In this 700+-comment thread, which seems to have become a dumping-ground for all DNA-related commentary, Dmitry Pruss said mildly but convincingly:
An ob gripe, I don’t think that it’s the best idea to discuss “everything DNA” in this, already oversize, thread…
So I’m hereby opening this as a continuation. If you have thoughts about genomic components and Denisovan signatures, this is the place for them!
I did recently link to a paper on Mongolia and the, eh, genetogenesis of the Xiongnu and the Mongolians in They Perished like Avars, where we have discussed much Post-Indo-European Steppe stuff. It didn’t attract any follow-up comments, so feel free to move it here.
Will we be seeing “Bride of Yamnaya” in due course?
And possibly eventually Second Cousin Twice Removed of Yamnaya.
Canonically, “Bride of Yamnaya” should have come first. Then “Son of Yamnaya”, then “Ghost of Yamnaya”, then “Yamnaya meets Dravidian”, then “House of Yamnaya”. The final(?) one should probably be a duo of comedians meet Yamnaya — I’d suggest “Nyland and Goropius”, but there is a surfeit of them to choose from.
/Hammertime
Yamnaya in the KONGO. (Perhaps too controversial for these politically correct times …)
Oh, the wind that blew through the whiskers on the flea in the hair on the tail of
the dog of the daughter of the wife of the Dayak has just come to town….
A new paper by Ioannidis et al., Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement is the most careful approach I have seen toward demonstrating early Polynesian-American contact using genetics. The paper finds an American genetic signature in Eastern Polynesian populations. What’s distinguishes this paper from earlier such studies is that it clearly separates the purported American signal from a European one; that it dates both plausibly; and that it clearly distinguishes different coastal American populations, and ties the source of the Polynesian signal specifically to a population in Colombia.
Interesting!
Y: Ioannidis et al 2020
We briefly discussed it here back in July. I still haven’t read the full text.
Dmitry (in Mother of Yamnaya): (Huang et al 2020).
I love it. This seems to take historical genetics to a whole new level, using the sheer power of numbers to shake out genetic commonalities that can be traced back to a common ancestor. The multi-ethno-linguistic matrixes are essentially the comparative method on genomes, but used to identify the oldest common elements rather than to reconstruct a complete ancestral genome.
A few seconds late to edit I meant to add a few random observations:
They identify a “Northeast Asian Cluster”, which must be more or less identical with what Jeong et al dub ‘Ancient North Asians’ in the paper on the genetic history of Mongolia..
They identify a gene flow from “European” into “Inland South Asian” (likely including the group speaking Proto-Sino-Tibetan) at ~5800 kA. I wonder where that came from.
Note the predictive force. They posit a yet unsampled group in a specific location and with a specific genetic signature as the linguistic ancestors of Kra-Dai.
Thanks, Trond. I somehow missed that discussion (and what followed it, which was very interesting, too.)
(This connects to several discussions. Most immediately me (July 29, 2020 at 7:25 am) in They perished like Avars:
I got the Yu paper (thanks!) and just finishen reading it. Not much time to digest, but my takeout is that it’s a complementation to what we already knew about Eastern Siberia. On the ancient and basal level, it fills out the picture of the North Asian population that is ancestral to Non-Arctic Native Americans. Additionally it starts to untangle the movements and admixtures of the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age that eventually would lead to the formation of the ethnic and linguistic groups we know today. The plague is part of that. Intriguingly it’s found in two individuals without Steppe ancestry. They were from the same site, but one of them had migrated in his early childhood. The date and the strain of Yersinia pestis are practically identical to those of a Corded Ware individual from the Baltic. This fits well with the population crisis in Scandinavia before the arrival of the Bell Beakers.)
A new Siberian archaeo-genetics paper from Dmitry on Facebook:
Kılınç et al “Human population dynamics and Yersinia pestis in ancient northeast Asia” Sci. Adv. 2021; 7 : eabc4587.
Their conclusions corroborate and expands on earlier studies:
Apart from that, the paper is unusually hard to digest, but the supplementary text is more readable. I guess they had to edit it down to the available number of pages. Anyway…
Expanding on Yu et al this study makes it very likely that there was a regional plague pandemic at around the year 2500 BCE. In my view the region could well turn out to be the entire continent, but there’s not enough data to tell yet. A few centuries later the bacterium is found at the Kolyma river in the farthest end of Yakutia. I’d think that to spread in a sparsely populated region like that, this early incarnation of the plague must have been both a slow killer and independent of rats.
Something close to the source population of Paleo-Eskimos (and hence also of Na-Dene?) is found with the sampling of two 7th millennium BP individuals from the region of Yakutsk in Yakutia, associated with the Belkachi culture and its immediate predecessor, the Syalakh culture. This is in line with earlier hypotheses based on material culture. The two seem to be close to a mid-9th millennium BP individual from east of Lake Baikal, also in line with hypotheses from material culture. All three are said to show genetic affinity with modern Chukotko-Kamchatkans — as is Saqqaq.
Two 5th millenium BP individuals from the Lena Basin and three 4th millenium BP individuals from the Kolyma River further northeast form a distinct group, apparently descended from Syalakh/Belkachi with additional admixture from southeast. An interesting outlier was left unmentioned in the main text but shown on the maps and diagrams, where it’s intriguingly grouped with the Yakutian individuals. This is a mid-5th millenium BP individual from south of Krasnoyarsk who seems to fit perfectly within the contemporary population in the Lena Basin. Is this the first Yeniseian? This individual also shows evidence of a recent genetic bottleneck, in line with the plague hypothesis.
The Syalakh/Belkachi cultures are also thought to be ancestral to the Bronze Age Ymyyakhtakh culture that spread almost explosively along the Arctic coast in the late 2nd millennium BCE. The Kolyma individuals are late enough that they could be part of this movement, but I can’t find anything on their cultural affinity.
I’m on record suggesting a Dene-Yeniseian homeland (providing there is such a thing as Dene-Yeniseian) on the Arctic Coast. I’ll note that a mobile riverine culture on the Lena could easily spill over into the Yenisei Basin via the Angara or Tunguska rivers (or vice versa). It’s the distance from there to Alaska that disturbs me. The ancestors of the Paleo-Eskimos (and/or Na-Dene) would have migrated from the Lena Basin long before those of the Syalakh-Belkachi descendants found on the Kolyma River. For the Yeniseian branch to have been brought from the Lena to the Yenisei in the 5th millennium BP, we’d have to suppose that the stay-behind groups on the Lena were Pre-Proto-Yeniseian for a long time, even as new East Asian groups moved into the area and were integrated in its genetic profile. If so, also the movers north should be (Para-)Pre-Proto-Yeniseians. Maybe these coastal Leniseians were yukagrified from the west.
It is a mainstream view in Russia that Yukaghir languages came into region with the Bronze Age Ymyyakhtakh culture in late 2nd millennium BC.
From Baikal region, but their original homeland was further west, closer to Urals.
Since this is the Great Eurasian Plague thread, I’ll link to
Julian Susat et al: A 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer already plagued by Yersinia pestis Cell Reports, 2021
(Link from Dmitry, as usual)
The oldest and most basal strain of Y, pestis yet has been discovered in a 5300-5050 cal. BP hunter-gatherer from northern Latvia. Needless to say, the last line of the summary is controversial. But since every instance of the plague is a zoonosis, the controverse is really about whether the plague is spreading as a pandemic among rodent parasites on human society. It’s when Y. pestis becomes pandemic (or endemic) among rodents, and the bacterium gains the ability to infect humans easily, that the zoonosis in humans becomes pandemic by extension.
Here’s a thought-provoking paragraph from the discussion:
The question of how a rodent disease could trigger a human pandemic in a sparsely populated region of Eurasia is important, and I’m trying to get my head around it upthread. So maybe the authors are right and the first instances were isolated infections. Maybe, even, that the plague never was pandemic among hunter-gatherers. Still, I think hunter-gatherers with early Y. pestis are significant. As incrisingly deadly ad/or infectious strains of Yersinia spread among wild rodents, hunter-gatherers (beaver hunters?) could have adapted (by non-fatal exposure or genetic selection) before it infected the rats of the agriculturalists, and they would then be in a position to fill the void after the first plague.
@Trond Engen: It seems to me that the terminology with early plague strains is bit tricky—being based, in part, on what appears to have been an erroneous assumption about how the modern plague strain developed (and thus where to place the dividing line between Yersinia pseudotuberculosis and Y. pestis). As I understand it, it is conventional to call all bacterial lineages with the pMT1 and pPCP1 plasmids Y. pestis. However, it is now known from very early genomes (and according to that Cell Reports paper, the Rinnukalns genetic data confirms this) that pMT1 was actually acquired without the gene for the key virulence factor ymt (Yersinia murine toxin). Only later was the gene for ymt, which makes it much easier for the bacteria to thrive inside the flea vectors, added to the plasmid—meaning that assimilation of the plasmid itself was not one of the primary enablers in the development pestis-level human infectivity. Nomenclature will presumably get even trickier if fossil genomes with only one of the pMT1 or pPCP1 plasmids are found (which has not, to my knowledge, been observed thus far).
@Brett: Thanks. I couldn’t have written that, but I agree.
Dmitry Pruss on Facebook linked to these interesting papers:
The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes:
Dairying enabled Early Bronze Age Yamnaya steppe expansions:
horse domestication … the novel exploitation of secondary animal products
Is transport an “animal product” ? Or is primarily horse dung meant ?
Aren’t dairy products the reference there — meat being the only use considered primary?
Yes, if one bothers to click through, one finds (bolding added):
Of course, the reference to “dairying” in the title might have been a clue.
Adding a reference to “Horsing around” in the title would have been yet another welcome clue.
Perhaps “dairying” was misread as “draying”, a nonce synonym for “drayage” . . .
It”s the same paper jack morava linked to in another thread recently. I haven’t had time to read it, but I immediately like it. And I don’t know if it rejects the horse hypothesis as much as nuances and complements it.
@Trond Engen,
I started trying to take this seriously when I saw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot
Open-access paper on how Japan was settled in three stages.
Five open-access papers and their abstracts:
Ancient Mitochondrial Genomes Reveal Extensive Genetic Influence of the Steppe Pastoralists in Western Xinjiang
Genomic Insight Into the Population Admixture History of Tungusic-Speaking Manchu People in Northeast China
Genomic Insight Into the Population Structure and Admixture History of Tai-Kadai-Speaking Sui People in Southwest China
Peopling History of the Tibetan Plateau and Multiple Waves of Admixture of Tibetans Inferred From Both Ancient and Modern Genome-Wide Data
The Opportunities and Challenges of Integrating Population Histories Into Genetic Studies for Diverse Populations: A Motivating Example From Native Hawaiians
Thanks for those!
I haven’t had time to read them myself yet.
Thanks! Will read.
I’m frantically trying to get up to date with all these papers.
The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes has showed up as open access in Nature.
(Quoting a bit more)
[…]
That is, the rapid spread of Steppe ancestry in Europe wasn’t carried on horseback. It wasn’t even bringing horses along. Horses bred for riding and chariotry came a millennium later, and we may ask what upheavals that caused.
Oddly, the paper on the genetic history of the Tibetan plateau does not cite this one by a reshuffling of the same authors, published half a year earlier in the same journal.
Trond: the contrast between the Indo-Iranian speaking zone and the European zone (=Indo-European minus Anatolian, Tocharian and Armenian) is reminiscent of another such contrast: whereas in Europe there is a layer of place-names that seems to go back to a nearly undifferentiated Indo-European (=Krahe’s “Old European”), nothing like this has been found in the Indo-Iranian zone.
So, if I may speculate wildly here: perhaps in Europe the original bearers of Steppe ancestry (whatever the original cause(s) of their expansion across Europe may have been) were the first wave of Indo-European speakers and were the ones responsible for “Old European” place-names, with a later wave of Indo-Europeanization in Europe taking place as a result of the domestication of the horse (wholly replacing, partly replacing, or simply heavily influencing, the older Indo-European varieties? All possible. Would it be possible to associate the later Indo-Europeanizing wave with some linguistic innovation(s)/isogloss(es) within Europe? The RUKI-rule, perhaps?). Because in the Indo-Iranian zone the spread of Indo-European was due to the domestication of the horse, Indo-Iranian spread across an area which, unlike Europe, had not been previously Indo-Europeanized.
Hm. Thinking out loud here…this scenario fits with the linguistic facts well for another reason: Indo-Iranian shows far more non-Indo-European influence (in vocabulary) than any of the European branches of Indo-European, which seems odd since we have much older records for Indo-Iranian than for European Indo-European (All other things being equal, we would expect that the languages attested earlier would show less outside influence).
BUT…if Indo-Iranian did indeed spread at the expense of non-Indo-European languages, and (later, domestic horse-using) European Indo-European spread over a substrate of (earlier) Indo-European varieties (which may well have formed a dialect continuum, and been mutually intelligible with, the expanding varieties), well, that would explain the contrast, wouldn’t it?
Okay, enough with the soliloquy, thoughts, anyone?
I like it, but I await what better-informed folks will have to say.
Two potentially important considerations are
1) Male-dominated, Steppe ancestry-rich population turnovers in Europe didn’t end with the initial spread of Yamnaya across Dnieper and up the Danube. Rather, they just started. A replacement event every 200-300 years all the way to the end of the III millennium BCE. As documented recently e.g. in
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi6941
2) Military technologies spread somewhat independently of the main population moves. Take Sintashta. Their principal genetic ancestors were the Fatyanovo who didn’t have horses and didn’t live on the Steppe in the first place. They were grazing sheep and raising pigs on the riverside meadows of the forests. Fatyanovo did form an early offshoot East of Volga since they needed copper ores lacking in their core lands. It overlaps in time with Turganik and its proto-domestic horses, but Turganik is assigned to a very different Samara culture. Even though it’s geographically close to Sintashta which soon flourished. But Sintashta is known to have been something of a melting pot, with the DNA of some of Sintashta remains being quite dissimilar from its main population. So I believe that Sintashta got its horses from one of the Steppe populations which contributed less, genetically, to its population. A sort of a culturally important minority. The horse technology could have spread West in the same way, as a cultural import or a contribution of a minority group.
Leiden press release, pretty long and readable. I still haven’t read the real thing, but I’ll try to do that right away.
There may not actually be any evidence for this. Check out Piotr’s conference presentation “Against Old European: Why we need to be more specific” from 2012.
More than one wave of IE language spread in western & central Europe (not to mention the Apennine and Balkan peninsulas with the whole Crotonian business, or the Italic loanwords in Proto-Slavic) are a given, e.g. because the Bell Beaker expansion was simply too early to be Proto-Celtic or anything like that. But those probably all came from within that region; e.g., there’s no reason, AFAIK, to assume the origin of Celtic was any farther east than Bavaria.
That’s a fascinating open-access article! Abstract:
Fascinating it is. This opens so many doors it’s hard to know where to go. For now. Soon this fine-grained approach will be applied everywhere, and we’ll have migration history on a level I couldn’t imagine.
Obviously, the whole process of indoeuropeanization just became very chaotic. I was surprised, but I realize I shouldn’t be. A culture established through full replacement of the male line won’t stop having male lines replaced just like that. The period from the late 4th to the early 2nd millennium BCE was one long migration era, and migrations went in all directions. Funnel Beaker and Global Amphora were intrusive to Bohemia from the north. Then came Corded Ware from the northeast, probably (but not necessarily) introducing Indo-European, Bell Beaker from the west, and then Únětice from the northeast again.
So why did it calm down for a while in the Bronze Age? Or is the Bronze Age just as restless, and we just haven’t got the data yet?
The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies in open access. Abstract:
Later on:
Yup, they were already living off cow, sheep and goat milk products (despite not making any lactase). Ephedra = Mormon tea = soma/haoma as already used in the BMAC.
Amazing stuff — early history is getting progressively rewritten.
We’ve very quickly come a long way from nos ancêtres les Gaulois (or, farther east, from pre-Celtic “Illyrians” who “died out” as my sister was still taught). I envy the generation of current kindergarten kids the prehistory chapters they’ll have in their history schoolbooks.
As they will envy the kids in a few decades…
Even with all the new data pouring in, I fear that there’s no sign yet of a coherent picture crystallizing. It seems like every new discovery scrambles the history afresh. I fear that we’re far off indeed from being able to codify much at the level of children’s schoolbooks.
But that’s good! It’s better to have a complicated, unclear picture than a simple-minded fairy tale.
Of course, but it’s nice to be at a point where we know that we at least have an approximation to what’s going on. It feels like we are not even to the “let’s start filling in the details” stage.
If we taught kids in the kindergarten the real prehistory, I imagine it would look like this.
Our great-great-great…..grandpa came from the east and raped our great-great-great…..grandma and thus our great and glorious nation was born.
But not yet! Because another two centuries passed and our great-great-great…..grandpa came from the east and raped our great-great-great…..grandma and thus our great and glorious nation was born again.
And so on for five thousand years.
That’s what literally these papers amount to.
Alternatively, great-great-great .. grandma may just have preferred men with chariots to pedestrians.
You are absolutely right.
That’s exactly what would be written in the version for kindergarten kids.
The impression I’m getting is that we’ve been having a coherent picture for a few years now. Every new discovery complicates it considerably, but generally in ways that make more sense than the simplicity we had before.
