proper Indus Valley Civilization DNA to come

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.
not only in the steppe
the Amorites were seen as invaders in southern Mesopotamia
when famine and drought strikes, farmers always seem to be in a weaker position because of their immobility compared to the herders continously moving and looking for greener pastures

Razib Khan :
Of course, pre-modern societies did not have totalitarian states and deadly technology. Rapid organized genocide in a way that we would understand was unlikely to have happened. Rather, in a world on the Malthusian margin, a few generations of deprivation may have resulted in the rapid demographic extinction of whole cultures. You don’t need to kill them if they starve because they were driven off their land.

This seems to be the situation when the Amorites moved south, but the last sentence is misleading, as if the purpose of the invading herders is to starve the farmers.

What was the situation when the IE moved south bypassing BMAC?
Nobody knows.
Fact is that BMAC was not destroyed by the IE herders, it merely became redundant.
To me it looks like there was not a famine, but herders saw the wealth of BMAC and the opportunity to combine herding with trade and even knowledge exchange (as with the Mitanni, the Kassites).

As for organised warfare, where and when did it start?
I think it started in many places in the world.
There were the fortresses in Sintashta.
But also written reports of war and extreme cruelties in Summer and Akkadia.
It existed in Maya and Aztec cultures.
And in Longshan culture, China.

And one more thing : warlords don't always have to be pastoralists.
The Germanic tribes originated from peacefull farmers in the Nordic Bronze Age.
They became warlike and started moving south when climate became cooler making agriculture impossible up north 6th century BC.
 
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:

Was the Dorian invasion of Greece in the late bronze-age fabricated or real ...........they are stated as coming from the barbaric north
 
I believe that the initial instinct of pastoralists was to turn farmland into pasture for his herds.

Which was preceded by the Cucuteni farmers expanding into the steppe from the Prut to the Dneister to the Bug to the Dneiper River, turning pasture into farmland, building forts to protect their incursion. Sounds not unlike the expansion of the U.S. western frontier, justified as "manifest destiny", with the "Indians" resisting the expropriation of their hunting grounds. The difference in the case of the Cucuteni farmers is that the "Indians" fought back and won, undoubtedly due to the former's lack of rifles and cannon.
 
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not only in the steppe
the Amorites were seen as invaders in southern Mesopotamia
when famine and drought strikes, farmers always seem to be in a weaker position because of their immobility compared to the herders continously moving and looking for greener pastures

Razib Khan :
Of course, pre-modern societies did not have totalitarian states and deadly technology. Rapid organized genocide in a way that we would understand was unlikely to have happened. Rather, in a world on the Malthusian margin, a few generations of deprivation may have resulted in the rapid demographic extinction of whole cultures. You don’t need to kill them if they starve because they were driven off their land.

This seems to be the situation when the Amorites moved south, but the last sentence is misleading, as if the purpose of the invading herders is to starve the farmers.

What was the situation when the IE moved south bypassing BMAC?
Nobody knows.
Fact is that BMAC was not destroyed by the IE herders, it merely became redundant.
To me it looks like there was not a famine, but herders saw the wealth of BMAC and the opportunity to combine herding with trade and even knowledge exchange (as with the Mitanni, the Kassites).

As for organised warfare, where and when did it start?
I think it started in many places in the world.
There were the fortresses in Sintashta.
But also written reports of war and extreme cruelties in Summer and Akkadia.
It existed in Maya and Aztec cultures.
And in Longshan culture, China.

And one more thing : warlords don't always have to be pastoralists.
The Germanic tribes originated from peacefull farmers in the Nordic Bronze Age.
They became warlike and started moving south when climate became cooler making agriculture impossible up north 6th century BC.

I have no argument with most of what you wrote. I have written here innumerable times that there are certain cycles in history, one of which is that civilizations, settled and based on farming, form, develop, expand, influencing to some degree more pastoral groups on the poorer land in the periphery, and that then those pastoral groups invade, destroy the nucleus of the civilization, and then it all has to be built up all over again. It's the same in the Americas, in Europe, in the Near East (the Amorites are a good example), South Asia, and East Asia. The Manchu are another example. (The Chinese are good at neutralizing their conquerors, however. )I acknowledge that, but I don't have to "like" it, even from a strictly utilitarian point of view. It's just such a waste of time having to start all over again. Think how much we might have advanced if there hadn't been so many stops and restarts.

What happened in the Near East is indeed very analogous to what happened in Europe.

I do have one quibble: I think there are lots of documented instances where invading groups do indeed want the natives to starve. Not pretty, as I said upthread, but the reality. The Huns are only perhaps the worst example.

Why do you think that Europeans deliberately infected trading blankets with smallpox, or didn't give a damn that killing buffalo for sport from moving trains would leave the Plains Indians dependent on them starving? They wanted the LAND, Bicicleur. The Romans sowed the fields of Carthage with salt once they destroyed it. Do you think the Lombards didn't take all the best land, and the hell with whether the natives who fled to the mountains would starve to death?

Good grief, Hitler and his generals and bureaucrats were planning to send all the Poles and Russians to the gas chambers so they could give all that nice, flat, farmland to, in their view, the more industrious German farmers. That was, what, eighty years ago? The Balkan War was much more recent than that. The Serbs set up camps to make raping Bosnian Muslim women and impregnating them with Serb children easier, while they executed the men and boys. They did it in part to get LAND. You think that was the first time in history that happened?

Yet, somehow, people want to think the Indo-European invasions, or perhaps you want to call them "Wanderings" too, were benign? Well meaning? It's just a coincidence that in some places the yDna of the prior inhabitants virtually disappeared? I don't think so. Their own mythology explains exactly what happened. I think a course on the mythology of the major civilizations should be required reading, a mythology often found in their sacred texts.

Take the Rig Veda, for example: the arrival of the Indo-Europeans was not some peaceable affair. There was war and death and enslavement, and the imposition of a rigid caste system based on color. To this day, high caste men can rape lower caste women with impunity. Or take the Old Testament. The Helots in ancient Greece. We have to look at ancient peoples and the events of the past as objectively as possible if we are to learn from our studies and analyses of them. It's not supposed to be about making us feel superior because of certain ancestors.

Just because we number certain people among our ancestors doesn't mean we should put on rose-colored glasses when we examine historical events.
 
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.

I know, I know, but none of what you say is what they have in mind when they resist so much against these evidences. They're projecting contemporary concerns and ideologies onto a completely different, ancient history - and they aren't the only ones guilty of that, as we can see even here. They are often deeply attached to a widely held belief that Indian civilization is immemorially ancient and mostly autochthonous despite one or another foreign influence, and they were also taught that decisively Indo-Aryan things like the Rigveda are many thousands of years old, and not just 3,000-4,000 years old. I've seen some comments which suggest that they are perfectly fine with an ultimately foreign origin, as long as - necessarily - it was dozens of thousands of years ago or something like that, that is, allowing for a lot of time to reaffirm the "100% independent" development of Indian civilization within South Asia. Sooner rather than later, like Europeans, they'll have to reconcile with the fact that they're mixed and not just genetic ancestry, but even agriculture and pastoralism themselves came from elsewhere, let alone languages, which are in some contexts even more easily shifted.

Finally, even though as you say this kind of thinking obviously is totally meaningless and wrong, the fact is that, maybe because of anti-colonial and even anti-European grudges after centuries of being in an inferior position to them, many of them do equate "Indo-Aryan migration from the steppes" with "the origins of our civilization were just another 'white colonization' done by foreigners" - even though that of course implies a very inaccurate confusion between genetics and culture, because nobody believes that the steppe Indo-Iranian culture was exactly like the Indian Rigvedic culture, just one of its ancestors.

They're totally wrong and even deranged, but it's kind of a pitiful situation too, because they have a desperate need - maybe a projection of inner insecurities and resentments - to assert their uniqueness, independence and self-relying past glory. Of course the reality indicated by a growing amount of evidences is knocking on the door by now, so some will resist even more vocally and maybe even angrily.
 
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.

Yes, none of those scenarios - neither the "monstrous mounted warriors" nor the "poor climate-change refugees" - will fit the much more complex reality. It was probably a mix of all those things, in some places a more violent immigration, in some others are more gradual and conciliatory infiltration, but always with some degree of violence, because that's what both the invaders and the invaded peoples used to do against foreigners, who were mostly assumed to be enemies until proven the opposite. Also, there is the fact that certainly not all the violence meant outright murder. As in the much later slave-based societies of Latin America, the disenfranchjised males were not just murdered en masse during this or that war, but subject to higher levels of violence, maltreatment and heavier work in a chronic fashion along several generations (as slaves, servants and so on) - and thus, much more than the females, they suffered violence not just in moments of open conflict, but a kind of structural violence that most definitely meant they had lower reproductive success. That's also a part of the "ugly" side of this process, even though not as visibly shocking as massive slaughters.
 
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:

If by Greeks you mean the "city-states proper of ancient Greeks", okay, but essentially even they were strongly dominated by the "barbarian version of Greeks", the Macedonians, and by the originally less sophisticated Romans, and of course much later they were subject to heavy Slavic and Turkic invasions, and even former Hellenized/Greek parts of their world were most definitely conquered and changed by the "barbarians", mainly parts of Northern Greece (and areas to its north, like FYROM) and all of West Anatolia.
 
The Germanic tribes originated from peacefull farmers in the Nordic Bronze Age.
They became warlike and started moving south when climate became cooler making agriculture impossible up north 6th century BC.

As early as the 6th century BC, really?!? That's virtually as early as the first expansion of La Tène/Gaulish culture to much of Western/Central Europe.
 
Their own mythology explains exactly what happened. I think a course on the mythology of the major civilizations should be required reading, a mythology often found in their sacred texts.

Take the Rig Veda, for example: the arrival of the Indo-Europeans was not some peaceable affair. There was war and death and enslavement, and the imposition of a rigid caste system based on color. To this day, high caste men can rape lower caste women with impunity. Or take the Old Testament. The Helots in ancient Greece. We have to look at ancient peoples and the events of the past as objectively as possible if we are to learn from our studies and analyses of them. It's not supposed to be about making us feel superior because of certain ancestors.

Just because we number certain people among our ancestors doesn't mean we should put on rose-colored glasses when we examine historical events.

That was a great comment, Angela. You nailed it. It's a shame some still feel this "tribal", perhaps clannish urge to defend their ancestors as if they themselves had some conscious participation and merit in the things (the achievements as well as the mistakes and even hideous crimes) done by people many generations ago.
 
@ Angela

Indeed there are instances where pastoralists deliberately destroy the land of farmers, or as in the Wild West, were farmers killed the buffalos on which some Native American tribes depended.

In case of the Amorites invading Southern Mesopotamia, which is recorded in written history, I don't think it was the purpose of the Amorites to destroy the land, but they did.

I think it was likewise when Indo-Aryan pastoralists moved south.
They could have destroyed the BMAC cities, but they didn't, unlike your example, the Huns or the Mongols.
I think deliberate strategies in destroying the habitat of other tribes came later in history, maybe in late bronze age, after the era of the Sea Peoples.
Afaik even the Egyptians and the Hittites didn't do so.

As for the caste system, it's origins remain unknown.
According to DNA it exists 2000 years or longer.

And slavery would already exist longer than farming, as it is also observed amongst HG societies.

I haven't read the RigVeda, but heard of it, of course.
I recommend reading about the city states in Southern Mesopoatamia, which is written history.
There are no signs of such wars and destructions commited by the Aryans.
 
As early as the 6th century BC, really?!? That's virtually as early as the first expansion of La Tène/Gaulish culture to much of Western/Central Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Bronze_Age#Climate
The Nordic Bronze Age was initially characterized by a warm climate that began with a climate change around 2700 BC. The climate was comparable to that of present-day central Germany and northern France and permitted a relatively dense population and good opportunities for farming; for example, grapes were grown in Scandinavia at this time. A minor change in climate occurred between 850 BC and 760 BC, introducing a wetter, colder climate and a more radical climate change began around 650 BC.[3]

Before that, there was agriculture as far north as southern Finland.
Climate change made it impossible to feed the dense population.
War bands formed, united under daring warlords.
 
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.

Very well said. What a lot of people do not understand is that the genes of the people who invaded or colonised one land live on in the modern population of this land, not in the invaders' original homeland. That's why Neolithic Anatolian farmers resemble more modern Sardinians than modern Anatolians. That's also why the genome of Yamna people is closer to modern Irish, Scots and Norwegians than to modern Ukrainians or South Russians.

The Indo-Europeans that left Russia and migrated to Northern Pakistan to become the Indo-Aryans were the ancestors of modern South Asians, not of modern Russians. The Iranian farmers that left Iran to colonise South Asia became the ancestors of all South Asians, not of modern Iranians. Modern Iranians do have shared similar ancestry from the farmers that remained there, but also plenty of ancestry from later migrations into Iran.

As ancient DNA has shown us, and which David Reich explains at length in his book Who We Are and How We Got Here
ir
, modern racial or ethnic groups were only formed in the last 5000 years from ancestral groups that do not exist any more in their unmixed form. The only people who may have survived without external input in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years are very isolated tribes such as the aborigines of the North Sentinel Island in the Andamans (who shoot arrows at helicopters), or some tribes from the Amazon, Papua New Guinea or Australia. Even the Khoisan of southern Africa have recent admixture from farmers. If Indians were descended from the Palaeolithic South Asians without admixture they would be essentially like the North Sentinel tribes genetically (and perhaps also culturally). I don't understand why anyone would be ashamed to descend from the people who invented farming.
 
