ARTICLE

Proving Communal Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers: The Quasi-Rousseauan ErrorAZAR GAT

Was human fighting always there, as old as our species? Or is it a late culturalinvention, emerging after the transition to agriculture and the rise of the state, whichbegan, respectively, only around ten thousand and five thousand years ago? Viewedagainst the life span of our species, Homo sapiens, stretching back 150,000–200,000years, let alone the roughly two million years of our genus Homo, this is the tip of theiceberg. We now have a temporal frame and plenty of empirical evidence for the“state of nature” that Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacque Rousseau discussed in theabstract and described in diametrically opposed terms. All human populations duringthe Pleistocene, until about 12,000 years ago, were hunter-gatherers, or foragers, ofthe simple, mobile sort that lacked accumulated resources. Studying such humanpopulations that survived until recently or still survive in remote corners of the world,anthropology should have been uniquely positioned to answer the question of abo-riginal human fighting or lack thereof. Yet access to, and the interpretation of, thatinformation has been intrinsically problematic. The main problem has been the“contact paradox.” Prestate societies have no written records of their own. There-fore, documenting them requires contact with literate state societies that necessarilyaffects the former and potentially changes their behavior, including fighting.

Another difficulty was, paradoxi-cally, anthropology’s indispensableemphasis on field research. Withhunter-gatherer societies fast disap-pearing into the fold of civilization,research since the 1950s has mainlyfocused on sparse surviving popula-tions such as those in the savannahsand deserts of East and SouthernAfrica, as well as some other particu-larly isolated and marginal popula-tions. Only a few within the disciplinehave called attention to the resulting

distortion of perspective.1 The hunter-gatherers of East Africa and theKalahari were unrepresentative inthe sense that before the adventand spread of agriculture, hunter-gatherers inhabited not only marginalland that agricultural and pastoralistsocieties were unable to use and didnot want, as they do today, but alsomainly lived in the world’s most fertileenvironments. In addition, the hunter-gatherers of East and Southern Africainteracted for more than a thousandyears with their agricultural and pas-toralist neighbors. Furthermore, dur-ing the twentieth century they wereincreasingly subjected to the pacifyingintrusions of state authorities andpolice.

CLASSICAL ROUSSEAUISM ANDEXTENDED ROUSSEAUISM: THEIR

RISE AND FALL

By the 1960s, the focus on thehunter-gatherers of East and South-

ern Africa coincided with the rise ofRousseauism in anthropology. TheKalahari bushmen, for example,were celebrated as the “harmlesspeople.”2 However, after the initialspate of enthusiasm for the peacefulchildren of the earth, their chiefresearcher, the Rousseauan RichardLee,3,4 discovered that before theimposition of state authority, thesepeople had more than four times the1990 homicide rate in the UnitedStates, which was by far the highestin the developed world. Similarly, intitles such as Never in Anger, theInuit of mid-Arctic Canada, one ofthe sparsest populations on earth,were celebrated as being peaceful.5

However, it was later revealed thattheir rate of violent mortality wasten times higher than the UnitedStates’ 1990 rate.6:145,7

These findings constituted a poten-

tially fatal challenge to what we call

Classical Rousseauism, the view that

human existence was fundamentally

nonviolent before the adoption of

sedentary and denser habitation, the

transition to agriculture, and the

development of more complex social

and political structures. However,

before the full significance of the

challenge to Classical Rousseauism

had sunk in, a more radical Rous-

seauan view, which we call Extended

Rousseauism, came into vogue in the

1980s and early 1990s. According to

this view, serious fighting began at

an even later stage, really taking off

only with the emergence of states.Extended Rousseauism was associ-

ated with the so-called tribal-zonetheory.8 Proponents of this theoryhypothesized that it was only aftercontact with intrusive states that

Ezer Weitzman Professor, Political Sci-ence Department, Tel Aviv University, TelAviv, 69978, Israel

Key words: hunter-gatherer warfare; Rousseau-

ism; Australian Aborigines; naturally evolved

predispositions for violence and peace

VC 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.DOI: 10.1002/evan.21446Published online in Wiley Online Library(wileyonlinelibrary.com).

Evolutionary Anthropology 24:111–126 (2015)

tribal structures sprang up and com-petition and warfare between themrocketed, most notably in parts ofthe world affected by Europeanexploration and expansion, but alsoearlier in history.9–13 This argumentwas applied to the vast microcosmsof complex hunter-gatherers thatsurvived until recently, or still sur-vive, in the American Northwest,Central America, Amazonia, andHighland New Guinea. In all of theseareas, the natives fought ferociouslyamong themselves during and aftercontact.

Proponents of the tribal-zonetheory remained vague aboutwhether contact with state civiliza-tions actually introduced or“invented” warfare among previouslynonbelligerent natives or, instead,merely intensified long-existing pat-terns of warfare. The former wasstrongly implied and was the under-tone or subtext of their argument. Atthe same time, however, the majorityof these scholars in fact recognized,in line with all other research, thatwarfare in all the above areas hadbeen very old and had long predatedcontact with states.10,11,13 Fortifiedsettlements were known to havebeen archeologically recorded in theAmerican Northwest, for example,for no less than four thousandyears.9,14–20 Body armor made ofhide or wood, an unmistakably spe-cialized fighting device, was knownto have been extensively used by thenatives before the European arrival.Indeed, its use actually declined aftercontact because it was useless undermusket fire.18,20–26 Thus, given thatmost of the tribal-zone proponents(with rare exceptions12) were wellaware of the evidence of extensiveand vicious warfare before contactwith states or civilizations, theirpoint was difficult to rationalize.

The tribal-zone theory’s briefmoment ended in 1996 with the publi-cation of Lawrence Keeley’s Warbefore Civilization: The Myth of thePeaceful Savage.27 Other wide-rangingstudies of the evidence28–32 arrived atremarkably similar conclusions. Theyall found that there was widespreadviolence and warfare among bothhunter-gatherers and prestate horti-culturalists, which resulted in rates of

violent death as high as 25% of adultmales and 15% of the adult popula-tion. Pinker has drawn wide publicattention to these finds.33

A similar reversal was almostsimultaneously taking place withrespect to animal violence. KonradLorenz’s claim in the 1960s34 thatfighting between animals of thesame species is mostly “ritualistic”and mainly involves display has beenrefuted by field studies that havefound high rates of intraspecific kill-ing throughout nature. This is alsotrue of our closest cousins, the chim-panzees, among which intragroup

killing, as well as in intergroup fight-ing and killing to the point of groupextermination have been docu-mented.35–40 Recent studies of sev-eral communities of chimpanzees41

have found their violent mortalityrates to be: in one community, 20%generally, 24% among males; inanother one 36% (generally); and ina third one 16% (generally). Anothercomprehensive study of six chimpan-zee populations has set the mediannumber of violent deaths amongthem at 271 per 100,000 individualsper year, as compared with 164 per100,000 per year, which the authorscalculated as the average amonghuman hunter-gatherers.42 The sug-gestion that the factor that drovechimpanzees to violent killing is theexpansion of human settlement (thechimpanzee equivalent of the tribal-zone theory) has been persuasivelyrefuted.43

In contrast to the chimpanzee,pygmy chimpanzees or bonobosexhibit a semi-idyllic life of free sexand far less violence.40,44,45 Notably,chimpanzees, with their dominantaggressive male coalitions, resemblethe known patterns of aboriginalhuman social life far more than dobonobos, which are dominated byfemale alliances. Nonetheless, thebonobo has at least partly kept alivethe question of what our humanancestors were like.

Archeology is beset by well-recognized problems in addressingthe antiquity of human fighting.Weapons for fighting before theintroduction of metals are practicallyindistinguishable from huntingimplements: stone axes, spears, andarrows. Specialized fighting equip-ment, such as shields, are made ofperishable material — wood andleather — and do not survive. In thewake of Keeley’s book, archeologicalstudies of the subject increased sub-stantially, above all with respect tothe more sedentary communities offoragers and horticulturalists thatproliferated during the Holocene.The prevalence of palisades aroundsettlements has been extensivelydocumented, as have other defensiveindications in settlements’ nuclea-tion, protected location, and spacingwith “no-man’s-land” between them.Holocene human remains showwidespread traces of violent traumato crania and forearms (parryingfractures).

