While working on the creation of a dataset of the fossil record of Homo sapiens I became interested the origins of interpersonal violence and warfare. Nam Kim and I have written a book that discusses the evolutionary arc of human warfare. This book details the anthropological data on violence and the emergence of warfare, providing a holistic anthropological view of the question of when war began. We argue that “emergent warfare” must be considered in association with “emergent peace,” as the same capacities that make us human allow us to interact and socialize in very complex ways also give us creative ways to organize our behaviors, whether violent or nonviolent. This manuscript will be published in March of 2017 by Routledge.
This research has led to a new project that examines the question of whether violence has declined or increased over our evolutionary history. It brings together ethnographic, archaeological, and biological data. Some of this research has recently been published in PNAS (Oka et al. 2017), looking at factors that effect the size of war groups. See the blog section of this site for more detail