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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.

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Don't get me wrong - I recognize that. And it is still hard for me to imagine!
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Hard for you to imagine because you live in a modern society and your next meal is guaranteed. You don't have to traverse hundreds of miles on foot in the face of drought, wildfire, famine, disease, war, etc to find some food source to sustain yourself and some shelter free of attacks by random tribal conflict.
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> Hard for you to imagine because you live in a modern society and your next meal is guaranteed.

It is easy to reduce people to caricatures when we don't know them. Since we aren't at a happy hour regaling each other over the craziness of lives lived, I'll be brief: there have been periods of life where this assertion wasn't true.

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Your next meal is guaranteed in a way that you can't possibly relate to what someone 2000-8000 years ago had to fear.
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I'm not understanding what you are trying to say in your comment? That you can't imagine "tomrod" or other hackernews commentariat have ever gone hungry for an extended period? That you can't imagine a modern community facing food insecurity, drought, war, or other maladies?

Communities built themselves around food production and child rearing 2000-8000 years ago as they nominally do today. I think you may be overstating the disparity in experiencing the negatives (drought, disaster, and war) and ignoring that these conditions also happen today and sometimes also don't get resolved -- people die, starve, drink poisoned water, and so forth.

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Like when the Zionists with European and US help cut off food from entering Gaza for a few months last year? That is modern society.

Give me an idyllic migration through bountiful pastures 20,000 years ago any day. Many hunter-gatherers work less than 40 hours a week, less than a worker in our modern society, who did not get laid off in past years as so many on this board were.

The original affluent society as it has been called.

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Some el nino, volcano or other cause drought in entire region may have wiped out entire communities. 20k years ago was also much more colder with ie massive glaciers ie in much of central Europe.

Every hunt was fight for life and survival, any injury could be fatal and treatment was practically non existent, broken foot was almost sute death sentence. Winter (and each one was harsh) was barely survived in bitter 24/7 cold and a lot of starvation outside of tropical regions.

You have no actual clue nor imagination with your first world whining about toils of office work which you can easily abandon and not be dead with your family within 2 weeks. You can definitely do better than that.

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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.
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> completely true. No society is innocent of this.

Perhaps in history. But we humans have the ability to think and adjust our behavior. We didn't kill all the horse-people when we invented the car. It's likely that in the future we could be able to move past all the horrible things we do to each other.

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That is my hope. While it won't be utopia, how much better would we be if our small "tribes" grow to be humanity and life in general.
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sure but i was talking against singling any society out
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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.
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How does this jive with the inland Papuan tribes in Papua New Guinea? They were quite isolated and from what I read they can be just as violent (of course, not on the scale of mechanized slaughter by moderns)
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> Papuan tribes

The smallest definition of a tribe is usually 500 people. They can be 10 tines that size. Tribes did not exist until about 10,000 years ago. They were preceded by hunter-gatherer bands.

The inland Papuan group most associated with violence are the Enga, but they are not migratory hunter-gatheree bands. They are farmers who grow sweet potatoes and raise pigs.

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It depends on what you mean, as I did not argue that life for the average person in a traditional society was filled with violence.

What I argued is that whenever two competing groups came into contact, wanting the same land, the result was usually genocide (or one of the groups fled to another area, where they would have to fight those inhabitants), and as a result, when history records a new group "inhabiting" or "settling" a peace of land that is new to them, then that inhabitation is generally not peaceful, but genocidal in nature. Regardless of whether there is a written history to record the violence, we can have confidence that the violence did occur.

Now, given that modern humans have been around for 300,000 years at least (the date keeps being pushed back, since before the Moroccan discovery, it was thought to be 100,000 years), and have been swarming over the whole earth, that is a lot of violence and genocide, even though it was certainly possible to live a life of peace as well for a specific individual, since migrations weren't going on all the time in all places.

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Skeletons from 100,000 years ago look similar to our own, and as you said, recent discoveries could push that back to 300,000 years ago.

There is little evidence of behavioral modernity - cave paintings, Venus figurines, hearths, burials etc. prior to 50,000 years ago. There is some evidence so the time could always be pushed back.

Farmers compete for land. Migratory hunter-gatherers are just passing through, so there is less competition for land. Also, bands usually mate with nearby bands, who are often more distant relatives.

There has not been much evidence of hunter-gatherer bands clashing violently then or even in modern times, including observations over past centuries. There is a plethora of evidence of post-neolithic farming and then industrial societies being this way.

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