(Glo. 2024 Reading) Controversial Origins of War and Peace: Apes, Foragers, and Human Evolution

These flashcards are designed to help students review and prepare for their exam based on the lecture notes regarding the origins of war and peace in human evolution.

What is a contentious topic in evolutionary sciences?

The role of warfare in human evolution.

What do proponents of the deep roots perspective believe about warfare?

Warfare has a deep evolutionary history, potentially dating to our last common ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees.

What is the shallow roots perspective on warfare?

War is a recent development that arose with the advent of agriculture and sedentism.

How do bonobos and chimpanzees differ in terms of intergroup violence?

Bonobos are generally less violent and have intergroup cooperation, while chimpanzees exhibit lethal intergroup violence.

What is one important behavioral characteristic that defines war in a broad sense?

Intergroup coalitionary killings.

How does the definition of war impact the study of its origins?

A definition based solely on contemporary human warfare is less useful for evaluating war's evolutionary emergence.

What approaches do deep rooters use to understand the origins of intergroup coalitionary killing?

Phylogenetic and adaptive approaches.

What is a phylogenetic approach in studying war?

It focuses on whether closely related species share a trait to infer a common evolutionary origin.

What is the adaptive approach to studying war?

It identifies the selective pressures that gave rise to a trait and examines the conditions in which it evolved.

Why do shallow rooters argue that war is a by-product?

They believe war arises from social conditions like population density and is not an inherited trait.

What is one major critique of recent studies on hunter-gatherers regarding warfare?

Such studies often depend on ethnographically biased or transformed populations lacking context of earlier societies.

What are some mechanisms hunter-gatherer societies used to resolve conflicts?

Peace meetings and traditional ceremonies to renew relationships.

How do recent research findings challenge the assumption that hunter-gatherers lacked war?

Evidence indicates that many hunter-gatherers participated in occasional warfare despite varying intensity.

What was the primary method of violence among mobile hunter-gatherers?

Raid-based attacks that targeted lone individuals, rather than organized battles.

What does the complexity of intergroup relationships among early humans imply?

Human intergroup dynamics involved both cooperation and violence, shaped by various ecological and social contexts.