proper Indus Valley Civilization DNA to come

Keep in mind they were already in contact with BMAC and the ancient cities of the Turan for a while by the time they entered South Asia.
they made charriots with spoked wheels and trained horses before contact with BMAC
they were skilled metallurgists, but not as sophisticated as BMAC
the spread of later Seima-Turbino through the steppe has been associated with the casting of metals with lost-wax techniques from BMAC
what is more, the IE tribes seem not to have destroyed BMAC, but they took over the trading networks of BMAC, making the BMAC cities and fortresses redundant, the IE people seem to have been learning from other cultures quite fast
 
That's mostly right, but they, or at least the later IE steppe cultures like Sintashta and Andronovo, become very good at making metal tools and objects, as well as efficient means of transportation (trained horses, wheels, wagons, chariots). They also must've been quite efficient in immaterial techniques like military organization and management, if not they couldn't have sustained their power and enforce their cultural ways for a long time anywhere, they would've been nothing but temporary raiders. They couldn't win those more advanced peoples if they just had strength and will, and nothing else.

I would be wary of the way settled civilizations that were attacked by the steppe peoples portrayed them in a very dehumanizing and demeaning way. No attacked people who hates those foreigner hordes would say very good things about them. You just need to read how Romans and later Europeans portrayed the Huns and later the Mongols and Turks. Granted, they weren't "that" sophisticated, but the way they were portrayed would make us believe they were completely ignorant and primitive savages, and modern historians know that wasn't exactly the case - not when they reached Europe, anyway.

As for the Gutians, nobody really knows if they were IE. Their few extant names don't look particularly IE to most linguists. I think people are just trying to find a direct link between the IE expansion and the Gutian invasions broadly in the same historic period. But I would be really surprised if the IE speakers were the only steppe/desert peoples to have invaded civilizations and settled societies in the Early-Mid Bronze Age. We know for sure that at least another people, Semites, expanded right in the same period and in a similar fashion, too.

Generally agree with you although i'd say it would be wrong to compare Turkic people to Indo Europeans. When Turkic people moved out to Near East, Central Asia was a center of the Islamic Golden Age and had the world's largest city (Merv)

On the other hand i am not a trol* or someone else's secondary account and don't know why people are claiming that. I've been reading Dienekes and Razib since 2006 and commenting with the same nickname.
 
Generally agree with you although i'd say it would be wrong to compare Turkic people to Indo Europeans. When Turkic people moved out to Near East, Central Asia was a center of the Islamic Golden Age and had the world's largest city (Merv)

On the other hand i am not a trol* or someone else's secondary account and don't know why people are claiming that. I've been reading Dienekes and Razib since 2006 and commenting with the same nickname.

That's right, but the Turks were also a foreign element in Central Asia, at least with absolute certainty south of Kazakhstan, the really civilized and urbanized portion of Central Asia. They were also, at least until they became fully integrated and in turn assimilated the locals (linguistically and genetically), conquerors and for a long time a co-existing ethnicity, maintaining its distinct way of life and identity, occupying ecological/economic zones not fully used by the local Islamico-Persianate cultures. I think the situation of the gradual Turkification of most of Central Asia was more akin to the expansion of IEs in the Balkans (Cucuteni-Tripolye) and especially in India, though of course similarities are just very vague and generic, for the historic periods and contexts were very different.
 
Ancient studies linked with proto and late indo-europeans shows how much inclusive they were. They probably didn't care who the peasant were, if they were genetically related or not. And most of exterior women could have been take as concubine, only focusing on the rulling elite, like actually most of the society even today. Just like vikings becoming count in western europe, they didn't care about lost their culture and their friend if they could have power and honor, this is pretty much how those guys had to be.

I also believe they were inclusive at least initially and at least for women (concubines, arranged marriages, political/tribal alliances through marriage) and for potential male warriors that could strengthen their bands. I doubt they, who were probably not the largest ethnic population in the continent, could've done so much if they hadn't had the help of many integrated peoples and circumstantial allies. That does not mean they were egalitarian or "PC", but just that they had to accept outsiders and make large-scale alliances and compromises if they were willing to expand and win over adversaries that in many cases were actually more advanced than them (much like the Romans, Germans and Turks later did).
 
