Welcome to Caribbean Rhythms, episode 148. I am here with friend, Tom Rousil, YouTube independent historian, advocate and researcher into remote Indo-European antiquity. And many of you have known him many years. He's one of most interesting researchers online, I believe. Welcome to show. Tom, I'm honored to have you on. It's a great pleasure to be here, Bronze Age Pervert. Thank you so much for having me here. Yes, well, Tom, I like to go into hiding frequently and move across many different countries and talk about these details. I'm thinking of starting maybe cooking, not cooking show, but, you know, Anthony, Anthony Bourdain style and Zimmern, Andy Zimmern type culinary travel show. I'm thinking of doing this, but yes, I think might be amusing.

but you are also an avid traveler for a long time, no? Yeah, yeah, I used to travel a long time, for a lot, when I was a younger man, I was very keen on being, like, going into, I had similar feelings to you, I think, and that's partly what appealed to me about your book when I read it in 2019, because it reminded me of this, my, I always, like, when I was a young man, and I heard other people talking about me traveling, I viewed them with severe contempt, I despised them, and I thought that they were, sort of decadence talking about the life-changing experiences in India and following these tourist trails and things but then when I traveled myself I started off like I got a first time I left Europe was an internship in Qatar

and Middle East and then then I went and did like a project in Venezuela film project I was trying to I had a commission to do documentary there I spent two two and a half months living in Venezuela in 2008 was still you know Bolivarian communism and stuff but that got me really bit me this travel bug because I realized that there was this sense of freedom that being you know in the middle of nowhere or in some third world country afforded that I couldn't I'd never previously imagined and it was that it's like only when you get out of the feeling of I mean I don't know you know America Romania different but Britain you have like the most surveilled people in the world and like Like even back, even like 10, 15 years ago, they said you could be filmed by 70 different

cameras on your way to work. So it's like a panopticon. And like, yes, this is the sort that the psychological effect of living in this kind of a society where there's a quite a still like it's disintegrating, but there's still quite a sophisticated security system. And it does like monitor and control certain people, especially if you're, you know, middle class, and you want to make sure they understand things and when you go to another country, go to other parts of the world and you can just feel a sense of like liberation just from not being surveilled that was that was enough to make it appealing to me but also i just like uh meeting strange peoples uh going into the jungle seeing animals and this kind of thing yes no the united

states uh is about as bad as britain maybe not with the cameras but i recently speak to friend who also, I haven't been back to America in years, and he also hates going back every time. He says even before the plain lands, when you are approaching the eastern seaboard of the United States, you feel heaviness. And I think it's not just the political regime. I really think the North American land mass is cursed in some way. I believe this, Tom. And I always, I couldn't live there it feels yes there's a pressure a heaviness I'm joked about it I'm not sure it's a joke it might be true that under the New York Federal Reserve they have a machine they turn on this machine they use certain rays against me and my friends to basically implant thoughts in our heads and destroy spiritedness or

other things but I yeah I there's no reason to go back to to to America and And then the UK has the surveillance and I've heard similar problems with the bleak city landscapes is what I've heard, although the land itself is supposed to be nice. But I've heard about the bleak city landscapes. And in general, regarding travel and what you say and the escape from these tightly controlled or pressurized systems of America, the UK, I would add Europe to that. They're all incredibly antiseptic and controlled. It's not just the cameras, it's the weight of convention hanging over everything. It's the fact that every aspect of life seems, there's somebody looking at you commenting, there's some kind of pathetic commentary on everything you do or observation of what you do.

Whereas in the third world, a lot of it is filthy, yes, and there's crime, but it doesn't have this antiseptic quality and the government is too incompetent to control you. makes a big difference. There's a real sense of freedom, I, yes. It's like seeing, you know, a woman in Southeast Asia with like five children balanced on the back of a moped, like, it's like, it's okay, in one sense you can say, I've traveled with like other Westerners and they're like horrified when they see stuff like that in India or wherever. And then, but I think when I see it, I'm like, ah, what a relief to just know that okay yes this is that's a bad this is a very bad decision as a parent but ah she's her she can she can do what she wants this is it's not my problem or is

that just doesn't exist in it's not just the state and surveillance there's a kind of when I lived in Sweden the same things there it's like I spent three years living in Sweden and like that's the general pressure of northern Europeans to ensure like you know conform to your behavior especially on things like that. And like that, I mean, nowadays, it doesn't matter so much because I'm like, I'm pushing 40. And I'm a dad of two. But when I was a young man, I craved liberty very strongly and I hated to be to feel that I grew up in what is like the trad ideal was a rural English village. But um, and that's what I wanted to return to when I lived in the city I did crave that what I craved about the countryside is the is the peace,

quiet and the animals and nature but not so much the actual I mean I do like having a village but when I was a young man I did not like being in a village at all and I really wanted to get out and it's very um it was oppressive and I had like you know police would just like come and just you know like taunt me and stuff because they were bored they didn't know there were no crimes around so like I was making sandwiches in a local shop and they'd just come into the shop and start asking me if I commit any crimes and stuff like this it's really like pestering me because they you know there's nothing going on and they're all there's not any respect for young men in that kind of environment there's no room for them uh and so yeah I didn't actually start experience traveling

until later but I do think that like you happen to be alive right now in one of those rare periods of history it's like a little window in history where a young western man although he has a lot of problems to face he actually is capable without from say if you save a bit of money you can go pretty much anywhere on the planet you want and that has never been the case before and it's not likely to be the case for very long i'm sure this is uh this is a brief you know halcyon period and there won't be and there will be you know there'll be all kinds of excuses to raise taxes on fuel for flights and to try and prevent people being able to move around yeah it won't last forever so i'd I'd say to young people, however decadent it may seem, if you're a young man, take the opportunity

and just see some of the world while you can. It's also good realization to see how much of life in a so-called developed world is a scam, especially in the United States. I've called it the sheepshearing operation. And when you go to some third world countries and you see the things available there, sometimes it's like a weight lifted off you realize, Well, life doesn't need to be this way, it appears in America, which is really, I think, a place built for women and Catholics and so on. I want to be polite, I don't want to say more, Tom, and we should talk, we should remember nice things. In that sense, I want to ask you, of the countries you've traveled, what are some most striking, unusual travel memories? I know you said Venezuela. Did you go into, were you just in the city,

or did you go into the wilderness there? Did you see the gigantic table mountain type, what are they called? I climbed, I did the entire country, basically, because I was there for two and a half months. I was very like strongly, ideologically against the idea of being a traveler and like hearing about like travel, what do they call it? The hippie trail, the banana pancake trail, where people do like a day in Peru, a day in, you know, like Brazil, and then they go on. But you can't see anything that way. You don't learn anything about anything. So I was like, no, I'm not going to learn. I'm going to be immersed in the culture and I'm not going to stay in hotels. I'm going to live with people. So I stayed in Venezuelan families' homes and that included middle-class families

and also in the slums. I had like hooking up with girls in the slums and stuff like that. Yes. That was a fun way of learning. I didn't even speak any Spanish when I got there, but I just learned as I went. And I had like, I went in the jungle. So I climbed the only Tapu'i that you can climb, which is Buraima, which was first scaled by British people in the late 19th century, I think, or early 20th, and it's the inspiration for the Disney Pixar film, Up, which has a similar one. And I went to the waterfalls, the angel falls in the jungle. I went into the Kanaima National Park, which is named after that dark shamanic tradition of Kanaima, which Stone Age herbalists post about. and I had their very, very surreal and prophetic dreams that changed me forever. I dreamed of these-

