| ▲ | carefree-bob an hour ago | |
It depends on what you mean, as I did not argue that life for the average person in a traditional society was filled with violence. What I argued is that whenever two competing groups came into contact, wanting the same land, the result was usually genocide (or one of the groups fled to another area, where they would have to fight those inhabitants), and as a result, when history records a new group "inhabiting" or "settling" a peace of land that is new to them, then that inhabitation is generally not peaceful, but genocidal in nature. Regardless of whether there is a written history to record the violence, we can have confidence that the violence did occur. Now, given that modern humans have been around for 300,000 years at least (the date keeps being pushed back, since before the Moroccan discovery, it was thought to be 100,000 years), and have been swarming over the whole earth, that is a lot of violence and genocide, even though it was certainly possible to live a life of peace as well for a specific individual, since migrations weren't going on all the time in all places. | ||
| ▲ | regularization 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | |
Skeletons from 100,000 years ago look similar to our own, and as you said, recent discoveries could push that back to 300,000 years ago. There is little evidence of behavioral modernity - cave paintings, Venus figurines, hearths, burials etc. prior to 50,000 years ago. There is some evidence so the time could always be pushed back. Farmers compete for land. Migratory hunter-gatherers are just passing through, so there is less competition for land. Also, bands usually mate with nearby bands, who are often more distant relatives. There has not been much evidence of hunter-gatherer bands clashing violently then or even in modern times, including observations over past centuries. There is a plethora of evidence of post-neolithic farming and then industrial societies being this way. | ||