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An Ancient, Brutal Massacre May Be the Earliest Evidence of War
HughPickens.com writes: Violence has always been part of human behavior, but the origins of war are hotly debated. Some experts see it as deeply rooted in evolution, pointing to violent confrontations among groups of chimpanzees as clues to an ancestral predilection while others emphasize the influence of complex and hierarchical human societies, and agricultural surpluses to be raided. Now James Gorman writes in the NY Times that scientists have discovered a site in Africa dated about 10,000 years ago where a group of hunter-gatherers attacked and slaughtered another, leaving the dead with crushed skulls, embedded arrow or spear points, and other devastating wound. It's not clear that anyone was spared at the Nataruk massacre. Of the 27 individuals found, eight were male and eight female, with five adults of unknown gender. The site also contained the partial remains of six children. Twelve of the skeletons were in a relatively complete state, and ten of those showed very clear evidence that they had met a violent end. In the paper, the researchers describe "extreme blunt-force trauma to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs, arrow lesions to the neck, and stone projectile tips lodged in the skull and thorax of two men." Four of them, including a late-term pregnant woman, appear to have had their hands bound. "These human remains record the intentional killing of a small band of foragers with no deliberate burial, and provide unique evidence that warfare was part of the repertoire of inter-group relations among some prehistoric hunter-gatherers," says Dr Marta Mirazon.
The killers carried weapons they wouldn't have used for hunting and fishing, including clubs of various sizes and a combination of close-proximity weapons like knives and distance weapons, including the arrow projectiles she calls a hallmark of inter-group conflict. " This suggests premeditation and planning," says Mirazon Lahr. Other, isolated examples of period violence have previously been found in the area, and those featured projectiles crafted of obsidian, which is rare in the area but also seen in the Nataruk wounds. This suggests that the attackers may have been from another area, and that multiple attacks were likely a feature of life at the time. "This implies that the resources the people of Nataruk had at the time were valuable and worth fighting for, whether it was water, dried meat or fish, gathered nuts or indeed women and children. This shows that two of the conditions associated with warfare among settled societies—control of territory and resources—were probably the same for these hunter-gatherers, and that we have underestimated their role in prehistory."
The killers carried weapons they wouldn't have used for hunting and fishing, including clubs of various sizes and a combination of close-proximity weapons like knives and distance weapons, including the arrow projectiles she calls a hallmark of inter-group conflict. " This suggests premeditation and planning," says Mirazon Lahr. Other, isolated examples of period violence have previously been found in the area, and those featured projectiles crafted of obsidian, which is rare in the area but also seen in the Nataruk wounds. This suggests that the attackers may have been from another area, and that multiple attacks were likely a feature of life at the time. "This implies that the resources the people of Nataruk had at the time were valuable and worth fighting for, whether it was water, dried meat or fish, gathered nuts or indeed women and children. This shows that two of the conditions associated with warfare among settled societies—control of territory and resources—were probably the same for these hunter-gatherers, and that we have underestimated their role in prehistory."
The title is pretty honest: this is early evidence of war. I agree that we likely cannot observe too many battlegrounds 10,000 years later. The annoying thing about these reporting on this article is that it makes it sound like humans invented war 10,000 years ago! A human 10,000 years ago is virtually identical to us today, so why would we expect them any less capable or motivated to commit mass murder than someone today?
But we're as far as I know the only species that hunts and kills each other for no other reason than for fun. With every other species you can point to a logical reason to kill another member of your own species, be it competition for food, mating rights, territory or even to eat the competitor.
We need no such petty reasons. We just do it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Cats do too. Yes, that is a silly piece, not to be taken too seriously, but Google cats kill for fun and see 7M results, not all humour.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
What people fail to understand
`People' don't "fail to understand." They're taught the wrong understanding.
"Violence never solves anything." "Violence begets violence". "Thou shalt not kill." Pablum we feed each other from birth.
Why people think this was an invention which came much later is beyond me
It's really remarkable such a simple concept has escaped you. Have you been under a rock somewhere? Our world is governed by people that are convinced violence is the exclusive fault of greedy capitalist, white Christians and their military industrial complex. But for them the world would be a big happy romper room, and before the advent of these cretins there was only peace.
That is the mentality we impart to children. How can it possibility be a surprise to you that they believe it?
We're told our ancestors were all vegan. I've been hearing that tripe my entire life. Yet every ancient habitation we've found is festooned with arrow heads and axes. Skeletal remains — animal and human — are covered in tool marks and damaged by pointed weapons. My digestive system processes large quantities of meat just fine. And so does yours, regardless of what you've allowed yourself to be convinced of.
You're been fed bullshit by bullshit artists that don't like your nature and would rather you suppress it. Having fully inculcated that bullshit, you're convinced everyone else has as well.
We haven't. Not all of us. Stop assuming you're some special snowflake with a unique insight. You're not.
According to the dominant themes of the gnostic heresies, God didn't put the tree there...He was just not powerful enough to remove it. He didn't actually create life, just matter, and uses it as a prison to keep us trapped and suffering in his insanity. But since he isn't all-powerful (that's just a lie he uses to convince us to worship him), he couldn't prevent an embodiment of wisdom from giving us a way out: knowledge.
The serpent was a messenger of wisdom, the woman was the first to attain gnosis (knowledge of her true nature as a spiritual being that is not a slave to matter), and she acted as the guide to help man along.
