Prehistoric violence among nomadic hunter-gatherer communities
A pregnant woman with her hands and feet bound. A man with an obsidian blade embedded in his skull. Men and women with arrow wounds to the head and neck.
That’s the grisly scene archaeologists describe at Nataruk, in modern-day Kenya, where they say they’ve uncovered unique evidence of violence in prehistoric, nomadic hunter-gatherer communities.
The massacre they’ve uncovered is striking, they say, because it pushes back against a theory that warfare didn’t become a feature of human culture until communities settled down.
Archaeologists from Cambridge University excavated the remains of 27 people, including at least eight women and six children, in a region that was once the edge of a lagoon, near modern-day Lake Turkana. The remains included 12 skeletons that were fairly complete, “preserved by the particular conditions of the lagoon,” the researchers write in Nature.
Source & further reading:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/21/463835225/discovery-of-ancient-massacre-suggests-war-predated-settlements
Paper:
http://www.nature.com/articles/nature16477.epdf
#history #archeology #violence
I was reading this the other day and thought it would be something you would find interesting. It shows human tendency to be violent towards those who are 'different', or a perceive threat is just a part of who some people are. Of course there is also is compassion, kindness and tolerance - if there wasn't, we wouldn't still be here
ReplyDeletewow, harsh. Come to think of it, we don't see a lot of paleolithic battle sites. I always assumed there were too few of them to really clash often. Additionally, lacking surplus items makes you less attractive to theives, so there's less motivation. You'd really only attack to get fresh DNA into your tribe via kidnapping, or if you actually ran into each other hunting and gathering the same resources, which would have been pretty rare if you weren't kin.
ReplyDelete