Sex at Dawn полностью

In Beyond War, anthropologist Doug Fry rebuts the neo-Hobbesian view of universal war. “The belief that ‘there has always been war,’” Fry writes, “does not correspond with the archaeological facts of the matter.” Anthropologist Leslie Sponsel agrees, writing, “Lack of archaeological evidence for warfare suggests that it was rare or absent for most of human prehistory.” After conducting a comprehensive review of prehistoric skeletal evidence, anthropologist Brian Ferguson concluded that apart from one particular site in modern-day Sudan, “only about a dozen Homo sapiens skeletons 10,000 years old or older, out of hundreds of similar antiquity examined to date, show clear indications of interpersonal violence.” Ferguson continues, “If warfare were prevalent in early prehistoric times, the abundant materials in the archaeological record would be rich with evidence of warfare. But the signs are not there.”²⁶

Our bullshit detectors go off when scholars point to violent chimps and a few cherry-picked horticultural human societies mislabeled as foragers, claiming these as evidence of ancient tendencies toward warfare. Even more troubling, these scholars often remain mute on the distorting effects on chimps of food provisioning, ever-shrinking habitats under siege from armies of hungry soldiers and poachers, reduced living space, food, and genetic vigor. Equally troubling is their silence on the crucial effects of population demographics and the rise of the agricultural state on the likelihood of human conflict.

nonAs the summer of love was winding down and Jane Goodall’s first reports of chimpanzee warfare were exploding into public consciousness, Napoleon Chagnon suddenly became the world’s most famous living anthropologist with the publication of Yanomamo: The Fierce People. The year 1968 was a good one to come out with a dashing anthropological adventure yarn claiming to prove that warfare is ancient and integral to human nature.

The year began with the “velvet revolution” in Prague and the

TET offensive in Vietnam. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s worst

dream came true in Memphis, Robert Kennedy was felled on

a Los Angeles stage, and blood and chaos ran in the streets of

Chicago. Richard Nixon slinked into the White House,

Charles Manson and his lost followers plotted mayhem in the

dry hills above Malibu, and the Beatles put the final touches

on The White Album. The year ended with three American

astronauts, for the first time ever, gazing back upon this

fragile blue planet floating in eternal silence, praying for 27

peace.

Given all that, perhaps it’s not surprising that Chagnon’s account of the “chronic warfare” of the “innately violent” Yanomami struck a public nerve. Desperate to understand human murderousness, the public lapped up his depictions of the day-to-day brutality of people he described as our “contemporary ancestors.” Now in its fifth edition, Yanomamo: The Fierce People is still the all-time bestseller in anthropology, with millions of copies sold to university students alone. Chagnon’s books and films have figured prominently in the education of several generations of anthropologists, most of whom accepted his claims to have demonstrated the inherent ferocity of our species.

But Chagnon’s research should be approached with caution, as he employs a host of dubious techniques. Ferguson found, for example, that Chagnon conflates common murder with war in his statistics, as does Pinker in his discussion of the Gebusi. But more importantly, Chagnon fails to account for the effects of his own disruptive, rather Hemingway-esque presence among the people he studied. According to Patrick Tierney, author of Darkness in El Dorado, “The wars that made Chagnon and the Yanomami famous—the ones he wrote about with such relish in The Fierce People—began on November 14, 1964, the same day the anthropologist arrived with his shotguns, outboard motor, and a canoe full of steel goods to give away.”²⁸ Tierney cites Chagnon’s own doctoral thesis, showing that in the thirteen years prior to his arrival, no Namowei (a large branch of the Yanomami) had been killed in warfare. But during his thirteen-month residence among them, ten Yanomami died in a conflict between the Namowei and the Patanowateri (another branch).

Kenneth Good, an anthropologist who first went to live with the Yanomami as one of Chagnon’s graduate students and stayed on for twelve years, described Chagnon as “a hit-and-run anthropologist who comes into villages with armloads of machetes to purchase cooperation for his

research. Unfortunately,” wrote Good, “he creates conflict

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and division wherever he goes.”