The earliest found evidence of small scale warfare discovered in the Nile River valley. Seems to have been triggered over dwindling resources.
Hunter-gatherers first launched violent raids at least 13,400 years ago
More than 8,000 years before the rise of Egyptian civilization, hunter-gatherers went on the attack in the Nile Valley.
Skeletons of adults, teens and children excavated in the 1960s at an ancient cemetery in Sudan known as Jebel Sahaba display injuries incurred in repeated skirmishes, raids or ambushes, say paleoanthropologist Isabelle Crevecoeur and her colleagues. The site, which dates to between 13,400 and 18,600 years ago, provides the oldest known evidence of regular, small-scale conflicts among human groups, says Crevecoeur, of the University of Bordeaux in France.
Although people buried at Jebel Sahaba don’t show signs of having fought in a one-time battle, they participated in an early form of sporadic warfare, the researchers conclude May 27 in Scientific Reports.
“Repeated violent episodes were probably triggered by well-recorded environmental changes” around the time people were buried at Jebel Sahaba, Crevecoeur says.
Signs of human activity declined sharply in the Nile Valley between around 126,000 and 11,700 years ago. Toward the end of that span, hunter-gatherers occupied floodplains in what’s now southern Egypt and northern Sudan. As the Ice Age waned, a fluctuating climate contributed to declines in prime fishing and hunting spots. Competition for those resources probably triggered fighting among regional groups, the researchers suspect.
The new report fits a scenario in which ancient, possibly culturally distinct communities violently raided each other when dwindling resources threatened their survival, says bioarchaeologist Christopher Stojanowski of Arizona State University in Tempe, who has studied the Jebel Sahaba remains but did not participate in the new study.
Ancient people carefully dug graves for their dead at Jebel Sahaba, interring bodies in similar, flexed postures. “So amidst the apparent hardship, amidst the apparent violence and tragedy, we still see humanity here,” Stojanowski says.