Long, long ago, in a century far, far away, there lived beautiful people coexisting with nature in balanced ecoharmony, taking only what they needed, and giving back to Mother Earth what was left. Women and men lived in egalitarian accord and there were no wars and few conflicts. The people were happy, living long and prosperous lives. The men were handsome and muscular, well coordinated in their hunting expeditions as they successfully brought home the main meals for the family. The tanned, bare-breasted women carried a child in one arm and picked nuts and berries to supplement the hunt. Children frolicked in the nearby stream, dreaming of the day when they too would grow up to fulfill their destiny as beautiful people.
But then came the evil empire—European White Males carrying the diseases of imperialism, industrialism, capitalism, scientism, and the other “isms” brought about by human greed, carelessness, and short-term thinking. The environment became exploited, the rivers soiled, the air polluted, and the beautiful people were driven from their land, forced to become slaves, or simply killed.
This tragedy, however, can be reversed if we just go back to living off the land where people would grow just enough food for themselves and use only enough to survive. We would then all love one another, as well as our caretaker Mother Earth, just as they did long, long ago, in a century far, far away.
Figure 12. The Erotic Side of Human Nature
Into the Heart is a moving love story between anthropologist Kenneth Good and a young Yanomamö woman named Yarima. They eventually married, had children, and returned to the United States. Yarima grew bored with American life and returned to the more stimulating environment of Amazonia. (Courtesy of Kenneth Good)
Figure 13. Splendor in Fierceness
Chagnon nuances the realities of Yanomamö life, and of human life, in all its richness in his ethnography entitled simply Yanomamö. Earlier editions included the subtitle The Fierce People, but readers missed the multilayered meaning of courage, valor, and compassion. However, warfare among the Yanomamö is a reality, as it is for all of humanity. Here we see (top) Yanomamö men dressed for ceremony and (bottom) dressed differently for war, without feathers and their faces painted black with masticated charcoal. (Courtesy of Napoleon Chagnon)
I have thoroughly deconstructed and debunked the Beautiful People Myth elsewhere, so I will not belabor the point here.56 When it comes to how humans treat other humans and the environment, the Beautiful People have never existed except in myth. Humans are neither Beautiful People nor Ugly People, in the same way that we are neither moral nor immoral in some absolute categorical sense. Humans are only doing what any species does to survive; but we do it with a twist (and a vengeance)—instead of our environment shaping us through natural selection, we are shaping our environment through artificial selection. In a fascinating 1996 study, for example, University of Michigan ecologist Bobbi Low used the data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample to test the hypothesis that we can solve our ecological problems by returning to the mythological Beautiful People’s attitudes of reverence for (rather than exploitation of) the natural world, and by opting for long-term group-oriented values (rather than short-term individual values).57 Her analysis of 186 hunting-fishing-gathering (HFG) societies around the world showed that their use of the environment is driven by ecological constraints and not by attitudes, such as sacred prohibitions, and that their relatively low environmental impact is the result of low population density, inefficient technology, and the lack of profitable markets, not from conscious efforts at conservation. Low also showed that in 32 percent of HFG societies, not only were they not practicing conservation, environmental degradation was severe; again, it was limited only by the time and technology to finish the job of destruction and extinction.
Extending the analysis of the BPM to other areas of human culture, UCLA anthropologist Robert Edgerton surveyed the anthropological record and found clear evidence of drug addiction, abuse of women and children, bodily mutilation, economic exploitation of the group by political leaders, suicide, and mental illness in indigenous preindustrial peoples, groups not contaminated by Western values (allegedly the source of such “sick” behavior).58
Anthropologist Shepard Krech analyzed a number of Native American communities, such as the Hohokam of southern Arizona, and discovered that a large-scale irrigation program led to the salinization and exhaustion of the Gila and Salt River valleys, ultimately triggering the collapse of their society. Krech says that even the reverence for big game animals we have been led to believe was ingrained into the world-view of America’s indigenous peoples is a myth. Many, if not most, Native Americans believed that common game animals such as elk, deer, caribou, beaver, and especially buffalo are replenished through divine physical reincarnation. Game populations bounced back after successful hunts not because Native Americans made it happen through ecological veneration, but because they believed the gods willed it.59 Given the opportunity to overhunt big game animals, Native Americans were only too willing to do so.
