Impact of Indo-Europeans on Language and Culture

There are times in human history that appear calm, like the surface of a lake on a still summer's day. Then there are other times, when those waters of history bubble and froth, crashing against the shores of time in a furious gale, sweeping away all that stands before the surging forces of fate. The origins of the world we know today was born in such tumult, shaped by the fires of war, migration, and catastrophe. Thousands of groups have been swept away by the bloody tides of fate, many of which we know nothing about, some of which we have but the footprints they left behind. Yet few such periods were as significant to the origins of so many people across the world as the dramatic events that took place in Eastern Europe some 5,000 years ago. From the far western shores of Ireland and Iberia, to the Indus Valley, and the deserts of Xinjiang, China. A mysterious people, hardly recognized in archaeology, defeated the forces of nature and the civilizations that came before them to conquer more lands than any empire in pre-modern history. From those people, the languages of Hindi, Persian, Russian, Spanish, English, German, and Gaelic have all come. They are known commonly as the Indo-Europeans. But who really were these people? When did they exist? And where did they actually come from? How could they possibly have had such a dramatic impact on the languages and cultures of so many people across the world? New linguistic theories have recently been birthed to challenge the long-standing views, all of which will be examined as we seek to answer, who were the Indo-Europeans? Hi friends, I'm Kevin MacLean. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and consider supporting the channel through Patreon, PayPal, or YouTube Super Stickers. Your support helps me to make long, in-depth videos like this. I appreciate all of your support. Though Indo-Europeans are a popular topic of conversation among those interested in ancient prehistory, archaeology, mythology, and linguistics today, it has been popular for quite some time. The modern awareness that many of the languages of Europe, Iran, India, were anciently connected can be dated to the 16th century. Individuals who had experience in India recognized linguistic commonalities, but it wasn't in the early 18th century that they were able to understand the language until the 18th century that the question began to be more widely known and discussed in some detail by academics. Mikhail Lomonosov, a Russian polymath born in St. Petersburg in 1711, known for his groundbreaking achievement in astronomy, geology, physics, engineering, and poetry, noted that Latin, Greek, German, and Russian must have had a common ancestry in the ancient past. By the end of the 18th century, the topic was taken up by Sir William Jones, and by 1813, the use of the term Indo-European was coined by Thomas Young, using the western and eastern extremities of the proposed language grouping as the basis for the name. Now, noticing a relationship between Indo-European languages is really only as difficult as becoming familiar with a few. While there are a lot of differences, There are key similarities in nearly all of the languages that are recognizable to nearly anyone. Family names and structures are some of the most core vocabulary in a language, and Indo-European languages nearly all share many important family words. Father in English, pater in Latin, pateras in Greek, pedar in Persian, pita in Hindi, aher in Gaelic. And we also have English mother, Latin mater, Greek mitere, Persian modar, Russian mat, gillek, maher. There are many other words shared across many of the languages, so that anyone familiar with several would have some inkling that there was a connection. So why then did it take until the 16th century for anyone to notice? It may not have. The ancient Greeks had extensive dealings with a wide range of people, many who spoke Indo-European languages and some others who didn't. In their myths, they claim that the ancient Greek hero Perseus was the founder of the Persians. Now this is often explained by the similarities of the given name of the hero to the name of the ethnic group, but it may have been more than this. While modern Greek and modern Iranian languages have moved further away, In part due to different sense of loan words, Ancient Greek and Ancient Iranian were more similar to each other. Recognizing this might have given justification to some Greeks for thinking there was an ancient connection between the people. As with most mythology, this was explained through a founder myth. This is the same for many other European peoples that the Greeks interacted with. Greek accounts typically depict all other Europeans as having an ancient blood relation with Greeks, often via the wide-traveling Heracles. Many nations in Europe agreed that they were related to the Greeks in ancient times, with an account by Ammianus Marcellinus recording a Germanic community who proclaimed themselves the descendants of Odysseus when he was on his ten-year journey. The Romans also recognized a commonality. though they tried to express this in a less direct way. Famously, the Aeneid tells of how the Romans were the descendants of the Trojan hero Aeneas. However, the Roman knowledge of the ethnic character of the Trojans was entirely derived from Homeric epic, which depicts them as speaking and being essentially Greek, worshipping Greek gods and following Greek customs. The idea that the Romans were related to the Trojans was likely devised in part for political purposes, but expresses the belief that they were closely connected to the Greeks. Among these ancient peoples who spoke Indo-European languages was a belief that they were all related in an ancient past, and we can suppose that part of the reason for this belief was the awareness of similarities in language, which were greater than they are today. proof of the recognition of this linguistic similarity and awareness of it is found in an ancient account by Pliny the Elder. He explained that the meaning of the word druid, an ancient Celtic priest, was likely connected to the Greek word for the oak tree, which they revere, an etymology that is in fact correct. Recognizing that an Indo-European common ancestral language existed, of course, was the easy part. The hard part was finding out who originally spoke this language. Who were the Proto-Indo-Europeans? By far the most widely agreed explanation for the origins of Indo-European is labeled the Step Hypothesis. The theory was first widely promoted by philologist Otto Schroeder. in the late 19th century. He undertook extensive study into the common roots for domestic plants, animals, and technologies across the Indo-European languages, and concluded that the early Indo-Europeans were pastoralists who domesticated horses, as so many common Indo-European words were related to horses and horse-related gear. He thought that they must have resided on the Pontic-Caspian steppe where horses were native. This theory was later supported, fleshed out, and articulated by Lithuanian archaeologist Maria Gimbutas, and more recently corrected and expanded on by many researchers in linguistics, genetics, archaeology, and anthropology, such as David Anthony, among many others. Seemingly because certain political groups and ideologies in the early 20th century abused simplistic ideas about Indo-Europeans, to further their own racial views, there was a reaction against a concept rooted in emotion rather than objective analysis, which until recent advances of archaeogenetics was trying to douse the flames of any Indo-European ethnic origin theory. However, we now know that these theories, only half guessed at by earlier researchers, were at least partly or even largely correct. There was a genetic flow into central and western Europe around 3000 BC from the Pontic-Caspian steppe. In simplified analysis, this is often referred to as steppe ancestry or Yamnaya. Modern Europeans have differing levels of this ancestry, ranging from very low in places like Sardinia to around 50% in places like Britain, Ireland, Lithuania, Belarus, Norway, and others. Most scholars now accept that this influx of steppe ancestry was responsible for the introduction of the Indo-European language into Central and Western Europe. Although a continuing battle now surrounds the ultimate origin of this language, which we will look at shortly, most agree that even if its ultimate origin were not in the steppe, that it spread into Europe predominantly by populations from the steppe. The origins of these so-called steppe people is to be found in groups of eastern hunter-gatherers who had inhabited the eastern and northeastern fringes of Europe since at least the Mesolithic. Genetically, they had descended largely from ancient North Eurasians and likely had a common origin with Uralic peoples in a very distant past. This is possibly reflected linguistically. There have been debates among linguists for over a hundred years about whether there is a common connection between Indo-European and Uralic languages. Due to structural similarities, as well as some cognate vocabulary, as Eastern hunter-gatherers were almost certainly the progenitors of the Indo-European language, the similarities noted by some are likely to be explained by a very ancient common root in a language spoken by Eurasian hunter-gatherers. tens of thousands of years ago. These Eastern hunter-gatherers were spread over a vast territory and likely spoke many related languages with many regional dialects. Some of this linguistic diversity may be reflected in the different branches of early Indo-European. Breaking with the typical trend seen elsewhere in the world, Eastern hunter-gatherers produced pottery while not practicing agriculture. They hunted fished in rivers and seemed to have developed a first-known trait in amber. Genetic tests conducted on the remains of