This article is conflating language and ancestry. The seed of the confusion is in Reich’s research but the WSJ journalist blows it up to preposterous levels. Take India as an example. Most of the population is speaking some variant of an Indo-European (Indo-Iranian to be more precise) language but only a minority is genetically traced to Indo-European steppe people [1]
I think that numbers relying on self-identification from census can also be far from the actual genetic makeup of the American population. But after some searching I couldn't find any comprehensive study that tried to trace today's Americans to different European ethnicities. And I'm not sure if this is possible anyways, given that Europeans were mixed in many ways.
Germans are a distinct ethnolinguistic group that existed prior to the unified German nation state.
Many (most?) countries exist because pre-existing ethnolinguistic groups got their own country. For example, Bengalis have existed for long enough that you can easily identify them as a tightly clustered, distinct group in genetic profiles,[1] but never had their own country until 1971.
This has often meant displacing huge numbers of people in order to create contiguous nation states. Some 15 million in the partition of India and a similar number in Eastern and Central Europe.
The German Empire of 1871 is just one of many. Germans have lived in those lands for quite some time. Already Julius Caesar was conducting campaigns in Magna Germania.
The place existed, and people existed in the place, and the communication about that place is taking place today, and the way for one person to communicate a reference to that place to another person today, is to use the label Germany.
Given that English is itself germanic to an extent, yes. But it's also clearly got a lot of latin influence.
All of northwestern europe, of course, had quite a bit of DNA mixing over the centuries, so to what extent some DNA is particularly "German" or "English" largely depends on the time period.
While English is a Germanic language a huge number of words come from Old French since that was the language of the ruling elite following the Norman conquest of 1066 and continued to be used in administration for a couple of centuries.
Amusingly the Franks after whom French is named were also Germanic but they adopted the Vulgar Latin derived Old French then spoken in Northern France and which the Norse who invaded Northern France adopted before invading England.
Modern English didn't pop up out of nowhere, or relied on borrowing everything. Old English was a Germanic language, and while modern English borrowed quite a bit from other languages, it didn't start from scratch. It is still based upon Old English, which was Germanic. Even if you mean extremely modern, the base language is Old English, although the language evolves constantly. You would have a harder time comparing what is currently being spoken to Old English, but at the same time, you can't disconnect the two just because comparing the two now sounds entirely different. Language should evolve, since it's meant to communicate, not on it's own merit (as much as those who study language would like it to be). It's not crazy to think that in the future that a language could evolve even further to convey more meaning in a smaller amount of speech.
We’re well past “quite a bit” at this point. Overall 29% of English words have Latin roots, 29% are French, and only 26% are Germanic in origin. Common vernacular favors French.
I upvoted because that make sense, but isn't that Old English still a kind of "glue language", where words are replaced and of different origin, but ultimately just chosen based on contact with other languages and/or slang that matches another language? I'm honestly interested, because translating from Old English or Germanic seems to be easier to do with automated tools, than what you'd consider modern English. Granted, being American, I am pretty good with figuring out slang or new words (especially having a teenager). I can definitely see American-English being a creole language, with a lot of evolution towards Spanish, given a lot of Hispanic culture being blended into American culture. I wish I knew more about language evolution, because it seems exciting and actually useful for tracking meaning between people.
I guess I explained so much so that you could tell I wasn't trolling, and looking for a legitimate answer (or your educated opinion). I appreciate whatever you respond with!
> On the other hand English has copied enough from French to make it noticeably easier to pick up at the beginning than German. Some of that is simply being a more recent exchange with less time for linguistic drift, but these kinds of classifications are ultimately based on arbitrary criteria.
I think the difficulty with learning German is the complex grammar which is quite different from English. I suspect Dutch or Norwegian would be easier as their structure is more similar. And while there are more shared words in French, Spanish is normally considered easier to learn as it is more regular.
