[mcswell]

My understanding from listening to anthropologists talk about this sort of thing is that some cultures do not have either fixed leaders or priests. By "fixed leaders", they mean someone who is the recognized leader in most any community operation. Instead, a good hunter may be the leader for a hunting expedition, a good house builder may be the leader when it comes to house building, a good fisherman for a fishing trip, and so forth.

And of course some cultures were so divided that there was no one who spoke for or led the community as a whole. The Waorani and Shuar of Ecuador might have fallen into this situation in the past, possibly less so now.

I have less often heard whether elders are generally recognized as leaders. I suspect that a good hunter is someone who over the course of his life has brought back a lot of meat. That would probably be someone older.