Origins of War

In ancient times, hunter-gatherers commonly called themselves "the people." This suggests that they considered outsiders not quite people. They had no science to draw from in classifying who was human and who was not, or what was human. Outsiders could be evil spirits, or at least intent on doing evil. The intentions of outsiders were suspect. The outsiders might raid, taking what little food they had stored or a woman or child. The ancient world was not yet well tied together by communications. Different societies did not know one another and had not worked out agreements. And where neighbors knew neighbors, disrespect was likely. "The people" were not inclined to respect the differences of others.

Hunter-gatherers were untroubled by grandiose questions about how things could or should be. They were concerned about how things were. They had gods that performed magic, and evil spirits were about. The gods had not filled the minds of different peoples with the same rules. A society could defend itself from violence only by a counter violence. Ancient tribal societies, especially nomadic societies, which frequently came upon other societies, were warrior societies. Men wanted to be good at warfare to be respected.

Men exercised their skills as warriors by raiding. Beyond raiding, battles among tribal people were fought. People have gone to war believing that sickness of disease among them was caused by a member or members of another society having cast an evil spell on them. Or tribal people went to war merely because two societies of strangers had come upon one another. We have knowledge of a tribe coming upon another tribe in 19th century Eastern Africa, the men of each side in ranks, posturing with their weapons and making threatening gestures, the women watching from the sidelines, cheering them on.

The nature of war changed when tribes on the move saw advantage in holding ground and exploiting those they came upon - a change from raiding to conquest. With this, empire was born. A local ruler, if he survived conquest, might become a tool of the conqueror, collecting taxes and controlling the locals for the conquerors.

Hunter-Gatherers, Farmers, Gods and Human Sacrifice

Stories and Shamans

An examination of Stone Age humanity reveals that people lived in packs: in extended families, in clans or sometimes a grouping of clans called a tribe. They moved about, scavenging, hunting game and gathering food that grew wild. They had sticks, bone, stones and twine for tools. Strangers they came upon, or outsiders they knew, they did not necessarily see as fellow humans. There was no scientific understanding of the difference between a human and beast. Ethnocentrism was extreme. Stone Age communities called themselves "the people," as if there were no other humans.

There was fear that strangers they came across might attack them, put some evil spirit upon them or steal their women, and attacks and the stealing of women sometimes occurred. This and an endless camping trip with all of one's relatives was bound to produce disagreeable moments. In Colin Turnbull's study of the people of the Ituri forest in the 1950s, published as The Forest People, we see that a community of hunter-gatherers sometimes quarreled, and a quarrel might escalate into a brawl as people took sides, with the violence burning itself out before it destroyed or endangered the community.

Rules in earliest human societies were created through discussion. There was no written law or holy book from which to take guidance. No one presumed to be above others in authority. No one exhorted the group about laws laid down by any of the spirits whose presence they felt. There were no preachers or priests, but there were shamans - another word for witchdoctor. And in Stone Age societies almost anyone could be a shaman. They claimed to be in communication with spirits, but, rather than command, the shamans merely described, or suggested, and performed what they and others imagined were cures. Shamans strutted, or danced, or made shouting noises in an attempt to display their powers. Many helped themselves to visions by using hallucinogenic drugs, perhaps from the bark of a tree. It was the community that had authority - everyone and no one. From what has been seen of such societies, it appears that, in general at least, individuals did not pray for themselves. Their work and their prayers were community endeavors. Their relationship with their gods was as a group. Individuals identified their welfare with the welfare of the group, and morality was what they found to be best for the group.

Stone Age people did have an understanding of simple cause and effect: I drink water and my thirst goes away; you hit me and I hurt; I sleep and I awake rested; I eat this root and I become sick. They were skilled in the techniques of hunting and gathering. Beyond these immediate realities they invented explanations as to how the world worked. It was through stories that people thought they understood the world around them - stories that passed from generation to generation. People, it seems, wondered about the world around them, as bright children do today. Stone Age people let their imaginations run. Stone Age people did not believe in skepticism or suspended judgment. They had no idea of progression in discovery and knowledge. They did not believe in progress.

Their stories merely changed. Their stories were often fanciful and impulsive rather than systematic. Within a tribe might be variations on the same story. With free imagination as the source of the stories, across generations their stories were embellished and altered. Stone Age people told their stories without demand for consistency or empirical verification. The element of free imagination would make their stories appear to people of later ages as childlike, incomplete or absurd. But Stone Age people accepted the stories as true because these were the explanations of their mothers, fathers, grandparents and clan or tribal leaders.

Stone Age people believed that they were living at the center of the universe, that the earth was a disk extending not far beyond known neighbors, mountains, or shorelines. They believed that all movement was the product of will. They saw insects as moving by will. They saw the sun, moon and stars closer than they were and as moving by will. For Stone Age people, will was spirit, and they saw their world as filled with many spirits. Or, to use another word: gods. This was the original polytheism.

When a person saw his reflection in the water he believed he was seeing his spirit - the invisible made visible by the magic of the water. (In modern times, Stone Age people might believe that a photographer had captured something of their spirit and for this reason object to being photographed.)

Seeing the lifeless bodies of those who had died, people believed the spirit of that person had left their body and gone to an invisible world where the spirits of the dead dwelled. And they believed that invisible spirits hovered around them.

People saw spirits as able to penetrate human bodies through the skin, nostrils, mouth, ears or other openings. Dreams, not being willed, were seen as invasions by a spirit during one's sleep. Sickness was seen as an invasion by an evil spirit, and cures were sought in the form of having the invading spirit exorcised from oneself - a practice that survived into modern times.

People saw spirits as able to invade things as well as persons. If a rock happened to have a shape that reminded one of a dead uncle it might be because the spirit of the uncle had invaded and become a part of that rock. Spirits were imagined to have taken up residence in stone or wooden idols. Spirit, they believed, was invisible and in everything.

Not yet interested in strict categories, people did not think about the difference between what they saw as spirit and what was later to be called materiality. And not having defined the difference between spirit and materiality, they believed that if one ate a portion of the body of a strong beast, such as a bear, one might acquire the spirit of the bear, or, if one ate a portion of the body of a deceased king one might acquire the special qualities of that king. The flesh of timid animals might be avoided in fear of ingesting timidity.

And not having defined a difference between spirit and materiality, Stone Age people believed that in preserving a corpse they were helping to preserve the spirit of one who had died. And they believed that they could nourish the spirit of the corpse by putting gifts of food alongside it.

Magic and Religion

Not knowing how the world worked, Stone Age people attributed everything to the magic of the spirits. Birds flying or hovering on an updraft of air without falling to the ground was magic. Lightning, thunder, rain, the tides, and procreation were magic. Fire was magic and it was spirit, for it moved itself, and, when water was thrown upon it, it uttered a cry like a slain animal.

Seeing everything in nature as spirit they respected it in its many forms. Also, they recognized their dependence on some of what the spirits had to offer. They feared the power of the spirits and deprivation. People saw spirits as having emotion. Lightning, thunder, strong winds high seas and floods were anger. People feared the anger of the spirits and hoped to placate them with kind words and gifts through a magic of their own.

How the world came into being was explained in stories about the doings of the spirits, a common story being of a male god of sky and the mother god that was earth giving birth to gods that were atmosphere and other phenomena. The imagination of those who created the stories was limited to the world that they could understand. They spoke of gods having created humanity out of earth, tree bark and other ingredients. A god was described as having created plants, beasts and humans, and a story described why the spirits were immortal and humans merely mortal.

They believed that their gods had made the world what it is and that their society and the world would always be as the gods had made it. They had no sense of social progress or image of humanity's capabilities. The imagination of those who had a biological potential for genius, and others of normal intelligence, was limited by their culture. Had it been otherwise, modern times would have come much sooner than it did.

