The picture, then, of our warrior ancestors does not fit notions of heroic warfare in which one warrior meets and defeats another as an equal. Much more likely, the style of doing battle was opportunistic and motivated largely by an intuitive risk/benefit analysis. When life is squeezed into the tight margin of survivability, grandiose gestures will give way to careful calculation. A sure kill by a mob swarming, in a brief moment of advantage, over a numerically inferior enemy may not be pretty, but it cuts the odds of harm to the attackers significantly. Early humans were no different from most hunting packs. This was the way they had learned to overcome animal prey, and it was a tactic equally effective against human enemies. In some ways it is not so different from insurgent warfare of our era, which is also based on isolating and overrunning small groups of the enemy in ambushes and traps—in fact on any opportunistic tactic that increases the odds of success, no matter how “underhanded” it might be. Whether it be Europeans fighting natives in North America (settlers referred to the natives’ style of combat as “the skulking way of war”); the French fighting Spanish guerrillas during the Peninsular War of the Napoleonic era; the French and Americans fighting communists in Vietnam in the twentieth century; or the Soviets fighting the mujahideen and Americans the Taliban in modern Afghanistan, insurgent tactics reject a definition of the heroic; based that is, on open and transparent confrontation.
When did we start killing each other in combat? Some scholars date the earliest warfare to 2 million years ago.7 Homo habilis lived 2.3–1.4 million years ago, while we, the relative newcomer Homo sapiens, did not make an appearance until about 250,000 years ago. It was among the fraternal interest groups of our hominid hunter ancestors some 400,000 years ago that the territorial instinct turned lethal.8 They killed one another not only to protect what they already had but also to extend their spheres of influence in order to maximize their chances of surviving and thriving.9 The self-interest of the band was, and remains, the great motivator of warfare. We may have dressed that self-interest in a flashy rhetorical uniform, and the bands may now be nation-states, but it is nevertheless still connected to our most basic and ancient instincts. We cannot quite rid ourselves of the ripe stink of the pelt.
About 1.7 million years ago Homo erectus began to spread out of Africa carrying clubs, and about 400,000 years ago wooden spears with fire-hardened tips were added to the armory.10 However, it was the introduction of missile weapons that gave a tactical shape to prehistoric warfare that would be characteristic of battle ever since: the proximity of shock versus the long range of missiles. Homo neanderthalensis, a competitor of Homo sapiens, was physically stronger and long experienced in the use of stone-tipped spears for both throwing and stabbing. But it was the nimbler and more inventive H. sapiens who would succeed in driving Neanderthals from the richer hunting grounds, thereby squeezing them into an evolutionary cul-de-sac that reduced their chances of thriving and, ultimately, of surviving.
About 40,000 years ago H. sapiens developed a weapons technology that would profoundly shift the balance of combat power: the atlatl.11 Faced with adversaries who in close combat could make best use of direct muscular power, H. sapiens needed a counterpunch. The atlatl was a wooden missile launcher, sharing some of the physics of the sling, for hurling short, spearlike darts. It was one of the first force multipliers, increasing the range of the hand-thrown spear by about four times (from 25 yards to 100, with fairly predictable accuracy up to 30 yards),12 and it afforded the critical advantage of being able to fend off a physically powerful opponent who could make good use of shock weapons, and grievously hurt him from a distance. It meant that the atlatl-wielding group could start an assault earlier than an enemy armed only with clubs and hand-thrown spears. In some prehistoric actuarial calculation, the increased risk to the attacked and the concomitant reduction of risk to the attacker translated directly into the margin of success. And by the time the bow and arrow made an appearance around 20,000 years ago, Homo neanderthalensis was extinct.13
The bow brought some very distinct advantages over the atlatl. It had greater range; ammunition was lighter and therefore more of it could be carried; it was an easier weapon to learn to operate. Above all, it offered the great tactical advantage of being much more versatile—it could be used in open combat, but more important, it was better adapted to ambush warfare, where it could be fired from cover (difficult for the atlatl-fiver who needs unencumbered space). But change in history does not work with the crisp exactness of a page being turned. The atlatl, for example, was still used by Aztec and Inca warriors well over 40,000 years after its introduction (as were Stone Age swords, the edges embedded with slivers of razor-sharp obsidian, capable of lopping off a conquistador’s horse’s head in one terrible strike).14
