
An Ancient, Brutal Massacre May Be the Earliest Evidence of War - behoove
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-brutal-massacre-may-be-earliest-evidence-war-180957884/?no-ist
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Rodeoclash
Reminds me of the Cormac McCarthy quote:

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade
awaiting its ultimate practitioner"

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WJW
That seems a bit pretentious. Surely there can be a species better suited for
war?

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talmand
From the videos I've seen ants and wasps are pretty good at it.

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drewblaisdell
> Even nomadic hunter-gatherers engaged in deliberate mass killings 10,000
> years ago

This may be our earliest evidence of it, but I would bet that even pre-sapien
hominids engaged in deliberate mass killings for tens of thousands of years.
10kYBP is still very recent in the history of our species.

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greenyoda
_" I would bet that even pre-sapien hominids engaged in deliberate mass
killings for tens of thousands of years..."_

I think that's very likely. The article notes that chimpanzees "deliberately
stalk and kill members of other groups". So humans may have inherited these
nasty traits from our primate ancestors ages ago.

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i_feel_great
The Gombe Chimpanzee War:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War)

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i_feel_great
This article has been edited since I first looked at it around 2013. At that
time, there were other explicit descriptions of the violence - chimps killing
and eating infants from the other group, and beatings and rape of females.
This New Scientist article has more details:
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229682.600-only-
kno...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229682.600-only-known-chimp-
war-reveals-how-societies-splinter)

~~~
gus_massa
The newscientific's article has more information. But I think the documented
case of eating chimps children is from another place.

And this is the revision that did that remove the rape part:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gombe_Chimpanzee_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gombe_Chimpanzee_War&type=revision&diff=649596805&oldid=633464265)

The comment is:

> _The war: Second paragraph. Chimps were not raped. No where does this
> reference occur in Goodall 's articles or any other Gombe researcher. The
> source seems to be the Morris reference. I don't know where they got that._

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TurboHaskal
The article is hilarious.

Not only they seem reluctant to coming to terms with our nature, but they had
to clarify that, in a great exercise of our anthropocentrism, that we and only
us humans are also capable of showing acts of altruism. Just in case somebody
gets upset at the idea that violence and warfare might not be social
constructs.

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Claudus
I wonder how accurate the millennium approximations are, it would put this
event about 2000 years before the 1 in 17 males reproducing for every female
at the dawn of agriculture.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/2zkgq5/8000_years_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/2zkgq5/8000_years_ago_17_women_reproduced_for_every_one/)

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arjn
I find it strange the author of the article seems to imply this is a
surprising find. Humans have been slaughtering each other for all sorts of
reasons since the beginning of known history. This merely is another
confirmation.

