Oldest Fortresses in the World Discovered | Hacker News Reader

Oldest Fortresses in the World Discovered

phys.org

163 pointswglb86 comments

I’ve always found this notion strange:

> overturning previous assumptions that competition and conflict were absent in hunter–gatherer societies

Chimps have competition, conflict, some even call it ‘warfare’ between neighbouring troops. Groups of human teenagers in modern societies have conflict. But somehow Stone Age humans must’ve lived in some pre-historic la-la-land until some form of modernity spoiled us.

Might be motivated reasoning connected to the notion that European colonialism was unique in human history.

I don't think this is a serious position held by anyone with even a cursory understanding of history. Loud people on social media maybe.

tbf, I think the position that hunter gatherer society was relatively idyllic and non-violent until the nasty proto-states came along and forced people into agriculture being argued against here is (whilst largely unrelated to colonial exceptionalism) also a niche one with significantly more currency amongst loud people on social media than in academia

It’s a little more complicated than that. Deeper in the past people could kind of just spread out, and there wasn’t much archeological evidence for conflict between groups. While chimp bands do engage in this behavior, bonobos do not.

I kind of get that reasoning. But then on the other hand, it’s just not well supported by the vast majority of societies actually observed.

Everywhere we go or went to, people already had weapons, and knew how to use them against other humans. Everywhere the first thing to get their hands on were better weapons to gain the upper hand over some pre-existing enemies. With the exceptions, such as Moriori, being few and far between. And killed.

The continuity of inter-group violence throughout pretty much any known culture is so strong, that I really find the notion that it somehow suddenly appeared out of nowhere because ‘farming’ really weird.

I can't find the reference right now, but one example is supposedly aboriginal Australian societies. I read somewhere that one thesis was the because those societies often lived in small groups which might not be genetically viable on their own, and they were widely separated due to the low carrying capacity of the land, when groups encountered each other they would be more interested in, ahem, exchanging genetic material, than fighting. And since they lived that way until recently (in historical terms) there is at least some memory of what happened.

But personally I know nothing about Australian aboriginal societies and that might be complete rubbish. In any case of doesn't seem likely to be representative of cultures living in areas that would support a denser population.

"exchanging genetic material" is also a major motivation for violence. Kidnapping women as a way of obtaining a bride or brides has been practiced throughout history all over the world and is still practiced in some groups today. Living in a state of nature means no laws and the only restriction on your actions is the willingness and ability of others to physically stop you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping

I wonder if there was a similar phenomena in Australian to North America, where basically all observations were of cultures radically altered and depopulated by disease.

Depopulation by disease started with the arrival of Europeans, right? Apparently Native Americans knew how to do genocide also before European arrival:

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

And, apparently, no, not really:

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/aborigines/2022/07/truth-tel...

You need enough food to feed enough fighting age men in order for the economics of raising to even work. If a band of 50 or so loses more than a few prime age men they might not be able to feed themselves.

Just because you can spread out doesn't mean you want to. I have enough plates at dinner for my kids to spread out, but both of my kids want the plastic red one and will fight over it. Anciently, people are going to fight over what they think is the more ideal spot to live, or mine, harvest, etc. even if the other side of the mountain is exactly the same.

I'm not sure how true this is. We definitely have evidence of ethnic cleansing in the paleolithic archeological record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare

I don't get the argument.

If people spread out, they're more likely to run into other people's territories. Which is how you get conflict.

> Deeper in the past people could kind of just spread out, and there wasn’t much archeological evidence for conflict between groups.

There isn't archeological evidence because the violence would be done with stones and sticks, which tend to not preserve very well, as opposed to later conflicts, fought with metal weapons and armor.

It's another compounding factor to the lack of physical evidence in addition to far lower population density (population bottleneck during the ice age and probably several millennia after)

Stone survived just fine, we've got evidence of stone tools going back over three million years. It preserves much better than iron which rusts to bits in the ground within a few thousand years

The issue is the relative lack of signs of bone injury that is obviously from axes or piercing weapons (as opposed to falls and blunt force trauma). Archaic humans have had hand axes capable of very obvious damage for over a million years, spears for half a million, and they wouldn't have had anything resembling armor until about 200k years ago.

There was certainly competition but if warfare was particularly common, we should have seen more evidence. We probably weren't "peaceful," though, just smart enough to realize that conflict avoidance is usually the optimal strategy.

This also follows the general pattern we observe in the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture: The hunter-gatherers weren't really killed until the imperialism of the common era, they were absorbed or just out competed by the agriculturalists. Lots of their remnants survive ranging from the Bedouin to Namibian pastoralists to the jungle dwellers of Papua New Guinea.

stone tools like hand axes were not well suited for combat. For example, war clubs the dominant weapon of choice in every stone age culture I know of, despite using hand axes for work and spears for hunting.

I don't think there's much physical evidence for the use of war clubs in the stone age except a few skulls with blunt force trauma that could have also been caused by hand axe - it's mostly based off ethnographic studies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample [1].

IMO any culture that participated regularly in warfare would have figured out that sharp spears with long reach are far more effective than clubs unless that combat was largely symbolic. Clubs would make sense because they're not as lethal.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-023-09445-3

Spears are easily parried and its really difficult to recover an attack posture afterwards since you need to quickly retreat the full length of the spear. Someone wielding a short one handed weapon has a major advantage because they can move in quickly, parry with their weapon or free hand and then make multiple strikes to an opponent who can only defend at that range and can’t attack. They’re only really effective in formation with a lot of other soldiers which is not a tactic you would expect from a group without military discipline.

There are plenty of spear points and arrow heads, but very few skeletons of young men with injuries from such implements before agriculture. After a certain point the record for small scale war is strong.

In my layman's opinion, conflict is always about territory and resources - often territories exist as the containers of certain resources. One would think (or just I imagine) that hunters/gatherers would be nomads (honestly I didn't read TFA), so no territory and then less conflicts, and you don't need static defenses such as fortresses. For instance, chimps are sedentary while bonobos are nomadic.

The idea that hunter gathers didn't have "territory" or resources to defend is a misnomer. There are richer lands with more plants to gather, and those that are arid. There are plentiful hunting grounds, and those that are devoid of wildlife. These areas are valuable, and people fought for access to them. Nomadic peoples usually stayed in one area for quite a while until the resources were exhausted, and then moved on elsewhere. Specific peoples differed in how they did things, but this pattern was typical of many North American indigenous groups. They setup semi permanent settlements meant to last years. Other peoples followed migratory animals for hunting, and therefore been more mobile, but their valued resource (the herd) was still vulnerable for others to take.

"Nomadic" didn't mean people just aimlessly wandered and sustained off of whatever they chanced upon that day. You can't go just anywhere and expect to feed your family off of what you find. When you found some place or something good, you tried to claim it and defend it from those who encroached on it. You moved on under your own volition only when the resources were depleted/left.

It seems it must be interpretation of the article rather than the position held by academia. Most of our earliest known cities had walls, suggesting that defensive fortifications were essentially a requirement for any large concentration of resources (cities) to exist. And we also know that wooden palisades were a common feature amongst North American indigenous villages, indicating that hunter gather societies thought a lot about defense.

Napoleon Chagnon would beg to differ, he spent decades fighting the ingrained notion that hunter gatherers were inherently peaceful. Despite his first hand experience and evidence from modern day tribes still living in primitive conditions he faced a huge amount of resistance from the scientific community and barely gained recognition for his work a few years before his death at the age of 81. He still gets a lot of posthumous flak from people who refuse to believe that humans inherently use violence as a tool when not restricted by modern morals and societal structures even though that should be plainly evident from literally all of human history right up to this very second.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon

I gather it was a trendy view in certain sectors of academia for some time, and possibly in parts of pop culture.

