When Did Ancient Humans First Go to War?

[00:00:00]You have never been in a war. Probably.

[00:00:02]You have never had to defend your food with your hands, never had to watch the tree line for movement that meant danger, never had to decide in a single second whether the group of strangers walking toward you meant trade or violence. But your body has not forgotten the possibility. That tightening in your chest when someone steps too close. The way your attention sharpens when a stranger's tone shifts.

[00:00:24]The speed at which a calm room can become a dangerous one. And the speed at which your nervous system registers the change before your conscious mind has processed a single word. That is not anxiety. That is ancient. That is a system built by hundreds of thousands of years of an environment where the wrong read on another person's intentions could end your life before you finished the thought.

[00:00:46]The question researchers have been arguing about for decades is not whether ancient humans were capable of violence.

[00:00:53]Of course they were. The question is whether violence was the exception or the rule. Whether your ancestors were peaceful by nature and violent only by circumstance or violent by nature and peaceful only when conditions allowed.

[00:01:08]Whether war is something civilization created or something civilization inherited. The answer is more complicated than either side of that argument wants it to be. And it starts much earlier than most people expect.

[00:01:20]Before Homo sapiens. Before language.

[00:01:23]Before fire was reliably controlled or tools were deliberately shaped. Before almost everything we associate with being human, there was already something that looks from the fossil record disturbingly like organized violence between groups.

[00:01:38]In 1994, paleoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley was excavating a site in the middle Awash region of Ethiopia when his team uncovered fragments of a skull belonging to Homo heidelbergensis, an archaic human species that lived between 700,000 and 200,000 years ago.

[00:01:59]The skull designated Bodo had cut marks on it. Not animal tooth marks, not erosion. Deliberate, precise cut marks made by a stone tool in patterns consistent with defleshing. Someone had taken a stone tool to another individual's skull and removed the flesh from it after death.

[00:02:18]This was not butchery for food or not only for food.

[00:02:23]The pattern of cuts matched what forensic anthropologists call perimortem processing, work done on a body around the time of death. Deliberately, methodically, whether it was ritual, cannibalism, trophy taking, or something without a modern name. Something intentional and violent had happened to that individual somewhere between 600,000 and 400,000 years ago.

[00:02:47]That is the oldest direct physical evidence of one human ancestor doing something deliberate and lethal to another.

[00:02:54]But, it is not the oldest indirect evidence. Go back further. Go back 6 million years to the evolutionary split between the lineage that produced chimpanzees and the lineage that produced you.

[00:03:05]Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, sharing approximately 98.7% of our DNA, engage in something that primatologists did not want to call war for decades because the word felt too human, too loaded, too much like projection. They eventually had to call it war anyway.

[00:03:24]In 1974, primatologist Jane Goodall, who had spent 14 years studying chimpanzees at Gombe Stream in Tanzania, observed the beginning of what became known as the Gombe Chimpanzee War.

[00:03:37]A single community had split into two groups, the Kasakela in the north and the Kahama in the south. Over the next 4 years, the Kasakela systematically hunted down and killed every adult male in the Kahama group one by one in coordinated attacks involving multiple aggressors who held victims down while others delivered fatal injuries. By 1978, the Kahama community had been completely destroyed and its territory absorbed.

[00:04:04]This was not spontaneous aggression. It was not two individuals fighting over food or status. It was organized, premeditated, coalition-based lethal violence directed at an out-group with the apparent goal of territorial expansion.

[00:04:20]It was, by any functional definition, war.

[00:04:24]Goodall was shaken by what she witnessed. She had spent years believing chimpanzees to be fundamentally different from humans in their capacity for organized cruelty.

[00:04:34]She wrote later that the Gombe war forced her to reconsider not just chimpanzee nature, but human nature.

[00:04:41]If our closest relative could conduct what looked like warfare without culture, without language, without ideology, then the capacity for organized group violence was not something civilization had created. It was something civilization had inherited. Something old enough to predate the human lineage entirely.

[00:04:59]That is the starting point. Not a date, not an event, a capacity woven into the primate body before the first hominin stood upright on the East African savanna. But capacity is not destiny.

