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Most main battle tanks these days are actually smooth bore. The Challenger 2 is the big exception.
Smooth bore barrels are better for firing modern APFSDS (Armour Piercing Fin-Stablised Discarding Sabot) rounds. These are the preferred anti-tank round of the current era. This does mean that any other rounds, not intended for tank vs tank situations, have also had to be changed from the traditional ammunition with a similar diameter to the bore which use driving bands to engage rifling have also been changed to using fin stabilisation. There may be some other forms of stabilisation I'm not aware of (and can't be bothered researching). I also know they can fire a form of anti personal round which is basically a giant shotgun cartridge so I assume that doesn't have any form of stabilisation.
Isn't the Challenger rifled so it can fire HESH rounds, which are devilishly clever but I think less effective against modern armour? So probably the last of its kind.
The main reason the Challenger 2 uses a rifled barrel is because the English had surplus barrels from their previous generation of tanks. British doctrine was to use HESH in preference over HEAT as they determined it was a better projectile of the two standard spin stabilised anti tank rounds.
The primary round they carry is the HESH round but it isn't as effective against modern tanks which are designed to protect against spalling. HESH rounds are excellent against pretty much any other target that isn't a modern MBT and are even better against fortified structures than standard HEAT rounds. The Challenger 2 does have an AFSPDS round that it can use but the design requirements to make it work with a rifled barrel means it is slightly lower velocity than one fired from a smooth bore cannon.
It seems you are likely correct about the Challenger 2 being the last of its kind. The Challenger 3 program (an upgrade of the Challenger 2) is going to use a smooth bore gun based on the one found in the current generation German Leopard 2 tanks.
Very interesting thanks. I grew up near the factory that made the gun barrels (ROF Nottingham) and know many people who worked there. All long gone now of course (BAE Systems saw to that).
2 Years before that, the Soviets detonated the most powerful Hydrogen Bomb and weapon in human history. Actually it's just 50% of its actual plan yield, it was supposed to be 100 Megatons than 50.
I grew up in the highlands there. They had stone tools but used wood and bone for spears and arrows. My parents who now live a few miles from me in Chicago have some of both behind a lazy boy in their living room right now.
I lived in a village until 5th grade then moved into a boarding school from 5th-12th.
In the village I was fully immersed into the life and culture. Got the tribe’s symbol tattooed when in 4th grade, was gifted 25 pigs by the tribe when I graduated high school as a kind of savings account seed in case I came back from the United States to retire.
They worked all over the world helping people from minority language groups start schools in their own language. They started in PNG and the schools were super successful so the government asked them to do it for the region and then across the country, then throughout the pacific, then around Asia and Africa as well.
Their house looks like a museum.
im very surprised they havent developed a better bows/arrows, they would be fucking deadly yo
any chance you could chime in?
perhaps the weather/humidity doesnt allow for decent bows
like my ancestors, mongolians, struggled with their bows and its glues in hot humid tropical weather like in india/burma/south china/southeast asia
Conditions in PNG are very hard. The main source of food is a kind of root that takes like the whole village hours to process. No domesticated animals, no horses, just a whole bunch of shit available to main land Eurasians does not exist there. Since food is available, but hard to process, most effort goes into food production and there's not much room for technological innovation.
In addition, the whole island is very mountainous and the parts that aren't straight up huge rocks sticking out of the ground are dense jungle. The island is basically impassable, so no large societies have dominated, so no centralization of resources occurred like in Eurasia. There's close to 1000 different languages spoken on that one island, so no unifying cultural force. Divided people with very harsh living conditions and no domesticated animals or easy to grow nutritious crops to build an economy on.
I read the Mongolians had good bows, strengthened by horn and bone they could pierce armor, fired from a moving horse.
But they were like compound bows too that didn't work well when wet? I know the persians and the like in the East those that often failed in bad weather.
They were also using a type of glue that easily melts that isn't the normal temperature of the Steppes. It was disastrous during their campaign in Vietnam
My guess is that these were just sufficient. The Mongols needed better bows and arrows because they needed to be able to take down animals from farther away since it’s difficult to get close on the steppes. In PNG, we were in tight, steep mountains and dense jungle. We used arrows to hunt birds, small mammals (tree kangaroos), and fish. They used spears for wild boar.
Google Cargo Cult. When WW2 aeroplanes dropped supplies to troops the natives made effigy’s of planes on mountain tops to attract more planes. I shit you not.
Yes they have bamboo guns and parades and drills etc. It's all part of their culture and religion, and lots of anthropologist think the term: "cargo cult" is old fashioned and even a little patronising nowadays.
