Earliest evidence of Warfare

[frigidmagi]

smithsonian magazine

Skulls smashed by blunt force, bodies pin-cushioned by projectile points and hapless victims—including a pregnant woman—abused with their hands bound before receiving the fatal coup de grâce.

This violent tableau resembles something from the darker side of modern warfare. But it instead describes the grizzly demise of a group of African hunter-gatherers some 10,000 years ago. They are the victims of the earliest scientifically dated evidence for human group conflict—a precursor to what we now know as war.

The battered skeletons at Nataruk, west of Kenya's Lake Turkana, serve as sobering evidence that such brutal behavior occurred among nomadic peoples, long before more settled human societies arose. They also provide poignant clues that could help answer questions that have long plagued humanity: Why do we go to war, and where did our all too common practice of group violence originate?

"The injuries suffered by the people of Nataruk—men and women, pregnant or not, young and old—shock for their mercilessness," says Marta Mirazon Lahr of the University of Cambridge, who co-authored the study published today in the journal Nature. Still, she notes, "what we see at the prehistoric site of Nataruk is no different from the fights, wars and conquests that shaped so much of our history, and indeed sadly continue to shape our lives.”

Nataruk's prehistoric killers did not bury their victims' bodies. Instead their remains were preserved after being submerged in a now dried lagoon, near the lake shore where they lived their final, terrifying moments during the wetter period of the late Pleistocene to early Holocene.

Researchers discovered the bones in 2012, identifying at least 27 individuals on the edge of a depression. The fossilized bodies were dated by radiocarbon dating and other techniques, as well as from samples of the shells and sediment surrounding them, to approximately 9,500 to 10,500 years ago.

It's not clear that anyone was spared at the Nataruk massacre. Of the 27 individuals found, eight were male and eight female, with five adults of unknown gender. The site also contained the partial remains of six children. Twelve of the skeletons were in a relatively complete state, and ten of those showed very clear evidence that they had met a violent end.

In the paper, the researchers describe “extreme blunt-force trauma to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs, arrow lesions to the neck, and stone projectile tips lodged in the skull and thorax of two men.” Four of them, including a late-term pregnant woman, appear to have had their hands bound.


This female skeleton was found reclining on her left elbow, with fractures on the knees and possibly the left foot. The position of the hands suggests her wrists may have been bound. (Marta Mirazon Lahr)
The murderers' motives are lost in the mists of time, but there are some plausible interpretations that could challenge conventional ideas about why people go to war.

Warfare has often been associated with more advanced, sedentary societies that control territory and resources, farm extensively, store the foods they produce and develop social structures in which people exercise power over group actions. Conflict erupts between such groups when one wants what the other possesses.

The bodies at Nataruk provide evidence that these conditions aren't necessary for warfare, because the hunter-gatherers of the time lived a far simpler lifestyle. Yet the killings have the hallmarks of a planned attack rather than a violent chance encounter.

The killers carried weapons they wouldn't have used for hunting and fishing, Mirazon Lahr notes, including clubs of various sizes and a combination of close-proximity weapons like knives and distance weapons, including the arrow projectiles she calls a hallmark of inter-group conflict.

“This suggests premeditation and planning,” Mirazon Lahr notes. Other, isolated examples of period violence have previously been found in the area, and those featured projectiles crafted of obsidian, which is rare in the area but also seen in the Nataruk wounds. This suggests that the attackers may have been from another area, and that multiple attacks were likely a feature of life at the time.

“This implies that the resources the people of Nataruk had at the time were valuable and worth fighting for, whether it was water, dried meat or fish, gathered nuts or indeed women and children. This shows that two of the conditions associated with warfare among settled societies—control of territory and resources—were probably the same for these hunter-gatherers, and that we have underestimated their role in prehistory.”

“This work is exciting and it suggests, at least to me, that this type behavior has deeper evolutionary roots,” says Luke Glowacki, an anthropologist with Harvard University's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

We aren't the only species to engage in such behavior, he adds. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, regularly engage in lethal attacks. “To deliberately stalk and kill members of other groups, as the chimps do, that alone is very suggestive of an evolutionary basis for warfare,” he says.



