In the recent film The Northman the protagonist, Amleth, has a romantic relationship with a woman, “Olga of the Birch Forest.” Amleth was a Viking who raided Kievan Rus, and Olga was a Slavic woman who was captured in a raid.
Birch trees flourish across the temperate zone, but they’re particularly dominant in the north, due to being hardier. When I wrote about Finnish genetics, history and culture last year I stumbled upon the fact that early Finns who arrived in America (usually they were identified as “Swedes” because they were ruled by the Swedish Crown) often found an immediate affinity with northern Native American tribes. One explanation is that Finns and northern Native Americans are both “birch forest people.” Many aspects of their culture were similar, down to their moccasins.
As it happens, a long long time ago, and far far away, my forefathers were also birch forest people. Long before Olga’s kith and kin occupied the birch forests of northwestern Russia, they were occupied by the Fantyanovo-Balanovo culture. Until recently this cattle-raising society on the northern edge of the Indo-European world was assumed to perhaps be Baltic-speaking due to local hydronyms, but ancient DNA retrieved from Fatyanovo-Balanovo suggests a different answer. The vast majority of the men in their burial grounds carry Y chromosomal haplogroup R1a-Z93. This lineage is now found overwhelmingly in Indo-Iranian people, as well as in the Altai region.
The ancient DNA transect and succession is clear
– Fatnyanovo-Balanovo expanded eastward
– Turned into the Abashevo copper miners west of the Urals
– Gave rise to the Sintashta on the southern slope of the Urals into northwest Kazakhstan
At this point the Sintashta around 2000 BC exploded and turned into the Andronovo Horizon that covered much of Central Eurasia between 2000 and 1500 BC:
At some point Olga of the Birch Forest was left behind. A recent paper estimates that about 8% of the mtDNA lineages among populations like the Kalash and Pashtun in northern Pakistan is of steppe provenance. This is in contrast to about 2% to the south and east in “mainland” South Asia. This is contrast to the frequency of R1a in this region of Pakistan, about 50%, and 25% in mainland South Asia. In terms of total genome ancestry, about 25-30% of the ancestry in northern Pakistan among these groups is steppe, with an average across the subcontinent a bit below 15% (I did a weighted calculation a while ago).
What you see here is a massive drop off in maternal lineages of steppe Indo-Iranians, and a strong persistence of Y chromosomes, with total genome content being about in the middle. Figure 4c of Narasimhan et al. shows the same thing, with R1a fractions way higher than total genome content of steppe heritage.
This sex-specific admixture is not limited to South Asia. It can be found in the European context as well, though rarely as extreme.
So what’s going on here? One thing to note about Indo-European people is that on the whole they are patrilineal and patrilocal and exogamous. That is, one’s identity was determined by one’s father. Women moved into the household’s of their husband, and tended to be unrelated to them. This seems to be a perfect recipe for the assimilation of women into a society. But that’s not the reason all of these culturally and genetically different women are being brought into Indo-European societies. It is because the men are moving, and migrating very long distances.
In a podcast last year with myself and Patrick Wyman David Anthony claimed that they have detected Yamnaya individuals buried in western Mongolia and in Europe who are clearly related to each other. This means that Yamnaya cultural and social networks spanned Eurasia due to their mobility. In The Northman Olga was shipped from Russia all the way to Iceland. But this was the exception, not the rule. As Indo-European men expanded out of the core Eurasia zone, they moved as bachelor groups, and assimilated local women.
And not just Indo-Europeans. Among Uralic people, as well as some Siberians, a particular Y chromosome is very dominant from the Baltic all the way to eastern Siberia.
It’s a branch of N, and it is clearly East Asian in origin. It seems to have shown up in the Baltic region about 2,500 years ago, and it’s now the dominant haplogroup in Finland, and the Baltic countries. And yet the total genome content of modern day Finns that is East Asian is about 5% or so, even if N3a (TAT-C) is about 70%. There are almost no Siberian mtDNA lineages among Finns (OK ~1%). Among the Saami, about 25% of the genome is Siberian, but less than 10% of the mtDNA. Just like the Indo-Europeans, there seems to have been a male-mediated migration west. Why didn’t they bring women?
Can you imagine women and children moving fast across the zone of Eurasia north of the birch forest???
