I live 2 kilometers from Talheim where they found the massgrave. Not far away is a quarry where another skeletton, a woman, was found. I think, perhaps she has tried to escape......
Herxheim is so weird, it deserves its own video which i may do in future but im sure there are ones already. The interpretations seems to range from it being a special burial place where the dead were brought to and there may have been cannibalisation of the remains, or, its a place to bring people to slaughter, dare i say sacrifice, and there remains cannibalised. Whichever is the case, Herxheim doesn't reflect an attacked settlement as is the case for most of the sites dealt with here. Therefore, Herxheim may reflect violent tendencies, contemporary to the sites looked at here, but the behaviour represented within the trauma of the remains and their contexts likely reflects some different motive than explored here.
Very good stuff. One remark: lower limb wounds happens when combatants use shields. Then you first go for legs, then you smash the head when the opponent goes down. If armies are big, front lines just trample over the fallen, but it doesn't seem to be the case here. Breaking bones so they couldn't escape also seems plausible. Anyway, it's good someone came from the steppe and brought some order haha
As there was also a shift from open to enclosed settlements in this period, violence became a more prominent part of live in the later LBK tradition. It might have lead to the end of the culture, just after 5000 bce, and the emergence of more localized traditions.
Thank you! Fine mixture of close detail and narrative brevity. The closing remarks that such events were the exception and not the rule are also important to keep in mind.
Excellent scientific content that surfaces the last year.After all that pseudo-sci stuff you kept up my hope for honest quality content and education via TH-cam.Thanks, mate!
You deserve way more views dude, keep up the great work! As another creator dealing with this same sort of subject matter, I would personally recommend using more specially crafted thumbnails to get people's attention and keeping the amount of time a particular visual is up on screen for to a minimum to keep watchers engaged. I love how you're bringing light to these amazing discoveries, though, I just subscribed!
An excellent presentation! I have a very limited knowledge of this time period or archeology in general but found this video very interesting! You've got yourself a new subscriber. Thanks!
Life itself is violent. I've seen guppies (little tropical fish) decide to gang up on and tear apart one of their own that had spent their entire lives in the same tank.
@@genossinwaabooz4373 funny we see the same thing go on in employment, someone with a long time with a company finds themselves on the outside of the clique/circle of trust, except its usually a cold shoulder till the employee quits no torn apart. Tribalism is a bitch and it only takes one small thing to start the shredding.
You know what that implies? That the tribes doing this, thinking they are superior, left almost no trace except for their violence. While their victims, once buried, passed through time to tell us their story. Kinda poetic justice after 5 thousand years.
@@BaronFeydRautha7000 years actually . Indeed, it’s quite amazing there is any record at all! One imagines that it wouldn’t be all that common, as if it were, there would simply not be many people left. If a tribe of 30, wipes out a tribe of 30, taking 6 girls captive, it’s a net loss of 24 people.
After 12 minutes: "trauma to the legs" - If they fought with large shields, hitting an exposed leg is easier (I've practiced medieval sword fight reenactment) Shields could have been made of hide, like Zulu warrior shields.
I thought perhaps the leg injuries were to prevent them running away after being captured. It seems likely the missing age groups were enslaved. Perhaps the slaughter of the remaining victims and throwing them in a midden was a display for the newly enslaved, to add to their trauma and terror to help ensure their compliance. It must have been bloody horrific.
I recall a video about Aztec warfare where the objective was capture for ritual sacrifice where damage to the legs was the target in order to keep the victims alive but immobile to allow them to later be sacrificed. As for shields, I have never heard of any shield being found in this era, and in any case if this was conventional warfare (of the kind where shields might be used) one would expect the victims to be mostly men of military age (whatever military age might mean in that era).
Thanks for your summation. Have there been any other comparable finds elsewhere in Europe from this time? And was there an increase in the local population or a sudden increase in burials found else where? Your summary of these sites and a look at what else may have been going on could be valuable in piecing together what was going on.
Off the top of my head i can only think of Herxheim which would be roughly contemporary with the sites here (same region too), although Herxheim is on such a massive scale. A lot of massacre sites dated to the late neolithic after the LBK and early bronze age.
@@Archaeology101vids Thank you. Some observations of mine Re similarities from my research of 'The Struggle for Control of North America, 1675-1820' that might help (or not?). 1, sadly, massacres by all sides were all too common due to interethnic conflicts and the difficulty of catching your opponent in the 'Bush Warfare'. 2. Many of the conflicts were brought on more by the rapid population growth of the Euromericans (geometric in some places) vs. the struggling Indigenous Peoples population growth due to European diseases. These were often horrific fights over land and resources by 2 different desperate peoples. 3, the preferred method of execution of captives when they felt it was necessary by the Indigenous was clubbing the victims in the back of the head with a hatchet or war club. 4. Based on my experience and research in North Am Archeology, I would say that the number of sites found so far may only be a sample of a much larger conflict. There are always more sites than archeologists and the only recent finds of locations of these sites may have been due to an earlier lack of recognition. 5, the selective nature of the victims suggests both a 'rub out' and enslavement. The deliberate burial of the victims in mass graves suggests the perps planned on reusing the sites. Slavery was a very old Old World practice with most slaves being caught in a conflict. It didn't appear much in the 1675-1820 North Am wars for multiple reasons, so I have few other observations. In Ancient Summer and Egypt, there was much talk about the extermination and enslavement of conquered peoples, potentially as a form of 'state terrorism'.
I’ve read that Native American tribes would do something similar, and raid another tribal settlement, killing the people who they would not be able to make use of, like older women and of course grown men and children who only presented to much labor to care for and capturing the able bodied young who weren’t really strong enough to fight back but could be useful. They were supplementing their own population that wasn’t growing fast enough. It wasn’t a land dispute in that situation.