If by Greeks you mean the "city-states proper of ancient Greeks", okay, but essentially even they were strongly dominated by the "barbarian version of Greeks", the Macedonians, and by the originally less sophisticated Romans, and of course much later they were subject to heavy Slavic and Turkic invasions, and even former Hellenized/Greek parts of their world were most definitely conquered and changed by the "barbarians", mainly parts of Northern Greece (and areas to its north, like FYROM) and all of West Anatolia.

The Romans and Macedonian were in matters of warfare much more sophisticated than the Greeks. Philip II could conquer Greece because of his tactical & strategic innovations. This is completely unlike Rome's struggle with the Barbarians - a well prepared Roman army always defeated the Germanics in pitched battles.

My guess would be that Bronze Age dynamics were much more akin to the latter phenomenon, but still more extreme. The world view that arose in theBronze Age must have been completely unlike that of the Neolithic & Paleolithic peoples. The same sociological developments can be seen (in some cases even earlier) in Afro-Asiatic, Sumerian, Hurro-Uratrian, Turkic, Minoan, Etruscan and so forth. We're talking about the ascendancy of hitherto unknown male gods, doctrines associated with bands of men, the sudden ubiquity of symbology related to war like armed stelae & the labrys and such things.
 
Very well said. What a lot of people do not understand is that the genes of the people who invaded or colonised one land live on in the modern population of this land, not in the invaders' original homeland. That's why Neolithic Anatolian farmers resemble more modern Sardinians than modern Anatolians. That's also why the genome of Yamna people is closer to modern Irish, Scots and Norwegians than to modern Ukrainians or South Russians.

The Indo-Europeans that left Russia and migrated to Northern Pakistan to become the Indo-Aryans were the ancestors of modern South Asians, not of modern Russians. The Iranian farmers that left Iran to colonise South Asia became the ancestors of all South Asians, not of modern Iranians. Modern Iranians do have shared similar ancestry from the farmers that remained there, but also plenty of ancestry from later migrations into Iran.

As ancient DNA has shown us, and which David Reich explains at length in his book Who We Are and How We Got Here
ir
, modern racial or ethnic groups were only formed in the last 5000 years from ancestral groups that do not exist any more in their unmixed form. The only people who may have survived without external input in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years are very isolated tribes such as the aborigines of the North Sentinel Island in the Andamans (who shoot arrows at helicopters), or some tribes from the Amazon, Papua New Guinea or Australia. Even the Khoisan of southern Africa have recent admixture from farmers. If Indians were descended from the Palaeolithic South Asians without admixture they would be essentially like the North Sentinel tribes genetically (and perhaps also culturally). I don't understand why anyone would be ashamed to descend from the people who invented farming.

I don't think they're ashamed to descend from the people who invented farming, Maciamo. From things I've read most of them seem to be ok with being descended in part from Neolithic Iran like people. Their issue is with owing anything in terms of genes or culture to anything associated with Europe.

Given their history I understand it, but facts are facts. To deny certain things just makes a country look ridiculous. They have to accept, like everyone else, that their people and culture are a mix of different groups.
 
I don't think they're ashamed to descend from the people who invented farming, Maciamo. From things I've read most of them seem to be ok with being descended in part from Neolithic Iran like people. Their issue is with owing anything in terms of genes or culture to anything associated with Europe.
Given their history I understand it, but facts are facts. To deny certain things just makes a country look ridiculous. They have to accept, like everyone else, that their people and culture are a mix of different groups.
they have a theory that IE originated in India (out of India theory)
they deny every prehistoric invasion of India, and see India as the origin of many expansions
read the article, it says an Indian origin of IE has become impossible now
in their view, Mehrgarh was a local development
and the Indo-Aryan invasion, it never happened
 
I don't think they're ashamed to descend from the people who invented farming, Maciamo. From things I've read most of them seem to be ok with being descended in part from Neolithic Iran like people. Their issue is with owing anything in terms of genes or culture to anything associated with Europe.

Given their history I understand it, but facts are facts. To deny certain things just makes a country look ridiculous. They have to accept, like everyone else, that their people and culture are a mix of different groups.
Haven't Russia/USSR and India enjoyed good relations since India became independent? During the Cold War I think that Indians were even closer to Russians than Westerners. It got my attention when I read that because I found it uncanny that two very different cultures but sharing a high percentage of haplogroup R1a should be so close. It made me wonder if there were shared genes that made them feel close or mutually compatible. With that in mind, it is surprising that Indians don't want anything to do with Russians genetically. When you think about it, even if nationalist Indians believe that Indo-Europeans originated in India, that still makes Europeans their genetic cousins. So why feel shame about that relatedness?

