Rather than being peaceful, ancient hunter-gatherers engaged in violent warfare

[Judi Lynn]

FEBRUARY 10, 2023

A wide-scale examination of early Neolithic human skeletons reveals the violent history of a supposedly peaceful period.


Researchers find evidence of head trauma in Neolithic farmer remains. By using modern forensic methods, archaeologists opened a window into prehistoric warfare and violence. Increasing competition between settled and growing communities may have led to the start of formal warfare in northwestern Europe.

Saugat Bolakhe

Around 10,000 years ago, the Krohl were a semi-nomadic clan, a group of hunter-gatherers who had started adapting to a farming lifestyle in the mixed mountainous forests of northwestern Europe. But his clan struggled to survive as both hunts and crops began to fail. Meanwhile, the neighboring Frohl clan thrived. Enraged, Krohl plotted an attack to take over the resources of their neighbors and, in the process, annihilated the entire Frohl clan, leaving no survivors behind.

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Around 10,000 years ago, the Krohl were a semi-nomadic clan, a group of hunter-gatherers who had started adapting to a farming lifestyle in the mixed mountainous forests of northwestern Europe. But his clan struggled to survive as both hunts and crops began to fail. Meanwhile, the neighboring Frohl clan thrived. Enraged, Krohl plotted an attack to take over the resources of their neighbors and, in the process, annihilated the entire Frohl clan, leaving no survivors behind.

Neolithic wars
While the clash of the Krohl and the Frohl clans is imaginary, the reality may not have been so different. New research published in the journal PNAS suggests that increasing competition between settled and growing communities for resources like arable land may have led to the start of formal warfare in northwestern Europe during the early Neolithic period. In fact, such intergroup violence may have been so prominent that it led to “the utter destruction of entire communities,” the researchers write.

Share Rather than being peaceful, ancient hunter-gatherers engaged in violent warfare on LinkedIn
Around 10,000 years ago, the Krohl were a semi-nomadic clan, a group of hunter-gatherers who had started adapting to a farming lifestyle in the mixed mountainous forests of northwestern Europe. But his clan struggled to survive as both hunts and crops began to fail. Meanwhile, the neighboring Frohl clan thrived. Enraged, Krohl plotted an attack to take over the resources of their neighbors and, in the process, annihilated the entire Frohl clan, leaving no survivors behind.

Neolithic wars
While the clash of the Krohl and the Frohl clans is imaginary, the reality may not have been so different. New research published in the journal PNAS suggests that increasing competition between settled and growing communities for resources like arable land may have led to the start of formal warfare in northwestern Europe during the early Neolithic period. In fact, such intergroup violence may have been so prominent that it led to “the utter destruction of entire communities,” the researchers write.


Back in the early 2000s, Linda Fibiger stumbled upon a mass grave while digging at an archaeological site in Ireland. She noticed the presence of distinct head trauma in many of the skeletal remains. While bones tend to break down naturally over time, researchers can still spot the difference between trauma and natural decay by observing patterns of bone breakage. Studying the prehistoric crime scene like a modern-day detective, she couldn’t help but wonder exactly how our ancient ancestors used to kill each other and what was the wider context for such acts of violence.

The early Neolithic period marks a distinct phase. Not only did it bring about farming, it also marked massive changes in society, demographics, and technology. Fibiger set out to study the era by teaming up with archaeologists across Europe to uncover the broader patterns of the region. Throughout their ten-year study, they looked at around 2,300 individual sets of remains from about 180 sites collected from Denmark, France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, and Spain.

More:
https://bigthink.com/the-past/neolithic-ancient-warfare-hunter-gatherers-farmers/

[Ferrets are Cool]

1. The beginnings of "GET OFF MY LAWN".

[stopdiggin]

2. yep. small scale skirmishing between groups

was (probably) the age old norm. (as evidenced by some of our closest relatives) And the 'peaceful hunter gatherer' was probably always a bit of romanticism. Wholesale extirpation (in today's terms genocide) rather than 'pressuring' a rival group to abandon or 'move along' - is probably an inflection point that signals a real shift in thinking and tactics - (and may have continued to be largely the exception rather than the norm, through most of our history). But - the violent impulse and seed was probably already there and just waiting for the right type of trigger. Social cohesion and structure brings about both positives and negatives.

[mitch96]

3. We are a violent race. No wonder aliens don't want to visit...😱....nt

[progree]

4. "Rather than being peaceful, ancient hunter-gatherers engaged in violent warfare on LinkedIn"

I knew it. That and other social media. Lots of slings and arrows there.

[Warpy]

5. I can't help but think of all those lousy cowboy movies back in the 50s and 60s

when the cattlemen were battling the farmers. Barbed wire settled things back then, dirt cheap and kept the cattle off the crops.

