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points by cucumber3732842 17 hours ago | 0 comments

>If I understand the article correctly, there is DNA evidence of mass migration from Scandinavia to Northern Poland, but going further south, the evidence points to migration of a smaller elite rather than mass migration.

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.

[–] a34729t 15 hours ago

Sadly very par for the course. You wont get very far if you challenge the consensus nor get funding. I know of this true in at least a major area of neuroscience reliable 2ndhand.

[–] TFNA 17 hours ago

Archaeogenetics is a new field in archaeology and linguistics, it only started to really make an impact in the last 15 years. No one was "looking into it let alone saying it" before that simply because DNA from dated archaeological sites hadn't yet been extracted, sequenced, and made available to researchers.

You rushed here to slander people working in the field without familiarizing yourself with the first things about it. Shame on you.

[–] brabel 15 hours ago

I suspect the academic community had a bias towards nationalistic interpretation of history. We see this both from Russian and Polish/Ukrainians, whose history is totally interlinked, making it plausible for both sides to make claims favoring what their national identity would prefer, rather than the truth.

[–] TFNA 15 hours ago

Again, why "suspect" something about a field of scholarship? You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others. The Goths left no descendants identifying as such, their entire branch of the Germanic language family went extinct, and no scholar working today is emotionally invested in them for nationalist reasons, nor would they resist particular interpretations because anyone else was.

[–] themgt 15 hours ago

> You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others.

I am no expert, but here's Michael Kulikowski's argument quoted from the wiki page on the debate:

[Heather] is right to try to deduce governing apparatus from the actions that kings and chieftains were able to compel their followers to take. This approach, more than anything, goes some way toward justifying his assertion that a broad class of nonaristocratic "freemen" warriors must have existed in many of the barbarian cultures of the first half of the millennium. Yet to claim the point proved and build further hypotheses upon it is not legitimate; he comes perilously close to recreating the old, volkisch notion of an inherent “Germanic” belief in freedom. Throughout, in fact, Heather makes the tacit assumption that evidence from any “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group can be used to analyze any other “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group—in other words, that linguistic identity and socioinstitutional behaviors go inevitably together. [...] a great many historical comparanda would support a model that he ignores — that the Goths were formed from a large number of indigenes and a small number of migrants under the pressure of Roman imperialism, and in the shadow of the Empire.[31]

And more:

Kulikowski charges that old German nationalist and even Nazi influences continue to influence scholarship on the Goths up to the present day, particularly through the theories of Gustav Kossinna.[19] He considers much of what is written about Goths to be "Germanist fantasy" derived from this legacy.

This isn't exactly what I would describe as a debate "blessedly free from nationalist squabbles"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Goths

[–] TFNA 14 hours ago

Your first paragraph is a bog-standard caveat in the historical study of particular peoples, and you are interpreting it wrongly to see it as a sign of nationalist squabbles among anyone living today. As for the second:

> old German nationalist and even Nazi influences

Notice how the key word there is "old". Scholars may respond to earlier schools of thought in the field, from a now long-vanished time when anyone actually was invested in it for nationalist reasons, but that doesn't mean anyone today is invested in it. For example, major work today on Gothic linguistics, one component in the Urheimat debate, happens in places like Leiden and UCLA where no one has any nationalist dog in the fight.

[–] shakow 16 hours ago

I mean, the academic community deliberately went against historical sources without much evidence-based arguments to do so. Turns out that denying DNA data is not doable, and now they have to do a 180.

I personally wouldn't put the “shame” onto GP.

[–] TFNA 16 hours ago

Again, anyone actually familiar with Gothic studies (I trained in the field and remain employed in a closely related one) would know that people didn't outright "go against Jordanes", but rather the Gothic Urheimat was always discussed as a matter of controversy, with Jordanes' claims one version but external evidence lacking. Now there is some external evidence.

Historians hold out on claims made in historical sources -- especially when written centuries after the fact -- all the time, it is a standard scientific practice to seek external evidence.

[–] shakow 16 hours ago

And for having worked in a similarly behaving field, there is a big difference between “yeah we're not sure yet” and “no the ancients are most certainly wrong because our Modern Thinking is necessarily better (wink wink)”.

[–] TFNA 16 hours ago

And within the specific field of the linked article, I never heard the latter about the issues discussed in the linked article.