Did Pre-Historic Humans Fight Wars? How Often and Why?

[warpus]

Says who?

I'm pretty sure ancient Greek city states warred against one another. No countries there.

 

[Lexicus]

Let's start with wild Chimp packs waging war. They organize skirmishes, sneak up to their enemies without making sounds, use sticks, rocks, fists and teeth to harm and kill, and generally fight over territory. We have documented occurrences of this happening, and considering how few of the worlds Chimp packs we do observe, it seems likely that it isn't a very uncommon thing.

Chimps have been observed waging war a grand total of once, as far as I am aware.
I'm not sure how this provides evidence that prehistoric humans did the same. Bonobo chimps have never been observed waging war and we are as closely related to them as we are to "regular" chimps.

but unless you can make a hypothesis for why hunter-gatherers would have not waged war for tens/hundreds of thousands of years, but suddenly started to do so 13,000 years ago, I would think that there were wars before then too.

It should be added however, that because of the low population density, wars were unlikely to be a very common thing, of course.

I don't see how this is any different than saying the same thing about writing, fire, sedentism, etc. The compelling reason is that there is no evidence they were waging war more than 13,000 years ago, just as there is no evidence of writing older than 5,000 years ago or using fire older than about four hundred thousand years. I think it is likely that we were fighting wars before the very first evidence appears (just as it's likely there was writing and control of fire before the first evidence of these things appears), but not *that* much earlier.

 

[Berzerker]

A book by a Zulu medicine man said their ancient ancestors (the 'artificial ones') went to war with the 'apemen' when the war star rose in the sky.

 

[Cheetah]

Chimps have been observed waging war a grand total of once, as far as I am aware.
I'm not sure how this provides evidence that prehistoric humans did the same. Bonobo chimps have never been observed waging war and we are as closely related to them as we are to "regular" chimps.

I don't see how this is any different than saying the same thing about writing, fire, sedentism, etc. The compelling reason is that there is no evidence they were waging war more than 13,000 years ago, just as there is no evidence of writing older than 5,000 years ago or using fire older than about four hundred thousand years. I think it is likely that we were fighting wars before the very first evidence appears (just as it's likely there was writing and control of fire before the first evidence of these things appears), but not *that* much earlier.

Bonobo's are generally far more pacifistic than we are though. I'd say we are far closer to Chimps in how we interact.

I was asking for a hypothesis for why we would start waging wars around 13kya, and not having had wars before then. Of course advancements can happen before we have evidence of them, but that argument really just puts an upper limit on when wars were first fought. It doesn't work to set the lower limit for when we started with them.

Fire was something we started with when our brains grew complex enough to understand and transfer the knowledge of how to make fire. Sedentary life came about when we learned how to grow food instead of having to hunt and forage, and writing was an evolutionary process from creating markings and accounting to eventually representing complex and abstract thoughts.

How did war come about if it hadn't existed before? If you are simply arguing that it comes from population density, then we should expect there to have been wars earlier too, whenever the populations in an area grew enough. If you are arguing that it came about with agriculture, sedentary life and stratified societies, then 13kya is a bit early, and doesn't account for mass graves and evidence of massacres from pre-agrarian times.

 

[BvBPL]

The archaeological record clearly demonstrates that organized warfare did occur in prehistoric societies.

As for why they went to war, I rather doubt that the reasons our ancestors warred between themselves were any less diverse than why we do it now.

 

[Narz]

You guys keep talking about chimp Warfare but it's important to remember that we have no idea how chimps lived thousands of years ago before we started pushing them into smaller and smaller and more degraded territories.

It's speculated that chimps only stated "warring" due to modern pressures.

 

[Lexicus]

Bonobo's are generally far more pacifistic than we are though. I'd say we are far closer to Chimps in how we interact.

In other words, your conclusion demands that we be more like chimps than like Bonobos, so you assume it.

Fire was something we started with when our brains grew complex enough to understand and transfer the knowledge of how to make fire. Sedentary life came about when we learned how to grow food instead of having to hunt and forage, and writing was an evolutionary process from creating markings and accounting to eventually representing complex and abstract thoughts.

These are not really explanations for why these things happened, though, not in the same sense you seem to want an explanation for why war began happening. They're just different ways of stating what happened. The truth is we have no idea, in specific terms, why we started using fire or writing or settling down.

How did war come about if it hadn't existed before? If you are simply arguing that it comes from population density, then we should expect there to have been wars earlier too, whenever the populations in an area grew enough. If you are arguing that it came about with agriculture, sedentary life and stratified societies, then 13kya is a bit early, and doesn't account for mass graves and evidence of massacres from pre-agrarian times.

