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In the previous segment we discussed the

relgious and spiritual world of our
ancestors.
In this segment, we will try to say
something about politics
and warfare tens of thou, tens of
thousands of years ago.
Again, we cannot say as much as we would
like, because there
is eh, little film evidence eh, to support
eh, eh, our theories.
As we discussed at the beginning of this
lesson, scholars cannot even agree on the
most basic stuff such as,
whether people had private property,
whether
they had nuclear families and monogamous
relationships.
But, from time to time, archaeologists do
come across some rich finding
that can shed some more light on the world
of the stone age.
One of the most remarkable findings
of the last few decades was made at
Sungil.
It's a place in Russia.
There, Russian archaeologists have
uncovered a 30,000 year
old burial site belonging to a culture to
society of mammoth hunters.
A society which subsisted and mainly by
hunting
mammoth and other large animals in the
Arctic.
In one grave in this burial site, they
discovered
the skeleton of a 50 year old man which
was covered in the grave with strings of
ivory beads.
Beads made from the ivory of mammoth, this
kind of very big elephant.
Altogether, the grave contained about
3,000 such ivory beads.
On the head of the dead men, there was a
hat decorated with the
teeth of fox.
On his hand he wore 25 ivory bracelets.
This is also something that they found in
the grave.
Other graves from the same site contained
also skeletons of
people but with far fewer decorations and
far fewer grave goods.
So, scholars deduced the Sungir mammoth
hunters probably lived in a hierarchical
society with the big chief, and that the
dead man was probably the leader, not only
of one band, but of an entire tribe
comprising several different bands.

Because it is unlikely that a few dozen

members of
a single band could've produced so many
grave goods by themselves.
Archaeologists then discovered
an even more interesting tomb at this
place at Sungir.
The second, then the other tombs they
found later on, contained
two skeletons buried head to head one, one
against the other.
One skeleton belonged to a boy the, of, of
the age of around 12 or 13.
And the other skeleton belonged to a girl
of about
nine or ten years old.
And the girl apparently suffered from
severe, some,
some kind of severe deformity in their
hip.
And maybe with difficulty walking.
The boy was covered with about 5,000 ivory
beads of the same kind like as the chief.
And the boy wore on his head a hat.
We didn't find the hat, but we found
the decoration of the hat.
It was, again, teeth of foxes,
about dozens of teeth of foxes.
And the boy also
was, was wearing, when they buried him, a
belt which was studded
with 250 teeth of foxes.
At least
60 foxes had to have their teeth pulled
out in order to get so many
teeth of foxes for the belt of the boy.
The girl was covered
with equally amazing and rich offerings.
She was covered with about
5250 ivory beads and all kinds of other
jewelry and and interesting stuff.
Both children were
also surrounded by ivory statues and by
other kinds of
eh, delicate and interesting objects.
Now, it took a skilled
craftsman or craftswoman probably about 45
minutes to prepare
each one of the ivor, of the thousands of
ivory beads that covered the two children.
Fashioning the 10,000 ivory beads that
cover the
two children, and I don't, without
counting all the
other objects, required about 7,500 hours
of
delicate work of a very experienced
craftsman.
This adds up to about three years of
labor by an experienced artisan just for

the ivory
beads, without all the other fox teeth and
then the statues and then, then the other
things.
It is extremely unlikely that at
a such a young age, the children of Sungir
had proved themselves as
big chiefs or powerful hunters, and this
is why they got all this respect.
Only cultural beliefs can explain why they
received such an extravagant burial.
One eh, one option, one theory is that the
children owed their rank to their parents.
Perhaps these were the children of the
chief, of the leader, in
a culture that believed in family charisma
and in strict rules of succession.
So even though the children themselves did
not accomplish anything special during
their life they were still buried with in
a magnificent way, with huge investment.
According to a second belief, a second
theory, the children
had been identified at birth as the
reincarnation
of some long dead spirit.
And this is why they were given so much
respect.
A third theory of that was developed by
other scholars argues that the children
were buried in such a magnificent way
not because of the way of the status they
had while
alive but because of the way that they
died.
These scholars argue that the children
were ritually
sacrificed eh, perhaps as part of the
burial
rites of the leader and then were buried
with all the jewelry and all the
magnificent things.
And we have examples of such things
of people, ordinary people being
sacrificed during
the funeral of a big chief, and then
buried in huge magnificence.
So it might have happened also 30,000
years ago.
We don't know for sure what is the correct
answer, but whatever it is,
the children of Sungir are among the best
pieces of evidence we have.
That 30,000 years ago Sapiens could invent
social political codes
that went far beyond the dictate of our
DNA and
the behavioral patterns of other humans
and other animals species.
There is nothing like these burial of the

