A new paper reports on a transect of ancient DNA from Switzerland confirms a lot of things we knew: the transition between the Neolithic and Copper Age saw a shift toward increased “steppe” ancestry which was strongly male mediated. But one section jumped out at me:
The social and family structures, as reconstructed by biological kinship networks, remain the same before and after the arrival of steppe-related ancestry in the region. The predominant social structure in populations buried at the sites investigated in this study must have been a patrilocal society where males stayed where they were born, and females came from more distant living families, a societal dynamic which has been confirmed by stable isotopes…
The late Marija Gimbutas posited, correctly, that Indo-European languages arrived in Europe through the migration of Kurgan builders from the Pontic steppe. She also suggested that they replaced a more peaceful matrifocal farming population. “Old Europe.” It does not seem she was correct on this.
Lawrence Keely’s War Before Human Civilization has an extensive section on the violence that farmers brought to Europe. The data in this paper shows a massive shift from Y chromosome G2 to R1b coincident with the arrival of steppe populations.
I’ll leave to those with more familiarity with archaeology to work out the details, but this is another case of male groups replacing other male groups.
The big mistake of Gimbutas & Co. was that they thought they need some sort of big explanation, even revolution in the path which explains “patriarchy”. This is especially true for Marxists and even more so for modern Cultural Marxists, since they want to explain “everything bad” from their distorted view on reality by more evolved, more complex, more modern like conditions. The logical opposite is, that you have to imagine a past, in which patriarchy and war are not present or much weaker. Its like a tale of the “lost paradise”. Everything was as it should be, until “bad guyes with horses and metals” appear and bring the brutal age of metal, warfare, in the end “evil modernity”.
But that story was wrong from the start to the end, because even if a less patriarchal and more matriarchal society like Bachofen imagined it, who influenced Marxists a big deal, especially Frankfurt School Cultural Marxists, it was an unproven imagination that those societies would have been in every way better.
In reality patriarchy is just the more competitive, more efficient way of organising a society, especially in the premodern context and war was a constant companion of humans through time, even Chimpanzees are warlike, which is why some of the ideologists tried to make Bonobos the great role model for modern humans, which relates directly to the “sexual revolution” and some propaganda we are plastered with.
The Neolithic colonists were well organised and warlike from the start, they were patriarchal and clan based people. That they had more of a feminine pantheon, or this is what survived in the material remains at times, means little for the more basic organisation they lived in. If archaeologists are always so careful about interpreting stuff, even obvious weapons and fortresses being interpreted as “symbolic” by some Marxist influenced scholars, why weren’t they when it came to feminine goddesses and cults in the Neolithic? And the reaosn is again the dogma of a “different past” before it was ruined by bad packs of plundering males. This was an imagined past and they tried to find it in the remains, even if it was simply not there.
The next step is that at the time of the Yamnaya or better and more important Corded Ware expansion, the old Neolithic cultures didn’t exist any more! The societies we find later were even more warlike, possibly even as or more strictly patriarchal, possibly even polygynic on a grander scale than later steppe people! Because the male lineages which brought the Neolithic cultures were largely wiped out before the first bands of steppe warriors moved West.
The original male Neolithic lineages were utterly destroyed and largely replaced by local European hunter gatherer lineages, which in large parts of Europe already introduced more of an agro-pastoralist and warlike way of life. The issue is that this didn’t result in a such drastic autosomal shift first and this “revolution” didn’t introduce fundamentally new genetic components like the steppe expansion. But it was as brutal, as revolutionary and in some ways as important, because it was the steppe people which might have even learned from these warlike agro-pastoralists.
If you look at LBK and Cardial Pottery, as the main spreaders of the original Neolithic in mainland Europe, you can’t lump them together just like that with FBC/TRB and GAC at all.
Gimbutas was even more wrong when she assumed that GAC was already largely influenced by steppe. But unlike her greater construct of prehistorical life, this mistake is excusable, because many people made it. Why? Because the people of the Globular Amphora culture were warlike agro-pastoralits, they lived in clearly and strongly patriarchal clans, they might even have practised polygyny and they actually looked not that different from Corded Ware specimens based on their skeletal remains. So for this Gimbutas was not alone.
Yet now we know they were not steppe people, they actually had virtually zero significant genetic input from the steppe.
And if people say they were simply “Neolithic” like Anatolian farmers, this is wrong too. Because their paternal lineage is that of European hunter gatherers and their WHG being increased signifcantly in comparison. That is why local hunters took Neolithic communities over.
So what we see in Europe is probably that hunters were more strictly patriarchal, agro-pastoralists even more so, farmers could at times be less so, but were never on the Bachofen side of the societal organisation. And if they ever were, anywhere, even just closeer, it was among people in a less competitive and more protected environment, usually with a low level of cultural and societal dynamic and progress. The whole idea of “bad patriarchy” comes, ideologically, from an “anti-modern”, “anti-state” even “anti-higher culture” sentiment which proclaims “the good primitive” as the ideal. Similar to Rousseau, who might be quoted as not the first, but probably one of the most influential ideologists for this “back to the roots that never were” mantra. And these ideas influenced archaeology in the post 1960’s environment in particular is actually the main reason why many of those ideologists reacted allergic to the new results of ancient DNA: They made their carefully constructed, unsubstantiated fantasies crumble. It was not just ancient DNA, because new archaeological results did prove the same thing with even more clarity than in the past(patriarchal family structures, violent expansions and war), but it was the final nail in the coffin.
Yet some still don’t accept the inevitable conclusions, if its about interpreting the results, for purely ideological reasons.
According to Stephen Shannon, Neolithic farmers were also patrilocal. According to Julian Maxwell Heath, Neolithic farmers had brutal wars with the most despicable practices and tactics.
However, the record isn’t clear if Neolithic farmers developed a warrior class the way steppe peoples did. Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest the Neolithic European religion was based around a fertility goddess. This is highly speculative though.
My guess is, Neolithic Europeans could be just as vicious and warlike as the steppe peoples. They devoted more to a goddess of agriculture in their religion, though it’s not clear if women necessarily enjoyed more “equality.” However, the steppe peoples were able to use the horse in warfare and this was probably the decisive advantage. Furthermore, I expect the steppe peoples had more of a warrior class. Look at Crete: the Minoan paintings and reliefs lack the warrior focus of the Mycenaean art pieces.
@Sid: “However, the record isn’t clear if Neolithic farmers developed a warrior class the way steppe peoples did.”
The steppe people had for most of their time no such a distinct warrior class as well. So the same standards applied, the same can be said. Even on the contrary, at the time the steppe expansion began, the later and more developed Neolithic cultures were more socially inequal, more structured and hierarchical, than the steppe people. Comparing Corded Ware with the Carpatho-Balkan developed cultures, they strike as relatively more simple and less hierachical.
I even would use the comparison of old Rome vs. Germanic if comparing some Carpatho-Balkan and Maykop cultures. The steppe people were the simpler, less structured, more egalitarian, tribal people.
“Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest the Neolithic European religion was based around a fertility goddess. This is highly speculative though.”
That’s like the venus idols from the Paleolithic. Yes, women might have prayed for good health, a safe birth and fertility of themselves and nature. But what did this mean for the hierarchy and structure in their families, in their clans, in their society as whole? Even if there were priestess, witches or female diviners, what did this mean?
This is like some people say, Christianity is so patriarchal, so “anti-feminist” because it didn’t allow female priestess. And its true, in most Indo-European societies, women could play a greater role in the rituals and religion in their pagan times. But these were extraordinary, special roles just a handful of women really conformed to. For the great majority, the pre-Christian society was much more patriarchal and restrictive, even though there were female goddesses, cults and priestess.
Because the “normal role” for women was a clear and functional thing in the pre-Christian society, whereas Christianity attacked the clan, the lineage and emphasized a different life concept which was not centered around family and offspring. So Christianity with its dysfunctional perspective on the world and its future, with doomsday coming, gave women a different perspective on and meaning to life, beside clan, family, husband and children.
Similarly, the same patterns could be observed in the past: That some women could rose to high ranks, could fulfil special roles, even in the cult, does say little, sometimes even nothing, about how the NORMAL and FUNCTIONAL role of women were in the society as a whole. You can always spare some individuals, can bend rules for special, ritual occasions, as long as you keep up the normal rules for the majority and society as a whole functional.
Therefore if you see the bare breasted priestess with snakes in their hands in the Minoan art, what does this tell you about how patriarchal they were? Like you have similar images in Mesopotamia, yet if you look at the codes of Sumer and Akkad, do they strike you as “matriarchal”? Especially in the ways some Marxist ideologists imagined it? If at all, you find proto-Capitalism more evolved in these urban societies, rather than the egalitarian paradise.
And the more egalitarian tribes, which had to organise themselves effectively on a smaller scale, in smaller units, too, they were all, on the longer run, rather strictly patriarchal. So what does that tell you about stricter vs. less strict patriarchy in more developed cultures (matriarchy didn’t exist among them)?
It says that sometimes patriarchy got less strict in the more complex, more developed societies, rather as a luxury good and related to decadence (late Rome, late occidental societies from the 20th century), than being the original state of society. A less strict moral and patriarchy is something, like in other parts of society too, which needs to be paid for, which a people need to be able to afford by producing surplus power and superiority elsewhere (like technology). It makes a society weaker, more vulnerable and less stable, but, potentially, allows greater individual and creative freedom beside the prescribed roles to both sexes in traditional, functional societies. That in mind, its not the older, but the newer and already more decadent, luxurious state of affairs which diminishes patriarchy.
If people don’t know the past, like the reality in pagan societies, they can’t appreciate the role of Christianity in these matters. Similarly, if they imagine the past as an egalitarian Feminist paradise, they have to come to wrong conclusions about the cultures which succeeded each other in prehistory.
What? I hadn’t heard that before. I had heard that hunter-gatherer ancestry increased with the arrival of steppe people though.
@TGGP
He is talking about Y-DNA I hunter-Gatherer lineage.
Y-DNA G is Anatolia Neolithic, it was common in Neolithic samples but is very rare in Europeans today.
The original Neolithic lineages were almost exclusively G2a, with some E1b and first local lineages thrown in here and there. These were the male clans which led the first colonisation of mainland Europe with the LBK and Cardial cultures.
But during the Neolithic times it got more chaotic, with a crisis of the original settlements, probably due to being not adapted well enough to a worsening habitat or the Northern European situation as such. The behaviour got more violent and when more agro-pastoralist, warlike societies emerged, better adapted to the cooler climate, which even practised head hunting and human sacrifice on a larger scale it seems, we find these original Neolithic lineages largely disappear, especially North of the Alps.
TRB and GAC were (so far) almost exclusively I2a, descending from local hunter gatherer clans. And its not just these Northern cultures, but Iberia too was not as much, but still largely, I2a too, so was Britain and even Sardinia was affected by these expansions from hunter lineages.
The replacement of G2a by I2a was near complete in the North, and less so in the South, which is why e.g. in Sardinia you have still a significant amount of G2a, even rather old and diverse. But even in Sardinia, among the “Neolithic survivors”, haplogroup I is now more common than G.
Haplogroup G now exceeds only in a very few people, mostly from the Caucasus, 25 percent. But among the carriers of the early Anatolian and European Neolithic, they seem to have been between 80-100 percent. Obviously no people change that frequency so fast, so drastically, peacefully. They were largely exterminated.
Not by the steppe people, but by hunter lineages from Europe before already.
So we have at least 4 times the same thing happening:
– Neolithic G2a
– Middle Neolithic I2a
– Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age R1a and R1b
largely eliminating the preceding male lineages. And its not restricted to Europe or these examples, because before the Neolithic, the Mesolithic expansions produced the same results and after the Bronze Age, many takeovers resulting in the same also.
Its just that the steppe case was so striking, because they introduced completely new haplogroups and autosomal profiles on such a grand scale. But the same thing happens over and over again, but usually going on for longer times and with the differences being less obvious – or were at least presented that way.
Because we can look to many places and “cultural shifts” around the world, and they all have the same pattern. Most significant cultural changes of the past in a given region didn’t happen because one people learned from the other, but because one people replaced the other. And if not completely, they at least finished off a large portion of the local males.
