14 ms·

Large-scale violence in Late Neolithic Western Europe based on skeletal evidence

90 points by diodorus 3y ago

axpy906 3y ago
10k years ago about the same time as when more advanced civilizations could’ve possibly existed. Wonder if these are the inhabitants getting attacked by them.
smarri 3y ago
I found this a fascinating bit of research. I suspect that there is so much of our history undocumented, with only remnants like those described as a window to that past.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  What is considered history is basically only what is written down. That means that everything that wasn't written down, and everything that happened before we invented writing, is lost. This includes almost all ordinary peoples lives, but also things like the childhood of people like Charlemagne.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    Everything that wasn't written down, and everything that happened before we invented writing, isn't lost, it's simply called prehistory instead of history. We do know all kinds of things about ordinary people's lives based on physical evidence in archeology; we can figure out what they ate and where they got that, what jobs they did and how they organized that, what health issues they had and how they died.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
How (modern) society has overcome violence as the dominent means of ensuring compliance and replaced it with decades of social norms and training and to be fair material reward (go to school, learn, work hard, don't kill anyone), this is "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled". Convincing billions to co-operate based on rules. It's incredible
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  There's the occasional relapse tho...
- krapp 3y ago
  Violence remains the dominant means of ensuring compliance, the "supreme authority from which all other authority is derived." Social norms are backed up with a threat of violence from the community. Civil society and its laws are enforced with violence from the state. Religious authority is enforced with the threat of divine violence. Even familial authority is very often enforced with violence from parents. Of course, not all violence is physical. The real change has been the transition from the common application of physical violence to emotional and psychological violence as our societies become more abstract and removed from the cold brutality of nature and subsistence living, except in "extreme" cases. Also the "greatest trick the devil ever pulled" was convincing people he doesn't exist. Slaves pick your food, sew your clothes and mine the rare earth minerals in your electronics. Vast engines of automated slaughter put meat in your stores. Every advertisement is mind control and every news story is psychological warfare. Every cop is a thug, every judge a sadist, every CEO a sociopath, every politician a psychopath. "People sleep peacefully in their beds only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf," as George Orwell said. And they do, cruel, wicked violence. Your hands are soaked in blood, the roads are paved with bones, and the skies are blackened with ashes from the ovens of Moloch. But you don't see it most of the time, it's hidden away from you, or it's intangible. That's the trick the world learned from the Nazis, how to manipulate and control mass perception through modern media, and by extension to normalize the violence that drives modern society. You can just play Candy Crush, pay your taxes, be nice and not kill anyone and pretend the devil isn't real.
  - automatic6131 3y ago
    Most of what your talking is gross exaggeration. Exaggeration to the point of falsehood. Even the kernel of truth of underpaid, subsistence workers producing a lot of our food and machines, to call the rest of it what you have is just false.
    - 3y ago
dr_dshiv 3y ago
On one hand, war and violence kill off the most violent people in society, providing a genetic benefit to those who don’t fight. On the other hand, the winners produce a lot of babies. But the mass killings of early modern and modern Europe really didn’t increase the fecundity of the winners. It mostly just killed off the violent. I’ve no idea about the genetics of this, might be bunk, but europe and Japan were both so warlike for so long, it is bizarre to see them so peaceful.
- mhuffman 3y ago
  >On one hand, war and violence kill off the most violent people in society This sounds very counter-intuitive to me! Interesting if true. I get that two war parties going at each other would result in some violent people dying. But I am not sure bravery and violence are always locked together, and it would also seem that a relatively small group of very violent people could kill a very large group of non-violent people.
  - vitorbaptistaa 3y ago
    See: Spanish invasion of the Americas. Hundreds of Spanish soldiers with superior technology and bad intentions VS. thousands of native Americans.
    - lazide 3y ago
      You mean 10's of millions of natives?
    - nradov 3y ago
      The Spanish invaders relied as much on diplomacy as on violence. They formed alliances with local groups who were opposed to the Aztec and Inca empires.
    - cracrecry 3y ago
      You mean hundreds of Spanish soldiers with superior technology allied with tribes that were subjugated and enslaved by other Native American tribes? The Spaniards did not do it alone. This is a fact very easy to prove. It always shocks me to see people in North America complaining about Spaniards, when in North America there is less than 1% native Americans, the rest were exterminated, ethnic cleansed. In most hispanic countries, native and mixed people are over 70% of the population.
nologic01 3y ago
There is something mysterious about homo sapiens' organized violence behavior: How much of it is genetically driven (nature) versus culturally determined (nurture)? Random individual violence does not seem to be innate except as an aberration. You can walk in any tightly-packed megapolis of millions (an environment that was presumably never encoded / selected-for in our DNA) and not really worry that one of the thousands individuals you come across will simply go berserk for the fun (or benefit) of it. "Rage" of various forms happens, but typically under intense stress conditions. But give a group of individuals the slightest pretense in the form of some arbitrary cultural narrative and they will engage in acts of incredible cruelty and dehumanization of random "other" groups. Competition for actual resources seems just a fig leaf. Clan dominance in some imagined anthroposphere is typically the real driver. Think e.g., two football fan clubs attacking each other in ritualistic or actual murder. Its supposed to be fun, there is nothing real at stake, yet somehow group violence is triggered. This behavior is so pervasive in history (and pre-history) that it is almost certainly based on genetic traits. But maybe what was once a "positive" feature is now a millstone around our neck. In a crowded planet with ever advancing technological capabilities large-scale violence based on arbitrary cultural concoctions is simply not a scenario we want to have in front of us. Feels like maybe the most critical aspect of our own species we need to understand and somehow "manage" - assuming its at all possible. Do we have a survival strategy?
- toss1 3y ago
  Yup >>But give a group of individuals the slightest pretense in the form of some arbitrary cultural narrative ... "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." — Voltaire c.1765
- adolph 3y ago
  > Do we have a survival strategy? If one frames organized violence as a means rather than an ends, then it is possible to see an answer other than the survival strategy of “be the best at organized violence.”
  - nologic01 3y ago
    I don't see this working in the long-term. It assumes that one can win "once-and-for-all", whereas the splintering in competing factions and the pursuit of group objectives with violent means seems a recurrent pattern. Historically even in absolute monarchies (where you would think power relations have been settled would be paralyzed by internal strife, infighting clans etc.) Now, all this would be just the normal human history (and as per the article, pre-history). What changes the dynamic is the advancement of science and technology. If we assume that it is accruing monotonically (which has been the case for several centuries), then if the same social dynamic or emergent organized violence continues, at as some point even a small group that drifts into a state of feeling aggrieved could prompt vast destruction.
gcanyon 3y ago
Anyone interested in our violent past, and how we got to our less-violent present, would be interested in The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. He goes into great detail about how ridiculously violent the past was, and how much less violent we have become over time. Tl;dr: the concentration of permission to commit violence into the hands of the state has been a huge factor. As the numbers in the article here show, it is a rare state that can keep up with the level of violence that occurs naturally when individuals are having at it.
lacrosse_tannin 3y ago
Neolithic is ~10,000 years ago, when agriculture, sedentary life, cities, started; not sure how you all trying to attribute organized violent behavior to genetics.
- mrangle 3y ago
  Most people don't have a concept of the timeline of civilization. Which leads to a warped sense of human history across other topics. Like probable human organization in Spain in roughly the same era in which people in Egypt were planning the Pyramids. At the same time, commenting is fun.
- chmod775 3y ago
  Not to mention that there seemed to be surprisingly little lethal human-on-human violence prior to the Neolithic period. From what we know, lethal violence rose sharply as soon as people started settling down, amassing possessions, and forming more elobrate social hierachies. Lethal is an important qualifier here, because even skeletons from before that priod routinely show signs of human-on-human violence - it just wasn't what killed them. Which makes sense: To this very day most killing is done for material gain or when fighting over land. Without these reasons, we'd likely be a more peaceful species.
amanaplanacanal 3y ago
Are these dates consistent with the migration of the Indo-European people into this area?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
huytersd 3y ago
According to David Reich, isn’t this when the Yamnaya rolled through Europe, killed 99% (really) of the men and took all the women?

