A Man is the Sum Of His Enemies' Wrath

A correspondent wrote that there was a tribe in New Guinea which had no war-chiefs, didn't wage "wars," and didn't understand the concept.

I wrote: "Warfare" as we know it is a development associated with 'civilization," and would be incomprehensible to pre-civilized/tribal people.

There are no pre-citified/-civilized peoples ("TRIBES") with numbers of people enough to waste 20% of them in "warfare."

Have you read "Ishmael," by Dan Quinn? He postulates a theory in which tribes--pre-citified--expressed their hostilities with one another on an individual basis, opportunistically, such that should, say an Arapaho hunter/warrior cross the path of a Sioux hunter/warrior, only one of them would return to his tribe, with the weapons and spoils of the other, now dead.

War, as WE now and use the term means turning the whole efforts of that society into utterly defeating an enemy and seizing their territory and resources.

As far as we know, that rarely happened in tribal societies.