Discoveries

March 07, 2024

A Dark Past

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Violence is ubiquitous throughout human history: Now, a new study on Stone Age Europeans is showing that farmer-settler groups brutally wiped out nomadic hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago, Science Alert reported.

To arrive at this conclusion, an international research team conducted a thorough DNA analysis of human remains spanning more than 7,300 years in southern Scandinavia, covering the periods between the Middle Stone Age and Early Bronze Age, which respectively showed a decline in hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the rise of farming life.

The findings suggest that the transition involved two significant population turnovers within a thousand years.

At first, farming communities drove out existing hunters, foragers and fishing populations in those areas around 5,900 years ago. These settlers – known as the Funnelbeaker culture – also altered their environment, such as clearing forests to create farmland.

But the Funnelbeakers lasted for another millennium before another wave of newcomers from the eastern Steppes replaced them – later establishing a whole new group called the Single Grave culture.

Remarkably, the DNA analysis showed a near-complete replacement of the previous populations in both instances, indicating widespread demographic shifts and limited genetic continuity between successive cultures.

Study author Anne Birgitte Nielsen underscored the significance of these findings in understanding the complex dynamics of human migrations and cultural interactions in prehistoric Europe.

“This transition has previously been presented as peaceful,” she explained. “However, our study indicates the opposite. In addition to violent death, it is likely that new pathogens from livestock finished off many gatherers.”

This story originally appeared in the March 07, 2024 newsletter, The Language of Families.