Manthropology
Page 9
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On the wings of eagles
Viking warriors didn’t just kick a man when he was down, they hacked him. Warriors unlucky enough to be bested by a ninth-century Scandinavian swordsman might find a fate worse than death awaited them: human sacrifice via the gruesome “Blood Eagle Rite.” Ancient Viking poetry gives us the history of this horrific ordeal. Ragnars Saga (“Hairy-Breeks’s Tale”) records that the English king of Northumbria, Aella, had the image of an eagle carved on his back at sword-point by the great Danish Viking Ivarr. Other sources also have the sadistic Ivarr pouring salt into the wound. A later epic poem, Pattr af Ragnar’s Sonum, says that Aella’s spine was slashed, his ribcage ripped open and his still-breathing lungs pulled out to simulate an eagle’s wings. According to later sagas, other victims of the Blood Eagle included King Haraldr Harfagri of Norway, King Maelgualai of Ireland, and even King Edmund of England. Unfortunately, though, scholars have since pointed out that the supposed ritual may be a simple mistranslation of the original poet’s reference to the eagles that perched on Aella’s back and consumed his corpse. Still, whether dismembered by surgical broadsword or left for bird food, Aella’s fate shouts one message loud and clear: Ivarr, like any other Viking warrior, was best avoided.
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Another reason for the high mortality rate of prehistoric war was the surprising effectiveness of primitive weaponry. Numerous authors have testified to the impressive speed and precision of the ancient Turko-Mongol composite bow. Unlike the slow and feeble early Western musket, the bow shot 10 projectiles per minute to ranges of over 550 yards (a stone monument found in Siberia records that in the 1220s Genghis Khan’s nephew, Yesüngge, hit a target there from 586 yards away using a composite bow).32 Yet even supposedly primitive bows could be devastatingly lethal. The simple flint arrowheads used throughout the prehistoric world, for example, had ragged, tearing edges sharper than modern steel. Keeley reports that in prehistoric North America these basic arrowheads were so deadly, and so commonly used, that up to 40 percent of all deaths were caused by them. Prehistoric warriors also took fiendishly inventive measures to increase killing power. Many groups barbed their arrowheads to make them difficult to remove, and deliberately weakened their shaft attachments so they would break off in the wound. The aggressive Mae Enga achieved the same effect by capping theirs with hollow cassowary claws, which would likewise be left in the body to fester. Numerous groups tipped their arrows with poisons, such as the muriju plant sap of the Kenyan Giriama (which could stop an elephant’s heart in hours) or the snake venom of the ancient Sarmatians. More fiendish again was the use of microbial poisons to cause blood poisoning. Shoshone Indians, for example, buried sheep intestines filled with blood, left them to rot, and then dug them up and smeared the septic ooze on their war arrows. New Guinean groups daubed theirs with grease or human excrement, or wrapped them in orchid fibers. These devices meant the projectile didn’t have to kill instantly; it could destroy enemies later through septicemia. Even such derided weapons as the primitive sling were, in reality, viciously effective. Ancient literary sources record that the Roman army (which used slingers as auxiliaries) only recruited those who could hit a target at 200 yards. Enemies greatly feared these whizzing projectiles which, unlike arrows and spears, couldn’t be seen and avoided. Though sling stones rarely killed outright, they stunned even armored victims sufficiently that they could then be dispatched with club or spear (or, as in prehistoric Tahiti, with daggers made from a stingray’s tail).
Yet another reason for the high mortality rate of prehistoric warfare was the failure to distinguish between soldiers and civilians. Any modern Western air force that conducts a bombing raid faces a severe grilling in the press if civilians are harmed. Yet numerous historical accounts confirm that in ancient times it wasn’t just defeated warriors who were slaughtered after a lost battle—everyone was. Victories often turned into annihilating rampages through the losers’ territory. Anthropologist of the Pacific Islands, Douglas Oliver, reports that after eighteenth-century Tahitian battles it was common to see “infants…transfixed to their mothers, or pierced through the head and strung on cords…[and] women…disembowelled and derisively displayed.”33 So many were killed in these rampages that the losers’ territory apparently often stank of death for weeks. Keeley, similarly, records archaeological evidence from a mass grave at Crow Creek in South Dakota, dated to circa 1325 CE, which shows that over five hundred men, women, and children (60 percent of the population) were massacred there. Only the very young women were spared, probably for incorporation into the victors’ tribe.
Even in those societies that did recognize a distinction between civilian and military, ancient warfare was an extraordinarily lethal business. Authors Richard Gabriel and Karen Metz calculate that defeated soldiers in ancient Sumerian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman armies had an average 37.7 percent chance of dying on the battlefield.34 (Death rates among victorious armies, at an average 5.5 percent, were much lower because the greatest slaughter always occurred when the losing side broke and ran.) Losses in some battles were truly catastrophic, as in the famous battle at Cannae, where the Romans lost seventy thousand men, or 95 percent of their engaged force. How does this compare to modern soldiering? Gabriel and Metz report that the death rate for American soldiers in twentieth-century wars averages 23–24 percent (with a dip to 14 percent during the Korean War due to the introduction of body armor). Interestingly, applying their method of analysis to the Iraq War gives a very similar death rate of 28.77 percent of American combat troops (at the time of writing). Though this is already a third lower than the death rate of ancient soldiers, it doesn’t sound dramatically less dangerous. There is, however, a secret buried in Gabriel and Metz’s approach—it drastically overestimates the death rate of modern soldiers by factoring in the modern military “teeth-to-tail” ratio. This is the ratio of fighting soldiers to support soldiers, which in the modern U.S. army is roughly 1:11. Gabriel and Metz confine their survey to those modern soldiers who actually fight, but in ancient armies every soldier fought (their teeth-to-tail ratio was almost 1:1). A modern soldier’s comparative chance of dying in battle should, therefore, really be divided by eleven. That gives us about 2.62 percent chance of death in battle for American soldiers in Iraq—a far cry from the terrifying odds faced by ancient Eurasian warriors. It is even further from those faced by Tahitian soldiers fighting at sea in canoes: the Dutch explorer, Moerenhout, wrote that no Tahitian naval battle ever ended with less than 75 percent casualties, even on the victors’ side.35
Ancient battle was also far more terrifying than its modern counterpart because of its immediacy. Ancient soldiers slashed, stabbed, and clubbed each other from mere inches away, unlike modern combatants, who may be miles distant. The presence of so many thousands of men—all screaming, slaughtering, bleeding, and dying—undoubtedly made ancient battlefields a true vision of hell. At Cannae, for example, the surrounded Romans endured four hours of bloodbath horror as Hannibal’s Carthaginians crowded them in so tight they couldn’t lift their weapons, then butchered them with sword and spear. The Roman historian Livy records that after the battle several dead Romans were found to have dug holes and buried their own faces in the dirt—to escape their terror through self-suffocation. There is also a special horror to the maiming injuries ancient soldiers faced, particularly from swords. Livy reports that the Greeks were appalled to see the slashed flesh, hacked limbs, and split skulls suffered by their dead countrymen after defeat at the battle of Cynoscephalae—the first time they had fought brutal Roman swordsmen. Nor were the horrifying projectile injuries of modern war entirely absent. The Jewish historian Josephus records some of the gruesome wounds dealt out by Roman ballista (or catapults): one Jewish soldier decapitated by a stray ballista stone, and a pregnant woman whose fetus was smashed from her womb and flung one hundred yards by another. Even the absence of such technology, however, did not restrict the truly horrific injuries primitive
warriors might have to face. Champion fighters among those savage Tahitians, for instance, commonly clubbed their opponents completely flat, then cut a neck hole in their flattened corpses and wore them as grotesque ponchos!
