Large-scale violence in Late Neolithic Western Europe based on skeletal evidence
nature.com
nature.com
Random individual violence does not seem to be innate except as an aberration. You can walk in any tightly-packed megapolis of millions (an environment that was presumably never encoded / selected-for in our DNA) and not really worry that one of the thousands individuals you come across will simply go berserk for the fun (or benefit) of it. "Rage" of various forms happens, but typically under intense stress conditions.
But give a group of individuals the slightest pretense in the form of some arbitrary cultural narrative and they will engage in acts of incredible cruelty and dehumanization of random "other" groups. Competition for actual resources seems just a fig leaf. Clan dominance in some imagined anthroposphere is typically the real driver. Think e.g., two football fan clubs attacking each other in ritualistic or actual murder. Its supposed to be fun, there is nothing real at stake, yet somehow group violence is triggered.
This behavior is so pervasive in history (and pre-history) that it is almost certainly based on genetic traits. But maybe what was once a "positive" feature is now a millstone around our neck. In a crowded planet with ever advancing technological capabilities large-scale violence based on arbitrary cultural concoctions is simply not a scenario we want to have in front of us. Feels like maybe the most critical aspect of our own species we need to understand and somehow "manage" - assuming its at all possible. Do we have a survival strategy?
If one frames organized violence as a means rather than an ends, then it is possible to see an answer other than the survival strategy of “be the best at organized violence.”
Now, all this would be just the normal human history (and as per the article, pre-history). What changes the dynamic is the advancement of science and technology. If we assume that it is accruing monotonically (which has been the case for several centuries), then if the same social dynamic or emergent organized violence continues, at as some point even a small group that drifts into a state of feeling aggrieved could prompt vast destruction.
This isn't surprising at all given that "absolute monarchy" was more of a marketing term than a description of reality.
England, which rather decisively cut off their monarchs' pretensions at absolute power, was far more centralized than whatever the fuck the different parlements (sp?) of France or the Spanish cortez were doing during the absolutist age.
Or are you proposing a genetic breeding/selection program to weed out such tendencies? A "final solution" to violence, perhaps?
Murdering Cluster B people might be a little extreme, and most non-Cluster B people will feel uncomfortable with that idea.
But most violence is demonstrably driven by certain personality types who lead the violence and normalise it.
Excluding those types from leadership positions of all kinds as soon as they show evidence of toxicity is unlikely to make things worse.
The alternative is on a scale from small cults to megadeaths. (Perhaps gigadeaths on a bad day.)
And we already exclude most of the population from leadership and power anyway, using other reasons as an excuse.
I’m guessing whatever criteria that was decided for filtering would conveniently exclude the one making it?
It also seems likely to be problematic human survival wise, as it’s not like those traits evolved in a vacuum.
At all times look for the motivators of behavior (such as "slaughtering people") and address them proactively.
And at least right now, wouldn’t that require massive, global, overwhelming force?
No matter how objectively correct or convincing, I could see no way China or Russia would take any such proposal seriously, or take any such action voluntarily, let alone a large chunk of the rest of the world? And they certainly have enough might to not take it lying down.
For example, it wouldn’t have mattered one bit how peaceful Ukraine was when Russia started on its rampage.
Near as I can tell, the only reason Ukraine still exists is because Western Europe and the US had massive stockpiles of weapons they gave, Ukraine had enough angry (and murderous) Ukrainians, and Ukraine and the US had been preparing to murder a bunch of Russians for years after the last move Russia made before Russia made it’s move this time.
And even then it is no small, certain, or cheap endeavor. Horrible destruction has been wrought.
But compared to it’s women and children taken (and raped or ‘married off’/‘adopted’ within Russia) and the men slaughtered, conscripted, or imprisoned, and everything that made them, them destroyed, it’s still the better outcome no?
And that is exactly what would have happened, and has been happening in the area they did take.
Which is pretty normal for these kinds of things. NOT having it happen is definitely the notable exception.
So seems to me, these traits, while irritating/disruptive in peacetime, are essential at some level during times of conflict. And conflict inevitably comes, always. Just as death is a part of life.
Megapolis implies society, structure and rules. Also machinery to enforce these rules.
Not an example demonstrating that violent individuals are an aberration.
Chimp Empire is worth watching in this context.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/
It does seem to me that most political arguments fall into this category
We should be careful to not project our current norms on the entire history of humanity.
