When we were monsters
Unraveling ancestry, kinship, and violence in a Late Neolithic mass grave: In 2011, archaeological excavations near the village of Koszyce in southern Poland uncovered a ca. 5,000-y-old mass grave…associated with […]
The enormous demographic impact of the Indo-Europeans
When I was a kid I remember seeing a map of the distribution of Indo-European languages, and being perplexed by their spread and distribution, from the North Sea to the Bay of Bengal. Later, I learned and understood that language families can spread by diffusion and cultural assimilation. In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: […]
How a Eurasian “band of brothers” shaped the world
When I was eight years old I saw a map which genuinely confused me. I had opened up deluxe dictionary at my elementary school and saw a map of the world’s language families, and noticed that there were a group of dialects which spanned the Bay of Bengal to the North Sea. In fact, according […]