Irish Monks, Tang Dynasty Gnostic Christians, and Greco-Shinto Iconography

--Or-- Age of Crushed Skulls cont'd.

Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne

 The beginning of the Viking Age for the United Kingdom was the sacking of the monastery at Lindisfarne, a small tidal island on the Northeastern coast of England. This monastery was founded by the Irish Saint Aidan, who was living on the island of Iona. Despite Iona's Greek-sounding name, Saint Aidan came to Lindisfarne from the Inner Hebrides in western Scotland. It's difficult to ascertain just how exactly Iona came to be called Iona, some speculate that it means "the yew-place," some say it's a latinized form of a phrase meaning "Calum's island," some suggest it's a from another name meaning "den of the brown bear."

Christianity came to the U.K. region during the 3rd Christian Era. Thus, Christianity came to the region just as Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. But, the Romans largely withdrew their military presence form the British Isles during the 4th and 5th centuries so that they could defend Rome against the Visigoths (who ultimately sacked Rome in 410 CE) This left the monks in the U.K. region largely insulated and accounts for the forms of Christianity known as Celtic Christianity that developed during the early middle ages and would not be reformed until the twelfth century, CE.

Herculean depiction of Vajrapani (right), as the protector of the Buddha, 2nd century CE Gandhara,

The Christians of continental Europe accused some of the British bishops of heresies such as Pelagianism, named after Pelagius who is remembered as stating that Original Sin did not taint human nature and that our will is still possible to choose good over evil without the special aid of Divine intervention. Thus humanity has full control, and responsibility for every sin committed.  So, because men are sinners by choice, they are therefore criminals who need the atonement of Jesus Christ. By extension of this argument, the Pelagians believed that it is possible to attain moral purity in this lifetime.

This was in direct opposition to St. Augustine (of City of God fame, who basically is responsible for the Roman Catholic Church) who stated that there is no salvation for humanity except through Divine Grace which humanity can choose to accept or not. The Pelagians argued that St. Augustine was secretly a Manichean, whose beliefs included that the flesh itself was sinful and that Jesus was never present in the flesh (that is, in an impure state).

Manichaean priests, writing at their desks, with panel inscription in Uyghur.

Did you know that Manicheanism, a form of Gnostic Christianity, was the most widespread religion in the world between the 3rd and 7th centuries CE?

The Manicheans were known from the Western Roman Empire, who kicked them out of the Church in 432 CE (and then announced themselves as the Catholic--meaning Universal--Church) and all the way to Southern China, where they were known as 摩尼教 (monijiao). The Manicheans and the Church of the East thrived in Southern China until the 14th century.

The Manicheans get their name from the Prophet Mani, a Persian man who has a vision to leave his parents' Syrian Christian church and travel to "India" (now called Afghanistan). It is believed that while in that region he was influenced by Greco-Buddhism.

Nestorian priests in a procession on Palm Sunday, in a 7th- or 8th-century wall painting from a Nestorian church in China, Tang Dynasty

Greco-Buddhism is a syncretic religion that blends Hellenistic culture and Buddhism. This was made possible by the conquests of Alexander the Great, whose wars brought Hellenistic colonists on his march to the ends of the Earth. Greco-Buddhism flourished for nearly a thousand years from the 4th century BCE to the 5th CE.

Author standing next to statue of Fujin, Shinto god of Wind; Asakusa Temple, Tokyo. Depicting Fujin in this manner has it's origins in the Herculean depictions of Vajrapani, protector of the Buddha, from the Greco-Buddhist syncretism (see above)

New Post at The Avant Guardian

popOp is back and it's bad. no, that's not true. popOp's a good boy. who's a good boy? is it you? is it?

Dogs in the Media

Wired's Science blog has a great article on the world's oldest trees (here).

Did you know know trees can live to be as old as 9,500? This one did (right).


This is Old Tjikko and lives in Sweden.

And it's named after the dead dog of the geologist that discovered it.

Who's a good boy?

Cynico-Anarchist

Some of you may have noticed that I have a soft spot for dogs. To quote Jason Wirth, they are Nature's mute ciphers.

I named my dog Chino Zapata Moreno de Guevara about 12 years ago when I was really feeling the EZLN (and the deftones).

