Is war inevitable? For the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes: “For where there is no Commonwealth, there is, as hath been already shown, a perpetual war of every man against his neighbour; and therefore everything is his that getteth it and keepeth it by force; which is neither propriety nor community, but uncertainty.”1
Hobbes presents man as a basically selfish being, inclined to violence and competition, ready to do anything to make his own interests triumph over others’. He was one of those who think that, left to themselves, men quickly end up killing each other.
Winston Churchill goes further: “The story of the human race is war. Except for brief periods and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.”2 All throughout our academic education, we have been taught that the history of humanity is nothing but one long, uninterrupted series of wars.
Shaped by this intellectual heritage, the first paleontologists who studied the history of the human species systematically interpreted the marks of breaks or crushing on prehistoric human remains as signs of violent death caused by their fellows. As we will see, it turned out that, in most cases, that was only the fruit of their imagination.
In the same vein, an evolutionary psychology manual explains that human history “reveals coalitions of warring males omnipresent throughout all cultures.”3 The founder of sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson, shares this view of humankind and its evolution: “Are human beings innately aggressive?… The answer to it is yes. Throughout history, warfare, representing only the most organized technique of aggression, has been endemic to every form of society, from hunter-gatherer bands to industrial states.”4 Such assertions are countless in the fields of anthropology, archeology and paleontology.
But over the past twenty years an increasing number of researchers has been defending very different theses. In his book Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace, the anthropologist Douglas Fry has gathered together the discoveries of researchers, after re-examining a vast collection of archeological and ethnographic studies.5 The debate about our origins, violent or peaceful, seems not to be about to die out, but as the eminent ethologist Robert Sapolsky stresses in his preface to Fry’s book: “A thorough review of the evidence leads, first, to a critique of the status quo picture of war and human nature—here dubbed the ‘man the warrior’ perspective—and, second, to the construction of a new interpretation of human aggression. The book argues that warfare is not inevitable and that humans have a substantial capacity for dealing with conflicts nonviolently.”
In fact, the majority of the history of Homo sapiens unfurled before the phenomenon of war appeared about ten thousand years ago.
According to two influential anthropologists, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, authors of a book with the explicit title Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, we are “the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”6 According to them, humans are the descendants of “killer apes” and inherit from their ancestors an innate predisposition to violence.
Similarly, in his bestseller African Genesis, the popularizer of science Robert Ardrey proclaims, “We are Cain’s children. The union of the enlarging brain and the carnivorous way produced man as a genetic possibility. The tightly packed weapons of the predator form the highest, final and most immediate foundation on which we stand.… Man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon.”7
These assertions rest on two hypotheses: one, that violence predominates among certain great apes; and two, that this condition was true for our common ancestor and for the first hominids.
The first point rests mainly on the observation of violent behavior among chimpanzees, especially on the episode of the “chimpanzee war” in the Gombe reserve in Tanzania as described by Jane Goodall. Actually, as we have seen in a previous chapter, elimination of one group of chimpanzees by a rival band remains a relatively rare phenomenon. In everyday life, disputes are infrequent, and are generally resolved by reconciliations between protagonists who groom each other. Observations in the field carried out by Jane Goodall and other researchers in fact show that, if chimpanzees devote 25% of their time to social interactions, for a given individual, the frequency of aggressive interactions does not exceed an average of two disputes per week.8 What’s more, among chimpanzees, it is not unusual for a dominant male to intervene during an argument and hold the arguers apart from each other until they calm down.
What about other primates? After reviewing a large number of studies of over sixty species, Robert Sussman and Paul Garber concluded that the vast majority of interactions are friendly and cooperative (preening, sharing food, etc.).9 By contrast, antagonistic interactions—mild spats, forcible ejections, threats and fighting—constitute barely 1% of social interactions. These authors conclude that, “Taken together, these data may help to explain observations that nonhuman primates live in relatively stable, cohesive social groups and solve the problems of everyday life in a generally cooperative fashion.”10 Similarly, after having observed baboons for fifteen years, Shirley Strum concludes, “aggression was not as pervasive or important an influence in evolution as had been thought, and social strategies and social reciprocity were extremely important.”11
We are genetically quite close to chimpanzees and bonobos (our DNA is 99.5% identical with theirs), but we do not descend from either one of them. According to the data at our disposal, the evolutionary lineage of early humans separated from that of the great apes six million years ago, long before the scission between bonobos and chimpanzees. So there is no reason to think a priori that our common ancestor resembled chimpanzees more than the more peaceful bonobos. As Frans de Waal remarks:
Had bonobos been known earlier, reconstructions of human evolution might have emphasized sexual relations, equality between males and females, and the origin of the family, instead of war, hunting, tool technology, and other masculine fortes. Bonobo society seems ruled by the “Make Love, Not War” slogan of the 1960s rather than the myth of a bloodthirsty killer ape that has dominated textbooks for at least three decades.12
In 1925, a young anatomy professor, Raymond Dart, discovered the fossilized skull of a young two- or three-year-old primate in a quarry in South Africa. The skull of the “Taung child,” from the name of the site, was extraordinarily well-preserved and presented a mixture of simian and human characteristics. Dart named the species Australopithecus africanus (“the southern monkey from Africa”) and asserted it was an ancestor of the human species. His hypothesis was first rejected by the scientific community and then, as new specimens of Australopithecus came to light, the importance of his discovery was acknowledged, and australopithecines classified among our ancestors, the hominids.
