I.e it wasn't fashionable, didn't make for good career advancement for anyone to look into it let alone say it.

>In this comment section it seems people really want it to be one or the other, evidence be damned.

I'm just here to remind everyone that the "professionals" are fallible and subject to industry circle jerks.

Languages can spread by utility, rather than culture.

For example, "Low German" was a common trade tongue, and shows up in parts of the world, where Germans never set foot.

When I read about history of Europe/Old World in Roman and post Roman times, it's clear that large scale movements of whole groups of people is very common in the historical record.

I wonder why such views were ever resisted in prehistory, a time when such movements were simpler and their motivations more likely to arise?

The "pots aren't people" wave wouldn't be problematic per se (e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life), rather because it sought to be the dominant theory.

We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing - defeat of the Nazis, which made some ideas extremely dirty and other ideas very attractive.

This has an interesting consequence in that we do not know much about natural human intelligence today, which is coming back to bite us in the age of emerging artificial intelligence. The topic of human intelligence has been a political minefield for nearly a century now. It is probably safer and easier to study intelligence of octopuses and crows than that of humans. You're definitely freer from political repercussions there.

How will you prevent that harm from recurring? Ignoring it hasn't worked, and doesn't distinguish the program you propose from a long line of racist programs and propaganda - that is, nobody can tell whether it's sincere or just another cover story.

But people can tell that it's not responsible, which is a clue about the thought behind it. We can't wash our hands of the consequences of our actions. If you don't prevent the next racist catastrophe, who will? Will you just do it and leave the consequences for others to clean up (and suffer from)?

So the 5th and 6th centuries are still very much guesswork when it comes to scandinavian history.

I just always assumed that the legend of Rome was powerful enough for swedes to claim the Goths. But it makes sense that it's based on fact.

During its existence, Kievan Rus was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus" or the "Rus land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus being derived from the ethnonym Роусь. ... The first known use of the term Kievan Rus comes from the 1582 chronicle by Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski, where it was used to describe the region of Rus state immediately adjacent to Kyiv.

In 1837 it was adopted by Kyiv University rector Mykhailo Maksymovych in relation to the Principality of Kiev; known for his Ukrainophile political orientation, Maksymovych later spread that definition to the whole realm, seeing Kyiv as the original point where Rus statehood emerged, establishing the base for the future Russian Empire.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#Names

What seems more accurate is that there were people near the Vistula River around year 1 who had cultural, linguistic, trade and - yes - genetic connection to people on the other side of the Baltic sea, and in the age of migration those people got moving, got into Arian Christianity and called themselves Goths. They did comparatively well in a time when most of Europe didn't, so they have plenty of descendants, many of them carrying ancestry we can trace back to people who lived in Scandinavia before year 1.

E.g., the North Island of New Zealand is called "Te Ika A Māui" in Māori, that is "the fish of Māui", and if you look at it from above, it definitely resembles a stingray.

What blows my mind is how Māori knew that before cartography or aerial mapping or satellites.

I understand how they likely did, Polynesians didn't spread across the Pacific by being clueless about geography and coastlines.

But still, a pre-literate society that was able to say "huh, this island half the size of the UK looks like a giant stingray" is pretty bloody cool.

For example, the Roman Republic had adapted to constant warfare and the steady stream of casualties caused by it. And then the Late Republic got into trouble, because Rome had become too good at war, and the required casualties didn't happen.

Their longboats made them amphibious. Their ships were durable enough for the open ocean, but still able to land on any beach, or sail fair upriver.