A paper by an international team of bioarchaeologists on conflict and organised warfare in neolithic Europe, published on January 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges the traditionally accepted notion that early farming communities were cooperative and lived in peace, and that growing urbanisation triggered warfare. It examined skeletal material from 180 sites in Denmark, France, Germany, the British Isles, Spain and Sweden, for trauma typically inflicted by weapons. More than one in 10 of 2,300 early farmers’ remains had blunt trauma to the skull, perhaps inflicted by stone axes. Penetrating injuries were also noted. The remains that were examined date from 6,000–2,000 BC.
Studies of the origins of violence are of contemporary importance. They seek its original motives and effects on society, such as inequality (it can be both a trigger and an effect of violence), which are being harnessed by right-wing political organisations to sell golden ages, golden dawns and fool’s gold to the gullible. In Indian history, Upinder Singh’s Political Violence in Ancient India (2017) has looked under the hood of another golden age narrative, predominant in the Independence era, which held up the Buddha and Ashoka as ideals of an ancient age of enlightened peace. The reality was far more complex, and routinely violent.
It has often been pointed out that despite Ashoka’s renunciation of violence after the Kalinga war, the Mauryan empire probably maintained the world’s biggest standing army. The paper on Neolithic farmers in PNAS by Linda Fibiger, Torbjörn Ahlström, Christian Meyer and Martin Smith also suggests that while early farming cultures have been taken to be highly collaborative and somewhat like communes (many contemporary hunter-gatherer communities remain that way), the era may actually have featured sharply increased violence as agriculture introduced inequality, and less successful farm communities evened the odds by a bit of marauding on the side. It may not have taken too long for sporadic raiding to harden into a martial culture, formalising warfare. Significantly, many of the northern European remains with weapon injuries were found in mass burials, suggesting that entire communities were wiped out. That’s not like a raid. It’s like war.
A high level of violence was also reported from the proto-city of Çatalhöyük in present-day Turkey, in a paper by bioarchaeologists (PNAS, June 17, 2019), which accumulated the findings of about 25 years of excavation. One of the world’s oldest urban sites, it may have held as many as 10,000 people when it flourished in 7,000 BCE. It can be examined like a petri dish for early signs of not only violence, but all the other ills of modern crowded cities and the agriculture-based economy. That includes the world’s most common chronic disease—dental caries, probably the result of a diet rich in wheat, barley and rye, which were new to humans. Sugar, which has turned caries into a global plague, was still restricted to the sugarcane-growing areas of India.
Çatalhöyük’s residents lived cleanly, dumping rubbish scrupulously in middens outside city limits. Homes were kept clean with obvious effort; perhaps it was a civic requirement. But the town plan was very dense, with homes jam-packed together without intervening lanes, like cells in a hive. The entrances were on the roofs, which ran together to form open plazas which may have been used for work, play, markets, and plazas with communal ovens (within living memory, such ovens were a feature of village communities in north India).
A densely packed community is the happy hunting ground of contagious disease. Since livestock was kept at home, zoonotic diseases like the plague, Lyme disease, West Nile virus and rabies would have flourished, too. The development of violence as societies transitioned from a hunting-gathering economy to a sedentary life based on agriculture is fascinating, but other evils like diseases, lifestyle disorders and pollution—inevitable, when fire is the only controllable source of energy—are likely to have taken a much higher toll.
Anyway, organised group conflict—the precursor of war and communal violence—predates the agricultural and urban revolutions. The earliest evidence of a mass killing is from Nataruk, west of Lake Turkana in Kenya. There, about 10,000 years ago, nomadic hunter-gatherers launched an armed attack on another group. Some of the victims had their wrists tied, and one was a pregnant woman, reported a 2016 paper in Nature. There is nothing new under the sun, but this strain of barbarism has kept well.
The crime committed at Nataruk challenges traditional perceptions, because it occurred between hunter-gatherer communities. It is assumed that settled living and immovable property beget territorial behaviour, which in turn begets violence. Wars are launched, whether by a monarch or a street gang leader, to protect turf from which a community makes a living. Even wars launched in the name of high-minded ideals like saving the world for democracy are triggered by territorial concerns. What if the ideological enemy sets countries falling like dominoes, and the tide of collapse spreads worldwide?
But it is presumed that nomadic hunter-gatherers would be less territorial. They should have enough leg room to give way if a neighbour pushes, without losing economic security, because a patch of berries, or a watering hole, is much like another. But what if what’s at stake is not fungible, like a sacred grove or a natural feature—maybe just a rock—whose cultural significance is now invisible to us? Even the motives of contemporary group conflict are mysterious, perhaps for the same reason—their origins are lost in the detritus of millennia.
Pratik Kanjilal
Editor of The India Cable
(Tweets @pratik_k)