The highest cause of death among young men in the HG tribes of Papua New Guinea is other young men. It's an incredibly violent culture there. The !Kung tell a much different story:
Patricia Draper - (1978) Learning Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior among the !Kung:
In writing an essay on aggression in !Kung life, one encounters some of the problems outlined above. Aggression, conflict, and violence—none of these are culturally elaborated preoccupations. Nor could one argue that a central cultural theme is concerned with an opposite set of values—the enforcement of peace and the uppression of aggression. From this point of view, values about interpersonal aggression do not qualify as an especially auspicious position from which to view the cultural terrain. Nevertheless, the !Kung are a people who devalue aggression; they have explicit values against assaulting, losing control, and seeking to intimidate another person by sheer force of personality. Furthermore, on a daily basis and over months of fieldwork one finds that overt physical acts by one person against another are extremely rare. In two years I personally observed three instances in which people lost control and exchanged blows: two twelve-year-old girls who wrestled and fought with fists; two women who scratched and kicked each other over a man (the husband of one of the women); and two men who violently shoved each other back and forth, shouted and separated to gather weapons, only to be dissuaded by other people from their respective camps. In a fourth case I saw two women who had fought the night before. Lorna Marshall, an anthropologist with much experience among the !Kung, makes a similar report:
During seventeen and a half months of fieldwork with the Nyae Nyae !Kung . . . , I personally saw only four flare-ups of discord and heard about three others which occurred in neighboring bands during that period. All were resolved before they became serious quarrels. [Marshall, 1976, pp. 311-12]
Patricia Draper - (1978) Learning Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior among the !Kung:
In writing an essay on aggression in !Kung life, one encounters some of the problems outlined above. Aggression, conflict, and violence—none of these are culturally elaborated preoccupations. Nor could one argue that a central cultural theme is concerned with an opposite set of values—the enforcement of peace and the uppression of aggression. From this point of view, values about interpersonal aggression do not qualify as an especially auspicious position from which to view the cultural terrain. Nevertheless, the !Kung are a people who devalue aggression; they have explicit values against assaulting, losing control, and seeking to intimidate another person by sheer force of personality. Furthermore, on a daily basis and over months of fieldwork one finds that overt physical acts by one person against another are extremely rare. In two years I personally observed three instances in which people lost control and exchanged blows: two twelve-year-old girls who wrestled and fought with fists; two women who scratched and kicked each other over a man (the husband of one of the women); and two men who violently shoved each other back and forth, shouted and separated to gather weapons, only to be dissuaded by other people from their respective camps. In a fourth case I saw two women who had fought the night before. Lorna Marshall, an anthropologist with much experience among the !Kung, makes a similar report:
During seventeen and a half months of fieldwork with the Nyae Nyae !Kung . . . , I personally saw only four flare-ups of discord and heard about three others which occurred in neighboring bands during that period. All were resolved before they became serious quarrels. [Marshall, 1976, pp. 311-12]