The skeletal evidence is particu-larly striking. While rates of violenttrauma varied considerably fromplace to place, they were exceedinglyhigh in some areas and very high onaverage. Among the prehistorichunter-gatherers of coastal SouthernCalifornia, traces of healed cranialvault fractures range from 15% tonearly 40% among males and around10% to 20% among females.46 Theserates are even higher when childrenof both sexes are factored out. Thepercentage for males from the ear-liest period in the sample (6630-4050BC) is close to 20% (again higher ifonly adults are counted). Traces ofprojectile injuries in the skeletonrange from around 3% to over 20%in the males and up to 10% among

there was widespreadviolence and warfareamong both hunter-gatherers and prestatehorticulturalists, whichresulted in rates of vio-lent death as high as25% of adult males and15% of the adultpopulation

112 ARTICLE

females. Broad surveys of the NorthAmerican evidence47,48 reveal greatvariation between sites, with somerecording exceedingly high rates ofviolence from the earliest settlement.In British Columbia, as in someother sites of the American North-west (a prime case of the tribal-zonetheory9) violent skeletal trauma inthe period 3500-1500 BC is evidentin 21% of 57 observable individu-als.49 This is as high as the rate ofviolent trauma recorded for the sub-sequent period, between 1500 BCand 500 CE, when the region’s popu-lation became denser and clusteredinto large villages.48,49 It follows thatincreasing population density andsocial complexity were not the fac-tors that inaugurated humanfighting.

The evidence from a comprehen-sive study of the Andes50 reveals asimilar picture and similarly highrates of injuries. The cranial traumafrequencies studied varied signifi-cantly during the millennia fromearly human habitation to the rise ofstates and the Inca Empire. Nonethe-less, the average rate for the Archaic,well before the coming of states, isaround the average for the entireperiod and just under 15% for cra-nial trauma alone, and is skewedtoward the adult male population.Note that signs of skeletal traumaremain undetected in many cases.Moreover, injuries to soft tissues,including fatal injuries, are notpreserved.

This extensive archeological evi-dence has been particularly devastat-ing for the Extended Rousseauantribal-zone theory. As Ferguson, thetheory’s most active exponent, con-ceded in his contribution to theedited volume that incorporated theearlier finds in this wave ofresearch,51:321 “If there are peopleout there (sic!) who believe that vio-lence and war did not exist untilafter the advent of Western colonial-ism, or of the state, or of agriculture,this volume proves them wrong.”Ferguson attempted to redress thebalance in his next sentence:“Equally, if there are people whobelieve that all human societies havebeen plagued by violence and war,that they were always present in

human evolutionary history, this vol-ume proves them wrong.” However,the various claims in the secondproposition were anything but“proved.” At best, they remainedunproved and open to furtherinvestigation.

In time, Ferguson has attemptedto salvage parts of his tribal-zonetheory and adjust its meaning, claim-ing that in at least some areas andperiods, warfare was either nonexis-tent or rare and seems to have flaredup only under contact with states.He has constructed his argumentaround a supposed contrast betweentwo major prehistoric cultural-geographical zones, which he positsas test cases.52 He now, in effect,concedes that in Neolithic Europe,long before the existence of states,archeological signs of warfare arerife, albeit with considerable varia-tion from place to place.27,53,54 Atthe same time, he claims that thesparser and less clear-cut archeologi-cal evidence of warfare in the Neo-lithic Levant suggests that warfare inthe region was uncommon or absentin many places. Ferguson actuallycites much of the evidence of vio-lence and war in the prehistoricLevant. However, in contrast toother broad reviews,55,56 he consis-tently adopts a reductive interpreta-tion of that evidence and drives theargument toward a mostly pacificconclusion. In an earlier paper,57:483

Ferguson cited low levels of cranialinjuries found in the skeletons of thepre-Neolithic Natufians of the south-ern Levant. The Natufians during the14th210th millennia BC were theworld’s first known semi-sedentaryor sedentary hunters and collectorsof wild wheat. Ferguson later learnedthat a recent study had put healedcranial injuries among the Natufiansat 16.7% among the adult males and20% among adult women58 – highrates such as we have seen to bequite typical in other places. Fergu-son then fell back on the argumentthat these high rates can be evidenceof individual violence rather thangroup warfare.52:212

Moving forward in time, Fergusonmentions early Neolithic (PPNA) Jer-icho (after 8,000 BC), where a stonewall, stone tower, and ditch were

found to have existed millennia ear-lier than in any other place.59 Heapprovingly cites Bar-Yosef’s“alternative interpretation,”60 whichis that, rather than being defensiveconstructions, the wall and ditchwere anti-flood devices and thetower a ritual construction (for a cri-tique see LeBlanc56). Either way, cir-cuit walls were not the only, or eventhe most typical means of early largesettlement defense. For example,Catal-H€uy€uk in Anatolia (second halfof the seventh millennium BC),which had a pueblo-like layout ofclustered, impregnable houses, wasclearly designed for defense.61,62:82–3

Other large and closely agglomeratedearly Neolithic settlements, some ofthem located on hilltops or otherwisein difficult to access locations —clearly for defense — have beenfound elsewhere in Anatolia, Meso-potamia, and the Southern Levant.63

Ferguson also mentions several forti-fied sites of the fifth millennium BCthat have been excavated in Anatoliaand northern Syria.52 At the sametime, in other parts of the Levant, hesees the absence of clear signs ofwarfare, particularly fortificationsaround settlements, as strongly sug-gesting that the local cultures wereunfamiliar with war. He gives shortshrift to evidence from the nuclea-tion and location of sites, and cele-brates the fact that circuit city wallsappeared only in the third millen-nium BC. Attributing this develop-ment to the rise of Egypt as aunified kingdom and great power, hesuggests that state interference, ineffect, inaugurated warfare in thearea.

In reality, the picture that emergeswherever we have both archeologicaland ethnographic or historical evi-dence on prestate horticultural andagricultural societies is that some ofthe most warlike societies lacked for-tifications. While fortifications are asure positive sign of warfare, theirabsence is not an indication that fero-cious warfare was not endemic. Set-tlement nucleation (and, wherepossible, protected location) were suf-ficient to counter the most commonand most lethal form of prestate war-fare, the surprise night raid.56,64,65

The following are but a few examples.

ARTICLE 113

As Polybius writes,66:2.17 the ancientCelts “lived in unwalled villages. . .and were exclusively occupied withwar and agriculture.” The Greekpoleis, despite the endemic warfareamong them during the Archaicperiod (eighth-sixth centuries BC),were not surrounded by walls untilwell into the fifth century BC. Thesame applies to the city-states of Mes-oamerica. In particular, the ClassicMaya, lacking city walls and famouslycelebrated by early researchers ashaving been peaceful, have beenrevealed to have been ferociously bel-ligerent after the deciphering of theirscript.67 The analogy with and lessonfor the prehistoric Levant is all tooobvious.

The ethnographic record fromaround the world reveals a similarpicture. For example, the Mae Engahorticulturalists in highland NewGuinea, whose violent death rate foradult males was nearly 35%, lived inclan farmsteads, “defended, literally,to the last yard”68:2 and lacked forti-fied villages. More recently, the nine-teenth century’s Montenegrins, oneof Europe’s last tribal populations,who had an estimated violent deathrate among adult males of about25%, built houses with small win-dows and thick walls, but no special-ized communal fortifications.69 Thesocieties of multi-island Polynesia,long the object of Rousseauan fanta-sies, have been shown to have beenrife with violence and warfare.According to a major study of eight-een of them, from the largest to thesmallest, not one lacked endemicwarfare.70,71 Nonetheless, fortifica-tions, though existing in many pla-ces, were far from being evidenteverywhere or from correlating withthe intensity of warfare. For exam-ple, “In striking contrast to New Zea-land or Rapa, the Hawaiian Islands –despite the endemic warfare thatcharacterized late prehistoric [thatis, ethnographically known] Hawai-ian culture – generally lack fortifiedsites.”70:213, 72 In all these cases —therates of killings among the AfricanBushmen and Canadian mid-Arctichunter-gatherers, Polynesian andMaya warfare, the Natufians, andmany others (including the cause ofthe death of Neolithic “Iceman” €Otzi,

an arrowhead discovered in hisshoulder decades after he had beenfound) — the surprise discoveriesalways go in one direction.

