The Copper Age "Iceman" found 20 years ago in the Italian Alps is one of the first documented homicide victims. /Image via age-of-the-sage.org
A
University of Utah study published this week in the
Journal of Experimental Biology concludes the human hand was more likely formed to make fists than use tools.
"There are people who do not like this idea, but it is clear that compared with other mammals, great apes are a relatively aggressive group, with lots of fighting and violence, and that includes us,” Utah biology Professor David Carrier, lead author of the study, told unews.utah.edu on Tuesday, Dec. 18. “We’re the poster children for violence.”
Carrier contends the human thumb is part of a design scheme that protects relatively delicate ligaments and muscles during hand-to-hand combat. “An individual who could strike with a clenched fist could hit harder without injuring themselves, so they were better able to fight for mates and thus more likely to reproduce,” he said, adding violence was also sparked over food, water, land and shelter to support a family, as well as “over pride, reputation and for revenge.”
Humanity's violence indictment goes far beyond Carrier's conclusions. Legendary American director Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey begins with one proto-human ape learning how to use one of humanity's first tools, a club, to beat a rival proto-human senseless. The club is then thrown into the air and transformed into a spacecraft, symbolizing the driving force of violence fueling humanity's technological advances.
Our scientists' most Earth-shattering achievement, the nuclear bomb, required huge computational capacity to run the equations that eventually harnessed the power of the Sun. (Theoretically, the only limit on the explosive yield of a hydrogen bomb is literally the stars.) The computers used in the U.S. rocketry and atomic bomb programs helped give birth to supercomputers, moonshots, iPhones, fuel injection, jet aviation, nuclear power plants and many other technological innovations of the Modern Age.
At least 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War. /Image via civilwarphotos.net
I don't know whether there's ever been peace on Earth in my lifetime. Either my country has been at war or some other countries have been warring with each other. The historical record is filled with warfare and violence, from the
Peloponnesian wars in Greece 2,500 years ago to the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The fossil record of our prehistoric cousins over the past 10,000 years is no less damning.
There is
archeological evidence of cannabalism among our not-so-genetically-distant relatives, including in the American southwest. And skeletal remains recovered from this period of human history show signs of violence-related injuries. The Copper Age
"Iceman" found in the Italian Alps was probably murdered by someone he knew. The 9,000-year-old remains of a man found in the Columbia River in Washington state, known as
Kennewick Man, show a deep spear wound in one of his hips and several other injuries that indicate a violent past.
