No, War Is Not Inevitable

[David Morris]

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jun/02-no-war-is-not-inevitable

The modern version of the “killer ape” theory depends on two lines of
evidence. One consists of observations of Pan troglodytes, or
chimpanzees, one of our closest genetic relatives, banding together
and attacking chimps from neighboring troops. The other derives from
reports of intergroup fighting among hunter-gatherers; our ancestors
lived as hunter-gatherers from the emergence of the Homo genus until
the Neolithic era, when humans began settling down to cultivate crops
and breed animals, and some scattered groups still live that way.

But consider these facts. Researchers did not observe the first deadly
chimpanzee raid until 1974, more than a decade after Jane Goodall
started watching chimps at the Gombe reserve. Between 1975 and 2004,
researchers counted a total of 29 deaths from raids, which comes to
one killing for every seven years of observation of a community. Even
Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, a leading chimpanzee
researcher and prominent advocate of the deep-roots theory of war,
acknowledges that “coalitionary killing” is “certainly rare.”

Even more important, the first solid evidence of lethal group violence
among our ancestors dates back not millions, hundreds of thousands, or
even tens of thousands of years, but only 13,000 years. The evidence
consists of a mass grave found in the Nile Valley, at a location in
modern-day Sudan. Even that site is an outlier. Virtually all other
evidence for human warfare—skeletons with projectile points embedded
in them, weapons designed for combat (rather than hunting), paintings
and rock drawings of skirmishes, fortifications—is 10,000 years old or
less. In short, war is not a primordial biological “curse.” It is a
cultural innovation, an especially vicious, persistent meme, which
culture can help us transcend.