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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
READ IN A DAY. REMEMBER FOR A LIFETIME.In this timely addition to the bestselling Shortest History series, acclaimed writer and military expert Gwynne Dyer tells the story of war from its prehistoric -- perhaps pre-human -- origins to the present age of algorithms and atomic weapons.With the clarity and insight that have won his columns millions of readers around the world, Dyer chronicles warfare's coming-of-age in the first cities; the rise of tyranny as humans multiply; the millennia of classicalcombat ended by the firearm and the carnage of the Thirty Years' War; and the brief interlude of limited war before the popular revolutions of the 18th century ushered in the era of total war -- itself halted, for now, by Hiroshima.The final chapters deal with the precarious equilibrium of the past 75 years -- the longest peace between major powers in history -- and the threats posed by nuclear proliferation, global heating and superpower rivalry.This marvellously clear-sighted book is vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the role of war in the long human story: why we do it, and how we can stop.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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SELECTED PRAISE FOR GWYNNE DYER
War
‘Entirely convincing… at once a valuable historical treatise and a fervent and compelling call toward pacifism’ Publishers Weekly
‘Ranges over the terrain of history, sparkling with insight and digressions… brilliant’ Seattle Times
‘Provocative, agile and very well argued, with an a-ha! moment on nearly every page’ Kirkus Reviews
Climate Wars
‘A truly important and timely book… Dyer has made the best and most plausible set of guesses I have yet seen about the human consequences of climate change, of how drought and heat may ignite wars, even nuclear wars, around the globe’ James Lovelock
‘Frightening yet essential reading’ Library Journal
‘Dyer eloquently explores the “grim detail” of how governments will grapple with a challenge unprecedented since before there were governments… As an insight into what the military strategists imagine is going to happen as a result of climate change, this book is truly terrifying’ New Scientist
After Iraq
‘A calm and masterful analysis’ Scotsman
THE SHORTEST HISTORYofWAR
Gwynne Dyer
For Alice
CONTENTS
Foreword
An air force is a very expensive thing. Drones offer small countries very cheap access to tactical aviation and precision guided weapons, enabling them to destroy an opponent’s much costlier equipment such as tanks and air defense systems.
Michael Kofman, military analyst, CNA, on the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war1
There is always another war to analyse, and I’ve done some of that in my time. But this is not that sort of book. It’s about how war as a whole works, and why we do it, and even how we might stop. In many countries popular opinion has finally turned against war as a way of doing business, but almost every nation still keeps an army, however remote the possibility that they will have to use it may seem to most of them.
We have made significant progress. No great power has fought another directly in three quarters of a century, the longest interval in the past several thousand years. They may sometimes wage proxy wars or attack smaller, weaker countries, but their weapons have become so destructive that they have repeatedly avoided open war with each other, despite some terrifying crises.
Moreover, the toll of war in lives lost and cities destroyed has fallen steeply since 1945, when more than a million people were being killed each month. By the 1970s it was down to a million a year, and it is now in the low hundreds of thousands – fewer people than die in traffic accidents. Indeed, apart from the chronic conflict zones in southwestern Asia and Africa 2there are currently no wars of any size underway anywhere in the world.
There are also international organisations and laws, almost all new since the Second World War, that aim to reduce the threat of war and restrict its impact on civilians, and they have had some successes. The media constantly feed us new images of war because they know we cannot resist watching them, but they usually come from the same few places. This is probably the most peaceful time in world history.
Yet the weapons are still there, more lethal than ever before. The general staffs still make their plans, the armies still train their soldiers to kill (these days quite explicitly), and defence budgets have actually grown in most countries in the past ten years. Even in this time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, war continues to be seen as possible by both the soldiers and the diplomats. And harsher times are coming.
The bill is falling due on our two-century binge of eightfold population growth and mass industrialisation, and we will find it very hard to pay. The climate is already moving out of the stable state in which we have grown our civilisation over the past ten thousand years, and we will be lucky if we can stabilise it before it passes the +2oc threshold and goes runaway.
