140k years of war led to a new type of Goddess

I come to you from the future. I just finished editing this video, it is very late, and I just realized how it all matches up perfectly with one of my favorite Nietzsche quotes. From Thus Spake Zarathustra, Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent, thus wisdom wants us. She is a woman and loves only a warrior. This will make a lot more sense when you understand that the areas where farming emerged, their goddesses become associated with wisdom and war, and these areas were contested for over 140,000 years with three different types of hominin groups. Welcome everybody, and this is another one where I just kept pulling on one of those threads, and it led to a really interesting connection. The TLDR is the civilizations that have agriculture and domestication of both plants and animals, these focal points of civilization. The Fertile Crescent broadly, from Anatolia with sites like Gobekli Tepe, these great rivers like the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, and the Indus and Ganges, here the goddesses of fertility are also goddesses of war. And there's even really specific connections with the whole dynamic of Hathor with Sekhmet, the lioness, and Inanna from Samaria, and the Vedic Durga are literally riding on top of a lion. And it's way deeper than it just looks cool, it gives us a great look into the minds of these ancient people, who are at one of the most fascinating junctions in human history, this kind of high-tech, sci-fi almost jump of what it means to be human. Into the broader theme of this channel overall, the ancient people seem to have a better understanding that it's the memes, not the genes, that are so crucial to shaping one's mind. If we can just state the obvious, technology and civilization did not arise everywhere equally, even among fully modern humans, in whatever group you think came to pioneer what we call civilization, or achieve some peak, it is also obvious that there were ups and downs, and that whatever people group you're thinking of, did not always have what we're calling civilization. I mean you could think of it like this, if aliens came down at different periods of human history, and if they thought like supremacists and said which group is the best, where best is defined as just having the most advanced technology, and the most complex arts. If you came down in the mid-1800s, I think it's safe to say the English would win, but that wouldn't be the case if you came 2,000 years earlier. It's to my point that it's memes, or the ideas and the culture of a people, not their genes, because the English genes did not profoundly change over 2,000 years. I'll read this famous excerpt from Cassius Dio, There are two principal races of the Britons. Both tribes inhabit wild and waterless mountains and desolate and swampy plains, and possess neither walls, cities, nor tilled fields, but live on their flocks, wild game, and certain fruits. For they do not touch the fish, which are there found in immense and inexhaustible quantities. They dwell in tents, naked and unshod, possess their women in common, and in common rear all the offspring. Their form of rule is democratic for the most part, and they are very fond of plundering. Consequently, they choose their boldest men as rulers. This video is in part inspired by a lot of comments on the Aboriginal Australian video. If you haven't seen it yet, it is a wild ride. I'll put it down in the description and it's up in the cards. But you can imagine what some of the comments were. This is the internet, and they focused on the fact that the Aboriginal societies in Australia developed for tens of thousands of years without metallurgy, writing, wheeled transport, or even long-range projectile weapons like bows and arrows. But this critique or mindset is both useless and inaccurate in describing what it is that brought about the thing that they see as superior, i.e. high civilization. And just to be clear, I've been doing this channel long enough, and just been online long enough, to know that it is not just white people, people that look like me, but it is Africans, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Chinese, just about every group you can think of, while on the other end you have the types that act like civilization is evil. One of the biggest points of this channel is that if you believe in evolution at all, you think your ancestors were even more primitive than whatever group you want to dunk on for being primitive. So we should really try and understand why it is that certain high-tech civilizations seem to emerge from certain areas. And a really crucial aspect that most people overlook is why did it not just die out? There are many places on earth that it seemed to die out, so why did certain areas continue developing up until today? Because also in the aboriginal video, I mentioned the case of Tasmania. Where it seems to be even worse, archaeological evidence shows the loss of certain technologies over time. They have even less than the aboriginal Australians. They've lost things like bone tools and fishing equipment, and this is thought to be because they became more isolated and population densities dropped. If you did want to focus on a genetic route, it's pretty scary that it could just be a lack of genetic diversity amongst these people. If you're one of the weirdos trying to turn this into a supremacist claim, it's funny how