What happened to this? Yeah, I dreamed of this. I was dreaming of, in my dream, I was in the hammock in the jungle. I was just sleeping in a hammock strung between two trees. And I felt like this, in the dream, there was this ape creatures and I could feel like all of the different animals in the jungle, like talking through these ape creatures. And I didn't, I wasn't well birthed enough in the local zoology to actually know that there are no apes in the Americas. There are no apes in South America. But anyway, there was like this ape and it, there were only monkeys. There are lots and lots of monkeys, but no apes. And it reached out and touched my chest. And then I felt it touch, like it would, I woke up and it was like a real, something was grabbing my chest,

but then there was nothing there. But then afterwards I looked into it and there was all these legends of apes that the like the white man saw, like the Spaniards encountered in the jungles of Canaima. And there was even a photograph you can see online of one of them, they allegedly caught, but people were like, no, that's just a gibbon and you cut the tail off or whatever, but it doesn't look like a gibbon. Anyway, I don't know what it was. It was only a dream, but I tell you, it was very not like a normal dream. It was really real and it definitely changed the way I think about things. Have you heard of the nice theory that humans are descended from New World monkeys and not Old World apes? Yeah, that was Positonius. Do you remember this critic user?

He used to tell me about how the out of America theory, how like there was an ape in America that evolved into mankind and stuff. Well, it's even the monkeys in South America now, they are monogamous, there is paternal investment, they have vocalizations and many other such things, whereas the African apes don't really have the kinds of vocalizations that South American monkeys do. They don't have paternal investment, et cetera. There are certain things about South American monkeys that seem closer to mankind, you know. Yeah, it's a cool theory. I think there's, I don't know if it's true, but it's cool. I mean, I'm interested in like the gaps in human origin stories. Like I'm generally convinced, I'm not like 100% set on out of Africa,

but I'm generally convinced that the weight of evidence does indicate that the majority of non-African humans ancestry does originate in Africa, just on the genetics, but I mean, there's so many gaps in our knowledge, especially in terms of archeology, like to try and match the DNA up to the archeology that there could be, I could well be wrong. Not like it's a confident in it at all. Well, yes, I intend, let's talk archeology a little bit later, but in regards to its relationship with travel, you know, Alexander Humboldt, he visits Venezuela, I think. Yeah, I was reading Alexander von Humboldt while I was in the tributaries of the Orinoco and he was reading about him on the Orinoco. And I called an anaconda, like wrestling it out the water.

And I had like a condensed version of his travel writings called Jaguars and Electric Eels. I never saw any jaguars there, but I found their footprints in the jungle. Never, never saw one, but yeah. He was a great man, a very interesting fellow. Yes, he visited there around 1800. I heard from a common friend of ours. He says there is a rumor, there's a lost Alexander Humboldt notebook essay saying that he found Negritos in the Tepuis of Venezuela. Ah, interesting. That would be nice because I think it's obvious that some Negrito population spread around the world in some prehistoric time. I don't know. When you know about the genetic evidence, there's two forms of evidence that go back to archaeology and genetics, but like two forms of evidence that there was some kind

of the Grito race in the Americas. One is the residual sort of Australoid affinities found in some Amazonian peoples in their DNA. And the other is, I think they found an ancient DNA sample that also has even high amounts of it from somewhere in South America. It escapes my memory exactly where. Yeah, there must be some, there's some explanation. And someone told me that it's perhaps that the ability of the Aboriginal Australians to spirit travel using through dream time they can they can project themselves into the amazon at will when they when they wish yes it's very odd because the tribes they found with this signature are quite isolated and nobody knows they're kind of in eastern brazil i don't know how they would have

gotten there through the andes uh i mean coming from the pacific or something like that but no this is all very interesting but you also traveled a lot i understand to sri lanka and india uh yeah those was also had a magical element please you beat hippies there i i heard about sail on them i heard that sri lanka has magical feeling i don't mean to interrupt yeah the first time i went to sri lanka and it was 10 years ago and i had a girlfriend at the time and she was a psychology student and she was doing some kind of aid work for like the sri lanka um you know the uh tsunami victims and stuff and like yeah yeah she was like trying to tell them you know i was telling her just leave they got Buddhism that's all the psychological help they need but she was saying

you know they need western but they need western psychological psychiatry or whatever to help get over anyway uh uh we were i was hoping you would say she's a psycho but sorry go on she was a psycho probably but i don't know she wasn't that bad but yeah anyway she we we split up shortly after but the point is she she didn't want me to come with her at first but then afterwards she got there and she was having a hard time getting sexually harassed by like every time she was on a bus like all the brown people were like groping, she was Swedish, like my current wife is Swedish as well but like for some reason I attract Swedes, met both of them, they were like grabbing her hair so anyway she said she wanted me to come out there

so I was like, I had gone through like, I was like going through some spiritual like development things and then it was interrupted and I thought okay whatever I'm doing here in London it's being deliberately interrupted I have to go to Sri Lanka for some reason, I don't understand why but it's It's obvious I got to go there. So I went there and met her. And then I went up to the hills, the hill country. And I was like, insanely, it was the weirdest thing. I was like saying to her, this is like where I come from or something. I can just feel it. I just know this is like where my people come from here. They don't understand how. And then like a couple of years later after I got, I had this problem with my ancestry research because there'd been a mistranscription

of the birthplace of my great grandfather. They wrote Aton on ancestry.com. I actually found out, I looked at the actual documents, it said salon. My great-grandfather was born in salon in that hill country where I knew, I don't know how I just felt it, I could tell that's where I'm from. You're from a Raj, you're from an Indian, I mean just to let the audience know, I think most people know what you look like. Mr Tom Rosewell has perfect, I don't mean to embarrass you, Tom, but perfect Anglo-Saxon Viking physiognomy, but your family lived in the British Raj. They were in colonial India, yes? That's right, yeah. They started off in Sri Lanka. My great-great-grandfather went there, and he was a tea planter, and then he got made the

