A barbarian tribe's mythic origin story is true, ancient DNA reveals
science.org
science.org
For those that don't know about him:
- he was an ancient historian
- he made a lot of "wild claims" e.g. there was a tribe that made clothes out of human skin
- historians assumed these were myths or exaggerated
- recent research has shown that many of his wild claims were true (even the one above) [1]
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
1 - https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-scythians-us...
As a result, you got stories about dog sized ants that were nonsense but then also stories that were legit.
People tend to be rather binary with how they process information, so when there's things that are wrong they group everything in the 'wrong' category.
Definitely a lot of false negatives with how Herodotus was regarded. Much like how the prevailing consensus was that Troy was a fictional city until it was discovered.
Which if described by others and you never have seen them, they sound like mythological creatures
So a sort of one-man Greek Facebook then?
I've been re-reading Herodotus and his work is actually pretty good for its time. You just have to remember that he, just like a modern day travel blogger, both sees the world through the lens of an upper class Greek and also has to keep his audience engaged with cool trivia and clickbait.
He was pretty open about the fact that he basically wrote down any interesting stories, and was not attempting to find some historical truth, but instead transition as much as possible from oral tradition to written.
He mostly gets called the father of history for this semi-novel take. That you can (and in most cases, should) strive for recorder and interpreter to be separate tasks.
> In 251 C.E., Roman Emperor Decius, his son, and most of his army were killed fighting Goths in what is today Romania, in one of the empire’s greatest defeats.
Envision the black Eyeliner
All this to say that I am envisioning quite easily.
If they are bandido, casco, tregua they are identical to the Italian bandito, casco, tregua. The only difference is a d/t. Actually in Italy a cyclist and a worker wear a casco, but a soldier wears an elmetto.
I googled the etymology of casco and it comes from Latin but it came to Italy from Spain a few centuries ago. So I wonder what other word for helmet they use in Spain, that originated in the Goth language.
There are plenty of other warlike terms in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_terms_derive... such as gaita (bagpipes).
>The "ez" signifies "son of". The name Rodrigo is the Spanish form of the German name Roderich, meaning "rich in fame", from the Gothic elements "hrod" (fame or glory) and "ric" (rich). It was the name of Roderic, the last Visigothic King before the Muslim conquest, and the subject of many legends. The surname Rodríguez could have originated in the 9th century when patronymic names originated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodr%C3%ADguez_(surname)
The Visigoths directly ruled in Iberia so that's an example of the "elite influence" spreading culture and language.
> The findings challenge decades of scholarship that played down the importance of migration and emphasized the spread of language and culture between settled populations.“
> “What the genotyping is showing is what the ancient sources report, and what late–20th century historiography has been working very hard to deny,” says Yale University historian Noel Lenski, who was not involved in the work. “We have to … admit the sources knew more than we thought they did.”
If I'm reading that right they are implying academics were pushing the idea of cultural exchange being the most valuable thing, a vague menagerie of local and foreign cultures coming together, rather than a specific set of people arriving from a far off land to dominant an existing empire and influencing the entire region in the process.
> In the beginning, there was a big migration, but later they started mingling, and the transmission of Gothic was more of a cultural nature.
In this comment section it seems people really want it to be one or the other, evidence be damned.
I.e it wasn't fashionable, didn't make for good career advancement for anyone to look into it let alone say it.
>In this comment section it seems people really want it to be one or the other, evidence be damned.
I'm just here to remind everyone that the "professionals" are fallible and subject to industry circle jerks.
You rushed here to slander people working in the field without familiarizing yourself with the first things about it. Shame on you.