I think the common thing that connects the Indo-European groups here and the Uralic people is that there was a period when they were highly mobile over very long distances. This does not mean that women and children could never be involved. Some women were moving with their men judging by the mtDNA here and there. But, on the whole these were strongly male biased migrations. These were young and robust groups of men with few ties that moved rapidly across territory. There wasn’t time or inclination to have a baggage train.
Another way to look at it is from the gene’s-eye first view. Let’s look for explosive punctuated clusters within haplogroups.
The above is a phylogenetic tree with I1 and I2 (Y). I1 is dominant in Northern Europe, and particular Scandinavia, and I2 is mostly found in the Balkans, though it was once dominant in Northern Europe during the late Neolithic. Both come out of Western European Hunter-Gatherers. Notice that I1 is geographically distinct, and the genetic distance between the tips is small, and there’s a veritable exposition from a recent common ancestor. Contrast it with I2, which has deeper divergences between the nodes, and a stead accumulation of informative mutations.
I1 seems to have been assimilated into the early Corded Ware society, and expanded north and west after the assimilation, and become very successful. I2, less so.
R2, R1a, R1b, and Q all descend from P. You can see just visually that R1b and R1a seem to diverge from a really recent common ancestor, and all these tips are equally differentiated. This is due to a rapid population expansion before diversification in a stepwise fashion.
Here’s another figure which shows you in a clearer way what’s going on:
Note R1b, R1a, I1 and E1b. E1b is associated with the Bantu expansion, though they time it somewhat earlier.
Finally, here’s a graph that shows you how spread out N3a is, and how recent it is:
There are haplogroups that are old and venerable, like G and J, that come in various branches, and seem associated with gradual increase in frequency during farming. But, there are a subset of Y chromosomal haplogroups associated with “burst” within the last 6,000 years or so. I would hold that most of these bursts are due to massive radiation of groups of men who are defined by a particular lifestyle and ecology they’ve mastered.
Hi Razib, posts such as this, as well as your commitment to truth, are the reasons I’ve been with you on Substack since the beginning. You are doing much better at writing for a broader audience as you gain experience. Thanks, and good wishes to you and yours.
Robert Eggers has said that in his original script the raid would have been on or near the Orkneys, and Alexander Skarsgard instead suggested eastern Europe. My understanding is that in Iceland the mtDNA tends to be Irish.
A small gloss:
Linguists have believed for a long time that Baltic and Indo-Iranian
were somehow linked — they share a very unusual sound shift. Until
about five years ago this seemed highly mysterious to me but the
explanation is becoming clear.
I believe that Fatyanovo was (proto)-Baltic-Indo-Iranian but when
some of these people moved east and formed Sintashta, there was a
linguistic split into (proto)-Baltic and (proto)-Indo-Iranian.
Archaeology, linguistics and genetics are all coming together here.
The same male dominated expansion followed by assimilation of local women was also, as you have previously noted, seen in the Jewish people, and of course, in Latin America. It is also seen in the expansion of Berber Y-DNA in North Africa.
An odd outlier is Japan, where it appears that lots of Jomon Y-DNA survived, despite the language of the indigenous pre-Yaoyi population and mtDNA surviving to a much, much lesser degree and autosomal DNA being passed on in smaller proportions.
Comments on some things I’d have a slightly different nuance on:
1) There’s a distinction between “left behind” women and “less reproductively successful after migration”, that I think is hard to distinguish between.
In all the transects where we can actually see migration happening, males of unadmixed ancestry seem to me no more frequent than females, particularly. E.g. steppe Corded Ware into Czech Republic, Bell Beaker people into Spain. The early women are showing up about the same frequency as men in terms of unadmixed migrants coming in.
But that doesn’t mean they were equivalently reproductively successful when they arrived.
One hypothesis I have about this is that the early IE groups tended to preferentially nourish male children or practiced selective infanticide, and this was relatively subtle but skewed ratios enough that things became male biased over the course of a fairly long time, hundreds of years. (I don’t know of any support for this though). Women came with the family group, but ultimately there is less interest in raising the daughters compared to raising the sons and finding a way to get the nearby women if necessary, and so the lineages split in a certain way. Patriarchal stuff.
2) In terms of whether explosions of particular male lineages were driven by skills at a very high level (“mastery”), or by luck and being in the right place at the right time, that’s another thing I don’t think we’ll know!
