The idea is old and it is everywhere: strip away government and police and people will simply kill each other, a war of all against all. Thomas Hobbes gave it its most famous form, but it long predates him. Chapter 10 exists to test that assumption—and it does not survive. For Intro to Anthropology we read chapter 10 in The Human Story. This page covers the full chapter: aggression, violence, and warfare; the archaeology of when war actually begins; structural violence; and the four ways people fight back. For broader context see the Power Analysis hub. For an extended treatment of the four responses—including sovereignty and Audra Simpson—see the companion page Resistance, Refusal, Revolution, Reconciliation.
Key Concepts
- Aggression, violence, and warfare are three different things: aggression is motivated by a desire to harm without necessarily causing it, violence is interpersonal harm, warfare is organized violence between groups (286).
- Humans are the only species that fights for ideological or symbolic reasons—over flags, lines on a map, and the idea of honor (286).
- Coalitionary aggression has been observed among chimpanzees but never among bonobos, who are equally distant from humans evolutionarily (287).
- The most-observed case, Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees at Gombe in Tanzania, involved animals habituated to humans and provisioned with food—one rose to the top of the hierarchy by rolling a gasoline can down a hill (287).
- Isolated interpersonal violence appears in the record 800,000 years ago, but there is no archaeological evidence for organized warfare before 13,000 years ago, with a marked increase at 7,000 (288).
- Warfare tracks domestication, city-states, private property, and hierarchy—not weaponry, and not inevitably (288).
- Structural violence, associated with the anthropologist Paul Farmer, is harm produced by social structure: differential rates of disease, illness, and death with nobody pointing a gun (299).
- People fight back four ways—resistance, revolution, reconciliation, refusal—and a revolution fought from below is not the same thing as a coup fought to preserve dominance (308–311).
The Assumption This Chapter Is Testing
Several deep assumptions run through how people think about human history since agriculture. That agriculture is always better than hunting and gathering. That a city has to have a ruler. That things always get more and more complicated, when evolution does not necessarily tend toward complexity and societies can simplify as they grow.
The last one is the law of the jungle: that out in nature the chimpanzees and every other creature are competing and fighting it out for survival of the fittest, and that without a government to tell us what to do—without the police around to give me a ticket on a Saturday night—we would all just kill each other. A war of all against all. The idea goes back to Thomas Hobbes and has been around far longer. It holds that creatures are naturally violent and will hurt each other unless kept in line forcefully.
That assumption is what this chapter examines, and it does not turn out to be the case. That is perhaps the whole point of chapter 10.
Aggression, Violence, Warfare: What’s the Difference?
We hear aggression, violence, and warfare as though they mean the same thing—people are aggressive, so they’ll be violent, so they’ll fight each other. They are different (286).
Aggression is behavior motivated by a desire to harm, but it does not necessarily result in harm. You can act aggressively, or passive aggressively, without hurting anyone physically. As discussions of microaggressions emphasize, effect matters as much as intent.
Violence is when you take it up to the level of actually hurting someone. But that is interpersonal violence, between people. Warfare is organized violence: people group together and fight, between groups, in some way organized.
Fighting Over Flags and Lines on a Map
Human beings are the only species that does these things for reasons other than access to resources or mates—for ideological or symbolic reasons (286). We fight over flags, over lines on a map, over the idea of honor. As far as we know, nothing else in the animal kingdom gets into conflicts about what color your hats are; other animals fight over specific resources.
We do that too. But we also fight for reasons we can’t fully name. We fight for our country, which is an idea we have in our heads, and we fight with people we have never met over ideas and symbols.
What About Other Primates?
Among chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans you see displays of aggression and some interpersonal violence—but honestly, not a ton. What has almost never been observed among other primates is coalitionary aggression, where a group gets together and fights another group (287).
The only primates observed doing it are chimpanzees, who have been seen to group up and raid another group or gang up on an individual. It has not been observed among bonobos—and bonobos are equally distant from humans evolutionarily. We have not observed it among our equidistant relatives. Where we have observed it in chimpanzees, it is focused on concrete things: food, mates, defending a territory (287).
The Gombe Problem
The most-observed case came through Jane Goodall and her research assistants in Tanzania—a famous place, really the origin of naturalistic primate studies. Goodall died in October 2025.