Native tribal societies vary drastically, and over time, across present areas called Canada, USA, Mexico, and related coastal habitable locations. Colonization, war strategies, and perfidies of all kinds, etc. are generally overlooked even now, perpetuating really poor scholarship and frustrating the diligent efforts making headway. The scope is also beyond making generalized claims. What I've learned has been both devastating and encouraging, worse and better things about who we've been as people. It's hard.
Most Native American cultures had a goal of adoption rather than killing. We were most interested in captives. Tribes that lived in harsh environments, like the American Southwest and Mexico, were more violent and genocidal. This is the same in other parts of the world. Religions become more about dominance, sacrifice, submission and focus more on supposed pacts with people to conquer others and less about nature - in fact nature is seen as a force of evil and it must be conquered - Abrahamism and all of its filthy branches is a perfect example. Meanwhile social order and warfare in harsh environments becomes about extermination rather than absorption. Societies become more absolutely autocratic. Also... Since you made a generalization, just remember it was Europeans who came here and wiped out 80 million of us. Our numbers were Bush League before you guys got here and showed us how it is really done.
@@PalmettoNDN the whole "Comanches were violent" lie came about cause whites kept losing to them. They really weren't anymore aggressive than any other tribe.
Combat and violence in earlier periods were of a smaller scale but I doubt violent encounters were less common. Being smaller they will leave less evidence by the very nature of the encounter; there would be no effort made to bury your defeated opponents.
Thanks that was interesting. I had read of a couple of these massacre sites, I didn't know there were so many recently uncovered. It leads me to suspect that as Europe becomes more intensively settled more will come to light and our assesment if them will change from rare isolated occurences to being the human norm.
More people could put pressure on local resources, such as good farmland, territory, perhaps even hunting ground to an extent and likely along with a combination of factors could be one reason the intensity of violence increases.
Excellent presentation but one thing is unclear: - You state that massacres were relatively rare. - But you don't explain what evidence you have for that assertion. - How many burial sites have been found from that period where people appear to have died a natural death? - In other words, what are the proportions of violent vs peaceful deaths?
Yup you are right to point that out, obviously there will be cases of one on one violence that go missed as well as a few massacre sites to be found as well i be bound! However, at this point in time there are only a handful of these sites and the majority of burials during this period don't display such levels of conflict.
@@Archaeology101vids First, thanks for answering 😊. Second, I'm sorry to be annoying, but I'm not an archaeologist and I have no clue how many bodies have been found from this period. It's one thing if there are thousands of them - meaning about 1% were massacred - quite another if there are less than a hundred, which would mean about even chances of dying in your bed vs getting scragged by the neighbours.
@gerardvila4685 not annoying at all, totally valid questions! I'm afraid I don't have a percentage of the numbers, but the numbers of the individuals in the sites here total just over 100, however, the 'normal' burials will be in the thousands.
The population was increasing, families had fenced off land and "private property" and farming interfered with people still following the old ways, much like gypsies and travellers today. Young women weren't taken to help with breeding. That's very nieve, they were taken for forced intimacies and slavery. Young teenage boys would also be inducted into a life of slavery, abuse and their bodies dumped or fed to animals. We have been "civilised" for 2 thousand years, yet this behaviour still happens all over the world. Just imagine, if and when the lights of civilisation go out.
The Talheim site wasn't found during construction works, but by a homowner digging in their vegetable garden. It's also interesting that there's more and more evidence of the LBK practicing some very violent customs (Herxheim) and the use of human remains of outsiders as trophies (Niederpöring).
Trauma to the legs is a common thing in the skeletons of the battle of Visby, 1361 AD (you might check on that). In hand-to-hand fighting, hitting your opponents on their shin bones is of one the basic techniques. Welcome to the real world of The Croods! ^_^
I guess if you claimed some land as your own when it had previously been used by everyone,that may cause violence, also if you grew crops and others just helped themselves may be a cause of conflict. The changing of ways of being could be perceived as threatening.
Always has been. If society were to ever break down, it would become like that again. Humans naturally want to exert power over others, and violence is the ultimate manifestation of power. We needed such a mindset to hunt mega fauna and survive as long as we have, and it actually looks like we are in the process of self domestication. Our brains are shrinking and we are becoming more docile. Testosterone levels are also plummeting. I actually think in the future under population is going to be a problem.
If crops fail, I guess it goes a lot faster to conduct a sneak attack on your neighbors than farming more land which you can't harvest until it is too late anyway, with your children and many others starving to death. Also the reasoning might have been that it is better to attack the neighbors than having them attack you. This happens in some parts of the world in our day and age. And most wars are fought for far less rational reasons.
I have to wonder if this was some conflict between the native hunter-gatherers (WHG) and the farmers. We now know through genetics that farming was a result of mass migrations from Anatolia and not natively derived. And the genetic evidence tells us that the WHGs did not mix very much with the farmers, which implies that one side (or both) didn't want to integrate and live together. Of course, it could just as well be competing farming communities fighting over land or resources, but I have a hunch it was a farmer/hunter clash. It just seems too "nasty" and brutal to be some localized dispute between farmers. And I doubt farming communities went on "raids" very often (that's more of a hunter or nomadic practice). I can easily envision the WHGs supplementing their nomadic lifestyle by raiding settled villages for loot. For instance, there was a mass grave found in Poland that dates right at the end of the Neolithic/early bronze age. This would have been the exact time that the Steppe herders began invading Europe. Indeed, the archaeologists who excavated the site suggested it could be Corded Ware people pushing out the Globular Amphora farmers. What's interesting about that site is they DNA tested them all and found that the two adult women were the mothers of all the children. However, they did not find the husbands/fathers in the grave. All the bodies were neatly buried with grave goods, yet they were all clearly murdered by blows to the head. This means that the husbands of the dead women/children likely came home and found their families slaughtered. Or the husbands were killed somewhere else defending the village and perhaps some friendly survivors buried the dead.