I would push back a bit at the idea only a little because sometimes there’s an idea that emerges of the early Indo-Europeans as people who must’ve been astonishingly good or well-adapted to pastoralism, much more so than their descendents. This is more a meme than something that is seriously thought or not that I think is being presented here. But still. (I would guess they were probably quite a bit worse than their admixed descendents at mobility, pastoralism, war, etc. Less well adapted than those Alans and the rest. But it doesn’t matter if you have first mover advantage.)
So instead of kidnapping them and taking them to Iceland, Amleth and gang would have simply killed a bunch of the local men and then taken over the settlement, setting themselves up as overlords and marrying some of the local women?
I read somewhere that in the case of the area around Stonehenge there was a 90% replacement of males when the Indo-Europeans showed up.
@bob sykes
Not right. There was a 90% (at least) replacement
of everyone (males and females) across Britain.
This corresponds to the arrival of the Bell Beakers.
@Brett, as a comment on that: For Europe, in the limited genetic sampled of early Corded Ware settlements in Central Europe with unadmixed females without steppe ancestry, the women didn’t all look like from the same local genetic group, but instead with different admixture profiles (ratios of Anatolian Farmer to WHG). The women looked like they were from all over the place, not a single local group – we found “Olgas” basically. Which was surprising given the idea was that that we’d thought they were supposed to only be from Globular Amphora, though still likely the Globular Amphora does represent the main society and genetic profile that the women came from.
So probably it could be both. They’re highly mobile and it’s likely this didn’t stop.
E.g. they didn’t so much take over local settlements and settle, living like feudal lords or something, rather they may have just opportunistically grabbed women and then ran away from the settlement (before a counterattack) and maintained a separate society which is always on the move from trouble (like Romany or Pavees, but with raiding that these people can’t do). There’s that burial in Poland where there are many Globular Amphora people, where it looks like the men were drawn away from the village and then someone came in and killed all the old men, disabled men, women and children, then the men come back and find their dead and give them a mass burial. Though we can’t tell if it was the Corded Ware men wot did it.
Another thing that I think might support this is that the ratios of ancestry of steppe ancestry between X chromosome and autosome don’t always indicate steppe male bias on the autosome. The only way this makes sense to me that fits with the y-dna profile is if males from the early generations of admixture turned back round and raided / absorbed women from cultures who’d preserved more of the original steppe ancestry. Which I think would explain that the X and A chromosome signal reduces while the y-chromosome signal stays.
So I guess that doesn’t seem like some thing like Latin American conquest, at least not for a very long time, where you’ve got a persistent hierarchal caste/social structure being put in place, and more like back-and-forth raiding. It’s not necessarily like Latin America where men marry native women, but then their sons have limited opportunity to marry European women, but more like the sons are treated as a full part of society or otherwise have the same opportunity. For an example of that, consider that the Amesbury Archer who is most high status burial we find in Britain during the Beaker period (I think) and who is sampled for dna had waaay more EEF ancestry than the typical Beaker from Britain; he’s not coming from some situation where he is stratified in a particular or low position in Beaker society due to the EEF ancestry.
Gathering women from over East-Central Europe with slightly different cultures might help explain why IE languages tend to transmit with migrations, because even when there was a pulse of women rather than a slow drip in, the women wouldn’t speak the same language and couldn’t teach it to their children.
It may have been different in India and other places like this where the IE society has developed more into a hierarchical society before it crashes into others.
This is why I know Mr. Khan is married and has children. “I told all of you to get in the minivan 15 minutes ago!”
The Emishi – possibly of some strains of Jomon origin – were fierce warriors, hunters, iron workers, and horse riders and variously resisted the Yamato expansion or served under the Yamato as soldiers. I think there were even noble lineages that originated from the assimilated Emishi warlords and captains.
To be fair, lots of women were kidnapped and taken to Iceland. The Vikings kinda had to do that since it was uninhabited and there were no local woman to abduct. But there was a great resource of this much closer to Iceland in Ireland. Indeed, I can’t remember the details, but I believe most of the MTdna lineages suggest that the Icelandic population is mostly Irish maternally.
The elevated presence of red hair in Norway over Sweden and Denmark also suggests that a fair amount of Irish/Scottish women were carried back to the mainland.