I also believe they were inclusive at least initially and at least for women (concubines, arranged marriages, political/tribal alliances through marriage) and for potential male warriors that could strengthen their bands. I doubt they, who were probably not the largest ethnic population in the continent, could've done so much if they hadn't had the help of many integrated peoples and circumstantial allies. That does not mean they were egalitarian or "PC", but just that they had to accept outsiders and make large-scale alliances and compromises if they were willing to expand and win over adversaries that in many cases were actually more advanced than them (much like the Romans, Germans and Turks later did).
How i see late ie's, especially in western europe seems to me like a form of proto-feodalism. They had something like a cliens - patron relationship between the elite and the plebs. I dont think they were egalitarian at all and that there was some social mobility. Modern western male lineage just shows how much yamnaya related male ancestry have annihilate others, so certainly local men who were absorb in the community, even if they became warriors, could not be on the long term prolific lineage, meaning an elite. And of course there is the obvious, when you conquer another land, there's gonna be some remnants of the previous society, i dont know if those people were slaved or take as cliens in the long term, but see how ie's male lineage are so predominent ether in western and eastern europe, men had to suffer verry much of the situation.
 
How i see late ie's, especially in western europe seems to me like a form of proto-feodalism. They had something like a cliens - patron relationship between the elite and the plebs. I dont think they were egalitarian at all and that there was some social mobility. Modern western male lineage just shows how much yamnaya related male ancestry have annihilate others, so certainly local men who were absorb in the community, even if they became warriors, could not be on the long term prolific lineage, meaning an elite. And of course there is the obvious, when you conquer another land, there's gonna be some remnants of the previous society, i dont know if those people were slaved or take as cliens in the long term, but see how ie's male lineage are so predominent ether in western and eastern europe, men had to suffer verry much of the situation.

Agreed. However, I think those sweeping changes favoring just a few haplogroup subclades was not a sudden consequence of their conquest/immigration, but rather a long-term consequence of a strictly hierarchical and unequal, as well as still clan-based society, where one's marriage and procreation prospects differed a lot depending on whether the belonged or not to the "right" lineages (something like the way elite Romans cared so much about the "gens" to which someone belonged). In ancient times, more surviving offspring certainly came from a better social standing, a more influential and helpful network (one's important lineage and their allies and clients) and more family real estate (I don't think they were initially very bent on individual property, more like a clan/family-based and patriarch-centered property). It's probable that many women wouldn't be married off by their parents to men without a prestigious "gens", an important social position and significant property. And the conquered males were disproportionately among those disadvantaged "unmarriable" - or simply incapable of suppoting large families - men.

I have done a simple experiment months ago: a hypothetical scenario where the non-IE and non-dominant males wouldn't have been massively annihilated, not for a long time, but where their lower status and wealth made them have only half the number of children of the IE dominant males. In "just" 300-400 years a huge change in Y-DNA haplogroups could happen even in the absence of any "genocidal" elimination of native males.
 
Agrred. However, I think those sweeping changes favoring just a few haplogroup subclades was not a sudden consequence of their conquest/immigration, but rather a long-term consequence of a strictly hierarchical and unequal, as well as still clan-based society, where one's marriage and procreation prospects differed a lot depending on whether the belonged or not to the "right" lineages (something like the way elite Romans cared so much about the "gens" to which someone belonged). In ancient times, more surviving offspring certainly came from a better social standing, a more influential and helpful network (one's important lineage and their allies and clients) and more family real estate (I don't think they were initially very bent on individual property, more like a clan/family-based and patriarch-centered property). It's probable that many women wouldn't be married off by their parents to men without a prestigious "gens", an important social position and significant property. And the conquered males were disproportionately among those disadvantaged "unmarriable" - or simply incapable of suppoting large families - men.
This was pretty much what i wanted to say. A lot of people have idealized the indo-europeans in a Julius Evola way, but in reality, those societies must have been one of the hardest to have ever lived. If we take the latter scythians or the turco-mongols, at least the cultural evolution made that because of horse was the main weapon, every warriors were pretty much at the same level, whether they were of royal blood or of peasant, every child must have learned to mount from childhood. It's not like the earliest indo-europeans where the elite had horses and chariots and the plebs just their feet. This must have been an hardcore society that was naturally focus on individualism and self-developement, every men could only count on himself, even if they were from the same society and related blood, if they could found a civilization with better lifestyle, they would totally pick it.
I have done a simple experiment months ago: a hypothetical scenario where the non-IE and non-dominant males wouldn't have been massively annihilated, not for a long time, but where their lower status and wealth made them have only half the number of children of the IE dominant males. In "just" 300-400 years a huge change in Y-DNA haplogroups could happen even in the absence of any "genocidal" elimination of native males.
Yes when i say annihilated i think in a large scale of time. Little by little, the neolithic or previous regional male lineages were absolutely not favored by multiple environnemental reasons
 
