Data from: Violence in the prehistoric period of Japan: the spatiotemporal pattern of skeletal evidence for violence in the Jomon period

Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to
warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the
most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent
studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various
archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it
is unclear whether or not warfare among prehistoric hunter–gatherers was
common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective pressure
for the evolution of human behaviour. This paper reports the mortality
attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus
shown among ancient hunter–gatherers using skeletal evidence in
prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13 000 cal BC–800 cal BC). Our
results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and
spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies
that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common.