A quote from A Distant Mirror The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman:
In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement. Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless
and another one:
The citizens of Mons bought a condemned criminal from a neighboring town so that they should have the pleasure of seeing him quartered.
The group of people trying to head-butt the chicken to death are playing a sport. Often enough to at some time add trumpets to it.
* head-butt the chicken please re-read the quote, it doesn't mention chickens.
* When the entertainment committee invests in quartering of a human being, it reflects the norms and attitudes of the general population.
If you are interested in the topic, "THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES" is open source and text is available here https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Waning_of_the_Middle_Ages
Obviously no one likes crime so societies try and clamp down in that
My take is that this is a natural consequence of competition for resources. The more individuals or groups are organised, the more violence becomes organised as a logical consequence.
We have evolved as social animals members of tight groups and this seems to be quite old looking at chimpanzees and gorillas, for example. So this 'tribal' streak is probably embedded in us to this day.
More often than not, and very broadly speaking, the fight is over mindshare: tribal beliefs and allegiances. Differences of religion, politics, nationality or ethnicity are nearly always perceived to be far greater than they actually are.
The machine's weapons of choice are algorithms, code, simulations, viruses. No physical violence. But still very high stakes, like mind wipes.
As individuals we want acceptance, respect and love. It's abnormal for someone to randomly, attack others when they are alone and already vulnerable feeling. Normal people crave community and do not attempt acts that result in their ridicule and/or rejection. Only outliers like psychopaths continuously break societal norms.
As groups we form bonds and have our place/role. Protecting what we have and those we love seems natural as does protecting the society, world view, or leader(s) our group supports.
Therefore, I would expect individual violence to be much less than group violence in intensity, duration and occurrence.
to me this analysis is not starting off in the right direction. We're talking about Neolithic people here so it's appropriate to use more straight up evolutionary law of the jungle thinking. Sudden violence is in us from the get go. Look at so many other mammals, they use violence with each other to sort things out at the drop of a hat. Look at how we portray cowboys, and indians (or fasts, and furiouses?). I'm not even saying that the picture is accurate to history, I'm saying the picture is accurate to how we think, viscerally, and such films excite us, not because of memories because we were there, we weren't. Just because it's how we think.
So I'd start out the analysis with, we are violent animals at the base of our brain, or is it at the base of our evolution, but animals don't kill each other that often. On top of that we are extremely social animals, you can walk down the street surrounded by strangers and not hit them. But also on top of that we are thinking, calculating, theory of mind imagining: this person has been irking me for awhile now, if I secretly kill them, my problems will be solved.
I'm not saying it's anywhere near that simple or that that's accurate, but we need to think that way. We've seen some papers recently here that said it's not appropriate to think we have 3 brains in 3 layers, wrestling with each other, because they're more intertwingled than that. So this kind of noodling only takes us so far, but I have the sense that it's the right kind of thinking.
I don't think our violence is aberrant at all, but we did "invent" being extremely social, and then etiquette, and then even the term aberrance to talk about some behaviors which are unusual within that framework. Rabies might be aberrant behavior in dogs, and anxiety conditions, but otherwise they're pretty basic. And anxiety is so prevalent we have to assume it's adaptive anyway.
Starting with Freud, an aspect of psychology that is not as widely understood as it should be is the notion of unconscious thought, and unconscious motivation. (The term subconscious is associated with a more woo-woo theory of Jung's, that we share subconsious awareness with other people, is why unconscious is the usual term.) It's very difficult for people to grasp that they don't actually know what they are thinking, but it does leak out.
If you are talking to somebody and say "I'm not saying that you're X, I'm saying that you are Y", you are definitely thinking that they are X, or at least a substantial part of you is. That's where you got the idea to deny it from. It can be broken down plainly in computer programmer terms. While the brain isn't "just like a computer", in order for you to compare X and Y you have to use the subroutine or the struct or the class for X and the other one for Y, they are separated at some place in your mind. You can't say X without the X part of the brain lighting up. What makes you say "I'm not calling you X" is another part of your brain lighting up to say "this is an unpleasant thought, better not be accused of saying it, that will be socially awkward".
"Children blurt out the truth, children say what we are all thinking." We have additional brain processes that children have not developed yet, but we didn't lose the thoughts they have, that's why we understand them. It's all that shame and judgement we fear from other people and apply to ourselves that starts to tear our coherent ideal self (that we think we are) apart.
