"Pacifying The Past:" Scientists Lie To Whitewash Primative Societies' Ceaseless Warfare

More on Before the Dawn, this time from Steyn:

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."

...

[P]rofessor 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.

"Christianists" and secularists seem to have a fundamental debate over the nature of man. "Christianists" postulate man was conceived in sin and acts sinfully, and must strive to be better than an animal.

Secularists seem committed to the opposite proposition, that man was conceived in perfect tranquility and harmony with nature and never sinned at all until "society" came along (sua sponte) and began teaching him all sorts of nasty things, like racism, homophobia, wifebeating, war, and "factory farming."

Hobbes versus Rousseau, for the billionth time.

The "Reality Based Community" sure seems pretty detached from reality, by my reckoning.

Thanks to Matt.

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