"The results from Bell Beaker cemeteries support the view that early Indo-European expansion resulted in a shift towards monogamy, exogamy and the mobility of young men through fostering:"
yeah, all this stuff about the neolithic to bronze age strikes me as wrong in your post tbh. the newgrange burials and other megaliths show the emergence of powerful individual dynasties and a lot of stratification. the indo-europeans were flatter and more egalitarian. the neolithic societies were very warlike and very patrlineal as per DNA.
also, the saxons had lots of slaves (their own coethnics). the normans suppressed this.
i know ricardo duchesne is popular among based people. but when i read his stuff my head just goes RETARD RETARD constantly.
I don't think those are points of disagreements - my general point was the Neolithic (in the broad) societies were more collectivist, as well as being concerned with patriarchal lineages. The mass burials reflect a kinship and social network where status relative to the family was of great importance. I'm suggesting that individualism emerged with the onset of the bronze age, with nuclear families, bilateral lineages and greater equality for the individual (dependent on status ofc). I don't agree with the simple longhouse meme that the Neolithic was more egalitarian and peaceful by any stretch.
Duchesne's book was interesting but far too overwrought and cherry picked for my taste, the quote I picked mostly relied on Anthony and was just a concise explanation which doesn't seem controversial.
the peak of complexity, stratification and the rise of powerful male lineages was the late neolithic in europe. the arrival of indo-europeans saw a regression.
the longhouse meme is a problem because it was the total opposite. we have archaeology and DNA: the neolithic longhouse was a patriarchal center of control and domination.
you have to know the work on newgrange. it's just not true that these collectivist societies 5.5K BP didn't valorize individual lineages.
I think we're on the same page here. I agree with you about Newgrange and other sites, which is the point I'm making - well established patriarchal lineages with a powerful male ancestor is exactly what you'd expect from a collectivist society, not an individualist one. I'm sure IEs also held certain ancestors in high regard, but they were much more egalitarian and meritocratic in disposition.
Poor Herbalist! Being conciliatory here was socially sensible given the way Razib is held in high esteem, but frankly it doesn't look like he really engaged with your post, or even put much thought into punctuating what he was writing. Oh well - wait until you have another 10k subscribers, I guess!
I'd be very interested to see you do a long-form response to Duchesne's arguments, Razib, as his claims undergird his popularity, and most people, myself very much included, aren't informed enough to dispute them in any depth.
How is it that anyone listens to you when you write this way, even in little comments? You would think these would be the easiest places to... write as though you were intelligent. You seem like the retard writing like that.
Just something funny I noticed about language while listening when you wrote “a skull may be found in the possession of a man”... so does the skull possess the man or the man possess the skull? It actually works both ways depending on your interpretation.
Roman law moved on from the 12 Tables. Re this passage:
"where a son had unlimited rights to acquire and own property, a daughter was not excluded from her family when she married, a wife could easily obtain a divorce to protect herself against her husband’s authority, and kinship was determined through the mother’s as well as the father’s side of the family."
It describes Roman law throughout the classical period. See, for example, Cicero’s letters about his divorce.
No, the Roman paterfamilias did not have absolute authority in Classical Rome. This was the first great legal culture, with very sophisticated, almost proto-Darwinian, perspectives.
Both Rome and Athens engaged in constitutional change to suppress kin groups, changing tribe from lineage to location. Indeed, suppression of kin groups seems to have been a pattern across Greek city-states.
Also, the Indo-Europeans in India ended up with rather different patterns than in Europe. Mythologies in both India and Europe show traces of patrilineal pastoralists achieving dominance over, but incorporating elements from, matrilineal farming cultures. Which makes the differences in subsequent patterns even more striking.
Aug 1, 2023·edited Aug 1, 2023Liked by Stone Age Herbalist
The WEIRD thesis is embarrassing to whomever has the slightest idea about how the roman family law evolved.
In latin, prehistoric times, many romans were member of greater families, like Abraham's host or the hundreds of Fabii killed by the Gauls at the Crémera river: it is a common feature of the evolution of the ancient families in clan made of kin and non-kin and then in poleis-urbes made of clans (roman tribus).
The smallest social cell of the archaic, repubblican roman polity was instead the "pater familias, civis, sui iuris" i.e. a non-slave, roman citizen without a living father or grandfather (fathers literally owned sons and wives as he owned land and oxes) - the birth of the Roman Res Publica can be read as the evolution fo the non-kin member of a noble clan in a citizen linked to the old master as cliens.