[00:05:14]And here is where the argument gets complicated because the archaeological record of early human violence is not a straight line from primitive brutality to civilized peace. It is something far stranger. A pattern of violence that appears, disappears, intensifies, fades, and reappears in ways that track not the development of human nature, but the development of human circumstances. Not what people were capable of, but what their environment made likely. The distinction matters more than almost anything else in this story. In 2013, anthropologist Douglas Fry of the University of Alabama at Birmingham published a comprehensive analysis of 21 known archaeological sites containing skeletal remains from before 10,000 years ago, the period before agriculture, before permanent settlements, before the material conditions that most researchers associate with organized warfare. His finding was striking. Of the 21 sites, only four showed clear evidence of interpersonal violence.

[00:06:18]And only two showed anything resembling mass conflict involving multiple individuals killed in a coordinated event.

[00:06:26]The rest showed death patterns consistent with accident, predation, or individual homicide, the kind of violence that exists in every human society, but does not require an army.

[00:06:37]Fry's conclusion was not that ancient humans were peaceful. It was that the specific form of violence we call war, organized, sustained, group versus group lethal conflict conducted for territorial or resource goals, was rare or absent in the deep Paleolithic.

[00:06:56]That it required conditions that nomadic foragers generally did not have. But here is what's strange. The conditions that create war are not the conditions of cruelty or malice. They are the conditions of abundance, specifically stored abundance, concentrated, defensible, stealable abundance. For most of human prehistory, the nomadic foragers lifestyle made large-scale organized warfare almost structurally impossible.

[00:07:23]If your group has no fixed location, no stored food, no territory that is meaningfully yours and not someone else's, then the logic of conquest does not apply. What would you conquer? A campsite someone has already left, a landscape that belongs to everyone and no one. You can raid a neighboring group and take their food, but if they have no stored food, you are raiding people who are as hungry as you are, and the caloric return on organized violence is low. This is the argument anthropologist Christopher Boehm of the University of Southern California developed across decades of research into forager social structures. Boehm found that the most consistently documented feature of mobile hunter-gatherer groups, from the Kung San of the Kalahari to the Hadza of Tanzania to the Batek of Malaysia, was an intense, almost enforced egalitarianism.

[00:08:16]A social system specifically designed to prevent any individual or subgroup from accumulating power, resources, or dominance over others.

[00:08:25]If someone in a Kung camp began hoarding food or behaving as if they had authority over others, the group responded with a predictable sequence of sanctions. First, mockery, then ostracism, then, in extreme cases, killing. That is how the Kung kept order.

[00:08:43]That is how they kept each other equal.

[00:08:45]Not because they were morally superior to people who live differently, but because in a mobile forager group, dominance hierarchies are dangerous to everyone, and the group had developed social antibodies against them. A group that enforces equality this aggressively is a group that does not produce the internal conditions for war.

[00:09:02]No chiefs to order attacks, no surplus to fight over, no territory to defend at the cost of lives. Because the territory is the whole landscape, and you can always move to a different part of it.

[00:09:12]But then something changed. Not everywhere at once, not suddenly, but beginning roughly 15,000 years ago in certain resource-rich environments, some forager groups began doing something new.

[00:09:24]They began staying still. The Pacific Northwest coast of North America, the Natufian culture of the Levant, the Jomon culture of Japan. In each of these regions, an unusual abundance of food, salmon runs, wild grain, shellfish beds made it possible to feed a large group without moving. And when you do not need to move, you can store. And when you can store, you have something worth defending. And when you have something worth defending, you have the foundational logic of war. The Natufians are the clearest case. The Natufian culture flourished in what is now Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria between roughly 15,000 and 11,500 years ago.

[00:10:07]They were not farmers. They had not yet domesticated plants or animals.

[00:10:12]But they were sedentary, living in permanent villages of stone-walled structures, harvesting wild grain with flint-bladed sickles, storing it in purpose-built facilities, and building cemeteries that indicate both permanent settlement and a sense of ancestral connection to specific ground. And then, roughly 12,000 years ago, something in the Natufian record shifts.

[00:10:34]Archaeologist Marsha Levine of Cambridge University and her colleagues, analyzing skeletal remains from Natufian burial sites, found a sharp increase in trauma patterns around 12,900 BCE, corresponding roughly to the Younger Dryas, a sudden, severe cold event that lasted approximately 1,200 years and dramatically reduced the availability of wild food resources across the Levant.

