A very interesting and unexpected study, which, unfortunately, remained practically unnoticed by the reading public.Historians rarely devote much space to discussing the causes of wars. But this topic, in addition to history, is also studied by other disciplines. The debate about the origins of war over the past few hundred years has revolved largely around one single question: Is war the result of human nature's instinct for predation, or is it the result of principles learned through upbringing?
Military historians rarely devote much space to discussing the causes of wars. But this topic, in addition to history, is also studied by other humanitarian disciplines. The debate about the origins of war and peace over the past few hundred years has revolved around one single question. It looks like this: is war the result of the predatory instinct inherent in human nature, or is it the result of principles learned in the process of education?
Social Darwinism and its criticism
The basic ideas for both answers go back to the concepts of the philosophers of the New Age - the Englishman T. Hobbes and the Frenchman J. J. Rousseau. In accordance with the concept of Hobbes, war is the result of the natural aggressiveness inherent in man, which is overcome as a result of the conclusion of a social contract. According to Rousseau's ideas, man is inherently good, war and aggression are a late invention and arise only with the advent of modern civilization. These ideas retained their significance even in the second half of the 19th century.
The modern phase of this debate began in 1859 with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In it, life on Earth was presented as a competitive process in which the fittest individuals survived. The concept of social Darwinism, which became most widespread at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, considered war as a continuation of the natural competition that we observe in wildlife.
Critics of this trend noted that war is a collective process in which separate groups and communities act against each other, while in nature this process takes place at the level of individual individuals. Moreover, the most fierce competition unfolded among the closest neighbors, who occupied the same ecological niche, ate the same food and claimed the same females. So the similarity here could be purely external.
On the other hand, if we follow the logic of cultural anthropologists of the second half of the 20th century, who saw the war only as a bad habit and the result of an inappropriate system of education, it is not clear why this habit is so difficult to correct. War is still a characteristic element of modern life, and this sad fact stimulates new research into the problem of its origin.
To date, the main results in this area have been brought by the development of the ethological approach. According to him, various patterns of human activity, including aggression, are considered as genetically determined programs. Each of these programs arose and developed at a certain stage of evolution, as they contributed to the successful resolution of problems as diverse as the search and distribution of food, sexual behavior, communication, or response to threat.
The peculiarity of the ethological approach in comparison with earlier directions is that here human behavior is considered not as the result of an instinct laid down once and for all, but as a kind of predisposition, which, depending on a particular situation, can be realized or not. This approach partly explains the variability of warlike behavior that we observe in nature and in history.
Ethological approach
From the point of view of ethology, war is a coalition intraspecific aggression that is associated with organized and often deadly conflicts between two groups of the same species. It should not be identified either with aggression as such, which has a purely individual dimension and is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, or with predation directed against representatives of another species. Warfare, although traditionally a male activity, should not be equated with activities such as female rivalry, which by definition is an individual behavior. Genuine coalition aggression is very rare in the animal world. As a special form of behavior, it has developed only in two groups of animals: ants and primates.
According to Darwin's theory, natural selection encourages behavioral strategies that enhance the survival of a certain set of genes that are passed from one generation of descendants of a common ancestor to another. This condition imposes a natural limitation on the size of the social group, since with each new generation this set will change more and more. However, the insects managed to break this limitation and create related groups of huge sizes.
Up to 20 million insects live in a tropical anthill, while all of them are siblings. The ant colony behaves like a single organism. Ants fight neighboring communities for territory, food, and slaves. Often their wars end with the total extermination of one of the opponents. The analogies with human behavior are obvious here. But among humans, anthill-like forms of society—with numerous, permanent, compactly living populations strictly organized along territorial lines—arose comparatively late, only with the advent of the first agrarian civilizations about 5,000 years ago.
And even after that, the formation and development of civilized communities proceeded at an extremely slow pace and was accompanied by centrifugal processes that bear little resemblance to the rigid solidarity of ants. Accordingly, the expansion of our knowledge about insects, primarily about ants, is still unable to explain the origin of coalition aggression at the earliest stages of human development.
War among primates
Great apes, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, are the closest relatives of humans. At the same time, for a long time, the results of their observation were practically not used in any way to explain the origin of coalition aggression in humans. There were two reasons for this.
First, they were seen as extremely peaceful animals, living in harmony with nature and with themselves. In such relationships, there was simply no room for conflict that went beyond the traditional male rivalry over females or food. Secondly, great apes were considered strict vegetarians, eating only greens and fruits, while the ancestors of people were specialized big game hunters.
Chimpanzees eat a killed monkey - a red-headed colobus
Only in the 1970s. it has been proven that chimpanzees are much more omnivorous than previously thought. It turned out that in addition to fruits, they sometimes eat birds and small animals they have caught, including other monkeys. It also turned out that they actively conflict with each other and, most strikingly, carry out group raids on the territories occupied by neighboring groups.
In this activity, according to one of the researchers, something eerily human is visible. Only males participate in raids, although female chimpanzees actively take part in hunting and intra-group conflicts. These groups of young males move to the border area and patrol the perimeter of their possessions. Having detected the presence of single alien individuals, as a rule, also males, chimpanzees begin to pursue them, while demonstrating a fairly high level of collective interaction. Having driven the victim into a corner, they pounce on it and tear it apart.
The results of these observations seemed so incredible to the researchers that a whole discussion flared up in the academic environment regarding the possibility of chimpanzees killing their own kind. Opponents of this view insisted that these unprecedented forms of behavior were the result of an artificially created situation in the Gombe Stream Reserve. They argued that feeding bananas to chimpanzees led to increased competition and struggle for resources between them.
A group of chimpanzees patrolling the area
However, subsequent observations, purposefully carried out in 18 chimpanzee communities and 4 bonobo communities, still confirmed the ability of chimpanzees to kill their relatives in the natural environment. It has also been shown that such behaviors are not the result of human presence and have been observed, among other things, where human impact on the chimpanzee's habitat was minimal or non-existent.
The researchers recorded 152 murders (58 directly observed, 41 determined from the remains and 53 suspected). It has been noted that collective aggression in chimpanzees is a conscious act, in 66% of cases directed against alien individuals. Finally, we are talking about a group action, when the forces of attackers and victims are not equal (on average, the ratio of forces was 8:1), so the risk of killers in this case was minimal.
This study also contributed to the destruction of another myth about the great apes, namely the supposedly non-aggressive bonobos. It turned out that bonobos, like their larger relatives, are capable of showing aggression, including in its lethal forms.
Why are they fighting?
Anthropologists in the process of research have identified three factors that unite chimpanzees with the ancestors of humans and which are potentially responsible for the emergence of coalition aggression in both cases. First, chimpanzees, like humans, are one of the few primate species in which males remain in their natal group after maturation, while females are forced to leave it. Accordingly, the core of the group in chimpanzees is formed by males related to each other, and females come from outside. In most other primates, the situation is exactly the opposite.
Secondly, chimpanzees are moderate polygamists. They live in a ranking society in which males usually compete with each other for females, but at the same time there is no life-and-death struggle among them. Sometimes dominants tend to restrict access to females for low-ranking individuals. Sometimes chimpanzees form pairs for a long time.
Third, chimpanzees show little sexual dimorphism. Males are about a quarter larger than females, about the same as in humans. Gorillas and orangutans, unlike chimpanzees, are pronounced polygamists. In these species of anthropoid males, there is a fierce struggle for females, which are almost half their size. The larger size and large fangs of individual male gorillas are a serious advantage in the fight against a rival. The winner monopolizes all the females in the group, driving the losing opponent out of the group. Chimpanzees do not have such intraspecific polymorphism and advantage over rivals. Therefore, it is easier for them, like people, to cooperate with each other within their group in order to compete with males of other groups, protecting them from encroachments on their territory and their females.
It is also important that great apes, and especially chimpanzees, are endowed with a fairly complex brain. It gives them the opportunity to show empathy, to understand the meaning of the actions of other animals, attributing certain intentions to them. These abilities make real collective action possible on their part in a human-like sense.
A group of chimpanzees kill an intruder
The most important prerequisite for the latter is the ability to adequately perceive the intentions of others, soberly assess their capabilities and plan long-term strategies for interaction. There are other types of monkeys in which, like chimpanzees, the males coordinate with each other. However, without the appropriate qualities of the brain, they are not able to maintain such interaction for a long time.
Much of what is known today about chimpanzees is also relevant for our common ancestors, who existed about 6 million years ago. They were probably quite advanced and intelligent primates living in a closed, stable community, with high opportunities for male coalition behavior.
Over the past two decades, a number of large papers have been published proving that the sense of altruism underlying the ability of people to form stable coalitions was laid in close connection with the development of parochialism. In other words, hatred of a stranger is the reverse side of love for one's own, and militancy is an inevitable companion of friendliness. In the light of the data obtained by primatologists, it can be assumed that some semblance of parochialism is also present in chimpanzees, whose last common ancestor with humans lived only 6 million years ago.
Literature
- Kazankov A. A. Aggression in archaic societies / A. A. Kazankov. - M.: Institute for Africa RAS, 2002. - 208 p.
- Markov A. Human evolution. In 2 books. Book 1. Monkeys, bones and genes. M.: Corpus, 2012. 496 p.
- Shnirelman V.A. At the origins of war and peace. War and peace in the early history of mankind / V. A. Shnirelman. - M.: Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1994. - p. 9–176.
- Dawson D. The First Armies / D. Dawson. - London, 2001. - 124p.
- Wilson M. L., Wrangham, R. W. Intergroup relations in chimpanzees. // Annual Review of Anthropology 2003, vol. 32, pp. 363–392.
- Wilson M. L. et al. Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts // Nature 2014, vol.513, p.413–419.
The scale of the tragedy
The first researchers, in the early 1940s. those who studied the origin of war and its role in the history of prehistoric societies had to rely on common sense and normative models developed by philosophers. Then in 1960-1980. Anthropological researchers appeared who systematically observed the life of the primitive societies of the Amazon, Australia and Papua New Guinea. The information they collected made it possible to take a fresh look at the life of our ancestors and once and for all bury the remnants of the Rousseauist myth of the good savages. All evidence available to date indicates that war, internal conflicts and domestic violence were a daily part of the life of primitive societies.
Cruel people
Lawrence Keely, The War Before Civilization (1997) and Azar Gat, The War in Human Civilization (2006), who have already become classics on this topic, argue that about 90–95% of the societies studied, belonging to 37 traditional cultures of various types, adopt participation in hostilities against neighbors. The only exceptions are isolated tribes like the Bushmen of the South African deserts or the peoples of the far North, where the external environment is extremely harsh on its inhabitants and is so poor that a huge territory is required to feed a minimal group.
As soon as the climate allows food for groups of several hundred people, strife between neighbors immediately begins, leading to bloody conflicts over territories, property and women. This general trend is characteristic of a variety of tribes: the natives of Australia, Indochina and New Guinea, the Indians of the Amazon, the farmers of the African savannah and the hunter-gatherers of the rainforests.
In terms of statistics, in almost all observed groups, conflicts with neighbors on average occur almost constantly and are the cause of death from 24 to 35% of men between 15 and 49 years old. Among the Yanomamo Indians in the Ecuadorian Amazon, 15% of the adult population (24% of men and 7% of women) die a violent death over several generations in a row, since the beginning of their study by anthropologists. Napoleon Chagnon, who lived among the Yanomamo in 1964-1965, wrote that the village in which he stayed was attacked 25 times over a period of 17 months, with nearly a dozen different neighboring groups alternately attacking.
The Yanomamo warriors have earned anthropologists the nickname "brutal people" because they are constantly at war with their neighbors, and also have a very high level of intra-communal violence.
In New Guinea, 28.5% of men and 2.4% of women die from violent death in the Dani tribe, 34.8% of men die in the Euga tribe. In the Goilala tribe, over 35 years of observation, out of 150 people, 29, mostly men, became victims of tribal conflicts. Although female mortality is much lower - from 4 to 7%, here we face high risks of intra-tribal violence. It is also characteristic of the male part of society, and in this case, in terms of the number of victims, not only is it not inferior, but sometimes even exceeds the losses in intercommunal clashes.
