Comments by "Peter Lund" (@peterfireflylund) on "Epimetheus" channel.

  1. 160
  2. 32
  3. 25
  4. 19
  5. 12
  6. 9
  7. Who on Earth said that they were white European? Nobody did :) Hindi, Gujarati, and the other modern Northern Indian languages are derived from Sanskrit -- or rather, the kind of Sanskrit that common people spoke and not so much the highly standardized formal form of Sanskrit that Pāṇini described/invented. This is no different than how French/Spanish/Italian/Romanian are derived more from the common man's vulgar Latin than from the highly standardized prestige form of Latin that Cicero and Caesar wrote in. So where did Sanskrit come from? Was it invented one afternoon around teatime? Was it a purely Indian invention that took place in India? No. The predecessor to Sanskrit was brought into India from the North West -- and it was very similar to the language that evolved to become Persian. The common ancestor to that -- and to languages like Latin, Greek, Albanian (all very different and separated for thousands of years) and the Germanic and Slavic languages came (roughly) from an area in South-East Ukraine and a bit further East from that (the Pontic steppes). Nobody is saying that Europeans invaded India. Nobody -- except bonkers Indian nationalists -- is saying that Indians invaded Europe. What they are saying is that lots places were invaded by a people that originally (as far back as we know) came from the Pontic steppes. This was pretty obvious a long time ago just from archeology and linguistics -- and the way people looked. Shared elements in mythologies and religions also strengthened the hypothesis. We didn't know exactly where the original home of the protoindoeuropeans was but the Pontic steppes were always one of the leading candidates. Now we have even more confirmation of all this through the use of ancient DNA -- they literally look at tiny pieces of DNA in tiny bits of old skeletons and compare them! How cool is that? These (rather brutal and nasty) guys were our common ancestors, unless you are entirely Dravidian, in which case it is only large parts of your culture that came from them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamna_culture Btw, we have lots of really, really, really old Indo-European writing -- not just in (old!) Latin or (even older) Greek. We also have some so old that it predates not only the Latin, Greek, and the Brahmic script. It is so old that it even predates Linear B! It is written in cuneiform on clay tablets + we have toponyms, personal names, and loanwords in writing in non-Indo-European languages that are even older. We really have a lot of material to base the Indo-European hypothesis on. We don't know whether the Indus valley civilization crashed because of the, let's face it, barbarian Aryan invasion(s) or whether the Aryan invasion(s) were made possible because of the crash of Indus valley civilization. All we really know for sure is that there is a curious coincidence in the timelines. Northern Europe was not well developed during the time of the Indus valley civilization. The Hittites and Luwians seem to have been quite advanced, though.
    7
  8. 6
  9. 6
  10. 4
  11. 3
  12. 2
  13. 1
  14. 1