Zitat:Ferguson (2013) reviews archaeological data on prehistoric warfare for Europe and the Near East. For Europe, the Upper Paleolithic shows negligible evidence of war, and barely any evidence of interpersonal violence. In the Mesolithic, from the onset of the Holocene around 11,600 BP (before present) until the arrival of agriculture, warfare is 'scattered and episodic'. This period is associated with increasing sedentism, more food storage, more distinctive group identities, and greater inequality. About 500–1000 years after the Neolithic transition to agriculture, warfare became widespread, and during the subsequent Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages, warfare was the norm.

For the Near East, Ferguson's account begins with early Natufian society around 15,000 BP, which was pre-agricultural and similar to the European Mesolithic. There is no skeletal evidence of war in the southern Levant for the next 10,000 years. Likewise, there is no evidence of fortifications in this period. Peace came to an end in the southern Levant in the early Bronze Age around 3200 BC, a time that coincided with the formation of the Egyptian state. The apparent absence of war over this time span is remarkable in light of the intensive archaeological study the region has received

Zitat:Ferguson reviews a substantial body of evidence indicating warfare in other parts of the Near East, including Anatolia and the northern Tigris area, at least as early as the Pottery Neolithic, beginning around 8400 BP. At some sites, warfare probably goes back to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, from 11,600–10,500 BP, when agriculture began to arise in southwest Asia.

Zitat:The Standard Cross Cultural Sample, or SCCS, is a representative sample of 186 well-documented and culturally independent pre-modern societies (Murdock and White, 1969, Murdock and White, 2006). Two results from this data set stand out (Kelly, 2013a, Kelly, 2013b). The first is that while there is evidence for warfare in all types of societies, the incidence of warfare is lower for egalitarian nomadic foragers than it is for non-egalitarian sedentary foragers. The second (first reported in Keeley (1996)) is that population pressure is correlated with warfare while population density is not, where population pressure refers to population relative to total food, and population density refers to population relative to total land.

Zitat:Our theory helps explain Ferguson's (2013) finding that in Europe, warfare was rare or non-existent in the Upper Paleolithic, sporadic in the Mesolithic, and common in the Neolithic and later. The small foraging bands of the Upper Paleolithic probably had fluid social boundaries, with easy individual mobility across groups through exogamous marriage and kinship networks. At very low population densities it would also have been difficult to exclude outsiders from a territory, leading to open access conditions (Dow and Reed, 2013). Moreover, the foraging bands of the Upper Paleolithic almost certainly had Malthusian fertility dynamics. Together, these factors would make warfare unlikely.

The shift to the Mesolithic and the Neolithic was associated with rising sedentism (Dow and Reed, 2015) and social segmentation (Kelly, 2000, ch. 4). This would make it harder for individuals to move among groups. In addition, community sizes were rising. Research on recent small-scale societies suggests that this probably made endogamous marriage more common (Dow et al., 2016), reducing kinship linkages across groups and increasing mobility costs for individuals. In combination with the shocks resulting from technological and environmental change, this would have made warfare more common.

Our results are also consistent with stylized facts from anthropology. The model accounts for the empirical finding that warfare is a function not of population density but rather of pressure on food resources.

Zitat:The evidence from Section 2 suggests that warfare is more common among farmers than among mobile hunter-gatherers. This appears to be true even for egalitarian farming groups, although warfare undoubtedly increases when such groups develop into stratified chiefdoms or states.

Zitat:Around 7,000 years ago - all the way back in the Neolithic - something really peculiar happened to human genetic diversity. Over the next 2,000 years, and seen across Africa, Europe and Asia, the genetic diversity of the Y chromosome collapsed, becoming as though there was only one man for every 17 women.

Now, through computer modelling, researchers believe they have found the cause of this mysterious phenomenon: fighting between patrilineal clans.

Drops in genetic diversity among humans are not unheard of, inferred based on genetic patterns in modern humans. But these usually affect entire populations, probably as the result of a disaster or other event that shrinks the population and therefore the gene pool.

But the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck, as it is known, has been something of a puzzle since its discovery in 2015. This is because it was only observed on the genes on the Y chromosome that get passed down from father to son - which means it only affected men.

