> There's been this undercurrent in archaeology and historiography since the 1960s that interprets the past as a successful of peaceful cultural, technological, and linguistic diffusions and that downplays evidence of conquest, force, and violence. For example, an archaeological belonging to this school that chanced across a layer of an ancient fortress festooned with skulls, arrowheads, and soot would present that layer as evidence of some kind of funerary ceremony instead of applying Occam's razor and suspecting a conquest and sack. It's infuriating.
I think we’ve been watching different documentaries, reading different books and growing up in different educational environments because everything I’ve been taught about history was that it was hard, violent and often unjust. I mean castles weren’t exactly built and designed purely as aesthetic stately homes. The Bayeux Tapestry‘s most iconic scene is a presumed king with an arrow in his eye. Kids are taught about the beheadings of Henry the 8ths wives (was it two that were killed?) at school. The violence of our ancestors has anything but been brushed under the carpet.
But let’s also not forget that you don’t have to travel that far into our history to see how violent we can be.
That school does believe in violent past, just not far one. They believe it’s the emergence of states and modernity that brought out the violence, and the state of pre-state society was peace and bliss.
I think this is more of a problem in America than in Europe.
After all, their native population got wiped out by disease, so they don't have castles littering the landscape, the way we do.
Yeah maybe that’s the case. In the UK kids are taught about how how brutal our history was because it’s an important part of our heritage having been conquered multiple times and each time the culture of those invaders being incorporated into our own. One could argue that Americans have more of a reason to underplay their barbaric past because they’re a much younger culture who were the invaders.
Not that I’m saying us Brits are without blame given we had the largest global empire in the history of this planet. And sadly we have a tendency to brush over some of our misnomers during that period too.
American here, I can only agree with u/pushpop. Was taught in school about the various times Rome was sacked, where the term Vandalism comes from, Viking raids, etc. I don't remember anything about peace.
> The reason Europe speaks Indo-European languages isn't that the ancient inhabitants thought that Proto-Indo-European was neat and adopted it --- it's that the PIE-speaking Yamnaya swept in from the caucuses and slaughtered mostly everyone (especially men) except the Basques. It's not pretty, but that's the way it was.
Incidentally, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2010) https://erenow.com/ancient/the-horse-the-wheel-and-language/ https://erenow.com/ancient/the-horse-the-wheel-and-language/ is a freely available book that shows just how far a well-deployed combination of good-old philology/historical linguistics and archaeologocal evidence can go when it comes to reconstructing features of the genuine PIE Urheimat. But then, yup, they still try to advocate for an optimistic "PIE spread via cultural diffusion" story that doesn't jive at all with the more modern sources of evidence you mention in your comment. It does seem like our history, especially pre-Bronze Age, was marked by constant conflict which only decreased slowly over time, perhaps finally leading to the reasonably-stable "empires" we're somewhat familiar with from ancient history only as late as the Iron Age.
> ...perhaps finally leading to the reasonably-stable "empires" we're somewhat familiar with from ancient history only as late as the Iron Age.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a capital/resource : technology boundary at which you see this.
Essentially, pre-metalworking, pre-farming, what do you have to risk if you upset order in your valley? You can migrate and hunt elsewhere.
Post-metalworking, post-farming, we start to develop centralized resource generation. Suddenly, as long as there is some sense of economic equality (probably where the Romans went wrong with their neighbors), everyone stands to lose if anyone's farms are burned or the forges destroyed.
At that point, the calculus changes greatly. And even more so when suddenly this technology is spread worldwide. Even during the world wars, you saw relatively limited wholesale destruction (e.g. carpet bombing cities) compared to what would have been possible.
It'd also be curious to extend into the modern era, because it seems like longer simmering civil wars tend to happen in places where there is extreme economic inequality or a lack of infrastructure (e.g. DRC, South Sudan, Afghanistan). Which I guess is where the "bridges, not bombs" strategy comes from.
> The reason Europe speaks Indo-European languages isn't that the ancient inhabitants thought that Proto-Indo-European was neat and adopted it --- it's that the PIE-speaking Yamnaya swept in from the caucuses and slaughtered mostly everyone (especially men) except the Basques. It's not pretty, but that's the way it was.
This is ridiculous statement. Yes, there must have been conquests and slaughters in history and many other man made disasters. Some of the conquerors had been multiplying faster because they had been taking better lands from conquered or because they had better agricultural techniques.
