Pre-/his/tory Thread

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>>3145062
The world's first empire was the Egyptian one

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>>3145062
Scots invented toilets

>>3145062
bumping for interest

>>3145164
i second this

I don't have any academic work to link to or recommend, but this is an interesting and well-reasoned post on the topic:
http://www.razib.com/wordpress/?cat=2670

Not related directly to any of the questions in the OP, but most of the new genetic evidence is telling us that "pots, not peoples" was a very misguided idea: population replacement really did happen in this era, and often corresponded with changes in material culture. The Bell Beaker people basically genocided the previous inhabitants of the British Isles (http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-bell-beaker-behemoth_10.html). On the other hand, the spread of Bell-Beaker culture to the Iberian peninsula was not accompanied by a major genetic change in the population, though it's possible that a new elite brought it with them.

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>>3145225
>On the other hand, the spread of Bell-Beaker culture to the Iberian peninsula was not accompanied by a major genetic change in the population

Same in Sardinia

I wonder why the British natives were so easily killed

>>3145225
bell beaker culture started in portugal

>>3145259
>Sardinians
Forgot to talk about EEF/First Farmers in the OP.
They were the OG colonizers--not just the Mediterranean littoral, but most of Western Europe as well. Some things that were once controversial about them are now clear:
1. It was a true demic expansion, not just the diffusion of the idea of farming.
2. They didn't speak indo-european.

But we still know very little about them given that a huge chunk of the ancestry of modern Europeans derives from this group. Anyone have more?

>>3145313
Can't find a cite but I remember reading recently that an Iberian origin is looking increasingly unlikely. Central Europe probably.

>>3145155
>Orkney
>Scottish

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>>3145327
Sardinians are closer to European Neolithic farmers than pure Anatolian ones

>>3145545
Anatolia_N and Europe_EN are virtually identical on that plot, and Sardinians are clearly the modern pop closest to both of them.

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>>3145062
?

Who were the Maykop and what did they want?

>>3145545
>>3145578
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5003663/
Anatolia as the source of the earliest European farmers isn't controversial at this point.

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>>3145589
Dunno but I like their art. The Caucasus is weird.

>>3145062
At most you could say that uruk was a trade empire.

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?

>>3145611
How would you refute Razib's theory? He's not a specialist but it seems plausible enough.
>>3145225

>>3145654
They established trade colonies. They wouldn't have controlled the surrounding areas outside of trade routes. The population was probably made up of people from uruk as a way to relieve overpopulation. This is a problem that ultimately caused the collapse of the temple economy and the priest kings and led to the formation of the big men or what we would call kings today. As for the surrounding areas i couldn't say anything about them or their populations

>>3145654
He's also just listing things from a book. It is a good read and i would recommend it

>>3145956
Here's the book

>>3146047
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00603KW4U/geneexpressio-20

>>3145956
Except, contra Kriwaczek, he argues that they probably WEREN'T just trade colonies or local emulation.
Uruk could have been an entity like the Maurya Empire (and many other pre-modern empires) where only scattered urban strong points were directly controlled from the metropole and the lands in between were probably left to their own devices besides nominally acknowledging Uruk hegemony.

>>3146113
Kriwaczek doesn't go into genetics. Every thing the blogger talks About when it comes to genetics is from another source

>>3146126
What i was trying to say is that there probably wasn't done genocide. They just sent their own people to build colonies as those early Sumerian cities were plagued with over population problems.

>>3146138
*some

>>3145062
> What was Southern China like before Han cultural/demographic expansion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu_(state)#Culture

>>3145077
This always blows my mind at how sophisticated cultures were so long ago.