Ah, so this thread is where it is more appropriate to discuss these sorts of discoveries. I posted about the Tarim discovery in the Tocharian thread but it wasn’t really noticed there
https://languagehat.com/tocharian/#comment-4311399
preferred men with chariots
sometimes it’s the opposite disconnect between the conventionally accepted history narrative and what the genes say (the rape was always posited but something different must have happened in reality). Like one of the genes I spent decades with is BRCA1, a scourge of early-age breast and ovarian cancers. The Ashkenazi Jewish population has two common mutations in it, one with venerable, likely middle Eastern roots, another much younger in origin and shared in all peoples of Baltic / Eastern European origins, from Denmark to Greece. One can follow the history of the mutation by checking what else in its neighborhood is passed along from parent to child, and building a phylogenetic tree of these patterns. The root of the tree is buried in the post-Roman Great Migrations age somewhere in the Denmark / South Sweden area. The Ashkenazi sub-branch is relatively young, and grows from a larger Polish / Kresy branch, splitting off in the XVII century, give or take a century or two.
It’s been known for over 15 years, and people immediately jumped to an interpretation: this genetic scourge must be a lasting legacy of the Chmielnicki rapes. Except the more recent studies show that the massive infusion of East Slavic DNA into the Ashkenazi Jewish population was female-mediated, and took place largely in the 1500s as small founder groups of the Ashkenazim moved to Mazovia and on to the Lithuanian Grand Duchy. Most parsimoniously, it’s the pioneering migrants taking local wives, in a pattern repeated by so many peoples in so many places and circumstances across the globe. Here goes the rape story…
I imagine that in those days a Jewish man could marry a gentile woman without her ritualistically converting, and it would be overlooked, and a few generations later none would be the wiser.
It is safer to assume that conversions did occur, but the process might have differed in some important details from today’s extremely high bar. The rabbinical authorities, including some even in Israel, already consider mitochondrial DNA tests when making halachaic decisions. Their favorite mtDNA haplotypes are the most common among the Ashkenazi Jews but are, ultimately of Western Mediterranean origins, rather than from the Middle East. So these “authentically Jewish” mtDNA lineages are undoubtedly of a female convert origin too, only from an earlier era. By extension, the additional Eastern Europe-specific mtDNA types ought to be considered convert too. Since they’ve been added to the population DNA more recently, they can’t be used to tell Jewish vs. gentile maternal lines apart, but it’s the only difference.
Very few Ashkenazi maternal lines can be traced by DNA back to the Middle East. Only the paternal lines lead there with few exceptions.
Could those W. Mediterranean lineages be Roman/Italian?
embroidering on @Y:
/hops on hobby horse/
i don’t think it’s a matter of “overlooking” – i think it’s part of a very pervasive pattern!
to my eye, data like this helps strengthen the argument that jewish communities that emerged in earlier periods did so in quite similar ways to the more recently-established ones that we know a great deal about (from the abuyadaya back to the beta israel). which is to say, primarily through non-institutional affiliation, in many cases with the presence of a small number of jewish people (mostly men) from other places, but not necessarily any (as with the abuyadaya). those communities have then had varying degrees of harmonization of some parts of their practice to neighboring or influential older communities, often in many waves over time.
we know (from daniel boyarin’s research, among others) that the different gender systems and dynamics of gendered power in jewish communities made them desirable points of affiliation for women, in particular, in the period when rabbinic jewishness was emerging. that seems likely to have also been true in the later stages of the christianization of eastern europe (which came especially late to the baltic, of course) – though i’d guess that as in the red sea basin and elsewhere, the chance to at least partially opt out of the structuring conflicts between empires and actively proselytizing religions was a bigger factor.
this process of ethnogenesis through affiliation is also, i’d say, the easiest way to explain why jewish communities not only look like their neighbors but generally* speak the same languages, or ones that have only recently diverged, with minimal substrates, and why linguistic and minhag/nusakh boundaries line up so precisely. if there were in fact an ancient-greek-style colonial process, you’d expect to see a patchwork of reappearing languages (or at least substrates) and minhogim based on where the founding populations came from. and we don’t, except in some exceptional cases – either communities that remained quite small (the sefardi community in madras; the baghdadi community that began in surat; &c) or were established through mass displacements or migrations (the sefardi diaspora; the yiddish emigration wave) rather than settlement by small core groups.
.
* yiddish is the most confusing exception, though the 19thC evidence of 18thC communities speaking something slavic is suggestive about the date that it became the dominant jewish language in eastern europe. and, more importantly, we have very little evidence of what anyone but rabbis and other wealthy men who dealt with the state authorities spoke. and those guys were/are a highly endogamous elite class – one that does seem to have been established by migrants and is often explicitly contrasted with the majority of yiddish jews. the other exceptions (judezmo/ladino being the main one) all have pretty clear explanations.
Could those W. Mediterranean lineages be Roman/Italian?
Possibly. There is no 100% certain answer, because ancient DNA from the region isn’t sampled well enough, and because the Ashkenazi founder effects may have enriched some previously rare lineages just by chance, potentially reducing the odds of finding similar mtDNAs in the ancient samples.
A classic paper tries to stay vague
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543
On the up-to-date trees combining literature and user-submitted DNAs, it looks like the roots of the lineages date back to Roman times, not later than II c., but without any ancient DNAs in the comparisons. One example:
https://yfull.com/mtree/K1a1b1a/
@rozele interesting, 1700s and 1800s Slavic usage evidence, can you please elaborate? We discussed 1600s about a year ago here, it sounds like a very exaggerated interpretation of a quote of a prescriptivist rabbi…
https://languagehat.com/lost-yiddish-words/#comment-4049403
There is talk about even earlier Canaanitic but it seems to be smoke without a fire too
Oh, yes, I overlooked the Tocharian thread.
Intriguing. Could you elaborate?
rozele, I join Dmitry Pruss in asking for more details. How is that possible that low class Jews in Russian empire in 19th century have spoken Yiddish, but before that a Slavic language? This makes no sense to me, which is not the same as being wrong, of course.
i’ll see how much i can post tonight, and get to anything that’s left later!
first, @DM:
all of this adapted from daniel boyarin [i had thought Border Lines was mainly what i’m remembering, but i looked at my copy and it seems to be something else – i’ll see if i can figure it out]…
rabbinism emerges during the centuries on either side of christian year 0 – first as a countercurrent to temple-centered judean ritual practice, and then as its successor – through the emergence of the studyhouse/synagogue as an institution, the development of the texts that now get grouped as the talmud, and the decreasing power of the hereditary temple priesthood and monarchy. all of this largely* under roman hegemony, which is to say within a society whose gendered structures (which become christianized to form the core of the contemporary euro/colonial gender system) leave barely any space for women to have a public role, much less economic or institutional power.
rabbinism develops a whole other gender system [this is boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct and Carnal Israel], which is equally binary and committed to privileging men, but very different in content. one of those differences is an openness to women’s active participation in economic and institutional life. if i remember right, this shows up in the early synagogue epigraphy, as well as being quite clear from the polemical writing by writers affiliated with both of the gradually disentangling christian and (rabbinist) jewish movements.
during this same period, there’s a wave of affiliation with what we can start to see as jewishness, partly enabled by the way that rabbinism makes it exist as something other than “what judeaens do”. there’s enough of it that the rabbis make a ritual for it, and formally decide (though arguments last into the early modern period**) that by affiliating, a person becomes a descendent of abraham just like any other jew [this is s.j.d. cohen]. that wave is, to my eye, what makes something we can properly call jewishness out of the constellation of judean emigrant communities.
it’s not much of a stretch to see these two processes as connected. if the question is “why become jewish?”, the answer has to be the things distinguishing jews from other segments of roman society. and one of the big ones is their gender system, and the greater space of possibility it offered women.
that analysis is reinforced, i think, by the way that the same dynamic played into the expansion of early christianity through women’s affiliation [this i think is well-established]. i won’t even glance at the whole question of how to even distinguish that from the expansion of jewishness in the same period – the point is that they’re largely one and the same. the way paul and his successors combined attacks on women’s influence with an insistance on the non-jewishness of christianity shows quite clearly that they understood the two to be related.
* i know less about what’s up in the persian imperial zone, the other main center of rabbinic jewishness’ emergence. i’m not gonna open that can of worms, except to say that i think it’s arguable that the rabbis’ ideological decision to present themselves as the heirs of the jerusalem temple put the emphasis on the roman sphere even as the mesopotamian rabbis became authoritiative beyond the persian empire.
** relevantly, once they exist, rhineland and then eastern european rabbis are very consistently on the ‘pro-convert’ side in their decisions, in contrast to iberian and north african rabbis.
@DP, @DO:
this is a whole kettle of worms, and nobody has any decent answers. what’s clear is that the conventional explanations for (as of the 19thC) both the presence in eastern europe of the world’s biggest jewish population and its use of a germanic language don’t hold up. there were no mass migrations to the east; weinreich’s rhineland hypothesis doesn’t hold up to scrutiny; western yiddish probably isn’t monogenetic (though the whole family of yiddishes probably is)*; and so on and so forth.
and, even worse, the jewishness of the khazars is both historically unclear and probably irrelevant!
but: the piece of the puzzle i was referring to is this:
R. Isaac Ber Levinsohn (1901, 33–34 note 2; from Hebrew), who lived from 1788 to 1860, was also of the opinion that Russian Jews, in the first instance, spoke Russian:
“and our elderly told us that the Jews, a number of generations before us, only spoke the language of this Russia in these districts [Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev, and the other districts], and that the Yiddish that we now speak had not been disseminated among all the Jews who lived in these districts, and they also told me, on behalf of […] (Czacki) […] that some hundreds of years ago, the Jews in these districts said their prayers in Polish and not in the holy language as they are used to do nowadays, and this as proof that their language was Polish or Russian”
this is jits van straten in his tendentious The Origin of Ashkenazi Jewry, whose analysis i wouldn’t rely on, but who i’ve got no reason to distrust on his sources (he’s no paul wexler). levinsohn was an anti-yiddishist enlightener, so we probably have this tidbit thanks to his excitement about finding evidence of eastern european jews using something he could consider a “real language”. but there’s no reason for us to think (as van straten seems to) that the language his informants were talking about was what we’d call russian. if “this russian” is a decent translation of levinsohn’s hebrew, it seems much more likely to be referring to whatever the local slavic vernacular(s) were at the time than to any state language.
but what we can glean is that at the edge of living mid-19thC memory, the jews of a core region of eastern europe were speaking something slavic rather than yiddish, and that some time before that they had also prayed in a slavic language*.
this harmonizes pretty well with what alexander beider writes: “The Yiddish literature of Eastern Europe known to us dates from the 16th century only and comes from Poland. No Yiddish publication from the territories of modern Ukraine, Belarus, or Lithuania is known even for the 17th century.” [Contested Origins of Eastern European Jewry: Clues from History, Linguistics, and Onomastics – in Avotaynu 33:2, 2017]
and even for poland, the yiddish material is quite sparse into the 17thC. one of the earliest eastern yiddish texts – and possibly the earliest printed one by well over a century!*** – is a 1613 refue / remedy book, seyfer derekh ets ha-khayim, that ewa geller says shows that its writer was a fluent polish speaker, while “taytsh, on the other hand, seems to have been an acquired language for the author”.
i’ll leave it at that, with no pretense of being able to make it all make sense!
.
* i’m trusting alexis manaster ramer on this, partly because he actually talks about methodology in ways that make sense.
** the time period here is uncertain; oral testimony of “some hundreds of years” could mean anything past living memory. and what exactly “said their prayers” refers to here is an interesting question. it could be anything from synagogue liturgy – which seems quite unlikely, though not impossible given how much everyone seems to agree that there weren’t many rabbis in eastern europe – to some or all of the many genres that were later mainly performed in yiddish.
*** i’m not gonna go looking further, but geller’s article cites another refue-bukh from 1790 as the previous “first literary document of Eastern-Yiddish”.
Interesting indeed, thanks!
I don’t get this part, though: how can the whole family be monogenetic when its parts aren’t?
Interesting indeed, thanks!
Seconded!
this is jits van straten in his tendentious The Origin of Ashkenazi Jewry
I copyedited that book! (He thanks me nicely in the acks.) I too found it tendentious and wondered how much of it to take seriously, but he’s a great guy (and paid me promptly).
@rozele, dm, dp, do
What I am missing here is what different authors mean by “said their prayers”, “spoke the language”, etc. These are multilingual communities with exogamy and transnational or even transcontinental networks involving both Jews and non-Jews. So a significant proportion of people might have been code-switching and what language they “spoke” or “said their prayers” in might depend on the individual and the context. So could Yiddish be a sort of lingua franca adopted over time and in parallel with the rise of nations in Europe?
So could Yiddish be a sort of lingua franca adopted over time and in parallel with the rise of nations in Europe?
That’s what it’s sounding like, and it’s an exciting idea (to me, anyway).
Since Ashkenazi Jews are of West German origin (there can be no doubt about it), it means that they originally spoke some other West German dialect (not Yiddish).
They lost it within few generations after migration to Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 15th century, switched presumably to some version of Old Ruthenian and then reacquired another West German dialect which became Yiddish sometime in 18th century.
Or alternatively (and perhaps more plausibly) this is what happened to some groups of Lithuanian Jews, not all of them.
So some isolated groups of Jews who lost Yiddish, spoke Ruthenian and even prayed in Slavic were later reintegrated back to the Yiddish-speaking majority.
Anyway, sounds very interesting.
I sadly don’t recall the details – I’ve heard about it about two or three years ago – but supposedly one Eastern European… either language or highly divergent dialect… is attested from one word list (and/or a few sentences), written in a notebook found by a Soviet teenager in the 1970s, which was then reportedly thrown away by his mother, but fortunately some parts of the text had been copied.
There’s a lot we don’t (and, often, can’t) really know about the linguistic landscape of Eastern Europe even as recently as the 19th century, never mind the 18th. So much just either didn’t happen to be written down, or was lost later.
I guess in a lot of cases there’s always the hope for some accidental further discovery…
@DM:
quickly as i run to work:
manaster ramer argues that all yiddishes do share a common origin, but that the major/earliest historical splitting is not between the varieties have been clustered (on reasonable linguistic grounds) as “western yiddish” and “eastern yiddish” – roughly west and east of the oder – but between varieties east and west of the elbe (or a line west of it). so the eastern dialects of “western yiddish” are more closely related to the dialects of “eastern yiddish” than they are to the western dialects of “western yiddish”.
here’s the paper.
this matters more than it may seem because the big cultural and community-identity division in central & eastern european jewry runs along the elbe, and very much not the oder. proverbially, minhag ashkenaz ends, and minhag poyln begins, at the Dammtor in hamburg. one of the big implicit arguments for the idea that eastern european jews can be considered a subset of german jewry – i.e. as “ashkenazim”, despite having a distinct minhag and nusakh from the rhineland-centered minhag ashkenaz – is the idea that even if yiddish isn’t a pure dialect continuum, its western branch includes a sizeable section of poyln along with ashkenaz. if manaster ramer’s right, that simply doesn’t hold up.
and that speaks to SFReader’s proposals, too. pace SFReader, there’s metric tons of doubt about the rhenish hypothesis, and always has been. dovid katz, alexander beider, and others have pointed out the shakiness in the – very few – concrete arguments weinreich made to back up his assertions, and i don’t know that anyone has actually tried to make a well-grounded case for it since (as opposed to simply using uncle max’s name as an amulet). but ultimately, how much that matters depends on what we’re trying to explain. west-of-the-elbe yiddish – the yiddish of minhag ashkenaz – may indeed have a rhenish center point. but that doesn’t say much of anything meaningful about the history of east-of-the-elbe yiddish – the yiddish of minhag poyln – which is, after all, the only piece that’s confusing! west of the elbe, it makes sense for jewish communities to speak a germanic language; east of the elbe, not so much, since (again pace SFReader) there’s no evidence for mass migration east.
(the question of when and why eastern european jews started to be talked about as a subset of german jews (as “ashkenazim”) is its own whole can of worms – all i’ll say here is that my bronx-born grandfather’s line on his jewish identity was “whaddya mean, ashkenazi? i’m a galitsianer!”)
@January First-of-May, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudovian_language#Polish-Yotvingian_vocabulary
I agree.
rozele, thanks for a detailed explanation and good for your grandfather to be a proud galitzaner (usually, not the most envied Jewish subsubidentity, but I remember in Munich the movie another proud galitzaner denouncing a “yekke potz”). Even if the gradient hypothesis (from Rhine eastward) is correct, there is no reason for religious and language boundaries to coincide.
The spread of Yiddish among Central and Eastern European Jews does seem oddly similar to the nearly contemporaneous spread of Ladino (A.K.A Judeo-Spanish, A.K.A. Judezmo) among Jews of the Mediterranean world and the Balkans: and I do recall one monograph on a variety of Ladino which made a strong case that Ladino had spread, in hellenophone Europe, at the expense of whatever variety/varieties of Greek Jews of the region had originally spoken. The discussion upthread on Yiddish having possibly spread, among Jews, at the expense of Slavic in Russia and Poland reminded me of this, and more broadly makes me suspect that the dynamics of Ladino and Yiddish language spread may have more than a few points in common.
Well, in case of the Greek Jews and the spread of Ladino, there’s a clear case of swamping — the number of Jews in present-day Greece and surrounding areas immediately prior to the 1492 expulsion was tiny compared to the the exiled newcomers.
On the other hand, rozele says there was no large-scale eastward migration of Yiddish speakers.
Dmitry: Ah, so this thread is where it is more appropriate to discuss these sorts of discoveries. I posted about the Tarim discovery in the Tocharian thread but it wasn’t really noticed there
I’ve very much noticed it, but I haven’t had time to dive into it. Will do.
Since these were ANE people related to the Botai, here’s a speculation on Botai and Mongolia in what for a while was the horse thread. The rest of the discussion needs updating in light of the new dating of riding.
(LanguageHat: Where everything is discussed but never under the right headline.)
I think there are genetic studies which prove West German origin of all Ashkenazi Jews.
It’s also perfectly compatible with idea of no mass migration eastwards – all millions of Eastern European Jews are descendants of a very small original founder population – numbering in low hundreds in 14th century.
