The Origins of War (500,000 BC–3,000 BC)

In a part of the Nile Valley that was soon  going to be flooded by the construction of the Aswan Dam, the archaeologist Fred Wendorf  made a groundbreaking discovery. In 1964 he found a prehistoric burial site which contained 61  skeletons near the border between Egypt and Sudan. This burial site, called Jebel Sahaba, was  constructed by members of the Qadan culture about 14,000 years ago.

Because almost all these  skeletons showed clear signs of physical trauma, Wendorf and his colleagues thought they  had found the oldest battlefield in history. But were these skeletons really  the victims of the first battle? And did organized warfare even exist at all at  that time?

If so, what did it look like? In this video we address these questions  and search for the origins of war. Recently, Isabelle Crevecour and her  colleagues re-examined the Jebel Sahaba finds.

They do not believe the skeletons are the victims  of a battle. The dead women, children and men all show signs of fresh and healed injuries. Also,  they were not all buried at the same time.

This suggests that Jebel Sahaba is not a trace  of the first battle in history, but a burial place for the victims of ongoing small acts of  violence, i. e. raids, ambushes and the like.

The injuries, which were to a large extent caused  by arrows and spears, also support this idea. At least two skeletons show that people  were struck down and then executed while lying on the ground by an arrow through  the lower jaw into the head. In some cases, the skeletons have numerous wounds.

In tomb no.  44 lies a 30-year-old woman, whose body contained 21 stone splinters from numerous arrowheads. Like  many other skeletons, she has a broken forearm, an injury that typically occurs when defending  oneself against an impact weapon such as a club.

However, the young woman's arm had healed by the  time of her death, which suggests that she had been in a fight at least twice in her life. Jebel Sahaba is considered one of the earliest archaeological pieces of evidence of  deliberate violence between groups. However, since it probably was a series of  smaller clashes over a longer period, the question remains whether these events can  be considered war.

To get to the bottom of this, we must ask what war is in the first place. Chapter 1: What is War? The Archaeologist Andrew K.

Scherer defines war  as a "a collective effort involving conflict among autonomous groups […] [that] involves not  only physical trauma but also […] emotional and psychological trauma [. . .

]". Firstly, this means,  that war takes place between two separate groups, secondly a large proportion of these groups are  involved in it in some way, and thirdly physical and psychological injuries are caused in the  process. Most archaeologists more or less agree with this definition.

In the eyes of most military  historians, however, it lacks a crucial aspect, namely that of organization. In their eyes  a fight is only to be understood as war, if several combatants are organized under a leader  and operate in a formation and/or follow a tactic. For the purposes of this video, we add this  point to our definition of war- war is organized.

Organization does not mean that there has to be a  big battle - ambushes, feuds and small skirmishes can be considered war as well. In terms of  size, the fight in the Nile Valley almost 14'000 years ago could potentially be seen as war.  However, it is unclear to what extent the clashes were organized and who was involved.

Given  the age of these finds, a question arises that has been discussed by researchers and philosophers for  centuries, namely if war has always existed and if it is simply part of human nature. Winston Churchill wrote in his treatise on World War I:  " The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has  never been peace in the world; and before history began murderous strife was universal and  unending.

" Churchill's view is in the tradition of the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes,  who believed that war was in the nature of man and imagined life in a primitive society to be "  solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Unlike Churchill, for a long time most archaeologists  agreed with the view of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, in response to Hobbes's grim scenario,  created the notion of a “noble savage” who lived peacefully in harmony with nature. As a result of  this, and in the light of the horrors of World War II, many scholars thought of prehistoric  warfare as a minor matter.

Consequently, they tried to present prehistory as a time of  peace and often ignored possible traces of war. Weapons and armor tended to be understood by  researchers as status symbols or hunting weapons, and prehistoric fortifications were seen as  ritual markers or purely practical devices. One example that still causes great debate  today are the walls of Jericho.

While some consider them a defensive structure, others,  such as the famous Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, think they were a protection against  the spring floods from the nearby mountains. This assumption that war was unimportant in  prehistory was really only challenged when the influential archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley  published his book "War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage" in 1996.

