Are there any peaceful tribes or civilizations that ever lived in harmony with nature and never fought wars?

Since a lot of history was oral and not written, people like to paint "dead" or "dying" cultures as peaceful. In all likelihood, there was probably no fantasy-novel type of culture that frolicked through the fields and never fought anyone else.

They may well have had fights with each other over anything from personal feuds to territorial or resource disputes.

They did not live "in harmony with Nature" in the sort of rose-tinted sense we often hear these days. I think that's really a rather patronising view of them.

Hunter-gatherer societies, of which a few still exist in remote areas, were likely only ever to have taken what they needed; but for purely practical reasons. They would know picking too many wild fruits at once is wasteful because fruit spoils very rapidly. They would not have killed more wild animals than necessary because such hunting is difficult, arduous and dangerous; and meat rapidly decays even in cool weather.

The supposed "harmony" with Nature is that their populations and predation rate were insufficient to cause much damage. They had to eat, they needed furs and bones; but they had to work hard and often dangerously to ensure this. They could not be squeamish or romantic about the fauna and flora.

The more settled people with some form of agriculture tended to be quite destructive, using slash-and-burn land clearances. If this had limited overall effect millennia ago that is only because there were far fewer people about; but mankind has been deforesting much of Europe and many other regions since the Bronze Age if not earlier. All that's happened is that we have become much more efficient and rapid at it.


This is not to say the ancients had no respect for Nature. I expect they did, as they often worked it into their own religions and myths; but it is hard to think they had the sort of "hippy-dippy" attitudes very comfy for us to assume they had from the safety of our comfy 21C homes.

Nature can give but also take away; can be beneficent and bountiful but also harsh and dangerous; so these people would have lived as best they could with it. They had to, to survive.

Living in harmony with nature, quite possible, or it could be that they merely exploited the lands to the extent of their limited abilities.

As for not fighting wars, that's blatantly false.

There are two separate issues you bring up--living close to nature with respect, and fighting others...my understanding of native American culture is they did very much live in union with the nature they relied on and were a part of, a different view than the Europeans, who saw nature more as a source of fuel for industrialization, as ours to use for our own purposes...but there is also evidence that native Americans did in fact fight each other at times...sometimes the solution was for some to simply move somewhere else, but they probably did fight at times...the concept of property was also different for Europeans and Native Americans.

That started with Jean Jacques Rousseau with the idea of the Noble Savage. I have always been suspicious of regarding any "other" like some angel fallen from the sky free of frailties.

as long ago as the last century, there were tribes whose languages did not contain the concepts of violence, death, time, and other key linguistic concepts without which the modern mentality of the inhabitants of the earth cannot exist. now these tribes no longer exist.

I remember when the Woodstock Nation gathered 1/2 million strong - without a single black eye. Ernie

Fighting is part of nature too.

Native Americans were not one size fits all. There were many different cultures. Some were more peaceful, some were more warlike. Living with or against nature comes down to capabilities and resources to enact change. I'm sure native Australians were similar.

They were more respectful of nature, but they definitely weren't peaceful. Natives tribes warred with each other all the time.

I don’t think so. Even early humans had to fight sometimes to protect their territories.

Tribes? Yes, people aren't all always Americans or Romans.

I feel that this is a romanticised story2

Always feel upset about native americans .

Native Americans occasionally had intertribal conflicts for the same reasons various groups of people on all the continents have had disagreements. They consisted of different groups, and didn’t all share the same cultural beliefs.
But when Europeans make a point of indigenous people having their own conflicts, it’s no different than conflicts between different ethnicities (the word substituted for "tribes") on the European continent throughout history.