I think that there is often a desire to downplay the ancients as liars and/or fools where their claims conflict with modern political sensitivities (even Thucydides just a few decades after Herodotus called him a tall tale teller).
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.
Why did people doubt this? It doesn’t sound so ridiculous that a Germanic-speaking people would come from Scandinavia, which has a island called Gothland, a province East Gothland and West Gothland, a city called Gothenburg and people called Geats (probably related to Goths).
> 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.
If I understand the article correctly, there is DNA evidence of mass migration from Scandinavia to Northern Poland, but going further south, the evidence points to migration of a smaller elite rather than mass migration.
> 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.
>If I understand the article correctly, there is DNA evidence of mass migration from Scandinavia to Northern Poland, but going further south, the evidence points to migration of a smaller elite rather than mass migration.
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.
Sadly very par for the course. You wont get very far if you challenge the consensus nor get funding. I know of this true in at least a major area of neuroscience reliable 2ndhand.
Archaeogenetics is a new field in archaeology and linguistics, it only started to really make an impact in the last 15 years. No one was "looking into it let alone saying it" before that simply because DNA from dated archaeological sites hadn't yet been extracted, sequenced, and made available to researchers.
You rushed here to slander people working in the field without familiarizing yourself with the first things about it. Shame on you.
I suspect the academic community had a bias towards nationalistic interpretation of history. We see this both from Russian and Polish/Ukrainians, whose history is totally interlinked, making it plausible for both sides to make claims favoring what their national identity would prefer, rather than the truth.
Again, why "suspect" something about a field of scholarship? You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others. The Goths left no descendants identifying as such, their entire branch of the Germanic language family went extinct, and no scholar working today is emotionally invested in them for nationalist reasons, nor would they resist particular interpretations because anyone else was.
> You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others.
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"
Your first paragraph is a bog-standard caveat in the historical study of particular peoples, and you are interpreting it wrongly to see it as a sign of nationalist squabbles among anyone living today. As for the second:
> 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 mean, the academic community deliberately went against historical sources without much evidence-based arguments to do so. Turns out that denying DNA data is not doable, and now they have to do a 180.
Again, anyone actually familiar with Gothic studies (I trained in the field and remain employed in a closely related one) would know that people didn't outright "go against Jordanes", but rather the Gothic Urheimat was always discussed as a matter of controversy, with Jordanes' claims one version but external evidence lacking. Now there is some external evidence.
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.
And for having worked in a similarly behaving field, there is a big difference between “yeah we're not sure yet” and “no the ancients are most certainly wrong because our Modern Thinking is necessarily better (wink wink)”.
It was the post-WW2 hangover of "pots aren't people" (reaction to Kossinna and other racist archeologists favored by the Nazis). There was a lot of resistance from archeologists and anthropologists to ancient DNA findings in the 2010s vindicating mass migration but they ultimately had to fold (and admit that the historical linguists were right all along). Now we have a more balanced perspective and can see that language and material culture can be transmitted via either cultural diffusion or mass migration, and we have to look at the actual evidence in each case to identify the transmission mechanism. An interesting example of how both transmission mechanisms can be involved in one cultural-linguistic phenomenon is the Bell Beaker culture (associated with the spread of an Indo-European language family possibly ancestral to Italo-Celtic), which spread east from Iberia to Central Europe via cultural transmission, and then back west to the Atlantic via mass migration (reaching all the way to Britain, where they appropriated Stonehenge from its Neolithic builders, who went virtually extinct within a century).
Do you know of any good books or sources about this viewpoint?
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.
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.
Are they consistent across time and cultures? Are they corrected for differences in health, education, culture, wealth, etc? How big are racial differences compared to differences between people from different social classes?
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.
Do those groups relate closely to what people generally mean by race? Race as defined in which culture? I know from personal experience that its not the same definitions across cultures. How big are those differences compared to differences within racial groups?
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.
So on that graph, the distance between East and West Africans is about as great as the distance between Indians and Europeans. Somalis are closer to East Asians than they are to Southern African Khoisan people. Bedouin Arabs and Southern Europeans are closer to each other than either are to North Africans or Northern Europeans.
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.
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.
There is more genetic diversity among Africans than among all of the non-African groups. And yet I haven't seen a racial typology that didn't lump all of the Africans into one race, very often while they're trying to declare differences between people in the same European cluster.
Based almost entirely on racist studies, including some famous ones that were comparing white and black school children in apartheid South Africa. I wonder if there may have been some confounding variables there, but surely this is just my bias.
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).
We care about racial differences in outcomes that are correlated to IQ, such as employment and imprisonment.
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.
It's a good tool if you want to rank people, it's a bad tool if you want to help people. IQ tests couldn't (and can't) even detect dyslexia, a specific disability which you can get help with, which was known even in Terman's time. IQ tests by design throw out all information which could complicate ranking people. If your goal is to help, why would you measure people with a tool which can't tell the difference between dyslexia and concussion?
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.
IQ is a very bad tool for measuring populations. That's because IQ is definitionally designed to force a population to adhere a particular metric: a bell curve distribution, with the median at 100 and the standard deviation of 10. Whatever the thing you're measuring is--and there's good reason to think it's not "intelligence"--you're crunching and distorting that measurement to get the number at the end of it to force the population to adhere to a standard distribution.
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.
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.
I don’t see how your reply relates to my comment. At no point do I say that any correlations are linear, nor does my argument depend on linear correlations.
Fundamentally my argument is maybe science can solve a problem, let’s at least try.
It causes backlash because there are huge fields of modern academia built around the implicit assumption that everyone has the same IQ and hence the worse outcomes encountered by black and brown people are due to a big societal conspiracy against them, when in reality their outcomes are almost identical to white people who score the same on IQ tests as those groups do.
It is true any discussion of the subject marks you as a racist so how can we have an honest conversation in such environment? Just look at your own down votes?
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.
In the ideal world, assuming this is true, we could then ask for the question of, well, what can we do about these people with different intelligence levels?
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.
What plausible mechanism is there to even approach the idea that skin color influences intelligence? Why not study the effects on intelligence of eye color, or blood type?
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.
We know that people with red hair tend to metabolize anesthesia differently. It is not completely implausible that there is also a correlation between looks and other traits, although it seems almost impossible to me to untangle cultural, environmental and genetic effects.
Of course, any two traits can be correlated. But unless there is an obvious causal mechanism ("whiter skinned people get sun burns more easily", "darker skinned people tend to have vitamin D deficiencies at higher latitudes"), there's no reason to assume it and start looking for it to prove or disprove. It's a priori just as likely that there is a genetic link between toe shape and intelligence as skin color and intelligence. Yet no one is doing the science of measuring toe length correlation to intelligence, just skin color ("race").
As far as I know phrenology measured all kinds of things and claimed correlations. But they used highly dubious data (even for their time) and the field is now too unpopular to try (something similar) again with better methodology.
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 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.
I don't think many people dispute the fact that the environment plays a role in intelligence.
Not even many people dispute that there is some heritability to intelligence.
What is in dispute is whether that heritability means that some races are on average genetically more intelligent than others (and another problem is how to define intelligence).
How do you define races? As I said in another comment definitions shift and they are different in different countries. I have an encyclopedia from the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid". Some East Africans were also defined as "Caucasoid" historically.If we define races on the basis of genetic similarity then almost everyone whose ancestry is from Eurasia is the same "race", but people whose ancestry is African belong to multiple races.
If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.
That could also be explained by cultural differences, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming.
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.
There are significant cultural and economic differences between those communities. These will be similar between Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese and Indians are sufficiently recent immigrants for their culture to still have a lot in common (they speak the same language, follow the same religions, have inherited attitudes) with the places their ancestors came from.
Right, but the equation of workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit. That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place.
> workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit
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).
Now I want to say that your ideas don't come from your brain. But of course they do, as a result of interaction with other people's ideas, some of which were written down. (Don't worry, I'm not a dualist.)
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.
If you think any brain can be just as intelligent no matter how it works then why not extend that to things that aren't brains? If everyone's brain is equally good then isn't a rock just as good as well?
A lot of HN is currently about rocks that we've made very smart, in case you haven't noticed. I don't want archeology polluted by generic academic culture war stuff, so can we please leave "intelligence" out of it?
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.
If genetics had no impact whatsoever then great apes would have the same intelligence potential as humans, as human races are more diverse then you give them credit for.
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.
Race is a combination of genetic, and cultural factors such as nutrition, early childhood care practices, social values, etc.
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.
Every study that's been done shows a significant difference in mean IQ across races. Suggesting otherwise is anti-science, putting ideology over reality. That doesn't mean everyone of any particular race is stupid; Indians in America for instance on average have higher IQS than white Americans, in spite of the average IQ of India being significantly lower, because only the smarter Indians manage to immigrate to America.
Most studies of Indians done in famous IQ tests were of those Indians who lived in villages and suffered from diseases. Its been debunked so many times.
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.
I remember looking up the source of the IQ data from Nepal a few years ago. It was a taken from an IQ survey of a school for mentally disabled children..
To be honest, I'm more interested in what ideology/religion lead to the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent in a timespan of over thousands of years to almost utter replacement despite of the fact that, in the end, the "invaders" were almost identical to the "invaded", than I am in elucidating whether Llama 3 being less performant than Gemma 4 in benchmarks is due to the training corpus or the architecture.
