Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization is one of those books where I highlight one passage a page in some sections, grinning manically, because I just learned something incredible. Part 1 is about ‘war in the state of human nature’, which is hunter gatherer warfare.

First, how do we know what we think we know? One answer is archaeology, including all the skeletons with smashed skulls. Another is genetics (combined with archaeology), where we find that a bunch of people lived in an area until they all vanished, and another group started leaving their remains instead. And the richest source is modern hunter-gatherers that had contact with a literate society that recorded what their lives were like.

It’s important to know that extant hunter gatherers are not representative of prehistorical hunter-gatherers, because once agriculture took off, their lifestyle was outcompeted except in resource-poor environments where agricultural communities couldn’t thrive. There’s a correlation between resource-poor environments and egalitarianism, because people have to move a lot and own little. Both inequality and territoriality rises in more resource-dense environments, which the majority of livable territory is compared to the land modern hunter gatherers occupied after agriculture became the normal way of life.

(Note on hunter gatherer social organization: Several family groups come together in a ‘regional group’ of about 500 people that shares a dialect and a sense of common identity. I get that impression that this is remarkably consistent, and has been for hundreds of thousands of years.)

Resource-poor definitely characterizes most of Australia, which is one of the most valuable sources of data we have, because they were exclusively peopled by hunter gatherers until late 18th century Western contact. Although the population density was low, the land was basically always at carrying capacity, and territories were well defined.

There was no ‘vast common land’, as some 1960s’ anthropologists believed. Rather than the free ranging of the Rousseauite anthropological imagination, the Aborigines … were in fact ‘restricted nomads’ or ‘centrally based wanderers’, confined for life to their ancestral home territories. These territories were sanctioned by totem and myth, with trespass regarded as a grave crime. Strangers provoked alarm and as a rule kept off. Uninvited, they were likely to encounter aggressive demonstration and violence.

The situation was similar in the northwest coast of North America, another site of great informativeness on hunter-gatherer societies – so similar that I won’t quote anything on it.

So you’re stuck with the same several hundred people, in the same land, all your life – it, uh, doesn’t seem that surprising that the homicide rate in basically all hunter-gatherer societies are several times that of the USA, which is itself highly murderous among industrialized countries. Violence claimed a shocking fraction of lives:

All this suggests that average human violent mortality rates among adults in the state of nature may have been in the order of 15 per cent (25 per cent for the men); extremely sparse populations living in areas where resources were diffuse probably occupied the lower part of the scale, but not by a very wide margin.

(The breadth of citation for that statistic is quite incredible, and is quoted under the cut of this post. The death rate is such that it exceeds that of countries that participated in the World Wars, if we average deaths over time.)

So, here is a sketch of affairs. What do people fight about?

• Land / food (mostly, meat, which was hotly contested among hunter-gatherers)
• Women (except in cases of home defense and some armies after people got good long-distance weapons, combatants are male, and the M.O. is the kill the men and kidnap the women. All known hunter-gatherer (and most agricultural?) societies have a sex imbalance, at least among young people, because infanticide is the primary population control mechanism and females are killed preferentially.)
• “They raided us, and if we don’t raid them back this is going to establish a pattern of victimization” (See this post for how raiding was the primary form of lethal violent conflict)
• “Oh, you know, normal blood feuds, we don’t know how it started, but they got our cousin last week, so we gotta…”
• “Our cousin died last week in bed, and while there are no physical signs of violence, we know that the neighboring tribe definitely had it out for him. They probably used witchcraft. Let’s go get ‘em!”
  

More on the “25% of men died of violence” statistic under cut.

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