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Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)
- dang 6y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11383601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11383601
- c-smile 6y agoI did not realize that Hacker News is that old ...
- mcguire 6y agoOuch.
- daveslash 6y agoIt was originally posted to HN only 2 months before you created your HN Account. ;-) I checked my account - created 3 years prior to the article. And I thought that I was late to the HN game when I joined. Wow... time flies...
- sho_hn 6y agoWoosh.
- nl 6y agoI don't know exactly when HN was founded, but it was quite large when I joined.
- erik_seaberg 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 looks pretty plausible as the actual first post, though I can't remember whether postings always had ids (most pageviews used to have URLs with random names that pointed at expiring Arc closures).
- mcphage 6y agoThis is just to say: at least some people got your joke, and thought it was funny :-)
- yread 6y agoSame battle as in this recent article https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/warrior-skeletons-reveal-bronze-age-europeans-couldn-t-drink-milk https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/warrior-skeletons-re...
- yread 6y agoAlso this one https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2019/10/puzzling-artifact-found-tollense-europe-oldest-battlefield/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2019/10/puzzling-...
- bookofjoe 6y agoThe pictures are staggering.
- defen 6y ago> Before the 1990s, “for a long time we didn’t really believe in war in prehistory,” DAI’s Hansen says. The grave goods were explained as prestige objects or symbols of power rather than actual weapons. “Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on,” Is that really true (that "we" didn't believe in war in prehistory)? It seems like a case of taking an absurd null hypothesis, not finding any evidence to refute it, and then deciding that your null hypothesis is probably true. We have plenty of evidence of pre-literate societies engaging in organized warfare, so why would prehistoric Europe be any different?
- Zippogriff 6y agoIt's true enough that in the early 2000s one of my poli-sci professors devoted most of a course to the book War Before Civilization and kept hammering on the idea of prehistoric war being widespread and common as some kind of huge revelation and surprise. I found such intense and sustained focus baffling, since the point seemed obvious (though the evidence was interesting, at least). I've since come to understand this as some "inside baseball" grad-level anthropology leaking through to the undergrad curriculum. We newbies didn't need to be convinced because we'd never strongly held the contrary view in the first place, but the field (and related ones) had only recently convinced itself so thought it worth spending a lot of time on.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jariel 6y agoIt should be a revelation because war is a civilizational concept - it's a form of organized violence, 'organization' being the keyword here. If you're living in scattered, small tribes, then at most you can get into small tribal scuffles and vendetta ... but war requires planning, organization, support, possibly diplomacy, marshalling of resources - so it's hard to have proper war without the mechanisms in place to support it. So maybe it's not quite so obvious.
- 6y ago
- charlieflowers 6y agoThe article claims something I found surprising -- that the written word was not common near Germany until about 1000 AD.
- brnt 6y agoThat's true for nearly all of nonRoman Europe.
- marshray 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)#/media/File:European_Output_of_Manuscripts_500%E2%80%931500.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)#/me...
- marshray 6y agoThey weren't called the Dark Ages for nothin'.
- dragontamer 6y agoDark Ages are traditionally 500 AD. The period of ~1000 BC was solidly Bronze age, before the classical era or antiquity (~500 BC), before the Roman Empire, before the fall of the Roman Empire leading to the Dark Ages.
- marshray 6y agoWe were discussing 1000 AD. "The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th century) that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoSome writing was around 1700 years ago - https://archive.archaeology.org/1207/trenches/frienstedt_germany_kaba_comb.html https://archive.archaeology.org/1207/trenches/frienstedt_ger...
- arifleman 6y agoLindybeige did a great and relatively short video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYj4BZdB1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYj4BZdB1w
- philwelch 6y agoAs much as I enjoy Lindybeige, I would take his analysis with a grain of salt. There’s a rather infamous case where Lindybeige released a video filled with bizarre and misleading claims about the MG34 and MG42 German machine guns (which he bizarrely conflated with each other and incorrectly dubbed the “Spandau”) and their relative merits with the Bren, followed by a rather substantial rebuttal from Military History Visualized, to which Lindybeige issued a defensive counter-rebuttal, the comments of which contain further commentary from Forgotten Weapons. If you don’t really want to get invested in an argument between three youtubers, fair enough—my takeaway is that while Lindybeige often has some idea about the topics he presents, he also has strong biases and gaps in his understanding that often result in him confidently pontificating well past his actual expertise.
- curiousllama 6y agoCmon, a guy with a sword as the first graphic? This is the Bronze Age - a club is a better weapon at that point...
- EForEndeavour 6y agoThis article was impossible not to read all the way through. I really hope to be able to write in such a compelling way at some point in my life. Admittedly, the subject matter of an epic battle is probably intrinsically more interesting than what I'll typically write about in my career, but still, the author tells such a vivid story by diving into minute details only to zoom back out to a broader context.
- poma88 6y agoGo for this book, it changed my life: "The Elements of Style was listed as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 by Time in its 2011 list"
- 8bitsrule 6y agoMore details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield