[HN Gopher] Archaeological analysis suggests warfare helped soci...
___________________________________________________________________
Archaeological analysis suggests warfare helped societies become
more complex
Author : pseudolus
Score : 50 points
Date : 2022-06-29 11:46 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| mediocregopher wrote:
| War is a symptom of various causes, like over-population,
| changing geographical conditions, and just plain old greed. It is
| not a root cause. If humans had no bloodthirst we would still
| wage war, so long as we had a will to survive (something which
| would be difficult to take out of a lifeform).
|
| The actual article only asserts that military innovation is a
| predictor for social complexity, which is pretty different from
| saying that "war makes society complex".
|
| > "Nobody likes this ugly idea because obviously warfare is a
| horrible thing, and we don't like to think it can have any
| positive effects."
|
| The implicit assumption being that a more complex society _is_ a
| good thing, which is not clear to me.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It's possible to cooperate to survive, it seems much harder
| (more complex!), but I don't agree that it's impossible. Much
| easier, I'm sure.
|
| We'd need to forgo some autonomy to achieve it IMO, for
| example: we'd need to get a handle on population rises; we'd
| need to limit resource usage using some mechanism other than
| financial affordability; and lots else.
| [deleted]
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It may not be universally clear but to most people it clearly
| is a good thing to be in a more complex society. im definitely
| happy to not be sitting in a hut in a jungle with no other
| option.
| [deleted]
| glitchc wrote:
| Warfare requires belief in an idea (or a collection of ideas).
| Animals capable of holding beliefs and ideas are likely to have
| complex societies and engage in war with other complex societies
| espousing a different set of ideas. Both are symptoms of higher
| cognitive function.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Ideas are a pretense in war, not a cause.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| I like watching ant colonies wage war against one another. I'm
| not sure what you are saying is true.
| trashtester wrote:
| Any social anmial that claim a territory can have warfare. From
| ants and up.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| This really comes down to how narrowly you define warfare and
| I'm pretty unclear on a good definition. Ant colonies fight
| battles with other ant colonies but do they fight wars?
|
| Does war require that the participants have some sort of shared
| goal? It is not an infrequent occurrence that in human wars the
| planners and decision makers are not unified around the aims of
| the war.
| User23 wrote:
| Somehow some mint started growing in my landscape. It's
| definitely waging a war on all the other weeds, and except
| for a few patches of monkey grass, it's winning decisively.
|
| It reminds me of the scene in Anathem where two of the monks
| wage a garden battle.
| hammock wrote:
| Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1787:
|
| _What country before ever existed a century and half without a
| rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their
| rulers are not warned from time to time that their people
| preserve the spirit of resistance?
|
| Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts,
| pardon and pacify them.
|
| What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of
| liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of
| patriots and tyrants.
|
| It is its natural manure._
|
| He seemed to believe in warfare theory
| Gys wrote:
| I wonder if he still would be with the current state of arms
| and options for mass destruction.
| googlryas wrote:
| Maybe? Flintlock muskets were fairly new technology around
| the US revolution - less than 100 years before that, people
| would have been using match locks and arquebuses - relatively
| the difference is probably similar to the difference between
| a smith and wesson revolver and an AR-15.
| eric-hu wrote:
| Did "right to bear arms" ever include larger weapons like
| cannons? I've kind of wondered why the second amendment
| doesn't cover larger and more destructive things.
| eterevsky wrote:
| Since the study concerns itself mostly with ancient
| civilizations, a better title would be "_Did_ warfare make
| societies more complex".
|
| We can't extrapolate the findings about the ancient societies to
| the post-industrial age.
| jokoon wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder about a worldwide, UN-controlled authority to
| dismantle any organization and factories that build firearms or
| other weapons that use powder.
|
| Maybe there will be a day in the future where firearms will be
| banned worldwide.
|
| Of course firearms will still exist but will be rare, making
| armed conflict almost impossible, and they would only be produced
| in very small quantities, to defend against people who make them
| illegally.
|
| One thing that should be definitely be banned, are long distance
| rockets mounted on trucks. Those are very inaccurate and should
| not exist.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| The UN would have to keep guns and other weapons because they
| have to enforce the no-weapons edict. Sure a realistic side
| effect is that the UN assumes an ever increasing level of
| power. But that is just the side effect of utopia.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| > making armed conflict almost impossible
|
| As China and India have demonstrated recently, this is not the
| case. Firearms are not the source of conflict.
|
| I also question whether you truly mean all firearms would be
| banned as it would not be possible to enforce this ban without
| your UN-controlled authority possessing firearms. So this is
| yet another proposal for only the government to have a monopoly
| on weapons.
| carapace wrote:
| "Klaatu barada nikto." You are thinking of "Gort"
|
| > Gort is an eight-foot tall, seamless robot apparently
| constructed from a single piece of "flexible metal". He is but
| one member of a "race of robots" invented by an interplanetary
| confederation (described as "A sort of United Nations on a
| Planetary level" by Klaatu, who is a representative of that
| confederation) to protect their citizens against all aggression
| by destroying any aggressors. Klaatu describes "him" as one of
| an interstellar police force, holding irrevocable powers to
| "preserve the peace" by destroying any aggressor. The fear of
| provoking these robots acts as a deterrent against aggression.
|
| ~
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gort_(The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_...
|
| The gunless world will arise when everyone voluntarily puts
| them down together and they rust along with the factories that
| made them.
| js8 wrote:
| > Sometimes I wonder about a worldwide, UN-controlled authority
| to dismantle any organization and factories that build firearms
| or other weapons that use powder.
|
| Well, banning nuclear weapons (and establishing an inspection
| schedule) would be a good start: https://www.icanw.org/
|
| Unfortunately, NATO is currently opposed to this.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| What's unfortunate about that? (Besides, obviously, every
| other nuclear-armed nation opposing it, not "just NATO")
|
| Moving the needle to zero is vastly more difficult than arms
| reduction; any leftovers are humongously dangerous which
| makes me question who actually thinks trying to do this is a
| good idea.
| js8 wrote:
| NATO is currently not, however, engaged in any effort of
| nuclear arms reduction. As somebody from a NATO member
| country, I don't care about other countries position on
| this, as I believe my country should be a moral leader.
|
| I have to say, I consider MAD theory to be completely
| misguided, and also morally wrong to engage in nuclear
| retaliatory attack.
|
| However, I understand the worry. It would be possible for
| NATO to propose an aggressive, world-wide nuclear arms
| reduction schedule (and possibly even lead it), but they
| are not doing that (they are rather doing the opposite,
| expanding).
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > NATO is currently not, however, engaged in any effort
| of nuclear arms reduction.
|
| START I, SORT, and New START (which is currently ongoing)
| don't count? And INF, though that was shelved due to
| Russian breaches (Kaliningrad _cough_ ), but even without
| that it wouldn't have had much more of a future due to it
| being bilateral, with no Chinese involvement.
|
| > I have to say, I consider MAD theory to be completely
| misguided, and also morally wrong to engage in nuclear
| retaliatory attack.
|
| MAD is irrelevant for this question. It's about stable vs
| unstable conditions. When everyone in the room has a gun,
| there is balance. If everyone in the room provably has no
| gun, there is also a balance. The former balance is
| vastly more stable than the latter, because even a
| fractional gun in the latter scenario changes the picture
| dramatically, while doing approximately nothing in the
| latter. Consequently, the value of an individual gun goes
| up hugely as the total number of guns in the rooms
| approaches zero. Russia having one more nuke today? Buys
| them virtually nothing. Someone finding a nuke in the
| basement in the utopian nuke-free world? _They own the
| world._
|
| It's an inherently unstable setup. Nukes will never go
| away and trying to do so is the most dangerous thing
| anyone could try to do. It's perhaps the least probable
| example of trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
| The best we can do is multilateral reduction in lock-step
| and preventing proliferation to more states.
|
| > (they are rather doing the opposite, expanding)
|
| Elaborate
| js8 wrote:
| I don't consider START or INF to be progress, it's pretty
| much an attempt to "prop up" the untenable nature of MAD
| theory (which, as you point out, completely disregards
| salami tactics, for instance). It's better but not much.
|
| I disagree with the idea that if everyone has a gun, the
| world is more stable (with respect to gun use) than if
| nobody has a gun. We see something similar play out in
| mass shootings in the U.S compared to other countries.
|
| I also don't think we can't, with diplomatic effort, put
| genie back to bottle. I think we owe it to future
| generations to try.
|
| NATO is expanding to Finland and Sweden (which was
| actually considering to sign nuclear weapon ban), not to
| mention earlier expansion. They are part of the problem
| (NATO is pretty much designed as a nuclear pact). There
| is plenty of countries without nuclear weapons or
| umbrella and doing just fine.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| > Sometimes I wonder about a worldwide, UN-controlled authority
| to dismantle any organization and factories that build firearms
| or other weapons that use powder.
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...
| vanattab wrote:
| They are not all very inaccurate. Some of them have GPS guided
| rockets
| philangist wrote:
| > a worldwide, UN-controlled authority
|
| How would it enforce it's authority with non-compliant actors?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Easier to just kill all humans.
|
| Also, have you considered what the term "authority" means?
|
| But then again, a bunch of people still also think communism or
| socialism are great ideas, so...
| bell-cot wrote:
| Grumpy Geezer reaction to the title: "None of the kids behind
| that Controversial Study knew squat about the history of Rome,
| did they? Nor game theory. Nor..."
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| War is an evolution on a societal organization level. Survival of
| the fittest.
|
| Through wars, we get to find out which system better and
| organizational structure fits better in the current world. Is it
| a fake democracy, anarchy, or an autocracy? Who will survive in
| the end? What kind of balance between military, science and
| economy works the best? What is more important, human rights of
| all in and out groups, or cohesion of the main societal group?
| Should the decision makers be people we elect, or "objectively"
| most capable and smartest individuals.
|
| We all played Civilization, and we know that different societies
| have different trade-offs and balances. The principle is the same
| in the real world, just more nuanced and complex. And it takes
| decades to show the results.
|
| Back to the question if the warfare make societies more complex?
| Maybe, but only in cases where more complex societies win the
| war, which is not always. We may consider current Afghanistan
| under Taliban one of the simplest societal structure, and they
| won hands-down against a complex alliance of complex organized
| societies.
| upupandup wrote:
| Chimpanzees engage in warfare, it is one of the few species other
| than humans to engage in mass combat. Is it complex? I would say
| to a certain degree.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
| manthedudeguy wrote:
| VictorPath wrote:
| Chimpanzees certainly don't engage in warfare, unless you want
| to anthropomorphic chimpanzees and change the nomenclature of
| warfare.
|
| While chimpanzees certainly hit each other, they have not been
| observed much to kill one another, unless humans artificially
| modify their feeding environments and territories.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Wars between groups of chimps are well documented.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
| missedthecue wrote:
| Is that the only one ever documented, because it's the only
| one I ever see sourced.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/science/22chimp.html
| missedthecue wrote:
| very, very interesting
| carapace wrote:
| Could the chimps have learned these behaviors from us?
| Maybe chimpanzees are bonobos that live too close to
| humans?
| upupandup wrote:
| More like chimpanzees by nature preceded humanity. We are
| mostly likely some derivative of them through some sort
| of eugenic (natural or not its unknown) process that
| helped us gain consciousness of the highest degree.
|
| It's likely that certain pharmacological byproduct
| consumed shaped and formed our awareness, the same way
| alcohol and tobacco have produced our modern male
| dominated society.
|
| Think about this. A chimpanzee encounters a strange
| mushroom, consumes it, suddenly begins to attain visual
| acuity which allows him more information gathering about
| the surroundings. Not to mention conceptualization,
| abstraction all of which are basic building blocks of
| human consciousness.
|
| We might be a decendant of group of primates that
| successfully mastered fire manipulation. Cooked meat has
| far more nutrients and proteins that further help develop
| ouir brain.
|
| Just running on bits and pieces I read here and there and
| its fun to entertain the thought of how we emerged as a
| dominant species. I'm under the school of thought that
| there was some informational/knowledge transfer that
| radically set us apart from the rest. Emergence of
| consciousness and our continued expansion of our
| awareness seems very much real.
| upupandup wrote:
| holy cow they even ave that side panel where they show the
| strengths on both sides with commanders and the outcome of
| the war. this is eerie
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Wait until you hear about ants
| eevilspock wrote:
| Very many human endeavors and technology were accelerated/funded
| by war (including cold wars). Some very recent examples:
|
| - satellites and space travel
|
| - the internet
|
| - GPS
|
| I'm sure we can add many more things to this list. (Please do in
| reply.)
|
| I don't think it's a contradiction to acknowledge this and at the
| same time be anti-war, just as it isn't a contradiction to
| acknowledge greed and selfishness as a strongly motivating factor
| in human nature (such acknowledgment is the very basis of
| capitalism) and at the same time advocate for human society to
| find a way to transcend our base natures and evolve a society and
| economic system not built on them.
|
| Transcending our base nature is the whole point of culture.
| boredumb wrote:
| Reminds me of https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-the-
| long-run-wars... from 2014.
| juve1996 wrote:
| FTA: "The majority of archaeologists are against the warfare
| theory," says Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at
| the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and the new study's lead
| author. "Nobody likes this ugly idea because obviously warfare is
| a horrible thing, and we don't like to think it can have any
| positive effects."
|
| I find it really concerning if this is actually true. How can you
| be an archaeologist and not think war has been a major part of
| human history?
