AN American general who enjoyed tremendous success on the battlefield once said: "Mankind must find a way to put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind."

For thousands of years warfare has been an accepted part of human endeavour and, indeed, is a major instrument in the conduct of foreign affairs between nations. Ever since the first cavemen clubbed one another millions of words have been spoken and written about the futility of warfare and of the suffering and grief that armed conflict invariably bring in its wake.

Yet mankind has not put an end to warfare and has instead greatly enhanced his ability to conduct ever greater destructive warfare with worldwide reach and consequences.

Despite the mountain of evidence of what warfare will do, succeeding generations have not put aside the idea of going to war.

It seems that mankind has ingrained in his genes the concept that warfare is as natural for human beings as sleeping, the need to eat, to stay alive or the sexual drive and the desire to procreate one's species.

However, warfare has not always been a natural part of the human condition. In fact, what we call warfare - or at least its more bloody and destructive manifestations - would appear only to be a recent phenomenon in terms of the time-line of human social development.

It is often assumed that man's more brutish and violent behaviour towards his fellow man has its origins in man's so-called pre-civilised state of existence, before the rise of organised religion. It is the so-called savage - the primitive, so to speak - who is given to outbursts of unrestrained violence and from this evolved the institution of warfare.

But, in fact, if we examine the anthropological evidence of man's pre-civilised state of existence, we may be surprised to discover that those societies were more peaceful than a lot of so-called civilised societies that have developed into the cultures that we have today.

When the English first went to Australia, they marvelled at the fact that even though the aboriginal tribes were primitive by their standards, they had, in fact, evolved a sophisticated social and life system which allowed them to settle a vast continent some 40 millennia ago and, what's more, allowed them to live in harmony in a potential hostile ecosystem and survive.

Even though they spoke more than 500 different languages (grouped into perhaps 31 related language families), they saw themselves as one people.

And as a result there seems to have been an absence of endemic warfare, a circumstance one would perhaps expect to find among traditional, tribally-based societies.

In fact, the Aborigines were not to experience the cruel realities of organised conflict until their lands were invaded by Europeans, mostly the British.

FROM a population that was estimated to be in the region of 300,000 to 1.2 million before the coming of the Europeans, it has now been reduced to a rump of 200,000 to 300,000 out of the overall Australian population of 15 million.

The Aborignines are a prime example of how a society could thrive with the absence of warfare before the coming of the European. And such an absence of fighting may have been much more of the norm in some societies than had been previously thought.

In an interesting book called The Parable of the Tribes by Andrew Bard Schmookler, the argument is put forward that the rise of warfare as we know it today is not rooted in so-called primitive or non-civilised societies but has its origins in those societies that considered themselves to be civilised.

That does not mean that there was the absence of conflict in the former; it's just that the resolution of such conflicts was less bloody and less destructive than the warfare that is engaged in by so-called civilised societies.

Quoting various opinions on the subject The Parable of the Tribes states that so-called warfare among primitive peoples was not warfare at all - certainly not in the sense that today's practitioners of state-on-state violence would recognise it.

It was highly inefficient and much of it was ritualised; the fighting was restricted to what were almost ceremonial displays of hostility, which in those circumstances produced very little injury and/or damage. And when the combat did produce bloodshed, it never reached beyond the raid or the skirmish - which by definition limited any such conflicts to short durations.

It is only after man began to develop more complex societies that we began to see more intense struggles over issues of power and more competition for that power; first within the same group, then with other groupings of people.

In today's terms that has evolved to mean the struggle of nations with other nations.

It has been less than 150 years since the creation of empires was the main preoccupation of the more powerful nations of the day.

And empire-building itself was the cause of much warfare between those nations; it was, in fact, the world order.

It is less than 100 years since former colonies became Independent nations and even some of them have gone to war against each other over some of the very same issues that nations have always gone to war over.

The struggle over power remains the same and there is an even more intense struggle for access to natural resources.

It is an old story that goes by new names: national interests; international security concerns; world order; nuclear and weapons of mass destruction disbarment; the United Nations and the rule of law and a preoccupation of armed force in the name of foreign policy interests and national security.

With respect to the last, an historical note might be in order: China built the Great Wall of China to keep its enemies out; but in the end China was still conquered. Britain once had the world's biggest and strongest navy but that did not prevent World War One or Two and thereafter, despite being on the winning side of those conflicts, the UK saw itself decline from superpower status.

And today, despite having the strongest military on earth, the United States was attacked on September 11.

The matter of national security is far from simple and may be relative, depending on a variety of factors rather than just pure military strength.

As regards to the present geopolitical situation I wish I could be more optimistic about the prospect of world peace and the end of the use of warfare as a foreign policy instrument. But alas I must accept that the more man civilises himself, the greater is his propensity to wage war.