""War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage,"" Topic

"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…"
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Armand

I have that book, it's very good reading! Zippy recommended it, and he was right.

I second Clays Russians. I bought Keeley's book back when it came out in the 90's. Very good and debunks many trendy myths.

Thanks for your guidance boys!.

Amicalement
Armand

Dances with Wolves showed the natives fighting each other quite a bit. It was only the main character's narration that was off.

Violence in humans has some deep evolutionary roots

"A team of Spanish scientists, in which the University of Granada (UGR) participates, has proven that lethal interpersonal violence, by which a subject is able to kill his fellow beings, is a widespread behavior in mammals, and the human species has inherited it during the course of its evolution

In a study published in the renowned journal Nature, researchers have compiled data on more than 4 million deaths and quantified the level of lethal violence in 1024 species of mammals, from 137 taxonomic families and in about 600 human populations, ranging from approximately 50,000 years to the present.

"Are humans naturally violent, as Hobbes said, or peaceful beings to whom civilization corrupts, as Rousseau suggested? This question has captivated intellectuals and scientists since time immemorial, but to this day we still do not have a definitive answer, although probably both were partly right", explains the main author of this work, José María Gómez Reyes, researcher at the Arid Zones Experimental Station (EEZA-CSIC, from its abbreviation in Spanish) and the University of Granada…"
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Armand