At the very moment humankind glimpsed its evolution and progress, it also engendered its own ordeal of perdition: war. This long journey began some fifteen thousand years ago with the invention of the bow and arrow. Since then, humanity has advanced along a path strewn with battles, conflicts, and lands stained with blood. A massacre in a village in southern Poland, some 2,800 years ago, according to archaeological findings from the Koszyce pit, is believed to have brought the Neolithic period to an end and ushered in the age of war.

Why? Is it in our genes? Since when has war been the solution? If what distinguishes Homo sapiens from other animal species is its capacity to reason and to have and manage feelings, why does the impulse to annihilate others persist? Where have solidarity, the pursuit of harmony, collective progress, and the understanding that drives society forward been?

Is it the lethal triad of power, selfishness, and narcissism?

Today, that route has just triggered another minefield of unpredictable global repercussions: the United States and Israel have attacked Iran and killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ruler of a rigid theocratic system for four decades. The operation has been justified in the name of global security, with the aim of preventing the development of nuclear weapons, and the freedom of the Iranian people.

A war with planetary effects that further fractures international geopolitics and strains the world like few times since the end of World War II (1939-1945): there are 56 active armed conflicts.

The spark that has just ignited in Iran adds to two other highly destabilizing conflicts: the one in Ukraine, since 2022, due to the Russian invasion that claims territories of that European country, and the one in Gaza-Palestine, which has intensified since 2023, but dates back to 1948, with Israeli attacks to eliminate Hamas terrorists, leaving a trail of devastation.

In total, there are more than one hundred open, latent, and varying-intensity conflicts, as well as violence perpetrated by internal armed groups. In Africa, there are conflicts in Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria; while in Asia, those in Myanmar and Afghanistan continue.

But no region is as unstable as the Middle East, populated since its ancient origins by multiple ethnicities, religious beliefs, cultural and social customs, and regional and international interests, especially those related to oil.

Olivier Guez, one of the journalists and writers who knows the region best, as demonstrated in his novel Mesopotamia (Tusquets), about the life of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), one of the most influential figures in shaping the modern Middle East, stated in an interview with WMagazín:

“What shocked me most was the nonchalance with which all those Middle Eastern countries were created, like a game. Rivalry between France and England, two kids fighting and saying, ‘This is mine, this is mine, this is mine’. These three madmen—Lawrence of Arabia, Gertrude Bell, and Winston Churchill—were three eccentric characters who created the modern Middle East. The problem is that the consequences are tremendous, and we haven’t recovered yet, because nothing could replace the Ottoman Empire. A region always dominated by great empires, imperial governance, and where the European-style nation-state has no legitimacy. Iraq didn’t exist. Lebanon didn’t exist. Syria didn’t exist. Israel, if we…”. Going back to biblical times, like Egypt, they had no natural borders. How do you define a desert when there are no rivers, no Pyrenees? So they just did pretty much whatever they could find on a global scale”.

While some wage war, scientists, scholars, and ordinary people continue to ask the same question: Why war?

The literature attempting to answer this question is extensive. Two recent books address this somber question from complementary perspectives: one from archaeology and history; the other from history, anthropology, and the humanities.

Scorched Earth: A Journey Through Violence from the Paleolithic to the 21st Century (Crítica, 2023), by Alfredo González Ruibal, traces this behavior through clues found over millennia.

Why War? (translated by Francisco García Lorenzana – Tusquets, 2025), by Richard Overy, constructs an intellectual map of the causes and motives that drive humans to these brutal conflicts, drawing on insights from biology, science in general, anthropology, and culture.

Richard Overy presents studies exploring the question, “Why war?”. He leaves it to the reader to decide whether it stems from a survival instinct rooted in a natural order that defies reason, whether it is a cultural construct and therefore malleable, or whether collective violence is unleashed by one or more individuals as behavioral anomalies—beings who, from their very core, become dehumanized.

