The Nonlinear Library EA - Violence Before Agriculture by John G. Halstead
Oct 2, 2023
18:07
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Violence Before Agriculture, published by John G. Halstead on October 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This is a summary of a report on trends in violence since the dawn of humanity: from the hunter-gatherer period to the present day. The full report is available at this Substack and as a preprint on SSRN. Phil did 95% of the work on the report.
Expert reviewers provided the following comments on our report.
"Thomson and Halstead have provided an admirably thorough and fair assessment of this difficult and emotionally fraught empirical question. I don't agree with all of their conclusions, but this will surely be the standard reference for this issue for years to come."
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University
"This work uses an impressively comprehensive survey of ethnographic and archeological data on military mortality in historically and archeologically known small-scale societies in an effort to pin down the scale of the killing in the pre-agricultural world. This will be a useful addition to the literature. It is an admirably cautious assessment of the war mortality data, which are exceptionally fragile; and the conclusions it draws about killing rates prior to the Holocene are probably as good as we are likely to get for the time being."
Paul Roscoe, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maine
Epistemic status
We think our estimates here move understanding of prehistoric violence forward by rigorously focussing on the pre-agricultural period and attempting to be as comprehensive as possible with the available evidence. However, data in the relevant fields of ethnography and archeology is unusually shaky, so we would not be surprised if it turned out that some of the underlying data turns out to be wrong. We are especially unsure about our method for estimating actual violent mortality rates from the measured, observable rates in the raw archeology data.
One of us (Phil) has a masters in anthropology. Neither of us have any expertise in archeology.
Guide for the reader
If you are interested in this study simply as a reference for likely rates/patterns of violence in the pre-agricultural world, all our main results and conclusions are presented in the Summary. The rest of the study explores the evidence in more depth and explains how we put our results together. We first cover the ethnographic evidence, then the archeological evidence. The study ends with a more speculative discussion of our findings and their possible implications.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the following expert reviewers for their extensive and insightful comments and suggestions, which have helped to make this report substantially better.
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University
Robert Kelly, Professor of Archeology at the University of Wyoming
Paul Roscoe, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maine
We would also like to thank Prof. Hisashi Nakao, Prof. Douglas Fry, Prof. Nelson Graburn, and Holden Karnofsky for commenting, responding to queries and sharing materials.
Around 11,000 years ago plants and animals began to be domesticated, a process which would completely transform the lifeways of our species. Human societies all over the world came to depend almost entirely on farming. Before this transformative period of history, everyone was a hunter-gatherer. For about 96% of the approximately 300,000 years since Homo sapiens evolved, we relied on wild plants and animals for food.
Our question is: what do we know about how violent these pre-agricultural people were?
In 2011 Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature. According to Pinker, prehistoric small-scale societies were generally extremely violent by comparison with modern stat...
This is a summary of a report on trends in violence since the dawn of humanity: from the hunter-gatherer period to the present day. The full report is available at this Substack and as a preprint on SSRN. Phil did 95% of the work on the report.
Expert reviewers provided the following comments on our report.
"Thomson and Halstead have provided an admirably thorough and fair assessment of this difficult and emotionally fraught empirical question. I don't agree with all of their conclusions, but this will surely be the standard reference for this issue for years to come."
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University
"This work uses an impressively comprehensive survey of ethnographic and archeological data on military mortality in historically and archeologically known small-scale societies in an effort to pin down the scale of the killing in the pre-agricultural world. This will be a useful addition to the literature. It is an admirably cautious assessment of the war mortality data, which are exceptionally fragile; and the conclusions it draws about killing rates prior to the Holocene are probably as good as we are likely to get for the time being."
Paul Roscoe, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maine
Epistemic status
We think our estimates here move understanding of prehistoric violence forward by rigorously focussing on the pre-agricultural period and attempting to be as comprehensive as possible with the available evidence. However, data in the relevant fields of ethnography and archeology is unusually shaky, so we would not be surprised if it turned out that some of the underlying data turns out to be wrong. We are especially unsure about our method for estimating actual violent mortality rates from the measured, observable rates in the raw archeology data.
One of us (Phil) has a masters in anthropology. Neither of us have any expertise in archeology.
Guide for the reader
If you are interested in this study simply as a reference for likely rates/patterns of violence in the pre-agricultural world, all our main results and conclusions are presented in the Summary. The rest of the study explores the evidence in more depth and explains how we put our results together. We first cover the ethnographic evidence, then the archeological evidence. The study ends with a more speculative discussion of our findings and their possible implications.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the following expert reviewers for their extensive and insightful comments and suggestions, which have helped to make this report substantially better.
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University
Robert Kelly, Professor of Archeology at the University of Wyoming
Paul Roscoe, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maine
We would also like to thank Prof. Hisashi Nakao, Prof. Douglas Fry, Prof. Nelson Graburn, and Holden Karnofsky for commenting, responding to queries and sharing materials.
Around 11,000 years ago plants and animals began to be domesticated, a process which would completely transform the lifeways of our species. Human societies all over the world came to depend almost entirely on farming. Before this transformative period of history, everyone was a hunter-gatherer. For about 96% of the approximately 300,000 years since Homo sapiens evolved, we relied on wild plants and animals for food.
Our question is: what do we know about how violent these pre-agricultural people were?
In 2011 Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature. According to Pinker, prehistoric small-scale societies were generally extremely violent by comparison with modern stat...