But Dart also had a fertile imagination. Although he was not a specialist in the processes of fossilization, after he had discovered several Australopithecus specimens, he saw in the presence of fractured skulls and broken bones proofs that these ancestors of man were not only hunters, but also that they killed each other and practiced cannibalism.13 The many baboon skulls and the few skulls of australopithecines that were crushed or had holes in them and that had been found on the same site signified to Dart that the individuals had been killed with clubs made from shinbones whose protuberances had produced the marks observed on the skulls. Similarly, based on the observation of regularly spaced holes on one skull, he decided it was a ritual murder. When a colleague asked Dart what percentage of the australopithecines he thought had been murdered, he replied, “Why, all of them, of course.” In Dart’s highly colored prose, our ancestors were “confirmed killers: carnivorous creatures that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb for limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.”14
Dart’s interpretations—which in the meantime inspired an entire literature on man’s ancestral barbarism, including The Children of Cain we cited earlier—have not held up under the investigations carried out by his successors. Minute examination of fossil remains led specialists in physical anthropology to conclude that the breakage in bones and skulls was the result of compression applied to the specimens by rocks and soil during the millennia of their fossilization.15
Another paleontologist, C. K. Brain, concluded that those holes observed in skullcaps were very likely perforations produced by the teeth of an extinct species of leopard whose remains were found in the same geological layer as the australopithecines.16 So we can agree with Douglas Fry’s conclusions: “The murderous, cannibalistic killer apes that Dart so vividly portrayed in fact turned out to have been merely lunch for leopards. Dart’s gruesome reconstructions were a fantasy.”17
As for the marks found on the skull of the Taung child, it was later shown that they resembled in every detail—size and distribution, outline of the scratches, forms of the fractures, etc.—the marks still made today by modern crowned eagles on the Ivory Coast on the skulls of the young baboons on which they feed.18
Thus, the main discoveries that led the first researchers to assert that our prehistoric ancestors were very violent toward each other, turned out to be, one after the other, explicable more plausibly by natural phenomena or by violence inflicted by non-human predators.
War is defined as an aggression carried out in a group by members of one community against members of another community. In almost every case it causes the deaths of non-specific members of the enemy community. So war should be distinguished from the personal violence characteristic of homicides and acts of vengeance, which aim at one or several individuals in particular.19
War leaves identifiable traces: fortifications built around villages; weapons intended for combat (which differ from hunting weapons); representations of scenes of war in art; burial places containing a large number of skeletons with points of projectiles or other artifacts embedded in the bones or other sites of the body; as well as a reduction of the number of males buried near villages (suggesting they died elsewhere). The simultaneous presence of several of these indications and their repetition in the same region constitute a proof of warlike activities.