I am no expert, but here's Michael Kulikowski's argument quoted from the wiki page on the debate:
[Heather] is right to try to deduce governing apparatus from the actions that kings and chieftains were able to compel their followers to take. This approach, more than anything, goes some way toward justifying his assertion that a broad class of nonaristocratic "freemen" warriors must have existed in many of the barbarian cultures of the first half of the millennium. Yet to claim the point proved and build further hypotheses upon it is not legitimate; he comes perilously close to recreating the old, volkisch notion of an inherent “Germanic” belief in freedom. Throughout, in fact, Heather makes the tacit assumption that evidence from any “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group can be used to analyze any other “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group—in other words, that linguistic identity and socioinstitutional behaviors go inevitably together. [...] a great many historical comparanda would support a model that he ignores — that the Goths were formed from a large number of indigenes and a small number of migrants under the pressure of Roman imperialism, and in the shadow of the Empire.[31]
And more:
Kulikowski charges that old German nationalist and even Nazi influences continue to influence scholarship on the Goths up to the present day, particularly through the theories of Gustav Kossinna.[19] He considers much of what is written about Goths to be "Germanist fantasy" derived from this legacy.
This isn't exactly what I would describe as a debate "blessedly free from nationalist squabbles"
> old German nationalist and even Nazi influences
Notice how the key word there is "old". Scholars may respond to earlier schools of thought in the field, from a now long-vanished time when anyone actually was invested in it for nationalist reasons, but that doesn't mean anyone today is invested in it. For example, major work today on Gothic linguistics, one component in the Urheimat debate, happens in places like Leiden and UCLA where no one has any nationalist dog in the fight.
I personally wouldn't put the “shame” onto GP.
Historians hold out on claims made in historical sources -- especially when written centuries after the fact -- all the time, it is a standard scientific practice to seek external evidence.
Languages can spread by utility, rather than culture.
For example, "Low German" was a common trade tongue, and shows up in parts of the world, where Germans never set foot.
When I read about history of Europe/Old World in Roman and post Roman times, it's clear that large scale movements of whole groups of people is very common in the historical record.
I wonder why such views were ever resisted in prehistory, a time when such movements were simpler and their motivations more likely to arise?
The "pots aren't people" wave wouldn't be problematic per se (e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life), rather because it sought to be the dominant theory.
We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing - defeat of the Nazis, which made some ideas extremely dirty and other ideas very attractive.
This has an interesting consequence in that we do not know much about natural human intelligence today, which is coming back to bite us in the age of emerging artificial intelligence. The topic of human intelligence has been a political minefield for nearly a century now. It is probably safer and easier to study intelligence of octopuses and crows than that of humans. You're definitely freer from political repercussions there.
I don't feel like being racist either way.
We know people often kill people. That doesn't even need explanation.
My argument is that it is thousands of years and dozens of mixed generations.
Why do you decide to participate in a thousand-years-long campaign to kill the neighbor who is also your second cousin?
There is no reason they couldn't have turned the other way and attacked their other second cousin.
My best guess is religion but it could also have also been a different kind of fanatic ideology.
In Iberia, you have northern Iberian groups which maybe spoke a bit of an Indo-European language at first, and they are invading Southern Iberians and leaving almost no trace of other haplogroups.
Britain is less interesting because basically it was a regular colonization/invasion of the kind we know by Britons; although there is a genetic trace left of the megalithic people, they were swamped.
As a contrast to the Iberian case, we have several steppe invasions in the historical record but most of them look nothing like it.
The Khans did expand rapidly and engage in some wild oat seeding but there is barely any evidence that they ever were in most of the places they conquered. The Huns were basically new management for Germanic tribes. Again, no trace of their existence.
The only one that looks a bit like the Indo-European expansion is the Turkish invasion of Anatolia where by the end you have a bunch of South-Eastern Europeans with minor Asiatic ancestry effectively larping as Islamic Asians and even becoming the center of the Islamic world for centuries.
But, even in the Turks, you don't see full Y-DNA replacement, not even with the power of Islam.
Sure it took many generations but it's hard to imagine that the violence wasn't culturally and racially motivated. Based on genetic evidence it's speculated that that there were more than 10 male migrants to every female coming from the steppe.
> The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.
