Warfare and Humanity

American Journal of Physical Anthropology

The origins of warfare have long been of interest for researchers across disciplines. Did our earliest ancestors engage in forms of organized violence that are appropriately viewed as approximations, forms of, or analogs for more recent forms of warfare? Assessed in this article are contrasting views that see warfare as being either a product of more recent human societies or a phenomenon with a much deeper chronology. The article provides an overview of current debates, theories, and methodological approaches, citing literature and data from archaeological, ethnographic, genetic, primatological, and paleoanthropological studies. Synthetic anthropological treatments are needed, especially in efforts to inform debates among nonacademic audiences, because the discipline's approaches are ideally suited to study the origins of warfare. Emphasized is the need to consider possible forms of violence and intergroup aggression within Pleistocene contexts, despite the methodological challenges associated with fragmentary, equivocal, or scarce data. Finally, the review concludes with an argument about the implications of the currently available data. We propose that socially cooperative violence, or "emergent warfare," became possible with the onset of symbolic thought and complex cognition. Viewing emergent warfare as a byproduct of the human capacity for symbolic thought explains how the same capacities for communication and sociality allowed for elaborate peacemaking, conflict resolution, and avoidance. Cultural institutions around war and peace are both made possible by these changes. Accordingly, we suggest that studies on warfare's origins should be tied to research on the advent of cooperation, sociality, and communication.

Peace & Change, 2010

David Livingstone Smith's The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War is the latest in a seemingly endless procession of popular writings purporting to explain the existence of war by biologically evolved tendencies to kill. In many ways it follows the standard formula: many detailed examples of almost unimaginable brutality, dubious analogies, scoffing at disbelief as wishful thinking, and invoking the standard formulation that only by facing up to the ugly biological truth will we be able to find a way past war. ''Human beings may not be doomed to war. We may be able to break its spell and take control of our future. But to do this we must be willing to look at ourselves, and face some stark unflattering truths'' (p. 27). What makes this book different is that Smith directly confronts some contradictory evidence that other writers ignore, the well-documented fact in American war studies that soldiers in combat very frequently display an extreme reluctance to take others' lives. Thus, humans appear to be ambivalent about war. He finds the answer to this puzzle in evolutionary psychology and a self-deceiving clash of hypothetical mental modules. Chapters One and Two give a general overview of his argument. Chapter Three asserts the necessary foundation for any biological explanation of war: humans have practiced war throughout our archaeological past. In Chapter Four, Smith claims that the roots of war go back to our common ancestors, chimpanzees, and that our propensity to kill has been propagated over the eons because it led to reproductive success. Chapter Five is about evolutionary psychology and its theory that the mind is made up of a mass of evolved, dedicated modules, which process certain types of information and produce particular dispositions for action. Chapter Six is on selfdeception, the idea that different parts of the brain can be disharmonious, one module pulling the wool over the other. Chapter Seven asks

War, Peace, and Human Nature, 2013

Many features of human societies are clearly inventions, such as agriculture (Bocquet-Appel, 2011), the domestication of cattle (Zeder, 2011), and writing (Woods, 2010). Other human traits are genetic adaptations and thus the products of evolution by natural selection, such as malaria resistance (Hedrick, 2011), lactase persistence (Leonardi, Gerbault, Thomas, & Burger, 2012), and, arguably, language (Pinker & Bloom, 1990). Anthropologists have long debated whether warfare is an invention (Gabriel, 1990; Haas, 2001; Kelly, 2000; Mead, 1940; Montagu, 1976) or an adaptation (Alexander, 1979; Gat, 2006; Tooby & Cosmides, 1988; Wrangham & Peterson 1996; van der Dennen, 1995). This debate largely follows the intellectual traditions established by Hobbes and Rousseau (Otterbein, 1999; Gat, 2006). Hobbes (1651/1997) considered “Warre” to be the natural state of humans, with strong institutions (the “Leviathan”) being necessary to keep in check natural tendencies toward selfi shness, theft , and violence. In contrast, Rousseau (1754/1964) argued that people were basically peaceful and cooperative, until corrupted by institutions such as property ownership. Hobbes and Rousseau illustrated their arguments with imagined states of nature, based mainly on their own intuitions and experiences, combined with travelers’ tales of “savages” in the Americas and elsewhere, and, for Rousseau, early descriptions of the behavior of African apes (Rousseau 1754/1964). While rooted in competing philosophical traditions, the question of whether warfare is an invention or an adaptation is ultimately an empirical one, which can be answered (at least in principle) by evidence from archaeology, ethnography, and other sources, including animal behavior. Field studies of our evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees, have played an important role in this debate (Boehm, 1992; Bowles, 2009; Eibl-Eibesfelt, 1979; Kelly, 2005; Otterbein, 2004; Sussman, 1999; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Here I review the evidence for warlike behavior in chimpanzees and discuss what these findings can tell us about human warfare. I begin with a review of the behavioral ecology of aggression, continue with an overview of the behavioral ecology of intergroup aggression in chimpanzees, and conclude with discussion of the implications for understanding the origins of war and prospects for peace in humans.

BMSAP, 2014

Journal of Big History, 2018

The aim of this article is to set a macro-historical narrative concerning the emergence of warfare and social ethics as symplesiomorphic features in the lineage of Homo sapiens. This means that these two behavioral aspects, representative of a very selected branch in the phylogenetic tree of the Primate order, are shared by the two lineages of great African apes that diverged from a common ancestor around six million years in the past, leading to extant humans and chimpanzees. Therefore, this article proposes an ethological understanding of warfare and social ethics, as both are innate to the social high-specialized modular mind present in the species of genera Pan and Homo. However behavioral restraints to intersocietal coalitionary violence seems to be an exclusive aspect of the transdominial modular cognition that characterizes modern humans. Thus, if in the evolutionary long durée, warfare and restrictions to intrasocial violence both appear to be ethologically common to humans and chimpanzees to a certain extent, an ethics of warfare - and, of course, the cognitive capability for intersocietal peace - seems to be distinctly human.

Why do we fight? Have we always been fighting one another? This book examines the origins and development of human forms of organized violence from an anthropological and archaeological perspective. Kim and Kissel argue that human warfare is qualitatively different from forms of lethal, intergroup violence seen elsewhere in the natural world, and that its emergence is intimately connected to how humans evolved and to the emergence of human nature itself.

A survey of recent evidence and arguments on the origins of human conflict. This is a much shortened version of a book chapter in my large survey of world military history that will be out in September 2015

International Handbook on Collective Violence

The evolution and history of warfare has been investigated by philosophers, historians, practitioners, social scientists and life scientists. Common questions in this endeavour are: How far back into human evolution and history do we find evidence of warfare? How frequent was warfare in any given historical period? How lethal was warfare? In short, scholarship on the evolution and history of warfare has focused on questions of origins, frequency, and intensity. Despite the fact that scientific interest in these questions is perhaps broader and more methodologically sophisticated than ever, consensus on these questions remains elusive for at least two reasons. First, the archaeological record of warfare is incomplete. Second, we do not agree on what warfare is or how to unambiguously distinguish it from other forms of violence. Beyond an agreement that warfare is something more than violence between two individuals, there is little consensus on the proper scope of our main unit of analysis. Given these hurdles, it would seem that an investigation into the evolutionary origins of human warfare is destined merely to perpetuate academic stalemates, in which old arguments are continuously repackaged with each new discovery of a mass grave or ‘peaceful’ society. Although this is a rather pessimistic view, I establish it at the forefront of this chapter since my argument will be that these hurdles (e.g. knowledge of ancestral phenomena and consensus on definitions) are not insurmountable. Entire disciplines thrive on their ability to successfully infer and model the unobserved past based on imperfect historical, geological and archaeological evidence. And the question of definitions must be placed in its proper scope – as a methodological, rather than ontological, consideration.

Public Anthropologist

Editorial and opinion pieces speculate (or proclaim) about the foundations of war, the curse of humanity. Here is another perspective, backed by forty years of anthropological research, on origins, causes, variations, and meanings of war, and their contemporary implications.