Ceylon Labour Commissioner. So he was responsible for all the Tamils there. It was like importing the Tamils basically. The Tamils being the the English Empire's preferred method of biological warfare. They were good workers. The Sinhalese noble race but they are not good workers. They were less inclined to do manual labor because they considered themselves above it and we needed people who needed these low-caste Tamils who were not above that and they would just get stuck into the tea pitcher. So that was why we did it and he was good at importing them and then helping the he became like an employee of the Sri Lankan government actually to and then he moved out to India afterwards but his son had already been my great-grandfather had already been

born in Sri Lanka at that point and yeah I didn't know this at the time the first time I went there and then after I learned all the stuff I then found out that I actually have relatives there because my great-great-grandfather's wife, she was in Sri Lanka as well with him, and her brother was also a planter out there, and he, after his wife died of malaria or whatever, a lot of anglers were just dropping like flies there because of the tropical diseases. Well then, you know, men get lonely, you know, so he needed something to keep him warm at night, so he took of native and uh and then had um children with her and the offspring of that uh of that that uh that issue started family there so i have like long lost relatives who are native Sri Lankans so

i went out i was invited to their home and there were really good people like lovely and they helped me find all the records of my family when i went back in 2016 and then in 2018 when i was living in sweden working for the world health organization as a science communicator randomly they took me to who they sent me out to India, like really close to where my family had lived in India in the Nilgiri Hills. So, and then I went, I didn't know where my great-great-grandfather had died. Nilgiri, that's also a tea growing region, no? Yeah, that's right. He was out there. His daughter was married to a big tea grower out there. So I thought that he didn't live there, actually. He lived in Tircanupali, which is where his offices were. But I just knew, I just had a feeling he died here

because I knew that his daughter lived there. And then when I went there to the church, the Tamil bloke was like, oh, I'll show you the records. And then we looked for the records and there it was. And then I found his grave was around the back. And like, I just found my great-great-grandfather's grave. And I had no plan or intention to go. Like India is like a whole continent practically. Like the odds that I would be sent by my job in Sweden to exactly that part, it's very slim. And I don't believe in coincidence and stuff. think all those travel all those travels were you know spiritual journeys for me but not in a way that like most people mean when they say they're going to find themselves in India yes though this

very interesting when you were in Sri Lanka were you long enough to go around the whole country um and had there been yet the complete defeat of the of the Tamil tigers in that country yet um and uh then my other question is if you saw the gigantic buddhist stupas that apparently were built by greek monks from the ancient greek kingdoms in bactria apparently they sent and they call you know they uh they said these stupas in in sri lanka the locals say they were built by 50 000 yona monks yona being you know the local name for greeks the ionians uh is this true did you see these things there i regret to say i didn't my my brother was in Sri Lanka during the war in 2009 and he told me about some things he saw but I did uh like when I went there in 2013

and then again in 2016 the conflict was over I visited most of the the island of the southern parts of the island uh like the western coast eastern coast the south coast and the hill country but I never went into the north which is the really Tamil area so I'd like to go back and explore like the Tamil regions of uh because there's actually two types of Tamils in Sri Lanka to be clear like there's the what's called um plantation tamils which are the kind that my ancestor brought over and uh then there's the ones who arrived in the medieval times when the i think it's the chola dynasty of tamil there was like the tamils actually were one of the most uh successful and like far-reaching and an expansionist of all the indian civilizations

they were the ones who pushed indian culture into indonesia like in bali and play and all the way in thailand and everywhere like they were really very very but they don't have you know very much aryan dna so it's like everyone wants to think of like indian civilization has been because of the aryans but actually the one of the most successful and advanced of all the indian civilizations was not particularly aryan and tamil is not an aryan language either but yes the the the and uh people forget southern india even today is is much uh better off than northern india is it not cleaner yes yeah my the the where i went the city i was running most of my work in in india was my saw misaru they call it now i think but it's uh there's i didn't see any open defecation so i was

yes the meme wasn't real at least there i think there's lots in other parts but yeah the medieval tamils are i think the tamil tigers are mostly people who were from like descended from the medieval Tamil population which is in the north a lot. I think most of the British imported Tamils are not as much involved in the Tamil tiger terrorist movement, maybe I shouldn't call it terrorist movement whatever, but I mean in Sweden the government's 100% like on the Tamil side because they're the underdog. I don't really have a specific, I mean the Sinhalese are like 75% of the population and it's their country originally, so I mean I don't know if I don't really have any strong feelings about on either side.

We don't need to talk about this conflict. I do think it's interesting though that it's the Tamil tigers who spearheaded the practice of suicide bombing which people today assume is some kind of religious uh motivated uh activity and that it shows that we live in a religious political uh political religion time. This was a big thing in the early 2000s with after 9 11 and and so forth, but the vast majority of suicide bombings I think are still to this day have been carried out by secular people, including the Tamil Tigers or leftist PLO, not as much religious people. But we don't need to go down this tangent, Tom. I want to ask you, Arthur C. Clarke lived in Ceylon and there are rumors that he did so because of his predilection for little boys and such.

And I'm wondering if in your travels in the third world, you have run into this type of, it's an older type of, you know, whenever I meet certain people, they say I'm not attacking you or myself, by the way. I'm just, because I travel to similar places, but you always run into these kinds of older men who are, oh, I travel to such and such place for the weather, but it's well known by the locals what they actually travel for, so I don't know. Well, I know a bit about the case of Major General Sir Hector Macdonald, which was, I'm not convinced, I'm not sure if you know about this, but this was like in the time of my ancestors living in Sri Lanka, there was, you know, the British attitude is you don't mix with the natives, You don't fraternize with them in any respect.

