nemitz audio sub

    2:22AM Apr 20, 2023

    Speakers:

    Razib Khan

    Peter Nimitz

    Keywords:

    bc

    hunter gatherer

    bronze age

    farmers

    societies

    age

    europe

    ware

    collapse

    people

    early

    agriculture

    synthesis

    years

    population

    north

    pleistocene

    civilization

    britain

    beakers

    Unsupervised Learning podcast, and I am here today with Peter Nemets. I'm not gonna say friend because I don't know Peter, except through the internet. And we've only had a few, a few discussions here and there. But he has a great substack nemets.substack.com. And yeah, I'm just gonna, like, come out and say it. Peter is, you know, someone who has a life that's totally unrelated to the internet. And so I'm not going to give the whole this where he works and all that stuff, okay, we're just gonna go, we're gonna focus on the content. That's why he's here. He's here because the substack he's here, because the post, he's here because of his Twitter. And, you know, we're gonna focus on the content. And that's, that's how we're gonna go. So Peter, you know, let's, let's like, dig into it. You know, you wrote a post, a very, very long post survey, basically called ‘Seven ages of western Eurasia, a brief outline of the 11,700 years from the Anatolian farmers to the present’. Now, as a preface, I do want to say, you know, my editor, for my text pieces, quite often is annoyed that I keep referring to the end of the Ice Age, like everybody would know when that is. Well, it is 11,700 years, I've been more explicit recently, about that date. I hope some of you appreciate it and recognize it. But yeah, so that's why that date is there. And so let's start with that date. And why don't you go through quickly? All the ages, give people a preview, and then we'll loop back, Peter, I just like dig. How's that?

    Sure. Sounds good. So first, and if the Ice Age goes on for hundreds of 1000s of years has some interglacials, like the Eemian I think was like 140,000 100, like 20,000 years ago. You know, some stuff probably happened, in those interglacials. But humanity hadn't really evolved to take off like it did within the last one. The Ice Age ended, I think, actually around 12,000 BC. And there's like this little over 1000 year long period, you know, this brief interglacial where it looks like Civilization actually starts to take off, not just in western Eurasia, but elsewhere, too. There's some fines and the Horton Plains of central Sri Lanka, that show like kind of intensive cereal harvesting, which may be agriculture may not be. But anyhow, right around I think it's about 10,800 BC. There is this what's called the Younger Dryas event, so like this 1000 years, there's this return Ice Age conditions. And that civilization or like proto civilization in Sri Lanka, as well as possible other proto civilizations, you know, they largely die off in that period. The exception is this kind of like pre civilization the Natufians in the Levant. The Levant, you know, that's like Syria, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon. And that's kind of like spared, you know, it still gets kind of colder, but they're still able to kind of harvest those grains they don't, like the range is still large enough, they don't completely revert to total hunting and gathering, like the rest of the world had to. So there's kind of like a proto civilization. And it's only like, really, until after the end of the Younger Dryas that you see kind of the permanent revival of agriculture. And that's across kind of the whole Fertile Crescent. So not just the Levant, but also like Mesopotamia, parts of Iran, Anatolia. And you see, people, they're exploiting all these different kinds of spirit, you know, wild cereals, and they're both, you know, deliberately as well as accidentally choosing the ones that work with them the best, like, you know, a lot of cereal grains in the wilds, they, you know, they shatter their seeds, just naturally, it's, you know, it's called a rachis or rachis? I'm not sure how you pronounce it. And it causes these like nutrient calorie rich seeds to go like shatter, and they go like flying around to kind of spread that plant around. So humans, you know, we don't want that to happen. We want the rachis to stay strong. So we're picking like the, you know, plants with the hardest rachis to kind of harvest. So there's a lot of different like the groups, no one really takes off in this first stage from like, 9700 to 8300 BC. It just everyone's kind of experimenting with agriculture, they're trying a bunch of different plants. And, you know, there's not really domesticated animals involved. Around 8300 BC, there's what's called a Bond event, you know, they happen every maybe like 1000 to 2000 years roughly, and for whatever reason, during these Bond events, like everything gets cold and tons of people die off, you know, you have famines, and when there's famines, you know, the chieftain you know, the Lord King, priests, whatever, they, you know, all of a sudden, they can't maintain their authority, since, you know, their authority, a lot of it has to do with, you know, kind of being able to somewhat understand reality as it is, you know, these first age people they did have, like, they did understand astronomy, and they actually built like, you know, they clearly had some form a calendar, like, there's this site Jericho, which has various like Astronomical stuff on it. And that's like, very common, like, even the most primitive sedentary societies, like they almost immediately within like a century or two, start building, you know, things that can tell like when the solstice is going to be, like, I know, the American Southwest, if you get on a Casa Grande, which is kind of near Tucson, like about an hour or two drive south of Phoenix, you know, fairly primitive society, and yet, like, you know, very marginal existence in a very harsh climate. And yet, what did they do, they built this giant structure where, you know, they could tell when the solstice was going to happen with it. So these people aren't dumb by any means. It's just, it's very, you know, the crops aren't as good as they became, and they didn't have domesticated animals. So they're still like, you know, it's a hard life. So 8300 BC, you know, everything kind of collapses, except, again, the southern Levant, which is kind of spared just an extremely good climate, you know, it's probably why the Palestinians and Israelis, you know, fight each other so much for even today. But kind of, during that, you know, colder climate, you start to see, in a lot of other places, there's a shift towards animal domestication, not so much in the southern Levant, but definitely in like Anatolia, as well as in kind of like western Iran and the Zagros Mountains. And kind of like the very northern parts of the Levant and the upper Mesopotamia, you know, people are messing around with cattle. And, you know, sheep, goats, that kind of thing. And it's a very different, you know, lifestyle. You know, they were more sedentary than kind of the wandering hunter gatherers. This was kind of the Second Age, by the way, this is like 8300, BC, 260 200 BC. And it creates kind of these new societies, you know, they're pastoral, so you have to build, like, the way that they're developing is not so much like, you know, a priest who has to tell the seasons and be able to predict like, oh, you know, this is when you sow the crops, this is when you harvest the crops, otherwise, everyone's gonna starve to death the next year, it's a lot more, like, you know, there's like, raiding involved, like, Gobekli T’épela, which is earlier than it was kind of a first age site. You know, it's this intensely, like, patriarchal, violent society, since animal raiding was presumably such a hard part of it, and we don't have any, like archaeological evidence of kind of this intense raiding other than that, you know, a bunch of these bones from that era, you know, clearly show evidence of violence. And then we have kind of comparable, you know, anthropological research in the last couple of decades, which shows, you know, hey, pastoralism, when you're herding these animals, you know, a lot of the conflict is going to come from, you know, people fighting for control these animals. So by like the 7000s, you have this synthesis, you start seeing, like the mixture of crops as well as animals. You know, so there's like a lot of churn, but nonetheless, like there were still pretty xenophobic societies, like they weren't really mixing that much with their neighbors, like the people in the Zagros Mountains are very distinct. The people in Anatolia are very distinct. And then the people in kind of the Southern Levant area are very distinct. And that doesn't really change until kind of the mid to late 7th Millennium, like the 6000 BC is when you do start seeing like a lot of mixing in the South Caucasus region, especially. So that second age ends, there's this like absolutely massive Cataclysm around 6200 BC. There's all these floods in the Pacific Northwest here in America. There's the Storegga Slides for a good part of the continental shelf off the coast of Norway collapses and there's like all these, you know, probably three tsunamis, I think is the current belief. You know, that kind of deluged the whole eastern coast of Britain. I think like even in the highlands, you can find like seashells from that layer, like right around 6200 BC. The Doggerland Land Bridge, which was more of an like archipelago at the time than a true like land bridge by 6200 BC, was kind of drowned in that period, presumably wiping out out like everyone who lived there. In the Danube River, that's kind of like, you know, we're Bulgaria and Romania, like their border up to, you know, through Serbia, Hungary, and into Austria. There are a bunch of floods there, which devastated the hunter gatherers. So just, you know, all these cataclysms going on in 6200 BCE. And it kind of like opens the way to, you know, the expansion of these, you know, farmers from the Middle East. So the Anatolian farmers, you know, they do have like cows and, you know, domesticate animals by that point, they move in, they reach Portugal by 5600 BC and Germany, I think, right around the same time. But their kind of like, ecological range is very restrictive, they focus on settling in areas with loess soils, which were very fertile. You know, meanwhile, in the east, you have, you know, like the farmers from the Zagros, who have mixed in, you know, somewhat with the farmers from Anatolia, you know, they're pushing into like the Southern Caspian, which was previously inhabited by gazelle and seal hunters. You know, I think there's some contacts in the 5000s, between the agricultural date Jietun society, and they're kind of like modern day Turkmenistan, Northeastern Iran. You know, they go and you would know that genetics better than I would, but there's clearly like some sort of cultural technological exchange between them and the people of the Indus Valley. Wasn't there a genetic exchange to or was it just like trade,

    Wait what date are you talking about?

