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A friend sent me a clip of the boxing champion Mike Tyson speaking to the famous American talk show guy Rogan. In that he said that men like him cannot be in regular society -- they are incarcerated for their fighting tendencies. I don't know much of him but I believe he himself
was put in jail for a while. He also mentioned that he had to use recreational substances to sort of "come down". This ties in what the primatologist Richard Wrangham has proposed: that emergence of stronger male coalition formation among beta males with improved linguistic
communication resulted in the alpha males getting killed by them. Thus, he suggests that the tamping down of human violence occurred with the elimination of the vastly more powerful alphas who were a prominent feature of great apes close to Homo. Indeed based on the analysis of
human brain size increase we have felt that the main driver for it was conflict. In fact it seems that it peaked before modern Homo sapiens and declined a bit probably corresponding to the alpha decimation by the beta coalitions. This parallels what Wrangham points out -- the
archaic Homo were robust and the males clearly selected for physical aggression. The skull of Homo & closely related lineages show clear anatomical signs of overengineering to take the blows from fists suggesting that "boxing" was a form of routine combat among males.This removal
the old-style alphas has been suggested by Wrangham & others as potentially leading to new-style alphas who are better at managing coalitions. This might have allowed emergence of large groups sizes & larger scale for violence.
