Sex at Dawn полностью

The causal reverberations between social structure (foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial), population density, and the likelihood of war is supported by research conducted by sociologist Patrick Nolan, who found, “Warfare is more likely in advanced horticultural and agrarian societies than it is in hunting-and-gathering and simple horticultural societies.” When he limited his analysis only to hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies, Nolan found that above-average population density was the best predictor of war.²¹

This finding is problematic for the argument that human war is a “5-million-year habit,” given our ancestors’ low population densities until the post-agricultural population explosion began just a few thousand years ago. Recent research looking at changes in mitochondrial DNA confirms that already low prehistoric global human population levels dropped nearly to extinction at several points (due to climatological catastrophes probably triggered by volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes, and sudden changes in ocean currents). As mentioned previously, the entire world population of Homo sapiens may have dropped to just a few thousand individuals as recently as 74,000 years ago, when the massive Toba eruption severely disrupted world climate. But even with much of the northern hemisphere covered in

ice, the world was anything but crowded for our distant

22

ancestors.

Population demographics have triggered wars in more recent historical times. Ecologist Peter Turchin and anthropologist Andrey Korotayev looked at data from English, Chinese, and Roman history, finding strong statistical correlations between increases in population density and warfare. Their research suggests population growth could account for as much as 90

percent of the variation between historical periods of war and

23

peace.

Early agriculture’s stores of harvested grain and herds of placid livestock were like boxes of bananas in the jungle. There was now something worth fighting over: more. More land to cultivate. More women to increase population to work the land, raise armies to defend it, and help with the harvest. More slaves for the hard labor of planting, harvesting, and fighting. Failed crops in one area would lead desperate farmers to raid neighbors, who would retaliate, and so on, over and over.²⁴

Freedom (from war) is just another word for nothing to lose—or gain.

But neo-Hobbesians ignore this rather straightforward analysis and the data supporting it, insisting that war must be an eternal human drive, all too often resorting to desperate rhetorical tactics like Pinker’s to defend their view.

In the fourth chapter of his book Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, for example, Robert Edgerton writes, “Social stratification developed in some small-scale societies that lacked not only bureaucracies and priesthoods but cultivation as well.” Okay, but in support of this assertion about social stratification and brutal rule by elites in “small-scale societies,” he offers fifteen pages of vivid descriptions of, in this order (and leaving nothing out):

• the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island (a slave-owning, settled, property-accumulating, potlatch-celebrating, complex, hierarchical society);

• the Aztec Empire (numbering in the millions, with elaborate religious structures, priesthoods, and untold acres of slave-cultivated land around a capital city larger than any in Europe at the time of first contact, featuring sewage systems and lighted streets at night);

• the Zulu Empire (again, numbering well into the millions, with slavery, intensive agriculture, animal domestication, and continent-wide trade networks);

• the Asante Empire of present-day Ghana, which, Edgerton tells us, “was incomparably the greatest military power in West Africa.”²

What any of these empires have to do with small-scale societies with no bureaucracies, priesthoods, or cultivation, Edgerton doesn’t say. In fact, he doesn’t mention a single foraging society for the rest of the chapter. This is like declaring that cats are difficult to train, then offering as evidence German shepherds, beagles, greyhounds, and golden retrievers.