Forgotten Neolithic Wars that (maybe) remain in our DNA

in 1983 a massacre site was discovered in Germany located near the town of talheim and this has since become known as the talheim Death Pit it is just one of at least 200 known Mass Graves dating to about 5,000 BC give or take maybe a century and although there are outliers this is a period in neolithic Europe which saw population collapse and increasing evidence of warfare these are still coming to light with a recent example from Spain discovered in 2023 and this particular one contains about 300 bodies but what is interesting about this site is

that this one does not appear to be a massacre pit rather it seems that these people essentially all of whom are male died at different times within several decades of each other and two are interpreted as having been Warriors who fought died and were laid to rest in a mass grave as if this were not interesting enough in 2015 a study of population genetics found that approximately 7,000 years ago so about 5,000 BC something happened to the Y chromosome across populations on almost every continent with a partial or at least a significantly reduced exception in

Africa the diversity of the Y chromosome seems to have essentially crashed it's what's known in prehistory as the Neolithic bottleneck and it seems to have left a permanent record in our our Collective DNA a scar if you will it is one of the great questions of the Neolithic because it appears to have occurred across the globe so how do we explain this well one of the suggestions is that there was a lot and I do mean a lot of warfare which targeted men and there have been a few videos on YouTube which sort of explore

this angle terming it a World War which wiped out 95% of all males so what I want to do here is talk about that idea if it is war what does it look like as well as another proposed explanation which is related to Warfare but doesn't necessarily have to be that being said while this Neolithic bottleneck shows up across the world I am strictly going to talk about Europe in this video and that's because at least as of right now Neolithic Europe has the most abundant archaeological data although this picture is beginning to change in

East Asia I wouldn't be surprised though if as the data for East Asia and other parts of the globe continue to accumulate you could take the argument for Europe and apply it approximately to other regions as well so use this video as a rough summation of an interesting subject if you want more reading by all means check out the papers in the video description genetics has completely revolutionized our understanding of prehistory and it's reinforced some theories derived from archaeological or linguistic evidence While discrediting others one of these areas is the spread of f farming in

Europe it largely enters the region from the Middle East and sweeps upward through the Balkans and thanks to genetic evidence we now know that this was not just technological diffusion it was a movement by the original populations who did the farming we call them the early European Farmers or EF who were derived from a population called the Anatolian Neolithic Farmers or ANF and this begins approximately 9,000 years ago so about 7,000 BC and by about 6,500 BC there is firm evidence of agricultural practices in what is today Greece and the general region around Istanbul farming

and the population expansion that accompanied it reaches the danu by approximately 6,000 BC and then it sort of stops for about 500 years around 56 or 5500 BC however farming begins to spread again and it takes two different routes into Europe one follows the Mediterranean loral and the other spreads first North into basically Central Germany and then East and West this forms a very distinct archaeological culture which we know as the lbk or the linear band caramic which is part of what makes this archaeological culture stand out but really the defining feature are long houses

in the Balkans the primary form of structure and settlement plans were smaller houses typically made of mud brick or wadland do which were continually torn down and rebuilt on the old foundations resulting in Mounds that archaeologists call tells for whatever reason the lbk people built long houses predominantly constructed of wood all of which appear to have approximately followed the same plan at one point it was not certain if the lbk people had interbred with the misthic hug gatherer populations who existed in Europe at the same time but we now know from genetics that they essentially

did not there is some ad mixture but it is extremely low between about 1 and about 4% generally speaking and while there is some evidence of for example a trade in lithic so there's may be some interaction the two populations appear to have remained relatively distinct what all of that essentially means is that if you were to plot out every lbk settlement site what that would look like on a map would be something of a patchwork of settlements the lbk people knew exactly what they were looking for highly fertile areas where they could grow the

two main crops they depended on for sustenance emmer and iron corn wheat as well as raising some livestock such as pigs the huntu gatherers on the other hand remained in different environments wetlands and marshes with Sandy soils places where you would expect there to be abundant levels of game if hunting and trapping was what you did for food the lbk population grew rapidly the level of archaeological evidence we currently have indicates between 1 and 3 % per year the long houses appear to have been occupied for maybe three decades or so about a generation and

then they were abandoned for what reason we can't really say but we do know that the settlements appear along rivers in fact they appear to almost exclusively be along rivers and they use the same Fields year after year although there is some limited evidence of other techniques like slash and burn so why were there so many settlements well this is where we start getting the bottleneck and ideas about the massacre sites across Europe we do not know the answer for certain there are no lbk people for us to talk to but it's theorized that lbk

