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Blue - Human Origins

Purple - Humans in cultural relation with the non-human world

Green - Taking action

Yellow - Issues in the Anthropocene

Red - Questions for the future of humanity

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Gorilla Intergroup Violence and Aggression

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Gorilla Intergroup Violence and Aggression

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Gorilla intergroup violence, often ritualized through chest-beating, vocal displays, and controlled aggression, reflects a primal form of competition deeply embedded in their social hierarchies. Silverback males, the linchpins of gorilla groups, engage in confrontations to assert dominance, protect mates, and secure access to food and territory which are behaviors that mirror early hominid struggles for survival. These clashes, while rarely lethal, function as a "sport" of sorts, where physical prowess and intimidation determine rank without escalating to fatal violence, preserving group stability. In the Anthropocene, however, human-driven habitat loss and resource scarcity amplify these conflicts, compressing gorilla populations into smaller areas and intensifying competition beyond natural thresholds. This distortion of traditional rivalry echoes environmental pressures faced by early hominids, who likely channeled similar aggressive instincts into rituals or cooperative strategies to mitigate conflict. For gorillas, hierarchical fights act as a social regulatory mechanism, ensuring only the strongest lead, much like how physical competition in early human groups may have shaped leadership and cooperation. The ritualized nature of gorilla violence, limited to displays rather than outright combat, hints at an evolutionary precursor to more structured forms of competition, akin to sport, where rules and boundaries emerge to mediate aggression.

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A combination of boxing and wrestling with barely any restrictions. The Washington Post. "Two Pankration Athletes Fighting." The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/02/09/pankration-greek-olympics-ufc-mma/. Accessed 2 May 2025.

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Pankration, the ancient Greek combat sport blending boxing and wrestling, embodies humanity’s primal fascination with ritualized violence, a tendency rooted in our hominid past. Emerging as early as 648 BCE, its brutal, no-holds-barred style mirrored the raw physicality of ancestral competition, where survival once depended on strength, strategy, and dominance. Like gorilla hierarchies or early hominid skirmishes, pankration channeled aggression into structured contests, transforming lethal potential into a spectacle governed by rules and honor. This evolution reflects a broader human tendency to codify conflict, turning primal instincts into cultural artifacts like martial arts, which balance violence with discipline and artistry.

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Bonobos are renowned for their unique approach to conflict resolution, which prioritizes social harmony over aggression. Instead of resorting to physical combat, they often use affiliative behaviors like sexual contact, grooming, or food-sharing to diffuse tensions and reconcile after disputes. This emphasis on cooperation and empathy helps maintain group cohesion, contrasting sharply with physical combat strategies seen in other primates, which can lead to injury, hierarchy enforcement, or prolonged hostility. Bonobos' methods highlight their evolved reliance on social bonds rather than brute force to navigate conflicts. This hominid behavior also foreshadows the ability of Homo Sapiens to seek other forms of conflict resolution other than physical combat.

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A depiction of Roman Gladiators. Britannica. "Roman Forum: Temple of Antoninus and Faustina." Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Rome. Accessed 2 May 2025.

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Roman Gladiators (1th Century BC - 4th Century AC)

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Roman Gladiators (1th Century BC - 4th Century AC)

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Roman gladiatorial combat, a spectacle of survival and skill, demonstrates humanity’s ancient entanglement with violence as both ritual and entertainment—an echo of hominid instincts repackaged for mass consumption. Emerging from funeral rites to become Rome’s ultimate theater of power, gladiators who were enslaved or imprisoned fought not just for life but for honor, their battles mirroring primal struggles for dominance once vital to early human survival. The arena’s staged clashes, blending martial prowess with dramatic flair, transformed raw aggression into a codified sport, much like how early hominids may have ritualized conflict to mediate disputes or strengthen social hierarchies. In the Anthropocene, this legacy persists: modern combat sports like MMA or boxing inherit the gladiator’s mix of brutality and spectacle, yet operate in a world where human dominance has reshaped ecosystems and destabilized the earth's climates. The Colosseum’s engineered violence, fueled by imperial excess and resource exploitation, prefigures today’s hyper-commercialized sports industries, where athletes are both celebrated and commodified, their bodies pushed to extremes in climate-controlled stadiums separated from natural contexts.

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Victorian boxing (pugilism) was a brutal, bare-knuckle sport popular in 19th-century England. Daniel Mendoza and Richard Humphries boxing - Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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Victorian boxing, with its blend of brutal spectacle and codified rules, reflects the tension between humanity’s primal instincts and the civilizing impulses of the Industrial Age, a duality central to the Anthropocene. Emerging in 19th-century Britain, bare-knuckle bouts under the London Prize Ring Rules (and later the Marquess of Queensberry’s gloves) transformed street brawls into regulated contests, mirroring how early hominids ritualized conflict to mediate disputes and establish social order. The sport’s popularity thrived amid urbanization and colonial expansion, its bloodied fighters celebrated as emblems of “muscular Christianity” and imperial vigor, much as physical dominance once secured status in ancestral human groups. Yet Victorian boxing’s veneer of civility with gentlemen spectators and written rules cloaked a raw violence rooted in survival, echoing the era’s exploitation of both laborers and colonized ecosystems to fuel industrial growth. This duality mirrors the Anthropocene’s paradox: societies that champion progress and morality while accelerating ecological disruption. The sport’s global spread via British imperialism also prefigured the homogenization of martial arts, as local combat traditions were overshadowed by Eurocentric ideals of “sport,” much like industrial monocultures displaced biodiverse landscapes.

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Saul "Canelo" Alvarez vs. Floyd Mayweather Jr. Getty Images (or Imagn or AP Images). "Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Canelo Alvarez face off." Sporting News, https://www.sportingnews.com/us/boxing/news/how-floyd-mayweather-vs-canelo-alvarez-face-boxing-10-years/68a715d12901c74cd9a6fa5b. Accessed 2 May 2025.

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Modern boxing, with its gloved fists and codified rules, distills humanity’s primal combat instincts into a globalized spectacle, mirroring the Anthropocene’s tension between domestication and excess. Rooted in the same survival-driven aggression that shaped early hominid competition for status and resources, the sport ritualizes violence into a disciplined craft, much as ancestral societies transformed raw conflict into social order. Yet, its contemporary form showcased in neon-lit arenas and broadcast worldwide epitomizes the Anthropocene’s industrial scale, where athletes train with climate-controlled technology and events generate sprawling carbon footprints, echoing humanity’s broader ecological indifference. The sport’s commercialization, fueled by pay-per-view empires and corporate sponsorships, mirrors the extractive logic of a planet pushed to its limits, commodifying bodies as relentlessly as natural resources. Fighters often emerge from marginalized communities, their pursuit of glory a stark echo of hominid struggles against scarcity, now reframed within systemic inequality.

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Traditional Martial Arts (7th Century - Present)

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Traditional Martial Arts (7th Century - Present)

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Traditional martial arts, such as Muay Thai, known as the "Art of Eight Limbs," emerged from Thailand’s ancient battlefields, its techniques honed over centuries to blend lethal efficiency with cultural reverence, a testament to humanity’s dual capacity for violence and artistry. Rooted in survival, its elbow strikes, knee drives, and clinch work mirror the primal combat strategies early hominids may have employed to defend resources or assert dominance, transforming raw aggression into codified systems of movement. The ritualized pre-fight Wai Kru dance, honoring teachers and ancestors, echoes the symbolic gestures of early human societies, where ritual mediated violence and reinforced communal bonds. In the Anthropocene, however, Muay Thai’s traditional ethos collides with modernity: stadiums lit by neon replace jungle clearings, and fighters now train in globalized gyms, their art commodified as both sport and spectacle. This shift reflects humanity’s broader trajectory from survival-driven conflict to structured competition. However, it also underscores how martial arts, once tied to local ecosystems, now exist in a homogenized, climate-disrupted world.

