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[Bumber]

Bone would be useless for mining and woodcutting. You'll want to knap stones instead.

Bone was used for both of these things all the time.

It looks okay for smaller trees, but I'm not sure how practical bone would be for thicker and harder trees. You might need a flint saw for those.

Likewise, a bone pickaxe is feasible for softer rock (e.g., soils and chalk,) but you need something more durable for breaking up chunks of hard stone. Either a quartzite tool or skip directly to metal. You'd want to use fire-setting to crack the hard rock first (even with metal tools,) but maybe it's already abstracted (or dwarves are just that good at mining.)

I don't entirely believe bone picks were historically used for mining. The manufacturing time is wasted for the durability. It's more likely the picks were used as weapons or butchery tools. Ore would've been obtained in placer deposits and crushed up using nearby stones. Then from hematite you could forge iron pickaxes.

[GavJ]

There was very little if any warfare prior to agriculture, and even then probably not much for quite awhile, bleeding into the ages of metalworking.

The simple fact was population density was too low, and especially before agriculture, there were no fixed locations to defend, no long term land investments, not even really much of a sense of ownership most likely. And few enough people that resources were not strapped hardly anywhere. What is there to fight over? Nothing, so you don't fight.

In the extremely rare event that they would fight, they would definitely have used hunting weapons, not specially made combat weapons, because it is a rare event, and you wouldn't have special tools or training for it. So you'd be fighting with spears, arrows, and slings if at all, not edged weapons which are terrible for hunting. Axes and things were practical utility tools.

Post agriculture, there starts to be a growing need for person-person weapons. Although still not for a long time, as population was still quite low. Only really when you start getting cities densely positioned near enough to have territorial disputes do you get "war." Which is going to be nearly bronze age by then, in most (but not all) places.

The handful of places that had agriculture for a very long time without metalworking, or without having much interest in metalworking even if they knew how (most precolombian civilizations), that's when you would see specially-made stone swords and maces and things. But it's sort of a special circumstance, more than the norm.



Also copper swords, in addition to being a bit anachronistic (wouldn't have really needed swords at the time when copper was the best metal available) would also be really terrible swords. Copper would make far more sense in a blunt or arrow weapon. But I wouldn't be shocked if a few exist somewhere. I also don't know that much about Asia or the Middle East timelines.

[GavJ]

Bumber, the bone picks were first used primarily in mining flints and cherts, being the most important geological resource of the time and thus the most extensive mines. They did not use fire at that time, because the mines show no evidence of it, even for light or in the main tunnel meeting zones. Data points to primarily hand labor with bone and perhaps occasional hard hammerstones, working most likely in near or entirely pitch blackness, with a workforce largely composed of children. This is around the mesolithic to early neolithic, post-ice age. By that time in flint-rich areas, they had rabbit warrens of small diameter flint mines with sometimes hundreds of entrances in one region.

Later on, when mining ores, they also usually did not use bronze picks, at least in Britain all the way up to the beginning of the iron age.
Wrought bronze was quite simply too expensive, and it was also a symbol of power and prestige. Mere lowly miners could not afford (most likely economically inflated/bubbling) luxuries for basic industrial work. There is evidence they continued to use hammerstones for most of the heavy ore digging, and may have still also employed bone picks or rarer super tough stones (like quartzite) just for the final finessing once they hit a good vein.

Also, if you're working in the dark (as hypothesized) a pick is sillier than a big, simple rock anyway.

The iron age was a bit different (in Europe) than the bronze age -- for whatever reason, people didn't seem to really view iron as very magical or prestigious like they did bronze. It was just sort of a useful tool more such like metals are today and culture shifted to other things. The raw materials are also far more abundant, so it wouldn't have been as expensive in a basic sense anyway. So they probably would have begun using iron industrial tools. It's entirely possible that in some people's own single lifetimes, they may have switched from stone to iron equipment for certain jobs, without any steps between.

[Bumber]

Bumber, the bone picks were first used primarily in mining flints and cherts, being the most important geological resource of the time and thus the most extensive mines. They did not use fire at that time, because the mines show no evidence of it, even for light or in the main tunnel meeting zones. Data points to primarily hand labor with bone and perhaps occasional hard hammerstones, working most likely in near or entirely pitch blackness, with a workforce largely composed of children. This is around the mesolithic to early neolithic, post-ice age. By that time in flint-rich areas, they had rabbit warrens of small diameter flint mines with sometimes hundreds of entrances in one region.

Later on, when mining ores, they also usually did not use bronze picks, at least in Britain all the way up to the beginning of the iron age.
Wrought bronze was quite simply too expensive, and it was also a symbol of power and prestige. Mere lowly miners could not afford (most likely economically inflated/bubbling) luxuries for basic industrial work. There is evidence they continued to use hammerstones for most of the heavy ore digging, and may have still also employed bone picks or rarer super tough stones (like quartzite) just for the final finessing once they hit a good vein.

Yes, but any kind of deeper mining is out of the question without using fire. It's not until the Bronze Age that we get the Ancient Egyptians doing some serious mining with that. Then we get the Ancient Romans doing even more complicated stuff (with machinery) in the Iron Age.

I guess my point is that you have a bunch of sad Hill Dwarves until you get stone or metal tools. Humans never had to worry about carving out large artificial living spaces in stone.

[SixOfSpades]

I would add a stone scourge in though, by tying a rock or two to the end of a vine you have a very basic scourge, and you could even have an option for teeth.

I would care about this if whips or scourges made any kind of sense as weapons. But they don't. Almost ANY kind of protection, even soft leather, is enough to absorb the majority of the damage. Granted, you're working with the time period of lots of bare skin, so Lashers would seem to have plenty of leeway . . . until you realize that all they could realistically accomplish was to get their enemy really, really pissed off so he goes berserk on their ass. As soon as Toady implements the fact that whips and scourges have nearly 0 penetration depth, and therefore can't do jack against any kind of armor, they will quickly drop from their unfortunate status of "lol, 1-shotted u thru ur mstrwrk steel helm rofl" to where they should be: The tools of the officers of the law. In my setup, I don't even have them as being invented as actual weapons, they're part of the Innovation for Punitive Justice. Even their upgrades aren't designed to make them more damaging, they're to incite stronger feelings of fear and obedience (or retribution & vindication) in the spectators at the public flogging.

Also, I think Obsidian "teeth" on a stick to make a macuahuitl should have an optional spot between "teeth on a stick" and "crude sword." It is dependent, of course, on your embark spot being on an obsidian flow, but realistically obsidian is a fantastic material for making weapons out of.

Indeed, go for it. As for the scarcity of obsidian, the stones of choice were flint and chert--of course, while still a good deal more common than obsidian, they couldn't be found everywhere either, so they were often trafficked. In Washington state & British Columbia, they've found tools made of chert that came from a specific site in New Mexico. Which got me thinking: Even though dwarves are not nomadic, humans frequently are, so if your site has no native stone worth knapping, just hold out for a bit . . . maybe you can trade some plump helmets and pottery for a chance for a step up the technological ladder.
Speaking of which, new Innovation progression:
Share Food (which you might want to have already researched at the start) -> Trading -> Caravan.

I reckon that the development of composite bows should unlock the manufacture of all different varieties of bow - short, recurve, long, and of course crossbows - in composite form, rather than recurve bows being in and of themselves the pinnacle of bow-making.

I kinda want to leave bows for the elves . . . but yes, I am planning Innovations for Recurve and (sexiest of all) Compound bows, for those civs who haven't yet invented the far more dwarfy crossbow. (Moment of silence for those poor sods who have nothing but blowguns.) All dwarven bows will be "standard"/short, because dwarves couldn't (effectively) use what humans or elves would call longbows: They're not tall enough to reach the handle with a horizontal arm, so they'd need to stand on something, or dig a hole for the bottom end of the bow. More importantly, their arms aren't long enough to reach the full draw power of the bow.

