The myth of the peaceful savage

In spite of world wars and international conflicts, we live in the most peaceful times in human history.

Summer 2024. It is difficult to get up in the morning and turn on the news. Deeply traumatic, in fact, to see, hear and read about the horrors that are taking place — in Ukraine, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, China, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Congo, to mention just the most serious and brutal conflicts. And all this happening just a century after two world wars that devastated Europe and the far east. It would be understandable for us to assume that we live in the most violent era in human history. This is how the sentiment is reflected:

In pre-state societies — when humans lived in bands, tribes or chiefdoms — war was rare and highly ritualised, consisting mainly of non-lethal contests or competition. It is only when primitive people encountered the “civilised” world that violence was introduced, and homicide became part of their everyday life. With the advent of modern mega states and advanced techniques of destruction, warfare and terror achieved its current terrifying levels of killing and slaughter. The 20th century was the most violent in the history of mankind, and the 21st continues in the same vein.

What is wrong with the above statements? The answer that they are all erroneous — in each case the opposite is true. Even though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given the horrors of world wars and mass genocides, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.

A 1996 book, “War before Civilisation” by Lawrence H. Keeley, exposes the myth of the peaceful savage. He describes in great detail how archaeologists have artificially “pacified the past” and, in spite of compelling evidence, denied the possibility of prehistoric warfare. They seem to have adopted the views of Jean-Jacque Rousseau, who believed that “nothing could be more gentle” than man in his natural state.

The truth of the matter is that since the advent of humanity, violence has been commonplace and lethal, with a large percentage of all adult males of all bands and tribes being involved at some stage in their lifetime in homicidal incidents. The encounter with civilization, far from introducing aggressive warfare to the peaceful primitives, generally served to pacify their murderous tendencies.

The Kung San (or Bushmen) of the Kalahari Desert are generally depicted as being a very peaceful community. In reality, Keeley tells us, their homicide rate from 1920 to 1955 was four times that of the United States, and during the 1950s and 1960s twenty to eighty times that of major industrial nations. The Kung were pacified by the Botswana police. Similarly the Copper Eskimo experienced very high levels of feuding and manslaughter before the Canadian Mounted Police suppressed this.

A very eloquent survey of the situation described above is presented by Harvard Professor Steven Pinker in the following lectures, which draw from Keeley and other archaeologists and ethnologist, deftly shattering the views (Pinker calls it “treacle”) which academia has propagated in spite of telling evidence to the contrary. What Pinker tells us puts things into a more accurate — and pretty startling — perspective.

Watch at least this half-hour talk. It is truly an eye-opener.

The myth of the peaceful savage is certainly not supported by evidence. Anthropological research has shown that warfare in simple societies is just as common, and in fact usually more common, than in complex societies. It is definitely more deadly. This is mainly the result of the weak social institutions which could resolve fierce competition and martial conflicts peacefully.

Here are some examples of warfare in simple societies:

• The Yanomami people of South America are known for their high rates of warfare. It was found that 40% of Yanomami men had died from violence.
• The Gimi people of Papua New Guinea are probably the most violent societies in the world. In the 1960s, it was estimated that the Gimi were killing each other at a rate of 100 per 100,000 people — per year.
• Fully one half of the population of the present-day Jebel Sahaba, Sudan, dating back 13,000 years, died as a result of warfare between different racial groups. A majority of the remains found in the mesolithic cemeteries show victims who bear marks of being killed by arrows, spears and clubs.
• The Dogrib Indians effective obliterated the Yellowknives tribe in Canada, who disappeared from history.
• In northern Australia a study found that inter-tribal warfare among the Aboriginal Murngin people had, over a 20-year period, killed 200 out of 800 men, i.e, 25% of all adult males.
• The Yanomami tribes engaged in constant infighting for women, prestige or enslavement of neighboring tribes. It took the lives of more than a third of Yanomamo males.

It is estimated that over 90% of primitive societies engage in war, resulting in casualty rates of up to 60% — compared to 1% of the combatants in modern warfare. Tribal warfare is on average 20 times more deadly than 20th-century warfare, when calculated as deaths from modern war as a percentage of the total population.