The division of labor in society is not a late development, it is built into the biology of human reproduction: women bear children and men do not. With regard to the social necessity of continuous reproduction, women are more valuable than men. If a war or natural disaster were to kill off half the men of a population, rates of reproduction would be little changed; if half the women were lost, reproduction would fall by half. This means men are expendable, which is why in almost all surviving societies (including our own, carried by a cultural inertia), men are expected to perform the most onerous and dangerous tasks, like war, large animal hunting, and other heavy, dangerous labor like mining or quarrying stone or felling trees. Men are physically stronger than women and women were threatened not only by death but also by increased rates of miscarriage in such dangerous jobs. This means the existential reproductive continuity of human societies would be much more threatened by a large loss of women rather than men. Over time, societies that exposed women instead of men to high risk, high mortality activities would tend to increase deaths and miscarriages and to be selected out by their greater probability of failing to successfully reproduce for that crucial one generation. Reproduction maximizing behavior selects out those cultures which minimize physical dangers to female adults. This will prompt the emergence of taboos about visibly pregnant women and work or at least certain kinds of work, and these may eventually be extended to all women. Societies that adopt a strategy of maximizing reproductive potential will gradually supplant those that do not, because of the manifold dangers of human life; locusts, floods, invasions, droughts, earthquakes, epidemics and such, increasing population increases the chances of long term social survival. It also entails that societies that succeed in reproducing quickly when conditions are favorable will eventually reach the carrying capacity of the local environment, resulting in conflict either within or between groups. People will fight before they will starve and they will fight like berserkers before they will have their offspring starve.
Male success in work or war might often result in reproductive success and in social, eventually political, dominance.[13] The tiny number of genuinely egalitarian or matriarchal societies compared to vast overrepresentation of patriarchies in human history must be the product of some sort of selection pressure.[14]The repeated and ubiquitous dominance of males in the human societies known to history is far too frequently and too regularly skewed to be plausibly described as the outcome of thousands of equally probable “coin flips”, as in Stoppard’s Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead.[15]
It is a plausible conjecture to suggest that the origins of human patriarchy lie in differential success in human reproduction. In preindustrial human societies reproduction was precarious, dangerous and easily threatened by unpredictable external forces like famine or epidemic or invasion. Every society that fails for even one generation to reproduce successfully fails forever. This meant that societies that survive would disproportionately tend to strictly enforce pro-reproductive social norms. Insuring the continuity of our “tribe” by breeding more descendants was every adult’s obligation, like helping to bail out a storm tossed ship. Ancient prohibitions on homosexuality were very likely derived from the same imperative. Maximizing reproductive potential within a society is a strategy that improves the chances of collective survival. Similarly, other altruistic behaviors (that may or may not serve the interest of the individual) like reciprocity can still be selected for at the level of collectivities, where they serve something besides their own reproductive success.
Patriarchal social relations, plus slavery and serfdom, were deciduous institutions, unavoidable at an early point of historical development, but losing their raison d’etre with the advent of new technologies which enabled machine power to replace muscle power and infant mortality to be drastically reduced. This released societies from the necessity of maximizing women’s reproductive capacities and men’s heavy, dangerous labor. The Industrial Revolution created, after making a hecatomb of several whole generations of people to the gods of capital accumulation, an unprecedented number of new possibilities for liberty. However the overlap between liberty and equality did not allow fraternity to resolve these border disputes between incommensurables, but rather to complicate them with incommensurable demands of its own. The advance of technology has given us a great deal of knowledge about how to do things, none about what to do and why to do it. This brings us to the earliest complex civilizations, with their fragile and violent hierarchies. Purpose can only come from love and only justice can enable the self overcoming of elites.
We are a grasping, murderous, thievish, unlovely lot. It has been suggested that throughout human history, about a quarter of the male population died in warfare, and while that figure is far lower now, warfare was in most places and times an ineradicable fact of life.[16] Recent work in historical DNA analysis has demonstrated that population “replacement” is common. The Hobbesian fear of violent death was a powerful impetus to the formation of large human groups, which eventually helped spur the emergence of large chiefdoms of warlike peoples that could prey upon them. Some societies were more prone to warfare than others, with aggressive peoples like the Vikings, the Mongols, the Aztecs, the Zulus, the Huns, the Assyrians, the Europeans and others treating warfare as a specialized, massively reorganized kind of hunting and gathering.[17] Such societies were what McNeill called “macroparasites”, but no society was untouched by organized violence. Even the ancient Indus river valley civilization, or ancient Polynesia, often touted as not being warlike, had their defensive fortifications, weapons and traditions of conflict. The first vacation taken by the New Zealand Maori to the Chatham Islands remains a most instructive surprise visit, like a social call paid by the Mongols or Vikings or Aztecs or Assyrians or Comanche or Zulu or Nazis.[[18]](applewebdata://C7A7C114-A1FB-40A7-BA8C-2361C1A0D426#_ftn18)
There has been of late in some historical circles a renewed advocacy of “barbarism” (usually with ironic scare quotes) as opposed to sedentary agricultural life. The bliss of nomadic foraging bands to live as free, healthy, happy, amusingly romanticized bush hippies is touted by such advocates and given a much higher estimation than it has ever had among those who do not put “civilization” in square quotes.[19] It is tempting to idealize the hardscrabble life of foragers, particularly from the urbane detachment of an air-conditioned university office. Primitivism is easily advocated by those who have never eked out an existence by hunting and gathering and fighting to the death for scarce resources with other groups doing the same. Such “noble savagism” is always a symptom of cultural decay in the effete society that produces it. The wistful history of lionizing the Savage Other as a trope in western intellectual life is at least as old as Tacitus’ Germania. Such primitivism is an understandable projection of disgust with the evils of the civilization that fosters it. It is moving but unrealistic. Nobody has it easy. While it is true that states and individuals are often cruel and oppressive and immiserating, the hope that nature will prove less pitiless than humans is touching but futile. Nature has nomercy. The little that exists is ours.
The nomadic life of hunting gathering bands, while avoiding enslavement by other people or death by predators, remain the slaves of that hard taskmaster, the physical world. It has been claimed that the life of foragers is preferable to the lives of sedentary agriculturalists in terms of “their diet, their health and their leisure.”[20] This is dubious because it discounts the problem posed by the omnipresent threat of predation in the wild. Of course, civilization brings new difficulties to human life: routine work, epidemics, taxation, political subordination, to name only a few. Human life, whether sedentary or nomadic, has always been uncertain, arduous, difficult, precarious and full of dangers and fears. However, in choosing civilization, we are not falling from some Edenic Golden Age of ease and innocence and plenty like that which Hesiod wrote about.[21]Thucydides disposed of such “Golden Age” wishful thinking long ago. Progress occurs not when the problems of human life are solved, but when we exchange our old problems for new ones that we like better. Asking old questions in a better way allows for the reassessment of failed solutions and the creation of improved answers. I’ll take an improved question over an improved answer anyday.
It has been claimed that compared to nomadic life, “…the life of farming is comparatively far narrower experientially and, in both a cultural and ritual sense, more impoverished.”[22] This is true, in the sense that the sedentary farmer would experience repeated and routine oppression, while the forager would have a wider experience with dumb luck, uncertainty and terror. There is no evidence that the cultural or ritual lives of sedentary farmers is inferior to that of nomads. What would count as evidence? A larger, more stimulating variety of threatening predators? Since sedentary life allows the emergence of a priestly stratum, which generally presides over and elaborates ritual and myth and divination, perhaps the opposite is more likely true.
Ancient cities had a high disease gradient. Epidemics could be devastating, and early agriculturalists were also prone to dietary deficiencies as well because of their limited crop varieties, but despite the large die off from disease, the trend for the population of sedentary farmers was nonetheless more steeply upward than that of nomads. This reflects how precarious foraging life was outside of the early river valley civilizations really was. While it is true that early sedentary farmers often had dietary deficiencies due to a lack of variety of foods, the variation of diet among foragers depended upon their location. The food supplies of hunter gatherers would have had a higher “standard deviation” of food intake than that of sedentary farmers, many unpredictable, unforeseeable accidents could bring feast or famine. In resource poor areas, there was little variety or quantity of food. It is not at all clear that such foragers, uncertain of their next meal, were less susceptible to disease, dietary deficiency or violence than farmers. Diseased animals are often easiest to kill and scavenging carrion was sometimes necessary, so the wholesomeness of food, when it could be found at all was often dodgy at best.
