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Let’s stop kidding ourselves with this idea that humans are naturally peaceful creatures who just “get corrupted” by society. Look at history. Look at the last 200,000 years. It is one long, bloody scream of conquest.

We like to talk about “survival of the fittest,” but let’s call it what it really was: survival of the most hostile. Every single one of us is the descendant of someone who was “hostile” enough to survive a raid, “aggressive” enough to take resources when things got tight, and “vicious” enough to keep their family alive while the pacifists next door were being wiped off the map. You think the “nice guys” won the resource wars of the Pleistocene? No. Those who stayed behind to “talk it out” left few descendants.

We are walking, talking bundles of ancient defense mechanisms. We have “hostility” baked into our DNA because, for 99% of human history, being a pacifist was a death sentence.

The Neanderthals are the perfect “what if” for this argument. They were objectively the “strongest” in a raw, physical sense. Their bones were thicker, and their muscle attachments suggest they were built like elite powerlifters. If you were in a cage match with an average Neanderthal, you would lose every single time.

So they didn’t go extinct because they were weak; they went extinct because they couldn’t compete with the specific brand of hostility we perfected. Neanderthals were ambush hunters who had to get within stabbing distance of a woolly mammoth to eat. We, being physically “weaker,” developed projectile weapons. We could kill from thirty feet away. In a conflict, the group that can kill from a distance always beats the group that has to get within three feet.

Our “hostility” was also organized on a scale they couldn’t match. Neanderthals lived in small, isolated family groups, while Sapiens developed the ability to cooperate in massive tribes. A group of ten Neanderthal “super soldiers” stands no chance against 100 Sapiens moving as a single, coordinated military unit. We didn’t win because we were “better” people; we won because we were the more effective, more efficient, and more numerous invasive species. We essentially “cooperated” them into the grave.

But here is the twist that messes with your head. If we were only hostile, we would have slaughtered ourselves into extinction before we even learned how to sharpen a rock. The same evolution that made us predators also made us “prosocial.” We are the most dangerous animals on earth because we learned how to play nice with “our” group so we could be more effective at destroying the “other” group.

Our “kindness” is just a high-level survival tactic. We evolved to cooperate, not because we are saints, but because a tribe of fifty coordinated killers will always annihilate a lone “strong man.” We are a walking contradiction: programmed for extreme violence and extreme cooperation at the exact same time. We aren’t “civilized.” We are just highly disciplined predators who realized that sharing a fire is more efficient than fighting over it.

Are we evolved to be more hostile? Maybe. Or maybe we just evolved to be the most calculated team players in the history of bloodshed.