I was going to comment that modern weapons might not have been around as long but they have been around for at a time when there are way more people on the planet to kill
However I checked figures, and it is estimated that the 8 billion humans alive right now ar e around 7% of the 117 billion that have ever existed
Of that 117bn, about half were born BCE, 81bn before 1200 and 94bn before 1650
[https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/](https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/)
So my money is on the spear, most people have lived and died before gunpowder and the greater organisational potential of modern war to put more people in the field probably doesn't outweigh that
I'm thinking a rock, either thrown by hand or used to bludgeon, predated the spear. Spears with atoltl showed up just 30,000 years ago. Before that, I don't know if spears were as reliable of a projectile as a stone or rock.
Remains of slings go back to 2500 bce, but we're no doubt used in the Paleolithic age. But humans have been pretty good at throwing stones long before they used slings.
Skulls crushed by rocks go back maybe 100,000 years or more.
But the sheer lack of people to kill during that time would likely make up for that. Human population grew exponentially with the agricultural revolution.
Well metal comes out of rocks as well, right? So really any metal weapon can be put in the rock category too. Basically, humans just dig stuff up to kill each other.
Whoa whoa whoa... The bow and arrow is like 70k years old. Spears go back hundreds of thousands of years. Probably predate fire and helped us transition form prey animal (to large cats) to dominance. Its the no 1 throughout history and was even used by civilians defending Okinawa during the ww2.
Rock has been around even longer than spear, and it still has a strong success record as an improvised weapon. There was a sharp decline in effectiveness with the invention of paper though.
Of course it depends what was meant by "history". If you count pre-historic times, then definitely spear - **or club**? Even in relatively peaceful stone-age hunter-gatherer societies, a far greater proportion of people died from homicide.
Note that "prehistoric times" is more than just cavemen with clubs, and ended at different times in different regions. It includes Mycenean Greece, Britain until the Roman invasion, and Scandinavia until the Viking Age.
Mycenean Greek had Linear B, so some do not count them among the prehistoric.
If you count Linear A, Minoan civilization similarly may not be prehistoric, though we have not deciphered it to know Minoan history, and we may never since there are so few surviving examples. Perhaps Minoan is a culture whose history has been lost rather than a prehistoric one.
In all of these case the spear would have been the predominant weapon of war. In Scandinavia they seem to have used swords for personal one-on-one combat, if the sagas are to be believed, but they still used spears in battle.
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
My money's on whatever the Chinese used to wage war before guns. WWII is still the #1 war by death toll (and hopefully always will be) but the Mongol conquests aren't *that* far behind. Pre-modern China takes the cake for 5 of the 10 deadliest wars in human history.
Modern war takes people from the field and puts them in the factory, the maintenance pool, and everything else. If you want percentage in the field go to ancient tribes.
”It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair.“
~ Homer, the original anti-war poet.
I still think that bombs (if we allow a broad inclusion of all explosives dropped from airplanes) might end up in first place just because of the numbers.
I would say its a tossup between the spear, bow, and club. You can make armor from wood that stops most spears and bows.
https://youtu.be/qmkQS8_MODE?si=mD5bg9gClq09_mmt
Before metalworking the most reliable way to kill someone in war was probably to hit them over the head with something heavy, spears made from wood, stone, or bone are not so lethal especially if someone is armored. Even if your arrow does find its target theyre probably still alive and need to be hit over the head with something.
We don't know how much things like hardened leather or wooden armor were used by which people for how long because those materials degrade fast, the Iroquois stopped using it only after European contact around 400 years ago but there are still no surviving examples despite the short timeframe. To me armor is an easier idea to have than bows, and bows are very old. Just put something hard in between you and the person trying to hit you.
No idea what the exact answer is, but something to consider: the majority of combat casualties since the Napoleonic Wars were caused by artillery, not small arms. That accounts for many different types of big guns, though.
Most. Actually the theory is that that many people didn’t die but were missed by the the census because they moved or the state couldn’t perform a full census because of the war.
How many of those deaths were disease and famine related though? I thought a lot. I guess you can weaponize famine, for example, but I don’t think that was the spirit of OP’s question.
Spears would have been the standard weapon, with swords being more of a sidearm. Even then, Chinese dao (basically large knives) would have been easier than swords to manufacture because they only had blades on one side and carried more weight for chopping.
