I think that there is often a desire to downplay the ancients as liars and/or fools where their claims conflict with modern political sensitivities (even Thucydides just a few decades after Herodotus called him a tall tale teller).
I've been re-reading Herodotus and his work is actually pretty good for its time. You just have to remember that he, just like a modern day travel blogger, both sees the world through the lens of an upper class Greek and also has to keep his audience engaged with cool trivia and clickbait.
Herodotus was an early kind of historian, in the context in which he was relating his histories he was as much an entertainer as much as a historian so he repeated every fun and weird story he heard. He did qualify the dog-headed men specifically as a thing he had heard in a ironic Greek tone, he was relating an entertaining tale, not trying to persuade you that dog-headed men really exist.
A human body with a canine head. My guy Herodotus wasn’t telling tall tales at all, he was merely giving accounts of some of the very first furry conventions. These “dog-headed” men were wearing fursuits!
Part of the issue was that Herodotus reported what his sources said. So rather than it being 'Herodotus' as a single reliable or unreliable source, it was more like a collection of unvetted sources.
As a result, you got stories about dog sized ants that were nonsense but then also stories that were legit.
People tend to be rather binary with how they process information, so when there's things that are wrong they group everything in the 'wrong' category.
Definitely a lot of false negatives with how Herodotus was regarded. Much like how the prevailing consensus was that Troy was a fictional city until it was discovered.
To be fair, Herodotus also didn't believe everything he wrote down. Both implicitly such as recording blatantly mutually exclusive accounts, as well just just explicitly stating that he didn't believe everything on several occasions such as "it is my business to record what people say, but I am by no means obliged to believe it."
He was pretty open about the fact that he basically wrote down any interesting stories, and was not attempting to find some historical truth, but instead transition as much as possible from oral tradition to written.
He mostly gets called the father of history for this semi-novel take. That you can (and in most cases, should) strive for recorder and interpreter to be separate tasks.
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.
The biggest guy I ever saw at an anime convention was a goth. Fishnet shirt, raver pants, arm socks, eyeliner, painted fingernails, lipstick, jet-black hair down to his back, and he had to be around six-foot-five, approaching four hundred pounds of builtfat. In particular, I remember him having a massive chest/arms and a solid belly. Like an NFL lineman deeply in touch with the utter darkness of his soul.
All this to say that I am envisioning quite easily.
> 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.
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.
I always found this fact about the common Spanish surname Rodríguez to be interesting:
>The "ez" signifies "son of". The name Rodrigo is the Spanish form of the German name Roderich, meaning "rich in fame", from the Gothic elements "hrod" (fame or glory) and "ric" (rich). It was the name of Roderic, the last Visigothic King before the Muslim conquest, and the subject of many legends. The surname Rodríguez could have originated in the 9th century when patronymic names originated.
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).
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
The immigrants from the steppes and their descendants. It's hard to interpret the fact that the majority and often 90% or more pre Indo European male lineages were replaced in Western and Northern Europe in any other way.
Sure it took many generations but it's hard to imagine that the violence wasn't culturally and racially motivated. Based on genetic evidence it's speculated that that there were more than 10 male migrants to every female coming from the steppe.
> The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.
I'm not sure what that means? Their descendants clearly did reach Iberia and Britain.
Are you referring to the R1a/R1b problem? We do know that non-Corded Ware-derived Indo-European speakers like the Greeks, Armenians, Albanians (the latter perhaps derived from ancient Illyrians) all carry significant amounts of R1b, like the Yamnaya. Why Corded Ware carried R1a instead is still an open problem but not fatal to the hypothesis that Corded Ware originated in a Yamnaya migration (e.g. there might have been different elite paternal lineages involved that weren't dominant enough to be represented in steppe kurgan burials).
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".
>(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.
Most of the ethnicities/nations that adapted Roman way of life did not attempt to secede from Roman rule for centuries after that, if ever.
While it is true that learning from Rome was very useful for its later challengers, this usually was not the primary motivation for adoption of Roman culture, especially before ~ 400 AD. It was more about the higher standard of living plus legal stability, as long as Rome could enforce its Pax.
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?
The Nazis did do a lot of damage - far more than any benefits from the science would balance - and the 'science' contributed to it. The Nazis and many other racists have long argued that they are just being objective and the other side is biased.
How will you prevent that harm from recurring? Ignoring it hasn't worked, and doesn't distinguish the program you propose from a long line of racist programs and propaganda - that is, nobody can tell whether it's sincere or just another cover story.
