Distant cousins

One of the things that fascinates me about Indo-European studies is discovering the antics, mishaps and shenanigans of my very early ancestors and their relatives—in many cases, people who aren't in my direct line of ancestry, but who were closely related to people who were.  For instance, last time I talked about this, I made a direct line between the Single Grave culture (which was a western Dutch/Danish/North German variation of the Corded Ware horizon) and the Celtic expansion later out of La Tene and Hallstatt.  The Corded Ware is really the first expansion into northern Europe from the steppes, and it is largely responsible, most likely, for the later development of all of the Indo-European cultures of Europe with the exception of some of the paleo-Balkan ones and their descendants (like the Greeks) which came more directly from Yamnaya or post-Yamnaya cultures (like Catacomb.)  Not only the Celtics from Single Grave variation of Corded Ware, but Germanics from the Battle-Axe variation of Corded Ware would make up the vast majority of my late Neolithic to EMBA ancestry.

But on the far eastern edge of the Corded Ware horizon, the Russian forest steppe north of the Catacomb culture at the southern end of the Urals and around the Samara Bend, we have the Abashievo and Fatyanovo variations, which in turn led to the Sintashta, which is generally considered the earliest definitely Indo-Iranian culture.  If you look at the PCA, you'll see that the Sintashta culture was absolutely congruent with the Corded Ware genetically, so although separated by many miles, these were the same people as my own ancestors further west, and even seem to have the same degree (more or less) of hunter-gatherer DNA, at least at this point in time.  (I don't know what this means with regards to the Poltavka culture, which is believed to be a descendant of Yamnaya specifically.  I'd like to see if they cluster closer to Yamnaya or Corded Ware, and how much they really contributed to Sintashta, if at all.) There were some contacts we know of (both from linguistics and from the odd DNA outlier) between some Siberian peoples who likely spoke very early Uralic or Yeniseian languages.

From Sintashta came the Andronovo horizon which led to the Scythians, for example.  Which is why it is not surprising to understand that the Greeks described the Scythians that their Black Sea colonists met during the Classic Age met as having a uniformly European physical type, and who lived in a way that wouldn't have seemed too unfamiliar to early Celts for that matter (although the choice of environment; open steppelands vs forested north European plain certainly contributed to some local developments of the culture.)  Although they lost their language eventually, the descendants of these Iranian-speaking steppe raiders of eastern Europe and central Asia, with some admixture from the Slavs, eventually became the Cossacks, it's believed, and still maintained a great deal of their original culture even so. (Of course, the Slavs were ultimately also descended from a Corded Ware variant culture, so they were distant cousins with similar genetics already anyway.  Admixture from waves of Hunnic, Mongol and Turkic invaders probably introduced more noticeable admixture anyway, although in surprisingly low volumes.)

This spread of specifically European genetics far and wide across Central Asia, specifically by the Andronovo wave that grew out of Sintashta, has led to European genetics turning up in some places where you wouldn't necessarily expect it.  The Uighurs, while speaking a Turkic language and practicing a Mahometan faith, are quite European in genetics and physical appearance, for instance, as are the Pamiris, many of whom almost look like they're just Russians dressed up in Central Asian garb.

That said, the most significant contribution genetically that they made is somewhat swamped.  The southern edge of Andronovo came across the urbanized Bactrian-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC).  There was a considerable synthesis and hybridization that went on here, and the cultures that later emerged south of BMAC such as Swat, Cemetary H, Gandhara Grave, Painted Grey Ware, etc. where therefore still fairly closely related to the Corded Ware antecedents, but had picked up a lot of both cultural and genetic "detritus" which made them considerably different too.  In this new area, they further admixed (or miscegenated, if you prefer) with the locals, whom they called Dasyans (in contrast to their own label for themselves, which was Aryan) and went on to become the languages and cultures of northern India—which later spread across most of the subcontinent.

This pick-up of genetic and cultural influences that were very foreign to their earlier ancestors and the descendants of their western cousins (like myself) means that while I can recognize that the culture of India is ultimately connected in some ways to my own, it is also very alien and much more alien than the cultures of, say, Ireland or Germany or Scandinavia (which are fairly similar in many respects to my own Scottish/English ancestry), or even more distantly related peoples like the Russians or the Greeks. (To be fair, the Greeks also picked up a lot of foreign influence, but that same Greek influence backwashed across northern Europe as part of the Classical tradition adopted by the Europeans as they evolved into the modern peoples that they are today.)

