Editor’s note: When debating with people about how to create a society without war, the argument always comes up that “back in the stone age humans were also violent” or “back to nature doesn’t work”. Yet historical research shows that even if we shouldn’t romanticise being a cave man or woman, in prehistory humans probably lived the most peaceful life they ever have on earth.
As this article by Deborah Barsky describes, how early Homo species hunted in vast lush territories and formed clan-like groups. They had to stick together against storms and times of hunger, because they knew they were interdependent on each other and on wild nature.
There’s no proof so far for bellicose violence until it comes to the Neolithic age around 12,000 years BC. Only from the times people became sedentary and had unequal access to ressources, archaeologists discovered ancient remains of weapons of war.
That’s somehow good news, because the narrative of humans being evil by force of their genes can likely be false, which means we can liberate ourselves from the excuse of being “only humans” and instead actively abolishing a culture of war and terrorism to create a new world where we’d be inspired by our ancestors and sitting calmly at the fire.
The famous American astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” But can we ever know the history of human origins well enough to understand why humans wage large-scale acts of appalling cruelty on other members of our own species? In January 2024, the Geneva Academy was monitoring no less than 110 armed conflicts globally. While not all of these reach mainstream media outlets, each is equally horrific in terms of the physical violence and mental cruelty we inflict on each other.Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, are known to partake in violent intra-specific skirmishes, typically to preserve privileged access to resources in response to breaches in territorial boundaries. But only humans engage so extensively in large-scale warfare.Do massive acts of intra- or interpopulational violence conform with Darwinian precepts of natural selection, or is this something we do as a competitive response to the stresses of living in such large populations? Looking back in time can help us find answers to such questions. Evidence preserved in the archeological record can tell us about when and under what conditions the preludes to warlike behaviors emerged in the past. Scientific reasoning can then transform this information into viable hypotheses that we can use to understand ourselves in today’s world.As archeologists continue to unearth new fossil evidence at an increasing rate, so too are they piecing together the human story as one of complex interactions played out by (a growing number of) different species of the genus Homo that lived during the tens of thousands of years preceding the emergence—and eventual global dominance—of our own species: Homo sapiens. In fact, scientists have recognized more than a dozen (now extinct) species of Homo that thrived over the millennia, sometimes sharing the same landscapes and occasionally even interbreeding with one another. Millions of years of hybridization is written into the genomes of modern human populations.Although we know very little about what these paleo-encounters might have been like, progress in science and technology is helping archeologists to find ways to piece together the puzzle of interspecific human relationships that occurred so long ago and that contributed to making us who we are today. In spite of these advances, the fossil record remains very fragmentary, especially concerning the older phases of human evolution.First consider Homo, or H. habilis, so-named because a significant increase in stone tool-making is recognized following its emergence some 2.8 million years ago in East Africa. The evidence for the beginnings of this transformational event that would set off the spiraling evolutionary history of human technological prowess is relatively sparse. But such ancient (Oldowan) toolkits do become more abundant from this time forward, at first in Africa, and then into the confines of Eurasia by around 1.8 million years ago. Throughout this period, different kinds of hominins adopted and innovated stone tool making, socializing it into normalized behavior by teaching it to their young and transforming it into a cutting-edge survival strategy. We clearly observe the positive repercussions of this major advancement in our evolutionary history from the expanding increases in both the number of archeological sites and their geographical spread. Unevenly through time, occurrences of Oldowan sites throughout the Old World begin to yield more numerous artifacts, attesting to the progressive demographic trends associated with tool-making hominins.Tool-making was a highly effective adaptive strategy that allowed early Homo species (like H. georgicus and H. antecessor) to define their own niches within multiple environmental contexts, successfully competing for resources with large carnivorous animals. Early humans used stone tools to access the protein-rich meat, viscera, and bone marrow from large herbivore carcasses, nourishing their energy-expensive brains. The latter show significant increases in volume and organizational complexity throughout this time period.But were these early humans also competing with one another? So far (and keeping in mind the scarcity of skeletal remains dating to this period) the paleoanthropological record has not revealed signs of intraspecific violence suffered by Oldowan peoples. Their core-and-flake technologies and simple pounding tools do not include items that could be defined as functional armaments. While a lack of evidence does not constitute proof, we might consider recent estimates in paleodemography, backed by innovative digitized modelization methods and an increasing pool of genetic data that indicates relatively low population densities during the Oldowan.Isolated groups consisted of few individuals, organized perhaps into clan-like social entities, widely spread over vast, resource-rich territories. These hominins invested in developing technological and social skills, cooperating with one another to adapt to new challenges posed by the changing environmental conditions that characterized the onset of the Quaternary period some 2.5 million years ago. Complex socialization processes evolved to perfect and share the capacity for technological competence, abilities that had important repercussions on the configuration of the brain that would eventually set humanity apart from other kinds of primates. Technology became inexorably linked to cognitive and social advances, fueling a symbiotic process now firmly established between anatomical and technological evolution.By around one million years ago, Oldowan-producing peoples had been replaced by the technologically more advanced Acheulian hominins, globally attributed to H. erectussensu lato. This phase of human evolution lasted nearly one and a half million years (globally from 1.75 to around 350,000 years ago) and is marked by highly significant techno-behavioral revolutions whose inception is traced back to Africa. Groundbreaking technologies like fire-making emerged during the Acheulian, as did elaborate stone production methods requiring complex volumetric planning and advanced technical skills. Tools became standardized into specifically designed models, signaling cultural diversity that varied geographically, creating the first land-linked morpho-technological traditions. Ever-greater social investment was required to learn and share the techniques needed to manipulate these technologies, as tools were converted into culture and technical aptitude into innovation.In spite of marked increases in site frequencies and artifact densities throughout the Middle Pleistocene, incidences of interspecific violence are rarely documented and no large-scale violent events have been recognized so far. Were some Acheulian tools suitable for waging inter-populational conflicts? In the later phases of the Acheulian, pointed stone tools with signs of hafting and even wooden spears appear in some sites. But were these sophisticated tool kits limited to hunting? Or might they also have served for other purposes?Culture evolves through a process I like to refer to as “technoselection” that in many ways can be likened to biological natural selection. In prehistory, technological systems are characterized by sets of morphotypes that reflect a specific stage of cognitive competence. Within these broad defining categories, however, we can recognize some anomalies or idiosyncratic techno-forms that can be defined as potential latent within a given system. As with natural selection, potential is recognized as structural anomalies that may be selected for under specific circumstances and then developed into new or even revolutionary technologies, converted through inventiveness. Should they prove advantageous to deal with the challenges at hand, these innovative technologies are adopted and developed further, expanding upon the existing foundational know-how and creating increasingly larger sets of material culture. Foundational material culture therefore exists in a state of exponential growth, as each phase is built upon the preceding one in a cumulative process perceived as acceleration.I have already suggested elsewhere that the advanced degree of cultural complexity attained by the Late Acheulian, together with the capacity to produce fire, empowered hominins to adapt their nomadic lifestyles within more constrained territorial ranges. Thick depositional sequences containing evidence of successive living floors recorded in the caves of Eurasia show that hominins were returning cyclically to the same areas, most likely in pace with seasonal climate change and the migrational pathways of the animals they preyed upon. As a result, humans established strong links with the specific regions within which they roamed. More restrictive ranging caused idiosyncrasies to appear within the material and behavioral cultural repertoires of each group: specific ways of making and doing. As they lived and died in lands that were becoming their own, so too did they construct territorial identities that were in contrast with those of groups living in neighboring areas. As cultural productions multiplied, so did these imagined cultural “differences” sharpen, engendering the distinguishing notions of “us” and “them.”Even more significant perhaps was the emergence and consolidation of symbolic thought processes visible, for example, in cultural manifestations whose careful manufacture took tool-making into a whole new realm of aesthetic concerns rarely observed in earlier toolkits. By around 400,000 years ago in Eurasia, pre-Neandertals and then Neandertal peoples were conferring special treatment to their dead, sometimes even depositing them with other objects suggestive of nascent spiritual practices. These would eventually develop into highly diverse social practices, like ritual and taboo. Cultural diversity was the keystone for new systems of belief that reinforced imagined differences separating territorially distinct groups.Anatomically modern humans (H. sapiens) appeared on the scene some 300,000 years ago in Africa and spread subsequently into lands already occupied by other culturally and spiritually advanced species of Homo. While maintaining a nomadic existence, these hominins were undergoing transformational demographic trends that resulted in more frequent interpopulation encounters. This factor, combined with the growing array of material and behavioral manifestations of culture (reflected by artifact multiplicity) provided a repository from which hominin groups stood in contrast with one another. At the same time, the mounting importance of symbolic behaviors in regulating hominin lifestyles contributed to reinforcing both real (anatomic) and imagined (cultural) variances. Intergroup encounters favored cultural exchange, inspiring innovation and driving spiraling techno-social complexity. In addition, they provided opportunities for sexual exchanges necessary for broadening gene pool diversity and avoiding inbreeding. At the same time, a higher number of individuals within each group would have prompted social hierarchization as a strategy to ensure the survival of each unit.
