Civilization #5: The Yamnaya Conquest of Europe

Marija Gimbutas, who is an anthropologist, makes the argument that for the longest time, for most of its history, Europe was egalitarian, peaceful and artistic. But today, we are a patriarchy. There's a lot of inequality, and we're always at war with each other. What changed? Old Europe was conquered by a warlike people who we call today the Yamnaya.

1. Three questions I want to answer: first of all, who are the Yamnaya? The second question is, where do they come from? The third question is, how did they conquer Europe?

The World Before the Yamnaya

Let's go back in time and look at the world about 10,000 years ago. We believe that about 11,000 years ago, in the Near East, we developed agriculture. We developed the technology of farming. It was because humans are a religious people, and farming allows us to celebrate our religion.

The reason why farming was founded in the Near East is, for the longest time, there was an Ice Age, so you couldn't farm. You had to move around from place to place to hunt and find food. After the Ice Age, which ended about 12,000 years ago, the climate became warmer, and the Near East became the area where you could grow crops the easiest.

The Near East is what we call the Middle East today, which includes Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Israel. That's where farming was invented. About 8,000 years ago, the weather became a lot cooler. There was another ice age for a very short amount of time, and this forced people to start to migrate to look for new lands.

People in the Near East went off to Europe. These people were very lucky because the geography of Europe was not that different from the geography of the Near East. They could take their religion, they could take their technology, move over to Europe, and still be about the same. There were some minor changes, but they were more or less the same. These people were very lucky.

The Religion and Society of Old Europe

As Marija Gimbutas said, these people had the same religion as the people of the Near East. They worshipped the Mother Goddess, who gives life to everything. They believed in the ideas of unity. Unity just means that we are the same. Every one of us is the same. We have a responsibility to love each other and to love each other's children. We're the same as animals. We're the same as plants.

We must do our best to protect nature. The farms allow us to eat food, but we should not destroy nature. We should protect nature because all are the children of the Mother Goddess. We also believe in balance and harmony.

This is the religion of many indigenous peoples around the world. If you go to Africa, Australia, the Amazon, and you meet these indigenous peoples, they have the same religion, which is we come from a Mother Goddess, and we have a responsibility to protect nature, the Earth, because that's the gift from the Mother Goddess. Everyone has a soul, so after we die, our soul still lives on. This is the religion of Old Europe.

Because of this religion, they were egalitarian, meaning there was no real difference between men and women. In fact, because women have the power to give birth, to give life, they were considered in many ways superior to men, and the political class was mainly governed by women.

They were peaceful. They really didn't have to fight each other because they felt their resources were enough for them. They were artistic, so they focused their intellectual energies on creating art to celebrate the Mother Goddess and their religion. The people of the Near East and the people of Europe were very similar.

The Crucible of the Steppes

The problem starts when these people went off to what we call the steppes. The steppes are a huge ocean of grassland that extends from Europe into Mongolia. The problem with the grassland is people can't eat grass, and you cannot grow crops on grassland that easily. The people on the steppes struggled to survive. The people on the steppes engaged in a process we call social evolution.

You may have heard the term evolution. I want to explain what the term evolution means for us. For us, evolution means:

Open Cooperative Competition

Evolution has historically been the greatest source of human innovation and creativity. Let me explain why. Open means there's no central authority. There's no great power. There's no hegemon. Everyone's competing against each other.

Competition just means these many different people are trying to compete to survive. There are very scarce resources in the steppes. It's not as wealthy as the Near East and Europe, and they're all trying to survive. They all adopt different strategies in order to survive.

At the same time, cooperative means they're still communicating with each other. They're still trading. They're still friends. Maybe they'll exchange wives, exchange presents. This is a process of social evolution that has created the most innovation in human history.

Historical Parallels of Innovation

In Chinese history, this most resembles what period? Which part of Chinese history has this process, where you have many different people in open competition with each other, but still learning from each other? Exactly right. That's where most of Chinese innovation and creativity came from. Confucius came from that period, Laozi. A lot of major intellectual breakthroughs came from that period.