eastern hunter-gatherers revealed that they were light skinned and carried genes for blue eyes and light-colored hair. Importantly, they also carried haplogroups R1b, R1a, and I2, all associated with later steppe cultures such as the Yamnaya. By around 5000 BC, some of these Eastern hunter-gatherers began to establish identifiable cultural groups on the steppes of Western Russia and Ukraine. Steppe is a word derived from Russian, meaning grassland or wasteland, whose ultimate etymology is unknown. It's a vast expanse of flat, largely treeless country that extends like a belt from Eastern Europe to East Asia. What drove them to make this cultural change we cannot know for certain, but if we look to later descended cultural practices we may get a glimpse into the lifestyle of these archaic Indo-European hunters. One cultural feature common to many descended groups is the concept of the young outcast warrior band, one which is often closely linked with the concept of the werewolf. I've done a specific video on the topic which details this in different European cultures. This practice is very likely pre-step, while at times it was a rite of passage. It was also related to the practice of the mass expulsion of young men from a community facing overpopulation. Like most hunter-gatherer communities, the eastern hunter-gatherers lived in relatively small family groups or tribes. likely representing not more than a few hundred people typically. They would interact and share borders with other closely related family groups, with whom they would contract marriages. The physical limitations of the pre-agricultural lifestyle strictly limited the size of these groups, and it also ensured that they would have strictly enforced their boundaries if they grew larger than the population of animals and natural flora they consumed in the regions. or if poachers from other tribes were allowed to hunt on their territories, they would face serious starvation. The boundaries between tribes was very strict because without them it was impossible to manage the limited resources within and ensure the survival of the community. All of this is very similar to how packs of wolves organized and the similarity was likely not missed by the ancient hunters. Whenever the population of a tribe expanded beyond the means of their territories to sustain, there were only three options. Expand into previously unclaimed lands, violently eliminate other tribes and take their lands, likely beginning with poaching raids on their territories and escalating into total war, or take a portion of the excess population and expel them from your lands. and have them live or die by their own merits. Often it was the latter that was resorted to, and tragically, the most expensive of all. The most commendable people in any society are the young men. In times of crisis, they would be gathered up, dedicated to the god to watch over them, and cast out to live as wolves. It is little wonder these young men took the wolf as their totem animal, and their god was always closely linked to this animal. With the warming weather and the retreat of the ice sheet in the Neolithic, the hunter-gatherer population was expanding more rapidly. Youths who needed to establish their own lands either had to win their place through warfare or be willing to learn and adapt to different lifestyles in order to survive in lands previously unclaimed. It's likely from such bands of youthful, archaic Indo-European warriors, expelled and landless, that the Pontic-Caspian steppe was first settled. and the dawn of steppe pastoralism began, a prehistoric version, perhaps, of the legend of Romulus and Remus. The first moves onto the steppe by the hunter-gatherers were tentative. They first settled in the forest steppe, and as they adopted pastoral activities, they began to extend their range a little bit further south so that they could graze their cattle and other domesticated animals on the steppe lands. But with the invention of the wheel and the wagon, perhaps around 3500 BC, The range of these steppe dwellers increased dramatically, and soon they were living out on the steppe, in wagons, and using wagons to haul the materials that they needed to survive. A number of archaeological groups comprised of eastern hunter-gatherers appeared on the steppe at roughly the same time. One of these, possibly the first, is a Samara culture. Around 5000 BC they took up residence near Samara along the banks of the Volga River. They were still practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle at this time, but already with them are the first signs of what would become the core of the steppe culture. They produced artifacts depicting horses, they performed horse sacrifices, and were responsible for the earliest known horse burials. It is thought that these horses were wild horses, primarily being used as food. But clearly at this early stage there is already developing a close attachment and reverence for the horse. They buried their most honored dead in large mounds or kuragans, covering their bodies with ochre, a red clay used for dye. The dead were effectively painted red. This may be preserved in much later mythology, which links the dead to the color red. In Gaelic mythology there are riders of the dead called the... ferderga and the dagda is also named ruithroessa or ruithri ruith meaning red king red Contemporaneous with the people of Samara were those of the Dnieper-Donets culture. Like those in Samara, they were entirely descended from the eastern hunter-gatherers. They also buried their dead covered in ochre, placed horse bones in burials, and produced horse figurine. There is at least some evidence that they may have begun to engage in some limited agriculture, though both groups lived over a thousand kilometers apart. Both are genetically and archaeologically nearly the same, and it speaks to their common origins as the first of the eastern hunter-gatherers to settle and make a life for themselves on the steppe, but who had not yet adopted a pastoral lifestyle. The first of these groups which appears to have become pastoral is the Kowalinski culture. Sometime around 4500 BC, they begin transitioning from hunter-gatherers to primarily pastoralists, herding domesticated animals, although it should be noted that hunting remained an important activity for all of these groups, one which continued well into the much later Indo-European cultures. The first evidence for horse domestication and copper working is found with them. That doesn't mean that the other groups were not doing this at the same time, but it's evidence bias, as we know only what has been recovered. Likely, if one group in the region was doing it, they were all by this time engaged in it. The Sredni Stog culture developed around 4500 BC and dwelt across much of Ukraine. They practiced pastoralism and some agriculture, possessed domesticated horses, as well as worked with copper and engaged in long-distance trading. There is some evidence that they range as far as the Balkans, with two individuals carrying steppe ancestry similar to Sredni Stog examples found near Varna, Bulgaria, dating to between 4500 and 4000 BC. It was also among the Sredni Stog that the first use of corded ware pottery is found, and with those people the very origins of the later corded ware culture may have begun. All of these early eastern hunter-gatherer descended groups are remarkable for their physical robustness. They were noticeably larger and had stronger bones and build than most other peoples in the same time period. In part, this is likely due to the lifestyle and diet, highly rich in fresh protein. Their custom of marrying from outside their own tribe would also lend itself to a healthier genetic line. In a short 500 years, all of the groups of eastern hunter-gatherers who had moved into the steppe had adopted forms of pastoralism and were domesticating the horse. A recent international study involving 150 scientists concluded in 2021 that the ancestor of the modern domestic horse, originated and was domesticated in the Volga Don region of Russia. All domestic horses in the world are related to the horses broken on the steppe by ancient Indo-Europeans, the first cowboys. Of course, the most talked about group to emerge on the steppe was the Yamnaya. They likely developed out of the preceding Rappin'culture, which began around 3900 BC. It was with the pastoral Rappin'culture that the use of the wagon on the steppe began in earnest, and by the Amnaya period, this appears to have developed into family groups actually living in wagons. It was a practice that would continue on the steppe for thousands of years. For around 450 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus writes that Particular groups of Scythians lived in their wagons. It is possible that the wheel was first invented by the Proto-Indo-Europeans sometime around 3500 BC. While older theories generally place the wheel as being first developed in Mesopotamia and spreading north and west, there is a significant problem with this theory. Most of the Indo-European languages, save for the Anatolian branch, have cognate words for wheels and wagon-related technology. Anatolian presumably does not share this vocabulary because it split from Indo-European before the technology was invented, perhaps around 4000 BC. These words cannot have been borrowed from one Indo-European language to another, as their morphological changes show that the terms descended from a common source. Thus, this very significant technological innovation must have developed during the period before the Proto-Indo-European languages fragmented. It not only dates the language to the time period of wheel technology, but because all the vocabulary surrounding the technology is entirely based on Indo-European roots, it shows that the technology was almost certainly not borrowed, but invented locally within the Indo-European language community. If the technology