90 points by diodorus 3y ago

10k years ago about the same time as when more advanced civilizations could’ve possibly existed. Wonder if these are the inhabitants getting attacked by them.

smarri 3y ago

I found this a fascinating bit of research. I suspect that there is so much of our history undocumented, with only remnants like those described as a window to that past.

tomjen3 3y ago
What is considered history is basically only what is written down. That means that everything that wasn't written down, and everything that happened before we invented writing, is lost. This includes almost all ordinary peoples lives, but also things like the childhood of people like Charlemagne.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  Everything that wasn't written down, and everything that happened before we invented writing, isn't lost, it's simply called prehistory instead of history. We do know all kinds of things about ordinary people's lives based on physical evidence in archeology; we can figure out what they ate and where they got that, what jobs they did and how they organized that, what health issues they had and how they died.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

How (modern) society has overcome violence as the dominent means of ensuring compliance and replaced it with decades of social norms and training and to be fair material reward (go to school, learn, work hard, don't kill anyone), this is "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled". Convincing billions to co-operate based on rules. It's incredible

isoprophlex 3y ago
There's the occasional relapse tho...
krapp 3y ago
Violence remains the dominant means of ensuring compliance, the "supreme authority from which all other authority is derived." Social norms are backed up with a threat of violence from the community. Civil society and its laws are enforced with violence from the state. Religious authority is enforced with the threat of divine violence. Even familial authority is very often enforced with violence from parents. Of course, not all violence is physical. The real change has been the transition from the common application of physical violence to emotional and psychological violence as our societies become more abstract and removed from the cold brutality of nature and subsistence living, except in "extreme" cases. Also the "greatest trick the devil ever pulled" was convincing people he doesn't exist. Slaves pick your food, sew your clothes and mine the rare earth minerals in your electronics. Vast engines of automated slaughter put meat in your stores. Every advertisement is mind control and every news story is psychological warfare. Every cop is a thug, every judge a sadist, every CEO a sociopath, every politician a psychopath. "People sleep peacefully in their beds only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf," as George Orwell said. And they do, cruel, wicked violence. Your hands are soaked in blood, the roads are paved with bones, and the skies are blackened with ashes from the ovens of Moloch. But you don't see it most of the time, it's hidden away from you, or it's intangible. That's the trick the world learned from the Nazis, how to manipulate and control mass perception through modern media, and by extension to normalize the violence that drives modern society. You can just play Candy Crush, pay your taxes, be nice and not kill anyone and pretend the devil isn't real.
- automatic6131 3y ago
  Most of what your talking is gross exaggeration. Exaggeration to the point of falsehood. Even the kernel of truth of underpaid, subsistence workers producing a lot of our food and machines, to call the rest of it what you have is just false.
  - 3y ago

dr_dshiv 3y ago

On one hand, war and violence kill off the most violent people in society, providing a genetic benefit to those who don’t fight. On the other hand, the winners produce a lot of babies. But the mass killings of early modern and modern Europe really didn’t increase the fecundity of the winners. It mostly just killed off the violent. I’ve no idea about the genetics of this, might be bunk, but europe and Japan were both so warlike for so long, it is bizarre to see them so peaceful.

mhuffman 3y ago
>On one hand, war and violence kill off the most violent people in society This sounds very counter-intuitive to me! Interesting if true. I get that two war parties going at each other would result in some violent people dying. But I am not sure bravery and violence are always locked together, and it would also seem that a relatively small group of very violent people could kill a very large group of non-violent people.
- vitorbaptistaa 3y ago
  See: Spanish invasion of the Americas. Hundreds of Spanish soldiers with superior technology and bad intentions VS. thousands of native Americans.
  - lazide 3y ago
    You mean 10's of millions of natives?
  - nradov 3y ago
    The Spanish invaders relied as much on diplomacy as on violence. They formed alliances with local groups who were opposed to the Aztec and Inca empires.
  - cracrecry 3y ago
    You mean hundreds of Spanish soldiers with superior technology allied with tribes that were subjugated and enslaved by other Native American tribes? The Spaniards did not do it alone. This is a fact very easy to prove. It always shocks me to see people in North America complaining about Spaniards, when in North America there is less than 1% native Americans, the rest were exterminated, ethnic cleansed. In most hispanic countries, native and mixed people are over 70% of the population.

