I see it that they were the conquerors, its the story of their arrival to India, because they are the Indo Aryans, in part at least.
Why do we have this picture of the peaceful farmer? They were conquerors too, desiring more land and removing or subjugating anyone who stands in their way.
Where did the Iron Gates HGs go? they vanished, after the farmers made it to the scene, later in LBK there was evidence for fortifications, they very much knew about war and their differences from the "others" at their borders.
I don't understand your first point at all. Most Indians have no or a couple of percent of steppe. Even the Brahmins, who make up a small percentage of the Indian population, and are indeed resented by a large percentage of the population, are at best 10-20% steppe. Then, in the Rigveda there are all these stories about the noble Arya defeating "lower" peoples. They have been taught that these were different autochthonous groups.
Now they're supposed to be thrilled at the suggestion that their holy book comes from Arya who were European related peoples from the steppe and who subjugated most of their ancestors, and this after they were subjugated and ruled for a couple of hundred years by Europeans, and whom they threw off only after great effort?
I don't understand how you don't get it.
As to violence in relationship to the migration of farmers from the Near East, there are some problems with getting a grip on it. Most importantly, we don't have recorded mythology to give us an understanding of what happened.
We do know, however, that the number of hunter-gatherers in Europe was pretty small. It's probably true that as the farmers took over loess soil areas, the hunter-gatherers retreated to the deep forests, mountains or to the northeast. Might there have been violence? I would think so. I think there's always been violence when two groups with different subsistence strategies meet.
However, we also have papers which show that in the Iron Gates, and in the German plain (I think Bollingino et al?,) and in Gotland as well, there are hunter-gather and farmer enclaves side by side for at least a thousand years. If you don't remember that, the papers are easy to find.
As time passed, there was some admixture, and the admixture was not just of farmer men with hunter-gatherer women. In fact, it seems that a good number of hunter-gatherer men were absorbed. That's why we have so many I2a( and even a I1) autosomally farmer samples, yes?
One of the big differences, I think, is that the Indo-European invasions, although some women also made the journey, were more male oriented, where I think it is pretty clear that the farmers came as family groups. It also seems that the Indo-Europeans were polygamous, and we don't know if that was the case with the farmers.
I think it's also clear that as the climate worsened and crops failed and there was intense competition for resources, there was substantial violence between farming communities.
The final factor is that in the later stages of the Indo-European migrations (not necessarily with Corded Ware, where the weapons were not actually superior to those of the farmers), in Central Asia and India, for example, we have the evidence from the Rig Veda and other written records which do reveal a lot of violence.
How much violence there was with the Bell Beakers or even Corded Ware, I don't know. In the beginning their weaponry and metallurgy were not very good, especially in the case of Corded Ware. It improved significantly pretty quickly, though. As I said on one of these threads, I'm sure there was violence. If there wasn't a lot of violence, yDna G2a and most of yDna I2a would not have disappeared. There were no long periods of the two groups living side by side. Instead, there was an abrupt change of culture. However, I do think that much of the far north and northeast were under-populated, and there had been population crashes, especially in Central Europe, and then there was the plague.
So, it was a perfect storm in a way.
Wow, Promenade, we cross-posted.
Yes, I see things in exactly the same way.