Читать книгу Tuberculosis and War - Группа авторов - Страница 13

Most of human history, to the limits that are known, was inhabited by hunter-gatherers, foragers who survived by hunting and killing animals, both large and small, and eating whatever foods they could pick from trees, find in nests or ponds, dig up, or scavenge. Before becoming extinct, groups of H. erectus survived as hunter-gatherers for around 2 million years – far longer than H. sapiens relatively brief existence thus far [4]. Dwellings, mostly temporary, were built and caves were commonly used for shelter and refuge. H. sapiens started out as nomadic hunter-gatherers, but as described in the next section, Neolithic Demographic Revolution, began to settle down in a single location, growing plants and domesticating animals.

A global marker of both the wide distribution and creativity of early H. sapiens culture are examples of Stone Age cave art. First recognized in Spain and France, outstanding decorative paintings were later discovered in Indonesia, some as early as 25,000–40,000 years ago. Before H. neanderthalensis became extinct, they also contributed to cave art. Most early cave paintings depict everyday animals – but some infrequent ones, such as mammoths, lions, and rhinoceros – and stencils of cave men’s (and women’s?) fingers and hands. Far less frequent were simple representations of human beings, often stylized.

Life expectancy was undoubtedly short, one educated guess is 35 years or less, and human survival remained treacherous for millions of years. Violence was epidemic. Competition between and among groups of hunter-gatherers seeking food, mating rights, and places of refuge must have led to violence. Many, but by no means all, anthropologists seem to agree that at least H. sapiens, and possibly earlier hominids, possess innate, genetically programmed lethal violence. Experts debate whether chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, have a similar violent predisposition. Other authorities agree that killing by apes does occur but nearly always from ordinary attacks of aggression. In contrast, as living conditions improved during the end of the Pleistocene period, the prehistoric human population of hunter-gatherers enlarged during the Great Expansion as serial colonization may have caused hunting territory to become crowded; competition seems to have triggered a few episodes of organized killing of humans by humans, which have been documented as shown below.

Human warfare is rarely illustrated in cave art, but one painting in Caugnac, France, dated roughly 25,000 years ago shows a “wounded man” with 3 spears protruding from his back and upper thigh, perhaps depicting some sort of interpersonal violence [10]. More scenes of war and battles show up in the rock art of Arnhem Land, N.T., Australia, dated “as early as 10,000 years ago” [11]. Another “unique evidence of a warfare event among hunter-gatherers” was reported recently (2016) by Mirazon et al. [12] in the late Pleistocene-early Holocene period in Kenya, Africa, at an “estimated age of –9,500 to 10,500 years (ago).” These authors describe the remains of a “minimum of 27 individuals,” 10 of whose 12 skeletons were found to have serious traumatic, presumably lethal injuries; in addition, there was evidence of arrow wounds, and other signs of “deliberate violent trauma.” These examples of warfare among nomadic hunter-gatherers overlap the early origins of newly settled human groupings. (See also later section on Prehistory of warfare.)