Selected examples, ranging from birds to pastoralistic nomads and subsisting peasants, indi-cate that the higher animals adopt foraging strategies similar to individual decision makers in economies without market (subsistence economies): in contrast to actors in (ideal neo-classical) market economies, max-imizing expected utility, they operate in a such way as to optimize longterm survival of genet-ically related groups. This can be seen as a strategy of (maximum) ruin avoidance, played by "selfish genes". In the sense of conjectural history the parallelism between risk behav-ior of animals and early men may be regarded as the con-tinued existence of principles of natural evolu-tion beyond hominization up to the historical emergence of complex societies where pursuit of surplus production replaced ruin avoidance as the primary orientation in the older subsis-tence economies.