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The Prehistoric Psychopath

Life in the state of nature was less violent than you might think. Most of our ancestors avoided conflict. But this made them vulnerable to a few psychopaths.

Our archeological estimates are based on reanalyzing a dataset developed by Gomez et al. (which was released after Better Angels was published and has dozens of extra samples), which attempts to measure rates of violent death by looking for evidence of trauma to skeletal remains. We know from modern sociopathy research that sociopaths are over-represented among the powerful, likely due to characteristics such as a drive for dominance, risk-taking behavior, willingness to disregard moral and social norms for the sake of personal ambition and high tolerance for conflict. It is true, for example, that modern states live in a similar way, with respect to one another, as hunter gatherers did: they are held together by loose affiliations and cultural and familial ties and have the capacity to do enormous damage to one another, but this does not mean conflict is inevitable.

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