Uncontacted Tribe

In a pretty fascinating story yesterday, a group called Survival International released aerial photography of an "uncontacted tribe" of indigenous people's living in the Amazon jungle. The group is an advocacy organization on behalf of isolated tribal peoples and they say "We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist."

And, indeed, I had no idea that any such groups existed until I saw these stories. But there are around 100 such groups in the world, with about half of them living in Brazil, then another large group in the western half of New Guinea, and then the rest living in other parts of the Amazon. You can learn more here. The tribes face dispossession from the usual suspects for deforestation, but are also extremely vulnerable to epidemic disease.

Research indicates that "primitive" hunter gatherers actually enjoy a higher average standard of living than have most people in historical times and, indeed, higher than in many of today's poor countries. Agricultural techniques allow a given piece of land to support a much larger population, but at a lower standard of living.

Comments

That's true about the standards of living (Jared Diamond loves to trumpet that), Matt, but only for the ones who survive to adulthood. These tribes have extremely high rates of infant mortality. They also engage in infanticide to kill off sickly children. You can't hunt if you're disabled.

I'm deaf in my left ear, with some more in my right, and I was sick a lot during childhood.

I'll take modern society and medicine over the "noble savage" and his brutal, but necessary, ways any day of the week.

Posted by Greg | May 31, 2008 2:35 PM

Do you really need the quotation marks around "primitive"? These tribes are basically the living definition of the word.

Posted by The Darkness | May 31, 2008 2:56 PM

Lmao, check out the third picture. These folks are clearly freaked out by the flying metal bird of doom above their heads.

Posted by soullite | May 31, 2008 2:59 PM

"But there are around 100 such groups in the world..."

100 minus 1. Whoops.

Posted by Alex F | May 31, 2008 3:00 PM

Hey, these people are uncontacted! How do we know what their quality of life really is?

Posted by Taddie Bell | May 31, 2008 3:01 PM

Compared to modern societies, hunter-gatherer tribes have extremely high levels of violence and rape. As Steven Pinker has written, the odds of a man being killed by another are much, much greater among primitive peoples. Surely that grim fact must have some bearing on their "standard of living"?

Posted by Francisco | May 31, 2008 3:03 PM

Compared to modern societies, hunter-gatherer tribes have extremely high levels of violence and rape. As Steven Pinker has written, the odds of a man being killed by another are much, much greater among primitive peoples. Surely that grim fact must have some bearing on their "standard of living"?

Posted by Francisco | May 31, 2008 3:04 PM

Ummm....

A few things.

I would be wary of blanket statements about what 'they' do absent any direct observation of 'them' doing it. There's a wide variety of practices in indigenous people, and generalizations don't really work.

Hunting and gathering is more efficient in terms of the diversity of nutrition you can get, the amount of work you need to do and resistance to climate variation. The only advantage of basic agriculture is that it requires less land per person to produce food. Other than that, it isn't an improvement at all.

What should you compare these people's presumed living standard to?

Read Death Without Weeping, by Nancy Sheper Hughes - which documents the incredibly high infant mortality rates among poor peasants in agricultural communities in Brazil. I don't necessarily agree with all of her conclusions, but if you want a baseline to compare this group to it might be better than comparing them to middle class America.

Posted by justaguy | May 31, 2008 3:08 PM

In at least a few cases (I don't know if it's some, many, or most) hunter-gathering can support more people than agriculture. In Danish prehistory population density actually went down when agriculture was introduced. That's in "How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory"

http://www.amazon.com/How-Chiefs-Come-Power-Prehistory/dp/0804728569

Posted by Chris | May 31, 2008 3:19 PM

"Compared to modern societies, hunter-gatherer tribes have extremely high levels of violence and rape."

How can you compare 'violence' in societies with such different forms of social organization?