loose we get with that definition of race. Because if we're thinking of the Tasmanians as a distinct people, a distinct race, this point is the opposite. They are not static and unchanged. And their technology regresses, if not because of, at least in line with their lack of genetic diversity. To be clear, do not lump me in with the diversity is our strength types that would take certain truths from genetics and history to twist it into their anti-European political agenda. I'm not saying that either. I'm basically saying I'm annoyed by both groups of extremists. Of course, this channel covers distinct people groups, but we are also all homo sapiens, and the genes have not changed dramatically in a few thousand years. But the software of culture has. These pressures that shape our modern minds. The memes are more responsible for shaping our modern minds than our genes. And when you look at the myths of these people who put us on this upward technological and civilizational trajectory, you'll see that this mind essentially emerged from a dual aspect, symbolized by many goddesses of both fertility, but also warfare, the greatest of evolutionary pressures. When pressures are low, when populations are sparse, environments relatively predictable, competition limited, and social systems stable, there's no strong incentive to formalize knowledge, externalize your memory, or accelerate innovation. Skills remain embodied rather than institutionalized. Knowledge is transmitted orally, in specific situations, and locally within the tribe system. It's optimized for survival rather than expansion. And so like we saw with the aboriginal people, who were under a certain amount of pressure and tension amongst all the different tribes in Australia, but those of Tasmania became even more cut off, even less pressure from other tribes. It's all a relative plateau of technology for thousands of years, or even a regression. But importantly, it's just dropping down to a lower level, but without threatening the viability of the society. In other words, it is still survival of the fittest, in the way people often joke that crabs or crocodiles are perfect. We are not more evolved than any other creature, they just hit a perfect little zone where they don't have to change. And so the Australian and Tasmanian cases make it clear that technological accumulation is not a default human trajectory, it is a contingent response to sustained stress. By contrast, nearly every major technological first clusters in a narrow belt stretching from Egypt through the Near East, including Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia, and radiating outward toward India, Greece, Ukraine, and beyond. Agriculture, writing, state bureaucracy, metallurgy, formal law codes, coinage, astronomy, long-distance trade networks, organized warfare, and standing armies all emerge here first. And it's happening repeatedly and independently, but crucially it's always within overlapping reach of one another. That's not a coincidence. These societies were not isolated. They were locked in constant interaction, aware of each other, they were trade partners, and enemies in war, both in constant escalation. Better goods and better weapons. Once innovation begins in this environment, it does not proceed linearly, it compounds. Writing enables accounting. Accounting enables taxation. Taxation enables standing institutions. Institutions that enable surplus extraction. And surplus support specialists. These specialists generate further innovation. Each advance creates the condition that makes the next advance not just possible, but feels inevitable. Each advance creates the conditions for the next advance. And societies that fail to adopt new tools, organizational strategies, or military techniques become absorbed, destroyed, or marginalized by those that do. This produces a runaway feedback loop in which the gains multiply faster and faster, while societies far outside of this pressure zone remain comparatively unchanged. Not because they cannot innovate, but because they are not forced to. Again, to the point of people can't just hold complexity in their minds, it seems. But the aisles did not play any role in any of these tech advances I mentioned. But of course, when this pressure zone expands to include all of Europe, then they do continue to this technological improvement system in ways unlike ever seen before. It's not a genetic thing. The British people didn't change on a genetic level in any fundamental way from the times of Roman conquest. They only do start contributing to high society when they are brought into this pressure zone. As Roman and Germanic forces. But it does bring us to a deeper question here. Humans are violent everywhere, so shouldn't there have always been tribal warfare? It is seen with all primates up through homo sapien tribes all over the world. So why wasn't that enough competition? Why didn't this level of infighting produce ingenuity? Well, the answer seems to lie in its duration and the population density. The Fertile Crescent region experienced the longest, most continuous overlap of pressures in all of human history. And this is where we get to the point of the concept of fertility and warfare connected in the earliest goddesses we know of. Goddesses that all come from this Fertile Crescent region. Inanna or Ishtar in Mesopotamia, Durga or Kali in the Vedic world, do not emerge in marginal or resource-poor regions. They