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| These beliefs--that (1) war has been a major part of human
| history and (2) war doesn't have _positive_ effects--seem
| compatible to me, what do you mean?
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Part of it is clarifying the claim. Is it "some positive
| effects" meaning some subset of all the effects being
| positive or "overall positive effect" meaning the sum of all
| the negative and positive effects is positive? The first one
| is pretty simple, you just need to find one positive effect.
| The second is much more difficult and requires making
| judgements of the relative size of good and bad effects which
| is much more subjective, and I could see someone's view of
| subjective waits making it impossible for this to ever be
| true.
|
| But both views still require deciding if something is
| positive, which isn't exactly a scientific question. It is a
| bit like asking if evolution has positive effects. From a
| purely scientific view, is life or increased complexity of
| life a positive?
| juve1996 wrote:
| It seems dubious to claim something that has impacted history
| as significantly as war has not had any positive effects on
| civilization.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| It's pretty easy to imagine that war significantly slowed
| humanities advancement and caused significant pain and
| suffering along the way. Anything good that came out of
| warfare might also have come out of less horrible methods.
|
| Not sure why you are having so much trouble with this.
| bergenty wrote:
| Much as I dislike it, I'm having trouble too. Warfare
| will push the society to create better weapons
| (metallurgy, chariot making etc,), better logistics,
| solidify hierarchies etc. The spoils of war are extremely
| effective motivators at a very base human level (power,
| land, wealth, rape).
|
| I doubt peaceful means could achieve what war can.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| > I doubt peaceful means could achieve what war can.
|
| It works the other way as well, I doubt war can achieve
| what peace can.
|
| > Warfare will push the society to create better weapons
| (metallurgy, chariot making etc,), better logistics,
| solidify hierarchies etc.
|
| In many historical examples this also involved the
| destruction of knowledge. The Roman empire set
| mathematics back a thousand years. The Greeks were very
| close to calculus.
|
| Large hierarchies often stagnate societies.
|
| The result of the Peloponnesian War was a diminished
| Athens and stagnant slowly dying Sparta.
|
| Did WW1 help Europe by killing two generations of French
| and German Mathematicians? Konigsberg was one of the top
| intellectual centers of the world for 300 years? How is
| it doing now? Can you even find it on a map?
|
| Warfare isn't just on thing that we isolate and ask, "is
| it beneficial?" The impact of a war on a society depends
| enormously on context and the chaos of history. Did WW2
| result in massive advances in human science, I think so.
| How can we know what the world would have looked like if
| so many human lives had not be lost? The world got really
| good jet engines but what did it lose?
|
| Did WW1 set science back, I also think that is true. WW1
| also helped set in motion the end of European colonialism
| which is a long term good for the world.
|
| There is no meaningful answer to this question when set
| at a scope as large as you have set it.
| goatlover wrote:
| The Shadows from Babylon 5 disagree. A contrarian point
| of view would be to look at the long term results of
| extinction events or pandemics, like the Black Death in
| Europe. One could argue that major disruptions shake up
| the status quo, leading to new evolutionary outcomes that
| were suppressed. Dinosaurs get replaced by mammals. Old
| European monarchies and treaties get replaced by modern
| democracies and capital.
| User23 wrote:
| I think the trouble is that you're emotionally wedded to
| the idea that war is absolutely bad. That's preventing
| you from even considering the possibility of higher order
| consequences of war having positive aspects. It's
| conceivable that warfare improved the human capability
| for advanced cooperation, motivated engineering advances,
| inspired great art, selected for stronger and healthier
| men, lead to beneficial gene flows between populations,
| and had other largely positive effects.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I'm not having any trouble at all, I can entertain both
| the idea that war has advanced society despite other
| issues and the idea that it has not. It is, in fact,
| unclear to me.
|
| I'm replying to a comment that says the idea that it has
| not is obviously impossible to entertain.
| wongarsu wrote:
| My intuition would say that surely can't be true, given
| recent history. Both WWII and the Cold War advanced
| technology tremendously. Sure, most of it would have
| happened anyways eventually, but advances in aviation,
| radar and nuclear would have taken decades longer. Our
| space launch capabilities are by many metrics only now
| catching up to where they were under war conditions 50
| years ago. Who knows how long it would have taken if the
| Germans didn't invent the V2 to bomb London, and the
| Americans and Russians didn't develop it into
| intercontinental missiles, culminating in a space race
| for ideological superiority.
|
| That said, this might all be recency bias on my part.
| Historically war has been a big drain on scarce
| resources, most of all non-agricultural manpower. It's
| hard to advance society if everyone who isn't on the
| fields is working on war-related things.
