According to a new academic study, mankind learned the art of going into battle much later than previously thought.
Is it natural for humans to make war? Is organised violence between rival political groups an inevitable outcome of the human condition? Some scholars believe the answer is yes, but new research suggests not.
Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg [umlaut over o] of Abo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland, studied 148 violently lethal incidents documented by anthropologists working among 21 mobile bands of hunter-gatherer societies, which some scholars have suggested as a template for studying how humans lived for more than 99.9 per cent of human history, before the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, according to the Independent newspaper.
The study of tribal societies that live by hunting and foraging has found that war is an alien concept and not, as some academics have suggested, an innate feature of so-called “primitive people”.
There has long been debate over this issue. Is it natural for humans to make war? Is organised violence between rival political groups an inevitable outcome of the human condition? Some scholars believe the answer is yes, but this new research suggests not.
The Independent reports that the findings have re-opened a bitter academic dispute over whether war is a relatively recent phenomenon invented by “civilised” societies over the past few thousand years, or a much older part of human nature. In other words, is war an ancient and chronic condition that helped to shape humanity over many hundreds of thousands of years?
The idea is that war is the result of an evolutionary ancient predisposition that humans may have inherited in their genetic makeup as long ago as about 7 million years, when we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees – who also wage a kind of war between themselves.
Fry and Soderberg found that only a tiny minority of violent deaths come close to being defined as acts of war. They found that most the violence was perpetrated by one individual against another and usually involved personal grudges involving women or stealing.
In the family?
The study found that about 85 percent of the deaths involved killers and victims who belonged to the same social group, and about two thirds of all the violent deaths could be attributed to family feuds, disputes over wives, accidents or “legal” executions, the researchers found.
Much of it comes down to feuds and revenge killings, often within small groups or the family.
Only a tiny minority involved more organized killing between rival bands – activity that could be classed as “war-like” behavior.
The two researchers found little evidence that hunter-gatherer societies were in a constant state of violent conflict with rival groups. In short they found that some of the most “primitive” peoples on Earth were actually quite peaceful compared to modern, developed nations.
Controversial issue
The findings also question the conclusions of well-respected academics such as Harvard’s Stephen Pinker and University of California’s Jared Diamond, both of whom have recently published best-selling books on the subject of war-like aggression and tribal societies.
Diamond’s book sparked controversy when it came out. “The World Until Yesterday” claims war is defined as recurrent violence between groups belonging to rival political units that is sanctioned by those units. Under this definition, many tribal societies, left to their own devices, would be in a state of chronic war, claims Diamond.
Pinker claims humans are innately violent and have only become less so recently because of cultural influences.
Pinker and Diamond have run into critics. Some anthropologists claim they have simplified and exaggerated the research they base their arguments on, or worse, that they used the discredited work of anthropologists such as Napoleon Chagnon who claimed the Yanomani people in the Amazon region are in a chronic state of warfare with one another.
The paint tribal people as “brutal savages,” whereas the truth may be much closer to the findings of Fry and Soderberg.
Diamond, quoted in The Independent, claims criticism of his work is unjustified and that it may be driven by a romanticized view of traditional societies.