[00:10:59]Skulls with blunt force injuries, long bones with cut marks inconsistent with butchery, individuals buried with projectile points embedded in their remains. The cold had arrived.

[00:11:11]The food had contracted.

[00:11:13]And people who had built permanent villages, who had invested years of labor in stone structures and storage facilities and cultivated relationships with specific patches of wild grain, could not simply move. The landscape they depended on was right here.

[00:11:27]They would fight for it.

[00:11:29]That is the match that lit organized warfare.

[00:11:32]Not malice, not innate brutality.

[00:11:35]Resource stress combined with the inability to retreat from it. And then the oldest confirmed massacre site in the human record makes this argument in the most visceral possible terms.

[00:11:46]Nataruk. In 2016, paleoanthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr of Cambridge University published findings from a site on the western shore of what was once a lagoon near Lake Turkana in Kenya.

[00:11:59]The site called Nataruk contained the skeletal remains of 27 individuals dating to approximately 10,000 years ago.

[00:12:07]What those skeletons showed was not the gradual accumulation of deaths over a long settlement period. It was a single event.

[00:12:15]12 of the 27 individuals showed clear perimortem trauma, blunt force injuries to the skull, stone projectile points embedded in bone.

[00:12:24]One individual had a bone point lodged in his skull, driven in with enough force to fracture the cranium around the entry point. Another had both knees in a position consistent with having been bound before death.

[00:12:35]A woman was found in a position suggesting she was heavily pregnant when she died. These were not warriors. They were not a raiding party that had been intercepted. They were a group that included women, children, and a pregnant woman that had been attacked and killed in what Lahr described as a massacre.

[00:12:52]Not a battle between two armed forces.

[00:12:55]An attack on a group that included non-combatants carried out with enough coordination and sustained violence to kill at least 12 people and leave their bodies unburied at the edge of a lagoon.

[00:13:05]10,000 years ago, before agriculture, before cities, before armies in any formal sense. And yet the bones at Nataruk look like what bones look like after organized lethal violence. But here is what Lahr was careful to point out and what makes Nataruk more complicated than a simple proof of ancient warfare.

[00:13:24]The site dates to a period and a region where mobile forager groups were encountering resource stress from climate fluctuations.

[00:13:31]The lagoon at Nataruk would have been a critical resource, a rare source of fresh water and aquatic food in an environment that was becoming increasingly arid. A group that controlled the lagoon controlled survival. A group that wanted the lagoon and did not control it had a rational, if brutal, incentive to take it by force. Nataruk is not proof that war is human nature. It is proof that war is a human response to specific conditions, conditions that have recurred throughout history with terrible regularity.

[00:14:02]Those conditions arrived permanently with agriculture.

[00:14:06]The transition to farming, beginning roughly 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and spreading across the world over the following millennia, changed the logic of violence permanently and irreversibly.

[00:14:18]Farming produces stored surplus. Stored surplus creates wealth. Wealth creates inequality. Inequality creates the class of people who have enough to lose that they will organize others to defend it and the class of people who have little enough that they can be organized to take it from someone else. This is not cynicism. This is archaeology. At Crow Creek in South Dakota, archaeologist P.

[00:14:40]Willey of California State University excavated a site in 1978 that contained a mass grave dating to approximately 1325 CE.

[00:14:52]The remains of 486 individuals from a single Arikara village.

[00:14:58]Nearly every skeleton showed evidence of perimortem violence, scalping, decapitation, mutilation.

[00:15:06]The bones had been processed after death and many were missing entirely, taken as trophies. The attack had been so complete that virtually no one in the village survived and the context was unambiguous.

[00:15:19]A period of severe drought had compressed agricultural communities competing for the same dwindling resource base. The violence at Crow Creek was not ideological. It was caloric. Go further back. At Talheim in Germany, a site excavated in 1983 by archaeologist Joachim Wahl of the State Office for Cultural Heritage Baden-Württemberg, a mass grave dating to approximately 5,000 BCE contained the remains of 34 individuals, men, women, and children all killed by blows to the back of the skull. The attack pattern, strikes from behind, suggests the victims were fleeing or captured before being killed.

[00:16:02]The site dates to the Early Linear Pottery Culture, the first farming communities of Central Europe, and the skeletal demographics suggest an entire social unit, a village or extended family, had been wiped out.

