lol, still… I’m in a HEMA club for Kopesh, so indoor AC is a must for me lol
I’ve wanted to take up HEMA but clubs are always hard to find, especially when you move every few years.
But I wouldn’t mind not having the AC XD
edit We have gone WWWWWAAAAAAAAY off topic, if you want to continue talking in a PM we can do that, but we should probably leave the thread for Bronze Age and Neolithic warfare posts 
lol. I have ADD sometimes…
But… the khopesh is bronze age…
@Dernwine @Sargon the story they teach us in France (at primary school level so accurate is not their main concerne) is :
- Franks soldiers take the town of Soisson and loot it.
- Amoung the loot there is a vase which belong to the church
- The clergy asks King Clovis if he take give the vase back, he agreed
- During the loot spliting Clovis say that the vase had to be given back and remove it from the loot
- One soldier disagree and break the vase
- Clovis seem to forgive the soldier
- Some time later during an formal review of the troops Clovis stop in front of the soldier who broke the vase and ask why his weapons are dirty
- Clovis take the soldier weapons and threw them on the ground
- When the soldier kneel to pick up his weapons Clovis smash his head with his axe while saying : 'Remenber Soisson vase"
A nice story 
I don’t how accurate it is. There is an expression in french, if I translate it litteraly it meam “National novel”. It is the French History created in the 19th centuary when nationalism start to rise and it glorify the french past. It is full of story like this one (and the one with Roland) and I hate it… Too black and white, a lot of 19th point of view on classical/medieval time evens. It is not teach at school anymore but some conservatives and extrem right party want it back.
cool, I remember watching some god awful history channel documentary that covered that little story as if it was 100% accurate and it made me laugh, even when I was a child.
Look on the bright side: the account of Clovis’s skull bashing comes from Gregory of Tours, who wrote it around 575 AD, so while your French primary school might not have been 100% percent accurate, that specific story isn’t a 19th century creation 
@Dernwine That true . However Clovis was the one who conver himself and the Frank to Christianity so maybe Gregory of Tours, who was bishop, try to make the King look better that he was. It is the same with all ancients writer. At least he was from the same time period (less that 100 years after).
It’s the same with every writer in every period. Always consider your sources when reading History.
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A really nice and exciting thread! Too bad, unfortunately missed …
3 things I found still worth mentioning.
- It was certainly not only the deer and roe deer what be hunting, but also the wild horse, the hare, the bear, the reindeer boar, the goose, the duck, and so on. Spear as a throwing or throwing weapon (or in combination with a limb), stone slingshot and traps, smaller animals as bait for larger animals … etc.
- Remember, in the event of an argument, everyone fought with all that was at his disposal. Often, surely, escape was the better way, because our ancestors could already recognize our ancestors (or we would not be able to see them) and decided whether a fight was to be won. For a shot with the bow - of whatever quality - you need distance. The decision-making or flight had therefore to be taken before the “hand work”.
- The topic “elite” or “caste” is exciting for the company’s development. Early forms of nobility, from which Prince (the first among equals) formed.
Forgive my bad English
I’d say the first instance of a “prince” as we would know it would have likely been in the Sumerian city states under the title of Lugal. This title, similar to the later Roman title of Dictator, was a special title granted to warlords in times of peril by the En (priests). Eventually, these Lugal became powerful enough to usurp power away from the En and eventually build their own E (palaces). With this advent, the idea of succession and heirs likely became more commonly accepted.
Kinda late to the discussion about bow hunting, but from my experience hunting red deer, it’s a hell of a lot more difficult than just aiming at the chest when you are hunting with a bow, first unlike rifle hunting you have to get a lot closer to be effective which obviously makes it easier for the animal to detect you, so you usually cannot just rely on ambush as you can when hunting with a rifle; second when using a bow, the angle and direction of the shot matters a lot more to how deep the shot gets, and if it hits a rib it usually doesn’t kill on the spot, unless you are very close, and I imagine these problems are even greater if you are using a primitive bow with stone arrow heads.
I imagine the reason some hunters in Africa to this day still hunt through exhausting the animal is because that’s the most effective way for them, the bushmen from the Namibian desert use small bows that have nowhere near enough power to kill the animal, but the bleeding caused by it helps weaken the animal and facilitate tracking it, which can be a pain in the ass is some environments. For anyone interested IIRC there was an episode of the BBC documentary Human Planet that showed this.
