I have always chalked this up to an abundance of land and resources. There is no point in fighting other humans for something when it is easier to just walk over to the next valley. But as soon as it becomes worthwhile for humans to fight for something, they will fight for it.
I'm no anthropologist, but my extremely amateurish guess as to why hunting is so over-represented in those paintings is because there was perhaps an element of ritual to it. Hunting is very uncertain, there's never a guarantee that you'll find an animal to hunt, much less successfully be able to kill it and bring it back to eat. And with so much at stake, maybe those cave paintings of a hunt served as something like a shrine to appeal to whatever supernatural force they thought might give them a better chance. Like they were trying to gain an element of control over their own fortune.
More often than not, people in societies create art for art's sake when they have time on their hands. Granted, the hunting life was precarious and success was never guaranteed, but once a 10,000 pound mammoth was killed, the abundance of food meant leisure time for some time. Prehistoric people don't seem to be all that different from us in size and cranial capacity so maybe they drew for the same reasons we do. Some of the depictions in wall art are of prey animals but many were not. And many are not of animals at all, but geometric patterns and the outlines of hands. Also, the animals depicted are often elaborately designed and exquisitely colored, almost like they were drawn by an artist to show the world that he or she was an artist. There are carvings, too, of humans and animals.
There were less people then and much much(uncountable) more animals, The mantra about unsuccessful hunts is really not based on anyting from that time.*** Ancient hunters of cave painting era were really lazy hunters - these people drove animals to slaughter place, they have perfected the hunt of industrial scale. They had no hunger and plenty of meat. The only thing that would have prevented them from a good hunt was other tribe that would force them out from their hunting grounds. Or incurable sickness from which all of the tribe would die out. *** These are not native American hunters, that had hunger after white man killed all their food - buffalos, that were millions, out of which were left only 100 or so.
@@ewfse364u35jh Are you saying that the hand that was outlined on a cave wall belonged to the same individual who painted the bison a few feet away? Are you saying that it is impossible that the hand was done by a different person dozens or hundreds years later? That the drawing must have been done at about the same time as the hand and both must have been the same person? Are you saying that the blob of twenty hand outlines of many sizes and of several colors must have been from people who all together drew the horse as a group project?
I mean, the explanation seems very simple, and it's a combination of two things: - violent conflict was very rare. It surely happened. But there wasn't a yearly season for war. - prehistoric humans didn't represent everything. We don't have a lot of representations of humans at all - and we don't see them eating, making love, raising children etc. They represent what they find beautiful and the meaningful parts of their life. We don't see crimes and murders represented in Egyptian frescoes. Prehistoric wars are more comparable to that.
@@ArkadiBolschek The point is that even at a much later age, from which there are definite recordings and evidence of wars - there are MANY aspects of human life not recorded in art of the age. Which doesn't prove there weren't criminals in ancient Egypt - it just proves Pharaohs weren't fans of true crime genre. They only dealt with that aspect through legal codes - like what Hammurabi did. Similarly, there is very little art, even now, depicting human birth. And yet we seem to multiply somehow.
Two points: 1. When you're on the brink like this, its much more advantageous to make friends and cooperate than to make enemies and compete. We see this in the animal world- animals which cooperate, on the whole, tend to be more successful than those that don't. War is a resource drain and this was a time of extremely scarce resources. 2. We also see in the animal world that apex predators especially appear to go to great lengths to avoid direct conflict.
Cave Art was part of religious ceremonies begging the gods for success in the most critical part of hunter-gather lives. An unsuccessful hunt could mean starvation and death for the entire clan. Warfare on the other hand was about eliminating those pesky intruders who were poaching on the clan’s sacred hunting grounds the same as getting rid of a bad predator. No need to ask the gods for a lot of help in that, because you could not eat either pest.
@@gregorybiestek3431 During cave painting era there was no need for begging for success, as animals were more than plenty. Also, hunter gatherers do not draw animals to have a good luck in hunt - they sacrifice hunted animals(in a very graphic way) to their gods to have a good luck IN NEXT HUNT. So, pleas stap this nonsense with religious ceremonies. How these religious ceremonies have children hands painted next to those animals?
@@ewfse364u35jh You have never been in an actual religious ceremony then have you? Every religious group from established faiths to cult-like followings has included children to introduce them to the “mysteries” of the belief system. Try looking up Jonestown, try Waco Compound, try Judaism, Catholicism, or Islam, try Hinduism or Buddhism, try Indigenous Shamanism. Go away and take your pathetic opinions with you.
@@ewfse364u35jh YT seems to enjoy deleting factual replies. You have never been in an actual religious ceremony then have you? Every religious group from established faiths to cult-like followings has included children to introduce them to the “mysteries” of the belief system. Also multiple University studies (Cambridge, Yale, Colorado State, etc.) have shown that Paleolithic people were constantly on the edge of starvation where frequent unsuccessful hunts could doom an entire clan-group. Malnutrition was a common occurrence because of the heavy reliance on hunting, Famine happened frequently, Food was sometimes unavailable or only seasonally available, resulting in high Death rates and 2-out-of 3 children did not reach 14.
Population density (more precisely combined with not having food shortages that could be addressed by warfare)? Also, chimp warfare would not really show up in the record, would it? Isn't that more about killing a few males and taking the spoils? One needs to get to some level of genocidal warfare to get good records from badly preserving artifacts I think.
Truth be told, the total amount of surviving paleolithic art is not exactly s robust sample size. The war art could very much have been made in other forms and materials - including wood.
I suppose that it is vital to depict war if you want to impress others who don't know you personally. To show them what you did to others in order to keep your enemies anxious, to force them to surrender, or to keep your own people quiet.
Why wouldn't there be? Imagine native Americans of the great plains, even in precolumbian/pre horses times. There would have been incentive to compete over good Buffalo jumps, high quality sources for lithics, trade rights/routes. All this intensified when horses came around. Like they say in the video it has more to do with how strong the competition for resources is, which is correlated, but doesn't map perfectly, with agriculture or sedentism
@@aaronmeehan8161 Precolumbian Natives were still several thousands of years removed from our global Paleolithic ancestors. They had much higher populations and population density and many Great Plains peoples did have agriculture or were semi-horticultural during some parts of the year. They had extensive trade networks that archaic groups didn’t have on the same scale. They had a complex of city states along the Mississippi River that served as America’s first civilization as well. More modern Hunter-Gatherer peoples aren’t good analogs for prehistoric ones.
@@YaBoiDREX I agree that plains Indians were likely a much more complex and densely populated society than most groups in the deep past, and yes, there would have been a gradient of more settled groups in the east that were more influenced by the Mississippian cultures, and more mobile groups farther west and north. But I brought it up as an example of a culture that wasn't sedentary and at least in parts didn't have agriculture where there was a lot of competition.
It depends how you define war. That's why I think it's more helpful to talk about "violent conflict". There's no doubt that prehistoric peoples would have had reasons for violent conflicts. Maybe they stole a prey, maybe it was a love story, whatever. "Nomadism" can also mean a lot of different things. People imagine that prehistoric peoples were always on the move, Mongolian pastoralism style. In practice, it's more than they had different spots depending on the season - it's only on very large scales of time that we see them moving from continent to continent. On the scale of a generation, a prehistoric human probably saw always the same landscapes in their life, unless they were forced to leave for a reason or another. Nomadic peoples don't necessarily consider that there's no territory.
Nomadic peoples, given the chance, would tend to migrate *within* a defined circuit where they know there will be resources that replenish over time. Wandering without any idea of territorial control is for people who lack access to more resource-rich areas.
It could just be that a Sharing Society is more sustainable that a Conflict Society. Why live in fear of other humans when the real threat is from countless millions of creatures populating the environment at every scale. Surely Humanity understood and understands that the accumulation of knowledge is an individual activity.
Has there ever been reconsidered that the hunting scenes might be actual depictions of war - and that the animals might represent the human opponents? One possible reason could be the wish to derogate their opponents because it may help justify any gruesome encroachment on other humans and, by that, also calm their conscience about what happened. It could be related with religious beliefs that transfer actual history into different, transcendental context. - I suspect that, although there is no hard evidence to it.
It is after 8000 BP, the critics would say ;) But Glowacki’s point is like yours: Hunter-gatherer war isn’t. But we do have a lot of paintings about war from later periods, even in hunter gatherer art. So I do find this to be relevant piece of “absence of evidence” counting for sth. Thoughts?