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This was pretty much what i wanted to say. A lot of people have idealized the indo-europeans in a Julius Savola way, but in reality, those societies must have been one of the hardest to have ever lived. If we take the latter scythians or the turco-mongols, at least the cultural evolution made that because of horse was the main weapon, every warriors were pretty much at the same level, whether they were of royal blood or of peasant, every child must have learned to mount from childhood. It's not like the earliest indo-europeans where the elite had horses and chariots and the plebs just their feet. This must have been an hardcore society that was naturally focus on individualism and self-developement, every men could only count on himself, even if they were from the same society and related blood, if they could found a civilization with better lifestyle, they would totally pick it.
Yes when i say annihilated i think in a large scale of time. Little by little, the neolithic or previous regional male lineages were absolutely not favored by multiple environnemental reasons

Yes, now I understand your point better. Even more individualistic, my hunch is that these early IEs were very family/clan/lineage-centric, with stark divisions and even distinctive identities and customs from one clan to the other. They would do anything for them and their patriarch-led "gens", period, there wasn't a sense of unified ethnic, cultural or even regional identity.

Maybe that "hardore society" also explains why so many of them went into "adventures" very far away from their homeland: they were quite literally looking for a better life, more opportunities and a safe heaven, because their original society was kind of closed, self-limited, without enough social and economic mobility and a winner-takes-all structure that left a lot of people with very little perspectives and no hope to get a rightful place in the social pyramid. Looking for a new life in a distant place may have been a rational thing to do in several different situations, especially when disputes arose or resources were more scarce.
 
Yes, now I understand your point better. Even more individualistic, my hunch is that these early IEs were very family/clan/lineage-centric, with stark divisions and even distinctive identities and customs from one clan to the other. They would do anything for them and their patriarch-led "gens", period, there wasn't a sense of unified ethnic, cultural or even regional identity.

Maybe that "hardore society" also explains why so many of them went into "adventures" very far away from their homeland: they were quite literally looking for a better life, more opportunities and a safe heaven, because their original society was kind of closed, self-limited, without enough social and economic mobility and a winner-takes-all structure that left a lot of people with very little perspectives and no hope to get a rightful place in the social pyramid. Looking for a new life in a distant place may have been a rational thing to do in several different situations, especially when disputes arose or resources were more scarce.
This is basically that, it was the same with vikings or ancient celts i guess, with the ver sacrum. At some point, little groups had to migrate because of the growth of the demography and a too much inequal society. Those guys were warriors and certainly their spiritual beliefs where around the fact to die as a warrior with honor. When you have guys like this, with a specific individualistic mind in a spiritual or cultural way, not a lot of things can stop you. If we take in a totally other context guys in ISIS, they might have exactly the same mental pattern as those ancient peoples, when you are cornering in your own society, you become a lone wolf and you try to have a piece of the world for yourself. There is that concept of the Männerbund, basically i warrior chief surround by brave companions ready to die for their chief and brothers, those people were certainly peasants for the most part in their original society, and might have a very low incom for food and women, they had to make their own society by conquering other people. Some royal prince might been the chief of that kind of group and at the end of the day, the only ones who wins something from conquering other peoples.
 
Are we really sure that that was a common thing among all the Indo-European speakers who conquered other peoples and lands, especially outside South Asia? I remember having read that there are signs of still extensive inter-ethnic/inter-caste mixing in India up to a mere 2,000 years ago, when the genetic structure seems to have started to become "fossilized" and the groups became much more endogamous and to drift from each other much faster. Some saw that as an indication that the caste system only became really rigid many centuries after the supposed Indo-Aryan migration and assimilation and was an internal development of Indian culture/politics. Are there strong evidences that it was actually a much more ancient and Indo-European-wide phenomenon?

He [David Reich] cautioned, however, that Majumder and his team's calculation could have erred as they used certain statistical methods software, and also considered 22.5 years as the span of one generation. "Standard citation in genetics literature is 29 years based on studies in many diverse societies around the world. We usually use 29 years and that would give substantially older calendar dates than the authors cite," he told TOI.

