More on Bell Beakers

I think the thing that desperately needs to happen, and this new genetic study by Olalde and Co. (which I'm even seeing referenced on social/political blogs like Vox Day—because of the implication of mass migration and population replacement that it highlights) is that we need to formally recognize that what we call the Bell Beaker culture is really two cultures that have a totally difference genesis.  And then one of them needs to be renamed.  Although they were (more or less) coterminous in time, and certainly there was interaction of sorts between them, but the Atlantic beakers, based on a copoz pottery prototype are not the same as the German/Dutch beaker culture with pottery based on Corded Ware prototypes.  Not only is it not necessary to derive their various potteries from a single source, but we now know that they had completely different genetics, specifically Y-DNA genetics, and even in Iberia where the Atlantic Beaker tradition started, there was a massive invasion and pretty much 100% replacement of Y-DNA lineages in the early Bronze Age associated with a Corded Ware derived Beaker culture, setting the stage for the later appearance historically of the Celtiberians, the Lusitanians, etc.  Now granted, this doesn't mean that the Beakers were themselves Celtic (the term Celtic linguistically doesn't have much meaning prior to the Urnfield culture at the earliest, which is considerably later, and it also likely is the material culture associated with other later appearing linguistic groups too, like the Illyrians and maybe even the Italic and Venetic groups) and we do know that waves of Hallstatt cultural artifacts continue to appear in Iberia later, possibly bringing updated Indo-European (specifically Celtic) languages with them.  Or possibly the Bell Beakers' descendants in Iberia maintained some linguistic continuity due to continued contact with the Hallstatt peoples as they eventually shed some of the other linguistic groups and gradually became Celtic.

But they are not the same people who started the Atlantic Beaker tradition prior to the arrival of Corded Ware Y-DNA lineages.  The genetic evidence is very clear.  Even if they contributed culturally in some way (well, they did contribute mtDNA.  Apparently the arriving northern Beaker people took lots of local girls to wife, likely in a similar manner as the rape of the Sabine women.  Except without the reconciliation between the new husbands and the fathers.)

The other odd finding is that the Basque people are just as rich in steppe ancestry as the rest of them.  In other words, the early Aquitanian people are genetically the same as the Indo-European peoples around them.  In fact, modern Basques are more similar to Iron Age Indo-Europeans in Iberia than current Indo-Europeans in Iberia are, because subsequent admixture events have caused further drift in the Iberian population (notably the mixing of many Romans, then later Visigoths and Franks, then later Moors) that has not affected the Basques.  As "Davidski" says:

The Basques form a tight cluster with most of the Copper, Bronze and Iron Age Iberians, and, unlike the other present-day Iberians, they basically look like an Iberian population from the metal ages. This is nothing new and very much in line with the results in Olalde et al., but I wanted to emphasize the point that Basques were not just a group that experienced an extreme founder effect in R1b-P312, which is a Beaker-specific Y-chromosome lineage. Rather, they're still very similar to Iberian Beakers in terms of overall genetic structure. So where did they get their language?

Some folks are mesmerized by this, and presume that, "oh my gosh; where does Basque come from then?" because they can't imagine a scenario where conquering males taking local wives pick up the language of the wives instead of the other way around.  (To which I say; ever hear of the Normans?)

As an aside, I picked up copies of Koch's Celtic out of the West books from Academia.edu and I'm quite curious what they say.  Sure, sure—the theory doesn't have mainstream approval yet, but I wonder; is there any reason why a very archaic Celtic couldn't have spread from the Atlantic Bronze Age into the Urnfield region, bringing languages with it that later emerge as Hallstatt Celtic?  Anyway, more after I've had a chance to read them.

We do already know that the mainstream view is that Illyrian is associated with the eastern Hallstatt material culture, and I don't know of anyone that proposes that Illyrian is a Celtic language, or even a para-Celtic language (like maybe Venetic and Lusitanian.)  If Celtic did come from the west, it didn't originate with the Bell Beakers, but with their subsequent descendant cultures.  And while there usually is a strong correlation between material cultures, genetics and linguistics, we should be cautious to remember that there isn't always that correlation in every specific example.  It is certainly possible that people sharing a very close if not practically identical genetic profile, with very similar material cultures, spoke different languages.  And it's also important to remember that there may well have been extinct branches of Indo-European that we don't know anything about because they were linguistically "updated" by the spread of a newer language or dialect. From the Baltic Coast in just relatively recent historical times we know the West Baltic languages (like Old Prussian) were replaced by German(ic) languages following the northern Crusades, and those same areas have largely if not completely been converted now into Slavic speaking (Polish) areas following WWs I and II.  And that's just a few centuries of written historical records for the area.  Similar linguistic changes could have been widespread in the many millennia between the Indo-Europeanization of Europe and the arrival of written languages in the Middle Ages, or Late Classical Age at best. In pre-literate societies, who knows how many times this has happened?

Friday Art Attack

While not exactly a "WAR" edition, I do have a fair number of Mr Reynolds' works in this post this time around.  But first, some historical stuff: Mycenean Greek warriors from the time of the Trojan war and the Sea Peoples.  In spite of the Brad Pitt movie, they do not look like Dark Ages Greeks in their dress.  At all.

Sometimes it's a good idea to teach Chewie a lesson and remind him that he's not that tough.

Some WAR characters fighting some kind of naga monster or some-such.  I think this is a Paizo adventure path cover, but I can't remember which.  Maybe it's one of the setting/rules books.  (UPDATE: I was wrong; it's the cover to one of their "Occult" setting books.

I used to laugh a bit at this guy who had an underwater Greyhawk game, and think of it as the Little Mermaid setting.  But, I'll be darned if Aquaman didn't make me think that maybe it could work and be really cool after all.

A Grim Reaper, a Deep One, and some little aliens, from Paizo and WAR.

Exotic races by Paizo.

I'm not sure what this is, but it almost certainly comes from the Crimson Throne adventure path somewhere, and it looks really cool.

Let's not forget to add some space opera from time to time.  I do like it nearly as much as fantasy, after all.

Daemons and the River Styx.  Of course, given that this is Paizo, which is derived from D&D, they're not daemons, or at least only one of them is, they are daemons, demons and devils.  Rolleyes.

Stylized, probably a book cover, given the big area at the top appropriate for a title, but pretty sweet.

If only Naboo had been this cool. Sigh.  Great concept art, though.

Bell Beakers in Iberia

Keep in mind that the Bell Beaker phenomena is from 2,800 to 1,800 BC.  As noted below, by 2,000 BC there was significant genetic replacement in Iberia, even in the areas where non-Indo-European languages like Basque later emerge, with steppe DNA.

We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula. We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming. We reveal sporadic contacts between Iberia and North Africa by ~2500 BCE and, by ~2000 BCE, the replacement of 40% of Iberia’s ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry. We show that, in the Iron Age, Steppe ancestry had spread not only into Indo-European–speaking regions but also into non-Indo-European–speaking ones, and we reveal that present-day Basques are best described as a typical Iron Age population without the admixture events that later affected the rest of Iberia. Additionally, we document how, beginning at least in the Roman period, the ancestry of the peninsula was transformed by gene flow from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

After (and during) the Roman period, significant admixture from North Africa too, although keep in mind that North African populations have changed significantly from the time of the Romans.  I mean, the Carthiginians were completely destroyed, for instance.  So, that means that the Celtiberians were probably more like the Celts elsewhere in Gaul, and the current very Mediterranean looking Spanish population is probably at least partly the way it is because of the Romans and the Moors.

And also remember that most of North Africa was Roman territory during the days of Empire.

And maybe you'll want to read this too. https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/02/migration-of-bell-beakersbut-not-from.html

While archaealogists will tell us that the Bell Beaker cultural package seems to originate in Iberia, certainly the genetics of the Bell Beaker spread tell a different story altogether.  If it did originate in Iberia, it seems to have been "culturally appropriated" by Central European and North Sea early Indo-European Corded Ware peoples and subsequently spread by them.

Brie Larceny

https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/03/13/new-reports-of-empty-theaters-at-captain-marvel-add-to-movies-controversy/

Disney lying to us about the success of Captain Marvel.

Not shocked.

Further DH5 development

It's been quite a while since I made an RPG related post, and that's allegedly the purpose for which I started this blog.  Sure, sure—interest comes and goes, and blog topics as a percentage of blog posts wax and wane over time, but I do think it's important that I do at least maintain a trickle of RPG and setting related posts from time to time.  I'm very delinquent on what I had expected to do in terms of mapping out a Hill Country area and figuring out how to attach it to Timischburg, but one thing that I am quite sure of is that the Hill Country area will be drawn on a piece of paper turned sideways to "landscape" orientation.  Timischburg will be attached to it somewhere in the northeastern corner, but because Timischburg has a sea to the south and the Hill Country cannot really, I'll rotate Timischburg 90° to the counter-clockwise, I think.

I'm a little unsure exactly how this will work.  I had not really envisioned Timischburg and the Hill Country initially as very close to each other, but as I took Timischburg out of the setting that I was starting to develop for it and added it to DH5, and then decided that those two areas would be the only ones that I spent any intellectual capital on working with, I have to work them together somehow.  The Hill Country is loosely based on the Texas Hill Country geographically (if not necessarily ethnologically) while Timischburg was based on the old Tarush Noptii, which was a kind of Mediterranean version of Transylvania.  I guess that will kind of work, but I pretty much have to throw out any connection to real world geography, or even geography that necessarily makes sense.  The Hill Country will be bizarrely warm for it's location, and Transylvania will be maybe a little cooler than anyone would expect. (EDIT: Whoops!  Got that backwards!  Fake Transylvania will be a bit on the warm, Mediterranean side compared to the real thing, and the Hill Country will have cooler, shorter summers than the blazingly hot 6-month or more long summer of southern Texas.) There are also young, sharp, Alps or Rockies like mountains where I'm not sure why there are any, since the "prototype" real world continent that I'm using has, at best, extremely old, eroded, worn-down rounded mountains in the same area.

Ah, well.  Does any of that really matter?  My conception of DH5 as a kind of "calque" of the United States, at least as far west as the Rockies, with Dark Ages European colonial nations on it isn't really very important anymore, since I've determined not to go crazy trying to detail the whole continent anyway.  Much of the Hill Country map will be a kind of mix of the Texas Hill Country, the Davis Mountains of West Texas, and then "soften" up the climate just a bit by assuming the lower jetstream and generally milder temperatures of the last glacial maximum.  So summers won't be quite so hot or so long, and winters will be cool enough to feature snow regularly, although not heavily or for long, and it will melt away off and on throughout the winter as warm fronts blow through.  If you could imagine Fort Davis and Uvalde Texas somehow placed in the same geographical place as today's Grand Junction Colorado or Farmington New Mexico, that's about what I'm thinking, if that makes any sense at all.

The connective tissue, if you will, between the Hill Country and Timischburg will be what is right now the Knifetop Mountains, the Haunted Forest and the Thursewood.  The Knifetop will actually get a significant expansion, and become somewhat more like the Carpathians, in a big, semi-circular arc that surrounds much of the northern and eastern boundaries of the Hill Country.  In the opposite corner, the area will turn into pretty harsh desert, gradually ending in a boundary as difficult as the mountains and hills around Death Valley.

While yeah, I really do need to get around to drawing a Hill Country draft map and re-drawing Timischburg with the corrected orientation, I'd also like to spend a little bit of time exploring this border region; the Knifetop Mountains, the Haunted Forest and the Thursewood.  I'll do another three posts in (relatively) short order going over each of those three areas in a little more detail.

Hard dance

So... I have a folder on my hard drive where I keep my best of hard dance.  I initially started keeping when I started collecting hard trance, and occasionally I'd add stuff to my phone's memory card because it was good enough to keep, but it didn't really fit here.  It's mostly hard trance, but includes some acid techno and acid house here and there, a bit of (non-hard) trance, and some hardstyle, especially early hardstyle that fits more with hard trance.  And a bit of hard house is in there too, although not much.