The first, longest-standing, most rapidly advancing civilization in Europe---Minoan Crete---had neither life-long kings nor a war state. They weren't utopians, just very life-loving (as a matriculture) and wise. Get to know them! ruclips.net/video/xupSvdb2l8c/видео.html
There are several answers to this question, but remember one that moat people don't talk about it that there were certainly more cave paintings but very little survived.
Yes, such an examination should start by mentioning that human activities are already a minority of the cave paintings we have. We only have an extremely limited glimpse at human prehistoric life from cave paintings. We have some hunting scenes, maybe initiations or ceremonial/sacred/worship scenes, dance, group dynamics, some reproductive imagery... we also have evidence of narrative depictions (so maybe they were used to give lessons? or convey myths/experiences). But that's still extremely limited, and in many cases we just have one or two scenes of each type in the entire world.
@@Ezullof Iberian cave art of the Mesolithic shows explicit scenes of battle between groups of archers. A group of three archers encircled by a group of four is found in Cova del Roure, Morella la Vella, Castellón, Valencia. A depiction of a larger battle (which may, however, date to the early Neolithic), in which eleven archers are attacked by seventeen running archers, is found in Les Dogue, Ares del Maestrat, Castellón, Valencia. At Val del Charco del Agua Amarga, Alcañiz, Aragon, seven archers with plumes on their heads are fleeing a group of eight archers running in pursuit.
What if all of the "hunting" art work is really about war, with the enemy depicted as animals. Dehumanizing the enemy is an important part of war. Why would it be any different in pre-history? That said, I don't see much motivation for war. War has always been about resources unavailable to one side or the other. In pre-history humans moved about the land, following the herds or the seasons. Different groups would stay relatively small, so there were plenty of resources for everyone. Until the invention of agriculture there was no reason to fight over land, If the land you happened to be on could no longer support you, you simply moved on.
Amaranthine: How to Create a Regenerative Civilization Using Artificial Intelligence explains why war would have been rare among widely dispersed hunter gatherers
@@DaveMarx-te2rs The oldest warfare in cave art is found at Aurignacian-Périgordian (roughly 30,000 years old) and the early Magdalenian (c. 17,000 years old). This art at these sites represents "spontaneous confrontations over game resources" (from the archeological report) in which hostile trespassers were killed.
10000 BC there were about 1 million people on the entire planet. Earth was basically empty of humans. That is about 1 person per every 63km^2 of the habitable land mass. There was very little reason to compete for resources among tribes. Surely there were interpersonal violence. Surely there was some competition for the very best locations. Those however probably were not that important to risk all out war.
There is a prehistoric massacre is at the site of Jebel Sahaba, committed against a population associated with the Qadan culture of far northern Sudan. The cemetery contains a large number of skeletons that are approximately 13,000 to 14,000 years old, with 24 out of 59 skeletons have arrowheads embedded in their skeletons, which indicates that they were the casualties of warfare.
@@gregorybiestek3431 Thanks for that. Still even after reading this, it was a culture that developed harvesting and then constrained by climate change and stuck between a growing desert and the sea
@@adam-k It goes back even earlier that 14,000 BC. The oldest warfare in cave art is found at Aurignacian-Périgordian (roughly 30,000 years old) and the early Magdalenian (c. 17,000 years old). This art at these sites represents "spontaneous confrontations over game resources" (from the archeological report) in which hostile trespassers were killed.
I’m curious to know when depictions of war evolved from historical documentation to political propaganda. or could war depictions always be construed as some form of propaganda given that the depiction is constructed by people in control of that particular narrative?
War is for loot = Horse's, Cattle, plus Treasures which can be both bribes, and rewards to your own inner circle with women being both prizes, and a receiver. This means private property. = ( ego ) which would have been hard to find in a cave before agriculture allowed accumulations of resources. Chimps need a minimum numbers advantage before war happens both of which would have been lacking, and you needed friendly groups to exchange mates or doom yourselves by inbreeding. Distance was latter overcome by infrastructure to support trade, but in so doing setting yourselves up as a rewarding target beyond the local requirements needed for both population advantage, and genetic diversity. War is a destroyer of genetic diversity. Todays world is enabling a welcome interbreeding interlude by allowing people to intermingle without being too concerned with a fixed tribal identity.
I'm not sure if i understand you right, but private property doesn't neccessarily depend on agriculture. It can also mean what you mentioned: horses, cattle, also tools or even people as slaves. So yes, reasons for warfare are many, even for nomads.
