Historiography
According to Canadian scholar Adam Jones, if a dominant group of people had little in common with a marginalised group of people, it was easy for the dominant group to define the other as subhuman. As a result, the marginalised group might be labeled as a threat that must be eliminated. footnote 5 cites Jones continues: "The difficulty, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn pointed out in their early study, is that such historical records as exist are ambiguous and undependable. While history today is generally written with some fealty to 'objective' facts, most previous accounts aimed rather to praise the writer's patron (normally the leader) and to emphasise the superiority of one's own gods and religious beliefs."
Chalk and Jonassohn wrote that: "Historically and anthropologically peoples have always had a name for themselves. In a great many cases, that name meant 'the people' to set the owners of that name off against all other people who were considered of lesser quality in some way. If the differences between the people and some other society were particularly large in terms of religion, language, manners, customs, and so on, then such others were seen as less than fully human: pagans, savages, or even animals."
Pre-history Neanderthal genocide
Yarin Eski, a criminologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, argues that "genocidal violence and mass exploitation are perhaps the defining characteristics of being human," and he also describes how our talent for murder put an end to the Neanderthals, and it has also colored all subsequent human history. Similarly, Kwang Hyun Ho stresses the fact that modern humans possess a mutated gene which is related to aggression and combined with fossil evidence, the possession of it by early modern humans proves that the Neanderthals were killed in acts of violence which were committed by early modern humans. The first person to publish an analysis of a Neanderthal, French paleontologist Marcellin Boule, was also the first to suppose (in 1912) that early humans violently replaced Neanderthals. In particular, larger tribal groupings and projectile weapons were supposed to give modern humans an edge in violent conflicts with Neanderthals and other indigenous populations of archaic humans that allowed early modern humans to wipe out other hominin species as they spread out of Africa. This view is at odds with the much more supported view that Neanderthal extinction occurred due to events such as interbreeding, inbreeding, disease, and climate change. Archaeologist Helle Vandkilde highlights the fact that the form of trauma that is indicative of interpersonal violence is only present in approximately 20 sets of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens skeletal remains which date back to the Palaeolithic.
Chiefdom genocides
Historian Max Ostrovsky concludes that chiefdoms performed the most genocidal warfare in human history and practiced this kind of warfare all over the world, wherever culture reached the level of chiefdom. He based his conclusion on anthropological researches and notes that Thomas Malthus collected many reports on genocidal wars by chiefdoms.
Malthus regards chiefdoms as an intermediate stage between independent tribes and states. By contrast to independent tribes, chiefdoms cumulated power after their decisive military victories but they did not learn to enslave their defeated enemies yet. Hence, according to Malthus, chiefdoms simply slaughtered them: "Their object of war is not conquest but destruction... Among the Iroquois, the phrase by which they express their resolution to make war against an enemy is 'let us go and eat that nation.'"Cited in The verb "eat" has a literal meaning. The cannibalism of chiefdoms appears in the military genocidal context which is referred to as "post-battle rage" rather than hunger. Immanuel Kant supposed that slavery and imperialism appeared at a later, albeit equally savage, stage, when peoples learned "how to make better use of their conquered enemies than to dine off them." Jared Diamond offered a similar explanation, arguing that enslavement of defeated groups could only be introduced at an advanced stage because it required feeding, guarding, and organising slaves for work, and tribal societies could not do these things and hence opted to kill all of the defeated.
Ostrovsky found that the hypothesis of chiefdom genocide applies to the Israelites of the Judges period (c. 1150–1025 BCE) when they formed a chiefdom (of twelve tribes): When Israel defeats the Canaanite nations, the tradition commands, "you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them" (Deuteronomy 7:1–2). Similarly to the chiefdoms which are described in the Age of Discovery, the genocide of the Hebrew ban was total which means that it extended to women, children and domestic animals (1 Samuel 15:3). "[You] must not leave anything that breathes" (Deuteronomy 20:16). The Bible exaggerates when it claims that the genocide of the Canaanite peoples (Joshua 10:40–41, 11:21–23, 6:18–19) was total, but, according to Ostrovsky, "whenever the Israelite chiefdom won, the vanquished did not survive." Given the vast data on chiefdom-level warfare, he finds the historicity of the Canaanite genocide credible.
