Cain and Abel.
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When modern humans arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago, they made a discovery that was to change the course of history.
The continent was already populated by our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, which recent evidence suggests had their own relatively . But within a few thousand years the Neanderthals were gone, leaving our species to continue its spread to every corner of the globe.
Precisely how Neanderthals became extinct remains a subject of fierce debate among researchers. The two main explanations given in recent years have been competition with the recently arrived modern humans and .
The persistence of in all modern people outside of Africa shows the two species interacted and even had sex. But it鈥檚 possible that there were other kinds of interactions as well.
Some researchers that competition for resources such as prey and raw materials for stone tools may have taken place. Others have proposed violent interactions and took place, and that this may have caused the Neanderthals鈥� demise.
This idea might seem compelling, given our species鈥� violent history of warfare. But proving the existence of early warfare is a problematic (although fascinating) area of research.
War or murder?
keep moving the threshold at which there is evidence for human warfare progressively earlier. But finding such evidence is fraught with problems.
Only preserved bones with injuries from weapons can give us a secure indication of violence at a given time. But how do you separate examples of murder or a family feud from prehistoric 鈥渨ar鈥�?
Preserved skeletons provide the best evidence of early warfare. ,
To an extent, this question has been resolved by of , where were massacred and buried together at a number of European sites dating to the Neolithic period (about 12,000 to 6,000 years ago, when agriculture first emerged).
For a while, these discoveries appeared to have settled the question, suggesting that farming led to a population explosion and pressure for groups to fight. However, of group killing suggested by the bones of hunter gatherers have re-opened the debate.
Defining warfare
A further challenge is that it is very difficult to arrive at a definition of war applicable to prehistoric societies, without becoming so broad and vague that it loses meaning. As social anthropologist argues, while group violence may take place among tribal societies, it is not always regarded as 鈥渨ar鈥� by those involved.
For example, in the dispensation of justice for homicide, witchcraft or other perceived social deviance, the 鈥減erpetrator鈥� might be attacked by a dozen others. However, in such societies acts of warfare also commonly involve a single individual being ambushed and killed by a coordinated group.
Both scenarios essentially look identical to an outside observer, yet one is regarded as an act of war while the other is not. In this sense, war is defined by its social context rather than simply by the numbers involved.
A key point is that a very particular kind of logic comes into play where any member of an opposing group is seen as representing their whole community, and so becomes a 鈥渧alid target鈥�. For example, one group might kill a member of another group in retribution for a raid that the victim wasn鈥檛 involved in.
In this sense, war is a state of mind involving abstract and lateral thinking as much as a set of physical behaviours. Such acts of war may then be perpetrated (usually by males) against women and children as well as men, and among skeletons of early modern humans.
Fossil record
So what does all this mean for the question of whether modern humans and Neanderthals went to war?
There is no doubt that Neanderthals engaged in and were the recipients of acts of violence, with of blunt injuries, mostly to the head. But many of these predate the appearance of modern humans in Europe and so cannot have occurred during meetings between the two species.
Similarly, among the sparse fossil record of early anatomically modern humans, of weapon injuries exist, but the majority date to thousands of years after the Neanderthals鈥� disappearance.
Where we do have evidence of violence towards Neanderthals it is almost exclusively . This means it is less likely to represent 鈥渨arfare鈥� as opposed to competition between males.
While there is no doubt Neanderthals committed violent acts, the extent to which they were capable of conceptualising 鈥渨ar鈥� in the way it is understood by modern human cultures is debatable. It is certainly possible that violent altercations could have taken place when members of the small, scattered populations of these two species came into contact (although we have no conclusive evidence for such), but these cannot realistically be characterised as warfare.
Certainly, we can see a pattern of violence-related trauma in modern human skeletons from the Upper Palaeolithic period (50,000 to 12,000 years ago) that remains the same into the more recent Mesolithic and Neolithic times. However, it is not at all clear that Neanderthals follow this pattern
Neanderthals probably struggled to survive in colder, more open habitats.
On the bigger question of whether modern humans were responsible for the extinction of Neanderthals, it鈥檚 worth noting that Neanderthals in many parts of Europe seem to before our species had arrived. This suggests modern humans can鈥檛 be completely to blame, whether through war or competition.
However, what was present throughout the period was dramatic and persistent climate change that the Neanderthals鈥� . Modern humans, although they had just left Africa, seem to have been more flexible to different environments and so better at dealing with the increasingly common colder open habitats that may have challenged Neanderthals鈥� ability to survive.
So although the first modern Europeans may have been the first humans capable of organised warfare, we can鈥檛 say this behaviour was responsible or even necessary for the disappearance of Neanderthals. They may have simply been the victims of the natural evolution of our planet.
, Principal Academic In Forensic and Biological Anthropology, and , Associate Professor of Evolutionary Palaeoecology,
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