But the idea that each coming wave had been perpetrating Holocaust on the entire territory of Europe is simply technically impossible.
Much more likely is that after some violent conquest there were periods of assimilation, mixing of cultures and single language becoming a common tongue.
Well, it seems to be mostly true for (north)America. Not much left of the native inhabitants. Must feel like a holocaust to them. Similarly for Australia.
> Much more likely is that after some violent conquest there were periods of assimilation, mixing of cultures and single language becoming a common tongue.
Yes. Newcomers slaughter the local men, take their women. Mixed kids are raised in the new culture, but mothers still teach them some of the old ways consciously or not.
It's not like one group of PIE-speaking people conquered and replaced all non-PIE men in europe in a single generation. This type of thing would be happening over hundreds or even a few thousands of years.
Come on, how likely is it that people who have dedicated their lives to archeology and linguistics are all deluded and you, who is an apparent outsider, just happen to see what’s obviously the correct interpretation?
History is full of examples of the respectable insider consensus being dead wrong.
Phrenology was accepted and respectable opinion for a long time, and I imagine that ordinary people saw through it as much as they do now. Spontaneous generation of life was a serious theory for a while. Baron Kelvin was influentially wrong about the age of the earth. Phlogiston theory
was "respectable" opinion for a long time.
Besides: if you'd read the linked articles, you'd have understood that many people _within_ the profession agree with my perspective. They form a growing minority, and they come with very good evidence.
The past 50 years of anthropology really is shaping up to be another one of these instances in history in which science takes an unproductive detour on its way toward the truth. Granted, that's an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. But in this case, we actually have that extraordinary evidence: ancient DNA.
> Phrenology was accepted and respectable opinion for a long time, and I imagine that ordinary people saw through it as much as they do now.
Why do you think that? (Not disputing you, I'm genuinely curious)
Pretty likely actually. A case in point is the tangled history of identifying the first inhabitants of the Americas.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/11/ancient-dna-reveals-complex-migrations-first-americans/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/11/ancient-d...
This article skips gently over what was a more than 40 years of denial and academic exclusion of people advocating (with evidence) for arrivals earlier than Clovis.
There is something about human intellect, that seems to repeat this pattern time and time again, of those with an established belief fighting tooth and nail against evidence that they are wrong.
> It's that the PIE-speaking Yamnaya ... slaughtered mostly everyone (especially men) except the Basques.
There is no evidence for that blanket claim, genetic or otherwise. No archaeologist or historical sociolinguist working with the spread of the IE languages would deny that some violence occurred in prehistory, but there is evidence for cultural diffusion – yes, even before writing. After all, there are numerous historical examples of language spread by cultural diffusion in the absence of writing, where violence was only sporadic, and the principle of uniformity leads us to posit that the same was possible for the Indo-European languages. Humans are social creatures just as much as they are violent ones, and social pressures lead to language change just as easily as force of arms.
> swept in from the caucuses [sic]
The consensus PIE Urheimat was well north of the Caucasus. The Caucasus is only relevant to IE linguistics for areal typology reasons.
> There is no evidence for that blanket claim, genetic or otherwise.
Strictly speaking, that's of course true; but the molecular-level evidence is pretty damning, and as close to "slaughtered all the men" as we'd ever be able to call in the first place. See the book Who We Are by David Reich for the full story. That pattern is really not that special, by the way - the very same conflict signature shows up in the PIE people themselves, which is how we know that they emerged after severe conflict with the ancient North-Eurasians.
> The consensus PIE Urheimat was well north of the Caucasus
It was north of the Caucasus, yes, but not that up north. Maybe parent should have said "Pontic steppe" instead of Caucasus, but he/she was in the ballpark.
I asked for a citation on your other post, and instead of providing one, you posted this reply elsewhere that simply repeats the claim. Please have some rigor. There are readers here sufficiently involved in the field that they are comfortable with the scholarly literature on the subject and, what’s more, expect it.
> Conan the Barbarian is a pretty fair depiction.
I'm not totally convinced you know what you are talking about.
I'm guessing it's along the lines of driving enemies and lamenting women, and while that wasn't Conan himself I thought the point was made.