Scholars devoted much of their attention to the Canaanite genocide and scholars of theology struggled to explain why Moses commanded the Israelites to wage a "genocidal" conquest of Canaan and the secular scholar Richard Dawkins characterises Yahweh as a "genocidal" and "blood thirsty ethnic cleanser." The genocides which were committed during the Judges period were partial genocides, such as the destruction of the Midianites by the Israelites (Numbers 31:7–18). Adam Jones notes that this massacre is an example of the partial destruction and the partial incorporation of an enemy ethnicity.
Julius Caesar's army waged a genocidal war against the Germanic chiefdoms (Gallic Wars 1:17). The Annales Bertiniani recorded the impression of survivors from the onslaught of the chiefdom of the Vikings: "Wild beasts... killing babies, children, young men, old men, fathers, sons and mothers... They overthrow, they despoil, they destroy, they burn, they ravage; sinister cohort, fatal phalanx, cruel host."
Gendercides Scholars of antiquity differentiate genocides from gendercides, in which groups of people were conquered and the males who belonged to the conquered groups were killed but the children (particularly the girls) and the women were incorporated into the conquering groups. Jones notes, "Chalk and Jonassohn provide a wide-ranging selection of historical events such as the Assyrian Empire's root-and branch depredations in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and the destruction of Melos by Athens during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), a gendercidal rampage described by Thucydides in his 'Melian Dialogue'. Jones and Wendy Lower also detail how gendercides are a common feature through much classical literature in the western tradition. Additionally, Jones highlights in an article published in the Journal of Genocide Research in 2000, that the gender specific targeting of men for extermination has persisted through many cases of conflict in the 20th century.
Prehistoric Andes In the Cambridge World History of Genocide, anthropologist and archaeologist Danielle Kurin wrote that there is archaeological evidence of genocidal violence at various points in time in the prehistoric Andes in South America.
Ancient history Destruction of Carthage
During the Third Punic War, the city of Carthage was besieged by Roman forces for three years (149–146 BCE). Once the city was breached, the Romans spent seven days systematically destroying it and killing its inhabitants. Ben Kiernan has labelled the devastation of the city and the massacre of its population "the first genocide". Kiernan highlights calls for the destruction of Carthage before the third Punic war, and escalating rhetoric during the siege, with Polybius stating in his report from the battle that the Carthaginians were "utterly exterminated".
Scholars Bridget Conley and Alex de Waal, as well as Lemkin considered the destruction of Carthage to have been genocidal.
Asiatic Vespers
In 88 BCE, king Mithridates VI of Pontus ordered the murder of all Italics in Asia Minor, resulting in the deaths of about 100,000, mainly civilians. The death toll makes it one of the deadliest recorded genocides in classical antiquity. This action provoked the Romans, leading to the First Mithridatic War.
Julius Caesar's campaigns Julius Caesar's campaign against the Tencteri and Usipetes has been characterised as a genocide. During the Gallic Wars Caesar reported that he burnt every village and building that he could find in the territory of the Eburones, drove off all of the cattle, and his men and beasts consumed all of the grain that the weather of the autumnal season had not destroyed. He left those who had hid themselves, if there were any, alive in the hope that they would all die of hunger in the winter. Caesar said that he wanted to annihilate the Eburones as well as their name. Their country was soon occupied by a Germanic tribe with a different name, the Tungri. However, the report by Tacitus which states that the Tungri were the original "Germani" who first crossed the Rhine, and the way this matches Caesar's description of the Eburones and their neighbours, leads to the possibility that they survived under a new name.
However, historian (2008) argues that the genocide of the Eburones in 53 BCE could not have happened as Caesar claimed. If the systematic destruction of infrastructure by the Roman forces was intended to prevent the local people from regaining power, the physical extermination of them proved to be impractical. The available areas of refuge which were hardly accessible to the Roman legions were numerous: the low mountain range of the Ardennes, the swamps and wastelands which were located towards the Menapii, the coastal islands, etc. Moreover, Caesar's second attempt to annihilate the tribe two years later is proof that the community survived, and its apparent ability to regenerate itself lead Caesar to believe that he needed to launch more raids against them. According to Nico Roymans, their disappearance from the political map may have resulted from "a policy of on the part of the Roman authorities, in combination with the confiscation of Eburonean territory". A great part of their gold fell into Roman hands during repeated Roman raids on the Eburones in 53–51 BCE, and then it was melted down and carried off.
Bar Kokhba revolt