The quality of water for nomads also varied considerably, and the pathogens and parasites they were exposed to were less predictable than the water problems of sedentary peoples. Nomadic populations had their share of parasites and diseases, but because they were decentralized bands, the results would have been far less dramatic than the epidemic of crowding diseases in sedentary life. Moreover, the food supplies of hunter-gatherers were dangerously seasonal. It is difficult enough to store and preserve food in a sedentary agricultural community, but this is a far harder problem for nomadic hunter-gatherers. In areas of abundant resources, this would pose a manageable problem, but in other places seasonality would have been very threatening. In areas of abundant resources, isolated populations quickly increased, and overhunting created environmental disequilibrium, inevitably creating conflicts over scarce resources. In resource rich areas, there was Hobbesian struggle for prime natural advantages. The highly touted “leisure” in bountiful areas was marred by the anxious lookout for dangerous strangers and other predators.
Minds and bodies can have different priorities. The greatest contribution that city life made, even to the exploited workforce, was psychic. There is satisfaction in steady work if it lessens danger to oneself and one’s family. Food, if less varied in agricultural peoples, was more predictable and regular, and the extremes of hunter gatherer luck, the downside of which involved scavenging carrion, if not outright starvation, were reduced and the danger of lethal water supplies also declined. The unprecedentedly high rates of reproduction enabled by sedentary agricultural life, once they were protected by city walls, enhanced settled urbanites’ (and surrounding rural populations’) security and stability, which was already considerable because increased population made for safety in numbers. Once early sedentary agriculturalists reached the thousands in population, they were far more secure from the threat of destruction and raiding by most nomadic foraging tribes, which generally had far smaller populations. Predictability and security for oneself and one’s family was a considerable compensation for the toil of agriculture and extraction of taxes. This also helps explain the origins of feudalism in so many societies later in history: it was a civilized, sedentary alternative to chaos and terror because half of something is more than all of nothing. In the wild, there was no reason to spare strangers who competed for resources until trade with agricultural civilizations emerged. The “… main commodity traded [by nomads] to early states was the slave”.[23] Trade with early sedentary civilizations may have provided many nomadic peoples with their first and only reason to take captives rather than simply slaughter competing populations, as is found in so many archaeological sites in every portion of the planet. The Cain and Abel conflict has been reprised at every place and time. We are all descended from Cain.
The suggestion that city walls in Mesopotamia and the Great Wall of China were made to keep taxpaying farmers in as much as barbarians out is humorous and provocative but not plausible.[24] Conditions on the Eurasian steppes centuries ago were less welcoming to those from the other side of the Great Wall than say, East Germany was decades ago. Chinese who sought a better life on the other side of the wall would not have known the languages of those outside. They were not likely to have been proficient with weapons, nor accomplished horsemen. The survival rates of Chinese runaways must have been extraordinarily low. The conventional wisdom that the location of the Great Wall kept the threatening steppe nomads out is quite convincing. Very few of the soldiers guarding the Wall seem to have made the jump. There was no desirable destination for oppressed farmers or laborers in China or Mesopotamia or even the Indus valley to go: still less in Egypt. Doubtless the impulses of hotheaded young men led some to run, as it surely led some to fight, but life outside civilization was hard and full of dangers for which they were ill prepared. Running away individually from a sedentary agricultural society was a desperate and probably doomed venture. Where would an isolated individual go to be safe? Straying Chinese farmers going west would quickly succumb to the fierce Mongolian tribes. How would a plucky runaway from Mesopotamia survive? If you think this easy or obvious, try a month alone in the wild, with little but the clothes on your back: no fire, no weapons, no tools. This is simply suicidal in locations where there are few resources. In areas where resources are plentiful, the chances are greatly increased that a welcome committee of locals would make short work of a lone outsider. The intercultural rules of hospitality and xenia were still works in progress and the need for such customs to protect strangers from reflexive violence speaks for itself.
Runaways that had been captured in warfare might bolt for freedom, and achieving freedom might be briefly possible. But what then? How does an isolated, atomized individual survive freedom without a fellowship from the Cato Institute? Unless he was a recent captive from a foraging group, he would have none of the bush skills that are indispensable to human life in the wild. [“I] t is unknown whether they (runaways) fled back to their place of origin, or to another town, which would surely have welcomed them, or to pastoralism.”[25] It matters little because this love of freedom is imbued with a dangerously unrealistic optimism. In Genesis 4:14 Cain says, after God banishes him, “I shall be a restless wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me.” Which means this story comes from an age before the advent of rules of hospitality. The archaic sources of this story, wherever they were, assumed that a man alone invited lethal violence. This would also have been true of the Tigris-Euphrates in the third and second millennia. There was no good Bronze Age alternative to oppression. What options were open to a runaway prisoner of war fleeing Mesopotamia? He could not go home, even if he knew how to get there, because “…towns and villages of the defeated peoples were generally destroyed so there was nothing to go back to.”[26] He could flee to another town, where it is not at all clear that he would be welcomed, since such hospitable townsmen would incur the wrath of the ruler from whom he had fled. Why would the fugitive be treated as an honored guest rather than simply re-enslaved? Alternatively, if he were to choose pastoralism over agriculture, he would be impeded by his entire lack of animals and a likely inability to ride horses.
