joegibbs8 hours ago
Why did people doubt this? It doesn’t sound so ridiculous that a Germanic-speaking people would come from Scandinavia, which has a island called Gothland, a province East Gothland and West Gothland, a city called Gothenburg and people called Geats (probably related to Goths).
dmix8 hours ago
The article explains
> The findings challenge decades of scholarship that played down the importance of migration and emphasized the spread of language and culture between settled populations.“
> “What the genotyping is showing is what the ancient sources report, and what late–20th century historiography has been working very hard to deny,” says Yale University historian Noel Lenski, who was not involved in the work. “We have to … admit the sources knew more than we thought they did.”
If I'm reading that right they are implying academics were pushing the idea of cultural exchange being the most valuable thing, a vague menagerie of local and foreign cultures coming together, rather than a specific set of people arriving from a far off land to dominant an existing empire and influencing the entire region in the process.
bazoom424 hours ago
If I understand the article correctly, there is DNA evidence of mass migration from Scandinavia to Northern Poland, but going further south, the evidence points to migration of a smaller elite rather than mass migration.
> In the beginning, there was a big migration, but later they started mingling, and the transmission of Gothic was more of a cultural nature.
In this comment section it seems people really want it to be one or the other, evidence be damned.
throwthrowuknow3 hours ago
“mingling”
cucumber373284234 minutes ago
>If I understand the article correctly, there is DNA evidence of mass migration from Scandinavia to Northern Poland, but going further south, the evidence points to migration of a smaller elite rather than mass migration.
I.e it wasn't fashionable, didn't make for good career advancement for anyone to look into it let alone say it.
>In this comment section it seems people really want it to be one or the other, evidence be damned.
I'm just here to remind everyone that the "professionals" are fallible and subject to industry circle jerks.
senderista7 hours ago
It was the post-WW2 hangover of "pots aren't people" (reaction to Kossinna and other racist archeologists favored by the Nazis). There was a lot of resistance from archeologists and anthropologists to ancient DNA findings in the 2010s vindicating mass migration but they ultimately had to fold (and admit that the historical linguists were right all along). Now we have a more balanced perspective and can see that language and material culture can be transmitted via either cultural diffusion or mass migration, and we have to look at the actual evidence in each case to identify the transmission mechanism. An interesting example of how both transmission mechanisms can be involved in one cultural-linguistic phenomenon is the Bell Beaker culture (associated with the spread of an Indo-European language family possibly ancestral to Italo-Celtic), which spread east from Iberia to Central Europe via cultural transmission, and then back west to the Atlantic via mass migration (reaching all the way to Britain, where they appropriated Stonehenge from its Neolithic builders, who went virtually extinct within a century).
ChrisMarshallNY2 minutes ago
Language etymology is a fascinating study. This is very far from my own expertise, but I have family that have made it more of a vocation.
Languages can spread by utility, rather than culture.
For example, "Low German" was a common trade tongue, and shows up in parts of the world, where Germans never set foot.
skew-aberration5 hours ago
Do you know of any good books or sources about this viewpoint?
When I read about history of Europe/Old World in Roman and post Roman times, it's clear that large scale movements of whole groups of people is very common in the historical record.
I wonder why such views were ever resisted in prehistory, a time when such movements were simpler and their motivations more likely to arise?
inglor_cz7 hours ago
Politicization of science is never good.
The "pots aren't people" wave wouldn't be problematic per se (e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life), rather because it sought to be the dominant theory.
We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing - defeat of the Nazis, which made some ideas extremely dirty and other ideas very attractive.
This has an interesting consequence in that we do not know much about natural human intelligence today, which is coming back to bite us in the age of emerging artificial intelligence. The topic of human intelligence has been a political minefield for nearly a century now. It is probably safer and easier to study intelligence of octopuses and crows than that of humans. You're definitely freer from political repercussions there.
siva77 hours ago
> We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing
no we don't. intelligence isn't racial..
fliglr4 hours ago
IQ differences between the racial groups is one of the most, if not the most, replicated findings in psychology.
graemep3 hours ago
Are they consistent across time and cultures? Are they corrected for differences in health, education, culture, wealth, etc? How big are racial differences compared to differences between people from different social classes?
How do you define racial groups? its something that constantly shifts. I have an encyclopedia for the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid" which is not how most people now think.
DC-33 hours ago
You can do a dimensionality reduction on genetic variants and certain recognisable groups fall pretty clearly out of the data.
graemep2 hours ago
Do those groups relate closely to what people generally mean by race? Race as defined in which culture? I know from personal experience that its not the same definitions across cultures. How big are those differences compared to differences within racial groups?
DC-3an hour ago
Take a look yourself.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Principa...
Obviously some racial groups which are heavily socially constructed are not borne out by the data. There's no cluster for 'Latinos'. But in general I think there is quite a high correspondence with race as it is constructed in society and culture.
tsimionescuan hour ago
Based almost entirely on racist studies, including some famous ones that were comparing white and black school children in apartheid South Africa. I wonder if there may have been some confounding variables there, but surely this is just my bias.
Plus, none of these studies actually spend the money to do any genetic testing, they simply assign people to "white" or "black" race based almost always on skin color (which, since the gene for dark skin is dominant, is a very poor marker of actual genetic similarity - the great grandchild of a dark-skinned person with otherwise only white-skinned relatives can still be dark-skinned).
Edit: and I'm not even mentioning the obvious publication bias, as essentially only racists care about this race vs intelligence discussion, at least enough to invest in creating studies about it. Plus the fact that IQ itself is actually a very problematic measure, when applied beyond its actual medical use (quantifying mental disability).
adrianN6 hours ago
Suggesting that intelligence might be (partially) inheritable always causes backlash.
gsich5 hours ago
Intelligence is inheritable.
vintermann4 hours ago
Intelligence isn't even well defined.
gsich2 hours ago
That doesn't matter.
vintermann2 hours ago
Apparently not.
wolfi13 hours ago
for the sake of DJT's offspring I hope not
logicchains5 hours ago
It causes backlash because there are huge fields of modern academia built around the implicit assumption that everyone has the same IQ and hence the worse outcomes encountered by black and brown people are due to a big societal conspiracy against them, when in reality their outcomes are almost identical to white people who score the same on IQ tests as those groups do.
Roark662 hours ago
It is true any discussion of the subject marks you as a racist so how can we have an honest conversation in such environment? Just look at your own down votes?
Having said that, even if the academic outcomes of people with darker skin color were worse (no idea if that is true, or in which country) just knowing that is no proof. It may as well be cultural or even income based (pregnant mothers eating worse quality food for example, or same thing with young children).
Is the question even answerable? What kind of intelligence do we measure with "academic outcomes"? How do we adjust for income and quality of life as a child, things like having both parents, or grandparents? It's an absolute minefield of possible manipulation. Same data can probably be spun to "proove" any hypothesis you have.
Then imagine writing a proposal for such research. What benefits can you predict? If you find there is absolutely no correlation between skin color and academic outcomes after adjusting for all external factors will it convince people that are racist as part of their identity? I doubt it.
Lets say you do prove there is some correlation. What the result of that would be? Open discrimination and vindication of racist views. But even if the principle was true the average doesn't apply to individuals so you can't apply it to any particular person.
tsimionescuan hour ago
What plausible mechanism is there to even approach the idea that skin color influences intelligence? Why not study the effects on intelligence of eye color, or blood type?
This is especially clearly just a racist concept once you realize that none of the studies of IQ vs race actually do any genetic testing, they only rely on phenotype. Which is absurd given the fact that the child of a black-skinned person born in sub-Saharan Africa and a white-skinned person born in a village in Ireland is extremely likely to be black-skinned, but is genetically just as much part of both populations. It's only the history of racism that assigns this child as black more so than white.
adrianNan hour ago
We know that people with red hair tend to metabolize anesthesia differently. It is not completely implausible that there is also a correlation between looks and other traits, although it seems almost impossible to me to untangle cultural, environmental and genetic effects.
tsimionescuan hour ago
Of course, any two traits can be correlated. But unless there is an obvious causal mechanism ("whiter skinned people get sun burns more easily", "darker skinned people tend to have vitamin D deficiencies at higher latitudes"), there's no reason to assume it and start looking for it to prove or disprove. It's a priori just as likely that there is a genetic link between toe shape and intelligence as skin color and intelligence. Yet no one is doing the science of measuring toe length correlation to intelligence, just skin color ("race").
adrianNan hour ago
As far as I know phrenology measured all kinds of things and claimed correlations. But they used highly dubious data (even for their time) and the field is now too unpopular to try (something similar) again with better methodology.
