SCHWERIN — The bones of the murdered are stored in an air-conditioned environment. The relative humidity at the archives in Schwerin is a constant 50%. Detlef Jantzen, the state archeologist for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, pulls a cardboard box from the shelf and lifts the lid. The sight inside is not a pretty one.
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Rust-red bone fragments, discolored by the peat water in which they lay for centuries, are piled together. A skull bears a hole the size of a quail’s egg in its forehead. “A blow from a club,” Jantzen speculates grimly. And the dent on the left side? “Probably a second strike.”
Though this grim event occurred almost 3,300 years ago, the find — catalogued as ALM 1996/855,8 — still radiates an unsettling sense of horror. Archeologists believe it stems from a large-scale battle that erupted toward the end of the Bronze Age, around 1250 B.C. The fighting unfolded in the Tollense Valley, along the banks of a river between Schwerin and Stettin, involving as many as 6,000 combatants. It is thought to be the largest known military conflict in Europe up to that time.
This raises two pivotal questions: Was this when war was first “invented”? And can something as horrifying as war even be called an invention — or is the urge to kill part of human nature itself?
So far, the remains of 140 bodies have been recovered, telling a tale of systematic and large-scale slaughter. Many bear injuries with no signs of healing — likely the fatal blows. The Schwerin archives now stores more than 12,000 human bones and fragments unearthed from the Tollense Valley since 1996. Back then, the first clue was found when a conservationist spotted a humerus bone from a rubber dinghy.
What is a war?
Jantzen carefully pulls another box from the shelf. Nestled in foam padding, a long bone is retrieved, with a flint arrowhead still embedded in it.
“The finder suspected immediately that something violent had happened here,” Jantzen recalls. Other artifacts tell similar stories: a bronze arrowhead lodged in a skull, its tip bent by the force of the impact. In other boxes there are bones with dents on the sides. “Probably a sword,” says Jantzen.
This battle wasn’t an isolated event. Around the same time, in 1274 B.C., the armies of the Hittites and Egyptians clashed at the Battle of Kadesh, in what is now Syria. The subsequent peace treaty between Ramses II and Hittite King Hattusili III— etched into a clay tablet — is the oldest known treaty in history, offering indirect testimony of large-scale war.
But does this temporal proximity — Tollense and Kadesh occurring almost simultaneously — mark the dawn of warfare? Historians agree that Kadesh at least represents a form of collective warfare that was thoroughly organized by political minds and carried out intentionally and with deadly weapons: it’s the modern definition of war.
Mass burials or the absence of burials are also suspicious.
The key events in wars are the battles, and those are difficult to classify. You can’t always call it an act of war when people attack each other in groups. Weapons play a role, violence, political, economic or religious goals — but to call that a war, there has to be a certain level of organization.
And yet some scientists interpret some even older violent events as war. Long before the conflicts in the Tollense Valley and in Kadesh, in 5100 B.C, 34 people were violently killed in the Talheim massacre in Baden-Württemberg. Where the town of Kilianstädten, near Frankfurt, now lies, 26 people were massacred 7,000 years ago. And in Lower Austria, at around the same time, 200 Neolithic people died from blunt force and arrows in the Schletz massacre.
U.S. anthropologist Richard Brian Ferguson has compiled a gruesome list to clarify the situation. Destroyed settlements and large numbers of skeletons are among them. These can be interpreted as elements of war.
Beheadings or scalping marks indicate that war trophies were stolen. “Parrying fractures” on ulnar bones often show that victims tried to fend off a blow by raising and bending their forearm — an injury that archeologists often encounter on ancient battlefields. Mass burials or the absence of burials are also suspicious, and gender imbalances in cemeteries (indicative of the fact that male inhabitants were away, probably fighting) are all telltale signs of collective violence.
The invention of war?
The same goes for settlement patterns: Jericho, in the West Bank, which has often been damaged, was already protecting itself with a wall 10,000 years ago. Settlements were built on cliffs, and that would make no logical sense unless it was to make defending easier — and that’s an indication of the existence of wars per se, without scientists having to find traces of violence.
