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IS HUMAN nature essentially warlike? Beyond War: The human potential for peace will reassure anyone who thought humans incapable of peace. In a broad look at our species with a special focus on hunter-gatherers, social anthropologist Douglas Fry documents groups of people that have lived entirely without war for decades or more. So war is not inevitable. Furthermore, when war does happen it takes a variety of forms depending on how the societies involved are organised. Such unpredictability, Fry claims, justifies a major conclusion: war does not have evolutionary roots and can therefore be stopped.

This is a passionate book containing a tidy account of systems of war and peace. Yet for all his care, Fry鈥檚 conclusions are quirky at best. Take his claim that war was rare among nomadic hunter-gatherers. This would startle anyone who has read about the appalling inter-group violence that sometimes touched the lives of hunter-gatherers, from the Arctic to the tip of South America.

鈥淲hat makes inter-group violence so alluring to humans?鈥�

Fry justifies his assertion by being peculiarly restrictive in his definition of war. For instance, among the Andamanese hunter-gatherers who live on islands in the Bay of Bengal, men of one group (the Jarawa) are known to have killed any member of a neighbouring group (the Aka-Bea) whenever they encountered them. In Fry鈥檚 view this was feuding so it does not count as war. Likewise he excludes the practice of 鈥渕aringo鈥� by Australian aboriginals of the Murngin tribe, though it is defined as a surprise revenge attack by a group, always involving woundings or death.

If Fry chooses not to call these lethal attacks on neighbouring groups 鈥渨ar鈥�, that is his prerogative. But such attacks have long been known to have been the principal form of inter-group violence in small-scale societies, and were responsible for far more deaths than battles, which were relatively rare. Excluding them makes his conclusion about the rarity of war in primitive societies highly misleading.

Certainly there have been some hunter-gatherers who in recent history did not attack their neighbours, such as the Semai people of the Malay peninsula and the Mbuti from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Remarkably, Fry treats such cases as models of Pleistocene life without reminding us that those people lived in tiny groups adjacent to politically powerful farmers or pastoralists whose military superiority would have made any attempt at violence absurd. Instead of seeing this as evidence that people know when not to fight, as I would, Fry uses them to reject the view that warfare is ancient, natural and an intrinsic part of human nature.

What he really needs, but does not discuss, is an account of violence and peace among hunter-gatherers who lived surrounded by other hunter-gatherers. That would be an enormously better model of the Pleistocene. I believe I know what he would find. To judge from studies such as those of anthropologist Ernest Burch on the Inupaiq of Alaska, external warfare (meaning in this case lethal violence towards those who speak a different language or dialect) would regularly have been persistent and brutal.

Fry does not hide his biases. He has written a work of advocacy because, he says, 鈥淚f war is seen as natural, then there is little point in trying to prevent, reduce, or abolish it.鈥� We can sympathise with his distaste for violence and his wanting to do something about it. There is merit, too, in reminding us that there are many routes to peace. But he appears as if in a time-warp from the culture wars of the mid-20th century, when 鈥渂iological鈥� was taken to mean 鈥渋nevitable鈥� rather than what it implies today: a selected tendency that responds to circumstance in ways that make sense.

Fry may claim the moral high ground when he asserts that the notion of a peaceful evolutionary history for humans will make violence less likely in the future. In reality, there is nothing about his anthropological recipe for peace that rests on the view that war is unnatural. He says, for example, that we should 鈥渦tilise conflict management processes in place of war鈥�. Quite. So would someone who thinks that war has deep roots in human prehistory.

Fry鈥檚 notion that an evolutionary analysis will lead to apathy in the face of threat is patently untrue. People like David Hamburg and Robert Hinde have been writing about the evolutionary roots of violence since the 1970s while also working at the highest levels to devise means of preventing war and genocide. Such efforts depend on a serious understanding ofthe biological propensities that tragically make humans vulnerable to the allure of inter-group violence, rather than on unrealistic visions of a prehistoric Eden.