ABSTRACT
Contemporary peace prospects are clearly related to views of human nature though one can always argue that even a naturally violent species can and should learn new behaviors. For human beings also have the capacity to work for peace, to develop personal and social mechanisms to reduce conflict, and this, too, can serve basic biological purposes. At the least, they demonstrate that human societies can consistently avoid war and remain quite intentionally devoted to peace. The chapter sees that hunting and gathering societies introduced hunting equipment, such as spears, that could also be used against people but it was only with agriculture that human societies had the resources to support more explicit weapons development. The final stage in the assessment of the early human experience with peace involves the advent of more complex societies, often called civilizations, in which cities and formal governments played a growing role.