The examination of a number of archeological documents has led many researchers, including the anthropologist Leslie Sponsel, to note:
During the hunter-gatherer stage of cultural evolution, which dominated 99 percent of human existence on the planet… lack of archaeological evidence for warfare suggests that it was rare or absent for most of human prehistory.20
During millions of years hominids, our ancestors, had immense spaces at their disposal. According to the survey carried out by the United States Census Bureau, ten thousand years ago, just before the development of agriculture, the population of the planet numbered between 1 million and 10 million individuals.21 Until that time, vestiges were indeed found indicating that certain individuals were probably victims of murder, but no trace of war between groups has been found. According to the anthropologist Jonathan Haas: “Archaeologically, there is negligible evidence for any kind of warfare anywhere in the world before about 10,000 years ago.”22 That seems plausible if we think, along with Frans de Waal, that the first human societies lived in small scattered bands, far from each other, and had no reason to wage war. They were much more concerned with surviving and escaping the predators prevalent at the time.23
The study of hunter-gatherer societies that still exist today also shows that they are comprised of small egalitarian communities, without leaders or marked hierarchy, which, because of their great mobility, could not own many goods or stockpile provisions.24 According to the evolutionary specialist Bruce Knauft: “With emphasis on egalitarian access to resources, cooperation, and diffuse affiliative networks, contrary emphasis on intergroup rivalry and collective violence is minimal.”25 The ethnologist Christopher Boehm, well-known for his encyclopedic knowledge, and who has studied hundreds of diverse societies, summarizes the image that emerges from the data he has analyzed in this way:
The data do leave us with some ambiguities, but I believe that as of 40,000 years ago, with the advent of anatomically modern humans who continued to live in small groups and had not yet domesticated plants and animals, it is very likely that all human societies practiced egalitarian behavior and that most of the time they did so very successfully.26
Even today, the Paliyan of South India, studied by the British ethnographer Peter Gardner, greatly value respect for the other, as well as autonomy and equality among all members of the community, men and women alike. The Paliyan avoid any form of competition and even abstain from making comparisons between people. They seek no form of prestige and have no leader. They prefer to resolve conflicts by mediation or avoidance rather than by confrontation.27 The same is true for the Kung of the Kalahari. When a skilled hunter brings back a particularly fruitful hunt, he is welcomed cheerfully but also, so that he won’t take himself too seriously, with jokes like “What a useless heap of skin and bones!” If anyone tries to impose himself as leader, he is subjected to general ostracism.28
Many cultures also have customs that work to prevent the emergence of a hierarchy within the group. According to Boehm, among the Hazda, “when a would-be ‘chief’ tried to persuade other Hazda to work for him, people openly made it clear that his efforts amused them.” Among the Iban, “if a chief tries to command, no one listens.”29
It’s when some hunter-gatherers began to become sedentary around 10,000 years ago that inequalities, hierarchical stratifications, and hereditary transmissions of wealth began.30 These sedentary populations began to cultivate the land and domesticate animals; they could thus accumulate wealth, which conferred power, attracted envy, and had to be protected. This new situation created hitherto nonexistent reasons to attack a group of people in order to seize their wealth, their land, or their herds. These raids were no longer directed against any particular individual, but against communities. Little by little they transformed into wars of conquest. Triumphant minorities governed. Aristocracy, clergy, and other hierarchical structures appeared, marking the end of equality within a society.
About ten thousand years ago, then, we detect the first signs of war. In the Near East, hunting and gathering gave way to an economy based on agriculture and animal husbandry. Archeological digs indicate scattered traces of war going back to about nine thousand five hundred years ago, followed by a geographical propagation and intensification of war over the centuries. Fortifications, absent till then, appear about seven thousand years ago along trade routes.31 The first signs of massacres and mass burials of adult males were also found.32
The famous walls of Jericho, which are over nine thousand years old, were long thought of—wrongly—as the first known military fortifications. A closer examination of the situation led the archeologist Marilyn Roper to conclude that no sign of war could be found there. What’s more, five other sites contemporary with that region are without surrounding walls.33 The moats of Jericho were dug only on three sides, thus leaving one side open, which scarcely makes sense for a defensive structure. The archeologist Bar-Yosef suggested a plausible alternative: The Neolithic walls of Jericho seem to have been built in order to form a rampart against floods and mudslides.34
On the American continent, the first signs of war appear four thousand years ago in Peru and three thousand years ago in Mexico. In his study of the coastal regions of North America, the archeologist Herbert Mashchner notes that before two thousand years ago, we find only a small number of traces of trauma attributable to blows, for instance, among skeletal remains. Then about 1,500 or possibly 1,800 years ago, the signs characteristic of warlike activities become evident. Defensive structures and larger villages, built in strategic positions that facilitate their defense, are encountered. Further, a decline in population, attributable to warfare, can be seen.35
So it seems that the assertions of the anthropologists Wrangham and Peterson, according to which “neither in history nor around the globe today is there evidence of a truly peaceful society,” are supported by no tangible proof.36 These authors argue that the existence of war goes back millions of years, without backing up their assertions by the use of archeological data. For Fry, one of the methodological errors of these authors consists of likening violent deaths (an ambiguous term) and homicides to acts of war.37 They speak, as the American archeologist Lawrence Keeley also does, of “prehistoric wars,” for circumstances that have nothing in common with what we today call “war.”38 As Fry remarks, it’s a little as if one spoke of war when an Englishwoman poisons her husband or South American bandits rob and kill travelers on a deserted road.39
Anthropologists teach us that human beings have spent over 99% of their existence on the planet in nomad bands surviving on hunting and gathering. Here again, we find at work the same prejudices, well-illustrated, for example, by the evolutionary psychology manual called The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence, in which Michael Ghiglieri declares, “Human recorded history, including hundreds of ethnographies of tribal cultures around the globe, reveals male coalitional warfare to be pervasive across cultures worldwide.”40 The same author concludes: “We live in a world in which cheaters, robbers, rapists, murderers, and warmongers lurk in every human landscape.”
