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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Naturuk therefore challenges our views about what the causes of conflict are. It is possible that human prehistoric societies simply responded antagonistically to chance encounters with another group. But this is not what seems to have happened at Nataruk. The group which attacked was carrying weapons that would not normally be carried while hunting and fishing. In addition, the lesions show that clubs of at least two sizes were used, making it likely that more than one of the attackers were carrying them.
>All three involved projectiles, one of the hallmarks of inter-group conflict. Two of the projectiles found embedded in the bones at Nataruk and in two of the other cases were made of obsidian. This tells us that such attacks happened multiple times, and were part of the life of the hunter-gatherer communities at the time.
>In this study, Standen and colleagues examined signs of violent trauma on the remains of 288 adult individuals from funerary sites across the Atacama Desert coast, dating from 10,000 years ago to 1450 AD. The researchers also analyzed patterns in weaponry and in artistic depictions of combat during this time. They found that rates of violence were surprisingly static over time, though there was a notable increase in lethal violence during the Formative Period starting around 1000 BC, a trend also found in similar studies of the Andean region. Data from strontium isotopes indicate that this interpersonal violence was occurring between local groups, not between local and foreign populations.
> I concluded that most recent foraging groups were likely to have at least occasionally participated in lethal intergroup violence. I used this evidence alongside several other lines of evidence, such as archaeological remains, the behavior of other species, and predictions from behavioral ecology, to argue that at least occasional intergroup violence extended well into the Pleistocene.
>Progression in science typically requires agreement on a shared empirical reality. Once we identify well-supported empirical findings, we then make inferences about how these findings relate to hypotheses about behavior we cannot directly assess, such as the role of war or cooperation in human evolution (Table 1). Much of the current stasis on the role of intergroup violence in human evolution is due to a failure to agree on the nature of mobile forager intergroup relationships with minimal colonial/state influence or impact from agriculturalist neighbors. If we cannot reasonably agree on whether ethnographically recent mobile foragers sometimes killed members of other groups as part of or supported by a coalition, then we cannot begin to reach a consensus on what those relationships may tell us about warfare in human evolution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 to handle harvest.
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 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.
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.
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.
Guess that is good work from the Lund communication team.
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.
>> Yes exactly. We have been intermingling since before humans existed. There is no one true people who can claim to own any land because of their race.
Noone owns their land because of their race but because they can defend it. The moment you can't defend it anymore, you're conquered and driven out.
And conquering is attempted either naively by armed conflict like Russia in Ukraine or insidious like migrants in EU.
My bet is that the first will fail and the second will succeed.
Israelis are not claiming that. Israel is composed of many races. It is actually the Arabs who are arguing that they have solo rights to the land due to their ethnicity.
When the Amish out-procreate the rest of the population in the US, do they "slaughter" us? With their pitchforks and buggys? Are you funking serious Lund University?! Is this the excellence you can imagine aspire to? Yikes folks. Going to have to remember that name because I'm sure we'll see more lovely headlines from them at this rate.
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.
Being "not nice" guarantees downvotes here. I'm engaging in exposure therapy so that people get used to it so we can actually have debate that isn't layered behind needless coddling and cotton-padding.
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.
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.
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 wilds of a back alleyway, 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.
What is the proof that the “systemic context has changed?” Pointing to “state mechanisms” cuts both ways. Because in a democracy, the state mechanisms give newcomers power over those who are already here through the power of the state. The newcomers don’t even have to overwhelm you physically to change your way of life.
People sometimes misunderstand this so I'd better add: of course it's fine to use AI tools! We use them heavily ourselves. Just please don't use them to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on Hacker News.
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.
I am glad HN is adopting of AI tools! Please remove me from any blacklist you have me on -- I am not using genai generally for comments, and won't use it to help rework my normal awkward phrasing moving forward. It seems the comments being "caught" in the blacklisting are anything with structure on them - including citations or bullets. As an academic its killing me to not cite my sources.