Pretty sure we all said that already to some degree. Obviously, hunting is not as simple as “stick em with the pointy end”.
As is documented and is still in wide practice today, covering yourself in the scent of the animal (feces, hair, blood, etc.) and positioning yourself down wind of the animal would facilitate an easier time ambushing it. There are plenty of ways to sneak up on a deer: hide in the trees, bushes, rivers, etc. or make loud noises to scare them off into a trap.
The angle of the shot? Sorry, not sure what that means in the context that we were talking about. We all assumed that the shots were learned over thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of hunts. I’m sure the hunters knew what angle to shoot at and what depth they needed to get to take the animal down. No flesh wound would take down a doe in one shot was basically my argument.
The bows depicted in the painting were not small-bows. They were relatively normal sized 3-4 foot bows with arrows that are deeply lodged in the animal. And the Namibian bowmen use poison tipped arrows, so their 2 foot short bows don’t need to be strong to take down large game. The reason they likely track their prey is that the poison takes time to set in and therefore chasing it is easier for them to do.
Let us try to move into a group of hunters and later settlers who are still at the very beginning of a society. According to which criteria the one “chieftain” would select.
And - do women have a fellow-language right? Is there any hierarchy and something like legal norms? How do they look at a natural people?
Think this could make this game very interesting.
He means the angle the arrow penetrates the body at. No matter how good you are, you will not always strike a deer, moving or still, at the perfect angle needed. Especially since the tolerances between a clean shot and a shot that hits a rib are quite small: Therefore reducing the chances of a 1 hit kill.
While you are right, I’m not sure I trust the artists 100% here. Maybe they did get the bows right, maybe they didn’t. If we interpret the picture literally we’d have to assume that human beings where hideously malformed ;). Luckily the finds we have mentioned elsewhere do support the idea that the bows where indeed not tiny (probably because we have more wood to make good quality bows from than people in the Namib).
@tschuschi I’ll write in German and in English since I know your German is better.
Heutzutage glauben die meisten das im Neolithicum die meisten Kulturen keine Soziale Struktur hatten. Alle mitglieder der gruppe waren mehr oder weniger gleich gestellt und alles wurde gleicht geteilt. Eine richtige Hierarchie hat sich nur entwikelt als menschen sich in Doerfe und Staette niedergelassen haben (aber selbst dan ist das nicht immer passiert. Kulturen in “Alt Europa” obwohl die niedergelassen waren, und zum teil in massive sidelungen mit ueber 10.000 maenschen wohnten, ohne irgent etwas wie ein “Prinz”). Wie @Sargon gesagt hat, das erste mah, soweit mir bewusst ist, wo wir beweisen koennen das es passiert ist war in das Alte Summer.
Today most people believe that the majority of cultures in the Neolithic didn’t have a social structure. All members of a given group where more or less equal and everything was shared equally. A true Hierarchy only became established as people settled into villages and cities (and even then it didn’t always happen, a lot of cultures in “old Europe,” despite being settled and lived, in some cases, lived in large settlements with over 10,000 people without any form of “prince”). As @Sargon said, the first time, as far as I’m aware, where a social hierarchy can be proven was in Old Sumeria.
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Though my works are fiction, I don’t provide any significant social structure for the small tribes. I only add a limited social structure for the occasional very large tribe or Proto City. Even then, it’s mostly councils of Elders, priest / priestesses ( more Shaman like then anything formal), and trade specialists.
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Thank you very much for your understanding, I am really a little “disabled” in English 
On what I wanted to go out: the game begins in a time, from which we know very little, much to suspect. We also have space for speculation and could try. Would be exciting to find out whether civilization had come to the fore as we “know” it today or whether it could have taken a completely different cours
Danke sehr für dein Verständnis, bin in Englisch wirklich ein wenig “behindert”
Auf was ich hinaus wollte: Das Spiel beginnt ja in einer Zeit, aus der wir nur wenig wissen, vieles vermuten. Wir haben also auch Raum für Spekulation und könnten probieren. Wäre spannend zu erfahren, ob es zwingend zu der Zivilisation gekommen wäre, wie wir sie heute “wissen” oder ob es auch hätte einen völlig anderen Verlauf nehmen können.
Haha woops. Sorry should’ve remembered: English.
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Just found this video. This make me think Neolithic battles could have been in some sense very much like this.
What do you think?
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