Humans in Shadow of Old Night

A couple of quick things, none of them sufficient to merit a post on their own.

1) I've been listening to the Hideous Laughter podcast. I'm in episode 29, and they average somewhere over an hour each, so I'm pretty invested in it... that said, it's getting harder and harder to listen to for a variety of reasons. Most of them are related to the fact that they're using the Pathfinder system. In general, actual plays aren't great spectator sport anyway, although the only way I seem to be able to do them is via audio only while I'm in the car. But Pathfinder is even worse than most, because they spend so much time talking about mechanical considerations. I'm going to set it aside when this episode is over. I don't claim to be done listening to it, but I need to take a break from it, at least. I'll probably download some of the Red Moon Roleplaying Warhammer Enemy Within episodes instead and try them out. Even so, I've decided that I need a pretty good run of actual music in between episodes. If the episodes are an hour, I need a good hour or music too.

2) I looked at the dates of the Focus on Freeport entries, which I have all compiled into a single ~60 page pdf. The earliest ones were posted in 2000, and the latest in 2002. I've decided that I can read that before reading Hell in Freeport and still approximate my chronological reading goal, so rather than waiting for Hell to arrive in the mail before starting the Freeport trilogy, I can start it now, while I'm motivated. That said; it's probably a moot point. I doubt I'll actually read even the trilogy much less Focus on Freeport before my Hell in Freeport order comes in the mail anyway. (You can also still get the individual focus files here.) Speaking of reading...

3) I'm just a few pages away from finishing my big Greek Myths & Tales book, a fancy Flame Tree Publishing book available at a decent price from Barnes & Noble. I also bought a Celtic and Norse one, but I'm not going to read them immediately. The text was quite old; mostly from the late 1800s, and it didn't exactly read like either a novel or a non-fiction study either one. I think I want to read something else first. That said, I was struck—not that I didn't already know this, but it's not something you think about—with how incredibly foreign the morality and culture of the Greeks is from us, in spite of their position at the foundation of Western Civilization in many ways. The famous saying is, "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." In the original context, that means that just the past in your own life among your own people, but it's really true when you talk about reading something like The Odyssey. But yeah, Norse and Celtic... I don't know the Celtic in particular as well as the Greek, but it can still wait. I've got other things to read.

4) So, I'm also likely to finish the 3.5 Monster Manual this week too. Before I start Freeport, or maybe concurrently, but I'll prioritize it, I want to read Raymond Feist's novel Silverthorn (cover art pictured above, although I have an earlier printing with a different cover. Oh, well.) We'll see what else I want to read, depending on how fast I finish stuff. I usually read novels fairly quickly, and I do want to not wait too long before moving on from Silverthorn to the last novel in the series; A Darkness at Sethanon. But I have two additional novel series to read after that; a trilogy and a quadrilogy. And of course, loads of gaming books on deck. In addition to Freeport stuff on pdf (mostly pdf, but not completely) I've also got Eberron in my backpack, and Heroes of Horror and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, and Libris Mortis, and more to read. And, of course, once I finish the Monster Manual, I've got the other Monster Manuals, the Fiend Folio, etc. too.

5) I've been calling the setting for the Shadow of Old Night game the Three Realms sometimes, referring to the Hill Country, Timischburg and Baal Hamazi, the actual Three Realms. But in many ways, it's developing into Five Realms, as I spend a little bit more time lately on Lower Kurushat and the Corsair Coast. Those aren't really as big in scope as the Three Realms, but the then again, I'm not sure how much smaller they are, or what that cut-off is. Three Realms, plus two half-realms? Lower Kurushat in particular always was kind of there, but I didn't consider it too much. Pivoting to actually developing more details about it is a new thing. And, of course, the Corsair Coast is a new area, although I'll be building it by taking old Dark•Heritage material and making minor updates so that it fits in the new context. (I'm going to update a lot of Terassan stuff and make it slightly less "Spanishy", like Porto Liure (POR-toe lee-YOOR-ay) will be changed to Port Liure (port LYOOR) and I'll rewrite and update some of my old stuff to be up to date with the Shadow of Old Night context. Port Liure is, as an aside, my own pseudo-Provençal translation of Freeport. Catalan also gave Port Lliure. Spanish would, of course, be Puerto Libre, but that sounded too familiar to people in America, and I wanted a more European and slightly exotic/Medieval feel. Some of the other Romance languages give good results, if I massage them just a bit.)

6) Which reminds me; I need to probably talk briefly about the different human ethnicities. I'm slowly accreting more and more of them. The Corsair Coast people are meant to be very similar to the old Terassans and I will posit that they are related to the Tarushan ethnic group. This is now a bigger group than I thought, although in several branches that have diverged over many centuries, and do not speak languages that are the same, nor see themselves as the same people anymore. The Tarushans are either an extension to the west, or a closely related western cousin of the peoples of Old Kinzassal. Although I don't really talk about Old Kinzassal much, I do propose that there is still a lingering branch of it in the Hill Country, hidden in the deep woods and still so-far unsettled corners. The Tazitta tribes are one such; probably the largest. Otherwise, there is mixed ancestry from Old Kinzassal among many of the Hill Men in general, especially in Southumbria, although they have lost their language and culture, and their genetic percentage is relatively low. 

After the fall of Old Kinzassal, and its dwindling into a rural rump people, their close relatives the Tarushans carried the torch of their culture under a new banner and in different format. Tarushans, of course, are still a prominent ethnic group, especially in Timischburg. The Drylanders also have some obvious influence from either Tarushans or another substrate that was related to the Tarushans (but maybe separated by many centuries by geographical distance and the Indash Desert) and this is detectable in some loanwords and other linguistic stuff, but the Drylanders are also a different ethnic group and the largest component of their genetics, culture and language is unrelated to the Tarushans. 

The Terassans, or Corsairs, or whatever it is that I end up calling them are also related, but have been their own group for at least a millenium, and they do not look at the Tarushans and think of them as long-lost cousins or anything. But they clearly have a related language (kind of like the Romanians and the Spanish have related languages from old Latin, but also clearly are widely separated and don't consider themselves the same people at all).

And I've mentioned the Northlanders for some time, but as I start to actually focus a little bit on Lower Kurushat, they become important. They are also completely different from any other group. Maybe the "Terassans" can just be the Southlanders to match the Northlanders? Northrons and Southrons? Northlings and Southlings? I dunno. Still tossing around labels.

The last thing to mention is that I've mentioned these other languages. I don't actually mess with languages, except as they relate to names, to signal culture. Hillmen use Medieval British sounding names, for instance, whereas on the Corsair Coast use Medieval "Spanish" (usually actually Catalan or Provençal names) and Timischers use German-sounding names, etc. without actually assuming that they speak different languages. This is mostly just because I've never found that languages in fantasy stories and games has ever added anything very fun (Tolkien notwithstanding.) Even though linguistics is, in fact, kind of a minor hobby of mine, I've decided that it just isn't all that fun in game to deal with languages and linguistics. Honestly, even Tolkien agreed with this and punted to a Common speech that almost everyone used.

Pre-Contact North American linguistic map

I've always been fascinated by this, but here's a collection of the various maps, with some commentary by me... just for fun. 

"Pre-contact" is of course somewhat arbitrary. Much of the territory covered here in the first group was actually Norse before it was any "native" language, but when the Little Ice Age started and the Norse colonies started to falter, the Eskimo seal-hunting way of life was more tenable than the Norse sheep grazing way of life.

Eskimo-Aleut family (Greenlandic in the east and Yupik in the far West are the two largest entities). This is obviously the latest arriving language family, and it's spread is pseudo-historical; they weren't in Greenland, at least, at the time of Viking settlement, although they were arriving as the Norse settlements were faltering due to the onset of the Little Ice Age.

Na-Dene is the next family, covering much of Alaska and western Canada, but languages most familiar to most Americans are Navajo and related Apache, which are geographically isolated from the rest of the family. This family has—intriguingly—been linked to the Yeniseian language family in central Siberia (which is now mostly extinct; just a handful of speakers of a handful of languages still remain.) That linkage is linguistically kind of controversial, but tentatively most people in the profession believe it likely. 

Algic Languages, which are mostly Algonquin, plus a few other smaller languages, are a large group mostly in southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States. As you can see, it spreads quite far to the west, however, and Blackfoot, Arapaho and Cheyenne belong too. There are some speculative claims that the urheimat may have been to the West, either west of the Great Lakes or even as far west as the Columbia Plateau in Washington State. It's also not clear that the majority of the Algonquin languages are actually a genetic rather than areal family.

The Iroquois languages are geographically more limited, but their impact on the early colonists was significant, and their nations were powerful and populous. Even today, these are some of the more famous Indian groups, like the Cherokee and the Mohawk.

Siouan languages are mostly Great Plains languages, although a few were located in the East in Virginia and North Carolina. My own new location, in fact, is smack dab in the Catawban range. Siouan, Caddoan and the Iroquian languages may have some primeval connection, either as distant relatives of each other, or as former neighbors who had features spread as part of a Sprachbund.

