Mass grave in Poland embodies the violent beginning of the Bronze Age
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The only example I can think of that might fit the bill are the Sami. But I'm not an expert on Sami genetics or history. There's also the issue where you know people in an area may have been living a certain way of life for tens of thousands of years, but without ancient dna, how do you recognize an invading culture that left similar archaeological artifacts (like evidence of reindeer herding) but was genetically/linguistically distinct?
Albanian are a mix or Yammaya, Corded Ware cultures, and the hypothetical Pellasgian people/culture
Greeks are in the same spot. They are called paleo-ballkanik population for a reason. (Fun fact, 23andme has hard time distinguishing the people genetically between Albanians and Greeks and are lumped in the same spot)
Some of the remains that were found and dated to 5800bc, have genetic markers similar to today’s inhabitants/Albanians. Which means there was intermingling/mixing of the Indo-European commers with the original cultures who are supposed to have had darker tone skin and blue eyes
There are antic accounts of an earlier culture in the are called Pellasgians, and there are some city names that still have survived to this day (eg Larissa in Greece, and Lezha in Albanian).
This is all pre 1500b.c. and is still hypothetical as archeological findings have not found populations that were genetically different up to 5,800b.c
As for the actual culture and language, that’s a different story. There are many cases where local people adopt a language or culture of a conquering class, (most Latin speaking countries), or vice versa (Bulgarians)
But from genetics alone, Sardinians seem to be the European population closest to the earliest farmers
There's been this undercurrent in archaeology and historiography since the 1960s that interprets the past as a successful of peaceful cultural, technological, and linguistic diffusions and that downplays evidence of conquest, force, and violence. For example, an archaeological belonging to this school that chanced across a layer of an ancient fortress festooned with skulls, arrowheads, and soot would present that layer as evidence of some kind of funerary ceremony instead of applying Occam's razor and suspecting a conquest and sack. It's infuriating.
Reading recent papers on ancient Rome (a personal interest of mine), I find myself stopping, sighing, and saying almost out loud, "Those Germans just moved into the empire as good neighbors? The name 'Vandal' got its connotation for no reason at all? The contemporary historians were just lying propagandists and we can dismiss everything they wrote? Really, dude?". Or, "Indo-European languages replaced almost all indigenous European languages because... cultural diffusion? Before writing? Okay dude." I could go on and on on. These "[migration of] pots not people" people apply the same lens to _everything_, and it's super annoying: what they claim runs counter to what everyone knows deep down is true about human nature.
Fortunately, this "[migration of] pots not people" is no longer tenable. Ancient DNA has opened up a world of new evidence --- see [1] and [2]. As it turns out, As it turns out, intuitions of the early anthropologists like Gordon Childe --- whom these 1960s-era "pots not people" have not rested from attempting it discredit --- were right after all. Conan the Barbarian is a pretty fair depiction. What you see in the genetic record is wave after wave after wave of conquest and slaughter. Some Y chromosome lineages disappear entirely, while the X chromosome ones survive --- indicating that conquerors (as everyone suspected) basically killed off all the men and took all the women. This pattern is attested in historical times in Asian steppe cultures [3], and there's no reason to suspect that pre-historic cultures operated any differently. Turns out, they didn't.
The reason Europe speaks Indo-European languages isn't that the ancient inhabitants thought that Proto-Indo-European was neat and adopted it --- it's that the PIE-speaking Yamnaya swept in from the caucuses and slaughtered mostly everyone (especially men) except the Basques. It's not pretty, but that's the way it was.
Moreover, it's important to realize that we all have the latent potential for barbarism inside us. We've been at peace for so long --- almost 75 years --- that we've forgotten that man's natural state is "war of all against all" and that peace is incredibly fragile. Downplaying ancient violence encourages present complacency and endangers our present peace.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03773-6 [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43701630 [3] https://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World-eboo...
I think we’ve been watching different documentaries, reading different books and growing up in different educational environments because everything I’ve been taught about history was that it was hard, violent and often unjust. I mean castles weren’t exactly built and designed purely as aesthetic stately homes. The Bayeux Tapestry‘s most iconic scene is a presumed king with an arrow in his eye. Kids are taught about the beheadings of Henry the 8ths wives (was it two that were killed?) at school. The violence of our ancestors has anything but been brushed under the carpet.