So the idea of bumming little boys would be completely off the cart. But the way that the actual culture of the planters was a bit like what you call it, the longhouse culture. So like it was, all the men were out busy working and doing stuff with military or with the plantations and the women were left to like manage the Anglo-homeland like centers of culture in India and Sri Lanka. And so it was quite like gossip-based. And if you showed up in somewhere in like one of these settlements as a newcomer, like looking to make a fortune and you don't, I didn't, like you can see this in Kipling's novels. Like if you didn't fit in, then they would just start rumors about you. So like, so Major General Sir Hector Macdonald was like a great war hero and stuff, but it was alleged in Sri Lanka

that other planters started saying that he was bumming little boys. And the final result was that he, I mean, Aleister Crowley actually went to Sri Lanka at the time and met him. And then at the same time, my family were living there. I wonder, well, cause the founder of Wicca, you know, Gerald Gardner was also born in Sri Lanka and all these like magicians and stuff and like wizards and pay neo-pagans or whatever happening from Sri Lanka. My family were Freemasons, like there was a Masonic lodge up in the mountains of Sri Lanka that my family were involved in. So I wonder whether they had any connection and it's a Crowley. Anyway, when he got back to England, he was like, he tried to defend Hector McDonald, but the result was that he'd gone to,

Hector McDonald fled to Paris and then shot himself. So I wonder whether he really was a pedophile or whether he was just a victim of this kind of gossip, you know, attack. But yeah. And I don't know about Arthur C. Clarke himself, but that's very interesting that a lot of these rumors would be started by the local Euro female society. It makes sense, you know. Yeah, it's not the natives. In fact, I don't think the natives even had strong taboos against that sort of thing, like as much. It's the white people there. To give you an idea, like the traditional food, like they didn't even eat the fresh tropical fruits in India and Sri Lanka, because they didn't want to go native. So they would import tinned beaches and only eat like

tinned European fruit. So there was like, okay, they were living in India, but there was a very strong like you don't mix with them religion you don't mix with their these people so there was like in there was that's partly why it's so different to the spanish form of colonialism or the french form of colonialism like the anglo lived as an anglo in every single possible respect even when he was in the middle of the jungle yes no this is very interesting you mentioned your special feel when you first came to saillon that you felt you must have been there before a kind of intimacy um and i have no doubt that maybe you had racial memories from your grandfather, great-grandfather and so on. But I've never been to Ceylon, but I heard from someone

else that he had a very special feel when he came there. And then also, I was in Bali, which of course people say is ruined by Instagram tourists taking photos on the beach and so on. But I think despite the glut of tourists, Bali does have this incredible magical feel. I've again felt it even before the plane landed. I really do think it's a blessed island. it's just uh there's a magical feel in some of these islands and i was wondering if if i know you've been to indonesia i was wondering if you felt that in bali or other parts of indonesia you've been in yeah i had my honeymoon with my wife in indonesia and we spent like a week in sumatra like looking at orangutans in the jungle and looking like really really third world

shithole parts of sumatra and um and after that like we were really ready for some luxury so we're So we're going to go to Bali and have like some, you know, like night, one of those like Instagram hotel kind of experiences, because we've been sleeping in like, like places with shit stains on the walls and kind of, so we were fed up with that. But um, but yeah, I know, like Bali, okay, it's true what people say it's full of tourists, like obnoxious, unpleasant kind of tourists. It's all Instagram thoughts. The traffic is insanely bad now, because it's so overpopulated, like all the trash from Java and Sumatra like who want to just make a buck like the Muslims just trying to scan tourists just move there and try and get in on scams and you to drive from A to B takes ages because it's just

gridlock traffic all that's true but what you said is also true you can sense there is a there's something sacred about it like it is a holy place and just walking around like some of the ruins of the temples like even when they're very crowded it is a very holy place and I was really like refreshed to be there when I got there from Sumatra because it was so different and the Balinese are really lovely people. I mean, I like Indonesians, they're okay, but the Balinese are the best Indonesian. They're very friendly, yes, and have their culture, the temples, the Hindu temples are, yes, Instagram aside, but they are fascinating to see. The other problem besides the third world filth that you mentioned, you know, open ditches next to roads and so on, is also that

you will almost inevitably get sick and that's unfortunately true for many of these countries. But that makes the achievement of Europeans of the past so much more impressive. I was wondering, do you have any like or opinion about men like Rajabruk who set up his own kingdom in Sarawak, in Indonesia. I guess it's Malaysian, Borneo, not now, right? I don't know. But do you... I have greatly admired this man. There's a biography by Bron Simon, the white Rajas, but it's really, it must have been inspiration for Conrad and so on, just an adventurer setting up, English adventurer, setting up his own kingdom in Indonesia. I've not read about Rajabrook, but it reminds me of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King and the, you know, the attempt to become

kings of Nuristan, Kefiristan, among the Kalash or whatever. This I do admire and I think it's very interesting and there's an appeal, I think there's this ancient Indo-European desire, isn't there, to just go to a new land and impose upon, become the king among this race of foreigners, which is probably the model of Indo-European expansion really. yeah I think that's well that's what the evidence seems to suggest anyway but yeah I think that those kind of men were really great and like I think sometimes it's understated like how many people died because when I was in India and when I was in Sri Lanka I don't one of the things I did was visit all the graveyard the British graveyards and it's just so many young people dying

and they're not just that like I mean also if you read some of Kipling's short stories about like the baby like you have babies if you're there with your wife you're like your baby's quite likely to die of fever like white children just don't do well in malarial zones at all so like it was a constant like all everyone you everyone who lived there in these communities knew at least one person who's died like a young of like a tropical disease at least one so that So that could be your next door neighbor, your wife, your children. It's it's like a massive risk. It wasn't just like a gold mine for them. It was like, OK, there's a chance that I'll be able to make a good living if I go out there and there are opportunities for people that might not be there in the homeland.

So they'll take a risk. But there's also that the risk is like not just on them. It's like on their whole family. They've got to bring them out there. And it's it's brave and it's not a heroic death like dying of dysentery, like shitting yourself to death. There's nothing glamorous about that at all. That and that's what a lot of them fixed. Yes Much of Africa also inaccessible for for the reason you just said Tom. We should go to break soon I want to come back and continue talking about the matter you just brought up the ancient Indo-europeans the proto indo-europeans the ancient indo-european spirit Which I actually I think in modern times has been better preserved by the English people some of the English people and the Dutch

much, not as much by what most people think, but we can come back to talk about that. Before we leave for break, I wanted to ask you, because recently with travel, you and other friends have had problems at borders of Anglosphere, specifically the five ice this would be Canada, United States, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and do you care to say anything at all about that? Yeah, you know, it's true that I mean, I, I'm in Britain here, I have had in 2020 problems with the intelligence services at the border entering on my way back from holiday in Turkey and then after then like loads of my friends not all of them public figures like just you know friends uh but they because they have like the they you don't have when they

stop you on the counter they use counter-terror legislation so that you don't have any rights you don't have the right to remain silent you don't have anything so they just take your phone download everything off of it and then any of your mates who are on your phone it becomes suspects and they get stopped when they go on holiday as well and they do the same treatment to them like they can hold you for up to six hours let me interrupt you before i are you allowed to refuse your phone in other words do they need your password do they need your password you're not allowed to do anything of the sort uh they could arrest you then for a non-corporation in a counter-terror um yes like thing but then i don't know whether