Some of you may be aware that Alexander the Great was a student of Aristotle. Did you know that Alexander also sought the teachings of Diogenes of Sinope? He was called Diogenes the Dog because he lived without concern for social decorum, choosing to sleep in a tub and sun bathing. If I heard correctly, Diogenes was sunbathing when approached by Alexander. Diogenes effectively told him, "You're standing in my Sun," and set him away.

It is from Diogenes that we have inherited the term cynical (related to the Greek word for dog). And really, the whole reason I'm even posting today is because my friend, Jay sent me this amazing link to what appears to be the same dog in a series of riots that have been rocking Athens over the last several years.

Behold! (The following images are from the 12oz. prophet site)

This is my favorite one, for sure.

On Dogs

The always-awesome Robert Cheatham shared a fascinating article this week and I want to share with you. I've been marinating on some ideas about dogs and humanity for a while no: here, here, and here. In part this has been sparked by reading Coppinger's Dogs, but also from Jason Wirth's essay on Milan Kundera where he stated dogs, "are Nature's mute cipher." Great.

Anywho, here's the article about Moscow's subway-riding strays.

(Economic) Notes on Society of the Spectacle

So let's finish-up the first chapter, ね？

We got to §21 the other day. But I'd like to assert some things that I did not in that previous posting: Chapter 1 of Society of the Spectacle is an economic text.

1. Debord here is announcing this new term he calls "the spectacle." This is important to keep in mind because the temptation is there to misconstrue the term. Thus we would read this text as Debord as making value judgements, something to the effect of him saying contemporary society is simply being spectacular and indulgent. What he seems to be doing in this first chapter is defining terms. Thus, when he states, in §21, "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion." he is not describing either religion as illusory in a pejorative sense nor that the process that has led to this contemporary social arrangement that he earlier defined as "the spectacle" (in §4, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. Or also in §24, "the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of 'mass media' which are its most glaring superficial manifestation....")
   
2. Debord seems to be building from the presupposition that the reader has also read Marx's Capital, vol. 1 at a minimum. Over and over again we get definitions and phrases lifted from Capital.
   

I think it's important to mention this because Marx's book was an attempt to analyze and explain a new social reality whose, though it has been developing over centuries, functioning continues to be mysterious.

In §7 we are reminded of the fundamental alienation that accompanies the mass production which capitalism requires.

With §11 we sense that Debord is attempting to unite Marx with Heidegger's Dasein, "the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught."[itals original] Or perhaps thrown?

This is a text that attempts to describe the fundamental nature of all human interactions in the late capitalist period, as such this text must discuss economics. Whereas Marx sought to explain the dialectical nature of commodity generation and defines capitalism as the movement of commodities as capitalism, Debord's spectacle (qualified in §1 by the statement, "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.") is the, "autonomous movement of the non-living" (§2). What is the spectacle? "It is no more than the economy developing for itself." (§16) It is, "the main production of present-day society." (§15) Marx saw the commodification of the proletariat's labor and the commodification of money itself; Debord attempts something similar, "The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist."

Debord gives us a brief genealogy of how we came to be in the spectaclist economy, and he does this by sketching a shift in social ontology:

The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. (§17)

What are the symptoms of this new arrangement of social relations? Not simply advertisements for the commodities of capitalism, but advertisements as something more than suggestions. Advertisements as rules:

I think that Žižek has spoken about this in several places, this injunction to, Enjoy!" Debord puts it this way in §25, "The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible." This echoes a theme in §6 where the we are told that the spectacle is "the affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corrolary consumption." For an elaboration on this affirmation of the choice already made, consider George Ritzer's McDonaldization of Society. Here's a great site for all your McDonaldization needs.

§26 provides a summation and reiteration of the alienation principle from Marx, but Debord extends this alienation, as nothing can escape this process, "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletariatization of the world."

