More than 1 year of the steppe
Over at my Substack I’ve spent more than a year writing about the cultural and genetic impact of the Eurasian steppe. I’ve put out a large number of essays, so […]
Onward on the steppe!
After a long delay, I’ve dropped part 4 of my continuing series on the Eurasian steppe and its history (I am currently planning on going down to the 13th century AD…so this should take me into 2022 since I’ve barely made it beyond 2000 BC as of now). The next installment is planned to be …
How much “steppe” ancestry is there in South Asia? (Indian subcontinent)
Since this question always comes up at some point, I decided to do a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation of the % steppe across the Indian subcontinent. The way I did it was by taking Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, and estimating the average percentage from the caste breakdowns (e.g., UP is 20% “upper caste” and 20% “Dalit” …
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The Empire of the Silk Road and the “Babel of Nations”
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present is one of my favorite books because it combines erudition with trenchent and opinionated analysis. One of the arguments explicit within the author’s narrative is that the geographic parameters of Eurasian steppe created a set of societies and […]
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 […]
Why Bronze Age steppe people replaced the farmers they conquered
One of the major revisions in my own mind about the demographic and historical processes of the Holocene in relation to humans has been the reality that large and dense agglomerations of agriculturalists could be marginalized by later peoples, to the point of having a smaller genetic footprint in the future than anyone might have […]