Celtic Shield (Credit)

Celtic Warrior Who Died of Old Age.

I confess I’m fascinated by the prehistoric Steppes horsemen in their role as conquerors of Old Europe, old South Asia, and old Anatolia. Considering the two indelible lines of evidence: Steppes genetics and the Indo-European language, something awesome resulted from the merger of the small beginnings of horsemanship in Botai Kazakhstan and the genetics of the Yamnaya culture. Apparently, there is little genetic relationship between those two people groups (or their horses), but they’ve left an enormous mark on European history leading to the Celtic domination of Europe (described at length in last week’s post) and also to the rise of the Romans who superseded the Celts in deepening the roots of Western civilization. Not a one-trick pony, this 4th-millennium people and their horse-based culture thrust south into Anatolia forming the Hittite and Luwian languages, while thrusting east into Mongolia and the Tarim Basin and also southwest to supplant the Harappan culture which was enfeebled by the desertification of its rivers in what is now called the Indo-Aryan invasion.

Legendary Saraswati River Watering Harappan Civilization Found.

The existence of the Saraswati River running through the heart of the Harappan Civilization has long been hypothesized, but now is scientifically validated. Only a heavy, uninterrupted river flow could justify the large population of the Harappan cities whose ruins lie along the channel of the seasonal river that now flows only during the monsoon season.

Genetic Study Suggests Denisovans Were the Mythological Rakshasas.

Since I had already included Rakshasas in the novel I am completing, I now want to go back and update that substory with the upgraded hypothesis that the “mythical” Rakshasas were not demons but, rather, the cultural memory of what Genetics now identifies as more likely to have been South Asian Denisovans, which is a much-preferred improvement on their mythic basis. Now that Rakshasas are logically not spiritual but flesh and blood, they will no longer be handled as immortals in that scene. I would not have discovered this if I hadn’t been writing this post on recent developments in archaeology.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke