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http://www.sltrib.com/05202001/nation_w/98868.htm
Click here: The Salt Lake Tribune -- Going to War: Why We Fight Going to War: Why We Fight The Semai people of Malaysia never
fight.
Whenever two tribe members have a
conflict, it is resolved with words --
lots of them. The village leader calls a meeting to
discuss the dispute. Anyone with an
opinion can speak up. And they do. The meetings can go on for
days. Redundancy is a given.
When the talking finally stops, the
village leader makes a ruling. Then
he orders everyone present never to speak of the dispute again, and that is the end of it. It is no secret that the vast majority of
the world's societies are
nothing like the peaceful Semai. But why? Why do people split into groups with
deadly intent? Why does it happen at
particular moments in history? And what are the roots of the concept of warfare? In the past few years, researchers in several fields have been exploring these questions with growing vigor. "It's a contribution that archaeology has
to make to contemporary debates
about what's going on today in Rwanda, in Croatia, in Ireland and in all the rest of those places," said archaeologist Jonathan Haas of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Haas spoke at a recent meeting of the
Society for American Archaeology,
where some members argued that war is about 10,000 years old. If that is true, then war is probably a social invention analogous to agriculture, cities and political states. But others contend that war is much older,
maybe even millions of years
old. If war goes so far back, it must be a much more basic element of human nature, like language or tool-making -- a trait that everyone naturally acquires even with minimal encouragement. Until about a decade ago, many scholars
dismissed primitive warfare as
nonexistent or, at the most, inconsequential. Warfare was thought to be primarily a tool of political states bent on territorial control and expansion. Any evidence for war that did appear in
the absence of centralized
government was compared to the head-butting contests of rutting elk, or pairs of grizzly bears wrestling over salmon -- a ritual competition that almost never escalated to lethal combat. Some archaeologists were so convinced by
this explanation that for years
they ignored obvious signs of warfare at ancient sites. Recently, archaeologists interested in war
have excavated hilltop forts
in the Andes that were built centuries before the Inca empire swept out of a small valley to conquer the region. On the South Pacific island of Palau, they have mapped fortified hilltops and villages built 1,000 years before Europeans arrived. In the U.S. Southwest, they have found numerous Anasazi skeletons with bashed skulls, broken bones and other obvious evidence pointing to a violent end. But determining that war occurred among
people untouched by modern
civilization does not settle the question of when, where and how it began. Nearly every primitive society ever
studied fought wars. To those who
believe war is a fundamental part of human experience, that means the concept must have developed more than 10,000 years ago. If war is common among people who live now as humans did before 10,000 years ago, they reason, it must have been a common practice back then. Yet anthropologists have found a handful
of cultures, such as the Semai,
that never fight wars. That doesn't mean they aren't violent -- in fact, some have strikingly high homicide rates. But these cultures never organize themselves into groups to violently settle disputes. In his 2000 book Warless Societies and the
Origin of War, University of
Michigan anthropologist Raymond Kelly argues that these cultures have one thing in common: They do not consider belonging to a group an essential part of individual identity. They have no clans, no classes, no chiefs.
People from these cultures
would have a hard time understanding school spirit, party loyalty or national pride. Kelly believes that before about 20,000
years ago, all cultures lacked
the concept of group identity. In such a world, he argues, war would be impossible. It was only after people started settling down between 20,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago that their societies grew stable enough to develop the idea of group identity -- and war. Virtually every scholar of ancient war
agrees that the earliest
archaeological evidence for organized violence lies in the Nile valley of southern Egypt. The site, known as Jebel Sahaba, is one of the oldest cemeteries known. The people buried at Jebel Sahaba were
laid to rest between 12,000 and
14,000 years ago, after stressful lives wracked by periodic famine. The Ice Age was jerking to a close then, causing periodic droughts that created the Sahara Desert and dried up the Nile. Nearly half of the 59 skeletons
archaeologists uncovered at Jebel Sahaba
had stone points either lying amid the bones or embedded in them. Some of them contained many more stone points than it would take to kill a person, as if the attackers had brutally "pincushioned" the bodies of their victims. Many of the children had points embedded at the same place in the backs of their necks, as if they had been executed. But it appears to be an isolated case,
because the next oldest evidence
of war doesn't appear for several thousand years. Archaeologists working at three sites in
Iraq dating back 10,000 years
have found defensive walls, projectile points and mace heads. Many experts consider maces -- spiked clubs -- a dead giveaway for war, because arrowheads, spear points and axes could always have had non-combat uses. Walls could have been for flood control or corralling animals. But maces aren't good for much besides bashing heads. Other early signs of war include the
9,500-year-old walls of Jericho, the
famous walled city whose conquest is described in the Old Testament. Some archaeologists have argued that
Jericho's walls were really for
flood control, not defense. But there is little doubt about Catal Huyuk, an early agricultural settlement in Turkey occupied about 8,000 years ago. The houses are packed together like New York City apartment buildings, with entrances on their roofs that would have made Catal Huyuk a tough town to ransack. By 6,000 years ago, there were
indisputable signs of war across Europe
and in many other regions as well. In Spain, dramatic cave paintings depict impaled human figures and executions. Many archaeological studies show that once
prehistoric war began in a
region, it came and went with natural cycles of feast and famine. Recent research shows that before Europeans arrived in North America, repeated and prolonged droughts sparked hostilities in a number of regions. But during times of plenty, war could
disappear for decades or centuries.
Eastern North America experienced a prolonged peace beginning about A.D. 1, when the regional food supply increased due to the widespread adoption of maize and bean cultivation. Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at the
Newark, N.J., campus of Rutgers
University, interprets this record as an indication that war was invented independently in many areas -- but nowhere much more than 10,000 years ago. He believes that during prolonged periods of drought or other ecological catastrophes, a previously peaceful species turned to war as a means of wresting precious resources from their neighbors. But Lawrence Keeley, an archaeologist at
the University of Illinois in
Chicago, takes a different view of the same evidence. He has argued that war occurred regularly before 10,000 years ago. There is no evidence for it because of what he calls "a problem of archaeological visibility." Before 10,000 years ago, Keeley pointed
out, people were nomadic and did
not live in permanent settlements. They had no reason to build fortifications around villages that they were just going to abandon in a few weeks. Being constantly on the move meant they
didn't have cemeteries either --
so archaeologists have few examples of human remains to examine for signs of violent death. Without such evidence, there is little
means of proving the existence of
war. But when the evidence does appear at places such as Jebel Sahaba and Catal Huyuk, Keeley argues, war looks like it has been going on for a long time. Keeley's account fits well with recent
observations of warfare among
chimpanzees. It is possible that man and ape came to
war independently. But because
chimpanzees are by far the closest living relatives to humans, some researchers believe a common ancestor of the two species invented war more than 5 million years ago. "It's a pattern of behavior that grows out
of hunting," Keeley said.
But the antiquity of war doesn't make it
genetic, said Steven LeBlanc, an
anthropologist at Harvard University. It just means that the evolutionary pressures human ancestors experienced millions of years ago were already pushing them toward war. "There's nothing built-in," LeBlanc said.
"It's situational. And we've
been in that situation for most of human history." ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK
OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ================================================================= |
