...The selective factors that favored coalitionary killing of neighbors may have remained in play until as late as 1 million years ago...

...Because superior numbers were not invariably decisive in encounters between hunting parties, an initial success would neither materially reduce the stakes for aggressors in subsequent attacks nor make it possible to freely encroach on the territory of a neighboring group that had sustained a casualty. Under these circumstances, aggression resulted in stalemate and a condition analogous to a war of attrition rather than territorial gain...

...selective circumstances no longer favored aggression as a means of achieving territorial gain. Conflict avoidance and the development of intergroup relations of friendship, mutuality, sharing, and cooperation were favored instead. Intragroup cooperation was elaborated in conjunction with the teamwork entailed by large game hunting and was further reinforced by mechanisms for sharing large animals jointly killed by a hunting party...

...Conflict avoidance dictated that groups move apart to alleviate resource competition whenever possible. This response to crowding facilitated migration out of Africa into the temperate and subtropical zones of Europe and Asia, vastly expanding the geographic distribution of Homo erectus...

...This period of Paleolithic warlessness, grounded in low population density, an appreciation of the benefits of positive relations with neighbors, and a healthy respect for their defensive capabilities, lasted until the appearance of Homo sapiens some 315,000 years ago engendered the origin of war...

...The earliest conclusive archaeological evidence for attacks on settlements is a Nubian cemetery near the present-day town of Jebel Sahaba in the Sudan dated at 12,000-14,000 B.P. War originated independently in other parts of the world at dates as late as 4,000 B.P. Otterbein argues that agriculture was only able to develop initially at locations where ambushes, battles, and raids were absent...

“The evolution of lethal intergroup violence”,

“Warless Societies and the Origin of War”.

(С) Raymond C. Kelly

It started about 5,120 years ago. However, the exact date of the beginning of the war was lost in history. The war lasted for three hundred years. It was called the "Panic war"...

They were in a huge amphitheater, where the light of torches and candles – placed around the perimeter of the arena - was trying to dispel the thick veil of darkness, when the first explosion sounded. The walls trembled and plaster crumbled. The black sphere was located in the very center of the hall directly above the Lotus-shaped depression and emitted a characteristic pulsating hum. The boy looked with frightened eyes at the man in the gray raincoat standing next to him, who did not immediately understand what was happening. In the next moment, more explosions followed, the strength of which were comparable to that of the Tambura volcano’s eruption. The man turned to the boy and said:

"Out! Quickly!

They raced for the exit, the kid struggling to keep up with the man, who was surrounded by a bright blue sphere with a rotation period ranging from one to ten milliseconds, accompanied by the sounds of a Geiger counter. They had already reached the big door, and the next explosion knocked them off their feet. They both got to their feet and went up the spiral staircase, the walls cracking around them, and it seemed that the whole underground structure was about to collapse and become their grave. The closer they got to the exit, the more they heard the screams of panic, chaos, and terror.

The man was the first to run out into the street and was dumbfounded. In the doorway, the young lad saw the darkness of war and the red light of fire, fire that was growing into the all-consuming conflagration. He ran outside and the first thing that caught his eye was the dying residents. Someone was without hands; someone was crawling to get back his severed leg. Someone was lying there, screaming. The faces of the wounded were disfigured and mutilated; the bodies covered with burns and dried blood. Women stood with their backs to the South, holding their own children in their arms, and did not move; the men did not know what to do - save the wounded or run to the part of the city where the enemy was supposed to be. The scene was like a devilish and completely merciless hunt for people.

From the roof of a house five meters away, men in metal armor and blunt batons jumped down, hooting, and they immediately smashed several of the men's heads. They took their spheres and immediately activated them, after that the characteristic crunch of women’s spines breaking rang out. The man in the gray cloak, coming out of his stupor, rushed to the enemy, his sphere shone with a bright light and inadvertently blinding the boy, when the boy’s vision returned to normal, each barbarian was already cut into several pieces, and on the severed heads you could see the last expression of their face, depicting the inevitable acceptance of death. There was the sound of houses collapsing from the fire. And the man's gray cloak was stained with blood.

Crows, griffins, and dark flying creatures with no faces and a Scorpion's tail swirled in the sky, eager to feast on flesh; black clouds raced at great speed into the distance, and every few seconds powerful white lightning lit up the fallen city. The young lad heard the old men yell behind him, drowned out by the laughter of the barbarians looming over them with axes. They cut through their flimsy bodies so quickly that they didn't even have time to shout for help or use their own spheres. Several men standing nearby tried to protect them, but also collapsed to the ground with their limbs severed. Children in this turmoil lay, cuddling down to their already dead parents, hoping that they would not be noticed, but the bloodthirsty devils, who only bring death, took out their knives and hacked all the bodies lying on the ground once again.

