Tag: mesolithic

Collapse of the European ice sheet caused chaos in northern and eastern Europe until about 8000 BC

deglaciation-europe-east

A new paper with open access has appeared in Quaternary Science Reviews, authored by Patton et al.: Deglaciation of the Eurasian ice sheet complex, which offers a new model investigating the retreat of this ice sheet and its many impacts.

According to the comments of professor Alun Hubbard, the paper’s second author and a leading glaciologist:

To place it in context, this is almost 10 times the current rates of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica today. What’s fascinating is that not all Eurasian ice retreat was from surface melting alone. Its northern and western sectors across the

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The Aryan migration debate, the Out of India models, and the modern “indigenous Indo-Aryan” sectarianism

indus-valley-early-harappan

The Proto-Indo-European Urheimat

Not long ago, the Proto-Indo-European language Urheimat problem used to be cyclic in nature: linguistic and archaeological publications appeared supporting a Copper Age migration from the steppe proposed by Marija Gimbutas, or a Neolithic expansion from Anatolia (or Armenia) proposed by Colin Renfrew, and back again.

I have always supported the simpler, more recent Chalcolithic migration of Late Indo-Europeans from the Pontic-Caspian steppe over an older Neolithic expansion from Anatolia with agriculture. The latter model implied a complex cultural diffusion over a greater span of time than is warranted by linguistic guesstimates, understood as the … Read the rest “The Aryan migration debate, the Out of India models, and the modern “indigenous Indo-Aryan” sectarianism”