Homo sapiens is a cultural species, almost entirely reliant on social learning for subsistence and survival. By necessity, we must acculturate to loca

Traditions of Conflict

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2022-05-18 04:30:06

Homo sapiens is a cultural species, almost entirely reliant on social learning for subsistence and survival. By necessity, we must acculturate to local context to abide and thrive. Many significant consequences follow from this.

Ideally, a person absorbs important adaptive knowledge and skills from their surrounding circumstances. Learning valuable information from parents, peers, or other community members, such as skills in foraging, social conduct, constructing tools and shelter, etc.

Of course, this is not the full extent of how humans influence, and are influenced by, each other. One underexplored phenomenon in this regard is the diffusion of cultural practices through hostile interactions.

Trophy taking in warfare offers one illustration of this. I looked into scalping practices among the North American hunter-gatherer societies in the eHRAF World Cultures database (Table 1).

I found clear evidence for scalping for 30 of the 43 societies (~70%), however it is the regional distribution that is particularly interesting.