Page 167 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1944 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

While a historian’s answer might be that both are “nor- of Homo erectus, the widespread ancestor of modern
mal” as aspects of the past, the question remains current humans, have been gathered from sites across Eurasia
because it implicates debates about human nature and, dating from between 2 million and 100,000 years ago,
often, social and political policy. In other words, how one and skeletons of Homo sapiens, the modern human
views the origins of war affects how one sees the possi- species, from between 150,000 and 10,000 years ago
bility or advisability of trying to end war.This article will have been found around the world. Of these several thou-
sketch an overview of the historical origins of war, of the sand skeletons, very few bear any unambiguous signs of
major stages in the history of war, and of the landmarks human-inflicted violence, and those that do are isolated
in the less-studied history of peace. cases. In short, if we define war as organized human vio-
lence against other humans, as opposed to the odd mur-
The Origins of War der, there is no evidence for it before about 8000 BCE.A
Getting at the origins of war historically is, of course, a site in northern Iraq from around that date is the earliest
difficult task, and controversy surrounds all attempts at of a type that becomes increasingly common later: a mass
providing an answer. Even defining war proves difficult, burial of several hundred skeletons showing clear signs of
as what counts as war is built into many interpretations the impact of human weaponry. At roughly the same
of the evidence. Since written records do not take us to a time, unambiguous fortifications also begin to appear in
time before war, historians must depend on archaeology the same part of the world. The evidence spreads from
and anthropology for evidence. Anthropological this point of origin and also appears independently later
approaches have often involved studying isolated hunter- in other places such as northern China.
gatherer peoples living much as our ancestors did thou- What conditions characterize the places and times
sands of years ago.The Yanamamo of the Amazon basin where warfare springs into existence after millennia of
are a famous case. The very high levels of interpersonal peace? Not surprisingly, given the times and places
(especially inter-gender) and intertribal violence that char- involved, the conditions are associated with the emer-
acterize Yanamamo culture have often been taken as evi- gence of agriculture.A rising population in especially fer-
dence that a proclivity for warfare is built into human tile areas and rich hunting grounds began to put pressure
nature. But recent reinterpretations of the original field on those resources. Nevertheless, populations in such
studies in light of the broader colonial history of South areas, even before full-scale agriculture, became less
America have called this reading into question. Far from nomadic, staking claims to territorially defined settle-
being isolated, the Yanamamo have been directly and ments, a trend reinforced by farming. In addition to put-
indirectly affected by neighboring (and often more com- ting pressure on resources, the rising population—in
plex) societies for centuries—societies which themselves terms of both absolute numbers and the density of
practiced organized warfare, exported weapons, and in settlements—led to the rise of increasingly defined social
general contaminated the supposedly pristine experi- hierarchies and mechanisms of community governance.
ment provided by the Yanamamo, or indeed by any other Even if such developments arose to deal with questions
simple society that managed to survive into the twentieth of intra-community dispute resolution and economic
century.And for every study of a violent tribe, there seems redistribution, they provided the means for a more organ-
to be a counterexample of a study of a group living peace- ized and effective communal response to outside threats,
fully.The anthropological record, at least based on stud- especially in terms of centralized decision making. Finally,
ies of living peoples, is therefore problematic. in the first case in northern Iraq and in several later cases
The archaeological record poses its own problems, where war making arose apparently independently, there
however, because it is far from complete. But the outlines appears to have been a severe environmental crisis that
of an answer are beginning to emerge. Skeletal remains triggered the move to military conflict by creating an