So, I dunno.  Maybe it's a foolish thing to think of, but I wish I could have seen what the Indo-Aryans could have become had they had the same population replacement in India that they did in Europe.  While they clearly made a major impact on the subcontinent in terms of language, culture, and even Y-DNA, their PCAs aren't particularly close to ours, and when I see hordes of H1-B visa holding mercenary scabs all over the commons in America these days, I dislike it considerably.  Then again, were H1-Bs given to Russians or Poles or Serbians or whatever, maybe I'd dislike that somewhat too, although at least they have prettier girls, amirite?

EDIT: I found a PCA with Poltavka on it.  Poltavka clusters with Yamnaya and not with Corded Ware and Sintashta, so it can't have contributed much genetically to Sintashta after all.  Another archaeological hypothesis struck down by ancient DNA genetics!  Sintashta isn't a hybrid of Abashevo and Poltavka after all, it's simply a development of Abashevo in the same area where Poltavka used to be.  The "pulling" towards Yamnaya and Poltavka is way too modest for it to have been anything other than a very minor element of admixing.

Friday Art Attack

It's almost time for yet another week-long hiking trip, so after today wraps up, I won't be posting anything for a little while (it'll be curious if anyone gets up in arms about my bratty princesses post, but I doubt anyone who's likely to would stumble across this little corner of the internet anyway.)  I'd like to post something else on this blog today before I wrap it all up for the next 8-9 days or so, but I may not.  So, let's at least get our Friday Art Attack out of the way before I end up missing it again!

Water dragons are a shamefully under-represented concept.

There's lots of variations on what the wendigo myth looks like; I think this is Paizo's approach.

Werewolves are, of course, a very European concept.  Werehyenas would be an African concept, assuming that they have that concept in African folklore (I'm sure somebody has folklore that's close enough.)  But, keep in mind that the cave hyenas were endemic to Eurasia in the Stone Age.

Sometimes fantasy is really missing out on having weird alien people.  That's part of the reason AD ASTRA is fantasy in space, complete with wizards and everything.  Although the Jedi aren't usually considered wizards exactly, they really kind of are; in fact, the first time Ben Kenobi is referred to, that's exactly what he's called, and Vader's "sorcerous ways" are also mentioned early on.

This is always what the Company wanted, isn't it?  Why not some art that shows them getting what they were after, just because?

One of the main attractions of fantasy as a genre is the nostalgic call back to a perceived Golden Age in the past when things were beautiful, peaceful, simple and the way the world was supposed to be.  And part of that is always idyllic landscapes, I think.

RAWR!  On Barsoom, with the white apes.

Speaking of white, here's some white Boba Fett.  Actually, this seems to recall early concept art by McQuarrie of Boba Fett, back when he wasn't named yet, and was referred to as the "supercommando."  Echoes of this original idea still linger in the way Mandaloreans appear in the Clone Wars and Rebels TV show, but the concept is significantly mangled from what it once was.

Eye of Horus spaceships.  A giant artificial ring around the planet.  Cool stuff.

More idyllic fantasy landscapes.  Although I have to admit that this particular space may be less than idyllic for most of the year, unless you're really into winter sports.

In today's politically correct world, it's often difficult to find someone willing to take on the concept of the savage and actually make them savage.  There's a good reason why that was such a compelling icon in adventure fiction, though.  Let's bring back the Golden Age of brown savages threatening white damsels in distress!

Everyone loves a good pseudo-horror witch-hunter vibe with standing stones in a primitive countryside.

Speaking of which, this particular witch-hunter looks to be a real veteran.

And this may well be his target.

Or even this guy.  Wizards don't always have to be friendly Gandalf types, and if you read older accounts of Merlin, he wasn't always necessarily as friendly as he later appeared to be either.

Wotan and the Wild Hunt.  Not all art has to be modern; this is a great piece of Victorian stuff.

I believe this it eh 5e wraith.  Anyone who plays 5e probably knows, because it'd just be in the Monster Manual.  Nice piece, though, right?

