New Evidence Suggests Middle East Conflict Predates All Human Civilization
NEW YORK—In a major breakthrough that provides new insight into the region’s deep-seated instability, researchers at Columbia University presented evidence Tuesday that indicates the long-running conflict currently engulfing the Middle East predates all human civilization.
According to the team of leading historians, archaeologists, and paleontologists, the regional turmoil appears to have originated long before the Sunni-Shiite rift of the seventh century or even the first proto-urban settlements in Mesopotamia some 11,000 years earlier, with data suggesting that the violent struggle has been raging across the same 5-million-square-mile area since the dawn of life on earth.
“In our efforts to trace the underlying origins of the Middle East conflict, we found that the brutal hostilities started almost 4 billion years earlier than we previously thought,” said lead researcher Anthony Jackson, who added that the conflict could now be linked back to savage guerrilla attacks launched by the first single-celled organisms to emerge in what would later be known as Jordan. “Eons before there were Israelis or Palestinians in the region—or anyone else, for that matter—fighting broke out at the microbial level, with the unusually fierce clashes soon spreading into what is now Iraq, Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, and Turkey. Of course, it was just a barren, featureless landscape covered by a prehistoric sea at that point, but nevertheless, unrest was highly concentrated in this area.”
“This discovery allows us to put developments from the Holocene epoch of the past 12,000 years—the Arab Spring uprisings, the 1982 Lebanon invasion, the Yom Kippur War, and so on—into a much fuller context,” he continued. “We can now say that today’s fighting in Syria and Iraq is simply a continuation of the battles waged in the primordial soup of the Precambrian age.”
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