The Proto-Hellenic Homeland

The proto-Greek homeland prior to 4000 YBP.

From Indo-European linguist V. I. Georgiev:

The Proto-Greek region included Epirus, approximately up to Αυλών in the north including Paravaia, Tymphaia, Athamania, Dolopia, Amphilochia, and Acarnania), west and north Thessaly (Hestiaiotis,, Perrhaibia, Tripolis, and Pieria), i.e. more or less the territory of contemporary northwestern Greece)

So prior to 4000 YBP, the proto-Greeks were already in Greece. When did they come there? Sometime between 4800 YBP and 4000 YBP. Who was already there? Probably some sort of non-Indo-European group that that existed in Greece prior to the Greeks. There are many non-IE words in the Greek language and placenames in Greece and the surrounding area.

These people are generally called Pelgasians, but no one quite knows who they were. A relationship with the Etruscans of Italy is possible. They may also have been a non-IE group from Anatolia or from the Caucasus. At any rate, the Greeks moved in over 4000 years ago and intermingled with the people already there, creating the Greek people who created Classical Greece 1,500 years later.

Where did the proto-Greeks come from? No one seems to know, but it’s generally thought that they came from somewhere to the north.

References

Georgiev, Vladimir Ivanov. 1981. Introduction to the History of the Indo-European Languages. Publishing House of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. pp. 156.

The Rapid Spread of a Great Idea

The spread of chariots in all directions from their birth in northwest Kazakhstan 4000 YBP.

Wow! Look at how fast a great idea spreads. The spoke-wheeled chariot was invented by the Indo-European (IE) people in NW Kazakhstan 2000 YBP. The culture was called the Andronovo culture and appears to be proto-Indo-Iranian. From there, next it goes to the BMAC in Turkmenistan only 200 years later.

Next, 3600 YBP, all the way to the coast of China, probably via the IE Tocharian people.

Then, 3500 YBP, to Swat in Pakistan, all the way through Iran to Anatolia and then all the way down through the Levant to Egypt!

Then, 3300 YBP, to Greece and all the way to northern Europe around southern Sweden, northern Germany, Denmark and Holland. Note that there were not yet any Germanic people in that area yet. I am not sure if the ancient Greeks were yet in Greece. They may have just arrived from parts unknown.

By 3200 YBP, they were in Punjab writing the Rig Veda.

By 2600 YBP, chariots had spread all the way to France and the lower half of Iberia.

By 2500 YBP, all the way to southern England.

Once you come up with a great idea, it spreads pretty fast!

The horse was domesticated on the Pontic Steppe about 6000 YBP. The Pontic Steppe extends about from Ukraine across southern Russia through the Volga Basin past the Urals and down into Northern Kazakhstan. This area is known as “the steppes.” The horse was not particularly important militarily for the next 2000 years.

However, the invention of the chariot suddenly made the horse very important for military reasons. Near Eastern empires show an intense interests in the chariot for this reason from 3800 YBP. It’s not often stated, but the chariot was probably one of the great military inventions of all time.

More Nordicist and White Nationalist Insanity

We have a Nordicist in our comments section, posting on the thread about racial decline in Egypt.

According to most of these guys, race-mixing, in and of itself and independent of the stocks being mixed, causing automatic degeneration of any populations subjected to such mixing. This is obvious nonsense. In a region where a lesser stock exists, mixing via invasion or migration with a better stock with improve the overall quality of the stock. Race mixing can go either way depending on the stocks being mixed.

Ask any animal or plant breeder if mixing stocks causing automatic and immediate degeneration of the stocks involved. All animal husbandry and agriculture is based on “race-mixing” of various stocks to produce this or that breed.

Examples are given of “mongrelized” stocks such as in North Africa, the Arab World, Central Asia and South Asia. First of all, there’s not a lot of evidence that these stocks are any more mongrelized than anybody else, and there’s no evidence that race mixing caused any kind of stock decline over the years. Hell, it may well have improved matters. As I said, mixing can go one one way or the other. Were North Africans, Arabs and Central and South Asians really so superior before they got racially mixed? The evidence for this is about zero.

This commenter also pointed out some other White nationalist and Nordicist lies.

One is the age-old lie that ancient Greeks and Romans were Nordic Whites and that the declines of these empires occurred slowly over time as they got mixed with more and more “niggerish” (mixed with Black, Arab and Berber) genes. There’s little to no evidence for this. The ancient Romans were just Italians. The present day Italians are descendants of the Romans. The ancient Greeks were just Greeks. Present day Greeks are the descendants of the ancients.

Whether or not racial decline occurred in Egypt or not is up for grabs. Ancient Egypt was about 9% Black genetically. Modern Egyptians are about 20% Black. Between the time of ancient Egypt and modern Egypt, the Black % has about doubled. There are zero anthropologists who suggest that race mixing caused the decline of Egyptian Empire.

Further, ancient Egyptians were not really European Whites. They were Arabids and Berberids, the same “niggerish” stocks that supposedly caused the collapse of Rome and Greece!

The Egyptian Empire started in 3150 BC and lasted until 60 BC. Decline began to set in around 600 BC or so, about 80% of the way through the history of the empire. It progressed during the time of Alexander in 300 BC and by the time the Romans conquered, the Empire was on its last legs.

The same commenter says that North America used to be populated by Whites called Solutreans 20,000 YBP. There is zero evidence that these “Whites” in Europe ever made it to North America, and anyway, no one knows if Europeans of 20,000 YBP looked like Whites. Europeans of 30,000 YBP looked more like the Amerindians of the Washington State coast than any other race.

Supposedly, Asiatics in the form of Amerindians came across the Bering Strait and genocided the Whites of North America. This theory has interesting implications. It implies that North America is White land, not Indian land, and that Indians are not the natives and that they have no right to be here, completely the obverse of the standard narrative of Indians as natives and Whites as invaders and usurpers.

