On Mar 3, 2:56 am, "Immortalist"
yahoo.com> wrote:> On Mar 1, 2:54 pm, "tg"
earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> On Mar 1, 1:59 pm, "Immortalist"
yahoo.com> wrote:>
>>> On Mar 1, 4:15 am, "tg"
earthlink.net> wrote:>
> Thanx for pointing that out, I was probably confusing "fortification"
> in the first paragraph below with "large stones" in the second. I
> should pay more attention sometimes, but thats the plight of a
> generalist. I really enjoy learning how to debate these subjects.
>
> --------------------
>
> Keeley suggests that warfare and conquest fell out of favor as
> subjects of academic study after Europeans' experiences of the Nazis,
> who treated them, also in the name of might makes right, as badly as
> they were accustomed to treating their colonial subjects. Be that as
> it may, there does seem a certain reluctance among archaeologists to
> recognize the full extent of ancient warfare. Keeley reports that his
> grant application to study a nine-foot-deep Neolithic ditch and
> palisade was rejected until he changed his description of the
> structure from ("fortification") to "enclosure." Most archaeologists,
> says LeBlanc, ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and
> viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years
> Mayan records have been deciphered. Contrary to archaeologists'
> wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily
> into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents.
>
> Archaeologists have described caches of (large round stones) as being
> designed for use in boiling water, ignoring the commonsense
> possibility that they were slingshots. When spears, swords, shields,
> parts of a chariot and a male corpse dressed in armor emerged from a
> burial, archaeologists asserted that these were status symbols and
> not, heaven forbid, weapons for actual military use. The large number
> of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age
> burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money. The
> spectacularly intact 5,000-year-old man discovered in a melting
> glacier in 1991, named Otzi by researchers, carried just such a copper
> axe. He was found, Keeley writes dryly, "with one of these moneys
> mischievously hafted as an ax. He also had with him a dagger, a bow,
> and some arrows; presumably these were his small change."
>
>
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy/msg/0f2108056410176a?
I read the post referenced and it reinforces my opinion that this is
propagandistic, and if not, it involves terrible scholarship and
reasoning. I don't feel like refuting point by point but just let me
observe that using the Iroquois as an example of an 'uncivilized'
group is a mistake that belongs in elementary school.
In general, the breathless reporting of massacres in the Americas as
proof of mistaken anthropological models simply ignores the associated
evidence---which is that there was a much higher population density,
supported by agriculture, than the popular misconception. The error is
not in thinking that these were noble savages, it is in thinking that
they were savages at all---that is, they don't fit the cultural model
of hunter-gatherers operating in relatively isolated self-sufficiency.
>
>>>> As to the options below: There is a genetic benefit to ritualized
>>>> warfare, which is to expand the gene pool for relatively isolated
>>>> groups. But as with 'civilized warfare', to argue that there is a
>>>> heritable component beyond the presence of testosterone-fueled
>>>> individual aggressiveness is ludicrous. Complex social behaviors like
>>>> this are not genetically encoded.
>
>>> Are you saying that over hundreds of generations that there is
>>> absolutely no selction of particular individuals that were better at
>>> "testosterone-fueled individual agressiveness?" How would you defend
>>> that theory while allowing that capacities influenced by testosterone
>>> evolved?
>
>> This has nothing to do with different types of warfare---take a
>> teenage male any time in the last 200K years and you will surely have
>> enough hormones to turn him into a soldier. Warfare doesn't even
>> necessarily select for the most aggressive individual---remember, a
>> good soldier's job isn't to die for his country, it is to make the
>> other poor bastard die for *his* country.
>
> So your saying that the presence of warfare over many hundreds of
> generations lead to no selection of those better or worse at it. There
> is a place for neutral mutations, which evolve this way and that. So
> we could have very war like individuals popping into the gene pool
> occaisionally and then disappearing. Its possible that selection could
> not alter the gen frequencies of such individuals, but that theory is
> harder to believe in light of cultural selection, sexual selection and
> whatever selection based on the presence of some sustained pattern of
> activity over many millennium.
>
I can only point out yet again that 'warlike' is not a useful
characterization. Is the most successful warrior big and strong, or
quick and clever? Is it better to be aggressive, or to know when to
run away? Will a disciplined force always beat a group of berserkers,
or the other way around?
Good warriors are those who *do not* have only one trait, but can
adapt to circumstance. This has been true since the first skull got
bashed with a rock.
-tg