The ancient costruction of "pater+cives+sui iuris" was almost dead after the Second Punic War and the destruction of small households for the very simple reason that there were very few "patrii" around after 20 years of war. In those times, the praetori (roman "common law" judges) invented (as true common law judges) the peculium, the women emancipation and the testamentum:
1. according roman archaic law, a father owns whatever a son gets, even e.g. a loot or the profit of a succesfull enterprise: the peculium was a legal fiction that gives the son the legal control of his treasure to avoid the "unjust" acquisition of it by an "idle" father - the old legal justification of the quasi-slavery condition of the son, i.e. that his treasure was his father's treasure, was no more and so was the family insititution;
2. for the same reason, the praetori emancipated widows and orphan women (btw, in a very funny way: roman wives were adverse-possessed by husbands, so the praetori authorized wives to leave the husbands' house to avoid the adverse-possession).;
3. for these same reason, the praetori authorized the last will (testamentum) to avoid an "idle" heir acquiring the inheritance.
Then, during the imperium and expecially dominatus (when the roman law was consolidated and codified) the pattern reverse: e.g. imperial rescripta (legal opinions from the imperial curia to local magistrate) first limited the last will with the fidecommissione, the roman equivalence of an unlimited family trust, and the "insanity defence", a legal fiction according with only a madman would disinherited his - the State likes its subjects accountable and its easier to account and tax few people tha many.
Which of these social structures was the "roman antecedent" WEIRD theorists dickride?
IMHO every single historical society is the synthesis of economy and social memes: the Bronze Age Nobles were the sons of the military revolution brought by horses and bronze itself that make the charioted armored warrior a juggernaut; english peasants benefitted from an unruly, riotouse and self-defeating aristocracy too busy to enserf them like french, prussian and russian nobles did; the roman family law changed with the change of the source of wealth (personal gain vs land inheritance).
I think the primary role of the Church in Europe was that it A: created the atmosphere for a synthesis between the unwritten national law codes of post-Roman Europe and the codified Roman/Hebrew law and B: was able to push through certain social reforms and norms (no married priests, no polygamy, etc.). I wonder if there's room for a comparative study of Scots and Common law and how their differences effect national behaviour in Scotland and England
Indo-European origins fits in with the Church sanctifying the Roman synthesis of single-spouse marriage, law as human, no cousin marriage, female consent for marriage, suppressing kin groups and testamentary rights. Michael Mitterauer’s ‘Why Europe’ provides a wealth of scholarship of the impact of the Church, especially via manorialism, in developing European family and institutional structures.
Thankyou, that looks a great resource. I need to read more about the impact of the Church but my guess would be that these impositions were in some way already socially acceptable, or were modifications rather wholesale reform of existing institutions.
I loved his earlier book, but have not read the weird one. From what I have read about it, however, it seems that he may protest too much in insisting on some kind of exogenous cultural factor. This is understandable, of course. It is no longer a good look to assume that Europe became what it is due to inborn cultural and genetic traits. Assuming that it couldn't have become Europe as we know it without a completely foreign Judeo Christian influence saves an author from accusations of all the wrong kinds of supremacy.
> This is really something of a primer or an introduction into whole areas of thought surrounding kinship, individualism, private property, the free market and the legacies of pre-Christian life which make up the character of modern populations and nations. As it stands I think the fundamental break was the end of the Neolithic and the development of an aristocratic cultural and biological substrate during the Bronze Age, one which ushered in a form of individualism which set Europe on a different path.
Say this is true. Why? What caused the West to develop in this way when other societies did not? Europe's climate was cool but mild, cloudy overall, with less heat and snow than Africa and Asia, and plenty of coastline, but it isn't clear why any of this would have been significant in nurturing an individualist culture. Was there some technology, some religious movement, even some random quirk that could be pointed to as the cause?
Truthfully I'm not convinced this is the right path to follow. We have very clear data on modern societies showing that, as individual wealth increases, so too do individual values. (For anyone else who isn't aware, just compare Inglehart's data from the end of the 20th century to the present day: https://www.marefa.org/images/thumb/6/6a/Inglehart_Values_Map.svg/610px-Inglehart_Values_Map.svg.png vs https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/photos/EV000190.JPG ) Indeed it seems clear that most, if not all, of the madness of the present day can simply be described as hyper-individualism, as a standard of living and values once held by a few wealthy nobles seeping into the entire society.
