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On this November 11
On this November 11 I would like to observe that the development of military capability appears to have been the singular event that marked the beginning of modern civilization 6,000 years ago. Before then we apparently never needed it. Afterward we were never without it.
Update on Saharasia, New Findings Since the First Printing
by Dr. James DeMeo
In 1992, I was invited to Vienna, Austria, to give lectures on my research, and while there visited the Natural History Museum, which at the time had a large collection of East European artifacts organized chronologically. The display cabinets lined a pathway, which allowed one to see recovered artifacts and scenes reconstructing daily life, starting with the most ancient downto modern times. I made my way through the earliest collections of primitive stone tools, through Neanderthal times, and into the epoch of early Homo sapiens.Simple villages were shown in the reconstructed scenes,along with agriculture and animal domestication, some early types of pottery, fabrics and copper implements formed into decorative shapes. Settlements slowly grew in size, naturalistic artwork developed along with what I call “mother-dolls” (clay figures of women, what some have interpreted — wrongly I believe — as a “mother-goddess”). Artifacts of simple clay, stone, ceramic,copper, and even woven fabrics appeared, along with simple, yet elegant architecture, and the technology associated with agriculture, animal herding and hunting progressively improved in sophistication. All in all, it basically recorded an ordinary, though certainly vital and exciting existence of hunting, farming, dancing, and peaceful human relationships.
When the collection arrived at the middle of the fourth millennium BC (c.3500 BCE, or Before the Current Era) a broad white stripe, interrupting the path,had been painted on the walls and floor of the Museum gallery, bearing bold dark letters “CIVILIZATION BEGINS”. Upon walking over that line, the display very dramatically included all kinds of war-weapons, battleaxes, shields and helmets. Artifacts related to horse-riding warriors appeared, as did crowns, coins and tombs for kings and other big-man leaders. Fortifications, palaces and temples then appeared, with all the evidence for war-making, despotic, and murderous "Homo normalis", as discussed in Wilhelm Reich’s monumental clinical discovery of human armoring, the biophysical source of neurotic behavior and impulses towards sadism and brutality, and the wellspring for virtually every authoritarian social structure which exists, or which has ever existed.
This example from the Museum depicts “civilization” in a manner quite unflattering as compared to the usual definitions, and implies that warfare and social violence is a relatively recent invention by our species,of only around 6000 years duration. It also implies that we have become so accustomed to warfare and violence as the “norm” that we have difficulty even conceptualizing there might be, or might have been in our mostancient past, another mode of social existence free of the horrors of warfare and all but the most uncommon examples of interpersonal violence. This point of view,however unrecognized or unpopular, has much evidence to support it.
by Dr. James DeMeo
In 1992, I was invited to Vienna, Austria, to give lectures on my research, and while there visited the Natural History Museum, which at the time had a large collection of East European artifacts organized chronologically. The display cabinets lined a pathway, which allowed one to see recovered artifacts and scenes reconstructing daily life, starting with the most ancient downto modern times. I made my way through the earliest collections of primitive stone tools, through Neanderthal times, and into the epoch of early Homo sapiens.Simple villages were shown in the reconstructed scenes,along with agriculture and animal domestication, some early types of pottery, fabrics and copper implements formed into decorative shapes. Settlements slowly grew in size, naturalistic artwork developed along with what I call “mother-dolls” (clay figures of women, what some have interpreted — wrongly I believe — as a “mother-goddess”). Artifacts of simple clay, stone, ceramic,copper, and even woven fabrics appeared, along with simple, yet elegant architecture, and the technology associated with agriculture, animal herding and hunting progressively improved in sophistication. All in all, it basically recorded an ordinary, though certainly vital and exciting existence of hunting, farming, dancing, and peaceful human relationships.
When the collection arrived at the middle of the fourth millennium BC (c.3500 BCE, or Before the Current Era) a broad white stripe, interrupting the path,had been painted on the walls and floor of the Museum gallery, bearing bold dark letters “CIVILIZATION BEGINS”. Upon walking over that line, the display very dramatically included all kinds of war-weapons, battleaxes, shields and helmets. Artifacts related to horse-riding warriors appeared, as did crowns, coins and tombs for kings and other big-man leaders. Fortifications, palaces and temples then appeared, with all the evidence for war-making, despotic, and murderous "Homo normalis", as discussed in Wilhelm Reich’s monumental clinical discovery of human armoring, the biophysical source of neurotic behavior and impulses towards sadism and brutality, and the wellspring for virtually every authoritarian social structure which exists, or which has ever existed.
This example from the Museum depicts “civilization” in a manner quite unflattering as compared to the usual definitions, and implies that warfare and social violence is a relatively recent invention by our species,of only around 6000 years duration. It also implies that we have become so accustomed to warfare and violence as the “norm” that we have difficulty even conceptualizing there might be, or might have been in our mostancient past, another mode of social existence free of the horrors of warfare and all but the most uncommon examples of interpersonal violence. This point of view,however unrecognized or unpopular, has much evidence to support it.
