Evidence For Warfare

One of the books I got for Christmas reviews the evidence whether there was warfare in Europe before the arrival of my (our) cursed ancestors the Yamnaya branch of the Indo-Europeans. In the early 20th C it was believed to be "Yes, of course, because they were barbarians, and we all know barbarians engage in near-constant warfare. This opinion was supplanted by anthropological fashions that said "No, of course not.  They were farmers, and everyone knows farmers try to avoid war. Besides, primitive man was pacific anyway, and violence only came in as a result of civilisation and hierarchy." That view gained steam during the second half of the 20th C as the European academics took the view that "You Americans don't know how terrible war is, and you are gun-loving violent people anyway. So lets just talk about nice things like trade and cooperation."

By the late 80s the Bohemian archaeologist Slavomil Vencl took his field to task (apparently - I don't read Czech) in "War and Warfare," showing that people had taken this idea that all those conflicts before 5000 years ago were mostly just for show with only occasional deaths did not accord with the actual record of broken bones and smashed skulls being found. No one listened, but by the end of the century Lawrence Keeley had come out with War Before Civilization (discussed repeatedly) that demonstrated that "No, actually, those were real conflicts and lots of people died." And of course there was Napoleon Chagnon chuckling all along that the Amazonian tribe he was observing decade after decade was quite violent, and quite organised about it.

I have been a big fan of that particular myth being exploded, because it was very much in ascendance when I took a minor in Anthro in 1975 and even then, my uber-liberal self detected that maybe there was some wishful thinking in the idea that these early peoples were pretty gentle, and only hierarchy, especially capitalism or Christianity (or, shudder, both together) had caused them to abandon their cooperation with nature to fend off the evil ones. 

Yet I forgot in my eagerness to have my particular views vindicated that discussions of whether there had been warfare in any particular place (and the book includes a lot of North American examples as well), there were going to be lots of descriptions of skull smashed in and arm wounds and whether the stone axes were for agricultural or military use. Page after page of it, actually. 

Indeed, scientific analysis of the skeletons from Talheim has identified two possible brothers, and a father and his two children, providing us with a sad reminder that the mutilated bones found at this site once belonged to people who probably had to witness their loved ones dying a horrific death.

Yes, exactly the sort of thing one would not wish to think about repeatedly for a week. Can their descendants be tracked down and comforted, somehow, and the perpetrators identified and secretly poisoned, to make an example of them so that this doesn't occur again? 

Well, I got what I asked for.  As a wise psychiatrist once said in my presence: "You ordered it.  You eat it."