Is corded ware all one common culture? I understand their pottery (ware) were quite similar across a large geography but I imagine there were distinct cultures amongst these. Just seems like r1b, r1a-282, and r1a-z93 all had their own sub cultures among these and given the trmca dates – these sub cultures/paternal clan groups whatever may have existed from yamnaya times?
“In terms of whether explosions of particular male lineages were driven by skills at a very high level (“mastery”), or by luck and being in the right place at the right time, that’s another thing I don’t think we’ll know!”
I think we know quite a bit about this.
First, the male lineages were expanding into collapsing late Neolithic farming societies, that were collapsing due to some combination of a major arid climate period and probably also soil depletion due to unsustainable Neolithic agricultural practices. Herders were more robust in the face of a major arid climate period since their way of life could adapt if their local area became incapable of supporting the herd to someplace else that could, and because plain old natural grass for herds to consume wasn’t as climatically fragile and wasn’t depleted by unsustainable farming practices. In favorable climate conditions, Neolithic farmer society was stronger in its capacity to organize and provide military defense for itself than Neolithic herders, in unfavorable climate conditions, the balance tipped in favor of herders.
Also, late Neolithic farmer societies were organized in a way that relied upon economies of scale. They needed comparatively large organized hierarchies of political power to function as they had and couldn’t decentralize quickly to help them adapt to scarcity which made supporting those at the top a luxury that they couldn’t afford which was longer providing them with benefits. In contrast, herder societies had a social organization that could function on a decentralized basis better. In short, steppe herder social organization was more functional and better suited to the prolonged and wide ranging drought conditions the region was facing at the time than the social organization of late Neolithic farmer communities. This form of herder social organization wasn’t better in any global or universal sense, but it was better suited to meet the pressures that people were facing at the time.
Second, leading up to their climate driven moment of opportunity when the balance of power would change due to climate between farmers and herders, the steppe people adopted metallurgy and developed their exploitation of the previously domesticated horse in a way that increased the utility of horses for purposes including hunting and war and allowing their communities to engage in long range nomadism. The earliest available historical accounts of Bronze Age Indo-Europeans like the Hittites, suggest that the secrets of metallurgy were jealously guarded by them with an explicit intent to give them a military edge over competing societies near them or subject to them. Iron and Bronze weapons wielded by skilled horsemen were superior to stone and wooden clubs and spears wielded by men on foot.
These advantages were accentuated because the horsemen were better fed, had tight interpersonal bonds to each other, had been groomed to be absolutely ruthless towards their enemies, and were used to dealing with “foreign” people due to their practice of exogamy. In contrast, the men in failed late Neolithic farming communities had less meat in their diet, less calories because their cereal farms were failing in arid conditions, had weaker bonds from being from the same community in less socially deep military units, had learned less ruthless civic moral virtues in how to treat others useful in sedentary village life, and had no experience dealing with people from outside their local communities.
Was there a timing factor involved? Absolutely.
Was it just luck? Not really. It was having a culture better suited to the current conditions and more advanced technology, along with a food production mode that wasn’t as badly impacted by the current conditions as sedentary cereal farming.
I wouldn’t call it “mastery” so much as social organization, norms, and a package of technologies.
I’m sure that late Neolithic villages had some men who were absolutely crack martial artists who trained tirelessly with their stone and wooden spears with green thumbs that would put county fair prize winners to shame. I am likewise sure that there were young steppe men who were lazy, only so-so at swordsmanship and riding, and not particularly exceptional at animal husbandry. But well-fed mediocre cavalrymen with metal weapons prevail over nearly starved virtuoso infantry with flint tipped spears the vast majority of the time.
But, in different conditions, the technologies and social organization that provided in edge during steppe expansion ceased to provide the same advantages.
In later ages, when everybody had metal weapons and military forces on both sides had horse drawn chariots, when the sedentary farmers had good harvests that kept them well fed, and those sedentary societies had learned to build well organized Army units to defend themselves against herder warriors who had tight social bonds with each other, the technological advantages dissolved, and the cultural practices and norms that had proven to be an edge in an apocalyptic drought no longer provided a benefit relative to the less ruthless the cooperative norms that allowed sedentary farmers to build large kingdoms and empires mobilized to resist herder warriors, and greater scale facilitated not just larger kingdoms but the ability to access technologies impossible in smaller scale societies. In those conditions, iron age and classical kingdoms and empires arose and prevailed over herder warriors, until bad climate conditions caused another collapse and barbarians overran the Roman Empire.
