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"War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease -- the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences."
- From President Obama's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
George Orwell famously wrote, "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." A clear understanding of prehistory is critical to an effective response to current and future challenges. Unfortunately, President Obama is misinformed about the origins of war -- and thus misunderstands its relation to human nature.
Obama's confusion is apparent in his rhetoric: the "first man" appeared long before "the dawn of history." Most experts date the appearance of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to about 200,000 years ago, but the end of prehistory and thus, the "dawn of history," was just ten thousand years ago. There are huge differences between "the first man" and the first farmer -- the first "historical man." It's impossible to have a clear understanding of the origins of war without appreciating these differences.
But President Obama's mistake is so common as to be standard. New York Times science columnist and author Nicolas Wade voices the standard line when he claims that "warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent" (Before the Dawn, 2006). According to this view, our propensity for organized conflict has roots reaching deep into our biological past, back to distant primate ancestors by way of our foraging forebears. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson warn that we are "the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression" (Demonic Males, 1996).
But nobody's very clear what all this incessant prehistoric war was over. Despite his certainty that foragers' lives were plagued by "constant warfare," Wade acknowledges that "ancestral people lived in small egalitarian societies, without property, or leaders or differences of rank ...." So we're to understand that egalitarian, nonhierarchical, nomadic groups without property ... were constantly at war? Hunter-gatherer societies, possessing so little and thus with so little to lose (other than their lives), living on a wide-open planet were nothing like the densely populated, settled agricultural societies struggling over limited and/or accumulated resources in historical times. Why would they be?
Why would hunter-gatherers risk their lives to fight wars? Over what, exactly?
• Food? That's spread out in the environment. It would be like fighting over raindrops.
• Stuff? Foragers have few possessions that would be of any non-sentimental value.
• Land? Our ancestors evolved on a planet nearly empty of human beings for the vast majority of our existence as a species.
• Women? Unlikely, as this claim presumes that population growth was important to foragers and that women were commodities to be fought over and traded like the livestock of pastoralists. In fact, it's likely that keeping population stable was more important to foragers than expanding it. There is no inherent advantage in having more people to feed in band-level societies. Women and men would have been free to move among different bands in the fission-fusion social system still typical of hunter-gatherers, chimps, and bonobos.
Foragers have little to gain from risking their lives in war, but early agriculture's stores of harvested grain and herds of placid livestock provided something well worth fighting over: more. More land to cultivate. More women to increase population to work the land, raise armies to defend it, and help with the harvest. More slaves for the hard labor of planting, harvesting, and fighting. Failed crops in one area would lead desperate farmers to raid neighbors, who would retaliate, and so on, over and over.
Freedom (from war) is just another word for nothing to lose-or gain.
In Beyond War (2009), anthropologist Doug Fry rebuts the neo-Hobbesian view of universal war. "The belief that ‘there has always been war,'" Fry writes, "does not correspond with the archaeological facts of the matter." Anthropologist Leslie Sponsel agrees, writing, "Lack of archaeological evidence for warfare suggests that it was rare or absent for most of human prehistory." After conducting a comprehensive review of prehistoric skeletal evidence, anthropologist Brian Ferguson concluded that apart from one particular site in modern-day Sudan, "Only about a dozen Homo sapiens skeletons 10,000 years old or older, out of hundreds of similar antiquity examined to date, show clear indications of interpersonal violence." Ferguson continues, "If warfare were prevalent in early prehistoric times, the abundant materials in the archaeological record would be rich with evidence of warfare. But the signs are not there."
In fact, war is primarily a consequence of the rise of agriculture about ten thousand years ago. Like slavery, misogyny, and sexually monogamous marriage, it has been cynically repackaged and sold to the public as an intrinsic part of human nature. Don't buy it.