This commenter also holds that the ancient Polynesians were Whites called “the Lapita people.” Later on, the Polynesians “sea-niggers” showed up and genocided the ancient Whites. This theory appears to be utter nonsense. The Lapita came from Taiwan and were some of the greatest mariners who ever lived. They became the Filipinos, Indonesians, Polynesians, Micronesians and Melanesians.

The story of the racial decline of Portugal has been discussed previously on this site. First of all, we need to realize that most WN’s are Nordicists who think that Southern Europeans are non-Whites because they are Whites who have mixed with “niggerish” types like Blacks, Berbers and Arabs.

The notion is that Portugal was once a great White country = Nordic country. This follows from the north of Portugal, Lusitania, having Celtic roots. Over time, the niggerish genes moved in, and Portugal declined.

But the timeline is all messed up. The Black genes probably came in during the Roman Empire and not later. The Arab and Berber genes came in during the Arab conquest of Iberia, but this was before Portugal was a great power, not after. After Portugal became a great power, there were few to no Berber, Arab or Black genes added to the stock. The decline of Portugal followed logically from the decline of all colonial European powers, and race had nothing to do with it.

The Out of India Model for Indo-European

Related to “There was no Aryan Invasion” folks, mostly Hindu nationalists and Indian nationalists.

Out of India Model. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page makes it seem somewhat plausible. It’s not. Not plausible, that is. It’s nonsense. Indo-European speakers did not come out of India. India is not the homeland of the Indo-Europeans. The true homeland is in far southern Russia north of the Caucasus, or, even better, in Anatolia.

This is what really happened: an Indo-Aryan migration. Read through that piece and it becomes quite clear that this is what really happened. Part of the problem is with the word invasion. There was no invasion. They just moved in.

Michael Witzel, a Sanskritist, has been in the forefront of attacking the Out of India model. Here is a good page savaging most of their arguments. He takes apart one of their leader proponents, N. Kazanas of Greece, a guy who is little more than a dilettante. It takes a little while to get through this stuff as it’s a bit heavy going, but I was able to do it. Once you do it, the Out of India Theory lies in ruins.

One of the OOI arguments is that Indo-Aryan peoples have no memory of a migration. But who does anyway? Most IE peoples do not remember their obvious migrations either. Romans said they came from Troy. This is a lie. Gypsies say they came from Egypt. Fiction.

Here is an argument against an Indo-Aryan incursion:

we have an archaeologically attested culture of many centuries if not millennia with undoubted literacy but without any traces of religious texts, legal codes, scientific works and even simple secular fables (except most laconic legends on indecipherable seals), and, in quick succession, even as the older culture declines, an intrusive illiterate people with no archaeological attestation at all who yet produce within a few centuries (according to the AIT) all the literature that was missing from the previous culture.

This is a unique situation that makes little sense.

However, this very thing happened in Greece. First, a Minoan cult, a Helladic civilization, but no literary texts, then, in a few centuries, then, within a few centuries, an explosion of literature, poetry, religion, philosophy, the Homeric texts, etc. Further, it does not produce “all the literature that was missing from the previous civilization. It produces new literature at a very rapid pace – see the Yayoi invasion of Japan from Korea and the rapid replacement of the Jomon culture for something similar.

Another argument is that archeologically, the record of civilization in India is continuous – that is, there is no obvious disruption dating from an Aryan invasion. However, as a general rule, culture, archeologically, is continuous in all parts of the world. Culture is continuous in Europe too, and we know full well that Indo-Europeans took over and supplanted earlier groups. Is there a record of this takeover culturally? Well no, but it happened.

However, keep in mind that horses and chariots showed up with the Indo-Aryans and were not found in India previously. OOI folks say silly things like, “Egyptians had chariots too” (Point being?). Anyway, horses and chariots did not develop in India. They came down from the steppes with the I-A speakers.

Surely if OOI is true than Sanskrit would be the most ancient IE language. It’s not at all. It only goes back 3,500 years too. The Anatolian branch may well date back 8,000 years.

If OOI is true than borrowings from other Indian languages such as Dravidian and Munda would be found in all branches of IE, no? But of course they are only found in Indic, which we would expect if Indic speakers migrated into India and not out of it.

Going back to pre-Indo-Aryan times, paleontologists find differences between bones even between Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. Also, there are no I-A bones found here. Of course not. Aryans will not show up for 1000′s of years.

Yes, Harappans built wheels, but they built no spoke-wheeled chariot. This came only with the Aryans. OOI folks have no explanation for this.

Indeed, Aryan chariots are built from woods from the Punjab plain, not wood from say the steppes. But this is not a valid OOI argument. Invaders always use whatever is available. Aryan immigrants brought chariot technology with them from the steppes. To make chariots in their new homeland, they used local wood. This is surprising?

Peter Tobin “Clarifying the Primitive Communism Question”

The previous post on primitive communism was attacked by rightwing capitalist ideologues who insisted that primitive man did not live under primitive communism at all.

Peter Tobin responds:

These folks are profoundly wrong and apparently have read nothing, never mind bothering to find out what Marx and Engels actually said. Their knowledge appears to be derived from the first twenty minutes of Kubrick’s 2001.

Engels, rather than Marx, is pre-dominant in this area as the term arises in his seminal work Origins of the Family, Private Property and State. The key work that inspired them work was the American Morgan’s groundbreaking Ancient Society.

What Morgan does, in a serious materialist way, is to trace human progress from, what he terms, savagery to civilization. What Engels takes from this is that there are identifiable stages in human social evolution. So the primitive stage is sub-divided into lower, middle and upper stages. In the lower stage there were no classes, and state and economic relationships were broadly egalitarian. Hence there was a collective right to basic resources, and the question of a superior authority (kings, priests or elders) did not arise.

Morgan himself speculated on the “liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.” He even finds contemporary evidence in the layout of the Native American village, which he calls “communism in living.”