Yet interpreting “weapon finds” can be tricky. Many battles relied on everyday tools repurposed for violence. In Germany’s Peasants’ War (1524-1525), for instance, axes, scythes and pitchforks served as weapons. Daggers — the first purpose-built killing tools — emerged only around 5,000 years ago.
The oldest evidence of organized group violence comes from Jebel Sahaba on the Nile, in modern Sudan. Some 13,000 years ago, around 60 skeletons were found with projectile points and unhealed injuries. Yet these burials, conducted in stages, suggest intermittent skirmishes rather than a single battle. Most researchers attribute the violence to resource scarcity during times of climatic hardship — not quite “war” as we know it.
When trying to classify violent events involving many people, it helps to focus on the occasions and causes: religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, colonial wars in the 20th century. But what caused the very earliest mass conflicts? Historian Yuval Harari suggests tribal feuds began after agriculture was established 10,000 years ago. Ethnologist Margaret Mead posited in 1940 that war is a cultural invention, akin to cooking or the alphabet.
Murderous activities are not necessarily a human invention.
A look at the Paleolithic period, however, reveals that the opposite school of thought could also be right: A high propensity for violence is biologically inherent in humans. Some 430,000 years ago, a Neanderthal man died as a result of two fractures in the Sima de los Huesos, a cave not far from Atapuerca in Spain. The two injuries to his forehead were caused by the same object, and a fall is not a possible cause for such a pattern of marks. Rather, the skull from the “Cave of Bones” tells of the oldest proven murder in human history.
Most of the traces of crimes in the Paleolithic period have long since faded away. The few that have survived, however, show that the idea that humans lived in peace until they settled down and began farming might not be right. At least 26 people were killed at Lake Turkana in Kenya 10,000 years ago, when only hunters and gatherers lived there. What happened? No one knows.
War might be the answer, even if many researchers still believe that military conflict only came into the world with the ploughshare, property and territorial thinking. Settling down, politics and technological progress increased the possibilities for waging war in an organized manner. But that does not make them prerequisites for it.
It’s only natural
The animal world provides evidence that similar murderous activities are not necessarily a human invention. Between 1974 and 1978, primatologist Jane Goodall observed what would become known as the “Chimpanzee War of Gombe”: two groups of monkeys fought each other until one of them was wiped out.
Banded mongooses, native to the south of the Sahara Desert, also regularly encounter each other in territorial fights. The groups form up in a kind of battle line and attack each other — often resulting in many deaths. Ants, armed with shells, stingers and pincers, also prove that warlike actions — including the annihilation of other colonies — are not only found in mammals.
And who could have been responsible for the attack in the Tollense Valley in the Bronze Age, which many believe was a real battle? A few weeks ago, the investigations revealed a surprising finding.
Archeologist Leif Inselmann had taken a close look at the projectiles. They resemble the spearheads that have so far been found mainly in southern Central Europe, in Bavaria or Moravia, suggesting fighters may have traveled great distances.
Something horrifying happened in the Tollense Valley.
Maybe it was not regional groups beating each other’s heads on the banks of the small North German river — maybe it was all part of a major European battle raging in what is now the Mecklenburg province. Jantzen remains cautious, noting that the distribution of arrowheads alone doesn’t prove the fighters’ origins: “We are investigating in all directions.”
Stark reminder
He even doubts that there was a battle at all. No warlike equipment can be found on the victims. Weapons such as a heel axe that was found on site could have been used to kill — but also for gardening. The bodies of the men killed at that time also raise suspicion: not strong around the shoulders, as warriors usually are, but fit and robust in the lower body.
That would be more in keeping with porters or runners. And the fact that tin rings were found alongside the weapons, which were standardized trade goods at the time, also points to something else. For example, a trading caravan that was attacked and massacred. His alternative scenario, says Jantzen, also explains the state of the remains of at least four horses on the site: The human victims could have been horse and metal traders who were ambushed while trying to cross the river over the nearby dam.
Whatever the scenario, one thing is certain: something horrifying happened in the Tollense Valley. Whether it was a full-scale war or a brutal attack, it’s a stark reminder of the violent streak that has always been part of humanity.
