Violence and the Neanderthals

And the others you mentioned didn't? Have you even read a single work by him, from cover to cover? If you had, you should at least know how to spell his name.

The man obviously never had a spiritual experience in his life. But to answer your question; no I haven't read his works. Aristotle, Carl Jung, and Lao Tzu are about the only "mainstream" philosophers I've really read a lot of, Nichomachean Ethics being one of my favourite works, and in my mind, more truthful, and vastly superior to Nietzsche's philosophy.


Also as to your first question, if you consider discovering music theory, the principles behind musical intervals, pie/phi, countless contributions to mathematics, geometry, philosophy and constructing a profound religious order (Pythagorianism, influence by knowledge from the Egyptian mysteries schools of old, only allowed admittance after a fast of 40 days) as being equal to writing down his opinion on paper then sure.... - Pythagoras

Nikola Tesla - Hundreds to thousands of inventions, many from spontaneous visions in his mind that were perfectly constructed even in immaterial form, radio-control and radio communication, wireless electricity, three-phase power, neon lighting, induction motor, harnessing AC current and the AC motor, and quite literally creating this modern age of technology we live in now.
 
The man obviously never had a spiritual experience in his life. But to answer your question; no I haven't read his works. Aristotle, Carl Jung, and Lao Tzu are about the only "mainstream" philosophers I've really read a lot of, Nichomachean Ethics being one of my favourite works, and in my mind, more truthful, and vastly superior to Nietzsche's philosophy.

As I suspected. Ignorance speaks loudest...
 
As I suspected. Ignorance speaks loudest...

One doesn't have to read entire works of someone to understand their position, and the philosophies they espouse. If you really think that Nietzsche achieved a higher level of greatness and accomplishment than Pythagoras, Tesla or Sir Isaac Newton etc... then I don't know what to say.
 
One doesn't have to read entire works of someone to understand their position, and the philosophies they espouse. If you really think that Nietzsche achieved a higher level of greatness and accomplishment than Pythagoras, Tesla or Sir Isaac Newton etc... then I don't know what to say.

And I doubt you've read Pythagoras, either, since no extant works of his have survived. Tesla and Newton weren't philosophers.
 
And I doubt you've read Pythagoras, either, since no extant works of his have survived. Tesla and Newton weren't philosophers.

We were discussing genius, not philosophers. His teachings survive through the works of his students, ie; the Pythagoreans.

EDIT: Also, whilst philosophy not being the things they are known-best for, they certainly were philosophers in every true sense. Is it your Neitzchean influence that gives you this apparent attitude problem and confrontational behaviour? Or is it a case that people of those sorts are drawn to Nietzsche's work in the first place?
 
We were discussing genius, not philosophers. His teachings survive through the works of his students, ie; the Pythagoreans.

EDIT: Also, whilst philosophy not being the things they are known-best for, they certainly were philosophers in every true sense. Is it your Neitzchean influence that gives you this apparent attitude problem and confrontational behaviour? Or is it a case that people of those sorts are drawn to Nietzsche's work in the first place?

You're the one making claims based on ignorance. I won't further disturb your "bliss".
 


I don't believe that personally. Put people in a utopian civilisation/society and I don't think much if any violence or destruction would be present.

There is no real evidence of warfare/combat/violence between human-beings, or Neanderthals, or "cro-magnon" until the emergence of agriculture and heireichal/fuedal civilisations.

I think the problem is that many people seem to be very easily conditioned, and their emotions prayed upon by using fear, jealousy, anger etc... to rile people up and set them against each other, in the beliefs that it is for their own betterment, safety, or benefit. Just as religion has been used as a tool that run counter to it's very heart and reason for existence, society has been used as a tool of indoctrination and manipulation that continues to the very day. People hate and insult people who have opposing beliefs, will go to war and kill others who are only following orders the same as they are... This is weakness and infantile behaviour, but not the nature of humanity. Let a man live freely and in peace, and I see no reason to believe there would be any real conflicts beyond those of argument/discussion (well unless huge quantities of alcohol come into the equation).

Divide and conquer, and setting peoples against each other rather than confronting the true problems in this world is the oldest trick in the book, yet somehow people are still fooled by it.
 
There is also plenty of evidence that humans living in a state type society, had significant violent trends[against brave opposing warriors or ones own innocent defenseless child-depending on time and place]; sometimes to appease nothing more than man made gods.

Comparing Maya culture-
A number of methods were employed by the Maya, the most common being decapitation and heart extraction. Additional forms of sacrifice included ritually shooting the victim with arrows, hurling sacrifices into a deep sinkhole, entombing alive to accompany a noble burial, tying the sacrifice into a ball for a ritual reenactment of the Mesoamerican ballgame and disembowelment.
Levant culture-
Levant developed quite early we find
The Levant saw the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BCE, followed by sites in the wider Fertile Crescent.
there are accounts of the deliberate termination of a potential human life[ones own first born son/child for example]by passing them into fire to appease a man made god
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt09b21.htm#1 "and he made his son pass through fire"
 
I think it's absurd to think that violence wasn't present in human groups until the advent of agriculture. As has been pointed out by another poster, we have abundant evidence in the human remains from the Paleolithic and Mesolithic in Europe, for example, showing there was a lot of violence, often of the bash each other on top of the head variety. In fact, it's proportionately more in pre-state societies.

The only logical deduction from history and pre-history is that humans, particularly humans of the male variety, have always been violent. To some extent, civilization is about trying to control at least intra-society violence, with the exception of state sanctioned ritual violence.

I just posted a thread about pre-contact Mexican society where a cult existed which practised the ritual flaying of a sacrificial victim and then donning his skin.

A lot of Biblical scholars believe that the Abraham and Isaac story, where Abraham is told to sacrifice his son but then given a reprieve, was the writers trying to show that God did not sanction human sacrifice, and indeed that was one of the stark distinctions between the beliefs of the early Hebrews and their Canaanite neighbors.

If the pressure is on, the least socialized will quickly turn to violence. It's only realistic to be aware of that, and not live in some non-existent, Pollyanna fantasy world.
 
To what extent do we believe in ancient historians narrative such as Diodorus; who described cruelty connected to Carthage[organized city]? We know Carthage was connected to Canaanites/Phoenecians. Also our language is English[West Germanic branch]however the script is derived from Phoenecian-Proto-Canaanite[as compared to Egyptian or Sumerian cunieform symbols]. The same script and language was used in the formation of ten commandments on burning bush mountain narrative. The same script/language used to describe male genital mutilation for 99 year old man married to sister/half sister. Same script/language used to describe sharp stone mutilation [Zipporah at the inn]on the way to deliver plagues to Egypt. Coincidentally the same script/language used to carry out [and] record genocide for its oldest known sampled users- Canaanites.
The Roman historian Diodorus and other ancient historians gave graphic accounts of Carthaginian childsacrifice
 
To what extent do we believe in ancient historians narrative such as Diodorus; who described cruelty connected to Carthage[organized city]? We know Carthage was connected to Canaanites/Phoenecians. Also our language is English[West Germanic branch]however the script is derived from Phoenecian-Proto-Canaanite[as compared to Egyptian or Sumerian cunieform symbols]. The same script and language was used in the formation of ten commandments on burning bush mountain narrative. The same script/language used to describe male genital mutilation for 99 year old man married to sister/half sister. Same script/language used to describe sharp stone mutilation [Zipporah at the inn]on the way to deliver plagues to Egypt. Coincidentally the same script/language used to carry out genocide for its oldest known samples users- Canaanites.

Now you've lost me. A language now makes you prone to gruesome ritual sacrifice or genocide? So, Germans started three major, horrific wars within one hundred years, and also brought down the Roman Empire with untold loss of life and horrific consequences for culture and intellectual knowledge. Is the Germanic language to blame? Indo-Europeans committed at least some male genocide everywhere they went. Is there some connection to their languages? Of course, they were illiterate. Were the Canaanites and Phoenicians worse because they were literate? I don't think so.

