Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (28 page)

… usually less than 5 percent of their day is spent in any active social behavior whatsoever.” Sussman and Garber found that “usually less than 1 percent of their day is spent fighting or competing, and it’s unusually much less than 1

percent.” They found cooperative, affiliative behavior like playing and grooming to be ten to twenty times more common than conflict in all primate species.15

But Goodall’s impression of relative harmony was to change—not coincidentally, argues Power—precisely when she and her students began giving the chimps hundreds of bananas every day, to entice them to hang around the camp so they could be observed more easily.

In the wild, chimps spread out to search for food individually or in small groups. Because the food is scattered throughout the jungle, competition is unusual. But, as Frans de Waal explains, “as soon as humans start providing food, even in the jungle, the peace is quickly disturbed.”16

The mounds of deliciously smelly fruit locked in reinforced concrete boxes opened only for timed, regular feedings altered the chimps’ behavior dramatically. Goodall’s assistants had to keep rebuilding the boxes, as the frustrated apes found endless ways of prying or smashing them open.

Ripe fruit that could not be eaten immediately was a new experience for them—one that left the chimps confused and enraged. Imagine telling a room of unruly three-year-olds on Christmas morning (each with the strength of four adult men) that they’ll have to wait an unspecified amount of time to open the piles of presents they can see right there, under the tree.

Recalling this period a few years later, Goodall wrote, “The constant feeding was having a marked effect upon the behaviour of the chimps. They were beginning to move about in large groups more often than they had ever done in the old days. They were sleeping near camp and arriving in noisy hordes early in the morning. Worst of all,
the adult males
were becoming increasingly aggressive.
… Not only was there
a great deal more fighting than ever before,
but many of the chimps were hanging around camp for hours and hours every day [emphasis added].”17

Margaret Power’s doubts concerning Goodall’s provisioning of the chimps have been largely left unaddressed by most primatologists, not just Wrangham.18 Michael Ghiglieri, for example, went to study the chimps in Kibale Forest in nearby Uganda
specifically
in response to the notion that the intergroup conflict Goodall’s team had witnessed might have been due to the distorting effects of those banana boxes.

Ghiglieri writes, “My mission … [was] to find out whether these warlike killings were normal or an artifact of the researchers having provisioned the chimps with food to observe them.”19 But somehow Margaret Power’s name doesn’t even appear in the index of Ghiglieri’s book, published eight years after hers.

We lack the space to adequately explore the questions Power raised, or to address subsequent reports of intergroup conflict among some (but not all) unprovisioned chimps in other study areas.20 While we’ve got our doubts about the motivations of Pinker and Chagnon (see below), like Margaret Power, we have none about Jane Goodall’s intentions or scientific integrity. Still, with all due respect to Goodall, Power’s questions deserve consideration by anyone seriously interested in the debate over the possible primate origins of warfare.

The Spoils of War

Margaret Power’s questions cut to the heart of the matter: why fight if there’s nothing worth fighting over? Before the scientists started provisioning the apes, food appeared throughout the jungle, so the chimps spread out in search of something to eat each day. Chimps often call out to the others when they find a fruiting tree; mutual aid helps everyone, and feeding in the forest isn’t a zero-sum endeavor. But once they learned that there would be a
limited
amount of easy food available in the same place each day, more and more chimps started arriving in aggressive, “noisy hordes” and “hanging around.” Soon after, Goodall and her students began witnessing the now-famous “warfare” between chimp groups.

Perhaps for the first time ever, the chimps had something worth fighting over: a concentrated, reliable, yet limited source of food. Suddenly, they lived in a zero-sum world.

