Recalling what I said in post 212 about archaeology being restricted by definition to what is found in the ground, archaeology is making rapid strides in filling in a lot of facts that were never before available on ancient events. The big story is how DNA analysis is now being used on ancient corpses, which has arisen from the unexpected fact that DNA evidence is not destroyed in all remains, even after millennia. This is resolving long-standing disputes in a myriad of diverse and seemingly unsolvable conundrums such as the origins and ancestry of modern horses back 6,000 years and conclusive evidence that Marija Gimbutas was right all along (despite a phalanx of archaeologists snickering at her Kurgan Hypothesis) that Old Europe was overwhelmed by horsemen from the Steppes.

For today’s post, we find in the hot archaeological news another instance where DNA gives us an incredible insight into a massacre that occurred within what is now Poland about 5,000 years ago. DNA analysis done on the human remains reveals that all the dead are genetically related within a couple generations, and that the adult males are not present in the grave. The following articles go with the picture heading this post:

1. The dead represented the “Old Europe” Globular Amphora Culture which was virtually surrounded by the Corded Ware Culture, AKA the invading Kurgan folks from the Steppes.
2. The archaeologists point out that the bodies were stacked with their nearest and dearest beside them—which they hypothesize were other Globular Amphora folks, and the more optimistic hypothesize that those burying them were the returning male heads of household who had been away when the slaughter took place.
3. The definitive paper on the massacre creates a striking artist’s representation of the piled bodies and conceptualizes various scenarios leading to this scene.

Let your imagination take these facts and hypothesize what happened.

My take on the scene is that the older menfolk joined others from the culture to thwart an incursion by the Corded Ware folks. The Globular Amphora folks were overwhelmed and killed in the battle, and the victors charged on into the midst of villagers such as these and slaughtered them. Thus, this scene would represent a microcosm of the huge slow-motion westward invasion that began with the Yamnaya folks of the central Steppes and largely eliminated the male DNA of Marija Gimbutas’s Old Europe.

I would be a liar if I could not admit that I cannot look upon this grave, and especially the artist’s representation of the pile of bodies, without sadness. But I am gladdened that with the advance of scientific tools of analysis, at least we know a lot more about what happened here—and that strips the anonymity from the bones and reminds us that their past was as ugly as our present.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke