Tensions between incoming Corded Ware herders/farmers and local Neolithic farmers

Alan

Elite member
Messages
2,517
Reaction score
450
Points
0
Ethnic group
Kurdish
Y-DNA haplogroup
R1a1a1
mtDNA haplogroup
HV2a1 +G13708A

At 6:48 Prof. Kristiansen mentions the killing of Corded Ware families in East Germany by the local farmers.

I mentioned this a few times in the past. There was a guy on Eurogenes comment section who actually did say that there are archeological mass graves of Corded Ware groups who were slaughtered by local Farmers of East Germany. He even linked a few archeoloigcal papers into this debate back than.

Doesn't fit that much into the image of the superior "Steppe Invders" who overrun neolithic Europe, that some Users on the net and even few academics of the past wanted to paint.
 
Last edited:
Here is some comments I catched up which actually makes the picture more clear. CWC look more like a immigrant group that had to suffer from racism of the local groups which didn't like the idea of a new people settling on their land and "exploiting their resources".

The Eulau massacre is probably the best investigated crime of the Neolithic, involving - in addition to archeologists, aDNA and isotope analysts - also modern pathologists and crime scene investigators. Last I heard, they had traced back the weapons used for the killing - they in size and shape correspond to typical Schönfelder Group axes. The Schönfelder Group settled on the Upper Middle Elbe, between a bit north of Magdeburg, and Hamburg. They had little CWC influence, if at all, but instead set forth Bernburg (FB) and GAC traditions, producing a/o a kind of proto-BB ceramics.

As concerns Sati, note
a) those Eulau burials all suffered violent death, usuallly slaughtered from behind;
b) the buried were either women, infants/ juveniles, or seniors, with regular adult males missing (the idea is that they were out for taking cattle to pasture, or for hunting, upon their return found their village folk murdered, and set up the burial);
c) CWC was a burying culture, while the Schönfelder Group used cremation.
So, essentially, there is nothing in Eulau even remotely reminiscent of Sati.

Eulau also demonstrates that "Steppic", Yamnaya-like immigrants didn't arrive as militarily superior destroyers of "Old Europe". Instead, they were immigrants suffering violence from the established populace (a quite unfortunate tradition that has survived to date in East Germany).
It finally serves as a cautionary warning: Eulau has supplied around a third of all CWC aDNA we have so far. The context is extraordinary, which should be kept in mind when interpreting the aDNA results.

However, I guess somebody excavating west of the Missisippi in some 4500 years from now may, in addition to burnt-down settler farmsteads, also recover mass-graves of violently killed Amerindians. So far, there isn't any evidence from East Germany of LN violence against the "natives". And, unlike the Amerindian scenario, "native" cultures such as Bernburg, GAC, Schönfelder Group or Elbe-Havel culture (Potsdam/ Berlin area) continued next to, and unaffected by, CWC, for many centuries until ultimately giving way to BB and Unetice. The only culture that so far has been archeologically evidenced to have suffered external violence is CWC.

What appears to me here is that the incoming herder groups took over by plague + overpopulating the locals.
 
There were already many clues that Corded Ware expanded in already weakened depopulated land without much fight. Most likely due to climate cooling and drying or even helped by a plague. Typical neolithic european farmers' crops and practices were not doing well in northern Europe. CW farmers who developed their farming practices in north and supplemented it with hunting, could survive and function in colder climate.
Their southern and western border of expansion is where enough neolithic farmers lived to resist this wave of CW migration.
And of course wherever there are two different cultures living close together in separate groups, sooner or later there is a conflict, war and mass graves.

All my wisdom about CW in 3 sentences, lol. Now I'm going to watch the movie from post 1.

Edit: Interesting tidbits but conclusions are painted with quick and wide brush. It is hard to buy into everything he says.
 
I agree with both of you. We have climate change leading to malnutrition and a decline in population, in some areas more than others, then periodic outbursts of plague. The result is a perfect storm for the farmers in certain parts of Europe. No wonder we see a decline in population during this period, despite the arrival of the newcomers.

I've always thought that Eulau was a good example of what we know also happened in the New World: incoming group establishes a settlement, the "natives" attack while the men are gone, perhaps hunting. It also happened the other way around in the New World. I don't know of any archaeological sites off-hand in Europe that show this kind of violence against the native farmers, but I'm virtually certain that it must have happened. It's all brutal and horrible, but not surprising given what we know of human history.

The poster, whoever it is, makes an excellent point about how MN enclaves co-existed with steppe ones for quite a long period.

I'm also not overly impressed with the video contents.
 
I agree with both of you. We have climate change leading to malnutrition and a decline in population, in some areas more than others, then periodic outbursts of plague. The result is a perfect storm for the farmers in certain parts of Europe. No wonder we see a decline in population during this period, despite the arrival of the newcomers.

I've always thought that Eulau was a good example of what we know also happened in the New World: incoming group establishes a settlement, the "natives" attack while the men are gone, perhaps hunting. It also happened the other way around in the New World. I don't know of any archaeological sites off-hand in Europe that show this kind of violence against the native farmers, but I'm virtually certain that it must have happened. It's all brutal and horrible, but not surprising given what we know of human history.

The poster, whoever it is, makes an excellent point about how MN enclaves co-existed with steppe ones for quite a long period.

I'm also not overly impressed with the video contents.

The thing however is, there is absolutely no sign of violance from CWC or any other "Steppe invaders" towards the local Neolithic groups. There are however allot of evidences of violance and oppression from local groups to the newcomers. That is actually very different from the case of Americas and more comparable to working class immigrants of Germany in the 70 to 90s and Irish settlers to the new world.

They were basically seen as not liked newcomers to the region, who "exploited the resources of the native mans land". Indeed climatic changes and plague seem to have played a role and there is an indiciation for this if you take a look at how there is a decrease of "Steppe herder" DNA from North to South. With the exception of parts Southeast Europe which can simply be explained by geographical closeness as well the Slavic expansion into the region.

The reality is, that Indo European speech spred around South European with cultures that were not so Steppic (if some of them were Steppic to begin with) at all.

Let's take the BellBeaker and Unetice as example. Really strong did the Indo Europeans get when they ultimately merged with the local rests of the farmer slowly dying farmer cultures, in the regions they moved in. Like in the case of BellBeakers those people were already halfway if not even more of local Neolithic ancestry and more of a local farming culture than incoming herders.

And these new Bronze and Iron Age cultures which were more influental spred ultimately the speech.

It was the combination of the locals slowly dying out and the necomers taking slowly the upper hand of some of the local cultures. I know some people won't like the comparison but it is similar to what is happening here in Germany (even if the background is a different), the locals getting older and slowly dying out while newcomers from countries around increase in numbers. Just that back in the time the reason must have been climate changes and plague in some parts of Europe. As we know from some sources the neolithic communities became more violant. And violance often comes up when a shortage of resources is the case.

We also know from the beginning of the Neolithic revolution the Farmers were actually more lenient in settling in the more northern spheres of Europe anyways while South and Central Europe with much more densley populated by them. which can be still seen in the aDNA of this parts of Europe. Over time the climate in Central Europe might have changed a little more + the plague and you have the better adapted herders taking over there and merging with the local farmers. And this new group ultimately spreds around.

This is why there is more diversity in Haplogroups and more "typical" farmer yDNA found in South Europe in comparison to North where most of the cases 2 or 3 Haplogroups dominate.

What we know for sure is that something happened in Neolithic Europe and some regions were being slowly abondened by the farmers. The population size was decreasing also.

So what the incoming Herder groups simply did was coexist with the local farmers and simply wait, the time and nature(climate, plague) was playing against the local farmers and they only had to settle in the sparseley populated areas.

what we also know is that the local farmer cultures of East Europe had some low level of Steppe admixture. This is why I think that the CWC herders might have got their EEF admixture through intermarriage with the local farmers. And this went on while the local groups died slowly out due to climatic changes, the herder groups grew.
 
where and when did this steppe admixture into the local farmer cultures of East Europe start?

it could explain EEF admixture in CWC, but how do you explain Potapovka/Sintashta had EEF as well?
 
At 6:48 Prof. Kristiansen mentions the killing of Corded Ware families in East Germany by the local farmers.

I mentioned this a few times in the past. There was a guy on Eurogenes comment section who actually did say that there are archeological mass graves of Corded Ware groups who were slaughtered by local Farmers of East Germany. He even linked a few archeoloigcal papers into this debate back than.

Doesn't fit that much into the image of the superior "Steppe Invders" who overrun neolithic Europe, that some Users on the net and even few academics of the past wanted to paint.

The more technologically advanced folks do not always win. Look at the colonisation of the Wild West in the USA during the 19h century. American settlers were sometimes ambushed and exterminated by Native Americans with considerably lower technology (but more people and fighting to protect their ancestral land). The technological gap was not nearly as great between Corded Ware and LBK-derived farmers. Both were Copper Age farmers. The main difference was that CW were more mobile horse-riding cattle pastoralists who made more frequent use of copper to make axes. The military advantage became more important once actual bronze weapons, especially swords were developed, like those of the Unetice culture.

