[lit-ideas] Re: Ah, philosophy

>>They also seem to have been quite human in their personal lives
People still in Rousseau fantasyland might want to look at Steven Pinker's _The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature_ [Viking Penguin 2002]. There's an interesting chart accompanying the text on pp. 56-57. Drawn from the work of anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, it looks at "percentage of male deaths caused by warfare" in hunter-gatherer versus Western liberal democracies.
Top of the slaughter list are the noble Jivaro, with a kill ratio of almost 60 percent. The author writes, "The nearly invisible bar at the bottom [of the chart] represents the United States and Europe in the twentieth century and includes statistics from two world wars."
"Moreover ... native peoples are dead serious when they carry out warfare, Many of them make weapons as damaging as their technology permits, exterminate their enemies when they can get away with it, and enhance the experience by torturing captives, cutting off trophies, and feasting on enemy flesh." 
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