One of evolutionary psychology’s unsolved mysteries is how much a violent disposition is baked into humans and will we ever live in an entirely peaceful era? In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) Steven Pinker explains why violence has been on a continuous decline for the past 5,000 years. To do so, he tells us about the five big motivators of violence (dominance, revenge, ideology, sadism and predatory violence) and the four “better angels of our nature” (reason, empathy, moral sense and self-control), that counteract these forces.
While I think that Pinker got a lot right, he really doesn’t tell us the bigger picture and misses some vital parts of the story. The picture one gets from Pinker’s account is that humanity has been on an almost unstoppable trajectory towards being more peaceful. A lot of people who bought into Pinker’s narrative must be asking themselves why there is war in Ukraine in 2022. Or why did gun purchases in the US drastically rise after Joe Biden was elected president? Why are there militias in all 50 states in the US now? Even if Pinker may believe that violence is mostly a thing of the past, most people don’t seem to believe so. There isn’t really much reason to believe so when the threat of violence has come to the doorsteps of Pinker’s “enlightened part of the world”.
Mortal Wounds: The Human Skeleton as Evidence for Conflict in the Past (2017) by Martin Smith tells a somewhat different story. Pinker was right, that violence has always been in our past, as hunter-gatherer raids testify. There has always been potential for conflict over resources and mates in our human past. Pinker was cunning to start his history of violent decline with the Bronze Age, 5,000 years ago, because that is a peak in violence accompanied by many social and cultural changes. Single graves for high status males buried with weapons appeared, the first sign of stratified societies. Bronze weapons and adornments were rare and a sign of high status. The first weapons that were specifically made for killing humans as opposed to animals appeared: daggers, swords, and a change in arrowheads from microlithic flint points to larger leaf-shaped arrowheads.
Was the Bronze Age really so much more violent and martial than the ages before and after and if so, why? Ancient people seemed to believe so. Hesiod paints the opposite picture we got from Pinker, a world that was becoming increasingly violent:
In the Golden Age (Palaeolithic) Humans did not have to work to feed themselves, for the earth provided food in abundance. They lived to very old age but with a youthful appearance and eventually died peacefully.
Men in the Silver Age (Neolithic) lived for one hundred years under the dominion of their mothers. They lived only a short time as grown adults and spent that time in strife with one another.
Men of the Bronze Age were hardened and tough, as war was their purpose and passion. Zeus created these humans out of ash tree. Their armor was forged of bronze, as were their homes, and tools. The men of this Age were undone by their own violent ways
It’s not hard to see that the Golden Age was the Palaeolithic Age of foragers (hunter-gatherers). Anthropologists would agree with Hesiod that foragers had healthier and longer lives than the early Neolithic farmers. However, there is considerable disagreement as to their levels of violence. There is certainly some evidence for hunter-gatherer violence, on the other hand, no other people have ever been described as “the peaceful people” as hunter-gatherers. When forced to live a sedentary life, violence levels rapidly rise among hunter-gatherers, along with social problems such as alcoholism and unemployment. Apart from that, it is somewhat hard to see what hunter-gatherer violence should have consisted of, with no private property and largely monogamous societies where most males were partnered there would have been little incentive for raiding neighbouring bands. What’s more, large-scale warfare would have been next to impossible in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies as nobody has the authority to give commands.
The Silver Age was obviously the age of the first farmers. Hesiod doesn’t paint them as violent people, but there was still constant conflict. For a long time, historians believed the Neolithic to be an extremely peaceful age. However, Martin Smith takes Hesiod’s side here. On closer inspection of the remaining bones a lot of wounds were found that were caused by clubs. What’s more, mass graves were found, often with children and young women absent from them. A likely scenario would be that they were used as, slaves, concubines or wives of low status men who didn’t find a partner in a polygamous society. What was likely to have happened is that farming actually did decrease the level of in-group violence as higher levels of cooperation were necessary, but increased the level of outgroup violence, especially when the harvest was poor, fights over property rights, etc. Smith suggests that ancient megaliths were a claim to property, a sign that the “sons of the soil” had been here forever, similar to putting an American flag on the Arctic and claiming the land. Megaliths had the advantage that it would have been hard to remove them and a great way of signalling: “Stay away from my turf!” The decrease of in-group violence may also have gone hand in hand evolutionarily with an increase in endogamy. Hunter-gatherers are more endogamous, so attacking a neighbouring band would often entail attacking kin, whereas attacking in-group members would have entailed attacking more closely related people for farmers than foragers.
