5 million years in the blink of an eye

Over on the message boards I made the following unqualified assertion:

'The Cold Was is a phenomenon that has roots that can be traced back to 5 million years ago when our hominid ancestors climbed down from the trees in the thinning forests to try their luck on the West African savannah. It, like all war, hot, cold or otherwise, is the consequence of human conscious intelligence, the natural instinct of human cooperation.'

Clearly I wasn't going to get away with that, so in an effort to redeem myself I have found the following extract from an old essay of mine which might help to explain my point:

'[T]he desire to affect military change has been around for at least as long as civilisation itself. The idea that there is something innately human about the desire to take human interaction to a violent conclusion should also be considered as fundamental to the pursuit of military change. The military historian Martin van Crefeld asserted that 'however unpalatable the fact, the real reason why we have wars is that men like fighting, and that women like those men who are prepared to fight on their behalf'.[1] This statement has a deal of value when attempting to appreciate the influence of human instinct upon military evolution. However, it would be a mistake to take van Crefeld 's words to mean that man is instinctively aggressive and because of this, war, and therefore the evolution of war fighting (and ergo, military change), is inevitable. In fact the opposite is closer to the truth, man is instinctively cooperative but it is this cooperation that leads to his intuitive aggression. Mankind owes its very survival to social prowess and ability to cooperate with its own kind in order to adapt to a changing and challenging environment. Human instinct has evolved over millions of years through a steady state of natural genetic selection (ie, genetic patterns, including random mutations, both good and bad, survive intact only through successful reproduction (breeding) and all that is implicit in that: health, good looks and charm, apparent ability to provide for and support a nursing mother and child, survival to sexual maturity, etc). The dilemmas that faced man's ancestors millions of years ago fundamentally influence the way in which it behaves and interacts with its environment today. As the celebrated contemporary anthropologist and clinical geneticist Robert Winston points out: 'Five million years ago, our hominid ancestors climbed down from the trees in the thinning forests to try their luck on the savannah. They were forced by an encroaching Ice Age to adapt to a new environment, a place with fewer natural resources than the vegetation-rich forests and little physical protection from predators. Here, a slow and vicious drama of natural selection would be played out over two hundred thousand generations as the ape-men struggled to compete with animals that were faster, stronger, hardier, more poisonous and fundamentally more suited to the violence, mayhem and weather of savannah life. Whoever invented nuclear weapons was not thinking about the ease with which we form alliances and turn to violence against our enemies. There is tension between our Stone Age instincts and the stresses and strains imposed by post-industrial civilisation. We are forced, as a species, to walk through life laden down with the genetic baggage of five million years of savannah psychology and the inherited traits that preceded the hominids'.[2] This description of man's evolution lends much credence to Martin van Crefeld's assertion regarding mans willingness to fight and the overall inevitability of conflict itself as a product of 'modern' society and a natural consequence of man's cooperation. Whilst it is true that, mankind's survival has been absolutely predicated upon the crucial and instinctive desire to procreate, in the absence of other more physical attributes that might enable survival (ie, brightly coloured feathers, pointy teeth, short gestation period etc), man's cerebral capacity for interaction and co-operation, along with an ability to out-think its adversary (and even overcome its own instincts) has ensured this survival to date. The pursuit of excellence in any activity, including war fighting and therefore key to driving military change, is a channelled extension of man's innate survival instincts. The absolute requirement for man to cooperate has evolved to the creation of a civilisation where life is governed by rules. From dictating social norms that prevent the consequences of in-breeding, through prescribing the order in which motorists navigate a busy road junction, to lines drawn on maps that allocate resources to particular social groupings, it is these rules that ensure survival. In the absence of a degree of enlightenment where the population is instinctively aware of the requirement for order (remember that human instinct is generally subconscious and often widely removed from acts of intuition), rules must be enforced as a constant reminder. It is this conscious enforcement of rule, and the instinctive human reaction towards them, particularly in the absence of adequate or evenly distributed resources that can explain how, despite the overall necessity for cooperation; it is this requirement for cooperation that ultimately leads to conflict.'

[1] Winston Robert (2002), pp. 286-7.
[2] Ibid, pp. 19-20.

NRM Dymond (2004)