You can read it in historical descriptions as well, its no big deal or unknown, but rather the post 1960s ideologists preferred to interpret these accounts as “unreliable” and “exaggerating”, which they were not. There are still such scholars out there, which question the reliability of accounts about the destruction and death caused by e.g. Ottomans or Mongols, yet we have many of these. They just don’t want it to be true, so they prefer to close their eyes before the truth, instead of facing the reality that this world was, for the most time, a far more brutal place than it was in the last 150 years. But acknowledging that would mean that “Western modernity” could be acquitted, what these postmodernists will never accept without pressure. Its that these anti-modernist ideology dominated the scientific apparatus from the 1960s, which not just prevented new, better perspectives on the topic becoming established, but actually made the situation worse than it was before, when a more realistic perspective was the norm. And realism is the minimum requirement for any scientific interpretation I’d say…
Eh, G persists OK in the Czech MN I think, well after LBK but overlapping in territory, where LBK is really the only early G we see in North Central Europe.
I don’t think we know that there was really a point at which G rich colonizers in Europe were “replaced” during the neolithic; in England and Sweden, the earliest farmers we find are I2. Likewise in Spain, I dont think we really see a change in frequencies where I2 is way beyond increase in autosome between EN to CA and the frequency of I2 vs G is pretty consistent since the beginning.
It may just be that expanding farmers from the beginning allowed (with varying enthusiasm) daughters to marry into the HG groups, perhaps as a means to keep the peace, and then genetic drift and being on the edge of colonisation (and so well placed to expand) meant that these came to be the most common groups. Especially if HGs were also patrilocal to some degree, and HG and farmers were more likely to accept exchange of women between them than male “interlopers”.
The central point is that there’s not really a high frequency of G2 across Northern Europe that changes. What we see in the results is just as compatible with a farming expansion that incorporated HG males, from the start.
@Matt: “Eh, G persists OK in the Czech MN I think, well after LBK but overlapping in territory, where LBK is really the only early G we see in North Central Europe.
I don’t think we know that there was really a point at which G rich colonizers in Europe were “replaced” during the neolithic; in England and Sweden, the earliest farmers we find are I2.”
You are right, but lets contemplate about the reasons: G2a was what brought Neolithic culture (LBK) and ancestry to Central Europe. They tried to move up further North, but they failed. And its exactly in this border zone, in which large communities of Mesolithic hunter gatherer people lived, that the tide changed.
First we see “Neolithic” mtDNA and DNA in hunter-fisher people of Northern Europe, so obviously these are wives from the LBK communities.
By taking the “Neolithic women” the foragers changed themselves genetically and culturally and shortly afterwards, we find the more agro-pastoralist and warlike I2a “Neolithics” emerging and expanding.
It was those “Neolithics with hunter lineages” which teared down the barrier to the North and pushed the remaining foragers up, establishing Neolithic societies even in places like Sweden.
This failure of the initial colonisers to capture the North exemplifies their weakness and long term failure.
“Likewise in Spain, I dont think we really see a change in frequencies where I2 is way beyond increase in autosome between EN to CA and the frequency of I2 vs G is pretty consistent since the beginning.”
You can debate that for Iberia, but no, I don’t agree. And even if you can argue it for Iberia, you can’t do the same for Central Europe to Western Europe (France, Germany, Alpine countries, Poland etc.) where EEF were however already firmly established, with G2a based colonisers, before it was overtaken.
The finer detail of this replacement has to be worked out with more samples and fine grained analyses.
“It may just be that expanding farmers from the beginning allowed (with varying enthusiasm) daughters to marry into the HG groups, perhaps as a means to keep the peace,…”
Let’s assume that’s correct, what kind of situation are we looking at then? That means they were already under pressure, had no choice but make bad deals with the hunter-warriors in the woods and on the coasts! This is exactly the kind of situation which leads to everything I described above. They were weaker, they couldn’t properly defend themselves, they had to compromise, fall back, and finally got broken. That’s what happened.
In the earliest stage you see how they acted aggressive and expansive, building even something like a line of defended pioneer villages at the border to the foragers. But as time went on, this border defense just crumbled.
“and then genetic drift and being on the edge of colonisation (and so well placed to expand) meant that these came to be the most common groups.”