    This would be like the 5000s with the Jietun culture and like the very beginning of Mehrgarh

    Okay, so Jietun where are they from originally is the hypothesis?

    They're from like, you know, Khorasan basically Northeastern Iran like Southwestern Afghanistan.

    Yeah. So what I would say to that is, there looks to be an insertion or like admixture of a minority Siberian component at around that time, it's definitely before the the steppe Indo-Aryans came, the enrichment into the Indus Valley. And that was probably mediated, I think, through a mixed population. So that could be a signal of that because there was consistent movement of ancestral North Eurasian, like, let's say, from the Altai region and kind of Kazakhstan southward along the, the fringe in, you know, the Pamirs in that area. It looks like probably where there's like more precipitation of the mid latitudes as people always go in North and South, it seems. So I think that's what you're what you're alluding to there.

    Yeah. I think, like the Geok-Syur site I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that, I think maybe in like the 3000s or 2000s, I think it's in that big, you know, South Central Asia, genetic paper a couple of years ago, you know, and they found that kind of, like ancestral North Eurasian rich component within that kind of, like, southeastern Caspian region. So that makes sense, then if it uh, you know, that kind of mixed in with these farmers migrating from, you know, the Zagros. And then, you know, they mixed with the Eastern Caspian people, and then, you know, they pushed into the Indus from there.

    Yeah. Yeah. And just to be clear, because, like, I have, you know, listeners who are quite, we're gonna get, if I don't like clarify here, it does look like now to the best of our knowledge that the dominant Iranian component in the Indus Valley Civilization split off from the Zagros farmers during the Pleistocene, probably well, after the last glacial maximum, before the end of the Pleistocene, 11,700 years ago. And so you know, their dominant component is not actually Zagreb, Farmer proper, but probably a related population that was probably occupied Afghanistan, perhaps the fringe of Pakistan, the whole area of the Pamirs, just just to be clear.

    Yeah, there's some, you know, I think it's like the Tutkaulian complex of Tajikstan you know, and I think that's the current belief for that kind of like Zagrosian like population that migrated to Central Asia during the Pleistocene.

    Alright, so I gotta be clear for you. And for the listeners. I am recognizing some of these archaeological complexes, but a lot of them are Greek to me, so just bear with me.

    I mean, they're Greek to me too. I just kind of like read the literature and try to make sense of it. So what's going on and like the 5000s You know, you see these farmers you know, this kind of synthesis of the farmers and the herders, you know, they're expanding into Central Asia have some influence in the Indus Valley, you know, they overrun a good chunk of Europe. And, you know, when you start getting into the 4000s, you actually start seeing, like, some movement into Northwestern Africa too. The Cardial Ware people they, you know, I mean, that to me to go into this is kind of like a long tangent that doesn't really have that much to do with the thesis. But there's kind of like,

    why don't you just move past that? Because we'll loop back, okay, you can dig you know, I mean, that's, I think how we should do this.

    Gotcha. So, you know, Third Age, you've or this, you know, Second Age, you've got this, or we went over the second fall, you know, floods and everything. So third age 6200 BC, to 4400 BC. You know, the farmer herder synthesis expands everywhere, you know, people have goats, they have pigs, it was presumably devastating to a lot of the hunter gatherers everywhere, you know, pigs and cows, they carry all sorts of nasty diseases, like, you know, cows, for instance, can carry tuberculosis. And, you know, I think the earliest tuberculosis find is from like a second age, sight, like, you know, 8000 BC, roughly, I think, northern Mesopotamia. So, I think a lot of the reasons for why it was specifically this, you know, Second Age synthesis of, you know, animal domestication and farmers that took over in the Third Age was because they had resistance to a lot of these diseases carried by domestic animals that the, you know, hunter gatherers that they encountered in the Third Age didn't necessarily have third age, we also see kind of the rise of like irrigation, there's a lot more mixing, at least in the Middle East. So you know, some signs of like cosmopolitanism, that kind of like extreme xenophobia, racism, whatever you want to call it, that feature like the first and second age, you know, it still exists, but it's not like, to the same extent, like we have, you know, there's records in the Americas, for instance, you know, a lot of the peoples, they only, you know, they're only concepts for, you know, they would call themselves like the humans or the speakers, and then, you know, all of their neighbors would be known as, like, the enemies or the animals or something like that. And that kind of happens and like, Europe too, like, you know, even in medieval Russia, the Russians called their neighbors like, the mutes, the strange ones, you know, the Nemetsi the Chudsi, that kind of stuff. So it's not like something that's totally alien. But there starts to be like some kind of cosmopolitanism. Within the Third Age, I start to see like, a lot more fortifications. You know, which is, you know, chiefdoms that kind of thing, more than just, you know, roving bands of, you know, kind of, there's definitely a lot of like endemic warfare, once the farmers had kind of like taken over the ecologies that they could exploit. They contested those very fiercely, especially after 5000 BC, once they populated them. A lot of the population stuff happened like very, very rapidly, I think, you know, there are populations in a lot of places were probably doubling every, like 20 to 25 years or so. It's, you know, after eight generations, they could just take over an area, if there weren't hunter gatherers there. The third fall was kind of mysterious. It's around 4400 BC, at least in Europe. I'm not as familiar with India and the Middle East around 4400 BCE. But in Europe, like it's clear that something absolutely massive happens, since you see like the downfall of all of these like farmers societies, and their conquest by the hunter gatherers, and it seems to be like, specifically their neighboring hunter gatherers that take them over, like, you know, pops up in Ukraine, Poland, Germany, kind of like the low countries as well as Iberia. And it looks like these basically everywhere, except for Croatia, which was like the one place where the farmers kind of held up. But what I think happened there for this, you know, this third fall around 4400 BCE, was, you start to see like, right around 4600 4500 BC is the spread of like copper working, copper mining, that kind of thing. And it's in these locations in like the Carpathians, in Hungary and Austria, which were kind of like not in the farmer realm, you know, it's like up in the mountains. So you have like these hunter gatherers, and I think what was happening is the hunter gatherers had access to the metal, they became like the wealthy and powerful ones. And then, you know, that kind of broke the old order of the farmers and they managed to conquer the farmers. And they created like this hunter gatherer farmer synthesis, which was a lot better than either like the farmer culture and the hunter gatherer culture. So as a result like after that, like horrible event where, you know, obviously tons of people were killed and raped because In the Y chromosomes of the successor peoples end up being like in Iberia, something like 80% of hunter gatherer, even though they were only like 15 to 20% of the autosomal ancestry you know, but the synthesis like definitely takes off the parts of Europe that, you know, like Southern Scandinavia, Britain, you know, kind of like the areas not around the loess soil start to be taken over by these new like, this hunter gatherer and farmer synthesis. This is also when, you know, I think something similar happened in the South Caucasus to you see, these hunter gatherer cultures, which had survived all the way into, like, you know, the fifth millennium BC, coexisting with farmers for, you know, 1000s of years, in some cases, and all of a sudden, like, their signs of their existence disappear. And you start seeing, like, major fortified sites. So, you know, there's kind of like state, kind of like state structures that are starting to be built, you know, I know for like, the Neolithic France stuff around like 4000 BC, they're, you know, they couldn't really if you look at like the PCA, there's not that much difference between, like the people of Southern France, like in the Pyrenees, and the people in kind of like the Paris basin, which I think along with kind of evidence of large scale colonization of Britain, around the same time, from, you know, the same people, shows there was some, you know, like state structures that were integrating these people and kind of like, binding them together. So, that kind of society, you know, that takes off in Europe. Everything is like thriving. And, you know, it's not until like the 3600 BC, and that's when there actually is a climate downturn. And kind of like the old Europe, you know, the hunter gatherer farmers synthesis starts to decline, population falls. And finally, you know, it's just kind of like, someone was going to shake things up, and that someone just happened to be the Indo Europeans who had taken up kind of cattle pastoralism, you know, they're milking their cows, they figured out how to ride horses, although mostly, I think it was, you know, kind of horse driven carts were, you know, providing them the logistics for long distance military campaigns. Senior Europeans, they go in, they, like, totally wipe out certain groups, like, you know, the funnel beakers were basically annihilated as were the Cucuteni–Trypillia people, you know, but some people, you know, kind of like the Spanish integrated, like the Tlaxcala you know, when they conquered Mexico, and, you know, they formed the Mexicans, you know, it looks like it was similar for the Indo Europeans with the kind of early European farmer, Western hunter gatherer, like synthesis. You know, the globular amphora cultures, they mixed with them, they formed like this new synthesis the Corded Ware culture and that's kind of like, you know, one part of the big, you know, change around 3000 BC, there's a lot of other stuff going on, like you see the rise of Egypt, you see, you know, the Indus Valley civilisation starts to become like, a lot more integrated in the world sphere, you've got like the sail the wheel that are going around everywhere. You see, like the Minoans, they launch, like this massive invasion of Greece, presumably from kind of like the northern coast of Anatolia, which is shielded from, you know, kind of Central Anatolia, by you know, the various mountains there. It's that kind of ushurs in the Bronze Age, there's this new like, global structure, presumably mediated by like the Indo Europeans controlling like these trans, you know, steppe trade routes. And that goes on for a couple 100 years. There's a big, you know, the 2200 BC, that's another, you know, a lot of areas did collapse, but the Bronze Age like did endure it, even though it was definitely not a pleasant time. Like the Indus Valley civilization had some issues, even though it didn't really collapse for another couple 100 years. Down in like, Karnataka, there's, you know, evidence of like, large scale, like burnings of, you know, farmsteads, that kind of thing, which might be the arrival of the Dravidians, you know, from the north, you know, I don't think the DNA is really illuminated that yet,or has it?