I agree. I may not have been clear enough when I said “at the beginning” but I was referring to shared vocabulary being more obvious vs German.
Perhaps a better way to say it is the overlap between Modern English and Old English is nearly useless when looking at an old text without prior training because of everything experienced linguistic drift.
Meanwhile more recent exchanges in either direction just pop out. The pop up here has buttons labeled “Accepter et continuer” which looks like accept and continue, and “S’abonner” which looks enough like Abandon to suggest what clicking on them does. https://www.lemonde.fr/
> I can definitely see American-English being a creole language, with a lot of evolution towards Spanish, given a lot of Hispanic culture being blended into American culture.
I don't think American-English is likely to become a creole language through mixture with Spanish because modern media is such a huge standardizing force. As a Brit I've never had trouble understanding anyone in the US while in the UK there are regional dialects I struggle to understand.
Linguists focus on grammar and generally agree with you. To be fair, Dutch is really close to modern English in terms of grammar and they have a lot of shared vocabulary.
On the other hand English has copied enough from French to make it noticeably easier to pick up at the beginning than German. Some of that is simply being a more recent exchange with less time for linguistic drift, but these kinds of classifications are ultimately based on arbitrary criteria.
This shouldn’t be downvoted. Except for colonizer languages, most languages in the world are coextensive with an ethnic group or closely related ethnic groups. Virtually everyone who speaks Bangla, Japanese, Korean, or Thai is ethnically Bengali, Japanese, Korean, or Thai.
This is both pedantic and probably worth the correction. English is a Germanic language, originated in an exceedingly small continental territory nestled among other Germanics. Virtually no one would be able to discern the Germanic people who originated the English language from other Germanic people. If you are referring to the English people from the UK, then of course they are more mixed. But the English language was brought to the UK by the aforementioned continental tribe(s).
Nobody can. There's far too much overlap regionally between Britain and North-Western France.
And nobody in Britain has just Brittonic ancestry, or Frankish ancestry in France. For the most part the populations in Europe have been stable since a time that predates the expansions of the Celtic and Germanic linguistic groups.
And yet the genetic differences are so insignificant so as to make them pointless to mention in the context of (paraphrasing) "it's super strange that German immigrants speak the Germanic English language that originates from the cultural region of Northern Germany".
The person you responded to explains that the most common ancestry in the US is German, but English is the dominant language.
You seem to be making the point that the most common ancestry in England is from England, but the Germanic language of English is dominant, rather than the Celtic one it replaced.
It's the same phenomenon, not a correction. That languages spread even when genes don't.
>The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
Their specific point is that "language isn't DNA". To support that argument they note that Continental German immigrants to America now speak English.
My specific point is that English originates not only within the language family of German speaking peoples, but that it originated with the DNA pools that comprise Northern Germany.
Therefore, I don't see how "the Germans are speaking English" makes the point that language isn't DNA.
I'm not saying that it is, at all. Its very obviously not. But the example being argued didn't make that point.
Archive version of the above science.org article "Where did India’s people come from? Massive genetic study reveals surprises
Analysis confirms Iranian influx, but also finds genes from Neanderthals and a mysterious human ancestor": https://archive.is/Wd4tP
>> This article is conflating language and ancestry
From the article:
"DNA detectives, including at Reich’s lab, analyzed DNA samples from the remains of around 450 prehistoric individuals taken from 100 sites in Europe, as well as data from 1,000 previously known ancient samples"
Ancestry, not language.
"Reich’s award-winning lab at Harvard has one of the largest ancient DNA databases in the world and uses proprietary gene-analysis software co-developed by Nicholas Patterson, a British mathematician who once worked as a codebreaker for U.K. intelligence services."
Ancestry, not language.
"DNA evidence shows that the proto-Yamnaya population migrated from the Volga region to Anatolia"
Ancestry, not language.
"In many places, indigenous male DNA disappears upon the arrival of the Yamnaya, while indigenous female DNA is traceable in the following generations"
Ancestry, not language.
