Tracks of war

Natural History, July-August, 2003 by Peter Brown

After the disastrous looting of archaeological artifacts in Iraq, reported by our correspondent David Keys in our June issue, any positive news sounds virtually miraculous. So it was a relief to learn that many of the antiquities that had been on public display in Baghdad's National Museum had been hidden away by museum staff members before the war, sometimes in their own homes. Yet though some of the signature artifacts are safe, Keys still puts the number of stolen items in the thousands. Outside the Iraqi capital, where there are literally thousands of ancient sites, security remains patchy, and widespread looting, driven by the black market in antiquities, is continuing as we go to press.

For a broad perspective on warfare in this time of war, Natural History asked the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson to describe his ongoing survey of the evidence for conflict at prehistoric archaeological sites around the world (see "The Birth of War," page 28). In a sense, his findings so far are encouraging: no unequivocal evidence of warfare appears at any site before sometime between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago--suggesting that war is by no means an inevitable feature of the human condition. Yet if warfare is a "recent" invention, its present near-universal reach makes it one of the most "successful" inventions ever made.

Seldom has scientific nomenclature been so aptly applied as in the botanical name for the genus of the cacao tree: Theobroma, "food of the gods" (see "The Chocolate Tree," by Robert A. Rice and Russell Greenberg, page 36). As an unrepentant chocoholic, I've accumulated enough T-shirts on chocolate themes to have a decent collection of the genre. My favorite is the "Will Rogers" version: on the front it says, "I never met a piece of chocolate I didn't like," and on the back it has a large hole made by the bite of what must have been a partly literate (but very confused) dog.

You won't find that shirt in the gift shop for the "Chocolate" exhibition, which just opened in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History. But you will see plenty of other offerings--and a lot of botanical and cultural artifacts on display as well.

Readers who don't want to miss a single one of Neil deGrasse Tyson's columns should not panic over this month's table of contents. Neil is taking a much-deserved vacation this month; his column "Universe" will return in the next (September) issue of Natural History.