Firstly on disease:
Yes, the proportional impact of disease may well completely wipe out an notional effect originating from warfare. That would indeed be a reasonable answer to the query. On the other hand, I would be interested to know to what degree desease fatalities increase with increasing populations and density, becuase while diseases may cause fataltities that open up opportunity spaces, dapatations to disease are largely invisible. Thus gross morphological changes must be impelled by influences other than disease.
Sfs, I think the neolithic can be ruled out. I'm definitely in the camp that sees neolithic society as essentially not exhibiting warfare. Conflicts yes, but organised significant warfare, no. The advent of urbanised socities appears appears to seen trigger the advent of organised warfare, to the point that our earliest records are essentially dynastic military claims (narmer pallette etc).
However I still put this back at about 4000 BC as this is the point at which rulership develops as a political concept. Rulership entails the maintenance and mobilisations of military force as a necessary prerequisite to its existance. And the wars of the period are often ones of extermination, as we see reflected in the bible. In later periods the inevitable imperial projects brig about massive urban improvement but also a huge increase in the scale and intensity of warfare, which still exhibits large-scale slaughters of the populace captured cities.
The Romans of course also dealt with multitudes of migrating barbarians, and both these groups had a sort of take-no-quarter approach. The migrations themselves are a massive movement of human population and created huge geographic zones of serious warfare.
Now a comment on the scales of populaiton here. World War One is mentioned above, but as a recent trailer has ben maintaining, the loss of English life was proportionally greater in the civil war than that WW1. In Japan, the military samurai class reached as much as 10% of the whole population, the Western feudal nobility achieving about 6-8%. While the turnover among the Samurai is pretty low, it is not in the European case, and of course there are large numbers of combatants and civilians beyond the 10% also affected by the fighting.
When Rome fought the Gauls, probably much more than 10% of the populace weree combatants, probably something in the region of 20-25%; again, the various battles and massacres must have accounted for a sizable chunk of the local population. The Pechenegs were a significant ethnic power in the Black Sea region until virtually extirpated by the Byzantines. It seems to me that the classical sources are full of accounts of whole cities and provinces being depopulated, whole ethnicities exterminated.
In addition to all of this, there is the necessaity to do some killing merely to maintain the social order of urbanised societies, and so this period also sees the universal developement of corporal punishment as a means of state power. But of course we have very much less information about such judicial killings than we have of military adventures.
So my point is, before the advent of industrialism, a significantly greater proportion of the populace would be engaged militarily, the absolute population would be much much smaller, and the intensity in terms of population impact would, it seem to me, be rather higher. And again, this is activity sustained over a large geographic region for a long period of time. It would in fact be surprising to me if there were not impact at all.
This message has been edited by contracycle, 02-08-2005 05:48 AM
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