Eric Gans has had arguably the most significant influence on my ROBA Hypothesis. His Originary Hypothesis posits a moment when the violence of the human community becomes so potentially apocalyptic that someone, or everyone, produces the first signal of deferral. In Gans’ configuration, the protohuman group gathers around an animal carcass, which they’ve hunted. In animal hierarchies, the alpha gets first dibs, he doles out some meat to the betas, and the rest get scraps, if anything. But when violence became dangerous enough to threaten the entire group with a mimetic outbreak—which he attributes to a gradual, evolutionary increase in the group’s mimetic desire—then combat became a non-option. The first sign was therefore issued, which Gans hypothesizes is an “aborted gesture of appropriation,” whether a withdrawn reach or some other symbol that one was unwilling to risk a violent outbreak to get their share. There may have been failed configurations of this, but ultimately, the symbol sticks, and the group chooses instead to cut up and distribute the animal carcass, inaugurating the very idea of the sacred.
I first read Gans’ Originary Hypothesis in 2015 while recovering from food poisoning in a Beijing hotel room. Being a stuntman and choreographer (and having some free time on my hands in that hotel room), I tried to choreograph this scene in my head. What did protohuman combat look like before the originary sign was issued? What made it dangerous enough to necessitate the sign? How then did our violence evolve into school shootings, gang violence, terrorism, and nuclear war?
Trying to choreograph Gans’ Originary Scene was a zen koan for me for years. I emailed him many times, and he always responded. He would meet me for lunch every time I went mocappin’ in Socal and we’d talk for hours. At one point, he asked me, “What’s a stuntman doing reading my book?” Either he doesn’t understand his reach, or I’m a weird stuntman.
Ultimately, the solution lay in answering the question What is human combat and what made it different from pre-human combat? The solution hit me in the face while I was studying the Gombe Chimpanzee War in early 70s Tanzania. I’m a millennial, and I was raised by a generation of boomer hippies who, disenchated by the Cold War and Vietnam, referred to humans as “chimps” and considered chimps “human-like.” It was the Planet of the Apes generation, one which had it all figured out: humans descended from primates, are primates—they still call apes “non-human primates”—and our violence is just this gross evolutionary stowaway, which can be kept in check with good social planning, education, and PBS. Under this environment, I had always assumed that the chimpanzees of Gombe fought with sticks and stones, because that’s what cavemen do.
Except they didn’t. Apes don’t use weapons.
Sometimes they use objects in combat, but never reciprocally, and never to effect damage, only for intimidation. There’s only one recorded instance of a chimpanzee—Rodolf, from Jane Goodall’s excellent Through a Window—which used a rock as a weapon. Still, even then it was not used as an attack, but as an act of intimidation, victory, or both. It served the same purpose as throwing rocks at a tree stump, which is orders of magnitude more common. Chimps are doing backyard combat training, or else we’d see a lot more stone-throwing in primate combat. Instead, throwing stones at trees makes loud sounds, which establishes territory, the same as does gorilla chest-beating.
And if and when a primate uses an object in combat, even as an act of intimidation, it’s not copied. Primates copy each other’s natural attacks, but not their object-usage. It comes out of nowhere, does little if any damage, and is not mimicked by the group.
This is surprising because of the primate’s capacity to mimic tool-usage, but only in sustenance—cracking nuts with stones, or the Japanese macaque washing potatoes—and predation—chimps licking a sticks to fish for termites. Gibson and Ingold’s Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution is chock full of examples of primates teaching tool-based skills. Still, there’s no evidence of object-usage being used in combat, except for, again, false memories of the Gombe war. I even debated Google’s Gemini on this, and it made the same mistake. (If you need more convincing, read my article The Myth of the Weaponized Ape.)
In Gans’ Originary Hypothesis configuration, there are no details about what differentiates animal combat from human combat. We assume one evolved into the other. But there is a crucial distinction: animals use only their natural weapons, while humans can use anything. The first, most obvious weapon would be a rock. They’re in infinite supply, and a woman, or a child, or the sick or elderly, could feasibly wield one—or, better, gang up as a group—and, using gravity (and a bit of stealth), apply enough force to kill the strongest alpha male. Primates do not stone to death. If they could, they would have a vastly different social hierarchy. But then again, according to my definition, they would no longer be animals but humans.