Western civilization is built on three main pillars: one is the peoples and traditions of Northern Europe; the Germanic peoples (often superimposed on a Celtic substrate) specifically.  One is Christianity.  But the Classical tradition and legacy of the Greeks and Romans is a part of our inheritance too.  Although I wonder if Cronos was ever really supposed to be a gigantic lava monster guy in any classical interpretation, like he is here.  I don't think so.  That's probably more of a northern thing, actually, with Surtur.

Why not add a gigantic ice monster to accompany my gigantic lava man.

Entitled, bratty little princesses

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/03/26/teen-boys-rated-their-female-classmates-based-looks-girls-fought-back/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5ee522674158

How dare these bratty, entitled little princesses play this up like they're the victims, and then harass, harangue and lecture the boys in their school for two and a half hours and demand additional harassment from the school board, the Principal's office and the media?!

The boys shouldn't apologize.  They should stand up fearlessly and demand that the shrieking harpies shut their mouths, threaten to sue them, and then point to each of the girls in a row and say that they're fives at best.  The middle one probably isn't even that much.  Maybe if I'm feeling charitable I'd give bare midriff on the right a six.  At least she doesn't have the manjaw of the one on the left or the no eyebrows and gigantic forehead of the one in the middle.

Beakers to Celts

Davidski has made the plausible little chart showing a progression of genetics.  It needs some further development, but I think there's something to it that's very, very likely.

Single Grave > Rhenish Beakers > Czech and Hungarian Beakers > Urnfield culture > Hallstatt culture > La Tene culture > Celts

Anyway, one must be very cautious in applying linguistic and ethnic identity to material cultures.  Linguistics, archaeology and genetics all work together to help us untangle history where no written history exists, but it can also occasionally lead us astray.  For one thing, there's not a lot of consensus on when you can talk about Celtic in a linguistically meaningful sense, although Chang's philogeny suggests that Italic and Celtic split sometime more recently than 2,000 BC.  This puts the notion that the Bell Beakers spoke some kind of very early Celtic down pretty authoritatively, but even before Chang's article, hardly any linguist seriously still entertained that.  But archaeologists and geneticists are blithely assuring us that Celtic arrived in Britain with the Bell Beakers, for instance.  No, that makes no sense, it obviously can't be true.

I've reattached a smaller version of the phylogeny, but you can click on it to get the larger version.  But given those dates, the split probably started happening as the Unetice culture was evolving into the Urnfield culture; but if that's so, where did the Italic languages go and what material cultures do they belong to?  Or should they be considered part of the Urnfield culture too?  For that matter, just because the phylogeny suggests a split between Celtic and Italic more recent than 2,000 BC doesn't mean that we're suddenly talking about Celtic languages.  There is a lot of evidence that para-Celtic languages which are today not attested existed in the past, by which I mean languages that are related to Celtic and/or Italic, but belonging to neither exactly.  Venetic, Lusitanian, Ligurian, etc. are often proposed to be para-Celtic languages.  There's a lot of stuff that could have happened even after that split (assuming that the date is good in the first place) before we end up with something that we can say is ancestral to Celtic and only Celtic.

For that matter, the Hallstatt material culture is often presumed to be the fully formed common Celtic material culture from the late Bronze Age.  On the other hand, the Iron Age spread of the La Tene culture is also often given that status.  How well do these two work?  Hallstatt itself, in it's western zone, is right about where and when we'd expect to find proto or archaic Celtic languages spoken, since we find shortly afterwards that the Romans and Greeks talk about Celts living in the area where the Hallstatt culture was found.  The requisite links to areas where the Celtiberians later appear, as well as the southern shores of the British Isles are a bit spotty; it looks like there was some link, but whether it's sufficient to effect a language shift from whatever was spoken before to Celtic is hardly an agreed upon given consensus.  However; it's also associated with some para-Celtic and even non-Celtic (unless one is to propose that Illyrian is actually a para-Celtic language) languages in its eastern zone.  So Hallstatt can't simply be Celtic, although maybe an early form of Celtic is represented in the west, and peoples who shared a very similar material culture and probably were in some kind of intense contact relationship of some kind but who spoke different languages made up some of their southern and eastern portions.

Hallstatt warriors on Hallstatt Lake

The La Tene has to be Gallic, though, because it corresponds in time and place with actual historically attested Celts.  And, the La Tene emerged out of (at least a portion of) the Hallstatt culture without showing any breaks in continuity.  On the other hand, regionally that's too simplistic a thing to say; there were certainly some areas where the Hallstatt > La Tene transition was more notable and represents a discontinuity of sorts.  But La Tene is really quite late, and whatever language La Tene spoke (which was no doubt Celtic) it also no doubt grew out of the language of the Hallstatt areas where the La Tene was first manifested.  So, if La Tene is Celtic, then at least the Hallstatt areas which spawned La Tene had to have been some kind of archaic Celtic too.  What about the rest of Hallstatt?  How much of Hallstatt can be said to be Celtic?  Not just the fact that La Tene evolved out of Hallstatt, but so did the Celtiberians, who clearly spoke a Celtic language but which do not have links to La Tene specifically, and which in fact predate them.

Probably more than just the specific areas where La Tene was formed.  And when La Tene spread, it may have introduced a leveling effect; prestige dialects from the La Tene area superimposing themselves over closely related Celtic languages in other areas that were already archaic Celtic of some form or other.  And no doubt Celtic superimposed itself on areas where non-Celtic languages were previously spoken too as it expanded.

This is the really interesting thing.  We have some historical records that show us the spread of Latin-derived and Greek derived languages across Europe over areas that previously spoke a different kind of Indo-European (such as the installation, if you will, of proto-French in what was Gaul.)  We also have the spread of Germanic and Slavic languages fairly well historically attested.  We can almost but not with much precision, see the same thing happening with Celtic just prior to the historic age, and some of the expansions of Celtic we actually can attest historically, although some of them did not remain (such as the Galatians in Anatolia.)  I wonder how many other such expansions of one group suddenly growing at the expense of another we would find in the prehistorical record if it were actually recorded?  And although we can make some pretty good guesses, especially when we triangulate evidence from all three disciplines: archaeology, linguistics and genetics, there are still all kinds of nuances that may have been incredibly significant that we will never be able to detect, only speculate about.  For instance, see this notion from "zardos", which I quite like, but which certainly isn't every likely to be falsifiable:

That is my pet theory actually, because it seems that Eastern raiders might have founded Hallstatt culture and created an elite way of life which was very much about Mediterranean ways and luxury goods. The social stratification was remarkable and this elite lived detached from the common people in their fortresses. 

La Tene in comparison looks much more like a mass culture of common warriors and their are signs of revolt and that old customs were discarded at the end of Hallstatt period. 

The later Eastern influence is evident in the Celtic ornamental style and horse cult also.

There's obviously some kind of elite dominance during the Hallstatt period that is absent from La Tene. What this means about Celtic is uncertain.  Could the common people of the western Hallstatt zone have spoken an archaic Celtic, but the common people further east spoke Illyrian, or something else, and the elites spoke something else entirely?  Or did the elites speak Celtic?  Or both, at least in some regions?  Elite dominance does suggest that maybe the Hallstatt culture was not as monolithic as it appears to be, though—it probably represents warriors/traders who dealt in luxury Mediterranean goods and imposed themselves politically on the common people in their own area initially.  These elites may have expanded into other areas where other languages were spoken, but someone, at least, in the Hallstatt culture spoke a language that was Celtic which was associated with the La Tene expansions.

"zadros"'s theory suggests that maybe the elites aren't the Celts, though, but rather the Western common people.

Aryans

Because raciss!! and Hitler!! people have scoffed at the idea that the proto-Indo-Europeans may have called themselves Aryans.  However, quietly, it's come back around.  Quoting from the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, :