In the long term, the more technologically advanced people won, be it in Copper/Bronze Age Europe or during the colonisation of the Americas. But casualties are inevitable on both sides in this kind of shock of civilisations.
 
[video=youtube;wKn05BbEMcs]

I mentioned this a few times in the past. There was a guy on Eurogenes comment section who actually did say that there are archeological mass graves of Corded Ware groups who were slaughtered by local Farmers of East Germany. He even linked a few archeoloigcal papers into this debate back than.

can you give more details ?
 
A paper analyzing it is here:
https://www.academia.edu/649220/The...e_Multiple_Burials_from_Saxony-Anhalt_Germany

They themselves note the similarities with a (pre-Columbian) Native American site.

The one site from Central Europe with the best parallels to theEulau skeletons is the Early Neolithic mass grave from Talheim,Germany (Wahl and König, 1987). At Talheim, several dozen peoplewere murdered in a raid that most probably annihilated awhole village. Due to broadly comparable weaponry used, the injuriesof the Talheim skeletons also consist of penetrating cranialtrauma and arrow wounds, much like those observed in the Eulauskeletons. The 14th century Crow Creek massacre site from SouthDakota also has many parallels to the Talheim mass grave,although it resulted in the deaths of several hundred individuals(Willey, 1990). Many crania from Crow Creek showed perimortemtraumatic injuries, and men, women, and children were among thevictims, which is not surprising when a settlement is overrun(Schulting and Wysocki, 2005). The physical remains of the peoplewere buried in a common mass grave. While the Crow Creek victimshad at least been partially disarticulated upon burial, the Talheimvictims were interred as complete and probably fresh bodies.If indeed the whole village population had been killed at Talheim,the question of who actually buried the dead still remains. Whilethe exact answer will probably never be known, it is possible thatthe attackers or some unrelated inhabitants of neighbouring settlementsthrew the bodies into the grave pit. The bizarre and haphazardbody positions at Talheim have nothing in common with theusual burial customs of that time, indicating lack of care and religiousrites. The same is evident for the victims of the Crow Creekraid, as the remains have been thrown into a defensive ditch whichC. Meyer et al. / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28 (2009) 412–423 421had not been intended as a grave site when constructed (Willey,1990). Another site from the European Neolithic which has to bementioned in this context is Asparn/Schletz, which is contemporaneousto Talheim and rather similar to the Crow Creek site (Teschler-Nicolaet al., 1996). At Asparn, the partly disarticulatedskeletons of at least several dozen victims of a violent attack havebeen found at the bottom of a defensive ditch. Many show evidenceof multiple cranial trauma, including females and children,as well as carnivore gnawing marks. This has been interpreted asevidence that the bodies were lying exposed for some time beforethe then partly scattered remains were dumped into the ditch.Again, similar to Crow Creek, this ditch was not intended for burialupon its construction (Teschler-Nicola et al., 1999).
 
The more technologically advanced folks do not always win. Look at the colonisation of the Wild West in the USA during the 19h century. American settlers were sometimes ambushed and exterminated by Native Americans with considerably lower technology (but more people and fighting to protect their ancestral land). The technological gap was not nearly as great between Corded Ware and LBK-derived farmers. Both were Copper Age farmers. The main difference was that CW were more mobile horse-riding cattle pastoralists who made more frequent use of copper to make axes. The military advantage became more important once actual bronze weapons, especially swords were developed, like those of the Unetice culture.

In the long term, the more technologically advanced people won, be it in Copper/Bronze Age Europe or during the colonisation of the Americas. But casualties are inevitable on both sides in this kind of shock of civilisations.

Evidence of horse riding in Corded Ware is completely absent. Polished stone axes predominate in the CW communities, copper axes being being rather rare. The fanged copper axes found in the Chalcolithic alpine region in contrast are much more sophisticated. It's likely that CW communities adopted the use of axes from the west - further east the characteristic hammer-head pins happen to be more numerous.