Regardless of how you feel about being racist, some people will accuse you of being uncomfortably close to a Nazi for talking about the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent, because 19th and early 20th century anthropologists that the Nazis liked and amplified the ideas of really did think that the Yamnaya Y line took over a continent, they just called them "Aryans" instead of "the Yamnaya Y line".
The immigrants from the steppes and their descendants. It's hard to interpret the fact that the majority and often 90% or more pre Indo European male lineages were replaced in Western and Northern Europe in any other way.
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.
>(e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life),
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.
The Nazis did do a lot of damage - far more than any benefits from the science would balance - and the 'science' contributed to it. The Nazis and many other racists have long argued that they are just being objective and the other side is biased.
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)?
"Hitler was a vegetarian. You aren't like Hitler, are you?" is a fair reason to run a garbage-collection pass over your beliefs if you're vegetarian, checking your reasons for it -- but invalid argument against claims that vegetarian diets are healthy. It sounds like mid-century historians collectively made the latter mistake.
And what's the difference exactly? We knew that e.g. the Visigoths had Scandinavian ancestry, but we also know that by then they had lots of other ancestry, too.
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.
When you're reading a popular-science story about a new discovery, there are two things to be careful about:
- 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.
Same here. This study is mostly kicking in open doors - or at least the people quoted not affiliated with the study for some reason, are kicking in open doors. I got into this as a tangent from genealogy, and that the Goths were for a good part actually from Scandinavia is not a particularly bold assertion.
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.
Science is not just believing what sounds plausible. It is about gathering evidence. Having historical, archeological and DNA evidence is a lot stronger that just historical evidence alone.
The article says why. The fall of the Roman empire being increasingly attributed to the migration of foreigners is both topical and problematic to certain ideologies
Yeah but I'm a Swede and even I thought those regions were named long after Rome, in tribute to Roman history. Claiming the origins of the infamous Goths just because of their accomplishments in the south.
Because Swedish history before 1000AD is very murky.
Never read it, but also, wasn't it written like hundreds of years after? I thought the oldest written stories we had were Snorres and the Icelandic sagas.
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.
Wiki has a pretty interesting history on that [1]:
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.
Vikings took slavs as slaves. In Swedish "slav" means "slave". Vikings was rowers from Roslagen. In Finland they use the name Ruotsi for Sweden and Venäjä for Russia.
I rewatched the Vikings recently (highly recommended, perhaps not historically accurate, but no horned helmets). It was a bit ... don't know, eye opening or strange or hard to believe to learn that the Vikings played a crucial role in that part of the continent and Constantinople. I know that the term "Viking" is not an ethnic identification, more like a profession/warrior, but I don't have another word in my vocabulary.
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.
Not contributing anything intellectually, but this article is a lot of fun to read when one mentally envisions the modern style, looks and meaning of the word Goths.
> 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.
> the Spanish for “bandit,” “helmet,” and “truce.”
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.
I always found this fact about the common Spanish surname Rodríguez to be interesting:
>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.
We have yelmo and almete, but looking up both of them, they seem to be considered later medieval loans.
Espuela (spur), dardo (dart) and a few other warlike items are often mentioned. And of course guerra (war) itself.
Swedish Gotlander's have been referring to this mythic origin story for centuries. I believe Gustavus Adophus referenced this history to justify blatant Swedish militarism in the 17th century.
Actually, the most ancient recorded instance of the Goth language is a Bible that was written in what is now Bulgaria around 350: The so-called Bible of Wulfila. So, there is nothing new under the sun about the presence of Goths in the area, bringing their language and culture around.
Your "Well acktually..." is misplaced, because no one anywhere in the article ever cast doubt on that, but rather the debate was about the Gothic Urheimat and the degree of gene spread versus cultural diffusion.
I'm not so sure this study proves anything new, too. We always knew some Goths came from Scandinavia, that they mixed extensively with less mobile people in the regions they passed through during the age of migration, and that Gothic identity was (at least eventually) more tied to Arianism than to ancestry, so that when they became Catholic they stopped identifying as Gothic.
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.
If you believe the origin story from over 1000 years later (by a guy who had read Jordanes' story written merely 500 years later), sure.
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.
I love a myth that kinda makes sense with a bit of poetic licence.
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.
> 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")
Anyone who talks like a barbarian. In some tales the ancient Greeks thought that anyone who lived outside their city states sounded like bleating sheep. True or not, the word did mean someone who talks like a foreigner.
Then why did those people move? Was it because of climate change?
First of all, it seems less like a movement of a warrior group and more like a group migration that included women and children—so why on earth did they have to move that way? I’m curious: is there research on this?
The Huns drove them out of their lands. The Goths needed to find better lands to support their population. The Roman Empire was weak. The Romans had better land. The Romans couldn't defend their land against the Goths and the Goths couldn't defend their lands against the Huns.
As for the climate change argument this movement of people groups is not uncommon. Rome up until the arrival of the Goths had been dealing with "barbarian" incursions for a thousand years.
