Camile.Bidan
Banned
great article on a pre historic massacre involving hunter gatherers (most likely).
Hobbes was 100% right in his conclusions. The state of human nature without the State is a state of anarchy and endless violence.
this also calls into question the modern progressive argument that war and violence is a product of capitalism, poverty and oppressive culture.
Every year it becomes more clear that the classic progressives of the Wilson era had it right. I spent the last 15 years if my life believing that they were wrong, but maybe I was wrong. By that extension I think I may have to bow out to the neo conservatives that I always had beef with.
mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/science/prehistoric-massacre-ancient-humans-lake-turkana-kenya.html?_r=2&referer=Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart: A Prehistoric Massacre in Africa Suggests that the State of Nature was a State of War
The scene was a lagoon on the shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The time about 10,000 years ago. One group of hunter-gatherers attacked and slaughtered another, leaving the dead with crushed skulls, embedded arrow or spear points, and other devastating wounds.
The dead, said the scientists who reported the discovery Wednesday in the journal Nature, seem to have been scattered in no apparent order, and eventually covered and preserved by sediment from the lake. Of 12 relatively complete skeletons, 10 showed unmistakable signs of violent death, the scientists said. Partial remains of at least 15 other people were found at the site and are thought to have died in the same attack.
The bones at the lake, in northern Kenya, tell a tale of ferocity. One man was hit twice in the head by arrows or small spears and in the knee by a club. A woman, pregnant with a 6- to 9-month-old fetus, was killed by a blow to the head, the fetal skeleton preserved in her abdomen. The position of her hands and feet suggest that she may have been tied up before she was killed.
Violence has always been part of human behavior, but the origins of war are hotly debated. Some experts see it as deeply rooted in evolution, pointing to violent confrontations among groups of chimpanzees as clues to an ancestral predilection. Others emphasize the influence of complex and hierarchical human societies, and agricultural surpluses to be raided.
The skeleton of a woman found at the site also had a fetal skeleton in her abdomen. Researchers say the position of her hands and feet suggest she had been tied up.
No one is suggesting that one discovery, at a place called Nataruk, will settle this argument, but it may be the first instance of a massacre in a foraging society. A discovery in Sudan from an earlier date found burials of victims of intergroup violence, but that society may have been more settled.
Marta Mirazon Lahr and Robert A. Foley, ofCambridge University and the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, and a team of other scientists, concluded in Nature that the find represented warfare among prehistoric hunter-gatherers.
Luke A. Glowacki, a postdoctoral researcher in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University not involved with the discovery, agreed. “There’s no other find like it,” he said.
With Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, Dr. Glowacki has traced the evolutionary roots of human warfare in chimpanzee behavior. And, he said, this find “shows warfare occurred before the invention of agriculture.”
Hobbes was 100% right in his conclusions. The state of human nature without the State is a state of anarchy and endless violence.
this also calls into question the modern progressive argument that war and violence is a product of capitalism, poverty and oppressive culture.
Every year it becomes more clear that the classic progressives of the Wilson era had it right. I spent the last 15 years if my life believing that they were wrong, but maybe I was wrong. By that extension I think I may have to bow out to the neo conservatives that I always had beef with.
mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/science/prehistoric-massacre-ancient-humans-lake-turkana-kenya.html?_r=2&referer=Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart: A Prehistoric Massacre in Africa Suggests that the State of Nature was a State of War
The scene was a lagoon on the shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The time about 10,000 years ago. One group of hunter-gatherers attacked and slaughtered another, leaving the dead with crushed skulls, embedded arrow or spear points, and other devastating wounds.
The dead, said the scientists who reported the discovery Wednesday in the journal Nature, seem to have been scattered in no apparent order, and eventually covered and preserved by sediment from the lake. Of 12 relatively complete skeletons, 10 showed unmistakable signs of violent death, the scientists said. Partial remains of at least 15 other people were found at the site and are thought to have died in the same attack.
The bones at the lake, in northern Kenya, tell a tale of ferocity. One man was hit twice in the head by arrows or small spears and in the knee by a club. A woman, pregnant with a 6- to 9-month-old fetus, was killed by a blow to the head, the fetal skeleton preserved in her abdomen. The position of her hands and feet suggest that she may have been tied up before she was killed.
Violence has always been part of human behavior, but the origins of war are hotly debated. Some experts see it as deeply rooted in evolution, pointing to violent confrontations among groups of chimpanzees as clues to an ancestral predilection. Others emphasize the influence of complex and hierarchical human societies, and agricultural surpluses to be raided.
The skeleton of a woman found at the site also had a fetal skeleton in her abdomen. Researchers say the position of her hands and feet suggest she had been tied up.
No one is suggesting that one discovery, at a place called Nataruk, will settle this argument, but it may be the first instance of a massacre in a foraging society. A discovery in Sudan from an earlier date found burials of victims of intergroup violence, but that society may have been more settled.
Marta Mirazon Lahr and Robert A. Foley, ofCambridge University and the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, and a team of other scientists, concluded in Nature that the find represented warfare among prehistoric hunter-gatherers.
Luke A. Glowacki, a postdoctoral researcher in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University not involved with the discovery, agreed. “There’s no other find like it,” he said.
With Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, Dr. Glowacki has traced the evolutionary roots of human warfare in chimpanzee behavior. And, he said, this find “shows warfare occurred before the invention of agriculture.”