[00:16:16]At Asparn Schletz in Austria, a site of similar age and similar culture, archaeologist Maria Teschler-Nicola of the Natural History Museum, Vienna, found the skeletal remains of at least 67 individuals in a ditch surrounding a settlement, all showing perimortem trauma, all missing the demographic groups, young women and children, that would have been present in a normal death assemblage. The missing bodies were not buried elsewhere. They were taken, which means the site records not just a massacre, but a raid with survivors taken captive, the oldest known evidence of what might be called slave-taking in the archaeological record. Farming did not just enable war, it created the specific forms of war that have defined human history ever since. The raid, the siege, the massacre, the taking of captives, the destruction of stored food as a weapon.

[00:17:09]Every military tactic that appears in written history appears first in the archaeology of early agricultural communities, because every one of those tactics follows logically from the conditions farming created. This is the uncomfortable thread that runs through 10,000 years of human conflict. Not hatred, not evil, not some darkness in the human soul that civilization has been struggling to suppress. Resource competition combined with the inability to escape it, combined with the organizational capacity that sedentary life makes possible. Your ancestors did not go to war because they were bloodthirsty. They went to war because the food was here, the enemy wanted it, and moving was no longer an option. But here is the part that reframes everything. The same cognitive and social architecture that made organized warfare possible is the same architecture that makes organized peace possible.

[00:18:00]The capacity to coordinate large groups of unrelated individuals toward a shared goal, to maintain alliances across time and distance, to enforce agreements through social pressure and the threat of punishment. These are the tools of both war and diplomacy. They are the same tools, pointed in different directions. Anthropologist Robert Kelly of the University of Wyoming spent decades analyzing the transition from forager to agricultural violence, and concluded that what changed between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic was not human nature, but human scale.

[00:18:34]The same impulses that produced cooperation within a group produced competition between groups. And as groups got larger, the consequences of both cooperation and competition got larger with them. The Paleolithic raid involved dozens of people. The Bronze Age battle involved thousands. The Second World War involved hundreds of millions. The impulse is the same. The scale is what civilization changed.

[00:19:00]Which means the solution, if there is one, is also a matter of scale. Every time in human history that the circle of who counts as us has expanded, violence has contracted. The invention of the city-state made inter-village raiding less common. The invention of the nation reduced intercity warfare. The invention of international institutions reduced international conflict, imperfectly, inconsistently, but measurably.

[00:19:28]The pattern is not guaranteed. It is not inevitable. But, it is real.

[00:19:33]Your ancestors at Nataruk died because the people who killed them did not think of them as us. They were the group at the lagoon. They were the people between us and the water. They were the obstacle. That cognitive distinction, us and them, is as old as the primate brain. It was present in the chimpanzees at Gombe. It was present in the archaic humans who defleshed the Bodo skull. It is present in you right now, running quietly in the background of every social judgment you make, sorting the world into familiar and foreign, safe and suspicious, ours and theirs. The history of human violence is the history of that distinction being drawn too narrowly.

[00:20:14]The history of human cooperation is the history of that distinction being pushed outward, slowly, incompletely, but persistently, across 300,000 years of a species learning at enormous cost, who counts as a neighbor.

[00:20:30]Sit with that for a moment.

[00:20:32]The oldest confirmed massacre happened 10,000 years ago at the edge of a lagoon in Kenya.

[00:20:37]The victims were left unburied, their bones scattered by water and time, until a researcher found them in 2012 and understood what she was looking at.

[00:20:46]They had no names we can recover, no language we can reconstruct, no story that survived them.

[00:20:54]But, their bones told one. A story about what happens when the resource is scarce and the group at the water's edge is not yours. A story that has been told in every century since, in every language, on every continent, with every weapon technology humans have ever devised.

[00:21:11]The bones at Nataruk are 10,000 years old. The story they tell is not finished yet. If you made it this far, you are exactly the kind of person this channel exists for. We make videos like this one every week about ancient human behavior, about what your body still remembers, about the gap between the world you were built for and the one you actually live in.

[00:21:33]If that is something you want more of, hit subscribe. It costs you nothing and it tells the algorithm that this kind of storytelling is worth keeping alive. See you in the next one.