I am in my history of the Great War class, and my professor gives a figure that 292 out of 5,584 years have seen peace. However I remember seeing an article somewhere on this site that greatly reduced those years. Can anyone back that up? Or are my professors statistics correct?
I don't know where that figure came from but I'd refer you to this thread for probably the best answer out there right now.
A lot of it comes down to how you define "war"; are we talking about declared conflicts between organized nation-states? Throughout most of history, the world really hasn't really been organized that way, so it's tough to give an exact answer. And the further back you go the murkier it gets. I'm pretty skeptical of any definitive claim over what happened as far back as 5,584 years ago, since that's well before the first coherent forms of writing emerged (which was 2600 BC).