So, imho we don't get anywhere by imagining we are a "good people" walking around who sometimes aberr; we are complicated collections of competing selfish ideas, some of which are nasty.
>>But give a group of individuals the slightest pretense in the form of some arbitrary cultural narrative ...
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."
— Voltaire c.1765
Chimpanzees wage wars and go on raids.
But the mass killings of early modern and modern Europe really didn’t increase the fecundity of the winners. It mostly just killed off the violent.
I’ve no idea about the genetics of this, might be bunk, but europe and Japan were both so warlike for so long, it is bizarre to see them so peaceful.
This sounds very counter-intuitive to me! Interesting if true. I get that two war parties going at each other would result in some violent people dying. But I am not sure bravery and violence are always locked together, and it would also seem that a relatively small group of very violent people could kill a very large group of non-violent people.
The Spaniards did not do it alone. This is a fact very easy to prove. It always shocks me to see people in North America complaining about Spaniards, when in North America there is less than 1% native Americans, the rest were exterminated, ethnic cleansed. In most hispanic countries, native and mixed people are over 70% of the population.
As for countries and war-like...that doesn't seem to be limited by geography and/or DNA. The species generally prefers violence. World history teaches us that. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare.
E.g. if we're talking about the major conflicts causing depopulation - the 30 years war had half a million combat deaths but five million or more dead civilians; Mongol conquests lack good numbers for aggregate combat deaths, but they are clearly a small fraction of the 40-75 million of total depopulation, as the armies simply weren't even close to that large; conquest of Americas has most of indigenous population die outside of combat; WW2 has civilian deaths at twice the military deaths; WW1 is the exception of being roughly equal, but then we have events like Taiping rebellion which killed more than WW1 but again with civilians outweighing combatants, etc.
Smallish tight groups of hunter gatherers trying to survive in an hostile environment. As such, when group violence arose I suspect that there wasn't much of a "those who don't fight" kind of people.
Change to this way of life is relatively recent (on a scale of thousands of years, not hundreds of thousands+). And the "modern world" is really something that is brand new and most likely has not changed us in evolutionary terms yet.
This applies to all the world. Before Hispanic conquerors, in America the wars were extremely gore, with things like pyramids of heads(The conquerors wrote about them , but archaeological evidence had been found recently), skinning and scalping the of enemies, human sacrifices.
The wars in North America were not less violent, with everyone carrying a rifle, people using them to hunt Indians from the train, and the eventual extermination of almost the entire native population.
Africa? When has Africa been peaceful? I helped refugees in Europe from recent wars in places like Congo or Central African Republic where kids are given automatic guns and enforced to kill and rape their family members. That is happening today in Africa and nobody cares.
Asia? Most of what you call violence in Europe actually came from Asia. The Huns, the Parthians, the Mongols, the Arabs, the Turks, all came from Asia, mostly from the central plains.
China history is full of violence in order to unify the territory. They also suffered from invasions like the Mongols, the Manchus and the piracy of the Japanese.
That's one reason why it's still happening.
In contemporary war, tribal leaders have no direct, personal, immediate threats. They have meetings while other people do the dying for them.
TBF this wasn't always true, and that didn't make war less likely. But it's true today, and there are certainly leaders who would be less casual about death if they were facing it personally.
Lethal is an important qualifier here, because even skeletons from before that priod routinely show signs of human-on-human violence - it just wasn't what killed them.
Which makes sense: To this very day most killing is done for material gain or when fighting over land. Without these reasons, we'd likely be a more peaceful species.
Convincing billions to co-operate based on rules.
It's incredible
Of course, not all violence is physical. The real change has been the transition from the common application of physical violence to emotional and psychological violence as our societies become more abstract and removed from the cold brutality of nature and subsistence living, except in "extreme" cases.
Also the "greatest trick the devil ever pulled" was convincing people he doesn't exist. Slaves pick your food, sew your clothes and mine the rare earth minerals in your electronics. Vast engines of automated slaughter put meat in your stores. Every advertisement is mind control and every news story is psychological warfare. Every cop is a thug, every judge a sadist, every CEO a sociopath, every politician a psychopath. "People sleep peacefully in their beds only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf," as George Orwell said. And they do, cruel, wicked violence. Your hands are soaked in blood, the roads are paved with bones, and the skies are blackened with ashes from the ovens of Moloch.
