Why do we fight? Prehistoric Origins of Organized Group Violence

The prehistoric psychopath

Life in the state of nature was less violent than you might think. Most of our ancestors avoided conflict. But this made them vulnerable to a few psychopaths.

by John Halstead & Phil Thomson

Link: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-prehistoric-psychopath/

My dad sent this one my way a while back, and I finally got to it: It’s an excellent read in it’s entirety, but I’ve highlighted some interesting bits below:

"The defining characteristic that drives high rates of violent death in our species is not our proclivity for lethal violence but rather our capacity for it. Human beings are unusually vulnerable to violence. We have massive heads, thin skin, puny muscles, little to no protective fur; we can’t fly, swim, or burrow away, and we’re not even very good at running away. Our children are even more fragile, particularly as babies, and take ages to mature.

At the same time, our offensive abilities make us the most lethal species on the planet. Violent attacks in a hunter gatherer context are essentially undefendable. We have abilities to collectively organize, plan, and deceive far in advance of any other species. Even lions are afraid of us. Our stone-tipped tools, poisons, and projectile technology appear to have killed off almost all of the planet’s megafauna, like mastodons, giant kangaroos, and saber-tooth tigers.

Put together, these factors make human intra-species conflict extremely deadly. It is not that we have an unusual proclivity for aggressive violence. On the contrary, most other species are far more aggressive than humans. Chimpanzees, for example, are over 150 times more likely to initiate violence against each other than we are. Rather, our species is characterized by low rates of aggression and conflict but extremely high lethality rates when conflict does arise.

Hunter gatherers prefer restraint because they understand that violent aggression inevitably exposes them to retaliatory violence. In one study of Amazonian societies, 70 percent of killings were motivated by revenge, and Paul Roscoe reports that his database of over 1,000 military actions in New Guinea small-scale societies shows that 61 percent were revenge based. Our violent proclivities are largely retaliatory rather than aggressive." [Emphasis Mine]
...
"The egalitarian !Kung were able, with difficulty, to restrain the bullying, domineering impulses of Gau and Twi. But what if such individuals were to gain a position of power in a more hierarchical society? We know from modern sociopathy research that sociopaths are over-represented among the powerful, likely due to characteristics such as a drive for dominance, risk-taking behavior, willingness to disregard moral and social norms for the sake of personal ambition and high tolerance for conflict.

Consider this description of chief Moawa of the Yanomami, a small-scale agricultural group, by the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who knew him personally:

He was the nastiest and most unpleasant person I’ve met anywhere . . . even people in his own village despised him but were mortally afraid of him . . . he had an unusual and devastating style, one he invented . . . he would make very long arrow points . . . they were rigid, sharp as knives and pointed at both ends . . . he would lie in wait along a secluded part of a trail and wait for a passer-by. Then he would pounce on the victim from behind and thrust his arrow point down into the victim’s lungs through the throat and silently flee.

Moawa was personally responsible for at least 22 murders. No wonder the Yanomamo suffered high rates of violence with people like him in charge.

Both Better Angels and our own data suggest that early agriculturalists were significantly more violent than the hunter gatherers they supplanted across the world. In our view, it is likely that atypically violent leaders were a major factor in driving these dramatic increases in violence." [Emphasis Mine]

For those folks that have been around for awhile know that my research speciality is The Victim Identity Model - aka how the combination of psychopathic leadership, in-group perceived victimization, and threat proximity lead to apithological (aka not-pathological or crazy) organized group violence. My hypothesis has always been this describes most group violence regardless of culture or historical period; IE it's the real reason why we fight. For my literature review, I was only able to go back to the 1600s because well, I’m a one man band. But it’s nice to see someone else is digging deep into the weeds on prehistoric violence as well.

This is some great historical support for the overall concept which predates my own research by a few thousand years. It seems nothing is new under the sun.

Now, with this in mind when you go back and reread Hitler, Lenin, the Declaration of Independence, FDR's speech after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, GWB after 9/11, Putin leading up to 2022, etc you can see exactly how they do it - good or bad, it’s the focus on the perceived (not because it isn't true, but because the actual person who needs to be convinced to fight about it isn't being directly impacted by it) victimization of the group - the higher the in-group level of abstraction the greater the group size; which makes those artificial lines on the map we call country borders really convenient, you can thank the Treaty of Westphalia for some of that.

Bringing back dueling seems a little less far fetched eh? Alternatively, humans could be a little less receptive to the hyperbole, but that is also generally against our nature so it’s a never-ending battle.

Click here for a more in-depth look at the Victim Identity Model.