These examples strikingly demon-

strate the undisputed need to bring

the archeological and comparative

historical or ethnographic knowledge

to bear on one another in order to

overcome the problems that each of

the disciplines faces. Indeed, archeol-

ogy’s difficulties increase sharply as

we go further back in time, to vio-

lence and warfare during the Paleo-

lithic. Human skeleton remains from

the Paleolithic are very few, frag-

mented, and badly preserved. Not

only were human populations small

and thinly dispersed, but they also

moved around to subsist and lived in

shifting campsites. Therefore, they

did not leave substantive cemeteries

adjacent to sedentary settlements, a

treasure trove for archeologists. For

the same reason, evidence of fortifi-

cations or violent destruction often

found in sedentary settlements does

not exist for mobile hunter-

gatherers. There is evidence of vio-

lent skeletal trauma, including canni-

balism, among both Neanderthals

and Homo sapiens during the Paleo-

lithic. However, the paucity and poor

condition of that evidence make the

scope and exact nature of the vio-

lence difficult to determine.73–75

Indeed, group violence amonghunter-gatherers and, hence, duringmost of human prehistory, hasbecome the new focus of debate. Thevery high killing rates that weredocumented, originally by Rous-seauan anthropologists, among eventhe most thinly dispersed hunter-gatherers, have debunked ClassicalRousseauism, which postulated anonviolent human past. Archeologyhas then helped to refute theExtended Rousseauan claim thatdeadly violence and warfare werenonexistent, rare, or very low amongthe prestate populations of settledforagers, horticulturalists, and agri-culturalists that emerged during theHolocene. However, in response tothese developments, the Rousseauanposition has been adjusted and refor-mulated, taking a form we here labelQuasi-Rousseauism.

QUASI-ROUSSEAUISM: CLAIMSAND CONCEPTS

Foreshadowed by Ferguson,51 theQuasi-Rousseauan position has beenthe most distinctive in the recentRousseauan literature. In his WarlessSocieties and the Origin of War, Ray-mond Kelly, explicitly breaking withthe Classical Rousseauan tradition,fully accepts that, as the ethno-graphic record shows, hunter-gatherers experienced exceedinglyhigh rates of killings, far higher thanthose common among modern statesocieties.76 At the same time, analyz-ing the evidence, Kelly argues thatthe less organized, less clusteredaround clan and tribe, and less seg-mented a hunter-gatherer commu-nity was, the less it experiencedcollective, intergroup “warfare,” asdistinguished from homicide andfeuds that did not involve or targetthe entire community on either side.Kelly’s analysis suggests that theabsence of segmentism largely corre-lates with, among other things, thelow population density of mobilehunter-gatherers. Since our Paleo-lithic ancestors were overwhelminglysparse and mobile hunter-gatherers,Kelly concludes that although homi-cide and feuds were probably rifeamong them, warfare as such seemsto have developed only after thattime. More or less the same view hasbeen adopted by Douglas Fry.77,78

Unlike Kelly, who straightforwardlyembraces the statistics of violentdeath recorded among recenthunter-gatherers, Fry avoids specificmention of the evidence that killingrates among them were, on average,very high. Nonetheless, he tacitlyaccepts this, while claiming that theyfell under the categories of homicideand feud rather than warfare.

The distinctions between homi-cide, feud, and warfare involve bothsemantic and substantive questions.Note that the framing of aboriginalhuman violence by Kelly and Fry isvery different from either Hobbes’sor Rousseau’s. Hobbes’s “warre”encompasses all forms of deadlyhuman violence, including homicideand feuds, which made the human“state of nature” so insecure andlethal. Similarly, Rousseau’s peaceful

114 ARTICLE

aboriginal condition, presupposingminimal human sociability andinteraction, was ostensibly free fromall forms of human violence. Thus,both Hobbes’s and Rousseau’sunderstanding of belligerence andpeacefulness are very close to thatused in anthropological surveys andstatistics of aboriginal deadly humanviolence79,80 which Kelly and Frycriticize for conceptual fuzziness.This is why this article refers toclaims such as those made by Kellyand Fry as Quasi-Rousseauism.These claims sound very significantwith respect to aboriginal humanviolence. However, they actuallyhang on a thin thread of definitionsfor which the empirical basis, as weshall see, is very dubious, cf.81 whileturning the spotlight away from thequestion of hunter-gatherers’ violentmortality rates. These rates are thefundamental question in the debateregarding the aboriginal human con-dition, whether it was violent or not.The centuries-old debate appears tohave been discarded at a stroke,without anybody admitting or evenrealizing it.

Native linguistic usage also seemsto have been different from the state-era dichotomy between homicideand feud or war. For example, theroot of the English word war, werra,is Old Frankish-German, going backto their tribal, prestate past andmeaning confusion, discord, or strife— in effect Hobbes’s “warre” (http://www.iep.utm.edu/war/). Similarly, asBoas wrote, among the eastern,Great Plains, and Northwest Ameri-can Indians (whom he studied atfirst-hand), “the term ‘war’ includesnot only fights between tribes orclans, but also the deeds of individu-als who set out to kill a member ormembers of another group.”82:108

Note that in addition to the nativeterminology he describes, Boasaccepts, as a matter of course, thereality of large-scale intertribalfighting.

This brings us to the residual sub-stantive question that Quasi-Rousseauans raise, which is whetheror not group fighting existed amongmobile hunter-gatherers and, byextension, throughout prehistory. Webegin with some general comments.

The idea, first suggested by MargaretMead,83 that individual killing was aprimordial feature of human soci-eties while group fighting was not,makes no sense. People are a socialspecies; they habitually practicemany forms of cooperation amonggroup members. A recent model84

has demonstrated how conditions ofsmall-group solidarity and inter-group fighting were likely to bring astrong evolutionary advantage dur-ing the Paleolithic. Moreover, Fryrefers to hunter-gatherer groups asbands, which is a common anthropo-

logical term that gives the impres-sion of a random collection ofpeople. In actuality, the hunter-gatherer band was a kin group, criss-crossed by kin ties and marriage alli-ances.31,81 The people in thesegroups exhibited kin devotion andsolidarity among themselves andagainst aliens. In acts of aggression,a man, while sometimes actingalone, as often called for help fromhis father, sons, brothers, uncles,cousins, and in-laws, as well as closefriends. Occasionally, fighting took awider form, engulfing much of thetribal manhood. Intergroup fightingoccurred at all levels — individual, asmall group of closely related men,and larger tribal groupings.

Kin solidarity in relatively smallkin-based societies undermines thelogic of another widespread Rous-seauan claim, that while in-groupkilling may have occurred amonghunter-gatherers, intergroup fighting

and killing were unknown or rare.Fry,77 who did not share this posi-tion, now champions it, supposedlyon the strength of his sample ofhunter-gatherer societies.85 However,Boehm’s extensive survey of hunter-gatherer societies concluded thatdeadly fighting was more common,and conflict resolution less deeplyembedded and less effective, betweenthan within groups.86 The simpleand obvious reality was that violencewithin communities was more con-strained and more regulated,whereas different communities werenot only alien to each other,but lessequipped with mechanisms of medi-ation and conflict resolution. To besure, such mechanisms were oftenalso used between groups to resolveindividual or intercommunal griev-ances, including the agreed-on pun-ishment of a member of onecommunity who committed anoffense against a member or mem-bers of the other community. Inmany cases, however, group mem-bers defended their own people orfought other groups over issues indispute that were more collective innature and unresolved. Notably,most killing among chimpanzees isalso documented to take placebetween rather than within groups.43

This takes us again to the empiri-cal, ethnographic evidence. Keeley,27

dissecting the Extended Rousseauanclaim, concentrated on horticultural-ists as well as complex, more seden-tary hunter-gatherers. He has beenso effective that the battleground hasshifted to the earlier, temporallymuch longer, and more fundamentaldomain of mobile hunter-gatherers.Kelly ostensibly grounds his argu-ment about them in a carefullycrafted analysis of the ethnographicrecord.76 However, by far the bestand clearest evidence we have, thatfrom Aboriginal Australia, revealscommunal as well as individual andfamilial violent conflicts, docu-mented across the whole range ofgroup densities and organization,and in every ecological niche, fromthe lushest to the most barren.Exchange and other forms of peace-ful interaction were also common inAustralia, as elsewhere. Both hostileand peaceful relations existed and

the hunter-gathererband was a kin group,crisscrossed by kin tiesand marriage alliances.The people in thesegroups exhibited kindevotion and solidarityamong themselves andagainst aliens.

