We are naturally a highly violent species with a thin veneer of civilization that masks a brutal proclivity for violence – or so many people think. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that human life without government is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’. William Golding’s novel, The Lord of the Flies, which won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983 and many of us read in school, suggests that boys will rapidly descend into mob violence and brutal cruelty without oversight from authority. To know whether this is true, we need to understand the rates of violence among our ancestors.
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