And I would say that the racist claim is that there is observable correlation and that genetic explanations are about as probable as other explanations. But I suppose many non-genetic explanations (eg cultural differences) would also be counted as racism, since in these kinds of discussions race and culture are often jumbled together.
card_zero6 hours ago
I just got a downvote for an opposing opinion, so at least one person feels keenly that intelligence is genetic and is unable to say why.
Roark663 hours ago
>intelligence isn't racial
And how do we know that? Any very controversial stuff like this will have people on both sides doing all in their power to convince everyone to their point of view. The truth gets lost.
To discuss this objectively we have to first agree on some basics. First I think the concept of race is a bit outdated. People have phenotypes and these phenotypes have various features (one may be skin color).
Also where did the idea there exists one feature responsible for "intelligence" came from? It seems to be accepted apriori, but I think the truth is closer to humans (and animals and AI) having various types of intelligence. Social, emotional, linguistical, math like, spatial (ability to imagine shapes etc) and probably few more.
And those intelligence types may very well have a genetic component and be present in one phenotype in a different mix than another.
But saying it is likely vs having actual proof are two different things so my view is that we simply don't know.
paganel6 hours ago
> intelligence isn't racial..
The same way as South-Koreans are by now taller than North-Koreans (because of material reasons) we could posit that "intelligence", i.e. the "workings" of our brain, can be distributed in a non-uniform manner across humankind, depending on the "local" material conditions.
And this is not about "race", because according to those that do believe in the "race" stuff both North-Koreans and South-Koreans are part of the same "race", it is about those material conditions that I've mentioned and which, in the end, by necessity end up modifying things in our (very material) brains, and hence in our "intelligence". Believing otherwise, meaning believing that are our brains are not affected by the material conditions under which we live our day-to-day lives, would be preposterous.
pingou6 hours ago
I don't think many people dispute the fact that the environment plays a role in intelligence. Not even many people dispute that there is some heritability to intelligence. What is in dispute is whether that heritability means that some races are on average genetically more intelligent than others (and another problem is how to define intelligence).
graemep3 hours ago
How do you define races? As I said in another comment definitions shift and they are different in different countries. I have an encyclopedia from the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid". Some East Africans were also defined as "Caucasoid" historically.If we define races on the basis of genetic similarity then almost everyone whose ancestry is from Eurasia is the same "race", but people whose ancestry is African belong to multiple races.
thin_carapace6 hours ago
I don't understand how the precedents could lead to any question regarding the disputed conclusion
logicchains5 hours ago
If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.
pingou4 hours ago
That could also be explained by cultural differences, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming.
Or it could be discrimination. There are studies that show that black and white mixed races children did not score any higher than children with two black parents, while white people score higher than black people on average, which may point to some discrimination impacting IQ.
JuniperMesos4 hours ago
Discrimination against whites in favor of blacks doesn't lower white IQ.
graemep3 hours ago
There are significant cultural and economic differences between those communities. These will be similar between Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese and Indians are sufficiently recent immigrants for their culture to still have a lot in common (they speak the same language, follow the same religions, have inherited attitudes) with the places their ancestors came from.
card_zero6 hours ago
Right, but the equation of workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit. That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place.
paganel6 hours ago
> workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit
I don't find it that tricky, intelligence does come from the brain.
> That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place
Both one's brain and one's "intelligence" belong to the same person, like, physically and materially, which is not true when it comes to your bicycle example. More to the point, I find the comparison itself kind of self-describing, it's like deciding to "outsource" intelligence to some other external, non-ethereal entity (like a bicicle that is physically separate from a human being) in order to avoid those hard questions the OP was alluding to (hard questions that oftentimes also involve the political side of things).
card_zero6 hours ago
Now I want to say that your ideas don't come from your brain. But of course they do, as a result of interaction with other people's ideas, some of which were written down. (Don't worry, I'm not a dualist.)
