>Naturuk therefore challenges our views about what the causes of conflict are. It is possible that human prehistoric societies simply responded antagonistically to chance encounters with another group. But this is not what seems to have happened at Nataruk. The group which attacked was carrying weapons that would not normally be carried while hunting and fishing. In addition, the lesions show that clubs of at least two sizes were used, making it likely that more than one of the attackers were carrying them.
>All three involved projectiles, one of the hallmarks of inter-group conflict. Two of the projectiles found embedded in the bones at Nataruk and in two of the other cases were made of obsidian. This tells us that such attacks happened multiple times, and were part of the life of the hunter-gatherer communities at the time.
https://theconversation.com/finding-a-hunter-gatherer-massac...
>In this study, Standen and colleagues examined signs of violent trauma on the remains of 288 adult individuals from funerary sites across the Atacama Desert coast, dating from 10,000 years ago to 1450 AD. The researchers also analyzed patterns in weaponry and in artistic depictions of combat during this time. They found that rates of violence were surprisingly static over time, though there was a notable increase in lethal violence during the Formative Period starting around 1000 BC, a trend also found in similar studies of the Andean region. Data from strontium isotopes indicate that this interpersonal violence was occurring between local groups, not between local and foreign populations.
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/long-term-history-of...
> I concluded that most recent foraging groups were likely to have at least occasionally participated in lethal intergroup violence. I used this evidence alongside several other lines of evidence, such as archaeological remains, the behavior of other species, and predictions from behavioral ecology, to argue that at least occasional intergroup violence extended well into the Pleistocene.
>Progression in science typically requires agreement on a shared empirical reality. Once we identify well-supported empirical findings, we then make inferences about how these findings relate to hypotheses about behavior we cannot directly assess, such as the role of war or cooperation in human evolution (Table 1). Much of the current stasis on the role of intergroup violence in human evolution is due to a failure to agree on the nature of mobile forager intergroup relationships with minimal colonial/state influence or impact from agriculturalist neighbors. If we cannot reasonably agree on whether ethnographically recent mobile foragers sometimes killed members of other groups as part of or supported by a coalition, then we cannot begin to reach a consensus on what those relationships may tell us about warfare in human evolution.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...