Part of a man’s skeleton found lying in the lagoon. The skull has multiple lesions on the front and left side consistent with wounds from a blunt implement. Photograph: Marta Mirazón Lahr
The Guardian: Stone-age massacre offers earliest evidence of human warfare
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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WNU Editor: 27 victims .... men, women, and children .... all killed in the same place and time .... and violently. This was a deliberate massacre where taking prisoners was not a priority.
More News On The Confirmation Of The Oldest Known Evidence Of Human Warfare
Prehistoric Massacre Hints at War Among Hunter-Gatherers -- New York Times
Prehistoric massacre in Kenya called oldest evidence of warfare -- Reuters
10,000-Year-Old Battered Bones May Be Oldest Evidence of Human Warfare -- Live Science
Attack 10,000 years ago is earliest known act of warfare -- Science News
Anthropologists in Kenya find evidence of 10,000-year-old massacre -- DW
Prehistoric site shows brutal human attacks -- USA Today
War is as old as time: Cambridge University researchers unveil massacred bodies dating back 10,000 years -- The Independent
A Prehistoric Mass Grave Suggests Hunter-Gatherers Weren’t So Peaceful -- The Atlantic
10,000-year-old mass killing is still a mystery -- Ars Technica
Photos: The Oldest Known Evidence of Warfare Unearthed -- Live Science
4 comments:
No point in taking prisoners if you goal is to eliminate competition for food.
Competition?
Ingenuity, tech increases resources. Merely going Malthusian does not.
Hunter/Gatherers use roughly 50% of their claimed territory. The Center is where it's "safe", ususally, the outer edges are where claims overlap and hunting and gathering is "dangerous".
Origionally viewed as "bloodless", later more scientific studies of Hunter Gatherer cultures showed that the "attrition" in the border areas, where a larger group ambushes a tiny group out hunting or gathering, was almost constant, with up to 80% casualties per generation.
Of course, when one group had managed to "attrit " another group down to the point of seriously outnumbering them, or managed to form enough alliances to significantly outnumber the Luther group, then it was a no holds barred attack with no survivors.
Successfully wiping out a neighboring group, more than doubled the winning groups available resources, as the border areas between the two groups, were now part of the central "safe zone".
The result was closer to a tripling of available resources.
The question I have is how will this be used by those who advocate aggression against "our" enemies. "See, look, we've have been killing each other for ten thousand years!!! It's human nature!!!" The inevitable conflation of hunter gatherer "war" with later wars for the extraction of value, profit and the privileges accrued from said will serve comfy interests well.
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