From: L' Ermit (lhermit@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Feb 26 2002 - 22:15:52 MST
[url]http://anthro.annualreviews.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/1/573[/url]
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2001. 30:573-596.
[quote]
A BIOARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
Phillip L. Walker
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara,
California 93106; e-mail: walker@sscf.ucsb.edu
KEY WORDS: warfare, archaeology, skeletal trauma, prehistoric homicide
Traumatic injuries in ancient human skeletal remains are a direct source of
evidence for testing theories of warfare and violence that are not subject
to the interpretative difficulties posed by literary creations such as
historical records and ethnographic reports. Bioarchaeological research
shows that throughout the history of our species, interpersonal violence,
especially among men, has been prevalent. Cannibalism seems to have been
widespread, and mass killings, homicides, and assault injuries are also well
documented in both the Old and New Worlds. No form of social organization,
mode of production, or environmental setting appears to have remained free
from interpersonal violence for long.
[/quote]
[hr]
[url]http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/286/5437/128[/url]
Neanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy, Ardèche, France
Alban Defleur, 12* Tim White, 2 Patricia Valensi, 3 Ludovic Slimak, 4
Évelyne Crégut-Bonnoure 5
[quote]
The cave site of Moula-Guercy, 80 meters above the modern Rhone River, was
occupied by Neanderthals approximately 100,000 years ago. Excavations since
1991 have yielded rich paleontological, paleobotanical, and archaeological
assemblages, including parts of six Neanderthals. The Neanderthals are
contemporary with stone tools and faunal remains in the same tightly
controlled stratigraphic and spatial contexts. The inference of Neanderthal
cannibalism at Moula-Guercy is based on comparative analysis of hominid and
ungulate bone spatial distributions, modifications by stone tools, and
skeletal part representations.
1 UMR 6569 du CNRS, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie, Faculté de Médecine,
Secteur Nord, Boulevard Pierre Dramart, 13916 Marseille Cedex 20, France.
2 Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Studies, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
and Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley,
CA 94720, USA.
3 Laboratoire de Préhistoire du Lazaret, 33 bis Boulevard Franck Pilatte,
06300 Nice, France.
4 UMR 6636 du CNRS, 5 Rue du Chateau de l'Horloge, Boite Postale 647, 13094
Aix-en-Provence Cedex 2, Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I, France.
5 Museé Requien, Rue Joseph Vernet, 84000, Avignon, France.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
defleur@voltaire.timone.univ-mrs.fr
[/quote]
Hermit notes: I can provide off-list access to the full article on request.
[hr]
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/286/5437/18b
PALEOANTHROPOLOGY:
Neanderthals Were Cannibals, Bones Show
Elizabeth Culotta
Neanderthals expertly butchered the game they killed, slicing meat and
tendons from bone with stone tools and bashing open long bones to get at the
fatty marrow inside. Now, on page 128, a French and American team reports
that 100,000-year-old Neanderthals at the French cave of Moula-Guercy
performed precisely the same kinds of butchery on some of their own kind.
Tantalizing hints of cannibalism have been spotted at other Neanderthal
sites for decades, but this is far and away the best documented case, say
other researchers.
[/quote]
Hermit notes: I can provide off-list access to the full article on request.
[hr]
[url=http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/10_2_99/fob4.htm]Cave finds revive
Neandertal cannibalism [/url]
By B. Bower
[quote]
The butchered skeletal remains of six individuals, unearthed at a
100,000-to-120,000-year-old cave site in southeastern France, offer
compelling evidence of Neandertal cannibalism, according to a new report.
Neandertal and animal bones found in Moula-Guercy Cave, which overlooks the
Rhone River, exhibit identical signs of meat and marrow removal, says a team
headed by anthropologist Alban Defleur of the CNRS Anthropology Laboratory
in Marseille, France.
Neandertals were the only members of the human evolutionary family known to
have inhabited southwestern Europe at the time. Defleur and his coworkers
thus propose that Neandertals killed and ate their own at Moula-Guercy—for
as yet undetermined reasons.
"This is conclusive evidence that at least some Neandertals practiced
cannibalism," holds anthropologist Tim White of the University of
California, Berkeley, a member of Defleur's group. "Moula-Guercy was a
temporary occupation, and we can't say what the reasons were for cannibalism
occurring there."
Reports of prehistoric cannibalism go back more than a century. Researchers
have identified butchery marks on human bones at a 6,000-year-old French
cave and at U.S. Southwest Anasazi Indian sites that are 800 to 1,600 years
old (SN: 1/2/93, p. 12).
