"Pastoral"

About 7500 years ago, aliens from the southeast appeared in Central Europe, inhabited by hunters and collectors. They brought the seeds of cultivated plants with them, drove cattle, began to build houses and cultivate land. Archaeologists will recognize their settlements by specially decorated with clay ceramics, called the linear-Lenth, LLK. LLK culture lasted from 5500 to 4000 BC. e., it is well studied, and the longer the experts explore it, the stronger the confidence that the European peasants of the early Neolithic led their lives by no means pastoral. They wished their neighbor's property and lands and mined the desired by fierce armed raids.

Two mass burials found in the 1980s in Talheim (Germany) and Austria (Austria) in the 1980s, which were absolutely not similar to traditional burials traditional for this culture [1, 2], brought to the idea of ​​the bloodthirstiness of the first farmers. Farmers of the early Neolithic buried their dead in specially allocated areas in single graves. The bodies were carefully laid in a bent position, on the left side, head to the east, sometimes in a different position. Among people who are buried in this way, there are no killed in the battle, but they have received injury or wound and recover from it. Ceramics, shells from shells and stone products, including tips, were placed in the graves. In the burials of some men there are stone tesla, which were used to process wood and as a weapon.

The burial in Talheim (approximately 5000 BC) is a hole that is not put, but the bodies of 34 men, women and children with broken heads are dumped. Obviously, the aggressors completely destroyed the inhabitants of the village and took possession of their property and land.

In the helmet, the remains of 67 killed adults and children were investigated, including one newborn who lay without burial for about six months: their bones are gnawed by animals. There were almost no young women among the dead - obviously they were captured as prey. Researchers analyzed the ratio of stable isotopes of strontium in bone remains. It depends on the food that people ate during their lifetime, and all the victims of the attack turned out to be the same, therefore, all of them are the inhabitants of the same settlement, which, after a robber raid, ceased to exist. There was no one to even bury the dead. The burial is not completely excavated, according to researchers, it can be about 300 people.

No matter how eloquent these cases are, there are only two of them, and some scientists, recognizing the existence of armed clashes between agricultural communities, considered them a rarity. But recently, the researchers had the third mass burial, discovered in 2006 in Schönek-Kiliansteden (Germany) during road works. The burial is a V-shaped pit of about 7.5 m long and a width of 0.3–1.0 m, into which the bodies of killed people are dropped (Fig. 1). The bones are dated 5207–4849 BC. In addition to the remains, in the pit there were shards, pieces of burned clay, animal bones, and fragments of stones. All this, no doubt, garbage, and not the remains of the utensils laid in the grave.

The find was examined by a bio -acceone from the University of Mainz Christian Meyer and his colleagues from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and South Africa [3]. The remains of people are poorly preserved, but the researchers managed to draw some conclusions. Based on the analysis of the structure of the bones, they concluded that in the burial of 13 adults and 13 children, 10 of which are younger than 6 years old, and the youngest is not more than six months, two more from 6 to 8 years old, one young man from 16 to 21 years old. Although he, without a doubt, was considered an adult, the structure of his bones is still teenage. Among adults, young people prevail, only two women more than forty. There were no remains of young women in the burial, obviously, the attackers captured them - the usual practice of wars. They did not find in the grave and adolescents from 9 to 15 years old. Perhaps they were able to escape, but it is possible that they, like women, were captured by the winners.

The bones carry imprints of diseases ordinary for that time: tuberculosis, vitamin C deficiency, fractures of ribs and long bones, well -coaling cranial injury, osteomyelitis. Diseases of teeth and joints are rare. The health of these people was no worse than on average in Central Europe at that time, they all died from the fact that they broke the skulls. Both children and adults hit the left parietal bone, as would occur when facing face to face (Fig. 2). Two bone tips were found in the ground next to the bones, perhaps they plunged into the bodies.

The burial in Kilianstedten has one feature that is not observed in two other mass burials: all dead are interrupted by the legs, and some of the bones of the hands. This is obviously not an accident, people were mutilated before dumping into a hole, possibly so that they could not run. It is possible that they were tortured. But in any case, the interrupted bones testify to the strongest hatred that the attackers experienced for the vanquished. Researchers believe that the settlement, consisting of 18 houses, was completely destroyed.

Since these raids took place in three different places, remote from each other at significant distances, it can be assumed that the extermination of entire communities was a significant factor in the Neolithic life. In addition to three large burials, others are also known, less, in which the broken skulls or the bodies of several killed people are buried. The ancient farmers did not disdain cannibalism. Recently, French and German anthropologists have described the mass burial in Herksheim (Germany), which is about 7000 years old [4]. In several pits, bones were dumped more than 500 people, including children. They look like the remains of animals fried on a spit. The meat was scraped off the bones, their ends were broken off to suck bone marrow. Judging by the streams found in the same pits, the bones have been accumulating there for several decades. According to ethnographic data, cannibalism and various murders are often associated with military operations and victims become defeated.

