Dramatic Echoes of
Ancient Wars

A spectacular archaeological find, in an area called Nataruk on the ancient banks of Lake Turkana in Kenya, shows the still-harrowing evidence of an episode of war that took place there ten thousand years ago. News of it has been published in the magazine Nature, by a group of English, Kenyan, Australian and Indian archaeologists. The importance of the find lies in the light it may shed on a desperately urgent question: why do we wage war?

There are two main theories concerning the origin of warfare. The first maintains that war is relatively recent in origin: it arose with the birth of agriculture, when people had begun to accumulate resources – harvests stored in granaries, for instance. These resources became attractive to other groups, triggering cycles of robbery and violence. Two factors support this hypothesis. Firstly, populations that today follow a way of life that is pre-agricultural, pre-cattle-raising and pre-sheep-farming do not, in general, wage war. They live by hunting and gathering, as humans have done for thousands of years. This is a form of subsistence that does not permit accumulation: every surplus is perishable, and it is best to give it away, receiving gratitude and recognition in exchange. In populations such as this, encounters with other groups are occasions for gift-giving and receiving, and for the formation of new couples. The second observation in support of the recent origin of warfare is the absence of violence in one of the two species that most resemble us: the bonobo. When groups of these small, lively, West African chimpanzees meet, it becomes a festive occasion.

The opposite theory is that violence between groups is intrinsic to our species, and that war has existed throughout the long prehistory of Homo sapiens, which is to say for millions of years. In support of this second view, there is the behaviour of another species close to our own: the common chimpanzee. Violent confrontations between groups of these apes is commonplace and can lead to the killing of enemies.

Which version is right? Throughout the hundreds of millennia of our prehistory, when we wandered nomadically about the world in small groups, hunting with bows and arrows and collecting herbs, berries and roots, were we pleased or terrified when we came across a group of the same species as ourselves? Were we thinking of how to thrust a pre-emptive spear into their bellies, or was it an occasion for making gifts, and for young men and women to exchange meaningful glances with each other?

The discoveries at Lake Turkana add something to the debate. Ten thousand years ago, at Nataruk, on the ancient shore of a lake that was much bigger at the time, there was a massacre. All the evidence suggests that it was a massacre of one group of humans by another. It is the oldest evidence of conflict between humans that we have found to date. Twenty-seven skeletons of men, women and children have been found, in a variety of postures, without ritual burial and with obvious signs of violence having been done to them: crushed skulls, stone arrowheads in ribcages, indications that some of them may have been tied up, evidence of massive traumas and fractures to the arms and legs of victims. There are signs that maces, arrows or spears were used. One man has an obsidian blade still stuck in his skull, another a wound in his cranium from a blow that crushed part of his face, and an arrowhead in his knee. He fell headfirst into what had probably been a low-lying lagoon. A pregnant woman is in a contorted position that suggests that her hands and feet had been bound and then tied together. The site has yet to be fully excavated, so the victims of this slaughter could turn out to be more numerous. From the remains of what in all likelihood were the weapons used to perpetrate it, there are blades made of obsidian from another geographical area, indicating that at least one of the groups that came into conflict on the banks of Lake Turkana may have come from elsewhere. What we are dealing with are dramatic echoes of ancient wars.

The discovery puts in place an element of evidence about the origins of war that seems certain: ten thousand years ago in East Africa, before the great Neolithic revolution that spread agriculture and made possible the birth of civilizations, there already existed violent conflicts between groups of humans, and these conflicts could culminate in massacres.

Does this mean that war has always existed? Is the hope we have of putting an end to the barbarism of war just the noble product of civilization – and a very recent one at that?

Perhaps not. On the contrary, the archaeologists who studied the site emphasize that the discovery might be part of a case proving that war itself is recent. Ten thousand years ago, the western shores of Lake Turkana formed a particularly fertile coast that would have been able to sustain a high density of groups of hunter-gatherers. There is evidence there of the use of ceramic vessels that may indicate that reduced nomadism and the accumulation of primitive resources had already begun. Ten thousand years ago is not so far distant from the erection of the first Pyramids. If these clues are confirmed, and it becomes clear that there is no evidence of violent conflict preceding this period in the history of humanity, then the discovery will serve to prove that war is a recent development. To prove that we humans did not evolve over millions of years to be as bestial as those ancient skeletons and our daily news seems to show. The disgust for war that many of us feel may be rooted in the instinctual mental fabric of our species.

A Scandal That Has Lasted for Ten Thousand Years is the subtitle of what I believe is one of the greatest Italian novels: History, by Elsa Morante. And ‘ten thousand years’ is precisely the age of the find at Nataruk, almost as if Morante already knew about it, with her intense humanity and her clear-eyed and moving vision of life. Ten thousand years is a long time: too long for the despair of countless victims such as her Ida Ramundo, the mother of the unforgettable Useppe, or for the pregnant woman bound and killed at Lake Turkana, or for the Ida Ramundos of today, cowering beneath the bombs falling on Aleppo. But perhaps we should also inflect Elsa Morante’s terms to think of the duration of this scandal as only ten thousand years, rather than millions. A long scandal, but one that it is perhaps not too late to extricate ourselves from.