Article: Muggings were rife in New Stone Age
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Robert Karl Stonjek - 11 May 2006 23:46 GMT Muggings were rife in New Stone Age 11 May 2006 Emma Young IF YOU are worried about being attacked or killed by a violent criminal, just be glad you are not living in Neolithic Britain. From 4000 to 3200 BC, Britons had a 1 in 14 chance of being bashed on the head, and a 1 in 50 chance of dying from their injuries.
Grisly figures from the first systematic survey of early Neolithic British skulls reveal that life then was no rural idyll. "It's certainly more violent than we'd considered," says Rick Schulting of Queen's University Belfast, UK, who conducted the study with Mick Wysocki at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.
The discovery of craniums from the New Stone Age with signs of human-inflicted trauma is nothing new but this is the first clue to the overall frequency of violence. Schulting and Wysocki have so far identified and studied the remains of about 350 skulls, mostly from southern England. The pair found healed depressed fractures in 4 to 5 per cent of the skulls, and unhealed injuries in about 2 per cent - suggesting the person died from their wounds, or at some point in the attack.
Most of the fatal blows were to the left side of the head, which would make sense if two right-handed people were fighting, says Schulting. The injuries were mostly caused by blunt objects, although some of the skulls seem to have been hacked by stone axes and there is some evidence that ears were chopped off. Schulting presented the work at last month's annual conference of the Society for American Archaeology in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Full Text from NewScientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025514.900?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg1902 5514.900
Posted by Robert Karl Stonjek
Day Brown - 12 May 2006 06:03 GMT > *Muggings were rife in New Stone Age* > 11 May 2006 [quoted text clipped - 31 lines] > http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025514.900?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg1902 5514.900 > <http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025514.900?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg1902 5514.900> I'm well into "Constant Battles" by Steven LeBlanc, which also takes to task the idea of the 'noble savage', outlining similar evidence he claims is all over the world at all times. [there is an exception he does not seem to know of] But he also cites the 'parry' injuries to the forearm as proof of assault. LeBlanc says that 25% of the Yanamomo and New Guinea highlanders died of violent assault before the influence of white men put a stop to it... largely thru the introduction of new food technologies that reduced the competition for territory.
Regarding the exception, Steven Pinker reports that forensic exam of skeletons in yeoman farmer graveyards only show 5% of the rate seen in tropical hunting tribes. see "The Blank Slate".
spiznet - 12 May 2006 17:48 GMT > > *Muggings were rife in New Stone Age* > > 11 May 2006 [quoted text clipped - 43 lines] > skeletons in yeoman farmer graveyards only show 5% of the rate seen in > tropical hunting tribes. see "The Blank Slate". In other words, there never was peaceful co-existence until settled crops and farming... hmmm. Interesting. Of course the social benefits of peacefulness during farming culture is extreme! Property, safety, you are waiting around for months while these crops grow, they must have societal calmness.
So peace is the exception and not the rule!
-Spiznet
Day Brown - 13 May 2006 06:03 GMT > In other words, there never was peaceful co-existence until settled > crops and farming... [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > > So peace is the exception and not the rule! Well certainly, like at Little Big horn, there can be a good year, and the warriors of all tribes will gather for a barbi. Then too, you can have a pandemic sweep thru, and it dont matter how brave the warriors are, the best survival rate is among hermits.
European folklore, like Hansel & Gretel, are full of tales of witches or farm families living alone in the woods. And the ice ages must have often crashed the population, which is why so few Neandertals have ever been found, and a big settlement had maybe a few dozen people.
The Mammoth bone Longhouses along the Don were 100 miles apart. That was not convenient enough for warfare either, most especially during the ice age winters.
But in the tropical zones, the populations were higher, and warfare went on almost all the time. I'm about 1/3 thru LeBlanc, "Constant Battles" in which he says warfare was universal and forever. But he has yet to take note of the above- admittedly small and isolated populations.
