In this data vacuum, anyone could have a go at speculating about primitive people, and it did not take long for a contrary theory to turn up. Hobbes’s opposite number was the Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who opined that “nothing can be more gentle than [man] in his primitive state.... The example of the savages . . . seems to confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, . . . and that all ulterior improvements have been so many steps . . . towards the decrepitness of the species.”9
FIGURE 2–1. The violence triangle
Though the philosophies of Hobbes and Rousseau were far more sophisticated than “nasty brutish and short” versus “the noble savage,” their competing stereotypes of life in a state of nature fueled a controversy that remains with us today. In The Blank Slate, I discussed how the issue has accumulated a heavy burden of emotional, moral, and political baggage. In the second half of the 20th century, Rousseau’s romantic theory became the politically correct doctrine of human nature, both in reaction to earlier, racist doctrines about “primitive” people and out of a conviction that it was a more uplifting view of the human condition. Many anthropologists believe that if Hobbes was right, war would be inevitable or even desirable; therefore anyone who favors peace must insist that Hobbes was wrong. These “anthropologists of peace” (who in fact are rather aggressive academics—the ethologist Johan van der Dennen calls them the Peace and Harmony Mafia) have maintained that humans and other animals are strongly inhibited from killing their own kind, that war is a recent invention, and that fighting among native peoples was ritualistic and harmless until they encountered European colonists.10
As I mentioned in the preface, I think the idea that biological theories of violence are fatalistic and romantic theories optimistic gets everything backwards, but that isn’t the point of this chapter. When it came to violence in pre-state peoples, Hobbes and Rousseau were talking through their hats: neither knew a thing about life before civilization. Today we can do better. This chapter reviews the facts about violence in the earliest stages of the human career. The story begins before we were human, and we will look at aggression in our primate cousins to see what it reveals about the emergence of violence in our evolutionary lineage. When we reach our own species, I will zero in on the contrast between foraging bands and tribes who live in a state of anarchy and peoples who live in settled states with some form of governance. We will also look at how foragers fight and what they fight over. This leads to the pivotal question: Is the warring of anarchic tribes more or less destructive than that of people living in settled states? The answer requires a switch from narratives to numbers: the per capita rates of violent death, to the best we can estimate them, in societies that live under a Leviathan and in those that live in anarchy. Finally we will take a look at the upsides and downsides of civilized life.
VIOLENCE IN HUMAN ANCESTORS
How far back can we trace the history of violence? Though the primate ancestors of the human lineage have long been extinct, they left us with at least one kind of evidence about what they might have been like: their other descendants, chimpanzees. We did not, of course, evolve from chimps, and as we shall see it’s an open question whether chimpanzees preserved the traits of our common ancestor or veered off in a uniquely chimp direction. But either way, chimpanzee aggression holds a lesson for us, because it shows how violence can evolve in a primate species with certain traits we share. And it tests the evolutionary prediction that violent tendencies are not hydraulic but strategic, deployed only in circumstances in which the potential gains are high and the risks are low.11
Common chimpanzees live in communities of up to 150 individuals who occupy a distinct territory. As chimpanzees forage for the fruit and nuts that are unevenly distributed through the forest, they frequently split and coalesce into smaller groups ranging in size from one to fifteen. If one group encounters another group from a different community at the border between their territories, the interaction is always hostile. When the groups are evenly matched, they dispute the boundary in a noisy battle. The two sides bark, hoot, shake branches, throw objects, and charge at each other for half an hour or more, until one side, usually the smaller one, skulks away.
These battles are examples of the aggressive displays that are common among animals. Once thought to be rituals that settle disputes without bloodshed for the good of the species, they are now understood as displays of strength and resolve that allow the weaker side to concede when the outcome of a fight is a foregone conclusion and going through with it would only risk injury to both. When two animals are evenly matched, the show of force may escalate to serious fighting, and one or both can get injured or killed.12 Battles between groups of chimpanzees, however, do not escalate into serious fighting, and anthropologists once believed that the species was essentially peaceful.
Jane Goodall, the primatologist who first observed chimpanzees in the wild for extended periods of time, eventually made a shocking discovery.13 When a group of male chimpanzees encounters a smaller group or a solitary individual from another community, they don’t hoot and bristle, but take advantage of their numbers. If the stranger is a sexually receptive adolescent female, they may groom her and try to mate. If she is carrying an infant, they will often attack her and kill and eat the baby. And if they encounter a solitary male, or isolate one from a small group, they will go after him with murderous savagery. Two attackers will hold down the victim, and the others will beat him, bite off his toes and genitals, tear flesh from his body, twist his limbs, drink his blood, or rip out his trachea. In one community, the chimpanzees picked off every male in a neighboring one, an event that if it occurred among humans we would call genocide. Many of the attacks aren’t triggered by chance encounters but are the outcome of border patrols in which a group of males quietly seek out and target any solitary male they spot. Killings can also occur within a community. A gang of males may kill a rival, and a strong female, aided by a male or another female, may kill a weaker one’s offspring.
