Gregory Cochran mocks the inexorable progress of science by contrasting old, outdated archaeology with what followed:
In 1939, archeologists and prehistorians seem to have thought that agriculture was brought to Europe by a gracile Mediterranean people, and was in large part spread by their expansion. They thought that the Corded Ware culture was Indo-European and probably originated in South Russia.
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A lot of this stems from Gordon Childe’s work – for example The Aryans, published in 1926. Understand that this was all before carbon dating, and before a tremendous amount of modern archaeological work, including much of the work in the Balkans.
Archaeology took a different path in the 1960s and later. Archaeologists became very uncomfortable with the idea of migration, colonization, conquest, and prehistoric violence. I say this without really understanding its inner nature: I personally am made quite uncomfortable by the thought of dinosaur-killing asteroids or Yellowstone-scale megavolcanoes showing up in my neighborhood, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that they occurred. I don’t get it.
The low point in acceptance of the reality of prehistoric violence seems to have occurred in the 1970s, according to Lawrence Keeley (War before Civilization). In those days, a log palisade with a 9-foot-deep ditch surrounding a frontier Neolithic village was explained as expressing the “symbolism of exclusion.”
Theories that disallowed migration (let alone conquest) became more and more popular with time. I can find examples of grown human beings suggesting that the Anglo-Saxonization of England need not have required any actual Anglo-Saxon immigrants at all.
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With a very limited set of clues, smart guys managed to get key facts about European prehistory roughly correct almost 90 years ago . With tremendously better tools, better methods, vastly more money, more data, etc, archaeologists (most of them) drifted farther and farther from the truth.
Cochran cites Carleton S. Coon’s The Races of Europe, which makes the following points — in 1939:
- The Caucasoid race is of dual origin consisting of Upper Paleolithic (mixture of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals) types and Mediterranean (purely Homo sapiens) types.
- The Upper Paleolithic peoples are the truly indigenous peoples of Europe.
- Mediterraneans invaded Europe in large numbers during the Neolithic and settled there.
- The racial situation in Europe today may be explained as a mixture of Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans.
- When reduced Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans mix a process of “dinaricization” occurs which produces a hybrid with non-intermediate features, epitomized by the Dinaric race.
- The Caucasoid race extends well beyond Europe into the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa.
- “The Nordic race in the strict sense is merely a pigment phase of the Mediterranean”, created by the combination of Corded and Danubian elements.
Coon missed the Indo-Europeans.
A while ago the BBC aired a special on the history and evolution of Stonehenge. They completely missed the racial turnover at the site and attributed all the radical cultural changes evident there to endogenous developments. No Indo-Europeans for them, either.
“Cochran cites Carleton S. Coon’s The Races of Europe, which makes the following points — in 1939:”
All the following passages are then wrong, but they almost got it right.
There are 3 Caucasian Races:
1. European Hunter Gatherers (divided into 3 groups, Western(WHG), Scandinavian(SHG) and Eastern(EHG))
2. Caucasus Hunter Gatherers
3. Mediterranean Farmers
A. The original inhabitants of Europe were the European Hunter Gatherers.
B. Then came the invasion of the Mediterraneans in the Neolithic. Initially they genocided the European Hunter Gatherers and mixed very little, but throughout millennia, the Hunter Gatherers reclaimed territory and increased their fraction of ancestry in the population by mixing more. These people are known as EEF (Early European Farmers).
C. Then came the Aryans (Yamnaya, Indo-Europeans), which were a mixed 50/50 Eastern European Hunter Gatherers and Caucasus Hunter Gatherers. They invaded Europe from what’s now Ukraine. Then Corded Ware appears and continues East and Westwards. They would subsequently migrate to all of Central Asia, Persia and India. Europeans today are the product of said time, varying from being about 25% Aryan + 75% EEF to being 50% Aryan + 50% EEF. Of course, rough numbers.
The Original Middle Easterners were as follow:
1. Mesopotamian: 75% Caucasus Hunter Gatherer, 25% Mediterranean Farmer
2. Canaanite: 50% Caucasus Hunter Gatherer, 50% Mediterranean Farmer
3. Egyptian: 25% Caucasus Hunter Gatherer, 75% Mediterranean Farmer
Of course, I’m being very simplistic, but that’s the story. Today, specially after the end of Roman times and the rise of Islam, the Middle East saw a huge amount of Sub-Saharan African slaves and admixture. Same thing for the Aryans of India and their Dravidian neighbours, and Central Asia with the Turks and Mongols.
You could say that the “European/Aryan World”, genetically speaking now, peaked in the Bronze Age, and after that it started collapsing due to other people migrating (ironically, people who received Aryan technology and way of life, which is clearly the case with the Turks and Mongols, for instance).
The 7th Century was when the downturn happened for good and never bounced back again.