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Shaolin Monks. Smith, David. "Kung-fu monk fights his critics." The Independent, 24 Mar. 2010, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/kung-fu-monk-fights-his-critics-1855403.html. Accessed 2 May 2025.

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Martial Arts Philosophies Rooted in Nature

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Martial Arts Philosophies Rooted in Nature

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Many martial arts traditions draw deeply from observations of the non-human world, reflecting a historical interdependence between humans and nature. For example, Shaolin Kung Fu’s Five Animals system (tiger, crane, leopard, snake, and dragon) emulates the strength, agility, and tactics of wild creatures, while Brazilian Capoeira incorporates fluid, animal-like movements (jogo de bichos) inspired by jungle fauna. Philosophically, disciplines like Japanese Aikido and Kyudo (archery) emphasize harmony with natural forces, teaching practitioners to align their actions with principles of balance, flow, and minimal disruption—mirroring ecosystems’ resilience. These practices not only celebrate nature as a teacher but also encode ethical frameworks that stress respect for the environment, contrasting sharply with the Anthropocene’s exploitative human-nature dynamics. By grounding combat in reverence for the non-human, such arts offer a lens to rethink humanity’s role within, rather than above, the natural world (Anthropocentrism).

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Spanish Bull Fighting. Aguilar, Antonio de Jesús. "What I Learned About My Catholic Faith Watching a Bullfight." America Magazine, 21 Sept. 2017, https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/09/21/what-i-learned-about-my-catholic-faith-watching-bullfight. Accessed 2 May 2025.

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Animal blood sports, from cockfighting to dogfighting, expose humanity’s long-standing obsession with ritualized violence—a dark mirror to our hominid ancestors’ survival-driven conflicts. These spectacles, often framed as “entertainment,” amplify natural animal aggression into controlled, human-orchestrated battles, reflecting our species’ complex relationship with dominance and power. Early hominids likely witnessed similar raw confrontations in nature, where territorial disputes or mating competitions among animals shaped their understanding of conflict as a tool for hierarchy, a concept later codified in human combat sports. Yet, in the Anthropocene, blood sports reveal a perverse twist: human-engineered environments and commodification of wildlife distort natural behaviors, reducing animals to gladiatorial proxies in a world increasingly severed from ecological balance. Martial arts and combat sports, by contrast, ritualize violence into disciplines of skill and respect, transforming primal instincts into cultural traditions that honor the body’s potential rather than exploiting it. Blood sports, however, strip away such nuance, laying bare a raw, unchecked impulse that echoes humanity’s capacity for cruelty, even as we evolved cooperative strategies for survival.

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Modern Muay Thai. YOKKAO. "YOKKAO Fight Team Glove Shot." Yokkao.com, https://yokkao.com/pages/muay-thai-history. Accessed 2 May 2025.

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Immergence of Muay Thai in the Western consciousness

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Immergence of Muay Thai in the Western consciousness

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The proliferation of Muay Thai gyms in Western countries, coupled with social media coverage, has transformed it from a niche practice to a mainstream fitness and sport. Cultural elements, such as the ritualistic Wai Kru dance, now intrigue Western practitioners, blending tradition with combat efficacy 10. This fusion of historical allure and modern adaptability has solidified Muay Thai’s status as a global martial arts phenomenon, an unexpected reemergence in a popular Western culture immersed in its own sports. This seems to be a strong force of decolonization.

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Khabib Nurmagomedov (left) and Islam Makhachev (right) are two of the most successful fighters in the history of the sport. They are both from Caucasian Russian Republic Dagestan. Porter, Gavin. "The Success Of Khabib Nurmagomedov And Islam Makhachev In Abu Dhabi." UFC.com, 18 Oct. 2023, https://www.ufc.com/news/success-khabib-nurmagomedov-and-islam-makhachev-abu-dhabi. Accessed 2 May 2025.

