Oops, Looks like it was People, not Pots

There’s an exciting new study on Bronze Age genetics that you’ve probably already heard about but I’m gonna post about anyway because stuff like this is kind of like our core competency around here.

Summary: Scientist people sequenced genomes (did fancy lab things with genetics) on 101 dead Europeans/Asians from a few thousand years ago, to try to figure out who they were and where they came from.

One of the big anthro/archeology debates over the past 70 years or so has been whether the different layers of cultural artifacts (eg, pots) represent things being traded while people stay put, or people invading and bringing their new stuff with them.

To put it in a modern context, if you saw a picture of people from Papua New Guinea taken in 1900, wearing traditional tribal clothes, and then saw a picture taken a few decades later of people from Papua New Guinea wearing Levi’s and T-shirts, you might wonder if the people of PNG had gotten some new clothes, or if some people wearing Levi’s had gone to PNG.

The archaeological assumption pre-1940 or so was generally that different layers of cultural artifacts represented actually different groups of people, who had probably invaded and slaughtered the previous group of people. For a variety of reasons that you can probably figure out on your own, this view fell into disrepute around the mid 1940s, and so was replaced with the peaceful assumption that new cultural artifacts probably spread primarily through trade, not warfare. This is expressed through the phrase, “Pots, not people,” meaning that the pots were moving around, not the people.

So now we can sequence ancient genomes and shit, so we can actually take a look at the people in ancient burials and try to figure out if people in Layer of Pots A are related to people in Layer of Pots B, or if they are a totally different group of people. This is like squinting at the photographs of Papua New Guineans and trying to figure out if the people wearing the clothes look like they come from the same group, but with lab tools and science.

From an archaeology/anthropology perspective, this is big stuff people have been debating about for over a century.

Conclusions: The Yamnaya are the Indo-Europeans (or proto-Indo-Europeans.) They started out around the Ukraine, then about 4,000 years ago, they spread out (cause they had horses and wagons and chariots and such with wheels,) toward the west and east. In Europe they became the Corded Ware Culture. The Corded Ware may have headed toward the Urals and became some of the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians, but that’s still fuzzy.

The Yamnaya had high (relatively) rates of lactose tolerance, so they probably helped spread that gene/the gene helped spread them. Blond hair and blue eyes are not Yamnaya traits–those came from elsewhere. They probably had pale skins, but so did most of the people already in Europe, so they didn’t change that.

I had already figured the Yamnaya were the PIEs (along with a bunch of other people paying even vague attention to the field,) but apparently my rough mental estimate of the time frame was off. 4,000 years ago is not that long–we have quite abundant records of life 2,000 years ago, so imagine what sorts of records or rumors those Greeks and Romans had about life 2,000 years before themselves.

There is much that we once naively took as fact, then skeptically decided was myth, then decided was fact again, like the existence of Troy. (Of course, there is also much that has turned out to be actually false. Like Herodotus’s dog-sized ants.) Perhaps some more of what seems mere myth in the Greek and Roman accounts will turn out to have some basis in history.

On the eastern end of the geographic range they surveyed, the steppe-folks out there were later replaced with a more Asian population that looks more closely related to the Native Americans (possibly descended from a population ancestral to both them and the Native Americans.)

I don’t know yet just how violent the invasion was–the existing European population was not wiped out, a la the Dorset. The groups mixed; modern Europeans (and many Asians) are a mixture of many population waves. But we do know now that these were people, not just their pots.

Things Have Changed Incredibly Fast, and We have Forgotten —

The past is long, the present is short
We are living in the dreamtime
And it will all fad away

Your culture is, at most, 70 years old. Maybe less.
Everything you take for granted that makes your life possible, everything without which your life would be completely unrecognizable, perhaps not even livable (for you, anyway) did not exist for the vast majority of people 70+ years ago.

Air conditioning. Electricity. Running water. Grocery stores that carry virtually anything you want, any time you want. Clothes you didn’t make yourself.

The general expectation that your children will survive their first week of life.

The general expectation that you and your loved ones will not be crippled by Polio or killed by dozens of other infectious diseases.

Not spending your days in back-breaking agricultural labor and hoping desperately that it rains this year.

