Bronze Age/Corded War Battle Axe. Famous from North Mythology as Mjölnir - Thor’s hammer, not merely a tool, but a lethal weapon too as well as a status object.
Rational optimists, like Steven Pinker, want to make us believe that human beings have been on a trajectory from violent to increasingly peaceful. Unfortunately, during a time when there is war in Europe, this is kind of hard to believe. However, this is not the main problem with Pinker’s theory. It most likely does not correspond to historic facts. There is no doubt that the human past was violent and that the human present is comparatively peaceful. However, there is no trajectory from violent to non-violent. Gentisticst are uncovering the “Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA”:
THE iconic sarsen stones at Stonehenge were erected some 4500 years ago. Although the monument’s original purpose is still disputed, we now know that within a few centuries it became a memorial to a vanished people. By then, almost every Briton, from the south coast of England to the north-east tip of Scotland, had been wiped out by incomers. It isn’t clear exactly why they disappeared so rapidly. But a picture of the people who replaced them is emerging. The migrants’ ultimate source was a group of livestock herders called the Yamnaya who occupied the Eurasian steppe north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains. Britain wasn’t their only destination. Between 5000 and 4000 years ago, the Yamnaya and their descendants colonised swathes of Europe, leaving a genetic legacy that persists to this day. Their arrival coincided with profound social and cultural changes. Burial practices shifted dramatically, a warrior class appeared, and there seems to have been a sharp upsurge in lethal violence. “I’ve become increasingly convinced there must have been a kind of genocide,” says Kristian Kristiansen at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. As he and others piece together the story, one question resounds: were the Yamnaya the most murderous people in history? New Scientist
A study estimated a (38.8–50.4 %) ancestral contribution of the Yamnaya in the DNA of modern Central, and Northern Europeans, and an 18.5–32.6 % contribution in modern Southern Europeans. This is a huge genetic contribution from a small pastoralist tribe that started out in the Pontic steppe. Even bigger was its linguistic contribution in the area, where the vast majority of people speak Indo-European languages now. How did this happen? The Yamnaya and their descendants most likely dominated local farming populations, like those British Neolithic farmers that erected Stonehenge.
In Who We Are and How We Got Here David Reich writes about how a few men from the Bronze Age left an enormously disproportionate amount of offspring (star clusters):
In East Asians, Europeans, Near Easterners, and North Africans, the authors found many Star Clusters with common male ancestors living roughly around five thousand years ago.
The time around five thousand years ago coincides with the period in Eurasia that the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt called the “Secondary Products Revolution,” in which people began to find many uses for domesticated animals beyond meat production, including employing them to pull carts and plows and to produce dairy products and clothing such as wool. This was also around the time of the onset of the Bronze Age, a period of greatly increased human mobility and wealth accumulation, facilitated by the domestication of the horse, the invention of the wheel and wheeled vehicles, and the accumulation of rare metals like copper and tin, which are the ingredients of bronze and had to be imported from hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. The Y-chromosome patterns reveal that this was also a time of greatly increased inequality, a genetic reflection of the unprecedented concentration of power in tiny fractions of the population that began to be possible during this time due to the new economy. Powerful males in this period left an extraordinary impact on the populations that followed them—more than in any previous period—with some bequeathing DNA to more descendants today than Genghis Khan.
What turned the Yamnaya (and their descendants the Scythians, Parthians, Vikings) into such bloodthirsty people? The answer lies probably in their mode of subsistence: pastoralism. Pastoralists can be fairly peaceful and have symbiotic trading relations with their neighbouring farmers. However, pastoralists everywhere also turn easily from raiding to raiding, especially during hard times. Ecologically pastoralism is likely more unstable than farming and far more unstable than foraging.
