So called “hot” spring

Matt and I have successfully finished filming in beautiful Iceland. Time to go

Powerful embroidery of a swan god sex hallucination was hanging in our airbnb. Only hyperboreans understand

Channeling the ghost of Jonathan Bowden

Good bye Iceland. 🇮🇸

In Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana, a simple offering format is outlined in a statement by a jötunn woman who is being tormented by her sisters:

Hét ek þá á Þórr at gefa honum hafr þann, sem hann vildi velja, en hann skyldi jafna með oss systrum.

I then vow to Þórr to give him a buck of his choosing, but he should make even with us sisters.

The format is:

1) Promise to the deity
2) Dedication of an animal
3) Requested action in exchange for the animal

In the instance of this saga, this is not an explicit sacrifice by the petitioner at that moment, but like in other sagas, the long-term cultivation of an animal to give as a sacrifice to the deity at the appointed time.

This is similar in function to the dedication of Freyfaxi by Hrafnkell Freysgoði in Hrafnkels saga. In a later part of the saga, the horse is sacrificed to Freyr.

A similar event occurs in Flóamanna saga, when Þorgils Þórðarson during his tumult with the god Þórr after his conversion, realizes that one of the oxen he has aboard his ship was one he dedicated to him. He had the ox thrown overboard to propitiate Þórr, as Þórr wanted what he was owed.

According to the recently published paper from the Harvard lab on the origins of the Indo-European languages, the roots of the Yamnaya culture is hypothesized to come out of the Mikhaylovka culture. This group which forms a bridge from Sredny Stog to Core Yamnaya, expand from Ukraine.

According to one of the paper’s authors, Losif Lazaridis, he had the following to say on his twitter account.

The Yamnaya, proximal scions of the Serednii Stih archaeological culture that preceded them in the Eneolithic North Pontic region, and more distally composed of a mix of CLV newcomers and Dnipro-Don hunter-gatherers, largely eclipsed the previous inhabitants of the steppe. 4/
Source

The Yamnaya's precursors were formed by admixture ca. 4000BCE and experienced an interlude of relative isolation before the emergence of the Yamnaya horizon ca. 3300BCE. Our best guess of where this happened is in the vicinity of Mykhailivka in the Lower Dnipro in Ukraine. 5/

source

Photo credit

Ticking Iceland off the bucket list has filled out my travel map of Northern Europe. I have also now visited every single Germanic nation

Who is more Stog? Fst genetic distance to the Proto-Indo-European Sredny Stog culture

Fst distance to “core yamnaya”

Genetic admixture model for KST001 an approx 5800 year old WSH sample from a barrow near the Caucasus at Konstantinovskiy in Russia.
kurgan 4, grave 17. Context information: Single inhumation in north-south orientation with a wooden covering in a rectangular grave-pit. The grave was robbed and
destroyed in antiquity. but a ceramic vessel was documented.

The discovery of a Bell Beaker Burial, Porlock, Somerset, England in 1896. The early Indo-European grave dates to 2400-2000 BC