Why did people doubt this? It doesn’t sound so ridiculous that a Germanic-speaking people would come from Scandinavia, which has a island called Gothland, a province East Gothland and West Gothland, a city called Gothenburg and people called Geats (probably related to Goths).
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.
If I understand the article correctly, there is DNA evidence of mass migration from Scandinavia to Northern Poland, but going further south, the evidence points to migration of a smaller elite rather than mass migration.
> In the beginning, there was a big migration, but later they started mingling, and the transmission of Gothic was more of a cultural nature.
In this comment section it seems people really want it to be one or the other, evidence be damned.
“mingling”
>If I understand the article correctly, there is DNA evidence of mass migration from Scandinavia to Northern Poland, but going further south, the evidence points to migration of a smaller elite rather than mass migration.
I.e it wasn't fashionable, didn't make for good career advancement for anyone to look into it let alone say it.
>In this comment section it seems people really want it to be one or the other, evidence be damned.
I'm just here to remind everyone that the "professionals" are fallible and subject to industry circle jerks.
Sadly very par for the course. You wont get very far if you challenge the consensus nor get funding. I know of this true in at least a major area of neuroscience reliable 2ndhand.
Archaeogenetics is a new field in archaeology and linguistics, it only started to really make an impact in the last 15 years. No one was "looking into it let alone saying it" before that simply because DNA from dated archaeological sites hadn't yet been extracted, sequenced, and made available to researchers.
You rushed here to slander people working in the field without familiarizing yourself with the first things about it. Shame on you.
I suspect the academic community had a bias towards nationalistic interpretation of history. We see this both from Russian and Polish/Ukrainians, whose history is totally interlinked, making it plausible for both sides to make claims favoring what their national identity would prefer, rather than the truth.
Again, why "suspect" something about a field of scholarship? You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others. The Goths left no descendants identifying as such, their entire branch of the Germanic language family went extinct, and no scholar working today is emotionally invested in them for nationalist reasons, nor would they resist particular interpretations because anyone else was.
> You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others.
I am no expert, but here's Michael Kulikowski's argument quoted from the wiki page on the debate:
[Heather] is right to try to deduce governing apparatus from the actions that kings and chieftains were able to compel their followers to take. This approach, more than anything, goes some way toward justifying his assertion that a broad class of nonaristocratic "freemen" warriors must have existed in many of the barbarian cultures of the first half of the millennium. Yet to claim the point proved and build further hypotheses upon it is not legitimate; he comes perilously close to recreating the old, volkisch notion of an inherent “Germanic” belief in freedom. Throughout, in fact, Heather makes the tacit assumption that evidence from any “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group can be used to analyze any other “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group—in other words, that linguistic identity and socioinstitutional behaviors go inevitably together. [...] a great many historical comparanda would support a model that he ignores — that the Goths were formed from a large number of indigenes and a small number of migrants under the pressure of Roman imperialism, and in the shadow of the Empire.[31]
And more:
Kulikowski charges that old German nationalist and even Nazi influences continue to influence scholarship on the Goths up to the present day, particularly through the theories of Gustav Kossinna.[19] He considers much of what is written about Goths to be "Germanist fantasy" derived from this legacy.
This isn't exactly what I would describe as a debate "blessedly free from nationalist squabbles"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Goths
I mean, the academic community deliberately went against historical sources without much evidence-based arguments to do so. Turns out that denying DNA data is not doable, and now they have to do a 180.
I personally wouldn't put the “shame” onto GP.
Again, anyone actually familiar with Gothic studies (I trained in the field and remain employed in a closely related one) would know that people didn't outright "go against Jordanes", but rather the Gothic Urheimat was always discussed as a matter of controversy, with Jordanes' claims one version but external evidence lacking. Now there is some external evidence.
Historians hold out on claims made in historical sources -- especially when written centuries after the fact -- all the time, it is a standard scientific practice to seek external evidence.
And for having worked in a similarly behaving field, there is a big difference between “yeah we're not sure yet” and “no the ancients are most certainly wrong because our Modern Thinking is necessarily better (wink wink)”.
And within the specific field of the linked article, I never heard the latter about the issues discussed in the linked article.
It was the post-WW2 hangover of "pots aren't people" (reaction to Kossinna and other racist archeologists favored by the Nazis). There was a lot of resistance from archeologists and anthropologists to ancient DNA findings in the 2010s vindicating mass migration but they ultimately had to fold (and admit that the historical linguists were right all along). Now we have a more balanced perspective and can see that language and material culture can be transmitted via either cultural diffusion or mass migration, and we have to look at the actual evidence in each case to identify the transmission mechanism. An interesting example of how both transmission mechanisms can be involved in one cultural-linguistic phenomenon is the Bell Beaker culture (associated with the spread of an Indo-European language family possibly ancestral to Italo-Celtic), which spread east from Iberia to Central Europe via cultural transmission, and then back west to the Atlantic via mass migration (reaching all the way to Britain, where they appropriated Stonehenge from its Neolithic builders, who went virtually extinct within a century).
Language etymology is a fascinating study. This is very far from my own expertise, but I have family that have made it more of a vocation.
Languages can spread by utility, rather than culture.
For example, "Low German" was a common trade tongue, and shows up in parts of the world, where Germans never set foot.
Do you know of any good books or sources about this viewpoint?
When I read about history of Europe/Old World in Roman and post Roman times, it's clear that large scale movements of whole groups of people is very common in the historical record.
I wonder why such views were ever resisted in prehistory, a time when such movements were simpler and their motivations more likely to arise?
The Nazis did do a lot of damage - far more than any benefits from the science would balance - and the 'science' contributed to it. The Nazis and many other racists have long argued that they are just being objective and the other side is biased.
How will you prevent that harm from recurring? Ignoring it hasn't worked, and doesn't distinguish the program you propose from a long line of racist programs and propaganda - that is, nobody can tell whether it's sincere or just another cover story.
But people can tell that it's not responsible, which is a clue about the thought behind it. We can't wash our hands of the consequences of our actions. If you don't prevent the next racist catastrophe, who will? Will you just do it and leave the consequences for others to clean up (and suffer from)?
Politicization of science is never good.
The "pots aren't people" wave wouldn't be problematic per se (e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life), rather because it sought to be the dominant theory.
We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing - defeat of the Nazis, which made some ideas extremely dirty and other ideas very attractive.
This has an interesting consequence in that we do not know much about natural human intelligence today, which is coming back to bite us in the age of emerging artificial intelligence. The topic of human intelligence has been a political minefield for nearly a century now. It is probably safer and easier to study intelligence of octopuses and crows than that of humans. You're definitely freer from political repercussions there.
> We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing
no we don't. intelligence isn't racial..
>intelligence isn't racial
And how do we know that? Any very controversial stuff like this will have people on both sides doing all in their power to convince everyone to their point of view. The truth gets lost.
To discuss this objectively we have to first agree on some basics. First I think the concept of race is a bit outdated. People have phenotypes and these phenotypes have various features (one may be skin color).
Also where did the idea there exists one feature responsible for "intelligence" came from? It seems to be accepted apriori, but I think the truth is closer to humans (and animals and AI) having various types of intelligence. Social, emotional, linguistical, math like, spatial (ability to imagine shapes etc) and probably few more.
And those intelligence types may very well have a genetic component and be present in one phenotype in a different mix than another.
But saying it is likely vs having actual proof are two different things so my view is that we simply don't know.
IQ differences between the racial groups is one of the most, if not the most, replicated findings in psychology.
Are they consistent across time and cultures? Are they corrected for differences in health, education, culture, wealth, etc? How big are racial differences compared to differences between people from different social classes?
How do you define racial groups? its something that constantly shifts. I have an encyclopedia for the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid" which is not how most people now think.
You can do a dimensionality reduction on genetic variants and certain recognisable groups fall pretty clearly out of the data.
