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Originally Posted by DrSatanDracula
Snakeeyes:
I mean both. Linguistically, certainly. Genetically, not as strong, but almost as much.
I base my argument along the y-chromosmone phenotypes most common in Europe and amongst Persian (I.E. non-ARabic or Turkic) Iranians. Namely, R1A1, R1b, and I. This strongly suggests that at least on the paternal side, there was a people who spread alongside the Indo-European languages and civilizations. It is not as strong, again, as the linguistic ties, but it paints a very convincing picture.
We also must speak of the religious connections. Iranian, Hindu, Germanic, Greco-Roman, and Celtic divinities share cognates and loose placements with one another. Examples: Aesir (Germanic), Asura (Sanskrit), and Ahura (Persian). Zeus (Greek), Dyeus Pita (Sanskrit), Tiwaaz/Tyr (Germanic).
It is actually qutie reasonable to assume that PIE and Finno-Ugric and Altaic have a common root even further back, although I am not aware of enough studies that prove that consistantly. But then we'd be getting back to the tens of thousands of years prior, as opposed to the last 6,000 or so.
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Okay, I'm not totally familiar with the genetic research on this one, but my argument was that in fringe areas, such as the outer reaches of Scandinavia, the Mediterranean pre-Mycenean period and of course the Indian subcontinent, Indo-Europeans came in to places already populated by other cultures. Indo-European speaking peoples, just looking at them, exhibit very broad and diverse physical characteristics in the countries they inhabit.
My field is Indo-European languages and cultures; I've done comparative work on Greek, Hittite, Avestan, and Sanskrit, and I was a religion/linguistics double major, with the religious studies aspect focused on Greek and Indian religions, among others. The cultural and linguistic data I'm more than familiar with; Although the Dyaus Pitar/Zeus/Jupiter is a given, the Asura/Ahura thing is solid only for Indo-Iranian (this being the most solidly reconstructible IE family after Greek), with the addition of Old Norse Aesir a theory only, and one that has been convincingly argued against many times. There are other things we can boil down and say with some authority were culturally PIE, like the solar gods/goddesses like Eos/Usas (dawn) and Helios/Sol/Surya (sun), and some specific rituals like the Horse sacrifice and probably a fire cult of some sort (Agni/Hestia). But these are bare-bone details, they come from the most archaic sources we have from individual cultures and even then there is abundant evidence that in places like India, Greece, the British Isles and Scandinavia, they've been heavily influenced by contact with other cultures (all the Sanskrit retroflex stops, for example, which are there in the earliest examples we have, are non-Indo-European).
Nothing about the cultural or linguistic evidence is proof of genetic affinity; consider that Haitians mix Christian themes in with Voodun practices and have a French/African creole as their language, that certain Scandinavian beliefs are now thought to be borrowed from Shamanic practices of Lapps and Finns they came in contact with, that they speak a creole of Spanish in the Phillipines with a Catholic and Buddhist religious strata, a creole of Sanskrit and Polynesian in Indonesia with a native animist and classical Hindu mixed religion, so on and so forth. Languages and culture spread and are adopted across cultures very easily. The French are a Germanic/Celtic ethnic group who adopted a Romance language almost a thousand years ago, and now they have a substantial Arabic population living there as well.
Basically, when we come to it the IE homeland question is almost considered a lost cause by leading Indo-Europeanists like Watkins, Jamison, Nagy, Witzel, etc; and almost nobody gives any credence to the "Aryan race" idea that was so popular a hundred years ago. Ancient history is just too confusing to say that with any authority and we know there's been heavy mixing and movement. If there's "convincing" genetic evidence, I haven't seen it and few people in the field are paying much attention to it. I read a book on the British Isles alone and it seemed you could only get peripheral ideas on Germanic and Celtic genes and their movements, so I don't know how we're supposed to believe these geneticists have somehow figured all this out. You would first have to sift through all the History and Archeology to even get an idea where everyone has gone and been, which is something the world of academia has been doing for 200+ years without a definitive answer, and then you'd have to test tens of thousands of people in a hundred different countries to be sure. This kind of genetic work is very new and people get very excited over it but it hasn't proven anything very conclusively quite yet.