If large-scale human violence is difficult to identify in the Paleolithic record, it is common in later, proto-historic iconography. Evidence for warlike behavior (accumulations of corpses bearing signs of humanly-induced trauma) appear towards the end of the Pleistocene and after the onset of the Neolithic Period (nearly 12,000 years ago) in different parts of the world, perhaps in relation to new pressures due to climate change. Arguably, sedentary lifestyles and plant and animal domestication—hallmarks of the Neolithic—reset social and cultural norms of hunter-gatherer societies. Additionally, it may be that the amassing and storing of goods caused new inter-relational paradigms to take form, with individuals fulfilling different roles in relation to their capacities to benefit the group to which they belonged. The capacity to elaborate an abstract, symbolic worldview transformed land and resources into property and goods that “belonged” to one or another social unit, in relation to claims on the lands upon which they lived and from which they reaped the benefits. The written documents of the first literate civilizations, relating mainly to the quantification of goods, are revelatory of the effects of this transformational period of intensified production, hoarding and exchange. Differences inherent to the kinds of resources available in environmentally diverse parts of the world solidified unequal access to the kinds of goods invested with “value” by developing civilizations and dictated the nature of the technologies that would be expanded for their exploitation. Trading networks were established and interconnectedness favored improvements in technologies and nascent communication networks, stimulating competition to obtain more, better, faster.
From this vast overview, we can now more clearly see how the emergence of the notion of “others” that arose in the later phases of the Lower Paleolithic was key for kindling the kinds of behavioral tendencies required for preserving the production-consumption mentality borne after the Neolithic and still in effect in today’s overpopulated capitalist world.
Evolution is not a linear process and culture is a multifaceted phenomenon, but it is the degree to which we have advanced technology that sets us apart from all other living beings on the planet. War is not pre-programmed in our species, nor is it a fatality in our modern, globalized existence. Archeology teaches us that it is a behavior grounded in our own manufactured perception of “difference” between peoples living in distinct areas of the world with unequal access to resources. A social unit will adopt warlike behavior as a response to resource scarcity or other kinds of external challenges (for example, territorial encroachment by an ‘alien’ social unit). Finding solutions to eradicating large-scale warfare thus begins with using our technologies to create equality among all peoples, rather than developing harmful weapons of destruction.
From the emergence of early Homo, natural selection and technoselection have developed in synchronicity through time, transforming discrete structural anomalies into evolutionary strategies in unpredictable and interdependent ways. The big difference between these two processes at play in human evolution is that the former is guided by laws of universal equilibrium established over millions of years, while the latter exists in a state of exponential change that is outside of the stabilizing laws of nature.
Human technologies are transitive in the sense that they can be adapted to serve for different purposes in distinct timeframes or by diverse social entities. Many objects can be transformed into weapons. In the modern world plagued by terrorism, for example, simple home-made explosives, airplanes, drones, or vans can be transformed into formidable weapons, while incredibly advanced technologies can be used to increase our capacity to inflict desensitized and dehumanized destruction on levels never before attained.
Meanwhile, our advanced communication venues serve to share selected global events of warfare numbing the public into passive acceptance. While it is difficult to determine the exact point in time when humans selected large-scale warfare as a viable behavioral trait, co-opting their astounding technological prowess as a strategy to compete with each other in response to unprecedented demographic growth, there may yet be time for us to modify this trajectory toward resiliency, cooperation, and exchange.
I think you really need to read psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined and, especially, neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky’s just published Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will and his magisterial Behave, The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst as well as a few of primatologist Frans de Waal’s books on our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, perhaps beginning with Our Inner Ape.
Thank you, Deborah Barsky, for writing and sharing this thought-provoking piece with us, that raises many vital, urgent questions. As a retired historian who taught for decades in the field called, “Native American Studies,” this intersection between history and what is mistakenly labeled as “pre-history” has long been an intellectual territory of constant musing and wondering for me, and even more so in this era of impending societal collapse. Much of what you cover here I have also observed and speculated upon, especially the unfounded claim that “pre-historic” or pre-colonialized, indigenous peoples were particularly “war-like” (a.k.a., the old slander, “savage”), when recent cultural, anthropological, archeological, historical and ecological evidence suggests that the opposite is more likely true.
