Early European Farmers displaced the mesolithic Hunter Gatherers in the areas they both inhabited but there wasn't a complete elimination of the HG groups. In fact, the I1 Y haplogroup associated with Germanic tribes comes from the mesolithic Hunter Gatherers, so they obviously were _not_ totally eliminated. Actually, it was the EEF group that was more or less fully eliminated in Scandinavia when the Yamnaya appeared because both groups exploited similar areas. They wanted loess soils along rivers, while the Hunter Gatherers lived near the coastline.
Was it the entire population or just the males? At this time there was a worldwide phenomenon called the Neolithic Y chromosome bottleneck in which 95% of Y chromosomes disappeared.
pre biblical, read the epic of Gilgamesh where Gilgamech enlists the harlot Shamat
to ensnare the wild man Enkidu who otherwise may have been to fierce to fight,the very fact of Neanderthal and denisovian blood in our own suggests, if not that, then something that rhymes.
I consider it a good thing that most humans are willing and wanting to educate about the ills of xenophobia and other maladies. To have entire ethnic groups get wiped out is hard for me to imagine. What crazy times our ancestors lived through.
To the contrary, I think our education system has so over focused on “xenophobia” and things like that that people are unable to understand the myriad other and more significant social factors that exist between human groups.
On the contrary - I view today's xenophobia as rooted in fear that a person may hold that their way of life will be wiped out as it has through human history. In other words - if it is built on a rational foundation instead of an emotional foundation, then education can help.
If things are as you described it, then isn’t that fear rational? What you seem to be saying is that people should hope that things happen differently this time than it did in history. That seems like the irrational part.
No. Fear of a needle makes sense in the wild, but maintaining that same terror when a doctor uses one to administer medicine is irrational because the systemic context has changed.
Fearing historical population replacement ignores the fact that prehistoric societies lacked modern state mechanisms to integrate labor. When you treat modern economic migration like a prehistoric invasion, you end up building policies that actively destroy your own society to fight a ghost.
We are seeing the results of this irrationality right now in the agricultural sector. Because we are legislating based on prehistoric fear, the state is deploying unaccountable, militarized enforcement units and holding massive numbers of people in extrajudicial detention facilities stripped of congressional oversight. The consequence of treating a massive economic input as an ex-ante criminal invasion isn't a safer society. It's systemic self-sabotage. Local farming economies are being decimated, crops are rotting, and businesses are failing because the workforce is either locked up or terrified. Building a massive, authoritarian state apparatus to destroy your own labor supply and crush local economies isn't "rational self-preservation." It is an irrational panic that breaks the modern system in a futile attempt to solve a prehistoric problem.
This is just one study, which the website notes goes against consensus, and we have a very sparse view into ancient DNA. Just from knowing Norwegian geography, I'm rather skeptical of full-genocide theories.
This is basically all of human history. I guarantee you that whatever ethnic group you belong to, if they are the dominant group in a region, they got to be that way be slaughtering the previous inhabitants. Modern anthropology has really opened our eyes to this fact, which contradicts a lot of the post-war anthropology that wanted to say that, say, fall of the Roman Empire was mostly peaceful, or the mass disappearance of Early European hunter artifacts was merely the movement of "pots, not people". But with DNA studies we can confirm that no, it's not that everyone started using a different kind of pottery, it's that they were all wiped out by the new group that had their own styles of pottery. The men were slaughtered and women were raped. Same thing for modern day Japanese moving into the islands, or the Bantus migrating into what is now Namibia, or the Aztecs, or basically anyone else. All of history is built on fighting for land to call your own, and killing off the male population that was there before. It's biblical, even - read the book of Joshua.
Hard for you to imagine because you live in a modern society and your next meal is guaranteed. You don't have to traverse hundreds of miles on foot in the face of drought, wildfire, famine, disease, war, etc to find some food source to sustain yourself and some shelter free of attacks by random tribal conflict.
> Hard for you to imagine because you live in a modern society and your next meal is guaranteed.
It is easy to reduce people to caricatures when we don't know them. Since we aren't at a happy hour regaling each other over the craziness of lives lived, I'll be brief: there have been periods of life where this assertion wasn't true.
