When Will They Ever Learn?

Michael Emsugut, left, and Frances Rivera excavate one of the skeletons                                 AAP

The haunting folk song Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, by Pete Seeger, drifted into my head as I read this story about the discovery of the oldest known act of warfare. It took place between 9,500 and 10,500 years ago, near Lake Turkana in what is now Kenya. The area was lush and abounded with animals and other resources, and it seems from the evidence that the group of 12 hunter-gatherers whose skeletons were found there had been attacked by an outside group, probably in a premeditated bid for those resources. The findings “support the notion that serious intergroup conflict might be as ancient as group identity itself,” says University of Mainz biological anthropologist Christian Meyer: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/attack-10000-years-ago-earliest-known-act-warfare?utm_source=Society+for+Science+Newsletters&utm_campaign=026c34995f-Ed_Picks_1_22_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a4c415a67f-026c34995f-104586561
   Seeger explains that the inspiration for Where Have All the Flowers Gone? came from three lines in the four-volume novel And Quiet Flows the Don, by Mikhail Sholokhov (which you can read here: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23276946M/And_quiet_flows_the_Don). Seeger had copied them into his notebook, and later, on a plane, he saw them and another line he had written at a different
time, "long time passing," and put them together. It took him 20 minutes, he said, to compose the song, which then was three verses long. He sang it at a college concert, and one of the students, Joe Hickerson, started singing it at his summer job as a camp counselor. Hickerson added the two last verses that tied the song together (and Seeger gave him 20 percent of the royalties). Of all the versions of the song ~ and there have been many ~ the one that sticks in my mind is by the folk group The Kingston Trio (video; the group actually performs other songs here as well, but Flowers is the first one): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBtT9NfWtbE