For this proletariatization to be possible, the consummation of the process of rationalization must occur. Once every task had been made automated and efficiency achieved, the worker would be liberated from the workplace, free from toiling in exploitative environments. With no employees to exploit, the managers would be liberated as well. Lefebvre, in an excellent interview discussing the origins of the Situationists, states that his Critique of Everyday Life was inspired by a science-fiction story wherein all the humans have killed themselves because they have nothing to do after the robots took over their work, leaving dogs to exploit the robots. Debord finds this liberation from work suspect:

[T]his inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. [...] Thus the present "liberation from
labor," the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result. §27

§s29-34 reiterate, once more, the alienation inherent in capitalist production. But where Marx saw it as perverse, this freeing of the serfs to enter contracts, but free from the ability to control the means of production; Debord repeatedly emphasizes that today nobody is free from the spectaclist economy:

The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of "lonely crowds." The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely. §26

Further still, "The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production." §32 The chapter ends with simple statement, "The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image." §34 

(remember this show on A&E? Oh, yeah there was that show on Discovery also) 

Is this how we arrived at the current economic crisis? One of the principle causes of the current meltdown of global capital is that the American real estate market tanked. This, then meant that all that value that Wall Street had created in the last few years immediately evaporated. How? Value, as Marx stated in Capital (1867), is manifested socially-necessary labor-time. You get enough of these suburbanites buying these properties and mistaking the menu for the meal, and, poof....

Human Terrain Systems

• It all began with dogs on the Silk Road, no surprise... - from Wired's Danger Room

I've got this thing for dogs and the Silk Road, I keep finding my self thinking, "If I understood how dog phenotypes (what the Kennel Club people call breeds, but are simply lying to themselves) got spread around on the Silk Road, I'd understand people and history a lot more." So I found a lot of great pages discussing the U.S. military's Human Terrain System.

• Anthropology Today issue

I'm a little saddened by the comments that are left on the Wired pages and the overall complexity of the arguments being made about HTS. The American Anthropology Association has shown some sac and is calling a spade a spade: the military's use of social scientists is unethical.

There are arguments like, "those academics don't know what they're talking about, because they don't understand military engagement." Well, that problem is mutual, actually. Those making the above argument aren't recognizing that AAA's concern is to avoid recreating the conditions that allowed medical doctors (conducting scientific research) to perform surgeries on unanesthetized civilians captured by military forces, like what happened only 60 years ago.

The basic tenet of social science research and the performance of social science is informed consent. That means that both parties must agree to communicate with one another without feeling coerced into doing so. Being in a war zone does not allow for informed consent. It simply doesn't. Because war is always unethical. The best we can do is "sanitize" war, remove it from our immediate field of vision, get the enemy as far away from us as possible so that we don't have to acknowledge that we just killed someone that has a family just like we do, or dreams just like we do. Which leads me to

• this great article by elizabeth rubin - from the New York Times

There's a great point in the article where Giunta states, in a rage, "The richest, most-trained army got beat by dudes in manjammies and A.K.’s." Both the American soldiers and the Afghan fighters are doing the same thing, they are fighting for what they believe is right in the best way they know how. According to the latest research, what they believe in most is not some political end - they believe in community, in social solidarity.

That's not so surprising, right? We see it in all the conventional Hollywood movies, soldiers fighting for their buddies. When their buddies are face down in the muck they look around, wild-eyed, wondering how they got to this point. You can't hold it all in, I guess, so you just go with what you know: that your buddies got your back and you'd better have theirs also. What Giunta and Rubin are pointing out is even more sad: we're simply raining tons and tons of metal (piles and piles of excess capital) onto some of the poorest people in the world. So we have two groups of people engaged in the very same activities, and have been doing so for years and years. The definition of madness is doing the same thing in the same way and believing with each attempt that a different outcome will arrive.

• DARPA's modeling problem - again from Danger Room
  

Another problem is a ludicrous faith in the ability to predict human behavior using models that rely too heavily on the bias of the programmer - that is, the person that creates this model has an assumption about the values of Others that probably isn't going to match well with what the Other actually values. So we have an effect that doubles: first their if the faulty assumptions of the author of this model, then there is the faulty assumption that the map is the territory. Then, it gets worse as people start making poor decisions based on these first two false leads.

Ultimately, what's most disturbing is that the U.S. forces are being asked to do so many things all at once. Soldiers should not be asked to win hearts and minds. That's not the role of a soldier. If soldiers want hearts, they should cut them out. If they want to win someone's mind they should beat the brains out of their opponents. That's what soldiering should be.

Militarizing the services that the State is necessarily going to mean having a military state, not a democracy. A look at the history of terrorism will show you that terrorism only occurs in States that are free. Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes don't have terrorists.

