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Comment by Tuna-Fish | Hacker News Reader

Less famine, much more war. Population densities don't stay down on their own -- people can breed quite rapidly in good conditions. What happens is that population rises to the point where there is no longer enough food for everyone, and then territorial clashes start happening, until someone identifies a weak neighbor tribe and slaughters them. So everything is better until that week you're fighting for your life, and the life of everyone you know and love.

This is exactly how chimpanzees live today, and matches well with most of the archaeological remains we have of primordial hunter-gatherers. Our forebears lived very violent lives.

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That sounds like a pretty good explanation for most conflicts up to the present day. We are just chimpanzees that wear clothes and can talk.

Don't forget our bizarre and inexplicable neoteny. We are the Peter Pans of the primate world.

> Our forebears lived very violent lives.

I've been reading some books on the subject that claim the contrary, also based on archaeological proofs (and on identifying faults with the existing studies). So I wouldn't state that with such confidence.

See RoboTeddy's comment for some details on this POV.

And also, if we look at bonobos, another primate closely related to us, we might get a completely different perspective on life in the distant past. It's just that we discovered chimpanzees first.

Actually, contrary to your claim, bonobos do wage war against each other. They behave very similarly to chimpanzees and humans, as they form coalitions and organize attacks to exterminate rival groups.

It appears that some people prefer to focus on a very specific behavioral trait pinned on bonobos (having sex with group members to diffuse conflicts) just because it fits their preconceived notion of an ideal outcome involving absence of conflicts in general and war in particular. Some people even pin the name "hippie ape" in what looks like a desperate attempt to validate their personal ideals. Yet, bonobos are indeed known for organizing attacks on neighboring primate groups for the express purpose of killing and even eating them.

I wasn't claiming anything, just providing a different perspective (see the "might" in my sentence).

But could you please shed some light on this sentence:

> Yet, bonobos are indeed known for organizing attacks on neighboring primate groups

Are those primates other bonobos? That could be called going to war. If not, it's called hunting: those other primates are just food. It's not like we go to war against whatever other animals we are eating.

There's Lynn Saxon's book The Naked Bonobo that debunks a lot of popular myths about Bonobos - https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Bonobo-Lynn-Saxon/dp/1523945516

To the parent's comment though, bonobos don't actually form patrols and they tend to avoid contact with other groups, so intra-group conflict is lower for bonobos than chimpanzees.

I've been reading some books on the subject that claim the contrary

Could you please cite the names of one or two of those books? I'll start by citing "War Before Civilization" and "Social Conquest of Earth" as in the camp of "our forbears lived very violent lives".

> What happens is that population rises to the point where there is no longer enough food for everyone, and then territorial clashes start happening, until someone identifies a weak neighbor tribe and slaughters them.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's a hell of a simplification. Do you have sources for your two sentence summary of 250,000 years of human pre-history?

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