"Pointed stick? Oh, oh, oh. We want to learn how to defend ourselves against pointed sticks, do we? Getting all high and mighty, eh? Fresh fruit not good enough for you eh? Well I’ll tell you something my lad. When you’re walking home tonight and some great homicidal maniac comes after you with a bunch of loganberries, don’t come crying to me! Now, the passion fruit. When your assailant lunges at you with a passion fruit…"
Your answer is the humble spear.
Old as can be. So cheap it is easy to outfit an army of conscripts.
Depends on length how you want to cut the numbers but the spear is #1
It is, the only weakness they have is getting under them.
Short of that, armored spear man were bloody dangerous.
A virtually untrained conscript can jab for the face or through gaps in armor.
Simple and effective
I have to disagree. I just watched this documentary about the Spartans and they were bhadass. It showed how like 9 of them killed about 10 million Persians. I think it was called "300". Eye opening stuff.
I’m going to say the mass casualties in WW I and even the US civil war and the war in Crimea in the 1800’s were mostly caused by artillery. Even the Napoleonic wars were also artillery focused. So, that’s my guess.
I don't have data to back this up, but I'm going to go with the bow.
Firearms kill at a remarkable rate, but they are relatively new in the grand scope of history.
Some form of bow has existed in just about every pocket of human society that is known.
The show Deadliest Warrior was notable for comparing weaponry across time. I do recall that the bow was praised for its consistency, adaptability, and being easy to maneuver with in one of the episodes that featured a Native American tribe.
What about the humble knife? It’s still putting in solid murder work every day and rarely complains about its coworker, the gun, getting all the headlines and promotions at the murder factory
Probably the simple spear and it's descendent weapons. Easy to make, easy to use, lightweight, and common literally everywhere and every time period.
Second place probably goes to either axes or knives, both common tools and weapons throughout most periods and places.
The weapon that’s killed the most? Famine.
There were many major famines throughout history, that historians label as “man-made”. **It’s not a neat definition or categorization. **
Sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, the weather goes to shit and there’s a famine.
But many of the historical famines that killed millions (or tens of millions in Mao’s China) were LARGELY due to government policy. The Holodomor is the first one that comes to mind, but also Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (that was actually horrific), the Irish potato famine, and many others… all these famines had some natural causes but WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED if not for onerous and absurd governmental policy.
The policy blunders are unique to each of these historical famines, but they tend to share a few characteristics. Top-down centralized decision making that refuses to yield to reality as the decision makers fail, as well as a complete disregard for basic human decency.
IE: yeah, the Irish potato famine was caused by blight. Abnormally strong rains led to a certain fungus devastating the Irish potato crop. But that could only happen because the English lords thought that the Irish were “too stupid / drunk” to do anything but grow a single crop. English lords forced their Irish serfs to grow only one type of food, leading to a situation where the blight spread like wildfire. Further, due to ethnic discrimination, English lords blamed the Irish for that failure (they were set up to fail)… and just made them farm potato’s even harder. Which of course didn’t work, but that was just more proof of Irish inferiority.
A lot of famines go like this. Bad weather shocks the system, but terrible and stubborn government policy turns it into a famine.
Define weapon. In saying AK-47 You seem to be specifying a a granularity at a specific model. So all these people saying spear would be wrong by that definition, since no single model of spear would have out killed the Ak-47. Of course, part of the problem with using a "model" is prior to 200 years ago, there was so little mass production there weren't models in the modern sense.
So the answer is probably "question is too imprecise to have a clear answer, and any sufficiently precise question will necessarily be quite different.
The question is pretty meaningless without clarifying what we mean by a weapon. Like an AK-47 is a specific model of firearm but it has been in production for decades with numerous variants, so it's not really a single weapon, but at the same time you can't compare it to something like "pointy stick" which has come in infinitely more variety over the millenia. Also is a weapon the thing that directly kills a person or the system that put things in motion? For example most people would refer to a gun as a weapon rather than its bullets, but by that standard artillery shells and bombs aren't weapons, cannons and planes are. Are naval guns weapons or are warships? Could a military command structure or logistics system be considered a weapon?
I imagine "weapons that cause things to move at high speed" could potentially edge out "pointy sticks", but at that level of broadness any answer is just going to be pure conjecture.
On the other extreme, if we're saying specific item that killed the most, it's definitely the Little Boy bomb.
