War: Built on Bones

Up until very recently, and even continuing today, many people believed in "the myth of the peaceful savage," as Lawrence Keeley referred to it in the subheader of his 1990s book on the topic. Essentially, before a certain point, the idea was that humans were largely peaceful. Native Americans, nomadic tribes in Africa... groups that hadn't been poisoned by civilization and lived in harmony with nature were not prone to the kind of violent conflict that seemed to plague the modern man.

In this chapter, Hassett debunks this, tracing violence in the form of community on community conflict all the way back to perhaps the beginnings of communities. There wasn't previously much evidence to support this, but over time evidences of massacres started to pop up in Africa, Germany and Austria -- massacres that involved trauma to the backs of the skulls of men, women and children that were then tossed aside into bogs, or perhaps cannibalized and left deep in the caves.

There are many explanations for what may have brought this about: neighboring communities engaging in territorial disputes, for one. The cannibalism example (from 850,000 years ago) mimicks an activity witnessed in chimpanzees. In this case the victims were primarily children, and chimpanzees similarly tend to target the young and weak of neighboring groups when territory or resources are contested.

These are massacres, though, without clear signs of defensive postures or actions on the part of the victims. I.e., they are not war. Organized, professional warriors engaging in battles against other professional warriors does not come until later.

What inspired Keeley to change his position from what was apparently a prevailing anthropological belief until the 1990s -- the idea of largely peaceful ancient peoples roaming around -- was architectural: the site he was digging was "fortified," not just "enclosed." The conclusion that struck him as a result was that, if something were fortified, there must be something it was fortified against. If there are walls, there must be something those walls are intended to keep out. It suggested that war was practiced much earlier than expected.

However, just because there appear to be walls and fortifications, these elements alone don't point directly to protection from armed enemies as their purpose. Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon's work at the ancient city of Jericho dated its walls to the Early Bronze Age and suggested they were pitched in such a way as to more likely protect against flooding than invading armies.

As Hassett states: "If Jericho's walls were for keeping water out, and the hillforts of Iron Age Europe were for keeping cattle in, perhaps the appearance of city walls and other fortifications in human history cannot be immediately interpreted as evidence of increasing conflict."

That said, there is, in fact, evidence of increasing conflict. And, of course, it comes back to the bones: the massive amounts of bodies with clear marks of battle wounds. But it's also back to the reality of massacres, committed not by professional warriors, but using as weapons adzes and axes. And, though there is evidence of "warriors" with weapons buried alongside bodies in tombs and other symbols of warfare, these symbols, though prevalent, do not necessarily track with the rates of violence as evidenced by the skeletons within the tombs. In other words, there could have been warriors, there was definitely conflict, but perhaps there's a lot more showmanship to it.

One of the earliest known organized battles is the one that took place in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash around 2450 BC. The "Stele of the Vultures" is an object that was left as a permanent testimony to this war, which implies tens of thousands of individuals fought (though the number of people making up the earliest standing armies is thought to possibly actually be closer to 600 or 700).

Warriors grew in number when there were states and greater political forces to sponsor them. With more complex polities comes death on greater scales due to war. The twentieth century brought death on a scale that would have been impossible in the Neolithic, as the casualities of millions in a single battle could by some testaments account for the entire population of humans at the start of the Neolithic. Cities, it seems clearly, and all that comes with cities, ratcheted war up to massive levels.

That said, Keeley has argued that civilization has actually pacified us. It seems preposterous given the above, but recent evidence suggests there may be something to this. When you compare humans and primates and how much each kills over time, we see a rise in violent human-caused deaths from the Paleolithic which peaks in the Americas during the periods of contact and the continent's genocides, and then... it falls. It had been predicted that higher population denisty would lead to greater conflict, but in the human case it seems that, on the scale of things, high population density has a pacifying effect on us.

The chapter builds up to armies, which is where Hassett leaves off, since it is armies that bring the next issue to the stage: disease. They go places, they are weakened getting there, they bring diseases, they get new diseases, and they bring those diseases back to their homelands as souvenirs. The next chapter is sure to be a grim one!