Talk:Proto-Indo-Europeans

"Centum branch"

The concept "centum branch" as subdivision of PIE is long outdated, because identified as later development. See any modern textbook.2A02:8108:9640:AC3:61BA:41CB:5788:1115 (talk) 14:34, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

There's not a "Centum" subgrouping, but there are "centum" languages, peripheral to an innovating central "satem" zone. AnonMoos (talk) 00:52, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

The dark Proto-Indo-European hoax

The content in the physical appearance section is a hoax. None of the studies cited say that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were dark haired or dark skinned, and all of them are primary research papers. Please see this archived talk page discussion at the Yamnaya article for the full details which concerned these exact sources and exact statements.

However, numerous secondary sources do state that populations like Corded Ware and Yamnaya were light-skinned, and had a variety of hair and eye colors.

they are fair skinned but have dark eye colors; blue eyes can be more often seen in the CWC (note: Corded Ware Culture)

- Kossina's smile, V. Heyd.

Interestingly, ancient North Eurasian derived populations, such as eastern hunter-gatherers and Yamnayas, carried the blond hair allele rs12821256 of the KITLG gene to Europe.[66] Its first evidence was described in an 18 000 years old ancient North Eurasian west of Lake Baikal (Figure 2, right). It is important to note that the four major founding populations of Eurasians, which were farmers of the Fertile Crescent (including western Anatolia), farmers of Iran, hunter-gatherers of central and western Europe as well as of eastern Europe (Figure 2, right), genetically differed from each other probably as much as today’s Europeans to East Asians.[77] Thus, the classic light phenotype of Europeans became frequent only within the past 5000 years[3, 56, 70] and owes its origin to migrants from Near East and western Asia.[48]

Differences in the relative admixture of ancient hunter-gatherers, Anatolian farmers, Yamnaya pastoralists and Siberians explain the variations in skin and hair pigmentation, eye colour, body stature and many other traits of present Europeans.[60, 74, 78, 79] The rapid increase in population size due to the Neolithic revolution,[64, 80] such as the use of milk products as food source for adults and the rise of agriculture,[81] as well as the massive spread of Yamnaya pastoralists likely caused the rapid selective sweep in European populations towards light skin and hair.

- Skin color and vitamin D: an update, A. Hanel, C. Carlberg

But whatever the evolutionary causes of blond and red hair, their spread in Europe had little to do with their possible innate attractiveness and much to do with the success of the all-conquering herders from the steppes who carried these genes."

Skin Deep: Dispelling the Science of Race, G. Evans

So, at least this dark Proto Indo European hoax can be deleted. Hunan201p (talk) 12:46, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

I have deleted the entire section "Physical characteristics". For details, see my comment at Talk:Yamnaya_culture#The_dark_Yamnaya_hoax_(again). Given that there is no simple one-to-one identity between the Yamnaya_culture and the Proto-IEs, the whole business of ascribing general physical characteristics to the Proto-IEs is even more baseless. –Austronesier (talk) 14:49, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. Well then, why even bother keeping the section when all three verification-failed sources do not even link Yamnaya to proto-Indo-Europeans? Hunan201p (talk) 21:10, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

The dark pigmented reality is not acceptable only for racist White- Power sympathizers.

The dark pigmented reality of proto-IE people is not acceptable only for the racist White- Power sympathizers. The reveal of the reality of the past has a pedagogical purpose too. Many white-power nationalist try to falsely imagine and interpret the proto IE people as the "basic historic "fundament of White race", in the reality the very opposite is true, because (if they try to stress the idea, and they really believe in the existence of the so-called "races") , the proto IE people perfectly fit in the >>>brown race<<< criterias.--Pecksbayout (talk) 14:55, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

But why then this obsession to racialize everything? That's the base of racism, no? What's the point of attributing such BS like "race" to a group of people in the past which certainly was diverse as any other social group in human history? -Austronesier (talk) 15:15, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

The study about pigmentation used a very modern so-called Autosomal technology, which contains magnitude bigger information/data about the origin of people than the (almost 35 years) old and somewhat backward Y or MT.DNA technology. With modern Autosomal genetic research, you can find fine-admixtures even below 1% precision, and with enough sample tests you can even measure genetic distance between various ethnic groups. Your yamnaya relationship to proto IE people is based on backward Y DNA technology, which is somewhat not really trusty technology in 2021.--Pecksbayout (talk) 15:18, 21 June 2021 (UTC) The modern European native population is a mixture of three main components (in various degrees, the ratios depend on the given location of Europe) The proto-IE people were the darkest pigmented among the components.--Pecksbayout (talk) 15:24, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