nologic01 3y ago

There is something mysterious about homo sapiens' organized violence behavior: How much of it is genetically driven (nature) versus culturally determined (nurture)? Random individual violence does not seem to be innate except as an aberration. You can walk in any tightly-packed megapolis of millions (an environment that was presumably never encoded / selected-for in our DNA) and not really worry that one of the thousands individuals you come across will simply go berserk for the fun (or benefit) of it. "Rage" of various forms happens, but typically under intense stress conditions. But give a group of individuals the slightest pretense in the form of some arbitrary cultural narrative and they will engage in acts of incredible cruelty and dehumanization of random "other" groups. Competition for actual resources seems just a fig leaf. Clan dominance in some imagined anthroposphere is typically the real driver. Think e.g., two football fan clubs attacking each other in ritualistic or actual murder. Its supposed to be fun, there is nothing real at stake, yet somehow group violence is triggered. This behavior is so pervasive in history (and pre-history) that it is almost certainly based on genetic traits. But maybe what was once a "positive" feature is now a millstone around our neck. In a crowded planet with ever advancing technological capabilities large-scale violence based on arbitrary cultural concoctions is simply not a scenario we want to have in front of us. Feels like maybe the most critical aspect of our own species we need to understand and somehow "manage" - assuming its at all possible. Do we have a survival strategy?

toss1 3y ago
Yup >>But give a group of individuals the slightest pretense in the form of some arbitrary cultural narrative ... "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." — Voltaire c.1765
adolph 3y ago
> Do we have a survival strategy? If one frames organized violence as a means rather than an ends, then it is possible to see an answer other than the survival strategy of “be the best at organized violence.”
- nologic01 3y ago
  I don't see this working in the long-term. It assumes that one can win "once-and-for-all", whereas the splintering in competing factions and the pursuit of group objectives with violent means seems a recurrent pattern. Historically even in absolute monarchies (where you would think power relations have been settled would be paralyzed by internal strife, infighting clans etc.) Now, all this would be just the normal human history (and as per the article, pre-history). What changes the dynamic is the advancement of science and technology. If we assume that it is accruing monotonically (which has been the case for several centuries), then if the same social dynamic or emergent organized violence continues, at as some point even a small group that drifts into a state of feeling aggrieved could prompt vast destruction.

gcanyon 3y ago

Anyone interested in our violent past, and how we got to our less-violent present, would be interested in The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. He goes into great detail about how ridiculously violent the past was, and how much less violent we have become over time. Tl;dr: the concentration of permission to commit violence into the hands of the state has been a huge factor. As the numbers in the article here show, it is a rare state that can keep up with the level of violence that occurs naturally when individuals are having at it.

lacrosse_tannin 3y ago

Neolithic is ~10,000 years ago, when agriculture, sedentary life, cities, started; not sure how you all trying to attribute organized violent behavior to genetics.

mrangle 3y ago
Most people don't have a concept of the timeline of civilization. Which leads to a warped sense of human history across other topics. Like probable human organization in Spain in roughly the same era in which people in Egypt were planning the Pyramids. At the same time, commenting is fun.
chmod775 3y ago
Not to mention that there seemed to be surprisingly little lethal human-on-human violence prior to the Neolithic period. From what we know, lethal violence rose sharply as soon as people started settling down, amassing possessions, and forming more elobrate social hierachies. Lethal is an important qualifier here, because even skeletons from before that priod routinely show signs of human-on-human violence - it just wasn't what killed them. Which makes sense: To this very day most killing is done for material gain or when fighting over land. Without these reasons, we'd likely be a more peaceful species.

amanaplanacanal 3y ago

Are these dates consistent with the migration of the Indo-European people into this area?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

huytersd 3y ago

According to David Reich, isn’t this when the Yamnaya rolled through Europe, killed 99% (really) of the men and took all the women?