In  this book he demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was serious business and  neither primitive nor incidental. He emphasizes that conflicts in this period,  while small in comparison to modern conflicts such as the 30 Years War or the World Wars, had  enormous consequences for the hunter-gatherers of prehistory: "Primitive warfare is actually total  war waged with very limited means. " The conflicts of prehistory were mostly short and small, but  you have to put the whole thing in perspective: For the hunter-gatherer groups of the time, which  usually consisted of around 20 to 30 members, even the loss of a handful of adults  could mean a threat to their existence.

Keeley's book led archaeologists and historians  to reconsider the question of the origins of war. No conclusive answer has been found, and we  will not find one here either. It is important, however, not to make the mistake of  thinking that there was a peaceful world before history just because no traces  of war have survived.

Just as those who argue that prehistory was dark and warlike must  prove that there was war, those who view it as a lost paradise must prove that there  was a peaceful prehistory. That being said, let us search for the first traces of war. Chapter 2: The Beginning of Violence About 500,000 to 300,000 years ago, humans  mastered the use of fire and developed weapons to hunt big game.

Groups of hunters could now  use spears to kill larger animals such as deer, horses or woolly mammoths. A famous example of  these early weapons are the so-called Schöningen spears, which are between 290,000 and 337,000  years old. Afterwards, hunting methods and weapons became more and more sophisticated.

Points and  blades made of horn and stone appeared and group cooperation became more complex. By the last  Ice Age (115,000 to about 11,700 B. C.

), spears, clubs, and thrown stones were the most important  weapons. Although there is no clear evidence that the hunter-gatherers of this period also used  their weapons against members of the same species, it is very likely that they used all  available means when fighting occurred. One of the earliest indications of the  use of weapons in conflicts was found in the Shanidar cave in what is now Iraq. 

Shanidar 3, a Neanderthal about 45-50,000 years old, has a wound in the chest area that  was most likely caused by a throwing spear. Because it had long been assumed that Neanderthals  did not use throwing weapons at all and because their physique definitely put them at  a disadvantage when throwing spears, researchers assumed that it was a modern human,  that is a Homo Sapiens, who had thrown the spear. Accordingly, the find was interpreted as a sign  of conflict between Neanderthals and early humans.

This in turn became an argument in the debate  about how modern humans replaced Neanderthals. Indeed, there are two major theories  about this. The Interbreeding Theory, which assumes that humans and Neanderthals  interbred, and the Replacement Theory, which assumes that modern humans forcibly replaced  Neanderthals and Denisova humans, possibly even wiping them out in a kind of genocide –  which could be seen as early signs of war.

These possibilities are still discussed  today, even in more publicly read books, like Yuval Noah Harari's bestseller Sapiens.  According to him, only a small part of the genes of modern humans originated from Neanderthals,  which makes it unlikely that they had interbred on a large scale. Harari therefore suspects  that humans prevailed in the competition for food thanks to better technology and better social  skills, and thus gradually displaced Neanderthals.

This suggests that there were conflicts between  individual groups, but probably no organized warfare yet, and certainly no coordinated  action by humans against the Neanderthals. The two aspects that gave humans an advantage,  their use of technology and their social skills, were rapidly evolving. By the late  Paleolithic (Paleolithic 35,000 to 12,000 BC), weapons and hunting techniques were becoming more  effective, and new weapons such as the Atlatl, spear-throwing lever, appeared on the scene.

And  soon, in the Neolithic, they were increasingly used against members of the same species. Chapter 3: First traces of war When Erhard Schoch, a winegrower from the small  town of Talheim in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, was working in his garden in 1983, he made a  gruesome discovery. He came across a pile of human bones.

It was not long until, archaeologists  began digging a pit in order to get to the bottom of the matter. They discovered the skeletons of  34 men, women and children, a large number of whom had been killed by a blow to the head. The injury  patterns indicate that they had been surprised, executed with a stone axe, and then buried  in a pit.

This method of execution was also used in two other well-known massacres at  Kilianstätten and Schletz and is linked to a whole series of lesser-known acts of violence  that took place in Europe around 5,000 BC. By means of a so-called isotope analysis, a  method that sheds light on what a human or animal ate and therefore hints at a certain habitat,  researchers were able to show that the people buried in the Talheim death pit belonged to three  groups. Strikingly, there were no female corpses among those who lived in Talheim itself, which  is why archaeologists assumed that the massacre was related to an abduction of women.

However,  why the women of the other groups were executed and why so many people of different groups were  in one place at the same time remains a mystery. It is also unclear whether these massacres  indicate organized warfare between distinct groups. They, however, do indicate that  the people of the Linear Pottery culture in eastern and central Europe, which produced many  technical, economic, and social innovations , resorted to violence to secure their survival  and their interests.

The Linear Pottery culture is considered the oldest culture in central Europe  that had permanent settlements in the Neolithic. They are most famous for their long houses. The shift from hunting and gathering to a sedentary lifestyle is part of a vital change in  human history called the Neolithic Revolution.

People began to settle down, cultivate crops and  raise livestock. This not only led to greater population density, but also intensified  conflicts over resources. People built up stocks from the surpluses they produced, but  that also meant they had more to lose.

Their supplies provided a worthwhile target for those  who had not yet settled and other raiders, which, according to the historian Kauschik Roy, led to  increased fighting between groups. Along with territorial and personal disputes, the struggle  for resources was the most common trigger of conflict throughout Eurasia. To protect themselves  and their supplies and possessions, settled groups soon began to fortify their settlements.

Chapter 4: Organized Warfare Four warriors armed with bow and arrow are  attacking a group of three archers. This scene can be found on a cave painting from Morella la  Vella in northeastern Spain, which has been drawn a good 5,000 years ago. It is probably the oldest  known representation of a fight between archers.

Because of the positioning of the figures, some  historians assume that it is the first depiction of a double envelopment, with the four archers  on the left attacking the three on the right. Of course, this is far from evident, and one  should not read too much into such illustrations. But taken together with other cave paintings  dating roughly from the same time it can be taken as the first actual indication of cooperation  and tactics and thus the fourth condition of our definition of war, organized action.

One of these  depictions shows five archers marching in column behind a leader recognizable by his headdress,  and another shows the execution of a person lying on the ground. According to military historian  Arther Ferrill, these scenes indicate that there was a leader and an orderly procedure "which  is synonymous with the invention of tactics. " By this, Ferrill primarily refers to the most  basic components of tactics, namely a hierarchy, the column, and the line.

Like most researchers,  he assumes that tactics and strategy derived from hunting strategies, for example driven hunts,  in which organized groups drove large animals into swamps or over cliffs. These hunting  techniques were then transferred to the fight against members of the same species. The bow was one of four weapons that became widespread in the Epipaleolithic or  Middle Stone Age (ca 20,000 - 10,000 (6,000 bc in western Europe)) and Neolithic (Neolithic  10,000-4,500 BC (2,200 BC in western Europe)).

The other three are the sling, the dagger, and the  mace. Except for the mace, they were all used for hunting as well. The bow and arrow were  the most important of these weapons.

They drastically increased the range and efficiency  of long-range weapons, completely changing the conditions of hunting and fighting. A well thrown  spear had an efficient range of no more than 25m, a spear thrower of up to 100m. But even a simple  bow could shoot an arrow over 150m or more and was much simpler to handle.

With it, one could  attack an enemy or opponent without having to put oneself in immediate danger, carry many  projectiles, and fight effectively in a group. While Stone Age warriors of Western Europe relied  on bow and arrow, Near Eastern warriors preferred the sling. Archaeologists found large quantities  of rounded stones and fired clay balls that were certainly intended as ammunition for this weapon. 

The sling was superior to the earliest bows in terms of range and penetrating power. It took  years of training to use it effectively, but those who mastered it could be absolutely deadly  on a distance of up to 180m with a maximum range of about 400m. The sling was used in primitive  communities all over the world and was especially popular in the Mediterranean even into antiquity,  most famously on the Balearic Islands.

The most important Neolithic close combat weapons were  spears, but maces, axes and adzes with blades and heads made of stone were also used. However, they  were not nearly as important as the bow and the sling. These new and efficient weapons underline  the increasing importance of armed conflict in the Stone Age.

Combined with the evidence of tactics  and the archaeological finds, they show that all four points of our definition were ticked in the  Neolithic. Neolithic people waged war, and all too soon war took on increasingly terrifying forms. Chapter 5: An Age of War?

When in 2015 a team of researchers studied the  genetic diversity of our Stone Age ancestors, they noticed something strange: According to  their data, about 7-5,000 years ago there was only one man per 17 women in Africa, Europe and Asia.  This became known as the Y-chromosome bottleneck. Anthropologists and biologists were baffled.

