Genocide instinctive group violence and hominid mass killing : toward a biohumanistic historical perspective

Current genocide scholarship is an interdisciplinary field constituted largely within the humanities and social sciences. It does not commonly address evidence from physical anthropology, archaeology and zoology. Such evidence suggests that collective forms of mass killing may be a constant (albeit rare) potential, not only of humans, but of primates of high intelligence and complex social structure, posing questions about its relationship to violent instinct and to group cohesion through othering. These lines of inquiry are generally avoided by genocide scholars in view of their association with debunked universalist paradigms that infused many of the early attempts to theorize a social psychology of mass violence. But there is now the potential to move beyond such faulty conceptions through a more integrated bio-psycho-social view of genocide potential as a constant of hominid life.