This paper responds to Birch and Buskell's thoughtful critique. In it, I defend my use of behavioural ecology. I argue, contra Birch and Buskell, that I can give a principled defence of the emergence of conventions for respecting property, modelling as a network of pairwise iterated PDs between incipient farmers. Second, I defend my scepticism about the power of cultural group selection to optimise community normative packages. Finally, I located my views, as requested, against those of The dawn of everything. (...) I argue that the more complex “original position” envisaged in Dawn depends on special conditions rarely found on Pleistocene Africa. (shrink)