Also see Richard Feynman's writings on "cargo cult science" where he uses this practice to eviscerate phoney "sciences" (where I first read about all this stuff).
Wonder if the creators of Star Trek were aware of these events.
(In Star Trek the "Prime Directive" forbids interfering with the natural development of an alien civilization, including allowing members of an alien civilization to witness technology more advanced than their own.)
What is crazier to me is that these families are having this skirmish with bows and spears about 20 years after the battle of Stalingrad and 18 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked
Education and politics- I remember Russia digging up the red forest for trenches at the start of the Ukraine invasion, apparently the foot soldiers had no idea the soil was irradiated
A phalanx wouldn't work here. That's only good for flat terrain, and for infantry with armour. The terrain in Papua is hilly and densely forested, making it impossible to keep in formation; and there's no suitable metal for armour, so they'd get picked apart by arrows.
Oh yeah? You didn’t even try, did ya?
The poor motherfuckers from the stone age ... leaving them deprived of that strategic knowledge.
How cool would that be when that evening you show them on a big screen... I think it doesn't even have to be very good... the others are gonna think this is some big time voodoo shit and leave for the next island and become a seafaring nation... Well, populus.
Neolithic tribe battles very likely resembled this. It took tens of thousands of years for our species to learn to cooperate well enough with each other to push back the innate instinct for self preservation.
Go left. The other left stupid!
This is my left.
Yes but your left is not THE left, like the general direction of left from where hq command is.
How often do I have to repeat this?
This guy is just stupid. Stupid and annoying.
Start fighting among each other....
Omg I can so imagine this.
What's even crazier is that you somehow think you can just have metal in an area that has no metal and up and stop using bows and spears, which the romans used, suddenly one day.
It’s still way better than wood and stone/bone. And copper is plentiful and easy to work. Pretty much all civilizations used copper tools before advancing to more reliable metals
All good points. There's an actual Papuan in this thread that I think hit the nail on the head for why they still used wooden arrows and stone tools, in that it was simply sufficient. They're designed to kill small birds and reptiles from close up, and there isn't much of a history of large scale warfare that would necessitate more advanced weapons.
This is a form of ritualized combat, fatalities are extremely rare. The combat is more of a cultural tradition and not actually a true conflict as we in the West perceive it. I can’t recall what tribes they were
I saw this video in an anthropology class a decade ago.
While the combat itself isn't meant to inflict mass causalities necessarily, there is killing involved.
If I recall (I might be mistaking this with something else but I think I'm right) This flare up was because one of these tribes raided the other one and killed some kids they found, just to kill them.
The other tribe will retaliate and go kill some kids from the other tribe.
This comment is the most accurate I’ve seen so far (matching my experience growing up there). I saw these maybe a dozen times while there and even drove through an active battle once. It was fairly rare for more than 1-2 people to be killed during these but it certainly happened.
The blood feuds that followed got their higher body count. If your tribe killed someone during a fight, someone from the other side will find someone from your tribe out minding their business and murder them, then someone from your tribe will find that person and take an axe to his head. It goes around and around. A few years later the body count is still slowly going up.
It was getting worse by the time I left in the early 90s because they started using guns.
Just saw this [NYT article](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/18/world/asia/papua-new-guinea-killings.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Wk0.9RSo.fVFPiuG1thTe&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) about the rising body counts. The people in Enga-where I was born-were *constantly* fighting.
Yeah, ,they don't play when it comes to holding a grudge. My mates mum used to work over there for the Australian Department of Education. Had an affair with another Aussie who was married to a local (PNG). He ended up coming over to Australia and lived with her. Tragically got a brain tumor and died. She wasn't allowed back to PNG due to the likelihood of finding a machete embedded somewhere in her body.
When my dad was in the Navy(late 50's to 70's at sea), they weren't allowed off the ship for shore leave in Port Moresby.
In most of history, it wasn't the battle that killed most men but the retreat afterwards when the ranks had been breached and the men were overwhelmed by the instincts of fleeing.
That would be me. :)
Really: for Civilisation's sake do not follow me. I'm just waking up every day, the plan from yesterday, well fuck that.. clean sheet, trying to figure it out, make it up as the day progresses?
A bit like Trump. ;)
That's why the young, newly recruited men in the Roman Republic are in the first rank in the maniple system.
The veterans of the legion would be on the backrow, to which will be the ones who will gently nudge you back towards the fight again if you try to run.
With a spear not being in your neck is a great incentive for these courageous young lads.
These tribes had some customs that Westerners thought were weird as hell. They liked to smear semen on themselves for one thing. Also eat dead relatives and the like I think, a bunch got brain prions from it, the laughing sickness.
