New Insights Into Clashes Between Neolithic Farmers and Hunters

Two new research studies shed some insight into settlement patterns across prehistoric Europe and ultimately other continents. In Clash of Cultures — Neolithic Europe vs. Middle Eastern innovators I wrote:

In some cases the hunter-gatherers must have clashed with the farmers. In other cases they must have adopted the farming way of life, perhaps merging with newer peoples. The upheavals in their cultures would have broken age-old traditions, bonds between families, and led to the breakdown of once unified communities.

A new model published in the latest issue of New Journal of Physics proposes that strong communities of hunter-gatherers slowed the expansion of Neolithic farmers. This model proposes that farmers would have expanded more quickly into sparsely inhabited lands, whereas their expansion into lands dominated by large populations of hunter-gatherers would have been resisted.

This makes sense on several levels. First, a large population of hunter-gatherers would have to be supported by abundant resources — hence, you’re more likely going to find wetlands, forests, and grazing herds of animals. Farmers need to clear land and although they can use the slash-and-burn method to break new ground within a forest, doing so while the local hunter-gatherers are crowding ’round you or firing their weapons at you isn’t so easy.

I can think of seven possible outcomes of a clash between hunter-gatherers and farmers:

The hunter-gatherers drive off the farmers
The farmers drive off the hunter-gatherers
The hunter-gatherers kill off the farmers
The farmers kill off the hunter-gatherers
The hunter-gatherers enslave the farmers
The farmers enslave the hunter-gatherers
The farmers and hunter-gatherers learn to coexist peacefully

During the course of thousands of years all of these scenarios probably occurred at least once. The last three scenarios give rise to the tantalizing idea that the birth of warrior castes among ancient peoples may have been due to cultural clashes. History provides us with some very poignant examples of how successive waves of invasion produce stratified social groups — India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh offering the more pronounced examples of such stratification.

Other factors may have come into play in determining the outcomes of cultural clashes. For example, another recent study has reconstructed the hydrology of colonial North America — that is, researchers have developed a model for estimating what the water systems were like and how they were used in colonial North America.

The researchers looked at how water resources were used/impacted in New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Chesapeake Bay area. New England’s early colonists were “close-knit religious communities with strong central governments [that] concentrated their economic efforts on fur-trading and timber extraction”. These communities engaged in some farming but supported two primitive industries (which, it could be argued, eventually gave rise to the shipping, mining, refining, and manufacturing industries that came to dominate the northeastern United States economy).

The Chesapeake region was “settled largely by young, unskilled men who cleared trees and planted tobacco fencerow to fencerow.”

And “the Middle Colonies were characterized by diverse social, cultural, and religious traditions and feudal-style estate agriculture.”

The Chesapeake area experienced the greatest amount of erosion. However, the Chesapeake region eventually became the center of US politics and government (even extending to business-related government, as many companies incorporate in Delaware).

The colonial model may not much resemble Neolithic Europe but it does provide some clues to how communities utilize their natural resources and what the geo-political consequences of such utilization may be. For example, is it possible that Neolithic societies gave rise to bands of adventurous young men? If so, what did they do? Did they go off and conquer other communities? Did they raid communities for wives and settle down somewhere? Would they have been as careful to work with the land as their families back home?

Geography must also have come into play. At what point, for instance, did Neolithic clans or tribes cross the Danube and Elbe rivers, to name two of Europe’s largest waterways? Did they follow the rivers toward their sources and cross at fordable points and then migrate back down the other banks? When would they have made river-navigable boats? Would hunter-gatherers be more likely to develop boats than farmers?

We have also seen evidence of specialization among the Neolithic peoples who built the great monuments. Were the specialists found only among the farming groups? British archaeologists have proven that Neolithic Britons were skilled in carpentry as early as 8500 BCE, a time thousands of years before farming was introduced to Britain. These people were hunter-gatherers who built large seasonal villages that were reinhabited year after year. Such a pattern indicates a tribal-like territoriality must have existed at the time, and if it existed in Neolithic Britain it probably existed on the mainland at the same time.

The political landscape of Neolithic Europe was probably more complex than we are accustomed to imagining. Neolithic peoples may have been united by language, religious beliefs, and customs and practices in all walks of life. What would have happened when the farming groups appeared and began pushing the hunter-gatherers out of their lands? I don’t think it’s appropriate to suggest that the sophisticated farmers simply shunted the brutish, savage hunters aside.

There must have been exchanges of ideas, probably trade in goods and wives, and most likely attempts at peaceful coexistence that eventually led to conflict. In fact, archaeologists have studied the traces of conflict in early European agricultural communities. Military historian Arthur Ferrill argues that human warfare was probably common in the Neolithic and that it probably only developed after the Paleolithic.

The increase in human population groups and their sizes must have radically transformed interactions between social groups. Eventually it became either impossible or impractical to expect one group or another to just pick up and move on when the competition for local resources became too intense. Warfare probably began at the clan level but would have been most pronounced at the tribal level if only because tribes are better able to manage and defend large tracts of land against invaders.

We know from historical sources that Celtic and Germanic tribes practiced agriculture, and yet they were capable of launching great migrations that resulted in invasions of older, more well-established regions. Farmers need not necessarily be peaceful or friendly. They can, in fact, be quite aggressive and warlike and history is filled with examples of farming-based economies that expand through warfare.

We probably need to rethink our ideas of how hunter-gatherer societies function. They must, like agricultural societies, experience growth phases that have been poorly documented and understood until now. It seems reasonable to argue that sufficient evidence has now been found to support the thesis that Neolithic European hunter-gatherers engaged in widespread trade and communication, cooperation between family groups, and quite probably also built tribal or primitive nation-states which we don’t yet understand because we cannot yet identify their social and geopolitical boundaries.

The hunter-gatherer peoples who faced the migrating agriculturists could, in fact, have been the more socially advanced and sophisticated cultures clashing with bands of young adventurers. But the agriculturists brought more than simple farming with them: they also brought superior knowledge of metals, better tools and weapons, and eventually greater numbers. The tipping point may have occurred around the time when farming produced enough food to allow for a greater population than the local hunter-gatherer tribes could support. Each region may have succumbed in a domino-like effect as a steady flow of farming clans moved into reinforce older, growing farming clans.

We have also seen how that works in recent history, too, when European colonists gradually expanded across North America, pushing the native tribes further and further west. Many of those native tribes had very sophisticated cultures, and they also practiced farming on a less sophisticated scale. They engaged in widespread trade and communication with each other. But they were overwhelmed by the greater numbers and superior weapon-and-tool technologies that the invaders brought.