On the whole, yes: more peaceful than the farming societies and states that came after them, though they were not pacifists. Nomadic hunter-gatherer bands skirmished, and individuals sometimes killed one another, but organised war aimed at wiping out another people seems to have been rare until settled life, stored food and farming. The question is still disputed, with writers such as Lawrence Keeley and Steven Pinker arguing that early human life was violent and anthropologists such as Douglas Fry, Raymond Kelly and Brian Ferguson replying that organised war is recent, and that much of the evidence for violence comes from farming peoples or from foragers disrupted by outsiders.
Why is this question so charged? #
Because the answer has been used to justify things. The usual view of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is the one the philosopher Thomas Hobbes gave in Leviathan: lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, in a time of war “of every man against every man” before governments came along to civilise people.1 Portraying hunter-gatherers as savage, violent and cannibalistic has been used for thousands of years to justify arriving in their lands to ‘save’ them from their own barbarity. That does not make the picture false, but it is a reason to look at it very closely and not take it at face value.1
There is a second reason. If violence and selfishness are simply human nature, then people need strong rulers to protect them from each other, and handing power to the ruthless looks like common sense. So the idea that for most of human history people lived largely in peace has had to be forgotten or derided, part of what the writer Daniel Quinn called the Great Forgetting.2 See Who was Daniel Quinn, and what did Ishmael teach?
What does Therapeutic Shamanism say? #
That hunter-gatherers were not warlike, and not pacifists either. Fighting existed, as skirmishing between bands, but full-scale war in the modern sense, obliterating another tribe and taking all its land, was virtually unheard of, and in many hunter-gatherer cultures fighting was contained and limited by ritual and convention.3 They were, after all, hunters, with no qualms about killing when it was needed, for food, in self-defence, or, as a last resort, to stop someone who would not stop trying to dominate the band.4 The first large armies, conquering neighbours and enslaving or slaughtering them, appear only with the city-states, around 4,000 BC.5
The truth, in this view, probably lies somewhere between the violent picture of the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley and the more peaceful one of the psychologist Steve Taylor, with Therapeutic Shamanism leaning towards Taylor’s side whilst fully accepting that some tribes would have been more aggressive and less empathic than others, and some may even have been taken over by bullying psychopaths.6 Taylor himself has been questioned for romanticising hunter-gatherer life, and that criticism is accepted to a certain extent. Where people land between the two pictures probably comes down to what they believe about human nature: how far it is selfish, and how far cooperative. See Who is Steve Taylor, and what is his idea of “the Fall”?
Why does it matter which peoples are counted? #
Because farmers and hunter-gatherers are very different, and the violent cases are mostly farmers. Most of the examples Keeley gives of violent ‘pre-civilised’ cultures are settled, agricultural cultures, not hunter-gatherers. One of his hunter-gatherer cases, the Inuit who may have finished off the struggling Norse farming colony in Greenland, is better read as hunter-gatherers protecting themselves from aggressive settlers.7 The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon presented the Yanomami of the Amazon as fierce and typical of hunter-gatherers, but most of their food has come from farming for centuries, and they had been attacked again and again by Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese colonists.8
There is a material reason for the difference. A band that felt threatened by its neighbours could usually move on. Farmers who have cleared and ploughed land, with only stone tools, have far more to lose by leaving, and so their first option is to stand and fight, or to wipe out troublesome neighbours before they become a threat.7 The rare complex hunter-gatherers who settled on very rich ground, such as the peoples of the Pacific North-West coast, developed chiefs, slavery and mass warfare without farming at all.8 Jared Diamond’s figures make the same point from the other direction; see What did Jared Diamond mean by calling farming “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”?
Is there a difference between killing and war? #
Yes, and much of the argument turns on it. The anthropologist Raymond Kelly, in Warless Societies and the Origin of War (2000), defines war by one thing: that any member of the enemy group, not only the person who did the wrong, becomes a fair target. Murder, the execution of a killer, and a fight over food are something else. By that measure war is “neither universal nor pervasive”, is most likely rare to non-existent amongst foraging bands without clans or lineages, and has “a definite origin in the relatively recent past”. Yet Kelly is just as clear that killing goes far back. Amongst the Copper Inuit, Arctic hunter-gatherers, the explorer Knud Rasmussen found that most of the adult men in one community had killed someone. Kelly’s conclusion holds both: the “nightmare past” Hobbes imagined “clearly never existed”, but neither did a utopia without conflict.9
The anthropologists Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg, looking at killings recorded amongst nomadic foragers, found that most were individual affairs, not raids by one group on another; only 8.8 per cent fitted the picture of a coalition attacking another society.10 The anthropologist Brian Ferguson says that homicide may have been fairly common in the prehistoric world, but “homicide is not war”. He lists what makes war more likely, settling down, growing populations, valuable stores, hierarchy and hard group boundaries, and what makes peace more likely, ties of kinship and marriage across groups, shared food, and the freedom to move to another group.11 That second list is close to a description of nomadic band life.
Who says hunter-gatherers were violent, and what is the reply? #
Several writers, from several fields. Keeley, in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996), set out to show that war before the state was common, with high casualty rates. The psychologist Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), holds that violence has fallen over history and that the coming of states brought a large drop in violent death. The economist Samuel Bowles, in 2009, estimated high rates of death in war amongst ancestral hunter-gatherers. The primatologist Richard Wrangham, in The Goodness Paradox (2019), suggests that humans are unusually gentle with each other day to day but unusually capable of planned, collective killing, and cites Kelly’s description of the hunter-gatherers of the Andaman Islands, for whom “External war is unremitting”.12 And archaeology has its own case: at Nataruk, beside Lake Turkana in Kenya, the remains of twenty-seven people from a hunter-gatherer camp of about ten thousand years ago were reported in 2016 as victims of an attack, some with stone projectile points still in their bones.13
On the other side, Fry and Söderberg found that every killing Bowles counted as war amongst the Aché of Paraguay was recorded as “shot by Paraguayan”, and that the Hiwi ‘war deaths’ were Hiwi murdered or massacred by outsiders; both were foragers in transition, under pressure from settlers. They also note that the main proponents of a violent past are an economist, a psychologist and a primatologist, not specialists in foragers.14 Ferguson, weighing the archaeology, finds little or no evidence that war was a fact of life in the earliest finds.15 At Nataruk itself, another team questioned in the same journal whether the site shows a massacre at all, arguing that the way the bodies lay looks more like burial. Kelly, for his part, finds that the archaeology he presents puts the beginning of war after about ten thousand years ago everywhere except the Nile Valley.16 See Isn’t the Fall just “noble savage” romanticism?
Why does it matter now? #
Because the story a culture tells about its past shapes what it thinks is possible. If war is human nature, there is little point hoping for anything else. If organised war has a beginning, tied to settled land, stored surplus and power handed to the ruthless, then it is a recent sickness and not something innate to being human, and what was once done can be done differently.17 That is why the line between hunter-gatherers and the farming cultures that followed them matters so much, without any pretence that hunter-gatherers were saints. See How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal? and What is the Fall?
