We are at war! This is why we are fighting.

[Almighty Colin]

Originally posted by cj@Sep 12 2004, 01:58 AM
When did you last see a lion rounding up his troops to go take over another lions den?!?!

Lions do kill each other in territorial disputes. They don't "round up the troops" but they lack the social structures that you see in primates. Of course, they have social structures but they are quite different in kind and size and they lack the kind of complex communication that would be needed for such organization.

Our closest relative, the chimpanzee, is a completely different story though. In the 70s, Jane Goodall documented a chimpanzee troop ambushing and killing a chimpanzee from another troop. This behavior has been documented more extensively since. I've seen an aerial view video taken with an infrared cam of a group of chimps coordinating such an ambush. Enter another chimps territory and risk being beaten to death. They do murder each other and it is organized. They are highly social and can communicate coordinated complex plans to each other.

There are plenty of human bones from the neolithic period with arrows in them. There are hundreds of paleolithic era bones with stone points in them - likely from spears. Some of them have more than a dozen injuries from sharp objects that didn't heal. D.O.A. There are cave drawings which depict human on human violence. Even earlier, there are Neanderthal skulls which many think were the result of murder/battles.

I think the answer is simple. It doesn't matter whether such behavior is for survival or not. What matters is that the more violent social groups were more likely to survive and perpetuate their social systems and maybe even their genes. Pacifists perished.