had been borrowed, it is likely its foreign name would have been used. At the very least, we would expect at least one term related to wheel and wagon technology to be borrowed. Because all of these words are native Indo-European constructions, it's likely that the technology either developed simultaneously north and south, or that it developed first in the steppe. and very quickly spread to numerous other regions. We do know for a fact that it was among the Proto-Indo-Iranian Sintashta culture that the earliest evidence for the use of the spoked wheel is found, around 2000 BC. And it's a curious thing that nearly all the Indo-European cultures made the wheel a significant religious symbol. While the symbol may be originally based on the sun, it later fuses. with the symbolism of the physical wagon or chariot wheel, with which the sun is strongly associated with in the earliest Indo-European myths. This expresses how important the wheel was to the life of the Proto-Indo-European. Because of the open flat space of the steppe, they were able to utilize the wagon and later the chariot like few other cultures could. They drove across the vast grasslands like ships upon the sea. It could be that such ideas were also why ships were poetically referred to as steeds in Norse poetry, and Greek Poseidon, possibly an early god of horses and the vast land sea that was the steppe, becomes a god of sea and ship. With the Yamnaya is also found the first physical evidence for horseback riding. A recent study by Trautmann et al. points to horse riding by Yamnaya individuals by around 3000 BC. The cult status of the horse, noticeable in the Samara culture from around 5000 BC, is likewise found in many later attested Indo-European cultures, with similar very strange rituals found in both Irish and Vedic sources of a sovereign wetting a horse then sacrificing it. The commonalities between such extreme practices suggest that it must have originated from a Proto-Indo-European cult practice developed on the steppe. The cow was also an extremely important ritual animal and in the daily life of the Yamnaya and other western steppe herder groups, Indo-European mythology envisioned a primordial cow whose milk represented the cosmic waters, and many goddesses and subsequent traditions are connected with cattle. The burials of the Rappan culture began with typical flat graves, the dead covered in ochre the same as nearly all the other Eastern hunter-gatherer descendant peoples. As they expanded they began to adopt the use of tumuli, and the practice was maintained by the Yamnaya. Also notable is the use of kromlechs, meaning essentially megalithic stone circles. Many ancient Rappin and Yamnaya stone circles have been identified in Russia, and many other menhirs, or standing stones, are associated with them. Sometimes they would encircle a tumulus with standing stones, something we see replicated in Britain and Ireland, even in cases when the tumulus was built by the preceding population. They created the Karnasivsky idol, A stone carving, possibly of a god, which strongly resembles other later carvings throughout Europe, and clearly they had a tradition of using stones to mark sacred spaces. On the steppe, there was a limited supply of wood. While the Yamnaya have gained fame for being identified as a source of the Proto-Indo-European language, recent genetic research suggests that the Details are likely more complicated than this. While the Yamnaya certainly spoke a dialect of Proto-Indo-European, they do not appear to have been the primary vector for the language's dispersal across Europe and Asia. Instead, their dialect of the language is argued to have given rise to the Balkan Indo-European languages, such as Proto-Greek. They were also the origin of the Afanasievo culture, which moved to the Far East. and is thought to be the origin of the mysterious Tocharian language that was recorded around 600 AD in the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang, China. The root of most of the Indo-European languages is, however, with groups of close relatives of the Yamnaya, the Corded Ware culture. While it was earlier believed that the Corded Ware culture had been formed directly from migrations from the Yamnaya, Genetic studies suggest that this was not the case. Though most corded ware individuals carry a high percentage of so-called steppe ancestry, that is, a genetic mixture that was very similar to that possessed by Yamnaya, there are slight differences in male haplogroups that suggest that they were derived from a very closely related but separate group. Though they were primarily pastoralists, they did not dwell directly on the steppe. but within the forest steppe and even the forest. Evidence suggests they cleared great stretches of land through fire and used these cleared areas to pasture animals and plant cereal crops. They buried their dead in singular graves, sometimes with accompanying tumuli, very much like the Yamnaya and other groups of a similar origin. Though they probably spoke a dialect understandable to the Yamnaya and shared a very similar genetic origin and culture. they would have also had cultural and linguistic differences. It could be that it was the forest-step dwelling cousins of the Yamnaya, speaking of very closely associated languages. or dialect, which was the ancestor of the Indo-European languages like Slavic, Celtic, Iranian, Italic, Germanic, while the Yamnaya were responsible for the spread of other branches, such as Proto-Greek, Illyrian, Thracian, and Albanian. However, these Proto-Indo-Europeans, whether Yamnaya or not, were similar enough linguistically and culturally, that we can probably make some broad, sweeping generalities about them. They wove textiles using plant fibers and wool and created fired pottery. They raised a variety of livestock and possibly were instrumental in the breeding of sheep for wool production. They engaged in some farming of cereals and had native words for plow and field. They fermented milk to create cheese and they collected honey and produced a fermented beverage of it. They used specially designed stones for grinding grain, nuts. and other plant material. They trained horses and produced some horse gear still familiar today, though not the saddle, and they built both two and four wheeled carts designed with yokes to be pulled by animal power. They engaged in the production of copper and gold artifacts. They must have had houses with doors, fences, boats, and many other tools and other artifacts that we don't always associate with steppe culture. On a political level, they organized in tribes known as the Tuataha, which were led by a tribal leader called the Hregs, known in descendant language as Raj, Rex, or Ri, generally selected through a complex combination of aptitude, social status, and ritual. These tribes were often bound up with other closely related tribes in client-patron relationships. Sometimes based on lineage, historical debts, marriage, and even mythological reasons, this network of tribal alliances could at times bring vast numbers of people under the political guidance of a single ruler, likely one who at least verbally traced his lineage back to the gods. The legitimacy of rulers was upheld or cast down by a group of elders who served as priests. while another group of people served as poets, tasked with the memorization and recital of tribal histories and divine hymns. They had structured views of social class, status, honor, and one's relationship to the gods and to his community. They were strongly patriarchal, and they likely believed that one could gain immortality through battle. They glorified raiding, the abduction of women from rival peoples. and the total destruction of enemies. Their heroes were warrior cattle raiders, as can be seen in the Vedic texts which praise Indra for winning the cattle, and Heracles who plundered the cattle of Gerion. They organized war and raiding bands who engaged in ecstatic forms of combat, where the warriors mentally and spiritually transformed into fierce, raving animals such as wolves. They may have fought naked, save for an animal pelt, and entered into rages where they were perceived as being invincible. Yet, these were not unsophisticated and unintelligent people. They had very strict rules about providing hospitality to guests and strangers, which all the daughter branches shared. They gave elevated status to priests and poets and people of art. Upon the king was placed the burden of upholding truth, as the Gaelic lawgiver Morin described it. He had to guide the community like a seasoned charioteer. looking all about him judging the path in an instant responding to every bump every stone on the field so as not to break the wheel rim under him that path that the king must find was the concept of the trip truth or right, meaning to them something like cosmic order, known in Sanskrit as Krita. To the ancient barbarian stepper, the ideal king was of course a powerful warrior who could lead his people to victory, but he was also a wise man, a guide, a pathfinder, a charioteer, a cattle herder, with the tribe envisioned as his chariot. In what would be a shock to some, studies in 2015 revealed that the ancestry of the Yamnaya was not, like earlier steppe groups, almost entirely Eastern hunter-gatherer. While more than 55% of their ancestry was Eastern hunter-gatherer, they had picked up around 35% from a group identified as Caucasus hunter-gatherers. It is around this group of people that the controversial new theory of Indo-European origins is centered, and understanding the actual dynamics at play here is critical. It seems that as Eastern hunter-gatherer lineages extended further southwards towards the Caucasus that came into contact with a group identified genetically as Caucasus hunter-gatherers, they were closely related to populations living on the southern range. of the mountains, and would have been a northward expansion of this population that crossed the Caucasus at some earlier point. We don't actually know much about this population or exactly what they were involved in, if they were actually still hunter-gatherers or if they too had adopted a step lifestyle. Regardless, at some point prior to the rise of the Amnaya, there was a large ad-mixing event with this population. This in part is what led to a recent study by Paul Hegarty et al., published in Science on July 28th, 2023. The study tries to categorize and date the divergent Indo-European languages based on a systematic analysis of phylogenetic changes. They conclude that while the western steppe herders do indeed appear to have spoken and spread the progenitor language of Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and other languages, the latter are not the only ones to have spoken and spoken. There is a break between these languages and the languages of Greek, Hittite, and Indo-Iranian. They theorize that Proto-Indo-European first developed around 6000 BC, south of the Caucasus. Perhaps around 5000 BC, this language moved north, spoken by the Caucasus'hunter-gatherers. When they mixed with the Eurasian hunter-gatherers, the latter adopted the language of the Caucasus'hunter-gatherers. and established the root of Indo-European. Before this, others from this same group migrated west into Anatolia, creating the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, and Anatolians moved into Greece, perhaps around 3000 BC. According to this theory, Greek would have developed from the Anatolian branch or been very closely related to its origin. They also concluded that Indo-Iranian was unlikely to have been the result of steppe migration, but was instead the result of migration from these Proto-Indo-European speaking Caucasus hunter-gatherers, who migrated into Iran and through to India. Taking only a simplistic glance at this theory, it appears compelling. Curiously, there are some words in Indo-European which appear to be cognate with ancient Sumerian, ab or ap. means water in both languages. However, these can also be explained as linguistic borrowing, as Indo-European has other words, water in English, voda in Russian, which may have a common root with Uralic. It locates the origin of the language centrally and would, at a simplistic level, answer the question of Anatolia. One key problem of Anatolia is not only its proposed early dating, but that genetic studies have not found any significant level of steppe ancestry in Hittite samples, although there are very few samples as of now to work with. But taking this as proof that Indo-Europeans didn't spread from the steppe into Anatolia, the study instead looks to this Caucasus hunter-gatherer population as the possible vector, as it is found in Anatolia, Iran, and the steppe. What is critical to understand is that nearly all of this Caucasus hunter-gatherer admixture among the Yamnaya came from women. All agree that the Yamnaya and related steppe populations were highly patrilineal societies, as are or were all the descendant Indo-European societies. The concepts are powerfully rooted in the very language itself. It's inconceivable. Faced with this reality, that an almost if not entirely female admixture could form the nucleus of such a dramatic cultural and linguistic transformation, especially given the nature of the language and culture under discussion. In a traditional patrilineal society, women are brought away from their own families. They dwell in the household of the male and his family, and must adopt their way of life and their language, their custom. It is agreed that the family structure of Indo-Europeans operated in exactly this way. In such a scenario, word borrowings could take place, perhaps especially associated with words linked to women and women's activities, say water, which women were often responsible for fetching and for using to clean and cook with. The feminine primordial goddess is frequently linked to water in Indo-European traditions. However, A complete language shift is effectively impossible. Most likely, the admixture results from one of two things, or a combination of the two. Either the women were given over as tribute, or, more likely, or more frequently in my view, they were taken by force through raiding, probably over the course of several generations, in pillaging of a weaker group, unable to effectively defend itself. We know that elements of an earlier cultural practice of raiding for women was preserved in nearly every descendant into a European culture, making it likely that this was part of the proto-culture. While earlier this raiding, not only for cattle but women, who poetically are often likened to cattle, was mostly confined to other tribes that possessed Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry, When they came into contact with this Caucasus hunter-gatherer population, they fully exploited them for this purpose. Indo-Europeans would undertake exactly the same practices throughout Europe and Asia as they spread, often in places where steppe ancestry, in percentage terms, is not high. Their male haplogroups will still be disproportionately reflected due to their having obtained disproportionate reproductive access. to local women, to put it very politely. Linguists have long considered that the Anatolian branch entered the region from Thrace. Recent genetic finds in Bulgaria show that steppe ancestry, similar to Sredni Stog, was present in Bulgaria as early as 4500 BC, and it was likely around this same time, and from related groups that Anatolian developed. possibly developing from a different dialect or sister language to Indo-European. That in the case of the Hittites, the language becomes detached from steppe ancestry, and even steppe haplogroups, is uncommon in the spread of the language group elsewhere, but not at all improbable. In the historical case of the Hungarians, the entire ethnic group has become detached from its genetic origins as a Ugrian steppe herder group. Yet the language continues. In other cases, the Basque region is dominated by Indo-European haplogroups, but the non-Indo-European language persists. The Etruscans were found to be not significantly genetically distinct from other Italic peoples, but a step-admixture of around 35%, and yet the Etruscans spoke a non-Indo-European language. Certain aspects of modern language spread cannot be reasonably compared to ancient ones, but one aspect that is common is that power and prestige can play a very important role in the spread of a language and often trumps simple numbers of speakers. In places where small numbers of Indo-Europeans manage to gain power over an existing society, the language may have taken and been established as the language of the ruling class. After an initial domination, merging with the vastly superior numbers of the local population, their line can become buried, even as the cultural and linguistic forms might persist and gain dominance. We have seen such things play out within the historical period, and this is the most likely explanation for the origin of Anatolia. The final serious flaw in the conclusions of the new study, which I will mention here, are the proposals regarding the spread of Indo-Iranian. Breaking with earlier linguistic analysis, it is claimed that there is in fact no closer relationship between Germanic, Slavic, and the Indo-Iranian branch. They estimate that Indo-Iranian language broke off just shortly after Anatolian and was present through Central Asia thousands of years before the recording of Rig Veda. Inscriptions from the Mitanni which show strong Indo-Aryan influences including the names of Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and the Nasatis, and the use of Indo-Aryan names since at least 1700 BC does suggest that Indo-Iranian and its daughter branch Indo-Aryan must have not only split earlier than is sometimes thought, but spread through the region by at least this date. However, it is now well established that later migrations from the steppe had a substantial genetic impact on the region, and it seems a very large leap to accept that steppe populations moving in one direction would change the language of Europe, but moving in the other direction had no noticeable impact, but that the language was already Indo-European from a completely different source. The medieval influx of Turkic-speaking peoples from Asia would reshape the language and genetics in the region. Their migration also stands as a test case for how Indo-Europeans spread during its expansion phase. With these facts in mind, Indo-European most certainly developed and spread via the steppe. The culture, language, and even the genetics of these Proto-Indo-Europeans played a role in shaping many ethnic groups from the Hindu, Pashto, Iranians, Russians, Armenians, Greeks, Poles, Germans, French, English, Gaelic, Spanish, Portuguese, and so many others that now form the beautiful tapestry of the diverse nations of our world. It's unfortunate that at times this amazing legacy has been weaponized by certain groups and individuals. In reality, there are groups in Pakistan that have as much Indo-European ancestry as some of those in Europe. All the descendant groups are mixed. None of them are pure Proto-Indo-Europeans. Instead of fighting over who has more or less Indo-European DNA, as I have unfortunately seen far too often, we should respect all ethnic groups while recognizing and appreciating this amazing source of connection that many of us from Indo-European-derived linguistic and cultural groups share and appreciate. the thousands of years of linguistic, cultural, and genetic divergence that reflects the history of each people and adds 445 beautiful blossoms to the world. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like, share, and subscribe and consider supporting me on Patreon, PayPal, or through YouTube Super Stickers. Thank you all for watching and as always, stand tall.