There should also be separate innovations for light and heavy crossbow variants.

I'm not sure if I want to draw that distinction, but I'll keep thinking about it. You're right, I do want to diversify the crossbow innovations--maybe even have some Innovations that actively block each other. Usually, that's an unrealistic dynamic that I've been trying to avoid, but in this case it might make sense: You're not going the idea to put a stirrup at the end of the crossbow for a faster reload if there's already a Bayonet there, because you'd just stab your own foot. For most things, I'm shooting for so many Innovations in each industry that it's unlikely to discover them all, but in this case it might just be impossible. Which is probably a good thing.

One thing I'd like to mention is a mechanic to vary tech levels between broad regions in a logical fashion so one continent might work mainly with stone and be damn good at it (like meso-americans) while others may be pretty terrible in general and others be renaissance.

Hmm . . . unless you embarked on the other side for the map from your Mountainhome (which is something I've always disliked), I don't really see how this could affect you. Useful if you want to roleplay the conquest of the Americas, I suppose, although moving in the opposite direction could be troublesome to explain. I wouldn't mind if Toady were to implement something like this, although making sure that different regions had different tech levels might be tricky to implement.

Of course limited trade could work to solve this but if every region has the same core techs and has the same chance for inspiration it might be a bit off.

Those Innovations designated as Common Core are usually to "restore" a part of the vanilla game that I think would work better as something that dwarves didn't know how to do right away. But I've been thinking about it, and am toying with making Common Core only those Innovations that open up new industries, and the choice of whether or not to develop each industry would be up to the player (or, in the case of other civs, the RNG). Since the only reliable way to open up the further Innovations in each industry is to have a (rather inventive) high-level worker in that industry, the Inspirations help open up the technologies that best suit how each fort is already being run.
Every civilization on the map would have the same baseline chance for inspiration rates (with positive modifiers for population size and % chance of high intellectual creativity), and trade between civs would tend to even out imbalances, but then again, each civ also has different gods. In the 1st post on the 2nd page of this thread, I outlined a plan to have the computer-run civilizations each have Innovations that corresponded to the domains of that civ's most popular deities . . . with a setting in advanced worldgen to determine the odds that each Innovation would be influenced by the gods, as opposed to being purely random. So each civ could (ideally) develop a cultural and technological structure defined by their belief systems.

Sharp Stone -> Flint Knife -> Aztec Obsidian Blades -> Copper Short Sword -> Bronze Short Sword -> Iron Short Sword -> Steel Sword -> Longsword -> Hand-and-a-half Swords -> Zwei/Twohanders

While that's generally correct, it's misleading to think that simply because the rapier was developed later than the gladius, it is also an improvement upon, and generally better than, the gladius. I'm keeping all of the weapons strictly segregated in their vanilla DF categories (unless I encounter a really good reason to break from that), and I'm including variants only as the final step, so that "choosing" one design cannot cause continuity errors down the line: Quite obviously, the stiletto is not a further refinement of the cinquedea's design.

Likewise, a bone pickaxe is feasible for softer rock (e.g., soils and chalk,) but you need something more durable for breaking up chunks of hard stone. Either a quartzite tool or skip directly to metal.

Tool/weapon wear and breakage, with considerations for material (both for the tool itself & what it's used on), has always been high on my list of things that DF needs. I cannot agree hard enough.

Ore would've been obtained in placer deposits and crushed up using nearby stones.

In the tale of Jason & the Golden Fleece, the Argonauts visit a land (I forget the name of it, I think it was on the Black Sea) where the "iron men" lived. I saw a show where an archaeologist figured out where this place was, took a boat there, stepped off the boat, stuck a magnet into the sand, and . . . pulled it back out, covered in grains of iron. These "iron men" most likely were the beneficiaries of a hematite deposit upstream, and a lucky cook-fire on the beach. No pick required.