The Eskimos have almost no group clashes and wars in the traditional sense of the word. But the losses from killings by fellow tribesmen are 1 per 1000 people, i.e. 10 times more than in the US in the 1990s. The Yanomamo, known to anthropologists as the "violent people," have a homicide rate of 1.66 per 1,000 people. Among the New Guinean Papuans, this figure is much higher. Among the Khiva, murders are 7.78 per 1000 people, and among the Gebusi, 35.2% of men and 29.3% of women die at the hands of fellow tribesmen.
Asaro Papuans with weapons, in coloring and with ritual masks
To understand the real significance of these figures, let us compare them with the war statistics of "modern" societies. US casualties during the Civil War 1861–1865 accounted for 1.3% of the population. During World War I 1914–1918 France and Germany lost about 3% of their population, with losses among young men of military age reaching 15%. During World War II 1939–1945 The Soviet Union lost 14% of its population, and Germany 8.5%. The events that have become for our contemporaries a symbol of demographic catastrophe and the apotheosis of violence, for our ancestors were everyday routine in which they lived for millennia.
Violence in the Paleolithic Age
Archaeological evidence of conflicts in primitive societies goes back millennia into history. The vast majority of known Neanderthal remains bear traces of numerous wounds. Some owners of the found skeletons were injured with unenviable regularity. They are dominated by the characteristic marks of strong blows and falls, but there are also wounds, almost certainly caused by piercing weapons.
Skull from the Shanidar cave with traces of a penetrating head wound
For example, penetrating wounds of the chest and head, recorded on the skeleton from the Shanidar cave and on the skull from Saint-Cesar. Judging by some features of the mark on the ninth left rib of the Neanderthal from Shanidar, which was struck by a blow, the wound was inflicted by a light throwing weapon like a dart equipped with a stone tip. Today, these traces are generally regarded as the oldest reliable evidence of armed conflicts.
For the remains of Homo sapiens of the Upper Paleolithic, the amount of reliable evidence of armed violence is much greater than for the previous era. Traces of a wound, almost certainly inflicted by a weapon, were found on the first thoracic vertebra of a man from the famous burial in Sungiri, dated to the period 20–28,000 years ago. The damage is localized in the anterior lateral part of the vertebra and is a hole 10 mm long and 1–2 mm wide, left by a pointed thin object. The position of the hole suggests that the inflicting object, a spearhead or knife, passed through the lower part of the neck above the left collarbone. The absence of any signs of healing suggests that the wound was fatal. From a fatal wound inflicted by a piercing object in the pelvic area, and subsequent heavy bleeding, a teenager, whose skeleton is designated as Sungir-2, could also die.
The skeletal remains of Neanderthals contain many traces of wounds and damage that were the result of their harsh, full of deprivation of life.
Another monument that appears frequently in the literature in connection with the theme of armed violence in the Paleolithic is the Maszycka Cave in southern Poland. Here, in a well-preserved cultural layer dating back 13,000 years ago, along with stone and bone tools, about 50 fragments of at least 16 human skulls were found among animal bones. They identified traces of cutting, scraping and even scalping, which the site researchers considered sufficient reason to talk not only about the killing of the inhabitants of the cave by enemies, but also about "cannibalism, focused mainly on eating the brain."
Violence in the Mesolithic and Neolithic
With the advent of the bow and spear thrower about 20,000 years ago, these inventions were immediately adapted to violence against one's neighbor. The most important evidence of this time includes bones with stone or bone tips stuck in them. L. B. Vishnyatsky in a summary table of Paleo- and Mesolithic sites aged 5.8–15,000 years ago describes 29 known finds of bones belonging to 27 individuals.
A flint arrowhead lodged in a man's humerus, Talheim, Germany
Interestingly, more early period include finds of at least 10 animal bones with stuck arrowheads, but among them there are no bones belonging to people at all. About 15,000 years ago, the picture changes, and the number of animal finds roughly corresponds to the known number of human remains. It would be premature - the author believes - to draw any definite and far-reaching conclusions from the data presented, but it seems that it was from the end of the Paleolithic that people began to hunt their own kind in the same way that they previously hunted animals.
These findings are interesting for another reason. If for bone injuries of an earlier time in most cases there remains a minimal possibility of explaining through an accident that took place, then here we clearly see traces of a deliberate murder of our own kind.
A human vertebra pierced by a wooden arrowhead. Historical Museum, Copenhagen
In the Neolithic, rock art was added to the number of sources. Perhaps the oldest scenes of armed violence known today are drawings of fighting people from the land of Arnhem in northern Australia. They date back to around 10,000 years ago.
In the Old World, the most famous images of battle scenes come from the Spanish Levant. Previously, these images were attributed to the Paleolithic-Mesolithic era, today, by analogy between the images of animals on rocks, on the one hand, and on ceramics, on the other hand, they are dated to the Neolithic era, and perhaps later. In the earliest drawings, images of single figures or groups consisting of several people predominate. The later time includes mass scenes with a large number of participants - 111 figures in one, 68 and 52 in the other.
One of the oldest depictions of a battle scene from Les Dogues, Spain
Archaeological statistics
A great success for archaeologists is the discovery of Neolithic burial grounds, in the analysis of which it is possible to obtain statistical information. A large, comprehensive study was carried out in California between the Sierra Nevada and San Francisco Bay, where more than 16,000 graves belonging to 13 different ethnic groups that have lived here over the past 5,000 years of history have been studied. As a result, the researchers opened a complex picture of everyday violence in which local residents were involved.
Its most common features are dart and arrowheads embedded in bones, found in 7.2% of the burials of the hunter-gatherers who lived here. Blunt head trauma was recorded in 4.3% of cases, in slightly less than 1% of cases, signs of dismemberment were detected.
Terry Jones of California Polytechnic state university believes that there are several tidal waves of violence associated with advances in military technology and the emergence of new murder weapons. The invention, first of the spear-thrower-atlatl, and then of the bow and arrow, certainly changed the social and political environment, increasing the intensity of inter-group conflict, he writes. The second surge took place between 1720 and 1899, when Europeans arrived in the area and brought new weapons with them.
At the Madisonville Ohio Indian burial ground, 22% of the skulls found had healed wounds, and 8% were crushed, causing death. Of the people buried in an Indian burial ground in Illinois, 8% died a violent death.
From the surveyed burials of the ancient pit culture, in the 4th-3rd millennium BC. that existed in a wide area from the southern Urals in the east to the Dniester in the west, 31% of the skulls bear traumatic injuries. Many of them were fatal. In some cases, intravital fracture of the nasal bones is noted, probably obtained in a hand-to-hand collision. And this is only what can be recorded from the bone remains: fatal injuries to soft tissues that did not leave marks on the bones inherited by archaeologists simply could not be taken into account.
Genetics
Interesting results were obtained by genetic studies of the population of Europe. In its genome, there are many different subtypes of mitochondrial DNA that are passed down through the female line. Their distribution roughly corresponds to the waves of settlement of the continent, starting with the first Cro-Magnons. But if the diversity of mitochondrial DNA indicates many sources and distant epochs, then in men there is a total predominance of one haplogroup R1b, which in the western part of the continent gives from 60 to 90% of the population, and practically does not occur outside of Europe.
The prevalence of haplogroup R1b
Its prevalence surprisingly well coincides in time with the settlement of speakers of the Indo-European group of languages, which, in turn, are associated with the expansion of the Yamnaya archaeological culture. Having learned at the end of the IV millennium BC. melting bronze by taming a horse, inventing a wheeled wagon, and then a war chariot, the population of the steppe belt of the northern Black Sea region received significant military superiority over their more peaceful neighbors. After that, very quickly, there were no other men left in the gigantic spaces from Scotland to the Pamirs, and only “female” mitochondrial DNA makes it possible to judge the human diversity that existed here before.
Literature
- Anikovich M.V., Timofeev V.I. Armament and armed conflicts in the Stone Age. In: Military archeology. Weapons and military affairs in historical and social perspective. SPb., 1998, p. 16–20.
- Vishnyatsky L. B. Armed violence in the Paleolithic. // Stratum plus 2014, №1, p. 311-334.
- Shnirelman V. A. 1994. At the origins of war and peace. In: War and peace in the early history of mankind. T.1. Moscow: Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology RAS, 9–176.
- Chagnon N. A. Yanomamö: The Fierce People. New York, 1968. 224 p.
- Gat A. War in human civilization. Oxford, 2006, 822 p.
- Keely L. War Before Civilization. Oxford, 1997, 245 p.
- Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers. Ed. by M. W. Allen and T. L. Jones. Walnut Creek, 2014, 391 p.
Stone Age Tactics
In the 1960s and early 1970s. Anthropologists' ideas about war in primitive society were dominated by the concept of ritualized aggression created by Konrad Lorenz, which included mainly a demonstrative threat. Collisions of this kind are extremely rarely associated with the actual use of force. primate research,as shown earlier , dispelled these illusions, as it turned out that even great apes actively fight and kill each other. The concept of ritualized aggression turned out to be wrong.
Asymmetric war
The main reason for Lorenz's error was that both chimpanzees and primitive people tend to minimize their own risks in a collision and resort to violence when they have a significant advantage over the enemy. Violence becomes the more attractive option for conflict resolution, the lower the risk of loss or injury for the attacking side. What researchers took for ritual aggression was only the first phase of the conflict. In it, assuming a formidable appearance, each of the parties sought to convince the other to give up the fight.
According to Clemens Rachel of the University of Toronto, co-leader of the archaeological expedition in Hamukara, "the finds included projectiles in all stages of use, from manufacture to hitting the target." One of the cores was found deeply embedded in the clay coating surrounding the city. brick wall. It must have been at the last stage of the defense that the defenders of the city, in desperation, threw everything they could get their hands on at the attackers. In one of the rooms, a neat hole in the floor and a vessel buried up to the neck were found. It was commonly used by the people of Hamukar to recycle unwanted clay seals. Here, archaeologists found 24 slingshots laid out along the edge of this pit.
The remains of one of the defenders of the city found among the ruins and clay shells for slings found next to them
The efforts of the city's defenders went to waste. The wall surrounding it fell, and the quarters adjacent to it were engulfed in fire. The battle continued among the ruins. Archaeologists have discovered under rubble the remains of 12 people who died, most likely in this last battle. Probably, a similar fate befell the rest of the defenders.
Who exactly destroyed Hamukar remains unknown, but scientists have an assumption that it was done by warriors who came from the south. When the city was rebuilt after the destruction, the culture of the locals had many elements of similarity with the culture of the Sumerian Uruk. “Even if Hamukar was not destroyed by them, but by someone else, the natives of Uruk were the first to come to the ruined city and settled there” Rachel said.
Literature
- Hirst K. The Battle for Hamoukar - Mesopotamia's First Great Battle. // archaeology.about.com
- McMahon A. Urbanism and the Prehistory of Violent Conflict: Tell Brak, northeast Syria. archeorient.hypotheses.org
- McMahon A., Sołtysiak A. and Weber J. Cities and conflict: Late Chalcolithic mass graves at Tell Brak, Syria (3800–3600 B.C.). // Journal of Field Archaeology 2011, vol. 36, p. 201-220.
ancient battlefield
The phenomenon of decisive battle, according to Victor David Hanson and his followers, is a characteristic part of the "Western way of warfare." Such elements of this tradition as the concentration of large forces of both sides, offensive actions to defeat or destroy the enemy forces, the desire to decide the outcome of the confrontation on the battlefield in a short-term hand-to-hand fight, run like a red thread through European military history over the past three millennia. Archaeological find at the endThe 20th century made it possible to push the origin of this tradition back several hundred years into the depths of history. In the north of Germany, scientists have discovered what is possibly the oldest battlefield known to date.
Loud find of archaeologists
In 1996, on the banks of the small river Tollensee in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, 60 km from the coast of the Baltic Sea, amateur archaeologist Hans-Dietrich Borgwardt and his son Ronald discovered a number of bones that belonged to the human skeleton. The finders believed that these were the remains of a soldier who died during the Second World War, until they noticed a flint arrowhead embedded in one of the bones. Other bones were soon discovered, as well as two wooden clubs. Professional scientists became interested in the find, and in 2008 systematic excavations began in the Tollensee Valley, supported by the University of Greifswald and the German Research Society.
Archaeologists explored the river bank for about 2 km, a team of professional divers was involved to inspect the river bottom. Thanks to the joint efforts of specialists, over 8 years of work, more than 9,000 bones belonging to at least 125 individuals were discovered. The vast majority of the discovered remains belong to young men under the age of 30. However, there are also several bones belonging to children and women. About 40 traces of injuries of varying severity were found on the bones, which indicates that the death of these people was of a violent nature.