One of the anthropologists who has contributed greatly to this somber view of things is Napoleon Chagnon, author of a publication—which became instantly famous—on the Yanomami Indians of the Amazonian forest.41 In this article and the book that followed, Yanomamo: The Fierce People,42 Chagnon asserts that men who had committed murders during raids on neighboring tribes had more wives and three times more children than those who had never killed anyone. Thus, since killers have a reproductive advantage over their less violent fellows, they would more likely transmit their genes to the following generations, and should thus have been favored by evolution. Chagnon deduced from this that violence might be the main force acting behind the evolution of culture. His book sold millions of copies worldwide, contributing widely to propagating the image of violent primitive man.
But it turned out that his study erred on a number of points, especially in the selection of different age groups: the sample of killers that Chagnon had selected was on average ten years older than that of the non-killers. It is obvious that, regardless of their quality as “killers” or “non-killers,” men of thirty-five will have had, on average, more children than those of twenty-five. Chagnon’s study is marred with many other methodological errors that invalidate his conclusions.
The French psychologist Jacques Lecomte searched for other anthropological studies on this theme and found only two, one conducted among the Cheyenne, the other among the Waorani, in Ecuador.43 Both are methodologically more rigorous than Chagnon’s study, and lead to the opposite conclusion: men involved in murderous activity have on average fewer children than men not involved in this type of activity.44
The anthropologist Kenneth Good, a student of Chagnon’s, expected the worst when he first traveled to the site. In the end, he spent many years among the Yanomami and even married a woman from the group. He discovered an entirely different reality:45
To my great surprise I had found among them a way of life that, while dangerous and harsh, was also filled with camaraderie, compassion, a thousand daily lessons in communal harmony.46 As I passed my first year with the Yanomama, I found that little by little I was growing to like their normal way of life, the harmony and cohesion of their group.… I liked the familial mutual aid, the way people took care of children, without ever being separated from them, pampering them or constantly educating them. I liked the respect they had for each other.… Despite raids, fits of anger and fighting, in the end they are a happy people, living in a harmonious society.47
Kenneth Good remains clear about the potential for violence of the Yanomami and acknowledges the existence of raids to avenge a murder or to seize women belonging to neighboring tribes but, according to him, by attributing to an entire people the behavior of a few individuals, Chagnon deformed reality as much as a sociologist who described New Yorkers as “a people of thieves and criminals” would do. In summary, among the Yanomami, violence is the deed of only a minority of individuals and, even among them, it is rare.48
We can wonder if the popularity of Chagnon’s book might partly be due to the fact that it seems to give scientific support to beliefs about man’s violent nature. How can we form a more nuanced idea of the incidence of violence in primitive cultures? In their introduction to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, Richard Lee and Richard Daly summarize the conclusions of a number of up-to-date studies:
Hunter-gatherers are generally peoples who have lived until recently without the overarching discipline imposed by the state.… The evidence indicates that they have lived together surprisingly well, solving their problems among themselves largely without recourse to authority figures and without a particular propensity for violence. It was not the situation that Thomas Hobbes, the great seventeenth-century philosopher, described in a famous phrase as “the war of all against all.”49
Even today, the Batek and Semai of Malaysia, for example, avoid violence and systematically choose to distance themselves from their potential enemies, going so far as to take flight in order to avoid any kind of conflict. They are however far from cowardly, and show great courage in their daily lives. The anthropologist Kirk Endicott once asked a Batek why his ancestors had not used their blowpipes with poison arrows to shoot at the Malais, who were launching raids to capture Batek and reduce them to slavery. The man was shocked by the question and replied, “Because it would kill them!”50 When disputes arise within their community or with another group, they find a way to settle them through mediation. As one Semai explained, “We’re very careful not to hurt others.… We really hate being involved in conflicts. We want to live in peace and security.”51 Nonviolence is ingrained in their children starting in infancy.