But let’s also not forget that you don’t have to travel that far into our history to see how violent we can be.
Archaeologists, quite often still have the Noble Savage archetype lurking underneath their theories, despite the massive evidence of violence among current-day hunter gatherer societies, and the extensive evidence of trauma to the remains of ancient skeletons.
My aunt and uncle are archaeologists. I hear this claptrap about Native Americans living in harmony every family reunion.
Consider ancient Carthage: after the Romans defeated Carthage in what was basically the classical world's equivalent* of WWII, Roman historians wrote that Carthage had been practicing ritual infant sacrifice --- which horrified the Romans as much as it horrifies us.
In the 20th century, the "pots not people" crowd spent decades dismissing these ancient reports as mere wartime propaganda.
Well, guess what archaeologists uncovered under the ruins of Carthage [1] --- pits full of hundreds of charred infant skeletons. From the article: "evidence for child sacrifice is overwhelming and that instead of dismissing it out of hand, we should try to understand it."
A lot of recent historical revisionism really is shockingly wrong. I know that it's really hard to accept, but it's true, and it's the product of motivated reasoning and willful misinterpretation.
Everyone is predisposed to imagine the past as a time of stupidity and ignorance and to imagine today as the height of enlightenment. Tragically, it's frequently the other way around. We have unlearned truths.
[1] http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-re...
* in a surprising number of ways, actually
But boy there certainly seem to be some people highly opposed to the idea that the past was a violent place kicking around today.
Have you considered this might not be completely representative of the state of archeological research?
After all, their native population got wiped out by disease, so they don't have castles littering the landscape, the way we do.
Not that I’m saying us Brits are without blame given we had the largest global empire in the history of this planet. And sadly we have a tendency to brush over some of our misnomers during that period too.
Incidentally, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2010) https://erenow.com/ancient/the-horse-the-wheel-and-language/ is a freely available book that shows just how far a well-deployed combination of good-old philology/historical linguistics and archaeologocal evidence can go when it comes to reconstructing features of the genuine PIE Urheimat. But then, yup, they still try to advocate for an optimistic "PIE spread via cultural diffusion" story that doesn't jive at all with the more modern sources of evidence you mention in your comment. It does seem like our history, especially pre-Bronze Age, was marked by constant conflict which only decreased slowly over time, perhaps finally leading to the reasonably-stable "empires" we're somewhat familiar with from ancient history only as late as the Iron Age.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a capital/resource : technology boundary at which you see this.
Essentially, pre-metalworking, pre-farming, what do you have to risk if you upset order in your valley? You can migrate and hunt elsewhere.
Post-metalworking, post-farming, we start to develop centralized resource generation. Suddenly, as long as there is some sense of economic equality (probably where the Romans went wrong with their neighbors), everyone stands to lose if anyone's farms are burned or the forges destroyed.
At that point, the calculus changes greatly. And even more so when suddenly this technology is spread worldwide. Even during the world wars, you saw relatively limited wholesale destruction (e.g. carpet bombing cities) compared to what would have been possible.
It'd also be curious to extend into the modern era, because it seems like longer simmering civil wars tend to happen in places where there is extreme economic inequality or a lack of infrastructure (e.g. DRC, South Sudan, Afghanistan). Which I guess is where the "bridges, not bombs" strategy comes from.
Can you cite this, please?
This is ridiculous statement. Yes, there must have been conquests and slaughters in history and many other man made disasters. Some of the conquerors had been multiplying faster because they had been taking better lands from conquered or because they had better agricultural techniques.
But the idea that each coming wave had been perpetrating Holocaust on the entire territory of Europe is simply technically impossible.
Much more likely is that after some violent conquest there were periods of assimilation, mixing of cultures and single language becoming a common tongue.
Yes. Newcomers slaughter the local men, take their women. Mixed kids are raised in the new culture, but mothers still teach them some of the old ways consciously or not.
