"The Oldest Known Evidence Of Human Warfare " Topic

This is Old… but shows why many Wars we see…seems it's be in our origin…

"Researchers say remains of 27 murdered tribespeople in Kenya prove attacks were normal part of hunter-gatherer relations

Some 10,000 years ago a woman in the last stages of pregnancy met a terrible death, trussed like a captive animal and dumped into shallow water at the edge of a Kenyan lagoon. She died with at least 27 members of her tribe, all equally brutally murdered, in the earliest evidence of warfare between stone age hunter-gatherers.

The fossilised remains of the victims, still lying where they fell, preserved in the sediment of a marshy pool that dried up thousands of years ago, were found by a team of scientists from Cambridge University…."
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Amicalement
Armand

Nah, they were all gentle, peaceful and noble tribes back then. :)

Dan

Warfare amongst pre-civilisation peoples seems to be an aberration.

Read:
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Semantics.

Then just keep it at one tribe/clan mobilizing, raiding and killing members of another tribe/clan for what and who it had, and or to intentionally attack in order to eliminate a competing tribe/clan by use of violence.

That should be simple enough for most to wrap their huge modern brains around.

Dan

At a time when family was life and death – much more than it is now – I'm willing to bet that the ones who were killed were not related to those who did the killing.

It is much easier to kill strangers. So easy that even chimps will do it.

Killing strangers is more logical in cases of multiple killings. It's why we historically dehumanize our enemies to convince our tribe/clan/gang to do large scale violence. Also killing multiples implies some level of plan and organization.

Dan

@ Patriot2
Thank you for your reasoned & balanced response. I'm inclined to agree with you & some of the research does too.

The anthropologists who try to make exact analogies between chimpanzee behaviour & human behaviour seem to be overegging the pudding.

If we wish to study the behaviour of hunter-gathers in the past, the study of such groups surviving in a modern context must be very compelling.

You would be aware of ritual warfare in Papuan & other societies.
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I think labelling such carefully moderated, low level violence, "warfare" is misleading & I believe that "war" between ancient h-g groups would probably have followed a similar model with the occasional bloody massacre being an exception rather than the rule.

All in all, it's a fascinating issue that regularly seems to veer from Rousseau's "noble savage" to a pseudo-Darwinian "nature, red in tooth & claw" view. Certainly at the moment, archaeology seems to support the low-level of organised violence concept.

@ Cacique Caribe

I'm willing to bet that the ones who were killed etc

Opinions are all very well but do you have any substantive information to back this up?

That should be simple enough for most to wrap their huge modern brains around.

The size of Homo Sapiens brains doesn't seem to have changed in the relatively short period the species has been around. So "modern" would be redundant here.

Interesting article on a prehistoric massacre of some kind. I agree that there are many possibilities. The article on Jomon period Japan is also interesting as a counter-point, but why would conditions in Japan 10k years ago be anything like life in Kenya at the same period? As far as we know, the ancient Jomon may have been peaceful due to an abundance of territory and resources on their islands that there was little reason for inter-group conflict. The Jomon left us no written records so we don't even know how they considered themselves within their own communities. Were all Jomon groups closely related kin-wise? Did they all speak the same language?

Back to East Africa at the same time. Again we know very little about whether the people living around Lake Turkana in those days represent a single culture or multiple cultures. Maybe there was competition over limited resources (though at that time East Africa was more fertile than today). One can only look at the preserved victims and wonder what happened. Some sort of violence between rival bands seems possible,but also violence within a band. Even an event such as one faction of a band wiping out another faction that lost in a power struggle, or even irrational slaughter such as sacrifice or witch hunting.

From what I understand. Cro-Mags were "smarter" and maybe even a bit more "adaptable" than Neanderthal. But I was not there so …

I did have a DNA test, and it appears, many modern humans have some Neanderthal "markers" in their DNA. If I understand the information provided by the 23 And Me site. It also appears for the record, I have only a few Neander traits. However, I know based on interaction with some of the members of the gym I use to manage/where I worked out. They certainly had many Neander DNA markerd than I and some others I know …

Regardless, it appears both Cro-Mags and Neanders existed briefly at the same time. Cross-breeding most likely/assuredly occurred. However, it seems to me the age old "survival of the fittest" paradigm occurred. And the "superior" human won out, i.e. the Cro-mag. Which if I understand it correctly were basically what we modern humans are.