    Not yet. We can talk about that later. Maybe, maybe, but you really like there's no DNA right now that's published. I mean, I guess I'll just say it like, it looks like people in India just sitting on ancient DNA, I don't know what's going on. There's a lot of lot of - you know, there's a lot of anger and right now. So in the online community, you probably are a little bit of it.

    Yeah, I see it. I'm I'm really eager to see you know, what the answers for a lot of this stuff will be as well. You know, because the other interesting thing too, you know, it's focusing more on like Western areas - See like, because I don't know, like, nearly enough to judge on eastern areas yet. But I guess there were like some, you know, signs of like rice based civilizations kind of like more in the Ganges Delta area. You know, they were rice based rather than wheat based, that kind of thing. So I'm kind of interested to see like, what kind of, you know, genetic impact those guys had to.

    Yeah, yeah, no,

    that would have been like, long before the Munda arrived, I think. Right?

    Yes. So the Munda, just for the listeners Austroasiatic people, and their language is Austroasiatic. They're about like, 20 25%, East Asian, it looks Southeast Asian Austroasiatic. And it's all paternal. Like there's almost no East Asian mitochondrial DNA. But like something like 60% is East Asia and y chromosomal. And basically, if it is true, that agriculture came to Southeast Asia after 4000 BCE, by definition, or 2000 BC, so 4000 years ago, by definition Munda would have to post aid that, although it could be a little earlier in some areas, there are some finds in Myanmar that suggests that maybe there was more early intrusion and the location in Vietnam in northern Vietnam that dates to there's there's a site in northern Vietnam, where Australia Melanesia basically, just you know, hunter gatherer forger people are buried with farmer people from north from China, data 2000 BCE. So that's usually the peg for when agriculture started spreading. But there's a site in Myanmar, which is like 100 or 200 years later, but it looks just mixed in a way that indicates that they were there for a while. So it could be a little earlier. But overall, yes, the Munda are pretty late arrivers, to the subcontinent, definitely, after the coalescence of the Indus Valley Civilization people.

    Okay. So the 2200 BC, that was like, you know, it was a pretty major collapse, but it didn't end the Bronze Age. That had to wait until like, the Bronze Age is the fifth age, by the way, that's like 3000 BC to 800 BC by my, you know, crude, you know, chronology, Bronze Age collapse, you know, absolute catastrophe, you have all these droughts in like the Middle East and East Africa. And, you know, so people are starving, you know, the kings, lords, high priests, whatever, they can't, you know, do their gift exchange and stuff that maintains their, you know, kind of their social framework and legitimacy. So there's just like, widespread, you know, collapse everywhere. And I think it brought down, you know, like, everyone focuses on the eastern Mediterranean, since that's the area, that's the best studied, we actually have, like records of it. You know, like, some of the stuff in the Bible, I think happened in like, during the Bronze Age collapse, like Solomon, and David. You know, that whole thing, I think, was maybe like 1050 BCE. To my understanding, I know, the Biblical Institute at Jerusalem guys do a lot of that research. You know, so a lot of terrible stuff happens. And, you know, it's interesting, there's a recent, I think the only the preprints out it should be published in the next couple of months. But hepatitis strains actually, like largely die off during the Bronze Age collapse, which just gives some idea of like, how far international contacts fell in that period. There's a lot of evidence of just like, absolutely massive population turnover. You know, in Britain, for instance, for like the Celts replaced half the population. You know, a lot of stuff going on in India as well, I think that's when, like the gray painted ware people are spreading, who are mostly Aryans, to my understanding. The Iranians, you know, they sweep into Iran. You know, there's parts like the Don River where people just like forget, you know, they lose access to metal and, you know, they just go back to like stone and bone tools, basically, like literally, they go back to the Stone Age just because the collapse falls that far. And then you also have the Uralic peoples, you know, the ancestors, the Finns, the Udmurt, the Maori, the Estonians, you know, they go and they still have like access to all this bronze metal unlike everyone else who's you know, trade networks are breaking down. So they go and they conquer, like all of Russia, north of the forest line and cross into like Estonia, the Baltic, Finland. And, you know, it's kinda like these warbands of Uralic chieftains who set themselves up as the new rulers. I don't think there was that much female migration. And, you know, that's kind of a different story because it looks like there were like several different migrations, like the one that produced the Udmurts and the Komi went like via the North and the Pechora, whereas the other ones like, you know, probably went further south. So that's the Bronze Age collapse. And one part of the world that actually kind of like endured the Bronze Age collapse This was the South Caucasus, which had experienced kind of like its own localized collapse around 1500 BC, possibly due - and you know, this is just like wild speculation due to kind of the, you know, the Iranians Aryans in Central Asia, you know, they took over, you know, the copper and like tin trade routes to Central Asia and like those markets for the wealthy civilizations, Mesopotamia. So the kind of South Caucasus peoples, they were like, pushed to the periphery, by this, like takeover, you know, by all these changes going in Central Asia. So, they actually had these early experiments with iron working with the iron bloomeries in the South Caucasus. And, you know, iron working kind of, like spreads out from the South Caucasus, you know, gradually goes into like Europe, the Middle East Africa, India is a little bit different, you know, I'm gonna mispronounce it, it's like Chhattisgarh, but kind of like the, you know, very remote area, even today in India to my understanding, but there's kind of the innovators of iron metallurgy in India, you know, so it kind of like diffuses from that part. So it's kind of like these very peripheral people's, you know, whether it's the Uralic’s with their bronze metallurgy, in like the Altai, it was, you know, the Colchian civilization in the West, you know, South West Caucasus, as well as these people in Chhattisgarh who are like spreading metallurgy, you know, around the world, right at the end of the Bronze Age collapse, which was the, you know, the fifth fall fifth collapse and my chronology. And I think, you know, again, this is just like total speculation. There's the whole like, Prometheus myth, where he's on Mount Elbrus and puts down days, I think it's Russia, maybe it's in Georgia. You know, but he's kind of like, you know, he's the one that gives like, fire to the Greeks. And I kind of wonder if that's like a dim memory of like, these Caucasian people like spreading, you know, technology and knowledge back to all of these people who had a, you know, collapse during the Bronze Age. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not gonna just total speculation. So the sixth age, which is roughly like 800 BC to 80 AD you know, the Iron Age, the Classical Age later parts, late antiquity, you know, Romans, the Persians, you know, the Mauryans, the Guptas, you know, everyone's pretty familiar with it. Very different, like social structure, because of the way that iron changes things, you know, tin, you know, so for bronze you need like copper, and tin. And even though everywhere has copper, tin is pretty rare. And, you know, the competition for these tin sources drove a lot of stuff, you know, possibly Celtic invasion of Britain, possibly, you know, the Iranian Aryan conquest of like, Central Asia. Iron though, you know, a lot more common, takes more like capital investment, just to get, you know, to make like bloomeries and stuff, and it does to make bronze. But at the same time, like, since iron is more like available, it favors the creation of like, these large infantry armies, rather than having like these small war bands of like guys who just take over on chariots or whatever, with their bronze Arms and Armor. Instead, you know, everything kind of changed to how does a state mobilize like as many men as it possibly can, to, you know, be armed by its, you know, with armed with, you know, iron weapons. So, you know, whereas everything was kind of like totally shattered and 100 BC, there's this definite trend towards consolidation in India, the Middle East, and in Europe, too. You know, that's where you get, like the Romans, they start off as this kind of like tribe and, you know, then the Persians they start off, it's like, or, I guess, the person, or the, the better way to describe it would be, you know, the Romans started off as kind of like the Keystone ally, and like, this alliance network of italic peoples, and they, you know, became powerful not through getting like the wealth, you know, collecting taxes and tributes from their neighbors, but by, you know, getting soldiers you know, as part of their, like alliance structure, so they had to, like, you know, conquer or die for them, if they didn't, if they weren't at war, and they very rarely were not at war, then, you know, their allies would, you know, their allies have their own political systems, their own customs, their own languages, and a lot of cases really ended like the first century in the aftermath of the social war, when everything you know, when a lot of those peoples got taken in as like Roman citizens and stuff. They always had to be at war, they always had to get like more and more plunder, to pay off their allies with and they just kind of like, you know, snowballed and took over everyone else. In Greece, it was a lot different. They had the Alliance structures, but like, you know, you've got what was there was the Peloponnesian Link was Sparta, right? And then it was the dealing Delian League was Athens. Yes, the Delian League was Athens. And they were, you know, at least the Athenians, you know, they, you know, they took tribute rather than I mean, they did require, like, you know, Soldier and naval contributions from their allies and the people in Delian League. But, you know, a lot of it was tribute which made, you know, a lot of those people, understandably, unhappy with Athens. So, rather than seeing like this trend towards militarization, like you do, you know, in Rome, we were, you know, by like, the Punic Wars, the Romans were able to, you know, come back from even catastrophes, like Cannae and like, raise new armies, I think, what was it like, 10% of Roman men, or, like, 15% of Roman men were killed at Cannae or something? Yeah, and it just like,