We tend to naturalize the violence in our own culture and pathologize violence in others. For example, I am wearing shoes that were made in a 3rd world country, where workers live and work in conditions that are not very healthy. Part of that is the legacy of covert intervention by my government into their domestic politics that set up laws favoring transnational business over the rights of individuals. Is my purchasing shoes an act of violence?

As an anthropology teacher said in a recent lecture I attended, in the state of California the US government paid out over a million dollars in bounties for the scalps of Native Americans (at less than $10 a scalp) to bounty hunters who hunted them for profit. Who's the savage?

Posted by justaguy | May 31, 2008 3:20 PM

"Compared to modern societies, hunter-gatherer tribes have extremely high levels of violence and rape."

How can you compare 'violence' in societies with such different forms of social organization?

We tend to naturalize the violence in our own culture and pathologize violence in others. For example, I am wearing shoes that were made in a 3rd world country, where workers live and work in conditions that are not very healthy. Part of that is the legacy of covert intervention by my government into their domestic politics that set up laws favoring transnational business over the rights of individuals. Is my purchasing shoes an act of violence?

As an anthropology teacher said in a recent lecture I attended, in the state of California the US government paid out over a million dollars in bounties between 1851 and 1852 for the scalps of Native Americans (at less than $10 a scalp) to bounty hunters who hunted them for profit. Who's the savage?

Posted by justaguy | May 31, 2008 3:21 PM

I'll take modern society and medicine over the "noble savage" and his brutal, but necessary, ways any day of the week

Well sure, so will I, if we're talking about living standards and if by "modern society" we're talking about rich democracies. But I'd rather be a "primitive" tribesman in deepest Amazonia than one of the world's couple of billion third world slum dwellers. And yes, it's true, average human health and vitality declined markedly after the advent of agriculture for people who made the leap from being hunter gatherers.

Posted by Jasper | May 31, 2008 3:23 PM

Every day, MattY learns something that everyone else has known for years.

What would be even more interesting is things like this.

Posted by TLB | May 31, 2008 3:23 PM

Yeah, but...

Okay, so these are uncontacted tribes. Cool. But let's cut to the chase. Do they support Obama or Hillary? Should their delegations be seated, or not?

Posted by Glen Tomkins | May 31, 2008 3:25 PM

the bbc made an interesting documentary about some wacko who gets together groups of tourists to make first contact with tribes in New Guinea. I stayed up way too late last night watching it on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jprJBYYRcqQ

Posted by dan | May 31, 2008 3:33 PM

The same people who complain about McCain's position on gay marriage don't seem to mind when these "primitive" tribes don't even allow full partner benefits for gay couples.

Posted by Ronnie P | May 31, 2008 3:36 PM

For some reason it makes me happy that we still live in the part of human history that has "uncontacted tribes". Pretty soon (100 years?) that won't happen, and a 1.4 million year long chapter of human history, with the experience of finding new people, will be over.

Posted by d. | May 31, 2008 3:36 PM

For some reason it makes me happy that we still live in the part of human history that has "uncontacted tribes". Pretty soon (100 years?) that won't happen, and a 1.4 million year long chapter of human history, with the experience of finding new people, will be over.

Posted by d. | May 31, 2008 3:37 PM

This prompts me to think of some pranks which could be pulled on a massive scale for very little budget and input.

Posted by El Cid | May 31, 2008 3:38 PM

As soullite said, "check out the third picture. These folks are clearly freaked out by the flying metal bird of doom above their heads."

That was my first thought, too. They looked ready to do whatever was necessary to drive it off.

Posted by Edward, the mad shirt grinder | May 31, 2008 3:44 PM

Re "Agricultural techniques allow a given piece of land to support a much larger population, but at a lower standard of living"
-----------
The moral for our immigration policy is, I trust, sufficiently pointed.

Or should we ask the Native Americans what they think of an Open Door policy?

Posted by Don Williams | May 31, 2008 3:45 PM

Hmmmm.

The fact that these Amazon dwellers are pointing weapons and reacting with hostility to the approach of our peaceful missionaries suggests they're highly intelligent.