Limited in their view of the breadth of the world, people believed the gods had made their surroundings especially for them. The gods were their gods, and seeing their most powerful god as having their interests at heart they tended to see this god as good. When something went wrong, as in failures at hunting or sickness and death, a society might engage in a ritual to make things good again by waking up the Great Spirit. In another society, calamity might be believed to be the product of people disobeying their gods.

Unrestrained in self-confidence, they believed that if the gods could perform magic so too could they. The earliest form of religious ritual was an attempt at magic through imitation - such as painting a face on the belly of a pregnant woman in hope that the magic of the drawing would encourage birth. There were also ritual fasts or trances that were believed to invoke magic, done in order to receive from the spirits the skills needed to be a good hunter or warrior.

Also common were rituals that we call funerals. The participants wailed and cried with exaggeration to demonstrate that they cared for the dead person, fearing that otherwise the spirit of the dead person might return in anger and haunt or harm them.

Funeral ritual for some tribes included burying their dead. Some other tribes cremated their dead. A tribe in the Amazon jungle in the 20th century, the Yanomami, opted for cremation, believing that burying bodies in the ground was a horrible indignity for the dead. One of their rituals was to grind the ashes of a dead person into a soup, which they drank, believing that the dead would be unhappy if they did not have a resting place within the bodies of their relatives.

Seeing matter and spirit as the same while guarding themselves against the dead, ancient Greek warriors had a ritual of cutting off the fingers from the sword hand of an enemy they had slain, in order to prevent revenge by his spirit.

Stone Age people were wary of enemies performing magic against them. If one suffered from an illness it was often attributed to the evil intentions of someone exercising his magic, perhaps someone with whom one had had an argument, or someone from a neighboring tribe that he had recently met. One might wear a pendant made from a small stone, or perhaps a piece of copper thinned by pounding, as an object of magic to ward off evil.

And to avoid evil, taboos were created. Speaking the name of a dead king might be taboo for fear of evoking a ghost with too much power. Speaking the name of a weapon might be taboo because it would leave the weapon open to hostile magic, making it ineffective. Stone Age people took care not to let a personal object fall into the hands of an enemy, who could then use the spirit in that object to send evil against them - similar to or worse than a modern person losing his credit card.

Ritualized magic differed slightly from tribe to tribe, and the stories that supported the rituals also differed. Early in the twentieth century differences in Stone Age religions put academicians at great labor and debate. Unlike their Stone Age ancestors, the scholars were concerned with definitions. Emerging from these debates was the commonly accepted belief that religion included both ritual and myth, and the scholars created a label for the religion common among Stone Age people:animism. Their definition of animism was simple and therefore easy to agree upon: the belief that spirit permeates all.

Agriculture and Fertility Gods

By 10,000 BCE, humans had spread into virtually all habitable places on earth. In the northern hemisphere between the years 10,000 and 8,000 the last of the continental glaciers retreated. Where the glaciers retreated, agriculture began to replace, in small steps, hunting culture. In an area called the Fertile Crescent, hunter-gatherers camped alongside fields of wild wheat or barley, and cereals. Here was also the game - such as gazelles. Soon they were planting gardens to supplement their hunting. By 7000 BCE, in hilly regions, settlements of from 50 to 100 persons emerged. There were long dry summers and rainy winters. The soil was thin but fertile. The planting of seeds had become a major source of food. People began growing grains and vegetables and raising sheep and goats, and their farming anchored them to one place.

Agriculture was also spreading to Greece. And around 6000 BCE, agriculture was developing independently among hunter-gatherers in southern Mexico. In North Africa along the upper Nile River, people were growing sorghum, millet and wheat. By 5500, people were planting crops in China. By 4500, agriculture had spread from Greece into central Europe where, by 4000 BCE, people were using a wooden plow.

By the year 4500, farming had reappeared in Africa south of the Sahara in the Niger Basin in the West. The Sahara at this time was grass and woodland with an abundance of rainfall, rivers, lakes, fish and aquatic life. People there were growing crops and raising sheep, goats and cattle.