The thing is that no matter how fancy your bicycle, I can still ride my shitty bicycle to a university, and you can ride your lubricated carbon fiber bicycle into a ditch, and then you're not so smart. If what you call intelligence is how fast your bicycle typically goes into the ditch, then sure, it can be measured on a scale and you have more of it.
defrost6 hours ago
You, as a dualist, is the least of the fears we hold.
There are other notions about the transfer of ideas: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/06/memory-transfer
card_zero6 hours ago
I'm not a dualist! Fumes
Wait, cannibal worms that eat memories? My my.
defrost6 hours ago
I for one thank our AI overlords that weight training avoided that path not taken :/
jstanley5 hours ago
If you think any brain can be just as intelligent no matter how it works then why not extend that to things that aren't brains? If everyone's brain is equally good then isn't a rock just as good as well?
card_zero3 hours ago
Sure, if the rock has good ideas.
(Rocks don't have ideas.)
vintermann4 hours ago
A lot of HN is currently about rocks that we've made very smart, in case you haven't noticed. I don't want archeology polluted by generic academic culture war stuff, so can we please leave "intelligence" out of it?
ffsm85 hours ago
If genetics had no impact whatsoever then great apes would have the same intelligence potential as humans, as human races are more diverse then you give them credit for.
The impact of it's culture and behavioral like inbreeding being acceptable probably plays a bigger role though, but denying genetic impact is just putting your head in the sand because you cannot face reality not being equal. Which it ain't. It's also almost certainly a range, with most of the curves overlapping. If studied, I'd expect there to be a measurable impact in the rates of high intelligence individuals with the median intelligence being pretty close across all groups, but obliviously just my personal experience from interacting with people.
simonh4 hours ago
Race is a combination of genetic, and cultural factors such as nutrition, early childhood care practices, social values, etc.
Humans are far more genetically homogenous than many animal species due to a population collapse at one point in our developmental history.
Cultural practices can have a big effect on intellectual development, so disentangling any possible genetic factors from cultural ones can be very difficult, but there is very little evidence for genetic factors related to race also being related to intelligence at the population level. Obviously certain genetic disorders can have a significant effect.
card_zero6 hours ago
I say intelligence is ideas, so it isn't physiological* and doesn't have a quotient.
* except in that being beaten around the head can make a person stupid.
logicchains5 hours ago
Every study that's been done shows a significant difference in mean IQ across races. Suggesting otherwise is anti-science, putting ideology over reality. That doesn't mean everyone of any particular race is stupid; Indians in America for instance on average have higher IQS than white Americans, in spite of the average IQ of India being significantly lower, because only the smarter Indians manage to immigrate to America.
kshri244 hours ago
Most studies of Indians done in famous IQ tests were of those Indians who lived in villages and suffered from diseases. Its been debunked so many times.
Those who immigrate to America are not smarter. They just had the where with all to pay for immigration. Even those who go on scholarship have to prove they have atleast land/housing back in India to even get a chance to immigrate.
kelipso11 minutes ago
I remember looking up the source of the IQ data from Nepal a few years ago. It was a taken from an IQ survey of a school for mentally disabled children..
Talk about sampling bias lol.
bigmysteryious16 hours ago
[dead]
seri4l3 hours ago
Lysenkoism predates the defeat of the nazis and it's pretty much the same pseudoscientific dismissal of nature for ideological reasons.
cucumber373284228 minutes ago
>(e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life),
If you wanna tell the romans to GFY you're gonna have to adopt a lot of the structures that make them competitive in order to resist them. There's a fairly large "you wrestle the pig you get shit on you" factor going on.
avadodin6 hours ago
To be honest, I'm more interested in what ideology/religion lead to the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent in a timespan of over thousands of years to almost utter replacement despite of the fact that, in the end, the "invaders" were almost identical to the "invaded", than I am in elucidating whether Llama 3 being less performant than Gemma 4 in benchmarks is due to the training corpus or the architecture.
I don't feel like being racist either way.