As for the Carthaginians, they were indeed an offshoot of the Phoenicians, who were an offshoot of the Canaanites, who did indeed practice child sacrifice, as well as ritual prostitution as part of their fertility rites, another practice which the Hebrews detested. (If you haven't ever read it, I would suggest "The Source", by James Michener, which covers a lot of pre-history as well as history of the Middle East in a very entertaining, fictionalized way.)

(Child sacrifice has a sort of horrific logic to it. If things are terrible, and destruction seems at hand, what do you choose to sacrifice to the gods to get their mercy? Your most precious possession, I guess. A lot of ancient societies turned to it under stress, including my favorites, the Cretans, for example. It's part of our collective unconscious, I suppose you could say, a la Jung. It's even resurrected in modern fantasy fiction, as in Game of Thrones. The Christ story is a re-working, in a way. God so loved mankind that he sacrificed his only begotten son, with the uplifting addition of the fact that he is resurrected. James Campbell writes a lot about the dying hero or King in mythology who saves his people.)

As to the reality of it all, however, I would take anything written about the Carthaginians by the Romans, and Greeks, for that matter, with a skeptical eye, since they were all rivals for dominance of the Mediterranean, and the Romans, in particular, detested them. One of the funnier bits when you take some Classics courses is Cato starting every speech he gave, including ones about sewers, with "Carthage Must be Destroyed". :) They did also literally sow their fields with salt. That's pretty darn intense.

I can recommend also "Carthage Must Be Destroyed" by Richard Miles. He quite takes their side in their conflict with Rome imo, which was no stranger to barbaric pursuits itself, btw.
 
Now you've lost me. A language now makes you prone to gruesome ritual sacrifice or genocide? So, Germans started three major, horrific wars within one hundred years, and also brought down the Roman Empire with untold loss of life and horrific consequences for culture and intellectual knowledge......................Destroyed" by Richard Miles. He quite takes their side in their conflict with Rome imo, which was no stranger to barbaric pursuits itself, btw.
Some of the above examples[pre Natufian region] are from an area that experienced agricultural revolution 10K+/- yet after 1000's of years of civilization building and fell into the same genocide ways. Under one King who offered his own son to fire and shed much innocent blood[his own people and prophets by some accounts]. Rome under Cestius Gallus again is shown to have been in the same territory, later to be totally destroyed by Titus who impaled people by facing them to the city they were trying to flee, later genocide[Josephus account].[Titus arch of Rome]

I have often wondered if there is a link between culture/language/genes.
Rome also committed genocide[Gual] and built stadiums for gladiator style games. I'm sure Arminus was well as other Germanic tribes were well aware the genocide and cruelty Romans could inflict. The examples given are after hundreds and thousands of years of evolution of architectural, cultural/linguistics and city/state building.
 
Some of the above examples[pre Natufian region] are from an area that experienced agricultural revolution 10K+/- yet after 1000's of years of civilization building and fell into the same genocide ways. Under one King who offered his own son to fire and shed much innocent blood[his own people and prophets by some accounts]. Rome under Cestius Gallus again is shown to have been in the same territory, later to be totally destroyed by Titus who impaled people by facing them to the city they were trying to flee, later genocide[Josephus account].[Titus arch of Rome]

I have often wondered if there is a link between culture/language/genes.
Rome also committed genocide[Gual] and built stadiums for gladiator style games. I'm sure Arminus was well as other Germanic tribes were well aware the genocide and cruelty Romans could inflict. The examples given are after hundreds and thousands of years of evolution of architectural, cultural/linguistics and city/state building.

You're reaching, and conveniently ignoring the genocide by the Indo-Europeans, among others. Ever read the Hindu classics? What did the ancestors of the "Gauls" do to the men of the European Neolithic? How about the Huns? What about what the Germans did to the Jews and Poles? How about the Spanish and Portuguese versus Amerindians. How about the Hotu and Hutu? The Persians vs the Jews was pretty horrific too. I could go on and on. It's the human condition. There's no "pure" group in terms of behavior.

Stop attributing horrendous behavior only to peoples you don't like. It's intellectually dishonest.
 