When Goodall first wrote about these killings, other scientists wondered whether they might be freak outbursts, symptoms of pathology, or artifacts of the primatologists’ provisioning the chimps with food to make them easier to observe. Three decades later little doubt remains that lethal aggression is a part of chimpanzees’ normal behavioral repertoire. Primatologists have observed or inferred the killings of almost fifty individuals in attacks between communities, and more than twenty-five in attacks within them. The reports have come from at least nine communities, including ones that have never been provisioned. In some communities, more than a third of the males die from violence.14
Does chimpicide have a Darwinian rationale? The primatologist Richard Wrangham, a former student of Goodall’s, has tested various hypotheses with the extensive data that have been amassed on the demography and ecology of chimpanzees.15 He was able to document one large Darwinian advantage and one smaller one. When chimpanzees eliminate rival males and their offspring, they expand their territory, either by moving into it immediately or by winning subsequent battles with the help of their enhanced numerical advantage. This allows them to monopolize access to the territory’s food for themselves, their offspring, and the females they mate with, which in turn results in a greater rate of births among the females. The community will also sometimes absorb the females of the vanquished community, bringing the males a second reproductive advantage. It’s not that the chimps fight directly over food or females. All they care about is dominating their territory and eliminating rivals if they can do so at minimal risk to themselves. The evolutionary benefits happen indirectly and over the long run.
As for the risks, the chimpanzees minimize them by picking unfair fights, those in which they outnumber their victim by at least three to one. The foraging pattern of chimpanzees often delivers an unlucky victim into their clutches because fruiting trees are distributed patchily in the forest. Hungry chimps may have to forage in small groups or on their own
and may sometimes venture into no-chimp’s-land in pursuit of their dinner.
What does this have to do with violence in humans? It raises the possibility that the human lineage has been engaged in lethal raiding since the time of its common root with chimpanzees around six million years ago. There is, however, an alternative possibility. The shared ancestor of humans and common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) bequeathed the world a third species, bonobos or pygmy chimps (Pan paniscus), which split from their common cousins around two million years ago. We are as closely related to bonobos as we are to common chimps, and bonobos never engage in lethal raiding. Indeed, the difference between bonobos and common chimpanzees is one of the best-known facts in popular primatology. Bonobos have become famous as the peaceable, matriarchal, concupiscent, herbivorous “hippie chimps.” They are the namesake of a vegetarian restaurant in New York, the inspiration for the sexologist Dr. Suzy’s “Bonobo Way of Peace Through Pleasure,” and if the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd had her way, a role model for men today.16
The primatologist Frans de Waal points out that in theory the common ancestor of humans, common chimpanzees, and bonobos could have been similar to bonobos rather than to common chimps.17 If so, violence between coalitions of males would have shallower roots in human evolutionary history. Common chimpanzees and humans would have developed their lethal raiding independently, and human raiding may have developed historically in particular cultures rather than evolutionarily in the species. If so, humans would have no innate proclivities toward coalitional violence and would not need a Leviathan, or any other institution, to keep them away from it.
The idea that humans evolved from a peaceful, bonobolike ancestor has two problems. One is that it is easy to get carried away with the hippie-chimp story. Bonobos are an endangered species that lives in inaccessible forests in dangerous parts of the Congo, and much of what we know about them comes from observations of small groups of well-fed juveniles or young adults in captivity. Many primatologists suspect that systematic studies of older, hungrier, more populous, and freer groups of bonobos would paint a darker picture.18 Bonobos in the wild, it turns out, engage in hunting, confront each other belligerently, and injure one another in fights, perhaps sometimes fatally. So while bonobos are unquestionably less aggressive than common chimpanzees—they never raid one another, and communities can mingle peacefully—they are certainly not peaceful across the board.
The second and more important problem is that the common ancestor of the two chimpanzee species and humans is far more likely to have been like a common chimpanzee than like a bonobo.19 Bonobos are very strange primates, not just in their behavior but in their anatomy. Their small, childlike heads, lighter bodies, reduced sex differences, and other juvenile traits make them different not only from common chimpanzees but from the other great apes (gorillas and orangutans) and different as well from fossil australopithecines, who were ancestral to humans. Their distinctive anatomy, when placed on the great ape family tree, suggests that bonobos were pulled away from the generic ape plan by neoteny, a process that retunes an animal’s growth program to preserve certain juvenile features in adulthood (in the case of bonobos, features of the cranium and brain). Neoteny often occurs in species that have undergone domestication, as when dogs diverged from wolves, and it is a pathway by which selection can make animals less aggressive. Wrangham argues that the primary mover in bonobo evolution was selection for reduced aggression in males, perhaps because bonobos forage in large groups without vulnerable loners, so there are no opportunities for coalitional aggression to pay off. These considerations suggest that bonobos are the odd-ape-out, and we are descended from an animal that was closer to common chimpanzees.