ARTICLE 115

interchanged. All the same, the Abo-riginal tribal groups generally sus-pected and feared their neighborsbecause violence was always a dis-tinct possibility and occasionallyerupted. Those who trespassedacross territorial group boundariesrisked death.

In earlier works, I singled out Aus-tralia as the indispensable key forovercoming the contact paradox andas being particularly significant forthe study of mobile hunter-gather-ers.28,29,31 A recently publishededited book81 presents argumentssimilar to mine. This book focuseson mobile hunter-gatherers as theultimate subject of contention. Itdraws on a rich variety of ethno-graphic and archeological studies ofhunter-gatherer populations, most ofthem documenting group fighting.Critics may argue that the majorityof these populations were contami-nated by contact, as for centuries oreven millennia they neighbored onhorticultural or agricultural societies.However, the book includes twochapters on Aboriginal Australia, inwhich the general findings and con-clusions are similar to mine.87,88

What is still lacking in the scholarlydiscourse is a full realization of howcrucial Australia is to our subjectand how qualitatively incomparableit is to any other ethnographic case.

Australia was an entire continent ofAboriginal hunter-gatherers, with noagriculturalists, pastoralists, or states,whose isolation came to an end onlyas late as 1788, with the arrival of theBritish. People reached Australiasome 50,000 years ago, shortly afterour species first left Africa. The Aus-tralian Aborigines remained practi-cally out of touch with other humanpopulations and cultural develop-ments elsewhere around the world.They did not even have the bow,invented some 20,000 years ago andassumed by some scholars to haveenhanced, or even inaugurated, war-fare. Thus, practically isolated bothgenetically and culturally and hometo about 300 tribal groups when theEuropeans arrived, Aboriginal Aus-tralia is the closest to a pure, unconta-minated laboratory of hunter-gatherer communities on a continen-tal scale that we are ever going to

have. There is nothing even remotelyequivalent in the whole world.Although the rich evidence assembledamong the Aboriginal tribes duringthe nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies was widely familiar toanthropologists throughout theworld, they have been strangely for-gotten and largely disappeared fromanthropological discourse from the1960s onward, as more recent fieldwork, particularly in East and South-ern Africa, drew the discipline’s atten-tion away. Unreflectively, thediscipline simply moved on.

Fry is quite exceptional in devotingan entire chapter in his book77 to

Australia and in recognizing itsunique significance for the study ofhunter-gatherers. However, with thechapter titled “Aboriginal Australia: AContinent of Unwarlike Hunter-Gatherers,” both the picture he por-trays and his conclusions are theopposite of mine and those presentedby other recent studies.87,88 Thus, areexamination of the evidence fromAboriginal Australia is called for. Thefollowing focuses specifically on theevidence of large-scale intercommu-nal fighting or warfare, the kind ofviolence that mobile, thinly dispersed,unorganized, unsegmented, egalitar-ian hunter-gatherers are alleged notto have engaged in.

BACK TO AUSTRALIA: THEEVIDENCE OF ABORIGINAL

INTERGROUP FIGHTING

In 1803, only fifteen years after theEuropeans first arrived in Australia,a 23-year-old Englishman namedWilliam Buckley (1780–1856) wasbrought to the new continent on thefirst convict ship arriving at the pen-

alty settlement at Port Philip, nowMelbourne. He escaped shortly after,and for 32 years, until 1835, livedwith an Aboriginal tribe. During thattime, he learned to speak their lan-guage and participated in their dailyactivities. No anthropologist has everachieved a similar familiarity and atsuch an early date. After returning tocivilization, Buckley, on several occa-sions, related his experiences.89

Rousseauans either ignore hisaccount or insinuate that it is unreli-able. Yet it appears to be remarkablyauthentic with respect to everythingthat can be verified concerning thenatives’ lives. Indeed, it also talliesremarkably with everything we shallsee regarding Aboriginal violenceand warfare from other sourcesthroughout Australia. Buckleyrecounts some dozen battle scenes,as well as many lethal feuds, raids,and ambushes, comprising a centralelement of the natives’ traditionalway of life. He describes their weap-ons of war in great detail: clubs,spears, “war boomerangs,” throwingsticks, and shields.89:39,65–66 Tribestypically consisted of 20–60 familieseach and were egalitarian, withoutchiefs.89:72 There was fighting at alllevels: individual, familial, and tribal.Some of the intertribal encountersthat Buckley recorded involved largenumbers: five different tribes col-lected for battle89:40–42; a battle andraid against an intruding enemytribe, 300 strong89:49–51; several full-scale intertribal encounters, the lastone a raid with many dead89:68–72;two other encounters, the secondagainst a war party of 60 men.89:81–83

Ceremonial cannibalism of the van-quished was customary.89:108,190

Buckley reported that the large-scaleraid was the deadliest form of vio-lence and often involved indiscrimi-nate massacre: “The contestsbetween the Watouronga, of Gee-long, and the Warrorongs, of theYarra, were fierce and bloody. I haveaccompanied the former in theirattacks on the latter. When comingsuddenly upon them in the night,they have destroyed without mercymen, women and children.”89:189

In the 1870s, Fison and Howittstudied the Kurnai tribe in southernAustralia (Gippsland, Victoria). They

Australia was an entirecontinent of Aboriginalhunter-gatherers, with noagriculturalists, pastoral-ists, or states

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described both feuds and wholegroups’ fighting. In one epi-sode,90:213-14 fresh tracks indicatingtrespassing into the tribal territorieswere revealed and a spy was sent toreconnoiter. He found the intruders,with “lots of women and children.”The Kurnai men “got their spearsready.” After securing enough huntedfood for the womenfolk they leftbehind and more reconnoitering, “inthe middle of the night they allmarched off well armed.” After sev-eral marches, “when near morning. . . they got close to them . . .. Thespies whistled like bird, to tell whenall was ready. Then all ran in; theyspeared away, and speared away!They only speared the men, and per-haps some children. Whoever caughta women kept her himself. Then theyeat the skin of the Brajeraks [thetrespassing tribe].” The native inform-ants told of other episodes that endedin ceremonial cannibalism of the van-quished.90:214–15,223–24 Fison andHowitt went on to describe howmembers of the families, divisions,and clans were connected by descentand kinship and “depended on eachother for mutual aid andprotection.”90:215–216 In addition toraids, many feuds also took place, aswell as formal battles, which wereoften agreed on and stopped after thefirst injuries. According to the inform-ants, the last great battles of theGippsland clans’ took place around1856–1857. Escalating from a feud,much of the tribal group assembledon the strength of kin ties: “Therecould not have been less than twohundred of us — at least the whitemen counted and told us so.”90:219

There followed a protracted spate ofhostilities against the rival tribe, withseveral encounters. Police interven-tion was the factor that put an end tothe natives’ fighting. Fison andHowitt conclude that whereas feudingwithin the tribe did not necessarilyentail killing, killing was inseparablefrom the settling of accounts betweentribes. Further, “the feuds attachesnot only to the individual, but also tothe whole group of which he is amember,” and they were prosecutednot only by relatives, “but also by thewhole division, or even by the wholeclan.”90:220–221

Wheeler is no less clear.91 Hedescribes at length the regulatedfights used to fulfill demands for jus-tice between individuals and wholelocal groups throughout Australia. Insuch fights, which mainly involvedspear throwing at a distance, littleblood was shed. However, Wheelerwrites91:148–149: “Such is regulatedwar, by far the commonest form inAustralia; but by its side exists whatmay be called war in the true mean-ing — that is, revenge or justice car-ried out by one group on another,under few, if any, restrictions or con-ditions, and carried out indiscrimin-ately on the individuals of the groupto which the offender belongs bythat to which the injured personbelongs.” Wheeler cites differentobservers’ reports from all over Aus-tralia. According to one such report,after “march by night in the moststealthy manner . . . then follows anight attack and a wholesaleextermination.”91:151 According toanother report, “A common proce-dure in such warfare is to steal up tothe enemy’s camp in the dead ofnight, and encircle it in the earliestdawn. With a shout, the carnagethen begins.”91:152 Wheeler concludesthat tribal solidarity generally pre-vented internal warfare. “Whatseems clear is that war proper ismarked off from other forms of jus-tice by the fact that the vengeance iscarried out indiscriminately on themembers of another tribe.”91:152–153

