Author: Day BrownDay Brown Date: Jun 5, 2008 20:19
tg wrote:
> Except that there is almost never 'war for hunting lands'. There are
> benefits to various acts of violence between groups, like mixing the
> gene pool, but the economic return for actual warfare just doesn't
> exist. Look to our fellow territorial creatures and you will see that
> fights to the death are rarely part of the paradigm.
Constant Battles, by LeBlanc blows the myth of the "noble savage" away
with the forensic reports from hunter graveyards that show twenty times the rate of violent assault on the skeletons as found in the graves of yeoman farmers. Jared Diamond, "Collapse" reports that 25%% of the New Guinea highlander men died in battle until the white man showed up with new veggies that dramatically expanded food sources.
Custer died at Little Big Horn cause he never imagined that so many plains Indians would ever ally themselves together, but it'd been a remarkably good year and they were having a buffalo barbie.
Gen White, at Ft. Smith brokered a peace in 1828 that stopped a great alliance of other tribes and white mercenaries from entirely wiping out the Osage. Even today, if you speak with the local Ozark Cherokee, they will tell you the Osage were like Nazi scum. They dont have any use for the Lakota either, as the Chippewa will tell you because they were driven out of Southern MN by the Souix- who became the Osage.
> Farm land is never 'up the wazoo' for very long because people
> reproduce to fill the gap. Then, it makes perfect sense to sacrifice
> surplus young males in order to get another piece of that highly
> productive resource---that's actual warfare, not ritualized raiding
> and bride-snatching.
Ordinarily true. But Europe in particular, because of its humid climate had lotsa plants that developed an effective defense against herbivores from eating them by causing sterility and abortions. Witches figured this out, which is why Bishops began burning them as soon as they could in the 5th century.
But the tels along the Danube show how the populations remained stable down thru 4000 years of occupation layers. See Gimbutas and Campbell.
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