University Place

Violence and Warfare in Humanity's Past

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the Division of Extension Wisconsin 4-H. And on behalf of those folks on our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night by Zoom, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Nam Kim. He’s a professor in the department of anthropology here at UW-Madison. He got his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in international relations and his masters at New York University in political science. And then he got his PhD at the University of Illinois at Chicago in anthropology.

Tonight, he’s gonna be speaking to us about the origins of violence and warfare across human history. Would you please join me in welcoming Nam Kim to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab?

– Thanks so much, Tom. And thanks to Tina Hauser and others at PBS Wisconsin’s University Place. I really appreciate this opportunity to talk with the Biotech Center, as well as PBS Wisconsin. The conversation today has to do with warfare and violence in humanity’s past. And this is meant to give a very broad introduction, an overview into what we know, how we know it, and what is important about this research, what it can tell us about ourselves, what it can tell us about our history, and how we might anticipate possible futures. I have to say something about the nature of the slides. Because of the nature of the research, some of the slides may be graphic because of the violence that may be depicted. I just want you to know that as we move forward. But it is a pleasure, and I’m delighted to have this opportunity.

So this particular story takes place all over the world. We’re gonna be looking at various cases and bodies of data from different parts of the world when we think about the early and earliest expressions of organized violence, as we can see. We’re gonna be looking at various bodies of data, as they’ve been collected by many researchers over all kinds of case studies. And so really, we’re gonna be standing on the shoulders of giants as we gaze back into the past across geographic space and time. One thing that you will start to see is that everybody has an opinion about this and there are all kinds of debates. The ongoing debates generally tend to look at the origins. And when we think about origins, we wonder about how far back we can see these kinds of behaviors. In some ways, you can kind of encapsulate the argument into a long versus a short chronology. Is it a very recent phenomenon or is warfare something that goes very far back into our humanity’s history? And of course, everybody has an opinion about this. It doesn’t matter if you’re a researcher or a specialist, it doesn’t matter if you’ve participated or if your lives have been affected by war.

Everybody has an opinion. And there is no really wrong answer when it comes to this topic. Even myself and my colleague, my co-author, Marc Kissel, we have opinions about this. We’ve been collaborating on research related to the origins of warfare. Just a couple years ago, we produced a volume called Emergent Warfare in our Evolutionary Past. And so some of the research I’m gonna be presenting today is taken from our ongoing collaborations. I’m a little bit of a movie buff and you might see on the image, on the screen now, a scene from a film called The Matrix. And in this particular scene, there’s a choice being given to our protagonist, Neo. He’s asked if he wants to take one pill or the other, the red or the blue, and in doing so, he’s choosing to learn more about reality. And this is something that I’m showing as an analogy because I’ve been taking that blue pill for quite some time.

And I’ve been going down this rabbit hole in terms of research for most of my adult life. So hopefully, you are okay with joining me on this journey. And as we start, the first thing that I would like to do is to think about the definitions that we’re talking about. So when we’re contemplating warfare, the very first thing I want to actually get into is a little bit of my history, because this helps explain my interest in this particular topic. So I’m of mixed ancestry. My father is Korean, my mother is Vietnamese. And both experienced war as children, at very young ages in their home respective countries. So the Korean War and the Vietnam War, specifically, or various versions of the French Indochina conflict for my mother. Both were affected, both became refugees. Their families had to flee ancestral homelands.

They were pushed out of these areas, never to go back. And as fate would have it, my father ended up in Vietnam in the 1960s and met my mother there. To make a long story short, they fell in love, they got married, they had me, and not long after that, the Vietnam conflict began to come to a close. So this was April 29th, 1975, the day before Saigon was taken by the North. My parents and I escaped as refugees off the rooftop of the USAID building. We ended up as refugees going across, by helicopter and other means, the Pacific Ocean, ending up in various refugee camps before finally ending up in the United States. And so from a very young age, I’ve always been fascinated by the stories that I’ve heard and the knowledge that warfare, in various forms, pushed our families into different places. It was responsible for us becoming American. And I’ve always been fascinated by the phenomenon. So let’s talk about this.

Let’s talk about the phenomenon. If I were to ask you to close your eyes and to think about what warfare looks like, what it feels like, you might come up with an image like this. So here we have the end of World War I, the so-called Great War. This is 1918, present-day Belgium. What you can make out in this image is the utter amount of destruction, the loss of life, the bodies. You can see the consequences of war. Others may think about other kinds of images, right? If you think about warfare in the past, you might think about something like this. This is from a temple wall in the city of Angkor, several centuries ago in the modern-day country of Cambodia. Where you can see depictions of armies, war elephants, and other kinds of military equipment. If you rewind the clock even further back, you might see artifacts that show us depictions like this.