It's not exactly the "best of" because it's not exclusive enough for that, but it's also not everything that I have in EDM or even hard dance music. Most of the hardstyle that I got before I really started getting into hard trance is not in this folder, for instance (although I did retroactively add a few early hardstyle tracks.) But if I put the whole thing in Window Media Player and hit shuffle, I find that I have 2,149 tracks and 259 hours worth of it.  I could literally play this for 11 days straight, 24 hours a day, and not play the same track twice.

The challenge, of course, is that I got so much music so fast that I really haven't listened to a lot of it yet very much.  Some of it I've only heard once, and thought—yeah, that's worth grabbing—so I did, stuck it in the folder, and by luck or whatever, haven't managed to come back to it yet.  Which is kind of unfortunate.  I keep telling myself that I don't need anything else when I'm in the situation, and that I'm in danger of becoming addicted to the acquisition of new music, without actually caring about it after I get it.  But every time I tell myself that I don't need anything else, I end up becoming aware of something that I desperately decide that I do need.

Anyway, check out one of my other blogs, Synthpop80s for a sampling of this stuff.  I initially created that blog to highlight 80s new wave (especially the synthpop stuff, obviously) but I eventually stopped caring about the decade and added synthpop and futurepop that was more current.  Then, I ended up expanding into synthwave, and finally the EDM stuff that I spend most of my time listening to now.  In fact, I now have a tab of a Google Sheet that has listed all of the tracks in my folder mentioned above, and I have it randomly select a song from it, and I'll write it up, find a youtube or dailymotion link, and put it out there for you to listen to.  Sometimes you can't find a decent youtube video of a song; either the quality is terrible, or it's truncated, or it just isn't available at all.  If it's the latter, I'll usually skip it and do another track instead, but otherwise I'll give you at least a sample of it.

This isn't the most recent posting there (or even any posting there yet) but it happens to be the track I'm listening to literally at this very moment while I'm typing this up.

Captain Marvel's real place in the MCU

Even without being The Last Jedi of the MCU, apparently being The Force Awakens is bad enough.  I think that this is pretty spot on.

Monday Morning Grab-Bag: Captain Marvel and Bell Beakers

Well, in spite of the fact that I didn't really want to, my wife wanted to go see Captain Marvel this Friday, and I told her that if she bought tickets, I'd go.  We also ended up taking my youngest son, who's 15 going on 25, so we put more money in Disney's coffers than I would have liked (it was my intention to watch it sometime this week at matinee prices.

It seems like it hardly matters, I suppose.  Captain Marvel did pretty big business this weekend, opening to more than $150 million (although I sometimes wonder with how early they project a weekend take if a lot of it isn't fudged.  They can also game the numbers somewhat by adding more theaters, which they certainly did in this case.)  The critical reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are at 80% after dipping briefly to 79% (I guess they found another review or two that they could dubiously call positive that were added to the total.)  After purging almost 60,000 user reviews, they've managed to get the user score up to 58% (with about 63,000 scores.)  The more trustworthy Metacritic has critics score at 64 out of 100 and a user score of 3.3 out of 10.  Of course, more trustworthy means merely that it more accurately reports what the users and critics have said, not that the users and critics are themselves trustworthy.  By funny coincidence, I think Rotten Tomatoes user score is and the metacritic critics score, which are relatively close to each other might be the more accurate reflection of what people really thought of the quality of the movie.  My wife and son said the movie was in the 60s and they liked it.  I said it was in the 40s and I didn't very much, although I certainly admit it wasn't a complete failure on all fronts.  My wife and son do tend to be easily pleased with movies and not very critical, for whatever that's worth.

I had earlier thought that the movie was going to be mediocre, but not actively bad—much like Black Panther, actually.  There'd be some passive aggressive digs on the cultural war front, but it wouldn't be a raging "I hate white males" movie (even if the actress and producers do, in fact, hate white males, which I think is pretty obvious from their racist, sexist and altogether inappropriate and foolish public behavior the last several weeks.)  I figured it likely that Carol Danvers would be a Mary Sue, and that at the end of the movie, once she figured out that "the patriarchy" or whatever was holding her back, she'd suddenly become invincible, boringly overpowered, and the conclusion to the movie would fall flat.  I also predicted that French Cheese Larson would be a charmless and unlikable lead.  So, like Justice League except with even more unlikable characters than that movie managed.

But then, as the controversy intensified last week and critics reviews were much more muted in their praise than I expected, and early user reviews were much worse than I expected, I started to convince myself that the movie really was going to be actively and aggressively bad.  I don't know honestly if I'm glad or not to report that it's not actively and aggressively bad, just kinda passively and lazily bad.  It's not The Last Jedi of Marvel Films, it's The Force Awakens, in more ways than one.  In fact, my earlier predictions were almost exactly correct in every detail.  I was left telling myself that I told you so, which is kind of awkward and weird, if you really think about it.  I smirked a few times at a few jokes, although it wasn't up to the normal Marvel comedy.  I thought Talos the leader of the Skrull guys, played by Ben Mendelsohn, was excellent.  Jude Law as Kree strike team leader Yon-Rogg was also excellent, and Sam Jackson as young Nick Fury was... surprisingly underused and oddly put in a kind of ridiculous Stepin Fetchit role, which should be kind of embarrassing to everyone.  Although, other than that, he at least has plenty of on-screen charisma, so there's that.  I actually really like the Marvel Space stuff, and they've done a pretty good job with it.  In fact, I'd suggest that that's the best aspect of this movie altogether, and that... I dunno.  It doesn't save it exactly, but it does give you a reason to go see it other than the fact that it makes it quite obvious that they're going to do some kind of BS Captain Marvel Mary Sue to drop the ball in Avengers Endgame, and all of those years of watching Marvel movies is likely going to feel like it ended on a major let-down.

