The Causes and Origins of "Primitive Warfare": On Evolved Motivations for War

Azar Gat's argument represents a major advance toward realism in neo-Darwinian theory on war. Consistently reasonable, plausible, with substantial evidence (on some points), his basic argument is that a wide range of reasons for war are all part of an integrated motivational complex, evolved to deal with problems of survival and reproduction in our species past. Some, clashes of material (somatic) or reproductive interests, are "root causes" of conflict. Others are secondary or derived, "second floor" elaborations necessary for coping with more basic competition, including an impulse toward revenge, sensitivity to status, fear of sorcery, quest for power, even predilection toward sadism. His point is that cultural anthropologists have been mistaken in trying to identify one versus another as explaining war, because they all are involved, non-reductionistically, stamped into our species' mind by their complementary contributions to our evolutionary success. In approaching war, he avoids the more dubious evolutionary constructs, such as "instincts to kill" (Ghiglieri 1999: 178), "Darwinian algorithms" for collective aggression (Tooby and Cosmides 1988), and unconscious tracking of reproductive advantages of violence (Chagnon 1979; 1987). I do not know how he categorizes his approach, but in emphasizing material self- interest and behavioral plasticity, along with directed efforts to maximize inclusive fitness, it appears to me as a development of evolutionary ecology. Evolutionary ecology has a great deal of overlap with ecological approaches that do not include reproductive interests. So Gat's view (Part II: 79) of reasons for war on the Pacific Northwest Coast is much like my (Ferguson 1984a) pre-contact model, though he brings in evidence of women capture which, as he notes (I: 28), 1 ignore. And there are major correspondences with the Divale and Harris (1976) model regarding female scarcity and fighting over women, although without the population-regulation element. The primary difference between evolutionary ecology and "regular" ecology is the former posits that human behavior is evolutionarily designed to maximize reproductive success along with material well-being. I have several major disagreements with Gat. First, throughout his arguments runs the assumption that humans practiced war throughout the huntergatherer past. I believe that assumption is unsustainable. The question of the antiquity of war has been raised but clouded by Keeley (1996), whose rhetoric exceeds his evidence in implying war is as old as humanity. The earliest accepted evidence for warfare, Site 117, near Jebel Sahaba, Nubia, is a cemetery dated to 12,000 to 10,000 B.C., in which 24 of 59 well-preserved skeletons are associated with stone artifacts interpreted as projectile microliths (Wendorf 1968: 90-93; Wendorf and Schild 1986: 818-824). Though late Paleolithic in standard periodization, these people had been experimenting with wild crop harvesting thousands of years before the development of agriculture elsewhere. This experiment was brought to a crashing halt by climatic change which would have put extreme pressure on all peoples throughout the region, especially those in favorable locales like Site 117 (Hoffman 1993: 86-90). Northern Australia, a favorite illustration for Gat, is a unique area in terms of the depth and continuity of collective violence among mobile huntergatherers, with rock art images suggesting individual and small group combats from about 8,000 B.C., and larger group confrontations beginning about 4,000 B.C. (Tacon and Chippindale 1994). This was a time of massive ecological crisis, with rising sea levels drowning the rich plain that once connected Australia to New Guinea. Socially, we see signs of increasing complexity and cultural divisions (Jones and Bowler 1980:23; Schrire 1982: 7; Tacon and Chippindale 1994: 217, 224, 227). Why war became such an institutionalized pattern is suggested by historic observations: their reliance on water holes in dry seasons, sources that sometimes disappear in droughts, gave them an extremely concentrated and valuable resource to fight over (Meggitt 1962: 24, 42), as Gat notes (I: 23). …