But people can tell that it's not responsible, which is a clue about the thought behind it. We can't wash our hands of the consequences of our actions. If you don't prevent the next racist catastrophe, who will? Will you just do it and leave the consequences for others to clean up (and suffer from)?
"Hitler was a vegetarian. You aren't like Hitler, are you?" is a fair reason to run a garbage-collection pass over your beliefs if you're vegetarian, checking your reasons for it -- but invalid argument against claims that vegetarian diets are healthy. It sounds like mid-century historians collectively made the latter mistake.
That's an attempt at dismissing a priori the issues outlined in the GP, completely avoiding addressing them. These are very serious issues with very serious consequences; dismissing them won't change the outcomes.
Assuming you also don't want these horrible outcomes, it doesn't make sense to dismiss the risk. The people who advocate dismissing it are the ones who don't care about or seek those outcomes and are trying to remove obstacles.
Who's dismissing? The healthy reaction in scholarship is the GC pass of checking, invalidating, and retracing inferences. How else do you approach truth?
Intimating that caring about truth implies "seeking those outcomes" is a great way, to the extent it influences your field, of disconnecting it from reality.
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.
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.
>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.
Archaeogenetics is a new field in archaeology and linguistics, it only started to really make an impact in the last 15 years. No one was "looking into it let alone saying it" before that simply because DNA from dated archaeological sites hadn't yet been extracted, sequenced, and made available to researchers.
You rushed here to slander people working in the field without familiarizing yourself with the first things about it. Shame on you.
I mean, the academic community deliberately went against historical sources without much evidence-based arguments to do so. Turns out that denying DNA data is not doable, and now they have to do a 180.
Again, anyone actually familiar with Gothic studies (I trained in the field and remain employed in a closely related one) would know that people didn't outright "go against Jordanes", but rather the Gothic Urheimat was always discussed as a matter of controversy, with Jordanes' claims one version but external evidence lacking. Now there is some external evidence.
Historians hold out on claims made in historical sources -- especially when written centuries after the fact -- all the time, it is a standard scientific practice to seek external evidence.
And for having worked in a similarly behaving field, there is a big difference between “yeah we're not sure yet” and “no the ancients are most certainly wrong because our Modern Thinking is necessarily better (wink wink)”.
I suspect the academic community had a bias towards nationalistic interpretation of history. We see this both from Russian and Polish/Ukrainians, whose history is totally interlinked, making it plausible for both sides to make claims favoring what their national identity would prefer, rather than the truth.
Again, why "suspect" something about a field of scholarship? You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others. The Goths left no descendants identifying as such, their entire branch of the Germanic language family went extinct, and no scholar working today is emotionally invested in them for nationalist reasons, nor would they resist particular interpretations because anyone else was.
> You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others.
I am no expert, but here's Michael Kulikowski's argument quoted from the wiki page on the debate:
[Heather] is right to try to deduce governing apparatus from the actions that kings and chieftains were able to compel their followers to take. This approach, more than anything, goes some way toward justifying his assertion that a broad class of nonaristocratic "freemen" warriors must have existed in many of the barbarian cultures of the first half of the millennium. Yet to claim the point proved and build further hypotheses upon it is not legitimate; he comes perilously close to recreating the old, volkisch notion of an inherent “Germanic” belief in freedom. Throughout, in fact, Heather makes the tacit assumption that evidence from any “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group can be used to analyze any other “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group—in other words, that linguistic identity and socioinstitutional behaviors go inevitably together. [...] a great many historical comparanda would support a model that he ignores — that the Goths were formed from a large number of indigenes and a small number of migrants under the pressure of Roman imperialism, and in the shadow of the Empire.[31]
And more:
Kulikowski charges that old German nationalist and even Nazi influences continue to influence scholarship on the Goths up to the present day, particularly through the theories of Gustav Kossinna.[19] He considers much of what is written about Goths to be "Germanist fantasy" derived from this legacy.
This isn't exactly what I would describe as a debate "blessedly free from nationalist squabbles"
Your first paragraph is a bog-standard caveat in the historical study of particular peoples, and you are interpreting it wrongly to see it as a sign of nationalist squabbles among anyone living today. As for the second:
> old German nationalist and even Nazi influences
Notice how the key word there is "old". Scholars may respond to earlier schools of thought in the field, from a now long-vanished time when anyone actually was invested in it for nationalist reasons, but that doesn't mean anyone today is invested in it. For example, major work today on Gothic linguistics, one component in the Urheimat debate, happens in places like Leiden and UCLA where no one has any nationalist dog in the fight.
The new evidence points to a population replacement having occurred to a greater extent than academics had anticipated. That is alway a topic that involves nationalist rhetoric because people would rather believe they had been always there, not that they descend from the invaders, or even the next wave of maigrants.
Can you point to any nationalist rhetoric from people working in the field? Among the handful of current scholars in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia -- i.e. the countries relevant to the article -- I doubt anyone feels anxiety about possibly having Goths among their ancestors. That happened so long ago (nearly two millennia ago), and there are obviously more recent conflicts that weigh more heavily on people's minds and national consciousness.
Well, I was thinking of Kyiv Rus, which appeared almost a thousand years later and were arguably Slavic people with a Scandinavian elite... but if you read the history in different languages around the region they once inhabited, you'll get quite a different picture. I don't know if there's something similar about the Goths, but I am just saying that the academy apparent preference for the Goths having been just a moving culture for the most part, with little population displacement, seems quite biased towards the very common "our people were here for eons" narrative, from the outside.
If you don't actually know much about a field of inquiry yourself, maybe it is best to refrain from assuming (and based on a totally different branch of history/archaeology/linguistics) what interpersonal dynamics are at play within it and what it is biased towards. As someone who has been in the field, these posts are just dripping with uninformedness.
Sadly very par for the course. You wont get very far if you challenge the consensus nor get funding. I know of this true in at least a major area of neuroscience reliable 2ndhand.
> 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.
From what I understand, the prevailing academic belief was based on cases where "elite replacement" was what did happen. For example, the Norman conquest of England contributed massively to modern English (all those French load words), and affected the culture in a lot of ways. But for the most part, the actual population movements were smaller. And DNA evidence suggested that several other big cultural and linguistic shifts worked the same way. Mostly the ordinary folk kept doing their thing, while the ruling class suffered upheaval.
The linked article is interesting because it confirms an actual population displacement. Which breaks the recent pattern of studies! But even here later stages were often more cultural shifts than population ones.
We don't know any of this until someone does the DNA studies.
Honestly, this is one of those things where historiography swings back and forth and the truth is somewhat in the middle. The swinging back and forth is usually because confidence builds around a certain assumption but time is long and eventually evidence is discovered challenging that, then other assumptions get undermined, the new revelation gets focused on to the expense of all the past evidence and it becomes the new central assumption
Vikings took slavs as slaves. In Swedish "slav" means "slave". Vikings was rowers from Roslagen. In Finland they use the name Ruotsi for Sweden and Venäjä for Russia.
I rewatched the Vikings recently (highly recommended, perhaps not historically accurate, but no horn helmets). It was a bit ... don't know, eye opening or strange or hard to believe to learn that the Vikings played a crucial role in that part of the continent and Constantinople. I know that the term "Viking" is not an ethnic identification, more like a profession/warrior, but I don't have another word in my vocabulary.
Ivar the Boneless, Varangians. When I was growing up in Ukraine, this was never ever mentioned in any literature, school, college. That the names like Oleg or Igor were not native threw a twist too, but they are very common names over there in UA/RU, on par with Ivan and Dmitry.
Wiki has a pretty interesting history on that [1]:
During its existence, Kievan Rus was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus" or the "Rus land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus being derived from the ethnonym Роусь. ... The first known use of the term Kievan Rus comes from the 1582 chronicle by Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski, where it was used to describe the region of Rus state immediately adjacent to Kyiv.
In 1837 it was adopted by Kyiv University rector Mykhailo Maksymovych in relation to the Principality of Kiev; known for his Ukrainophile political orientation, Maksymovych later spread that definition to the whole realm, seeing Kyiv as the original point where Rus statehood emerged, establishing the base for the future Russian Empire.
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.
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.
Probably because you need to exaggerate both for people to care. Everyone thought X was true and now we have evidence for X to be true isn't a particularly interesting thing to read about. Either you insert some drama or you don't even bother reporting it to the larger public.
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.
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.
Never read it, but also, wasn't it written like hundreds of years after? I thought the oldest written stories we had were Snorres and the Icelandic sagas.
So the 5th and 6th centuries are still very much guesswork when it comes to scandinavian history.
I just always assumed that the legend of Rome was powerful enough for swedes to claim the Goths. But it makes sense that it's based on fact.
The article says why. The fall of the Roman empire being increasingly attributed to the migration of foreigners is both topical and problematic to certain ideologies
Because the university departments are held by a certain type of individuals who want to play down and dismiss anything held sacred and holy by tribes, old cultures, religions, etc., explaining them away with "totems", "magic rituals", etc.
This article is ultimately about support for Jordanes' claim that the Goths originated in Scandinavia and then some new findings that the Goths spread by gene flow, not just cultural assimilation. Jordanes was a Christian writing among a Gothic community that had converted to Christianity, and they had no attachment to whatever was "sacred and holy" to their ancestors centuries before. Consequently, historians expressing scepticism about Jordanes claim were not doing it out of any bone with "sacredness and holiness".
Perhaps before trying to depict an ultimately rather minor controversy among historians as some axe ground against the sacred and the holy, it might be worth actually learning about the topic first?
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.
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.
Swedish Gotlander's have been referring to this mythic origin story for centuries. I believe Gustavus Adophus referenced this history to justify blatant Swedish militarism in the 17th century.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> According to Māori mythology, the North and South Islands of New Zealand arose through the actions of the demigod Māui. Māui and his brothers were fishing from their canoe (the South Island) when he caught a great fish and pulled it right up from the sea. While he was not looking, his brothers fought over the fish and chopped it up. This great fish became the North Island, and thus a Māori name for the North Island is Te Ika-a-Māui ("The Fish of Māui").
Does your perception of the stingray match the head location in local use?
> Names of certain tribes like Muaūpoko (mua upoko "front of the head") and Muriwhenua (muri whenua, "backland")
The ancient sources were highly irresponsible in promoting mass migration theories, which play into the hands of Nazis and other ethnonationalists. Even if they didn't know any better, modern historians and archeologists certainly do. Let's not allow DNA analysis and historical linguistics to privilege reality over justice.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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?
There are often cultural elements in that balance. Many societies had cultural adaptations that lowered fertility under normal circumstances but enabled faster repopulation after a crisis. But if there was an outlet for excess people, the base reproduction rate could be higher.
For example, the Roman Republic had adapted to constant warfare and the steady stream of casualties caused by it. And then the Late Republic got into trouble, because Rome had become too good at war, and the required casualties didn't happen.
The Irish solution was mass emigration and blaming the English.
They had too many births before the potato famine -- it's the reason why it was such a disaster in Ireland compared to the rest of Europe -- and they continued up until a few decades ago. This happened during a time when it was unusually easy to move to "empty" land and colonize it.
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.
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.
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...
I think that there is often a desire to downplay the ancients as liars and/or fools where their claims conflict with modern political sensitivities (even Thucydides just a few decades after Herodotus called him a tall tale teller).
I've been re-reading Herodotus and his work is actually pretty good for its time. You just have to remember that he, just like a modern day travel blogger, both sees the world through the lens of an upper class Greek and also has to keep his audience engaged with cool trivia and clickbait.
Regardless, he reported a lot of made up stuff like dog headed men and so forth
well if a bunch of other stuff he said that ppl thought was false turned out to be true, why not that too lol
How much of that is just literary flourish.
Herodotus was an early kind of historian, in the context in which he was relating his histories he was as much an entertainer as much as a historian so he repeated every fun and weird story he heard. He did qualify the dog-headed men specifically as a thing he had heard in a ironic Greek tone, he was relating an entertaining tale, not trying to persuade you that dog-headed men really exist.
A human body with a canine head. My guy Herodotus wasn’t telling tall tales at all, he was merely giving accounts of some of the very first furry conventions. These “dog-headed” men were wearing fursuits!
So there are myths about wolf men which are now considered to be evidence of some sort of wolf ritual.
Part of the issue was that Herodotus reported what his sources said. So rather than it being 'Herodotus' as a single reliable or unreliable source, it was more like a collection of unvetted sources.
As a result, you got stories about dog sized ants that were nonsense but then also stories that were legit.
People tend to be rather binary with how they process information, so when there's things that are wrong they group everything in the 'wrong' category.
Definitely a lot of false negatives with how Herodotus was regarded. Much like how the prevailing consensus was that Troy was a fictional city until it was discovered.
The dog ants with gold were the Marmota with gold dust in their mounds (if the arid place had gold)
Which if described by others and you never have seen them, they sound like mythological creatures
What’s the connection between Marmota and Ants? They look pretty different, no?
There may've been a translation issue behind "ants". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-digging_ant
> So rather than it being 'Herodotus' as a single reliable or unreliable source, it was more like a collection of unvetted sources.
So a sort of one-man Greek Facebook then?
To be fair, Herodotus also didn't believe everything he wrote down. Both implicitly such as recording blatantly mutually exclusive accounts, as well just just explicitly stating that he didn't believe everything on several occasions such as "it is my business to record what people say, but I am by no means obliged to believe it."
He was pretty open about the fact that he basically wrote down any interesting stories, and was not attempting to find some historical truth, but instead transition as much as possible from oral tradition to written.
He mostly gets called the father of history for this semi-novel take. That you can (and in most cases, should) strive for recorder and interpreter to be separate tasks.
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
Sarcasm and irony were their greatest weapons
The feared eye-rolls, scathing side-eyes, and deadly scoffs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spqrposting/comments/1lhqmlp/rome_i...
The biggest guy I ever saw at an anime convention was a goth. Fishnet shirt, raver pants, arm socks, eyeliner, painted fingernails, lipstick, jet-black hair down to his back, and he had to be around six-foot-five, approaching four hundred pounds of builtfat. In particular, I remember him having a massive chest/arms and a solid belly. Like an NFL lineman deeply in touch with the utter darkness of his soul.
All this to say that I am envisioning quite easily.
Somehow I imagine a version of Eddie Riggs from Brütal Legend.
> 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.
"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).
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.
And tangentially, to this day Canary islanders'slur for peninsulars is "godos", in the sense of "arrogant and haughty"
And in German the word is "Helm" as well
And French has both casque (from latin) and heaume (from germanic languages).
Yelmo for helmet
I always found this fact about the common Spanish surname Rodríguez to be interesting:
>The "ez" signifies "son of". The name Rodrigo is the Spanish form of the German name Roderich, meaning "rich in fame", from the Gothic elements "hrod" (fame or glory) and "ric" (rich). It was the name of Roderic, the last Visigothic King before the Muslim conquest, and the subject of many legends. The surname Rodríguez could have originated in the 9th century when patronymic names originated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodr%C3%ADguez_(surname)
The Visigoths directly ruled in Iberia so that's an example of the "elite influence" spreading culture and language.
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).
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.
The cultural exchange part was more a post punk thing. The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
The immigrants from the steppes and their descendants. It's hard to interpret the fact that the majority and often 90% or more pre Indo European male lineages were replaced in Western and Northern Europe in any other way.
Sure it took many generations but it's hard to imagine that the violence wasn't culturally and racially motivated. Based on genetic evidence it's speculated that that there were more than 10 male migrants to every female coming from the steppe.
> The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.
I'm not sure what that means? Their descendants clearly did reach Iberia and Britain.
Are you referring to the R1a/R1b problem? We do know that non-Corded Ware-derived Indo-European speakers like the Greeks, Armenians, Albanians (the latter perhaps derived from ancient Illyrians) all carry significant amounts of R1b, like the Yamnaya. Why Corded Ware carried R1a instead is still an open problem but not fatal to the hypothesis that Corded Ware originated in a Yamnaya migration (e.g. there might have been different elite paternal lineages involved that weren't dominant enough to be represented in steppe kurgan burials).
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".
There’s really only one way you totally replace male lineage.
Lysenkoism predates the defeat of the nazis and it's pretty much the same pseudoscientific dismissal of nature for ideological reasons.
>(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.
Most of the ethnicities/nations that adapted Roman way of life did not attempt to secede from Roman rule for centuries after that, if ever.
While it is true that learning from Rome was very useful for its later challengers, this usually was not the primary motivation for adoption of Roman culture, especially before ~ 400 AD. It was more about the higher standard of living plus legal stability, as long as Rome could enforce its Pax.
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?
_Who We Are and How We Got Here_ by David Reich (the dean of ancient DNA studies).
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.
The Nazis did do a lot of damage - far more than any benefits from the science would balance - and the 'science' contributed to it. The Nazis and many other racists have long argued that they are just being objective and the other side is biased.
How will you prevent that harm from recurring? Ignoring it hasn't worked, and doesn't distinguish the program you propose from a long line of racist programs and propaganda - that is, nobody can tell whether it's sincere or just another cover story.
But people can tell that it's not responsible, which is a clue about the thought behind it. We can't wash our hands of the consequences of our actions. If you don't prevent the next racist catastrophe, who will? Will you just do it and leave the consequences for others to clean up (and suffer from)?
"Hitler was a vegetarian. You aren't like Hitler, are you?" is a fair reason to run a garbage-collection pass over your beliefs if you're vegetarian, checking your reasons for it -- but invalid argument against claims that vegetarian diets are healthy. It sounds like mid-century historians collectively made the latter mistake.
That's an attempt at dismissing a priori the issues outlined in the GP, completely avoiding addressing them. These are very serious issues with very serious consequences; dismissing them won't change the outcomes.