There was very little if any warfare prior to agriculture

Mostly true, although I have to point out that the Sanskrit word for "war" literally translates to "the desire for more cattle". So nomadic herdsmen can still make war.

Also copper swords, in addition to being a bit anachronistic (wouldn't have really needed swords at the time when copper was the best metal available) would also be really terrible swords. Copper would make far more sense in a blunt or arrow weapon. But I wouldn't be shocked if a few exist somewhere. I also don't know that much about Asia or the Middle East timelines.

Ancient Egypt had a few (and man, the khopesh is one weird-lookin' sword), but even they switched to bronze pretty much as soon as they could.

Data points to primarily hand labor with bone and perhaps occasional hard hammerstones, working most likely in near or entirely pitch blackness, with a workforce largely composed of children.

Yay for getting some productive use out of the children! But . . . um . . . pitch darkness?
1) Bro, do you even fire?
2) How could they have any idea what the hell they were doing? Did they lick the rock to figure out what to dig?
Granted, I have zero first-person knowledge of such sites, but I still find that hard to believe.

The iron age was a bit different (in Europe) than the bronze age -- for whatever reason, people didn't seem to really view iron as very magical or prestigious like they did bronze.

The history of England is the story of one invasion after another, as settlers from the continent kept showing up. One of these Iron Age waves came from Germany (or thereabouts), and consisted of a people who tended to be shorter and stockier than the native Celts, and whose men were generally hairier about the face. These newcomers possessed knowledge of metalworking to which the Celts had not been exposed, and which therefore likely seemed mysterious and even magical to them. The smiths among these newcomers often built their workshops inside the slope of a hill, so the sheltering earth above would provide insulation and make hotter fires easier to obtain.
A race of short, broad, bearded people, who like to live underground and know the strange arts of metalworking. Gentlemen, in this thread so heavily concerned with the origin of the dwarves, we have arrived . . . at the origin of the dwarves.

[Dwarf4Explosives]

Wow. This is awesome. I would love to see this added to DF. It'd give me incentive to run a fort for a long time, for one thing. And being able to make more and more complicated weapon systems...yum.

I'd like to suggest looking up the varieties of arrows used by the Romans. If I remember correctly, they came up with a number of important advancements on the basic metal arrow.

The flaming arrow might also be an important innovation (with the Chandlery Innovation required?). Might be rather impractical to incorporate, though. On the other hand, it could work with a reaction that uses tallow/flammable material+lighter+arrow to make a single flaming arrow, perhaps noting the flammability of the material in a way similar to the way that the Bimetallic Construction Innovation accounts for its properties.

Also,

The iron age was a bit different (in Europe) than the bronze age -- for whatever reason, people didn't seem to really view iron as very magical or prestigious like they did bronze.

The history of England is the story of one invasion after another, as settlers from the continent kept showing up. One of these Iron Age waves came from Germany (or thereabouts), and consisted of a people who tended to be shorter and stockier than the native Celts, and whose men were generally hairier about the face. These newcomers possessed knowledge of metalworking to which the Celts had not been exposed, and which therefore likely seemed mysterious and even magical to them. The smiths among these newcomers often built their workshops inside the slope of a hill, so the sheltering earth above would provide insulation and make hotter fires easier to obtain.
A race of short, broad, bearded people, who like to live underground and know the strange arts of metalworking. Gentlemen, in this thread so heavily concerned with the origin of the dwarves, we have arrived . . . at the origin of the dwarves.

This is awesome and hilarious and rather siggable.

EDIT: War might also need to be an innovation, perhaps?

[IndigoFenix]

War as an innovation?  I don't think so.  War, in the sense of mass violent attack on another group's territory, has been around ever since there have been groups, territory, and violence.  Even chimpanzees will invade another chimpanzee troop's territory en masse for the purposes of killing them and taking over their spot.  Expansionist war, perhaps, requires the idea of large territory ruled by a single group from a distance... but I doubt it took very long to go from the concept of large territories to the concept of killing someone and taking their territory.