Yet few such periods were as significant to the origins of so many people across the world as the dramatic events that took place in Eastern Europe some 5,000 years ago. From the far western shores of Ireland and Iberia, to the Indus Valley, and the deserts of Xinjiang, China. A mysterious people, hardly recognized in archaeology, defeated the forces of nature and the civilizations that came before them to conquer more lands than any empire in pre-modern history. From those people, the languages of Hindi, Persian, Russian, Spanish, English, German, and Gaelic have all come.

They are known commonly as the Indo-Europeans. But who really were these people? When did they exist?

And where did they actually come from? How could they possibly have had such a dramatic impact on the languages and cultures of so many people across the world? New linguistic theories have recently been birthed to challenge the long-standing views, all of which will be examined as we seek to answer, who were the Indo-Europeans? Hi friends, I'm Kevin MacLean. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and consider supporting the channel through Patreon, PayPal, or YouTube Super Stickers.

Your support helps me to make long, in-depth videos like this. I appreciate all of your support. Though Indo-Europeans are a popular topic of conversation among those interested in ancient prehistory, archaeology, mythology, and linguistics today, it has been popular for quite some time. The modern awareness that many of the languages of Europe, Iran, India, were anciently connected can be dated to the 16th century.

Individuals who had experience in India recognized linguistic commonalities, but it wasn't in the early 18th century that they were able to understand the language until the 18th century that the question began to be more widely known and discussed in some detail by academics. Mikhail Lomonosov, a Russian polymath born in St. Petersburg in 1711, known for his groundbreaking achievement in astronomy, geology, physics, engineering, and poetry, noted that Latin, Greek, German, and Russian must have had a common ancestry in the ancient past. By the end of the 18th century, the topic was taken up by Sir William Jones, and by 1813, the use of the term Indo-European was coined by Thomas Young, using the western and eastern extremities of the proposed language grouping as the basis for the name. Now, noticing a relationship between Indo-European languages is really only as difficult as becoming familiar with a few. While there are a lot of differences, There are key similarities in nearly all of the languages that are recognizable to nearly anyone.

Family names and structures are some of the most core vocabulary in a language, and Indo-European languages nearly all share many important family words. Father in English, pater in Latin, pateras in Greek, pedar in Persian, pita in Hindi, aher in Gaelic. And we also have English mother, Latin mater, Greek mitere, Persian modar, Russian mat, gillek, maher.

There are many other words shared across many of the languages, so that anyone familiar with several would have some inkling that there was a connection. So why then did it take until the 16th century for anyone to notice? It may not have. The ancient Greeks had extensive dealings with a wide range of people, many who spoke Indo-European languages and some others who didn't.

In their myths, they claim that the ancient Greek hero Perseus was the founder of the Persians. Now this is often explained by the similarities of the given name of the hero to the name of the ethnic group, but it may have been more than this. While modern Greek and modern Iranian languages have moved further away, In part due to different sense of loan words, Ancient Greek and Ancient Iranian were more similar to each other.

Recognizing this might have given justification to some Greeks for thinking there was an ancient connection between the people. As with most mythology, this was explained through a founder myth. This is the same for many other European peoples that the Greeks interacted with. Greek accounts typically depict all other Europeans as having an ancient blood relation with Greeks, often via the wide-traveling Heracles.

Many nations in Europe agreed that they were related to the Greeks in ancient times, with an account by Ammianus Marcellinus recording a Germanic community who proclaimed themselves the descendants of Odysseus when he was on his ten-year journey. The Romans also recognized a commonality. though they tried to express this in a less direct way. Famously, the Aeneid tells of how the Romans were the descendants of the Trojan hero Aeneas. However, the Roman knowledge of the ethnic character of the Trojans was entirely derived from Homeric epic, which depicts them as speaking and being essentially Greek, worshipping Greek gods and following Greek customs.

The idea that the Romans were related to the Trojans was likely devised in part for political purposes, but expresses the belief that they were closely connected to the Greeks. Among these ancient peoples who spoke Indo-European languages was a belief that they were all related in an ancient past, and we can suppose that part of the reason for this belief was the awareness of similarities in language, which were greater than they are today. proof of the recognition of this linguistic similarity and awareness of it is found in an ancient account by Pliny the Elder. He explained that the meaning of the word druid, an ancient Celtic priest, was likely connected to the Greek word for the oak tree, which they revere, an etymology that is in fact correct.

Recognizing that an Indo-European common ancestral language existed, of course, was the easy part. The hard part was finding out who originally spoke this language. Who were the Proto-Indo-Europeans? By far the most widely agreed explanation for the origins of Indo-European is labeled the Step Hypothesis. The theory was first widely promoted by philologist Otto Schroeder.

in the late 19th century. He undertook extensive study into the common roots for domestic plants, animals, and technologies across the Indo-European languages, and concluded that the early Indo-Europeans were pastoralists who domesticated horses, as so many common Indo-European words were related to horses and horse-related gear. He thought that they must have resided on the Pontic-Caspian steppe where horses were native.

This theory was later supported, fleshed out, and articulated by Lithuanian archaeologist Maria Gimbutas, and more recently corrected and expanded on by many researchers in linguistics, genetics, archaeology, and anthropology, such as David Anthony, among many others. Seemingly because certain political groups and ideologies in the early 20th century abused simplistic ideas about Indo-Europeans, to further their own racial views, there was a reaction against a concept rooted in emotion rather than objective analysis, which until recent advances of archaeogenetics was trying to douse the flames of any Indo-European ethnic origin theory. However, we now know that these theories, only half guessed at by earlier researchers, were at least partly or even largely correct. There was a genetic flow into central and western Europe around 3000 BC from the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

In simplified analysis, this is often referred to as steppe ancestry or Yamnaya. Modern Europeans have differing levels of this ancestry, ranging from very low in places like Sardinia to around 50% in places like Britain, Ireland, Lithuania, Belarus, Norway, and others. Most scholars now accept that this influx of steppe ancestry was responsible for the introduction of the Indo-European language into Central and Western Europe.

Although a continuing battle now surrounds the ultimate origin of this language, which we will look at shortly, most agree that even if its ultimate origin were not in the steppe, that it spread into Europe predominantly by populations from the steppe. The origins of these so-called steppe people is to be found in groups of eastern hunter-gatherers who had inhabited the eastern and northeastern fringes of Europe since at least the Mesolithic. Genetically, they had descended largely from ancient North Eurasians and likely had a common origin with Uralic peoples in a very distant past.

This is possibly reflected linguistically. There have been debates among linguists for over a hundred years about whether there is a common connection between Indo-European and Uralic languages. Due to structural similarities, as well as some cognate vocabulary, as Eastern hunter-gatherers were almost certainly the progenitors of the Indo-European language, the similarities noted by some are likely to be explained by a very ancient common root in a language spoken by Eurasian hunter-gatherers.

tens of thousands of years ago. These Eastern hunter-gatherers were spread over a vast territory and likely spoke many related languages with many regional dialects. Some of this linguistic diversity may be reflected in the different branches of early Indo-European. Breaking with the typical trend seen elsewhere in the world, Eastern hunter-gatherers produced pottery while not practicing agriculture. They hunted fished in rivers and seemed to have developed a first-known trait in amber.

Genetic tests conducted on the remains of eastern hunter-gatherers revealed that they were light skinned and carried genes for blue eyes and light-colored hair. Importantly, they also carried haplogroups R1b, R1a, and I2, all associated with later steppe cultures such as the Yamnaya. By around 5000 BC, some of these Eastern hunter-gatherers began to establish identifiable cultural groups on the steppes of Western Russia and Ukraine. Steppe is a word derived from Russian, meaning grassland or wasteland, whose ultimate etymology is unknown.

