The Primatological Origins of War and Genocide

Key Insight

Despite claims from bodies like UNESCO that war is a purely human invention without biological roots, an evolutionary perspective suggests that war, as a continuation of political motives and deeper evolutionary conflicts, may indeed have profound biological underpinnings. This view asserts that if war has deep evolutionary roots, it would be universal, occur in primitive economic environments, be observed in nonhuman animals, and alter the fitness of groups by impacting gene pools and resource availability in nonrandom ways.

Empirical evidence strongly supports the universality of war, with 63 armed conflicts in 1993 alone and over 100 million civilian deaths and 210 million from genocide in the 20th century. Furthermore, war is not a modern aberration; 90 percent of hunter-gatherer societies engage in warfare, with 64 percent fighting every two years, and death rates from collective violence among them being 20 times higher than for Europeans and Americans in the 20th century, even with major wars included.

Our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, exhibit behavior akin to warfare. Primatologist Jane Goodall's research at Gombe Stream National Park documented systematic lethal raiding parties between chimpanzee communities, resulting in the annihilation of male rivals and absorption of females, accounting for an estimated 30 percent of adult male deaths. This lethal inter-group aggression, a species-wide pattern in chimpanzees, is driven by territoriality in resource-poor environments and reinforced by patrilocality, where related males defend territory to secure resources and access to females, making chimpanzees and humans unique among social predators for their extreme, genocidal inter-group violence.