Violence among the LBK

 

The map above depicts the spread of Neolithic culture from the fertile crescent into Europe. There were two migration paths. One around the Mediterranean coast into Southern Europe, and another through Anotolia into Northern Europe. I am interested in the Northern migration wave, and in particular the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK), not so much for their pottery, as because these were the people, three of whose settlements were massacred in Germany and Austria around c.5000 BC.

A question which has not been conclusively answered is who carried out the attacks? Were they fellow members of the LBK migrant community, or locals? My first instinct was to blame the locals (European Mesolithic or Western hunter gatherers (WHGs)). If the farmers had been warlike and frequently attacking each other, there would surely be at least some evidence of open battles in the record. If the villagers frequently visited other villages to slaughter the residents while they slept, surely the victims of these attacks would have been a little better prepared with weapons or strong defences, and would have inflicted at least some casualties on the attackers. And if the LBK were intrinsicly bellicose, surely the evidence of violence would have been spread evenly over their time in Europe, rather than concentrated at the end of it.

I wanted to draw a parallel with Brexit, where smoldering resentment towards migrant workers was harnessed by activists into a successful political movement. I thought the LBK farmers might have been not dissimilar to EU migrants to Britain. They didn’t seem to have waged war on the locals, or looted and pillaged. They seem to have come in quietly, harvested a few acres along the riverbanks, and let the resident WHGs carry on doing what they were doing before. And all seems to have gone well for a thousand or so years, until perhaps they were taking too much land, or being too successful, or perhaps visibly living better than the local WHGs. This might have given rise to envy or resentment.

I didn’t know the typical group size of the WHGs at the time, but Archaeogenetic research indicated some interbreeding between WHGs and European Neolithic farmers (ENFs) including the LBK. This implied at least some degree of social interaction, and if WHG groups were interacting with the LBK, it didn’t seem a big stretch to suggest they were interacting with each other. So whatever the WHG group size, there may well have been scope for ASPD individuals to stumble across each other and intermingle. And if the WHG community at large was feeling resentment towards the LBK, there would have been scope for the ASPD individuals to exploit this and make a case for violent action against the LBK. Whether the ASPD individuals persuaded people from the general community to take up arms, or whether they simply coalesced into a large enough ASPD group or gang to attack the LBK with impunity, the results would have been the same for the LBK victims.

But there are some problems with this idea, besides the fact that it doesn’t seem to have been suggested by any professional historian.

The first problem is geographic. The map above shows, in red LBK settlements where evidence of violence has been found, and in green other well known settlements. I should emphasise I have mapped seven non-violent sites to illustrate geographic spread in relation to sites with evidence of violence, but there are were many more than this. This article (on climate analysis) has a map showing huge clusters of LBK sites in Bavaria alone.

The massacre sites are:

  • Schöneck-Kilianstädten, Germany, with 26 victims;
  • Talheim, Germany, with 34 victims;
  • Asparn/Schletz, Austria, with 67 or more victims;

The two German sites are over 100km apart and the site in Austria is around 500km from them. This is too far apart to suggest a single marauding band of WHG’s was responsible. And in the unlikely event that an army of WHGs did march from Talheim to Asparn, why didn’t they take out Aiterhofen on the way?

A second major problem is evidence from two other settlements where the violence seems to have been carried out from within the settlements:

  • Halberstadt, Germany, with evidence 9 individuals were executed;
  • Herxheim, Germany, with evidence of mass cannibalism;

At the Halberstadt settlement evidence of executions was given by clustered cranial trauma in a mass grave. The victims were adults, eight male and one female, killed by targeted blows to the back of the head. Isotope analysis suggests the victims were from outside the settlement.

At the Herxheim settlement the evidence of mass cannibalism was given by extensive analysis of bone markings, which resembled those on butchered animal remains. In the section of the mass grave excavated so far the remains of 500 individuals have been found. Estimates of the total mass grave size indicate the total number of victims may be twice that.

So maybe I was wrong to blame the WHGs for the LBK massacres. I had this preconceived idea that the agriculturalists were all good guys, and the hunter gatherers (HGs) were all primitive and stupid and violent. I thought the HGs invented war by switching from hunting game to hunting villagers, initially killing them all, but slowly evolving to a system where the HGs “farmed” the villagers, making them produce food in return for not being killed, and possibly even being “protected” against violent attacks by other HGs.

I now acknowledge that history is more complicated than that. But does the LBK evidence fit my model on mass violence?