13.-KNM-WT-71264-in-situ-3.jpg
A closeup image of the skull of a male skeleton from the Nataruk site. The skull has multiple lesions on the front and left side consistent with wounds from a blunt implement such as a club. (Marta Mirazon Lahr, enhanced by Fabio Lahr)
But evidence to support or refute such theories has been thin on the ground. The sparse previous examples of prehistoric violence can be interpreted as individual acts of aggression, like a 430,000-year-old murder victim found in Spain last year. That makes Nataruk a valuable data point in the fossil record.

More clues may be found among the behaviors of living peoples. Researchers can make inferences about conflict among early human hunter-gatherers by studying their closest living parallels, groups like the San of southern Africa. But such comparisons are tenuous, Glowacki notes.

“The San are very different from our ancestors. They live in nations, they are surrounded by pastoralists and they go to markets. That limits the utility of making inferences about our own past.” Still there are other suggestions that resource competition isn't always at the root of human violence.

“In New Guinea for example, where there are abundant resources and land, you've traditionally seen very intense warfare driven by tribal and status dynamics,” Glowacki says. “We don't have any way of knowing if that was involved at Nataruk.”

And whatever its roots, warfare persists even in the same region of Africa: “This is still an area with a lot of intense violence in the 21st century,” Glowacki notes. “It was eye-opening from my perspective that the first really good fossil evidence for warfare among ancient hunter-gatherers comes from a place where there is still, today, this ongoing intergroup violence.”

But, the authors point out, there is another aspect of human behavior that has also stood the test of time.

“We should also not forget that humans, uniquely in the animal world, are also capable of extraordinary acts of altruism, compassion

[Josh]

So they done found your spiritual ancestors, or at least the people lost to your spiritual ancestors.

[frigidmagi]

Marine's don't murder prisoners.

[Josh]

Whoops, yes, they were prisoners.

[Cynical Cat]

Frigid has neglected to mention this so I will: human prehistory is violent. Primitive societies are more violent than modern ones. This is a great find, but there is nothing shocking about violent death in hunter-gatherer societies. This shit is why our ancestors put up corrupt priests, tyranny, and unjust laws because a shitty tyrant who provides some order and security is better than raiders hitting your camp just before dawn and killing the men, raping the women, taking the kids, and killing everyone who they didn't enslave.

[Lys]

See you would think that is the case, but actual contact between civilizatized and hunter-gatherer societies in North America generally resulted in a hell of a lot of Englishmen wanting to join the Indians, and damn few Indians wanting to join the Englishmen. Hell, to quote Ben Franklin, "When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language, and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived a while with them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them."

Note that in some cases, this includes young white children who were taken prisoner after watching their parents torture-murdered in front of them. They still preferred to stay with the Indians. The rise of civilization is actually something of a mystery, because by pretty much every measure it's better for the average person to be a hunter-gatherer than to be a member of a pre-modern civilization. Hunter-gatherers are generally taller, healthier, and have more leisure time than pre-modern farmers, and people in general just seem to like the lifestyle better. And yet civilization happened, and not just once, but repeatedly across multiple areas of the globe. Nobody really knows why given that when people are given a real choice, a taste of both lifestyles, civilization is not the one they tend to pick. (At least before the modern day, after grinding this shit out for over 10 000 years, we finally built a technological base sufficient to arguably make the average person better off civilized.)

So my best guess here is that the reason why our ancestors put up with corrupt priests, tyranny, and unjust laws is that by the point those propped up, they were already stuck inside of civilization and had no other choice. The whole thing probably started because it gives a competitive advantage over one's hunter-gatherer neighbours, and at least in the primitive stages it's not so bad on the individual level. But it's a trap, once you're in it you can't leave, even after it becomes unpleasant. At the societal level the larger population produced through civilization can only be supported by maintaining that civilization, trying to dismantle it means everyone starves. At the individual there's no hunter-gatherers around to defect to because your civilization killed them all, and even if there are you're an outsider to them and odds are pretty good they'd rather just kill you. So it becomes self-perpetuating.

[Cynical Cat]

Settled societies allow food storage, more specialization, and are less violent. But if you're living on the frontier where you have more violence anyway and hunter-gatherers can trade with settled societies for things they want or need, then it might be more appealing. It's not like 19th Century people had studies showing hunter-gatherers had higher homicide rates than the worst parts of modern Detroit.

