From: Kharin (kharin@kharin.com)
Date: Tue Oct 07 2003 - 03:12:59 MDT
http://www.washtimes.com/books/20030816-105047-3673r.htm
Excerpted from a review of CONSTANT BATTLES: THE MYTH OF THE PEACEFUL, NOBLE SAVAGE By Steven A. LeBlanc
"Mr. Le Blanc's sole predecessor was Lawrence Keeley who revolutionized this debate in 1996 with an extraordinary work, "War Before Civilization." Mr. Keeley used archaeological evidence to show that prehistoric villages in both Europe and North America had almost all been constructed with fortifications and that a high proportion of the skeletal remains of their inhabitants showed they had been killed by weapons of war: spears, arrows, swords and clubs. Prehistoric massacre sites were common.
Mr. Keeley used anthropological studies to show that in most remaining tribal societies, whether Amazon Indians or New Guinea highlanders, comparative fatality rates from war were four to six times higher than even the worst experienced by modern nations, such as Germany and Russia in the 20th century. In tribal society, warfare was a recurring, annual, even seasonal occurrence.
Mr. LeBlanc's book makes one valuable contribution to the debate. He addresses a question that remained a yawning gap in Keeley's work: whether hunter-gatherers have been as warlike as tribal villagers. Mr. Keeley lumped both together under the category of primitive or tribal society. However, for at least 95 percent of the past 200,000 years, humans were hunter-gatherers.
Agriculture — even the most elementary kind such as that still practiced in New Guinea — is a comparatively recent invention, less than 10,000 years old. Tribal villagers who tend gardens have an obvious need to defend the plots in which they have invested their labor and on which their very ability to survive depends. Hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, are mostly nomadic people with fewer territorial imperatives. If challenged by rivals, they can usually move on to more congenial locales. On the face of it, villagers and nomads should have quite different propensities to go to war.
Mr. LeBlanc devotes a chapter to this issue with a detailed analysis of three hunter-gatherer populations for which there is reliable evidence: the !Kung bushmen of south-west Africa, the Eskimos of arctic America and the Aborigines of Australia. The picture that emerges of these nomads (or foragers, as Mr. LeBlanc prefers to call them) is little different from that of more sedentary agriculturalists. "From the earliest foragers found archaeologically to historical accounts of foragers from all corners of the globe," Mr. LeBlanc writes, "the evidence shows that they fight and kill in deadly earnest."
For instance, archaeologists working on the Saunaktuk Inuit site on the Beaufort Sea, in the Northwest Territories of Canada, have recovered the remains of many women and children that show violent death and dismemberment. In Arnhem Land in northern Australia, a study of warfare among the Murngin people in the late-19th century found that over a 20-year period no less than 200 out of 800 men, or 25 percent of all adult males, had been killed in intertribal warfare."
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