Kind of like Quebec, really.
IIRC, all 9 or 10 million Franco-Canadians and Franco-Americans are descendants of about 800 young French women sent by king to Canada between 1663 and 1673.
Re the Ashkenazi bottleneck, I’ve found the following:
https://systemsbiology.columbia.edu/news/study-sheds-light-on-ashkenazi-jewish-genome-and-ancestry
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1216062/
https://www.nature.com/articles/5201156
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/107/37/16222.full.pdf
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1007329
Headlines? What headlines?
I’ve read it all now. The paper is from 1997. Manaster Ramer made three claims:
1) the most conspicuous division in Yiddish is not between “Western” and “Eastern” (of the Oder, very roughly), but between “Westerly” and “Easterly” (of the Elbe or even farther west); Western is therefore paraphyletic with respect to Eastern.
2) There’s little evidence on whether Westerly Yiddish is monophyletic, though he prefers to think so for the moment and calls for further research.
3) Yiddish as a whole is monophyletic, as shown by “a very large number” of mostly lexicosemantic innovations with regard to German and Hebrew/Aramaic, notably including both a few Romance and a few Slavic words.
Much more recently, Beider has agreed with 1) (unfortunately, as Manaster Ramer pointed out in a recent paper, keeping the terms “Western” & “Eastern” and applying them to Westerly & Easterly), but not with 3) or the stronger form of 2): Easterly is not descended from Westerly but has a separate origin (and I think he also offers the possibility that Westerly itself might be polyphyletic, but I haven’t read his book), and the innovations found all across Yiddish must have spread between the mutually intelligible Yiddishes later. I think we have to assume that for the Slavic ones anyway. In particular, it seems to me that khotsh(e) “although” has a specifically Polish form, not Czech.
On 3), Manaster Ramer presented what he called a small sample “for lack of space (indeed, it seems to call for a monographic treatment).” Has anyone made one? He himself seems not to have – I can’t find any on his very, very long academia.edu page*. Of the three “in press” papers he promised, I can only find one, Yiddish origins: the Austro-Bavarian problem by him and Meyer Wolf (also from 1997). Not having read Beider’s book I don’t know what Beider says about any of the examples.
But I can say a few things about both of Manaster Ramer’s papers anyway. 🙂
In sections 3 and 4 of the first paper, Manaster Ramer talks about the megamerger of MHG ei, öu, ou** as /aː/, which has often been taken as the defining phonological feature of Western Yiddish. In section 4, he quotes Beranek (1961 apparently) as saying that it spread across Western Yiddish later, and that it became popular not only because it’s a simplification but also because it was present in “the language of” Frankfurt, the Sudetes and Austria. It’s not present in Austria. MHG ou is indeed /a/ (length is no longer phonemic), but ei is /a/ only in the east (e.g. Vienna) and along the western railway, and the (long unrounded) öu has merged not with the old ei, but with the new one, i.e. MHG î – as in Swiss and Alsatian Yiddish interestingly.
“Beranek (1965:8, 10) reports scattered traces of relic forms with /eː/ for E4 [MHG ei] and similar traces of relicforms with /oː/ for O4 [MHG ou] in Yiddish dialects of the Rhineland, an area which in general, like all of Western Yiddish, has /a:/ in both cases.” Those are the Low and Central German outcomes.
The report of [ç] in Swiss Yiddish is fascinating, because Swiss German lacks [ç] and even [x] entirely; it famously has all [χ] all the time, no allophony, like Eastern (or apparently all of Easterly) Yiddish.
The report, in the same paragraph, of an actual separate /ç/ that does not depend on the preceding vowel in unspecified Westerly Yiddish varieties (“as is well known”; apparently up and down the Rhine) is downright mind-blowing.
At the end of section 4 is the claim that there’s no “/ç/” in Bavarian. There isn’t, but Manaster Ramer doesn’t seem to use brackets anywhere in the section, and in footnote 13 he says more or less the same dialects “have no ich-Laut”; [ç] very much exists (in Bavarian other than Tyrolean, and in Swabian but not the rest of Alemannic) as the usual allophone (spectrum of allophones really).
Near the end of section 5 there’s a paragraph on different reflexes of “2”. These could be complicated by the fact that German used to distinguish all three genders by different forms of that word – into the 17th or 18th century in written works (zween, zwo, zwei), and apparently still in a few dialects in Bavaria.
Section 8 (iii) presents “a large set of additional characteristically Yiddish vocabulary whose etymologies and/or particular semantic, morphological, or phonological developments are specifically Yiddish”, starting with shmeykhlen “smile”. I wonder if that’s a mixture of schmeicheln “flatter” and śmiech- “smile”… Also, horkhen for “hear” isn’t as surprising as its membership in this list makes it seem. Bavarian generally has taken the contrast of sehen “see” (involuntarily) and schauen “look” (deliberately), consolidated it to the point that zusehen “watch” is considered a contradiction in terms and replaced by zuschauen, and extrapolated it to involuntary hören vs. deliberate horchen and zuhorchen. For shabeyse-nakht(s) I’m not sure what the unexpected innovation is supposed to be: “night” for “evening”? My grandma’s way of saying “in the evening” is literally “onto the night”.
Footnote 40 talks about “the lengthening of vowels in certain stressed final syllables (i.e., usually monosyllables)” as a “possible Proto-Yiddish phonological development”. Guess what? All of High German has lengthened the vowels of monosyllabic words that end in less than two consonants.
The other paper is off to an odd start: “the Austro-Bavarian dialects, which once covered not only Bavaria and Austria but also parts of the Czech lands and Hungary”? Hungary in the pre-1921 sense, yes, but barely since then.
Section 2 repeats the gaffe about öu & ei.
Section 4 teaches me about double diminutives in Bavarian. This is not sarcasm; if it’s in Schmeller’s grammar from 1821, it’s probably real and has merely been lost widely. It also looks like it explains a few things about the weird behavior of -/l̩/ and -/ɐl/ in my dialect (basically, words mostly take one or the other without rhyme or reason, and -/ɐl/ triggers phonological phenomena that only make phonetic sense for -/l̩/). – I didn’t know about the Westphalian island with ink for euch either, nor about 17th-century grammars of Yiddish (both mentioned in section 6), nor about the -s plurals in East Central German (section 8).
Interesting that vowel length in Courland Yiddish was apparently lost very late (section 5), but not surprising: in Latvian, vowel length is srs bzns.
The statement (still in section 5) that vowel length is not phonemic in Austro-Bavarian is accurate (except for a few South Bavarian dialects, where it remains phonemic when a consonant cluster follows – long consonants don’t count). But the description of the phonetic situation is really muddled, and not just because slashes are used instead of brackets throughout. The key to understanding is the fact that consonant length has been phonemic ever since Proto-Germanic at the very least, and that the affricates, even though they don’t participate in the inherited length contrast, are by default long in postvocalic position both by their historical origin (from long plosives) and by current phonetics.
I’ll stick with the noggin example from the paper.
It starts with More or Less Classical Latin cuppa [kʊpːa]. Either get that into Germanic very early (before Proto-Northwest Germanic; Varus could have done it), or wait for Early Romance to give it to early West Germanic***. Either way, once the Empire is over and the High German consonant shift dawns, it has become *[kʰopːʰ]. It shifts straightforwardly to *[kxopːf] (I’m omitting the tie bars for simplicity).
Immediately thereafter, OHG passes a total ban on word-final long consonants. Affricates are treated as word-final as a unit, but the long part is the stop, not the fricative – so the stop is shortened. Result: *[kxopf] in the nominative singular.
By whatever analogy, this word acquires an *-i plural with umlaut. Before OHG is even over, in the last third of the 11th century, the short rounded front vowels are already unrounded**** in Bavarian as I just learned, so, by the time MHG begins in the middle of the following century, the plural is *[kxepːfə].
Then, the intervocalic three-way contrast of /d t tː/ – all voiceless, all unaspirated – breaks down in Central Bavarian just as MHG officially begins (and South Bavarian implements the “NHG diphthongization”). As a byproduct, all word-final postvocalic fortis consonants are shifted to their lenis counterparts if they have any. Affricates are again treated as word-final as a unit, but only the stop part is shifted, because the fricatives never participated in the fortis/lenis contrast.***** Result: *[kxob̥f] vs. unchanged *[kxepːfə].
Toward the official end of MHG in the mid-14th century, apocope hits. (Or, perhaps more likely, a general loss of /ə/ in most environments.) At this point, the ban on word-final long consonants is lifted, and we get a phonemic contrast for word-final affricates: singular *[kxob̥f], plural *[kxepːf].******
Finally, /kːx/ is deaffricated in Central Bavarian, and at some point the vowel lengthening of monosyllabic words ending in less than two consonant moras is introduced from Switzerland. /bf/ counts as one, /pːf/ as two or more, so the modern forms result: [koˑb̥f], [kepːf].
And then Anatoly Liberman comes in, notices the vowel length but not the consonant length, and goes mad from the incomplete revelation, gibbering about “nominative lengthening” as an utterly eldritch morphological process. Apparently the same happened to Manaster Ramer & Wolf’s source, Жирмунский (1956), and maybe even to the mighty Kranzmayr. But I digress. 🙂
In section 7, about “word”-final “devoicing” and its absence, it is stated that “Yiddish generalized the devoiced variant in many nouns ending in -nt”. The examples given, hunt & hant, don’t illustrate this, because they had nt in OHG before final fortition showed up in MHG, coming quite regulary from *-nd as the English cognates – hound, hand – show. Either the Central Bavarian postvocalic lenition process also operated after nasals (it did not after /r/; coda /l/ no longer existed), or Bavarian participated in the weird and never mentioned shift of nt, lt to nd, ld that happened in the ancestry of Standard German, which looks like straightforward voicing except there’s still no voice in Bavarian. So, to find out whether “Yiddish generalized the devoiced variant”, we need to find words that had nd in OHG, from *nþ. But Jugend “youth” and Tugend “virtue” have exactly the kinds of abstract meanings that I’d expect Yiddish to lexify from Hebrew… did it? – Anyway, I’m still not sure whether the MHG final fortition ever covered all of Bavarian. The forms cited from Kranzmayer (1956) as showing fortition clearly do so, but they’re equally clearly South Bavarian, and that group has a wide east-west spread…
The conclusion of the second paper seems fully compatible with Beider’s scenario: Easterly Yiddish starting as a Bohemian koiné composed in about equal parts of Bavarian and East Central German, Westerly Yiddish without any direct Bavarian contribution.
* So many puns and variations on Wörter und Sachen…
** Those are the 19th-century normalizations anyway; öu is probably spelled ou throughout the manuscripts or nearly so, and must at some point have been entirely front & rounded, so öü would have been a better choice of normalization.
*** Actually, that way I could explain why the word is masculine: after WGmc had lost the m. nom. sg. *-z, *-a was suddenly a masculine ending. There’s that famous comb with kaba on it that shows the *-a- did not drop out first.
**** What a fascinating text (transcribed in full in the article). Check out megi, leski, wirdiglihen, modern Standard möge, lösche, würdig-. I think the long ones & diphthongs are all still rounded, though; they seem to be spelled uo, o, oi, iu and maybe u.
***** If you don’t like that hypothesis, I can offer others, but this seems the simplest.
****** This becomes a productive pattern, e.g. Tisch – Tische [tɪˑʃ] – [tɪʃː], Fisch – Fische [fɪˑʃ] – [fɪʃː] have a specially created short /ʃ/ from what was still a consonant cluster /sk/ in OHG. Schuh – Schuhe, both [ʃʊɐ̯xː] with long /xː/, must have joined this pattern before leaving it again; otherwise both forms would have had to keep their etymologically short /x/. Note that extra consonants don’t get in the way, e.g. Strumpf – Strümpfe [ʃtʀʊmb̥f] – [ʃtʀɪmpːf].
thanks so much for that deep read, DM!
i don’t have the chops to even start evaluating the (quite friendly) disagreements between beider and manaster ramer on the technical merits (having read most of beider’s book, and a lot of what manaster ramer’s put on academia.edu). on a gut level, i lean away from beider on purely aesthetic grounds: he seems to both want a clear and fairly unitary answer and to think he’s found one, which makes me doubly skeptical.
leyzer burko’s review of beider’s book may be useful for folks who want to keep on going down this rabbithole; it mostly deals with the bohemian and east franconian parts of the argument (with some criticism of beider’s depiction of bohemian as a fairly unified dialect).
o, and off the top of my head i don’t know a cognate for Tugend, but standard yiddish does take ‘youth’ from the germanic side: יוגנט / yugnt (i don’t know how old the word is in the language, though); the hebrew/aramaic-origin words in that semantic zone that come to mind are all more specific (בתולה / bsule ‘maiden, virgin’ and such).
Oh, that article! It featured prominently in this thread a few years ago. 🙂 I commented – and conclude that Standard German and Easterly Yiddish may very well continue different registers of late medieval Prague German that went in different directions (geographic and otherwise).
That’s an interesting thread. Dmitry Pruss said:
>Oh that thread…
More proof that you guys have forgotten more than I’ll ever know about this stuff, despite my interest.
It is funny how many threads reach the “Oh, yeah, we did discuss that” moment. I think largely a sign of the range and depth of what is said, rather than oncoming senility. The latter, or at least a senescent inability to remember as large a volume of data, may be an issue for me though.
All topics are discussed somewhere by LH. However, despite JC’s best efforts, some of the conclusions cannot now be retrieved in polynomial time, and are inaccessible to all currently known search methodologies. Nevertheless, we believe that they exist.
Credo quia inaccessibile.
We are all monkeys with typewriters here.
Auto-correct vastly reduces the number of monkeys you have to put in front of keyboards to have a shot at producing Shakespeare.
Kind of like Quebec, really.
IIRC, all 9 or 10 million Franco-Canadians and Franco-Americans are descendants of about 800 young French women sent by king to Canada between 1663 and 1673.
Yes, only more severe in terms of impact on genetic diversity. There are other parallels, like hereditary inequality of the reproductive success further reducing the effective bottleneck size (in Quebec it was linked to the size and location of the land holdings which critically affected reproductive success, while in Eastern Europe, it is also partly an economic-niche effect but also augmented by restrictions on who can marry / reside / have a business in town, and on the social class-selective military draft). Or like continuing migration of the clergy / the rabbis long after the initial migrant waves settled.
Inland Finland is the Western world’s other example of severe historical founder effects.
(Yes, I realized that we discussed Bohemia and Mazovia and the migrate-and-send-sons-further-afield modus operandi of the Litvak Jews before, but people already found it before I could even get to it)
The specific problem with the Ashkenazi bottleneck effect is the historians’ tradition of ascribing it to the pogroms and community annihilation of the Middle Ages, crusades and plagues. It is a superficially plausible and kind of attractive hypothesis but it doesn’t survive the detailed testing. So the ethnogenesis of the Ashkenazim becomes somewhat less unique … also primarily driven by migrations in search of opportunity, like in so many other peoples, and less so by the persecution of a kind uniquely experienced by the Jews.
One question I have – one of the points of Tim Snyder’s Bloodlands is that the systematic murder of Jews in the Holocaust happened in a particular region. And that in some ways, it was a consequence of the Holodomor, which had terrorized many of the same people, destabilized the same areas, drew its blood-price from the some of the same populations.
And even prior to this, at least in the US, Jewish immigration was heavily weighted towards those who lived in Germany and Western Europe.
So the Jewish populations of today may not reflect the Jewish populations of the 19th century very well. Would studies of the genetics of Ashkenazi Jews that didn’t attempt to oversample people whose heritage was in Eastern Europe be prone to overstate the bottleneck?
Also, in another reference to ugly points of history, the Quebecois bottleneck is also overstated, since Franco-Canadian heritage includes native women not counted in that figure.
Ryan: And even prior to this, at least in the US, Jewish immigration was heavily weighted towards those who lived in Germany and Western Europe.
I don’t think so. My recollection of the genetic situation is that most American Jewish ancestry comes from central and eastern Europe. American Jewish culture is definitely more based on eastern practices than western. The very trop used for reading the Torah is different between American synagogues and those in western Europe today; American Jews use the eastern European version.
Moreover, while the Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s was certainly a horrific place in multiple ways, calling the Shoah a consequence of the Holodomor is pretty absurd. It makes no sense ideologically or geographically (Poland having been the center of the Nazi extermination campaign and the also the country that lost the largest number of Jews).
at least in the US, Jewish immigration was heavily weighted towards those who lived in Germany and Western Europe
Depends on what era you are taking about. Before the 1860s, it was generally true. After the Polish uprisings, immigration from Poland and Lithuania increased, Catholic but also Jewish. And starting from late 1880s, a rather conscious effort of the Czarist government to reduce their Jewish population by promoting emigration created a near-deluge of Russian Empire Jews.
But the “Jews who lived in Germany and Western Europe” in mid-XIX century were to a great extent of Polish extraction, a consequence of the Partitions which made masses of Polish Jews subjects of Prussia and Austro-Hungary. The Prussian partitioned area of Poland generated particularly strong migration currents. And from the areas further East, Eastern Belorussia Jews moved to Belgium and the Netherlands and Courland Jews, to Germany, supplanting the local communities.
It’s true that the Holocaust and migrations left us with virtually no original regional Ashkenazi populations to study. There remain nearly-endogamous cultural groups to this day, but there is a well-known gap of misunderstanding between geneticists on the one hand, and linguists, historians and anthropologists on the other, and so the geneticists to this day sample the Ashkenazim by the modern country of origin or by continent, rather than by a more granular cultural and dialectal afficilation. One possible exception is the South African Jewish community which still closely corresponds to the Kovno Governorate Litvaks of yore, due to an accident of steamer line cartel policies of the XIX-early XX centuries.
Sorry, Brett. One lesson for me is never to make asides when talking about the Holocaust, or I’m certain to sound fatuous. To the point of offensiveness. “To some degree a consequence” wasn’t central to my point, nor was it what I really meant. Of course Hitler, the Nazi Party and the willingness of too many Germans and others to commit genocide take overwhelming responsibility for the Holocaust.
I was trying to allude to Tim Snyder’s point in Bloodlands, if I remember the argument properly, that both the Holodomor and the Soviet invasion after the Stalin Ribbentrop pact destroyed social and governmental structures before the Nazi onslaught, which in other places would diminish the ability of the Nazis to achieve total control. That in the rest of conquered Europe, the genocide had to contend with, not so much sympathy for Jews, though in some places that helped at the margins, but punctiliousness about what Germans could do to Jewish citizens of countries that remained sovereign, even if only nominally. Jews and others in the Bloodlands had effectively become stateless, and he argues that had a significant effect on whether large numbers of people survived. That was what I was trying to say with “to some degree a consequence.” That the brutalization of the region by the Holodomor had some impact on how many people were killed later.
Naturally, I can’t find my copy of Bloodlands right now, and I imagine someone here knows the book and/or the facts better, and can explain how I’m still mangling it. But perhaps this does a bit more justice to Snyder than I did previously.
But my main point in mentioning the Holodomor wasn’t that it had any impact on the Holocaust, but simply that many Ukrainian Jews were victims of the famine even before the genocide, and that this compounded the focused effect of the Holocaust in destroying particular Jewish communities.
Ryan, most Ukrainian Jews leaved in cities and towns, not in the villages. The Great break and the famine decimated mainly villages. Far it be from me to praise Soviet system, but I should note that in USSR a good number of Jews were evacuated during the war and many men fought Nazis, not just suffered from them (obviously, many suffered). It also worth remembering that the occupied territories were under the scorched earth warfare on all sides.
I am not sure how much trust one should put into the Wikipedia figures, but if they are true, Western European Jews faired much less badly (numerically speaking) than Eastern European, independent of the country. This speaks mainly to a relative comparative restraint that Germans exercised in the West. USSR, in 1939 borders, did relatively less badly than other Eastern European countries, perhaps mostly because a lot of Jews lived on never to be occupied territories and some were evacuated.
The USSR Jews who ended up in Nazi hands (either because they couldn’t flee, or because they couldn’t flee fast enough and were overrun by the German advance, or because they were taken prisoner), they fared much worse than Polish or Western Jews. The rule of thumb is, everyone in this misfortunate category was dead, typically in 1941. A few women survived by white-passing, a few able-bodied men joined the guerrilla partisans, but these options were for a tiny fraction of one percent. There were no concentration camps out East, just bullets in the nearby ditches or quarries. In contrast, the mass extermination in Poland and Western Europe gained steam only by 1943, and some people survived in the camp, in ghettos, and in deportation queues. A minority, but not an infinitesimally tiny minority like in the USSR. They were more survivors overall in the USSR because people were called up or evacuated in an organized fashion or just fled ahead of the German advance. Also because a part of the USSR was in the Romanian occupation zone, which was about as bad as Poland, meaning that a small percentage survived. Unlike under the German occupation to the North.
Snyder’s Bloodlands tried to bring more light to the Nazi atrocities outside of the better-known concentration camps, and it’s a commendable goal in itself, but the actual goal of the book is broader. It is to expose both Hitler’s and Stalin’s crimes and to elevate the idea of their moral (immoral) equivalence. This, in itself, might be also a worthy goal, but it really comes out weird. It begins to look like a regurgitated Nazi propaganda point that Stalin’s / Kaganovich’s / “alleged Jewish-Comminist” crimes against Poland and Ukraine justified, or paved way to, the Holocaust. If the book juxtaposes both regimes’ crimes in such a way that in the eyes of the readers, it blames the victims, then it’s a really bad way to narrate the history.
X, I didn’t see Bloodlands as lending itself to a theory of blaming the victims, and I’m sorry if my initial cursory statement gave the impression I was doing so.
This article doesn’t give the impression that the famine left Ukrainian Jews untouched. Nearly 1,000 Jewish dead on the streets of Kyiv in one month, numbers of dead and starving in various stetls, more than 1000,000 Jews who had been encouraged to become (well, suppressed into becoming) agricultural workers and suffered the same fate as their neighbors. Ihttps://www.academia.edu/43629946/The_Holodomor_and_Jews_in_Kyiv_and_Ukraine_An_Introduction_and_Observations_on_a_Neglected_Topic
“Your mother died from starvation… Her last wish was that you, our only son, say Kadish for her.”
It’s hard to see how it could be otherwise, with most Jews living in small towns dependent on the produce of the nearby collectives whose output was being sent elsewhere.
The scale of death was different in towns, more so in cities, but I suspect the idea that Jews didn’t die in large numbers in the famine is largely a product of the anti-Semitism some adopted as a way to try to make sense of the calamity that rained down on the peasantry.
Jews who had been encouraged to become (well, suppressed into becoming) agricultural workers
Jewish agricultural settlements in the Ukraine are not Soviet invention, but an old Tsarist project dating back to early 19th century.
It is often described as a failure, it probably was if we consider that majority of Jews in Tsarist Russia remained town dwellers instead of becoming prosperous peasants as the Tsarist government wanted.
But on the other hand – several hundred thousand Jewish farmers in the Ukraine at the eve of Revolution ought to count for something.
PS. I particularly liked an interesting linguistic detail about this experiment. The Tsarist officials understood that the Jews had no knowledge of farming, so several German farming families were allocated to each Jewish agricultural settlement to teach Jews how to farm. As the bureaucrats noted, the Jews and Germans understand each other since they speak “the same language”.
Kuznetsov supposedly wrote that the Holodomor made the population of Kyiv so inured to death and suffering, that it dulled their reaction to the Babi Yar massacre.
LH – it seems like Google no longer indexes this site? Or perhaps does it too infrequently? “Recently commented posts” page was out of commission and I tried finding this discussion as
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alanguagehat.com+beider+&biw=1366&bih=625&tbs=qdr%3Aw&sxsrf=AOaemvLQEXqvB08t39zmXDQ0ABr4Adx5Ug%3A1636653917282&ei=XVuNYYe4ELqyqtsP67ap8A8&oq=site%3Alanguagehat.com+beider+&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EANKBAhBGAFQ_RJYnh1gpCNoBHAAeACAAWOIAcQFkgEBOJgBAKABAcABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz&ved=0ahUKEwjH2u_68pD0AhU6mWoFHWtbCv4Q4dUDCA8&uact=5
but no such luck.
@Ryan – Holodomor (as opposed to the more general famine and starvation in the USSR in the same timeframe) is specifically understood as genocide against the Ukrainian people by the enemies who are officially ethnically blank Soviet, but in the Nazi propaganda, there were no such ethnic ambiguity about the alleged masterminds of the genocide.
Both Czarist and Stalinist Russia were of two minds about the Jewish agricultural activities. There were numerous rounds of eviction of the rural Jews, the earliest known to me was the mass eviction which uprooted my ancestors and killed many of their fellow Jews in the dead of the winter 1825 near Vitebsk; the biggest known was a part of the “Temporary Statute” of 1883 (which, despite its name, never expired until 1917) which made another relative of mine sell his apple orchard in Podolia, and, after a few destitute years, emigrate; and latest one, which also affected a branch of the Vitebsk area family, happened right before the Revolution, and affected the Jewish veterans of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 who were granted residency privileges after coming home, only to be stripped of the right to live in the villages 10 years later. In the USSR times, collective / communal farming was promoted, but the better-off Jewish farmers were literally run off the land.
The agricultural colonies of Kherson and Tavria Governorates of Southern Ukraine (both Jewish and German) are probably the best known because after generations of misery, they achieved lasting success and their population grew in numbers and influence. But most Jewish villagers were not Kherson colonists (in Podolia and on the North-Eastern fringes of the Pale, a huge percentage of the Jews lived in the villages, and in Polesye, were colonists on the infertile government lands, although with a few exceptions, they didn’t till the land, but worked as blacksmiths, horse-dealers, fishermen, loggers, ash-burners, cart drivers, orchard-keepers etc., all of them being occupations where the head of the household could make living without much reliance on the women and children in the household … because in the traditional family, the women weren’t expected to work outside at all, and the boys needed to study long hours)
LH – it seems like Google no longer indexes this site?
No, it’s keeping up the good work. It’s true it doesn’t find this thread if you search on “beider,” but it’s the second hit for “Yamnaya.”
all of them being occupations where the head of the household could make living without much reliance on the women and children in the household … because in the traditional family, the women weren’t expected to work outside at all, and the boys needed to study long hours
How are these occupations less reliant on the family than farming? Surely some farming could be adapted to be a one-man job, albeit less productive?
In general, the farther east they were, the more brutally the Nazis behaved. Some of the reasons for this seem to have been largely just contingent, but there was also a significant ideological component lying behind these geographical differences. Hitler proclaimed that the people in the East were Untermenschen. Slavs were worthy only of behind enslaved, but the more Asiatic groups even further east were considered even lower. In contrast, however much the Nazis may have despised the French and considered them decadent, they never denied that France had a distinguished and culturally meaningful history.
Of course, no ethnic or religious group—except maybe the Romany (the most authentically Aryan group in Europe, actually!)—was considered as vile as the Jews, but the level of brutality of Nazi actions against the Jews in a particular region was often influenced by how brutal the Nazi regime was there more generally. The broader milieu affected the level of background barbarity to which the both local Jewish and non-Jewish populations were exposed. In largely democratic western Europe, where Jews were typically better integrated into the national culture and identity, the occupation regimes were generally less violent and more accepting of the existing local communities and power structures. There was at least a minimal degree of respect for the occupied peoples in places like France, Denmark, or the Netherlands and a concern that the non-Jewish populations of those countries would object more strongly to actions taken against their Jewish countrymen and countrywomen. In contrast, in the Soviet Union, the invading Germans viewed the existing people as fundamentally corrupt—politically, socially, and racially (with Jewish influence being perceived as practically omnipresent). So the Germans had few qualms about conducting mass executions in relatively public fashions, using Einsatzgruppen to machine gun the local Jews and other undesirables, rather than the more secretive death camp system that took over most of the killing in 1942.
some farming could be adapted to be a one-man job, albeit less productive?
Never been a subsistence farmer in Belarus myself, but I imagine that with the poorly fertile soils and colder, wetter climates, it’s already “less productive” and without literally throwing all people at work dawn to dusk when the weather allows making hay or harvesting, one risk certain death in winter. The government policies explicitly discouraged peasants’ children from attending schools because the boys’ labor was desperately required in the fields.
Interestingly, Jewish farmers weren’t officially put in the specific sub-class of peasants, but instead, in the broadly equivalent subclass of “earth-tillers” (земледельцы rather than крестьяне), even though they didn’t plow the soil. The post-1883 “Temporary Statute” evictions paperwork is a golden trove of documentation on Jewish families and their economy, because the papers were filed with the police departments and ended up preserved much better than vital or tax records (everything related to persecution was so much better preserved in Russia!). So generally one can learn occupations of all families, both grandfathered under the statute and the evictees. Up in a very rural Nevel district, for example, nobody farmed. My relatives there, the Konsons, were village blacksmiths, burly light-haired people who picked equally strongly built brides, and who looked genuinely Slavic despite being, as the name suggests, real Kohanim. Some rural residents of Nevel held not-so-rural occupations, like cobblers or small traders, but most just occupied the genuinely rural but non-plowing economic niches. Another branch of rural Neveler relatives, the Neploks, were generally into anything about horses. Drove carts, traded horses. One police file investigated a Neplokh who improperly rented land from a Christian villager for a horse-pasture. Another police file investigated a suddenly-missing Neplokh who was never found, but was rumored to be on trial in the neighboring county for horse thievery. Not the classic “poor huddled masses” of the shtetls.
Neplokh
Not bad!
Goodenough is a classic English surname
Nekrasov of Neyelovo, Neurozhayka tozh follows a different approach.
>Not the classic “poor huddled masses” of the shtetls.
The following is an understanding I drew from The Golden Age Stetl, a New History of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern.
Stetls were chartered trading sites, literally belonging to nobility or the state, protected by law, by monopoly profit, and by networking effects. Traditionally, peasants couldn’t break into a business like horse-trading, practically or legally. One could decide to adopt a town-based occupation without making the whole family work because much of the competition was locked out.
>For example, the 1740 agreement between a magnate and the Zaslav (Iziaslav) Jewish communal elders outlined the key functions of the Jews, who would organize five annual fairs during Eastern Orthodox and Catholic holidays such as Spas (Savior) and St. Martin in the old part of the town, and another four, also on Christian holidays such as St. Peter and St. Virgin Mary, in the new part of the town, and still three more brief fairs in the town’s central square.
This was both a right and a privilege. The community had to fulfill the terms or lose out. And they paid taxes, unlike peasants. But no one else could conduct trade in the stetl, and typically, that meant no one else within easy travel. A peasant from a village around Zaslav basically had to buy his tack, his horseshoes and his liquor from the stetl, or newly, the “mestechko”.
Petrovsky-Shtern goes on to say that the “marriage of convenience between Jews and magnates was in reality not an equal partnership and sometimes took the form of humiliation, exploitation and abuse.” I’ll bet.
But the privilege, the exclusion of peasants from such trade and industry, is certainly the answer to why the occupations of townsmen could give a life of leisure.
He argues that the system began to break down after partition, because the new Russian bureaucrats didn’t feel the same tenderness and obligation towards the szlachta landlords.
Petrovsky-Shtern captures a snapshot of the shtetle history between the end of early period when the Jewish business was largely limited to financing and customs collection, and the dissolution of the Jewish communal self-rule. His title has the word “Golden Age” for a reason. Those towns (some on government land, but many on magnate-owned lands) with their cozy hereditary market stall arrangements were quite different from the hamlets of the “huddled masses” of Lady Liberty, separated in time by two or more generations. Many opportunities disappeared in the interim. First, Eastward migration stopped. Then, migration to the South-East reached near-saturation as well. Finally, migration to the smaller hamlets which didn’t have a shtetle status was permanently closed by the “Temporary Statute”, locking most of the community in the same old and increasingly overcrowded places. The end of community self-rule opened up all opportunities for competition. Other traditional lines of business were decimated with the end of Polish magnate landownership, and with the construction of the railroads which undermined the traditional commodity-transportation and export businesses. And finally the system of skilled-artisan guilds was abolished too. In the end, if something was still guaranteed for life, it was the economic and legal uncertainty.
We discussed Petrovsky-Shtern’s book in 2014.
In August of 2014, to be specific. And I remember where I was when I was reading the book, at my in-laws’ dacha, which we always visited in August at the time. It must have been 2014, obviously prompted by the mention here.
>migration to the South-East reached near-saturation as well. Finally, migration to the smaller hamlets which didn’t have a shtetle status was permanently closed.
Dmitry, sure. But saturation is such an interesting word. Another way of describing saturation is that the monopolies were so lucrative that they had so many kids that there simply weren’t enough towns for them in all of Slavdom! Increasingly, it was hard to find a spot that ensured the wife and kids didn’t have to work, as you point out.
At the time, at least some of my ancestors were killing Native Americans to make way for their kids. Or moving into territories recently cleansed. I’m not pointing fingers in any way that doesn’t ultimately lead to Algren’s captain, whose “finger of guilt, pointed so sternly for so long across the query-room blotter, had grown bored with it all at last and turned, capriciously, to touch the fibers of the dark gray muscle behind the captain’s light gray eyes.”
But the myth-making must be as jarring to folks descended from the peasantry as a cowboy movie for those of a different heritage or a different sensibility.
I am not sure what my decidedly non-monopolistic but sometimes cutthroat businesslike ancestors did to draw a parallel with the killers of the Native Americans or maybe those who enslaved and raped the Africans. Actually I AM sure that there are all sorts of different degrees of descendant’s guilt but being a descendant of a severely persecuted & dehumanized minority goes a long way to alleviate guilty feeling of the sort. So I strongly suggest that you stop measuring your alleged ancestor myths against mine.
But just to dispose of the idea of the old shtetle Jews being the same as hereditary monopoly merchants. Yes, the private towns’ community self-rule books repeatedly describe which family shall trade in what goods at which street. But it is a bias of ascertainment to conclude that this is what the community was doing. You see, the self-rule council (the Kahal) was an intermediary between the landowner and the taxpayers, and accordingly, it regulated the matters of commercial real estate. Because commerce meant taxes and real estate meant the town’s owner’s property. The Kahal also regulated public bathhouses and houses of worship, for exactly the same reason. It did not regulate any trade outside of the town owner’s properties, or employment of artisans and laborers. Most of the moneyed class’s income was from outside of the city street, typically in contract management (factorship), tax collection (otkup) and sales of agricultural commodities. One of my ancestral families, the Lapitskys, were among the richest merchants in such privately owned towns, Gorki & Romanovo, but their businesses weren’t shop fronts. It was the otkup collection & shipments of local and Ukrainian grain up the Dnieper, on horsecarts across the divide, and down Dvina to the export markets in Riga. The patriarch of the family boasted of riding a carriage with 8 horses because the town’s owner had 6. A whole group of top merchants was involved in such activities covering the wide area, and in no way restricted by the Kahal. Like in nearby Shklov a group of merchants specialized on importing diamonds and jewelry & wholesaling it in big cities. It wasn’t a local storefront business, and therefore it wasn’t regulated in any special way. Then a bit lower rung of the merchant class was actually running local retail through the Kahal-controlled storefronts. A lot more Jews, as you can find from the Census (Revision) records, were designated skilled artisans of the guilds (цеховые) – bakers and brewers, cobblers and tailors, coppersmiths and blacksmiths and so on. Lots and lots of them compared to the small merchant class. But most of the town’s Jews were even lower on the social scale and belonged to the “plain” townsfolk classes. Laborers and porters, house painters and glass installers, cart drivers and bath workers (and many peddlers and traders in this same category) (and most rabbis and melameds and spectors belonged to the plain townsmen category as well) … none of these occupations had guilds, but they far outnumbered both the guild members and the merchants even early in the XIX c. (Before 1795, the censuses are in Polish and therefore much harder for me to read, but I read plenty of pre-Napoleonic ones). For Gorki there is actually a 1770s Census surviving in a 1784 Polish copy and annotated in Russian, and from it, you can see that a private town wasn’t this imaginable neat formation of shopfronts even before the “Golden Age” book. It’s just the Kahal specifically regulated the storefronts and that’s why we know so much about them.
