Scandinavia's first farmers slaughtered hunter-gatherer population, DNA suggests (phys.org)

53 pointsby optimalsolver10 hours ago76 comments

PessimalDecimal 9 hours ago

Early European Farmers displaced the mesolithic Hunter Gatherers in the areas they both inhabited but there wasn't a complete elimination of the HG groups. In fact, the I1 Y haplogroup associated with Germanic tribes comes from the mesolithic Hunter Gatherers, so they obviously were _not_ totally eliminated. Actually, it was the EEF group that was more or less fully eliminated in Scandinavia when the Yamnaya appeared because both groups exploited similar areas. They wanted loess soils along rivers, while the Hunter Gatherers lived near the coastline.

rightbyte 7 hours ago

The article is very much making up conclusions not present in the work cited. There were no "wipe outs" or "total turnovers".

Probably some sort of jingoist advocating ethnic cleansing writing articles like this.

senderista 3 hours ago

We can’t say for certain what the causes were, but there are some very striking near-total population replacements we can infer from DNA analysis, such as the disappearance of Neolithic ancestry in Britain over the span of just a century or two.

EA-3167 20 minutes ago

Phys.org is good for DOI links to the studies they butcher and nothing else. It makes me cringe every time I see people discussing their writing seriously, but my God they’re a popular domain.

They’re often sensational and frequently inaccurate or misleading, but often the research they cite is worthwhile.

senderista 3 hours ago

However, the Corded Ware culture that largely displaced EEF in Europe itself had a large EEF component in addition to Yamnaya (and in some places like Sardinia EEF still dominates).

senderista 3 hours ago

BTW, the only modern Indo-European ethnicities/language families that are not Corded Ware-derived are Greek, Albanian, and Armenian. (Indic and Iranic speakers resulted from a Corded Ware migration out of Central Europe back into the steppe, completing the circle begun with the Yamnaya migration out of the steppe into Europe.)

bryanlarsen 9 hours ago

Was it the entire population or just the males? At this time there was a worldwide phenomenon called the Neolithic Y chromosome bottleneck in which 95% of Y chromosomes disappeared.

nextaccountic 8 minutes ago

Could this mean just that 95% failed to reproduce?

RobotToaster 9 hours ago

Those who enclosed the commons did so with the sword, I thought that had been common knowledge for hundreds of years.

sl-1 9 hours ago

Sadly not. I think I did not hear anything about this in schooling (Finland).

tokai 28 minutes ago

Pretty naughty by Lund University. Sure they took part in this research (a single author). But its primarily driven and financed by a danish foundation, the danish Copenhagen University, and danish museums.

Guess that is good work from the Lund communication team.

jaqalopes 9 hours ago

This exact dynamic happened in the American west and is still happening in Brazil

nish__ 9 hours ago

Its biblical. Cain the farmer slays Abel the shepherd in Genesis.

metalman 7 hours ago

pre biblical, read the epic of Gilgamesh where Gilgamech enlists the harlot Shamat to ensnare the wild man Enkidu who otherwise may have been to fierce to fight,the very fact of Neanderthal and denisovian blood in our own suggests, if not that, then something that rhymes.

tomrod 9 hours ago

I consider it a good thing that most humans are willing and wanting to educate about the ills of xenophobia and other maladies. To have entire ethnic groups get wiped out is hard for me to imagine. What crazy times our ancestors lived through.

carefree-bob 9 hours ago

This is basically all of human history. I guarantee you that whatever ethnic group you belong to, if they are the dominant group in a region, they got to be that way be slaughtering the previous inhabitants. Modern anthropology has really opened our eyes to this fact, which contradicts a lot of the post-war anthropology that wanted to say that, say, fall of the Roman Empire was mostly peaceful, or the mass disappearance of Early European hunter artifacts was merely the movement of "pots, not people". But with DNA studies we can confirm that no, it's not that everyone started using a different kind of pottery, it's that they were all wiped out by the new group that had their own styles of pottery. The men were slaughtered and women were raped. Same thing for modern day Japanese moving into the islands, or the Bantus migrating into what is now Namibia, or the Aztecs, or basically anyone else. All of history is built on fighting for land to call your own, and killing off the male population that was there before. It's biblical, even - read the book of Joshua.

