> indicating a complex balance between war and peace among our ancestors
this is a deeply interesting article, but the insistence on homogenizing cultures in the name of objectivity is excessive. Obviously hunter clans conflicted with culture-trading clans and in fact made them captives systemically. War clans defeated and captured other war clans as slaves. The article speaks in a false monotone about "levels of violence"
Brian Hayden has a book right at the heart of this topic, how secret societies (terrorist proto-religions, think scientology+murder) anticipate civilization. You don't find such societies in precarious places, perhaps because extorting wealth isn't tolerated, though you do find them in hunter-gatherer societies as well as civilizations.
Unlike many paleontologists, he is willing to bring in psychology and unlike many anthropologists he is willing to doubt sincerity/motives.
>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.
I would argue that increased legality IS increased aggression. A person can whack me with a stick or they can shoot me in the head. One is a more aggressive act than the other.
Not sure if "homicidal" = "psychopath". It's a fraught task to make a mental health diagnosis beyond the grave, this book is probably the state of the art
but it covers "serious mental illness" which is inclusive of schizophrenia, bipolar and psychotic depression. No way you can diagnosis psychopathy by looking at bones.
I don’t think the author means to make a mental health diagnosis. He brings up the question at one point about whether a “bully” nature is a mental health issue or an evolutionary adaption. The concept pointed to feels clear to me — a low percentage of individuals with a homicidal disposition and nature. Whether we use the term bully, sociopath, psychopath, or so on, what the article refers to seems clear and not an attempt at mental health diagnosis IMO.
I don't see any argument or evidence for the assertion that people who engage in atypical levels of violence have atypical personalities. We would expect sociopathy to be a factor in making someone more prone to violence, but there's no reason to assume it would be the sole or most important one. Most people, most of the time, don't find themselves in circumstances where the benefits of violence outweigh the risks. Even when a person finds themselves in a position where violence might benefit them, they have to weigh their own ability (probably untested) against the challenge (probably unknown) and may wisely decide that this is not the right moment for their rookie attempt. But someone who has previously tried and succeeded, or who has prevailed when attacked by another, has a more informed basis for choosing violence in a given situation. If it goes well, it may make them bolder in a subsequent situation, and then another, etc. And we might see this person as having an atypical personality, when it is only that they had some early experience that tipped the balance towards making violence a more rational choice for them.
As engineers, we can see in our own practice that an early job experience that led to us master a particular technology makes us much more likely to reach for that technology than we would if we did not already know it.
Psychopathy as predictor for violence is well established. There is a ton of literature on it. This study is large scale and try to control for other variables:
That study looks exclusively at people who chose violence in situations where it had predictably negative consequences for themselves. I don't think studies of people who commit crimes in heavily policed societies and predictably end up in prison can tell us much about times and places where violence often paid off in big ways.
I'm surprised that there are no mentions of uncontacted tribes (ctrl-f of 'uncon' and 'native' yields no matches). It seems that violence and extreme xenophobia is the cultural norm, not the exception from a few psychopaths. And the methodology seems dubious, trying to estimate social behavior, norms and statistics based of people long gone and whose remains are scattered far and wide both in place and time.
In the Amazon a lot of the "uncontacted tribes" have been contacted by illegal loggers, miners and in the past rubber harvesters, and have every reason to think we're all a bunch of demons. The ones who still hide out are often the victims of past massacres, and not even the prospect of shoes and plastic cups is enough to overcome their reaction to how they were treated in the past.
If that was true then the longer a tribe remains uncontacted then the more pacific and welcoming it would get. But remote tribes are just as violent than those closer to civilizations; or at least no such correlation have been observed.
there's a pretty big alternative: they survived by integrating with a larger group
(they could either maintain a subculture, or fully integrate and become indistinguishable. either way, they don't necessarily die off when they make contact)
"Integrating" is an interesting choice of words. From what I've seen of the integration, nothing of their genes really survive. Nothing of their culture survives. I don't think it's survival at all. They're absorbed, surely, but in the same way an amoeba absorbs some prey... little pieces of the prey move around doing what those pieces always do, at least for a little while. But eventually those pieces stop moving, and get broken down into ever smaller pieces, until nothing of them remains. And it's just a big amoeba.
Not sure what word is a better choice though. Maybe someone can reply with one.
do you have any citation for the idea that genes rarely survive?
i don't really have any idea what the ratio is. i do know that there are a ton of traceable groups from ancient times today. i don't know that there isn't an even larger number of groups that didn't make it
> ethnographic data – contemporary studies of groups that existed until some modern contact
> an important challenge when interpreting evidence from ethnographies of modern hunter gatherers is determining which groups are likely to be representative of hunter gatherers who would have lived before the invention of agriculture.
>"To avoid these problems, our ethnographic sample ... excludes groups who were only studied long after sustained contact with agricultural or state societies.
Interesting argument, but misses how modern culture abstracts and distances violences.
If you included people being starved and denied healthcare for "economic reasons", and also the number of deaths from avoidable illnesses caused by promoting harmful and/or addictive products for profit, the numbers would be less reassuring.
I don't think that these two can be directly compared.
For example, a lot of animals are kept and slaughtered in less than optimal conditions away from our sight, but it would be a stretch of the word to call everyone who is not a vegan a psychopath for just eating animal products that came with some history of abuse.
The defining thing about psychopathy is that psychopaths like, or at least are indifferent to, violence face to face.
U.S. population: ~335 million
Deaths per 100,000: 412
‘’’
So combined with the 8 violent deaths per year it washes out to be about the same as the 420:100,000 prehistoric figure. (Using very hand waivey numbers - and excluding things like traffic deaths that have a huge utility tradeoff).
It really isn't. Even if we accept the premise that offering/advertising cigarettes is somehow equal to bashing someone's skull with a rock, there's still the problem of attributing all tobacco/alcohol/drug deaths as being perpetuated by others. In other words, it assumes people have no agency and pretends that all such deaths wouldn't happen if it wasn't for tobacco/alcohol/drug companies, which is absurd. Tobacco and alcohol are almost as old as civilization, for instance. Thus your calculations are at best, an upper bound for how much "violence" is being inflicted.
There's also the problem that as medicine and sanitation improves, deaths shift from causes that are hard to blame on anyone (eg. pneumonia) to deaths that can plausibly be blamed on society (eg. cancer, heart disease). Cancer deaths have gone up not because the environment has gotten more cancerous, it's because the non-cancer deaths have been eliminated. I doubt anyone would think that's a bad thing, even if you accept those things count as "violence".
That’s a fair point about personal agency, but it sidesteps the meat of the parent's comment: modern systems are engineered to obscure accountability. Many "personal" deaths - addiction, poor health, lack of care - aren't just random or self-inflicted. They emerge from structures built to deflect blame: lobbying, regulatory capture, and alegal negative externalities[1]. The issue isn't agency vs. violence - it's that our bureaucracies are designed to make harm invisible and responsibility untraceable.
Or as Stafford Beer wrote "the purpose of a system is what it does." The system we've built reliably produces death and violence - intentions or agency aside.
Yeah, this is an interesting point! It would be very hard to quantify, but it feels fair to say there is a significant level of what might be called “covert violence” in modern society that would increase the numbers if it could be accurately measured, and wouldn’t have applied to prehistory. I would largely exclude things like alcohol and tobacco, but a lot of other things feel valid to include to me. And if you consider something like Covid-related deaths could be included, which I realise would be debatable, the numbers would rise significantly.
I guess the questions I have are whether the prevalence of psychopaths has remained constant or decreased over time, and/or if the general level of violence in all people has gone down.
(And by psychopath, I loosely define it as people who enjoy hurting other people.)
In other words, we have information about the victims, but not the perpetrators.
Isn't that the definition of sadism? I thought psychopathy was defined by lack of empathy. (Obviously the two go together nicely, but this doesn't seem to be strictly necessary.)
I met a man who claimed to have no empathy, but was otherwise normal. (He called himself a psychopath for this reason.) He said that he felt he was lacking something important about being human.
In the book The Psychopath Inside, the author posits that psychopathy arises when an unlucky person inherits too many of the related traits, and that on their own those traits provide an advantage (or at least no negative effect) for survival, so evolution isn't going to remove them.
Fascinating. Reminds me of a gene that, if you get one copy, massively boosts your intelligence and creativity, and if you get two copies, gives you a serious neurological disease.
The article goes a lot into puzzling about the ancient past, but we have the last few centuries of descriptions of Europeans meeting hunter-gatherer bands. In virtually all encounters they lived peacefully. Where there was violence they were already agriculturists, or had European loggers who were trying to kill them.
I don't understand the discussion of psychopathy. The New York Times had an article about how Netanyahu had the Mossad head urge the Qataris to bankroll Hamas in mid and late 2023. Now both US political parties celebrate the destruction of all of Gaza's hospitals, the further invasions of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen etc. The killing and starvation of Gazan children. This is just normal American behavior. Look at Trump. The majority of Americans elected him because he is a reflection of what America is.
I understand being pissed at the US right now, but this is just false:
> Now both US political parties celebrate the destruction of all of Gaza's hospitals, the further invasions of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen etc. The killing and starvation of Gazan children. This is just normal American behavior. Look at Trump. The majority of Americans elected him because he is a reflection of what America is.
Just for starters, a plurality, not a majority, of those Americans who voted elected Trump. There are plenty of Americans who have despised Trump since before he ever ran for elective office, and their opinion of him has not improved.
If you see two men in a park and one strikes the other, do you say "I hate men" or "I hate that man"?
If you hate a group of people without distinction, fine, you lie about them and vilify them, you blame everyone for the actions of a few, etc. But if you want to promote good behavior and punish bad, you attempt to assign guilt or praise where it is due.
this is a deeply interesting article, but the insistence on homogenizing cultures in the name of objectivity is excessive. Obviously hunter clans conflicted with culture-trading clans and in fact made them captives systemically. War clans defeated and captured other war clans as slaves. The article speaks in a false monotone about "levels of violence"