Radiocarbon dating of the finds indicates that they belong to the Bronze Age, between 1300 and 1200 BC. BC. In the Mediterranean region and the Middle East at that time there already existed a developed civilization, a bureaucratic state, a large population and intensive trade. But the northern part of Europe remained a sparsely populated swampy region, in which no traces of monumental buildings or any large settlements have yet been found.
According to archaeologists, the population density at that time did not exceed 5 people per km2, and from 70 to 115 thousand people lived throughout the entire territory of modern Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The discovery of the remains of so many people in this wasteland needed an explanation. Archaeologists immediately rejected the hypothesis of a large burial ground, since the burial customs of that time in this region included the cremation of the dead, followed by the placement of the collected ashes in an earthen urn and its placement under the mound along with the simplest inventory. Traces of urns, as well as accompanying offerings, were not found here.
In addition, the bodies of the dead were not burned, but lay rather disorderly. At the very beginning of the excavations, on a small ledge of the coast on an area of only 12 m2, archaeologists discovered the largest concentration of remains - 1478 bones, more than 20 skulls. What could have happened here, why the bodies of the dead were piled up?
To date, archaeologists have found approximately 9,000 bones belonging to at least 125 individuals on the Tollense coast.
The most plausible interpretation of the finds was the hypothesis that archaeologists discovered not just a burial of war victims, but the battlefield itself, the oldest known in Europe today. At that time, the groundwater level was higher than the modern one, Tolense was much wider and more abundant, and its banks were swampy, which, by the way, is another argument against identifying the find as a burial ground. In addition, there are practically no traces of teeth and claws of scavengers on the bones, which would be inevitable if the bodies of the dead had spent some time in the air.
Most likely, they were either thrown into the water by the victors immediately after the battle ended, or remained where they died if the battle took place in a swampy floodplain of the river. Some researchers believe that the battle itself took place somewhat upstream, and where they ended up, the bodies were brought by the river. Their opponents argue that in this case, the bodies would inevitably disintegrate and archaeologists would get only large bones, while in reality scientists have at least a certain number of whole bodies at their disposal.
Wounds and the weapons with which they were inflicted
Bone damage allows you to reconstruct the nature of the wounds inflicted in battle. One of the finds of archaeologists is a skull, in the frontal part of which there is a round hole the size of a child's fist. The skull had been crushed by a blow from a blunt heavy object, possibly a wooden club like the one discovered by Hans-Dietrich Borgwardt.
Broken skull found at the battle site
Another skull found by archaeologists was pierced by a bronze arrowhead, which entered the brain by 30 mm. Another arrowhead made of flint was found embedded in the humerus. A cross-shaped incision on one of the femurs was most likely left by a bronze arrowhead, and a diagonal split on the other femur is not a fracture from a fall from a horse, as previously thought, but a blow from some kind of sharp weapon, possibly an arrowhead. spears.
Some damage is visible to the naked eye, others are only small chips on the bones. Most of the injuries do not show signs of subsequent healing, a small number of healed injuries indicate that some of the participants in the battle had previously participated in such skirmishes. In general, the number of damaged bones discovered by archaeologists - 40 examples - is very small against the general background of a large number of finds. In this regard, the researchers point out that the cause of death could be soft tissue damage and wounds that did not leave corresponding marks on the bones. In addition to human remains, the remains of at least four horses were found among the bone finds.
Wooden club in the shape of a croquet mallet, made from blackthorn wood
Among the finds of weapons that were wounded, two wooden clubs, one of which had the shape of a baseball bat 73 cm long and was carved from ash, should be mentioned first of all. The second resembled a croquet mallet with a handle 53 cm long, the material for which was the wood of the turn. The most common group of finds are arrowheads, both bronze and made of flint.
A total of 49 bronze arrowheads were found here. The uniqueness of this find is evidenced by the fact that before the start of excavations on the banks of the Tollensee, only 28 points were known throughout Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 3 points in Schleswig-Holstein, and not a single one on the entire Scandinavian Peninsula. Although the hypothesis attributing flint arrowheads to local residents and bronze to aliens looks very tempting, it must still be recognized that both types of arrowheads were used at that time in both Northern and Southern Europe.
Bronze arrowheads found in the Tollense Valley
Thus, bows and arrows were a common type of weapon for ordinary warriors, which is weakly or not represented at all during excavations of burials. On the contrary, such items of weapons as a bronze sword or a battle ax, which, thanks to excavations of princely burials, which became an element of our ideas about how a warrior of the Bronze Age should look like, were not found. Such weapons, apparently, were rare and only representatives of the nobility had them. If it was used during the battle, then after the battle everything was collected by the winners. However, one of the fragments found by archaeologists is interpreted as part of the blade of a bronze sword or dagger.
The number and composition of opponents
During the construction of the A20 autobahn, which runs about 3 km east parallel to the Tollense, traces of a small Bronze Age settlement were discovered. Approximately 10 km downstream is a burial ground of 35 burial mounds dating from the same period as the remains of the battle. All this speaks of the presence of a settled population, and, consequently, of neighboring conflicts and disputes.
At the very beginning of the excavations, archaeologists believed that they had found traces of a collision between neighboring groups that did not share the territory with each other. However, as soon as the true scale of the find became clear to them, this hypothesis had to be corrected. Although the remains of 125 people have been identified so far, archaeologists believe that this is only a small part of what remains to be found. The total number of those who fell in the battle they estimate at least 800 people. Based on the proportion of the dead in 20-25 percent of the personnel, it turns out that from 3,000 to 4,000 people could take part in the battle on the river bank.
A bronze arrowhead that pierced the skull bone and pierced the victim's brain
However, it can be assumed that most of the remains belong to the soldiers of the losing side, and the winners, who controlled the battlefield, were able to carry away part of their bodies in order to bury them in accordance with custom. And in this case, the total number of units could be even greater. Considering that the population of even a large Bronze Age village hardly exceeded 100-200 people, in order to raise armies of such a size, it was necessary to carry out large-scale mobilization within a very large territory.
The secret of who the participants in the battle were, whether they were relatives or countrymen to each other, can be given by an analysis of the DNA of the fallen extracted from the bones. While this research is still not completed; The strontium isotope extracted from tooth enamel indicates that they most likely originated from different geographical areas.
Inhabitants of Northern Europe in the Bronze Age, modern reconstruction
The carbon isotope d13C found in the bones of many of the fallen indicates the predominance of millet in their diet. Since the locals mainly ate fish and seafood, archaeologists believe that at least some of the participants in the battle could be strangers who came from somewhere in the south. The two bronze brooches found on the battlefield are typical of the Bronze Age archaeological culture of Silesia, which lies 400 km southeast of this site. This fact may also indicate that the conquerors, whoever they were, were aliens in this region.
Place of battle
In 2012, in the southern part of the excavated area, the researchers found the remains of an earth embankment on the river bank, as well as wooden piles driven into the bottom and traces of a wooden flooring. All this could be the remains of a bridge that was built in this place across the river. Dendrochronological analysis of the find makes it possible to date it to about 1700 BC, that is, a time 400 years preceding the probable date of the battle. This suggests that in those distant times, along the coast of Tollense, there could be a trade route associated, for example, with salt or ore trade.
A sign of the extended lines of communication that linked together the remote regions of the European continent is the bronze weapons of the participants in the battle. Bronze is an alloy that contains such a rare metal as tin. It was mined, among other things, in the territory of Silesia, from where it then moved along trade routes over vast distances. It is noteworthy that among the finds discovered by archaeologists at the bottom of the river were two gold spiral bracelets and two bracelets made of pure tin. The latter are almost certainly either a commodity intended for exchange or a means of payment.
Map of the excavations of the Tollense Valley, indicating the concentration of finds
The battle, in which very large forces at that time clashed with each other, hardly happened by chance at the place of crossing the river. Most likely, an ambush took place here, which was arranged for the enemy by local warriors, who, it seems, possessed a certain superiority of forces. Whether the war party acted as an adversary, undertook a raid for prey to the north, but was intercepted by those whom they themselves planned to surprise on the way, or vice versa, local natives attacked a trading caravan from the south - it is impossible to say for sure. Most likely, the fight was long and stubborn. Fighters wounded by arrows were finished off with clubs.
It appears that the invaders from the south, whether they were the aggressors or the victims of robber attacks, were defeated. The victors, having killed a large number of their opponents, took possession of the battlefield. Here they collected spoils of war, leaving the bodies of the dead to lie on the spot where they were discovered by archaeologists more than three thousand years later.
Literature
- Brinker U., Flohr S., Piek J. & Orschiedt J. Human remains from a Bronze Age site in the Tollense valley – victims of a battle? // Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Human Conflict. Ed. Knüsel C. & Smith M.J. .London-New York, 2013. - P. 146–160.
- Jantzen D., Brinker U., Orschiedt J., Heinemeier J., Piek J., Hauenstein K., Krüger J., Lidke G., Lübke H., Lampe R., Lorenz S., Schult M., Terberger T A Bronze Age battlefield? Weapons and trauma in the Tollense Valley, northeastern Germany. / Antiquity 2011, vol. 85, pp. 417–433.
- Terberger T., Dombrowsky A., Dräger J., Jantzen D., Krüger J., Lidke G. Professionelle Krieger in der Bronzezeit vor 3300 Jahren? Zu den Überresten eines Gewaltkonfliktes im Tollensetal, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. // Gewalt and Gesellschaft. Dimensionen der Gewalt in ur- und frühgeschichtlicher Zeit. Internationale Tagung vom 14–16 March 2013 an der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Link T., Peter-Röcher H. (Hrsg.). Universitätsforschungen zur Prähistorischen Archaeologie 2014, Bd. 259-S. 93-109.
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Periodization of ancient history
The first stage in the development of mankind - the primitive - communal system - takes a huge period of time from the moment of the separation of man from the animal kingdom (about 3-5 million years ago) until the formation of class societies in various regions of the planet (approximately in the 4th millennium BC. .). Its periodization is based on differences in the material and technique of making tools (archaeological periodization). In accordance with it, in the most ancient era, there are:
Stone Age (from the emergence of man to the III millennium BC);
Bronze Age (from the end of the 4th to the beginning of the 1st millennium BC);
Iron Age (from the 1st millennium BC).
In turn, the Stone Age is subdivided into the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic), Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic), New Stone Age (Neolithic) and the Copper Stone Age transitional to Bronze Age (Eneolithic).
A number of scientists divide the history of primitive society into five stages, each of which differs in the degree of development of tools, the materials from which they were made, the quality of housing, and the corresponding organization of housekeeping.
The first stage is defined as the prehistory of the economy of immaterial culture: from the emergence of mankind to about 1 million years ago. This is a time when the adaptation of people to the environment was not much different from obtaining a livelihood by animals. Many scientists believe that East Africa is the ancestral home of man. It is here that bones of the first people who lived more than 2 million years ago are found during excavations.
The second stage is a primitive appropriating economy approximately 1 million years ago - XI millennium BC. e., covers a significant part of the Stone Age - the early and middle Paleolithic.
The third stage is a developed appropriating economy. It is difficult to determine its chronological framework, since in a number of localities this period ended in the 20th millennium AD. e. (subtropics of Europe and Africa), in others (tropics) - continues to the present. Covers the late Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and in some areas - the entire Neolithic.
The fourth stage is the emergence of a manufacturing economy. In the most economically developed regions of the earth - IX - VIII millennium BC. e. (Late Mesolithic - Early Neolithic).
The fifth stage is the era of the producing economy. For some areas of dry and humid subtropics - VIII - V millennium BC. e.
In addition to the production of tools, the material culture of ancient mankind is closely connected with the creation of dwellings.
The most interesting archaeological finds of the most ancient dwellings date back to the early Paleolithic. The remains of 21 seasonal camps have been found in France. In one of them, an oval stone fence was discovered, which can be interpreted as the foundation of a light dwelling. Inside the dwelling there were hearths and places for making tools. In the cave of Le Lazare (France), the remains of a shelter were found, the reconstruction of which suggests the presence of supports, a roof made of skins, internal partitions and two hearths in a large room. Beds - from the skins of animals (foxes, wolves, lynxes) and algae. These finds date back to about 150 thousand years ago.