Rome invade Gaul, Germany, and Britannia which people seem to omit. There is no argument that climate change forced them too. They did it because they could. The "barbarian" tribes invaded because they could. Both sides in this conflict are human and have human motivations.
The Huns arrived centuries after the Gothic expansion, which reached as far as the Volga river. I assumed the OP's question is (like the linked article) about that expansion from Scandinavia south and east, not the later one west into the Roman Empire.
I was wondering the same things : I often heard that the relative civilizational collapse that happened in europe during the middle ages was correlated with lower overall temperatures, e.g. what you see here [1] or there [2]. In the second one, the most recent projections (in red), show that there were a lot of very cold years (down to -0.6 degrees relative to normal) during those times.
Later on, starting in the 1200s, there was the Little ice age, where temperatures fell to -0.9 relative to normal (I don't know how they defined normal). The peak, when almost all years were at -0.6 or below on that scale, caused the "General Crisis of the seventeenth century" where people from the Goth/scandinavian regions also had huge famines [3].
So my guess would be that there were several very cold years in a row, which caused famines, and the populations understood that their best survival chance was to migrate south, where they had to compete with the roman empire for land.
For many decades, climate events have been viewed as one driver of cultural events during the Age of Migrations: somewhere on the Asian steppe, decline in quality pasturage successively causes one people to pressure another people to their west, and eventually the avalanche rolls into Europe.
It has saddened me to see this viewpoint associated in the American cultural wars with one party's "enemy camp", where discussion of climate as a problem is automatically associated with all kinds of unrelated policy positions. People are unaware this historical explanation was posited by hoary old (and largely long-dead) twentieth-century men who had no dog in the contemporary political divide.
I was visiting the northern city of Umeå in Sweden, in the middle of the winter. It's a bit dark, and in a good year you get a mantle of snow that reaches waist-high, and that was a good year. So I'm sitting in this super-cozy fika room with nice warm lighting having some coffee. Out of the blue, this sweet middle aged lady who had been born there a good half a century before and who loves skiing, says: "I can't bear the darkness any longer. I'm going to Spain this year."
This is often said (also about the Viking age) and it seems such an incomplete explanation to me. Normally if more people are born than the land can feed, then vulnerable people (eg babies and kids and elderly) die at higher rates until the balance is restored. Why would Scandinavia be different?
This reminds me of Herodotus [0].
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 think that there is often a desire to downplay the ancients as liars and/or fools where their claims conflict with modern political sensitivities (even Thucydides just a few decades after Herodotus called him a tall tale teller).
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.
Why did people doubt this? It doesn’t sound so ridiculous that a Germanic-speaking people would come from Scandinavia, which has a island called Gothland, a province East Gothland and West Gothland, a city called Gothenburg and people called Geats (probably related to Goths).
The article explains
> 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.
If I understand the article correctly, there is DNA evidence of mass migration from Scandinavia to Northern Poland, but going further south, the evidence points to migration of a smaller elite rather than mass migration.
> 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.
“mingling”
>If I understand the article correctly, there is DNA evidence of mass migration from Scandinavia to Northern Poland, but going further south, the evidence points to migration of a smaller elite rather than mass migration.
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.
Sadly very par for the course. You wont get very far if you challenge the consensus nor get funding. I know of this true in at least a major area of neuroscience reliable 2ndhand.
Archaeogenetics is a new field in archaeology and linguistics, it only started to really make an impact in the last 15 years. No one was "looking into it let alone saying it" before that simply because DNA from dated archaeological sites hadn't yet been extracted, sequenced, and made available to researchers.
You rushed here to slander people working in the field without familiarizing yourself with the first things about it. Shame on you.
I suspect the academic community had a bias towards nationalistic interpretation of history. We see this both from Russian and Polish/Ukrainians, whose history is totally interlinked, making it plausible for both sides to make claims favoring what their national identity would prefer, rather than the truth.
Again, why "suspect" something about a field of scholarship? You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others. The Goths left no descendants identifying as such, their entire branch of the Germanic language family went extinct, and no scholar working today is emotionally invested in them for nationalist reasons, nor would they resist particular interpretations because anyone else was.
> You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others.
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"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Goths
Your first paragraph is a bog-standard caveat in the historical study of particular peoples, and you are interpreting it wrongly to see it as a sign of nationalist squabbles among anyone living today. As for the second:
> 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 mean, the academic community deliberately went against historical sources without much evidence-based arguments to do so. Turns out that denying DNA data is not doable, and now they have to do a 180.
I personally wouldn't put the “shame” onto GP.
Again, anyone actually familiar with Gothic studies (I trained in the field and remain employed in a closely related one) would know that people didn't outright "go against Jordanes", but rather the Gothic Urheimat was always discussed as a matter of controversy, with Jordanes' claims one version but external evidence lacking. Now there is some external evidence.