Applying this same reasoning to human societies, we’re left wondering why immediate-return hunter-gatherers would risk their lives to fight wars. Over what, exactly? Food? That’s spread out in the environment. Societies indigenous to areas where food is concentrated by natural conditions, like the periodic salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada, tend not to be immediate-return hunter-gatherers. We’re more likely to find complex, hierarchical societies like the Kwakiutl (discussed later) in such spots. Possessions? Foragers have few possessions of any nonsentimental value. Land? Our ancestors evolved on a planet nearly empty of human beings for the vast majority of our existence as a species. Women? Possibly, but this claim presumes that population growth was important to foragers and that women were commodities to be fought over and traded like the livestock of pastoralists. It’s likely that keeping population stable was more important to foragers than expanding it. As we’ve seen, when a group reaches a certain number of people, it tends to split into smaller groups anyway, and there is no inherent advantage in having
more
people to feed in band-level societies. We’ve also seen that women and men would have been free to move among different bands in the fission-fusion social system typical of hunter-gatherers, chimps, and bonobos.

The causal reverberations between social structure (foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial), population density, and the likelihood of war is supported by research conducted by sociologist Patrick Nolan, who found, “Warfare is more likely in advanced horticultural and agrarian societies than it is in hunting-and-gathering and simple horticultural societies.” When he limited his analysis only to hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies, Nolan found that above-average population density was the best predictor of war.21

This finding is problematic for the argument that human war is a “5-million-year habit,” given our ancestors’ low population densities until the post-agricultural population explosion began just a few thousand years ago. Recent research looking at changes in mitochondrial DNA confirms that already low prehistoric global human population levels dropped nearly to extinction at several points (due to climatological catastrophes probably triggered by volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes, and sudden changes in ocean currents). As mentioned previously, the entire world population of
Homo sapiens
may have dropped to just a few thousand individuals as recently as 74,000 years ago, when the massive Toba eruption severely disrupted world climate.

But even with much of the northern hemisphere covered in ice, the world was anything but crowded for our distant ancestors.22

Population demographics have triggered wars in more recent historical times. Ecologist Peter Turchin and anthropologist Andrey Korotayev looked at data from English, Chinese, and Roman history, finding strong statistical correlations between increases in population density and warfare. Their research suggests population growth could account for as much as 90

percent of the variation between historical periods of war and peace.23

Early agriculture’s stores of harvested grain and herds of placid livestock were like boxes of bananas in the jungle.

There was now something worth fighting over: more. More land to cultivate. More women to increase population to work the land, raise armies to defend it, and help with the harvest.

More slaves for the hard labor of planting, harvesting, and fighting. Failed crops in one area would lead desperate farmers to raid neighbors, who would retaliate, and so on, over and over.24

Freedom (from war) is just another word for nothing to lose—or gain.

But neo-Hobbesians ignore this rather straightforward analysis and the data supporting it, insisting that war
must
be an eternal human drive, all too often resorting to desperate rhetorical tactics like Pinker’s to defend their view.

In the fourth chapter of his book
Sick Societies: Challenging
the Myth of Primitive Harmony,
for example, Robert Edgerton writes, “Social stratification developed in some small-scale societies that lacked not only bureaucracies and priesthoods but cultivation as well.” Okay, but in support of this assertion about social stratification and brutal rule by elites in “small-scale societies,” he offers fifteen pages of vivid descriptions of, in this order (and leaving nothing out):

• the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island (a slave-owning,

settled,

property-accumulating,

potlatch-celebrating, complex, hierarchical society);

• the Aztec Empire (numbering in the millions, with elaborate religious structures, priesthoods, and untold acres of slave-cultivated land around a capital city larger than any in Europe at the time of first contact, featuring sewage systems and lighted streets at night);

• the Zulu Empire (again, numbering well into the millions, with slavery, intensive agriculture, animal domestication, and continent-wide trade networks);

• the Asante Empire of present-day Ghana, which, Edgerton tells us, “was incomparably the greatest military power in West Africa.”25

What any of these empires have to do with small-scale societies with no bureaucracies, priesthoods, or cultivation, Edgerton doesn’t say. In fact, he doesn’t mention a single foraging society for the rest of the chapter. This is like declaring that cats are difficult to train, then offering as evidence German shepherds, beagles, greyhounds, and golden retrievers.

