We act like conflict is baked into our DNA.
With fires burning in three time zones right now it’s hard to imagine any other way of living. The question is simple though the answer isn’t: Has there ever been a moment without war?
Ian Morris says it depends on your definitions. He teaches at Stanford, he writes history books that are dense with facts, he also says if you define war as government-versus-government, then yeah. For ninety-nine percent of human history we had no governments so technically no war existed.
Violence is a different story. That’s been here since the beginning. Morris told Live Science the answer is pretty clearly no—we haven’t ever lived without fighting or killing each other. We always did that part.
The Hunter-Gatherer Gap
Back when we were wandering the plains, chasing things with spears, big organized battles were rare. Peter Stearns at George Mason agrees. He notes little to no war before agriculture took root. Why? The bones say so.
Archaeologists dig up skulls and look for holes. Stab wounds, slash marks, blunt force trauma, the whole tragic collection. They want mass graves with multiple victims, signs of organized slaughter. Before 8000 B.C.? Almost nothing. After we stopped moving and started staying put? The injuries exploded.
But let’s be clear: just because it wasn’t “war” doesn’t mean people weren’t dying at each other’s hands. In Kenya they found 27 bodies from ten thousand years ago at a site called Nataruk. Violent deaths, sure, signs of intergroup clashes. In Sudan, the Jebel Sahaba cemetery has remains from thirteen thousand years back showing clear attack marks.
These are fights, brutal ones, but do they count? Not under the strict rules researchers use. Morris explains that war usually implies government organization or casualties in the hundreds. Early bands were tiny, dozens of people maybe. No state machinery, no bureaucracy to organize the kill chain. So by the definition it wasn’t war. David Christian at Macquare University backs this up, suggesting that violence has always been a human capacity, but it only took on the shape we call war when communities grew big enough to sustain it.
When Rivals Shake Hands
Then the big kingdoms came. Empires. Borders. And with them, war became the standard setting. Jared Morgan McKinney did a doctorate on this, looking for the breaks in the pattern, the times major powers actually stopped killing each other. He found war was the norm, usually because one guy beat the other guys into submission like during the Pax Romana. But not always.
Wars cost money. They risk everything. Sometimes rivals look at each other and say, hey, we can’t afford this anymore.
Peter Frankopan, an Oxford historian, points out that peace often comes from parity. When enemies realize they are equally matched, they settle for stability instead of annihilation.
It happened before you’d expect. Between 1400 and 1250 B.C. Egypt and the Hittites (based in modern Turkey) went unusually long stretches without war. The kings recognized each other as equals. They signed treaties instead of sending armies. A formal agreement beats a broken nose, apparently.
Then there’s Rome and Persia. Usually enemies, constantly testing boundaries. But from roughly 387 to 501 A.D., the “Long Fifth Century,” they mostly stopped fighting. Maybe the outside threats were too expensive, or maybe they found a shared language of “brotherhood.” Whatever the reason, the swords stayed in the scabbards.
China figured it out differently around A.D. 1100. The Song Dynasty paid off the northern tribes—the Liao and Jin—to keep the border quiet. McKinney notes it looked like a bribe, maybe weak, but the cost was a rounding error compared to the profits China was making through trade. Buy peace, sell goods. Smart math.
From 1600 to 1850 East Asia enjoyed its own quiet spell while Europe tore itself apart in competition for territory. Frankopan says Europe’s constant aggression tricks us into thinking war is a “natural state.” It’s not natural, it’s a choice. A really expensive, stupid choice most of the time.
North America had its version too. The Iroquois, later known as the Haudenosaunee or League of Nations, managed three centuries of relative calm starting in 1450. Former enemies forged a confederacy instead of fighting to extinction.
South America offers the longest modern example. No major interstate wars since 1935. McKinney calls it the South American Long Peace and he’s not exaggerating.
War is the default mode for large groups, McKinney admits. He doesn’t sugarcoat it. History is heavy on conflict.
But as these scattered, stubborn exceptions show, it is not inevitable.
Is it really a natural state?
Or do we just forget how to stop?