Assuming you also don't want these horrible outcomes, it doesn't make sense to dismiss the risk. The people who advocate dismissing it are the ones who don't care about or seek those outcomes and are trying to remove obstacles.
Who's dismissing? The healthy reaction in scholarship is the GC pass of checking, invalidating, and retracing inferences. How else do you approach truth?
Intimating that caring about truth implies "seeking those outcomes" is a great way, to the extent it influences your field, of disconnecting it from reality.
Still nothing on the merits. Have a good day!
I'm confused about what merits you mean, then. If it's about something other than truth, why should it conflict? Best to you too.
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.
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.
“mingling”
>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.
Archaeogenetics is a new field in archaeology and linguistics, it only started to really make an impact in the last 15 years. No one was "looking into it let alone saying it" before that simply because DNA from dated archaeological sites hadn't yet been extracted, sequenced, and made available to researchers.
You rushed here to slander people working in the field without familiarizing yourself with the first things about it. Shame on you.
I mean, the academic community deliberately went against historical sources without much evidence-based arguments to do so. Turns out that denying DNA data is not doable, and now they have to do a 180.
I personally wouldn't put the “shame” onto GP.
Again, anyone actually familiar with Gothic studies (I trained in the field and remain employed in a closely related one) would know that people didn't outright "go against Jordanes", but rather the Gothic Urheimat was always discussed as a matter of controversy, with Jordanes' claims one version but external evidence lacking. Now there is some external evidence.
Historians hold out on claims made in historical sources -- especially when written centuries after the fact -- all the time, it is a standard scientific practice to seek external evidence.
And for having worked in a similarly behaving field, there is a big difference between “yeah we're not sure yet” and “no the ancients are most certainly wrong because our Modern Thinking is necessarily better (wink wink)”.
And within the specific field of the linked article, I never heard the latter about the issues discussed in the linked article.
I suspect the academic community had a bias towards nationalistic interpretation of history. We see this both from Russian and Polish/Ukrainians, whose history is totally interlinked, making it plausible for both sides to make claims favoring what their national identity would prefer, rather than the truth.
Again, why "suspect" something about a field of scholarship? You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others. The Goths left no descendants identifying as such, their entire branch of the Germanic language family went extinct, and no scholar working today is emotionally invested in them for nationalist reasons, nor would they resist particular interpretations because anyone else was.
> You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others.
I am no expert, but here's Michael Kulikowski's argument quoted from the wiki page on the debate:
[Heather] is right to try to deduce governing apparatus from the actions that kings and chieftains were able to compel their followers to take. This approach, more than anything, goes some way toward justifying his assertion that a broad class of nonaristocratic "freemen" warriors must have existed in many of the barbarian cultures of the first half of the millennium. Yet to claim the point proved and build further hypotheses upon it is not legitimate; he comes perilously close to recreating the old, volkisch notion of an inherent “Germanic” belief in freedom. Throughout, in fact, Heather makes the tacit assumption that evidence from any “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group can be used to analyze any other “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group—in other words, that linguistic identity and socioinstitutional behaviors go inevitably together. [...] a great many historical comparanda would support a model that he ignores — that the Goths were formed from a large number of indigenes and a small number of migrants under the pressure of Roman imperialism, and in the shadow of the Empire.[31]
And more:
Kulikowski charges that old German nationalist and even Nazi influences continue to influence scholarship on the Goths up to the present day, particularly through the theories of Gustav Kossinna.[19] He considers much of what is written about Goths to be "Germanist fantasy" derived from this legacy.
This isn't exactly what I would describe as a debate "blessedly free from nationalist squabbles"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Goths
Your first paragraph is a bog-standard caveat in the historical study of particular peoples, and you are interpreting it wrongly to see it as a sign of nationalist squabbles among anyone living today. As for the second:
> old German nationalist and even Nazi influences
Notice how the key word there is "old". Scholars may respond to earlier schools of thought in the field, from a now long-vanished time when anyone actually was invested in it for nationalist reasons, but that doesn't mean anyone today is invested in it. For example, major work today on Gothic linguistics, one component in the Urheimat debate, happens in places like Leiden and UCLA where no one has any nationalist dog in the fight.
The new evidence points to a population replacement having occurred to a greater extent than academics had anticipated. That is alway a topic that involves nationalist rhetoric because people would rather believe they had been always there, not that they descend from the invaders, or even the next wave of maigrants.
