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With the greatest of respect...

The setting up of your barbecue on your neighbour's lawn proves nothing about how hunter-gatherers would behave. Our instincts have been conditioned by so many years of agriculture that it's simply impossible to reason backwards like that.

And anyway, my neighbour regularly sets up his barbecue on my lawn (to say nothing of employing builders to trample it into oblivion) and I don't behave at all violently towards him. Although I suppose I do sometimes use music as a weapon on them when I need privacy. Beside the point, though!

You'll have to come up with better proof than this if you hope to make a more convincing argument than the one that's based on the scientific observation of chimps that FW mentions! ;)

The bari bit was a little "tonge in cheek" though not totally. I don't believe human nature as changed a great deal in the last 150,000 years. We are a little less barbaric, cannibalism is frowned upon, slavery outlawed but evolutionaryly (can't be bothered to look up the spelling) we will have changed little. It is part of human nature to put ones own family first, extended family second, tribal loyalties third, we may pretend otherwise but this has always been so. The Arabs have a saying, "If my cousin hits my brother, I will hit my cousin. If a stranger hits my cousin I will hit the stranger."

I have a theory that physical violence was the driving force behind our evolution. The main reason our aboreal ancestors developed an upright stance and led directly to the development of the human brain. To me it is all perfectly logical although unlike "stone-rowing" I will never be able to prove it.