Chapter 1: Human Nature and the Evolutionary Process, Part 1

"The basic question about human nature
isn’t whether humans are basically peaceful or basically violent —
for we are both — but which of the two are we going to organize."
— Joan Baez

In the Beginning
Figuring out how far back competition goes is easy; it’s in our history books, and our most ancient scriptures and stories, passed on orally from generation to generation before the written word. The theme of most significant events from our earliest recorded history is conquest. The stories, written by the victors, are about chiefs, kings, emperors and generals vanquishing their adversaries. Their legacy is competition and domination. War, the ultimate competition, has become a model for most of our enterprises.

Obviously, the competitive mentality goes back much further than recorded history. Anthropologists and archeologists trace this tribal mentality back to our primordial past. Has it always been this way, or was there ever a more cooperative time? Over the last thirty years a significant body of evidence has emerged from the archeological record suggesting that prior to about five thousand years ago a more cooperative culture flourished in the Near East, the Middle East, and on into Central Europe. The archeological record since then points to societies based on a hierarchical, competitive model. But before that, at least for a portion of the planet, evidence indicates that a different model prevailed.

At the religious and burial sites of these older societies dating back to Paleolithic and Neolithic times, archeologists have found a preponderance of female figurines. These artifacts from the Paleolithic period date back thirty thousand years, and those from the Neolithic date back about ten thousand years. Archeologists surmise that these figurines relate to worship of the feminine — evidence of a goddess culture. In later cultures, male deity figures are common in burial sites.

Examples of Neolithic paintings and other art depicting scenes of religious ceremonies centering around a female figure also abound. Feminine figurines and symbols occupied a central place in the mythology of this time. And in the art of the Neolithic era discovered so far, scenes of battles, conquering heroes, and even weapons are conspicuously absent. Excavations of many sites from this period do not reveal a hierarchical pattern of a few grand structures and many small ones, but a more egalitarian pattern, with most buildings similar in size. Nor did these sites reveal structures with a high level of fortification common to war-like cultures. Archeologists postulate that these societies were more egalitarian, with everyone closer to equal in status, and less war-like than later cultures. Excavations of later sites reveal much greater variability in building size, indicating a more hierarchical social system, with an abundance of fortification.

The historian Riane Eisler, in her highly acclaimed book The Chalice and the Blade, documents evidence of a culture that included a more egalitarian approach to living, which she calls a partnership model. Archeological research indicates that between five thousand and seven thousand years ago, groups of invaders, which Eisler calls dominator races (and which history books have called the Mongol hordes), came into these areas from the north and east. Through conquest these invaders displaced the cooperative cultures with their hierarchical ones. The archeological record provides a large body of evidence that these dominator cultures placed their religious sites directly on top of the earlier sites, attempting to erase any evidence of what came before.

The likelihood of a more cooperatively based culture somewhere in our past is important to our understanding of the history of competition. It lets us know that the current competitive model is not the only option. Another approach has at least been tried, and appears to have prospered for a time.

In any case, over the last five thousand years encompassing written history, the record is clear: Competition has been king. Hierarchical societies have been the norm. Domination, not cooperation, has been the rule. For the most part, those of us living today are descended from the winners of this dominator mentality. Our ancestors were those who survived the battles. We inherited their characteristics. No wonder many of us are competitive and aggressive.