The Great Khan's Fist

It seems that most of human history for the last 10,000 years is about the conflict between nomads and agriculturists. Agriculture makes it easier to feed yourself, but harder to defend yourself. The ability of agriculturists to defend themselves depends on a high level of social organization. The same story is told over and over again, of agricultural societies becoming "weak" and being overrun by nomads.

Central Asia is just one source of nomads. The Arabian desert, for example, was another - the invasion led by Muhammad being just the latest of a long line which (if you trust the source) also included the Jews.

hm. well, central asia vs. the arabia desert? well...that is a toss up. ural-altaic (turkic, finno-ugric) and semitic have their origins in these regions (proximally at least). there is strong circumstantial evidence to connect the indo-european expansion with central asia somehow, again, perhaps secondarily, but still significantly.

David, the pastoral cavalry nomads became militarily significant about 700-900 BC. There always have been less-civilized peoples at the borders pushing in, and often or usually they've been stock-raisers, but what I was writing about was cavalry nomadism.

Migrating ox-herding peoples like the early Indo-Aryans weren't really nomads by that definition. They practiced shifting mixed agriculture (including cattle) but fought on foot.

An expanding agricultural people will have a generation or two of movement followed by settlement. (One thing that's striking about the American frontier is that a lot of individuals WERE restless and unstable and "nomadic", and pioneered successively in 2 or 3 different states. But the ultimate outcome was settled agriculture.)

Razib, last I heard the uralic / altaic connection was in doubt. The whole argument about larger language groups (Nostratic, etc.) seems to be an impossible mess.

Razib, there's no such thing as "Ural-Altaic" any more than there's Uralo-Dravidian, Uralo-Sumerian or Uralo-Quechua. It's an old hypothesis that has never had rigorous work backing it up. (Sure, it's a much more *plausible* idea than Uralo-Quechua, but the *evidence* is just as non-existent.) I personally "believe" it's likely to be true (thinking about the known prehistory, it makes perfect sense; I've tried studying some Turkish and it feels eerily familiar), but there's no evidence (ie. no systematic, catalogueable correspondencies between the languages) beyond the subjective "belief" of some people. (It's easier to come up with possible correspondencies to IE.) The consensus among Uralic linguists is that if Uralo-Altaic is true, the connection is too far back in time (~10000 years or more) to permit any reconstruction.

You can find the idea cited as "fact" in lots of old sources, especially Germanic-language (incl. English) texts. (Oh no, this'll soon turn into a rant on the Evil Germanic Fascists!) This is a legacy from a time when the standards of the field were abysmally low and it was all extensively politicised, ie. for evidence you wouldn't have needed anything more than subjective feelings of a respected scholar and a lot of them were happy imperialists on a mission to prove that other peoples needed the rule of . So, northeastern Europeans like Uralic people became a part of the yellow peril, the Balkans turned out to be full of negroes and so on. (It took WWII to end most of that BS.) If you see Ural-Altaic quoted as fact today, it simply means that the author knows nothing whatsoever about either Uralic or Altaic peoples/languages and can be trusted to write pure nonsense.

It's also not known at all where the proto-Uralic "Urheimat" would've been, much less any hypothetical proto-Ural-Altaic one. The east was the standard national romantic idea ("the great bend of the Volga" is the standard story in Finland), but it's kind of political in origin as well. All the Uralic-speaking nations with eventually successful independence movements are on the (present) Western edge of the language family and it was easy to imagine them as products of some previous incarnation of the Great Khan finding his way to Europe and sticking around to impose his culture on some conquered subjects. This became the standard story likely because it was acceptable both to the Indo-European and the Uralic-speakers: the former could imagine the other to be Mongols needing the rule of civilised people, the latter could imagine themselves to be descendants of the world's greatest conquerors (and develop fantasies of rediscovering the conqueror roots and building the next empires).

Archeology doesn't tell whether Uralic people expanded from the east to the west or from the west to the east. (There's good evidence to build a consistent picture for when eg. the present-day Finnic/Saami areas were settled, but pottery doesn't speak any language, so no one knows for sure when the first Uralic-speakers arrived. Might've been 4000 years ago, might've been 10000 years ago when ice was still covering most of the place.)