Has /his/ discussed this yet? http://www.sciencemag.org/ne

Intredasting

>>956885
HYPER WAR GET HYPE

hot damn this is interesting

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>>956972
Perhaps some post hyper-war finnic mercenaries were involved.

>>956885
Thanks for the heads up, this is ome interesting stuff.

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>>956885
>3200 years ago
>1200 BC
what the fuck happened during the bronze age collapse

>>956885
Most of human history is tribes beating the shit out of eachother wait we call that ""war" nowadays.

>>956885
>http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle


This is REALLY cool. Thanks OP.

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>>956885
Of course it wasn't a backwater.

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>>956991
Do you think Finnish scientists who had a slight idea about how Ancient Finnish tech worked would have been brought along. Possibly slaves?

>>957524
>posts proof it was a backwater
>dates are actually 2000 years LATER than in the OP
>m-muh white pride

>>957650
What are you talking about? Especially why did you say "muh white pride"? Do you think anything that portrays ancient European peoples in a dignified light is "white supremacist propaganda"?

>thighbone snapped in half at the hip by a spear

Fucking ow

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>>957794
Slaine joined the party.

>>956885
Good article
Thanks OP

very interesting

>>957545
^ hyperwar thread is here

Possible ancient empire we don't know of?

>>956885
What were they fighting over?

>>957874
Why haven't we found evidence of them before?

>>957890
Why didn't we find evidence of this battle before?

>>957953

Because there was no advanced civilization there to leave any testimony of anything whatsoever whether in written form or in urban/monumental form.

Only a bunch of niggas from one tribe stabbing another bunch of niggas from the enemy tribe, and now some nigga has found some bronze knives of the stabbing nigga under the mud of some nigga river, yo.

>>957879
Likely the bridge that crossed the river at the site of the battle. It was a large causeway and probably had lots of strategic value.

>>958014
>no evidence
>likely

LOTR confirmed real

>>956885
>Maybe Northern Europe during the Bronze Age wasn't as big a backwater as we think
Of course it wasn't, but because so much of their shit was made of wood or bone as opposed to stone and much of where they lived has been built on for thousands of years and they had no written language there are almost zero records of them apart from their metalwork.

>>958006
>tribe
>4,000 people in combat
I don't think you quite get how big this is.

>>958040
Well the battle took place on/around the bridge. I doubt bridges were common in Germany 3200 years ago. But there won't BE any evidence for what they were fighting over because they probably didn't leave any writing around. All we're able to do is make logical guesses.

>>958064
Oh, and also large chunks of where they lived are now underwater.

>>958066
Tribe doesn't mean how big a group is

>>957874
>Possible ancient empire we don't know of?
More like a bunch of villages & alliances fighting it out since
>many from Southern Europe

>>958066

>4000 people in combat

[citation needed]

>>956885
>Weapons were mostly bronze

isn't this more to do with bronze not rusting and deteriorating?

>>958142
No it's to do with using metal detectors and missing flint weapons.

>>958142
>>958154
OP is wrong. Read the article. They say they found some bronze weapons but a bunch of flint arrowheads and some wooden clubs.

This is really interesting

Normally you think about petty raids and ooga booga wars over sheep when ancient north europe comes to mind

Those warriors assembled there for a reason

>>958142

No, it's more to do with there being a bronze age that precedes the iron age because copper is easier to find and work, but once you can into ironworking you drop bronze weapons because they are much more fragile and easier to break than iron spears/swords.

>>958110
Read the article. It's just guesswork but 4,000 is the estimate of the people doing the dig.

>>958110


Just to elaborate on what>>958391 said, the chain of reasoning goes

>We've found bones from 130 different bodies so far
>However, we've only excavated somewhere between 3-10% of the battlefield.
>Density of where remains lie is not likely to be uniform though, so we're not looking at thousands dead, but more likely high hundreds dead.
>If you have say, 700 dead people in the battle, you probably have a lot more actually fighting in it.
>There were probably about 4,000ish people fighting if that many fell.

>Retired University of Wisconsin, Madison, archaeologist Doug Price analyzed strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotopes in 20 teeth from Tollense. Just a few showed values typical of the northern European plain, which sprawls from Holland to Poland. The other teeth came from farther afield, although Price can’t yet pin down exactly where. “The range of isotope values is really large,” he says. “We can make a good argument that the dead came from a lot of different places.”
>Further clues come from isotopes of another element, nitrogen, which reflect diet. Nitrogen isotopes in teeth from some of the men suggest they ate a diet heavy in millet, a crop more common at the time in southern than northern Europe.
>DNA from teeth suggests some warriors are related to modern southern Europeans and others to people living in modern-day Poland and Scandinavia. “This is not a bunch of local idiots,” says University of Mainz geneticist Joachim Burger. “It’s a highly diverse population.”
>As University of Aarhus’s Vandkilde puts it: “It’s an army like the one described in Homeric epics, made up of smaller war bands that gathered to sack Troy”—an event thought to have happened fewer than 100 years later, in 1184 B.C.E. That suggests an unexpectedly widespread social organization, Jantzen says. “To organize a battle like this over tremendous distances and gather all these people in one place was a tremendous accomplishment,” he says.
>Twenty-seven percent of the skeletons show signs of healed traumas from earlier fights, including three skulls with healed fractures. “It’s hard to tell the reason for the injuries, but these don’t look like your typical young farmers,” Jantzen says.
>“If you fight with body armor and helmet and corselet, you need daily training or you can’t move,” Hansen says.“This kind of training is the beginning of a specialized group of warriors,” Hansen says.
Mercenaries? Invaders from the South?

WE

that's the coolest thing i've read in months. bronze age is awesome.

>>959487
Refuges.

>>960596
You're memeing, but this might actually be a cause for them to migrate north.

>>960637
>Guys there's gonna be huge fight up north!
>And these guys are paying us for the trip!

>>960637
At last they got warm welcome.

>>959487

Trade was a thing back in those days too, you know. Specifically from the Baltic region, amber was the most particular good being traded south to the Greek states. Iron, copper, silver and salt were also mined and traded in austria/hungary/balkans down south. So if you pick a map a draw a line southwards you might infer a trading route from the baltic to the greek states. And from this you might infer merchants and a variety of people doing the dealing, the carrying, the talking and the protection along the way. And where there's a chance for acquiring profit you might infer fighting.

Which leads us to that place having some sort of strategic/economic significance, most likely related to the commerce of amber, and variety of people from local rival tribes to rival groups of traders/merchants fighting for it.

>>957454
holy shit

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>tfw oral cultures have wiped countless amounts of history from us
We still don't know what the hell Gaul culture/history was about beyond some Herakles-derivative sculptures and the Romans shitposting about them.

>>956885
I'm honestly more surprised at the fact that there was a huge bridge than potentially 4,000 men fighting in that part of the world.

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>>956885
>The arm bone showed signs of healing, meaning that the warrior fought on for days or even a week after receiving the wound

the motherfucker got shot by a flint arrow, had the arrowhead still in his arm... not just in the flesh but the bone. The bone. He fought on before dying in another skirmish. Ancient people had to be the toughest things.

>>956885
>>961750
I bet it was a conflict over the bridge as a point of trade. Like if the Rotbart tribe held it then they could tax the trade instead of the Schwarzkopf tribe

>>956885
Yes we had a thread about this before.

That said the figure of 4000 is really just a guess. They assume 1/5 or 20% killed. In the Roman or medieval world such ratios of dead were often found on the winning side with the losing side going closer to 40-50%.

>>957454
Pretty sure this battle is like within a few decades of Troy and the Iliad.

>>961765
I don't think you can compare post-classical casualties with bronze age fighting.

>>961771
What relationship could exist between the sea peoples destruction and this battle?

>>961791
Maybe it's possible some of the sea peoples are Scandinavians?

>>961793
Or maybe a branch of them ended up north and the other ended down south

>>961791
>>961793
>>961798
What if it was more like a wave of violence? It started somewhere far West or North, then displaced more and more people until eventually a massive movement clashed with the Near East civilizations.

Just a thought

>>961750
They probably had a longer attention span too, the next paragraph:
>Microscopic inspection of that wound told a different story: What initially looked like healing—an opaque lining around the arrowhead on an x-ray—was, in fact, a layer of shattered bone, compressed by a single impact that was probably fatal. “That let us revise the idea that this took place over weeks,” Terberger says

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>>961753
Hmm, who could be behind this battle

Seriously though that sounds like a plausible theory.

>>961811
Ah, the Long-Nose tribe. Should have known

>>961806
Haven't you heard, anon? ADHD is a natural occurrence in humans that goes back to our earliest ancestors. They were a bunch of unmedicated spaz

>>956885
>As many as 4,000

Let's not forget what this actually means:

>The number suggests the scale of the battle. “We have 130 people, minimum, and five horses. And we’ve only opened 450 square meters. That’s 10% of the find layer, at most, maybe just 3% or 4%,” says Detlef Jantzen, chief archaeologist at MVDHP. “If we excavated the whole area, we might have 750 people. That’s incredible for the Bronze Age.” In what they admit are back-of-the-envelope estimates, he and Terberger argue that if one in five of the battle’s participants was killed and left on the battlefield, that could mean almost 4000 warriors took part in the fighting.

Seems like VERY weak evidence that the battle was that big. An intriguing possibility at best.

>>956885

This is just a minor skirmish in the well documented Latvian-Albanian hyperwar that raged from 1240BC to 1194BC, which resulted in the destruction of both mighty Empires

>>961859
Conventional thought is that ancient battles had very low death rates, armies were likely to have one quick clash with the weaker army breaking and fleeing before too many could be killed.

>>957650

Oh look another /pol/ boogeyman autist who thinks he's not worse than any /pol/ack.

They all fought and died and the world doesn't even remember what for.

>>961919
Then they should've wrote it down.

>>961262

The OP battle took place at the height of the Wewuz Empire. It was likely a proxy war fought between them and someone else.

A battle of that scale must have been a part of a major conflict and the Wewuz would have no doubt had something at stake.

It must be amazing to find these bones and see the remains of a battle that took place hundreds of years before Rome was even founded right before your eyes.

Just thinking that the flint and arrows embedded within in them came from actions that happened that long ago and have remained undisturbed for all that time blows my mind.

>>961765
In the Roman and Medival world, casualties on the winning side were usually negligeable: most people killed in battle were killed while trying to flee. And while not unheard of, it was pretty rare for the defeated' casualties to hit 50%

>>961944
Right? Or reading about one guy's rib having two v-shapes cut into it from being stabbed twice in the same place.