That means, you are only as free as you are able to trust that your society will trust you to not become a terrorist. The less your neighbor trusts you, the less democratic your society becomes. Like Benjamin Franklin said, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Some Dog Stuff

This is another thought collage about in the "Age of Crushed Skulls" series, it originally appeared on Friday, February 16, 2007.

So I am writing about dogs, culture and something more (but what?) and I was overwhelmed by how amazing dogs really are. Listen to them sing:
african wild dog
puppy
Doberman
wolf
fox
basset hound
They even form choruses:
blood hounds
New Guinea Singing dogs
I mean, really I can't express to what degree I am really shocked at how versatile these animals can be in their expression.

The Age of Crushed Skulls (Update!!!!)

This is a follow-up to the last blog of this title and appeared on my other blog on Monday, December 11, 2006.

Forgive that these blogs are, at best, a long aphorism. They are bread crumbs I'm leaving as I think about culture and its transmission. There's something, in my xin (heart-and-mind) that tells me that how we understand dogs, the history of the peoples of the Silk Road, and prehistory says much more about who we are today than what it says about any of those topics.

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ng1946.html

Follow the above link to read about a recently published article discussing the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens.

In the original "Age of Crushed Skulls" scenario I briefly alluded to technology and reproduction, i.e. those with technology reproduced because they crushed others' skulls.

Furthermore, I was trying to suggest in the previous edition that culture itself is THE technology that you gotta get behind. What? Why? See the above article.

It seems that the ability to digest milk (by not allowing the lactase enzyme to be "turned off") is a result of environmental pressures. Those who "became" pastoralists were able to have more energy resources available to them than were those who were unable to consume the milk of the cattle. In fact, they lost valuable water with diarrhea whereas those who were lactose tolerant had more water and the sugar-energy available by breaking down the milk.

Also of note, the "Funnel Beaker" culture of northern Europe seems to be tremendously successful in maintaining this trait to this day (where something on the order of 99% of Swedes are lactose tolerant today).

Why is this of any significance? Typically the social sciences (including political science and economics) think of culture in terms of largely stagnant pools. So, saying something like, "Those Iraqis are not ready for democracy," or more scarily assuming that democracy is something "we" got and they don't know they want. This stagnant pools idea which tends to guide institutional thinking assumes a fixity of identity within the objects being observed.

The objects being observed are in this case pastoralists, industrialists, nomads, gatherer/hunters, etc. It is assumed that the mode of economic production (being a farmer, being a ceo of a multinational company, being a shepherd) largely determines "why" people act the way they do.

I kinda resist this thinking, though, because it's kinda puttin the cart before the horse. What I mean is this: people are more or less co-conspirators in their environment and are the deliberated, mutually-influencing product of this exchange. That is, you're not really born a pastoralist or a ceo; you're born a culture-producing machine. Given the appropriate resources, any schnuck could be an astronaut, or a sherpa. (Plainly I am broadly conceptualizing resources here, but that's the thrust of my thinking here).

If it's the case that people have always been dumb and lazy, with brilliant examples generously sprinkled throughout for countermeasure, then there really shouldn't be any kind of talk of violence between peoples as a natural result of who they are. I'm trying to work through what Zizek was writing about last year after the riots in paris and new orleans and iraq.

More later...

The Age of Crushed Skulls

This was originally posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 at my older blog on myspace. I've long been trying to become comfortable with the public perception of myspace as the high schooler's social network (and then trying to wrap my silly mind around the notion that facebook is the college version - how the fuck does that make sense?)

But you know what? Me and my pals are on myspace, and we like to keep-up with each other there (even though every day brings on a new pornbot from a friend's phished account). Also, frankly, as you can tell by this site's layout, I am not really even remotely aware of how to make a web page (it's called temerity, I've learned).
Be that as it may, I am going to slowly post here things I've been posting there over the last several years, some moldy oldies.

I am really fascinated by the Silk Road this semester.

This is a path, basically, that pastoralists have been following since, seemingly, pastoralism became a subsistence strategy for humans (somewhere nearing the ninth century BCE ~ 11,000 years ago). This is when villages are possible, and when dogs become domesticated.