On the territory of the USSR, the remains of land dwellings, dating back to the early Paleolithic, were found near the village of Molodovo on the Dniester. They were an oval layout of specially selected large mammoth bones. Traces of 15 fires located in different parts of the dwelling were also found here.
The primitive era of mankind is characterized by a low level of development of productive forces, their slow improvement, the collective appropriation of natural resources and the results of production (primarily the exploited territory), equal distribution, socio-economic equality, the absence of private property, the exploitation of man by man, classes, states.
An analysis of the development of primitive human society shows that this development was extremely uneven. The process of isolation of our distant ancestors from the world of great apes was very slow.
The general scheme of human evolution is as follows:
Australopithecus man;
Homo erectus (formerly hominids: Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus);
Man of modern physical appearance (late hominids: Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic people).
In practice, the appearance of the first Australopithecus marked the emergence of material culture, directly related to the production of tools. It was the latter that became for archaeologists a means of determining the main stages in the development of ancient mankind.
The rich and generous nature of that period did not contribute to the acceleration of this process; only with the advent of the harsh conditions of the Ice Age, with the intensification of the labor activity of primitive man in his difficult struggle for existence, new skills rapidly appear, tools are improved, new social forms are developed. The mastery of fire, the collective hunting of large animals, adaptation to the conditions of a melted glacier, the invention of the bow, the transition from an appropriating to a productive economy (cattle breeding and agriculture), the discovery of metal (copper, bronze, iron) and the creation of a complex tribal organization of society - these are the important stages that mark the path of mankind in the conditions of the primitive communal system.
Paleolithic - mastery of fire
There are early, middle and late stages of the Paleolithic. In the early Paleolithic, in turn, the primary, Shellic and Acheulian eras are distinguished.
The oldest cultural monuments were found in caves: Le Lazare (dating back to about 150 thousand years ago), Lyalko, Nio, Fond-de-Gaume (France), Altamira (Spain). A large number of objects of the Shellic culture (tools) were found in Africa, especially in the Upper Nile Valley, in Ternifin (Algeria), etc. The most ancient remains of human culture on the territory of the USSR (Caucasus, Ukraine) belong to the turn of the Shellic and Acheulian eras. By the Acheulian era, man settled more widely, penetrating into Central Asia, the Volga region.
On the eve of the great glaciation, man already knew how to hunt the largest animals: elephants, rhinos, deer, bison. In the Acheulean era, the sedentary nature of hunters appeared, living in one place for a long time. Complex hunting has long been an addition to simple gathering.
During this period, humanity was already sufficiently organized and equipped. Perhaps the most significant was the mastery of fire about 300-200 thousand years ago. It is not for nothing that many southern peoples (in those places where people settled then) have preserved legends about a hero who stole heavenly fire. The myth of Prometheus, who brought people fire - lightning, reflects the largest technical victory of our very distant ancestors.
Some researchers also attribute the Mousterian era to the Early Paleolithic, while others distinguish it as a special stage of the Middle Paleolithic. Mousterian Neanderthals lived both in caves and in dwellings specially made of mammoth bones - tents. At this time, man had already learned to produce fire by friction, and not only to support it, kindled by lightning.
The basis of the economy was hunting for mammoths, bison, deer. The hunters were armed with spears, flint points and clubs. The first artificial burials of the dead belong to this era, which indicates the emergence of very complex ideological ideas.
It is believed that the birth of the tribal organization of society can also be attributed to this time. Only by streamlining the relationship of the sexes, the emergence of exogamy (the prohibition of marriages within the same team) can explain the fact that the physical appearance of the Neanderthal began to improve and thousands of years later, by the end of the ice age, he turned into a neoanthrope or Cro-Magnon - people of our modern type.
The Upper (Late) Paleolithic is known to us better than previous eras. Nature was still harsh, the ice age was still going on. But man was already armed enough to fight for existence. The economy became complex: it was based on hunting large animals, but the beginnings of fishing appeared, and the gathering of edible fruits, grains, and roots was a serious help.
Stone products were divided into two groups: weapons and tools (spearheads, knives, scrapers for dressing skins, flint tools for processing bone and wood). Various throwing means (darts, serrated harpoons, special spear throwers) were widely used, which made it possible to hit the beast at a distance.
According to archaeologists, the main cell of the Upper Paleolithic social system was a small tribal community, numbering about a hundred people, of which twenty were adult hunters who ran the household of the clan. Small round dwellings, the remains of which were found, may have been adapted for a double family.
The finds of burials with beautiful weapons made of mammoth tusks and a large number of decorations testify to the emergence of a cult of leaders, tribal or tribal elders.
In the Upper Paleolithic, man settled widely not only in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, but also in Siberia. According to scientists, America was settled from Siberia at the end of the Paleolithic.
The art of the Upper Paleolithic testifies to the high development of the human intellect of this era. In the caves of France and Spain, colorful images dating back to this time have been preserved. Such a cave was also discovered by Russian scientists in the Urals (Kapova Cave) with the image of a mammoth, rhinoceros, horse. The images made by the artists of the Ice Age in paint on the walls of caves and carvings on bones give an idea of the animals they hunted. This was probably due to various magical rites, spells and dances of hunters in front of painted animals, which should have ensured a successful hunt. Elements of such magical actions have been preserved even in modern Christianity: a prayer for rain with sprinkling of fields with water is an ancient magical act that goes back to primitive times.
Of particular note is the cult of the bear, dating back to the Mousterian era and allowing us to talk about the origin of totemism. Bone figurines of women are often found at Paleolithic sites near hearths or dwellings. Women are presented as very portly, mature. Obviously, the main idea of such figurines is fertility, vitality, the continuation of the human race, personified in a woman - the mistress of the house and hearth.
The abundance of female images found in the Upper Paleolithic sites of Eurasia allowed scientists to conclude that the cult of the female progenitor was generated by matriarchy. With very primitive sex relationships, children knew only their mothers, but far from always knew their fathers. Women guarded the fire in the hearths, dwellings, children: women of the older generation could keep track of kinship and monitor compliance with exogamous prohibitions so that children were not born from close relatives, the undesirability of which was obviously already realized. The prohibition of incest gave its results - the descendants of the former Neanderthals became healthier and gradually turned into people of the modern type.
Mesolithic - the settlement of mankind from south to north
Approximately ten millennia BC, a huge glacier, reaching 1000-2000 meters in height, began to melt intensively, the remains of this glacier have survived to this day in the Alps and the mountains of Scandinavia. The transitional period from the glacier to the modern climate is called the conventional term Mesolithic, that is, the Middle Stone Age, the interval between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, which takes about three to four millennia.
The Mesolithic is a clear proof of the strong influence of the geographical environment on the life and evolution of mankind. Nature has changed in many ways: the climate has become warmer, the glacier has melted, full-flowing rivers have flowed to the south, large expanses of land that were previously closed by the glacier have been gradually liberated, vegetation has been renewed and developed, mammoths and rhinos have disappeared.
In connection with all this, the stable, well-established life of the Paleolithic mammoth hunters was disrupted, and other forms of economy had to be created. Using wood, man created a bow with arrows. This greatly expanded the object of hunting: along with deer, elk, horses, they began to hunt various small birds and animals. The great ease of such hunting, and the ubiquity of game, made strong communal groups of mammoth hunters unnecessary. Mesolithic hunters and fishermen roamed the steppes and forests in small groups, leaving behind trails of temporary camps.
The warmer climate has made it possible to revive the gathering. Especially important for the future was the gathering of wild cereals, for which even wooden and bone sickles with flint blades were invented. An innovation was the ability to create cutting and piercing tools with a large number of sharp pieces of flint inserted into the edge of a wooden object.
Probably at this time, people became familiar with moving through the water on logs and rafts, and with the properties of flexible rods and the fibrous bark of trees.
The domestication of animals began: a hunter-archer followed a game with a dog; killing wild boars, people left broods of piglets to feed.
Mesolithic - the time of the settlement of mankind from south to north. Moving through the forests along the rivers, the Mesolithic man passed all the space freed from the glacier and reached the then northern edge of the Eurasian continent, where he began to hunt the sea animal.
The art of the Mesolithic is significantly different from the Paleolithic: there was a weakening of the leveling communal principle and the role of the individual hunter increased - in the rock carvings we see not only animals, but also hunters, men with bows and women awaiting their return.
neolithic revolution
Neolithic - the transition to a productive economy. This conventional name is applied to the last stage of the Stone Age, but it does not reflect either chronological or cultural uniformity: in the XI century AD. e. Novgorodians wrote about barter with the Neolithic (by type of economy) tribes of the North, and in the 18th century. The Russian scientist S. Krasheninnikov described the typical Neolithic life of the local inhabitants of Kamchatka.
Nevertheless, the period VII - V millennium BC is attributed to the Neolithic. e. Settled in different landscape zones, humanity went in different ways and at different rates. The tribes that found themselves in the North, in harsh conditions, for a long time remained at the same level of development. But in the southern regions, the evolution was faster.
Man already used polished and drilled tools with handles, a loom, knew how to sculpt dishes from clay, process wood, build a boat, and weave a net. The potter's wheel, which appeared in the 4th millennium BC. e., dramatically increased labor productivity and improved the quality of pottery. In the IV millennium BC. e. In the East, the wheel was invented, the draft power of animals began to be used, the first wheeled carts appeared.
The art of the Neolithic is represented by petroglyphs (drawings on stones) in the regions of the North, revealing in all details elk skiers, whale hunting in large boats.
One of the most important technical upheavals of antiquity is associated with the Neolithic era - the transition to a productive economy (Neolithic revolution). In the Neolithic era, the first social division of labor into agricultural and cattle breeding took place, which contributed to progress in the development of productive forces, and the second social division of labor - the separation of craft from agriculture, which contributed to the individualization of labor.
Agriculture was distributed very unevenly. The first centers of agriculture were discovered in Palestine, Egypt, Iran, Iraq. In Central Asia, artificial irrigation of fields with the help of canals appeared already in the 4th millennium BC. e. The agricultural tribes are characterized by large settlements of adobe houses, sometimes numbering several thousand inhabitants. The Dzheytun archaeological culture in Central Asia and the Bugo-Dniester culture in Ukraine represent early agricultural cultures in the 5th-4th millennium BC. e.
Eneolithic - agricultural society
The Eneolithic is the Copper Stone Age, during this period individual products made of pure copper appeared, but the new material has not yet affected the forms of economy. The Trypillia culture (VI-III millennium BC), located between the Carpathians and the Dnieper on fertile loess and chernozem soils, belongs to the Eneolithic era. During this period, the primitive agricultural society reached its highest peak.
The Trypillians (like other early farmers) developed the type of complex economy that existed in the countryside until the era of capitalism: agriculture (wheat, barley, flax), cattle breeding (cow, pig, sheep, goat), fishing and hunting. Primitive matriarchal communities, apparently, did not yet know property and social inequality.
Of particular interest is the ideology of the Trypillian tribes, permeated with the idea of fertility, which was expressed in the identification of the earth and the woman: the earth, giving birth to a new ear of cereal from the seed, was, as it were, equated with a woman giving birth to a new man. This idea underlies many religions, including Christianity.
Clay figurines of women associated with the matriarchal cult of fertility are attributed to the Trypillia culture. The painting of large clay vessels of the Trypillia culture reveals the worldview of the farmers who took care of irrigating their fields with rain, the picture of the world they created. The world, according to their ideas, consisted of three zones (tiers): the zone of the earth with plants, the zone of the Middle Sky with the sun and rain, and the zone of the Upper Sky, which stores above the reserves of heavenly water, which can be shed when it rains. The supreme ruler of the world was a female deity. The picture of the Trypillian world is very close to that reflected in the ancient hymns of the Indian Rigveda (a collection of religious hymns of philosophical and cosmological content, took shape in the 10th century BC).
The evolution of man especially accelerated with the discovery of metal - copper and bronze (an alloy of copper and tin). Tools of labor, weapons, armor, jewelry and utensils from the 3rd millennium BC. e. They began to produce not only from stone, but also from bronze. The exchange of products between the tribes increased, and clashes between them became more frequent. The division of labor deepened, property inequality within the clan appeared.
In connection with the development of cattle breeding, the role of men in production has increased. The age of patriarchy has begun. Within the clan, large patriarchal families arose, with a man at the head, leading an independent household. Then there was polygamy.