This is from the Egyptian civilization. This is what is known as the Narmer Palette. It dates to about 5,100 years ago. And depicted on this palette are scenes of conquest, scenes of violence. We have the unification of upper and lower Egypt, the beginnings of the Dynastic Period, all implicated in warfare. So seeing these kinds of images, thinking about warfare in this kind of context, it begs the question, the big question, has warfare always been a part of humanity? If we go back to that image, thinking about Belgium and the end of World War I, it helps us to kind of contextualize also, not only the question about how far back it goes within human history, but why we should care in the first place. If we think about the end of the Great War and we think about all of the efforts that ensued after 1918, we know that the League of Nations was established in order to try to prevent further outbreaks of violence on that kind of large, collective scale. And of course, despite our best efforts, World War II still happens. And on the heels of World War II, after 1945, we know that the United Nations is established. And the UN, its mission, and you can go right to its website and see, the UN came into being in 1945 on the heels of the Second World War with the one central mission of maintaining international peace and security.

And despite those efforts, we know that from 1945 through the end of the Cold War in the early 90s, there was something like 150 major wars that occurred in various regions of the world. And some would argue the only reason World War III did not happen is not because of our efforts, but because of the threat that comes with nuclear weapons. If we think about the devastation that happened in places like Hiroshima in August 1945, 70,000 people killed in an instant. With that specter of violence hanging over us, perhaps that’s the reason why World War III never happened. But if we think about the cost and we think about the debates, and we wonder about what the relationship between humanity and warfare might be, these are questions that have been dealt with, that have been speculated about for many, many generations. Think back to Thomas Hobbes, for instance, the old debates, seeing various kinds of perspectives on human nature. Hobbes, in the 17th century, argued that warfare was a sort of natural state for humanity. On the other hand, you had folks like Jean-Jacques Roussea writing a century later who argued the opposite, that perhaps peace was the natural state of humanity. These debates persist, and they change and sort of form. But we know that researchers in the present day continue to grapple with these questions.

We have political scientists, international relations theorists, psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists. If you look at the gamut of research across disciplines and subfields, you can see this healthy concern with warfare. Many of these questions, many of these debates revolve around a particular pivot. At the crux, we’re talking about whether or not warfare, potentially as old as it is or as young as it is, whether or not it’s related to us, right? Whether it’s biological or cultural. The old nature versus nurture debate. So today, I want to talk a little bit about this, and I want to preface this by saying and this is a spoiler alert. It’s a little bit of both when we think about nature versus nurture. It might be sort of, at least for me, a spurious dichotomy to try to distinguish between the two, to say that one is the answer versus the other, right? That one is natural or unnatural, war or peace. This takes us into the next part of the lecture when we’re talking about anthropological perspectives, because for me and for many of my colleagues, anthropology is very well-suited to address many of these questions because of the frameworks, because of the tools that we have and the nature of our questions, to look at warfare in its various manifestations, whether we’re talking about the present day or going back into the archeological past, or going back even deeper into our past. So before we get into the anthropological perspective, let’s talk about the conventional perspective.

If you look up war in the dictionary, for instance, you might see a definition like this. “A state of usually open and declared armed conflict between nations or states. ” And on the surface, this definition seems reasonable enough, but then you start diving a little bit deeper into some of the phrasing, some of the concepts that are embedded within that definition. And it might interest you to know that there are researchers who see this as very true, nations and states engaged in conflict. In fact, some researchers, political scientists, even go further, specifying criteria for what constitutes a war, saying something like a minimum threshold of battle fatalities, maybe like a thousand. Anything short of that does not qualify. And it then makes you start to wonder. Are there inherent biases in this sort of perspective? Is there a sort of modern bias? If we start looking at war as only happening between nation states, are we downplaying, are we ignoring or trivializing other forms of conflict that may be happening between non-states, smaller-scale communities and societies? And if this is the case, are we then running the risk of restricting the database? If we want to truly understand the phenomenon and understand its underpinnings, its antiquity, then doesn’t it make sense to think about all the kinds of cases that may come up, right? So looking at it from a different perspective may be necessary. And one definition that I find very interesting as a starting point would be an anthropological view, as proposed by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski decades ago. So back in the 1930s, he published the definition, something to the order of “War is the use of organized force between politically independent units.

” And to me, this sort of inclusive definition is more productive. And in fact, I might even go further and say a more inclusive or universal definition would be very useful and productive for us. So something like “Organized violence between autonomous groups or societies. ” So let’s adopt that for the sake of argument, for our conversation today. Let’s think about some of the anthropological perspectives that have been published in recent years. A prominent anthropologist by the name of Brian Ferguson wrote a piece not that long ago where he pondered the question whether or not war is a part of human nature. And he asks, is it innate to the human species or did it emerge after the organization of societies that we view as complex, socially complex societies? And he argues for the latter, that collective killing, this kind of organized violence that we constitute as warfare, that we define as warfare, that these kinds of conditions resulted only after the middle of the Holocene, when we start to see civilizations, so-called states, complex societies beginning to emerge. And in effect, he argues that there is very little to no evidence for warfare in the Pleistocene, so the so-called Ice Ages. In this kind of view, the implication is that we only see warfare happening because it’s recent and because of certain trends that are happening, and these trends are linked to sedentism, agricultural production, farming lifestyles, urbanism, all the trappings of so-called civilization. So when we have this sort of view, it starts to show us that there are different areas of the past that we can look at.