I'm not sure what that means? Their descendants clearly did reach Iberia and Britain.
If you wanna tell the romans to GFY you're gonna have to adopt a lot of the structures that make them competitive in order to resist them. There's a fairly large "you wrestle the pig you get shit on you" factor going on.
While it is true that learning from Rome was very useful for its later challengers, this usually was not the primary motivation for adoption of Roman culture, especially before ~ 400 AD. It was more about the higher standard of living plus legal stability, as long as Rome could enforce its Pax.
How will you prevent that harm from recurring? Ignoring it hasn't worked, and doesn't distinguish the program you propose from a long line of racist programs and propaganda - that is, nobody can tell whether it's sincere or just another cover story.
But people can tell that it's not responsible, which is a clue about the thought behind it. We can't wash our hands of the consequences of our actions. If you don't prevent the next racist catastrophe, who will? Will you just do it and leave the consequences for others to clean up (and suffer from)?
Assuming you also don't want these horrible outcomes, it doesn't make sense to dismiss the risk. The people who advocate dismissing it are the ones who don't care about or seek those outcomes and are trying to remove obstacles.
Intimating that caring about truth implies "seeking those outcomes" is a great way, to the extent it influences your field, of disconnecting it from reality.
To me this reads like Lenski (not affiliated with the authors!) trying a little too hard to make it into an academic culture war issue.
From what I understand, the prevailing academic belief was based on cases where "elite replacement" was what did happen. For example, the Norman conquest of England contributed massively to modern English (all those French load words), and affected the culture in a lot of ways. But for the most part, the actual population movements were smaller. And DNA evidence suggested that several other big cultural and linguistic shifts worked the same way. Mostly the ordinary folk kept doing their thing, while the ruling class suffered upheaval.
The linked article is interesting because it confirms an actual population displacement. Which breaks the recent pattern of studies! But even here later stages were often more cultural shifts than population ones.
We don't know any of this until someone does the DNA studies.
Academics were captured by ideological concerns. There's nothing really veiled about this. One slogan for the movement was "pots not people".
- are the claims it's making about the discovery right, or exaggerated?
- are the claims it's making about what people previously believed right, or exaggerated?
When I'm reading about areas that I happen to know something about, I find that there's a smallish tendency to exaggerate the first and a large one to exaggerate the second.
I think it's likely that's true in other areas. I get the impression it's particularly common for archaeological discoveries for some reason.
Now that the Wielbark culture simply is the Goths, that would be a sightly bolder assertion - and one which is probably good they're not making since it would probably be oversimplifying things.
News are entertainment, after all.
Because the university departments are held by a certain type of individuals who want to play down and dismiss anything held sacred and holy by tribes, old cultures, religions, etc., explaining them away with "totems", "magic rituals", etc.
Perhaps before trying to depict an ultimately rather minor controversy among historians as some axe ground against the sacred and the holy, it might be worth actually learning about the topic first?
Because Swedish history before 1000AD is very murky.
So the 5th and 6th centuries are still very much guesswork when it comes to scandinavian history.
I just always assumed that the legend of Rome was powerful enough for swedes to claim the Goths. But it makes sense that it's based on fact.
During its existence, Kievan Rus was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus" or the "Rus land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus being derived from the ethnonym Роусь. ... The first known use of the term Kievan Rus comes from the 1582 chronicle by Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski, where it was used to describe the region of Rus state immediately adjacent to Kyiv.
In 1837 it was adopted by Kyiv University rector Mykhailo Maksymovych in relation to the Principality of Kiev; known for his Ukrainophile political orientation, Maksymovych later spread that definition to the whole realm, seeing Kyiv as the original point where Rus statehood emerged, establishing the base for the future Russian Empire.
Ukranian picture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:%D0%...
Croatian picture - https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolazak_Hrvata#/media/Datoteka...
Ivar the Boneless, Varangians. When I was growing up in Ukraine, this was never ever mentioned in any literature, school, college. That the names like Oleg or Igor were not native threw a twist too, but they are very common names over there in UA/RU, on par with Ivan and Dmitry.