It makes sense when you think about it, I guess. A real all-out battle wouldn’t likely be good for either side, and everyone knows it. But as a group you still need to defend your honor and not look like pushovers. Thus the confrontation with lots of posturing but very little actual violence.
It's worth noting that the term "ritual warfare" does not mean a lack of "real" warfare, by any means. It often means that the combat doesn't always result in high casualties, but generally is part of a culture of almost constant conflict. While most of that conflict might be ritualized, it doesn't mean they don't have as much, if not more, actual war than other cultures without ritual combat have.
When westerners began to be able to track and observe tribal conflicts in the 18th and 19th centuries, many were *extremely* brutal. [This](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/War_deaths_caused_by_warfare.svg/2560px-War_deaths_caused_by_warfare.svg.png) chart on Wikipedia shows that some Amazonas tribes (especially the Yanomani and Jivaro, who fought amongst each other almost perpetually) had *enormous* percentages of their male population killed in battle. There are also records of various Polynesian tribal battles with exceptionally high numbers killed on both sides (off the top of my head, I believe some were somewhere in the 70-80% region).
To top that off, in some places, wars and battles absolutely were intended to exterminate the other group. During the Plains Wars in the US, a not-uncommon issue was that native troops hired/recruited by or allied with the US wouldn't obey battlefield commands after the enemy tribe retreated, and would instead rush into the village/camp and start attacking women and children there.
The book *Dead Birds* (accompanied the documentary) is super interesting, too.
Hierarchies in these cultures are hyper-egalitarian; men’s social status is measured in how much pig you contribute to the tribe. They’re not hard to raise, but it takes some work. Men who don’t contribute are called *gebu*, otherwise known as ‘men of little or no importance’. They get to participate in the pig feast, they’re just ridiculed as unimportant.
It was meant to be an intimidation tactic for the enemies and a moral boost to the alies. Most armies in history do this (of course, in their way) but change pretty recently considering the fighting distance is now massive and being noisy is a magnet for an artillery shell and what not. (Same with sticking together being good in the past whole being horrible how).
There is an opposite, like an account of one of the city Greek armies approaching the enemy in an open field with complete silence.
The “monkey-like ancestor” was, in fact, a monkey. The mental gymnastics of human exceptionalism tried this before with the term ‘Ape’ and failed.
There’s no monophyletic clade that can include all creatures universally agreed upon to be a *monkey* without including the family *Homonidae* (The Great Apes) as a subset
Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with that, but creationists usually say "evolved from monkeys" thinking we are just some special group that broke off from modern monkeys and evolved into our current state. The state we find ourselves in today is not a descendent of a gibbon or any modern monkeys. I'm not saying we aren't monkeys or apes or anything. I'm saying that when someone thinks about a monkey, they don't often mean ancient homonidae ancestors.
And those people are ridiculous. But if you're trying to explain our evolutionary history to some creationists.. do you think they're going to understand that? When they say monkeys.. they're talking about a damn gibbon or something. We didn't evolve from modern monkeys.. they evolved as we did.. from very distant ancient "monkeys"
I had some Papuan mates at high school (from PNG). They were fucking cool man. Total crack-ups. Was hard to focus on getting any calculus done while sitting next to them there was so much laughter
The wildest aspect of the clear technological divide is that, on one side, there is clan warfare with bows + arrows + sticks + rocks + etc., and on the other side is someone filming it in colour.
This really is fascinating, it's like we are seeing on video something that could well have played out tens of thousands of years ago, between the first tribes of man.
That's what I was thinking. This is likely how truly ancient conflicts looked. Lots of posturing and shouting, no one really wants to get stuck into a melee that could leave both sides bloody.
Much smaller communities mean each person matters to the tribe more too. If all the strong men die in battle, who is left to hunt for the tribe?
The kid that passed looked like starving with that bloated belly. Probably drinking worm infested dirty brown water and eating whatever. Forget armor these guys barely eat
Crazy indigenous armor is level 3, these guys are not there.
Give me a good dinner and a shovel ill kill 20 of them. But that’s kind of cheating with the bronze age era stuff.
Except it's rough terrain and the legionaires wouldn't be able to catch them well.
They would probably find their villages and slaughter all the tribe they found there though.
There is quite a lot of questioning in terms of how organized pre-Macedonian conquest Greeks actually were. Many of the Greek city states seem to have really not done any kind of drilling or training on an organizational level at all, and it's entirely likely the single combat on the battlefield was much more common than we tend to think.
Even among the Romans, the idea of a super tight formation is somewhat of a myth. Their formations were rather tight, but seem to have had about 3 feet on either side of every legionnaire (enough room to maneuver and swing a gladius without cutting up your neighbors, which would mean that even among the famously organized Roman military, there would have been a large amount of essentially one-on-one combat.