I’ve decided to call human violence reciprocal, object-based aggression (or, more recently, reciprocal, object-bearing aggression) or ROBA for short. ROBA is, simply, the basic operating system of human violence. Because all people are capable of ROBA, all people are also capable of anticipating ROBA. I will also anticipate that my enemy anticipates that I can use ROBA, and so on forever—recursively—for all people and groups, anticipating all people and groups, anticipating all people and groups. The potential for ROBA gets us precisely to the Originary Scene: violence is simply untenable, almost unthinkable, because it’s so apocalyptic.
There’s just one problem: how did we evolve ROBA from animal combat? Per the advice of Adam Katz, we actually don’t have to answer this. ROBA is a single, simple, mechanical thing that humans do and animals do not. It necessitates deferral itself, which then generates new kinds of violent potential. ROBA constantly co-opts technology—gunpowder and nukes being perfect examples of non-violent technologies becoming weapons of war. The ROBA Hypothesis does nothing to modify the Originary Hypothesis except to issue a challenge: Here is a mechanical definition of the violence that necessitated the originary sign of deferral, and necessitates it on an ongoing basis. Where it came from is irrelevant for my purposes, but if you believe it evolved from primates, you must show how our ancestors went from natural animal combat to ROBA, and only did it once, because no primate has done it since.
Gans’ recent article Language and Science… and the Deferral of Mimetic Desire cited the ROBA Hypothesis, but got it wrong:
… Eric Jacobus’ If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence [2025], likewise attributes to our ancestors’ growing ability to use deadly force the stimulus that led us to become fully human.
I’ve never said violence “led us to become fully human.” I’ve said only that ROBA is an exclusive human property, perhaps the exclusive human property1. And there is no clear way to go from animal combat to ROBA. Nobody has tried to explain this leap. That would require someone to truly differentiate human violence from animal combat, but nobody has even done that, not even war historians, not Robert Ardry, not Freud, not Wrangham, nobody. So is the current state of the human sciences.
What I appreciate about the Generative Anthropology group, a group I’ve been a member of for nearly a decade, and for whom I’ve done more than a few presentations at their conferences, is that they listen to outsiders like me. Their members—and Gans himself, and especially Adam Katz—have been amazing sounding boards. But I feel like I still need to clarify ROBA: there’s no way to trace the process of “becoming” human until we bridge animal combat to human violence (ROBA). It seems like such a simple gap to bridge, because combat is so simple, but if it can’t be bridged, then that’s a big deal, and maybe we need to rethink some things. Then maybe there’s no bridge. Then maybe language is actually infinitely complex at the origin and actually simplifies over time2.
The ROBA Hypothesis eliminates the need to find a theory of origin to understand violence. Animal combat is inherently stable3, but human combat is inherently unstable and must constantly be converted to deferral. It’s a closed loop. If we’re concerned about violence—which we must be, always—then we can stop looking at animals and start only looking at humans, not as animals or primates, but as humans only. We can stop looking at computers, because no AI systems have simplified human violence this way. We can stop looking at genetics, since there is no gene for violence only; if we knock that out, we will knock out culture too. There are no human groups predisposed only to more violence, because then they must also be predisposed to more deferral, or else they don’t exist. Violence is not an issue that bureaucrats can ever touch. Zoology, primatology, and genetics don’t matter here. If you think it’s important to know where it came from, go for it. I’d love to hear what you find, but I argue it’s not necessary for the science of violence.
We can treat violence either as a Big Bang event that literally came out of nowhere, or as something that always-has-been. It doesn’t matter for our purpose, which is to understand violence and find a way out of it. The ROBA Hypothesis is anti-university, anti-intelligencia, anti-bureaucracy. It’s very pro-people—very punk rock.
If you’d like to read more, be sure to check out my book, If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence, which you can buy on Amazon in paperback and e-book formats.
- If only because it’s so hard to distill language, religion, kinship, technology, and all these other cultural traits into a mechanical feature, all of which primatologists claim are in a nascent state in prmiates, but ROBA is seen in abzolutely zero primates, and it’s why I believe ROBA and culture (or any deferral of violence), being merely different directions of the same recursive loop, like hot and cold in the plumbing, comprise all of the human condition.
- I don’t know Gans’ take on ancient languages, but they are anything but simple. Case systems, tones, clicks, and phonetics get simpler over time in China, Europe, and India. The simplest Polynesian language is Hawaiian, which is also the most advanced of the Polynesian civilizations. The most complex languages of Africa appear to be the oldest ones. I’m potentially turning The Origin of Language on its head here…
- The one exception would be the Irish Elk, which failed to shed their antlers, causing them to grow to ridiculous sizes and making mobility, and eating, impossible.