Nothing here is a criticism of her. But when coalitionary aggression was observed at Gombe, it was at a site where the chimpanzees had been habituated to human presence and given food by researchers. There is film of one rolling a gasoline can down a hill to make noise, and by doing so ascending to the top of the chimpanzee hierarchy. Obviously there is no such thing in nature as a gasoline can you can roll down a hill. These groups had been altered by the presence of human beings. Goodall later said she regretted the provisioning.
And often when coalitionary aggression is observed, it is among groups whose habitat has been reduced by human encroachment. They may be fighting over habitat that, evolutionarily speaking, they might never have had to fight over. So: coalitionary aggression is not observed among other primates except chimpanzees, and even there it is unclear whether it was a completely natural occurrence.
No Archaeological Evidence for Warfare Before 13,000 Years Ago
Among human beings we do not see much archaeological evidence for interpersonal violence. We do identify it, as early as 800,000 years ago—people who fought each other, who had stone tools or knives put into them. But it is isolated (288).
Crucially, there is no archaeological evidence for coalitionary aggression or warfare before 13,000 years ago. For most of our evolutionary history—the two million years or so of being securely bipedal, stone-using creatures, and certainly the 200,000 years of being Homo sapiens—there is no archaeological evidence for warfare.
We may yet find it earlier. Absence of evidence does not necessarily mean we did not fight each other in an organized way. But from what archaeologists have uncovered, there is clear evidence of warfare emerging about 13,000 years ago and no evidence of it before. Then the evidence increases—mass graves, weapons, sites that look like battles—around 7,000 years ago (288).
What Happened at 13,000 and 7,000 Years Ago?
Around 13,000 years ago we see the domestication of plants and animals developing into fuller agriculture. And what comes with agriculture, and with organizing people into agglomerations of city-states? More emphasis on private property. More resources to defend. More hierarchy. More people to lead around into war and battle (288).
This is not inevitable. There are plenty of places where people grew things and didn’t fight each other much. But there does seem to be a connection between the emergence of agriculture and the capacity to organize a complex society in ways that let you boss people around and make them do things, even when it hurts them and hurts others.
Cooperation Cuts Both Ways
Human beings are an intensely cooperative species. Other primates and other animals cooperate too, but we cooperate a great deal and form complex social groups—organizing ourselves by kin, by ethnic groups, eventually by nations.
For the most part people like to get along. There are always some who don’t, and we do things to them: we shun them, we gossip about them, we make people follow the rules. Most of us simply like to fit in, to live harmoniously with our group, to not be teased and left out.
Usually this is good—it is how we cooperate and build things. But it can also lead to warfare, when people get convinced that another group is bad or is taking their stuff. Because we are cooperative, we can also cooperate to do bad things to other people.
Norms Around Violence Can Change
The textbook’s example is the Waorani, who for a long time had an established norm of intergroup raiding and quite high rates of interpersonal violence. Over time they shifted, became a more peaceful society, and began channeling that energy into political issues rather than interpersonal ones (296).
Norms around violence can change. People can become more peaceful, and more violent, over time. Europe’s own famous case runs the same way: the Vikings were the feared people of the north, marauding everybody else, and now those countries are about the most relaxed places you can imagine.
Dehumanization and Rhetoric
One thing to watch for always is how we talk about other people. Rhetorical strategies deployed on radio, on television, in speeches can be dehumanizing—describing another person in language that makes them seem less than a person (296).
Watch the metaphors. If you hear someone compare another person to an animal—a rat, a savage, a snake—stop and ask what is going on here. Why am I being asked to compare a human being to an animal? Because pretty soon you are probably going to be asked to do something about that.
Group identity by itself is fine, even good: people cooperate, build things, grow things. But combine group identity with the idea that someone else is threatening you, coming to take something away, coming to hurt you, and you can gin up the idea that those people need to be hurt or eliminated—that they aren’t really people, that they aren’t as good as us. Look at most cases of warfare in human history and there has been some form of dehumanization, some idea that you must follow orders to hurt somebody because that person is bad.
An example from linguistic anthropology: in Hungary, the Roma community was dehumanized through talk of “Gypsies,” “Gypsy crime,” and “Gypsy criminals.”