One of the most poignant examples of this is the famous “Head-Smashed-In” buffalo kill site in southern Alberta, Canada. I had an opportunity to visit Head-Smashed-In (the name alone belies the Noble Indian myth). It is a most dramatic site. Standing on the edge of the cliff, one looks down upon a thirty-foot-thick deposit of buffalo bones that reflects five thousand years of Native American mass hunting. Looking back away from the cliff, one sees a vast and expansive V-shaped valley in which the hunters ambushed and drove their game for tens of miles. The terrain is on a slight decline toward the cliff, so these massive animals built up so much speed that upon reaching the cliff they were unable to stop themselves. They tumbled over, one after another, until there were so many carcasses that most were left unused. Buffalo populations were ultimately stable not because of a Native American conservation ethic, but because they simply did not have the numbers and technology to drive these big game animals into extinction. Other species were not so fortunate. The evidence is now overwhelming that woolly mammoths, giant mastodons, ground sloths, one-ton armadillo-like glyptodonts, bear-sized beavers, and beefy saber-toothed cats, not to mention American lions, cheetahs, camels, horses, and many other large mammals, all went extinct at the same time that Native Americans first populated the continent in the mass migration from Asia some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. The best theory to date as to what happened to these mammals is that they were overhunted into extinction.60
The Ignoble Savage and the Nature of War
The evidence is overwhelming that violence, aggression, and warfare are part of the behavioral repertoire of most primate species. While most conflicts among monkeys end relatively peacefully, this is due primarily to the fact that they lack brute strength and deadly weapons. In their stead, screams, gestures, pushing, hitting, and biting result in struggles for and changes in social status and mate choices, but it is clear that the potential for deadly violence exists. Among the great apes it was long believed that “only man kills,” but that is no longer the case. Murderous raids among chimpanzees have now been well documented, and they are not rare. While it would be inappropriate to compare the gang raids among chimpanzees to the wars of modern civilization (chimpanzee gangs mostly attack individuals or much smaller groups), the basic process of a gang of young and aggressive males fanning out into neighboring environments on a seek-and-destroy mission to gain resources and females is apparent in the species, genus, and family. As Jane Goodall famously observed: “If they [chimpanzees] had had firearms and had been taught to use them, I suspect they would have used them to kill.”61
Even when anthropologists have admitted that there is evidence for prehistoric human warfare, they often portray it as rare, harmless, and little more than ritualized sport. Now even that noble image has taken a major hit from new data. For example, in his survey of and comparison between primitive and civilized societies, University of Illinois anthropologist Lawrence Keeley demonstrates that prehistoric war was, relative to population densit
ies and fighting technologies, at least as frequent (as measured in years at war versus years at peace), as deadly (as measured by percentage of conflict deaths per population), and as ruthless (as measured by the killing and maiming of noncombatant women and children) as modern war.62 At a bone bed site at Crow Creek in South Dakota, dated in the pre-Columbian fourteenth century, Keeley also found “the remains of nearly 500 men, women, and children. These victims had been scalped, mutilated, and left exposed for a few months to scavengers before being interred.” Keeley also recounts the last moments of a young man who was shot in the back during a mass raid of a Neolithic village in Britain, during which he fell and crushed the infant he was carrying. In yet another example, seven thousand years ago in Talheim, Germany, a band of thirty-four adults and children were murdered by blows to the head and then tossed into an open pit, not so different from what the Nazis did many millennia later.63 The Nazis had no monopoly on violence.
In Constant Battles, an exceptionally insightful study of this problem by Steven A. LeBlanc, the Harvard archaeologist quips, “anthropologists have searched for peaceful societies much like Diogenes looked for an honest man.” That is, they are exceptionally rare. “In spite of the presumption that most societies were peaceful in the past, anthropologists have had a lot of trouble finding ethnographically known peaceful people. Despite all the effort that has been devoted to the search, the number of what can be considered classic cases of peaceful societies is quite small.”64 Consider the evidence from a 10,000-year-old Paleolithic site along the Nile River: “The graveyard held the remains of fifty-nine people, at least twenty-four of whom showed direct evidence of violent death, including stone points from arrows or spears within the body cavity, and many contained several points. There were six multiple burials, and almost all those individuals had points in them, indicating that the people in each mass grave were killed in a single event and then buried together.”65 LeBlanc presents evidence from a site in Utah that contains the remains of ninety-seven people killed violently: “six had stone spear heads in them … several breast bones shot through with arrows and many broken heads and arms … . Individuals of all ages and both sexes were killed, and individuals were shot with atlatl darts, stabbed, and bludgeoned, suggesting that fighting was at close quarters.”66
LeBlanc’s survey of our not-so-noble past reveals that even cannibalism, long thought to be a form of primitive urban legend and a myth to be debunked (noble savages would never eat each other, would they?), has now been supported by powerful physical evidence that includes broken and burned bones, bones with cut marks, bones broken open lengthwise to allow access to the marrow, and bones broken to fit inside cooking jars. Such evidence for prehistoric cannibalism has been uncovered in Mexico, Fiji, Spain, and other parts of Europe. The final (and gruesome) proof came with the discovery of the human muscle protein myoglobin in the fossilized human feces of a prehistoric Anasazi pueblo Indian.67
Savage yes. Noble no.
