Before agriculture, supply trains weren't a thing. How much less wouldn't they have been a thing before language.
It's not that I think ancient people were nice, far from it. But "vast clashes" suggest armies, wars of extinction etc. and those wouldn't have been a thing for economic and logistic reasons. Your tribe might have been better at killing than your neighboring tribe, but they weren't a thousand times better at it.
Even into recent prehistory, this was true. I speak a language descendend from more or less invading steppe peoples (as do we all here), but they're just a small part of my genetic ancestry. That is actually still mostly from European hunter-gatherers. My Y-DNA is from EHGs too, like the majority in my country, so there clearly wasn't the stereotypical "taking all the women as slaves" event that many imagine either.
Agriculture and horses gave some people from outside a big advantage, sure, big enough to dominate in many ways, but not big enough to wholesale replace the people who lived in this part of the world already. "Vast clashes" is not the right way of thinking about how some early hominids replaced others.
Before agriculture, supply trains weren't a thing. How much less wouldn't they have been a thing before language.
It's not that I think ancient people were nice, far from it. But "vast clashes" suggest armies, wars of extinction etc. and those wouldn't have been a thing for economic and logistic reasons. Your tribe might have been better at killing than your neighboring tribe, but they weren't a thousand times better at it.
Even into recent prehistory, this was true. I speak a language descendend from more or less invading steppe peoples (as do we all here), but they're just a small part of my genetic ancestry. That is actually still mostly from European hunter-gatherers. My Y-DNA is from EHGs too, like the majority in my country, so there clearly wasn't the stereotypical "taking all the women as slaves" event that many imagine either.
Agriculture and horses gave some people from outside a big advantage, sure, big enough to dominate in many ways, but not big enough to wholesale replace the people who lived in this part of the world already. "Vast clashes" is not the right way of thinking about how some early hominids replaced others.