Certainly much smarter than those guys in the mountains of Pennsylvania who greeted Hillary
with a fulsome welcome.

Posted by Don Williams | May 31, 2008 3:52 PM

While there is much enthusiasm for preserving animal and even plant biodiversity, little attention is paid to human biodiversity.

In the Indian Ocean, there is an uncontacted tribe of pygmy negritos (average height for men of other Andaman tribes is 4'-10") living on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Islands. If contacted, they would probably die out like the other Andamanese are doing due to lack of disease resistance, but they've driven off repeated landings with volleys of arrows. A couple of years ago, two Indian fishermen got drunk, fell asleep and there boat was washed up on the beach. The Andamanese promptly killed them to encourage the others.

Here's my interview with George Weber, head of the Andaman Society, who has done much to get the Indian government to leave the North Sentinelese alone:

http://www.isteve.com/andamanese.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2008 4:01 PM

Not to get too Star-Trek-prime-directivey, but if these are really uncontacted tribes, doesn't flying an airplane over their settlement at all risk seriously fucking with their society? From the pictures, they clearly reacted pretty strongly.

Posted by BlyMlvy | May 31, 2008 4:01 PM

Reacting to the news of the uncontacted tribe, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign said that the Democratic Party should not decide on a nominee before this tribe has had a chance to schedule a primary.

Posted by My Alter Ego | May 31, 2008 4:03 PM

Way too many assertions without evidence in this thread.

Posted by Freddie | May 31, 2008 4:03 PM

For some reason it makes me happy that we still live in the part of human history that has "uncontacted tribes". Pretty soon (100 years?) that won't happen, and a 1.4 million year long chapter of human history, with the experience of finding new people, will be over.

Oh, I don't know--I still have my hopes that a combination of peak oil and global warming will restore the basic adventurousness of everyday living which was the norm in the pre-modern era.

Posted by James Gary | May 31, 2008 4:09 PM

By the way, Jared Diamond has a long account in The New Yorker this week of the war stories told him by a New Guinea highlander about tribal feuding. Diamond's pal's uncle was killed in battle, so honor demanded that the nephew spend 3 years and get 30 people killed getting revenge on the killer.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/jared-diamond-life-is-full-of-interest.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2008 4:12 PM

Re: Agricultural techniques allow a given piece of land to support a much larger population, but at a lower standard of living.

Many of these people are agricultural, at least at a primitive level. The Amazonian ones definitely are, some of the Papuans too. Hunter-gatherer bands are almost totally gone. The San peopel of the Kalhari have been abandoning their traditional hunting lifestyle for the last 50 years. The Andaman Islanders (with whom there is almost no outside contact) are the only hunter-gathrer culture I know of that is likely to remain intact through the 21st century.

Posted by JonF | May 31, 2008 4:50 PM

Here's a nice picture of a happy Andaman Islander couple from the Onge tribe (now, sadly decimated by Eurasian diseases):

http://www.olimu.com/Notes/Andamanese.jpg

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2008 5:09 PM

And here's a jaw-dropping picture of how useful steatopygia is to Andaman Islander mothers in carrying around their toddlers:

http://www.olimu.com/Notes/Steatopygia.jpg

Both pictures are from the famous anthropologist Carleton Coon's 1965 bestseller "The Living Races of Man."

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 31, 2008 5:15 PM

Re "Diamond's pal's uncle was killed in battle, so honor demanded that the nephew spend 3 years and get 30 people killed getting revenge on the killer."
-----------
Don't give Hillary ideas.

Posted by Don Williams | May 31, 2008 5:25 PM

Way off in the weeds but very few people know that the products of agriculture produces less energy than required for their production. A thermodynamic loss. Impossible you say? No, think of animals used for tilling and gathering. Horses oxen and mules whose energy is derived from grass, which humans cannot digest. Then think of oil.

