[FlyingSnake]

> the society of Rig-Veda

I fail to understand how the Rigvedic society can be connected to this DNA research. Rigveda never mentions anything beyond the Punjab/Swat/Haryana region in any of the hymns. The flora and fauna mentioned in it is also exclusive to this region. Lastly there is no mention of an ancient homeland both in Rigveda and Avesta.

[flir]

I believe there's some stuff around burial practices that parallels some steppe practices. Something about horses and mound construction, I think?

Here we go: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.

[FlyingSnake]

While I don’t mind if they’re related, the evidence is rather thin. Interestingly, chariots and royal burials were also found in Sinauli, India which provide an interesting alternative to this theory.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/...

[suddenlybananas]

Do you believe in out-of-india theory for IE or are you just sceptical about the use of the Rig Veda specifically.

[incompatible]

It gets a bit silly when you start using archaeology to prop up modern political doctrines. Humans left Africa over 100k years ago, and groups have been moving around ever since. Whether a group moved from the Caucasus to South Asia or vice versa, around 5k years ago, shouldn't really matter. Perhaps they had moved in the opposite direction 10k years ago. Obviously, we all have human ancestors who were living 5k, 10k, 100k, 200k years ago.

[Shorel]

> Whether a group moved from the Caucasus to South Asia or vice versa, around 5k years ago, shouldn't really matter.

It's not that it "matters" in a political or nationalistic sense. That's an error in interpretation of the motivation for this kind of work.

It is important because the more we know about how we got where we are, the better.

Science is useful, if it is not immediately obvious, then future generations will surely find an use for it, as it has happened time after time with mathematical ideas.

I would even say it is you who are putting a modern political spin on this by rejecting it.

[incompatible]

The research is fine. I'm referring to the likes of Hindutva trying to establish that the Aryans were "indigenous" to India and subsequently migrated elsewhere, thus proving that Hindus alone are indigenous to India. The out-of-india theory referred to above.

[FlyingSnake]

Exactly. Humans are moving constantly, even today. It is silly to attach political doctrines to such complex events.

For all we know, we might never get a complete picture and there might be many other aspects which we are not aware of behind PIE.

[FlyingSnake]

Option#2: I was only curious about the GPs claim which added Rigveda to the mix.

[valarauko]

Its heavily contested if these were chariots. If anything, I would suggest that the consensus scholarly opinion is that these were ox drawn carts, not chariots.

- no horse remains or equestrian objects have been found, anywhere in India for this time period

- solid wooden wheels (shown in the reconstruction) are too heavy for horses to draw, for which spoked wheels were developed in the Steppe

- the shape of the yoke that would be tied to the animals is straight, the way ox carts have, like Harrapan ox carts. By contrast, yokes for horses are curved, to match the animal's posture.

[empath75]

I think this comment is based on some confusion about how languages spread. Languages spread along with people, but while a local language may be replaced, the people are not generally replaced with the language. There may have been some genetic mixture, there may have been a time where they were conquered by them for a time, but there's no sense in which the people who wrote those works _were_ Yamnayan, any more than the Germans are. They wouldn't have a story about having a far away homeland because they wouldn't have had a far away homeland, and nobody would have remembered any previous language because that language had been replaced thousands of years before, and well before anybody started writing anything down. They gradually picked up the language of either invaders or their trading partners, just as has happened many other times in history.

Edited to add: there are basically no migration stories in _any_ indo-european mythological cycles or oral traditions. That's not evidence that there wasn't spread through, migration or invasion, but it does indicate that it was a gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time.

[macleginn]

All the recent palaeo-DNA data suggest a horribly massive process of genetic replacement of the local population by the new arrivals. This process is of course very uneven -- e.g., the population of Ireland seems to have mostly shifted to a new IE language -- but in some cases the change was drastic. Moreover, in some parts of Europe this seems to have happened several times, with first agriculturalists replacing local hunter-gatherer populations and then IE people replacing them in turn.

The problem of IE is of course very abstract, while the problem of, e.g., Celts is much more concretely paradoxical (continental and island Celts share the language family but not a lot of archaeology and a dubious amount of genes). However, it is still a more or less commonly accepted fact that at some point in the past PIE peoples spread like wildfire, bringing their dialects, genes, and culture to a very large area, and it is of huge historical interest to know where they started from.

The fact the IE epic and mythological traditions have zero memories of all this, I would say, is interesting but does not prove or disprove anything.

[kragen]

The Rig Veda is only 3000–3500 years old, contrary to folk traditions holding it to be much older. The Yamnaya culture is 5300 years old and only lasted 700 years. When the oldest parts of the Rig Veda were composed (and they are, incidentally, about the proper way to praise the gods, not about historical events) the Yamnaya culture had died about 1100 years ago. Those 1100 years included a lot of warfare, mostly nomads living in tents, without writing.

How much do English-speakers today know about the events in early 10th century France that eventually led to English becoming a sort of pidgin French, full of words like "eventually" and "sort" that didn't exist in Beowulf? How much effort do they typically devote to passing on traditions about Æthelwold's challenge to Edward the Elder in Wessex?

And that's after 1100 years of a literate, mostly settled culture with libraries that contain physical books from that time, in a culture that values that kind of factual knowledge of history, rather than more practical sorts of knowledge such as how to properly worship Agni to gain his favor and which plants to poison your arrows with.