Mark Allen, another anthropologist, published very recently this idea. He argued that there was a persistent tendency with many anthropologists to take a default position that war is recent, that it has a short chronology. If you look at the screen, I have a very crude graphic here. But it’s meant to give you an illustration of a long versus short chronology. And within it, as Allen characterizes, there might be different camps or schools of thought. On the one hand, doves, as he called them. On the other hand, hawks. The doves believe that warfare is more recent. The hawks see a longer chronology. And even within those particular camps, there might be subcamps, right, different kinds of views.

And depending on your perspective, some argue that warfare is a recent phenomenon, very recent, and it’s only within the last several centuries, and it’s associated with modern nation states. Others argue that we’re looking at warfare with the emergence of ancient civilizations, maybe the mid Holocene, 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. Others would argue for longer chronologies. And even within that camp, there are gradations of difference and opinion. Some would say we’re looking at early parts of the Holocene. Some would say the end of the Pleistocene. Some would say even far, as far back as a million years ago. And we’ll talk about some of these examples in the coming minutes. On the screen, you have an image from a film, a documentary known as Dead Birds. This was from the 1960s.

And depicted in this film is warfare among the Dani people of New Guinea. And what’s interesting about this film is that it influenced some of the perspectives at the time about warfare among non-states, warfare among smaller-scale societies. And it sort of led to these kinds of conventional views that true wars look very different than what we see in this documentary. True wars between nation states of the modern world were much more destructive, very different. And so what we see here, according to this conventional view, is primitive war, quote-unquote primitive or tribal. And in some ways limited, game-like, or ritualistic. My late advisor, Larry Keeley, published a book in the 1990s called War Before Civilization, in which he critiqued that conventional view. And he said, “Perhaps the idea that only states make war is unsupported. ” If you look at the archeological evidence, if you look at the ethnographic evidence, the idea that only states make war is untenable. That in fact, all kinds of societies are capable.

And in some cases, some smaller-scale societies experience war in much more deadly scales, much deadlier scales. But they have an impact on everyday life more so than in other kinds of large state societies. And when you look at the definition this way and you look at the evidence in this perspective, you start to see a whole range of different kinds of behaviors that may be important to examine. This gets us into the next part of the talk. How archeologists detect these kinds of behaviors in the past. How do we see warfare in the past? There are various markers we can use. The first obvious one would be trauma on bodies. So if you have skeletal remains for people in the past, if you have blunt force trauma or lesions, if you have peri fractures on the arms. Various clues tell you that people may have been fighting, right? Violence was a part of life. You might also see specialized kinds of equipment that are not ambiguous.

So sometimes when you find an axe, it could have been used for violence, or it could have been used to chop a tree down. You could see bows and arrows. That could have been used for violence against other people, or it could have been used as hunting implements. But sometimes there’s less ambiguity when you come across something like a mace or a sword or armor, armor for people, armor for animals. These kinds of equipment tell you that something else is going on. Here on the screen, you might see a couple of images that are familiar to you. On the left, there is an image from New York City, right? This is Times Square. And what I want you to take a look at are some of the constructions that are sitting right there by the side of the street. They’re sitting on the curb. And these globes, they may seem decorative when you look at them at first glance, but when you start to delve deeper into understanding why they’re there and what the functions may be, you realize these are bollards and these are designed to prevent cars from jumping the curb and hitting people.

Closer to home, the Willis Tower in Chicago, you can see this image on the right, bollards also sitting there, part of the architectural landscape. They might seem to blend in, but they’re designed for a specific purpose, to prevent cars from driving bombs into the lobby of the building. Here’s another image. This is from a fort in India, a couple centuries ago. And what’s interesting about this is it’s a door to the fort. And if you look closely at this particular door, you can make out some of these architectural features. These spikes that come out of the door and some of these spikes are located as high as 9 to 10 feet up in the air. At first glance, this might seem like an aesthetic choice or it may be something that’s decorative, but then you realize that at the time, the kinds of technologies available to people in terms of battering rams were war elephants that would be used to batter these doors and break into these locations. We know that war elephants were used by Hannibal when he tried to attack Rome centuries, millennia ago. We know that war elephants, again, were used, as I showed earlier in parts of Cambodia during the Angkorian Empire.

