The late 1960s witnessed an important academic debate over the nature of humankind. Robert Ardrey published three popular science books all heavily based on the research and opinions of anatomist Raymond Dart;1
his basic premise was that humans evolved as inherently aggressive animals for whom the violence of hunting for meat was a normal occurrence. At the other pole was palaeoanthropologist Richard Leakey, who proposed a much gentler origin for humanity, one in which meat was obtained only by scavenging.[175] [176] Inherent in the discussion was the question of human nature: were we violent because of our evolutionary roots, or was violence something learned only in recent human history? If the latter was true, then we could ‘unlearn' our aggressive traits and live better with our geopolitical neighbours.
Was sharing in our nature, or were we doomed to compete violently with everyone else?Embedded in this evolutionary debate were references to a specific group of living hunter-gatherers who were either gentle or aggressive, depending on which side of the academic fence you sat. In the 1960s the San (‘Bushmen') of the Kalahari had recently been exposed to a worldwide audience through the romantic writings of Laurens van der Post and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.[177] To a large degree, Dart had already popularised a vision of the Khoesan as ‘living primitives' who provided a model for us to understand the nature of our more distant hunting and gathering ancestors.[178] Taken together, these earlier ideas provided a basis for the Kalahari Research Group that began systematic studies of the lives of the San in the 1960s.[179] Their new ethnographies of the San provided a rich corpus of knowledge about these people, but on the assumption that the San not only represented an unchanged remnant of the past but also had been largely unaffected by cultural contact with their ‘more advanced' neighbours. Such views have been challenged by scholars,[180] but to a large extent the San remain the model by which we interpret the archaeology of their distant genetic ancestors, who lived in the subcontinent of southern Africa from the appearance of the Later Stone Age some 100,000 years ago to the arrival of Europeans in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Ethnographic evidence for the Kalahari San has assumed that these people live in a natural balance where the killing of animals is strictly for use as a food source.
The Kalahari ethnographies argue that simple foraging communities were inherently peaceful and, wherever possible, avoided violence via conflict resolution.[181] Yet historical evidence and some ethnographic data suggest that violence was more common than previously assumed. Richard Lee noted that violence among San groups focused on disputes over women, and he recorded a surprisingly large number of fatal interactions.[182] If his data are statistically extrapolated, the murder rate among the Dobe !Kung was three times higher than New York City's murder rate in the 1970s, and twice as high as the peak New York murder rate in 1990.[183] Such statistics simply do not fit the preconceived idea of the ‘gentle San' and suggest that the underlying assumption may be very wrong.Academics have agonised over the apparent conflict they see between the social anthropological perspective of the gentle hunter-gatherer in ecological balance with their environment and historical records of extreme violence among the San.[184] [185] None dispute the historical evidence, but all feel that the historical period was a special case that cannot be applied to the past. Mathais Guenther in particular suggests that the ‘San's peaceful ways in recent times' is a reactivation of the pre-colonial lifestyle based on ‘egalitarianism, openness and sharing'. For him, the violence of the historic period is an aberration rather than the cultural norm.