
Mass grave in Poland embodies the violent beginning of the Bronze Age - diodorus
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/mass-grave-in-poland-embodies-the-violent-beginning-of-the-bronze-age/
======
eruci
We are all standing on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of
some {mostly unidentified} people.

~~~
Mirioron
I'm not sure that this is true in some parts of Europe. Some of the
inhabitants of those places are descended from the people that first inhabited
it when the ice sheets pulled back.

~~~
opportune
Which places? I would imagine this might be true of e.g. basque people but
even in cases where you can draw a clear cultural/linguistic lineage, that
doesn't mean that population has actually remained genetically distinct / free
from admixture in that time. Which isn't a bad thing, but I think it makes the
claim to direct lineage not really true.

The only example I can think of that might fit the bill are the Sami. But I'm
not an expert on Sami genetics or history. There's also the issue where you
know people in an area may have been living a certain way of life for tens of
thousands of years, but without ancient dna, how do you recognize an invading
culture that left similar archaeological artifacts (like evidence of reindeer
herding) but was genetically/linguistically distinct?

~~~
quotemstr
Sardinia too, at least in the highlands. The Basques and the Sardinians are
very closely related: the PIE-speaker conquest basically never touched them.
(~10% Steppe ancestry, with ~0% in some inland villages.) Unlike Basque,
though, the neolithic Sardinian language didn't survive --- except in a few
place names.

~~~
opportune
Interesting, I would have thought that the Sardinians would have more mixed
ancestry after the Carthaginians/Romans interacted with them. I was aware that
they had an ancient culture but not that it was non-PIE

------
xchaotic
Unfortunately Poland still is positioned in an area where enemy can come from
any direction (and they have - Russia, Germany, Austira, Sweden etc) and it
sucks geopolitically.

~~~
village-idiot
One of the running jokes of the Revolutions podcast is that to truly
understand the history of the X revolution, first you must understand Poland.
He keeps saying this because events in Poland triggered some surprisingly
weird outcomes Europe wide, including arguably helping turn the French
Revolution from a domestic affair to a continent wide war.

------
quotemstr
It's said that "the past is a foreign country". It's also an incredibly
violent one.

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.

Reading recent papers on ancient Rome (a personal interest of mine), I find
myself stopping, sighing, and saying almost out loud, "Those Germans just
moved into the empire as good neighbors? The name 'Vandal' got its connotation
for no reason at all? The contemporary historians were just lying
propagandists and we can dismiss everything they wrote? Really, dude?". Or,
"Indo-European languages replaced almost all indigenous European languages
because... cultural diffusion? Before writing? Okay dude." I could go on and
on on. These "[migration of] pots not people" people apply the same lens to
_everything_, and it's super annoying: what they claim runs counter to what
everyone knows deep down is true about human nature.

Fortunately, this "[migration of] pots not people" is no longer tenable.
Ancient DNA has opened up a world of new evidence --- see [1] and [2]. As it
turns out, As it turns out, intuitions of the early anthropologists like
Gordon Childe --- whom these 1960s-era "pots not people" have not rested from
attempting it discredit --- were right after all. Conan the Barbarian is a
pretty fair depiction. What you see in the genetic record is wave after wave
after wave of conquest and slaughter. Some Y chromosome lineages disappear
entirely, while the X chromosome ones survive --- indicating that conquerors
(as everyone suspected) basically killed off all the men and took all the
women. This pattern is attested in historical times in Asian steppe cultures
[3], and there's no reason to suspect that pre-historic cultures operated any
differently. Turns out, they didn't.

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.

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.

[1]
[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03773-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03773-6)
[2] [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-43701630](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43701630)
[3] [https://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World-
eboo...](https://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World-
ebook/dp/B000FCK206/)

~~~
chewz
> 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.

~~~
ako
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.

------
Koshkin
OK, yes - the humans' entire past has been incredibly violent. But hey, even
now we are not far behind, are we? (And, by the way, you can't possibly invent
something horrible that can be done to a person that hasn't already been done,
many times over.)

~~~
avar
You can't? How about being thrown naked out of an airlock into space? That's
pretty horrible, but nobody's done it yet.

I guess it comes down to how picky you want to be with "no, that's similar
enough to XYZ that's been done before", but finding new stuff is _easy_!

~~~
heavenlyblue
But you didn't just invent that - the idea of an airlock death is building on
at least a hundred years of prior art here.