The southern alpine zone remained the metallurgical center of Central Europe for quite some time. This is were the first halberds make an appearance in the Chalcolithic (Remedello) - the first Central European Bronze Swords (Aue II type) were found in Northern Italy too. In comparison, neither Bell Beaker nor Corded Ware had particularly advanced metallurgy.
 
where and when did this steppe admixture into the local farmer cultures of East Europe start?

it could explain EEF admixture in CWC, but how do you explain Potapovka/Sintashta had EEF as well?
As I wrote obviously the Steppe herders expanded into areas which were sparsely populated and not so much suited for cereal farming. The reason why both CWC and Sintashta had EEF is because they both derive from a common group of herders which moved into a region populated by some neolithic farmers and merged with them. Than this new group expanded again. And in Europe by Bronze Age already a pure Steppe herder group didn't exist anymore. We have signs of Steppe admixture in local neolithic farmer groups. as well growing EEF admixture in incoming Steppe groups.

It is no suprise to me that the first place the Steppe herders could hold a foot on was Central and Northeast Europe. Which is in fact the region with highest WHG admixture which again indicates that this is the region least effected by the neolithic farmers. So when the Steppe groups came into this specific region there wasn't allot of farmers to begin with.

There is a reason why Steppe admixture couldn't penetrate further into South. The only reason why Indo European speech even catched up in the South is due to the reason that the individuals who brought the speech weren't that much Steppe to begin with. There were some studies showing that Italic might as well stem from Crete. If not from Crete they probably expanded via the BellBeaker complex. Now the Bellbeaker were not Steppe anymore but local farmers who merged with the Steppe herders and therefore created a new more advanced culture.
 
A paper analyzing it is here:
https://www.academia.edu/649220/The...e_Multiple_Burials_from_Saxony-Anhalt_Germany

They themselves note the similarities with a (pre-Columbian) Native American site.

This is about LBK people and has nothing to do with CWC massacers. The major difference here however in comparison to Americas is, that the archeologists say there is no evidence of any violance from the CWC towards the local farmer groups however there is evidence of violance from the farmer groups to the CWC herders. What is the reason why I personally compare it to "hatred of the foreigners that could steal the resources" they think belongs to them as natives.
 
The thing however is, there is absolutely no sign of violance from CWC or any other "Steppe invaders" towards the local Neolithic groups. There are however allot of evidences of violance and oppression from local groups to the newcomers. That is actually very different from the case of Americas and more comparable to working class immigrants of Germany in the 70 to 90s and Irish settlers to the new world.

They were basically seen as not liked newcomers to the region, who "exploited the resources of the native mans land". Indeed climatic changes and plague seem to have played a role and there is an indiciation for this if you take a look at how there is a decrease of "Steppe herder" DNA from North to South. With the exception of parts Southeast Europe which can simply be explained by geographical closeness as well the Slavic expansion into the region.

The reality is, that Indo European speech spred around South European with cultures that were not so Steppic (if some of them were Steppic to begin with) at all.

Let's take the BellBeaker and Unetice as example. Really strong did the Indo Europeans get when they ultimately merged with the local rests of the farmer slowly dying farmer cultures, in the regions they moved in. Like in the case of BellBeakers those people were already halfway if not even more of local Neolithic ancestry and more of a local farming culture than incoming herders.

And these new Bronze and Iron Age cultures which were more influental spred ultimately the speech.

It was the combination of the locals slowly dying out and the necomers taking slowly the upper hand of some of the local cultures. I know some people won't like the comparison but it is similar to what is happening here in Germany (even if the background is a different), the locals getting older and slowly dying out while newcomers from countries around increase in numbers. Just that back in the time the reason must have been climate changes and plague in some parts of Europe. As we know from some sources the neolithic communities became more violant. And violance often comes up when a shortage of resources is the case.

We also know from the beginning of the Neolithic revolution the Farmers were actually more lenient in settling in the more northern spheres of Europe anyways while South and Central Europe with much more densley populated by them. which can be still seen in the aDNA of this parts of Europe. Over time the climate in Central Europe might have changed a little more + the plague and you have the better adapted herders taking over there and merging with the local farmers. And this new group ultimately spreds around.

This is why there is more diversity in Haplogroups and more "typical" farmer yDNA found in South Europe in comparison to North where most of the cases 2 or 3 Haplogroups dominate.

What we know for sure is that something happened in Neolithic Europe and some regions were being slowly abondened by the farmers. The population size was decreasing also.

So what the incoming Herder groups simply did was coexist with the local farmers and simply wait, the time and nature(climate, plague) was playing against the local farmers and they only had to settle in the sparseley populated areas.

what we also know is that the local farmer cultures of East Europe had some low level of Steppe admixture. This is why I think that the CWC herders might have got their EEF admixture through intermarriage with the local farmers. And this went on while the local groups died slowly out due to climatic changes, the herder groups grew.

