Ever since Rousseau fondly imagined “noble savages”, it’s been fashionable among certain types of people to imagine that primitive peoples wafted about like hippies with flint tools. Surviving paleolithic cultures are patronised as “at one with their environment” and peaceable and “Zen like”.
The truth is brutally different.
As Jared Diamond was gauche enough to notice, tribal peoples wage war. Lots of war. Chronic war.
Naturally, Diamond’s daring to suggest that primitive people are anything but benevolent and peaceable was met with autistic screeching the length and breadth of polite society. Aboriginal activists insist that there was no violence in Aboriginal society before those wicked whities came along. Never mind the facts. As Stephen Pinker showed, violence has declined remarkably over the course of human history. Stephen Webb’s Paleopathology of Aboriginal Australians showed that pre-European Australia was a horrifically violent place (as had already been attested by the eyewitness accounts of early explorers and settlers).
In fact, new archaeological insights from Sudan suggest that humans have been hacking at each other for a very, very long time. Not just interpersonal violence, but all-out war. Brutal, bloody, stomach-turning war.
In 2014, archaeologists deduced that a site discovered in Sudan decades before wasn’t a prehistoric cemetery on the bucolic banks of the Nile but the site where the victims of the world’s first organized war were interred.
Actually, it was worse than that, archaeologists now say, having revisited the human remains with advanced technologies. They now believe the evidence shows not an isolated clash but a succession of violent episodes at least 13,400 years ago. In fact, the battles seem to have featured some truly nasty weapons – multipoint arrows and spears, purposely designed to cause maximal laceration and bleeding.
One notable feature of this Stone Age war was that it seemed fought along racial lines. The site featured two distinct groups of bodies: one tall with short torsos and one short with long torsos. Newer research suggests that it was a long-running state of war between different groups fighting over diminishing resources in a period of intense climate change (I wonder who was burning the fossil fuels, back then?).
The site, called Jebel Sahaba, now lies under Lake Aswan, but before it was inundated, the remains of some 61 individuals were excavated. New analysis of the remains points to prolonged, incredibly brutal war.
Violence? Extreme violence, perhaps. The team deduced that the ancient warriors had used both arrows (possibly both light and heavy ones) and spears – and that the majority of lesions were produced by “composite projectiles.”
Which means what? If you are squeamish, stop reading here.
It means that the business ends of the arrows or spears were composed of multiple sharp-edged stone blades, the team suggests. Some of these blades became laterally embedded in the bones.
Why might they have used spear or arrow points with oblique or transverse distal cutting edges – blades with various orientations? Plausibly, the purpose was to slash and cause bleeding, the team writes.
It gets worse.
Jebel Sahaba is one of the oldest-known sites of organized war between peoples. Now it’s looking like a site of early torment as well[…]
One of the male bodies, over 30 years of age (going by the state of his teeth), had 17 projectiles in direct association with his skeleton, of which two were embedded in the bone.
That said, the injuries were not confined to the men. Women and children were also shot by spears and arrows; one of the women, also over 30 years of age, was found in association with 21 stone artifacts, one embedded in her ribs […] spared the rod, the children were not: One of the bodies is of a child around 5 years of age, who took a projectile in the head.
Haaretz
Tell me again how primitive peoples live in peace and harmony, and how war is a wicked, modern invention.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD