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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

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.
- singularity2001 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      So someone wrote down chants in the 19th century and realized that similar chants were written down almost 2000 years earlier?
      - kragen 2y ago
        No, all of the texts we're talking about here have been passed down in written form for 2000–3000 years, if we ignore the Scandinavian ones. It was only the first 1000–1500 years of the preservation of the Rig Veda that were exclusively oral.
        singularity2001 2y ago
        am I living in a bubble in which Wikipedia gives me different articles? According to my Internet the oldest surviving fragment is from 1040CE from Nepal.

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.

singularity2001 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    So someone wrote down chants in the 19th century and realized that similar chants were written down almost 2000 years earlier?
    - kragen 2y ago
      No, all of the texts we're talking about here have been passed down in written form for 2000–3000 years, if we ignore the Scandinavian ones. It was only the first 1000–1500 years of the preservation of the Rig Veda that were exclusively oral.
      - singularity2001 2y ago
        am I living in a bubble in which Wikipedia gives me different articles? According to my Internet the oldest surviving fragment is from 1040CE from Nepal.