FREEMAN
*h₄erós ~ *h₄erios [ed. I couldn't find one of the diacritics in my character map that the actual entry shows on the i] 'member of one's own (ethnic) group, peer, freeman; (Indo-Iranian) Aryan'. [IEW67 (*ario-?); Wat 3 (*aryo-); GI 657 (*ar(y)o-); BK 387 (*har-/hər-), 429 (*ar-/ər-)]/ From *h₄erós comes Hit ara- 'member of one's own group, peer, companion, friend', with further derivatives arawa- 'free from', arawahh- 'set free from', arawanni- 'free; freeman', Lycian arawa- 'free (from)', arus- 'citizens'; from *h₄erios: OIr aire 'freeman (whether commoner or noble); noble (as distinct from commoner)' (the latter meaning nmay be rather from *prios, a derivative of 'first'; the Gaulish personal names with Ario-, eg., Ario-manus, presumably contain 'noble'), Av airya- 'Aryan', (i.e., 'Iranian' in the larger sense), OPers ariya- 'Aryan', Iran Alani (< *aryana) (the name of an Iranian group whose descendants are the Ossetes, one of whose subdivisions is the Iron [< *aryana-]), *aryanam (gen. pl.) 'of the Aryans' (>MPers Iran), OInd ari- 'attached to, faithful; a faithful devoted person; ± kinsman' (and distinct from the homophonous ari- 'enemy'), arya- 'kind, favorable; attached to, true, devoted'; arya- 'Aryan; one who is faithful to the Vedic religion'. From *h₄er- 'put together'. Oswald Szemerenyi's suggestion that it derives from an Ugaritic word meaning 'kinsman' is hardly compelling.

Clearly supposed in the original meaning is an emphasis on in-group status as distinguished from the status of the outsider, particular those outsiders forcibly incorporated into the group as slaves. In Anatolian the base word has come to emphasize the personal relationship between individuals while the derivatives continue the more general focus on social status, as remains the case in Old Irish. In Indo-Iranian, presumably because the unfree were typically captives taken from other (ethnic) groups, the word has taken on a more purely ethnic meaning. Less likely, but still possible, is the assumption that this word was originally an ethnonym, the self-designation of (at least parts of) the Indo-European people, that was revalued as a term of social status.

An independent derivative of the same verbal root is *h_aero/eh_a- 'fitting' seen in Hit ara '(what is) fitting, right proper, fas', natta ara 'it is not right, it is forbidden/illegal, nefas', Av arəm'fittingly, enough', armaiti (< *ara-mati-) 'right thought', OInd aram 'fittingly, enough', ara-mati 'right thought, devotion', evara 'truly fitting, just right'.

See also Booty; Friend, Kinship; Master; People; Physical Anthropology [D.Q.A.]

Friday Art Attack

An alternate Darth Vader, made up to look like a WW1 soldier.

This is what a real hellhound looks like.  Yikes!

A particularly savage and less anthropomorphic (especially in the face) version of the yeti.

The best illustration ever done, as near as I can tell, for Yeenoghu and for gnolls in general.

I've had a long and esoteric obsession with orc and half-orcs and goblinoids as potential player characters.  I don't know why, but this clearly is a good one.

You shall not pass!  Comic book version.

Some interesting line-art called young lady Godiva.  Because, y'know, before her famous ride, apparently she sat around riding naked on horseback all over the countryside...

Also a technically good piece of line art called Young Perseus.  I do have to wonder why this artist loves to draw so many naked people, though.

Exactly where I want to spend the rest of my life; in this peaceful mountain valley with cherry tree blossoms and wildflowers everblooming around me.

A Yutyrannus sketch.  Still one of my favorite recently discovered dinosaurs.

Who says zombies have to be thin and reedy?  Given that in DH5, zombies are really more like Frankenstein's monster, this illustration probably better reflects them.  Especially after being in combat for a while.

Speaking of which, zombie Hulk.

Half-orc female put in the classic Conan pose.  I'm not quite sure what would ever motivate anyone to paint this, but... y'know.

After looking at that last monstrosity, it's nice to see a girl who's feminine, pretty and who appears to be pleasant to be around.  Y'know, like the kind that men have always loved, as opposed to those who pretend like they are men rather unconvincingly and turn everyone off?

Bell Beaker language and stuff

Bell Beaker Blogger has some interesting comments on the whole linguistics of the Beaker Folk question:

Rather than try and defend the IE character of Bell Beaker, I think I'd rather make a case that they spoke a single language based on their habits, regardless of what the DNA says.   

Why one language? 