It seems that we didn't domesticate dogs in the sense that we got a wolf cub and raised it to be cool with people. THis wouldn't be possible because wolves are imprinted with fear of "not-wolves" within 19 days of birth. Domesticated dogs, however, are impressionable up into the ninth week. Wolves have huge teeth that in comparison make dogs teeth look cute. Wolves have huge brains and can learn to escape a pen by watching it opened by a person once. Chino never learned how to do that. Wolves are afraid of "not-wolves" so much so that they will run quickly and far-far away (so far away that they may not return to that site for a ful 24 hours). This is not at all like a dog, who will return within minutes.

In a village setting this means that a wolf that was willing to eat out of the waste pile (like Chino does with my compost pile) would have an easy source of (low quality but abundant) calories. Those wolves that consistently demonstrated a tolerance for humans in this respect were able to turn those claories, granted not into big wolf brains, but into its offspring. That's right, being dumber wolves meant it was able to do it more. We can see toady in some cultures, like in certain East African pastoralist societies, this symbiosis at work: upon the child entering into toddlering the child would be given a puppy. The pup was there to watch after the toddler (by eating its poop).

People talk about pure bred dogs and dogs that have part wolf in it, like this is a good thing. It's not. In the case of the latter, you now have a dog less likely to want to be around others. In the case of the former let us consider the Silk Road. I bring this up because domestic dogs are demonstrating culture - a culture that seperates dogs from wolves. I would like to suggest that this difference is very much like that between homo sapiens sapiens and neanderthals. Both may interbreed (and I think have) but they are radically different.

The silk road did not arise because the empires of Japan, Korea, and China wanted to have contact with the Empires of Europe or Africa or India. To think of the Silk Road in this way is similar to asking, "Why do all American Civil War Battles occur in National Parks?"

The Silk Road (as we are calling it, itself a Germanic phrase from the 19th century) is simply the path that shepherds have carved over 11,000 years. They walk their sheep from nice pastures in the winter to the fresher mountainous pastures of the summer. Then they beat feet as soon as the Fall comes so they don't get caught in a blizzard. Half a million sheep per half a dozen shepherds who have with them about five dogs each (total dogs ~ three dozen).

These dogs have been socialized to sheep the way we socialize chihuahuas to Paris Hilton: give the person the dog within the first month of its birth. In the case of shepherd dogs you isolate the dog from other non-shepherd dogs and put them in pens with sheep. THey grow up thinking that they are like sheep in the same way that Paris Hilton must think that her dog thinks it's a person. The dog, nobley, remains silent as to how it sees these relations.

There is nothing special about these dogs, any ol' dog would do this, you just gotta catch the dog early enough. And so the breed is pointless. Another reason breed is pointless is this - Once you're on the trail, you cannot keep a bitch in heat from getting impregnated. Dogs go into heat twice a year (diestrus). That means (since the average shepherd travels on average 370 -520 miles per year) that there is a huge spreading of genetic material over a geographic area. You could get knocked-up in New York and end up pregnant again traveling back from Washington DC!

This is true with people. In fact, another interesting phenomenon between dogs and people is this: Dogs are not any particular color, at all. It seems that domestication cares very little for coat color. The phenotypes that matter are size and thickness of coat. Foxes bred in isolation (those that were more curious about people and tolerant of people were allowed to breed) in Russia within seven generations had piebald coats (like dogs). There was no advantage to the foxes looking like this - they were bred to be tolerant of people and a side development was the variety of coat color. This is true with people too.

There is something called the "founder effect" in genetics. Imagine that parvo wipes out all the dogs within a 50 mile radius, except yours. Then another bitch, with its shepherd, comes along one season. All of a sudden the dogs within your 50 mile radius look an awful damn lot like that bitch that came through by chance. This becomes especially true if say, people in that radius have a taboo against all dogs but white dogs. That means they kill all pups that don't have that mutation for being white. Voila, you got what people call a breed. What we're seeing here is that there are pressures for breeding - usually it just comes down to available calories that can be converted into breeding.

But what about when there ain't no food? Those that are able to sustain themselves longest (the "fittest in the classsical Darwinian sense") have a better chance to reproduce. What if all the dogs but this white one make it? What if people record that as important - that it was a white dog? Now we're only breeding white dogs in our culture. It's not more useful, it's a matter of confluence of taste (artificiality) and chance (arbitrarity). This is possibly why most of the world today has dark hair and dark eyes. Except where?

