The birth of war: an archaeological survey concludes that warfare, despite its malignant hold on modern life, has not always been part of the human condition

Natural History, July-August, 2003 by R. Brian Ferguson

Raymond C. Kelly, an anthropolgist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in his book Warless Societies and the Origin of War, has detected what may be another important pattern in the origins of war. In examining the ethnographic literature to compare hunter-gatherers who make war with those who do not, he finds a pattern: Among the few known cases of warless societies of hunter-gatherers, social organizations do not extend beyond family and a loose, flexible network of kin. In contrast, hunter-gatherer societies that make war have larger and more defined groupings such as clans. The existence of bounded groups makes for a sense of collective injury and desire for collective retaliation.

Over the millennia, tribal warfare became more the rule than the exception. As the preconditions for warfare (permanent settlements, population growth, greater social hierarchy, increased trade, and climatic crises) became more common, more tribal peoples in more areas adopted the practice. That development in itself spread warmaking to other groups. Once ancient states arose, they employed "barbarians" on their peripheries to expand their empires and secure their extensive trade networks. Finally, the European expansion after 1492 set native against native to capture territory and slaves and to fight imperial rivalries. Refugee groups were forced into others' lands, manufactured goods were introduced and fought over (as with the Yanomami), and the spread of European weapons made fighting ever more lethal.

When I began studying war in the mid-1970s, I was trained in an approach called cultural ecology, which argued along the lines that Steven LeBlanc does today. Population pressure on food resources--land, game, herd animals--was seen as the usual cause of indigenous warfare. In some cases the theory did work. Among the peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast prior to the depopulation of the nineteenth century, groups fought to gain access to prime resource locations, such as estuaries with good salmon streams. But in far more cases around the world, such as that of the Yanomami, warfare could not be linked to food competition.

Today, under the rubric "environmental security," many nonanthropologists who work on issues of international security embrace that ecological view. Recent outbreaks of violence, they argue, may be rooted in scarcities of subsistence goods, fueled by growing populations and degraded resources (such as too little and eroded cropland). But when you examine the cases for which that interpretation seems superficially plausible--the conflicts of the past several years in Chiapas, Mexico, for instance, or in Rwanda--they fail to confirm the "ecological" theory.

We anthropologists are just beginning to bring our experience to bear in the environmental security debate. What we find is that if a peasant population is suffering for lack of basic resources, the main cause of that scarcity is an unequal distribution of resources within the society, a matter of politics and economics, rather than the twin bugbears of too many people and not enough to go around.