SOME MILESTONES IN THE HISTORY OF WARFARE
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Sometimes people were (or at least should have been)
shocked by advances in warfare. These advances
were sometimes technical and sometimes not – caused instead by some change in
attitudes, living conditions, or habits.
In any case, they brought about increases in casualties – killed and
wounded – that were not usually anticipated.
War was invented.
This assumes that was is a group activity requiring
organization and coordination of the activities of many individuals. To say “war was invented” does not
necessarily mean that there was a golden age before any kind of violence among
people. There probably was some
interpersonal violence going back a very long way. But it was not always organized warfare. Here is an approximate timeline:
It is important to stick to evidence in
this and, actually, in all subjects. It
is often pointed out that there is a vast amount of evidence pre-historical
war. This means anything older than
about 3500 BC (and not that old in many parts of the world). But the signs of warfare do slow down to a
trickle and gradually die out for sites older than around 12,000 BC. The type of evidence is outlined in the chart
above.
It is also often pointed out that
modern-day peoples using primitive technology do a lot of fighting. This seems to be true in spite of some
contrary claims. However, they have a
vastly different history than peoples who actually lived before 12,000 BC. They have been overrun by someone, pushed out
of ancestral lands, limited to marginal lands, and so forth. It is still true that evidence for systematic
warfare becomes undetectable before a certain time.
I am not going to speculate much of what
caused warfare to grow from something below the “radar” to the dominating
influence that it eventually became. But
the mass graves referred to in the chart above testify to the kinds of
casualties produced by this invention.
Various possible reasons have been
suggested for the change. It was
probably not the fact that several new weapons such as the bow and arrow were
invented at about the time that warfare grew.
That was probably done as a result of the fighting; such emergencies
have always motivated us to invent new technologies. Most of reasons offered actually involve
defending territory. This practice was
made necessary by the increased dependence on the territory for food production
that came with the agricultural revolution and increasing population. Such a squeeze on the resources needed for
survival could have probably made major changes in people’s attitudes about one
another.
In his 1898 novel, “The War of the
Worlds”, H. G. Wells told a fictional story of Martians invading the earth in
search of food. This story made earth
people into the modern people with primitive technology and the beings from
Mars into the technologically advanced civilization. His Martians treated earth people in just
about the same way as technologically advanced civilizations on earth were
treating primitive tribes at the time.
In describing the history of the Martians that he invented, he described
how their dying planet squeezed them out of the ability to grow food and said,
on about the second page, “The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened
their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts”. He may have been onto something.
If you wish to study this further, here
are some books that discuss the subject.
Dyer, Gwynne, War, Crown Publishers, Inc.,
O’Connell, Robert L., Soul
of the Sword (An Illustrated History of Weaponry and Warfare from Prehistory to
the Present), The Free Press,
Ferrill, Arther, The Origins of War from the Stone Age to
Alexander the Great, Thames and Hudson, London, 1985.
Gregor, Thomas, ed., A Natural History of Peace,
Keegan, John, A History of Warfare, Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc.,
Starr,
Wenke, Robert J., Patterns in Prehistory, Humankind's First
Three Million Years, Oxford University Press, London, 1990.