2023-11-02 18:00:46
Documented with human remains
Updated Thursday, November 2, 2023 – 17:00
5,000 years ago, numerous men and young people died or were wounded during a war that would supersede the Battle of Tollense in 1250 BC (in modern-day Germany) as the oldest war on the continent.
A skull of one of the victims of the war conflict TERESA FERNNDEZ CRESPO
The investigation of ancient sites and cemeteries are a source of first-hand information for historians. By examining the skeletons of buried people with current techniques, not only can we find out aspects of their culture, their diet and their health, but we can also establish when armed conflicts or wars occurred.
One of these studies has just revealed that the oldest large-scale battle from which there are human remains took place in the territory that is now Spain, specifically in Rioja Alavesa (lava province). A new analysis carried out on 338 individuals about 5,000 years old of antiquity found in the site of San Juan before Portam Latinam (Laguardia), has revealed that many of them could have been victims of the first war conflict in the territory that is currently Europe that has been documented with human remains, advancing in a millennium to the previous known conflict.
The investigation, published this Thursday in the magazine Scientific Reports and led by Teresa Fernández Crespo, researcher at the University of Valladolid, indicates that both the number of people injured “and the disproportionately high percentage” of men affected They suggest that the injuries were the result of a period of conflict, which they believe lasted at least several months.
As Teresa Fernndez Crespo explains to this newspaper, until now “The oldest large-scale conflict in Europe was considered to be the Battle of Tollense in present-day Germany,” which is estimated to have taken place between 1250-1200 BC, during the Bronze Age (approximately between 4,000 and 2,800 years ago).
Thanks to archaeological studies we know that In the current Rioja Alavesa, agricultural and livestock populations settled 5,000 years ago, structured in large groups with a certain social complexity.l. As the authors of this study review, “those settlers left many funerary evidences, sheltered in natural caves such as in San Juan, or in megalithic monuments.”
However, there is not much information about the war conflicts during the European Neolithic period (whose chronology extends approximately between 9,000 and 4,000 years ago). Previous research suggested that these clashes consisted mainly of short raids lasting a few days and involving small groups of up to 20 to 30 people. Primitive societies were therefore assumed to lack the logistical capabilities necessary to resist during longer and larger-scale conflicts.
But the site of San Juan before Portam Latinam (SJAPL) demonstrates that conflicts of greater magnitude and duration took place earlier than was believed: “The site was discovered in 1985 and was excavated in the early 90s, before most of the evidence of prehistoric violence that we currently know in Europe was published, in which cranial trauma predominates,” Fernández Crespo details through an email.
A regional conflict
“At SJAPL, on the other hand, it was striking that, despite having multiple evidence of arrowhead wounds (direct and indirect), only one unhealed head trauma had been documented. Therefore, the collection was re-studied to value this uniqueness. And “The evidence suggests that they are the oldest war conflicts on the continent,” The researcher explains that she believes that it was a regional conflict, since human remains with arrowhead wounds have been found in other sites within a radius of ten kilometers.
The deposit of St. John before Portam LatinamJ.I. VEGAS
Although violence has been documented since the origins of human beings, such a large number of individuals involved in violence had not been documented in Neolithic Europe, according to Fernández Crespo, who considers that the number of people involved, mostly men, and a prolonged duration that this conflict must have had represents “a quantitative and qualitative leap when it comes to exercising a type of intergroup violence”.
Specifically, this team, which includes researchers from the universities of Cantabria, the Basque Country, Aix-Marseille (France) and Oxford (United Kingdom), examined the bone remains of 338 people for evidence of healed and unhealed lesions. All the remains came from a single mass burial site in a shallow cave in the Rioja Alavesa region, radiocarbon dated to between 5,400 and 5,000 years ago.
52 flint arrowheads were also found at the site. Previous research found that 36 of them had damage associated with hitting a target. The authors determined that 23.1% of the individuals had skeletal injuries, and 10.1% had unhealed injuries, a percentage substantially higher than the estimated injury rates for that time (7-17% and 2-5 %, respectively).
They also found out that 74.1% of unhealed lesions and 70% of the healed wounds had been suffered by adolescent or adult mena rate significantly higher than in women, and a difference not observed in other European Neolithic mass mortality sites.
That relatively high rate of healed wounds suggests, according to scientists, that the conflict continued for several months. The reasons that triggered it are not clear, But among the causes being considered is the possible tension between different cultural groups in the region during the late Neolithic.
As the researcher from the University of Valladolid explains, the analysis of the skeletons “also suggests poor living and health conditions, which we interpret as collateral damage of the conflict in the general population.”
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