There do exist dissident voices, like the anthropologist Carole Ember, but she too commits the mistake of including under the term “war” any kind of hostile behavior, including individual murders.52 Using more realistic criteria, other researchers have counted over seventy traditional cultures that are mainly exempt from violence.53 That does not mean that violence and murder are absent from these cultures, but that it’s a question of personal disputes and not conflicts between groups.
In Arnhem Land in Australia, a number of cave art sites have been discovered that are 10,000 years old, where animals, humans and mythical creatures are represented. Most scenes evoke daily life, and some of them show people hurling spears and boomerangs.
The archeologists Paul Tacon and Christopher Chippindale interpreted these latter images as scenes of war. In an article entitled “Ancient Warriors of Australia,” they explain that “Some of the paintings depict fighting, warriors, aspects or the results of warfare, and even elaborate, detailed battle scenes.”54
Yet well-documented studies have established that war was unknown among the aborigines.55 But, above all, ethnologists have described an ancestral custom, known as makarata, still practiced until recently, that strongly resembles what was represented in the cave paintings. When the members of two tribes had accumulated grievances and complaints against each other—seduction of women or promises not kept—having gone beyond a certain limit of tolerance, one of the tribes would set out on an expedition and camp near the other.
The first night was spent in reciprocal visits, carried out by individuals who knew each other well and hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Then, the next morning, a few dozen men from each camp would stand face to face. An elder from one of the tribes would open the hostilities by haranguing an individual from the other tribe, pouring all his detailed recriminations onto him. When he was out of breath and arguments, the accused would retort with just as much verve, for as long as he liked. Then came the turn of a second member of the first tribe to reel off his speech, to which the person targeted would reply by expressing his own grievances. It is remarkable to note that these vehement reproaches were always addressed to individuals, never to the group itself. As we have seen, we know that mass violence, massacres as well as genocides, always begin by demonizing a particular group.
After endless talk, finally, the throwing of spears began. It was always one individual that aimed at another, and it was mainly practiced by the elders. Whenever some young men threw the weapon, the elders would always remind them, “Be careful, don’t wound anyone!” The exchanges of throws calculated to miss their target would continue, until, inadvertently, a person was injured. Then, everything would stop. After a last torrent of verbal dispute, in which this time all the relatives of the victim would join in, who were usually distributed among both camps because of marriages between groups, the meeting was over.
We can see how the possibility was theatrically provided for each of the members of the two tribes, who usually entertained good relations, to “get things off their chest” when too many grudges had been accumulated. A much more serious conflict was thus avoided. By piercing the abscess, the illness is cured and good relations resume. Far from being an act of war, these ceremonial battles served to calm tensions and to avoid actual conflicts. However, despite the fact that in twenty years of observations, W. Lloyd Warner never observed a single death resulting from these makarata, he made this ritual, which he himself defined as a “ceremonial combat to make peace,” one of the “six categories of war” that he listed.56 It is, to say the least, paradoxical to call “war” a ritual meant to make peace and which causes no deaths.57
It was important, then, when considering the overviews of Douglas Fry and other anthropologists, to dissipate the belief in a humanity that has always been brutal, bloodthirsty and instinctively given to violence. Nevertheless, once a vision closer to reality has been re-established—namely that most primitive tribes stressed cooperation and peaceful cohabitation more than exploitation and aggressiveness—it would be just as wrong to give an idyllic vision of our ancestors. The image of Rousseau’s “noble savage” is no more plausible than that of the “martial man.” Individual violence was part of the existence of our ancestors and resulted in murders, themselves followed by reprisals. Although the method attempting to establish a count lends itself to controversy, it seems that the rate of violent death (including death due to non-human predators) varies from 1% or 2% to 15% in prehistoric societies and in contemporary societies of hunter-gatherers, with extremes that have naturally drawn attention, like the Waorani of the Amazon, for example, among whom up to 60% of violent deaths among men has been registered.58
On the other hand, today, the homicide rate in Europe is only 1 per 100,000 inhabitants (.001%) per year. Despite all the alarmist news widely spread in the media, we live in incomparably greater safety than in the past.
Though war did not exist during the first 98% of human history, it has soared, starting about 10,000 years ago, to reach catastrophic dimensions for several millennia. But over the course of the last few centuries, especially since the second half of the twentieth century, as the following chapter illustrates, the number of conflicts and their gravity have continued to diminish.59