The thermodynamic economics don't always match money economics either but they usually stay pretty close. Cheap energy made for plentyful crops and low prices. If energy prices stay high and fall less than food for some periods, talking in seasons or years, the world can look forward to more frequent shortage and larger swings in prices.

By the way buy some meat now for the freezer. The herds are being liquidated as meat prices have not kept pace with feed prices. There is a self reinforcing dynamic in this cycle. As the herd is liquidated, meaning animals rushed to market since feeding them is a money loser and also breeding stock goes to market the larger supply depresses prices further. Feed demand should then fall followed by feed prices and the herds will build again.

Hunter gatherering avoids all this complication but it cannot support the population densities that formal agriculture does.

Posted by rapier | May 31, 2008 5:28 PM

Re rapier's comment "Way off in the weeds but very few people know that the products of agriculture produces less energy than required for their production."
------------
This is particularly acute in survival gardening with hand tools (e.g., with mattock). Nuclear war planners found that while the bombs themselves and fallout could be dealt with, feeding the postwar populace in the longer term was a very bleak prospect.

You have to be careful that you don't burn up more calories than what you receive from the crops --a negative balance yields slow starvation absent hunting supplements. Wild game doesn't survive very long near refugee camps -- only in areas with VERY low human density.

Primitive people use some efficient tricks which modern man has forgotten. Take us outside our infrastructure -- constructed over 2000 years -- and we're pretty pathetic compared to the "primitives".

Posted by Don Williams | May 31, 2008 5:44 PM

Re: Nuclear war planners found that while the bombs themselves and fallout could be dealt with, feeding the postwar populace in the longer term was a very bleak prospect.

Given climate disruptions and the radioactive contamination of some of the world's most fertile croplands that's hardly unexpected. And just how did they propose to deal with the bombs and fallout? Most estimates I've seen suggested that somewhere around 1/3 of the population of the US would be dead with days of a major nuclear war in which cities were targeted.

Posted by JonF | May 31, 2008 6:38 PM

Oh please...

We can make pretty good guesses about such uncontacted tribes because anthropologists have contacted plenty of them. They tend to be very egalitarian, very violent, and women and children have very low power/status. Exceptions exist of course.

Also, have you ever been to a tropical rainforest? It is incredibly dense, but also incredibly productive. Anyone who starves to death in a tropical rainforest is an idiot... sustaining a small tribe in isolation on hunting and gathering does not exactly imply some great 'ancient secrets' we have lost. The one thing that really does surprise me is how some of these tribes manage to exist without big metal knives (machetes)... I found it hard to get more than 5 feet off-trail without one.

As for 'human diversity': Anthropologically and sociology there is a case to be made there. Genetics wise, not so much. Small inbred groups are useful for human genetic studies, don't get me wrong, but they don't really represent any meaningful 'diversity'. The genetic difference between two random Africans is highly probable to be larger than the difference between a European and one of the isolated Amazonian tribe members. The 4'10" people New Guinea will probably be 5'6" if they had a decent diet as children.

Oh, and as for agriculture being less productive than hunting/gathering... Umm, no. In a rainforest or costal land with great fishing, maybe... but those are pretty special cases. Also, don't forget that agricultural societies support lots of people who are not actually spending all their time getting food!

The stories of agriculture supporting less people in ancient times are highly dubious. There are lots of other effects (disease and climate changes) which are more likely to be the cause of population density changes... and there are quite compelling arguments that the advent of agriculture was actually an effect.

Posted by travc | May 31, 2008 6:46 PM

1. glad to see that Steve Sailor is a Jarred Diamond fan. Maybe he's coming around.

2. When I was 14, in 1963, I spent several weeks with tribes in French Guiana that, while not "uncontacted", appeared extremely similar to the Amazonian pictures. It was a remarkable experience; I hope these tribes survive.