children of Sungir, among Neanderthals or

chimpanzees and elephants.
The burial at Sungir is also a very clear
indication
that at least in some bands there were
hierarchy's and
the world's social inequality, a lot of
social inequality already 30,000
years ago.
Eh, what now about warfare?
Was warfare also an ancient institution
among
Sapiens or is it a relatively new
phenomenon?
Did ancient forager bands like the Sungir
people, did they fight their neighbors or
not?
As usual, nobody knows for sure.
There are different schools of thoughts
and, and many theories.
Some scholars imagine that ancient forager
societies were kind of
peaceful paradise and they argue that war
and violence between
people on a large scale began only with
agricultural revolution.
When people started
to accumulate private property and houses
and fields and so forth.
Before there was agriculture and there
were no villages and
cities and granaries and livestock, there
was nothing to fight about.
So, there were no wars before, before
agriculture.
This is one, eh, eh, theory.
Other scholars maintain that the world of
the ancient foragers was actually
exceptionally cruel and violent, and that
warfare and
large scale violence is not the result of
agriculture.
Both schools of thought, those who think
that the
ancient foragers were very peaceful and
those who think
the ancient foragers had a lot of wars and
conflict, they have very little evidence
to support their arguments.
All they have to go by, or we have to go
by when we try
to understand this question are some
meager archeological
remains and anthropological observations
of present day foragers.
Some scholars imagine the ancient
proto-societies as a kind of peaceful
paradises, and argue that war and violence
begin only
with the agricultural revolution, when

people started to accumulate private

property.
Before there was agriculture, and
villages, and
cities, and granaries, and livestock, and
fields,
and all these things, there was, there was
simply nothing much to fight about.
So, people like the Sungir people, they
had little reason
to get involved in deadly conflict with
their neighbors or
within themselves.
Eh, so this is one, eh, one eh, way of
thinking of it.
Other scholars maintain that violence,
large scale violence began,
began long before the agricultural
revolution, that it is somehow embedded
eh, in our genes as, as Sapiens, and that
the
lives of the ancient foragers, like the
Sungir people were exceptionally
cruel, and brutal, and violent.
Already 30,000 or 50,000 years ago.
Both school of thought have very little
evidence to support their arguments.
All we have to go by, when we try to
understand the history,
the ancient history of warfare are
some meager archaeological remains and
anthropological observations
of present day hunter gatherers.
The anthropological evidence
is far richer and is very intriguing but
it's very problematic also.
Eh, foragers today, live mainly in
isolated and
inhospitable areas; such as, the Arctic or
the Kalahari Desert.
The population density is very low.
And the opportunities to find
other people are limited.
So there are scholars who find that the
people
in the Kalahari Desert don't fight a lot
among
themselves but this is maybe just because
they live
in the Kalahari Desert and they hardly
meet anybody.
It doesn't mean that people who lived,
say, in the Ganges Valley
in the fertile Ganges Valley 30,000 years
ago did not have wars.
moreover a recent generations foragers,
even in the Kalahari Desert, are
increasingly
subject to the authority of modern states.
And modern states don't like their

subjects fighting with one

another, so they prevent the eruption of
large scale conflict.
So if we don't find a lot of large scale
conflict between
different bands in the Kalahari, maybe
this is just the effect of,
efficient, modern countries preventing it,
and it doesn't
tell us much about conditions before,
cultural revolution.
Anthropologists actually had only two main
opportunities to observe large and
relatively
dense population of, foragers who were
independent of the control of modern
states.
One time was in Northwestern North
America, in the northwestern
part of the United States, western Canada,
and Alaska in the nineteenth century.
And the second time was in North
Australia during the nineteenth and early
twentieth century.
Those were the two occasions when
anthropologists had
the opportunity to see in a relatively
fertile
area how a lot of hunter gatherers, how,
how
a lot of hunter gatherer bands interact
between them.
And in both cases, anthropologists have
found that there was a
relatively high frequency of armed
conflict between the different bands.
So this supports the idea that warfare has
been common among humans and
among Sapiens long before agriculture.
However, it's not
conclusive, eh, evidence because we can't
be sure that what
is true of people in Western Canada in the
19th century, was also true
40,000 years ago for people in Indonesia,
or in China.
The archaeological finding is, is more
important because
it, it gives us a picture of how things
were back then, and not how
they are today.
Unfortunately, the archaeological evidence
is meager and ambivalent.
First of all it should be stressed
that we have absolutely no clear evidence
for violence, large scale
violence, between humans from more than
about 20,000
years ago.
Say for the period of the Sungir people,

