Is War A Recent Development?

Does this look like fun to you?

Is it possible that war is a recent development in human history? Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg of Åbo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland think so.

Their recent paper in Science contends that archaeological evidence from Europe, the Middle East and western Asia contains relatively few signs of murder and war until after 10,000 years ago.

Of course this is a controversial notion and many researchers have chimed in with their two cents, but the idea is that before man organized mass killing (warfare), most murder was one-on-one.

Fry and Söderberg used modern nomadic groups as a way to model the past and found that lethal attacks on one community by another rarely occurred during the 19th and 20th centuries, and murders of one person by another in the same group accounted for a majority of intentionally caused deaths. Ten of the hunter-gatherer groups had no recorded killings involving more than one attacker, effectively making those societies no-war zones.

Fry and Söderberg say that this evidence suggests that humans evolved a tendency to avoid killing in general. War originated only within the past 10,000 years, in their view, with armed conflicts intensifying as the first states expanded between 6,000 and 4,000 years ago.

It will be very interesting to see where this line of research leads us. Hopefully the researchers won't organize into opposing sides and attack each other. It seems that's what other groups of humans have learned to do when they disagree.