Together, Söderberg and Fry interpret their findings to suggest that warfare is rare among foraging groups, a result of modern circumstances and not an inherent feature of human nature.
“In general,” Söderberg said, “these societies present a lifestyle in which lethal aggression is not so much about organized conflicts between different groups as it is about individual quarrels stemming from personal motives, such as two men competing over a woman or a family revenging a murder by targeting the killer.”
But there are numerous problems with those conclusions, according to other experts. Excluding sedentary foragers from the study sample, for example, probably skewed the results because hunter-gatherers have lived in settlements for tens of thousands of years, said Sam Bowles, director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute. And in many cases, there are high levels of violence between these sedentary groups.
All the groups that were included in the study, Bowles added, live in places with governments that have worked hard to reduce violence among hunter-gatherer populations, and those efforts were already well-established when the ethnographies used in the new paper were conducted.
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