A skeleton displayed in a museum in Khartoum belongs to a person who lived roughly 13,400 years ago in the Nile Valley, in what is now northern Sudan. There is a stone point embedded in the left side of the ribcage—not resting near the bones, but driven into the living tissue with enough force to lodge in bone. The wound healed. The bone grew around the stone.
Then the person was attacked again, and a second, unhealed wound killed them. That skeleton came from a site called Jebel Sahaba, also known as Cemetery 117, excavated in 1964 by archaeologist Fred Wendorf during construction work related to the Aswan Dam. The burial ground contained 61 sets of human remains from a culture archaeologists call the Qadan, dating to roughly 13,400 years ago. Dozens of skeletons showed signs of violent death, with stone projectile points embedded in bones or lying within body cavities.
For decades, Jebel Sahaba was cited as the oldest evidence of warfare—a prehistoric battle, even the first war. Then, in 2021, paleoanthropologist Isabelle Crevecoeur of the University of Bordeaux re-examined every skeleton using modern microscopic analysis, and her findings, published in Scientific Reports, changed the story. Crevecoeur’s team identified over 100 previously undocumented lesions on the remains. The critical detail was that many individuals had both healed and unhealed wounds—the same person had been attacked, survived, and then been attacked again, sometimes multiple times.
Men, women, and children were affected. This was not one battle. It was chronic, recurring, low-level group violence: raids, skirmishes, and retaliatory attacks stretching across years or generations. The team concluded that the violence was likely driven by climate change.
At the end of the last ice age, the Nile Valley was experiencing severe environmental stress, with fluctuating water levels and unpredictable resources. When resources become unpredictable, humans become dangerous. This was not a single outburst of rage, but a pattern, a strategy, a way of life among hunter-gatherers with no agriculture, no cities, no states, and no written law. Jebel Sahaba is not alone.
In 2012, a field assistant named Pedro Abeiya was walking near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya when he noticed bones eroding out of the sediment. A team led by Marta Mirazón Lahr of Cambridge University excavated the remains of 27 individuals dating to roughly 10,000 years ago, publishing their findings in Nature in 2016. The bodies had not been buried; they had been left where they fell in what was then a marshy lagoon. Ten of the skeletons showed clear signs of violent death: smashed skulls, broken knees, an obsidian blade still lodged in the skull of one man, and arrow lesions in the necks of others.
One woman was found in a position suggesting her hands had been bound. The site is called Nataruk, and it matters because these people were nomadic hunter-gatherers, not settled farmers. For decades, the traditional explanation for the invention of war was that it arose with agriculture. You plant crops, store food, build a village, and now you have property and borders—something worth stealing.
Nataruk blew a hole in that theory. These people were mobile, owned what they could carry, and were killed anyway. The reasons are unknown. The area around Lake Turkana was lush and resource-rich 10,000 years ago, which might point to territorial competition.
The demographics of the dead—adults of both sexes but no young adult females—have led some researchers to suggest that women may have been taken as captives. Or it may have been revenge, a feud, or an insult that escalated across generations. The bones alone cannot say. The question of whether humans invented war or inherited it also has a test case in the animal kingdom.
In 1974, primatologist Jane Goodall was observing chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, a group she had studied for over a decade. The community split, with a group of males breaking away to form a southern splinter group called Kahama, while the northern group was called Kasakela. Over the next four years, from 1974 to 1978, the Kasakela males systematically hunted down and killed every adult male of the Kahama community. They did not do it in a single attack, but in coordinated raids—small groups traveling silently into enemy territory to isolate and beat individuals to death.
By 1978, Kahama had ceased to exist. Goodall was devastated, later writing that for years afterward she would wake in the night with horrific images in her mind. Since chimpanzees share roughly 98. 7% of our DNA and engage in coordinated lethal territorial violence, the capacity for that behavior may predate the human lineage entirely.
Not everyone agrees with that conclusion. Lawrence Keeley, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published War Before Civilization in 1996, arguing that prehistoric warfare was not rare or ritualized but constant, brutal, and far more lethal per capita than anything in the modern world. His data suggested that in many pre-state societies, between 15 and 25% of males died violently at the hands of other humans, compared to roughly 1 to 2% of Europeans who died from war in the 20th century. Steven Pinker picked up this data in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature to argue that humans are actually becoming less violent over time and that the modern state has been a remarkably effective pacifying force.
