Paleolithic Peace Through Strength

Once again "scientists" are trying to read current political debates back into the deep past. Raymond Kelly, a paleoanthropologist at U. Mich. [Ann Arbor] argues that a key step in human evolution emerged from a technological innovation -- the use of pointed sticks to kill at a distance.

National Geographic reports:

The invention of the spear about a million years ago sparked 985,000 years of relative peace between tribes of early humans, according to a recent report.

This advent of weaponry also marked a split in the behavioral paths of chimps and humans, says the report's author, Raymond C. Kelly, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Studies by Jane Goodall and others show that if a group of chimps from one community spots an individual from a neighboring group, they stalk and kill the trespasser.

This type of violence occurs almost exclusively among adult males in border areas where two or more groups hunt for food. The killing is opportunistic and is done to establish territorial dominance.

Strength in numbers benefits the group attacking and outweighs the attackers' risk of injuries or fatalities.

Early human behavior followed this pattern until about a million years ago, when humans invented throwing weapons to hunt large mammals, Kelly says. The ability to kill from a distance and the use of ambush tactics significantly affected border interactions.

The size of a group was no longer a guarantee of success, and the potential of being seriously wounded or killed increased.

Kelly believes the change in circumstances forced early humans to come up with new ways to resolve conflicts and to maintain friendly relations.

So cooperative human social relations emerged out of a way to deal with the lethality of new weaponry. What is more -- the new social habits and weaponry conferred an evolutionary advantage on their possessors. Groups what developed mechanisms for peace and defense could become larger and,

The larger population size would mean the cooperative groups contributed more genes to subsequent generations—meaning that there was an evolutionary advantage to peaceful relations.

Read the article here.

This last seems a bit dubious. Big game hunting strategies made possible by new weaponry seem, at least to me, to be a more plausible explanation for both the development of cooperative group dynamics and the purported increase in the size of human communities. However, it does raise an interesting interpretive point.

If projectile weaponry did encourage peaceful relations among human groups this takes us back to the old Marxist assertion that warfare was an innovation of the Neolithic period. In fact the article makes that very point.

The earliest archaeological evidence for organized warfare dates from between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago and is found in Sudan, Africa. In other parts of the world, wars weren't conducted until as recently as 4,000 years ago.

Kelly ties the advent of military warfare to the development of agriculture, which increased the value of territory exponentially. Until then, he argues, most human conflict was like that of chimps—sporadic, unplanned fights over turf.

So we're back to the peaceful paleolithic.

Kelly then commits the customary error of trying to link his findings to present day geo-politics, noting that war is not inevitable, that nations like the US and Canada can establish long-term peaceful relations, etc. Oh well, scholars have to seek significance for their work somewhere.