I've been watching a few 'history of the world' series and was surprised to discover there have been whole societies that were thought to be completely peaceful (normally right up until they were conquered by a warlike neighbour) and it got me thinking as to whether the whole world has ever been without war. Even for like ten minutes.
If it has happened before, then maybe people will believe it can happen again?
To answer your initial question. If you want an answer based on "in the entirety of human history has their been no war?" It would be extremely difficult to answer due to the lack of documentation or reliable documentation of the state of the world. Now they're is a project that documents all wars since 1816 called The Correlates of War Project. The scientists who participates in this project has defined war as "sustained combat involving substantial fatalities" which includes intra-state wars (civil wars) and extra state wars.
In summary since 1816 there hasn't been a single point in time in which the world was not in a state of war. If you want to exclude civil wars the same group noted their was a time of peace between 1829-1846. But obviously saying this was a time of peace completely misses the point and excludes a lot of human misery because of conflict or war.
Hope this helps.
hi. This question is asked quite frequently, but the problem is that there simply aren't records of what was going on everywhere in the world. If you can limit the geographical reach of the question, and extensive records were made & survive, it may be possible for historians to derive a meaningful answer. Meanwhile, here's a previous post on this from the FAQ (link on sidebar):
What is the longest span of time the world has gone without a war?