Controversy still surrounds claims that ancient groups pursued anything
other than starvation-induced cannibalism in emergencies.
Defleur began excavating Moula-Guercy in 1991. After finding Neandertal
bones with stone-tool incisions suggestive of cannibalism, he invited White
to help analyze the remains.
Their report, published in the Oct. 1 Science, focuses on 78 pieces of bone
from at least six smashed Neandertal skeletons found among animal bones and
stone tools. The Neandertal remains come from two adults, two adolescents,
and two children.
The braincases had been broken into fragments and the limb bones shattered.
The tongue of one child had been cut out. Microscopic scrutiny of incisions
on the bones indicates that the skeletons were cut apart to obtain meat, the
researchers contend.
A reassembled leg bone also displayed dents made by a stone hammer, fracture
marks produced when the bone was smashed, and striations from a stone anvil
against which it was held. Bones of red deer and other animals that lay
among the Neandertal remains showed the same types of marks.
Neandertals often faced food shortages in the ice age environments of
western Europe, suggesting that they turned to cannibalism at Moula-Guercy
and elsewhere to stave off starvation, remarks anthropologist Erik Trinkaus
of Washington University in St. Louis.
White suspects that cannibalism had deeper meaning for Neandertals and other
prehistoric groups. He plans to compare evidence at Moula-Guercy with that
from other ancient cannibalism sites—including a cave containing
800,000-year-old butchered Homo bones, which Spanish scientists will soon
describe in a scientific journal.
[/quote]
[hr]
You may also find [url]http://www.muohio.edu/~erlichrd/dart.html[/url]
enlightening
In addition:
Athena Review has, as part of its ongoing series on "H. heidelbergensis in
Iberia" published on this topic:
Early hominid fragments at Gran Dolina in Atapuerca Spain, 800,000 BP (AR
1,1)
Evidence of Cannibalism at pre-Acheulan sites in Spain, 780,000 BP (AR 1,1)
Jane Goodall has described striking chimpanzee behaviors like hunting,
warfare, infanticide, cannibalism, and extensive tool use in numerous
publications.
[url]http://wwwnlds.physik.tu-berlin.de/~prengel/Lem/ch8.htm[/url]
According to several researchers (like Dart, for example [Hermit: Cited
supra]), we are "hereditarily handicapped", or rather characterized by an
asymmetry in our tendency to "good" or "bad" by the fact that our ancestors
have practiced cannibalism for three fourths of a million years, not in the
face of death from starvation (as "normal" predators do), but as a rule.
This has been known for a rather long time, but currently this cannibalism
is regarded as a creative factor of anthropogenesis, for which the
explanation is that herbivorism does not maximize "reason", since bananas do
not force their gatherers to the development of tactics entailing the
instantaneous assessment of a situation, nor the development of strategies
for approach, fight and pursuit. Therefore the anthropoids sort of stopped
in their development, whereas the primeval man made the fastest progress
because he hunted for those who equaled his own astuteness. Owing to this it
came to a most radical sifting out of the "not very bright", because the
mentally limited herbivore has to fast from time to time in the worst case,
whereas the not sufficiently clever hunter of his own kind has to die soon.
Hence the "cannibalistic invention" had to be an accelerator of mental
progress, in the sense that struggle within the species ensures the skill to
survive of only those who possess the most effective mind, a mind that
realizes a universal transfer of life experiences to new situations. By the
way, the australopithecus which we are talking about here was an omnivore;
somehow the osteodontoceratic culture preceded the stone age, because the
first cudgel, which was produced accidentally - by gnawing - was a long
bone, hence his first vessels and battleclubs where sculls and bones, and
the smell of blood accompanied the formation of the first rituals. This does
not imply that we have inherited any "archetypes of a criminal character"
from our ancestors, since no non-instinctive, ready knowledge can be
inherited, which would direct us to certain activities, and so one can only
assume that the human brain and body were formed in a situation of permanent
struggle. Another intriguing thing is the "asymmetry" of the cultural
history, where good intentions quite regularly turned into bad ones, but the
opposite metamorphosis somehow did not take place, and in one of the
religions which rule to the present day, blood still plays an important role
- in the doctrine of transubstantiation. If similar hypotheses do have a
factual background and the depths of our brains were formed under the
influence of the events of those hundreds of thousands of years, then a
certain melioration of the species - in the area of that so called
"asymmetry" - would really be desirable.
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