Even if we succeed in avoiding that calamity, the delayed action of greenhouse gas emissions already in the atmosphere but not yet producing their full effect on the climate, plus the effect of the other emissions that are bound to follow even if we now take the most radical steps to switch from fossil fuels to other sources of energy, will cause enough warming to do great damage to global food production, particularly in the tropics and sub-tropics.
That will almost certainly lead to refugee flows far larger than anything we have seen in the past, forcing governments 3in the destination countries to make agonising choices about whom to let in and whom to keep out – and what means can legitimately be used to keep them out. Governments that cannot feed their people tend not to survive, so we may end up with large ‘ungoverned’ spaces in some of the worst affected countries – think ten to twenty Somalias. Countries that share major river systems may find it hard to avoid war when the total flow is way down and the upstream country is tempted to keep more of the remaining water for its own people.
These future probabilities, not often discussed in public, are already being taken into account in the strategic assessments that are made by senior planning staffs in the largest military powers. It’s not that they are looking for trouble, but it is their professional responsibility to foresee and prepare for it. In their judgement, there is big trouble coming that cannot be, or at least probably will not be dealt with by non-military means. War, even major war, is not dead; it is only sleeping.
This is bad news, but it is also a good reason to re-examine the whole phenomenon of war. Until only a century ago – up to midway through the First World War, say – the general view was that war is a noble enterprise and a Good Thing (provided you win). The mass slaughter of citizen-soldiers in the trenches put an end to that, and ever since the attentive public has believed, correctly, that war is a Problem. They didn’t even have to wait for nuclear weapons to come to that conclusion.
Most of us, though, are not very well informed about where war comes from or how it really works. This is in large part because we fear that too close an examination will undermine the reverence and gratitude we feel towards those who sacrificed their lives in our own country’s wars. Nevertheless, with due respect for the ‘fallen’ (and they deserve better than such a weasel word), we should proceed. 4
This is not a military history in the usual sense, although I trained as a military historian and spent the first half of my adult life kicking around various parts of the military. It is a study of war as a custom and tradition, as a political and social institution, and as a Problem.
Tactics, strategy, doctrine and technology will figure prominently, as cutting people open would in a history of surgery, but they are not the prime focus. The human beings who must accept the extraordinary demands of this institution, leaders and ordinary soldiers alike, must be part of the story too. Mostly, though, it’s a book about why we do this thing, and how we might stop doing it now that we really need to.
Notes
1. Robyn Dixon, ‘Drones owned the battlefield in Nagorno-Karabakh — and showed future of warfare’, Washington Post, 11 Nov 20
1. ORIGINS
How Old is War?
Human beings did not invent war. They inherited it. Our most distant ancestors practised it, as do some of our primate near-relatives down to this day. Yet for the past couple of centuries most people have believed that war grew with civilisation, and had not been a major problem for our hunter-gatherer predecessors.
This belief was strongly promoted in the mid-18th century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the most influential philosophers of the Enlightenment, who argued that the ‘Noble Savages’ who had lived before the rise of the mass civilisations had lived in freedom and equality – and, he implied, also in peace. We could recover that lost paradise if only we got rid of the kings and the priests who currently oppressed the civilised lands. It was an attractive idea, and in his own time people were beginning to act on it. He died two years after the outbreak of the American Revolution, and only eleven years before the far greater upheaval of the French Revolution.
Rousseau would have known that the Noble Savages of his own time did occasionally fight each other, but their armed clashes were small, caused few casualties, and seemed a world away from the terrible battles between the great armies of civilisation. Even two centuries later, when anthropologists began to study the few hunter-gatherer groups that had survived into the modern world, they continued to see the occasional armed conflicts between these little bands – as few 6as 30 people, and almost always fewer than 100 – as essentially ritual activities with a low cost in lives. It’s only in the past fifty years that we have realised how wrong they were.
