Vendettas, not war? Unpicking why our ancestors killed
Vendettas, not war? Unpicking why our ancestors killed
20:03 18 July 2013 by Bob Holmes
Is war in our blood? Perhaps not, if you believe a controversial new study that suggests violence in primitive cultures is overwhelmingly the result of personal squabbles, rather than organised violence between two different groups. The finding contradicts the popular view that humans have evolved to be innately warlike.
In recent years, many anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have come to believe that warfare arose deep in humans' evolutionary past. In part that is because even chimpanzees exhibit this kind of intergroup violence, which suggests the trait shares a common origin. Proponents of this view also point to the occurrence of war in traditional hunter-gatherer societies today, such as some notoriously quarrelsome groups in the Amazon, and hence to its likely prevalence in early human societies.
Yet the archaeological record of warfare in early humans is sketchy, and not all contemporary hunter-gatherers make war.
In a bid to resolve the issue, Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg of Åbo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland, turned to the Ethnographic Atlas, a widely used database that was created in the 1960s to provide an unbiased cross-cultural sample of primitive societies.
More:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23895-vendettas-not-war-unpicking-why-our-ancestors-killed.html?cmpid=RSS|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL|online-news#.UehDaOoo7JU
