Posted by benbreen 16 hours ago
For those that don't know about him:
- he was an ancient historian
- he made a lot of "wild claims" e.g. there was a tribe that made clothes out of human skin
- historians assumed these were myths or exaggerated
- recent research has shown that many of his wild claims were true (even the one above) [1]
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
1 - https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-scythians-us...
I've been re-reading Herodotus and his work is actually pretty good for its time. You just have to remember that he, just like a modern day travel blogger, both sees the world through the lens of an upper class Greek and also has to keep his audience engaged with cool trivia and clickbait.
> In 251 C.E., Roman Emperor Decius, his son, and most of his army were killed fighting Goths in what is today Romania, in one of the empire’s greatest defeats.
Envision the black Eyeliner
All this to say that I am envisioning quite easily.
> The findings challenge decades of scholarship that played down the importance of migration and emphasized the spread of language and culture between settled populations.“
> “What the genotyping is showing is what the ancient sources report, and what late–20th century historiography has been working very hard to deny,” says Yale University historian Noel Lenski, who was not involved in the work. “We have to … admit the sources knew more than we thought they did.”
If I'm reading that right they are implying academics were pushing the idea of cultural exchange being the most valuable thing, a vague menagerie of local and foreign cultures coming together, rather than a specific set of people arriving from a far off land to dominant an existing empire and influencing the entire region in the process.
> In the beginning, there was a big migration, but later they started mingling, and the transmission of Gothic was more of a cultural nature.
In this comment section it seems people really want it to be one or the other, evidence be damned.
I.e it wasn't fashionable, didn't make for good career advancement for anyone to look into it let alone say it.
>In this comment section it seems people really want it to be one or the other, evidence be damned.
I'm just here to remind everyone that the "professionals" are fallible and subject to industry circle jerks.
You rushed here to slander people working in the field without familiarizing yourself with the first things about it. Shame on you.
I am no expert, but here's Michael Kulikowski's argument quoted from the wiki page on the debate:
[Heather] is right to try to deduce governing apparatus from the actions that kings and chieftains were able to compel their followers to take. This approach, more than anything, goes some way toward justifying his assertion that a broad class of nonaristocratic "freemen" warriors must have existed in many of the barbarian cultures of the first half of the millennium. Yet to claim the point proved and build further hypotheses upon it is not legitimate; he comes perilously close to recreating the old, volkisch notion of an inherent “Germanic” belief in freedom. Throughout, in fact, Heather makes the tacit assumption that evidence from any “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group can be used to analyze any other “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group—in other words, that linguistic identity and socioinstitutional behaviors go inevitably together. [...] a great many historical comparanda would support a model that he ignores — that the Goths were formed from a large number of indigenes and a small number of migrants under the pressure of Roman imperialism, and in the shadow of the Empire.[31]
And more:
Kulikowski charges that old German nationalist and even Nazi influences continue to influence scholarship on the Goths up to the present day, particularly through the theories of Gustav Kossinna.[19] He considers much of what is written about Goths to be "Germanist fantasy" derived from this legacy.
This isn't exactly what I would describe as a debate "blessedly free from nationalist squabbles"
> old German nationalist and even Nazi influences
Notice how the key word there is "old". Scholars may respond to earlier schools of thought in the field, from a now long-vanished time when anyone actually was invested in it for nationalist reasons, but that doesn't mean anyone today is invested in it. For example, major work today on Gothic linguistics, one component in the Urheimat debate, happens in places like Leiden and UCLA where no one has any nationalist dog in the fight.
I personally wouldn't put the “shame” onto GP.
Historians hold out on claims made in historical sources -- especially when written centuries after the fact -- all the time, it is a standard scientific practice to seek external evidence.
Languages can spread by utility, rather than culture.
For example, "Low German" was a common trade tongue, and shows up in parts of the world, where Germans never set foot.
When I read about history of Europe/Old World in Roman and post Roman times, it's clear that large scale movements of whole groups of people is very common in the historical record.
I wonder why such views were ever resisted in prehistory, a time when such movements were simpler and their motivations more likely to arise?
The "pots aren't people" wave wouldn't be problematic per se (e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life), rather because it sought to be the dominant theory.
We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing - defeat of the Nazis, which made some ideas extremely dirty and other ideas very attractive.