1.  The geographic expanse of Bell Beaker was enormous.  Janusz Czebreszuk went so far as to say that in the history of Europe only the EU was of comparable size.  Very large inter-regional networks generally communicate in a single language regardless of what is spoken at home.   

2.  Beaker spreads across Europe shockingly fast.  In a short time they are in Ross, Doagh, Man, the Orkneys, little islands in the North Sea and the Baltics. They're all over the Western Mediterranean, sometimes in islands previously uninhabited or seldom visited.  They are literally in the Arctic and the Sahara at the same time.  If you read Volker Heyd's comments on the early Aegean Bronze Age or Jan Turek's "Echos", it's possible these people were really canoeing waaaay out there. 

They moved over long distances quickly because they were horse-riders and boatsmen.   

3.  It wasn't all style.  Most everywhere, Beakers lived by or with other people, maybe even in the same house.  Even when they lack Steppe ancestry, their heads are still deformed which means as infants they were raised as Beakers.  So their culture is more than hip artifacts and styles, it's their upbringing and their ancestry.   

4.  Beaker religion and superstition is clearly different from the Neolithic.  Their expressions are, as Antonio Valera commented, almost iconoclastic, being always schematic, geometric and skeumorphic.  Because they were not literate, traditions and myth were conveyed through storytelling and singing.  Beaker religion and Beaker language were almost certainly connected as we should expect for Bronze Age religion and language. 

5.  Beakers essentially controlled most of the avenues of movement in Western Europe.  Lots of peoples lived around Csepel Island.  Lots of people lived around the Tagus Estuary.  But it is Beakers who impose themselves in these examples as the dominant, intrusive group.  This is an important point, because it really doesn't matter what language most people in Portugal or Hungary spoke, the important thing is that if you wanted something, or wanted to go somewhere, you'd be dealing with Beakers.  VanderNoort made a somewhat similar observation regarding riverine and island hopping settlements. 

6.  Beakers seemed to have recognized and sometimes tolerated Beakers from other regions.  It's fascinating to see Beakers who plausibly come from different backgrounds in the same locality or even in the same cemetery as other Beakers (consider Southern Britain, or the Mesetas, or Little Poland).  This is huge because it tells us about how they viewed themselves as a nation.  Beakers from Brittany, the Middle and Lower Rhine, and probably Portugal, can be found within several miles of each other in Southern Britain.
Time, space, money, identity and God, I'll bet there was only one language.

Actually, the genetics does suggest one language.  The steppe ancestry can be pretty reliably traced to the earlier Corded Ware expansion based on PCA analysis, which can in turn be traced to the Yamnaya culture of the steppes before that.  Sure, sure—as they expanded, the contacted other peoples and other cultures, and there was admixture and syncretization to some degree.  We see that, for example, in the recent Spanish papers which suggest a high degree of steppe Y-DNA lineages, but a fair amount of continuity with the mtDNA lineages.  (By the way, why did so many men run off from their original homelands looking for women?  Why weren't there any local girls?  Were the Beaker-folk polygynous and the younger men needed to expand and "rape the Sabine women" in order to have any access to women at all?  Or did they practice it as a deliberate conqueror strategy to take slaves and concubines from local girls in the territories they expanded to after killing their men in addition to their actual wives from their actual culture? Did they practice female infanticide and thus have fewer women?  Any of the above?  All of the above?)  And if there is admixture and syncretization, there was at least enough resistance to their expansion that some elements of the original cultures survived, including (in the case of Basque, at least) most likely their language in at least one isolated mountainous area.

Speaking of which, I can hardly blame the Beakers for wanting to settle that area.  The little town of Pau on the French side of the Pyrenees seems about perfect.  Mild Mediterranean climate with palm trees and olives, and fantastic views of the stunningly beautiful Pyrenees nearby.

Spain Bell Beaker and Basques

Probably my last word on these papers, at least for a time.  I think we're running out of permutations of permissible and plausible interpretations of them.

Anyway, this graphic apparently accompanied one of the papers.  I wish it were higher resolution, but it's still pretty nice.

