Scandinavia's first farmers slaughtered hunter-gatherer population, DNA suggests

tomrod

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.

newsclues

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.

jaqalopes

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

bryanlarsen

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.

gen220

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!

RobotToaster

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

PessimalDecimal

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.

cmrdporcupine

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.

MichaelRo

>> 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!

tokai

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.

auselen

Article is from 2/2024.

cadamsdotcom

Sounds like a massive evolutionary advantage in the hands of the new arrivals. In tech we call it "disruption" and celebrate it.. but of course it's different as it's tech, and doesn't involve human populations being decimated. Just interesting to consider the similarities in nature and the similar effects on who gets the spoils.