CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Never-Ending Battle over Prehistoric War (Brutish?)
Evolutionists say that back in the twilight of life a beast, name and nature unknown, planted a murderous seed and that the impulse thus originated in that seed throbs forever in the blood of the brute’s descendants….
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN1
Just as neo-Hobbesian fundamentalists hold that poverty is intrinsic to the eternal human condition, they maintain that war is fundamental to our nature. Author Nicolas Wade, for example, claims that “warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent.”2 According to this view, our propensity for organized conflict has roots reaching deep into our biological past, back to distant primate ancestors by way of our foraging forebears. It’s always been about making war, supposedly, not love.
But nobody’s very clear what all this incessant war was over. Despite his certainty that foragers’ lives were plagued by “constant warfare,” Wade acknowledges that “ancestral people lived in small egalitarian societies, without property, or leaders or differences of rank….” So we’re to understand that egalitarian, nonhierarchical, nomadic groups without property … were constantly at war? Hunter-gatherer societies, possessing so little and thus with so little to lose (other than their lives), living on a wide-open planet were nothing like the densely populated, settled societies struggling over dwindling or accumulated resources in more recent historical times.3 Why would they be?
We’ve no space for a comprehensive response to this aspect of the standard Hobbesian narrative, but we’ve selected three well-known figures associated with it for a closer look at their arguments and data: evolutionary psychologist Stephen Pinker, the revered primatologist Jane Goodall, and the world’s most famous living anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon.4
Professor Pinker, Red in Tooth and Claw
Imagine a high-profile expert stands before a distinguished audience and argues that Asians are warlike people. In support of his argument, he presents statistics from seven countries: Argentina, Poland, Ireland, Nigeria, Canada, Italy, and Russia. “Wait a minute,” you might say, “those aren’t even Asian countries—except, possibly, Russia.” The expert would be laughed off the stage—as he should be.
In 2007, world-famous Harvard professor and best-selling author Steven Pinker gave a presentation built upon similarly flawed logic at the TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in Long Beach, California.5 Pinker’s presentation provides both a concise statement of the neo-Hobbesian view of the origins of war and an illuminating look at the dubious rhetorical tactics often used to promote this bloodstained vision of our prehistory. The twenty-minute talk is available at the TED website.6 We encourage you to watch at least the first five minutes (dealing with prehistory) before reading the following discussion. Go ahead. We’ll wait here.
Though Pinker spends less than 10 percent of his time discussing hunter-gatherers (a social configuration, you’ll recall, that represents well over 95 percent of our time on the planet), he manages to make a real mess of things.
Three and a half minutes into his talk, Pinker presents a chart based on Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. The chart shows “the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of foraging or hunting and gathering societies.” He explains that the chart shows that hunter-gatherer males were far more likely to die in war than are men living today.
But hold on. Take a closer look at that chart. It lists seven “hunter-gatherer” cultures as representative of prehistoric war-related male death. The seven cultures listed are the Jivaro, two branches of Yanomami, the Mae Enga, Dugum Dani, Murngin, Huli, and Gebusi. The Jivaro and both Yanomami groups are from the Amazon region, the Murngin are from northern coastal Australia, and the other four are all from the conflict-ridden, densely populated highlands of Papua New Guinea.
Are these groups representative of our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Not even close.7
Only one of the seven societies cited by Pinker (the Murngin) even approaches being an immediate-return foraging society (the way Russia is sort of Asian, if you ignore most of its population and history). The Murngin had been living with missionaries, guns, and aluminum powerboats for decades by the time the data Pinker cites were collected in 1975—not exactly prehistoric conditions.
None of the other societies cited by Pinker are immediate-return hunter-gatherers, like our ancestors were. They cultivate yams, bananas, or sugarcane in village gardens, while raising domesticated pigs, llamas, or chickens.8 Even beyond the fact that these societies are not remotely representative of our nomadic, immediate-return hunter-gatherer ancestors, there are still further problems with the data Pinker cites. Among the Yanomami, true levels of warfare are subject to passionate debate among anthropologists, as we’ll discuss shortly. The Murngin are not typical even of Australian native cultures, representing a bloody exception to the typical Australian Aborigine pattern of little to no intergroup conflict.9 Nor does Pinker get the Gebusi right. Bruce Knauft, the anthropologist whose research Pinker cites on his chart, says the Gebusi’s elevated death rates had nothing to do with warfare. In fact, Knauft reports that warfare is “rare” among the Gebusi, writing, “Disputes over territory or resources are extremely infrequent and tend to be easily resolved.”10
Despite all this, Pinker stood before his audience and argued, with a straight face, that his chart depicted a fair estimate of typical hunter-gatherer mortality rates in prehistoric war. This is quite literally unbelievable.11
But Pinker is not alone in employing such sleight-of-hand to advance of Hobbes’s dark view of human prehistory. In fact, this selective presentation of dubious data is disturbingly common in the literature on human blood-lust.
In their book Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson admit that war is unusual in nature, “a startling exception to the normal rule for animals.” But because intergroup violence has been documented in both humans and chimps, they argue, a propensity for war must be an ancient human quality, going back to our last common ancestor. We are, they warn, “the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression.” Ouch.
But where are the bonobos? In a book of over 250 pages, the word bonobo appears on only eleven of them, and the species is dismissed as offering a less relevant sense of our last common ancestor than the common chimpanzee does—although many primatologists argue the opposite.12
But at least they mentioned the bonobo.
In 2007, David Livingstone Smith, author of The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War, published an essay exploring the evolutionary argument that war is rooted in our primate past. In his grisly accounts of chimps pummeling one another to a bloody pulp and eating each other alive, Smith repeatedly refers to them as “our closest non-human relative.” You’d never know from reading his essay that we have an equally close nonhuman relative. The bonobo was left strangely—if typically—unmentioned.13
Amid the macho posturing about the brutal implications of chimpanzee violence, doesn’t the equally relevant, nonwarring bonobo rate a mention, at least? Why all the yelling about yang with nary a whisper of yin? All darkness and no light may get audiences excited, but it can’t illuminate them. This oops-forgot-to-mention-the-bonobo technique is distressingly common in the literature on the ancient origins of war.
But the bonobo’s conspicuous absence is notable not just in discussions of war. Look for the missing bonobo wherever someone claims an ancient pedigree for human male violence of any sort. See if you can find the bonobo in this account of the origins of rape, from The DarkSide of Man: “Men did not invent rape. Instead, they very likely inherited rape behavior from our ape ancestral lineage. Rape is a standard male reproductive strategy and likely has been one for millions of years. Male humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans routinely rape females. Wild gorillas violently abduct females to mate with them. Captive gorillas also rape females.”14 (Emphasis is in the original.)
Leaving aside the complications of defining rape in nonhuman species unable to communicate their experiences and motivations, rape—along with infanticide, war, and murder—has never been witnessed among bonobos in several decades of observation. Not in the wild. Not in the zoo. Never.
Doesn’t that warrant a footnote, even?