The practical choices of exploited farmers in the ancient river valley societies were bad and worse. This greatly diminished the attractiveness of flight. It is not that runaways did not exist. It is that their Hobbesian lives were generally poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short. Slaveowning master classes are always get disproportionately exercised about runaways, which were a symbolic challenge as much as a practical one. In the US, there was vociferous lamenting the Fugitive Slave Laws and their enforcement or lack thereof. However, the number of slaves and slaveholders actually affected by these laws was vanishingly small. Runaways were not always small in number although they usually were, but they always symbolized a challenge to the political supremacy of the Herrnvolk. Barbarism was “a rational economic calculation as well as a bolt for freedom” only under highly unusual circumstances: where food, clothing and shelter were practically available, where freedom was something other than the freedom to be killed by hostile locals, when the escapee possessed bush skills allowing him to forage solo without being killed by the local predators and where there were sufficient compensation for social suicide in the sense of abandoning family and friends forever.[27]
Humans are social animals. If an individual runs away, it is entirely possible that the local rulers will take out their anger and frustration by harming family that the individual runaway leaves behind. This was the practice with runaways in ancient Egypt and still is practiced in contemporary North Korea.[28] Many people will endure quite a lot of hardship in order to protect their parents or children or spouse. Of course it might be possible for whole extended families to run away, but as with tools and food, the more children and old people that are taken by a runaway, the greater the incentive to pursue them and the greater the ease with which they can be tracked and recaptured. The larger the number of people fleeing sedentary farming civilizations, the more difficult such an enterprise becomes to organize, feed, move and protect. A mass flight of oppressed subjects away from a river valley civilization would be, as in Exodus, an event requiring some spectacular miracles. It is true that the collapse of a civilization does not “necessarily mean decline in health, well being or nutrition, not the dissolution of culture” but alas, while it must be noted that necessarily is used here, it is not credible that civilizational collapse would be cost free nor even inexpensive. Without the division of labor and political hierarchy, its every man for himself, poverty combined with insecurity is not conducive to human flourishing.
Section 3 🔗
We have evidence that most postcivilizational Dark Ages, such as Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire or India in the centuries after the collapse the Indus valley civilization, are sites of danger, poverty, depopulation, cultural loss and civil destruction.[29] Should he survive, the renegade Mesopotamian slave/serf that ran into the wilderness alone would be permanently threatened by the environment until some lethal threat eventually killed him. His first infected cut is his last and any illness or injury will be his last. Moreover, the decline in population and the loss of social complexity mean a drastic reduction in the division of labor, which reduces specialized skills and aggregate wealth, however distributed. It is also possible not to regard the end of a civilization not as collapse, but to instead to regard the subsequent political fragmentation or anarchy as emancipation, but regrettably there is no evidence that either several small states fragmented out of one large one or the entire absence of political order is less immiserating, or more secure, or otherwise beneficial to human flourishing than stable unified states.[30] Over time, the greater the surplus produced by a society, the greater the levels of inequality, but even the most rapacious premodern ruling elites (like the Romans or the later Mongols) had a vested interest in keeping the workers they exploited alive, as Marx pointed out.
The emergence of “Dark Ages” might have enabled a lucky farmer to have “avoided labor and grain taxes, escaped an epidemic, traded an oppressive serfdom for greater freedom and physical mobility, and perhaps avoided death in combat.” And it is true that “The abandonment of the state may, in such cases be experienced as emancipation.”[31] But on the other hand, it is at least equally possible that this “emancipation” may be short lived, as lack of foraging skills could easily have led to starvation or death from dangerous water. It may well have resulted in him and his family being killed by predatory animals. He may have realized his greater freedom and physical mobility in the act of failing to outrun hostile strangers bent on killing them. The previous high culture is certainly lost during a collapse into a Dark Age, and despite the current valorizing of anarchic emancipation, there is no evidence that most specific human beings in general are better off, and it is absolutely clear that human beings over time, as a whole, are worse off, despite the sacrifices exacted by civilization.
