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Reconstruction of a female headdress from the Novo-Yabalaklinsky-1 burial ground associated with the Srubnaya culture. A successor of the Yamnaya/IE culture.

Everything I said in this video five years ago about the origin of the Celts seems to have been vindicated in this new paper.

Urnfield > Hallstatt > iron age celtic cultures around Europe.

Please can everyone stop referring to Bronze age British and Irish artefacts as “Celtic” now.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.28.640770v1?ct

Celtic regions

Some idiotic people saying I am anti-Celtic because I don’t support the BS celtic from the west cope.

Also saying I don’t produce enough content about Celts because I hate them.

In 2024, 6 videos dealt with Germanic cultures and 5 dealt with Celtic ones. Hardly a major bias!

My children saw these offerings at woodhenge today and felt the need to pick daisies “för guden” to add to the pile

Who made this? LOL

Athena appears with bright grey eyes which means blue. This is an essential feature of Her manifestation which it is not acceptable to change.

I will not watch this film.

That Yamnaya spoke PIE is certain: this is not based, as @BronzeAgePalaestra has assumed in his recent podcast, merely on the fact that their autosomal genetic signal (termed WSH) spreads exactly in time with how linguists estimate the spread of IE languages into Armenia, Anatolia, West Europe, India etc.

However, even that is far greater evidence than he realises because the linguistic dating of the early IE language families corresponds to early break aways from the core archaeological culture (Afanasievo speaking the root language of Tocharian for eg).

Nor is the Yamnaya archaeological complex some loosely affiliated group of tribes with no certain connection of culture- they are defined by a shared funerary ritual which is a clear indicator of a shared culture. The archaeological developments associated with their lifestyle (pastoralism, wagon mobility, horse riding, intense dairying) spread fast and with their expanding kinship network. There was an example of a skeleton from the Altai and another from Slovakia separated by over 5000 km but the two men were cousins! - DNA shows more than ethnic makeup, it shows kinship networks and the close relationship of the people associated with not only Yamnaya, but also derived archaeological cultures like Afansievo in Asia.

Another clincher is horse dna. All domestic horses after yamnaya are from theirs which are termed DOM2 horses. This shows that this people were more influential on the early spread of equestrianism than any other and when we see the terms for equestrianism are usually PIE derived we should naturally associate PIE with Yamnaya,

Another is archeo-linguistics which matches the technological innovations in the archaeological records to the first reconstructed IE words for them. Words for things like the (domestic) horse, wheel and axel limit which cultures can be identified as PIE since the correct archaeological culture needs to have all of these things as well as being dated to the 3rd or 4th millenium BC.

Mythic comparison also shows a clear PIE concern with cows and cattle rustling which indicates a pastoralist culture with mobile wealth. The first truly nomadic pastoralist culture was the Yamnaya - previous cultures had to have much smaller herds which they were not able to easily move around. Again, a strong piece of evidence pointing to Yamnaya as PIE.

Archaeological traits associated with the spread of IE language speakers and practitioners of IE religions include barrows, wagon (later on chariot) burials and horse sacrifices. So the parent culture had to have all these and the first culture with all of the above together is Yamnaya who took them from preceding steppe cultures.

The problem of Yamnaya that I and others have had is, contrary to BAP who prefers Drews' outdated model of a 2nd millennium BC expansion of PIE rather than a 3rd mil BC, that the Yamnaya expansion of the early 3rd mil BC makes it too LATE. According to the model most linguists prefer, PIE is around 6000 years old so Yamnaya (starting ~5300 years BP) is a bit too young which is why I prefer it’s parent culture Sredny stog (6500-5500 years old) as the initial PIE from which the Anatolian branch broke off prior to the mass adoption of the wheel on the steppe (hence the word for wheel being absent in Anatolian languages).

Yamnaya and Corded ware are the late PIE speaking material cultures associated with the spread of IE languages and religions in the 3rd mil BC. A wealth of evidence from various unrelated disciplines all point to this, which is why Yamnaya was proposed as PIE long before any genetic evidence existed.

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