I can recommend the new book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney. It's an overview of what we know about Proto Indo-European and its spread across the world. Much of the book is evidence from linguistics but it also regularly dips into Reich's ancient DNA work and other sources to cross-correlate with the linguistic evidence. It's very well written.
> It's an overview of what we know about Proto Indo-European and its spread across the world.
That's a bit misleading isn't it? PIE died out a long time ago. And it certainly didn't spread all over the world. It's descendent languages moved into india, middle east and europe. And it's european languages ( primarily spanish, french and english ) that went global. Nobody would say Latin went global just because spanish is spoken around the world. Or old english went global because much of the world speaks english.
I highly recommend that people who read the book also read criticism addressing the authors understanding of race and genetics in said book, such as https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bfopinion/race-genetics... quote: ‘Reich’s understanding of "race" … is seriously flawed.’
Before agriculture, supply trains weren't a thing. How much less wouldn't they have been a thing before language.
It's not that I think ancient people were nice, far from it. But "vast clashes" suggest armies, wars of extinction etc. and those wouldn't have been a thing for economic and logistic reasons. Your tribe might have been better at killing than your neighboring tribe, but they weren't a thousand times better at it.
Even into recent prehistory, this was true. I speak a language descendend from more or less invading steppe peoples (as do we all here), but they're just a small part of my genetic ancestry. That is actually still mostly from European hunter-gatherers. My Y-DNA is from EHGs too, like the majority in my country, so there clearly wasn't the stereotypical "taking all the women as slaves" event that many imagine either.
Agriculture and horses gave some people from outside a big advantage, sure, big enough to dominate in many ways, but not big enough to wholesale replace the people who lived in this part of the world already. "Vast clashes" is not the right way of thinking about how some early hominids replaced others.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 29.2 ms ] threadThat's a bit misleading isn't it? PIE died out a long time ago. And it certainly didn't spread all over the world. It's descendent languages moved into india, middle east and europe. And it's european languages ( primarily spanish, french and english ) that went global. Nobody would say Latin went global just because spanish is spoken around the world. Or old english went global because much of the world speaks english.
But thanks for the recommendation.
You will learn more about human prehistory in that 2 hours than anything else.
It's a really good interview. Recommended if you're an amateur wanting to understand more about human prehistory.
Before agriculture, supply trains weren't a thing. How much less wouldn't they have been a thing before language.
It's not that I think ancient people were nice, far from it. But "vast clashes" suggest armies, wars of extinction etc. and those wouldn't have been a thing for economic and logistic reasons. Your tribe might have been better at killing than your neighboring tribe, but they weren't a thousand times better at it.
Even into recent prehistory, this was true. I speak a language descendend from more or less invading steppe peoples (as do we all here), but they're just a small part of my genetic ancestry. That is actually still mostly from European hunter-gatherers. My Y-DNA is from EHGs too, like the majority in my country, so there clearly wasn't the stereotypical "taking all the women as slaves" event that many imagine either.
Agriculture and horses gave some people from outside a big advantage, sure, big enough to dominate in many ways, but not big enough to wholesale replace the people who lived in this part of the world already. "Vast clashes" is not the right way of thinking about how some early hominids replaced others.