the ills that come from culture not survivingchanges coming or even imposed by interethnic contact. Maybury-Lewis[29]describes his experience: I sometimes felt, when I wasalone with the Shavante encampment, like a limpet on a rock. The whole universe seemed to be made up ofhardness. The ground we slept on washard. The food we ate was hard and hadto be torn apart by fierce teeth or held captive in the mouth and sawn off witha knife. The glare was hard by day andthe cold was hard by night. The wayswere hard to travel, hard underfoot as we approached high summer and hard totear a path through.Comparethe fieldwork of anthropologists with the imagination of Zerzan, which followsanother path: Eden was clearly the home of the hunter-gatherers and theyearning expressed by the historical images of paradise must have been that ofdisillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relativeease.[30] Zerzan wants us to believe that foragersalways lived peaceful lives, with no war or struggles for foraging territoriesor group conflicts, plus a life of comfort. Nevertheless, conflict in hunter-gatherer societies not only has existedbetween different ethnicities, but also, and sometimes mainly, betweenpolitical/familial groups of the same ethnicity. Maybury-Lewis - and myself as well during mystay with the Shavante - witnessed conflict between different families of thesame ethnic group. A major anthropologicalwork on the subject of tribal wars was written by Lawrence H. Keeley, whoaffirms: Even today, most views concerning prehistoric (and tribal) war andpeace reflect two ancient and enduring myths: progress and the golden age.[31] Zerzan harshly critiques the former, only toembrace the latter myth. The myth ofprogress is the belief that in the primitive condition, violence, war, andignorance prevailed. It is the belief ofHobbes. On the other hand, the myth ofthe golden age presupposes a Fall from natural grace. It is the myth of Montaigne, Rousseau, andpresent-day romantics such as Zerzan. They can be precisely defined as myths if by this we mean a full-blownexaggeration suited to a particular tradition (of thought in thoseexamples). For us not to enter intodetails here as to the relationships between these myths, suffice it to sayhere that Rousseaus Noble Savage was a direct, reactive response toHobbes. It was created as anoppositional myth. If Hobbes contendedthat humans are naturally cruel, Rousseau responded that at base, in itsnatural state, the human being is gentle. As Keeley showed, peaceful societies cannot be claimed to having beenthe norm in human history. Perhaps quitethe contrary is true. Even the !Kungbushmen of the Kalahari Desert, much acclaimed by Zerzan as a peaceful people,had homicide rate from 1920 to 1955 [that] was four times that of the UnitedStates and twenty to eighty times that of major industrial nations during the1950s and 1960s.[32] Between war and peace there is muchvariation, it is hard to define when one begins and the other ends in manycases, particularly with regards to people that dont exist anymore and thatleft almost nothing sometimes nothing of vestige. Ina book that covers current anthropological knowledge on hunter-gatherersocieties, the academic awareness of the problematic of such an object ofknowledge the hunter-gatherers came