Civilization #5: The Yamnaya Conquest of Europe

Anthropologist Marija Gimbutas makes the argument that for the longest time—for most of its history—Europe was egalitarian, peaceful, and artistic. Today, however, we live in a patriarchy with a lot of inequality, and we are always at war with each other. So, what changed? Old Europe was conquered by a warlike people who we call today the Yamnaya.

This discussion will answer three questions:

1. Who were the Yamnaya?
2. Where did they come from?
3. 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—the technology of farming. This was because humans are a religious people, and farming allows us to celebrate our religion. The reason farming was founded in the Near East is that, 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 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.

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, so they could take their religion and 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.

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—that we are all 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. Farms allow us to eat food, but we should not destroy nature; we should protect it because it's all from the Mother Goddess.

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

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 and give life, they were considered in many ways superior to men, and the political class was mainly governed by women. They were peaceful; they didn't have to fight each other because they felt their resources were enough for them. And they were artistic, so they focused their intellectual energies on creating art to celebrate the Mother Goddess and their religion.

The Crucible of the Steppes

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

You may have heard the term evolution. For our purposes, evolution means:

Open Cooperative Competition

Evolution has historically been the greatest source of human innovation and creativity. Let me explain. Open means there's no central authority, no great power, no hegemon; everyone's competing against each other. Competition 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. They all adopt different strategies in order to survive. At the same time, Cooperative means they're still communicating with each other, trading, and remaining friends—maybe they'll exchange wives or exchange presents. This process of social evolution has created the most innovation in human history.

Historical Parallels of Innovation

In Chinese history, this most resembles the Warring States period. That's where most of Chinese innovation and creativity came from. Confucius came from that period, as did Laozi. A lot of major intellectual breakthroughs came from that period.

But it wasn't only the Warring States period of China. 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.

• We will be studying the Greek city-states. We will spend a lot of time on the Greek city-states like Athens, Sparta, and Thebes because, for the longest time, we believed the origin of Western civilization was 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.
• We will also look at the Sumerian city-states, which are very similar to the Greek city-states.

I want you to remember two important principles.

1. Whenever there's an Open Cooperative Competition, tremendous innovation happens.
2. Eventually, someone triumphs in this competition. The group that triumphs 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 Alexander the Great.

We see the same pattern play out with the Sumerian city-states. For hundreds of years, the city-states were in competition with each other, 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 then conquered the Sumerian city-states and established the first great world empire, called the Akkadian Empire. The founder of this empire, we will learn, 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 on the Steppes, from our knowledge of the Greek and Sumerian city-states, we can hypothesize the same process played out there. Different tribes and groups were creating all sorts of different innovations. Then one outside group came in, adopted all the innovations, and conquered everyone. These people are who we call the Yamnaya, who we believe originated in Ukraine.

The Innovations of the Steppe Peoples

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

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

Because of these two innovations, the people on the Steppes were, on average, 20 centimeters taller than the farmers in the Near East and in Europe. 20 centimeters is a lot. The reason is that the farmers did not eat meat mostly, and they could not drink milk; they ate vegetables.

• Domestication of the Horse: The third big innovation is the domestication of the horse. The grassland is huge, and they needed to travel huge distances to trade and communicate. So they started to domesticate the horse. It's very hard to domesticate the horse because horses are hardwired to run away from humans. If they see a threat, they run away. We believe this process 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.
• The Wheel and the Wagon: Then they invented the wheel. This is important because 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 were able to move from place to place because if 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 that if you move from place to place and the cows are eating all the grass, conflict usually happens. You are now in competition for what we call grazing rights. If your cows go into a grassland and eat all that grass, that's preventing other people from going in and having their cows eat that grass. So now they're fighting over land and grazing rights. What else are they now going to fight over? Cows. In this economy, one way to survive is to feed your cows. What's another way to survive? Steal other people's cows.

The protection of the cows meant there was a greater emphasis on men. Remember, in the agricultural societies of the Near East and Europe, 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 and conflict, men became more important. With these innovations, they started to change their economy, society, and religion.

Economy: The first major change from the farming society is the idea of private property. 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 had no concept of private property.

Society: 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 100 cattle, and I die. Who gets my cattle? Who gets my wealth? It has to be the older son. 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. If the 10 sons have 10 sons, then by the third generation, everyone has one 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? The elder son gets everything, and for the nine other sons, it's too bad. You have to go build your own wealth, and that means basically 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 it, and which encourages young men to go out and expand their civilization and fight wars.

Religion: If you're making these changes, you now have to change the religion. Their religion makes major changes to the Mother Goddess religion.