Whether atlatl or bow, the long-range missile weapon radically changed battlefield prospects. Now a David could kill a Goliath; a nincompoop a genius; the lowest the highest. It was the start of the great social leveling of combat killing. The ever-increasing sophistication of missile weaponry (the atlatl of the Aztecs defeated by the arquebuses of the conquistadors, the arquebus by the musket, the musket by the breech-loading rifle, and so on), and the concomitant reduction of high-risk, close-action shock combat is one of the core themes of warfare. Killing from a distance is invariably preferable to the riskiness of close combat. And so, over millennia the evolution of missile weaponry has all but rendered shock weapons redundant. Clubbing and stabbing, although occasionally resorted to, are no longer the tactical lingua franca of modern battle, despite exhortations—even in quite recent history—for soldiers to go in with cold steel. As a consequence, the battlefield has become “empty”: In most cases the warrior does not see whom he kills or is killed by. In fact, there is a prospect that we will so increase the distance between combatants that killing may well be done by drones and other smart weapons that will make the heroic traditions of close-combat shock warfare as antiquated as the duel between Achilles and Hector, and “modern” small-arms fighting as quaint as medieval swordplay. The bullet or heat-seeking bomb does not give a jot for courage or trial-by-arms; they fly to the heart of the matter with unblinking dispassion. But perhaps this was ever so. The arrow is nothing but the uncritical servant of the archer, no better or worse than the unmanned drone or the man with his finger on a computer key, whereas the swordsman and the spearman, the soldier wielding a bayonet, must look into the eye of his fellow warrior, see his fear, hear his cry, smell his blood. And in that contact there is a whole moral world; a world that might be hateful, angry, terrified, disgusted, full of regret, or crazed with exultation—but never dispassionate, never coldly unhuman.
Despite the fact that killing by long-distance missiles is on some level a more efficient handling of risk, earliest warfare endowed close-quarters combat with a much higher heroic status. There were quite pragmatic reasons for the distinction. The most effective warriors had the bravery to close for the kill. The risks were great but the prize greater. The primary benefit was quite straightforward: The decisive killer was the most productive, and the one likely to ensure the well-being of his immediate family and the larger group. In him lay their future; to him was accorded power, influence, status, something the hero can translate into very tangible benefits: power and influence. The prehistoric hunter’s claim on the kill would be mirrored, later in the history of combat, in the ancient warrior’s claim to the panoply of his defeated enemy (with its echo in modern warfare in the taking of souvenirs from the defeated).
Close-combat killing defined the heroic for millennia. There is a tension, constant for most of military history, between shock and missile tactics that arises from the constraints imposed by the physical properties of the weapons. Put simply, shock weapons—clubs, swords, stabbing spears, maces, et cetera—were more effective killers than missiles, but the warrior had to get close to his enemy, which is dangerous: “These very short ranges create severe psychological and social difficulties that render shock weapons th
e weapons of choice among only the more severely disciplined armies of high chiefdoms and states.… And more important, to reach this closure the warrior must pass through the killing zone of the enemy’s fire weapons.”15
Archers and slingers, although a tactical staple of the armies of the ancient Middle East—especially Egyptian, Assyrian, and Sumerian—were often viewed, especially in ancient Greece, as craven compared with infantrymen. As though to underscore the “unheroic” nature of the missile warrior, there was a long tradition among many primitive societies of employing “dirty” techniques to increase missile lethality. Spear and arrow shafts were sometimes weakened so that the point would break off in the wound when extraction was attempted; animal claws were attached in such a way as to remain in the wound and promote infection; arrowheads were barbed to make extraction difficult; and, of course, many societies tipped heads with various poisons or excrement and otherwise went to great lengths to maximize lethality, including draining the blood from the heart of a sheep, putting it in a section of intestine, burying it until it was nicely rotted, and then smearing the pestilent concoction on their arrowheads. As one anthropologist notes: “The widespread use of such nasty weapons directly contradicts the commonly held idea that primitives took pains to ameliorate the deadliness of their combat.”16
Nor were our primitive forebears too scrupulous about the treatment of the defeated. The eradication of potential competitors is, perhaps, hardwired into our evolutionary makeup, and warriors on the losing side (and very often their families) were usually terminated without compunction. Fleeing, it might be thought, would elicit some sort of compassion on the part of the victor; but quite the opposite is true. Throughout history retreat has often triggered a deep-rooted joie de mort—killing as celebration. Just as the animals of the prehistoric hunt were eaten, so too were the defeated human enemy. Such “communions of triumph,”17 although disturbing to modern sensibilities, are profoundly embedded in religious rites: the symbolic cannibalism of the Christian Eucharist being one of the more obvious.