Third, there seems to be little evidence that zoonotic diseases to which steppe people were immune but late Neolithic people were not, was an important factor in steppe population replacement. The fact that steppe men were having children mostly with local woman strongly disfavors this hypothesis (which was true in the Americas) as a major factor, even though there are instances of this, most famously in the case of the Justinian plague, that are attested (and being better fed could lead to differential survival rates in times of plague and associated famine).
There are details of the process that we don’t know. For example, ancient DNA alone can’t tell us, for example, if late Neolithic men were mostly outright slaughtered, or if they instead were deprived of access to women who steppe bands abducted or attracted, and were reproductively unsuccessful as a result. We likewise know little about the character of the relationships between the steppe warriors and the women they had children with. But I think we know a lot of the main parts of the story at this point.
“Is corded ware all one common culture? I understand their pottery (ware) were quite similar across a large geography but I imagine there were distinct cultures amongst these. Just seems like r1b, r1a-282, and r1a-z93 all had their own sub cultures among these and given the trmca dates – these sub cultures/paternal clan groups whatever may have existed from yamnaya times?”
You can look at things as a “lumper” or a “splitter”, emphasizing commonalities even when it isn’t 100% or emphasizing distinctions. The specialized scholars in archaeology tend to be splitters. But you can gain a lot of insight into the situation by being a lumper and focusing on the commonalities at a greater level of generality in the larger context.
The Corded Ware macro-culture is a collection of archaeological cultures derived primarily from a common Corded Ware culture source and a common patriarchal clan of steppe men and giving rise to the cultural and genealogical descendants. Over time, this culture differentiated and evolved into local variations of the culture, but these cultures were made up of people who probably all spoke languages in the same language family from a common Corded Ware proto-language, probably shared a common larger religious worldview even if there were distinct flavors of it, used technologies with a common origin for the most part adapted over time due to drift and local conditions, and borrowing to some extent from the locals, and probably shared a lot of cultural practices, traditions, folkways and norms.
Crudely speaking, one might analogize the relationships of the various modern peoples who speak the Romance languages to a common cultural and linguistic source in the unified, Latin speaking, Roman Empire. For example, almost all European societies that speak Romance languages have legal systems that were derived from the restoration of legal rules and procedures based upon Roman legal texts that were eventually codified into European civil codes.
Regarding the impact of the zoological factor, couldn’t that case of th Neolithic females be because of survivorship bias? Especially if this impact was a minor factor.
@ohwilleke: “Second, leading up to their climate driven moment of opportunity when the balance of power would change due to climate between farmers and herders, the steppe people adopted metallurgy and developed their exploitation of the previously domesticated horse in a way that increased the utility of horses for purposes including hunting and war and allowing their communities to engage in long range nomadism … Iron and Bronze weapons wielded by skilled horsemen were superior to stone and wooden clubs and spears wielded by men on foot.”
Does that makes sense though? Where we have y-dna replacement – in Northern and Central Europe – people did not have metal. In SE Europe – where we just more or less have an increase in diversity of y-dna but still the continuity of G2a, I2 and much less shift to R1 anyway – people did have metallurgical skills. Corded Ware on Globular Amphora was if anything stone-axe on stone-axe (late Neolithic, stone age, no swordsmanship for them, just clubs). Whatever the story of the Corded Ware, is, it seems not that they understood metallurgy and the local people did not and this was an advantage for them.
As far as I know the proper Bronze Age cultures in Central Europe with metal use – beginning with the Unetice Culture – do seem to show more diversity in y-dna with some I2 in particular (about 22% of the sample among 49 samples), though this is well after the introduction of steppe ancestry. Certainly I don’t think there’s a story where herders, as a general group, ever had a leading edge in metallurgy or the development of weapons, although horse use per capita, probably.
Also, I guess I don’t know how much the neolithic people who were more replaced – in Central Europe – had very large population sizes and centralized settlements and things. For Globular Amphora “settlements are sparse”. A dense society seems more SE European, where again, it’s more resilient and they’re interacting with Yamnaya a different way.
