A barbarian tribe's mythic origin story is true, ancient DNA reveals
28 points by benbreen 2 hours ago | 6 comments
pmontra 5 minutes ago
> the Spanish for “bandit,” “helmet,” and “truce.”
replyIf they are bandido, casco, tregua they are identical to the Italian bandito, casco, tregua. The only difference is a d/t. Actually in Italy a cyclist and a worker wear a casco, but a soldier wears an elmetto.
I googled the etymology of casco and it comes from Latin but it came to Italy from Spain a few centuries ago. So I wonder what other word for helmet they use in Spain, that originated in the Goth language.
defrost 50 minutes ago
Of all the mythic origin stories about the globe, Goths originating in Scandinavia is one of the less exciting ones to be proven correct.
replyDNA from unearthed car sized scales proving a giant snake carved the rivers and shape of the land would be something ...
vintermann 38 minutes ago
I'm not so sure this study proves anything new, too. We always knew some Goths came from Scandinavia, that they mixed extensively with less mobile people in the regions they passed through during the age of migration, and that Gothic identity was (at least eventually) more tied to Arianism than to ancestry, so that when they became Catholic they stopped identifying as Gothic.
replyThe real wild Gothic origin story is that the island of Gotland got overpopulated and they decided by lottery which 1/3 of them should leave.
> The findings challenge decades of scholarship that played down the importance of migration and emphasized the spread of language and culture between settled populations.“
> “What the genotyping is showing is what the ancient sources report, and what late–20th century historiography has been working very hard to deny,” says Yale University historian Noel Lenski, who was not involved in the work. “We have to … admit the sources knew more than we thought they did.”
If I'm reading that right they are implying academics were pushing the idea of cultural exchange being the most valuable thing, a vague menagerie of local and foreign cultures coming together, rather than a specific set of people arriving from a far off land to dominant an existing empire and influencing the entire region in the process.