Did Humans Ever Live At Peace?

“Because war is, by definition, organized violence, some early anthropologists believed that it was invented by the first large-scale, sedentary societies. They were, after all, much more organized than their predecessors, and we know that many were warlike. Hieroglyphic inscriptions tell us that more than 5,000 years ago, the first pharaoh conquered chiefdoms up and down the Nile delta to consolidate his power over Egypt. A Sumerian poem suggests that some centuries later, King Gilgamesh fended off a siege at Uruk, the world’s first city. But new findings, at Laguardia and other sites across the planet, now indicate that wars were also occurring at small-scale farming settlements all the way back to the dawn of agriculture, if not before.”

“The site outside Laguardia had stacks upon stacks of them, all sheltered under a crude stone funerary structure. At some point during the past 5,000 years, it collapsed, crunching the skeletons into a solid layer of ivory-colored carnage. Skulls popped off their vertebrae. Limbs went askew. Mixed in with them were arrowheads, blades, and polished stone axes.”

“For nearly a century, anthropologists have wanted to know how long people have been engaged in organized group violence. It’s not some idle antiquarian inquiry. For many, the question bears on human nature itself, and with ruinous wars ongoing in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere, it has become more resonant. If warring among humans began only recently, then we might be able to blame it on changeable circumstances, cultural or otherwise. If, however, some amount of war has been with us since our species’s origins, or earlier in our evolutionary history, it may be difficult to excise it from the human condition.

At a certain point, the evolutionary trail goes cold, and perhaps that’s for the best. There is danger in making too much of humanity’s immutable nature, and folly in emphasizing only our worst aspects.

What separates us most from other species is our cultural plasticity: We are always changing, sometimes even for the better. We have largely given up chattel slavery. We have found ways to end blood feuds that implicated hundreds of millions. War may be a long-standing mainstay of human life, an inheritance from our deepest past. But each generation gets to decide whether to keep passing it down.