Woah thats an interesting find! I can only imagine it was a mixture of reactions, some would likely have happily adapted to a new lifestyle when new people arrived and were amalgamated whereas others must have had violent clashes.
I was wondering the same re: Anatolian farmers v. Native hunter gatherers. Do you know if there has been any genetic analysis of these remains?? Also, I could be wrong but I think there’s some evidence that the intercultural relationships were very different at different times and places. There was a range that included trade and intermarriage on the one end to extreme violence on the other.
@@jcollins3182 Of the ones mentioned here, i dont think so, unless its hidden in a German journal. There have been such studies done in the UK and west Europe and you can see the Anatolian farmer DNA with a slight mix of Western Hunter-Gatherer (WHG) DNA showing the replacement of HG populations.
Do we have the capability of discerning normal burning (not complete scorching or cremation)? Perhaps some of this soft tissue damage could be the result of smoke inhalation from burning structures/being smoked out or tree lines set on fire
Interesting thought I don't believe so, definitely you can see if bone has been affected by fire but that tends to be evidence of more intense heat treatment such as if a body is cremated like you say. I suspect if smoke inhaltion was a cause of death it would be much to quick to leave any lasting trace on boney tissue.
I agree with the capture of young women hypothesis. But while thinking about it, it crossed my mind nobody ever comes up with the hypothesis that it was the young women that woke up one morning and decided to commit a massacre on everyone else, children included :D
Is it likely that those in a roughly teenage category were about the right age for forced assimilation into other groups? Young children might require a lot of work to keep around with reduced short term value to provide labour, where full adults might be more resistant to being assimilated into a new culture? Would this up tick of violence correspond more closely with an increase in population which might have resulted in demographic pressure? Is there any evidence of any emerging elite groups in such communities yet?
Could well be, the only ethnographic example I can think of for comparison is the Comanche who would kill babies, teenagers and adults due to burdening, risk of reprisal etc but they would sometimes keep some of the young children who were then assimilated into the group. I really hope there will be a high quality series of bio studies on these massacre sites which might help to answer some of these questions. Population was most likely on the rise, at least on a local level, people weren't moving around as much as they were previously so larger groups of people are putting more pressure on resources and that likely was part of the cause of one of these massacres.
@@Archaeology101vidsI will yield to your expertise but I think there may have been other tribes that did that as well. Growing up in the Great plains of the US there are a lot of stories from both sides who experience violence. A good example would be Wounded Knee.
@@Archaeology101vidsThe Algonquins had the same practice before European contact. Kill or enslave the teenage boys, raise the younger kids as your own family.
@ 16:55.......... "This is most likely 'neighbors killing neighbors'. Why they do this, we can't always say...." 🙂 Umm, excuse me..... are you familiar at all with human beings??
When humans discovered how to domesticate certain plants and animals, they began to control their lives more than they had when they were totally at the mercy of what they could find to eat and what animals they could kill for food. Out of that, the power of one settled agricultural community could be threatened by the attempt of another one to militarily dominate said community and own and control that community's wealth. Classes develop, top down structures of political power and the whole shebang. Thus war.
that's kind of the conventional line, that organized war was an outshoot of agriculture. Personally I'm with the 'Killer Ape' theory, hunting gave us all the tools we needed, good hunting grounds would have been prized, blood feuds would propagate, etc. Currently reading a book on the Cherokee whose society had men hunting and women farming. The author makes it clear that their spiritual outlook was very centered on cosmic balance, to the point vengeance killings weren't just emotionally driven but completely necessary in order to maintain the cosmic balance, avoid angry ghosts etc. and one point made is that vengeance was not about finding the specific killer but making sure someone from the offending tribe died. I live in the Shenandoah Valley, one of America's richest agricultural areas, and while it's clear the earliest Europeans feared the Native Americans there (seen in defense structures in their houses, extra stories, escape tunnels etc.) there is almost no record of actual hostilities, with the indication being that very powerful tribes, some from far away (Cree, Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee) were fighting for the resources in the area to the point it had became too dangerous to live there.
@@skipperson4077 I think it's valid to connect resource fights to murderous violence. A similar pattern of violent confrontation happens between chimps when resources are scarce. Less scarcity, less violence. Our closest genetic relative in the animal kingdom, the Bonobos, enjoy resource rich environment and make love, not war. I don't think that means we're genetically driven murderers, more we're genetically driven adapters to our environments.
The population levels of Europe 3000BC I have to say there would of been plenty of land to farm to support much bigger populations so I dont think its a fight over farming land. I think its the spread westward of the Yamnaya, they begin spreading west at this time and looking at the Cucuteni Trypillia culture in the later stages of their time their settlements where becoming much more fortified. This settlement has no fortifications and I dont believe the farming people went to war like this I think they had cultural rules on warfare between one another because of the lack evidence of attacks like this throughout Europe. Add into the mix that we know the Yamnaya took Neolithic women and it was a quite high percentage in Germany compared to places like the British Isles for me its the spread westward of the Yamnaya. Also we know there was a plague at this time, the pneumonic plague which has a 90% to 95% mortality rate also played a role in wiping out all the farmers for me its the only plausible explanation for a 93% population replacement in the British Isles. The only place we have seen population replacement on this scale is Native Americans in more modern times and the diseases destroyed the Native Americans far more than any actual warfare...
