Is it natural for humans to make war?
New study of tribal societies reveals conflict is an alien concept.
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.
 |
War, an alien concept
for tribesmen |
A 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”.
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
seven million years, when we last shared a common ancestor with
chimpanzees - who also wage a kind of war between themselves.
Lethal incidents
However, two anthropologists believe this is a myth and have now
produced evidence to show it. Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg 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.
They found that only a tiny minority of violent deaths come close to
being defined as acts of war. Most the violence was perpetrated by one
individual against another and usually involved personal grudges
involving women or stealing.
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.
“When we looked at all the violent events about 55 per cent of them
involved one person killing another. That’s not war. When we looked at
group conflicts, the typical pattern was feuds between families and
revenge killings, which is not war either,” said Dr Fry.
“It has been tempting to use these mobile foraging societies as rough
analogies of the past and to ask how old warfare is and whether it is
part of human nature. Our study shows that war is obviously not very
common,” he said.
Only a tiny minority of cases involved more organised killing between
rival bands of people, which could fall into the definition of war-like
behaviour. Most of these involved only one of the 21 groups included in
the study - the Tiwi people of Australia who seemed to be particularly
prone to violent incidents, Dr Fry said.
Rather than finding war ubiquitous, 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.
“These findings imply that warfare was probably not very common
before the advent of agriculture, when most if not all humans lived as
nomadic foragers,” Kirk Endicott, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College
told the journal Science, where the study is published.
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.
Recurrent violence
In Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday , for instance, 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, Diamond says.
He cites the case of the Dani people living in the Baliem Valley of
the New Guinea Highlands who in 1961 engaged in a series of violent
conflicts that led to many deaths. Although the Dani are
agriculturalists, Diamond uses them as examples of how early humans
societies may have interacted with one another.
Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature argues that humans
are innately violent and have only become less so in recent years
because of cultural influences that have kept this aggressive nature in
check.
Both Pinker and Diamond have been criticised by some anthropologists
for simplifying and exaggerating the research they use to support their
conclusions.
Even worse, some argue that they used discredited work of
anthropologists such as Napoleon Chagnon who has claimed that the
Yanomami people of the Amazon are in a state of chronic warfare with one
another.
- The Independent |