Is Warfare in Our Bones? [Christians call it "Human depravity" beginning with the first man Adam]

Is Warfare in Our Bones?

Editorial Board / International New York Times Weekend | 23 January 2016

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The discovery of what looks like the aftermath of a brutal clash between two groups of prehistoric hunter-gatherers on the shore of an African lake is certain to stir up a debate about human nature that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve.

The biblical creation story posits that our forebears [only Adam and Eve] were inherently pure and peaceful and only fell [original sin] into nasty struggles for dominance [later, but the original temptation that led to the original sin was, "you will be like God"] with the knowledge of the forbidden fruit. A corollary [sic!] advanced by one school of archaeologists and anthropologists holds that our Stone Age ancestors were not inherently violent, and, apart from the odd murder, did not wage organized war until they started to coalesce into societies.

Not so, proclaim proponents of a rival theory [how is this a rival to the Christian idea of original sin, that everyone falls short of the glory of God, that is "depraved"?] that war has deep biological roots, and we’ve been waging it forever. That’s what we are, argued the philosopher Thomas Hobbes; not so, declared Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Even President Obama jumped into the debate when, in his Nobel acceptance speech in 2009, he asserted that “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man [yes, Adam!].”

What scientists found at a place called Nataruk on what was once the shore of a lagoon on Lake Turkana in Kenya were skeletons showing unmistakable evidence of violent deaths — crushed skulls, imbedded arrow or spear points and the like. According to a report of the find in the journalNature, one man had been hit in the front of the head and stabbed in the neck; the skeleton of a pregnant woman looked like she had been tied up before she was killed. It was obviously a terribly violent encounter. But was it war?

The skeletons, alas, do not provide a conclusive answer, the scientists acknowledged. War, broadly defined as large-scale violent clashes, was fairly common between settled societies, and it is not clear whether the dwellers on the fertile land around Lake Turkana at the time of the Nataruk clash were already forming such societies, which would make a violent encounter less surprising, or whether the foraging groups banded together to fight. “In either case,” write the scientists, “the deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war.”

But are they testimony to the inevitability of war? If warfare is indeed common from the dawn of human history, does that suggest that we will never cease fighting? Not necessarily. A propensity for violence, even if it is innate, has been more than matched throughout our existence by a preference for peace [the world saw a drastic change for peace since Jesus' teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount]— a fact the bones of the victims of the battle of Nataruk cannot show.