Is there any recent historic evidence that pastoralists commonly come to dominate farming tribes? Avi Tuschman in Our Political Nature writes about the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis:
The truth, however, is even less politically correct. Intermarriage between Hutus and Tutsis for four centuries has reduced differences to a certain extent. Still, the Tutsis have a different ancestral history. They likely migrated to central Africa from Ethiopia, or elsewhere in the Horn of Africa, in the sixteenth century. The Tutsis integrated fairly peacefully with the Hutus, but a society emerged that has been described as “Rwandan feudalism.” This caste-like system, in which the Tutsis were at the top, dominated the socio-economic structure of precolonial Rwanda.Hutus and Tutsis have distinguished between one another based on physiological traits such as height, weight, hair, and facial features. According to social psychologist Neil Kressel, an expert on genocides, the average Tutsi is four inches taller and five pounds lighter than the average Hutu. These differences, however, are difficult to scientifically attribute to differing genetic histories; intermarriage and semipermeable socio-economic classes could both confound perceptions. Genetic studies, however, do corroborate the oral histories that the Hutus and Tutsis originated from different regions. Rwandan Hutus have a proportion of sickle-cell gene carriers similar to neighboring central African peoples. Tutsis, though, virtually lack this mutation. This absence of the sickle-cell mutation suggests that the Tutsis spent many centuries in a region with less malaria (or that they have one of the other mutations that resist the disease). In addition, the majority of Tutsis have a gene that helps them digest lactose; most Hutus lack this gene. The ability to digest milk products is typical of desert-dwelling pastoralists, which further substantiates the theory that Tutsis originated in East Africa. Psychologically, Hutus and Tutsis are conscious of their different origins and the socio-economic tension between the two populations. These perceptions come across in the words of a Burundian Hutu refugee, who described the nature of his hatred of Tutsis: In the past our proper name was Bantu. We [Hutus] are Bantus. “Hutu” is no tribe, no nothing!…Muhutu is a Kihamite [Tutsi] word which means “servant.”…The name means “slave.” We are not Hutu; we are abantu—human beings. It is a name that the Tutsi gave us. In this context, Hutus and Tutsis have committed genocide after retributive genocide against one another, going back to the independence of Rwanda and Burundi.
Tuschman is aware of how sensitive the past history of these two tribes is and he chooses to go with the safe version that the Tutsis, originally a pastoralist people as their genetics make plausible (lactose tolerant), integrated fairly peacefully into a Bantu farmer populations. However, as the entomology of the word “hutu” (slave in Tutsi language) suggests, it is much more likely that the Tutsi made themselves the overlords of the Hutu, hardly in a peaceful way. The Tutsi and Hutu speak Kinyarwanda, a Bantu language spread by farmers. However, pastoralist languages dominated in north-east Africa, which Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan likely have been spread by pastoralism.
David Reich writes about the Luo:
The genetic data make it clear that Nilotic-speaking herders were not always socially disadvantaged relative to farmers in the frontier regions where they encountered each other. For example, the Luo group of western Kenya (to which former U.S. president Barack Obama’s father belonged) are a primarily farming people who speak a Nilotic language. But George Ayodo, a Luo scientist from Kenya who spent time in my laboratory, found that the mutation frequencies in the Luo are much more similar to those of the majority of Bantu speakers, likely reflecting a history in which a Bantu-speaking group in East Africa adopted a Nilo-Saharan language from its high status neighbors.
A farming people adopted a pastoralist language. By now it should be clear that this was not due to the higher status of their pastoralist neighbours. If the pastoralist language had a higher status (which is likely true), it is because the pastoralist people constituted the dominant class, very much like the Normans did in England and from whom English derived its countless French words.
If Pinker’s idea of a peaceful trajectory was true, it would mean that our forager ancestors had the most incidence of violence. However, for people who had little use for material possessions, it is much more likely that they had a much lower incidence of violence than the farmers who came after them. Violence is likely to have increased slightly with the Neolithic, the age of farmers, but much more with the Bronze Age, the age of herders.
For more, check out my book: Understanding History: Herders, Horticulturalists and Hunter-Gatherer
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09P8S9RNV
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