This is within a century of the fall of the Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Mycenaeans, Canaanites, Troy, Miletus, and a few others. What I would give for a time machine to know precisely what caused all this turmoil.
So much of our modern culture has roots in that era, with fables like Jason and the Argonauts, epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey, mythological elements like the great flood, supernatural cosmology (deities and their interactions with mankind), and on and on. You can trace the origins of so much of the nature and character of 21st century human civilization back to that era. And yet, so little of what happened was recorded, so little was preserved even with artifacts and ruins. So much happened and we know so little about it.
Both events were a huge loss for humanity.
There are entire cultures and nation-states as important to history as the Greeks who we know very little about simply because they didn't have the habit of recording damned near everything of importance that happened and eventually writing it down. There is so much of the Hittites, the Scythians, the Celts, etc. that we just don't know and may never know because of that.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed-Turnin...
One thing this battle shows, people have been killing each other for a long time.
> DNA from teeth suggests some warriors are related to modern southern Europeans and others to people living in modern-day Poland and Scandinavia. "This is not a bunch of local idiots,” says University of Mainz geneticist Joachim Burger. “It’s a highly diverse population.”
I'm curious if this analysis takes into account the historical migration patterns of the Germanic tribes that were potentially living in the area at that era. For instance, the Vandals, Goths and Lombards are all believed to have been settled in north-central Europe prior to their late-Roman migrations into Italy, Spain and elsewhere. On the other hand, this might be before those tribes migrated south out of Scandinavia, if, as is believed, they originated in Scandinavia, in which case the inhabitants of this area may have been the proto-Celtic Urnfield culture[1]. And there is always the question of how much displacement versus assimilation occurred in these movements. It all gets pretty hazy, and most of these divisions are based on styles of artifacts and burial practices. As DNA sequencing improves, I'm very interested in seeing how that fills in the blanks around these large-scale migration events.