Posted on 07/18/2006 7:45:03 AM PDT by Pokey78
Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps.
But the passage that really stopped me short was this:
"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."
That's Lawrence Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois. And the phrase that stuck was that bit about artificially pacifying the past. We've grown used to the biases of popular culture. If a British officer meets a native -- African, Indian, whatever -- in any movie, play or novel of the last 30 years, the Englishman will be a sneering supercilious sadist and the native will be a dignified man of peace in perfect harmony with his environment in whose tribal language there is not even a word for "war" or "killing" or "weapons of mass destruction." A few years ago, I asked Tim Rice, who'd just written the lyrics for Disney's Aladdin and The Lion King, why he wasn't doing Pocahontas. "Well, the minute they mentioned it," he said, "I knew the Brits would be the bad guys. I felt it was my patriotic duty to decline." Sure enough, when the film came out, John Smith and his men were the bringers of environmental devastation to the New World. "They prowl the earth like ravenous wolves," warns the medicine man, whereas Chief Powhatan wants everyone to be "guided to a place of peace." Fortunately, Captain Smith comes to learn from Pocahontas how to "paint with all the colours of the wind."
In reality, Pocahontas's fellow Algonquin Indians were preyed on by the Iroquois, "who took captives home to torture them before death," observes Nicholas Wade en passant. The Iroquois? Surely not. Only a year or two back, the ethnic grievance lobby managed to persuade Congress to pass a resolution that the United States Constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation -- which would have been news to the dead white males who wrote it. With Disney movies, one assumes it's just the modishness of showbiz ignoramuses and whatever multiculti theorists they've put on the payroll as consultants. But professor Keeley and Steven LeBlanc of Harvard disclose almost as an aside that, in fact, their scientific colleagues were equally invested in the notion of the noble primitive living in peace with nature and his fellow man, even though no such creature appears to have existed. "Most archaeologists," says LeBlanc, "ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years Mayan records have been deciphered. Contrary to archaeologists' wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents.... The large number of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money."
And on, and on. Do you remember that fabulously preserved 5,000-year-old man they found in a glacier in 1991? He had one of those copper axes the experts assured us were an early unit of currency. Unfortunately for this theory, he had it hafted in a manner that suggested he wasn't asking, "Can you break a twenty?" "He also had with him," notes professor Keeley, "a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change." Nonetheless, anthropologists concluded that he was a shepherd who had fallen asleep and frozen peacefully to death in a snowstorm. Then the X-ray results came back and showed he had an arrowhead in him.
Not for the first time, the experts turn out to be playing what children call "Opposite Land." There's more truth in Cole Porter's couplet from Find Me A Primitive Man:
I don't mean the kind that belongs to a club But the kind that has a club that belongs to him.
Although Porter was the kind that belongs to a club, the second line accurately conveys his own taste in men. He'd have been very annoyed if Mister Primitive had turned out to be some mellow colours-of-your-windiness hippy-dippy granola-cruncher.
Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."
Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? And to the point of pretending a bunch of torturing marauders devised the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. We do it for the same reason we indulge behaviour like that at Caledonia, Ont. We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.
I was interested to read Wade's book after a month in which men raised in suburban Ontario were charged with a terrorist plot that included plans to behead the Prime Minister, and the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River. The Mexican drug gangs weren't Muslim last time I checked, but evidently decapitation isn't just for jihadists anymore: if you want to get ahead, get a head. A couple of years back, I came across a column in The East African by Charles Onyango-Obbo musing on the return of cannibalism to the Dark Continent. Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo (four million dead but, as they haven't found a way to pin it on Bush, nobody cares) had been making victims' relatives eat the body parts of their loved ones. You'll recall that, when Samuel Doe was toppled as Liberia's leader, he was served a last meal of his own ears. His killers kept his genitals for themselves, under the belief that if you eat a man's penis you acquire his powers. One swallow doesn't make a summer, of course, but I wonder sometimes if we're not heading toward a long night of re-primitivization. In his shrewd book Civilization And Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes:
"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary."
It's worse than Harris thinks. We're not merely "forgetful." We've constructed a fantasy past in which primitive societies lived in peace and security with nary a fear that their crops would be stolen or their children enslaved. War has been the natural condition of mankind for thousands of years, and our civilization is a very fragile exception to that. What does it say about us that so many of our elites believe exactly the opposite -- that we are a monstrous violent rupture with our primitive pacifist ancestors? It's never a good idea to put reality up for grabs. You can bet your highest-denomination axe on that.
There was a little resistance and argument, but not much. Up here in Fairbanks there is a fair share of lefties, but for the most part the students are conservative and the faculty runs about 50/50 so they can't push their agenda too far.
That is about the freakiest thing I've ever read.
Yes, I know. I wasn't drawing a parallel between the two. It's just that - let's face it - how often do you get to bring up the Beane family in the course of a lifetime?
Same here.
Done.
I love Steyn... and not just for his ax.
Bears repeating.
L
FMCDH(BITS)
I live in Durango CO about 45 miles from Mesa Verde National Park. Built by the Anaszi Indians, it is, INDEED, way up there in the mountains. A twenty minute ride around and around in circles to get to the top.
I'm a printer here in Durango, and constantly print 4/c brochures and books about Mesa Verde, and Chimney Rock to the south. There is never any mention of fighting or "wars" about these ancients.
Kind of funny, isn't it, considering this article....if Mesa Verde and the Anansazi had cannons, it would be "The Guns of Navarone".
Most of the crap I print here for the touristas is just that...Crap.
FMCDH(BITS)
In May, I visited the New American Indian Museum at the Smithsonian. There was a detailed native account of finding village after village with so many people dead of disease there weren't enough survivors to bury them in the area around present day Cape Cod.