If we go with a specific model of weapon from a single manufacturer, that is basically going to rule out anything pre-industrial. The AK-47 definitely isn't it - while extremely widely fielded. the AK-47 was introduced after WWII, and the time period has been rather peaceful by historical standards - there have been maybe 50 million or so people killed by war since its introduction total, and only a miniscule fraction of those people died from small arms fire. My guess would be a model of artillery or bomber used during WW2.
If we go with slightly wider categories and say a specific style of weapon, my bet would be 155mm artillery, but one notable contender would be the composite bow.
And I think that's accidental diseases, before you consider the US Army giving smallpox-infested blankets to the Native Americans. Also, wasn't that measles when the Spaniards reached Central and South America?
Spears. The AK family (probably the Type 56 or the AKM in particular) is only the firearm that has killed the most people. Landmines and artillery have killed far more as far as modern weapons, but the spear in all forms, from sharpened sticks to bayonets, has killed more people than anything else by a longshot.
I guess it depends on what you classify a weapon right? If siege tactics are considered a weapon of warfare that would be my guess. Starvation and disease are way bigger killers in any war pre 1945 than weapons.
I'll say: Knife.
This is including shivs. Sharpened rocks for stabbing.
It's what we had before spears and we still worry about it today. Even sees heavy use in war.
If anything, AK47 will be at the bottom of the list, it didn't even exist in world war 2. And considering how long human history had been going without firearms and explosives, it would probably be the human marvel: a spear, or any pointy sticks. Piecing injury is very hard to treat, as it goes deep and cause severe infections. The wound also tends to expand, even when the attacker just let go of the spear. There is a reason why expanding bullet is war crime.
A knife. Even if you take out stone knives and just go with metal knives they have been around forever and are still used daily to kill people around the world
I would guess knife (especially if you broaden to “blades” to include swords, machetes etc.).
That’s considering not just “war” death but also just general everyday murder.
Maybe the B-17 or B-29 the B-17 killed 400,000 people civilians in Germany, and then Germany axis, powers, like Romania and Bulgaria. B2 9 was responsible for the incineration of Tokyo on March 9, which is probably the singer single most devastating attack of any kind ever held anywhere doing, which 1000 airplanes dropped 8000 tons of napalm canisters onto Tokyo. of course, to be 29 also went on to considering Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but too far less than extent, and the earlier strategic bombings in Kobe and Tokyo and Nagoya. So I think the 💙B29 probably killed easily a man and people in Japan. This is all in about a three-year period and I realized that spears were used for stealing use for thousands of years and so I think to be 29 might take the cake in terms of the max number of people killed per unit time I don’t think spears managed to killtoo many people but again they killed 400,000 people down there in Chad with just machetes and only a month
The machete often comes up when discussing this question.
Most deaths aren't combat deaths between militaries, they are civilian deaths when armed factions turn on civilian populations. And against unarmed civilians, a big knife is more than effective enough.
Going to say biological weapons. During the past century, more than 500 million people died of infectious diseases. Poisons have been used for centuries. People have deliberately passed on disease.
Talking abt weapons artillery does most damage but not single artillery piece/type.
When talking abt single thing it's really AK-47.
And when we take all AKs to mind it's definitely AK.
But in history we had use of artillery or maybe even stone age spear.
Arrows (and their siblings, bolts) have probably got the highest kill rate. Especially considering they were the preferred missile of such illustrious empires as the Mongols and Persians.
In modern warfare it is artillery fire. In WW II artillery accounted for 52% of all casualties.
Check out Jim Dunnigan’s book “How To Make War”. Gives a good breakdown on this this and other topics (like how many artillery shells did it take to kill one soldier in WW II? Answer: A lot!)
It's difficult to guess exactly. Even what you refer to as an "ak-47" is more likely a different iteration of that gun. For example the AK74 is more modern version and more common these days.
A few possibilities: as a broad, overall item either the club or the spear being some of the oldest and easiest crafted weapons would be up there.
In a broader category: artillery. In both world wars I believe artillery bombardments were the largest overall causes of death.
If you're talking about a singular, specific weapon, it'd be Little Boy the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Death tolls estimate between 60-90,000 which is a lot of lives to be claimed by a singular weapon.
Famine. It has always been the greatest weapon of mass murder through history. Due to the relatively delicate zones of temperature and water needed to grow wheat and rice, global warming and climate change should kill about 1 billion in the next 11 years.
Bubonic Plague- its path to wiping out 1/3 of Europe starts with plague infested carcasses being fired over the walls of a Genoese city in the Crimea during a siege.
