So I was interested in this for a bit, and I really want to hear what you think. The Indo-European invasions were large migrations in the Bronze Age which went west to Europe and East to Iran and India. It destroyed the local civilization there and had a varying degree on the local genetics.
What would happen if the Indo-European Invasions never occurred?
- Thread starter Dyl7atalthist
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A world so utterly alien that we'd have difficulty comprehending it. Dravidians and other similar groups would be more widespread across India, the majority of Europe would be populated by a people with pale brown skin speaking something like Basque, without Kurds or Iranians existing I'd imagine that Afro-Asiatic populations would spread further eastwards, the PIEs would likely have colonised eastern Europe and the Caucasus without their rapid expansion elsewhere... and that's just what I can think of off the top of my head.
There's also the technology of the horse. That was probably started by the PIE-speakers.
Everything would be different given Indo-European influence occurs in practically every part of the Old World beside sub-Saharan Africa and insular Southeast Asia. Just...everything.
Only the Western Hunter Gatherers and groups with heavy admixture from them had dark skin, and they were on the decline for millennia so in all likelihood Europeans would not have skin tones too different from today. There's also no evidence Basque formed a continent-wide language family, although maybe some paleo-European language area would exist or would eventually form.
I'm not sure about that given Urartu, the Hurrians, and Elam were replaced by Indo-European languages and not Semitic. Gutians and whoever else lived in central/northern Iran in that era might, but who's to say the area might not coalesce into a state strong enough to repel all but the most temporary incursions from Mesopotamian empires?
But to a degree had diffused without their direct invasions
World would be completely unrecognsible. It would be like fantasy world.
European linguistic situation would be completely different and probably more divergent. Iberia and perhaps parts of OTL France would be populated by Iberian/Basque related peoples. British Isles would keep their own native speakers which from we don't know anything. Italy may remain as Etruscan or whatever what there lived before them. Balkans would be completely unrecognsible. Scandinavia and Eastern and perhaps even Central Europe would be Uralic speaking. Probably agriculture to Europe would be bit delayed but not so much. Someone here said that Europeans would have pale brown skin (like Arabs?). That is not true. Them still would have pretty same skin color as OTL modern Europeans. It was already developing that way millenia before arrival of Indoeuropeans.
Iran might remain as Elamite. India remains as Dravidian so there would be completely different cultural development. Probably adopting of horses and chariots would be bit slower.
European linguistic situation would be completely different and probably more divergent. Iberia and perhaps parts of OTL France would be populated by Iberian/Basque related peoples. British Isles would keep their own native speakers which from we don't know anything. Italy may remain as Etruscan or whatever what there lived before them. Balkans would be completely unrecognsible. Scandinavia and Eastern and perhaps even Central Europe would be Uralic speaking. Probably agriculture to Europe would be bit delayed but not so much. Someone here said that Europeans would have pale brown skin (like Arabs?). That is not true. Them still would have pretty same skin color as OTL modern Europeans. It was already developing that way millenia before arrival of Indoeuropeans.
Iran might remain as Elamite. India remains as Dravidian so there would be completely different cultural development. Probably adopting of horses and chariots would be bit slower.
This is true. One hypothesis I recall reading some years ago was the idea that Basque might be a modern remnant of the otherwise-lost languages of Old Europe. That is why I said it.
Alas, Cheddar Man duped even the likes of me.
Technological effects would be staggering if the Yamnaya culture or the Indo-Europeans had failed to domesticate horses or if a possible dwindling population of Eurasian horses in parts of Europe and Siberia would have implications, thus delaying the migrations of the said language group that significantly influential in spreading languages and bringing technology across Eurasia.
If it happens, it would even prevent the downfall and the collapse of Harappan Civilization or the Indus Valley culture, which might have altered the development of Indian languages and in particular, would even have led to survival of some pre-Indo-European civilization and cultures in Europe.
