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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 5299818" data-attributes="member: 463">I agree that humans are generally good at threat assessment and avoiding conflict.However, homicide does make up the majority of deaths in some cultures, especially among adult males.  Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn has a good discussion of this.  Modern hunter-gatherer cultures which appear to closely resemble the global ancestral populations (ie the way all our ancestors used to be) typically have extremely high homicide rates compared to most of the populations in modern industrialised cultures, in the region of ca 1/30th population per year for adult males AIR (not evenly spread, as that includes wholesale extermination of the males in rival groups and absorption of the survivors). So I guess our ancestors must have had very Authoritarian Personalities. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Or, to put it another way:  Rousseau was wrong.  We weren't born Good, or peaceful, or nice.  Our current relative peaceableness and niceness was the end point on a long hard road, and may well be a transient condition.</blockquote>