[natmaka]

I was under the impression that in a distant past tribal wars ceased at the first blood, serious wound or at worse first victim, and didn't induce a major risk for non-combattants.

Modern politics and weaponry changed transmuted tribal wars into contemporary wars, some with systematic massive massacres and such.

If true it may mean that most 'classic' tribal wars were way less damaging than WW1 or WW2. In any case it seems hard to imagine how even some extreme tribal war may be more damaging than a total nuclear war.

[prepend]

> I was under the impression that in a distant past tribal wars ceased at the first blood, serious wound or at worse first victim, and didn't induce a major risk for non-combattants.

Not sure where this comes from. Tribal wars frequently ended in genocide, mass destruction, etc. The book Sapiens covers some of the evidence for how Neanderthals were exterminated.

I agree though that total nuclear war would be way worse than all the tribal wars in history. Although, interestingly, it seems like threat of nuclear war has prevented lots of wars. There have been no wars between major powers since nuclear wars. Maybe the closest was the Korean War, but China wasn’t a nuclear power back then.

[natmaka]

Which non-modern tribal war ended in genocide or mass destruction?

AFAIK Neanderthals went extinct due to climatic change and disease.

Moreover tribes are everywhere defined by a complex and dynamic system of relationships. Neanderthals where another human species, or at least subspecies, and as far as I understand we cannot be sure that such relationships were established or even possible with another human species.

The threat of nuclear war ("MAD") may have prevented wars between major powers, but it didn't prevent many proxy wars, some of them quite destructive, and assuming that the net effect was positive is only an opinion (probably not shared by many in Africa and Asia).

[prepend]

There are multiple theories for what killed Neanderthals [0] but violence by Homo Sapiens seems the most supported by the fossil record. It would be hard for climate change and disease to wipe out an entire species, especially since there was interbreeding with homo sapiens so if a disease was so virulent to span the entire half of the world with Neanderthals it would affect homo sapiens as well.

I’m not sure there are any modern tribal wars. I’m not sure I’d consider Rwanda a tribal war, but it was tribes fighting.

I was thinking more about pre-historic tribal warfare. Or at least pre-bronze age before Egypt, Indus, Greece, etc. The tribes in the Amazon, Africa, Papua New Guinea [1] frequently had wars of extinction that eliminated their opposing tribe.

This kind of brutal warfare seems in our genes as even other primate have these genocidal wars where entire communities are wiped out [2].

There were certainly many proxy wars and lots of death, so I don’t think MAD means absolute peace. But it did stop world war 3 (while almost starting it quite a few times) and it’s most likely the reason why there haven’t been any large wars with casualties that existed prior to MAD (ww2,ww1,sino-japanese,Napoleon).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War