[ExI] Foragers and violence

[J. Stanton]

Dan wrote:
> I thought violent death would also be a factor. From what little I've read on
> hunter-gatherers, I gathered (sorry, bad pun!) that they were much more prone to
> violence and murder rates were far higher amongst them

Those are some very squishy numbers, based on a lot of assumptions, many 
of which are poor or entirely false.

First, most such arguments I've seen are based on non-hunter-gatherer 
cultures!  The Yanomamo, for instance, are swidden agriculturalists that 
live in villages, as are the New Guinea highlanders on which most of 
these comparisons are made.  It's astounding to see a competent 
anthropologist like Richard Wrangham making such comparisons with a 
straight face: you'd better go back more than a few thousand years if 
you're making an argument about 'human nature'.  (To be fair, he admits 
that the Yanomamo are farmers...but why, then, is that an interesting 
data point?  Primitive agriculture is still agriculture.)

Second, most of the violence figures for civilization are based on 
modern urban crime rates in Western nations, and omit the hundreds of 
millions of deaths due to war, genocide, famine, and plague.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_disasters_by_death_toll

Third, the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies only remain because 
their land is either so worthless to us that we never bothered to take 
it -- or because they were so warlike that we were unable to conquer 
them.  The Huaorani are warlike because their rainforest habitat is only 
*mostly* undesirable and they've had to survive the incursions of the 
Quechua, whereas the Hadza and !Kung, whose desert habitat no one wanted 
until very recently, are generally peaceful.  In other words, the 
sampling is not representative.

This isn't to say that foragers led an idyllic life free from violence. 
  But slavery, organized war, social class, and the entire notion that 
one can control another's behavior by threat of force are features of 
agricultural civilization, not of foragers.

JS
http://www.gnolls.org