    Yeah, yeah,

    it was like Turkey in World War One, or like Russia in World War Two, as far as, you know, percentage death toll. But they could come back, just like the, you know, Soviet communism or, you know, the Turkish nationalists under Ataturk did, just buy like this tremendous mobilization. You know, just because that was their whole social structure was built torwards you know, mass mobilization for these like iron bearing warriors. The Greeks meanwhile, you know, they were more big on like wealth, trade. They're probably smarter than the Romans, honestly, I think there's like that British team, you know, they're doing the polygenic scores for the ancient samples, they, you know, there's like a positive correlation between the Caucasian hunter gatherer ancestry and intelligence leads for the old world, the eyes, I'm not sure what happened with that project. I haven't seen them, like put anything out. But I believe that the Greeks definitely were advanced a lot more than a lot of the neighbors were. So you know, wealth kind of capital investment technology that made sense.

    Further to the east, you have kind of the tribes in Iran, you know, it's much closer to the steppe and Central Asia, you have kind of these horse riding warriors that are roaming around. So you have kind of a different social structure, where you're trying to get these, like roving bands of, you know, nomadic or semi nomadic, like cattle pastoralists to support your army. And that, you know, it's a lot more complicated than that, of course, because obviously, there are a lot of like, sedentary peoples involved in the Persian Empire. But it was a different style of militarization that was based on like, clan alignments and stuff, you know, and then meanwhile, in India, you know, I'm not as familiar with that. But, you know, I think the - part of it was the population in India and the Indus Valley is just so much larger than it was in Europe or the Middle East. So you have like, these class divides, which were even more extreme, and you get like, the Nandas, who were kind of like a, I don't know, like a bourgeois revolutionaries, that's probably pretty, an anachronistic description. But, you know, so there's different processes going on in India too. But anyhow, like, it's all like the general tendencies with iron were towards more mobilization of resources towards political consolidation. So that kind of goes all the way up until kind of like the third to seventh centuries AD, once kind of the limits of those, you know, the legacies of that era of mass mobilization kind of start to fail. Like in Iran, you have, you know, when the, like, Persian rulers were trying to assert their authority, they didn't want to be undermined by like the powerful Zoroastrian priestly class. So they kind of like restricted the power of the priests. And as a result, the priests became, like, more state based, like the Russian Orthodox Church did. It wasn't that integrated with the people. So when the state fell so did the religion, you know, with Alexander and everything, and outside of places like Cappadocia and Armenia, which, you know, did rise again. You know, it wasn't until like the rise of the Parthians, and eventually, the Sassanids, that kind of Zoroastrianism was revived. Meanwhile, the Roman Empire, like Roman paganism, kind of, you know, it worked very well it like integrated a lot of different beliefs. With, I guess, there were like the Jews and the Druids were kind of the two big groups that caused a lot of religious issues with the Romans, But largely, you know, people were fine with their gods being integrated into like this Roman pagan system. But even that had its limits once. I mean, there's just I mean, the fall of Rome has been done enough. I don't need to go over that again. So, you know, all these societies have their limits. There's all these catastrophes, you've got the Huns that are, I think, the Huns that invaded the India in the sixth century, were Iranian not Turkic, right, even though they had the same name?

    I believe so, yeah, I believe they were not Turkic, they were They're the white Huns or the Hephthalites. But yeah, Hun is a little bit of a generic became kind of a generic term.

    So you've got them, you know, they're devastating these kind of largely settled societies. And then eventually you have kind of the rise of, you know, in Europe you have Christianity and, you know, the Middle East you have Islam. So, the sixth fall of the Roman Empires, the Huns, the Avars, you know, the white Huns. You know, the Arabs, the Berbers, the Slavs, you know, they're all overthrowing civilization. And everything becomes fragmented again. The seventh age, you know, you have like, these parallel power structures, you with, you know, the Christian churches in the West, and then you have this- so even if like a state fell in the West, like, the Catholic Church was still there, you know, with its tithes, its lands, its monks, you know, it still had like, a lot of legitimacy, and something could be restored from the ruins. The Middle East, you know, is different, you have like a unified caliphate fairly, you know, very, I mean, from the beginning, actually, except it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't a total state, it was, you know, you always had a bunch of different tribes under the caliphates are always maneuvering against each other. There's always opportunities for groups to embrace stuff, like the Abbasid movement, or, you know, Shiaism you know, that wanted to kind of restore the true Islam. And then, you know, once Islam, as Islam spread, it's most like, you know, it's best spreading variants, you know, further and further to like Malaysia, where they, you know, spread the alphabet became huge cultural parts, the Sufi mystics in India, which provided like an alternative form of legitimacy to kind of like secular King hood. And see if like these kind of parallel power structures that develop in the Middle Ages, that kind of, like, bring order learning and civilization to these like otherwise barbarian warlords. And that's where, you know, I think it's like, right around the 13th century that Islam and Christianity diverge. And I think a lot of it had to do less with the philosophical precepts of Islam and Christianity, and I'm sure a lot of people disagree with me on that, I think a lot more of it had to do with hydrology. You know, the Middle East, unfortunately, you know, for better or for worse, has, you know, a limited number of navigable rivers, there's places like Anatolia and Iran, especially, which really kind of like the basis of the main empires. And, you know, they're notorious for being mountainous and having a lot of non navigable rivers. Meanwhile, you're up, you've got the Rhine, you've got the Danube, like, I think Britain has the highest density of navigable rivers in the entire world, at least in Eurasia. So, you know, there's all these opportunities for capital investment in watermills. And, you know, so in the 13th century, you see, like, all these watermills, that are developing all over Europe, so rather than, you know, the past, which had been based on like, you know, animal power, you know, the future was waterpower, like, it was all capital investment, it was engineering, it was learning that was, you know, kind of setting the west on its, you know, its path, whereas, you know, the Middle East it was, you know, still progressing, there's still a lot of advances in technology in science, society, religion, everything else, too. It's just they lacked that class of engineers didn't develop as much as it did in Europe. And to the extent it did, it was like, very heavily taxed on like a press, like a Nader Shah, for instance, in the 18th century, you know, he was like, depopulating, a city is not by, you know, by killing them, which I mean, he did, I guess, but a lot of it was just he taxed people so much that they went and like became, you know, roving nomads, they went and, you know, herded their sheep or cattle were his, you know, soldiers couldn't tax them as easily as they could in the cities. So that kind of like, you know, took Europe and the Middle East in two different paths. Reformation in Europe is kind of contemporaneous with like the Shia revival in Iran, which have been kind of interesting that they happen both at the same time, and yet their structures were like, very, very different. Like, you know, the Shia revival was done by the, you know, fanatical Turkman warrior bands of the Safavid order, you know, that wanted to spread this sheer revolution, you know, from the Mediterranean to, you know, the Hindu Kush. You know, which they're somewhat successful in. And then, you know, even though like the Ottomans had heterodox origins, they, you know, eventually became the beliefs in 1517 and kind of took the mantle of Orthodox Sunni Islam. You know, meanwhile, you know, but they're still like, you know, the base for both of them was these kind of like semi nomadic pastoral nomads in Anatolia and Iran. Meanwhile, in Europe, you have like these guys who are, you know, the polemicist, the guys who are like making the most outrageous claims in the printing presses who could get the most, you know, distribution for their views get the support from the princes, who are kind of driving, like this trend that lasted for about five centuries, like all the way up until 1945, where you have like increased mobilization of the population, through education, through military mobilization through, you know, capital investment in a lot of places. So there's like this general increase in state capacity and political consolidation all the way up until 1945. You know, that's kind of the path of the West goes, and that kind of ends with, you know, you have liberal democracy. I guess there's, like, the American Revolution was kind of a push back against that. But, you know, that's beyond you know, the topic of this conversation.

    Yeah. Well, I mean, so you hit a lot of you hit a lot of points. And I want to go back and dig into some of these, if you are okay with that.

    Yeah.

