A narrowing of the origin location of the Indo-European languages, and possibly a connection to the sagas

[Micael]

For some years scientists have been pointing to the Yamnaya people, originating roughly to the north of the Black Sea, as the origin pooulation of the Indo-European languages. However there has been a problem with this as although the currently existing Indo-European languages certainly stemmed from the Yamnaya, some extinct ones in Anatolia such as Hittite has been shown to not stem from the Yamnaya by way of DNA. So last year a study was published which sought to find an earlier origin population which fed into both the Yamnaya and the Anatolian populations, as such a population can be presumed to have originated the Indo-European language. They found it, and it is referred to as the Caucasus Lower Volga people. They lived around 6,500 years ago in roughly the location delineated by the two lines on this map:

IMG_5663.jpeg

This is interesting for several reasons, we have narrowed down the geographical starting point of Indo-European, and have also pushed it back in time a bit. An article about the study can be read here:

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dn ... age-family

Now we get to the other part of the title of this thread. The take on the Norse sagas as pure fiction, pure fact, or something in between. From the mid 20th century onwards the dominant take in academia was that they were just fairy tales, made up for entertainment and religious/political purposes. Earlier than that many academics had viewed them as partially or mostly true, but they were overruled by the new generation of scholars.

Snorri Sturlasson is the Icelandic 13th century author who has conveyed much of the saga corpus to us, and he is probably the most well known name in this field. When Sturlasson recounted a sort of origin story of the Norse religion and the royal house of Uppsala in his Ynglingasaga he has been dismissed as having made it up, mainly for religious reasons as he - a Christian - would have wanted to demote the Norse gods to mere mortals for propaganda purposes, or so the academics claimed.

But, in light or these findings about the Caucasus Lower Volga people it is interesting to note that Sturlasson was extremely specific about the geographical origin of the Aesir and the Vanir (the two groups of gods that make up the Norse pantheon.) The Vanir, who were a minority among the pantheon and is described to have essentially married into the Aesir following a conflict, he says lived around the river Tanais, earlier called Tanakvisl or Vanakvisl, and that the Aesir lived to the east of them. The current day name for that river is Don. In the map above I’ve drawn a (crude) red arrow that points to that river. The location of the Caucasus Lower Volga people population is in other words exactly where Sturlasson placed the Aesir in his saga.

Now, it would be a remarkable coincidence if Sturlasson just happened to make up an origin story which places the mythological gods right at the very point half a continent away where we now believe that the origin population of the Indo-European languages were located. A bit too big of a coincidence in my opinion. What do you think?

More likely I believe Sturlasson’s saga was based on oral tradition that was muddled over many centuries, and it certainly contains incorrect elements and dating, but that it did retain something of a core memory of where the ruling class originally came from. This is why I think it is very important to study ancient accounts very, very carefully. Do not take information in them as fact, but look for clues, find kernels of truth that can point us in the right direction, come up with ideas that can be validated or dismissed by modern methods.