The amazing country was once the murder capital of Europe

Denmark, currently ranked as the second most peaceful country in the world, was once the scene of two waves of mass killings.

That’s right, the small European country now famous for Lego, Hygge, and general loveliness has violently overthrown its population not once, but twice.

A new study published in the journal Nature has found that Denmark has experienced two near-complete population changes over the past 7,300 years.

And it wasn’t fun.

The first was about 5,900 years ago, when Neolithic farmers arrived in the region and hunter-gatherers were wiped out through violence and murder. The farmers had Anatolian (modern Turkey) ancestry.

“This transition has so far been described as peaceful,” said co-author Anne Birgit Nielsen of Sweden’s Lund University. However, our study shows the opposite.

“In addition to violent deaths, new pathogens are likely to emerge.” [diseases] It caused the death of many collectors from livestock.

The researchers examined DNA from 100 skeletons from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Early Bronze Ages.

They found that the genetic make-up of people belonging to the region’s Mesolithic culture remained constant from 10,500 to 5,900 years ago, linking them to other Western European hunter-gatherers.

But everything changed with the arrival of Neolithic farmers.

These farmers had lived there for about 1,000 years, and some had the same hunter-gatherer roots, so those who weren’t killed likely migrated to their way of life.

However, peace did not last long. About 4,850 years ago, a new group of Neolithic farmers and pastoralists migrated from the same eastern steppes as the first group, and a new death toll from murder and disease began.

“There was so much population turnover that there were virtually no descendants from previous generations,” Ms Nielsen said.

Apparently this was the last of the brutal peasant invasions. The new wave of people has “an ancestral profile similar to modern Danes”, meaning the world’s second most peaceful nation had a less-than-stellar beginning.

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