You can’t blame Rousseau for getting it wrong. In his time knowledge of the past only went back around 3,000 years. Nobody knew how old the Earth was (4.5 billion years), or anything about evolution (our own hominin lineage diverged from that of the chimpanzees between 4 and 5.5 million years ago), or even when homo sapiens first appeared (ca. 300,000 years ago). It’s harder to understand how anthropologists managed to ignore for so long the evidence that was piling up on their doorstep, but they went on believing Rousseau until quite late in the 20th century.
They ignored the narrative evidence of people like William Buckley, who escaped from a penal colony on the south coast of Australia in 1803 and lived for 32 years as a fugitive among the Aborigines.
On the hostile tribe coming near, I saw they were all men… In a very short time the fight began… [Two members of Buckley’s band were killed in the clash, but they counter-attacked that night] and finding most of them asleep and laying about in groups, our party rushed upon them, killing three on the spot, and wounding several others… The enemy fled… leaving their war implements in the hands of their assailants and their wounded to be beaten to death by boomerangs.1
They ignored equally the work of pioneer ethnologist Lloyd Warner, who studied the Murngin people of Arnhem Land in northern Australia in the early 20th century. The Murngin had only recently come into regular contact with Europeans and their oral history tradition was still strong, so people actually 7knew and could relate the deeds done by and to their grandparents and great grand-parents. Through extensive interviews Warner tried to reconstruct the scale of warfare among local aboriginal bands in the late 19th century (before first contact). He concluded that the chronic low-level raiding and ambushes, rarely killing more than one or two people at a time, nevertheless accounted over the 20-year period he studied for the deaths of about 25 percent of the adult males in the various bands that made up the Murngin people (population ca. 3,000).2 But Warner was largely overlooked by the budding profession of anthropology: Rousseau still reigned.
Fierce People
Fierce Reaction: Chagnon’s controversial study
The debate finally opened up with the publication in 1968 of Yanomamo: the Fierce People, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s study of the Yanomamo people living in southern Venezuela and northern Brazil on the headwaters of the Orinoco and Amazon rivers. The Yanomamo were some 25,000 people divided among about 250 villages that were constantly at war with one another. Technically they were not hunter-gatherers but ‘horticulturalists’, practising a form of slash-and-burn agriculture that required them to move their villages every few years. But their group size was about the same (an average of ninety people per village), and so were their social customs, including the custom of warfare. 8
Their villages were fortified, and there were huge buffer zones between them – up to thirty miles in some cases, presumably because raiding parties can travel far and fast. Moreover, the Yanomamo tended to stay in the central parts of their territory, venturing into the border zones only in large groups and leaving them mostly unexploited. From time to time entire villages would be destroyed. And the average death toll of this chronic warfare over a generation, Chagnon calculated, was 24 percent of the men and 7 percent of the women.3
Chagnon’s ideas gained some traction, and his book became a staple of the university curriculum. But the notion of an in-built tendency to war was just too much of an affront to the doctrines of Rousseau, and to those anthropologists who tended his flame. A backlash from the old guard saw Chagnon accused of distorting or even fabricating his data, and for a time the Venezuelan government banned him from going back to visit the Yanomamo. It was 2012, seven years before Chagnon’s death, before he was rehabilitated sufficiently to gain admission to the US National Academy of Sciences.
