Background: Evolutionary psychiatry posits that many mental disorders derive from the dysregulation of originally adaptive mechanisms, selected to manage threats, resources, hierarchies, and social cohesion. In this framework, depression and mania are understood as alterations of complex affective and socio-evaluative systems, shaped by human phylogenetic history and currently subjected to mismatched environmental and sociocultural conditions. Objective: To integrate the main evolutionary, ethological, and sociobiological models applied to mood disorders, articulating them with the Innate Precipitating Mechanism (IPM) Model and contemporary sociocultural factors, especially those characteristic of postmodernity, to establish a foundation for a comparative anthropological psychiatry. Methods: Narrative review of specialized literature in evolutionary psychiatry, affective neuroscience, ethology, sociobiology, biocultural anthropology, and comparative studies in humans and non-human primates. Relevant theoretical and empirical works on emotions, hierarchical regulation, social cognition, socioecological variability, and affective psychopathology were included. Results: Emotions function as adaptive systems designed to coordinate physiological, cognitive, and behavioral responses to social and environmental challenges. Mood disorders emerge when these systems are activated under conditions that differ from the ancestral niche, generating mismatches in energetic, hierarchical, and socio-evaluative regulation. Price’s hierarchical theory, Baron-Cohen’s social cognition models, and the IPM allow for the reframing of depression and mania as functional failures of an integrated IPM-A/IPM-AA system. Cross-cultural and primatological evidence questions the universality of patterns described in WEIRD populations and underscores the impact of the postmodern context, characterized by structural uncertainty, hyper-responsibility, and self-demand. Conclusions: Evolutionary psychiatry offers an integrative framework to reinterpret the clinical heterogeneity of mood disorders, identify subtypes with distinct evolutionary bases, and guide interventions tailored to the human emotional architecture. This approach allows for linking light rhythms, hierarchical dynamics, social support, inflammation, and social cognition with differentiated depressive and manic profiles.