Prehistoric Violence
The following graph was transcribed by Alex Tabarrok from Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.
Lawrence Keeley’s 1996 War Before Civilization 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. Massacre sites were common.
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 4 to 6 times higher than even the worst experienced by modern nations, such as Germany and Russia in the 20th century.
For at least 95% 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.
Steven A. LeBlanc, in Constant Battles, analyzes 3 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. These foragers’ record of violence is little different from that of more sedentary agriculturalists.
“Enduring myth of ‘noble savage’ vs. a species at continuous war?,” by Keith Windschuttle