But the point here is that some of these features may blend in and without contextual information, it’d be hard to know the functions. Here’s another image. This is from the modern-day city of Nicosia in Cyprus. And this aerial photograph shows you some features of the city. And one of the interesting things is this kind of circular pattern. And when you zoom in and you start to look at some of the historic records, you realize that those features were actually bastions, that there was a moat surrounding this particular settlement. And that these bastions are actually fortification features. Bastions of course, are designed to come out from the city walls to give overlapping fields of fire to protect the walls against potential attackers. When you start analyzing the archeological past and you see things like that, or baffling of gates or V-shaped ditches, you start to realize that these subtle clues exist almost everywhere you look. And it tells you something about what may be happening, the kinds of concerns people have.

In addition to architectural features, you might see iconography, like these images here from Bronze Age Scandinavia or the Neolithic in Spain some 8,000 years ago, where we have depictions of people holding bows and arrows facing one another. By themselves, they may be ambiguous. We don’t know exactly what’s happening, but it tells you that something may be worth investigating. Here’s another image. You may recognize the Hawaiian Islands. And here we’re looking at islands that were formed through volcanic activity. Of course, with these volcanic activities, we know lava tubes were formed on the islands. And researchers have found evidence of occupation, temporary occupation and habitation in some of these lava tubes. Now, by themselves, that kind of evidence might not tell you, that kind of data might not tell you all that much about why people were using these lava tubes. But we know from the ethnohistoric record about conflict that’s happening in the Hawaiian Islands.

We know that these lava tubes were being used as refuges. People were fleeing combat, fleeing conflict and turmoil and hiding intermittently in some of these lava tubes. The point here, and there are a few points actually, is that when we look at the archeological record, sometimes there’s ambiguity. Sometimes there are various strands of evidence that tell you something may be worth investigating, but there are many potential indicators. And we’ve just covered a few in the last few minutes, but there are many potential indicators. And the more you can combine these data streams, these separate, disparate data streams together, the stronger your inferences might be, the stronger the case might be. The point is that a bigger context, a package of indicators is important to understand the past. And the other point, the other upshot of course, is that forms of warfare could’ve looked very different depending on the time, the location, and the place and the culture. So you have to keep an open mind when you look at these kinds of cases. Now having said that, let’s now look at a few examples, case studies.

The first has to do with some iconography. And here we have what’s known as the Moche culture civilization. This dates to the first millennium of the Common Era. We’re looking at the Andean mountain chain in South America. And what you can make out in this image is some depictions. These depictions show warriors with their weapons. We can also make out potential captives. In some cases, sitting and bound. There may be images of ritual sacrifice that are associated with this. Now up until the 1990s, there were some researchers who said, if you see these images, it doesn’t necessarily mean that warfare was prevalent or happening.

It could be somebody’s imagination. It could be somebody recording mythical tales, for instance. How do we know that warfare was happening? How do we know that it was significant for these communities? But then people started to find the remains, human remains of people who had experienced trauma, who had died violently, who maybe were taken captive in raiding kinds of activities and then sacrificed. And so the point here is that warfare probably was happening and we can see evidence of this. And here we have a convergence of two streams of data telling us something about that past. Let’s go back further in time. So this was the Common Era. Here’s another case. This is from the Tollense River Valley in Germany. This is the Bronze Age, it dates about 1200 BCE.

Not that long ago, researchers uncovered areas along the river bank of the Tollense, finding bones of people who had experienced trauma, who likely died violently. They found the bones of humans. They found the bones of horses as well, in the same context. And in the midst of all that, they also found implements, artifacts. Some of the artifacts appear to be weapons. Some of the artifacts were embedded, points were embedded into human bone. We see blunt force trauma, fractures on many of these individuals. Many of them were male of a certain young age. And so with this context, with the riverbank showing us weapons, individuals, horses, and other kinds of material, it suggests something very significant is happening here, that this is not accumulating over time. The radiocarbon dates tell us that this seems to be happening in a kind of short time span.

Maybe it’s even one event. It’s hard to say, but that’s a distinct possibility. Perhaps we’re looking at a battle. And we suspect that there is only a fraction of the site that’s been detected so far, that there could be many more individuals out there. Suspicion right now is that there could be thousands who were involved in this event or in this series of events and that they likely came from faraway places. We can tell this based on some of the isotopic analyses, as well as the diagnostics for the artifacts. People gathered here from very far away to participate in this particular battle. So likely, we’re looking at warfare of some kind with professional soldiers, professional warriors. On the other side of the Eurasian landmass around the same time period, if we go east to parts of modern-day China, for instance, we see artifacts like this. This is part of what’s known as the Shang culture in Bronze Age China, around 1200 BCE.

This particular artifact is known as an oracle bone. The oracle bone is part of divination practices, rituals for the elites to communicate with the supernatural world, the ancestors, the gods. On some of these bones, they wrote down various things that were being given to them, knowledge or ideas that were being passed on, messages from the supernatural. And many of these bones describe warfare. So here’s a map showing the general vicinity or extent of that Shang civilization. We can see the central plains of China in all of this. The last capital of the Shang Dynasty, and the capital would move around from one generation to the other. But the last capital was a place called Yinxu. This is a massive city at the time, something dating to about 1200 BCE. And within this massive city, we have cemeteries.

