There is no evidence that our species ever behaved like that.accelafine wrote: ↑Sat Jul 26, 2025 1:20 pm He would like to go back to the time of 'noble savages', when people spent all the time tip-toeing through soft mists, making poetry and never killing anything or anyone.
It can seem like that, because the experience of interband conflict among hunter gatherers might seem rare. But this is not taking into account the statistics. Suppose the band suffers one warrior fatality plus one "civilian" fatality per decade. Doesn't seem like much, but the band size is only 50. What happens when you work out "what % of deaths are the result of being killed by the enemy". Surprisingly high, isn't it.
The is an argument that this has been our behavior even before we could be said to be human and that it serves an evolutionary purpose. We are a long lived, slow to reproduce species. Over our lifetime, our band could expect to encounter multiple "bad years" (drought, flood, etc.). If hostility between neighboring bands caused bands to leave space between, space not normally utilized for hunting or gathering because too dangerous, then in normal years, only a small percentage of the total land would be heavily utilized. Come the bad years, these otherwise untapped areas could be utilized, the reason normally avoided less important as your neighbor band is also scrambling for food, too busy to feud. On the other hand, if bands normally shared the habitat peacefully, there would be no space between, no normally unutilized reserve, and the result of a bad year would be massive, area wide die off.
