Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?

War and Peace? Modern behavior, including the development of advanced tools, musical instruments, and art, seems to have arisen in humans in stages. The earliest hints are seen in Africa about 70 to 90,000 years ago, but later in Europe about 45,000 years ago. An ongoing discussion centers on the origins and significance of human prosociality. During early human development, could the benefits of altruistic behavior have outweighed its costs (see the Perspective by Mace )? Bowles (p. 1293 ) constructed a model of conflict between groups of humans and extracted estimates of the critical parameters from archaeological and ethnographic data sets. Provocatively, it appears that warfare might have enhanced the…