The Uto-Aztecan map, as you can probably divine from the name, is a Great Basin family north of the border, including Comanche, Shoshone, and the Ute and Piute languages. South of the border is a bundle of languages spoken in the Aztec empire. I'm otherwise a little less interested in Mexican Indian languages, but of course, the current boundary between Mexico and America didn't matter before there was a Mexico or an America, so they often straddled the border. It's usually believed to have formed as a proto-language on the southwestern Mexico/US border, but that's just based on the fact that that's where it is now; it could have formed anywhere and moved, as many of these languages obviously have done in prehistory.

The Chichimeca Languages may not have been related to each other. These central Mexican languages are the equivalent of the Greek and Roman designation of "barbarian" although even less precise, from the point of the view of the Aztecs. It's also not clear to what extent the vague, handwavy Big Bend area Texan and Mexican tribes that were not part of the Apacheria or Navajo are related to either them or other nearby groups. The Meso-American language area was famous for being somewhat areal, with features that were shared by contact rather than genetics. The map below is the same as above, but with more areal languages and families added to it. Because most of these are south of the border, I'm both less familiar and less interested in them. The Chichimeca languages are the brownish ones in the central Mexico area. The lime green Mayan family is also notable, as well as the dark gray-black Yuman family of southern California and Arizona and Baja California.

Salishan or Salish is a geographically small group of PNW tribes in modern day southwestern Canada, Washington and Idaho, etc.. Because of the richness of the natural fisheries in the region, they were quite populous for their constrained geography, however. Tillamook is one famous example.

Finally, the Muskogean family of the American southeast is the largest family of the southern colonies, and one famous for many well-known tribes and groups like the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole and Creek. While not prevalent in peninsular Florida (which was populated by isolates that are poorly known now) it otherwise made up most of the American Southeast. Some other Gulf Coast isolates that are geographically very constrained make up smaller islands here and there, especially in the "hole" noted below in southern Mississippi, Alabama and the western Florida panhandle.

In summary, the linguistic diversity of the pre-contact North American landscape is strong evidence that there is no overly simplistic migration theory, regardless of which one(s) you prefer. Genetics seems to support this as well, although many Injuns are not super keen on genetic studies, they reject genetic evidence as evidence of tribal identity and are kinda of generally skeptical of "paleface science" in general. Regardless, it's clear that multiple waves of peoples who were both genetically and linguistically distinct made up the pre-contact population. And even to the extent that we can approximate the ethno-linguistic groups on the eve of European contact, it doesn't necessarily mean that much, as its clear that there was a lot of movement among peoples both prior to and after contact, absorption, adoption of different ways of life (Plains Indian light cavalry and teepee living seems to be almost materially identical across multiple unrelated ethno-linguistic groups, for example—the pre-Columbian and early Columbian Mound Builders are also presumably assimilated from various ethno-linguistic groups) and no doubt population and cultural replacement happened a ton, just as we're starting to realize how much that happened in the Old World too. 

IE families; now with new archaeological and genetic evidence

A new(ish) genetic study now suggests that the Greeks don't share super recent common ancestry with the rest of the steppe related portion of Europe. What this means is that, as has sometimes been proposed based on archaeology, that the Corded Ware population, growing from its earliest expression in the Middle Dnieper culture, which was probably a descendent of the Sredni Stog culture, was genetically distinct, although closely related to, the Yamnaya population. Yamnaya used to be billed as the proto-Indo-European culture, but now, Proto-Indo-European is almost certainly Corded Ware + Yamnaya, which had distinct genetic y-DNA haplogroups, and which were neighboring cousins... but not exactly the same population. This means that archaeological, genetic and linguistic evidence is all lining up to produce a story that all three disciplines support, which is a good thing. You can see here what I mean; and I'll annotate this with some additional commentary on how archaeology and genetics lines up with the branches.

The Cernavoda and Usatove expansions westward from the earliest steppe groups are often believed to be the first to leave the steppe homeland. Not coincidentally, their expansion into the Balkans sets them up for further movement into Anatolia, where they can explain the later expression of the Anatolian language family. So far so good; there's an archaeological solution that completely fits the earliest split from a linguistic expression. It's the right culture in the right place and the right time. Genetically not a lot of known about it yet, but as more samples are coming in, the steppe input into Anatolia and the early Balkans is becoming clearer.

Tocharian is the next to split. The Afanasievo culture has long been recognized as genetically indistinguishable from late Repin and Yamnaya. It makes sense that this is the expression of the next linguistic step. True, the archeology and genetics of steppe populations moving eastward is still quite murky, and Afanasievo is close to but not exactly in the same place as we'd expect the ancestors of the Tocharians, but it's clearly the best candidate. More and better sampling, with more and better analysis is certainly to be hoped for here.

The next branch to break off, which includes "Hellenic" (what exactly does that include other than Greek?) Armenian and Albanian is what this latest genetic study addresses, suggesting that they come from a Yamnaya population rather than a Corded Ware one. This probably also includes poorly attested paleo-Balkan languages, like Phrygian (is that considered part of Hellenic?) and Illyrian (sometimes supposed to be ancestral to Albanian) as well as a number of other lingering and poorly known Balkan languages before the arrival of Thracian and Dacian. Based on archeology, we can expect ghost languages related to these still lingering in the steppes for some time, but we have no knowledge of the languages that they spoke, only that they later interacted with and were replaced by Corded Ware derived languages.

All of the remainder of the Indo-European languages appear to have a Corded Ware origin. The next one to split off, the Indo-Iranian branch, is derived from eastward marching Corded Ware groups like Fatyanovo and Balunovo that evolved into Sintashta and Andronovo. Balto-Slavic, on the other hand, likely remained further to the west in east-central Europe, although both Baltic and Slavic have had extraordinary spreads in the past. Baltic, of course, has since been shrunk back to a rump area on the Baltic Coast, but previously spread across much of the eastern forest steppe in lands that during the Middle Ages were later Slavic. 

Thracian and Dacian are poorly known, but they are most often and most convincingly compared to either the Balto-Slavic branch or the Indo-Iranian branch or both. Their origin is probably from a northeastern Central European homeland that later spread into the Balkans over the paleo-Balkan remnants of earlier Yamnaya-based Indo-Europeanization, only to later be themselves largely converted to either Slavic, Latin (Romanian) or even non-European (Hungarian) languages. It makes sense that geographically they are probably in between the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian groups in terms of ultimate homelands, because linguistically they probably cluster close to those two branches too.

Germanic is next, and the old narrative still seems to be true, that it was a primarily Corded Ware (Battle-Axe or other northern variant) language that probably would have been more similar to a Balto-Slavic language, but that under the influence of the Bell Beaker superstrate developed into its own thing. Not surprisingly, according to the linguistic analysis, it clusters between Balto-Slavic and Italo-Celtic.

Italo-Celtic, of course, the last major branch about which we know enough to say something, probably derives ultimately from the Bell Beaker peoples (who ultimately derive from the farthest westward Corded Ware variant, the Single Grave culture). Bell Beaker was probably broader than just Italo-Celtic, but keep in mind that many potential branches are unknown to us; languages or dialects that disappeared before they had a chance to develop into something unique, or cut off before they were written down so we have only vague tantalizing hints that they may have once existed. Post Bell Beaker cultures like Unetice are probably ultimately the expression of an Italo-Celtic group, before it started splitting and splintering into more granular cultures and linguistic entities that we know of today.

Rogue vs Thief

For various reasons, I've been noticing the Nissan Rogue on the streets a great deal recently. The rogue (or rouge, as he's often mistakenly called online) has been a D&D class for a long time, although the rogue replaces what was once called the thief. For whatever reason, old-fashioned types make a big deal out of the name change, and point to it as evidence of the "softening" of D&D over time. One camp will tell you that rogue is a synonym for thief, and that the name change is immaterial. Others will say that rogue has become a good word due to semantic shift; while it may once have meant the same thing as a thief, it now tends to be seen as a likeable, charming maverick rather than a villain. They often point to the Nissan vehicle, and suggest that if rogue actually meant the same as thief, there's no way that a popular corporate brand would be named after it. I tend to agree with this, in part because I'm a hobbyist about linguistics and find instances of semantic drift interesting and maybe more consequential than someone who doesn't care as much about it. However...

I disagree that that's a problem. A big part of the reason for this is that the thief character class or archetype is too pigeon-holed, and the rogue character class is meant to represent a broader suite of archetypes than the thief. One reason I dislike the use of thief is that I don't believe my "thief" characters need necessarily be thieves! Not because there's any reason why they can't be; I'm not talking about 2e style censorship and sensitivity editing of concepts in D&D that were seen as "edgy"; I'm just talking about having a much broader paradigm of what the game is about. If "thieves" aren't necessarily back-stabbing sneak-thieves and lockpickers, are they thieves? What if they're con artists? Spies? Scouts? Some other kind of expert adventurer who focuses on the (admittedly stupidly named) "skill-monkey" concept? Well, that's as good a reason as any to talk about changing the name from thief to rogue. In fact, arguably the name (and scope) of the archetype wasn't changed enough.

