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Ok – just to synthesize and extract elements of the link and why the link I misposted on the site is relevant. Where Deleuze and Guattari take the Universal history project forward using Mumford and Dumezil from the moment of the first industrial revolution and the invention of the State (see ATP and AO)dated around 10,000 ago. The weblink I posted touches on the enormous pre-history placing human beings firmly in our history of animalness, relating us directly to being dinner for the predecessors of George the Cat.
I quote: “Barbara Ehrenreich discovered that what applied to our pre-human ancestors was equally true of our human forebears. Right up until the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago, human beings were routinely killed and eaten by predator beasts, such as lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, etc. The evidence for this unpalatable fact, which has accumulated since the 1980s, is now overwhelming and indisputable. Somehow the human race managed to collectively forget its long-time status as catfood. “
and
“ Homo sapiens is the only species ever to have transformed from prey to predator. Though our hominid ancestors relied on meat for the protein they needed for their big brains, they didn't know how to bring down the big game all around them. Thus they had to acquire their meat largely by scavenging the kills of other animals. According to anthropologist Lewis Binford, it wasn't until about 70,000 years ago that humans learned to hunt, and even then it was more like herding than what we think of as hunting today. By the Upper Paleolithic, around 30,000 BP (before present), humans had become highly skilled hunters. Though the tools they forged were later used in warfare, for millennia the men who wielded these weapons used them to hunt animals, not each other...”
The argument is that warfare developed out of the extraordinary success of the castes of men who used weapons to defend themselves form George's predecessors...
"There are many signs of the practice of war in prehistory, but they only go back so far. After 12,000 BP, the evidence is seemingly everywhere. Prior to 12,000 BP, there's nothing - no drawings of soldiers on cave walls, no spear points embedded in human skeletons - nothing of any kind. Though long believed to be an expression of an inherently violent human nature, war is a cultural product with a very definite beginning in time. Triggered by a combination of overhunting and climate change at the end of the Ice Age, warfare came in the wake of widespread devastation of not only grass-eating herd species but the predators that fed on them.13 According to historian Lewis Mumford, the warrior band was the flip-side of the hunting band. In all the earliest literature, great warriors are also accomplished hunters. Ehrenreich explains the relationship between hunting and war in her 1997 book, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War:
With the decline of wild predator and game populations, there would have been little to occupy the males who had specialized in hunting and anti-predator defense, and no well-trodden route to the status of "hero." What saved the hunter-defender male from obsolescence or a life of agricultural toil was the fact that he possessed weapons and the skills to use them. Mumford suggests that the hunter-defender preserved his status by turning to a kind of "protection racket": pay him (with food and social standing) or be subject to his predations....”
It isn't necessary to accept the totality of Ehrenreich's position to recognise the validity and interest of the Universal History work. It's worth adding that I think that only through being aware of our complete animalness can we make the advances necessary to eradicate the nastiness that produces 'heros'. On the plane of difference one singularity has no greator value than another... |
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