LeBlanc looks at the chimp warfare and concludes it goes way back in hominid development. but I dont think it was a universal as he claims. The mt Tuva eruption, 75,000 years ago seems to have been responsible for the manifest bottleneck in hominid DNA of only 10,000 *globally*.
With that few people, spread across that much landscape, how you find anyone to war with? In writing of the Yanamamo and New Guinea highland tribes, he crunches the numbers to show how it was profitable. but I can play that game as well, and show when it wasnt.
Besides the mammoth hunters, we have the earliest agrarians at Chatal Hoyuk, Hacilar, and the other Anatolian cities 10,000 years ago. Sass, in "The Subtance of civilization" calculates that when grain growing began, the amount of land needed to support a tribe shrank to just 0.2% of what hunter/gatherers need.
The result was a series (five I know of) of cities of several thousand in an era when the hunter tribes were perhaps a few hundred. No way were warriors going to attack so many defenders concentrated in one place. As was suggested by the website they had up while the Chatal Hoyuk dig was going on. Nobody found any evidence of warfare despite occupation that went on for 1500 years.
The dig also revealed Semite, Caucasoid, and Alpine skulls. The place also had *lots* of sacred shrines, and was a huge draw for religious pilgramages. Then as now, energetic talented people would have seen the new lifestyle, and tired of the domination of alpha male hunters, took up residence in a community run by *women*.
Which makes sense when you look at the lives of primitive tribes. the men regard gardens as 'women's work'. Only now, all of a sudden, that power base produces hundreds of times as much food without having to be out in bad weather hunting.
Another thing that women do, which we see going on now, is that when they have the power, they *control* the birth rate. They after all, are the ones who literally have to bust a.s for the next generation, and dont do it any more than necessary. Thus the Anatolian cities dont show boom and bust population patterns.
That is, until about 6200 BCE, when a younger dryas type of chronic drought set in, and everyone left. Most of them went north and on into Europe where the rain was more reliable. Thus begins the Chalcolithic matriarchies that have fueled so much controversy.
John Wilkins - 13 May 2006 08:00 GMT >> In other words, there never was peaceful co-existence until settled >> crops and farming... [quoted text clipped - 66 lines] > Europe where the rain was more reliable. Thus begins the Chalcolithic > matriarchies that have fueled so much controversy. Can you give some refs for all of this? I find it fascinating...
 Signature John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com "He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."
Larry Caldwell - 13 May 2006 18:51 GMT > > That is, until about 6200 BCE, when a younger dryas type of chronic > > drought set in, and everyone left. Most of them went north and on into > > Europe where the rain was more reliable. Thus begins the Chalcolithic > > matriarchies that have fueled so much controversy.
> Can you give some refs for all of this? I find it fascinating... Keep your grains of salt handy. This is mostly mythology, based on the work of Marija Gimbutas, who was positive that the female fertility objects common in eastern Europe were evidence of a matriarchal culture. She completely ignored the male fertility objects which are just as common as the female objects. The culture was apparently obsessed with sex and fertility, but that is all we know.
The idea of a culture where women ran things and worshipped a goddess has been quite popular among the lunatic fringe of the feminist movement, but there is no evidence that such a culture ever existed. You hear people talking about it as fact because that is what they want to believe.
John Wilkins - 13 May 2006 23:49 GMT >>> That is, until about 6200 BCE, when a younger dryas type of chronic >>> drought set in, and everyone left. Most of them went north and on into [quoted text clipped - 15 lines] > You hear people talking about it as fact because that is what they want > to believe. Thanks. That's why I asked. I hear a lot about these matriarchal societies of the dim past, and particularly the Goddess cults, but never find anything to back it up. I knew of Gimbutas...
 Signature John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com "He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."