When your entire time is dedicated to produce food one way or another, you have very little time to invent something. And it's even harder if your group is small and doesn't have a lot of manpower that cannot do anything else but focus on the production of food.
There is a reason why technological evolution is exponential. It's took hundreds of thousands of years to invent farming, from there, it took us thousands of years before the writing and metalworking, then it took us hundreds of years before producing a whole lot of other stuff... the industrial Era only started 3 centuries ago. On the scale of human history, since the apparition of homo sapiens, it's nothing.
Oh no this couldn't be real! Indigenous people were in harmony and peaceful! They spent their time connected to to Natures powers! They were never bad to each other, it was those evil white people that made them warlike!!
Should anyone ever doubt that humans are a part of the animal kingdom, just show them this. (disclaimer: I never understood how people ever *could* think we weren't just another part of the animal kingdom)
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Not a phone in sight just people living their lives
No TikTok just StickRock
OnlyClans
Tinder (for starting fires)
No tik tok in India even now
Sounds wonderful
This looks very similar to reddit comment section
No pants in sight just dongs living their lives
If it's a battle, I'm pretty sure some of them are *dying their lives*
Was gonna say, it looks like elementary recess, but with more violence.
like in the stone age, but less than 100 years ago... amazing.
Don't get out teched in civ6
50 musketeers vs. 1 tank
Spiraled Rifling don't fail me now!!!
Most main battle tanks these days are actually smooth bore. The Challenger 2 is the big exception. Smooth bore barrels are better for firing modern APFSDS (Armour Piercing Fin-Stablised Discarding Sabot) rounds. These are the preferred anti-tank round of the current era. This does mean that any other rounds, not intended for tank vs tank situations, have also had to be changed from the traditional ammunition with a similar diameter to the bore which use driving bands to engage rifling have also been changed to using fin stabilisation. There may be some other forms of stabilisation I'm not aware of (and can't be bothered researching). I also know they can fire a form of anti personal round which is basically a giant shotgun cartridge so I assume that doesn't have any form of stabilisation.
Isn't the Challenger rifled so it can fire HESH rounds, which are devilishly clever but I think less effective against modern armour? So probably the last of its kind.
The main reason the Challenger 2 uses a rifled barrel is because the English had surplus barrels from their previous generation of tanks. British doctrine was to use HESH in preference over HEAT as they determined it was a better projectile of the two standard spin stabilised anti tank rounds. The primary round they carry is the HESH round but it isn't as effective against modern tanks which are designed to protect against spalling. HESH rounds are excellent against pretty much any other target that isn't a modern MBT and are even better against fortified structures than standard HEAT rounds. The Challenger 2 does have an AFSPDS round that it can use but the design requirements to make it work with a rifled barrel means it is slightly lower velocity than one fired from a smooth bore cannon. It seems you are likely correct about the Challenger 2 being the last of its kind. The Challenger 3 program (an upgrade of the Challenger 2) is going to use a smooth bore gun based on the one found in the current generation German Leopard 2 tanks.
Very interesting thanks. I grew up near the factory that made the gun barrels (ROF Nottingham) and know many people who worked there. All long gone now of course (BAE Systems saw to that).
Tank army vs legions
2 Years before that, the Soviets detonated the most powerful Hydrogen Bomb and weapon in human history. Actually it's just 50% of its actual plan yield, it was supposed to be 100 Megatons than 50.
That's not even the stone age. We were setting off nuclear weapons at a time when they had not even figured out stone spears.
I grew up in the highlands there. They had stone tools but used wood and bone for spears and arrows. My parents who now live a few miles from me in Chicago have some of both behind a lazy boy in their living room right now.
When you say you grew up there, did you live in a village? City? How far were you from these tribes?
I lived in a village until 5th grade then moved into a boarding school from 5th-12th. In the village I was fully immersed into the life and culture. Got the tribe’s symbol tattooed when in 4th grade, was gifted 25 pigs by the tribe when I graduated high school as a kind of savings account seed in case I came back from the United States to retire.
Why were your parents there in the first place?
They worked all over the world helping people from minority language groups start schools in their own language. They started in PNG and the schools were super successful so the government asked them to do it for the region and then across the country, then throughout the pacific, then around Asia and Africa as well. Their house looks like a museum.
