Warfare becomes organised
Fortifications, arrow-wounded skeletons and massacre sites appear across the Neolithic world.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 2.2 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Once there is stored grain, fixed land and livestock, there is something to take and something worth defending. Ditched and palisaded enclosures spread across Europe, skeletons with embedded arrowheads and healed and unhealed cranial injuries become common, and mass graves appear from Germany to Sudan. Whether foragers fought at comparable rates is genuinely disputed; what is not disputed is that Neolithic violence is well evidenced, organised, and sometimes total.