You have raised so many good questions, that I cannot adequately address here, I would like to suggest to you and others who read this essay that we someday have an online discussion on Zoom or something like that (like those day-length online seminars that DGR has produced in recent years), in order to probe these questions and subjects a little deeper. Some points that I would hope to discuss with others include:
-the role of the advent of money or currencies, just after the development of agriculture and dependency on trade, in the transition to more militarized behaviors among our species
-how the old directional focus (or even life purpose) of first peoples was on stability and keeping a good, eco-harmonious, relatively peaceful way of life going (or, “keeping the [natural] world alive,” as the old Kiowa scholar and writer, N. Scott Momaday used to say), compared to our current desperate quest to escape from a dystopian, collapse-bound way of not really living
-why weapons used for hunting that were perfectly adaptable for use in warfare were rarely ever used for intergroup conflict (battles or war) for so long in human history (I include what is called “pre-history” there, which I would be glad to elaborate on later)
-correcting some misconceptions about what is still sometimes called “nomadicism”
-many other related topics
Thanks again, and I hope that others will be interested in further discussion, too.
There have been countless speculations on what an extraterrestrial culture would be like. Almost all of them have started with the assumption that however different from the cultures of earth, they would follow the same basic trajectory in their history. And there is an assumption that if they are capable of getting here from another planet, they must be farther along that path than we are.
So, let us examine some aspects of our own history and see where our own culture came from and where it is going.
The story we were told in school is simple: humans started out as simple hunter-gatherers, living in a state of nature, then, after some millions of years, suddenly changed to peasant-farmers, using metal tools instead of stone, growing food instead of searching for it wherever it might be, and living in large dense concentrations under kings and religious rulers. Since then, we are told, it has been a steady march to ever-greater technological mastery over the environment, interupted only by wars and ocassional natural catastrophes
The story is simple in it’s outlines and most people believe it. In fact, enormous peer presure is exerted upon anyone who expresses any doubt. But the whole story is wrong. Nothing of the kind ever took place.
As is agreed by almost everyone, humans originated ( however that may have been, and for whatever reasons ) a long time ago. For most of the time since then they lived as hunter-gatherers. They have only begun to use metal implements, organize into large-scale communities, fight organized wars, use most forms of technology, and countless other inovations, within the last 10,000 years. Indeed, most of the main inovations are as recent as only the last 5,000 years or so.
If you backtrack the earth and other solar system objects by computer, you find that starting around 12,000 years ago the earth intercepted a swarm of meteors in space. These interceptions have recurred every seven or eight centuries since, though with diminishing intensity each time. And each time they occur, changes take place in human history.
There were repeated and drastic changes in the global climate. There were mass extinctions, some caused by humans and some not, especially of the largest and most important members of most continental ecosystems. There was massive desertification, some caused by atmospheric conditions, some by humans raising excessive livestock. And humans began to change from hunters and gatherers to farmers and city-dwellers.
Cities depend on farming. Large organized empires depend on farming. To fight a war, an empore must have both a large enough population and a surplus of food to feed non-productive soldiers. Nothing we would call civilization could exist without farming. What does farming depend on?
You can dig up enough ground with a digging stick to grow a little extra food to suplement gathering wild foods, but you cannot plough a large enough field to feed yourself and several other people that way. Farming had to wait for the invention of the plough. And you cannot plough up much land with a plough made of wood. It would wear out too quickly. The plough had to wait for the use of metal.
In the times before the meteors hit the earth, the earth was much more highly charged than it is today. The meteor storms discharged a lot of that charge and it has never recovered to what it was before that. And the use of metals had to wait for the reduction in charge because until then metals could not be used. It hurt to touch anything made of metal. A touch would cause a painful shock every time.
So the discharging of a large part of the global charge was the needed pre-condition for development of a civilization that uses metals in it’s technology, gets most of it’s food from farming, and has a large enough population to have urban populations that do other things instead of gathering food for a living. And if there had not been a swarm of meteors in the right orbit to hit the earth, we would all still be hunter-gatherers with a stone-age technology.
So any extraterrestrials we encounter in space will not have a modern-type technology unless they too have had a similar experience in their history. Civilizations do not happen inevitably. They happen because of a specific set of environmental conditions and while the laws of biology indicate there could be, indeed probably are, many planets with humans more or less like those on earth, even possibly many that are identical to the degree we can detect, they are almost certain to be hunter-gatherers, not urban engineers.
But there will be other difference also. The same meteor storms that made possible development of metal-using technology also caused certain changes in the behavior of the vast majority of human cultures. Maybe a few rainforest tribes escaped the devastation and environmental changes enough to remain unchanged, but the majority of human cultures did not.emerge unscathed. Almost all human cultures literally went insane from the trauma and have remained so ever since.
And the cultures that have developed since the meteor storms are dependent on that insanity. To give only one example, no healthy person, feeling alive and aware of his own body and emotions, would consent to spend his working life deep in a mine, digging for coal or iron. So in a society of healthy people, coal and iron would not be dug. People brought up free and capable of independent thinking would not join a regimented army. So large empires would not exist. People would not live in large cities unless they were deadened and out of contact with their biological instincts. So there would be no large cities.
