> Before the 1990s, “for a long time we didn’t really believe in war in prehistory,” DAI’s Hansen says. The grave goods were explained as prestige objects or symbols of power rather than actual weapons. “Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on,”
Is that really true (that "we" didn't believe in war in prehistory)? It seems like a case of taking an absurd null hypothesis, not finding any evidence to refute it, and then deciding that your null hypothesis is probably true. We have plenty of evidence of pre-literate societies engaging in organized warfare, so why would prehistoric Europe be any different?
It's true enough that in the early 2000s one of my poli-sci professors devoted most of a course to the book War Before Civilization and kept hammering on the idea of prehistoric war being widespread and common as some kind of huge revelation and surprise.
I found such intense and sustained focus baffling, since the point seemed obvious (though the evidence was interesting, at least). I've since come to understand this as some "inside baseball" grad-level anthropology leaking through to the undergrad curriculum. We newbies didn't need to be convinced because we'd never strongly held the contrary view in the first place, but the field (and related ones) had only recently convinced itself so thought it worth spending a lot of time on.
It should be a revelation because war is a civilizational concept - it's a form of organized violence, 'organization' being the keyword here.
If you're living in scattered, small tribes, then at most you can get into small tribal scuffles and vendetta ... but war requires planning, organization, support, possibly diplomacy, marshalling of resources - so it's hard to have proper war without the mechanisms in place to support it.
> We had considered scenarios of raids, with small groups of young men killing and stealing food, but to imagine such a big battle with thousands of people is very surprising
So it's not so much the violence itself that's the surprise, as it is the scale of said violence
Think about the organisation that an army involving hundreds of people must have meant:
You have to gather them. There is no written means of communication yet in that part of Europe. There are not many roads yet. They live on farms spread out over vast territories. The article says there were 5 people per square km. Most are probably kids and half are women, so to find 1 able bodied man of fighting age you might need 20 people, which would require 4 square km. Now, if like in later ages the soldiers were the second and third oldest sons, you might find 1 soldier per 10 square km. To gather an army of 500 men, you would need a territory of roughly 100*50 km.
You have to feed them for days, weeks, or maybe even months before or between battles. Crazy expensive at a time where just feeding yourself is not easy.
They have to sleep somewhere, even if just in tents.
You have to provide some weapons and equipment, even if merely wooden clubs and spears.
Unless they are slaves, which some might have been, you may have to pay them or they need to be convinced they fight for their own sake, for example because a foreign people is invading their land.
The most obvious way to organize all that is to imagine a strong regional rulers, a class of local nobles, taxes, some sort of manorialism. Structures that are known later in history (or much further south in the bronze age). But maybe Northern Europe was also organized like that already in the bronze age.
I was surprised when I first read about that theory (that pre-historic people were largely free of warfare) and it seems really unintuitive, but I also kind of get why it may have been easy to paint that picture even with some science. It’s nice to see us trudging forward and making sure to correct our records :)
This was not really "prehistory". About 100 years before the event here the battle of Kadesh [1] happened. Tens of thousands of soldiers are believed to have participated in that battle.
Not sure anyone "before the 1990s" was thinking that people were peaceful during the Bronze Age. 3200 years ago was almost to the day contemporaneous with the Trojan war [2]. That was not a time when people were peaceful and "concerned with trading and so on".
There’s a no true Scotsman type thing where some folks require some threshold of size or violence or whatever to meet the definition of war. I’m sure if you lived in the village where your neighbors kidnapped and raped your wife and daughters and stole your livestock the distinction may not quite work.
As with anything, people run with type of thing and make seemingly absurd leaps.
I would say that the ability to declare war is one of the things that distinguishes us as humans. Even chimpanzees declare war, and for the same reasons we do.
GP is indeed amongst them, though I admit I was not clear in my original statement. Chimps (and our chimp-like ancestors) both developed culture, warfare And the beginnings of language. In this sense, ‘human-ness’ is a continuum. For culture see this fascinating material...
Still, supporting a proper army is a massive economic undertaking, so it seems likely that army sizes (and battle sizes) started relatively small and grew over time. Maybe this new finding actually does suggest that scale-up happened earlier than most previous legitimate estimates.
If p is the probability of the null hypothesis and you want a low p value to promote your alternative hypothesis, you can obtain the low p value by choosing a garbage null hypothesis like "prehistoric civilizations lived in peaceful harmony with each other." Just about any other theory looks brilliant next to such hot garbage.
This is my understanding. Most of what I've read suggests that there was lots of "tribal raiding" going on, but "warfare" pretty much by definition requires larger polities such as city states or nations which are thought to be a more recent development.
I don't know about Germany, but the UK is full of ancient fortifications - from earthworks that would enclose a few huts to huge ruined stone fortresses. Almost all of these get very little attention.
In fact they are probably later, but they are definitely "prehistoric" in the sense that for most (certainly here in Scotland) there are no records, written or oral, for most.
This article was impossible not to read all the way through. I really hope to be able to write in such a compelling way at some point in my life. Admittedly, the subject matter of an epic battle is probably intrinsically more interesting than what I'll typically write about in my career, but still, the author tells such a vivid story by diving into minute details only to zoom back out to a broader context.
Go for this book, it changed my life: "The Elements of Style was listed as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 by Time in its 2011 list"
As much as I enjoy Lindybeige, I would take his analysis with a grain of salt. There’s a rather infamous case where Lindybeige released a video filled with bizarre and misleading claims about the MG34 and MG42 German machine guns (which he bizarrely conflated with each other and incorrectly dubbed the “Spandau”) and their relative merits with the Bren, followed by a rather substantial rebuttal from Military History Visualized, to which Lindybeige issued a defensive counter-rebuttal, the comments of which contain further commentary from Forgotten Weapons. If you don’t really want to get invested in an argument between three youtubers, fair enough—my takeaway is that while Lindybeige often has some idea about the topics he presents, he also has strong biases and gaps in his understanding that often result in him confidently pontificating well past his actual expertise.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 looks pretty plausible as the actual first post, though I can't remember whether postings always had ids (most pageviews used to have URLs with random names that pointed at expiring Arc closures).
Even being able to write your name was uncommon through the 1600's. Literacy has changed a lot in the last 200 years.
In 1500's(14?) Spain, being able to read and write got you better than "I'm a computer programmer in 2000" prospects. Being able to read silently, without even moving your lips(!?!), got you rumors of deals with the Devil. Now you get to graduate primary-school, and eventually learn programming. Before the recent vast expansion in programming jobs, lots of science phds were driving cabs. Veterinary masters clean cages in zoos. Minimum viable education has been seriously escalating. Even with everything still being taught very very badly. If education tech ever dramatically improves... that'll be interesting.
The question isn't about common literacy, it's about literacy among the nobility, chieftains, clerics.
Much of that, among many other things like basic education, architecture, so many materials and methods, didn't happen until Latinization/Christianization of that part of Europe.
The period of ~1000 BC was solidly Bronze age, before the classical era or antiquity (~500 BC), before the Roman Empire, before the fall of the Roman Empire leading to the Dark Ages.
"The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th century) that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire."
#/media/File:European_Output_of_Manuscripts_500%E2%80%931500.png){kind=link}
Is that really true (that "we" didn't believe in war in prehistory)? It seems like a case of taking an absurd null hypothesis, not finding any evidence to refute it, and then deciding that your null hypothesis is probably true. We have plenty of evidence of pre-literate societies engaging in organized warfare, so why would prehistoric Europe be any different?