Steven Pinker is WRONG About the Decline of Violence

Okay, so here’s a murder mystery for you. A real who dunnit.

In 1991, two tourists were hiking in the German Alps when they discovered a body which they presumed was a recently deceased mountaineer.

It turns out Otzi, as he came to be known, was a mountaineer of sorts – just a 5200-year-old one.

He was so well-preserved in the ice that scientists know how old he was when he died, what he had for lunch, that he wore a backpack, had an axe and a dagger, a bow, a quiver of arrows, and snowshoes. He had a cut hand and an arrowhead imbedded in his back.

In Stephen Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, he writes that Otzi ‘had not fallen in a crevasse and frozen to death, as scientists had originally surmised; he had been murdered’.

Pinker declares that Otzi had belonged to a raiding party clashing with a neighbouring tribe.

Let’s put Otzi on ice for sec.

Pinker uses him as one piece of evidence in a broader argument; that human violence has declined across history. The Better Angels of Our Nature is a monumental and impressive book, clocking it at around 800 pages of graphs, statistics, anecdotes, and literary references.

Today, I want to look specifically at a part of Pinker’s and Thomas Hobbes’ argument: that life in a state of nature – before civilisation – was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Amongst other things, Pinker argues that hunter-gatherers, tribal societies, were – and are – much more violent than later more civilised societies. Both Pinker and Hobbes argue that the state and its monopolisation on force and authority have pacified our darker human instincts.

Consequently, human nature is pretty bad, human civilisation pretty good.

This fits with another claim that is often made: that war is part of human nature.

In the 1996 book War Before Civilization, for example, archaeologist Lawrence Keeley argues that prehistoric violent deaths probably ranged from around 7-40% of all deaths.

He says: ‘there is nothing inherently peaceful about hunting-gathering or band society’.

In 2003, Steve LeBlanc and Katherine Register claimed in their book Constant Battles that ‘everyone had warfare in all time periods’.

Biologist Edward Wilson asked, ‘Are human beings innately aggressive?’ Yes. Coalitional warfare is ‘pervasive across cultures worldwide’.

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides declare that ‘Wherever in the archaeological record there is sufficient evidence to make a judgment, there traces of war are to be found. It is found across all forms of social organization—in bands, chiefdoms, and states’.

The book Demonic Males argues that ‘neither in history nor around the globe today is there evidence of a truly peaceful society’.

And Steven Pinker has written that ‘Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong’.

So that’s the charge: violent, warmongering, innately aggressive.

But just on an intuitive level these statements seem curious. One the one hand, yes, war is everywhere. We turn on our televisions, go to the movies, read the newspapers and hardly a day goes by without seeing or hearing about it in some way. On the other hand, the vast majority of us wake up every morning and go about our lives without managing to get a brawl or stumbling into a military conflict.

Surely we can’t be inherently warlike and innately peaceful? Surely peace is the norm and violence the exception, not the other way around?

So was it Hobbes or Rousseau who was right? Has violence declined because of the state? What does this tell us about human nature? Were we noble savages or nasty beasts? Let’s find out.

A few different types of evidence have been drawn upon to make arguments about the peacefulness or violence inherent in human nature.

We’ve often been compared to our closest living animal relatives: chimpanzees, who spend quite a lot of time fighting, murdering, and eating their own kind.

And millions of years old fossils found in one site of our ape-like ancestors Australopithecus seemed to show that 80% had their heads bashed in.

We are, many have argued, just another killer ape.

But bonobos and gorillas are much more peaceful than chimpanzees.

Primatologist Frans de Waal has written that if we focused on bonobos ‘reconstructions of human evolution might have emphasized sexual relations, equality between males and females, and the origin of the family, instead of war, hunting, tool technology, and other masculine fortes’.

And those bashed in Australopithecus heads. It was later that skull damage was from leopard bites and ecological pressure during fossilisation.

Ultimately, comparing us to completely different species has very little to say about human nature. To understand that, we need to dig into humans.

Let’s return to Otzi.

It turns out though that the bow was unfinished, the dagger a third a length of a kitchen knife – good for skinning probably. The arrows were useless.

In other words, Otzi was not a warrior or raider but a hunter.

Here’s an alternative to Pinker’s scenario that he was murdered.

He was hunting – as he and every other human did every day – dressed in fur, in low visibility blizzard conditions, and got hit by a stray arrow.

Consider this: even today around 1000 hunters are accidently shot in the US every year. If you’re a hunter today, you’re more likely to be killed by accident than be murdered.

