BRUTAL LIVES OF STONE AGE BRITONS

So much for The Noble Savage…- or the good old days, or “family values”. It’s believed by the scientific community that the Neanderthals were exterminated by Homo sapiens in genocidal wars…there’s no question that we are an extremely violent species…our first burst on the European scene was accompanied by bloodshed on a truly grand scale!

BRUTAL LIVES OF STONE AGE BRITONS
By Paul Rincon
BBC News
May 11, 2006

A survey of British skulls from the early part of the New Stone Age, or
Neolithic, shows societies then were more violent than was supposed.

Early Neolithic Britons had a one in 20 chance of suffering a skull fracture
at the hands of someone else and a one in 50 chance of dying from their
injuries. [Note that the report doesn’t talk about soft tissue injuries.]

Details were presented at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology
and reported in New Scientist magazine.

Blunt instruments such as clubs were responsible for most of the traumas.

This is not the first time human-induced injuries have been identified in
Neolithic people; but the authors say it is the first study to give some
idea of the overall frequency of such traumas.

Rick Schulting of Queen’s University Belfast and Michael Wysocki from the
University of Central Lancashire looked at 350 skulls spanning the period
from 4000 BC to 3200 BC.

“We generally think of Neolithic people as living peaceful lives — they
were busy looking after cereal crops and rearing livestock,” Mr Wysocki told
the BBC News website.

“But it was a much more violent society.”

Mortal wounds

Nearly 5% of the skulls showed healed depressed fractures. They found
unhealed injuries in 2% of the sample, suggesting these individuals died
from their wounds.

But the true scale of the violence still remains unclear due to the nature
of the evidence, say the authors. In other simple, small-scale societies,
the incidence of death as a result of violence ranges from 8-33%.

“Our data shows 2% lethal cranial injuries, but these are just cranial. The
data for other societies is for all lethal injuries, but ours is limited so
we can’t compare it,” Mr Wysocki said.

“A lot of lethal injuries will be to soft tissues and that needn’t affect
bone.”

The researchers suspect that what they are seeing is violence at the local
and regional level rather than large-scale warfare involving large sections
of the country.

“We could also be seeing raiding parties, cattle rustling, somebody
suspecting the other tribe across the hill is practising witchcraft,” the
University of Central Lancashire forensic anthropologist explained.

“Some of the violence may be domestic; some of it may even be ritualised.”

The majority of the traumas were caused by blunt instruments which may have
included improvised clubs. But a handful of fractures look like they have
been inflicted by flint arrowheads and spearpoints. One of the females in
the sample appears to have been the victim of a brutal attack with a stone
axe.

Another individual with a suspected projectile fracture appears to have had
their ears slashed off — a possible instance of trophy-taking, the
researchers speculate.

The research originally appeared in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric
Society journal.

Source.