Is War Natural For Humans? ~ Douglas P. Fry

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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Intro

00:00 • 3min

Reassessing the Origins of War

02:43 • 6min

The Complex Society of the Calusa: Resource Management and Military Evolution

08:26 • 6min

Understanding Human Aggression through Primates

14:09 • 11min

Critique of Violence Narratives

24:39 • 26min

Reevaluating Warfare in Human History

51:08 • 19min

Understanding Humanity: The Mammalian Nature of Cooperation and Conflict

01:10:33 • 3min

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)