This has an interesting consequence in that we do not know much about natural human intelligence today, which is coming back to bite us in the age of emerging artificial intelligence. The topic of human intelligence has been a political minefield for nearly a century now. It is probably safer and easier to study intelligence of octopuses and crows than that of humans. You're definitely freer from political repercussions there.
no we don't. intelligence isn't racial..
And how do we know that? Any very controversial stuff like this will have people on both sides doing all in their power to convince everyone to their point of view. The truth gets lost.
To discuss this objectively we have to first agree on some basics. First I think the concept of race is a bit outdated. People have phenotypes and these phenotypes have various features (one may be skin color).
Also where did the idea there exists one feature responsible for "intelligence" came from? It seems to be accepted apriori, but I think the truth is closer to humans (and animals and AI) having various types of intelligence. Social, emotional, linguistical, math like, spatial (ability to imagine shapes etc) and probably few more.
And those intelligence types may very well have a genetic component and be present in one phenotype in a different mix than another.
But saying it is likely vs having actual proof are two different things so my view is that we simply don't know.
How do you define racial groups? its something that constantly shifts. I have an encyclopedia for the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid" which is not how most people now think.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Principa...
Obviously some racial groups which are heavily socially constructed are not borne out by the data. There's no cluster for 'Latinos'. But in general I think there is quite a high correspondence with race as it is constructed in society and culture.
There are certainly some cases where the genetic data matches conventional thinking about race, but also many where they flatly contradict. It also suggests that saying something like "white people are genetically smarter on average than black people" is highly suspect. The group of people that we call "black" has a greater range of genetic profiles than the rest of the world put together, and the group we call "white" is kind of confused—to be genetically meaningful it would probably need to either include North Africans and Arabs or exclude Southern Europeans.
Looking at this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation#/media...
It looks as though there are two rough clusters, Africans and everyone else, with Europeans and Middle Easterners in the intersection. Pretty much reflecting geography.
Plus, none of these studies actually spend the money to do any genetic testing, they simply assign people to "white" or "black" race based almost always on skin color (which, since the gene for dark skin is dominant, is a very poor marker of actual genetic similarity - the great grandchild of a dark-skinned person with otherwise only white-skinned relatives can still be dark-skinned).
Edit: and I'm not even mentioning the obvious publication bias, as essentially only racists care about this race vs intelligence discussion, at least enough to invest in creating studies about it. Plus the fact that IQ itself is actually a very problematic measure, when applied beyond its actual medical use (quantifying mental disability).
What if some of the observed racial differences were caused by a lack of vitimin D, due to darker skin photosynthesising less of it? Vitamin D is essential for brain development. Black people in northern climates get less of it than evolution intended. This lack of vitamin D might be causing reduced brain development in black populations. If that is true, we could fix the prison crisis and racial IQ differences with a pill!
Sadly we don’t know because you can’t do the research to test the hypothesis.
If we block all research into a problem then we can’t solve it.
If you actually care about fixing a problem then we should bring all available tools to fix and solve it.
IQ tests have been revised several times to address things like that, like that they "unfairly" penalize dyslexia, or that they had lots of questions which were easier for people of specific social backgrounds. Every time they were, they naturally became less "predictive", since both dyslexia and not belonging to the California white upper middle class give you pretty obvious disadvantages in life outcomes.
So don't waste time on IQ, and don't waste time on other academic culture war BS either.
Tell me then, if someone scored low on a text-based IQ test and that's all you know, how do you tell if it was caused by dyslexia or concussion? I guess you break out that "battery of other tools"? What does IQ tests give you that those other tools don't give better?
Oh, I know one. An excuse to write someone off as simply stupid. An excuse to _stop looking_ for the things which might have helped them. Which is what it was historically used for.
The research to ban lead in fuel relied on measuring IQ and measuring lead exposure, then showing a correlation between the two.
At the population level IQ is a very useful tool.
We don't have a good model of what intelligence is. But since IQ studies are fairly common, there's a lot of data collected that uses IQ, and since it IQ looks vaguely like "intelligence," a lot of researchers who are motivated to find reasons to declare particular people intelligent or unintelligent are more than happy to use that data to support their claims.
Answer this question:
> If you can’t study IQ how do you demonstrate that lead poisoning causes reduced intelligence?
It should be clearly evident that trying to use IQ to establish that "<insert ethnic group here> are stupid" is bad science. It's the same sort of science to establish that "<insert environmental factor here> causes stupidity," so we also need to reject it even if the environmental factor is clearly something problematic. The problem isn't the conclusion, it's the methodology.
