Myth: Warfare is a natural activity, as old as humanity…
If the martial impulse is inherent in human nature, then the prospects for a humanist vision remain dim.
If, on the other hand, our cooperative impulses are likewise inherent, then those prospects may ultimately be brighter.
This gives us a follow-up question to our previous chapter: If human beings aren't "killer apes," not predisposed to personal violence – might groups of humans still be inclined to collective violence? Is warfare part of our nature?
Winston Churchill thought so:
“The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.”
Much evidence can be mustered to support the first half of Churchill's argument. As far back as written history goes, organized war has been with us. But "before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending" is a statement not supported by fact.
A growing body of evidence, however, is reinforcing the idea that Homo sapiens is neither inherently violent nor warlike, that this has always been the case, and that intra-species violence and organized conflict are recent innovations for humanity.
Cemetery 117
Winston Churchill's famous assumption above is shared by many. Recorded history shows no deficit of vicious physical conflict between groups. The patriarchal religious texts of antiquity are bursting with tales of deity-ordered slaughters and conquests; actual histories, all the way back to the Sumerians, demonstrate patterns of almost constant warfare. The assumption that human beings have not only engaged in organized violence since the dawn of our species is not without impetus.
But saying that human beings are natural warmongers requires more than supposition - what is the evidence?
We know from the fossil record what the violent death of a human being looks like: a number of fossils - the Maba skull in South China, and Cranium 17 from the Pit of Bones in Northern Spain, clearly show violent death-by-handmade-weapon.
But that's not the same thing as organized warfare – one group of humans planning and executing a homicidal attack upon another. We know what that looks like, too, and it looks very different.
We see rare, isolated personal attacks – one-on-one – between individual humans deep in the fossil record, reaching back to our pre-Cro-Magnon predecessors; but we only find fossil evidence of actual warfare in that period of time since the last ice age ended.
Jebel Sahaba
Jebel Sahaba – also known as Cemetery 117 – represents the oldest evidence of organized human warfare found to date. Located in the Nile Valley near the Sudan border, it contains more than 60 human skeletons, almost half of which died as a result of human violence.
Estimated to be over 12,000 years old, the Jebel Sahaba burial site was discovered in 1964 during the UNESCO High Dam Salvage Project, which sought to salvage archaeological sites in the path of the under-construction Aswan Dam. Led by Fred Wendorf, the site 117 team recovered numerous skeletons of men, women and children, 21 of which had stone projectiles in their bodies. Others had marks of their bones suggesting attack with sharp weapons – and some possessed previously-damaged bones, implying a violent culture predicating their cumulative ending.
The victims buried in Cemetery 117 are thought to be members of prehistoric Egypt's Qadan culture, a hunter-gatherer affiliation that persisted for an impressive 4,000 years. The Qadan were believed to have been organized enough to initiate an early form of farming, cultivating grass and grain for sustenance but lacking the knowledge and insight to do so in a structured fashion.
They also left behind sophisticated stone tooling, putting weapons of war firmly within their grasp. This, plus their ability to accumulate resources en masse - resources to be protected/plundered - indicate a people who had achieved the necessary ingredients for organized warfare – perhaps the very first ever do so. Cemetery 117 is the oldest evidence found to date of such a capability.
Nataruk: Bigger, Badder, Bloodier
If Cemetery 117 was the first incidence of organized warfare in prehistory, it was by no means the worst.
In 2012, west of Lake Turkana in Kenya, another mass grave was discovered. This one contained at least 27 different bodies, dated as having died between 9,500 and 10,500 years ago. Better preserved than the victims of Jebel Sahaba, they presented clear evidence of "to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs, arrow lesions to the neck, and stone projectile tips lodged in the skull and thorax of two men.”1
The site, Nataruk, contained eight distinct males and females, as well as five other adults of indeterminate gender. Six children were in the grave. Four of the dead individuals were tied up, and one was a late-term pregnant woman.