There is evidence of cannibalism from early Neolithic southern France (five to six thousand years ago) and prehistoric southwestern North America.18 In precolonial Mesoamerica, North America, and parts of Oceania and western Africa, captive warriors were often killed publicly and wholly or partially consumed. Aztec cannibalism, for example, has been attributed to religious motives—propitiation of the sun god through blood sacrifice—but also to the more mundane need for protein. Another powerful motivation was simply to subdue potential enemies through astounding acts of very public cruelty: an effective way of bolstering the power of the ruling elite—a technique not lost on even modern despots like the East African dictator Idi Amin, who was reported to enjoy choice cuts of his opponents.19
In studies of forty-two primitive societies it has been found that the vast majority (thirty-nine) routinely killed all captured enemy warriors.20 Zapotecs removed hearts and genitals; the ancient Chinese bound and buried their defeated enemies and, like the Aztecs, much preferred to capture an enemy for later ritual sacrifice than kill him outright on the battlefield. Sometimes these acts of torture were carried out by noncombatant women and children (particularly young boys, for whom it was an initiation rite), as was the case among some of the American woodland Indian tribes such as the Iroquois:
Captured warriors were often subject to preliminary torture during the return journey of a war party. When the party arrived at the home village, the prisoners were beaten by running the gauntlet into the village. At a council, the warrior prisoners who survived these initial torments were distributed to families who had recently lost men in warfare. After these prisoners were ritually adopted and given the name of the family’s dead member, they were usually tortured to death over several days. The victim was expected to display great fortitude during these torments—taunting his torturers and expressing contempt for their efforts. When the prisoner was dead, some parts of his body were eaten (usually including his heart).21
It was extremely rare that a captive warrior would be spared and incorporated into his captor’s tribe, although it did happen occasionally among, for example, the Fox and Shawnee of mid-western North America, if the captive had endured his torture with outstanding bravery and if there also happened to be a need for replacement manpower due to unusually high combat losses.
If cannibalism in the primitive world was one way of consuming the enemy, the dead warrior’s body could also become an object of totemic importance. Sometimes the killed enemy was never quite dead enough, and he had to be rekilled with many postmortem blows. Occasionally they were motivated by hatred but often were a frenzied release of tension, even celebration. A grave pit in Heilbronn, Germany, dating from 5000 BCE contains thirty-four victims, most struck on the back of the head with stone axes while fleeing, then on the back of the neck, the dome and sides of the skull, and, probably after death, the arms, legs, and pelvis.22 At the prehistoric (9000 BCE) Jebel Sahaba cemetery in Egypt, skeletons have been found with between fifteen and twenty-five arrowheads in each. In more recent times, US soldiers killed by American Indians in the nineteenth century were often struck by many arrows and their bodies mutilated. British redcoats killed by Zulus were disemboweled and often beheaded after death. In some primitive cultures the killed foe was transfigured from corpse into couture: “In Tahiti, a victorious warrior, given the opportunity, would pound his vanquished foe’s corpse flat with his heavy war club, cut a slit through the well-crushed victim, and don him as a trophy poncho.”23 Aztec priests would also wear the flayed skin of sacrificed warriors, and one Colombian group flayed their victims, stuffed them, made wax faces for their skulls, and set them up “in places of honor” within their households.24
The body itself was also literally and symbolically appropriated by the taking of trophies. Scalping was a custom firmly rooted in North American aboriginal culture and was very widespread from the eastern seaboard across to California, from the subarctic to northern Mexico. But there is also a grave site in Chienkon, China, that dates to 2200 BCE and contains victims who were scalped after having been killed.25
Scalping was eschewed by early Europeans, the trophy of choice being the whole head. The ancient Celts were particularly fond of beheading (Trajan’s Column in Rome features a striking bas-relief of a Germanic warrior with the hair of the severed head of his conquered foe gripped firmly in his teeth), and not content with decapitating enemy warriors, Celts would often behead their horses as well. The head is probably the most culturally widespread trophy because it is irrefutable in a way that a scalp, or lopped hands, or sliced-off ears, are not; the man is dead. (The samurai were particular fetishizers of severed heads, collecting them assiduously and building them into elaborate after-battle ritual cairns.)