Those are all different phenomena that were eliminated over time for different reasons. There’s not an undifferentiated blob of “progress,” but rather social dynamics changing in response to context.
What people call “xenophobia” these days—which isn’t really xenophobia as properly understood—is just the flip side of ethnic affinity coin. If I come to America and declare that I’m a “proud south Asian” and indicate my affinity for my co-ethnics by joining various “south asian XXX associations,” then what reaction am I going to elicit from the people outside my ethnic group?
If you take a society that has been taught to abandon their own ethnic identity, and introduce into it foreigners with strong ethnic identity and in-group affinity of their own, you’re going to generate counterfeiting response. You can call it “xenophobia” or whatever you want, but the only way to overcome it is to strip subgroup identity altogether.
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.
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.
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.
Like when the Zionists with European and US help cut off food from entering Gaza for a few months last year? That is modern society.
Give me an idyllic migration through bountiful pastures 20,000 years ago any day. Many hunter-gatherers work less than 40 hours a week, less than a worker in our modern society, who did not get laid off in past years as so many on this board were.
The original affluent society as it has been called.
Some el nino, volcano or other cause drought in entire region may have wiped out entire communities. 20k years ago was also much more colder with ie massive glaciers ie in much of central Europe.
Every hunt was fight for life and survival, any injury could be fatal and treatment was practically non existent, broken foot was almost sute death sentence. Winter (and each one was harsh) was barely survived in bitter 24/7 cold and a lot of starvation outside of tropical regions.
You have no actual clue nor imagination with your first world whining about toils of office work which you can easily abandon and not be dead with your family within 2 weeks. You can definitely do better than that.
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 is a truism. The violent isolated ones around today are of course violent and isolated. The ones not predisposed towards violence and isolation have opened themselves up, and you might see them in documentary TV sharing food and song with the western hosts. They might even have cellphones and tshirts but still know how to chuck a spear and perform ancient ritual.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> Indo-European ethnicities/language families
language families, not ethnicities
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.
wonderful; the culture is dead but one of its remnants at some point had a position of leadership over its conquerors; this is success
The article is very much making up conclusions not present in the work cited. There were no "wipe outs" or "total turnovers".
Probably some sort of jingoist advocating ethnic cleansing writing articles like this.
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.
This is the litteral title of the scientific article
> 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
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.
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.
Yeah I guess we should be happy for the hotlink to the article at least.
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.
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)
The fact that we see this disparity between the sexes means that this wasn’t a disease based takeover like it was in the Americas.
Could this mean just that 95% failed to reproduce?
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.
> Males back then didn't fail to reproduce from the same social situations as today.
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
nowadays failure to reproduce is glorified
The Fox without a Tail: https://www.loc.gov/static/collections/childrens-book-select...
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.
Yamnaya?
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.
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.
They also had no problem driving species to extinction.
This idea of a group of people living in harmony with nature is fantasy.
> 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.
>Naturuk therefore challenges our views about what the causes of conflict are. It is possible that human prehistoric societies simply responded antagonistically to chance encounters with another group. But this is not what seems to have happened at Nataruk. The group which attacked was carrying weapons that would not normally be carried while hunting and fishing. In addition, the lesions show that clubs of at least two sizes were used, making it likely that more than one of the attackers were carrying them.
>All three involved projectiles, one of the hallmarks of inter-group conflict. Two of the projectiles found embedded in the bones at Nataruk and in two of the other cases were made of obsidian. This tells us that such attacks happened multiple times, and were part of the life of the hunter-gatherer communities at the time.
https://theconversation.com/finding-a-hunter-gatherer-massac...
>In this study, Standen and colleagues examined signs of violent trauma on the remains of 288 adult individuals from funerary sites across the Atacama Desert coast, dating from 10,000 years ago to 1450 AD. The researchers also analyzed patterns in weaponry and in artistic depictions of combat during this time. They found that rates of violence were surprisingly static over time, though there was a notable increase in lethal violence during the Formative Period starting around 1000 BC, a trend also found in similar studies of the Andean region. Data from strontium isotopes indicate that this interpersonal violence was occurring between local groups, not between local and foreign populations.
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/long-term-history-of...
> I concluded that most recent foraging groups were likely to have at least occasionally participated in lethal intergroup violence. I used this evidence alongside several other lines of evidence, such as archaeological remains, the behavior of other species, and predictions from behavioral ecology, to argue that at least occasional intergroup violence extended well into the Pleistocene.
>Progression in science typically requires agreement on a shared empirical reality. Once we identify well-supported empirical findings, we then make inferences about how these findings relate to hypotheses about behavior we cannot directly assess, such as the role of war or cooperation in human evolution (Table 1). Much of the current stasis on the role of intergroup violence in human evolution is due to a failure to agree on the nature of mobile forager intergroup relationships with minimal colonial/state influence or impact from agriculturalist neighbors. If we cannot reasonably agree on whether ethnographically recent mobile foragers sometimes killed members of other groups as part of or supported by a coalition, then we cannot begin to reach a consensus on what those relationships may tell us about warfare in human evolution.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...
Why is “nature” being intact so important? Humans are part of nature just like every other living thing, even today.
Those who enclosed the commons did so with the sword, I thought that had been common knowledge for hundreds of years.
Sadly not. I think I did not hear anything about this in schooling (Finland).
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.
This exact dynamic happened in the American west and is still happening in Brazil
Its biblical. Cain the farmer slays Abel the shepherd in Genesis.
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.
Also present in Sumerian tablets: The Debate between Sheep and Grain[1] circa 2000BC.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_sheep_and_grain
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!
It makes sense as a universal dynamic.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Breastfeeding is a natural contraceptive.
Having got my wife pregnant while she was still nursing our 1 year old, I think the contraceptive nature of the nursing period is overstated.
I think the contraceptive affect is stronger if the mother nurses on demand, i.e. through the night
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 to handle harvest.
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 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.
Why?!
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.
Chinese history says otherwise. Nomadic tribes always get an upper hand despite disadvantage in numbers.
It’s an amazing book. One of the few that actually changes how you see the world. Recommended.
Sounds like a massive evolutionary advantage in the hands of the new arrivals.
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.
> doesn't involve human populations being decimated.
Eh, "palantir kill chain".
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.
Guess that is good work from the Lund communication team.
Article is from 2/2024.
'Slaughtered' is a bit hyperbolic. Opening the article, I kind of assumed this was about cannibalism, which it isn't.
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.
(from the article)
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.
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Yes exactly. We have been intermingling since before humans existed. There is no one true people who can claim to own any land because of their race.
Ethnonationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels.
> Ethnonationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels
It is but we must also realize that 'land acknowledgements' , 'indigenous reservations', etc are also ethnonationalisms.
>> Yes exactly. We have been intermingling since before humans existed. There is no one true people who can claim to own any land because of their race.
Noone owns their land because of their race but because they can defend it. The moment you can't defend it anymore, you're conquered and driven out. And conquering is attempted either naively by armed conflict like Russia in Ukraine or insidious like migrants in EU. My bet is that the first will fail and the second will succeed.
Not least because of defeatists like you!
> There is no one true people who can claim to own any land because of their race.
Its working out pretty well for the Israelis
Israelis are not claiming that. Israel is composed of many races. It is actually the Arabs who are arguing that they have solo rights to the land due to their ethnicity.
When the Amish out-procreate the rest of the population in the US, do they "slaughter" us? With their pitchforks and buggys? Are you funking serious Lund University?! Is this the excellence you can imagine aspire to? Yikes folks. Going to have to remember that name because I'm sure we'll see more lovely headlines from them at this rate.
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.