On the other side, R. Brian Ferguson of Rutgers University has argued that war is not biological but cultural—a technology humans developed under specific conditions that did not exist for most of our evolutionary history. Ferguson argues that Keeley and Pinker cherry-pick their data, noting that many war-like societies were already in contact with colonial powers whose encroachment themselves sparked or intensified violence. He also distinguishes between homicide and war: a murder or a family feud is not a war, which requires social organization, group identity, strategic planning, and the dehumanization of the enemy—things that are learned, not born.
Douglas Fry and Patrick Söderberg’s 2013 study in Science examined 148 instances of lethal aggression in 21 mobile forager band societies and found that most violence was personal—individual disputes, jealousy, revenge—while organized group attacks were a minority. They concluded that war is not the default state of humanity but a specific cultural behavior that emerged under specific historical pressures. The evidence points to something more complicated than either side wants to admit. The capacity for group violence appears to be very old, present in both chimpanzees and in the bones at Jebel Sahaba and Nataruk.
Something in the primate brain—territorial instinct, coalition behavior, the ability to categorize others as not us—appears to predate agriculture and civilization by tens of thousands of years, possibly millions. But the capacity for violence is not the same as war, which requires organization, logistics, leadership, and a reason to fight shared by a group. Those elements appear to have been developed over time in response to specific conditions, the most important being having something worth fighting over that could not be moved. For most of human history, we were nomadic.
If a neighboring group became aggressive, you could leave and walk away. Conflict was possible, as Nataruk proves, but it was not inevitable. The inability to retreat arrived with agriculture. Roughly 12,000 years ago, in what archaeologists call the Neolithic Revolution, humans began domesticating plants and animals, settling down, building permanent villages, and storing surplus food.
That created immovable wealth: a granary of wheat, a herd of cattle, a field that took months to clear. For the first time, humans had possessions worth defending and worth stealing. The archaeological record reflects this. Fortified settlements began appearing within a few thousand years of the earliest agriculture.
The walls of Jericho, dating to roughly 8,000 BC, were long cited as the first military fortifications, though some modern scholars argue they may have been built for flood control. But by 6,000 BC, unmistakable defensive architecture—ditches, palisades, watchtowers—was appearing across the Near East and Europe. Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey, occupied from roughly 7,500 to 5,700 BC, had no walls or gates, but its entire architecture was a defense. Houses were built directly against each other with no streets or ground-level doors.
You entered through a hole in the roof using a ladder, meaning the outer face of the settlement was a blank, windowless wall of mudbrick. Skeletal evidence shows remarkably low levels of violent trauma. But the fact that a community of several thousand designed their homes to repel attackers tells you that attackers existed. By 8,000 BC, organized violence between groups was common enough that people were literally building their lives around the expectation of it.
The rise of hierarchy turned raiding into war. By roughly 3000 BC, Mesopotamian city-states like Ur, Uruk, Lagash, and Umma were competing for control of fertile land with organized armies. The Stele of the Vultures, carved around 2450 BC and discovered by French archaeologist Ernest de Sarzec at ancient Girsu in modern Iraq, depicts King Eannatum of Lagash leading his soldiers against the rival city of Umma. Those soldiers are marching in formation—shoulder to shoulder, shields interlocked, spears leveled, helmets on.
It is the earliest known depiction of the phalanx, a formation that would dominate warfare for the next 2,000 years. The stela also shows vultures carrying away severed heads and limbs. By 2450 BC, war was not just something that happened; it was something celebrated and commemorated in stone. Roughly 200 years later, Sargon of Akkad created the first permanent professional standing army in history.
Soldiers who did not go home after the battle but trained year-round, fed and paid by the state. Ancient texts claim he maintained a force of 5,400 soldiers. A professional army allowed campaigns in any season and the holding of conquered territory with permanent garrisons. Sargon used it to forge the Akkadian Empire, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean—the first empire in history, built on the back of the first army designed not to defend a city but to conquer one.
That is the moment war stops being a defensive reaction and becomes a tool of policy, something you do not because you have to, but because you can. The Standard of Ur, dating to roughly 2600 BC, shows war on one side—battle carts trampling enemies, infantry in formation, prisoners led before the king—and peace on the other, a banquet with musicians. War and peace were already understood as two sides of the same political coin 4,600 years ago. In 1457 BC, Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III marched his army through a narrow mountain pass called the Aruna, against the advice of his generals, to surprise a coalition of Canaanite forces outside the fortress city of Megiddo.
