The anthropologist Douglas Fry was sceptical, however. Reviewing the original sources, he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorised as Aché ‘war mortality’ actually concerned a tribe member listed as ‘shot by Paraguayan’.
The Aché were in fact not killing each other, but being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’, reads the original source, whereas they themselves ‘desire a peaceful relationship with their more powerful neighbors’. It was the same with the Hiwi. All the men, women and children enumerated by Pinker as war deaths were murdered in 1968 by local cattle ranchers.40
There go the iron-clad homicide rates. Far from habitually slaughtering one another, these nomadic foragers were the victims of ‘civilised’ farmers wielding advanced weaponry. ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion.’41
What can we learn, then, from modern anthropology? What happens if we examine a society that has no settlements, no farming and no horses–a society that can serve as a model for how we once lived?
You guessed it: when we study these types of societies we find that war is a rarity. Based on a list of representative tribes compiled for the journal Science in 2013, Douglas Fry concludes that nomadic hunter-gatherers avoid violence.42 Nomads would rather talk out their conflicts or just move on to the next valley. This sounds a lot like the boys on ‘Ata: when tempers flared, they’d head to different parts of the island to cool down.
And another thing. Anthropologists long assumed that prehistoric social networks were small. We wandered through the jungle in bands of thirty or forty relatives, they thought. Any encounters with other groups swiftly devolved into war.
But in 2011 a team of American anthropologists mapped out the social networks of thirty-two primitive societies around the world, from the Nunamuit in Alaska to the Vedda in Sri Lanka. Turns out the nomads are extremely social. They’re constantly getting together to eat, party, sing and marry people from other groups.
True, they do their foraging in small teams of thirty to forty individuals, but those groups consist mainly of friends, not family and they’re also continually swapping members. As a consequence, foragers have vast social networks. In the case of the Ache in Paraguay and the Hadza in Tanzania, a 2014 study calculated that the average tribe member meets as many as a thousand people during his or her lifetime.43
In short, there’s every reason to think that the average prehistoric human had a large circle of friends. Continually meeting new people meant continually learning new things, and only then could we grow smarter than the Neanderthals.44
There is one other way to resolve the question about early man’s aggressive nature. By digging. Archaeological evidence may offer the best hope of settling the debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, because the fossil record can’t be ‘contaminated’ by researchers the way tribes can. There’s one problem, though: hunter-gatherers travelled light. They didn’t have much and they didn’t leave much behind.
Fortunately for us, there’s an important exception. Cave paintings. If our state of nature was a ‘war of all against all’ à la Hobbes, then you’d expect that someone, at some point in this period, would have painted a picture of it. But that’s never been found. While there are thousands of cave paintings from this time about hunting bison, horses and gazelles, there’s not a single depiction of war.45
What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 per cent. But, as before, Pinker’s list here is a bit of a mess. Twenty of the twenty-one digs date from a time after the invention of farming, the domestication of horses, or the rise of settlements, making them altogether too recent.
So how much archaeological evidence is there for early warfare, before the days of farming, riding horses and living in settled societies? How much proof is there that war is in our nature?
The answer is almost none.
To date, some three thousand Homo sapiens skeletons unearthed at four hundred sites are old enough to tell us something about our ‘natural state’.46 Scientists who have studied these sites see no convincing evidence for prehistoric warfare.47 In later periods, it’s a different story. ‘War does not go forever backwards in time,’ says renowned anthropologist Brian Ferguson. ‘It had a beginning.’48
5
The Curse of Civilisation
1
Was Jean-Jacques Rousseau right? Are humans noble by nature, and were we all doing fine until civilisation came along?
I was certainly starting to get that impression. Take the following account recorded in 1492 by a traveller on coming ashore in the Bahamas. He was astonished at how peaceful the inhabitants were. ‘They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword… and [they] cut themselves out of ignorance.’ This gave him an idea. ‘They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.’1
Christopher Columbus–the traveller in question–lost no time putting his plan into action. The following year he returned with seventeen ships and fifteen hundred men, and started the transatlantic slave trade. Half a century later, less than 1 per cent of the original Carib population remained; the rest had succumbed to the horrors of disease and enslavement.
It must have been quite a shock for these so-called savages to encounter such ‘civilised’ colonists. To some, the very notion that one human being might kidnap or kill another may even have seemed alien. If that sounds like a stretch, consider that there are still places today where murder is inconceivable.
In the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, for example, lies a tiny atoll called Ifalik. After the Second World War, the US Navy screened a few Hollywood films on Ifalik to foster goodwill with the Ifalik people. It turned out to be the most appalling thing the islanders had ever seen. The violence on screen so distressed the unsuspecting natives that some fell ill for days.