Anthropologist Ernest Burch had an easier time. In the 1960s he conducted a similar investigation into hunter-gatherer warfare among the Eskimos of north-western Alaska. The warfare had largely ended after contact was established with Europeans and Americans about 90 years before, but drawing on historical records and the memories of old men, he concluded that there used to be at least one war a year in the region: between Eskimo bands in the local area; against other Eskimos from further away; even against Athabasca Indians in what is now the Yukon. Alliances were constantly shifting as rival groups tried to attain numerical superiority, and the ultimate goal of the war was generally the annihilation of the opposing group. 9
The Eskimo warriors wore body armour made of bone or ivory fragments strung together like chain mail under their outer garments, and raiding parties as big as fifty men would travel for many days to attack their enemies. From time to time there were set-piece battles in which lines of men would face each other, but more often there were pre-dawn raids on sleeping villages, which would sometimes end in wholesale massacres. Male warriors were not taken prisoner unless they were to be kept for later torture and killing, and women and children were not normally spared. A decade earlier his data would have ignited a huge controversy, but Burch did not publish his conclusions until 1974, and by that time the cat was out of the bag.4
Chimp Wars
Lady and the Chimp: Jane Goodall with David Greybeard, ca. 1965
Curiously, the final nail in Rousseau’s coffin was not another anthropological study, but came from the primatologist Jane Goodall. While observing a chimpanzee troop in Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Goodall noted that her troop also waged war against the neighbouring band. Since human beings share more than 99 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, 10and have constantly waged war almost everywhere at least since the hunter-gatherer stage, it seems probable that this behaviour is shared by the hominin and chimp lineages all the way back to our Last Common Ancestor over 4 million years ago.
The chimpanzee clashes were even more distant from civilised warfare than the ‘wars’ of human hunter-gatherers. Chimpanzees rarely use weapons (the occasional tree-branch, perhaps), and it is not easy for one chimpanzee to kill another with his bare hands. There are never pitched battles between chimpanzee bands; all the killing is done by ambush, in which a number of chimpanzees from one band encounter an isolated individual from a rival band.
It began as a border patrol. At one point… they spotted Goliath [an elderly chimp], apparently hiding only 25 metres away. The raiders rushed madly down the slope to their target. While Goliath screamed and the troop hooted and displayed, he was held and beaten and kicked and lifted and dropped and bitten and jumped on… They kept up the attack for 18 minutes, then turned for home… Bleeding freely from his head, gashed on his back, Goliath tried to sit up but fell back shivering. He too was never seen again.
Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence5
Was it really war? Well, these attacks did not happen every time a patrol caught a lone member from a rival band. They would listen for the calls that other members of the rival group made to keep in touch as they moved through the forest, and only attacked if there were no members of that band nearby who might come to the aid of the intended victim. Otherwise, they would quietly withdraw and leave it for another day. But it was 11deadly serious stuff. Despite their extreme caution and the fact that the killing was always done one chimp at a time, there were instances when all the males of one troop were finally eliminated. Thereupon the males of the rival band would move in, appropriate the surviving females, and kill the existing babies to make room for their own.
Some of these chimpanzee bands have been observed for 50 years now, and across all the bands studied, this endemic warfare ultimately caused the deaths of about 30 percent of the adult males and 5 percent of the females. The territories controlled by the chimpanzee bands were far smaller than those of Yanomamo villages – only three or four miles between one band and the next – but the chimps spent almost all their time in the central third of their territory. The rest of the territory was equally rich in resources, but was treated as a ‘no-man’sland’ and only visited in large groups due to the danger of ambush and death at the hands of a neighbouring troop.6
Murngin hunter-gatherers in Arnhem Land, Yanomamo horticulturalists in Amazonia, chimpanzees in Gombe: a bell was tolling for our illusions in the way these statistics lined up. They signalled a style of warfare whose casualties far exceed anything experienced by modern civilisations, and that was very ancient indeed. Archaeologists were alerted to start looking for evidence of warfare in the fossil record of humans and closely related species. It wasn’t long before they found it.
They found Homo erectus fossils from 750,000 years ago bearing signs of violence inflicted by human-style weapons, like depression fractures in skulls (perhaps made by clubs) and cut-marks on bones that suggest de-fleshing and cannibalism. Such killings generally require complex purification rituals afterwards, and ritual cannibalism is often part of them. They also found Neanderthal fossils dating back to between 40,000 and 12100,000 years ago with injuries inflicted by spears, a stone blade lodged between the ribs, even mass graves.7
Going forward to just a few thousand years before the rise of the first civilisations, they found scenes of mass slaughter that could only have been associated with war, like the 27 people massacred at Nataruk, west of Lake Turkana in Kenya, about 10,000 years ago. They were men, women and children, mostly clubbed or stabbed to death (although six were probably killed by arrows) and their bodies were not buried but left to rot. The media treated it as a revelation, but no doubt it was just another incident among tens or hundreds of thousands of similar ones in the long pre-history of human and hominid warfare. So what are we to make of all this?