In about '04 or '05 one of my poli sci classes assigned War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (OUP, 1996, Keeley) and the professor spent much time debunking the notion of the peaceful savage or a time before war, but already then, almost two decades ago, it seemed like a weird thing to focus on because none of the students were aware this was a myth that needed debunking because we hadn't encountered it until that class. I assume it seemed important to the professor because some little academic war (ha, ha) over the issue had wrapped up in the recent past.

What you are seeing is Rousseau-ian philosophy in action, which is super prevelent in certain parts of the academia. The "noble savage" trope, the belief that it's the civilisation that made people violent.

If I have learned anything from Dan Carlin (and the excellent "Hardcore History" podcast), it's that the steppe people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythians) were no joke -- so it doesn't surprise me that the oldest fortress would be located there.

steppe people's fortress located in the snow forest?

Some Indo-European cultures (e.g. Andronovo) did extend into forested and mountainous regions of Siberia, but not that far north AFAIK.

While the Scythians did range into Siberia, Amnya is north of the steppe by something like 1500km, and I don't think even the Andronovo horizon ever extended that far north. Also, you're off by a few millenia: Indo-Europeans didn't emerge from the Pontic-Caspian steppe until the 4th millenium BCE.

> Chimps have competition, conflict, some even call it ‘warfare’ between neighbouring troops. Groups of human teenagers in modern societies have conflict. But somehow Stone Age humans must’ve lived in some pre-historic la-la-land until some form of modernity spoiled us.

Chimp warfare isn't particularly well understood and looks most similar to the warfare that extant tribes participate in, which is symbolic tit-for-tat, not the societal warfare that reached its peak with the Ancient empires like Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc. The conflict informs migration patterns but it doesn't lead to tribe-ending battles.

Groups of human teenagers live and go to school with groups that are easily ten to a hundred times the size of an ancient tribe so it's not really comparable. It's like comparing the behavior of a wild wolf to a dozen held in a small cage in a zoo. They're going to behave completely differently in both scenarios.

> ...doesn't lead to tribe-ending battles.

Jane Goodall observed exactly that in Gombe, as described in 'Through a Window'. I believe it was something of an eye-opener for primatology at the time.

For those who believe human conflict is the product of certain social or economic conditions that prevail today, rather than inherent to the human condition, the idea that more primitive conditions were peaceful is an appealing one.

You also see this line of thinking extend to the idea of hierarchy, with limited archaeological evidence for primitive hierarchies being taken to imply the absence of hierarchy, in spite of hierarchy and status existing among modern day hunter gatherers and other primitive groups.

To complete the dance around the central message, there was once vigorous academic activity on this thesis in what are now Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

Tbf, wasn't all that an offshoot of German intellectual activity?

>Chimps have competition, conflict, some even call it ‘warfare’ between neighbouring troops.

Worth mentioning "Chimp Empire" at Netflix. Interview with the director James Reed at Joe Rogan #1988 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab7j5Ffb4ZE

That assumption derives from the assumption that capital is the only resource worth fighting for, and also assumptions about what forms capital can take.

This article is an example of land capital (prime fishing spots) being useful for a non-agricultural society.

If you like this sort of stuff, I recommend The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a 2021 book by anthropologist and activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

The paper cites Graeber and Wingrow:

[Findings like this fort] can contribute to the critical re-appraisal of narratives of linear pathways to social change increasingly explored in both scientific and popular debates (e.g. Dan-Cohen Reference Dan-Cohen2020; Graeber & Wengrow Reference Graeber and Wengrow2021).

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/wo...

edit: on second read this comment came across to me as not supportive of the parent comment, which was not intended. I second the recommendation of reading Graeber and Wengrow, and was happy to see them directly cited.

“The Dawn of Everything” does include some lengthy polemical content. Even if the authors point of view isn’t to one’s own aesthetic or political sensibility: skip ahead, it is still worth reading the whole thing.

