Late Neolithic Denmark was an inhospitable place for hunter-gatherers and farmers, but it was also an easy place to die.
Several studies published in the journal Nature on January 10 show that invasions that began in about 3,900 BC wiped out almost the entire population of Denmark’s dominant population on two separate occasions.
These Neolithic genocides first targeted the hunter-gatherers who had lived there for thousands of years. Farmers who invaded the area almost completely wiped them out, and 1,000 years later they themselves were nearly wiped out by nomadic migration.
A woman demonstrating the funnel-beaker culture (ca. 4,000 BC to ca. 2,700 BC).Image: Hans Splinter via Flickr
This is a major departure from the consensus that these transitions were largely harmonious.
“Our study shows the opposite,” study co-investigator Anne Birgit Nielsen, a geologist and director of the radiocarbon dating laboratory at Lund University in Sweden, said in a statement. Stated. “In addition to violent deaths, new pathogens from livestock likely killed many foragers.”
The study is based on DNA analysis of skeletons and teeth found in modern-day Denmark. The first brutal invaders, the peasants of 5,900 BC, were distinctly different from their victims. In just a few generations, they brought about major changes in the country’s genotype, phenotype, diet, and land use.
This is the Funnel Beaker culture, a Neolithic group that originated in a wide area around Denmark. They created funnel-shaped earthenware vessels and produced the first cultured foods. This effectively changed the local diet away from wild forage.
They also introduced introduced diseases that hunter-gatherers could not fight off. Their numbers dwindled as the virus spread and violence increased.
The study found that hunter-gatherer DNA continues to exist within the Funnelbeaker tribe. However, they had almost completely adopted the new customs and remained a complete genetic minority.
However, this group enjoyed dominance for only 1,000 years. The last comprehensive population turnover occurred in Denmark around 2,850 BC. Nomads, or nomadic animal herders, came from the eastern steppes. Equally rapid and devastating, this event gave rise to the Single Grave culture, whose ancestry was similar to modern-day Danes.
A person of a single-grave culture.Image: Pinterest
“People with genetic roots in the Yamnaya (a herd of livestock originating from southern Russia) came to Scandinavia and wiped out the previous peasant population. Again, this involved both violence and new pathogens. may have been involved,” the researchers wrote.
For example, these steppe people gave Denmark an increased risk of multiple sclerosis. Not only that, they significantly changed the flora of the area. Vegetation has adapted to withstand the intense shifting grazing of the new herds.
The unique burial behavior of this new group was also inherited, often placing weapons of war such as battle axes in the grave.
Axes, hatchets, and mace heads from single-grave cultural burials at the Schleswig-Holstein Museum.Photo: Wiki Commons
In today’s Danes, the genetic traces of the Funnelbeaker tribe have virtually disappeared.