Early agriculture and warfare


 

According to Haaretz there is growing evidence that the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and cultivation took place gradually as a result of experimentation in a time of relative plenty as the last age waned 20000 to 10000 years ago.

Haaretz describes evidence of wild grain cultivation in a village near the Sea of Galilee as early as 23000 years ago, and the domestication of plants and animals in various locations at various times from 11000 years ago. Lumen Learning describes the Halfan culture developing in Nile Valley between 20000 and 17000 year ago and the subsequent Qadan culture harvesting wild-grain with sickles and processing it with grinding stones. Britannica places the dawn of agriculture between 15000 and 10000 years ago. The New York Times reports that “evidence for full-blown agriculture — crops, livestock, tools for food preparation, and villages — dates back about 11000 years”.

I’d like to speculate about the personality traits of the people who carried out such experimentation. Would they have been aggressive and warlike, or would they have been more deliberative and peaceful? My vote goes with deliberative and peaceful. I then pose the question: what gave rise to modern warfare. I’m not talking about an individual attacking someone who slept with his wife or even a family feud. I’m talking full on war waged for political or economic ends. Who thought of that idea, and what sort of personality traits would they have had? Did warfare arise in the settled communities, did it predate them, or was it brought to them after they had cracked the agricultural code and transformed their lives from subsistence to prosperity?

 

Evidence of Paleolithic warfare is very sparce. One example described in Smithsonian Magazine and various other sources is a site at Nataruk, Kenya. And warfare is probably wrong term to use. One group of people were massacred by another. The evidence was dated at 10000 years ago. Neither of the protagonists were engaged in agriculture, but the victims were encamped near a river, an abundant source of food, and they may have kept food stores.

Evidence of group violence between hunter gatherers, albeit an incident coinciding with the dawn of agriculture elsewhere, would seem to imply that warfare was not invented by agriculturalists. Indeed, the same article refers to observations of our closest relatives, chimpanzees, engaging in lethal attacks against members of other groups, and they cite this as evidence that there may be an evolutionary basis for lethal violence between humans.

But how frequest was it? Nataruk is just one slightly special site, and many other paleolithic settlements have been found without any evidence of violence between people. Raymond Kelly has argued that hostility between neighbouring groups of hunter gatherers in sparcely populated areas is likely to be counterproductive. First of all, in the absence of fortification, raiding another group’s territory is unlikely to yield a permanent territorial advantage. Second, the defenders have a natural advantage, because they are more familiar with the terrain. They know the best spots for an ambush, and will be better able to retreat and hide after making a guerrillor attack on the encroachers. And hostility between neighbouring groups will results in de facto buffer zones between territories. These will not be fully utilised for hunting, which is a waste of scarce resources. So there is a positive incentive for neighbours to be friendly to one another to avoid misunderstandings on the borders and to enable the full utilisation of the available resources.

Anyone born in the 20th century might be forgiven for thinking that warfare and bloodshed is endemic to humanity and that it spans our entire history. But the evidence of the archeological record does not support this view, and Raymond Kelly’s analysis gives a possible reason why. So the question remains: when, where, why and how did warfare become the norm?

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