New research believes there my have been 2 other type "humans" existing at the same time as the Neander and Cro-mags also. But it appears more research, etc. needs to occur. And again, I was not there … so …

In my continuing trend of full disclosure, as I have said I really have nothing to hide …

Ralph DeLucia
100%

European
95.6%

Middle Eastern & North African
4.4%

Unassigned
< 0.1%

European
95.6%

Southern European
95.5%

Italian
69.6%

Balkan
12.8%

Iberian
1.5%

Broadly Southern European
11.6%

Ashkenazi Jewish
< 0.1%

Broadly European
< 0.1%

Ashkenazi Jews are thought to have settled in Central and Eastern Europe about 1,000 years ago. DNA shows clearly the connections among those who consider themselves to be Ashkenazi Jewish: two Ashkenazi Jewish people are very likely to be "genetic cousins", sharing long stretches of identical DNA.

Italian
Balkan
Middle Eastern
Iberian
North African
Ashkenazi Jewish

Ralph DeLucia
100%

European
95.6%

Southern European
95.5%

Italian
69.6%

Balkan
12.8%

Iberian
1.5%

Broadly Southern European
11.6%

Ashkenazi Jewish
< 0.1%

Broadly European
< 0.1%

Middle Eastern & North African
4.4%

North African
2.7%

Middle Eastern
1.0%

Broadly Middle Eastern & North African
0.7%

Unassigned
< 0.1%

No Data Available

Sorry guys … I ran out of time to post … so there are some big breaks, etc. However, for those interested in their DNA, this is a good example of what you can expect generally. Based on your DNA … No mine … of course …

Regarding the Neanderthals had bigger brains theory, if you look at the data the average was in fact slightly smaller but the variance was greater meaning that some neanderthals had bigger brains than the modern humans.
Also I'm not aware of any link between IQ and brain size in modern humans as nuron connnection density is not determined by gross size.

Robert

I also think in this case … size does not matter …

Cacique: "At a time when family was life and death – much more than it is now – I'm willing to bet that the ones who were killed were not related to those who did the killing."

Patriot2: "And yet, even today, most murder victims know their killers. That's true twice over when the murder victims are women and children."

That's just my point. Everyone keeps trying to compare these scenarios to statistics from societies in the developed world or to areas with large populations. Apples to oranges.

As I said, every member of you small tribe played a vital role, they had to or they would go extinct, just like in some small isolated tribes in the Amazon or in a couple of the Andaman Islands tend to do to this very day. And yet they have no problem showing open hostility to outsiders, of whatever race or tribe they might be.

Dan

It depends on what is meant by "war."

If "war" is simply shouting, "Let's go kill the other tribe," and then having your tribe attempt to do so, while the other tribe fights to stop you (or reverse the goal) then yes, primitive man undoubtably engaged in "war."

We call it "tribal warfare" today, though it's really not much different than a "gang war," either. (When two criminal organizations set out to kill each other, is that warfare?)

As for the situation described, is it warfare when people are massacred, or is it mass murder? Does it matter the number of attackers, or the defensive capabilities of the victims? Is it warfare if you succeed in a violent action, achieving your goal without the enemy stopping you or even providing any defense at all? Is one attack that wins (or loses) it all a "war?" Even if it's just a battle, or even a slaughter, is the action itself still "warfare?"

The problem is that mass death of innocents can indeed occur in warfare. And, ironically, "warfare" can even happen with very few deaths at all. But it is the latter that tells us that warfare is different. Warfare clearly involves concerted planning to achieve a political goal through military might and/or intimidation. It is thus impossible to ascertain whether the evidence is of a political goal at all, except in the loose sense of "we want our people to have all the food, not your people," and even that's an assumption.

In the end, it's really just a poor choice of words. "Warfare" is an unnecessarily complicated term for what is in this incident really just mass violence. But the notion that our ancestors were "peaceful, gentle and noble" is just misty-eyed nonsense, up there with the "noble savage" trope and the idiotic notion that people who "live at one with nature" are of course more peaceful and better than people who create cities and technology, when there is really no evidence of that (and a great deal of evidence otherwise). People are people; some are good, some are bad, some are peaceful, some are violent, and most can be any of these at almost any time, if pressed. The years and the technology make no difference, save in the broader potential impact of the actions.

All Good points … E.g. the Hatfields & McCoys Feud, biker gangs, gang bangers, drug dealers or etc. killing off each other. Is a little different in scope, intent, motive, etc. Than e.g., WWI & II, Korea, Vietnam, etc.

Or even when one considers what is going on in Syria, Iraq, A'stan, Africa, etc., etc., … Albeit tribal differences come into play at times. But it is more than just that in many cases …