When years later an anthropologist came to do fieldwork on Ifalik, the natives repeatedly asked her: was it true? Were there really people in America who had killed another person?2
So at the heart of human history lies this mystery. If we have a deep-seated, instinctive aversion to violence, where did things go wrong? If war had a beginning, what started it?
First, a cautionary note about life in prehistory: we have to guard against painting too romantic a picture of our forebears. Human beings have never been angels. Envy, rage and hatred are age-old emotions that have always taken a toll. In our primal days, resentments could also boil over. And, to be fair, Homo puppy would never have conquered the world if we had not, on rare occasions, gone on the offence.
To understand that last point, you need to know something about prehistoric politics. Basically, our ancestors were allergic to inequality. Decisions were group affairs requiring long deliberation in which everybody got to have their say. ‘Nomadic foragers,’ established one American anthropologist on the basis of a formidable 339 fieldwork studies, ‘are universally–and all but obsessively–concerned with being free from the authority of others.’3
Power distinctions between people were–if nomads tolerated them at all–temporary and served a purpose. Leaders were more knowledgeable, or skilled, or charismatic. That is, they had the ability to get a given job done. Scientists refer to this as achievement-based inequality.
At the same time, these societies wielded a simple weapon to keep members humble: shame. Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee’s account of his life among the !Kung in the Kalahari Desert illustrates how this might have worked among our ancestors.4 The following is a tribesman’s description of how a successful hunter was expected to conduct himself:
‘He must first sit down in silence until someone else comes up to his fire and asks, “What did you see today?” He replies quietly, “Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all… Maybe just a t
iny one.” Then I smile to myself because I now know he has killed something big.’5
Don’t get me wrong–pride has been around for ages and so has greed. But for thousands of years, Homo puppy did everything it could to squash these tendencies. As a member of the !Kung put it: ‘We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.’6
Also taboo among hunter-gatherers was stockpiling and hoarding. For most of our history we didn’t collect things, but friendships. This never failed to amaze European explorers, who expressed incredulity at the generosity of the peoples they encountered. ‘When you ask for something they have, they never say no,’ Columbus wrote in his log. ‘To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.’7
Of course there were always individuals who refused to abide by the fair-share ethos. But those who became too arrogant or greedy ran the risk of being exiled. And if that didn’t work, there was one final remedy.
Take the following incident which occurred among the !Kung. The main figure here is /Twi, a tribe member who was growing increasingly unmanageable and had already killed two people. The group was fed up: ‘They all fired on him with poison arrows till he looked like a porcupine. Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached his body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death.’8
Anthropologists think interventions like this must have taken place occasionally in prehistory, when tribes made short work of members who developed a superiority complex. This was one of the ways we humans domesticated ourselves: aggressive personalities had fewer opportunities to reproduce, while more amiable types had more offspring.9
For most of human history, then, men and women were more or less equal. Contrary to our stereotype of the caveman as a chest-beating gorilla with a club and a short fuse, our male ancestors were probably not machos. More like proto-feminists.
Scientists suspect that equality between the sexes offered Homo sapiens a key advantage over other hominins like Neanderthals. Field studies show that in male-dominated societies men mostly hang out with brothers and male cousins. In societies where authority is shared with women, by contrast, people tend to have more diverse social networks.10 And, as we saw in Chapter 3, having more friends ultimately makes you smarter.
Sexual equality was also manifest in parenting. Men in primitive societies spent more time with their children than many fathers do now.11 Child-rearing was a responsibility shared by the whole tribe: infants were held by everybody and sometimes even breastfed by different women. ‘Such early experiences,’ notes one anthropologist, ‘help explain why children in foraging societies tend to acquire working models of their world as a “giving place”.’12 Where modern-day parents warn their children not to talk to strangers, in prehistory we were raised on a diet of trust.
And one more thing. There are strong indications that hunter-gatherers were also pretty laid-back about their love lives. ‘Serial monogamists’ is how some biologists describe us. Take the Hadza in Tanzania, where the lifetime average is two or three partners, and women do the choosing.13 Or take the mountain-dwelling Ache in Paraguay, where women average as many as twelve husbands in a lifetime.14 This large network of potential fathers can come in handy, as they can all take part in child-rearing.15
When a seventeenth-century missionary warned a member of the Innu tribe (in what is now Canada) about the dangers of infidelity, he replied, ‘Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.’16
2
The more I learned about how our ancestors lived, the more questions I had.
If it was true that we once inhabited a world of liberty and equality, why did we ever leave? And if nomadic foragers had no trouble removing domineering leaders, why can’t we seem to get rid of them now?