At this time family groups were consanguine, and Engels refers to these family groups as the “original communistic common household” which lasted to the late middle stage of barbarism. There was even group marriage and incest, which existed in Polynesia and lasted until quite recently (to the horror of Christian missionaries). He does not hold this that stage up for emulation, instead, “communism” is used a technical terms to denote the “sharing” of sex with a related group.

This stage gave way to new household communities (Hausgemeinden), which Morgan calls the punaluan family, which prohibits sex between brothers and sisters and children and parents, but allows it between cousins. But this is not the bourgeois form of the family where one man possesses and dominates one women, as women were common wives and men were common husbands.

Far from extolling the former, Engels make the point that as it withered, the human stock grew stronger and better by outbreeding as opposed to inbreeding.

The other important factor that must be considered is the emergence of man as a hunter of animals and hence an omnivore. His brain grew bigger and his teeth smaller. What is salient here is the behavioral changes took place, especially in the process of socialization. In order to hunt effectively man had to organize communally and develop stratagems for success.

Consider, by contrast, the earlier hominids, such as the australopithecines, who were herbivores and consequently had larger teeth and smaller brains – a trait shared by many vegetarian animals today.

You can all these forms, “communist,” “socialist,” “communal” or whatever nomenclature denotes shared activity, because this phenomena is self-evident.

These stages gave way as man settled down and took up agriculture. Private property and the growth of surplus and authority became prevalent, although residual forms of the earlier stages continued.

For example, Grote, in his History of Greece, defining the characteristics of the emerging Greek tribes, found evidence of: common religious ceremonies, common burial, common rights of inheritance, common obligation to help the tribe in times of struggle, and the common ownership of property, while at the same time he noted the growth of authority figures, kings, priests, lawgivers and even treasurers.

References

Engels, Frederick. 2001 (1884). Origins of the Family, Private Property and State. Honolulu, HA: University Press of the Pacific.

Grote, George. 2000 (1846-1856). The History of Greece: From the Time of Solon to 403 B. C. London: Routledge.

Morgan, Lewis H. 1887. Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization. London: MacMillan & Company.

Excellent Shot Across the Bow at the Nordicists

This is a great comment from an earlier piece I wrote, The Racial Makeup of Hispanics. It has attracted many an idiotic comment, especially from ignorant Hispanics. However, this comment was a nice one. It was written by a Spaniard in response to a stupid comment by a Nordicist claiming that ancient Greece and Rome were Nordic and that Mediterranean types were inferior non-Whites.

Spain a bastardized race? Britain is by far more bastardized.

Tacitus, a Roman historian made a clear description of how the Romans, Greeks, Celts, Germanics and Middle Eastern Scythians were.

First of all, Roman historical documents describe Carthaginian port towns as far as in Ireland. Carthaginian traders were originally from Phoenicia. These documents from around 300 B.C. clearly describe the phenotype differences of the Romans from other Barbaric tribes.

The Roman description of themselves is clearly the same as modern day Spanish person, Roman nose profiles resemble a Spanish nose profile. Romans describe themselves as having pale, easily tanned skin, dark hair and mostly having amber, light brown and more commonly hazel eyes.

The Celts, contrary to common ignorant beliefs, were described in 300 B.C. as having pale skin that could tan, dark hair and to a large degree, blue eyes.

Many Hibernians (Irish), however, were describe as having brown skin and dark eyes. Others as White with dark eyes and large noses. Ireland was then inhabited by a majority of Basques, some Celtic tribes and many Carthaginian traders.

The Germanic tribes were described as tall, blond and and light blue eyed, and reddish white skin.

Scythians originated in what today is Kazakhstan and were describe by Tacitus as tall, grey eyed and red haired.

These historical descriptions explain why Italians, Spaniards, Southern French, Portuguese, and to some degree Romanians look alike. Romans were never a Nordic race, nor did they ever have blue eyes. The Mediterranean people are not a result of a bastardized race.

The Roman Empire extended its influence to Britain, and many Roman Nobles moved in what is today known as Wales. As an obvious result, a great % of Welsh people have hazel eyes, Roman nose profiles and Mediterranean skin, perhaps paler due to the fact that Britain is located in a Northern region. Some might even still look Basque. The only reason Carthaginian or Semite phenotypes became uncommon is because of a constant absorption by other ethnicities.

Greeks thought that blue eyes were a sign of cowardice and uncivilized people.

Romans viewed Celtic, Germanic and other tribes, except Greeks, as inferior to them. Before the Roman conquest, technologically and culturally speaking, they were right; they possessed a poor writing system, did not have massive constructions and lacked a truly organized state. Germanic tribesmen rarely possessed any metal armor and fought naked. For Romans, Celtic or Nordic features were barbaric.

Ignorant people think mestizo people look like Indians or Arabs. I’ve been to Mexico and have some friends who are blond, blue eyed and both their parents look Indian; some others have green, hazel and grey eyes with white reddish skin, and some are even red haired with swarthy parents.

I’ve seen mixed people in Sweden (a great % of population) who come from Sami parents (who came from Siberian Mongoloid tribes) and are light blond haired and light blue eyed. The same in Finland and even in Greenland. This mix happened thousands of years before the Viking invasion, so DNA tests prove that English people have Sami blood to a certain extent too – they just lack the phenotype.

Ignorant people think mixed races among European and non-European have to look non-White, which is really stupid.

Hungarians are also a mixed of Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Magyar and Mongols. Many Russians absorbed Sami, Ugric and Mongoloid people for centuries. And Jews have also been mixing for almost a thousand years with some Europeans. If Jewish people hadn’t preserved their religion, they would be considered European. In Germany many blond Nordic looking folks were accepted in the Army even when their parents were Jewish.

The final point is that when mestizo populations are constantly absorbed by another group, over the centuries they become part of the culture that absorbed them. That is also the main reason why our languages constantly change; all Germanic languages used to be one but got mixed and changed. Same with Romance, Slavic and probably every single language in the world.