Sigh.

In actually more exciting news, at least to me, I found this interesting PCA of some Bell Beakers genetic samples compared to some other samples of other interesting characters, including some modern populations.  What does it show us?  Well, first of all, Bell Beaker almost perfectly coincides with Germanic and very nearly does with Irish and French too.  There's also a very close (overlapping even) similarity between Bell Beakers and Czech and German Corded Ware.  There's also some overlap between them on one edge and the Germany Bronze Age, although that tends to tail out away from the Bell Beaker cluster, overlapping almost exactly with some of the Finno-Ugric and most of the Slavic samples.  Baltic and Slavic, by the way, are in the midpoint of a line that you can draw between the Bell Beaker cluster and the Baltic Bronze Age and late Corded Ware.  Some of the Finno-Ugric fits in there too; Finno-Ugric actually has quite a wide spread.  It seems to be the language family that genetically doesn't have a very strong signal; it tends to resemble it's neighbors quite closely.  Although curiously, the Yamnaya samples are at a midpoint between the Bell Beakers and the Finno-Ugric cluster that isn't on the same cline as the rest of the Indo-European population, which is quite curious.  The Ukraine Eneolithic is in this Yamnaya cluster (which is not surprising at all) as is Early Baltic Corded Ware.

However, if you look at a few more details, some other interesting texture starts to come out.  The Bell Beakers do not cluster right with the Yamnaya or the Ukraine Eneolithic, and are closer to the Czech and German Corded Ware (which bridge the two, overlapping a bit with Beakers).  The former two, however, are the same Y-DNA haplogroup as the most common in the Bell Beakers, and the Corded Ware is not.  This is quite curious, and has bedazzled many observers, who note the Y-haplogroup and ignore the PCA.  I'm not quite sure what to make of it, or how to interpret it.  Whether it means that later arriving dominant male Beaker people took an awful lot of Corded Ware wives or something is unclear, but clearly the R1a-M417 rich Corded Ware Y-haplogroups are still common in Scandinavia and the rest of the North Sea coast; they make up a significant portion of Germanic populations today (or rather, their descendant clades do) as well as modern Baltic and Slavic populations.  The Indo-Iranian languages also seem to primarily feature a descendant clade of this same R1a-M417 (the Z93).  This suggests that regardless of what interactions later Yamnaya had on Europe itself, that the Corded Ware horizon is still mostly responsible for most of the extant Indo-European languages; Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Germanic and Celtic (at least modern Celtic) and probably Italic all come from a population that is mostly Corded Ware in its formation, with various levels of admixture.

The Paleo-Balkan languages seem to be the exception (and their likely descendants like Greek and Armenian), as do the Tocharian languages, which come from R1b-rich Yamnaya-derived populations without the R1a-rich Corded Ware layer.  But that's it.

I'm still unclear on the actual steppe pre-spread interactions between the R1a and R1b haplogroups and why Yamnaya and Corded Ware differ so much from each other (and what in the Corded Ware "pulled" them away from Yamnaya; presumably a substrate of Narva and TRB guys.  I'm also still very unclear where Baden and GAC fit, but they were probably remnants of an earlier pre-Indo-European population that remained for a time near to the Corded Ware horizon. GAC may even be intrusive from the west, although it looks like they died off without much issue (no doubt later Central European populations have some admixture, but not nearly as much as you'd think.) They're not on this PCA, but I've seen others that suggest that they are a cline of EEF and WHG or SHG and have very little if any steppe admixture.

And it still doesn't really answer the question of who the Bell Beakers are and where they came from.  It's clear that the later Unetice culture is genetically descended directly from the Beakerfolk, and that (most likely) the Celtic, Germanic and Italic language families all come from people who lived in the Unetice culture, and the aristocracy at least, if not in fact most of the people, who later emerged in those culturo-linguistic groups, are direct descendants therefore of the Bell Beakers.  And it seems like a big portion of the Bell Beakers were, in fact, Corded Ware peoples who suddenly became very cosmopolitan about 2,800 BC, went all over Europe, spread their language, culture and genetics with them, but did admix a bit with the locals; they didn't just wipe them out and replace them.  So they were almost certainly predominantly late Western Indo-European at some stage earlier than the division into those three language stocks specifically, and may well have included many people who belonged to other Indo-European language stocks or even other language families altogether, especially wives who were probably taken in Männerbund raids, which explains their diversity of geography and genetics to a great degree.

But those are pretty vague and handwavy conclusions, and I wish more detail were really understood.  The Bell Beakers remain one of the most mysterious, and yet one of the most important historical peoples to have ever lived in Europe, and are an early example of my own ancestors at a certain stage of development.

Alita Battle Angel

I watched Alita Battle Angel last night with my wife.  It was pretty good, for what it was—a very Japanese cyberpunk movie.  The Japanese-ness of it was a challenge for both of us, by which I mean specifically the story structure left us unsatisfied.  I don't really like stories were nobody except the protagonist is actually really very good (well, her adoptive "father" was too, I suppose) and where everyone has to die and where the movie ends without actually showing the big showdown that they've been leading up to the entire movie.  My wife thinks that they were trying to set it up for a sequel; I think it's just too Japanese and that's how it was supposed to end.

Given all that has been going on online with this movie versus Captain Marvel, I'll be honest—I hoped it would be better.  It was good, but it's not going to challenge Captain Marvel, not matter how terrible Captain Marvel is.  How terrible is it?

Pretty bad, apparently.  Shockingly so, even.  Sure, sure—there's no doubt some "stick it to Disney, the media, Brie Larson, Rotten Tomatoes and everyone else involved in being an avowed enemy of regular white guys" going on here, so I still presume that it's not going to end up being that bad.  Is it going to be worse than Justice League?  Where they turned Flash into a really annoying, neurotic Jewish kid (seriously, whiskey tango foxtrot on that one), completely eliminated any tension when Superman showed up and easily defeated the villain that the rest of the team had been having a good fight with, etc.  Justice League actually wasn't a terrible movie by most accounts, but it was ruined by them dropping the ball late in the movie in a big way and making Superman simply be too OP to justify anybody else even existing at all.

