This is the History of the World Podcast with me Chris Hasler

and this is volume 2 the ancient world

episode 34 ancient weaponry. Oh, Military history is the history of human conflict and the history of warfare dates right back to ancient

times. However it is not in the human nature to go directly into conflict with other humans. So although we want to look at the history of weaponry,

we need to understand the nature of conflict and explore the origins of our expertise in the creation of weapons.

In order to do that we must understand why we created weapons in the first place

and why we felt that we had to have conflict with each other.

These two questions are actually not related as we will discover throughout this episode.

Weapons were not created for humans to go into conflict with other humans.

As we already know, weapons were created for humans to hunt animals.

So to get a complete background on our expertise,

we need to go back to the content of a very old episode of this podcast.

Back in volume one, we discussed the history of hunter-gatherers in episode 12.

This took us way back to the Stone Age and the work of the Leakey family, among others, at places

like Olduvai Gorge.

Now it seems like a long time since we spoke about this, but we must go back to

this period to have a comprehensive understanding of the progress so that by the end of this

episode we should have a strong appreciation of the

timelines of advancement. So let's summarize some of the hunting weapons that we

already know about.

Older wan tools date back to around 2.5 million years ago,

a period of human history that we explored in volume one.

...