Farming has often been described as humankind's worst mistake (Jarred Diamond, Yuval Harari) and indeed early farmers often had harder and shorter lives than the foragers before them. They may be wrong, pastoralism is a more likely candidate for this accolade. Humankind’s darkest time wasn’t the Neolithic, but the Copper and Bronze Ages, commonly associated with the first civilizations. While farming may have laid the foundations for stratified societies by creating inequalities and hierarchies, there is little evidence that during the Neolithic there were marked differences in status. This was to change during the Copper and Bronze Ages:
By analyzing the DNA of more than 100 ancient skeletons from a burial site near Augsburg, Germany, the researchers determined the sex and relatedness of individuals buried together on single farmsteads. They were members of Central European farming communities that spanned from the late Neolithic period through the Bronze Age—or from around 2800 B.C. through 1300 B.C. Related individuals, the study’s authors found, were laid to rest with goods and belongings that appeared to be passed down through generations. The unrelated people in the household were buried with nothing, suggesting they were a lower class of “family members,” who were not given the ceremonial treatment. Scientific American
Neolithic farming most likely brought about occasional mass violence that had been absent from hunter-gathers, who despite certainly not being strangers to personal conflict were unlikely to go to war against outgroups :
It is therefore reasonable to assume that there was no war in the Palaeolithic period, strictly speaking. There are several reasons that could explain this absence – a small population, a sufficiently rich and diversified subsistence territory, a lack of resources, and a social structure that was egalitarian and less hierarchical. source
Mass violence increased in the Bronze Age which saw the emergence of specialised weapons. In the Lord of the Rings, the fateful rings were forged on Mount Doom in Mordor, the realm of evil. J. R. R. Tolkien. If there was ever a Mordor in human history then it was the Eurasian Steppe and the Sintashta culture in the southern Ural mountains can be identified as their Mount Doom where lethal weapons were forged.
This culture is thought to represent an eastward migration of peoples from the Corded Ware culture. It is widely regarded as the origin of the Indo-Iranian languages. The earliest known chariots have been found in Sintashta burials, and the culture is considered a strong candidate for the origin of the technology, which spread throughout the Old World and played an important role in ancient warfare. Sintashta settlements are also remarkable for the intensity of copper mining and bronze metallurgy carried out there, which is unusual for a steppe culture. Among the main features of the Sintashta culture are high levels of militarism and extensive fortified settlements, of which 23 are known. (Wikipedia)
The Sintashta culture is associated with the Proto-Indo-Iranian language and was itself an offshoot of earlier Yamnaya pastoralist cultures.
Archaeological evidence suggests that Abashevo society was intensely warlike. Mass graves reveal that inter-tribal battles involved hundreds of warriors of both sides, which indicates a significant degree of inter-regional political integration. Warfare appears to have been more frequent in the late Abashevo period, and it was in this turbulent environment in which the Sintashta culture emerged (Wikipedia)
Sintashta was followed by the Andronovo culture in the late Bronze Age that spread Indo-Iranian languages rapidly in Eurasia, from the Carpathian to the Altai mountains and into the Indian subcontinent. Haplogroup R1a and largely also R1b are thought to have been spread by Proto-Indo-European speakers.
How could a small tribe from the Steppe have left such a huge imprint on people in Eurasia, with more than 50% carrying their y-haplogroups and speaking offshoots of their language?
David Reich: Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018) reports about genetic star clusters, i.e. powerful males who left offspring disproportionately.
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.
How could this have happened? Reich writes about a more recent episode in human history that clearly shows the pattern, the colonization of South America:
To maintain their status in the social hierarchy, the Spanish and Portuguese set up a casta system in which people of entirely European ancestry (especially those born in Europe) had the highest status, while people who had even some non-European ancestry had lower status. This system collapsed under the demographic inevitability of admixture; within a few centuries people of entirely European ancestry were either an extreme minority or gone, and it was no longer feasible to limit power to those with entirely European ancestry. [...] The male-biased European contribution to admixed populations in the Americas is stark in African Americans, but it is truly extraordinary in populations in South and Central America, reflecting stories like that of Hernán Cortés and La Malinche. Andrés Ruiz-Linares and colleagues have documented how in the Antioquia region of Colombia, which was relatively isolated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, about 94 percent of the Y chromosomes are European in origin, whereas about 90 percent of the mitochondrial DNA sequences are of Native American origin.This reflects social selection against Native American men. Because nearly all the male ancestry comes from Europeans and nearly all the female ancestry comes from Native Americans, one might naively expect that the people of Antioquia today would derive about half their genome-wide ancestry from Europeans and half from Native Americans, but this is not the case. Instead, about percent of Antioquian ancestry comes from Europeans. The explanation is that Antioquia was flooded by male migrants over many generations. The first European men to arrive mixed with Native American women. Additional European male migrants came later. Through repeated waves of male European migration, the proportion of European ancestry kept populations to form the present genetic structure of India.
What we see in the colonization of South America is exactly what we see in Yamanya colonization: a reduction of native Y-chromosome (male) diversity, a huge increase in invader male genetic admixture, social stratification where there had been none before, slavery, and an even greater spread of the invaders’ language due to social dominance.
The patterns are exactly the same, there can be no doubt that the Indo-Europeans invaded Europe and Asia in a way that can’t be described as peaceful. Here are some steppe pastoralists and their offshoots notorious for raiding Europe and Asia:
For more check out my books: Foragers, Farmers and Pastoralists : How three tribes have been shaping civilization since the Neolithic and Understanding History: Herders, Horticulturalists and Hunter-Gatherers
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