The debates that revolve around human aggression, war, hatred, racism, wife beating, and generally bad behavior are never resolved. As soon as some groups reach out for world peace or community concern for the variously oppressed, the violence just spurts out somewhere else. "A global assessment of the ethnographies for 31 hunter-gatherer societies found that 64% of them engaged in warfare once every two years, 26% fought wars less often, and only 10% were considered to fight rarely or never. So the record suggests regular, almost constant war for most foraging cultures." (Demonic Males, 115) Philosophers, politicians, religious leaders and social scientists keep trying to formulate an adequate social structure and morality to get beyond the fighting - but so far nothing works. And over the past fifty years, there has simultaneously been a battle between blaming nature or nurture for our troubles, with the simultaneous plea that we are all of the human race and should get along.
However, we have been compared to our closest genetic ancestor the chimpanzee. And new evidence is emerging that we, like the chimps, were naturally selected to hate and kill our enemies with a special lust for rape, torture, mutilation and genocide. We are one of the five great apes that include chimpanzees and bonobos on one side of our genetic heritage and gorillas and orangutans on the other. That is, chimpanzees are closer to us genetically than they are to gorillas, despite their close physical resemblance to gorillas. In behavior, we seem to have kept the chimpanzee social structure and behavioral traits, with primarily our higher intelligence differentiating us from the chimps.
To shed some light on the above issues, it would be helpful to look at our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees and the bonobos. As I tell this story, please keep in mind that up until 1928, no one knew that there were two species of chimpanzees. But eventually, in the case of the less populous bonobos, experts recognized not one species but two, and the bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees were reclassified as a separate species - for fifty years they were thought to be the same.
We are all familiar with the chimpanzee. And bonobos look almost identical to chimps but have a radically different culture and behavioral traits. Without repeating what can be found in numerous books about each primate's traits, I shall list them succinctly:
What is interesting about these two primate species, the two that are our closest relatives, and two that are physically the same in appearance, is that they are only separated by the Zaire river in Africa. They are so close physically that many human population groups have more variation between them than these apes do. On the north side of the river, the chimpanzees share their ecological niche with gorillas, and the gorillas eat the available herbs. This means that chimpanzees have to fight over fruit and meat for their dietary needs. On the south side of the river, the same ecology exists, but there are no gorillas and the bonobos have free access to the herbs, and eat far less meat. Meat is not required because of other abundant foods. So here we have two species, separated only by a river, who have changed radically in their behaviors but not in outward appearance. They were even kept in captivity for decades, and allowed to mate, while it was not recognized they were separate species.
So only the separation of a river and the difference of one competitor for food - the gorilla - in the ecological niche occupied by chimpanzees, is enough to change the innate social behavioral traits of the two species. One passive, promiscuous, non-violent; and the other a warring, shrieking, stalking killing machine. Chimpanzees were ready to go to war for the singular purpose of group survival because with genocide in mind, the group that can eliminate another group will be evolutionarily more successful where food is scarce. And we humans seem to be much more like the chimpanzees than bonobos...