Conflict: Altruism's midwife

摘要

Groups of fire ants, chimpanzees, meerkats and other animals engage in lethal conflicts. But we humans are especially good at it, killing outsiders' on a scale that altered the course of our evolution. Prehistoric burials of large numbers of men and women with smashed skulls, broken forearms and stone points embedded in their bones - as well as ethnographic studies of recent hunters and gatherers - strongly suggest that warfare was a leading cause of death in many ancestral populations. Yet at the same time, humans are unusually cooperative, collaborating with non-kin, for example in hunting and sharing food, on a scale unknown in other animals. Paradoxically, the grisly evidence of our warlike past may help explain our distinctly cooperative nature.