Why Warfare? Lessons from the Past

• Published in: Daedalus (Cambridge, Mass.) Vol. 136; no. 1; pp. 13 - 21
• Main Author: LeBlanc, Steven A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1209, USA The MIT Press 22-12-2007; MIT Press; American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Subjects: Analysis; Ancient warfare; Archaeology; Behavior; Competition; Ethical aspects; Evolutionary genetics; Farmers; Human genetics; Humans; Iraq War-2003; Morality of war; Natural resources; Peacetime; Politics; Scarce resources; Social aspects; Violence; War; War and morals; Warfare; Wars; United States
• ISSN: 0011-5266; 1548-6192
• DOI: 10.1162/daed.2007.136.1.13

Most political scientists and historians who consider the reasons for warfare start with the modern era, or even the iSoos; fewer go back to the ancient Greeks. Discerning whether or not human warfare has a genetic base, for instance, is an impossible task to accomplish with such limited scope; instead, we must examine evidence from deep history and worldwide ethnography, which represent most of human history and most of human cultural variability. For example, archaeological evidence now shows that the SaIishian tribes of the Plateau area of western North America, who had no remembered history of warfare when studied by anthropologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had had significant warfare a few centuries earlier.