Some thoughts on the matter....population size in Europe during the late Paleolithic was very small. With a limited gene pool is there even any sense in regularly occurring conflicts reducing it further? And for the first agrarians shouldn't we consider a process of learning from failures to eventually succeed? Meaning you would have some folks ending up with nothing and starving while others are doing well. That could be a source of conflict..... The trauma seen on the legs at that one site can be explained differently. It is a valid combat strategy known from later periods. You take away your enemies' mobility and you are going to win that fight...you can always bash their heads in later. PS you pronounced those German names very well actually 😄
The Palaeolithic is really hard to gauge anything about the population because the sample size is miniscule and really is restricted to cave sites. You are probably correct about the starvation, peoples crops fail and they attack another group for their food. The thought about the trauma is very intriguing as well. I hadn't seen that considered in the reports. Dankeschon
@@Archaeology101vids I know, population estimates for periods until the Magdalenian/Azilian are very low. Then they get a bit more numerous. But for Solutrean it is around 2.000 people in western Europe for example and that is considered higher than the late Gravettian already. And i did not just mean the risk of crop failures which is always there even today still. I meant it is worse for beginner growers...again even in this day and age. And for Neolithic beginners probably much worse still....
@@ChrisShortyAllen You make an excellent point. I am generalizing, however, but crops do fail, food can be scarce and without any surplus, dependent on the time of year, you might not be able to get enough wild foods for a large population.
The lack of young women could be that they were the instigators. If they were patrilocal, perhaps these women felt they were being mistreated and sought help from their birth families who came along and rescued them. Or maybe the young women were elsewhere when the attacks occurred (could there have been taboos on menstruating women). We will never know, but I think it is disingenuous to only suggest that the young women were stolen. Is there any other evidence of this kind of behavior? And why kill all the others when you can just kidnap the women?
Interesting. But missing any parallel discussion or correlation with the rise (or absence) of fortified settlements and archeological discovery of contemporaneous weapons. Also although DNA analysis of remains is now commonly performed the video misses any discussion of interrelatedness of victim individuals. This video misses far more than it explores and completely ignores that social violence arises within a context that leaves behind other evidence besides skeletal remains.
Astonishing, how early blind, bloodthirsty violence has entered our lifes. This urge for rage is deeply rooted in us and once in a while, the urge to do violence, to _ill other people (children, women, ...) just overtakes. Not much has changed in the past 11000 years.
I think the Yamnaya came into Europe after the LBK period, i scoured the web for anything on isotopes and DNA for these sites and nothing significant turned up, it would be very insightful at establishing familial ties amongst the massacred individuals and where they might have come from.
If only they had more D*E*I in those days none of this would’ve happened. Too bad Karl Marx wasn’t around then to straighten this all out. All the mammoth meat would've been divided fair and square. All mud huts would’ve been exactly the same size and shape and the women would’ve been divided up fairly. In those days there wouldn’t have been any slackers because they understood everyone was exactly the same. We had to wait all the way to modern times to finally figure out everyone is non-binary and there is no such thing as he/him or she/her. We are just one gigantic mindless blob of undifferentiated humanoids.
Possibly, but a hunter-gatherer group would be very out of place in comparison to the farming communities that were common throughout Germany at this time.
I'd like to know what motivated this massacre... are humans just bloody monsters or was there a need for it, like dwindling resources? I'll listen to the end...but strange they'd taken prisoners if there were a severe drought or the like. ✌🏻 ❤️🩹
I live 2 kilometers from Talheim where they found the massgrave. Not far away is a quarry where another skeletton, a woman, was found. I think, perhaps she has tried to escape......
Thank for this very informative presentation. Do you have an idea, how the site of Herxheim fit's into this picture?
Herxheim is so weird, it deserves its own video which i may do in future but im sure there are ones already.
The interpretations seems to range from it being a special burial place where the dead were brought to and there may have been cannibalisation of the remains, or, its a place to bring people to slaughter, dare i say sacrifice, and there remains cannibalised.
Whichever is the case, Herxheim doesn't reflect an attacked settlement as is the case for most of the sites dealt with here. Therefore, Herxheim may reflect violent tendencies, contemporary to the sites looked at here, but the behaviour represented within the trauma of the remains and their contexts likely reflects some different motive than explored here.
I am glad to have discovered your channel. Thank you for creating such high-quality content.
Youre doing valuable work! As a mature master student returning to archaeology after a long break, this kind of content is so helpful.
Good luck with your degree! I hope you're enjoying it :)
Very good stuff. One remark: lower limb wounds happens when combatants use shields. Then you first go for legs, then you smash the head when the opponent goes down. If armies are big, front lines just trample over the fallen, but it doesn't seem to be the case here. Breaking bones so they couldn't escape also seems plausible. Anyway, it's good someone came from the steppe and brought some order haha
As there was also a shift from open to enclosed settlements in this period, violence became a more prominent part of live in the later LBK tradition. It might have lead to the end of the culture, just after 5000 bce, and the emergence of more localized traditions.
Thank you! Fine mixture of close detail and narrative brevity. The closing remarks that such events were the exception and not the rule are also important to keep in mind.
Excellent scientific content that surfaces the last year.After all that pseudo-sci stuff you kept up my hope for honest quality content and education via TH-cam.Thanks, mate!
You deserve way more views dude, keep up the great work! As another creator dealing with this same sort of subject matter, I would personally recommend using more specially crafted thumbnails to get people's attention and keeping the amount of time a particular visual is up on screen for to a minimum to keep watchers engaged. I love how you're bringing light to these amazing discoveries, though, I just subscribed!
Thanks for the feedback, tech isn't really my thing (blatantly) but I will look into it, appreciated :)
good advice for channel host
Thank you for an interesting presentation! I hope more information eventually comes to light on these enigmatic burial sites!
I really hope so too, very intrigued to know if there will be isotopic and DNA analysis.
An excellent presentation! I have a very limited knowledge of this time period or archeology in general but found this video very interesting! You've got yourself a new subscriber. Thanks!
This was great. Thanks for your time on this.
Excellent and informative- thank you!
Life itself is violent. I've seen guppies (little tropical fish) decide to gang up on and tear apart one of their own that had spent their entire lives in the same tank.
Captivity & it's conditions reflect poorly on what conduct would otherwise be going on.
@@genossinwaabooz4373 funny we see the same thing go on in employment, someone with a long time with a company finds themselves on the outside of the clique/circle of trust, except its usually a cold shoulder till the employee quits no torn apart. Tribalism is a bitch and it only takes one small thing to start the shredding.
really well done. I love the format
I wonder how many of these happened that weren't buried in sediment or otherwise preserved the many thousands of years since?
You know what that implies?
That the tribes doing this, thinking they are superior, left almost no trace except for their violence. While their victims, once buried, passed through time to tell us their story. Kinda poetic justice after 5 thousand years.
@@BaronFeydRautha7000 years actually . Indeed, it’s quite amazing there is any record at all! One imagines that it wouldn’t be all that common, as if it were, there would simply not be many people left. If a tribe of 30, wipes out a tribe of 30, taking 6 girls captive, it’s a net loss of 24 people.
After 12 minutes: "trauma to the legs" - If they fought with large shields, hitting an exposed leg is easier (I've practiced medieval sword fight reenactment) Shields could have been made of hide, like Zulu warrior shields.
That's a really interesting hypothesis, thank you!
I thought perhaps the leg injuries were to prevent them running away after being captured.
It seems likely the missing age groups were enslaved. Perhaps the slaughter of the remaining victims and throwing them in a midden was a display for the newly enslaved, to add to their trauma and terror to help ensure their compliance. It must have been bloody horrific.
I recall a video about Aztec warfare where the objective was capture for ritual sacrifice where damage to the legs was the target in order to keep the victims alive but immobile to allow them to later be sacrificed.
As for shields, I have never heard of any shield being found in this era, and in any case if this was conventional warfare (of the kind where shields might be used) one would expect the victims to be mostly men of military age (whatever military age might mean in that era).
Was thinking this exact thing when hearing of the leg blows. Wood & hide shields could definitely be a possibility.
Yes, leather shields would rot away unless deposited in a bog or clay. So it’s difficult to prove/disprove.
Well done! Nice to be able to watch an archaeological study that isn’t packed full of wild speculation and supposition in order to mine for “clicks.”
Thank you for watching :)
Thanks for your summation. Have there been any other comparable finds elsewhere in Europe from this time? And was there an increase in the local population or a sudden increase in burials found else where? Your summary of these sites and a look at what else may have been going on could be valuable in piecing together what was going on.
Off the top of my head i can only think of Herxheim which would be roughly contemporary with the sites here (same region too), although Herxheim is on such a massive scale. A lot of massacre sites dated to the late neolithic after the LBK and early bronze age.
@@Archaeology101vids Thank you. Some observations of mine Re similarities from my research of 'The Struggle for Control of North America, 1675-1820' that might help (or not?). 1, sadly, massacres by all sides were all too common due to interethnic conflicts and the difficulty of catching your opponent in the 'Bush Warfare'. 2. Many of the conflicts were brought on more by the rapid population growth of the Euromericans (geometric in some places) vs. the struggling Indigenous Peoples population growth due to European diseases. These were often horrific fights over land and resources by 2 different desperate peoples. 3, the preferred method of execution of captives when they felt it was necessary by the Indigenous was clubbing the victims in the back of the head with a hatchet or war club. 4. Based on my experience and research in North Am Archeology, I would say that the number of sites found so far may only be a sample of a much larger conflict. There are always more sites than archeologists and the only recent finds of locations of these sites may have been due to an earlier lack of recognition. 5, the selective nature of the victims suggests both a 'rub out' and enslavement. The deliberate burial of the victims in mass graves suggests the perps planned on reusing the sites. Slavery was a very old Old World practice with most slaves being caught in a conflict. It didn't appear much in the 1675-1820 North Am wars for multiple reasons, so I have few other observations. In Ancient Summer and Egypt, there was much talk about the extermination and enslavement of conquered peoples, potentially as a form of 'state terrorism'.
I found this very interesting and well done, and subscribed. Archaeology is fascinating and enjoyed the video very much.
I’ve read that Native American tribes would do something similar, and raid another tribal settlement, killing the people who they would not be able to make use of, like older women and of course grown men and children who only presented to much labor to care for and capturing the able bodied young who weren’t really strong enough to fight back but could be useful. They were supplementing their own population that wasn’t growing fast enough. It wasn’t a land dispute in that situation.
Yes that could have been in Empire of the Summer Moon? The Comanche used this strategy apparently.
Native tribal societies vary drastically, and over time, across present areas called Canada, USA, Mexico, and related coastal habitable locations.
Colonization, war strategies, and perfidies of all kinds, etc. are generally overlooked even now, perpetuating really poor scholarship and frustrating the diligent efforts making headway.
The scope is also beyond making generalized claims.
What I've learned has been both devastating and encouraging, worse and better things about who we've been as people. It's hard.
That's largely exaggerated. If you read a list of massacres in the western hemisphere it increases rapidly with the white invasion.
Most Native American cultures had a goal of adoption rather than killing. We were most interested in captives. Tribes that lived in harsh environments, like the American Southwest and Mexico, were more violent and genocidal. This is the same in other parts of the world. Religions become more about dominance, sacrifice, submission and focus more on supposed pacts with people to conquer others and less about nature - in fact nature is seen as a force of evil and it must be conquered - Abrahamism and all of its filthy branches is a perfect example. Meanwhile social order and warfare in harsh environments becomes about extermination rather than absorption. Societies become more absolutely autocratic.