The face is also the token of personality and even after death remains a vital reminder of the living. It can be spoken to, as a Maori warrior did to the severed head of his enemy: “You wanted to run away, did you? But my meri [war club] overtook you: and after you were cooked, you made food for my mouth. And where is your father? He is cooked—and where is your brother? He is eaten—and where is your wife? There she sits, a wife for me—and where are your children? There they are, with loads on their backs, carrying food, as my slaves.”26 And if heads could have conversations, albeit one-way, the slain could also be made to play a merry tune; in South America and New Zealand the long bones of the leg and arm were made into flutes.
It is hard to deny that in many cultures throughout history, including our own, killing in combat may be seen as, if not precisely a joyful act, then one that comes close, and is celebrated. But in many primitive cultures the warrior who had just slain a foe was considered by his noncombatant kin to be stained. A crime of a sort (though considered necessary) had been committed, and an expiation was necessary. In some cultures the warrior was forced into isolation for a period, or made to eat only certain foods, or abstain from sex: “Because he was a spiritual
danger to himself and anyone he touched, a Huli killer of New Guinea could not use his shooting hand for several days; had to stay awake the first night after the killing, chanting spells; drink “bespelled” water; and exchange his bow for another. South American Carib warriors had to cover their heads for a month after dispatching an enemy. An African Meru warrior, after killing, had to pay a curse remover … returning raiders had to cleanse themselves by drinking water and vomiting.”27
Samurai warriors, although dedicated collectors of their slain enemies’ heads, were considered defiled if, by chance, they directly touched the head or any part of the corpse. In ancient Japan there were elaborate ceremonies of purification following battle, and a horror of the pollution associated with decay and death.28 And in an echo of these ancient rites modern warriors also often need to be “cleansed” through the ministration of a range of care facilities.
OF THE VISUAL depictions of prehistoric and ancient war only fragments remain, but they are fragments of extraordinary beauty. The whole schema has long gone, and we are left to decipher as best we can the enigmatic shards. The Stele of the Vultures (so called because the ruler is seen allowing vultures to devour the enemy dead, a kind of shameful “double death”) dates to about 2500 BCE (about thirteen hundred years before the Trojan War). Apart from prehistoric cave paintings delineating intertribal violence, it is the earliest depiction of organized warfare. The stele is a Bronze Age limestone slab that celebrates, in bas-relief images, the victory of Eannatum, ruler of Lagash in Sumeria, over the bordering kingdom of Umma, although victor and vanquished alike are now all fallen into some Ozymandian obscurity. A column of infantry (looking remarkably like a Greek phalanx about twelve hundred years before it appeared in Greece) walks, implacably, over the bodies of its fallen enemy (elsewhere the enemy dead—naked but unmutilated—lie in heaps). The victorious infantrymen’s eyes are resolutely fixed forward; every detail is immaculately ordered. They are in a column six files deep, with a nine-man frontage. They are spearmen, and the spears are long and need to be held in both hands; the spear tips extend well beyond the front rank. The warriors are protected to some extent by shields, which, because they cannot be supported by an arm, must have been suspended from a shoulder strap. The commander (perhaps the king) leads them from his chariot. It is an image of organization, of order and fixed intent. It conforms to a seductive notion of warfare: that it is planned and efficiently executed. There are those who have been empowered to give orders, and there are those who obediently execute them. But it is also unsettling, as though we are reviewing SS troops circa 2500 BCE.
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