We will also look at two other major periods where there was a major outburst of innovation, and they have a very similar social structure to this.

• We will also be studying the Greek city-states. We will spend a lot of time on the Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta and Thebes because, before, we actually thought the origin of Western civilization was the Greek city-states. We no longer believe that, but for the longest time, we believed Western civilization came from the Greek city-states. When you look at the Greek city-states, you will discover the system they had back then is very similar to this system.
• We also look at the Sumerian city-states, which are very similar to the Greek city-states.

1. I want you to remember the first important principle: whenever there's an Open Cooperative Competition, tremendous innovation happens. That's the first principle I want you to remember.
2. The second principle I want you to remember is eventually someone triumphs in this competition. The people that triumph are the people who are most open to adopting innovation in order to destroy others. They're the most ruthless in adopting all innovations for the sole purpose of destroying others and becoming the sole hegemon.

We saw this with the Greek city-states, where for hundreds of years they were in competition with each other. Then there was a people called the Macedonians, who weren't actually Greek. They were marginal to the Greek city-states, and the Greeks didn't really consider the Macedonians part of their civilization.

But they were on the outskirts, and they observed all the innovations that the Greek city-states were creating, especially in terms of military innovation. They adopted all the innovations for their purposes and then conquered the city-states before they moved on and conquered Persia and Egypt.

The leader of the Macedonians was called—do you guys know who was the leader of the Macedonians who conquered the Greek city-states? I'm sure you know who he is, but you may not know he was Macedonian. Who's the most famous Greek you've heard of? He was actually Macedonian: Alexander the Great.

What's amazing is we see the same pattern play out with the Sumerian city-states, where for 100 years, the city-states were in competition with each other. They were all trying to conquer each other without success. Then an outside people, a neighbor called the Akkadians, adopted all the innovation and technology of the Sumerian city-states. They conquered the Sumerian city-states and established the first great world empire, called the Akkadian Empire.

The founder of this empire is called Sargon the Great. Sargon the Great is considered the world's very first empire-builder.

Even though we know almost nothing about what was happening here, from our knowledge of the Greek city-states and the Sumerian city-states and what happened to them, we can guess or hypothesize the same process played out here, where these different tribes, different groups were creating all sorts of different innovations. Then one outside group came in, adopted all the innovations, and then conquered everyone. These people are who we call the Yamnaya, who we believe originated in Ukraine.

The Innovations of the Steppe Peoples

Let's discuss the innovations that these people created. The innovations were pretty incredible because they forever transformed human history.

• The first innovation they adopted was a pastoral economy. A pastoral economy, raising or herding cattle or cows. We cannot eat grass, but cows and sheep and goats can eat grass, and then we can eat the cows, the goats and the sheep.
  
  What these people realized is they can take the cows, the goats and the sheep from the farmers, because there's a lot of trading back then, and then raise them in the steppes. Because there's so much grass, they'll grow very fast, and then you can use that as the source of your food. They created a new economy.
• The second innovation is what they then realized: "You know what? We can also drink their milk." Dairy. This is important because, for most of human history, we could not drink milk because we were lactose intolerant. In fact, most people in the world today are still lactose intolerant. But they developed the enzymes, the peptides, in order to drink milk. They became lactose tolerant. That's their second big innovation, the ability to drink milk.

If you're able to eat protein, and you drink milk a lot, what happens to your body? What happens to your body? Exactly. You become very tall, very strong. Because of these two innovations, the people in the steppes were on average, just average, 20 centimeters taller than the farmers in the Near East and in Europe. 20 centimeters is a lot, guys. The reason why is the farmers did not eat meat mostly, and they could not drink milk. They ate vegetables.