Two Conditions
Do we bear the mark of Cain? Are we simply doomed to wage ever greater wars until we finally destroy ourselves? Not necessarily. But we do meet the two conditions needed to account for the war-like behaviour of any species towards other members of its own kind: is the species predatory, and does it live in groups of variable size?
We and our ancestors have been hunters for millions of years, and we can therefore easily kill other human beings. Indeed, we have been able to kill even the largest animals for at least a couple of hundred thousand years, so we definitely tick the ‘predator’ box. (Chimpanzees, who regularly hunt, catch and eat monkeys and other small game, are the only other primate species to tick that box – and also the only other primate species that fights wars.)
On the face of it, ‘living in groups of variable size’ is a more puzzling requirement, but it works like this. Solitary predators rarely engage in serious fights with other members of the same 13species, because there’s about a 50 percent chance of death in such an encounter, and it’s just not worth it in evolutionary terms. In any case, warfare is by definition a group activity. But if those groups are all of similar size, and their members stick together, the likelihood of a head-on battle is equally low: they would be more or less evenly matched, there would be lots of deaths, and any victory would be Pyrrhic.
By contrast, groups of variable size, which must sometimes split up into smaller groups or single individuals to forage, present opportunities for ambushes in which the odds will be very much in favour of the attackers. Attritional warfare is thus possible between such groups, and although the attacks are mostly opportunistic, they may result in the extermination of all the males in one of the groups. Lions behave like this, and wolves, and hyenas too, and of course chimps and humans – all predators that live in groups of variable size. But what benefit are the winning groups actually getting out of this? What evolutionary advantage does it confer?
The world was never empty, and food has always been limited. Whether the environment is desert, jungle, seashore or savannah, both the predator- and the prey-species will tend to breed up to the carrying capacity of the environment – and a bit beyond it. Human hunter-gatherers often practised infanticide as a form of birth control, but the decision to expose the infant seems generally to have been taken by over-burdened parents, not imposed as a matter of band policy. It probably didn’t slow population growth very much.
If your band is living up around the maximum carrying capacity of the local environment, even a brief interruption in food supply (e.g. changes in the weather pattern or in animal migration routes) will create an instant crisis, since most of the foods people eat cannot be stored. In a matter of weeks or months 14everybody is hungry all the time, and since human beings are gifted with foresight, they know what lies ahead for most of the group if this goes on. But if your band has been systematically culling the adult male population of the neighbouring band by serial ambushes for a long time, it may now have the option of going for broke, exterminating the rest of the neighbouring band’s males, and taking over their food resources to get you through the crisis.
Evolution is not driven by rational calculation, and the chronic warfare that fills our pre-history was not consciously designed as a device for ensuring the survival of our own genetic line. But to explain it, you only have to assume that there was always some degree of competition for resources between neighbouring bands, even in good times, and that in bad times some groups might be driven to violence. Whether for cultural or genetic reasons, some bands will be at least marginally more aggressive than others. Those are the bands that are likeliest to survive when the resources get scarce, and to pass on both their 15culture and their genes to the next generation. Put these factors on a low heat and stir occasionally for a few hundred generations, and you get the plight of the Yanomamo people.
[Yanomamo] villages are situated in the forest among neighbouring villages they do not, and cannot, fully trust. Most of the Yanomamo people regard their perpetual intervillage warfare as dangerous and ultimately reprehensible, and if there were a magic way to end it perfectly and certainly, undoubtedly they would choose that magic. But they know there is no such thing. They know that their neighbours are, or can soon turn into, the bad guys: treacherous and committed enemies. In the absence of full trust, Yanomamo villages deal with one another through trading, inter-marriage, the formal creation of imperfect political treaties – and by inspiring terror through an implacable readiness for revenge.
