Despite the fact that in Atapuerca and in many other places bones from hundreds of thousands of years ago have been found with remains of lethal and deliberate contusions (the oldest, from the Sima de los Huesos, is about 430,000 years old), it is impossible to determine the origin of collective and organized violence, what over time and depending on the context we call war. However, as explained by the archaeologist at the CSIC Institute of Sciences Alfredo González Ruibal, who has excavated in sites around half the world, there is no evidence of it until the appearance of modern humans.
“When we think of human evolution, we usually do it in a positive key, in achievements that are being unlocked, as we would say now: bipedalism, language, food production, metallurgy… But each achievement has its dark side It also happens with the cognitive revolution that supposes the appearance of anatomically modern humans: the same intellectual capacities that make Altamira possible -complex communication, a notion of cultural identity and a certain degree of abstraction- make organized collective violence possible”.
Violence that the researcher goes through in great detail in Devastated Earth (Crítica), a journey through the archaeological traces left by human conflicts from the Paleolithic to today that is born from his intention to discover and record why our species has been killing each other since its origins . “Wars have always been more than battles: they are forms of social organization, landscapes that are transformed, rituals, everyday objects and all those people who suffer from them. Archaeologists do not excavate data, but lives torn apart by violence in a common grave or in a devastated town. It’s hard to forget people when what you find is not a document with figures, but their own bones.”
We archaeologists do not excavate data, but lives destroyed by violence in a mass grave or in a devastated town
For this reason, be it in medieval battles such as Aljubarrota, sieges of ancient times such as those of Dura (Syria) and Hímera (Sicily) or in the trenches of the Somme in the First World War, the anxiety, fear and brutality inherent in war they are always the same. “There are forms of excessive violence that seem not to have changed much over time: in the Neolithic, as in the 20th century, we see massacres of non-combatants and savage forms of cruelty. What changes is the way in which it is practiced, the ideas that promote and justify it and the scale of the massacres,” he explains.
To talk about war, there must be a certain duration in the conflict, there must be two or more clearly defined sides, an institutionalization, a warrior identity and weapons of war itself. “In the case of Europe, this takes place around the fourth millennium BC, between the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Metal Age, a period that, not by chance, coincides with the development of social differences and the emergence of great leaders.”
From that time dates one of the largest and best documented mass massacres – today we would say genocide – in history, which led to the end of the culture of the Ceramic Bands, the first Neolithic society in Central Europe. “For a series of generations around 5,000 BC, the populations of what is now Germany and the surrounding territories dedicated themselves to annihilating themselves almost without any brake,” the archaeologist recounts. “Entire villages were razed, women and children were massacred, and even cannibalism was practiced. It’s hard to know what led to the apocalypse, but it was probably a combination of causes, including an ecological crisis: harvests were getting worse and the chances of minimal migration”.
Around 5000 BC, entire villages were razed, women and children were massacred and even cannibalism was practiced.
It is not the only case. Similar collapses have occurred in other societies. At the end of the second millennium BC, the culture of the ancestors of the Pueblo Indians, in the southwestern United States, began to collapse in a context of climate crisis while extreme forms of violence became widespread, with mass murder, torture and cannibalism. “The ends of the historical cycle can give rise to more just and free social formations, but they can also end in a bloodbath, when the social mechanisms that prevented forms of extreme violence disappear. We have seen it in Iraq or Syria in recent times “, says González Ruibal.
Because one of the many clichés that this essay refutes is that violence and tolerance towards it have been progressively decreasing throughout history. Rather it is about cycles. “A widespread idea is that primitive (tribal) peoples practice war more and in a more savage way than civilized (state) peoples. But the truth is that the archaeological evidence of collective violence in state societies is usually more abundant and on a much larger scale”, points out González Ruibal, who adds that there are historical periods “unfairly stigmatized without much justification”, such as the Early Middle Ages.
“A study on skeletons found in excavations showed that the number of deaths from violence at the beginning of the Middle Ages remained more or less the same compared to Roman times and that people’s health improved. And the beginning of modernity witnessed violence of an intensity and scope considerably greater than that of the preceding centuries, with the wars of religion and European expansion”.
Many of our preconceived ideas, the expert maintains, have to do with the fact that we know little about history beyond the West. For example, “we tend to think that humans apply cutting-edge technology in the first instance to the military field. But this is not the case in many cultures. Pre-Columbian societies, for example, knew about metal, but they used it for ornaments and religious ceremonies, not to make weapons,” he says. Also in sub-Saharan Africa, a highly sophisticated iron and steel industry developed at the same time as in Europe, but unlike here it was mainly applied to agriculture: “At the beginning of the Iron Age what we find most are hoes and axes, not weapons” .
These facts make the archaeologist optimistic, despite the harshness of his essay. “Archaeological narratives, like historical ones, inevitably condense time. When it comes to violence, they can make us think that history is nothing more than a succession of massacres and atrocities. A rather depressing image,” he sums up. “But the truth is that, if this were the case, archaeologists would find many more mass graves and levels of destruction than we found. And the truth is that, for every settlement destroyed in a war, we found 10 that were abandoned peacefully “.
Actually, we should ask ourselves how we have managed to live without slaughtering ourselves for so long
“We haven’t been killing each other nonstop, and when we have, it hasn’t always been without restraint. Societies have routinely found ways to limit conflict, and this is something we forget about, perhaps because avoiding genocide is so difficult. less shocking than the genocide itself. And the century in which the people of the Banda Ceramics massacred themselves draws our attention more than the 500 or 600 years in which they lived peacefully”, reflects the author. “Focusing only on excess is a mistake. We should ask ourselves why at certain moments and in an exceptional way we have massacred ourselves without limit, but also how we have managed to live without massacring ourselves for so long. History and archeology offer some answers to those questions “.
Is it possible, then, the utopia of reaching a society that rejects violence, as was thought in 18th century Europe? González Ruibal thinks so. “During the last 5,000 years the intensity of violence has varied greatly by region. Conflict is inherent to the human being, but war, especially the total war of the contemporary age, is not. In the same way that war had a beginning , it is possible that it has an end. Could we reach a total rejection of collective violence as a species? It is possible that yes, at least on a larger scale. Let us think that today the ruler of no country boasts of exterminating civilians or looting others countries (even if they do), but quite the opposite. That would be unthinkable 2,000 years ago,” he reasons.
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