Also... Since you made a generalization, just remember it was Europeans who came here and wiped out 80 million of us. Our numbers were Bush League before you guys got here and showed us how it is really done.
@@PalmettoNDN the whole "Comanches were violent" lie came about cause whites kept losing to them. They really weren't anymore aggressive than any other tribe.
Great presentation fella! 😊
Very interesting. Great content. I liked and I subscribed 😊
Combat and violence in earlier periods were of a smaller scale but I doubt violent encounters were less common. Being smaller they will leave less evidence by the very nature of the encounter; there would be no effort made to bury your defeated opponents.
I also wonder about the timeline of different migrating cultures around Europe in this period, and how it may have contributed.
Thanks that was interesting. I had read of a couple of these massacre sites, I didn't know there were so many recently uncovered. It leads me to suspect that as Europe becomes more intensively settled more will come to light and our assesment if them will change from rare isolated occurences to being the human norm.
How does increase in scale of violence correspond to increase in population?
More people could put pressure on local resources, such as good farmland, territory, perhaps even hunting ground to an extent and likely along with a combination of factors could be one reason the intensity of violence increases.
How is it with Herxheim where hundreds if not thousands of individuals bones were thrown away showing all signs if butchery ?
Excellent presentation but one thing is unclear:
- You state that massacres were relatively rare.
- But you don't explain what evidence you have for that assertion.
- How many burial sites have been found from that period where people appear to have died a natural death?
- In other words, what are the proportions of violent vs peaceful deaths?
Yup you are right to point that out, obviously there will be cases of one on one violence that go missed as well as a few massacre sites to be found as well i be bound! However, at this point in time there are only a handful of these sites and the majority of burials during this period don't display such levels of conflict.
@@Archaeology101vids First, thanks for answering 😊.
Second, I'm sorry to be annoying, but I'm not an archaeologist and I have no clue how many bodies have been found from this period.
It's one thing if there are thousands of them - meaning about 1% were massacred - quite another if there are less than a hundred, which would mean about even chances of dying in your bed vs getting scragged by the neighbours.
@gerardvila4685 not annoying at all, totally valid questions! I'm afraid I don't have a percentage of the numbers, but the numbers of the individuals in the sites here total just over 100, however, the 'normal' burials will be in the thousands.
The population was increasing, families had fenced off land and "private property" and farming interfered with people still following the old ways, much like gypsies and travellers today.
Young women weren't taken to help with breeding. That's very nieve, they were taken for forced intimacies and slavery. Young teenage boys would also be inducted into a life of slavery, abuse and their bodies dumped or fed to animals.
We have been "civilised" for 2 thousand years, yet this behaviour still happens all over the world.
Just imagine, if and when the lights of civilisation go out.
Forced intimacy is breeding. It's every woman's most frequently reported fantasy.
Excellent video! Thank you for sharing!
The Talheim site wasn't found during construction works, but by a homowner digging in their vegetable garden. It's also interesting that there's more and more evidence of the LBK practicing some very violent customs (Herxheim) and the use of human remains of outsiders as trophies (Niederpöring).
D'oh yes you're right! Yes the LBK certainly appears to be an unsafe period
This was a very interesting video. Thank you!😊
Curious to know what the climate was doing during that time, was it all a case of diminished resources.
Its alot harder to run away with a broken leg
Subscribed. Excellent work. TY.
Trauma to the legs is a common thing in the skeletons of the battle of Visby, 1361 AD (you might check on that). In hand-to-hand fighting, hitting your opponents on their shin bones is of one the basic techniques.
Welcome to the real world of The Croods! ^_^
All honor to the doomed defenders of Visby. 😢
I guess if you claimed some land as your own when it had previously been used by everyone,that may cause violence, also if you grew crops and others just helped themselves may be a cause of conflict. The changing of ways of being could be perceived as threatening.
This content is lit 🔥
Lit... hic.
Thank you, yes that was interesting...seems like life as always been tough.
Always has been. If society were to ever break down, it would become like that again. Humans naturally want to exert power over others, and violence is the ultimate manifestation of power. We needed such a mindset to hunt mega fauna and survive as long as we have, and it actually looks like we are in the process of self domestication. Our brains are shrinking and we are becoming more docile. Testosterone levels are also plummeting. I actually think in the future under population is going to be a problem.
Living hell -- a hell, we create for ourselfes.
You have it easy compared to pre-industrial life.
If crops fail, I guess it goes a lot faster to conduct a sneak attack on your neighbors than farming more land which you can't harvest until it is too late anyway, with your children and many others starving to death. Also the reasoning might have been that it is better to attack the neighbors than having them attack you. This happens in some parts of the world in our day and age. And most wars are fought for far less rational reasons.
Interesting.
Were the aggressors Neolithic farmers? Were those killed from the same group?
@@popacristian2056 Probably another group of farmers, who exactly, whether local or not who knows in each case
@@Archaeology101vids Some genetic analysis of those killed would have clarified if they were farmers or hunter-gatherers.
I have to wonder if this was some conflict between the native hunter-gatherers (WHG) and the farmers. We now know through genetics that farming was a result of mass migrations from Anatolia and not natively derived. And the genetic evidence tells us that the WHGs did not mix very much with the farmers, which implies that one side (or both) didn't want to integrate and live together. Of course, it could just as well be competing farming communities fighting over land or resources, but I have a hunch it was a farmer/hunter clash. It just seems too "nasty" and brutal to be some localized dispute between farmers. And I doubt farming communities went on "raids" very often (that's more of a hunter or nomadic practice). I can easily envision the WHGs supplementing their nomadic lifestyle by raiding settled villages for loot.