Anthropologists from the University of Illinois Mark Golitko and Lawrence H. Keeley are committed to armed conflicts from the University of Illinois [5]. In their review under the eloquent name “Swearing the screaming into swords”, the researchers refer to the calculations, according to which 20% of the people of the LLK culture were killed or wounded as a result of an armed attack. Calculations are made before the opening of the burial in Kilianstedten. If you exclude from them data on two other mass burials, the share of the affected by weapons is 6.2%. The farmers of the western part of Germany were especially aggressive, there the level of violence reached 32%. This statistics do not include death from arrows and darts that struck soft tissues without hitting the bones.

Frequent wars are also evidenced by the fortifications that people built around their settlements. The ditches and palisades were found during excavations at the beginning of the twentieth century, but most researchers considered them not powerful for defensive structures and believed that this was an ordinary fence or cattle corral. American anthropologists note that small communities physically could not defend powerful structures, because they were not built. But that they erected, invested significantly more labor and art than in a regular corral. The depth of most ditches was 2.8–1.6 m, that is, it exceeded the average growth of a Neolithic person. In the context of these ditches V- or Y-shaped. They are destroyed faster than ditches with a U-shaped or even bottom, it makes sense to dig them only to protect people from attack. Typically, such ditches surrounded the internal shaft or picket fence. It is also inconvenient in everyday life, but the gate device justifies itself during defense, which limits the number of incoming. Researchers do not exclude that these structures could also be used as cattle, but their main purpose was different. The authors of the review collected data on 84 fortified settlements of the LLK culture. Most of them belong to its initial period and are located in the western part of the territory of farmers, precisely where aggression was felt the most.

According to archaeological data, the earliest defensive structures were built along the external borders of agricultural settlements and were intended, apparently, to protect the mesolithic culture, hunters and collectors from the attack of people from the attack. Many of these structures did not use long: obviously, the threat quickly passed. This could happen if the newspaper farmers exterminated or assimilated the indigenous population, whose density was significantly lower than that of farmers. Hunters and collectors desperately resisted. In many settlements, LLK find mesolithic throwing tips that could use as a weapon. In the area of ​​Esbe in Belgium, the Earth of farmers and representatives of the mesolithic culture shared a nicepa strip 20–25 km wide. The presence of such stripes is a certificate of military conflicts, since people are unlikely to become a distance for no good reason. It is possible that such buffer zones existed in other areas. It is known that some mesolithic settlements ceased to exist just at a time when farmers settled next to the neighborhood.

Later, agricultural settlements began to be at enmity with each other. The reasons for the conflicts could be different: revenge for previous attacks, territorial disputes, the seizure of slaves and women, the conquest of fertile, well -cultivated lands. The main strategy of Neolithic wars was the complete destruction of the opponent’s community. In all three famous cases of mass beating, both the attackers, and the victims were farmers. This is evidenced by the features of skeletons and skulls and the nature of the wounds inflicted by Tesla and axes - tools of culture LLK.

No, the bearers of advanced agricultural technologies did not come to the world in central Europe. They actively crowded the indigenous population and exterminated each other.

1. Wahl J., Trautmann I. The Neolithic Massacre at Talheim: A Pivotal FND In Confict Archaeology. // Sticks, Stones, and Broken Bones / Eds Schulting R, Fibiger L. Oxford: Oxford UNIV. Press, 2012. R. 77–100. DOI: 10.1093/ACPROF: OSOBL/9780199573066.003.0005.

2. Teschler-Nicola M. The Early Neolithic Site Asparn/Schletz (Lower Austria): Anthropological Evidence of Interpersonal Violence. // Sticks, Stones, and Broken Bones / Eds Schulting R, Fibiger L. Oxford: Oxford UNIV. Press, 2012. 101–120. DOI: 10.1093/ACPROF: OSO BL/9780199573066.003.0006.

3. Meyer C., Lohr S., Gronenborn D., Alt Kw the Massacre Mass Grave of Schöneck-Kiliantädten Reveals News Into Collective in Early Neolithic Central Europe // Procedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2015. 112 (36) 11217–11222. DOI: 10.1073/ pnas.150436512.

4. Boulestin B., et al. Mass Cannibalism in the Linear Pottery Culture at Herxheim (Palatinate, Germany) // 2009. 83 (322). R. 968–982, DOI: 10.1017/S0003598x00099282.

5. Golitko M., Keeley LH Beating Plougshares Back Into Swords: Warfare in the Linearbandkermik // Antiquity. 2007. 81 (312). R. 332–342.