What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly Read Free Book Online Page B

person per square kilometer in cooler climes. The 200 to 300 folk in your greater tribe would be the total number of people you’d meet in your lifetime. You might be aware of others, because items for trade or barter could travel 300 kilometers. Some of the traded items would be body ornaments and beads, such as ocean shells for inlanders or forest feathers for the coast dwellers. Occasionally, pigments for face painting were swapped, but these could also be applied to walls or to carved wood figurines. The dozen tools you carried would have been bone drills, awls, needles, bone knives, a bone hook for fish on a spear, some stone scrapers, maybe some stone sharpies. A number of your blades would be held by bone or wood handles, hafted with cane or hide cord. When you crouched around the fire, someone might play a drum or bone flute. Your handful of possessions might be buried with you when you died.
    But don’t take this progress for harmony. Within 20,000 years of the great march out of Africa, Sapiens helped exterminate 90 percent of the then-existing species of megafauna. Sapiens used innovations such as the bow and arrow, spear, and cliff stampedes to kill off the last of the mastodons, mammoths, moas, woolly rhinos, and giant camels—basically every large package of protein that walked on four legs. More than 80 percent of all large mammal genera on the planet were completely extinct by 10,000 years ago. Somehow, four species escaped this fate in North America: the bison, moose, elk, and caribou.
    Violence between tribes was endemic as well. The rules of harmony and cooperation that work so well among members of the same tribe, and are often envied by modern observers, did not apply to those outside of the tribe. Tribes would go to war over water holes in Australia or hunting grounds and wild-rice fields in the plains of the United States or river and ocean frontage along the coast in the Pacific Northwest. Without systems of arbitration, or even leaders, small feuds over stolen goods or women or signs of wealth (such as pigs in New Guinea) could grow into multigenerational warfare. The death rate due to warfare was five times higher among hunter-gatherer tribes than in later agriculture-based societies (.1 percent of the population killed per year in “civilized” wars versus .5 percent in war between tribes). Actual rates of warfare varied among tribes and regions, because as in the modern world, one belligerent tribe could disrupt the peace for many. In general, the more nomadic a tribe was, the more peaceful it would be, since it could simply flee from conflict. But when fighting did break out, it was fierce and deadly. When the numbers of warriors on both sides were about equal, primitive tribes usually beat the armies of civilization. The Celtic tribes defeated the Romans, the Tuareg smashed the French, the Zulus trumped the British, and it took the U.S. Army 50 years to defeat the Apache tribes. As Lawrence Keeley says in his survey of early warfare in War Before Civilization, “The facts recovered by ethnographers and archaeologists indicated unequivocally that primitive and prehistoric warfare was just as terrible and effective as the historic and civilized version. In fact, primitive warfare was much more deadly than that conducted between civilized states because of the greater frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was conducted. . . . It is civilized warfare that is stylized, ritualized, and relatively less dangerous.”

    Comparison of War Fatality Rates. Annual war deaths as a percentage of the population in both prestate (gray bars) and modern societies (darker bars).
    Before the revolution of language 50,000 years ago, the world lacked significant technology. For the next 40,000 years, every human born lived as a hunter-gatherer. During this time an estimated 1 billion people explored how far you could go with a handful of tools. This world without much technology