This isn’t to say I reject the idea that there were some differences in cultural skills between these groups and a different outlook or norm (one is certainly more mobile and is drafting women into group to bolster population size, gradually over hundreds of years at like 1/33 or 1/16 reproductive events, and the other is not), just that I want to be careful not to mash up the ideas where the CWC become some kind of metal weapon using, men on horseback, encountering cultures in Central Europe who are vastly more numerous under some fracturing political hierarchy, but lack metal weapons, have problems with nutrition etc. It seems likely to me they were doing raiding and things but the early CWC didn’t have metal weapons as far as I know really, they encountered people who might’ve been quite sparse – and on that point basically if the evidence that there are RoH shared between sampled Globular Amphora people and Corded Ware descendents is correct (through the female), then it seems not too likely that the GAC had a very large population size (if we’re actually finding direct relatives).
When there’s more proper expansion into Southern Europe, with more continuity of y-dna in Italy and SE Europe, then that’s later Bronze Age Central European people, who are more like farmers in their subsistence right? (Even Bell Beakers into England are reintroducing more farming). So it’s not all one thing or set of skills that is at root driving things but some contingent events that are dependent on technologies that are introduced and having the right package for the circumstances that come up (timing).
I think Matt is on to something and would like to build on that.
It’s possible that the IE migrated with similar numbers of both genders but all it takes for the discrepancy is for IE males to have more success breeding and passing on genes than the native males while the native and IE females had roughly similar success. That could happen by the pastoral IEs killing off all the native males and taking the native women in to harems or simply being a higher status ruling class and getting access to more native females. So long as there’s polygyny and no deep racism leading to endogamy, that would happen. Wasn’t that the case with most Native Americans and also the Mongols? We don’t wonder deeply about why male Mongol DNA is spread over a large swathe of Eurasia while female Mongol DNA isn’t, after all.
Recent archaeo-DNA analysis reveals that the neolithic southern coast of Korea was inhabited by people of Jomon affinity. Some were nearly Jomon while the majority were already admixed with continentals.
Yayoi type people from Japan( No Korean samples have been tested yet as Korea lacks samples from this period) already show a high proportion of male haplogroup D so it is possible that Yayoi were heavily D already when they migrated to Japan.
The neolithic southern coastal Koreans were a mix of C-M8 and D2. C-M8 is rare among Ainu and Yayoi while it was found in medieval Emish people(hairy people supposedly akin to Ainu) and modern Japanese(also found among modern Koreans at lower frequency).
The simplistic notion that D is Ainu and O is Korean is obviously false. My guess is that C-M8 and D inhabited southern Korea for a long time and the rest of Korea was inhabited by people akin to Devil’s gate(one rare Neolithic/Bronze age sample from central Korea was C2a, the same as Devil’s Gate) and people from southwestern Manchuria(Liao valley people). Neither side enjoyed clear technological/military superiority and exchanged females with patri-locality for a long time. This will result in the Yayoi-profile at the time of migration and explains why modern Japanese are heavily D2.
I am glad Razib finally metinoned the male-female profiles of Uralic people. I have been, for a long time, citing this as an example that male-female lineage bias does not necessarity imply military conquest and wife stealing. It happened quite traumatically at the time of post Renaissance European expansion but that does not mean it happens all the time.
There is a rumor that Reich once told Razib that science may sometimes be politically incorrect, but a politically incorrectness does not imply scientific truth. Whether this rumor is true or not, it is something that many amateur “scientists” should heed.
@EastAsianMan
That can modify the scenario in which D ended up in the Japanese population, but its still from a Jomon-like source, which, if merged with a non-Jomon like source would nonetheless involve a hunter-gatherer Jomon-like source successfully being able to pass it on to the other source that it mixed with in southern Korea.
One situation that can avoid the subsuming of farmers by HGs here is if the other (non-Jomon-like) source was also some kind of HG (of a different, continental population type), and that after this HG-HG mixture, it culturally received the farming kit from a third party (all of which happened in Korea), and then this population then moved on to Japan. Though that sounds a little convoluted in comparison to a yDNA D + M8 HG source mixing with a different (likely migrant) farming population producing this mixed neolithic group in Korea.
Some points of consideration:
While that may be true for grass vs. subsistence crops, another consideration must be factored into the discussion. Domesticated herding animals, dairy cows in particular, consume a large amount of water. Grass may be resilient to droughts, but rivers, lakes, and creeks aren’t. Unlike agriculturalists who can use aquifers and irrigation, pastoralists have to rely on surface water, which may dry off during droughts. And you can’t move the herds if they are thirsty. They are liable to drop dead.