Clearly, a very high level of bravery and aggression was needed to face these brutal trials. Would modern soldiers have been up to the job? Again, sadly, the answer is probably not. The famed U.S. Army combat historian Samuel “Slam” Marshall wrote in his World War II classic Men Against Fire that on average just 15 percent of American troops actually shot their weapons at the enemy, even when they themselves were under fire. Marshall put this down to the inherent nonaggressiveness of the American soldier and his consequent reluctance to take enemy life. An American officer who fought in the first Gulf War, Captain John Eisenhauer, confirmed this, stating that all his battalion’s soldiers had failed to fire on attacking Iraqis—except for those artillery gunners who could do so through a long-distance thermal sight. Subsequent studies to Marshall’s support this: the rate of fire of modern soldiers goes up in direct proportion to their distance from the enemy.36 So pronounced is the problem that the U.S. Army has adopted special training methods—such as pop-up firing ranges that create a game-like atmosphere—to raise the fire rate. Amusingly, the current U.S. Army proudly trumpets a 90 percent success rate from these measures—meaning 90 percent of their soldiers now actually fire the weapons it is their duty to wield.
One reason modern soldiers get away with such slackness is the speed of modern projectiles. Who, after all, can tell who fired any particular bullet among hundreds traveling at 933 yards per second? Tribal bowmen, on the other hand, had no such luxury: under the intimate gaze of their fighting brothers, they had no choice but to fight—and to win or die.
Although most, it seems, were so naturally aggressive they hardly needed the encouragement.
There is still one place in the world where the extraordinary belligerence of prehistoric tribesmen can be directly observed. In 1981 the crew of a Panamanian freighter, the Primrose, experienced it first-hand. Run aground one night in treacherous seas on a reef in the Bay of Bengal, the Primrose’s captain was relieved to see, come morning, that his ship had fetched up a mere few hundred yards from Sentinel Island, a lonely outpost of the isolated Andaman Islands. He shouldn’t have been. Just two days later he was forced to send an urgent message to the Indian Navy requesting an immediate airdrop of firearms for protection against a horde of tribesmen who had spent the day showering his freighter with arrows, and who were now, ominously, building canoes to bring their murderous fire even closer. The attacks eventually grew so severe that the Primrose’s crew had to be rescued by helicopter from the besieged freighter’s deck. Twenty-five years later, in 2006, two Indian fishermen were not so lucky; they were murdered by arrow fire under the horrified gaze of their colleagues after drifting too close to Sentinel Island (their bodies have never been recovered).
All these unfortunate seafarers had, unbeknown to them, stumbled upon an island of super-aggressive tribesmen whose reputation for violence stretches back to Marco Polo and beyond. One Arabic text from 851 CE said of the Andamanese that they:
…eat men alive. They are black with woolly hair, and in their eyes and countenance there is something quite frightful…they go naked and have no boats. If they had they would devour all who passed near them. Sometimes [with] ships that are wind-bound…in such cases the crew sometimes fall into the hands of the [natives], and most of them are massacred.37
British colonialists in the nineteenth century had their own confirmation of this, with attacks like those on the Proserpine, relentlessly assaulted by the Andamanese as it searched for the shipwrecked Emily, which had itself been attacked earlier. Holding the natives off with cannon shot, the search party found just one set of remains: “the corpse of the second officer [who] had been murdered and his corpse badly mangled, the top of his skull removed with a blunt saw-like instrument.”38 So aggressive are the Andamanese, even today, that they remain, effectively, the last uncontacted people on earth.
Incredibly, hostile societies such as the Andamanese even contain certain warriors so aggressive that their own side avoids them, too. In the Andaman Islands these hotheads, known as tarendseks, are widely loathed due to their habit of running amok and killing their own (such as the tarendsek recorded as murdering two of his tribe’s children simply because they disturbed his sleep). Among New Guinean Baruya tribesmen, similarly, berserk warriors known as aoulattas brave the enemy’s arrows and advance alone to smash those enemies’ skulls with their keuleukas (ancestral stone clubs), but likewise terrorize their own community with random murders.39 The prime examples of such super-aggressive warriors were, of course, the Viking berserkers. These ferocious fighters terrorized friend and foe alike in the Scandinavian world between the ninth and eleventh centuries ce. Disdaining armor, berserkers plunged into battle wearing simple wolf or bear skins (possibly even nothing at all) smiting and tearing enemies with unsurpassed fury. Contemporaries witnessed them howling like beasts and frenziedly biting their shields (one berserker apparently tore out an enemy’s jugular with his teeth). The key to the berserkers’ aggression was the berserkergang, the trancelike fury they entered, which apparently made them impervious to death and injury. Though used to devastating effect as shock troops by several early Norwegian kings, berserkers also exacted a heavy toll on their own people. Under King Eirik Bloodaxe in the eleventh century, for example, berserkers were outlawed due to their habit of challenging rich men to holmganga, the death duel, then slaying them and confiscating their property (and wives: berserkers were also noted rapists). Despite attempts to attribute the berserkergang to the drinking of psychoactive substances such as wine spiced with the bog myrtle plant, it appears the wild men’s frothing fury really was a simple case of hyper-aggressiveness, possibly genetic in origin.
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Beating the chest
The ferocious Yanomami Indians of the Brazilian and Venezuelan Amazon don’t have to go far for a fight—just as far as the nearest Yanomami man. So often do Yanomami men fight that they have developed a five-stage system of aggressive brawling, starting with the chest-pounding duel. In this ritual, combatants stand stock-still while their opponent adjusts their arms and chest for maximum vulnerability, takes a run-up, then smashes his fist into the man’s left pectoral muscle, right over the heart. The victim must withstand four or five of these blows, which raise painful and bloody bruises, to earn the right to retaliate—the winner being whoever doesn’t collapse or step away. If chest fighting doesn’t solve the dispute, combatants escalate things to a side-slapping duel, where open hands are swung at maximum velocity into the vulnerable spot between the opponent’s ribs and pelvis—a blow that frequently results in unconsciousness. The next step is a club fight, where fighters take turns cracking each other over the skull with heavy wooden staves; most Yanomami men tonsure the top of their heads to display their proud scars from this ordeal. If that doesn’t help, they might then step it up a notch to an axe fight using the blunt edge of their stone axes—though this is so often lethal they might as well just use the sharp side. If the opponents still aren’t sick of fighting (which is often the case), the combat will then turn really serious: bows will come out, along with six-foot arrows tipped with lethal curare poison. Ouch!
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Such fighting spirit is clearly lacking in modern soldiers, but so are other martial qualities. A quick scan of historical literature shows that modern grunts are seriously short on strength and endurance, too. The U.S. Army, for example, proudly highlights its physical fitness standards—infantry recruits are expected to be able to run 12 miles in 4 hours by the end of basic training. Yet this is couch-potato stuff. Members of the Yuan Dynasty’s Imperial Guard in ancient China had to run 56 miles in 4 hours for their fitness test.40 Alexander the Great’s Macedonians, similarly, ran between 36 and 52 miles a day, for 11 days straight, in their pursuit of the defeated Persian king, Darius
. The most leisurely pace of Roman armies, likewise, was 18 miles per day, but they often covered much more distance. In 207 BCE, for instance, the Consul Claudius Nero marched a Roman legion 310 miles in 6 days, at the rate of almost 50 miles per day, to meet and defeat Hannibal’s brother, Hasdrubal.41 This represents a dogtrot of 6 miles per hour, or about half the speed of modern Olympic marathon gold medallists—day after day after day. What’s more, marathon runners wear only light clothes, but Roman legionaries marched in full armor and carried extensive baggage. These days the U.S. Army, and even the Marines, limit every soldier’s load to a third of the average American recruit’s bodyweight which at an average 153 pounds works out to an approximate 50-pound load. Based on this rule, Nero’s soldiers, who weighed an average 145 pounds, should have carried just over 47 pounds for their ultra marathon; they actually carried up to 100 (two-thirds of their bodyweight).42 Other warriors, unburdened by such staggering loads, ranged even further, and faster. Shaka Zulu’s impis, for example, commonly ran over 50 miles a day when on campaign. One war leader of the East African Ruga-Ruga, Mirambo (“Heaps of Corpses”), was similarly once recorded as running sixteen miles to attack a village, conquering it, and then running 30 miles to assault another.43