I’m referring, of course, to war. The kind that ends in extermination. The kind that, presumably, humans practiced better than all of our close hominid relatives who are all conspicuously extinct as of shortly after we spread throughout the world.
Minor point: it’s my understanding that wars of extermination are not a human universal.
Strictly speaking they don’t need to be; they “just” need to be common enough among human cultures for that to exert distinguishable selection pressure, and successful enough that the groups that come up with the idea don’t end up autodarwinating. Though the latter is group selection pressure of a kind, too.
I’d rather stay agnostic on whether or not this is the case; we have very little reliable data on culture under non-marginal paleolithic conditions. I haven’t heard of any conclusive skeletal evidence for war in that era (murder yes, war no), but this isn’t my field so I could easily be missing some.
I’d rather stay agnostic on whether or not this is the case; we have very little reliable data on culture under non-marginal paleolithic conditions. I haven’t heard of any conclusive skeletal evidence for war in that era (murder yes, war no), but this isn’t my field so I could easily be missing some.
This paper argues that coalitionary killings were rare among hunger-gatherer societies, and that warfare as we currently understand it did not come into exitence until the rise of agriculture and sedantism, because prior to those develpments, the average hunter-gatherer band simply didn’t have enough accumulated material wealth to make the benefit of raids into another band’s territory outweigh the risk of getting ambushed by unseen defenders with projectile weapons who know the territory better than you.
However, the development of the throwing spear, used in conjunction with ambush hunting techniques, ushered in an era in which the enhanced lethality of weaponry amplified the costs of assessment errors, and the necessity of movement also placed intruders at a comparative disadvantage with respect to both detection and assessment. Moreover, asymmetrical detection rather than a numerical imbalance of power determined the outcome of hostile encounters. This reconfiguration of the decisive factors in lethal conflict not only raised the stakes (or potential costs) for would-be aggressors but also rendered the benefit of intercommunity dominance unattainable. Because superior numbers were not invariably decisive in encounters between hunting parties, an initial success would neither materially reduce the stakes for aggressors in subsequent attacks nor make it possible to freely encroach on the territory of a neighboring group that had sustained a casualty. Under these circumstances, aggression resulted in stalemate and a condition analogous to a war of attrition rather than territorial gain.
These developments marked a major turning point in the evolution of lethal intergroup violence and in the character of interrelations between neighboring groups. Although fitness continued to be related to territory size (for food-limited populations in occupied environments), selective circumstances no longer favored aggression as a means of achieving territorial gain. [...] In other words, the development of the throwing spear altered the means of production as well as the social relations of production, distribution, and consumption within groups in fundamental ways that also transformed intergroup relations and influenced subsequent hominid evolution.
That paper seems to focus on raiding activities; if repeated raiding activities are difficult, then wouldn’t that increase the utility of extermination warfare?
Indeed, the paper you cite posits that exactly that started happening:
The earliest conclusive archaeological evidence for attacks on settlements is a Nubian cemetery (site 117) near the present-day town of Jebel Sahaba in the Sudan dated at 12,000-14,000 B.P. (7, 12). War originated independently in other parts of the world at dates as late as 4,000 B.P. (13). Otterbein argues that agriculture was only able to develop initially at locations where ambushes, battles, and raids were absent (14).
And that such war predated agriculture.
I noted that humans are the only hominoid species alive.To the best of my admittedly limited archaeological knowledge, the others became extinct during the timeframe of the first two phases the paper describes; yet, if that were the case, wouldn’t other hominoid communities have likely survived to see the total war phase of human development?
I would thus posit that total war is much older than even their existing data suggests.
Well, it’s not conclusive evidence by any means, but I did note that we have no hominoid relatives; they’re all extinct with a capital E. To me, that implies something more than just us being better at hunting-gathering.
And if we, as a species, did exterminate one or more other hominid species, then it seems a small leap of logic to conclude we did the same to each other whenever similar circumstances came up.
Two points. First, the extinction of nonhuman hominids happened at about the same time as a more general die-out of megafauna. Overhunting by H. sapiens is one popular explanation for why that happened, but it’s not the only one, and if one of the alternatives ends up being true (or partly true) then it could easily have affected our hominid relatives as well.
Second, species inadvertently cause each other to go extinct all the time without going to war with each other, just by competing for a niche; consider any of the introduced species that have been causing ecological problems recently. Again, this could easily have happened to our hominid relatives over the timescales we’re discussing.
These ideas, of course, aren’t mutually exclusive.
And if we, as a species, did exterminate one or more other hominid species, then it seems a small leap of logic to conclude we did the same to each other whenever similar circumstances came up.
Remember, different hominid species were, y’know, different species, with different (apparently suboptimal) adaptations. So them getting exterminated is more likely in any case.
Minor point: it’s my understanding that wars of extermination are not a human universal.
Strictly speaking they don’t need to be; they “just” need to be common enough among human cultures for that to exert distinguishable selection pressure, and successful enough that the groups that come up with the idea don’t end up autodarwinating. Though the latter is group selection pressure of a kind, too.
I’d rather stay agnostic on whether or not this is the case; we have very little reliable data on culture under non-marginal paleolithic conditions. I haven’t heard of any conclusive skeletal evidence for war in that era (murder yes, war no), but this isn’t my field so I could easily be missing some.
This paper argues that coalitionary killings were rare among hunger-gatherer societies, and that warfare as we currently understand it did not come into exitence until the rise of agriculture and sedantism, because prior to those develpments, the average hunter-gatherer band simply didn’t have enough accumulated material wealth to make the benefit of raids into another band’s territory outweigh the risk of getting ambushed by unseen defenders with projectile weapons who know the territory better than you.
That paper seems to focus on raiding activities; if repeated raiding activities are difficult, then wouldn’t that increase the utility of extermination warfare?
Indeed, the paper you cite posits that exactly that started happening:
And that such war predated agriculture.
I noted that humans are the only hominoid species alive.To the best of my admittedly limited archaeological knowledge, the others became extinct during the timeframe of the first two phases the paper describes; yet, if that were the case, wouldn’t other hominoid communities have likely survived to see the total war phase of human development?
I would thus posit that total war is much older than even their existing data suggests.
Well, it’s not conclusive evidence by any means, but I did note that we have no hominoid relatives; they’re all extinct with a capital E. To me, that implies something more than just us being better at hunting-gathering.
And if we, as a species, did exterminate one or more other hominid species, then it seems a small leap of logic to conclude we did the same to each other whenever similar circumstances came up.
Two points. First, the extinction of nonhuman hominids happened at about the same time as a more general die-out of megafauna. Overhunting by H. sapiens is one popular explanation for why that happened, but it’s not the only one, and if one of the alternatives ends up being true (or partly true) then it could easily have affected our hominid relatives as well.
Second, species inadvertently cause each other to go extinct all the time without going to war with each other, just by competing for a niche; consider any of the introduced species that have been causing ecological problems recently. Again, this could easily have happened to our hominid relatives over the timescales we’re discussing.
These ideas, of course, aren’t mutually exclusive.
Remember, different hominid species were, y’know, different species, with different (apparently suboptimal) adaptations. So them getting exterminated is more likely in any case.
As I said, it’s a minor point. I’m pretty sure the grandparent’s argument will stand or fall the same way regardless.