Oblomov Boblomov wrote:I have wondered about the evolution aspect before – is it not true that while we are social animals to an extent, once outside a fairly local social circle we are evolved to be very tribal and essentially racist towards people who are different?
It's an interesting question and it's very difficult to separate out "human nature" from "learned through culture".
My recollection (like ORKN, also quite casual, so take it with a pinch of salt!) of the current state of understanding is that hunter-gatherer tribes were actually relatively accepting of outsiders. There is not a lot of evidence at all for warfare between tribes before the invention of the agricultural settlement. And this was borne out when people met hunter-gatherer tribes in remote regions in the modern era - they were more often met with curiosity than hostility.
Of course there might have been individually hateful people back then too, like, "urrrggghh, Ug hate all the Grognak tribe, you know what they're like!!!" but it doesn't seem like it's the norm.
Alongside warfare, I've read that some anthropologists believe the patriarchy as we understand it was developed with settlements too. Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers seem to have had more social equality for women, rather than them culturally having lesser social status. (There was a division of labour between male and female hunter-gatherers but anthropologists believe it wasn't at the expense of women's autonomy - they wouldn't be "owned" by a man in the way they were in some later ancient societies.)
Lex-Man wrote:I thought a lot of small village groups lived in a state of war with their neighbours. I remember watching stuff like Tribes and it seemed like quite often they talked about all the battles with the people in the next village over.
Villages definitely did go to war, a lot! But villages came after hunter-gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherer societies were nomadic, and we developed settlements alongside agriculture. (In general. I'm sure there are exceptions as with everything in anthropology...!)