"Within years of their arrival, some 99% of the indigenous people disappeared, according to Reich’s analysis of DNA samples from the time"
Ancestry, not language.
I rate your claim that "This article is conflating language and ancestry" as false, and I award you no points.
This article's confusion is where it states "half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya." He thinks because half of the world population speaks an Indo-European language, and because the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European languages were the Yamnaya culture (as Reich's research suggests), then half of the world population are descendants of the Yamnaya culture.
That article says nothing about the percentage genetic component of the Indo European step people in the Indian population. It does mention a high genetic similarity to Iranians.
And interestingly Iranians are mostly not the descendants of the so-called Indo-Iranian steppe nomads (genetically). But they speak various Iranian languages.
Does a claim like this even have any meaning at all?
If you assume each generation is 25 years, then everybody alive today has 2^200 ancestors from 5,000 years ago. Which is obviously way more people than even existed in the world because your ancestors start overlapping, but the point is that you could probably make the claim that "half the human beings alive today" are descended from tons of groups of humans that existed 5,000 years ago. People travel and migrate and marry and genes get passed on at an exponential rate.
I'm glad someone gets the intuition of the Charlemagne paradox. In fact ALL people today are related if you go back 3000 years, but the aboriginees might have very little DNA from the pharaohs. The point is that ONE individual 1500 years ago traveling to Australia (and bringing the dingo) is enough to connect these graphs. The only question is: how related. 0.0000001%? ;)
Wouldn't that assume each parent had totally different DNA? Seems like there would be more than 50% DNA from each parent. At the very least there would be an enormous amount of DNA that just qualifies us as human, in general.
It means that if you trace Y-chromosomes back 5000 years, you'll find that grand-grand-grand-...-fathers of 40% of people are concentrated in the area of the Yamnaya culture. Grand-grand-grand-...-mothers would be from multiple groups, yes.
The article reads "some four billion human beings alive today—can trace their ancestry to the Yamnaya". It's 50%. I haven't checked the research though.
> r1b's population is only 190 million [1]
Their population likely had multiple haplogroups. R1b was the most common (5000 years ago). But, yeah, the 50% number looks too high.
> you could probably make the claim that "half the human beings alive today" are descended from tons of groups of humans that existed 5,000 years ago
Surely it's still notable to identify specific groups for which this is true, particularly when the group itself is primarily identified by an unrelated archaeological characteristic.
hard not to interpret these steppe horse cultures as being the centaurs of mythology.
lots of pet theories but this idea that much human language originated with them implies further to me that horsemanship was the origin of western ethics of stewardship and morality. riders require a unique ontology that includes sophisticated communion with other beings, and it's literally the approbation of nature. mythic surely, but it may also have some predictive power. fun stuff
Given that the currently dominant human primates are also murderous rampagers, glorifying the killing of the men and raping of the women in order to spread their "culture", does seem to align well with evidense of this DNA diaspora.
All just additional evidense that we are still basically cave people with nuclear weapons.
I don't find this kind of comment helpful. Humans do awful things and also do wonderful things. Probably very few people reading this live in anarchy, and the great majority live in peaceful, prosperous, and free place where rights are protected - humans did that and do that.
The issue is, how do we do more of the latter? To say it never happens and/or it's hopeless is obviously false and contributes nothing.
People always over emphasize negatives. As a species, we always want to know about risks that we may better remain alive. So, we notice them more. The good things that happen, people don’t always emphasize. This also means that the good outcomes are studied less and thus harder to replicate.
I believe such comment might be helpful if only you envision that before the 'rogue state switch' 4000 BC people were much more peaceful (still debated, but you can fantasize!)
Hard to measure “peaceful” relative to now in contexts without the structures we have that let us trust each other more.
I.e. we don’t need to be constantly paranoid strangers we run into won’t resolve the same inability to trust dilemma they have with us, by being first to violence.