are born out of the most fertile, productive landscapes on earth. River valleys like the Tigris and Euphrates and the Indus and Ganges system. These environments could generate enormous agricultural surplus, which meant population growth, wealth, and political power. But that same fertility acted like a magnet. Rich land inevitably drew outsiders, rival clans and even far-off migrants, and eventually armies. Abundance creates pressure, and pressure demanded defense. In these settings, fertility was never passive. It was something that had to be guarded and violently protected. In Mesopotamia, Inanna or Ishtar embodies this perfectly. She is a goddess who makes crops flourish and herds multiply. But she is also the deity who marches with kings into battle and decides which cities will fall. It mirrors the lived experience of early city-states surrounded by competitors. Irrigated land required coordination, boundaries, and just physical force. To lose a field or canal was to lose food, labor, and future generations. The same divine power that opens the womb, what gives life, is also what can strip away the vital energy. Inanna's love and Inanna's violence are two expressions of the same civilizational logic, and the same pattern appears in the Vedic and later Hindu world. Durga and Kali arise in regions where fertile plains supported dense populations in early states, but also constant warfare. Durga is a mother and protector, yet she only comes into being to annihilate threats that endanger cosmic and social order. Kali directly fuses bloodshed with renewal. Her destruction is what allows time, rebirth, and life itself to continue. Like the bloody ordeal that is human childbirth, or the blood and sweat dropped into the soil to produce a bountiful harvest, it's also going to be blood and sweat that is spent to protect it all, to protect your family and crops. Fields yield crops, crops feed people, people form armies, and armies fight to hold the fields. The goddess must rule all stages of that cycle. When you notice this, you're just going to keep seeing it everywhere. The fertility and war goddess combo consistently appears in major civilizational hubs. But not on the periphery. Even in what might seem to break this rule, like Freya, she's a goddess of war and fertility, but of the Norse people. People think of with Vikings, they're not growing enormous fields of crops, they're not agriculturalists. But where she would seem to break the rules, she actually adds to it. Because there are two different groups of Norse gods, the Vanir and Aesir. It's believed that these two groups are thought to preserve a real fight between the farming people coming into Europe, where it was the common practice to have wives married off to rival tribes in order to keep the peace. The Aesir, with Odin and Thor, they more match up with the non-agriculturalist type of gods. And so do all the goddesses. The only goddess of war and fertility is Freya, of the Vanir. It seems that she was coming from a group of agriculturalists. And how cool, it's a bit of a stretch, but not that much. She's also associated with felines. Maybe not lions or tigers, but her chariot is pulled by two cats. Though they're often shown as being like house cats, they're actually described as being large. So maybe something like a jaguar or a panther? But it is just a bit wild that we're getting felines here again. Where land is rich and competition is intense, you might have different goddesses of the hunt, or other gods with more distinct specialties. But to those who had farms and herds of domesticated animals, creation and destruction came from the same source. Those animals were only domesticated because humans intervened. They killed off the weak and killed off the members of the herd that they wanted to consume, but they were also the generative force of the herd. I keep bringing it up in videos, but I can't stop. If you just have your own little garden, you'll feel this same tension. Even to just plants, it can feel cold to just wipe out an entire bed because some disease took, or because you got what you wanted from it. It already produced its crop and now it's time to cut everything down. But you are also the source of life. You're the whole reason why it was there to cut down in the first place. And you're going to plant new stuff. To those that shape the world around them, to the people of these emerging civilizations, life and destruction, fertility and war, are aspects of the same thing. Almost necessarily so. In Egypt, we see the same thing. We have Sekhmet, a goddess of plague, slaughter, and battlefield fury, who is explicitly paired with Hathor, the deity of fertility, sexuality, joy, and motherhood. They're not seen as opposites, but modes. Almost like avatars of this same divine force. And maybe even some sort of missing link concept here with the Egyptian Bastet, another aspect of the Eye of Ra along with Sekhmet and Hathor, but who can be either a normal house cat or a ferocious lion. Maybe something similar is happening with Freya. It's emerging in the Nile Valley, one of the most agriculturally productive environments on earth, where annual flooding created immense surplus, but also demanded centralized control and military protection. You don't get to have stuff without becoming a target to those who don't have stuff. The richness of the Nile made them a constant target. Neith, also pronounced Neet, is an early goddess