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Has there been a peaceful time before civilization, where people weren't fighting over territory? Without modern political organization and agriculture, we'd s

Has there been a peaceful time before civilization, where people weren't fighting over territory? Without modern political organization and agriculture, we'd spend all of our time either trying to hunt food or steal hunting grounds from others, or we'd wind up right back where we are (likely after another 10,000+ years of slavery).

dredmorbius 9y ago
Possibly, though in large part because the population densities and portability of food afforded were insufficient to allow for widespread warfar. You'd have had inter-tribal conflicts, but almost certainly of limited and brief duration. Quite probably intra-tribal as well. I believe it's Jared Diamond who discusses how the introduction of the potato (a calorically-dense, portable foodstuff) changed the nature of warfare in New Zealand as tribes with the potato could sustain far longer military campaigns than those without. "An army marches on its stomach." Not so much "weren't fighting" as "couldn't fight as much, as hard, as long, or in as organised a fashion".
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Evidence of cannibalism, violence, etc in early hominids suggests that low population numbers didn’t offer a cure to the problem. We are the problem.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Agreed. Again, it's not the existence of conflict I'm considering, but the scale.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Fair enough, but remember to put a “per capita” section in the scale.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        It's ... more complicated than that. I've just recently run across a reference to a metric for military force and capability, though I can't recall at the moment what it is based on. Though I believe it related to the capacity to project force. The size of an army, its relation to the total population size, the distance / range at which it can act, the quantity, accuracy, and efficacy of force project, and much else. Just by way of example, I've been looking at WWII history, particularly the fall of France. On base specifications, French armour was actually more capable than German, with one critical exception: German tanks had radios. The ability to act in concert and respond in realtime to changing battle circumstances proved critical. Against a relatively numerically-balanced French force, the German military was tremendously more effective. Blitzkreig tactics didn't work against numerically-superiour, and largely technically-matched, US and British forces on and after D-Day, though. Quantifying fitness metrics is complicated.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Possibly, though in large part because the population densities and portability of food afforded were insufficient to allow for widespread warfar. You'd have had inter-tribal conflicts, but almost certainly of limited and brief duration. Quite probably intra-tribal as well. I believe it's Jared Diamond who discusses how the introduction of the potato (a calorically-dense, portable foodstuff) changed the nature of warfare in New Zealand as tribes with the potato could sustain far longer military campaigns than those without. "An army marches on its stomach." Not so much "weren't fighting" as "couldn't fight as much, as hard, as long, or in as organised a fashion".

QAPereo 9y ago
Evidence of cannibalism, violence, etc in early hominids suggests that low population numbers didn’t offer a cure to the problem. We are the problem.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Agreed. Again, it's not the existence of conflict I'm considering, but the scale.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Fair enough, but remember to put a “per capita” section in the scale.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      It's ... more complicated than that. I've just recently run across a reference to a metric for military force and capability, though I can't recall at the moment what it is based on. Though I believe it related to the capacity to project force. The size of an army, its relation to the total population size, the distance / range at which it can act, the quantity, accuracy, and efficacy of force project, and much else. Just by way of example, I've been looking at WWII history, particularly the fall of France. On base specifications, French armour was actually more capable than German, with one critical exception: German tanks had radios. The ability to act in concert and respond in realtime to changing battle circumstances proved critical. Against a relatively numerically-balanced French force, the German military was tremendously more effective. Blitzkreig tactics didn't work against numerically-superiour, and largely technically-matched, US and British forces on and after D-Day, though. Quantifying fitness metrics is complicated.