Hacker News

The article explains

> 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.

When you're reading a popular-science story about a new discovery, there are two things to be careful about:

- are the claims it's making about the discovery right, or exaggerated?

- are the claims it's making about what people previously believed right, or exaggerated?

When I'm reading about areas that I happen to know something about, I find that there's a smallish tendency to exaggerate the first and a large one to exaggerate the second.

I think it's likely that's true in other areas. I get the impression it's particularly common for archaeological discoveries for some reason.

Science is not just believing what sounds plausible. It is about gathering evidence. Having historical, archeological and DNA evidence is a lot stronger that just historical evidence alone.

Yeah but I'm a Swede and even I thought those regions were named long after Rome, in tribute to Roman history. Claiming the origins of the infamous Goths just because of their accomplishments in the south.

Because Swedish history before 1000AD is very murky.

Or that Russia commenced as a Viking startup.

If you sail south (toward the sun) it's pretty hard to miss Poland, and you'd know it's there long earlier due to observing migratory seabirds.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spqrposting/comments/1lhqmlp/rome_i...

Sarcasm and irony were their greatest weapons

I always found this fact about the common Spanish surname Rodríguez to be interesting:

>The "ez" signifies "son of". The name Rodrigo is the Spanish form of the German name Roderich, meaning "rich in fame", from the Gothic elements "hrod" (fame or glory) and "ric" (rich). It was the name of Roderic, the last Visigothic King before the Muslim conquest, and the subject of many legends. The surname Rodríguez could have originated in the 9th century when patronymic names originated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodr%C3%ADguez_(surname)

The Visigoths directly ruled in Iberia so that's an example of the "elite influence" spreading culture and language.

"On the peninsula" ... I found elmo, does Galician count? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/elmo#Galician

There are plenty of other warlike terms in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_terms_derive... such as gaita (bagpipes).

We have yelmo and almete, but looking up both of them, they seem to be considered later medieval loans. Espuela (spur), dardo (dart) and a few other warlike items are often mentioned. And of course guerra (war) itself.

And in German the word is "Helm" as well

Yelmo for helmet

Your "Well acktually..." is misplaced, because no one anywhere in the article ever cast doubt on that, but rather the debate was about the Gothic Urheimat and the degree of gene spread versus cultural diffusion.

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.

The 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.

Giant wiggly snake is a great explanation of the obvious evidence glaciation/erosion, ngl.

That depends a great deal on who is talking or typing, in what era, and where. Here's a brief list of some of the OED options for meaning:

* A foreigner, one whose language and customs differ from the speaker's.

* One not a Greek.

* One living outside the pale of the Roman empire and its civilization, applied especially to the northern nations that overthrew them.

* One outside the pale of Christian civilization.

* (With the Italians of the Renascence) One of a nation outside of Italy.

* A rude, wild, uncivilized person.

* (in mid 1800s) Applied by the Chinese contemptuously to foreigners.

* An uncultured person, or one who has no sympathy with literary culture.

* A native of Barbary.

Which one (or three) apply here can be left as an exercise for the reader.

Anyone who talks like a barbarian. In some tales the ancient Greeks thought that anyone who lived outside their city states sounded like bleating sheep. True or not, the word did mean someone who talks like a foreigner.

No kidding. That's not an ok word to be putting in a headline

In this context it means they invaded the Roman empire.

The Huns drove them out of their lands. The Goths needed to find better lands to support their population. The Roman Empire was weak. The Romans had better land. The Romans couldn't defend their land against the Goths and the Goths couldn't defend their lands against the Huns.

As for the climate change argument this movement of people groups is not uncommon. Rome up until the arrival of the Goths had been dealing with "barbarian" incursions for a thousand years.

Rome invade Gaul, Germany, and Britannia which people seem to omit. There is no argument that climate change forced them too. They did it because they could. The "barbarian" tribes invaded because they could. Both sides in this conflict are human and have human motivations.

I was wondering the same things : I often heard that the relative civilizational collapse that happened in europe during the middle ages was correlated with lower overall temperatures, e.g. what you see here [1] or there [2]. In the second one, the most recent projections (in red), show that there were a lot of very cold years (down to -0.6 degrees relative to normal) during those times. Later on, starting in the 1200s, there was the Little ice age, where temperatures fell to -0.9 relative to normal (I don't know how they defined normal). The peak, when almost all years were at -0.6 or below on that scale, caused the "General Crisis of the seventeenth century" where people from the Goth/scandinavian regions also had huge famines [3].

So my guess would be that there were several very cold years in a row, which caused famines, and the populations understood that their best survival chance was to migrate south, where they had to compete with the roman empire for land.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:2000_Year_Temperature_... [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:2000_Year_Temperature_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1695%E2%80%931...

I was visiting the northern city of Umeå in Sweden, in the middle of the winter. It's a bit dark, and in a good year you get a mantle of snow that reaches waist-high, and that was a good year. So I'm sitting in this super-cozy fika room with nice warm lighting having some coffee. Out of the blue, this sweet middle aged lady who had been born there a good half a century before and who loves skiing, says: "I can't bear the darkness any longer. I'm going to Spain this year."

Overpopulation, Scandinavia did not have very fertile soil.