Phrenology was accepted and respectable opinion for a long time, and I imagine that ordinary people saw through it as much as they do now. Spontaneous generation of life was a serious theory for a while. Baron Kelvin was influentially wrong about the age of the earth. Phlogiston theory was "respectable" opinion for a long time.
Besides: if you'd read the linked articles, you'd have understood that many people _within_ the profession agree with my perspective. They form a growing minority, and they come with very good evidence.
The past 50 years of anthropology really is shaping up to be another one of these instances in history in which science takes an unproductive detour on its way toward the truth. Granted, that's an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. But in this case, we actually have that extraordinary evidence: ancient DNA.
Why do you think that? (Not disputing you, I'm genuinely curious)
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/11/ancient-d...
This article skips gently over what was a more than 40 years of denial and academic exclusion of people advocating (with evidence) for arrivals earlier than Clovis.
There is something about human intellect, that seems to repeat this pattern time and time again, of those with an established belief fighting tooth and nail against evidence that they are wrong.
Historians are probably reporting best-available information, but there is no special reason to believe they are right. Like economists a historian is best used as a living catalogue who can point you to examples where an idea has been tried before.
That, and a clear tendency in outsiders, like the scientific press (i.e. people who would love to be scientists but have to settle with reporting on it) to present scientists as idiots who don't know anything and need some rebel to come over and teach them the error of their ways, when the truth is that there is no other group of people on the planet who are so ready to change their mind when confronted with strong arguments, than scientists.
There is no evidence for that blanket claim, genetic or otherwise. No archaeologist or historical sociolinguist working with the spread of the IE languages would deny that some violence occurred in prehistory, but there is evidence for cultural diffusion – yes, even before writing. After all, there are numerous historical examples of language spread by cultural diffusion in the absence of writing, where violence was only sporadic, and the principle of uniformity leads us to posit that the same was possible for the Indo-European languages. Humans are social creatures just as much as they are violent ones, and social pressures lead to language change just as easily as force of arms.
> swept in from the caucuses [sic]
The consensus PIE Urheimat was well north of the Caucasus. The Caucasus is only relevant to IE linguistics for areal typology reasons.
Strictly speaking, that's of course true; but the molecular-level evidence is pretty damning, and as close to "slaughtered all the men" as we'd ever be able to call in the first place. See the book Who We Are by David Reich for the full story. That pattern is really not that special, by the way - the very same conflict signature shows up in the PIE people themselves, which is how we know that they emerged after severe conflict with the ancient North-Eurasians.
> The consensus PIE Urheimat was well north of the Caucasus
It was north of the Caucasus, yes, but not that up north. Maybe parent should have said "Pontic steppe" instead of Caucasus, but he/she was in the ballpark.
FWIW, I'm definitely not a scholar in this field, but I'd like a plausible hypothesis for the extinction of entire Y haplotype lineages without the elimination of maternal lineages through just 'cultural diffusion'. Slavery and genocide seem like much more likely, simple explanations.
I've been reading Herodotus's Histories and he makes it pretty clear that mass enslavement of conquered populations was not exactly rare. What do you imagine happens to enslaved men and women?
there's definitely evidence:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8152
https://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/2018-08/attach... (p 50-54 for quick skim)
I'm not totally convinced you know what you are talking about.
"The Faroese are of mixed Norse and Gaelic origins. About 21,000 Faroese live in neighbouring countries, particularly in Denmark, Iceland and ... studies show that mitochondrial DNA, tracing female descent, is 84% Celtic."
But in this case the invaders were in smaller numbers, and the local population was large enough could absorve the blow and still survive.
If the invading people are in much larger numbers, they can easily wipe out the local population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corded_Ware_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baden_culture
That's a pretty categorical statement of fact.
There are other ways for a population to undergo big shifts in genetic makeup. For example 95% of Europeans can consume lactose (drink milk) but this arose from a localized genetic mutation around 3 or 4 thousand BCE. There was no violent conquest by milk drinkers running amock exterminating non-milk drinkers required for milk drinkers to dominate the population.