But the point is this: it’s anecdotal. Arbitrary. We don’t know. So let’s look at Pinker’s more substantive evidence.

Let’s have a quick look at this graph from the beginning of Pinker’s book. It’s a graph that depicts violence declining over time, like this. Actually, let’s look at the actual graph.

At the bottom here, Pinker says that the average rate of violent death today is around 1%. Across the 20th century it was around 2% – that’s including the world wars.

Then there’s the earliest states like Ancient Mexico which he clocks in at 5%.

Then he says he’s ‘lumped together’ – his words not mine – horticulturalists and hunter-gatherers – 24.5%.

Then the average for just hunter-gatherers – 14%,

And finally, at the top, hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists found by archaeologists – 15%.

‘We started off nasty,’ Pinker concludes. We’re pacified by civilisation.

Actually, this was pretty accurate. Conclusive? Case-closed? Let’s dive in.

We’ll start with the modern-day hunter-gatherers. How violent are they? Remember, Pinker claims that 14% died violently. That’s quite a lot.

Anthropologists Brian Ferguson and Douglas Fry argue the data Pinker uses is cherry picked and inaccurate. For a start, all eight are from a single study published in 2009. A small sample.

Take the Ache of Paraguay – by far the highest violent death rate in the list at around 30%. Except, when you look at the original study you find that all the deaths involved frontiersmen and ranchers. The Ache, the original study says, were being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’ while apparently desiring a peaceful relationship with their neighbours.

The same applies to the Hiwi of Venezuela and Columbia. Every single death involved colonists and ranchers, including a massacre.

How about the Casiguran Agta of the Philippines? That 5% figure is based on an anthropologist’s account of nine deaths that happened, quote, ‘in the context of an influx of immigrant colonists into the area, and the resulting cutting back of the forest and decline of game and fish’, which led to fighting. Two of those deaths were carried out by immigrant farmers.

Okay, the Ayoreo of Bolivia and Paraguay. Oh hang on, they’re horticulturalists not hunter-gatherers so they should be struck off the list. As should the Modoc of America.

If we account for these changes, Fry shows, Pinker’s 14% should be reduced down at least to 7%, assuming the rest is correct. A big if. So far the section is looking a bit of a mess.

Fry says, ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages of war deaths for “hunter-gatherers” convey an air of scientific objectivity and validity. But in this case, it is all an illusion’.

This is one common problem with studying modern hunter-gatherers – they’ve often been ‘contaminated’ by colonists, imperialists, slave-traders, globalisation, or simple farming. So this has nothing to do with what they’d have been like thousands of years ago.

Another problem is that anthropologists studying violence are also more likely to study – guess what – more violent societies. Twenty percent of Pinker’ data here comes from a guy called Napoleon Chagnon who seems like a bit of a character. His studies have been roundly criticised by other anthropologists and he annoyed tribes so much he was banished from one.

Taking a different approach, Fry looks at a cross-sample of 186 cultures studied by anthropologists. 21 are described as nomadic foragers and in only eight of them was more mentioned. In seven homicide was reported as rare, very rare, low or never mentioned. He also looked through the anthropological literature for mentions of cultures that lacked war, looking for statements like these: ‘[The Veddahs] live so peacefully together that one seldom hears of quarrels among them and never of war’.

‘Warfare in the sense of organized intertribal struggle is unknown [among the Arunta]. What fighting there is, is better understood as an aspect of juridical procedure than as war’.

He found 70. Seventy. Compared to this. Let’s move on. What does the archaeological record say? Surely there we can find a real state of nature?

Evidence for prehistoric warfare usually comes from four categories: Art – depictions of violence. Tools and weapons. Ditches, walls, and fortifications. And more importantly, skeletal remains. Cuts, shattered bones, or embedded projectile points.

Let’s have another look at Pinker’s average – 15% died violently based on 21 archaeological sites around the world.

Jebel Sahaba, for example, in Sudan from at least 10,000BC clocks in at a whopping 40%. This is our earliest clearest evidence for war. 24 out of 59 bodies were found with projectiles like arrowheads. But as some have argued, these could have buried with them – they were lifelong hunters after all. I’d certainly like to buried with my treasured hunting mace. But this is a high figure, nonetheless.

Then there’s the oldest graveyard in the Sahara, though – Gobero, Niger – from around the same time, where 0% show signs of violent death.

