As indicated on the right column, this blog is available to others under a Creative Commons license. The license doesn’t include commercial use. I assume that your travel book is a commercial use (a book for sale). I’m willing to discuss such use, but you haven’t allowed sufficient time for such a discussion.

My tentative thinking about commercial use is that I would like such users to make some other, comparable value contribution to the domain of works that others can use relatively freely, i.e. accessible and shareable by everyone around the world with Internet access.

Write to me with specific requests and proposals. Allow for at least a week for me to respond, especially at busy times of the year.

I would be interested in using an image of yours that I have seen on this flickr website. I am collecting images for use in a travel book on Mediterranean islands. If you would like to more about the forthcoming publication, please visit http://www.mediterraneanislands.org. The publisher has said that all contributors will be sent a copy of the book in recognition of their agreement to the image being used.

Could you confirm you have personally taken the picture of this image and therefore have rights to? I would also need confirmation that the picture is actually of a trireme! Would you mind it being used in the publication?
If so, please e-mail me back as I think your image is just right for what I have in mind.

The deadline on my project is this Friday, so I would greatly appreciate a reply at your earliest convenience.

Kind Regards

Hassina Christian

The Hamzanama, an artistic masterpiece created from 1558 to 1573 in the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, frequent describes combat between armies through individual combat. Both armies form opposing lines. Each line then sends out a “champion.” The champions fight to determine which side wins the battle. While the Hamzanama is a romance, bio-economics favor such an organization of battle. It would minimize total casualties and support general patterns of male status competition. Perhaps brutal fighting as a kind of spectator sport has a long history.

Scholars have recently documented high levels of violence in prehistoric societies. Steve Pinker writes:

It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

A long history of such circumstances would have effects on human nature. But even if capacity for extraordinary physical and mental feats arose from high-intensity battles for survival, I believe that human nature has enough plasticity to use such capacities in different circumstances.

National Georgraphic Fight Science Doc:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/fightscience/?fs=www9.nationalgeographic.com

Muaythai:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=V3vrziWRjwY

The ancient Greek warriors existed in a world where the issue of life and death was necessarily a daily preoccupation; where facing survival and war were a constant fact of life. But, not only did these men have to live and breathe each moment like their own lives depended upon it, their entire population did. And not only did their people’s existence depend on the warriors’ strength, skill, and willpower – their entire *kind* did. I believe the urgency of protecting life, family, and genetic essence brought out in these men (if I may speak figuratively) an extremely and insanely badass expression of human physical potential.

I believe Nature has equipped all of us with this incredible potential, as a synergy of physical structure, mental resolve, and spiritual inspiration. It’s why we came to rule the earth the way we now do. It’s what gave us the luxury of time to figure out how to create “domestic” technologies that have since made those incredible faculties but obsolete solutions to threats and conditions no longer immediate and, for most, inconceivable.

We are overdomesticated, is all. Modern elite athletes, while proud, conditioned and genetically gifted, rarely experience the stimulus of “genetic survival” faced by ancient warriors who protected their entire race – their very essence – from extinction.

To ground my theory, I offer my experience studying martial artists in the world – particularly the Muaythai fighters of Thailand. They are renowned for their incredible toughness and power, despite their lack of the modern athletic training and sports nutrition. Originally employed for unarmed battlefield combat, Muaythai is cherished by Thais as having helped the kingdom resist all foreign invasion, and thus also ensuring survival of the race.

Beginning at age 8-11, Muaythai fighters come almost exclusively from extremely poor families, pursuing the sport as a necessary means of life support for themselves and their relatives. Their bodies, minds, and spirits are therefore conditioned by the need to pursue “race survival”. And that is the culture of the sport: to never give up until nature decides it. As a result, they are able to manifest and withstand tremendous physical impact and intensity. A recent National Geographic documentary on martial artists (“Fight Science”, discovered that a lightweight, 10-years-retired Muaythai champion to be able to knee-strike a crash test dummy with the impact of a car moving at 35mph. To be blunt, these guys hit freaking hard, yo.

Let us not forget:
We were made for more.