Is that really true (that "we" didn't believe in war in prehistory)? It seems like a case of taking an absurd null hypothesis, not finding any evidence to refute it, and then deciding that your null hypothesis is probably true. We have plenty of evidence of pre-literate societies engaging in organized warfare, so why would prehistoric Europe be any different?
I found such intense and sustained focus baffling, since the point seemed obvious (though the evidence was interesting, at least). I've since come to understand this as some "inside baseball" grad-level anthropology leaking through to the undergrad curriculum. We newbies didn't need to be convinced because we'd never strongly held the contrary view in the first place, but the field (and related ones) had only recently convinced itself so thought it worth spending a lot of time on.
If you're living in scattered, small tribes, then at most you can get into small tribal scuffles and vendetta ... but war requires planning, organization, support, possibly diplomacy, marshalling of resources - so it's hard to have proper war without the mechanisms in place to support it.
So maybe it's not quite so obvious.
You have to gather them. There is no written means of communication yet in that part of Europe. There are not many roads yet. They live on farms spread out over vast territories. The article says there were 5 people per square km. Most are probably kids and half are women, so to find 1 able bodied man of fighting age you might need 20 people, which would require 4 square km. Now, if like in later ages the soldiers were the second and third oldest sons, you might find 1 soldier per 10 square km. To gather an army of 500 men, you would need a territory of roughly 100*50 km.
You have to feed them for days, weeks, or maybe even months before or between battles. Crazy expensive at a time where just feeding yourself is not easy.
They have to sleep somewhere, even if just in tents.
You have to provide some weapons and equipment, even if merely wooden clubs and spears.
Unless they are slaves, which some might have been, you may have to pay them or they need to be convinced they fight for their own sake, for example because a foreign people is invading their land.
The most obvious way to organize all that is to imagine a strong regional rulers, a class of local nobles, taxes, some sort of manorialism. Structures that are known later in history (or much further south in the bronze age). But maybe Northern Europe was also organized like that already in the bronze age.
Yes.. and/or religious leaders.
I think this is where I first ran into the concept: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/08/archaeologists-uncov...
Not sure anyone "before the 1990s" was thinking that people were peaceful during the Bronze Age. 3200 years ago was almost to the day contemporaneous with the Trojan war [2]. That was not a time when people were peaceful and "concerned with trading and so on".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kadesh
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_War#Historical_basis
In relative terms, Pax Romana definetly was such a time.
As with anything, people run with type of thing and make seemingly absurd leaps.
Still, supporting a proper army is a massive economic undertaking, so it seems likely that army sizes (and battle sizes) started relatively small and grew over time. Maybe this new finding actually does suggest that scale-up happened earlier than most previous legitimate estimates.
My money's on p-hacking though.
In 1500's(14?) Spain, being able to read and write got you better than "I'm a computer programmer in 2000" prospects. Being able to read silently, without even moving your lips(!?!), got you rumors of deals with the Devil. Now you get to graduate primary-school, and eventually learn programming. Before the recent vast expansion in programming jobs, lots of science phds were driving cabs. Veterinary masters clean cages in zoos. Minimum viable education has been seriously escalating. Even with everything still being taught very very badly. If education tech ever dramatically improves... that'll be interesting.
Much of that, among many other things like basic education, architecture, so many materials and methods, didn't happen until Latinization/Christianization of that part of Europe.
The period of ~1000 BC was solidly Bronze age, before the classical era or antiquity (~500 BC), before the Roman Empire, before the fall of the Roman Empire leading to the Dark Ages.
I checked my account - created 3 years prior to the article. And I thought that I was late to the HN game when I joined. Wow... time flies...
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