Since its discovery in the 1960s, the Jebel Sahaba burial ground in Sudan has been considered one of the oldest evidence of a prehistoric war. More than 13,000 years ago, dozens of people were buried there, apparently killed in battle. But now a new analysis of 61 skeletons from Jebel Sahaba paints a new picture: Many of the dead not only bear the traces of several injuries sustained immediately before their end, but also show wounds that have already healed. The archaeologists conclude that the dead at Jebel Sahaba did not all die together in a war. Instead, in the course of their lives they were repeatedly embroiled in minor violent conflicts with neighboring groups.
When the Aswan Dam was to be built in the Nile Valley in the 1960s, UNESCO ordered rescue excavations in the area where the accumulating water would flood large parts of the Nile Valley. The area of Jebel Sahaba on the northern border of Sudan also belonged to these areas. A team led by the US archaeologist Fred Wendorf discovered two burial grounds on both sides of the Nile, in which they found the remains of a total of 61 people who died more than 13,000 years ago. A closer examination of this oldest grave complex in the Nile Valley revealed that at least half of the dead showed clear traces of violence, and numerous stone points and blades were found around their bones. “Since then, this site has been seen as key evidence of the development of violence and organized war through territorial disputes,” explain Isabelle Crevecoeur of the University of Bordeaux and her colleagues.
New look at old bones
However, it remained controversial whether the dead at Jebel Sahaba died in a single event – a real war – or whether the grave fields were perhaps more of a kind of cemetery for those who were violently killed. Because the original sites are now flooded by Lake Nasser, only the finds and 61 skeletons from the Ice Age burial grounds that were recovered by Wendorf’s team and that are still stored in the British Museum in London today. Crevecoeur and her colleagues have now re-analyzed these relics. To do this, they examined all the bones again using modern microscopic methods and also examined the design of the individual stone points found in the dead.
The investigation showed that in addition to the 20 dead with injuries already identified by Wendorf, 21 other skeletons also showed clear signs of violence. “A total of 41 individuals show at least one type of healed or unhealed injury,” reports the research team. “These include three quarters of adults and half of adolescents and children.” The wounds included skull injuries as well as numerous broken bones in the hands and forearms, which are typically caused by defending against a blow. Most of the dead also had traces of bones left by projectiles such as arrows or spearheads. It also fits that the archaeologists found a total of 123 stone points and blade fragments in the vicinity of the dead. “Their variety of sizes and shapes suggests that they come from different types of weapons, including mainly light arrows, but also heavier arrows and spears,” write Crevecoeur and her colleagues.
Violence and attacks, but no war
These results first confirm that the people buried in Jebel Sahaba once perished violently and as part of armed conflict. “The projectile injuries found in at least half of the dead indicate a struggle between different groups, not an internal conflict or domestic violence,” say the researchers. However, there is also some evidence that contradicts the earlier interpretation of these dead as the earliest known victims of war. On the one hand, the archaeologists found that the age and gender distribution of the dead did not fit this scenario: men and women were almost equally represented in the graves, and children and young people were also buried there. The occurrence and frequency of traces of injury were also independent of age and gender. On the other hand, the recordings and recordings made during the excavations document disturbances in the subsurface, which indicate that not all of the dead were buried at the same time
“This does not suggest that these people all died in a single catastrophic event,” state Crevecoeur and her team. The traces of injuries on the dead disprove this thesis even more clearly, because 16 of the individuals had both freshly inflicted injuries and older injuries that had already healed at their death, as the analyzes revealed. “On the basis of these new data, we reject the hypothesis that Jebel Sahara reflects a single war event,” write the archaeologists. “Our results support a scenario in which there were sporadic and recurring episodes of interpersonal violence.” Specifically, the research team suspects that the few fishermen-and-gatherers who lived in the Nile Valley at the end of the last ice age were reinforced by the change in climate There was competition for resources. As a result, violent conflicts arose again and again, with one group attacking the other or raiding their settlement area. According to the researchers, the dead of Jebel Sahaba are indeed victims of interpersonal violence, but not the dead of an organized war or even a campaign.
Source: Isabelle Crevecoeur (CNRS, Université de Bordeaux) et al., Scientific Reports, doi: 10.1038 / s41598-021-89386-y