The difference between being willing to use violence - to protect yourself, in a fit of jealousy, or to punish someone who has transgressed against the norms of the group is an entirely different thing than valuing warfare and violence as a central aspect of your culture. We see in the pottery and art of the world, around the time that dominance hierarchies came into pervasiveness a change from art that showed a beautiful goddess surrounded by animals perhaps kissing her consort to pottery and art that is often decorated with scenes of conquest, with dragging slaves in chains, or with a king standing triumphant over a fallen enemy.
Even cultures that are considered to be more violent than others have a lot of mechanisms for avoiding violence. As Frans de Waal notes, “Destabilization of the social resource network decreases group stability and efficiency and lowers the average fitness benefit derived from cooperation. When group stability is important for individual advantage, selection will favor active peacemaking and cooperation in our closest relatives and ourselves.”
The massacre at Jebel Sahaba 13,000 years ago is often cited as the oldest known evidence of warfare or systemic intergroup violence. But then, I already said that.... 🙄
Since writing this story several years ago, I've learned even more that supports it.
Chapter 23, The Evolution of Agonism noted, “As we shall see, unrestrained aggression (the last category in Figure 23.1) is exceedingly rare among mammals. An important implication of this fact is that any claim that escalated, unrestrained fighting is species-typical in humans must be strongly justified, rather than simply assumed a priori, as such a claim flies in the face of a well-documented mammalian pattern of restrained agonism. The burden of scientific proof reasonably rests with any claimants that human agonism (the benefits of conflict) in this regard constitutes an exception to a widespread mammalian pattern. The logical default proposition would be that human aggression rather opposes than constitutes a reversal of selection pressures to favor homicide or war.” (p. 455)