But in most of the occupations, the employment opportunities didn’t grow as fast as the population, so the sons had to diversify into new opportunities or move to the frontier. Nothing an American wouldn’t understand, i suppose.
Basically, the Jewish population of the “Pale of Settlement” was demographic equivalent of the Israeli Haredim today who are currently at about 12.6% of Israel’s population, but double every 16 years with probably the highest population growth rate in the world.
This has to account for a lot of what happened there later.
I wonder if anyone compared Ukraine-1919 with Rwanda-1994.
Employment opportunities didn’t grow for peasants either. But they were locked out of competing for town jobs and barred from moving, at least on their own decision. They ate less and had fewer kids. The urban class in the region was, as you point out, communal. Though it was not literally hereditary, and people competed within the class, the communal aspect was enforced by law and social norms. While higher level businesses like shipment of agricultural surpluses were less regulated, the peasants still had to sell their surplus to the stetl. The export firms grew out of the strongest of the firms benefitting from protection in the stetl.
I only made the post after repeated mentions of how oppressive it was to be in a shtetl. I do believe that. But not nearly so oppressive as to be in a village. That’s a truth that shouldn’t be erased.
I make no comments about your direct ancestors as individuals. I mentioned my “ancestors” by way of saying there is oppression behind many stories. I was saying “people have done worse.” It seems strange to get anti-American insults precisely because I raised the fact that there are such horrors in American history. I also meant it broadly, my ancestors as a class. I know of no relative who fought on a frontier, nor even moved in very quickly afterwards. None of them lived anywhere that slavery was legal in the last 210 years, nor in areas where slavery was widespread in the last 280, where the trail goes dead. Arguably, they benefited indirectly from slavery elsewhere.
The timeline of abolition across the US is not that different from the timeline of the emancipation of the serfs from Poland to the Russian empire.
Those of my direct ancestors that weren’t European in the early 1700’s were all Pennsylvanians, to our knowledge. William Penn bought the land they moved into, and relations with natives were still good when they appear in the genealogies. Some moved into eastern Ohio two decades after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in western Ohio. That’s as close to a frontier as anyone ever got.
Still, they benefitted indirectly from the later, pressured sale of Native lands in Pennsylvania, and from conquest elsewhere, just as others did from the conquest of Tatar and Muslim lands, as you seem to acknowledge. Opportunities South-east that were eventually saturated.
As you know, the DNA stuff is littered with references to an inexplicable demographic miracle that needs some explanation. But it seems explicable.
The stetl was an institution that oppressed the peasantry and advanced the townsmen, even as it served the interests of a higher class that routinely punched downward at the stetl, and was entangled with a lower, agricultural class that sometimes bit savagely upward. That doesn’t taint your ancestors any more than mine are tainted. Maybe less.
I disagree pretty strongly that it “accounts for a lot of what happened later,” as was just posted above now that I’m about to post my comment. I don’t agree with the premise, much of it is at a remove of a century or more, and I find it an unfortunate way to refer to genocide.
But the fact that later horrors occurred doesn’t make the truth of the stetl’s place in an oppressive society unspeakable. If anything, attempting to elide that history has fed the demon.
Ryan, judging by the numbers there are about 45 million African Americans in the US and about 3.5 to 5 million Native Americans. This is very different from the situation in 1600. How can we explain this demographic miracle? Maybe African slaves and their descendents under the protection of European emigrants took all the opportunities for development from Native people? I hope no one would take this sort of argument seriously.
Jews didn’t establish serfdom in Western Ukraine and there was plenty of oppression in Eastern Ukraine and in Great Russia where there were no Jews at all. Jews also didn’t decide that the extractive economy is the best way to organize life in Western Ukraine. And somehow people who denied Ukrainians the possibility of development are the Jews. This is completely and entirely absurd. In Eastern Ukraine and in Great Russia merchant classes were Ukrainian and Russian. Did it make oppression of the peasants any better?
. Arguably, they benefited indirectly from slavery elsewhere.
Well, I absolutely benefit from labour of people who sewed my clothes elsewhere. (but they are not angry at me, because they do not see me).
Is it possible to discuss it without distributing guilt/blame/responsibility?
“Saturation” is a neutral term.
“Serfs were oppressed too” is a valid point.
The claims made above are fine, but their moral interpretations…
@drasvi
It is hard to avoid tendentiousness in “X prepared the ground for Y” or “Group A was privileged in comparison with Group B” statements, because they lead to associations and linkages not justified by the facts. For example, “The provisions of the Treaty of Versailles prepared the ground for the rise of Fascism and associated authoritarian movements.” Some people could and did argue that the Versailles settlement inevitably led to, and provided justification for, various actions of Fascist agitators and governments. But I do not believe such an argument provides anything like a full explanation, only “window-dressing”. The other point is that inter-ethnic rivalry/conflict is not a dialectical process, leading to a synthesis😊. It is more like a fire that flares unpredictably, but never burns out.
It seems strange to get anti-American insults precisely because I raised the fact that there are such horrors in American history.
There were no anti-American insults that I could see; Dmitry Pruss said “I am not sure what my decidedly non-monopolistic but sometimes cutthroat businesslike ancestors did to draw a parallel with the killers of the Native Americans or maybe those who enslaved and raped the Africans,” and that was my reaction as well, even though I’m neither Jewish nor of Eastern European descent. It seems an unfortunate and unhelpful comparison.
>And somehow people who denied Ukrainians the possibility of development are the Jews.
I’m not trying to say that. I’m trying to make a smaller point, that a class or group that is deeded a legally protected, significant economic role denied to a much larger portion of that society is a privileged group. Not the most privileged group, nor the most responsible. I tried to make those points, but maybe not strongly enough. I did mention a number of times the ways the system bit back.
I certainly don’t balk at saying, as D.O. asks me, that the merchant class beyond the Pale benefitted from the system that oppressed the serfs in the same way. No, that didn’t make the oppression of peasants any better.
I don’t think any of those things undermine the point I was making, which I continue to think is fair, and gets lost sometimes. But again, it’s a small point, in a whole world of oppression and privilege. Perhaps to belabor it is to make it loom larger, when it really belongs against the backdrop of a thousand other groups and classes that have benefitted historically from systems of oppression, so I’ll drop it now.
no anti-American insults
Thanks LH , I was starting to get worried that I sounded offensive when I only wanted to sound perplexed.
even though I’m neither Jewish nor of Eastern European descent.
I suspect that most people of Western descent also have ancestors from the members of Medieval and post-Medieval trade corporations and guilds, which all regulated and restricted who can do business where and how, and typically passed it from farther to son. Sometimes this self organization of businessmen and artisans achieved wonders of economic and technology development , but perhaps just as often, the micromanaging regulation stifled innovation and caused monopoly stagnation… but that’s simply how they thought the economic activity must self organize. I imagine that they both took some lessons from, and simultaneously needed to counterbalance, the feudal power, and that’s how trade corporations became what they were. Out East, these forms might have lingered into obsolescence a bit longer, but there isn’t really anything narrowly specific to the shtetle in these types of business self-regulation. In fact some of their vestiges still linger today in the US, in commercial zoning and licensing and in a few officially sanctioned guilds like the electricians
Yeah, and all that stuff is so complex and confusing that I tend to ignore it, even though I know I shouldn’t.
>worried that I sounded offensive when I only wanted to sound perplexed.
On first read, the passage about rapes of African Americans felt like “my ancestors were much better than yours” particularly since I doubt that my ancestors had much to do with any slaves. But that is not a fair assessment of what you wrote. And I imagine reading my earlier post felt the same way to you, though that was not really what I was saying.
A somewhat different point – most of us experience privilege not the way Cortez and his men did, or the Tsar and his boyars, or Thomas Jefferson on his hilltop, but the way stetl residents and Pennsylvanians of the late 18th century did, or as drasvi mentions in his line about inexpensive clothing, mostly as indirect benefits that they/we may not have any useful way to unwind, in a setting in which other things press down on us, and the sacrifices we might make seem to sacrifice far more, individually, than the amount of collective redress they add up to.
I tend to ignore it, even though I know I shouldn’t
Not sure then if I should add more confusing historical details 🙂 but the basic concept should be simple, I believe. Pretty much all the guild rules date back to the X c. Magdeburg Rights. These town self rule principles gave the merchants and artisans control of their trades, regulating who can do what and how – including even when and how the junior guild members cam marry. The self regulation system included only Catholics. The cities and the Crown soon realized that regulation of the Jewish business was important too, but they couldn’t possibly invite the Jews into the Councils, so they built a parallel regulation system, where the Jews were the Royal chattel and negotiated their trade rules directly with the Crown. By XIV c. Poland, devastated by wars, started inviting Germans and the Jews to establish or rebuild towns, under the Magdeburg Law with the same royal-slaves Jewish addenda. Eventually the Polish crown abandoned its formal role of the legal slave-owner of the Jews, and the German migration slowed, so knock-off quasi-Magdeburg arrangements were put in place, with a similar town’s business community self rule but substituting Catholicism with Judaism.
The Tsarist officials kept complaining that Jews exploit Ukrainian peasants by selling them alcohol so the peasants would then get drunk and ruin themselves.
This was actually one of the justifications for the Pale of Settlement – if we abolish it, the Jews will come and start selling vodka to Great Russian peasants too and they will get even poorer than they are now.
Of course, the small point that the Russian government itself essentially employed Jewish tavern keepers to sell vodka to peasants (and derived much of the fiscal revenue from tariffs on alcohol and state monopoly on production of hard spirits) was never mentioned.
the small point that the Russian government itself essentially employed Jewish tavern keepers to sell vodka to peasants (and derived much of the fiscal revenue from tariffs on alcohol and state monopoly on production of hard spirits) was never mentioned.
As I understand, Jewish tavern-keeping took an outsize importance only after the Partitions when the Czarist government outlawed Jewish arenda, a traditional line of business of middlemen in land leases and agricultural sales, because they worried that it may become a slippery slope to the Jewish land control. Suddenly destitute, many Jews with rural connections turned to rural tavern-keeping, a business which absolutely required some literacy and numbers skills, rare in the countryside, for commercial viability (because the tabs needed to stay open until after the harvest time if one hoped to sell any volume of booze worth doing business)
I’m sure the factual points here are true. But to quibble about adjectives, is a word like destitute properly applied to those who can let others hold their tabs open till harvest time, and can send their kids (200 years ago) to school, rather than to those who can’t afford their summer purchases till after harvest, and can’t afford to let their children learn to read.
Not sure what you’re trying to prove here. These people were better off than those people but worse off than other people. So?
Ryan, I am not an expert on 18/19c Ukrainian agriculture, but a little that I understand is that there are two relatively short (few weeks) periods of sowing and harvest that required enormous physical effort and all available hands. Outside these two periods there was plenty of time for children to get elementary education if there was a will to do so. And obviously, schooling needn’t to be a full-time occupation and children could have keep up doing their chores. There simply wasn’t enough incentive for education because of the serfdom.
Farmers/peasants in all societies need some system to smooth the consumption (and everyone else as well, but to a lesser degree). Including modern US. I know the banks are not the most popular of institutions, but honestly, do you think keeping farmers’ accounts in modern US is a form of exploitation? Alternative is keeping a stockpile of money under a mattress, which is inefficient now and wasn’t available in the olden days Ukraine because peasants didn’t own mattresses.
People react more strongly than I did, with essentially a raised eyebrow, to inaccuracies that seem to unfairly condition sympathies, especially when they have a deep emotional attachment to the group being ignored.
It was suggested above that Tim Snyder telling the truth about the deaths of millions of Ukrainians might be unfortunate, because it might get pulled into ugly propaganda. I don’t know what my old Slavic soccer team would make of reading this thread, where mentioning the Holodomor can be called problematic; and pointing out that stetl tavernkeepers were anything but destitute, and in fact had significant resources, unlike the peasants they sold to on credit, is a point not even worth making.
I doubt it would improve their understanding and broaden their sympathies about the disasters of the 20th century in the way people seem to hope.
Were debt peons who were also legally bound to the land they were on exploited by their various creditors, prime among whom was probably the noble landowner? I suspect it does depend to some degree on the tavernkeeper, the peasant, the estate owner, and other contingencies we can’t measure. But I suspect that it didn’t consistently work out as well for the serf as modern American bank-farmer relationships do. But that wasn’t even my point. To use your analogy, however exploitive modern banks may or may not be, would you call the banker destitute?
And yet. Americans are in fact annually primed to feel sorry for Jimmy Stewart, the banker and prime vessel for our sympathy with the victims of the Depression. Gah! People.
Perhaps you’re not aware of the “Jews complain too much, they’re well off, maybe too well off if you know what I mean” (with potential segue into running the world through banking) trope. Obviously that’s not what you’re saying, but you seem bizarrely unaware of the problematic nature of your stubborn attitude of “Jews had it pretty good.” It’s like people not seeing what might be wrong with focusing on the biology of race.
I am not sure that further details about schooling, poverty, and suffering of various groups in the early XIX so-called “golden age of the shtetle” are of further interest here. It’s a kind of a niche knowledge, anyway. But if there a burning desire to discuss the actual historical details, rather than general (and generally misguided) attitudes, then please let me know.
If you’d like to give more, I’ll read but refrain from further comments.
Ryan, I don’t think Dmitry Pruss meant that tavern-keepers were destitute. It was an occupation some Jews assumed when other opportunities closed. Some Jews were “destitute” until they switched to doing something else like inn-keeping.
I don’t think anyone thinks that the death of millions of Ukrainians is not worth remembering, but as anything under the sun, it might simply be irrelevant to some other awful things happening in the same place.
Everyone who spent any time with the history of Russian Empire knows how completely screwed the system of serfdom was. Whatever minuscule advantage tavern keepers, itenerant merchants, and all sorts of tradesmen might have had while interacting with serfs is utterly irrelevant compared to the fact that people couldn’t improve their lot by simply changing what they were doing or just moving to a different place. Which many demonstrated quite clearly by simply running at the first opportunity they’ve got. It is a bog standard story of nationalism as a tool of the governing class to deflect the blame for maintaining and benefitting from an inefficient (and in the case of serfdom, deeply inhumane) system toward the ethnic minorities, foreigners etc. That makes me sound as some sort of Lenin, but the basic story is true, that’s what it is. The fact that nationalism is a more complicated thing than just a concoction of the governing classes doesn’t change the fact that it is used that way. I am not sure what a modern American example can be. How about blaming Chinese and Mexicans for stealing American jobs? This is about the same level of dishonesty and blame-shifting as blaming Jewish innkeepers and tradesmen for keeping Ukrainian peasants down.
This sort of finger-pointing is really dangerous in Eastern Europe where everyone learned to blame everyone else for just about anything, but it is simply wrong and there is no need to bring it all here, where it is not dangerous, but just wrong.
Well said.
Jimmy Stewart, the banker
Distinguo. Henry Potter, his antagonist, is a genuwine American bankster and robber baron of the old school; George Bailey is the founder of a savings-and-loan society chartered to take individual deposits and write house mortgages. It is mutualistic but profit-making, the stockholders being the depositors and mortgagees, and Bailey technically serves at their pleasure. It’s not clear whether Potter owns his bank outright (probably) or has minority investors. In any case, their roles are as different as chalk and cheese.
Genetic history of Croatia: almost pure Anatolian Farmers in the Neolithic, possibly completely unadmixed in some cases; Copper Age individuals indistinguishable from the Neolithic ones and others that look like Corded Ware lived just 60 km apart – notably the latter have the usual amount of Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry, unlike the former; the one individual from Roman times is indistinguishable from the locals today. There’s also a lot of archeology and anthropology in the open-access paper.
Genetics of Greek-speaking Calabrians: basically, they’re the most isolated of the locals, with no sign of any immigration since the Copper Age. (Least amount of Yamnaya ancestry outside Sardinia.) Also in open access.
Fascinating!
Evidence for pre-Norse occupation of the Faroe Islands, supporting indirect evidence of an earlier population coming (slightly earlier) from the British Isles.
A lot of reading for the holidays. And then it’s the backlog.
The potential of sedimentary DNA (or broader yet, sedimentary bio-chemistry) is huge and every time I blink the field has expanded in yet another direction. Archaeologists and biologists should be taking broad soil samples from wherever landscapes are destroyed by development and seal them off for later analysis.
That’s an amazing paper. It’s also in open access.
I’ve finally read the papers:
David M. : Genetic history of Croatia: almost pure Anatolian Farmers in the Neolithic, possibly completely unadmixed in some cases; Copper Age individuals indistinguishable from the Neolithic ones and others that look like Corded Ware lived just 60 km apart – notably the latter have the usual amount of Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry, unlike the former; the one individual from Roman times is indistinguishable from the locals today.
Yes, Now I’m yearning for a wide study of the genetics of the Balkan Neolithic..Anatolian Farmers came in several waves and along different paths,
David M.: Genetics of Greek-speaking Calabrians: basically, they’re the most isolated of the locals, with no sign of any immigration since the Copper Age. (Least amount of Yamnaya ancestry outside Sardinia.)