Had  men almost been extinct? Soon it became clear that it was not the number of men that had declined so  drastically, but merely their genetic diversity, which means that a small, interrelated group of  men was reproducing with the bulk of the women. Nevertheless, this discovery puzzled  biologists and anthropologists.

In 2018, researchers at Stanford University  found a plausible explanation. They suspect that the diversity of Y chromosomes has decreased  due to cultural and social changes, that is, that the male gene pool has shrunk so much because  patrilineal clans have repeatedly fought each other over generations. Because membership  in these clans passed from father to son, and wars wiped out more and more of these male  bloodlines, in the end only the men of a few clans actually reproduced with a majority of all  women.

This hypothesis fits with a number of hints that a "burst of organized warfare" occurred in  the Neolithic, which Arther Ferrill considers to be as drastic as "Alexander's conquest of Persia  in the fourth century BC or the march of Islam in the seventh century AD. " The most important  indication of this development is that between 8,000 and 4,000 BC, people increasingly began to  fortify their settlements to protect themselves, their supplies and the infrastructure that was  necessary for their new sedentary lifestyle. Fortifications are probably the most impressive  and unambiguous trace of organized warfare in the New Stone Age.

They clearly show the  impact war had on humankind's way of life. One of the places that was fortified very  early is Jericho. This settlement had a ditch, walls that were three meters thick and  four meters high as well as a massive 10m tower that was built around 8'000 BC.

These  constructions probably enclosed the entire settlement with its approximately 2'000-3'000  inhabitants. However, it is disputed whether it really was primarily a defensive structure.  Some archaeologists suggest that the wall served as protection against seasonal floods.

But  even if that was the wall's main function, it was also an effective protection against  attacks, because until heavy siege equipment and mines were invented, a simple wall  gave the defenders a huge advantage. Similarly, the attackers of Çatalhöyük found  nothing but smooth walls. This settlement, which at first glance looks like a densely packed  group of houses, on closer inspection turns out to be well-fortified.

The site, which was built  between 7,500 and 6,300 BC, was not protected by a free-standing wall, but by the fact that  the houses in the outermost row were connected to each other, so that their outer walls formed  a linked line of defense. These dwellings were accessible only by ladders from the roof, so that  the outermost ring of houses even formed a kind of double wall. If attackers managed to break through  the outer wall, they were trapped in one of the simply furnished housing spaces and exposed to  the defenders on the roof.

In similar settlements, for example in Hacılar Höyük and Yumuktepe, the  same system was even combined with an outer wall. Over the next few centuries, fortifications became  common and improved rapidly. Around 5,000 B.

C in Mesopotamia, the settlement of Tell es-Sawwan  was protected by a wall with a foundation, and another 500 years later, Yangalach,  a city on the Trans-Caspian plateau, had a wall with round towers that were  no longer inside the wall but outside it. This was a milestone for defensive installations, because in case of an attack, it was possible  to shoot along the wall at an attacker’s flank. Epilogue In 1991, a mummified body was found in Tyrol.

It soon became known as Ötzi due to  an article in a Viennese newspaper, which named him after the the Ötztal Alps  where his body was found. About 5250 years ago, an arrow pierced his shoulder blade and a violent  blow, possibly from a fall, crushed his skull. The exact circumstances of his death are still debated  today.

While some initially claimed to have found blood on his equipment, the Institute for Mummy  Studies at Eurac Research center in Bozen did not detect any human blood on either the dagger or the  arrows he was carrying. However, the arrow wound in his shoulder, the cuts on his hand and arm, and  scratch marks all over his body indicate that he was involved in a fight shortly before his death.  Ötzi is possibly the best-known victim of early warfare and as such stands for the fact that  organized warfare existed in the Neolithic period.

It might not be possible to determine whether  it is in human nature to wage war or whether it is a learned behavior, but from the Neolithic  period onwards it certainly has been a crucial part of the human existence and has had a  decisive influence on the development of human culture. It was not long until humans  resorted to even more effective weapons, used more complicated tactics, and built  stronger defenses. Fortified cities would soon become city-states and eventually the first  great empires would emerge.

Cities and Empires escalated war to a new dimension in the Bronze  Age and henceforth war unlike any other force would decisively shape humanity and the course of  history - but this is a topic for a future video.