Is War Natural For Humans? ~ Douglas P. Fry

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Nov 19, 2022

Douglas P. Fry, an anthropologist and expert on the origins of war, challenges the notion that conflict is innate to humans. He discusses the archaeological evidence for war's recent development, arguing that many hunter-gatherers are actually peaceful. Fry critiques misleading narratives about historical violence, comparing modern assumptions with ancient data. He also reflects on the complexities of aggression in mammals, particularly in relation to human nature and societal structure, advocating for a nuanced understanding of conflict.

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INSIGHT

War Emerges Under Specific Preconditions

War is not anciently universal; archaeological sequences show peace shifting into war under specific conditions.
Complex preconditions like population growth and resource intensification predict wartime emergence.

ANECDOTE

Calusa: Fisherfolk Who Built A War System

The Calusa engineered fish-holding canals and supported dense populations without agriculture.
By 2,700 years ago they built mounds, elites, and a military class that fought the Spanish.

INSIGHT

Don't Extrapolate From Chimpanzees Alone

Comparing humans to chimpanzees to infer ancestral warfare is fallacious because bonobos differ markedly.
Studying humans directly gives better insight than projecting from one primate model.

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Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that life in the state of nature was “nasty, brutish, and short”. Recently, various scholars have claimed that Hobbes was basically right: our ancestors lived in a state of constant raiding and chronic warfare. Indeed, some have suggested that as many as 15% of ancestral humans died due to war. And the claims are made with the utmost confidence.

But there is something disturbing about this confidence. The earliest archaeological records of war are only c. 14 000 years old. And many anthropologists working with modern-day hunter-gatherers claim that they tend to be remarkably peaceful.

The literature around this question is dense and difficult to penetrate. This episode aims to make it a notch more accessible.

Douglas P. Fry is an anthropologist and a leading scholar on the topic. He has written extensively about the origins of war in books such as War, Peace and Human Nature. His papers on the matter have been published in top journals such as Science. And his conclusions might be surprising to many.

In this discussion, Ilari and Professor Fry talk about:

The archaeological evidence for the origins of war.
Why do some hunter-gatherers wage war? Why does Fry think that most of them do not? And why is the data in Better Angels of Our Nature so misleading - even fabricated?
How common is lethal violence in mammals more generally?
How violent was the human Pleistocene (over 11,700 years ago)? Does it matter?

Ethnic groups mentioned

Pacific Northwest hunter-gatherers (hunter-gatherer groups well-known for having complex “civilisation”, including social hierarchies, warfare and slavery)
Calusa (a complex hunter-gatherer group in Florida)
Tiwi (Australian hunter-gathers who are atypical for having clans and a high level of lethal violence)
Andaman Islanders (in the Bay of Bengal)
Iñupiaq (the warring Inuit group, which was not named in the discussion)

Names and technical terms

Herbert Manscher
Jane Goodall (primatologist who recorded so-called Gombe wars in chimpanzees)
Steven Pinker
Samuel Bowles
Leslie Sponsel
Christopher Boehm
C. Darwent, J. Darwent

References

Misreported “war deaths” in Better Angles of Out Nature (Fry & Söderberg 2019) and lethal violence in hunter-gatherers (Fry & Söderberg 2013)
Lethal violence in mammals (Gomez et al. 2016) and in archaeological skeletons (Haas & Piscitelli)
Cooperation in a spatial prisoner’s dilemma (Aktipis 2004)
Peace systems (video & the Nature article)