It’s a good thing that measuring IQ enabled us to discover that trace amounts of lead in the environment causes reduced intelligence. That was a key piece of data for banning lead in fuel. The loss of IQ points happens to all kids living in cities, rich and poor. Rich powerful people didn’t want their kids made stupid by lead in the air.
I think that removing lead from paint and fuel has greatly improved the lives of billions of people.
> The loss of IQ points happens to all kids living in cities
No, it didn't. The reduced test scores happened _on average_.
I won't rule out that what you said is correct, in that it may well be the fear that "my child may lose 1-5 IQ points!" helped get lead banned, but if so, that's an indictment of society.
Correlation measures whether Y=mX+c holds with small error. I sometimes think that many people unknowingly assume that all dependencies are somehow straight-line ones. This is distinct however from "linear approximations" in physics, which can at least be justified sometimes.
I also suspect that correlations of 0.5 or lower are often just statistical noise.
Fundamentally my argument is maybe science can solve a problem, let’s at least try.
Having said that, even if the academic outcomes of people with darker skin color were worse (no idea if that is true, or in which country) just knowing that is no proof. It may as well be cultural or even income based (pregnant mothers eating worse quality food for example, or same thing with young children).
Is the question even answerable? What kind of intelligence do we measure with "academic outcomes"? How do we adjust for income and quality of life as a child, things like having both parents, or grandparents? It's an absolute minefield of possible manipulation. Same data can probably be spun to "proove" any hypothesis you have.
Then imagine writing a proposal for such research. What benefits can you predict? If you find there is absolutely no correlation between skin color and academic outcomes after adjusting for all external factors will it convince people that are racist as part of their identity? I doubt it.
Lets say you do prove there is some correlation. What the result of that would be? Open discrimination and vindication of racist views. But even if the principle was true the average doesn't apply to individuals so you can't apply it to any particular person.
Intelligence is not just a single thing. We can assign a number by an intelligence test, of course, but there are lots of ways to look at it that are more nuanced. Generally, you're not going to say someone is better than everything you're going to find that someone is better at some things. And so can we direct people to the things you're better at for the better of everyone? Division of labor is a good thing.
But contrast, assuming that we find it's not true, then we can ask, well, why are we finding these differences in the data? if it's not genetic and perhaps we can find what it really is and then improve those groups that are currently disadvantaged.
The larger point is you have to know before you can make a useful adjustment.
This is especially clearly just a racist concept once you realize that none of the studies of IQ vs race actually do any genetic testing, they only rely on phenotype. Which is absurd given the fact that the child of a black-skinned person born in sub-Saharan Africa and a white-skinned person born in a village in Ireland is extremely likely to be black-skinned, but is genetically just as much part of both populations. It's only the history of racism that assigns this child as black more so than white.
And I would say that the racist claim is that there is observable correlation and that genetic explanations are about as probable as other explanations. But I suppose many non-genetic explanations (eg cultural differences) would also be counted as racism, since in these kinds of discussions race and culture are often jumbled together.
The implication that if one group was shown to have a measurably lower intellect they are less “human” somehow is really worrying.
The same way as South-Koreans are by now taller than North-Koreans (because of material reasons) we could posit that "intelligence", i.e. the "workings" of our brain, can be distributed in a non-uniform manner across humankind, depending on the "local" material conditions.
And this is not about "race", because according to those that do believe in the "race" stuff both North-Koreans and South-Koreans are part of the same "race", it is about those material conditions that I've mentioned and which, in the end, by necessity end up modifying things in our (very material) brains, and hence in our "intelligence". Believing otherwise, meaning believing that are our brains are not affected by the material conditions under which we live our day-to-day lives, would be preposterous.
Or it could be discrimination. There are studies that show that black and white mixed races children did not score any higher than children with two black parents, while white people score higher than black people on average, which may point to some discrimination impacting IQ.
I don't find it that tricky, intelligence does come from the brain.
> That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place
Both one's brain and one's "intelligence" belong to the same person, like, physically and materially, which is not true when it comes to your bicycle example. More to the point, I find the comparison itself kind of self-describing, it's like deciding to "outsource" intelligence to some other external, non-ethereal entity (like a bicicle that is physically separate from a human being) in order to avoid those hard questions the OP was alluding to (hard questions that oftentimes also involve the political side of things).