In the Bronze Age, large cultural communities were already outlined, which, perhaps, corresponded to language families: Indo-Europeans, Finno-Ugric peoples, Turks and Caucasian tribes.
Their geographical distribution was very different from the modern one. The ancestors of the Finno-Ugric peoples moved, according to some scientists, from the Aral Sea region to the north and north-west, passing west of the Urals. The ancestors of the Turkic peoples were located east of Baikal and Altai.
In all likelihood, the main ancestral home of the Slavs was the area between the Dnieper, the Carpathians and the Vistula, but at different times the ancestral home could have different outlines - either expand at the expense of Central European cultures, or move east or sometimes go out to the steppe south.
The neighbors of the Proto-Slavs were the ancestors of the Germanic tribes in the northwest, the ancestors of the Latvian-Lithuanian (Baltic) tribes in the north, the Daco-Thracian tribes in the southwest and the proto-Iranian (Scythian) tribes in the south and southeast; from time to time, the Proto-Slavs came into contact with the northeastern Finno-Ugric tribes and, far to the west, with the Celtic-Italic ones.
Decomposition of the primitive communal system
Approximately in the V - IV millennium BC. e. the disintegration of primitive society began. Among the factors contributing to this, in addition to the Neolithic revolution, an important role was played by the intensification of agriculture, the development of specialized cattle breeding, the emergence of metallurgy, the formation of a specialized craft, and the development of trade.
With the development of plow agriculture, agricultural labor passed from women's hands to men's, and a man - a farmer and a warrior became the head of the family. Accumulation in different families was created differently, and each family, accumulating property, tried to keep it in the family. The product gradually ceases to be shared among members of the community, and property begins to pass from father to children, the foundations of private ownership of the means of production are laid.
From the account of kinship on the maternal side, they pass to the account of kinship on the father's side - a patriarchy is formed. Accordingly, the form of family relations changes; there is a patriarchal family based on private property. The subordinate position of women is reflected, in particular, in the fact that the obligation of monogamy is established only for women, while polygamy (polygamy) is allowed for men. The oldest documents of Egypt and Mesopotamia testify to such a situation, which had developed by the end of the 4th - beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. e. The same picture is confirmed by the oldest written monuments that appear among some tribes of the foothills of Western Asia, China in the 2nd millennium BC. e.
The growth of labor productivity, increased exchange, constant wars - all this led to the emergence of property stratification among the tribes. Property inequality gave rise to social inequality. The top of the tribal aristocracy was formed, in fact, in charge of all affairs. Noble community members sat in the tribal council, were in charge of the cult of the gods, singled out military leaders and priests from their midst. Along with property and social differentiation within the tribal community, there is also differentiation within the tribe between individual clans. On the one hand, strong and wealthy clans stand out, and on the other, weakened and impoverished ones. Accordingly, the first of them gradually turn into dominant ones, and the second into subordinate ones. As a result, entire tribes or even groups of tribes could turn out to be in blue.
However, for a long time, despite the property and social stratification of the community, the top of the tribal nobility still had to reckon with the opinion of the entire community. But more and more often the labor of the collective is abused in its own interests by the tribal elite, with the power of which ordinary community members can no longer argue.
So, the signs of the collapse of the tribal system were the emergence of property inequality, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the leaders of the tribes, the increase in armed clashes, the conversion of prisoners into slaves, the transformation of the clan from a consanguineous collective into a territorial community. Archaeological excavations in different parts of the world, including on the territory of our country, allow us to draw such conclusions. An example is the famous Maikop mound in the North Caucasus, dating back to the 2nd millennium BC. e., or magnificent burials of leaders in Trialeti (south of Tbilisi). The abundance of jewels, burials with the leader of violently murdered slaves and female slaves, the colossal size of the grave mounds - all this testifies to the wealth and power of the leaders, to the violation of the initial equality within the tribe.
In different parts of the world, the destruction of primitive communal relations occurred at different times, and the models of transition to higher formations were also diverse: some peoples formed early class states, others - slave-owning, many peoples bypassed the slave-owning system and went straight to feudalism, and some - to colonial capitalism (the peoples of America , Australia).
Although defensive aggressiveness and cruelty are not, as a rule, the cause of war, these traits still find expression in the way war is waged. Therefore, data on the conduct of wars by primitive peoples help to supplement our understanding of the essence of primitive aggressiveness.
A detailed account of the war of the Walbiri tribe in Australia we find in Meggit; Service believes that this description is a very apt description of the primitive wars of the hunting tribes.
The Walbiri tribe was not particularly militant - it did not have a military estate, there was no professional army, a hierarchical command system; and there were very few conquests. Every man was (and remains) a potential warrior: he is constantly armed and always ready to defend his rights; but at the same time, each of them was an individualist and preferred to fight alone, independently of others. In some clashes, it happened that kinship ties placed men in the ranks of the enemy camp, and all the men of a certain community could accidentally belong to one of these groups. But there were no military commanders, elected or inherited positions, no headquarters, plans, strategy and tactics. And even if there were men who distinguished themselves in battle, they received respect and attention, but not the right to command others. But there were circumstances when the battle developed so rapidly that the men entered the battle precisely and without delay, using precisely those methods that led to victory. This rule still applies today to all young unmarried men.
In any case, there was no reason for one tribe to be forced to engage in a massive war against others. These tribes did not know what slavery was, what movable or immovable property was; the conquest of a new territory was only a burden for the winner, for all the spiritual ties of the tribe were connected with a certain territory. If occasionally there were small wars of conquest with other tribes, then, I am sure, they differed only in scale from conflicts within a tribe or even a clan. So, for example, in the battle of Waringari, which led to the conquest of the Tanami reservoir, only men from the Wanaiga tribe participated, and, moreover, no more than twenty people. And in general, I do not know of a single case of military alliances between tribes for the sake of attacking other Valbyrian communities or other tribes.
From a technical point of view, this kind of conflict between primitive hunters can be called the word "war". And in this sense, one can come to the conclusion that from time immemorial man has waged wars within his species and therefore an innate craving for murder has developed in him. But such a conclusion overlooks the profound differences in the conduct of wars by primitive communities of different levels of development and completely ignores the difference between these wars and the wars of civilized peoples. In primitive cultures low level there was no centralized organization, no permanent commanders. Wars were very rare, and wars of conquest were out of the question. They did not lead to bloodshed and did not have the goal of killing as many enemies as possible.
The wars of civilized peoples, on the contrary, have a clear institutional structure, constant command, and their goals are always predatory: either this is the conquest of territory, or slaves, or profit. In addition, another, perhaps most important, difference is overlooked: for primitive hunters and gatherers, the escalation of the war has no economic benefit.
The increase in the population of hunting tribes is so insignificant that the population factor can very rarely be the cause of a war of conquest by one community against another. And even if that happened, it most likely wouldn't lead to a real battle. Most likely, the matter would have worked out even without a struggle: simply a more numerous and stronger community would have presented its claims to “foreign territory”, actually starting to hunt or gather fruits there. And besides that, what a profit from a hunting tribe, there’s nothing to take there. He has few material values, there is no standard exchange unit that capital is made up of. Finally, such a widespread reason for wars in modern times as the enslavement of prisoners of war did not make any sense at the stage of primitive hunters due to the low level of production. They simply would not have had the strength and means to maintain prisoners of war and slaves.
The general picture of primitive wars drawn by Service is confirmed and supplemented by many researchers, whom I will try to quote further. Pilbeam emphasizes that these were clashes, not wars. He goes on to point out that in hunting communities, example played a more important role than strength and power, that the main principle of life was generosity, reciprocity and cooperation.
Stewart draws interesting conclusions about warfare and the concept of territoriality:
There have been many discussions about the ownership of the territory by primitive hunters (nomads): did they have permanent territories or sources of food, and if so, how did they ensure the protection of this property. And although I can’t say for sure, I think that it was atypical for them. First, the small groups that make up the larger tribal communities usually cross-marry, intermingle if they are too small, or split up if they become too large. Secondly, the primary small groups do not show a tendency to secure any special territories for themselves. Thirdly, when people talk about "war" in such communities, then most often they are talking about nothing more than actions of revenge for witchcraft or something like that. Or they mean long-term family feuds. Fourthly, it is known that the main trade in large areas was to collect fruits, but I do not know of a single case where someone defended a territory with fruits from attack. The primary groups did not fight each other, and it is difficult to imagine how a tribe could call their men together if it was necessary to defend their territory in a united effort, and what could be the reason for this. True, it is known that some members of the group took individual trees, eagles' nests and other specific sources of food for individual use, but it remains completely incomprehensible how these "objects" could be protected, located at a distance of several miles from each other.
N. N. Terni-Khai comes to similar conclusions. In a 1971 paper, he notes that while fear, anger, and frustration are universal human experiences, the art of warfare developed late in human evolution. Most primitive communities were incapable of waging war, as they lacked the necessary level of categorical thinking. They did not have such a concept of organization, which is absolutely necessary if someone wants to take over neighboring territory. Most wars between primitive tribes are not wars at all, but hand-to-hand fights. According to Rapoport, anthropologists met the work of Terni-Hai with little enthusiasm, because he criticized all professional anthropologists for the lack of reliable first-hand information in their reports and called all their conclusions about primitive wars insufficient and amateurish. He himself preferred to rely on the amateur studies of ethnologists of the past generation, because they contained reliable first-hand information.
The monumental work of Keynes Wright contains 1637 pages of text, including an extensive bibliography. Here an in-depth analysis of primitive wars is given, based on a statistical comparison of data on 653 primitive peoples. The disadvantage of this work is its predominantly descriptive-classifying nature. Yet her results provide statistics and show trends that are in line with the findings of many other researchers. Namely: “Simple hunters, gatherers and farmers are the least warlike people. Greater belligerence is found by hunters and peasants of a higher level, and the highest-ranking hunters and shepherds are the most aggressive people of all the ancients.
This statement confirms the hypothesis that pugnacity is not an innate human trait, and therefore one can speak of militancy only as a function of civilizational development. Wright's data clearly show that a society becomes more aggressive the higher the division of labor in it, that the most aggressive are social systems in which there is already a division into classes. Finally, these data show that militancy in society is the less, the more stable the balance between different groups, as well as between the group and its environment; the more often this balance is disturbed, the sooner the readiness to fight is formed.
Wright distinguishes four types of wars: defensive, social, economic, and political. By defensive warfare, he understands the kind of behavior that is inevitable in the event of a real attack. The subject of such behavior can even be a nation for which war is completely uncharacteristic (not part of its tradition): in this case, people spontaneously “grab any weapon that comes to hand in order to protect themselves and their home, and at the same time consider this necessity as misfortune.
Social wars are those in which, as a rule, "not much blood is shed" (similar to the wars between hunters described by Service). Economic and political wars are waged by peoples interested in seizing land, raw materials, women and slaves, or for the sake of maintaining the power of a certain dynasty or class.
Almost everyone makes this conclusion: if civilized people show such belligerence, then how much more belligerent primitive people must have been. But Wright's results confirm the thesis about the minimum militancy of the most primitive peoples and about the growth of aggressiveness with the growth of civilization. If destructiveness were an innate human quality, then the opposite trend should be observed.
Wright's opinion is shared by M. Ginsberg:
One gets the impression that the threat of wars in this sense increases with economic development and the consolidation of groups. Among primitive peoples, one can rather speak of skirmishes on the basis of insults, personal insults, betrayal of a woman, etc. It must be admitted that these communities, in comparison with more developed primitive peoples, look very peaceful. But there is violence and fear of power, and there are fights, albeit small ones. We do not have much knowledge about this life, but the facts that we have indicate, if not about the paradise idyll of primitive people, then, in any case, that aggressiveness is not an innate element of human nature.
Ruth Benedict divides wars into "social-lethal" and "non-lethal". The latter are not intended to subjugate other tribes and exploit them (although they are accompanied by a long struggle, as was the case with various tribes of North American Indians).
The idea of conquest never crossed the mind of the North American Indians. This allowed the Indian tribes to do something extraordinary, namely to separate the war from the state. The state was personified in a certain peaceful leader - the spokesman for public opinion in his group. The peace leader had a permanent "residence", was quite an important person, although he was not an authoritarian ruler. However, he had nothing to do with the war. He did not even appoint foremen and was not interested in the behavior of the warring parties. Everyone who could assemble a squad for himself took a position where and when he pleased, and often became commander for the entire period of the war. But as soon as the war ended, he lost all power. And the state was in no way interested in these campaigns, which turned into a demonstration of unbridled individualism, directed against external tribes, but without causing any damage to the political system.