It looks like not only did they do that with Captain Marvel, but they also cast a completely charmless and unlikable lead, and they also wrote no chemistry with her and her co-stars, and even worse, they set up the last Avengers movie to completely suck too.

Are there saner heads at Disney who can stop this train wreck at the last minute?  Not sure.  Maybe.  Probably not.



UPDATE!!!

Uh... what happened to all of the user ratings?  And even after purging tens of thousands of "trolls" (for values of "troll" that mean "saying something I don't want them to") they only got the score up a few points!  Hah!

Still, kinda funny to catch Rotten Tomatoes red-handed at trying to manipulate the audience score.

DJ Gius

Although I'd been aware of him for some time, and had a few tracks and remixes credited to DJ Gius, I hadn't really delved very far into his catalog.  First off, of course, DJ Gius is Christiano Giusberti, better known as Technoboy, and one of the superstars of Italian hardstyle.  Some of the earlier DJ Gius tracks and remixes were hard trance, so I had assumed that he'd kept the two names separate to separate the styles.  However, this isn't really true.  Some later DJ Gius tracks, like "Jerk It!" and anything later are indistinguishable in style from a Technoboy song of the same vintage.

Meanwhile, some of his slightly earlier tracks like "Puffganger" and "Mega What" bridge the gap between hard trance and hardstyle, and would fit very well in a set with either as needed.  And some of his really early work under the DJ Gius name, like "Overcharge" and a few others (maybe) are usually considered hard house.  Although that highlights how similar all of these genres are to each other in the first place, and I tend to like some of the stuff that slides a bit out of its genre "swim lane" and picks up some influences from the next lane over quite often.  I guess I reject the notion that genre purity is an important thing. (This may be part of the reason why I enjoy stuff by Guyver or Lee Haslam, for instance, which brings a UK Hard House vibe to their hard trance—when they're not overtly actually making hard house.) (Of course, I also don't like house as much as I like trance, and some of the hard house stuff sounds cheesy to me when there's too much of it.  But I otherwise like the variety of some hard house elements in my hard trance.)

Anyway, my favorite DJ Gius songs tend to be the ones that are hard trance, but which have enough hardstyle-like elements that you could slip them into a hardstyle set and they wouldn't really feel all that out of place or weird, but not the ones that are so overtly hardstyle that I just consider them (in my own mind, at least) like a Technoboy song.  Here's a small sampling.

British Bell Beakers

A recently released study of a few British Bell Beaker skeletons has some interesting facts that help to accurately write the history of the settlement of Britain by a population that's... well, kinda modernish, I suppose.

First; although the area around Stonehenge in Wiltshire is littered with Bell Beaker barrows, it almost certainly wasn't built by the Beaker People, but rather by the Megalith people.  Stonehenge was their last and greatest monument across all of Europe, and may even have been part of the reason that characters like the Amesbury Archer or the Boscombe Bowmen came to Britain in the first place.  The interesting thing about the Boscombe Bowmen is that while related, they show remarkable genetic diversity.  Both are closely related on the Y-DNA line, but on the mtDNA line, one has mothers from eastern Germany, while the other has mothers from Spain or southern France.

What this makes clear is that the Bell Beaker phenomena was a rather cosmopolitan one; presumably Indo-European Bell Beaker people spread across Western and Central Europe, and the remained in contact with each other, they remained fairly mobile, and they moved around.  The two individuals sampled at Boscombe show by isotope analysis that they grew up in either Wales or the Lakes District, and later moved to Wiltshire, but their maternal DNA suggests that their immediate forebears had been even more well-traveled then they had.

The Bell Beaker phenomena is one that is poorly understand in many ways, but which is integral to understanding the Indo-Europeanization of Europe.  The best guess by most is that it is a "cultural package"—ritual, religion, and certainly pottery, which provides the material culture's name—all spread across a vast area rather quickly, and probably swept up more than one genetic population into its aegis.  Let me quote a section of Infogalactic:

There have been numerous proposals by archaeologists as to the origins of the Bell Beaker culture, and debates continued on for decades. Several regions of origin have been postulated, notably the Iberian peninsula, the Netherlands and Central Europe. Similarly, scholars have postulated various mechanisms of spread, including migrations of populations ("folk migrations"), smaller warrior groups, individuals (craftsmen), or a diffusion of ideas and object exchange. 

Recent analyses have made significant inroads to understanding the Beaker phenomenon, mostly by analysing each of its components separately. They have concluded that the Bell Beaker phenomenon was a synthesis of elements, representing “an idea and style uniting different regions with different cultural traditions and background.” 

Radiocarbon dating seems to support that the earliest "Maritime" Bell Beaker design style is encountered in Iberia, specifically in the vibrant copper-using communities of the Tagus estuary in Portugal around 2800-2700 BC and spread from there to many parts of western Europe. An overview of all available sources from southern Germany concluded that Bell Beaker was a new and independent culture in that area, contemporary with the Corded Ware culture. 

The inspiration for the Maritime Bell Beaker is argued to have been the small and earlier Copoz beakers that have impressed decoration and which are found widely around the Tagus estuary in Portugal. Turek sees late Neolithic precursors in northern Africa, arguing the Maritime style emerged as a result of seaborne contacts between Iberia and Morocco in the first half of the third millennium BCE. However, radiocarbon dating from North African sites is lacking for the most part. 

AOO and AOC Beakers appear to have evolved continually from pre-Beaker period in the lower Rhine and North Sea regions, at least for Northern and Central Europe. 

Furthermore, the burial ritual which typified Bell Beaker sites was intrusive into Western Europe. Individual burials, often under tumuli burials, with the inclusion of weapons contrast markedly to the preceding Neolithic traditions of often collective, weaponless burials in Atlantic/Western Europe. Such an arrangement is rather derivative of Corded Ware traditions, although instead of 'battle-axes', Bell Beaker individuals used copper daggers. 

