From the trenches of World War I, to the death camps of World War II, to the 1990s’ “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and Rwanda, the brutality of the 20th Century has been stupefying, taking an estimated 100 million lives since 1900.
Lucky for us, said Chicago archeologist Lawrence Keeley, that 20th-Century weapons like machine guns, laser-guided missles and supersonic warplanes are inefficient tools of war. If modern soldiers had used more-lethal weapons like stone-tipped arrows, spears and warclubs, he says more than 2 billion people would have been slain in this century.
The subject of war and mankind has, of course, been a matter of intense intellectual analysis for centuries. But Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, this month has declared war on the intellectual thinking that has prevailed since World War II.
Disregard, Keeley says, the message of such popular entertainment as “Pocahontas” and “Dances With Wolves.” Prehistoric people lived no more harmoniously or less destructively than modern humans.
In fact, Keeley says, they were far more murderous than people are today, though we perversely assume that we’re superior in all endeavors–even killing others.
His claims have already drawn fierce support as well as criticism, the latter from scholars who say he ignores evidence of long periods of peace in prehistoric cultures.
Archeologists and anthropologists reconstruct human life in prehistory (before the invention of writing and cities) by sifting through whatever remains that have survived to modern times. Mostly this is in the form of bones, village sites and ancient garbage heaps.
Since World War II, said Keeley, scientists have either largely misinterpreted or completely overlooked ample evidence of the prehistoric human propensity for massacre as lunatic as today’s.
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In a book published this month, “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage,” Keeley cites and re-interprets physical evidence excavated worldwide and long-known to archeologists, to arrive at that conclusion.
Robert Carneiro of Columbia University in New York, considered the nation’s leading anthropological authority on warfare, believes Keeley is rectifying serious oversights in human historical record.
“His (Keeley’s) thesis is very true, very important and has been neglected by many in the anthropological profession,” said Carneiro.
“It’s eye-opening,” said Chip Stanish, chairman of the Field Museum of Natural History’s anthropology department, of Keeley’s book. “It’s going to be very controversial.
“He debunks a lot of myths about primitive and modern warfare. In doing that, the book tends to attack in a strong fashion certain liberal orthodoxies–the idea that everything western is corrupt and that non-western values are somehow more virtuous and pure.”
Keeley, 48, whose politics are grounded in his ultra-liberal days as a student in the 1960s, isn’t a reactionary ideologue launching theories to rail against the current “political correctness” trend.
Archeologist George Milner of Pennsylvania State University said it is important to recognize that humans from whatever era or ethnic background share the same propensity for violence.
“No group is unique in this respect,” said Milner. “Why do these conflicts (war and organized violence) erupt at all? It should concern all of us, yet we have very poor ideas of why it occurs.”
Studying the burial places and battle sites of pre-colonial Indian settlements from the Northeast Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, Milner has linked violence with competition for scarce resources. He correlates the evidence of an extremely violent era around 1300 A.D.in central Illinois between tribal villages with evidence of an extended period of climatological cooling that decimated crops and availability of wild game.
As further evidence to support his theory about the bloodthirsty nature of our ancestors, Keeley cites:
– Archeological evidence of the earliest known homicide, a male killed 20,000 years ago in the Nile River Valley with arrow points in his abdomen and arm. By 12,000 B.C., warfare was so common and brutal in Egyptian Nubia that more than half the men, women and children found in one excavated cemetery died violently, most of the children executed by stabs in the head or neck.
– Mass graves in Germany and France dug 2,000 to 5,000 years ago, littered with smashed skeletons of all ages and both sexes, suggest a grisly “take-no-prisoners” mentality of warfare.
But R. Brian Ferguson, a Rutgers University anthropologist whom Keeley singles out as being guilty of “pacifying the past,” strongly disagrees with the premise of Keeley’s book, and how it uses the archeological evidence.
“He’s overgeneralizing,” Ferguson said.
“He (Keeley) uses many very famous incidents of prehistoric war,” Ferguson said, to make it seem more prevalent than it actually was.
Criticism of western culture in general overlooks its contribution to making modern life less violent than prehistory, according to Keeley. He especially credits western political life, creating strong central governments and international alliances, with decreasing the incidence of war and fighting.
The prehistoric style of fighting–raids and ambushes–is closely related to guerrilla warfare, which American colonialists learned from Native Americans and used very effectively to defeat Britain in the revolution. The Vietnamese used it to defeat first French and then American armies in this century.
“A lot of our modern weaponry is noisy and destructive of property,” said Keeley, “but is not nearly as lethal as a war club.
“As each new weapon comes into use, people very soon learn how . . . to duck it. It took more than 200 artillery shells to wound one soldier as soon as armies began to dig trenches in World War I.”
“Ultimately,” Keeley said, “warfare is not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation but merely the most destructive expression of it.”