Real warfare became practical when, between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, men learned to tame food-animals and raise crops. Hence two of the main courses for war, economic competition and the prospect of robbery, were absent. Furthermore, at that stage of culture nobody ever had enough wealth to be worth stealing. They had then reached the Neolithic or polished stone stage of culture, like that of the most primitive peoples of today.Īs far as we can judge, these hunters and food gatherers did not practice formal warfare, not because they were more virtuous than we are, but because the world’s human population was so small and thinly spread that no occasions arose for large-scale fighting, though no doubt there was a lot of individual assault and murder. Then men learned to finish their stone tools and weapons by grinding and polishing, and to tame the dog to help them hunt. By 10,000 years ago these simple implements had developed into an extensive kit of stone-headed spears, axes, bone harpoons, and the like. Both as members of the armed forces and as citizens, it is our business to be able to weigh the sweeping predictions we hear from time to time about the nature of future warfare and to come out with some sensible result.Ībout 500,000 years ago our ancestors learned to hunt and fight with pointed sticks and flat pieces of flint sharpened on one edge and held in the fist. We are to study the history of naval weapons, first, in order to make the study pf the weapons themselves more interesting, and second, to obtain an idea of how the whole process of the evolution of weapons take place so that we can learn what sort of changes to expect in weapons in the future.
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