Thanks for posting the videos. Two thoughts that came from watching that:

1. It is really interesting that we live on a planet that has such a society, along side one that had built nuclear weapons, and was soon to walk on the moon.

2. Our modern society has not progressed at all from any of these base instincts, and in some cases & applications we have gotten worse.

They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died. Compare with e.g. battles in the ancient Mediterranean, where the fighting would have continued until one side panics and tries to flee, and the winning side kills anyone who can't run away fast enough. Now maybe they're simply bad at warfare, but I think a more likely explanation is that they're intentionally not escalating to that level of violence and mostly stay at a standoff distance where fatalities are unlikely. The narrator also calls it a "formal battle" at one point.

In any case, I don't think you can ascribe much of their bow-and-arrow tactics to base instincts.

In addition, please check out Sentinelese tribe from the North Sentinel Islands in India [1]. It is more mindblogging than this, in my opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

3. Handing a people that can not progress, exponential tech, without which they regress, but which also kills them all when they regress, is a trapdoor function worthy of St.Fermi .

> we live on a planet that has such a society, along side one that had built nuclear weapons, and was soon to walk on the moon.

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”

― William Gibson

I disagree with the (2). The laws of war are and have been evolving, and there's plenty of evidence in recorded history. The first records we have come from Ancient Babylon and they have been modified and amended multiple times since. Another aspect of this development is the existence of international arbitrage with laws that also keep evolving, something that minimizes the need to go to war.

And there's more: the relationship between the state and its army changed a lot. The role, the rights and the duties of individual soldiers changed a lot. Just to give you some examples: the Lieber Code is the one created during the US Civil War -- it's perhaps the first to mention the concept of unlawful orders, exonerating the soldiers who wouldn't follow such orders. Traditionally, St. Maximilianus is described as the first conscientious objector to draft, a concept that, too, went through multiple iterations... And, really, we didn't even scratch the surface mentioning these. Military history is probably the most eventful and rich sub-field of history.

>Our modern society has not progressed at all from any of these base instincts, and in some cases & applications we have gotten worse.

Not at all surprising given that base instincts come from genetics and genes take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to change significantly.