    Yeah. And so, just to be clear, for the listeners, viewers, you know, this is this is from your, your substack. I mean, that narrative nemetz.substack.com and emets.substack.com. Just for the spelling for those of you who want to know it's a southern ages of western Eurasia, so you start 11,700 years ago, but you allude to things earlier, so there was an Eemian, which is like 115,000 years ago, then around there. You know, the interglacial, it was super hot. The fact that I always remember about the Eemian, is there hippos in southern England, and agriculture did not happen that we know of then. But you allude to you allude to like a few kind of attempts at civilization. And so, I want to be clear here, because I think we both agree. But you know, some of the people out there might not know, or they might have different views. You know, civilization - the old school way to define civilization is there's got to be writing, you got to have history, et cetera, et cetera. I don't define it that way anymore. Because when you look at the Cucuteni–Trypillia civilization, with what they did iron working or not ironworking gold gold working in the Varna, which is in Bulgaria earlier, like 5000 BC or something. You know, there's a lot of things that are going on, that are pre literate, that are pretty advanced. And it's not just all in the Middle East. Yes, the Middle East. You know, I mean, it's, it's a pretty big coincidence, or it's interesting that the Middle East hit writing first, had literacy, which was a big deal. And it probably had agriculture first, even though it had agricultural roads independently elsewhere, it probably was the first place that it really spread a lot. So those two things, I think, have skewed our perspective. Because between those two events, a lot other parts of the world did a lot of things. So for example, domestication of horses, it's kind of a big deal, almost certainly, it happened multiple times in the Eurasian steppe. And then it spread to the rest of the world, as I said, like, you know, working in gold, well, I mean, that that seems to have happened in Bulgaria, you know, things like this. And so civilization, we use a bigger category. I think of it as more, you know, like specialization. Beyond just like, everyone is a primary producer, everyone's a farmer, you have some level of hierarchy, you have surplus that's sequestered by the lead, and then engage luxury, good production, etc, etc. I think civilization is a little bit. I'm not going to say what it's referencing, but it's like, you know, it when you see it, type of thing, we can enumerate it, but everyone kind of knows. Okay, so you allude to, you know, I think you talked about Göbekli Tepe like explicitly and I have done I did a podcast with Samo Burja, you link to his piece in Palladium - great magazine, by the way, everyone should check out Palladium. In any case. You know, it's it's definitely a pre agricultural site as we understand it. And then you talked about a Palaeolithic village, in Israel and underwater megalith off the coast of Sicily. I did not I did not like check the Sicily one in too much detail. But I did look at the Israel one. And that looks pretty interesting. You know, Peter, you really, really read a lot of archaeology. And obviously you have mastery of some of these facts. Let's let's talk a little bit about this latest talk about the Israeli Village talking about the Sicily thing. Let's talk about your your perspective as someone who reads the literature on what was going on in the Ice Age. So I think, you know, Samo had his book and then And I think David Graeber and what's his names? They're book ‘the dawn of everything’ kind of had some stuff like this, although like, I'm not gonna lie, I haven't read it because I saw some really negative reviews from people I really respect. But you know, there's this idea that ice age humans Pleistocene- late Upper Paleolithic, Late Pleistocene humans after 40,000 years ago, when it's just us mostly, there could be a few relic populations here and there of other types of human lineages. I do take some objection to you calling other hominids, non human, but we're going to get into that. I think humans should be a big category, and some people think it should be a little category. But in any case, let's talk about these Ice Age, proto civilizations incipient false starts, like, tell us about it, because I'm fascinated. This sort of stopping, I'm not going to go Graham hey, I'm not going to Graham Hancock, but like, talk about it?

    Sure, um, I mean, the most unambiguous one is the one and Israel you know, I think it's like 22,000 BC, I believe. And that, you know, there's signs of intensive kind of cultivation, or at least harvesting of cereal grains and kind of like processing those. So in the southern Levant, which seems to be an area, which is like uniquely protected from, you know, climate downturns, you know, it's a warm area. You know, I think, you know, it does go back quite, you know, I think there's probably stuff earlier than that specific site. I think part of the problem too, is that since the levels are so much lower, you know, people were, you know, like, estuaries are very nutritionally rich. So a lot of these old like civilized sites, where you have, you know, specialization, you know, agriculture or at least intensive cultivation, cereals, you know, are underwater, I think the Levant would be like, the best place to, you know, off the coast of Israel and coastal Lebanon would be the best place to look for that. Maybe off the coast, I think a lot of you know, there's a theory called Euphrates and, you know, linguist, friend, like, totally dismisses it, but he thinks there's actually a substrate in Sumerian of a population that lives in, you know, the lands that are now like drowned underneath the Persian Gulf, just off the coast of Iraq. You know, I think that's another good place to look, since you've got like the Tigris and Euphrates, they would have been like training into, you know, the much smaller Persian Gulf back then. And it would have been like a very nutrient and fish rich area. It didn't necessarily have to be agricultural. I think there is a POS, I think a lot of these kind of like civilized societies in the ice age would have been more like the Calusa or the Pacific Northwest Amerindians where they would have been like intensive, you know, they would have been, like, stratified, they would have had specialization, but they would have been still based on like hunting and gathering and particularly fishing since fishing is very, you know, wealthy source of nutrients. But there were some like the one in the southern Levant, which I think are kind of like a sign of, you know, agriculture or, you know, intensive cultivation of wild cereals. The issue, though, with detecting these two is one, like a lot of the sites will be underwater. And then two is that the traits that we want, like the non shattering rachis on cereal grains, is that those are intensively disfavored by, you know, natural selection in nature, you know, grain that doesn't shatter naturally, it's not going to spread its seeds, and it's just not going to go very far. It's something that has to be selected for by humans. So, you know, maybe, you know, genetics much better than I to, you know, maybe there's some way genetically, we could see previous signs of domestication for now, wild plants, you know, but it's not going to show up just by looking at their phenotypes.

    Yeah, I mean, you'd have to look at bottlenecks and things like that, like long term, long term variation, effective population size, you should be able to see signatures of that. So domestication tends to cause bottlenecks, because when you're doing selection, you're reducing the sample size of any given generation. So you see massive, massive bottlenecks and domestic lineages of cattle and obviously dogs and other sorts of animals, right. Some of them are not as bottleneck dogs. Dogs seem to have evolved very slowly. I don't know. Basically, there are outbred noncreepily inbred dog lineages that like really, really old. Some of these ancient breeds that are around like the Basenji or something but not just the Basenji other types of dogs as well. So that's what you would look at. You know, it's it's interesting, you're talking about the Calusa or the Palouse I think, the Pacific Northwest, you know, it's the part of country I'm from but I'll just reiterate. You know, I actually talked to a last year at a podcast with Manvir - Dr. Manvir Singh about foragers In hunter gatherers and how they were probably very different in the Pleistocene than we think of them - actually Pleistocene, early Holocene, because you can think of places like in Northern Europe on the north, you know, the Baltic or the North Sea, where hunter gatherers and foragers did quite well and had high population densities, because there are a lot of calories there that they could access. So in the Pacific Northwest, we know exactly what they did and why they were so dense, there's massive salmon runs, and a baby could go be a fisherman. They're just so dense. And I mean, you can see some of the old the earliest films, I mean, there are silent films that show these people or at least what was left of them fishing. And it was just crazy how easy it was to get calories out of, you know, the rivers as the salmon are swarming and coming up, there are other situations like that, I mean, their salmon in the Atlantic. There's other situations that are like that. And we don't see them in the old world, because agriculture kind of eliminated those foragers, but they were around for a while. And so if you have a high enough forager density, you could imagine that they could do hierarchy, primary production, beyond primary production to surplus. This is what we see in the Pacific Northwest tribes. They are basically hunter gatherers or hunters. They're not necessarily super mobile, but they're foraging in the local area. And they have stratification. They have slavery, they're very warlike. And, you know, this is the culture of potlatches, where a very, very wealthy people engage in conspicuous, conspicuous consumption and also conspicuous generosity to establish their status. So these are obviously complex societies that are not dependent on agriculture. So yes, that can happen. It's interesting to me that Israel is so important, obviously, many of the listeners and viewers are going to be, you know, believers that Israel is very important religiously, in origin of the human species. And what you're saying is, it sounds like Israel's kind of at this equipoise, at this perfect, perfect median, between the north and the south. We know evolutionarily, this is as far north, as some early modern human lineages got, before the explosion of the Upper Paleolithic or like lithic technology, around 60,000 years ago that swept across the world. As far south Northern Israel is probably as far south as Neanderthals got. So, you know, our cousins got down there, too. And of course, there's a new species, supposedly, probably some form of Neanderthal, I'm gonna be honest, that was discovered a couple of years ago by Israeli archaeologists, Israel really invest in this field and you know, more power to them. So that that that was definitely interesting to me. I guess, like, you know, okay, so these Ice Age, Pleistocene civilizations, you know, they were humans like us. They had the same impulses. But they didn't scale. We never did anything during the Eemian. So we just didn't have our stuff together. Okay. Now we move into the Holocene. And it seems like, you know, you're describing all these collapses, and stuff like that? Are you simplifying the cycles? Because I don't know, the archaeology as well as you, but, you know, like, resource exhaustion collapse that you mean? Were there littler cycles in there that you didn't mention in your piece?

