Prehistoric warfare left no written accounts of battles or lists naming the people who fought and died. Archaeologists instead work from physical evidence: a weapon point lodged in a skeleton, bodies left together in a settlement, painted archers confronting one another, or bones and equipment scattered along a Bronze Age river crossing in northern Germany. These finds show that people were capable of organized, lethal conflict long before written history and, in some cases, before states existed. They cannot establish how frequently every prehistoric community fought, or how much of daily life was shaped by violence.
Discussion of prehistoric warfare has long been shaped by two competing assumptions. One imagines peaceful hunter-gatherers whose descendants turned to fighting only when agriculture and ownership of land appeared. The other assumes that raids and killings dominated life until governments imposed order. Archaeology has given neither picture a simple endorsement. The record survives unevenly, the societies being compared differed greatly, and a weapon injury in one skeleton may tell us nothing about the wider community’s relationship with its neighbours. A massacre establishes a particular episode of violence; it cannot provide a reliable estimate of warfare across whole continents or millennia.
The examples also span widely different periods. At Jebel Sahaba beside the Nile, people suffered repeated attacks toward the end of the Pleistocene. A deposit at Nataruk in Kenya may preserve an attack on foragers early in the Holocene, though specialists dispute its interpretation. Several early farming communities in central Europe experienced massacres. Much later, armed groups fought a major engagement in the Tollense Valley. The evidence has to be understood in relation to each society’s settlement patterns, population, weapons and ability to mobilize fighters.
What counts as prehistoric warfare?
Archaeologists use the term warfare for organized violence between groups or communities, which can include an ambush or raid as readily as a pitched battle. That is different from one person killing another in a dispute, a domestic assault or a punishment imposed within a community. Prehistoric fighters did not need uniforms, formal ranks or permanent armies for an encounter to qualify as war. The difficulty is that bones can sometimes tell us how someone was injured, but rarely identify the people responsible or explain what organization lay behind the attack.
A fractured skull may record a quarrel or an attack during a raid. An arrowhead embedded in bone provides stronger evidence of an assault with a weapon, but it could still result from an isolated encounter. Several people with fresh weapon injuries, buried hastily together, make an attack on a group more likely. Before reaching that conclusion, researchers have to establish whether the bodies reached the deposit at the same time, whether the wounds preceded burial, and whether damage caused later by soil or excavation could resemble violence. How the remains were deposited is often as important as the wound.
Tibor Rutar makes this distinction in a 2022 review of archaeological and anthropological evidence. He argues that discussions of prehistory have sometimes counted every case of interpersonal violence as warfare, then used especially striking massacre sites to characterize entire periods. His assessment accepts that hunter-gatherers could fight while questioning the claim that frequent warfare was universal among mobile communities. Individual discoveries document violence without establishing how common warfare was among all prehistoric foragers.
Jebel Sahaba: repeated attacks in the prehistoric Nile Valley
Jebel Sahaba, also known as Site 117, is a cemetery in the Nile Valley of present-day northern Sudan. Excavated in the 1960s, it is a cemetery dating to the end of the Pleistocene, before agriculture became established in the area. The remains of 61 individuals survived well enough for renewed examination using modern techniques. The burials attracted attention because so many people appeared to have suffered violence. They were sometimes presented as the victims of one devastating prehistoric massacre, an interpretation later research has challenged.
The 2021 reanalysis by Isabelle Crevecoeur and colleagues identified more than 100 injuries that earlier investigators had not recorded, among them damage associated with stone projectiles. Of the 61 people studied, 41 had at least one injury interpreted as evidence of interpersonal violence. Some wounds had healed, showing survival after an earlier attack; others had not. Several people had both kinds. That combination points to violence on separate occasions rather than one event in which the entire cemetery population died. Radiocarbon measurements indicated burials at least 13,400 years old, with some dates considerably earlier.