I love everything David Graeber wrote, including this book. But this is a book that reliably puts me to sleep. I had trouble finishing it when I first read it, it took me almost two months to read it as I kept falling asleep. I suffer from the occasional insomnia, so I bought this book and whenever I feel like my hypothalamus is not cooperating, I try to read a chapter. Works like a charm.

It may be difficult to find settlements older than 16,000 years ago, because sea levels were lower then, so their coastal settlements would now be underwater. Perhaps completely obliterated... or perhaps there is a coming age of discovery of their remnants?

So-called "land bridges", connecting places, were huge places in their own right, not narrow "bridges", and (probably) prime land.

Very valid point - Doggerland comes to mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

True, but we haven't found anything older than 12000 years, haven't we?

That's because people tend to settle near or in coastal plains. Coastal plains from 12000 years ago are ocean today.

That would depend upon what you are aiming to find.

- The Lomekwi site shows stone tools that around 3 million years old.

- Jericho is over 10 thousand years old.

- Gobekli Tepe is at least 11 thousand years old with some nearby sites being at least 12 thousand years old.

- The Cactus Hill site is at least 16 thousand years old.

- Tel al-Qaramel is at least 12 thousand years old.

- Theopetra is around 135 thousand years old.

Obviously, some of these are more important than others. Theopetra just shows that some people built a wall (most likely to block wind) at a cave entrance, while Qaramel shows people having built large burial mounds. Jericho and the various sites at and near Gobekli show people having built cities. Importantly, the flooding of low coastal areas during glacial melt explains the rather "sudden" appearance of complex construction at both Jericho and Gobekli (and slightly later Sumerian and Indus Valley) sites. People would have fled those now under water areas quickly, and they'd have taken the story of the flood and devastation with them along with their knowledge of construction. Accordingly, we have a flood myth in Semitic culture and a super old city. We do not know the myths and legends of Gobekli, but it doesn't make sense for "primitive" hunter gatherers to have suddenly invented construction, sculpture, city planning, logistics, and so on. It makes far more sense that they'd have fled an older site that was flooded by glacial melt.

Nah.

We find structures that are half a million years old:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598742

https://www.archaeology.org/issues/537-features/top10/11937-...

Wood structure! 476,000 years old!

It makes sense that you'd seek to retain occupation of prime spots for harvesting abundant seasonal protein and fats, especially when all the protein and fat is coming to you.

I feel like our view of hunter-gatherers tends to be distorted by present day tribes who largely live in the tropics, where food abundance isn't so location dependent, or the San of Southern Africa who have a nomadic lifestyle necessitated by their harsher environment.

Distorted how? From the article:

The abundance of natural resources in the Siberian taiga, such as annual fish runs and migrating herds, probably played a crucial role in the emergence of the hunter–gatherer forts

In our public consciousness hunter gatherers don't build anything ever. They just run around women are gathering berries and handling game meat with an aesthetic fire while the 90% muscle Chad hunter came back to his temporary cave with a new kill.

I always find it sad that our history knowledge is so incomplete.

I wish humans learned to write earlier and more globally. We know virtually nothing of so many civilizations.

Having enjoyed Durant & Durant's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization in short doses, I once tried to read through multiple volumes of them in a row; after a certain point it just becomes a blur of people being awful to each other.

(and that's less than 2% of human history)

Blame mainly awful people who liked to brag how awful they were and what awful things they did to other people. When writing down the history of stuff and people, it was too expensive for ordinary folks to engrave on stone how they optimized their crops or how they improved weaving.

While awful by today's standards, they recorded their feats because those awful actions allowed their civilization to thrive, even at the cost of others' perishing. Plus, by boasting of your awful deeds, you're more likely to dissuade would-be challengers.

It would be lovely if we had knowledge from the common man from throughtout history, but the common man wasn't typically the reason for domminance.

> after a certain point it just becomes a blur of people being awful to each other.