However fine the methods of genetic research may be, we will never make more than inspired guesses about which language a person who died 4-5k yrs spoke. The language we speak does not leave a somatic trace in our bones and other tissues. -Austronesier (talk) 15:26, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

The identification of proto IE remains was a huge coordinated multi-disciplined scientific work and existing accumulated knowledge of historians, archeologists linguists, and finally geneticists. Please do not underestimate the work and efforts of scholars, just because you don't like the result (for political / ideological reasons or personal taste)--Pecksbayout (talk) 15:54, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

So how many works of modern historians, archeologist, linguists actually talk about the superfical physical features of Proto-Indo-Europeans? Historians and archeologist have come to appreciate the results of genetics not with the primary objective to establish how dead people looked like, but because these results offer immensely important insights about population movements that are not directly visible in the signals of material culture. What I truly dislike as a scholar and Wikipedian is when peripheral and speculative information is sexed up and given undue weight here in a way that does not reflect actual scientific discourse. -Austronesier (talk) 16:16, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello Austronesier! Please consider, if you want to refute this statement, you must search another (newer) genetic research (which includes the examination of eye hair and skin color) which states that they were light pigmented light haired and eyed. You can not provide such research. Thank you for your reply! --Pecksbayout Until that, for me, the so-called average proto IE people will look like that person. https://pistike.hu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/37947328_1756659374455043_6806699101669818368_n.jpg --Pecksbayout (talk) 12:40, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't refute anything. I simply say that until now no one has come up with reliable sources which actually bother to talk about the physical appearance of the diverse collective (cf. the introductory quote by Martin L. West in Proto-Indo-Europeans#Definition) of speakers of Proto-IE. The Nazis cared a lot about it, but why should we? The presently cited sources in the section "Physical appearance" don't do it either. Because the very paradigm that led to such bullshit like "PIEs = white" are obsolete. Reviving these discarded paradigms (which equate proto-languages and archeological cultures with ethnicities, and ascribe stereotypical features to ethnicities) with other content is like wearing the brown shirt inside out: it's still the same shirt. -Austronesier (talk) 13:41, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Pecksbayout -- Your use of the term "dark pigmented" is somewhat disingenous, because the evidence is NOT that PIE speakers had a skin-color comparable to sub-Saharan Africans or south Indians. A few Nazis thought that PIE speakers were blond-haired and blue-eyed, but that was stupid even back in the 1930s, and I don't know of any reputable scholar with a knowledge of linguistics, and not under the influence of overwhelming ideology, who argued for this. I don't know why the fact that Nazis were evil and stupid in the 1930s should prevent today's scientists from studying some similar questions with newly available facts and evidence. Some populations of European hunter-gatherers (before farming and herding came in) have been found to have specific combinations of external appearance features which are not typical of any group living today... AnonMoos (talk) 00:56, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

By the way, "brown race" is not at all a traditional term in the analysis of population groups. Usually, there are Europeans, Africans, and Asians, and then varying numbers of distinctive smaller groups that don't fit well within the basic trichotomy can be added (e.g. Khoisan, Amerindian, Australian, South Asian, "Malayo-Polynesian" etc. etc. etc.). There are various sub-groups with intermediately dark skin tones, but no unified "brown race"... AnonMoos (talk) 01:04, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

In Germanic origin countries like England, Germany and (even the early 20th century) USA, racist belief system like the NORDICISM was a ruling/standard/normal way of thinking. They condemned and look down on Southern Latino Europeans too, due to their average darker eye, hair and skin color. They used the "brown race" to describe Latino (romance speaker) Europeans too. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordicism and read about US emigration law of 1924.--Pecksbayout (talk) 15:09, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

What the heck relevance does the 1924 Immigration Act (not "emigration") have to modern Indo-European studies as practiced by scholars in 2021??????? Insisting that modern linguists and genetic scientists take into account the strange outdated fantasies of Madison Grant and Lorthrop Stoddard or whatever, seems to be far more of a racist maneuver than an anti-racist maneuver... AnonMoos (talk) 22:21, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

I didn't see any studies from Pecksbayout which said proto-Indo Europeans were dark or the "most darkly pigmented" of the three ancestral components of the tri-"racial" mixture of Europeans. On the contrary, research seems to indicate they were the lightest. Catherine Frieman (2019) notes that this is actually consistent with Nazi rhetoric.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00438243.2019.1627907

In April 2017, a new article by Kristiansen et al. (2017) argued that linguistic evidence about the spread of proto-Indo-European, isotopic mobility data and archaeogenetic data all supported a model of male migrants invading northwest Europe from the Steppe before intermarrying (or at least reproducing with) local women and settling down. Like many of the other aDNA papers published in peer-reviewed journals or on pre-print databases, it received considerable media attention. Headlines ranged from The Daily Mail's lurid `Stone Age farming women tamed Nomadic warriors' (Liberatore 2017) to The Register's more disturbing `Steppe thugs pacified by the love of stone age women' (Hall 2017). Both of these headlines, and in particular the latter, drew on the provocatively-titled press release prepared by the University of Copenhagen.

