A 13,400-year-old skeleton found on the banks of the Nile preserves the oldest known evidence of organized violence between human groups. The man had been stabbed in the chest with a stone spearpoint, and the wound had healed, with bone growing around the embedded point. Years later, he was killed by a second point, which never healed. That skeleton, unearthed from the burial site known as Jebel Sahaba, Cemetery 117, has become central to one of the most contested questions in anthropology—whether war is an ancient inherited behavior or a recently invented cultural practice.
Excavated in 1964 by archaeologist Fred Wendorf amid preparations for a dam project, the site initially appeared to tell a straightforward story. More than 60 bodies, dating back roughly 13,000 years, carried stone points lodged in their bones, leading early researchers to describe the location as a prehistoric battlefield. A 2021 reassessment by paleoanthropologist Isabelle Crevecoeur, however, overturned that simple narrative. Using modern microscopy, her team identified over 100 previously unnoticed wounds across the skeletons.
The critical finding was not just the volume of injuries, but their pattern. Many individuals had been attacked, survived, and then attacked again—sometimes repeatedly over their lifetime. Men, women, and children all bore evidence of recurring violence. This was not a single battle, but a pattern of chronic, low-level conflict, likely involving raids, skirmishes, and retaliation across years or generations.
Crevecoeur’s team attributed the violence largely to environmental pressures, noting that at the end of the last ice age, the Nile experienced severe fluctuation in water levels and food availability, conditions that historically coincide with increased human conflict. Jebel Sahaba isn’t the only ancient site suggesting group violence predates civilization. In 2012, researchers in Kenya uncovered the remains of 27 people at Nataruk, near Lake Turkana, dating back around 10,000 years. The victims had died violently—smashed skulls, broken knees, an obsidian blade lodged in one skull, and arrow wounds on others.
One woman’s position suggested her hands may have been bound. What made Nataruk particularly significant is that these people were nomadic hunter-gatherers, not settled farmers with stored wealth to protect. Their attackers killed them despite having no crops, villages, or granaries to steal, questioning assumptions that organized warfare emerged only after agriculture created property worth defending. While some researchers suggest the presence of adult females was notably absent among the dead, possibly indicating captives were taken, others propose causes ranging from competition over rich territory to prolonged cycles of revenge, but the true motive remains unknown.
The archaeological record pushes the origins of violence between groups even deeper, raising the question of whether humans inherited this capacity from their primate ancestors. Jane Goodall’s observations of chimpanzees at Gombe Stream in Tanzania, beginning in the early 1970s, provided a critical test case. After a community of chimpanzees split into two factions, the northern Kasakela group systematically huntedand killed every adult male of the breakaway Kahama group over a four-year period. The attacks were coordinated, silent raids on isolated individuals, ending with their deaths.
By 1978, the Kahama community ceased to exist. Goodall later described being haunted by the violence she witnessed, having documented what appeared to be a primitive form of warfare among animals sharing roughly 98. 7% of human DNA. If humans’ closest living relatives engage in coordinated, lethal, territorial violence, the capacity for such behavior may predate the human species itself.
This evidence has fueled a long-standing scholarly dispute between two camps. One side, exemplified by archaeologist Lawrence Keeley inversus book “War Before Civilization,” argues that prehistoric warfare was not rare or ritualized, but constant and highly lethal, with data suggesting violent death rates of 15 to 25% among men in many pre-state societies. This compares starkly to the estimated 1 to 2% of European deaths from war during the entire 20th century, including both World Wars. Psychologist Steven Pinker has built an influential argument on such data, claiming modernity has actually made humans less violent.
On the other side, cultural theorists like anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson contend war is not biological instinct but a cultural invention, emerging only under specific conditions. Ferguson has argued that many supposedly warlike prehistoric societies were already under colonial pressure, which itself sparked or intensified violence, and he draws a strict line between homicide and war. A murder, he insists, is not war, nor is a family feud.
War requires social organization, group identity, strategic planning, and dehumanization of the enemy—all learned behaviors. A 2013 study published in Science by Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg supported this cultural perspective, examining 148 instances of lethal aggression across 21 mobile hunter-gatherer bands. They found most killings stemmed from personal disputes, jealousy, or revenge, which they classified as homicide rather than organized group conflict. Their conclusion was that war is not humanity’s default state, but a specific cultural behavior arising under particular pressures.
Neither interpretation fully resolves the evidence, which suggests a more complex picture. The capacity for group violence appears ancient, evident in chimpanzees and 13,000-year-old human skeletons, possibly rooted in primate territoriality and coalitional instincts. Yet, capacity differs from war itself, which requires organization, leadership, logistics, and shared motivation—structures that were developed, not inherited. The decisive transformation toward institutionalized war came with agriculture, approximately 12,000 years ago, during the Neolithic Revolution.
