Can We Reconstruct Ancient Forager Warfare?

If we want to consider the evolutionary impact of ancient warfare then we must consider forager warfare. For most of human history humans were foragers or were organised into small non-hierarchical societies with no hereditary or permanent leaders, which are also known as acephalous socie­ties.

Our forager society data comes from two sources: recent foragers for whom we have historic and ethnographic information, and prehistoric for­agers for whom we have only the archaeological record. We have some ethnographic information from most continents about such peoples as the Bushmen, pygmies and Hadza in Africa, all societies of Australia, some societies in New Guinea, a few in South East Asia, a few in India, and a number in the Americas from the Eskimo in the north to the Fuegians in the south. The challenge in using the information on these foragers relates to when it was obtained. In many instances, by the time they were studied by anthropologists, their numbers had been decimated, they had access to metal tools and guns, and they were no longer highly mobile.

An important question here is whether we can use historic data on recent foragers as models for earlier human behaviour concerning warfare. Equally important is how relevant are data from recent foragers who live surrounded by farmers and state-level societies? This issue is further complicated by those who feel that our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees, provide a useful analogue for very early humans in their warfare-like behaviours. This is outside our concern here, but the chimpanzee data are very intriguing.^[73] If we can use these various types of data, it would greatly enhance our ability to have more than just the very limited direct data from the deep past at our disposal. I think the answer is yes, we can use such information, but we must be extremely careful to understand the quality and relevance of such infor­mation and how valid such analogies might be.

For example, ethnographic data on foragers suffer from two major draw­backs. First, virtually all such studies have been of people who no longer had the potential for unfettered warfare due to the presence of, and control by, more complex societies, so what information was obtained about warfare was from stories about the past rather than direct observation. Also, virtually all forager societies that have been studied by ethnographers have had their numbers drastically reduced due to diseases and other impacts. They have also obtained new tools such as metal knives, guns, axes and cooking vessels. These two factors greatly changed their relationship to their carrying capa­cities: lower numbers and more efficient tools made them much less near the carrying capacity compared with pre-contact times.

By the time ethnographies of virtually all foraging societies were done, there had been a shift in their carrying capacities either through reduced population or by access to new technology. If warfare is the result of, or strongly related to, competition over resources, then the picture of warfare that emerges in these ethnographies is not at all the same as what it would have been when these foragers were living only among other foragers.

Examples occur in Australia, California, and among non-complex farmers such as the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea. In the classic case of the Mountain Arapesh, Margaret Mead maintained they were and had been peaceful, yet there is solid evidence that no more than a generation earlier they had engaged in substantial warfare, thus demonstrating the problem that arises involving warfare with all such studies.^[74] Thus research by uni­versity-trained anthropologists of the twentieth century is much less useful for understanding forager warfare than the early accounts of explorers, missionaries and patrol officers. Such early historic and ethnographic data on the Alaskan Inupiaq and Aboriginal Australians can be extremely enlightening.^[75] These early accounts have the potential for bias and lack of completeness and must be used with caution, but such is the case with all data. It appears that the failure to comprehend the problems with recent, twentieth-century ethnographic studies renders the opinions of people like Douglas Fry and Brian Ferguson about peaceful societies virtually worthless.