You're reaching, and conveniently ignoring the genocide by the Indo-Europeans, among others. Ever read the Hindu classics? What did the ancestors of the "Gauls" do to the men of the European Neolithic? How about the Huns? What about what the Germans did to the Jews and Poles? How about the Spanish and Portuguese versus Amerindians. How about the Hotu and Hutu? The Persians vs the Jews was pretty horrific too. I could go on and on. It's the human condition. There's no "pure" group in terms of behavior.

Stop attributing horrendous behavior only to peoples you don't like. It's intellectually dishonest.

Interesting choice of West Germanic dialect derived words and, unknown/unproven ancestoral examples of Indo-Europeans[to date] Neolithic genocidal track record; for a rebuttal.Pure; that's right out of left field? Perhaps there is miscommunication or transliteration Latin/English/German component I'm missing.
Still does not change the fact that mans nature has not changed in the last 10+/-k years despite living in an urban environment or steppe or desert,Imo.
 
Interesting choice of West Germanic dialect derived words and, unknown/unproven ancestoral examples of Indo-Europeans[to date] Neolithic genocidal track record; for a rebuttal.Pure; that's right out of left field? Perhaps there is miscommunication or transliteration Latin/English/German component I'm missing.
Still does not change the fact that mans nature has not changed in the last 10+/-k years despite living in an urban environment or steppe or desert,Imo.

Silesian, please...

Why did farmer mtDna survive, but not their ydna, in Spain and Portugal, for example. The plague would hit men and women alike, and so would starvation. The same thing happened in the New World. I certainly don't like it, but that's the most probable scenario. Or, just read the Hindu classics to find out how the Indo-Europeans behaved when they got to India.

How do you explain the data from paleolithic and mesolithic Europe? They sure weren't farmers. In fact, a study I just recently published showed there was more of it at that time than at subsequent periods. Should we just ignore it? It makes sense: they were always living at the edge of extinction. The myth of the Noble Savage is just that: a myth.

It's HUMAN nature. It's part of our make-up, especially the make-up of men. Look at chimps, for goodness sakes, our near cousins...nasty, homicidal brutes. You're Polish, I think, yes? Have you forgotten your catechism? :) Original sin is a pretty good story for what genetics will scientifically explain. Violence is hard-wired in human beings to use Le Broc's term.

Do you have children? Have you spent a lot of time watching children interact at playgrounds? Anyone who thinks they're all sweet darlings isn't paying attention. Girl children aren't as physically violent, but they can cause a lot of damage all the same. My best friend Ruth used to call one blue eyed dark haired angelic looking little girl the "demon child". Within a half hour of her arrival three or four little girls would be crying.

Once you accept than man is by his nature flawed, that darkness lurks within most people, including violence, everything makes more sense. Man's institutions are flawed because man is flawed and he created them, not the other way around.
 
Silesian, please...

Why did farmer mtDna survive, but not their ydna, in Spain and Portugal, for example. The plague would hit men and women alike, and so would starvation. The same thing happened in the New World. I certainly don't like it, but that's the most probable scenario. Or, just read the Hindu classics to find out how the Indo-Europeans behaved when they got to India.

How do you explain the data from paleolithic and mesolithic Europe? They sure weren't farmers. In fact, a study I just recently published showed there was more of it at that time than at subsequent periods. Should we just ignore it? It makes sense: they were always living at the edge of extinction. The myth of the Noble Savage is just that: a myth.

It's HUMAN nature. It's part of our make-up, especially the make-up of men. Look at chimps, for goodness sakes, our near cousins...nasty, homicidal brutes. You're Polish, I think, yes? Have you forgotten your catechism? :) Original sin is a pretty good story for what genetics will scientifically explain. Violence is hard-wired in human beings to use Le Broc's term.

Do you have children? Have you spent a lot of time watching children interact at playgrounds? Anyone who thinks they're all sweet darlings isn't paying attention. Girl children aren't as physically violent, but they can cause a lot of damage all the same. My best friend Ruth used to call one blue eyed dark haired angelic looking little girl the "demon child". Within a half hour of her arrival three or four little girls would be crying.

