Bibliographic Essay
Early suggestions that the past was not as peaceful as was typically portrayed were put forward by Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt in ‘Aggression in the !Ko-Bushmen', in Martin A. Nettleship and R.
Dale Givens (eds.),War, Its Causes and Correlates (The Hague: De Gruyter Mouton, 1975), pp. 281-96, and The Biology of Peace and War: Men, Animals and Aggression (New York: Viking, 1979); and by David Webster in ‘Warfare and the Evolution of the State: A Reconsideration', American Antiquity 40. 4 (1975), 464-70. Recent thinking about prehistoric warfare really began with Lawrence H. Keeley and his book War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).This rethink spawned a number of more specific studies, such as those in Mark W. Allen and Terry L. Jones's edited volume, Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2014), and Patricia M. Lambert's ‘The Archaeology of War: A North American Perspective', Journal of Archaeological Research 10.3 (2002), 207-41). Several new syntheses of the extent, great time depth, deadliness and relevance of ancient warfare also appeared, including Azar Gat's extensive War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and my own more general treatment (with Katherine E. Register), Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage (New York: St Martin's Press, 2003).
New data and their interpretation have given rise to approaches exploring the evolution of altruism (Samuel Bowles, ‘Did Warfare among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?', Science 324.5932 (2009), 1293-8) and modelling social change (Peter Turchin, ‘Warfare and the Evolution of Social Complexity: A Multilevel-Selection Approach', Structure and Dynamics 4.3 (2010), 1-37, and War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations (New York: Pi Press, 2005), as well as Paul Roscoe, ‘Intelligence, Coalitional Killing, and the Antecedents of War', American Anthropologist 109.3 (2007), 485-95).
It has also opened new interest by evolutionary psychologists: Joyce F.
Benenson with Henry Markovits, Warriors and Worriers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Todd K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen (eds.), The Evolution of Violence (New York: Springer, 2014) and led to provocative comparisons with chimpanzee conflict (Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1997)).Several anthropologists have offered different interpretations of the time depth, universality and deadliness of warfare in the past: Raymond C. Kelly, Warless Societies and the Origin of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead (eds.), War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe,CA: School of American Research Press, 1992); Keith F. Otterbein, How War Began (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004); Douglas P. Fry, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and more recently Douglas P. Fry, ‘Life without War', Science 336.6083 (2012), 879-84. This debate is far from finished.
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- Fagan Garrett G., Fibiger Linda, Hudson Mark, Trundle Matthew (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 756 p., 2020
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- Antony Robert, Carroll Stuart, Pennock Caroline D. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 3: AD 1500-AD 1800. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 710 p., 2020
- On Warfare Origins