So what did come from steppe? Something came for sure after all that made those lines so successful, even as we speak. So is the wealth accumulated due to what Europeans owe to steppe or near east, this could be a good question to answer?
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Blevins, you know all this, surely? Where did agriculture originate? How about metallurgy? It was in the Near East and some of it was developed by EEF like people in the Balkans. How about irrigation systems, cities, monumental buildings, paved roads, writing, law codes? If you want to add empires, throw that in.
Do I have to go on???
We learn all this in middle school and high school, at least in the U.S., and from what I've seen in the Anglo world as a whole There's no need to belabor it. It's not some plot.
The original steppe people were fisher/hunters living in yurts, illiterate, without domesticated animals other than the horse, without farming, without metallurgy. Now, I want to emphasize that's how ALL human beings lived originally, even in the Near East, but there they developed more sophisticated cultures first.
Every culture builds on prior cultures; they borrow and adapt to suit their own needs, and the better ones add some improvements of their own. Look at the Japanese. Within one hundred years of Commodore Perry's arrival they had totally transformed their culture. There's no shame in it.
The Greeks of the Aegean learned and added, created something new, something that didn't exist in the Near East, and passed it on to the Romans, who added their own tweaks and then passed it down to all Europeans. Then most of it was lost and had to be re-learned in the Renaissance.
The steppe people (half EHG and half CHG like) mixed with EEF people when they moved west. By the time the Indo-European speaking people got to Italy, they were
already a mixture of EEF (with some additional WHG from the resurgence) and steppe. The Beakers were about 50/50 broadly speaking, yes?. You know all this.
Once the Indo-European speakers got to Italy they admixed with the Neolithic population there, a population much like the EEF, but already with some CHG/Iran Neo like ancestry, perhaps from Greece or perhaps by a more direct route. It further diluted the steppe signal. The same thing happened elsewhere in Southern Europe. It's only in the low population extreme north-east of Europe that you get people over 50% steppe. I mean, think about it, there was barely anyone living up there. Even Britain is more EEF than steppe. Southern Europe was heavily populated, so it's the least steppe.
Sometimes we just have to step back when we look at historical processes and use some reason and common sense.
To this day, Northern Italians/Tuscans have the highest EEF ancestry in Europe after certain Sardinians perhaps, followed closely by Spaniards. Look at the plot. They lean toward the Sardinians. These Iron Age and Republican Era samples average out perhaps to the high 30s for steppe ancestry? (I haven't gotten into the nitty gritty of the details yet.) That's not much more than Northern Italians have today.
What did modern Europeans get from them? Language for most Europeans, of course, parts of the religion prior to Christianity, perhaps a more male centered social structure, although the desert Near Easterners may have them beat. Some parts of the culture, perhaps. Oh, also the domesticated horse, which turned out to be really important for traveling long distances quickly, and eventually for warfare, along with the chariot, although it was the Near Easterners who perfected chariot warfare.
It's too big a topic to cover in one post on another topic altogether.
@Joey,
Half of my ancestry comes from the Po Valley, and I assure you they're not Celts, whatever you mean by that. They don't plot with the people of the Celtic fringe like the Irish or Welsh, and not even with the French. We're our own people.
Did the Gauls invade in the first millennium BC? Yes, they did, although some, like the Boi, were mostly kicked out. The ones who remained mixed with the people already living there. The Italics and Etruscans, people of mixed Italian Neolithic and Indo-European ancestry, weren't wiped out. Place names and inscriptions show Italic, Etruscan, and Gallic names in the same area.