Our Ancient Ancestors Had No Need Of War
There is no archeological evidence of it prior to 13K years ago
The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker is a book about how human violence has declined over the past several thousand years — it is not a book about how our Paleolithic and Neolithic ancestors were as or more violent than today. Nonetheless, more than once, I’ve had it presented to me as such, including a graph that is put before me as definitive evidence of warfare as a fact of human life throughout time.
The problem is, that graph from Pinker’s book indicates that most violence occurred around 8,000 BCE or earlier, with a few instances that took place later, with none older than 14,000 BCE.
The relatively recent past was undoubtedly more violent than now, but this does nothing at all to shine a light on what our ancestors were doing 25,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago, much less 300,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first emerged. When I write about the largely peaceful and egalitarian history of our ancient ancestors, a topic that I have thoroughly researched and written extensively about, there is always some guy who has to insist that no, the truth is that humans have always been violent and warlike, usually based on evidence that doesn’t actually demonstrate that, as with Pinker’s book.
Either these men have no concept of the actual breadth of history or they are so blinded by their own preconceptions that it never occurs to them that although 13,000 years is a long time, it’s hardly the beginning of human history. In fact, it’s just a drop in the bucket. They sometimes cite other books or articles as well, but these are all based in flimsy physical evidence or ethnographic speculation that isn’t quite on point, which they mostly don’t even bother to specify. Some book I read once said warfare was pervasive, so all of your scientific supports don’t count, or something to that effect. It’s tiresome.
There is no archeological evidence of warfare or large-scale violent death of any kind from our distant past. In fact, the massacre at Jebel Sahaba, about 13,000 years ago is widely recognized as the first site of mass armed conflict. Therefore, those who are making assertions about pervasive warfare before that time are basing it not on archeological evidence, but on notions that fit their preconceived ideas and that ignore realities that do not mesh with that preconception. Here is one such example:
Based then on two depictions in rock art and six cases of projectile points in bones, Otterbein concludes, ‘What has been found suggests widespread killing in the Upper Paleolithic.’ He makes a huge presumptive leap from killing to warfare.
While negative evidence is not by itself proof of an absence of warfare, it nevertheless bears directly on the relative density of humans on the continent during this very long period {200,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE}. There is nothing at all to indicate any kind of population pressure or possible scarcity of resources. There is also a complete lack of concrete social units above the level of family or immediate family group for this same period. Who then, would have been fighting whom and for what possible reason?
As I’ve said before, peacefulness and egalitarianism did not come about because our ancient ancestors were noble savages. It came about because it was actively enforced as part of a cooperative way to survive. The things needed to impede war were a well-established part of ancient societies, well up into the Neolithic period, and we have strong archeological and anthropological evidence of that.
“Many social arrangements impede war, such as cross-group ties of kinship and marriage; cooperation in hunting, agriculture or food sharing; flexibility in social arrangements that allow individuals to move to other groups; norms that value peace and stigmatize killing; and recognized means for conflict resolution. These mechanisms do not eliminate serious conflict, but they do channel it in ways that either prevent killing or keep it confined among a limited number of individuals.
People are people. They fight and sometimes kill. Humans have always had the capacity to make war if conditions and culture so dictate.
But those conditions and the warlike cultures they generate became common only over the past 10,000 years — and, in most places, much more recently than that. The high level of killing often reported in history, ethnography, or later archaeology is contradicted in the earliest archaeological findings around the globe.” (emphasis mine). Scientific American
Cooperation and enforced egalitarianism were survival strategies that allowed small family groups of about 20-50 to survive. They had low population density, and ample natural resources, and relied on neighboring bands to trade members in order to maintain genetic diversity and prevent inbreeding. Not only would there have been no reason to kill each other but the social environment was one designed to keep any impulse for widescale violence in check.
FOR 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn’t always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organized ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.*
Decision-making was decentralized and leadership ad hoc; there weren’t any chiefs. There were sporadic hot-blooded fights between individuals, of course, but there was no organized conflict between groups. Nor were there strong notions of private property and therefore any need for territorial defense.
Nearly all of those who are claiming that warfare was commonplace in the Paleolithic era, rely on two types of supports for their claim from the same limited examples — rock art and skeletal remains. The rock art comes from 3 caves in France, consisting of all of four figures punctured by spears. However, two of the figures have tails and one appears to be half man and half bird. This is in shocking contrast to the thousands of depictions of the hunting of animals and a greater depiction of human violence found in cave art from 8000 BC on. (Nash 2005)
The skeletal remains are also few in number — one individual each found in two separate sites in Italy with embedded tool points, as well as two in the Ukraine. One Czech site had three people in a mass grave, but there was no indication of violence to the remains and they more likely died of disease.
“Rather than demonstrating the commonness of ancient warfare amongst humans, consideration of the entire archeological data set shows the opposite.”
Isolated incidents of murder indicate either a lone act of passion or punishment for a member of the tribe who was not maintaining the group values. This is seen today in modern hunter-gatherers who use teasing, shaming, banishment, and in some instances, execution to rein in or punish those who do not maintain the ethos of the group.
Brushing off the data and scientific evidence as coming from a dove or a feminist is something that I often hear as well, but without substantive refutation of the assertions made by that source, it is just a lame attempt at discrediting something when there is no other more meaningful way to counter it. If you have no actual proof of something different, it doesn’t really matter who has said it.
I will concede that there is some academic dissent on this topic, but it seems to be founded in a strange kind of wishful thinking because it is unsupported by the actual data and involves large leaps of imagination. The example above from Otterbein where he decides that a couple of skeletons and cave paintings, which may or may not even depict humans, equaled widespread warfare is once such instance.
Just because the prevailing social structure of the past 8,000 years has been a dominance hierarchy based on violence and conquest, it has no bearing on the times before that had vastly different conditions. Not only did the population density increase dramatically, but the larger accumulation of wealth and personal possessions meant that eventually there was something to actually fight over. To make the assumption that despite these dramatic changes, the world continued on to be as it had always been is to willfully choose to ignore all the evidence to the contrary.
Let's look at what we do actually know about the Paleolithic era:
- Paleolithic peoples lived in small family bands of 20–50 who worked together cooperatively as a survival strategy.
- There was a very low population density and ample natural resources.
- These bands had reciprocal relationships with neighboring ones, including trading members in order to prevent inbreeding. Science Daily
- Warring would have taken a detrimental toll on both groups engaged in any armed conflict and impaired their ability to survive by reducing already low numbers.
“According to cultural anthropologist and ethnographer Raymond C. Kelly, the earliest hunter-gatherer societies of Homo erectus population density was probably low enough to avoid armed conflict. The development of the throwing-spear, together with ambush hunting techniques, made potential violence between hunting parties very costly, dictating cooperation and maintenance of low population densities to prevent competition for resources. This behavior may have accelerated the migration out of Africa of H. Erectus some 1.8 million years ago as a natural consequence of conflict avoidance.”
- Paleolithic peoples had little or no reason to make war and every reason to maintain peace, including a social structure that was based in maintaining order and cohesion rather than being based in conflict. We do not see the arrival of dominance hierarchies until about 6 K years ago.
“And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organized ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.” New Scientist
- The earliest anthropological evidence of any kind of mass violence comes from 13,000 years ago, and most of it comes from 8,000 years ago and later.
- One of the most thoroughly excavated archeological sites in the world is Çatalhöyük, in what is now Turkey. It was a thriving vehemently egalitarian proto-agricultural enclave of about 10,000 people that existed from approximately 7500 BC to 5700 BC. The settlement was on an open plain near a river, with little defensive capabilities. The residents were the first to smelt ore and they made tools but few weapons. None of this is up for debate. It’s all well-established.
If the world around them was filled with warfare and always had been, that wouldn’t have been the case. They could not have lived for thousands of years on an open plain with no weapons. It just doesn’t add up.
When you put together all of the factors, both archeological and anthropological, the picture that they paint is not one of ever-present violence and warfare — it’s affirmatively the exact opposite. When I first began studying this topic, I had no preconceived ideas, although if any assumptions were made, it was probably that the world has always been much the way it is now, only with different technology.
But as I read and studied and learned more over the course of a year or more, what comes through loud and clear is that there really isn’t any substantive evidence of warfare — and in fact, the overwhelming evidence from a huge variety of sources and subject areas is just the opposite. It may be difficult to conceive of a world that played by different rules than we do now, but that’s really just a form of chauvinism to ignore that possibility because even today we have many examples of cultures that do not play by the same rules that most of the rest of us do.
The Na of China have “walking marriages” in which the partners never live together or formalize their relationships, and in fact, there is no real cultural concept of fatherhood or husbands. The culture is matrilineal, and everyone lives in the house of their mother or grandmother. Until very recently, the Maasai were polyandrous, with women having multiple husbands, and in Himalayan India and certain areas of Tibet, fraternal polyandry is still practiced, wherein one woman marries two brothers.
There are contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures that maintain egalitarianism through reverse hierarchies, where the group keeps anyone who might get ideas about their importance or power in check. These are just a few examples. To believe that we know what the world is like or was like looking only through the lens of our own experiences and expectations is the height of hubris.
Early cultures didn’t have a lack of war because they were noble savages; they didn’t have war because they had little reason to fight, and many reasons to actively guard against unnecessary violence for reasons of their own survival. Their most valuable strategy for staying alive at that time was social cooperation — something that humans are hardwired for in ways that far surpass other primates. Anthropologist and primatologist Christopher Boehm believes that this is a central element of our evolutionary success.
There is really no actual scientific support for warfare in the Paleolithic era, and there is an overwhelming indication that pervasive violence and mass conflict only becoming prevalent in the past 8,000 years or so. R. Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist who studies war says that after studying the published work of dozens of other researchers he finds no evidence of war in the Stone Age, prior to 13,000 years ago. His findings were published in 2013 as a chapter in the book, War, Peace and Human Nature. “Views of human nature as inherently warlike stem not from the facts but from cultural views embedded in Western thinking.”
People do what is in their immediate best interests, and warring with neighboring bands or tribes was not what was in our ancient ancestor's best interests, particularly since they were likely to contain members of their own extended family. Eventually, enough factors changed in order to make it something that served a real purpose, worth the risks it entailed, but that is a relatively recent development. And that’s what all the science that makes any sense at all indicates.