So, in just the same way, there could have been a small Germanic population in Iran that was not large enough to leave a significant impact on the genetics of Iran populations.I doubt the Celtic population in Asia Minor was ever large enough to leave a significant impact on the genetics of Asia Minor populations whether they were endogenous or not.
That they were "pale" suggests they were likely to be of Northern provenance, compared to the people who described them as such. That they were ignorant of local practices suggest they were most likely newcomers. Combined with genetic estimates that Northern autosomal DNA arrived in the region at about that time, and a branch of the Northern haplogroup R1-M417 began developing there also at that time. I haven't seen any evidence suggesting the contrary, so on the balance of probabilities, I would suggest a Northern provenance is most likely.Is there any specific evidence that states the Guti were of "northern provenance"?
I don't believe in conflating language with genetics - language can be adopted. Most views about these various tribes are speculative, and I am as wary of these as I am of conclusions drawn on the basis of demonyms. However, we know from more recent populations that denonyms can be significant, even when they are separated by up to 2,000 years - Danish Anglians and English East Anglians, Dutch Franks and French, German Goths and Spanish Zaragoths, Italian Romans and Romanians. Why not the Guti, Getae and/or Gauti likewise? They don't have to have the same language, culture or genetics to be related.I would be very wary of drawing connections between people based on demonyms (be they exonyms or endonyms). We know for some time it was believed that the Getae were related to the Goths, however the Getae are a Thracian people more closely related to the Dacians, while the Goths are a Germanic people with an attested Germanic language. In regards to the Caspians and Kashubians, from what I've seen the Caspian people are often regarded as a pre-Indo-European people linked to the Kassites. Kashubians are a Slavic people in the Baltic region, living in Pomerania (literally, by the sea). Now if the Gutians were indeed Indo-European, from what I've read, they were probably more like Tocharians than Germanic people, secondly I think we'll be hard-pressed to find anything that definitively proves whether they were IE people, we lack a corpus of their language and a kings list does not tell us much about their language.
Agreed. We should neither assume, nor rule out.If we cannot rule out connections, we also shouldn't assume there are connections either, especially when the evidence is weak, or based off of the seeming similarity of names.
I am sure there is some semblance of truth in some medieval works. To work on the basis that there isn't any is denying yourself access to data that helps build a picture.We also should be very careful of interpreting medieval "historical" (more like pseudo-historical) works as having any semblance of truth.
Solid evidence is hard to come by. If we only relied upon what was definitely proven and ignored all circumstantial evidence and balance of probabilities, we would have very little indeed.I'm all for finding new connections throughout history, however they need be backed by solid evidence.
It might not be that Iranian Guti, Ukrainian Getae and Eastern Baltic Gauti descend directly from each other, but the question is could they have a root in common (possibly reflected in their names), which could be a genetic, a cultural or a linguistic one? Genetically, I suspect they have a relatively recent common root in R1a-Z645, which (according to yfull estimates) only arose in the early third millennium BC. And it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they had a common ancestor significantly later than this (on the collapse of Corded Ware circa 2,400 BC), which by the way probably also spawned the Kashubian Slavs, the Thracians and the Caspian Indo-Aryans (in admixture with various other people).