Probably short. Putting aside predation, disease and starvation, there is evidence (see Pinker) that violent death was a common way to go in nomadic tribes.
Violent death was common, sure, but not necessarily more so in pre-agricultural times. See e.g. the early chapters of "Sapiens" (Yuval Harari). Agricultural revolution led to lower standard of living, increased risk of starvation (feast-or-famine dependence on fragile harvest), increased health issues (less-varied diet, also disease rampant in denser populations), and whereas in the presence of potentially hostile competition nomadic hunter-gatherers could choose to move, farmers would logically choose to stay and fight rather than leave the farm and almost certainly die. The agricultural revolution was a pretty bad deal for most people for most of the time since it began.
> See e.g. the early chapters of "Sapiens" (Yuval Harari).
This part of Harari's book have been debunked quite a few times already: his views of pre-agricultural are romanticized and doesn't match with the work of the specialists of this period. (While Harari is indeed an historian, he's a specialist of medieval times and has little authority on early-humans history).
Btw, I'm not even disagreing with you about agriculture, I just wanted to point out that quoting Harari on that has really little value.
Thanks, @littlestymar. To me, Harari's take seems more neutral than "romanticized". I share his skepticism of those who claim concrete knowledge of aspects of pre-literate human culture at which, logically, one can only guess or imagine. This might counter your point about his relative expertise / authority for that time period.
That said, I'm no historian, just a layperson who found Harari's work (so far -- I haven't yet finished "Sapiens") thought-provoking and interesting. In the relevant early chapters his perspective is refreshingly different from the norm -- in some ways comparable (for me) to Zinn's "A People's History of the US", in that it provides a PoV sufficiently removed from the standard narrative to serve as a reminder of how shallow and incomplete any one-sided version of events must be. The GP's citing of Pinker likely belongs in this camp, too: referencing an author whose ideas have merit (eg Pinker's computational theory in "How the Mind Works"), independent of their ultimate status as authoritative works.
> whereas in the presence of potentially hostile competition nomadic hunter-gatherers could choose to move, farmers would logically choose to stay and fight rather than leave the farm and almost certainly die
You might think this, but the historical pattern -- everywhere -- is that farmers stay where they are and get conquered by more mobile non-farmers. They don't so much fight as submit.
The farmers won. Why would they choose to farm if there were no advantages?
What happened was that farming was so successful that the human population boomed. When famine did occur, it caused more deaths because there were more humans.
Farming societies are more hierarchical and have more people. For the ones in charge that is for sure advantageous.
Also it’s a bit of a trap: as soon as you switch over you cannot go back, as foraging cannot sustain as many people. You will have to constantly expand to feed the growing population.
The work of Pinker you refer to has been thoroughly debunked as pseudoscience -- the concrete point about nomadic tribes may or may not stand, regardless, of course.
I’ve heard lots of substantive criticism of Enlightenment Now, but less of The Better Angels of Our Nature. Do you have sources to rebut the latter? I read Better Angels, and some associated reviews, and most of the critical reviews seemed to stipulate all the facts in the book and were left to express sour grapes, or a hang-up with the perceived idea of de Chardin-esque progress (which I don’t think Pinker was advocating; he was clear he believed in the factors, and that those factors were not inevitable or inexorable).
There was a long back and forth between Pinker and NN Taleb. To me it seemed that Pinker didn't properly address any of Taleb's concrete critical points.
Hunter gatherer cultures don't have as many issues with disease spread because of the low population density. If your little community has a couple dozen people, even a 100% morality rate doesn't tend to spread past the couple dozen. Plagues really require high density agricultural societies.
This isn't true. Most studies of virgin soil epidemics have been in modern foragers and all of the "common" agents I could think of in a minute (Y. pestis, tuberculosis, smallpox, malaria...) evolved long before agriculture was invented.
>Since they lived in small groups and moved frequently, they had few problems with accumulating waste or contaminated water or food.
>The shift from the hunter-gather mode of living to an agricultural model provided a more secure supply of food and enabled expansion of the population. However, domesticated animals provided not only food and labor; they also carried diseases that could be transmitted to humans. People also began to rely heavily on one or two crops, so their diets were often lacking in protein, minerals, and vitamins
>Rodents and insect vectors were attracted to human settlements, providing a means of spreading disease.
That page is intended for a lay audience. I'm not sure a single sentence of the first paragraph is correct. Everything from the dates to the statements about mobility and nutrition are questionable or plainly incorrect.
Instead, here's Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers. From the 2nd ed., p. 200 on disease:
> An important cause of childhood death in many forager societies are infectious and parasitic diseases, including respiratory tuberculosis (TB), influenza, pneumonia, bronchitis, and diarrheal diseases resulting in dehydration.
> Among the Dobe Ju/’hoansi, disease, especially TB and malaria, account for 85 percent of childhood deaths ... and violence for 8 percent.
> Infectious disease (with most deaths occurring among infants and juveniles) accounts for 85–95 percent of Agta deaths
One weakness of current literature is that the mechanism by which adults get sick (contact with other adults) is radically different for living foragers than our paleolithic ancestors. With that said, the fact that we still have these epidemic diseases with us today demonstrates that they were able to survive in ancient populations (excepting plague, which is resident in marmots and only "accidentally" infectious to humans). Perhaps larger regional group sizes and a functioning long-distance forager trade network helped these diseases to survive where they struggle today, but survive they clearly did.
Probably short. Putting aside predation, disease and starvation, there is evidence (see Pinker) that violent death was a common way to go in nomadic tribes.