Via Instapundit, finally, somebody's finally exposing the public to something I've been aware of for a while. Yet another entry in the everything-we-know-is-wrong file:

Two billion war deaths would have occurred in the 20th century if modern societies suffered the same casualty rate as primitive peoples, according to anthropologist Lawrence H Keeley, who calculates that two-thirds of them were at war continuously, typically losing half of a percent of its population to war each year.

Missionaries I've met and read about were often good about recording the way societies they encountered lived: and the endlessly recurring theme was the endless cycle of revenge and honor killings -- in Papua, New Guinea, in South America, in Africa... belief in Jesus, when embraced, is the key which breaks the cycle of violence.

See The Point of the Spear for one example among many.

That raises the question: Why, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, does popular culture portray primitives as peace-loving folk living in harmony with nature, as opposed to rapacious and brutal civilization? Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which attributes civilization to mere geographical accident, made a best-seller out of a mendacious apology for the failure of primitive society. Wade reports research that refutes Diamond on a dozen counts, but his book never will reach the vast audience that takes comfort in Diamond's pulp science.

I sometimes suspect we have a gut feeling for lies, and subconsciously detect and embrace them readily.

Why is it that the modern public revels in a demonstrably false portrait of primitive life? Hollywood grinds out stories of wise and worthy native Americans, African tribesmen, Brazilian rainforest people and Australian Aborigines, not because Hollywood studio executives hired the wrong sort of anthropologist, but because the public pays for them...

As opposed to what? Which movies, produced after the 1950s, have portrayed primitive peoples as living short, brutish, and nasty lives? It's meaningless to say this idea has popular demand since the contemporary public is never exposed to a competing vision.

(Nor could they be, since the backlash would be tremendous -- cries of "racism" would undoubtedly abound.)

Native Americans, Eskimos, New Guinea Highlanders as well as African tribes slaughtered one another with skill and vigor, frequently winning their first encounters with modern armed forces. "Even in the harshest possible environments [such as northwestern Alaska] where it was struggle enough just to keep alive, primitive societies still pursued the more overriding goal of killing one another," Wade notes....

The author goes on to ponder about what our quest for "authentic" (i.e. fantasy) primitivism means for modern man, especially homo Americanus. Worth reading, IMO.