    Yeah, I mean, the whole piece is definitely a you know, it's an outline, it's a simplification, and I'm just trying to, you know, show people the broader trends. Like the 2200 BC collapse was definitely like a major, you know, huge, you know, catastrophic event. You know, it didn't end the Bronze Age, though, and I don't think it was on a scale is like some of these other collapses, though, if that makes sense. You know, similarly, there's some parts like the 4400 BC collapse, you know, definitely happened in Europe. But at the same time, like Europe actually thrived after the collapse, like it was, you know, the resulting synthesis clearly - was beneficial to the long run.

    Well, I want to ask you about this, because like people, just the hunter gatherer resurgence, the forger resurgence. Talk about it a little talk about that part, because that's really interesting, I think, to a lot of people, and we could like to explore it a little bit.

    I think the hunter gatherer Resurgence is something that, you know, the 4400 BC One is the one that's best known since Europe has, you know, a lot of resolution as far as, you know, ancient DNA, there's tons of archaeological work, but I think it is like a broader, historical. You know, it happens a bunch of times and bunch of different places, like, you know, it happened in Japan where, you know, the old like, Y haplogroup D carrying Jomon, You know, they get over run like twice in a couple 100 years, and yet something like a third of Japanese men carry their, you know, are direct male line descendants from them, they carry that y haplogroup D. There's something similar in Tibet where I really need to read that new Tibetan DNA paper, but I think there's like two waves of farmers. But yeah, you know, most Tibetan men still carry a isn't a majority, or it's at least a significant minority.

    Yeah, so haplogroup D just for the listeners and viewers out there that are like, unfortunately not nerdy enough to know this - Haplogroup D is found in three places, Japan, Tibet, and the Andaman Islands.

    So there's definitely like something that's going on, though, where, you know, these peripheral peoples, whether it's because they have access to metal mines, whether it's because they're, like these high Asiatic groups in the mountains, that are just healthier than, you know, they're they've got like access to meats from goats or whatever. Versus like the very malnourished, you know, kind of farmer people in the lowlands, you know, maybe they like repeatedly take them over, they can install themselves as like a ruling class being like, stronger and more warlike. And that's a pattern that repeats in a lot of different places. I think it happened in Cameroon, to where you have, like certain groups that are, you know, overwhelmingly Bantu and ancestry, but that they have this extremely rare like A00 haplogroup that split off like 200,000 years ago. You know, so there's an even in the American Southwest, for instance, you have kind of these like marginal desert peoples that overran the kind of civilized peoples around like 1350 to 1450. Now, I mean, some of those peoples were, you know, like totally foreign. They were like the ancestors, the Apache and the Navajo who are coming all the way from, like Northern Canada, but some of them were like local desert, like, people that just rose up and took over these kind of civilized farming, agricultural people with irrigation and, you know, astronomy. In Europe, I think, you know, is probably something pretty similar. The height, like the, the height overlap is, or the height differences between the Western hunter gatherers and their, like, the early European farmer neighbors, and the fifth millennium BC are pretty extreme. Like, there's a lot of, they're actually samples that people believed were actually men. You know, from the Western hunter gatherer from the early European farmers that actually turned out to be Western hunter gatherer women, just because of like, how much healthier the hunter gatherer lifestyle was from, you know, a very narrow, loess soil farming society, once the farmers had kind of hit their, you know, ecological limit. I think the trigger though, like, I don't think it's a coincidence at all, it's like one century you have, you know, all these mined copper mines in, you know, the Carpathians, like Austria and Hungary open up. And then the next century, you have like this massive, like overthrow of this kind of like network of societies by these people who were living right where these hunter gatherers were. So I think something about the spread of metallurgy changed the relationship of the hunter gatherers to the farmers. And that's why the overthrow happened. Because also, interestingly, too, is the trade networks with, you know, the South Caucasus don't break off, like, there's still the trade going on from like the Carpathians to, you know, the South Caucasus. So, you know, it was definitely like a fall. And, you know, it's like this Age of Revolution, I guess, more than a fall. So if you want to like critique the article, you could argue that, like, the 4400 fall wasn't really a fall, it was more like this change and dramatic change and like social and population relations.

    Yeah, and so I mean, your argument is, from what I can take it, what I can understand is that there was a synthesis between these mostly male, so overall, in the genome of the farmers of the middle to the late Neolithic, so there's the early Neolithic, I guess, maybe the middle of Neolithic as well, but really is the transitions in the middle Neolithic to the late Neolithic. The ancestry that's forger goes from say, like 5%, or something, to 15 to 40, depending on where it's like 40 in the northern most Funnel Beakers in Sweden, and then you know, it's closer to like 15 in Sardinia and Spain or wherever was lower. But the key issue that you're pointing out is Y chromosomal replacement. So all across northern Europe, we see the displacement of G2 in particular G haplogroup G, with haplogroup J or I2 so I2 is the canonical Neolithic farmer Y chromosomal lineage in Northern Europe actually when the Indo Europeans show up but that actually you It originated in the foragers, I1 and I2, are both basically Western hunter gatherers seem to have been almost all I Eastern hunter gatherers somewhat different, more diverse, but we don't know as much about them and, you know, deep history, but so this was somehow male mediated absorption, right.

    Yeah. And, you know, I don't think it was just Europe to I think there was something similar that happened in North Africa. Unfortunately, there isn't, you know, that much North African DNA, we don't have a lot of like, you know, prehistoric resolution and like, the archaeology and everything, but they're, like the very, you know, you have the Iberomaurusian who are kind of like the indigenous human lineage and like northwest Africa, and then, you know, around, I think it's like 5200 BC, you start seeing like the Cardial Ware pottery stuff arrive in Morocco, except the DNA that's associated with that Cardial Ware like, right at the end of the sixth millennium BC, which would have been, I think, better than the fourth age and my Yes, or they would have been the Third Age, sorry. So you know, kind of the middle of a third age, you know, and it's still like almost pure Iberomaurusian in ancestry. And yet, when you get to the samples from like, the early fourth millennium BC, you know, it's actually a mixture of - about an even mixture, like about half like Iberomaurusian half, you know, Cardial Ware, and specifically Cardial Ware not the like hunter gatherer Cardial Ware synthesis that happened in Iberia, after 4400 BC. So what I think happened is you have like, there's these Iberomaurusian groups or, you know, Morocco Neolithic would be the more proper archaeological term, that adopt, like this Cardinal Ware toolkit, the Cardial Ware people somehow push in, like the first couple centuries of the 4000s. And then, you know, there's a fusion of them that happen at some point between before 3700 BC, and that, like fusion caused them, you know, to, like, totally change culturally, one branch of them. You know, there's the Tenerian culture, which I'm really interested in, and it's kind of like the northern part of like Chad, and Niger, with like the Aïr Mountains and everything. They do a bunch of like cattle burials and stuff very clearly. They're into like cattle pastoralism. And I don't think we have any of the, we don't have any DNA of the Tenerians actually. But I think they're like the ancestors of the modern of like in a large part of the the Berbers and then also the, the Chadic peoples. Because there's a y chromosomal haplogroup that's originally found in the western hunter gatherers, it was picked up like very, very early on in the Balkans by the early European farmers, R1bv88. And that's actually found very early on and like the Cardial Ware settlement of Iberia, I think all the way in like 5800 BCE, and like the Pyrenees. And then it's most common today, though not in Europe, but in northern Nigeria, which is inhabited by the Hausa people. And the Hausa people they speak a Chadic language. Chadic is an afro Asiatic language, or, you know, every sciatic though, at least accordin to - you know, linguists that I trust, you know, they think it's nonsense, or it's a, it's a result of language contact rather than a genetic family. And, you know, it's interesting and kind of like what's nowadays northern Sudan, so kind of like the mid Nile region, there used to be like west to east tributary, the Nile called the Yellow which flowed in from Chad into Sudan. And it didn't dry up until the big like, 2200 BC crisis. And there's some DNA from right around that region. That's actually very closely related not to the people of Sudan, but to the people of Somalia. So I think that suggests that the ancestors of you know, the Somalis, there are Cushitic people like a lot of the people in Ethiopia. So I think you have the Cushites you know, that are in Sudan, I think you have there's the lighter band culture which is in the yellow Nile and has like a lot of the same cattle pastoral stuff as the Tenerians even though it's pottery is like very closely, you know, very much like locally derived. So I think you have like this Iberomaurusian, some Cardial Ware synthesis, you know, the forms the Tenerians. A branch of the Tenerians goes to the Yellow Nile, you know, and then so that's like the ancestors of the Chadic peoples, you know, they eventually like migrate west into Nigeria. And then you have the Egyptians who had moved to Egypt, I think. I think - when was like, first agriculture in Egypt. It was like 5000 BC or 6000 BC.

    Yeah, yeah, I think. I think it wasn't that early because the green Sahara thing

    How did the green Sahara prevent agriculture from developing in Egypt?

    I think the issue is like in terms of like resource constraint and stuff like that. I because they weren't agriculture is but they were pastoralists. Right?

    The Tenerians in the lighter band were yeah

    Yeah because there's a lot of cattle, the green Sahara and stuff. So yeah.