Overall, all these elements (Iberian-derived maritime ceramic styles, AOC and AOO ceramic styles, and ‘eastern’ burial ritual symbolism) appear to have first fused in the Lower Rhine region.

What ancient DNA genetic research is showing us is that while there were certainly contacts between the Iberian maritime Beakers, as well as some significant cultural sharing, there was much less genetic sharing than was maybe previously believed, and the Dutch Beakers, for example, show go much genetic continuity with the earlier Corded Ware variants that were located in the same area that they can be seen as their direct descendants, with only a little bit of more cosmopolitan admixture.  And the Dutch Beakers were the primary source of the slightly later appearing British Beakers.  The Dutch (and German) Beakers were certainly related somehow to the Maritime Beakers, but they also seem to have been their own thing with their own origins and development more rooted in the Corded Ware expansion that had earlier spread across northern Europe and spurred into new activity by some increasing Yamnaya contact as well as by whatever interactions they were having with the Iberians.

Yeah, yeah—this seems to be in contrast to the maternal lineages of these two Boscombe bowmen, but what happens at an individual level doesn't necessarily mean that those patterns were strongly correlated to what was otherwise happening at a population level.  What's clear is that contacts were sufficient that there could be wide-ranging wife-taking, but at the same time, genetic continuity was pretty close.  That said, the Bell Beaker genetic sampling done in the Netherlands and Germany do show strong similarities to the earlier Corded Ware population, but they do "pull" just a bit towards the EEF genetic signature relative to the Corded Ware, so there must have been some level of admixture or cultural substrating from the Megalithic Builder culture which occupied Europe before the arrival of steppe peoples.

My personal theory is that some elements of a cultural package came out of the Iberian coast, but that was probably the result of the continued penetration of early Indo-Europeans who made it that far.  They probably didn't arrive in enough numbers to overwhelm the natives, like they had earlier in Northern Europe, and they may not (yet) have been able to impose their language and culture on those who were already there, although they certainly later did.  Rather, that was probably a longer process related to the ongoing Bell Beaker phenomena, which may have at times resembled piratical banditry and raiding, and may have at times resembled sophisticated trade routes and connections.  Regardless of how it happened during the Bell Beaker era, the end result is easy to see in subsequent populations—when we first are able to get a culturo-linguistic picture of Iberia, for example, we find a thick penetration of Celtiberian peoples, but surrounded by what are probably non-Indo-Europeans like the Iberian and Tartessian groups, and the obviously non-Indo-European Aquitanians of the Pyrenees, who's remnants today are the Basques.  In spite of that, though, the genetics of Iberia is much more influenced by the natives than by the intrusive steppe peoples, and the Spanish and Portuguese (as well as the Italians, Greeks and Balkans area peoples) have the strongest component of EEF relative to WHG or Yamnaya genetics.  So, in the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, genetic replacement was strongly a component of the earlier Corded Ware expansion over Central and Northern Europe, and of the expansion across Britain of Bell Beakers.  It was notably less so in the Indo-Europeanization of southern and Western Europe, including the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, the Balkans and Greece (and for that matter, Anatolia.)  The weakest signal of EEF is among the Baltic peoples and some of the nearby Slavs, the Scandinavians and the Scottish.  It is obvious, then, that regardless of the spread of language and culture, there remains a cline of genetics south to north.

Anyway, to add to the mix, some of the northern Bell Beaker types; the actual Beakers I mean, are derivable from previous Corded Ware wares.  It's entirely possible, of course, that archaeologists are making much too much of the pottery, simply because that's what they have access to more than any other cultural artifact.  Think to yourself about your own flatware and whatnot; how much do you really care about it, and what would it take for you to switch to a new set?  Probably not much.

So who are the British Bell Beakers?  Genetically, they are Dutch Bell Beakers, with some admixture here and there.  They probably came quite frequently as Männerbunds, which may explain to a some degree the diversity of maternal lineages compared to paternal ones.  And they may well have been drawn to Britain, and specifically to Wiltshire, because of the obvious wealth in the area, which they came to plunder and then eventually to dominate themselves. Not only did they, then, not build Stonehenge, but they later took significant effort to modify it, although they didn't have the requisite expertise, so their modifications resulted in the eventual collapse of at least some of the stones. They replaced the population that was already there (or, to be more precise, the population that followed is 90% based on the Bell Beakers, and the Megalithic Britons only contribute 10% to the modern genome.  This doesn't necessarily mean that they were replaced; for all we know, there never were that many of them across the island anyway.)

They probably weren't Celtic, because Celtic is meaningless in this historical context; it's way too early for there to even be a language that is recognizably Celtic.  However, they may have been related to the ancestors of the ancestors of the Celts.  Linguistically, I mean.  If they were, they maintained contacts with the Continent, because Celtic as we know it developed in a much more geographically constrained area, and we can draw parallels between q-Celtic and p-Celtic on the Continent that strongly suggests that the languages came to Britain (and Ireland) from sources on the continent much more recently, and that Brittonic was related to Gallic and Goidelic was related to Celtiberian.  Of course, other linguists disagree with the entire p- and q-Celtic classification and instead focus on Insular vs Continental as the main branches.  Even if the latter ends up being true, it's a relatively easily verifiable fact that some groups, such as the Belgae, spanned the channel; they were part of the confederation defeated by Julius Caesar in Gaul, and the British tribe the Catuvellani were supposed Belgic usurpers on the Island, according to Caesar.  And aside from that, there was territory claimed by the Belgae in Britain at the base of the Southwest Peninsula (in other words, not particularly close to the Catuvellani.)

Of course, complicating all of this is the proposal that the Belgae weren't actually Celtic at all, but rather some anonymous Nordwestblock Indo-European language family that went extinct on the very verge of historicity.  In all, I think it unlikely that the Bell Beakers spoke some kind of very early Celtic, but even if they did, the Celtic languages that they did eventually end up speaking almost certainly came more recently from the Continent.

