The pattern of fighting in simple, small-scale, prestate societies

This article shows that the pattern of human fighting among hunter-gatherer s and simple horticulturalists was not very difference from that prevailing among animals species; indeed, it is explained by a similar evolutionary l ogic. The article addresses all scales of both inter and intragroup fightin g, for fighting and killing take place both within and between groups. This pattern is more complex than the simple ingroup cooperation/outgroup rival ry suggested by Herbert Spencer and W.G. Sumner. The distinction that has b een made between "blood feuds" and "warfare," "homicide," and "war killing, " while of course not wholly arbitrary, largely reflects our point of view as members of more or less orderly societies. The phenomenon dealt with her e is deadly aggression, whose forms differ little within or between groups, in individual feuds or in large-scale fighting.