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War, what is it good for?

Rahul Oka, Agustin Fuentes, Susan Sheridan, Mark Golitko, Nam Kim, and I recently published a paper in PNAS looking at how demographics affects both the size of a war group and conflict causalities. Here is the gist: Many scholars have noted that in hunter-gather populations, the number of people involved in fighting can be as much as 40% of the population, but this percentage drops in big state-level societies.