Oral tradition can preserve knowledge to an astounding degree. There are songlines, as I understand it, that record the geography of landforms that have been undersea since the Ice Age (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-indigenou... roughly the same time as the Proto-Indo-European culture). But it is hardly surprising when it is silent on a topic we wish we knew more about.

[philwelch]

I think it’s not so much that the Rigveda by itself gives us a direct insight into Proto-Indo-European culture, but rather that if we compare it to Western texts it can help us reconstruct elements of a shared ancestral culture, or at least a shared ancestral language (from which we can perhaps infer something about culture).

[kragen]

Certainly. But what I was commenting on was the claim that, because "there are basically no migration stories in _any_ indo-european mythological cycles or oral traditions," we can conclude, "migration or invasion (...) was a gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time." I don't think that conclusion is justified.

[wqaatwt]

> we can conclude, "migration or invasion (...) was a gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time.

Recent genetic research points to the complete opposite (at least to some extent). It might have taken just a generation or two for some individuals to get from the steppe to e.g. Britain.

[philwelch]

What about centaurs? One theory about the centaur myth is that it originated from the confused perceptions of a culture that had never seen men on horseback being suddenly invaded by steppe nomads.

[FlyingSnake]

I’m not sure if you’re talking about my comment, but I didn’t make that claim. I simply asserted that Rigveda might be not a good source of data if we’re looking for evidence of a migration.

[singularity2001]

The actual surviving texts are even less than 2000 years old. one just beliefs that the oral tradition was written down pretty unaltered but that's questionable in my opinion

[empath75]

There's one good reason to believe that they wrote it down (mostly) unaltered and continued transmitting it (mostly) unaltered, which is that they continued copying it and reciting it well past the point where they even understood what many of the words meant any more, and they developed a lot of techniques to recite it and memorize it based purely on phonemes and developed ideas about how the sounds themselves carried religious power, divorced of any meaning. That's not to say that they didn't understand it at all, but surely if it were going to be altered, they would have updated the language to something more understandable at some point. Instead they wrote commentaries about the text, reinterpreting it over time.

It wasn't really until the 19th century that it was re-translated and the connection to other indo-european cultures and pantheons was rediscovered.

[singularity2001]

So someone wrote down chants in the 19th century and realized that similar chants were written down almost 2000 years earlier?

[Justta]

Proof that oral tradition started 2000 years before it was written?

[wqaatwt]

> events in early 10th century France

Were there such events?

> How much effort do

Not a lot. Since they don’t need to because of writing. As far as we can tell non-literate societies put in massively more effort into preserving oral traditions.

Of course it’s debatable but there is some evidence that oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.

[kragen]

> Were there such events? [That is, events in early 10th century France that eventually led to English becoming a sort of pidgin French, full of words like "eventually" and "sort" that didn't exist in Beowulf]

There certainly were; quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_Normandy (28 August 0932 – 20 November 0996):

> Richard either introduced feudalism into Normandy or he greatly expanded it. By the end of his reign, the most important Norman landholders held their lands in feudal tenure.

Normandy, as you may or may not know, is in France.

Then, a century later, his great-grandson, Duke of Normandy, conquered England, subjugating the Britons, Anglo-Saxons, et al., under a French-speaking noble elite. If Jarl Rikard had been cut down by bandits in his youth, or had merely failed to enlist the Norman landholders' swords under his banner (and that of his son, grandson, and great-grandson), the Norman invasion would not have happened. Similarly, if Richard's son Richard had been unable to escape from the court of King Louis IV in 0946, or unable to then win back Normandy from the king by force of arms, his grandson William would have been in no position to conquer—and it is unlikely that the subdivided Duchy would have been able to raise an army to successfully invade England, a feat that has not been repeated in the ensuing 959 years. And so on.

> Of course it’s debatable but there is some evidence that oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.

Yes, your comment was written in reply to a comment naming one of the most surprising examples of such preservation, as a result of non-literate societies, as you said, "put[ting] put in massively more effort into preserving oral traditions". Nevertheless, they seem to preserve massively less historical knowledge despite that effort.

[wqaatwt]

> There certainly were

That’s rather indirect. But you do have a point.

However we do know quite a bit about those events? So any English speaker who cares can learn about them.

> How much effort do they typically devote

Well unlike illiterate societies they don’t need to because of books.

> massively less historical knowledge despite that effort.

Well obviously, we can’t really compare them with more literate societies. Then again we’re just very lucky that there was no complete societal collapse in the Greco-Roman world since the 500-600s BC. or so. Some highly literate civilizations like Carthaginians or the Etruscans were effectively entirely erased because nobody bothered to copy their texts).

The problem with oral traditions is that they can preserve knowledge of events that might have happened > 500 years ago (e.g. Homer describes cities, weapons and other aspects of pre Bronze age collapse Mycenaean civilization but it’s all intermixed with contemporary(Greek dark age) stuff and it’s very hard to separate fact from fiction (even ignoring the supernatural bits).

[wqaatwt]

> there are basically no migration stories

Irish have migration myths.

So do Greeks (probably a bit more localized intra-Balkan movement, though).

To be fair IE migrations were very long ago. It’s not inconceivable that oral myths might have been preserved for several thousand years and yet we might know nothing about them.

> wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time

Probably not true. At least genetic evidence points otherwise. IIRC we’ve found individuals as far as Britain who were closely related (a couple of generations) with remains found in the steppes. At least some elite groups were very closely related paternally and moved very fast across Europe.