NEOLITHIC GENOCIDE: an inhumane way to change eras
Rock art in the Jabbarena cave, Algeria (6,000–1,000 BC) / drukarnia.com.ua
As part of the «Population Genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia» study, a team of scientists analyzed the sequenced genomes of 100 ancient skeletons that spanned 7,300 years of the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods. According to the data obtained, each new wave of immigrants to the territory of Europe arranged the local inhabitants the genuine genocide.
A REVOLUTION THAT NEVER HAPPENED?
Genetic material with which the scientists worked was found on the territory of Denmark, but its analysis allows us to judge about the processes that thousands of years ago occurred throughout Europe. Scientists focused their attention on the southern part of Scandinavia because the natural conditions here are favorable not only for food and agriculture but also for the preservation of human remains.
As it is known, under the term «Neolithic Revolution,» scientists mean the transition of people from hunting and gathering to agriculture. It is assumed that such a transition was smooth, and for a long time, people’s way of life changed gradually.
Textbooks on ancient history give, as a rule, very general information about this epoch without «excessive» details. By default, it is assumed that people somehow moved from gathering fruits to sowing cereals by themselves. In reality, however, things were quite different.
FARMERS AGAINST HUNTERS
The Mesolithic inhabitants of Denmark delayed the transition to the Neolithic by more than a thousand years compared to Central Europe. And in the period from 10,500 to 5,900 B.C., people here were genetically almost no different from the rest of the Western European hunter-gatherers.
They demonstrate such genetic homogeneity until Neolithic farmers of Anatolian origin — migrants from the distant peninsula of Asia Minor, where modern Turkey is located today — appear in the territories where they lived.
And suddenly, around 5900 BC, the picture changes so dramatically that there is no smooth transition to discuss. Previously, it was believed that ancient Scandinavian farmers received about 30% of their genome from hunter-gatherers because the populations were supposedly mixed.
New data have shown — that it is not so; the DNA of hunter-gatherers is practically erased, and in the genomes of Neolithic farmers, it has almost disappeared.
IT WASN’T TRANSITION BUT GENOCIDE
In addition to the genome, scientists have analyzed various products of human activity. As well as plant pollen, which can be used to track changes in the vegetation of the region. Neolithic farmers lived in entirely new homes in a very different way, clearing forests for farmland. However, it was not only the surrounding landscape that changed dramatically.
The genetic contribution of hunters and gatherers, who had lived in these territories for thousands of years, to the new Neolithic population turned out to be very limited. That is, the local population did not «retrain» smoothly, preferring to plow the land rather than take from nature what God sent. They were simply slaughtered by the farmers who settled their habitat. This is the inhumane way the Neolithic replaced the Mesolithic.
NOMADS VERSUS FARMERS
But, unfortunately, the «law of boomerang» has never been canceled… By destroying the competitors for natural resources, the new inhabitants of Denmark, in turn, sprinkled their own blood on these fertile lands. Within literally a thousand years, not one, but two, almost complete population changes took place.
Again, witness those long-ago demographic events that led to the very rapid replacement of one population by another, parallel shifts in genotype, phenotype, nutrition, and land use.
They suggest that the funnel cup farming culture was only allotted about 10 centuries. After that, it was wiped out by an invasion of immigrants of Eastern origin, who once again changed the landscape to suit them.
DANES FROM THE ASIAN STEPPES
The nomads who came from the depths of the Asian steppes were of Caucasoid type. Their culture is commonly referred to as the culture of single burials. And the people found in these burials are strikingly different from both Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers.
Their genetic profile is the closest to modern Danes, who today can hardly be suspected of being from «steppe» origins. But dramatic population changes did not occur only because the migrants mercilessly exterminated the locals.
The point is that no worse than axes and spears, and they were crippled by new diseases transmitted from livestock, against which the locals simply had no immunity.
Original resource: 100 ancient genomes show repeated population turnovers in Neolithic Denmark
