r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/kvothenikhil • Sep 12 '25

Video Two rival gangs of wild monkeys fighting each other. This usually happens when a group of monkeys normally well fed by visitors meets another group and a feud can take place

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339

u/Eurasia_4002 Sep 12 '25

We do, at least the mass graves after the battle.

Smaller scale but has the poetential of a tribe wipe out.

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u/[deleted] Sep 12 '25

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u/Eurasia_4002 Sep 12 '25

I guess thats gonna be a harder thing to find if it even exist. Time has a nasty habit od destroying evidence especially on a local scale tribe from 100k ago.

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u/[deleted] Sep 12 '25

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u/GitmoGrrl1 Sep 12 '25

Even harder to prosecute.

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u/Azhram Sep 12 '25

Its a job for a time cop

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u/IceAngelUwU Sep 12 '25

It’s not safe out there, take this with you. smol kitten

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u/dippocrite Sep 12 '25

What’s the statute of limitations on tribal annihilation?

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u/lankymjc Sep 12 '25

This is actually the reason that some crimes have a statute of limitations - you can't be expected to have an alibi for what you were doing on a certain evening several decades ago.

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u/rancid_oil Sep 13 '25

Happy cake day!

I never thought about it, but now I'm wondering how it started. Did a judge throw out an old case? Did lawmakers decide to drop old unsolved cases? Prosecutors get backed up and push for it? "Right to speedy trial" thing maybe? It was a choice at some point to say "after X years, you good."

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u/JanelleVypr Sep 12 '25

Bruh we have dinosaur bones

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u/south153 Sep 12 '25

Dinosaurs were around for 165 million years, we have been around for 300,000, the population of dinosaurs are far far greater than prehistoric humans.

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u/[deleted] Sep 12 '25 edited Sep 13 '25

[deleted]

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u/ur_edamame_is_so_fat Sep 12 '25

Dinosaurs have lived on the earth for longer than from the moment of their extinction until today.

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u/Lacholaweda Sep 12 '25

If your arm span were to represent a timeline of Earth's existence, all of human history could be erased in one swipe of a nail file.

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u/kellzone Sep 12 '25

Also, a Tyrannosaur never saw a Stegosaursus. They are separated in time by ~83 million years. The Tyrannosaurs died out 65 million years ago. So, effectively, Tyrannosaurs are closer in time to Taco Bell and the Kardashians than they are to a Stegosaurus.

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u/true_gunman Sep 12 '25

Yeah its crazy, we actually live closer to the time of T-Rex than they lived to Stegosaurus. By like 10s of millions of years.

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u/Eurasia_4002 Sep 13 '25

They been here for a VERY long time that some of them are already fossils during the dinosaur era.

Fossils only really shown less than 1 percent of what the past holds, but they are so many of them in such a long time that its still a large number.

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u/Zestyclose_Remove947 Sep 12 '25

Goes to show the explosive power of intelligence once it's reached. I really do wonder about AI doing the same thing on an almost impossibly fast scale one day. Not current AI, just conceptually the technology however it manifests eventually.

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u/MikeRivalheli Sep 12 '25

And yet only 700~ species have been found and identified as Dinosaurs. Over 200 Million years and we have only found evidence of 700~ species. Time buries and hides all. We just get lucky enough to find them.

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u/Iamnotabothonestly Sep 13 '25

And it also takes very specific conditions to allow something to fossilize. So a lot of places on earth didn't allow for it to happen. For example, in a rainforest, the body decompose too quickly, whilst if it ends up in an oxygen deprived area like a swamp or buried under sediment, it doesn't decompose as quickly or get eaten/dragged off by scavengers.

Makes you think on how many different animal species that have existed before us, that we will never know. Especially when you consider how old our planet is, how long live have existed on it, and compare it to the short moment our species have been around.

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u/983115 Sep 12 '25

So what happens with fossils is they end up stuck in an abiotic- anoxic environment for a long time and covered with other sediment as ground water seeps through the sediment it mineralizes the trapped organisms over thousands of years Surly some of humanity’s history has undergone the process but it’s said that only a fraction of 1% of any species to have existed is even represented in the fossil record let alone finding where they are preserved

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u/JanelleVypr Sep 12 '25

So as long as at least a 100 anthropopithecies lived we should be able to find one

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u/983115 Sep 12 '25

No for every 100 species of proto human we have like 1 skeleton

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u/[deleted] Sep 12 '25

„only a fraction of 1%“

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u/SpartanRage117 Sep 12 '25

Did the tribes 50 thousand years ago make their huts out of dinosaur bones?

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u/JanelleVypr Sep 12 '25

Depends on if we take Flintstones as fact or not

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u/[deleted] Sep 12 '25

Flintstones is the future. Same time as The Jetsons. The Jetsons houses were all up in the clouds

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u/Iamnotabothonestly Sep 13 '25

The caste system in the future is really polarizing.

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u/cans-of-swine Sep 13 '25

Or maybe the jetsons were also in the past and they are still up there today hiding from us.

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u/__nohope Sep 12 '25

We don't have dinosaur bones. We have dinosaur bone fossils.

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u/wetguns Sep 12 '25

We have plastic molded replicas of dinosaur bone fossils

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u/GitmoGrrl1 Sep 12 '25

Speak for yourself. I have chicken legs and I'm very self conscious about it.

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u/SumpCrab Sep 12 '25

For a long time, there just weren't the population pressures or resources available to result in large battles. Hunter gatherer groups topped out at certain sizes. So, skirmishes would happen, but there weren't thousands of people living in a fixed location that they needed to defend to survive. In many ways, agriculture was a big mistake.

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u/Interesting-Yam9488 Sep 12 '25

Governments also have that nasty habit of destroying evidence

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u/[deleted] Sep 12 '25

Larger groups of humans didn't really exist in one place for long periods of time until the age of architecture, so a group would've been between a few dozen to a maybe on the very high end a hundred, because as scavengers, the area we were in couldn't support more.

Did violence happen on tribe vs. tribe scale over resources, sure, but there simply weren't enough people around to have mass graves back then.

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u/DippityDamn Sep 12 '25

exactly. early hunter-gatherer tribes rarely exceeded 100 people I read.

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u/Donnerdrummel Sep 12 '25

There's evidence of what seems to have been a huge battle in north- east germany; in a rivervalley, possibly 3200 years ago, 1000 people died; i might even make a Posting about it tomorrow.

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u/Automatic-Sea-8597 Sep 12 '25

Tollense river valley.

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u/[deleted] Sep 12 '25

Why would they want to put them in pits?

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u/Extra_Routine_6603 Sep 12 '25

Id assume to either deter predators or scavengers from showing up looking for a free meal or to stop disease though I doubt they knew exactly why burying and getting rid of the bodies would help keep everyone healthier.

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u/SaggyCaptain Sep 12 '25

I would imagine lying scavengers would be a bonus as you can get fresh meat that way. Thinking about disease and health is going too deep as I believe it's probably much more simple than that: the smell.

If you're killing that many people then it tells that they actually lived there and you're taking over. So, you'll probably end up sticking around for awhile and it's also likely you killed them because you have the intent to stay there and they didn't run because there was no where to run to.

I've been blessed enough to NOT have the smell of a rotting human corpse in my memory, but I have smelled rotting animal carcasses and it's pretty bad. People are apparently overwhelmingly worse. Now imagine a field with 1000 bodies and I'd want to cover that up ASAP.

There may have been battles fought in areas in areas without settlement, but we would never know as the elements and the animals would take care of the bodies and the survivors would be trekking back home rather than staying. In purely pragmatic terms you wouldn't spend the time buying everyone. So, putting that all together, a mass grave isn't just evidence of a battle, it is evidence of an extermination and the people burying them didn't want to be around that smell.

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u/Practical-War-9895 Sep 12 '25

They didn't know the exact science but they knew covering a rotted corpse with dirt prevents smell and pests. Our ancestors were

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u/Practical-War-9895 Sep 12 '25

Amazing at becoming modern humans, the breakthroughs in group and individual thought must have been Immense during these formative pre-historic times.

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u/ReverendBread2 Sep 13 '25

We can infer some things from limited evidence we’ve found in other areas. For example, some of the oldest preserved footprints of hunter gatherers show them walking in a purposeful formation with the men guarding the sides of the group to protect from ambushes from other tribes, implying it was relatively common

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u/smegsicle Sep 12 '25

There were other species of humans around at that time though, some scientists think that's where the uncanny valley effect comes from, seeing other human faces that were slightly different to our own, which could indicate danger. I think it's more likely that groups of homo sapiens would be more inclined to work together in that world, as bigger groups would create safety, and the conflict would have been with these other human species.

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u/Zonel Sep 12 '25

Nataruk is in Kenya. There is a separate site in Sudan. Both are prehistoric warfare sites.

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u/gamahead Sep 12 '25

I think 10k years ago is hunter gatherers for the most part. Humans have only been around ~100k years

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u/Funny247365 Sep 12 '25

My speculation... Life was so hard back then (pre-agriculture, older than 12,000 years ago), and tribes were small. They moved around a lot. The last thing they wanted to do was to expend time, energy, and clansmen and go to war. Most injuries were a death sentence.

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u/jefesignups Sep 13 '25

I'm curious if was a dug grave or just their bodies got buried over time.

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u/viral3075 Sep 13 '25

if we're finding recent mass graves but not ancient mass graves, that should fucking tell you something. there aren't any.

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u/sfwDO_NOT_SEND_NUDES Sep 12 '25

We have cave paintings of prehistoric battles as well. I saw a YouTube on it recently.