More than 8,000 years before the rise of Egyptian civilization, HUNTER-GATHERS went on the attack in the Bike Valley.
Skeletons of adults, teens and children excavated in the 1960’s at an ancient cemetery in Sudan known as Jebel Sahaba display injuries incurred in repeated skirmishes, raids or ambushes, say paleoanthropist Isabelle Crevecoeur and her colleagues. The site, which dates to between 13,400 and 18,600 years ago, provides the oldest known evidence of regular, small-scale conflicts among human groups, says Crevecoeur, of the University of Bordeaux in France.
Although people buried at Jebel Sahaba don’t show signs of having fought in a one-time battle, they participated in an early form of sporadic warfare, the researchers conclude May 27 in Scientific Reports.
“Repeated violent episodes were probably triggered by well-recorded environment changes” around the time people were buried at Jebel Sahaba, Crevecoeur says.
It’s hard to precisely estimate the frequency of violent attacks among ancient hunter-gatherers in Africa and elsewhere, says archeologist Mark Allen of Cal Poly Pomona. The new Jebel Sahaba report suggest that competition for limited resources has long sparked lethal raiding among these groups, he says. Allen and his colleagues have found that skeletal evidence of violence among California hunter-gatherers from around 1,530 to 230 years ago peaked during times of resource scarcity.
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