Europeans reached Australia’s sub-tropical Northern Territory laterthan they did the temperate south,but the picture is barely distinguish-able. Warner, studying the Murnginhunter-gatherers of Arnhem Landduring the 1920s, wrote, “Warfare isone of the most important socialactivities of the Murngin people andsurrounding tribes.”92:155 Warnerdescribed a whole spectrum of vio-lent conflicts, ranging from individ-ual feuds to small-group, clan, andtribal conflicts. Such conflicts couldlead to face to face confrontationsup to the scale of battles. However,the most lethal and common form ofwarfare among the Murngin was thesurprise night raid. This could becarried out by individuals or smallgroups intending to kill a specific

enemy or members of a specific fam-ily. But raids were also conducted ona large scale by raiding parties com-ing from whole clans or tribes. Insuch cases, the camp of the attackedparty was surrounded and its unpre-pared, sleeping dwellers were massa-cred. It was in these larger raids thatby far the most killings were regis-tered: 35 people were killed in large-scale raids, 27 in small-scale raids,29 in large battles in whichambushes were used, 3 in ordinarybattles, and 2 in individual face-to-face encounters.92:457–8 Thus, thelargest number of casualtiesoccurred in large-scale tribal clashes.

Arnold Pilling wrote about armedconflict among the Tiwi of northernAustralia: ‘The night raids were effec-tively terminated, about 1912, whenSir Baldwin Spencer was inadver-tently injured by a Tiwi during aspear-throwing demonstration.”93:158

“This Spencer incident, which wascorrelated with the end of night raid-ing and sneak attacks, appeared tohave stopped pitched battles thatproduced death. In fact, however,death-causing battles with clubsoccurred as late as 1948. Under theold pattern, sneak attack was suffi-ciently common that informantsspoke of special ecological adjust-ments to it. The threatened group Awas likely to move to the mangroves,a very specialized and unpleasantecological niche with, among otherthings, crocodiles and a sloshy mudfloor.”

Demographically, “it is importantto note the incidence of fatalitiesassociated with the old pattern ofattacks and the way of life withwhich that pattern was correlated. Inone decade, 1893–1903, at least 16males in the 25-to-45-year-old agegroup were killed in feuding, eitherduring sneak attacks or in arrangedpitch battles. Those killed repre-sented over 105 of all males in thatage group, which, of course,included young fathers.”

One major action in Arnhem Landis described by Strehlow.94:124–125

“To punish Ltjabakuka and hismen meant the wiping out of thewhole camp of people normally resi-dent at Irbmankara, so that no wit-ness should be left alive who could

ARTICLE 117

have revealed the names of theattackers. A large party of avengersdrawn from the Matuntara areaalong the Palmer River, and fromsome Southern Aranda local groups,was accordingly assembled and ledto Irbmankara by Tjinawariti, whowas described to me as having beena Matuntara ’ceremonial chief’ fromthe Palmer River whose prowess as awarrior had given him a great repu-tation . Tjinawariti and his men fellupon Irbmankara one evening, afterall the local folk, as they believed,had returned to their camps fromtheir day’s quests for food. Men,women and children were massacredindiscriminately.”

Chaseling, too, mentions the wholespectrum of violence, from frequentindividual fights to regulated battlesbetween clans to raids. “Raids arecommon, and as the men are killedthe vendetta passes from one genera-tion to another. Entire hordes havebeen exterminated.”95:79 If no suchdecisive result was reached, peace-making might eventually end theconflict.

R. G. Kimber, drawing on a varietyof studies and sources,summarized:96:163

“One can infer from archaeologicalevidence that conflict has been anancient problem, and many mytho-logical accounts also suggest this.Small-scale conflict, with very occa-sional deaths, was no doubt thenorm, but the ’payback law’ couldresult in lengthy feuds. On otheroccasions major conflicts had dra-matic demographic implications.”

Kimber cites evidence of somesuch major conflicts, including theone described by Strehlow: “In about1840, at a locality called Nariwalpa,in response to insults, the ’Jandru-wontas and Piliatapas killed so manyDiari men, that the ground was cov-ered with their dead bodies”. . .Strehlow gives the most dramaticaccount of a major arid-country con-flict. He estimates that 80–100 men,women, and children were killed inone attack in 1875 at RunningWaters, on the Finke River. In retali-ation, all but one of the attackingparty of ‘perhaps fifty to sixty war-riors’ were killed over the next threeyears, as were some of their family

members. This indicates that some20% of two identifiable tribes werekilled in this exchange.”

Kimber adds, “The red ochre gath-ering expeditions . . . involved travelfrom the eastern portion of the studyarea to the Flinders Ranges . . . Theseexpeditions took place on a regularbasis, were normally all-male parties,and although cordial relationshipsbetween groups were sought, fight-ing appears to have been a commonhazard faced by travelling parties.One entire party, with the exceptionof one man, is recorded as havingbeen ambushed and killed in about

1870, whilst in about 1874 all butone of a group of 30 men were’entombed in the excavations’.”

Kimber concludes, “The evidencesuggests that major conflict could beexpected in the well-watered areas,where population density was at itsgreatest, or during regular ’tres-passer travel’ for high-prized prod-ucts. Although exact figures willnever be known, a low death rate ofpossibly 5% every generation can besuggested for the regions of leastconflict, and a high death-rate ofperhaps 20% every three generationselsewhere.”

Warfare was not confined towater-rich Northern and SouthernAustralia, but was evident in every

climatic zone throughout the conti-nent. Meggitt studied the Walbiritribe of the Central AustralianDesert, in one of the most forbiddingenvironments on earth. The popula-tion density of the Walbiri tribe wasas low as one person per 35 squaremiles. Walbiri were friendly withsome of their neighbors and hostilewith others. In the latter case, raidsand counter-raids were common.97:38

“The men’s descriptions made itclear that the Warramunga (andWaringari) trespasses were notmerely hunting forays impelled byfood shortages in the invaders’ ownterritory but rather were raids under-taken to combine hunting for sportand the abduction of women. Often,too, the raiders were simply spoilingfor a fight. They were met withforce, and deaths occurred on bothsides. Walbiri war parties wouldthen invade the Warramunga coun-try in retaliation. If they were able tosurprise the enemy camps and kill ordrive off the men, they carried awayany women they found.”

On one recorded occasion aroundthe beginning of the twentieth cen-tury, things came to a head on awider scale and with a differentmotive.97:42 “Until then, the Warin-gari had claimed the ownership ofthe few native wells at Tanami andthe country surrounding them, butin a pitched battle for the possessionof the water the Walbiri drove theWaringari from the area, which theyincorporated into their own territory.By desert standards the engagementwas spectacular, the dead on eitherside numbering a score or more.”

Thus, the range of evidence fromacross Aboriginal Australia, the onlycontinent of hunter-gatherers, strik-ingly demonstrates that deadlyhuman violence, including groupfighting, existed at all social levels, inall population densities, in the sim-plest of social organization, and inall types of environments. cf.87,88

Contrary to Classical Rousseauism,Aboriginal fighting was highly lethal,with violent death rates far higherthan those normally incurred by his-torical state societies. Contrary toQuasi-Rousseauism, fighting com-prised intercommunal warfare aswell as homicide and feuds, with the

the range of evidencefrom across AboriginalAustralia, the only conti-nent of hunter-gatherers,strikingly demonstratesthat deadly human vio-lence, including groupfighting, existed at allsocial levels, in all popu-lation densities, in thesimplest of social organi-zation, and in all types ofenvironments.

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evidence consistently suggesting thatmost casualties were incurred inlarge-scale raids and battles. Vio-lence was sparked by competitionover resources such as hunting andfishing territories and water holes, aswell as over women, both of crucialfitness value. Cycles of retributionand mutual suspicion, which wereconducive to accusations of sorcery,greatly intensified and escalated thescale of violence.29

Fry77 is familiar with a great dealof the Australian evidence I havecited, though apparently not withsome of the earliest sources. (At leasthe does not cite them, even thoughthey are cited by his sources). None-theless, while Fry does not deny thataggression and violent death werecommon among the Aborigines, heavoids any reference to their overallprevalence and very high lethalityrates as attested to in the records:Pilling’s 10% of all males in the 25-to 45-year age group killed in onedecade; and Kimber’s 20% of twoidentifiable tribes in a single three-year conflict, a general death rateestimate of 5% every generation forthe regions of least conflict, anddeath rate of perhaps 20% everythree generations elsewhere. Obvi-ously, such estimates are highly ten-tative. Nonetheless, they areremarkably similar, and are also ingeneral agreement with those sug-gested by Warner. In a population ofthree thousand in the tribes in hisstudy area, he recorded and calcu-lated about two hundred deaths“caused by war” in the last twentyyears.92:157-8 All these are preciselythe very high death rates that Fry(and Ferguson98) tend to dismisswith scorn.

The evidence of precontact violentskeletal trauma among the Aborigi-nes, not cited by Fry, is as indicative.According to Knuckey,99 57.3% ofthe sample of 366 adult crania fromall over Australia reveal human-inflicted injuries. Webb has shownsomewhat lower figures and consid-erable variation between places,100

but the range is still high and verysimilar to that we have seen else-where in the world. Moreover, unlikefigures from other places, the Austra-lian ones can be compared with the

ethnographic evidence of Aboriginalkilling rates. They reinforce the con-clusion that these were very highand suggest that two main adjust-ments are required in such compari-sons. The first is that injuries to thecrania were mostly suffered in nonle-thal, mostly internal and regulateddisputes (cf. Chagnon’s seminalstudy of the Yanomamo101), includ-ing a particularly high percentage ofblows to the head registered amongAboriginal women; the second is thatkillings in intertribal night raids arelargely unrecorded in the skeletalevidence because the spearing ofthose taken by surprise and unableto defend themselves mostly resultedin fatal injuries to soft tissues.

Fry employs a variety of othermethods to cope with the Australianevidence. While he tacitly acceptsthat killing rates among the Aborigi-nes were not insignificant, he con-signs them all to the categories ofmurder and feud, again contrary tothe evidence. On one page of hischapter “Aboriginal Australia: A Con-tinent of Unwarlike Hunter-Gath-erers,”77:149 Fry deals with some casesthat might contradict the chapter’stitle. Thus, while he cites the Murn-gin gaingar, or open battle, he passesin silence over the large-scale surpriseraid, which students of primitive war-fare know to be the main form ofprestate warfare. Furthermore, hewrites that the gaingar “resembleswarfare’” and again comments aboutthe gaingar, “whether labeled war or

feud.” Fry repeats the same methodis his next paragraph, on the Tiwi,whose fights, he writes, “superficiallyresembling warfare.”. He again doesnot mention the Tiwi’s extremelyhigh killing rates. Remarkably, how-ever, in his later Science article,85 Frycites the Tiwi’s killing rates withoutany reservation and, indeed, singlesout the Tiwi as the main world excep-tion to his general claim that hunter-gatherers rarely engaged in group vio-lence. At the same time, he includesthe Aranda, his second Australianexample in this article, among theunwarlike groups, despite the evi-dence to the contrary, such as thatcited by Strehlow.

With respect to the Walbiri, Fryagain offers no description of theirfrequent warfare, citing Birdsell’ssuggestion102:341 that the conquest ofwells “was unlikely to have been fre-quent in pre-contact times.” He doesnot cite the view expressed by Meg-gitt,97:42 whom he otherwise quotesextensively, that such conquest,while generally uncommon in Aus-tralia, may have “occurred moreoften than we realize in the desertregions where water is a preciouscommodity” and is, indeed, the dif-ference between life and death inparticularly arid times. More impor-tantly, whereas in the Murngin caseFry associates warfare with battle,ignoring the large-scale raid, in thisinstance he creates the impression(without arguing so) that the conceptof warfare is linked to the conquestof territory.

In the same spirit, Fry77:151 quotesBerndt that “fights of conquest,attempts to impose the governmentof one group or tribe upon another,were virtually unknown,” a general-ization with which every student ofprimitive warfare probably wouldagree. Yet he fails to cite Berndt’soverall summary of the situation inAboriginal Australia:

“Warfare is armed conflict carriedout by members of one social unit (atribe or clan, for example), or in thename of that unit, against another.Feud, however, is armed conflictwhich concerns particular familiesor groups of kin, although it mayhave repercussions throughout thecommunity and implicate a large

killings in intertribal nightraids are largely unre-corded in the skeletalevidence because thespearing of those takenby surprise and unableto defend themselvesmostly resulted in fatalinjuries to soft tissues.

ARTICLE 119

number of persons: feud can driftinto warfare . . . a blood feud canspread and involve the entiretribe.”103:299

Berndt thought that such warfarewas infrequent, and indeed it wasmuch less frequent than the endemicfeuding. However, as we have seen,it very much existed, both as esca-lated feuds and for collective aims.

Furthermore, the evidence consis-tently suggests that in contrast tosmall-scale feuding, larger scalegroup warfare accounted for much,if not the majority, of the violentdeath toll.

Finally, in Fry’s Australian chapter,as throughout his book, one encoun-ters only photos of smiling faces andpeaceful activities. Pictures and pho-

tos of Aboriginal groups of warriorscarrying shields — unmistaken fight-ing devices — as recorded through-out Australian in the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries arenowhere to be seen, nor are theymentioned. However, for what possi-ble purpose would the Aboriginescarry a cumbersome shield, so out ofstep with their nomadic light gearand alleged unwarlike life?

DOUGLAS FRY’S CRUSADE FORPEACE AND THE ISSUES IN

QUESTION

Fry extensively writes about schol-ars on the other side of the debate,whom he criticizes for being stronglybiased by cultural expectations, guiltyof preconceived definitions, and mak-ing selective choice of examples, par-tial citations, and tendentiousinterpretations. He has been the mostactive and polemical representative ofthe Quasi-Rousseauan position. Forthis reason, and in view of the majorissues that this position raises, fur-ther scrutiny of his arguments andmethods is inescapable. cf.108

Fry argues that the vast majorityof hunter-gatherer life is spent inpeace, with violence, and especiallydeadly violence, erupting very rarely,usually as isolated incidents that lastbriefly and are separated by years.This is quite true, as long as a fewcrucial points are added. First andforemost, these violent occasions aresufficient to accumulate into rates ofkilling that are, on average, farhigher than in any state society.Moreover, death in general is ahugely significant occurrence in thelife of people, even if it takes only abrief moment compared to an entirelifetime. Indeed, the imminentpotential of violence among hunter-gatherers is a social fact that hangsover their lives and dominates themeven when violence is not activated.

Fry also argues correctly that lev-els of violence and killing amonghunter-gatherer societies are not uni-formly very high, and that some ofthese societies are even quite pacific.Clearly, there was some range of var-iation in the violence among hunter-gatherer groups, including, at the

Figure 1. Warriors carrying shields and “war boomerangs”.104,105,107

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end of a bell curve, a few groups thatexhibited little violence, withdrawingto isolated environments, often,reportedly, in response to earlierexperiences of violence. Historicalstate societies are an apt analogy. Inan “anarchic” international system,some states fought more than others;the large majority fought some ofthe time, and a few, such as Swedenand Switzerland, have remainedlargely outside the circle of war dur-ing the past two centuries because oftheir special circumstances. Doesthis mean that the last-mentionedstates have never fought? Obviouslynot. On the contrary, both the Swissand the Swedes had an exceptionallyviolent, warlike, and bloody past.