3. regarding travc's comment: Also on the trip, our American group composed mostly of college students was stranded for 4 days in the rain forest. We had pistols and machetes. Although we heard animals, we saw none. We shot a very small parrot. Living on the bounty of the jungle is very tricky for civilized folk. It was difficult, but not as difficult as for us, for the tribes we visited. Locals with modern weapons (guns, machetes) and jungle skills found it pretty easy. There are fascinating stories beyond the scope of this comments section.

Posted by jk | May 31, 2008 7:41 PM

Re travc's comment "Also, don't forget that agricultural societies support lots of people who are not actually spending all their time getting food!"
-------------
Wait until next April 15 and then tell us how that is a great argument in its favor.

Re travc's comment "sustaining a small tribe in isolation on hunting and gathering does not exactly imply some great 'ancient secrets' we have lost. "
-------
Actually, what I had in mind was how does one establish a subsistance garden in TEMPERATE forested woodlands/Eastern suburbs with hand tools. I know how -- and travc probably knows how if he's studied primitive peoples -- but I think many modern day people do not.

Not only have most of us lost "great ancient secrets" we have almost lost the special corn and bean varieties used by the Indian tribes. Varieties superior to modern day hybrids for conditions of short growing seasons, random drought, and low soil fertility. Not to mention generating seed corn which can be used in subsequent generations.

Posted by Don Williams | May 31, 2008 7:48 PM

Historically, agriculture would produce more calories in a given area than hunter-gathering, but a much less balanced diet. So, a society that switched to agriculture would see shorter, sicker people (generalizing) but more of them.

Then, these denser societies would have more social organization, and larger warrior groups. That lets an agricultural society push away hunter gatherer tribes, even if the technology level was similar.

That's all generalizing of course.

In the case of Denmark, I wonder if hunter gatherers initially overpopulated their environment because of abundant land and sea wildlife. Then, when the local wildlife is decimated, they are compelled to pursue agriculture.

Posted by stm177 | May 31, 2008 7:51 PM

Don Williams,

Agriculture can produce more energy than you put into it, or less, depending on how it's practiced. If I recall correctly low input agriculture with animal power is generally more energy efficient than modern mechanized conventional agriculture. It also depends what you grow of course....I think that rice grown in traditional paddy fashion is supposed to be one of the most energy efficient methods of agriculture.

Justaguy,

Nancy Scheper-Hughes book is indeed excellent. However if I recall correctly it wasn't dealing with rural peasants or with a thriving agricultural community. I believe her study was done in the shantytowns surrounding a small city- while there was agriculture around and a lot of her informants had work in the sugar industry, they were more properly described as the urban or peri-urban residents rather than rural peasants.

Posted by Hector | May 31, 2008 7:57 PM

Re JonF's comment "And just how did they propose to deal with the bombs and fallout? Most estimates I've seen suggested that somewhere around 1/3 of the population of the US would be dead with days of a major nuclear war in which cities were targeted "
----------
"I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed, Mr President." --Air Force General in Dr Strangelove

The direct effects from a 1 Megaton airburst (blast, heat ) tail off around 9 mile from center of detonation. Which sounds like a lot until you realize how big the USA is.

Fallout from strikes on the major cities of the Eastern seaboard would mostly fall on the Atlantic Ocean (prevailing winds from the west.)

An enormous amount of fallout would be thrown up from a counterforce strike on the 3 Minuteman missile fields in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota. That large cloud, depending on the jet stream, would reach east to Kentucky. (Until a few years ago -- when 3 other Minuteman fields farther to the east were retired -- it could have reached to New York State and Pennsylvania. ) But most of it would be in the northern part of the USA.

Bottom line -- there might be large parts of the USA that would receive only moderate amounts of fallout (assuming radiological weapons are not detonated on the western seaboard.)

But large numbers of survivors in those areas would probably still die from starvation because of the difficulty in producing food without modern tractors/fuel and without large herds of oxen/mules/work horses. (Even the small existing herds of work animals --e.g, in Amish areas -- would be killed off by fallout. It's kinda hard to fit a Clydesdale into a fallout shelter.) That is what I was referring to.