Some of these are royal or elite cemeteries, and we can glean clues from these cemeteries about the importance of violent practices. We can see evidence of weapons, bronze weapons, and all kinds of wealth being buried with elites when they pass on to the next world. We can also see chariots, whole chariots, as well as the remains of horses that were sacrificed and the chariot drivers that were sacrificed to accompany, presumably, these elites and generals and royal figures into the afterlife. This also is reflected elsewhere in the Shang world, where we have sacrifices associated with mortuary rituals. Thousands of humans and animals sacrificed during this historic period of the Shang Dynasty. There are a couple of things I want you to take from this when you think about this particular Shang case. One is to think about the significance of warfare and violence within this ancient state. The other is to think about the variability when it comes to cultural practices, when it comes to our own perceptions, our own ideas about what’s acceptable or unacceptable. This varies from one society to the other in our modern world, and of course, it varies across all the kinds of cultures that have ever existed in the world, right? Our ideas, our attitudes, and preferences when it comes to violence. So you have to look at it from a cultural lens of the people that you are studying.

There’s a different logic that may be at play. Let’s go further back in time to another case. Let’s go back to Europe. This is the site of Herxheim. It dates to about 7,300 years ago, located in southwestern Germany. And here we have a site that’s associated with what’s known as the Linearbandkeramik culture, LBK for short. These are some of the earliest farming communities found anywhere in Europe. And once farming practices that began to emerge in the Fertile Crescent in southwest Asia, a couple thousand years earlier, once these farming practices begin to radiate out into other parts of the world, including parts of Europe, we start to see these non-state societies, these smaller-scale societies change their lifeways. So they become more sedentary, they become more agricultural, and they start to build these settlements. And many of these settlements that we see with LBK had fortifications around them, including palisade walls as well as fortification ditches.

And at Herxheim, in the fortification ditch, we find the remains of people. There are all kinds of settled villages with the LBK. And in this particular one, we have evidence of maybe hundreds, 500 people from various demographics, from babies to the elderly within this fortification ditch. The individuals appear to have suffered from various forms of trauma. We have bones that have been shattered. Many of the bones are kind of haphazardly dispersed with tools, stone tools. There are cut marks in some of these bones. We see faces that were smashed in. We can speculate about why people might’ve been doing this. We don’t know exactly the reasons, but we also have evidence of skulls that were fashioned potentially into bowls or cups.

There are various potential reasons we see this. It could be warfare. It could be a massacre of some kind. It could be raiding between communities. It could be treatment of the dead, ritual, mortuary practices. It could be cannibalism. All kinds of possibilities. So whether or not this is warfare, it’s a bit ambiguous. We could say it’s quite possible, but we don’t know for sure. Let’s go even further back in time.

This is another case from about 10,000 years ago. This is from the site of West Turkana, Lake Turkana. This is in the modern-day country of Kenya. And this is the Nataruk site. And in this particular instance, this case study, researchers recently found evidence of individuals that appear to have suffered from violent death. Clear signs of trauma on these individuals. We’re looking at a couple thousand plus people, various demographics, and this dates to about 10,000 years ago. It seems to be one event. It seems to be a series of people all meeting together at this one location, one larger group overtaking another group and potentially killing them. We have evidence of bone with points embedded within them.

We have tools that may be coming from far away. So groups from other areas coming together. But the point here is that many of these individuals suffered from trauma, may have been bound, in fact, when they were killed and then left haphazardly in this location. The upshot of this is that we have evidence of group-on-group violence that dates to this time period, right? It’s not restricted to the mid Holocene. It’s not restricted to state societies or large-scale civilizations. These are hunting and gathering communities. There were no states. There were no cities at 10,000 years ago. So this is a very different kind of context. And it tells us something about the possibilities of warfare going into smaller-scale societies, because for the vast majority of human history, we did not live in big cities.

We were not farmers. We lived in these more mobile kinds of temporary camps, hunting and gathering across extensive tracts of landscape. This suggests that the longer or long-ish chronology for the origins of war may be something to look at. So let’s ask the question now, what about even earlier? What do we see? Let’s go back to that graphic that we showed a little bit earlier when we saw this timeline, this crude timeline. I think we’ve safely eliminated modern war or modern histories as the origins for warfare, and even the mid Holocene as the origin point for warfare. We might now start asking, how far back does it go? Here’s an image, as I mentioned before, I’m a bit of a movie buff, and here’s another image. Some of you may recognize this particular scene. This of course, is that iconic opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey by Kubrick. And what’s interesting about this particular scene is that if you haven’t seen the film, I’ll just summarize very briefly. We have a hominin picking up a bone, wielding it as a power, using it for violence, right? And there’s some speculation about whether or not our ancient earliest ancestors, our hominin ancestors were violent, right? Getting back to that question about nature versus nurture.