If it happens, it would even prevent the downfall and the collapse of Harappan Civilization or the Indus Valley culture, which might have altered the development of Indian languages and in particular, would even have led to survival of some pre-Indo-European civilization and cultures in Europe.
Actually Harappa Civilisation was already collapsing due climate change. Indoeuropeans at most just finished what there was left. But India indeed would be very different place.
Honestly one of the things that interest me in one of these scenarios would be the role of the Phoenicians in this timeline and if they would colonize and spread Semitic culture to Southern Europe with a equivalent to Carthage forming in Southern Europe.
That could be one possibility. And perhaps generally Afro-Asiatic languages could spread further altough it would too bit slower due lack of developed chariot technology.
Does that mean no William Jones or is a wide semitic sprachbund able to get the comparative method going?
Even without the Indo-European migration we would still see a selection for pale skin in the area around the Baltic, and we would still see the western Baltic send migration waves out into Europe when a cold spell resulted in agriculture collapsed in the region. Of course with a founder population where blond hair is rarer, we will likely see a greater selection in Northern Europe for red hair instead.
vgh...
Banned
Cheddar Man was a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer, not a Neolithic farmer, and the very dark reconstructions on him were an artistic liberty taken with him lacking many of the alleles modern Europeans have associated with depigmentation in mind. The media picked it up and ran with it for political reasons I would get banned from this website for talking about, but that's another tangent for another time. The Atlantic Neolithic megalith-builder inhabitants of Britain that seem to have flooded Britain relatively quickly from the continent in a few generations and were finally almost completely wiped out by a paternally-Indo-European Bell Beaker-era invasion lived thousands of years later and were of a very different genetic stock to Cheddar Man. Depigmentation widely happened across Europe during the Neolithic and also literally everywhere else intensive agriculture spread in a higher latitude - in Asia, East Asians developed and selected for a variant of the OCA2 gene that causes skin depigmentation, which is why a lot of Chinese, Koreans and Japanese are paler than Cheddar Man could very well have been. In fact in Europeans another variant of OCA2 plays a part in blue eyes, the eumelanin in dark eyes is the same compound as the eumelanin in dark skin so this shouldn't surprise us.
Now, the article you read would probably have told you that Cheddar Man and his ilk (Western Hunter-Gatherers) were actually the original population with blue eyes, so why dark skin? The dominant theory everyone has read about is that it was selected for due to dietary folate and vitamin D levels - if you have an early agriculturalist's grain-based diet, you need to synthesise more vitamin D yourself and you have an excess of folate (which UV exposure causes to degrade in the human body) . Without animal foods that are rich in most nutrients, at a cloudy higher latitude and with way too much folate in your blood anyway, it's probably evolutionarily advantageous to not have a high concentration of eumelanin in your skin (polite way of saying be pasty to avoid rickets). People have argued sexual selection for lighter skin but that doesn't even seem to be 100% universal in humans so who knows, and it seems mainly to apply to completely separate agricultural people in mid-high latitudes so while I'm not a biochemist something to do with diet makes sense to me. I imagine Cheddar Man as maybe having an Inuit-like ruddy-brown skin tone personally, since those people live at a high latitude and have always been hunter-gatherers with a high intake of animal foods. Agriculture makes their East Eurasian relatives and Cheddar Man's West Eurasian mid/high-latitude descendants much paler as a rule.
Diet is responsible for other characteristics of Neolithic Europeans too, by the way. Gravettian Paleolithic Europeans were some of the tallest pre-industrial humans ever to have existed, but a nutrient deficient, grain-heavy, tooth-rotting, bone-stunting agricultural diet so selected for conserving nutrients and calories that Early European Farmers became very short. Males of the Funnelbeaker Culture in late Neolithic Northern Europe who were about 50% Hunter-Gatherer by blood were still like 160 cm tall. It's not really outlandish, countries of short people who have a genetic predisposition to being short exist today like Peru, Indonesia, etc. And also the southern regions of Europe like Sicily, Greece, Southern Italy and ESPECIALLY Sardinia where Indo-European blood didn't penetrate as much are the shortest in Europe, again for genetic reasons, owing to their high amount of Neolithic farmer blood. Sardinians are especially interesting since they have very little Indo-European blood, were never really invaded by IEs until historical times (when Rome conquered the nuraghe-builders), and on PCA charts of population genetics their alleles tend to cluster closest with the original Neolithic farmers from Anatolia. (much closer than the current inhabitants of Anatolia actually! Being isolated on an island with no prior inhabitants for thousands of years helps!)