I.e. People could have been generally peace loving, not prone to violence in their familiar communities, but still situationally more provoked beyond those communities. Both more peaceful & more violent isn’t a contradiction.
Interestingly, it is not the case in the modern era. Cooperation is very effective. Take New Zealand as an example: when the Moriori were beaten by the Maori the latter ate them. When the Maori were beaten hollow by the British, they just incorporated them. At least for a century the Borg wins over the Klingons. But we don't know what the future will hold.
https://archive.md/zSFzj
This article is conflating language and ancestry. The seed of the confusion is in Reich’s research but the WSJ journalist blows it up to preposterous levels. Take India as an example. Most of the population is speaking some variant of an Indo-European (Indo-Iranian to be more precise) language but only a minority is genetically traced to Indo-European steppe people [1]
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-india-s-pe...
You also see this in places like Egypt. Nearly everyone speaks Arabic, but only a minority of their DNA is from the Arabian peninsula.
Which is not a difficult phenomenon to understand.
The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
This is incorrect. The most common ancestry in the US is in fact English.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Americans
That’s an artifact of the 2020 census.
2012: 50.7 million Americans identified as German. 2022: 41 million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans
I think that numbers relying on self-identification from census can also be far from the actual genetic makeup of the American population. But after some searching I couldn't find any comprehensive study that tried to trace today's Americans to different European ethnicities. And I'm not sure if this is possible anyways, given that Europeans were mixed in many ways.
German? Germany didn't even exist until 1871.
Germans are a distinct ethnolinguistic group that existed prior to the unified German nation state.
Many (most?) countries exist because pre-existing ethnolinguistic groups got their own country. For example, Bengalis have existed for long enough that you can easily identify them as a tightly clustered, distinct group in genetic profiles,[1] but never had their own country until 1971.
[1] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/07/09/the-main-interesti...
This has often meant displacing huge numbers of people in order to create contiguous nation states. Some 15 million in the partition of India and a similar number in Eastern and Central Europe.
The German Empire of 1871 is just one of many. Germans have lived in those lands for quite some time. Already Julius Caesar was conducting campaigns in Magna Germania.
that term "gemanic tribes" comes to mind for sure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_peoples
The place existed, and people existed in the place, and the communication about that place is taking place today, and the way for one person to communicate a reference to that place to another person today, is to use the label Germany.
Before 1871, everyone knew what you meant when you said, "Germany." It just wasn't under a single government.
In Florence I've seen an old map from around 1400 that had Germania in it.
Is East Francia (post-Verdun) better term?
Given that English is itself germanic to an extent, yes. But it's also clearly got a lot of latin influence.
All of northwestern europe, of course, had quite a bit of DNA mixing over the centuries, so to what extent some DNA is particularly "German" or "English" largely depends on the time period.
What do you mean to an extent? It's definitely not Romantic.
While English is a Germanic language a huge number of words come from Old French since that was the language of the ruling elite following the Norman conquest of 1066 and continued to be used in administration for a couple of centuries.
Amusingly the Franks after whom French is named were also Germanic but they adopted the Vulgar Latin derived Old French then spoken in Northern France and which the Norse who invaded Northern France adopted before invading England.
https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/324w60/how_...
English is a Germanic language...
Old english was a Germanic language. Modern English borrowed a little too much to really qualify.
Modern English didn't pop up out of nowhere, or relied on borrowing everything. Old English was a Germanic language, and while modern English borrowed quite a bit from other languages, it didn't start from scratch. It is still based upon Old English, which was Germanic. Even if you mean extremely modern, the base language is Old English, although the language evolves constantly. You would have a harder time comparing what is currently being spoken to Old English, but at the same time, you can't disconnect the two just because comparing the two now sounds entirely different. Language should evolve, since it's meant to communicate, not on it's own merit (as much as those who study language would like it to be). It's not crazy to think that in the future that a language could evolve even further to convey more meaning in a smaller amount of speech.