you know how hard they would charge you but might be quite a minor charge but the general offset now Now since at least 2019 has been, or at least for me it's 2020 and I've told people since then, you should never travel over a border with sensitive data of any kind. You should just have it, just make sure that you don't do that and it's on you not to be carrying stuff like that over a border because you should presume that if you go over a border it's possible that it could be taken from you. Well especially the UK border and I mean I won't even take any connecting flight through any of the five ice countries. But I interrupted you, you were saying something about six hours, I just I want to ask you, because this practical details can be of quite some interest to

get the maximum they can hold you is six hours under this legislation. And that's quite a long time, especially if they stop you say, like, in my case, I hadn't slept for 24 hours by the time they got to me. So I was absolutely I was in a state, to be honest, yes, my son had been crying all the way back from Turkey. And anyway, they only held me for four hours, fortunately. But I know other people since then who stopped multiple times. So obviously, they didn't get very anything interesting from me because they didn't stop me again. But other people, they take an interest and they don't necessarily I'm not just talking about people who are public figures. I talk about anyone they can just pick on people. And I think it might

be dying down a bit in Britain now. But at the time, I think there was a big pressure on the counter-terrorist people to make some arrests that weren't Muslims because their entire, it's like they were getting big heat from the Guardian and the associated groups for their own use. It's very interesting. You know, they banned, yeah, they did that before with Michael Savage, you know, the radio doc show host in United States, and he's still banned from entering England, I think. And when they made the announcement, it was him and a bunch of radical Muslims and so on, probably they added him to show that she were not only attacking Muslims, but I just want people to understand something. Michael Savage is considered so-called pretty extreme, even within the United

States. He was never on Fox News. They have a fatwa against him on Fox News, going back a while. In any case, extreme or not, he's an explicitly political commentator. You are not, Mr. Roussel, is one of the best historians I know. You talk about antiquity, you talk about Anglo-Saxon antiquity, you talk about many things we've talked about now, world cultures, you are not really a political commentator. You're kind of adjacent to that for reasons we will discuss later, because everything's so insanely politicized now that what you do is considered radical tending or whatever, maybe. but it's just odd they stop a historian at the border and it's not just you they've stopped other people who've been in the news or who have a public profile the way you or I do

and even people who don't even people who don't I know people who literally have no like no public things at all and they're being stopped uh under this legislation because they're like they're just adjacent to it they're adjacent to it like it's like because they know that they know people or whatever they're like is this a surveillance state in the UK and then and and then to make it clear like I didn't say this year I was prevented from entering America my my um my my visa waiver the ESTA program that's between the UK and USA was uh was revoked at the last minute and I was supposed to go and do a talk in Philadelphia uh this summer and it was revoked so uh and then afterwards I got some like I I can't remember I I got complained to the relevant

department and they responded said look we we can't paraphrase him we can't tell you the reason why you weren't allowed in and why your visa your visa waiver was revoked however a small minority of the people who complained to us approximately two percent but what accidentally added to terror watch lists and we can't say that this is what happened to you however we will say that if you were to attempt to uh apply to for a visa waiver again you should be fine so my impression from that is that somebody uh in the you know homeland department whatever in america decided to put stick me on a terror watch list at the last minute to try and stop me going and then they've taken me off again now because they realized that i'm not a terrorist and it's stupid to put me on there in

the first place yes i just find this very very interesting that that's someone like you who is a historian and a cultural commentator and you get stopped. You can't come into the United States, you get stopped at the UK border. Other friends similar to you do that. I avoid these borders completely. I think it's very odd to see who can and cannot cross these borders. But Tom, I think I must go to break because my friend Brennan is here and he has made mistake like fixing my coffee and I must punish him severely. The ex-CIA chief Brennan needs severe punishment. So why don't we take a five-minute break and then we can come back and discuss this very interesting matter you brought up of the Indo-European spirit and what it means

in our world and what it was actually in antiquity. What do you say? Sounds good to me. Very good. We will be right back. Yes, welcome back. We are back to Caribbean rhythms and And I feel better now, my coffee is ready here, and I am here with Mr. Tom Rauzel, one of the most interesting historians, I think, commenting now on many ancient matters, Anglo-Saxon history, British history and culture, paganism, and especially interest of mine is the ancient And Indo-Europeans, let's just call them the Aryans, shorthand, if that's okay, Tom. And the proto-Indo-Europeans, their culture, their religion, what can be known about them. And I wanted to ask you, Tom, because I think there's some misunderstanding on this matter from well, many sides, but especially origin of this misunderstanding.

19th century German Arianism, and it was preserved in different ways by Ludwig Klages, who is otherwise someone I like very much, a philosopher, Klages, and implicitly I think by Heidegger, in which they saw the Arian way, the ancient Indo-European way, as something static, as as a golden age of farming, let's say the farming commune is something, and Clages looked back actually to the Pelasgians and believed that they had the kind of golden age of mankind, even though I don't think they were Indo-European at all, but that's debatable. And in general, this attitude is preserved today among some pagans, among some nationalists who, again, they idolize things that they attribute to the ancient Aryans that are, in my view, not Aryan. They're actually neolithic, Near Eastern farming culture.

And I want to read a couple of passages just so audience understands what this debate is. Please forgive me, Tom, while I read. According to Müller, this was a 19th century German historian, The enemies of the Indo-Europeans were, above all, people that he called Turanians, roughly corresponding, let's say, to Turkic or Eurasian step-Turkic nomads. This strange word can be traced all the way back to Avestan, but its modern ideological service first began through the Persian folk tale tradition about the three brothers, Salm, Tur, and Iraj. This tradition is elaborated especially in Firdawasi Shahnameh from the 11th century when Iraj, related to the Arya, Iranian Arya, et cetera, is presented as the forefather of the Iranian peoples

and Tur as the forefather of the wild nomadic Turkic peoples who raged in the northern and eastern parts of Iran. The similarities between the names of Santur and Iraj and the Nohites gave rise during the 18th century to speculations that the two groups of brothers were actually identical. In the various attempts to adapt Jones' discovery of an Indo-European language family to the mosaic ethnography. This circumstance further confused the classifications. In the works of the philologist Friedrich Rückert, the attempt at convergence resulted in the notion that it originally existed a Semitic, an Aryan, and a Turanian race. Müller was Rückert's pupil, and he adopted and popularized this triad. The word Turan, according to Müller, originally meant speed of a horse,

and therefore he concluded that the enemies of the ancient Iranians had been mounted nomads. At the time when the Avesta was composed around 1000 BC, Iranian farmers supposedly had already struggled against ancient relatives of the Tatars, Mongols, and Turks. Consequently, these people spoke what Mueller called nomadic or Turanian languages. During the 19th and a good part of the 20th centuries, the opposition between Iranians or Aryans, the people of the Plough, and the Turanians, the warlike and barbaric nomads, was one of the central pillars in the discourse about the Indo-Europeans. During the second half of the 20th century, etc., there was a complete reversal, but this text I'm saying continues. The archaeologist Marek Svelibil has described how archaeologists and historians

during the 19th, 20th century systematically idealized those three farmers who cultivated their own land and posited them as our true ancestors. And well, I don't want to bore people too much, But, well, perhaps this next one is especially interesting as regards ancient religion, because it talks about the mother goddess of fertility. In spite of the fact that Fustel de Culan, Schrader, Hurt, and other scholars maintain that ancient Aryaland had had a patriarchal culture, the question arose whether our ancestors had lived in the matriarchy at some point. If the comparative history of law did not give any support to this opinion, could the hypothesis perhaps still be proved indirectly by presenting evidence that there had once existed a cult of Mother Earth.

If the Indo-Europeans were farmers, then according to the anthropological theories of the time, they should have worshiped the earth that gave them its harvest. And he keeps going, describing these theories of the time, how they must have worshiped Mother Earth, and how even Jacob Grin, in his book about German mythology, claimed to have found traces of an ancient Indo-European Mother Earth goddess and so forth. And I believe that these images, Tom, have been actually preserved in our time to where a lot of people who invoke Aryanism, Indo-European paganism and so on, actually are confusing it for Neolithic farmer culture when, in fact, the Aryans maybe were much closer to the wild Turkic nomads of later times. and this opposition that was put between Aryan farmers

of civilization on one hand and Semitic nomads on the other is false or misunderstanding of what the ancient Aryans actually were. I've been talking a long time. I know you have opinions about this. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, those guys in the old, the 19th century scholars, they got a lot wrong, but they're so clever and they got so much right. Like that false narrative that was just presented by Clagas and people like Muller and all sorts of other scholars at the time said things that actually like, there's a lot right, that they're guessing right, but they got something wrong. It comes partly from an assumption that they know that there's like an early, under-grather primitive Europe, and then some point farming comes in and they assume from outside, they were correct.

And they also know Indo-European languages sort of come in at some point. And they, because they are aware that Indo-European languages are present in Asia, they start to, because at this time, they correctly identified that the most archaic written Indo-European language is in the Rig Veda. It is the most archaic, but that's just because it's written down earlier. Like what later linguists trying to reform Indo-Europeanism saying Sanskrit is the most archaic, is more archaic than Latin, because Latin is recorded from like 2000 years ago and the Sanskrit is three and a half thousand years old. but the descendants of like Lithuanian is more archaic than Hindi. Yes. Like Icelandic is more archaic than Hindi. So it doesn't, it's just, they're just like measuring

on the time that's written down and not the time, not from now. So that Sanskrit is not the most archaic in the European language. It's just more archaic than the other written ones because it's written down earlier. And the idea that then the assumption that we need to place the homeland close to the Aryan homeland, which is what they used to do. That was a big sort of feeling, especially among German scholars that the Aryan homeland, which Aryan meaning the ancestors of the Indians and the Iranians must be in Central Asia. And they're right, it was. But in those days they conflated Proto-Indo-European and Aryan. Hence, that's why traditionally we refer to Proto-Indo-Europeans as Aryans like you like to, but I prefer not to because of the very important fact

that the Aryans lived like over a thousand years after the Proto-Indo-Europeans. And I like to think of them as a different people because they were culturally slightly different, although very, very similar actually, like in many ways, but, and obviously one was descended from the other, but the thing they couldn't have known at the time, which we now know, and which the great scholar, Sir Colin Renfrew was like, he was one of the big guys for like Indo-European homeland being from Anatolia because he understood that farming from his archeological knowledge was likely to have entered into Europe from Anatolia with a migration of people. And he was correct, that did happen. And then he also just presumed that that was also accompanied

by the spread of Indo-European languages, but he was wrong. And we know that he was wrong because there was a second migration into Europe. So it was actually, the reason why they got mixed up is because there isn't just one disruptive migration into Europe, there are two. The first is of Anatolian farmers and the second is of Indo-Europeans from this depth. These Turanians that Yevestin talks about are Scythians. So the Iranians have a settled culture in Persia where they blended with the Elamites and become a settled civilized culture. but other Iranic peoples remained on the steppe and did not adapt to that. And they became a sort of a foil to Persian. The Scythians were like Iranic, but not Iranian in that sense. And they were an enemy of the Persian people and like tourism like,

and in a sense they are the ancestors of the Turkic people because of the Turkic migrations out of Siberia absorbed the Scythians and formed like the Turkic peoples of the steppe. And so, yeah, it's true that the Turkey peoples the steppe were in many ways the cultural inheritors of the original tyrannic indo-european culture but so yeah that's why these guys got a lot wrong but so much I don't like to speak it too ill of the 19th century guys because they were so clever in so many ways and like even in 1851 an Englishman Robert Latham said that he thinks the real indo-european Heimat was actually southern Russia and that was pretty unpopular in the mid 19th century century, but he was right, we know it now, the Yamnaya. And Victor Helm had said at the time,

only in England, the land of eccentricities, someone could place the primitive habitat of the Indo-Europeans in Europe. And even as recently as the National Socialists, a lot of them believed that the Aryan homeland, as they called it, meaning Indo-European homeland, must have been in Asia, and they were looking around in Tibet and stuff like that for evidence of it. They were wrong, it was much closer to home in Ukraine in Russia and this idea that of the aria being uh meaning plow is an etymological it's a proposed etymology of aria but it's i don't think it's widely accepted uh and actually if you look at like the who the aria the actual archaeological cultures associated with the aria which is the

mutual ancestors of the persians and the and the uh indo-aryans it's it's sintastha and andronovo and they've got some farming but they're not focused on agriculture. Their economy is, you know, metallurgy and pastoralism. They've got big herds, so it just doesn't make sense. And Arya doesn't mean plow in any of the descendant Indo-Iranic languages, it means noble. So I think that's what it meant really. And there may be actually an earlier pre-Iranian, pre-Iranic, pre-Indo-Iranic, like, cognate of Aria, which would be potentially in Proto-Indo-European Arios, in which case the Yamnaya and the Cordewear people would have called themselves Arios, but that's speculative, we can't be sure of that etymology for sure. We know for sure

that the Andronovo people would have called themselves Arians or Aria, so that's a good word to call them, and that's why personally, I know we're like to get like, you know, on a high horse about it if you want to call the proto-europeans Aryans that's fine that's a traditional word that's been used in scholarship and whatever but for me i find it useful to distinguish the aria from the proto-europeans because there's a distance in time and space between them yes i didn't mean to cast a bad light on all 19th century german uh i mean i follow some of them especially in 1890s uh and um it's not 19th century but german archaeologists in the 1920s decided on this idea that the Indo-Europeans spread through elite dominance by a military case of charioteers.

