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When new technologies become available and cultures adopt them, the result can be either convergence, cultures becoming more similar as a result, or divergence, when cultures adopt technology in different ways that maintain or even further accentuate their differences. An analysis of full‐service national Web portals from different countries, typically offering a search engine, directories of links on a set of selected topics, news items (including weather, sports, entertainment, and stock market results), advertisements and shopping, and free e‐mail, shows evidence of both trends. While most national portals closely resemble the basic structure of Yahoo!, the original free full‐service portal, there are also differences in appearance and features offered that can be attributed to cultural variations based on Hofstede’s framework.

The question of violence in hunter-gatherer society has animated philosophical debates since at least the seventeenth century. Steven Pinker has sought to affirm that civilization, is superior to the state of humanity during its long history of hunting and gathering. The purpose of this paper is to draw upon a series of recent studies that assert a baseline of primordial violence by hunters and gatherers. In challenging this position the author draws on four decades of ethnographic and historical research on hunting and gathering peoples.

At the empirical heart of this question is the evidence pro- and con- for high rates of violent death in pre-farming human populations. The author evaluates the ethnographic and historical evidence for warfare in recorded hunting and gathering societies, and the archaeological evidence for warfare in pre-history prior to the advent of agriculture.

The view of Steven Pinker and others of high rates of lethal violence in hunters and gatherers is not sustained. In contrast to early farmers, their foraging precursors lived more lightly on the land and had other ways of resolving conflict. With little or no fixed property they could easily disperse to diffuse conflict. The evidence points to markedly lower levels of violence for foragers compared to post-Neolithic societies.

This conclusion raises serious caveats about the grand evolutionary theory asserted by Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham and others. Instead of being “killer apes” in the Pleistocene and Holocene, the evidence indicates that early humans lived as relatively peaceful hunter-gathers for some 7,000 generations, from the emergence of Homo sapiens up until the invention of agriculture. Therefore there is a major gap between the purported violence of the chimp-like ancestors and the documented violence of post-Neolithic humanity.

This is a critical analysis of published claims by authors who contend that ancient and recent hunter-gatherers typically committed high levels of violent acts. It reveals a number of serious flaws in their arguments and use of data.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the discrepancy between ethnohistorical accounts on north-western Kalahari San of the nineteenth to early twentieth century and recent ethnographic accounts, the former depicting the San as intensely warlike, the latter as basically peaceable.

Review of historical, ethnohistorical and ethnographic source material (reports, journal articles, monographs).

The warlike ways of the nineteenth-century Kalahari San were reactions to settler intrusion, domination and encapsulation. This was met with resistance, a process that led to the rapid politicization and militarization, socially and ideationally, of San groups in the orbit of the intruders (especially the “tribal zone” they created). It culminated in internecine warfare, specifically raiding and feuding, amongst San bands and tribal groupings.

While the nineteenth-century Kalahari San were indeed warlike and aggressive, toward both intruders and one another, this fact does not warrant the conclusion that these “simple” hunter-gatherer people have an agonistic predisposition. Instead, of being integral to their sociality, bellicosity is historically contingent. In the absence of the historical circumstances that fuel San aggression and warfare, as was the case after and before the people's exposure and resistance to hegemonic intruders, San society and ethos, in conformity with the social structure and value orientation of simple, egalitarian band societies, is basically peaceful.

A setting-the-record-straight corrective on current misunderstandings and misinformation on hunter-gatherer warfare.