Again, you are just describing what happened rather than telling me why it happened. If settling down is just "preferable to humans", we'd expect it to have happened much earlier than it did.
We did settle down earlier, where possible. Iirc, Japan and the NW Pacific coast for instance, were fertile and provided enough food from foraging and hunting that one could settle down without agriculture. And those places seem to have had sedentary populations very soon after first being colonised. For most of the Earth's areas however, it wasn't sustainable to live sedentary, as there wasn't enough food. At most people had seasonal settlements. But whereever we could settle, we did so.
The same way we went from not having any other cultural invention, to their being ubiquitous or nearly so. We tend to describe all kinds of innovations, after the fact, as having had some clear utility or 'objective' attraction outside the realm of culture, but I'm not sure this is really the case. For example with fire we can clearly trace how our digestive systems evolved to deal with cooked food after we started controlling fire, so the idea that we started cooking our food because it we were better-suited to do that than to eat raw food in the beginning is clearly wrong.
Iirc, cooked food releases more nutritions than raw food, which was how we started to prefer cooked food when possible. The thing about all these cultural inventions, is that they all seem to follow an evolutionary path. From cave paintings to hieroglyphs to Mona Lisa and Campbell's Soup Cans. From wheelbarrows to chariots to rail cars and Model S. Simply saying that "we didn't have war and then culture invented it" doesn't make any sense. There should be, if not direct evidence, at least a plausible argument for how it came to be.
But that is exactly what you're doing. You're saying that because I can't provide some explanation for how something occurred, it must not have occurred. It is more or less the same as saying the Big Bang couldn't have happened because I can't explain why that happened, either.
As many scientists have noted,
why may simply be just a stupid question.
I think perhaps or disagreement can come down to what we see h0 as being:
I would say that warfare, in the form of organised violence, being a part of human is the default, and it has been with us for as long as we've been able to organise and has had a penchant for violence.
You seem to be saying that the default hypothesis should be that warfare was invented, because it seems like a very cultural thing, which, if not exclusively being a property of humans alone, certainly occur extremely more often among humans, and might altogether be misinterpreted when seeming to happen among other animals.
(Do correct me if I'm misrepresenting your position.)
That the Big Bang occurred is a hypothesis backed up by evidence.
Why it occurred seem somewhat beside the point. Considering that we are social creatures which differ from other animals precisely because we are able to organise with far more complexity than others, and unless it is argued that violence itself is a cultural invention, it seems very reasonable to me that the initial hypothesis should be that war has existed as long as humans have existed.
And until I see evidence to disprove this hypothesis, or a rival hypothesis appears to explain things better, I think it is fair to stay with the first one.
Uh, I wouldn't disagree with this and don't see how it is mutually exclusive with h1. Nor do I see how war, in the case that h2 is true, would be any more 'special' than any other thing humans didn't do and then started doing.
If your argument is not something along the lines of 'war is something humans are doomed to because of our evolutionary biology,' then we may not have any real disagreements at all.
I was reading that Margaret Mead essay and an interesting bit jumped out again.
In other words, her argument is that the reasons for war are entirely cultural, and that to search for "objective" causes like resource scarcity or population density is futile. I'm not sure I agree with that entirely, but I do think the evidence is problematic at best for anyone attempting to posit such 'objective' causes for war residing outside culture.
I'd argue that Mead is a big shortsighted here. As long as any human knows of violence itself, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that asking a friend to help carry out the violence is a smart move. And suddenly we have an organised violence taking place.
Whatever reasons people have for using violence and going to war, be that resource scarcity, imperialism, religion, honour, etc. -- most violence can usually be explained my multiple reasons, many of which I can agree are some form of cultural (but this is a whole other discussion, imo), I don't think it is unreasonable to track the lines back to having a group of 5 guys sneaking up and attacking another small group of humans to chase them away from their hunting/foraging grounds (or to claim their women, or to win a bet, or whatever else they had as their reasons). We do know that Chimps do this at least, and the "needing culture for having reasons for war" argument can be met with pointing out that all societies have some form of culture (and usually a spiritual belief as well, to mix in religion).
But to get to the difference between the two hypotheses:
If warfare has always been with us, it is a simple evolutionary process of war growing bigger and more complex in line with our societies growing bigger and more complex. There is nothing special about them as such, and no miraculous event which suddenly brought war into the world.
If, instead, warfare is a cultural artifact which was invented whole cloth somehow, it would raise several questions: Where did it come from? Was it latent in us, or did the first guy who crowned himself Chieftain suddenly figure out that he had to prove his awesomeness by killing people in the outgroup just because? Did diverse and separate societies develop different types of warfare? What does that even mean? And how does one define warfare? Is a drunk killing another drunk a war? Or a brawl? Does two people on each side make a war? A hundred? What part of our culture led to inventing war? Could we all have simply "missed it", in a different universe? Biologically speaking, we haven't changed much in the last fifty thousand years. How come war suddenly showed up in the last ten thousand?
It all seems like a much more complicated theory, while the first hypothesis seems very plain and simple:
that war is a product of our individual ability to do violence and our social skills of organising groups. As far as I can tell, humans never "didn't do and then started doing" something. There is always a gradual evolutionary process to go from one thing to the next. So to posit that war suddenly was "invented" seems very particular.
And finally:
If your argument is not something along the lines of 'war is something humans are doomed to because of our evolutionary biology,' then we may not have any real disagreements at all.
My argument certainly isn't that we are
doomed to anything! I do see war as a very natural thing, a mere evolutionary trait formed by our ability to do violence and organise, but origins are not destiny:
There are many natural inclinations that we have which we have left behind -- or are seeking to leave behind -- because our rational minds, our culture and our values have evolved to a point where we find it right and necessary to do so. Obvious examples would be torture, the death penalty, racism and religion, and while recent history holds plenty of terrible wars, large scale violent conflicts are quite rare nowadays. While war will never disappear, just like murder and theft will never disappear, it can certainly become rarer, and striving to avoid it when necessary, is both productive and good.
