New discoveries hint at 5,500 year old fratricide at Hamoukar, Syria

Five years ago, archaeologists found the “earliest evidence for large scale organized warfare in the Mesopotamian world.” Using slings and clay bullets a – likely Uruk – army took over the city of Hamoukar, burning it down in the process. Now, new discoveries at a nearby settlement shed more light on the 3500 BC battle – and raise more questions. If the invading army was from Uruk, did they kill their own people? If so, why?

Hamoukar is a city that flourished in northern Syria since at least 4000 BC. They traded in obsidian and in later times copper working became increasingly important to the city’s economy. Thousands of clay sealings – once used to lock doors or containers and impressed with stamp seals – were found at the ancient site. They tell of a bureaucratic system that was almost as complex as our own.

Uruk was a massive city, located to the south in modern day Iraq. Unlike Hamoukar it was lacking in natural resources such as timber and metal. Yet, despite this lack of resources, its people were on the move. “This Uruk culture from the south started expanding all over the Middle East,” said Professor Clemens Reichel, of the University of Toronto and Royal Ontario Museum, who is leading the excavation at Hamoukar. His team’s work is being supported by the Department of Antiquities in Syria and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

One of these colonies was located just outside Hamoukar. It’s a small site, probably occupied by no more than a few hundred people. Its pottery remains were scattered over a hectare. When researchers analysed the pottery they found that much of it consisted of Uruk pottery. “It’s the same stuff that you would find in Southern Mesopotamia, almost 700 km to the south,” said Reichel.

Researchers believe that this colony was there to facilitate trade, but was probably not controlled by Uruk’s rulers. “I’m tending more to them being sub-state entities,” said Reichel, private entrepreneurs, perhaps like the British East India Company of more recent colonial times.

In 3500 BC Hamoukar was destroyed by a violent attack. Slings and clay bullets were the force’s primary weapons. While incredibly crude, by today’s standards, these weapons could do a lot of damage. The archaeologists tested the slings' effectiveness by creating their own bullets and attacking their own dig house.

“The impact is quite remarkable,” said Reichel. At one point he was accidentally hit in the head by a colleague who was practising. “He wasn’t very good at that point, but by god I felt it,” he said. “Once he got really good, the speed, the velocity, that those guys get, is amazing... I’m virtually certain it can be fatal.”

While Professor Reichel survived his encounter, many people at Hamoukar did not. The attackers broke inside the city’s three meter thick city wall, the fighting continued and buildings were set on fire.

Artefacts from Hamoukar which postdate the battle, are similar in style as items created at Uruk. This makes an Uruk army the likeliest attackers. "If the Uruk people weren't the ones firing the sling bullets, they certainly benefited from it. They took over this place right after its destruction," Reichel told the New York Times back in 2005.

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Boeing buys a ticket for the new space race

"Please ensure your spine is in the stiffened position and your fears of hurtling towards the stars are stowed for take-off. Any passengers not planning to visit the Space Station today should disembark now."

These are niceties you probably will not hear should you become one of the lucky terrestrials to land a spot in the new Boeing "space taxi" that could be blasting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida as soon as in 2015. It will be cosy in there – you, perhaps another couple of casual tourists and, hopefully, three or four professional astronauts.

Catching a cab to the constellations may sound like science fiction, but not according to Boeing. The aviation giant has entered a joint venture with Space Adventures to catapult Joe Public to the stars. Based in Virginia, Space Adventure is the outfit that has arranged already for a very few – and very rich – individuals to visit the International Space Station (ISS) by way of Russia's Soyuz spacecraft. Seven souls have taken that trip.

The Boeing announcement offers a new glimpse into a future where space routes will be commercially exploited and travellers running out of places to see on Earth will suddenly have new, rather inky horizons stretching beyond the planet. Vanishing are the days when space travel is exclusively government-run and funded and blast-off is something you only watch on television. Globe-trotting will no longer do. Prepare to space-trot.

The plan – though it hinges almost entirely on the outcome of squabbles in Washington about the future of Nasa – is for Boeing to build capsules much like the familiar Apollo ones; blunt cones, just 15 feet across, and then send them up to the space station carrying astronauts from Nasa and tourists. Space Adventures will do the marketing, persuading you and me that a week in space might make for a different sort of holiday.

