Posted on 05/11/2006 11:50:02 AM PDT by blam
Muggings were rife in New Stone Age
11 May 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Emma Young
IF YOU are worried about being attacked or killed by a violent criminal, just be glad you are not living in Neolithic Britain. From 4000 to 3200 BC, Britons had a 1 in 14 chance of being bashed on the head, and a 1 in 50 chance of dying from their injuries.
Grisly figures from the first systematic survey of early Neolithic British skulls reveal that life then was no rural idyll. "It's certainly more violent than we'd considered," says Rick Schulting of Queen's University Belfast, UK, who conducted the study with Mick Wysocki at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.
The discovery of craniums from the New Stone Age with signs of human-inflicted trauma is nothing new but this is the first clue to the overall frequency of violence. Schulting and Wysocki have so far identified and studied the remains of about 350 skulls, mostly from southern England. The pair found healed depressed fractures in 4 to 5 per cent of the skulls, and unhealed injuries in about 2 per cent - suggesting the person died from their wounds, or at some point in the attack.
Most of the fatal blows were to the left side of the head, which would make sense if two right-handed people were fighting, says Schulting. The injuries were mostly caused by blunt objects, although some of the skulls seem to have been hacked by stone axes and there is some evidence that ears were chopped off. Schulting presented the work at last month's annual conference of the Society for American Archaeology in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
From issue 2551 of New Scientist magazine, 11 May 2006, page 16
BAN ROCKS AND AXES NOW!!
I didn't know the bloods and crips went back that far...wow! Gang warfare in ancient Britian...film at 11.
In the distant future, some race of archeologists will be amazed when they discover the great resurgence of neanderthals in major cities in Europe and North America.
Neolithic Football hooligans........
Sharpen up your sticks
We'll drive the woolly mammoth
Right of the cliff
Hey cavemen
Now that we're a team
We'll attack those other cavemen
Across the stream
We'll sneak up
Ready for a fight
We'll steal their food and weapons
In the dead of night
Rejoice!
Cavemen rejoice!
Hang on a sec....
1/14 chance = .714
1/50 chance = .002
SO, assuming the chances are linked (i.e. - You had a 1/50 chance of dying IF you made your 1/14 chance of being bashed in the head...)
We get:
.714 X .002 = .00143 = .143%
Considering that the population of Neolithic Britan at the time...I'll take those odds.
Funny how things are worded one way to cause shock value, until you view them from an empiracal stand.
A one in fifty chance of dying from the injury? With the current British social medical system, I suspect that is about and even chance now.
Soccer Hooligans, like as not!
Methinks it would be far less violent than CURREND Britan...
Though, admittedly, I have no corroborating data to reinforce my guess.
I imagine that there were stone age hooligans who weren't willing to cultivate some grain, harvest it, store it, grind it, make bread...Or they weren't willing to get a stick, put a sharpened rock on the end, chase a sweet, innocent bambi, spear it, skin it, jerk it, eat it.
The SAH's would get a sharpened stick and chase down the responsible stoner who worked hard and provided for his dogs and his family.
"Funny how things are worded one way to cause shock value, until you view them from an empiracal stand.
Funny how things are worded one way to cause shock value, until you view them from an empiracal stand."
Ain't Bayes' Theorem a B***h?
I thought the noble savages were supposed to be granola- munching, kumbaya-singing pacifists, that made love, not war, and not just with one another, but even with other (sub)species?
Heh -- face-to-face fighting pretty much discredits the mugging theory. Unless it took several thousand years to perferct the art of sneeaking up behind someone and bashing their skulls in.
I wonder if they considered that maybe the skull of a person who was killed by a violent act stood a better, or worse, chance of being found thousands of years later due the manner in which the body person killed this way was disposed of. Seems to me like that would really skew your statistical findings if you only had a slice of the total population.
Yeah, but that was back in the day when if a girl wanted to play hard to get, she would cut her hair short.
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