Prehistoric warfare predates loot or agriculture. Prehistoric warfare was about eliminating those pesky intruders who were poaching on the clan’s sacred hunting grounds the same as getting rid of a bad predator. The oldest warfare in cave art is found at Aurignacian-Périgordian (roughly 30,000 years old) and the early Magdalenian (c. 17,000 years old). This art at these sites represents "spontaneous confrontations over game resources" (from the archeological report) in which hostile trespassers were killed.
@@johannageisel5390 One of these war cave arts is located in San Borjitas, a painted cave in Sierra de Guadalupe, south of La Palmarita. If you want to know about others, I suggest you read a copy of “Prehistoric Warfare - The History of Early Human Conflicts” by Charles River.
War is natural for Homo Sapiens. The oldest warfare in cave art is found at Aurignacian-Périgordian (roughly 30,000 years old) and the early Magdalenian (c. 17,000 years old). This art at these sites represents "spontaneous confrontations over game resources" (from the archeological report) in which hostile trespassers were killed. There is a prehistoric massacre is at the site of Jebel Sahaba, committed against a population associated with the Qadan culture of far northern Sudan. The cemetery contains a large number of skeletons that are approximately 13,000 to 14,000 years old, with 24 out of 59 skeletons have arrowheads embedded in their skeletons, which indicates that they were the casualties of warfare.
@@OnHumansPodcast The University of Utah book “Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest”; The University of Cambridge 2016 study of Nataruk, Lake Turkana massacre; the 2018 compilation by Andrea Dolfini “Prehistoric Warfare and Violence”; the discovery of a massacre 7,000 years ago in Schöneck-Kilianstädten.
They most likely skirmished more than they had all out battling so no need to really make art of it. The death rate of these skirmishes was probably low too especially considering the low population density.
Death rate would be per capita, so it might actually be higher with lower population density. Like if you consider two extended families where one member of a family murdered one member of another family, and if there's only 100 people between both families, that murder rate would be almost 16 times the current U.S. murder rate.
@@darkfool2000 If we had official statistics from Prehistory then yeah, sure. But all we have is archaeological evidence. So it doesn't matter at all if the death rate per capital would be higher - violent deaths are still so rare that it's very rare to find evidence of it. When we find a medieval cemetery we can make statistics such as murder rate, death by disease rate, because we get a good view of how people died. We have no such thing in prehistory. There are no cemeteries. We only find isolated tombs, or people who died by accident. It creates a bias in our sample. We don't have access, we can't have access to prehistoric death rates. And the fact that it's so rare to find human remains that indicate a violent death by a human weapon can very well be explained by the rarity and generally non-lethality of conflicts in that time.
The Bonobo and common Chimpanzee diverged from us prior to diverging from each other. They still interbreed occasionally both in captivity and the wild.
Bro never heard of the Gombe chimpanzee war that killed 11 of the 29 adult chimpanzees involved. No matter how you slice it, that's a casualty rate at least as bad as WW2.
@@Ezullof There's a big difference between animals fighting each other out of the need to survive, and a species systematically killing its own kind for no reason but greed
![BRASIL vs. URUGUAY [1-1] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 12](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-hWBAuxF1eY/mqdefault.jpg)
I have always chalked this up to an abundance of land and resources. There is no point in fighting other humans for something when it is easier to just walk over to the next valley. But as soon as it becomes worthwhile for humans to fight for something, they will fight for it.
I'm no anthropologist, but my extremely amateurish guess as to why hunting is so over-represented in those paintings is because there was perhaps an element of ritual to it. Hunting is very uncertain, there's never a guarantee that you'll find an animal to hunt, much less successfully be able to kill it and bring it back to eat. And with so much at stake, maybe those cave paintings of a hunt served as something like a shrine to appeal to whatever supernatural force they thought might give them a better chance. Like they were trying to gain an element of control over their own fortune.
Or it was just a teaching tool. A whiteboard for planning tactics.
More often than not, people in societies create art for art's sake when they have time on their hands. Granted, the hunting life was precarious and success was never guaranteed, but once a 10,000 pound mammoth was killed, the abundance of food meant leisure time for some time. Prehistoric people don't seem to be all that different from us in size and cranial capacity so maybe they drew for the same reasons we do.