Right now we have a socioeconomic model that looks something like this:
People are poor and crowded --> Black death empties the land, preferentially affecting lower classes --> Survivors are wealthier and probably smarter --> individualism increases --> technology flourishes --> wealth increases --> Westerners become downright WEIRD
Why complicate this model by proposing Germanic individualism is much more ancient?
You could be interested in an alternative framework:
The hunter-gatherers' nuclear family (with a relatively high status for women and loose family ties) is gradually complexified by successive innovations in family systems. So, the complex family systems with cousin marriage and strong family ties is the result of numerous successive innovations.
Like others (agriculture, state, writing...), these innovations appear in a few key points over the world before spreading.
For Eurasia, these points were the Fertile Crescent and China. Distant regions, such as Western Europe, have been less affected retaining primitive characteristics, especially the low kinship intensity of the nuclear family; the Catholic Church only formalized the existent family practices of Western Europe.
including recent analysis (using DNA and Isotops) of European Neolithic farmers such as https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06350-8 revealing the lack of cousin mariage, monogamy and patrilocality (These characteristics are typical of the Stem family observed still recently in south west France or Germanic areas.)
Interesting post, a few things that come to mind, on the section near the end about the church, you can find a core difference between Catholic and Protestant belief in Portestants emphasing blood lineage where as Catholics do not or at least don't refer to it as much. (This can be seen in Europe where germanics lean more towards Protestantism over Catholicism as it is where Protestantism came from)
As regards the other part about individualism vs collectivism, take a look who came up with socialism as a concept first and you'll find it came from Britain first not Germany, Marx and Engels were educated in Britian.
And lastly, you need to watch out for people like Razib Khan, he has connections with the torie party and subversive elements that want to control the emerging right wing views via places like unheard and the mallard to name a few.
If you need further research on my last point I will direct you here for said information;
True, but Razib is also a good guy overall. I'd rather hang around a brilliant, law abiding family man with whom I disagreed sometimes than just about *anyone* else.
"The results from Bell Beaker cemeteries support the view that early Indo-European expansion resulted in a shift towards monogamy, exogamy and the mobility of young men through fostering:"
yeah, all this stuff about the neolithic to bronze age strikes me as wrong in your post tbh. the newgrange burials and other megaliths show the emergence of powerful individual dynasties and a lot of stratification. the indo-europeans were flatter and more egalitarian. the neolithic societies were very warlike and very patrlineal as per DNA.
also, the saxons had lots of slaves (their own coethnics). the normans suppressed this.
i know ricardo duchesne is popular among based people. but when i read his stuff my head just goes RETARD RETARD constantly.
I don't think those are points of disagreements - my general point was the Neolithic (in the broad) societies were more collectivist, as well as being concerned with patriarchal lineages. The mass burials reflect a kinship and social network where status relative to the family was of great importance. I'm suggesting that individualism emerged with the onset of the bronze age, with nuclear families, bilateral lineages and greater equality for the individual (dependent on status ofc). I don't agree with the simple longhouse meme that the Neolithic was more egalitarian and peaceful by any stretch.
Duchesne's book was interesting but far too overwrought and cherry picked for my taste, the quote I picked mostly relied on Anthony and was just a concise explanation which doesn't seem controversial.
the peak of complexity, stratification and the rise of powerful male lineages was the late neolithic in europe. the arrival of indo-europeans saw a regression.
the longhouse meme is a problem because it was the total opposite. we have archaeology and DNA: the neolithic longhouse was a patriarchal center of control and domination.
you have to know the work on newgrange. it's just not true that these collectivist societies 5.5K BP didn't valorize individual lineages.
I think we're on the same page here. I agree with you about Newgrange and other sites, which is the point I'm making - well established patriarchal lineages with a powerful male ancestor is exactly what you'd expect from a collectivist society, not an individualist one. I'm sure IEs also held certain ancestors in high regard, but they were much more egalitarian and meritocratic in disposition.
Poor Herbalist! Being conciliatory here was socially sensible given the way Razib is held in high esteem, but frankly it doesn't look like he really engaged with your post, or even put much thought into punctuating what he was writing. Oh well - wait until you have another 10k subscribers, I guess!
I'd be very interested to see you do a long-form response to Duchesne's arguments, Razib, as his claims undergird his popularity, and most people, myself very much included, aren't informed enough to dispute them in any depth.
i guess. he's so retarded tho
"he's so retarded tho"
How is it that anyone listens to you when you write this way, even in little comments? You would think these would be the easiest places to... write as though you were intelligent. You seem like the retard writing like that.