This points to a social, rather than an environmental, cause, and given the social restructures between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago as humans shifted to more agrarian cultures with patrilineal structures, this may have had something to do with it.

In fact, a drop in genetic diversity doesn't mean that there was necessarily a drop in population. The number of men could very well have stayed the same, while the pool of men who produced offspring declined.

This was one of the scenarios proposed by the scientists who penned the 2015 paper.

"Instead of 'survival of the fittest' in a biological sense, the accumulation of wealth and power may have increased the reproductive success of a limited number of 'socially fit' males and their sons," computational biologist Melissa Wilson Sayres of Arizona State University explained at the time.

Tian Chen Zeng, a sociologist at Stanford, has now built on this hypothesis. He and colleagues point out that, within a clan, women could have married into new clans, while men stayed with their own clans their entire lives. This would mean that, within the clan, Y chromosome variation is limited.

However, it doesn't explain why there was so little variation between different clans. However, if skirmishes wiped out entire clans, that could have wiped out many male lineages - diminishing Y chromosome variance.

Computer modelling have verified the plausibility of this scenario. Simulations showed that wars between patrilineal clans, where women moved around but men stayed in their own clans, had a drastic effect on Y chromosome diversity over time.

This means that warring patrilineal clans are the most likely explanation, the researchers said.

Zitat:The LBK farmers flourished for more than 400 years, eventually occupying a 1500-kilometer belt of fertile land stretching as far west as the Paris Basin.

Then something went terribly wrong. Vráble and other mass graves across Europe attest to a wave of brutality around 5000 B.C.E., about the same time as hundreds of LBK settlements across the continent abruptly vanished. In the aftermath, parts of the continent remained empty for centuries. .......“The LBK were the first farmers, the first large pan-European culture, and the first time we see these repeated finds of violence,” says Christian Meyer, an independent osteoarchaeologist who has studied human remains from multiple LBK mass graves.

The finds at Vráble and other LBK sites challenge a long-held notion that prehistory was more or less peaceful, with isolated cases of interpersonal violence but no large-scale conflicts or wars. It may also shed light on one of prehistory’s great vanishing acts. “It’s one of the most interesting questions in history,” Fuchs says. “What led to the disappearance of an entire culture?”

Zitat:Perhaps thanks to its rapid expansion, LBK society remained remarkably uniform across an estimated 700,000 square kilometers of Europe, judging from artifacts and, more recently, ancient DNA. Extracted from LBK skeletons, the DNA shows these pioneers were directly descended from early Anatolian farmers, and mostly avoided mingling with local hunter-gatherers they may have encountered as they spread across Europe.

Zitat:In the decades since, archaeologists have found many more mass graves across Europe, all dating to roughly the same time. Many, like Talheim, looked at first like the results of small-scale raiding or local conflicts.

But as more burials emerged, those easy explanations faded. If conflict was a regular part of LBK life, the graves should appear throughout the culture’s 400-year span instead of only at the very end. And each new LBK massacre site seems to have its own distinct character and particular details that suggest some mysterious constellation of brutal practices, not competition for land or mates. “What we see is different from anything we see before. It’s an indication of an end phase, where people turn to rituals and odd beliefs,” says Leibniz Center for Archaeology archaeologist Detlef Gronenborn. “Then it breaks out in an orgy of violence. Then it stops, but it’s too late.”

Zitat:At a site in southwestern Germany called Kilianstädten, for example, the 26 victims included 
10 children under age 6. As at Talheim, many of the skulls had been smashed, but the assailants had systematically shattered their targets’ shins, too, either as a form of torture or as a symbolic postmortem maiming. “It was a statement by the perpetrators,” says Meyer, who examined the bones. “They did this on purpose.”

Another site that Meyer helped excavate in Germany revealed violence reminiscent of the Neolithic version of gangland killings. Eight of the nine people tossed in the mass grave were young men. They had fractures on the backs of their head, invariably on the right-hand side—suggesting they had been forced to kneel for a killing blow from behind. “These people were held prisoner and executed,” Meyer says.

