Weapon systems

A weapon, arm, or armament is any device used with intent to inflict damage or harm to living beings, structures, or systems. Weapons are used to increase the efficacy and efficiency of activities such as hunting, crime, law enforcement, self-defense, and warfare. In a broader context, weapons may be construed to include anything used to gain a strategic, material or mental advantage over an adversary.

While just about any ordinary objects such as sticks, stones, cars, or pencils can be used as weapons, many are expressly designed for the purpose – ranging from simple implements such as clubs, swords and guns, to complicated modern intercontinental ballistic missiles, biological and cyberweapons. Something that has been re-purposed, converted, or enhanced to become a weapon of war is termed weaponized, such as a weaponized virus or weaponized lasers.

The use of objects as weapons has been observed among chimpanzees, leading to speculation that early hominids first began to use weapons as early as five million years ago. However, this can not be confirmed using physical evidence because wooden clubs, spears, and unshaped stones would not have left an unambiguous record. The earliest unambiguous weapons to be found are the Schöninger Speere: eight wooden throwing spears dated as being more than 300,000 years old. At the site of Nataruk in Turkana, Kenya, numerous human skeletons dating to 10,000 years ago may present evidence of major traumatic injuries to the head, neck, ribs, knees and hands, including obsidian projectiles still embedded in the bones, that might have been caused by arrows and clubs in the context of conflict between two hunter-gatherer groups, but this interpretation of the evidence of warfare at Nataruk has been challenged.

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Wikipedia