{"id":32790,"date":"2018-03-26T06:32:53","date_gmt":"2018-03-26T11:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32790"},"modified":"2018-03-26T06:34:07","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T11:34:07","slug":"review-humanity-the-world-before-religion-war-and-inequality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32790","title":{"rendered":"Review: Humanity: The World Before Religion, War, and Inequality"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/03\/26\/review-humanity-the-world-before-religion-war-and-inequality\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Review: Humanity: The World Before Religion, War, and Inequality<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"socialtwo\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"post_content\">\n<p>In his groundbreaking work, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1773022253\/counterpunchmaga\">Humanity: The World Before Religion, War, and Inequality<\/a>, author Barry Brown has managed to definitively prove humankind\u2019s natural tendencies to be peaceful, cooperative, and egalitarian. Brown\u2019s work is the first ever to document the history of humankind before and after the advent of warfare. Barry takes the reader on a tour de force through humanity\u2019s prehistory as well as providing detailed evidence for his assertions about ancient mysteries such as the Venus statues, the original meaning of the swastika, his theory about the location of the Garden of Eden, and the real purpose of the Gobekli Tepe site, an enigmatic archaeological site in southeast Turkey.<\/p>\n<p>Brown\u2019s background as a journalist is his greatest asset, as he manages to make connections that are seemingly overlooked and\/or downplayed by the world\u2019s leading archaeologists, paleontologists, historians, and even evolutionary biologists.<\/p>\n<p>One of Brown\u2019s main supporting arguments can be found in a Scientific American\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/cross-check\/quitting-the-hominid-fight-club-the-evidence-is-flimsy-for-innate-chimpanzee-let-alone-human-warfare\/\">essay<\/a>\u00a0which elucidates the nearly completely non-violent behaviors of chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living ancestors, as well as the early fossil record of hominids, where no group warfare among masses of people is found before the advent of agriculture, cities, and hierarchies. This indicates that our biological nature is peace-loving, and that our tendency towards group violence has become normalized due to propaganda, socialization, and cultural factors. Although small cases of individual killing did occur in hunter-gatherer societies, these are outliers, not the norm. The first ninety-nine percent of human history was peaceful, without organized warfare.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Review: Humanity: The World Before Religion, War, and Inequality In his groundbreaking work, Humanity: The World Before Religion, War, and Inequality, author Barry Brown has managed to definitively prove humankind\u2019s natural tendencies to be peaceful, cooperative, and egalitarian. Brown\u2019s work is the first ever to document the history of humankind before and after the advent [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[19464,9219,5493,9519,19463,425,19465,19466,862,17616],"class_list":["post-32790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-survival-2","tag-barry-brown","tag-behaviour","tag-counterpunch","tag-human-history","tag-human-prehistory","tag-inequality","tag-non-violent-behaviour","tag-organized-warfare","tag-war","tag-william-hawes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32791,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32790\/revisions\/32791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}