I'm not understanding what you are trying to say in your comment? That you can't imagine "tomrod" or other hackernews commentariat have ever gone hungry for an extended period? That you can't imagine a modern community facing food insecurity, drought, war, or other maladies?
Communities built themselves around food production and child rearing 2000-8000 years ago as they nominally do today. I think you may be overstating the disparity in experiencing the negatives (drought, disaster, and war) and ignoring that these conditions also happen today and sometimes also don't get resolved -- people die, starve, drink poisoned water, and so forth.
completely true. No society is innocent of this. One good example is slavery - I myself was surprised that chattel slavery was common everywhere in the world and it was the west that had the mental capacity to stop it.
> completely true. No society is innocent of this.
Perhaps in history. But we humans have the ability to think and adjust our behavior. We didn't kill all the horse-people when we invented the car. It's likely that in the future we could be able to move past all the horrible things we do to each other.
Not really. From the time of the cave paintings at Lubang Serij Saleh 40,000 years ago, as well as 10,000 years before that, up to the beginning of the Neolithic revolution 10,000 years ago, all evidence is humans lived rather peacefully. As is evidenced also by similar remaining bands over the past centuries until now. The Neolithic revolution and rise of surplus, class societies, warrior castes and such was the beginning of such things. And that only spread over the entire globe over the past 600 years.
How does this jive with the inland Papuan tribes in Papua New Guinea?
They were quite isolated and from what I read they can be just as violent (of course, not on the scale of mechanized slaughter by moderns)
The smallest definition of a tribe is usually 500 people. They can be 10 tines that size. Tribes did not exist until about 10,000 years ago. They were preceded by hunter-gatherer bands.
The inland Papuan group most associated with violence are the Enga, but they are not migratory hunter-gatheree bands. They are farmers who grow sweet potatoes and raise pigs.
It depends on what you mean, as I did not argue that life for the average person in a traditional society was filled with violence.
What I argued is that whenever two competing groups came into contact, wanting the same land, the result was usually genocide (or one of the groups fled to another area, where they would have to fight those inhabitants), and as a result, when history records a new group "inhabiting" or "settling" a peace of land that is new to them, then that inhabitation is generally not peaceful, but genocidal in nature. Regardless of whether there is a written history to record the violence, we can have confidence that the violence did occur.
Now, given that modern humans have been around for 300,000 years at least (the date keeps being pushed back, since before the Moroccan discovery, it was thought to be 100,000 years), and have been swarming over the whole earth, that is a lot of violence and genocide, even though it was certainly possible to live a life of peace as well for a specific individual, since migrations weren't going on all the time in all places.
Skeletons from 100,000 years ago look similar to our own, and as you said, recent discoveries could push that back to 300,000 years ago.
There is little evidence of behavioral modernity - cave paintings, Venus figurines, hearths, burials etc. prior to 50,000 years ago. There is some evidence so the time could always be pushed back.
Farmers compete for land. Migratory hunter-gatherers are just passing through, so there is less competition for land. Also, bands usually mate with nearby bands, who are often more distant relatives.
There has not been much evidence of hunter-gatherer bands clashing violently then or even in modern times, including observations over past centuries. There is a plethora of evidence of post-neolithic farming and then industrial societies being this way.
Can totally see how some people who think everything is fair game from nature and people who cultivated land and raised livestock would end up in conflict.
Yeah, I think one of the major conflicts that humanity has gone through is the conflict between the hunter-gatherers and the farmers. Obviously the farmers won, and now we have the concept of land ownership and everything that comes from that, but it was a conflict I wasn't very aware of and that I don't see discussed much.
Farmers did well compared to hunter gatherers, but they were in turn devastated by pastoralists - who, in Europe at least, had a lot of hunter gatherer ancestry.
Instead we invented the concept of owning nature from the farmers, and now that the world has been claimed, everyone born after T0 is just a renter.
Not sure which side I should be rooting for, but at least hunter-gatherers didn't try to own the land.
Also if anyone wants to say "if it wasn't for the farmers, you wouldn't be here right now," to me, that's not quite the boon you might be imagining. I'm actually perfectly fine with not having existed if it meant that nature wasn't ravaged.