culture either was or became patrilocal meaning that it was the women who Moved households not the men with that in mind we should probably emphasize here that although Patrol locality and patrilineal kinship structures are sometimes argued to be universals in human society that is not true across the board in early medieval Japan for instance many Aristocrats and some early Samurai practice Mator local residence meaning that it was the men who moved or even Ur local kinship patterns meaning that the children reside with the mother's parents anyway back to the lbk we can infer this kinship

structure through isotropic analysis of the lbk women's teeth which tell us that they were born and raised in one place and then moved later in life but the men typically did not so it's this petrol local structure which probably helps explain the spread of the settlements land is required for new or expanding families So eventually you move however this would eventually become a problem as land was colonized eventually the best sites for agriculture would have been occupied and younger groups of the population would have been forced to make do with less fertile land leading to

a rise in inequality around 5,000 be see so right around the time that this Neolithic bottleneck is observed two things begin to show up in the archaeological record for the lbk the first is that these settlements begin to have ditches and Earthworks surrounding them and these Massacre pits begin to appear global temperatures also appear to have dropped by maybe 2° and then they begin to fluctuate which would have led to irregular agricultural Cycles in this period long-distance trade especially lithics declines noticeably and people began to Source those stones and their resources much more locally which

suggest arise in suspicion and distrust of other communities so how do we explain the fortifications well they've been interpreted obviously as systems of Defense but they've also been interpreted as marking a new type of hierarchy developing in the European Neolithic these would have been groups of settlements with the total population in the hundreds scattered across several of them with one major settlement being the nucleus around which the others were probably organized so we have what looks to be changes in Social organization during the late lbk and this is where we come to an interesting idea

developed by a group of students and researchers at Stanford University the Neolithic bottleneck is dated to between approximately 7,000 and 5,000 years ago or 5,000 to 3 000 BC this is prior to the development of large- scale political units that we would term States or at the very least Proto States but what you see with the end of the lbk is the rise of what seems like if the interpretation of the fortifications I just brought up is correct smallscale units of political organization to do this those patterns of patrilineal organization likely would have been reinforced

so what this would eventually result in is a decrease in the diversity of the Y chromosome not because of warfare per se but because a shift in marriage and kinship patterns possibly indicate a change in which males were allowed to reproduce this does not necessarily have to be caused by Warfare it's entirely possible that part of the drop in Y chromosome diversity is the result of more powerful patrilineal groups with access more resources enslaving other groups of non-related men but the level that this occurred at that probably isn't possible with at least some degree of

warfare and this is where the massacre sites come in as a factor one of the most gruesome is the massacre at schletz in modern Austria this particular settlement was like many from the lbk around 5,000 BC enclosed by a ditch and probably Earthworks as well 67 skeletons were found in that ditch There are 16 adult males nine adolescent males five adult females eight adolescent females and 18 babies and five children at talheim there were 34 skeletons nine adult males seven adult females 16 children and two adults of undetermined sex another one at shik Killian staden

has 26 skeletons 13 adults one teen two pre-teens 10 children but unlike talheim and schletz this one shows evidence that the legs were broken while the murder victims were alive possibly indicating that they were tortured prior to being killed in Croatia at the site of potani 41 individuals were killed and at St Paul twau in France three female skeletons were found contorted into bizarre positions covered with stones the supposition is that the bodies were arranged in such a way that ropes tied to their feet and throat would have served to strangle them what stands out

here is the site of herheim probably the biggest site we found from this period and which appears to be less of a mass grave and more of a ritual Center based around cannibalism and possible Human Sacrifice no matter which way you look at it though the situation is extremely bloody and at several Massacre sites notably at schletz some of the bones have indications that the meat on them was eaten before the bodies were discarded Now the ages of the victims are not necessarily uniform across all of the 200 or so known Massacre sites in Europe

during this period but many of them don't seem to have young women of breeding age among the bodies the interpretation is that these were smallscale conflicts fought over women by these petrol theal units which would help to explain the Neolithic bottleneck at least in this part of the world so it's not that we have a rising polygamy small groups of men keeping large harms so much as the organization of late lbk and probably post lbk Society into Clans based around patal kinship and then the competition between those Clans over resources land and very likely people

over several centuries led to an apparent decrease in Y chromosome diversity because kinship became traced through the male line rival males would be killed and their women taken or they would be outc competed for resources or land and subsequently die off it's part of the shift to agriculture that took place against a back background of population collapse and probably resource depletion and climate change so was this a Neolithic World War well not exactly but there was an increase in violence maybe even smallscale Wars certainly as we transition from simple agricultural societies to more complex chiefdoms

and the situation and the state of our knowledge is likely to grow even more complicated as more archaeology and more genetic work is conducted over the coming years