Voloshkoe and Vasilkyevka in Europe from around the same time do show a high proportion of remains with fractures and signs of violence. This is the earliest evidence of warfare in Europe.

Then there’s two out of 60 that look violent from Calumnata in Algeria – one has a projectile but when we look at the original source the other death is described as likely a collision with a rock, not violence. Come on, Steven.

Now the Pacific northwest coast of America was very violent and had defendable sites with walls etc.

But let’s pause a minute. Notwithstanding the problems already alluded to, like with our friend Otzi, surely hunting accidents were more common? Surely people were hunted by predators more? Surely lithics – arrowheads – tools and weapons could be buried with the person as ceremonial. And what if war deaths were simply respected more, buried more ceremonially. All of this would distort the record.

And look at those top two sites from South Dakota in 1325 and Nubia in 10,000BC – they’re doing a lot of heavy lifting on this very small data set.

Can we not to better?

Anthropologist Brian Ferguson takes a closer look at the evidence. One survey of 2000-3000 remains found in France showed 48 with projectile wounds. That’s 1.9%. Not on Pinker’s list. One site in Britain of 350 individuals showed about 2%. Not on Pinker’s list. 418 individuals in Serbia and Romania – 2.3%. Not on Pinker’s list. Another study looks at Japan between 13000 and 800BC and of 2500 adults finds 2% died potentially violently. Not on Pinker’s list. Anthropologist Ivana Radovanovic has looked at 1107 remains from Europe, including all of the cases on Pinker’s list, and concludes that you could average out at 3.7% for a low estimate and 5.5% for a high estimate. Not 15%!

Now, I don’t think you can accurately gauge this, but for Pinker’s sake we’ll take the high estimate – 5.5%. That’s more than fair.

But let’s pause again. There’s another problem here. All of the examples on Pinker’s list come from after the invention of farming. They’re all after about 10,000 BC. These people aren’t hunter-gatherers at all. A quick history lesson.

The Homo genus – that’s humans – evolved from Australopithicus around 200,000 years ago. The first humans were homo habilus, homo erectus, home neantherderthalis and several others. But modern homo sapiens first arrived on the scene around 200,000 years ago.

All of Pinker’s examples are from around 12,000 years ago and later. Okay, hang on, I’m gonna need a bigger piece of paper. He’s left 95% of our existence unaccounted for. What happened around 12,000 years ago? The Neolithic revolution, otherwise known as the agricultural revolution, the advent of civilisation, the emergence of sedentary societies.

What anthropologists call complex hunter-gatherers emerged around this time. They used a mix of hunting, gathering, and farming, the domestication of animals. Their societies had higher population densities, were more permanent, they stored resources, and had more inequality – high status individuals are more commonly found buried with rare artifacts.

All of Pinker’s evidence is from after this point – after agriculture, after the start of civilisation.

So, hang on Steven, what happened before here?!

The oldest suggestion of war in Europe that’s often cited comes from over 750,000 years ago. An excavation in Spain shows signs of cannibalism. But this was a different species – Homo Antecessor – with a completely different brain. So we can scrap that. Some Neanderthals have shown signs of skull fractures that could be violence but as we’ve seen could also be leopard bites, and again, they’re a different species. So scrap that.

Cave art like this has often been cited as evidence of warfare. But, why are the lines wavy? And, like our own culture, art could be a warning against rare and dangerous war, not evidence for its ubiquity.

This period is called the Palaeolithic – the old stone age – so let’s concentrate on this. What does the evidence say?

One study looked at 103 remains found across Europe and found a violent death rate of 1%. Another looked at 209 remains in France and found five fractures. Although none were on the left side of the head, which you’d expect if they were the result of human violence. Even so, let’s say 2%. And, well, that’s about it.

In one overview of the evidence from Eastern Europe, Archaeologist Pavel Dolukhanov wrote that ‘in no cases could one find any evidence of inter-group conflict’.

Commenting on the total record, Henry de Lumley has written that ‘the first Homo sapiens do not seem to have led the warrior’s life so often attributed to them, for their pathology is not marked by a traumatology other than that caused by the accidents of everyday life’.

Anthropologist Leslie Sponsel has written that that, ‘during the hunter-gatherer stage of cultural evolution, which dominated 99 percent of human existence on the planet… lack of archaeological evidence for warfare suggests that it was rare or absent for most of human prehistory’.

So that 15%, for this period, so far, on scant evidence, we could it bring it down to around 2%.

