War, Origins in Animals and Early Societies

Animal Warfare

Unicellular organisms devour prey, compete for best access to food, and defend through encystment and attack through pseudopodia and poisons. Our own cells can devour, compete with, and kill foreign cells. In this sense, it could be said that hunting, competition, and fighting, the three agonistic survival strategies already exist in our most primitive structures.

Hunting, competition, and fight are ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom. The last of these is most striking as far as war is concerned. The socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson says, “The strongest evoker of aggressive response in animals is the sight of a stranger [of the same species], especially a territorial intruder” (1975, p. 249).

From ants to primates, nothing coheres a group and energizes it to aggression as much as intrusion by strangers. Pavement ants may kill, dismember, and eat each other in territorial wars. Suspicion of foreigners (the “xenophobia principle”) is ubiquitous among social animals.

Territorial intruders may actually be dangerous. Lions and chimpanzees may kill neighboring males, cannibalize them and their progeny, and impregnate their females.

We see that interspecies hunting and intraspecies cannibalism, competition, and offensive-defensive wars already exist in animals.

Mitigating aggression are hierarchies and territories. Initial contests for dominance and formation of “pecking orders” obviate later intragroup struggles. Respect for territories prevents external wars.

Primitive Warfare

Archeological findings, as Lawrence H. Keeley notes, indicate that our genetic forebears and our own species murdered, warred, and massacred each other wherever they were in the world. Indeed, attrition rates resulting from conflict among primitive people were comparable to our modern wars.

Let us look more closely at the agonistic survival strategies among primitive societies.