Casting out the wolf in our midst is a fantastic blog post about how the Yamnya managed to spread their genes (R1a and R1b Y-haplogrous) so rapidly during the Bronze Age. Razib Khan, the author, describes the Yamnaya pastoralists as wolf packs that swept raiding and raping through Europe. My Y-haplogroup is R1a (Yamnya) and my maternal mtDNA haplogroup is H (Neolithic farmers). Once Marija Gimbutas was ridiculed for suggesting that extremely violent herders subjugated fairly peaceful Eurasian farmers. However, genetic data are suggesting just that. What’s more, Ancient Civilizations took a millennium to reach their prior glory once they had been invaded by these pastoralist warriors:
[...]the appearance of aggressive Indo-European agro-pastoralists was responsible for the ultimate extinction of Europe’s Neolithic civilizations. The post-Neolithic Indo-European Bell Beaker and Corded Ware cultures known to us by their distinctive, but indisputably humble vessels, never constructed anything as grand as what had been wrought by the megalith builders of Western Europe, nor did they craft richly vibrant pottery like the Cucuteni–Trypillia of Eastern Europe had. They were among Stonehenge’s inheritors, not its creators. Likewise, in the Indian subcontinent, the Indo-Aryans would not replicate the material accomplishments of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) for over a millennium after their arrival around 1800 BC. The IVC at its peak, around 2100 BC, boasted a network of vast cities with public sanitation and hydraulic works that spanned 25% of South Asia. But after its decline and collapse, urbanism only regained its footing in the subcontinent after 500 BC. Like the Anglo-Saxons in post-Roman Britain, the early Indo-Europeans ruled over a fallen world. But their reign of barbarity lasted more than a millennium, rather than the century of Anglo-Saxon darkness.
If we assume that pastoralist competitiveness can produce males with extremely low empathy (psychopaths) it becomes clear why massive pastoralist gene influx causes a prolonged period of stagnation. What we see after the fall of the Roman Empire is not the rise of a new centralised state, but the rise of decentralised feudalism. Feudalism is a decentralised organisation that arises when central authority (farmer hierarchy and bureaucracy) cannot perform its functions and when it cannot prevent the rise of local powers. In the isolation and chaos of the 9th and 10th centuries, European leaders no longer attempted to restore Roman institutions, but adopted whatever would work. Feudalism is a really large-scale mafia, undermining any central authority with many rivalling clans that make permanent peace impossible.
Pastoralists, unlike farmers, are egalitarian and non-hierarchical with their clan or in-group, however, they have a social dominance orientation (SDO) towards other groups. Which makes it morally ok for them to raid or subjugate “inferior groups” (slavery or serfdom). As pastoralist genes slowly diminish over time within a farmer group, hierarchical and authoritarian organisations regain strength and state formation starts again.
In the new age after the dark receded, the brutal barbarism wrought by the koryos would be reined in, channelled in the service of the polis, undeniable strength wedded to justice, and the warrior caste, the kshatriya, for example, charged with protecting the weak rather than preying upon them. Impersonal material forces transformed the prehistoric world, unleashing the anti-culture. But after this interregnum of waste and destruction, it was force of mind, it was new ethical religions and philosophies that ultimately banished our terrifying, innate wolf energy back to the periphery of polite society. And from there, it has haunted our dreams and pervaded our myths ever since.
The earliest Vedic texts listed the Kshatriya (warrior class) as first in rank, then the Brahmans (priests and teachers of law) as lower caste. It looks like the relationship between farmer class (priests) and dominant pastoralists (warrior) reversed at some stage. This is actually what can expected if
a) the pastoralist warrior class was a small minority
b) the subjugated farmer personality type fared much better economically as is to be expected in an agrarian society
This phenomenon can be observed in the conflict betweenTutsi (former pastoralist overlords, now lower socioeconomic status) and Hutu (once serf class, now higher status). The wolf has been tamed so far as the wolf’s aggression is now not directed towards the farmer population, but towards external enemies. We can assume that “psychopathic” genes diminished during prolonged periods of peace or that their phenotypes became increasingly less violent.
So, has humanity cast out the wolf? No. Wolfs (pastoralist personality types) nowadays can be found in team sports or extreme sports. These two forms of sport appeal particularly to the psychology of the wolf/pastoralist type. Yamnaya pastoralist genes still abound in Eurasia.
Can we detect pastoralist temperament? I have argued that pastoralist temperament correlates with sensing and perceiving types (SP) in Jungian psychology, whereas farmer types correlate with sensing and judging types (SJ). If this hypothesis is correct, the distribution of these types/temperaments should correspond highly to Yamnya and farmer admixture, respectively.
Wolves in Europe and America have been “tame” for the past decades. However, they are awakening again. Putin is a wolf/pastoralist type. So is Trump. The war in Ukraine is probably fought mostly by wolves. We have all seen a lot of wolves recently. They are awakening. Wolves have even found a figurehead: the Yellowstone Wolf:
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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