Farming created more food, and more food made possible more people. More people kept farming communities on the brink of inadequate nutrition. And farmers were more dependent on nature than were hunter-gatherers, who were free to drift from drought to areas that had more game and wild foods. Domesticated plants were vulnerable to insect ravages in ways that wild plants were not. Archaeologists have found in the bones of children in agricultural societies more signs of malnutrition than that of people living from hunting and gathering, and the average height of early farming populations has been discovered to be shorter than that of hunter-gatherers.

Also, more populous societies lived amid a greater lack of sanitation. People were careless about their refuse, their sewage and water supply. They knew nothing about bacteria, and their ignorance was costly. They suffered from disease epidemics that had been rare among hunter-gatherers. Perhaps fewer than half of the children of agricultural societies lived past the age of ten.

Needing rain for their crops, people in agricultural societies tried evoking magic in the form of imitation. Where frogs came out when it rained, witchdoctors might croak like frogs to suggest to their gods that they should start the rain.

With agriculture came gods of fertility. Farmers knew enough about fertility to associate it with sexual intercourse. They believed that their gods created sexually, a father and mother god having created son and daughter gods, and men and women copulated in their fields as religious ritual to suggest to their gods that they should make their crops grow.

Where growing seasons passed, people saw their fertility god as having died, and when the growing season returned they saw their god as having been resurrected - the beginning of resurrection as a concept. One such god worshipped by the Greeks was Adonis. Adonis was believed to spend his annual death with the goddess Persephone in Hades - otherwise known as hell. Each year when the growing season returned he was seen to have been resurrected, and he was believed to be living in blissful union with the fertility goddess of love, Aphrodite.

In agricultural societies, misfortune was explained as the work of displeased gods, and early farmers were eager to please the gods by sending them what gifts they could. It was believed that killing someone or an animal sent that creature, in the form of spirit, to the invisible world of the gods. People saw the sending of one or a few members of their society to the gods as a good bargain insofar as it served the survival of the entire society. Or someone might be sacrificed who had been a stranger seized on some pathway or held captive from war - solving the problem what to do with a war captive, who would otherwise draw on the people’s precious supply of food.

Animal and human sacrifices appear to have been less prevalent in societies of hunter-gatherers, such as those on the plains of North America and in Australia. Sacrificing people took place among agricultural people in India, Egypt and elsewhere in agricultural Africa and among the farmers of Europe and the Middle East.

Billions of Years galaxy earth

Time is the motion of particles relative to each other. From a scientific perspective, without motion and without matter there is no time. If the material universe had a beginning, time as we know it began when the universe began. But science can postulate no such beginning.

None of us, including scientists, grasps reality whole. With incomplete knowledge, physicists grasp the universe as energy (E), equal to mass (M) times the speed of light (C) squared (Emc2). Any old mass, including rock, has energy, detectable when its molecules are split. And astronomers gather that the universe is expanding, that galaxies have been moving away from a dense configuration for the past 15 billion years.

The nearest galaxy to our galaxy, the Milky Way, would take 2 million years to span at the speed of light (299,793 kilometers or 186,291 miles per second).

Geologists claim the age of the sun and earth to be around 4.550 billion years and that the sun is moving around our galaxy at roughly 500,000 miles per hour. One revolution around the galaxy is said to take 200 million years. Dividing 4,550 by 200 makes 23 revolutions around our galaxy since the sun and earth formed. Ten thousand years covers only one twenty-thousandth of a revolution.

Geologists describe the earth as having come together gravitationally. Hot and fluid energy was condensing into what we know as solids. The denser matter (iron and nickel) settled at the center. The less dense matter, in the form of rocks, rose to the surface. And, as the earth gave off heat, its outer layers cooled first, leaving Earth's interior hot and molten. Gasses bubbled to the surface, eventually to become atmosphere. When the temperature was right, gasses in the atmosphere produced clouds that contained moisture - hydrogen and oxygen. It began to rain, and water began to cover much of the earth's surface.

Among the chemicals on the Earth's surface were two nucleic acids: DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (ribonucleic acid). These acids could divide and replicate themselves. Biologists claim that earliest forms of life consisted of carbon, water, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphor, sulfur and other materials. Although they were not discovered until the 19th century, micro-organisms existed, presumably, and these organisms could mutate genetically. Knowledge of this is established to the extent that biologists can alter a characteristic in mice, for example, that will be passed to their offspring.

Biologists have theorized about millions of years of genetic development, of plant-life and spineless creatures that developed in ocean water. Vegetable life in the form of algae transferred to land and became more complex - and became nutrition for creatures that crawled out of the ocean.

Life that was dependant on movement in chosen directions for nutrition had a brain. Life that got its nutrition without mobility did not need a brain and did not develop a brain.

This book explains in clear terms the role exercise plays in our mental processes. Moving our muscles produces proteins that play roles in our highest thought processes. Ratey says, "thinking is the internalization of movement." He illustrates this with the story of the sea squirt that hatches with a rudimentary spinal cord and 300 brain cells. It has only hours to find a spot of coral on which to put down roots or die. When it does put down roots, it eats its brain. According to Ratey only a moving animal needs a brain.

Scientists calculate that more than 3.5 billion years after the earth had formed - around 230 to 220 million years ago - dinosaurs first appeared. They estimate that the age of the dinosaurs (the Jurassic Period) began 20 million years later. Around perhaps it was 80 million years later that mammals first appeared - in the form of small nocturnal creatures that fed on insects and nursed their young. Paleontologists describe dinosaurs as having become extinct 65 million years ago, with birds and other smaller creatures being able to survive . Scientists calculate that 38 million years ago primates appeared - creatures resembling those we call monkeys and apes.

Biologists speak of variation between species and within species - a specie being creatures that can interbreed. Within a specie, imprecise replications occur from parent to offspring - unlike cloning. Across a great span of time, some variations survived and other variations did not.

The fossil of an ape that lived around 10 million years ago has been discovered in a volcanic mud deposit in what is today northern Kenya. It is considered among those primates that preceded gorillas, chimps and humans. To quote the the science reporter for the BBC, Helen Briggs, "Genetic studies suggest that the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees went along their separate pathways of evolution about five million to seven million years ago."

According to findings at an archaeological site in what today is southeastern Spain, 1.8 million years ago the following creatures lived side by side: giant hyenas, saber-toothed cats, zebras, giraffes, gazelles, wolves, wild boar and lynx (BBC, October 30, 2007).

DNA analysis suggests that around 700,000 years ago humans and Neanderthal began diverging from a common ancestor.

Humans (homo sapiens) are said to have lived about 60 thousand years ago in Africa. The poetic describe humans as below the angels, and indeed humans have survival techniques similar to other earthbound creatures that move around to get nourishment, including the unangelic ability to excrete what they ingest but cannot use.

Humans have a chemistry that makes fighting and empathy possible, the latter allowing them to live in a group, which adds to their ability to survive. They remain dependent on environmental circumstances to live and on their body chemistry for sanity.

Like other living things that move around to get nourishment, they have the ability to make choices. And they have the ability to reflect.

World's Ten Most Corrupt Leaders

Name Position Funds embezzled

1. Mohamed Suharto President of Indonesia (1967–1998) $15–35 billion

2. Ferdinand Marcos President of the Philippines (1972–1986) 5–10 billion

3. Mobutu Sese Seko President of Zaire (1965–1997) 5 billion

4. Sani Abacha President of Nigeria (1993–1998) 2–5 billion

5. Slobodan Milosevic President of Serbia/Yugoslavia (1989–2000) 1 billion

6. Jean-Claude Duvalier President of Haiti (1971–1986) 300–800 million

7. Alberto Fujimori President of Peru (1990–2000) 600 million

8. Pavlo Lazarenko Prime Minister of Ukraine (1996–1997) 114–200 million

9. Arnoldo Alemán President of Nicaragua (1997–2002) 100 million

10. Joseph Estrada President of the Philippines (1998–2001) 78–80 million

Valley Forge-Winter 1777-1778

1 In 1777, the capital of the United States was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The British army was convinced that the war they were engaged in with the colonial soldiers of America would be a short one. They had a superior army. The colonials were neither trained nor well equipped. In September of 1777, the British commander, General William Howe led his army of 15,000 to Philadelphia. He thought that if he captured the American capital, the war would be over. General Washington tried to stop the British troops at Brandywine, Pennsylvania, but he was outnumbered and outfought. Howe was able to capture Philadelphia without a fight.