[deleted]23 minutes agocollapsed
JuniperMesos4 hours ago
Regardless of how you feel about being racist, some people will accuse you of being uncomfortably close to a Nazi for talking about the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent, because 19th and early 20th century anthropologists that the Nazis liked and amplified the ideas of really did think that the Yamnaya Y line took over a continent, they just called them "Aryans" instead of "the Yamnaya Y line".
throwthrowuknow3 hours ago
There’s really only one way you totally replace male lineage.
qwytw5 hours ago
Based on the evidence we have it seems that they simply killed most (in some places almost all) of the local men they could find?
avadodin4 hours ago
Who is they? The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.
We know people often kill people. That doesn't even need explanation.
My argument is that it is thousands of years and dozens of mixed generations.
Why do you decide to participate in a thousand-years-long campaign to kill the neighbor who is also your second cousin?
There is no reason they couldn't have turned the other way and attacked their other second cousin.
My best guess is religion but it could also have also been a different kind of fanatic ideology.
jimnotgym7 hours ago
The cultural exchange part was more a post punk thing. The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees.
vintermann4 hours ago
And what's the difference exactly? We knew that e.g. the Visigoths had Scandinavian ancestry, but we also know that by then they had lots of other ancestry, too.
To me this reads like Lenski (not affiliated with the authors!) trying a little too hard to make it into an academic culture war issue.
mjw10075 hours ago
When you're reading a popular-science story about a new discovery, there are two things to be careful about:
- are the claims it's making about the discovery right, or exaggerated?
- are the claims it's making about what people previously believed right, or exaggerated?
When I'm reading about areas that I happen to know something about, I find that there's a smallish tendency to exaggerate the first and a large one to exaggerate the second.
I think it's likely that's true in other areas. I get the impression it's particularly common for archaeological discoveries for some reason.
vintermann4 hours ago
Same here. This study is mostly kicking in open doors - or at least the people quoted not affiliated with the study for some reason, are kicking in open doors. I got into this as a tangent from genealogy, and that the Goths were for a good part actually from Scandinavia is not a particularly bold assertion.
Now that the Wielbark culture simply is the Goths, that would be a sightly bolder assertion - and one which is probably good they're not making since it would probably be oversimplifying things.
bazoom424 hours ago
Science is not just believing what sounds plausible. It is about gathering evidence. Having historical, archeological and DNA evidence is a lot stronger that just historical evidence alone.
INTPenis4 hours ago
Yeah but I'm a Swede and even I thought those regions were named long after Rome, in tribute to Roman history. Claiming the origins of the infamous Goths just because of their accomplishments in the south.
Because Swedish history before 1000AD is very murky.
ChrisGreenHeur4 hours ago
You did not find it weird that Beowulf identified as a geat?
barrenko7 hours ago
Or that Russia commenced as a Viking startup.
fsckboy6 hours ago
I think the Russia case is the case of some Viking leaders of Slavs
contingencies6 hours ago
If you sail south (toward the sun) it's pretty hard to miss Poland, and you'd know it's there long earlier due to observing migratory seabirds.
hypfer6 hours ago
Not contributing anything intellectually, but this article is a lot of fun to read when one mentally envisions the modern style, looks and meaning of the word Goths.
> In 251 C.E., Roman Emperor Decius, his son, and most of his army were killed fighting Goths in what is today Romania, in one of the empire’s greatest defeats.
Envision the black Eyeliner
RobotToaster4 hours ago
danparsonson5 hours ago
Sarcasm and irony were their greatest weapons
alexpotato41 minutes ago
This reminds me of Herodotus [0].
For those that don't know about him:
- he was an ancient historian
- he made a lot of "wild claims" e.g. there was a tribe that made clothes out of human skin
- historians assumed these were myths or exaggerated
- recent research has shown that many of his wild claims were true (even the one above) [1]
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
1 - https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-scythians-us...
pmontra7 hours ago
> the Spanish for “bandit,” “helmet,” and “truce.”
If they are bandido, casco, tregua they are identical to the Italian bandito, casco, tregua. The only difference is a d/t. Actually in Italy a cyclist and a worker wear a casco, but a soldier wears an elmetto.
