The largest linguistic group in the world and one who has given shape to all the civilizations in the Western world. The celts, greeks, germanic tribes all of them spoke related languages. If somehow they vanish from history, would the world might be still similar to ours or it'd be quite different? and in what things it would be?
Would History still be recognizable if there were no Indoeuropeans?
- Thread starter Lord Of Tacos
- Start date
Obviously, geography would still be roughly similar, so we might still see maritime cultures in what is OTL the Aegaeis, nomads in the Eurasian steppes etc.
Also, much of African history and even more of American and Australian and Polynesian history would be recognisable up to a certain time.
Other than that, divergences would be huge. You have Ancient Egypt, Ancient Mesopotamia, Indus Valley and Ancient China as unaltered starting points, but from there, everything could bounce off in countless directions difficult to imagine for us.
It would help a little (but only a little) if we could determine WHY there were no Indo-Europeans, and what took their place.
Also, much of African history and even more of American and Australian and Polynesian history would be recognisable up to a certain time.
Other than that, divergences would be huge. You have Ancient Egypt, Ancient Mesopotamia, Indus Valley and Ancient China as unaltered starting points, but from there, everything could bounce off in countless directions difficult to imagine for us.
It would help a little (but only a little) if we could determine WHY there were no Indo-Europeans, and what took their place.
No. It would be very unrecognsible. You would need very early POD. Probably POD before Indo-European languages begun spread from their original home land. Without Persians, Greeks and Romans world would be extremely unrecongsible. Different cultures, languages and totally different history. India would remain Dravidian, Middle Eastern history would be totally different, Etruscans might survive and etc.
Alcsentre Calanice
Gone Fishin'
And we know little about this culture anyway, so it would be very hard to write something about it.
Also, don't forget America. Native American history will roughly go as per OTL, because there's little how European history can influnce pre-Columbian American one.
Since this would be a POD in the Neolithic, I think it's obvious that history would be far different. It would probably look to some degree or another like a low fantasy world, evolving into a world recognisable but different from our own. It all depends how much you can abstract historical processes of empire building, migration, etc. We'd also have a host of different religions to influence world history. With a POD maybe 5,000-5,500 years ago, the world is basically a blank canvas for the author to paint on.
There's just too many theories with scant evidence out there describing things. I guess a Middle East dominated by Semitic peoples (but far different from OTL's since there is no Indo-European influence on them) and maybe a few other groups like the Hurrians. Persia is dominated by Elamite speakers? India is Dravidian, or whatever the hell the Indus Valley Civilisation was. Or both. And this means no Hinduism, so this clearly isn't India (which it certainly would never be called) as we know it. One thing I suspect you'd find is a Europe dominated by speakers of languages (and relatives we don't know) which are known to be pre-Indo-European. Basque is an obvious one, but Iberia in general is known to have had a large amount of non-Indo-European languages. Etruscans, Minoans, etc. In Fennoscandia, maybe Finns displace the natives in the parts where the Germanic languages were OTL north of Denmark. In the homeland of Germanic languages OTL, probably some other pre-Indo-European group.
But would the Etruscans, say, develop in any way like Rome? Could anyone develop like Rome, and the least important part about Rome is that they spoke an Indo-European language? And instead of fighting Celts, Illyrians, and whoever, they fight people we lump into a group as pre-Indo-Europeans?
The important part is how much of what we identify as history is unique to Indo-Europeans and their cultures. How much would other civilisations not be able to come up with or take much later to innovate?
The sense of order in me wishes that were plausible, but if there's no Indo-Europeans, the butterflies will add up to ridiculous levels in the New World. Potential alternate migrations, potential victories or defeats, who even knows.
And that's assuming we don't get something as crazy as Phoenicians/Carthaginians or other Semites actually going to the New World like some have hypothesised. I mean, if we cut out Indo-Europeans from history (bad famine/epidemic, mixed with migrations into their lands, leads to their assimilation by another cultural group?), certainly we can't exclude that possibility.
Of course, the Finno-Ugrians will rule Europe as they were destined to!
There's just too many theories with scant evidence out there describing things. I guess a Middle East dominated by Semitic peoples (but far different from OTL's since there is no Indo-European influence on them) and maybe a few other groups like the Hurrians. Persia is dominated by Elamite speakers? India is Dravidian, or whatever the hell the Indus Valley Civilisation was. Or both. And this means no Hinduism, so this clearly isn't India (which it certainly would never be called) as we know it. One thing I suspect you'd find is a Europe dominated by speakers of languages (and relatives we don't know) which are known to be pre-Indo-European. Basque is an obvious one, but Iberia in general is known to have had a large amount of non-Indo-European languages. Etruscans, Minoans, etc. In Fennoscandia, maybe Finns displace the natives in the parts where the Germanic languages were OTL north of Denmark. In the homeland of Germanic languages OTL, probably some other pre-Indo-European group.
But would the Etruscans, say, develop in any way like Rome? Could anyone develop like Rome, and the least important part about Rome is that they spoke an Indo-European language? And instead of fighting Celts, Illyrians, and whoever, they fight people we lump into a group as pre-Indo-Europeans?
The important part is how much of what we identify as history is unique to Indo-Europeans and their cultures. How much would other civilisations not be able to come up with or take much later to innovate?
The sense of order in me wishes that were plausible, but if there's no Indo-Europeans, the butterflies will add up to ridiculous levels in the New World. Potential alternate migrations, potential victories or defeats, who even knows.
And that's assuming we don't get something as crazy as Phoenicians/Carthaginians or other Semites actually going to the New World like some have hypothesised. I mean, if we cut out Indo-Europeans from history (bad famine/epidemic, mixed with migrations into their lands, leads to their assimilation by another cultural group?), certainly we can't exclude that possibility.
Of course, the Finno-Ugrians will rule Europe as they were destined to!
Alcsentre Calanice
Gone Fishin'
Then explain to me how the old world is going to influence the new world substantially BEFORE the first contact. Sure, some fishes will survive or die because there are more (or less) fishers on the European side of the Atlantic. But besides this? There isn't much natural contact man can influence.
True, but even minimal changes will add up over 5-6000 years to something greatly different.
People lighting fires differently, different agriculture affecting albedo, dumping different crap into streams/oceans, all affects weather patterns in even slight ways adds up to a storm on the other side of the world which never happened OTL. This leads to some fight between two tribal groups in North America ending differently, perhaps resulting in a great leader dying, or conversely, a skilled young leader living. Perhaps leading to slightly altered culture, altered migrations, etc., which leads to monumentally different civilisations in the New World by the time the Old World reaches there. Same goes with Polynesia, perhaps leading to later or earlier settlements of certain island groups.
It seems weather is the way the butterfly effect works, true to the origins of the term. Look how severe weather impacted known history, like, say, early European settlements in the New World, and then extrapolate to how it might've affected the unknown history of the pre-European cultures there. And that's just severe weather, not a chance rainstorm. Long-term climatic events might remain largely the same (since we're speaking of the Americas, the megadroughts known to have occurred at various times from 1 AD - 1600 AD), as would geological events like volcanic eruptions which are often responsible for long-term climate events. This is why that I'm fascinated by what we can tell of major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of the past which humans never recorded (especially in the Americas/Australia/Pacific where no records besides vague oral memories, if that, exist), as well as paleoclimatological records, because it's fairly unchanging as long as your POD is after the origin of modern humans. Archaeoastronomy too, because the heavens are similarly unchanging. To get back on topic, our pre-Indo-Europeans and other peoples will likely have similar but different responses to the events coming their way.
Well, in case of the Indian subcontinent, it's not just the Dravidians who would benefit from this significant change in history; the Burushos, Mundas and the Veddas of Sri Lanka could grab such an opportunity as well.
I've noticed that people here believe that at some point, butterfly effect basically becomes author wish granting. As in, it's a concept that you throw in to justify a region unrelated to the POD completely changing according to one's needs or wishes.
That's true to a certain extent, but if you have a POD so far back in the past, history, culture, etc. is nothing but a canvas for you to paint on as a writer. The butterfly effect is a convenient justification, to within certain limits. Some battle goes the other way in Europe, nothing big probably happens in China within a decade. But within fifty years? It's impossible to say what would happen, but there's plenty of possibilities to say what might happen, hence where alternate history comes in.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that Northern Indians would still have lighter skin than Southern Europeans without the Indo-Europeans. Anywhere else, it's even more doubtful Indo-Europeans had any effect on skin colour. Definitely not in Europe.
In relation to this thread, what particular civilization could live in the Tarim Basin if the IE expansion butterflied?
Some related to Tibetan and Sinitic groups, I suppose. Later, coming under pressure by Altaic nomadic "empires" maybe.
i think you misunderstood my post.
recent discovery has made it clear that light skin appeared much later than thought.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin.
the Pod would be in a period that the white skin gene is still in the process of being spreaded.
a pod this early could well influence the distribution
Would they? It could be Turko-Mongolic peoples, it could be a group which is now extinct from history without leaving a trace. Maybe a group of people related to Tibetans could live there, but it would be at the northern end of Sino-Tibetan expansion.
It doesn't make sense that no one in Europe would develop light skin without the Proto-Indo-Europeans. At least if we're assuming that "dark skin" means as dark sub-Saharan Africans, I think skin colour and physical features (with an obvious bias toward what we consider "white") like the Inuit and other circumpolar people (including the Sami apparently before Nordic admixture) is plausible. Even the article you posted doesn't suggest it was the proto-Indo-Europeans who spread light skin in Europe.
