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Scandinavia's first farmers slaughtered hunter-gatherer population, DNA suggests

28 points optimalsolver 1 hour ago 18 comments

tomrod 45 minutes ago | parent

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.

carefree-bob 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

tomrod 12 minutes ago | parent

Don't get me wrong - I recognize that. And it is still hard for me to imagine!

simianwords 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

vintermann 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

gradus_ad 3 minutes ago | parent

Reducing prehistoric existential struggle to "xenophobia" is really something...

newsclues 39 minutes ago | parent

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.

rpdillon 33 minutes ago | parent

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.

vintermann 8 minutes ago | parent

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.

ashkankiani 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

jaqalopes 36 minutes ago | parent

This exact dynamic happened in the American west and is still happening in Brazil

nish__ 29 minutes ago | parent

Its biblical. Cain the farmer slays Abel the shepherd in Genesis.

bryanlarsen 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

gen220 23 minutes ago | parent

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!

HarHarVeryFunny 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

whynotmaybe 4 minutes ago | parent

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.

RobotToaster 14 minutes ago | parent

Those who enclosed the commons did so with the sword, I thought that had been common knowledge for hundreds of years.

sl-1 3 minutes ago | parent

Sadly not. I think I did not hear anything about this in schooling (Finland).