Nevertheless, levels of violence were still far lower during the Neolithic than during the Bronze age. Who was responsible for it, the forager or the farmer? Or a third man? Let’s travel back in time and have a look around. Let’s do some detective work and find out more about the perpetrator’s profile:
To have possessed a bronze weapon at this early date this man must have been a very prominent and presumably powerful individual. In this respect it is of further interest that Racton Man was particularly tall, standing at more than 6ft. This is quite remarkable for an individual of this date15 when the average stature was around 5ft 7in. [...] Measurements of various portions of the skeleton show him to have had a muscular build in his prime, with a healthy body mass index by modern standards. Chemical analysis of his bones (stable isotope analysis) also reveals him to have eaten a diet high in animal protein.
Leaders and chieftains in various tribal cultures have often been titled simply as ‘big men’. Often this designation makes no reference to such individuals’ physical size but rather simply their position as a prominent figure in their society. However, it would seem that during the British Bronze Age at least, those in powerful positions commonly were larger
individuals. This raises the question of whether such rank was to an extent hereditary with the sons (and possibly daughters) of chiefs enjoying a better diet than the average person and so growing taller during their lives, or whether individuals who were already large and at a physical advantage were simply better at assuming such positions presumably through being more effective warriors (or perhaps a combination of the two). Either way, it would seem an elite class of people had indeed come into being, perhaps similar to the mentions in later written accounts we have for ‘heroic’ societies appearing from the Bronze Age onwards where Homeric-style elites enjoyed a privileged position of relative wealth and feasting, supposedly justified by their role as protectors of those beneath them.
What we learn about our perpetrator here is:
- He was of high status
- He ate a lot of meat, animal protein in general
- He was a tall, muscular man
- He was a “protector” of some sort
- He owned bronze weapons, designed to kill people
Here is what we can see on our trip. Unfortunately we're not given any information about hair and eye colour, but we are able to use the remaining pieces of information:
Our perpetrator couldn’t have been a farmer. For all we know, farmers were short and their diet consisted of the least amount of meat from among all of our suspects. So, our perpetrator must have been either a European hunter-gatherer or a Steppe pastoralist. We have never seen a hunter-gatherer population becoming overlords of a farming population, but we know that pastoralists (e.g. Mongols, Huns, etc.) have done so many times in history. What’s more, we know that the tallest people around at the time were precisely Steppe Pastoralists. Looks like we have identified our culprit. Here is his profile:
- Was physically tall
- Diet consisted of high protein intake (meat from livestock like cattle and sheep and dairy)
- Was part of a warrior culture that frequently turned to raiding when resources became scarce
- Was good at metallurgy (weapons)
- Was good at trading over long distances (e.g. copper and tin from far away places to smelt copper)
What made the Bronze Age the bloodiest period in history was a process in which Steppe Pastoralists for the first time in history had the weapons available to take our much larger farming settlements. That was far from a single invasion, but repeated small-scale invasions over centuries, probably subjecting some of their own relatives who already had subjected local communities in the process. The new overlords would soon be involved in clan feuding and be established as “protectors” in their own communities, unwillingly or willingly, just like mafia-style protection racketeers. To be fair towards pastoralists, they would also become the heroes of ancient epic sagas, from Achilles in Greece and the knights of the table round in Britain to the bogatyrs (hint: gigantic warriors) in Russia who fought against the invading Tartars.
Martin Smith also warns us to overestimate the Bronze Age warrior culture. Those pastoralists weren’t just bloodthirsty psychopaths like portrayed in the TV show Vikings. A lot of amours were probably much too thin to be really protected and probably served more as a deterrent. It makes evolutionary sense to avoid costly conflict if you can convincingly display dominance. Those guys would have made good poker players. The Vikings were, after all, as good at trading as raiding.
The result of the Bronze Age was a great mixing of peoples.
The Bronze Age was the first wave of globalisation in human history. It spread languages that were initially the languages of small herder populations across wide areas, like Semitic and Indo-European. There is no denying it was a pretty bloody period. It also marked the beginning of history. Before the “Great Mixing” people lived as foragers, farmers or herders. All of them had slightly different evolutionary adaptations as well as different values. After the “Great Mixing,” there was an internal dynamic in each society, pulling in any of the three directions. It was the beginning of history and the end of prehistory. QED, I rest my case.
For more, check out my book: Understanding History: Herders, Horticulturalists and Hunter-Gatherer
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09P8S9RNV
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