I suppose what settled things in the Neolithic was when the hunters moved north, where farming wasn't as big a thing, finally becoming the circumpolar Inuit tribes we know today, still hunting and gathering.

[wnylib]

6. A similar scenario to the farmers and ranchers in the West

played out in the New England colonies when the English arrived.

The Native Algonquian tribes of New England grew crops of corn, beans, and squash. They protected and preserved meadows where various types of berries grew wild. Some tribes were in an early stage of near domestication of deer by preserving the habitats that deer preferred in order to have a stable population of them to hunt. The only completely domesticated animals that Native people of that region had were dogs.

For animal protein, the Native people fished streams and ponds, collected clams on the ocean shore, and hunted wild animals.

English colonists let their pigs roam freely until time to slaughter them. They trampled the crops that Native people planted in clearings in the woods. English cattle grazed freely, also trampling Native crops. Mills built on creeks and rivers with large paddle wheels disrupted fishing. Native tribes used systems of weirs for fishing which were destroyed by colonists building on streams and creating their own dams. Colonists cut down trees and cleared brush that Native tribes had been preserving as deer habitats.

Native people used beavers for food as well as fur, but the colonial beaver fur trade wiped them out in some locations and some Native men began hunting and trading in them, too.

The Native people retaliated by killing rogue pigs and cattle. Colonists then retaliated back with raids on Native villages or attempts to catch and prosecute the individuals who killed the animals. Native populations resented colonial attempts to impose English laws on them.

Those conflicts resulted in the numerous battles and wars between the Native population of New England and the colonists. They contributed to the willingness of Native warriors to ally themselves with the French in Canada on their raids against New England villages and farms.

Peace in the colonies became the exception rather than the rule.

[Warpy]

7. Yes, the colonists just couldn't understand that the tribes had their own way

of separating cultivation from wild habitats. There were no stone walls, no wooden fences. Besides, they weren't Christians, which made them savages and subhuman. I'm always astonished by how blockheaded their religious and cultural arrogance made them, and how few exceptions there were.

Thomas Morton was one, a fast money guy who came over with the Puritans, befriended the Wampanoag people, left the colony in disgust and wrote a scathing book about the Puritans---which they promptly banned. He's one of my heroes.

Most of them were ignorant and pigheaded and set about trying to transform North America into another Europe. It's why half the colonists died during their first year in Massachusetts.

[wnylib]

8. Morton was, like most people, a mix of good and bad

in his dealings with other people, including the Wampanoag. From everything that I've read about him (the Puritan view and more neutral biographical details), he did not actually respect the Wampanoag. He was a libertarian who idealized the freedoms of Native people, but also regarded them as "noble savages" who needed to be civilized.

He was high church Anglican and planned to make the Wampanoag dependent on trade with him in order to "civilize" them into European style farming and trading partners through conversion to Christianity.

Yet, he also traded alcohol with them, which being new to them, they could not handle well. He apparently saw nothing wrong with holding drunken celebrations with his indentured servants and the Native people to let the servants get some sex while drunk and maybe take a Native "wife."

Puritans naturally objected to what they called "orgies," given the Puritan prudishness and abhorrence of mingling with Natives as equals.

But, on the plus side, Morton did encourage his indentured servants to rebel when his partner started selling them into slavery in Virginia. He gave them their freedom. His colony prospered until the Puritans took it over with a militia and arrested him.

For all his claims of equality for the Native people and indentured servants, he was a firmly committed royalist.

Seems like he was a complex and contradictory character.

[Warpy]

9. I think the orgy stuff was kind of conflated with the goings on of his

onetime sidekick, Wollaston, who left the Plimoth colony with him but proved, ahem, unworthy.

I've always had a grudging admiration for Morton because he wrote things down and published the book. Otherwise, people might have thought the Puritans were really saintly, when they were decidedly not.

[wnylib]

10. Through one of my grandmothers,

I have a slew of Puritan ancestors from New England. Researching them is how I learned about Morton. It's not enough for me to just get names and dates in genealogy. It's the people's lives and stories that I want to know about. So I've read up on Puritanism from a number of sources to get an idea of what the time period was like in their colonies and among their contemporaries outside of the Puritan world. I learned more about colonial American history and British history that way than I ever learned in high school or college.

They were a mixed bag, some admirable, some despicable. And they were as human as anyone in their personal lives, breaking laws quite frequently. In my research I found a listing of punishments given for misbehavior in the Connecticut colony. There were enough adultery charges and punishments to change our use of the word puritanical.

One woman was whipped after giving birth to an Indian child who could not possibly have been her husband's. He divorced her. A sea captain was punished for kissing his wife in public on his return when she greeted his ship. He and his wife moved away after that.