Well, “came to be”, how comes a male clan gives up his daughters, his terrain, and then evaporates? They would have made a stand, no way this happened peacefully and without a genocide, they were no Cultural Marxists. The frequencies did change in a lot of places a 100 percent within a lifetime and with a “cultural shift” accompanying it.
“The central point is that there’s not really a high frequency of G2 across Northern Europe that changes. ”
When I spoke about “Northern Europe” I meant the Neolithic people North of the Alps and didn’t include the foragers.
“What we see in the results is just as compatible with a farming expansion that incorporated HG males, from the start.”
Never ever. You mean a people which are almost exclusively descendent from the Neolithic colonisers, but all their males disappered? Its impossible to explain this shift by some sort of “social exchange” and “peaceful encounters”. Even if such exchanges took place occassionally before (which is observable), the real shift, the “real big thing” was a coup, a conquest, no doubt about it. That’s like comparing some Germanics in a Roman army here and there with the conquest by the Goths or Lombards. These are two completely different things and only the latter can explain such a change.
The furthest I can go is to say that it might be, in a lot of instances, a more gradual process. But where would leave us this conclusion? That the Neolithic lineages were incapable of defending their position and wives everywhere in Europe, in front of the forager males? That they were so inferior in the competition, over and over again, everywhere?
I don’t think so. Rather there was one or more take large takeovers in the border regions, and this takeover produced more competitive communities and cultures, which in turn, expanding and rolled over the Neolithic, “more traditional” Neolithic communities. That means this takeover, this kind of hijacking had to happen only once or twice, as did the accompanying innovations in lifestyle and fighting. I’d say this is the by far more parsiminious explanation.
Look at the data from LBK in Central Europe and how many non-G2a you find in the classic period, same goes for early Cardial. The shift is not supposed to have happened everywhere at the same time and under the same circumstances, like later, with the steppe expansion.
Also, we now even have proofs for acts of violence which fit into this bigger picture:
“The team stated that “the violent events in Els Trocs are without parallel either in Spain or in the rest of Europe at that time,” according to Scientific Reports . It appears that they were shot with arrows, apart from one skeleton found in a perpendicular position. The researchers also stated in Scientific Reports , “the children and adults furthermore show traces of similar blunt violence to the skull and entire skeleton.” The victims of the massacre had been shot by arrows and hacked to death showing evidence of overkill.”
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/spanish-pyrenees-0013276
There are some comments along the lines of what I am about to say but since I am phoneposting I haven’t read them so idk how much of this comment is redundant. Even if there was no r1 indoeuropean expansion, g2 would have lost out to i2 anyway. Here is a sequence: farmers arrive in europe -> there are signs of conflict on small (northern spain) and large (the death pits across Germany and central europe) scales -> frequency of g2 begins to go down while the frequency of i2 goes up. By the time the farmer train gets to far northwestern Europe in Britain (the furthest distance from the origin point) all of the males are i2 and the vast majority of maternal lineages are anatolian (mainly h + k + t + j etc.) and not the local u5. I wonder if these i2 lineages have something to do with the more megalithic nature of western and in general more i2 based farmer societies.
1. Long-distance raiding is associated cross-culturally with matrilocal residence/matrilineal kinship; see William Divale (1974) “Migration, External Warfare, and Matrilocal Residence,” Behavior Science Research 9:75-133. For example, 5 Nations Iroquois.
2. Longhouses (think LBK!) are associated cross-culturally with matrilocal/matrilineal social organization. See most recently Hrncir et al.:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0229363 “Identifying post-marital residence patterns in prehistory: A comparative analysis of dwelling size”
3.For a rational discussion of possible evidence of Bronze Age Minoan matriliny see J Driessen:https://books.openedition.org/pucl/2842?lang=en
4. Early Neolithic farmers came from western Anatolia, and matriliny may have lingered there well into the Iron Age. Here is Herodotus on the Lycians: “The customs which these have are partly Cretan and partly Carian; but one custom they have which is peculiar to them, and in which they agree with no other people, that is they call themselves by their mothers and not by their fathers; and if one asks his neighbour who he is, he will state his parentage on the mother’s side and enumerate his mother’s female ascendants: and if a woman who is a citizen marry a slave, the children are accounted to be of gentle birth; but if a man who is a citizen, though he were the first man among them, have a slave for wife or concubine, the children are without civil rights.”
