But as I have asserted in my book The End of War and on this site, Pinker and other Hobbesians have exaggerated warfare among early humans. The evidence is especially strong in the American Southwest, where archaeologists have found numerous skeletons with projectile points embedded in them and other marks of violence war seems to have surged during periods of drought. Yes, Native Americans waged war before Europeans showed up. The colonel retorts, “You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent.” Army colonel about whites’ violent treatment of the Indians. In the 2007 HBO docudrama Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Chief Sitting Bull complains to a U.S. Referring specifically to the pre-Colombian New World, Keeley asserted, “The dogs of war were seldom on a leash.” Popular culture has amplified these scientific claims. The Hobbesian thesis has been advanced in other influential books, notably War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, by anthropologist Lawrence Keeley Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, by archaeologist Steven LeBlanc War in Human Civilization, by political scientist Azar Gat The Social Conquest of Earth, by biologist Edward Wilson and The World Until Yesterday, by geographer Jared Diamond. Pinker expanded on this claim in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature. “Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage,” psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in 2007, “quantitative body counts-such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with ax marks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men-suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.” According to Pinker, the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes “got it right” when he called pre-state life a “war of all against all.” Prominent scientists now deride depictions of pre-state people as peaceful.
This episode seemed to support the view-often (apparently erroneously) attributed to the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau-of Native Americans and other pre-state people as peaceful, “noble savages.”
When I was in grade school, my classmates and I wore paper Indian headdresses and Pilgrim hats and reenacted the “first Thanksgiving,” in which supposedly friendly Native Americans joined Pilgrims for a fall feast of turkey, venison, squash and corn. The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding once again over scientists’ slanderous portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes. Note: This post first appeared on November 21, 2016.
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