Some of the depictions in wall art are of prey animals but many were not. And many are not of animals at all, but geometric patterns and the outlines of hands. Also, the animals depicted are often elaborately designed and exquisitely colored, almost like they were drawn by an artist to show the world that he or she was an artist. There are carvings, too, of humans and animals.
There were less people then and much much(uncountable) more animals, The mantra about unsuccessful hunts is really not based on anyting from that time.*** Ancient hunters of cave painting era were really lazy hunters - these people drove animals to slaughter place, they have perfected the hunt of industrial scale. They had no hunger and plenty of meat. The only thing that would have prevented them from a good hunt was other tribe that would force them out from their hunting grounds. Or incurable sickness from which all of the tribe would die out.
*** These are not native American hunters, that had hunger after white man killed all their food - buffalos, that were millions, out of which were left only 100 or so.
@@donlimoncelli6108 Artists... right, especially where hands were clearly chidrens hands.
@@ewfse364u35jh Are you saying that the hand that was outlined on a cave wall belonged to the same individual who painted the bison a few feet away? Are you saying that it is impossible that the hand was done by a different person dozens or hundreds years later? That the drawing must have been done at about the same time as the hand and both must have been the same person? Are you saying that the blob of twenty hand outlines of many sizes and of several colors must have been from people who all together drew the horse as a group project?
I mean, the explanation seems very simple, and it's a combination of two things:
- violent conflict was very rare. It surely happened. But there wasn't a yearly season for war.
- prehistoric humans didn't represent everything. We don't have a lot of representations of humans at all - and we don't see them eating, making love, raising children etc.
They represent what they find beautiful and the meaningful parts of their life.
We don't see crimes and murders represented in Egyptian frescoes. Prehistoric wars are more comparable to that.
You do see representations of warriors, battles, military campaigns and prisoners of war in Egyptian art, though.
@@ArkadiBolschek The point is that even at a much later age, from which there are definite recordings and evidence of wars - there are MANY aspects of human life not recorded in art of the age.
Which doesn't prove there weren't criminals in ancient Egypt - it just proves Pharaohs weren't fans of true crime genre.
They only dealt with that aspect through legal codes - like what Hammurabi did.
Similarly, there is very little art, even now, depicting human birth. And yet we seem to multiply somehow.
People forget that at one time animals were a greater threat than other humans.
Two points:
1. When you're on the brink like this, its much more advantageous to make friends and cooperate than to make enemies and compete. We see this in the animal world- animals which cooperate, on the whole, tend to be more successful than those that don't. War is a resource drain and this was a time of extremely scarce resources.
2. We also see in the animal world that apex predators especially appear to go to great lengths to avoid direct conflict.
Cave Art was part of religious ceremonies begging the gods for success in the most critical part of hunter-gather lives. An unsuccessful hunt could mean starvation and death for the entire clan. Warfare on the other hand was about eliminating those pesky intruders who were poaching on the clan’s sacred hunting grounds the same as getting rid of a bad predator. No need to ask the gods for a lot of help in that, because you could not eat either pest.
@@gregorybiestek3431 During cave painting era there was no need for begging for success, as animals were more than plenty. Also, hunter gatherers do not draw animals to have a good luck in hunt - they sacrifice hunted animals(in a very graphic way) to their gods to have a good luck IN NEXT HUNT. So, pleas stap this nonsense with religious ceremonies. How these religious ceremonies have children hands painted next to those animals?
@@ewfse364u35jh You have never been in an actual religious ceremony then have you? Every religious group from established faiths to cult-like followings has included children to introduce them to the “mysteries” of the belief system. Try looking up Jonestown, try Waco Compound, try Judaism, Catholicism, or Islam, try Hinduism or Buddhism, try Indigenous Shamanism. Go away and take your pathetic opinions with you.
@@ewfse364u35jh YT seems to enjoy deleting factual replies. You have never been in an actual religious ceremony then have you? Every religious group from established faiths to cult-like followings has included children to introduce them to the “mysteries” of the belief system. Also multiple University studies (Cambridge, Yale, Colorado State, etc.) have shown that Paleolithic people were constantly on the edge of starvation where frequent unsuccessful hunts could doom an entire clan-group. Malnutrition was a common occurrence because of the heavy reliance on hunting, Famine happened frequently, Food was sometimes unavailable or only seasonally available, resulting in high Death rates and 2-out-of 3 children did not reach 14.
