Prehistoric Warfare: The History of Early Human Conflicts

Raymond C. Kelly, an anthropologist and ethnologist who has written extensively on societal inequality and subsequent warfare suggests that among the hunter-gatherer groups of Homo erectus, the population density was low enough to avoid armed conflict in most cases. In the same vein, a perception has persisted that during this less populated time of Earth’s history, life among the Homo species was relatively peaceful. Archaeologists have supported this theory through early cave art, little of which ever depicts humans hunting or killing each other explicitly. Kelly theorized that the migration out of Africa by Homo erectus 1.8 million years ago was “a natural consequence of conflict avoidance.” He believes that this general period of “Paleolithic warlessness” was to persist until the appearance of Homo sapiens approximately 350,000 years ago, and that it began with the occurrence of “economic and social shifts associated with sedentism.”

However, depictions of humans pierced with arrows began to appear in the Aurignacian-Périgordian eras (30,000 years ago), and in the early Magdalenian era (17,000 years ago). A work of Mesolithic art (20,000 to 10,000 years ago) shows an explicit battle between groups of archers, and in Valencia, a group of three archers are seen surrounded by four of the similarly armed enemy in the Cova del Roure la Vella in Castellón. In the Ares del Maestrat in Alcañiz of Aragon, another work depicts warriors fleeing a group of eight archers, while a similar work at Val del Charco del Agua in Aragon shows seven archers with plumed headgear. Other examples show warriors in lines and columns with a “distinctly garbed leader at the front.”

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