I can imagine the guy being pinned to the ground, or snuck up on and repeatedly stabbed. He fell down helplessly while others fought each other, stepped on him, died next to him... it's pretty visceral

>>959487
>If you fight with body armor and helmet and corselet, you need daily training or you can’t move

lol

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>>962170
top kek, didn't notice that line anon

>>956885

why do people on /his/ think europe didnt have developed stone and broze age cultures?

its not like all those megalith structures just grew out of the ground

>>962246
It's not that we don't believe there couldn't have been a thriving bronze age culture or two in Europe, but that one could manage to bring as many as 4,000 people to fight for a bridge in Northern Germany is pretty surprising.

>>962275

maybe it wasnt just a culture or two

>>957454
How come I didn't know about this, really interesting stuff
>"the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire."A number of people have spoken of the cultural memories of the disaster as stories of a "lost golden age."
>Rodney Castledon even suggests that memories of the Bronze Age collapse even influenced Plato's story of Atlantis
Well shit, do we know anything about that period ? How advanced was it exactly ? Sounds crazy, to think all that we might have lost

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>>961944
>>962152
Kinda puts things in perspective. Those guys fought and died for something that must have been very important to them. Now they're just bones, and nobody knows why they fought in the first place.

>>962246
>why do people on /his/ think europe didnt have developed stone and broze age cultures?
1- Enlightenment thinkers who convinced everyone that Europe wasn't worth anything before and after Greece and Rome.

2- Fear of being labeled as /pol/ and WE WUZ for saying anything positive about ancient white people.

>>962884
>Fear of being labeled as /pol/ and WE WUZ for saying anything positive about ancient white people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni-Trypillian_culture

There's been a fair few thread about 'ancient white people'.

>>961771
>>961791
Modern dating: c. 1260–1180 BC

oh damn.

>>962062
>In the Roman and Medival world, casualties on the winning side were usually negligeable

Well I said the opposite. Unless you consider 10-20% casualty rates of negligible.

>>961421
Thats the creepy thing about Oral History.

The ancients back in the day when written history started were talking as if there have been way more ancient things that have transpired before they started writing them down.

>>962152

Yeah, just thinking that this all actually happened in the same way things are happening right now is amazing.

Even though that does make me sound retarded. I can't word it any other way.

>>962884

People misuse the wewuz meme all the time. It is literally only meant to be applied to retarded African Americans who claim they were everyone and shieet.

Talking about your real ancestors is more "Muh Heritage" tier than "WE" tier.
We wuz should be reserved exclusively for people claiming that their ancestors were things that they weren't.

>>963710

Except it was extraordinarily rare for the winning side to have a 10-20% casualty rate. Hell, it wasn't even that common for the LOSING side to hit 20% dead.

Look at Potidea, Raphia, Pydna, Cynosephalae, Actium, Gaugamela, Pharsalus, Tours, Manzikert, Arsuf, or a hell of a lot of stuff.

You only usually got losses approaching 10% on the winning side when they trapped the enemy and wiped them out instead of letting them rout, which didn't happen often.

>>963877
If you have JSTOR access I recommend reading http://www.jstor.org/stable/300198?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Makes quite a good case for mounting casualties before a rout or retreat occurs.

>>963924

I don't, I'm afraid, and I know there were casualties pre-rout, hell, the losing side's would almost certainly have been heavier in that phase even before the rout started, if they're the ones breaking and running.

But unless you're just completely willing to discard every source we have, the number of pre-modern battles, especially ancient ones most close in time to this one up in northern Germany, did not involve the winning side taking 10-20% losses. (Except at sea, sea battle was enormously more deadly than land battle) Were there exceptions? Yes, Hannibal's battles come to mind. But they're exceptions, not the rule. And even the article OP mentioned notes that a lot of the skeletons have injuries in the back, especially the back of the head, which indicates that quite a few of these people were shot or stabbed or clubbed from the back, likely while attempting to run.

>>963781
Good morning reddit

The reason they're closer related to Southern Euros, is that northern Euros are just Huns/Tatars from the East that got pushed into Europe because of Ghengis Khan. Infa 100%.

>>963939
A few battles in the 100 years war spring to mind too, especially verneuil. Oh and every battle the Swiss ever fought :)

>>963947
he's right though tbqh

If you're Italian and say "we wuz Romans n sheit" or if you're French and say "oui wuz Napoleon n shit" you're correct.

But if you're American and say "we wuz jesus n shit, muh mormons" or if you're sub saharan African and you say "we wuz cleopatra n sir lancelot and Charlemagne n sheeeit" then you're wrong.

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>>963964
>you're French and say "oui wuz Napoleon n shit" you're correct.

>>962368
Source on these warrior skeletons?

>>963964
>If you're Italian and say "we wuz Romans n sheit" or if you're French and say "oui wuz Napoleon n shit" you're correct.

Referring to something that happened centuries before your birth with "we" is retarded.

>>963947

Good morning reddit

>>964022

Which is why it should be responded to with "muh heritage" memery, but it's still more valid than "ayy yo we wuz African spacemen who invaded Europe in 10,000 BC nd shiet."

>>956885
>1200 BC

Why the fuck was this period so catastrophic?