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.
And for having worked in a similarly behaving field, there is a big difference between “yeah we're not sure yet” and “no the ancients are most certainly wrong because our Modern Thinking is necessarily better (wink wink)”.
And within the specific field of the linked article, I never heard the latter about the issues discussed in the linked article.
It was the post-WW2 hangover of "pots aren't people" (reaction to Kossinna and other racist archeologists favored by the Nazis). There was a lot of resistance from archeologists and anthropologists to ancient DNA findings in the 2010s vindicating mass migration but they ultimately had to fold (and admit that the historical linguists were right all along). Now we have a more balanced perspective and can see that language and material culture can be transmitted via either cultural diffusion or mass migration, and we have to look at the actual evidence in each case to identify the transmission mechanism. An interesting example of how both transmission mechanisms can be involved in one cultural-linguistic phenomenon is the Bell Beaker culture (associated with the spread of an Indo-European language family possibly ancestral to Italo-Celtic), which spread east from Iberia to Central Europe via cultural transmission, and then back west to the Atlantic via mass migration (reaching all the way to Britain, where they appropriated Stonehenge from its Neolithic builders, who went virtually extinct within a century).
Language etymology is a fascinating study. This is very far from my own expertise, but I have family that have made it more of a vocation.
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.
Do you know of any good books or sources about this viewpoint?
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?
Politicization of science is never good.
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.
> We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing
no we don't. intelligence isn't racial..
>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.
IQ differences between the racial groups is one of the most, if not the most, replicated findings in psychology.
Are they consistent across time and cultures? Are they corrected for differences in health, education, culture, wealth, etc? How big are racial differences compared to differences between people from different social classes?
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.
You can do a dimensionality reduction on genetic variants and certain recognisable groups fall pretty clearly out of the data.
Do those groups relate closely to what people generally mean by race? Race as defined in which culture? I know from personal experience that its not the same definitions across cultures. How big are those differences compared to differences within racial groups?
Take a look yourself.
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.
So on that graph, the distance between East and West Africans is about as great as the distance between Indians and Europeans. Somalis are closer to East Asians than they are to Southern African Khoisan people. Bedouin Arabs and Southern Europeans are closer to each other than either are to North Africans or Northern Europeans.
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.
Where are South and SE Asians on that?
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.
There is more genetic diversity among Africans than among all of the non-African groups. And yet I haven't seen a racial typology that didn't lump all of the Africans into one race, very often while they're trying to declare differences between people in the same European cluster.
Of course it is, creating that difference was the basis for IQ testing in the first place.
Based almost entirely on racist studies, including some famous ones that were comparing white and black school children in apartheid South Africa. I wonder if there may have been some confounding variables there, but surely this is just my bias.
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).
We care about racial differences in outcomes that are correlated to IQ, such as employment and imprisonment.
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.
It's a good tool if you want to rank people, it's a bad tool if you want to help people. IQ tests couldn't (and can't) even detect dyslexia, a specific disability which you can get help with, which was known even in Terman's time. IQ tests by design throw out all information which could complicate ranking people. If your goal is to help, why would you measure people with a tool which can't tell the difference between dyslexia and concussion?
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.
If you can’t study IQ how do you demonstrate that lead poisoning causes reduced intelligence?
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.
IQ is a very bad tool for measuring populations. That's because IQ is definitionally designed to force a population to adhere a particular metric: a bell curve distribution, with the median at 100 and the standard deviation of 10. Whatever the thing you're measuring is--and there's good reason to think it's not "intelligence"--you're crunching and distorting that measurement to get the number at the end of it to force the population to adhere to a standard distribution.
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.
Did you even read my comment?
Answer this question:
> If you can’t study IQ how do you demonstrate that lead poisoning causes reduced intelligence?
> correlated to
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.
I don’t see how your reply relates to my comment. At no point do I say that any correlations are linear, nor does my argument depend on linear correlations.
Fundamentally my argument is maybe science can solve a problem, let’s at least try.
Suggesting that intelligence might be (partially) inheritable always causes backlash.
Intelligence is inheritable.
Intelligence isn't even well defined.
That doesn't matter.
Apparently not.
for the sake of DJT's offspring I hope not
It causes backlash because there are huge fields of modern academia built around the implicit assumption that everyone has the same IQ and hence the worse outcomes encountered by black and brown people are due to a big societal conspiracy against them, when in reality their outcomes are almost identical to white people who score the same on IQ tests as those groups do.
It is true any discussion of the subject marks you as a racist so how can we have an honest conversation in such environment? Just look at your own down votes?
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.
In the ideal world, assuming this is true, we could then ask for the question of, well, what can we do about these people with different intelligence levels?
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.
What plausible mechanism is there to even approach the idea that skin color influences intelligence? Why not study the effects on intelligence of eye color, or blood type?
