Chimpanzees, War, and History Are Men Born to Kill?

by Ferguson, R. Brian

• ISBN13: 9780197506752
• ISBN10: 0197506755
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-06-12
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The question of whether men are predisposed to war runs hot in contemporary scholarship and online discussion. Within this debate, chimpanzee behavior is often cited to explain humans' propensity for violence; the claim is that male chimpanzees kill outsiders because they are evolutionarily inclined, suggesting to some that people are too. The longstanding critique that killing is instead due to human disturbance has been pronounced dead and buried. In Chimpanzees, War, and History, R. Brian Ferguson challenges this consensus.

By historically contextualizing every reported chimpanzee killing, Ferguson offers and empirically substantiates two hypotheses. Primarily, he provides detailed demonstration of the connection between human impact and intergroup killing of adult chimpanzees. Secondarily, he argues that killings within social groups reflect status conflicts, display violence against defenseless individuals, and payback killings of fallen status bullies. Ferguson also explains broad chimpanzee-bonobo differences in violence through constructed and transmitted social organizations consistent with new perspectives in evolutionary theory. He deconstructs efforts to illuminate human warfare via chimpanzee analogy, and provides an alternative anthropological theory grounded in Pan-human contrasts that is applicable to different types of warfare. Bringing readers on a journey through theoretical struggle and clashing ideas about chimpanzees, bonobos, and evolution, Ferguson opens new ground on the age-old question--are men born to kill?

Author Biography

R. Brian Ferguson is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. He has studied war since the 1970s and has developed a general theoretical perspective that encompasses ethnology, archaeology, biological anthropology, historical anthropology, and militarism in the world today. Ferguson engages both theoretical and contemporary issues of public concern and has published for specialist and public audiences.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part I: Controversies

Chapter 1: From Nice to Brutal

Chapter 2: The Second Generation

Chapter 3: Theoretical Alternatives

Part II: Gombe

Chapter 4: From Peace to "War"

Chapter 5: Contextualizing Violence

Chapter 6: Explaining the War and Its Aftermath

Chapter 7: The Postwar Era

Chapter 8: Interpreting Gombe Violence

Part III: Mahale

Chapter 9: Mahale: What Happened to K Group?

Chapter 10: Mahale History

Part IV: Kibale

Chapter 11: Kibale

Chapter 12: Ngogo Territorial Conflict

Chapter 13: Scale and Geopolitics at Ngogo

Chapter 14: The Ngogo Expansion, RCH + HIH

Chapter 15: Kanyawara

Part V: Budongo

Chapter 16: Budongo, Early Research

Chapter 17: Sonso

Part VI: Eleven Smaller Cases

Chapter 18: Eastern Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii

Chapter 19: Central Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes troglodytes

Chapter 20: Western Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus

Part VII: Tai

Chapter 21: Tai and Its Afflictions

Chapter 22: Sociality and Intergroup Relations

Chapter 23: Killings and Explanations

Part VIII: Bonobos

Chapter 24: Pan paniscus

Chapter 25: Social Organization and Why Male Bonobos Are Less Violent

Chapter 26: Evolutionary Scenarios and Speculations

Part IX: Adaptive Strategies, Human Impact, and Deadly Violence: Theory and Evidence

Chapter 27: Killing Infants

Chapter 28: The Case for Evolved Adaptations, by the Evidence

Chapter 29: Human Impact, Critiqued and Documented

Part X: Human War

Chapter 30: The Demonic Perspective Meets Human Warfare

Chapter 31: Toward a General Theory of War

Chapter 32: Applications

Tables
References
Index