Google: "70 generations ago, caste stopped people inter-mixing" (not allowed to post links yet).

22.5 x 70 generations = 1575 years ago, or c. 443 b.c.e. (Gupta Empire.)

29 x 70 generations = 2030 years ago, or c. 12 b.c.e. (Reich's numbers would date endogamy to the Kushan Empire.)
 
Strange that "barbarians", which the IE tribes and clans certainly were, should have had a reputation for being barbaric, although I suspect that if you piled up all their victims it would be a rather small hill compared to the mountain of bodies that can be attributed to the major "civilizations".

The more common pattern would be the establishment of client-patron relationships (ala Vico) with subjected populations (not unlike Mafia "protection" rackets, if you will), rather than population replacement or ethnic cleansing. Where population replacement did occur, we can't assume it wasn't due to non-martial factors (climate change, drought, famine, disease, etc.).
 
Strange that "barbarians", which the IE tribes and clans certainly were, should have had a reputation for being barbaric, although I suspect that if you piled up all their victims it would be a rather small hill compared to the mountain of bodies that can be attributed to the major "civilizations".

The more common pattern would be the establishment of client-patron relationships (ala Vico) with subjected populations (not unlike Mafia "protection" rackets, if you will), rather than population replacement or ethnic cleansing. Where population replacement did occur, we can't assume it wasn't due to non-martial factors (climate change, drought, famine, disease, etc.).
Yeah in the case of indo-europeans studies, the whole replacement by a 1000 miles long mounted warriors hypothesis is pretty immature, that's the kind of inference that your mind makes when you first hear about the whole concept.
 
Blame Gimbutas' overly simplistic narrative, which casts the Indo-Europeans as the evil patriarchal herders massacring the good matriarchal farmers, regardless that they lived side-by-side for centuries, trading, intermarrying, etc. What happened? The climate changed, growing colder and drier. Herds starved, crops failed. It could be that the the Yamnaya break-out of the steppes and drive up the Danube River valley was for one reason only - to find fresh fodder, "green grass", for their herds.

Same thing happened around 1200 b.c.e., with the marauding "Sea Peoples" who destroyed the Mycenaeans and Hittites (both, not incidentally, "Indo-European" civilizations) and almost destroyed the Egyptian civilization, and again in the 6th century c.e., when the Goths, Vandals, etc., brought down the western Roman Empire. If a choice of whose children should starve, would you volunteer your own? Or would you do whatever you needed to do to feed them?
 
All of a sudden we're back to the post war nonsense in archaeology and history where nobody was an invader, nobody massacred most of the males and raped the females; they were just good fathers providing for their young. Somebody was even saying the Huns were not so bad! No piles of human skulls, I guess. No depopulation of whole swathes of Central Asia. No panicked fleeing in front of them by the Germanic tribes either, I suppose.

Is no one honest and objective about their ancestors except me and a couple of others? I freely admit that the Romans enslaved or killed perhaps more than 1/3 of the people of Gaul, and it wasn't just to get food for their children! That's what conquering nations did at that time. Now, there's a lot of good things about the Roman Empire, I think, but that's not one of them.

I do wish people would stop back projecting modern values onto ancient peoples.

The big elephant in the room is that while, yes, population crashes in Central Europe occurred before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, and the plague they brought with them was devastating, that just means they didn't need to be Conan the Barbarian to conquer it. The other pertinent fact is that there is a huge imbalance between ydna and mtdna even though the academic papers indicate that women did accompany the Indo-Europeans into Central Europe, and an analysis of the mtDna of modern Central and Northern Europeans substantiates that.

The men and boys, presumably, were killed, but many of the women, those who survived, were not, and were kept for breeding.

Yes, I know all the arguments that it was just selective advantage over the generations. Yes, that may have contributed, but it's not the total picture. One should pay attention to a people's own mythology. It's where they reveal the heart of their culture. Read the Rig Veda, or Norse mythology. Heck, even read the Old Testament! This is what men did.

It may not be pretty, but it's the reality.

Let's look at the Lombards for a later example. Yes, there was climate change, and fewer food supplies, and yes, they were fleeing other tribes behind them, but does that really make it just fine that they not only invaded the land of another people, again killed a lot of the men, subjugated the locals, making them serfs, allowing them only minimal food, and when laws were codified, making them permanently an underclass? And please, they didn't just want food for their wailing babies. They liked bling, the Lombards.
 
