How War Began (review)

Keith F. Otterbein is one of the most preeminent scholars in the area of anthropology and war studies. He has been researching and writing about various topics related to the origins, evolution, and sociopolitical characteristics of war and violence in human societies since the 1960s. His book, How War Began, is the culmination of an academic career devoted to research and analysis of topics related to the nature of war in human history and culture.

Otterbein defines war in the broadest sense as "armed combat between political communities" (p. 9). He draws on a wealth of information from the fields of primate research, prehistoric archaeology, and comparative studies in cultural anthropology to set forth his thesis that there were two separate origins for war. The first origin occurred during the time of the big-game hunters of the Paleolithic era, when males who were armed with deadly hunting weapons and who were bound together into fraternal interest groups based on ties of kinship, began to fight males from different kin groups over hunting territories, habitation sites, and women. The second origin, tens of thousands of years later, occurred when the first states emerged in different parts of the world from earlier peaceful agricultural societies. These first states ultimately evolved the economic and sociopolitical attributes of complex societies, which necessitated the emergence of a military establishment. For his thesis that the first beginnings of war occurred between hunters of the Paleolithic age, Otterbein's evidence is quite speculative and scanty: observations of primate aggression and occasional tool use in the wild, highly unusual Upper Paleolithic cave art which seems to depict humans attacking each other with weapons, and the very rare finds (given the enormous length of the Paleolithic era) of stone projectile points embedded in human bone. Otterbein's case that there was a second emergence of war in the human record—among four original, or 'pristine' states that he identifies as the Chavin/Moche of South America, the Zapotec of Central America, the Uruk/Sumer in Mesopotamia, and Hsia/Shang in northern China—is, of course, much better documented by archaeologists and historians and on much more solid ground than the author's conjectures about the earlier origin of war during the Paleolithic period.

Otterbein's otherwise excellent, well-written, and intriguing book could be improved in some ways. A classic work in the literature of the anthropology of war, Robert Gardner's and Karl Heider's Gardens of War—Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age (New York: Random House, 1968), and its associated film, "Dead Birds," does not figure in Otterbein's work, when in fact the book and the movie had a major impact, I believe, on the view held by many contemporary anthropologists that primitive war was basically "ritual" war, whereas Otterbein argues that primitive war was "serious" war. Gardner's and Heider's classic and vivid account of war among tribal peoples in New Guinea must be cited in any study with the scope of How War Began. Also, with regard to his argument that war first originated among the big-game hunters of the past, it is unfortunate that he makes little mention of the ethnographic record of the Eskimo and Aleut peoples of the American Arctic, one of the very few known cases of modern humans whose subsistence economy revolved almost entirely around hunting and fishing. The extent to which such people were warlike or not should be included in the author's discussions about the relationship between big-game hunting during the Paleolithic era and the first hypothesized origin of war. Finally, the only illustrations in How War Began are charts and diagrams. Photos and drawings would have added significantly to the impact of the book. For example, illustrations of early cave art depicting human violence, which I had not heard of or seen previously in any work, would have been most welcome.

Keith...