Probably some sort of jingoist advocating ethnic cleansing writing articles like this.
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!
>> A thousand years later, about 4,850 years ago, another population change took place when people with genetic roots in Yamnaya—a livestock herding people with origins in southern Russia—came to Scandinavia and wiped out the previous farmer population.
And today we welcome immigrants in droves, because multiculturalism must prevail, and never in history a local population was replaced by migrants. Never!
Ethnonationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels.
Incoming colonists were (and remained) genocidal by comportment, yes. But they also had the "advantage" of having a wave of smallpox and other disease going before them in a wave of devastation.
Farmers coming up from the Balkans and Pontic Steppe would have been living in larger settlements and among livestock for generations and would likely have brought with them things like smallpox that dispersed hunter gatherer societies would be less likely to encounter.
Not sure which side I should be rooting for, but at least hunter-gatherers didn't try to own the land.
Also if anyone wants to say "if it wasn't for the farmers, you wouldn't be here right now," to me, that's not quite the boon you might be imagining. I'm actually perfectly fine with not having existed if it meant that nature wasn't ravaged.
They also had no problem driving species to extinction.
This idea of a group of people living in harmony with nature is fantasy.
Its just that population densities were on the whole lower. And there was a lot of land and resources to live from. So the impact was lessened.
But even then, there were in fact tribal groupings that effectively wiped out other tribal groupings.
Also it's becoming clearer and clearer that the line between settled agrarian and hunter gatherer was a lot less clear than we initially imagined. There were all sorts of grain and maize growing societies that continued to rely on deer and fish for their protein sources and trade in skins etc for hundreds of years after they started tending crops.
These are tribes, or in the case of the Mexicans, a civilization. Not hunter gatherer bands.
Meanwhile out west or near the arctic were hunter-gatherer bands. They were not making continual war. They were hunter-gatherer bands and not tribal.
When living in contact, hunter gatherers and farmers are in natural conflict since the most concentrated food source you could gather (or hunt) from is a farm. Raiding must have been fairly common.
In a conflict like this, it seems natural that the farming community would prevail, since they would naturally be more motivated to do so (this is their primary food source, they are the ones being attacked), and as a stationary community might be expected to build up more resources and be better prepared to defend themselves.
Perhaps there wasn't a change in culture, but rather that farmer tribes were able to grow bigger? A hunter-gatherer tribe could be size-limited according to the available resources. Likely 2 neighbouring tribes would therefore be roughly the same size. Which would make it hard for a tribe to fully exterminate other tribes. Would you send all your fighters to take on another tribe, with the risk of none of them coming back, leaving you defenseless? What if a dangerous animal walks into camp while all fighters are away?
If a farming tribe could sustain double population, that would mean double the amount of fighters, thus it would reduce the risk greatly of sending out a large group of fighters.
Breastfeeding is a natural contraceptive.
It is easy to reduce people to caricatures when we don't know them. Since we aren't at a happy hour regaling each other over the craziness of lives lived, I'll be brief: there have been periods of life where this assertion wasn't true.
Great example is in the US, MAGA have decimated their local farming community economies as a consequence of their deportation demands, to the point where farmers flood social media saying people won't work for the wages they are willing to pay since their workforce is either deported, in a concentration camp that won't allow congress oversee, or in fear of living as such. Wanting to have clarity or changes in immigration policy is rational. Treating every immigrant an ex ante criminal, as if all are guilty of rape, murder, or organized crime at rates far exceeding the citizenry (though the reverse is true), and treating them as subhuman through policy and deployment of undertrained secret police, is not rational.
It always surprises me when smart people think that xenophobia itself makes for rational policy. It shows major blinders in their personal worldview.
Just because some behavior made sense in a prehistoric society doesn't mean it does in a modern one.
In all places worth living we overcame those, and it was not something done irrationally.
Why should xenophobia, racism and such not follow the same path?
Perhaps in history. But we humans have the ability to think and adjust our behavior. We didn't kill all the horse-people when we invented the car. It's likely that in the future we could be able to move past all the horrible things we do to each other.
The smallest definition of a tribe is usually 500 people. They can be 10 tines that size. Tribes did not exist until about 10,000 years ago. They were preceded by hunter-gatherer bands.
The inland Papuan group most associated with violence are the Enga, but they are not migratory hunter-gatheree bands. They are farmers who grow sweet potatoes and raise pigs.
What I argued is that whenever two competing groups came into contact, wanting the same land, the result was usually genocide (or one of the groups fled to another area, where they would have to fight those inhabitants), and as a result, when history records a new group "inhabiting" or "settling" a peace of land that is new to them, then that inhabitation is generally not peaceful, but genocidal in nature. Regardless of whether there is a written history to record the violence, we can have confidence that the violence did occur.
Now, given that modern humans have been around for 300,000 years at least (the date keeps being pushed back, since before the Moroccan discovery, it was thought to be 100,000 years), and have been swarming over the whole earth, that is a lot of violence and genocide, even though it was certainly possible to live a life of peace as well for a specific individual, since migrations weren't going on all the time in all places.
The suggested universal dynamic of neighbors in conflict is different from that of well equipped, well trained, expansionist cultures preying on everyone.
You're saying hunter gatherer bands are tribes which is contradictory. Migratory hunter-gatherer bands max out at 50 people. They migrated there was no land which was "theirs", this is the point.
Tribes were hundreds of people, often had class systems within them, often had surplus and farmed. So yes, tribal farmers had conflict but they were not hunter gatherer bands.