Being "not nice" guarantees downvotes here. I'm engaging in exposure therapy so that people get used to it so we can actually have debate that isn't layered behind needless coddling and cotton-padding.
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.
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.
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Reducing prehistoric existential struggle to "xenophobia" is really something...
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 wilds of a back alleyway, 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.
What is the proof that the “systemic context has changed?” Pointing to “state mechanisms” cuts both ways. Because in a democracy, the state mechanisms give newcomers power over those who are already here through the power of the state. The newcomers don’t even have to overwhelm you physically to change your way of life.
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Some of your recent comments have been killed by our software because they've been classified as genai text, which is not allowed on HN itself (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079).
People sometimes misunderstand this so I'd better add: of course it's fine to use AI tools! We use them heavily ourselves. Just please don't use them to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on Hacker News.
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.
I am glad HN is adopting of AI tools! Please remove me from any blacklist you have me on -- I am not using genai generally for comments, and won't use it to help rework my normal awkward phrasing moving forward. It seems the comments being "caught" in the blacklisting are anything with structure on them - including citations or bullets. As an academic its killing me to not cite my sources.
It's exactly as rational as people hoarding toilet paper at the beginning of Covid.
Just because some behavior made sense in a prehistoric society doesn't mean it does in a modern one.
In history things such as slavery, marital rape, and honor killings were the norm.
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?
Those are all different phenomena that were eliminated over time for different reasons. There’s not an undifferentiated blob of “progress,” but rather social dynamics changing in response to context.
What people call “xenophobia” these days—which isn’t really xenophobia as properly understood—is just the flip side of ethnic affinity coin. If I come to America and declare that I’m a “proud south Asian” and indicate my affinity for my co-ethnics by joining various “south asian XXX associations,” then what reaction am I going to elicit from the people outside my ethnic group?
If you take a society that has been taught to abandon their own ethnic identity, and introduce into it foreigners with strong ethnic identity and in-group affinity of their own, you’re going to generate counterfeiting response. You can call it “xenophobia” or whatever you want, but the only way to overcome it is to strip subgroup identity altogether.
“Countervailing” not “counterfeiting.”
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.
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.
Don't get me wrong - I recognize that. And it is still hard for me to imagine!
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.
Your next meal is guaranteed in a way that you can't possibly relate to what someone 2000-8000 years ago had to fear.
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.
Like when the Zionists with European and US help cut off food from entering Gaza for a few months last year? That is modern society.
Give me an idyllic migration through bountiful pastures 20,000 years ago any day. Many hunter-gatherers work less than 40 hours a week, less than a worker in our modern society, who did not get laid off in past years as so many on this board were.
The original affluent society as it has been called.
Some el nino, volcano or other cause drought in entire region may have wiped out entire communities. 20k years ago was also much more colder with ie massive glaciers ie in much of central Europe.
Every hunt was fight for life and survival, any injury could be fatal and treatment was practically non existent, broken foot was almost sute death sentence. Winter (and each one was harsh) was barely survived in bitter 24/7 cold and a lot of starvation outside of tropical regions.
You have no actual clue nor imagination with your first world whining about toils of office work which you can easily abandon and not be dead with your family within 2 weeks. You can definitely do better than that.
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.
That is my hope. While it won't be utopia, how much better would we be if our small "tribes" grow to be humanity and life in general.
sure but i was talking against singling any society out
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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)
> Papuan tribes
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 is a truism. The violent isolated ones around today are of course violent and isolated. The ones not predisposed towards violence and isolation have opened themselves up, and you might see them in documentary TV sharing food and song with the western hosts. They might even have cellphones and tshirts but still know how to chuck a spear and perform ancient ritual.
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.
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.)
[1] https://news.tulane.edu/pr/new-study-reveals-long-history-vi...
If everybody were killed by spiders, would you talk about "the ills of arachnophobia"?
But when everybody were killed by invading foreigners, you talk about "the ills of xenophobia"??
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.
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.