Some very nice comments here. First of all, my prejudices. I regard Nordicists as splitters who are trying to divide out great White race. Further, I like Med Whites a lot, and I surely consider at least all of the Meds in Europe as fully, 100% White, whatever their petty genetics may look like. If you look White and act White, you’re White. Real simple. As far as Extended Mediterraneans in North Africa, the Middle East, etc., it’s a much more mixed bag, but I think there are a lot of White Berbers and White Arabs too. It probably mostly boils down to individual phenotype.

This comment makes clear that Meds and Spaniards are not some bastardized race, instead, they are simply the Meds, an ancient White people who are the direct ancestors of some of the greatest Whites that ever lived, the Romans and the Greeks.

Furthermore, the commenter notes that the British are quite mixed, with many Med types and Med features, especially among the Welsh. There is substantial Phoenician and Semitic (Middle Eastern Arab) blood in both the Irish and the British. Going back 2,300 years, the Irish were a dark haired and dark eyed people with heavy inputs from the dark Basques and Phoenicians and Celts.

Even the Celts, romanticized as uber-Nordics, are proven here to be have been dark haired with skin that tanned easily. They were very different from the Germanic types. Further, it is important to note a huge Celtic component in the Spaniards and Portuguese, especially in the north of Spain, in Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, the Basque Country, Argaon and Catalonia. There is substantial Celtic input in northern Portugal in the Lusitania region.

Celts are considered to be uber-Nordics, but the Spaniards are heavily Celtic, so are the Spaniards Nordics or what? The whole Nord vs. Med debate starts to get absurd because there has been so much Nordic-Med mixing over the millenia.

I laughed when I read that the ancient Greeks and Romans thought that Germanic Nordic types and features were inferior and barbarian phenotypes and peoples. How the world has changed, but it goes to show that all this crap is pretty subjective and there’s not a lot of “science” going on in the intra-European fights.

Surely the Hungarians are part Asiatic. You can sometimes see it in their eyes. Definitely, Russians are part Asiatic, mostly Siberian, as are Swedes and Finns, who have considerable Sami in them.

And of course Hispanic mestizos look like everything under the sun. One or both parents can be quite dark and indigenous looking, while one or more of the kids can be quite light, and vice versa. In the Caribbean, it works the same way, but the mix is Black and White. A genetic approach to Whiteness is nonsensical when denying Whiteness to someone who looks and acts White.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans and Their Early Descendants: Proto-Languages and Homelands

The Indo-European languages include most of the languages of Europe, Iran and Northern India. For instance, English, Gaelic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Albanian, Armenian and Kurdish are some of the better-known IE languages of Europe and the Near East.

In Iran, the major language, Farsi, is IE, as is the major language Pashto in Afghanistan. In India and Pakistan, the huge languages Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi are all IE.

They go back to a proto-language called Proto Indo-European, or PIE. In that the languages are all related, the truth is that the peoples are all related to for the greatest part. So Northern Indians, Pashtuns, Iranians, Kurds and Armenians are all closely related to Europeans since they all sprung in part from a common source, in the famous words of Sir William Jones, who discovered the IE languages in the late 1700′s.

Going back 6,500 years, we can reconstruct Proto-Indo-European quite well. One of the best resources is Julius Pokorny‘s Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (or Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch).

Originally written in German, this incredible 2,500 page masterwork has been translated largely, but not completely, into English. One of my favorite pastimes is wading through this monster. I have a downloadable copy on the blog here (huge file).

The homeland of the Indo-Europeans is the subject of much debate, but the modern consensus centers around putting the homeland at 6500 years before present (YBP) around Southern Russia. I have narrowed it to southern Russia, southeastern Ukraine and southwestern Kazakhstan north of the Caucasus. This is more or less the region in between the Black and Caspian Seas.

An arid region called the Kuma-Manych Depression is in the middle of this region and seems to be a major center of PIE culture. I could not find a map of the Depression, but it separates the North Caucasus from the Russian Plain.

There were also settlements in southeastern Ukraine near the Sea of Azov, about 50 miles north of the Caspian Sea in southwestern Kazakhstan and up around the Lower Volga Region near Samara. A good word for this general region is the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.

The homeland of the Proto Indo Europeans, as of 6,500 YBP. I looked around for good maps of the PIE homeland but I could not find any, so I drew my own. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.

From there, it’s not really known how or when the Proto-Indo-Europeans spread out, but they show up in Europe some time later. A good map of their migrations or conquests is here.

The PIE people had several advantages over their neighbors. They were already into the Bronze Age for one, and not only that, but there were horses running around Southern Russia. The PIE had managed to domesticate the horse. That’s quite an advantage, but the PIE people did one better.

They even invented a wheel. Then they logically put the two together and made horse-drawn chariots. With these chariots, the PIE people apparently conquered much of Europe and later parts of Southwest Asia and South Asia.

The people in Europe at this time were pre-PIE folks. We know little about their culture, but the master of PIE culture, the celebrated professor Marija Gimbutas (A woman!) calls it “Old Europe.” Old Europe is very little known or understood. A probable surviving language from Old Europe is Basque. Another, long extinct, is Etruscan.

The very early people of the British Isles, whose descendants are now known as the Black Irish, populated the Isles between 9000-11000 YBP. They had dark hair, dark eyes and very pale skin. Genetically, they seem to resemble the Basques and may have come on boats from Spain.

The Basques themselves and related peoples may have come from the Caucasus long, long ago. Although Basque is said to have no living relatives, I believe it is related to Caucasian languages like Chechen and Ingush. Throughout Europe one finds folks called Black this and Black that.

I had a girlfriend who called herself a Black Swede and later on, a girlfriend named Linda of Polish heritage. Both had very dark, curly hair, dark eyes and very pale skin. As a guess, these types of Europeans may be the remains of Old Europe.

