Due to the violent conflicts taking place around the world at the moment, war feels like a permanent state. But have humans ever lived without war?
The answer depends on how you define “war”. If war means a fight between two governments, then yes, there have been peaceful periods “because for about 99% of human history, there were no governments,” he said. ian morrisA historian and author at Stanford University “War! What is it good for? Conflict and the progress of civilization from primates to robots(Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2014).
Violence, on the other hand, has always been with us. If the question becomes “Have people ever lived without violence?” So “the answer is quite clearly no – people have always been fighting And killed each other,” Morris told Live Science in an email.
theory of peaceful prehistory
according to a Review of studies published in 2022Warfare was rare or non-existent in early human history when people lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. peter stearnsEmeritus Professor of History at George Mason University and author “Peace in World History” (Routledge, 2014), agree with this view. “There was little or no warfare in hunting and gathering [cultures] before the rise of agriculture,” he told Live Science in an email.
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This idea is based on archaeological records. Researchers examining ancient human bones from around the world have discovered skeletal evidence of war injuries, for example in many individuals with unhealed wounds from stabbing, dismemberment, and blunt force trauma, who were buried in mass graves. However, he found There is little evidence of battle wounds before 8000 BC Subsequently, when humans began to transition from nomadic life to permanent settlements, such injuries became widespread.
This does not mean that lethal violence was absent in prehistoric societies. Researchers in Kenya found 27 skeletons dating back 10,000 years at the archaeological site of Nataruk; These skeletons show signs of violent death, which some anthropologists interpret Evidence of intergroup violence among early hunter-gatherers. And at Jebel Sahaba, a prehistoric cemetery in Sudan, archaeologists unearthed 13,000-year-old remains signs of intergroup attacks.
But these cases of interpersonal violence do not count as war, because that is how researchers usually define it. “Researchers who look at war as a distinct category of violence usually define it as either state-organized violence or mass violence that kills more than a certain number of people,” Morris said. “Prehistoric societies rarely had formal governments and hunter-gatherer groups rarely had more than a few dozen members, so if you define war as a government-run conflict or a conflict that kills more than 100 people, then by definition there cannot be wars. [early] Prehistoric.”
David ChristianA historian and professor emeritus in the department of history and archeology at Macquarie University in Australia echoed this view. “Most communities in human history were so small that it is not clear whether we can compare violence to warfare,” he told Live Science in an email. “I think we can say that humans have always been capable of violence and as communities became larger, violence began to take forms that we might want to describe as ‘war.’
killed about war 231 million people in the 20th century, including approximately 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin in World War II and who are honored at the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park (pictured above) in Germany.
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peace between rival powers
Once large states and empires appeared, wars became very common. A doctoral thesis written by Jared Morgan McKinneyNow an assistant professor of international security studies at the Air War College of Alabama, he focused on periods of peace between major powers. He concluded that war was basically the norm throughout history and that famous “peaceful” eras such as the Pax Romana (Roman peace) usually meant that a powerful group defeated all the rest and submitted.
But there were some exceptions also. “Wars are expensive and risky,” he said peter frankopanProfessor of Global History at the University of Oxford. “So in many periods in history, stability and peace have been achieved by rivals, adversaries and neighbors being able to match each other’s capabilities.”
McKinney’s thesis identified several periods when rival powers managed to avoid war.
From about 1400 to 1200 BC, the great powers of the ancient Middle East – primarily egypt and the Hittite Empire, an ancient civilization in modern-day Türkiye – lasted two unusually long periods without major wars. Peace was possible because the “Great Kings” treated each other as equals and resolved their territorial and political differences through formal treaties rather than war.
Washington DC. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia is the burial site of a World War I soldier whose identity was unknown.
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For most of their history, Rome And Persia Were at war. Then, from about 387 AD to 501 AD, the two superpowers mostly stopped fighting. Historians call this the “Long Fifth Century” and have put forward several explanations for this period of peace, including that both sides faced serious external threats, making fighting less economical, and that both sides developed a language of “brotherhood”, accepting each other as equals rather than enemies, McKinney wrote in his thesis.
Between about 1000 AD and 1200 AD, the prosperous Song Dynasty China Ensured peace with his militant northern neighbors – the Liao and Jin – by making regular payments to them to keep the peace. Although these monetary gifts (or bribes) looked like weakness, according to McKinney, the payments were tiny compared to what China was earning through trade.
According to Morris, another example is The “Long Peace” between China, Korea, and Japan between about 1600 and 1850.. Whereas European states spent those centuries competing for power and territory through warfareThe East Asian states lived in relative peace. “In Europe, we have become much more aggressive and competitive – giving the impression that war is a ‘natural state’,” Frankopan said.
There was a remarkable period of relative peace in North America. Long peace among the Iroquois nationsMcKinney told Live Science in an email. For nearly three centuries, from approximately 1450 to 1777, five (and later six) Native American nations, previously engaged in violent and costly conflict, formed a peaceful relationship known as the “United Nations”.Haudenosaunee ConfederacyOr “League of Five Nations.”
In South America, McKinney pointed out south american long peace. This refers to the absence of major interstate wars between sovereign nations in South America since 1935.
“War is ‘normal’ in history,” McKinney said. But, as these examples show, “there are exceptions to the pattern.”
Can you identify these historical war items? test your intelligence with us Weapons of the World Quiz.
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