The brother of one of my ancestors conspired with two friends when they were teenagers to break into a business, steal some money, and run away to the Indians where they thought life would be freer and more adventurous. They were taken captive by a Native hunting party that came across them on their journey. They had to run the gauntlet in the Native village several times before they succeeded in getting all the way to the end without falling. Then they were tied up while the village decided what to do with them.

They managed to escape and get back to their own village where they faced punishment for stealing. But they were let off easy since the community decided that God had already taught them a lesson through their treatment in the Native village. They had to pay the money back, of course.

[Warpy]

11. Then there was a rather famous letter from former Mass. governor Winthrop

that detailed the purchase of white captives from a local tribe, but within two years, nearly all the captives had returned to the tribe. So it was complicated.

Something tells me those thieves created their story out of whole cloth, that was known to happen, also. They'd likely just failed to make it to an ale house where they weren'y known.

I had read of the captain and his wife punished for kissing each other in public on his return.

The one end of my family that was here early was Dutch, arrivals in New Amsterdam when the Dutch crown was giving native land away to lesser nobility they wanted to get rid of. They settled around Guilderland, an optimistic name for an area so ill suited to farming.

(I just looked, million dollar monstrosity houses on multi acre "horse properties." They should have hung onto it)

[wnylib]

12. The story of those boys and their theft

Last edited Sat Feb 18, 2023, 12:49 PM - Edit history (1)

is quite true, AFAIK. They lived in Deerfield, MA as adults. One of them, Benoni Stebbins, was the brother of my ancestor, Hannah Stebbins Sheldon. He was a "wild kid" in his youth, getting into trouble often, according to records about him. As a young adult, he was taken captive from a field by a raiding party and again escaped.

Eventually he was killed in the French and Indian raid on Deerfield n 1704.

His sister, Hannah Sheldon, was also killed in the raid. 3 of her children and her eldest son's wife were taken captive to New France (Canada), including my ancestor, her 12 year old son, Ebenezer. They were later ransomed back by her husband, John, who managed to ransom back over 100 captives, some of whom had been taken in earlier raids on other English villages.

Regarding captives who remained with their Native captors, I have a book on the Deerfield raid which has a chart showing which captives remained, which ones died on the March to Montreal, and which ones returned. Most of the ones who returned had been ransomed back within 2 years. A few returned on their own a couple years later. Some were taken for adoption by Native people who participated in the raid. Some were kept among the French, including Ebenezer Sheldon, who was bought from Native captors by a French woman to work in a cloth making business that she ran. His 16 year old sister, Mary, was taken to a Mohawk village outside of
Montreal. All of the Sheldons were ransomed back.

Most of the ones who returned were adults who had strong ties in Deerfield and older teens who came from families that had social status in Deerfield. The younger children were more easily assimilated into French or Native cultures.

But the adult and teen captives who chose to remain in Canada found life less restrictive in both the French and the Native cultures. The French offered land and money to adults who were willing to convert and settle in. The adult women found that in Native villages women were freer because Native women shared their work together, did not have the social restrictions of Puritan culture, and did not have a baby every year or two.

English colonists (and later frontier settlers farther west) were frustrated and embarrassed by the number of people who preferred to stay with Native captors.

[Warpy]

13. Was that a Miqmaq raid?

I know there was considerable friction between the Miqmaqs and the Wampanoag.

Women and girls had such a thin time in Puritan colonies that I'm always a little amazed that more didn't run away, chuck the corset, and say "Hello, Sailor!" to the first native man they saw. Just having to listen to some man in a church droning on for hours about how girls and women were the evil temptresses of men would have done it for me.

Well, it did do it for me. I went through the 60s. 'Nuff said.

[wnylib]

14. No, not a Micmac raid. The Wampanoag were

also not involved. The big colonial vs. Indians war that wiped out some English villages and nearly put the English out of New England did involve the Wampanoag and several allied tribes, but that was earlier, in 1675.

The Deerfield raid was in 1704 and was instigated by the French on the orders of the French king when England and France were at war in Europe. The French harassed English frontier villages, hoping to stop the spread of the English in North America on land that that France wanted to claim.

Deerfield is in western MA and was the farthest northwest village on the English frontier at the time, so it was vulnerable. The French recruited allies from the Mohawk, Wobenaki (aka Abenaki), Huron, and Pocumtuk tribes. The Mohawk were from a large Native village outside of Montreal. They had been converted to Catholicism by French missionary priests so they had relocated to be nearer to the French.

The land that Deerfield was built on had been gained by the English through shady deals with the Pocumtuk. Not surprisingly then, the Pocumtuk were eager to join the raid when the French recruited them.