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Male Aggression and Violence in Human Evolution

In the last few decades, new sources of evidence have continued to indicate that male violence has played an important role in shaping behavior in the human lineage. The frequency and nature of such violence varies widely among populations and over time raises questions about the factors responsible for the variation. In the past, much controversy and even some acrimonious debate has occurred over the question of whether humans lived in a state of ancestral peace. The aim of this symposium is to set aside such theories and debates and take a fresh look at the causes and consequences of variation in aggression, both between and within species. The focus will be on speakers who can critically examine and represent the available evidence from multiple sources, including comparative ethology, ethnology, archaeology, political science, and evolutionary neuroscience. While the symposium may not come to any definitive conclusions, it should allow for the best interpretation of the current evidence, and help suggest research agendas for the future. (from carta.anthropogeny.org)

Resource Unpredictability, Socialization and War. In this talk, Carol Ember (Yale Univ) describes the results from decades-long research that tested a variety of theories about warfare and other forms of violence in a sample of 186 societies. Many of the theories of warfare assumed to be plausible fell short, such as the idea that war becomes more likely with agriculture and political complexity. On the other hand, resource scarcity, particularly unpredictable scarcity such as drought, is a particularly strong predictor of more warfare. Warfare is, however, not an isolated form of violence; indeed warfare is correlated with many other types of violence. Ember concludes with a discussion about the relevance of these research findings to the world today.

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