Why Mostly Men?
Most warfare, and violence generally, has been conducted by men—and we see this among primates as well, where it is usually the male chimps getting together. Not always, among chimpanzees or among people, but often (298).
For human men this can be a way of getting an identity, of gaining social status, of thinking you are bigger and stronger. The ideas of being in a military, in an organized group, can be very appealing. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, except when it gets used to be mean to other people.
What is interesting is that even men need heavy training to carry out these activities. It is not something people simply do naturally and feel good about. They go through basic training—an intense period in which your identity is broken down and stripped away, then built back up as a soldier. A lot of people don’t make it through, because it is a very particular form of training.
This does not look innate. And many people who return from war end up suffering psychological distress over time even when they were never physically injured. It can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Structural Violence
Structural violence is most famously associated with the anthropologist Paul Farmer, who introduced the idea to anthropology; it is used in other disciplines as well (299).
We usually think of violence as physical aggression—somebody doing something bad to someone else. Structural violence points to a different kind, resulting from the way a society is structured. In complex societies where some people are on top and some on the bottom, that produces differences in the power people hold.
Say you live in a poorer stratum. You have less access to health care, education, food, water. You contract illnesses more rapidly and can’t get treatment. Your group has higher rates of death. In this idea, that is a form of violence. Nobody is putting a gun to your head. It is not physical aggression. It is a social form of aggression in which some groups have better health outcomes than others.
Settler Colonialism, Boarding Schools, and Language Death
The textbook’s example is settler colonialism—groups primarily from Europe arriving in the Americas and taking over land (300). In the United States and Canada across the 19th and 20th centuries, children were removed from their Indigenous communities and placed in boarding schools.
Many of the people doing it perhaps wanted to help, or so they said. What happened to the children removed from their homes is that they were prohibited from speaking their Indigenous languages. There was a great deal of language death in that period (301). Before Europeans arrived in the Americas, thousands of Indigenous languages were spoken in what is now the United States and Canada. Most of those languages have died, and the forced removal of children into boarding schools was part of that process.
Because of that trauma, and because it continues to this day—Indigenous peoples and Native Americans are often subject to differential treatment and have less access to health care, education, and wealth than other groups—this becomes a form of structural violence (303). In some cases there was actual violence and warfare. But there was also a situation set up in which people were subjected to the rule of others, and the result was and is differential rates of disease, illness, death, and worse health overall.
These things happen in human societies. Violence, warfare. But they are not built into them. They are not necessarily going to happen all the time. They come and go, and we can change them, and we can set up our society differently.
Fighting Back: Four Responses
The chapter’s final section asks what people do when they find themselves in a situation of structural or actual violence, their group disadvantaged relative to the rest of society. It names four forms of fighting back (308–311). They are not neatly separated—they are different ways of talking about how people try to change their circumstances.
Resistance
Resistance does not have to be bloodshed. It can be petitions, boycotts, going on strike—public forms. Or it can be hidden and slower: if someone is exacting too much from your job, you slow your work down, or you leave. It can be people taking over places or poaching resources that others are trying to enclose (308–309).
The textbook points to language revitalization. Many Indigenous languages were eliminated, and there has also been an effort to recuperate them, to start teaching them again—a form of resisting what was imposed. It can be individual, but it can also be public, organized, and used to challenge power. Many civil rights reforms were brought about this way, through boycotts and strikes, without bloodshed.
Revolution, and Why January 6 Was Not One
A revolution is a challenge to the government with the goal of establishing a new government (311). In this country we love the American Revolution and are then taught never to do it again. Good job, George Washington. Now stop. Revolutions are generally illegal, because replacing the government is the whole point.
The distinction that matters is who is fighting and in which direction. These four responses describe people on the bottom, disadvantaged, trying to change the system. In the American Revolution, people dominated by another group and denied their own form of government—taxation without representation—rose against it.
On January 6th, people stormed the Capitol and halted the counting of votes, attempting to keep in power a person who was supposed to leave power. What do you call it when a small group tries to continue its dominance by overthrowing a democratically elected government, using violent occupation against a democracy? That is a coup. It was not a civil war. It was an attempted coup.
