Ancient genomes reveal social and genetic structure of Late Neolithic Switzerland

[Anfänger]

Well, I am not so sure - perhaps CWC were violent when on the move or against enemy tribes, but had different rules for their own people?
After all Norway and Lithuania, which has the highest percent of CWC, have customary law with very good protections for women. For instance within Baltic customary law, violence or harm against a women is punishable double compare to the same done to a man. Also, bridge kidnaping or even more rape involve very heavy punishment. In case of rape, the punishment for the perpetrator is death.

Sure, Scandinavian and Baltic countries are the most just when it comes to gender equality but we are taking about pre historic times. Cultures change. 100 years ago the situation was different and 5000 years ago anyway. For example compare Iran before 1979 to Iran in 1980s or even today, everything changed in a few years.

 

[bicicleur 2]

I think in this particular case it is the other way. There is very few evidence that pastoralist groups like the Yamnaya culture had women in higher positions, there are very few cultures I can think of who were more male centered. For example CWC men "stole" the women of the farmers probaly by force.

I'm not sure they intentially stole the women, just because Kristiansen says so.
There was a clash for resources between different groups - the CWC, the Globular Amphora herders and the farmers.
Each of those groups (the farmers too as I pointed out above) were organised in clans which were male- and elite-centered.
The males of the other groups were seen as a threat and were killed, but they kept the women, at least the younger ones.
The older women were often seen as consumers of resources rather than assets, so they were killed too.

 

[Angela]

Well, I am not so sure - perhaps CWC were violent when on the move or against enemy tribes, but had different rules for their own people?
After all Norway and Lithuania, which has the highest percent of CWC, have customary law with very good protections for women. For instance within Baltic customary law, violence or harm against a women is punishable double compare to the same done to a man. Also, bridge kidnaping or even more rape involve very heavy punishment. In case of rape, the punishment for the perpetrator is death.

We're not discussing modern societies. I already stated that the treatment of women in the west is good compared to other parts of the world. Certainly, bride kidnapping and rape are crimes in all western cultures.

We're discussing cultures 5-7,000 thousand years ago.

Thankfully, the world is, in some respects, a different place.

 

[Angela]

I think in this particular case it is the other way. There is very few evidence that pastoralist groups like the Yamnaya culture had women in higher positions, there are very few cultures I can think of who were more male centered. For example CWC men "stole" the women of the farmers probaly by force.

The fact that these cultures practiced polygamy, and inheritance was only for the eldest male is well known. That meant they were stuck with a large population of young men who would be without land or women. That created potential for unrest and disruption of the social order.

Fundamentalist Mormons kick the young boys out of the community. It only works because it's a modern era and the police wouldn't look kindly on them coming back and killing their fathers and uncles and cousins.

The solution for these pastoralist socieites was to create a warrior culture, putting young boys in bands under instruction in raiding and fighting, and then sending them out beyond the home territory to get their own land and women.

That is "not" how the Neolithic moved into Europe. They were family groups; they brought their own women, and children.

There was absolutely nothing comparable in the farmer cultures of Neolithic Europe. This is far different from farmers in one clan attacking other farmers for food in times of scarcity, or farmers killing invaders when invaders appeared.

It isn't Kristiansen saying so; he's just applying it, wrongly, imo, to the case of Eulau. It's what anyone who has ever bothered to study the data has stated and put into papers and books.

No matter how simply I try to explain it, these false equivalences are made.

Of course there's violence in all human societies, especially in times of scarcity. That doesn't negate the fact that some cultures are just more violent and aggressive than others.

The same applies to the treatment of women. It's well known, as you say, that these societies were more male centered than the societies they encountered. They didn't even feed them properly, or bury them with any respect in the majority of cases. Does that mean "Old Europe" was a paradise for women, a la Gimbutas? Obviously not. That's not the point. It's a question of degree; nuance, if you will.

This was not about the advance of a superior civilization; far from it.

This was about an advance into areas either virtually empty, like the northeast, or areas weakened and decimated by plague and the failure of crops. That's why the steppe "percentage" in certain parts of central and northwest Europe can come close to 50%.