>allegedly Dorian invasion
>destruction of Ilium
>Sea Peoples and sacking of
>fall of Myceneans
>Minoans
>nomads start fucking up the Assyrians and Babylonians
>Hittite Empire destroyed

>>958066
Tribe just refers to a state of being. The Visigoths who helped destroy Rome had hundreds of thousands of members.

>>964053
Climate change and probably volcano eruptions fucking up harvests year after year. Mesopotamia was far greener and temperate and Europe colder before it.

>>964055

Pretty sure it was more like tens of thousands. Adrianople only featured 100,000 at most if you believe the ancient sources (who had a tendency to exaggerate), and even then, a lot of the warriors were non-Gothic allies.

>>964068
I was including the women and children, an absolute fuckton migrated through Italy in the 400s and 410s.

>>964053
Didn't the Exodus happen exactly at this time too?

>>963772
It isn't retarded. It's called history, bruv. They did not write it down - not that they could - and they did not pass the lesson down to their progeny.

We keep repeating this cycle of fighting massive wars with one another, then forgetting the real reason it happened in the first place after a century or two.

>>956885

Is this evidence of the ancient Finnish empire?

>>964196
All joking aside, it might be evidence of a Coalition of Northmen. Whatever their ethnicities, languages, religions, and such might have been.

To pull that many people together just for the purpose of battle takes serious coordination.

>>964268
...It says in the article it's all Southern Europeans and not modern germanics or slavs.

>DNA from teeth suggests some warriors are related to modern southern Europeans and others to people living in modern-day Poland and Scandinavia

LET ME TELL YOU OF THE DAYS OF HIGH ADVENTURE

>>964149

Exodus is a myth, but if it had happened it would have been ~300 years after the bronze age collapse.

>>964284
Christ, can you even read what you quoted.
>all
>some

>>964307
I think it's suspected that the philistines may have been sea peoples (ie they are described as uncircumcized, therefore not an indigenous semitic people of the Levant.)

>>964667
There are also a fair number of Indo-European roots for Philistine names, like "Goliath"

>>962335
Probably because it was so long ago, but yea it was absolutely terrible for humans, people dont really realise the bronze age was highly advanced and civilised, despite just having bronze, and that all ended and it took 1000 years to fully recover. I mean if that didnt happen we really would be on mars by now. And also we have no idea why it even happened.

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>>956885
Bronze Age hussars.

>>958164
Iron was originally the same strength as bronze. Main reason why most people switched to iron was because tin was rare and iron was easy to find, you could just pick up chunks of bog iron

>>956885
Pomerania is in Eastern Europe, not Northern.

>>964667

I've heard this and it seems reasonable, but you forget that the Phillistines were in Israel before the Jews were.

>>964739
>>958164

Hammered bronze is much harder than iron tho weaker than steel. The reason people switched to iron is because it's incredibly abundant, you can find iron ores pretty much anywhere whereas bronze needs both relatively plentiful copper but also rare tin or lead to make. Practically speaking, a bronze based economy requires stable long-distance trade routes, while an iron-based one can be wholly autarchic. As civilisatiions and the systems supporting them collapsed ~1200BC, iron won out in part at least because it was no longer possible to make bronze.

>>958064
Bingo

>>965209
Not if we assume the Jews were simply one of the successor peoples to the Caananites.

>>965344

Well fair enough, they probably were in fact just that. The Moses story is probably no older than 900BC, even tho it's set hundreds of years earlier. If the Israelites did indeed have roots in teh Canaanites and the Moses myth was invented to set themselves apart, itmaes sense it would be set in the distant past and not in teh present, since any living Israelite would know full well that their grandfathers were from Canaan, not Egypt.

>>961451
me too bridges are hard to build.

>>965434
>cut down tree
>throw across river

It's not rocket science.

>>956885
ITT the arrogance of the future is again checked....
No matter the science or philosophy man's hubris will always triumph

>>964306
This so much, the fact we know so little about it leaves so much to imagination

...for Frodo

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>>959487
>Mercenaries?

>>964833
Eastern Europe starts at the western polish border.

>>965217
Also, iron can be sharpened, bronze has to be straight up reforged.
At least according to /tg/.

>>964012
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Weird_War_Tales_Vol_3_1

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>>964053
It was also the time when non-Chinese cultures like the one at Sanxingdui disappeared from around the Shang lands, and the time the first written records appeared in China. Among other things, they mentioned raiders from Guifang (literally "demon land" or some shit) harassing the Shang.
Less than two centuries later Zhou overthrew Shang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifang

>>964055
>had hundreds of thousands of members
The population in all of ibera during their golden age is only estimated at around 8m.
And you're talking about something like a thousand years earlier, with a group of hundreds of thousands. So you're saying they got a 2% population boost from visigoths, assuming the most extreme numbers on both sides, so under your description, it would probably be something like 10% of the population being visigoths during that time, which is just not plausible due to them being the ones getting assimilated, culturally, religiously, ethnically, linguistically...

And the Iberian peninsula was no backwater in rome to boot...
I just don't see it happening.

>>966071
>And the Iberian peninsula was no backwater in rome to boot...
The interior of Iberia was literally the hardest place for Roman power to reach.

>>966088
Why was that, was it too hot?
I just know they had legions made of Iberians, and several emperors from there, as well of being a prize of the punic wars.
But during the inquisitions, inquisitors just wouldn't bother visiting villages in central spain, due to local parishes telling their members not to give the inquisitors the time of day, and the unbearable heat.
I would think that heat wouldn't get to Romans of all people...