> Hunter-Gatherers had concepts of land ownership, if another tried to hunt on your tribes land there was conflict.
You're saying hunter gatherer bands are tribes which is contradictory. Migratory hunter-gatherer bands max out at 50 people. They migrated there was no land which was "theirs", this is the point.
Tribes were hundreds of people, often had class systems within them, often had surplus and farmed. So yes, tribal farmers had conflict but they were not hunter gatherer bands.
To be fair, from what we see hunter gatherers also made continual "war" on each other through raiding and battles. North American tribes on the whole had a mix of trading and ritualized warfare for centuries before Europeans were involved.
And they burned often huge tracts of forest to manage grazing lands. And overhunted and overfished and then moved on to new areas.
Its just that population densities were on the whole lower. And there was a lot of land and resources to live from. So the impact was lessened.
But even then, there were in fact tribal groupings that effectively wiped out other tribal groupings.
Also it's becoming clearer and clearer that the line between settled agrarian and hunter gatherer was a lot less clear than we initially imagined. There were all sorts of grain and maize growing societies that continued to rely on deer and fish for their protein sources and trade in skins etc for hundreds of years after they started tending crops.
If you want to make a pre-Columbian example it could be the cities of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), or Cahokia. Tribes will do as well, they are simpler versions of this. Europeans arrived in North America and met the Iroquois Confederacy. In fact the Confederacy allowed peace among the Iroquois.
These are tribes, or in the case of the Mexicans, a civilization. Not hunter gatherer bands.
Meanwhile out west or near the arctic were hunter-gatherer bands. They were not making continual war. They were hunter-gatherer bands and not tribal.
There’s this really quirky and interesting book on this topic, called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
Basically this (totalitarian agriculture genociding alternative cultures) has happened everywhere and his thesis is that the total extermination aspect in particular is a novel aspect of farming culture, which did not exist for hunter-gatherers or herders. Not that violence didn’t exist, but exterminating violence was very rare.
He also connects it to the founding myths of Adam and Eve (who are cursed to practice agriculture, instead of being hunter-gatherers, and who believe they have the power of good and evil to know what plants and animals should live and which should die), and Cain (who sacrifices wheat, representing agriculture and land ownership) and Abel (who sacrifices a goat, representing a herding lifestyle).
If that sounds at all interesting to you should totally read it, it’s a really clever book!
When living in contact, hunter gatherers and farmers are in natural conflict since the most concentrated food source you could gather (or hunt) from is a farm. Raiding must have been fairly common.
In a conflict like this, it seems natural that the farming community would prevail, since they would naturally be more motivated to do so (this is their primary food source, they are the ones being attacked), and as a stationary community might be expected to build up more resources and be better prepared to defend themselves.
Interestingly enough, agrarian societies being invaded (and then ruled) by nomadic tribes has been a recurring phenomenon in the past two millennia (by the Arabs, the Turks, the Mongols, etc.)
I think that's something a bit different though - a later era, with some of these nomadic tribes being more inherently inclined to war and violence, and "war technology" such as horses, advanced bows, etc, playing a role.
The suggested universal dynamic of neighbors in conflict is different from that of well equipped, well trained, expansionist cultures preying on everyone.
And because the farming communities would simply outnumber the hunters, since they are exploiting photosynthesis more directly. A given area of land can sustain many more farmers than it can hunters.
> the total extermination aspect in particular is a novel aspect of farming culture
Perhaps there wasn't a change in culture, but rather that farmer tribes were able to grow bigger? A hunter-gatherer tribe could be size-limited according to the available resources. Likely 2 neighbouring tribes would therefore be roughly the same size. Which would make it hard for a tribe to fully exterminate other tribes. Would you send all your fighters to take on another tribe, with the risk of none of them coming back, leaving you defenseless? What if a dangerous animal walks into camp while all fighters are away?
If a farming tribe could sustain double population, that would mean double the amount of fighters, thus it would reduce the risk greatly of sending out a large group of fighters.
Yes, as I understand it the population growth of the arable community is far faster than the hunter gatherers. This is because hunter gatherers often did not wean children off breast milk until they were 5, whilst arable farmers breast fed there children only up to 1 year.
I also wholeheartedly recommend it. In the beginning, the narrator is warned that after embarking on his journey he’ll never be able to see the world the same way again. I definitely felt the same after reading it.
Excellent novel but, as a non native English speaker, the analogy with the Third assassin was puzzling, Shakespeare wasn't on the cursus when I learned English.
>> The first population change happened 5,900 years ago when a farmer population, with a different origin and appearance, drove out the gatherers, hunters and fishers who had previously populated Scandinavia. Within a few generations, almost the entire hunter-gatherer population was wiped out.
>> A thousand years later, about 4,850 years ago, another population change took place when people with genetic roots in Yamnaya—a livestock herding people with origins in southern Russia—came to Scandinavia and wiped out the previous farmer population.
And today we welcome immigrants in droves, because multiculturalism must prevail, and never in history a local population was replaced by migrants. Never!
Can we rule out a scenario where disease was also implicated, like here in the Americas?
Incoming colonists were (and remained) genocidal by comportment, yes. But they also had the "advantage" of having a wave of smallpox and other disease going before them in a wave of devastation.
Farmers coming up from the Balkans and Pontic Steppe would have been living in larger settlements and among livestock for generations and would likely have brought with them things like smallpox that dispersed hunter gatherer societies would be less likely to encounter.
Fearing historical population replacement ignores the fact that prehistoric societies lacked modern state mechanisms to integrate labor. When you treat modern economic migration like a prehistoric invasion, you end up building policies that actively destroy your own society to fight a ghost.
We are seeing the results of this irrationality right now in the agricultural sector. Because we are legislating based on prehistoric fear, the state is deploying unaccountable, militarized enforcement units and holding massive numbers of people in extrajudicial detention facilities stripped of congressional oversight. The consequence of treating a massive economic input as an ex-ante criminal invasion isn't a safer society. It's systemic self-sabotage. Local farming economies are being decimated, crops are rotting, and businesses are failing because the workforce is either locked up or terrified. Building a massive, authoritarian state apparatus to destroy your own labor supply and crush local economies isn't "rational self-preservation." It is an irrational panic that breaks the modern system in a futile attempt to solve a prehistoric problem.
Just because some behavior made sense in a prehistoric society doesn't mean it does in a modern one.
In all places worth living we overcame those, and it was not something done irrationally.
Why should xenophobia, racism and such not follow the same path?
It is easy to reduce people to caricatures when we don't know them. Since we aren't at a happy hour regaling each other over the craziness of lives lived, I'll be brief: there have been periods of life where this assertion wasn't true.
Communities built themselves around food production and child rearing 2000-8000 years ago as they nominally do today. I think you may be overstating the disparity in experiencing the negatives (drought, disaster, and war) and ignoring that these conditions also happen today and sometimes also don't get resolved -- people die, starve, drink poisoned water, and so forth.
Perhaps in history. But we humans have the ability to think and adjust our behavior. We didn't kill all the horse-people when we invented the car. It's likely that in the future we could be able to move past all the horrible things we do to each other.
The smallest definition of a tribe is usually 500 people. They can be 10 tines that size. Tribes did not exist until about 10,000 years ago. They were preceded by hunter-gatherer bands.
The inland Papuan group most associated with violence are the Enga, but they are not migratory hunter-gatheree bands. They are farmers who grow sweet potatoes and raise pigs.
What I argued is that whenever two competing groups came into contact, wanting the same land, the result was usually genocide (or one of the groups fled to another area, where they would have to fight those inhabitants), and as a result, when history records a new group "inhabiting" or "settling" a peace of land that is new to them, then that inhabitation is generally not peaceful, but genocidal in nature. Regardless of whether there is a written history to record the violence, we can have confidence that the violence did occur.
Now, given that modern humans have been around for 300,000 years at least (the date keeps being pushed back, since before the Moroccan discovery, it was thought to be 100,000 years), and have been swarming over the whole earth, that is a lot of violence and genocide, even though it was certainly possible to live a life of peace as well for a specific individual, since migrations weren't going on all the time in all places.
There is little evidence of behavioral modernity - cave paintings, Venus figurines, hearths, burials etc. prior to 50,000 years ago. There is some evidence so the time could always be pushed back.
Farmers compete for land. Migratory hunter-gatherers are just passing through, so there is less competition for land. Also, bands usually mate with nearby bands, who are often more distant relatives.
There has not been much evidence of hunter-gatherer bands clashing violently then or even in modern times, including observations over past centuries. There is a plethora of evidence of post-neolithic farming and then industrial societies being this way.
Not sure which side I should be rooting for, but at least hunter-gatherers didn't try to own the land.
Also if anyone wants to say "if it wasn't for the farmers, you wouldn't be here right now," to me, that's not quite the boon you might be imagining. I'm actually perfectly fine with not having existed if it meant that nature wasn't ravaged.
They also had no problem driving species to extinction.
This idea of a group of people living in harmony with nature is fantasy.
You're saying hunter gatherer bands are tribes which is contradictory. Migratory hunter-gatherer bands max out at 50 people. They migrated there was no land which was "theirs", this is the point.
Tribes were hundreds of people, often had class systems within them, often had surplus and farmed. So yes, tribal farmers had conflict but they were not hunter gatherer bands.
Its just that population densities were on the whole lower. And there was a lot of land and resources to live from. So the impact was lessened.
But even then, there were in fact tribal groupings that effectively wiped out other tribal groupings.
Also it's becoming clearer and clearer that the line between settled agrarian and hunter gatherer was a lot less clear than we initially imagined. There were all sorts of grain and maize growing societies that continued to rely on deer and fish for their protein sources and trade in skins etc for hundreds of years after they started tending crops.
These are tribes, or in the case of the Mexicans, a civilization. Not hunter gatherer bands.
Meanwhile out west or near the arctic were hunter-gatherer bands. They were not making continual war. They were hunter-gatherer bands and not tribal.
Basically this (totalitarian agriculture genociding alternative cultures) has happened everywhere and his thesis is that the total extermination aspect in particular is a novel aspect of farming culture, which did not exist for hunter-gatherers or herders. Not that violence didn’t exist, but exterminating violence was very rare.
He also connects it to the founding myths of Adam and Eve (who are cursed to practice agriculture, instead of being hunter-gatherers, and who believe they have the power of good and evil to know what plants and animals should live and which should die), and Cain (who sacrifices wheat, representing agriculture and land ownership) and Abel (who sacrifices a goat, representing a herding lifestyle).
If that sounds at all interesting to you should totally read it, it’s a really clever book!
When living in contact, hunter gatherers and farmers are in natural conflict since the most concentrated food source you could gather (or hunt) from is a farm. Raiding must have been fairly common.
In a conflict like this, it seems natural that the farming community would prevail, since they would naturally be more motivated to do so (this is their primary food source, they are the ones being attacked), and as a stationary community might be expected to build up more resources and be better prepared to defend themselves.
The suggested universal dynamic of neighbors in conflict is different from that of well equipped, well trained, expansionist cultures preying on everyone.
Perhaps there wasn't a change in culture, but rather that farmer tribes were able to grow bigger? A hunter-gatherer tribe could be size-limited according to the available resources. Likely 2 neighbouring tribes would therefore be roughly the same size. Which would make it hard for a tribe to fully exterminate other tribes. Would you send all your fighters to take on another tribe, with the risk of none of them coming back, leaving you defenseless? What if a dangerous animal walks into camp while all fighters are away?
If a farming tribe could sustain double population, that would mean double the amount of fighters, thus it would reduce the risk greatly of sending out a large group of fighters.
Breastfeeding is a natural contraceptive.
>> A thousand years later, about 4,850 years ago, another population change took place when people with genetic roots in Yamnaya—a livestock herding people with origins in southern Russia—came to Scandinavia and wiped out the previous farmer population.
And today we welcome immigrants in droves, because multiculturalism must prevail, and never in history a local population was replaced by migrants. Never!
Ethnonationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels.
Incoming colonists were (and remained) genocidal by comportment, yes. But they also had the "advantage" of having a wave of smallpox and other disease going before them in a wave of devastation.
Farmers coming up from the Balkans and Pontic Steppe would have been living in larger settlements and among livestock for generations and would likely have brought with them things like smallpox that dispersed hunter gatherer societies would be less likely to encounter.