NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/sci/archaeol/3250

Text File | 1993-01-28 | 2.1 KB | 49 lines

Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Path: sparky!uunet!well!dchapman
From: [e-mail] (Dave Chapman)
Subject: Re: Enabling Technology and the Origins of War
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Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
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Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 07:54:48 GMT
Lines: 36

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Richard Ottolini) writes:
>>The major primate researchers have documented that chimps kill chimps,
>>gorillas kill gorillas.
>
>>It was a romantic myth popularized by Rousseau and incorporated into Marxism
>>that economically primitive societies were more moral and less warlike than
>>more economically developed ones.
>
>Very true.  Marvin Harris makes an interesting case that war arose long
>before "civilization", as a means of reducing population pressure-- not by
>killing off a few males, which would have no appreciable affect on population
>growth, but by requiring tribes to preferentially rear males for fighting.
>Among the Yanomamo, for instance, adolescent boys outnumber girls by as
>much as 148 to 100.  Their wars are not wars of conquest-- they make heavy
>use of backstabbing, for instance-- but they're enough to make war one of
>the leading causes of death among males.

Despite the well-known acts of homicide among the great apes (primatocide?),
the digs still support the idea that, at approximately the time of the
Bronze Age, the level of violence increased considerably.

I have had an unpleasant thought:  Perhaps the period from 15000 BP - 5000 BP
was unusual.  Perhaps the Ice Ages had reduced the human population so much
that violence in general and war in particular was profitless.  Once there
had been a few thousand years of warm weather, the population density was
restored, and things returned to normal.

The problem with this theory, of course, is that many things believed to
be completely original have been developed in the last 10,000 years,
such as the net.  ;-)

-dave