[SunkenCiv]

Another "taxpayer-supported unsubstantiated B.S." topic.

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[SunkenCiv]

"Not bloody likely!" -- Jerry Seinfeld

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[ClearCase_guy]

Imagine there's no spear
It's easy if you try
No pointy sharp thing
No long and wooden pole

[RightWhale]

Kelly ought to reread Xenophon's Persian Expedition. Lots of spears. Defenders with spears don't have much chance against Greeks with a plan.

[mikrofon]

I don't know about ancient group violence, but she
currently generates a lot of disgust in general...

[visualops]

I have a joke I play on people at times. Someone will posit a question or muse about something and I advance what I call my "plausible theory" (which is a bunch of baloney). It's pretty easy to mess with people who want to believe something in particular.

[shuckmaster]

1,000,000 years ago, spears we most likely used as defense against predators by pre-human scavengers who followed herds. 150,000 years ago, spears were used by modern beachcomber humans to fish. 50,000 years ago, inland humans were hunting mammoths and other large animals. Organized civilization is a rather late (10,000 years ago), development that was related to cultivation and domestication. In that context, spears would have been first used as defense and much later as attack by organized armies.

I believe this article is mostly right to the degree that in sparsely populated times, there probably wasn't much inter-tribal warfare until cultivation led to civilization and subsequent population growth. After that time the haves and have-nots had a problem.

[NormB]

What if they attck us with pointed sticks?

[Vicomte13]

Considering that chimpanzee males roam around in packs, are territorial, and sometimes beat to death and tear to pieces, with fists, nails and teeth, other chimps they encounter on the way (and sometimes they don't), I'd say it's not a safe bet to try and find human agression emerging because of some technology.

I suppose that if you taught one band of chimps down there in Africa to pick up big sticks and beat their opponents when running around out there in packs, they would do so, and their young might learn from them too. This would be considerably worse than teaching kids to smoke.

[Gwaihir]

When spears are outlawed, only outlaws will have spears..

[Question_Assumptions]

like the Kalahari Desert Bushmen

This article if full of baloney. THe like the Kalahari Desert Bushmen have a homicide rate that exceeds that of Washington DC. These "experts" skirt around that by pretending that organized large-scale violence is the only sort of homicide performed by ancient peoples. Read Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage for lots of good examples of how social scientists ignore the evidence of violence they regularly pull from the grounds. And that's not even going into the levels of "domestic violence" and such suggested by the number of parry fractures and other signs of injuries obtained by abuse at the hands of other humans often found on ancient bones.

Ultimately, Keeley does draw a similar conclusion -- that often the only way premodern people could achieve peace was through isolation -- and he does put on some rose-colored glasses for the conclusion of his book. But I think the evidence in his book suggests a much grimmer reality than this article presents.

[SunkenCiv]

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