The stone projectile fragments provide more precise evidence about the weapons used. Many appear to have belonged to composite weapons, in which small sharpened stones were fixed into a shaft. Microscopic study helps researchers separate certain impact marks from breakage that happened after burial. Even so, the evidence names neither the attackers nor the precise number of encounters, and it does not make every injury a battlefield wound. The authors proposed repeated episodes of interpersonal violence, perhaps ambushes or small attacks in a period of environmental instability. Their conclusions weaken the old single-massacre account without diminishing the injuries themselves.
The late Ice Age Nile flowed through a landscape undergoing changes in rainfall, river conditions and the distribution of plants and animals. Those shifts could have affected where groups lived and how they moved. Competition for access to water might help explain the violence at Jebel Sahaba, although the skeletons cannot establish its cause. The cemetery demonstrates that people before farming could suffer serious injuries on more than one occasion. It cannot tell us how typical this was across the Nile Valley or whether the encounters resembled wars between later settled communities.
Nataruk: a possible attack on hunter-gatherers in Kenya
At Nataruk, west of Kenya’s Lake Turkana, skeletons were found in sediments associated with an ancient lagoon. The remains date to roughly 10,000 years ago, when foraging groups used the lakeside environment. Marta Mirazón Lahr and her colleagues described 12 articulated skeletons in a 2016 report in Nature. They interpreted injuries in 10 of them as evidence of violent death, citing head trauma and stone points found with some remains. Because the excavators found no clear evidence of deliberate burial, they suggested that a group of people had been attacked and left where they died beside the lagoon.
That reconstruction has been contested. Christopher Stojanowski and colleagues published a formal challenge later in 2016, questioning whether the skeletons represented deaths in a single event and whether pressure from surrounding sediments could explain some of the damaged skulls. The original excavators replied, maintaining that the injuries and positions of the bodies supported an attack. The dispute turns on the formation of the site and the identification of trauma. Neither question can be decided simply by looking at the apparent violence of the scene in photographs.
Claims that Nataruk provides the earliest proof of war go beyond what the excavations can securely establish. It remains an important, disputed candidate for an attack involving foragers early in the Holocene. Even if the excavators are right about the killings, one violent encounter would not establish that warfare was routine. The suggestion that some victims were bound is based on how their bodies lay, not on the survival of rope. Nor do the excavated skeletons prove that an entire hunter-gatherer camp was wiped out. The strength of the evidence has to be kept separate from the more dramatic stories built around it.
The Ofnet skull deposits: violence and ritual in Mesolithic Europe
Ofnet Cave, near Nördlingen in Bavaria, presents another challenge. During excavations in 1908, investigators found two pits containing groups of skulls, subsequently nicknamed skull nests. At least 28 people were represented in the larger deposit and six in the smaller. Mandibles and neck bones lay with the skulls, suggesting that the heads still had connecting soft tissue when placed there. Several bore injuries. Yet red ochre, thousands of pierced shells and perforated deer teeth were present as well, indicating a carefully arranged deposit rather than the unceremonious dumping of ordinary battlefield casualties.
Researchers consequently disagree about what happened at Ofnet. The University of Hamburg’s Ofnet Revisited project re-examines the evidence for a massacre, unusual burial traditions or some combination of violence and special treatment of the dead. Injuries may establish that certain individuals were harmed, but they do not explain why their heads were collected and placed with ornaments and pigment. The deliberate arrangement of skulls, ornaments and pigment must be explained alongside the injuries.
When Europe’s first farmers suffered massacres
By the sixth millennium BCE, communities practising agriculture occupied much of central Europe. Archaeologists call one widespread early farming tradition the Linearbandkeramik, or LBK, after pottery decorated with incised bands. People lived in timber longhouses, grew crops and kept domestic animals. Their households occupied particular places and held stored resources that might need protection. Sites dating to the later LBK also contain some of Europe’s clearest prehistoric evidence for groups of people being killed together.
At Talheim in southwestern Germany, archaeologists uncovered a pit filled with men, women and children who had suffered blows and projectile injuries, their bodies placed together rather than given individual burials. At Asparn/Schletz in Austria, a settlement enclosure yielded numerous human remains bearing signs of violence. The sites lie in different parts of central Europe, but both belong to the later LBK. They suggest attacks that could kill substantial numbers of people within farming settlements, rather than isolated altercations between individuals.
Further evidence came from Schöneck-Kilianstädten near Frankfurt. A 2015 study by Christian Meyer and colleagues reported at least 26 people killed through blunt-force blows and probable arrow wounds before being deposited in a communal pit. Children were among them. Especially notable were concentrated fractures of the tibiae and fibulae, the bones of the lower legs. The researchers suggested that the injuries, inflicted around the time of death, might represent torture or deliberate mutilation. The skeletons cannot show whether every victim was still alive when their legs were broken, so that part of the sequence remains uncertain.
Young women are comparatively scarce among the dead at Kilianstädten. Some scholars have suggested that attackers took women captive, an explanation also discussed in relation to Talheim and Asparn/Schletz. Yet no abduction is directly recorded: women could have been elsewhere when the attack occurred, and a mass grave is not a census of every person living in a settlement. Isotope research at Talheim has suggested differences in the origins of the dead, adding information about mobility and possible family ties without identifying who attacked them. The injuries and the mass grave support an interpretation of massacre, but the motive and fate of missing community members remain unresolved.
One possible source of head injuries was a tool known as the LBK shoe-last adze, named for the shape of its polished stone blade. Usually mounted on a handle for woodworking, it could also inflict a severe blow with its edge or heavy back. Bone damage may be compatible with such a weapon without revealing which particular tool caused it. Similarly, a Neolithic settlement’s ditch or palisade might have helped defend it, but these structures could have other functions, including drainage, managing animals, meetings or ritual activity. Their presence alone cannot settle whether warfare was expected.
Longer conflicts in Neolithic Europe
Collective violence could also recur over years rather than end with one massacre. At San Juan ante Portam Latinam, a rockshelter burial site in the Basque Country of northern Spain, researchers reassessed remains belonging to at least 338 individuals dated to about 3380 to 3000 BCE. A 2023 study documented 65 unhealed and 89 healed injuries consistent with violence, particularly among adolescent and adult males. Arrowheads and wounds at different stages of healing encouraged the authors to consider episodes of fighting across time. The combination of healed and unhealed injuries is more consistent with violence on multiple occasions than with one event.
Survivors might return to work, depend on care from others or be unable to produce food for extended periods. Repeated conflict could also affect where households chose to live or move. A burial deposit cannot quantify every disruption, but healed injuries record survival, while unhealed ones indicate wounds that did not recover. Together at San Juan ante Portam Latinam they point to the possibility of prolonged or repeated violence within Neolithic communities that have left no written histories of their disputes.
Discoveries at Achenheim and Bergheim in northeastern France raise further questions about what happened after people were defeated. The sites contained injured bodies and deposits of severed left arms, dated to roughly 4300 to 4150 BCE. In a 2025 multi-isotope study, researchers analysed isotopes from 82 humans alongside animal and plant samples to establish local comparisons. The results distinguished some of the victims from people given more conventional burials. The authors proposed that some victims came from other communities and that their treatment may have accompanied humiliation or celebrations after a victory. That is an interpretation of the deposits, not testimony from a victory ceremony, but it draws attention to the treatment of bodies as well as the killings themselves.
Paintings of archers and the limits of rock art
Painted figures offer another kind of evidence. In eastern Spain, Levantine rock art depicts small human forms hunting, carrying bows and sometimes confronting other armed groups. The UNESCO description of the Mediterranean Basin rock-art sites notes scenes interpreted as combat in the Maestrazgo and Lower Ebro regions, alongside hunting, gathering and other activities. At Morella la Vella and other sites, groups of archers face each other. Unlike a single bow painted in isolation, such scenes show armed people in apparent opposition, suggesting that confrontation belonged among the subjects chosen by prehistoric artists.