We don’t know much about what PIE people looked like, but it is thought that they had long (and possibly thin) noses. From Pokorny:

Nasals are the most important element of Proto-Indo Europeans since they indicate the homeland of Aryans in a cold, snowy territory. The prolongation of their nose must have taken place during thousands of years of habitat in the frosty climate.

The long nose served Indo Europeans to warm the air while breathing which eventually caused the presence of nasal sounds (Pokorny, p.90).

This type of long and thin nose is still found in Greeks, Armenians, Iranians and North Indians at the least. Hence it is possible that these peoples are one of the better examples of what the PIE people looked like.

Gimbutas is also the founder of the Kurgan Hypothesis, which is currently the best PIE theory out there. Gimbutas (photo) sort of lost it towards the end when she got into “Goddess worship” and whatnot, but it’s clear that this Lithuanian archeologist was one of the great scholars of our time.

Some time after 6500 YBP, PIE began to break up, but no one knows quite how this occurred. At any rate, by 4200 YBP, a split had occurred in PIE and a separate language had broken off, Indo-Iranian. There are maps out there of the Indo-Iranian homeland, but I don’t like them all that much so I made my own. My best guess was to place it in the far north of Kazakhstan and just over the border into Russia.

From there, after 3500 YBP, the Indo-Aryans moved out and migrated into Afghanistan, Pakistan, North India and Iran. Many people in these regions today speak Indo-Iranian languages descended from these people. These folks are thought to be the source of the famous Aryan Invasion of India at around this time.

A map of the Indo-Iranian Homeland in far northern Kazakhstan around 3500 YBP. This is where the Iranians, Afghans, North Indians and many Pakistanis came from. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.

As I noted, the process whereby these languages split off, other than the Indo-Aryan split, is little known. However, assuming this tree diagram is correct, maybe it can shed some light on the matter.

A very interesting tree diagram of the IE language family. Click to enlarge.

Unfortunately, this chart is hard to read, so I will try to decipher it. The first thing to note is the Anatolian split in the tree, apparently the first split. There are problems with the date for PIE. A glottochronological study recently gave a date of about 8500 YBP for PIE, considerably earlier than the usual date of around 6500 YBP.

Promoters of something called the Anatolian Hypothesis have used this to suggest than an earlier language called Proto-Indo-Hittite was spoken in Anatolia 8500 years ago.

The Anatolian languages split off, and the PIE speakers moved to the Pontic Steppe. The movement of Proto-Indo-Hittite speakers out of Anatolia to the Pontic Steppe to form the PIE people may be related to the Black Sea Deluge Theory which has recently been proven correct.

The Black Sea expanded dramatically according to this theory as, around 7600 YBP, a waterfall 200 times the size of Niagara Falls (!) poured through the Bosporus Straits, transforming the pre-Black Sea freshwater lake into the present-day brackish (part-salt water, part-fresh water) Black Sea. Soon after this event, PIE culture appears in the Pontic Steppe.

This is a very controversial proposal called the Indo-Hittite Theory, but I have long supported it. The late Joseph Greenberg, one of the greatest historical linguists that ever lived, also supported it.

This theory holds that Indo-European has two branches, Indo-European proper and the Hittite branch. The Hittite branch is related to the other branch only in a binary fashion. There is good evidence for this.

The Anatolian languages, all of which are now extinct, are very strange and seem distant from the rest. The appear archaic and have retained many forms which seem to not be present on the rest of IE. My guess is these are archaic forms.

Anatolian lacks grammatical gender – masculine:feminine, an IE innovation spread through the family. Instead, it has an archaic noun class system called animate:inanimate. This is reminiscent of ancient Niger-Congo languages in Africa. In addition, the Anatolian vowel system is reduced (fewer vowels) and the case system is simpler.

Many basic IE vocabulary terms are simply missing in Anatolian. All of this debris tends to add up to the hypothesis of an ancient branch of the language family.

Tocharian is visible on the diagram as Italo-Celtic-Tocharian. This branch is extremely strange, since Tocharian was spoken way over in Asia near East Turkestan and Kyrgyzstan, and Celtic and Italic are spoken in the heart of Europe. This is the area where the mummies with blond hair and blue eyes have been found. Tocharian may have split as early as 6000 YBP.

The Tocharian language is also very ancient and strange and is only distantly related to the rest of IE. If anything, it seems to look somewhat like Anatolian.

A very ancient branch of IE also split off around this time. Known as Balkan or Paleo-Balkan, it may also have split off 6000 YBP. There were two major branches, Thracian and Illyro-Venetic. Thracian is extinct, and all that remains of Illyro-Venetic is Albanian, a very ancient IE tongue that is only distantly related to the rest of IE. Proto-Illyrian and Thracian split around 4200 YBP.

Here is a map of the Illyrian tribes before the Roman conquest. It is from this milieu that the Albanians emerged. The Albanian language is quite strange within IE and seems to have very ancient roots dating back to Proto-Paleo-Balkan from 6000 YBP.

Another very early split you can see in the chart is something called Indo-Irano-Armeno-Hellenic. The Armeno-Hellenic branch probably split off 6000 YBP. The fact that Armenians and Greeks today still possibly retain a PIE appearance is also suggested by this early split. Only the Greek languages and Armenian remain of this family, as most of the family is extinct.

Proto-Hellenic may have split off around 5000 YBP, and Proto-Armenian may have split around 4500 YBP. The proto-Hellenics seem to have been related to the Indo-Iranians. This may be why a number of North Indians look like Greeks, Turks or Armenians.

Armenian and Hellenic are also strange IE branches that are only distantly related to the rest of IE.

The Italo-Celtic branch broke off as early as 5000 YBP.  Proto-Celtic split about 2800 YBP; the homeland is in Northern Austria. The Hallstatt Culture is associated with them. The Proto-Italics are dated to around 3500 YBP in Italy. Before that, the Italo-Celtic Homeland is thought to have been in southern and central Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

The fact that Italics (Italians and related languages) and Celts share common roots shows how insane and stupid Nordicism is, as Nordicists say that Italians south of the Po are ‘non-Whites.’ It turns out that those greasy dagos and those blond and blue guys in dresses blowing pipes in the Highlands are the same folks after all, as they share common genetic roots in Austria 3500 YBP.