[GavJ]

Mostly true, although I have to point out that the Sanskrit word for "war" literally translates to "the desire for more cattle". So nomadic herdsmen can still make war.

Domesticated cattle = agriculture, so that's not pre-agriculture.

War as an innovation?  I don't think so.  War, in the sense of mass violent attack on another group's territory, has been around ever since there have been groups, territory, and violence. Even chimpanzees will invade another chimpanzee troop's territory en masse for the purposes of killing them and taking over their spot.

* I'm inclined to agree with your list, but territory is the missing part of the equation up until about agriculture when people settled down and claimed one spot. So yeah, once they added that, the ingredients are complete, but not before.
* Chimpanzees do this only rarely. Raiding is a habit that comprises the culture of a specific subset of chimp groups. Most are more pacifistic.
* Chimpanzees are far more aggressive than humans. Yes, most groups are pacifistic in terms of planning out and executing raids. But not when it comes to immediate personal threats. The human response for much of prehistory was avoiding conflict by just moving further out. Chimps are more prone to tearing limbs off when somebody gets up in their grill, it's just a species thing. So they're going to be more prone to fighting instead of avoidance when density gets high.
* Regardless of one's observations about chimps or musings about psychology, the fact remains that there are no depictions of paleo or mesolithic cave paintings of people fighting each other, there are AFAIK no bodies found with weapon wounds or arrowheads or other weapons in them (unlike post agriculture where we do find many of these), and there are no known artifacts from those time periods of purpose-built weapons for human combat.

[SixOfSpades]

In this thread so heavily concerned with the origin of the dwarves, we have arrived . . . at the origin of the dwarves.

I should clarify this a bit before somebody beats me to it. While the actual earliest known myths concerning dwarves seem to be from Germany and Scandanavia (suggesting an even earlier origin that later spread to these regions), these early dwarves were hardly what you or I would recognize as such; they were not described as being of short stature, and even seem to be demi-demonic at times. From what I can tell, it was only later, after iron-working technology was imported to Britain, that "dwarves" really started resembling what we now know. Britain is full of legends of elves, faeries, gnomes, leprechauns, and the like--and they all seem quite similar to one another, lumped under the headings of "fay folk", "good people", or "little people". All humanlike beings that seemed magical, including druids (e.g., Morgan le Fay) were largely grouped together like this. But dwarves were separate: they do not cast spells, grant wishes, have power over nature, or vanish without a trace, and except for leprechauns' fondness for gold, dwarves are the only mythical race associated with metals. In fact, several types of fair folk actively shun metal, especially forged iron or steel. The rule about Dungeons & Dragons Druids' refusal to use metal weapons or armor is a direct outgrowth of this. In contrast, tales of dwarves seem more mundane and matter-of-fact than stories of the fair folk, probably largely due to the occasional presence of real, live, human dwarfs. But it was the immigration of those Germanic ironsmiths that largely defined dwarves as we know them today: they influenced the appearance and lifestyle of "Dwarf" in the eyes of British folklore, which then influenced Tolkien, who then influenced D&D, Toady, and us.

The flaming arrow might also be an important innovation (with the Chandlery Innovation required?). Might be rather impractical to incorporate, though.

Yeah, I'm toying with the idea of actually using the "Alchemy" skill to unlock some of the more chemistry-related things like lye, tanning, and dyes . . . but what physical goods would a Legendary Alchemist actually produce? Incendiary arrows, maybe. I still haven't decided which way to go on this, but per your username, I have to inform you that Toady has definitively stated that gunpowder will NOT be in the game.

Mostly true, although I have to point out that the Sanskrit word for "war" literally translates to "the desire for more cattle". So nomadic herdsmen can still make war.