To recap, I believe that lethal violence is domain of psychopaths, or to use the current medical terminology, people displaying symptoms of Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD). The frequency, or prevalence of ASPD in the general population has been estimated to be in the range of 1-4%, so the vast majority of people don’t have it.

In small communities ASPD individuals are rare and isolated, and they don’t have much impact on community behaviour. But in larger communities there will be more of them, and if they are able to coalesce and to reinforce each other’s world view, they may become active and dangerous. I have listed some factors which might determine the impact ASPD individuals on community behaviour:

  • the pre-existing ethos of the community;
  • the ability of the ASPD individuals to interact freely with each other;
  • the intellectual ability of the ASPD individuals;
  • the position of the ASPD individuals in the social order;
  • the ability of the ASPD individuals to make a case for group hostility;
  • the ability of the ASPD individuals to prove their case;

Without wishing to confuse the model with too many lists, these risk factors might be reorganised into risk levels for any community.

  • Level 0: The community is sufficiently small that ASPD individuals crop up only occasionally and as individuals.
  • Level 1: The community has grown sufficiently large for there to be multiple ASPD individuals, but the community has what it needs, and the prevailing culture is peaceful and tolerant. This might apply to some of the smaller modern democracies, where cultural values make anti-social individuals feel isolated and out of place. They lack the ability or the self confidence to track each other down.
  • Level 2: The ASPD individuals find opportunities to mingle and share ideas, but there is no cause for them to latch on to; nothing substantive to talk about;
  • Level 3: Conditions arise to give the ASPD individuals something to talk about, but they lack the intellectual ability to form any community threatening plots. Separating this one out may seem arrogant, but the risk level depends on the nature of the grievance and the people affected. If a few low level jobs have been given to migrant workers, the complainers are likely to be unskilled and have low social status. In that case the more intelligent ASPD individuals will probably not want to reveal themselves by identifying with their cause;
  • Level 4: There are two possibilities here. (There are probably lots, but I can think of two right now.) The first is that ASPD individuals quietly worm their way into the elite. From here they might influence the policy of the group, or even stage a coup and take control. The second is that conditions arise which impact the lives of high status individuals who may campaign for change on their own or join the ranks of the lower order ASPD individuals if they are already campaigning on the same issue. With the support of the high status individuals they may now be able to effect change. At this level the changes will be internal to the community. A few migrant workers may be hacked to death or some Jews may have their businesses vandalised. Capital punishment may be introduced, or the priesthood might make a case for human sacrifice.
  • Level 5: ASPD individuals are in or close to the elite and conditions have become so bad (or possibly so good) that they can make a case for lethal action against another community.
  • Level 6: A military campaign has been fought and won, the spoils of war have been shared, and ASPD individuals use this to argue for further military action.
  • Level 7: I’ve added this one here and it’s not really a risk level so much as an outcome: Military strength has become so important to the survival of the community that ASPD individuals not only control the government but also the cultural agenda; and they use this to keep the community on high alert and ready to sacrifice themselves in battle, whenever they are commanded to do so.

So how does the LBK evidence fit with this model?

Well, there is a probabilistic aspect to the model. The birth of an ASPD individual in any community is a random event, as would be the birth of another. The ability of two or more ASPD individuals to interact with each other is also subject to random forces: are they born into the same family or near neighbours, or do they live far apart in different community roles? Their intelligence and social position will also be subject to nature’s lottery.

The existence of some LBK sites with evidence of violence and some without is consistent with a model subject to the laws of probability. ASPD individuals represent a small minority (1-4%) of the population so non-violence would be expected to occur more frequently than violence. This is consistent with the observation that for most of their time in Europe, no evidence of violence has been found on LBK (or other) sites. It is also consistent with the observation that when violence did break out, it happened in a minority of settlements.

From what I have read so far, there is nothing in the LBK record which contradicts my model. The evidence is consistent with LBK communities reaching risk level 4 or possibly level 5 in the model, towards the end of their presence in Europe. Theories abound on the possible causes of this. One of them is climate events causing a run of years with poor crop yields. This article uses tree ring analysis to make detailed estimates of weather conditions during the LBK period. But regardless of the cause, something happened to induce acute community stress, and some communities exhibited violent behaviour.

The evidence suggests that risk level 6 in my model was not reached, because the incidents of violence seem to be quite localised and isolated. There are many LBK sites without signs of violence, and there are no signs of logistics routes or fortifications as you would find in a major military campaign. This is consistent with the climate problem theories, because if the community was starving you would not expect there to be any “reward” for the violence.

The LBK evidence not contradicting my model doesn’t prove that it’s right, but it does indicate further research is worthwhile.

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