associated with weaving, creation, and warfare. She creates the world while also arming warriors. While also the cosmic order, symbolized with the feminine Maat, is inseparable from a military force. And the divine feminine governs all three, the fertile land, the cosmic order, and the military. The ancient Greeks would synchronize Neith with Athena, who gave Athens the olive tree. The Athenians chose this gift over having their patron god be Poseidon. Essentially, they're choosing to be farmers instead of hunter-gatherers. Being on Poseidon's good side means you could be great pirates at sea and be great fishermen, but the olive tree makes you tied to the land and tied to this civilizational promoting force of agriculture. Which again leads to increased trade and increased warfare. Athena is also the goddess of war, but specifically juxtaposed with Ares. Athena represents strategic, defensive, and civilizational styles of warfare. Not the bloodlust, pure rage of Ares. She governs tactics, discipline, planning, fortifications, and the idea of a kind of violence that preserves order. She's often helping Odysseus. It's the idea that the Trojan horse is deceptive, but it brings about the quickest and cleanest end to the war. And in some of my other videos, I've covered the independent domestication events of plants and animals and writing in China. Along the Yellow River Basin, the pattern is subtler but still present, shaped by a uniquely volatile environment. The Yellow River's extreme flooding, so destructive that it earned the name China's Sorrow, meant that fertility and catastrophe were two sides of the same coin. While early Chinese religion did not center on a single explicit fertility war goddess, like we more clearly see in the Mesopotamian or Vedic sense, figures like Nuwa encode a similar logic. Nuwa is the creator and restorer of humanity, repairing the heavens after cosmic disaster, but her role emerges directly from environmental chaos, seen as an existential threat. And there are river deities and flood-taming heroes, like Yu the Great, which though he's a male, he occupies the same conceptual space. Fertility must be violently controlled, subdued, and defended. But the overall point is the same, this is the most fertile region in China, and so this is the focus of these evolutionary pressures, advancements in tech, while seeming to be at constant war. But another amazing point that I want to leave you with is that this has been playing out not for thousands of years, but hundreds of thousands, and with other hominin species. All hominins are thought to have originated from Africa, but roughly speaking, it's eventually the case where Neanderthals were dominant in Europe and throughout the Middle East, and Denisovans from about Central Asia and out through the rest of Asia. When Homo sapiens are venturing out of Africa, which was happening, by the way, long before the major successful movement we usually think of, that one around 70,000 years ago, that would eventually lead to us spreading over the entire world. Over 100,000 years before that, there were forays out into Europe and Asia that seemed to have lasted for tens of thousands of years, but they were eventually eliminated by Neanderthals and or Denisovans. What's a mind-blowing point is that geneticists are able to get snippets of genomes that passed from sapiens, into Neanderthals, and back into sapiens with that latest of migrations that led to us taking over the world. But how cool is that? We can tell of the interbreeding events far earlier because they remained in Neanderthals and made their way back into us. So this broad region from the Apidema cave in Greece at 210,000 years ago to many sites across the Near and Middle East from about 100 to 120,000 years ago, this whole region from Southern Europe, from Greece and Turkey and Egypt, North and Central Asia, to Iran and India, this whole zone that would be connected to the Fertile Crescent and seen as the single greatest civilizational and technological explosion zone has also been the most intense crucible of warfare for hundreds of thousands of years across at least three different types of humans. The fact that our oldest evidence of sapiens out of Africa is 210,000 years ago, but the global populating migration was around 70,000 years ago means that for at least 140,000 years, pockets of human groups were trying to expand out through the Near and Middle East, keeping this effort alive for sometimes tens of thousands of years, but ultimately being destroyed by this greater force. In other words, you were abandoned by this energy of fertility or war. Regions like Australia and much of the rest of the world show us what humanity looks like when the pressure is low, when everything is stable, sustainable, and technologically conservative, but the Near Eastern Corridor shows us what humanity becomes when pressure never lets up. They're hyper-innovative, expansionist, hierarchical, and ultimately global. Again, neither group is more human at a genetic level, we're the same species, and individuals can be geniuses or dullards from any part of the globe. This sort of racial simpleton is missing something that people thousands of years ago more accurately encoded in their goddesses, that fertility, war, and civilization are one aspect of the same force. Thanks for watching. If you made it this far, please hit that like button, it really does help, and I'll see you in the next one.