alt Hacker NewsThis is basically all of human history. I guarantee you that whatever ethnic group you belong to, if they are the dominant group in a region, they got to be that way be slaughtering the previous inhabitants. Modern anthropology has really opened our eyes to this fact, which contradicts a lot of the post-war anthropology that wanted to say that, say, fall of the Roman Empire was mostly peaceful, or the mass disappearance of Early European hunter artifacts was merely the movement of "pots, not people". But with DNA studies we can confirm that no, it's not that everyone started using a different kind of pottery, it's that they were all wiped out by the new group that had their own styles of pottery. The men were slaughtered and women were raped. Same thing for modern day Japanese moving into the islands, or the Bantus migrating into what is now Namibia, or the Aztecs, or basically anyone else. All of history is built on fighting for land to call your own, and killing off the male population that was there before. It's biblical, even - read the book of Joshua.
Replies
Don't get me wrong - I recognize that. And it is still hard for me to imagine!
completely true. No society is innocent of this. One good example is slavery - I myself was surprised that chattel slavery was common everywhere in the world and it was the west that had the mental capacity to stop it.
Not really. From the time of the cave paintings at Lubang Serij Saleh 40,000 years ago, as well as 10,000 years before that, up to the beginning of the Neolithic revolution 10,000 years ago, all evidence is humans lived rather peacefully. As is evidenced also by similar remaining bands over the past centuries until now. The Neolithic revolution and rise of surplus, class societies, warrior castes and such was the beginning of such things. And that only spread over the entire globe over the past 600 years.
That's nonsense. While there are some examples, where the conquerors massacred the existing populations, it was a rare exception. Most of the time, the purpose of a war of conquest was to increase your agricultural surplus, which was the key resource that supported everything else in the society. If you killed the people (or even just the men), it would take generations to restore agricultural production. By that time, your tenure as the Glorious Leader would be long gone.
In present-day Turkey, people typically have 5–15% Turkic ancestry. For the most part, their ancestors called themselves Roman, or Greek, or Lydian, or Phrygian, or Hittite, or whichever culture happened to be dominant at the time. When new conquerors came, they pillaged a bit and put their own people in charge. Most commoners, and even many cooperative elites, would then continue their lives as before. If the new elites managed to stay in power, people would often gradually adopt their language, religion, and cultural identity.
As for the Aztecs, I found it amusing that the previous Mexican ambassador to the US was Esteban Moctezuma. Guess from which ancestor that name came from.