For my own "OSR adjacent" ruleset, I've actually declined to include role protection in the form of classes, and instead have an a la carte "build your own class" process. Because I like edgy, grounded "low fantasy" or even "grubby fantasy" as the early Games Workshop guys used to call it back in the 80s, all characters are really kind of rogues, and many if not most of them might be thieves, if not necessarily beholden to that label by class. All the more reason to not be concerned with the label and what it means. This is one of the reasons I call myself old-fashioned, but not old school, and also say that I'm somewhat OSR-adjacent without being really invested or aligned with the actual OSR. Although, I think that we've actually arrived at a point where the OSR as a movement in general is moving into new directions that are more "OSR adjacent" rather than "classic OSR". However, given that the "dungeoneering" paradigm is still very central to the OSR, and it is not at all what I'm interested in, let's not go too far in that direction quite yet. My paradigm is very much a more investigative swashbuckling horror fantasy; like a Call of Cthulhu scenario, but set in a fantasy setting, and  maybe a bit more swashbucklery and action-oriented than CoC tends to be. (Although how "pulpish" CoC is in actual play is subject to a lot of variation, often more of perception and at the table variation than of anything specific in the rules.) I recently finished (or nearly so) re-reading Cubicle 7's Enemy in Shadows RPG campaign book, part 1 of 5 of the even bigger Enemy Within "director's cut" full campaign. While there are plenty of things not to like about this campaign, including it's somewhat railroady nature and tight cleaving to the Warhammer Old World setting, which makes it more difficult to adopt to another setting, it's still worth reading as a great example of what an investigative/horror adventure that has no dungeoneering at all whatsoever could look like. 

It's a little frustrating sometimes to think that D&D players, and even WotC themselves, have been so reluctant to move out of the dungeon and offer alternatives. As an aside, that is still a big part of my dissatisfaction with the Cityscape environment book from the 3e era. Given that investigative urban adventures, even in a D&D-like fantasy world, have been around since the first publishing of the Enemy Within campaign, if not even earlier, then it's a bit odd to think that nobody at WotC can figure out how to run an urban game without somehow making it still a dungeon-crawl at heart. If you're less concerned with it being a D&D-like setting, then the Cthulhu game was doing it already years before Games Workshop did it with WFRP. 

In any case, if you can get ahold of the campaign to read it, even if you don't ever run it, I recommend that you do. It is not only a great example of a non-dungeon-crawl type campaign, such as Dark Fantasy X games will be, but it is also a great example of characters that are more "rogue"-like without necessarily being thieves, thus again suggesting that the name change is actually a good thing. Not because it's D&D losing its edge, a la pandering to B.A.D.D. as happened in 2e, but rather because the thief as an archetype is too restrictive, too proscriptive, and the class—at least since  3e—has been broader in scope than the thief label suggests. I think that the OSR guys who complain about the label change don't tend to acknowledge that reality, either because in their games the role hasn't changed, and rogues are still obligatorily thieves, or because they don't want the role to expand in such a way and they're pushing back against it. Whatever the cause, I don't think I've really seen any of them acknowledge that with a more expansive suite of archetypes that the class mechanics are supposed to represent, a more broad label is certainly appropriate, and then make their case with that idea acknowledged and rolled up in their case for either keeping or reverting the label. It's perfectly fine to suggest that you don't want the role to be more expansive, and therefore thief is what you prefer. But I've never heard anyone specifically state that.

Random June 1st Hot Take: If you have to try so hard to convince yourself and everyone else that you're proud of who you are, then you're not. You're in denial. That said; Shame Month hardly has the same ring to it, does it? More accurate, though.

Who are the Dacians?

I said earlier that along with the Cossacks, my new interpretation of the Drylander ethnicity would be influenced also by the Dacians. That begs a question, since they obviously don't exist as a discrete people anymore; who were the Dacians? And that question is more difficult to answer than on might think. The Dacians don't appear to have written very much down on their own, other than a few glosses here and there in Greek or Roman texts, and one single possible text. While the Dacians, also sometimes called the Getae by Greek and Roman writers (although others made a distinction between them) were clearly up there north of Greece centered on what is now Romania and Moldova, and spilling across modern borders into Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ukraine and other bordering modern countries, it's not clear that they'd always been there, since the region has been washed over by invasions over and over again in recorded history, and if they weren't, it's not clear where they came from or who they were most closely related to.

Because it's simpler to assume so, many researchers believe that Dacian formed in situ after the Kurganization of the Old European farmers in the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age. I suspect that this may not be true; what we have seen in the recent archaeogenetic data is that people were coming and going and superimposing or replacing each other all through this period. Lacking any better detail, its probably a better null hypothesis that the original Kurganized Balkan people were either replaced or admixed with someone else from the Bell Beaker or Tumulus or Unetice (or all three, perhaps) or even someone else leading up to the formation of historically recognizable ethnic groups in the latest Bronze Age and more particularly in the Greek historical Iron Age and Roman periods. This, unfortunately, leaves us pretty wide open to all kinds of interpretations on who the Dacians were, who they were related to, and who they were influenced by.

We do know from the historical record that they were at least influenced by the Celts, since the Boii tried to invade that territory, and there was a lot of interaction between them. Two Dacian plant names that are known from glosses are also, according to at least one linguist, clearly Celtic in origin. I don't think it likely that the Dacians were Celtic or para-Celtic, but they may have absorbed and been influenced relatively late by Celtic people on the move during the Golden Age of Celtic Europe. But probably no moreso than the Germanic people were. We also know that the Dacians were influenced by steppe peoples to the east; Scythians and Sarmatians, and Sarmatian allies fought with them against Rome in the first centuries AD. This may have been an even deeper relationship, though—a number of people have talked about tantalizing links between "Iranian" nomads of the Iron Age and the Thracians for years, and the Thracians have often been considered close kindred to the Dacians, if not the same people.

However, although that's kind of the null hypothesis—that Thracian and Dacian are either closely related languages and peoples, or even two different dialects of the same language—there are reasons to doubt or at least challenge that assumption, and it's not clear that it's true. They've also been linked at various times to many other paleo-Balkan ethno-linguistic entities; the Phrygians, the Moesians, the Illyrians—but lacking convincing evidence, these ideas all have to remain possible, maybe even probable, but tantalizingly speculative.

There was even a theory a while ago that equated the Getae with the Goths, who during the Migration Period, before the Huns chased them further westward, lived in the steppes to their immediate east. But any connections with any Germanic peoples seem to be relatively late and not part of any Dacian ethnogenesis.

Because the territory of the Dacians is centered on modern day Romania and Moldova, naturally there's been a strong push to identify a Dacian substrate in the Romanian language, along with the assumption that many Romanized Dacians would have been part of the genesis of the Romanian people. However, this entirely reasonable assumption has been stubbornly resistant to proof, and attempts to wring Dacian etymologies out of Romanian words have been challenging. (Not surprisingly, Slavic has an easily identified influence on Romanian, probably dating back to the Migration Era too. 10-15% of the vocabulary, numerous grammatical features, the majority of the place-names and many of the personal names are clearly Slavic in origin.) Curiously, there is pretty decent evidence for some kind of either long-term contact link or possibly an earlier genetic link between Dacian and Baltic languages, which now exist in a small area, but which earlier extended further east, west and south. A number of linguists believe that this evidence is strong enough to call Dacian (and Thracian, if the two were closely related) a southern Baltic branch, or at least para-Baltic.

This of course, touches on another significant hypothesis; the Baltic and Slavic were united at some point between Proto-Indo-European and the development of the various Baltic and Slavic languages. While this theory has broad agreement amongst many, there are plenty of detractors who point out conflicting or contradicting evidence. Some even suggest that Baltic had closer (or at least earlier) ties linguistically with the Nordic Bronze Age and the Germanic languages than with the Slavic languages, and only adjacency of the two groups has led to their apparent close connections now. Others, of course, suggest that Slavic was a specific branch coeval with Eastern and Western Baltic, and it's just an accident of history that Baltic is nearly extinct except for the relatively geographically confined Lithuanian and Latvian today, while Slavic is widespread. Keep in mind that Slavic is supposed to have existed as a single mutually intelligible Common Slavonic into the early Middle Ages, and only started really breaking up around the 6th century AD.

Anyway, when I suggest that the Drylanders could be seen as similar to Cossacks and Dacians, I don't mean that I'd be borrowing very many specific details of culture or language, since the Dacians are relatively unknown to us in ways that matter. Rather, I'm suggesting that some of the material culture and look of the Dacians could be important. The Romans, talking about the Dacian Wars, mentioned that the Dacian gentry wore corselets of mail or scale, the unique forward curving Dacian variation on the Phrygian cap style helmet (which I could exactly replicate in Hero Forge, but I did my best to find a good analog) but that the more common infantry was unarmored. The Dacians were also well known for their successful and effective guerilla style warfare, which made the conquest of Dacia only ever half completed (the Roman province of Dacia was established, but truculent "Free Dacians" continued to exist beyond its borders.) Other than the helmet, the most iconic element of Dacian warfare was the falx, a huge curved blade, sharp on the inside of the curve, that had a relatively long handle and was often used two-handed. This weapon was so devastating that it actually prompted the Romans to alter their armor, something that happened very infrequently, especially as the result of a single war against a singular people with a singular weapon.

