Skeletons and marks of lethal trauma to the face. (Standen et al., JAA, 2021)
European archaeologists and historians have turned homicide investigators by peeling back the veil on human conflict thousands of years ago.
While data on homicide and assaults are readily available today, record keeping over the millennia is, unsurprisingly, less extensive. But records may exist in human remains unearthed by scientists over the years.
Writing in
Nature Human Behaviour, Professor Joerg Baten from the University of Tübingen, Giacomo Benati from the University of Barcelona and Professor Arkadiusz Sołtysiak from the University of Warsaw have ascertained a high point in historic human conflict by developing a dataset of ancient skeletons from the Middle East.
They studied the remains of more than 3,500 people uncovered in the region from modern-day Turkey around the Mediterranean Sea to Iran from 12,000-400 BCE.
Using skeletons with
signs of head trauma or weapon-inflicted wounds, their database quantified injuries by period, geographic location, and cause of injury.
The scale of lethal aggressions substantially dropped around 3,000 years ago during the transition from the Chalcolithic era into the Bronze Ages. It suggests a peak in human violence during the former, a period from 4,500-3,300 BCE.This was a period characterised by increasing urbanisation, which would have brought people closer together in growing cities."Crowding and rising inequality may have triggered conflicts following appropriation of other groups' resources resulting in higher interpersonal violence," the authors suggest.
While this period marked the rise of early nations, the researchers remark "their ability to settle conflicts within their populations was seemingly still quite limited".Declines in violence were marked during the Bronze Age transition as proto states shifted into classical societies marked by taxation, militarisation, legal systems and bureaucracy.Interpersonal violence was noted to increase during the transition to the Iron Age (1,200-590 BCE) as state-based conflicts aided by more sophisticated and cheaper weapons combined with climate-forced migrations and economic decline.
"Security gains - seemingly aided by climate and epidemiological shocks temporarily reducing population pressure - were short-lived and the region witnessed major disruptions across the transition between the Bronze and Iron Ages," the researchers found.
Reader Comments
All the mass migration in mussel men of fighting age to europe, canada etc... check bloody mate!
Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Law of the jungle (Social Darwinism on the Animal Farm per Orwell)
NOW this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky, And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
American military have butchered 1.5 million Iraqis based on proven lies and deceit.
The American military under the guise of NATO bombed and murdered more than 50,000 Libyans in a week under the guise of protecting them from there elected leader.
The Americans murdered the nations of Yugoslavia to better position itself for an attack on Russia.
The American military butchered millions in Vietnam and the nations surrounding what had also been butchered by the French called French Indochina before American military started butchering the Vietnamese!
Do I go back to the American military forcing the Chinese to accept the heroin they sold to destroy Chinese society? Or the 60 million the Chinese had to murder of there own nation to stop the American scourge and first time coined rules based order by Americans and the English. You cannot stop us from selling our heroin to your people who wants it.
Just because they couldn’t sell it to the Chinese these same vermin as selling it to your kids. Well you haven’t the gumption to take the fed which gives them the power to hold Americans to ransom.
The only nations that need exterminated are those who haven’t the wit to understand what there leaders are doing in there name. But when it comes home to roost, I hope your last thoughts are what did I do!
Because your selfishness greed and laziness allowed the crimes now being perpetrated against you and yours.
But one thing, Archaeology is perhaps the most retarded pseudo-science in the world, nothing but Conjecture.
Possibly worse than Psychology or even Economics (they print the stuff, Jim).
It’s american military.
But I thought to lift your eyes to your god. Because you are about to receive payback.
The black flag was raised t a sacred Muslim Razavi Shrine. Two million Iranians signed up.
Hezbollah is readying itself. Pakistan is readying itself.
No your not getting away again with this slaughter of humanity. You deserve to be repaid for your pogroms against human beings.
[Link]
The meaning behind the gesture
The black flag in Islamic tradition is not simply a piece of cloth. It represents a call to arms, a cry of resistance and, in some contexts, a sign of revenge. It is not a gesture that is made lightly, and the choice of Imam Reza's shrine as the location for this display has its own set of meanings.
The message from the Iranian embassy in Syria
But the flag was not the only message. Iran's embassy in Syria also weighed in with an enigmatic statement: “Time is up #طوفان_الأقصى.” The hashtag “Al-Aqsa Storm” It takes us directly to the heart of Jerusalem, to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. This site, sacred to Muslims and Jews alike, has long been a flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.