Posted by Don Williams | May 31, 2008 8:07 PM

I am wearing shoes that were made in a 3rd world country, where workers live and work in conditions that are not very healthy. Part of that is the legacy of covert intervention by my government into their domestic politics that set up laws favoring transnational business over the rights of individuals. Is my purchasing shoes an act of violence?

My shoes were made in China. Do you blame the American government for "covert intervention" against the workers there too?

Posted by Ragout | May 31, 2008 8:53 PM

"My shoes were made in China. Do you blame the American government for "covert intervention" against the workers there too?"
No, why would I?

Posted by justaguy | May 31, 2008 9:34 PM

Re: The genetic difference between two random Africans is highly probable to be larger than the difference between a European and one of the isolated Amazonian tribe members.

No. Most Africans are of West African lineage (or have some admixture of West African genes), due to the Bantu migrations. You're correct if you note that the genetic and liguistic difference between the Khoi-San and other Africans is greater than the diffrence between the rest of Africa and everyone outside Africa, but that's a single case example. Meanwhile, due to sporadic gene flows across the Sahara (which was not always a desert) Europeans have some small admixture of African genes, while they were were isolated from the Amazonian tribes since the Paleolithic (until very recently of course).

Re: The stories of agriculture supporting less people in ancient times are highly dubious.

Well, we do know with pretty high certainty that the population of the world was much, much lower before the present era. Pre-modern technology the world could not possibly have supported anything like the current population.

Re: Actually, what I had in mind was how does one establish a subsistance garden in TEMPERATE forested woodlands/Eastern suburbs with hand tools.

One doesn't have to. Non-handtool agriculture dates back pretty far into the past, long before mechanized agriculture came on the scene. Eurasian cultures have had plows and animals capable of drawing them since the late Neolothic. On the other hand Africa, Polynesia, New Guinea, and the Americas did manage to sustain decent sized populations with hand-agriculture and almost no major domesticates-- in some cases, no major game aniamls either. The Americas even managed to build full fledged civilizations on top of that base.

Re: Not only have most of us lost "great ancient secrets" we have almost lost the special corn and bean varieties used by the Indian tribes

Maybe, and that's a shame in several ways. Still many modern cultivars are more nutritious, more disease resistant, higher yielding, etc. than their ancient progenitors. So it may be an acceptable trade-off. There are also some crops, like quinoa and sourhgum (to name just two) that have only niche places in modern-day food economies, but which are highly nutritious, adapted to unusual environments, and could substitute for better known grains at need.

Re: The direct effects from a 1 Megaton airburst (blast, heat ) tail off around 9 mile from center of detonation.

Right. But that circle of destruction isn't random; it would include the most densely populated areas of the country. Nor can you count on a due west wind. Local fallout would land hither and thither around the suburbs, producing lethal cases of radiation sickness up to hundred of miles away (where weapons are ground burst). Have you never looked at fallout projection maps? They're pretty ugly: long black tails stretching out over large territories, and some areas almost completely unsurvivable.

Re: But large numbers of survivors in those areas would probably still die from starvation because of the difficulty in producing food without modern tractors/fuel and without large herds of oxen/mules/work horses.

That's secondary. The climatic effects would render agriculture dubious for months afterward, even under the least grim scenarios (assuming massive war not a handful of strikes that is). The survivors from that drastic culling (much of it quite rapid owing to raging pandemics like the events of the 540s and 1340s) probably would be few enough that they could resume pre-mechanized agriculture, and gradually boost themselves back to crude mechanized agriculture. As well, oases of technology would also survive near dams, wind farms, coal mines etc. The knowledge would survive intact after all, and that's the biggest component of modern technology. Iceland and New Zealand would probably come through intact assuming few or no strikes on them. And human beings are astonishingly inventive when need arises. The European Dark Ages, when long-distance grain shipments were cut off, saw several major innovations in agriculture.