Do those groups relate closely to what people generally mean by race? Race as defined in which culture? I know from personal experience that its not the same definitions across cultures. How big are those differences compared to differences within racial groups?
Take a look yourself.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Principa...
Obviously some racial groups which are heavily socially constructed are not borne out by the data. There's no cluster for 'Latinos'. But in general I think there is quite a high correspondence with race as it is constructed in society and culture.
So on that graph, the distance between East and West Africans is about as great as the distance between Indians and Europeans. Somalis are closer to East Asians than they are to Southern African Khoisan people. Bedouin Arabs and Southern Europeans are closer to each other than either are to North Africans or Northern Europeans.
There are certainly some cases where the genetic data matches conventional thinking about race, but also many where they flatly contradict. It also suggests that saying something like "white people are genetically smarter on average than black people" is highly suspect. The group of people that we call "black" has a greater range of genetic profiles than the rest of the world put together, and the group we call "white" is kind of confused—to be genetically meaningful it would probably need to either include North Africans and Arabs or exclude Southern Europeans.
Based almost entirely on racist studies, including some famous ones that were comparing white and black school children in apartheid South Africa. I wonder if there may have been some confounding variables there, but surely this is just my bias.
Plus, none of these studies actually spend the money to do any genetic testing, they simply assign people to "white" or "black" race based almost always on skin color (which, since the gene for dark skin is dominant, is a very poor marker of actual genetic similarity - the great grandchild of a dark-skinned person with otherwise only white-skinned relatives can still be dark-skinned).
Edit: and I'm not even mentioning the obvious publication bias, as essentially only racists care about this race vs intelligence discussion, at least enough to invest in creating studies about it. Plus the fact that IQ itself is actually a very problematic measure, when applied beyond its actual medical use (quantifying mental disability).
We care about racial differences in outcomes that are correlated to IQ, such as employment and imprisonment.
What if some of the observed racial differences were caused by a lack of vitimin D, due to darker skin photosynthesising less of it? Then we could fix the prison crisis with a pill!
If we block all research into a problem then we can’t solve it.
If you actually care about fixing a problem then we should bring all available tools to fix and solve it.
> correlated to
Correlation measures whether Y=mX+c holds with small error. I sometimes think that many people unknowingly assume that all dependencies are somehow straight-line ones. This is distinct however from "linear approximations" in physics, which can at least be justified sometimes.
I also suspect that correlations of 0.5 or lower are often just statistical noise.
Suggesting that intelligence might be (partially) inheritable always causes backlash.
Intelligence is inheritable.
Intelligence isn't even well defined.
That doesn't matter.
Apparently not.
for the sake of DJT's offspring I hope not
It causes backlash because there are huge fields of modern academia built around the implicit assumption that everyone has the same IQ and hence the worse outcomes encountered by black and brown people are due to a big societal conspiracy against them, when in reality their outcomes are almost identical to white people who score the same on IQ tests as those groups do.
It is true any discussion of the subject marks you as a racist so how can we have an honest conversation in such environment? Just look at your own down votes?
Having said that, even if the academic outcomes of people with darker skin color were worse (no idea if that is true, or in which country) just knowing that is no proof. It may as well be cultural or even income based (pregnant mothers eating worse quality food for example, or same thing with young children).
Is the question even answerable? What kind of intelligence do we measure with "academic outcomes"? How do we adjust for income and quality of life as a child, things like having both parents, or grandparents? It's an absolute minefield of possible manipulation. Same data can probably be spun to "proove" any hypothesis you have.
Then imagine writing a proposal for such research. What benefits can you predict? If you find there is absolutely no correlation between skin color and academic outcomes after adjusting for all external factors will it convince people that are racist as part of their identity? I doubt it.
Lets say you do prove there is some correlation. What the result of that would be? Open discrimination and vindication of racist views. But even if the principle was true the average doesn't apply to individuals so you can't apply it to any particular person.
In the ideal world, assuming this is true, we could then ask for the question of, well, what can we do about these people with different intelligence levels?