The thing is that no matter how fancy your bicycle, I can still ride my shitty bicycle to a university, and you can ride your lubricated carbon fiber bicycle into a ditch, and then you're not so smart. If what you call intelligence is how fast your bicycle typically goes into the ditch, then sure, it can be measured on a scale and you have more of it.
There are other notions about the transfer of ideas: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/06/memory-transfer
Wait, cannibal worms that eat memories? My my.
(Rocks don't have ideas.)
It takes an enormous amount of engineering work to make an intelligent rock, and not all intelligent rocks are equally intelligent. This is very obvious.
* except in that being beaten around the head can make a person stupid.
Those who immigrate to America are not smarter. They just had the where with all to pay for immigration. Even those who go on scholarship have to prove they have atleast land/housing back in India to even get a chance to immigrate.
Talk about sampling bias lol.
The impact of it's culture and behavioral like inbreeding being acceptable probably plays a bigger role though, but denying genetic impact is just putting your head in the sand because you cannot face reality not being equal. Which it ain't. It's also almost certainly a range, with most of the curves overlapping. If studied, I'd expect there to be a measurable impact in the rates of high intelligence individuals with the median intelligence being pretty close across all groups, but obliviously just my personal experience from interacting with people.
Humans are far more genetically homogenous than many animal species due to a population collapse at one point in our developmental history.
Cultural practices can have a big effect on intellectual development, so disentangling any possible genetic factors from cultural ones can be very difficult, but there is very little evidence for genetic factors related to race also being related to intelligence at the population level. Obviously certain genetic disorders can have a significant effect.
I don't feel like being racist either way.
We know people often kill people. That doesn't even need explanation.
My argument is that it is thousands of years and dozens of mixed generations.
Why do you decide to participate in a thousand-years-long campaign to kill the neighbor who is also your second cousin?
There is no reason they couldn't have turned the other way and attacked their other second cousin.
My best guess is religion but it could also have also been a different kind of fanatic ideology.
Sure it took many generations but it's hard to imagine that the violence wasn't culturally and racially motivated. Based on genetic evidence it's speculated that that there were more than 10 male migrants to every female coming from the steppe.
> The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.
I'm not sure what that means? Their descendants clearly did reach Iberia and Britain.
If you wanna tell the romans to GFY you're gonna have to adopt a lot of the structures that make them competitive in order to resist them. There's a fairly large "you wrestle the pig you get shit on you" factor going on.
While it is true that learning from Rome was very useful for its later challengers, this usually was not the primary motivation for adoption of Roman culture, especially before ~ 400 AD. It was more about the higher standard of living plus legal stability, as long as Rome could enforce its Pax.
How will you prevent that harm from recurring? Ignoring it hasn't worked, and doesn't distinguish the program you propose from a long line of racist programs and propaganda - that is, nobody can tell whether it's sincere or just another cover story.
But people can tell that it's not responsible, which is a clue about the thought behind it. We can't wash our hands of the consequences of our actions. If you don't prevent the next racist catastrophe, who will? Will you just do it and leave the consequences for others to clean up (and suffer from)?
Assuming you also don't want these horrible outcomes, it doesn't make sense to dismiss the risk. The people who advocate dismissing it are the ones who don't care about or seek those outcomes and are trying to remove obstacles.
From what I understand, the prevailing academic belief was based on cases where "elite replacement" was what did happen. For example, the Norman conquest of England contributed massively to modern English (all those French load words), and affected the culture in a lot of ways. But for the most part, the actual population movements were smaller. And DNA evidence suggested that several other big cultural and linguistic shifts worked the same way. Mostly the ordinary folk kept doing their thing, while the ruling class suffered upheaval.
The linked article is interesting because it confirms an actual population displacement. Which breaks the recent pattern of studies! But even here later stages were often more cultural shifts than population ones.
We don't know any of this until someone does the DNA studies.
To me this reads like Lenski (not affiliated with the authors!) trying a little too hard to make it into an academic culture war issue.
- are the claims it's making about the discovery right, or exaggerated?
- are the claims it's making about what people previously believed right, or exaggerated?
When I'm reading about areas that I happen to know something about, I find that there's a smallish tendency to exaggerate the first and a large one to exaggerate the second.
I think it's likely that's true in other areas. I get the impression it's particularly common for archaeological discoveries for some reason.
Now that the Wielbark culture simply is the Goths, that would be a sightly bolder assertion - and one which is probably good they're not making since it would probably be oversimplifying things.