And I think that's the correct model, we can argue about that, but it's not like all of them believed in this image of idyllic village farming life and so on. I do think it's interesting when you bring up Zoroastrianism and the Persians contrasting themselves to the wild nomads of the steppe who were actually an earlier version of themselves. Zarathustra Zoroastrianism is you can interpret as a kind of reversal of values transvaluation of values in which Zoroaster ends up identifying all the traits of the old Indo-Europeans from which the Persians themselves descended but he interprets all of that free wild nomadic warrior spirit as evil, and the traits of the sedentary farmers that the Persians had become by mixing

with non-Indo-Europeans, he identifies all of that as good, and the old Iranic mannerbunds who, you know, had black weapons and lived an extremely wild life where they worship these Apsara-like like Tyrai and so forth, he interprets those as the image of evil. I think it's interesting that Nietzsche names his book about Zarathustra, because I think he wants to see Zarathustra as reversing the bad judgment that he made, you see, that could be an interpretation, but I don't know if you want to comment on any of this or especially the military case of charioteer thing that I brought up. Well, that thing, my own feeling, that was one of the big problems Indo-Europeans face, the big humiliation for Indo-Europeanists was the real, because like, one of the things

that especially with mythological comparisons, like all these Indo-European cultures have gods conveyed by chariots, the Norse gods have chariots, the Greek gods have chariots, the Celtic, I don't know, actually, maybe not, I'm not sure about Celtic, but the Indian gods have chariots the chariots is a common thing so they must they reasonably concluded that the original indo-europeans had chariots but then the archaeological record shows conclusively they do not chariots were invented by sin testar which is the the real arian the aria the indo-iranians from about four thousand years ago their ancestors the proto-indo-europeans five thousand years ago in ukraine and south russia didn't have chariots in what we'd not now call a war chariot with

spoke wheels. They did have like wheeled vehicles. But they they're they mostly they and they definitely had road horses and they had horses that made the first people the Yamnaya and the Sredny Star were the first people to domesticate horses. But the the Sintashtar made the horses stronger and they developed viable military wheeled vehicles like there were the first two wheeled vehicles were from the catacomb culture, which is an offshoot of Yamnaya earlier, they're still using like solid wood and wheel vehicles. And anyway, the Proto-Indo-Europeans couldn't possibly have had guards conveyed by what we'd call chariots because they didn't have chariots yet. So this was a problem. So what it does seem is that the later, what we know for sure is that the Yanar horses

spread with Indo-Europeans in the Corded Ware, like the Corded Ware people in Europe had horses descended from Yanar horses. But then after the Sintashtar Aryans made better horses, all the horses in the world that had been spread by the Yamnaya were replaced. So the Sintashthara horses descended from Yamnaya horses as well anyway, but they were bred to be better with stronger spines. And now all the horses in the world descend from Sintashthara's horses. And what it seems to me is that the area of the Sintashthara spread with the horses as a horse breeding caste who were like used as, Like, if you wanted a chariot, if you wanted chariots and you wanted like these kind of war horses, like the Mitanni in the Middle East were basically people, Aryans from the steppe

who came into the Levant and brought, and like, they were like the horse lords, basically, who would like be hired by kings to be in charge of the stables and teeth. Cause like, it seems obvious now that, oh yeah, you can just, anyone can raise a horse, but actually if you consider a completely new technology, like the way that horses need to be broken in, the way that need to be trained, all of this were completely unknown to everyone the whole world accept them so they had these special skills so the horses didn't just spread by themselves like swords did like you can trade a sword and someone can figure out how to use it but the horses had to be traded with the men who would teach that you know teach a cavalry team or not a

cavalry except they didn't have cavalry yet but you know teach people how to use them effectively in war and i imagine that with that also spread an updated mythology so that that people reasonably started to give their gods the latest technology, so they probably previously were conveyed by wagons and then as the better technology came, chariots came. But yeah, I don't think Indo-European languages spread with chariots in most cases. Into India, yes, the first Aryans in India and Iran did have chariots, and into the Levant, yes, but the ones who spread into Europe didn't have chariots. But what about then, I like from Robert Drew's book, which I don't know if you like this writer Robert Drew's The Coming of the Greeks. He dates the Greek invasions of the Greek mainland, the

Arian invasions of the Greek mainland much later than other people. He thinks it happened around 1600 BC when there is actually a big wave of destruction and that's around when you start to to see the first beehive tombs with very step characteristics. But he interprets it very much in the late 19th century, early 20th century German tradition of charioteers. And he points also to, he thinks actually the settlement of Italy happened a little bit later than 1600 BC. But he points to this thing, the October horse ritual in Rome where the one lap race around, so there's one lap race on chariots and then the leftmost horse of the winning team gets sacrificed and it's exactly the same ritual in the Ashwamedha ritual in the Rig Veda. And so obviously, this is not something that,

I don't think that they would be introducing this later as an import, right? It's obviously this ritual coming from the same people with recent origins. What do you make of this argument that the actual invasion, at least of Mediterranean Europe would have come later in this way and would have come with chariots? It's possible, the earliest in progression of step DNA into Greece is 2200 BC, so much earlier than he's saying. And I'd say that's correct, that's gonna be the time that's probably the time for Proto-Greek, because Greek is an archaic, it's quite an early offshoot from Indo-European as far as you can tell. I wouldn't be surprised if there were later, it doesn't have to be a one-time event, there could be a later step movement around the time saying,

I don't really know about that, but it's perfectly possible. But as for the correspondence of the October horse with the Ashvamedha, or Ashvamedha, however it's pronounced, that definitely is, there's definitely a clear correspondence but I did a whole video about, called the Indo-European horse sacrifice was weird. And it compares the October horse to Asphemida and also to the Yule horse sacrifice, the Scythian funeral ritual of horse sacrifice. And it's clear that they're all the same in origin. And there's this association originally with the horse as a symbol, this horse is the sun. And in the Asphemida, actually it explicitly says the horse is the sun. What I think happened is that, I believe that the, my interpretation is that the Yamnaya already had,

and I think this is not at all controversial, the Yamnaya already met, for the Yamnaya from the earliest stage, the horse represents the sun and horse sacrifice is a solar ritual. And then once these advanced war chariots invented by Sintashthara, that also represents the sun. And the war chariot is just to stand in for the horse or can be included with many horses and a chariot being buried. So that it's, they're all solar. And there are some, I don't know if I go with this, but there are some people who go much further and say that actually the original association of the horse with the sun predates domestication of the horse and that actually relates to wild horses in the ice age and the fact that their breeding cycles correspond to solar cycles.