A painted confrontation cannot be tied to a specific battle, and it may depict an imagined scene rather than an event the artist witnessed. The scenes could represent memories, idealized encounters or stories that no longer have an intelligible context. Dating Levantine rock art is difficult, and the paintings cannot all be assigned confidently to one Mesolithic or Neolithic population. Some artists may already have belonged to farming societies. The images demonstrate an interest in scenes of human conflict, but they do not supply a chronological catalogue of prehistoric battles.
Tollense Valley: a Bronze Age battle on a river crossing
The Tollense Valley in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, northeastern Germany, preserves evidence of fighting on a much larger scale. Around 1250 BCE, during the Bronze Age, armed groups fought near the river. Human bones associated with violence first drew attention in the 1990s. Excavations subsequently recovered numerous remains along the valley, including skulls fractured by blows, bones pierced by arrows, wooden clubs and bronze weapons. The spread of weapons and bodies through this river landscape is consistent with a major battle rather than injuries gathered in a cemetery over generations. Most of the dead were young adults, although they were not all male.
Wet sediments helped preserve the wood and bone at Tollense, material that often decays elsewhere. A timber causeway or crossing structure, older than the conflict, suggests that the valley carried an important route. Whether the fighting concerned access to that crossing, goods or control of movement is unknown. No written account identifies the combatants, their commanders or the political cause. Nor can excavated skeletons provide a total death toll: estimates of how many people fought must allow for bodies that were removed, destroyed or never discovered.
A 2024 study of arrowhead types by Leif Inselmann and colleagues compared 54 bronze and 10 flint arrowheads from Tollense with thousands of examples found across central Europe. Some matched styles familiar in the local Nordic Bronze Age; others resembled forms used much farther south, including in present-day Bavaria and Moravia. The researchers proposed that at least one force may have included fighters from southern central Europe. That possibility strengthens the case for a conflict with connections beyond the valley. The arrowheads cannot identify the archers who fired them, since weapons could be traded, copied or reused.
Earlier analyses of isotopes in teeth and bones likewise suggested that some people represented at Tollense had spent their childhoods outside the immediate area. Isotope signatures can reveal differences in environment, but they cannot name someone’s home village, army or allegiance. Considered with the arrowheads, they make participation by people from several regions more plausible. The evidence also indicates that Bronze Age communities could assemble and confront sizeable armed forces without an imperial state in the region. Movement and exchange linked communities over long distances, sometimes with violent consequences.
Another Bronze Age massacre, without a battlefield
Another Bronze Age deposit preserves a different form of collective killing. A 2024 study of Charterhouse Warren in Somerset, England examined dismembered remains recovered from a deep natural shaft. At least 37 people, including children, died violently around 2210 to 2010 BCE. Their bones show breaking and cutting, with some evidence interpreted as consumption of human flesh. The remains appear to have been deposited in a single episode, although no motive can be securely identified. The investigators considered the possibility of extreme collective violence in which the handling of the dead was intended to humiliate enemies.
Charterhouse Warren and Tollense preserve quite different archaeological traces of violence. Tollense has weapons and remains spread across a battlefield landscape. Charterhouse Warren contains bodies that were deliberately dismembered and placed within a shaft. One may record combat between armed groups and the other a massacre followed by degrading treatment of the dead. Revenge, warfare and ritualized treatment of the dead are possible interpretations that must be assessed against each site’s distinct evidence.
How archaeologists identify violence in prehistoric remains
Skeletal analysis begins by examining where injuries occurred, what caused them and whether they healed. A blow delivered while bone was fresh can leave different marks from damage to bone that dried long after death. Microscopes help identify cutting or the impact of a projectile. A healed wound indicates that someone survived the injury, sometimes for years; an unhealed wound tells us only that recovery did not occur. Neither gives an exact time of death. An arrowhead trapped in bone ties an injury more directly to a weapon than an ordinary fracture, but it cannot reveal whether the attacker was an enemy, a neighbour or a relative.
