Abstract
Group-living is stressful for all mammals. I use homicide rates as an index of this for humans in small-scale ethnographic societies, and show that the frequency of homicide increases linearly with living-group size in hunter-gatherers. This not, however, true of cultivators living in permanent settlements, where instead there appears to be a series of ‘glass ceilings’ below which homicide rates oscillate. These glass ceilings correlate with the adoption of behavioural mechanisms that allow social friction to be managed. These results suggest (1) that the transition to a settled lifestyle in the Neolithic may have been more challenging than is usually assumed and (2) that the increases in settlement size that followed the first villages necessitated structural rearrangements so as to manage inter-individual discord.
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