Abstract: Sadly, aggression is still one of the most common features of human behaviour; it is an instinct to promote and survive our own genes against the genes of others. Human intraspecific aggression has gradually become part of human culture over the last 40,000 years and has been institutionalized in various forms of social activities. Particularly in the post-glacial period, the level of social relations has developed dramatically in the context of population growth and the growth of human communities. In the time of Neolithic and Chalcolithic European agricultural populations, the motive of control over farming land became highly important. Also the control of main means of production and social power was increasingly maintaining the intra-group competition and aggression. Thus, violence was employed within the community in order to obtain and maintain individual or collective social status, but also against other communities in an effort to protect property and territory. Particularly the intra-community aggression was soon transformed into variety of different formal ways of symbolic fighting, which usually did not lead to the unwanted death of a defeated member of the community. The symbolic struggle between members of the community as well as the defence against external aggression were gradually formalized in the form of introduction of specialized weapons designed for combat between people and creation of fortifications. During the Neolithic period a new phenomenon arose in human culture: warfare. Résumé : L’agression est, malheureusement, toujours l’une des caractéristiques les plus courantes du comportement humain ; c’est un instinct visant à favoriser et à faire subsister nos propres gènes face aux gènes d’autrui. L’agressivité intraspécifique chez les hommes a peu à peu fait partie de la culture humaine au cours des dernières 40 000 années et été institutionnalisée dans des formes d’activités sociales diverses. Notamment durant la période postglaciaire, le niveau des relations sociales se sont considérablement développées dans le contexte de la croissance démographique et la croissance des communautés humaines. À l’époque des populations agricoles européennes du néolithique et du chalcolithique, le motif du contrôle des terres agricoles est devenu très important. De plus, le contrôle des principaux moyens de production et du pouvoir social a de plus en plus maintenu la concurrence et l’agression entre les groupes. Ainsi, la violence a été employée au sein de la communauté afin d’obtenir et de maintenir un statut social individuel ou collectif, mais aussi contre d’autres communautés dans le but de protéger les biens et les territoires. En particulier, l’agression intra-communautaire fut bientôt transformée en différentes formes conventionnelles de combats symboliques, qui ne conduisaient généralement pas à la mort non voulue d’un membre vaincu de la communauté. Si la lutte interne, symbolique ou l’agression tournée vers l’extérieur ont été progressivement officialisées sous la forme de l’apparition d’armes spécialisées conçues pour le combat entre l’homme et par la création de fortifications. Au cours de la période néolithique, un phénomène nouveau est apparu dans la culture humaine : la guerre. Extracto: Tristemente, la agresión sigue siendo una de las características más comunes del comportamiento humano; es un instinto de promoción y supervivencia de nuestros genes frente a los genes de otros. La agresión intraespecífica humana se ha convertido gradualmente en parte de la cultura humana a lo largo de los últimos 40.000 años y ha sido institucionalizada en diversas formas de actividades sociales. En particular, en el período post-glacial, el nivel de relaciones sociales se ha desarrollado de manera dramática en el contexto del crecimiento de la población y del crecimiento de las comunidades humanas. En el tiempo de las poblaciones agrícolas neolíticas y calcolíticas europeas, el motivo del control de la tierra cultivable se convirtió en algo sumamente importante. También el control de los principales medios de producción y el poder social estuvo manteniendo cada vez más la competición intragrupo y la agresión. De este modo, se empleó la violencia dentro de la comunidad con el fin de obtener y mantener el estatus social individual o colectivo, pero también contra otras comunidades en un esfuerzo por proteger la propiedad y el territorio. En particular, la agresión intracomunitaria fue transformada muy pronto en una variedad de modos formales diferentes de lucha simbólica, que normalmente no llevó a la muerte no deseada de un miembro derrotado de la comunidad. Aunque la lucha interna simbólica o la agresión que mira hacia fuera han sido formalizadas gradualmente en la forma del surgimiento de armas especializadas diseñadas para combatir entre humanos y mediante la creación de fortificaciones, durante el período neolítico surgió un nuevo fenómeno en la cultura humana: la guerra.