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If war is something we inherited directly from the hostility between groups of male apes over female apes, with territory as merely a means to the end of sex, then it follows that tribal people must be going to war over women rather than territory. Anthropologists for a long time insisted that war was fought over scarce material resources, in particular protein, which was often in short supply. So when Napoleon Chagnon, trained in this tradition, went to Venezuela to study the tribal Yanomamö in the 1960s he was in for a shock: ‘These people were not fighting over what I was trained to believe they were fighting over – scarce resources. They were fighting over women.’49 Or at least so they said. There is a tradition in anthropology that you should not believe what people tell you, so Chagnon was ridiculed for believing them. Or, as he puts it, ‘You are allowed to admit the stomach as a source of war, but not the gonads.’ Chagnon went back again and again, and eventually accumulated a terrifying set of data that proves beyond doubt that men who kill other men (unokais) have more wives, independent of their social standing, than men who do not become murderers.50

Among the Yanomamö, war and violence are both primarily about sex. War between two neighbouring villages breaks out over the abduction of a woman, or in retaliation for an attack that had such a motive, and always results in women changing hands. The commonest cause of violence within a village is also sexual jealousy; a village that is too small is likely to be raided for women, but a village that is too large usually breaks up over adultery. Women are the currency and reward of male violence in the Yanomamö. Violent death is common in Yanomamö society. By the age of forty two-thirds of the people have lost a close relative to murder. Not that this dulls the pain and fear of murder. To Yanomamö who leave their forests, the existence in the outside world of laws that prevent chronic murder is miraculous and tremendously desirable. Likewise, the Greeks fondly remembered the replacement of revenge by justice as a milestone, through the legend of the trial of Orestes. According to Aeschylus, Orestes killed Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon, but the Furies were persuaded by Athena to accept the court’s verdict and end the system of blood feuds.51 Thomas Hobbes did not exaggerate when he listed among the features of life of primitive mankind ‘continual fear and danger of violent death’, though he was much less correct in the second and more familiar part of the sentence: ‘and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’

Chagnon now believes that the conventional wisdom – people only fight over scarce resources – misses the point. If resources are scarce, then people fight over them. If not, they do not. ‘Why bother,’ he says, ‘to fight for mongongo nuts when the only point of having mongongo nuts is so that you can have women. Why not fight over women?’ Most human societies, he believes, are not touching some ceiling of resource limitation. The Yanomamö could easily clear larger gardens from the forest to grow more plantain trees, but then they would have too much to eat.52

There is nothing especially odd about the Yanomamö. All studies of preliterate societies done before national governments were able to impose their laws upon them revealed routinely high levels of violence. One study estimated that one-quarter of all men were killed in such societies by other men. As for the motives, sex is dominant.

The founding myth of western culture, Homer’s Iliad, is a story that begins with a war over the abduction of a woman, Helen. Historians have long considered the abduction of Helen to Troy to be no more than a pretext for territorial confrontation between the Greeks and the Trojans. But can we be so confidently condescending? Perhaps the Yanomamö really do go to war over women, as they say they do. Perhaps Agamemnon’s Greeks did, too, as Homer said they did. The Iliad opens with – and is dominated by – a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon,