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“Consensus does not exist, and positions are polarized,” says Gómez. These opposing views on violence-the former emphasizing an innate proclivity, and the latter focusing on cultural influences-preceded Hobbes and Rousseau by many centuries, and outlived them by many more. In the 17th century, he argued that modern society protects us from our brutish nature, lived in “continual fear, and danger of violent death.” Not so, said Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who felt that civilization corrupts our neutral nature. Gómez’s team predicted that when our species arose, around 2 percent of us (1 in 50) would have been murdered by other people.
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We are an average member of an especially violent group of mammals, and we’ve managed to curb our ancestry. But time and social organizations have sated our ancestral bloodthirst, leaving us with modern rates of lethal violence that are well below the prehistoric baseline. Gómez’s team calculated that at the origin of Homo sapiens, we were six times more lethally violent than the average mammal, but about as violent as expected for a primate. He could use those similarities to predict how violent any given mammal should be, and whether it meets, exceeds, or defies those expectations. In particular, he noted that closely related species tend to show similar levels of lethal interpersonal violence. Gómez typically studies plants and insects, but he realized that the techniques he uses to study their evolution can be used to study our own. The point of this macabre census was to understand the origins of our own behavior. So do long-tailed chinchillas, which kill each other more frequently than tigers and bears do. When ranked according to their rates of lethal violence, ground squirrels, wild horses, gazelle, and deer all feature in the top 50. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have been known to wage brutal war, but even apparently peaceful creatures take each other’s lives. It clearly shows that we humans are not alone in our capacity to kill each other. Gómez’s study is the first thorough survey of violence in the mammal world, collating data on more than a thousand species. Almost one in five meerkats, mostly youngsters, lose their lives at the paws and jaws of their peers. These endearing black-masked creatures might be famous for their cooperative ways, but they kill each other at a rate that makes man’s inhumanity to man look meek. No, according to a study led by José María Gómez from the University of Granada, the top spot goes to… the meerkat. Nor is it a top predator like the grey wolf or lion, although those at least are #11 and #9 in the league table of murdery mammals. Which mammal is most likely to be murdered by its own kind? It’s certainly not humans-not even close.