Proto-Germanic also dates far back, with pre-Proto-Germanic possibly being spoken 3800 YBP in northern Germany, Denmark and Southern Scandinavia ( map). The homeland of the pre-proto-Germanics is in Southern Sweden and Jutland. They may have settled this area as early as 5000 YBP. These speakers may have been speaking something called Balto-Slavo-Germanic, a group you can see on the tree above.

Proto-Germanic proper probably dates from the Jasdorf Culture. The homeland of the proto-Germanics was in northern Germany, around Schleswig-Holstein south into the Lower Elbe region in what is now Saxony-Anhalt and the Hanover area.

It also extended along the Baltic coast of Germany to about the Polish border, down into Brandenburg and Mecklenburg. The original center of the homeland was in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony.

Balto-Slavic is also a very ancient branch of IE. Lithuanian is an ancient IE language that is very conservative and has retained many ancient IE reflexes that have been lost in the rest of IE. Proto-Balto-Slavic probably split around 4000 YBP. Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic split apart about 3400 YBP. Map of the Balto-Slavic homeland. This homeland encompassed Western Ukraine, Belarus and Eastern Poland.

Proto-Slavic, dating from 3400 YBP, seems to have its homeland in Northern and Western Ukraine and in Southern Belarus.

The proto-Baltic homeland dating from the same time frame is about the southern border region of Belarus around the Pinsk Marshes.

The rest of the splits, of Slavic, Italic, Celtic, Indian, Iranian and Germanic into their branches, are pretty well-documented, and all occur within the past 1500-3000 years.

Let us move to some interesting dilemmas about the Indo-Europeans. One is the distribution of R1a associated with the Indo-Europeans.

The map of the R1a lineage showing high concentrations in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

The highest levels of this haplogroup are found in Eastern Europe in a narrow band from the Black Sea in the Ukraine through Poland to the Baltic Sea and in Northern India and areas to the northwest around the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, but that does not mean that these two groups are particularly closely related. Northern Indians are most closely related to Iranians and relatively distantly to Eastern Europeans.

The truth is that this haplogroup is only a signature of a split from around the Aryan-Greco homeland in the Pontic Steppe region discussed above. This left high levels of R1a in Eastern Europe and in north India. High levels in North India are not particularly notable but exist only due to a founder effect. Actually, the highest levels are not found in North India but in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and north Afghanistan.

The high levels found in North India have led some to assume incorrectly that the homeland of the R1a people was in that area, but this is not the case.

A map of R1b DNA distribution. The homeland of the R1b line is the Maykop Culture, shown in the shaded pink region between the Caspian and Black Seas.

R1b levels are highest in Spain and the Western British Isles. The launching point for the R1b seems to have been the Maykop Culture of 5500 YBP. From there, they spread all over Europe.

The Maykop Culture was an early PIE split that existed between the Taman Peninsula just east of the Crimea east to the Dagestan border in the area that includes part of Southern Russia east of the Crimea, Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia and Chechnya in the Caucasus.

The center of the culture was around Maykop in Adygea (Circassia). The region is now inhabited by peoples of the Caucasus and is heavily Muslim.

An explanation:

The Proto-Indo-Europeans belonged both R1a and R1b. Their homeland was in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, in what is known as the Kurgan culture (7000-2200 BCE).

The presence of R1b in modern times between the Black Sea and the Caucasus hints at the Maykop culture (3500-2500 BCE) as their most plausible homeland, while the Eurasian steppes to the north were R1a territory. [...]

A comparison with the Indo-Iranian invasion of South Asia shows that 40% of the male lineages of northern India are R1a, but only 20% of the female lineages could be of Indo-European origin (H, J, K, T, U).

The impact of the Indo-Europeans was more severe in Europe because European society 4,000 years ago was less developed in terms of agriculture, technology (no bronze weapons) and population density than that of the Indus Valley civilization.

This is particularly true of the native Western European cultures where farming arrived much later than in the Balkans or central Europe. Greece was the most advanced of European societies and was the least affected in terms of haplogroup replacement.

Native European Y-DNA haplogroups (I1, I2a, I2b) also survived better in regions that were more difficult to reach or less hospitable, like Scandinavia, Brittany, Sardinia or the Dinaric Alps[...]

The eastern branch of the R1a steppe people was the Andronovo culture (2300-1000 BCE), around modern Kazakhstan, which correspond to the Indo-Iranian branch of languages. Their migration to the south have resulted in high R1a frequencies in southern Central Asia, Iran and the Indian subcontinent.

The highest frequency of R1a (about 65%) is reached in a cluster around Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan. In India, 15 to 45% of the population is R1a, depending on the region and caste. Over 70% of the Brahmins (highest caste in Hinduism) belong to R1a1, due to a founder effect.

References

Pokorny, Julius. 1959, 2007. Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Published on the Internet: Indo-European Language Revival Association.

Who Were The Ancient Romans?

This is an interesting question mostly because it would be academic and noncontroversial except that Nordicists have chosen to shove their hateful snouts into the matter and create a bunch of lies.

The proto-Italics, later to become the Romans in part, came from Austria 2900 YBP. No quite knows who Austrians were at that point racially, as Germanics don’t show up in Austria until late in the Roman Empire near the Fall.

A sector of the Nordicists have created a lie to disinherit the Italians of their claim to the Roman Empire. According to this lie, the ruling class of the Romans were pure Germanics, and the rabble/refuse were just a bunch of racially degenerated dagos. They enlist all sorts of nonsensical evidence in favor of this supposition, including looking at statues and paintings and whatnot.

The Nordicist notion stems from their incredulity that a bunch of no good wops could have created one of the greatest empires known to mankind.