I believe proto-Indo-European speakers are credited with domesticating the horse? This must have been a huge advance for humankind - suddenly a person does not have to consume their own calories to travel. The guy with the horse is going to leave the pedestrians in the dust in any competition for hunting, fishing, herding, etc. Maybe the existing women fancied their chances more with the horse people and were keen to hook up with guys who could guarantee food for their children? Assuming a patriarchical culture, then interbreeding will generally involve a male from the more desirable culture and not the other way around.
Maybe there was a huge imbalance in the gender ratio in favour of men in the initial groups of the PIE speakers who expanded into western Europe, so that even peaceful interbreeding would result in a lop-sided blended population.
I'm not actually proposing any of these as counter-theories - I'm just saying the effects you highlight regarding the genetic markers could be caused in other ways than violent conquest. Re. the fashion for "pots not people" theories - it's possible to swing too far the other way and deny a role for any cultural diffusion.
The idea that the PIEs would develop all the advanced technology you mention and use it all for some kind of nonviolent mate-attracting display --- and that this mate-attracting thing worked so well that pre-existing Y lineages went extinct --- and that the people going extinct just passively let it happen --- well, it defies plausibility. All the historical, ethnographic, archaeological, and generic evidence points in one direction. This grasping at straws to defend the non-violence hypothesis is exactly the annoying tendency that makes a lot of modern history unreadably annoying.
You've taken a very absolutist stance by presenting it as a categorical fact that the PIE speakers achieved genetic dominance through extermination. But you find it "annoying" when you're challenged despite the theory not being universally accepted.
I'm peripherally interested in the subject - more historical linguistics really - so I presented some alternatives by which the genetic effects you describe could have occurred.
> All the historical, ethnographic, archaeological, and generic evidence points in one direction.
Could you provide references to this evidence? Because I can't see how historical evidence would prove something about pre-history? And as far as I'm aware, there is only very speculative identification of any archaeological features with the spread of PIE. Simularly with the PIE culture - outside of historical linguistics - there is no widely accepted archaelogy to confirm anything about their culture.
Basically the island was settled by people navigating from Denmark, stoping in England or Ireland, killing and pillaging the local population, and kidnaping the women and bringing them to the island.....
I'm genuinely curious. Like I said, my amature interest in more in PIE from the perspective of historical linguistics but I'd love to know of any evidence linking the expansion of PIE with archeology or genetics.
I mean, to sustain the way of life of a pillaging horde you need a large number of pacifist suckers who choose to stay put and cultivate the land. Otherwise, the horde can't sustain itself. If the raiders end up exterminating their source of sustenance, they'll just die out, themselves. Same goes for smaller groups of course.
Or is the idea that it was the cattle herders and farmers who kept killing each other, unlike in historic times? How far back in prehistory did all this happen, and why was it so different than what we see throughout history, where organised societies focused on farming and trade were the wide majority, and bandit hordes focused on killing others and nicking their stuff the minority, of the population?
Well, vandal only became a reference for property destruction during the French Revolution. So your associations with that word are in fact quite modern.
Furthermore, if you’re going to assert that the vandals got the reputation that they deserved, then you’ll need to explain why goth now means “teenager with an affinity for black clothing”.
So the subculture is not directly inspired by the architecture, but the architecture and the horror genre is the two places where the term Gothic still used, while the previous meaning of "medieval" have gone out of use in English.
This is the black to the white of "we are all harmless pacifists by nature". The truth is probably in the middle: the majority of modern people prefer to negotiate than to fight and are horrified at the thought of violent confrontation, at any scale, but will occasionally follow leaders who want to stir up serious trouble.
And that is taking into full account the current rise of fascism in the EU (calling nationalist populism by its true name). Even in ogranisations like Golden Dawn (I'm Greek) it's my intuition that most are afraid of violence and will only engage in it when in the company of (many) others in the group and even then only when egged on by some authority figure or one of the few members of the group that are actually violent (bordering on the psychopathic).
In the end, the reason why we haven't had a war in Europe * in the last two generations or so is because we really don't want to have one.
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* Except Ukraine.
I guess it comes down to how picky you want to be with "no, that's similar enough to XYZ that's been done before", but finding new stuff is easy!