So now we have 2% for hunter-gathers, up to 5% for post agricultural revolution, 7% for modern hunter-gatherers, 5% for early states, and 3% for the 20th century.

Fry writes that, ‘the idea that 15 percent of prehistoric populations died in war is not just false, it is absurd’.

So what happened? War likely emerged at the end of the Ice Age and the advent of farming around 10000BC with a change in socioeconomic conditions like:

– A shift to sedentary existence

– Settlements become bigger, denser

– Growing population

– Resource concentration (harvests stored)

– Excess resources

– Hierarchy

– Enclosures show signs of social segmentation

– Clear inequality

– Use of salt, seashells, and obsidian to trade with

It seems like the first wars and increases in violence were associated not with ‘savages’, hunter-gatherers or nomadic tribes, but with civilisation. One anthropologist has described this as the ‘formative period of warfare’. After the Neolithic revolution, Ferguson says, ‘war had become a cultural obsession across Europe’.

Often wars and violence could have been the result of competition over favourable locations or responses to climactic shocks. ‘War does not extend forever backwards’, Ferguson writes. ‘It has identifiable beginnings’.

The increase in warfare across this period is clear in case after case. After the 6th millennium BC we have signs of war becoming an enduring phenomenon.

Take Bulgaria. Neolithic stone settlements began in the sixth millennium BC, then slowly in the fifth millennium we see more defendable locations with fortifications, then in 4500BC we find more weapons, arrows, maces, axes.

Or take the northwest coast of North America. About 5000 years ago, the evidence suggests, non-lethal injuries were dominant, maybe pointing to some kind of juridical interpersonal violence, maybe contests. Warfare comes later, with evidence of the first large-scale war appearing just 1700 years go.

In the Middle East a similar time sequence shows villages without walls or ditches being replaced by an increase in defensive structures and fortifications around 7000 years ago.

Or take Anasazi of the American Southwest. From 700 to 1200 AD – that’s FIVE HUNDRED YEARS – there are ZERO signs of warfare. Then the climate changed and by 1250 we see signs of war.

John Carman and ‎Anthony Harding write that the Anasazi co-existed peacefully for more than a thousand years. ‘The violence markers of raiding, killing, and burning appear only very late in Anasazi culture, as a complex response to changing demographic patterns and a prolonged period of severe environmental stress’.

Ferguson says that, ‘war sprang out of warless world’.

Ultimately, complex hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists might make war, but the majority of simple hunter-gatherers don’t.

Fry argues that war should not be depicted by a curve like this, but by an n-type curve, like this.

He laments that, ‘Pinker constructs his account of steadily more peaceful human existence starting not at the raising of the curtain, and not even in the middle of the play, but only in the final act’.

So what can we learn from this? Let’s return to Pinker briefly. One estimate for the rate of violent death in the first half of the 20th century is 3%. Including the second half, this drops to as much as 1%. In 2007 0.04% died violently worldwide. And most agree that there has been a decline in violence over time. Whether the state and its monopolisation on force is the cause of that is a different question. Pinker does, of course, talk about other motivators for later periods, but that’s a different video. The central point for us is that if we’re serious about what people were like in a state of nature then surely nomadic hunter-gatherers are the most central to ‘human nature’.

And ultimately, historically, they’re relatively peaceful and have nothing like what we’d call war.

As Fry argues, what we see is not a decline, but an n-type curve. And if we take the 20th century as a whole at 2%, the hunter-gatherers figure – on very limited evidence – could be 2%, too. And there’s one big woolly mammoth in the room: those hunter-gatherers didn’t have the access to medicine, healthcare, and technology that modern societies have. How much does this distort the numbers?

The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Hunters and Gatherers tells its readers that, ‘Hunter-gatherers are generally peoples who have lived until recently without the overarching discipline imposed by the state… The evidence indicates that they have lived together surprisingly well, solving their problems among themselves largely without recourse to authority figures and without a particular propensity for violence. It was not the situation that Thomas Hobbes, the great seventeenth-century philosopher, described in a famous phrase as “the war of all against all.”‘

You could say then that Rousseau was right, Hobbes was wrong.

Ultimately, though, Human nature is elastic, context dependent, varies across societies and cultures.

You might say that it’s within human nature to have a capacity for warfare. But you could also say it’s within human nature to have a capacity to make balloon animals or play the oboe. What’s more interesting is the context, what motivates war and what stimulates peace and cooperation. That’s a question I’ll return to next time, but for now I’ll leave you with this quote from Rousseau:

The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!