• The third big innovation is the domestication of the horse. The reason why is the grassland is huge, and they needed to travel huge distances to trade, to communicate. They started to domesticate the horse. It's very hard to domesticate the horse because horses are programmed, hardwired to run away from humans. If they see a threat, they run away.
• This process, we believe, took at least 3,000 years, but they kept on trying because the ability to ride horses was very important for their society and their economy. Now they have the ability to ride horses. That's the third big innovation.
  
  Then they invented the wheel. Why this is important is if you have the horse and the wheel, you can create the wagon. If you have the wagon, it means you are no longer stuck in one place. You can move from place to place. This is what we call the nomadic pastoral economy.
  
  They're able to move from place to place because what happens is you have a lot of cows, they're going to eat all the grass. Now you have to move somewhere else for them to eat the grass.

A New Economy, Society, and Religion

The problem with this is, if you move from place to place and the cows are eating all the grass, what happens? Usually conflict, because you are now in competition for what we call grazing rights. If your cows go into a grassland and they eat all that grass, that's preventing other people from going in and having their cows eat that grass. Now they're fighting over land and grazing rights.

What else are they now going to fight over? How about cows? Because in this economy, one way to survive is to feed your cows. What's another way to survive? What else can you do in this economy, in this world? Steal other people's cows.

The protection of the cows meant there was a greater emphasis on men. Remember, in this society, in the Near East, in Europe, these are agricultural societies. For them, what mattered was life-giving, giving birth and maintaining a harmonious society, so women were more important. But in this society, where there's a lot of violence, there's a lot of conflict, men became more important.

With these innovations, they started to change their economy, their society and their religion. Economy, society and religion.

Economy: Private Property

In terms of the economy, the first major change from this society is the idea of private property. Because cows are private wealth, and you have to protect that wealth. That's the first major innovation, the idea of private property, where this belongs to you and only you, and not to society or to the Mother Goddess. That's very different from the farmers in Europe, who have no concept of private property.

Society: Patriarchy and Primogeniture

From the idea of private property, the society changes and becomes a patriarchy, where men are in control. With a patriarchy and private property, the problem now is one of inheritance. Let's just say I have 10 sons, and I have 100 cattle, and I die. Who gets my cattle? Who gets my wealth? It has to be the older son. Why the elder son? Why?

Exactly. We need 100 cattle to survive as a family. If I start splitting the wealth up between the 10 sons, we become a lot poorer. The 10 sons have 10 sons, then by the third generation, everyone has one head of cattle, so everyone's now poor. The only way to solve this problem is if I, the patriarch, the father, give everything to the eldest son. This is what we call primogeniture.

This is a new innovation, primogeniture, where the eldest inherits everything. The problem is, what happens to the other nine sons? Exactly. The elder son gets everything, and the nine other sons, too bad. You have to go build your own wealth, and that means stealing cows from other people. This creates a war culture.

This is a society which honors men above women, which has private property and celebrates private property, which encourages young men to go out and expand their civilization and fight wars.

Religion: The Sky Father

1. If you're making these changes, you now have to change the religion. Their religion makes major changes to the Mother Goddess religion. The first major change is who's now God. Who do they now worship? A man, because men fight wars. They worship someone called the Sky Father, and he's the source of who the Greeks call Zeus, the thunder god, and who the Romans called Jupiter, also the thunder god. The first god is called the Sky Father. That's the first change.
2. The second change is whereas the Mother Goddess gave us everything, nature, the Sky Father gave us cows, cattle, money and wealth.
3. The third change is whereas the Mother Goddess asked us to love everything and protect everything, the Sky Father asks us to fight each other for the right to have wealth. That's now their new religion. They adopted this new religion.

These are all major innovations. Again, the one group who came in and adopted all these innovations are called the Yamnaya. If you're a group and you adopt most of these innovations, but not all these innovations, then you're going to lose to the group called the Yamnaya, who adopt all the innovations. This is what we call social evolution.