I remember after I read "The WEIRDest People in the World", my family couldn't get me to stop talking about it for about three weeks
Just something funny I noticed about language while listening when you wrote “a skull may be found in the possession of a man”... so does the skull possess the man or the man possess the skull? It actually works both ways depending on your interpretation.
Roman law moved on from the 12 Tables. Re this passage:
"where a son had unlimited rights to acquire and own property, a daughter was not excluded from her family when she married, a wife could easily obtain a divorce to protect herself against her husband’s authority, and kinship was determined through the mother’s as well as the father’s side of the family."
It describes Roman law throughout the classical period. See, for example, Cicero’s letters about his divorce.
No, the Roman paterfamilias did not have absolute authority in Classical Rome. This was the first great legal culture, with very sophisticated, almost proto-Darwinian, perspectives.
Both Rome and Athens engaged in constitutional change to suppress kin groups, changing tribe from lineage to location. Indeed, suppression of kin groups seems to have been a pattern across Greek city-states.
Also, the Indo-Europeans in India ended up with rather different patterns than in Europe. Mythologies in both India and Europe show traces of patrilineal pastoralists achieving dominance over, but incorporating elements from, matrilineal farming cultures. Which makes the differences in subsequent patterns even more striking.
The WEIRD thesis is embarrassing to whomever has the slightest idea about how the roman family law evolved.
In latin, prehistoric times, many romans were member of greater families, like Abraham's host or the hundreds of Fabii killed by the Gauls at the Crémera river: it is a common feature of the evolution of the ancient families in clan made of kin and non-kin and then in poleis-urbes made of clans (roman tribus).
The smallest social cell of the archaic, repubblican roman polity was instead the "pater familias, civis, sui iuris" i.e. a non-slave, roman citizen without a living father or grandfather (fathers literally owned sons and wives as he owned land and oxes) - the birth of the Roman Res Publica can be read as the evolution fo the non-kin member of a noble clan in a citizen linked to the old master as cliens.
The ancient costruction of "pater+cives+sui iuris" was almost dead after the Second Punic War and the destruction of small households for the very simple reason that there were very few "patrii" around after 20 years of war. In those times, the praetori (roman "common law" judges) invented (as true common law judges) the peculium, the women emancipation and the testamentum:
1. according roman archaic law, a father owns whatever a son gets, even e.g. a loot or the profit of a succesfull enterprise: the peculium was a legal fiction that gives the son the legal control of his treasure to avoid the "unjust" acquisition of it by an "idle" father - the old legal justification of the quasi-slavery condition of the son, i.e. that his treasure was his father's treasure, was no more and so was the family insititution;
2. for the same reason, the praetori emancipated widows and orphan women (btw, in a very funny way: roman wives were adverse-possessed by husbands, so the praetori authorized wives to leave the husbands' house to avoid the adverse-possession).;
3. for these same reason, the praetori authorized the last will (testamentum) to avoid an "idle" heir acquiring the inheritance.
Then, during the imperium and expecially dominatus (when the roman law was consolidated and codified) the pattern reverse: e.g. imperial rescripta (legal opinions from the imperial curia to local magistrate) first limited the last will with the fidecommissione, the roman equivalence of an unlimited family trust, and the "insanity defence", a legal fiction according with only a madman would disinherited his - the State likes its subjects accountable and its easier to account and tax few people tha many.
Which of these social structures was the "roman antecedent" WEIRD theorists dickride?
IMHO every single historical society is the synthesis of economy and social memes: the Bronze Age Nobles were the sons of the military revolution brought by horses and bronze itself that make the charioted armored warrior a juggernaut; english peasants benefitted from an unruly, riotouse and self-defeating aristocracy too busy to enserf them like french, prussian and russian nobles did; the roman family law changed with the change of the source of wealth (personal gain vs land inheritance).
I think the primary role of the Church in Europe was that it A: created the atmosphere for a synthesis between the unwritten national law codes of post-Roman Europe and the codified Roman/Hebrew law and B: was able to push through certain social reforms and norms (no married priests, no polygamy, etc.). I wonder if there's room for a comparative study of Scots and Common law and how their differences effect national behaviour in Scotland and England
Indo-European origins fits in with the Church sanctifying the Roman synthesis of single-spouse marriage, law as human, no cousin marriage, female consent for marriage, suppressing kin groups and testamentary rights. Michael Mitterauer’s ‘Why Europe’ provides a wealth of scholarship of the impact of the Church, especially via manorialism, in developing European family and institutional structures.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo5186371.html#:~:text=Michael%20Mitterauer%20traces%20the%20roots,origins%20in%20rye%20and%20oats.