Yes. They could be modeled as a mix of Sardinians and Aegaeans, if I understand it correctly. The authors do consider a continuous contact with the Aegaean/Eastern Mediterranean from way before the spread of the Greek language and until the Byzantne Era..
Y: Evidence for pre-Norse occupation of the Faroe Islands, supporting indirect evidence of an earlier population coming (slightly earlier) from the British Isles.
Great paper, timing the advent of husbandry to within a few years from 500 CE by detecting chemical signal of mammalian feces and ovine DNA in the sedimentary layers. Before reading I actually imagined they would have been able to use sedimentary DNA even more, e.g. for suggesting the origin of the livestock, but that’s just me expecting too much too fast. But we’ll get there.
The site of Eyði is at the far end of the Faroes as seen from both Britain and Scandinavia, and the valley where the sediment samples were taken is situated inland from the main settlement on the coastal plain. It’s hardly among the earliest places to have been exploited by agriculture or the first place for free-roaming sheep to have transformed, Unless the first settlers of the islands were primarily exploiting the marine resources and agriculture was a way of broadening the economic base. But there’s no traditional arcaeological evidence of that. How far are we from detecting bio-chemical evidence of human slaughtering of marine mammals in marine sediments?
Open-access paper from October 2021: “The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes”
Abstract:
Also:
Also of note:
Early 20th century???
Anyway, there’s ample Discussion and Supplementary Tables (pp. 38 & 39 of this PDF) about more language-related things, including language spread and language itself.
No justification is given for the use of neighbor-joining, a method that (if used for phylogenetics) falls hard for almost every known source of error; the sheer size of the dataset would make all other methods hard to use, though.
Thanks. I’ve seen it and tried to get my head around the implications. Wouldn’t it be fun if Anatolian came to Anatolia around 2200 BCE, and the older intrusions into Europe were Non- or Para-IE?
Early 20th century???
https://truenaturefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/last-tarpan.jpg
The last captive tarpan died in Moscow Zoo in 1905.
So maybe the CWC spoke a sister language to Sumerian (low odds, though). That whole thing about using IE vocab for horse things in Sumeria, does that fit with the timeframe? (If it’s in one of those appendices, I’ll just wait for Trune to report).
Ah yes, I must have managed to confused tarpans and auerochsen last night.
We’ve discussed that Nature paper that showed lots of Anatolian names in southeastern Anatolia/northern Syria down to 2500 BCE.
Those, too, are openly accessible, and I linked to the PDF with the language-related stuff in it. There’s no mention of Sumerian, though, and no text, just tables of the distribution of various horse-related words across IE branches.
The only one given for all of Anatolian, however, is Hieroglyphic Luwian a₂-su “horse”. Likewise for Tocharian. This fits their argument that the domestication of horses happened after Anatolian and Tocharian had moved off.
I for one will be amused if it turns out that David Anthony’s synthesis was right in broad outlines and many details and went wrong only where and to the extent he relied on equine archaeology, which is his specialty. I did some looking around last night, before which I hadn’t realized the degree of skepticism for his theory of early domestication/riding, which this study reinforces.
Maybe that’s natural – you’re only willing to advance risky ideas in the heart of your own investigation, relying more on consensus or at least a growing body of scholarship to fill in your understanding of the areas around your focus.
>Sumerian
I thought the relationships between Corded Ware, Sintashta and the IE arrival in Southwest and South Asia were fairly well understood, making it likely that Corded Ware spoke an IE language. Anything is possible, but eliminating Corded Ware from the IE tree would open a big gap between Indo-Iranian and the western families in need of explanation and connection, without any clear alternatives on a scale that could explain later IE dominance, wouldn’t it? Is there a body of scholarship pursuing the idea that Corded Ware was related to Sumerian, or non-IE?
The study David linked to didn’t seem to challenge CW as IE. Though I thought the throw-away line they wrote — more or less “maybe the Steppe just took advantage of an independent Neolithic population decline…” — was idle speculation that should have been left out.
Speak to what you’ve proven. I would have left it at “With little evidence of a strong equine presence in Corded Ware and clear evidence that an equine population explosion took place very late in the 3rd Millennium, our study casts doubt on the idea that the steppe expansion into northeast and north-central Europe in the early 3rd M. arrived on horseback.”
On the other hand, I’m inclined to wonder whether CW did in fact utilize horses at a somewhat lower scale, building the knowledge and networks that would make this new, more manageable breed of horse so desirable and successful once the adaptations took place, were recognized and bred for. It sounds like it was a genetic package, and it would take some time to center all such adaptations into an otherwise genetically healthy line or set of lineages.
That whole thing about using IE vocab for horse things in Sumeria, does that fit with the timeframe? (If it’s in one of those appendices, I’ll just wait for Trune to report).
I think it’s fairly uncontroversial that horses began to enter Mesopotamia from the north at the end of the third millennium via Hurrians who had come into direct contact with Indo-European speakers. The amount of IE-derived vocabulary that made it into Sumerian (usually via at least Hurrian and/or Akkadian) isn’t clear, and fits with the importation of vocabulary related to a novel technology. Rubio’s On the Alleged “Pre-Sumerian Substratum” remains probably the best summary of loan-words in Sumerian.
No.
No, it only means to drive another nail in the coffin of the idea that the IE-speakers who founded CW did so specifically by riding in and massacring people.
Specifically speakers of pre-Indic. Do a tiny bit of internal reconstruction on Vedic, and you get that language (as far as can be told from a few cuneiform characters).
>by riding in and massacring people
Right. Now we know they raced to and from the massacres in their ox carts.
Masterful use of “No comment is necessary here.” at the end of footnote 1.
However, I find the treatment of Whittaker’s “Euphratic” too short and of course outdated, because Whittaker didn’t stop in 1998: see the discussion starting here, with a link to the 2012 book chapter which almost competely lacks mentions of internal reconstruction of Sumerian and mentions features of the cuneiform script that Rubio did not bring up at all. Much more on the script is here (from 2001, though).
Of this paper (2004/5) I’ve only read the first footnote:
and the other two footnotes, which scold Rubio some more.
Also interesting: this undated work (youngest cited reference from 2008) on the “fire in water” complex in Sumerian and IE mythology.
Nowhere mentioned in any of this is that the IE “wine” word has an IE-internal etymology, which bolsters Whittaker’s conclusions.
>I’ve only read the first footnote.
He gave his proposed language a name that had already been used for a different but similar proposal, and he’s upset people think they’re related? I don’t need to read anything else.
I don’t have a very high opinion of Whittaker’s internal reconstruction of Pre-Sumerian. He has a knack for combining main-dialect and Emesal word forms in idiosyncratic ways that just so happen to evoke the IE form he has in mind. From Euphratic – A phonological sketch, he associates ‘kilim₂’ (reed bundle, rope) with *klh₂-m- (straw, reed) without mentioning that kilim₂ is usually read gilim₂ and that the Sumerian word for ‘reed’ is gi. He gives *dukud (sweet, good) as the Pre-Sumerian form that gave rise to EG dug and ES zeb, which would suggest a monosyllabic root, but he uses kuk(k)ud to somehow jam another syllable in there. Et ainsi de suite…
I predict that our idea of what a good Sumerian root looks like will change significantly over the coming years. A lot of evidence is pilling up for syncope in verbal prefixes creating more complex syllable structures than just CVC, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we find more complex forms in roots too.
Man, I love having a Sumerianist gracing this hattery.
This is my strategy: Ask a stupid question, and experts will fall out of the woodwork. Only works in the Hattery, though.
That’s promising!
A lack of creativity is actually a very good sign in this case…
Evolutionary Trajectories of Complex Traits in European Populations of Modern Humans
That’s the abstract. I haven’t read the paper yet.
Whaaa…?
Since when are “intelligence scores” a heritable trait, so uncontroversial that it can mentioned by unconcerned conjunction with other uncontroversial ones, such as height?
Yeah, that whole abstract reeks of, well, something that makes me exceedingly dubious.
Blech. They use HDL/LDL cholesterol as a proxy for intelligence, since some studies show that in individuals, some cognitive scores may, kind of, be correlated with their cholesterol scores for whatever unknown reasons (people who start taking statins also get better at crossword puzzles or whatever.) Generalizing from that to claiming that people 30,000 years ago were less intelligent because of some statistical trend of genetic markers is a travesty. It shows, at the minimum, that this paper was not subject to competent editorial evaluation.
These would have been intelligence scores recorded in flints. You can tell a lot from flint flakes. The paper is certainly flaky.
The discussion does in fact hint (and not that obliquely, either) that Europeans are just, well, cleverer, because Europeans and cholesterol. (Presumably the observation that agriculture has not, in fact, ever been confined to Europe, would have spoilt the “logic” a bit.)
Me on February 21st…
That actually struck me as suspicious at the time. Apparently I was right: “horse” in HL is a₂-zu₂-, and while there is a word a₂-su, it means “stone”, “stone monument” and/or suchlike.
(BTW, I think that paper’s main argument is half right, and a₂ was [ha].)
The Fat, yet Clever European thing reminds me something else I was reading lately:
https://ia903400.us.archive.org/18/items/ebbesen-psy-ar-xiv-2020/Ebbesen_PsyArXiv_2020.pdf
It never ceases to amaze me how many Scientifickal Studies are still dedicated to the proposition (however guilefully disguised) that Aryan Iz Best.
The real culprit for the “let’s just call everything ‘intelligence'” thing is this cited paper from 2018, to which I don’t currently have access.
But this part of the new paper
is just a blatant failure. Cholesterol is an important component of all cell membranes, and any brain contains a lot of cell membranes, so “cholesterol is fundamental for the development and functioning of the brain” in the same sense that, say, water is! It gives me the impression that the ten authors, two reviewers and one editor don’t know any biology above the molecular level…
…so we’ll waffle about it for the fun of it.
No explanation, no citation, nothing.
So the previous quote is completely useless, then.
The closing quotation mark is in the original. I find that very interesting.
…uuuuh… yes, it does.
I should have mentioned the paper is in open access and has the names and affiliations of the editor and the two reviewers in the left sidebar.
I don’t think that’s the case here. I think this is a lazy, unthinking paper: it takes a list of alleles that are “known to” correlate with anything, looks for them in sequenced ancient genomes of different ages, plots the frequencies over time and turns them into a Least Publishable Unit.
Judging from the authors’ names, including at least one each of the two first and the two last and corresponding authors, few of them could have much interest in declaring any sort of “Aryans” The Best…
has the names and affiliations of the editor and the two reviewers in the left sidebar
“Or, you can just find them across the street at their usual seats at the bar. That’s where we got them in the first place.”
That’s how megajournals often work, except cyber.
Going back to the plague theme, there’s a new paper out locating the origin of the Black Death to modern day Kyrgyzstan:
Spyrou, M.A., Musralina, L., Gnecchi Ruscone, G.A. et al. The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia. Nature (2022).
Yikes! Does this mean digging up ancient cemeteries is hazardous? Could they release more Yersinia pestis? To hitch a ride on passing fleas, to hitch a ride on passing rats.
I think that should be in “recorded human history”(?) IIRC there’s been various ‘bottlenecks’ detected in human DNA that suggests there were several times when nearly the whole species was wiped out.
Would the Covid-19 have had a similar effect if it weren’t for producing a vaccine so quickly? That is, if certain bloody-minded populations had had their way with resisting lockdowns/masks/etc?
It took a while before the difference between “detectable traces of SaRS-II RNA” and “infectious amounts of complete virus particles” started to be reported, and in the scarier parts of the reporting I’m not sure they ever cared.
(Or is that SArs? There is something funky going on with the capitalization in some institutions’ usage).
No, unless you have a mad scientist at hand who takes the reconstructed genomes from in silico [argh] to in vitro and then in vivo.
Unlikely, because it only ever killed a few % of infected people, as opposed to fully half.
I’ve only ever seen SARS-CoV-II.
Must have been the lowercase o from Co[rona]V[irus] echoing in the back of my brain, then.
(SARS-CoV-II seems a bit redundant — Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the one that’s a coronavirus. also the one that’s number 2. Or is it because MERS was also severe and acute and a coronavirus, so SARS-CoV-II is the second one that doesn’t happen to be called MERS? NGL, I thought the SA part was for Southeast Asian or something like that, as opposed to Middle Eastern)
xkcd on the failure to come up with a better name for the pandemic virus
Good comic, but I find myself wondering when it first appeared, which led to the discovery that xkcd comics don’t appear to be dated, which is annoying. Or am I missing something?
If you go to the archive, there’s a list of the comics by title; there it says to hover (I assume with the cursor) over the title to see the date. As I’m on my phone, I can’t test that.
(It confirms my general view of mankind that an intelligent fellow like Randall Munroe nevertheless comes up with such a clunky solution for his web site.)
Thanks, that works and it turns out the comic is 2020-3-2. But Jesus, what a crappy way of doing things.
I have noted before that xkcd, unlike most comics, has a full transcript of each comic on the site. That means you can search for a given comic by name, text, date, or whatever; it’s all locatable in the metadata. That makes it really easy to find particular xkcd comics; most comic sites are much worse. (And that’s not even counting the wealth of additional information at explainxkcd.com.)
(And that’s not even counting the wealth of additional information at explainxkcd.com.)
Indeed that’s the place I typically go to find out xkcd comic dates (most recently here).
i don’t think I’ve ever seen SARS-CoV-II [sic] – in my experience it had always been SARS-CoV-2 (and AFAIK it got the name because it’s a very close relative of the original SARS-CoV; of course MERS could have gotten that too, but historically it didn’t, so the option was free).
For a while I continued the mixed capitalization by spelling the disease name “CoViD-19”, but I can’t recall seeing anyone else doing that, and eventually I just switched to the more mainstream “Covid-19” and/or “the Covid”.
(Unrelated fun fact: the official announcement of the disease was on December 31, 2019. I like to joke that it was a miracle to song writers that “Covid-19” rhymed with “quarantine”, and that if the announcement was a few hours later we would all have been talking about Covid-20 and that would have been far harder to rhyme.)
@January First-of-May: I’m sure I agree that lyricists would have a hard time finding rhymes for “Covid-20.” In fact, I think there are plenty.
Well, there is plenty.
Sunny. Funny.
Yes, but it is hard to rhyme “covid-20” with “quarantine”.
Oh! Yes.
Also correct.
A trio of papers by Iosif Lazaridis et al., in a new issue of Science:
Ancient genomes and West Eurasian history (a non-technical critique, Open Access),
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add9059#core-R1
The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4247
A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq0755
Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq0762
A news item (in Dutch), with comments by IEist Alvin Kloekhorst:
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/08/25/de-taalsleutel-ligt-op-de-kaukasus-daar-ligt-de-oorsprong-van-veel-wereldtalen-a4139898
Kloekhorst laments the lack of linguists among the team, and proposes a different scenario to fit with the genetics, which doesn’t require an unreasonably old date (8000 ybp) for the Anatolian split.
Kloekhorst laments the lack of linguists among the team
As do I. When will they learn?
>The naming of the Southern Arc conjures a map projection that centers on the western tip of Eurasia rather than the Anatolian peninsula
There are many things to be said about the focus, assumptions and predilections of those studying ancient genomes. But this isn’t one of them.
Generally, the Science article first linked really wants to press a prehistoric moral relevance without giving much thought to where it leads. All in all, I’m quite glad Lazaridis do not focus more attention on the fact that the incoming men established their genetic preponderance in large part by raping the local women, (which, after criticizing L and co. for sanitizing things, they describe with the euphemism of ‘sexual violence.’).
8000
I am a bit confused, because Lazaridis mentioned 5000 BC and 7000-5000 bp.
Thanks, Y. I’ll read, but it’ll have to wait.
That, too, is in open access, and I’ve started reading it.
From the “Structured Abstract”: “The Yamnaya expansion also crossed the Caucasus, and by about 4000 years ago, Armenia had become an enclave of low but pervasive steppe ancestry in West Asia, where the patrilineal descendants of Yamnaya men, virtually extinct on the steppe, persisted.”
Nope! The reason the page is so long is that there are several types of abstract, including a figure, followed by all the 483 footnotes (references to the “paper” and the “supplementary information”).
The supplementary information, i.e. the actual paper, is in open access, though.
Likewise for the two related papers in the same issue, except they have only one abstract and fewer footnotes.
Poulsen and Olander, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. A presentation (pdf) in which they make the case (not overwhelming, but reasonable) for subgrouping the above two together.
(This is mostly linguistics. I wasn’t sure which would be the infinite IE linguistics thread.)
Interesting, and they do take genetics into account.
I guess behind this is a largely Graeco-Aryan model of PIE morphology, so that the many morphological correspondences between Greek and Indo-Aryan count as retentions.
If you don’t assume that, their neat model stops working.
Other assumptions that are at least debated:
1) Original split Dat. Pl. in -*m- vs. Instr. Pl. in -*bh-: this weakens a BSl – Germanic isogloss
2) The *sye/o-future is not convincingly attested for Slavic (the only form usually adduced here, OCS participle byšǫšt-, has also been explained otherwise)
3) They downplay the evidence from Luwian (and ignore the evidence from Albanian) that PIE had indeed three velar series (OTOH, the idea that satem is a subgroup and that kentum-satem is not a primeval split is pretty uncontroversial nowadays)
I’m not saying they’re wrong, and this certainly is a serious proposal, just how good it is hangs on a lot of assumptions that are not common opinion.
There are good reasons to think that the distribution of *-m- and *-bh- was originally phonological instead of morphological: *-bh- after *n, *-m- otherwise. This concerns not just the dat. pl. & inst. pl. suffixes, but derivational ones as well.
