Were the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers violent?

• Very little is known about the use of violence in ancient times, according to our partner The Conversation.

• The first significant evidence of violence between individuals, however, is attested by an isolated case about 450,000 years old.

• The analysis of this phenomenon was carried out by Isabelle Crevecoeur, paleoanthropologist at the University of Bordeaux and Nicolas Teyssandier, prehistorian at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Is violence peculiar to man? Vast question, especially in a media era where violent behavior regularly feeds the information. But what about in ancient times? Is violence consubstantial with mankind or, on the contrary, has it been built over time with the emergence of modern societies?

This question very early on fueled the constitutive controversies of modern philosophy through the classic opposition between Hobbes and Rousseau: for the former, violence is constitutive of humans who, in their natural form, are in a state of war and violence. permanent.

Laws are therefore necessary to regulate these behaviors and pass from the state of nature to the artificially created political order;

Rousseau is opposed to this vision by making humans naturally good, innocent and pure beings who would be gradually perverted by political constructions.

Make archaeological traces speak

Central in philosophy, the question of violence is also present very early in classical archeology. Among the most famous violent episodes, we can cite the legendary epic of Gilgamesh, this king of the first dynasty of Uruk dating from the 3rd millennium BC in southern Mesopotamia. Other examples could be summoned in Antiquity, featuring Celtic or Gallic peoples at war against Greeks or Romans. But that is not our object since we want here to investigate the origins of violence in very ancient human societies, those of the Paleolithic. To do this, we have to leave writing and stories behind and agree to focus only on archaeological traces, which must be deciphered and then made to speak.

During hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, let's say until the advent of Homo sapiens, we must admit that prehistorians do not have much to eat! Indeed, if there are indeed some traces synonymous with violent blows on human bones, they are not sufficient to prove the intentional homicide resulting in death. In archeology, proving the action of voluntarily giving death is a particularly difficult multimethod investigation and archaeologists must often be satisfied with the identification of a single modality which consists in breaking the proper functioning of human physiology by making it suffer violent trauma.

Bison butchering experiment with a cut quartzite chip, replica of a tool used by Neanderthals © traces-et-hommes.revolublog.com / Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0

Cannibalistic practices

In Neanderthals, we find here and there traces of intentional fracturing on fresh bones or traces of cutting caused by stone cutting edges on the bones, indicating a disarticulation and removal of the soft parts of the body.

In some cases, these post-mortem intervention methods reflect a cannibalistic practice, clearly attested today as early as 800,000 years before the present.

On the

in Atapuerca, Spain, 170 human remains belonging to 11 individuals have been discovered and most bear traces of anthropogenic intervention, corresponding to traces of cuts left by sharp tools in dressed stone, scraping marks probably indicating the removal of muscles or even percussion marks left by a pebble to break the bones and recover the marrow.

Cannibalistic practices which are therefore very old and here attributed for the first known to Homo antecessor, a fossil human species which would be close to the last common ancestor between the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

We will find other convincing evidence of a cannibalistic practice among the Neanderthals, between 100 and 50,000 before the present on at least 6 European deposits.

But nothing in these practices, often interpreted as cannibalistic practices for gastronomic purposes, comes to plead for willful homicide resulting in death!

Fighting in melee

The first significant evidence of violence between individuals is illustrated by an isolated case about 450,000 years old. Still in Atapuerca but this time at the archaeological site of La Sima de los Huesos, individuals clashed in hand-to-hand combat and the beatings then resulted in death, as some obvious traces testify.

One skull in particular bears the scars of two lethal punctures on the frontal bone, interpreted as the result of two blows from the same blunt weapon in a face-to-face interpersonal conflict.

Several hundred thousand years ago, one individual killed another, two humans were able to clash for reasons forever unknown which tell us about the antiquity of aggressive behavior, but not about collectively constituted violent phenomena or on the social structures that underlie them.

Distribution map of the main sites that yielded classical Neanderthal remains © User: 120 / Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0

Faced with the opacity of the data for the very old periods of the Paleolithic, let us now turn to the Late Paleolithic which, from 45,000 years before the present, marks the arrival of the populations of Homo sapiens at the origin of the diversity. current in Eurasia. New archaeological records appear and we think in particular of the drastic multiplication of hunting weapons in flint or antler like that of conspicuous objects such as ornamental adornments made of shells, stone or hard animal materials.

Despite all these innovations and the proven encounter between several humanities which give rise to a crossbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, the irrefutable traces of collective violence remain thin.

On the walls of the caves, the figurative art that is now displayed does not represent, or very little, human beings and a fortiori scenes of violence, apart from the few humans pierced with features that we discover at Cougnac or Pech Merle and which can very well represent scenes of hunting accidents or symbolic sacrifices.