Posted by JonF | May 31, 2008 9:43 PM

Regarding energy input and output in agriculture -- of course total energy input into producing crops exceeds the available energy in crops. However, the most important source of energy here is the sun. Whether inputs from other sources, such as labor by animals like oxen, humans, horses, etc, tractors, fertilizer production, etc, exceeds inputs is another question -- I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes" in the contemporary U.S., but that's a contingent fact about our agriculture system, not a logical consequence of the laws of thermodynamics.

Posted by Julian Elson | May 31, 2008 9:53 PM

The direct effects from a 1 Megaton airburst (blast, heat ) tail off around 9 mile from center of detonation.

Which sounds very dangerous, unless you can find a fridge to hide in and safely bounce away from ground zero.

Posted by El Cid | May 31, 2008 10:05 PM

the state of California the US government paid out over a million dollars in bounties for the scalps of Native Americans (at less than $10 a scalp) to bounty hunters who hunted them for profit. Who's the savage?

This has been described as the "worst slaughter of Indian peoples in United States history. But it's still no worse than the violence that was and is routine in hunter-gatherer societies, where it's typical for a quarter of men to die violent deaths.

So even though the California settlers killed the majority of California Indians, I'd say that makes them less barbaric than the typical hunter-gatherer society, since at least the settlers weren't killing each other at such rates.

Posted by Ragout | May 31, 2008 10:11 PM

JonF,

There are quite a lot of non-Bantu people in Africa (at least in a linguistic sense and presumably in a racial one as well). Many large and widely spoken languages in West and East Africa- Amharic, Luo, Hausa, Songhai, Fulani, etc.- are not related to Bantu languages. (Hausa and Amharic are actually more closely related to the Semitic languages like Arabic, Herbrew etc. than to Bantu).

If I recall correctly a lot of the pastoralist ethnicities in Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya etc. are completely racially distinct from West Africans, presumably still today- aren't some of the East African pastoralist groups supposed to be the sister group to the Khoisan?

Posted by Hector | May 31, 2008 10:22 PM

"So even though the California settlers killed the majority of California Indians, I'd say that makes them less barbaric than the typical hunter-gatherer society, since at least the settlers weren't killing each other at such rates."

What is the murder rate for the 'typical hunter gatherer society'?

Posted by justaguy | June 1, 2008 12:21 AM

I'm going to wait a bit before getting excited about this. Anyone remember the Tasaday?
Not saying it's not as it appears, just saying I'm going to wait. . .

Posted by giotto | June 1, 2008 2:30 PM

What is the murder rate for the 'typical hunter gatherer society'?

According to the article I linked to, it was typical for a quarter of men to die violent deaths. That's probably somewhat worse that being a soldier in WWII.

Posted by Ragout | June 1, 2008 5:47 PM

Yeah, I asked for two reasons. One is that the article lists side by side the figures of 25-30% of the adult male population and .5% of the population per year. If you assume an even yearly death rate, and that adult males are 25% of the population wouldn't you need 6.5% of the population to die by violence a year in order to have 1/4 of the adult male population die?

I know I have problems with basic math, but those numbers don't seem to add up.

The other problem is that - if you're going to say that a community that has a given subsistence strategy has a given level of inter or intra group violence you need to establish a link between the subsistence strategy and the violence. Otherwise you're taking something that could easily be due to historical contingency and making it an essential part of this type of social organization.

I don't know how Leblanc deals with this in his book, but it seems to be pretty problematic to me. That is, you can say that there are these groups of people who had this given rate of violent death and - absent issues with sampling error- that's fine. But once you go on to conclude that all similar societies have a similar rate of violent deaths you start arguing beyond the available evidence. It presupposes that hunting and gathering is the cause of the violence. How would you prove that? Leblanc might, but the article you link to doesn't address it.

