Ancient cemetery tells a tale of constant, low-level warfare

[Spartan]

When archaeologists in the 1960s unearthed a 13,400-year-old cemetery at Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, it looked like they’d stumbled across the aftermath of a large-scale battle fought during the Pleistocene. At least half the people buried at the site, which straddles the banks of the Upper Nile, bore the marks of violence: broken skulls, arrow and spear tracks gouged in bones, and stone projectiles still embedded in their bodies.

The site now lies at the bottom of the human-made Lake Nasser, created by the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. But the remains now reside in the British Museum’s collection (for better or worse), and anthropologists Isabelle Crevecoeur of the University of Bordeaux and Daniel Antoine of the British Museum recently re-examined the skeletons. With more modern microscope technology, the anthropologists noticed some skeletal trauma that the original archaeologists had missed. It turned out that about two thirds of the population of the ancient cemetery had bones damaged by either blunt-force trauma or—most often—by projectiles like spears and arrows. That included three out of four adults and roughly half the children.

Since the 1960s, archaeologists have thought of Jebel Sahaba as the earliest example of large-scale warfare between groups of people. But despite all the evidence of violence, the bones of the 13,000-year-old dead don’t actually seem to tell the story of a pitched battle with massive casualties. Instead, it looks like people along the Upper Nile Valley at the end of the Pleistocene lived with the constant threat of smaller-scale fighting, which affected men, women, and children alike. If you’re a gamer, think of it as living in a PvP zone in the midst of an environmental crisis.

Broken bones and embedded arrowheads

The people who lived on the floodplain of the Upper Nile as the last Ice Age drew to a close left few traces behind, but it’s enough to tell us that they made their living by hunting, fishing, and gathering. And archaeologists who study the area have noticed that each small group seemed to have its own unique style of tools and weapons, “believed to represent a cultural tradition that reflects group identity.” At least some of those groups had apparently started to spend more time in one location, because they spent centuries burying their dead in large graveyards like Jebel Sahaba.

Those trademark sets of stone tool technology are actually the first clue that life around Jebel Sahaba was marked by fighting between rival groups. The stone tools and flakes archaeologists found scattered on the surface of the site weren’t the same style as the projectile points they found in the graves, embedded in bones or lying in spaces once filled by soft tissue. And while artifacts left behind on the surface included a mix of weapons and everyday tools, the graves contained only projectile points and fragments thereof—and many of them had been broken or cracked by the force of their impact with human bodies.

On the other hand, the occupants of Jebel Sahaba aren’t what you’d expect from a battlefield cemetery. Combat tends to involve young men more than any other group, so a cemetery containing the dead from a single battle should contain more young men and fewer children, elderly people, and women. But at Jebel Sahaba, the demographics look like a cross-section of a hunter-gatherer community, and no one seems to have been spared the trauma of violence. Women’s skeletons have broken bones and projectile wounds just as often as men’s skeletons, and at least half the children buried at Jebel Sahaba also show signs of having been shot or bludgeoned.

So what happened here?

Climate change and conflict

Around 14,000 years ago, Lake Victoria, in modern Tanzania and Uganda, overflowed and sent the White Nile—one of two rivers that merge to form the Nile—flowing northward across northeast Africa. That’s when the Nile’s trademark pattern of seasonal flooding started in earnest. At the same time, however, conditions in the Nile Valley turned hyper-arid. Facing long term drought punctuated by severe floods, people who made their living off the land probably found themselves scrambling to find scarce resources amid a suddenly harsh and unpredictable environment.

"Pressure in terms of access to resources is one of the main reasons for conflict in the past and the present," Crevecoeur told Ars in an email.

At the same time, different groups of people living in the region clearly had their own strong sense of identity; that’s the conclusion archaeologists draw based on the different styles of stone tool tech each group developed. It also seems, based on large cemeteries like Jebel Sahaba, that at least some of these groups also had a sense of territory, which may have seemed more vital as the environment changed around them. With all of those ingredients in place, conflict over space and resources seems, in hindsight, inevitable.

Then again, it’s important to remember how much the archaeological evidence can’t tell us about people’s motivations, beliefs, and feelings. "Cultural/behavioral reasons that are inaccessible to us may have been stronger motives," Crevecoeur told Ars. "What is certain is that violent acts are recorded [for] hundreds of thousands of years, but their motives are probably as complex and varied as we can imagine."