Ruth Benedict's arguments touch on the relationship between the state, war, and private property. A social war of a “non-lethal” type is an expression of adventurism, a desire to show off, to win trophies, but without any goal of enslaving another people or destroying its vital resources. Ruth Benedict concludes: “The absence of war is not as uncommon as it is portrayed by the theorists of the prehistoric period ... And it is completely absurd to attribute this chaos (war) to the biological needs of man. No. Chaos is the work of man himself.
Another well-known anthropologist, E. A. Hable, characterizing the wars of the earliest North American tribes, writes: “These clashes are more like the “moral equivalent of war,” as William James puts it. We are talking about a harmless reflection of any aggression: here is movement, and sport, and pleasure (but not destruction); and the demands on the enemy never go beyond reasonable limits. Hubble comes to the same conclusion that man's propensity for war can by no means be considered instinctive, for in the case of war we are talking about the phenomenon of a highly developed culture. And as an illustration, he cites the example of the peaceful Shoshone and pugnacious Comanche, who in 1600 did not represent either a national or cultural community.
In the 1960s and early 1970s. Anthropologists' ideas about war in primitive society were dominated by the concept of ritualized aggression created by Konrad Lorenz, which included mainly a demonstrative threat. Collisions of this kind are extremely rarely associated with the actual use of force. Primate research has dispelled these illusions, as even great apes have been shown to actively fight and kill each other.
Asymmetric war
The concept of ritualized aggression turned out to be wrong.
The main reason for Lorenz's error was that both chimpanzees and primitive people tend to minimize their own risks in a collision and resort to violence when they have a significant advantage over the enemy. Violence becomes the more attractive option for conflict resolution, the lower the risk of loss or injury for the attacking side. What researchers took for ritual aggression was only the first phase of the conflict. In it, assuming a formidable appearance, each of the parties sought to convince the other to give up the fight.
Observations of anthropologists of the 19th–20th centuries. behind warfare among primitive peoples, exemplified by the Australian Aborigines, the Yanomamo of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the highlanders of Papua New Guinea, provide a visual representation of how the same principle of asymmetric violence is realized in the conditions of human society. Whether we are talking about quarrels of individuals, conflicts of small groups or clashes of entire clans, the same principle can be traced everywhere.
A group of Yanomamo warriors perform a dance demonstrating their courage during a visit to a nearby village.
In face-to-face confrontation, demonstrative aggression prevails, accompanied by screams, formidable postures and facial expressions. Participants can often exchange blows with clubs or spears, but losses from this kind of action are usually small. On the contrary, in raids undertaken by small groups, in ambushes and surprise attacks, when the enemy can be taken by surprise, casualties can be very high, especially among the elderly, women and children.
In other words, we are talking about an asymmetric war, in which the attackers carry out active actions, only having a multiple superiority of forces over the enemy or using the surprise factor. Otherwise, both sides of the conflict remain passive.
Australian aborigines
In 1930, Lloyd Warner published a work on the hunters and gatherers of Arnhem Land in northern Australia. There, Warner, among other things, described what their wars looked like. As a rule, the conflict between large groups or even tribes took the form of a ritual confrontation, the place and time of which were usually agreed in advance. Both sides almost never came close to each other, but kept a distance of about 15 meters, while bickering, throwing spears or boomerangs.
This could go on for many hours. As soon as the first blood was shed, or even before the grievances were settled, the battle was immediately over. In some cases such battles were held for purely ceremonial purposes, sometimes after a peace agreement had been made, in which case they were accompanied by ceremonial dances. To frighten the enemy and appease the spirits, people applied military coloring to their skin.
Sometimes these ritual battles developed into real ones due to the high intensity of the conflict or the deceit of one of the parties. However, since both sides kept a safe distance from each other, even in these actual battles casualties were usually low. The exception was cases when one of the parties resorted to cunning, covertly sending a group of soldiers to bypass the enemy and attack him from one of the flanks or rear. Losses during the pursuit and extermination of the fleeing could be quite high.
The most numerous victims were observed during surprise raids, when opponents sought to take each other by surprise or attacked at night. This happened when the attackers (usually small groups) intended to kill a certain person or members of his family. A large raid could also be carried out by groups consisting of the men of entire clans or even tribes. In such cases, the attacked camp was usually surrounded, and its unprepared, often sleeping inhabitants were massacred indiscriminately. The exception was women, who could be taken away by the attackers.
Most of the killings in such wars were carried out in such large raids. The statistics given in the study show that 35 people died during large military raids, 27 in local attacks on neighbors, 29 in large battles when the attackers resorted to ambushes and tricks, 3 in ordinary battles and 2 during one on one fights.
Yanomamo Amazonia
Napoleon Chagnon in 1967 described the society of the Yanomamo Indians, hunters and slash-and-burn farmers from the equatorial Amazon. The Yanomamo number 25,000. They live in about 250 villages with a population ranging from 25 to 400 men, women, old people and children. The Yanomamo have been nicknamed "the cruel people" by explorers, as they live in a constant state of war with each other and with their neighbors. Between 15 and 42% of Yanomamo males die violent deaths between the ages of 15 and 49.
Fist fight at Yanomamo
However, the reputation of fierce warriors did not inspire the participants in these clashes to expose themselves to increased danger. Collective clashes among the Yanomamo were tightly regulated by the rules, taking on a form similar to a tournament. Their participants had to exchange blows in turn. In the lightest form of combat, one punched the other in the chest. If he withstood the blows, he, in turn, received the right to inflict them on the enemy. At the same time, defense was not allowed, the duel was a test of strength and endurance.
In another version of the duel, wooden poles were used, with which the rivals hit each other on the heads. The severity of injuries increased significantly, but deaths remained rare. This form of combat was considered more honorable. In order to visually demonstrate their fighting qualities, the men shaved the tonsure at the crown, which, “like a road map”, was completely covered with a network of scars.
Battles in which opponents, by agreement, threw spears at each other remained very rare, not to mention the use of bows and arrows. The winners of such competitions could choose any gift of their own liking.
Large-scale raids on villages connected with the capture and destruction of their inhabitants, which we see everywhere in other warlike cultures of primitive peoples, do not appear in Chagnon's reports. Instead, the Yanomamo staged continuous raids and retaliatory raids, pursuing only very limited goals.
10-20 men took part in the raid. Often they were relatives related to each other through the female line through marriage, or cousins. After going through ceremonial rituals, the sabotage party was sent to the designated target, which was usually at a distance of 4-5 days of travel. Having reached the outskirts of the enemy village, the raiders remained in ambush for some time, clarifying the situation.
The main armament of the Yanomamo is a large wooden bow and arrows almost two meters long. Bone arrowhead smeared with poison
If the purpose of the raid is to kidnap a woman, they waited until she left the village for brushwood. Usually, the husband accompanying her was shot with bows, and the woman was taken away with them. If there was no suitable victim, the attackers fired a volley of arrows towards the village, after which they hurriedly fled.
Although the number of those killed in one such raid was usually small, it quickly increased due to the large number of such sorties. Chagnon wrote that the village in which he stopped and lived for 15 months was attacked 25 times, and almost a dozen different local groups were attackers in turn. Sometimes, due to the frequency of attacks and the death of a large number of people, local residents left their villages and moved to another place. In this case, the enemies destroyed their abandoned dwellings and trampled down the gardens.
Later sightings of the Yanomamo also recorded raids on neighboring villages and the killing of women and children captured there. To take advantage of the surprise effect, the attackers could pretend to be friends of the village owners and come to visit them for a holiday. Helena Valero, a Brazilian kidnapped by the Yanomamo in 1937 and living among them for many years, was present when the Caravetari tribe attacked:
Papuan New Guinea
The largest and at the same time the most isolated society of primitive agriculturalists in the world is found in the highlands of New Guinea. Until the middle of the 20th century, it remained completely unknown to the outside world, and therefore today it enjoys special attention from anthropologists. Local inhabitants inhabit plateaus, separated from each other by mountains and impenetrable jungle. They are divided into clans, each of which includes several hundred people, and tribes, numbering several thousand people.
Almost every tribe speaks its own language, the number of which here reaches 700 out of about 5000 that currently exist throughout the world. The tribes are in a constant state of war with each other, which takes place in the form of periodic attacks and retaliatory revenge. For 50 years of observations among the Papuans of the Euga, anthropologists counted 34 collisions. How such clashes take place among the Papuans, the maring, was described by the one who lived among them in 1962–1963 and 1966. anthropologist E. Wajda.
Papuans with large tower shields
The offensive weapons of the Papuans were simple bows, long spears and axes with polished stone pommel. Large, human-height wooden shields, the surface of which was brightly painted, served as a means of protection. Due to the gravity during the battle, the shields were installed on the ground.
The battle itself was usually arranged by agreement of the parties and was held on a special site on the border of the tribal territory. Both sides, hiding behind large shields, threw spears and arrows at each other from some distance. Otherwise, they were rather passive, exchanging only ridicule and insults. As long as all participants remained in sight of each other, they usually managed to easily dodge projectiles fired at them or intercept them with shields. According to the notes of observers, the participants in the fights rarely approached each other and tried to avoid real chest-to-chest clashes.
Papuans posing for the camera with bows and spears
Only occasionally did battles of famous warriors take place in the neutral zone, in which they fought each other with spears or axes. The wounded in such a duel could run away under the protection of his own, but if he fell, the enemy got the opportunity to finish him off. In general, during the ceremonial encounters, mortal wounds and injuries remained minor. Only in those relatively rare cases, when one of the parties managed to catch the other by surprise or successfully set up an ambush, did the losses of the combatants increase. The fights could go on for days on end without much change in the situation. They were interrupted if it was raining. Warriors dispersed, for example, to rest or refresh themselves with food.
Like the natives of Australia, the most common form of warfare among the Papuans was raids, ambushes and attacks on villages. Such enterprises could be carried out by small groups settling private conflicts, or by entire tribal groups seeking to expand their territory or take over the fields belonging to their neighbors.
This photograph, taken in the 1960s, shows one of the wars that the Papuans are waging against each other.
When planning attacks, a diverse arsenal of insidious tricks was used. To take full advantage of the element of surprise, attacks were usually carried out at night or at dawn. The raiders sought to catch their enemies asleep and kill as many of them as possible, especially men, but also women and children. The inhabitants of a village that was attacked usually fled.
In most cases, if the raiders were not numerous enough, having plundered the village, they immediately left. In other cases, the village was destroyed, and the fields of the vanquished were captured and devastated. The escaped residents, having come to their senses and turning to the allies for help, could try to regain their property. Sometimes it was possible to negotiate with the winners peacefully.
If there were not enough forces for resistance, the fugitives had to leave their settlement and settle down in a new place. To protect themselves from attacks, they tried to choose hard-to-reach places for settlements. The villages were surrounded by a palisade, and observation towers were set up in the most dangerous places. strangers afraid and suspicious. Violation of the boundaries between communities was associated with a mortal risk, and therefore it was usually tried to be avoided.
Dani Papuans with long spears and bows
Indians of North America
The same methods were used by the Indians of the Great Plains, for whom the war was a series of raids and ambush attacks. The highest casualties were observed if one group greatly outnumbered the other, or managed to catch its opponents by surprise. In this case, the weaker side was usually subjected to wholesale extermination. During the big clashes, which were also happening among the Indians at this time, casualties were much lower, since their participants did not unnecessarily endanger their lives and usually avoided hand-to-hand combat. As the contemporary American historian John Evers writes,
In some documented cases, melee did occur, but this was more of an exception than a common practice. With the arrival of the Europeans and the appearance of the horses and firearms brought by the colonists, the wars become much more bloody. Thus, the losses of the Blackfoot during the wars of 1805 and 1858, about which researchers have data, amounted to 50% and 30% of all men of the tribe, respectively.
Author warspot
Although defensive aggressiveness and cruelty are not, as a rule, the cause of war, these traits still find expression in the way war is waged. Therefore, data on the conduct of wars by primitive peoples help to supplement our understanding of the essence of primitive aggressiveness.
A detailed account of the war of the Walbiri tribe in Australia we find in Meggit; Service believes that this description is a very apt description of the primitive wars of the hunting tribes.