Italian dance

While I've been aware of a few of their works for a while, I only recently really dug into the many, many projects (over 50 different artist/band names) of Francesco Scandolari and Lorenzo Carpella.  And that number is just the groups that the two of them are in and nobody else; if you start creating additional permutations of where they're working with someone else, either the two of them together or just one of them, you get at least 50% more.

It's curious; these two are from Milan.  Northern Italy is culturally very distinct from Southern Italy, for those who don't know.  A hundred years after the Revolutionary War in America, what we see today as some iconic European countries—Germany and Italy, in particular—were actually just forming for the first time, and not always comfortably.  (Technically, Italy wasn't completely united politically until after World War I. But culturally and in other ways, they still aren't.)  Southern Italians are very Mediterranean in both culture and genetics, whereas northern Italians have been strongly influenced by the depopulation that occurred at the end of the Roman Empire.  Always a haven for non-Italian populations (Etruscans, Cis-Alpine Gauls) it was largely repopulated by Migration Era Germanic peoples like the Goths and the Lombards, and politically was often allied with either France or Austria until the Risorgimiento. Even today, they are often more like Italian-speaking Swiss, Austrians or Bavarians then they are like Sicilians or Calabrians. And although today, most speak standard Italian, this is a matter more of social expediency; prior to the Risorgimiento, northern Italian languages were a totally different branch of the Romance language family tree (Gallo-Italic) from the central and southern branches (Italo-Dalmatian).  The Southern Question relates to the Imperialistic imposition of a northern Italian Hajnal Line culture and economic system over a southern social and economic climate that was based on Big Men and which tolerated, if not actively encouraged, tribalistic organized crime syndicates and general corruption.  The unification was also a disaster economically for the backwards citizens of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which prompted a massive diaspora of southern Italians in particular to places like America and Argentina, where in many cases, they brought their corruption and organized crime with them—infamously.

After the Italian unification, Massimo d'Azeglio famously said, "L'Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani."  This is usually translated as, "We have made Italy.  Now we must make Italians."  Heh.

Anyway, this cultural distinction plays out in interesting ways.  During the late 70s up through the early 80s, there was a distinctive north Italian genre of dance music, for instance, called Italo-Disco (a name given to it by German record labels who were trying to market the stuff more widely on the Continent, actually) which was kind of a synthesizer garage band type of thing.  The north Italians have continued this localized dance music tradition for a long time, although Italo-Disco ended up being popular enough on the Continent to spawn the creation of various genres of dance-pop electronic music, like Eurobeat, Eurodance, Italodance, and more, and it played no doubt a very strong role in the development of Euro-House, even though most of the artists of that movement weren't Italians.

The north Italians—like Scandolari and Carpella—but also like big name dance music producers like Technoboy, Tuneboy, Luca Antolini, Mauro Picotto, Benny Benassi, or heck, even Giorgio Moroder before that, all belong to this same tradition, even though the music has turned into rave music.  As I've been exploring the worlds of hard trance, hardstyle, and other closely related subgenres of EDM, I've been shocked by how much material by northern Italians I've picked up; probably more than by any other region.  Sure, Germany is a hotspot of hard trance, the Netherlands one for hardstyle, and I've got a lot of material that builds on the acid tradition of Great Britain or the diaspora Anglo-phone traditions (apparently Australia is now the world's foremost hotspot for hard trance, specifically Melbourne)  I've got a surprising number of Swiss tracks.  But the northern Italians almost certainly top the numbers by sheer volume.  Not only are there tons of artists and groups, and many of them cross-pollinate and collaborate with each other, but they all seem to be just shocking prolific, turning out more vinyls in a year than I can imagine, during the heyday of their movement.

Which, let's be clear, is over now.  Hardtrance is still around, but much more dispersed.  Hardstyle seems to have peaked and faded.  I don't know what the hot genres for EDM are anymore, nor do I really care, I suppose.  Maybe there isn't such a thing as hot genres anymore.  This was always sufficiently underground that little indie labels were the thing; now localized self-released and sold as mp3s, or FLACs or wav files on the internet seems to maybe the the thing.  I dunno.

But at one point from the late 90s to about the late 00s or maybe a little longer, the sheer number of hard dance tracks coming out of northern Italy was truly immense.  It's really made me feel a sense of community that I didn't before with the northern Italians, and research more intensely their history and their ethnogenesis, and who they were, and look for connections.  There aren't really a lot; my ancestry is almost totally English and Scottish with just a touch (1/8) of Portuguese from a random guy who married into the family a little over a hundred years ago.  None of that connects me very closely to anything happening in Italy; at best, they're a slightly more distant cousin group to me than the Bavarians, and from a similar source, connected to me through the distant Anglo-Saxon connections to those same peoples from before they crossed the channel at the invitation of Vortigern.

Ah, well.  Regardless of the existence (or not, in this case) of close genetic ties, I still have to admit that our shared European Hajnal Line heritage is sufficient for me to feel a sense of kinship with them anyway, and the fact that they make really good music that I like certainly doesn't hurt.

As an aside; I've mentioned this before, but I'm amused to see how often they remix their own work, but credit it to one of their other aliases.  There's one song in particular, a cover song called "Kernkraft 400" done by the "band" Tweetwoof.  The single (well, the 2006 re-release anyway) has four versions on it, two of which were on the original 2003 release—remixes by Digimind, DJ Kubrik, Schwarzende and Skam.  However—all four of those remixers are actually aliases of the same team of two guys who make up Tweetwoof itself.  Arguably, those four names—along with, I dunno, Mental Miracle, Omega Nine and Tronik, are the most well-known of those aliases, so maybe they're just trying to market their brands as best they can, but I still find the whole affair kinda amusing.

Friday Art Attack, Angus McBride Edition

The Eastern European frontier of the Abbasid Empire.

Late Roman armies, falling to the Goths.  I think this is actually an illustration of the Battle of Adrianople.

More Late Roman or Post Roman scenery.

Romano-British during the Anglo-Saxon invasion after the Empire had officially retreated.

