6 ms·

> 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 Punja

> 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 2y ago
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-of-the-steppes https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.
- FlyingSnake 2y ago
  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/royal-burials-and-chariots-from-sinauli-uttar-pradesh-india-radiocarbon-dating-and-isotopic-analysis-based-inferences/A33F911D8E6730AE557E1947A66A583C https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/...
  - suddenlybananas 2y ago
    Do you believe in out-of-india theory for IE or are you just sceptical about the use of the Rig Veda specifically.
    - incompatible 2y ago
      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.
      - FlyingSnake 2y ago
        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.
      - Shorel 2y ago
        > 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 2y ago
        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.
        Shorel 2y ago
        Ah, I see. I agree with you then.
        throwfmon 2y ago
        Hindutva says Islamists and white Europeans were invders. Hows that wrong?
        incompatible 2y ago
        It's correct, but so what? It's part of history, nobody alive was involved, and it shouldn't have political implications for how we want to live today.
    - FlyingSnake 2y ago
      Option#2: I was only curious about the GPs claim which added Rigveda to the mix.
  - valarauko 2y ago
    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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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-indigenous-songlines-match-long-sunken-landscape-off-australia1/ 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

flir 2y ago

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-of-the-steppes https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.

FlyingSnake 2y ago
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/royal-burials-and-chariots-from-sinauli-uttar-pradesh-india-radiocarbon-dating-and-isotopic-analysis-based-inferences/A33F911D8E6730AE557E1947A66A583C https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/...
- suddenlybananas 2y ago
  Do you believe in out-of-india theory for IE or are you just sceptical about the use of the Rig Veda specifically.
  - incompatible 2y ago
    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.
    - FlyingSnake 2y ago
      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.
    - Shorel 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
        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.
        Shorel 2y ago
        Ah, I see. I agree with you then.
        throwfmon 2y ago
        Hindutva says Islamists and white Europeans were invders. Hows that wrong?
        incompatible 2y ago
        It's correct, but so what? It's part of history, nobody alive was involved, and it shouldn't have political implications for how we want to live today.
  - FlyingSnake 2y ago
    Option#2: I was only curious about the GPs claim which added Rigveda to the mix.
- valarauko 2y ago
  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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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-indigenous-songlines-match-long-sunken-landscape-off-australia1/ 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]