The Walbiri tribe was not particularly militant - it did not have a military estate, there was no professional army, a hierarchical command system; and there were very few conquests. Every man was (and remains) a potential warrior: he is constantly armed and always ready to defend his rights; but at the same time, each of them was an individualist and preferred to fight alone, independently of others. In some clashes, it happened that kinship ties placed men in the ranks of the enemy camp, and all the men of a certain community could accidentally belong to one of these groups. But there were no military commanders, elected or inherited positions, no headquarters, plans, strategy and tactics. And even if there were men who distinguished themselves in battle, they received respect and attention, but not the right to command others. But there were circumstances when the battle developed so rapidly that the men entered the battle precisely and without delay, using precisely those methods that led to victory. This rule still applies today to all young unmarried men.
In any case, there was no reason for one tribe to be forced to engage in a massive war against others. These tribes did not know what slavery was, what movable or immovable property was; the conquest of a new territory was only a burden for the winner, for all the spiritual ties of the tribe were connected with a certain territory. If occasionally there were small wars of conquest with other tribes, then, I am sure, they differed only in scale from conflicts within a tribe or even a clan. So, for example, in the battle of Waringari, which led to the conquest of the Tanami reservoir, only men from the Wanaiga tribe participated, and, moreover, no more than twenty people. And in general, I do not know of a single case of military alliances between tribes for the sake of attacking other Valbyrian communities or other tribes.
From a technical point of view, this kind of conflict between primitive hunters can be called the word "war". And in this sense, one can come to the conclusion that from time immemorial man has waged wars within his species and therefore an innate craving for murder has developed in him. But such a conclusion overlooks the profound differences in the conduct of wars by primitive communities of different levels of development and completely ignores the difference between these wars and the wars of civilized peoples. In primitive low-level cultures, there was neither a centralized organization nor permanent commanders. Wars were very rare, and wars of conquest were out of the question. They did not lead to bloodshed and did not have the goal of killing as many enemies as possible.
The wars of civilized peoples, on the contrary, have a clear institutional structure, constant command, and their goals are always predatory: either this is the conquest of territory, or slaves, or profit. In addition, another, perhaps most important, difference is overlooked: for primitive hunters and gatherers, the escalation of war has no economic benefit.
The increase in the population of hunting tribes is so insignificant that the population factor can very rarely be the cause of a war of conquest by one community against another. And even if that happened, it most likely wouldn't lead to a real battle. Most likely, the matter would have worked out even without a struggle: simply a more numerous and stronger community would have presented its claims to “foreign territory”, actually starting to hunt or gather fruits there. And besides that, what a profit from a hunting tribe, there’s nothing to take there. He has few material values, there is no standard exchange unit that capital is made up of. Finally, such a widespread reason for wars in modern times as the enslavement of prisoners of war did not make any sense at the stage of primitive hunters due to the low level of production. They simply would not have had the strength and means to maintain prisoners of war and slaves.
The general picture of primitive wars drawn by Service is confirmed and supplemented by many researchers, whom I will try to quote further. Pilbeam emphasizes that these were clashes, not wars. He goes on to point out that in hunting communities, example played a more important role than strength and power, that the main principle of life was generosity, reciprocity and cooperation.
Stewart draws interesting conclusions about warfare and the concept of territoriality:
There have been many discussions about the ownership of the territory by primitive hunters (nomads): did they have permanent territories or sources of food, and if so, how did they ensure the protection of this property. And although I can’t say for sure, I think that it was atypical for them. First, the small groups that make up the larger tribal communities usually cross-marry, intermingle if they are too small, or split up if they become too large. Secondly, the primary small groups do not show a tendency to secure any special territories for themselves. Thirdly, when people talk about "war" in such communities, then most often they are talking about nothing more than actions of revenge for witchcraft or something like that. Or they mean long-term family feuds. Fourthly, it is known that the main trade in large areas was to collect fruits, but I do not know of a single case where someone defended a territory with fruits from attack. The primary groups did not fight each other, and it is difficult to imagine how a tribe could call their men together if it was necessary to defend their territory in a united effort, and what could be the reason for this. True, it is known that some members of the group took individual trees, eagles' nests and other specific sources of food for individual use, but it remains completely incomprehensible how these "objects" could be protected, located at a distance of several miles from each other.
N.N. comes to similar conclusions. Terni-High. In a 1971 paper, he notes that while fear, anger, and frustration are universal human experiences, the art of warfare developed late in human evolution. Most primitive communities were incapable of waging war, as they lacked the necessary level of categorical thinking. They did not have such a concept of organization, which is absolutely necessary if someone wants to take over neighboring territory. Most wars between primitive tribes are not wars at all, but hand-to-hand fights. According to Rapoport, anthropologists met the work of Terni-Hai with little enthusiasm, because he criticized all professional anthropologists for the lack of reliable first-hand information in their reports and called all their conclusions about primitive wars insufficient and amateurish. He himself preferred to rely on the amateur studies of ethnologists of the past generation, because they contained reliable first-hand information.
The monumental work of Keynes Wright contains 1637 pages of text, including an extensive bibliography. Here an in-depth analysis of primitive wars is given, based on a statistical comparison of data on 653 primitive peoples. The disadvantage of this work is its predominantly descriptive-classifying nature. Yet her results provide statistics and show trends that are in line with the findings of many other researchers. Namely: “Simple hunters, gatherers and farmers are the least warlike people. Greater militancy is found by hunters and peasants of a higher level, and the highest-ranking hunters and shepherds are the most aggressive people of all the ancients.
This statement confirms the hypothesis that pugnacity is not an innate human trait, and therefore one can speak of militancy only as a function of civilizational development. Wright's data clearly show that a society becomes more aggressive the higher the division of labor in it, that the most aggressive are social systems in which there is already a division into classes. Finally, these data show that militancy in society is the less, the more stable the balance between different groups, as well as between the group and its environment; the more often this balance is disturbed, the sooner the readiness to fight is formed.
Wright distinguishes four types of wars: defensive, social, economic, and political. By defensive warfare, he understands the kind of behavior that is inevitable in the event of a real attack. The subject of such behavior can even be a nation for which war is completely uncharacteristic (not part of its tradition): in this case, people spontaneously “grab any weapon that comes to hand in order to protect themselves and their home, and at the same time consider this necessity as misfortune.
Social wars are those in which, as a rule, "not much blood is shed" (similar to the wars between hunters described by Service). Economic and political wars are waged by peoples interested in seizing land, raw materials, women and slaves, or for the sake of maintaining the power of a certain dynasty or class.
Almost everyone makes this conclusion: if civilized people show such belligerence, then how much more belligerent primitive people must have been. But Wright's results confirm the thesis about the minimum militancy of the most primitive peoples and about the growth of aggressiveness with the growth of civilization. If destructiveness were an innate human quality, then the opposite trend should be observed.
Wright's opinion is shared by M. Ginsberg:
One gets the impression that the threat of wars in this sense increases with economic development and the consolidation of groups. Among primitive peoples, one can rather speak of skirmishes on the basis of insults, personal insults, betrayal of a woman, and so on. It must be admitted that these communities, in comparison with the more developed primitive peoples, look very peaceful. But there is violence and fear of power, and there are fights, albeit small ones. We do not have much knowledge about this life, but the facts that we have indicate, if not about the paradise idyll of primitive people, then, in any case, that aggressiveness is not an innate element of human nature.
Ruth Benedict divides wars into "social-lethal" and "non-lethal". The latter are not intended to subjugate other tribes and exploit them (although they are accompanied by a long struggle, as was the case with various tribes of North American Indians).
The idea of conquest never crossed the mind of the North American Indians. This allowed the Indian tribes to do something extraordinary, namely to separate the war from the state. The state was personified in a certain peaceful leader - the spokesman for public opinion in his group. The peace leader had a permanent "residence", was quite an important person, although he was not an authoritarian ruler. However, he had nothing to do with the war. He did not even appoint foremen and was not interested in the behavior of the warring parties. Everyone who could assemble a squad for himself took a position where and when he pleased, and often became commander for the entire period of the war. But as soon as the war ended, he lost all power. And the state was in no way interested in these campaigns, which turned into a demonstration of unbridled individualism, directed against external tribes, but without causing any damage to the political system.
Ruth Benedict's arguments touch on the relationship between the state, war, and private property. A social war of a "non-lethal" type is an expression of adventurism, a desire to show off, to win trophies, but without any goal of enslaving another people or destroying its vital resources. Ruth Benedict concludes: “The absence of war is not such a rarity as it is portrayed by the theorists of the prehistoric period ... And it is completely absurd to attribute this chaos (war) to the biological needs of man. No. Chaos is the work of man himself.
Another famous anthropologist, E.A. Hubble, characterizing the wars of the earliest North American tribes, writes: “These clashes are more like the 'moral equivalent of war', as William James puts it. We are talking about a harmless reflection of any aggression: here is movement, and sport, and pleasure (but not destruction); and the demands on the enemy never go beyond reasonable limits. Hubble comes to the same conclusion that man's propensity for war can by no means be considered instinctive, for in the case of war we are talking about the phenomenon of a highly developed culture. And as an illustration, he cites the example of the peaceful Shoshone and pugnacious Comanche, who in 1600 did not represent either a national or cultural community.
Neolithic Revolution
A detailed description of the life of primitive hunters and gatherers shows that at the turn of 50 thousand years ago, man most likely was not a cruel destructive creature, and therefore it is wrong to speak of him as a prototype of that "man-killer" that we meet on later stages of evolution. But this is not enough. In order to understand the gradual transformation of man into an exploiter and a destroyer, it is necessary to trace his development during the period of early agriculture, and then study all his transformations: into a city planner, merchant, warrior, and so on.
In one respect, man remained unchanged (from Homo sapiens (0.5 million years ago) to man of the period of 9 thousand BC): he lived on what he got in the forest or on the hunt, but did not produce anything. He was completely dependent on nature, without changing anything around him. This relationship with nature changed dramatically with the advent of agriculture (and pastoralism), which archaeologists attribute to the beginning of the Neolithic (more precisely, to the "Protoneolithic" period dating back to 9-7 thousand BC). Archaeologists believe that during this period, agriculture began to develop over a vast territory (more than a thousand miles) from Western Iran to Greece, including a number of areas of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, as well as the Anatolian plateau in Turkey. In Central and Northern Europe, the development of agriculture began much later.
For the first time, man felt to some extent his independence from nature when he managed to apply resourcefulness and dexterity in order to produce something that is absent in nature. Now it became possible, as the population grew, to increase the area of cultivated land and the number of livestock.
The first great innovation of this period was the cultivation of wheat and barley, which were wild in this region. The discovery was that people accidentally discovered: if the grain of this cereal is lowered into the ground, then new ears will grow, and in addition, the best seeds must be chosen for sowing. In addition to this, the observant eye noticed that the accidental crossing of different types of grain leads to the emergence of a new variety, which was not yet among wild cereals. We are unable to describe in detail the development of grain from wild cereals to modern high-yielding wheat. For it was a long process of mutation, hybridization, doubling of chromosomes, and it took millennia before man reached today's level of artificial selection in agriculture. For a man of the industrial age, who is accustomed to consider the pre-industrial Agriculture as primitive, the discoveries of the Neolithic age probably seem insignificant and do not bear any comparison with the technical innovations of our day. In fact, it is difficult to overestimate the significance of those first human discoveries. When the expectation of the first harvest was crowned with success, this caused a whole revolution in thinking: man saw that he, at his own discretion and at his own will, could influence nature, instead of waiting for mercy from her. It can be said without exaggeration that the discovery of agriculture became the basis of scientific thinking in general, including the technological process of all future eras.
The second innovation was cattle breeding, which entered life almost simultaneously with agriculture. Already in 9 thousand BC. in Northern Iraq they began to breed sheep, and about 6 thousand BC. pigs and cows. Cattle breeding has become an important source of food, providing meat and milk. This rich and permanent source food allowed people to move from a nomadic lifestyle to a settled one, which led to the construction of villages and cities.
During the Protoneolithic period, a new type of settled economy was formed in the hunting tribes, based on the cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals. If earlier it was customary to attribute the very first traces of cultivated plants to the period of 7 thousand BC, then new data indicate that their roots go even further (to the very beginning of the Protoneolith, about 9 thousand BC) ; the conclusion is made on the basis of the fact that by 7 thousand BC. the culture of agriculture and animal husbandry has already reached a high level.
