Comment by forensic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forensic | Hacker News Reader

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The shortness of tribal people's lives has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, it's pure myth.

The book Sex at Dawn demonstrates this using the latest anthropology and archaeology if you want to know more.

Until recently, it was normal for tribal societies to live longer on average than agricultural societies. All of the statistics that support the idea that tribal life is short were done very poorly and skewed by abortion/infanticide.

Tribal societies would have the same lifespans on average as our society does today and perhaps even longer because they had far healthier diets and always got lots of exercise.

However, they would keep their numbers low through infanticide and eugenics. For instance a baby with birth defects would often be allowed to die and abortions using certain drugs were normal.

Anyway, the idea that tribal life was brutish, solitary and short is utterly wrong on every point.

The science indicates clearly:

- it was less brutish on average with more social harmony and warfare was less painful for all involved

- it was not short at all, quite the contrary. Only modern agricultural societies, through scientific medicine, have begun to approach the lifespans of tribal societies who are not interfered with. This was just a myth from the very start.

- it was not solitary. Our society is solitary. In a tribal society, every person is surrounded by lifelong friends and relatives at every moment of every day for their entire lives. Modern man can scarcely imagine the depths of human bonding that tribal societies experience.

> warfare was less painful for all involved

Does that book or other sources you have give a rough idea of how rare/common death by warfare/violence is in this type of society?

They go into various statistics yes.

But on a more qualitative note, tribal societies gain little from total war. "Total war" is the modern concept that every war is a struggle for existence and every avenue must be utilized to destroy the enemy culture/civilization.

In tribal societies most violent conflict was settled symbolically - Keegan goes into this in one of his books I forget which one.

For instance the tribes will line up against each other like in typical war and then attack each other, but due to various spiritual taboos against certain war practices, it's really more like a sport than what we consider war. There will be few casualties and most of the combat will be decided more like wrestling or, in some cases, even more like a dance competition. This is not a joke.

Obviously the particular superstitions and rituals differed among tribes, but hunter-gatherer warfare in general did not lead to even fractions of the amount of suffering that agricultural warfare leads to.

Having said all this, it's essentially impossible for hunter-gatherers to compete with agricultural civilization. It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma - whichever tribe "decides" to become agricultural will worse lives individually, but the collective is so powerful and efficient that it replicates itself.

Agriculture is better for our genes - we multiply far more. But hunter-gathering is better for our quality of life.

I haven't read that book, but others have estimated (it varies between tribes) that roughly half of all males that make it to adulthood die of violence - either within (murder and vengeance killing) or between tribes (warfare). One source, though I don't remember what kind of numbers he gave is Pinker's The Blank Slate; which also excoriates the kind of "primitive worship" that seems to be common in these comments.

There is a big difference between "primitive civilizations" and hunter gatherer tribes.

People often forget that the Aztecs were an agricultural civilization. So were most Native Americans like Pocahontas -- yes, Pocahontas' dad was a farmer. Shocking, I know.

The comparison is between different forms of past societies, not between past societies and today.

Until very recently, plenty of men in agricultural societies died from violence and war.

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