Hobbes’ view about war in our natural state. This particular film came out in the 1960s, I believe. And I think it was heavily influenced by a lot of anthropological thinking at the time. In fact, one of the individuals who may have been friends or may have influenced Kubrick was a man by the name of Robert Ardrey, who in the 1960s, as an anthropologist, was very interested in what’s known as the killer ape theory. So these are the kinds of views that have been in play in anthropology for decades. And of course, this implicates a larger story here, with a bigger cast of characters. If we think about human evolution, all the various ancestries and lineages that existed, we might ask how all of them behaved. How do we know this? How do we know if they behaved in violent ways? How do we know if there was homicide or organized violence that may have occurred? There are a couple of ways we can get at this kind of data and it tends to be fragmentary and speculative, but it gives us some glimpses into that past. Obviously, one would be the fossil record. And the other would be comparisons to primates of today as analogies or models.

Let’s start with the fossil record. We can see evidence from various fossil finds, scant finds that do exist, but they give us some clues like this one. This is from a site known as Sterkfontein. Dates about two million years ago in Southern Africa. We have cheekbone of a fossil that seems to have cut marks on it. You can see striations from a stone tool making these cut marks. Another example is the Bodo cranium from Ethiopia, dating to about 600,000 years ago. And again, you can see cut marks on the fossil. Why are these cut marks here? It’s been subject to a lot of intense debate and speculation. It could be that defleshing is happening.

That explains the presence of the marks, the presence, where they are located. That perhaps somebody was defleshing these individuals with stone tools, but why would this be happening? It could be a whole host of reasons. We really do not know. It could have been anatomical curiosity. It could have been a form of respect when someone passes on. It could have been curation. It could have been ritual. It could have been cannibalism. We simply don’t know because there’s not enough of a larger cultural context to answer that question. Here’s another case.

This is a bit more recent. This is from the Atapuerca Mountains in modern-day Spain. The site has hominin remains. The dating is something like 800,000 years ago, and it’s associated with what’s called Homo antecessor. And at this point in time, we know from the research, investigations have shown that some of the individuals that were found here, their bones were left in place with some of the prey animals in the same kinds of contexts. And these hominin bones also appear to exhibit or have experienced defleshing. There is cut marks on some of these materials as well. And the researchers suggest that because of the context, the association between the cut marks, the defleshing, and the presence of prey animals that were treated in very much the same way, perhaps we’re looking at examples of cannibalism. In fact, the researchers call it culinary cannibalism. Not too long ago, anthropologist Keith Otterbein looked at this evidence and commented, if this is true, if we’re looking at cannibalism, and if we’re looking at potentially one group going out and collecting people from another community for this kind of cannibalism, perhaps we’re looking at some of the oldest forms of raiding behavior, maybe the earliest precursors of warfare in human history.

This may be the case, but I would also submit that it’s hard, just like we talked about in the last couple of cases. When we see this kind of evidence, it’s difficult to know what the wider social context might’ve been. So it’s hard to say if this is one group fighting another group, if this is raiding of that kind, if this is indeed warfare of some kind. The data are still a little bit ambiguous. So it’s hard to say, right? We would need more information, more contextual information. So the fragmentary nature of the fossil record doesn’t tell us all that much. People also then look at primatological comparisons. So let’s talk about some of the best examples that we know about, such as chimpanzees. It used to be, people thought that chimpanzees and other primates were nothing like us, that we didn’t have the same kinds of behavior, that they didn’t think in sophisticated ways, but the work of Jane Goodall and other primatologists, she observed in the 1970s that chimpanzees would fish for termites. They would use these kinds of sticks as tools to stick into termite mounds to get food.

Very recently, Jill Pruetz and other anthropologists were examining and observing chimpanzees at a site in Senegal, a site known as Fongoli. And in this observation of wild chimps, what they noticed was astonishing. Some of the chimps would go out and take branches, use their teeth to sharpen the edges of the tips of these branches to fashion what may appear to be a spear of some kind, take that spear and go to tree hollows, jab into the hollows to procure, to hunt other animals, bush babies that might have been sleeping in the hollows. And so here is an example of chimpanzees using materials to fashion hunting implements and teaching the young to do this as well, right? This sort of upended a lot of our perspectives about chimpanzee behavior. Here’s another case that’s interesting to think about. This is from the Kibale National Park in Uganda. We’re looking at a study that took place over several years that observed chimpanzee behavior, especially the males. Most of the time, there was peaceful interactions, peaceful behavior, but every now and then, the males would get up in single-file line and start to patrol the boundaries of their community. And when they came across lone chimpanzees from the neighboring community, often they would attack, often they would kill these lone chimpanzees. And so researchers have dubbed this form of behavior coalitionary violence or lethal coalitionary violence.

