Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was

5. Hard Times in the Paleolithic: Constant Battles and Unequal Rights

57 Hard Times in the Paleolithic Constant Battles and Unequal Rights 5 There is nothing wrong with seeking generalizations; indeed, this is part of the obligation of a scientist. But generalizations should not mask the underlying variability. —Robert Kelly, The Foraging Spectrum The common assumption is that only when . . . increasingly more complex societies spread, and in particular when European civilizations came to dominate much of the world through colonizing, was warfare introduced (and induced) to the far corners of the earth. . . . Such an impression misses the essence of human history. —Steven LeBlanc, Constant Battles Where is the evidence of an earthly paradise just prior to the rise of agriculture, hierarchy, patriarchy, and monotheism? Why should we believe in such a dark green golden age, just prior to “civilization,” in which humans lived in harmony with nature, possessing untold wisdom that we moderns do not possess about how to live in the world and a natural predisposition toward sympathy and compassion for all creatures? 58 Convenient Myths In this chapter and the next I shall argue that there is no good reason to believe in such an age. We certainly lack direct evidence that this is how the world was back then. Faced with this deficit in direct evidence, advocates of the dark green golden age typically resort to what they regard as good indirect evidence. They propose that we can learn about the distant past by way of observation and analysis of modern hunter-gatherer societies, both in our immediate present and in the more recent documentable and recoverable past. There is little reason, however, to think that this belief is well founded. But even if it were well founded, the lives of these modern “primitive peoples ” would not suggest anything like an Edenic dark green golden age in the Paleolithic past. If the lives of these peoples suggest anything about the distant past, it is certainly not that. The Information Deficit and the Comparative Method In chapter 3 we noted Simon Goldhill’s criticism of Karen Armstrong’s attempt to locate the origins of our myths in the Paleolithic period and then to trace their developments in the subsequent Neolithic period. The problem is that there is no evidence for any mythic tale in either period. This case illustrates a general truth: in speaking about the distant human past, we are speaking about periods of human history for which there is a pronounced information deficit. About the Paleolithic era, which concluded around ten thousand years ago with the end of the last Ice Age, we know very little. We possess no written documents dating from this era, and we possess only a relatively limited amount of archaeological evidence. We do know from the latter that by the end of the Paleolithic era these distant ancestors of ours had discovered fire, had domesticated dogs, had learned to trap salmon, and had begun to produce art (e.g., cave paintings). They had certainly learned to fashion tools, of wood, stone, and bone. But we know not much more than that. 1 We are little better off when it comes to the Neolithic era that followed the Paleolithic and was marked by the development of farming, by the more widespread development of animal domestication , by larger and more permanent settlements, and ultimately by the appearance of pottery. Again, we lack written documents. 2 We know relatively little about Neolithic societies, beyond these very basic facts. Hard Times in the Paleolithic 59 This information deficit was already confronted by those nineteenth -century European thinkers whose ideas about the prehistoric past and how to access it have proved so influential. How might it be possible, they asked, in the light of (what was at the time even more) limited archaeological evidence, and in the absence of written sources of information, to reconstruct human prehistory? How might we fashion out of the fragments of the prehistoric past a coherent story of human progress toward modernity? The answer they arrived at was the comparative method, which, “stated simply . . . took existing cultural (and biological) diversity in the world and turned it into an evolutionary sequence. Different peoples represented different stages in humanity ’s march to perfection.” 3 Lewis Henry Morgan, for example, described world history in terms of seven eras—three of “savagery,” three of “barbarism ,” and then finally civilization. He thought it possible to identify contemporary peoples in terms of how far they had...