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

[Lexicus]

The thing about all these cultural inventions, is that they all seem to follow an evolutionary path. From cave paintings to hieroglyphs to Mona Lisa and Campbell's Soup Cans. From wheelbarrows to chariots to rail cars and Model S. Simply saying that "we didn't have war and then culture invented it" doesn't make any sense. There should be, if not direct evidence, at least a plausible argument for how it came to be.

Well....yeah....but an evolutionary path doesn't rule out moments of relatively abrupt change. Even in actual evolutionary theories no one really subscribes to the old strict gradualism anymore.

I would say that warfare, in the form of organised violence, being a part of human is the default, and it has been with us for as long as we've been able to organise and has had a penchant for violence.

Well, I'm not sure that 'organized violence' is entirely correct as a definition of war. Getting your cousin's help to knock that other guy over the head because he had sex with your wife is organized violence, but I don't think it counts as warfare.
There is something else, something more, that defines war, but I'm struggling to articulate exactly what it is, particularly in a way that wouldn't exclude later obvious examples of warfare conducted under social systems where kinship was more important than it is now - saying 'family conflict doesn't count' would exclude a lot of wars fought in the feudal age.

That the Big Bang occurred is a hypothesis backed up by evidence.

Yes, and I would say that the fact that some cultures are without war is evidence that war's invention occurred. Why it happened is also to some degree beside the point.

I'd argue that Mead is a big shortsighted here. As long as any human knows of violence itself, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that asking a friend to help carry out the violence is a smart move. And suddenly we have an organised violence taking place.

Yeah, I'd agree with this, but regardless there must have been a time before any war was fought by humans.

I wouldn't even argue that. Not in the past 50,000 years anyways. Scarcity is a relative thing. And it's relative to how many people are trying to consume those resources, and how much resources are recoverable to consume!

And the progress of human societies and populations has marched along with our ability to recover more resources to consume. Much is made in economics of the fact that humans have escaped the Malthusian Trap. But fewer people think it through to understand that up until the time Malthus lived, he was right. Anything before the mid 18th century or so and the Malthusian Trap really did describe the limits of human population growth. Populations grew until they ran out of resources to consume, and then didn't grow, or became per capita poorer, until they collapsed. But if you take that back in time even further, into prehistory, when human populations were very low. Then what you would find is that when a population ran up to the local Malthusian Trap, people would move elsewhere. And when elsewhere had as many people as it could support, they'd fight until one moved even further elsewhere. And in this manner in prehistorical times people were pushed to live in the most inhospitable parts of the globe. During prehistory humans came to inhabit every part of real estate on Earth that can be reached, with the exception of Antarctica and a handful of isolated islands.

By this way people 50,000 years go were pushed to live in Siberia. A place so inhospitable to humans that even now the region supports some of the lowest populations densities on Earth even now. And it was from Siberia that people were so over populated for the local resources that they were pushed to cross over into the Americas 13-15,000 years ago.

What this tells you is that population pressure overcoming local resources has been an ongoing problem for the human race during the whole of the existence of the human race. And so to think that they only resorted to fighting in the recent past is ridiculous.

Well, except that war doesn't correlate with population pressure at all so this theory is empirically disproved already.
Even if it were right all the logic would point to "leaving" being overwhelmingly predominant over "fighting" given the costs of the latter.

 

[Yeekim]

I was intrigued by the claim that Inuit/Eskimos "hadn't invented war", so I made a bit of research.
Sadly, that claim by Mead seems a bit... overstated.
http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/archives/nunavut000131/nunani.html

 

[civvver]

The answer is yes.

 

[Cheetah]

Well, I'm not sure that 'organized violence' is entirely correct as a definition of war. Getting your cousin's help to knock that other guy over the head because he had sex with your wife is organized violence, but I don't think it counts as warfare.

There is something else, something more, that defines war, but I'm struggling to articulate exactly what it is, particularly in a way that wouldn't exclude later obvious examples of warfare conducted under social systems where kinship was more important than it is now - saying 'family conflict doesn't count' would exclude a lot of wars fought in the feudal age.

Yes, and I would say that the fact that some cultures are without war is evidence that war's invention occurred. Why it happened is also to some degree beside the point.

Yeah, I'd agree with this, but regardless there must have been a time before any war was fought by humans.

I disagree that there are any cultures without war, but with your definition of war seemingly requiring some minimum level of participants, I can see how very low-population societies can end up not having wars.

I think I will still hold on to my definition however, that war is simply organised violence, and at its most basic really only needs two people cooperating on the same, violent objective. Just two people doesn't make a war these days, of course, since we have "decided" that wars are violence organised by the state, against other states. But before there were states, there would still be organised violence between people, and I will reserve the right to call that "war".

 

[Kyriakos]

^War could be a brawl, if your society/group/tribe only had a couple of families, i suppose, eg in prehistoric nomads. There is a logic to viewing it as tied to population density and organization. If a family/tribe of prehistoric cavemen was attacked by a rival one, then even two warriors on each side could make this a war. But in a world with actual states this would make no sense.

 

[Lexicus]

I disagree that there are any cultures without war,

This is not something it's possible to 'disagree' on - the ethnographic literature is quite clear on this. There have been recorded instances of cultures that do not fight wars, that lack of the concept of war. The Semai of Malaysia, the Mardu of Australia, are two good examples - even when confronted with slave traders the Semai simply fled rather than fighting.

I think I will still hold on to my definition however, that war is simply organised violence, and at its most basic really only needs two people cooperating on the same, violent objective. Just two people doesn't make a war these days, of course, since we have "decided" that wars are violence organised by the state, against other states. But before there were states, there would still be organised violence between people, and I will reserve the right to call that "war".

Well, if your definition of war is me and my cousin knocking you over the head because you banged my wife, then by your definition we've probably always had war (though again there are cultures that have been observed by anthropologists to lack even this basic form of organized violence), but I just don't think it's at all useful to define war so broadly.

 

[warpus]

^War could be a brawl, if your society/group/tribe only had a couple of families, i suppose, eg in prehistoric nomads. There is a logic to viewing it as tied to population density and organization. If a family/tribe of prehistoric cavemen was attacked by a rival one, then even two warriors on each side could make this a war. But in a world with actual states this would make no sense.

I disagree, I don't think one random brawl can classify as a war. IMO a war includes multime engagements, not just one, or at least the plan for future engagements.