Pants on women. Women with their hair uncovered.

Almost all of your values, as you understand them, like equality and freedom of religion, were not popularly believed a hundred years ago. People who thought whites and blacks were equal were generally regarded as mentally unhinged in the mid-1800s. Freedom of religion was understood to only cover Christian denominations, and Catholics were only sort of considered Christians. Parents had a right to decide whom their children married, in order to protect the purity of their family line–a notion we would now call “eugenics”.

Even in the fifties, many American women did not go out with their hair uncovered–a practice we now condemn as Medieval and barbaric among Muslims.

The Spanish Inquisition did not end until 1834. The last auto-da-fe took place in Mexico in 1850.

Auschwitz was liberated 70 years ago.

America and the rest of the West in 1900 or the mid-1800s would be totally foreign to you.

One of our great flaws is that we have completely forgotten this. We act as though the good times have always been here, they will always be here, and that there’s no possible way we could accidentally destroy them.

We take them for granted.

1. Don’t get too uppity about 70 years of good times. Good times can end. They probably will.

2. If you like the changes that have happened over the course of the past 400 years or so–if you like things like freedom of religion, if you like not torturing confessions out of prisoners, remember that these are NOT essential features of your society and must be carefully protected or else we will lose them.

3. We should not feel shame for our past (which is probably no worse than anyone else’s.) We should feel triumph at everything we have overcome and how much we have improved. Nor should we feel complacent, or try to recreate some mythical version of the past: the world is changing, and so must we.

Femininity as Fashion

My androgyny theory run up against the obvious complication of how you measure androgyny/dimorphism. Height? Hormones? Behavior? The latter is obviously affected by a ton of environmental factors.

Slate Star Codex has an excellent post analyzing fashion (and politics) via cellular automata. Other people have written really insightful things using this same model, so I recommend you shoving it into whatever spare theories you have lying around.

BTW, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should read Scot’s post before finishing mine.

Anyway, does the performance of femininity itself follow this model?
I propose yes.

Let’s go back to 1900 or so. Most people are farmers, and farmers have to work damn hard. The wives of farmers are not delicate wilting flowers, but extremely hard workers themselves, with very little excess time or money to spend on things like closets full of shoes. The traits we associate with femininity and gender role performance were largely luxuries available only to the wealthy, a situation that had probably been largely true for centuries.

Then came industrialization, the shift to the cities, and the rapid growth of the middle class. By the 1920s, the middle class could aspire to ape upper class behaviors, spending their new wealth on clothes and shoes and stay-at-home-motherhood. It is probably no coincidence that at the same time, fashionable women began dressing and acting like men, even aspiring to “boyish” figures.

Then came the Depression and WWII, and people went back to eating spare shoes instead of wearing them. By the fifties, femininity was once again a symbol of luxurious good living, complete with the magical wonders of modern technology like vacuums and Jello.

Of course, as soon as the middle class (and even, god forbid, proles,) started aspiring to vacuum in their pearls, such things became horribly retrograde. Poors might aspire to have enough money that one of them might be able to take off a little time to care for their children, but rich people had much better things to do with their time. No self-respecting career woman would be caught dead in public with a parcel of screaming brats; if they must breed for the sake of some horribly chauvinist husband, the actual care and upkeep of the children must be farmed out to suitably low-class (often non-white) nannies. Nor would she deign to humiliate herself by cooking meals or doing laundry. (Such work can also be done by low-class non-white women, to allow rich white women to keep up their masculine lifestyles.)

(Note: it’s not employing people that’s problematic. It’s believing that certain types of work are beneath you, but perfectly acceptable for other sorts of people. If you think women shouldn’t cook and clean, then don’t hire other women to cook and clean.)

Of course, poors and proles never quite got the message and continued buying their daughters Barbies and Bratz and whatnot, despite all of their betters’ constant harangues about the dire moral dangers of such toys.

As the economy continues to suck and the middle class shrinks, will femininity become again the domain of the super-rich?

Shakerin’ It

I’ve been reading the Wikipedia page about the Shakers (not to be confused with the Quakers.)

The Shakers believed in Christ’s immanent return to Earth–as a woman. Many of their preachers were female, and in 1770, one of their leaders, Anne Lee, was declared the Messiah. (Thereafter she was called Mother Anne.)

The Shakers had split from the Quakers, taking with them many of the more charismatic members and leaving behind a calmer set of Quakers. Shakers spoke in tongues, danced, shook, and received divine revelations. They believed that God was both male and female and practiced male/female equality in community leadership and structure. They became conscientious objectors during the Civil War, and as you probably already know, had no children.

They are also an example of successful religious communism–possibly because membership was voluntary, control was local, and the lifestyle agrarian.

Shaker communities managed to attract new members and remained economically successful until the Industrial Revolution radically changed the economic landscape, though I’m not sure it’s really the IR’s fault. There were 5 or 6,000 Shakers in the US in the 1800s (remember, the whole population of the US was much lower back then); today there are 3, in Maine.

I feel kinda bad for them.

A few thoughts:

1. There were some folks who adopted almost all of Shakerism, except the celibacy. This “Shakerism Light” sounds very close to what I would believe if I were a Christian. (Honestly, before I learned about groups like the Shakers and religious communism, I always wondered why Christians weren’t all in favor of these sorts of arrangements, as they seemed more Biblically supported than building up treasures on Earth.) A large chunk of my family attends a charismatic denomination, and Shakerism seem to have been popular with people like us.

2. The “Era of Manifestations” (Shakers began having more visions and other charismatic experiences) occurred about the same time as they expanded into Greater Appalachia. Charismatic churches are still most popular in Greater Appalachia, and viewed as low-class by outsiders. Were Shakers regarded as low-class at the time?

3. I suspect the Shakerism survived as long as it did by functioning like Protestant monks/nuns. Many Catholic monasteries have been around for centuries (or longer,) despite not allowing their members to have children, because their stock is regularly replenished from the ranks of regular Catholics. Most monasteries/nunneries in the West are probably hurting for members these days, too, but for Shakers, the lack of a formal relationship between them and other Protestants has probably been especially bad for their survival.

4. There seems to be a general social effect where female achievement and birthrates are negatively correlated. This may be entirely practical, as child-rearing and careers both take time, which is not infinite.

5. Do long-term successful communistic societies require little to no reproduction? With no children, people have more incentive to leave their worldly belongings to the community; with children, people try to amass wealth to support their children and withdraw it from the community.

6. Being religious is probably also an advantage for such communes, as people tend to be on their best behavior when they think god is watching.

7. Perhaps no communist system can thrive in an industrialized society.

Religious Communism

(Note: this is a subject of on-going research. I could be wrong about stuffs.)

We tend to think of “communism” as starting with Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto. Marx was certainly a significant political theorist, but he was actually part of an existing, much larger movement that has its origins in the same reforming impulse that lead to American democracy and many religious communes.

Today we think of “communism” and “democracy” as opposites, but in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, they were more or less the same. Democracy meant a community of people had the right to determine their own laws, instead of the King dictating laws to them. Communism of the day meant that the community had a right to determine their economic fates, rather than the King. In religious communes, in particular, councils voted on both legal and economic matters. Later, the idea of collectively running one’s own country and of collectively running one’s own factory can be seen as the same idea expressed at different levels.

As I understand it, our notion that the government and the economy are two separate entities is fairly modern. 500 years or so ago, the political and economic systems were completely entwined, via that system popularly known as feudalism.

(See also: Anarchism)

I’m still not clear on when or why democracy/communism first became a big deal, but we see at least some interesting groups emerging in the 1600s, with a variety of systems. The Pilgrims of the Plymouth Bay Colony, established a democratic society in 1620, apparently in keeping with Calvinist doctrines. (Though it seems like we could also speak of the precedent set by the Magna Carta, etc.) The colony’s government also administered certain economic concerns, eg, regulating the purchasing of land, but does not appear to have banned private property.

Some Quaker and Shaker groups did hold all property in common. The Diggers, around 1650, were agrarian socialists who attempted to farm on common lands. I believe the Mormons also practiced some form of centralized economic direction in the settling of Utah. And many monasteries and convents have been essentially communistic for centuries.

Some groups were obviously more successful than others, but overall, religious communes seem to have done pretty well, and may have provided much of the inspiration for the secular communism movement.