whitecoast said:
What I gathered from Paul Shepherd's work is that warfare and conquest began largely with the arrival of animal husbandry and domestication. This was a fundamentally different way of life from that of the early agriculturalists. Animal husbandry required less manual labour than the continuous planting and reaping of fields. And unlike agriculture--which need only take up as much space as your local field--animal grazing required a semi-nomadic lifestyle that would allow the herds to continuously graze new grasslands after depleting older areas. They essentially had to follow the rainfall, which is the reason why many believe these cultures became more obsessed with an authoritarian Sky-God instead of an agricultural Earth-Mother. This is also why those shepherd cultures became obsessed with appeasement of divine will through sacrifice and such. Since sheep numbers were the direct correlate of one's wealth, gradually those cultures that learned to steal cows became stronger. It is this initial increase in stealing and inter-personal violence that instigated the creation of the "warrior culture," which glorified strong leaders, valour in battle, and other pathological social qualities. Shepherd points to the Navajo as a culture that had relatively little interpersonal violence until animal husbandry came onto the scene. Perhaps the psychopathy gene was there all along, but only became encouraged to develop once
The agriculturalists, obviously, were prime prey for these shepherd cultures. Since agriculturalists live sedentiary lifestyles based upon toil and accumulation, it became a natural next step for the sheperd kings to move in and take over. Essentially, these people (psychopaths and their authoritarian followers) started to look at other people the same way they did their flock of sheep. Evil Magician, anyone?
This seems to fit wth the idea of the Kurganic Indo-europeans conquering the former native European peoples, who also had already been gradually introduced to agriculture from the Middle East via Anatolia and the Balcan area. If that is accurate (bearing in mind that prehistory is so misunderstood by mainstream science and evidence of many things have been corrupted) that could mean that agriculture was gradually introduced, while there was at the same time in the hunter peoples a loss of knowledge, maybe knowledge about psychopathy and other things.
And finally, when they were at the right critical point, already domesticated and weakened by agricultural diet, it was the time for the Eurasian horseriders to take over and introduce widely the pathological warlike society, reaching it's height during Roman times; and the current replay.
Potamus said:
war |wôr| noun
a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state
Thus, wars may not have begun until after the sedentary lifestyle was in place, and war itself might be argued to be a feature of the sedentary lifestyle.
There is also this:
_http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=war&searchmode=none
"war (n.) Look up war at Dictionary.com
late O.E. (c.1050), wyrre, werre, from O.N.Fr. werre "war" (Mod.Fr. guerre), from Frankish *werra, from P.Gmc. *werso (cf. O.S. werran, O.H.G. werran, Ger. verwirren "
to confuse, perplex"). Cognates suggest the original sense was "to bring into confusion."
Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian guerra are from the same source; Romanic peoples turned to Germanic for a word to avoid L. bellum because its form tended to merge with bello- "beautiful." There was no common Germanic word for "war" at the dawn of historical times. Old English had many poetic words for "war" (wig, guð, heaðo, hild, all common in personal names), but the usual one to translate L. bellum was gewin "struggle, strife" (related to win)."
To confuse, perplex, pretty much what psychopaths do. To Cause confusion, intrigue, divide, putting ones against the others.
whitecoast said:
The other category of hunter-gatherer societies, which is smaller in number and is typified by the Kwakiutl of the American Northwest Coast and the Ainu of Japan, is referred to as collector societies, delayed-return hunter-gatherers, complex hunter-gatherers, or non-egalitarian hunter-gatherers. In a chapter distinguishing the two categories, Robert Kelly characterizes the collector societies as having “high population densities, sedentism or substantially restricted residential mobility, occupational specialization, perimeter defense and resource ownership, focal exploitation of a particular resource (commonly fish), large residential group size, inherited status, ritual feasting complexes, standardized
valuables, prestige goods or currencies, and food storage.” He adds that they “also tend to have high rates of violence and condone violence as legitimate.”
I was surprised many times to have read of some hunter gatherer tribes who were territorial and if one tribe hunted in another's territory without permission, it was a cause for hostile conflict. (I think the Tasmanians had that type of society.) So, it seems that even for hunter gatherers, if they don't have enough knowledge about psychopathy, they can be ponerized too. But even in those cases, they are all late Holocene societies, with a lot of lost knowledge and probably their culture was totally misunderstood by the western invaders.
What intrigues me a lot, is how, in the middle of hunter-gatherer pleistocene times, the world ended up in the events related to Atlantis.
