I suspect humanity's competitive war over resources was driven by periodic famine and populations exceeding a land's carrying capacity. For our ancestors, that was a near constant state.
Maybe when humans first settled North America ~25k years ago, conflict and war took a long break. We had two new continents to populate and a fresh population of mega-fauna to eat.
Excellent observation about the sun being the energy source of humanity's drive. We're slowly moving beyond that. Nuclear power is, for now, the product (U235) of long dead stars.
And we've turned edable plants and animals into genetic freaks of their ancestral selves via rapid genetic selection/engineering. Along with re-engineering the soil itself by adding megatons of nitrogen fertilizer pulled from the air via the Haber-Bosch process. Hence our fields and pastures (and ugly factory farms) produce 10x the food per acre compared to a few centuries ago.
Let's pray we use these technologies of plenty to thrive and not destroy ourselves.
I don't really think that any of the historical steps you described are true or generalizable... It's a story that makes sense if you buy the thesis ex ante, but, there are so many aspects of the human experience and human history that deviate from the process you have described.
Please give examples and elaborate on your statement “but, there are so many aspects of the human experience and human history that deviate from the process you have described.” In doing so, explain what you think causes the deviation.
Yeah, sorry I didn’t mean to be so direct. I wonder what examples you are thinking of as well. It’s an interesting story, and I’m sure there’s some anthropology that fits it, but there’s also lots more anthropology that tells different stories.
I think your premise that the hunter gatherers were always at war is flawed. We know that happened and we know it happened at certain scales, but we also have lots of information that these groups were self-sustaining, independent, capable of intermarriage and peaceful development. There were times when the Great Plains were shared, times when it was simply big enough for everyone, times where regions of it were divided peacefully, times where there were conflict.
Similar with the steppes. The Mongolian, Manchurian, and similar peoples - there were times when these ‘people’ were separate tribes, inchoate groups fighting each other, and other times that they showed great unity as one people and held power stably and intergenerationally.
The way you tell the story seems to show a huge arc of history - ancient hunter gatherers to modern people. The Sioux were nomadic people
dominant over huge swaths of America until the 1800s. The Mongolians ruled China for a few generations; the Manchurians ruled China from 1600-1900 even though the Manchurians were nomadic horse people taking over and administering a very classical and ‘modern’ (for the time) state. Not to mention the indigenous people that exist to this day.
So that’s kind of the first part of it I would reconsider about your post. I don’t think the direction from hunter gatherer to farmer and then tension is quite so clean as you say (although we have lots of records of nomad/agriculturalist conflict!) From there I think some of the observations about religion or the search for good leaders… it’s just flimsy. War and peace do not have to be placed as polar opposites in this story,
compromise does not have to be posited as always ending in war (perhaps mankind’s small aberrations of war always ended in a return to compromise; either version is not quite true because we are not destined to one or the other, each are simply things that happened in our past, to be argued over and contextualized).
There are many societies that survive successfully for generations and generations without iconic or powerful leaders- think of how few Greek leaders you actually know, the muddy historical distinctions between Greece and Macedon and their neighbors, the confusion about how Greek Crete may be compared to Athens &c and whether these are city states or nations or groups that should be treated differently entirely. We in the present like to tell the story of Alexander the Great or repeat the tales of Agamemnon etc., but, that’s because they are powerful stories and the conquest of land and maintenance of empire is sexy, as much as it is because the leaders did anything different than any of the ones whose names we don’t know.
I do like where your piece starts. I think it’s important to remember that the Sun - and these biologies and ecologies of turning sunlight into calories humans can use - is a big part of life! Sine qua non!
I suspect humanity's competitive war over resources was driven by periodic famine and populations exceeding a land's carrying capacity. For our ancestors, that was a near constant state.
Maybe when humans first settled North America ~25k years ago, conflict and war took a long break. We had two new continents to populate and a fresh population of mega-fauna to eat.
Excellent observation about the sun being the energy source of humanity's drive. We're slowly moving beyond that. Nuclear power is, for now, the product (U235) of long dead stars.
And we've turned edable plants and animals into genetic freaks of their ancestral selves via rapid genetic selection/engineering. Along with re-engineering the soil itself by adding megatons of nitrogen fertilizer pulled from the air via the Haber-Bosch process. Hence our fields and pastures (and ugly factory farms) produce 10x the food per acre compared to a few centuries ago.
Let's pray we use these technologies of plenty to thrive and not destroy ourselves.
So well said.
I don't really think that any of the historical steps you described are true or generalizable... It's a story that makes sense if you buy the thesis ex ante, but, there are so many aspects of the human experience and human history that deviate from the process you have described.
Please give examples and elaborate on your statement “but, there are so many aspects of the human experience and human history that deviate from the process you have described.” In doing so, explain what you think causes the deviation.
Yeah, sorry I didn’t mean to be so direct. I wonder what examples you are thinking of as well. It’s an interesting story, and I’m sure there’s some anthropology that fits it, but there’s also lots more anthropology that tells different stories.
I think your premise that the hunter gatherers were always at war is flawed. We know that happened and we know it happened at certain scales, but we also have lots of information that these groups were self-sustaining, independent, capable of intermarriage and peaceful development. There were times when the Great Plains were shared, times when it was simply big enough for everyone, times where regions of it were divided peacefully, times where there were conflict.
Similar with the steppes. The Mongolian, Manchurian, and similar peoples - there were times when these ‘people’ were separate tribes, inchoate groups fighting each other, and other times that they showed great unity as one people and held power stably and intergenerationally.
The way you tell the story seems to show a huge arc of history - ancient hunter gatherers to modern people. The Sioux were nomadic people
dominant over huge swaths of America until the 1800s. The Mongolians ruled China for a few generations; the Manchurians ruled China from 1600-1900 even though the Manchurians were nomadic horse people taking over and administering a very classical and ‘modern’ (for the time) state. Not to mention the indigenous people that exist to this day.
So that’s kind of the first part of it I would reconsider about your post. I don’t think the direction from hunter gatherer to farmer and then tension is quite so clean as you say (although we have lots of records of nomad/agriculturalist conflict!) From there I think some of the observations about religion or the search for good leaders… it’s just flimsy. War and peace do not have to be placed as polar opposites in this story,
compromise does not have to be posited as always ending in war (perhaps mankind’s small aberrations of war always ended in a return to compromise; either version is not quite true because we are not destined to one or the other, each are simply things that happened in our past, to be argued over and contextualized).
There are many societies that survive successfully for generations and generations without iconic or powerful leaders- think of how few Greek leaders you actually know, the muddy historical distinctions between Greece and Macedon and their neighbors, the confusion about how Greek Crete may be compared to Athens &c and whether these are city states or nations or groups that should be treated differently entirely. We in the present like to tell the story of Alexander the Great or repeat the tales of Agamemnon etc., but, that’s because they are powerful stories and the conquest of land and maintenance of empire is sexy, as much as it is because the leaders did anything different than any of the ones whose names we don’t know.
I do like where your piece starts. I think it’s important to remember that the Sun - and these biologies and ecologies of turning sunlight into calories humans can use - is a big part of life! Sine qua non!