Skallagrim
Banned
If you're going with "true butterfly effect" (essentially what @metalinvader665 argues), the world certainly becomes utterly and unpredictably different with a POD that early. The sheer randomness would make it impossible to say anything meaningful about how such a world would evolve-- beyond very basic stuff like "steppes are good for nomdic cultures, so we'll probably still see those there", or "there will probably be mercantile sea-faring cultures along the coasts of the Med". But that tells us nothing of the particulars. Even in completely different parts of the world, things would end up completey different from OTL if we indeed hold that butterfly wings will alter meteological events, changing peoples' lives ever so slightly. I mean... because of a storm, a guy gets to a village he was travelling two a day late, doesn't meet the woman he married in OTL... and all their descandants don't get born. They both marry other people, meaning different descendants get to created. And those ATL partners of theirs had different partners in OTL, who also marry different people in this ATL, and so forth and so on...
Within a generation, this noticably changes the specific population and history of their community. After several thousand years? With such things happening, time and again? Even the people of uncontacted tribes will be different individuals (even if their culture is unchanged) by the time we get to the present.
Even if we stay with strict causality, however (so: America, Australia, etc. develop exactly as OTL until contact is made), the changes are still vast. Entire civilisations that had major impacts on world history are wiped out. In many cases, we know too little about the exact culture and identity of the pre-Indo-European peoples to even say what they might have looked like, had they been allowed to continue their development, unpertubed. In many cases it isn't even exactly clear at which point the Indo-Europeans "supplanted" other cultures, or to what extent they did. For instance: the etruscans have been mentioned as pre-Indo-European. This is not a definitive fact at all. They are generally thought to derive from the Villanovan culture, which has in turn tenuously been linked to both the Urnfield culture and the Halstatt culture. (And others deny that such links exist at all.)
Regarding the Halstatt culture: that's generally seen as (proto-)Celtic. But it's also linked to the preceding Urnfield culture, which is occasionally seen as (linked to) proto-Celtic, but most often seen as pre-Indo-European altogether. Best we can guess, the Celts derive from the Halstatt culture, which evolved from the Urnfield culture, but was clearly changed by the influence of the Indo-Europeans. At which point those changes occurred - or how they did - remains disputed. Did the Indo-European conquer? Or migrate and assimilate, simply exterying great influence via superior tech? Or did they do some combination of both? Did they merge with the indiginous population? Or did they supplant the ruling elite? And did this all happen to the Urnfiel culture, and is the Halstatt culture the result? Or did it happen later, over the course of the Halstatt culture's existence, perhaps far more gradually?
We don't know. We'll probably never know. Not for sure. And the same damn thing goes for almost every other place touched by the Indo-European migrations/expansion. All the way to India, where we don't even know who inhabited northern India before the Indo-European got there. (There's even people who maintain that the Indo-Europeans came from there, but I consider that pseudohistorical.)
Given such vast unknowns, I am confident in saying that we cannot reasonably describe a world without Indo-Europeans realistically. Even if other peoples, from the same general region, undergo a similar development/expansion... their basic culture would be different. And would they have the same tech? In his masterful book on the origins and migrations of the Indi-Europeans, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony describes how the Indo-Europeans had a vast advantage in their use of horses and chariots. (To the extent that it's suspected that the idea of the centaur originally derives from pre-Info-European peoples in Greece encountering Indo-European invaders on horseback-- seeing this fearsome foe as one creature.) The exact origins of such developments are murky. Domesticated horses and the use of chariots soon spread out. Did the proto-Indo-Europeans develop this all by themselves? Or was it a product of their region, which they cunningly exploited, but which would still have arisen without them at pretty much the same time? I tend towards the former, since genetic reseaurch has shown that all domesticated horses on the planet descend from a very small group of stallions (and possibly from just one). Domesticating mares was possible earlier; David anthony argues that the proto-Indo-Europeans were the first to succesfully domesticate a stallion, thus allowing them to breed stallions born in domestication... from which population all domesticated horses are derived.
If that is true, and I think it is, then "no Indo-Europeans" means "no (or at least: later) domestication of the horse". It means "no (or at least: later) use of horse-chariots". This by itself has vast effects on Eurasian history, even if other peoples basically take the place of the Indo-Europeans. And it's unclear that others would. Anthony argues that the use of horses and chariots allowed the Indo-Europeans to become so successful, and gain such plunder and other wealth, that they could - and did - sustain a rapidly expanding population. That this population could plunder and conquer on a yet greater scale, creating the basis for more wealth and population increase... which started the Indo-European expansion in the first place.
In a world without all this, I don't know what we'd see, but it's not something we'd recognise.
Within a generation, this noticably changes the specific population and history of their community. After several thousand years? With such things happening, time and again? Even the people of uncontacted tribes will be different individuals (even if their culture is unchanged) by the time we get to the present.
