An Ancient, Brutal Massacre May Be the Earliest Evidence of War | Hacker News Reader

An Ancient, Brutal Massacre May Be the Earliest Evidence of War

smithsonianmag.com

66 pointsbehoove15 comments

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Reminds me of the Cormac McCarthy quote:

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner"

That seems a bit pretentious. Surely there can be a species better suited for war?

From the videos I've seen ants and wasps are pretty good at it.

So far, humans are the only ones to build a fusion bomb.

> Even nomadic hunter-gatherers engaged in deliberate mass killings 10,000 years ago

This may be our earliest evidence of it, but I would bet that even pre-sapien hominids engaged in deliberate mass killings for tens of thousands of years. 10kYBP is still very recent in the history of our species.

"I would bet that even pre-sapien hominids engaged in deliberate mass killings for tens of thousands of years..."

I think that's very likely. The article notes that chimpanzees "deliberately stalk and kill members of other groups". So humans may have inherited these nasty traits from our primate ancestors ages ago.

The Gombe Chimpanzee War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

Amazing. Thanks for sharing this. Next time someone appeals to nature, I'll drop this little tidbit to remind them that life out there isn't all roses and butterflies.

Unlike their gentle Bonobo cousins, Chimps are notoriously aggressive. Humans are said to be 50% Chimp and 50% Bonobo in behaviour.

This article has been edited since I first looked at it around 2013. At that time, there were other explicit descriptions of the violence - chimps killing and eating infants from the other group, and beatings and rape of females. This New Scientist article has more details: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229682.600-only-kno...

The newscientific's article has more information. But I think the documented case of eating chimps children is from another place.

And this is the revision that did that remove the rape part: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gombe_Chimpanzee_...

The comment is:

> The war: Second paragraph. Chimps were not raped. No where does this reference occur in Goodall's articles or any other Gombe researcher. The source seems to be the Morris reference. I don't know where they got that.

While the article is interesting, the title of this article is kind of rubbish; there is vast evidence of pre-8000bc mesolithic warfare in Europe and North Africa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery_117

The article is hilarious.

Not only they seem reluctant to coming to terms with our nature, but they had to clarify that, in a great exercise of our anthropocentrism, that we and only us humans are also capable of showing acts of altruism. Just in case somebody gets upset at the idea that violence and warfare might not be social constructs.

I wonder how accurate the millennium approximations are, it would put this event about 2000 years before the 1 in 17 males reproducing for every female at the dawn of agriculture.

https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/2zkgq5/8000_years_...

I find it strange the author of the article seems to imply this is a surprising find. Humans have been slaughtering each other for all sorts of reasons since the beginning of known history. This merely is another confirmation.

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