Like the Celts, and frankly like many Indo-European peoples, plaid twill woolen cloth seems to have been in use amongst the Dacians at times, and my Hero Forge Dacian has them as well. The Dacians were also described by both Greeks and Romans as being physically alike the other "northern barbarians"; tall, light skinned, with straight hair, and "ruddy or tawny" coloration and light colored eyes, meaning brown or reddish or blondish hair. This was probably the ancestral condition of the steppe people, and is today still common to modern Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic peoples. The Germanic peoples seem to have the most common occurrence of blondism, but that may be a boosted signal from the Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers that the earliest pre-proto-Germanic Corded Ware peoples absorbed. Another alternative is that while blondism was inherently possible within the genetic matrix of the European peoples (including the EEFs from Anatolia that preceded the steppe migration) it wasn't very common until a Bronze Age selective breeding bias event caused it to spread rapidly amongst the northern Corded War derivative cultures. This may be true, although I think it unusual that Homer's description of the Mycenean Greeks is typically Nordic in nature, and the Mycenean Greeks are among the Indo-Europeans that probably are not derived from the Corded Ware, but rather from the closely related Pannonian Yamnaya. In reality, it's neither here nor there, but I personally believe that the WSH genetic cluster already had a pretty high incidence of tallness, light eyes and light hair, and if anything, it's probably become more diluted over time because of intermingling with the darker EEF peoples.

Here's my Hero Forge Dacian, which could represent a Drylander too. Like I said, I had to use an older Bronze Age Mycenean-like helmet as the closest I could find to the distinct Dacian helmet, and I had to use a katana to model a falx. In reality, the handles of the falces should have been longer and the blade more curved, as well as sharp on the inside of the curve rather than the outside. But I didn't have a lot of luck finding anything that looked any better in the Hero Forge library. There's a big chonky sickle in the library that looks OK. If they release a slimmer, updated version of it, it might do the job better.

Germanic and Slavic

Given that our current leadership (which is largely driven by non-native interests; the war-hawk neoconservatives who want to conquer the world are driven more by Jewish than Anglo-Saxon American interests) is bound and determined to engage in unnecessary civilization-level warfare with Russia (and probably China, before they're done), I'm more interested than ever in the long, complicated history of Germanic and Slavic peoples, which goes all the way back to the Bronze Age. Some interpretations of the Bronze Age battle of Tollense are that it was a major clash between a kingdom or polity of the Nordic Bronze Age, a proto-proto-Germanic culture, and the Lusatan culture, which is often interpreted as proto-Slavic, or more likely proto-Balto-Slavic.

The Nordic Bronze Age may well have extended far to the east along the Baltic Coast in territory that is now associated with Baltic peoples and the northern Polish coast, but if so, it would have originally been proto-proto-Germanic. By the beginning of the Migration period, however, it seems that the proto-Germanic peoples had recently re-spread into what is now Germany from Scandinavia, over what had been Celtic previously. The proto-Balto-Slavic people had probably split, or were about to, but had retreated further north and east in the wake of Celtic, Dacian and Scythian expansions.

Much of what is now western Slavica; Bohemia, the Balkans, Poland, etc. had gone back and forth between control between Germanic and Slavic peoples, and while Western historians often focus mostly on the Germanic expansions during the Migration Period, the reality is that the Slavic peoples had a parallel expansion at the same time further to the east. Germanic tribes migrated almost entirely en masse from what is now northern Poland to be replaced by migrating Slavs. 

By the middle ages, the Germanic peoples, now firmly established in the Holy Roman Empire, the Viking kingdoms, Anglo-Saxon and later Anglo-Norman England, Francia, etc. continued to interact a lot with the Slavs. The Varangian Guard literally fought against them in many instances in eastern Europe, and they started off as Vikings, and later became largely English after the Norman Conquest. The Teutonic Knights established what later became German Prussia. The Hapsburg Austrians came to rule over much of southern Slavica. The Russian polity was formed largely by Swedish Vikings who slowly integrated and assimilated into the Slavs to become the Russians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians; although they were all united culturally and linguistically at the time as a single people (they split later in the wake of Mongol and Turkic incursions.)

But it wasn't just the fusion of the Vikings and eastern Slavs to form the Rus. The Vikings and Franks had intermarried a fair bit with the Wends. The Polish ethnogenesis, as well as that of the eastern Saxons included a fair bit of border country and country and went back and forth between Slavic and Germanic populations

In general, I'm pretty sympathetic to the Slavs. I don't (as far as I know) have any Slavic ancestry at all; I'm mostly Anglo-Saxon with a second big chunk of Scottish, and a third chunk of Portuguese from my great grandfather on my paternal grandmother's side. That said, I think we do both ourselves and our distant Slavic cousins a disservice when we see them as rivals or enemies; we should see each other as similar and related peoples, who have a lot in common and should work together and have friendly relations with each other. 

Sigh. Of course, that's even more true for the Russians and Ukrainians, and the fact that the Poles and some other Slavs are just as eager for NATO war with Russia as the Jewish faction of Washington and Kiev both are. (You do know that Zelensky is Jewish, right? It kind of explains his cavalier attitude towards throwing the Ukrainian people at the Russians.) Truly, wars and rumors of wars have been poured out upon the earth because we are in the last days. It's a real shame, and a source of genuine melancholy and grief on my end that peoples who should be friends are not.

Haugbui

I've been reading through Kobold Press's Tome of Beasts lately, and I just passed, recently, the entry for haugbui. Frankly, I think it's a little silly to have an entry called haugbui. Haugbui or haugbuinn is an Old Norse term that is translated loosely as "howe-dweller", cairn-dweller, or barrow-dweller. William Morris, in his translation of Grettis Saga translated that into English as barrow-wight, a term which Tolkien himself, of course, also later used. A haugbui is therefore literally the exact same thing as a barrow-wight, not a new unique monster. 

However, if they wanted to make a more nuanced version of it, why not use an Anglicized word? The Danes famously ruled over Anglo-Saxon England during Cnut the Great's North Sea "Empire" and the Danelaw, and a number of Norse words and Norse folkloric elements passed into English and Scottish because of the number of Danish settlers in England. And yeah; maybe hog-boy (from haugbui) or shag-boy (from hog-boy) don't sound very much like scary undead monsters, but frankly, neither does haugbui. In English that sounds kind of silly. The Scots reflex of the word, hogboon sounds—slightly—less ridiculous. At least it sounds like some kind of native folklore instead of a very odd foreign word.

I've been saying for years now, however, that I'm a little bit miffed by D&D's predilection of over-splitting the same concept into slightly different mechanical variations, particularly in the realm of undead monsters. (The earliest post I could find where I made that point was from 2013, although it was mostly just an offhand comment back then.) And sadly, if D&D did it, then chances are the fantasy culture in general has followed suit in the many decades since D&D's ascension to the single most prominent influence in the genre, for better and for worse. There are a good dozen variations on what a "ghost" is, all with different names: ghost, poltergeist, banshee, specter, allip, wraith and more if you dig into more esoteric monster books. 

I'll reiterate what I said most recently (although still four years ago now) on the subject, reworded slightly; there are only a few types of undead creatures, and they don't need to be broken out into all kinds of unique variations. These include:

1) Corporeal Sentient: Undead who have physical bodies, and some degree of free will and sentience as we understand it.  At the top of the heap here would be vampires and liches and maybe powerful wights and mummies.

2) Incorporeal Sentient: Intelligent and free-willed, yet ethereal or incorporeal ghosts.  The real iconic example from fantasy fiction is the Ringwraiths, but other concepts of free-willed and intelligent ghosts of all kinds are here.

3) Corporeal Mindless: There's a vast throng of more or less mindless creatures like skeletons, zombies, and whatnot. They are basically automatons; golems who use a human corpse instead of a constructed statue or whatnot as the corporeal element. Some creatures, like wights or even mummies, have trended more into this territory, depending on the particular interpretation, although in Dark Fantasy X these creatures move into category 1.

4) Incorporeal Mindless: There are fewer examples of this, but the ghosts of the Dresden books qualify; basically just echoes of a brief moment in time of someone that remains causing havoc, but which can only react to things in certain rather pre-scripted ways, and which don't do much else.  Haunts from my rules qualify.

5) Undead Monsters: These guys are not specifically based on human corpses or spirits, as the other four so far discussed are, but are instead strange monsters made like the undead.  Stuff like the dracolich or zombie dragon (or fell ghast from my rules) is the perfect example.  When Harry Dresden brought "Sue" the T. rex skeleton back to unlife, cloaking it in ethereal ectoplasm and riding it into battle against the necromancers, that would qualify too.

6) Associated Hangers-On: Sometimes ghouls, wolves, bats, and other vermin get lumped in here; they're not Undead themselves per se, but they are associated with them. I've even parsed these down; ghouls, for example, are like "larval vampires"; savage and relatively low power, but some exceptional ghouls claw their way to lucidity and essentially "evolve" themselves into vampires.