Lots of modern examples. Most faroe islands come from Viking males, raiding England or Ireland, killing and pillaging the local population, and kidnaping the women off to their island.
"The Faroese are of mixed Norse and Gaelic origins. About 21,000 Faroese live in neighbouring countries, particularly in Denmark, Iceland and ... studies show that mitochondrial DNA, tracing female descent, is 84% Celtic."
But in this case the invaders were in smaller numbers, and the local population was large enough could absorve the blow and still survive.
If the invading people are in much larger numbers, they can easily wipe out the local population.
Ya, it’s pretty crazy to think that almost everyone of European descent (myself included) are descended from the (apparently) mass murdering Yamnaya. And a good percentage of Asians from the mass murdering Genghis Khan. And that although the Mongols did not conquer all of Europe [3], another steppe culture did succeed in it thousands of years earlier.
Originally "pots, not people" meant that we didn't have any good basis for determining whether populations replacements were occurring so we should study changes in the physical culture of areas over time rather than worrying unproductively about whether people were moving at the same time.
> it's that the PIE-speaking Yamnaya swept in from the caucuses and slaughtered mostly everyone (especially men) except the Basques. It's not pretty, but that's the way it was.
That's a pretty categorical statement of fact.
There are other ways for a population to undergo big shifts in genetic makeup. For example 95% of Europeans can consume lactose (drink milk) but this arose from a localized genetic mutation around 3 or 4 thousand BCE. There was no violent conquest by milk drinkers running amock exterminating non-milk drinkers required for milk drinkers to dominate the population.
I believe proto-Indo-European speakers are credited with domesticating the horse? This must have been a huge advance for humankind - suddenly a person does not have to consume their own calories to travel. The guy with the horse is going to leave the pedestrians in the dust in any competition for hunting, fishing, herding, etc. Maybe the existing women fancied their chances more with the horse people and were keen to hook up with guys who could guarantee food for their children? Assuming a patriarchical culture, then interbreeding will generally involve a male from the more desirable culture and not the other way around.
Maybe there was a huge imbalance in the gender ratio in favour of men in the initial groups of the PIE speakers who expanded into western Europe, so that even peaceful interbreeding would result in a lop-sided blended population.
I'm not actually proposing any of these as counter-theories - I'm just saying the effects you highlight regarding the genetic markers could be caused in other ways than violent conquest. Re. the fashion for "pots not people" theories - it's possible to swing too far the other way and deny a role for any cultural diffusion.
One can add epicycles indefinitely to patch up any theory, but there comes a point where we have to accept that the weight of evidence favors some simpler and more general new approach.
The idea that the PIEs would develop all the advanced technology you mention and use it all for some kind of nonviolent mate-attracting display --- and that this mate-attracting thing worked so well that pre-existing Y lineages went extinct --- and that the people going extinct just passively let it happen --- well, it defies plausibility. All the historical, ethnographic, archaeological, and generic evidence points in one direction. This grasping at straws to defend the non-violence hypothesis is exactly the annoying tendency that makes a lot of modern history unreadably annoying.
> The name 'Vandal' got its connotation for no reason at all?
Well, vandal only became a reference for property destruction during the French Revolution. So your associations with that word are in fact quite modern.
Furthermore, if you’re going to assert that the vandals got the reputation that they deserved, then you’ll need to explain why goth now means “teenager with an affinity for black clothing”.
>> Moreover, it's important to realize that we all have the latent potential for barbarism inside us. We've been at peace for so long --- almost 75 years --- that we've forgotten that man's natural state is "war of all against all" and that peace is incredibly fragile. Downplaying ancient violence encourages present complacency and endangers our present peace.
This is the black to the white of "we are all harmless pacifists by nature". The truth is probably in the middle: the majority of modern people prefer to negotiate than to fight and are horrified at the thought of violent confrontation, at any scale, but will occasionally follow leaders who want to stir up serious trouble.
And that is taking into full account the current rise of fascism in the EU (calling nationalist populism by its true name). Even in ogranisations like Golden Dawn (I'm Greek) it's my intuition that most are afraid of violence and will only engage in it when in the company of (many) others in the group and even then only when egged on by some authority figure or one of the few members of the group that are actually violent (bordering on the psychopathic).
In the end, the reason why we haven't had a war in Europe * in the last two generations or so is because we really don't want to have one.
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* Except Ukraine.