It makes a few things clear:

• The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who were there first contribute very little DNA to the modern Spaniards, although a Middle Neolithic pulse of additional HG ancestry can be traced.  Throughout the Neolithic and early Copper Age, EEF ancestry predominated.
• A major pulse of "steppe ancestry" associated with the Bell Beakers enters the genome in the early Bronze Age, and goes on to become much of the genome for most of Spain from that point on.
• The Basque region is mostly steppe ancestry, even though the language is almost certainly not of steppe origin.  It also had no additional gene flow since the Iron Age and today still resembles Iron Age Iberia genetically.
• The rest of the region, particularly Southern Iberia, also experienced significant but not tremendously so Italian and North African admixture in three pulses, the Italian one associated with the Roman occupation and the period that it was Hispania, a Roman province, one North African one also associated with this period, and one associated with the Moorish conquest.  I don't know for sure what they mean by "Roman Period" but presumably during the "Roman Period" they also refer to the Punic Wars, where Carthage had strong alliances with southern Iberia.  Also keep in mind that much of North Africa was one or another Roman province following the Punic Wars.
• On the other hand, significant Alan, Vandal, Visigothic, or other genetic flow that we know about from history is impossible to spot.  It's certainly possible to conquer a territory for a time and add nothing significant to the genetics of the population afterwards.
• All in all, the Roman admixture, the North African admixture, and the Mesolithic HG genetics are dwarfed by the EEF and steppe genetic contributions.

Some Angus McBride

I really like Angus McBride's historical artwork.  It's simply not been matched in the literature since his passing.  I thought I'd pick a few of his pieces and relate them to potential usages in DH5.

Keep in mind that I'm mostly treating Timischburg as if it were a Medieval fantasy version of a Bram Stoker-esque Transylvania.  It's made up of a population of Balkan-like peasants and an Austrian-like aristocracy; early Middle Ages in style.  As a nod to the earlier history of the area, some of the peasants militia, banditry or backcountry bravos may be somewhat Dacian-like in their accoutrements; including fighting with a falx and those kind of pointed Dacian helmets that were pictured on Trajan's column.

Country noble in Timischburg with his retinue

Timischer royals

Backcountry bandit chieftain and his men

The Hill Country, on the other hand, is meant to be more chaotic, more multi-ethnic, and more frontier-like.  I envision not only peoples that resemble Celts or Gauls but also people who resemble Germanic, Frankish, Viking, Anglo-Saxon, etc. peoples as well.  And those are the protagonist peoples; there will also be "demihuman" peoples as well as maybe red Injun type.  Maybe some "higher civilization" can be rump state Roman-like; kind of like Roman Britain after the Empire officially withdrew, but the locals still had a hybrid Romano-Celtic culture.

Granted; DH5 is a fantasy setting, and it's not necessarily meant to be historical too much.  Which means that I won't find Angus McBride artwork for everything that exists in DH5.  Rather, I'm attempting to use some existing Angus McBride stuff and find a way to work them in because I like them.

Soldiers of the Hill Country

King of one of the Hill Country city-states at the site of an expansion fort

Leftover nobles from the people before the Hill Country founding

Mercenary charter

More Hill Country soldiers

Hill Country countryside noble with his troops

Two Rival Hill Country groups greeting each other

"Wild" Hill Country warriors

Hill Country bandit warriors

Following a skirmish in the Hill Country

Finally, I've been using a cropped version of this picture of Valaris for quite some time to represent myself as Desdichado as an avatar, which was—of course—a nom de plume Ivanhoe used at the lists of Ashby.  Ivanhoe wasn't exactly like Valaris, and the armor and weapons are centuries apart in terms of development; the Gothic War between the Ostrogothic Italian kingdom and the Byzantines in the 6th century AD and the Third Crusader period in England in the late 12th century AD are, of course, far apart from each other in both time and space.

So not only is Valaris potentially a poor stand-in for Ivanhoe, but Ivanhoe isn't a very accurate representation of me either, although I do like 1) the association Sir Walter Scott made between Ivanhoe and one who has been deliberately disinherited by a hostile, alien race, and 2) his close association with the English nation as it was in the process of becoming as the Normans and Saxons were eventually merged.

But of course, I have much darker brown hair (now getting a bit grayish), green eyes and I'm not in the kind of shape that either Ivanhoe or Valaris would have been in.  But still; one is a historical champion of a southern branch of my people, and one is a fictional champion of my actual people.  Why not use the image?