Warfare between Egalitarian Groups
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The subject of early warfare is controversial: Some authors argue that it has been prevalent throughout human biological evolution while others argue that it arose more recently. We study warfare over land among internally egalitarian groups, which were the norm for most of human prehistory. Archaeological evidence for Europe and southwest Asia indicates that warfare was rare in the Upper Paleolithic, common in the Mesolithic, and widespread in the Neolithic. This suggests an increase in the frequency of warfare along the trajectory from mobile to sedentary foraging, and from sedentary foraging to agriculture. We constructs a model in which two groups occupy sites with possibly different productivities, and each group must decide whether to attack the other. If either group attacks, the probability of one group seizing the land of the other depends on the sizes of the two populations. If neither attacks, there is peace. We show that when individual agents can freely migrate between sites before group decisions about warfare are made, a stable equilibrium with warfare cannot occur. However, a model involving costly individual migration and Malthusian population dynamics can generate warfare if climatic or technological shocks alter the relative productivities of the sites.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".