[Lys]

Not everyone in 18th and 19th century America was living in the dangerous frontier. Indeed there was little difference between living in a coastal North American city and living in Europe. Yet we don't see much in the way of Indians going down to Philadelphia and thinking and it was awesome how safe and secure everyone was and deciding to stay, but we do see white people being introduced to the wild dangerous lives of the Indians deciding they liked them better. It might very well be the case that even if 19th century Americans had those studies telling them just how dangerous hunter-gatherer groups are, a bunch of them might have still gone and run off to join the Comanche. People don't tend to do what they think is right for them, they tend to do what feels right for them, and then rationalize accordingly. A lot of the baseline wiring on human brains is probably still oriented toward hunter-gathering, which means that it may very well intrinsically feel better and more fulfilling, even if it it's more dangerous.

And then it's not necessarily the case that less violence was a benefit of civilization to begin with. The murder rate in European societies was astronomically high until the High-to-Late Middle Ages, at which point it started dropping and has continued to drop to the modern day. This is probably on account of a combination of stronger state institutions and a long-standing human self-domestication project. However if we go back to the dawn of civilization, was it actually the case that settled societies were less violent? And even if they were, did the people living in them really make the trade-off of worse quality of life for greater security? Or was it more that they could produce more food and specialize better, and so out-competed their neighbours even if in the long run it wound up sucking more for everyone? (Though in the longer run, it's worked out pretty awesome.)

[Cynical Cat]

Yes, it was vastly more safe. That's how bad it was. We have very good studies of the rates of violence in surviving hunter-gatherer tribes (thanks anthropologists) and while crime rate tracking is hard, homicide is for various reasons, really fucking easy. When we deal with American Indians and way of life we have some other issues thrown in before we get into Stockholm Syndrome for kidnapped kids. Racial, cultural, and religious prejudice for one and then there's the little detail that things like living in towns and larger societies with the rule of law was something that some of those terrible, savage Native Americans were doing before white dudes every showed up.

[Lys]

Pinker's figures on the deaths from warfare among various societies show that while hunter-gatherers are extremely violent, agriculturalist tribal societies, whom we might perhaps call semi-civilized, are even more violent still (albeit with very wide variance in both cases). This suggests that the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture did not just bring with it worse nutrition, lower health outcomes, and longer working hours, but also more violence. Which again tells me that the main driving factor behind the development of agriculture, the first component of civilization, was done for the competitive advantage in a population pressure scenario, and not for the security benefits because there were none. On the other hand, it also suggests to me that the driving factor behind the development of the state, the second component of civilization, was in fact mainly security. So i guess in a way we're kind of right, as it is the case that people tolerated injustice and tyrants in order to attain security, but it is also the case that this is not why we moved away from hunter-gathering.

[Cynical Cat]

The most violent people on Earth are hunter-gatherers. Pinkers figures show a range of violence, so yes some parts of the second most violent group are more violent than some members of the most violent group, but hunter-gatherers are overall still on top and compose the most violent people on Earth with Yanomami ad Jivaro occupying the top spots. Agriculture was probably encouraged more by food security than physical security and you're absolutely right about decline in things like leisure time and health. It did, however, mean less starvation, and more specialization and that does lead to the state and its restrictions on physical violence and the rise of other conflict resolution methods.

[Lys]

The Yanomami and the Jivaro are classified by Pinker as hunter-horticulturists, not hunter-gatherers. His data shows that the upper bound on violence in hunter-gatherer groups versus hunter-horticulturist groups is about the same, but the hunter-gatherers have a much lower bound, which brings down their average violence rate in comparison. This means that semi-civilized groups, those who have developed agriculture but not state structure, are no less violent than the non-civilized groups who have neither. Thus settlement and agriculture do not reduce violence, the state does, but you must have the first before developing the latter.

