Why war? Darwinian explanations, such as the popular " demonic males" theory of Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham , are clearly insufficient. They can't explain why war emerged relatively recently in human prehistory--less than 15,000 years ago, according to the archaeological record--or why since then it has erupted only in certain times and places.
Many scholars solve this problem by combining Darwin with gloomy old Thomas Malthus. "No matter where we happen to live on Earth, we eventually outstrip the environment," the Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc asserts in Constant Battles: Why We Fight (Saint Martin's Griffin, 2004). "This has always led to competition as a means of survival, and warfare has been the inevitable consequence of our ecological-demographic propensities." Note the words "always" and "inevitable."
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