We’re well past “quite a bit” at this point. Overall 29% of English words have Latin roots, 29% are French, and only 26% are Germanic in origin. Common vernacular favors French.
It’s best described as a creole language.
I upvoted because that make sense, but isn't that Old English still a kind of "glue language", where words are replaced and of different origin, but ultimately just chosen based on contact with other languages and/or slang that matches another language? I'm honestly interested, because translating from Old English or Germanic seems to be easier to do with automated tools, than what you'd consider modern English. Granted, being American, I am pretty good with figuring out slang or new words (especially having a teenager). I can definitely see American-English being a creole language, with a lot of evolution towards Spanish, given a lot of Hispanic culture being blended into American culture. I wish I knew more about language evolution, because it seems exciting and actually useful for tracking meaning between people.
I guess I explained so much so that you could tell I wasn't trolling, and looking for a legitimate answer (or your educated opinion). I appreciate whatever you respond with!
(To deep to reply to the sibling comment.)
> On the other hand English has copied enough from French to make it noticeably easier to pick up at the beginning than German. Some of that is simply being a more recent exchange with less time for linguistic drift, but these kinds of classifications are ultimately based on arbitrary criteria.
I think the difficulty with learning German is the complex grammar which is quite different from English. I suspect Dutch or Norwegian would be easier as their structure is more similar. And while there are more shared words in French, Spanish is normally considered easier to learn as it is more regular.
I agree. I may not have been clear enough when I said “at the beginning” but I was referring to shared vocabulary being more obvious vs German.
Perhaps a better way to say it is the overlap between Modern English and Old English is nearly useless when looking at an old text without prior training because of everything experienced linguistic drift.
Meanwhile more recent exchanges in either direction just pop out. The pop up here has buttons labeled “Accepter et continuer” which looks like accept and continue, and “S’abonner” which looks enough like Abandon to suggest what clicking on them does. https://www.lemonde.fr/
> I can definitely see American-English being a creole language, with a lot of evolution towards Spanish, given a lot of Hispanic culture being blended into American culture.
I don't think American-English is likely to become a creole language through mixture with Spanish because modern media is such a huge standardizing force. As a Brit I've never had trouble understanding anyone in the US while in the UK there are regional dialects I struggle to understand.
Linguists focus on grammar and generally agree with you. To be fair, Dutch is really close to modern English in terms of grammar and they have a lot of shared vocabulary.
On the other hand English has copied enough from French to make it noticeably easier to pick up at the beginning than German. Some of that is simply being a more recent exchange with less time for linguistic drift, but these kinds of classifications are ultimately based on arbitrary criteria.
This shouldn’t be downvoted. Except for colonizer languages, most languages in the world are coextensive with an ethnic group or closely related ethnic groups. Virtually everyone who speaks Bangla, Japanese, Korean, or Thai is ethnically Bengali, Japanese, Korean, or Thai.
This is both pedantic and probably worth the correction. English is a Germanic language, originated in an exceedingly small continental territory nestled among other Germanics. Virtually no one would be able to discern the Germanic people who originated the English language from other Germanic people. If you are referring to the English people from the UK, then of course they are more mixed. But the English language was brought to the UK by the aforementioned continental tribe(s).
Yet ancestry.com can easily tell British with Anglo-Saxon and Brittonic ancestry apart from French with Frankish ancestry.
Nobody can. There's far too much overlap regionally between Britain and North-Western France.
And nobody in Britain has just Brittonic ancestry, or Frankish ancestry in France. For the most part the populations in Europe have been stable since a time that predates the expansions of the Celtic and Germanic linguistic groups.
Studies have found genetic evidence for population movements. You could make an argument for the Welsh having overwhelmingly Brittonic ancestry.
https://peopleofthebritishisles.web.ox.ac.uk/population-gene...
