Have you worked in anthropology professionally or at a graduate+ level? My experience is exactly the opposite. The views typically espoused by 'racists' (like the concept of biological races itself) are extraordinarily far from modern anthropology. Is there something you're specifically referring to?
Much further along in human history than the Neanderthals, but I can give some examples of the OP's claim from my own experience in academia. Over the last decade, genetic studies have broadly confirmed the mainstream view of the spread of the Indo-European languages, that Proto-Indo-European existed in the Pontic Steppe and the Indo-European languages were spread in various directions by populations that can now be identified not just archaeologically but also genetically. This is seen as racist by many Indians, because the popular view in India is that Sanskrit is the perfect, divine language, and all the Indo-European languages descend somehow from Sanskrit speakers leaving India for Central Asia and Europe, and spreading their civilization along the way.
Also, the uninformed layman may assume that any discussion of “Indo-European genes” is a rehabilitation of Aryan-race fantasies from the early 20th century.
Genetic studies have also sparked some disputes among indigenous peoples of the Americas, because group X says it had been there since time immemorial, but genetic findings find that the earliest buried inhabitants are genetically unrelated to the present people.
These invaders brought the Vedas (sanscript) which become modern day Hinduism and the dominant culture. The nationals don't want this to be the case, they believe light skin people came from India (could be wrong as I have never meet one of these nationalists).
Khan academy does a whole lesson in this in his ancient history course.
I think the yamnaya are very interesting people who basically wiped out all of the males in Europe. DNA shows most Europeans are from 5 males 5000 years ago when the Yamnaya invaded Europe from the step (likely Ukraine).
Can provider more links if anyone is interested.
Other things like the ability to process milk as an adult and the technology of domestication of horses added to their war ability.
The people in Europe before this were called the European hunter gathers, which were probably the ones with the high percent Neanderthal DNA.
> Can provider more links if anyone is interested.
Yes, please, thanks. Can't have too many links! p.s. I can only read the first couple of paragraphs of that link, it wants me to subscribe to read more.
> These invaders brought the Vedas (sanscript) which become modern day Hinduism
This is a pervasive myth due to accademia superficially spreadjng such nonsense, and Indians are broadly speaking quite correct to disagree.
The oldest layers of the rigveda describes an environment that seems to lie elsewhere, probably further north. Indo-Aryan religion is different, and Sanskrit is quite different from Iranian too, and this is likely due to local influences. The language too is full of non-indo-european elements (more recently an article by Lubotsky considers a Baktrian substrate for example, but without a solution). It's not really clear where and when Indo-Iranian actually split up, and I'm personally not too fond of tree models that branch out, unless you can trace it to the individual level in detail.
The grandparent's comment to the effect that the genetic lineage and socio-linguistic affiliation has been well understood is misleading as well. I'm not too deep into archaeogenetics but a society to be associated with the putative homeland remains illusive and not just as a matter of finding the bones.
> DNA shows most Europeans are from 5 males 5000 years ago when the Yamnaya invaded Europe from the step (likely Ukraine).
That shows a severe misunderstanding, that can even be found in wikipedia articles. Yamnaya is way too late and shows not the genetic profile to be the ancestor of Corded Wear, Bell Beakers and other archaeological groupings who are associated with the westward expansion.
> The people in Europe before this were called the European hunter gathers
This is not even wrong. There are also CHG (Caucasian), WHG (Western), etc. and as the names betray these are rather loose groupings.
You are very wrong on the level of a typical pop-sci article, and this doesn't even begin to touch upon the linguistic side of things, which is full of Affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent.
It's all very topical because ring species typically emerge around seas, mountains or other barriers when the end of a long line of developed comes back to the start changed beyond recognition. The Indo-Iranian north-west route around the Caspian sea therefore has to deal with the subaltern counter clockwise route, the fact that Greek is considered the closest relative language (and possibly donor of the Indic script, next to Armenian), the problem of tracing Scythian where there is barely any evidence of the language, the fact that Dravidian, Turkic and other origins are so uncertain that it can't be clear to what extent they had an influence, the Armenian homeland problem, as well as the Tocharien and Hittite's origin. There is simply no esteblished hronology, just as different timelines for the Levante are a crutch.
The point where some sense of superiority is aduced and identified with, it becomes racist no matter which side of the debate you stand on, whenever you take a side.
Everyone reading the above, please don't take it seriously. For anyone working in the field, it is obvious that the parent poster is a dilettante who has read some PDFs of scholarship on the internet, but he has no formal background in the field and he hasn't even really understood what he read. His post abounds in errors and claims that no Indo-Europeanist can take seriously.
> This is seen as racist by many Indians, because the popular view in India is that Sanskrit is the perfect, divine language, and all the Indo-European languages descend somehow from Sanskrit speakers ...
This is at the same level as "White supremacists declare modern science as racist as it fails to uncover genetic superiority of white people." (If you prefer, replace "white" by your favorite ethnic group.)
Those are interesting examples. My experiences in the Southwest with the latter are that many indigenous people make a distinction between spiritual and scientific knowledge, so these aren't necessarily in conflict for them. I can also reasonably imagine how someone might not, particularly if you're referring to Anzick-1 like I suspect. Thanks
There's a lot of misinformation about this, and it often conflates the debate about DNA diversity with a semantic debate about the word 'race'.
Leaving aside the notion of 'race', there is ample evidence of clusters humans with more shared DNA that broadly lines up with what humans usually perceive as 'race'. As evidence of that, you can do a genetic test and with high confidence predict what race the subject SELF-identifies as.
...but that 2nd part is less important than the recognition that there are clusters of humans with slightly different DNA. Irrespective of how they identify, these differences provide insight into the relative function of those different genes. These differences should be studied, but are not because the notion that there might be differences between humans risks reinforcing racist ideologies.
This is academia only researching the lowest common denominator of scientific good.