Intelligence is not just a single thing. We can assign a number by an intelligence test, of course, but there are lots of ways to look at it that are more nuanced. Generally, you're not going to say someone is better than everything you're going to find that someone is better at some things. And so can we direct people to the things you're better at for the better of everyone? Division of labor is a good thing.
But contrast, assuming that we find it's not true, then we can ask, well, why are we finding these differences in the data? if it's not genetic and perhaps we can find what it really is and then improve those groups that are currently disadvantaged.
The larger point is you have to know before you can make a useful adjustment.
What plausible mechanism is there to even approach the idea that skin color influences intelligence? Why not study the effects on intelligence of eye color, or blood type?
This is especially clearly just a racist concept once you realize that none of the studies of IQ vs race actually do any genetic testing, they only rely on phenotype. Which is absurd given the fact that the child of a black-skinned person born in sub-Saharan Africa and a white-skinned person born in a village in Ireland is extremely likely to be black-skinned, but is genetically just as much part of both populations. It's only the history of racism that assigns this child as black more so than white.
We know that people with red hair tend to metabolize anesthesia differently. It is not completely implausible that there is also a correlation between looks and other traits, although it seems almost impossible to me to untangle cultural, environmental and genetic effects.
Of course, any two traits can be correlated. But unless there is an obvious causal mechanism ("whiter skinned people get sun burns more easily", "darker skinned people tend to have vitamin D deficiencies at higher latitudes"), there's no reason to assume it and start looking for it to prove or disprove. It's a priori just as likely that there is a genetic link between toe shape and intelligence as skin color and intelligence. Yet no one is doing the science of measuring toe length correlation to intelligence, just skin color ("race").
As far as I know phrenology measured all kinds of things and claimed correlations. But they used highly dubious data (even for their time) and the field is now too unpopular to try (something similar) again with better methodology.
And I would say that the racist claim is that there is observable correlation and that genetic explanations are about as probable as other explanations. But I suppose many non-genetic explanations (eg cultural differences) would also be counted as racism, since in these kinds of discussions race and culture are often jumbled together.
I just got a downvote for an opposing opinion, so at least one person feels keenly that intelligence is genetic and is unable to say why.
> intelligence isn't racial..
The same way as South-Koreans are by now taller than North-Koreans (because of material reasons) we could posit that "intelligence", i.e. the "workings" of our brain, can be distributed in a non-uniform manner across humankind, depending on the "local" material conditions.
And this is not about "race", because according to those that do believe in the "race" stuff both North-Koreans and South-Koreans are part of the same "race", it is about those material conditions that I've mentioned and which, in the end, by necessity end up modifying things in our (very material) brains, and hence in our "intelligence". Believing otherwise, meaning believing that are our brains are not affected by the material conditions under which we live our day-to-day lives, would be preposterous.
I don't think many people dispute the fact that the environment plays a role in intelligence. Not even many people dispute that there is some heritability to intelligence. What is in dispute is whether that heritability means that some races are on average genetically more intelligent than others (and another problem is how to define intelligence).
How do you define races? As I said in another comment definitions shift and they are different in different countries. I have an encyclopedia from the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid". Some East Africans were also defined as "Caucasoid" historically.If we define races on the basis of genetic similarity then almost everyone whose ancestry is from Eurasia is the same "race", but people whose ancestry is African belong to multiple races.
Race was only ever a stand in before we had an accurate understanding of genetics.
It's a bit like the old adage that we should not judge a book by its cover. The outside often does not provide any clues into the content or worse, it could bias an observer's opinions about what they would find inside if they chose to engage with the material.
Its akin to judging a man by the color of his skin instead of by the content of his character.
Thanks for your comment that clarifies how genetics provides a much more granular window into an individual than any physical characteristic taken by itself can provide.
If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.
That could also be explained by cultural differences, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming.
Or it could be discrimination. There are studies that show that black and white mixed races children did not score any higher than children with two black parents, while white people score higher than black people on average, which may point to some discrimination impacting IQ.
