The Origins of War (500,000 BC–3,000 BC)

In a part of the Nile Valley that was soon going to be flooded by the construction of the Aswan Dam, the archaeologist Fred Wendorf made a groundbreaking discovery. In 1964 he found a prehistoric burial site which contained 61 skeletons near the border between Egypt and Sudan. This burial site, called Jebel Sahaba, was constructed by members of the Qadan culture about 14,000 years ago. Because almost all these skeletons showed clear signs of physical trauma, Wendorf and his colleagues thought they had found the oldest battlefield in history. But were these skeletons really the victims of the first battle? And did organized warfare even exist at all at that time? If so, what did it look like? In this video we address these questions and search for the origins of war. #history #documentary #education Patreon (thank you): Paypal (thank you: Twitter: 00:00-00:58 Intro: First Battle in History? 00:58-07:15 Chapter 1: What is War? 07:15-10:25 Chapter 2: The Beginning of Organized Violence 10:25-13:17 Chapter 3: First Traces of War 13:17-17:00 Chapter 4: Organized Warfare 17:00-21:14 Chapter 4: An Age of War? 21:14-23:20 Epilogue Bibliography: Archer, Christon I./Ferris, John R./Herwig, Holger H./Travers, Timothy H. E., World History of Warfare, Lincoln 2002. Churchill, S. E., Franciscus, R., McKean-Peraza, H. A., Daniel, J. & Warren, B. R. Shanidar 3 Neandertal rib puncture wound and paleolithic weaponry. J. Hum. Evol. 57, p 163-178 (2009). Crevecoeur, Isabelle et. Al., New insights on interpersonal violence in the Late Pleistocene based on the Nile valley cemetery of Jebel Sahaba, in: Scientific Reports vol. 11 (2021), Ferril, Arther, The Origins of War. From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great, London 1997. Harari, Yuval N., Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, New York 2011. Keeley, Lawrence H., War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford 1996. LeBlanc, Steven, The Origins of Warfare and Violence, in: The Cambridge World History of Violence vol. 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient World, pp 39-57. Scherer, Andrew K., Recent Research on the Archaeology of War and Violence, in Annual Review of Anthropology 50 (2021), pp 403-421. Waal, Frans de, The Age of Empathy, New York 2009. Zeng, T.C., Aw, A.J. & Feldman, M.W. Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck. Nat Commun 9, 2077 (2018).