This is the only case of a massacre found out of thousands of digs and yet Haaretz claims it proves that such clashes are as old as mankind itself. If we read carefully, not only do we note this is an exception but that the raiding people are from the area where the Agricultural Revolution began , where war was invented, and not locals. The claim that the massacre was about race is pure fiction, based on the fact that race is a modern fiction, dating from the rise of modern slavery in the 16th Century.
Haaretz goes on to report: "Some archaeologists even theorize that internecine violence, and the development of stone weapons, is one of the reasons prehistoric populations began to spread worldwide, though there is no clear evidence to support that postulation. While plenty of primitive cave art, for example, shows man hunting animals with weapons, none shows man hunting man."
For those seeking the counter argument, I offer the study by Samual Bowles in which he defines war as conflict involving at least 3 people, so if a man and brother seek revenge and attack another, that is considered war. By his calculation, 2% of early deaths were caused by violence (which is not the same as war, which is collective), whereas study of skeletons at 400 sites found only 4 marks of violence, and accepting that some wounds do not cause marks on the bone, the rate of violence is less than 1%. The rate of massacres found in archelogical digs is 1 out of thousands, and that happened AFTER the Agricultural Revolution invented war. Here is the notation Bowles uses to support his thesis that human altruism was a result of war:
c* = ÃŽ º2ÃŽ »A {FST --(1 -' FST) + 1/n}. ence.sciencemag.org/content/324/5932/1293.full
The obvious refutation of Bowles argument is that there are many communities which do not experience war and yet they are abundant in altruism and co-operation. That war is the cause of human kindness I find a bizarre hypothesis.
So not only is the evidence of early man devoid of signs of war or collective violence but there are not even any images of war. More recent history shows us that men obsessed with war are also obsessed with images of war.
Part II will dispell this modern projection onto ancient communities and present a more balanced view of human evolution, wherein more evidence that validates the Rousseauvian concept of human nature as inherently predisposed to peaceful co-existence is presented.
(Article changed on May 13, 2017 at 14:59)
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