5. Should one assume that Late Neolithic society was unchanged since the Early Neolithic expansion? Might a shift toward increased reliance on cattle and dairy have triggered a shift to patriliny/patrilocality? And might that somehow also be related to increasing absorption of local foragers as seen in Late Neolithic genomes? On increasing dairy with northern expansion see:
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS | (2020) 11:2036 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15907-4 |www.nature.com/naturecommunications Cubas et al.”Latitudinal gradient in dairy production with the introduction of farming in Atlantic Europe”.
6. Goude et al. 2018 “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Neolithic Life Reconstruction” J Archaeol Method Theory
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-018-9379-x :
“Discussion about territorial mobility patterns also suffers from the lack of studies and regional databases (Willmes et al. 2014). Previous works using Sr isotope analysis in southern French Middle Neolithic individuals from five sites (Goude et al. 2012) have highlighted a potential greater mobility for pastoralists than for agriculturalists.Furthermore, at the Middle Neolithic site of Pontcharaud, a patrilocal society in which
adolescent females came from abroad into the study groups has been suggested, based on significant isotopic variability (CN) recorded in female bone collagen (Goude et al.2013). Sr data from neighboring regions in Central Europe support the presence of patrilocal systems from the beginning of the Neolithic, as males indicate lower Sr variability compared to females (Bentley et al. 2012). As we have seen, this is not clear for the Le Vigneau 2 population, neither for carbon and nitrogen nor for strontium isotope data, which shows there is no strong trace of this purported patrilocal social structure in the Middle Neolithic of northern France. However, female Sr variability (0.71018 ± 0.00171; Δ= 0.00591; n = 20) is greater than what was observed in Early Neolithic Alsatian sites, and agrees with the European patrilocal pattern proposed by authors (Bentley et al. 2012). Ethnographic evidence frequently shows that female exogamy is a common trait (e.g. Murdock 1967; Wrangham 1987), and publications refer to this pattern to highlight the role of female mobility for trade (Brown 2016). However, we should not simply blindly project ethnographic evidence into a deep
prehistoric past that might have well had very different social structures and mind-sets to those we have recorded in living communities.”
@DaThang: The important aspect to this is that when the farmers colonised Britain, not just those going over the sea were like this, but those behind on the mainland were I2a and more WHG too! So this is a shift over large portions of the continent.
Britain is special insofar, as the first colonisers, still dominated by G2a, from France and Germany, didn’t make it to the Isles. It was those people which succeeded them in mainland Europe already, whereever and from whoever exactly (definitely hunter lineages) they got their I2a haplogroup and additional WHG ancestry from.
@Obs: “This failure of the initial colonisers to capture the North exemplifies their weakness and long term failure.”
Or they may have just stuck to rich loess in Central Europe or something like this (climates and soils they preferred), and not really tried.
It seems a bit like you’re trying to cram everything into your thesis of ever intensifying between group competition, in which everything is explained by groups that progressively intensify warfare and competition replace those that don’t.
Comparing this to last post it’s like “Well, OK, they didn’t replace them… but here’s another reason why once again it shows the triumph of the strong HG influenced group over the weaker and less warlike farmer group”.
Even in the context of this study in this very post, the very point is that neolithic and megalithic group at Switzerland is G2a…
It seems like you’ve decided on this sort of “Rape of the Sabine Women” sort of scenario then are going around sort of trying to find patterns that fit.
But all that we see is compatible with some groups expanding more than others, drift and greater growth at the frontier, etc. There were of course genocides and between group violence in Neolithic Europe but I don’t think the pattern you seem to see where they are necessarily constantly *from* HG admixed farmers towards less HG admixed farmers who are “rolled back” is a conclusion that can be drawn from looking at the evidence neutrally.
Another final thing, where G2 was prominent in the southeast (Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Hungary), it does seem from what I could see from Mathieson’s paper to remain pretty prominent and perhaps not really “replaced” that much (though added to) up until the era of the Greeks, Rome or even the Migration Period, and even then much of that replacement is driven by the coming of lineages from the Southeast (J2, E1b).
(FInal note, we probably have more samples now, but back in 2017, here was a quick graphic I made about how y-dna changed between eras in Iberia and Central Europe – https://imgur.com/a/trogTTJ).
