immediately ended warfare before European traders, missionaries, or even indirectly transmitted European trade goods could appear. When first studied by anthropologists in the 1950s, Africa’s !Kung bands were no longer raiding each other, although the frequency of individual murders within bands or between neighboring bands remained high until 1955. Four of the last five murders (in 1946, 1952, 1952, and 1955) resulted in the Tswana administration taking the killers off to jail, and that plus the availability of Tswana courts for settling disputes induced the !Kung to abandon murder as a means for resolving conflicts after 1955. However, !Kung oral histories report inter-band raids several generations earlier, until the time when increased Tswana contact introduced iron for arrowheads and other changes. Somehow, that contact resulted in an end to raiding long before the Tswana police intervened to arrest killers.
My remaining example comes from northwest Alaska, where formerly widespread fighting and exterminations among Yupik and Inupiaq Inuit ended within a decade or a generation of European contact—not because of patrol officers, police, and courts forbidding war but because of other consequences of contact. The end of Yupik warfare is attributed to an 1838 smallpox epidemic that depleted the populations of several groups. The end of Inupiaq warfare appears to have been due to the Inupiaq chronic obsession with trade, and to their greatly increased new opportunities to trade furs to the Europeans with whom regular contact became intense after 1848: continued warfare would have been an obvious impediment to those opportunities.
Thus, the long-term effect of European, Tswana, or other outside contact with states or chiefdoms has almost always been to suppress tribal warfare. The short-term effect has variously been either an immediate suppression as well or else an initial flare-up and then suppression. It cannot be said that traditional warfare is an artifact of European contact.
Nevertheless, there has been a long history of denial of traditional warfare among Western scholars. Jean- Jacques Rousseau, already mentioned for his speculative theory of state formation not based on any empirical evidence, had an equally speculative and ungrounded theory of warfare: he claimed that humans were naturally compassionate in a state of nature, and that wars began only with the rise of states. Trained ethnographers studying traditional societies in the 20th century mostly found themselves dealing with tribes and bands that had already been pacified by colonial governments, until some anthropologists were able to witness the last examples of traditional wars in the 1950s and 1960s in the New Guinea Highlands and Amazonia. Archaeologists excavating fortifications associated with ancient wars have often overlooked, ignored, or explained them away, e.g., by dismissing defensive ditches and palisades surrounding a village as mere “enclosures” or “symbols of exclusion.” But the evidence of traditional warfare, whether based on direct observation or oral histories or archaeological evidence, is so overwhelming that one has to wonder: why is there still any debate about its importance?
One reason is the real difficulties, which we have discussed, in evaluating traditional warfare under pre- contact or early-contact conditions. Warriors quickly discern that visiting anthropologists disapprove of war, and the warriors tend not to take anthropologists along on raids or allow them to photograph battles undisturbed: the filming opportunities available to the Harvard Peabody Expedition among the Dani were unique. Another reason is that the short-term effects of European contact on tribal war can work in either direction and have to be evaluated case by case with an open mind. But the widespread denial of traditional warfare seems to go beyond those and other uncertainties in the evidence itself, and instead to involve reluctance to accept evidence for its existence or extent. Why?
There may be several reasons at work. Scholars tend to like, to identify with, or to sympathize with the traditional people among whom they live for several years. The scholars consider war bad, know that most readers of their monographs will also consider war bad, and don’t want “their” people to be viewed as bad. Another reason involves unfounded claims (to be discussed below) that human warfare has an inexorable genetic basis. That leads to the false assumption that war would be unstoppable, and hence to a reluctance to acknowledge the apparently depressing conclusion that war traditionally really has been widespread. Still another reason is that some state or colonial governments are eager to get indigenous people out of the way by conquering or dispossessing them or by turning a blind eye to their extermination. Branding them as warlike is used as an excuse to justify that mistreatment, so scholars seek to remove that excuse by trying to absolve the indigenous people of the charge of being warlike.
I sympathize with scholars outraged by the mistreatment of indigenous peoples. But denying the reality of traditional warfare because of political misuse of its reality is a bad strategy, for the same reason that denying any other reality for any other laudable political goal is a bad strategy. The reason not to mistreat indigenous people is not that they are falsely accused of being warlike, but that it’s unjust to mistreat them. The facts about traditional warfare, just like the facts about any other controversial phenomenon that can be observed and studied, are likely eventually to come out. When they do come out, if scholars have been denying traditional warfare’s reality for laudable political reasons, the discovery of the facts will undermine the laudable political goals. The rights of indigenous people should be asserted on moral grounds, not by making untrue claims susceptible to refutation.
Warlike animals, peaceful peoples
If one defines war as I defined it on p. 131—“recurrent violence between groups belonging to rival political units, and sanctioned by the units”—and if one takes a broadened view of “political units” and “sanctioned,” then war characterizes not only humans but also some animal species. The species most often mentioned in discussions of human war is the common chimpanzee, because it is one of our two closest living animal relatives. War among chimpanzees resembles human band and tribal warfare in consisting of either chance encounters or else apparently intentional raids involving adult males. Calculated war-related death rates in chimpanzees, 0.36% per year (i.e., 36 chimpanzees per year in a population of 10,000), are similar to those for traditional human societies. Does this mean that warfare was transmitted to humans in a straight line from our chimpanzee ancestors, hence that it has a genetic basis, hence that we are helplessly pre-programmed to make war, hence that it’s inevitable and can’t be prevented?
The answer to all four of these questions is no. Chimpanzees are not the ancestors of humans; instead, chimpanzees and humans are both descended from a common ancestor that lived about 6,000,000 years ago, and from which modern chimpanzees may be more divergent than are modern humans. It is not the case that all descendants of that common ancestor make war: bonobos (formerly known as pygmy chimpanzees), which genetically are the same distance from us as are chimpanzees and hence are the other one of our two closest animal relatives, are also derived from that common ancestor but have not been observed to make war; and some traditional human societies don’t make war. Among social animal species other than chimpanzees, some (e.g., lions, wolves, hyenas, and some ant species) are known to practise lethal fighting between groups, while others are not known to do so. Evidently, war does arise repeatedly and independently but is not inevitable among social animals in general, nor within the human-chimpanzee evolutionary line in particular, nor among modern human societies more particularly. Richard Wrangham argues that two features distinguish those social species that do practise war from those that don’t: intense resource competition, and occurrence in groups of variable size such that large groups sometimes encounter small groups or individual animals which they can safely attack and overwhelm by numbers with little risk to the aggressors.
As for a genetic basis to human warfare, it of course has a genetic basis, in the same broad and distant sense in which cooperation and other multi-faceted human behaviors have a genetic basis. That is, the human brain and hormones and instincts are laid down ultimately by genes, such as the genes that control the synthesis of the hormone testosterone associated with aggressive behavior. However, the normal range of aggressive behavior, like the normal range of body height, is influenced by many different genes and by environmental and social factors (like effects of childhood nutrition on adult height). That’s unlike single-gene traits such as sickle-cell hemoglobin, which a person carrying the gene for that trait synthesizes regardless of childhood nutrition, other genes, or environmental competition. Like warfare, warfare’s converse of cooperation is widespread but variably expressed among human societies. We already saw in Chapter 1 that cooperation between neighboring human societies is favored by certain environmental conditions, such as resource fluctuations within or between years, and whether or not a territory contains all resources necessary for self-sufficient survival. It is not inevitable or genetically programmed that neighboring small-scale societies cooperate; there are reasons why some cooperate more and some cooperate less.