Domesticated cattle = agriculture, so that's not pre-agriculture.

No, cultivated crops = agriculture. Herds can easily be driven from one pasture to another with no need whatsoever for any kind of deliberate planting.


As for war itself being an Innovation, I shouldn't think so. If these proto-dwarves are to be anywhere near proto-goblins, who likely would have reproduction rates & expansionist tendencies to match modern goblins, then the concept of War would not be some new, brilliant idea, but rather something that the greenskins do on a roughly yearly basis.

[Skullsploder]

I have to agree with SixOfSpades on the warring side of things: without something to fight over, people usually won't fight.

HOWEVER, this is Dwarf Fortress, and included among the vanilla races are several groups of hostile animal people who will steal your shit and beat up your dwarves without being aggroed, and, more importantly, a race of sadists who steal babies and murder any dwarf they see. But all that's moot anyway. The invention of interpersonal weapons should be hinged simply on seeing combat, as in real life. If your dwarves live a pacifistic lifestyle, sealed off from the world since year 1 and never seeing the horrors of raiding or even hunting, just gnawing on plump helmets for centuries, they will develop into a civilisation with incredibly developed medicine, farming, literature, art, and architecture... but bugger-all martial ability. If, on the other hand, they live on the top of a small hill containing the only spring in a vast region of desert infested with goblins, they're gonna have to adapt to a life of constant warfare or die.

We don't have to argue about whether or not humans were fighting before agriculture: If the RNG decides that dwarves fight before they invent agriculture, they may well invent weapons before agriculture. If they don't fight, they won't invent weapons. Simple as that.

To get all technical, the tags enabling the development of weapons should be similar to:
[INSPIRE_OTHERS:DEFLECT:TEETH_ON_A_STICK:WEAPONSMITH:2:(all military skills etc...]
(i.e. a dwarf hits a sentient creature and gets frustrated with the way his blows aren't finding purchase, so he makes his murderstick more spiky)

Similar tags would be placed on all sentient creatures. Thus, for a dwarf to be inspired to invent non-hunting weapons, he'd have to fight against other sentients.

On that note, I'm starting to lean against a bayonet for the crossbow, having done more research into crossbows themselves. With the exception of a very few light crossbows, all mechanisms require the crossbow to be planted on the ground bow-first in order for you to draw the string, and that's simply not practical with a blade sticking out the front (at least, it's impractical if you want that blade to be sharp enough to stab something). It's really better just to carry around a short sword, a war hammer, or a dagger than trying to use a crossbow as a spear (Toady sidearms pls). Instead, we get crossbows that drown enemies in bolts or punch holes straight through them, and I'm comfortable with that.

Yeah, I'm toying with the idea of actually using the "Alchemy" skill...

Two words: Greek. Fire. Dwarves and primitive flamethrowers are meant to be together.

[GavJ]

No, cultivated crops = agriculture. Herds can easily be driven from one pasture to another with no need whatsoever for any kind of deliberate planting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture
"Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi, and other life forms for food, fiber, biofuel, medicinals and other products used to sustain and enhance human life."
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/agriculture
"The science or practice of farming, including cultivation of the soil for the growing of crops and the rearing of animals to provide food, wool, and other products."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm
"A farm is an area of land or water (for aquaculture) that is devoted primarily agricultural processes, (E.g., the practice of producing and managing food, i.e. produce, grains, or livestock, fibres, and increasingly fuel)."

The term means either. Though regardless of terminology anyway, domesticated animals are roughly the same historical age as farming of crops, so it is ultimately a moot point -- because either way, paleolithic and mesolithic i.e. prior to about 5,000 BC (in Europe at least), people were doing neither extensively and thus had few ties to specific plots of land, and thus did not war with each other.

If, on the other hand, they live on the top of a small hill containing the only spring in a vast region of desert infested with goblins, they're gonna have to adapt to a life of constant warfare or die.

...if it's the only water, what are the goblins drinking...

