back to article Steppe thugs pacified by the love of stone age women

It happens to the best of us: one minute you're raiding and pillaging on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, the next you're settled down with a stone age woman, have a mortgage on the hut and 2.4 kids. According to an article in the journal Antiquity, Steppe migrant thugs who came into Europe via Ukraine were pacified by Stone Age …

  1. NorthernCoder
    Boffin

    Been reading Pratchett lately?

    "It happens to the best of us: one minute you're raiding and pillaging on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, the next you're settled down with a stone age woman, have a mortgage on the hut and 2.4 kids."

    That sounds like what might happen to Cohen the Barbarian and the Silver Horde...

    Don't spoil anything, I have only read up to the beginning of "The Last Hero"!

  2. Your alien overlord - fear me

    Or you invade, kill off all the males and rape the local girls. Happened in the Stone Age, happens nowadays. When will humanity evolve?

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      "Or you invade, kill off all the males and rape the local girls."

      That seems a bit simplistic to explain the consequent emergence of a new culture which inherits elements of those of both parents in quite the same way.

    2. Chemical Bob

      When will humanity evolve?

      Thursday. Not necessarily this Thursday, tho...

    3. P. Lee

      >When will humanity evolve?

      Is there any evidence that humanity has "improved"?

      The Romans used to kill unwanted children via "exposure." We do it a bit earlier and make sure the corpses aren't seen, but we still do it - over thirty-six Legions-worth (half the empire's army at its peak) every year in the UK alone.

      A society which not only allows its children to be killed, but celebrates it as a sign of "progressiveness" may be rich and technologically advanced, but "evolved" it is not.

    4. the Jim bloke

      The technique worked

      We are all descendants of thousands of generations of successful breeders, saying the process offends your modern morality is like not only telling the tide not to come in, but not to come in last tuesday.

      Education, philosophy, science, technology, all have changed the way humanity interact with their environment, which means choices may be available now which were not valid then. By the same token, those thousands of generations favour responses which are inappropriate in a modern context.

  3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    A better link to the paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/retheorising-mobility-and-the-formation-of-culture-and-language-among-the-corded-ware-culture-in-europe/E35E6057F48118AFAC191BDFBB1EB30E

  4. Anonymous Blowhard

    I think Corded Ware Culture are appearing at the Upton Folk Festival later this month.

  5. x 7

    It was ever thus........

    The Rape of the Sabine Women?

    The Irish and English women carried to Iceland and Greenland by the Vikings

    The fact that the native language on the Isle of Man is Celtic not Norse (who looked after and taught the children? The WOMEN)

    1. richardcox13

      > The Rape of the Sabine Women?

      Not what you think it means.

      Go back far enough and "rape" covered "kidnap with intent to marry". And that in a culture where breaking through the defences of another village to claim a wife was part of becoming an adult. This helped to ensure genetic mixing at a time when the vast majority of the population otherwise wouldn't travel more than a few miles from their birthplace.

      History is complicated, cultural standards are of their time, etc.

      1. Tom Paine

        a culture where breaking through the defences of another village to claim a wife was part of becoming an adult. This helped to ensure genetic mixing at a time when the vast majority of the population otherwise wouldn't travel more than a few miles from their birthplace.

        First I've heard of it, got a source?

  6. Professur

    So ... these assholes are responsible for all the damn caravans on the road today????

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Sir Sham Cad

      Re: Amazing.

      He probably thought "I wondered where that sword came from and will you shut up about wanting a bloody boat!"

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    An interesting education article

    An interesting, educational article requires a sensible response ... from someone other than me.

    > amnaya warriors belonging to raiding parties married local Stone Age women in Neolithic Europe, settling and adopting an agrarian lifestyle. During this process a Proto-Germanic language and the Corded Ware Culture was formed.

    Corduroy jackets and trousers were invented in the Neolithic!! Who knew!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      Re: An interesting education article

      I read the Corded Ware bit as meaning that toasters and blenders were invented on the Stone Age Steppe.

  9. deadlockvictim

    Mitochondrial DNA

    Mitochondrial DNA is a marker handed down by women. Offhand I can't think of any genetic markers handed down exclusively from males. There is the Y-Chromosome, I suppose, but that is massive (from a genetic perspective).

