> I sincerely doubt that primitive human tribes widely tolerated healthy adults who contributed absolutely nothing to the group.    

It's certainly not hard to imagine that no, they would not have tolerated such behavior. But does this mean that you are suggesting the members of this tribe convened and decided to put rules in place to define a member's behavior and potentially institute punishment if these rules were broken? That sounds suspiciously like a society. It's almost as if the larger population felt that attempting to hinder a particular perceived flaw in human nature was a net positive for the group as a whole.

The existence of cooperation or the desire to cooperate does not disprove that cheating and lying are embedded instincts in living beings. Cheating and cooperation are not mutually exclusive concepts. The parent comment was suggesting that we are somehow evolving to lie and cheat and I'm suggesting that we have been more than capable of this behavior all along. In fact, I've gone so far as to say that not only were we immediately capable since the dawn of humankind, but we have actively suppressed these "survival skills" because they are deemed bad qualities.