Did Neanderthals go to war with our ancestors?
bbc.com
bbc.com
Though I’m not even a history hobbyist, it seems incredibly unlikely for those stories to be passed down orally for that long in any distinct manner.
I think the Nephilim, given the way they were described as tall "sons of God" who were "heros" and "warriors of renown" were an African people
It is possible that they were not that stupid and they were simply outbred by humans.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopes
(see Possible origins section)
https://www.amazon.com/First-Fossil-Hunters-Dinosaurs-Mammot...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
I wonder if there were ever any mixed communities. Human Hunter gatherers are know to take captives and slaves, which over generations could lead to a level of integration, just as one possible mechanism, although there are plenty of other plausible scenarios over that amount of time.
> In Eurasia, interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans with modern humans took place several times. The introgression events into modern humans are estimated to have happened about 47,000–65,000 years ago with Neanderthals and about 44,000–54,000 years ago with Denisovans.
(my pet peeve: history ed in school spends too much time on details, and not enough time on the macro perspective)
A plausible modern definition of war is that it is a conflict between two polities that sanctions otherwise illegitimate violence by particular people. That is, war is undertaken by government (not individuals); it requires the use of special participants (military forces); it requires a definitive, positive interaction to commence (e.g., a declaration of war); and it has rules that need to be observed. The exact contours of the definition will differ from author to author, and there are plenty of conflicts that sit in a nebulous gray area (would The Troubles constitute a war? or the Colombian conflict between the government and FARC? or gang wars?), but broadly speaking, you will see some sort of line being drawn between warfare and mere violence.
Archaeology tells us that there is pretty clear physical evidence of mass violent deaths as early as the Mesolithic. However, cultural evidence of warfare is not easily established: cave paintings in the Paleolithic don't depict anything like warfare, and even in the Mesolithic, evidence for warfare in paintings is kind of thin. It's really not until the development of sedentary agriculture in the early Neolithic that we see clear evidence of warfare, and even here, the evidence can easily be interpreted in a way that suggests it wasn't a major feature before then.
Her reasoning wasn't this deep though. It went mostly along the lines of idillic prehistoric humans solving every issue with mating until patriarchy driven civilizations came along and messed up the world.
Meaning all high status males have probably killed at least one member of their species in their lifetime.
Orangutans are the odd elevated ones.
Humans fought humans.
Neanderthals fought Neanderthals.
The most interesting question is, did humans and Neanderthals form coalitions against humans, Neanderthals, or other human and Neanderthals coalitions?
https://theconversation.com/war-in-the-time-of-neanderthals-...
I really like this way of doing heavy hyperlinking, btw.
https://theconversation.com/war-in-the-time-of-neanderthals-...
I think with regards to slavery you are bringing in modern views of humanity. I think it was the modern African chattel slavery practiced by the West that introduced the concept that slaves were less than human.
Prior to this, slavery was just considered something unfortunate that happened to a person. A person could become a slave because of debts. A person could become a slave if they lost a battle or their city was conquered. For sure, it sucked, and they did not have any rights, but again, there wasn't really a concept of human rights. In addition, there was no real concept of equality. These were very hierarchical societies. Thus, a slave, I think, would have been considered human, but at the lowest rung of the social hierarchy. In addition, there was no real ethnic component to slavery. There were Greek slaves and Greek masters. Slaves also were not considered intellectually inferior - see for example the Greek physicians and tutors that Romans would have as slaves.
Ironically, it was the push for equality and human rights that made African slavery so toxic. In the past, without concepts of human rights or equality, slavery was just what happened to people who were really unlucky somehow. However, with the concepts of equality and human rights, people realized that slavery was incompatible with that. However, they still wanted to enslave Africans. The way they dealt with this dilemma was to say that Africans were not really human, which magnified the damage caused by slavery a 100 fold, since that horrible idea persisted even after slavery ended in the West.
The GP post is talking about things the happened ~2.5k years ago (greek slavery) and less than 0.5k years ago (african slavery).
It's off-topic. Not incorrect, not unimportant. Just off-topic.
Seems it depends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece#Slav...
"Xenophon notes the accepted practice of treating slaves as domestic animals, that is to say punishing them for disobedience and rewarding them for good behaviour.[130] For his part, Aristotle prefers to see slaves treated as children and to use not only orders but also recommendations, as the slave is capable of understanding reasons when they are explained"
There's plenty more. I think you're being a bit rosy-tinted here. Some like josephus did ok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus but many slaves got worked to death.
1. The image of the enslaved Greek language tutor gives a misleading picture of ancient slavery. It's true Greeks and Romans seem to have divided their social world on language and religion rather than skin color. But the massive numbers of Carthaginians and Gauls worked to death in copper mines were almost certainly not seen as equals by their enslavers.
2. I may be misreading you here, but the claim that "it was the push for equality and human rights that made African slavery so toxic" is reversing cause and effect. Racial plantation slavery in the Canary Islands predated modern movements for universal human rights. It was slavery that made human rights a European-only idea, not human rights movements that made colonial slavery a racial institution.