“The injuries suffered by the people of Nataruk—men and women, pregnant or not, young and old—shock for their mercilessness,” according to Dr. Marta Mirazon Lahr of the University of Cambridge, principal investigator on the published study describing the site. Unlike the Jebel Sahaba bodies, the Nataruk victims were not buried, as such: they were found in a depression that had once been a lagoon, into which they had been thrown.
The point is not the horror of these and other incidents we know of in our near prehistory: the point is that our near prehistory is the only time period in which they can be found. The human timeline is littered with the bones of those who walked it – but only in the past 13,000 years, since the end of the last ice age and the dawn of agriculture and permanent settlements, are we certain that such organized violence has occurred.
If violence between human tribes has been the norm throughout human history – if mass attacks, one group upon another, had been commonplace throughout the phases of the Paleolithic – there would be many such cemeteries. If, indeed, we inherited our homicidal impulses from the foreparent we share with the chimpanzee, as anthropologists insisted for half of the 20th century, then we would be finding not only mass graves of humans, but cemeteries filled with Neandertals, hominins erectus and habilis, and many of our cousins.
Unless and until such evidence surfaces, we are forced to conclude that our homicidal impulses are not innate, not built into our genes, but a learned aberration - and a very recent one, at that.
The Taste for Armageddon
A number of other ideas help to dispel the assumptions of Dart, Ardrey et al. One is anthropologist Raymond Kelly’s observation that warfare is demonstrably not universal; studying indigenous societies that remain today yields a clean distinction between war-like and peaceful (an observation echoed by Jared Diamond, Douglas Fry and others).
Kelly notes in his 2000 book Warless Societies and the Origins of War that warless societies tend to be unsegmented:
“Unsegmented societies have a minimum degree of elaboration of internal or composite social groups; while segmented societies are internally demarcated e.g., into lineages, moieties or clans. No level of organization beyond the local community is found in unsegmented groups; while in segmented ones there are levels of organization bundled within the local community. Within local groups of unsegmented societies, families are usually identifiable as detachable constituent units; while in segmented societies, within local groups, families are not identifiable as detachable constituent units, but are one segment in sa larger grouping. In unsegmented societies, nuclear families tend to predominate within the local group; while in unsegmented societies, nuclear families are only one form of family organization and corporate extended families are common. In unsegmented societies the culturally recognized coactive groups are limited to the family and local community; while in segmented societies, the culturally recognized coactive groups are limited to the family and local community; while in segmented societies, the culturally recognized coactive groups found are not limited to the family and local community. In unsegmented societies there are no units that are equivalent in structure and function. In unsegmented society there is no segmental organization and no segmental hierarchy; while in segmented societies there is both segmental organization and segmental hierarchy and segmental organization is a combination of like segments and progressively more inclusive groups within a segmentary hierarchy. Unsegmented groups show no corporations of any sort; while corporations are a common feature of segmented societies e.g., lineages and clans.”
What causes societies to become segmented? Per Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, the cause is surplus production: with the advent of agriculture, it became possible to store food, a development that certainly had its upside, but triggered the invention of politics and economics, which have pronounced downsides.
Kelly also notes that unsegmented societies demonstrably lack the concept of vengeance: group violence between clans does not exist because clans themselves do not exist; the concept of group liability cannot form, and so retaliation never occurs to anyone.
Finally, says Kelly, “it is evident that violence is not a unitary phenomenon and that the development of war entails the institutionalization of practices governed by a distinctive social logic that renders the killing of a killer’s consociate a socially meaningful, morally appropriate, and emotionally gratifying form of reciprocation.”
Anthropologist Augustín Fuentes added the following, in Douglas Fries’ War, Peace, and Human Nature: “[Human warfare] is best seen as emergent from social structures, ecologies, and histories rather than being reflective of specific adaptive patterns of aggression and competition. It is not a basal human aggression that results in warfare or a basic human egalitarianism that results in peace. War and peace emerge from the interactions of patterns of cooperation, shared and disputed ecologies, social, economic, and symbolic histories, and the perceptions of human polities.”
Reality: Warfare is a recent human invention, and is not a natural behavior.
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