OP and the refutations are excellent and lovely resources. I am not that good of a person bc it is 1am. I'll try to come back in the morning and add better sources than wikipedia.
But wrt to the person being hella wrong in the first reply. That hypothesis is referred to as the Warlike Ape or the Killer Ape theory, and its from the 50s and 60s. It's still got its tendrils woven through the pop culture conceptualization of evolution, especially when someone is using the wrong definition of "Fittest" and/or lives in the manosphere.
That's where you see the idea that humanity succeeded thanks to an inherent and superior capacity for violence as uber hunters. It supports the thing that alpha-gym-bros are claiming; strong equals success, and preemptive murder means you're winning. Science no longer believes that.
Quick note; current belief is that chimps are about 100x more aggressive than humans are. If violence was the winning strat, we'd have died out. Chimps scare the hell out of me.
The Killer Ape theory started with an article by Raymond Dart called , and then expanded more by Robert Ardrey in African Genesis, plus his follow ups. It is absolutely steeped in colonialism, racism, sexism, etc that created an assumption of what they were looking to find. Same sort of biases that led to things like the Piltdown Man and people looking for a singular missing link so they could show evolution as a March of Time.
There are many fossil specimens that got pointed to as evidence for humans being an apex predator early in the evolutionary timeline, based on stuff like finding mostly skulls and leg bones, which they sorta thought meant we were bashing folk in the skull with femurs. For speed, I'm just going to use a single, easy, example.
The Taung Child (its only a skull), was discovered by Raymond Dart, the guy who proposed the Killer Ape theory.
Its the skull of a (we know now) 3yo Australopithecus africanus, and it was a Big Fricking Deal in the 1920s bc it was evidence for human evolution happening in Africa, not asia. It was a whole thing that he was arguing for it to be a human ancestor, and that we evolved from apes, and was eventually accepted by the scientific community. That's neato, and Dart was not a crank. He did some really important work. But. He was working from how he interpreted the fossils he found, and within the preconceptions present at the time.
Here's why its my example.
The Taung child has puncture damage to the skull and for a long time, a dominant theory was that our evolutionary ancestors brutally murdered a child.
Fossil interpretation is hard, y'all. That skull is 2.8mya, not complete, and it was removed from context before science got hold of it. I'm sure that Dart was confident and sincere in his write ups.
In 2006, science said hold up, nah, this damage looks what we see when an eagle snatches a primate and eats it. The now dominant theory is that australopithecines were prey, not predators. Definitely not apex predators.
There are lots and lots of fossil specimens of hominins that died violently. No argument there. But when you have a few pieces of a skeleton, you're interpreting partial evidence of what happened millions of years ago, and you're only seeing damage to the bones. Soft tissue damage(like disease) isn't visible. The history of specimens being found and removed from context is not helping, but there's a couple times when people when back and found out that 'brutal murder victim' was found in a pile with a bunch of small mammal bones bc a big cat or bird kept accidentally dropping them into a cave.
Finally, there's the (sorta ironic) survivorship bias involved. I've seen stuff saying humans started burying people 100kya or 250kya or maybe 500kya, and we start finding lots of evidence of human kindness and caretaking. (obligatory shout out to my man, Shanidar-1) That's cool as hell, but before that, a body left out is very unlikely to fossilize. Even something like a shallow burial, which is possibly a thing before 500kya, is not going to get you fossils. Body gets dug up by animals, scavenged, eaten, scattered.
Ps I can't backtrace the implied quote about hitting with sticks, but, again, its 1am, and I only tried for a few minutes.