Zitat:At a site in Austria called Asparn-Schletz, archaeologists found the remains of about 200 women, children, and men of all ages in a deep ditch outside a large LBK settlement. At first it looked as though an entire village had been slaughtered at once, presumably wiped out by rivals in an early act of organized warfare. In that scenario, the dead should include many biological relatives. But a study of ancient DNA from Asparn-Schletz published this year showed only two of the people in the ditch were close genetic kin, indicating something far stranger had occurred there.

Perhaps the most bizarre LBK massacre site is a grim spot called Herxheim, now mostly buried beneath an industrial park near Germany’s border with France. The sheer scale of the slaughter is stunning. Between 1996 and 2010, archaeologists excavated more than 80,000 pieces of human bone, including the skull caps of more than 500 people, mostly older children and young adults. Cut marks on the bones indicate they were purposefully dismembered, and shards of pottery and animal bones from feasts are interspersed with the remains. “People at Herxheim definitely didn’t die normal deaths,” says Andrea Zeeb-Lanz, an archaeologist at the Rhineland-Palatinate General Directorate for Cultural Heritage who directs research on the site.

Zitat:At Vráble, archaeologists hope to trace the forces that drove these curious acts of violence. Sending a drone into the clear sky, Kiel archaeologist Nils Müller-Scheeßel points out where ground-penetrating radar surveys found three massive “neighborhoods” occupied simultaneously at Vráble between 5250 and 5050 B.C.E. Each one is 400 meters across and had 15 to 20 longhouses at any given time, each housing an extended family. Together they amounted to a metropolis by LBK standards, with up to 1000 inhabitants.

Previous excavations had shown that around 5100 B.C.E., more than 2 centuries after Vráble was founded, a deep, V-shaped ditch was dug around one of the three neighborhoods and reinforced with an earthen berm. A second, inner ditch completed the structure. The effort required would have been immense. “A double ditch 1.3 kilometers long, with the tools they had back then? It’s crazy,” Fuchs says.

The wall had five gates, all facing away from the settlement’s other two neighborhoods. “The entrances cut off other neighborhoods,” Furholt says. “It’s quite a hostile act.” He notes that the three neighborhoods had been distinctive from the start. “We have very individual farms, with strong autonomy, living together as a village,” Furholt says. “You could see how this is a setup that falls apart at some point.”

Then came the killings and decapitations. The bodies were all thrown in the ditch around one of the gates and along the adjacent ditch. And within a few decades, radiocarbon dating shows, the surrounding settlement emptied out and was never reoccupied.

Zitat:When they found the first headless skeletons, Fuchs and her colleagues weren’t sure whether the bodies had been deliberately decapitated. Neolithic societies sometimes disinterred people and rearranged their bones long after death. Perhaps, they thought, the bodies were allowed to decay after dying naturally, and then the loosened skulls were removed as part of some unknown ritual.

But as more bodies have emerged, it’s become obvious their heads were deliberately removed around the time of death. The skeletons are mostly intact and in anatomical order, down to small bones like fingers and toes—a sign the bodies were not left out for scavengers to pick at, or buried and then moved again after decaying. “They seem to have been covered quite fast,” Furholt says. “This is one mass deposition event, or several in a short period.” And in the Stone Age equivalent of a smoking gun, many of the neck vertebrae bear cut marks.

Zitat:Archaeologists often invoke overpopulation and climate change to explain ancient turmoil. But so far, none of the bones from massacre sites have shown evidence of famine or malnutrition. To him the evidence points to “something of a cultural collapse.” From a demographic point of view, the LBK was a stunning success story. What started as a small core group of pioneering farmers spread and expanded across vast territories in just a few centuries, a population boom with few parallels in human history.

Penny Bickle, an archaeologist at the University of York, suggests a culture accustomed to constant expansion might have simply run out of room. Around 5100 B.C.E., the furious pace of the LBK’s territorial expansion slows, then stops, as it reaches the edges of the fertile loess zone. “Maybe the society reaches the limits of the landscape where expansion makes sense. Moving on and making new settlements doesn’t work as a social system anymore, so they start to look inwards,” Bickle says. “There’s a shift in how people are relating to each other.”