Unfortunately we humns are very good at violence and warfare, to the
degree that it seems instinctual. A morlal judgment about it raises
the traditional "is/ought" distinction, but I think that the
biological needs of human survival over-ride traditional ethics as a
sound justification for deciding right and wrong in this case; our
evolved psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-ought_problem
Military skills are probably underappreciated as a biological
phenomenon, but in their own way are just as remarkable a human
adaptation as is the artistic ability of the Upper Paleolithic cave
painters.
Before the Dawn: Recovering the
Lost History of Our Ancestors
by Nicholas Wade
http://www.amazon.com:80/Before-Dawn-Recovering-History-Ancestors/dp/014303832X/sr.../
The Costs and Benefits of Warfare
Besides being well adapted or designed for their environments, chimp
and human societies.possess another salient feature in common, that of
a strong propensity to kill their own kind. A willingness to kill
members of one's own species is apparently correlated with high
intelligence. It may be that chimps and people are the only species
able to figure out that the extra effort required to exterminate an
opponent will bring about a more permanent solution than letting him
live to fight another day.
Military skills are probably underappreciated as a biological
phenomenon, but in their own way are just as remarkable a human
adaptation as is the artistic ability of the Upper Paleolithic cave
painters. Warfare of the human kind has many levels of complexity and
at its highest is an integral component of statecraft. At the lower
end of the scale, however, it overlaps closely in both tactics and
goals with the chimpanzee variety...
... The Efficacy of Primitive Warfare
A propensity for warfare is prominent among the suite of behaviors
that people and chimpanzees have inherited from their joint ancestor.
The savagery of wars between modern states has produced unparalleled
carnage. Yet the common impression that primitive peoples, by
comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious
consequence is incorrect.
Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and
conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating
the opponent. As far as human nature is concerned, people of early
societies seem to have been considerably more warlike than are people
today. In fact, over the course of the last 50,000 years, the human
propensity for warfare has probably been considerably attenuated.
"Peaceful pre-state societies were very rare; warfare between them was
very frequent, and most adult men in such groups saw combat repeatedly
in a lifetime," writes Lawrence H. Keeley, an anthropologist at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. Primitive warfare was conducted not
by arrays of troops on a formal battlefield, in the western style, but
by raids, ambushes and surprise attacks. The numbers killed in each
raid might be small, but because warfare was incessant, the casualties
far exceeded the losses of state societies when measured as a
percentage of population. "In fact, primitive warfare was much more
deadly than that conducted between civilized states because of the
greater frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was
conducted. Primitive war was very efficient at inflicting damage
through the destruction of property, especially means of production
and shelter, and inducing terror by frequently visiting sudden death
and mutilating its victims."
Keeley's conclusions are drawn from the archaeological evidence of the
past, including the Upper Paleolithic period, and from anthropological
studies of primitive peoples. These include three groups of foragers
that survived until recent times-the !Kung San, Eskimos and Australian
aborigines-as well as tribal farmers such the Yanomamo of Brazil and
the pig and yam cultivating societies of New Guinea.
To minimize risk, primitive societies chose tactics like the ambush
and the dawn raid. Even so, their casualty rates were enormous, not
least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible
with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent's
society. Captured warriors were killed on the spot, except in the case
of the Iroquois, who took captives home to torture them before death,
and certain tribes in Colombia, who liked to fatten prisoners before
eating them.
Warfare was a routine occupation of primitive societies. Some 65%% were
at war continuously, according to Keeley's estimate, and 87%% fought
more than once a year. A typical tribal society lost about 0.5%% of its
population in combat each year, Keeley found. Had the same casualty
rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century, its war
deaths would have totaled two billion people.
On the infrequent occasions when primitive societies fought pitched
battles, casualty rates of 30%% or so seem to have been the rule. A
Mojave Indian war party was expected to lose 30%% of its warriors in an
average battle. In a battle in New Guinea, the Mae Enga tribe took a
40%% loss. At Gettysburg, by comparison, the Union side lost 21%%, the
Confederates 30%%.
An archaeologist, Steven LeBlanc of Harvard University, recently
reached similar conclusions to Keeley after an independent study. "We
need to recognize and accept the idea of nonpeaceful past for the
entire time of human existence," he writes. "Though there were
certainly times and places during which peace prevailed, overall, such
interludes seem to have been short-lived and infrequent. ... To
understand much of today's war, we must see it as a common and almost
universal human behavior that has been with us as we went from ape to
human."
Primitive warriors were highly proficient soldiers, Keeley notes. When
they met the troops of civilized societies in open battle, they
regularly defeated them despite the vast disparity in weaponry. In the
Indian wars, the U.S. Army "usually suffered severe defeats" when
caught in the open, such as by the Seminoles in 1834, and at the
battle of Little Bighorn. In 1879 the British army in South Africa,
equipped with artillery and Catling guns, was convincingly defeated by
Zulus armed mostly with spears and ox-hide shields at the battles of
Isandlwana, Myer's Drift and Hlobane. The French were seen off by the
Tuareg of the Sahara in the 1890s. The state armies prevailed in the
end only through larger manpower and attritional campaigns, not by any
superior fighting skill.
How did the warriors of primitive societies get to be so
extraordinarily good at their craft? By constant practice during some
50,000 years of unrestrained campaigning. Even in the harshest
possible environments, where it was struggle enough just to keep
alive, primitive societies still pursued the more overriding goal of
killing one another. The anthropologist Ernest Burch made a careful
study of warfare among the Eskimos of northwest Alaska. He learned,
LeBlanc reports, "that coastal and inland villages were often located
with defense in mind-on a spit of land, or adjacent to thick willows,
which provided a barrier to attackers. Tunnels were sometimes dug
between houses so people could escape surprise raids. Dogs played an
important role as sentinels. The goal in all warfare among these
Eskimos was annihilation, Burch reported, and women and children were
normally not spared, nor were prisoners taken, except to be killed
later. Burning logs and bark were thrown into houses to set them on
fire and to force the inhabitants out, where they could be killed.
Burch's study reveals that the surprise dawn raid was the typical and
preferred war tactic, but open battles did occur."
Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons
anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously
underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies.
"While my purpose here is not to rail against my colleagues, it is
impossible to ignore the fact that academia
has missed what I consider to be some of the essence of human
history," writes LeBlanc. "I realized that archaeologists of the
postwar period had artificially 'pacified the past' and shared a
pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare," says
Keeley.
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."
Despite the fact that the deceased was armed to the teeth,
archaeologists and anthropologists speculated that he was a shepherd
who had fallen asleep and frozen peacefully to death in a sudden
snowstorm, or maybe that he was a trader crossing the Alps on
business. Such ideas were laid to rest when an X-ray eventually
revealed an arrowhead in the armed man's chest. "In spite of a growing
willingness among many anthropologists in recent years to accept the
idea that the past was not peaceful," LeBlanc comments, "a lingering
desire to sanitize and ignore warfare still exists within the field,
Naturally the public absorbs this scholarly bias, and the myth of a
peaceful past continues."
If primitive societies of the historic past were heavily engaged in
warfare, it seems quite possible that their distant ancestors were
even more aggressive. A genetic discovery made as part of a study of
mad cow disease lends some credence to this idea.
Before the Dawn: Recovering the
Lost History of Our Ancestors
by Nicholas Wade
http://www.amazon.com:80/Before-Dawn-Recovering-History-Ancestors/dp/014303832X/sr.../