Even if we stay with strict causality, however (so: America, Australia, etc. develop exactly as OTL until contact is made), the changes are still vast. Entire civilisations that had major impacts on world history are wiped out. In many cases, we know too little about the exact culture and identity of the pre-Indo-European peoples to even say what they might have looked like, had they been allowed to continue their development, unpertubed. In many cases it isn't even exactly clear at which point the Indo-Europeans "supplanted" other cultures, or to what extent they did. For instance: the etruscans have been mentioned as pre-Indo-European. This is not a definitive fact at all. They are generally thought to derive from the Villanovan culture, which has in turn tenuously been linked to both the Urnfield culture and the Halstatt culture. (And others deny that such links exist at all.)
Regarding the Halstatt culture: that's generally seen as (proto-)Celtic. But it's also linked to the preceding Urnfield culture, which is occasionally seen as (linked to) proto-Celtic, but most often seen as pre-Indo-European altogether. Best we can guess, the Celts derive from the Halstatt culture, which evolved from the Urnfield culture, but was clearly changed by the influence of the Indo-Europeans. At which point those changes occurred - or how they did - remains disputed. Did the Indo-European conquer? Or migrate and assimilate, simply exterying great influence via superior tech? Or did they do some combination of both? Did they merge with the indiginous population? Or did they supplant the ruling elite? And did this all happen to the Urnfiel culture, and is the Halstatt culture the result? Or did it happen later, over the course of the Halstatt culture's existence, perhaps far more gradually?
We don't know. We'll probably never know. Not for sure. And the same damn thing goes for almost every other place touched by the Indo-European migrations/expansion. All the way to India, where we don't even know who inhabited northern India before the Indo-European got there. (There's even people who maintain that the Indo-Europeans came from there, but I consider that pseudohistorical.)
Given such vast unknowns, I am confident in saying that we cannot reasonably describe a world without Indo-Europeans realistically. Even if other peoples, from the same general region, undergo a similar development/expansion... their basic culture would be different. And would they have the same tech? In his masterful book on the origins and migrations of the Indi-Europeans, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony describes how the Indo-Europeans had a vast advantage in their use of horses and chariots. (To the extent that it's suspected that the idea of the centaur originally derives from pre-Info-European peoples in Greece encountering Indo-European invaders on horseback-- seeing this fearsome foe as one creature.) The exact origins of such developments are murky. Domesticated horses and the use of chariots soon spread out. Did the proto-Indo-Europeans develop this all by themselves? Or was it a product of their region, which they cunningly exploited, but which would still have arisen without them at pretty much the same time? I tend towards the former, since genetic reseaurch has shown that all domesticated horses on the planet descend from a very small group of stallions (and possibly from just one). Domesticating mares was possible earlier; David anthony argues that the proto-Indo-Europeans were the first to succesfully domesticate a stallion, thus allowing them to breed stallions born in domestication... from which population all domesticated horses are derived.
If that is true, and I think it is, then "no Indo-Europeans" means "no (or at least: later) domestication of the horse". It means "no (or at least: later) use of horse-chariots". This by itself has vast effects on Eurasian history, even if other peoples basically take the place of the Indo-Europeans. And it's unclear that others would. Anthony argues that the use of horses and chariots allowed the Indo-Europeans to become so successful, and gain such plunder and other wealth, that they could - and did - sustain a rapidly expanding population. That this population could plunder and conquer on a yet greater scale, creating the basis for more wealth and population increase... which started the Indo-European expansion in the first place.
In a world without all this, I don't know what we'd see, but it's not something we'd recognise.
Another mystery that may get at least partially resolved this year is the nature of the Bell-Beaker culture. It seems likely that in its early stages, this was non-IE in nature, spreading out from eastern Iberia into central Europe. But the later stages, during its spread from central Europe to western Europe, appear to have been IE in nature. It also appears to have been more like a long-distance, possibly multilingual, trading network than like a "nation".
My personal best guess? It started out as a (non-IE) trading network, making a few families, who controlled the flow of commodities of all kinds over large distances, very rich by the standards of the time. Eventually, the expanding IE tribes began to be included in the network as suppliers of raw materials and consumers of finished products. A few high-level tribe members join the network as traders/distributors in non-IE lands, and becoming wealthy and high-status, invite their friends and family from the Old Country to join them. This greatly increases IE immigration into non-IE regions, resulting in entire regions becoming majority IE-speaking, without requiring wars of conquest. This would be especially likely if the early IE-speaking members of the Bell-Beaker trading network were sitting on valuable resources, that allowed large numbers of IE-speaking traders in those resources to gain a lot of wealth and status compared to those who stayed home.
We should find out soon, likely this year, about the genetic histories of Bell-Beaker burials, and gain a much better idea of the genetic history of the Bell-Beaker phenomenon..