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Intermission

Knife I'm working on for a customer.View attachment 149666
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". . the fear of unpredictable disasters, rather than actual shortages is what mainly motivates people to go to war. Societies with only the threat of disasters, with a memory of unpredictable disasters during a 25-year period, fought very frequently, just like societies that actually had one or more disasters in the previous 25 years. So we think that people may decide to go to war because they want to cushion the impact of expected but unpredictable disasters, scarcity-producing events they expect to occur in the future but cannot control or prevent. The idea that war is an attempt ahead of time to mitigate the effect of unpredictable disasters is supported by the results pertaining to the outcomes or war. Almost always the victors in war take land or other resources from the defeated, even if the victors do not have resource problems at the time. If you don't need resources at the time, why take resources from the enemy, if not to protect against anticipated but unpredictable scarcity? Surprisingly, taking resources from the defeated occurs usually in foraging as well as in the agricultural cases. It looks like people even in pre-capitalist societies may have been mainly motivated to go to war for economic reasons."
Making the World More Peaceful (2001)
Carol and Melvin Ember


Tldr: war wasn't exclusive to farming. We want, we take.
 
war wasn't exclusive to farming
The piece more highlights that war isn't exclusive to scarcity.

When the average temperature in Europe rose by a few degrees is cause greatly increased crop yields, which lead to large population booms.
During this period we see increases in conflict and massive advancement in military technology. Going from viking era light troops to full plate heavy cavalry. We also see the normalization of a class of people raised from birth for combat, with no other profession. This is during a time of abundance.

The following cold period and its corresponding decline in food supply, we see expected famine, diseases, and population collapses, but we also see an increase in despotism, scapegoating, violent oppression of marginalized people, anti-semitism, witch hunts really put their boots on during this period.

This cycle is similar in some ways to an earlier warm period enabling, in part, the mass expansion of the Roman empire. Abundance of food supply allowed one civilization to take over much of the world.
While the empire later collapsed for a variety of reasons, it does correspond with a decrease in average temperatures.
The time following the collapse was also bad news for most people.
 
Surprisingly, taking resources from the defeated occurs usually in foraging as well as in the agricultural cases. It looks like people even in pre-capitalist societies may have been mainly motivated to go to war for economic reasons."
Making the World More Peaceful (2001)
Carol and Melvin Ember
Carol, and Melvin, Ember are well respected anthropologists...but, they don't necessarily represent the consensus view. They've been consistent in their more war like view, over 40years. I don't agree with her overall view, and it is mostly due to definitions. She divides 'foragers' into hunter/gatherers and 'complex hunter/gatherers'. Complex hunter/gatherers include semi-nomadic pastoral or agrarian and even static fish cultures. She states that complex hunter/gatherers are far more aggressive/violent than basic hunter/gatherers...I agree...I don't agree that they are hunter/gatherers at all. She also defines anything above a single death as 'warfare'...I think that is a pretty loose definition, she states that personal feuds are included in warfare as well...I don't.

In the statement you highlighted (and in previous statements), the loose definitions are obvious in that she mentions specifically economic motivations and taking of land. There is no economy or land ownership in H/G cultures.

We are talking communities that range in size from an extended family to a few dozen people...no more than a hundred at the extreme. War isn't a real possibility when there is no competition for resources and all the combatants on your side are family (any one who dies will be family). There was a discovery a decade or so of the remains of 27 bodies that were ~10,000 years old. This set the anthropology world on fire as proof of H/G warfare. In the last several years, there has been several papers published that dispute that the remains are all contemporary with each other, and that the claims of blunt force trauma as cause of death on several of the remains isn't supported by forensic science. So, this one of a kind discovery of a mere 27 casualties of a H/G war probably isn't any of those things.
 
Even in large migratory tribe of several hundred the risk of losing 15-30 of your youngest and strongest would have been obvious, in a conflict that most likely to result in a stale-mate, and unlikely to result in a situation where you could take from your enemy as you saw fit.

Where as, in a group that size, the benefits of trade and intermarriage will be equally obvious.
 

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