So any extraterrestrial civilization that becomes able to make ships able to carry them from there to here will have to suffer from the same mental illness that prevails on earth. If they do not, they will remain hunter-gatherers and not develop a technology able to bring them here.
This means that any extraterrestrial culture we contact will almost certainly resemble our own. Not in all details, just as there are some minor differences between the cultures of China and Europe, but in the essential matter of being insane.
There may be some like the Klingons, violent and agressive, and some like the Vulcans, cold and detached, and some like the Bajorans, mystical, and some like the Frengi, aquisitive to an extreme, and some like the Romulans, regimented with rigid disciplne, and some like the Borg, all individuality submerged in a collective mind.
But there will be none who are emotionally healthy; if they are able to get into space, they will have to be an insane race, suffering from the same constellation of emotional and social illnesses that mankind has suffered from for the past several thousand years. Otherwise, they will not be in space; they will be hunting for food in a vast wilderness on a planet that remains almost entirely in it’s natural condition.
And all this is true regardless of any minor differences they may exhibit from humans of earth. It is true of all mammals on earth, not just humans. It will be true regardless of if a species is telepathic or not, even to the extent of being a Borg-like collective mind. Unless a species is too different from us for us to be able to comunicate, their basic psychological functions will be the same.
And since the root cause of the human near-universal insanity is a cosmic accident, one not likely to have happened anywhere else that human life has arisen, there will be no aliens coming here to contact us. We will have to go to them.
An excellent essay that makes excellent points. Western civilization has long presented “tribes” as inferior and violent in comparison to themselves going back as far as ancient Rome, at least, and maybe ancient Greece. The very words “tribal” and “tribalism” are an insult, indicative of primitive and mindless group think, while “civilized” is literally defined by reason, refinement and decency.
Few people take the time to examine the validity of Euro-cultural myths, which change from era to ear in form but never in substance. Nor are they able to consider how materialism, wealth seeking, and social disparity fuel the alternate view of history that is, in fact, an alternate reality altogether, or the cognitive dissonance necessary to go along with the dominant society’s “story of us”.
A very popular current justification of western depravity is the human caused megafauna extinction. People should take the time to actually examine the megafauna extinction theory that supposedly proves how bloodthirsty and destructive “all” humans have always been. The very idea that humans went around killing all the largest animals is ludicrous. Why kill the short-faced bears but not the grizzlies that were almost as large? Why kill all the dire wolves but not the timber wolves, the largest of which were equal in size to smaller dire wolves?
Because those early, primitive and blood thirsty people were consciously distinguishing the dire wolves from the timber wolves in their murderous onslaught? I don’t think so.
While it’s true that extinct megafauna had survived several previous interglacial periods, it took an interglacial period for human incursion into new regions, and all interglacial periods saw a reduction in population and range of ice age animals. All introduced animals change their environments, and often dramatically, and humans are no exception. Nonetheless, there is almost zero to no evidence that early humans hunted a large majority of extinct megafauna. There is ample evidence in Australia and in the western hemisphere that humans existed with megafauna for thousands of years prior to the extinction of those animals. This on top of the regions in Africa and India where megafauna animals survived.
That is not to say that human incursion didn’t affect the extinction in some way, but the idea that it was through killing them just because they were “big” doesn’t make any sense. Especially when those animals had no value as food, and very especially when after exterminating all the largest animals those same humans settled down and developed rich Nature cultures and lived with a tremendous abundance of fauna biodiversity. Their identification with the animals in their world cannot be overstated, as those people developed their entire cultures around the other animals, their myths, their clans, their personal names, their dances and stories, and their wisdom parables.
But it’s a tidy, easy, projection for western academia, an apology for western destruction. We’re no worse than anyone else, we claim, but we were more “advanced” and therefor able to do what everyone else wanted to do but couldn’t. Or, at least that’s Jared Diamond says. We’re superior even in our destructive rampage around the world.
Certainly, Euro-culture over the past several centuries has done exactly that; gone into every region of the earth and destroyed the people, the animals, and the lands they found. They barely got off the boats in North America when they began killing everything that moved, dumping plenty of garbage into the waters, chopping down forests, exterminating large predators and “pest” species like birds, and certainly any animals with commercial value like beavers. They reduced the indigenous human population by as much as 96% – 98% through three hundred years of continuous warfare. All for land and wealth. If some Maoris in New Zealand did the same to some easy to kill big birds, there you have it! It’s all equal.
Never mind that not stealing and not murdering is a cultural moral imperative. When it comes to our greed we have ways around every possible moral prohibition.