Much the same applies to hunter-gatherers and other prestate societies.Fry claims that the groups in the eth-

nographic record, about which wehave no information on whether theywere violent, may conceal additionalcases of peaceful societies.77:87 How-ever, the opposite proposition is likelyto be far more common: Since visitsby anthropologists to remote and iso-lated societies are often rare or one-time events, there is greater probabil-ity for them to have occurred duringperiods of peace, so that they havemissed the outbursts of violence thatFry himself insists are far and fewbetween. Anthropological observa-tions are snapshots taken at particu-lar moments. Imagine an observerfrom another world arriving in Swe-den or Switzerland today and havingno inkling about their more distantwarlike past. Or suppose that anthro-pologists’ visits to the Australian Abo-rigines took place for the first time in

the second half of the twentieth cen-tury, after their bloody fighting dur-ing the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries had alreadyceased because of state interfer-ence.109,110 Probably the great major-ity, if not all of the few hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist societiesthat anthropologists have designatedas peaceful have had a history ofdeadly fighting.

Fry does not agree with the wide-spread view76,111,112 that the paucityand ambiguity of the archeologicalevidence makes it difficult to deter-mine with certainty whether or notwarfare exited during the Paleolithic.Rejecting the methodical rule that alack of evidence is not evidence of alack, he writes that77:139 (cf., some-what more cautiously, Fergu-son57:479–480) “as archaeological datahave accumulated from all cornersof the world, it is now clear that war-fare does leave archaeological marks.Unambiguous fortifications aroundsettlements, specialized weaponssuch as clubs and daggers not usedfor hunting, depictions of martialscenes in artwork, a substantialnumber of burials with projectilepoints either embedded in the bonesor else lying within the frame of theskeletons, evidence of massive firefollowed by a change in culturalartefacts, a reduced number of maleremains buried in cemeteries thatsuggests significant male death else-where . . ..”

The contradictions here are diffi-cult to rationalize. Fortified settle-ments, their destruction by fire, andcemeteries adjacent to them are allmarks of sedentary habitation anddid not exist among the mobilehunter-gatherers of the Paleolithicwho are the subject of Fry’s argu-ment. Furthermore, he ignores theextensive evidence of violent skeletaltrauma among hunter-gatherer pop-ulations, including during the Paleo-lithic. At the same time, because Frydoes not deny the prevalence ofhomicide and lethal feuds amonghunter-gatherers, it is curious thathe mentions skeletal evidence as amark of warfare and implies thatsuch evidence is rare. As for special-ized weapons, clubs are made of per-ishable material. However, fighting

Figure 2. Shields and clubs.105–107

ARTICLE 121

clubs, as well as daggers (and “warboomerangs”), are documented ingreat detail among the AustralianAborigines.89,104–106 Notably, Frydoes not mention shields, similarlymade of perishable material andintended solely for warfare. They tooare widely documented in“unwarlike” Aboriginal Australia.None of these arguments cohere.

Fry, like others, refers to theabsence of clear archeological signsof warfare before about 10,000 yearsago, before the Mesolithic, whendense, sedentary human settlementappeared in Europe, as in someother parts of the Old World, reveal-ing all the previously cited marks ofwarfare. However, the issue at stakeis the archeological evidence, irre-spective of time, of warfare amongmobile hunter-gatherers. After all,Fry and other Quasi-Rousseauansclaim that latter-day mobile hunter-gatherers did not fight either. Bylimiting the argument to the periodbefore 10,000 years ago, oneexcludes the archeological studies ofthe earliest skeletal evidence ofhunter-gatherer violence in NorthAmerica. People were late to arrivein the New World, and early humansettlement was very thin and com-prised precisely of the mobilehunter-gatherers that are the quasi-Rousseauans’ subject. Nonetheless,Fry is completely silent about thestrong conclusions of Walker’s com-prehensive survey47:584,591: “Bonesbearing cutmarks inflicted by otherhumans are surprisingly commonconsidering the paucity of earlyhominid remains.” The “earliestimmigrants to the New World . . .lived at low densities and had ampleopportunity to avoid violence bymoving away from it but apparentlywere unable to do so.”

Walker, summarizing the evidencefrom a number of studies, writes:“The 9000-year-old Kennewick find,one of the earliest Native Americanskeletons, has a large leaf-shapedprojectile point, probably propelledby a spear thrower, healed into thebone of his pelvis as well as a small,well-healed cranial fracture. . .. Simi-lar injuries, including embeddedpoints and cranial injuries, havebeen found in other early Native

American remains.”47:588–589 Walkerconcludes: “The search for an earlier,less-violent way to organize oursocial affairs has been fruitless. Allthe evidence suggests that peacefulperiods have always been punctuatedby episodes of warfare andviolence.”47:590

A recent study of the skeletonremains of the sparse populations ofPaleoamericans between the earliestidentifiable arrivals and approxi-mately 9,000 years BP (calibrated),has identified violent injuries in 58%of the males and 18% of the females.This is about double the rates citedearlier for many parts of later andmore densely populated periods ofprehistoric North America.114 As wehave seen, Lambert also detectedvery high rates of cranial injuries inthe earliest period of her Californiasurvey (6630-4050 BC).46 Other stud-ies of California and the West havefound that such injuries, includingmarks of scalp trophies, have beenhighest during the earliest periodssurveyed, from 3050 BC on, andactually decreased during later peri-ods, when sedentism grew.115,116

Certainly, conflicting viewsremain, understandably given thescarcity and nature of the archeolog-ical evidence for nonsedentary popu-lations. Lambert, while furnishingevidence of very high levels of vio-lence in some of the earliest andsparsest North American popula-tions, tended to believe that violenceincreased with denser and more set-tled habitation.48 She was alsoinclined to the opinion that most ofthe early violence took the form ofhomicide and feuds rather thanintergroup warfare, a view shared byChatters.114:82 This, however, is atheoretical presupposition ratherthan an empirical find. Dye,117 forexample, relying on Kelly and Fry,makes the same assumption, so whatwe have is a false theory guiding theempirical investigation. As we haveseen, the archeological finds must beexamined in conjunction with theethnographic record. Most notably,the Australian evidence suggests dif-ferences in the circumstances of soft-tissue as compared to bone injuries.The closest analogy to early NorthAmerica is the ethnographic record

from the sparse populations ofhunter-gatherers on the Great Plains.

Bison herds’ migration routes onthe Great Plains were changing anddifficult to predict. Hunting in othertribes’ territories thus became neces-sary from time to time, often result-ing in warfare.118,119 Indeed, earlyPaleo-Indians may have exhibitedbehavior patterns similar to those ofUpper Paleolithic hunters of largegame in Europe, from France to theUkraine. Fighting patterns on thePlains, both before and after adop-tion of the horse, are extensivelydocumented and reveal a familiarpicture, strikingly similar to that wehave already seen throughout Aus-tralia at both the individual andgroup levels. According toSmith,120:431,436 “Whether a warparty consisted of one warrior or aman and one or two of his most inti-mate friends, or of one to four hun-dred warriors, or even of the wholetribe the purpose and general formof its procedure did not change.” Anight raid and dawn attack was thenorm. “The mortality in Plains fight-ing was highest when attack took theenemy unprepared. . .. In such casesthe weaker groups were often com-pletely annihilated. The mortality ofpitched battles, which was of morefrequent occurrence than is generallysupposed, was considerably lower.”According to Mishkin,121:2 “the formof warfare preferred on the Plains[was] the surprise attack.” Ewers,specifically documenting the histori-cal and archeological evidence ofPlains Indian warfare before contact,writes,25:401 “The greatest damagewas done when a large war partysurprised, attacked, and wiped out asmall hunting camp. . .. Casualtieswere few in pitched battles betweenrelatively equal numbers ofwarriors.” Secoy describes the samepattern of prehorse, pregun fight-ing.24:34–35 According to the testi-mony of the old BlackfootSaukamappee, formal battles wereconducted from a distance andresulted in few casualties: “The greatmischief of war then, was as now, byattacking and destroying smallcamps of ten to thirty tents.”

