JERI STUDEBAKER

The origins of the state and its power elite lie in one or more groups of long-starving people, ancient groups that eventually, after starving for generations, teetered on the brink of extinction.  What saved them was this: their physically strongest male began violently stealing food out of the mouths of everyone else in his community.  

This alpha male then doled out his leftover scraps to a small group of starving henchmen willing to do his bidding, no questions asked.  Although as a result most in Alpha's group died of starvation, his me-first move actually saved his group from total extinction.  The downside, however, was that a new way of life was created, one ugly as a hobgoblin fattened on human-flesh, one based on the enslavement of most by a few.  This way of life, predicated as it was on fear-based, violent taking behavior, spread like wildfire -- through violent conquest.  In a nutshell this is how large cities, countries, the state, and "civilization" began.   

This theory of how the state began takes into account two new recent pieces of evidence.  The first is the 3900 BC "5.9 Kiloyear Event,” possibly one of the most devastating climate events ever to take place in the Holocene Epoch, the geological time period we're living in now.  The second is that archaeologists are beginning to admit that far from what many of us were taught in school, the rise in Mesopotamia of the first cities, of civilization, was not a giant leap forward for humanity, but a monumental lurch backwards.