I can get behind murder. I feel like this, to some extend, is a genuine part of human behaviour. Even the horrific aftermath of such. But genocide truly feels inhuman to me. So I can never fundamentally understand how in history, civilizations went from point A to point B to Point Genocide. Any thoughts on this?
I hear what you’re saying, but there’s a counterpoint to this.
In prehistoric times, population densities were low. In mesolithic times (hunter gatherers) there were simply no concentration of people large enough to wipe out or to do the killing. Nothing could be called genocide at this time.
In neolithic times (the first farmers) violence was definitely a part of life. Some early towns do show signs that they were destroyed. But again, population densities are low enough that the scale of violence would not be enough to call ‘genocide’. It’s a town burnt down with everyone murdered, not a ‘people’ - whatever that might mean at this time. This is not about egalitarianism - it’s population density.
However as we move to the bronze age, there are definitely signs that large scale events occur that might fit into the modern concept of genocide but archeological evidence is severely lacking. The main line I would argue is that the male lines of the neolithic farmers in Europe are hammered and almost completely replaced with the Yamnaya Y chromosomes across a huge expanse - from the east european plains to the Iberian peninsula. Genetic continuity with the neolithic farmers is maintained though indicating that male newcomers were having children with local women, and very few male locals had children. During this event the culture changed hugely - burial patterns, material goods, etc.
I don’t know if we can call this genocide - at least the full modern concept - because these changes took centuries to roll out across the expanse of Europe, but they speak to local conquests and, at the very least, the newcomers prevented local males from having their own families. At worst you can imagine a constant expansion of this new culture taking control of new areas, killing the men, taking local women as concubines and eradicating their gods, customs and ways of living. Quite a lot of genocidal checklist items ticked off there.
By the mid to later bronze age, genicide is definitely a widespread thing, recorded in many texts.
@modeler thanks, interesting info, esp the Yamnaya Y thing!
I realise I might sound a bit no true Scotsman but I don’t really see anything that doesn’t already arise before farming and granaries as being inherent in human nature.
Anything we adopted that late in the game can be un-adopted.
As I was discussing this with my partner we summarised this as:
Humans have always had the capacity for violence and murder; as populations grew, acts of violence could be larger, both in terms of number of combatants and also length of time of continuous fighting. This is a progression of:
Somewhere between city-states and full modern nation states, there have been full on campaigns of genocide. But genocide can be thought here definitionally as only possible with some significant number of people.
Unfortunately there is a deep dark part of the human psyche that has always been with us.