Thankyou, that looks a great resource. I need to read more about the impact of the Church but my guess would be that these impositions were in some way already socially acceptable, or were modifications rather wholesale reform of existing institutions.
I loved his earlier book, but have not read the weird one. From what I have read about it, however, it seems that he may protest too much in insisting on some kind of exogenous cultural factor. This is understandable, of course. It is no longer a good look to assume that Europe became what it is due to inborn cultural and genetic traits. Assuming that it couldn't have become Europe as we know it without a completely foreign Judeo Christian influence saves an author from accusations of all the wrong kinds of supremacy.
> This is really something of a primer or an introduction into whole areas of thought surrounding kinship, individualism, private property, the free market and the legacies of pre-Christian life which make up the character of modern populations and nations. As it stands I think the fundamental break was the end of the Neolithic and the development of an aristocratic cultural and biological substrate during the Bronze Age, one which ushered in a form of individualism which set Europe on a different path.
Say this is true. Why? What caused the West to develop in this way when other societies did not? Europe's climate was cool but mild, cloudy overall, with less heat and snow than Africa and Asia, and plenty of coastline, but it isn't clear why any of this would have been significant in nurturing an individualist culture. Was there some technology, some religious movement, even some random quirk that could be pointed to as the cause?
Truthfully I'm not convinced this is the right path to follow. We have very clear data on modern societies showing that, as individual wealth increases, so too do individual values. (For anyone else who isn't aware, just compare Inglehart's data from the end of the 20th century to the present day: https://www.marefa.org/images/thumb/6/6a/Inglehart_Values_Map.svg/610px-Inglehart_Values_Map.svg.png vs https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/photos/EV000190.JPG ) Indeed it seems clear that most, if not all, of the madness of the present day can simply be described as hyper-individualism, as a standard of living and values once held by a few wealthy nobles seeping into the entire society.
Right now we have a socioeconomic model that looks something like this:
People are poor and crowded --> Black death empties the land, preferentially affecting lower classes --> Survivors are wealthier and probably smarter --> individualism increases --> technology flourishes --> wealth increases --> Westerners become downright WEIRD
Why complicate this model by proposing Germanic individualism is much more ancient?
You could be interested in an alternative framework:
The hunter-gatherers' nuclear family (with a relatively high status for women and loose family ties) is gradually complexified by successive innovations in family systems. So, the complex family systems with cousin marriage and strong family ties is the result of numerous successive innovations.
Like others (agriculture, state, writing...), these innovations appear in a few key points over the world before spreading.
For Eurasia, these points were the Fertile Crescent and China. Distant regions, such as Western Europe, have been less affected retaining primitive characteristics, especially the low kinship intensity of the nuclear family; the Catholic Church only formalized the existent family practices of Western Europe.
The data strongly support this theory: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0279864
Key aspect of this theory is that the family in Western Europe was already with low kinship intensity long before year 1000.
Historical evidence support this early low kinship intensity in Western Europe
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279864.s001
including recent analysis (using DNA and Isotops) of European Neolithic farmers such as https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06350-8 revealing the lack of cousin mariage, monogamy and patrilocality (These characteristics are typical of the Stem family observed still recently in south west France or Germanic areas.)
Interesting post, a few things that come to mind, on the section near the end about the church, you can find a core difference between Catholic and Protestant belief in Portestants emphasing blood lineage where as Catholics do not or at least don't refer to it as much. (This can be seen in Europe where germanics lean more towards Protestantism over Catholicism as it is where Protestantism came from)
As regards the other part about individualism vs collectivism, take a look who came up with socialism as a concept first and you'll find it came from Britain first not Germany, Marx and Engels were educated in Britian.
And lastly, you need to watch out for people like Razib Khan, he has connections with the torie party and subversive elements that want to control the emerging right wing views via places like unheard and the mallard to name a few.
If you need further research on my last point I will direct you here for said information;
https://www.youtube.com/live/s5fxxoCv8B0?feature=share
True, but Razib is also a good guy overall. I'd rather hang around a brilliant, law abiding family man with whom I disagreed sometimes than just about *anyone* else.