Violence and the Neanderthals

davef · Jan 7, 2019

I have a hard time with the "war started with agriculture" thing. Tribal warfare has always been around and started well before the Neolithic

Angela · Jan 7, 2019

SYNCHRONIC said:
Well there is also contrary evidence to show that no such warfare occurred until the advent of agriculture, and perhaps the violence inflicted may have been by other "proto-humans", tusked/horned animals, or primates. Also most of the links you provide discuss chimpanzees and relatively modern tribal groups. Also I'm not sure what "gender equality" has to do with any of this. People before the past 20-50 years knew the obvious differences between males and females, and that it is a complimentary arrangement, symbiotic, yin and yang, not two equal and identical forces. Our minds and bodies function incredibly differently.

"Some scholars believe that this period of "Paleolithic warlessness" persisted until well after the appearance of Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago, ending only at the occurrence of economic and social shifts associated with sedentism, when new conditions incentivized organized raiding of settlements.^[5]^[6]
Of the many cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic, none depicts people attacking other people explicitly,^[7]^[8] but there are depictions of human beings pierced with arrows both of the Aurignacian-Périgordian (roughly 30,000 years old) and the early Magdalenian (c. 17,000 years old), possibly representing "spontaneous confrontations over game resources" in which hostile trespassers were killed; however, other interpretations, including capital punishment, human sacrifice, assassination or systemic warfare cannot be ruled out.^[9]
Skeletal and artifactual evidence of intergroup violence between Paleolithic nomadic foragers is absent as well.^[8]^[10]"

Please provide the source for these quotes so I can check the age of the supporting papers, as every recent paper of the last years presents an entirely different picture. If they're not recent, it's a lesson in the fact that you really have to keep up with science; it changes as methods and procedures become better.

Also, for the record, you don't look for portrayal of killings on cave paintings; you look for it on the skeletal remains of people.

Alyan · Jan 7, 2019

CrazyDonkey · Jan 7, 2019

Conflict over territory, resources, and females is as old as the first "Noddite" wanderer trying to climb Eden's "wall" to steal apples, real or figurative, so to speak...

Early agriculture, however, tends to be more expansive than hunting/gathering, in that fresh fields, to replace exhausted ones, had to be continuously acquired. The difference in warfare was less a matter of type than scale, with agriculture allowing larger, more organized, groups to band together and seize the territory, and females, of smaller, less organized, groups.

https://www.theguardian.com/science...-ancient-european-farming-community-neolithic

The scientists’ best guess is that a small farming village was massacred and thrown into a pit nearby. The skeletons of young women were absent from the grave, which suggests that the attackers may have taken the women captive after killing their families.

It is likely that fighting broke out over limited farming resources, upon which people depended for survival. Unlike their nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors, people of the Linear Pottery culture settled into a farming lifestyle. Communities cleared forests to farm crops and lived in timber longhouses alongside their livestock.

The landscape soon became full of farming communities, putting a strain on natural resources. Along with adverse climate change and drought, this led to tension and conflict. In acts of collective violence, communities would come together to massacre their neighbours and take their land by force.

Lawrence Keeley, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, said that alongside Talheim and Asparn, this latest massacre discovery fits a pattern of common and murderous warfare. “The only reasonable interpretation of these cases, as here, is that a whole typically-sized Linear Pottery culture hamlet or small village was wiped out by killing the majority of its inhabitants and kidnapping the young women. This represents yet another nail in the coffin of those who have claimed that war was rare or ritualised or less awful in prehistory or, in this instance, the early Neolithic.”

SYNCHRONIC · Jan 10, 2019

Angela said:
Please provide the source for these quotes so I can check the age of the supporting papers, as every recent paper of the last years presents an entirely different picture. If they're not recent, it's a lesson in the fact that you really have to keep up with science; it changes as methods and procedures become better.

Also, for the record, you don't look for portrayal of killings on cave paintings; you look for it on the skeletal remains of people.

The sources are literally hyperlinked into every single statement. Just click on the numbers.

JuanDT · Jul 26, 2019

bicicleur said:
afaik there is no proof of violence between modern humans and Neanderthal

the simplest explanation is the modern humans simply outcompeted Neanderthals after 50 ka

I read the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. Most interesting in that he believes what made Sapiens succeed was our ability to invent and believe in things that do not exist, and to get others to believe the same. This gave Sapiens the ability to work more effectively in large groups and probably also to be tactically or strategically more effective.

Violence and the Neanderthals

davef

Princess

Angela

Elite member

Alyan

Regular Member

CrazyDonkey

Regular Member

SYNCHRONIC

LEO/METAL SHEEP/INFJ/MAGI

JuanDT

Junior Member