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Slaughter At The Bridge: Uncovering A Colossal Bronze Age Battle (sciencemag.org)
schwit1 quotes a report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science via Sciencemag.org: About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can't be found in any history books -- the written word didn't become common in these parts for another 2000 years -- but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology. "If our hypothesis is correct that all of the finds belong to the same event, we're dealing with a conflict of a scale hitherto completely unknown north of the Alps," says dig co-director Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage in Hannover. "There's nothing to compare it to." It may even be the earliest direct evidence -- with weapons and warriors together -- of a battle this size anywhere in the ancient world.
and you believed it? The location is known and has been excavated.
btw, The Flood was in Gloucestershire, and Noah was a boat builder on the Severn. That is why the English are God's chosen people. You read it here first 'cos I just made it up.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Sounds like a reasonable extrapolation from what we do know, to be honest. If there's a troll here it's you.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The 'bloody scrum of europeans killing each other over something cryptic' bit isn't exactly news; but TFA describes a relatively massive number of combatants, with isotopic signatures suggesting they came a considerable distance to reach the site and with equipment and healed wounds suggesting that they were comparatively experienced rather than just the local peasant militia(which, given the low population density of the place at the time, wouldn't have amounted to much). I have to wonder how this all worked logistically: ~1,200BC wasn't exactly renowned for its medical technology, regular agricultural surpluses, or food storage capabilities. Aside from motivating this many guys to slog all the way to this site, simply keeping them healthy and fed long enough so they could kill one another before disease or starvation got them must have been a real trick.
Actually it was... Healers back then seem to have had a pretty good track record with things like arrow extraction, they were probably able to sew up and to some degree disinfect stab and slash wounds and they could repair scull damage from blunt trauma (read: hand thrown rocks, sling shot projectiles and war clubs) which is pretty impressive. I once saw an old Zulu medicine man describe how you treat a scull fracture due to a blow from a war club. You usually have to drill into the scull making carefully sure you don't drill into the brain matter which takes training and specialist tools. Sometimes this is done simply to pull out a section of scull that is pressuring the brain, in other cases it is t relieve pressure on the brain in which case you get a sound that he described as a "like the one you hear when you open a can of soda". If there is an impact fracture like this one you may have to remove large fragments of bone, do some carving, chiselling and pick bone fragments out of the brain matter before you sew the wound up. There are recorded survival rates of up to 70-80%.
You missed the point entirely. Sure the Sioux could do it, but that was in the "modern age" (compared to the battle here in question) with "modern" knowledge.
The battle in question happened thousands of years ago...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
There are actually prehistorical findings roughly up to 40k years old of scull and probably brain surgery. Skulls that where closed again with shells and evidently the bone grew back into the edges of the shells in a way that indicate the survivours left decades after that injury.
Regarding medical knowledge (that is more a comment to the parents), I think the misconception comes from the fact that modern people have not much of it, except for *cough* *cough* doctors and nurses.
E.g. Salvia (the plant) and Salvia (from the mouth) and Peppermint most definitely were well known as "medicals". Or mushrooms ...
Plenty of animals have "medical knowledge" and eat appropriated plants or even "earth/soil" when needed.
Probably most people consider herbs for healing hokus pokus not knowing that the exact same substances are meanwhile simply crafted chemically ... I for my part have always a few oils (instead of the plants or herbs) to treat simple stuff. E.g. blunt injuries from sports, are best treated with arnica. You hardly find anything modern that is "better" than it. And a cream with 10% or more Arnica costs close to nothing.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Nothing from this time and place got recorded, not a single word. People were illiterate. There is art that appears suggestive of tales and religious myths centred around seafaring and sun worship.
The earliest records from northern Europe were written by Roman explorers and historians more than a millennium later.
... it could have been part of some major trans-European migration like the one that brought down the Roman empire. Secondly it could have been a large scale raid like the armies that raided Britain and France during the peak of the Viking age.
one might wonder what could have been meaningful enough to these people to generate such massive warfare.
In a word: Amber... There were other valuable trade goods flowing down from Denmark/Norway/Sweden (and Eastern Baltic coast too) but Amber was transported down through this region from Denmark for example for thousands of years but along with tin, which did not occur in Scandinavia or N-Germany, amber which is plentiful in the region was probably one of the most valuable trade goods of the age. Recent surveys have found a number of forts dotting the Amber trade route from the Baltic through the Alps and into Italy. I remember at least one location in Germany, Austria or Switzerland where Mycenaean artefacts were found including a seal IIRC. The Amber route seems to have been heavily contested and the leaders of the tribes who found themselves sitting astride that trade route and were able to tax the merchants using it would have been richer than god and the focus of much envy from their less well located neighbours. It's the old story, you find oil under your land and your neighbour who doesn't have any oil under his land still feels entitled to drill obliquely under the property line into your oil deposits.