When they adopt all these innovations, what happens is their religion becomes aligned with their society, which becomes aligned with the economy. This is a people who are obsessed with collecting wealth and fighting wars and expanding into new territories.

Over a process of a few thousand years, they conquered the steppes. Their culture spread throughout the steppes. It doesn't mean they're one people. It means they're one culture practicing the same beliefs. These are the Yamnaya people. This is what they believe. This is where they came from. This is how they behave.

How the Yamnaya Conquered Europe

The next thing I'm going to look at is how these people conquered Europe. I already said the Yamnaya are stronger and bigger and more militaristic than the farmers of Old Europe. But what advantage do the people of Europe have over the Yamnaya? What's the major advantage that Europe had? If you have farming, what happens to your population? It grows very fast. In other words, Europe has more population than the steppes.

In theory, the Yamnaya have this warlike religion, they're extremely militaristic, they're very strong, but in theory Europe could have withstood the assault of the Yamnaya because Europe has more people. The question now is, how did the Yamnaya conquer Europe?

What's a problem with people who live on farms? What's their ultimate problem? The plague. Because you're living next to pig pens and rats, and there's a lot of garbage around, so it's very easy for diseases to spread. We believe two things happened to reduce the population of Europe significantly.

The Plague

The first thing that happened was the plague, and this wiped out entire communities. The thing is, though, the plague spread around the world. What's important to remember is these people in the steppes, in the Near East, in Europe, were all in contact with each other because they were trading with each other. The plague, we know from DNA research, was in Europe, the Near East and the steppes.

Why did it wipe out the population of Europe but not the population of the steppes, even though the plague was everywhere? Why? The answer is because the people in Europe were living in one place, whereas the people of the steppes were moving from place to place.

Even though the plague did impact the people in the steppes, the impact was far greater in Europe. In fact, we believe that most of the people were wiped out by the plague in Europe. That reduced the population significantly. That's the first thing that happened in Europe.

Climate Change

The second thing that happened in Europe is what we call climate change. About 5,000, 6,000 years ago, there was a mini-ice age in Europe. If you're a farmer, that's really bad for you because you can't grow crops. It's bad for you if you live in the steppes because a lot of your crops will die, but not as bad.

The other thing is that because of climate change, people in the steppes were now forced to expand further into Europe. This is what we think happened. Three things destroyed Europe. The first thing is the plague. That's actually the most important thing because it wiped out most of the people.

Think of when Europe conquered North and South America. What killed most people in North and South America was actually the plague. Europeans had these diseases they brought over, and that killed most of the local population. The plague was the main culprit that destroyed Old Europe. Then climate change, and then finally, you have people who came into Europe and started to colonize Europe and destroy the local population.

The Conquest

Let me explain why the Yamnaya decided to kill the people, the farmers of Europe. Let's just say that you're in Europe. You have a village, maybe 100 men, 100 women. You have 100 young men who have no wealth and no wives. What do they want to do? If you're a young man, you have no wife and you have no wealth, what do you want to do? You want to steal other people's wives and property.

They came in. What do they do? You have 100 men and 100 women in this village, so what do you do? They killed the men, and then they married all the women. That's what happened.

There are some circumstances when they came in, because again, this is a culture. This is not one people. It's a culture of people, and they adopted different strategies. Some of them decided to come in and said, "Listen, we'll take all the women, and we'll let the men go."

What did these men do in response? What would you do? They went to get their neighbors, got a thousand of them, came back and killed everyone. This was a violent, violent process, with violence on both sides.

Eventually, the Yamnaya conquered all of Europe. They even got to England. They conquered England. Not only did they conquer Europe, then they went to conquer India and Iran. This spread everywhere, even Mongolia, but not to China.

Why Couldn't the Yamnaya Conquer China?

Why didn't it impact China? What are the reasons why the Yamnaya could not conquer China? What's between India and China? They conquered India. If you have horses, you can't cross the Himalayas. That's what saved China, the geography.