>>966102
Tribe-ish insularity, hard terrain, heat.
Most of the Empire was within a few days of the ocean, or a major river, or had terrain conducive to roads.
Central Iberia was basically Afghanistan.

I like to think this was some kind of invasion from the south being resisted by a coalition of northern europeans

>>965892
no. there is no reason why bronze could't be sharpened. on the other hand, bronze tool or weapon CAN be just reforged if it's worn or broken beyond repair. if iron object is ruined then it's ruined and stays so.

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Abbout 400 km west of this the Gessel hoard was found in 2011. It dates from the same time. Speculation is all these gold rolls may have been currency and it belonged to a trader. Seems bronze age europe might have been more interesting than just huts and goats.

WE
WUZ
SEA PEEPLES

>>965835
Half of Pomerania is in Poland and the other in Eastern Germany which is by all definitions Eastern Europe. Don't fight it Kevin.

>>967675
Germany is not eastern europe, and it never will be. This battle as in germany

>>957454
It's like the entire world just fell into chaos for no reason. Mysterious...

>>967675
Unfortunately nowadays all of Poland is Central Europe. The cruel shifting realities of modern politics.

>>967675
It's west of the Oder, it's central Europe.
Also it doesn't fucking matter.

>>967715
I bet it was jews

>>957650
It says 3200 years ago, not 3200 BC.
>>>/trash/

>>958110
>4000 corpses suddenly appeared at the exact same place at the exact same time

Yeah sure

>>967715
India and China were doing fine.
My favorite theory is that society had simply grown too complicated and a few minor pressures were just enough to start a vicious cycle of crises.

>>967727
It's actually 150 and the scientists logically inferred 4000 based on battlefield size and casualty rates.

>>967734
That's only factual if the entire battlefield has as high density of corpses but battles don't always neatly spread the dead across the field.

>>967738
They included that too. The article says they acted as though that was an especially dense area of fighting. They probably used it as two std. dev. above average on a bell curve to obtain a cautious estimate.

>>967727
>4000 corpses
Jesus, can you read the fucking article, or at least the reply chain around the post you replied to?

>>967738
FFS

>>959439

>>967732
Actually, the Indus Valley finally collapsed in 1200 BC after centuries of decline. Meanwhile the Shang Dynasty collapsed after a successful rebellion by the Zhou around 1100 BC.

I'm not saying it was certainly because of the collapse, but it's a possibility as to what may have caused it.

Honestly I don't think what historians think of as the Bronze Age was the first time we used bronze. I think civilization has at least an extra 2000 years tacked onto it

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>>964053
> Why the fuck was this period so catastrophic?
People run out of bronze.

Or, to be precise, bronze got too expensive to sustain enough civilization to keep things working.

Once things got too expensive, honest work could no longer cut it for some people, they had to switch to dishonest work. That made honest work even less profitable. And even more people could no longer survive via honest work.

You get the general idea. Natural disasters, obviously, didn't help.

>>961750
I'd hate to be the dickhead with the flint when other people have bronze

>>967976
Implying Flint wasn't hipster and bronze Normie shit

>>965892
That's not at all what /tg/ says. I've never heard of such a thing. If anything, bronze is easier to repair because it tends to bend rather than break.

>>964053
could it have been nomadic tribes who fucked up the civilizations, like they did as huns and mongols?

>>957650

More "/pol/ boogyman" trash, go the fuck away.

>>962368
does that musketeer have a fucking breech-loading rifle?

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>>964307

>Exodus is a myth

>>966952

How could they lose all that gold?

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>>956885
>Forgotten Weapons circa 3,000 bc

>>962884
>ancient white people.
Depends what you mean. It's reasonable to talk about ancient cultures who happen to have been white. The issues arise when people get into the "ancient aryan progenitors of the white race" nonsense. In Ireland (and the rest of the celt belt I assume) it's pretty common to suck the dicks of neolithic society because muh newrange and muh dolmens. I assume the question is much more politicised in Slavic countries though.

>>968112

When you think about it, the bow was a really complex and astounding invention. When was it first seen?

>>968020
I thought it was that bronze breaks cleanly while iron shatters.

>>963964
>he's right though tbqh
t. Officer anon, reddit meme police

>>966690
>if iron object is ruined then it's ruined and stays so.
can't Iron be reforged? or at least melted down?

>>956885
Europe had cavalry in 1200BC? That's what surprised me.

>>968139
I invented it

give me money

>>968174
It was probably just horses used as battle taxis or by meme javelineers on horseback. Way too fucking early for melee cavalry.

Does anybody here know much about the intermediary periods of Egyptian civilisation? Was it an actual total collapse, with people living in the ruins of an older golden age sort of situation, or just the fracturing of a unified Egypt into city states and other factions?

>>968239
Were cavalry ever used in a direct melee role (as opposed to chasing a route, battle taxis etc) before the stirrup became widespread?

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>>968174
>>968239
This is still part of a lively scholars debate.

Some say horses at this point were to small to carry people yet others say the horses found in graves from the period would be perfectly capable of carrying people.

Others say it's the lack of saddle and stirrups that prevented them from being used without a chariot but that is not always a convincing argument either.

>>968262
See ancient warfare. i.e. Alexanders companion cavalry, gallic cavalry, german cavalry, roman cavalry, sarmatian cavalry, Cataphract cavalry etc etc.