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MMA, the apex of modern combat sports, synthesizes humanity’s ancient drive for physical dominance with the hyper-globalized, technology-driven ethos of the Anthropocene. Born from the fusion of disciplines like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, and wrestling, its hybrid nature mirrors early hominid adaptability where survival hinged on blending diverse skills to overcome challenges. The octagon, a sterile, corporate-branded arena, ritualizes violence into a consumable product, stripping martial arts of their cultural roots much like industrialization homogenizes ecosystems into resource pipelines. Fighters, draped in sponsorship logos, embody the Anthropocene’s paradox: disciplined athletes honing primal instincts in climate-controlled gyms, their training absent of the environmental contexts that once shaped ancestral combat. The sport’s rise parallels humanity’s digital age, with bouts streamed globally, amplifying our species’ interconnectedness while obscuring the carbon costs of arenas, travel, and gear production. MMA’s “no holds barred” ethos, tempered by safety regulations, reflects humanity’s dual urge to unleash and control aggression an echo of hominids balancing cooperation and competition to thrive. Although MMA is heavily commercialized at the elite level, it has brought a great democratization of professional fighting, putting all the worlds fighting styles on the map. A good example of this is Caucasian fighters being able to demonstrate their regions cultural heritage, which is often forgotten and marginalized, on the world stage with their wrestling-heavy style.

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Channeling Energy from Spectacle to Solutions

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Channeling Energy from Spectacle to Solutions

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There is a growing trend of communities increasingly focused on local resilience, from urban gardening initiatives and disaster preparedness groups to local environmental cleanups and citizen science projects. This mirrors a subtle but important shift in focus. While combat sports and entertainment (like MMA or boxing, themes explored historically in the image) draw huge audiences and participation, there's a parallel rise in people investing their energy in tangible, collective action for real-world challenges like environmental defense, community building, sustainable practices. The Action: Consider where your own energy and attention go. Could society see a shift into dedicating a portion of the time or resources spent on consuming spectacles of conflict towards participating in or supporting local groups tackling climate change adaptation, food security, or community well-being? This isn't about abandoning entertainment, but consciously redirecting some of that powerful human drive for engagement towards building a more resilient and sustainable local reality.

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Can Technology Redefine Humanity’s Relationship with Conflict?

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Can Technology Redefine Humanity’s Relationship with Conflict?

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As virtual reality and AI increasingly mediate human interaction, will physical combat sports evolve into digital simulations, stripping violence of its visceral stakes? Could algorithms replace primal dominance hierarchies, or will they amplify aggression by anonymizing consequences? How might societies balance the preservation of martial arts’ embodied discipline with the allure of risk-free, tech-driven competition in the Anthropocene?

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Will Ecological Collapse Force a Shift in Human Conflict Resolution?

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Will Ecological Collapse Force a Shift in Human Conflict Resolution?

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The Anthropocene’s climate crises demand unprecedented cooperation. Bonobos prioritize empathy and social bonds over aggression; could humanity adopt similar strategies to navigate resource scarcity and geopolitical tensions? Can institutions incentivize “affiliative” policies to replace zero-sum competition, or will survival instincts revert us to ancestral territorialism?

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Node. (2016, June 20). VR Boxing - Thrill of the Fight [Video]. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIrmhf9pRH0

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How is the explosive growth of ultra-realistic digital media already changing our social relationship with aggression, strategy, and risk?

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How is the explosive growth of ultra-realistic digital media already changing our social relationship with aggression, strategy, and risk?

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The lines are blurring faster than ever. Esports arenas sell out, rivaling traditional sports in viewership and investment. VR/AR technology is moving beyond gaming into realistic training simulations for complex jobs, from surgery to piloting drones. At the same time, debates rage about AI's role in decision-making, including autonomous systems and the ethics of virtual interaction. How is the explosive growth of ultra-realistic digital competition and simulation already changing our social relationship with aggression, strategy, and risk? As VR makes simulated combat or high-stakes scenarios feel increasingly real, what are the psychological and ethical knock-on effects in society? Are these digital arenas becoming primary outlets for competitive drives, potentially reducing real-world friction, or are they creating new forms of conflict and detachment? These aren't distant hypotheticals; they reflect social and technological shifts happening now, forcing us to question how we define skill, conflict, and consequence in an increasingly digitized world.