waveman comments on The Lens That Sees Its Flaws - Less Wrong

45 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 September 2007 12:10AM

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Comment author: Chala 14 March 2011 09:07:08PM 5 points [-]

What the heck, Humans who lived past infancy lived far longer than 16 years in the Ancestral environment - just very poor infant mortality brought down the average life expectancy.

"The typical human tribe" would not have gone around murdering whole other tribes... there is no evidence for that and that is not what modern isolated hunter gatherers do either.

Comment author: waveman 19 August 2016 07:47:31AM *  1 point [-]

. there is no evidence for that and that is not what modern isolated hunter gatherers do either.

I came across plenty of examples in my studies of anthropology. Of course it depends what you mean by "tribe". Really large scale violence requires a certain amount of technology. As an example"Yanomamo: The Fierce People" by Chagnon details some such incidents and suggests they were not unusual. Well actually the men and children were killed, the nubile women were kept alive for <reasons>.

See also the Torah / Old Testament for numerous genocides, though these were bronze/iron age people and also the historicity of the incidents is disputed.

This was not universal - the Kalahari Bushmen (now called the San people) did not do this, perhaps in part because their main weapon was a slow acting poison dart. An all-out war would kill everyone involved.

But rates of violent death among males were extremely high in hunter/gatherer societies often documented by early anthropologists (from reconstructing family trees) in the 30-50% range.