The idea that “human nature” is violent and competitive holds strong sway but this anthropological review of hunter gatherer societies shows that food-sharing, gender equality and cooperative childcare are far more the norm. #MutualAid #solidarity #communism
Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution: New light on old debates - Richard B. Lee
libcom.org/history/hunter-gatherers-human-evolution-new-light-old-debates-richard-b-leeA leading specialist on hunter-gatherers exposes Steven Pinker’s poorly-researched claims that humans have always been war-like.
Richard Lee also summarises decades of research on hunter-gatherers showing how they emphasise food-sharing, gender equality and cooperative childcare. Lee concludes that it was this sort of less aggressive and more cooperative social environment in our evolutionary past that permitted the long childhoods required for human brain growth.
A perennial debate in anthropology has centered around the question of the degree of violence in human history. These discussions are part of a larger philosophical debate about the relative weight of competition/aggression versus cooperation/nonviolence in human evolution and, by implication, in human nature. Adherents of one or another view on this question often invoke evidence from hunter-gatherers, ancient and modern. But the hunter-gatherer data are often misread or twisted to conform to the theorist’s preconceived agenda.
In this review article, I approach the issue from two perspectives. First, I examine the evidence, ethnographic and archaeological, for the argument that places hunter-gatherer violence and aggression at the center of theories of human evolution. And second, I take a fresh look at an old debate by drawing on other aspects of hunter-gatherer data that have stimulated exciting and innovative new thinking coming out of the world of human behavioral ecology and evolutionary theory, particularly the work of Hrdy (2009) and Narvaez (2014) and their colleagues and contemporaries.
Hunter-gatherer studies occupy a unique space in anthropology, straddling the borders between social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology. Practitioners often made forays into adjacent subfields in pursuit of problems not easily contained within subdisciplines. Human evolution has been a particularly fraught problem area for hunter-gatherer specialists. While some scholars have invoked ethnographic data to bolster one or another specific position, others eschewed it on the grounds that placing hunter-gatherers in such comparisons steered dangerously close to the discredited evolutionism of nineteenth-century anthropology. Acutely aware of the pitfalls, I have spent most of my career in anthropology studying hunter-gatherers from strictly ethnographic, ecological, political, and historical perspectives (e.g., Lee 1979, Leacock & Lee 1982, Lee & Daly 1999, Lee 2016). However, crucial questions of human behavioral evolution continue to draw the hunter-gatherer specialist into exciting but potentially murky waters.
As a cultural anthropology graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s, it was my good fortune to be exposed to human evolutionary studies with Sherwood L. Washburn, African prehistory with J. Desmond Clark, hunter-gatherer ethnography and archaeology with Robert Heizer, and theories of kinship and social organization with Robert Murphy, later (briefly) a colleague at Columbia University. These diverse influences ensured that I would never be entirely comfortable with the rigid divisions between anthropology’s subdisciplines and instead always be open to research problems that required analysts to cross boundaries and draw threads from two or more of these lines of inquiry.
Landing in 1963 in the northern Kalahari Desert with the Ju/’hoansi, then known as the !Kung Bushmen, demanded that I pursue an interdisciplinary approach. In one study, I conducted ethnography along classic Malinowskian lines, with kinship and marriage, subsistence and social organization, and politics and economic life at the center (Lee 1979). At the same time, through Washburn and Clark’s influences, I stayed alert to the potential evolutionary significance of the !Kung data. Given that their way of life—hunting of wild game and gathering of wild foods—was once the universal mode of human existence, could the study of the !Kung and other modern hunter-gatherers offer clues and shed light on the conditions under which the human way of life originally evolved? Assessing the relative weight of violence and nonviolence in hunter-gatherers offered a particularly compelling point of entry. In the 1960s, the bio-evolutionary world was shaken by the publication of Konrad Lorenz’s (1966) On Aggression, which painted a dark picture of mankind’s propensity for violence. The gravity of the issues raised is illustrated in the following (true) story.
Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, a brilliant US legislator in the 1960s and the founder of the scholarship program that bears his name, was just one public figure struggling to come to grips with the import of Lorenz’s theses. I vividly remember the late Irven DeVore coming into my office at Harvard University. “I just got off the phone with Senator William Fulbright calling from Washington,” DeVore said. “He asked me ‘Professor DeVore, if Konrad Lorenz is right, how are we ever to negotiate a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union?’” DeVore reassured Fulbright that Lorenz’s views were far from universally accepted among anthropologists, that violence in human history was a variable not a constant, and that its causes and expressions were far more complex than could be explained simply by pure animal instinct. DeVore’s disclaimers appeared to calm Senator Fulbright’s nerves, and in fact the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) went on to successfully negotiate a series of nuclear arms reduction treaties over the years. Nevertheless, the question of violence in human history continued to animate the debate within anthropology, fueled by Robert Ardrey’s “killer ape” hypothesis in his books African Genesis (Ardrey 1961) and The Territorial Imperative (Ardrey 1966). Interest was sustained by Napoleon Chagnon’s (1968) influential ethnography of the “fierce” Yanomamo and more recently by the writings of Wrangham & Peterson (1996), such as Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. I have labeled this persistent thread within anthropology and related disciplines as the “Bellicose School” (Lee 2014).
My own fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s with the Ju/’hoansi-!Kung San of Botswana drew me into the controversy. As a young fieldworker, I was a great admirer of the Marshall family’s work with !Kung people over the border in South West Africa, the ethnographies of Lorna Marshall (1957, 1961), the films of her son John Marshall (1973), and the writings of her daughter Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
I read with great pleasure Liz Thomas’s (1959) classic memoir of her family’s time in the field entitled The Harmless People. Yet how was I to reconcile the title of her book with the evidence I was gathering from my own fieldwork on the significant numbers of homicides committed by the !Kung? In all, colleagues and I documented some 25 homicides over a 50-year period. Given the small size of the base population, these numbers translated into homicide rates comparable in magnitude to rates in troubled American cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit (Lee 1979, pp. 390–400).
Though no fan of the bellicose school, I was driven by a sense of scientific responsibility to publish these findings and criticize the otherwise admirable work of Marshall Thomas. I am happy to report that Elizabeth and I worked out our differences. She acknowledged the possible misdirection of her title and, as will become evident below, I came to appreciate the deeper truths contained in her reflections on !Kung life (see the Appendix titled ‘Pinker and the Ju/’hoansi/!Kung Case Study’ for a closer examination of the Ju/’hoansi-!Kung case to place their homicide rates into a broader context).
This controversy within the small community of San ethnographers motivated me to understand better the historical roots of the bellicose school and its critics. The question of violence in hunter-gatherer society has animated philosophical debates since at least the seventeenth century. In Thomas Hobbes’s social evolutionary view, life in the “state of nature” was “nasty, brutish, and short” [Hobbes 1969 (1651)], while Jean-Jacques Rousseau launched humanity’s trajectory from a baseline of the “noble savage” [Rousseau 2003 (1749)]. Despite the publication of much more accurate data from twentieth-century archaeology and ethnography, the underlying debate has remained.
In a recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, psychologist Steven Pinker (2011), an avowed Hobbesian, added a new twist to the debate. Despite humanity’s deep flaws, he argues, there is reason for hope—things are getting better. Like the famous figure of Dr. Pangloss, in Voltaire’s eighteenth-century classic Candide, Pinker sought to affirm that civilization, if not the best-of-all-possible-worlds, is at least vastly superior to the state of humanity during its long history of hunting and gathering. In The Better Angels and elsewhere, Pinker (2002, 2007) draws on recent studies that assert a baseline of primordial violence by prestate peoples. Pinker cites these as the clincher for the Hobbesian view.
Just how accurate is Pinker’s reading of human history and prehistory? Does it survive the serious scrutiny to which all truth claims should be subjected? In the current era of fake news and alternative facts, it is particularly urgent to approach this issue in the spirit of scientific integrity. Our task here is finite and doable: to document the levels of violence in hunter-gatherer societies, recent and prehistoric, and understand their causes and consequences.
When we have a good grip on the empirical evidence, then we can go on to the bigger question: How does the presence or absence of violence and warfare in hunter-gatherer societies—past and present—impact the construction of plausible theories of the evolution of human behavior?