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.
We know that people with red hair tend to metabolize anesthesia differently. It is not completely implausible that there is also a correlation between looks and other traits, although it seems almost impossible to me to untangle cultural, environmental and genetic effects.
Of course, any two traits can be correlated. But unless there is an obvious causal mechanism ("whiter skinned people get sun burns more easily", "darker skinned people tend to have vitamin D deficiencies at higher latitudes"), there's no reason to assume it and start looking for it to prove or disprove. It's a priori just as likely that there is a genetic link between toe shape and intelligence as skin color and intelligence. Yet no one is doing the science of measuring toe length correlation to intelligence, just skin color ("race").
As far as I know phrenology measured all kinds of things and claimed correlations. But they used highly dubious data (even for their time) and the field is now too unpopular to try (something similar) again with better methodology.
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.
I just got a downvote for an opposing opinion, so at least one person feels keenly that intelligence is genetic and is unable to say why.
> intelligence isn't racial..
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.
I don't think many people dispute the fact that the environment plays a role in intelligence. Not even many people dispute that there is some heritability to intelligence. What is in dispute is whether that heritability means that some races are on average genetically more intelligent than others (and another problem is how to define intelligence).
How do you define races? As I said in another comment definitions shift and they are different in different countries. I have an encyclopedia from the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid". Some East Africans were also defined as "Caucasoid" historically.If we define races on the basis of genetic similarity then almost everyone whose ancestry is from Eurasia is the same "race", but people whose ancestry is African belong to multiple races.
Race was only ever a stand in before we had an accurate understanding of genetics.
Yes, but people seem very reluctant to accept that. They keep trying to pretend that genetics backs their culture's definitions.
If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.
That could also be explained by cultural differences, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming.
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.
Discrimination against whites in favor of blacks doesn't lower white IQ.
There are significant cultural and economic differences between those communities. These will be similar between Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese and Indians are sufficiently recent immigrants for their culture to still have a lot in common (they speak the same language, follow the same religions, have inherited attitudes) with the places their ancestors came from.
I don't understand how the precedents could lead to any question regarding the disputed conclusion
Right, but the equation of workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit. That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place.
> workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit
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).
Now I want to say that your ideas don't come from your brain. But of course they do, as a result of interaction with other people's ideas, some of which were written down. (Don't worry, I'm not a dualist.)
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.
You, as a dualist, is the least of the fears we hold.
There are other notions about the transfer of ideas: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/06/memory-transfer
I'm not a dualist! Fumes
Wait, cannibal worms that eat memories? My my.
I for one thank our AI overlords that weight training avoided that path not taken :/
If you think any brain can be just as intelligent no matter how it works then why not extend that to things that aren't brains? If everyone's brain is equally good then isn't a rock just as good as well?
Sure, if the rock has good ideas.
(Rocks don't have ideas.)
A lot of HN is currently about rocks that we've made very smart, in case you haven't noticed. I don't want archeology polluted by generic academic culture war stuff, so can we please leave "intelligence" out of it?
Well this just proves the point I'm making.
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.
If genetics had no impact whatsoever then great apes would have the same intelligence potential as humans, as human races are more diverse then you give them credit for.
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.
Race is a combination of genetic, and cultural factors such as nutrition, early childhood care practices, social values, etc.
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 say intelligence is ideas, so it isn't physiological* and doesn't have a quotient.
* except in that being beaten around the head can make a person stupid.
Every study that's been done shows a significant difference in mean IQ across races. Suggesting otherwise is anti-science, putting ideology over reality. That doesn't mean everyone of any particular race is stupid; Indians in America for instance on average have higher IQS than white Americans, in spite of the average IQ of India being significantly lower, because only the smarter Indians manage to immigrate to America.
Most studies of Indians done in famous IQ tests were of those Indians who lived in villages and suffered from diseases. Its been debunked so many times.
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.
I remember looking up the source of the IQ data from Nepal a few years ago. It was a taken from an IQ survey of a school for mentally disabled children..
Talk about sampling bias lol.
Lysenkoism predates the defeat of the nazis and it's pretty much the same pseudoscientific dismissal of nature for ideological reasons.
To be honest, I'm more interested in what ideology/religion lead to the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent in a timespan of over thousands of years to almost utter replacement despite of the fact that, in the end, the "invaders" were almost identical to the "invaded", than I am in elucidating whether Llama 3 being less performant than Gemma 4 in benchmarks is due to the training corpus or the architecture.
I don't feel like being racist either way.
Regardless of how you feel about being racist, some people will accuse you of being uncomfortably close to a Nazi for talking about the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent, because 19th and early 20th century anthropologists that the Nazis liked and amplified the ideas of really did think that the Yamnaya Y line took over a continent, they just called them "Aryans" instead of "the Yamnaya Y line".