I googled the etymology of casco and it comes from Latin but it came to Italy from Spain a few centuries ago. So I wonder what other word for helmet they use in Spain, that originated in the Goth language.
card_zero7 hours ago
"On the peninsula" ... I found elmo, does Galician count? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/elmo#Galician
There are plenty of other warlike terms in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_terms_derive... such as gaita (bagpipes).
fcatalan6 hours ago
We have yelmo and almete, but looking up both of them, they seem to be considered later medieval loans. Espuela (spur), dardo (dart) and a few other warlike items are often mentioned. And of course guerra (war) itself.
fcatalan6 hours ago
And tangentially, to this day Canary islanders'slur for peninsulars is "godos", in the sense of "arrogant and haughty"
madduci5 hours ago
And in German the word is "Helm" as well
nachexnachex2 hours ago
Yelmo for helmet
defrost8 hours ago
Of all the mythic origin stories about the globe, Goths originating in Scandinavia is one of the less exciting ones to be proven correct.
DNA from unearthed car sized scales proving a giant snake carved the rivers and shape of the land would be something ...
vintermann8 hours ago
I'm not so sure this study proves anything new, too. We always knew some Goths came from Scandinavia, that they mixed extensively with less mobile people in the regions they passed through during the age of migration, and that Gothic identity was (at least eventually) more tied to Arianism than to ancestry, so that when they became Catholic they stopped identifying as Gothic.
The real wild Gothic origin story is that the island of Gotland got overpopulated and they decided by lottery which 1/3 of them should leave.
andai2 hours ago
What is Arianism?
vintermannan hour ago
A non-trinitarian Christian doctrine, considered heresy by all Christians following the Nicene creed and vice versa. No relation to Aryans.
[deleted]4 hours agocollapsed
genxy6 hours ago
So it was quite literally a flood of people.
vintermann4 hours ago
If you believe the origin story from over 1000 years later (by a guy who had read Jordanes' story written merely 500 years later), sure.
What seems more accurate is that there were people near the Vistula River around year 1 who had cultural, linguistic, trade and - yes - genetic connection to people on the other side of the Baltic sea, and in the age of migration those people got moving, got into Arian Christianity and called themselves Goths. They did comparatively well in a time when most of Europe didn't, so they have plenty of descendants, many of them carrying ancestry we can trace back to people who lived in Scandinavia before year 1.
EdwardDiego7 hours ago
Giant wiggly snake is a great explanation of the obvious evidence glaciation/erosion, ngl.
taneq7 hours ago
It’s a water snake too, so the explanation is literally correct with a bit of poetic license.
EdwardDiego5 hours ago
I love a myth that kinda makes sense with a bit of poetic licence.
E.g., the North Island of New Zealand is called "Te Ika A Māui" in Māori, that is "the fish of Māui", and if you look at it from above, it definitely resembles a stingray.
What blows my mind is how Māori knew that before cartography or aerial mapping or satellites.
I understand how they likely did, Polynesians didn't spread across the Pacific by being clueless about geography and coastlines.
But still, a pre-literate society that was able to say "huh, this island half the size of the UK looks like a giant stingray" is pretty bloody cool.
clauderoux4 hours ago
Actually, the most ancient recorded instance of the Goth language is a Bible that was written in what is now Bulgaria around 350: The so-called Bible of Wulfila. So, there is nothing new under the sun about the presence of Goths in the area, bringing their language and culture around.
TFNA3 hours ago
Your "Well acktually..." is misplaced, because no one anywhere in the article ever cast doubt on that, but rather the debate was about the Gothic Urheimat and the degree of gene spread versus cultural diffusion.
ricksunny4 hours ago
barbarian = ?
defrost3 hours ago
That depends a great deal on who is talking or typing, in what era, and where. Here's a brief list of some of the OED options for meaning:
* A foreigner, one whose language and customs differ from the speaker's.
* One not a Greek.
* One living outside the pale of the Roman empire and its civilization, applied especially to the northern nations that overthrew them.
* One outside the pale of Christian civilization.
* (With the Italians of the Renascence) One of a nation outside of Italy.
* A rude, wild, uncivilized person.
* (in mid 1800s) Applied by the Chinese contemptuously to foreigners.
