>Yet in the early archaeological record of many regions,

>>1613763
It's difficult for skeletons to survive that long.

But there is a lot of evidence, there's a big pit in Germany with men, women and kids who were all killed and deposited at around the same time.

>>1613763

>Why is it there is so little evidence of conflict before civilization?

There isn't. You can go look up how "uncontacted" tribal societies NOW act and how violent they are towards each other. It's just that these societies are, somewhat necessarily, extremely small. Pre-agricultural populations are hard to keep at high levels. There isn't a lot of archeological evidence of anything they do, because there just isn't that much to work with, and you often have to create huge amounts of speculation from a few stone tools.

>>1613763
Foraging populations probably don't necessarily aim to kill and dominate as they are not locked into the region as agrarian peoples are, one simply needs to drive the other off and away. This at most would lead to small and scattered skirmishes of small fighters, likely killing only a few enemy at any given spot.

>>1613763
I recommend reading a chapter of Gwynne Dyers "War," I think it's chapter three or so, should be for free on his website. It basically talks about the "peaceful savage" meme and why it's wrong

File: warriors_03.png (800KB, 1280x720px) Image search: [Google]

800KB, 1280x720px

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle

>>1613763
smaller populations=more resources/person
less population density=less people coming into contact with each other

Evidence of war = large scale engagements between clans, and eventually kingdoms

Before war there were just 20 people that would murder eachother with spears. This was happening before humans were even homo sapiens. We have found that clans of monkiws have surrounded and murdered clans of other monkies.

>>1615425
That picture could not be before 10k b.c.

>>1615432
This is the answer. Don't bother reading the rest.

>>1613763

War is fought, among other reasons, over limited resources. When two hunter/gather tribes clashed over the same resources, it was often easier for one tribe to simply move rather than engage in war. When to agricultural civilizations clash, this is not possible.

>>1615474
But you are wrong. Monkies have been shown to fight wars.

>>1614042
That was still in the early Bronze Age though, when civilizations did exist. We don't know what to call them because written records don't exist (they used crude runes or symbolism, but not quite a written language) and so thus we don't know what they called themselves. But they were some kind of kingdom or chiefdom or whatever, and generally related to others around them. If I recall correctly, that huge battle in ancient Germany was fought between waves of PIE-settlers. An older group established as farmers versus a newer wave, who IIRC examination of the teeth showed had mostly come from Greece/Bulgaria.

Anyway, that's too late for the time frame OP is talking about.

I think the reason is mainly low numbers of humans, so conflicts (relatively speaking, they'd be very low intensity) would have resulted in relatively fewer deaths, not huge massacres that couldn't be cleaned up in a couple days. I recall reading once about remains of an ancient massacre of a family group somewhere in Kenya, Somalia, or in any case in the Sahel. 100kya or something. Modern humans, with signs of stabbing by spears and of bashing in the ribs and skulls. Interestingly, no young female skeletons were found. All were either male (children and adults) or old women. Theory being that it was probably a raid for food/territory/resources, etc. and the reproductive women were taken as booty.