Archaeolinguistic discussion

I tried to make this  post in the comments section of the Eurogenes blog, but it was too long and the system rejected it.  Even though the person I'm responding to will never see it here, I thought  "what the heck" and I'll post it anyway.

@Andrzejewski "I would love to know what language Tripolye spoke and its linguistic affiliation- is it related to Etruscan, LBK or whatever it was that Ötzi spoke."

Wouldn't we all love to know that! Get to work on interpreting that Vinca script!

Here's a few things we do know: the only languages that we have full agreement on that have ancestry that probably predates the Indo-Europeanization of Europe are Etruscan and Basque. There are other southeastern languages that MAY be related to some of these that we know existed, although we know almost nothing else about them other than that: Aegean/Pelasgian, Minoan, and Hattic. There are some other languages of dubious provenance from ancient Iberia, Italy and Anatolia/Aegean like Tartessian or North and South Picene, etc. Almost nothing is known about any of these, even if they are Indo-European or not. The best "theories" still don't manage to rise above the level of handwavey speculative hypotheses, such as the "Tyrsenian family" or the "Vasconic family" and there is little agreement among linguists about the basis for any of them.

Basque does seem to at least have been geographically consistent as far back as we can trace it, but we can't trace it much further back than to just prior to the Roman conquest of Gaul, many millennia after it was presumably already in place.  It is probably related to or even descended from the geographically larger Aquitanian language, but even that supposition is pretty handwavey. Etruscan "claims" by Roman historians to have come from the north, and may be related to other Alpine languages  like Rhaetic. The Etruscans themselves present a genetic profile that is pretty close to what we'd expect from early Italic-speaking Indo-Europeans, who also presumably came from north of the Alps or at least the Po valley from the Bronze Age, and the exact same material cultures have been proposed for the ancestors of the Italics as for the ancestors of the Etruscans. How a steppe-appearing population that looks on paper like a good candidate for the spread of early Italic languages came to speak a non-Indo-European language is a total mystery. While it seems possible that Etruscan is descended from a language similar to what Otzi's people may have spoken, that's simply based on geographical dead reckoning, and is abductive reasoning that may well have no basis in reality.

I wish for more information on it too, but the reality is that we have no idea what language(s) the EEF population spoke, nor do we have any idea what the WHG language(s) may have looked like, although it seems possible that Etruscan and/or Basque is descended from one such lingering linguistic stock. Quite probably, the linguistic picture was more complex than we expect; if we paint brush in broad strokes, that makes it easier for us to theorize, but in the areas where we actually have SOME information from neighboring early historians among the Greeks, Hittites, Egyptians or Romans, such as the paleo-Balkan linguistic situation, the Bronze Age and early Iron Age Anatolian, Italic and Iberian situation, we see the precise opposite; a patchwork of languages who's relationship to each other is confusing and uncertain at best.  We can probably deduce that that same situation was common across most of Europe, and that the "settling in" of Indo-European languages was a much longer and more involved process that involved multiple waves of differing "grades" of I-E development before Europe was well and truly Indo-Europeanized. By the time we have, for instance, records of the expansion of Celtic in the Iron Age across much of Central Europe, we can presume that it superimposed itself over a number of completely unrelated and anonymous previous Indo-European languages that existed in the area already, as well as who knows how many lingering stumps of pre-Indo-European that was fading away to be lost forever to the mists of time.

One of the best proposals I've seen, although it is precisely the type of broad-stroke paint job that I am making the case against, is Peter Schrijver's broader Anatolian theory where he makes a vague case that Hurrian, Hattic, Minoan, possibly at least some of the modern Caucasian languagess, and even Sumerian all have an ancient genetic link, and that that language family is most likely the starting point for EEF languages. That leaves Basque a little out in the cold, but again based on geographical dead reckoning, I like the idea—speculative though it clearly is—that it might be a lingering descendant of the old El Miron genetic cluster's original language, transmitted through WHG to more modern populations, and against all odds surviving as a hinterlands language isolate in the mountains for millennia. But I wouldn't bet money on that idea, as catchy as it sounds.

Ötzi the Iceman

Ötzi the iceman (herein spelled as Otzi so I don't have to try and figure out the diacritics every time I type it) is one of the oldest naturally occurring human mummies, and curiously, is from Europe in the Alps, so presumably he has some connection to modern Europeans and diaspora Europeans like ourselves here in America and elsewhere. He dates to the Chalcolithic, about 3300 BC. Otzi was a reasonably elderly man for the Chalcolithic, about 45, and appears to have been killed; an arrow wound in his shoulder, as well as other wounds, look to have been inflicted shortly before his death. Because he was high in what are today the Italian/Austrian border in the Alps, his body froze shortly after his death, and stayed there in a glacier for five thousand years, to be discovered by hiking tourists, of all people.

Other hints from his body suggest that he may have been involved in copper smelting; relatively high levels of copper and arsenic (to make arsenical bronze?) were found on and around his body. He predates the intrusion of the Western Steppe Herder ancestry, so is unlikely to have anything to do with the Indo-Europeanization of Europe at all. In fact, his Y-DNA haplogroup is uncommon in Europe today, but was common among the Early European Farmers, and probably arrived with them earlier in the Neolithic. His specific clade is especially uncommon, but is found in isolated places to the south like Corsica and Sardinia in better numbers than it can be found elsewhere, so he probably was a descendant of the early Cardial Ware spread of Neolithic peoples into Europe. Other lingering clades of related G2a lineages can also be found in the mountains of the Italic peninsula, and presumably it was very common across southern Europe at the time. His maternal haplogroup is also extremely rare; in fact, it was named after him, because it was a unique expression. 

In that limited sense, no—Otzi is not an ancestor of anyone in Europe; only somewhat more distantly related clades to him are even present in Europe at all, and they are found in extremely low numbers and extremely isolated geographies. Of course, it's not quite that simple, as as fair bit of EEF DNA is present in all Europeans, but most of it comes from female, rather than male lines. What likely happened is that men from other cultures took EEF girls as wives (or concubines, or slaves even) and that's how their ancestry came into our lineages. Because of this transmission process, it's unlikely that you can draw a lineal line to any cultures or languages of Europe today from the Neolithic EEF people. Their cultures and languages probably completely disappeared (with the possible exception of Basque) and even their genetics and physical type were somewhat marginalized across most of Europe, including the Tyrolean region where Otzi was found, except along the actual Mediterranean coastline. 

In fact, while I said earlier that the steppe peoples had yet to come to Europe, a mirror image process to this appears to have already been happening with old Mesolithic Western Hunter Gatherer lineages. In the years prior to the Chalcolithic, there was a resurgence of WHG Y-DNA haplogroups across Central Europe. The recent Papac et al. paper on Bohemian genetics over time strongly suggests that what happened was waves of new people from the west, who were a different sect of EEF people, but who had incorporated more WHG DNA, and whom especially had had male DNA resurgences, came into the area and largely replaced the other EEF peoples who were already living there. Now, granted, the Tyrolean Alps are not Bohemia, but Bohemia shouldn't be seen as somehow different than the rest of what was going on in Europe. New cultures, likely speaking new languages (although possibly related to Otzi's) and with male lines that came from the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had probably already marginalized Otzi's people by the time Otzi came along. The Indo-Europeans when they came, did so again, although even more thoroughly. He seems to have led a pretty hard life. He had tons of tattoos. Possibly somewhat romanticized accounts by scientists who have examined him and his gear suggest that he had killed several different people recently and still had their blood in and around his stuff (on one of his arrows, even) and that he may have carried a wounded and bleeding comrade over his shoulder for some time. He was probably killed by the arrow, but other injuries suggest that it didn't put him down right away, or that he had already been involved in fighting before being shot, and was pretty beat up other than the arrow wound, including a relatively serious head wound and a deep cut on his hand. In fact, one scientific team presented evidence that he was on the run, and had been fleeing up and down the mountains for days before being killed, bringing mossy plant remains from lower elevations with him as he desperately scrambled for an escape in the higher altitudes. To prove this, they say pollen embedded (from the air) in the food in his stomach suggests that he had eaten a meal at least 4,000 feet lower just a day or so before fleeing to the heights, where he ate a final meal just an hour or so before being killed right near the tree-line. Take this romanticized narrative with a grain of salt, however. The pollen could well have gotten on his food in any number of other settings, and before this narrative came out, the idea of him being a high altitude shepherd was common—and still quite plausible. As is the idea of him being a copper smelter of some kind, going into the mountains in search of ore.