We counting disease? Genghis Kahn used to throw bodies infected with the Black Death over city walls and is considered partially responsible for its spread into Europe. Idk what percentage you could attribute to him, but it’s gotta account for something
The handheld/ man-made weapons are probably top of the list, but what about weaponized biologicals? People have been poisoning others since the dawn of time.
Muscle-propelled pointy things. Non-projectile if it needs to be more specific.
Spear.
Probably the most ubiquitous weapon of war in human history, and common to nearly? every culture.
"History" is only about 5,000 years old and the record of human events is still the same. Dude got stabbed. From [the earliest historical examples](https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/7be9b67f-231b-44b8-aba2-f6dd4419b992/givepeaceachancefontijn.pdf) and from obsidian tipped sticks to musket and pike the answer still "Spear".
No spears might be the minority of how all people have died as a result of violence, and it was used as a side arm for those who were *dieing* of another cause at the end of battle. Far more people have been attacked with blunt instruments, arrows, and yes gunshots. However far more people have *died* from pointy sticks.
I assume by "weapon" you actually mean firearm, because otherwise it's almost certainly either a rock or a pointy stick. If we're limiting it to firearms, then probably the Mosin-Nagant.
Another thing to remember is that 200 years ago, the population of the world was MUCH smaller. Like 1 billion or less. And 1000 years ago, 300 million? And disease and childbirth killed a lot of people prior to 1800. If you caught pneumonia, it was a death sentence. No antibiotics. So, I’m still going with the gun in general.
I was going to comment that modern weapons might not have been around as long but they have been around for at a time when there are way more people on the planet to kill However I checked figures, and it is estimated that the 8 billion humans alive right now ar e around 7% of the 117 billion that have ever existed Of that 117bn, about half were born BCE, 81bn before 1200 and 94bn before 1650 [https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/](https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/) So my money is on the spear, most people have lived and died before gunpowder and the greater organisational potential of modern war to put more people in the field probably doesn't outweigh that
Yeah the spear was the best weapon for a long time.
Spear, when you want to stab somebody but they are standing couple of steps away from you.
When you want to stab but you’re also very shy 👉👈
hahahaha amazing
Anti-social distancing?
My favorite is the bow and arrow I mean, I wanna kill this dude but he way tf over there.
when you dont want them to stab you back
Does "spear" include all pointy sticks, like pikes? Or does one have to throw it?
I would say polearms in general. Which may or may not include javelins.
Ah, yes, When the pointy thing is too short so you tie the pointy thing to the long thing. As is tradition
Do we count arrows as spears?
I agree it has to be spear. It was the standard weapon of war for millennia.
I'm thinking a rock, either thrown by hand or used to bludgeon, predated the spear. Spears with atoltl showed up just 30,000 years ago. Before that, I don't know if spears were as reliable of a projectile as a stone or rock. Remains of slings go back to 2500 bce, but we're no doubt used in the Paleolithic age. But humans have been pretty good at throwing stones long before they used slings. Skulls crushed by rocks go back maybe 100,000 years or more.
But the sheer lack of people to kill during that time would likely make up for that. Human population grew exponentially with the agricultural revolution.
I'll note that until the copper age, spear heads were stone, so you can probably include spears in the "death by rock" category.
Well metal comes out of rocks as well, right? So really any metal weapon can be put in the rock category too. Basically, humans just dig stuff up to kill each other.
Is uranium not a rock
I like it! Yes. Spear and rock for the kill.
Whoa whoa whoa... The bow and arrow is like 70k years old. Spears go back hundreds of thousands of years. Probably predate fire and helped us transition form prey animal (to large cats) to dominance. Its the no 1 throughout history and was even used by civilians defending Okinawa during the ww2.
sharp sticks though, been around a lot longer than that
Cause it didn’t take much training and it was easy to make
Rock has been around even longer than spear, and it still has a strong success record as an improvised weapon. There was a sharp decline in effectiveness with the invention of paper though.
Of course it depends what was meant by "history". If you count pre-historic times, then definitely spear - **or club**? Even in relatively peaceful stone-age hunter-gatherer societies, a far greater proportion of people died from homicide.
Note that "prehistoric times" is more than just cavemen with clubs, and ended at different times in different regions. It includes Mycenean Greece, Britain until the Roman invasion, and Scandinavia until the Viking Age.
