Were hunter-gatherers really peaceful? Did humans live in primitice communism? I learned this in history...

Whoever told you that was making shit up because they didn't know. In fact, we can't be sure even today. Evidence would suggest inter-group violence was common enough, but relatively low scale overall. Looking at hunter-gatherers today gives some clues, too. As user posted, murder rates are higher overall, though it's not like constant battle royale death matches, either.

On the other hand, certain elements of "civilized" (in the literal sense) life also didn't occur. There was no long term total war or genocide (not that massacres or prolonged conflicts couldn't happen). No hoarding of resources, no elite castes.. Clan groups were far more likely to be what we'd today call "polyamorous" (without the political overtones, obvs). There would be a pecking order, but goods and resources were more or less communally shared.

I think there is a lot of cultural memory about pre-civilized humans in the ancient myths of settled societies. The concept of a spooky "wild man" of some kind is fairly ancient and universal. Early religions hinge on some enlightened founder knowing the way. Probably a warning against "uncouth" wild people.

You could probably draw some comparisons with Siberian natives (although they are almost all pastoralists, not true hunter/gatherers) or with some native Americans groups (historically).

>you are now aware that earliest European "Out-of-Africa'ers", hunter-gatherers, who cave painted for example, were most probably dark skinned
Although not Sub-Saharans either, probably like negritos or other manlets, but obviously no 'Asian breeds' admixture.

Hunter-gatherers probably roamed quite widely, with "territory" shifting quite often, so they would have had opportunity to conflict. In fact, it is neanderthals who largely stayed put in one place.

I think I recall reading about a cave in Siberia (denisovans, to be technical) where there was evidence of two specimens separated by thousands of years being directly related. The latter was a child having some Neanderthal or human admixture.

>negritos or other manlets
hearty chuckle

true conflated it with neolithikum for some reason
any article on the siberia thing ? sounds dope af

Marxist historiography is heavily criticized by modern historians for its unfalsifiable aspects.

In areas where the environment was productive enough to allow sedentism, food storage and population growth you could get stuff like hoarding, elite castes, slavery and the growth of chiefdoms. The Haida, Tlingit and other Pacific Northwest natives are a recent example. Overall they're a small exception though.

On the other hand, some smaller groups might abandon violence completely, like the Moriori, but again that's a rare exception only made possible by isolation.

>conjecture, the post

Such a price of peaceful life.

You're referring to Gimbutas' "Old Europe" hypothesis where the poor sedentary matriarchal farmers of Europe were overwhelmed by mean violent patriarchal horse riding savages from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.

By and large discredited as bunk today, beyond the general concept of an I-E migration.

>Modern hunter gather societies live in dense rain forests
There are some who live in Savannahs and deserts still.

Humans have always been territorial to an extent. If we're arguing about borders now, we most likely did the same thing during our early stages.

There is evidence that there were mass murders, cannibalism, and a number of other atrocities, but these seem to have become more common when farming began to be more commonplace.

There's no single answer about war or peace in hunter gatherer groups. The truth is that it varied greatly between groups. What you never saw was the large-scale warfare unique to complex societies. With that in mind, you could find almost totally peaceful societies (like the Eskimos) or societies that were perpetually engaged in low level warfare. Murder and such probably happened, but then again, there's virtually no society without occasional internal violence.
>primitive communism
In a way, yes. Surpluses were minimal and went either to tribal elders or those who produced them. People lived in small groups of less than a hundred so they shared a lot, as small groups do. Private property as we know it didn't exist. People for the most part only possessed what they needed and what they could carry from place to place.

>Were hunter-gatherers really peaceful?
They were mostly peaceful because there was little reason to attack one another. There were enough resources and groups of people could avoid each other.

The first wars happened when people started to settle down.

"Eskimos" (Inuit) were not warlike, but were certainly not totally peaceful, I'm not sure where you got that tidbit from.

Borgak is rightful Gork clay.

