World Wars

[Anomalocaris]

The Mongol years didn't manage to involve the Americas or Africa.

It was their world at the time. Anyplace else and they would have fallen off the edge.

looking at just the world known directly or indirectly to pre-colombian old world civilizations, Mongol invasion was just the last great pulse of steppe nomad migration that had been hitting all the civilizations all around the margins of the Euroasia continent since before the end of the bronze age.

So if we expand the scope and time frame of what we might considered to be wars in include these migrations,  then I would suggest the entire migration era might be considered one single extended 2500 year long world war that affected all the civilization and cultures on entire euroasia  continent from china in the east to spain in the west, with knock on effects extending well into northern Africa. 

If we break it down to considered individual pulses of migration during that long era of steppe migrations,  then I might propose the period of 50 years at the end of the bronze age to be the first world war.    During this period sea borne raiders called “sea people” hit all of the major bronze age cultural centers in europe, western asia and africa, and brought down all the major civilizations around the mediterranean except the egypt.

some scholars also considered the period between 1st century BC and 5th century AD to be a single pulse of interrelated step migration where nomads migrating out of central asia applied critical pressure on both ends of euroasia that led to the collapse of Han Chinese empire in the east and western Roman empire in the west.  That might also be seen as a world wide slow motion brawl thar might be described as a world war.