Ever since Darwin’s theory that humans evolved from “lesser” beings like monkeys and apes was reluctantly accepted by the scientific community, everyone from archeologists to psychologists have argued about whether we have it in ourselves to be peaceful, or whether or not war is a natural state of humanity. Darwin himself thought that humans were naturally empathetic and kind and that violence was a result of the stress of civilization, while his close associate Thomas Huxley said that man was greedy and his only aim was to snatch everything that was within his grasp. Ideas like this were especially during World War I, where violence was so devastating that the world didn’t wish for another conflict EVER again, to the extent that people even called it the War to end all Wars.
Of course, we ended up in an even more devastating war just two decades later. It didn’t help that the romantic mood of the early 20th century painted the idea of a noble savage, a wild, primitive man who didn’t believe in the ideals of civilization and was extremely violent and bloodthirsty but yet was more honest and chivalrous than the “wicked manipulators” of the era’s aristocracy. Prominent in creating this image was the author Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Tarzan novels, which while they are great for a fun read, portray a whitewashed account of savagery in tribal and “primitive remnant” societies. Besides, archeologists have kept finding skeletons that died of bad injuries thought to have been caused by stone tools. Today, since we can’t take a look at our ancestors, the next best thing is our cousin, aka the humble chimp.
Chimpanzees, while they may seem goofy and fun in circuses, are incredibly territorial and resemble our unpalatable sides a bit more than we would like. Chimpanzee males always get into fights for power, they live in different clans that are always warring, and chimpanzee gangs will hunt and torture animals for fun; even their own kind. Of course, does this mean that chimps are inherently evil? Clearly not. As always, there’s another side to the story, and for that we’ll have to look at bonobos, which are just hippie chimps.
Scientifically bonobos are a different species compared to normal chimps even though they look similar, and all of it has to do mainly with behaviour, which is the complete opposite of chimpanzees. Bonobos, unlike chimpanzees, are matriarchal in a way, where older females have all the power. Bonobos are quite peaceful and aren’t as violent to humans or anything else compared to their cousins are, even if clans will engage in serious conflict. Bonobos are smaller and weaker than chimpanzees, so that may contribute a role as well. However, bonobos engage in gratuitous sexual relationships both to establish dominance and to resolve conflict, which is unheard of in chimpanzees. Even more surprising is that bonding occurs between same-sex individuals, predominantly female-female.
As we can see, while these two animals couldn’t be any more different in their manner, we share characteristics with both chimpanzees and bonobos, and since they are much more “primitive” than us, we can safely assume that our present-day behaviour hasn’t changed significantly for a million years. The last time any such thing happened was 70,000 years ago, when humans started to think a lot more and culture advanced significantly. This happened in the background of a huge volcanic eruption that caused the temperature to rapidly drop down, leading to a lot of things dying and humans migrating out of Africa. As this occurred, various human groups began to differentiate themselves more and more.
As Yuval Noah Harari puts it in his bestseller Sapiens, there is no way to know what the exact behaviour of our species is, was, or will be in any given time because of one specific reason: Humans are very adaptable. Yes, even if most of us would love nothing but sit on the couch like a sack of potatoes, we have in fact, reached every single nook and cranny on this planet and even beyond simply through our resourcefulness. This is due to the fact that we can change our behaviour to adapt to our situation if we actually feel like it. Due to this, different groups of people and different individuals had, have, and will always have quite different personalities and manners which can only be loosely defined as a sort of “normal human behaviour”.
Of course, one last thing to remember is that because of our adaptability (and this can be either a curse or a blessing, depending on how you look at it) nurture plays a much bigger role in our behaviour than in say, a hamster. The best thing we can do to ensure the success of our species is to raise the next generation even better than we were raised and hopefully most of them will out turn out well. Today especially when our world is actually cooking and the average person works longer hours than a medieval peasant, it’s probably time for a change in behaviour.
Anay Ganesh 