Community differentiation and kinship among Europe’s first farmers (via Dienekes):
Community differentiation is a fundamental topic of the social sciences, and its prehistoric origins in Europe are typically assumed to lie among the complex, densely populated societies that developed millennia after their Neolithic predecessors. Here we present the earliest, statistically significant evidence for such differentiation among the first farmers of Neolithic Europe. By using strontium isotopic data from more than 300 early Neolithic human skeletons, we find significantly less variance in geographic signatures among males than we find among females, and less variance among burials with ground stone adzes than burials without such adzes. From this, in context with other available evidence, we infer differential land use in early Neolithic central Europe within a patrilocal kinship system.
I have already stated on this weblog that we will probably begin to discern a rather strong pattern soon of an interleaved genetic pattern across Eurasia and Africa where we can infer that populations in an expansionary demographic phase absorbed a host of other groups (more, or less). The exact details are to be worked out, but I'm moderately confident in this sort of pattern. But these results align with another of my expectations, which I have rather stronger confidence in:
that in parts of Eurasia the emergence of agriculture was correlated with the rise of powerful patrilineal kinship groups, which served as the cores of pre-historic polities
. I no longer believe that demographic expansion due to cultural innovation can be separated from the likely political and social consequences of these changes. No, rather what we saw with the rise of agriculture was another powerful social innovation, collective units of large numbers of males who operated as one in the quest for land, women, and material self-enrichment. I do not mean to imply here that violence began with the Neolithic. Rather, I simply believe that the numbers enabled by agriculture allowed for specialization and scalability to fundamentally change the game. This was a high stakes "winner-take-all" bet. As these males spread across the landscape, enabled by their culture (agriculture) and propagating their culture (language), in many cases their genetic-demographic signal may have been diluted across the wave of advance. But their cultural cohesion remained, and I believe that the patterns of Y chromsomal patterns evident across the modern world are an echo of their elimination of rivals. A tree of many Abels was pruned, as a few Cains proliferated like weeds.
