What do you guys think about the Indo-European hypothesis?
I've always found it kind of cool how early Greek and German pagan religions show striking similarity to the Vedic religions in India, with many gods having the same function and names that are in many cases cognates of one another.
But I've also heard some people say that a lot of the work that has been done on the hypothesis is riddled with confirmation bias, many philologists making connections that aren't there just to confirm their beliefs.
I think it's pretty good, but some of it's proponents haven't done a good job of keeping it clean of flowery language (See Dumezil)
I just took a class on Vedic society and religion at my uni so we discussed the religious IE aspect heavily
Some of it seems a bit conflicting to me - on one end, you would think that many early cultures would develop similar religions because of just tendency for them to have the same religious needs (harvest, fertility, etc.). But it's hard to get past the name cognates and the like.
One cool thing that was in one of our readings was wondering how the Aryans who went to India, a largely nomadic people, conceived of a God who resided in a large stone temple (similar to Zeus in Greek paganism) if they had no cities. The argument in the book was that the Aryans had somehow heard accounts of the Babylonian kings and their buildings. Obviously nothing there can be proved, but really cool.
>>386794
>But I've also heard some people say that a lot of the work that has been done on the hypothesis is riddled with confirmation bias, many philologists making connections that aren't there just to confirm their beliefs.
It's the most well-established and most well-researched language family in the world. People who deny it are most certainly cranks.
>>386833
or maybe they were migrating for a long period of time and had a semi sedentary lifestyle.
>>386794
It's 99% of the from "hypothesis" to "fact."
>>386891
*way
>pic related
A land between two rivers? Where have I heard that from before?
One thing I've always wondered is how it fits into the out of Africa hypotheses. Was it just one of the groups who left and happened to collect in that area?
>>386917
What are you trying to suggest?
>>386930
Well yeah, it was just one culture of nomads, probably originating in the Pontic Steppe, that domesticated horses and then spread out really far. There were generally other, pre-Indo-European peoples in the places where they spread, including Europe itself. It's just that, except for the Basques, those pre-Indo-Europeans are basically all gone. Because when people with horses meet people without horses, they style all over them.
>>386951
Oh, also, I forgot to mention, the Indo-European migrations probably happened around the Bronze Age. The first early humans most likely originated around what would now be East Africa, but this was long, long, LONG afterward, to put it very mildly.
>>386951
I wouldn't say "gone" so much as "assimilated/interbred."
>>386974
Can someone explain this graph to me I'm retarded.
>>388654
It's essentially a graph of Indo-European admixture in modern populations with ancient populations to compare.
>>388729
Breaking down Yamnaya ancestry into EHG and CHG doesn't make the data on modern admixture outdated.
>>386833
You've got to remember that Indic culture was already heavily fusional by the Vedic period, and that the Indo-Aryans were a population that had had thousands of years of contact with sedentary agricultural peoples.