Once you accept than man is by his nature flawed, that darkness lurks within most people, including violence, everything makes more sense. Man's institutions are flawed because man is flawed and he created them, not the other way around.

See:
"[h=1]Humans: Unusually Murderous Mammals, Typically Murderous Primates"[/h]

"[FONT=&quot]Humans do all three. Gómez’s team calculated that at the origin of [/FONT]Homo sapiens[FONT=&quot], we were six times more lethally violent than the average mammal, but about as violent as expected for a primate. But time and social organizations have sated our ancestral bloodthirst, leaving us with modern rates of lethal violence that are well below the prehistoric baseline. We are an average member of an especially violent group of mammals, and we’ve managed to curb our ancestry.[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Gómez’s team predicted that when our species arose, around 2 percent of us (1 in 50) would have been murdered by other people.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Thomas Hobbes would have approved. In the 17th century, he argued that modern society protects us from our brutish nature, lived in “continual fear, and danger of violent death.” Not so, said Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who felt that civilization corrupts our neutral nature. These opposing views on violence—the former emphasizing an innate proclivity, and the latter focusing on cultural influences—preceded Hobbes and Rousseau by many centuries, and outlived them by many more. “Consensus does not exist, and positions are polarized,” says Gómez. “We hope that our study will shed light to the role that both evolution and culture have played in human lethal violence.”"

"Gómez’s team showed that by poring through statistical yearbooks, archaeological sites, and more, to work out causes of death in 600 human populations between 50,000 BC to the present day. They concluded that rates of lethal violence originally ranged from 3.4 to 3.9 percent during Paleolithic times, making us only slightly more violent than you’d expect for a primate of our evolutionary past. That rate rose to around 12 percent during the bloody Medieval period, before falling again over the last few centuries to levels even lower than our prehistoric past."

"It’s likely that primates are especially violent because we are both territorial and social—two factors that respectively provide motive and opportunity for murder. So it goes for humans. As we moved from small bands to medium-sized tribes to large chiefdoms, our rates of lethal violence increased.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]But once we formed large states, “institutions like the rule of law reduced rates of lethal violence below what one would expect for a mammal with our ancestry and ecology, and below what has been observed in human societies in earlier periods and with simpler forms of social organization,” says Steven Pinker from Harvard University. He argued as much in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, but says that Gómez’s team have done so “with greater precision, rigor, and depth; I wish this study had been available when I wrote the book.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science...ammals-but-averagely-violent-primates/501935/

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See also the following plus the citations provided above.

https://books.google.com/books?id=9...y time period-mesolithic vs Neolithic&f=false[/FONT]

[h=1][/h]
 
Meerkats? They're adorable! I would've liked one as a pet but now that I see this chart I've changed my mind
 


Well there is also contrary evidence to show that no such warfare occurred until the advent of agriculture, and perhaps the violence inflicted may have been by other "proto-humans", tusked/horned animals, or primates. Also most of the links you provide discuss chimpanzees and relatively modern tribal groups. Also I'm not sure what "gender equality" has to do with any of this. People before the past 20-50 years knew the obvious differences between males and females, and that it is a complimentary arrangement, symbiotic, yin and yang, not two equal and identical forces. Our minds and bodies function incredibly differently.

"Some scholars believe that this period of "Paleolithic warlessness" persisted until well after the appearance of Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago, ending only at the occurrence of economic and social shifts associated with sedentism, when new conditions incentivized organized raiding of settlements.[5][6]


Of the many cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic, none depicts people attacking other people explicitly,[7][8] but there are depictions of human beings pierced with arrows both of the Aurignacian-Périgordian (roughly 30,000 years old) and the early Magdalenian (c. 17,000 years old), possibly representing "spontaneous confrontations over game resources" in which hostile trespassers were killed; however, other interpretations, including capital punishment, human sacrifice, assassination or systemic warfare cannot be ruled out.[9]
Skeletal and artifactual evidence of intergroup violence between Paleolithic nomadic foragers is absent as well.[8][10]"
 

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