Other examples of delicate interpretation come from the graves, such as this point of flint stuck in the spine of one of Grimaldi's children, found in a cave near Menton.

Jebel Sahaba: a foundational discovery

It is from the north of Sudan that a quite exceptional discovery comes to us, made in the early 1960s by Wendorf. It took place as part of the rescue excavation campaigns set up by Unesco in order to save the rich archaeological heritage of Lower Nubia which was going to be flooded by Lake Nasser following the construction of the Aswan High Dam. . The excavated necropolis, called Jebel Sahaba, is very unique: at the very end of the Late Paleolithic, around 13,500 years before the present, at least 64 subjects were buried there in a flexed position, most often placed in covered oval pits. thin slabs. The majority of graves are individual, but some contain several individuals (4 double graves and 4 multiple graves, containing up to 5 individuals).For these Paleolithic periods, finding such a concentration of buried individuals is already remarkable: it is the first large funeral complex in the history of mankind, the first cemetery in a way.

Archive photograph illustrating the excavation of Jebel Sahaba cemetery in 1965 © Fond d'Archives Wendorf of the British Museum (via The Conversation)

But what is even more surprising is the number of traces of violence present on more than half of the individuals.

The first works on this collection had highlighted the presence of traces of interpersonal violence on the skeletons of twenty individuals, some of whom still had fragments of cut stone frames stuck in the bones.

The Jebel Sahaba site had since acquired an almost iconic status in the work on the early drivers of violent behavior and organized warfare.

Recently, a multidisciplinary team led by one of us (IC) was able to re-study the entire collection kept at the British Museum in order to characterize the nature of the lesions present on these individuals. This new work confirms that the bone lesions are indeed the result of human violence and that they were carried out mainly with projectile weapons, in particular spears and arrows. Other lesions, such as scarred fractures of the forearms or bones of the hand, or certain head traumas, testify to close combat. The violence suffered by at least two thirds of those buried is no longer considered to be the result of a single event. Indeed, several individuals present in addition to traces of impact of projectiles causing death,previous throwing weapon injuries that have healed, indicating multiple violent events throughout a person's life.

The analysis of the anatomical distribution of the lesions at Jebel Sahaba also shows that, unlike most archaeological examples of the time, the traces of violence are extensive and are not limited to one category of people: women, men as well as children were indiscriminately affected.

Conflicts with undetermined reasons

Finally, the demographics of the cemetery and the reuse of some graves for the deferred deposit of individuals support the idea of ​​recurring episodes of small-scale interpersonal violence between members of different communities, in the form of skirmishes, raids or ambushes. This type of long-range, low-magnitude warfare is quite similar to the examples documented by ethnologists and ethnoarchaeologists within more recent hunter-fisher-gatherer societies. The site of the beginning of the Holocene of Naturuk in Kenya, slightly more recent than Jebel Sahaba, could moreover represent a snapshot of these types of conflicts whose victims could not have been brought back to their communities and buried.

Trace of projectile impact with lithic flake stuck in the perforation at the level of the posterior surface of the left hip bone of the individual JS 21 © Isabelle Crevecœur & Marie-Hélène Dias-Meirinho (via The Conversation)

Ethnographic work shows us that the reasons for these intergroup conflicts can be extremely diverse, between cultural reasons that are often difficult to access at the level of the archaeological archive, demographic pressure, or environmental constraints, without excluding a mixture of these different components to justify a point. of tilting within these precarious balances.

In the case of Jebel Sahaba, severe climatic changes are documented in the Nile Valley at the end of the Upper Pleistocene, between about 20,000 and 11,000 years before the present.

Archaeological data also show a very high concentration of human occupations in a small area of ​​the Nile Valley at that time associated with a great diversity of dressed stone industries interpreted as strong cultural components of human groups in the region.

Our "PREHISTORY" file

The environmental changes documented during this period and the demographic pressure on a small geographic area are likely to have been a source of rivalry for access to resources between groups of humans who are already culturally very structured.

The example of Jebel Sahaba already allows us to assert that socially constituted violence precedes the advent of Neolithic agricultural and pastoral societies, often cited as being the first in human history to document this type. of behaviors.

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This analysis was written by Isabelle Crevecoeur, researcher at CNRS, paleoanthropologist at the University of Bordeaux and Nicolas Teyssandier, researcher at CNRS, prehistorian at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

The original article was published on The Conversation website.

Declaration of interests

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• Paleontology

• Violence

• Archeology

• Prehistory

• The Conversation

• Neanderthal

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