There's also the fact, which I have frequently stated, that pastoralism, given the climatic conditions at the time, was more adaptive in central Europe, and that gave them an advantage. The domestication of the horse was also an advantage, although the data shows that had little to do with the Corded Ware advance. As for weapons, metallurgy, there was no advantage. If anything, they barely had any copper and bronze was far in the future. A warrior culture would definitely be an advantage.

I'm done with the discussion. It feels like the discussions about the Etruscans. People believe what they want to believe, not what the evidence shows.

 

[Anfänger]

The fact that these cultures practiced polygamy, and inheritance was only for the eldest male is well known. That meant they were stuck with a large population of young men who would be without land or women. That created potential for unrest and disruption of the social order.

Fundamentalist Mormons kick the young boys out of the community. It only works because it's a modern era and the police wouldn't look kindly on them coming back and killing their fathers and uncles and cousins.

The solution for these pastoralist socieites was to create a warrior culture, putting young boys in bands under instruction in raiding and fighting, and then sending them out beyond the home territory to get their own land and women.

That is "not" how the Neolithic moved into Europe. They were family groups; they brought their own women, and children.

There was absolutely nothing comparable in the farmer cultures of Neolithic Europe. This is far different from farmers in one clan attacking other farmers for food in times of scarcity, or farmers killing invaders when invaders appeared.

It isn't Kristiansen saying so; he's just applying it, wrongly, imo, to the case of Eulau. It's what anyone who has ever bothered to study the data has stated and put into papers and books.

No matter how simply I try to explain it, these false equivalences are made.

Of course there's violence in all human societies, especially in times of scarcity. That doesn't negate the fact that some cultures are just more violent and aggressive than others.

The same applies to the treatment of women. It's well known, as you say, that these societies were more male centered than the societies they encountered. They didn't even feed them properly, or bury them with any respect in the majority of cases. Does that mean "Old Europe" was a paradise for women, a la Gimbutas? Obviously not. That's not the point. It's a question of degree; nuance, if you will.

This was not about the advance of a superior civilization; far from it.

This was about an advance into areas either virtually empty, like the northeast, or areas weakened and decimated by plague and the failure of crops. That's why the steppe "percentage" in certain parts of central and northwest Europe can come close to 50%.

There's also the fact, which I have frequently stated, that pastoralism, given the climatic conditions at the time, was more adaptive in central Europe, and that gave them an advantage. The domestication of the horse was also an advantage, although the data shows that had little to do with the Corded Ware advance. As for weapons, metallurgy, there was no advantage. If anything, they barely had any copper and bronze was far in the future. A warrior culture would definitely be an advantage.

I'm done with the discussion. It feels like the discussions about the Etruscans. People believe what they want to believe, not what the evidence shows.

I agree with everything. You summarize the information we have much better than I do.:embarassed: Informative and easy to understand. Bicicleur that's also my view and since English isn't my first language and it is hard for me to write down my thoughts in English, I leave it like that.

 

[Angela]

I agree with everything. You summarize the information we have much better than I do.:embarassed: Informative and easy to understand. Bicicleur that's also my view and since English isn't my first language and it is hard for me to write down my thoughts in English, I leave it like that.

I'd also add that the fact that "Old Europe" was patrilineal and patrilocal doesn't mean the position of women was the same in Old Europe as it was in these pastoralist societies. Sometimes Razib Khan's fan girl crush on the Indo-Europeans and his R1a dna blinds him to obvious facts. Never understood it, but that's his business.

 

[Regio X]

deleted by the poster

 

[Angela]

Excuse me, amidst all this verbiage, is there any fact or paper which contradicts anything I have written? If there is, please point it out. All I see are "impressions". What I posted are hypotheses, most of them not originating with me, but which are part of the academic consensus, which I succintly summarize, and support by papers.

Everyone has their favorite cultures. I've often said I have a real fondness for the Minoan culture and don't particularly like the Mycenaeans. However, not everyone lets their preferences blind them when they analyze data, much less lead them to always deliberately massage the data to make their "favorite" groups look good. Feel free to point out when in the past I have drawn conclusions from data which have turned out to be proven incorrect and are clearly the result of bias.. My record is excellent, btw, unlike that of many others who either post here or have their own blogs, so I doubt you'll find much.

Of course, you'll have to read the papers, and maybe David Anthony, and the Journal of Indo-European Affairs, and the relevant archaeolgy as well as the threads here on these subjects. We've been discussing them for at least five years.

There are no shortcuts in this "hobby".

 

[Regio X]

Ops. It looks like I was not clear, even after all that "verbiage". My apologies. I was not referring to you, Angela. Next time I'll try to be more clear.

I'm going to delete the previous post to avoid more misunderstandings.

 

[Northener]

I agree with what you say, but Idon't agree when you quote Kristiansen, which you did several times in this thread.
His arguments and his interpretations are to selective.

Here is another one Kristiansen does not mention, because it does not fit his narrative :
Early Neolithic executions indicated by clustered cranial trauma in the mass grave of Halberstadt
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04773-w
Abstract
The later phase of the Central European Early Neolithic witnessed a rise in collective lethal violence to a level undocumented up to this date. This is evidenced by repeated massacres of settled communities of the Linearbandkeramik (ca. 5600–4900 cal BC), the first full farming culture in this area. Skeletal remains of several dozen victims of this prehistoric warfare are known from different sites in Germany and Austria. Here we show that the mass grave of Halberstadt, Germany, a new mass fatality site from the same period, reveals further and so far unknown facets of Early Neolithic collective lethal violence. A highly selected, almost exclusively adult male and non-local population sample was killed by targeted blows to the back of the head, indicating a practice of systematic execution under largely controlled conditions followed by careless disposal of the bodies. This discovery significantly increases current knowledge about warfare-related violent behaviour in Early Neolithic Central Europe.

I think it puts the invasion in another perspective. Maybe it changes your mind on Eulau too.
The IE invasions were not violent invasions in peacefull societies.
The societies invaded were often as violent and as male-centered elitarian as the IE themselves.

As I pointed out before it was a worldwide phenomenon.
And yes, it were probably the societies who were best organised and focused on violence who survived in this period of reduced Y-DNA diversity.
I must say I have the impression the IE were not only good in organised violence, it seems to me they were also good at adopting new technologies and embracing customs of other societies.
They adopted the Bell Beaker styles and they continued the Stonehenge traditions.
I believe it was already like that in the paleolithic.
A good example might be the 45,4 ka expansion of haplogroup K :
https://www.yfull.com/tree/K/
They must have replaced and expelled a good deal of other clades (including the Neanderthals).
That is how in a very short time (50-40 ka) modern humans conquered the whole of Eurasia and replaced all other archaic humans.
There may have been more expulsion and less replacement at that time, because 50 ka modern humans occupied just very small parts of Eurasia - there were still many lands left to flee to.

It is new technologies since 10 ka that broke the balances again,and the world was allready much more densely populated. And we know most about the last replacements, because many traces of the earlier replacements that started 10 ka are vanished.

Thanks. Illustrative.
For my own region the image is in this respect quite clear know. Some hypothesis based on archeology and genetics.
3400 BC the funnel beaker (TRB) came in as an offshoot of TRB North (Wentink 2008, FrankN 2019), high in Ertebølle HG.
2800 BC (first evidence Hijken, Drenthe) incoming Steppe pastoralist, were fundamental for the so called Single Grave Culture. The incoming male Steppe pastoralist Y-DNA lines became dominant, in the the mtDNA we still can find TRB residu. So SGC pastoralist took TRB woman. The 'Kristiansen scenario' is at it's place here.
In the SGC>BB transformation we get a very interesting group the Protruding Foot Beaker (PFB). In this transition the 'pots' c.q. the Bell Beaker package came most probably from SW Europe, the 'people' were as said a SGC(CW)/ TRB mix.
See:
https://bellbeakerblogger.blogspot.com/2015/11/interesting-corded-ware-grave.html

The Protruding Foot Beaker spread al over the North European place incl. the Isles.

David Wesolowski of Eurogenes did a tremendous job in this respect, he made the SCG>BB transition in genetic perspective very clear!

 

[Angela]

Well, you certainly packed a lot of disinformation, berefit of support in the form of papers, of course, in one post.

For one thing, get your time periods straightened out; you are confusing the steppe groups who entered Europe initially with the steppe admixed or steppe groups of 1-2 thousand years later. It's a mistake not to keep up with the scholarship.

Look up Corded Ware burials, for Christ's sake.