The standard explanation is that modern society can no longer survive without them. States and multinationals need kings, presidents, and CEOs because, as geographer Jared Diamond puts it, ‘large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions’.17 No doubt this theory is music to the ears of many managers and monarchs. And it sounds perfectly plausible, for how could you possibly build a temple, a pyramid, or a city without a puppet master pulling the strings?
And yet, history offers plenty of examples of societies that built temples and even whole cities from the ground up without rigid hierarchy. In 1995 archaeologists started excavating a massive temple complex in southern Turkey, whose beautiful carved pillars weigh more than twenty tons apiece. Think Stonehenge, but far more impressive. When the pillars were dated, researchers were astounded to learn that the complex was more than eleven thousand years old. That probably made it too early to have been built by any farming society (with kings or bureaucrats at the helm). And, indeed, search as they might, archaeologists could find no trace of agriculture. This gigantic structure had to be the work of nomadic foragers.18
Göbekli Tepe (translated as ‘Potbelly Hill’) turns out to be the oldest temple in the world and an example of what scholars call a collective work event. Thousands of people contributed, and pilgrims came from far and wide to lend a hand. Upon its completion, there was a big celebration with a feast of roast gazelle (archaeologists found thousands of gazelle bones). Monuments like this one were not built to stroke some chieftain’s ego. Their purpose was to bring people together.19
To be fair, there are clues that individuals did occasionally rise to power in prehistory. A good example is the opulent grave discovered in 1955 at Sungir, 125 miles north of Moscow. It boasted bracelets carved from polished woolly mammoth tusk, a headdress fashioned from fox teeth and thousands of ivory beads, all 30,000 years old. Graves like this must have been the final resting places of princes and princesses of a kind, long before we were building pyramids or cathedrals.20
Even so, such excavations are few and far between, constituting no more than a handful of burial sites separated by hundreds of miles. Scientists now hypothesise that on those rare occasions when rulers did rise to power they were soon toppled.21 For tens of thousands of years we had efficient ways of taking down anyone who put on airs. Humour. Mockery. Gossip. And if that didn’t work, an arrow in the backside.
But then abruptly, that system stopped working. Suddenly rulers sat tight and managed to hang onto their power. Again the question is: why?
3
To understand where things went wrong, we have to go back 15,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. Up until then, the planet had been sparsely populated and people banded together to stave off the cold. Rather than a struggle for survival, it was a snuggle for survival, in which we kept each other warm.22
Then the climate changed, turning the area between the Nile in the west and the Tigris in the east into a land of milk and honey. Here, survival no longer depended on banding together against the elements. With food in such plentiful supply, it made sense to stay put. Huts and temples were built, towns and villages took shape and the population grew.23
More importantly, people’s possessions grew.
What was it Rousseau had to say about this? ‘The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine”’–that’s where it all started to go wrong.
It couldn’t have been easy to convince people that land or animals–or even other human beings–could now belong to someone. After all, foragers had shared just about everything.24 And this new practice of ownership meant inequality started to grow. When someone died, their possessions even got passed on to the next generation. Once this kind of inheritance came into play, the gap between rich and poor opened wide.
What is fascinating is that it’s at this juncture, after the end of the last ice age, that wars first break out. Just as we started settling down in one place, archaeological research has determined, we built the first military fortifica
tions. This is also when the first cave paintings appeared that depict archers going at each other, and legions of skeletons from around this time have been found to bear clear traces of violent injury.25
How did it come to this? Scholars think there were at least two causes. One, we now had belongings to fight over, starting with land. And two, settled life made us more distrustful of strangers. Foraging nomads had a fairly laid-back membership policy: you crossed paths with new people all the time and could easily join up with another group.26 Villagers, on the other hand, grew more focused on their own communities and their own possessions. Homo puppy went from cosmopolitan to xenophobe.
On those occasions that we did band together with strangers, one of the main reasons was, ironically, to make war. Clans began forming alliances to defend against other clans. Leaders emerged, likely charismatic figures who’d proved their mettle on the battlefield. Each new conflict further secured their position. In time these generals grew so wedded to their authority that they’d no longer give it up, not even in peacetime.
Usually the generals found themselves forcibly deposed. ‘There must have been thousands of upstarts,’ one historian notes, ‘who failed to make the leap to a permanent kingship.’27 But there were also times when intervention came too late, when a general had already drummed up enough followers to shield himself from the plebs. Societies dominated by this breed of ruler only became more fixated on war.
If we want to understand the phenomenon of ‘war’, we have to look at the people calling the shots. The generals and kings, presidents and advisers: these are the Leviathans who wage war, knowing it boosts their power and prestige.28 Consider the Old Testament, where the Prophet Samuel warns the Israelites of the dangers of accepting a king. It is one of the most prescient–and sinister–passages in the Bible:
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