So, of course we want to say that this is “human nature”. Otherwise, we might have to face some very hard truths about our society and our history, and that would not only make us feel bad and demand that we question our way of life, we would be ostracized if not persecuted by the money machine that runs everything and has for centuries.
According to experts, there were three hundred separate indigenous languages in what is now the contiguous forty-eight states in the US prior to European arrival. That’s a lot of diversity. A lot of diversity indicates a lot of tolerance between groups. If larger groups of the pre-Columbian Native people of this country had actually gone around exterminating smaller, weaker groups, like we say is “human nature”, there would not have been so many languages. There would have been far fewer languages over larger regions. You know, like us.
But there were not fewer languages over larger regions.
Humans may be all the “same” biologically, and we may even be equally dumb and mean everywhere we go. But culture has the “same” humans living in vastly different realities, on very different planets, and with wildly different values. Now this culture has run out of planet and run out of future. But we’ll go to our own extinction telling ourselves that we were no worse than anyone, we were just the same except we were more “advanced”. Oh, well.
But were these early humans also competing with one another? So far (and keeping in mind the scarcity of skeletal remains dating to this period) the paleoanthropological record has not revealed signs of intraspecific violence suffered by Oldowan peoples. Their core-and-flake technologies and simple pounding tools do not include items that could be defined as functional armaments. While a lack of evidence does not constitute proof, we might consider recent estimates in paleodemography, backed by innovative digitized modelization methods and an increasing pool of genetic data that indicates relatively low population densities during the Oldowan.
Anatomically modern humans (H. sapiens) appeared on the scene some 300,000 years ago in Africa and spread subsequently into lands already occupied by other culturally and spiritually advanced species of Homo. While maintaining a nomadic existence, these hominins were undergoing transformational demographic trends that resulted in more frequent interpopulation encounters. This factor, combined with the growing array of material and behavioral manifestations of culture (reflected by artifact multiplicity) provided a repository from which hominin groups stood in contrast with one another. At the same time, the mounting importance of symbolic behaviors in regulating hominin lifestyles contributed to reinforcing both real (anatomic) and imagined (cultural) variances. Intergroup encounters favored cultural exchange, inspiring innovation and driving spiraling techno-social complexity. In addition, they provided opportunities for sexual exchanges necessary for broadening gene pool diversity and avoiding inbreeding. At the same time, a higher number of individuals within each group would have prompted social hierarchization as a strategy to ensure the survival of each unit.
I think you really need to read psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined and, especially, neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky’s just published Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will and his magisterial Behave, The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst as well as a few of primatologist Frans de Waal’s books on our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, perhaps beginning with Our Inner Ape.
Thank you, Deborah Barsky, for writing and sharing this thought-provoking piece with us, that raises many vital, urgent questions. As a retired historian who taught for decades in the field called, “Native American Studies,” this intersection between history and what is mistakenly labeled as “pre-history” has long been an intellectual territory of constant musing and wondering for me, and even more so in this era of impending societal collapse. Much of what you cover here I have also observed and speculated upon, especially the unfounded claim that “pre-historic” or pre-colonialized, indigenous peoples were particularly “war-like” (a.k.a., the old slander, “savage”), when recent cultural, anthropological, archeological, historical and ecological evidence suggests that the opposite is more likely true.
You have raised so many good questions, that I cannot adequately address here, I would like to suggest to you and others who read this essay that we someday have an online discussion on Zoom or something like that (like those day-length online seminars that DGR has produced in recent years), in order to probe these questions and subjects a little deeper. Some points that I would hope to discuss with others include:
-the role of the advent of money or currencies, just after the development of agriculture and dependency on trade, in the transition to more militarized behaviors among our species
-how the old directional focus (or even life purpose) of first peoples was on stability and keeping a good, eco-harmonious, relatively peaceful way of life going (or, “keeping the [natural] world alive,” as the old Kiowa scholar and writer, N. Scott Momaday used to say), compared to our current desperate quest to escape from a dystopian, collapse-bound way of not really living
-why weapons used for hunting that were perfectly adaptable for use in warfare were rarely ever used for intergroup conflict (battles or war) for so long in human history (I include what is called “pre-history” there, which I would be glad to elaborate on later)
-correcting some misconceptions about what is still sometimes called “nomadicism”
-many other related topics
Thanks again, and I hope that others will be interested in further discussion, too.
There have been countless speculations on what an extraterrestrial culture would be like. Almost all of them have started with the assumption that however different from the cultures of earth, they would follow the same basic trajectory in their history. And there is an assumption that if they are capable of getting here from another planet, they must be farther along that path than we are.
So, let us examine some aspects of our own history and see where our own culture came from and where it is going.
The story we were told in school is simple: humans started out as simple hunter-gatherers, living in a state of nature, then, after some millions of years, suddenly changed to peasant-farmers, using metal tools instead of stone, growing food instead of searching for it wherever it might be, and living in large dense concentrations under kings and religious rulers. Since then, we are told, it has been a steady march to ever-greater technological mastery over the environment, interupted only by wars and ocassional natural catastrophes
The story is simple in it’s outlines and most people believe it. In fact, enormous peer presure is exerted upon anyone who expresses any doubt. But the whole story is wrong. Nothing of the kind ever took place.
As is agreed by almost everyone, humans originated ( however that may have been, and for whatever reasons ) a long time ago. For most of the time since then they lived as hunter-gatherers. They have only begun to use metal implements, organize into large-scale communities, fight organized wars, use most forms of technology, and countless other inovations, within the last 10,000 years. Indeed, most of the main inovations are as recent as only the last 5,000 years or so.
If you backtrack the earth and other solar system objects by computer, you find that starting around 12,000 years ago the earth intercepted a swarm of meteors in space. These interceptions have recurred every seven or eight centuries since, though with diminishing intensity each time. And each time they occur, changes take place in human history.
There were repeated and drastic changes in the global climate. There were mass extinctions, some caused by humans and some not, especially of the largest and most important members of most continental ecosystems. There was massive desertification, some caused by atmospheric conditions, some by humans raising excessive livestock. And humans began to change from hunters and gatherers to farmers and city-dwellers.
Cities depend on farming. Large organized empires depend on farming. To fight a war, an empore must have both a large enough population and a surplus of food to feed non-productive soldiers. Nothing we would call civilization could exist without farming. What does farming depend on?
You can dig up enough ground with a digging stick to grow a little extra food to suplement gathering wild foods, but you cannot plough a large enough field to feed yourself and several other people that way. Farming had to wait for the invention of the plough. And you cannot plough up much land with a plough made of wood. It would wear out too quickly. The plough had to wait for the use of metal.
In the times before the meteors hit the earth, the earth was much more highly charged than it is today. The meteor storms discharged a lot of that charge and it has never recovered to what it was before that. And the use of metals had to wait for the reduction in charge because until then metals could not be used. It hurt to touch anything made of metal. A touch would cause a painful shock every time.
So the discharging of a large part of the global charge was the needed pre-condition for development of a civilization that uses metals in it’s technology, gets most of it’s food from farming, and has a large enough population to have urban populations that do other things instead of gathering food for a living. And if there had not been a swarm of meteors in the right orbit to hit the earth, we would all still be hunter-gatherers with a stone-age technology.
So any extraterrestrials we encounter in space will not have a modern-type technology unless they too have had a similar experience in their history. Civilizations do not happen inevitably. They happen because of a specific set of environmental conditions and while the laws of biology indicate there could be, indeed probably are, many planets with humans more or less like those on earth, even possibly many that are identical to the degree we can detect, they are almost certain to be hunter-gatherers, not urban engineers.
But there will be other difference also. The same meteor storms that made possible development of metal-using technology also caused certain changes in the behavior of the vast majority of human cultures. Maybe a few rainforest tribes escaped the devastation and environmental changes enough to remain unchanged, but the majority of human cultures did not.emerge unscathed. Almost all human cultures literally went insane from the trauma and have remained so ever since.
And the cultures that have developed since the meteor storms are dependent on that insanity. To give only one example, no healthy person, feeling alive and aware of his own body and emotions, would consent to spend his working life deep in a mine, digging for coal or iron. So in a society of healthy people, coal and iron would not be dug. People brought up free and capable of independent thinking would not join a regimented army. So large empires would not exist. People would not live in large cities unless they were deadened and out of contact with their biological instincts. So there would be no large cities.
So any extraterrestrial civilization that becomes able to make ships able to carry them from there to here will have to suffer from the same mental illness that prevails on earth. If they do not, they will remain hunter-gatherers and not develop a technology able to bring them here.
This means that any extraterrestrial culture we contact will almost certainly resemble our own. Not in all details, just as there are some minor differences between the cultures of China and Europe, but in the essential matter of being insane.
There may be some like the Klingons, violent and agressive, and some like the Vulcans, cold and detached, and some like the Bajorans, mystical, and some like the Frengi, aquisitive to an extreme, and some like the Romulans, regimented with rigid disciplne, and some like the Borg, all individuality submerged in a collective mind.
But there will be none who are emotionally healthy; if they are able to get into space, they will have to be an insane race, suffering from the same constellation of emotional and social illnesses that mankind has suffered from for the past several thousand years. Otherwise, they will not be in space; they will be hunting for food in a vast wilderness on a planet that remains almost entirely in it’s natural condition.