Discrimination against whites in favor of blacks doesn't lower white IQ.
There are significant cultural and economic differences between those communities. These will be similar between Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese and Indians are sufficiently recent immigrants for their culture to still have a lot in common (they speak the same language, follow the same religions, have inherited attitudes) with the places their ancestors came from.
I don't understand how the precedents could lead to any question regarding the disputed conclusion
Right, but the equation of workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit. That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place.
> workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit
I don't find it that tricky, intelligence does come from the brain.
> That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place
Both one's brain and one's "intelligence" belong to the same person, like, physically and materially, which is not true when it comes to your bicycle example. More to the point, I find the comparison itself kind of self-describing, it's like deciding to "outsource" intelligence to some other external, non-ethereal entity (like a bicicle that is physically separate from a human being) in order to avoid those hard questions the OP was alluding to (hard questions that oftentimes also involve the political side of things).
Now I want to say that your ideas don't come from your brain. But of course they do, as a result of interaction with other people's ideas, some of which were written down. (Don't worry, I'm not a dualist.)
The thing is that no matter how fancy your bicycle, I can still ride my shitty bicycle to a university, and you can ride your lubricated carbon fiber bicycle into a ditch, and then you're not so smart. If what you call intelligence is how fast your bicycle typically goes into the ditch, then sure, it can be measured on a scale and you have more of it.
You, as a dualist, is the least of the fears we hold.
There are other notions about the transfer of ideas: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/06/memory-transfer
I'm not a dualist! Fumes
Wait, cannibal worms that eat memories? My my.
I for one thank our AI overlords that weight training avoided that path not taken :/
If you think any brain can be just as intelligent no matter how it works then why not extend that to things that aren't brains? If everyone's brain is equally good then isn't a rock just as good as well?
Sure, if the rock has good ideas.
(Rocks don't have ideas.)
A lot of HN is currently about rocks that we've made very smart, in case you haven't noticed. I don't want archeology polluted by generic academic culture war stuff, so can we please leave "intelligence" out of it?
If genetics had no impact whatsoever then great apes would have the same intelligence potential as humans, as human races are more diverse then you give them credit for.
The impact of it's culture and behavioral like inbreeding being acceptable probably plays a bigger role though, but denying genetic impact is just putting your head in the sand because you cannot face reality not being equal. Which it ain't. It's also almost certainly a range, with most of the curves overlapping. If studied, I'd expect there to be a measurable impact in the rates of high intelligence individuals with the median intelligence being pretty close across all groups, but obliviously just my personal experience from interacting with people.
Race is a combination of genetic, and cultural factors such as nutrition, early childhood care practices, social values, etc.
Humans are far more genetically homogenous than many animal species due to a population collapse at one point in our developmental history.
Cultural practices can have a big effect on intellectual development, so disentangling any possible genetic factors from cultural ones can be very difficult, but there is very little evidence for genetic factors related to race also being related to intelligence at the population level. Obviously certain genetic disorders can have a significant effect.
I say intelligence is ideas, so it isn't physiological* and doesn't have a quotient.
* except in that being beaten around the head can make a person stupid.
Every study that's been done shows a significant difference in mean IQ across races. Suggesting otherwise is anti-science, putting ideology over reality. That doesn't mean everyone of any particular race is stupid; Indians in America for instance on average have higher IQS than white Americans, in spite of the average IQ of India being significantly lower, because only the smarter Indians manage to immigrate to America.
Most studies of Indians done in famous IQ tests were of those Indians who lived in villages and suffered from diseases. Its been debunked so many times.
Those who immigrate to America are not smarter. They just had the where with all to pay for immigration. Even those who go on scholarship have to prove they have atleast land/housing back in India to even get a chance to immigrate.
I remember looking up the source of the IQ data from Nepal a few years ago. It was a taken from an IQ survey of a school for mentally disabled children..
Talk about sampling bias lol.
[dead]
Lysenkoism predates the defeat of the nazis and it's pretty much the same pseudoscientific dismissal of nature for ideological reasons.