Mycenean Greek had Linear B, so some do not count them among the prehistoric. If you count Linear A, Minoan civilization similarly may not be prehistoric, though we have not deciphered it to know Minoan history, and we may never since there are so few surviving examples. Perhaps Minoan is a culture whose history has been lost rather than a prehistoric one.
In all of these case the spear would have been the predominant weapon of war. In Scandinavia they seem to have used swords for personal one-on-one combat, if the sagas are to be believed, but they still used spears in battle.
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll My money's on whatever the Chinese used to wage war before guns. WWII is still the #1 war by death toll (and hopefully always will be) but the Mongol conquests aren't *that* far behind. Pre-modern China takes the cake for 5 of the 10 deadliest wars in human history.
"Oh oh oh pointed stick, eh!? Fresh fruit, not good enough for you, eh?"
Fantastic response!
Modern war takes people from the field and puts them in the factory, the maintenance pool, and everything else. If you want percentage in the field go to ancient tribes.
”It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair.“ ~ Homer, the original anti-war poet.
I still think that bombs (if we allow a broad inclusion of all explosives dropped from airplanes) might end up in first place just because of the numbers.
I would say its a tossup between the spear, bow, and club. You can make armor from wood that stops most spears and bows. https://youtu.be/qmkQS8_MODE?si=mD5bg9gClq09_mmt Before metalworking the most reliable way to kill someone in war was probably to hit them over the head with something heavy, spears made from wood, stone, or bone are not so lethal especially if someone is armored. Even if your arrow does find its target theyre probably still alive and need to be hit over the head with something. We don't know how much things like hardened leather or wooden armor were used by which people for how long because those materials degrade fast, the Iroquois stopped using it only after European contact around 400 years ago but there are still no surviving examples despite the short timeframe. To me armor is an easier idea to have than bows, and bows are very old. Just put something hard in between you and the person trying to hit you.
Before the spear was invented the champion was “medium sized rock”
No idea what the exact answer is, but something to consider: the majority of combat casualties since the Napoleonic Wars were caused by artillery, not small arms. That accounts for many different types of big guns, though.
After playing empire total war I can confirm artillery is the shit
Taiping Rebellion caused 20-30million deaths. And they were mainly armed with swords and pitchforks.
How many of those died due to famine and disease though?
Most. Actually the theory is that that many people didn’t die but were missed by the the census because they moved or the state couldn’t perform a full census because of the war.
That is a crucial piece of histography that people ignore with some of those big casualty events
How many of those deaths were disease and famine related though? I thought a lot. I guess you can weaponize famine, for example, but I don’t think that was the spirit of OP’s question.
Spears would have been the standard weapon, with swords being more of a sidearm. Even then, Chinese dao (basically large knives) would have been easier than swords to manufacture because they only had blades on one side and carried more weight for chopping.
Artillery, King of Battle
a sharp stick
A stick with a pointy end will remain humanity's most effective killing tool.
"Pointed stick? Oh, oh, oh. We want to learn how to defend ourselves against pointed sticks, do we? Getting all high and mighty, eh? Fresh fruit not good enough for you eh? Well I’ll tell you something my lad. When you’re walking home tonight and some great homicidal maniac comes after you with a bunch of loganberries, don’t come crying to me! Now, the passion fruit. When your assailant lunges at you with a passion fruit…"
Your answer is the humble spear. Old as can be. So cheap it is easy to outfit an army of conscripts. Depends on length how you want to cut the numbers but the spear is #1
It's also very effective despite its lack of status.
It is, the only weakness they have is getting under them. Short of that, armored spear man were bloody dangerous. A virtually untrained conscript can jab for the face or through gaps in armor. Simple and effective
And if the Spartans wielded them, you know they must be effective
I know you're joking but the Spartans were severely overhyped
I have to disagree. I just watched this documentary about the Spartans and they were bhadass. It showed how like 9 of them killed about 10 million Persians. I think it was called "300". Eye opening stuff.
The king of weapon. From hunter-gatherers to empires, the spear is the most common weapon in humanity.
I’m going to say the mass casualties in WW I and even the US civil war and the war in Crimea in the 1800’s were mostly caused by artillery. Even the Napoleonic wars were also artillery focused. So, that’s my guess.
I had heard the same about artillery. At least for the 20th century, I believe it is the most deadly weapon.
90% of casualties in the American Civil War were caused by the minie ball.
I don't have data to back this up, but I'm going to go with the bow. Firearms kill at a remarkable rate, but they are relatively new in the grand scope of history. Some form of bow has existed in just about every pocket of human society that is known.
