Neolithic societies were more violent than supposed

Primitive War

Analysing statistics in Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996):

• Table 6.2 lists the Percentage of Deaths Due to Warfare. Of the 8 primitive societies that survived long enough to be analyzed by modern demographics, the median indicates that some 15.4% of all primitives, male and female alike, died by warfare. Of the 14 prehistoric cultures excavated and analyzed by archaeologists, the median indicates that about 14.8% of all prehistorics, male and female alike, died by warfare.
• Combining these into a sample group of 22 gives us a median of about 15.1%. The middle one-third of this combined sample runs from 12% to 16%. In practical terms, this means that for every 1,000,000 people who lived outside of a literate state, some 120,000 to 160,000 would eventually be killed in war. [For comparison, my calculation is that for every million people who lived in the 20th Century, some 45,000 died by violence.]
• Table 6.1 lists Annual Warfare Death Rates. The median for the 25 pre-state societies listed is 0.45%. The middle one-third runs from 0.3% to 0.6%. This indicates that if a region had population of, say, 1,000,000 typical primitives, 3,000 to 6,000 of them would be killed in war each year. That comes to about 450,000 (�150,000) per million per century, which nicely fits the 120-160,000 killed per generation in Table 6.2 if we assume some 3 or 4 generations per century.

According to Carl Haub, some 1138 million prehistoric humans were born between 50,000 and 8,000 BCE. According to the above analysis of Table 6.2, 170 million of them would have died in war.

Or instead, we could apply the analysis of Table 6.1. Assuming an average prehistoric population of 3 million, this indicates 4500 KIA each year worldwide, or 189 million for all the years between 50,000 and 8,000 BCE.

For later history, let's assume that from 8000 BCE to 1500 CE, the world's primitive population stayed about the same -- at 5 million. (After all, population growth would be confined to technologically innovative societies -- you know, civilization.) With 0.45% of them dying in war every year, this adds up to another 214 million killed in primitive war.

In total, all this indicates some 400 million people who died in primitive war before the primitives were wiped out or absorbed by civilization. Two caveats, however:

1. This does NOT displace WW2 as the worse thing that people have ever done to each other, because it's not a "thing". It's a category. The proper comparison is not "primitive war" vs. "World War II"; it's "primitve war" vs. "state-level war".
2. Don't you go tacking these 400M onto any kind of "death by government" category, because Keeley (and other anthropologists) specifically describe the societies in this category as "non-state".

I tend to agree, violent death doesn't necessarily equate to war. Then again studies of Amzonian societies show intertribal raids often resulted in massacres, including women and children.

Cemetery 117 is an ancient cemetery discovered in 1964 by a team lead by Fred Wendorf near the northern border of Sudan. It is often cited as the oldest known evidence of warfare, although this point is disputed. The site is also known as the Jebel Sahara Cemetery.

The site was discovered during the construction of the Aswan Dam and dated to the Epipaleolithic Qadan peoples. Fifty-nine skeletons were found at the site, nearly half of which show signs of violent deaths, such as flake point and arrowhead-inflicted injuries. Some of the skeletons have a number of wounds or were found with arrowheads inside their skulls.

Some question this site as an evidence of warfare, arguing that the bodies may have accumulated over many decades and may be the evidence of the murder of trespassers, but not war. That about half the bodies are female also causes some to question their origin.

Source Wikipedia