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Barbarian invasions tended to be the norm rather than something unusual up until recently, and few peoples in history were spared that fate. The archetypical barbarians of late antiquity - the Slavs and the Germanics - surely owed much of their expansions to the adoption of the warlike culture of the easterners under whose dominion they came. I doubt the dynamics were very different in the Bronze Age.

That doesn't mean that there isn't usually a kind of systemic weakness in civilized cultures that facilitates opportunistic invasions. The Germanic armies could roam the western empire for decades without being engaged by a standing Roman army. Such conquests were more often than not less than heroic.

Only the Greeks never really succumbed to invasions by less advanced peoples, because unusually for a civilized culture war always remained central to their ethos. That might be part of the reason why they were the greatest :grin:
 
^^Well, timing is everything. Not easy to be in power when there's climate change causing widespread famine in the periphery as well as shortages at home, and rampaging Huns building towers of human skulls of their defeated enemies and scattering other tribes in front of them, along with some plague, for good measure, all in addition to the normal problems that plague (pun intended) established and probably too prosperous and soft civilizations.
 
Strange that "barbarians", which the IE tribes and clans certainly were, should have had a reputation for being barbaric, although I suspect that if you piled up all their victims it would be a rather small hill compared to the mountain of bodies that can be attributed to the major "civilizations".

I'm not denying above that barbarians are often quite barbaric. I just think that the "good vs evil" historical narrative, ala Gimbutas, is overly simplistic and misleading. As to comparing the Indo-Europeans to the Mongols...
 
Goodness, I guess a lot of people are thinking about this.

See Razib Khan's post on why there is steppe ancestry over such a wide swathe of territory.
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018...quered/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

"During the Mongol conquest of Northern China Genghis Khan reputedly wanted to turn the land that had been the heart of the Middle Kingdom into pasture, first by exterminating the whole population. Part of the motive was to punish the Chinese for resisting his armies, and part of it was to increase his wealth. One of his advisors, Yelu Chucai, a functionary from the Khitai people, dissuaded him from this path through appealing to his selfishness. Chinese peasants taxed on their surplus would enrich Genghis Khan far more than enlarging his herds. Rather than focus on primary production, Genghis Khan could sit atop a more complex economic system and extract rents."

But this makes us ask: when did this dynamic begin? I don’t think it was primordial. It was invented and developed over time through trial and error. I believe that the initial instinct of pastoralists was to turn farmland into pasture for his herds. This was Genghis Khan’s instinct. The rude barbarian that he was he had not grown up in the extortive system which more civilized barbarians, such as the Khitai, had been habituated to.
In these situations where pastoralists expropriated the land, there wouldn’t have been an opportunity for the farmer to raise a family. Barbarian warlords throughout history have aspired to be rich by plundering from the civilized the peoples…but would the earliest generations have understood the complexity of the institutions that they would have to extract rents out of if there wasn’t a precedent?"

Again, based on their own mythology, if nothing else, I'm sure there was a lot of butchery involved but this adds some nuance.
 
The "Indian ultra-nationalist" community already warned us - in Eurogenes and other places - that Dr. Rai was "misunderstood" and "misquoted", and that "of course" the results will prove that the IVC people were relatively close to the modern North Indian Brahmins and already had typical Indo-Aryan autosomal and Y-DNA markers. Oh my God, what kind of brainwashing did these people take? I can only feel a bit of pity on them because, as a more sensible and well informed Indian man told me yesterday, they're somehow striving to decolonize the culture and mindset of India, and to get rid of the centuries-old (even before the British) feelings of inferiority due to foreign conquest, but they want to do that regardless of facts and evidences and in such an extreme, uncompromising way that their brand of nationalism is becoming an international laughing stock these days...

Why should they feel ashamed? the Indo-Aryans were their ancestors, and did contribute ancestry to all people in India, Indians and all people must accept that they are the result of a mixture of different peoples, these people must have come from somewhere, I mean it's not like they grew out of the ground.

And something else, when we say Iranian farmers that doesn't equal modern Iranians, and Indo-Aryans don't mean Russians or Turkmens, they were old ethnicities that disappeared in their unmixed form, and Indians shouldn't view them as foreign conquerors, Indians are not the AASI (Indian hunter-gatherers), and even they must have come from somewhere, they were just the first to arrive, or the first to conquer and replace a people that lived before them.
 

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