It's a vast expanse of flat, largely treeless country that extends like a belt from Eastern Europe to East Asia. What drove them to make this cultural change we cannot know for certain, but if we look to later descended cultural practices we may get a glimpse into the lifestyle of these archaic Indo-European hunters. One cultural feature common to many descended groups is the concept of the young outcast warrior band, one which is often closely linked with the concept of the werewolf. I've done a specific video on the topic which details this in different European cultures. This practice is very likely pre-step, while at times it was a rite of passage.

It was also related to the practice of the mass expulsion of young men from a community facing overpopulation. Like most hunter-gatherer communities, the eastern hunter-gatherers lived in relatively small family groups or tribes. likely representing not more than a few hundred people typically.

They would interact and share borders with other closely related family groups, with whom they would contract marriages. The physical limitations of the pre-agricultural lifestyle strictly limited the size of these groups, and it also ensured that they would have strictly enforced their boundaries if they grew larger than the population of animals and natural flora they consumed in the regions. or if poachers from other tribes were allowed to hunt on their territories, they would face serious starvation. The boundaries between tribes was very strict because without them it was impossible to manage the limited resources within and ensure the survival of the community.

All of this is very similar to how packs of wolves organized and the similarity was likely not missed by the ancient hunters. Whenever the population of a tribe expanded beyond the means of their territories to sustain, there were only three options. Expand into previously unclaimed lands, violently eliminate other tribes and take their lands, likely beginning with poaching raids on their territories and escalating into total war, or take a portion of the excess population and expel them from your lands. and have them live or die by their own merits.

Often it was the latter that was resorted to, and tragically, the most expensive of all. The most commendable people in any society are the young men. In times of crisis, they would be gathered up, dedicated to the god to watch over them, and cast out to live as wolves. It is little wonder these young men took the wolf as their totem animal, and their god was always closely linked to this animal. With the warming weather and the retreat of the ice sheet in the Neolithic, the hunter-gatherer population was expanding more rapidly.

Youths who needed to establish their own lands either had to win their place through warfare or be willing to learn and adapt to different lifestyles in order to survive in lands previously unclaimed. It's likely from such bands of youthful, archaic Indo-European warriors, expelled and landless, that the Pontic-Caspian steppe was first settled. and the dawn of steppe pastoralism began, a prehistoric version, perhaps, of the legend of Romulus and Remus.

The first moves onto the steppe by the hunter-gatherers were tentative. They first settled in the forest steppe, and as they adopted pastoral activities, they began to extend their range a little bit further south so that they could graze their cattle and other domesticated animals on the steppe lands. But with the invention of the wheel and the wagon, perhaps around 3500 BC, The range of these steppe dwellers increased dramatically, and soon they were living out on the steppe, in wagons, and using wagons to haul the materials that they needed to survive. A number of archaeological groups comprised of eastern hunter-gatherers appeared on the steppe at roughly the same time.

One of these, possibly the first, is a Samara culture. Around 5000 BC they took up residence near Samara along the banks of the Volga River. They were still practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle at this time, but already with them are the first signs of what would become the core of the steppe culture.

They produced artifacts depicting horses, they performed horse sacrifices, and were responsible for the earliest known horse burials. It is thought that these horses were wild horses, primarily being used as food. But clearly at this early stage there is already developing a close attachment and reverence for the horse.

They buried their most honored dead in large mounds or kuragans, covering their bodies with ochre, a red clay used for dye. The dead were effectively painted red. This may be preserved in much later mythology, which links the dead to the color red.

In Gaelic mythology there are riders of the dead called the... ferderga and the dagda is also named ruithroessa or ruithri ruith meaning red king red Contemporaneous with the people of Samara were those of the Dnieper-Donets culture. Like those in Samara, they were entirely descended from the eastern hunter-gatherers.

They also buried their dead covered in ochre, placed horse bones in burials, and produced horse figurine. There is at least some evidence that they may have begun to engage in some limited agriculture, though both groups lived over a thousand kilometers apart. Both are genetically and archaeologically nearly the same, and it speaks to their common origins as the first of the eastern hunter-gatherers to settle and make a life for themselves on the steppe, but who had not yet adopted a pastoral lifestyle.

The first of these groups which appears to have become pastoral is the Kowalinski culture. Sometime around 4500 BC, they begin transitioning from hunter-gatherers to primarily pastoralists, herding domesticated animals, although it should be noted that hunting remained an important activity for all of these groups, one which continued well into the much later Indo-European cultures. The first evidence for horse domestication and copper working is found with them.

That doesn't mean that the other groups were not doing this at the same time, but it's evidence bias, as we know only what has been recovered. Likely, if one group in the region was doing it, they were all by this time engaged in it. The Sredni Stog culture developed around 4500 BC and dwelt across much of Ukraine. They practiced pastoralism and some agriculture, possessed domesticated horses, as well as worked with copper and engaged in long-distance trading. There is some evidence that they range as far as the Balkans, with two individuals carrying steppe ancestry similar to Sredni Stog examples found near Varna, Bulgaria, dating to between 4500 and 4000 BC.

It was also among the Sredni Stog that the first use of corded ware pottery is found, and with those people the very origins of the later corded ware culture may have begun. All of these early eastern hunter-gatherer descended groups are remarkable for their physical robustness. They were noticeably larger and had stronger bones and build than most other peoples in the same time period. In part, this is likely due to the lifestyle and diet, highly rich in fresh protein.

Their custom of marrying from outside their own tribe would also lend itself to a healthier genetic line. In a short 500 years, all of the groups of eastern hunter-gatherers who had moved into the steppe had adopted forms of pastoralism and were domesticating the horse. A recent international study involving 150 scientists concluded in 2021 that the ancestor of the modern domestic horse, originated and was domesticated in the Volga Don region of Russia. All domestic horses in the world are related to the horses broken on the steppe by ancient Indo-Europeans, the first cowboys.

Of course, the most talked about group to emerge on the steppe was the Yamnaya. They likely developed out of the preceding Rappin'culture, which began around 3900 BC. It was with the pastoral Rappin'culture that the use of the wagon on the steppe began in earnest, and by the Amnaya period, this appears to have developed into family groups actually living in wagons.

It was a practice that would continue on the steppe for thousands of years. For around 450 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus writes that Particular groups of Scythians lived in their wagons. It is possible that the wheel was first invented by the Proto-Indo-Europeans sometime around 3500 BC. While older theories generally place the wheel as being first developed in Mesopotamia and spreading north and west, there is a significant problem with this theory.

Most of the Indo-European languages, save for the Anatolian branch, have cognate words for wheels and wagon-related technology. Anatolian presumably does not share this vocabulary because it split from Indo-European before the technology was invented, perhaps around 4000 BC. These words cannot have been borrowed from one Indo-European language to another, as their morphological changes show that the terms descended from a common source. Thus, this very significant technological innovation must have developed during the period before the Proto-Indo-European languages fragmented. It not only dates the language to the time period of wheel technology, but because all the vocabulary surrounding the technology is entirely based on Indo-European roots, it shows that the technology was almost certainly not borrowed, but invented locally within the Indo-European language community.

If the technology had been borrowed, it is likely its foreign name would have been used. At the very least, we would expect at least one term related to wheel and wagon technology to be borrowed. Because all of these words are native Indo-European constructions, it's likely that the technology either developed simultaneously north and south, or that it developed first in the steppe. and very quickly spread to numerous other regions. We do know for a fact that it was among the Proto-Indo-Iranian Sintashta culture that the earliest evidence for the use of the spoked wheel is found, around 2000 BC.

