In 2007, world-famous Harvard professor and best-selling author Steven Pinker gave a presentation built upon similarly flawed logic at the TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in Long Beach, California.5 Pinker’s presentation provides both a concise statement of the neo-Hobbesian view of the origins of war and an illuminating look at the dubious rhetorical tactics often used to promote this bloodstained vision of our prehistory. The twenty-minute talk is available at the TED website.6 We encourage you to watch at least the first five minutes (dealing with prehistory) before reading the following discussion. Go ahead. We’ll wait here.
Though Pinker spends less than 10 percent of his time discussing hunter-gatherers (a social configuration, you’ll recall, that represents well over 95 percent of our time on the planet), he manages to make a real mess of things.
Three and a half minutes into his talk, Pinker presents a chart based on Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. The chart shows “the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of foraging or hunting and gathering societies.” He explains that the chart shows that hunter-gatherer males were far more likely to die in war than are men living today.
But hold on. Take a closer look at that chart. It lists seven “hunter-gatherer” cultures as representative of prehistoric war-related male death. The seven cultures listed are the Jivaro, two branches of Yanomami, the Mae Enga, Dugum Dani, Murngin, Huli, and Gebusi. The Jivaro and both Yanomami groups are from the Amazon region, the Murngin are from northern coastal Australia, and the other four are all from the conflict-ridden, densely populated highlands of Papua New Guinea.
Are these groups representative of our hunter-gatherer
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ancestors? Not even close.
Only one of the seven societies cited by Pinker (the Murngin) even approaches being an immediate-return foraging society (the way Russia is sort of Asian, if you ignore most of its population and history). The Murngin had been living with missionaries, guns, and aluminum powerboats for decades by the time the data Pinker cites were collected in 1975—not exactly prehistoric conditions.
None of the other societies cited by Pinker are immediate-return hunter-gatherers, like our ancestors were. They cultivate yams, bananas, or sugarcane in village gardens, while raising domesticated pigs, llamas, or chickens.8 Even beyond the fact that these societies are not remotely representative of our nomadic, immediate-return hunter-gatherer ancestors, there are still further problems with the data Pinker cites. Among the Yanomami, true levels of warfare are subject to passionate debate among anthropologists, as we’ll discuss shortly. The Murngin are not typical even of Australian native cultures, representing a bloody exception to the typical Australian Aborigine pattern of little to no intergroup conflict.9 Nor does Pinker get the Gebusi right. Bruce Knauft, the anthropologist whose research Pinker cites on his chart, says the Gebusi’s elevated death rates had nothing to do with warfare. In fact, Knauft reports that warfare is “rare” among the Gebusi, writing, “Disputes over territory or resources are extremely infrequent and tend to be easily resolved.”10
Despite all this, Pinker stood before his audience and argued, with a straight face, that his chart depicted a fair estimate of typical hunter-gatherer mortality rates in prehistoric war. This is quite literally unbelievable.11
But Pinker is not alone in employing such sleight-of-hand to advance of Hobbes’s dark view of human prehistory. In fact, this selective presentation of dubious data is disturbingly common in the literature on human blood-lust.
In their book Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson admit that war is unusual in nature, “a startling exception to the normal rule for animals.” But because intergroup violence has been documented in both humans and chimps, they argue, a propensity for war must be an ancient human quality, going back to our last common ancestor. We are, they warn, “the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression.” Ouch.
But where are the bonobos? In a book of over 250 pages, the word bonobo appears on only eleven of them, and the species is dismissed as offering a less relevant sense of our last common ancestor than the common chimpanzee does—although many primatologists argue the opposite.12 But at least they mentioned the bonobo.
