Under The Microscope: The idea of the noble savage living in harmony with his fellows and with nature is a persistent myth. According to this notion, modern man is in a fallen state compared with his noble past, writes Prof William Reville
Scientific investigation has shown, however, that the truth lies closer to the reverse of the popular conception.
The poet John Dryden described man in a state of nature in 1670: "I am as free as nature first made man, when wild in woods the noble savage ran." In 1755 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the enlightenment philosopher, canonised the noble savage when he wrote: "Among the savages, personal interest speaks as strongly as among us, but it does not say the same things. The love of society and the care for common protection are the only bonds which unite them . . . . They do not have any discussion of interests which divide them. Nothing leads them to deceive one another. Public esteem is the only good to which they aspire and which they value."
Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of Brazil in 1501-02, described the natives as completely free, politically and morally, with no religion or kings and no need of money, trade or property, and living to be very old. Europeans found this image delightful, and for a long time European travellers to South America saw everything through this rose-coloured lens.
Noble savages were not confined to South America. In the 1960s anthropologists discovered the Kung people of the Kalahari Desert. A three-week study found them to be peaceful and egalitarian. They enjoyed a nutritious diet and gathered all the food they needed by foraging for two or three hours a day. It was concluded that this lifestyle was a universal human norm until 10,000 years ago. The lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer Kung was promoted as peaceful, healthy and leisurely and much better adapted to nature than the lifestyle of modern man.
It is now accepted that these ideas were erroneous. The three weeks of the study coincided with a brief bountiful period in an otherwise harsh life. In the 19th century the Kung were an integral part of the local economy. They traded cattle, ivory and ostrich feathers for manufactured and agricultural products. They used guns to hunt elephants. A hundred years later the elephants had surrendered to the guns and the cattle to disease - and nobody wanted ostrich feathers. The Kung were driven into deep poverty and a foraging lifestyle. Like other tribal societies their life is unpleasant. Infant mortality is high, life expectancy is 30 years and they suffer great hardship when food is scarce.
Journalists were taken to see a tribe called the Tasaday on Mindanao, the second largest island of the Philippines, in 1972. The Tasaday appeared to be genuine noble savages. They lived in caves, used tools of stone and bamboo and wore clothes made of leaves. They foraged a diet of roots, insects, fruit, frogs and crabs. They had no concept of corporal punishment, no method of counting time and no word for "war". They lived in harmony with one another and with their environment. In 1986 a Swiss journalist revisited the Tasaday. The tribesmen told him they had been paid to wear leaves, to eat wild food, to leave their thatched huts for caves and to swing from trees.
Many studies show that simple pre-industrial societies were no more consciously ecologically friendly or peaceful than our own industrial society. A study of almost 200 pre-industrial societies by Bobby Low of the University of Michigan showed that low population density, primitive technology and lack of profitable markets account for their low environmental impact rather than conscious effort at conservation. Other studies have shown that prehistoric wars were, taking fighting technology and population density into account, as frequent, as bloody and as cruel as modern war.
The good news is that, as reported by Michael Shermer in the September 2003 edition of Scientific American, humans are evolving in a more peaceful direction. The selective breeding of wild animals for domestication is accompanied by the evolution of smaller skulls, jaws and teeth than their wild ancestors'. This is called paedomorphism, which means the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. These include lower levels of aggression, delayed onset of the fear response to strange stimuli and a decrease in levels of stress-related hormones.
Humans have also become more agreeable as we have become more domesticated. Richard Wrangham, a Harvard University anthropologist, suggests that over the past 20,000 years, as human populations have grown and become more sedentary, selection pressures have reduced within-group aggression. This effect has been accompanied by features such as smaller jaws and teeth than seen in our hominid ancestors, as well as our continuous breeding season and pronounced sexuality.
The evolutionary hypothesis, as summarised by Sherman, suggests that limited resources selected for within-group co-operation and between-group competition in humans. This produced within-group amity and between-group enmity. The way to make further progress, therefore, is to continue to grow the circle of those we consider to be members of our group.
William Reville is associate professor of chemistry and director of microscopy at University College Cork