Thus, wide dispersion and low-density populations did not

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necessarily mean less resource stressand less competition. An extensivemode of subsistence required largeterritories, where large migratingherds were an invaluable, hotly con-tested group prize. As in Australiaand everywhere else, women wereanother vital and inherently scarceresource under competition, irre-spective of population density. Stud-ies of other macro and micro casesof mobile hunter-gatherers whointeracted almost exclusively withmobile hunter-gatherers come upwith similar finds.81, 122

WAR AND PEACE:BIOLOGICALLY EMBEDDED,

ALTERNATIVE, ANDCOMPLEMENTARY BEHAVIORAL

STRATEGIES

The evidence regarding violenceand fighting among aboriginal peopleis not easy to isolate and interpret.More than objective difficulties areinvolved. Ideological outlooks andconcerns have always played theirpart. For example, Rousseauism isoften adopted by those who are con-cerned that the antiquity of humanfighting may suggest that it is insepa-rable from human reality and seek todispel this notion in support of theeffort to reduce or eliminate war intoday’s world. This is Fry’s openlyand repeatedly stated mission. How-ever, the antiquity of human fightingand the question of the future of warare not at all connected in the directway that people tend to assume.Gat,31 Pinker,33 Goldstein,123 andMorris124 have all argued that whilehuman fighting was ubiquitous andhighly lethal in prehistory, its mortal-ity rates actually decreased under thestate, and that war in general hasdeclined sharply during modern andrecent times. Thus, there is no simpleconnection between the bloodyhuman past and a potentially betterpresent and future.

Fry does have an important contri-bution to make. He has stressed thepoint — not sufficiently coming outin the debate regarding human vio-lence — that violence and war, per-ceived as natural to man, are notinvariably all-pervasive. He eluci-

dates the other side of the humanbehavioral repertoire, which makesup what he rightly calls our“potential for peace.” This side con-sists of basic interpersonal and socialtechniques, which, in Fry’s list,include avoidance, toleration, nego-tiation, and settlement, all enhancedby social norms, group pressure, andcommunal ceremonies intended todissipate, deflect, and suppress theoutbreak of violence.77 Fry is correctin arguing that these most commonpractices of daily life have alwaysbeen with us and are widely attestedto in hunter-gatherer societies. He isalso right to point out that differentsocieties, including those of hunter-gatherers, have exhibited differentlevels of violence, largely dependingon their conditions and norms. How-ever, in pursuit of the cause of afuture peaceful world, Fry errs in theother direction, underplaying therole of violence and suppressing evi-dence of communal fighting in theaboriginal human past. Like the vari-ous forms of conflict resolution andaversion, they, too, have always beenwith us. Indeed, the ever-presentprospect of violent conflict is pre-cisely the reason why conflict resolu-tion has always been such a centralsocial practice, proving more or lesssuccessful in both intragroup andintergroup settings.

The root of the misconception isthis: People habitually assume that ifwidespread deadly violence hasalways been with us, it must be aprimary, irresistible drive that isnearly impossible to suppress. Manyfind in this reason enough to objectto the idea that human fighting isprimordial; others regard it as com-pelling evidence that war is inevita-ble. Both sides are wrong. Contraryto fashionable 1960s notions, tracedback to Freud’s latter-day theorizingabout a death drive or instinct, vio-lence is not a primary drive thatrequires release, like hunger or sex.The Swiss or Swedes, for example,have not fought for two centuries,yet they show no special signs ofdeprivation on this account. But tryto deny them food for more than afew hours, or sex for more than afew days, and their reaction wouldbe quite predictable.

On the other hand, the fact thatviolence is not a primary drive doesnot mean that we are not hardwiredfor it. Studies on “warless” prestatesocieties usually intend to prove thatwarfare, neither primordial nor natu-ral to humankind, probably was alate and, in any case, wholly contin-gent cultural phenomenon. MargaretMead’s framing of the problem,83

“Warfare Is Only an Invention —Not a Biological Necessity” is themother of all mistakes. It expressesthe widespread assumption that vio-lence must be either a primary driveor entirely learned, whereas, in fact,its potential is deeply ingrained in usas a means or tool, ever-ready to beemployed. People can cooperate,peacefully compete, or use violencein order to achieve their objectives,depending on what they believe willserve them best in any givencircumstance.

Cooperation, competition, and vio-lent conflict are the three fundamen-tal forms of social interaction (inaddition to isolation or avoidance;that is, zero interaction). People havealways had all three options tochoose from, and have alwaysassessed the situation to decidewhich option or combination ofthem seemed the most promising.Violent conflict as a behavioral strat-egy did not suddenly emerge some-time in later human history. Peopleare biologically well equipped to pur-sue any of these social strategies,with conflict being only one tool,albeit a major one — the hammer —in our diverse behavioral toolkit.Furthermore, Homo sapiens is asocial species, whose local andregional groups, universally anduniquely bound together by ties ofboth kinship and shared culturalcodes, including language and cus-toms, cooperate in a variety of groupactivities, including fighting. To besure, extreme conditions of sparsity,as in the eastern Canadian Arctic,may make large group action lesscommon.125 But as the evidencefrom the central Australian desertdemonstrates, even the most forbid-ding environments, with extremelylow population densities, could seeintense group fighting, sometimesfor collective goods such as hunting

ARTICLE 123

territories and water sources. Nei-ther a late invention nor a compul-sive inevitability independent ofconditions, group fighting is part ofour evolution-shaped behavioralmenu. It is in this sense that bothwar and peace are “in our genes.”

Some of those who have dealt withthe question in fact express the viewthat human societies have alwaysbeen Janus-faced, interchangeablyresorting to both peace and violentconflict.26,47,86,112 Based on his sur-vey of 49 hunter-gatherer societies,Boehm86:327 put both sides of theirbehavioral repertoire in a proper andstriking perspective: “59 percent ofthe LPA [Late Pleistocene Appropri-ate] forager sample has enoughlethal intergroup conflict for this tobe reported in an ethnography. “Headded, “With human foragers, nego-tiations of some type (including tru-ces and peacemaking) are found inmore than half of the LPA societiessurveyed (59 percent). However,Table 16.6 tells us that formal andeffective peacemaking is reportedonly for a few of the 29 societ-ies.”86:330 This agrees remarkablywith Ember’s79:443 pioneering, some-what cruder coding of the worldwidesample of hunter-gatherers: “64 per-cent had warfare occurring at leastonce every two years, 26 percent hadwarfare somewhat less often, andonly 10 percent . . . were rated ashaving no or rare warfare.” Accord-ing to the same study, by stricter def-initions, “warfare is rare for only 12percent of . . . hunter-gatherers. Insum, hunter-gatherers could hardlybe described as peaceful.”

CONCLUSION: HUNTER-GATHERERS AND THE HUMAN

POTENTIAL FOR WAR AND PEACE

Quasi-Rousseauism, which hasoccupied center stage in the Rous-seauan discourse since the turn ofthe twenty-first century, representssignificant progress in the debate onthe antiquity of human deadly fight-ing. Its proponents have acceptedthe documented evidence of veryhigh rates of killing among hunter-gatherers, Raymond Kelly forth-rightly, Douglas Fry more obliquely.

It has scarcely been recognized, oreven noted, that this constitutes amajor withdrawal from ClassicalRousseauism and its claim of littleor no violence among aboriginalhumans before sedentism, agricul-ture, and the state. Furthermore, evi-dence from the pure continent-sizeAustralian laboratory conclusivelyreveals that, contrary to the Quasi-Rousseauans’ remaining claim, fight-ing among hunter-gatherers tookplace at all levels, from the individ-ual to the family to the larger group.It encompassed collective intergroupfighting, involving and targeting thewider communities on both sides;that is, warfare as well as homicideand feuds.

The potential for both war andpeace is embedded in us. The diversehuman behavioral toolkit comprises avariety of major tools, geared for vio-lent conflict, peaceful competition,and cooperation, as well as avoidance.Although activated interchangeablyand conjointly in response to overallenvironmental and socio-cultural con-ditions, these behavioral strategies arenot purely learned cultural forms.This na€ıve nature-nurture dichotomyoverlooks the heavy and complex bio-logical machinery that is necessaryfor the working of each of thesebehavioral strategies and the interplaybetween them. Certainly, these deepevolution-shaped patterns are variablycalibrated to particular conditionsthrough social learning. However, thereason why they are there, very closeunder our skin and readily activated,is that they were all very handy dur-ing our long evolutionary past. Theyall proved highly advantageous,thereby becoming part and parcel ofour biological equipment. Indeed,among hunter-gatherers, as later inhistory, all these behavioral strategies,both violent and peaceful, were inter-changeably and variably employed.

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