The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,34

breasts but know that their enemies feel it too. That is why they sometimes massacre every last member of a village they raid: they anticipate that any survivors would seek revenge for their slain kinsmen.

RATES OF VIOLENCE IN STATE AND NONSTATE SOCIETIES

Though descriptions of violence in nonstate societies demolish the stereotype that foraging peoples are inherently peaceful, they don’t tell us whether the level of violence is higher or lower than in so-called civilized societies. The annals of modern states have no shortage of gruesome massacres and atrocities, not least against native peoples of every continent, and their wars have death tolls that reach eight digits. Only by looking at numbers can we get a sense as to whether civilization has increased violence or decreased it.

In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But should we look at absolute numbers, or at relative numbers, calculated as a proportion of the populations? The choice confronts us with the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of one hundred to be killed or 1 percent of a population of one billion. In one frame of mind, one could say that a person who is tortured or killed suffers to the same degree regardless of how many other people meet such a fate, so it is the sum of these sufferings that should engage our sympathy and our analytic attention. But in another frame of mind, one could reason that part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask, “If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?” The reasoning in this second frame of mind, whether it appeals to the proportion of a population or the risk to an individual, ends in the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies, we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts.

What happens, then, when we use the emergence of states as the dividing line and put hunter-gatherers, hunter-horticulturalists, and other tribal peoples (from any era) on one side, and settled states (also from any era) on the other? Several scholars have recently scoured the anthropological and historical literature for every good body count from nonstate societies that they could find. Two kinds of estimates are available. One comes from ethnographers who record demographic data, including deaths, in the people they study over long stretches of time.46 The other comes from forensic archaeologists, who sift through burial sites or museum collections with an eye for signs of foul play.47

How can one establish the cause of death when the victim perished hundreds or thousands of years ago? Some prehistoric skeletons are accompanied by the stone-age equivalent of a smoking gun: a spearhead or arrowhead embedded in a bone, like the ones found in Kennewick Man and Ötzi. But circumstantial evidence can be almost as damning. Archaeologists can check prehistoric skeletons for the kinds of damage known to be left by assaults in humans today. The stigmata include bashed-in skulls, cut marks from stone tools on skulls or limbs, and parry fractures on ulnar bones (the injury that a person gets when he defends himself against an assailant by holding up his arm). Injuries sustained by a skeleton when it was inside a living body can be distinguished in several ways from the damage it sustained when it was exposed to the world. Living bones fracture like glass, with sharp, angled edges, whereas dead bones fracture like chalk, at clean right angles. And if a bone has a different pattern of weathering on its fractured surface than on its intact surface, it was probably broken after the surrounding flesh had rotted away. Other incriminating signs from nearby surroundings include fortifications, shields, shock weapons such as tomahawks (which are useless in hunting), and depictions of human combat on the walls of caves (some of them more than six thousand years old). Even with all this evidence, archaeological death counts are usually underestimates, because