Can you point to any nationalist rhetoric from people working in the field? Among the handful of current scholars in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia -- i.e. the countries relevant to the article -- I doubt anyone feels anxiety about possibly having Goths among their ancestors. That happened so long ago (nearly two millennia ago), and there are obviously more recent conflicts that weigh more heavily on people's minds and national consciousness.
Well, I was thinking of Kyiv Rus, which appeared almost a thousand years later and were arguably Slavic people with a Scandinavian elite... but if you read the history in different languages around the region they once inhabited, you'll get quite a different picture. I don't know if there's something similar about the Goths, but I am just saying that the academy apparent preference for the Goths having been just a moving culture for the most part, with little population displacement, seems quite biased towards the very common "our people were here for eons" narrative, from the outside.
If you don't actually know much about a field of inquiry yourself, maybe it is best to refrain from assuming (and based on a totally different branch of history/archaeology/linguistics) what interpersonal dynamics are at play within it and what it is biased towards. As someone who has been in the field, these posts are just dripping with uninformedness.
Sadly very par for the course. You wont get very far if you challenge the consensus nor get funding. I know of this true in at least a major area of neuroscience reliable 2ndhand.
> 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.
From what I understand, the prevailing academic belief was based on cases where "elite replacement" was what did happen. For example, the Norman conquest of England contributed massively to modern English (all those French load words), and affected the culture in a lot of ways. But for the most part, the actual population movements were smaller. And DNA evidence suggested that several other big cultural and linguistic shifts worked the same way. Mostly the ordinary folk kept doing their thing, while the ruling class suffered upheaval.
The linked article is interesting because it confirms an actual population displacement. Which breaks the recent pattern of studies! But even here later stages were often more cultural shifts than population ones.
We don't know any of this until someone does the DNA studies.
> If I'm reading that right they are implying academics were pushing the idea of [...]
Academics were captured by ideological concerns. There's nothing really veiled about this. One slogan for the movement was "pots not people".
Honestly, this is one of those things where historiography swings back and forth and the truth is somewhat in the middle. The swinging back and forth is usually because confidence builds around a certain assumption but time is long and eventually evidence is discovered challenging that, then other assumptions get undermined, the new revelation gets focused on to the expense of all the past evidence and it becomes the new central assumption
Or that Russia commenced as a Viking startup.
I think the Russia case is the case of some Viking leaders of Slavs
Vikings took slavs as slaves. In Swedish "slav" means "slave". Vikings was rowers from Roslagen. In Finland they use the name Ruotsi for Sweden and Venäjä for Russia.
I rewatched the Vikings recently (highly recommended, perhaps not historically accurate, but no horn helmets). It was a bit ... don't know, eye opening or strange or hard to believe to learn that the Vikings played a crucial role in that part of the continent and Constantinople. I know that the term "Viking" is not an ethnic identification, more like a profession/warrior, but I don't have another word in my vocabulary.
Ivar the Boneless, Varangians. When I was growing up in Ukraine, this was never ever mentioned in any literature, school, college. That the names like Oleg or Igor were not native threw a twist too, but they are very common names over there in UA/RU, on par with Ivan and Dmitry.
Estonian "Venemaa" for Russia sort of points at a common origin there ("venemaa" would be "boat land" in Finnish). So rowing land, boat land.
And based in Kiev
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27
Wiki has a pretty interesting history on that [1]:
During its existence, Kievan Rus was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus" or the "Rus land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus being derived from the ethnonym Роусь. ... The first known use of the term Kievan Rus comes from the 1582 chronicle by Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski, where it was used to describe the region of Rus state immediately adjacent to Kyiv.
In 1837 it was adopted by Kyiv University rector Mykhailo Maksymovych in relation to the Principality of Kiev; known for his Ukrainophile political orientation, Maksymovych later spread that definition to the whole realm, seeing Kyiv as the original point where Rus statehood emerged, establishing the base for the future Russian Empire.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#Names
Funny how our slavic etymologies's mythologies are similar -
Ukranian picture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:%D0%...
Croatian picture - https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolazak_Hrvata#/media/Datoteka...
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.
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.
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.
Probably because you need to exaggerate both for people to care. Everyone thought X was true and now we have evidence for X to be true isn't a particularly interesting thing to read about. Either you insert some drama or you don't even bother reporting it to the larger public.
News are entertainment, after all.
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.
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.
You did not find it weird that Beowulf identified as a geat?
Never read it, but also, wasn't it written like hundreds of years after? I thought the oldest written stories we had were Snorres and the Icelandic sagas.
So the 5th and 6th centuries are still very much guesswork when it comes to scandinavian history.