Of course charging a fully formed unhurt formation was considered foolish and rarely did battles start with a cavalry charge anyways.

>>968267
If cavalry of the time were employed in a role where they would engage infantry, would they have been, for lack of a better term, essentially a one-shot weapon? That is, was it disastrous for cavalry to become bogged down in a melee if the initial charge failed to break an infantry formation?

>>968288
>to become bogged down in a melee

This is disastrous for cavalry anyways, I mean fucking Winston Churchill describes that happening in the late 19th century. The charge is done with the express purpose or throwing a group of infantry into disorder, if this works it turns into a slaughter for the infantry, if it fails the cavalry has to pull out of the mess. Primary sources which mention charges typically tell us that the hacking, stabbing and slashing after collision was a minute or two before either the cavalry pulled out or the infantry routed. After regrouping the cavalry could initiate another charge, hence sources describe cavalry executing charges (plural) and such, in a personal letter of Francis I he writes of the French cavalry having charged the Swiss no less than thirty times over the course of the battle of Marigano.

>>968324
I suppose I just have a hard time picturing the sort of cohesion, training and discipline it must have taken to extricate yourself from a fight after ploughing into infantry existing in ancient times. Danke for the info though.

>>968338
Well I am not sure if this happened before Alexander the Great, he is one of the first who used heavy (charging) cavalry effective in battle. What cavalry may or may not have done in 1200 BC is as much a mystery to me as it is to you.

>>968338
>>968347
>to extricate yourself from a fight after ploughing into infantry

That was the hard part, Churchill describes losing a significant part of his fellow soldiers during that part. Cavalry charges that don't result in breaking the infantry formation are just going to result in a lot of dead horses.

>>962210
>>962170
Well, he's kind of not wrong.
If you aren't trained to use armor properly you gonna get shanked by some naked scrub with a buckler.

The modern kevlar-plate systems are comparable in weight and the soldiers are forced to wear them during the physical activities and are trained to use the vests properly, yet there are still many of deaths because of the improper use of armor.

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>>956885
From Southern Europe?

Hmmm....

The widespread use of bronze, an alloy which used tin, a metal which however was not present in Sardinia if not in a single deposit, further proves the capability of the Nuragic people to trade in the resources they needed. A recent study (2013) of 71 ancient Swedish bronze objects dated to Nordic Bronze Age, revealed that most of copper utilized at that time in Scandinavia came from Sardinia and the Iberian peninsula.[35]

The circle is closing

>>964053
The Minoans fell in 1450 bc to the Myceneans

>>968430
Didn't Myceneans import tin from Britain by ship anyways?

>>968430
post source dude, don't just copy paste shit without sourcing, that's what this board severly lacks

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>>968463
I know of some Mycenean double axes found in Britain and Ireland, I don't know if they ever came there personally or those items only arrived there through indirect trade, I don't remeber Mycenean pottery ever being found in Britain.

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>>968472


http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313002689

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>>968484
>>968472

http://www.academia.edu/1909413/Moving_metals_or_indigenous_mining_Provenancing_Scandinavian_Bronze_Age_artefacts_by_lead_isotopes_and_trace_elements

>>968480
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/archaeology/7228108/Bronze-Age-shipwreck-found-off-Devon-coast.html

Not the most trusted source but this is what I meant.

>>968498
>Archaeologists have described the vessel, which is thought to date back to around 900BC, as being a "bulk carrier" of its age.

The Mycenean civilization was long gone in 900 bc

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>>968480
(Replying to my post)
Speaking about copper oxhide ingots, it's interesting to notice that during the bronze age Scandianvians made rock paintings depicting oxhide ingots (mostly present in Sardinia, Cyprus and Crete duting the late bronze age, those were the "international money" of the time) often accompanied by Ships with bull protomes, similar to the Nuragic ship bronze models like those in pic related.
And Scandinavians were getting those copper ingots from Sardinia and Iberia.

Coincidence?

>>968086
It was deliberately buried 50 cm deep in a sort of bag, neatly packed.

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>>966952
Doesn't necessarily mean shit. The average African pastoral herder carried precious metals as currency like that too. He traded them for wives and goats.
Granted, it's a really large quantity of gold so the king/trader must have been pretty wealthy, or else this is tribute they extracted from other tribes (each roll coming from a family for example)

Interestingly, another form of African bracelet money looked a lot like the celtic torc.

>>968170
not without fairly modern technology. you can heat it up and hammer it to a new shape but that's pretty much it. with bronze you can make actual direct copy of the original object from it's remains if you still have the mould.

>>964012
they look Somalian to me

Total War: Primal when
I want to lead Bronze Age savages against other Bronze Age savages

>>968624

Interesting. I wonder why.

>>968719

Just play the new Far Cry, or Age of Empires.

>>968818
>play the new far cry
No thanks, I have good taste in games

>>967934
so they hit Peak Bronze.

Peak oil and peak water is going to be fun...

>>967776
>Honestly I don't think what historians think of as the Bronze Age was the first time we used bronze.

Bronze doesn't rust and bronze artefacts often survive, why have no bronze artefacts older than the bronze age ever been discovered?

