I offer an extended summary of the work of studies of pre-agricultural society to state the case:
"When did war begin? Does war have deep roots, or is it a modern invention? A new analysis of ancient human remains by anthropologists Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli of Chicago's Field Museum provides strong evidence for the latter view. [*See also next post, "Survey of Earliest Human Settlements Undermines Claims That War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots."
The study (the author's last) found that modern foragers have engaged in little or no warfare, defined as a lethal attack by two or more people in one group against another group. This finding contradicts the claim that war emerged hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago.
The vast majority of archaeological evidence for warfare--which consists of skeletons marked by violence, art depicting battles, defensive fortifications, and weapons clearly designed for war rather than hunting--is less than 10,000 years old.
Deep Rooters try to dismiss these facts by resorting to the old argument that absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence. They allege, in other words, that there is not significant evidence of any human activity prior to 10,000 years ago.
To rebut this charge, Haas and Piscitelli recently carried out an exhaustive survey of human remains more than 10,000 years old described in the scientific literature. They counted more than 2,900 skeletons from over 400 different sites. Not counting the Jebel Sahaba skeletons, Haas and Piscitelli found four separate skeletons bearing signs of violence, consistent with homicide, not warfare."
The earliest symbols were of the circle and the human hand, a symbiosis of the unity of the human and equality.
To those who argue that the paradigm of the egalitarian and peaceful tribal societies of our past are a myth, I counter that this is a form of cultural genocide which is refuted by the findings of archeology and studies of pre-history. The Myth of the Noble Savage is itself a myth, designed to eliminate any possibilities beyond a world captive to slavery and war and a wicked human nature which makes these horrific "facts" inevitable.
Archeological studies show that war was non-existent in the much older societies but those who argue that "the savages" were violent rely on evidence from people whose cultures have been destroyed and who are, in reality, desperate refugees from modern genocide. If we go back before the genocide of native peoples, we find evidence of an absence of wars.
The efforts to disprove this by the recent discovery of a massacre of 12 about 10,000 years ago proves the point:
"Cultural clashes leading to war are evidently as old as man himself. Now archaeologists studying human remains in the Sudan believe they have found evidence of the world's first outright, large-scale war, some 13,000 years ago - and it seems to have been about race.
This Mesolithic-era battle could also have been one of the world's first water wars, as the region was undergoing a process of desertification which would have spurred competition over resources.
Fresh analysis of fossil remains first found half a century ago indicates that one group consisted of locals, the ancestors of black Africans. The identity of those on the other side remains unclear, but they seem to have originated in the Mediterranean Sea basin, according to a recent report in The Independent. Wherever they came from, the people on both sides clearly looked different"
read more: .haaretz.com/jewish/archaeology/.premium-1.607573
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