Isn’t the idea that pre-civilizated humans were peaceful a Marxist myth? Archaeology doesn’t teach this (or hasn’t for 4 or 5 decades). If Karl was the source of this fantasy it means the idea will never be given up. Reality has no value to Marxists.
That’s why this was in the excerpt, shows how attitudes have begun to shift off the ideological crap-basket that is the academic leftist bias:
> “Many people still seem to think that prehistoric California was a violence-free paradise, but the archaeological record shows clearly that that was not the case,” he said in an interview.
Yeah, but of course it goes back to well before Marx. Back to at least Shaftesbury around 1700. The notion has always been popular among those criticizing modern society.
In the book I mentioned earlier, it is demonstrated that the average among primitive peoples is a death rate from war and other violence that is considerably higher than hit either Germany or Russia during the 20th. In the most extreme societies over 50% of males die from violence.
Why this should be a surprise to anyone is itself a surprise.
Human evolution, since reaching intelligence, has pretty obviously not been between individuals, but between groups, tribes or whatever you want to call them.
What do you think happened to a peaceful tribe that came into contact with a warlike one? Either they abandoned their pacifism darn quick, or they died.
More precisely, the men died. The conquerors could always find a use for women, but adult males were just a danger, and were generally just massacred.
Modern genetics shows this very clearly.