The purpose of the study was to investigate the influencing behaviour of subordinates as a function of supervisor leadership style within a law enforcement setting. Fifty‐three subordinate police officers returned one of four randomly distributed scenarios depicting either a male—female transformational or male—female transactional leader (supervising officer). The subordinate police officers then completed the Profile of Organizational Influence Strategies—Form M (Kipnis & Schmidt, 1982) indicating the extent to which they would use rational, soft and hard approaches to influence their supervising officer as illustrated in the scenario. It was hypothesized that transactional leadership would be more closely associated with the three police officer influencing approaches than transformational leadership. Contrary to the prediction, transformational leadership was determined to be more closely related with subordinate rational influencing behaviour than transactional leadership. The findings are discussed in terms of the nature of transformational leadership and the unique characteristics of the police officer culture.

This Special Issue of Evolutionary Anthropology grew out of a symposium at the 2012 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting in Memphis, Tennessee (April 18-22). The goal of the symposium was to explore what we will argue is one of the most important and promising opportunities in the global archeological enterprise. In late prehistoric North America, the initial rise of cultures of strikingly enhanced complexity and the local introduction of a novel weapon technology, the bow, apparently correlate intimately in a diverse set of independent cases across the continent, as originally pointed out by Blitz. If this empirical relationship ultimately proves robust, it gives us an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate hypotheses for the causal processes producing social complexity and, by extension, to assess the possibility of a universal theory of history. The rise of comparably complex cultures was much more recent in North America than it was elsewhere and the resulting fresher archeological record is relatively well explored. These and other features make prehistoric North America a unique empirical environment. Together, the symposium and this issue have brought together outstanding investigators with both empirical and theoretical expertise. The strong cross-feeding and extended interactions between these investigators have given us all the opportunity to advance the promising exploration of what we call the North American Neolithic transitions. Our goal in this paper is to contextualize this issue.

This paper has several interconnected goals. First and most generally, we will review the project represented by the papers in this dedicated issue and the SAA Symposium (2012) on Social Complexity and the Bow. This project centers on the ever-stronger and broader theory testing now becoming feasible in archeology and anthropology, in this case exploiting the unique natural laboratory represented by what we refer to as the North American Neolithic transitions. Second, we will strive to synopsize the papers in this issue as opportunities to falsify two general theories of the cause of increases in social complexity associated with the North American Neolithic: warfare and social coercion theories.(1) We argue that, though much work remains to be done, the current evidence supports one of the central predictions of both these theories, that the local arrival of elite bow technology was a central driver of local transitions to increased social complexity. This conclusion, if ultimately verified, has profound implications for the possibility of general theories of history. Third, we will argue that several important details of this evidence falsify warfare theory and support (fail to falsify) social coercion theory (the authors' favored perspective). Moreover, several potential falsifications of social coercion theory are amenable to alternative interpretations, leading to new falsifiable predictions. Finally, we discuss how interactions with our colleagues in this project produced new insights into several details of the predictions of social coercion theory, improving our interpretative capacity.

Evolutionary psychology has made enormous progress in understanding how individual and kin selection shape our sexual and family behaviors. In striking contrast, our understanding of the evolution of our uniquely massive scale of social cooperation (kinship-independent; subjectively, the "public" sphere) has been seriously incomplete. We briefly critique theories of human social evolution to identify specific limitations. We then review and expand a specific theory of the evolution of the uniquely human public domain. This theory is coherent and well-supported empirically. Moreover, this theory has the broad predictive fecundity not displayed by earlier, less complete theories. For example, we can predict/account for both individual human novelties (speech, cognitive virtuosity, etc.) and the salient features of the human historical record through the present. We argue that our discipline can now catalyze the long-sought unification of the social and natural sciences. Further, this new theoretical power allows us to understand and address diverse elements of contemporary human welfare with substantially improved clarity. We argue that evolutionary psychology is now robustly positioned to contribute to formulation of potent local and global public policies that can build and sustain a very substantially improved human future. We explore specific examples of such policy implications.

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