Posted by justaguy | June 1, 2008 10:04 PM

"Nancy Scheper-Hughes book is indeed excellent. However if I recall correctly it wasn't dealing with rural peasants or with a thriving agricultural community. I believe her study was done in the shantytowns surrounding a small city- while there was agriculture around and a lot of her informants had work in the sugar industry, they were more properly described as the urban or peri-urban residents rather than rural peasants."

You're right, I think I blocked out a lot of that book due to all of the graphic descriptions of dead babies. She could have easily cut 200-300 pages and made her point. But still, the point stands that you can't assume that to be integrated into the Brazilian economy means that these people would have a good standard of living.

Posted by justaguy | June 1, 2008 10:12 PM

wouldn't you need 6.5% of the population to die by violence a year in order to have 1/4 of the adult male population die?

No. You're confusing deaths per year with cause of death. If 1% of the adult male population dies from violence each year, that means that about 25% of the adult male population will be dead from violence after before they've reached 25 years of adulthood (ignoring various details such as other causes of death).

When archeologists dig up graves of hunter-gatherers, they typically find that 25% or so of the men died from violence, and anthropologists find roughly the same thing when interviewing modern hunter-gatherers. I understand that to be a pretty widespread finding, so I don't think it's due to "historical contingency."

Posted by Ragout | June 2, 2008 12:16 AM

"What is the murder rate for the 'typical hunter gatherer society'?

According to the article I linked to, it was typical for a quarter of men to die violent deaths. That's probably somewhat worse that being a soldier in WWII."

It is VASTLY worse, certainly for US troops. The US lost 400 000 of 11 million served, a little under 3%.
But it does pretty much match the experiences of the heavy duty losers of the war, ie Japan, Germany and Russia, where the military deaths as fraction of those serving were around 25% to 30%. (Probably also Poland but I haven't seen those numbers.)

There were German units that lost 70% of their men in the very first assaults on the west; this is treated as an interesting and very unusual case that reflects a military personnel that took the war extremely personally and where the willingness to die for an idea was really ingrained. The general expectation for the US is that when about 25% of the personnel are dying, everyone left is going to turn tail and run.

You'd figure there were probably also Japanese units that lost 70% or so of their personnel, given that we're told how fanatic they were; and Russian units, given how brutal that particular aspect of the war was; but the reference that talked about the 70% figure did not mention any other examples.

Posted by Maynard Handley | June 2, 2008 3:15 AM

Re: There are quite a lot of non-Bantu people in Africa

Yes, I am aware of that. However they are mainly found at either the northern or southern ends of the Continent: Afroasiatic languages to the north and on the Horn, a band of Nilo-Saharan languages along the Sahel, and Khoi-San (and Afrikaans) in the South. The huge Niger-Khordifanian family, of which Bantu is a sub-sub-branch, occupies most of the geography of Africa.

Re: If I recall correctly a lot of the pastoralist ethnicities in Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya etc. are completely racially distinct from West Africans, presumably still today- aren't some of the East African pastoralist groups supposed to be the sister group to the Khoisan?

Yes, East Africans are a distinct ethnicity. And they do carry some Khoi-San gene markers. As well, they have mated a good deal with Semtic people (Amharic etc are Semitic languages). We had a large community of Ethiopians at my Orthodox Church in Fort Lauderdale since there was no Ethiopian church in the area. The Semitic strain in them is easily visible.

Posted by JonF | June 2, 2008 7:09 AM

Matt,

National Geographic had an article on this some years ago. There are groups in Brazil now to protect these tribes by preventing outsiders from contacting them. This is important because these tribes have zero immunity to diseases ranging from influenza to chickenpox to the common cold. So once 1/2 of the tribe dies of the common cold, the other half have zero skills on how to avoid exploitation by people and usually become impoverished wards of the state. In fact there was a movie several years ago about an an explorer trying to make first contact with a tribe in the Amazon. I never saw it but I assume it glorifies the explorer rather than villifying him for the genocidal individual he actually was.

Posted by freddiemac | June 2, 2008 11:13 AM