Summary
Is our desire to wage war something uniquely human or can its origins be traced much further back in our evolutionary past?
To suggest that warfare is a regular feature of human civilization would be to state the obvious. But just how deeply rooted is our desire to kill others of our species? Is lethal aggression a fixed part of our genetic code, something that has evolved from a common ancestor – and something therefore that has adaptive value? Or is warfare – and more generally, a predilection for lethal violence something that has emerged much more recently in human history? No longer the preserve of historians and philosophers, the question, as Geoff Watts discovers, is now argued over fiercely by anthropologists and biologists.
Producer: Rami Tzabar
Image Credit: Chimpanzee, courtesy of Getty
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
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| 0:07.0 | go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:11.0 | You're with discovery on the BBC, I'm just... broadcasts. of Southern Germany at a site called Tallheim. And these are the bones of early farmers who lived |
| 0:28.7 | 7,000 years ago. An entire community, men and women and children was basically massacred and there remains |
| 0:36.9 | thrown haphazardly into a very large pit. Archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson describing the so-called |
| 0:46.0 | Tallheim death pit. |
| 0:48.0 | Discovered in 1983, it dates from around 5,000 BC in the Neolithic period, and offers possibly the earliest indication of organized |
| 0:56.4 | or coalitionary violence between communities, the first direct evidence, in other words, |
| 1:02.1 | of human warfare. More of this later. But can we trace |
| 1:06.3 | the origins of violence and war further back than this, back even into the pre-human |
| 1:11.7 | period of our evolutionary history, and do the clues to be found |
| 1:16.5 | suggest that we modern humans are inherently violent, burdened by an innate predisposition to warfare. |
| 1:25.0 | Our far distant hunter-gatherer forebears probably live lives not unlike those of some of our |
| 1:30.0 | modern primate relatives such as bonobos and chimpanzees. So let's begin our |
| 1:34.8 | journey in an African forest with the chimps. |
| 1:40.0 | The first time I really saw a hunt, the adolescent was literally creeping up the trunk towards these two adult monkeys, |
| 1:49.5 | one of whom was a female with a baby, and the other adult chimps were stationing themselves so that wherever |
| 1:56.6 | those monkeys jump there would be a chim to intercept. |
| 2:00.5 | But in fact the adolescent grabbed the infant from the mother and raced down a tree and then the others took that prey away from the adolescent and I could see them eating it. |
| 2:18.0 | Dame Jane Goodall describing what no other primatologist before her has seen, chimpanzees hunting and killing monkeys, fellow primates. |
| 2:22.0 | But does violence in chimps tell us anything about violence |
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