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Thread: Hunter-gatherers first launched violent raids at least 13,400 years ago

  1. #11
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    Chris's Avatar Senior Member
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister D View Post
    I didn't realize there was still debate about this. It seems likely, IMO, that warfare predates the state. How do you explain the mace, for example? It can't be used for hunting but it's clearly a weapon. It's sole purpose appears to be cracking human skulls.
    There's not really a debate on that. I should have looked for the actual paper and not the popular science version. Found it here: New insights on interpersonal violence in the Late Pleistocene based on the Nile valley cemetery of Jebel Sahaba and it says "Since its discovery in the 1960′s, the Jebel Sahaba cemetery has been regarded as the oldest evidence of organized warfare caused by environmental constrains e.g." Their conclusion:

    For the first time since Wendorf’s original publication11, a complete reassessment of the Jebel Sahaba cemetery was used to clarify the nature, extent and dating of the violence experience by the individuals buried at the site. First, direct radiocarbon dates, between 13.4 and 18.2 ka, confirm the antiquity of the site, making Jebel Sahaba the oldest cemetery in the Nile valley. Second, using modern approaches and methods, our reappraisal undeniably supports the interpersonal nature of the lesions and confirms the projectile origin of most of the trauma. Our analyses also show that out of sixty-one individual, 26.2% of had signs of perimortem traumas and 62.3% displayed healed and/or unhealed traumas (excluding undiagnosed lesions) regardless of the age-at-death or sex, including children as young as 4 years old. Third, the reassessment of the lithic artefacts associated to each burial reveals that most were elements of composite projectile weapons. Fourth, although double and multiple burials are present, most probably indicating simultaneous deaths, demographic data and burial disturbance caused by subsequent interments does not support a single catastrophic event. While acknowledging the possibility that the Jebel Sahaba cemetery may have been a specific place of burial for victims of violence, the presence of numerous healed traumas and the reuse of the funerary space both support the occurrence of recurrent episodes of small scale sporadic interpersonal violence at the end of the Pleistocene. Most are likely to have been the result of skirmishes, raids or ambushes. Territorial and environmental pressures triggered by climate changes are most probably responsible for these frequent conflicts between what appears to be culturally distinct Nile Valley semi-sedentary hunter-fisher-gatherers groups.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Mister D (05-30-2021)

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    carolina73's Avatar Senior Member
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    Even wild animals are most territorial with their own species.

    I would be surprised to learn that the earliest men did not fight. The instinct in seeing another unknown person would have been fear, distrust...

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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Does the mace go back that far, 13,000 years ago? As a simple rock it could have been used to break bones to access marrow.

    Still, man would have to have developed warlike behavior in order for the state to come into existence. That and agriculture to sustain sedentary life, and a bureaucracy of bean counters.
    Competing for scarce resources is enough for warlike behavior. No state required.
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    Quote Originally Posted by hanger4 View Post
    Wiki is a lousy source, but I'm happy to stand corrected. As a concept with a club I suppose you're correct, but as that weapon proper with simpler designs, I'd still say Bronze age. Britanica I think is w here I got that.

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