30,000 years
ago, there is no clear evidence for large
scale violence.
But it doesn't mean that there was no
large, large scale
violence because we have very little
evidence of anything from that time.
From the period after 20,000 years ago
and until the outbreak of agricultural
revolution there
is still there 10,000 years of hunter
gatherer
life, from which we have much more
evidence.
But the evidence from this period between
20,000
years ago and the eh, beginning of the
agricultural revolution around 10,000
years ago, the evidence
from that period eh, can go both ways.
We have evidence for diff, for different
patterns.
For example, one famous study
was a survey that scientists made of 400
skeletons found in Portugal
that belonged to the period immediately
before the agricultural revolution.
They collected all kinds of, of, of
specimens and evidence about that period.
They found 400 different skeletons from
that period.
And only two
of these 400 skeletons showed clear marks
of human violence.
Like arrowhead embedded in a human bone,
which is clear evidence of human violence.
A similar survey of 400 skeletons from the
period immediately before
the agricultural revolution in Israel
discovered only a single crack in
a single skull that could be attributed to
human violence, that's all.
But it doesn't mean that the other people
did not die
from violence it just means we didn't find
hard, hard evidence.
You can slit somebody's throat and he will
die from it without leaving
any obvious marks for future
archaeologists on his or her body.
A third
survey again of 400 skeletons from
pre-agricultural sites in
was made of the Danube Valley, the valley
of the Danube river in central Europe.
And there, scientists found evidence,
clear evidence, for
violence on 18 skeletons out of 400.
18 out of 400
may not sound like a lot, but it's

actually a very, very high

percentage.
If all these 18 people really died
violently at human hands, it means that
about 4.5% of death in the ancient
Danube Valley was caused by human
violence.
Today the global average is
only 1.5%.
If you take all wars and all crime eh,
today in the world, in the early 21st
Century together, then you find that just
1.5% of the death is caused by them.
During the 20th Century, which was much
more violent will all the
genocide and world wars and so forth, we
have evidence for just 5%
of death being the result of human
violence.
So, if in the ancient Danube Valley, 4.5%
of people died
violently, this means that the ancient
Danube Valley was
as violent as the 20th Century.
The rather depressing
findings from the Danube valley are
supported by a string
of equally depressing findings from other
areas.
for example, at Jebel Sahaba, a site in
Sudan
archaeologists have found a cemetery from
12,000
years ago, just before the agricultural
revolution, containing 59 skeletons.
Now, in some of these
skeletons, they found arrowheads and spear
points,
which are still embedded either in the
skeleton itself or near it.
24 out of these 59 skeletons had such
arrowheads or spear points stuck in them.
That's 40% of the people who were buried
in
this cemetery were probably killed
violently by other Sapiens.
Not by elephants because, or lions because
lions don't shoot arrows, only Sapiens do.
The skeleton of one woman found
in that cemetery, revealed twelve
different injuries.
So somebody must of really hated her, or
tried to kill her and succeeded.
In another place, in the Offnet Cave in
Bavaria, archeologists discovered
the remains of 38 people.
38 foragers, mainly women and
children who were all thrown together into
two burial pits.
Half the skeletons, including those of

children and even babies,

bore clear signs of human weapons such as
knives and clubs.
The few skeletons which belonged to older
males
bore the worst marks of violence on them.
So, in all probability, the, this burial
site from Bavaria, from the Offnet
Cave, is eh, eh, eh, shows an occasion in
which an entire
forager band was massacred at one time.
The men may have tried to defend it
by, but failed, and then everybody was
massacred
by some enemies, and thrown into these
burial pits.
And for, after thousands of years we have
found them.
So we have all kinds of evidence from that
period.
And the question is, which evidence is
more important or representative?
Is it say the peaceful skeletons from
Israel
and Portugal, which, which have hardly any
marks of
violence in them.
Or are, or is there evidence for the
massacres in Jebel
Sahaba and Offnet more representative of
the world of the foragers.
The answer is that neither
is more representative.
Just
as foragers exhibited a
very wide I, a wide spectrum of religions
and
social structures, so too, they probably
had a variety of violence rates.
While some areas in some periods, like
Portugal or Israel, may have enjoyed peace
and tranquility, others might have been
torn
by ferocious conflict like Bavaria or the
Sudan.
So we don't really know much about the
lives of
the ancient foragers.
We would like to know a lot, not only in
order to not understand
their world, but also to not understand
our world, our psychology, our, our minds.
But, because of the lack of evidence, it's
very
difficult to reconstruct even the general
patterns of their lives.
Like, whether they had wars or not,
whether they had nuclear families or not.
It is even more difficult
To try and reconstruct particular events.

