Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: How War Began: Texas A&M University Anthropology Series

Author: Keith F. Otterbein

Narrator: John A. O'Hern

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-06-17

Publisher: University Press Audiobooks

Genres: Nonfiction, Social Sciences

Publisher's Summary:

Have humans always fought and killed each other, or did they peacefully coexist until states developed? Is war an expression of human nature or an artifact of civilization? Questions about the origin and inherent motivations of warfare have long engaged philosophers, ethicists, anthropologists as they speculate on the nature of human existence. In How War Began, author Keith F. Otterbein draws on primate behavior research, archaeological research, data gathered from the Human Relations Area Files and a career spent in research and reflection on war to argue for two separate origins. He identifies two types of military organization: one which developed two million years ago at the dawn of humankind, wherever groups of hunters met and a second which developed some 5,000 years ago, in four identifiable regions, when the first states arose and proceeded to embark upon military conquests. In carefully selected detail, Otterbein marshals the evidence for his case that warfare was possible and likely among early Homo sapiens. He argues from analogy with other primates, from Paleolithic rock art depicting wounded humans, and from rare skeletal remains with embedded weapon points to conclude that warfare existed and reached a peak in big game hunting societies. As the big game disappeared, so did warfare only to reemerge once agricultural societies achieved a degree of political complexity that allowed the development of professional military organizations. Otterbein concludes his survey with an analysis of how despotism in both ancient and modern states spawns warfare.

Published by Texas A&M University Press.

"A major contribution to the understanding of how and why warfare came into being." Robert B. Edgerton, University of California

Members Reviews:

The complete pack: origins of war, agriculture and the state

This is a masterful work that can be savoured by the professional historian and educated layperson alike. In this book, Otterbein challenges the notions that there was no warfare before the Neolithic period, that early agriculturalists engaged in warfare and that military conquest led to the first, pristine, states. He identifies an evolutionary sequence that goes from no war, to internal conflict, to combat between elite warriors and to battles between massed infantry. In short, he provides us with a framework to understand the way the spread of Homo Sapiens, the origin of war, the origin of agriculture and the origin of the state are inextricably intertwined (to put it in a nutshell, PLANTS plus SOIL AND WATER plus NO WAR led to THE STATE). Besides, the book is not a difficult reading (content: 5 starts; pleasure of reading: 4 to 3).

Other books I would recommend to read are the following:

- above all, the masterful "War in human civilization", by Azar Gat;

- and then, "The Origins of War. From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great", by Arther Ferrill, "War before Civilization. The Myth of the Peaceful Savage", by Lawrence Keeley; and "Historical Dynamics. Why states rise and Fall", by Peter Turchin.

Vital Reading

This is an important book because it counters a very dangerous tendency: the tendency for the modern world to see warfare as something endemic to the human species.

Otterbein shows clearly that this is not the case.

The "natural propensity" of humankind, he says, is peace (p.