Rather than finding war ubiquitous, the two researchers found little evidence that hunter-gatherer societies were in a constant state of violent conflict with rival groups. In short they found that some of the most “primitive” peoples on Earth were actually quite peaceful compared to modern, developed nations. “These findings imply that warfare was probably not very common before the advent of agriculture, when most if not all humans lived as nomadic foragers,” Kirk Endicott, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College told the journal Science, where the study is published. Once you put all this work into a sizable chunk of land, and try to maintain a huge surplus of food, then you have to defend it! Agriculture is tantamount to War, not human nature.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 13:19:41 +0000