The fossil record is spotty

Spatial Organization of Hominin Activities at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel:

The spatial designation of discrete areas for different activities reflects formalized conceptualization of a living space. The results of spatial analyses of a Middle Pleistocene Acheulian archaeological horizon (about 750,000 years ago) at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel, indicate that hominins differentiated their activities (stone knapping, tool use, floral and faunal processing and consumption) across space. These were organized in two main areas, including multiple activities around a hearth. The diversity of human activities and the distinctive patterning with which they are organized implies advanced organizational skills of the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov hominins.

ScienceDaily has a summary:

Evidence of sophisticated, human behavior has been discovered by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers as early as 750,000 years ago -- some half a million years earlier than has previously been estimated by archaeologists.

The discovery was made in the course of excavations at the prehistoric Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site, located along the Dead Sea rift in the southern Hula Valley of northern Israel, by a team from the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. Analysis of the spatial distribution of the findings there reveals a pattern of specific areas in which various activities were carried out. This kind of designation indicates a formalized conceptualization of living space, requiring social organization and communication between group members. Such organizational skills are thought to be unique to modern humans.

Attempts until now to trace the origins of such behavior at various prehistoric sites in the world have concentrated on spatial analyses of Middle Paleolithic sites, where activity areas, particularly those associated with hearths, have been found dating back only to some 250,000 years ago.

The new Hebrew University study, a report on which is published in Science magazine, describes an Acheulian (an early stone tools culture) layer at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov that has been dated to about 750,000 years ago. The evidence found there consists of numerous stone tools, animal bones and a rich collection of botanical remains.

500,000 years! This could be wrong, who knows? My network of priors in this area is too thin to evaluate the probability (leave it to someone like John Hawks). Rather, it is important to remember that the fossil record gets really thin the further back you go. Hominins were never common to begin with, at least before the recent past. There's a huge fossil gap in China for example between the early Homo erectus and the Holocene. I bring this up because John Horgan has been arguing that there's no evidence for "war" before the rise of agriculture, based on Brian Ferguson's research. Part of the issue might be how you define war. But another issue might be that this is a case where the sample sizes over time are small enough that you might actually miss a lot.

Citation: Nira Alperson-Afil, Gonen Sharon, Mordechai Kislev, Yoel Melamed, Irit Zohar, Shosh Ashkenazi, Rivka Rabinovich, Rebecca Biton, Ella Werker, Gideon Hartman, Craig Feibel, and Naama Goren-Inbar, patial Organization of Hominin Activities at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel, (18 December 2009), Science 326 (5960), 1677. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1180695]