    6

    6

    6

    that a

    griculture would go away so we could rediscover peace.  But

    Leaky is very wrong.  Violence is not a product of the digging stick and

    hoe.10

    In the Kalahari desert of southern Africa live a people called the

    !Kung.  The !Kung have no agriculture and very little technology.

    They live off the fruit and plants their women gather and the animals

    their men hunt.  Their way of life is so simple that hordes of

    anthropologists have studied them, convinced that the !Kung live as

    our ancestors must have over ten thousand years ago, before the

    domestication of plants.  In the early years of !Kung ethnography,

    anthropologists became wildly excited.  These simple people had no

    violence, they said.  Anthropology had discovered the key to human

    harmony--abolish the modern world and return to hunting and

    gathering.

    Richard Leakey used the !Kung as his model of paradisal

    pre-agriculturists.  The !Kung way of life proved that without the plow,

    men would not have the sword.  Yet later studies revealed a blunt and

    still under-publicized fact. !Kung men solve the problem of adultery

    through murder.  As a result, the !Kung have a homicide rate higher

    than that in New York.11

    !Kung violence takes place primarily between individuals.  In

    both humans and animals, however, the greatest violence occurs not

    between individuals but between groups.  It is most appalling in war.

    Diane Fossey, the woman who devoted nineteen years12 to living

    among and observing the mountain gorillas of Central Africa's Virunga

    mountains, felt these creatures were among the most peaceful on earth.

    Yet mountain gorillas become killers when their social groups come

    face to face.  Clashes between social units, said Fossey, account for 62%

    of the wounds on gorillas.  74%  of the males Fossey observed carried

    the scars of battle, and 80% had canine teeth they'd lost or broken when

    trying to bite the opposition. Fossey actually recovered skulls with

    canine cusps still embedded in their crests.13

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