And all this is true regardless of any minor differences they may exhibit from humans of earth. It is true of all mammals on earth, not just humans. It will be true regardless of if a species is telepathic or not, even to the extent of being a Borg-like collective mind. Unless a species is too different from us for us to be able to comunicate, their basic psychological functions will be the same.
And since the root cause of the human near-universal insanity is a cosmic accident, one not likely to have happened anywhere else that human life has arisen, there will be no aliens coming here to contact us. We will have to go to them.
An excellent essay that makes excellent points. Western civilization has long presented “tribes” as inferior and violent in comparison to themselves going back as far as ancient Rome, at least, and maybe ancient Greece. The very words “tribal” and “tribalism” are an insult, indicative of primitive and mindless group think, while “civilized” is literally defined by reason, refinement and decency.
Few people take the time to examine the validity of Euro-cultural myths, which change from era to ear in form but never in substance. Nor are they able to consider how materialism, wealth seeking, and social disparity fuel the alternate view of history that is, in fact, an alternate reality altogether, or the cognitive dissonance necessary to go along with the dominant society’s “story of us”.
A very popular current justification of western depravity is the human caused megafauna extinction. People should take the time to actually examine the megafauna extinction theory that supposedly proves how bloodthirsty and destructive “all” humans have always been. The very idea that humans went around killing all the largest animals is ludicrous. Why kill the short-faced bears but not the grizzlies that were almost as large? Why kill all the dire wolves but not the timber wolves, the largest of which were equal in size to smaller dire wolves?
Because those early, primitive and blood thirsty people were consciously distinguishing the dire wolves from the timber wolves in their murderous onslaught? I don’t think so.
While it’s true that extinct megafauna had survived several previous interglacial periods, it took an interglacial period for human incursion into new regions, and all interglacial periods saw a reduction in population and range of ice age animals. All introduced animals change their environments, and often dramatically, and humans are no exception. Nonetheless, there is almost zero to no evidence that early humans hunted a large majority of extinct megafauna. There is ample evidence in Australia and in the western hemisphere that humans existed with megafauna for thousands of years prior to the extinction of those animals. This on top of the regions in Africa and India where megafauna animals survived.
That is not to say that human incursion didn’t affect the extinction in some way, but the idea that it was through killing them just because they were “big” doesn’t make any sense. Especially when those animals had no value as food, and very especially when after exterminating all the largest animals those same humans settled down and developed rich Nature cultures and lived with a tremendous abundance of fauna biodiversity. Their identification with the animals in their world cannot be overstated, as those people developed their entire cultures around the other animals, their myths, their clans, their personal names, their dances and stories, and their wisdom parables.
But it’s a tidy, easy, projection for western academia, an apology for western destruction. We’re no worse than anyone else, we claim, but we were more “advanced” and therefor able to do what everyone else wanted to do but couldn’t. Or, at least that’s Jared Diamond says. We’re superior even in our destructive rampage around the world.
Certainly, Euro-culture over the past several centuries has done exactly that; gone into every region of the earth and destroyed the people, the animals, and the lands they found. They barely got off the boats in North America when they began killing everything that moved, dumping plenty of garbage into the waters, chopping down forests, exterminating large predators and “pest” species like birds, and certainly any animals with commercial value like beavers. They reduced the indigenous human population by as much as 96% – 98% through three hundred years of continuous warfare. All for land and wealth. If some Maoris in New Zealand did the same to some easy to kill big birds, there you have it! It’s all equal.
Never mind that not stealing and not murdering is a cultural moral imperative. When it comes to our greed we have ways around every possible moral prohibition.
So, of course we want to say that this is “human nature”. Otherwise, we might have to face some very hard truths about our society and our history, and that would not only make us feel bad and demand that we question our way of life, we would be ostracized if not persecuted by the money machine that runs everything and has for centuries.
According to experts, there were three hundred separate indigenous languages in what is now the contiguous forty-eight states in the US prior to European arrival. That’s a lot of diversity. A lot of diversity indicates a lot of tolerance between groups. If larger groups of the pre-Columbian Native people of this country had actually gone around exterminating smaller, weaker groups, like we say is “human nature”, there would not have been so many languages. There would have been far fewer languages over larger regions. You know, like us.
But there were not fewer languages over larger regions.
Humans may be all the “same” biologically, and we may even be equally dumb and mean everywhere we go. But culture has the “same” humans living in vastly different realities, on very different planets, and with wildly different values. Now this culture has run out of planet and run out of future. But we’ll go to our own extinction telling ourselves that we were no worse than anyone, we were just the same except we were more “advanced”. Oh, well.
Adios, ta ta, g’bye, and thanks for all the fish!