² Washington and his men tried to defeat the British at Germantown in October. Again they were defeated. It is easy to understand why. Washington had tried to surprise the British. His men had marched thirty-five miles to Germantown and fought a four hour battle all in one day. That was not an easy task at all.

³ By this time, it was getting late in the year. It was the practice in those days for an army to find a camp and stay there during the cold winter months. The British were warm and secure in the city of Philadelphia. Washington needed to find a place for his men. They were low on food. Their uniforms, the few there were, were torn and tattered. Many of the men had no shoes or boots. They had to find some place close so that they could regain their strength and try to get ready for the battles to come. Washington decided on Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. They arrived at Valley Forge on December 19. It had taken them eight days just to march thirteen miles. A snowstorm and icy rain had slowed their progress. They had to build a makeshift bridge to take the troops across the Schuylkill River. There are those who say that you could track the American army by the blood in the snow. The feet of those with no boots were cracked and bleeding. They tied rags around the bloody feet when they could. A day of Thanksgiving was declared by Washington when they were just a day away from Valley Forge. Their Thanksgiving feast consisted of a half cup of rice and a tablespoon of vinegar.

Restoration of Empire

Dynasty Song

in 960 a new power, Song (960-1279), reunified most of China Proper. The Song period divides into two phases: Northern Song (960-1127) and Southern Song (1127-1279). The division was caused by the forced abandonment of north China in 1127 by the Song court, which could not push back the nomadic invaders.

The founders of the Song dynasty built an effective centralized bureaucracy staffed with civilian scholar-officials. Regional military governors and their supporters were replaced by centrally appointed officials. This system of civilian rule led to a greater concentration of power in the emperor and his palace bureaucracy than had been achieved in the previous dynasties.

The Song dynasty is notable for the development of cities not only for administrative purposes but also as centers of trade, industry, and maritime commerce. The landed scholar-officials, sometimes collectively referred to as the gentry, lived in the provincial centers alongside the shopkeepers, artisans, and merchants. A new group of wealthy commoners--the mercantile class--arose as printing and education spread, private trade grew, and a market economy began to link the coastal provinces and the interior. Landholding and government employment were no longer the only means of gaining wealth and prestige.

Culturally, the Song refined many of the developments of the previous centuries. Included in these refinements were not only the Tang ideal of the universal man, who combined the qualities of scholar, poet, painter, and statesman, but also historical writings, painting, calligraphy, and hard-glazed porcelain. Song intellectuals sought answers to all philosophical and political questions in the Confucian Classics. This renewed interest in the Confucian ideals and society of ancient times coincided with the decline of Buddhism, which the Chinese regarded as foreign and offering few practical guidelines for the solution of political and other mundane problems.

The Song Neo-Confucian philosophers, finding a certain purity in the originality of the ancient classical texts, wrote commentaries on them. The most influential of these philosophers was Zhu Xi ( b1130-1200), whose synthesis of Confucian thought and Buddhist, Taoist, and other ideas became the official imperial ideology from late Song times to the late nineteenth century. As incorporated into the examination system, Zhu Xi's philosophy evolved into a rigid official creed, which stressed the one-sided obligations of obedience and compliance of subject to ruler, child to father, wife to husband, and younger brother to elder brother. The effect was to inhibit the societal development of premodern China, resulting both in many generations of political, social, and spiritual stability and in a slowness of cultural and institutional change up to the nineteenth century. Neo-Confucian doctrines also came to play the dominant role in the intellectual life of Korea, Vietnam, and Japan.