Wrangham and Peterson, op. cit., 658
Just change the names around, and this would serve as an explanation of the relationship between the great powers in the period before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. And just as the trigger for the First World War – the assassination of an Austrian archduke in a Balkan town – seemed a trivial cause for such a huge event, so the explanations the Yanomamo gave for their wars seem pathetic and even ridiculous. In fact, they usually blamed them on conflicts over women. But many people always suspected that there was something deeper going on too.
Equality and War
So far, Rousseau has been a full-spectrum failure as an armchair anthropologist, but he did get one thing right. It was a very 16big thing: he said that pre-civilised human beings, his Noble Savages, had lived in complete freedom and absolute equality. In fact, this was the main reason for his great popularity: he was finding a precedent in the past for people who wanted to make revolutions in the present – revolutions that would make people free and equal again. He was guessing, but it was a very good guess.
All men seek to rule, but if they cannot rule they prefer to remain equal.
Harold Schneider, economic anthropologist9
The three African great apes, with whom we share the relatively recent Common Ancestor, are notably hierarchical… but before twelve thousand years ago, humans basically were egalitarian.
Bruce Knauft, cultural anthropologist10
For those who concern themselves with the nature of human nature, the greatest puzzle is the fact that all the hunter-gatherer societies and almost all the horticultural societies we know of were egalitarian, at least when it came to adult males. Not just a little bit egalitarian, but intensely, even obsessively so, and this cultural preference continues to be visible even in their descendants who have long had contact with the mass societies of civilisation. The elders may carry authority in debate, the top hunters may get the best parts of the kill, but no single individual has the power of command.
This is a puzzle because the empires, absolute monarchies and dictatorships that fill our written history until quite recently were extremely hierarchical, unequal, oppressive societies. So are the little societies of our nearest primate relatives, 17the other great apes, and in particular the chimpanzees who are the closest of all. Chimpanzee bands are tyrannies in which the dominant male enforces his rule by dramatic displays of rage frequently accompanied by physical attacks on the other band members, to which they generally respond with gestures of submission.
Living out your life in a little band ruled by a bad-tempered despot is not much fun. There are constant attempts by the subordinate males, who can only have sex with the females in the band when out of the boss’s sight, to put together coalitions that will overthrow the dominant male. Sooner or later one of these conspiracies succeeds, generally when the top male is losing his ability to frighten all the others into submission because of age or injury. Unfortunately for the chimps, this only produces a new boss who behaves much like the old one. You would not choose to be born a chimpanzee.
We cannot know when a different system of values became dominant among human beings, but it must have been a very long time ago, probably many tens of thousands of years, because egalitarian values and the social attitudes and customs that support them are the norm in almost every aboriginal culture we know of, from the Arctic to the tropics, in deserts or forests, on every continent.
By my definition, egalitarian society is the product of a large, well-united coalition of subordinates who assertively deny political power to the would-be alphas in their group.
Christopher Boehm, evolutionary anthropologist11
Humans were different from the other great apes in two key respects: they were more intelligent, and they had language. The intelligence allowed them to figure out that their personal 18chances of emerging as ‘top dog’ in the constant struggle for power were not very good. Ending up towards the bottom of the pecking order, spending their lives being bullied and beaten, undesirable as that might be, was much more likely. It was a relatively short step from there to realising that the solution would be to overthrow the boss and enforce equality among all the adult males.
A bright chimpanzee might dimly grasp this concept, but he would have no language in which to express it clearly even to himself, let alone to the other chimps who might join an successful conspiracy. Humans did have language, and could put together a coalition that would not only overthrow the existing despot but shut the whole dominance game down permanently. Obviously, they did just that. Not only once, but thousands of times in thousands of different bands, because the example would spread rapidly.