It took another two or three millennia until mankind made another discovery, caused by the need to preserve food - this is pottery; people learned how to make pots (baskets began to weave even earlier). With the invention of the pot, the first technical discovery was made, which required knowledge of chemical processes. It is hard to deny that "the creation of the first vessel was a high example of human creativity." Thus, within the boundaries of the Early Stone Age, it is possible to isolate the pre-ceramic stage, when pottery was not yet known, and the ceramic stage. Some old settlements in Anatolia (for example, the excavations of Hakilar) belong to the pre-ceramic period, and Çatal Huyuk is a city with rich pottery.
Çatal Huyuk is the most developed Anatolian city of the Neolithic era. When archaeologists excavated a relatively small part of the city in 1961, the excavations immediately provided information that is extremely important for understanding the economic, social and religious aspects of Neolithic society.
Since the beginning of the excavations, ten layers have been unearthed, the deepest dating back to 6500 BC.
After 5600 BC the old settlement of Chatal-Hyuyuk was abandoned for unknown reasons, and on the other side of the river a new city of Chatal-Hyuyuk Western arose. Apparently, it existed for 700 years, and then people also left it, leaving no traces of destruction or violence.
The most amazing thing about this city is the high level of civilization. Very beautiful jewelry sets for women, as well as men's and women's bracelets were found in the burials. According to Mellart, the variety of stones and minerals found suggests that trade and the development of minerals were important factors in the economic life of the city.
Despite these signs of a highly developed culture, there are no elements in the social structure that are characteristic of the later stages of the development of society. So, in particular, there were clearly no class differences between the rich and the poor. Although not all houses are the same, and certainly social differences can be judged by their size and the nature of the burials, Mellart argues that these differences "are not evident anywhere." And when you look at the drawings of the excavated part of the city, you see that the buildings differ little in size (compared to later urban societies). We have seen in Childe an indication that in the villages of the early Neolithic there was no institution of elders; Mellart also draws attention to this fact in connection with the excavations of Chatal Huyuk. There were clearly many priestesses (possibly priests) there, but there is no sign of a hierarchical structure.
Probably, in Chatal Huyuk, due to the high level of agriculture, there were surpluses of food, which contributed to the development of trade and the emergence of luxury goods. In the earlier and less developed villages, Child notes a lack of signs of abundance and believes that there was more equality (economic above all). He points out that there were handicrafts in the Neolithic; one can probably speak of home production, and, moreover, the handicraft tradition was not individual, but collective. Members of the community were constantly exchanging experiences with each other; so that one can speak of social production arising as a result of collective experience. For example, the ware of a certain Neolithic village has a clear imprint of a collective tradition.
In addition, it should be remembered that in those days there was no problem with the land. If the population increased, young people could leave and establish an independent settlement anywhere. That is, economic conditions did not create the prerequisites for the division of society into classes and for the creation of an institution of permanent power, the function of which would be to manage the economy. Hence - there were no organizers who would receive remuneration for this work. This became possible much later, when numerous discoveries and inventions led to such an increase in production that the surplus of production could be turned into "capital", and after that came the exploitation of other people's labor.
In terms of the problem of aggressiveness, two points are especially important to me. For 800 years of existence of the city of Chatal Huyuk, nothing indicates that robberies and murders were committed there (according to archaeologists). But even more impressive is the complete absence of signs of violence (among the hundreds of skeletons found, not one had traces of violent death).
One of the most characteristic features of Neolithic settlements, including Çatal Huyuk, is the central position of the mother in the social structure, as well as the great role of religion.
According to the primitive division of labor, men went hunting, and women gathered roots and fruits. Accordingly, the discovery of agriculture belongs to a woman, and the domestication of animals was probably the work of men (in the light of the huge role played by agriculture at all stages of the civilizational development of mankind, we can safely say that modern civilization was founded by women).
Only a woman and the earth have a unique ability to give birth, to create a living thing. This ability (absent in men) in the world of primitive agriculture was an unconditional basis for recognizing the special role and place of a woman mother. Men were only eligible to claim such a place when they were able to produce material things with their intellect, so to speak, by magical and technical means. Mother was a deity who identified with mother earth; she was the highest goddess of the religious world, and therefore the earthly mother was naturally recognized as the central figure in both family and social life.
A direct indicator of the central role of the mother in Çatal Huyuk is the fact that in the burials, children always lie next to the mother, and not to the father. The skeleton of a woman is usually found under the house, in the place where the mother's room and her bed used to be. This room was the main one and was larger than the father's room. characteristic feature matriarchy is that children are always buried next to their mother. Here, kinship ties connected children primarily with the mother, and not with the father, as is the case in patriarchal social systems.
The hypothesis about the matriarchal structure of the Paleolithic finds its final confirmation thanks to data on the state of religion in Catal-Hyuk and other Neolithic settlements in Anatolia.
The results of the excavations have made a real revolution in our ideas about primitive religion. At the center of this religion - and this is its main feature - is the image of the mother goddess. Mellart writes: “Chatal Huyuk and Hakilar prove the continuity of religion from the Paleolithic to the period ancient world(including the classical one), where the central place is occupied by the image of the mother goddess, and then the incomprehensible images of the goddesses Cybele, Artemis and Aphrodite.
The central role of the mother goddess is manifested in the plots of bas-reliefs and frescoes found during excavations of sacred sites. Unlike finds in other Neolithic settlements, in Chatal Huyuk there were not only mother goddesses, but also a male deity, whose symbol was a bull or a bull's head (or only horns). But this does not change the essence of the matter, which is that the Great Mother occupied the supreme position as the central deity. Among the sculptures of gods and goddesses discovered during excavations, the majority were female figures. Of the 41 sculptures, 33 were, of course, female, and 8 sculptures with male symbols should almost still be understood in their relation to the goddess: these are either her husband or sons. (And in deeper layers, excavations have unearthed exclusively sculptural figures of goddesses.) And there is no doubt that the role of the mother goddess was central: in any case, not a single image of a woman can be interpreted as subordinate to a man. And this is confirmed by images of women pregnant or giving birth, as well as images of goddesses giving birth to a bull. (Compare with the typically patriarchal myth of a woman created from a man's rib, like Eve and Athena.)
The Mother Goddess is often depicted accompanied by a leopard, or dressed in leopard skins, or symbolically as a leopard. This is due to the fact that the leopard was the most predatory animal of that time. And such images were supposed to make the goddess the mistress of wild animals. In addition, this indicates the dual role of the goddess: she was the patroness of both life and death at the same time. An earth mother who gives birth to children and then takes them back into her womb when their life cycle ends is not necessarily a destructive mother. Although very rare (the Indian goddess Kali), a detailed study of this issue would lead us astray and take up much time and space.
The mother goddess in the Neolithic religion is not only the mistress of wild animals, she is also the patroness of hunting and agriculture, and the protector of all wildlife.
Finally, I want to quote Mellart's final conclusions about the role of women in Neolithic society (including Çatal Huyuk):
In the Anatolian religion of the Neolithic period, the complete absence of eroticism in bas-reliefs, statuettes and pictorial subjects is very remarkable. Sexual organs are never found in images, and this deserves special attention, especially since the Late Paleolithic era (and the Neolithic and Post-Neolithic outside of Anatolia) provides many examples of such images. This seemingly difficult question is very easy to answer. When we find an emphasis on eroticism in art, it is always associated with the transfer of sexual instincts and drives inherent in a man into art. And since the Neolithic woman was both the creator of the religion and its central actor, the reasons for the chastity that marked the artistic images related to this culture are quite obvious. And therefore, its own symbolism arose, in which the image of breasts, the navel and pregnancy symbolized the feminine, while masculinity had such signs as horns and horned heads of animals. In the early Neolithic era (as, for example, Chatal Huyuk), there were obviously more women than men in percentage terms (excavations confirm this). In addition, in the new forms of economic life, a woman performed a lot of functions (this still takes place in Anatolian villages) - this, of course, is the reason for her high social status. The woman was the main producer of life - as a farmer and continuer of the family, as a mother-nurse of children and domestic animals, as a symbol of fertility and abundance. Religion originates here, literally blessing the preservation of life in all its forms. This religion spoke about reproduction and fertility, about life and death, birth and feeding - i.e. about the emergence of those rituals that were an organic part of a woman's life and had nothing to do with a man. So, most likely, all cult actions in honor of the goddess were developed by women, although the presence of male priests cannot be ruled out...
There are interesting facts that testify to the social structure of the Neolithic society, which does not have obvious traces of hierarchy, suppression or pronounced aggressiveness. The hypothesis that the Neolithic society (at least in Anatolia) was fundamentally peace-loving becomes even more probable in light of the fact that Anatolian settlements had matriarchal (matricentric) structures. And the reason for this should be sought in the life-affirming psychology, which, according to Bachofen, is characteristic of all matriarchal societies.
The results of archaeological excavations of Neolithic settlements in Anatolia provide exhaustive material for proving the actual existence of matriarchal cultures and religions, which Bachofen stated in his work “Mother Right”, published for the first time in 1869. Only a genius could do what Bachofen managed to do on the basis of an analysis of the Greek and Roman mythology, rituals, symbols and dreams; in the almost complete absence of factual data, he, thanks to his analytical intuition, was able to reconstruct a completely unknown phase in the development of society and religion. (Quite independently of Bachofen, the American ethnologist LG Morgan came to similar conclusions while studying the life of North American Indians.) And almost all anthropologists (with rare exceptions) declared that Bachofen's reasoning and conclusions have no scientific significance. Indeed, it was not until 1967 that an English translation of his selected works was first published.
There were probably two reasons for rejecting Bachofen's theory. The first was that it was almost unthinkable for anthropologists living in a patriarchal society to overcome the social and psychological stereotype and imagine that the primacy of the man was not “natural” and that it was not always the exclusive privilege of men to dominate and command in history (Freud, according to the same for the very reason he even thought of his concept of a woman as a castrated man). Secondly, anthropologists were so accustomed to trusting only material evidence (skeletons, tools, weapons, etc.) that it was impossible to convince them that myths and legends were no less reliable than artifacts. This position led to the fact that the strength and depth of Bachofen's theoretical thinking was simply not appreciated on merit. Here is a passage that gives an idea of how Bachofen understood the spirit of matriarchy:
The miracle of motherhood is such a state when a woman is filled with a sense of belonging to all of humanity, when the starting point is the development of all virtues and the formation of the noble side of being, when in the midst of a world of violence and troubles, the divine principle of love, peace and unity begins to operate. In caring for her unborn child, a woman (earlier than a man) learns to direct her love and care to another being (outside her own Self), and turn all her abilities and mind to preserving and decorating someone else's being. All joys, all the blessings of life, all devotion and warmth, and all care and pity originate from here ... But motherly love is not limited to its inner object, it becomes universal and embraces an ever wider circle ... The fatherly principle of limitation is opposed by the motherly principle of universality; maternal feeling knows no boundaries, just as nature itself does not know them. In motherhood, the feeling of brotherhood of all people also originates, the consciousness and recognition of which disappeared with the formation of patriarchy.
The family, built on the principles of paternal law, focuses on the individual organism. In a family based on maternal law, common interests, empathy prevail, everything that distinguishes spiritual life from material life and without which no development is possible. The mother of the earth, Demeter, intends for every woman to forever give birth to children - brothers and sisters, so that the homeland will always be a country of brothers and sisters - and so on until, with the formation of patriarchy, the unity of people does not decompose and the undifferentiated will be overcome by the principle of division.
In states with maternal “rule”, the principle of universality manifests itself in a very multifaceted way. It is based on the principle of universal equality and freedom (which has become the basis of the lawmaking of many peoples); on it are built the rules of philoxenia (hospitality) and a resolute rejection of any kind of restrictive framework ...; the same principle forms the tradition of verbal expression of sympathy (praise songs of relatives, approval and encouragement), which, knowing no boundaries, evenly embraces not only relatives, but the whole people. In states with “female” power, as a rule, there is no place for a split personality, they clearly manifest a desire for peace, a negative attitude towards conflicts ... It is no less characteristic that bodily harm to a fellow tribesman, any animal was severely punished ... humanity, which we see on the faces of Egyptian statues, deeply penetrated into all the customs and norms of life of the matriocratic world.
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