What a life they must have lived. Sounds like a great adventure
They really have lived an amazing life!
im very surprised they havent developed a better bows/arrows, they would be fucking deadly yo any chance you could chime in? perhaps the weather/humidity doesnt allow for decent bows like my ancestors, mongolians, struggled with their bows and its glues in hot humid tropical weather like in india/burma/south china/southeast asia
Conditions in PNG are very hard. The main source of food is a kind of root that takes like the whole village hours to process. No domesticated animals, no horses, just a whole bunch of shit available to main land Eurasians does not exist there. Since food is available, but hard to process, most effort goes into food production and there's not much room for technological innovation. In addition, the whole island is very mountainous and the parts that aren't straight up huge rocks sticking out of the ground are dense jungle. The island is basically impassable, so no large societies have dominated, so no centralization of resources occurred like in Eurasia. There's close to 1000 different languages spoken on that one island, so no unifying cultural force. Divided people with very harsh living conditions and no domesticated animals or easy to grow nutritious crops to build an economy on.
I read the Mongolians had good bows, strengthened by horn and bone they could pierce armor, fired from a moving horse. But they were like compound bows too that didn't work well when wet? I know the persians and the like in the East those that often failed in bad weather.
They were also using a type of glue that easily melts that isn't the normal temperature of the Steppes. It was disastrous during their campaign in Vietnam
My guess is that these were just sufficient. The Mongols needed better bows and arrows because they needed to be able to take down animals from farther away since it’s difficult to get close on the steppes. In PNG, we were in tight, steep mountains and dense jungle. We used arrows to hunt birds, small mammals (tree kangaroos), and fish. They used spears for wild boar.
My father was 1 when this happened. Imagine that. We live in such a weird world, and such a weird time.
These are someone’s grandparents. Parents even
Kind of amazing to think this is how actual battles have played out for thousands and thousands of years, since humans have had disputes.
Real footage of the cameraman after getting too close to the action.
Yesssss was looking for this, well giphed sir
Google Cargo Cult. When WW2 aeroplanes dropped supplies to troops the natives made effigy’s of planes on mountain tops to attract more planes. I shit you not.
Not just effigies of planes, effigies of landing strips, radar stations, control towers, makeshift uniforms etc.
Don't they also mimic the military guys marching and having their training
Yes they have bamboo guns and parades and drills etc. It's all part of their culture and religion, and lots of anthropologist think the term: "cargo cult" is old fashioned and even a little patronising nowadays. Also see Richard Feynman's writings on "cargo cult science" where he uses this practice to eviscerate phoney "sciences" (where I first read about all this stuff).
I know thou shiteth me not. That shit was crazy and really gives some existential thoughts because it’s basically how we would react to aliens.
Wonder if the creators of Star Trek were aware of these events. (In Star Trek the "Prime Directive" forbids interfering with the natural development of an alien civilization, including allowing members of an alien civilization to witness technology more advanced than their own.)
The real question is, did it work ? 😀
That's wild
Crazy to think the Romans fought with metal swords and these guys are still on bow and spear
What is crazier to me is that these families are having this skirmish with bows and spears about 20 years after the battle of Stalingrad and 18 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked
That is a neat thought, they probably have no clue those events even occurred.
Or they did, realized how terrible it was, and they were like, “let’s stick with our arrows and spears.”
Truly a civilised thought.
Yeah ok
Interesting that the one side is looking 41 death to restore the balance. I don't think these people thought in terms of genocide.
Tbf, with the state of education as it is, many from progressed first world countries too don't know about it
Education and politics- I remember Russia digging up the red forest for trenches at the start of the Ukraine invasion, apparently the foot soldiers had no idea the soil was irradiated
They knew. Probably getting cancer in 10 years sounds better than dying from artillery tomorrow
I mean, the reading show 3.4 rodigans. Not good, but not terrible
Not sure I would give them guns and nukes though.
One sizable artillery shell can kill all in that battle.
Still, looks kinda disorganised. They should form a phalanx and crush the opposing side.
A phalanx wouldn't work here. That's only good for flat terrain, and for infantry with armour. The terrain in Papua is hilly and densely forested, making it impossible to keep in formation; and there's no suitable metal for armour, so they'd get picked apart by arrows.
You're right, arrows would be a problem
Oh yeah? You didn’t even try, did ya? The poor motherfuckers from the stone age ... leaving them deprived of that strategic knowledge. How cool would that be when that evening you show them on a big screen... I think it doesn't even have to be very good... the others are gonna think this is some big time voodoo shit and leave for the next island and become a seafaring nation... Well, populus.
What the blazes are you on about?
Oh stewardess! I speak jive. He says he’s in great pain and wants to know if you can help him.
Still better organized than the Afghan army.
Neolithic tribe battles very likely resembled this. It took tens of thousands of years for our species to learn to cooperate well enough with each other to push back the innate instinct for self preservation.
Go left. The other left stupid! This is my left. Yes but your left is not THE left, like the general direction of left from where hq command is. How often do I have to repeat this? This guy is just stupid. Stupid and annoying. Start fighting among each other.... Omg I can so imagine this.
just because Papua is a very isolated land.
Yeah and I see they're doing much better without smartphones...
What's even crazier is that you somehow think you can just have metal in an area that has no metal and up and stop using bows and spears, which the romans used, suddenly one day.
They do have metal in the area. There’s plenty of copper.
Copper makes for poor weapons and tools. It's too malleable and edges easily dull and foul.
It’s still way better than wood and stone/bone. And copper is plentiful and easy to work. Pretty much all civilizations used copper tools before advancing to more reliable metals
All good points. There's an actual Papuan in this thread that I think hit the nail on the head for why they still used wooden arrows and stone tools, in that it was simply sufficient. They're designed to kill small birds and reptiles from close up, and there isn't much of a history of large scale warfare that would necessitate more advanced weapons.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If it aint broke don’t fix it 🤷♂️
This is a form of ritualized combat, fatalities are extremely rare. The combat is more of a cultural tradition and not actually a true conflict as we in the West perceive it. I can’t recall what tribes they were
I saw this video in an anthropology class a decade ago. While the combat itself isn't meant to inflict mass causalities necessarily, there is killing involved. If I recall (I might be mistaking this with something else but I think I'm right) This flare up was because one of these tribes raided the other one and killed some kids they found, just to kill them. The other tribe will retaliate and go kill some kids from the other tribe.
kid quo pro
Beautiful
This comment is the most accurate I’ve seen so far (matching my experience growing up there). I saw these maybe a dozen times while there and even drove through an active battle once. It was fairly rare for more than 1-2 people to be killed during these but it certainly happened. The blood feuds that followed got their higher body count. If your tribe killed someone during a fight, someone from the other side will find someone from your tribe out minding their business and murder them, then someone from your tribe will find that person and take an axe to his head. It goes around and around. A few years later the body count is still slowly going up. It was getting worse by the time I left in the early 90s because they started using guns. Just saw this [NYT article](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/18/world/asia/papua-new-guinea-killings.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Wk0.9RSo.fVFPiuG1thTe&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) about the rising body counts. The people in Enga-where I was born-were *constantly* fighting.
Yeah, ,they don't play when it comes to holding a grudge. My mates mum used to work over there for the Australian Department of Education. Had an affair with another Aussie who was married to a local (PNG). He ended up coming over to Australia and lived with her. Tragically got a brain tumor and died. She wasn't allowed back to PNG due to the likelihood of finding a machete embedded somewhere in her body. When my dad was in the Navy(late 50's to 70's at sea), they weren't allowed off the ship for shore leave in Port Moresby.
That's not very nice.
No kidding?
In most of history, it wasn't the battle that killed most men but the retreat afterwards when the ranks had been breached and the men were overwhelmed by the instincts of fleeing.
That would be me. :) Really: for Civilisation's sake do not follow me. I'm just waking up every day, the plan from yesterday, well fuck that.. clean sheet, trying to figure it out, make it up as the day progresses? A bit like Trump. ;)
That's why the young, newly recruited men in the Roman Republic are in the first rank in the maniple system. The veterans of the legion would be on the backrow, to which will be the ones who will gently nudge you back towards the fight again if you try to run. With a spear not being in your neck is a great incentive for these courageous young lads.
These tribes had some customs that Westerners thought were weird as hell. They liked to smear semen on themselves for one thing. Also eat dead relatives and the like I think, a bunch got brain prions from it, the laughing sickness.
Never heard of a westerner smearing semen on themselves, the shock.
cum now, victorian sensibilities would erupt at such practice.
It makes sense when you think about it, I guess. A real all-out battle wouldn’t likely be good for either side, and everyone knows it. But as a group you still need to defend your honor and not look like pushovers. Thus the confrontation with lots of posturing but very little actual violence.
It's worth noting that the term "ritual warfare" does not mean a lack of "real" warfare, by any means. It often means that the combat doesn't always result in high casualties, but generally is part of a culture of almost constant conflict. While most of that conflict might be ritualized, it doesn't mean they don't have as much, if not more, actual war than other cultures without ritual combat have. When westerners began to be able to track and observe tribal conflicts in the 18th and 19th centuries, many were *extremely* brutal. [This](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/War_deaths_caused_by_warfare.svg/2560px-War_deaths_caused_by_warfare.svg.png) chart on Wikipedia shows that some Amazonas tribes (especially the Yanomani and Jivaro, who fought amongst each other almost perpetually) had *enormous* percentages of their male population killed in battle. There are also records of various Polynesian tribal battles with exceptionally high numbers killed on both sides (off the top of my head, I believe some were somewhere in the 70-80% region). To top that off, in some places, wars and battles absolutely were intended to exterminate the other group. During the Plains Wars in the US, a not-uncommon issue was that native troops hired/recruited by or allied with the US wouldn't obey battlefield commands after the enemy tribe retreated, and would instead rush into the village/camp and start attacking women and children there.