|
| Then again, without the military demand for better
| barrels and stronger steel, would we have developed the
| technology that enabled the pistons and steam engines
| that powered the industrial revolution?
| lupire wrote:
| On the _winner 's_ civilization, mostly.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Even the losers - we borrow many ideas from plenty of
| failed civilizations.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| And many ideas are also simply lost, history is full of
| the ebb and flow of advancement as civilizations are
| destroyed and plundered.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Despite these catastrophic civilization collapses,
| civilizations have grown increasingly more advanced
| despite a localized minimum.
|
| The need to wage war to defend or gain resources seems
| like a major driver of complexity. To maintain a military
| it needs equipped and fed, requiring large supply chains,
| and hence, more complexity. If you didn't need to defend
| your food stores, you wouldn't need such complexity.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| > How can you be an archaeologist and not think war has been a
| major part of human history?
|
| Archaeologists are not arguing that warfare hasn't been a major
| part of human history, rather they don't implied idea that
| warfare benefited humanity.
|
| However this isn't what the study is saying, the study is
| saying that "the introduction of mounted warfare and the
| emergence of iron weapons" resulted in an increase in social
| complexity.
|
| * An increase in social complexity may or may not be a good
| thing for humanity overall. For instance the indicators of
| social complexity used here were among other things: size of
| bureaucracy and size of empire. The fall of the Russian empire
| likely resulted in a decrease in social complexity for Poland:
| Poland no longer part of a larger state. Many Polish people
| will tell you that gaining their freedom was an improvement.
|
| * There can be different types of increases in social
| complexity. One might be beneficial to humanity and one might
| be terrible for humanity. These are not distinguished.
|
| * The study is upfront about social complexity not being the
| same as cultural complexity. You can have an increase in social
| complexity while seeing a decrease in cultural complexity.
|
| * They are looking at one specific innovation, iron weapons and
| mounted warfare. This doesn't generalize to all warfare. The
| war between Carthage and Rome resulted in Carthage's total
| destruction, this did not benefit Carthage and reduced the
| social complexity of Carthage to null.
|
| It's a very big leap from, societies that gain a set specific
| of weapons improvements gain in social complexity as they build
| bigger empires --> warfare offers more benefit to humanity than
| it costs.
| lupire wrote:
| It's baffling how stupid they allegedly are. They are
| scientists and they don't understand that competition and
| hurting someone can be profitable?
|
| Who made the shirts they are wearing and that good they are
| eating?
| leksak wrote:
| A generous way to read it is that they don't like the idea, but
| not necessarily claim that it is wrong. Although the use of the
| word "against" would plausibly imply "opposed" rather than
| "made uncomfortable by"
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Turchin isn't saying that majority of archaelogists don't
| believe that warfare was a major part of human history.
|
| It's a specific statement about theories about enabled/drove
| the increase in societal complexity in the last 10,000 years.
| The question is about the relative importance of agriculture
| and warfare as enablers and drivers.
|
| Unfortunately without the whole interview/quote, it's hard to
| parse out exactly what Turchin means when he says "the warfare
| theory". We do know that Turchin is arguing that warfare
| (external conflict) and agriculture are together the two
| dominant factors in driving societal complexity.
|
| The most charitable explanation would be that the people who
| are "against the warfare theory" would probably argue that
| agriculture is the dominant factor, with external conflict
| firmly in second place, as an important (perhaps the most
| important) secondary factor. Another reasonable reading would
| be that the majority of archaeologists do not believe that
| warfare is the dominant factor in societal complexity.
| kipchak wrote:
| My understanding of Turchin's argument from Ultrasociety is
| basically that for very early civilizations people were
| generally worse off individually giving up autonomy to
| absolute rulers, and that it goes against most people's and
| similar primates feelings about fairness/egalitarianism.
|
| As a result there must have been some very large advantage to
| centralization, which he argues was likely war in order to
| defend against external threats or raiders.
| User23 wrote:
| > I find it really concerning if this is actually true. How can
| you be an archaeologist and not think war has been a major part
| of human history?
|
| My understanding is that clear evidence of conquest and
| genocide, like artifacts associated with a culture ceasing to
| be made while all new artifacts of a different culture begin to
| be made, is habitually explained away as mere cultural
| exchange. The hypothesis is that the resident population wasn't
| wiped out, it just wholesale adopted a different culture.
|
| Another issue is that archeologically speaking it's pretty hard
| to tell war from migration. That's one of those clear
| scientific results that researchers prefer not to talk too much
| about on account of the political elite's position on
| migration.
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