It’s interesting that many Nazi racialist authors did not subscribe to the standard Nordicist lie of today. The Nazis were quite clear that the Italians of today were the descendants of the Romans. In fact, Nazi racial hierarchy placed Meds only slightly below Nordics on the racial scale. Both were seen as highly superior races, but the Nordics were seen as a bit better, as supremacists always have to put themselves on top.

Nazi theory held that both Meds and Nords had a lot of good and bad racial tendencies, and held that Meds were superior to Nords in many ways. In particular, the Meds were seen as one of the most, if not the most, creative race in modern times, or possibly ever.

The Nordicist distortion of today stems from the UK and the US. The US was settled by Northern Europeans and the Southern Europeans, including Italians, who immigrated starting 130 years ago were seen as highly inferior on a racial basis. Science has not born this claim out, but it remains a part of US founding stock culture, and it was a motivating factor being the restrictive 1925 Immigration Act.

I don’t know the UK racially very well, but I suspect that they have always looked down on the Continent in general, and probably the Southern Europeans in particular. Not when it comes to partying in Mallorca though I guess.

Anyway, the truth is that modern Nordicists have so distorted even Nazi Nordicism that most modern Nordicists would have probably been booted out of the Nazi Party at the time. I am not trying to romanticize the Nazis here, but in terms of racial science, they were correct in some ways. Contrary to popular nonsense, Nazis did not hold Jews to be inferior. Nazi racialism quite correctly recognized the superiority of the Jews. Instead, they just held that the Jews were evil.

The Nazis employed racialist academics who followed the army on their gruesome deeds. Over by the Caucasus, these academics undertook deep scientific studies that concluded that certain Jewish groups in that area were not racially Jewish, but instead were culturally Jewish. The Nazis were not as insane as everyone says, and they held by the findings of their scientists and saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews on that basis.

The pro-Meds have been battling the Nordicists about this for nearly a century now, and I support the Meds’ side of the argument. From Roman sources we get reports describing Romans in quite the same way as the peoples of Abruzzo to the Po would be described today. Germanics were described as blond, blue and very different looking than Romans.

The only difference between the Romans and the Abruzzo to Po Italians of today is that the people in this region are actually more Germanized today than they were under the Romans! To the South, there have been some changes, including a large injection of Arab, Phoenician, Spanish, Corsican, French (Norman), Greek and Albanian genes. This is most marked in Sicily.

One lie is that the Abruzzo to Po Italians have lots of Black blood in them. To the South, yes, there is some Black blood, but it is minimal. It is most prominent in Sicily at around 5%. From Abruzzo the Po, the % of Black blood is about the same as in Germany, if not less, at around 1.5%.

Academics have stayed out of the debate only to say that the ancient Romans were the same people as modern day Italians.

A similar lie was spread about Greece on the same basis. How could these dumbass Southern European inferiors have produced one of the greatest societies in history? It’s obviously not possible, so some mysterious Germanics must have infiltrated that rocky land to surreptitiously ruled over those swarthy inferiors. Once again, statues and whatnot are enlisted in support of this, and Nordicists study art and statues with magnifying glasses claiming to see secret Master Race features in Greek art.

The Meds have gone at them again in this argument, and once again, I side with the Meds.

The Nordicist argument is curious. If Romans and Greeks were secret Master Race types, then obviously the central Italians and Greeks, as largely racially unchanged folks, are their descendants anyway. The argument becomes circular. The Nords try to say that the Central Italians and Greeks underwent some massive racial degeneration after the Falls, but there is no evidence for this.

As with Southern Italians, there seems to be some Black blood in the Greeks, but only about 5%. It appears to have gone in mostly during Ancient Greece, so the argument for racial degeneration doesn’t make sense. The Ancient Greeks were a little bit Black too.

Some Nordicists make a truly insane argument about Ancient Egypt which is almost as insane as the Afrocentric crap about Black Athena.

According to this, some Master Race White types created Egypt, then Egypt underwent racial degeneration with an infusion of Black blood and collapsed into the Hellish Cairo of today, trash dumps everywhere, mangy stray dogs in the streets, and rats about as big as the dogs scurrying through the open air markets.

Garbage in Naples. Descendants of the great Romans? Afraid so. How so? A historian might say that down through time, shit happens.

Not only that, but nothing works, and in order to get hooked up to the non-working system, you have to wait in line forever and pay off a bunch of lazy pricks.

Academics once again stay out of this one, except to say that they think there was continuity between Ancient and modern Egyptians. I saw one piece in the Journal of Physical Anthropology that compared genes of ancient Egyptians with those of modern Egyptians. Amazingly, racially, they were about the same at 91% Caucasian and 9% Black.

The truth is somewhat interesting. While the Afrocentrist notion must be discarded, it’s certainly true that at least historically, a bit of Black blood mixed with mostly White stock has produced some of the greatest societies the world has ever seen. At 90-95% Med Caucasian and 5-10% Ethiopic Black, a mixing bowl for the greatest civilizations man produced was created.

It’s difficult to come up with a theory to explain why this stock did so well, but possibly mixing a bit of one stock to a lot of another produces an excellent genetic set. Anyway, this is how animal and plant breeders have been operating for centuries. It would be surprising if humans were different.

Nords Versus Meds, Game Starts at 8 Eastern Time

In the post, Albanians Are Neither White Nor Europeans? Lafayette Sennacherib takes issue with some of my anti-Nordicist POV, suggesting that ancient Greece was populated from the North, specifically the Baltics:

…there may turn out to be some truth in the notion that the Myceneans came from the North (though I think it unlikely that many went back).

I mentioned here before that I’d recently come across this book by Felice Vinci: The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales.

Homer, as you are no doubt aware, is credited  (it’s not known if he was one or many authors) with the creation of the earliest European literature with his epic tales ‘the Iliad’ about the Trojan war, and ‘the Odyssey’ about the journeys of Odysseus as he tries to find his way home, with a boatload of men, after the war.

Last I heard, the best guess is that it was composed about 1200BC and written down about 7oo BC. Trouble is, there’s a lot of description in Homer, but none of it fits the Mediterranean.

You’ve guessed what’s coming: Felice has matched all the descriptions and journey times and directions to the Baltic. Apparently there was a verifiable drastic climate change before which the Baltic was a lot more user friendly.

I think ( I haven’t read the book yet), from reviews I’ve read, that he places some of Odysseus’ travels quite far afield up the North Sea coast of Norway, and even to the Shetlands and Orkneys and possibly Scotland and Britain.

If you’ve ever seen the ancient underground towns in Shetland or Orkney (the back of beyond these days; in fact even the Romans called them Ultima Thule – the ends of the Earth), which seem to have had efficient plumbing maybe as early as 1500 BC, you can’t help but wonder how such refinements came to be in this most unlikely of places – Felice’s theory would locate them in a lively interlinked maritime world centering on the Baltic.

Of course, this isn’t proven, but I get the impression that some serious people are taking this seriously enough to fund more research.

Felice speculates that deteriorating climatic conditions caused many of these Baltic peoples to migrate south, and that they took their myths and poems with them, and that the reason that some of the names of towns correspond to known and existing Greek sites is that they named places in their new home after places in their old home, as Europeans have so obviously done in the USA, Australia and so on.

Well, I agree that the theory is interesting, but in the long run, none of it really makes sense from a Nordicist POV. Germanic tribes went all over Europe, so the very idea of Med and Nordic doesn’t make a lot of sense. And Meds went all over up into the north too. The two groups totally mixed in with each other. Nordics are part Med and Meds are part Nordic.

Bottom line is that modern Greeks are the same folks as ancient Greeks, no matter where they came from. Modern Italians are the same as the ancient Romans, no matter where the Romans came from.

Nordicists take issue with this, and say that Rome and Greece were created by some glorious Nordic types, and then after the Fall, some kind of mud people* or nigger people* from the South (I guess that means Arabs, North Africans, Ethiopians, Lebanese) came into Greece and Italy and muddied up these beautiful White German folks, creating the present day swarthy Med.

Nordicists are serious assholes!

The ones here in the US really, really, really, really hate Southern Europeans. They think they are inferior greaseball part-Mud*, part-nigger* people. Most US Nordicists say that Meds are not even White.

Anti-Southern European prejudice and discrimination, especially discrimination against Italians and Catholics, is pretty much history in White America, but at one time, this was a prominent trend. Italians have moved into the White Ruling Class, and the Catholic JFK was elected and ruled Camelot 50 years ago. Even the KKK lets Catholics in now, and says let’s let bygones be bygones.

The fact that probably 80% of White nationalists are Nordicists just shows once again how out of it these people really. Hell, these racist baboons are behind the times even in terms of intra-White prejudices. How do you spell “loser”?

If you read the original Nazi racialist authors, they do not say this at all. Say what you will about them, but they pursued this stuff as a science.

They agreed that Meds were a great White people, and that the modern Meds are descendants of the great cultures of Greece and Rome. They listed many attributes of the Meds and said that in many ways, Meds were superior to Nordics.

However, Nordics were also superior to Meds in many ways. When it all tallied up, the Nordics came out on top, but only slightly. To say that the Nazis felt that Meds were inferior is completely mistaken. Meds were a great White people, but Nordics were also great, and Nordics were somewhat greater the Meds. Of course they had to put themselves on top, all Supremacists do.

One thing the Nazi racialist scientists did say was that Meds were very creative, perhaps the most inventive and creative Whites that ever existed, or maybe the most inventive and creative humans that ever existed. They said that Meds were superior in terms of the arts, which is somewhat related.

I concur.

Modern day Nordicists (neo-Nazis in general) who despise and disparage Meds as non-Whites, in all honesty, would have been thrown out of the Nazi Party in Germany! That’s how out of it they are.

This is sort of a peculiarly American and Australian thing – the Nordicist contempt for Meds. I’m not sure if you see it that much in Europe, though people are always going to be rivals.

It does exist in Italy though, where the Padanianists pour scorn on the “part-nigger”* Southerners. The Padanianists also take pride in being “Celtic.”

However, non-racial frustration with the South extends as far south as Abruzze (east of Rome) in Italy. Even in Abruzze, they think that they work hard and they don’t get all their tax money back. Instead it goes to the unproductive South, who take more in revenues than they contribute in taxes.

Further, in Abruzze, there is frustration that any tax money sent South in the form of revenues is wasted, as it just goes to the Camorra (Mafia) anyway. The notion of the South, and that means Naples south (Naples is thoroughly Camorra-overrun) as being the Land of the Camorra is not misplaced.

The Camorra for all intents and purposes practically run the show down there. Police try to fight them, but they are overwhelmed. Most of the politicians are paid off, and those who are not might get shot. Judges and investigative journalists are routinely threatened and gunned down.

There was also something like this North-South rivalry in the former Yugoslavia, with the notion being that Slovenia and Croatia were the economic engines of the place, and everything south just took in more revenues than they paid out in taxes.

In the north of Spain, there is some pride once again in being “Celtic”, but I am not aware that Northern Spaniards hate Southern Spaniards all that much, or at all.

Some of the north, especially around Leon and Asturias, is in bad shape economically, and I’m sure they take more in revenues than they pay in taxes, so the North-South thing doesn’t really work.

In Western Asturias in particular, the region is depopulating, and most towns are losing population. Even wolves are coming back to the hills and foraging in garbage dumps outside of towns. In 20 years, many villages in Western Asturias may be effectively abandoned.

The economic and industrial engines of Spain are in the Basque Country and Catalonia (industry in the Basque area, corporate offices in Catalonia). This is one of the main reasons why Spain is dead-set against having these regions secede.

*Used sardonically.