ORIGINAL: desert
Pa·le·o·lith·ic 
(pâ'lç-ə-lĭth'ĭk)
Pronunciation Key adj. Of or relating to the cultural period of the Stone Age beginning with the earliest chipped stone tools, about 750,000 years ago, until the beginning of the Mesolithic Period, about 15,000 years ago.
In the paleolithic era, no evidence for warfare or organized conflict has been found. If a tribe attacked another tribe 50,000 years ago, it would be for food or territory, so stop equivocating the meaning of paleolithic. It refers to the specific time period, not whether a group is hunter-gatherer. Also, don't try saying they would have attacked for the heck of it.
And that thing about the Indus River Valley civilization is false. Why have NO weapons or signs of the cult of the warrior-king been unearthed in their ruins? And they worshipped unicorns and enjoyed bathing, never heard of them drawing penises. Can you get a link for that?
Good night then.
Paleolithic means 'old stone age.' It is differentiated from the 'New stone age' by the absence of agriculture and pastoralism.
Obviously, whether a culture was paleolithic, neolithic, or an iron age culture has nothing to do with when it existed, but with its level of technological development. The Iroquois were flourishing in the 1500's -- but were not a renaissance culture by virtue of that fact. The Chumash along California's coast were still hunting and gathering in the 1700's -- guess what? They were a paleolithic people. If you are going to define these terms by simple universal time periods, they lose all meaning. Would that the Chumash existed in 1720 therefore make them an early modern culture?
Now, those people with a paleolithic culture that we do have records of generally have waged war. So it follows that those that existed in the past did so as well. After all, we know that lions of today hunt medium-sized grazing animals. It follows that the lions of fifty thousand BC did so as well -- although it may be that no fossil evidence exists to show that they did. In this connection, notice that skeleton of a prehistoric man that was found in a Swiss glacier a decade or two back. He had scars from a healed arrow wound or some such thing.
As to no evidence
having been unearthed about the Indus valley cultures having waged war, that's a bit like me saying you have no sex life because I have yet to find any evidence that you do. There's a great deal I don't know about you -- in fact, I know almost nothing about you. The same applies to the people of the ancient Indus Valley.
We know almost nothing. When it comes to war, about all we can say is that since almost every other culture we do know something about has waged war, presumably the people of the Indus Valley did so as well. It's theoretically possible that they didn't -- but it's also theoretically possible they were hermaphrodites with two heads apiece. Just highly unlikely.
In any case, that you are driven to make assertions about people we know nothing about to support an apparent thesis that war is not a natural human activity just shows how flimsy your case must be. I might feel it desirable that people have no sexual desire -- but if all I could present to support such a thesis was the point that no evidence exists to show that various extinct people did have sexual desires, wouldn't you say my case was pretty weak?
The fact is that it is
us that are abnormal. Traumatized by WW's 1 and 2, and confronted by the obvious undesirability of massive nuclear exchanges, we have striven to convince ourselves that we don't like war and that we needn't permit it to occur.
Well, all the evidence is otherwise. It continues to happen frequently. We obviously find ourselves motivated to seek it out -- as happened after 9-11. Not that I find anything especially wrong in that fact. However, if we hadn't been so intent about lying to ourselves about our motives, we might have conducted ourselves more intelligently.