I just always assumed that the legend of Rome was powerful enough for swedes to claim the Goths. But it makes sense that it's based on fact.
The article says why. The fall of the Roman empire being increasingly attributed to the migration of foreigners is both topical and problematic to certain ideologies
Yeah, but these false-relationships exist a lot. Tamil onnu and English one are not related but Sanskrit’s eka is related to English one.
Western arrogance that anything not scientifically proven must not be true. Those myths and oral traditions are backward and uncivilized.
I Goth ham stickers also
> Why did people doubt this?
Because the university departments are held by a certain type of individuals who want to play down and dismiss anything held sacred and holy by tribes, old cultures, religions, etc., explaining them away with "totems", "magic rituals", etc.
This article is ultimately about support for Jordanes' claim that the Goths originated in Scandinavia and then some new findings that the Goths spread by gene flow, not just cultural assimilation. Jordanes was a Christian writing among a Gothic community that had converted to Christianity, and they had no attachment to whatever was "sacred and holy" to their ancestors centuries before. Consequently, historians expressing scepticism about Jordanes claim were not doing it out of any bone with "sacredness and holiness".
Perhaps before trying to depict an ultimately rather minor controversy among historians as some axe ground against the sacred and the holy, it might be worth actually learning about the topic first?
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.
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.
Swedish Gotlander's have been referring to this mythic origin story for centuries. I believe Gustavus Adophus referenced this history to justify blatant Swedish militarism in the 17th century.
Ah, the "stay at home goths" :)
I thought it was known already? Hardcore History covered it in Thor's Angels episode.
barbarian = ?
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.
In this context it means they invaded the Roman empire.
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.
No kidding. That's not an ok word to be putting in a headline
I’ve come to have low expectations of Science Magazine under EIC Holden Thorp.
Not Roman.
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 ...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagyl
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.
So it was quite literally a flood of people.
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.
What is Arianism?
A non-trinitarian Christian doctrine, considered heresy by all Christians following the Nicene creed and vice versa. No relation to Aryans.
Giant wiggly snake is a great explanation of the obvious evidence glaciation/erosion, ngl.
It’s a water snake too, so the explanation is literally correct with a bit of poetic license.
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.
I don't see stingray. I maybe see a bat.
The summary from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Island is:
> According to Māori mythology, the North and South Islands of New Zealand arose through the actions of the demigod Māui. Māui and his brothers were fishing from their canoe (the South Island) when he caught a great fish and pulled it right up from the sea. While he was not looking, his brothers fought over the fish and chopped it up. This great fish became the North Island, and thus a Māori name for the North Island is Te Ika-a-Māui ("The Fish of Māui").
Does your perception of the stingray match the head location in local use?
> Names of certain tribes like Muaūpoko (mua upoko "front of the head") and Muriwhenua (muri whenua, "backland")
Muaūpoko is in the south of Te Ika A Māui.
Northland is the tail, Wellington harbour is the mouth, and Lake Taupō is the heart.
This of course means that Spaniards are Swedes on extended vacation. They mentioned this to the latter at the 1545 Council of Trent.
Turns out Jordanes got the Scandinavian boat trip right. A few centuries later, though, most "Goths" were locals who'd signed up.
The ancient sources were highly irresponsible in promoting mass migration theories, which play into the hands of Nazis and other ethnonationalists. Even if they didn't know any better, modern historians and archeologists certainly do. Let's not allow DNA analysis and historical linguistics to privilege reality over justice.
> including some connected to conflict and conquest, like the Spanish for “bandit,” “helmet,” and “truce.”
And, totally weird words such as "casa" (home, house) or "sofá".
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?
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."
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...
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.
Overpopulation, Scandinavia did not have very fertile soil.
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?
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.
There are often cultural elements in that balance. Many societies had cultural adaptations that lowered fertility under normal circumstances but enabled faster repopulation after a crisis. But if there was an outlet for excess people, the base reproduction rate could be higher.
For example, the Roman Republic had adapted to constant warfare and the steady stream of casualties caused by it. And then the Late Republic got into trouble, because Rome had become too good at war, and the required casualties didn't happen.
The Irish solution was mass emigration and blaming the English.
They had too many births before the potato famine -- it's the reason why it was such a disaster in Ireland compared to the rest of Europe -- and they continued up until a few decades ago. This happened during a time when it was unusually easy to move to "empty" land and colonize it.
It had to do with inheritance. Younger sons in the viking era did not inherit the farmstead and had to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Anytime they had a population explosion, younger sons would have to go A Viking.
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.
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.