I certainly would not rule that out. So too with terrorism. There is a lot of work going on at the moment into the psychology of terrorism.
Scholars, and some practitioners, have realised that this idea of ideology driving people to blow themselves up is intellectually bankrupt. The modern world is profoundly unsettling, and we need to learn how to sate these very deep evolutionary imperatives. Is there any evidence some ethnicities are more prone to warfare than others? Luckily, I now hold British and Irish passports. Yes, of course they do. To be stereotypical, Italians eat pasta, and the Irish drink stout. And that certain groups of humans display different behaviours, this is undeniable.
In the case of pasta and stout, we can comfortably say that these are learnt behaviours. The British empire was great at these, and came up with all sorts of martial races, and servant races. In honour of Irish Times Food Month, a query into all manner of musical victuals. See a sample.
Exclusive competitions and restaurant offers, plus reviews, the latest food and drink news, recipes and lots more. Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription. Is fighting in our genes? Instead, for around , years, Neanderthals resisted modern human expansion. Why else would we take so long to leave Africa? Not because the environment was hostile but because Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe and Asia. If nothing else, population growth inevitably forces humans to acquire more land, to ensure sufficient territory to hunt and forage food for their children.
But an aggressive military strategy is also good evolutionary strategy. Instead, for thousands of years, we must have tested their fighters, and for thousands of years, we kept losing. In weapons, tactics, strategy, we were fairly evenly matched.
Neanderthals probably had tactical and strategic advantages. In battle, their massive, muscular builds must have made them devastating fighters in close-quarters combat.
Their huge eyes likely gave Neanderthals superior low-light vision, letting them manoeuvre in the dark for ambushes and dawn raids. Finally, the stalemate broke, and the tide shifted. Or perhaps better hunting and gathering techniques let sapiens feed bigger tribes, creating numerical superiority in battle.
Even after primitive Homo sapiens broke out of Africa , years ago , it took over , years to conquer Neanderthal lands. In Israel and Greece , archaic Homo sapiens took ground only to fall back against Neanderthal counteroffensives , before a final offensive by modern Homo sapiens , starting , years ago , eliminated them.
Ultimately, we won. In the end, we likely just became better at war than they were. But a careful examination of ethnographically known violence among local peoples in the historical record provides an alternative perspective. Hunter-gatherers of northwestern Alaska from the late 18th through the 19th centuries demonstrate the fallacy of projecting ethnography of contemporary peoples into humanity's distant past.
Intense war involving village massacres lingers in detailed oral traditions. This deadly violence is cited as evidence of war by hunter-gatherers before disruption by expanding states.
Archaeology, however, combined with the history of the region, provides a very different assessment. There are no hints of war in early archaeological remains in the simple cultures of Alaskan hunter-gatherers. The first signs of war appear between A. But these conflicts were limited in size and probably intensity. With favorable climatic conditions by A. After a couple of centuries, war became common.
War in the 19th century, however, was much worse, so severe that it caused decline of the regional population. Debate over war and human nature will not soon be resolved.
The idea that intensive, high-casualty violence was ubiquitous throughout prehistory has many backers. It has cultural resonance for those who are sure that we as a species naturally tilt toward war. Broadly, early finds provide little if any evidence suggesting war was a fact of life. People are people. They fight and sometimes kill. Humans have always had a capacity to make war, if conditions and culture so dictate.
But those conditions and the warlike cultures they generate became common only over the past 10, years—and, in most places, much more recently than that. The high level of killing often reported in history, ethnography or later archaeology is contradicted in the earliest archaeological findings around the globe. Anthropologists are looking at whether closely related primates show an instinctive propensity toward group killing.
Delving into the question of human predisposition to war often involves looking beyond our species to examine the experiences of our chimpanzee relatives. Human warfare involves opponents that often include multiple local groups that may be unified by widely varying forms of political organization. Despite these distinctions, some scientists have argued that chimpanzees demonstrate an innate propensity to kill outsiders, inherited from the last common ancestor of chimps and people—an impulse that still subliminally pushes humans as well into deadly conflicts with those outside their communities.
My work disputes the claim that chimpanzee males have an innate tendency to kill outsiders, arguing instead that their most extreme violence can be tied to specific circumstances that result from disruption of their lives by contact with humans.
Making that case has required my going through every reported chimpanzee killing. From this, a simple point can be made. Critical examination of a recent compilation of killings from 18 chimpanzee research sites—together amounting to years of field observations—reveals that of 27 observed or inferred intergroup killings of adults and adolescents, 15 come from just two highly conflicted situations, which occurred at two sites in — and —, respectively.
The two situations amount to nine years of observation, tallying a kill rate of 1. The remaining years of observation average just 0. The question is whether the outlier cases are better explained as evolved, adaptive behavior or as a result of human disruption. And whereas some evolutionary biologists propose that killings are explained as attempts to diminish the number of males in rival groups, those same data show that subtracting internal from external killings of males produces a reduction of outside males of only one every 47 years, fewer than once in a chimpanzee's lifetime.
This article was originally published with the title "Why We Fight" in Scientific American , 3, September Edited by R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. School of American Research Press, Douglas P. Oxford University Press, Brian Ferguson is a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University—Newark. His academic career has been devoted to explaining why war happens. Credit: Nick Higgins. Already a subscriber? Full text of the statement issued by the ICRC on 5 September , in the light of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which brought the war to an end.
There can be no doubt that war, an anachronism in a civilized world, has taken on a character so devastating and so widespread The Red Cross, nevertheless, is compelled, in time of war, to pursue its traditional efforts in the field of international law, that is to rise in defence of humanity and of the demands that it makes.
At a moment when peace seems, at last, to have returned, it may appear ill-timed to take up such a task, but that should not deflect the Red Cross from this fundamental duty.
The question arises whether they would, perhaps, keep it in lasting and unfailing reserve as a supreme safeguard against war and as a means of preserving a just order. This hope is not, perhaps, entirely vain as, during this six-year struggle, there has been no recourse to the chemical or bacteriological means of warfare as outlawed by the Powers in
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