The degree to which any of this was interpreted as metaphor varied from gnostic sect to gnostic sect. The Quakers were pretty literal about it, to the point of refusing to breed because doing so was an indulgence in the corruption of matter. That's why they aren't around any more.
As crazy as that is....it makes more sense than the fundamentalist explanation, which amounts to (after the long-winded conversation) the claim that God is so mysterious that his justice, which is perfect, seems like injustice to us mere mortals, so we should worship and adore him even though everything he does seems like sadism and sociopathy to us. (Same is true of God's love and mercy, perfect and hence not in contradiction with his plan to keep the vast majority of us in agonizing torture for ever with no way out, even though it seems blatantly contradictory).
There is more of a logical twist in the growth of human conflict. In more social minded era, the desire to not kill fellow humans resulted in the most server punishment being permanent exile from the tribe and the individual being left eventual die alone exposed to the wilderness without any support. This tended to work fine until population densities became high enough so that exiles could find each. So the inevitably psychopathic plotting a scheming kicked it and results in the obvious, the take over of a normal tribe and killing off many males, enslaving the rest and raping of the females and a new psychopathic tribe was created (the penultimate example being spartans and the helots, warrior and slave culture). Cant have to many psychopaths otherwise they of course tear themselves apart and of course the lazy fuckers don't want to do any real work, just beat people up until they do the work for them and of course rape women as a leisure activity.
Inevitably as psychopath numbers grew by rape, so those psychopathic tribes either attacked and took over other tribes or self destructed. Something that still be can be seen to this day. The psychopaths grow in percentage and either continue to expand the range of the society they control or those societies collapse due to excessive predation on the environment or on the non psychopaths who do all the work (they continually need to bring in more non psychopaths to do the work as they are bred out, for being less competitive in psychopathic societies, so increased territory or immigration). The greater the proportion of psychopaths the quicker the collapse, unless growth is maintained, the greater the number the worse and far more violent the outcome, it is just their inherent genetic nature (those same genetic anti-social defects can and do occur in other species and those individual are similarly ostracised but lack the ability to collude togethor to take over via murder and reproduce via rape).
The most awful glaring modern example of this, American Republicans refusing abortions for victims of rape, an inherent requirement of the psychopathic reproduction cycle (in modern terms either direct rape or economic rape, using economic dominance to force unwilling reproduction partners to breed with psychopaths).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Why people think this was an invention which came much later is beyond me, we started as animals, and in all the important ways, we still are animals.
I'll explain why people think that given that I've taken the trouble of reading some books, rather than just ranting on Slashdot about other people's stupidity.
The accepted idea, which this paper tries to overthrow, is that until the beginning of agriculture there wasn't much of a reason to fight. Human densities were quite low and food was available. As such, if one group tried, for whatever reason, to take the territory of another, it was easier just to flee than to risk confrontation. That is the reason this comes as a surprise and merits an article in such an important scientific journal as Nature.
It is known that people that moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture had poorer diets, were smaller, and had more diet/hunger -related diseases than the hunter-gatherers. Even today, (close to) hunter-gatherer societies have little trouble finding food. As such, there seems to be no problem with the reasoning that food was abundant. Perhaps scientists have been wrong all along thinking people wouldn't be willing to fight for it, and this case seems to bring some credit to that theory. However, it makes more sense to me (Occam's Razor and all) that his was just some sort of an isolated incident. There are assholes everywhere. Or maybe there was indeed something worth fighting for over there and these people were ambushed.
But then people act all surprised and think war and violence was a modern invention ... our limbic system says we directly evolved from things with not much more advanced impulses than a lizard ... eat, survive, fuck.
It's an intrinsic property, and when push comes to shove, we'll revert back to it pretty quickly. Having higher brain functions doesn't mean those other things have gone away.
Yes, our limbic system tells us to eat, survive and mate. Gratuitous fighting over food that has no special intrinsic value over any other food source violates the second rule of our limbic system. So, there's no good reason to fight over food which you haven't planted and tended for, and is growing freely in trees... hence the idea that actual warring started with agriculture. After all, you don't see any other animals actually engaging in long term conflicts either. And if your comment is "well, maybe there was no food available!" the generally accepted answer is that hunter-gatherers have such little possessions that they can just move to another area to look for food. And having higher brain functions tells you, once again, that in a normal situation that is preferable to confrontation. As before, surviving to eat more and eventually mate. So what was the problem in this specific case? I have no idea, but maybe there were external factors. Maybe there were going through an extreme drought and food was indeed too scarce, which sets a different background to this whole story. Maybe this area had the best fruits ever! I guess we'll never know. But this is just one small bit of information, it doesn't make us a bunch of assholes that have to kill each other because of our limbic systems.
Capitalism is a means of acquiring power. By pooling resources, it becomes possible to do things that an individual could not do on his/her own.
One of the most common applications of power is to control, suppress, or exterminate those whose presence or existence are inconvenient.
I don't see anything in there that could imply reduced conflict unless you mean the "reduced conflict" you get from slaves and the dead.
Or are you one of those who think that Capitalism = Free Market?
A truly free market discourages conflict because conflict disrupts trading. But capitalism itself often destroys a free market, because commonly the end result of a capital-leveraged concern is monopoly as the process feeds back into itself, with the successful gaining more and more assets (power), which, in turn facilitates gaining even more power.