Of course this still means that BSl and Germanic generalized the same allomorph in the dat./inst. pl. that the other branches lost. But I’d think that can be attributed to the well-known contact that also spread such things as the definite/indefinite distinction in adjective flexion (which is accomplished by completely different means in BSl and in Germanic) and the *-uj- > *-ij- shift (which is also shared with Celtic, and I forgot about Italic, but that’s in another paper by the same author as it happens).
I think that’s actually irrelevant to their model of satemization – though I haven’t understood all the details of that model and hope they get around to publishing it soon.
The latter, yes; the former, no – that’s what they’re trying to establish.
Of course this still means that BSl and Germanic generalized the same allomorph in the dat./inst. pl. that the other branches lost. But I’d think that can be attributed to the well-known contact that also spread such things as the definite/indefinite distinction in adjective flexion (which is accomplished by completely different means in BSl and in Germanic) and the *-uj- > *-ij- shift (which is also shared with Celtic, and I forgot about Italic, but that’s in another paper by the same author as it happens).
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not claiming that Germanic and BSl form a clade. My view is rather that there were several overlapping areal groupings – the ones you mention, satemisation, spread of Graeco-Aryan morphology (which hit Slavic more fully than Baltic), etc. By downplaying the other isoglosses, the authors arrange the evidence to support their cladistic model to the detriment of such an areal-based model.
Concerning the three-velar series, they make a bit of an effort in their presentation to knock it down, so I assume that it actually would pose a problem for them. But let’s see what they will say on this in the future.
the former, no – that’s what they’re trying to establish
I’ve seen assumed that satem is a subgroup so often in various papers and dsicussions that I maybe underestimate how controversial that still may be. Although if they take satemisation as diagnostic for a clade and not as an areal feature, than yes, that Needs to be proven.
Their assumption is that there is a tree, and that it can be found by identifying and peeling back (“downplaying”) all the areal layers; so that’s what they try to do.
After all, a precisely simultaneous split into 10 clades is simply improbable. Perhaps we’re ultimately unable to identify the tree, but we definitely won’t if we don’t try.
Exactly. They’re trying to show (or at least presenting that they’re trying to show in a forthcoming paper) that it’s a clade and not (just) an area.
Their assumption is that there is a tree, and that it can be found by identifying and peeling back (“downplaying”) all the areal layers; so that’s what they try to do.
I don’t mind if they try. I just think it’s wrong to fit everything in a cladistic straitjacket. As you probably have guessed from my remark, for me, B-Sl is a clade, part of which (Slavic) later became more similar to Graeco-Aryan under Iranian influence.
I also seem to remember that RUKI doesn’t even apply to the same degree in all Indo-Iranian, and that there’s partial RUKI outside of it – something that would be no surprise in an areal model, but needs to be explained in a clade model.
Poulsen & Olander clearly agree.
Nuristani just has RIK, though that’s been explained as a later partial reversal.
Areal influence is available as an explanation in both models, the difference being just that common inheritance is not available to a purely areal model, so that the latter hypothesis must explain all shared innovations as either coincidence or areal influence.
… and the surviving Baltic data has RK, though loanword evidence in Finnic shows that this, too, probably used to be RUKI; the most often-cited example is Lithuanian liesas vs. Finnish laiha > *laiša for ‘lean, thin’. (Related to the important point that *š from RUKI would not have been phonemic in any of the branches before various other changes.)
Feeding right into a pet peeve of mine: sounds can be easier to reconstruct in phonetic detail than the phonemes they belonged to, because sound changes (and borrowing) work on sounds, not on phonemes.
David M. (November 6, 2021 at 6:28 pm): The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies in open access.
I don’t think I ever got around to reading this last year. I have now. I don’t have much more to say about the Tarim mummies except that it was unexpected and interesting. The Dzungarian EMBA genomes show beyond doubt that there was movement of Afanasievo pastoralists into Dzungaria, strengthening the Afanasievo origin hypothesis for Tocharian. Also interesting is the somewhat later Kanai MBA individual, from just over on the Kazakh side. It’s shown in this paper as a three way mix of Dzungaria EBA1 with Tarim EMBA1 and Baikal, but it plots as pure Okinevo. That seems to add further evidence that the Okunevo peoples started moving south as well, as briefly (and speculatively) dicussed here.
First bioanthropological evidence for Yamnaya horsemanship, arguing for Yamnaya horseback riding c. 3000 BC based on skeletal evidence.
>However, it is apparent that organized cavalry was introduced not before the very end of the second millennium BCE (4).
Is there a distinction I’m not catching here? Horses were unused in organized armed warfare for nearly two millennia after riding began? Surely not. But what is the feature required before they’re willing to call it “organized cavalry”?
Honestly, I understand nothing about it.
Why did charoits dominate for a while and why did they become obsolete?
Organized cavalry means “strategic units of mounted soldiers trained and equipped for warfare from horseback”. I think the assumption is that it took long time to develop a breed of horses that could be taken into close battle without panicking and becoming unpredictable. Thinking of that, the chariot may also be seen as a way to constrain the movements of the horse.
The study is interesting and looks solid to this layman, but since it’s the first of its kind and (by design) limited to Yamnaya contexts, it’s not clear how widespread similar pathologies were outside of horse-using cultures.
Edit: Or outside of that specific horse-using culture.
Horses for movement, for scouting and for managing herds. That’s a huge advantage over settled farmers — even without direct confrontations and mounted warfare. Perhaps it wasn’t really the Pontic-Caspians who overran Old Europe but their herds. But the herders may have given the farmers offers they couldn’t refuse.
[Western movie theme playing]
But this doesn’t really work out. There’s no value in a herd without anyone to consume the yield. The ranch economy of the American frontier couldn’t develop without industrialization, urbanization and the railway. No Yamnaya chief would need more cattle than could be consumed. Maybe we should think of the herd as a means of extortion. Farmers paid tribute to the herders (in produce and marriage) to spare their fields, and the herders gave some of it back by feeding their most loyal tributaries in conspicuous feasts.
Also, long-distance communication.
Yes, indeed.
I keep thinking about herd size. The horse would presumably make it possible to manage larger herds with fewer people, but also to have more herders, allowing for even larger herds. But large herds need a large market to be profitable.
Herd size to population size is an interesting measure. How many animals does it take to feed a person and a family? How many herders do you need per 100 heads of cattle (sheep, goats, etc.), and how many people can you feed? The difference can be converted to trade surplus and luxury goods (if there’s a market), maintaining an entourage or a court of soldiers and artists, buying allegience, or increasing the number of wives and children. Could the latter be the mechanism for male line replacement? Would it be fast enough to explain the turnovers suggested by ancient DNA?
My understanding is that historically, cattle was much smaller and produced by far less meat and milk than modern cattle, so I guess herds needed to be bigger to feed the herder’s family.
Yes. But the economy is interesting. And how did the horse change it?
Or maybe we should look at it the other way around: a social expectation to support the entourage and buy allegiance and support the largest family possible makes it necessary to have a large herd – heroes eat beef and pretty much only beef, even in the Iliad where they’re surrounded by fish –, and if anything is left after that, that’s where trade for luxury goods comes in. Most of the luxury goods are promptly invested in buying allegiance anyway.
“develop a breed”, “constrain the movements” – @Trond, I thought about it too, but I don’t know how we can test the former idea…
As for economy, I don’t know how to come to simple conclusions from the notion of suprlus alone. As I understand you, you’re saying that herding can be more efficient (labour, time).
Your population reaches the maximum and surplus yok (but you have lots of free time) – unless the constraint on the size of population is imposed not by the land but by something else. So either you have this constraint or surplus is associated with inequality or it may appear dynamically due to instability of the system. Either way, it is not simple.
I also don’t understand how gender roles work. Usually people assume (a) men are only good for warfare and food production (b) women are only good for child birth, breastfeeding (or otherwise raising children) and for farmers also food production (for some reason Europeans rarely discuss role women in production among herders). (c) the society as a whole is an extreme r-strategist, it tries to give birth to as many children as possible, so all young females are busy. Is all of this right?
What is this yok of which you speak?
so all young females are busy. Is all of this right?
The modelling I’ve seen (sorry, can’t remember where) suggested hunter-gatherer ‘economy’ kept people ‘working’ only about 15 hours per week. Note this was an average, with wild variations: long hours at harvest or on hunting trips; idle when you were only waiting for the crops (or prey) to grow.
The human physiology for storing body-fat suggests humans are adapted for a feast-or-famine sort of lifestyle.
How would “young females” be kept busy by childcare?: babies just lie in their cribs and gurgle most of the time — it’s like leaving crops to grow.
It isn’t ’til humanity gets to industrial society/trade surplus/luxury goods/(wage-)slavery that anybody needs to worry about producing more stuff than you can eat before it goes rotten. Surplus Value is the Economists’ term. I’m agin’ it.
As the meme goes: tell me you’ve never done any real childcare without saying you’ve never done any real childcare.
Even in a society like ours where kids spend a lot of time in school or otherwise under the care of non-parents “parents spend 50 hours per child per week in child care [averaged] over the first twelve years of the child’s life” (Schoonbroodt, A. (2018). Parental child care during and outside of typical work hours. Review of Economics of the Household, 16, 453-476. Emphasis mine).
Hunter-gatherer economies and lifestyles are so diverse that generalization almost becomes meaningless. We tend to think of the mobile never-keep-anything-you-can’t-carry-with-you type, but others were settled, using local resources and storing food for consumption between seasons. Ceramics was invented by hunter-gatherers. Others changed lifestyles between seasons, or kept the lifestyle but changed locations.
As for the economy of the herders, I don’t claim anything, but it seems to have made it possible for a fairly small population to transform the landscape, the culture and the population of a continent in a few generations. I don’t think surplus of meat and dairy is enough to explain it, so what else did it yield?
You don’t have any younger siblings, do you.
Prestige and the plague.
How would “young females” be kept busy by childcare?: babies just lie in their cribs and gurgle most of the time — it’s like leaving crops to grow.
When ignorance is bliss, ’tis easy to be wise.
A more charitable take would be that this view of childcare originates in a childhood of neglect. As Topsy replied when asked where she came from: “I ’spect I growed. Don’t think nobody never made me.”
Circumspice, dude. Women break their balls taking care of kids, wherever you look. Even I know this, who never bothered about families or women.
I don’t know any of the vast anthropological literature about family planning in various societies around the world, and how family size correlates with this or that mode of living, but certainly modern Europeans didn’t invent birth control. The contrast between survival and population pressure, or between mouths to feed and helping hands (and social prestige) is not a subtle thing.
You don’t have any younger siblings, do you.
Yes, I’m the eldest of 5. Also have lots of cousins. Elder siblings/grandparents do the childcare as much as mothers.
“parents spend 50 hours per child per week in child care [averaged] over the first twelve years of the child’s life”
So you’re suggesting my parents spent 250 hours per week? There aren’t that many hours in a week after allowing time to sleep (let alone my father’s mere 40-hour office job). Your numbers don’t pass the sniff test.
And anyway that’s not a hunter-gatherer economy/is nuclear families. The point of the research (that I can’t now find) was that h-g’s had an easier life than in modern industrial economies. Who needs ballet lessons and soccer practice?
I’m certainly not siding with antc’s “It’s like watchin’ the corn get taller.” At the same time, Schoonbrodt’s post-millennial American parents are out at the point where the bell curve flatlined in spending 50 hours a week on the kids *till they’re twelve.* That was my generation’s tv budget while mom and dad did other stuff.
I still get texts about “playdates” for my 11 year old. I wanna be like “Why don’t you tell your kid to knock on our door every day at 3:45 like normal people?” But that’s not normal anymore.
That’s a very different statement from “babies just lie in their cribs and gurgle most of the time — it’s like leaving crops to grow.”
Back to the horseriding study: I didn’t notice that a skeleton from Hungary with four markers of horseriding is very early, directly dated and supported by context to ~4300 cal. BCE, and believed on independent grounds to be an immigrant from the steppe to the Tisza culture. That’s centuries before the still inconclusive archaelogical evidence of horseriding from the Botai culture, about a millennium before the Yamnaya expansion, and even longer before any significant increase in horse remains. It’s a single instance (of riding, not of early immigration from the steppe), but if it bears out it’s wild. Wild and puzzling, Wild and puzzling and maybe not unreasonable at all.
Let’s say the horse was used by steppe dwellers for long-distance journeys (trade? diplomacy? exploration?). That might explain how such a large portion of the Western steppe developed into a single culture in the fifth millennium BCE, but it could still have taken centuries of selective breeding before it was useful for managing large herds of cattle and sheep, allowing (or forcing) rapid and sweeping expansion across and out of the Steppe.
Or it could indicate that the full story of interaction between steppe nomads and settled populations in the formation of the Yamnaya culture is not yet told.
I was hoping for Dmitry to say something about this, but here we are. Disclaimers apply.
There’s a preprint on BioRxiv introducing a new tool for identifying close relatives in ancient DNA. The paper is partly a proof of concept, but since the samples they used are ancient Eurasian DNA, it also purports to add insights into the great migrations around 3000 BCE.
Ringbauer et al (2023): ancIBD – Screening for identity by descent segments in human ancient DNA
In the case of Corded Ware and descendants, the paper claims to settle the question of descent from Yamnaya itself rather than some Para-Yamnaya population. 75% of the genetic material is from a small group of people with close relatives buried in kurgans on the steppe. The remaining 25% is visibly recent ancestry from Globular Amphora. Both ancestries are evenly distributed in all descendant groups..
As usual this raises (or leaves) as many questions as it answers. Here are two:
The source of the R1a Y chromosome is still not found, and there aren’t many places left for it to hide. Where did it come from?
The even distribution of Globular Amphora ancestry in Corded Ware groups from Sweden to Russia is hinting at a systematic, maybe even formalized, process of merger at the onset of the northern expansion. How did that play out?
Interesting indeed.
That’s… a lot.
Yes, it’s pretty much every ancient Eurasian individual with enough coverage. In this study they just looked at the Yamnaya expansion, but there must be much more in there. And as they say, the power increases quadratically with the number of genomes, so this is going to give increasingly sharp pictures of large scale movements and small scale interactions. The power would also increase with the completeness of the genomes, which is likely to improve as well, technology doing what technology does.
They say they can’t discern the direction of a relationship (e.g. grandparent from grandchild), just identify it by genetic distance, but I wonder about that. With increasing coverage I think it should be feasible to identify up- and downstream genomes from splitting and recombination of long segments. But I’m no spesialist at all.
I don’t like the abbreviation “aDNA.”
Neither do I, but for some reason nobody ever asks me before inventing terminology in a field where I have no business interfering.
Well, ancIBD is even worse. it’s especially jarring as the first word in the title of the paper. (I put that “Well,” in front just to avoid it.)
In Russian I usually hear “Battle Axe” (культура боевых топоров) rather than “Corded Ware” (культура шнуровидной керамики), e.g. in the context of Fatyanovo culture in my part of Russia.
But English WP uses Battle Axe and Boat Axe synonymously (and the corresponding page in Russian WP is культура ладьевидных топоров, that’s Boat Axe). Is WP wrong?
ancIBD is a Python package (but an ugly name).
aDNA in the context of mRNA, tRNA etc. looks very weird…
Yes, it’s stridsøkskulturen in Norway too, while Denmark uses enkeltgravskulturen “the Single Grave Culture”.
I’m not sure of the difference between “battle axe” and “boat axe”. My impression is that the latter is used east of the Baltic and that the words represent slightly different designs of essentially the same object.
I am too tired to write the setup properly, but there’s a joke here about the German government research bureau responsible for studying the long-term maternal history of human populations. The punchline is “amtDNAamt.”
stridsøkskulturen
I first parsed that as strid-søks-kulturen and internally translated that as “battle-socks culture”. My brain plays tricks like that on me sometimes.
In German: Streitaxtkultur, which according to WP is an now outdated designation for Schnurkeramische Kultur. It was still frequently used at least in popular books on prehistory when I became interested in the topic almost 50 years ago.
And before “pots, not people”, it was often Streitaxtleute…
Anyway, I’ve seen the equivalence stated, but I’ve also seen Streitaxtkultur claimed to be a subset of Schnurkeramik(kultur). I’m getting the impression archeological taxonomy is as messy as rank-based biological taxonomy.
Stridsøksfolket up here. I think it has made a renaissance in this new era of peoples, not pots.
Snorkjeramisk does exist, but it’s used more for the continental forms and is not commonly known. Tellingly,, there’s no article about den snorkjeramiske kulturen on wp.no, and the article on stridsøkskulturen confuses it with den båndkjeramiske kulturen “Linear Pottery”.
@Trond, does “east of the Baltic” refer to researchers or artefacts located east of Baltic?
And do you use in Norway “battle axe” narrowly (to refer exclusively to a Scandinavian culture as in en.WP) or widely for Corded Ware in general ?
I am quite confused by en.WP, because I am only familiar with the wider sense…
I still get texts about “playdates” for my 11 year old.
I solve this problem by ruthlessly ignoring all texts (except those containing authentication codes I have requested, and even then I’ll take them by robot-voice if that’s an option) and the great majority of phone calls sent to my cell phone. I scrupulously answer calls to my landline, read my email, and come to the door when my doorbell is rung. I consider that that is quite sufficient.
I wanna be like “Why don’t you tell your kid to knock on our door every day at 3:45 like normal people?”
And then what? I’m not quite prepared to send my kid and your kid off to the park at age 11, half a mile (0.8 km) away, by themselves. So playdates, yes.
“I’m not quite prepared to send my kid and your kid off to the park at age 11, half a mile (0.8 km) away, by themselves.”
I think Ryan was complaining about this bit, not about texts per se.
Isn’t it strange how, at least in the US, crime rates have been going down since about 1991, but it’s become much less normal to send your ten-year-old with their friend to a park half a mile away?
in the US, crime rates have been going down since about 1991
Might we need to drill into those figures somewhat? My perception (from outside U.S.) is that random gun crime has been increasing. Also the number of people who are off their heads on drugs, and liable to lash out with no warning. (Those two categories maybe overlap.) Indeed aren’t they the sort of people more likely to lurk in parks?
Perhaps the crime rates in parks have been going down (if they have) only because parents no longer send their kids unattended?
…Back in the Cold War, when I was 6, I walked to school for a quarter of an hour every day on my own, and then back the same way. That was by no means unusual. ~:-|
Define “random”, and then look at the statistics – I think they’re all accessible from Wikipedia. There’s been a strange spike recently because somehow the pandemic made Americans and only Americans weirdly aggressive, but other than that it’s been going down for most definitions of “random” I can imagine right now. (I have to run, sorry.)
look at the statistics
Here (first graph) shows a steady increase in gun homicides since the 90’s — which was FJ’s start point. Yes there’s a spike over the pandemic, but the increase was there already. And of course U.S. gun homicide rates far outpace any other OECD country (later graph). There is a DoJ study saying it decreased 1993~1998 — which seems to be the nadir, just before that wp graph.
By “random” I meant to exclude police/criminals killing criminals/police; family/close relationship violence where the victim is known to the shooter; but include recent school shootings where the victims might have vaguely ‘known of’ the shooter — since we’re talking about kids walking to school.
Can’t find a specific analysis on wp. ‘Mass shootings’ graphed here vary wildly but show an upward trend since the 90’s. (spike in 2017~2018). BBC agrees.
Figures for drug-related gun violence will be mostly police- or criminal-on-criminal, not off-their-head user on rando.
it’s been going down for most definitions of “random” I can imagine right now
Doesn’t look like it to me.
somehow the pandemic made Americans and only Americans weirdly aggressive
Oh, no. In NZ we had some very nasty violent incidents. Vigilantes setting up road blocks; other vigilantes demolishing them; stand-over tactics. And an occupation of Parliament’s grounds very much mimicking the assault on the Capitol. The difference was no guns. Although gun ownership in NZ is high in rural areas — of course I mean high relative to civilised countries.
(Yeah from about age 10 I used to walk home about 40 minutes through a fairly remote bit of parkland. Once got thumped about the head by one of a bunch of ‘traveller’ kids — probably I was being an unbearable toff.)
Random mass shootings, tragic as they are, are still so rare as to be statistically meaningless. If your kids are going to a park, the danger of being killed by a car on the way there is astronomically greater than of their being assaulted or abducted by a stranger. (Abducted by your non-custodial ex may be another story.)
It may even be that there is a greater risk of something bad happening if you drive the kid there than if you let her walk. (I’ll give better odds on that being true in Denmark where we build roads with sidewalks, than in the US).
When we were kids, we used to play outside for hours; nobody controlled where we were between finishing our homework and supper. But it wasn’t without dangers; my little brother managed to almost drown twice.
Oh! My knowledge was out of date since 2015.
Same here, 90s.
Got stuck on a raft on a lake once (yes, in the city of Vienna).
Isn’t it strange how, at least in the US, crime rates have been going down since about 1991, but it’s become much less normal to send your ten-year-old with their friend to a park half a mile away?
Danger has gone way down; fear has gone way way up.
And of course U.S. gun homicide rates far outpace any other OECD country
Talking about “U.S.” homicide rates[*] in this context is as meaningless as talking about “European (including Russia)” homicide rates. In NYC (which is relevant), there were 1,927 homicides in 1993, 633 in 1998, 597 in 1998, 523 in 2008, 335 in 2013, 295 in 2018, 319 in 2019, 462 in 2020, 488 in 2021, and 433 in 2022. Meanwhile, the population rose from 7.3 million in 1993 to 8.4 million in 2018 (the bottom of the homicide curve) to 8.8 million, meaning that homicides per 100,000 (the standard statistical measure) went from 26.4 to 3.5 to 4.9. Hardly a crime wave.
[*] Knife homicide kills you just as dead.
…Back in the Cold War, when I was 6, I walked to school for a quarter of an hour every day on my own, and then back the same way. That was by no means unusual.
So did I. But I wouldn’t have sent my daughter at that age (too irresponsible) or my grandson (his mother was too fearful).
Figures for drug-related gun violence will be mostly police- or criminal-on-criminal, not off-their-head user on rando.
Bullets often miss. I don’t live in a “nice middle-class neighborhood”.
If your kids are going to a park, the danger of being killed by a car on the way there is astronomically greater than of their being assaulted or abducted by a stranger.
Sure. But hanging out there together for hours would be another matter, which is why David’s point isn’t so relevant. And the main concern isn’t major crimes, it’s getting into one of various kinds of trouble that might or might not involve other people. I had at one point to rescue Dorian from an (illegally climbed) tree because he couldn’t get down by himself.
Denmark where we build roads with sidewalks
Here in St. Petersburg West, we do too.
But it wasn’t without dangers; my little brother managed to almost drown twice.
Just so.
homicides per 100,000 (the standard statistical measure)
Yes, that’s the measure I was using — or rather wp was. So the growth of population in NYC with a fall in that gun rate just means the rest of U.S. has got less safe. The OP didn’t specify where in U.S.
Hardly a crime wave.
If I might hold up a mirror to our U.S. friends:
By any standards in OECD countries (excluding Russia [**], as you say), those figures are a crime wave. That nobody in U.S. cares enough to do much about it doesn’t stop it being a crime wave. We in NZ had one mass shooting of around 50 people by a ‘rando’. Within a month there had been dramatic changes to the law. Somebody I know with an all-official gun licence had the police all over him.
Yes, it’s difficult to understand the objective risk of random shooting vs car accident vs etc. But since it’s a risk I don’t need to take, and my most unpleasant experiences in international travel were crossing the U.S. (not even trying to enter the country) from gun-toting border security, I now travel Europe to/from NZ only via Asia. Thank you.
[**] I can’t see any grounds these days to count Russia in with Europe for any statistics.
Oh, they care. They just insist on canned solutions that are all blocked by the opposing party because all existing proposals for solutions have been completely politicized.
They just insist on canned solutions that are all blocked by the opposing party because all existing proposals for solutions have been completely politicized.
The second part of this sentence is correct, but I don’t know what you mean by the first: what “canned solutions”? This has been a problem for decades, and over that time pretty much every solution you could think of has been put forward. The problem does not lie with the people proposing solutions but with the people who will resist to the death any idea that even threatens to limit full access to guns for everyone everywhere. Please do not engage in both-sidesism.
If I might hold up a mirror to our U.S. friends:
This is no news to us, and the reasons are clear (Pinker spells them out with statistics). It’s a path-dependent result: in Europe, the pacification of society came before liberalization, whereas in the U.S. the order was reversed, so that private possession of weapons came to be seen as itself a liberty.
Within a month there had been dramatic changes to the law.
You inherited European notions of what counts as liberty. We didn’t. (You also didn’t have the historical experience, either in Enzed or in Britain, of having to defend your liberties by force.) Note that I am not defending the behavior of either my country or its citizens here, just pointing out the historical basis for their beliefs and consequent behavior.
But since it’s a risk I don’t need to take, and my most unpleasant experiences in international travel were crossing the U.S. (not even trying to enter the country) from gun-toting border security
Believe me, I have had the same experiences (except that I expected them and know how to behave in the presence of gun-toting etc., whereas you perhaps do not). So I don’t go anywhere, which suits me fine in the first place. I am Dennett’s Oxford lectern.
what “canned solutions”? This has been a problem for decades, and over that time pretty much every solution you could think of has been put forward
I think you and David M are in violent agreement: the solutions are already on the shelf, where they will remain for the reasons I gave above.
“They just insist on canned solutions” sounds deeply pejorative to me, as if “they” were ignoring innovative solutions that DM is presumably willing to offer them. If he meant it the way you suggest, I’m sure he’ll say so.
You inherited European notions of what counts as liberty. We didn’t.
The UK (and most European states) had a civil war/revolution with actual shooting guns. I rather think it’s the Europeans who brought guns to the U.S. NZ (and especially Aus) suppressed native uprisings with gun violence. In our ‘Wild West’/pre-establishing Colonial government histories there were no gun controls. There is to this day high gun (rifles, not handguns) ownership in rural areas for killing vermin.
So your “We didn’t” is a description, not an explanation. What different notions of liberty did Europeans bring to U.S., and why weren’t the European deaths in religious and civil wars remembered as a terrible warning?
(You also didn’t have the historical experience, either in Enzed or in Britain, of having to defend your liberties by force.)
English Civil War. (actually two of them) Persecution of Huguenots, French Revolution/The Terror.
NZ Maori wars aka ‘Land wars’. NZ didn’t have white-on-white ‘wars’ as such, but there was plenty of gun violence against the colonial administrations trying to ‘regulate’ — that is, tax — sealers and gold prospectors.
There is quite considerable regional variation in the U.S. both in absolute homicide rate and in historical trends in homicide rate, including not just urban v. non-urban variation but metropolis-A v. metropolis-B variation. In New York City, the rate came down further from the early Nineties peak than the national average and has rebounded in recent years less dramatically, although still enough to alarm residents who got an unwelcome reminder that positive historical trends sometimes stop trending in the positive direction. Indeed, the NYC homicide rate has recently been below that of some of the more violent Canadian cities (typically out on the Prairies: Winnipeg & Regina etc.) In certain other large U.S. cities (e.g. Chicago and Philadelphia), by contrast, the decline from the early-Nineties peaks was shallower and the more recent rebound sufficient to wipe out most/all of the gains.
High-level American-distinctiveness theories that purport to explain why America is more violent than Luxembourg or whatever often lack explanatory power for intra-U.S. variation.
BTW, foreigners familiar with the classic song “Streets of Laredo” about cowboy-on-cowboy gun violence may be surprised to learn that Laredo, Tex. is one of the less violent cities of its size in the U.S. these days. https://www.lmtonline.com/local/article/Laredo-ranks-13th-safest-cities-in-2022-improves-17084308.php
Indeed, although stereotypes about Texas-at-large have considerable global reach, there is quite considerable intra-Texan variation in this area among the largest cities – the homicide rate in Houston is more than quadruple that of El Paso (as of a few years ago, I could probably find stats a year or two more recent if I did more work than I have time for right now); that in Dallas almost quintuple that of Austin. That’s four of the six most populous cities in the state – the homicide rates for the remaining two, Ft. Worth and San Antonio, are sort of roughly in the middle of those extremes.
I’m too tired to be sure what exactly I meant by “canned solutions”, I’ll be back tomorrow. 🙂
It’s not that simple. In Germany, on many highways, there is no speed limit, and that’s treated as a freedom issue more important than people’s lives just like guns in America. A general speed limit was introduced during the oil crisis, but abolished again very soon under the alliterating slogan Freie Bürger fordern freie Fahrt “free citizens demand free passage/driving” which was pushed especially loudly by the Liberal Party, i.e. the closest thing Germany has to libertarians. All more recent attempts to introduce a general speed limit faded out very, very quickly.
There’s a stretch of highway close to Berlin that was so deadly a court found it legal to introduce a speed limit there; that was done, and now the death rate there is lower than the threshold the court set, so a court (I think the same one) found that the speed limit must be abolished again (and that’s about to happen, as far as I understand).
As it happens, the scarcity of speed limits doesn’t kill as many people as the scarcity of gun regulations in the US (either in total or per capita); but still.
There are even, sort of, equivalents to good guys with a gun. I’ve heard of an accident where a car crashed into the side of a truck at Ludicrous Speed, possibly 280 km/h. The people in the car ducked in time, and so they survived: the top half of the car was cleanly sheared off, the rest passed under the truck and emerged on the other side slowed down but without further damage. If the car had been slower, the whole car would have been crumpled at the edge of the truck, with the people in it. (…Or the crash wouldn’t have happened in the first place…)
Never heard of it, FWTW.
Never heard of it,
I suggest you stay that way. Even if I had heard of it, I’d vehemently deny all knowledge. Horribly schmaltzy. Cowboy in white linen? Huh? Seems terribly impractical.
… about cowboy-on-cowboy gun violence
There’s only oblique hints of that in the actual words — at least in the version I found. (Gun violence, yes. Cause unspecified.) Was this a well-known incident ‘immortalised in song’? “primarily descended from an Irish folk song” says wp. The Irish has cause of injury unspecified “All by a young woman” (sounds like he knew he deserved it)/no mention of gun violence.
If you look at the different versions of the song, beginning with “The Unfortunate Rake” (Wikipedia, Mudcat), it’s clear that the woman is a prostitute and the hero of the tale is dying of syphilis. There are dozens of versions. Here’s one of my favorites (only the first five lines actually belong to “Streets of Laredo”):
As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,
As I walked out in Laredo one day,
I spied a poor cowboy wrapped up in white linen,
Wrapped up in white linen as cold as the clay.
I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.
You see by my outfit that I am one too.
We see by our outfits that we are both cowboys.
Now you get an outfit an’ you can be a cowboy too.
Now you got no outfit, so you’re not a cowboy.
I got two outfits. You take one of mine.
Now you got an outfit, and I got an outfit,
And in our outfits now don’t we look fine?
You fit in my outfit. I fit in your outfit.
We fit in our outfits. We’re outfitted fine.
They’re fine-fitted outfits. They’re out-fitted fine-fits.
They’re fit-outed b-b-l-l-r-r-b-b. I’m fit to be tied.
As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,
As I walked out in Laredo one day,
I spied a young outfit wrapped up in his cowboy,
Wrapped up in his outfit, so I let him lay.
@J.W. Brewer: It is especially ironic that for some years now, El Paso has neen rated as one of the safest large cities in the country, while it’s right across from Ciudad Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
@AntC: The linen in “The Cowboy’s Lament” is bandaging. It’s really a wonderful cowboy song. My favorite recording is by Burl Ives, even though he doesn’t sing the verses that I like best.* It’s also a very influential song, much better known than the antecedent John Cowan mentioned, about leprosy instead.** References to its lyrics crop up in some possibly unexpected places. The chorus to “The Green Fields of France” by Eric Bogle runs:
Moreover, many other performers, apparently unsatisfied with the extent of Bogle’s allusion, change the third line to a variation of, “Did they play the death march as they carried you along?” corresponding to the next like from “The Cowboy’s Lament.”
* It’s not Ives’ best cowboy song either. That’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”
** “The Unfortunate Rake” has come to be associated with a St. James infirmary in New Orleans (where there is a St. James parish). However, that hospital apparently never existed. There may have been some confusion with a similarly named leprosarium in London.
@Brett: Similarly, the homicide rate in Nuevo Laredo, Tamps., right across the river from Laredo, Tex. and with similar demographics in many dimensions, has recently been orders of magnitude higher, as discussed here: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/Laredo_vs_Nuevo_Laredo_Dudley.pdf
@J.W. Brewer: It occurs to me that for the Mexican (drug*) cartels, cities close to the northern border are probably more attractive territory to control than similarly sized cities farther away from American border. In fact, the proximity to America would seemingly be valuable for two separate reasons. The first is simply related to cartel business; controlling the area around a concentration of border crossings should be extremely lucrative for a smuggling enterprise. The second reason is that it gives the members of the cartel easy access to American consumer goods and to America itself. El Chapo ensured that some of his children were born in America, to get them American citizenship.
* I was reading something today that claimed that the avocado industry in Mexico (or at least the transportation and resale parts of the supply chain) are also controlled by criminal cartels. However, it was not clear whether these were separate operations from the drug cartels.
…and if yes, how much longer they managed to stay separate operations from the drug cartels.
most versions of Streets of Laredo i’ve heard include a line specifying “i’m shot in the breast and i’m dying today”. i’m not sure whether that’s a defining element of the cowboy branch of the Unfortunate Rake song family, but to my ear it’s part of what distinguishes it from Saint James Infirmary and other cousins from the gambler/reprobate branch, where i think the cause of death is generally not explicitly named.
thanks for the outfit-centered version, JC! i’d never run across it, and it’s excellent.
There was a 1960 Folkways Records album, composed entirely of songs from “The Unfortunate Rake” family. The seem to represent a pretty comprehensive cross section of the traditional repertoire, and there are also some more recent parodic* versions included.
* The most famous parody is probably the Smothers Brothers’ version of “Streets of Laredo.”. I’m not sure whether the lyrics John Cowan quotes are an elaboration of the Smother Brothers’ words, or whether their version is an abridgment of the version he quotes.
Brett: Aha! That’s where this comes from, which I heard once on the radio decades ago:
Mystery solved!
Ancient human DNA extracted from 20,000-year-old deer tooth pendant found in Denisova Cave:
The Nature article, Ancient human DNA recovered from a Palaeolithic pendant.
From Denisova but not Denisovan
I remember when this was thinkable but universally considered infeasible several times over.
lo! these onescore years ago
Very little DNA, just about 20,000 tiny snippets, but it was enough to determine sex (by the X-chromosome fraction) and to see close similarity of the genetic profile to a few other better-studied ancient Siberian humans.
The authors tried the same trick on the artifacts from the older excavations but were stumped by the abundant modern DNA contamination from the digs where the archaeologists didn’t yet use gloves or masks. They also tried a more modern samples but extracted just a handful of short DNA molecules, not enough to conclude anything.
Perhaps the pendant success will remain a singular exception…
And to determine it’s from a human and not from the deer!
They got deer DNA too. Sometimes even the quality of species ID is marginal, like I recently read a paper on the horses of Gaya confederation, an early Korean state, where they proudly confirmed that DNA confirms that the teeth from the royal graves belonged to horses. It was based on a lone DNA fragment, and it still had three sequencing errors separating it from the clean match with the horse sequence…
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4435257