In the earliest civilizations of the world, the creation of the state and permanent political hierarchy was nearly impossible to stabilize because it dialectically created its own nemesis, institutionalized oppression and wanton exploitation of the weak by the strong. The arrogance of warrior elites made them hated by the people they exploited, which made the tenure of these elites episodic and unstable. Warrior elites turned captive savages into domesticated animals, enslaving them through conquest. This was not restricted to the ancient world. The exploitation of the weak by the strong is one of the most important problems in political thought. From Callicles and Thrasymachus to the Melian Dialogue to Machiavelli to Sade to the Terror to Manifest Destiny to Scientific Racism to Nietzsche to Social Darwinism to Nazism and Stalinism the disjunction between politics and ethics is filled by power for its own sake, disastrous for ruler and ruled alike. The contemporary downscale variant of this antisocial archaism is Ayn Rand, the upscale version is Michel Foucault. The most primitive kind of hero, like Achilles, was exemplary of the earlier hero of uncontrolled libido, while the clever, adaptable Odysseus is a later development, the kind of hero who sees the value in self restraint and has the capacity for self control. It is impossible to imagine Achilles returning to Ithaca in disguise and carefully plotting his revenge rather than going on a murderous rampage the first time he was affronted.
The uncontrolled rapacity and tyrannical lawlessness that we find at the beginning of the Gilgamesh epic, where the king rapes women and oppresses men without any restraint, is only the first recorded of many such depredations. Similar cruel examples could be multiplied almost endlessly. Militarism is only one in a long line of terrors made rampant by the division of labor and political stratification that inevitably characterize civilization. Early rulers treated their subjects like livestock, purely as means, not as ends in themselves. The image of subjects as sheep led to slaughter is vividly stated by Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato’s Republic. The reduction of conquered people to the status of animals is vividly captured by Plato in the Theatetus (174D) when Socrates says that when the just man
… hears the praises of a despot or king being sung, it sounds to his ears as if some stock-breeder were being congratulated - some keeper of pigs or sheep, or cows that are giving him plenty of milk; only he thinks that the rulers have a more difficult and treacherous animal to rear and milk; and that such a man, having no spare time, is bound to become as coarse and uncultivated as the stock-farmer; for the castle of the one is as much a prison as the mountain fold of the other.
The emergence of civilized political order empowered rulers in every early civilization with unprecedented opportunity for malign treatment of others and they took it. This is “pride” in Hobbes’ view. This rapacious conduct provoked both fear and hatred, and while Machiavelli was right that some measure of fear and violence is inevitable in any regime, he was most emphatically right that the hatred which results from widespread cruelty is eventually the death knell for any ruler or ruling regime anywhere. Hybris, unchecked Herrnvolk libido, created barely repressed rage and resentment which rendered political order ephemeral and episodic, always only a short half-step from disequilibrating back into the barbarism of Dark Ages. This is the reason for the repeated breakdown of the state in early Mesopotamia.[32] The staccato historical pattern of sharp rises and falls required that a stabilizing solution be found to the fragility of states run by men of wanton libido. Fortunately, states are problem solving organizations, and eventually a solution emerged.
Rulers of early states, both in the Old World and the New World had not learned Machiavelli’s lesson: they were feared not loved, but they were also hated. As Machiavelli noted if a ruler leaves alone the money and the women of other men, there will be few opportunities for politics driven by implacable, even self destructive hatred. The most primitive kind of conqueror, which is not unique to the archaic world, takes the wealth and women and lives of conquered men pursuant to their annihilation. The ancient Mesopotamian conquest state, and mutatis mutandis all early conquest states, was an ill designed vessel given to explode catastrophically against the local elite in response to predictable stresses. This was also true in the New World where the pure predator parasitism of the Aztecs or the Comanche made them hated and feared by everyone who survived an initial encounter with them, which is why Cortez had help from the tribes terrorized by the Aztecs who sided with him, offering invaluable information and acting as guides.
Within a civilization, external invasion or internal struggles for power could easily catalyze an explosive reaction among the oppressed farmers. The oppressed majority hated their overlords, but escape or even hope was rarely possible. However, given the threat of political disturbance like civil war or invasion, the enslaved or enserfed or otherwise oppressed farmers were a standing fifth column who would only too gladly help the opponents of their tormenters. This made the early state very brittle, and this fragility repeatedly led to political collapse and subsequent Dark Ages. The intermittent emergence of states in ancient Mesopotamia is a jagged pattern of quick rise and fall. Had runaways formed a statistically significant portion of the third and second millennium Mesopotamian underclass, it would have served as a sort of “pressure release” valve for the most discontented, tending to stabilize the early state, but the brevity of so many early Tigris-Euphrates regimes suggests instead that farmers’ resentment of abusive overlords was always bubbling just below the surface.
All complex societies, ancient and modern, are run by elites in practice. Once the ancient ruling elites had “domesticated” their subjects, it was then necessary for the subjects to dialectically “domesticate” their rulers, because without this reciprocity, stable continuous political order quickly lurched into disequilibrium and crashed. Then a Hobbesian cycle, a Dark Age and followed by another state that would emerge and soon collapse. Then and now, every power either seized by or delegated to government sooner or later gets abused. The great world religions of what Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age”, the first millennium BC, were not decorative but functional. Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and the others were the great political stabilizers who imposed moral restraint upon the brutality of power, which secured civilization from its wanton leaders. We can see this symbolically in the first book of the Iliad; it was only intervention by Athena that prevented Achilles, provoked to rage yet inexplicably restraining himself from killing Agamemnon and his bodyguard on the spot. Reducing outrageously unjust behavior (Gilgamesh at the beginning of the epic raping women, Pharaoh requiring the Hebrews to make bricks without straw, Achilles’ ritual abuse of Hector’s corpse, the ancient Assyrian blitzkrieg, Mongol cavalry armies anywhere, Qin Shi Huang Di’s rise) was accomplished by new belief systems. Apart from any metaphysical claims or mythic traditions, these axial Religions made the state more reliable and resilient, thus preventing catastrophic collapse at a critical military and political junctures. Religion saved the elites from themselves. After the advent of the great world religions, every ruling elite had to earn its tenure by observing the canons of justice which always involved providing advantages for the non elites. Efforts at political improvement focused on justice, which was the precondition for public support and successful cooperative effort.
[1] Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 33
[2] John Onians, Neuroarthistory: from Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki: (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008). Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: (New Haven, Yale University Press 2009).
[3] Clark, Andy, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again: (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
[4] Van der Waal Aeon 2016
[5] Steven A LeBlanc, Constant Battles, the Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, (New York, St Martin’s Press, 2003) 82.
[6] Steven A LeBlanc, Constant Battles, the Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, (New York, St Martin’s Press, 2003) 95
[7] Steven A LeBlanc, Constant Battles, the Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, (New York, St Martin’s Press, 2003) 5. Evidence for sustained genocidal war more than 13,000 years before the present has been found in the Sudan. See https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/world-s-first-war-13-400-years-ago-was-not-isolated-event-1.9849856?fbclid=IwAR2rQ4gTnjpQ6EN-QNwxB6zjvcjcUvWqakEq82E0oH6iqa-ojSV1ndpmNOY
[8] American Association For The Advancement Of Science. “Widespread Cannibalism May Have Caused Prehistoric Prion Disease Epidemics, Science Study Suggests.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 11 April 2003. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/04/030411071024.htm>.
[9] Scott, Against the Grain
[10] LeBlanc, Constant Battles, 149 Cite Diamond Collapse
[11] LeBlanc, Constant Battles, 59
[12] Wittgenstein, “Why can’t a dog lie?” Because he lacks language?
[13] Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here,
[14] Gregory Cochrane and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, New York, Basic Books 2009.
[15] Harari
[16] LeBlanc, Constant Battles, 230
[17] Scott, Against the Grain, 223 makes a similar point about nomads.
[18] LeBlanc, Constant Battles 192*.*
[19] James C, Scott, Against the Grain, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2017)
Harari, Sapiens, 50.
[20] Scott, Against the Grain, 10
[21] Marshall Sahlins, Original Affluent Society has been persuasively criticized in Lawrence Keely, War Before Civilization,
[22] Scott, Against the Grain, 20
[23] Scott, Against the Grain, 35
[24] Scott, Against the Grain, 138
[25] Scott, Against the Grain, 162
[26] Scott, Against the Grain, 171
[27] Scott, Against the Grain, 255
[28] Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt, New York, Routledge, 1991 129
[29] Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, New York, Cambridge University Press 1988, also Scott, Against the Grain, 186
[30] Scott, Against the Grain, 188
[31] Scott, Against the Grain, 211
[32]Scott, Against the Grain, 204, Also Robert McC Adams,
[33] Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2011) 576
[34] Footnote needed
[35] Cite Egyptian Book of the Dead
[36] Childe, V. Gordon, Man Makes Himself, 4th Edition (Moonraker Press, 1981). Wittfogel, Karl, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, (New York, Vintage Books, 1981).