    Yeah. Yeah, that Fulani paper was really interesting, too, since the lack of, or I think they're only Caucasian hunter gatherer ancestry, which is like kind of a signal of Middle Eastern ancestry rather than, like the Neolithic European ancestry. You know, it's more recent. So I guess that suggests that, you know, the formation, you know, their Iberomaurusian Neolithic European ancestry. You know, it's from like that much earlier migration and like, the -

    Yeah, let's give, let's give the listeners and the viewers a little bit of context here. There's a paper a preprint. I think it's a preprint. That came out. And I think it's, I just read it. So it's a whole gene that yes, the preprint for the listener or the viewer to Google it. echoes from the last green Sahara whole genome analysis of Fulani a key population to unveil the genetic history of Africa, so Fulani matter because while historically they matter, because they're like pretty badass about like imposing a harsh version of Islam Islam, on everybody else like the hos worse Lama sighs to great extent by the Fulani and the Sokoto Caliphate relatively late within the last couple 100 years, but earlier in history, you know, they're known as like traitors, pastoralists on the southern side of the Sahara, they're not quite Tao rag, they're not deep desert people, their features tend to indicate Eurasian affinity, so narrower nose that are lips, if you read some of Jeffrey Miller's early work, meeting mine, he talks about sexual selection, possibly, but it's pretty clear. We know from the genetics, they have West Eurasian ancestry, you know, like 15 20%, not like overwhelming, but it's definitely detectable. And they have some other things like they have a European variant, Eurasian, let's say Eurasian variant of lactase persistence gene in their system. That's a little weird. But if you look at their genetics, and I've, like, tried to analyze the Fulani, before actually actually counting to 2010, there were some, you know, simpler genotypes. And it was, there's something up with them, we always knew that yes, there West Eurasian in origin. But it could not be well explained by contemporary samples. And it can't obviously be explained even by a lot of the ancient samples. But it turns out that they're probably the product of a very, very early exchange between people in Sub Saharan Africa, and western Eurasia. That moved into North Africa, they fused at the beginning of the Holocene, creating this like, you know, Trans Sahara and culture. Some of you guys have probably seen documentaries that show, you know, scenes and caves in the Sahara, but it's like savanna, there's giraffe and stuff like that. And they're drawing their cattle, you know, and so obviously, the Sahara came, some of them went north, some of them went south, the Fulani are admix, but descended to, you know, non trivial proportion from these people who were probably mixed in some way originally, probably a higher proportion of West Eurasian, originally. And I think the interesting thing is, it shows that, you know, exchanges between Sub Saharan Africa and non Sub Saharan Africa happen very long time ago, there's a lot of arguments about how much happened during the Pleistocene, just so people know, during the Pleistocene, Northern Africa, like the Maghreb, that area was actually like pretty good. You think about the climate bands and how they move, the temperate zone moved to the south. But overall, the Sahara was way worse even than today. It was bigger. The rain forest in the Congo was fragmented. A lot of it was Savannah. And so it was probably a much bigger barrier during much of the Upper Paleolithic. And then the Holocene shows up, and we have this green Sahara phase when everything's much wetter, I think up until like, 5000 BC or so. And then, you know, the rest is history. Right. But yeah, so that mean, that was a cool paper. And yeah, you know, we we've engaged in some, there have been some peregrinations in this discussion, right, which like, this is a feature it's not a bug. um you know you have references to a lot of archaeology here some of them I've read so I will say to the listener the viewer if you have not read “The First Farmers of Europe” read it. imIt is by Stephen Shennan. That's the only book of his I've ever read. I think some of you have known of or read I mean, like, you know, former guests, hopefully future guest book “Dogs of War” should be out maybe next year. David Anthony ‘horse, wheel, language’ is referenced and then “Escape From Rome” Walter Scheidel I read that fall 2020 really great book. I wish Scheidel was like a little less anti classics by the way. He's a little bit anti classics, but whatever. I haven't read “Iran: a modern history” or yeah wait, you I have read it. That's a recent very recent book. I'm sorry, just all of these books that are wrong or just like Iran: history, or Iran: A short history. It's not very creative. But the other books I have not read and I just want to mention them. “Orcadia: Land, Sea and Stone in Neolithic Orkney” I want to talk about working in a second because it's kind of cool. And then “The Archaeology of South Asia” Robin Coningham and Ruth Young. You guys can see all of these in Nemetz, in Peter Nemetz posts, in Peters post here. And then of course “plagues and peoples” William H McNiell I forgot that was at the top of it. Everyone should read that book. William H. McNeill, one of my favorite the late William H. McNeill, one of my favorite late favorite late favorite historians, late you know, he's he died, read the Human Web. That's also a good book. He's got some other good books. Just a great, great macro historian. I have recommended him for years and I mean, I've been reading him says a little kid, like literally, I was literally a child. He was such a big deal of the 20th century. So, Orkneys let's talk about talk about the Orkneys. Because like, I think it's a cool story. I've never written on it and I haven't like talked about it. But there's been some papers that have come out recently. The Orkneys are kind of, it's like, what if civilization like persisted in this little, so you didn't like come out and say it, I think of the piece, but I'll come out and say it. Indo Europeans were like, I'm not gonna swear because Apple, but they were effing barbarians. And you know, I had JP Mallory on this podcast, years ago. Like some of you should look at the archives, because I just looked. While you know, I was paying attention. But I just looked at the podcast and I looked at the traffic and some of these old podcasts have not been trafficked very much. You guys don't know what gold is in there, doing the archaeology yourself. So I have a interview with David Anthony and JP Mallory Thomas Olander. Like I just call it both three indo European 's that I interviewed in the spring of 2021. Mallory said, you know, one reason we talked about Indo European graves all the time is because that's all they can find. That didn't really live in villages. Initially. They seem to be nomadic pastoralists, you know, agro pastoralists. And, you know, there's all these, like, you know, took attendee tripolia civilization had these huge villages that had this great, you know, pottery, beautiful pottery, the Neolithic megaliths societies, were creating these awesome megaliths stuff like Newgrange. And then these indo Europeans show up and they're like, barbarians, who are co-opting , reusing, refurbishing their previous civilizations of the Neolithic people, but they didn't get their crap together for like, a long time until, you know, the Middle Bronze Age maybe, maybe after 2000 BC and a lot of places start having larger settlements. So it took like 1000 years for civilization to really come back in Europe. And Orkney though is a very special place, because it was like a time capsule of a previous era in various ways. So if you'll talkabout Orkney, I've been talking for a while you take it away Peter?

