War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 2, 1996 by Robert Edgerton

THE belief that, before Western contact shattered their traditional ways of life, "primitive" peoples lived in remarkable harmony is not only the stuff that Hollywood movies are made of (Dances with Wolves comes to mind), it is a taken-for-granted underpinning of much scholarly discourse as well. Anthropologists, those academic sorts who know most about people in the world's "small-scale" societies (it is not done to refer to them as "primitive"), no longer call them "noble savages," as Rousseau had it, but they very often attribute all the nastiness that may exist in their lives to the disruptive influences of Western ideas, economic changes, and political domination. Kirkpatrick Sale answered criticism of his recent book The Conquest of Paradise (about the European conquest of the native peoples of America) by vigorously defending his claim that, compared to the cultures of Europe, the native cultures of preconquest America were much more "harmonious, peaceful, benign, and content."

Some may have been, but, as archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley convincingly demonstrates in War before Civilization, many were anything but benign and peaceful. It has long been known, for example, that many tribes of South America's tropical forest engaged in frequent and horrific warfare, but some scholars have attributed their addiction to violence to baneful Western influences. Keeley produces evidence of frequent deadly raids and occasional wholesale massacres over much of prehistoric North America, arguing that this archaeological evidence indicates that these massacres were not only prior to Western contact, but also more severe than anything reported in the ethnographic record for the region. For example, at a place called Crow Creek in South Dakota, archaeologists found a mass grave with the skeletons of over five hundred men, women, and children who had been killed, scalped, and mutilated -- around 1325 A.D., a century and a half before Columbus. Only young women, whose bodies were not found in the grave, appear to have survived, probably as captives. Of course, the Aztecs were predatory warriors long before Cortes landed.

Keeley points out that because archaeologists have had "a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare," they have "pacified the past," choosing to ignore evidence of mass warfare --large numbers of skeletons with arrowheads embedded in their spines or skulls, or with their skulls split open. In fact, archaeological textbooks frequently omit any mention of warfare until the rise of urban centers, even though there is clear evidence of warfare during the early Neolithic period, long before civilization could be said to have corrupted people's natural harmony. One half of the people found in a Nubian cemetery dating to as early as 12,000 years ago had died of violence.

Keeley also lays to rest the widespread belief among anthropologists that "primitive" warfare was ritualized, typically ineffective, and rarely deadly. He demonstrates that not only was warfare more common in small-scale societies than it has been among "civilized" nation states, it involved a greater percentage of the population, and the numbers killed were proportionately higher as well. In point of fact, truly peaceful small-scale societies were rare. Even the so-called "harmless people" like the Sau (or Bushmen) of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa have had a long history of warfare against their neighbors.

This tells us something basic about the human inclination to violence and evil: it was not created by civilization but existed from the start. In Dark Nature, biologist-naturalist Lyall Watson takes a broader perspective on human nature by examining what he calls the natural history of evil. With admirable judgment and superb craftsmanship, Watson ranges widely over such topics as the nature of ecology, genetic fitness, the selfish and deceptive behavior of gorillas, the premeditated violence of chimpanzees, and the altruism of false killer whales whom he observed trying to save not only one of their own who was having trouble breathing but Watson as well when they took his noisy snorkel to be evidence of distress. He also examines so-called evil in human societies, including his own experiences with the Asmat of Irian Indonesian New Guinea who are inveterate cannibals.

Watson's definition of evil is less satisfying than his many examples. Deeply troubled by the human horror in Rwanda and Bosnia as well as by a murder in Britain by two 10-year-olds who brutally and remorselessly beat a 2-year-old to death and then left his body on a railroad track to be cut in two, he searches for a definition of evil that will have universal applicability. His answer lies in an ecological vision of life in which human acts become consistently or deliberately evil when the ecosystem is disordered, population imbalances occur, and stable associations are disrupted or impoverished. From my perspective, these principles are anything but "simple," as Watson believes them to be, but his vision of human nature is crystal clear: "There is an inherited, genetically related system that is unrelentingly selfish, ruthless, and cruel."