Steppe Herders had a diet much higher in protein and nutrients from animal products than the local farmers. Neolithic Europeans had pastoralism too and made cheese, but Steppe herders were on another level - they were in the process of selecting for lactase persistance, drank the milk of cows and horses which they spread far and wide, rode around on initially wagons and then famously chariots, and their arrival coincides with (not pointing any fingers!) general deforestation as they cleared large tracts of land to raise their livestock. Archeologists have determined (based on ancient pollen samples and other stuff left in the soil, I imagine) that when the Corded Ware Culture rocked up in Jutland they deforested the entire peninsula really quickly. Lactase persistence isn't unique to Europeans either, it's developed a few times in the Sahel region, one other time in the Middle East and also in dogs domesticated by Europeans to my memory, but in Europe it's famously widespread. Steppe Herders did not have much of a history of settled agriculture at all when they arrived in Europe - the Western Steppe Herder population is a mix of Eastern Hunter-Gatherer-derived males of Russia and females from the Caucasus they took as wives. It showed in their appearance - they were big, physically powerful individuals with an appearance not at all characteristic of a population suffering from a nutrient-deficient grain-based diet.
The prevalence of light hair and eyes across Europe might actually be their fault though - it increased in frequency in a way people studying the Bronze Age and human populations have really struggled to explain. There was definitely positive selection for light hair and eyes in Bronze Age Europe, and unlike skin pigmentation these things don't seem to have much of a benefit for survival/nutrient levels in a high latitude. It's definitely unique, especially considering the alleles for blondism (which one associates with blue eyes) came from a completely different European Hunter-Gatherer population further east of Cheddar Man, and they were combined in this package by later migrations and invasions. Some people have proposed that it might actually be just cultural sexual selection, and to do with Indo-European "chieftans"/local kings selecting paler women, then breeding more and their offspring having higher status and thus a higher likelihood of breeding for many generations. The propagation of Indo-European paternal lines across the population over many generations thing definitely happened - modern Europeans in Atlantic countries are majority Haplogroup R1b. The majorities of entire nations can trace their direct paternal lineage back to just one dude who lived 5,000 years ago. I'm R-L21 myself so this applies to me. This even applies to places like Iberia/Basque Country where Indo-Europeans came late, as a small contingent, and didn't even get their language to stick most of the time (see: Pre-Roman Iberian language isolates)
So if they had a cultural preference for breeding with pale women, maybe they could have done it. Indo-Europeans were very patriarchal, customarily sent out young men in raiding parties and we can even reconstruct their word for "bride-price" so their head honcho and his sons could definitely pick the women they wanted out of a subjugated population. Places where Indo-European invaders and their genes make up a higher proportion of the population's ending up having high frequencies of light hair and eyes, much higher than the original Yamnaya themselves and in most of the farmers they subjugated? This is the rule in Europe. And I don't think it's just pop-prehistory how macho they were (Gimbutas's Neolithic matriarchy idea definitely is), they probably had traditions that made Kyrgyz bride-kidnapping look like a suffragette demonstration.
