It's true enough that in the early 2000s one of my poli-sci professors devoted most of a course to the book War Before Civilization and kept hammering on the idea of prehistoric war being widespread and common as some kind of huge revelation and surprise.

I found such intense and sustained focus baffling, since the point seemed obvious (though the evidence was interesting, at least). I've since come to understand this as some "inside baseball" grad-level anthropology leaking through to the undergrad curriculum. We newbies didn't need to be convinced because we'd never strongly held the contrary view in the first place, but the field (and related ones) had only recently convinced itself so thought it worth spending a lot of time on.

It should be a revelation because war is a civilizational concept - it's a form of organized violence, 'organization' being the keyword here.

If you're living in scattered, small tribes, then at most you can get into small tribal scuffles and vendetta ... but war requires planning, organization, support, possibly diplomacy, marshalling of resources - so it's hard to have proper war without the mechanisms in place to support it.

So maybe it's not quite so obvious.

Indeed, the article itself says

> We had considered scenarios of raids, with small groups of young men killing and stealing food, but to imagine such a big battle with thousands of people is very surprising

So it's not so much the violence itself that's the surprise, as it is the scale of said violence

Think about the organisation that an army involving hundreds of people must have meant:

You have to gather them. There is no written means of communication yet in that part of Europe. There are not many roads yet. They live on farms spread out over vast territories. The article says there were 5 people per square km. Most are probably kids and half are women, so to find 1 able bodied man of fighting age you might need 20 people, which would require 4 square km. Now, if like in later ages the soldiers were the second and third oldest sons, you might find 1 soldier per 10 square km. To gather an army of 500 men, you would need a territory of roughly 100*50 km.

You have to feed them for days, weeks, or maybe even months before or between battles. Crazy expensive at a time where just feeding yourself is not easy.

They have to sleep somewhere, even if just in tents.

You have to provide some weapons and equipment, even if merely wooden clubs and spears.

Unless they are slaves, which some might have been, you may have to pay them or they need to be convinced they fight for their own sake, for example because a foreign people is invading their land.

The most obvious way to organize all that is to imagine a strong regional rulers, a class of local nobles, taxes, some sort of manorialism. Structures that are known later in history (or much further south in the bronze age). But maybe Northern Europe was also organized like that already in the bronze age.

> The most obvious way to organize all that is to imagine a strong regional rulers, a class of nobles, taxes, some sort of manorialism.

Yes.. and/or religious leaders.

I was surprised when I first read about that theory (that pre-historic people were largely free of warfare) and it seems really unintuitive, but I also kind of get why it may have been easy to paint that picture even with some science. It’s nice to see us trudging forward and making sure to correct our records :)

I think this is where I first ran into the concept: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/08/archaeologists-uncov...

This was not really "prehistory". About 100 years before the event here the battle of Kadesh [1] happened. Tens of thousands of soldiers are believed to have participated in that battle.

Not sure anyone "before the 1990s" was thinking that people were peaceful during the Bronze Age. 3200 years ago was almost to the day contemporaneous with the Trojan war [2]. That was not a time when people were peaceful and "concerned with trading and so on".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kadesh

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_War#Historical_basis

> That was not a time when people were peaceful and "concerned with trading and so on".

In relative terms, Pax Romana definetly was such a time.

Not sure what you're getting at. Pax Romana was over 1000 yrs after the Trojan War was suspected to have happened.

I mean we have evidence chimpanzees engage in tribal warfare. This is an absurd thing for supposed scientific minds to assume.

There’s a no true Scotsman type thing where some folks require some threshold of size or violence or whatever to meet the definition of war. I’m sure if you lived in the village where your neighbors kidnapped and raped your wife and daughters and stole your livestock the distinction may not quite work.

As with anything, people run with type of thing and make seemingly absurd leaps.

I would say that the ability to declare war is one of the things that distinguishes us as humans. Even chimpanzees declare war, and for the same reasons we do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

Your second sentence contradicts your first sentence

It's a fringe viewpoint but some knowledgeable people have argued that Pan troglodytes is better called Homo troglodytes. Perhaps GP is among them.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2003/05/chimps-be...

GP is indeed amongst them, though I admit I was not clear in my original statement. Chimps (and our chimp-like ancestors) both developed culture, warfare And the beginnings of language. In this sense, ‘human-ness’ is a continuum. For culture see this fascinating material...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/animal-fashion-som...

I don' think it matters. Even if Chimps are put on the same branch, 'human', refers to homo sapiens.

Yeah, sounds like p-hacking.

Still, supporting a proper army is a massive economic undertaking, so it seems likely that army sizes (and battle sizes) started relatively small and grew over time. Maybe this new finding actually does suggest that scale-up happened earlier than most previous legitimate estimates.

My money's on p-hacking though.

P-hacking what?

If p is the probability of the null hypothesis and you want a low p value to promote your alternative hypothesis, you can obtain the low p value by choosing a garbage null hypothesis like "prehistoric civilizations lived in peaceful harmony with each other." Just about any other theory looks brilliant next to such hot garbage.

It may be more the level of organization. Warfare was common but thought to be more on the family/clan scale.

This is my understanding. Most of what I've read suggests that there was lots of "tribal raiding" going on, but "warfare" pretty much by definition requires larger polities such as city states or nations which are thought to be a more recent development.

I don't know about Germany, but the UK is full of ancient fortifications - from earthworks that would enclose a few huts to huge ruined stone fortresses. Almost all of these get very little attention.

I thought most of these fortifications are thought to be bronze age, not neolithic.

In fact they are probably later, but they are definitely "prehistoric" in the sense that for most (certainly here in Scotland) there are no records, written or oral, for most.