tomrod 9 hours ago

Don't get me wrong - I recognize that. And it is still hard for me to imagine!

chrisco255 9 hours ago

Hard for you to imagine because you live in a modern society and your next meal is guaranteed. You don't have to traverse hundreds of miles on foot in the face of drought, wildfire, famine, disease, war, etc to find some food source to sustain yourself and some shelter free of attacks by random tribal conflict.

tomrod 8 hours ago

> Hard for you to imagine because you live in a modern society and your next meal is guaranteed.

It is easy to reduce people to caricatures when we don't know them. Since we aren't at a happy hour regaling each other over the craziness of lives lived, I'll be brief: there have been periods of life where this assertion wasn't true.

chrisco255 8 hours ago

Your next meal is guaranteed in a way that you can't possibly relate to what someone 2000-8000 years ago had to fear.

tomrod 8 hours ago

I'm not understanding what you are trying to say in your comment? That you can't imagine "tomrod" or other hackernews commentariat have ever gone hungry for an extended period? That you can't imagine a modern community facing food insecurity, drought, war, or other maladies?

Communities built themselves around food production and child rearing 2000-8000 years ago as they nominally do today. I think you may be overstating the disparity in experiencing the negatives (drought, disaster, and war) and ignoring that these conditions also happen today and sometimes also don't get resolved -- people die, starve, drink poisoned water, and so forth.

regularization 7 hours ago

Like when the Zionists with European and US help cut off food from entering Gaza for a few months last year? That is modern society.

Give me an idyllic migration through bountiful pastures 20,000 years ago any day. Many hunter-gatherers work less than 40 hours a week, less than a worker in our modern society, who did not get laid off in past years as so many on this board were.

The original affluent society as it has been called.

kakacik 3 hours ago

Some el nino, volcano or other cause drought in entire region may have wiped out entire communities. 20k years ago was also much more colder with ie massive glaciers ie in much of central Europe.

Every hunt was fight for life and survival, any injury could be fatal and treatment was practically non existent, broken foot was almost sute death sentence. Winter (and each one was harsh) was barely survived in bitter 24/7 cold and a lot of starvation outside of tropical regions.

You have no actual clue nor imagination with your first world whining about toils of office work which you can easily abandon and not be dead with your family within 2 weeks. You can definitely do better than that.

simianwords 9 hours ago

completely true. No society is innocent of this. One good example is slavery - I myself was surprised that chattel slavery was common everywhere in the world and it was the west that had the mental capacity to stop it.

legacynl 9 hours ago

> completely true. No society is innocent of this.

Perhaps in history. But we humans have the ability to think and adjust our behavior. We didn't kill all the horse-people when we invented the car. It's likely that in the future we could be able to move past all the horrible things we do to each other.

simianwords 9 hours ago

sure but i was talking against singling any society out

tomrod 8 hours ago

That is my hope. While it won't be utopia, how much better would we be if our small "tribes" grow to be humanity and life in general.

regularization 9 hours ago

Not really. From the time of the cave paintings at Lubang Serij Saleh 40,000 years ago, as well as 10,000 years before that, up to the beginning of the Neolithic revolution 10,000 years ago, all evidence is humans lived rather peacefully. As is evidenced also by similar remaining bands over the past centuries until now. The Neolithic revolution and rise of surplus, class societies, warrior castes and such was the beginning of such things. And that only spread over the entire globe over the past 600 years.

gedy 8 hours ago

How does this jive with the inland Papuan tribes in Papua New Guinea? They were quite isolated and from what I read they can be just as violent (of course, not on the scale of mechanized slaughter by moderns)

regularization 8 hours ago

> Papuan tribes

The smallest definition of a tribe is usually 500 people. They can be 10 tines that size. Tribes did not exist until about 10,000 years ago. They were preceded by hunter-gatherer bands.

