1996, Oxford University Press, NY, 245 pages, with illustrations, photos, and extensive tables and bar graphs

If you would like to know what is the matter with the post-modern academic world than War Before Civilization is the best primer you could read on how and why—and to what effect—the delusional fantasies that constitute the intellectual world of our time came into being. Heeley’s first few chapters are about the struggles he faced to even be permitted to dig for the truth, through the objective study of physical evidence, that mankind might have actually been in the habit of occasionally harming other humans, before us evil white bastards invented war.

Oddly enough, the uninformed juvenile fantasies of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau [two men who knew about as much about the actualities of life outside of their small communities than today’s typical reality TV viewer] have, and still do, form the basis for most academic opinion on the conduct of pre-modern peoples. Two excellent examples are multi-million-viewer YouTube successes; Peter Joseph who promotes Rousseau’s ideal of the noble savage, or naturally good person, and Stefan Molyneux who comes off as a fairly firm student of Hobbes, seeing man as nothing but a creature of greed, who does nothing without a clearly defined view toward personal material gain.

Throughout War Before Civilization Heeley shows time and again that these two opposing philosophies will always take the thinker farther from the actuality of war than any eight-year-old child’s flight of fantasy could ever accomplish.

For decades I have read everything I could get my hands on concerning primitive life, warfare, and aggression. Despite wanting to prove my childhood fantasies—born of watching Hollywood adventure films as a child—that my gun-toting ancestors followed the only path to excellence in war, my reading has brought me to the conclusion that all civilizations have been brilliantly ineffective at fielding lethal fighting forces, until that point which they have adopted primitive [unconventional or guerilla] methods.

The evidence is fairly plain:

Until about 1900, and the wide spread use of machine guns and repeating riffles, a modern western military force was likely to fair poorly against equal numbers of stone age hunters.

The small unit tactics of western militaries that have culminated in the frightfully effective small scale special operations forces that now undertake most of the world’s combat operations can be traced directly to Eastern Woodland Indians teaching European settlers and British light infantry how to fight most effectively with the firearm.

Archaeological evidence points overwhelmingly to highly lethal war-making on the part of prehistoric peoples.

Ethnographic surveys by the very same anthropologists that credit primitives with being peaceful occupants of Eden and ineffective war-fighters, instead demonstrate that stone age societies have generally fielded more competent military forces with less resources than agrarian or industrial societies, and inflict greater losses per capita on their antagonists.

In short, it is no accident that post-modern nations like the U.S. have formed ‘special operations forces’ and even ‘commands.’ The U.S. military now fields ‘warriors’ rather than ‘soldiers.’ As far back as 1967 when the U.S. Army fielded long range recon patrols, and the Navy began converting under water demolitions personnel to SEAL’s in Vietnam, the officers fighting wars on the ground and coming home to teach at staff colleges realized that they would be much better off sending in a war party of Apache warriors than a squad of U.S. soldiers. Unfortunately the Apaches were out of business by then. So now the military makes its own Apaches, and names the occasional wicked instrument of death after some scary Native American or his weapon.

Only in a fairy tale world of blind privilege and dumb ignorance could the learned consensus be that a hunter who learned the art of mobile, stealthy killing from age five, ‘must’ make an inferior war fighter to a terrified urbanite who grew up whining to his mother for more cupcakes, and then at age 18 suddenly had an incredibly lethal instrument of death placed in his hands and showed vaguely how to use it by some hard-ass who was screaming at him.

Only in a make-believe world could an intelligent person be easily led to believe that a man who pushed markers around on a map and rode domesticated herbivores in preparation for war would have something to teach a man who scouted for enemies every time he urinated and hunted and ate wild herbivores and predators, about the realities of war, let alone all of it!

As with any book on the perennial favorite subject of authors, War Before Civilization offers the reader many Oh My God moments of jaw-dropping realization. Below are some of my favorites:

1. The rate of violent death in prehistoric [occupied by pre-Kevin Costner American Indians] Illinois was 70 times the U.S. homicide rate!

2. Battlefield medicine by primitive shamans was more effective than western medicine until WWI!

3. Stone age societies have all provided better care for psychological casualties than any modern or postmodern society.

4. One particular chief on the island of Fiji placed a stone behind his house for every person he had eaten. When he was finally interviewed by an ethnographer, the line of stones was 200 feet long, and numbered 782. I wonder what dinner table conversation was like in that house, “Yo Dad, this guy was a little stringy. Do you think we could raid a village next week—maybe bag some fat dude?”

I highly recommend War Before Civilization as a good, academia-busting, informative read.