Population density (more precisely combined with not having food shortages that could be addressed by warfare)? Also, chimp warfare would not really show up in the record, would it? Isn't that more about killing a few males and taking the spoils? One needs to get to some level of genocidal warfare to get good records from badly preserving artifacts I think.
Exactly my thoughts.
Truth be told, the total amount of surviving paleolithic art is not exactly s robust sample size.
The war art could very much have been made in other forms and materials - including wood.
Also the tendency of archaeologist to ascribe everything to ritual. Maybe the paintings where profane.
I suppose that it is vital to depict war if you want to impress others who don't know you personally. To show them what you did to others in order to keep your enemies anxious, to force them to surrender, or to keep your own people quiet.
Successful hunting is a constant desire. War is not. People paint the world they want, not the world they have.
Interesting!
Why would there be territorial disputes (war) for nomadic peoples? It seems natural that agriculture would predate war
Why wouldn't there be? Imagine native Americans of the great plains, even in precolumbian/pre horses times. There would have been incentive to compete over good Buffalo jumps, high quality sources for lithics, trade rights/routes. All this intensified when horses came around. Like they say in the video it has more to do with how strong the competition for resources is, which is correlated, but doesn't map perfectly, with agriculture or sedentism
@@aaronmeehan8161 Precolumbian Natives were still several thousands of years removed from our global Paleolithic ancestors. They had much higher populations and population density and many Great Plains peoples did have agriculture or were semi-horticultural during some parts of the year. They had extensive trade networks that archaic groups didn’t have on the same scale. They had a complex of city states along the Mississippi River that served as America’s first civilization as well. More modern Hunter-Gatherer peoples aren’t good analogs for prehistoric ones.
@@YaBoiDREX I agree that plains Indians were likely a much more complex and densely populated society than most groups in the deep past, and yes, there would have been a gradient of more settled groups in the east that were more influenced by the Mississippian cultures, and more mobile groups farther west and north. But I brought it up as an example of a culture that wasn't sedentary and at least in parts didn't have agriculture where there was a lot of competition.
It depends how you define war. That's why I think it's more helpful to talk about "violent conflict".
There's no doubt that prehistoric peoples would have had reasons for violent conflicts. Maybe they stole a prey, maybe it was a love story, whatever.
"Nomadism" can also mean a lot of different things. People imagine that prehistoric peoples were always on the move, Mongolian pastoralism style. In practice, it's more than they had different spots depending on the season - it's only on very large scales of time that we see them moving from continent to continent. On the scale of a generation, a prehistoric human probably saw always the same landscapes in their life, unless they were forced to leave for a reason or another. Nomadic peoples don't necessarily consider that there's no territory.
Nomadic peoples, given the chance, would tend to migrate *within* a defined circuit where they know there will be resources that replenish over time. Wandering without any idea of territorial control is for people who lack access to more resource-rich areas.
It could just be that a Sharing Society is more sustainable that a Conflict Society. Why live in fear of other humans when the real threat is from countless millions of creatures populating the environment at every scale. Surely Humanity understood and understands that the accumulation of knowledge is an individual activity.
Has there ever been reconsidered that the hunting scenes might be actual depictions of war - and that the animals might represent the human opponents? One possible reason could be the wish to derogate their opponents because it may help justify any gruesome encroachment on other humans and, by that, also calm their conscience about what happened. It could be related with religious beliefs that transfer actual history into different, transcendental context. - I suspect that, although there is no hard evidence to it.
very interesting idea. its always a possibility. it would be difficult to argue that its a likely one, though. but it's good keep an open mind!
So, among many other things, war is absolutely no good for leaving archaeological evidence.
It is after 8000 BP, the critics would say ;) But Glowacki’s point is like yours: Hunter-gatherer war isn’t. But we do have a lot of paintings about war from later periods, even in hunter gatherer art. So I do find this to be relevant piece of “absence of evidence” counting for sth. Thoughts?
The first, longest-standing, most rapidly advancing civilization in Europe---Minoan Crete---had neither life-long kings nor a war state. They weren't utopians, just very life-loving (as a matriculture) and wise. Get to know them! ruclips.net/video/xupSvdb2l8c/видео.html
I don't know what qualifies as war rather than a big fight? I'm guessing they didn't value fights enough to draw any of them.
