Did humans always wage war, or did farming and settling down invent it?
Hobbes pictured life before civilisation as a war of all against all, and Rousseau fired back that it was nothing of the kind. Centuries later, archaeologists digging through ancient cemeteries, cave paintings and palisades are still testing that quarrel, and the clues point to a surprising turning point: the moment people stopped wandering.
The anthropologist Raymond C. Kelly argues that the earliest hunter-gatherers, Homo erectus, lived so thinly spread that fighting made little sense. Hunting with throwing spears and ambushes demanded cooperation, so clashes between hunting parties carried a heavy price. He even suggests that keeping numbers low to avoid competition may have helped push Homo erectus out of Africa around 1.8 million years ago, and that this long warless stretch lasted well beyond the arrival of Homo sapiens about 315,000 years ago.
The Ice Age record is ambiguous. No Upper Paleolithic cave painting explicitly shows people attacking people, although some roughly 30,000 and 17,000 years old show figures pierced by arrows, which might mean clashes over game, executions or sacrifice. Absence of evidence is tricky too: small mobile bands left few durable traces, people only began burying their dead around 150,000 years ago, and nomads had little reason to build walls. Kissel and colleagues conclude that war was probably uncommon then, but not proven absent.
Clearer signs appear later. At Jebel Sahaba in northern Sudan, a cemetery around 13,000 to 14,000 years old holds 24 of 59 skeletons with projectile points lodged in them, and re-examination suggests repeated raids during a climate crisis along the Nile rather than one battle. Mesolithic cave art in Iberia shows groups of archers fighting, including a scene of eleven attacked by seventeen, and the bow let attackers strike from a safer distance.
Settled farming seems to have turned sporadic violence into something systematic. Around 5500 BC, the Talheim pit in Germany hints at raids to capture women, and more than 200 people died at Schletz about 7,000 years ago. Skeletons of over 2,300 early farmers, dug up at 180 northwest European sites, show that more than one in ten suffered weapon injuries. By 4300 BC, Mersin in Anatolia had fortifications and soldiers' quarters, and Hamoukar in the Near East fell to what may be the earliest urban warfare yet found, around 3500 BC.
Source: Prehistoric warfare