His military scribe Djuti recorded the entire campaign on the walls of the Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak. The Battle of Megiddo is the first battle in recorded history with a detailed, reliable account—the moment war stops being something inferred from bones and stone monuments and becomes something readable in the words of the people who fought it. The weapons themselves tell a story about how war became a permanent institution. For hundreds of thousands of years, human weapons were tools repurposed for violence—a spear for hunting, an axe for forestry.
The first object designed specifically and exclusively to kill another human being was the mace. It cannot cut meat, harvest grain, or build a shelter; it does one thing: delivers concentrated blunt force to a human skull. Mace heads begin appearing in the Near East roughly 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. Then it became a symbol.
The Narmer Palette, dating to approximately 3100 BC, shows King Narmer raising a pear-shaped mace over a kneeling prisoner. The first king we can name on a unified Egyptian artifact chose to represent his authority with a weapon designed for killing. War was no longer something that happened to societies; it was how societies defined themselves. Rock art in Eastern Spain, part of a tradition called Levantine art dating to roughly 6,000 to 2,500 BC, depicts groups of human figures carrying bows, running toward other groups carrying bows—battle scenes, the earliest visual depictions of war anywhere in the world.
At the Tollense River in northern Germany, an amateur archaeologist discovered a human arm bone with a bronze arrowhead embedded in it in 1996. Systematic excavations beginning in 2007 uncovered the oldest battlefield in Europe, dating to around 1250 BC. The remains of at least 150 individuals, along with thousands of bone fragments, bronze arrowheads, flint points, and wooden clubs, were scattered along a three-kilometer stretch of riverbank. Researchers estimate that roughly 4,000 warriors may have been involved, with up to 1,000 killed.
Isotopic analysis showed some combatants came from hundreds of kilometers away, indicating an organized interregional military conflict, not a local dispute. The site rewrote assumptions that Bronze Age northern Europe was a relatively peaceful trading zone. At Crow Creek in South Dakota, a mass grave unearthed in 1978 contained the remains of at least 486 men, women, and children, nearly all showing signs of scalping, skull fractures, and dismemberment. The massacre occurred around 1325 AD, likely driven by resource competition during a prolonged drought—not a battlefield, but the total destruction of a community.
The hardest part of war was never building a better weapon; it was convincing people to use it. Every culture on Earth has independently developed a psychological mechanism: you make the other group not human. You give them a different name, a different category, and once someone is not part of your group, the normal rules of empathy simply stop applying. Psychologists call this the in-group/out-group distinction, and it operates in every human society ever studied.
A different language, a different appearance, a different god—the mechanism is the same. Draw a line, decide who is on which side, and the people on the other side become something you can kill without it feeling like murder. That is not a recent invention or a product of civilization. It is a feature of the human brain that appears to be very, very old, and without it, war as we know it would be impossible.
Humans did not invent war the way someone invents a tool, in one place at one time with one clear purpose. War emerged gradually over thousands of years as a series of escalations. The capacity for group violence appears ancient, possibly predating our species. But the capacity for violence is not war.
War requires infrastructure: organization, leadership, logistics, and a sustained motive. Those elements were assembled piece by piece over roughly the last 12,000 years. Agriculture created immovable wealth worth fighting over. Settled communities created borders worth defending.
Hierarchy created leaders who could organize and direct violence on a large scale. Technology created weapons designed not for hunting animals, but for killing people. The probability that war is a single discrete invention that emerged at one point is essentially zero. The probability that the capacity for organized group violence has deep evolutionary roots shared with our closest primate relatives is very high.
But whether that capacity becomes war depends on conditions: the right pressures, the right social structures, the right stakes. For most of human history, those conditions did not exist. Then, roughly 12,000 years ago, they did. The bones at Jebel Sahaba are 13,400 years old.
The walls of Jericho are 10,000 years old. The first phalanx is 4,450 years old. The first recorded battle at Megiddo is 3,480 years old. The technology of war has changed beyond anything a Neolithic farmer could have imagined.
The reason has not: somebody has something, somebody else wants it.