Both books contain scientific data demonstrating the evolution of the human brain and emotions in pursuit of harmonious group progress.

Below are the origins of war according to Alfredo González and Richard Overy:

Scorched earth. A Journey Through Violence from the Paleolithic to the 21st Century

By Alfredo González

Organized violence likely emerged around the same time as other behaviors characteristic of modern humans, such as body decoration, appeared, some 150,000 years ago. And it is quite possible that it is related to evolutionary factors: anatomically modern humans have a greater capacity for symbolic thought, can communicate complex messages through language, and their forms of sociability and cooperation are more sophisticated. Cooperation can be used for both peaceful and violent objectives: painting Altamira or organizing a raid. Furthermore, higher levels of symbolic thought also imply a greater development of collective identity. And few things have caused as many deaths throughout history as the notion of belonging to a particular group.

The First Lethal Weapon

Evidence of collective violence in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic (40,000-12,000 BCE) is still scarce. (…) It is in the Upper Paleolithic that a An invention that would make collective violence more lethal. The most important invention in the history of warfare until the widespread use of firearms at the beginning of the modern age. I’m talking about the bow and arrow.

We don’t have a precise date for its origin, although it is believed that they began to be used in Europe at the end of the Upper Paleolithic, about twenty thousand years ago. That they are effective weapons is beyond doubt, because they are still used today and coexist with automatic rifles and intercontinental missiles. (…)

Projectile wounds began to be frequent in the Mesolithic, the period of the last hunter-gatherers, which developed between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago in Europe; the dates vary because in some places they disappeared earlier than in others. During that time, the ice retreated and Europe became covered in forests. The hunter-gatherer populations adapted to the new environment and practiced a diverse economy that ranged from hunting deer to… Fishing and shellfish gathering.

A continent with a low population density, a temperate climate, and abundant resources might seem like paradise. And to a large extent, it was, but bone trauma indicates that conflict also existed. A study of all known trauma cases has shown an increase from 13 to 60 contusion injuries (caused by blows) between the Upper Paleolithic and the Mesolithic periods. And from 3 to 17 projectile wounds. Furthermore, the wounds became more severe and, in many cases, fatal, because the number of perimortem traumas increased compared to antemortem traumas. Numerous Mesolithic human remains have been discovered with arrow wounds or cranial fractures. Everything indicates that coalition violence already existed. However, mass graves are still rare. (…)

“A 13,400-year-old cemetery confirms widespread Paleolithic violence”. The newspaper headline leaves no room for doubt: the hunter-gatherers of prehistory lived in conflict. constant. The headline refers to the Jebel Sahaba cemetery in Sudan, one of only two known massacres of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The Jebel Sahaba site was the first to be discovered. And it’s not even clear that it was actually a massacre. (…)

The First War

For about two hundred years, the pre-Indo-European groups of the Globular Amphora culture and the Indo-European communities of the Corded Ware culture lived side by side until the latter finally absorbed the former completely. Evidence that this absorption was not always peaceful is the Koszyce mass grave in southern Poland. It has been precisely dated, thanks to several radiocarbon dates, to between 2880 and 2776 BC. This date corresponds to the last century of the Globular Amphora culture, to which the buried individuals belonged. The remains of fifteen people were found inside: eight males and seven females. All had been killed by blows to the head. (…)

It is clear that those who buried the victims knew them well, given that all members of the same family were found together. And although it is a mass grave, the bodies were carefully arranged and accompanied by grave goods. In this case, however, it wasn’t the women who carried out the burial. They couldn’t because they had been murdered. It was most likely men, because they are underrepresented in the sample. And this tells us something more about how the massacre unfolded.

