Hacker News Comments on
War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone.Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past").[1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Sava...
⬐ RetricViolent death was common in primitive societies as in small tribes.However, logistically primitive societies couldn’t afford to spend that much time at war. The saying is the loser of a knife fight dies in the street the winner dies in the ambulance. In primitive societies battles are incredibly dangerous and they must therefore be uncommon.
Nations spend long periods at war, so tally up the number of days the UK or US was at war vs at peace and they look extremely violent. However on almost any given day primitive societies are going to look peaceful, but that’s in many ways an illusion covering brief periods of extreme violence.
⬐ EthanHeilmanI agree with your main point that prehistoric warfare and violence was not rare.I'm not sure I'd frame it as most scholarly works getting this wrong. Almost all scholarship I've encountered in the last 25 years agrees with the position that both prehistoric warfare was common and that relationships between hunter gather societies often included violence. There is an open question of exactly how violent (extremely violent, frequently violent), but one would be hard pressed to find credible scholars arguing that mass violence was almost unheard of in pre-history.
Going all the way back to John Locke in the 18th Century and before that to Biblical understandings of pre-history there was a notion that past human arrangements were extremely violent. There was some trendy early and mid 20th Century scholarship that attempted to argue that mass violence was a disease of the civilized societies, but such arguments were, as far as I can tell, only fashionable because they rejected the assumed status-quo.
Much has been written on the topic. Here's a fairly decent book.http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savag...