    If this paper is correct, then the mitochondrial DNA of Europeans should be different from Central Asian women while the male marker should be present in both groups.

    Of course, I should actually read the paper...

    1. stephanh

      Re: Mitochondrial DNA

      Y chromosome is indeed used to track male lineage. No probs with that.

      1. Lars Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Mitochondrial DNA

        As far as I remember, but did I understand, Lucy, our mother had kids with several men and that supposedly explains it all.

        Eagerly hats and coats.

  10. Farnet

    Dont Tell UKIP or Britain First

    Imagine them (if they could actually read) reading that article and finding out that we are all basically immigrants.... ohh the horror.

    Eddie Izzard did a 3 part series on Mongrel Britain many years ago, and basically absolutely everything that we consider British is from the Germans, French, Vikings, Romans to name but a few invaders.

    1. Evil Auditor Silver badge

      Re: Dont Tell UKIP or Britain First

      Isn't it that most of what we consider British is rather Anglo-Saxon, i.e. German (or Germanic)?

      Except for the language, which is French pronounced badly. Which probably is quite true since back in the days - wasn't it around King John's reign? - French was the language of England and only later, maybe during the 100 year war, English was (re-)created out of French and what remained from Old English.

      Disclaimer: I'm not a historian and I bend and invent facts freely to my liking.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Dont Tell UKIP or Britain First

        "French was the language of England"

        French was the language of the court which wasn't surprising as the Normans and their immediate successors owned up to 2/3 or so of France. After they lost that they discovered that the Parisian French were laughing at them for using unfashionable provincial French. So they stopped speaking French and started speaking English which everyone else had been speaking all the time.

      2. Lars Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: Dont Tell UKIP or Britain First

        English is the last Germanic language. Languages evolve from the mix of people and languages that took part in it. It's often easy to find the background using essential old words like for English, German, French and Swedish, mother, mutter, mère, moder. and father, father, père, fader or red, rot, rouge, röd or water, wasser, eau, vatten, and so forth. French a bit at odds here earlier influenced from the south or there are synonyms.

        Next we have words from the more advanced part of Europe, with mathematics, democracy and of course religion from Greek, Latin and Arabic.

        Next modern inventions like say telephone, telefon, téléphone, telefon.

        What an interesting salad we have created fucking around in Europe.

        The word "hooker" of course has a totally different background.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Dont Tell UKIP or Britain First

          "French a bit at odds here earlier influenced from the south or there are synonyms."

          Even French and other Latin derived languages aren't that much at odds. They're still derived from the same origins, the shifts in letters such as those which gave Latin pater and frater rather than father and brother are systematic and the remainder of the word is often the same.

      3. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Dont Tell UKIP or Britain First

        "Except for the language, which is French pronounced badly."

        More likely a creole developed from a pidgin, which in turn developed from a creole that developed from a pidgin.

        Linguists try to talk about purity, but every time there's an invasion, languages blend into a simplistic form which the descendants then recomplexify.

    2. JimC

      Re: Dont Tell UKIP or Britain First

      Hmm, be careful what you wish for. They might read that and decide that its scientific evidence that large scale immigration can utterly change a culture - which is pretty much what they are saying anyway.

    3. Primus Secundus Tertius

      Re: Dont Tell UKIP or Britain First

      There were Stone Age peoples who were wiped out by the invading Celts. Nowadays the Celts complain that their language and culture is being wiped out by the English.

    4. Tom Paine

      Re: Dont Tell UKIP or Britain First

      Obligatory Get Back In The Sea!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmiQgwME6oE

  11. retired_in_london

    Foreign savages invade European lands, take their women by force while their impotent, pathetic native men are displaced.

    Seems like an easily plausible scenario. Just look at what's happening today.

  12. G.Y.

    (alleged) locker-cave talk:

    "I grab women by the [deleted]; when you're a neanderthal, they let you do it"

    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Re: (alleged) locker-cave talk:

      Alleged indeed; if you look into it you may discover that Neanderthals were more refined than they usually get credit for.

      1. PhilipN Silver badge

        Re: (alleged) locker-cave talk:

        Neanderthal link : opens to a site with an uncanny resemblance to my wedding album

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