To be honest, I'm more interested in what ideology/religion lead to the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent in a timespan of over thousands of years to almost utter replacement despite of the fact that, in the end, the "invaders" were almost identical to the "invaded", than I am in elucidating whether Llama 3 being less performant than Gemma 4 in benchmarks is due to the training corpus or the architecture.
I don't feel like being racist either way.
Regardless of how you feel about being racist, some people will accuse you of being uncomfortably close to a Nazi for talking about the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent, because 19th and early 20th century anthropologists that the Nazis liked and amplified the ideas of really did think that the Yamnaya Y line took over a continent, they just called them "Aryans" instead of "the Yamnaya Y line".
There’s really only one way you totally replace male lineage.
Based on the evidence we have it seems that they simply killed most (in some places almost all) of the local men they could find?
Who is they? The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.
We know people often kill people. That doesn't even need explanation.
My argument is that it is thousands of years and dozens of mixed generations.
Why do you decide to participate in a thousand-years-long campaign to kill the neighbor who is also your second cousin?
There is no reason they couldn't have turned the other way and attacked their other second cousin.
My best guess is religion but it could also have also been a different kind of fanatic ideology.
The immigrants from the steppes and their descendants. It's hard to interpret the fact that the majority and often 90% or more pre Indo European male lineages were replaced in Western and Northern Europe in any other way.
Sure it took many generations but it's hard to imagine that the violence wasn't culturally and racially motivated. Based on genetic evidence it's speculated that that there were more than 10 male migrants to every female coming from the steppe.
> The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.
I'm not sure what that means? Their descendants clearly did reach Iberia and Britain.
>(e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life),
If you wanna tell the romans to GFY you're gonna have to adopt a lot of the structures that make them competitive in order to resist them. There's a fairly large "you wrestle the pig you get shit on you" factor going on.
The cultural exchange part was more a post punk thing. The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees.
And what's the difference exactly? We knew that e.g. the Visigoths had Scandinavian ancestry, but we also know that by then they had lots of other ancestry, too.
To me this reads like Lenski (not affiliated with the authors!) trying a little too hard to make it into an academic culture war issue.
The article says why. The fall of the Roman empire being increasingly attributed to the migration of foreigners is both topical and problematic to certain ideologies
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.
Same here. This study is mostly kicking in open doors - or at least the people quoted not affiliated with the study for some reason, are kicking in open doors. I got into this as a tangent from genealogy, and that the Goths were for a good part actually from Scandinavia is not a particularly bold assertion.
Now that the Wielbark culture simply is the Goths, that would be a sightly bolder assertion - and one which is probably good they're not making since it would probably be oversimplifying things.
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.
You did not find it weird that Beowulf identified as a geat?
Never read it, but also, wasn't it written like hundreds of years after? I thought the oldest written stories we had were Snorres and the Icelandic sagas.
So the 5th and 6th centuries are still very much guesswork when it comes to scandinavian history.
I just always assumed that the legend of Rome was powerful enough for swedes to claim the Goths. But it makes sense that it's based on fact.
Or that Russia commenced as a Viking startup.
And based in Kiev
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27
Wiki has a pretty interesting history on that [1]:
During its existence, Kievan Rus was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus" or the "Rus land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus being derived from the ethnonym Роусь. ... The first known use of the term Kievan Rus comes from the 1582 chronicle by Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski, where it was used to describe the region of Rus state immediately adjacent to Kyiv.
In 1837 it was adopted by Kyiv University rector Mykhailo Maksymovych in relation to the Principality of Kiev; known for his Ukrainophile political orientation, Maksymovych later spread that definition to the whole realm, seeing Kyiv as the original point where Rus statehood emerged, establishing the base for the future Russian Empire.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#Names
I think the Russia case is the case of some Viking leaders of Slavs
Vikings took slavs as slaves. In Swedish "slav" means "slave". Vikings was rowers from Roslagen. In Finland they use the name Ruotsi for Sweden and Venäjä for Russia.
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.