Of course resource scarcity can lead to conflict, but there is little evidence than any existed until relatively recently and there's also a huge amount of evidence that neighboring bands (of 20-50) relied heavily on each other, in part to maintain genetic diversity, so those tribes would have all included family members. They wouldn't be fighting their families when they had ample natural resources, and attacking each other was so inherently dangerous.
Edit: I just went back and read the links. The first one is a study of “an extensive bioarchaeological record dating from 1,530 to 230”. The time period we’ve been discussing is thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of years earlier. Please, pay attention to the time line when trying to use links as support of your position. Continued failure to do this is just …. I don’t even know what word to use, because all the ones that come to mind are aggressively insulting.
According to cultural anthropologist and ethnographer Raymond C. Kelly, the earliest hunter-gatherer societies of Homo erectus population density was probably low enough to avoid armed conflict. The development of the throwing-spear, together with ambush hunting techniques, made potential violence between hunting parties very costly, dictating cooperation and maintenance of low population densities to prevent competition for resources.
This behavior may have accelerated the migration out of Africa of H. Erectus some 1.8 million years ago as a natural consequence of conflict avoidance.
Paleolithic peoples had little or no reason to make war and every reason to maintain peace, including a social structure that was based in maintaining order and cohesion rather than being based in conflict. We do not see the arrival of dominance hierarchies until about 6 K years ago.
“And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organized ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.” New Scientist
And the problem with the so-called "hawks" is they don't actually have much to prove their case, other than deeply entrenched ways of viewing the world, which see everything through the lens of what they expect to find based on relatively recent history when dominance hierarchies are ubiquitous. And if you read all of that second article you linked to me, you’d see that discussed.
Nearly all of those who are claiming that warfare was commonplace in the Paleolithic era, rely on two types of supports for their claim from the same limited examples — rock art and skeletal remains. The rock art comes from 3 caves in France, consisting of all of four figures punctured by spears. However, two of the figures have tails and one appears to be half man and half bird. Not very compelling evidence.
This is in shocking contrast to the thousands of depictions of the hunting of animals and a greater depiction of human violence found in cave art from 8000 BC on. (Nash 2005) The skeletal remains are also few in number — one individual each found in two separate sites in Italy with embedded tool points, as well as two in the Ukraine. One Czech site had three people in a mass grave, but there was no indication of violence to the remains and they more likely died of disease. And from this, a case is made about the high levels of violence prior to 13 thousand years ago? It’s truly laughable.
You made an analogy earlier to mass shooters, but how on earth would one person with a spear kill dozens or hundreds of others before being stopped? It just doesn't make any sense, particularly when they lived in cultures that routinely used group pressure to maintain order and cohesiveness? I've already stipulated to minor, occasional interperson violence. Did you miss that part? Because none of this adds up to your assertion that pre-agricultural peoples lived in societies that were " a lot more violent" - your words.
What chimps do is entirely irrlevent since we are equally genetically close to bonobos and in fact, they have brains that are much more similar to ours. Bonobos live in very peaceful groups, where they pretty much spend their days eating and having sex with each other.
Bonobo females also use sex with each other to create a kind of sisterhood that keeps male power in check. “We don’t see infanticide or females being sexually coerced, and we don’t see males being aggressive to females in any way,” (primatologist Amy) Parish explained. This is the complete opposite of what chimps do, where we see all of those things commonly.
And you're also kind of making my point for me. The issue is not whether humans have inclinations towards violence; the issue, which I've already spoken to, is how those inclinations were handled and still are handled in hunter-gatherer groups today.
"When (anthropologist Richard) Lee asked one of the elders of the group about this practice (of insulting the meat from a kill), the response he received was the following: ‘When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.’ "
This is how peace and cohesion is maintained and was in the past. The picture you are trying to paint doesn't add up. It's just not what the science supports. They had no reason to fight each other en masse, and individual interpersonal violence was both rare and considered unacceptable by the culture. At least until agriculture came about and now you’ve got a much less sustainable food source, with surpluses which must be maintained. You’ve got property to guard, and a social system that is every man/family for themselves and is no longer using group wellbeing as a survival strategy.
“Labor roles became more gendered as well. Generally, men did the majority of the fieldwork while women were relegated to child-rearing and household work. Without contributing food (and by association, without control over it), women became second-class citizens. Women also had babies more frequently, on average once every two years rather than once every four in hunter-gatherer societies.
Because somebody had to have control over surplus food, it became necessary to divide society into roles that supported this hierarchy. The roles of an administrator, a servant, a priest, and a soldier were invented. The soldier was especially important because agriculture was so unsustainable compared to hunting and gathering. The fickleness of agriculture ironically encouraged more migration into neighboring lands in search of more resources and warfare with neighboring groups. Capturing slaves was also important since farming was hard work, and more people were working in these new roles.
This is why you only see large scale violence taking place after the agricultural revolution. It’s why prior to that time, people lived in tribes and proto-agricultural settlements that were overwhelmingly peaceful and egalitarian (those two things go together).
Archeological evidence indicates that most large scale violence occurred in the world around 8,000 BCE or earlier, with a few instances that took place later, with none older than 13,000 BCE. So it was really only around the time that this part of the fertile crescent was thriving that the first vestiges of systematic violence began creeping into the human experience. By way of context, Sumer would not be established until 4000 BCE, nearly two thousand years after Çatalhöyük declined and disappeared.
It also seems highly unlikely that this large proto-agricultural society would have been able to maintain order and to enforce egalitarianism if it had evolved from a social system that came out of a dominance hierarchy. If the people had been used to chieftains, social classes and wealth disparity, it doesn’t seem possible that they would have been able to successfully embrace this very different kind of organizational structure for such a sustained period of time. It is infinitely more likely that this was a continuation of the social structure used by Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands, who even as they grew in numbers and began to acquire more belongings still maintained the cooperative evolutionary strategy that had brought them this far.
How do you account for this, given your view of things? How do you account for the complete and utter lack of archeological evidence of any sort of wide-scale or pervasive violence prior to 13k years ago? Humans are one of the most utterly social species in the world. They needed each other in order to have survived. If killing each other had been a routine thing, it seems unlikely that the human race would have made it far enough to have ever planted a single crop. You’ve got to look at what the evidence supports — not just what you want to believe.