    Sure. So, you know, whatever, you know, so we talked about France earlier, for whatever reason, it looks like, you know, in the early 3000s, you know, after that kind of hunter gatherer early European farmer synthesis. You know, it looks like there was some sort of like French State or like states in France, where, you know, people were mixing both from, you know, the Pyrenees to the Paris basin. And, you know, the samples that, you know, are published from kind of, like, you know, about the same time in Britain from the early like, you know, early European farmer hunter gatherer synthesis, like settlements in Britain. You know, I think they're like 4000BC 3900 BC, you know, associated with a megalith construction because that's kind of a big, like religious, cosmopolitan structure that's going on at the point. You know, they have, you know, very short runs on homozygosity. They're not inbred like it was clearly, rather than being like a small group that was taking off in Britain, you know, they're clearly there multiple groups or, you know, an or what I think happened, without, you know, that much evidence is that there was like, an organized effort to colonize Britain. You know, whether for farmland or to exploit certain resources, I'm not sure. So they, you know, rapidly move they take over Britain and Ireland looks like they mix in with the hunter gatherers, a bit, hunter gatherer population probably wasn't that large, maybe a couple, you know, score 1000 in the entire British Isles. You know, there might have been some, like local hunter gatherer resurgences you know, but, you know, it doesn't look like it was, you know, campaign of annihilation, it looks like they were able to integrate the hunter gatherers, you know, peacefully or not peacefully. So, you know, about 3600 BC, there's not really like a collapse, but there's a depth you know, there's increase in like, rainfall increase in a kind of like, colder climactic conditions, which affects, you know, the whole world's the Green Sahara, of course, is affected too. And, you know, Britain, you see, like, a shift from wheat to barley from, you know, 3600 BC to 3400 BC. And there's kind of like, a lot of signs that the population is declining. Some areas, it's mostly wheat to barley, like in the 3000s, like, by the time you get into the 2000s, you actually see like, a shift from barley to hazelnuts, like rather than, you know, cultivating, you know, farmland, they've moved to just kind of like planting trees, and, you know, praying, you know, because trees are very hard to cut down, you have to burn them to, you know, destroy them. So, there's definitely like a pretty dramatic fall in population and most in Ireland, there's a lot of signs of like cattle pastoralism, you know, so it was kind of like an era of the cattle raider. You know, these guys were just like, running around there, no horses, they were doing it on foot. And there were exceptions, like climactic conditions improved about 3200 BC to 3000 BC. And that's when you kind of start to see like these huge tombs, you know, the infamous God King, this guy was a product of first degree incest about I think, you know, between 3200 - 3,000 BC in Ireland, you know, absolutely massive tomb had, you know, astronomical significance and everything. And, you know, clearly took huge effort with like 1000s and 1000s of workers involved in constructing these. But anyhow, like after, you know, in a century or two after his death, his kind of society starts to fall apart. And after between, like 3000-2500 BC, that's kind of like the last Age of Britain, you know, kind of that trend towards depopulation and shift away from agriculture towards pastoralism occurs everywhere except Orkney. So the Orkney Islands whose islands just off the northern coast of Scotland, and their population doesn't actually start to decline until like 2800 or 2700 BC. And, you know, fairly early on we see actually like the first dated sites for what's called the Grooved Ware culture they have these pockets with groups and then they call them them Groves Ware culture are actually in the Orkney Islands. And, you know, they start to appear on like, these coastal sites all over the British Isles and then gradually, like, press inland so what it looks like happened was these Orkney Island people, you know, they were like these sea pirates, they were the Vikings of their time, possibly the first Vikings of the, you know, the North Sea and the, you know, Irish Sea. So, looks like they were going around, they're kind of reaving you know, and that's why they were able, you know, they were presumably so successful that they were able to like raid crops and, you know, bring it back to Orkneys that enabled their, you know, very poor, very cold for remote islands to sustain itself, even in this era of kind of declining crop yields and civilizational decline. They were successful enough that, you know, when the Indo Europeans show up, you know, so the Indo Europeans, they, you know, initially they were like these hyper violent furries, you know, they had the Koryos where they have like the dog emblems, the wolf emblems, that kind of thing, you know, they just went out and, you know, wiped out whole, you know, like campaigns of extermination, basically, for the funnel beakers, and, you know, the Cucuteni–Trypillians you know, they're kind of like mixed descendants with the globular amphoras, they picked up what's called the bell beaker culture, which is - bell beaker is like a very loose cultural assemblage, but you know, did provide kind of like, you know, they did start to settle down somewhat, you know, grow more crops, they did have like settlements from the bell beaker influence. And they also learned how to sail. I mean, they had been able to sail boats fairly early on, like when they launched their invasion of Scandinavia. And there's one theory that they invaded Finland, first by land and then Sweden, second by sea. But you know, I think there's some people that kind of push back on this, Christian Christianson would probably have a better opinion than me. You know, but around like 2500 2600 BC, they improve their boats, and they start like contesting the sea routes around like the North Sea. And, you know, all the way to the Bay of Biscay. Actually, there's a bell beaker find near Bordeaux, actually, kind of southwestern France, for you know, one of these bell beakers around like 2550 BC, I think it's the radiocarbon dating. I think it probably took place a little bit later, you know, because there's like a range of a century or two for those. So clearly, like, you know, they're taking over like the old sea routes for the trade. You know, there's the whole Amber Road, which, you know, had gone on since I think kind of like the late it really depends, like, I know, like the Getty Museum, they've got like a nice discussion of it in some of their publications on whether or not certain finds are resin or amber and pre dynastic Egypt. But you know, there are suggestions that kind of the amber road the shipping from Amber from its like riches finds and what's nowadays like Russia, the Baltic, northern Poland, Denmark area, all the way down to Egypt might date to before the Indo European conquests, you know, so you have these guys that could have possibly been shipping this stuff all the way around the Baltic to the North Sea, through Bay of Biscay around Spain and the Mediterranean, almost certainly indirectly, but it was getting to Egypt. So, you know, Indo-Europeans, they've began contesting this stuff like 26 to 25th centuries, and they launched this, you know, part of this was a massive invasion of the British Isles, you know, this absolutely, like apocalyptic invasion, they replaced like 90% of the, you know, locals. And since, you know, the invading population was probably smaller. That means they probably killed a lot more than 90% of the original population, you know, before mixing with them. The exception though, last year, you know, there's some DNA papers from, you know, kind of the Orkneys. It showed that, you know, that actually, their y chromosomal lineage had actually survived. So what it looks like happened was the Orkney Islands, you know, in my opinion, probably, my guess is due to their considerable naval strength and naval heritage, were able to actually like stave off this, like, you know, genocidal series of invasions, the British Isles. And even though over the course of like, the Middle Bronze Age, they got absorbed into like, the Indo European world, like, presumably through like bride exchanges or possibly through sex slavery. You know, maybe they were like, I would assume their old like, sea reaving ways didn't stop, you know, they would have just been taking like the Indo European women and like bringing them back to the Orkneys. You know, they're y haplogroups like stay the same all the way to the end of the Bronze Age. Like I think there's a guy from like 1200 BC, right around the time of the Bronze Age collapse. And he still has that same Western hunter gatherer y chromosomal lineage that his like, you know, ancestors had had going back, you know, 3000 years to the hunter gatherer resurgence. So they, you know, unlike the Sardinians, who remained, like, just totally independent of the Indo Europeans and like, defied all attempts at Indo European colonization, you know, they were forced into the Indo European world, but they did it under their own terms.

    Yeah, yeah. So you're talking about Sardinians? Did you mention the Nuragics in your piece?

    No, I didn't.

    Yeah, like, let's, we've been talking for a while. So you know, we need to like cut this off. But another case, another island, but more isolated, is the Nuragics. And they had like these big weird megolith things and like these fortifications, and it looks like basically, they beat off the bell beakers and other types of indo Europeans. And you know, Into the Iron Age, when the Phoenicians and Etruscans and you know, Romans contacted them like the late you know, post Nuragic civilizations, non Indo European. So, Paleo Sardinian, which persisted into, into, you know, late antiquity. The Latin speakers the Vulgar Latin speakers would say that these people were just totally unintelligible and that basically means that they did not speak in an italic language, which makes sense that's far from Italy. They spoken non Indo European languages it paleo Sardinian it went extinct in like the sixth century or something. And they, you know, probably the descendants of the Nuragics of the Neolithic Sardinians. And it's kind of like a Sardinia in the Iron Age was kind of like a what if alternate history - What if the Indo Europeans had been like beat back or never shown up? And you see this totally weird alternative society, the Nuragics? You know, during the Bronze Age, their ancestors had these weird horned, like Dan Davies, his YouTube show, which is really great. He talks about like their weird horned helmets and stuff like that. I do think most of the sea peoples were definitely Achaean Greek, but there are some horned helmet individuals depicted in the Egyptian mass relief and the wall paintings. And I think that there is a high probability that they could have been Sardinians that somehow made it to the eastern Mediterranean. You know, we don't have like a really good sense of how much people traveled I think, in these ancient days, because it's not like there's that many, you know, shipwrecks and it's ship wrecks are hard to find, and, and all this stuff. And, you know, so I think that there was a little bit more, you know, travel back and forth. So, you know, we're, we're hitting the 130 mark, you know, we need to close out here. So, Peter, I'm gonna ask you, you did this survey of western Eurasia and archaeology, you did a lot of reading for it. Okay, what's the most surprising interesting thing that you found?

    Um, I mean, I think definitely like the context zone between Egyptian Chadic and Cushitic. That wasn't really discussed in the piece, but I kind of discussed it in my earlier “Son's of Chad” piece, and just that whole kind of like, you know, there's two great journeys, whether it was you know, the Cushites, I think, are like partially Natufian derived. And then you have, you know, so it's kind of like the two you have the Natufians in the southern Levant, and then you have the Anatolian farmers, we're kind of in you know, just to the north of them. You know, they have these like two giant arcs, the Anatolians going counterclockwise through Europe through Iberia into, you know, North Africa and the green Sahara. Then you have like these natufian, those who go through like, you know, going through Egypt into Sudan and stuff. And then they like meet each other right worth the Yellow Nile and the Nile kind of meet each other around like modern Dongola. And that's where you get, you know, the Egyptians, the Cushites and the Chadics are all meeting each other in the fourth millennium. And that's kind of the dawn of, at least, you know, the main branch of what's known as Afro Asiatic.

    Cool. So, yeah, the substack is Nemets N E M E T S.substack.com. There's some other pieces. I know that you're thinking about doing more of this. So hopefully you'll keep producing. Some of them are not as genetical you have a piece the roots of the Donbass wars. That's very long, you know quite a bit about Eastern Europe. You know, and you know, it shows in the piece a lot of maps I think that readers will readers and not listeners and viewers exclusively because I know some of you prefer to consume in this medium but readers will enjoy that piece. There's there's some other ones that are interesting. You wrote about state versus National Peoples and you referenced dancing in the glory of monsters by Jason Stern's I love that book it was great book. If you can read it, like in the late - Read it when I was much younger, just put it that way. So yeah, really enjoying your stuff. Thank you for coming on. And I hope people learned a lot. That was the point. There's a lot to learn out there. You don't need to be an academic. You could just be some guy out there like you Peter. Right?

    Yeah, it's, you know, just, I read at breakfast, read at lunch, read at dinner. You know, it's after 20 years, it really adds up.

    Yeah, it's awesome, man. Really, really appreciate it. Enjoy your stuff. I really recommend it. And thank you for your time, man.

    Yeah, thank you very much for having me on Razib and I hope you have a good rest of the evening.