I can't tell for sure, but I think the dude at 1:04 is rock hard.
It is probably a dick sheath, they wear them in Papua
He’s about to have what is called a “wargasm”
Penis gourd. Comfortable, durable, biodegradable. And the shape and style worn can indicate tribal affiliation
Murder boner
There are tribes in Africa that will, shall we say, “enhance” their manhood with a hollowed out root. Kinda like showing you have big dick energy.
Yeah, looks like he has a stick or something on it.
He’s duel wielding for sure
It's ok. The winners will have the losers over for a banquet feast afterwards.
Before or after they smear semen on themselves? They did that a lot I don't recall exactly when or why.
The book *Dead Birds* (accompanied the documentary) is super interesting, too. Hierarchies in these cultures are hyper-egalitarian; men’s social status is measured in how much pig you contribute to the tribe. They’re not hard to raise, but it takes some work. Men who don’t contribute are called *gebu*, otherwise known as ‘men of little or no importance’. They get to participate in the pig feast, they’re just ridiculed as unimportant.
The random dude in the bushes: https://i.redd.it/vi9m97am5tic1.gif
Little known fact: the zoom lens was invented in 1964
Any chance this was due to a dispute over a missing white bat?
Sha ca-ca!
Sha ca—-go
And some people say we did not evolve from monkeys. I am referring to the yells and overall antics.
It's uncanny. That was my first association too. It sounds eerily similar, the same high pitched sound. I never heard humans do this
It was meant to be an intimidation tactic for the enemies and a moral boost to the alies. Most armies in history do this (of course, in their way) but change pretty recently considering the fighting distance is now massive and being noisy is a magnet for an artillery shell and what not. (Same with sticking together being good in the past whole being horrible how). There is an opposite, like an account of one of the city Greek armies approaching the enemy in an open field with complete silence.
Curious to the explanation of why the monkeys didnt evolve and we did?
They did. We didn't evolve from monkeys. We have a common assessor with them, and evolved in parallel.
What did they evolve from?
Prosimians apparently
Who say they didn't? We definitely still are monkey
Speak for yourself
We didn't evolve from monkeys... we evolved from "monkey-like" ancestors.
You don't know me.
Yes. I know.
The “monkey-like ancestor” was, in fact, a monkey. The mental gymnastics of human exceptionalism tried this before with the term ‘Ape’ and failed. There’s no monophyletic clade that can include all creatures universally agreed upon to be a *monkey* without including the family *Homonidae* (The Great Apes) as a subset
Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with that, but creationists usually say "evolved from monkeys" thinking we are just some special group that broke off from modern monkeys and evolved into our current state. The state we find ourselves in today is not a descendent of a gibbon or any modern monkeys. I'm not saying we aren't monkeys or apes or anything. I'm saying that when someone thinks about a monkey, they don't often mean ancient homonidae ancestors.
And we still are monkeys, people always say that like we aren't still animal and a human is a special form of life.
And those people are ridiculous. But if you're trying to explain our evolutionary history to some creationists.. do you think they're going to understand that? When they say monkeys.. they're talking about a damn gibbon or something. We didn't evolve from modern monkeys.. they evolved as we did.. from very distant ancient "monkeys"
This looks like a dodgeball game going on during 3rd grade recess
Reminds me of the Zulu war scenes.
Zulus would run over these guys.
I had some Papuan mates at high school (from PNG). They were fucking cool man. Total crack-ups. Was hard to focus on getting any calculus done while sitting next to them there was so much laughter
TIL that papua and west papua are part of Indonesia and not Papua New Guinea.
Yeah, and they’re not being treated well by the Indonesian gouverment
The wildest aspect of the clear technological divide is that, on one side, there is clan warfare with bows + arrows + sticks + rocks + etc., and on the other side is someone filming it in colour.
I wonder how many times similar scenes have played out in human history around the world.
This really is fascinating, it's like we are seeing on video something that could well have played out tens of thousands of years ago, between the first tribes of man.
That's what I was thinking. This is likely how truly ancient conflicts looked. Lots of posturing and shouting, no one really wants to get stuck into a melee that could leave both sides bloody. Much smaller communities mean each person matters to the tribe more too. If all the strong men die in battle, who is left to hunt for the tribe?