I don’t think this is true. The advantages of pastoralists were, generally, that:
1) They were mobile. They didn’t have fixed property of value (i.e. land) to defend. When inferior in number, they could melt away before their enemy and return as soon as the enemy retreated. Conversely, they could often pick the time and place of their own choosing to battle (or raid).
2) They had higher mobilization rate than agriculturalists. Even when there was surplus crop, agriculturalists could only support a small number of professional soldiers. Among agriculturalists, all able-bodied males were warriors/raiders.
3) They were physically healthier and stronger due to diet and “work environment.”
4) They were used to, and proficient in, surrounding and killing live beings, both their own animals and wild animals, an excellent practice for war, as was the constant raiding (for livestock and women) practiced by the pastoralists, against each other and against sedentary peoples.
Even when the pastoralists only had non-metallic weaponry (i.e. bone arrows and lassos), they were still quite dangerous due to the factors I outline above.
Far more than metal weaponry, I think horses were decisive esp. once a proper horseback-riding cavalry was developed. Mobility is an incredible force multiplier, not just tactically, but far more crucially operationally.
This is a false. For much of human history, the utility of cavalry in battle was for reconnaissance, raiding, harassing, launching missiles and retreating safely, screening, attacking the flanks and/or the rear, and pursuit (during which 2/3 of casualties for the opponents occurred typically). Until heavy charging cavalry was developed, cavalry generally fared poorly against drawn-up infantry in pitched battles (even with heavy cavalry, casualties would be prohibitively high when employed in frontal charges). Horses aren’t so dumb as to charge into pointy sticks (even if the said sticks aren’t metal-tipped).
Much of pre-gunpowder human history is that of pastoralists defeating agriculturalists and becoming the elite strata of the latter, to be replaced by other pastoralists in turn.
@twinkie:
“2) They had higher mobilization rate than agriculturalists. Even when there was surplus crop, agriculturalists could only support a small number of professional soldiers. Among agriculturalists, all able-bodied males were warriors/raiders.”
There’s some question here of how intensive agriculture is though, and the types of crops,?
Like, Polynesians, or Papuan Highlanders, or famously the Yanomami, for example, were all agriculturalists, in the sense they lived mainly off planted crops (rather than foraging or domesticated livestock). But they spend lots of time fighting with each other! Every man is a warrior of a sort, or at least a fighter, in these societies.
This isn’t incompatible with agriculture so much as its incompatible with them spending a lot of time on intensive agriculture (where you’re doing lots of effort to gain higher yield from more marginal land and support a larger popuilation of that land) and they’re stuck to forms of shifting cultivation and so the total population is limited. But it’s not like they can do anything different, because there’s no state to protect them and keep the peace.
Advanced, intensive agriculturalists are definitely doing all these things like preparing fodder for the animals that they need for the fertilizers, and double-cropping their fields, and practicing crop rotation, and maintaining waterways and all these things that take all their time. Land improvement and multiple cropping rather than planting the best land and doing nothing. But this takes time and many simple agriculturalist groups are just doing simple slash and burn, and the agricultural effort is mainly a female occupation, and men are fighting each other.
My theory is that: Agriculture gives rises to states, which limit fighting and mobilization for war (mainly for the self-interested reasons of the rulers), and that allows more focus on the economy and intensive agriculture, which then it turn makes ratcheting up to more fighting and mobilization for war and fielding high numbers of fighters difficult because you need all that intensive agriculture to keep people alive… But for pastoralists, enduring states aren’t as possible (because people will migrate away with their herds when anyone tries to build a permanent state; they can “avoid tax”), so this can’t happen on that side of things.
That’s “OK” as long as they can muster a big enough war group and their technological advantage is big enough to fight societies who maintain a high level of mobilization (whether that be pastoralists like the Mongols, agro-pastoralists like the Germanic tribes, or agriculturalists like the migrating Tais). But its a problem if they can’t due to civil war, some waxing of the herds and gathering of the tribes on the pastoralist side and diffusion of their technology to the pastoral side through trade and so on.
(In terms of where pre-IE agriculturalists were, I’d guess agriculturalists in Northern and Central Europe, where they were more replaced, were likely to be simple, while SE Europe was probably getting more intensive with more mega-villages and more effort in agriculture? But this is a guess.).