It was Christopher Boehm who first articulated this notion, which he calls a ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’. His model does not require us to re-invent human beings as a species without ambition or envy in order to explain what happened. All it needs is a coalition of subordinate males to use their superior numbers to deter the alpha-males from taking control. It rarely even requires physical force. As a !Kung hunter in the Kalahari Desert said to anthropologist Richard Lee, explaining how the social controls work:
When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this… so we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.1219
Every hunter-gatherer band that anthropologists have had an opportunity to study was fiercely egalitarian. The greatest social crime was for one adult male to give an order to another. Decisions were made, when they were needed, by a process of discussion that could last for days, leading to a consensus that was still not binding. People married outside the group, so if you truly hated the decision you could always leave and join another band where you had relatives.
In aboriginal groups with relatively intact cultures, the tall poppies are always cut down, at least metaphorically. The penalties for trying to put yourself above the others start with mockery and move up through ostracism to exile – or in the past, in extreme cases, even execution. The hunter-gatherers of the long past were not sweet, gentle stewards of nature; they were heavily armed men, proficient in violence, who fought frequent wars with neighbouring bands, for the egalitarian revolution did not eliminate the wars. They would kill if necessary to ‘defend the revolution’ (as they certainly would not have put it), but once ‘reverse dominance’ was firmly established, they may not have had to do that very often.
When did this revolution happen? Not before 100,000 years ago, because if human beings had already had enough language for that kind of sophisticated plotting before the last inter-glacial warm period (131,000–114,000 years ago), they 20would probably have started in on agriculture, mass civilisation, and all the rest way back then. They certainly didn’t waste any time in getting started once the current inter-glacial arrived. It’s unlikely to have been less than 20,000 years ago, because entrenching the egalitarian values so deeply in human cultures (and maybe even in the human genome) that those values would survive millennia of universal tyranny unchanged would have taken a long time. But we cannot be more precise.
A Bushman family, 2017
One remarkable by-product of this great change was the institution of the human family. In a band where all the adult males were equal, a single dominant male was no longer trying to monopolise sexual access to the females of the band in the usual primate way. (Was this part of the motivation for the revolution? Probably yes.) Gender equality was not part of the revolution, but henceforward each free and equal male would likely end up with one female consort in a more or less stable relationship, and would know, or at least think he knew, which children were his. He might even help to raise them. 21
The Great Change
And so we arrived at the brink of the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, a species transformed. We had colonised every habitable part of the Earth apart from a few ocean islands like Madagascar and New Zealand, and we probably numbered around four million people, all still living in those little ancestral bands. War took a constant toll on all of those bands (except perhaps a few who lived in splendid isolation), but those who stayed alive were free, healthy for the most part, and maybe even happy. Then we became farmers, and everything changed.
Well, not quite everything. War remained.
Notes
1. J. Morgan, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley: Thirty-Two Years A Wanderer Amongst the Aborigines, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979 [1852], 49–51.
2. W.L. Warner, ‘Murngin Warfare’, in Oceania I :457–94 (1931).
3. N.A. Chagnon, Studying the Yanomamo, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974, 157–61; N.A. Chagnon, Yanomamo, 4th edition, New York: Harcourt and Brace: Jovanovich College Publishers, 1994, 205.
4. E.S. Burch Jr., ‘Eskimo Warfare in Northwest Alaska,’ Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska 16 (2), 1–14, (1974).
5. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1996, 17
6. Stephen A. LeBlanc and Katherine E. Register, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Noble, Peaceful Savage, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003, 81–85.
7.Ibid., 94–97.
8. Wrangham and Peterson, op. cit., 65.
9. Harold Schneider, Livestock and Equality in East Africa: the economic basis for social structure, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979, 210.
10. Bruce Knauft, ‘Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution’, Current Anthropology Vol. 32 No. 4 (Aug. - Oct., 1991), 391–428.
11. Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 1999, Kindle 2119–20.
12. Richard B. Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