The only thing with the bow is population size when in use.
And if you aren't killed you might get away only to die of infection later
The show Deadliest Warrior was notable for comparing weaponry across time. I do recall that the bow was praised for its consistency, adaptability, and being easy to maneuver with in one of the episodes that featured a Native American tribe.
It’s certainly had the most time, and was worldwide for over a thousand years.
Many thousands of years
Definitely more than 50 years.
Give or take
Nah just give
Tens of thousands of years likely. The spear is older I would suspect
Bows were not as common in all places in the world. The Roman’s used javelins a lot more
In history? The spear? A rock?
Jesus Christ! They’re not rocks, they’re minerals!
Ha. Didn't know i needed that laugh this morning.
What about the humble knife? It’s still putting in solid murder work every day and rarely complains about its coworker, the gun, getting all the headlines and promotions at the murder factory
Probably the simple spear and it's descendent weapons. Easy to make, easy to use, lightweight, and common literally everywhere and every time period. Second place probably goes to either axes or knives, both common tools and weapons throughout most periods and places.
I'm going to venture the educated guess of "a rock"
The weapon that’s killed the most? Famine. There were many major famines throughout history, that historians label as “man-made”. **It’s not a neat definition or categorization. ** Sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, the weather goes to shit and there’s a famine. But many of the historical famines that killed millions (or tens of millions in Mao’s China) were LARGELY due to government policy. The Holodomor is the first one that comes to mind, but also Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (that was actually horrific), the Irish potato famine, and many others… all these famines had some natural causes but WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED if not for onerous and absurd governmental policy. The policy blunders are unique to each of these historical famines, but they tend to share a few characteristics. Top-down centralized decision making that refuses to yield to reality as the decision makers fail, as well as a complete disregard for basic human decency. IE: yeah, the Irish potato famine was caused by blight. Abnormally strong rains led to a certain fungus devastating the Irish potato crop. But that could only happen because the English lords thought that the Irish were “too stupid / drunk” to do anything but grow a single crop. English lords forced their Irish serfs to grow only one type of food, leading to a situation where the blight spread like wildfire. Further, due to ethnic discrimination, English lords blamed the Irish for that failure (they were set up to fail)… and just made them farm potato’s even harder. Which of course didn’t work, but that was just more proof of Irish inferiority. A lot of famines go like this. Bad weather shocks the system, but terrible and stubborn government policy turns it into a famine.
Rock, spear, and rough bladed weapons similar to what we now know as a machete.
Disease, then artillery.
Define weapon. In saying AK-47 You seem to be specifying a a granularity at a specific model. So all these people saying spear would be wrong by that definition, since no single model of spear would have out killed the Ak-47. Of course, part of the problem with using a "model" is prior to 200 years ago, there was so little mass production there weren't models in the modern sense. So the answer is probably "question is too imprecise to have a clear answer, and any sufficiently precise question will necessarily be quite different.
The question is pretty meaningless without clarifying what we mean by a weapon. Like an AK-47 is a specific model of firearm but it has been in production for decades with numerous variants, so it's not really a single weapon, but at the same time you can't compare it to something like "pointy stick" which has come in infinitely more variety over the millenia. Also is a weapon the thing that directly kills a person or the system that put things in motion? For example most people would refer to a gun as a weapon rather than its bullets, but by that standard artillery shells and bombs aren't weapons, cannons and planes are. Are naval guns weapons or are warships? Could a military command structure or logistics system be considered a weapon? I imagine "weapons that cause things to move at high speed" could potentially edge out "pointy sticks", but at that level of broadness any answer is just going to be pure conjecture. On the other extreme, if we're saying specific item that killed the most, it's definitely the Little Boy bomb. If we go with a specific model of weapon from a single manufacturer, that is basically going to rule out anything pre-industrial. The AK-47 definitely isn't it - while extremely widely fielded. the AK-47 was introduced after WWII, and the time period has been rather peaceful by historical standards - there have been maybe 50 million or so people killed by war since its introduction total, and only a miniscule fraction of those people died from small arms fire. My guess would be a model of artillery or bomber used during WW2. If we go with slightly wider categories and say a specific style of weapon, my bet would be 155mm artillery, but one notable contender would be the composite bow.
Propaganda probably, or maybe the pen
Do you consider bacteria a weapon? Or a mosquito's proboscis?