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Haven't Russia/USSR and India enjoyed good relations since India became independent? During the Cold War I think that Indians were even closer to Russians than Westerners. It got my attention when I read that because I found it uncanny that two very different cultures but sharing a high percentage of haplogroup R1a should be so close. It made me wonder if there were shared genes that made them feel close or mutually compatible. With that in mind, it is surprising that Indians don't want anything to do with Russians genetically. When you think about it, even if nationalist Indians believe that Indo-Europeans originated in India, that still makes Europeans their genetic cousins. So why feel shame about that relatedness?

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I think they feel shame about being conquered. You really have to read the Rigveda to understand. That's why many of them don't seem to care very much if ancestry came to them from the west, from Iran. Those were just farmers moving in and blending. They didn't subjugate them. It's also all tied into colonialism and the Raj.

Meanwhile, the values which came with the Indo-Europeans persist to this day. I just saw an article the other day about sperm banks In India touting that their sperm would guarantee "light-skinned" tall offspring.

It's schizophrenic and totally illogical, but emotional stances are often just that. I mean, to my European eyes even the very much in a minority high caste Brahmins or Kshatriya with their 15-20% "steppe" ancestry are still decidedly "brown", so it's hard to understand these delineations.

Still, it's there. One of our Miss Americas was of Indian descent and said in an interview that she's too dark to have ever won such an award in India. I find that really sad.

nina-davuluri.jpg


The same used to be true to some extent in the U.S. or the Caribbean, and is still true to some extent. One of my closest friends is a "black" Jamaican (although "brown" describes her color better, and my Cuban friend said she would be described as a "mulatta" in Cuba), and the other day she was saying that one of her daughter's has "better" hair than the other. By that she means straighter.
 
why do you think that these values come from indo europeans? you have the same thing in east asia and africa. that didn't come from indo europeans but from the our modern culture.
 
The only people who may have survived without external input in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years are very isolated tribes such as the aborigines of the North Sentinel Island in the Andamans (who shoot arrows at helicopters), or some tribes from the Amazon, Papua New Guinea or Australia. Even the Khoisan of southern Africa have recent admixture from farmers. If Indians were descended from the Palaeolithic South Asians without admixture they would be essentially like the North Sentinel tribes genetically (and perhaps also culturally). I don't understand why anyone would be ashamed to descend from the people who invented farming.

Even in the case of non-islander isolated tribes, like the Amazonians, I find it extremely unlikely that they remained more or less unadmixed in the last 5,000-10,000 years. In the case of the Amazon, my opinion is mostly due to the fact that we have reliable indications of huge expansions of a few language families associated with more intensive farming and very warlike structures, such as the Tupi-Guaranis and Arawaks. I don't know about the Arawaks, but for the Tupi-Guarani their expansion is dated to around 2,000 years ago. The reach of those languages was, in the early Columbian times, extremely wide, in territories roughly as large as 1/2 or even 2/3 of Europe, and that would be almost impossible - certainly not with extreme linguistic divergence to the point that the connections would now be almost unrecognizable - if this situation had been persisting since as much as ~10,000 years ago. Thus, we can see that even apparently "pristine" and isolated regions must have actually had a lot of action, cultural change and demographic replacements in the last milennia, especially after the spread of farming encroaching on hunter-gatherer territories.
 
The Romans and Macedonian were in matters of warfare much more sophisticated than the Greeks. Philip II could conquer Greece because of his tactical & strategic innovations. This is completely unlike Rome's struggle with the Barbarians - a well prepared Roman army always defeated the Germanics in pitched battles.

My guess would be that Bronze Age dynamics were much more akin to the latter phenomenon, but still more extreme. The world view that arose in theBronze Age must have been completely unlike that of the Neolithic & Paleolithic peoples. The same sociological developments can be seen (in some cases even earlier) in Afro-Asiatic, Sumerian, Hurro-Uratrian, Turkic, Minoan, Etruscan and so forth. We're talking about the ascendancy of hitherto unknown male gods, doctrines associated with bands of men, the sudden ubiquity of symbology related to war like armed stelae & the labrys and such things.

In matters of warfare, yes, certainly, but as we were talking about the level of sophistication of the civilization I'm pretty sure that Romans until around 200 BC and Macedonians by 340 BC were certainly seen by the Greek city-state dwellers as pretty unrefined and uncivilized, even if increasingly, as time went on, more for hubris and xenophobic bias than for real differences in levels of wealth and technological advances.
 

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