A surprising country was once the murder capital of Europe
Denmark, a country currently ranked as the second most peaceful in the world, was once the setting for two waves of mass murder.
Yes, the small European nation now renowned for Lego, hygge and general loveliness has not once, but twice had its population violently overturned.
New research, published in the journal Nature, has shown there have been two almost complete population turnovers in Demark in the past 7,300 years.
And it wasn’t pleasant.
The first, around 5,900 years ago, saw hunter-gatherers wiped out – with violence and murder – after the arrival of Neolithic farmers to the region. The farmers had Anatolian ancestry, now modern-day Turkey.
‘This transition has previously been presented as peaceful,’ said co-author Anne Birgitte Nielsen, from Lund University in Sweden. ‘However, our study indicates the opposite.
‘In addition to violent death, it is likely that new pathogens [diseases] from livestock finished off many gatherers.’
The researchers examined DNA from 100 skeletons from the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.
They found that those belonging to the region’s Mesolithic cultures were related to other Western European hunter-gatherers, as their genetic makeup stayed constant from 10,500 to 5,900 years ago.
However, all that changed when the Neolithic farmers arrived.
These farmers lived there for around 1,000 years, and it seems those who weren’t murdered transitioned to their way of life, as some were found to have the same hunter-gatherer roots.
But the peace didn’t last. About 4,850 years ago, a new group of Neolithic farmers and pastoralists moved in from the same Eastern Steppe as the first, and so began another round of death by murder and disease.
‘There was also a rapid population turnover, with virtually no descendants from the predecessors,’ said Ms Nielsen.
This, it seems, was the last of the brutal farmer invasions. The new wave of people had ‘an ancestry profile more similar to present-day Danes’, meaning the world’s second-most peaceful nation had a rather less-so beginning.
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