Q&A for History of Mankind (11)
The brutal conquest of prehistoric Europe & a challenge to the Austronesian migration model
Welcome! I'm David Roman and this is my History of Mankind newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone kind and decent forwarded it to you.
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This is the eleventh Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.
Before we get to that, let me give you a quick update on my book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history of ancient Western and Chinese philosophy”: it’s available at Amazon here and also at a much cheaper price and straight from the publisher, which you can contact here. And, like I said, it’s also free for all paid subscribers of A History of Mankind, who get an electronic copy.
Very fitting this, now that we are in the middle of a season filled with Greek history posts. Obviously, much of ancient western philosophy was Greek.
In addition, I will comment on a couple of recent archeological/historical debates. First, I’d like to point you to the recent news that 38 beheaded, hastily buried bodies were were found during excavations in the summer of 2022 by a German-Slovak archeological team.
This is relevant news for the study of the European prehistory because the bodies date to between 5250 BC and 4950 BC, that is, the era when sophisticated, murderous immigrants from Çatalhoyuk and other parts of Anatolia moved west across Greece and the Balkans looking for new lands away from the ever-more crowded Fertile Crescent.
Because of these migrations/invasions, these people became ancestors to the Europeans who would later be largely replaced (at least in the cultural sense, albeit also genetically, to a great extent, except in places like the Basque Country and Sardinia) by the steppe invaders of the horse-and-cart era of about 3000 BC. As I put it in one of the very earliest post of A History of Mankind…
…The migrants settled at some interesting places: in Lepenski Vir, on rugged terrain by the Danube in Serbia, they created some of large settlements of the time anywhere in the world, based on fishing sturgeon at large gorges and ponds, and carved haunting images of human faces and abstract designs on boulders. They lived there with descendants of Old European hunters and gatherers[1], at least some of whom may have been captives or slaves.
It's hard to tell to which extent the migration caused large-scale conflict, but it certainly caused friction, epidemics and probably massive population replacement with the usual influx of local female mitochondrial DNA into the newly-arrived tribes. Suddenly, all new houses in central Europe were built exactly in the same style, a sign less of successful design and more of new customs forcibly replacing the previous ones.
The Linear Band peoples were farmers who cleared forests and bushes to plaint their crops, including wheat, peas and lentils from the Middle East, as well as hemp and flax that they grew for raw material to make ropes and clothing. With farming taking on a more important role, social roles became more fixed: burials show a growing sexual split, as men were buried with stone tools that had previously been used for woodwork, butchery, hunting, or interpersonal violence, while women were buried with stone tools used on animal hides or leather.
Generally speaking, Linear Band peoples buried their dead in kinship groups, with remarkably more care than the inhabitants of Skateholm across the Baltic, or even cremated them – an innovation that first appeared in Australia around 15,000 BC. They weren't as nice with their enemies, and those they displaced.
In the Talheim Death Pit of around 5000 BC in Baden, Germany, 34 bodies were thrown after they were massacred with adzes and arrows, including sixteen children, nine adult males and seven adult women. A tomb in southern Spain from 4800 BC-4550 BC was found with a decapitated woman and child, buried next to an older man. Much bigger graves, possibly containing hundreds of individuals, are found in nearby Asparn an der Zaya (Austria) and Herxheim (Rhineland). Many of the bodies in the latter also show signs of cannibalism.
The 38 bodies found in Slovakia likely are (scholarly investigations are still being conducted) just another of those massacres conducted by the Anatolian invaders/migrants.
There’s one other recent paper I wanted to highlight this week. This one looks at the Austronesian migrations, which I already discussed in a fairly comprehensive old post:
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