For example the events of one war, or the

events of one religious movement.
Nevertheless it is vital to realize that
people who lived 20 or 30,000 years
ago may have had very rich, exciting and
troublesome lives.
Just like people today.
The world
was as colorful, as dramatic, as exciting
as it is, eh, eh, today.
Full of eh, various events, which we know
almost nothing.
We can know almost nothing about eh, eh,
today.
It is vital to realize it, that eh, they
had their own
revolutions, ecsta eh, ecstatic religious
movements, profound philosophical
theories, and artistic masterpieces, even
if we didn't find the, the remains.
Eh, and it is important to keep asking
these
questions about the lives and world of the
ancient
foragers even if we don't have many
answers and
even if you will never have all the
answers.
It's important to ask the questions first
of all.
Because by asking
the questions we are inspiring ourselves
to
try and look more carefully for evidence.
And all the time, scholars develop new
kinds of
research methods and come up with new
kinds of evidence.
For example, in the recent 10, 15 years,
there's been a great revolution in the
study
of ancient foragers, with help of genetic
evidence.
30 years ago, 40 years ago nobody used
this because there was not the necessary
technology.
But today we begin to be able to extract
DNA from ancient fossilized
bones and from this evidence we gain all
kinds of new insights about the world of
the ancient foragers.
For instance let's take the question of
whether they lived in nuclear
families and, whether they were monogamous
or they lived in
communes, and practiced multiple eh, eh,
common fatherhood.
So, how to answer this question?
Previously, it was thought that we will
never be able

to have the answer, at least, until we,

we, eh,
eh, develop time traveling machines and
can go back and look for ourselves.
But today, it seems that we might have
pretty good
answers in the next few years with the
help of genetics.
For example, you can go to the burial site
at
Sungir and extract DNA from all the people
buried there.
And you can go to Jebel Sahaba in Sudan
and to Offnet Cave
in Bavaria and extract DNA from all, from
the remains of the people there.
And then with the DNA you can start,
reconstructing the family
trees of the, of those people who probably
belonged to the
same band.
And you can see, for example, where the
people with
the same mother also had the same father
or not.
And this is a good way of solving a
riddle about the lives of the ancient
foragers that until
the big breaks of modern genetics seemed
to be
something we could never, we could never,
eh, eh solve.
Another reason why it is important to keep
asking questions even if there are
no clear answers is in order to remind
ourselves of our ignorance.
Science is built not only on knowledge, it
is also built on ignorance.
It's very, very important always to
remember what we don't know.
And we must remind ourselves
how very little we actually know about the
history of our species of Homo Sapiens.
History has been going on for 70,000 years
since the agricultural revolution.
And about the first 60,000 years of
history, we know very, very little.
It's like a, a person who thinks he knows
who he is, or thinks he knows
himself or herself, and he is, say, 30
years old, and the only
thing he remembers and knows are the last
five years of his life.
He remembers nothing, he knows nothing
about
his childhood, and he thinks he knows
himself.
So, this is us, Sapiens.
We think we understand who we are, we
think we understand human nature

and so forth, but we know close to nothing

about 60,000 years of
our 70,000 years history.
And these 60,000 years were extremely
important
because during that time, the foragers
shaped to a very large extent,
not only the bodies and minds, which we
still
carry today, but also they shaped the
world around us.
There is hardly a place in the world,
except perhaps
Antarctica, which was not reshaped by the
ancient foragers long before the
agricultural revolution.
When today we go to visit places like the
Siberian Tundra, or the deserts
of central Australia, or the rainforest of
the Amazon, we often imagine to
ourselves that we enter a pristine
landscape virtually untouched
by human hands.
But, that's an illusion.
The foragers were there before us, in all
these places, and they brought about
dramatic changes.
In the ecology, even of the most dense
jungle,
and even of the most remote and desolate
desert.
The next lesson, we'll explain how our
forager ancestors
completely changed the ecology of planet
earth
long before the first agricultural village
was built.
These wandering bands of storytelling
Sapiens turned out to be, not only most
important, but also the most destructive
force
that the animal kingdom had ever produced.
What this destructive force did
will be the subject of
the next lesson.
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