This related to the item
I just posted about Neanderthals and allergies, and I've posted directly on this topic, in regards to our ancient ancestors, before. But I'm doing so again, as the way this topic has been historically treated is rather interesting. It says something, well. . . about us. Not them
It's invariably the theory amongst any historical or scientific work written by Europeans or European Americans that our ancestors were Bad. And those Baddies killed off any other group of people that they came in contact with. Always.
Well, DNA studies are showing not so much.
And I'm not surprised.
Perhaps the classic example of this is the long accepted story of the Anglo Saxon invasion of Great Britain. Classically, the story is that Horsa and Hengest came in as mercenaries and saw that Britain, or at least southern Britain, was ripe for hte taking and this sparked the invasion of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. They came in, killed all the British save for those basically north of Hadrian's Wall and who didn't manage to hold out in Wales, and established the series of Kingdoms that became England in later years. Some, like Winston Churchill in his classic History of the English Speaking Peoples, allowed for the survival of a British woman here and there, but not much.
Brothers Horsa and Hengest come with the tribe, as depicted in the Renaissance. In reality, they probably not only didn't look this calm, but they wouldn't have looked this modern, if you will, either. They probably looked a lot like what we imagine Vikings to look like, as they really weren't much different. Assuming they existed at all. Their names, oddly, mean "horse" and "horse", and they might be allegorical.
Well, a study of DNA on Great Britain reveals that the British, including the English, are mostly truly British. That is, while that German DNA is in there, it's not in there so much. Seems the Germanic invaders came in, or sort of meandered in really, and ultimately gained political dominance over any one region, but never gained a population dominance. And while entire tribes moved, once settled, they started marrying amongst the existing population.
Gee, what a surprise.
This is true, by the way, for the Vikings too.
Now, I'm not saying the Vikings weren't bad. They really were. And I don't appreciate the latter day revision of them which would hold that they were a bunch of misunderstood hippies. Baloney. They did invade, and they ultimately brought their families with them.
But, missed in the modern stories of them somewhat, their language was intelligible with the Old English of the time, and they weren't all that different in some ways. A huge difference, of course, was religion, as they adhered to a really primitive form of the old Germanic paganism. . . for a time.
But they started converting themselves. By the last Viking invasion of 1066 their king was a Catholic monarch. So, like the Angles, Saxon and Jutes before them, they slowly melted into the existing population. You can tell, by their DNA, where they were strong today, but the British remain the dominant British genetic contributors.
Although some British DNA, it should be noted, like Irish DNA, goes back 10,000 years. That's right. All the way back. Showing, once again, that earlier populations were not slaughtered like people like to imagine.
Now this is becoming increasingly evident about the Neanderthals. The popular imagination has held that the Cro Magnons, i.e., us, came in and killed the whole lot of them, because we are bad. Well, not it appears that the populations, which weren't as different as we imagine, merged. Some would have held that "oh they were too ugly that can't be true", but that's turning out to be less true as well. They did look a bit different, but then existing populations do as well. Existing populations of humans mix readily today and frankly there will come a day when the mixing is sufficiently complete that there will be no differences in human populations (i.e., no races), so why we ever thought that it was the case that no Cro Magnon began to think that some young Neanderthal female wasn't somewhat cute is beyond me.
Now, all of these examples go a ways back. But it might serve to reconsider some ideas that became very popular in the United States in the 1970s, about European Americans and their presence in North America. At that time, the old image of heroic colonist taming a wilderness yielded to an image of savage Europeans dominating the native populations.
Now, the conquering of North America was violent. And, contrary to the popular imagination, the conquering of American east of the Mississippi was much more violent than that event west of the Mississippi. But the use of terms like genocide are really misplaced. The killing impact of disease is very real, but what is probably the case is that it was much more accidental than anything else. That isn't good, but it also isn't quite what its recently been portrayed as. And, as with the other example, populations mixed a lot more than sometimes imagined. This is particularly true in Spanish and French speaking regions of North America, where there tended to be a lot less fighting and a lot more attraction than seems to be commonly considered. Indeed, we should be well aware of this as it's well known that the first Spanish Indian couples showed up as early as Cortez' conquest of Mexico and even English colonial populations, which were amongst the least likely to mix in North America, started mixing right from the onset.
Rebecca Rolfe, the wife of John Wolfe. Known better to history as Pocahontas, although that was a nickname and she had several other "Indian" names. She married John Wolfe in 1614.
So, what's the point of this? Well, perhaps simply a pleas that occasionally we slow down and consider human beings as human beings before getting retrospectively indignant and righteous. It's easy to look back and condemn all of our ancestors for avarice and violence. But truth be known, most people have always been people. And, frankly, most people here are the product of mixed ancestries even if they aren't ware of it. Somebody crossed that color line, cultural line and even that subspecies line at some point. Probably a lot of your ancestors did.
And, let's give ourselves credit. We don't always do the right thing. But we don't have a roadmap to the future either. And we might do the right thing more often than not. And at least here, while it's easy to imagine everyone from our culture, as we belong to that human culture that uniquely feels guilt about itself, was a baddie. More often than not, chances were high that what happened is that young hunter Gronk of the newly arrived Cro Magnons was invited over for aurock by the family of young gatherer Gronella of the old Neanderthals, and things went fine.
As mundane as it might seem, scenes like this probably have a lot more to do with average human ancestry that warfare.