*shrug* I don't think the origins of war are fully understood. But this is a textbook argument from ignorance - that I can't give a definitive answer doesn't mean that war then must have been fought into the distant past.
I think sedentism probably has something to do with it. One plausible explanation is that war arose among sedentary communities and then spread culturally to hunter-gatherer groups - we know that cultural exchange between nomads and farmers played a huge role in much of premodern Eurasian history so that doesn't seem like a big stretch to me. Certainly cultural militarism appears to be a development linked to the onset of civilization/agriculture.

Doing a bit of research, I found this interesting paragraph:

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/18294

Keeley then devotes several chapters to the causes and contexts of nonstate warfare, ultimately concluding that conflict is less closely associated with population density and more closely associated with any sort of situation that requires or encourages exchange or mutual acquisition of desired resources between societies. He argues that “the fact that exchange and war can have precisely the same results is often forgotten by archaeologists. When exotic goods are found at a site, they are almost invariably interpreted as being evidence of prehistoric exchange. That such items might be the spoils of war seldom occurs to prehistorians. . . . Thus archaeologists doubly pacify the past by assuming that all exotic items are evidence of exchange and that exchange precludes war. The ethnographic evidence implies that both of these assumptions are invalid; war moves goods and people just as effectively...as exchange, and exchange can easily incite warfare” (p. 126). Keeley further identifies proximity to unusually bellicose neighbors, severe economic hardships, and frontier locations and conditions that frequently encourage exchange as additional contexts for nonstate warfare. (The term frontier, however, is not clearly defined: does it refer to border areas between societies, or does it include outside groups from the perspective of a given center?)

There is also this bit from Margaret Mead that I think is relevant even if it doesn't answer your question:

warfare, by which I mean recognised conflict between two groups as groups, in which each group puts an army (even if the army is only fifteen pygmies) into the field to fight and kill, if possible, some of the members of the army of the other group - that warfare of this sort is an invention like any other of the inventions in terms of which we order our lives, such as writing, marriage, cooking our food instead of eating it raw, trial by jury, or burial of the dead, and so on. Some of this list anyone will grant are inventions: trial by jury is confined to very limited portions of the globe; we know that there are tribes that do not bury their dead but instead expose or cremate them; and we know that only part of the human race has had the knowledge of writing as its cultural inheritance. But, whenever a way of doing things is found universally, such as the use of fire or the practice of some form of marriage, we tend to think at once that it is not an invention at all but an attribute of humanity itself. And yet even such universals as marriage and the use of fire are inventions like the rest, very basic ones, inventions which were, perhaps, necessary if human history was to take the turn that it has taken, but nevertheless inventions. At some point in his social development man was undoubtedly without the institution of marriage or the knowledge of the use of fire.

THE CASE FOR warfare is much clearer because there are peoples even today who have no warfare. Of these the Eskimos are perhaps the most conspicuous examples, but the Lepchas of Sikkim described by Geoffrey Gorer in Himalayan Village are as good. Neither of these peoples understands war, not even defensive warfare. The idea of warfare is lacking, and this idea is as essential to really carrying on war as an alphabet or a syllabary is to writing. But, whereas the Lepchas are a gentle, unquarrelsome people, and the advocates of other points of view might argue that they are not full human beings or that they had never been frustrated and so had no aggression to expand in warfare, the Eskimo case gives no such possibility of interpretation. The Eskimos are not a mild and meek people; many of them are turbulent and troublesome. Fights, theft of wives, murder, cannibalism, occur among them--all outbursts of passionate men goaded by desire or intolerable circumstance. Here are men faced with hunger, men faced with loss of their wives, men faced with the threat of extermination by other men, and here are orphan children, growing up miserably with no one to care for them, mocked and neglected by those about them. The personality necessary for war, the circumstances necessary to goad men to desperation are present, but there is no war. When a travelling Eskimo entered a settlement, he might have to fight the strongest man in the settlement to establish his position among them, but this was a test of strength and bravery, not war. The idea of warfare, of one group organising against another group to maim and wound and kill them was absent. And, without that idea, passions might rage but there was no war.

 

[BvBPL]

Using primate behavior to explain the social behavior of prehistoric man is pretty flawed.

No one would conclude that because chimps don’t shave their chins or cut their hair that prehistoric man didn’t groom himself in that manner.

 

[warpus]

I was asking for a hypothesis for why we would start waging wars around 13kya, and not having had wars before then.

It makes sense to me that war would become possible as soon as complex enough social groups started forming. And they don't have to be very complex at all for you to get tribes and "enemy tribes" and wars between them over territory or whatever.

 

[Kyriakos]

Says who?

I'm pretty sure ancient Greek city states warred against one another. No countries there.

Those were "countries", for all intents and purposes Usually each region was its own country, either with a hegemonic city or being a league. Eg Attica, Phocis, Locris (both of them ), Argolis, Achaia, Corinth, Lacaedemon, Thessaly etc etc. And very often they had allies elsewhere, up to a full empire in the case of Athens.