There are several answers to this question, but remember one that moat people don't talk about it that there were certainly more cave paintings but very little survived.
who tf are the moat people
@@zande4x08bp9 People who lived in moats. So obvious!
Yes, such an examination should start by mentioning that human activities are already a minority of the cave paintings we have.
We only have an extremely limited glimpse at human prehistoric life from cave paintings. We have some hunting scenes, maybe initiations or ceremonial/sacred/worship scenes, dance, group dynamics, some reproductive imagery... we also have evidence of narrative depictions (so maybe they were used to give lessons? or convey myths/experiences).
But that's still extremely limited, and in many cases we just have one or two scenes of each type in the entire world.
@@Ezullof Iberian cave art of the Mesolithic shows explicit scenes of battle between groups of archers. A group of three archers encircled by a group of four is found in Cova del Roure, Morella la Vella, Castellón, Valencia. A depiction of a larger battle (which may, however, date to the early Neolithic), in which eleven archers are attacked by seventeen running archers, is found in Les Dogue, Ares del Maestrat, Castellón, Valencia. At Val del Charco del Agua Amarga, Alcañiz, Aragon, seven archers with plumes on their heads are fleeing a group of eight archers running in pursuit.
What if all of the "hunting" art work is really about war, with the enemy depicted as animals.
Dehumanizing the enemy is an important part of war. Why would it be any different in pre-history?
That said, I don't see much motivation for war. War has always been about resources unavailable to one side or the other. In pre-history humans moved about the land, following the herds or the seasons. Different groups would stay relatively small, so there were plenty of resources for everyone.
Until the invention of agriculture there was no reason to fight over land, If the land you happened to be on could no longer support you, you simply moved on.
Human nature will always be contentious.
True, but it won't always be organized, and war is an organized and sustained type of violence.
Amaranthine: How to Create a Regenerative Civilization Using Artificial Intelligence explains why war would have been rare among widely dispersed hunter gatherers
Interesting topic.
And what if a war involved cannibalism on one side. I imagine the first time war was invoked as an idea would be against a cannibalistic people.
There were no wars then. Just small battles for resources and women. Just like most all mammals. That's it.
no Younger Dryas - no war...
They depicted the things they wanted. Not those they didn't.
But the idea of not painting the sex-making kinda makes less sense under this belief.
@@DaveMarx-te2rs The oldest warfare in cave art is found at Aurignacian-Périgordian (roughly 30,000 years old) and the early Magdalenian (c. 17,000 years old). This art at these sites represents "spontaneous confrontations over game resources" (from the archeological report) in which hostile trespassers were killed.
Since food was so important they just ate the enemy. ??
10000 BC there were about 1 million people on the entire planet. Earth was basically empty of humans. That is about 1 person per every 63km^2 of the habitable land mass. There was very little reason to compete for resources among tribes. Surely there were interpersonal violence. Surely there was some competition for the very best locations. Those however probably were not that important to risk all out war.
There is a prehistoric massacre is at the site of Jebel Sahaba, committed against a population associated with the Qadan culture of far northern Sudan. The cemetery contains a large number of skeletons that are approximately 13,000 to 14,000 years old, with 24 out of 59 skeletons have arrowheads embedded in their skeletons, which indicates that they were the casualties of warfare.
@@gregorybiestek3431 Thanks for that. Still even after reading this, it was a culture that developed harvesting and then constrained by climate change and stuck between a growing desert and the sea
@@adam-k It goes back even earlier that 14,000 BC. The oldest warfare in cave art is found at Aurignacian-Périgordian (roughly 30,000 years old) and the early Magdalenian (c. 17,000 years old). This art at these sites represents "spontaneous confrontations over game resources" (from the archeological report) in which hostile trespassers were killed.
I’m curious to know when depictions of war evolved from historical documentation to political propaganda. or could war depictions always be construed as some form of propaganda given that the depiction is constructed by people in control of that particular narrative?
War is for loot = Horse's, Cattle, plus Treasures which can be both bribes, and rewards to your own inner circle with women being both prizes, and a receiver. This means private property. = ( ego ) which would have been hard to find in a cave before agriculture allowed accumulations of resources. Chimps need a minimum numbers advantage before war happens both of which would have been lacking, and you needed friendly groups to exchange mates or doom yourselves by inbreeding. Distance was latter overcome by infrastructure to support trade, but in so doing setting yourselves up as a rewarding target beyond the local requirements needed for both population advantage, and genetic diversity. War is a destroyer of genetic diversity. Todays world is enabling a welcome interbreeding interlude by allowing people to intermingle without being too concerned with a fixed tribal identity.
