Critics of today’s human behavior often point our tribal past as an example of how we should nobly live in harmony with nature. Animal activists sometimes do the same, when decrying today’s vanquishing of the natural world. But this nonsense is becoming particularly tiresome and annoying. The following is therefore a response to the myth of the noble savage.

Our prehistoric ancestors indulged a wide range of murderous and bizarre excesses resembling the insanity of rampaging chimpanzees. Archaeologist Lawrence Keeley provides a detailed account of our ancestors’ war-faring behavior in War Before Civilization. He presents the thesis of a decline in violence—the same picked up and expanded later by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, noting that as civilization emerged in the form of established settlements and governments, violence declined and has been declining ever since. • • •

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