The violence on screen so distressed the unsuspecting natives that some fell ill for days. When years later an anthropologist came to do fieldwork on Ifalik, the natives repeatedly asked her: was it true? Were there really people in America who had killed another person?2 So at the heart of human history lies this mystery. If we have a deep-seated, instinctive aversion to violence, where did things go wrong? If war had a beginning, what started it?