I suppose the internet is a fairly accurate reflection of human history. What a depressing thought.

Humans will weaponize anything. If AI is trained on human data, it will most certainly extinguish us. How can we use the behavior of all animals to train AI? I’d rather have a smart dog (retriever?) to talk to than a human. I could trust it

Be careful what you wish for. The (nonhuman) animal world is much more ruthless than the human one, despite all our own ruthlessness.

Prey animals in the wild often die more awful deaths than what even slaughterhouses see.

And even predators in the wild don’t die under professional care in a hospital bed surrounded by loved ones. It’s probably a violent death or starvation.

I did falconry once and found it impressive that the captive birds had a mean life expectancy of 22 years while the wild ones had just 9. The reason was starvation. You get injured and can't hunt? You starve. You age a bit and aren't quite fast enough to catch mice anymore? You starve.

Civilization's ability to let us specialize, combined with private property, really allows humans to achieve amazing lives compared to the often romanticized other options.

I did the other side - I’ve had pet house rabbits. A wild rabbit is apparently lucky to make it to 2 years. High probability it gets gruesomely torn apart and eaten alive by predators.

Meanwhile a house rabbit can live on average 8-10 years, even as long as 12-15.

Why Writing? Ancient monuments and buildings tell us more than another creation myth.

writing can capture different information, and the fact that much of what we do have is religious is tied to the fact that writing was so rare!

If you personally dont find the history of human belief interesting, think of something you might. What if you could read journals from explorers settling the pacific islands. What would a daily journal from a 20k BC Mesoamerican include? What did people think about sabertooth tigers,

Without translations it's not useful either. I'm not against writings but we can glean way more info from DNA and archeology than glyphs. Pictographs are useful but long dead writing methods aren't interesting unless we can understand them.

Obviously that depends on what you want to learn. DNA is not going to tell you the hopes, dreams, or thoughts of early peoples. I have zero care for information as a general concept. I care about specific types of information.

The funny thing about translations are that if you have lots of texts, it makes them easier to translate

It is important to remember that most writing from just two thousand years ago didn't survive to us today. Due to the collapse of civilizations over time, the number of people capable of writing and therefore copying decaying manuscripts fell periodically. Only what the folks doing the copying felt was most important therefore survived, and many of those writings could have been changed by the transcriber (Beowulf comes to mind). While we have no evidence to support the idea that the oldest civilizations known had any form of writing, it is certainly possible that they did. It is also well-known to modern historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists that writing was often purposefully destroyed. As a new Egyptian king replaced a former, it wasn't unheard of for all mention of the previous to be completely erased. The Spanish purposefully destroyed "heathen" writings of the Maya. It is unknown how common these practices may have been in antiquity, but we know that many civilizations were quite proud of themselves and disdainful of all others.

It seems that social stratification and violence can emerge in hunter-gatherer societies where there's enough resource abundance to generate surpluses. Some phenomena normally associated with agricultural societies (e.g., elite conspicuous consumption, slavery, warfare) have been observed in non-agricultural Pacific Northwest tribes like the Tlingit, where abundant salmon runs led to huge surpluses.

> overturning previous assumptions that competition and conflict were absent in hunter–gatherer societies

What about Jericho? It has a wall that is older than this. Maybe it doesn't fall into the classification of "fortress" but it still already seems to show there was some sort of conflict or competition going on at that time. There was also a tower but from what I remember, the location of the tower at Jericho would be a little odd as a defensive structure.

My point is there are well known structures at Jericho that are considered to be "defensive" and these are largely agreed to predate the findings in this article. So why would these recent findings overturn this thinking of Jericho did not?

Its claim to be "the oldest" appears to be fairly narrowly delineated as "promontory hillfort", whereas Jericho was a full blown town and Tell Qaramel just a single tower. It's also in a completely different world region, of course.

