Steve Conner - Is it natural for humans to make war? New study of tribal societies reveals conflict is an alien concept

Mankind learned the art of going into battle much later than previously thought, a new academic study

I read somewhere once, and I think I even posted it here, that years ago human groups got no larger than about a hundred people and so everyone knew who the psychopath was. Only a few people needed to be conned by the lying, cheating, toe rag for everyone to know who he was, and after that, he had to behave himself or he would get thrown out of the group. 

But in modern society, though, psychopaths can move from group to group and start all over again wrecking people's lives.. They can also rise up in companies as modern capitalism seem to reward psychopathic behavior, like extreme greed and selfishness. And the clever, intelligent ones can use their ruthlessness to rise up in society sometimes becoming leaders of countries. These people are often pro war because they don't expect they will ever fight in one, but they think they can gain from it. There seems to be a lot of them in the Ukraine right now, sponsored by the psychopaths in the US. They are all after the money.

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.

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”.

he 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.

However, two anthropologists believe this is a myth and have now produced evidence to show it. 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.

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 per cent 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.

The Independent

Steve Conner - Is it natural for humans to make war? New study of tribal societies reveals conflict is an alien concept