Globalization....on the skids 1875

Kamal R. Prasad Prior to the hegemony of Islam, there were three main routes east from the Jade Gate with links among them and a free market system of city states in compebreastion with each other. Nobody could raise the tariffs at any one point without that point being bypbutted on some other route. Islam consolidated the whole thing like a monopoly, and as many other monopolies since, priced itself out of business by making people develop unforeseen compebreastion.

The intolerance which still characterizes Islam had the leaders of the cities replaced by zealots who really didnt understand business, and their draconian rule drove talented people East into China and West into the new Viking trading system up the rivers from the Caspian to the Baltic seas.

JP Mallory, In Search of the Indo Europeans, shows how widely they traveled, buttimilating both technologies and people along the way. So yes, the Aryans were a very diverse lot. The "Saxons" it turns out, were not a bloodline, but a culture marked by men who carried a certain kind of axe. Then too, I know of a dig on a remote island north of Scotland that had a group of "Pictish" huts that was replaced by a Nordic Longhouses, but no diff at all in the physiology of the skeletons after the 'Vikings' took over.

Given the economic reality of the island, with few trees, it made sense to live poly amorously in one house, needing only one fire. Polyamory also maximized genetic diversity in such small isolated communities. It seems related to the fact that Mallory cant find a word for "marriage" in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European.

I take issue with the usual characterization of "Aryan invasion" as the cause of the introduction of so many place names and technologies. From Atilla, we see an example of a horde of nomads moving into an area because of drought on the Steppe. The local power structure was tyrannic with goon squads keeping control of serfs and slaves who had no investment in the system, who naturally welcome the arrival of Aryans, who show up in such numbers that the goon squads cant cope.

Thus as with Atilla, the nomads he showed up with were quickly swollen by mbuttes of the downtrodden hoping for a new deal. But then, as EW Barber, in "The Mummies of Urumchi" notes, the drought ended, nomads return to the Steppes, but leave a new, more egalitarian, but chaotic system behind. However, the nomads Barber refers to, 6000 years ago, were the Amazons. Early horses were impossible for men to ride.

Thus, in India, the earliest art shows us dark men with fair skinned women at the top of the power structure.