Were our ancient ancestors more or less brutal?

Question

What was the society like before the implementation of ethics and religion. Did they have any compassion? Were they moral, by today's standards? If you can recommend a book or a website on this matter, I'd be thankful.

Answer 1

Before ethics and religion? In my uninformed opinion, you might as well be talking monkeys, take a look at them and decide :)

Answer 2

religion, and be extension ethics, have always been a part of humans.  I believe it was the Neandertals that started burying their dead.  If they had funerals, they had religion.  Before that time, we were some freaky ape looking things and probably didn't even worry about that kind of stuff.  I think that humans brains are over developed, like a bird that can only open one kind of nut.

Answer 3

depends on the context and it has to do with standards. people associate brutality with the etruscans and later the romans; however, their standards and ethos were far different than ours. they would say we are more brutal than they.

Answer 4

Back then as does now, the strongest will survive.  Back then it was the ability to defeat and conquer violently establishing ones will over all objection and to the glory of the devastation and wasting away of other humans.

Now we do the same except that it isn't brawn and human physical might, a human several hundred years ago could cut one of us to pieces with a sword but I don't think he could type in a military assault on a computer and then send it to the field where soldiers who pull triggers on computerized weapons push and pull a few digital triggers and the enemy gets pretty much the same cold death as he did hundreds of years ago.

Answer 5

Humans have always had ethics, it is innate within the specie Homo Sapien.

Organized religion or institutionalized religion came later though the existance of a religion probably spurned it on.

And being brutal is a relative condition.  I think humans are pretty brutal today in the 21st century.

Answer 6

It isn't a matter of being more or less brutal, having more or less ethics, its about the change and development of ethical and moral perspectives. People in the past may have led shorter and more brutal lives by our standards now but they were for the most part the normal standards of the time. Compassions, violence, cruelty - everything would have been proportional for the people living at the time and it is only with hindsight and the mindset we have developed in our own world that we look back and ponder such questions as the one you are posing.

Its one of the first major things you are taught as an archaeologist, do not apply modern beliefs and standards to your interpretations of the past. You should be aware as well that a lot of surviving sources for the past are inherently biased and should be treated with extreme caution in regards to the picture of the past they create.

As for books, some entry level Archaeological Theory works should be a good start (Anthropology if your American).