War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage Cover
Podcast Mentions

War Before Civilization The Myth of the Peaceful Savage

Lawrence H. Keeley

The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, accordin...

Podcasts 1
Quotes 4
The Matt Walsh Show

Walsh referenced Lawrence Keeley's book as a thorough source on precolonial tribal warfare, recommending it for listeners who had not yet read it.

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That is something that Lawrence Keeley explains in depth in his book War Before Civilization which is worth reading if you haven't

— Episode: Ep. 1174 - Twitter Censors ‘What Is A Wo...

Episode: Ep. 1174 - Twitter Censors ‘What Is A Woman’

Walsh referenced Lawrence Keeley's book as a thorough source on precolonial tribal warfare, recommending it for listeners who had not yet read it.

"

That is something that Lawrence Keeley explains in depth in his book War Before Civilization which is worth reading if you haven't

Episode: The Real History of the American Indians

Matt Walsh cited the book to argue that most societies were warlike and that many American Indian tribes engaged in frequent violence, contradicting the peaceful myth. He also used it to describe evidence of cannibalism at archaeological sites.

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According to the book, War Before Civilization by archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley, ...

According to Keeley, ... somewhere between 90 and 95% of known societies in all of human history were warlike.

According to Keely's book, War Before Civilization, at 25 sites in the American Southwest, anthropologists have discovered cannibalized human remains dated from roughly the year 900 to 1300.

Note: The book recommendations on this page are discovered automatically from podcast transcripts, and may be incorrect or incomplete.