The implication that white man brought the disease was obvious. Less obvious was the dates of the account-- all years before any white man set foot on Plymouth Rock (1620).
This account was collaborated by an associate at the North Dakota Historical Society years earlier. Because I can prove some native blood in my lineage, I have access to some sources of information ordinary white guys do not. The associate told me that human remains dating from the 15th century (late 1400's) found in North Dakota showed signs of TB, another "white man's disease" supposedly unknown at the time. In the opinion of this associate, much of the agitation to return remains to politically-connected tribes was to prevent further study.
The archaeological evidence for overhunting is hard to find other than in New Zealand--and that was more recent. There is the "blitzkreig hypothesis" that holds that the extinctions occured within a few hundred years of the first arrival of humans in any one place. The American large mammals did disappear suddenly.
1. Evidence is growing all the time that humans have been in the Americas for much longer, as far back as 20,000 or 25,000 BP.
The earlier American humans who had much different skulls than the Siberians may have been situationally more like the Africans who coevolved with large mammals. In Africa the extinctions were low (19 percent) compared to the losses in the Americas. As an aside I can't help but wonder if the early Americans made it off the continents or were extinguished by the invaders (as large mammals?).
A great many other animals went extinct at the same time, including ones unlikely to be hunted by people, implying that there were other causes involved.
Astor's fur gatherers used Nobel's dynamite on beaver dams in large areas of the West. With the beavers gone many other species disappeared as well. Restoration of that ecology now that the streams that once held beaver ponds are arid gullies is nigh impossible. The hydrologic drought caused by the demise of those green hills extends for hundreds of miles downwind.
I'm sure you've got something wrong in your chronology.
The fur trade in the West was more or less over by 1835 as fashions changed.
Nobel invented dynamite in 1867.
If Astor had a time machine, no wonder he became the richest man in America.
What would you call it?
What would you call it?
White men had been all over the area for nearly a century. 1620 was just when the first permanent white settlement was founded.
For instance, hundreds of ships visited the Great Banks every year, and many of them went to shore nearby for a little R&R and trading with the Indians.
Squanto, who you may remember from the Pilgrim story, was abducted by some of these men and taken to Spain and then England before eventually making his way home.
Such intermittent contact is plenty to pass disease along.
I can't speak to your ND story. However, it is believed that most of the diseases spread from tribe to tribe without a white man in sight. By the time whitey showed up, anywhere from 50% to 95% of the original inhabitants had already died off. The white man, logically enough, took what he found as the natural state of things.
There is a very logical reason that epidemic diseases were probably unknown in the Americas before Columbus. They are almost all diseases of domestic animals that have mutated to where they affect people. Which we continue to see today with flu strains. The Indians had essentially no domestic animals and therefore no epidemic diseases. With the possible exception of syphillis, which the Spaniards may have taken back to Europe with them. In any case, it was noted as a new thing in Italy in 1493.
BTW, if it makes you feel any better, just about all these diseases should be called Asian or African diseases. Very few originated in Europe.
BUMP!ping
bttt
Steyn brilliantly exhibits how so-called modern scientists have drank the Kool-Aide.
Clearly, considering the propensity of human beings to shape their interpretation of evidence based on their personal worldview, one must consider ones associations more thoroughly.
Being that Steyn is so brilliant in his ability to torture the logic of others, I am glad he is a believer in Jesus Christ.
You raise some interesting points until you got here. Most of the plains and eastern tribes used dogs as beasts of burden (and meals) long before whitey showed up. In the southern end of the continent, the Incas used Llamas and Alpacas. In what is now North Dakota, the Mandan raised chickens.
I always get a kick out of how backward Europeans look at out native peoples. The Aztec and Maya cities are legendary for their work with precious metals, cement and medicine. Both civilizations were rotting from within by the time whitey showed up.
Even in the less civilized tribes of North America, there was a trading culture far more advanced than is realized. Tools and metal artifact of eastern tribal design have been found in central North Dakota burial mounds. The Navajo originally came from Alaska. The Chippewa were originally pushed out of the Finger Lakes region of New York by the Seneca and eventually made it to Wisconsin and Minnesota to push out the Sioux who, in turn, moved to the Dakotas to displace the Mandan and others . . . again long before whitey showed up.
Certainly whitey brought more diseases into the mix, but he also took a few back to Europe with him, as you pointed out. The whole point of Steyn's article (as well as our exchange about the exchange of diseases) is to show that the so-called experts don't know squat.
Years ago, in a past life, I had a job which brought me in contact with a lot of these people. I learned a lot of interesting stuff including this account of Tehcumseh's curse.
Fair enough. I was aware of the llama, alpaca and dogs being present in America. Also I believe the Muscovy duck and turkeys were domesticated in Mesoamerica.
My point stands, however. Most of the major epidemic diseases come from domesticated herd animals such as pigs, sheep, horses and cattle. The Indians had none of these animals and therefore no exposure to the diseases we contracted from being in constant contact with them.
There is also some evidence that pureblood Indians have a narrower range of immune responses, probably due to "genetic bottleneck" created by Indians being descended from a small group.
I suspect you are wrong about the Mandans raising chickens. Possibly when Lewis and Clark arrived, not before Columbus, as I believe chickens are native to SE Asia, not South Dakota.
I don't believe Indians were backward. The more we look, the more complex and varied their societies are found to be.
A single plague, the Black Death, in medieval Europe killed about 1/4 to 1/3 of the population and caused massive social disruption for the next century or so.
Consider the effects of plague after plague with equivalent or greater death rates. Most of the Indians the white man ran into were basically refugees from broken societies.
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