Also, China had a huge population, so even if they came, the population could have repulsed the attack. China was not conquered by the Yamnaya. China, for most of its history, was isolated from the rest of the world.

A New World Order

This conquest meant now there's a common language among all these people in India, in Iran, in the steppes, basically Russia, in the Near East and in Europe. This language is what we call Proto-Indo-European. That's the language they spoke. Now they have a common religion.

From this point on, this world, stretching from Europe all the way to India, was in constant communication with each other, trading ideas, people and gods. This is what we call today the West, and it's distinct from China, which was isolated from this world.

The Mongolian people are descended from the Yamnaya, yes. If you think about it, the Mongolian people are very similar to the Yamnaya. The Mongolians are also nomadic pastoral people who are also very much warlike. In fact, Genghis Khan adopted very similar policies as the Yamnaya. We'll see a lot of similarities between Genghis Khan and his conquest and the Yamnaya conquest of the world at this time, about 4,000 or 5,000 years ago.

The Plague and the European Population

Yes, the plague killed most Europeans. Yes, because Europeans were living on farms. They were living together. Because it reduced the population of Europe, they were less able to resist invasion.

The plague was all around the world. This is actually the bubonic plague. The bubonic plague is spread by rats, and we have DNA of this plague. We know the bubonic plague has been with us for the longest time.

The plague kills people who live closely together because then it's easier to transmit the disease. If you live closely together, you're much more likely to catch the disease and die. But if you live far apart, then you're less likely to catch the disease.

In Europe, people were living on farms, and there's like 10,000 people who might live on a farm. That's a lot of people who live very closely together. They're also living with animals, so it's very unclean. But if you're living in the steppes, first of all, you're living far apart. That's the first thing.

The second thing is your life is much more hygienic because you're not living with pigs and rats. The third thing is your body is a lot stronger. You're drinking milk. You're getting a lot of physical exercise. These people are less likely to die from the plague.

Basically, everyone in Europe, except for a few people, is a descendant of the Yamnaya. The Indian people, the Iranian people, are also considered descendants of the Yamnaya.

The Farmers in Europe

When they came, these farmers in Europe, there were maybe three major responses. The first response is, "Let's fight them," and then they got killed. The second response is, "Let's try to cooperate with them." The third major response is, "Let's move somewhere else."

The people who moved to islands, for example, there's an island called Sardinia in Italy. It's an island. They survived against the Yamnaya, and they have less Yamnaya DNA than other people. But if you can't run off to an island, you're going to get wiped out. Basically, all Europe was conquered by the Yamnaya. When you look at that DNA evidence, it's pretty stark.

Adapting to Different Territories

This process took a long time, hundreds of years. During this time, this is the spread of a culture, so it's not one people. It's not one nation. As they conquered different territories, they had to adapt themselves to that territory because the geography is different. In the steppes, you're leading a nomadic pastoral lifestyle, and at first they tried that.

For example, we have evidence that in Norway, which is in North Europe, they burned down all the forests because they were trying to replicate their homeland. But eventually, they discovered this is not going to work. It's too hard. Then they started to mix their lifestyle with the local lifestyle, and they became more focused on agriculture.

As they kept on spreading, they also stole the technology of the local people. Even though the Yamnaya people had no shipbuilding technology, they couldn't sail the seas, they were able to conquer people off the coast who did have access to the sea and who did have boats. Then they stole the technology. They killed the people, and they learned the technology.

Once they had the technology, then they sailed off to England and killed everyone in England. It's a very slow process, and these are different groups of Yamnaya.

When you think of Western civilization, the Greeks, the Romans, they all come from this world. What the Yamnaya did is create a new history for humanity. Before the Yamnaya, humans were egalitarian, peaceful and artistic. Now, with the Yamnaya, you have patriarchy, you have war, you have money. But before, we didn't have these concepts. This marks a new history for humanity.