>>968083

Don't take my word for it. Israeli archeologists have been looking for evidence for 40 years and so far found bupkiss.
>The reality is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Jews were ever enslaved in Egypt. Yes, there's the story contained within the bible itself, but that's not a remotely historically admissible source. I'm talking about real proof; archeological evidence, state records and primary sources. Of these, nothing exists.
>http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/the-jewish-thinker/were-jews-ever-really-slaves-in-egypt-or-is-passover-a-myth-1.420844

>>968288

Cavalry aren't used to attack heavy infantry unless said infantry has already routed. Cavalry's primary purpose is to destroy enemy archers and keep enemy cavalry off of your archers.

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>>968480
>Mycenean double axes

These Labrys axes are Minoan not Mycenean. The Cretans did trade with Cornwall for thier tin, probably not directly but via a series of middle men.

The hyborean age is real

>>969220
>archeological evidence, state records and primary sources
>Old Kingdom

Pick one. There is very little known about it in general, let alone some Jews.

>>969235
>Trust me I play Total War

>>969823

You're totally wrong, there is a wealth of evidence from the Old Kingdom and from other civilisations around at the time. Also, the time of Exodus would have been the New Kingdom, not the old. Also also, the Jews have spent literally decades scouring the land looking for evidence and they have found exactly nothing.

>>966133
This was my thought as well. It explains why the majority of the dead were southern European instead of northern.

>>968139
First bows were found in the Mesolithic in Denmark somewhere iirc. I think it was around 9k BCE. There are much older arrowheads from Africa though.

>>970835
>>968139

The bow probably evolved from the fire drill and seems to have been developed independently several times. Of course, being made of wood, they seldom survive in the archeological record, but flint arrowheads are extremely numerous across the world, with some dating back tens of thousands of years. Of course, the bow as a hunting tool is not the same beast as a war bow, which was developed much more recently and in Mesopotamia.

>>970862
Funny thing is that we found a 5300 year old Yew 160 lbs longbow recently. Wouldn't that predate even Sumer?

>>970935
Ötzi?

>>970944
Yep.

>>970935

Longbows were used for hunting, particularly for larger game such as deer (and Otzi lived at a time when there was very large game indeed, aurochs and rhinos and bears and the like).

>In its original state, the bow was extremely powerful and would have broken on the first shot because the compressive strain in the limbs (1.5%) was so great. The bast fiber bowstring was probably much too thin to support a bow of this weight. The simplest way to transform this stave into a weapon pulling 50 pounds at 26 inches would be to reduce the thickness along the limbs to 69 % of its present value (the cube root of 50/150.9), leaving the width unmodified. This would reduce the maximum strain to 0.97 %, a very safe conservative value for a yew bow.
http://www.primitiveways.com/Otzi's_bow.html

>>970957
>Evidence for and against the hypothesis that Ötzi's bow was an unfinished weapon has been presented. If it were a finished weapon it would mean that Ötzi had a very powerful physique and probably shot his bow on an almost daily basis. Otherwise he would not have the strength to shoot it accurately. It would also mean that X-ray examination of Ötzi's arm and shoulder bones would show that his skeleton had the characteristics of someone who had a very asymmetric upper body muscular development, characteristic of someone who shoots a very powerful bow.

tl;dr- the bow found with Otzi was not a finished weapon but a work in progress.

>>970957
>Otzi lived at a time when there was very large game indeed, aurochs and rhinos and bears and the like

He was after the ice age, there wouldn't have been rhino in europe then.

>>970957
>>970962
New research has proven otherwise. It's fine tuned and matches a Mary Rose longbow almost exactly, I believe Mark Stretton or Joe Gibbs from the English warbow society ran it through a CAT scan and made a replica that drew 160.

Furthermore, it was waterproofed with a blood based coating indicating it was finished. Why would someone march into the alps with a waterproofed but unfinished bow and a bunch of arrows, how did the Ibex end up in his stomach if he did not shoot it?

Early researchers simply didn't believe anyone could draw and it and simply slapped on the label 'unfinished' then a 5"6 tall normal stature Englishman shows up who can fire such bows with ease.

Give me a minute and i'll have the papers.

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>>970983
>Shoot bow
>Get shot

>>970983

The evidence that the bow was unfinished seem pretty solid, certainly Otzi's remains show no sign of the physical deformities common of English Longbowmen so if the bow is a finished item, it didn't belong to him.

>>964149
The Exodus did not happen.

>>965953
That's a very happy guy.

>>969131
>peak water
What?

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>>970992
>physical deformities common of English Longbowmen

Common? How common? Got any numbers? Like if we find the body of an archer that doesn't have physical deformaties we cannot easily tell he's an archer right? I do not believe every archer had physical deformities caused by shooting a high powered bow, modern people try to shoot with both sides to prevent compression.

>The evidence that the bow was unfinished seem pretty solid

40 year old guy marches off to the alps with a quiver of arrows and an "unfinished bow" with a weatherproof coating and no other hunting weapons. He also carries with him a a copper battle axe. somehow manages to kill a mountain goat and eat it and is then promptly shot by other archers.

Why carry a battle axe and an unfinished hunting bow? Why did he get shot to death? He was in possesion of a weapon meant solely for killing other people and was killed by other people, wouldn't that suggest he was either a warrior or expected to face combat? Why not carry a waterproofed warbow with you?

>>971005
peak water is a retarded idea, but obviously local scale water shortage would increase with larger population size, see droughts.