Young boy’s black sphere hummed with a deafening roar, the force of gravity pinned the enemies to the ground and they could not move or shift their hands which were still holding on their weapon. Madness appeared on their faces! In the flash of lightning, small stones rose from the sandy street and hit the enemy with a machine-gun like shots. And only then, did the boy notice that behind the large carcass of one of the bastards was the wounded and lifeless body of a ten-year-old boy, which felt on the ground, who, apparently, got up to try and escape at this moment.

The young lad stiffened in horror, not knowing what to do next. The man grabbed the boy by the shoulder, and gave him a hard slap on the face, this harsh move brought the boy to his senses. In the sky behind his mentor, the boy saw a huge burning meteor flying towards them, cutting through the thick layer of black clouds. He pointed at it in silence. The man turned, the bright blue sphere reactivated and began to absorb the fire scattered everywhere, and powerful radiation waves burst out. The resulting energy was converted into a thin beam and cut the meteorite into several parts. The boy used gravitational force and threw the fragments a hundred kilometers away from the place which became a slaughterhouse. The ground shook.

"Teleport to the Planet of the Endless Water, and I'll go to Sphere Control Center and block access to it. Just sit there and wait for my instructions, okay? "

"I can fight!" the boy snapped at his mentor.

"Not now, I need you alive."

"Lord Pelleas…"

"Come on, come on!"

The boy's eyes filled with tears. He couldn't answer any more, and in a second, he was gone. Pelleas ran to the sphere control center. The chaos, the noise, the hooting of the enemy did not stop for a second. The once beautiful green world was burning in bright flames, the sand under the feet was extremely hot. He ran forward without looking back; only hearing people asking for help behind him, people whom he had sworn to protect many centuries ago.

Turning into the main street, Pelleas saw a hundred enemy soldiers dragging their victims out of the burning houses and immediately chopping off their heads, taking their different colored spheres. Some for mercy, while in their knees; some said everything they thought about the invaders. These stinking strangers smashed their shields against the necks of the wounded men which were lying helplessly on the ground, and all they could hear was the dull crunch of breaking lives. One woman fought valiantly, like an angry lion, burning her enemies right and left, however, she did not notice how the lightning shadow crept up on her from behind, grabbed her by the neck squeezing her eyes out. Without waiting for her own execution to continue, the woman burned herself alive with the help of her sphere. And the barbarians, seeing this power, began to kill each other in order to get it for themselves.

Out of the smoke, straight into Pelleas’ face, flew a still-breathing, screaming, one-year-old child, and right behind him came a barbarian with a long spear, burning, black armor, bloody eyes, and the madness of a medieval savage. Pelleas waved the small body away, with one hand he deflected the spear, and with the other broke the shaft in half, and his sphere filled the enemy's body with a big amount of radiation that it immediately turned to dust and scattered in the wind.

A second later, a man from the guard ran up to Pelleas, with frightened void eyes, that would never be the same again, and asked what they should do.

"Gather everyone who can fight at the sphere control center."

"And what to do with the wounded?"

Pelleas did not answer, and plunged into the darkness, no longer aware of the pain or the heat. He split the invaders into molecules and kept on running. The enemy's army mobilized, and jumping and tripping over the corpses of their own and their victims, tried to kill Pelleas, but it was all in vain. Some of the survivors and rescued women were dragging the dead bodies of their husbands and children somewhere. The busy streets, which once was dominated by both joy and celebration, were now littered with entrails, dead lifeless bodies of people and destroyed spheres. A group of angry old men charged into the battle, helping Pelleas fight his way to the center of the sphere controls. Despite their age, they weren’t inferior to Pelleas at all, when it came to cutting down their enemy.

At the corner of the street, a few meters from the center, the group was showered with arrows. Pelleas did not immediately react, putting up an ethereal shield, and several people fell dead. Those who were not hit managed to run behind the building and take with them those who still had a chance to survive. The shield collapsed. Blood was bubbling from the wounds of the few injured, and the capillaries in their eyes were bursting.

"Where are all the black sphere owners?" one asked. "They will die of their wounds if they aren’t treated."

But Pelleas only turned his head from left to right. The wounded were finished off.

The group arrived at the site and descended several floors down into the ground, one of the old men said:

"What a disaster happened on my watch!"

Krugis was waiting for them in the small room, and he turned to Pelleas from the doorway:

"Tell me what to do."