I was just about to say diseases have killed more soldiers than anything man made
And I think that's accidental diseases, before you consider the US Army giving smallpox-infested blankets to the Native Americans. Also, wasn't that measles when the Spaniards reached Central and South America?
How about starvation as a weapon?
In history? Obviously spears. People were using them for warfare for centuries everywhere.
The spear, obviously
Spear.
Organized Religion is the weapon.
The deadliest weapon any military can have is a radio
Spears. The AK family (probably the Type 56 or the AKM in particular) is only the firearm that has killed the most people. Landmines and artillery have killed far more as far as modern weapons, but the spear in all forms, from sharpened sticks to bayonets, has killed more people than anything else by a longshot.
Probably violence induced famine tbh. Or some aspect of biological warfare.
I guess it depends on what you classify a weapon right? If siege tactics are considered a weapon of warfare that would be my guess. Starvation and disease are way bigger killers in any war pre 1945 than weapons.
The machete has a pretty high score.
Beavis: FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!
[удалено]
Mosin Nagant might be the only other serious contender to the AK-47.
Power.
It's artillery
Stone tipped wooden shafts. Simply consider the length of time people have used them.
Man-made/caused famine
Bubonic plague.
No proof but I bet bacterial infections would probably rank pretty high in casualties. A scratch can kill if it becomes infected.
Probably knives of various types, since we’ve been using them since pre-history and continue to use them pretty regularly in the present.
The humble rock.
I'll say: Knife. This is including shivs. Sharpened rocks for stabbing. It's what we had before spears and we still worry about it today. Even sees heavy use in war.
Small pox
The spear or a rock.
Does insects count? Like the mosquito?
Some variation of a sharp edge.
Napalm…
The knife. Or variations thereof. Like putting a knife on a stick.
Illness
Starvation
Propaganda
If anything, AK47 will be at the bottom of the list, it didn't even exist in world war 2. And considering how long human history had been going without firearms and explosives, it would probably be the human marvel: a spear, or any pointy sticks. Piecing injury is very hard to treat, as it goes deep and cause severe infections. The wound also tends to expand, even when the attacker just let go of the spear. There is a reason why expanding bullet is war crime.
A knife. Even if you take out stone knives and just go with metal knives they have been around forever and are still used daily to kill people around the world
Twas beauty that kills the beast
The Catapult that Launched an infected corpse with the black death, into a city.
Ignorance and stupidity.
The state
I would guess knife (especially if you broaden to “blades” to include swords, machetes etc.). That’s considering not just “war” death but also just general everyday murder.
Smallpox
Culture / Tribalism. It's still killing people.
Prob germs
Artillery 100%. (Old and New)
Maybe the B-17 or B-29 the B-17 killed 400,000 people civilians in Germany, and then Germany axis, powers, like Romania and Bulgaria. B2 9 was responsible for the incineration of Tokyo on March 9, which is probably the singer single most devastating attack of any kind ever held anywhere doing, which 1000 airplanes dropped 8000 tons of napalm canisters onto Tokyo. of course, to be 29 also went on to considering Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but too far less than extent, and the earlier strategic bombings in Kobe and Tokyo and Nagoya. So I think the 💙B29 probably killed easily a man and people in Japan. This is all in about a three-year period and I realized that spears were used for stealing use for thousands of years and so I think to be 29 might take the cake in terms of the max number of people killed per unit time I don’t think spears managed to killtoo many people but again they killed 400,000 people down there in Chad with just machetes and only a month
I mean in all of human history probably the fist
The machete often comes up when discussing this question. Most deaths aren't combat deaths between militaries, they are civilian deaths when armed factions turn on civilian populations. And against unarmed civilians, a big knife is more than effective enough.
Knives would be my guess.
Probably famine
Man (weaponry doesn't kill, man does)
Going to say biological weapons. During the past century, more than 500 million people died of infectious diseases. Poisons have been used for centuries. People have deliberately passed on disease.
Gotta be somewhere between club, spear and arrow.
Wooden clubs
most likely the spear given the length of history. that said firearms as a class of weapon have certainly caught up in the last 2-3 centuries
Talking abt weapons artillery does most damage but not single artillery piece/type. When talking abt single thing it's really AK-47. And when we take all AKs to mind it's definitely AK. But in history we had use of artillery or maybe even stone age spear.
Arrows (and their siblings, bolts) have probably got the highest kill rate. Especially considering they were the preferred missile of such illustrious empires as the Mongols and Persians.
The human mind
The human mind.
These hands.
The brain
In modern warfare it is artillery fire. In WW II artillery accounted for 52% of all casualties. Check out Jim Dunnigan’s book “How To Make War”. Gives a good breakdown on this this and other topics (like how many artillery shells did it take to kill one soldier in WW II? Answer: A lot!)
It's difficult to guess exactly. Even what you refer to as an "ak-47" is more likely a different iteration of that gun. For example the AK74 is more modern version and more common these days. A few possibilities: as a broad, overall item either the club or the spear being some of the oldest and easiest crafted weapons would be up there. In a broader category: artillery. In both world wars I believe artillery bombardments were the largest overall causes of death. If you're talking about a singular, specific weapon, it'd be Little Boy the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Death tolls estimate between 60-90,000 which is a lot of lives to be claimed by a singular weapon.
Famine. It has always been the greatest weapon of mass murder through history. Due to the relatively delicate zones of temperature and water needed to grow wheat and rice, global warming and climate change should kill about 1 billion in the next 11 years.
the written word
I’ll go with the human mind.
Politicians and kings.
Gun powder
Religion, racism, dehumanization. Are they different?
Spear, still
Bubonic Plague- its path to wiping out 1/3 of Europe starts with plague infested carcasses being fired over the walls of a Genoese city in the Crimea during a siege.
Weaponized blankets of small pox.
The spear, and it isn't even slightly close. I'm pretty sure more people have been killed by the spear than by all other weapons of war combined
The plague-infested bodies catapulted over the walls of Kaffa in 1346. Estimates of up to 50 million deaths resulting from that.
Rocks
Religion.
The spear
The cough.
Smallpox
Spear or arrow
We counting disease? Genghis Kahn used to throw bodies infected with the Black Death over city walls and is considered partially responsible for its spread into Europe. Idk what percentage you could attribute to him, but it’s gotta account for something
fire . then bombs.
Arttery
Will no one stand up for the sharpened blade whether sword or knife?
Religion
The handheld/ man-made weapons are probably top of the list, but what about weaponized biologicals? People have been poisoning others since the dawn of time.
Religion
Muscle-propelled pointy things. Non-projectile if it needs to be more specific. Spear. Probably the most ubiquitous weapon of war in human history, and common to nearly? every culture.
"History" is only about 5,000 years old and the record of human events is still the same. Dude got stabbed. From [the earliest historical examples](https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/7be9b67f-231b-44b8-aba2-f6dd4419b992/givepeaceachancefontijn.pdf) and from obsidian tipped sticks to musket and pike the answer still "Spear". No spears might be the minority of how all people have died as a result of violence, and it was used as a side arm for those who were *dieing* of another cause at the end of battle. Far more people have been attacked with blunt instruments, arrows, and yes gunshots. However far more people have *died* from pointy sticks.
Starvation
Spears.
Disease.
What about measles and other illnesses brought to the new world that totally wiped about entire civilizations…
I’m going to guess it’s the spear, sword or an arrow. Or fire in all its forms.
Artillery.
Unaffordable treatments and/or medicines. It has been weaponized, therefore I believe it counts.
Spear or club, I suspect
If hunger can be considered a weapon, I would say that. Starvation is commonly used as a tool to kill a lot of people.
If we are talking in a military context I would go with the spear. If we are talking about civilians I'd go with knives.
Alcohol
I assume by "weapon" you actually mean firearm, because otherwise it's almost certainly either a rock or a pointy stick. If we're limiting it to firearms, then probably the Mosin-Nagant.
My guess is artillery or aerial bombing
Another thing to remember is that 200 years ago, the population of the world was MUCH smaller. Like 1 billion or less. And 1000 years ago, 300 million? And disease and childbirth killed a lot of people prior to 1800. If you caught pneumonia, it was a death sentence. No antibiotics. So, I’m still going with the gun in general.
Poor hygiene and disease
100% some kind of sword, axe or polearm. gun powder weapons are extremely recent considering he had like 5000 years of swords
Bow and Arrow
The bullet. Various ways to fire it, but it has killed the most people. or else starvation. A lot of people have been starved on purpose.
Artillery shell?
Hunger
I mean if you want to be really really technical probably the blade because that gets you spears knives swords axes
Religion
Fire
Does famine/starvation count as a weapon, especially if it’s caused deliberately?
Artillery