Since I am still on the phone my comment will be brief and may miss out on certain details. Yes the balkans didn’t exerience the replacement that the pioneering westward moving farmers did. However that is in stark contrast to western and Northern European farmers. Switzerland can allow for decent isolation which can explain why g2 persisted longer meanwhile the Balkans acted as an accumulated core of the initial farmer population thus making them harder to replace even if there was a pushback from local hunter gatherers early on. But who knows, if indo Europeans and ehg in general didn’t exist then given enough time the northern now fully i2 farmers could have eventually come into conflict with the large balkan reserve.
@Matt: “Or they may have just stuck to rich loess in Central Europe or something like this (climates and soils they preferred), and not really tried.”
They tried, because we have a border between farmers and foragers which moved up and down, forward and backward. So you can’t say they didn’t try, which would make no sense anyway once they hit a certain population density and usage of soils (especially considering their still rather primitive techniques), they just failed as a group, with the package they got. And the real reason they failed so miserably is that they had strong and large forager communities as opponents. Like in the North Pontic region. The steppe people came up the same way, just being even much more successful in replacing competitors not just on the male lineage, but overall ancestry.
This might be in part because the North Western hunters were more dependent and integrated in the Neolithic networks when they took over.
“It seems a bit like you’re trying to cram everything into your thesis of ever intensifying between group competition, in which everything is explained by groups that progressively intensify warfare and competition replace those that don’t.”
Not exactly, because the success of hunter lineages with e.g. TRB and GAC cannot be explained just by them being more warlike, there was an even more fundamental change in the way they used resources, like they started being real agro-pastoralists, with larger herds of cattle. And they actually might have ended the chaos at the end of the era of the initial colonisers, with many competing groups and at times it seems even a collapse of efficient networks. They created a much larger, better network instead than was present before.
There is more to it, but fact is, they won, the hunter I2 lineages took the price, the G2 fellows lost and were, with the exception of some refuges, largely replaced, long before the first steppe people came in.
“But all that we see is compatible with some groups expanding more than others, drift and greater growth at the frontier, etc. There were of course genocides and between group violence in Neolithic Europe but I don’t think the pattern you seem to see where they are necessarily constantly *from* HG admixed farmers towards less HG admixed farmers who are “rolled back” is a conclusion that can be drawn from looking at the evidence neutrally.”
I didn’t say so, you are attacking a strawman. What I said is that the most likely explanation for the observable pattern is that once or twice, not sure where and how exactly, already acculturated, admixted groups led by hunter lineages adopted a more competitive cultural package, with intensified agro-pastoralism, large herds of cattle, a more mobile and warlike lifestyle, possible better networks and hierarchy. They expanded most of Europe West of the forest steppe, but also not necessarily everywhere. But most importantly, to Britain, France, Iberia, Germany, Scandinavia and Poland.
“Another final thing, where G2 was prominent in the southeast (Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Hungary), it does seem from what I could see from Mathieson’s paper to remain pretty prominent and perhaps not really “replaced” that much (though added to) up until the era of the Greeks, Rome or even the Migration Period, and even then much of that replacement is driven by the coming of lineages from the Southeast (J2, E1b).”
They just repeat the same pattern as we have seen it with Neolithics reaching the North and steppe, or the steppe people reaching the Balkans, Anatolia, the Near East, India and Iberia. Where the local people have reached a certain level of development, farming was organised in an already proto-state fashion, the population was large and the climate different, we could say, many conquerors instead of replacing the locals started “to milk, rather then slaughter them” (like the Mongols in China too, whereas they largely replaced competitors in their “natural environment” at that time) and make alliances with the local upper class even. That’s why I explicitly concentrated on the regions North of the Alps.
Finally about the numbers: If you sum up the early Neolithic colonisation, you see the absolute dominance of G2, which, with some regional exceptions, falls back in the Middle Neolithic. You can also see this pattern in the image quoted by Razib, just look at the increase of WHG in GAC.
@DaThang: “But who knows, if indo Europeans and ehg in general didn’t exist then given enough time the northern now fully i2 farmers could have eventually come into conflict with the large balkan reserve.”