And it's a curious thing that nearly all the Indo-European cultures made the wheel a significant religious symbol. While the symbol may be originally based on the sun, it later fuses. with the symbolism of the physical wagon or chariot wheel, with which the sun is strongly associated with in the earliest Indo-European myths. This expresses how important the wheel was to the life of the Proto-Indo-European.

Because of the open flat space of the steppe, they were able to utilize the wagon and later the chariot like few other cultures could. They drove across the vast grasslands like ships upon the sea. It could be that such ideas were also why ships were poetically referred to as steeds in Norse poetry, and Greek Poseidon, possibly an early god of horses and the vast land sea that was the steppe, becomes a god of sea and ship.

With the Yamnaya is also found the first physical evidence for horseback riding. A recent study by Trautmann et al. points to horse riding by Yamnaya individuals by around 3000 BC. The cult status of the horse, noticeable in the Samara culture from around 5000 BC, is likewise found in many later attested Indo-European cultures, with similar very strange rituals found in both Irish and Vedic sources of a sovereign wetting a horse then sacrificing it.

The commonalities between such extreme practices suggest that it must have originated from a Proto-Indo-European cult practice developed on the steppe. The cow was also an extremely important ritual animal and in the daily life of the Yamnaya and other western steppe herder groups, Indo-European mythology envisioned a primordial cow whose milk represented the cosmic waters, and many goddesses and subsequent traditions are connected with cattle. The burials of the Rappan culture began with typical flat graves, the dead covered in ochre the same as nearly all the other Eastern hunter-gatherer descendant peoples.

As they expanded they began to adopt the use of tumuli, and the practice was maintained by the Yamnaya. Also notable is the use of kromlechs, meaning essentially megalithic stone circles. Many ancient Rappin and Yamnaya stone circles have been identified in Russia, and many other menhirs, or standing stones, are associated with them.

Sometimes they would encircle a tumulus with standing stones, something we see replicated in Britain and Ireland, even in cases when the tumulus was built by the preceding population. They created the Karnasivsky idol, A stone carving, possibly of a god, which strongly resembles other later carvings throughout Europe, and clearly they had a tradition of using stones to mark sacred spaces. On the steppe, there was a limited supply of wood. While the Yamnaya have gained fame for being identified as a source of the Proto-Indo-European language, recent genetic research suggests that the Details are likely more complicated than this. While the Yamnaya certainly spoke a dialect of Proto-Indo-European, they do not appear to have been the primary vector for the language's dispersal across Europe and Asia.

Instead, their dialect of the language is argued to have given rise to the Balkan Indo-European languages, such as Proto-Greek. They were also the origin of the Afanasievo culture, which moved to the Far East. and is thought to be the origin of the mysterious Tocharian language that was recorded around 600 AD in the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang, China.

The root of most of the Indo-European languages is, however, with groups of close relatives of the Yamnaya, the Corded Ware culture. While it was earlier believed that the Corded Ware culture had been formed directly from migrations from the Yamnaya, Genetic studies suggest that this was not the case. Though most corded ware individuals carry a high percentage of so-called steppe ancestry, that is, a genetic mixture that was very similar to that possessed by Yamnaya, there are slight differences in male haplogroups that suggest that they were derived from a very closely related but separate group. Though they were primarily pastoralists, they did not dwell directly on the steppe. but within the forest steppe and even the forest.

Evidence suggests they cleared great stretches of land through fire and used these cleared areas to pasture animals and plant cereal crops. They buried their dead in singular graves, sometimes with accompanying tumuli, very much like the Yamnaya and other groups of a similar origin. Though they probably spoke a dialect understandable to the Yamnaya and shared a very similar genetic origin and culture.

they would have also had cultural and linguistic differences. It could be that it was the forest-step dwelling cousins of the Yamnaya, speaking of very closely associated languages. or dialect, which was the ancestor of the Indo-European languages like Slavic, Celtic, Iranian, Italic, Germanic, while the Yamnaya were responsible for the spread of other branches, such as Proto-Greek, Illyrian, Thracian, and Albanian. However, these Proto-Indo-Europeans, whether Yamnaya or not, were similar enough linguistically and culturally, that we can probably make some broad, sweeping generalities about them. They wove textiles using plant fibers and wool and created fired pottery.

They raised a variety of livestock and possibly were instrumental in the breeding of sheep for wool production. They engaged in some farming of cereals and had native words for plow and field. They fermented milk to create cheese and they collected honey and produced a fermented beverage of it. They used specially designed stones for grinding grain, nuts. and other plant material.

They trained horses and produced some horse gear still familiar today, though not the saddle, and they built both two and four wheeled carts designed with yokes to be pulled by animal power. They engaged in the production of copper and gold artifacts. They must have had houses with doors, fences, boats, and many other tools and other artifacts that we don't always associate with steppe culture.

On a political level, they organized in tribes known as the Tuataha, which were led by a tribal leader called the Hregs, known in descendant language as Raj, Rex, or Ri, generally selected through a complex combination of aptitude, social status, and ritual. These tribes were often bound up with other closely related tribes in client-patron relationships. Sometimes based on lineage, historical debts, marriage, and even mythological reasons, this network of tribal alliances could at times bring vast numbers of people under the political guidance of a single ruler, likely one who at least verbally traced his lineage back to the gods.

The legitimacy of rulers was upheld or cast down by a group of elders who served as priests. while another group of people served as poets, tasked with the memorization and recital of tribal histories and divine hymns. They had structured views of social class, status, honor, and one's relationship to the gods and to his community.

They were strongly patriarchal, and they likely believed that one could gain immortality through battle. They glorified raiding, the abduction of women from rival peoples. and the total destruction of enemies. Their heroes were warrior cattle raiders, as can be seen in the Vedic texts which praise Indra for winning the cattle, and Heracles who plundered the cattle of Gerion. They organized war and raiding bands who engaged in ecstatic forms of combat, where the warriors mentally and spiritually transformed into fierce, raving animals such as wolves.

They may have fought naked, save for an animal pelt, and entered into rages where they were perceived as being invincible. Yet, these were not unsophisticated and unintelligent people. They had very strict rules about providing hospitality to guests and strangers, which all the daughter branches shared. They gave elevated status to priests and poets and people of art.

Upon the king was placed the burden of upholding truth, as the Gaelic lawgiver Morin described it. He had to guide the community like a seasoned charioteer. looking all about him judging the path in an instant responding to every bump every stone on the field so as not to break the wheel rim under him that path that the king must find was the concept of the trip truth or right, meaning to them something like cosmic order, known in Sanskrit as Krita.

To the ancient barbarian stepper, the ideal king was of course a powerful warrior who could lead his people to victory, but he was also a wise man, a guide, a pathfinder, a charioteer, a cattle herder, with the tribe envisioned as his chariot. In what would be a shock to some, studies in 2015 revealed that the ancestry of the Yamnaya was not, like earlier steppe groups, almost entirely Eastern hunter-gatherer. While more than 55% of their ancestry was Eastern hunter-gatherer, they had picked up around 35% from a group identified as Caucasus hunter-gatherers.

It is around this group of people that the controversial new theory of Indo-European origins is centered, and understanding the actual dynamics at play here is critical. It seems that as Eastern hunter-gatherer lineages extended further southwards towards the Caucasus that came into contact with a group identified genetically as Caucasus hunter-gatherers, they were closely related to populations living on the southern range. of the mountains, and would have been a northward expansion of this population that crossed the Caucasus at some earlier point. We don't actually know much about this population or exactly what they were involved in, if they were actually still hunter-gatherers or if they too had adopted a step lifestyle. Regardless, at some point prior to the rise of the Amnaya, there was a large ad-mixing event with this population.