The inland Papuan group most associated with violence are the Enga, but they are not migratory hunter-gatheree bands. They are farmers who grow sweet potatoes and raise pigs.

carefree-bob 8 hours ago

It depends on what you mean, as I did not argue that life for the average person in a traditional society was filled with violence.

What I argued is that whenever two competing groups came into contact, wanting the same land, the result was usually genocide (or one of the groups fled to another area, where they would have to fight those inhabitants), and as a result, when history records a new group "inhabiting" or "settling" a peace of land that is new to them, then that inhabitation is generally not peaceful, but genocidal in nature. Regardless of whether there is a written history to record the violence, we can have confidence that the violence did occur.

Now, given that modern humans have been around for 300,000 years at least (the date keeps being pushed back, since before the Moroccan discovery, it was thought to be 100,000 years), and have been swarming over the whole earth, that is a lot of violence and genocide, even though it was certainly possible to live a life of peace as well for a specific individual, since migrations weren't going on all the time in all places.

regularization 8 hours ago

Skeletons from 100,000 years ago look similar to our own, and as you said, recent discoveries could push that back to 300,000 years ago.

There is little evidence of behavioral modernity - cave paintings, Venus figurines, hearths, burials etc. prior to 50,000 years ago. There is some evidence so the time could always be pushed back.

Farmers compete for land. Migratory hunter-gatherers are just passing through, so there is less competition for land. Also, bands usually mate with nearby bands, who are often more distant relatives.

There has not been much evidence of hunter-gatherer bands clashing violently then or even in modern times, including observations over past centuries. There is a plethora of evidence of post-neolithic farming and then industrial societies being this way.

jltsiren 18 minutes ago

That's nonsense. While there are some examples, where the conquerors massacred the existing populations, it was a rare exception. Most of the time, the purpose of a war of conquest was to increase your agricultural surplus, which was the key resource that supported everything else in the society. If you killed the people (or even just the men), it would take generations to restore agricultural production. By that time, your tenure as the Glorious Leader would be long gone.

In present-day Turkey, people typically have 5–15% Turkic ancestry. For the most part, their ancestors called themselves Roman, or Greek, or Lydian, or Phrygian, or Hittite, or whichever culture happened to be dominant at the time. When new conquerors came, they pillaged a bit and put their own people in charge. Most commoners, and even many cooperative elites, would then continue their lives as before. If the new elites managed to stay in power, people would often gradually adopt their language, religion, and cultural identity.

As for the Aztecs, I found it amusing that the previous Mexican ambassador to the US was Esteban Moctezuma. Guess from which ancestor that name came from.

vintermann 9 hours ago

This is just one study, which the website notes goes against consensus, and we have a very sparse view into ancient DNA. Just from knowing Norwegian geography, I'm rather skeptical of full-genocide theories.

gradus_ad 9 hours ago

Reducing prehistoric existential struggle to "xenophobia" is really something...

tomrod 8 hours ago

On the contrary - I view today's xenophobia as rooted in fear that a person may hold that their way of life will be wiped out as it has through human history. In other words - if it is built on a rational foundation instead of an emotional foundation, then education can help.

rayiner 8 hours ago

If things are as you described it, then isn’t that fear rational? What you seem to be saying is that people should hope that things happen differently this time than it did in history. That seems like the irrational part.

stymaar 8 hours ago

It's exactly as rational as people hoarding toilet paper at the beginning of Covid.

Just because some behavior made sense in a prehistoric society doesn't mean it does in a modern one.

tomrod 8 hours ago

No. Fear of a needle makes sense in the wilds of a back alleyway, but maintaining that same terror when a doctor uses one to administer medicine is irrational because the systemic context has changed.

Fearing historical population replacement ignores the fact that prehistoric societies lacked modern state mechanisms to integrate labor. When you treat modern economic migration like a prehistoric invasion, you end up building policies that actively destroy your own society to fight a ghost.

We are seeing the results of this irrationality right now in the agricultural sector. Because we are legislating based on prehistoric fear, the state is deploying unaccountable, militarized enforcement units and holding massive numbers of people in extrajudicial detention facilities stripped of congressional oversight. The consequence of treating a massive economic input as an ex-ante criminal invasion isn't a safer society. It's systemic self-sabotage. Local farming economies are being decimated, crops are rotting, and businesses are failing because the workforce is either locked up or terrified. Building a massive, authoritarian state apparatus to destroy your own labor supply and crush local economies isn't "rational self-preservation." It is an irrational panic that breaks the modern system in a futile attempt to solve a prehistoric problem.

rayiner 6 hours ago

What is the proof that the “systemic context has changed?” Pointing to “state mechanisms” cuts both ways. Because in a democracy, the state mechanisms give newcomers power over those who are already here through the power of the state. The newcomers don’t even have to overwhelm you physically to change your way of life.

tomrod 4 hours ago

[flagged]

dang 4 hours ago

Some of your recent comments have been killed by our software because they've been classified as genai text, which is not allowed on HN itself (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079).

Since people sometimes misunderstand this, I'd better add: of course it's fine to use AI tools! - we use them ourselves. Just not to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on HN.

It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.

surgical_fire 8 hours ago

In history things such as slavery, marital rape, and honor killings were the norm.

In all places worth living we overcame those, and it was not something done irrationally.

Why should xenophobia, racism and such not follow the same path?

rayiner 5 hours ago

Those are all different phenomena that were eliminated over time for different reasons. There’s not an undifferentiated blob of “progress,” but rather social dynamics changing in response to context.

What people call “xenophobia” these days—which isn’t really xenophobia as properly understood—is just the flip side of ethnic affinity coin. If I come to America and declare that I’m a “proud south Asian” and indicate my affinity for my co-ethnics by joining various “south asian XXX associations,” then what reaction am I going to elicit from the people outside my ethnic group?

If you take a society that has been taught to abandon their own ethnic identity, and introduce into it foreigners with strong ethnic identity and in-group affinity of their own, you’re going to generate counterfeiting response. You can call it “xenophobia” or whatever you want, but the only way to overcome it is to strip subgroup identity altogether.

rayiner 2 hours ago

“Countervailing” not “counterfeiting.”

rayiner 8 hours ago

To the contrary, I think our education system has so over focused on “xenophobia” and things like that that people are unable to understand the myriad other and more significant social factors that exist between human groups.

cucumber3732842 22 minutes ago

Exactly. Call racism/xenophobia/whatever bad (ok, easy enough). Write off all the bad shit in history as if those were the simple causes. And in doing so doom yourself to repeat them. Because things are far more complex than that. "Bad" (to our modern opinions) beliefs are rarely doing the heavy lifting on their own. There's usually economic issues and/or less clear cut fundamental differences at play.

carlosjobim 6 hours ago

If everybody were killed by spiders, would you talk about "the ills of arachnophobia"?

But when everybody were killed by invading foreigners, you talk about "the ills of xenophobia"??

tomrod 6 hours ago

When was the last time everyone was killed by invading foreigners? Turkey's Armenian genocide? Rwanda? Genuine recent tragedies that, by our mutual acknowledgment that they are tragedies, shows that the norm is no longer acceptable.

It is rational to fear needles in the wilds of a back alleyway. Not so rational when we are in a doctor's office.

carlosjobim 6 hours ago

Every person alive today is survivors of survivors of survivors⁵ of people who have faced foreign invaders. Being suspicious of foreigners (men only) is part of human DNA, just like being suspicious of spiders and heights. War is our destiny, war has always been with humanity for millions of years. How many war victims would it take before you would admit to "xenophobia" being rational? How many of our ancestors throughout the eons were killed by spider bites for it to be encoded as a fear?

newsclues 9 hours ago

Can totally see how some people who think everything is fair game from nature and people who cultivated land and raised livestock would end up in conflict.

rpdillon 9 hours ago

Yeah, I think one of the major conflicts that humanity has gone through is the conflict between the hunter-gatherers and the farmers. Obviously the farmers won, and now we have the concept of land ownership and everything that comes from that, but it was a conflict I wasn't very aware of and that I don't see discussed much.

vintermann 9 hours ago

Farmers did well compared to hunter gatherers, but they were in turn devastated by pastoralists - who, in Europe at least, had a lot of hunter gatherer ancestry.

actionfromafar 9 hours ago

Yamnaya?

ashkankiani 9 hours ago

Instead we invented the concept of owning nature from the farmers, and now that the world has been claimed, everyone born after T0 is just a renter.

Not sure which side I should be rooting for, but at least hunter-gatherers didn't try to own the land.

Also if anyone wants to say "if it wasn't for the farmers, you wouldn't be here right now," to me, that's not quite the boon you might be imagining. I'm actually perfectly fine with not having existed if it meant that nature wasn't ravaged.

themaninthedark 8 hours ago

Hunter-Gatherers had concepts of land ownership, if another tried to hunt on your tribes land there was conflict.

They also had no problem driving species to extinction.

This idea of a group of people living in harmony with nature is fantasy.

regularization 8 hours ago

> Hunter-Gatherers had concepts of land ownership, if another tried to hunt on your tribes land there was conflict.

You're saying hunter gatherer bands are tribes which is contradictory. Migratory hunter-gatherer bands max out at 50 people. They migrated there was no land which was "theirs", this is the point.

Tribes were hundreds of people, often had class systems within them, often had surplus and farmed. So yes, tribal farmers had conflict but they were not hunter gatherer bands.

jrflo 8 hours ago

Why is “nature” being intact so important? Humans are part of nature just like every other living thing, even today.

cmrdporcupine 8 hours ago

To be fair, from what we see hunter gatherers also made continual "war" on each other through raiding and battles. North American tribes on the whole had a mix of trading and ritualized warfare for centuries before Europeans were involved. And they burned often huge tracts of forest to manage grazing lands. And overhunted and overfished and then moved on to new areas.

Its just that population densities were on the whole lower. And there was a lot of land and resources to live from. So the impact was lessened.

But even then, there were in fact tribal groupings that effectively wiped out other tribal groupings.

Also it's becoming clearer and clearer that the line between settled agrarian and hunter gatherer was a lot less clear than we initially imagined. There were all sorts of grain and maize growing societies that continued to rely on deer and fish for their protein sources and trade in skins etc for hundreds of years after they started tending crops.

regularization 7 hours ago

If you want to make a pre-Columbian example it could be the cities of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), or Cahokia. Tribes will do as well, they are simpler versions of this. Europeans arrived in North America and met the Iroquois Confederacy. In fact the Confederacy allowed peace among the Iroquois.

These are tribes, or in the case of the Mexicans, a civilization. Not hunter gatherer bands.

Meanwhile out west or near the arctic were hunter-gatherer bands. They were not making continual war. They were hunter-gatherer bands and not tribal.

gen220 9 hours ago

There’s this really quirky and interesting book on this topic, called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Basically this (totalitarian agriculture genociding alternative cultures) has happened everywhere and his thesis is that the total extermination aspect in particular is a novel aspect of farming culture, which did not exist for hunter-gatherers or herders. Not that violence didn’t exist, but exterminating violence was very rare.

He also connects it to the founding myths of Adam and Eve (who are cursed to practice agriculture, instead of being hunter-gatherers, and who believe they have the power of good and evil to know what plants and animals should live and which should die), and Cain (who sacrifices wheat, representing agriculture and land ownership) and Abel (who sacrifices a goat, representing a herding lifestyle).

If that sounds at all interesting to you should totally read it, it’s a really clever book!

HarHarVeryFunny 9 hours ago

It makes sense as a universal dynamic.

When living in contact, hunter gatherers and farmers are in natural conflict since the most concentrated food source you could gather (or hunt) from is a farm. Raiding must have been fairly common.

In a conflict like this, it seems natural that the farming community would prevail, since they would naturally be more motivated to do so (this is their primary food source, they are the ones being attacked), and as a stationary community might be expected to build up more resources and be better prepared to defend themselves.

pfdietz 8 hours ago

And because the farming communities would simply outnumber the hunters, since they are exploiting photosynthesis more directly. A given area of land can sustain many more farmers than it can hunters.

stymaar 8 hours ago

Interestingly enough, agrarian societies being invaded (and then ruled) by nomadic tribes has been a recurring phenomenon in the past two millennia (by the Arabs, the Turks, the Mongols, etc.)