So who were Otzi's people, then? We're not actually sure. Pinning him to a material culture is difficult. The museum where he is displayed claims he belongs to the Tamins-Carasso-Isera 5 group. I have no idea what this cultural group is; and searching it is circular; it appears to be referenced only with regards to Otzi. Their cultural artefacts seem to be similar to those of the Remedello culture of the Po Valley, however. This is further to the south, but loads of studies suggest that Otzi had been moving northwards in the weeks prior to his death, and probably grew up in the southern area of the Alps, nearer to Remedello. Whether or not that means he was from that culture, or simply traded with and was familiar with them we don't know, but likely if he wasn't from the Remedello culture, then he was from a neighboring and closely related one. Who these people were is unclear, but there is at least some evidence, although it's disputed, that the Etruscans and neighboring Rhaetic people may have been autochthonous (the other proposal is that they crossed the Alps from the north prior to the historical period.) If the former proposal turns out to be true, the Remedello people might be distant ancestors of the Etruscans. It is worth pointing out, however, that the Etruscans, when they emerge, have a fair amount of steppe ancestry, and are often associated with the Villanova culture, which was itself an offshoot (so it's supposed) of the northern Urnfield culture. This is confusing, as both Villanova and Urnfield are also often associated with Indo-European languages, but it's just a reminder that language, genetics, archaeological cultures and historically attested peoples may not all line up as nicely as we'd wish them to. Perhaps the language was associated with autochthonous peoples, but other aspects of the culture and genetics come from the north, making the Etruscans a hybrid of Indo-Europeanized Neolithic holdovers speaking an old Neolithic language still. Sadly, one can only speculate.

Physically, Otzi appears to be a typical Neolithic EEF type guy. He's fairly small and slight; about 5'5" and estimated to have weighed about 110 lbs. Even if he'd been on the run and eating lean for several weeks, that's really thin. My wife (sometimes) weighs 110-120 lbs. at 5'4" and from the perspective of an American, she's a small, thin woman. (Even if she's now older than Otzi was when he died.) Otzi must have looked like a runt. But that's not unusual for the EEF people; it was only the addition of hunter-gatherer genetics that Europeans started getting taller and more robust again after the EEF settlement of the continent. The WSH admixture brought more tallness and robustness. The hunter-gatherers, whether lingering western ones coming from the Atlantic, or Scandinavian ones coming down south during the Chalcolithic, or as a principle component of the western steppe herders coming from the Pontic-Caspian would have all been pretty manly, good-looking chads compared to the spindly EEF men. It's not necessarily necessary to propose all kinds of massacre and rapine scenarios to see EEF women falling into the arms of the various newcomers who's paternal DNA replaced the EEF men's during the late Neolithic, Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age.

There's a lot of confusing and contradictory information about the physical appearance of the various population groups of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Europe. Some people propose that the EEF peoples were early carriers of the alleles for blond hair, blue eyes and light skin. However, other studies contradict that, and certainly every population that today has elevated levels of EEF genetics is dark-haired, brown-eyed and dark-skinned (from a European context, of course. Those who suggest that any ancestral European population were as dark as sub-Saharan Africans have some kind of ideological ax to grind, and the science does not actually support that, as has been pointed out repeatedly by the actual authors of the papers who are sometimes mortified to find their conclusions misrepresented.) It appears Otzi had brown hair (probably with plenty of gray by this point in his life) and brown eyes. I'm personally of the opinion that the modern Sardinians are the best phenotypal analogs to what the EEF population of the Neolithic looked like, by virtue of parsimony. It's possible, of course, that "whiteness" is a relatively recent genetic innovation that spread rapidly at some time after the arrival of the current genotypes that make up modern Europe, but it appears more likely that the hunter-gatherer and western steppe-herder DNA (the latter very heavy in Eastern Hunter-Gatherer already) is the better source of brown/reddish hair, blond hair and light colored eyes. That's a more parsimonious interpretation of the data, at any rate. Otzi was probably rather dark, thin and short, and would have looked like a somewhat malnourished yet physically lean and tough mountain man version of an Italian.

Of course, all of this discussion about whether or not you can draw a lineal straight arrow between modern Europeans and Otzi's people is kind of moot. Even if you could, although it looks like we cannot, it's fair to say that if he were a pre-Corded Ware individual closely related to the formation of the Nordic Bronze Age and the Germanic peoples, of whom the Anglo-Saxons (and eventually the Americans) are an off-shoot of, that his life would still be completely alien and foreign to us. Regardless of the fact that his culture, language and genetics would have been directly ancestral to ours. He probably would have even looked kind of foreign, and he certainly would have acted it and dressed it. If he'd practiced skull deformation, he might have really looked alien. It's hard to imagine how alien it would have been, and we'd be tempted to try and fit the familiar into it when it doesn't really fit. The excellent work by Dan Davis, for example, takes this Chalcolithic setting where the Pitted Ware culture (the last lingering Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer culture), the Battle Axe Culture (a Scandinavian Corded Ware variant) and the Funnelbeaker culture (a northern variant of the EEF horizon, with elevated WHG ancestry, as was common in northern and central Europe of the twilight of the EEF cultures) are all coexistent—it's a great setting idea for a fantasy novel, but without any frame of reference to how these people might have thought, believed or acted, he has been adopting Greek mythology into this setting, with analogs to Perseus and Heracles specifically. 

Anyway, I'll end there on a plug for Davis' work. Go check it out. It's pretty interesting stuff, and he's a great guy. I've interacted with him a bit in the comments section of various YouTube channels related to Indo-European archaeology, like Genos Historia, Survive the Jive and his own channel as well. I like him.

https://dandavisauthor.com/

More on Celtic from the Middle

A few days ago, I posted this on the concept of "Celtic from the Centre", a linguistic hypothesis by Peter Schrijver. Coincidentally, I've seen a number of people referring to ancient material cultures, like Unetice as "Celtic" or at least "proto-Celtic" which is, in my opinion and the opinion of most linguists, quite absurd. As part of some of this discussion, I had pointed out to me in the Eurogenes comments by user "Romulus" that 

1) The earliest Celtiberians might lack material culture ties to the Urnfield/Hallstatt area, as Schrijver points out, but they do have obvious genetic ties to that culture, and seem to come from them in a genetic sense.

2) There's a genetic discontinuity in the British Isles ~1200 BC or so that's not as marked as the Bell Beaker transition, but still represents a significant population turnover of ~40-50%. The newcomers look like early Urnfield/Hallstatt people genetically, and seem to have the same general time depth as well.

Of course, none of this means that Celtic from the Centre is unworkable. Even Celtic from the Centre proposes that Celtic arises out of the Urnfield/Hallstatt group, just not out of the whole group, and not out of the eastern group either. The rest of the Urnfield peoples who didn't specifically give rise to Celtic may well have spoken some kind of para-Celtic language; an eastwards equivalent to Lusitanian. Ligurian is already proposed by some to be just such a para-Celtic language, for instance.

The latest Papac paper, which is making all kinds of buzz in the archaeogenetics community lately, suggests something similar by inference. Without major autosomal changes to the DNA of a population, there was still wave after wave of ascendant haplogroups over-riding previously ascendant haplogroups, etc. Not only did this happen after the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, but it was happening before it too, in the later Neolithic farmer cultures of Central Europe. This is also inferred from what we do know of regions for which written records exist, or written accounts by their neighbors, at least. I.e., the Iberian peninsula, the Balkans, the Italic peninsula, Anatolia, etc.--all show a higher level of linguistic diversity in the Bronze Age than expected. Rather than big, broad, ethnolinguistically united cultural horizons, we have a patchwork of related, unrelated and lesser related in a region, that only later acquires a common linguistic approach.

To be honest, the same state of affairs existed to a great degree right up until the advent of mass communication and the modern age. I mean, only a hundred and fifty years ago, French wasn't even spoken by the majority of the inhabitants of France still. Occitan represented by itself nearly 39% of what "Frenchmen" spoke, and "Franco-Provencal" dialects made up another significant portion of the eastern part of the country, etc. 

There's a tendency where if we know of a modern language, we want to push its immediate antecedents back to unrealistic time depths and assign very broad material cultures to these purported proto-languages.

Much more likely is that the linguistic situation of the Bronze Age and even Iron Age of Europe was much more diverse than we'd like to think, and the languages that we know of spread much more recently and from a smaller nucleus than we're previously proposed.

So, yeah. Celtic came from Urnfield, probably. But that doesn't mean that Urnfield was totally Celtic. Heck, even the Hallstatt = Celtic theory proposes that Hallstatt may well also have been Illyric in the east. And that's the default, overly broad model.

Celtic from the Middle

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-alternative-to-celtic-from-the-east-and-celtic-from-the-west/4F186F087DD3BE66D535102484F8E8C3

That article is a good read. While I like the Celtic from the West hypothesis, I don't think it's as good a theory as the null hypothesis. Although I admit that the null hypothesis; the Hallstatt theory of Celtic origins, leaves a lot to be desired. (The paper itself points out some of the particulars.) One that it only mentions off-hand, but which I've come to see as pretty important independently is that while our models have large, broad areas of developing language blocks, in every case where we have actual early written records, we have a much more patchwork and confusing scene. The Italian peninsula, for instance, is not just the area where the Italic language family developed; the written records include several non-Italic Indo-European languages (Greek being the most notable, from the Magna Grecia colonies), non-Indo-European languages altogether (Etruscan being the most prominent) and a strange patchwork of very early Italic languages, and languages who's affinity is highly suspect and nobody knows what they are. Messapic and Venetic and Ligurian (and Liburnian, although technically that's outside what is today Italy) are Indo-European, but otherwise have mysterious affinities. Lepontic appears to be an early Celtic. South Picene "appears" to be related to Osco-Umbrian, but neighboring North Picene is not. The old Sicel language, which gave the island of Sicily it's name, is also Indo-European, but what it's related to is unknown. Rhaetic may have been related to Etruscan and thereby been non-Indo-European.

