As far as I know all this is controversial. Some tribal zones are under nearly constant low-intensity warfare, other know rare but rather sever episodes. In m

As far as I know all this is controversial. Some tribal zones are under nearly constant low-intensity warfare, other know rare but rather sever episodes. In many other areas war is sporadic and each conflict is, by convention, halted after a rather limited event (first wound, first blood, or first death). In at least some cases neighboring tribes intervention forbids escalation (as they have members coming from the tribes at war, or want to avoid unpleasant side-effects, for example arson). Someone unhappy can escape from a tribal zone, and (albeit not easy) it is much more easy than to escape from our civilization. In the same vein escaping a tribe or tribal war may not be easy, but one may have major problem showing to me that escaping modern society or modern war (or, worse, a full-blown world war, or nuke war) is more easy. In our very own towns there are very violent subcultures, composed of a rather high amount of people. Many women living in gang zones have life paths (companions killed, maimed, overdosed, in prison for life...) similar to the ones of the New Guinea’s Iyau women. One may also check the lumpen proletariat, living and dying in IMHO appalling conditions. Is this representative of our civilization? Are those Iyau's women representative of tribal life (in each and every tribe)? Are those last less able to escape than gangzone women? Each civilization has zones of extreme occurrences of nearly any type of event (here of violence), and at least partially locks people into their present situation. Studies about the amount of violent deaths in the past are difficult to assess. Some tribe members invented stories in order to satisfy their audience (anthropologists). What an individual is living (or really able to do) in a given culture is very difficult to understand and represent in another context, as illustrated by Horace Miner's Nacirema 'study'. Not to mention than cultural relativism and moral relativism heavily taint all this. Moreover various forms of 'biases' in studies, some extreme, are known ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_of_the_Tribe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_of_the_Tribe ). A fundamental question is to me "is someone born in a random tribe more free than we are to chose his lifepath?" The excerpt you quoted comes from Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel..." book. This author opinion is quite different from some "tribal life is too violent, we are more happy" motto ( https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/06/jared-diamond-tribal-life-anthropology https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/06/jared-diamon... )