For instance, there was a mass grave found in Poland that dates right at the end of the Neolithic/early bronze age. This would have been the exact time that the Steppe herders began invading Europe. Indeed, the archaeologists who excavated the site suggested it could be Corded Ware people pushing out the Globular Amphora farmers. What's interesting about that site is they DNA tested them all and found that the two adult women were the mothers of all the children. However, they did not find the husbands/fathers in the grave. All the bodies were neatly buried with grave goods, yet they were all clearly murdered by blows to the head. This means that the husbands of the dead women/children likely came home and found their families slaughtered. Or the husbands were killed somewhere else defending the village and perhaps some friendly survivors buried the dead.
Woah thats an interesting find! I can only imagine it was a mixture of reactions, some would likely have happily adapted to a new lifestyle when new people arrived and were amalgamated whereas others must have had violent clashes.
I was wondering the same re: Anatolian farmers v. Native hunter gatherers. Do you know if there has been any genetic analysis of these remains?? Also, I could be wrong but I think there’s some evidence that the intercultural relationships were very different at different times and places. There was a range that included trade and intermarriage on the one end to extreme violence on the other.
@@jcollins3182 Of the ones mentioned here, i dont think so, unless its hidden in a German journal. There have been such studies done in the UK and west Europe and you can see the Anatolian farmer DNA with a slight mix of Western Hunter-Gatherer (WHG) DNA showing the replacement of HG populations.
Great video!
Excellent 👍🏻 😁 👍🏻
Subscribed 🎉 👍🏻 🎉
The older teenagers of Talheim were all out hunting. They returned to find all their relations murdered. They did the burying.
Do we have the capability of discerning normal burning (not complete scorching or cremation)? Perhaps some of this soft tissue damage could be the result of smoke inhalation from burning structures/being smoked out or tree lines set on fire
Interesting thought
I don't believe so, definitely you can see if bone has been affected by fire but that tends to be evidence of more intense heat treatment such as if a body is cremated like you say.
I suspect if smoke inhaltion was a cause of death it would be much to quick to leave any lasting trace on boney tissue.
I agree with the capture of young women hypothesis. But while thinking about it, it crossed my mind nobody ever comes up with the hypothesis that it was the young women that woke up one morning and decided to commit a massacre on everyone else, children included :D
I mean, I am sure you are joking but of course that didn’t happen.
Even after 7000 years, too soon.
No young males either
Well…this kinda cured my romantic imagination of wishing I lived in a more simple time in ancient Europe …seems like nobody was safe back then !
@@redbeardsbirds3747 It wasn't called "Nasty, Brutish, and Short" for nothing.
Is it likely that those in a roughly teenage category were about the right age for forced assimilation into other groups? Young children might require a lot of work to keep around with reduced short term value to provide labour, where full adults might be more resistant to being assimilated into a new culture?
Would this up tick of violence correspond more closely with an increase in population which might have resulted in demographic pressure? Is there any evidence of any emerging elite groups in such communities yet?
Could well be, the only ethnographic example I can think of for comparison is the Comanche who would kill babies, teenagers and adults due to burdening, risk of reprisal etc but they would sometimes keep some of the young children who were then assimilated into the group.
I really hope there will be a high quality series of bio studies on these massacre sites which might help to answer some of these questions.
Population was most likely on the rise, at least on a local level, people weren't moving around as much as they were previously so larger groups of people are putting more pressure on resources and that likely was part of the cause of one of these massacres.
@@Archaeology101vidsI will yield to your expertise but I think there may have been other tribes that did that as well. Growing up in the Great plains of the US there are a lot of stories from both sides who experience violence. A good example would be Wounded Knee.
@@Archaeology101vidsThe Algonquins had the same practice before European contact. Kill or enslave the teenage boys, raise the younger kids as your own family.
Could this be a Celtic invasion ?
[Apologises for butchering foreign names] proceeds to pronounce them all perfectly. 🤣
So the killing of prisoners was already a thing millennia ago
Check ou Herxheim near Landau, famous neolithic site
I purposefully left that site out as I think it deserves its own video!
It would have been so awesome too watch all this first hand huh?
The premature death of females in childbirth would require obtaining females from outside the group to keep male female ratios constant.
Could be raids by Hunter tribes as the settlements were not occupied.
The Bell Beakers wiped most neolithic folk that went before
@ 16:55.......... "This is most likely 'neighbors killing neighbors'. Why they do this, we can't always say...." 🙂 Umm, excuse me..... are you familiar at all with human beings??
When humans discovered how to domesticate certain plants and animals, they began to control their lives more than they had when they were totally at the mercy of what they could find to eat and what animals they could kill for food. Out of that, the power of one settled agricultural community could be threatened by the attempt of another one to militarily dominate said community and own and control that community's wealth. Classes develop, top down structures of political power and the whole shebang. Thus war.
that's kind of the conventional line, that organized war was an outshoot of agriculture. Personally I'm with the 'Killer Ape' theory, hunting gave us all the tools we needed, good hunting grounds would have been prized, blood feuds would propagate, etc. Currently reading a book on the Cherokee whose society had men hunting and women farming. The author makes it clear that their spiritual outlook was very centered on cosmic balance, to the point vengeance killings weren't just emotionally driven but completely necessary in order to maintain the cosmic balance, avoid angry ghosts etc. and one point made is that vengeance was not about finding the specific killer but making sure someone from the offending tribe died. I live in the Shenandoah Valley, one of America's richest agricultural areas, and while it's clear the earliest Europeans feared the Native Americans there (seen in defense structures in their houses, extra stories, escape tunnels etc.) there is almost no record of actual hostilities, with the indication being that very powerful tribes, some from far away (Cree, Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee) were fighting for the resources in the area to the point it had became too dangerous to live there.