But you don't see it most of the time, it's hidden away from you, or it's intangible. That's the trick the world learned from the Nazis, how to manipulate and control mass perception through modern media, and by extension to normalize the violence that drives modern society. You can just play Candy Crush, pay your taxes, be nice and not kill anyone and pretend the devil isn't real.
Yes we hide a lot of ... oppression/violence/unfair business practises ... under the supply chain. But hell i think the electronic ledger and RFID will be amount the most transformative technologies our children will see.
Underpaid subsistence workers do produce a huge portion of goods consumed in western nations. Engines of automated slaughter do put meat in stores. Advertising cares not an ounce for your wellbeing, food conglomerates employ chemists to optimize not for health or flavor but how compulsively you want to eat their products, game studios and social networks employ psychologists to most effectively addict you. Mindlessly consuming the news is a great way to get psyopped. Note that I have dropped the universals (e.g. "every", "all") because they weaken the argument by opening it to pedantic attacks, but the above is largely true.
The "every X is a Y" is more fraught. Police are too often predisposed to violence and abuse, many politicians are sociopaths, surely. Selection effects are real. But there are reasonable people too.
The more important point, which the comment misses, is that nobody is really in charge. Yes, there are "smoke-filled rooms" where conspiracies are hatched, but modernity is too large and complex for complete centralized control. The dominant forces today, I would argue, are distributed algorithms composed of flesh and blood human beings, their ideas and social fictions (which comprise institutions), and a vast array of machines. This vortex, this enormous, evolving structure of incentives and infrastructure, has its own autonomy. This is Moloch, and it doesn't even require active malice on any particular person's part.
Paperclip maximizers are not just a thought experiment, we are surrounded by them. We are in them.
Yes, the advertisers don't care one bit for the well-being of the consumers, but can you imagine a reality where they would? I don't. Calling something evil even though there's not much improvement to be made is ... needlessly negative?
> the advertisers don't care one bit for the well-being of the consumers, but can you imagine a reality where they would?
Yes. Imagine a reality where we don't have anything like the advertising sector, or myopically extractive industry in general, sidestepping the whole problem.
Failures of imagination seriously constrain the possibility space. Modernity's totalizing tendency ("the end of history", "the best we've ever had it", etc) is a big reason it threatens to self-terminate, I think. History is path-dependent, yes, and for all I know we do live in a block universe, but for practical purposes the future is under-determined.
> the trick the world learned from the Nazis
Also, what you described is basically psudeoscience and veers very closely to eugenics (the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable)
During these periods of imperial peace, warfare is mostly confined to the frontier regions or where the empire abuts another empire.
One could argue that we are in a similar time now. The USA basically has a de-facto empire over the Americas and Western Europe. The Middle East is a frontier zone. Ukraine abuts a former empire (Russian/Soviet) trying to regain its former glory. Taiwan abuts China which is trying to establish its own hegemony in its region.
Peace as in no major wars, sure. But plenty of hyper-local conflicts (think clan feuds, hyperlocal peasant revolts, etc) would happen all the time before the expansion of state power in the 20th century.
Hell, when my great-grandfather was born, they were recent settlers in a region of Northern India that was completely depopulated of the indigenous population during the British conquest of the Sikh Empire.
Where my great-grandfather's family was from was filled with multi-generational clan feuds, the occasional peasant revolt against the govt tax collector, and the occasional millenarian revolt.
You wouldn't read about most of this stuff in your high school history textbook or on History Channel, but it would happen with consistency. I can guarantee with a fact that this same story existed in every single country before the 20th century and the rise of the railroad, canned food, and the telegraph.
Before those 3 technologies arose, power projection was difficult, and "empires" were in reality a mixture of local fiefdoms (literally) who pledged feality to some guy in a capital far away.
To use the classic Chinese and Russian quote - God and the Emperor are far, but I am here [0]
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emper...
A country that is a bully to others is not the definition of empire. This isn't even loosely comparable to a real former empire like British Empire and yes "Soviet Empire". China is slowly becoming an even bigger bully in Asia and Africa, but that doesn't make it an empire either.
This includes almost all ordinary peoples lives, but also things like the childhood of people like Charlemagne.
We do know all kinds of things about ordinary people's lives based on physical evidence in archeology; we can figure out what they ate and where they got that, what jobs they did and how they organized that, what health issues they had and how they died.