Even if common chimps and humans discovered coalitional violence independently, the coincidence would be informative. It would suggest that lethal raiding can be evolutionarily advantageous in an intelligent species that fissions into groups of various sizes, and in which related males form coalitions and can assess each other’s relative strength. When we look at violence in humans later in the chapter, we will see that some of the parallels are a bit close for comfort.
It would be nice if the gap between the common ancestor and modern humans could be filled in by the fossil record. But chimpanzees’ ancestors have left no fossils, and hominid fossils and artifacts are too scarce to provide direct evidence of aggression, such as preserved weapons or wounds. Some paleoanthropologists test for signs of a violent temperament in fossil species by measuring the size of the canine teeth in males (since daggerlike canines are found in aggressive species) and by looking for differences in the size of the males and the females (since males tend to be larger in polygynous species, the better to fight with other males).20 Unfortunately the small jaws of hominids, unlike the muzzles of other primates, don’t open wide enough for large canines to be practical, regardless of how aggressive or peaceful these creatures were. And unless a species was considerate enough to have left behind a large number of complete skeletons, it’s hard to sex them reliably and compare the size of the males and the females. (For these reasons many anthropologists are skeptical of the recent claim that Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4-million-year-old species that is probably ancestral to Homo, was unisex and small-canined and hence monogamous and peaceable.)21 The more recent and abundant Homo fossils show that the males have been larger than the females for at least two million years, by at least as great a ratio as in modern humans. This reinforces the suspicion that violent competition among men has a long history in our evolutionary lineage.22
KINDS OF HUMAN SOCIETIES
The species we belong to, “anatomically modern Homo sapiens,” is said to be 200,000 years old. But “behaviorally modern” humans, with art, ritual, clothing, complex tools, and the ability to live in different ecosystems, probably evolved closer to 75,000 years ago in Africa before setting out to people the rest of the world. When the species emerged, people lived in small, nomadic, egalitarian bands of kinsmen, subsisted by hunting and gathering, and had no written language or government. Today the vast majority of humans are settled in stratified societies numbering in the millions, eat foods cultivated by agriculture, and are governed by states. The transition, sometimes called the Neolithic (new stone age) Revolution, began around 10,000 years ago with the emergence of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, China, India, West Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Andes.23
It’s tempting, then, to use the 10,000-year horizon as a boundary between two major eras of human existence: a hunter-gatherer era, in which we did most of our biological evolving and which may still be glimpsed in extant hunter-gatherers, and the era of civilization thereafter. That is the dividing line that figures in theories of the ecological niche to which humans are biologically adapted, which evolutionary psychologists call “the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.” But that is not the cut that is most relevant to the Leviathan hypothesis.
For one thing, the 10,000-year milestone applies only to the first societies that farmed. Agriculture developed in other parts of the world later and spread outward from those cradles only gradually. Ireland, for example, was not lapped by the wave of farming that emanated from the Near East until around 6,000 years ago.24 Many parts of the Americas, Australia, Asia, and Africa were populated by hunter-gatherers until a few centuries ago, and of course a few still are.
Also, societies cannot be dichotomized into hunter-gatherer bands and agricultural civilizations.25 The nonstate peoples we are most familiar with are the hunters and gatherers living in small bands like the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert and the Inuit of the Arctic. But these people have survived as hunter-gatherers only because they inhabit remote parts of the globe that no one else wants. As such they are not a representative sample of our anarchic ancestors, who may have enjoyed flusher environments. Until recently other foragers parked themselves in valleys and rivers that were teeming with fish and game and that supported a more affluent, complex, and sedentary lifestyle. The I
ndians of the Pacific Northwest, known for their totem poles and potlatches, are a familiar example. Also beyond the reach of states are hunter-horticulturalists, such as peoples in Amazonia and New Guinea who supplement their hunting and gathering by slashing and burning patches of forest and growing bananas or sweet potatoes in small gardens. Their lives are not as austere as those of pure hunter-gatherers, but they are far closer to them than they are to sedentary, full-time farmers.
When the first farmers settled down to grow grains and legumes and keep domesticated animals, their numbers exploded and they began to divide their labors, so that some of them lived off the food grown by others. But they didn’t develop complex states and governments right away. They first coalesced into tribes connected by kinship and culture, and the tribes sometimes merged into chiefdoms, which had a centralized leader and a permanent entourage supporting him. Some of the tribes took up pastoralism, wandering with their livestock and trading animal products with sedentary farmers. The Israelites of the Hebrew Bible were tribal pastoralists who developed into chiefdoms around the time of the judges.