War in Europe Began Way Before We Thought, Ancient Discovery Reveals

Large-scale warfare in Europe may have occurred far earlier than previously thought, human bones from a prehistoric mass burial site have revealed.

For a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of researchers re-analyzed the skeletal remains of more than 300 individuals originally excavated from the San Juan ante Portam Latinam (SJAPL) rock shelter in northern Spain.

The human remains date back to around 5,000 years ago during what is known as the Neolothic period. In Europe, this period lasted roughly between 9,000 and 4,000 years ago although there is some notable variability between regions.

The latest study has shown that many of the individuals excavated from the SJAPL site may have been casualties of the earliest period of warfare in Europe.

Previously, the earliest known large-scale conflict in Europe was thought to have occurred more than a millennium later during the Bronze Age, which lasted from approximately 4,000 to 2,800 years ago in this region.

"The earliest known large-scale conflict [prior to this study] was probably the Bronze Age battle of Tollense in Germany, which, despite seeming to be a single event, may have involved around 4,000 combatants," Teresa Fernández-Crespo, an author of the study affiliated with the University of Valladolid, Spain, Aix-Marseille University, France, and the University of Oxford, U.K., told Newsweek.

"The study is particularly important for providing evidence of larger-scale, more organized and longer-lasting conflict than previously suspected for the Neolithic, to an extent that had not been observed until 1,000 years later during the Bronze Age when there are some well-known battlefields and depictions of warriors."

Small- and medium-scale collective violence in the form of confrontations between neighboring groups may be as old as humankind itself. But warfare—i.e. larger-scale, organized violence between groups—seems to be associated with certain conditions that generally accompanied the shift from hunting and gathering to societies based on farming.

These conditions included people increasingly settling in one place and higher population densities, as well as greater concentrations of resources and power. Nevertheless, conflict during the European Neolithic remains poorly understood.

Previous research has suggested that conflicts during this period consisted of short raids, lasting no more than a few days and involving small groups of up to 20-30 individuals. As a result, researchers assumed that Neolithic societies lacked the logistical capabilities to support larger-scale conflicts. But the results of the latest study have challenged this view.

"In the context of the study, by large-scale warfare we mean a conflict that involved many individuals, was organized, was sustained or persisted in time—at least for months—and had wider impacts in the communities living in the region where it occurred," Fernández-Crespo said.

To investigate conflict in the Neolithic, the authors of the latest study re-analyzed remains found at the SJAPL rock shelter, which was discovered accidentally in 1985 when a bulldozer was widening a track and uncovered human remains.

Subsequent rescue excavations identified the remains of at least 338 individuals that have been dated to between roughly 5,400 and 5,000 years ago. These people were buried together in a haphazard way, with the bodies found interwoven with each other—some in unusual positions. The remains were found together with 52 flint arrowheads, 64 blades, two polished stone axes, and other artifacts.

Many of the remains—which include both complete and incomplete skeletons—displayed evidence of arrowhead injuries, while researchers also found a single example of unhealed trauma to the skull, or cranium.

Original interpretations of the mass burial site suggested that the individuals found there were slaughtered in a massacre—i.e. the indiscriminate killing of helpless or unresisting people. But subsequent studies have challenged previous interpretations—based in part on the fact that the remains are primarily those of adolescent and adult males—suggesting that many of them died in one or more violent conflicts.

The re-examination of the SJAPL remains in the latest study was aimed at identifying new evidence of violence on the bones. This work was undertaken, in part, because previously documented evidence at the site—i.e. the prevalence of arrowhead injuries and a single unhealed cranial trauma—was unusual compared to other burial sites of Neolithic Europe associated with massacres where unhealed cranial traumas tend to predominate.

The authors found that the rate of skeletal injuries among the remains was substantially higher than expected for the time. They also found that males were disproportionately affected by injuries, while also observing a relatively high rate of healed injuries overall.

These findings led the authors to conclude that the individuals at the burial site may have been the casualties of conflict, with the relatively high rate of healed injuries indicating that this conflict persisted over the course of several months.

The bones provided evidence of re-occurring and varied violent events—for example, some individuals showed both healed and unhealed injuries suggesting repeated exposure to violence, while evidence of arrowhead injuries and cranial traumas indicate that they were involved in different types of combat, Fernández-Crespo said. The remains also suggest that these people experienced social unrest and difficult life conditions, showing signs of malnourishment, anemia and other conditions.

The factors that drove this proposed conflict are unclear, but the authors propose several potential causes.

"We think we are seeing the result of a regional inter-group conflict. We suggest that resource competition and social complexity could have been a source of tension, potentially escalating into lethal violence," Fernández-Crespo said.

"We conclude that warfare in the Neolithic was much more sophisticated, organized and with the potential to affect the general population than previously thought, which means that there was necessarily a greater socio-economic hierarchy than assumed."