Anyway, the point of all that is that imagining an early proto-Celtic that stretches back thousands of years and makes up the majority language of big material cultures like the Tumulus culture or the Urnfield culture is not consistent with the spread of Italic, and then again specifically Latin over what later became known as Italy; why would we expect Celtic to have been much more monolithic than what Italic was?

We have similar reasons to believe that the Iberian peninsula on the eve of historical records was similarly linguistically diverse, and we know that Anatolia in the Bronze Age was linguistically quite diverse. The spread of Greek over Greece is also fraught with concepts like Pelasgian, the Dorian invasion, and other things that hint at more linguistic diversity than which later emerged. The Balkans is also a big fat mess of languages, who aren't well enough known to be classified, but which seem to show more linguistic diversity than we'd have thought if Dacian or Thracian were similar to the theories of Celtic development. It's quite likely that the Bronze Age of Europe was much more linguistically diverse than we give it credit for, and that the origin of the languages that we know of (as opposed to those which disappeared anonymously without ever being written down) come from smaller and more recent sources than we expect. As the article linked above says in the introduction:

This explains the endless debates about the "homelands" and dates of Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Indo-European and other postulated proto-languages—debates further complicated when simplistic assumptions are made about prehistoric populations' archaeological, linguistic, ethnic and biological homogeneity. All too often, philologists have leant on outdated archaeological models, which in turn depended on outdated philological speculations—and vice versa. Such circularity is particularly evident in the study of Celtic ethnogenesis, a topic which can hardly be approached without understanding the chequered development of "Celtic philology", "Celtic archaeology" and their respective terminologies.

The term "Celtic" has been used in many conflicting senses. In this paper, "Celtic" refers both to the peoples whom Greek and Latin writers called variously Celts, Galatians, Gauls and Celtiberians and to their related languages, as known from inscriptions or inferred from place- and personal names. Applying a single term both to a population and to a language should never be done lightly, but in the case of the Celts they do seem, at least from the middle of the first millennium BC onwards, to constitute a valid "ethno-linguistic group". No single material "culture" can be associated with them, and there is no prima facie reason why we should expect one to do so. The relevant material "cultures" are so varied as to cast doubt on the coherence of ‘Celtic archaeology’ and "Celtic art". Old attempts at archaeological definition such as "The term 'Celt' designates with certainty the La Tène cultural complex from 400 BC on" now appear arbitrary; "Celtic" is rightly regarded as a misleading label for the central European Hallstatt and La Tène material "cultures" of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. The peoples of the first millennium BC who spoke the attested languages which meet the philological criteria for Celticity—certain unique divergences from reconstructed Proto-Indo-European—corresponded encouragingly well in their distribution to the historically attested Celts, Galatians, Celtiberians, and so on, while corresponding poorly to the "archaeological Celts" deduced from Hallstatt and La Tène archaeology.

Anyway, this means little other than that we should be careful of overly simplistic and pat models that rely on assumptions more than they do on actual evidence. Yes, this means that instead of having answers, we may well have questions that cannot be answered in this lifetime. But sometimes that's better than an answer that's wrong. And sometimes, as with this elegant Celtic from the Middle hypothesis, we can eliminate what evidence tells us is very unlikely or even impossible to be true, and therefore have more likely solutions left over to pick from.

Anyway, I now present a picture of "Hallstatt peoples" from superstar artist Angus McBride. In the past, and even in the present to most people, these would be considered Bronze Age Celts. I think we now we need to more cautiously call them Hallstatt Indo-European peoples who may or may not have been Celtic, or speakers some other Indo-European language altogether. 

UPDATE: As a minor aside, if this theory is valid, then it offers up a fifth alternative to the discussion of Pictish to those listed on Infogalactic or Wikipedia. And to be fair, even the Celtic from the East default mainstream theory, allows for this proposal, since it also proposes an early Indo-Europeanization of the British Isles that is separate from the much later Celticization of the British Isles; i.e., the theory of Pictish as non-Indo-European is inferior in every way to the idea of Pictish as "anonymous pre-Celtic Indo-European" that is a local descendent of whatever Indo-European language stock the Bell Beaker invaders spoke. That doesn't mean that it rises to rival the prevailing view that Pictish was probably related to the Brythonic Celtic languages, but given that that theory is not super solid to begin with, the spectre of Pictish as non-Celtic remains viable. If it is non-Celtic, or if a hinterlands, backwater non-Celtic language still lingered, at least, then it was probably Indo-European rather than non-Indo-European. As an aside, the Rodway (2020) source from the paper linked above clarifies, the Pictish ogham script's assignment to Celtic is refuted, and it is now considered to be likely non-Celtic. It's not clear to me why non-Celtic seems to revert in most people's minds to non-Indo-European, when we also suppose that the Bell Beakers Indo-Europeanized the British Isles thousands of years before the first attestation of any Celtic languages.

R1a-Z93

We traveled recently, and my wife booked the flights, as normal. She has an anxiety reaction to being in the middle seat, but after having sat next to her in one too many times, I told that I didn't like sitting in the middle seat any more than she did, so stop putting me there. So now she sticks me next to the window and she takes the aisle (I'll have to tell her that I actually greatly prefer the aisle too, I suppose, or she'll keep doing that forever.)

I actually hate flying in every way whatsoever, and would greatly prefer never to be on an airplane or in an airport ever again in my life. But sometimes it's not too bad, when nobody else is in the middle seat. We took a there and back again flight, both were two legs each, and both had one leg with a blank seat and one leg where someone sat between us. The last leg of the last flight, late last night, I had a smelly Indian guy jammed in between us. Luckily, it was a rather short leg, but it gave me a new topic to think about. I've thought about it before, of course, but not that often. And with the recent disaster in Afghanistan, and our leaders threatening to flood our communities (unasked for by us) with a bunch of Afghan Quislings and traitors who collaborated and colluded with the invasion of Afghanistan some twenty odd years ago, it's worth reflecting on the origins of the Indo-Iranian peoples. Because some people run around saying that they're close cousins of ours. This isn't really true, but it's not entirely untrue either. The Indians and other "Iranian" peoples that exist today are a kind of "failed" white people; their ancestors were from what is today central Russia, and they spread eastward and southward deep into what is today China, India and the Middle East. There, they met demographic disaster; lacking sufficient manpower to overwhelm the locals, and in particular, having a number of single men who took local women as slaves or wives or concubines, or otherwise had issue with them. Today, we can see that legacy in particular in the male haplogroup R1a-Z93 and its related subclades, which is a European haplogroup, although it is most heavily present today in Iran, Central Asia and northern India. However, nobody will look at your typical Paki, Indian or Afghan and think that they look like close relatives of the Slavs, because their genetic profile is ~80% native rather than white. (This is more true the further south and east you get; into what is today India and China respectively) But their language, some lingering elements of their culture, and their paternal haplogroup yet reveal their ultimate origin as being closely related to the Bronze Age of Europe.

It's worth noting that before the Turkic incursions in the area, the lands to the north of the current distribution of Indo-Iranian languages were also full of Indo-Iranian speakers, like the Scythians, Sarmatians, Sakae, etc. These are the descendants of the Andronovo horizon who continued to live in a more traditional ancestral fashion than those who went through the "membrane" of the Bactria-Margiana urban centers, or ended up as far south as Pakistan and India, or as far east as the Ordos Basin in China. How are these barbarians described by the Greeks, Romans, Persians and Chinese who knew them first-hand?

• Herodotus called them red-haired and gray-eyed.
• Hippocrates called them light-skinned
• Callimachus called them fair-haired
• Zhang Qian said that they had yellow and blue eyes (probably hazel or green in the case of the first one there)
• Pliny the Elder says that they were red-haired, blue-eyed and unusually tall.
• Clement of Alexandria said that they had long, auburn hair
• Polemon says that they had red hair and blue-gray eyes
• Galen says that they had reddish hair like the Illyrians, Germans and other northern peoples
• Ammianus Marcellinus says that they were tall, blond and light-eyed.
• Gregory of Nyssa calls them fair-skinned and blond-haired
• Adamantius called them fair-haired

That's an interesting survey, because it starts in the 5th century BC and the last one to comment was a thousand years later in the 5th century AD. Ultimately, the Sarmatians and Scythians are believed to have been assimilated by Goths and later more thoroughly by the Slavs, and the Cossacks may well have been maintaining Scythian-like traditions and lifestyle, as well as maintaining a pretty Scythian-like genetic profile. Many of the varied peoples of what is today "Turkestan" have assimilated Indo-Iranian DNA, and many of them also have physical features that are relicts of this past. Heck, Genghis Khan himself is rather reliably said to have had green eyes and red hair, although of course this is considered "controversial." Given that we already know that Scythians of various tribal names like the Wu-sun, Yuezhi, and others, as well as the iconically Scythian archaeological culture from the Ordos Loop and the supposed multi-ethnic status of the Hsiung-Nu confederation certainly makes it likely that if the Dong-Hu were practicing a very Scythian like mobile economy immediately adjacent to them, that they may well have had a Scythian strata in their make-up before emerging later as the Mongols.

