Did humans sow seeds of war before farming?

The scene was a lagoon on the shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The time about 10,000 years ago. One group of hunter-gatherers attacked and slaughtered another, leaving the dead with crushed skulls, embedded arrow or spear points, and other devastating wounds.

 

The dead, said the scientists who reported the discovery on Wednesday in the journal Nature, seem to have been scattered in no apparent order, and eventually covered and preserved by sediments from the lake. Of 12 relatively complete skeletons, 10 showed unmistakable signs of violent death, the scientists said. Partial remains of at least 15 other people were found at the site. The bones tell a tale of ferocity. One man was hit twice in the head by arrows or small spears and in the knee by a club.

 

A woman, pregnant with a 6 to 9-month-old fetus, was killed by a blow to the head, the fetal skeleton preserved in her abdomen. The position of her hands and feet suggest she may have been tied up before she was killed.

 

Violence has always been part of human behaviour, but the origins of war are hotly debated. Some experts see it as deeply rooted in evolution, pointing to violent confrontations among groups of chimpanzees. Others emphasise the influence of complex and hierarchical human societies, and agricultural surpluses to be raided.

No one is suggesting that one discovery, at a place called Nataruk, will settle this argument, which may be the first instance of a massacre in a foraging society. A previous discovery in Sudan found burials of victims of intergroup violence, but that society may have been more settled. Marta Mirazon Lahr and Robert A Foley, of Cambridge University and the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, concluded that the find represented warfare among prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

 

Luke A Glowacki, a postdoctoral researcher in human evolutionary biology, said this find "shows warfare occurred before the invention of agriculture." Douglas P Fry, a professor, said nomadic foragers were unlikely to practice war, which tends to arise in more complex societies, and that these foragers may have already been in transition to a more settled life.

The first person to spot the bones, some of which were lying on the surface, was Pedro Ebeya, one of the fossil hunters who works with the Turkana Basin Institute. Lahr said the scars showed no signs of having healed, which means that they had occurred at the time of death. And the position of the bodies showed no effort at burial. The stone remnants were obsidian, which is rare in that area, "suggesting the attackers were coming from somewhere else."

The authors of the report say the attack could have been a raid for resources, or it could be an example of organised violence. NYT NEWS SERVICE