Pointy stick wielding tribespeople are “no more violent than you or I” claims Survival International

Why is critically acclaimed author and scientist Jared Diamond getting the pointy stick treatment from indigenous people and tribe protection charity, Survival International over his latest book: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? 

The charity claims that being greeted by a mob of angry, sharp-stick, bow and arrow or rock wielding tribes men when approaching a remote village, doesn’t at all suggest that they are more violent than your average western counterpart. 

"Yo white helicopter man, stop staring at my banana plants!"

A spokesperson for the similar charity, West Isn’t Best said: “We’ve all heard a story of someone been chased off a farm by a crazed farmer brandishing a shotgun after Rufus ‘worried his sheep’. It’s just a human instinct to protect what you see as your own. Try walking into Buckingham palace uninvited without getting yourself tasered and subsequently sandwiched beneath ten police officers, and compare that to a stumbling across a group of naked men with sticks, you tell me which is more violent.”

Writing with almost five decades of experience and with support from a large anthropologist backing, Diamond tells how mortality rates from wars and murders are higher in traditional societies due to less prominent leadership and centralised control over dealings internally and with other tribes. In some cases this leads to a state of near continuous warfare and their notoriously edgy response to strangers. In defence of his book he suggests that all the stick-stabbing, widow-strangling, child-killing and grandma abandoning is conveniently overlooked by such well-meaning charities, aiming to secure support and funding for tribal protection.

It was only Monday that images were released of a group of US backpackers who were bound, beaten and robbed by whip-brandishing Peruvian villagers and were lucky to escape the ordeal alive. So did Diamond really deserve the backlash for walking the middle path between "primitive brutish barbarians" or "noble savages” living in harmony with their environment?