The spear brought peace to humanity, researcher claims

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="95%" height="1"> <tr> <center> <td valign="top" width="33%" height="33"> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="5">The spear brought peace to humanity, researcher claims</font></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Arial">July 2</font><font face="Arial"><font size="1">, 2005<br> Courtesy Queen's University<br> and World Science staff<br> </font> <br> </font> <b><font face="Arial" size="2">The invention of spears, paradoxically, heralded a long era of peace for Stone Age peoples, and helped them spread out of Africa to colonize the world, an anthropologist argues.<br> <br> Raymond C. Kelly of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Mich., said spears made it costlier for people to attack each other, at least until people developed military organizations. This led to a nearly 400,000-year lull in group violence, said Kelly, writing in this week’s early online edition of the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<br> <br> Kelly’s proposal adds one theory to many that researchers have advanced to explain why humans conduct wars, and whether warfare is hard-wired in the human brain. He based his conclusions on observations of human tribal societies and of group fighting among chimps, which has been compared to a primitive form of warfare. <br> <br> The period of peace, he said, may have been a bridge between an earlier era of warfare—in which our fighting was somewhat like the chimp battles—and the later era, lasting from around 14,000 years ago to the present. <br> <br> The two violent periods each had different characteristics in terms of the type of violence employed, Kelly argued. And the spear’s invention, he claimed in the paper, was a “major turning point.”<br> <br> In the chimp battles that some researchers compare to warfare, chimps have been documented to get into fights as they roam the borders of their group’s territory. If a group of chimps encounters a lone chimp in that area, the group will sometimes take advantage of its numerical advantage to gang up on the lone chimp and kill it. <br> <br> Some anthropologists have theorized that in evolutionary terms, this is a strategy to whittle away the strength of a neighboring group, in order to more easily encroach on its territory and obtain more food. Some other researchers disagree, but Kelly said he generally accepts the theory. In fact, people may have used similar strategies hundreds of thousands of years ago, he wrote.<br> <br> But the spear, he added, made such tactics obsolete. <br> <br> With killing at a distance possible, strength in numbers was no longer a deciding factor in fights, he reasons. Thus, invading a neighboring territory no longer paid off. The defenders would usually have superior numbers, better knowledge of the territory and the advantage of surprise conferred by the ability to kill at a distance.<br> <br> Thus cooperation took over as the dominant strategy, Kelly reasoned.<br> <br> Cooperation sometimes entailed one group moving away from another group, to go hunt elsewhere, rather than invading the other group’s land to hunt there, Kelly argued. This may have been a factor humanity’s spread out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world, a dispersal that many scientists estimate took place sometime between 45,000 and 80,000 years ago.<br> <br> The period of peace came to an end, Kelly claimed, when humans developed more effective military organizations. Previously, fighting had been the province of hunters who essentially freelanced as warriors, he said. This wasn’t conducive to all-out war. But later, this equation changed radically, as full-fledged warriors emerged. <br> <br> This “facilitated the mobilization of all adult male group members and their participation in preplanned dawn raids on settlements in which the tactical advantages of surprise and numerical superiority could be brought to bear,” he wrote. <br> <br> “At this juncture, the unit involved in combat is a raiding party… rather than a hunting party,” he added. And “the location of combat shifts from the border zone to the sleeping quarters at the core of a group’s territory.” This, Kelly claimed, led to the “origin of war” in the modern sense of the word. <br> </font></b> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <b> <font face="Arial" size="2">* * *</font> </p> <p><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#FFFFFF">Send us a <a href="mailto:editor@world-science.net">comment</a> on this story, or <a href="mailto:?Body=http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050822_spearfrm.htm">send it to a friend</a></font> </p> <p>  </p> </b> </center> </td> </tr> </table> </body>