* A foreigner, one whose language and customs differ from the speaker's.
* One not a Greek.
* One living outside the pale of the Roman empire and its civilization, applied especially to the northern nations that overthrew them.
* One outside the pale of Christian civilization.
* (With the Italians of the Renascence) One of a nation outside of Italy.
* A rude, wild, uncivilized person.
* (in mid 1800s) Applied by the Chinese contemptuously to foreigners.
* An uncultured person, or one who has no sympathy with literary culture.
* A native of Barbary.
Which one (or three) apply here can be left as an exercise for the reader.
DNA from unearthed car sized scales proving a giant snake carved the rivers and shape of the land would be something ...
The real wild Gothic origin story is that the island of Gotland got overpopulated and they decided by lottery which 1/3 of them should leave.
What seems more accurate is that there were people near the Vistula River around year 1 who had cultural, linguistic, trade and - yes - genetic connection to people on the other side of the Baltic sea, and in the age of migration those people got moving, got into Arian Christianity and called themselves Goths. They did comparatively well in a time when most of Europe didn't, so they have plenty of descendants, many of them carrying ancestry we can trace back to people who lived in Scandinavia before year 1.
E.g., the North Island of New Zealand is called "Te Ika A Māui" in Māori, that is "the fish of Māui", and if you look at it from above, it definitely resembles a stingray.
What blows my mind is how Māori knew that before cartography or aerial mapping or satellites.
I understand how they likely did, Polynesians didn't spread across the Pacific by being clueless about geography and coastlines.
But still, a pre-literate society that was able to say "huh, this island half the size of the UK looks like a giant stingray" is pretty bloody cool.
The summary from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Island is:
> According to Māori mythology, the North and South Islands of New Zealand arose through the actions of the demigod Māui. Māui and his brothers were fishing from their canoe (the South Island) when he caught a great fish and pulled it right up from the sea. While he was not looking, his brothers fought over the fish and chopped it up. This great fish became the North Island, and thus a Māori name for the North Island is Te Ika-a-Māui ("The Fish of Māui").
Does your perception of the stingray match the head location in local use?
> Names of certain tribes like Muaūpoko (mua upoko "front of the head") and Muriwhenua (muri whenua, "backland")
Muaūpoko is in the south of Te Ika A Māui.
And, totally weird words such as "casa" (home, house) or "sofá".
As for the climate change argument this movement of people groups is not uncommon. Rome up until the arrival of the Goths had been dealing with "barbarian" incursions for a thousand years.
Rome invade Gaul, Germany, and Britannia which people seem to omit. There is no argument that climate change forced them too. They did it because they could. The "barbarian" tribes invaded because they could. Both sides in this conflict are human and have human motivations.
So my guess would be that there were several very cold years in a row, which caused famines, and the populations understood that their best survival chance was to migrate south, where they had to compete with the roman empire for land.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:2000_Year_Temperature_... [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:2000_Year_Temperature_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1695%E2%80%931...
It has saddened me to see this viewpoint associated in the American cultural wars with one party's "enemy camp", where discussion of climate as a problem is automatically associated with all kinds of unrelated policy positions. People are unaware this historical explanation was posited by hoary old (and largely long-dead) twentieth-century men who had no dog in the contemporary political divide.
They had too many births before the potato famine -- it's the reason why it was such a disaster in Ireland compared to the rest of Europe -- and they continued up until a few decades ago. This happened during a time when it was unusually easy to move to "empty" land and colonize it.
Their longboats made them amphibious. Their ships were durable enough for the open ocean, but still able to land on any beach, or sail fair upriver.
For example, the Roman Republic had adapted to constant warfare and the steady stream of casualties caused by it. And then the Late Republic got into trouble, because Rome had become too good at war, and the required casualties didn't happen.
Anytime they had a population explosion, younger sons would have to go A Viking.