Are humans inherently violent?
The earliest human civilizations appeared between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago; since then, humans as a species have been entirely at peace for approximately 268 years. And as many as 1 billion people may have perished as a direct result of war, according to "What Every Person Should Know About War" (Free Press, 2003) Violence is clearly not a modern phenomenon, but is it an inherent part of being human? Have we evolved to be aggressive? It turns out the answer isn't simple. A 2014 study published in the journal Nature noted that lethal violence was common in the communities of one of our closest living primate relatives: chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ). That suggests that violence may have been part of the human repertoire at least as far back as our last shared ancestor with chimps, which would have lived about 8 million years ago. Related: What's the deadliest month of the year? So clearly, violence has been prevalent for as long as humans have been around, ...