I am fine with throwing out whatever is unfalsifiable.
That's pretty much everything from art history to biology, isn't it? To one extent or another.
A society which only values a few ultra-hard sciences might be able to congratulate itself on the epistemological purity of its scholars, but I can't imagine it would be a very interesting place to live.
That was my point.
War kill a lot of people, but overall on the whole human population, they were usually limited in range and would affect A LOT of people in their location, and very few outside. Fighting fauna, hunting accident and so on might have a low occurence, but it's a daily low occurence.
I think that you overstate the extent to which hunter-gatherers were battling mammoths or whatever. Humans mostly hunt birds and small mammals, and will mostly seem to have done so through trapping or extended pursuits. Dramatic scenes of ambushing mammoths are very romantic, but not typical.
On the other hand, wars can last months and years, they can devastate large areas, they can destroy not only farmland but crucial agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation and dams. Moreover, the dislocation and death caused by this destruction makes it even harder to piece everything back together again.
If Og gets gored by a boar, it is sad, but the world moves on. If your village is destroyed and your farmlands are flooded and half your family has been slaughtered, then everything is ruined and life will never be good again. It is not simply a case of counting how many people meet premature deaths, because half a tribe meeting premature deaths over the course of a generation is very different than half of a county meeting premature deaths in one very bad month.
Samely for plagues and famines : illness themselves probably existed for all of mankind history, it was just the higher population density that made them more visible (I see no reason why tribes would be immune to poax or such). Samely, food scarcity was the primary limitation on population, be a tribe or a country, and I doubt there were much difference in the proportion of people hit by lack of food either way.
Most of the really nasty communicable diseases, the ones that merit the status of "plagues", originated in domesticated animals. This is why many of them were absent in the world outside of Africa-Eurasia, even in the dense urban cultures of Mesoamerica and the Andes. You can't get Bubonic plague without cattle. Further, density does not simply increase the visibility of these diseases, it also increases opportunities to communicate disease between individuals. A hundred people spread thinly are less likely to spread the disease amongst themselves than ten thousand people packed closely. It's why plagues tended to kill a larger proportion of urban populations than rural ones.
Food scarcity is something which effects both hunter-gather and agrarian societies, but only the later will encounter actual
famine, because famine assumes a staple crop or crops which are vulnerable to some specific devastating failure: blight, poor weather, the failure of irrigation systems, and so on. Hunter-gatherers certainly experience episodes of dearth, but their greater mobility and reliance on more distributed sources of food are going to cushion the impact, because it is unlikely that all of the resources available to hunter-gatherers across the entire year and over a wide area will simply fail all at once. Hunter-gatherers may have bad weeks, bad months, bad seasons, they may plausibly encounter periods of death severe enough to cripple or even destroy a band, but they don't run into the sort of situation where three or four years go by without a consistent source of food. You really do need a complex agrarian society for that.
A single skirmish in a tribe with 50 warriors which leaves seven of them dead, is actually about the same impact, numerically speaking, as the entirety of WW1 on France. Let that sinks in. You don't need a "total war for years" (which is certainly a novelty requiring a whole society power and might be felt as something new and terrifying) to have the same proportion of people dieing to conflict. You just need a single encounter that somewhat turns badly.
The Western Front of the First World War is a bit of a strange example to cite, because all of the contending powers recovered pretty quickly. The psychological impact on combatants was certainly immense, and the demographic impact was not inconsiderable, but the image of a shattered desert of mud and craters is really more a vision of the battlefields than a useful description of its broader impact on France, Germany or Belgium.
Killing a significance part of the able-body male population is going to cause problems, yes, but society will at least in the short term continue, and depending on circumstances may be well prepared to recover; the demographic losses of the First World did not strop Britain, France or Germany from mustering similar numbers a generation later.
It's part of our western tradition, so why not. I kind of like our dead men. If you've got some dead chinese men or dead muslim men (although arn't they really western too?), I'd love to hear what they said too. Women too, for sure. They had interesting things to say. In our current political strife, it would be wise to take a look again in what they said. Even if the groups and words with which they fought their ideological battles are different from ours, the underlying nature of humans has changed very little.
