> War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, 1996) is a book by Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specializes in prehistoric Europe. The book deals with warfare conducted throughout human history by societies with little technology. In the book, Keeley aims to stop the apparent trend in seeing civilization as bad, by setting out to prove that prehistoric societies were violent and frequently engaged in warfare.
> How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth
> The puzzling question is then how a world dominated by ultra social human cooperation can also frequently succumb to large scale war and conflict?
> Turchin’s answer, and one of the big ideas in the book, is that war between social groups is the mechanism by which cooperative behaviour develops “within groups”. It is a fundamental evolutionary process happening between societies at a large scale. He elevates war as a selection mechanism for cooperation, and values it above many of the technological factors like domestication of plants and the advent of agriculture.
I haven't read this book, but regardless of its ultimate correctness, it's worth recognizing that it too is interpretative mythmaking (about who we are based on a very small historical slice of our existence). It probably generalizes well enough to who we've been since the last glacial maximum, but I think there's enough evidence to be skeptical of interpreting any human group since the LGM as untouched by the processes driving what we call civilization.
"Civilization" is a relative measure, not an absolute one. It's shaped by what we're accustomed to, and vulnerable to unknown biases. (Is raising and slaughtering your own pig more or less civilized than modern factory farming? Is solitary confinement more or less civilized than exile?) Claiming to discuss war "before" civilization draws an arbitrary line separating very gradual change driven by many competing/interacting processes. What standard do we measure whether some group of people in some place and time were civilized against?
If you measure against the great apes, when did the relationships between hominid groups and their environments cross a rubicon? What technological and social markers count? Tool use? Language? Trade? Making objects and carrying them around with us over great distances? Art? Stories? Clothing? Religion? Cooking? Baking? Early agriculture?
AFAIK there's evidence for most of these back well into the stone age (and in some cases among pre-homo-sapiens hominids). We're also mostly limited to studying sites above modern sea levels and have vastly less access to evidence of hominid activity that may exist in areas now under water (including glacial refugia such as the potential "Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis"
).
I guess implicit in this is that strife and warfare (in addition to new pasture/hunting grounds) led to expansion and exploration in pre history just as if did on later times. Some of it was just seeking avoidance.
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
> How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth
> The puzzling question is then how a world dominated by ultra social human cooperation can also frequently succumb to large scale war and conflict?
> Turchin’s answer, and one of the big ideas in the book, is that war between social groups is the mechanism by which cooperative behaviour develops “within groups”. It is a fundamental evolutionary process happening between societies at a large scale. He elevates war as a selection mechanism for cooperation, and values it above many of the technological factors like domestication of plants and the advent of agriculture.
http://evonomics.com/how-10000-years-of-war-made-humans-the-...