Archaeologists discover southern army fought at 'Europe's oldest battle'

[erronis]

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-archaeologists-southern-army-fought-europe.html

Archaeologists analyzed thirteenth century BC bronze and flint arrowheads from the Tollense Valley, north-east Germany, uncovering the earliest evidence for large-scale interregional conflict in Europe. The Tollense Valley in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is well-known as the site of a large conflict dating to c. 1250 BC.

The quantity of human remains found (more than 150 individuals) suggests over 2,000 people were involved, an amount unprecedented for the Nordic Bronze Age. First proposed to be a battlefield in Antiquity in 2011, nowadays the site is often referred to as "Europe's oldest known battlefield," since no other conflict of this scale has been discovered that dates earlier.

However, very little is known about the people who fought and died at Tollense over 3,000 years ago. Who was involved in the battle, and where did they come from? To answer these questions, a team of researchers from several German institutions compared bronze and flint arrowheads found in the valley with over 4,000 contemporary examples from across Europe.

Their results are published in the journal Antiquity.

"The arrowheads are a kind of 'smoking gun,'" says lead author of the research, Leif Inselmann, who collected more than 4,700 arrowheads from Central Europe for his M.A. thesis at Göttingen University. "Just like the murder weapon in a mystery, they give us a clue about the culprit, the fighters of the Tollense Valley battle and where they came from."

The article in the Antiquity journal is fascinating. It's Open Access - yea!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003598X24001406/type/journal_article

[Bayard]

1. "Organized violence"

Seems to be in our genetic code.

[Redleg]

2. I read somewhere that hierarchical structures are intended to control violence of young men

and I believe it. I have read a good deal about early medieval ("dark ages&quot Britain and am always shook by the level of violence in those times. It is chilling.

[Judi Lynn]

4. After getting too many smiling faces when I was trying to post, I discovered quotation marks

next to the right parenthesis is the culprit! After adding the right quotation mark, simply hit the space bar one time before adding the second parenthesis. That'll fix their wagon! (Crafty cackling!)

Your comment was insightful, and it rings true! There was incredible gory, nightmarish, totally traumatizing, and probably rarely survivable violence, and they even had to drag their innocent horses into that hell.

You would think seeing how monstrous it actually was would have discouraged them, wouldn't you?

Not if you're the ones in control of the whole #### show, apparently.

Thank you, Redleg.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Wow! What a discovery. Thank you, erronis.