Free The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade Page A

later, as was the practice among certain tribes in Colombia. Otherwise, captured warriors were killed on the spot. “In fact, primitive warfare was much more deadly than that conducted between civilized states because of the greater frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was conducted,” Keeley concludes. 47
    Thomas Hobbes’s description of primitive warfare was all too accurate. “It is manifest,” he wrote in 1651, “that during the time that men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war. This war is every man against every other man.” 48 Some anthropologists and archaeologists have long been reluctant to accept this conclusion. Instead, perhaps with a desire to portray modern warfare as unusually wicked, they have suggested that war is an aberration, or that it started only after the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago.
    The anthropologist Raymond Kelly (to be distinguished from Lawrence Keeley, quoted above) argues that there is little evidence of violent death in the Upper Paleolithic period, which lasted in Europe from 45,000 to 10,000 years ago. Since warfare would leave such evidence, he asserts, there can have been little or no warfare during the period. “The ‘nightmare past’ that Hobbes envisaged in which individuals lived in continual fear of violent death clearly never existed,” he writes. 49
    But the people of the Upper Paleolithic were hardly pacifists. They would not have been in Europe in the first place had they not wrested it from the grip of the fearsome Neanderthals and driven them to extinction. The style of primitive warfare—raids and minor skirmishes—would not leave a strong fingerprint in the archaeological record, and the absence of much evidence of warfare at this time cannot be taken as evidence of its absence.
    Nor is it at all likely, as Kelly contends, that “war is not primordial but has a definite origin in the relatively recent past.” 50 The existence of territorial warfare among chimps, and its practice by people today, suggests that both species inherited the behavior from their common ancestor who lived some 5 million years ago. The frequency of warfare may wax and wane and peaceful societies can always be found, such the Icelanders of today, who have no army, or Sweden, which last went to war in 1815. But given that both peoples are descendants of the hyperaggressive Vikings, no one is likely to accuse them of having pacifism in their genes. Human societies are remarkably well adapted to warfare, but exercise that capacity depending on circumstance and calculation of their own interests.
    Modern humans have lived as hunters and gatherers for most of their existence, and the warlike nature of most contemporary hunter gatherer societies can reasonably be assumed to have prevailed throughout the distant past as well. “We need to recognize and accept the idea of a non-peaceful past for the entire time of human existence,” writes the archaeologist Steven LeBlanc. “To understand much of today’s war, we must see it as a common and almost universal human behavior that has been with us as we went from ape to human.” 51
    Morality, altruism, loyalty and duty are considered high virtues, but policies of aggression and extermination reflect the darkest aspects of human nature. It is not a comfortable thought that both should have been shaped by the same selective pressure, the need for a degree of social cohesion sufficient to withstand the demands of intergroup warfare. Still, as Lawrence Keeley notes, “Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it.” 52 Human nature, as has often been remarked, is a mixture of contrarieties, with capacities for great good and great evil being interwoven. It is not so surprising that both should be branches of a tree that itself is rooted in deeply ambiguous moral