Ian Brown, editor-in-chief of eFinancialCareers, sinks his teeth into the primitive urges which mean bonuses are never quite meaty enough.

Hands up if you work in the City and think you’re worth a mouth-watering, multi-million pound Kobe Beef steak of a bonus for this year’s labours.

I know I do, if only tangentially as a journalist covering the financial markets. We’re all worth it. Some of us are just more in a position to collect on it than others.

If you didn’t put your hand up, maybe you shouldn’t be working in the Square Mile. C’mon, you deserve to earn as astronomical a bonus as possible for as long as possible. It’s what I call the culture of Scare City, and you need to show you’re keen to keep up and get whatever the market will bear before the other guy does.

We only need look back a few millennia to our ice-age cousins, Cro-Magnon man, and a genetic reason for why all those zeros at the end of a bonus will never add up to enough.

Working in teams, not unlike prop trading or capital markets desks, Cro-Magnons would send whole herds of animals over cliffs and turn them into woolly mammoth fillet mignons and woolly rhino rib-eyes. Top hunter then became chief.

Today we might call that extra flesh fees generated on the back of selling structured products, but back at the cave, could our forefathers possibly consume all that meat? No, but they could store it for when game was scarce or for the day when mammoths might go extinct altogether (nah, couldn’t happen).

Evolution is nice in theory, but lack and stockpiling is still the mindset today. Most reward, like hunting, is performance-based and therefore an uncertain source of income. Witness hedge fund Amaranth winding down this week and taking a lot of trader and prime broker bonuses down with it. You know who you are.

Next time you’re with more pecuniarily-challenged contacts, however, and tempted to defend your bonus payouts, past or (potentially) soon-to-be, do this: while not divulging any figures (that would be bad form), tell them they’d be worth every pound sterling too if they were as talented and lucky as you.

Then take them out for a mammoth (in size) steak dinner. Invites my way gladly accepted.

Ian Brown, Editor-in-Chief