HarHarVeryFunny 7 hours ago

I think that's something a bit different though - a later era, with some of these nomadic tribes being more inherently inclined to war and violence, and "war technology" such as horses, advanced bows, etc, playing a role.

The suggested universal dynamic of neighbors in conflict is different from that of well equipped, well trained, expansionist cultures preying on everyone.

whynotmaybe 9 hours ago

Excellent novel but, as a non native English speaker, the analogy with the Third assassin was puzzling, Shakespeare wasn't on the cursus when I learned English.

nkrisc 9 hours ago

I also wholeheartedly recommend it. In the beginning, the narrator is warned that after embarking on his journey he’ll never be able to see the world the same way again. I definitely felt the same after reading it.

legacynl 8 hours ago

> the total extermination aspect in particular is a novel aspect of farming culture

Perhaps there wasn't a change in culture, but rather that farmer tribes were able to grow bigger? A hunter-gatherer tribe could be size-limited according to the available resources. Likely 2 neighbouring tribes would therefore be roughly the same size. Which would make it hard for a tribe to fully exterminate other tribes. Would you send all your fighters to take on another tribe, with the risk of none of them coming back, leaving you defenseless? What if a dangerous animal walks into camp while all fighters are away?

If a farming tribe could sustain double population, that would mean double the amount of fighters, thus it would reduce the risk greatly of sending out a large group of fighters.

uxhacker 8 hours ago

Yes, as I understand it the population growth of the arable community is far faster than the hunter gatherers. This is because hunter gatherers often did not wean children off breast milk until they were 5, whilst arable farmers breast fed there children only up to 1 year.

Breastfeeding is a natural contraceptive.

MichaelRo 8 hours ago

>> The first population change happened 5,900 years ago when a farmer population, with a different origin and appearance, drove out the gatherers, hunters and fishers who had previously populated Scandinavia. Within a few generations, almost the entire hunter-gatherer population was wiped out.

>> A thousand years later, about 4,850 years ago, another population change took place when people with genetic roots in Yamnaya—a livestock herding people with origins in southern Russia—came to Scandinavia and wiped out the previous farmer population.

And today we welcome immigrants in droves, because multiculturalism must prevail, and never in history a local population was replaced by migrants. Never!

HlessClaudesman 8 hours ago

Yes exactly. We have been intermingling since before humans existed. There is no one true people who can claim to own any land because of their race.

Ethnonationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels.

yolp5 6 hours ago

> There is no one true people who can claim to own any land because of their race.

Its working out pretty well for the Israelis

vestyup 6 hours ago

Israelis are not claiming that. Israel is composed of many races. It is actually the Arabs who are arguing that they have solo rights to the land due to their ethnicity.

MichaelRo 4 hours ago

>> Yes exactly. We have been intermingling since before humans existed. There is no one true people who can claim to own any land because of their race.

Noone owns their land because of their race but because they can defend it. The moment you can't defend it anymore, you're conquered and driven out. And conquering is attempted either naively by armed conflict like Russia in Ukraine or insidious like migrants in EU. My bet is that the first will fail and the second will succeed.

Not least because of defeatists like you!

anon291 10 minutes ago

> Ethnonationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels

It is but we must also realize that 'land acknowledgements' , 'indigenous reservations', etc are also ethnonationalisms.

cmrdporcupine 8 hours ago

Can we rule out a scenario where disease was also implicated, like here in the Americas?

Incoming colonists were (and remained) genocidal by comportment, yes. But they also had the "advantage" of having a wave of smallpox and other disease going before them in a wave of devastation.

Farmers coming up from the Balkans and Pontic Steppe would have been living in larger settlements and among livestock for generations and would likely have brought with them things like smallpox that dispersed hunter gatherer societies would be less likely to encounter.