Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past by Nam C Kim Marc Kissel

Author:Nam C Kim, Marc Kissel [Nam C Kim, Marc Kissel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781629582672
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Late Pleistocene

As should be clear, archaeologists often face a major challenge in distinguishing between intergroup conflict and interpersonal violence or homicide (Kim and Keeley 2008). Skeletal trauma only suggests the possibility of violence, which could have been homicidal and interpersonal in scale, and do not necessarily demonstrate collective violence. Many signs (some more equivocal than others) of interpersonal violence do exist within the Pleistocene record, but one or several violent and contemporaneous deaths do not necessarily mean warfare was involved. When it comes to Pleistocene contexts, we have to rely almost exclusively on osteological remains for signs of violence, but these findings cannot tell us much about the participants, their intentions and planning, and scales of violence. As illustration, we can return to the case of Otzi the “iceman.” What could we infer had we only been able to recover his skeletal remains and not any of the other artifacts and ecofacts associated with his body? With the other materials, researchers are able to offer stronger conclusions about the violence contributing to his death.

While the fossil and archaeological records for much of the Pleistocene largely hint at violence and organized violence, the evidence becomes more compelling as we get closer to the Holocene. From the Late Pleistocene comes a case associated with the fascinating site of Les Rois, in southwestern France (Ramirez Rozzi et al. 2009). This cave site yielded stone tools attributed to the Aurignacian industry, a stone tool tradition associated with anatomically modern humans and dating to ~30,000 years ago. What makes the site interesting is that two jaw bones were found at the site: one which looks like a modern human jaw and the other, a juvenile mandible of a Neandertal. Interestingly, the Neandertal jaw has cutmarks on the interior surface (similar to marks seen on the faunal remains at the site). One provocative interpretation of these data is that the Neandertal child was consumed by modern humans. Of course, there are other plausible interpretations, such as biological contact between the two groups. As genetic evidence indicates that Neandertal and modern humans did mix (Green et al. 2010), this is also a possibility.

The Upper Paleolithic period in Europe, which roughly spans a period of 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, provides additional evidence of some interpersonal conflict and perhaps war deaths. A child from an Upper Paleolithic site (c. 32,000 BP) in Italy has a point embedded in the vertebrae, which would likely have been lethal (Kim and Keeley 2008). A female pelvis from San Teodoro Cave, Italy, has a flake embedded in it that may have been an arrowhead (Bachechi 1997). Keeley (1996) suggests the presence of warfare-related victims at the Upper Paleolithic sites of Predmosti (27,000–25,000 BP) and Dolni Vestonice, though Ferguson (2006) discounts this, suggesting that the data are not sufficient to make a strong determination.

One problem with assessing the record is that not all traumas lead to death, which means that it is often quite hard to tease apart the reasoning behind the recorded injuries.

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