Violence was widespread in early farming society, says new study | Hacker News Reader

Violence was widespread in early farming society, says new study

phys.org

19 pointspseudolus13 comments

Probably one of the two main reasons why agrarian revolution took so long time, you can't establish the any trade-routes either if you are surrounded by bloodthirsty nomads

A few hot takes :

- It takes time to cut down forests.

- It takes time for cultivars suited for the local conditions to be found.

- The advantages of farming might not be obvious on an individual level (farmers just tend to live harder and poorer lives than hunter-gatherers) and it's likely that it spread more so from the demographic excess these societies produced than from cultural adoption of that technology and lifestyle.

I’d guess that it’s also a longer process to get productive. It’s not like hunter gathers just stopped one day and started eating mutton and broccoli.

I like articles written about studies because if done well you get at least one skeptical or dissenting expert opinion.

The nyt generally does well here.

I make fun of my friends for automatically discounting all research but particularly if it was written about in the times

But

My tentacles are up on this one

It doesn't give a single reason why the violence was there, but it just seems hokey

And it reminds of those racist studies of various tribes that were allegedly inherently violent

And the allegedly violent monkeys -- turns out they were just losing habitat to dumbass humans and that explained about 100% of the violence

Bah humbug

...I read some more this article and more. I guess I can buy it. More cooperation for farming but then greater stores of valuable food and tools and humans leads to envy / jealousy thus violence.

I think the idea of polite, peaceful hunter/gatherer/agri villages were probably the exception rather than the rule. It seems like once humans get out of an extended family/friends circle of say 30-40 people they become less and less peaceful and altruistic. I'm sure there are exceptions but I think 90% of them are gonna start seeing other cliques as competition rather than "my fellow peaceful human". Especially as resources become limited. There's a reason why in zombie apocalypse scenarios other humans are as dangerous as any zombie.

It makes some amount of sense to me. If I lived a nomadic existence and a larger more powerful tribe drove me out of some territory I'd be angry but eventually just try to find new territory since I'm mobile anyway.

If I was a farmer though and my crop was being stolen I'd probably fight to the death. I wouldn't be able to easily replace it and if I was driven off the territory my group would probably starve before we could locate a new site a establish a new farm.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2209481119?downloa...

So, that would make at least 5'000 years during which (at least at one end of the distribution) the returns to studying violence were greater on average than the returns to shepherding capital?

No kidding.

Chimps go to war with each other, humans have been doing so since before we were "human". There is literally no point in human history without documented violence.

Even ants go to war.

I don’t know why but this comment triggered a memory of a toy I used to play with as a kid called Army Ants. I haven’t thought about this for 30 years.

They were small plastic to toy ants in military gear. Each ant had a squeezable butt, aka abdomen.

http://www.virtualtoychest.com/armyants/armyants.html

I remember about a decade ago standing outside our house and watching an incredibly long trail of ants leading from an ant-hill in-between our patio bricks towards our driveway - I followed it figuring they were migrating to a different hill but it ended up leading to an absolutely massive swarm of I assume two different breeds/colonies of ants fighting - it was honestly very interesting to watch - like how you'd see medieval armies fighting in movies - the thin lines of combatants on either side walking to war ending up in a thick horizontal battlefront of ants and ant bodies.

Absolutely amazing stuff. Makes me wonder if humans are controlled by our pheromones/scents/secretions/etc more than we think we are.

Humans slaughtering each other. Shocking.

Next they’ll tell us water is wet.

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