This in part is what led to a recent study by Paul Hegarty et al., published in Science on July 28th, 2023. The study tries to categorize and date the divergent Indo-European languages based on a systematic analysis of phylogenetic changes. They conclude that while the western steppe herders do indeed appear to have spoken and spread the progenitor language of Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and other languages, the latter are not the only ones to have spoken and spoken. There is a break between these languages and the languages of Greek, Hittite, and Indo-Iranian. They theorize that Proto-Indo-European first developed around 6000 BC, south of the Caucasus. Perhaps around 5000 BC, this language moved north, spoken by the Caucasus'hunter-gatherers.

When they mixed with the Eurasian hunter-gatherers, the latter adopted the language of the Caucasus'hunter-gatherers. and established the root of Indo-European. Before this, others from this same group migrated west into Anatolia, creating the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, and Anatolians moved into Greece, perhaps around 3000 BC.

According to this theory, Greek would have developed from the Anatolian branch or been very closely related to its origin. They also concluded that Indo-Iranian was unlikely to have been the result of steppe migration, but was instead the result of migration from these Proto-Indo-European speaking Caucasus hunter-gatherers, who migrated into Iran and through to India. Taking only a simplistic glance at this theory, it appears compelling. Curiously, there are some words in Indo-European which appear to be cognate with ancient Sumerian, ab or ap. means water in both languages.

However, these can also be explained as linguistic borrowing, as Indo-European has other words, water in English, voda in Russian, which may have a common root with Uralic. It locates the origin of the language centrally and would, at a simplistic level, answer the question of Anatolia. One key problem of Anatolia is not only its proposed early dating, but that genetic studies have not found any significant level of steppe ancestry in Hittite samples, although there are very few samples as of now to work with.

But taking this as proof that Indo-Europeans didn't spread from the steppe into Anatolia, the study instead looks to this Caucasus hunter-gatherer population as the possible vector, as it is found in Anatolia, Iran, and the steppe. What is critical to understand is that nearly all of this Caucasus hunter-gatherer admixture among the Yamnaya came from women. All agree that the Yamnaya and related steppe populations were highly patrilineal societies, as are or were all the descendant Indo-European societies.

The concepts are powerfully rooted in the very language itself. It's inconceivable. Faced with this reality, that an almost if not entirely female admixture could form the nucleus of such a dramatic cultural and linguistic transformation, especially given the nature of the language and culture under discussion. In a traditional patrilineal society, women are brought away from their own families.

They dwell in the household of the male and his family, and must adopt their way of life and their language, their custom. It is agreed that the family structure of Indo-Europeans operated in exactly this way. In such a scenario, word borrowings could take place, perhaps especially associated with words linked to women and women's activities, say water, which women were often responsible for fetching and for using to clean and cook with.

The feminine primordial goddess is frequently linked to water in Indo-European traditions. However, A complete language shift is effectively impossible. Most likely, the admixture results from one of two things, or a combination of the two.

Either the women were given over as tribute, or, more likely, or more frequently in my view, they were taken by force through raiding, probably over the course of several generations, in pillaging of a weaker group, unable to effectively defend itself. We know that elements of an earlier cultural practice of raiding for women was preserved in nearly every descendant into a European culture, making it likely that this was part of the proto-culture. While earlier this raiding, not only for cattle but women, who poetically are often likened to cattle, was mostly confined to other tribes that possessed Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry, When they came into contact with this Caucasus hunter-gatherer population, they fully exploited them for this purpose. Indo-Europeans would undertake exactly the same practices throughout Europe and Asia as they spread, often in places where steppe ancestry, in percentage terms, is not high. Their male haplogroups will still be disproportionately reflected due to their having obtained disproportionate reproductive access.

to local women, to put it very politely. Linguists have long considered that the Anatolian branch entered the region from Thrace. Recent genetic finds in Bulgaria show that steppe ancestry, similar to Sredni Stog, was present in Bulgaria as early as 4500 BC, and it was likely around this same time, and from related groups that Anatolian developed. possibly developing from a different dialect or sister language to Indo-European. That in the case of the Hittites, the language becomes detached from steppe ancestry, and even steppe haplogroups, is uncommon in the spread of the language group elsewhere, but not at all improbable.

In the historical case of the Hungarians, the entire ethnic group has become detached from its genetic origins as a Ugrian steppe herder group. Yet the language continues. In other cases, the Basque region is dominated by Indo-European haplogroups, but the non-Indo-European language persists.

The Etruscans were found to be not significantly genetically distinct from other Italic peoples, but a step-admixture of around 35%, and yet the Etruscans spoke a non-Indo-European language. Certain aspects of modern language spread cannot be reasonably compared to ancient ones, but one aspect that is common is that power and prestige can play a very important role in the spread of a language and often trumps simple numbers of speakers. In places where small numbers of Indo-Europeans manage to gain power over an existing society, the language may have taken and been established as the language of the ruling class. After an initial domination, merging with the vastly superior numbers of the local population, their line can become buried, even as the cultural and linguistic forms might persist and gain dominance. We have seen such things play out within the historical period, and this is the most likely explanation for the origin of Anatolia.

The final serious flaw in the conclusions of the new study, which I will mention here, are the proposals regarding the spread of Indo-Iranian. Breaking with earlier linguistic analysis, it is claimed that there is in fact no closer relationship between Germanic, Slavic, and the Indo-Iranian branch. They estimate that Indo-Iranian language broke off just shortly after Anatolian and was present through Central Asia thousands of years before the recording of Rig Veda.

Inscriptions from the Mitanni which show strong Indo-Aryan influences including the names of Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and the Nasatis, and the use of Indo-Aryan names since at least 1700 BC does suggest that Indo-Iranian and its daughter branch Indo-Aryan must have not only split earlier than is sometimes thought, but spread through the region by at least this date. However, it is now well established that later migrations from the steppe had a substantial genetic impact on the region, and it seems a very large leap to accept that steppe populations moving in one direction would change the language of Europe, but moving in the other direction had no noticeable impact, but that the language was already Indo-European from a completely different source. The medieval influx of Turkic-speaking peoples from Asia would reshape the language and genetics in the region.

Their migration also stands as a test case for how Indo-Europeans spread during its expansion phase. With these facts in mind, Indo-European most certainly developed and spread via the steppe. The culture, language, and even the genetics of these Proto-Indo-Europeans played a role in shaping many ethnic groups from the Hindu, Pashto, Iranians, Russians, Armenians, Greeks, Poles, Germans, French, English, Gaelic, Spanish, Portuguese, and so many others that now form the beautiful tapestry of the diverse nations of our world.

It's unfortunate that at times this amazing legacy has been weaponized by certain groups and individuals. In reality, there are groups in Pakistan that have as much Indo-European ancestry as some of those in Europe. All the descendant groups are mixed. None of them are pure Proto-Indo-Europeans. Instead of fighting over who has more or less Indo-European DNA, as I have unfortunately seen far too often, we should respect all ethnic groups while recognizing and appreciating this amazing source of connection that many of us from Indo-European-derived linguistic and cultural groups share and appreciate.

the thousands of years of linguistic, cultural, and genetic divergence that reflects the history of each people and adds 445 beautiful blossoms to the world. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like, share, and subscribe and consider supporting me on Patreon, PayPal, or through YouTube Super Stickers. Thank you all for watching and as always, stand tall.

Transcript for:Impact of Indo-Europeans on Language and Culture

Transcript for:
Impact of Indo-Europeans on Language and Culture