A short history of long-distance warfare

Humans are pretty good at killing. From sharp rocks and blunt clubs to long-distance bombers and remote-controlled robots, the quest to kill in new and ‘improved’ ways has long captivated humanity’s creative capacity. Yet at the heart of these developments is something revealing and rather disturbing. With each new epoch of weaponry and warfare has come a separation of the human from the visceral heat of battle, from face-to-face fighting, and from the very act of killing. There are exceptions, of course: in any era of conflict, humans might still find themselves in hand-to-hand combat, but this is most certainly not the norm. Instead, over the longue durée of human history, countless attempts have been made to produce weapons that allow us to become more detached from those we kill.

There is a very prosaic reason for this. We distance ourselves from killing so that we do not incur the risk of being killed ourselves. Some may call this cowardly, yet it is no secret that societies and states have sought to save blood and treasure by protecting their fittest, fastest, most highly trained and brightest young fighters. If you can kill from a distance, with superior weapons, it negates the need to risk the sacrifice of life. This has been key to survival throughout history. Still, is this the only reason we seek weapons that distance us from the practice of killing? Or is there something less instinctive and more cognitively driven that explains why we choose to develop and then hide behind ever more advanced weapons?

Let’s step back 10,000 years or so, to a time around the end of the last ice age. By the fertile and frequented shores of a lagoon in Kenya, 21 miles west of Lake Turkana, early peoples