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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

It’s a little more complicated than that. Deeper in the past people could kind of just spread out, and there wasn’t much archeological evidence for conflict between groups. While chimp bands do engage in this behavior, bonobos do not.

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Just because you can spread out doesn't mean you want to. I have enough plates at dinner for my kids to spread out, but both of my kids want the plastic red one and will fight over it. Anciently, people are going to fight over what they think is the more ideal spot to live, or mine, harvest, etc. even if the other side of the mountain is exactly the same.

I kind of get that reasoning. But then on the other hand, it’s just not well supported by the vast majority of societies actually observed.

Everywhere we go or went to, people already had weapons, and knew how to use them against other humans. Everywhere the first thing to get their hands on were better weapons to gain the upper hand over some pre-existing enemies. With the exceptions, such as Moriori, being few and far between. And killed.

The continuity of inter-group violence throughout pretty much any known culture is so strong, that I really find the notion that it somehow suddenly appeared out of nowhere because ‘farming’ really weird.

I can't find the reference right now, but one example is supposedly aboriginal Australian societies. I read somewhere that one thesis was the because those societies often lived in small groups which might not be genetically viable on their own, and they were widely separated due to the low carrying capacity of the land, when groups encountered each other they would be more interested in, ahem, exchanging genetic material, than fighting. And since they lived that way until recently (in historical terms) there is at least some memory of what happened.

But personally I know nothing about Australian aboriginal societies and that might be complete rubbish. In any case of doesn't seem likely to be representative of cultures living in areas that would support a denser population.

"exchanging genetic material" is also a major motivation for violence. Kidnapping women as a way of obtaining a bride or brides has been practiced throughout history all over the world and is still practiced in some groups today. Living in a state of nature means no laws and the only restriction on your actions is the willingness and ability of others to physically stop you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping

I wonder if there was a similar phenomena in Australian to North America, where basically all observations were of cultures radically altered and depopulated by disease.

Depopulation by disease started with the arrival of Europeans, right? Apparently Native Americans knew how to do genocide also before European arrival:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Creek_massacre

And, apparently, no, not really:

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/aborigines/2022/07/truth-tel...

You need enough food to feed enough fighting age men in order for the economics of raising to even work. If a band of 50 or so loses more than a few prime age men they might not be able to feed themselves.

> Deeper in the past people could kind of just spread out, and there wasn’t much archeological evidence for conflict between groups.

There isn't archeological evidence because the violence would be done with stones and sticks, which tend to not preserve very well, as opposed to later conflicts, fought with metal weapons and armor.

It's another compounding factor to the lack of physical evidence in addition to far lower population density (population bottleneck during the ice age and probably several millennia after)

Stone survived just fine, we've got evidence of stone tools going back over three million years. It preserves much better than iron which rusts to bits in the ground within a few thousand years

The issue is the relative lack of signs of bone injury that is obviously from axes or piercing weapons (as opposed to falls and blunt force trauma). Archaic humans have had hand axes capable of very obvious damage for over a million years, spears for half a million, and they wouldn't have had anything resembling armor until about 200k years ago.

There was certainly competition but if warfare was particularly common, we should have seen more evidence. We probably weren't "peaceful," though, just smart enough to realize that conflict avoidance is usually the optimal strategy.

This also follows the general pattern we observe in the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture: The hunter-gatherers weren't really killed until the imperialism of the common era, they were absorbed or just out competed by the agriculturalists. Lots of their remnants survive ranging from the Bedouin to Namibian pastoralists to the jungle dwellers of Papua New Guinea.

stone tools like hand axes were not well suited for combat. For example, war clubs the dominant weapon of choice in every stone age culture I know of, despite using hand axes for work and spears for hunting.

I don't think there's much physical evidence for the use of war clubs in the stone age except a few skulls with blunt force trauma that could have also been caused by hand axe - it's mostly based off ethnographic studies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample [1].

IMO any culture that participated regularly in warfare would have figured out that sharp spears with long reach are far more effective than clubs unless that combat was largely symbolic. Clubs would make sense because they're not as lethal.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-023-09445-3

Spears are easily parried and its really difficult to recover an attack posture afterwards since you need to quickly retreat the full length of the spear. Someone wielding a short one handed weapon has a major advantage because they can move in quickly, parry with their weapon or free hand and then make multiple strikes to an opponent who can only defend at that range and can’t attack. They’re only really effective in formation with a lot of other soldiers which is not a tactic you would expect from a group without military discipline.

There are plenty of spear points and arrow heads, but very few skeletons of young men with injuries from such implements before agriculture. After a certain point the record for small scale war is strong.

I'm not sure how true this is. We definitely have evidence of ethnic cleansing in the paleolithic archeological record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare

I don't get the argument.

If people spread out, they're more likely to run into other people's territories. Which is how you get conflict.

In my layman's opinion, conflict is always about territory and resources - often territories exist as the containers of certain resources. One would think (or just I imagine) that hunters/gatherers would be nomads (honestly I didn't read TFA), so no territory and then less conflicts, and you don't need static defenses such as fortresses. For instance, chimps are sedentary while bonobos are nomadic.

The idea that hunter gathers didn't have "territory" or resources to defend is a misnomer. There are richer lands with more plants to gather, and those that are arid. There are plentiful hunting grounds, and those that are devoid of wildlife. These areas are valuable, and people fought for access to them. Nomadic peoples usually stayed in one area for quite a while until the resources were exhausted, and then moved on elsewhere. Specific peoples differed in how they did things, but this pattern was typical of many North American indigenous groups. They setup semi permanent settlements meant to last years. Other peoples followed migratory animals for hunting, and therefore been more mobile, but their valued resource (the herd) was still vulnerable for others to take.

"Nomadic" didn't mean people just aimlessly wandered and sustained off of whatever they chanced upon that day. You can't go just anywhere and expect to feed your family off of what you find. When you found some place or something good, you tried to claim it and defend it from those who encroached on it. You moved on under your own volition only when the resources were depleted/left.

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