Are savages noble? Two new books ask whether our ancestors were right about food, sex, war, and trade.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: 'Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live' and 'The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?' - Book review

Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live, by Marlene Zuk, Norton, 304 pages, $27.95

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, by Fared Diamond, Viking, 499 pages, $36

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MODERN ANTHROPOLOGICAL research may be settling the great debate between the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Was the state of nature a "war of every man against every man" in which life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," as Hobbes wrote? Or did "savages" live in utopian bliss, thanks to "the tranquility of their passions and their ignorance of vice," as Rousseau believed?

Two new books, Marlene Zuk's Paleofantasy and Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday, examine the data on how hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers have eaten, loved, socialized, fought, reared children, and lived. Both side mostly with Hobbes.

Yet the books offer a radically split decision on what lessons we can draw from Hobbes' triumph. Zuk, a biologist at the University of California-Riverside, aims at destroying contemporary myths, or as she calls them "paleofantasies," about our Stone Age ancestors. She rejects the idea that there was "a time when everything about us--body, mind, and behavior--was in sync with the environment." For Zuk, anthropological knowledge mainly raises questions about how we moderns should live, without providing much in the way of answers.

Diamond, a geographer at the University of California-Los Angeles, is more prone to prescription. He blends his personal experience of living and working for decades among contemporary subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers in New Guinea with extensive anthropological and ethnographic data from around the world to draw conclusions about how we moderns ought to function.

Both Zuk and Diamond are unconvinced by Rousseau's notion of the noble savage. In his 1754 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men, the Frenchman claimed that "more murders were committed in a single day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single town than had been committed in the state of nature during entire centuries over the whole face of the earth." But archaeological and modern ethnographic data show that small-scale stateless societies--which were once called "savage" or "primitive"--are far more violent than are modern state societies. To the extent that they are a good proxy for Rousseau's state of nature, they reveal Rousseau to be wrong.

Zuk cites archaeological and ethnographic work finding that 14 percent of deaths in ancient and contemporary pre-state societies resulted from human violence. Diamond notes that while the level of violence varies among traditional societies, it "usually ranks as either the leading cause or (after illness) the second-leading cause of death."

These arguments jibe with the data reported by the...