This is no hypothetical scenario, because the Northern agro-pastoralists moved South and made different incursions into Southern territories and vice versa, exactly when the steppe people moved out too. Actually detachments of GAC made it to the Carpatho-Balkan region and played their role together with incoming steppe people, with which they, in some cultural groups, seem to have teamed up.
The idea that everything was peaceful and static before the steppe people came and stirred everything up is completely wrong. There were huge movements of people, military campaigns and big competition West of the steppe and in the steppe. The “steppe invasion” just brought both parts of Europe together which were, by and large, separated for quite some time with only very limited flow between the West and East in comparison to within movements.
I remember something about the Balkans I2 coming from Belarus or the surrounding regions in general north of the Balkans, so there might have been a successful GAC + steppe integrated attack on at least parts of the Balkans.
Still, I do wonder, if someone were to say delete EHG altogether at 10,000 BP, then would we see a WHG enriched farmer incursion bouncing as far back as Anatolia? GAC had it’s own wheels, those would easily be turned into chariots if the right animals were in stock.
@DaThang: The question is not that much about EHG, because the most successful expansion from the steppe were Corded Ware people and those were not that dissimilar from GAC in most respects. I’m not even completely sure about what it was, but the steppe people had on various levels innovations, which other people didn’t have or simply didn’t had at that time. I consider for the long term success two things very important:
1st: The direct access to the high level copper mines and industry from the Carpathians after the fall of Tripolye-Cucuteni. This was, in my opinion, a real turning point in prehistory. Because for quite some time the steppe people were dependent on metal products from the West (Carpatho-Balkan sphere) or East (Maykop and Near East). When those two were falling, they could act freely.
2nd: The horses and oxen drawn carts in combination. This gave the steppe people which adopted a more mobile way of life and especially warfare the real edge. Before that, the river people of the North Pontic were caught in their valleys. The steppe in between worked like a barrier. When this barrier was falling, because of the added mobility, the conflict between much larger tribal organisations could grow to the next level. Yamnaya is nothing but a big push of one group, people like the Corded Ware or Usatovo another, moving to the West. This created a probably unprecedented cycle. It was not just that the steppe people were able to conquer, but they were forced to do so, because after the innovations, when reaching a certain demographic weight, any large scale conflict or natural disaster would inevitably force one large group of people out of the steppe, whereever the weakest resistance was, they would push into.
You can see this in their migration pattern, how they evaded strongholds, moved around large natural or human caused barriers, and then back again on track to a region which suited their way of life better or which supplied them with local working force (proto-state farming societies).
They could do it, and they had to do it. This new mobility acted like a accelerator. What needed many generations of hard fighting and slow moving could now be done within a generation and was much easier.
The big human barriers were GAC and TCC in the West, Maykop in the East. Once these two were broken, they flooded the rest, until they met ill-suited habitats for their human type and way of life, as well as, for their time, highest level states.
If the GAC people, what isn’t that far fetched, would have, as a whole, adopted these innovations and mobility first, they would have done it. But that’s a bad hypothetical question, because the steppe people evolved the way they did, also because there was a need for doing so – like the overcrowded river valleys, with lots of grass steppes in between. To use that steppe habitat more effectively and to overcome this barriers, they had a great need for increased mobility. So even innovations coming from elsewhere were adopted and developed further there than elsewhere, because they met a desperate demand in the region. That the package they developed there would have been so superior elsewhere too is what came out of it on the longer run.
I think the Pontic steppe and the way the people lived there was in itself the reason for this great innovations and the question is whether such a package could have come up elsewhere too in the same manner.
I think you might have misunderstood me, my hypothetical scenario was this: If IEs didn’t exist at all, like not even EHGs existing in the first place at all, then could a WHG enriched wave of cart driving neolithic GAC-like people have an edge over the Balkan copper using folks?
In our timeline, a lot of what happened was driven by steppe groups which acted as vectors for the different technologies and adapted certain important combinations which allowed them to be the most successful group in the region, the question is if this group never existed and if the major innovations were strictly split among two major EEF groups, then who would win in the conflict between a mobile yet materially less sophisticated group vs a metal using but largely static group. Or at least who would be more likely to win if the answer isn’t definite.