The men of the village had gone out with the livestock or perhaps to look for a group of warriors from the Cuerda Ware culture, as news of strangers lurking in the area had been arriving for days. They left before dawn, while their families were still asleep. If they were looking for the enemy, they didn’t need to go far. Because the enemy was waiting, hidden in the forest, watching the men leave the defenseless village behind. When they were sure they were far enough away and that the screams wouldn’t be heard, they launched their attack. Armed with their battle axes, they entered the village howling and began to murder its inhabitants one by one, women and girls who ran in terror before falling to the ground with their skulls shattered. The men arrive at dusk, and the first thing they notice is the silence. And the blood soaking the ground. Then, the mangled bodies of their wives and children.

The Neolithic era is over. War has begun.

Why War?

By Richard Overy

Is Violence Genetic?

Ever since the 19th century, when the father of evolutionary theory, the British scientist Charles Darwin, proposed that all species are engaged in a “struggle for survival”, the relationship between biology and war has been one of the most contentious topics in attempts to explain why humans fight. The neo-Darwinian anatomist Arthur Keith, writing in the mid-20th century, argued that war was biologically useful for human communities to eliminate the weak and strengthen the strong. He assumed this was a law of nature. At a meeting in 1986 in the Spanish city of Seville, an international group of twenty prominent scientists from across the humanities attempted to completely overturn the scientific effort to explain war as dictated by biology, which they considered a pernicious distortion. In November 1989, UNESCO adopted the Seville Declaration, giving it formal status; it was widely disseminated and republished in 2002. This initiative did not end the debate. Although no scientist currently endorses Keith’s stark metaphor, biology remains, in one way or another, a central point of reference in the debate on war.

Biology, or more precisely evolutionary biology, makes a strong case for being the first science to address the question of why humans wage war, but this is far removed from Darwin’s intentions. His assertion that all species are engaged in a struggle for survival was part of natural history, designed to explain how plants and animals adapt in evolutionary terms to environmental pressures or competition within or between species.3 In this sense, “struggle” was a metaphor, not a synonym for war. He referred more directly to the possibility of ancestral human conflict in The Descent of Man, published in 1871, but even here it is a peripheral element to his more significant ambition of explaining how humans evolve, especially through sexual selection. (…)

“Biology of Peace”

It has been shown that a “biology of peace” is easier to derive from reading Darwin than a biological selection for war. The development of genetic science after 1900 demonstrated the difficulties in suggesting an inherited predisposition toward conflict, while the argument that war was useful as a means of ensuring the survival of the biologically fittest was ridiculed after the First World War because of the obviously dysgenic effects of a conflict that killed millions of young, fit men, leaving the less fit at home. Academic evolutionary biology after the war focused more on the non-human natural world and on predicting the variation of species. War as a means of evolutionary selection for the human population remained a matter of belief rather than scientific certainty. (…)

Although violence among primates may have an ancient and common root, humans from about two million years ago evolved very early on in a way that was quite different from other primates, most notably developing a much larger and more complex brain that allowed for the emergence of unique cognitive abilities, including language, mastery of primitive technologies, and a wide variety of cultures.

Early pre-humans had a brain capacity of about 400 cubic centimeters; early hominins had a brain capacity of about 600 cubic centimeters; Homo sapiens has a brain capacity of 1,370 cubic centimeters. The cerebral cortex may have evolved to increase the human capacity to discover how to survive by selecting for the use of  “predatory aggression” against non-human predators or in competition with other humans. Those with larger brains may have been able to push less adapted hominins into marginal environments, where their chances of survival were greatly reduced.

To what extent the evolution of these physiological changes made coalitionary violence possible or probable is open to speculation, but it seems unlikely that the violence was an exact replica of violence among chimpanzees or other primates. In fact, it is precisely what differentiates human evolution from that of our closest primate relatives that makes it difficult to maintain the thesis of continuity between chimpanzee and human behavior (and, therefore, patterns of aggression).

Over millions of years of development, chimpanzees have only been able to use sticks and stones to forage for food or, very occasionally, to beat up a neighbor.

• With translation assistance from Robert Lienhard.

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