[quote]kamui wrote:
[quote]ironcross wrote:
[quote]kamui wrote:
violence, conflicts and aggression have been around since the beginning of humanity, but war itself is a pretty recent invention.
We invented it during the neolithic, at the same time we invented agriculture, metalworking, antropomorphic deities and social stratifications.
so we have two possibilites here :
going back to the paleolithic
evolving toward a ‘post-neolithic’ society.
and they are both extremely theoretical.
[/quote]
This is incorrect. Perhaps you mean large scale war, but even some of the most rural, hunter-gatherer tribes participate in war. Chimpanzees also go to war with each other.
http://web.scc.losrios.edu/files/evanst/Ghiglieri.pdf
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3317329
The tribes this is referring to are hunter-gatherers.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/203/4383/910.short[/quote]
well, if you take a broad enough definition of war, even unicellular beings like bacteria make war.
but broad definitions are, as a rule, not very helpful.
This is not (only) a matter of scale however. Tribal violences and ‘civilized’ wars doesn’t have the same dynamics nor the same structural causes.
btw, the Sambian tribesmen, like most Papuan people, are not a hunter-gatherers. They live in hamlets, they have complex social stratifications, and they do practice agriculture (a quite sophisticated form of sedentary permacultures with crop rotation), and they have probably been doing so for millenia.
Their society is in no way comparable to paleolithic society.
So i don’t see them as a counter-example, but as a near-perfect example of what i was refering to in my previous post.
your last link doesn’t seem to work for me.
[/quote]
How about we start by defining war then.