Nearly 11,000 years ago (just around when the glaciers were receding from their maximal reach at the beginning of the Neolithic/end of mesolithic ages), modern humans were moving around. Possibly they were following big game (thus stressing the hunter aspect of gatherer/hunter). They probably were in a sense following big game because some of the biggest (most calorie rewarding) food was on the move, because it was getting really hot where they were.

Imagine something like a huge mammoth literally dying of heat stroke consistently and quickly over a span of about 500 years in a region like Afghanistan. This ain't a long amount of time and the only breednig mammoths are those that are good at walking away from humans (those tolerant of humans are not reproducing - they're being eaten; those sticking around are dying from an adaptation to a climate increasingly hostile to their very being. I don't the people are hunters in the sense that they are way smart and aggressive (just like today most are dumb and lazy), I think these people just put two and two together and followed the path of least resistance. Staying in the tropics meant too many predators and walkin around with these huge, dying animals meant scraps were good for us. Just like dogs follow us.

Also, imagine that in the recently opening northern Europe, you are following this game and the game runs out. You wander around eating what you can. Another group of people comes along - not many (11,000 years ago the world's population is less than that of metro Atlanta > 5 million). These people are floored because: 1, they ain't seen another human for two years; but more significantly, you're a woman with blue eyes and blond hair. Only in the vaguest memories are their blondes and you're a walking vague memory so obviously you are special. You breed. Not only do you breed, but your phenotype is isolated as being special and only your blonde children are allowed to breed. Just like a dog. Are you a special breed? Only in the same sense that a shepherd's dog is.

Below are two citations form Wikipedia. I've been supremely interested in the ancient people of central asia and I've been looking up odd things about human migrations and wars. The first is to compare with the last. Culture moves slowly in Europe because few groups are interacting with one another, unlike in central asia where huns, turks, alans, hans, the gamit are bumping into one another's sheep and towns for millenia.

..The Swedish-Norwegian Battle Axe culture, or the Boat Axe culture, appeared ca. 2800 BC and is known from about 3000 graves from Skåne to Uppland and Trøndelag. The time of its appearance and spread over Scandinavia has been called the Age of the crushed skulls, because from this time there are many finds of buried people with crushed skulls and not only men, but also many women and children (Lindquist 1993:43). Its introduction was violent and fast, and a very likely candidate for an Indo-European (and specifically earliest-Germanic) invasion...
from Wikipedia, ..Corded Ware Culture..

..Lapis lazuli was being traded from its only known source in the ancient world .. Badakshan, in what is now northeastern Afghanistan .. as far as Mesopotamia and Egypt by the second half of the 4th millennium BC. By the third millennium BC lapis lazuli trade was extended to Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley...
from Wikipedia, "Silk Road"

Quickly (within a couple hundred years) we see that people are exchanging cultural artifacts from India to Norway. Hell yeah the violence was swift. One minute you're marveling at lapis lazuli up there in the Baltic sea, literally within five generations you are marveling at this awesome technology called the hunk of metal on a stick (an axe). All you've got going for yourself now is that there are way more exotic men and women. You may not live to see the day when your "ethnic" group is on the other end of the violence, but that you happened to have a distant relative that happened to have had blonde hair and blue eyes and lived an extra couple of years after everyone else in the group (the founder effect) has allowed you to turn your mates' crushed skull into the khaganate's progeny.

Don't worry. From the 15th century to now the blondes have been increasingly on the right side of technology. Hopefully it doesn't kill us all.



I'd like to also suggest that what is the difference between following animals bigger than you (why is that hunting) and following animals smaller than you (that is pastoralism)? Seems to me to be about the same thing. You know what the big difference is? The way the two groups talk about themselves. Gatherer/hunters have a radically different view of their place in the cosmos (say, responsive to the conditions of the environment) and pastoralists view themselves as more independent of their environment. Like the way the Bible talks, being responsible for other people like they were sheep (your property, something external of who you "are") which, as if you didn't notice, is a tall tale from a bunch of pastoralists. Very similar to two other major pastoralists - Jews and Muslims. Did you know that the Pashtun (indigenous) people of Afghanistan call themselves b'nai israel (children of israel)? The next nearest neighbors of Afghans are Chinese muslims....