I think all of these things could be food for thought as to what Europeans at least might look like without an Indo-European invasion (since we can't really speak most of their languages, of which there were many, or ask them about their culture instead of consulting skeletons and pots). I think these alt-Europeans would be short, gracile people, with narrower frames and lighter bones. They'll have pale skin like Europeans in real life, but a much lower frequency of light hair and eyes outside of isolated places (so they'll have dark hair and eyes). Not sure whether they'd be more dolichocephalic or brachycephalic than modern Europeans or what other aspects of their facial features might be like, hopefully someone else can comment on that since average skull shapes in Europe seem to have changed since the Bronze Age for reasons not directly related to Indo-Europeans. Their faces will definitely be recognisably European though, as IRL Sardinians' are. Nothing freaky. They might be mostly lactose intolerant, or the prevalence of lactase persistence might be much more geographically limited in Europe than in real life, but they'll eat cheese like Europeans in real life do. If someone from this parallel universe was transported to ours and started walking around the street, you wouldn't notice much besides their bewilderment.
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vgh...
Banned
Why would this be the case? Was red hair any more common in Neolithic Europeans than in Steppe-Hunter Gatherers before being selected for during the Bronze Age by their invasion? The most red-haired parts of Europe proper are the parts where more of the population's gene pool was replaced by Indo-European invaders. And the most red-haired people in the world are Udmurts deep in Russia. Bashkirs are one of the most R1b populations in the world and they live in that region so you can see where that genetic package came from, even if they got assimilated to other language families in time. I reckon dark hair like most of the world is more likely to proliferate than red or blonde. Yamnaya were swarthier than Funnelbeakers remember.
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Red hair is a more common mutation than blond hair, but blond hair serve pretty much the same purpose as red hair, is dominant (compared to red hair), and have slightly less negative effects than red hair. Which is why the Baltic region have heavily selected in favor of blond instead of red hair.
Also while Yamnaya was tanned, the gene for blond hair originated among them, it was still pretty rare among them with most of them being dark haired, but when their descendants in the Baltic region have been heavily selected for it. Without large scale migration of Yamnaya, the introduction of genes for blond hair would have happen on much smaller scale and we would have seen selection for genes which already existed in the local population like for red hair.
vgh...
Banned
Why though
I know the allele for blondism comes from WSH through ANE/EHGs, also it was present in Funnelbeakers too from Scandinavian and Baltic Hunter-Gatherers btw. But why would a totally different culture select for something that was selected for rather abruptly without much explanation? I guess blondism/red hair in a package with depigmentation in general would secure its presence but no way red hair would be anywhere near as widespread as to be able to "replace" blondism.
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It should be considered that historians are in agreement that there weren’t any one giants invasion but gradually indo european elite's assimilated the natives of the Area into indo european culture thus fact that they were able to do this implies Cople of things
Usually the Elite new commer conquerors are assimilated into the majority and yet it didn't happen in Europe that implies either structure weakness from pre indo Europeans or some kind of social benefit that was gained from assimilating into indo europeans
Usually the Elite new commer conquerors are assimilated into the majority and yet it didn't happen in Europe that implies either structure weakness from pre indo Europeans or some kind of social benefit that was gained from assimilating into indo europeans
Because gene for red hair is more common and without the large scale introduction of a better gene for depigmentation, the gene for blond hair would be unlikely to spread fast enough in a population which selected hard for depigmentation.
vgh...
Banned
To what degree does depigmentation automatically mean light hair though? Neolithic Northern Europeans were already fairly depigmented without such a drastic selection for hair and eye colour alleles that were definitely present in their population, no? It seems like a product of the Bronze Age. And Funnelbeakers/Globular Amphora late Neolithic Baltic/Scandinavian people already had blondism in their populations too by the way, before any Steppe people had showed up . So blondism is not just Steppe people. Scandinavian Hunter-gatherers had the same allele of KITLG from Ancient North Eurasians via Eastern admixture into them and they passed that onto local farmers. There are several Funnelbeaker samples tested who were likely blonde, you can look this up.
The selection for light hair appears to have been sexual, spurred on by Indo-Europeans during the Bronze Age and not inevitable like depigmentation from agriculture. Either that or it would have flared up in the Baltic and Scandinavia anyways as it was already present.