We are moral animals, yes, but we are also immoral animals, tragically but indubitably so. Figures 14 through 17 graphically depict this hard and factual reality of the human condition.
Figure 14. Political Organization and Frequency of Warfare
The level of warfare for ten organized states, six chiefdoms, twenty-five tribes, and nine bands. (Derived from Table 2.1 in Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization, 1996)
Figure 15. Death Rate from Warfare
Deaths due to warfare as a percent of all deaths recorded in representative societies. Ancient societies: Northern British Columbia, British Columbia, Southern California, Central California. Western Europe is for the seventeenth century; the United States and Europe are for the twentieth century. (Data from Table 6.2 in Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization, 1996)
Figure 14 presents Keeley’s data showing that there is no obvious distinction between bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states in terms of warfare frequency—humans typically and frequently solve social disputes with violence, prehistorically, historically, and today—and they do so regardless of the political structure. Figure 15 shows, counterintuitively, that if there are any historical trends it is that the death rate as a result of warfare is actually decreasing over time, with modern Western states representing the lowest death rate and premodern political organizations the highest. Figure 16 depicts the different sites within Native American Southwest cultures in which evidence of violent deaths, processed human remains, and mutilations of the dead occurred. These are not isolated events, since the sites studied include the remains of hundreds of murdered individuals. Figure 17 depicts the data from R. N. Holdaway’s study of the extinction of New Zealand moa birds after the arrival of Polynesian Maoris, surely the perfect image of Beautiful People by anyone’s standard in the West. When Europeans arrived in New Zealand in the 1800s, they found bones and eggshells of large extinct moa birds, an ostrichlike bird of a dozen different species ranging in size from three feet tall and 40 pounds to ten feet tall and 500 pounds. We now know, from preserved moa gizzards containing pollen and leaves of dozens of plant species and from archaeological digs of Polynesian trash heaps, that the Maoris committed a full-scale ecocide. Although some biologists have suggested a change in climate as the cause of the moa extinction, Jared Diamond makes the case that when the extinction occurred, New Zealand was enjoying the best climate it had had in a long time. Also, carbon-dated bird bones from Maori archaeological sites prove that all known moa species were still present in abundance when the Maoris arrived around 1000 c.E. But by 1200 C.E.—six centuries before the arrival of Europeans—they were all gone. The final piece of evidence of what happened to the moas came from archaeologists who uncovered Maori sites containing between 100,000 and 500,000 moa skeletons, ten times the number living at any one time. In other words, they had been slaughtering moas for many generations, until they were all gone in a mass extermination.68
Figure 16. Pueblo Culture War Sites
The number of sites in the American Southwest showing excavated evidence of violent deaths, processed human remains, mutilations of the dead, and sieges. These sites include the remains of at least 128, 252, an unknown number, and 174 individuals, respectively. The “processed remains” represent individuals who were apparently butchered for consumption. (Data from Steven LeBlanc, Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest, 1999)
There is nothing beautiful about the Beautiful People. Give them the plants, animals, and technologies—and the need through population pressures—to exploit their environment and they would do so; indeed, those that had that particular concatenation of elements did just that. In other words, centuries before and continents away from modern economies and technologies, and long before European White Males (dead or alive), humans consciously and systematically destroyed each other and their environments. The ignoble savage lies within.
Figure 17. Models for Moa Extinction
The results represent modeling the time to extinction of the New Zealand moas after the arrival of the Maoris in the late thirteenth century. The model assumes 100 initial settlers, that no moa eggs were taken, and that no juvenile moas were killed. The model includes two moa consumption rates, two rates of human population growth, and whether moa habitat was destroyed. The light gray bar at the far right shows the results for the most likely of the tested conditions: 200 initial settlers, a 2.2 percent human population growth rate, and habitat destruction. (Data from R. N. Holdaway and C. Jacomb, “Rapid Extinction of the Moas” in Science, vol. 287, 2000)
In the Heart of Every Human
Now that we have dispensed with the myths of pure evil and pure good, with what are we left? What remains when we strip away the mythic fog that has for too long shrouded human nature is human behavior—the things people do. So, a final way to view the visage of humanity is to think about human behavior not as inherently good or evil, moral or immoral, but as actions that we like and actions that we do not like, as these actions may be provisionally defined and
judged. That is, in most circumstances, for most people certain behaviors most of the time are considered moral or immoral, and we reward and punish those actions accordingly. Our political constitutions are formed according to our natural constitutions. As Preacher Casey tells Tom Joad in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, after he explains that he has given up holding revivals because of the obvious hypocrisy between the content of his preaching about fidelity and context of his own infidelities:
Science of Good and Evil Page 12