Corded Ware had NO advantage in weapons. They had NO sophisticated weaponry. They had virtually NO metallurgy, absolutely no bronze, which was developed much later, and very small amounts of copper. They certainly didn't introduce farming. Whatever farming they practiced they picked up along the way. They didn't even have pottery.

To say this was a "superior" society to "Old Europe" is ludicrous. Those were societies which had advanced farming, advanced metallurgy, urban centers, sophisticated art, etc.

What the steppe people had was mobility in the form of wagons, from the burials we know they had horses, but not very many of them, and they weren't used in warfare; that came much later and far to the east, and indeed THEN it was a great advantage, along with chariots.

WHEN are hobbyists going to stop confusing Corded Ware with the ancient Iranians and people like the Scythians and Samaritans who lived many, many generations later?

What they encountered was a society weakened by plague (which the leading experts if not hobbyists believe was brought in by sporadic contact with the steppe), poor harvests and hunger caused by climate change and perhaps too intensive agriculture etc., a society which yes, was turning on itself in this time of scarcity.

Mobile pastoralists with a land use more suited to the changed environment, and a society where most of the men were warrior trained and without enough women of their own, who, given they had lived with the plague longer had more immunity to it, were able to conquer a weakened, decimated culture.

Is this pattern unique in human history? No, it isn't. It's a depressingly familiar pattern. People live in scattered clan groups, intermarrying too much, always living on the verge of starvation. They band together, cooperate, practice farming, produce a surplus of food for the first time, which allows for specialized crafts, like sophisticated pottery and metallurgy to develop, but also art, and more. Eventually it leads to writing, and eventually to things like the computers on which you're typing.

What happened with, as I said, with depressing frequency is that the civilized "core" begins, with time, some shorter, some longer, to decay, often because of climate change or disease or civil warfare, and then, the pastoralists or other marginalized people of the periphery move in, destroying the prior culture and all those advancements, and the whole process has to start all over again. You can see it everywhere in the Near East and in Europe in many time periods.

This is just perhaps the first example.

In the case under discussion it was a perfect storm, and one with tremendous consequences.

One final point: violence is endemic to human societies. The creation of constantly trained warrior bands deprived on women and land and sent out to conquer their own is not. We know they existed. Violence in "Old Europe" existed, increasingly as scarcity increases. Everything else you wrote about it is sheer speculation with not an ounce of academic support.

Commentary that hasn't kept up with the scholarship is not helpful, and can misinform "newbies".

 

[Anfänger]

If you mean me, I for sure did not. Its Sarmatians and not (Near Eastern, Semitic) Samaritans by the way, both Scythians and Sarmatians being Indo-Iranian speakers.

However, there is one parallel: The Corded Ware people were, for many of their Central-Eastern European opponents, similarly advantaged as later those Indo-Iranians were in comparison. Because we deal with stages of increased mobility from:
- Initial, rather stationary farming (G2a dominated)
- Agro-pastoralism with the dominance of herding (I2a dominated)
- Agro-pastoralism with an increased dominance of herding, oxen drawn carts and the introduction of the horse (steppe, R1a and R1b dominated)
- Pastoralism based on large droves and the use of carts in which whole families could live, with large scale horse back riding and fighting, composite/reflex bow (Indo-Iranians first)

In one way Angela was right about Scythians and Sarmatians they were ancient Iranians and not Indoiranians and maybe it was a typo?

 

[Riverman]

In one way Angela was right about Scythians and Sarmatians they were ancient Iranians and not Indoiranians and maybe it was a typo?

Of course it was just a typo or slip of the pen. Its wrong nevertheless and if you find something like that in what I have written, it needs to be corrected too. Iranians are part of Indo-Iranians, like Indo-Iranians are Indo-Europeans. But I wrote Indo-Iranians on purpose, since it seems that they were the first to apply large scale horse drawn chariots and horseback riding. And they were the first to transition to the even more mobile lifestyle and warfare in general.
Also, if you say Iranians, even though its linguistically correct, some narrow it down to modern Iranians, which is not intended.

 

[Anfänger]

Some even narrow down Iranians to be Arabs, so what ? Scientific correct definition of Scythians and Sarmatians is ancient Iranians. If you want talk about chariots, Indoiranian is correct, if you want to talk about Scythians ancient Iranian is the correct definition. No one would refer to Gaulish tribes in 100BC as Italo-Celtics. Anyway, have a nice discussion I appreciate any information even if it is against my opinion, just try to be polite.