The rest seems to be the author hinting at the classic pop science trope of "if it hasn't been discovered before it must be radically challenging an incorrect old paradigm". Whereas "semipermanent structures in defensible positions in the middle of hunting grounds" sounds like exactly what someone that believes in a broader theory of simple hunter-gatherer tribes gradually progressing into complex agricultural societies would expect. (Likewise Gokpeli Tepe is problematic for anyone committed to the idea of "civilisation" having a particular start date, but hunter gatherers establishing some sort of [semi]permanent settlements near plains full of nutritious wild grasses and probably drawing on the labour resources of the surrounding hunting tribes to help with monument-building is entirely consistent with the general notion of hunter gatherers gradually evolving into more complex urban societies)

Hunter gatherers needing defensive walls long before their neighbours acquired agriculture-supported armies is pretty bad for the "violent competition didn't emerge until agriculture and large scale organisation" theorists, but I'm not sure this has ever really been a mainstream academic view.

"I have an idea! You know how we make structures to sleep in? How about if we made a REALLY BIG structure where we can go when there's an attack, that would protect us from people just coming into our camp, and that arrows couldn't get through! We could all go there to defend ourselves together, and store all our weapons there so they can't be stolen!!"

> overturning previous assumptions that competition and conflict were absent in hunter–gatherer societies

just a question - could it be that these forts provided defence against wild life? I think mammoth, woolly rhinos, bisons, aurochs, and some big extinct deers may have still been there. As well as siberian tigers, bears, wolves, etc

That is a good point. Native Americans prepared for war to kill a brown bear. Not an easy beast to kill even with a rifle. Having some protection from a predator just roaming in and eating people is a good idea.

Roaming predators isn't something most people today even consider. Our predecessors had already killed them all. On the other hand, other humans are far more dangerous than furry carnivores.

If they were hunter gatherers and nomadic then how did they ensure their fortress was not taken over by whatever enemy they built it to protect against? Kind of a big design flaw.

Maybe they had a permanent caretaker?

https://youtu.be/CMbI7DmLCNI?feature=shared

What i find remarkable is that this place is frozen 8 months out of a year. It takes some special skills just to stay alive there. It's pretty remarkable they found a way to keep themselves heated 24/7 and thrive in that weather 8000 years ago. Nobody wants to live there now.

Are you sure it was the same temperature back then?

Does anybody know the exact GEO location of this?

Rough location here: https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge...

2048x1365 image of exact location here: https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/presse/informationen/fup/2023/fu...

Described as: "The fortified settlement sits atop a section of land overlooking the bountiful Amnya River."

Google Maps|Earth + rivers layer should get you close.

Further clues to be found via: https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/presse/informationen/fup/2023/fu...

The headline is wrong. The study was not about the oldest fortresses in the world but about the oldest fortresses created by hunter-gatherers. Walls were built around Jericho 10000 years ago, which means those walls are 2000 years older than the fortresses in the study.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Jericho-West-Bank

Is it possible that the walls around Jericho were there to keep out wild animals?

A simple wooden palisade keeps out wildlife just fine. The walls of a Jericho were a fair bit larger to put it mildly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_es-Sultan#Walls

Is it really so hard to believe that the wealth and resource concentration that exists in cities would be a tempting target? Especially given the finite and often scarce resources available?The earliest cities almost all have walls. Those that don't usually have some other form of natural fortifications. Large stone walls are as old as our oldest societies

> The Siberian findings, along with other global examples like Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia, contribute to a broader reassessment of evolutionist notions that suggest a linear development of societies from simple to complex.

WARNING: Crazy train off the tracks!

Evolution doesn't pretend to tell us about the social sciences.

The creationists who call other people "evolutionists" would like us to believe that strawman so that evolution can be wrong.

I Think the article states evolution in a social and not biological sense

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

It should be obvious what "evolutionist" means considering that it's explained in the sentence you quoted starting immediately after the word. If anything, it seems like you might actually want creationists to own the word. Crazy warning, indeed.

"[L]inear development of societies from simple to complex" is indeed a strawman.

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