@@skipperson4077 I think it's valid to connect resource fights to murderous violence. A similar pattern of violent confrontation happens between chimps when resources are scarce. Less scarcity, less violence. Our closest genetic relative in the animal kingdom, the Bonobos, enjoy resource rich environment and make love, not war. I don't think that means we're genetically driven murderers, more we're genetically driven adapters to our environments.
The population levels of Europe 3000BC I have to say there would of been plenty of land to farm to support much bigger populations so I dont think its a fight over farming land. I think its the spread westward of the Yamnaya, they begin spreading west at this time and looking at the Cucuteni Trypillia culture in the later stages of their time their settlements where becoming much more fortified. This settlement has no fortifications and I dont believe the farming people went to war like this I think they had cultural rules on warfare between one another because of the lack evidence of attacks like this throughout Europe. Add into the mix that we know the Yamnaya took Neolithic women and it was a quite high percentage in Germany compared to places like the British Isles for me its the spread westward of the Yamnaya. Also we know there was a plague at this time, the pneumonic plague which has a 90% to 95% mortality rate also played a role in wiping out all the farmers for me its the only plausible explanation for a 93% population replacement in the British Isles. The only place we have seen population replacement on this scale is Native Americans in more modern times and the diseases destroyed the Native Americans far more than any actual warfare...
Some thoughts on the matter....population size in Europe during the late Paleolithic was very small. With a limited gene pool is there even any sense in regularly occurring conflicts reducing it further? And for the first agrarians shouldn't we consider a process of learning from failures to eventually succeed? Meaning you would have some folks ending up with nothing and starving while others are doing well. That could be a source of conflict.....
The trauma seen on the legs at that one site can be explained differently. It is a valid combat strategy known from later periods. You take away your enemies' mobility and you are going to win that fight...you can always bash their heads in later.
PS you pronounced those German names very well actually 😄
The Palaeolithic is really hard to gauge anything about the population because the sample size is miniscule and really is restricted to cave sites.
You are probably correct about the starvation, peoples crops fail and they attack another group for their food.
The thought about the trauma is very intriguing as well. I hadn't seen that considered in the reports.
Dankeschon
@@Archaeology101vids I know, population estimates for periods until the Magdalenian/Azilian are very low. Then they get a bit more numerous. But for Solutrean it is around 2.000 people in western Europe for example and that is considered higher than the late Gravettian already. And i did not just mean the risk of crop failures which is always there even today still. I meant it is worse for beginner growers...again even in this day and age. And for Neolithic beginners probably much worse still....
Very poor analysis.
Farmers know what to do. The land is teaming with wild food.
Natives often slaughter the newcomers.
@@ChrisShortyAllen You make an excellent point. I am generalizing, however, but crops do fail, food can be scarce and without any surplus, dependent on the time of year, you might not be able to get enough wild foods for a large population.
@@Archaeology101vids Human beings really don't need a extreme survival motivation to attack others. Simple greed is often enough.
Older teenage girls were spared. We think kidnapped for sexual partners. Obviously.
It's nice to know that we've always been a pathetic species. Very little has changed.
12:49 bruh i` looks like a bone. Sacrifiiiiice
The lack of young women could be that they were the instigators. If they were patrilocal, perhaps these women felt they were being mistreated and sought help from their birth families who came along and rescued them. Or maybe the young women were elsewhere when the attacks occurred (could there have been taboos on menstruating women). We will never know, but I think it is disingenuous to only suggest that the young women were stolen. Is there any other evidence of this kind of behavior? And why kill all the others when you can just kidnap the women?
> And why kill all the others when you can just kidnap the women?
What do you think the men would do after their wives had been kidnapped?
Interesting. But missing any parallel discussion or correlation with the rise (or absence) of fortified settlements and archeological discovery of contemporaneous weapons. Also although DNA analysis of remains is now commonly performed the video misses any discussion of interrelatedness of victim individuals.
This video misses far more than it explores and completely ignores that social violence arises within a context that leaves behind other evidence besides skeletal remains.
If you have links to papers relating to the dna analysis i would love them, i could find very little in the more scientific analysis
@@Archaeology101vids ...
Astonishing, how early blind, bloodthirsty violence has entered our lifes. This urge for rage is deeply rooted in us and once in a while, the urge to do violence, to _ill other people (children, women, ...) just overtakes. Not much has changed in the past 11000 years.
You need to seek counselling for those urges.
Worse is that it is often done in rational cold blood.
@@ChrisShortyAllen 🤡
Yamnaya's arrival? The prodominant y chromosome exchange in western Europe?
I think the Yamnaya came into Europe after the LBK period, i scoured the web for anything on isotopes and DNA for these sites and nothing significant turned up, it would be very insightful at establishing familial ties amongst the massacred individuals and where they might have come from.
Conclusions out of thin air.
🪦
The advent of inequality caused every single one of our problems.
If only they had more D*E*I in those days none of this would’ve happened. Too bad Karl Marx wasn’t around then to straighten this all out. All the mammoth meat would've been divided fair and square. All mud huts would’ve been exactly the same size and shape and the women would’ve been divided up fairly. In those days there wouldn’t have been any slackers because they understood everyone was exactly the same. We had to wait all the way to modern times to finally figure out everyone is non-binary and there is no such thing as he/him or she/her. We are just one gigantic mindless blob of undifferentiated humanoids.
Farming = patriarchy
You must have a collection of weak equations. I like Bra = Slave.
Please share more. The movement needs more intellectual momentum.
Thanks
Could these have been attacks by the native hunter gatherers?
Possibly, but a hunter-gatherer group would be very out of place in comparison to the farming communities that were common throughout Germany at this time.
I'd like to know what motivated this massacre...
are humans just bloody monsters or was there a need for it, like dwindling resources?
I'll listen to the end...but strange they'd taken prisoners if there were a severe drought or the like.
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