Day Brown - 14 May 2006 04:47 GMT >> That is, until about 6200 BCE, when a younger dryas type of chronic >> drought set in, and everyone left. Most of them went north and on into >> Europe where the rain was more reliable. Thus begins the Chalcolithic >> matriarchies that have fueled so much controversy. > > Can you give some refs for all of this? I find it fascinating... I dont defend the lunatic fringe feminists. Let me first mention the unmentionable in Gimbutas's books that go a long ways why *both* the feminists, and her debunkers are wrong.
She shows us *lots* of what she labels "Phallic Wands". But I've seen porn flicks, and I know dildos when I see them. *NOW* if kings were in power, would we be finding dildos all over the place? Hello?
No. Kings have a tool that they dont want having any competition, and to keep it busy, they have harems. And for harems, you need palaces. Go look at the digs. aint no palaces.
Or look at Goodison & Morris, who on the fly leaf of "Ancient Goddesses" note the controversy over the absence of any evidence of warfare in the chalcolithic (matriarchic) digs. So- they choose a virgin tel, and open it up, specifically looking for the general layer of burn rubble such as is always left after a place has been raped, pillaged... and burnt in the globally standard warrior fashion.
All they could find was a *single* housefire that had been ritually burned. They deduce this because of the artifacts just barely buried in the corners of the house.
Now, the Romans called this region "Dacia", and tried to conquer it for hundreds of years, barely holding it for 50. Seems that the Transylvanian witches, (the "raj") would send girls into the camps to f.ck with the Romans. And- somehow, the Dacians always knew when the Romans were coming...
Then too, Dacia was famous for its "fertility rites" at which the men of all the surrounding villages were invited on every moon to come to one of the other villages to get laid. Hmm. Now, consider the problem a warlord has wanting to make a raid. The men react with all the enthusiasm we'd expect if he wanted to go burn down a whorehouse.
So- the Feminists just dont get it; They dont know how to put out like the witches did to get what they want. And if they ever do figure that out, does anyone doubt that they will take over? Hello? And the debunkers dont get it either, they dont even want to *think* about how sex will motivate men rather than their bibles.
FWIW, I have been to a ritual organized by witches which arranged for dudes to get laid by several women over the course of a weekend. If I was not nearly 67, I mite have been offered their services. But then I also saw the effect on a macho dude over the several weeks thereafter, and all of his arrogant aggressive bullschit was... history. all he could think about was the next time they'd have a ritual. And had a warchief wanted to back up there for a raid, he wouldda come back with the chief's head on a stick.
*That* is how matriarchy worked for millennia. It was largely put out of business by Roman roads which delivered men with STDs faster than the witches could cure them or develop an effective treatment. But now, the witches I saw know how to supervise safe sex, so women bring hubbies to get laid, letting the guys express that instinct, but not come home with anything later.
Its perhaps also instructive to consider that the Roman word for 'witch' meant 'poisoner'. Nowadays, we'd call that a biological weapon. Lots of ancient armies were wiped out, not with the sword, but disease. It was the *women* who knew how to use these tools. You dont read about it cause they didnt write about it. They didnt have male egos that wanted to go down in history. They were having too much fun with sex, drugs, and rock & roll.
Lorenzo L. Love - 14 May 2006 17:49 GMT >>> That is, until about 6200 BCE, when a younger dryas type of chronic >>> drought set in, and everyone left. Most of them went north and on into [quoted text clipped - 65 lines] > to go down in history. They were having too much fun with sex, drugs, > and rock & roll. Hey, I've been feeling awfully aggressive lately! Were do I go for the cure?
Lorenzo L. Love http://home.thegrid.net/~lllove
"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: one is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell; the other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on Earth and you should save it for someone you love." Butch Hancock
Day Brown - 15 May 2006 05:52 GMT > Hey, I've been feeling awfully aggressive lately! Were do I go for the > cure? depends on how smart you are. if you are talented, you are able to use that aggression as drive and focus to excel at some endeavor.
If not, then you suffer, as Nietzsche put it, 'The rancor of the powerless', and are a sucker for any demagogue who seems to promise you empowerment by enslaving others; most especially women.
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