This is the second Q&A for History of Mankind. Paid subscribers received an email soliciting questions and I got some. I picked the five that I think I can shed the most light upon:
Question 1 — (by Michael Gallozzo): “There’s some buzz around some new papers on the Caucasian origins of Indo-Europeans. Since you already addressed the discussion on the origins of Indo-Europeans and Aryans in a previous post, I wonder whether you intend to update that post or what.”
Answer— This is a fascinating question. So, I’m going to break it down in two parts. First, I will address the issue of how I incorporate research and comments that make me tweak or adjust views expressed in previous posts. And later I will discuss those new papers.
First, new research is being published every day. I try to keep up with it, but it’s humanly impossible to cover everything, so I focus. Since I’m currently writing about the pre-Christian era, that’s now my area of focus. In the end, the History of Mankind project arose from my initial plan of writing a single-volume history of mankind, of which there are several examples already, none of which I like very much. When this project is completed, there will be two books (or perhaps three) that will incorporate all of these posts I’m publishing, plus additions and corrections that I come across or that readers alert me to. These books will cover up to the year 500 AD, between 500 and 1500 AD, and the following (modern) era. So, to sum up: I will not update old posts, I will incorporate any new research, tweaks and corrections into the books themselves. But I love this question, because it allows me to explain that I will discuss any significant modifications of old posts in this Q&A format. Now, for the specific question:
The view that the Indo-European homeland is north of the Caucasus — a view reflected in my post “The First Pyramids of the Americas & the Indo-Europeans of the Steppes” — came under strong attack/correction by three papers led by Iosif Lazaridis and published in 2022 by Science magazine: in “Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia,” Lazaridis et al look at population movements centered in Anatolia before the rise of the Indo-Europeans, while “The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe” proposes that the steppe Indo-Europeans were themselves the progeny of Caucasian migrants who moved north between 5000 and 3000 BC, giving rise to the so-called Yamnaya culture of the Ukrainian steppe, which only then served as homeland for Indo-Europeans moving back south and west, and Aryans who migrated north of the Caspian Sea before they turned south towards Iran and India. “A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia” summarizes this theory.
If Lazaridis et al are right, calling Indo-European “Caucasians” would be more accurate than anyone ever suspected in the 20th century. But these papers don’t fundamentally change the narrative I relied upon: the biggest change, if Lazaridis is right, would be that early Indo-Europeans, rather than fundamentally the progeny of Siberian mammoth-hunters, were fundamentally the progeny of Caucasian tribesmen who moved north taking advantage of a better, warmer climate after the Younger Dryas.
For more details, I recommend that anyone interested on the topic checks out Razib Khan’s well-informed take on the matter here.
Question 2 — (by Anonymous): “I’m a bit surprised to see that you believe that China is not such an old civilization as many Chinese claim, or as influential”. What’s your view?”
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