>>970862
>Of course, the bow as a hunting tool is not the same beast as a war bow, which was developed much more recently and in Mesopotamia.
I'm pretty sure that mankind has been using bows to kill one another for as long as bows have existed, famalamadingdong.

>>971034
>Common? How common?

Universal, actually. It's generally pretty easy to identify a longbowman, even from just bones.

>>971034
>Why carry a battle axe and an unfinished hunting bow?

How would I know? I don;t have a time machine. Nonetheless, the bow was unfinished as the lack of notching demonstrates, and the bowstring found with it is for a bow pulling no more than 50lbs. the bow would have snapped if you had used it, there is such a thing as "too strong" when it comes to bows.

>>971050

They've been using rocks too, does that make rocks weapons of war? Don't be such a faggot.

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>>971050
East coast native Americans had warbows, early colonists remarked they had a superior draw to any English archer. Probably exaggerating but quite telling nonetheless. Bronze age middle eastern societies and Egypt also held archers in high esteem, paid more than spearmen IIRC>

>>971063
>How would I know? I don;t have a time machine.

Well take the path of least assumptions and assume he was carrying a warbow. Copper weapons weren't cheap to begin with so assuming he was a warrior or trained in combat isn't to alien of a thought, he did meet his demise in combat too. He carried arrows with him too and I believe blood was found on their tips that wasn't his so they were used too. Maybe he had another bow we don't know about, but why carry a second bow all across the alps? An unfinished one for that matter, quite a long one too.

Stretton ran it through a CAT scan and notes fine tool work suggesting it was more or less done, tooling marks apparently smaller than any made by tools he was carrying with him, not polished but that is not a problem in itself. The nock is the real problem.

Let's just agree to disagree then, maybe someday this 5300 year old riddle will be solved.

One of the first good threads in a long time

>>970862
>The bow probably evolved from the fire drill
that theory has been pretty much bunked for decades. it probably evolved from flexible atlatl or staff sling.

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This was part of the post-Finnic Khanate Aryan-conflicts, it's well discussed

>>957650
>>>/Reddit/

>>963947
Misusing and ruining memes is Reddit incarnate

>>964196
No fucking joke, there's a series of culturally-similar burial mounds stretching from Finland to Mongolia that is said to have a cultural origin point in the Altaic Mountains.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seima-Turbino_phenomenon

>>962884

>Fear of being labeled as /pol/ and WE WUZ for saying anything positive about ancient white people.

Because southern europeans like Greeks and Romans weren't white people but either Latinos or Ebony Gods

>>963973
MUH SICILIAN HERITUGE

>>965380
There may be aspects of the Moses myth which have some truth, ie nomadic pastoral peoples who were canaanites but had contacts with Egypt, also in the Exodus time period Egypt directly ruled Canaan. The post-Moses period of tribal warfare probably describes the period of decentralization which followed the Bronze Age collapse and the retreat of Egyptian authority in the region.

>>973591
T. Fernando Martinez

>>973888
Isn't it generally agreed that all the biblical stories are very roughly based on actual occurrences.

>>971066
They're wrong.

Full stop. Most bows known to be used by Amerindians were of fairly poor quality.

We're talking about bows made with shapes to REDUCE the power so the shitty would wouldn't break as fast in some areas. On top of that, they simply didn't use bows in a manner that calls for the use of heavy warbows, especially on the east coast.

Old world military archery involved massed fire at long range.

New world war mostly involved small raids and ambushes that typically occur in broken terrain, where a heavy draw gets you no range advantage, but increases your draw time and fatigue from use.


Now, did they have a stronger draw than a Victorian era target archer?
Yes, probably. So does my bow, and i'm not all that impressive.
>>968263
>Others say it's the lack of saddle and stirrups that prevented them from being used without a chariot
laughingapache.ghost

>>968324
Churchill is also referring to a dramatically different time period.

When you're dealing with a bronze age society, shit ghanges pretty significantly.

You've got men on the field who are wealthy, meaning they have MUCH better arms-actual weapons of war-, much better training, and they may actually have armor.

Against men with sticks and clubs.

And there's examples of groups of men kept around SPECIFICALLY to deal with armored cavalry who've broken into infantry formations in byzantine manuals.

Cavalry VS infantry is not as cut and dry as people like to think.

>>957454
Horns. The helmets have horns. The "sea peoples" that invaded egypt also were bronze armored and weaponed, but the distinction is the horned helmets.

>>966952
So are these finds and the battle from the OP indirect evidence that there was advanced social organisation in Europe during the Bronze Age, perhaps with even city-sized settlements?

>>971273
agreed

>>977348
I don't think that was ever in doubt.
Too bad they didn't have writing.

>>977348

There was like a late stone age town in Spain with around 5000 inhabitants or so.

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Los millares? It was the capital of the surrounding towns/villages in the calcolithic.

>>977145
The sea peoples also always had had round shields

>>961793
VI

>>961793
There's no evidence for it whatsoever, not even in their names, so I dodn't think so.

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What folk do y'all think were involved? Germanic tribes? Non Indo-Europeans?

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>>978675
finns.

Great thread, everyone.

>>971273
>>981235
I feel like ancient /his/tory threads fare better than most because they avoid more politically charged recent history and also invite specialists who can educate us.

Except for Egypt/Nubia threads. Those are awful.

>>981412
Because they run into WE WUZ idiot politicking.