Because Swedish history before 1000AD is very murky.
So the 5th and 6th centuries are still very much guesswork when it comes to scandinavian history.
I just always assumed that the legend of Rome was powerful enough for swedes to claim the Goths. But it makes sense that it's based on fact.
During its existence, Kievan Rus was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus" or the "Rus land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus being derived from the ethnonym Роусь. ... The first known use of the term Kievan Rus comes from the 1582 chronicle by Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski, where it was used to describe the region of Rus state immediately adjacent to Kyiv.
In 1837 it was adopted by Kyiv University rector Mykhailo Maksymovych in relation to the Principality of Kiev; known for his Ukrainophile political orientation, Maksymovych later spread that definition to the whole realm, seeing Kyiv as the original point where Rus statehood emerged, establishing the base for the future Russian Empire.
Ukranian picture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:%D0%...
Croatian picture - https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolazak_Hrvata#/media/Datoteka...
Ivar the Boneless, Varangians. When I was growing up in Ukraine, this was never ever mentioned in any literature, school, college. That the names like Oleg or Igor were not native threw a twist too, but they are very common names over there in UA/RU, on par with Ivan and Dmitry.
If they are bandido, casco, tregua they are identical to the Italian bandito, casco, tregua. The only difference is a d/t. Actually in Italy a cyclist and a worker wear a casco, but a soldier wears an elmetto.
I googled the etymology of casco and it comes from Latin but it came to Italy from Spain a few centuries ago. So I wonder what other word for helmet they use in Spain, that originated in the Goth language.
There are plenty of other warlike terms in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_terms_derive... such as gaita (bagpipes).
>The "ez" signifies "son of". The name Rodrigo is the Spanish form of the German name Roderich, meaning "rich in fame", from the Gothic elements "hrod" (fame or glory) and "ric" (rich). It was the name of Roderic, the last Visigothic King before the Muslim conquest, and the subject of many legends. The surname Rodríguez could have originated in the 9th century when patronymic names originated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodr%C3%ADguez_(surname)
The Visigoths directly ruled in Iberia so that's an example of the "elite influence" spreading culture and language.
DNA from unearthed car sized scales proving a giant snake carved the rivers and shape of the land would be something ...
The real wild Gothic origin story is that the island of Gotland got overpopulated and they decided by lottery which 1/3 of them should leave.
What seems more accurate is that there were people near the Vistula River around year 1 who had cultural, linguistic, trade and - yes - genetic connection to people on the other side of the Baltic sea, and in the age of migration those people got moving, got into Arian Christianity and called themselves Goths. They did comparatively well in a time when most of Europe didn't, so they have plenty of descendants, many of them carrying ancestry we can trace back to people who lived in Scandinavia before year 1.
E.g., the North Island of New Zealand is called "Te Ika A Māui" in Māori, that is "the fish of Māui", and if you look at it from above, it definitely resembles a stingray.
What blows my mind is how Māori knew that before cartography or aerial mapping or satellites.
I understand how they likely did, Polynesians didn't spread across the Pacific by being clueless about geography and coastlines.
But still, a pre-literate society that was able to say "huh, this island half the size of the UK looks like a giant stingray" is pretty bloody cool.
The summary from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Island is:
> According to Māori mythology, the North and South Islands of New Zealand arose through the actions of the demigod Māui. Māui and his brothers were fishing from their canoe (the South Island) when he caught a great fish and pulled it right up from the sea. While he was not looking, his brothers fought over the fish and chopped it up. This great fish became the North Island, and thus a Māori name for the North Island is Te Ika-a-Māui ("The Fish of Māui").
Does your perception of the stingray match the head location in local use?
> Names of certain tribes like Muaūpoko (mua upoko "front of the head") and Muriwhenua (muri whenua, "backland")
Muaūpoko is in the south of Te Ika A Māui.
* A foreigner, one whose language and customs differ from the speaker's.
* One not a Greek.
* One living outside the pale of the Roman empire and its civilization, applied especially to the northern nations that overthrew them.
* One outside the pale of Christian civilization.
* (With the Italians of the Renascence) One of a nation outside of Italy.
* A rude, wild, uncivilized person.
* (in mid 1800s) Applied by the Chinese contemptuously to foreigners.
* An uncultured person, or one who has no sympathy with literary culture.
* A native of Barbary.
Which one (or three) apply here can be left as an exercise for the reader.