Burial context is equally important. A cemetery could hold people injured in several unrelated encounters, while multiple bodies dumped together with similar fresh trauma could reflect one massacre. The evidence must show whether the deposit formed at once. Ofnet’s carefully arranged skulls and ornaments demand questions about mortuary ritual. At Nataruk, arguments about sediment, body position and burial are central to the competing interpretations. Along Tollense, erosion, movement by river currents and the limits of excavation all affect how the distribution of human remains is understood.
Chemical and genetic evidence helps reconstruct people’s origins and biological relationships. Strontium ratios in tooth enamel reflect the geology and food of childhood, while oxygen isotopes may indicate the kinds of environments in which people grew up. Ancient DNA can reveal biological relationships and broad patterns of ancestry. None of these methods determines why someone died or which side of an encounter they supported. Likewise, an arrowhead characteristic of another region may indicate contact between communities without proving that its owner travelled from there to fight. The results need to be read alongside trauma patterns and the archaeological setting.
Much evidence of prehistoric violence never survives for excavation. Wooden clubs usually decay, and an arrow can kill without striking bone. Victors might carry their dead away while leaving opponents behind. Only parts of many sites are excavated, while other places erode or disappear without ever being recognised. These gaps help explain why famous massacres cannot be counted up to calculate a prehistoric rate of warfare. At the same time, a site without surviving weapon injuries cannot be assumed to represent a peaceful community.
Why did prehistoric groups fight?
Control of food, water and land may have contributed to conflict in particular places. Communities might compete over water, fishing places, hunting grounds, pasture or cultivated fields, especially where valuable resources were concentrated. Agriculture also brought fixed settlements and food stores that could be attacked or protected. Yet identifying a resource does not demonstrate that anyone fought over it. Tollense’s crossing is a plausible place to contest movement or trade, for instance, but the excavations have not established that controlling the route caused the battle.
Other possible motives include kinship disputes, retaliation, prestige and the capture of people. Missing age or sex groups in Neolithic massacre deposits have led to suggestions of abduction, while severed limbs at Achenheim and Bergheim have been interpreted as trophies or displays of victory. Such explanations describe different human actions. Capturing people, avenging an attack and bringing an armed force to a river crossing would involve different aims and might leave quite different archaeological traces. Communities separated by continents and thousands of years cannot be expected to share a single social order or reason for fighting.
Environmental stress may have contributed to conflict in particular settings, including the late Pleistocene Nile Valley. Changing rainfall or drought cannot by itself establish that war followed. Scarcity might encourage migration, alliances or exchange as readily as violence. Arguments about motive become stronger when patterns of settlement, subsistence, injuries and dates support one another. Where they do not, historians and archaeologists have to leave the cause open rather than turn a plausible explanation into a recorded fact.
What the evidence changes about early human history
The injuries at Jebel Sahaba establish that serious violence occurred among people who lived before agriculture became established in the region. Nataruk remains a disputed example, while the later mass graves of farming settlements show deadly attacks on entire groups. The opposite picture, of people living in continual warfare, goes far beyond what these sites establish. Archaeologists can sometimes identify specific victims, weapons and episodes of violence with considerable confidence. How common fighting was in the lives of most communities, and what those communities thought it meant, is much harder to discover.
Prehistoric conflict left different traces in different societies. Jebel Sahaba preserves repeated injuries, Nataruk a contested interpretation of deaths near a lagoon, Neolithic Europe several massacres and Tollense the remains of a substantial armed confrontation. They belong to different societies and should not be arranged as though each inevitably led to the next. People organized lethal violence before written laws, standing armies or states. The harder question is how often people chose to fight and how conflict fitted into lives also shaped by cooperation, exchange and ordinary work.
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