 

 

A lifetime of violence

When we think of warfare today, we picture large, highly-organized armed forces facing each other in battle. But “warfare” turns out to be a pretty broad concept with room for a lot of variation on the general theme of “kill the other guys and take their stuff.” Between some groups, warfare may take the form of raids, ambush attacks, and trophy-gathering, or it may involve pitched battles between groups of fighters.

At Jebel Sahaba, archaeologists originally thought the sheer scale of violence preserved in the bones of the dead pointed toward a large-scale battle. But Crevecoeur and Antoine suggest that Pleistocene warfare along the Nile Valley probably looked more like a constant flow of small-scale encounters.

Crevecoeur and Antoine noticed that people buried at Jebel Sahaba took spears and arrows to the back as often as the front. That’s the kind of pattern you’d expect from raids and ambushes, not from set-piece battles with groups of opposing warriors facing off against each other directly. And several of the adults had old wounds which had long since healed, as well as injuries suffered around the time they died; anthropologists can recognize an injury received around the time of death because the bone won’t have had time to begin healing and remodeling.

In other words, as Crevecoeur and Antoine wrote, “Some had experienced multiple episodes of interpersonal violence during their life.”

One middle-aged man, for instance, had a puncture wound from a projectile point on his left shoulder blade and a v-shaped furrow along his upper arm where another projectile had skimmed the surface of the bone. Those injuries had no time to heal before the man died, but a bony bulge in his right femur revealed an older wound which had long since healed—trapping three chips of stone inside the remodeling bone. It’s hard not to wonder how much pain the old injury must still have caused him.

Archaeologists found two more broken bits of stone projectiles embedded in the man’s spine and pelvis—and a total of 15 lying in his grave as if they’d been stuck in his body before the soft tissue decomposed, leaving only bones and stones behind. That’s a common theme at Jebel Sahaba; several other skeletons had projectile points lying in the space that would once have been occupied by the soft, perishable parts of their bodies, along with a few still lodged in their bones.

Enlarge / Projectile impact mark with a stone flake still embedded in the bone, 13,000 years later.

Crevecoeur and Antoine 2021

No one escaped the fighting

That middle-aged man was just one of several people at Jebel Sahaba who had lived through a lifetime of violence. In total, 38 of the 61 people buried in the cemetery had wounds from either projectile hits or close combat—and that’s just what was visible on their bones. Soft tissue injuries that didn’t break or cut into a bone are invisible to archaeologists. About a quarter of those 38 people had old, healed wounds as well as fresh ones.

The recurring raids or ambushes left no part of the community untouched. Women had about the same number of injuries as men, and they were just as likely to have been shot or stabbed while facing their opponent.

One woman, who was just over 30 years old when she died, had a projectile point lodged in her fourth rib, and another was embedded in her hip. Damage to the nearby bone hints that someone might have tried removing the point just before she died. "It is difficult to say if it was attempts by the victim or done by the attackers while the victim was down," Crevecoeur told Ars. "The force needed to remove it from behind for the victim is hardly accessible, but must have been difficult."

Two parallel scrapes along the shaft of her femur (thigh bone) suggest that a composite arrow (one with multiple points) cut deeply along her leg as she was fleeing her attacker. 20 more chips and points of stone lay in the space her body would once have filled. It was a violent end to what had clearly been a harsh life; her left collarbone and right forearm both had healed, twisted breaks as if she’d taken a bad fall at some point in her early life.

Crevecoeur and Antoine noticed only subtle differences between the sexes; men were slightly more likely to have projectile points embedded in their bones, and women were slightly more likely to have defensive fractures on their forearms.

"It may relate to instinctive reaction in close combat position," Crevecoeur told Ars. "Overall, Jebel Sahaba rather attest of balanced roles or non-specific targets in relation to the sex, if there were any."

Pleistocene arms race

Violence was clearly a fact of life in the Pleistocene Nile, and people apparently got very, very good at it.

Most of the injuries evident on the Jebel Sahaba skeletons came from projectiles, ranging from light arrows to heavy spears. It’s easy to underrate how sophisticated and deadly these stone-tipped weapons really were. Based on the damage to the bones, combined with the points and chips mingled with the bodies, most of these projectiles involved a carefully-shaped stone point at the end of a wooden shaft, with sharp pieces of stone sticking out from the sides of the shaft for added damage.

“One of the main lethal properties sought was to slash and cause blood loss,” Crevecoeur and Antoine note, adding, “The fact that many were found inside the volume of the skeleton also indicates their efficiency at penetrating the body.