Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

It's true enough that in the early 2000s one of my poli-sci professors devoted most of a course to the book War Before Civilization and kept hammering on the idea of prehistoric war being widespread and common as some kind of huge revelation and surprise.

I found such intense and sustained focus baffling, since the point seemed obvious (though the evidence was interesting, at least). I've since come to understand this as some "inside baseball" grad-level anthropology leaking through to the undergrad curriculum. We newbies didn't need to be convinced because we'd never strongly held the contrary view in the first place, but the field (and related ones) had only recently convinced itself so thought it worth spending a lot of time on.

Yeah, sounds like p-hacking.

Still, supporting a proper army is a massive economic undertaking, so it seems likely that army sizes (and battle sizes) started relatively small and grew over time. Maybe this new finding actually does suggest that scale-up happened earlier than most previous legitimate estimates.

My money's on p-hacking though.

It may be more the level of organization. Warfare was common but thought to be more on the family/clan scale.

I was surprised when I first read about that theory (that pre-historic people were largely free of warfare) and it seems really unintuitive, but I also kind of get why it may have been easy to paint that picture even with some science. It’s nice to see us trudging forward and making sure to correct our records :)

I think this is where I first ran into the concept: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/08/archaeologists-uncov...

I would say that the ability to declare war is one of the things that distinguishes us as humans. Even chimpanzees declare war, and for the same reasons we do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

I mean we have evidence chimpanzees engage in tribal warfare. This is an absurd thing for supposed scientific minds to assume.

This was not really "prehistory". About 100 years before the event here the battle of Kadesh [1] happened. Tens of thousands of soldiers are believed to have participated in that battle.

Not sure anyone "before the 1990s" was thinking that people were peaceful during the Bronze Age. 3200 years ago was almost to the day contemporaneous with the Trojan war [2]. That was not a time when people were peaceful and "concerned with trading and so on".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kadesh

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_War#Historical_basis

There’s a no true Scotsman type thing where some folks require some threshold of size or violence or whatever to meet the definition of war. I’m sure if you lived in the village where your neighbors kidnapped and raped your wife and daughters and stole your livestock the distinction may not quite work.

As with anything, people run with type of thing and make seemingly absurd leaps.

Think about the organisation that an army involving hundreds of people must have meant:

You have to gather them. There is no written means of communication yet in that part of Europe. There are not many roads yet. They live on farms spread out over vast territories. The article says there were 5 people per square km. Most are probably kids and half are women, so to find 1 able bodied man of fighting age you might need 20 people, which would require 4 square km. Now, if like in later ages the soldiers were the second and third oldest sons, you might find 1 soldier per 10 square km. To gather an army of 500 men, you would need a territory of roughly 100*50 km.

You have to feed them for days, weeks, or maybe even months before or between battles. Crazy expensive at a time where just feeding yourself is not easy.

They have to sleep somewhere, even if just in tents.

You have to provide some weapons and equipment, even if merely wooden clubs and spears.

Unless they are slaves, which some might have been, you may have to pay them or they need to be convinced they fight for their own sake, for example because a foreign people is invading their land.

The most obvious way to organize all that is to imagine a strong regional rulers, a class of local nobles, taxes, some sort of manorialism. Structures that are known later in history (or much further south in the bronze age). But maybe Northern Europe was also organized like that already in the bronze age.

Go for this book, it changed my life: "The Elements of Style was listed as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 by Time in its 2011 list"

Also this one https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2019/10/puzzling-...

As much as I enjoy Lindybeige, I would take his analysis with a grain of salt. There’s a rather infamous case where Lindybeige released a video filled with bizarre and misleading claims about the MG34 and MG42 German machine guns (which he bizarrely conflated with each other and incorrectly dubbed the “Spandau”) and their relative merits with the Bren, followed by a rather substantial rebuttal from Military History Visualized, to which Lindybeige issued a defensive counter-rebuttal, the comments of which contain further commentary from Forgotten Weapons. If you don’t really want to get invested in an argument between three youtubers, fair enough—my takeaway is that while Lindybeige often has some idea about the topics he presents, he also has strong biases and gaps in his understanding that often result in him confidently pontificating well past his actual expertise.

I did not realize that Hacker News is that old ...

That's true for nearly all of nonRoman Europe.

They weren't called the Dark Ages for nothin'.

Some writing was around 1700 years ago - https://archive.archaeology.org/1207/trenches/frienstedt_ger...

Even being able to write your name was uncommon through the 1600's. Literacy has changed a lot in the last 200 years.

In 1500's(14?) Spain, being able to read and write got you better than "I'm a computer programmer in 2000" prospects. Being able to read silently, without even moving your lips(!?!), got you rumors of deals with the Devil. Now you get to graduate primary-school, and eventually learn programming. Before the recent vast expansion in programming jobs, lots of science phds were driving cabs. Veterinary masters clean cages in zoos. Minimum viable education has been seriously escalating. Even with everything still being taught very very badly. If education tech ever dramatically improves... that'll be interesting.