Tag: anthropology
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A Stuntman’s History of Violence
The city… is the source of violence, or the product of violence? Lewis Mumford’s The City in History says that the city acquired a propensity for a particularly harsh kind of violence with unlimited expansion due to the emergence of kings. Smith’s The Aztecs details the violence of the Aztec Triple Alliance and how it embarked…
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Abram, the Last Matriarch
In Genesis 16 there’s a fragment that caught my attention, which might support the hypothesis that Abram came from a matrilineal society in the middle east. His wife, who is his half-sister Sarai, is marriageable because they have different mothers. Different mothers means different clans and this is therefore a legal union. Marrying Sarai was…
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The First Word Might Have Required Object-based Intimidation
What exactly caused the bridge between object-usage and combat which gave rise to ROBA in humans, which (per my hypothesis) produced human, recursive language? Apes have the capacity to “reach” for combat using objects. As seen in the 1980s macaque studies, apes’ axions extend outward when given a tool, and then the axions retreat once…
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Death from a Distance – Failing to Bridge the Spandrel between Object-Use and Combat
I recently was leaving a comment on a previous post and thought it worth reposting it here. Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza’s Death from a Distance sits on my shelf unread. It’s over 600 pages. The hypothesis is: Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe attempts to explain both human evolution…
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The Copernican Oracle
Frans de Waal’s book Mama’s Last Hug (2019) is so far very good. It’s good not because I agree with him, but because he has the balls to take his viewpoint to its logical conclusions. Which is: if humans are just animals as he claims, then to attempt to differentiate ourselves is to engage in…
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The Hierarchy of Language Coming from the Combat-Merge Field
Recently I used animal combat loops as evidence that animals don’t utilize objects in their built-in combat “systems.” Animals do, however, have rudimentary signaling which, I claim, is generated from a very simple and limited Merge field. We can imagine this Merge field as a shared moment of anticipation which validates or rejects signals based…
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The Violent Spectator and the War Dance
Spectators play a pivotal role in ritual combat. This article covers the mechanics of their part in preventing violent contagion, as well as the eras of violence that societies undergo when facing violent contagion.
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Mirror Neurons and Human Violence
Part 1 of The Art of Violence series We hear this a lot: we humans are even worse than animals because we murder one another. That’s a half-truth. It’s true that animals don’t murder one another, at least not very often, and humans do. The other half of the truth is that humans have created…