Anyway, regardless of that, I think it's clear that the ancestral condition for the Indo-Iranians was that they looked, dressed, and behaved much like the proto-Slavs would have at the same period. You can still look up peoples in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, or even Pakistan today, especially if they're from a somewhat isolated mountain-dwelling subset, that look extremely white and European in their features, not unlike the Russians themselves. So, what happened? Why are they nothing like the rest of the European peoples now, then?

The answer is that they were both physically and culturally dispossessed of the majority of their heritage, or willingly gave it up by marrying locals. There's strong evidence that the original Aryan invaders of Central Asia, the Iranian Plateau and northern India would have looked just like the Scythians did, being, in essence, Scythians warbands that were on the move. But after passing through Central Asian urban cultures—the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, or Oxus civilization, they lost some of their uniquely northern European physical traits. After then diving into more densely populated areas, like the Near Eastern kingdom of Mitanni, or the remnants of the Harappan civilization in northern India, the Elamites of the Persian Gulf eastern shores, etc. they lost their genetics. Curiously, in India, in some ways they maintained more of their culture—their language, at least, and the names of some of the deities in their religion—although it became increasingly bastardized with local "Dasyan" (as opposed to Aryan) concepts. In Persia and the rest of the "-stans" they suffered Islamic conquest, which saddled them with a significant cultural handicap and deference to the wild barbarism of the Arabs, and further to the north, they were either encroached upon by east Asian barbarians, ultimately being destroyed by the Mongols or the Turks or both, or even the Chinese themselves. 

While it's tempting therefore, because they're kind of gone now as a recognizable force, to see these peoples are merely failed white people, with a failed white people culture that could and should have been equivalent to a further eastern and southern extension of white Europe, with civilizations that would have been no more exotic than that of the Russians, its important to remember that they were successful for many generations; thousands of years, in some cases, before their genetic and/or cultural influences were eventually swamped by Third World hordes. Rather than look at them as pitiable remnants of the failure of our distant cousins, we should see in them an object lesson for what happens when you allow the Third World to overpower the First World demographically.

EDIT: Arguably, a similar case could be made for the Iberian peninsula, the Italian peninsula, Anatolia, and Greece, and even to some degree the Balkans prior to the arrival of the Slavs. But because they remained closer to the heartland of "Indo-European culture" and because they're more familiar to us, it doesn't feel that way. In fact, arguably all Indo-Europeans went through the same or similar processes. In Scandinavia, for instance, which is ultimately the homeland of all Germanic peoples, including the English and their offshoot cousins, us Americans, they just assimilated a physically similar people in the form of lingering Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers, like the Pit-Comb culture. And the Sintashta people, who were ancestral to the Andronovo people, who in turn were ancestral to the various Indo-Iranian peoples like the Scythians, the Persians or the Aryans of northern India, were hardly some monolithic people without any admixture or influence from their neighbors. There is some degree of subjectivity in terms of when does a people undergo too much admixture, both genetic and cultural, to be considered a white people, Indo-European culture anymore. But regardless of whether you think the Sicilians or Portuguese qualify, it's very obvious that the Hindis and Persians do not. The degree of genetic (and cultural) admixture was just an order of magnitude different than it was across much of Europe, except the southern Mediterranean fringe.

Corded Ware and Yamnaya

The latest from Davidski:

There's been a lot of talk lately about the finding that the peoples associated with the Corded Ware and Yamnaya archeological cultures were close cousins [...]. As I've already pointed out, this is an interesting discovery, but, at this stage, it's difficult to know what it means exactly.

It might mean that the Yamnayans were the direct predecessors of the Corded Ware people. Or it might just mean that, at some point, the Corded Ware and Yamnaya populations swapped women regularly (that is, they practiced female exogamy with each other).

• In any case, I feel that several important facts aren't being taken into account by most of the interested parties. These facts include, in no particular order: despite being closely related, the Corded Ware and Yamnaya peoples were highly adapted to very different ecological zones - temperate forests and arid steppes, respectively - and this is surely not something that happened within a few years and probably not even within a couple of generations
• both the Corded Ware and Yamnaya populations expanded widely and rapidly at around the same time, but never got in each others way, probably because they occupied very different ecological niches
• despite sharing the R1b Y-chromosome haplogroup, their paternal origins were quite different, with Corded Ware males rich in R1a-M417 and R1b-L51 and Yamnaya males rich in R1b-Z2103 and I2a-L699

I suppose it's possible that the Corded Ware people were overwhelmingly and directly derived from the Yamnaya population. But right now my view is that, even if they were, then the Yamnaya population that they came from was quite different from the classic, R1b-Z2103-rich Yamnaya that spread rapidly across the steppes.

Indeed, perhaps what we're dealing with here is a very early (proto?) Yamnaya gene pool located somewhere in the border zone between the forests and the steppes, that then split into two main sub-populations, with one of these groups heading north and the other south?

I think it's most likely, personally, that Yamnaya and Corded Ware are derived ultimately from separate but adjacent earlier sources that practiced a lot of female exogamy over many generations, probably spoke closely related languages or even dialects of the same proto-Indo-European—in part because we can't yet determine that some of the Indo-European daughter languages of the Balkans in particular didn't actually come from a Yamnaya rather than Corded Ware source. I do suspect that they weren't ever really exactly the same population source, however, as the paternal Y-DNA haplogroups seem to be different, as well as to be rooted in more ancient populations. The paternal split between east and west on the steppe seems to have been quite deep rooted, going back quite a bit longer than the Yamnaya and Corded Ware peoples to their predecessors. However, the latest is that Yamnaya essentially spread from the western edge of its range, rather than developing exactly out of Khvalynsk. While the eastern and western steppe cultures that preceded Yamnaya appear to have had a very similar economy and material culture, and probably broadly similar genetics, we're starting to get enough fine scale structure detail to be able to describe some movement and fluctuations which probably resulted in intrusions from adjacent people's haplogroups, and stuff like that. 

It's important to not be too mesmerized by the haplogroups, though. While the different paternal haplogroups between Corded Ware and Yamnaya are both interesting and probably mean something, the fact that at an autosomal level the two populations were still very closely genetically related means something too. They may have been two broadly integrated cultures that had different male lines in ascension in the different regions. David Anthony has proposed some kind of pseudo-Marxist class-based solution to the haplogroup differences. I think the point is that we don't really know. But as Davidski points out, Anthony's solution is probably not the most parsimonious, nor is it necessary.

And besides, there's more structure yet to come. While Davidski says that Corded Ware was rich in R1a-M417 and R1b-L51, the reality is that the R1b-L51 seems to be a slightly later development, during the Bell Beaker phase. If the Corded Ware themselves were rich in it, most of those samples haven't yet been published (although he hints that he's aware of unpublished samples.) In terms of what's published, we have, rather: 1) Yamnaya rich in R1b-Z2103 and to a lesser extent I2a-L699, Corded Ware rich in Rla-M417 and Bell Beaker rich in R1b-L51. The Bell Beaker haplogroup seems to have been quite rare in the early expansions of the Corded Ware (although, again, hints of unpublished results that will partially bridge that gap are common) and had an explosive radiation after the Corded Ware was already established... but mostly, only in the Western half of the Corded Ware horizon. The eastern half remains heavy in R1a-M417 and its subclade Z93.

In fact, one paper on academia.edu that I've read suggests the same thing; a Sredni Stog origin for Indo-European, through Corded Ware, but also suggests that the WSH element is an illusion of sorts. It represents an admixture (roughly 50/50) between the EHG and the CHG populations, but it does not necessarily imply that all "WSH" admixture later reported actually comes from a single source of that admixture of CHG and EHG. This is, again, in keeping with explaining the structure on the steppes, and promoting the idea that Khvalynsk and Sredni Stog were not necessarily as closely related (or closely tied, maybe is a better word) than has been often proposed in the past. Rather, the paper proposes that the WSH should remain broken out as CHG and EHG respectively. It also proposes that rather than there being a CHG/EHG hybrid in the steppes for centuries or even millennia, that the CHG and EHG components should be seen as representing populations that came together in the region, yet probably retained some coherence as separate populations for some time. The early Corded Ware people are, therefore, on average 40% EHG, 30% CHG, 22½% EEF and 7½% WHG. The admixing between them probably started way back in the Dnieper-Donets phase, since all four populations were on contact that long ago in the western steppe and forest steppe, before even the Sredni Stog, much less Corded Ware were formed. 

Sredni Stog, based on so far very limited sampling, seems to show about 1/5th EEF admixture. The earlier Dnieper-Donets culture seems to be almost exclusively EHG with some WHG admixture. The EEF admixture probably came from extended contacts, which are fairly well documented anyway, with the most westerly EEF Cucuteni-Trypillia culture. The Khvalynsk culture has no EEF admixture, but the CHG admixture that it shows is supposed to have happened earlier in the East rather than the West.

Still trying to untangle what all of this means, but I do tend to think that Davidski's models are the best ones for the development of a PIE-speaking population, in part because he's the most inclined to rigorously include the best fine-scale data.