In
Beyond War,
anthropologist Doug Fry rebuts the neo-Hobbesian view of universal war. “The belief that ‘there has always been war,’” Fry writes, “does not correspond with the archaeological facts of the matter.” Anthropologist Leslie Sponsel agrees, writing, “Lack of archaeological evidence for warfare suggests that it was rare or absent for most of human prehistory.” After conducting a comprehensive review of prehistoric skeletal evidence, anthropologist Brian Ferguson concluded that apart from one particular site in modern-day Sudan, “only about a dozen
Homo sapiens
skeletons 10,000

years old or older, out of hundreds of similar antiquity examined to date, show clear indications of interpersonal violence.” Ferguson continues, “If warfare were prevalent in early prehistoric times, the abundant materials in the archaeological record would be rich with evidence of warfare.

But the signs are not there.”26

Our bullshit detectors go off when scholars point to violent chimps and a few cherry-picked horticultural human societies mislabeled as foragers, claiming these as evidence of ancient tendencies toward warfare. Even more troubling, these scholars often remain mute on the distorting effects on chimps of food provisioning, ever-shrinking habitats under siege from armies of hungry soldiers and poachers, reduced living space, food, and genetic vigor. Equally troubling is their silence on the crucial effects of population demographics and the rise of the agricultural state on the likelihood of human conflict.

The

Napoleonic

Invasion

(The

Yanomami Controversy)

nonAs the summer of love was winding down and Jane Goodall’s first reports of chimpanzee warfare were exploding into public consciousness, Napoleon Chagnon suddenly became the world’s most famous living anthropologist with the publication of
Yanomamö: The Fierce People.
The year 1968 was a good one to come out with a dashing anthropological adventure yarn claiming to prove that warfare is ancient and integral to human nature.

The year began with the “velvet revolution” in Prague and the TET offensive in Vietnam. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s worst dream came true in Memphis, Robert Kennedy was felled on a Los Angeles stage, and blood and chaos ran in the streets of Chicago. Richard Nixon slinked into the White House, Charles Manson and his lost followers plotted mayhem in the dry hills above Malibu, and the Beatles put the final touches on
The White Album.
The year ended with three American astronauts, for the first time ever, gazing back upon this fragile blue planet floating in eternal silence, praying for peace.27

Given all that, perhaps it’s not surprising that Chagnon’s account of the “chronic warfare” of the “innately violent” Yanomami struck a public nerve. Desperate to understand human murderousness, the public lapped up his depictions of the day-to-day brutality of people he described as our

“contemporary ancestors.” Now in its fifth edition,
Yanomamö: The Fierce People
is still the all-time bestseller in anthropology, with millions of copies sold to university students alone. Chagnon’s books and films have figured prominently in the education of several generations of anthropologists, most of whom accepted his claims to have demonstrated the inherent ferocity of our species.

But Chagnon’s research should be approached with caution, as he employs a host of dubious techniques. Ferguson found, for example, that Chagnon conflates common murder with war in his statistics, as does Pinker in his discussion of the Gebusi. But more importantly, Chagnon fails to account for the effects of his own disruptive, rather Hemingway-esque presence among the people he studied. According to Patrick Tierney, author of
Darkness in El Dorado,
“The wars that made Chagnon and the Yanomami famous—the ones he wrote about with such relish in
The Fierce People
—began on November 14, 1964, the same day the anthropologist arrived with his shotguns, outboard motor, and a canoe full of steel goods to give away.”28 Tierney cites Chagnon’s own doctoral thesis, showing that in the thirteen years prior to his arrival, no Namowei (a large branch of the Yanomami) had been killed in warfare. But during his thirteen-month residence among them, ten Yanomami died in a conflict between the Namowei and the Patanowateri (another branch).