Avars being charged by the Franks.

Black Sea Scythians as known to the ancient Greeks.

Celtic mercenaries in Egypt.

Vikings shortly after Christianization and the ending of the Viking Age.

"Free Dacians."  It's a real shame, sometimes, that the Dacians and the Gauls in particular had their civilizations destroyed by the Romans.  As much as I think the Romans made a better foundation for subsequent Western civilization (and probably the Germans too, for that matter) I do particularly miss these two folks.

Edain being ambushed by Druedain in the forests of western Gondor or southern Eriador.  Keep in mind that McBride did some really great Lord of the Rings art, even though historical stuff was his bread and butter.

Eastern Swedish Vikings, including probably those who founded the state of Rus.

Carolingian warriors.  I can't find any reference to that "scola" heavy cavalryman other than the book from which this comes, but it's fair to say that it's a prototype of the later Medieval Knight.

A charge of Gauls against a Roman line.

Gandalf and the Witch-King at the gates of Gondor.

An early Migration era Germanic King in Italy; probably in a Roman building, which looks like it is in need of some repair.

A Ghost in the Marshes near Tharbad.

Valaris, the Gothic Champion who was slain by (and slew in turn) Artabazes, the only member of the Roman army who was willing to accept his challenge to single combat.  This was right before the Battle of Faventia, which Totila and the Goths won handily.

Kievan prince and his household.

Roman soldiers from the age of Justinian.

The founding of the Rus by Vikings.  The earlier picture I just posted above of Rus Vikings was from a book on Vikings, this one is from a book on Medieval Russia.  It's not clear to what degree the Vikings and the Slavs had assimilated together in the early Rus period, but this "Viking" prince does have a Slavic rather than Nordic name.  In fact, the degree to which the Vikings participated in the formation of the Rus' is controversial—the Russians and Ukrainians tend to prefer, obviously, a local Slavic origin rather than a foreign Varangian one.

Fairly early Gallic warriors, during the height of Continental Celtic power.  I actually have another picture (also by McBride) of Brennus wearing that same bird helmet while sacking Delphi.

Dogmatic Angels Green Spot and Red Spot

I had to listen to these two tracks back to back several times before I was sure that I could tell that they were in fact different from each other.  Same length, same structure; their waveforms in Audacity even look almost identical.  But they're not the same, although the differences between them are more subtle than obvious.

The third song in the "Spot" trilogy—"Yellow Spot" is more obviously different, though.

B&W

Just a quick note.  Just because Ansel Adams took some iconic black and white photos (in a time when color photos weren't very good, mostly, I'll point out, although certainly he stuck with black and white long after he could have migrated) doesn't mean that they're better, or more artistic, or anything else.  A big part of the reason Adams did black and white and continued to work with it was because of technological limitations of his time, and the solutions that he developed to deal with them, which led him to continue to prefer black and white.

When you post black and white pictures in this day and age of your hiking trips, you just look like a poser.  We all know that 1) you took those pictures in color, because you don't have a black and white film camera, 2) you turned it either black and white or sepia in Photoshop or some other comparable image manipulation software.  It's not a question of some artistic technique, it's a quick drop down menu, and 3) it looks better in color.

I seriously wish hikers would knock it off with the fake Ansel Adams black and white shots.  They look ridiculous by now.

Ansel Adams' famous shot of the Tetons and Snake River

A modern color shot from almost exactly the same spot—albeit admittedly with much less dramatic lighting in the sky.

Friday Art Attack

I haven't done a Friday Art Attack the last two Fridays, so I better not miss a third.

I'm not quite sure what his is, but I find it really evocative and creepy.  I like it.

An older Warhammer Vampire Counts army book cover.  I do sometimes wish that Warhammer wasn't so focused on armies, but it is, after all, Warhammer, and I don't think that that was really meant to just be evocative of the specific weapon.

Here's a Ken Kelly (I believe) fake Frazetta style cover art piece.  Nice work, Ken!

Some more Conan stuff, from the comics world.

Another great Michael Whelan book cover, based on a mediocre (if you're generous) work by Asimov.  I suppose Foundation is... important, in its way.  But it's not good.  Asimov, along with Campbell and a few others (L. Sprague de Camp and Michael Moorcock were purveyors of this travesty too) got caught up in the excitement of speculative fiction as a genre, and then made it nerdy, self-righteous and emasculated.  On purpose, even.  Even when they were writing stuff that has some merit, I still despise them and everything that they stood for.

On the other hand, here's some stuff from the real Golden Age of science fiction.  I don't even know what this is, but I already suspect that it's a better story than Foundation.

Wayne Reynolds is a modern day artist I quite like. Sadly, the material he's given to work with is often subpar.  Why in the world in a market who's consumers are overwhelmingly white males would the blatant tokenism and discrimination against white males in terms of their heroic "iconic characters" even be considered a good thing?

Oh, right, because we live in Clown World, and Paizo is made up of virtue-signaling traitors who hate their own people and their own customers.

I'm not 100% sure what's going on here, but these Fake Egyptian undead fighting these fake Orientalist heroes is kinda cool.

Another of the monstrously ugly and unlikeable iconic characters from Paizo in a work that would be excellent with a better subject.  I actually find the demon more charismatic, myself.

Adrian Smith's dark fantasy stuff is really cool.  This is what the Frankenstein monster should look like.

So there you go.  In DH5, this is the flesh golem.  Wham!

I'm not quite sure what's going on here either.  This is probably a little too much gratuitous exotica to make any sense.

One of the actually kind of interesting Paizo iconic characters, although it's essentially just "Zorro except in the Fake French Revolution country instead of Spanish colonial California."

Another great Wayne Reynolds Paizo piece, with the iconic villain of their second adventure path.

I think those little girl guards are kind of silly, though.

I'm also not quite sure what is happening here; maybe this is an illustration of Call of Cthulhu (the actual short story, not the game.)  Whatever; gratuitous Lovecraftiana is never unwelcome here.