Reconciliation
Reconciliation works when you expose the truth of what has been going on (311). You are not trying to cover the truth up—that is something else. First expose the truth, then establish responsibility: who did what here. The purpose is that you no longer have to keep hurting each other, and can move forward in peace.
With the boarding schools there have been efforts to expose what happened in those institutions—in some, actual violence against Indigenous children—and to establish responsibility, in order to reach a place where we can say that was wrong and try to be better.
In October 2024, Joe Biden traveled to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona and apologized for the policy of removing children to boarding schools. He was the first president to formally apologize for it; the federal government had never said it was wrong. That is an attempt to reconcile: to account for past injustice, establish responsibility, and move forward in peace. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Refusal
The line between resistance and refusal is hard to draw exactly. By refusal we mean that you are not going to adhere to or comply with unjust laws or norms (310). The civil rights movement was in some ways resistance, but you might also consider it refusal: you were told to sit at the back of the bus and you refused, because you believed the law was unjust.
In some cases refusal means rejecting the idea that a country has power over you at all. For some Indigenous groups it means not acknowledging that the colonial power should control their actions—resisting the idea that you should belong to a nation-state, hold its citizenship, or be counted in its ethnic categories.
The textbook’s example is the work of Audra Simpson, on Mohawk territory not far from here, now cut through by the border between the United States and Canada. By treaty right, people there can cross that border without a passport—though that right is frequently challenged or interrupted. Simpson’s work is about people refusing to pay allegiance to either national government.
I agree with the refusal people. Maybe we need more of that in our society. A little more refusal.
For the extended treatment—the sovereignty question, Puerto Rico, and Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus at length—see Resistance, Refusal, Revolution, Reconciliation and The Anthropology of Refusal.
Warfare Is Not Natural
Organized warfare is tied to agriculture, territory, surplus, and settlement—not to a deep evolutionary inheritance. Sporadic interpersonal violence runs throughout human history, but coalitionary organized violence against other groups is recent. Getting people to participate requires extensive training, dehumanizing rhetoric, and the breaking down of ordinary reluctance.
War seems normalized and permanent. But “seems” is the key word. If it has not always been this way, it does not have to be this way.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did warfare begin?
There is no archaeological evidence for organized warfare before about 13,000 years ago, with a marked increase around 7,000 years ago (288). Isolated interpersonal violence appears far earlier—as early as 800,000 years ago—but without mass graves or concentrations of weaponry. Absence of evidence is not proof, and earlier evidence may yet be found, but this is what archaeologists have uncovered.
Is warfare part of human nature?
The record does not support it. For the roughly two million years of bipedal, stone-using existence and the 200,000 years of Homo sapiens, there is no archaeological evidence for warfare. Getting people to fight requires intense training that breaks down and rebuilds identity, and many return with lasting psychological distress (298)—the opposite of what you would expect from something innate.
Do chimpanzees go to war?
Chimpanzees are the only primate observed in coalitionary aggression, raiding other groups or ganging up on individuals (287). Bonobos, equally distant from humans evolutionarily, have not been observed doing it. The most-cited case at Gombe involved chimpanzees habituated to humans and provisioned with food, and coalitionary aggression is often observed where habitat has been reduced by human encroachment—both reasons for caution.
What is structural violence?
Structural violence, associated with Paul Farmer, is harm produced by how a society is organized rather than by physical aggression (299). Living in a poorer stratum with less access to health care, education, food, and water produces higher rates of illness and death. Nobody points a gun; the differential outcome is itself the violence.
What is the difference between a revolution and a coup?
A revolution is a challenge to the government from below, by people who are disadvantaged, aiming to establish a new government (311). A coup is a small group using violent occupation to preserve its own dominance against a democratically elected government. On this distinction, January 6th was an attempted coup rather than a revolution or a civil war.
Course Navigation
- Previous class: Redistribution in Anthropology – Palace economies to taxation
- Next class: Sex and Gender in Anthropology – Chapter 11
- Companion: Resistance, Refusal, Revolution, Reconciliation – The four responses in depth
- The Anthropology of Refusal – Simpson, Ferguson, and Consent’s Revenge
- Warfare Is Not Genetic – Fuentes on the extended evolutionary synthesis
- Biology and Power – Extended evolutionary synthesis
- Power Analysis Hub – Anthropology and structures of power