[Closed] Archaeology/Anthropologist types - question

I would suggest all of those are pretty poor articles. Not all H/G societies were as violent as others (lots of those violent societies are PNG, which was very warlike, some in south America had ritualised violence which was very limited on numbers) and some of the comparisons to modern societies are very narrowly chosen also.

Yay, someone took at interest - thanks nickc.

Do we have enough archaeological data on hunter gatherers to make generalisations? How peaceful were the least violent tribes, how common were they?

The most violent functioning states, ege Colombia in the 90s and early 2000s wouldn't come close to the hunter gatherers highlighted in the ourworldindata article.

The NS article reads like an opinion piece.

And the last one is just a rant.

It's very hard to make judgements based on single sites or even known battle sites you can say:

One: there's much less specialism. In H/G societies everybody fights, as we moved to agriculture, you can have special men to do that for you, so as a percentage of population H/G suffered much higher rates of depopulation and extinction threats. Secondly they're also your resource gatherers, so any depletion of those men has a big impact on survival

In terms of data about tribes (or periods of history) about how fighty (or not) they were? Not really, sorry. As you get towards neolithic much warfare is already becoming more ritualised.

Interesting Nick.

So the NS article is bullshit, nice to know that they are publishing popular science articles with as much journalistic integrity as the Daily Mail.

There is plenty of evidence in the archaeological record of violence between individuals - so I would extrapolate that it was also true between groups. Throw in the anthropological experience of inter-tribal conflict in hunter gatherer societies and I would say that any article claiming otherwise is wide of the mark.

I even lived with such a tribe for a few months 22 years ago and learned what life used to be like for them - if anything moving into a more modern society and the links and communication that has brought with it had made them considerably less warlike 😉

Do we have enough archaeological data on hunter gatherers to make generalisations?

Tom_W1987 - Member

Interesting Nick.

So the NS article is bullshit,

YOu mean it doesn't fit in with your predjudices so in your closed mind you dismiss it same as you do with anything you don't understand.

There are still hunter gather tribes in some remote areas who live without conflict from my vry limited knowledge

Did you do the thing scientists / researchers do when critiquing a piece? Look to the sources, read them, see if the inferences drawn are valid?

Just because it's in New Scientist doesn't mean it's true.
I watched a National Geographic "documentary" being filmed, where two elephants were taking turns to lie in a ditch and pretend to be injured.

There is always an agenda.

Did you do the thing scientists / researchers do when critiquing a piece? Look to the sources, read them, see if the inferences drawn are valid?

Yup, a few cherry picked articles strung together like always. I could probably do the same as a hack for the Daily Mail and pin cancer on immigration.

James Woodburn seems to be quoted a lot in Marxist Magazines, Frank Marlowe seems to be a part of group called "Radical Anthropology" - on their website they describe one workshop as "[i]Ingrid Lewis has spent many years with the Bayaka forest hunter-gatherers of the Congo Basin. In this emotionally powerful practical workshop, she will reveal what she has learned from these people about how to manage social conflict, create harmony and ensure mental and physical well-being, all through polyphonic singing. Everyone can do this. Previous singing experience not required! [/i]" 😀

But to digress away from tongue in cheek character assassination, the field seems to be a little to full of people making big claims based on qualitative field work (hanging out with the odd tribe or two) with very little hard data to back their assumptions up. It doesn't surprise me either, I used to on occasion - hang out with a lot of history students in Oxford. If they weren't out of their ****ing minds on weed they were singing folk music and strumming god damn mandolins - anything about statistics or data would make their eyes glaze over.

I found myself surprised that a scientific news source is willing to print such sotheadedness.

So the NS article is bullshit

I think they're all a bit dicey TBH, the first one, yeah I've read any number like that, and its true that there is a large part of the archeology world that wants this world view to be true. But it's also true that when bodies are found from HunGat societies they've often got holes in them... The problem with then concluding that they were all very fighty all the time is again one of evidence. There are sites on migration routes that show evidence of culture mix and even cooperation, so no they weren't peace loving hippies but they weren't all mad max wannabes either. When they needed to be they were extremely violent and probably just as equally not when they didn't need to be.

However that second article with all the graphs is equally as gash, one of them compares single site events with the whole of c15 Europe!

The third article is just a rant

I think it's extremely dicey to compare modern HunGat societies who are often forced to live in marginal spaces under repressive regimes and say "this is how we used to live" , just because they're still wearing penis shrouds and carrying spears...

I think it's extremely dicey to compare modern HunGat societies who are often forced to live in marginal spaces under repressive regimes and say "this is how we used to live" , just because they're still wearing penis shrouds and carrying spears...

This. The NS piece seems to make a few leaps which seem more driven by modern political agendas than a painstaking use of evidence. It could be that some HG units were models of non-violence and shared resources, but the scarcity of evidence leaves a vacuum which can be conveniently filled with opinion and bias-driven guesswork.

A quick look at the CV of the research author suggests that the core of her work, and possibly her belief-system, centres on inequality and social justice.

NS has always been a bit of a comic though - the 'angle' and the headline trumps the rigour.

After a recent visit to Atapuerca that article seems tobe motivated by something other than objective observation and interpretation.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248412001406