Mass grave in Poland embodies the violent beginning of the Bronze Age
It&#x27;s said that &quot;the past is a foreign country&quot;. It&#x27;s also an incredibly violent one.<p>There&#x27;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&#x27;s razor and suspecting a conquest and sack. It&#x27;s infuriating.<p>Reading recent papers on ancient Rome (a personal interest of mine), I find myself stopping, sighing, and saying almost out loud, &quot;Those Germans just moved into the empire as good neighbors? The name &#x27;Vandal&#x27; got its connotation for no reason at all? The contemporary historians were just lying propagandists and we can dismiss everything they wrote? Really, dude?&quot;. Or, &quot;Indo-European languages replaced almost all indigenous European languages because... cultural diffusion? Before writing? Okay dude.&quot; I could go on and on on. These &quot;[migration of] pots not people&quot; people apply the same lens to _everything_, and it&#x27;s super annoying: what they claim runs counter to what everyone knows deep down is true about human nature.<p>Fortunately, this &quot;[migration of] pots not people&quot; 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 &quot;pots not people&quot; 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&#x27;s no reason to suspect that pre-historic cultures operated any differently. Turns out, they didn&#x27;t.<p>The reason Europe speaks Indo-European languages isn&#x27;t that the ancient inhabitants thought that Proto-Indo-European was neat and adopted it --- it&#x27;s that the PIE-speaking Yamnaya swept in from the caucuses and slaughtered mostly everyone (especially men) except the Basques. It&#x27;s not pretty, but that&#x27;s the way it was.<p>Moreover, it&#x27;s important to realize that we all have the latent potential for barbarism inside us. We&#x27;ve been at peace for so long --- almost 75 years --- that we&#x27;ve forgotten that man&#x27;s natural state is &quot;war of all against all&quot; and that peace is incredibly fragile. Downplaying ancient violence encourages present complacency and endangers our present peace.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-018-03773-6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-018-03773-6</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;science-environment-43701630" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;science-environment-43701630</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B000FCK206&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World-eboo...</a>