As is to be expected of university media offices, this press release recast a complex and deeply academic piece of research in simple and accessible terms, but did so by employing highly inflammatory terminology. Yamnaya migrants were portrayed as `thugs' - a strongly derogatory term with racial connotations in North American English (e.g. Adamson 2016; Smiley and Fakunle 2016). This choice of terminology was reinforced by the subheading (drawn directly from Kristiansen et al.'s research) naming these violent migrant bands `black youth', an infelicitous translation of an Armenian folk legend about young male warriors. Although used by Kristiansen and colleagues without racial intent, this creates a vivid image in the modern reader's mind about who was invading Western Europe in the Neolithic and how they behaved. This is particularly ironic because geneticists suggest that the subsequent Corded Ware period was characterised by a population of tall, light-skinned and often blue-eyed people (Allentoft et al. 2015; Reich 2018, 20, 110-21). In other words, these eastern migrants were masculine and violent, while western Europe was productive, technologically advanced, stable, and feminine (cf. Whitaker 2019). Therefore, this model of violent invasion from the east on the one hand plays on fears about cultural extinction fomented by demagogic and right-wing reporting about contemporary migration, while on the other also promotes a narrative of (biological and social) domination by pale, blue-eyed men. It is perhaps unsurprising that this research was rapidly adopted by modern racists and neo-Nazis in online forums like Stormfront and 8chan `to demonstrate that Hitler was 100% right about them [Ancient Aryans] and how we ARE them' (https://8ch.net/pol/res/10540451.html).

Gavin Evans has authored a nice book (Skin Deep: Dispelling the Science of Race) in which he notes that the Steppe migrants of the Bronze Age were paler than the settled farmers (and by extension, European hunter gatherers).

And Hanel & Carlberg (2020) argue that the Ancient North Eurasian ancestry (half of Yamnaya's genome) played a crucial role in lightening the skin and hair color of modern Europeans.

So, Pecksbayout would appear to be arguing uphill with the established research. Hunan201p (talk) 21:28, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

@Pecksbayout: Read WP:TALK to find out what Wikipedia Talk pages are for. This is not a forum. Your contributions have no connection with improving the article. To tell vicious fairy tales about people who disagree with you, go somewhere else. --Hob Gadling (talk) 18:35, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

I think it is similar to a Skinhead pub somewhere in London or Berlin, where skinheads try to prove that their language had Aryan origin IE language, and the proto-IE people were the cradle of the white race...blah blah. I feel nazi-like sympathy in such people, who force that baseless and ridiculous fairy tales.--Pecksbayout (talk) 06:50, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

It does not matter what you think or feel. Here, it only matters what reliable sources think. Go away, you are WP:NOTHERE to build an encyclopedia. --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:09, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

• Important comment Pecksbayout is just another puppet of Stubes99 (talk · contribs), a troll that can be identified by their typical interests: Hungary, engineering and race. Please report it at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Stubes99, I'd do it myself but it is tiring after the tenth time. Super Ψ Dro 21:38, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

"Hypothetical People"

They weren't hypothetical, they really existed, they just wouldn't have called themselves "Proto-Indo Europeans" AmazinglyLifelike (talk) 03:21, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

I agree that phrase needs re-wording. "Hypothetical," yet the term "Indo" itself is a reference to the western word for India, which comes literally from the cross-cultural interpretation of someone saying "Hindi" with a native accent, the hard-"H" is not pronounced, so it sounds like "Indi," and this we get words like "Indian," or Proto-"Indo"-European, and this again implies the reality argued by Hindu scholars that Hinduism is well over 10,000 years old, and thus does form a religio-cultural shared background to be aware of, and calling that "hypothetical" is damaging to scholarship. I'd prefer to see references here to articles about the etymology of the word "Indo," than see an early unfounded claim that this is all conjecture. Carl.r.larson (talk) 13:25, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Whatever -- the word "Hindu" actually comes from the Persian language. (It would begin with an "s" as in "Sindhu", the Sanskrit name for the Indus River, if it came from an Indian language.) I fail to see what this has to do with the question. AnonMoos (talk) 21:33, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

PSEUDO-THEORY

This Pseudo-Theory is since years debunked as a fallacy and it`s refuted. 2A01:C22:A901:6700:CD3A:2DD:5E64:CEDB (talk) 15:18, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

That would be quite noteworthy if you could provide reliable sources. Happy Friday. Dumuzid (talk) 15:26, 30 June 2023 (UTC)