There’s really only one way you totally replace male lineage.
Based on the evidence we have it seems that they simply killed most (in some places almost all) of the local men they could find?
Who is they? The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.
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.
The immigrants from the steppes and their descendants. It's hard to interpret the fact that the majority and often 90% or more pre Indo European male lineages were replaced in Western and Northern Europe in any other way.
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.
>(e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life),
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.
The Nazis did do a lot of damage - far more than any benefits from the science would balance - and the 'science' contributed to it. The Nazis and many other racists have long argued that they are just being objective and the other side is biased.
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)?
"Hitler was a vegetarian. You aren't like Hitler, are you?" is a fair reason to run a garbage-collection pass over your beliefs if you're vegetarian, checking your reasons for it -- but invalid argument against claims that vegetarian diets are healthy. It sounds like mid-century historians collectively made the latter mistake.
The cultural exchange part was more a post punk thing. The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees.
And what's the difference exactly? We knew that e.g. the Visigoths had Scandinavian ancestry, but we also know that by then they had lots of other ancestry, too.
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.
When you're reading a popular-science story about a new discovery, there are two things to be careful about:
- 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.
Same here. This study is mostly kicking in open doors - or at least the people quoted not affiliated with the study for some reason, are kicking in open doors. I got into this as a tangent from genealogy, and that the Goths were for a good part actually from Scandinavia is not a particularly bold assertion.
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.
Science is not just believing what sounds plausible. It is about gathering evidence. Having historical, archeological and DNA evidence is a lot stronger that just historical evidence alone.
The article says why. The fall of the Roman empire being increasingly attributed to the migration of foreigners is both topical and problematic to certain ideologies
Yeah but I'm a Swede and even I thought those regions were named long after Rome, in tribute to Roman history. Claiming the origins of the infamous Goths just because of their accomplishments in the south.
Because Swedish history before 1000AD is very murky.
You did not find it weird that Beowulf identified as a geat?
Never read it, but also, wasn't it written like hundreds of years after? I thought the oldest written stories we had were Snorres and the Icelandic sagas.
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.
Or that Russia commenced as a Viking startup.
And based in Kiev
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27
Wiki has a pretty interesting history on that [1]:
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.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#Names
I think the Russia case is the case of some Viking leaders of Slavs
Vikings took slavs as slaves. In Swedish "slav" means "slave". Vikings was rowers from Roslagen. In Finland they use the name Ruotsi for Sweden and Venäjä for Russia.
I rewatched the Vikings recently (highly recommended, perhaps not historically accurate, but no horned helmets). It was a bit ... don't know, eye opening or strange or hard to believe to learn that the Vikings played a crucial role in that part of the continent and Constantinople. I know that the term "Viking" is not an ethnic identification, more like a profession/warrior, but I don't have another word in my vocabulary.
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 you sail south (toward the sun) it's pretty hard to miss Poland, and you'd know it's there long earlier due to observing migratory seabirds.
Not contributing anything intellectually, but this article is a lot of fun to read when one mentally envisions the modern style, looks and meaning of the word Goths.
> 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
https://www.reddit.com/r/spqrposting/comments/1lhqmlp/rome_i...
Sarcasm and irony were their greatest weapons
> the Spanish for “bandit,” “helmet,” and “truce.”
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.
I always found this fact about the common Spanish surname Rodríguez to be interesting:
>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.
"On the peninsula" ... I found elmo, does Galician count? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/elmo#Galician
There are plenty of other warlike terms in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_terms_derive... such as gaita (bagpipes).
We have yelmo and almete, but looking up both of them, they seem to be considered later medieval loans. Espuela (spur), dardo (dart) and a few other warlike items are often mentioned. And of course guerra (war) itself.
And tangentially, to this day Canary islanders'slur for peninsulars is "godos", in the sense of "arrogant and haughty"
And in German the word is "Helm" as well
And French has both casque (from latin) and heaume (from germanic languages).
Yelmo for helmet
Swedish Gotlander's have been referring to this mythic origin story for centuries. I believe Gustavus Adophus referenced this history to justify blatant Swedish militarism in the 17th century.
Actually, the most ancient recorded instance of the Goth language is a Bible that was written in what is now Bulgaria around 350: The so-called Bible of Wulfila. So, there is nothing new under the sun about the presence of Goths in the area, bringing their language and culture around.
Your "Well acktually..." is misplaced, because no one anywhere in the article ever cast doubt on that, but rather the debate was about the Gothic Urheimat and the degree of gene spread versus cultural diffusion.
Of all the mythic origin stories about the globe, Goths originating in Scandinavia is one of the less exciting ones to be proven correct.
DNA from unearthed car sized scales proving a giant snake carved the rivers and shape of the land would be something ...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagyl
I'm not so sure this study proves anything new, too. We always knew some Goths came from Scandinavia, that they mixed extensively with less mobile people in the regions they passed through during the age of migration, and that Gothic identity was (at least eventually) more tied to Arianism than to ancestry, so that when they became Catholic they stopped identifying as Gothic.
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 is Arianism?
A non-trinitarian Christian doctrine, considered heresy by all Christians following the Nicene creed and vice versa. No relation to Aryans.
So it was quite literally a flood of people.
If you believe the origin story from over 1000 years later (by a guy who had read Jordanes' story written merely 500 years later), sure.
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.
Giant wiggly snake is a great explanation of the obvious evidence glaciation/erosion, ngl.
It’s a water snake too, so the explanation is literally correct with a bit of poetic license.
I love a myth that kinda makes sense with a bit of poetic licence.
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.
I don't see stingray. I maybe see a bat.
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.
This of course means that Spaniards are Swedes on extended vacation. They mentioned this to the latter at the 1545 Council of Trent.
barbarian = ?
That depends a great deal on who is talking or typing, in what era, and where. Here's a brief list of some of the OED options for meaning:
* 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.
Anyone who talks like a barbarian. In some tales the ancient Greeks thought that anyone who lived outside their city states sounded like bleating sheep. True or not, the word did mean someone who talks like a foreigner.
No kidding. That's not an ok word to be putting in a headline
I’ve come to have low expectations of Science Magazine under EIC Holden Thorp.
In this context it means they invaded the Roman empire.
Then why did those people move? Was it because of climate change? First of all, it seems less like a movement of a warrior group and more like a group migration that included women and children—so why on earth did they have to move that way? I’m curious: is there research on this?
The Huns drove them out of their lands. The Goths needed to find better lands to support their population. The Roman Empire was weak. The Romans had better land. The Romans couldn't defend their land against the Goths and the Goths couldn't defend their lands against the Huns.
As for the climate change argument this movement of people groups is not uncommon. Rome up until the arrival of the Goths had been dealing with "barbarian" incursions for a thousand years.
Rome invade Gaul, Germany, and Britannia which people seem to omit. There is no argument that climate change forced them too. They did it because they could. The "barbarian" tribes invaded because they could. Both sides in this conflict are human and have human motivations.
The Huns arrived centuries after the Gothic expansion, which reached as far as the Volga river. I assumed the OP's question is (like the linked article) about that expansion from Scandinavia south and east, not the later one west into the Roman Empire.
I was wondering the same things : I often heard that the relative civilizational collapse that happened in europe during the middle ages was correlated with lower overall temperatures, e.g. what you see here [1] or there [2]. In the second one, the most recent projections (in red), show that there were a lot of very cold years (down to -0.6 degrees relative to normal) during those times. Later on, starting in the 1200s, there was the Little ice age, where temperatures fell to -0.9 relative to normal (I don't know how they defined normal). The peak, when almost all years were at -0.6 or below on that scale, caused the "General Crisis of the seventeenth century" where people from the Goth/scandinavian regions also had huge famines [3].
So my guess would be that there were several very cold years in a row, which caused famines, and the populations understood that their best survival chance was to migrate south, where they had to compete with the roman empire for land.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:2000_Year_Temperature_... [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:2000_Year_Temperature_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1695%E2%80%931...
For many decades, climate events have been viewed as one driver of cultural events during the Age of Migrations: somewhere on the Asian steppe, decline in quality pasturage successively causes one people to pressure another people to their west, and eventually the avalanche rolls into Europe.
It has saddened me to see this viewpoint associated in the American cultural wars with one party's "enemy camp", where discussion of climate as a problem is automatically associated with all kinds of unrelated policy positions. People are unaware this historical explanation was posited by hoary old (and largely long-dead) twentieth-century men who had no dog in the contemporary political divide.
I was visiting the northern city of Umeå in Sweden, in the middle of the winter. It's a bit dark, and in a good year you get a mantle of snow that reaches waist-high, and that was a good year. So I'm sitting in this super-cozy fika room with nice warm lighting having some coffee. Out of the blue, this sweet middle aged lady who had been born there a good half a century before and who loves skiing, says: "I can't bear the darkness any longer. I'm going to Spain this year."
Overpopulation, Scandinavia did not have very fertile soil.
It had to do with inheritance. Younger sons in the viking era did not inherit the farmstead and had to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Anytime they had a population explosion, younger sons would have to go A Viking.
This is often said (also about the Viking age) and it seems such an incomplete explanation to me. Normally if more people are born than the land can feed, then vulnerable people (eg babies and kids and elderly) die at higher rates until the balance is restored. Why would Scandinavia be different?
They didn’t just have the motivation to leave, they also had the opportunity.
Their longboats made them amphibious. Their ships were durable enough for the open ocean, but still able to land on any beach, or sail fair upriver.