Not sure that agriculture really means less starvation, farmers are a lot more malnourished than hunter-gatherers, that's precisely why there's different health outcomes. It seems to me that agriculture only gets you greater food security in a population pressure scenario were good hunting and gathering is scarce on account of too many people. Without a group niche-hopping into agriculture, that scenario would resolve itself with a sudden demographic collapse and then take centuries to arise again. Meanwhile agriculturalists still get to have demographic collapses every few centuries, but also be sickly, malnourished, and overworked. On the other hand once you get full civilization the agriculturalist are less likely to meet violent ends. So which one is objectively better for the average person depends on your opinion of being happier vs less likely to be murdered (and/or raped for females). Which one is subjectively better is harder to gauge, but i'm still leaning towards people being biased toward what they evolved to do. Hence the long-standing fascination with the noble savage that civilized people have, but which is not reciprocated by said savages.

[Cynical Cat]

Classification of hunter-gatherer versus hunter-hortoculturalists is arguable, but in either case we are talking about ignoble savages. As for food security versus malnutrition, these are too different things. Agriculturalists are more likely to have malnutrition, but they are more food secure because their capacity to store food is superior. A more sedentary lifestyle means more disease and less hunting can lead to various deficiencies, but they are fucked less by a bad year. It's trade offs.

As for romantization, that's easy. The grass is always greener on the other side and the ugly side of modern civilization can be seen in the bottom of the class system without difficulty. Grasping that all your female relatives run that risk of being married via rape-abduction and that meeting a stranger might very well end in your death are regular features of this life is something less obvious for sentimental, comfortable westerners.

[Lys]

Except this romantization still produced a fair number defections of civilized people to hunter-gathering people, and very little of the reverse. Actual people who experienced the realities of uncivilized life in North America generally seemed to like it much better than any of the virtues of civilization. This cannot be because they did not realize how violent it was, they lived it, surely they noticed it was pretty fucking violent. It would seem to me that people simply intrinsically weigh "less work, better food, more fun" part more heavily than the "more likely to be horribly raped/tortured/murdered" part. Which fits pretty well with my notions of human nature, as people regularly spends large amounts of time and effort doing stuff they enjoy even if it's risky and to their own detriment, and hunter-gathering is literally the thing evolution wired us to do. (Which we've been slowly rewiring ourselves to not do since the Neolithic, but it's only been about 10 000 years, these things take time.) In fact, thinking about it, it occurs to me that some of the super-addictive mechanics in like MMOs could be argued to be proxies for hunter-gathering behaviour, and people have destroyed their lives playing those. So i really do think we kind of built civilization in spite ourselves, though it's definitely worked out really awesome in the very long run.

[Cynical Cat]

Yes, I agree. We all weigh pros and cons differently and anyone who chooses to live on a dangerous frontier isn going to be more tolerant of risk.

[Josh]

Evolutionarily successful strategies can produce very uncomfortable circumstances. Look at the amazing success of the chicken. There's probably trillions of them around the world, but ain't none of us trading up for life in the chicken mill.

Chickens don't get a choice, obviously, but the sheer monolithic success of agriculture made it inevitable that it would run wild.

It's not a transition that happens overnight, it's a series of steps that lead to consolidation. Plant some plants so you don't have to go forage for them, now you're fixed to that plot of land until the soil goes bad, thus decreasing your range. Now you need water, dig a well so you don't have to lug it up from the river. All these steps eventually lead to massive fields of grain and etc., but they don't happen in a single generation.

Another aspect is that once you've settled down with a bit of controlled agriculture, you lose the knowledge base required for successful hunter-gathering.

Basically, nobody 'makes the choice', and viewed from that perspective it kind of becomes inevitable over time.

[Lys]

Man, having started to read Empire of the Summer Moon, i suddenly feel the need to clarify something that i consistently implied above but never stated outright. When i was talking about white people joining the Indians and liking it better than European civilization, i meant the ones who were accepted and treated as full members of their tribe. Captives who were kept as slaves? Yeah, they were all real eager to get back to civilization, for reasons that should be obvious. Just had to mention it, because Empire pulls no punches in establishing just how brutal shit got out in the Wild West.

[Josh]

Yeah, both sides have been romanticized at various intervals, which does a disservice to the fact that there was some really brutal conflict between folks who did not particularly regard each other as human.

[Cynical Cat]

Well, actually you do choose it's just that you choose without knowing how the future is going to work out and constrained by the conditions of the present. The universe gives no shit about your informed consent.