>pre-IE monuments which could only be built with peace and cooperation, consider the stone henge, built 5000? years ago with stone from 100s of miles away.
Or you know, with slave labour

War as we know it doesn't make any sense in a hunter-gatherer context. Going out to kill a bunch of people in another tribe is usually a way too big risk, and may even lead to your entire tribe (and gene pool) getting exterminated. Also keep in mind that any injuries would have far greater consequences for both yourself and your fellow tribesmen than in a civilization. That doesn't mean they necessarily didn't have bloody conflicts, just that they were a lot rarer, caused by a way higher level of desperation than now. Threatful displays and such would have been a much more common way of dealing with rivaling tribes.
About their economy and posessions you have to keep in mind that most hunter-gatherers lived nomadic lives, meaning you can't have any more possessions than you're able to carry. There are still a lot of pastoralists left moving around between the seasons, and just like them, these hunter-gatherers would have shared most of their things between them, just because it makes much more sense. Calling them primitive communists though is just stupid and misses the entire point of what communism is about. It's just sharing, not the same thing.

I think we overestimate the engineering and manpower needed for some of these ancient monuments. They were modern humans, and surely there were math whizzes and building experts among them.

Crime wasnt a problem in human tribes because the entire tribe would lynch you if you broke any custom or rule, blacks in Africa still do this today.

>This fear of attack was not an unfounded worry; early morning raids by neighboring villages happened with some frequency and the results were often fatal. Through his meticulous research and data-keeping, Chagnon found that in 1988, “two-thirds of all living Yanomamö over the age of forty [had] lost one or more close genetic kinsman—a father, brother, husband, or son—to violence.” In comparison, around one-sixth of Britons lost a member of their immediate family in the famously bloody Great War. This of course means that the percentage of Yanomamö men who had killed another was also quite high; Chagnon discovered that 45% of these tribesmen had slain at least one other man.

>Herxheim
>Talheim Death Pit

Neolithic farmers were utterly demonic motherfuckers and probably thought of themselves as a master race too good to mix with them hunter savages.

>Were hunter-gatherers really peaceful?
No, hunter gatherer societies are actually some of the most violent per capita as they lack significant population growth to replace the casualties they sustained
>Did humans live in primitive communism?
No, because hierarchy still developed and existed in the form of seniority/tyrannies of a small group that made the majority of executive decisions and who basically, if they wanted, could own and take property for themselves. It was hardly egalitarian past valuing ones strength and ability to survive.

>Crime wasnt a problem in human tribes because the entire tribe would lynch you if you broke any custom or rule
>blacks in Africa still do this today.

pick 1

There was some retired 50 year old who managed, alone, and without any machinery at all, to erect a henge. All he used were wooden levers IIRC. Might be remembering very wrong but the point is that moving immense weights isn't too difficult if you're clever about it.

>blacks in Africa still do this today

southafricatoday.net/media/hard-news/terrible-mob-beating-in-south-africa-video/

Chagnon's findings are disputed.

there are uncontacted Amazon tribes which still pillage, rape and kill each other.

>The truth is that it varied greatly between groups.
This sentiment has a lot of truth to it but let's be clear about something, fellas: the fossil record doesn't lie
archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/bloody-stone-age-war-in-the-neolithic.htm
livescience.com/27055-neolithic-skulls-show-violence.html

The plain, hard truth is that wherever you get societies without government (or places with weak/ineffectual ones) you get raiding culture. No matter if it's the black sea basin in 10,000 BC, Celtic Gaul in 60 BC, the shittiest part of Harlem in the 1970's, or Somalia in 1993, the most cost effective way to make a living is to steal it from another human, and the only thing stopping the tiny minority of crazies ballsy enough to do it (and make life fucking hell for all the humans around them) is to constrain them by the authority of a government which ruthlessly enforces its own force monopoly.

In Celtic Gaul around 60 BC Julius Caesar gave those forest apes a choice: continue their life of continuous vengeance raids and domestic violence as free men, or submit to the power of Rome, allow themselves to be repressed 2nd class citizens brutally exploited by a distant aristocracy which doesn't even begin to care whether they live or die, but only that they obey two rules: keep the peace, and pay your taxes. People found life far more tolerable under the oppressive Romans than they did as Celtic freemen. Of course it only took him slaughtering virtually the entire male population of fighting age and putting a rape-baby in the belly of every woman of breeding age, but once exposed to civilization, nobody returns to the jungle by choice.

How is it not private props?

>commusim before capital existed

>No, hunter gatherer societies are actually some of the most violent per capita as they lack significant population growth to replace the casualties they sustained
How does this make sense?
Having less ability to reproduce would cause them to be less violent, not more.

>could own and take property for themselves.
What property? people didn't have anything aside from some basic tools that required immediate use. Any food they got they shared because losing members of the group is too costly.

>People found life far more tolerable under the oppressive Romans than they did as Celtic freemen. Of course it only took him slaughtering virtually the entire male population of fighting age and putting a rape-baby in the belly of every woman of breeding age, but once exposed to civilization, nobody returns to the jungle by choice.

That doesn't sound like they chose civilization

Fucking hell. What is it with Germans and mass executions?

>That doesn't sound like they chose civilization.
It all started when the weakest, most preyed upon tribes appealed to the Romans for aid. What followed was literally Julius Caesar writing the book on divide and conquer.

Those were brutal, primitive times and the way they did it was much nicer than the way any other civilization of its time did it. People conquered by Rome wanted to become full Romans rather than resist the status quo

I have read that n the 60s anthropologists visited a bunch of tribal societies around the world and found their murder rates were incredibly high

i'd imagine human prehistory would have been a similar situation
no sources sorry

>Oldest known mummy has an arrowhead lodged in his ribcage and human blood on his knife
I doubt it.

no, they couldn't have been communist since there were no means of production to seize, your professor is a cuck.

Communism is ultimately irrelevant to literally everything before the industrial revolution.

>wouldn't the distances between tribes alone cut out a lot of violence

necessarily, but they're all following herds of hunting animals.

It's over the stock of available resources that conflict literally always happens.

It is important to perceive the question of hunter-gatherer violence within the context of both Western contact and the complexity of the hunter-gatherer society itself. The downfall of many books and studies written on the subject is that they ignore the classifications of immediate return vs. delayed return hunter-gatherers (as well as the differences present in groups such as nomadic pastoralists) and also base their non-archaeological ethnographic evidence upon societies that they perceive as being "pristine" which is impossible being that colonial and state expansionism has "contaminated" most indigenous societies before they could be ethnographically studied. The introduction of western manufactures generally has a highly destabilizing effect on indigenous populations which is perhaps why you see cultures like the Yanomami shredding the fuck out of each other in internecine conflicts.

this is a solid post. Anarcho-primitivists like Zerzan portraying pre-agricultural society as utopian are delusional, but it was also not the Hobbesian eternal warfare scenario that is still a popular idea.

>Having less ability to reproduce would cause them to be less violent, not more.

really?

You think that given the average human male, not being able to mate encourages peaceful behavior?

inter tribal violence was probably just as large a problem as intra tribal violence

>the weakest, most preyed upon tribes

cucks

>appealed to the Romans for aid

ultra-cucks

they doomed their culture because they were weak

I would say that it doesn't cause intragroup violence, since that could potential mean losing valuable members

There's no reason to think the average male wasn't mating either, considering band level groups can easily have a one-to-one mapping of the sexes, and any changes can be revised by intermingling with another group.

>they doomed their culture because they were weak
They were forest apes who were domesticated into civilized human beings

surely you can figure out when you're on the wrong board.

I'm being metaphorical.

As soon as the Romans came into town, everyone wanted to be Roman and the relentless grind of vengeance raiding ceased.

do you believe they had primitive jobs, paid with primitive money stocked in primitive bank ?

> forest apes

Pretty sure you can't have advanced metallurgy, central authority and fortified cities if you're a forest ape

>don't touch my shit or I'll bash your brains in

Bam, private property. Commies BTFO.

For vevery peace hg society you will fingers dozens of Waring ones.

So yes, it's ignorant bullshit

Memes are rotting your brain