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.

I took an anthropology class that focused heavily on the Papua New Guinea highlanders and they fight a ritualized tit-for-tat warfare where they rarely kill and when they do, it’s essentially tribal revenge for the last kill. Almost every male participates and they specifically avoid high intensity warfare because the cost could effectively kill a tribe’s agricultural output.

Note though that even in the Mediterranean, routes where most of the enemy was killed were relatively rare.

Sometimes this sort of ritualised combat is a way for young men to show off their bravery without too much chance getting killed. Probably also helps with tribal cohesion. And I assume reduce the chance of full-on, lets kill everyone in the tribe, violence between groups.

To be fair, I wish the whole world was much "worse" at warfare in the same way as they are. We'd probably be a much happier world overall. Or at the very least less destructive.

"They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died."

Observe the weapons. Most of them are sharpened sticks and they had a limited supply. Less deadly than swords and no mass manufacturing of weapons either.

The spears would be lucky to penetrate the ribcage. But they could go through the gut or throat, and if they were embedded in a thigh, they could easily cause sepsis.

That's because very primitive humans still have a bicameral mind, i.e. things appear to them as auditory hallucinations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...

"a bicameral mentality was the "normal and ubiquitous state" of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, at the end of the Bronze Age"