Can they? They clearly want you to think so, but my own personal results are pretty mixed on how accurate that is.
And yet the genetic differences are so insignificant so as to make them pointless to mention in the context of (paraphrasing) "it's super strange that German immigrants speak the Germanic English language that originates from the cultural region of Northern Germany".
I don't see what correction you're making.
The person you responded to explains that the most common ancestry in the US is German, but English is the dominant language.
You seem to be making the point that the most common ancestry in England is from England, but the Germanic language of English is dominant, rather than the Celtic one it replaced.
It's the same phenomenon, not a correction. That languages spread even when genes don't.
I'll be clearer and repost theirs.
>The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
Their specific point is that "language isn't DNA". To support that argument they note that Continental German immigrants to America now speak English.
My specific point is that English originates not only within the language family of German speaking peoples, but that it originated with the DNA pools that comprise Northern Germany.
Therefore, I don't see how "the Germans are speaking English" makes the point that language isn't DNA.
I'm not saying that it is, at all. Its very obviously not. But the example being argued didn't make that point.
Archive version of the above science.org article "Where did India’s people come from? Massive genetic study reveals surprises Analysis confirms Iranian influx, but also finds genes from Neanderthals and a mysterious human ancestor": https://archive.is/Wd4tP
This research specifically incorporated DNA analysis. As is made clear if you actually read the article. I fail to see where the conflation happens.
>> This article is conflating language and ancestry
From the article:
"DNA detectives, including at Reich’s lab, analyzed DNA samples from the remains of around 450 prehistoric individuals taken from 100 sites in Europe, as well as data from 1,000 previously known ancient samples"
Ancestry, not language.
"Reich’s award-winning lab at Harvard has one of the largest ancient DNA databases in the world and uses proprietary gene-analysis software co-developed by Nicholas Patterson, a British mathematician who once worked as a codebreaker for U.K. intelligence services."
Ancestry, not language.
"DNA evidence shows that the proto-Yamnaya population migrated from the Volga region to Anatolia"
Ancestry, not language.
"In many places, indigenous male DNA disappears upon the arrival of the Yamnaya, while indigenous female DNA is traceable in the following generations"
Ancestry, not language.
"Within years of their arrival, some 99% of the indigenous people disappeared, according to Reich’s analysis of DNA samples from the time"
Ancestry, not language.
I rate your claim that "This article is conflating language and ancestry" as false, and I award you no points.
This article's confusion is where it states "half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya." He thinks because half of the world population speaks an Indo-European language, and because the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European languages were the Yamnaya culture (as Reich's research suggests), then half of the world population are descendants of the Yamnaya culture.
Is the logical error clear now?
That article says nothing about the percentage genetic component of the Indo European step people in the Indian population. It does mention a high genetic similarity to Iranians.
And interestingly Iranians are mostly not the descendants of the so-called Indo-Iranian steppe nomads (genetically). But they speak various Iranian languages.
I believe this is the actual research:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08531-5
Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Anthony, D. et al. The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans. Nature 639, 132–142 (2025)
"supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation" [1]
Also possibly this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2
[1] https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-study-identifies-or...
Does a claim like this even have any meaning at all?
If you assume each generation is 25 years, then everybody alive today has 2^200 ancestors from 5,000 years ago. Which is obviously way more people than even existed in the world because your ancestors start overlapping, but the point is that you could probably make the claim that "half the human beings alive today" are descended from tons of groups of humans that existed 5,000 years ago. People travel and migrate and marry and genes get passed on at an exponential rate.
I'm glad someone gets the intuition of the Charlemagne paradox. In fact ALL people today are related if you go back 3000 years, but the aboriginees might have very little DNA from the pharaohs. The point is that ONE individual 1500 years ago traveling to Australia (and bringing the dingo) is enough to connect these graphs. The only question is: how related. 0.0000001%? ;)
Actually it's even more complicated. every human has 50% DNA from each of parents. And at the same time 60% DNA common with banana.