 

[Angela]

So, the intellectual rebuttal comes down to a typo and a recommendation to read a book (which I've already read, fwiw) telling us what is obvious, which is that violence is endemic to all human societies.

I see no other fact based, paper based refutation of anything I said.

Believe what you wish; you're still wrong.

I have no time or interest in rehashing arguments done to death for five or more years with yet another "steppist" who can't see these cultures objectively. The data and papers are there for anyone who actually wants to get a fact based picture of the past.

This is too much like the unending debates about the Etruscans, where the same people were absolutely, dead wrong.

Oh, and btw you did say they had a "superior" civilization, which is, as I said, RIDICULOUS, and you said they were able to conquer these cultures because of superior weaponry and metallurgy. You also stated that the Neolithic advance practised genocide of the males, which is also RIDICULOUS because the I2a males were incorporated into their culture. Nor is there a shred of evidence the I2a males were pastoralists. They were freaking hunter gatherers.

I've taken a screen shot of your post, so no deleting it now.

 

[Riverman]

Some even narrow down Iranian to be Arabs, so what ? Scientific correct definition of Scythians and Sarmatians is ancient Iranians. If you want talk about chariots Indoiranian is correct if you talk about Sycthians ancient Iranian is the correct definition. No one would refer to Gaulish tribes in 100BC as Italo-Celtics.

Agreed, but we are talking about very early developments in prehistoric times. Honestly you can't even say for sure which kind of dialect every group of the steppe spoke at the time when the first horse archer armies and family wagons appeared. Its more likely they all were Iranian speakers, its highly likely they spoke some sort of Indo-Iranian, but its more than just Scythians, which are a specific ethnolinguistic group imho. So even from this point of view, I think Indo-Iranian is appropriate because its safe.

Anyway, have a nice discussion I appreciate any information even if it is against my opinion, just try to be polite.

I always try to be polite

 

[Riverman]

I see no other fact based, paper based refutation of anything I said.

You were right about most of what you said, I don't think we are that far apart on the facts.

Believe what you wish; you're still wrong.

About what exactly?

I pointed out that there were phases after the initial introduction of farming and what made the steppe people (Corded Ware, Usatovo and related groups, Yamnaya etc.) different and that the plague hypothesis is just mere speculation which can't explain, even if true, the great movements of people which took place then.

The steppe cultures even got the cattle herding and at least the Western groups their copper tools from the Western Carpatho-Balkan cultures. It was not always one sided by the way, there were GAC groups moving to the Carpatho-Balkan region at the same time and there were strong groups of pre-steppe people like in the Baden cultural sphere which could, by and large, hold their position. But they all were, in the end, not that different any more, since in most of Europe it was warlike agro-pastoralists which survived. What we really see in the Carpatho-Balkan region is the collapse of the large scale settlements of Tripolye-Cucuteni, being succeeded by more small scale economic structures before a slow recovery takes place. But the size of TCC wasn't reached again.

 

[Northener]

This is also my assumption, I wrote this into one of my previous post. Particularly for CWC males who had overwhelmingly MtDNA-lineages of the Late Neolithic cultures, very likely from GAC.

Indeed and on the North German Plain (Denmark/ Northern Germany, North Dutch) the Steppe derived Single Grave Culture came in contact with funnel beaker.....same thing.

 

[halfalp]

I know it's kinda agreed by the intelligentsia that Steppe Cultures were mainly Patriarcal and Neolithic Cultures mainly Matriarcal, but was it really the case for the later? A cult of pregnant women, fertility dont tell us anything. And just like Steppe cultures, Neolithic Cultures shows continuity in y-dna until the very end of chalcolithic, wich tells us that at least, neolithic men survived and affirmed themselves as perpetuators until maybe a Plague coming from the Steppe peoples replaced them. On the contrary, mtdna in neolithic peoples was highly highly diverse, telling us that they undergo multiple founding effects, wich is more linked with movements than imobilism. Showing us that neolithic cultures and steppe cultures kinda evolved in a same way.

 

[kingjohn]

by the way
any of you experts know :
which language did those late neolithic individuals spoke ?
a pre- indo-european language close to basque?