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309 declines, and abandonment of settlements. The prehistoric people who ived in southern California had the highest incidence of warfare deaths known anywhere in the world. All Polynesian societies had warfare." Attacking what he described as the myth of the peaceful, noble savage, LeBlanc challenged the prevailing scholarly view that warfare was of little social consequence in the past and is relatively unimportant in understand- ing the human condition. That belief is the result of a universal desire to know that things must have been better. In fact, wars are not an aberration, but a continuation of behavior stretching back into prehistory. Six million years of intergroup conflict might result in a human genetic predisposition ‘or war. The rise of social complexity results in more organized and intense warfare, observed LeBlanc. Complex societies not only fought among hemselves but also attempted to expand into the territories of less com- plexly organized peoples. Almost all ancient states were involved in enough warfare to be recognized archaeologically.'”” Greater intelligence did not result in greater peacefulness. Although intelligence alone does not result in war, it seems to be a necessary pre- condition because it enables the technology and social abilities for more complex warfare. Asimov argued that humans inevitably reach the level of making war not because our species is more violent and wicked than others, but because it is more intelligent.'** LeBlanc came to an optimistic but questionable conclusion, arguing that the amount of warfare has declined markedly over the course of human history. Past wars were necessary for survival, he theorized, and therefore were rational. The Industrial Revolution lowered the birth rate and increased available resources; when people no longer have resource stress, they stop fighting.” This thesis ignores the fact that the most destructive wars in history have been fought since the Industrial Revolution. Techno- logical advance has greatly increased the killing power of military forces. Optimism about historical trends is not supported by statistics. A table of war-related deaths from 1500 to 1999 showed a dramatically rising trend both in terms of absolute numbers and in terms of deaths per 1000 people. The twentieth century was by far the bloodiest.'° Military historian John Keegan ventured that warfare as we have known it may be drawing to an end, based on a rational calculation that the costs outweigh the benefits. Although this might be true of strategic warfare between nuclear weapons states, that calculation has not prevented fre- quent smaller conflicts. Between 1900 and the mid-1980s, there were some 275 different wars.'*' Although we have so far avoided nuclear conflict, lesser combats since 1945 have killed millions, the civil wars in Sudan and Cambodia being particularly ugly examples. Jill Tarter recognized that if the number of civilizations were large and expansion were a natural consequence, competition should be included in War Will Be Obsolete