 

[warpus]

Either way "You need countries for war" is a strange claim IMO

 

[Berzerker]

have we found evidence of 'war' between Neandertals and us?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

This is not accurate. What may be true is that the, extremely sparse, archeological evidence from prehistory does not solve the question. But we know from later time periods that warfare among hunter-gatherers is absolutely common. And so the argument against warfare in prehistory is that prehistoric people were fundamentally different than all the people descended from them.

And that is an extraordinary claim, which by convention requires extraordinary evidence.

The better argument, should it hold, is that circumstances were sufficiently different that the incentive to war was also different.

What constitutes "war" in this context? How many people had to be on either side for it to count as war, compared to a localized brawl over resources? The OP has a fundamental definition issue to solve first...at what point does a "fight" become a "war" in the formal sense...or even by definition/consideration? One guy shanking another 20000 years ago wouldn't be "war". Would 10 v 8 count?

I find it implausible to assume people didn't kill each other over stuff, that would indeed be an extraordinary position to take without similar evidence showing it. With less scarcity and less encounters per time due to fewer people, I wouldn't be surprised if the fights were less common on average, but not having them?

 

[warpus]

What constitutes "war" in this context? How many people had to be on either side for it to count as war, compared to a localized brawl over resources?

I don't think the number of people really matters, unless it's just 1 guy on each side. I would define a war to be a military conflict between two groups of people that goes beyond a simple one-time skirmish or battle (or a brawl).

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I don't think the number of people really matters, unless it's just 1 guy on each side. I would define a war to be a military conflict between two groups of people that goes beyond a simple one-time skirmish or battle (or a brawl).

There are wars that were 1 battle affairs, and military conflict between groups wouldn't be reasonably construed as war in the sense of say something like bandits cutting people down for resources...or rather I feel like that should be considered differently from other motivations and types of conflict.

 

[Narz]

have we found evidence of 'war' between Neandertals and us?

IIRC it's hard to know for sure. Probably we had some part in wiping them out though (though some of their DNA lives on in us).

 

[warpus]

There are wars that were 1 battle affairs, and military conflict between groups wouldn't be reasonably construed as war in the sense of say something like bandits cutting people down for resources...or rather I feel like that should be considered differently from other motivations and types of conflict.

Yeah you're right there are a lot of nuances here that prevent us from easily defining what is a war and what isn't. It seems that all you'd need for war are moderately advanced social groups, which would have existed more than 13,000 years ago

 

[timtofly]

The archaeological record clearly demonstrates that organized warfare did occur in prehistoric societies.

As for why they went to war, I rather doubt that the reasons our ancestors warred between themselves were any less diverse than why we do it now.

Or they just had an established death penalty for those who came up with a rival ideology...

 

[EgonSpengler]

I consulted Clausewitz, but I'm not sure he's very helpful here.

2. Definition.

We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the countless number of duels which make up a war, we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: his first object is to throw his adversary, and thus to render him incapable of further resistance.

War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.

Violence arms itself with the inventions of Art and Science in order to contend against violence. Self-imposed restrictions, almost imperceptible and hardly worth mentioning, termed usages of International Law, accompany it without essentially impairing its power. Violence, that is to say physical force (for there is no moral force without the conception of states and law), is therefore the means; the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will is the ultimate object. In order to attain this object fully, the enemy must be disarmed; and this is, correctly speaking, the real aim of hostilities in theory. It takes the place of the final object, and puts it aside in a manner as something not properly belonging to war.

I dunno... Doesn't this mean a schoolyard bully is "waging war" upon his nerdy victims? Meh.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Here's something from Lt. Col. Eric Schnitzer, USAF, "Perfecting War: Searching for the Silver Bullet."

An even more comprehensive definition of war is that it is a conflict between or among state and state-like entities for political control over people, territory, or resources. This definition covers all the questions of who, what, and why, and as long as one interprets conflict as violent force, the how as well. Violence is what turns conflict into war. Each portion of the definition is important so as not to confuse war with other human interactions.

The object of political control must be present. Wars are fought by individuals, but those individuals are fighting as part of something larger than themselves. They are fighting for their state, ethnic group, or society. “Societies go to war,” not individuals acting alone. In order to impose political will on an enemy, the group going to war must be a political entity. This is why the definition includes state-like entities as well as states. State vs. state wars fall easily into this definition and are the subject of most of history. States are the most widely accepted participants in war. Indeed, states are optimized to wage war as the ultimate test of their first duty—the protection of their citizens and territory.

The more thorny part of the definition is the state-like entities. This includes societies formed from ethnic or racial groups that congeal in order to break away from a state or impose their will upon the state. According to Martin Van Creveld, “in the future, war will not be waged by armies but by groups whom we today call terrorists, guerrillas, bandits, and robbers…motivated less by “professionalism” than by fanatical, ideologically-based, loyalties.”

"Societies go to war" sounds like it might be a useful quote here. Schnitzer attributes it to James William Gibson's The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, which I've never heard of.