As humans domesticated plants and animals, they abandoned nomadic lifeways for permanent settlements, creating immovable wealth. —granaries, herds, fields—that could neither flee nor fold up nor be abandoned cheaply. For the first time, humans possessed assets worth defending worth stealing, and the archaeological record immediately reflects a shift in human design. Fortified settlements appeared across the Near East and Europe within thousands of years, with ditches, palisades, and watchtowers signaling organized defense.
Though the famous walls of Jericho, erected around 8,000 BC, are now debated by some scholars as possibly serving flood control, by 6,000 BC, unmistakable defensive architecture emerged, and as one archaeologist noted, communities do not build watchtowers out of fear of floods. An especially striking example lies in Çatalhöyük, a large Neolithic settlement in modern Turkey, inhabited from roughly 7,500 to 5,700 BC. Rather than constructing a perimeter wall, its residents built homes directly against one another, sharing walls, with no streets and no ground-level doors—entry was possible only through roof hatches reached by ladder. The settlement’s blank, windowless outer walls formed its own defense, creating a fortress where attackers would have had to scale a sheer surface while defenders attacked from above.
Despite this elaborate defensive design, skeletons there show remarkably low rates of violent trauma, suggesting the residents’ architectural strategy succeeded. The very existence of such fortified settlements, however, proves attackers were common enough that thousands of people organized their lives around the expectation of aggression. As organized violence between groups became more persistent, so did the technology designed specifically for it. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans used hunting and working tools—spears, bows, axes—that, while lethal, had not been designed for killing people.
The first known tool created exclusively for human violence was the mace, a polished stone head mounted on a wooden handle, effective only for delivering blunt force to a skull. It could not cut meat, harvest grain, or dig, making it the first object whose only purpose was to kill another human. Mace heads began appearing in the Near East roughly 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, coinciding with the rise of settled communities with stored resources. Symbolically, the mace soon transcended its practical use, becoming an emblem of royal authority.
The Narmer Palette, dating to around 3,100 BC, depicts the first named king of a unified Egypt raising a mace over a kneeling prisoner, cementing war as a governing identity rather than merely a response to threat. As city-states emerged in Mesopotamia around 3,000 BC, competition over fertile territory between the Tigris and Euphrates produced the first true organized armies. The Stele of the Vultures, carved around 2,450 BC, shows King Eannatum of Lagash leading soldiers against rival Umma, and critically, those troops are shown marching in discipline formation—a phalanx, the earliest known depiction of tactical military organization, a formation that would dominate battlefields for millennia. Initially, these Sumerian forces were citizen militias, farmers temporarily called to fight neighbors before returning home, a system adequate for defending one city against another but insufficient for territorial conquest.
Around 2,334 BC, Sargon of Akkad changed that equation, creating history’s first permanent professional standing army. Ancient texts record his force of roughly 5,400 soldiers who permanently served the state, trained year-round, fed and paid from its resources, whose sole purpose was military conquest. This innovation enabled him to forge the Akkadian Empire, the world’s first empire, built through projecting force over vast distances and holding conquered territories with garrisons—a fundamental shift transforming war from reactive defense into proactive policy tool. About a thousand years later, the first battle in recorded history with a detailed, reliable account took place.
In 1,457 BC, Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III, against his generals’ advice, marched his army through a narrow mountain pass called Aruna to surprise a coalition camped outside the fortress of Megiddo. His military scribe documented the entire campaign, including troop movements, logistics, and the pharaoh’s decisions, on the walls of Karnak temple, marking the transition of war from something inferred through bones into something read in the words of its participants. Yet, the deepest puzzle of war lies not in its technology or organization, but in how humans, biologically wired for empathy and cooperation, are persuaded to systematically kill others fundamentally like themselves. The answer appears to lie in a mechanism common to every human culture ever studied—the in-group/out-group distinction.
By categorizing others as different—through language, appearance, religion, or geography—societies can place them outside the boundaries of moral consideration, enabling violence without the psychological weight of murder. Psychologists recognize this categorization as a universal feature of human cognition, appearing remarkably ancient, predating civilization itself. Without this mechanism, war as practiced would be impossible, for its greatest challenge has never been crafting better weapons, but convincing people to use them. Humans did not invent war, then, as a single discrete invention made in one place at one time, but rather developed it gradually over millennia through a series of escalations.
The capacity for group violence is ancient, rooted in biology shared with close relatives and visible in the bones of hunter-gatherers with no farms or borders, like those at Jebel Sahaba and Nataruk. War itself, however, required assembling infrastructure piece by piece—agriculture creating immovable wealth worth fighting over, settlements creating borders worth defending, hierarchies creating leaders capable of directing large-scale violence, and technology creating weapons designed specifically to kill humans. While the probability of war being a singular invention is essentially zero, the probability that the capacity for organized violence has deep evolutionary roots is very high. Whether that capacity blossoms into war, however, depends on the right conditions—pressures, structures, stakes—that largely did not exist for most of human history, but emerged unexpectedly around 12,000 years ago.
Once those conditions materialized, war proved one of humanity’s most enduring inventions, persisting across the roughly13,400-year arc spanning the first known victim of group violence to the weapons being built and aimed tonight.
