Steve, thanks for posting that link. Fascinating stuff, and the conclusions about this being a pivotal time for development of civilization is certainly on point.
I was struck by this one statement in the paper:
The number suggests the scale of the battle. “We have 130 people, minimum, and five horses. And we’ve only opened 450 square meters. That’s 10% of the find layer, at most, maybe just 3% or 4%,” says Detlef Jantzen, chief archaeologist at MVDHP. “If we excavated the whole area, we might have 750 people. That’s incredible for the Bronze Age.” In what they admit are back-of-the-envelope estimates, he and Terberger argue that if one in five of the battle’s participants was killed and left on the battlefield, that could mean almost 4000 warriors took part in the fighting.
The estimates may be low, if what is commonly held to be true by archaeologists/historians of warfare bears in this case. Massed battle hand-to-hand fighting rarely produced casualty rates as high a 25-30%, and never more than that. Armies typically broke when casualties approached 1 man in 4 in Iron Age battles, and probably even lower than that in Bronze Age fights. This battle was really at a transition point from Stone-age to Bronze Age, if I read the authors correctly. To be sure, casualties could go up after the battle during the pursuit phase, but that presumes effective numbers of cavalry... which they may not have had.
Anyway, the authors' suggestion that KIA's were as high as 20% is really, really high. Mortality rates of 10% or less were more the norm. It's not like modern battles where most of the casualties are inflicted at a distance.
So, my point (finally!) is: if you take the more commonly-accepted casualty predictions from ancient warfare, the number of skeletons they found, when extrapolated over the whole battlefield, may suggest much larger armies than the figures these guys have published. Like 8000-10,000 or more.
Big doings.