Sign of Advancing Society? An Organized War Effort
Some archaeologists have painted primitive societies as relatively peaceful, implying that war is a reprehensible modern deviation. Others have seen war as the midwife of the first states that arose as human population increased and more complex social structures emerged to coordinate activities.

A wave of new research is supporting this second view. ...

...With the same process now documented in both North and South America, “we are coming closer to having a model for pristine state formation that may have worldwide significance,” Dr. Marcus said. “It also shows that our species, when thrust into almost identical circumstances, behaves in almost identical ways.”

Dr. Stanish believes that warfare was the midwife of the first states that arose in many regions of the world, including Mesopotamia and China as well as the Americas.

The first states, in his view, were not passive affairs driven by forces beyond human control, like climate and geography, as some historians have supposed. Rather, they were shaped by human choice as people sought new forms of cooperation and new institutions for the more complex societies that were developing. Trade was one of these cooperative institutions for consolidating larger-scale groups; warfare was the other....

...But group-level selection is more likely to operate the fiercer the competition is between groups. Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute, believes warfare between early human groups was intense, and explains the very slow growth of population prior to 20,000 years ago....

...Of the regional chiefdoms that start a war for dominance, all but one will perish before the pristine state is formed. So why not form nonaggression pacts rather than take such a gamble?...

...Another reason is that elites who run chiefly societies “are very aggressive and competitive — they assassinate rivals even when they are siblings or half-siblings,” Dr. Marcus said. “Competitive interaction is one of the most powerful driving forces in evolution, whether biological or social.”