The only LBK farming area I know of sits roughly on the old borders of East and West Germany, from Karsdorf, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. Both T1a skeletal remains belong to the Linienbandkeramische Kultur. T1a from Karsdorf constitutes 22.2% of all ancient samples between 7500 and 6800 ybp in Germany. The remainder belong to other clades: 22.2% are H2 carriers from Derenburg, and the remaining 55.6% are G2a bearers from Halberstadt and Derenburg.
Was the I haplogroup in this area also LBK ............or are we to accept they are all hunters?
What haplogroups came into this area being CWC people?
 
They were killed by Bell Beakers, not by local farmers. This is how R1b (BB) replaced R1a (CWC) in Germany.

There is a German documentary about Eulau mass grave, and they mention Bell Beaker groups as murderers:

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beit...ort+Eulau#/beitrag/video/1118362/Tatort-Eulau

All of Germany up to the Rhine used to be R1a Corded Ware territory. Later R1b Bell Beakers invaded that area.

Not only did Bell Beakers kill Corded Ware population in Eulau - they also ate (cannibalized) them afterwards.
 
Eulau also demonstrates that "Steppic", Yamnaya-like immigrants didn't arrive as militarily superior destroyers of "Old Europe". Instead, they were immigrants suffering violence from the established populace (a quite unfortunate tradition that has survived to date in East Germany).

This is some idiotic "political archaeology" once again.

Meanwhile a Muslim immigrant truck driver killed 12 people and injured 50 in Berlin just a few days ago.

And as I wrote, those were not "established populace", but Bell Beakers, who killed those people in Eualu.

So it was one group of immigrants killing another group who had immigrated before (because Corded Ware culture preceded Bell Beaker culture in Germany - Bell Beaker culture replaced Corded Ware culture in areas east of the Rhine).
 
They were killed by Bell Beakers, not by local farmers. This is how R1b (BB) replaced R1a (CWC) in Germany.

There is a German documentary about Eulau mass grave, and they mention Bell Beaker groups as murderers:

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beit...ort+Eulau#/beitrag/video/1118362/Tatort-Eulau

All of Germany up to the Rhine used to be R1a Corded Ware territory. Later R1b Bell Beakers invaded that area.

Not only did Bell Beakers kill Corded Ware population in Eulau - they also ate (cannibalized) them afterwards.

The projectiles found at the site of the massacre belong to the Schönfeld culture. The trauma on the skeletons also fits with the axes produced by the these people.

The people of Schönfeld people practiced cremation and made quite distinctive pottery. Clearly not Bell Beaker - the author of the piece got this wrong.
 
The projectiles found at the site of the massacre belong to the Schönfeld culture. The trauma on the skeletons also fits with the axes produced by the these people.

The people of Schönfeld people practiced cremation and made quite distinctive pottery. Clearly not Bell Beaker - the author of the piece got this wrong.

Do you have a link? The ZDF article does not give many details indeed.
 
They were killed by Bell Beakers, not by local farmers. This is how R1b (BB) replaced R1a (CWC) in Germany.

There is a German documentary about Eulau mass grave, and they mention Bell Beaker groups as murderers:

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beit...ort+Eulau#/beitrag/video/1118362/Tatort-Eulau

All of Germany up to the Rhine used to be R1a Corded Ware territory. Later R1b Bell Beakers invaded that area.

Not only did Bell Beakers kill Corded Ware population in Eulau - they also ate (cannibalized) them afterwards.

I'm not sure who killed who but it is quite likely that CW people were displaced by BB 4-4.5 ka west of the Elbe river and also in northern Denmark (R1b-U106).
In Sion, Switzerland an older BB tribe would even have been replaced by a new incoming BB tribe.
BB tribes however didn't occupy large landmasses. They occupied only strategic places to controll e.g. trade routes.
In the end, however so many BB tribes controlled so many patches of land that started to overlap.
 
They were killed by Bell Beakers, not by local farmers. This is how R1b (BB) replaced R1a (CWC) in Germany.

There is a German documentary about Eulau mass grave, and they mention Bell Beaker groups as murderers:

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beit...ort+Eulau#/beitrag/video/1118362/Tatort-Eulau

All of Germany up to the Rhine used to be R1a Corded Ware territory. Later R1b Bell Beakers invaded that area.

Not only did Bell Beakers kill Corded Ware population in Eulau - they also ate (cannibalized) them afterwards.

Bell Beaker is a local farmng culture and it's origin predates the supposed Steppe migration. The massacres were made by the Schönfelder culture. Schönfelder and Bernburg are non Bell Beaker local farming cultures too.
 

This thread has been viewed 15892 times.

Back
Top