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[Loud Whispers]

“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.

So far the team has published only a handful of peer-reviewed papers. With excavations stopped, pending more funding, they’re writing up publications now. But archaeologists familiar with the project say the implications are dramatic. Tollense could force a re-evaluation of the whole period in the area from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, says archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen  of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “It opens the door to a lot of new evidence for the way Bronze Age societies were organized,” he says.

For example, strong evidence suggests this wasn’t the first battle for these men. 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.

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

I know what you're all thinking, when will Paradox make Prehistory Kings. But in all seriousness this is amazing stuff, I wonder how long humans have been civilized and just how much is lost due to the erosion of time

[Morrigi]

Absolutely fascinating. Looks like it was one hell of a fight.

[TheBiggerFish]

PTW.

[redwallzyl]

 as you resident archeologist in training.



also ouch

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Emma]

also ouch

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I thought the same thing. Can someone explain who important this could be to history to me please? It seems pretty cool but I don't really know how important it will be.

[Trapezohedron]

as you resident archeologist in training.



also ouch

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: meme (click to show/hide)

[Morrigi]

also ouch

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I thought the same thing. Can someone explain who important this could be to history to me please? It seems pretty cool but I don't really know how important it will be.

The area was considered to be an uncivilized backwater at the time. The fact that a battle of this scale happened contradicts that.

[Tawa]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A bronze arrow penetrated this skull, reaching the brain.

Germanic soldier has been struck down.

In all seriousness, this is a really interesting discovery. I wonder why they were fighting?

[RedKing]

Fairly significant. As the article states, the idea of cohesive Bronze Age civilizations outside of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley and China is unheard of to this point.

For comparison, these battle would have been contemporaneous with the "Sea Peoples" who brought about the fall of the Hittite and Mycenaean civilizations. These had been assumed to have been proto-Greeks or Anatolian tribes, but this evidence gives pause to that. Perhaps they were Baltic/Germanic in origin, which would mean that they had seafaring technology and skills far surpassing most of the rest of the world at that point. Essentially, they'd have been proto-Vikings (as the Vikings did raid into the Mediterranean, 2000 years later). And like the Vikings, if these people were the "Sea Peoples", their depredations brought some major regional powers to an end and allowed new ones to emerge (like the Phoenicians and Hellenes).

The Late Bronze Age collapse is pretty well documented, but the causes and sources of some of the external pressures has been ambiguous.
(Disclaimer: While I have a BA in Archaeology, it's about 20 years old now, and my area of expertise was China, not Europe or the Near East).

[smjjames]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A bronze arrow penetrated this skull, reaching the brain.

Germanic soldier has been struck down.

In all seriousness, this is a really interesting discovery. I wonder why they were fighting?

Probably for the same reasons people have been fighting wars for millennia.

[Wolfhunter107]

I'm kinda interested in the bit that talked about how they came from quite a distance from the actual battle site. That's definitely gonna turn out to be interesting.

[Tawa]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A bronze arrow penetrated this skull, reaching the brain.

Germanic soldier has been struck down.

In all seriousness, this is a really interesting discovery. I wonder why they were fighting?

Probably for the same reasons people have been fighting wars for millennia.

Well, yeah. I'm just wondering which specific one. Territory? Religion? Personal disputes between leaders?

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A bronze arrow penetrated this skull, reaching the brain.

Germanic soldier has been struck down.

In all seriousness, this is a really interesting discovery. I wonder why they were fighting?

The peeps who dug them out and counted the bones and such reckon the fact that there were all these wars ending civilizations left and right might have helped. Who knows why they fought though, we don't really know anything about these people, we just sorta assumed all they did was hunt and spread out not doing much with each other
A battle of thousands, with professional soldiers / officers? History is discovered!

Well, yeah. I'm just wondering which specific one. Territory? Religion? Personal disputes between leaders?

Well they were coming from all over Europe to fight, with the article talking about their diet showing them from being drawn there in the same manner the Greeks assembled a massive host to besiege Troy
Though then again with Troy the Greeks began questioning themselves what they were actually fighting for

North of the Alps though, I assume it was one large group of people fighting their way through, causing a ruckus and alerting all the tribes all around, causing them to unite?

Why must prehistory be so elusive D:

[RedKing]

I'm kinda interested in the bit that talked about how they came from quite a distance from the actual battle site. That's definitely gonna turn out to be interesting.

Scholarship has revised a lot of opinions on transportation technology and the range of migrations in the pre-modern era. The Tocharians, for instance (although several hundred years after this) appear to have migrated from continental Europe to east-central Asia in a relatively small band of time, maybe one or two generations.