That's just it. Without something like agriculture that lets you store up large amounts of resources for hard times, this situation doesn't really end up happening. Without enough immediate resources for both groups, both groups wouldn't be there in the first place. And without a base of operations and, again, largely stockpiled cache of food, you can't sustain an army to march far away across areas without resources in between, nor do you have any reason to, because you couldn't manage the "empire" you win.

[Airgeoff]

Just wanted to say quickly that bayonets were often attachable/detachable, so this may be a way to still incorporate them on crossbows.  In many early cases they actually blocked the weapon from firing and were attached usually only when close combat was inevitable.

[GavJ]

spring loaded bayonet:

Put something vaguely like this on the front of the stock:


Then attach the two arms to the stock, the middle part to a radially moving bayonet that folds under. The spring force is such that it's under tension when folded, it "wants" to flip out in front.

Then make a latch  further back on the stock that holds it in place i.e. folded back toward you (won't cut you cause it's snug against the wood and underneath). It also flips out with the flat side of the blade leading the swing to reduce self injury, and the spring wouldn't be nearly as high tension as that one. If you want to be fancy, you can put in another auto "click in" detent/latch thing in the front similar to most pocket knives how they lock open until you push a tab to release them again.

Now when you miss your shot and some guy is charging you down, you can unlatch, swing boom! deployed in 1-2 seconds only, no fumbling for a sidearm. After stabby stabbing, you have time to fold back and relatch in place, freeing the front of the crossbow for loading actions again.

[Skullsploder]

Haha ok I take back my anti-bayonet rant.

If, on the other hand, they live on the top of a small hill containing the only spring in a vast region of desert infested with goblins, they're gonna have to adapt to a life of constant warfare or die.

...if it's the only water, what are the goblins drinking...

That's just it. Without something like agriculture that lets you store up large amounts of resources for hard times, this situation doesn't really end up happening. Without enough immediate resources for both groups, both groups wouldn't be there in the first place. And without a base of operations and, again, largely stockpiled cache of food, you can't sustain an army to march far away across areas without resources in between, nor do you have any reason to, because you couldn't manage the "empire" you win.

That was just a quick example, but you seem to be missing the fact that goblins are incredibly aggressive by nature. If your dwarves live in close proximity to goblins, regardless of the state of their ability to build an empire, the goblins are going to want to kill the dwarves. True, in the stone age they would be equivalent to nothing more than hyper-aggressive chimpanzees who claim a bigger turf than they need, but still.

And, like I said, it's completely moot anyway, because this game can simulate war and it can simulate peace. If it simulates war, there will be weapons. If it simulates peace, there will not be weapons.
The game would, of course, have a system to gauge the strategic value of any location to determine whether anyone would attack it, and that value would gain modifiers depending on the state of the potential attackers' empire-building ability, need for farmland, need for grazing land, natural aggression, distance from the location, etc.
If the goblins attack the dwarves repeatedly, and the dwarves survive, the dwarves will invent weapons. Sure, chances are agriculture will already be around before wars are fought, but there's always the possibility that the dwarves, taken by some madness, decided to settle in the embark tile next to the first goblin settlement.

[GavJ]

True, in the stone age they would be equivalent to nothing more than hyper-aggressive chimpanzees who claim a bigger turf than they need, but still.

That's not an adaptive strategy evolutionarily. This should be bred out of them quickly (the "bigger than you need" part, I mean). But sure, if they happen to be the rare cottonwood of the animal kingdom at that time by happenstance, then it could play out as occasional warfare, yes.

Alternatively, if the world of DF were very different geographically, with the entire place having something of a "watering hole" climate setup, forcing everybody into the same spots seasonally, you could also get wars earlier than in earth history. Not sure how you'd do that without Toady-requiring updates to the code.

Actually come to think of it, I'm not sure how you'd do any sort of pre-agricultural game without the ability to be nomadic which would require code changes.