Interesting new paper (below). Trade, as an aspect of universal human culture,
may have served as a (buffer against) certain evolutionary selective pressures
at one point in our history. The raw vegan pseudoscience fakes who dismiss the
culture-evolution link as Lamarckism, are only fooling themselves:

How trade saved humanity from biological exclusion: an economic theory
of Neanderthal extinction

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, In Press, February 2005
Richard D. Horan, Erwin Bulte and Jason F. Shogren

One of the great puzzles in science concerns the rise of early modern humans
and the fall of Neanderthals. A number of theories exist, and many support the
biological principle of competitive exclusion. But the evidence for such
mechanistic theories in which biology is destiny is limited. In response, this
paper develops a behavioral model of Neanderthal extinction. We show how the
endogenous division of labor and subsequent trading among early modern humans
could have helped them to overcome potential biological deficiencies. We
discuss the relation between economics and natural selection, and show how
trade may partially offset natural selection.

Tom Billings