This was the kind of thing that Jane Goodall had observed back in the ’70s, and it’s been reinforced through more recent studies. And based on these kinds of data, certain researchers have come to the interpretation or the idea or conclusion that perhaps because we shared a last common ancestor with chimpanzees, because we are so closely related to them and because chimpanzees engage in lethal coalitionary violence and because humans do as well, that perhaps our last common ancestor, our earliest ancestors in the hominin lineages in the past were also behaving in this way. And that perhaps over time, we’ve evolved, we’ve become predisposed through cultural changes, through biological changes to adapt to this kind of behavior, right? That perhaps we have genetic predispositions for violence and warfare. Now on the surface, this is a very compelling argument. We can see chimpanzee behavior and we can have speculations about our own underpinnings of behavior, but I would also point out a couple of issues. Other colleagues have talked about this as well, but there are some counterpoints to consider. The research on chimpanzee violence can tend to overshadow all the sociality and peaceful behavior that we see with chimpanzee behavior. We also know that chimpanzees are not the only model. We can think of many other kinds of primates who can also give us glimpses into our earliest past. Chief among them might be the bonobos, very closely related to both chimpanzees and to us, who don’t seem to exhibit the same kinds of coalitionary violence that we have.

And of course, we might say that there are very big differences, qualitative differences in the forms of organized aggression that chimpanzees have and those that we might have, our forms of warfare. Here’s an image of artifacts, materials. These are bone daggers. They’re very recent. And they come from Papa New Guinea. And what’s interesting about these bone daggers are the very elaborate decorations on them, as well as the material that they come from. So these two examples, one comes from cassowary, a flightless bird very renowned for its sort of fighting prowess. The other comes from the femur of a human. And what’s interesting about this particular case is these daggers were used by warriors in this particular community for close combat, but they’re also used to display symbol. They’re used to symbolize power.

And there’s a quote by anthropologist Paul Roscoe who talks about the uses of these daggers. And there’s an interesting quote that I want to share here, “It’s almost like a spiritual aura, “like your father was watching over you “and you were carrying him into battle with you. ” If you use the femur of your father to use as a raw material to fashion one of these daggers, right? But the point that I’m trying to make here is that it highlights a sort of fundamental difference between our forms of conflict and forms of conflict we see elsewhere in the natural world with other species. All of the cultural dimensions that we overlay, all the symbols and meanings that we put on top of our kinds of war-like behaviors. They stand in contrast with what we see elsewhere. This now gets us to the final part of the lecture. I wanna talk a little bit about some of the longer-term implications, and these are speculative, right? Let’s think about the implications for human nature. Now, not that long ago, former President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize and in his acceptance speech, he says something that is interesting about war itself. I won’t read you the entire quote. You can see it on the screen here, but suffice it to say, there’s a couple of things that I want you to take away from that quote.

And the very first thing is that he says, “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. ” That phrase there is interesting to think about, first man. Is this an accurate view, right? Is this telling us something about what he thinks about the antiquity of war? What does he mean by war and what is meant by first man? That gets back to the original question we started off with at the beginning of this talk when we thought about, has warfare always been a part of humanity? Going back to Obama’s quote, first man, going back to that first question that we set out with, has it always been a part of humanity? The evidence, as we’ve seen today, suggests that our deepest past, in the deepest recesses of human history, the evidence is suggestive, but by no means conclusive that warfare existed, that warfare was rampant or frequent. We don’t know exactly what it may have looked like. There are subtle clues. Most of that data is fragmentary, such as the fossil record, but we again have very little social context. We don’t know all kinds of things from that deeper past. So it’s hard to say why people were doing what they were doing. If violence was happening, is it interpersonal? Is it between family members? Is it some kind of dispute? Is it warfare in terms of conflict between communities? That is difficult to make out. But on the other hand, I would say that there are enough clues to warrant further investigation, for further studies and hypothesis testing, right.

We cannot just assume that warfare did not exist. We have to take a neutral standpoint to begin with and ask, well, maybe it did. And if it did, how would we know? What other kinds of technologies do we have to investigate that past, to analyze materials and to answer questions? Unless we ask the question, we won’t seek answers for it. The other thing to note is perhaps we are asking the wrong question. If we think about hominin warfare and how that data might be ambiguous, maybe instead of asking when warfare happened, maybe we should be asking, when did humanity happen? When did we start seeing the capacity for warfare? This is at the heart of the argument that my colleague Marc Kissel and I make. We argue that instead of when warfare, the bigger question should be when did we become human? And the reason for this is because warfare itself is a highly cooperative kind of endeavor. It’s a sort of spurious dichotomy to say warfare and peace or competition and cooperation, because warfare actually involves very sophisticated forms of cooperation, very sophisticated forms of communication. You have to coordinate. You have to believe in the same goals. You have to be able to effectively communicate what those goals should be to compel others to follow along, to risk their life, to risk their limbs, to fight alongside you.

