The fundamental hypothesis of David Graeber's last book is that anthropologists and archaeologists are like the drunk with the streetlight - they're looking for their keys over here because the light's better, even if they dropped them over there. Graeber (and Wallerstein before him) point out that anthropologists tend to study "uncontacted" people because they're easier to study in isolation, despite the fact that the historical record is replete with evidence that 'uncontacted' people are the laggards of societal evolution. It's like learning about chemistry solely by studying the noble gases. Graeber points out over and over that the idea of civilization being this unending, incremental march towards enlightenment is not borne out by the historical record or anthropological reality - the most common societies throughout history are those of conditional civilization where the rules change depending on the conditions and a mass of hunter-gatherers are perfectly capable of highly-structured society in the event of seasonal gatherings, tribal meetings, etc. Not only that, but "civilizations" tend to fall when the marginally-attached hunter-gatherers get sick of the "civilization's" bullshit and cease to provide it resources. He specifically mentions Stonehenge as an example of a "civilization" where it's not like everyone was wiped out, it's that they got sick of building large earthworks and stopped coming to the parties. Did they vanish? Or did they stop making tourist attractions? From an archaeological standpoint the answer is the same but from an anthropological standpoint it matters a lot. The Minoans had plague and they traded regularly as far as Istanbul. There isn't any evidence they headed west with any regularity but there also isn't much to prevent trade around coastal Europe. Well and let's not ignore the fact that it made scribes so in-demand that an enterprising fellow named Gutenberg came up with the Xerox machine. "A struggle between lords and serfs" is an interesting framing for "massive labor shortage." "Eventually" = 300 years later. We'll ignore the whole Muslim conquest, a two-hundred-years-more-proximate event, for purposes of narrative but whatevs. "Replaced" or "joined?" It's interesting to me how Western history is always about one group "replacing" another with the concept of interbreeding deliberately ignored. Amusing sleight-of-hand here - the Scythians are a catch-all for pretty much anybody who used horses, which is why we talk about them as a "culture" rather than a "population." Early European civilization, it turns out, was much more about vibes than bloodlines. citation needed Right - the British, who have yet to unpucker from the Normans or Vikings, have absolutely no historic tales about being wiped out by armies of mounted warriors. Despite the fact that there's nothing the British like more than digging up mass graves and they haven't found any, obviously there was a great deal of violence. Hey what did the Agathyrsi look like? Where have I heard that before "Hey, babe. I've got this horse that'll plow that field hella faster." "Oooh, sexy. But what will we do with all the spare time?" "Ever been with a dude with a tattooed penis?" Well and the Incas were in the middle of a bloody struggle for succession and the Conquistadors played both sides off each other and the Aztecs had managed to completely piss off the Tlaxicans. The Anasazi meanwhile had shattered 300 years previously and were a scattered bunch of reavers, nomads and dirt farmers under constant raid. Once the Spanish headed north things didn't go nearly so well. Yup. Plague somehow never made it north. That's why the Spanish were assed out, it had nothing to do with the adoption of technology. Apropos of nothing, this whole book is ostensibly about what would happen if it happened later. If you finish it let me know; I've tried three times and it keeps turning into this weird reincarnation bullshit festival. uhm uhh err Yes this is definitely a well-grounded assertion based in iron-clad facts that are indisputable.why did the people who introduced farming to the British Isles suddenly vanish shortly after they built Stonehenge some five millennia ago?
While scientists have identified plague DNA in human remains across Europe and Asia dating to between 5,000 and 2,500 years ago, until last week, we couldn’t be sure that this prehistoric pandemic reached these isles. It’s now clear that it did.
The Black Death, which killed more than half the British population in the mid-14th century, triggered a struggle between lords and serfs that led to the collapse of feudalism and the emergence of capitalism.
Eight hundred years earlier, the plague of Justinian had halted the eastern Roman empire’s efforts to reconquer its lost western provinces. Eventually, the nation states of western Europe emerged from this political vacuum.
About 6,000 years ago, Cheddar Man’s foraging kinfolk were replaced by an olive-skinned, dark-haired population who originated in modern-day Turkey and migrated slowly across Europe, bringing agriculture with them.
The newcomers were nomadic pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe, where they used cutting-edge technology – horses and wagons – to raise herds of animals.
Violence may have played a role in the replacement of the Stonehenge builders from Anatolia:
90% of the steppe herders involved in the great westward migration were males, and domesticated horses and metal weapons would have provided them with a distinct advantage in conflict.
The tattoos of the Agathyrsi, which followed checkered designs and were done using blue-black ink, were located on their faces and their limbs, and their intensity, intricacy and vibrancy was proportional to their bearers' social status and the prestige of their lineage,with tattooing being especially practised among Agathyrsi women.
But even taking all this into account, it is almost impossible to explain how a small group of nomadic herders was able to replace a large, well-established farming society.
The US geneticist David Reich suggests that the most similar historical parallel is the European colonisation of the Americas in the 16th century. Tiny numbers of Spanish conquistadors armed with guns and steel managed to vanquish vast and sophisticated empires. Tiny numbers of Spanish conquistadors armed with guns and steel managed to vanquish vast and sophisticated empires.
These seemingly miraculous victories were, of course, only possible because Old World germs – first smallpox, then others – raced ahead of the Spanish and devastated the enemy.
Similarly, it is possible that a prehistoric plague pandemic cleared the way for the steppe herders to migrate across northern Europe. Evidence points to a catastrophic demographic crash about 5,000 years ago. The population fell by as much as 60% and remained at that level for centuries. We can’t be sure that plague was responsible but it is the best explanation we currently have.
Although immigrants have continued to enrich the gene pool in the intervening years, the influx of steppe herders in the third millennium BC was the last transformative movement of people into Europe.
All this should be a reality check for notions of where people are “really” from, and how we measure who is entitled to settle where in the world. The white British population are certainly not the indigenous people of the British Isles. They are the descendants of immigrants who arrived on boats. And it is likely that they were only able to settle here because the humble Yersinia pestis bacterium cleared the way for them.