The Yamnaya probably did ride horses…
One of the major weak points of The Horse the Wheel and Language is that there isn’t good evidence for horsemanship during the period of Yamnaya expansion. More recently, the […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 19: Historical Linguistics
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 19: Historical LinguisticsThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) we discuss the historical linguistics Dr. Asya Pereltsvaig. The author of Languages of the World and T…
Nomads, cosmopolitan predators, and peasants, xenophobic producers
Ten years ago when I read Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians, its thesis that the migrations and conquests of the post-Roman period were at least in part folk wanderings, where men, women, and children swarmed into the collapsing Empire en masse, was somewhat edgy. Today Heather’s model has to a large extent been validated. The recent […]
Near Prehistory in Northern Europe was an Indo-European world
The Picts were the topic of discussion on this week on In Our Time. They are a mysterious yet intriguing people because we don’t know much about them in their own words, but, they are one of the roots of modern Scottish identity. When I first encountered the Picts decades ago there was some debate as […]
The war between the Aesir and Vanir
In Snorri Sturluson’s preservation of pre-Christian Scandinavian mythos, he outlines two groups of gods, the Aesir and the Vanir. Though ultimately presented as a united pantheon in comparison to beings such as the giants, there are references to a war between these two divine factions. But, there is still scholarly debate as to the significance […]
There are more things in prehistory than are dreamt of in our urheimat
A new paper in Science claims to have ascertained the locus of origin of the Indo-Europeans, Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family. These are bold claims, and naturally have triggered a firestorm. No surprise, the same …
Some of the Indo-Europeans found?
School girls in Hunza, Pakistan A few days ago I observed that pseudonymous blogger Dienekes Pontikos seemed intent on throwing as much data and interpretation into the public domain via his Dodecad Ancestry Project as possible. What are the long term implications of this? I know that Dienekes has been cited in the academic literature, […]