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they made charriots with spoked wheels and trained horses before contact with BMACKeep 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.
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.
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.
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.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.
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.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.
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 reasonsI 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.
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
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.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.
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.
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.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 "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...
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