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  • Hacker News
  • Article is from 2/2024.
    by auselen
  • 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.
    by newsclues
  • 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!

    by gen220
  • This exact dynamic happened in the American west and is still happening in Brazil
    by jaqalopes
  • 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.

    by cadamsdotcom
  • Those who enclosed the commons did so with the sword, I thought that had been common knowledge for hundreds of years.
    by RobotToaster
  • 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.
    by bryanlarsen
  • 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.
    by PessimalDecimal

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