The riddle of the missing genes
For British archaeology there was a grisly ending to 2024. The study of a mass of human bones in a Somerset cave had brought to light an ancient atrocity in which close to 40 people were butchered in a frenzied onslaught and their bodies “processed”.
Cut marks on the 3 000 bone fragments pointed to mutilation, dismemberment, scalping, trophy-taking and cannibalism. There were no signs of a fight-back, suggesting a surprise attack.
Evidence for such unhinged savagery was new — the transition from the Neolithic (late Stone Age) to the Bronze Age 4 500 to 4 000 years before the present (BP) had been thought of as relatively peaceful.
In Britain, that is. But in continental Eurasia, the Charterhouse Warren discovery added to a growing catalogue of prehistoric enormities in which whole groups, including women and children, were cut down and their remains disposed of in a dehumanising way.
As these were pre-literate societies, one can only guess at the motive. But the mass graves and their pitiful contents speak loudly to the indelible stain of communal violence in our own age and its main object, The Other.
The American scholar Lawrence Keeley emphasised a “neo-Rousseauan” strain in archaeological thinking after World War II that “pacified” the ancient past. Interpersonal violence in the Neolithic, in particular, was minimised as small-scale, ritualised and unimportant.
Tied to this was a rigid orthodoxy that insisted prehistoric cultural change was driven by non-violent elite emulation, intermarriage and trade, rather than belligerent, long-range “folk movements” and colonial tyranny. The “New Archaeology” and its anti-migration credo peaked in the “flower power” 1960s. Then, amid growing evidence of communal brutality in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, it started to wane.
Recent decades have yielded irrefutable genetic evidence of ancient mass migrations across Eurasia. At the same time, prehistoric massacre sites have been unearthed in France, Germany, Austria and Norway, further east in Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria, and to the south in Italy, Croatia and the High Pyrenees.
“Massacre” in prehistoric Eurasia implies an armed assault on a defenceless group — often including women and children — causing sharp and blunt-force skull trauma, flight wounds and parrying injuries to the arms and hands. The skeletal remains do not always fit claims of minor, sporadic violence.
At Schletz in Austria (7 000BP), for example, more than 200 victims were dumped in a mass grave 300m long. At the late Bronze Age site of the Tollense Valley in Germany (3 250BP), 12 000 human bones, including those of children, were recovered from the site of a suspected ambush.
Women were sometimes spared. But the notable paucity of female remains at the Schletz and Talheim massacre sites, for example, might mean that they were kidnapped and sexually enslaved.
And the incidents were not always isolated — brutalised human remains found in the Spanish cave of Roc de les Orenetes suggest repeated violence over four centuries.
British archaeologists, in particular, have preferred benign explanations for such interpersonal nastiness.
One example is the hillforts that first loomed over the British landscape in about 5 300BP — at peak there were 1 300 of them — which some archaeologists dismissed as defensively worthless and probably intended for communal get-togethers and religious rites or to corral cattle.
Really? More than 600 arrowheads were found outside the causewayed enclosure on Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire. The timber defences at Hambledon Hill in Dorset were burnt three times before the fort was finally abandoned. At nearby Maiden Castle, Europe’s largest hillfort, archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler found 52 skeletons, some with “horrific wounds”.
One scholar remarks on a “relatively serious crisis in British society from 5 000 years ago”, which he linked to the sway of “big men”.
The crisis flowed from developments thousands of kilometres away. Many of the European massacre victims were from the continent’s first settled farming communities. Their killers were probably nomadic pastoralists called the Yamnaya (“pit-grave people”), who moved from the Pontic-Caspian steppe into Europe in a massive migration in 5 000BP.
The death knell for the anti-migration dogmatists of the New Archaeology was a set of stunning advances in the science of ancient DNA (aDNA), which spurred the sequencing of genomes in the deep past, making it vastly cheaper and more sensitive.
In 2015, the brilliant geneticist David Reich lobbed a grenade into the sequestered groves of academe by showing, via aDNA, that people with a steppe genetic signature had populated most of Europe, including Britain on its western fringe, in a lightning continent-wide dispersal.
Even more startling was the finding that after arriving in Britain from the Netherlands, another steppe-related culture, the Bell Beaker Folk, replaced 90% of the Neolithic genepool in a few centuries.
What happened to the builders of Stonehenge? Did horseback-riding steppe intruders, wielding bronze weapons, wipe them out in a genocidal campaign?
As Harvard magazine observed, a million men seemed to have vanished without trace.
One possibility is that male-biased, endogamous steppe intruders monopolised local women.
In this case, one would expect an initial “pulse” of steppe DNA followed by a rebalancing. But later generations show no sign of a Neolithic genetic bounce-back.
And as new maternal DNA lineages were also created, we know there were women in the Bell Beaker landing party.
At first some scholars, including Danish archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen, favoured the genocide theory. Based on the discovery of ancient plague genomes in Sweden, Kristiansen now argues that a global epidemic may explain the genetic riddle.
The theory is unconvincing. The Black Death that killed 40% of Europeans in the 14th century left abundant remains. Where are the plague pits and other signs of mass mortality from the Neolithic?
The genocide theory has also suffered from a lack of mortuary evidence. But scholars now broadly agree that interpersonal violence in the Neolithic gathered momentum towards organised, state-sponsored warfare with the advent of horseriding, the chariot and bronze weapons.
Perhaps first to fall to the warrior ethos that has so dominated European history since then was the sophisticated “Old Europe” of the Balkans area, where 600 Neolithic hill settlements were burnt and abandoned 6 000 years ago.
After a “push factor” of drier, colder weather — an event called the Piora Oscillation which must have sapped agriculture — burials ascribed to intrusive steppe herders appeared in the lower Danube Valley and eastern Bulgaria.
One Bulgarian archaeologist described what followed as “a catastrophe of colossal scope … a complete cultural caesura”. Beneath two of the burnt settlements, Hotnitsa and Yunatsite, massacre victims were discovered.
Give or take a few hundred years, the Charterhouse Warren massacre shadows the arrival of the steppe-derived Bell Beaker Folk in Britain. The charnel pit in fact contained elements of a Beaker cultural assemblage, including typical pot shards.
Perhaps more significant is the distinctive character of the massacre. Like others of the period, it was seemingly carried out by “frenzied, ritualised warriors”, to use one investigator’s phrase.
In his ground-breaking study The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David Anthony dismisses the idea of a Mongol-style invasion in which an “army of pitiless nomads lined up on the horizon on shaggy ponies, waiting for the command of their bloodthirsty general”.
But he does suggest youthful warriors, in cattle-raiding brotherhoods rather than organised militias, might have been the shock troops of the Indo-European steppe tribes.
Cattle raids were no doubt encouraged by the payment of bride-prices in livestock. But the youthful berserkers — often styling themselves as dogs and wolves — might have escalated them into revenge feuds and the pursuit of “imperishable fame”, idealised in Indo-European myth and epic poetry.
So important and widespread were these age cohorts that the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language has a name for them: koryos.
Our age tends to see resource inequality as the fuel of group violence. The World Bank, for instance, contends that when income per person doubles, the risk of civil war halves.
But cultural drivers such as values and beliefs, and their associated rituals, can be just as explosive. It is hard to see what economic benefit Israel and Russia derive from their cruel wars.
Perhaps linked to the ideas of clan service and self-sacrifice, there does seem to have been a mythical/ritual dimension to the crazed bloodlust of Charterhouse Warren and other ancient massacres.
Were koryos the perpetrators? And did they have something to do with the mystery of the missing genes?
Drew Forrest is a former deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian.