Look, life is nasty, brutish, and short, but you knew that when you became a caveman. -- New Yorker cartoon

This chapter is about the origins of violence, in both the logical and the chronological sense. With the help of Darwin and Hobbes, we will look at the adaptive logic of violence and its predictions for the kinds of violent impulses that might have evolved as a part of human nature. We will then turn to the prehistory of violence, examining when violence appeared in our evolutionary lineage, how common it was in the millennia before history was written down, and what kinds of historical developments first reduced it.

Thomas Hobbes and Charles Darwin were nice men whose names became nasty adjectives. No one wants to live in a world that is Hobbesian or Darwinian (not to mention Malthusian, Machiavellian, or Orwellian). The two men were immortalized in the lexicon for their cynical synopses of life in a state of nature, Darwin for "survival of the fittest" (a phrase he used but did not coin), Hobbes for "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Yet both men gave us insights about violence that are deeper, subtler, and ultimately more humane than their eponymous adjectives imply. Today any understanding of human violence must begin with their analyses.