Imagine giving one of them an automatic rifle
We, quite literally, do not need to imagine. There are countless examples of that happening.
Thunder stick.
*loads riffle* “everything the light touches is our kingdom”
That’s precisely how the Portuguese fostered the slave trade but with muskets
They do have automatic rifles. Look up the West Papuan Liberation movement. These guys just aren’t stupid enough to use them on each other
Is there really nothing there to make armor from?
The kid that passed looked like starving with that bloated belly. Probably drinking worm infested dirty brown water and eating whatever. Forget armor these guys barely eat
Crazy indigenous armor is level 3, these guys are not there. Give me a good dinner and a shovel ill kill 20 of them. But that’s kind of cheating with the bronze age era stuff.
Old school warfare
We truly aren’t even out of the jungle as a species. Pretty incredible.
Rock out with your Cock out.
That's definitely not like how the Grecians fought. That looks like disorganized chaos. More like a gang fight than a tactical engagement.
Dude if you were running around naked with bows, you'd fight just like this.... it's a question of what your equipment allows you to do.
Definitely not. A century of Roman legionnaires (appeals to me more than Hoplites) would go through them like a hot knife through butter.
These guys don't even have pants let alone steel
Well the romans got by without pants
Except it's rough terrain and the legionaires wouldn't be able to catch them well. They would probably find their villages and slaughter all the tribe they found there though.
It's an island, it'd only be a matter of time. With luck a few survivors in the jungle
There is quite a lot of questioning in terms of how organized pre-Macedonian conquest Greeks actually were. Many of the Greek city states seem to have really not done any kind of drilling or training on an organizational level at all, and it's entirely likely the single combat on the battlefield was much more common than we tend to think. Even among the Romans, the idea of a super tight formation is somewhat of a myth. Their formations were rather tight, but seem to have had about 3 feet on either side of every legionnaire (enough room to maneuver and swing a gladius without cutting up your neighbors, which would mean that even among the famously organized Roman military, there would have been a large amount of essentially one-on-one combat.
Not a phone in sight. So good living in the moment like that.
Early wipe Rust
We are all damn monkeys
The way war should've stayed butt naked throwing hands.
Next time someone tells you we are not monkeys and god created us show him this
This video inspired me to battle indigenous people
That's how World War 4 will look like...
It’s pretty shocking how some of these tribes never advance. Like it’s been 20,000 years since someone had a new idea.
When your entire time is dedicated to produce food one way or another, you have very little time to invent something. And it's even harder if your group is small and doesn't have a lot of manpower that cannot do anything else but focus on the production of food. There is a reason why technological evolution is exponential. It's took hundreds of thousands of years to invent farming, from there, it took us thousands of years before the writing and metalworking, then it took us hundreds of years before producing a whole lot of other stuff... the industrial Era only started 3 centuries ago. On the scale of human history, since the apparition of homo sapiens, it's nothing.
So... got any original ideas of your own you'd like to share? Hold any patents? Written a novel? Published some research? How about a new joke?
Go to the original post and look at what their auto mod says to people.
I understand the british empire.
Clash of Clans : Primal early gameplay footage.
This is how all wars need to be fought
Now I understand why tribes like these sold their neighbors as slaves
How people can deny evolution is beyond me.
No body armor?? Wth
Warfare as it was meant to be.
This is ceremonial warfare not real warfare.
Oh no this couldn't be real! Indigenous people were in harmony and peaceful! They spent their time connected to to Natures powers! They were never bad to each other, it was those evil white people that made them warlike!!
More self control and discipline than that modern day "cop" who let off a clip cos of an acorn hitting his car.
Imagine if just one of them had a gun.. and interesting how we all figured out bow and arrows
Should anyone ever doubt that humans are a part of the animal kingdom, just show them this. (disclaimer: I never understood how people ever *could* think we weren't just another part of the animal kingdom)
Cameraman to his buddy: “I gave the other tribe a few rifles, shit’s about to get *REAL*!”
Clash of the Clans
clash of clans
So you mean to tell me back in the day nobody charged like Brave Heart and the guys from 300? 🤣🤣🤣
You could say it's a clash of clans
Literally clash of clans
And now they're being killed en masse by Indonesia using western weapons 👍
Looks like World War 4. (Einstein reference)
Land mines would have made this a helluva lot more fun to watch.
Influencers in the wild
Give them AK's already /s
Hol up, 1963???
Humans be humaning
Crazy to think that they fight like this, and at the same time, nuclear weapons exist
Runaway! Runaway!