We start to bring in meaning and symbols. So as much as biology might be important, our cultures become just as important when we think about warfare. The fact that we might fight and die and sacrifice, not just for family members, but for strangers, non-kin. To us, this involves different forms of cognition, symbolic thinking, and values. We have creative ways to identify each other, to identify ourselves, to identify relationships between people that might be strangers, non-kin and others, how we identify others, even outside of our community, those that would be acceptable as targets of our violence and warfare. So varied motivations and varied ways in compelling others to subscribe to those motivations. And if we ask that question, “When did we become human,” let’s take a look very briefly at this. It used to be that people looked at something like this cave art from France 40,000 to 30,000 years ago and said, “This is when we became human. This is when we started to think symbolically. ” We now know, of course, with more and more archeological information, that that kind of symbolic thought didn’t originate at 40,000 years ago in Europe.

We see evidence of it even earlier and elsewhere, parts of Africa, for instance. We see designs, markings, and other kinds of media material, 70,000 years ago and elsewhere. In fact, if you look at the fossil record for anatomically-modern humans, people like us, that goes back 200,000 to 300,000 years. Our morphology has existed for quite that long, if not longer. And the behaviors as reflected in KBR or in other kinds of artifacts that reflect sophisticated cognition, complex symbolic thinking, that goes very far back as well. And if we combine these streams of evidence, this is just a hypothesis that requires more testing, but if you combine all of that, it tells us that forms of complex cooperation and communication existed as far back as 200,000, maybe more, years ago. If that’s the case, we would argue, that’s how far back warfare probably goes. It says nothing about frequency. It says nothing about how often people fought, but it says that the capacity to fight definitely existed and that conditions could have arisen, not just environmental conditions, but sometimes social conditions called for violence because maybe the gods told us we need to do this. Maybe we wanted to for various reasons, but those kinds of capacities existed in the past.

We shouldn’t deny our ancestors that capacity. So in a nutshell, we’re arguing for forms of socially cooperative violence that may have been directed at outsiders, those not deemed to be part of our own community. We see this going very far back. So in this timeline, if I show this crude graphic once more, we’ve eliminated the earlier or the more recent eras. And now we’re starting to question the very earliest ones because of the fragmentary nature of the data. But perhaps, we’re looking at something like this 200,000 to 300,000 years ago when we start to see anatomically-modern humans and our behaviors. This for us, is where we see warfare really starting to form. And it’s not something that emerges overnight. These kinds of behaviors come about through piecemeal fashion and gradually, probably over the course of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary change, right? But they’re part of this process. Maybe they’re tied up to language.

Maybe they’re tied up to other forms of communication. And of course, if we take this argument, it tells us that complex cooperation led to the ability to fight, right? It opened the door for war, but it also, on the flip side of that argument, opened the door to avoid fighting, what we might call peacefare. And this is at the heart of some of the research that we’re moving forward and trying to do now. So we think about behavioral plasticity, the various possibilities of human behavior, the various strategies in our repertoire, in our toolbox. When we started to behave in this way, in very complex ways in cooperation, we were able to start envisioning various kinds of scenarios to avoid conflict. And this gets at ideas about sociality, about empathy. Many researchers in anthropology are continuing this kind of work, right, where we look at various forms of relationships and how people interacted, how they socialized, and perhaps emergent peacefare is what we should be looking at next. And this may be rooted in forms of sociality. And there is a lot of research that have been ongoing, whether we’re looking at human societies or we’re looking at primate societies, but the ideas related to empathy and sociality are important to consider as well. And this ongoing research about reconciliation or altruism or other kinds of behaviors are important as we move forward.

I’d like to start wrapping up here. I know that we’ve been dealing with a very sobering topic. So I’d like to end on a more positive note. I don’t know if anybody’s familiar with this location that’s on the screen now. Some of you may have been here, maybe not. But this Ebenezer Church in Atlanta. And you may know that Ebenezer Church was where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his sermons and got his start. And I got to visit this location not too long ago. And right across or down the street from the church is a museum, a center for nonviolent social change that’s dedicated to this idea of nonviolence and peace, dedicated to Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s life. And when you enter that center, you’re faced with this image and this quote from Dr. King. “It is no longer a choice, my friends, “between violence and nonviolence. “It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. ” And at the heart of this particular idea is something that I want to leave you with. Complex cooperation was required to create sustained practices of both war and peace. Neither is a natural state. Peace is not simply the absence of war.

It is something that we manufacture. It is something that we cultivate. And at the heart of that idea then, is the idea that we have choices. We can study the evolution of warfare and of peacefare, and that kind of research, that kind of understanding enables us. It gives us a chance to change our views, our cultural values, our ideas about how violence can or should be avoided, what is just or unjust. We can start to see possible outcomes and possible futures. We can start to imagine what we want the world to look like. And with that, I’ll end here. And I just want to acknowledge many of the supporters for the research that my colleagues and I have been doing over the years. And I thank you very much for your time and your interest.

And I hope that you take something away from this particular talk. Thank you.