Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students.

When I published the results of my research into both historical and cross-cultural childhoods, documenting how childhood both in the past and in other cultures has been massively idealized, both historians and anthropologists concluded that I surely must have been mad. As Melvin Konner put it in his book Childhood | Lloyd deMause, then editor of the History of Childhood Quarterly, claimed that all past societies treated children brutally, and that all historical change in their treatment has been a fairly steady improvement toward the kind and gentle standards we now set and more or less meet. [...] Now anthropologists — and many historians as well — were slack-jawed and nearly speechless. [...] Serious students of the anthropology of childhood beginning with Margaret Mead have called attention to the pervasive love and care lavished on children in many traditional cultures. | The only way to disprove this widespread opinion about parenting in traditional cultures is to examine what anthropologists have written and see whether their evidence actually shows something other than "pervasive love and care lavished on children". In order that the effects of culture contact with the West may be kept to a minimum, I will concentrate here on child rearing in New Guinea, with a few forays into nearby areas, because Western contact was in these areas both late and minimal as compared with Africa and other areas. [...] | Margaret Mead, for instance, kept infanticide out of the published reports, but wrote in her letters such observations as "we've had one corpse float by, a newborn infant; they are always throwing away infants here." [...] Anthropologists commonly pass over these statistics quickly. | Ch. 7, pp. 257-259.