I'm not sure if i understand you right, but private property doesn't neccessarily depend on agriculture. It can also mean what you mentioned: horses, cattle, also tools or even people as slaves. So yes, reasons for warfare are many, even for nomads.
@@fiktivhistoriker345 Yes horses, and cattle are a type of indirect agriculture. Both are property thus wealth to fight over
Prehistoric warfare predates loot or agriculture. Prehistoric warfare was about eliminating those pesky intruders who were poaching on the clan’s sacred hunting grounds the same as getting rid of a bad predator. The oldest warfare in cave art is found at Aurignacian-Périgordian (roughly 30,000 years old) and the early Magdalenian (c. 17,000 years old). This art at these sites represents "spontaneous confrontations over game resources" (from the archeological report) in which hostile trespassers were killed.
@@gregorybiestek3431 Can you please tell us the names of these caves? I want to look into that further.
@@johannageisel5390 One of these war cave arts is located in San Borjitas, a painted cave in Sierra de Guadalupe, south of La Palmarita. If you want to know about others, I suggest you read a copy of “Prehistoric Warfare - The History of Early Human Conflicts” by Charles River.
You seem to have a very strong focus on pre-historic war as a channel.
War is not creative. War is mimetic.
War is natural for Homo Sapiens. The oldest warfare in cave art is found at Aurignacian-Périgordian (roughly 30,000 years old) and the early Magdalenian (c. 17,000 years old). This art at these sites represents "spontaneous confrontations over game resources" (from the archeological report) in which hostile trespassers were killed. There is a prehistoric massacre is at the site of Jebel Sahaba, committed against a population associated with the Qadan culture of far northern Sudan. The cemetery contains a large number of skeletons that are approximately 13,000 to 14,000 years old, with 24 out of 59 skeletons have arrowheads embedded in their skeletons, which indicates that they were the casualties of warfare.
Could you share links on the paleo-european cases? Jebel Shaba is typically cited as the earliest evidence. Would like to read more!
@@OnHumansPodcast The University of Utah book “Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest”; The University of Cambridge 2016 study of Nataruk, Lake Turkana massacre; the 2018 compilation by Andrea Dolfini “Prehistoric Warfare and Violence”; the discovery of a massacre 7,000 years ago in Schöneck-Kilianstädten.
Perhaps cave art was done by families or individuals and not clans or larger
There was basically no difference between the two. Prehistoric human groups weren't very large.
They most likely skirmished more than they had all out battling so no need to really make art of it. The death rate of these skirmishes was probably low too especially considering the low population density.
Death rate would be per capita, so it might actually be higher with lower population density. Like if you consider two extended families where one member of a family murdered one member of another family, and if there's only 100 people between both families, that murder rate would be almost 16 times the current U.S. murder rate.
@@darkfool2000 If we had official statistics from Prehistory then yeah, sure. But all we have is archaeological evidence. So it doesn't matter at all if the death rate per capital would be higher - violent deaths are still so rare that it's very rare to find evidence of it.
When we find a medieval cemetery we can make statistics such as murder rate, death by disease rate, because we get a good view of how people died.
We have no such thing in prehistory. There are no cemeteries. We only find isolated tombs, or people who died by accident. It creates a bias in our sample.
We don't have access, we can't have access to prehistoric death rates. And the fact that it's so rare to find human remains that indicate a violent death by a human weapon can very well be explained by the rarity and generally non-lethality of conflicts in that time.
War is unnatural, our closest relatives are bonobo chimps which are extremely peaceful, not chimpanzees
The Bonobo and common Chimpanzee diverged from us prior to diverging from each other. They still interbreed occasionally both in captivity and the wild.
Bro never heard of the Gombe chimpanzee war that killed 11 of the 29 adult chimpanzees involved. No matter how you slice it, that's a casualty rate at least as bad as WW2.
Violent conflict isn't that rare in nature. The scale of human war makes it different.
But there's no doubt that our ancestors had violent conflict.
@@Ezullof There's a big difference between animals fighting each other out of the need to survive, and a species systematically killing its own kind for no reason but greed
We are equidistant from bonobos and chimpanzees.