The space-excursion industry already has other players, most notably the British aviation tycoon Richard Branson, the founder of \Virgin Galactic, which expects to begin test flights beyond the Earth's atmosphere, all being well, next year. The company said it welcomes Boeing joining the fray because the two will not be in direct competition.

Customers of the Virgin Galactic, which has its base in the Mojave Desert close to Los Angeles, will be paying far less for a much less involved expedition. They will essentially go up into space for three hours or so and then come back down again, all for around $200,000. If it is anything like the rides already offered on the Soyuz, those riding on the Boeing capsule will pay as much as $40m for a round-trip ticket. They will circumnavigate Earth as they rendezvous with the ISS and they will remain in space, presumably, for days at a time.

"This is not a competing product in any shape, sense or form," said Will Whitehorn, the president of Virgin Galactic, arguing that what Boeing has in mind will "be more like putting lots of Darwins on the Beagle than space tourism".

That US government policy on space exploration is in flux means opportunity and peril for the new Boeing project. The Obama White House is pushing for a new direction for Nasa, under which it would give up trying to develop new spacecraft of its own to ferry astronauts to the ISS – the current shuttle fleet has only about two more missions left before it is retired – and turn instead to commercial companies to develop them. It is into this breach that Boeing hopes to tread. Taking tourists as well as astronauts is a way towards greater viability.

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Making whoopie with Neanderthals

The point about science is that it provides the best tools we have for discovering the truth about the world around us, but this doesn't of course mean that it can always give us simple answers to big questions.

Take the long-running debate over the Neanderthals, the species Homo neanderthalis, the last close relative of our own tribe, Homo sapiens, to go extinct. The question is whether the Neanderthals were a just a distant relative – an evolutionary dead end who did not interbreed with anatomically modern humans – or whether they were indeed part of our direct ancestry.

Soon after the first bones of the Neanderthals were found in the Neander Valley of Germany in 1856, scientists proposed that they were the immediate "cavemen" ancestors of present-day Europeans. It fitted in with Darwinian theory and the idea of a progressive, linear line of ascent, from apeman to modern man – a notion that is now disabused as a hopelessly simplistic view of our complex family tree.

But the thing about science is that it never stops raising fresh questions that can constantly undermine the comfortable scientific orthodoxy. The carbon dating showed that Neanderthals lived in Eurasia for tens of thousands of years before anatomically modern humans arrived there from their migration out of Africa. But then it emerged that for thousands of years the two species occupied the same territory, and even the same cave systems – but almost certainly not at the same time.

The archaeology suggested little interaction between early, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, known as Cro-Magnon man in Europe, and the seemingly less sophisticated Neanderthals. Anatomically, the stocky Neanderthals with their beetle-brows, flared rib cages and short limbs seemed no match to the gracile moderns with their clever tool making and arty body ornaments.

Although it became clear that the Neanderthals were not the direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, scientists were split on just how the two species interacted when they presumably lived cheek by jowl for thousands of years. The alternatives were memorably summed up by anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington University: making war or making whoopee.

The latest study aimed at answering this question suggests the latter – when Neanderthal man met Homo sapiens woman it resulted in what scientists euphemistically call "gene flow". It seems that this interbreeding, which probably took place somewhere in the Middle East when the first modern humans migrated out of Africa, has resulted in a little bit of Neanderthal in all of us today with a non-African ancestry.

We know this because this remarkable piece of research has extracted fragments of DNA from Neanderthal bones dating to 40,000 years ago and, even more remarkably, the scientists involved, led by the legendary Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, constructed about 60 per cent of the full Neanderthal genome, the 3bn chemical bases that make up the entire DNA code. This enabled them to compare the Neanderthal genome with that of five modern-day people from around the world, and, to Paabo's astonishment, Neanderthal DNA sequences were found in the genomes of the three people who lived outside Africa. Paabo freely admits that he was biased against such a finding. His earlier work on mitochondrial DNA suggested no such interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans, so his initial reaction was that the data had to be a statistical fluke, or erroneous.

But it is a measure of greatness in science if you can accept something that you had previously rejected, when faced with new and convincing evidence.

Comparisons between the genomes of modern humans and the Neanderthals clearly indicated that there was a small but significant amount of interbreeding early in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, most probably after our species had first emerged from Africa between about 80,000 and 50,000 years ago. Other scientists, such as Professor Joao Zilhao of Bristol University, who has long argued that there was close cultural and biological interaction between Neanderthals and modern humans, can rightly feel vindicated for their somewhat unfashionable stance.

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