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Today we are witnessing nothing less than a revolution in the science of our past. Archaeogenetic research has unleashed a second Great Flood of information on who we are and where we came from with unprecedented accuracy. Nearly half the world can trace some part of their past to an obscure group of herders on the Ukrainian and Russian Steppe north of the Black Sea. While good fortune certainly played a part, something about their culture made them special. They migrated, they settled, they drifted, they intermarried, they adventured, they conquered: they took enormous risks, and their reward was cultural and territorial dominion over most of the Earth.
They did not write down their words or their history. But they did gift us more than just their language. They endowed us with profound reverence for the natural world and a healthy appreciation of our tiny part in it; a respect for divinity and a moral compass based the natural order; our sense of what it means to be a man, and a woman; the foundations of inheritance, property and exchange; our penchant to take risks and realize rewards; and most importantly our unslakable thirst for freedom.
Ancient DNA:
Razib Khan
Razib Khan is a blogger and podcaster with a background specializing in genetics. I recommend him for anyone who has done some reading in the field already as he is equally well versed in the big-picture message as he is with the technical details.
He provides an up-to-date picture of the evolving landscape of archaeogenetic research that is evolving rapidly. Don’t wait for some breathless New Scientist[1] reporter to misrepresent the science … listen to Razib instead!
If you subscribe to his Substack you’ll find a deep library podcasts exploring ancient DNA including interviews with some of the big names in the field. Moreover, Razib has many collateral interests that are equally fascinating.
Carlos Quiles
Another good source of ancient DNA information is https://indo-european.eu/.
It’s like a specialized encyclopedia on the subject with atlases and its own set of reference books that you can buy online. It’s also a blog for Carlos Quiles who comments on many of the advances in the field.
While it needs some updating for the past few years of research it is a good way to familiarize yourself with some basics of the field, usually with graphics or maps.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132230-200-story-of-most-murderous-people-of-all-time-revealed-in-ancient-dna/
The Farm People
At the beginning of The Toll of Fortune you encounter a ruined people living in the remains of a once populous settlement. It’s no lie to say that these settlements once housed tens of thousands of people, centuries before the first cities of Mesopotamia. These were the Cucuteni-Trypillia People. A recent, user-friendly article about them can be found here:
https://voloshin.md/en/cucuteni-trypillia
For more information Wikipedia contains some useful information.
The Wolf Valley People and Prehistoric Metallurgy
In another chapter you encounter the Wolf Valley People who excel at metallurgy. While the details are the invention of fiction, the people are not. The Vučedol People did live in what is now Croatia some time after the events of the book, thus the Wolf Valley People that Wolf is related to are their ancestors. In fact Vučedol means “Wolf Valley”. While their culture prospered some time after the book, their metallurgical practices almost certainly predate it – going back perhaps as far at the 5th millennium BC. Here’s a short post on the Vučedol:
https://patmaginess.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/the-vucedol-culture
Staying on the topic of metallurgy, I have always found it useful to see it in practice rather than just read about it. Fortunately today we have plenty of YouTube tutorials showing how metal was smelted and forged and hammered back then. Metallurgy, even with our advanced knowledge, is quite complex. So it is not hard to imagine how complex the history of its discover could be – let alone how difficult the job is for archaeologists to piece it together. Moreover the discovery of metallurgy occurred at different places and times across the world. In my book I focused on the Balkan culture and discovery of metallurgy (as opposed to, say, the Armenian or Anatolian) and the following video gives a good delineation of some of the nuances.
Rain’s Mound: Kurgan culture
Kurgans are tumuli of earth raised into a mound. And while there are many types and examples from the Caucasus to Hungary the consensus among archaeologists is that they were graves, usually for important peoples, designed both to awe and establish landmarks. Much literature (academic and popular) can be found about kurgans but this site has a short, user-friendly introduction on kurgans used by the Scythians. While these were one of the last cultures to use the mounds, the similarity of the structures to the first ones used by the Yamnaya is a testament to the immutability of their presence.
https://brewminate.com/kurgans-ancient-burial-mounds-of-scythian-elites-in-the-eurasian-steppe
Indo-European Culture:
One of my favorite forums for Indo-European culture is the website below. In many ways it mirrors some of the books I’ve recommended but in a more interactive, blog-based format. Its topic range from the philosophical to the hermeneutic – comparing works like the Vedas, Hesiod, and other ancient Germanic texts or mythologies. Its focus tends to be on the spiritual, which I think is a good way to introduce oneself to the culture since these were quasi-nomadic people without writing. They had no written word, yet somehow their culture has come down to us masked only by a historical palimpsest. They were highly mobile, as was their property, and left very little material culture behind. They were highly innovative both materially (consider their advanced wagon and horse technology for the time) and culturally (they intermarried where beneficial and created social networks like the koryos to propagate their values. Thus an appreciation of their spiritual life is essential to understanding their nature.