1. The first major change is who is now God. They now worship a man because men fight wars. They worship someone called the Sky Father. He's the source of who the Greeks call Zeus, the thunder god, and who the Romans called Jupiter, also the thunder god.
2. The second change is that whereas the Mother Goddess gave us everything, like nature, the Sky Father gave us cows, cattle, money, and wealth.
3. The third change is that 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.

They adopted this new religion. These are all major innovations. 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 of them, 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 adopted all these innovations, their religion became aligned with their society, which became aligned with their economy. This is a people who are obsessed with collecting wealth, 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. This doesn't mean they're one people; it means they're one culture practicing the same beliefs.

How the Yamnaya Conquered Europe

The Yamnaya are stronger, bigger, and more militaristic than the farmers of Old Europe. But what advantage did the people of Europe have over the Yamnaya? If you have farming, your population grows very fast. In other words, Europe had a larger population than the Steppes. In theory, Europe could have withstood the assault of the Yamnaya because Europe had more people. So the question now is, how did the Yamnaya conquer Europe?

What's a problem with people who live on farms? The plague. Because you're living next to pig pens and rats, and there's a lot of garbage around, 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 plague spread around the world. It's important to remember that these people in the Steppes, the Near East, and Europe were all in contact with each other because they were trading. We know from DNA research that the plague 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? 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 on the Steppes, the impact was far greater in Europe. In fact, we believe that most of the people in Europe were wiped out by the plague. This was the bubonic plague, spread by rats, and we have DNA of this plague. It kills people who live closely together because 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, you're less likely to catch it.

In Europe, people were living on farms, and maybe 10,000 people might live on a farm. That's a lot of people living very closely together. They're also living with animals, so it's very unclean. But if you're living on the Steppes, first of all, you're living far apart. Second, your life is much more hygienic because you're not living with pigs and rats. Third, your body is a lot stronger; you're drinking milk and getting a lot of physical exercise. These people were less likely to die from the plague.

Climate Change

The second thing that happened in Europe is what we call Climate Change. About 5,000 to 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 on the Steppes because a lot of your crops will die, but not as bad. The other thing is that because of climate change, people on the Steppes were now forced to expand further into Europe.

We think 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 came climate change, and then finally, you have these people who came into Europe and started to colonize it and destroy the local population.

The Conquest

Let's just say that in Europe, you have a village with maybe 100 men and 100 women. You have 100 young Yamnaya men who have no wealth and no wives. What do they want to do? If you're a young man with no wife and no wealth, you want to steal other people's wives and property. So they came in. What did they do? They killed the men and married all the women. That's what happened.

There are some circumstances where they came in—because again, this is a culture, not one people, and they adopted different strategies. Some of them decided to come in and say, "Listen, we'll take all the women, and we'll let the men go." What did these men do in response? They went to get their neighbors, got a thousand of them, came back, and killed everyone. This was a 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, but they then went on to conquer India and Iran. This spread everywhere, even to Mongolia, but not to China.

Why couldn't the Yamnaya conquer China?

What's between India and China? They conquered India, but why couldn't they conquer China? 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 the Yamnaya came, the population could have repulsed the attack. China, for most of its history, was isolated from the rest of the world.

A New World Order

This conquest meant there was now a common language among all these people in India, Iran, the Steppes (basically Russia), the Near East, and Europe. This language is what we call Proto-Indo-European. They now had 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.

What happened to the original farmers of Europe?

When the Yamnaya came, the farmers in Europe had maybe three major responses. The first response was to fight them, and they got killed. The second response was to try to cooperate with them. The third major response was to move somewhere else. The people who moved to islands survived. For example, there's an island called Sardinia in Italy. They survived against the Yamnaya and have less Yamnaya DNA than other people. But if you couldn't run off to an island, you were going to get wiped out. Basically, all of Europe was conquered by the Yamnaya. When you look at the DNA evidence, it's pretty stark. Everyone in Europe, except for a few people, are the descendants of the Yamnaya. The Indian and Iranian people are also considered descendants of the Yamnaya.

How did the Yamnaya adapt as they spread?

This process took a long time—hundreds of years. During this time, this was the spread of a culture, not one people or one nation. As they conquered different territories, they had to adapt themselves to that territory because the geography is different. On 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 Northern Europe, they burned down all the forests because they were trying to replicate their homeland. But then eventually, they discovered this was not going to work; it was too hard. So they started to mix their lifestyle with the local lifestyle and 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. They stole the technology, killed the people, and learned the technology. Once they had the technology, they sailed off to England and killed everyone in England. It was a very slow process, and these were different groups of Yamnaya.

When you think of Western civilization—the Greeks, the Romans—they all come from this world. Basically, 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, war, and money. Before, we didn't have these concepts. This marks a new history for humanity.