Wouldn't that assume each parent had totally different DNA? Seems like there would be more than 50% DNA from each parent. At the very least there would be an enormous amount of DNA that just qualifies us as human, in general.
It means that if you trace Y-chromosomes back 5000 years, you'll find that grand-grand-grand-...-fathers of 40% of people are concentrated in the area of the Yamnaya culture. Grand-grand-grand-...-mothers would be from multiple groups, yes.
I don't think they are claiming 40% of males today have y-haplogroups descended from the Yamnaya
r1b's population is only 190 million [1]
[1]https://www.razibkhan.com/p/the-haplogroup-is-dead-long-live...
The article reads "some four billion human beings alive today—can trace their ancestry to the Yamnaya". It's 50%. I haven't checked the research though.
> r1b's population is only 190 million [1]
Their population likely had multiple haplogroups. R1b was the most common (5000 years ago). But, yeah, the 50% number looks too high.
> you could probably make the claim that "half the human beings alive today" are descended from tons of groups of humans that existed 5,000 years ago
Surely it's still notable to identify specific groups for which this is true, particularly when the group itself is primarily identified by an unrelated archaeological characteristic.
I wish they'd had proto indo European as a language class in high school.
This is wrong at so many levels. It's sad to see probability is used as a hand trick to make this kind of claims look scientific..
more on the topic: 2023
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451
more of this kinda stuff, please! :)
hard not to interpret these steppe horse cultures as being the centaurs of mythology.
lots of pet theories but this idea that much human language originated with them implies further to me that horsemanship was the origin of western ethics of stewardship and morality. riders require a unique ontology that includes sophisticated communion with other beings, and it's literally the approbation of nature. mythic surely, but it may also have some predictive power. fun stuff
Doesn't Strauss like centaurs?
[dead]
Given that the currently dominant human primates are also murderous rampagers, glorifying the killing of the men and raping of the women in order to spread their "culture", does seem to align well with evidense of this DNA diaspora.
All just additional evidense that we are still basically cave people with nuclear weapons.
I don't find this kind of comment helpful. Humans do awful things and also do wonderful things. Probably very few people reading this live in anarchy, and the great majority live in peaceful, prosperous, and free place where rights are protected - humans did that and do that.
The issue is, how do we do more of the latter? To say it never happens and/or it's hopeless is obviously false and contributes nothing.
People always over emphasize negatives. As a species, we always want to know about risks that we may better remain alive. So, we notice them more. The good things that happen, people don’t always emphasize. This also means that the good outcomes are studied less and thus harder to replicate.
I believe such comment might be helpful if only you envision that before the 'rogue state switch' 4000 BC people were much more peaceful (still debated, but you can fantasize!)
Hard to measure “peaceful” relative to now in contexts without the structures we have that let us trust each other more.
I.e. we don’t need to be constantly paranoid strangers we run into won’t resolve the same inability to trust dilemma they have with us, by being first to violence.
I.e. People could have been generally peace loving, not prone to violence in their familiar communities, but still situationally more provoked beyond those communities. Both more peaceful & more violent isn’t a contradiction.
Interestingly, it is not the case in the modern era. Cooperation is very effective. Take New Zealand as an example: when the Moriori were beaten by the Maori the latter ate them. When the Maori were beaten hollow by the British, they just incorporated them. At least for a century the Borg wins over the Klingons. But we don't know what the future will hold.
> When the Maori were beaten hollow by the British, they just incorporated them.
I thought the way the Brits treated the Maori wasn't entirely positive?
But they didn't eat them. And they gave them room in the government.
unpopular and perhaps also inaccurate.. there are more mysteries in the origins of modern humanity yet
[flagged]
> those nuclear weapons quell a lot of our more violent habits, hasn't been a world war since
It’s only been 85 years, give it a bit more time…