* An uncultured person, or one who has no sympathy with literary culture.
* A native of Barbary.
Which one (or three) apply here can be left as an exercise for the reader.
mr_toad2 hours ago
Anyone who talks like a barbarian. In some tales the ancient Greeks thought that anyone who lived outside their city states sounded like bleating sheep. True or not, the word did mean someone who talks like a foreigner.
singpolyma32 hours ago
No kidding. That's not an ok word to be putting in a headline
ricksunnyan hour ago
I’ve come to have low expectations of Science Magazine under EIC Holden Thorp.
bazoom423 hours ago
In this context it means they invaded the Roman empire.
jdw647 hours ago
Then why did those people move? Was it because of climate change? First of all, it seems less like a movement of a warrior group and more like a group migration that included women and children—so why on earth did they have to move that way? I’m curious: is there research on this?
cma2562 hours ago
The Huns drove them out of their lands. The Goths needed to find better lands to support their population. The Roman Empire was weak. The Romans had better land. The Romans couldn't defend their land against the Goths and the Goths couldn't defend their lands against the Huns.
As for the climate change argument this movement of people groups is not uncommon. Rome up until the arrival of the Goths had been dealing with "barbarian" incursions for a thousand years.
Rome invade Gaul, Germany, and Britannia which people seem to omit. There is no argument that climate change forced them too. They did it because they could. The "barbarian" tribes invaded because they could. Both sides in this conflict are human and have human motivations.
TFNA44 minutes ago
The Huns arrived centuries after the Gothic expansion, which reached as far as the Volga river. I assumed the OP's question is (like the linked article) about that expansion from Scandinavia south and east, not the later one west into the Roman Empire.
gorgmah5 hours ago
I was wondering the same things : I often heard that the relative civilizational collapse that happened in europe during the middle ages was correlated with lower overall temperatures, e.g. what you see here [1] or there [2]. In the second one, the most recent projections (in red), show that there were a lot of very cold years (down to -0.6 degrees relative to normal) during those times. Later on, starting in the 1200s, there was the Little ice age, where temperatures fell to -0.9 relative to normal (I don't know how they defined normal). The peak, when almost all years were at -0.6 or below on that scale, caused the "General Crisis of the seventeenth century" where people from the Goth/scandinavian regions also had huge famines [3].
So my guess would be that there were several very cold years in a row, which caused famines, and the populations understood that their best survival chance was to migrate south, where they had to compete with the roman empire for land.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:2000_Year_Temperature_... [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:2000_Year_Temperature_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1695%E2%80%931...
TFNA4 hours ago
For many decades, climate events have been viewed as one driver of cultural events during the Age of Migrations: somewhere on the Asian steppe, decline in quality pasturage successively causes one people to pressure another people to their west, and eventually the avalanche rolls into Europe.
It has saddened me to see this viewpoint associated in the American cultural wars with one party's "enemy camp", where discussion of climate as a problem is automatically associated with all kinds of unrelated policy positions. People are unaware this historical explanation was posited by hoary old (and largely long-dead) twentieth-century men who had no dog in the contemporary political divide.
dsign5 hours ago
I was visiting the northern city of Umeå in Sweden, in the middle of the winter. It's a bit dark, and in a good year you get a mantle of snow that reaches waist-high, and that was a good year. So I'm sitting in this super-cozy fika room with nice warm lighting having some coffee. Out of the blue, this sweet middle aged lady who had been born there a good half a century before and who loves skiing, says: "I can't bear the darkness any longer. I'm going to Spain this year."
ChrisGreenHeur4 hours ago
Overpopulation, Scandinavia did not have very fertile soil.
namenotrequired2 hours ago
This is often said (also about the Viking age) and it seems such an incomplete explanation to me. Normally if more people are born than the land can feed, then vulnerable people (eg babies and kids and elderly) die at higher rates until the balance is restored. Why would Scandinavia be different?
mr_toad2 hours ago
They didn’t just have the motivation to leave, they also had the opportunity.
Their longboats made them amphibious. Their ships were durable enough for the open ocean, but still able to land on any beach, or sail fair upriver.
TFNA42 minutes ago
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senderista9 hours ago
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