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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Migratory hunter gatherers compete for foraging and hunting grounds. Just passing through is a bit naive; they are passing through to hunt your deer and forage your mushrooms now the carrying capacity of your land is lower. That could lead to some consequences where you start favoring your own kin over others for who gets a share of this part of the forest's finite available resources.
Everything that I have read about hunter-gatherer and tribal societies is that there was a fairly high level of background violence. Here's one study [1]. Bret Devreaux has an article on how Native American-like societies had a lot of small raiding. (I think it is in his "That Dothraki Horde" series.) There are a lot of stories of missionaries narrowly avoiding getting killed by at the border of tribe they were going to, indicating an expectation of attack and shoot first ask questions later tactic. (Some missionaries did, in fact get killed, notably Elizabeth Eliot's first husband.)
That's nonsense. While there are some examples, where the conquerors massacred the existing populations, it was a rare exception. Most of the time, the purpose of a war of conquest was to increase your agricultural surplus, which was the key resource that supported everything else in the society. If you killed the people (or even just the men), it would take generations to restore agricultural production. By that time, your tenure as the Glorious Leader would be long gone.
In present-day Turkey, people typically have 5–15% Turkic ancestry. For the most part, their ancestors called themselves Roman, or Greek, or Lydian, or Phrygian, or Hittite, or whichever culture happened to be dominant at the time. When new conquerors came, they pillaged a bit and put their own people in charge. Most commoners, and even many cooperative elites, would then continue their lives as before. If the new elites managed to stay in power, people would often gradually adopt their language, religion, and cultural identity.
As for the Aztecs, I found it amusing that the previous Mexican ambassador to the US was Esteban Moctezuma. Guess from which ancestor that name came from.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. Call racism/xenophobia/whatever bad (ok, easy enough). Write off all the bad shit in history as if those were the simple causes. And in doing so doom yourself to repeat them. Because things are far more complex than that. "Bad" (to our modern opinions) beliefs are rarely doing the heavy lifting on their own. There's usually economic issues and/or less clear cut fundamental differences at play.
When was the last time everyone was killed by invading foreigners? Turkey's Armenian genocide? Rwanda? Genuine recent tragedies that, by our mutual acknowledgment that they are tragedies, shows that the norm is no longer acceptable.
It is rational to fear needles in the wilds of a back alleyway. Not so rational when we are in a doctor's office.
Every person alive today is survivors of survivors of survivors⁵ of people who have faced foreign invaders. Being suspicious of foreigners (men only) is part of human DNA, just like being suspicious of spiders and heights. War is our destiny, war has always been with humanity for millions of years. How many war victims would it take before you would admit to "xenophobia" being rational? How many of our ancestors throughout the eons were killed by spider bites for it to be encoded as a fear?
Just because something is no longer "acceptable" doesn't mean it won't happen. Russia invaded Ukraine multiple times recently and killed a lot of people while most of the rest of the world has done little or nothing to stop it.
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.
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.
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.
Males back then didn't fail to reproduce from the same social situations as today. They were not neets hiding in basements. Failure to reproduce basically means killed, exiled, or having your groups women taken (by force)
There were other reasons. Early farming communities were almost always patriarchies where the sons stayed on the farm but the daughters switched communities. So local disasters that wiped out a single community took out a male lineage but not a female one.
If I was slaughtering the hunter gatherers I would only kill the males, the females would make good wives for my new settled civilisation. And giving the men wives would enable the civilisation to maintain stability (incels will stab up the longhouse)
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
Food. In Arable societies children could be weened onto porridge or milk from cows. Food that hunter gatherers survived on is less digestible for babies.
So you would get higher population growth in Arable societies but not necessarily healthier.
Farms yield more food than forest of course as well. But what is more, the whole math of children changes between hunter gatherers and farmers. For hunter gatherers, more mouths in the tribe are a liability. Everything has now gotten harder. What few game species and edible plants in the area have not changed in number and are being demanded further.
For agriculture societies however, the planting is easy. Harvest and processing is the challenge. Tendency is to therefore overplant and struggle to harvest it all unless some crop failure or other catastrophe befalls. This keeps you in a pattern to avoid famine but also incentivizing constant population increase.
Now take it a step further and what might you do in times of low food output with excess males? Might be a good time for a war, spend down some of those males and maybe return some more arable land to alleviate food pressure in the remaining population. Maybe the old agriculture chiefs of old didn't think in these terms so explicitly, but they are bound by these incentives and history seems to support this sort of model playing out over time.
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.
We can’t say for certain what the causes were, but there are some very striking near-total population replacements we can infer from DNA analysis, such as the disappearance of Neolithic ancestry in Britain over the span of just a century or two.
Phys.org is good for DOI links to the studies they butcher and nothing else. It makes me cringe every time I see people discussing their writing seriously, but my God they’re a popular domain.
They’re often sensational and frequently inaccurate or misleading, but often the research they cite is worthwhile.
You're right that "wipeouts" and "total population turnover" basically doesn't exist in our genetic history, but there's one critical exception to that rule of thumb: massive epidemics really do wipe out entire local populations, and given that early farming was involved (with its higher pathogen burden) this cannot be ignored as a factor here.
However, the Corded Ware culture that largely displaced EEF in Europe itself had a large EEF component in addition to Yamnaya (and in some places like Sardinia EEF still dominates).
BTW, the only modern Indo-European ethnicities/language families that are not Corded Ware-derived are Greek, Albanian, and Armenian. (Indic and Iranic speakers resulted from a Corded Ware migration out of Central Europe back into the steppe, completing the circle begun with the Yamnaya migration out of the steppe into Europe.)
No, both, where I'm loosely using "ethnicity" to denote "genetic population cluster". E.g. the R1a haplogroup is associated with Corded Ware and is not found in these populations while the R1b haplogroup is (R1b is associated with Yamnaya and its absence in Corded Ware is still something of a mystery with various theories being currently debated).
> there wasn't a complete elimination of the HG groups
The annihilated culture was not worried about its haplogroups, it was worried about is survival; its dead now; its haplogroups survive so everything is fine, yes?
It did survive! And it paints a fascinating picture of adaptation. The Yamnaya cultural package brought elite domination and patrilineal succession. So for the I1 line (mesolithic European HG) to not just survive but spread widely across Scandinavia and crowd out the Yamnaya R1 haplogroup suggests that at least one member of the Hunter Gatherers became dominant over the Yamnaya and beat them at the new Bronze Age game they brought to the region.
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.
> "This transition has previously been presented as peaceful. However, our study indicates the opposite. In addition to violent death, it is likely that new pathogens from livestock finished off many gatherers," says Anne Birgitte Nielsen, geology researcher and head of the Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory at Lund University.
We cannot, this article is from 2024 and early into 2025 there was a paper showing that there was a massive bubonic plague epidemic around this time. So we can be reasonably sure that disease from the imported steppe animals played at least some role, even if we can't estimate the death toll just from # of people buried with plague on their teeth.
>> 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!
Pretty naughty by Lund University. Sure they took part in this research (a single author). But its primarily driven and financed by a danish foundation, the danish Copenhagen University, and danish museums.
The end result is literally a combination of the three characterizations of the source populations.
This doesn't preclude violence but likely it wasn't a planned extermination campaign but rather accidental partial extinction due to genetic swamping.
Particularly with the Yamnaya the people who settled Sweden had a totally different genetic makeup from the people replacing farmer YDNA with R1b in Portugal.
Even the Paleolithic-Mesolithic replacement which was thought to be full turned out to leave some traces in latter Mesolithic populations. Just because the contribution isn't detectable anymore it doesn't mean individuals left no descent.
Why the downvotes? After AI takes our jobs, all of us technical people are going to have to resort to hunting and gathering, which puts us in the crosshairs of the Amish. It makes perfect sense.
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[ 0.36 ms ] story [ 20.4 ms ] threadWhat 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.
[1] https://news.tulane.edu/pr/new-study-reveals-long-history-vi...
In present-day Turkey, people typically have 5–15% Turkic ancestry. For the most part, their ancestors called themselves Roman, or Greek, or Lydian, or Phrygian, or Hittite, or whichever culture happened to be dominant at the time. When new conquerors came, they pillaged a bit and put their own people in charge. Most commoners, and even many cooperative elites, would then continue their lives as before. If the new elites managed to stay in power, people would often gradually adopt their language, religion, and cultural identity.
As for the Aztecs, I found it amusing that the previous Mexican ambassador to the US was Esteban Moctezuma. Guess from which ancestor that name came from.
But when everybody were killed by invading foreigners, you talk about "the ills of xenophobia"??
It is rational to fear needles in the wilds of a back alleyway. Not so rational when we are in a doctor's office.
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.
Yes, but they could fail to reproduce due to other situations. I think from this
> Failure to reproduce basically means killed, exiled, or having your groups women taken (by force)
Only "killed" supports the thesis that males were slaughtered
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!
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.
So you would get higher population growth in Arable societies but not necessarily healthier.
For agriculture societies however, the planting is easy. Harvest and processing is the challenge. Tendency is to therefore overplant and struggle to harvest it all unless some crop failure or other catastrophe befalls. This keeps you in a pattern to avoid famine but also incentivizing constant population increase.
Now take it a step further and what might you do in times of low food output with excess males? Might be a good time for a war, spend down some of those males and maybe return some more arable land to alleviate food pressure in the remaining population. Maybe the old agriculture chiefs of old didn't think in these terms so explicitly, but they are bound by these incentives and history seems to support this sort of model playing out over time.
Probably some sort of jingoist advocating ethnic cleansing writing articles like this.
They’re often sensational and frequently inaccurate or misleading, but often the research they cite is worthwhile.
> 100 ancient genomes show repeated population turnovers in Neolithic Denmark
Of course there are still parts of the hunter gatherer genome present, but we still have neanderthal and Denisovan genome present
languages or language families, not ethnicities;
nor the names menthioned are ethnicities, more like nationalities
The annihilated culture was not worried about its haplogroups, it was worried about is survival; its dead now; its haplogroups survive so everything is fine, yes?
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.
(from the article)
>> 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!
In tech we call it "disruption" and celebrate it.. but of course it's different as it's tech, and doesn't involve human populations being decimated.
Just interesting to consider the similarities in nature and the similar effects on who gets the spoils.
Eh, "palantir kill chain".
This doesn't preclude violence but likely it wasn't a planned extermination campaign but rather accidental partial extinction due to genetic swamping.
Particularly with the Yamnaya the people who settled Sweden had a totally different genetic makeup from the people replacing farmer YDNA with R1b in Portugal.
Even the Paleolithic-Mesolithic replacement which was thought to be full turned out to leave some traces in latter Mesolithic populations. Just because the contribution isn't detectable anymore it doesn't mean individuals left no descent.