I don't know about that, but this is like, that would explain how it came because there's nothing innately obviously solar about a horse when I look at it. And we don't necessarily have to associate that connection with the domestication event of Yamnaya. So it's possibly possible that it was widespread before Yamnaya, anyway, the solar association of horses. But yeah, the specific core sacrifices we see in all these different Indo-European cultures are very much connected to the solace, the modes of the sun in the air, like in the Germanic case, it's like associated with yule. And it's also associated with the authority of the king. So the Ashwamedha is all about the king. It's about proving his authority by his, you know, he's conquered the son. And the exact same thing is in the,

it's in the Germanic horse sacrifice at Yule. It's the king who has to do it. And the king has the source we have in Haakonamal, where the Christian, the king converts to Christianity and he refuses to eat the horse meat at Yule, which is like Christmas time. And they, the Trondheimers in Norway get really, really upset because this is like extremely disruptive to their view of the universe, that the king won't participate in the sacrifice and consumption of a horse at Yule. Yes, no, this is very interesting. And I wonder, in your researches, have you come across much on idea of the divine twins in Indo-European mythology, because Druze also connects them to the typical war chariot team, which has a chariot driver and an archer. And if you look at Castor and Pollux,

they seem to be the same as the Ashvin twins from India, the Vedic mythology, and could also be the same as Horst and Hengist, the founders of Saxon England, and some other figures, perhaps from Indo-European. What do you, and the European mythology, do you believe that? I mean, but that goes again with the chariot thing, though, you know. I'm not sure, but I mean, I think they could probably be, the fact there's two of them, it could be like connected to the chariot and charioteer, but then there's a problem with like chariots and charioteers generally aren't like equals. Like one of them is socially superior to the other, I think so. Whereas these two twins don't seem to have that. But the twins have also this really solar significance in the mythos, which is not,

it's not really easy to reconstruct it. Even with like, we've got, it's clear Castor and Pollux and the Ashvins, and probably Hengist and Horsa, Romulus and Remus even perhaps, and many others. But often there are actually the founders of dynasties. So like the founder of the English race, Hengist and Horsa, the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. Like they're also usually the grandsons or great-grandsons of the sky father or the chief god. So Hengist and Horsa descended from Woden. There's a connection of these two, the Ashvins, to Jaos Peter, who is a minor god in Hinduism, but presumably based on etymology, Jaos Peter is the same as Jupiter. So he probably was prominent, more prominent at some point in history.

So but the mythological function is like involves like the reconstructed mythos of the two twins that they're like rescuers that they are they go after the damsel in distress there's a girl and she needs rescuing and they go and like fetch her and she has some kind of solar significance she's like related to the Sun God or the Sun goddess or she is the Sun goddess or something like that if it varies we can't really reconstruct it properly but it's really clear that there's like their role is to rescue a female who is related to the Sun in some respect So that's very interesting, and it's a little bit frustrating that it's too elusive for us to reconstruct based on what we have. I mean, the earliest actual mythos in the European mythos we got written down clearly is the Rig Veda.

And that's only 1500 BC, so it's quite a long time after the Amnaya and all that sort of thing. Yes, it is these precise kind of vivid myths that are obviously shared by these different cultures, including, you know, the poetic formulas, undying fame, and many such things. These are, in my view, knock out evidence, knock out arguments, whereas Dumezil with his tripartite division, probably correct, but that seems to me much less certain, more vague, other nations also have tripartite division. But in this connection, I wanted to ask you again, he's one of my favorite writers, Robert Drewes. His most recent book about Indo-Europeanization of temperate parts of Europe makes unusual case, points to the Anatolian languages, which have always had a very strange relationship

to the rest of Indo-European, but he thinks it's undeniable that they are much older, in fact, than Indo-European languages proper. And so he interprets them, maybe I'm slightly distorting, but he interprets the Anatolian languages as a kind of ancestor of Indo-Europeans who ended up moving with farming into, let's say the Caucasus, the Volga region, and over there they met someone else, probably hunter-gatherers, with who they mixed. And then that is really the birthplace of Indo-European languages proper, later than the Anatolian languages. But he doesn't spell it out, he's a scholar, he's very, I don't want to say dry, but he's a mainstream academic, and so he doesn't spell it out. But the kind of sense I got from his description

was that you have essentially a Near Eastern farming people who becomes wild, goes rewild, goes wild in the Volga region, mixes with wild tribes. The language changes and from that ethnogenesis, you get the Indo-European languages proper. Whether you agree with that or not, I don't know what you think about that. I don't want to keep you too long on this segment. I guess what I'm getting at is, Do you want to comment at all on what the Proto-Indo-European or Indo-European spirit might be? Because I see much significance in what I just said, that it's essentially a farming people who rejects that, who goes wild. I somewhat see that reflected in the myths across the different peoples. I don't know. I don't know about any mythological evidence for it,

actually, but maybe you can tell me about that. but I haven't read Robert Bruges, but what you've said of his theory is quite similar to now what's popularly being presented by Harvard, like by the Wright Club, David Wright, and Joseph Lazaridis are trying to promote this in their big paper called, a southern art paper. It was a huge paper. And they're trying to say that Indo-Anatolian, that Indo-European is an offshoot of an older language called Indo-Anatolian, and that the actual homeland of Anatolia is south of the Caucasus, somewhere near Armenia, and it was like a farming culture. And then, like Drew's suggested, some of these settled agricultural people went north, mixed with these savages in the steppe of Russia, and then those are the ones

who spread Indo-European languages afterwards. Everyone agrees now that those people, those savages of the steppe, are the ones who actually spread Indo-European languages. But what's disputed is whether that was introduced from the south. I will say that one of the actual contributors on that paper, David Anthony is probably the most respected scholar of Indo-Europeans alive today, has recently published a paper where he's then said that absolutely, definitely that there is no possibility Indo-European was spoken anywhere other than the steppe for the first time. That's where it comes from so it's web and he's not a geneticist he's an archaeologist but the the language the word there aren't words the words that they use for agriculture

are all non indo-european mostly their loan works so it really does seem like this is the people who did not receive farming from people who spoke the same language as them and they're genetically like they they don't have this I mean And the signal they're talking about, like Harvard genetic, they're talking about a genetic signal coming from the south, but that signal had existed on the steppe since the Mesolithic. So like the actual first people on the steppe to have a mixture of this Russian hunter gatherer with the caucus hunter gatherer ancestry existed long, long, long before Proto-Indo-European was spoken. It was on the steppe and existed there long, long before Proto-Indo-European was spoken. And they were only hunter gatherers.

None of them had farming, so they were savages, but they had some CHG admixture. But the CHG people in the mountains of the Caucasus were not like settled Middle Eastern farmers. They have a similar genetic profile to what's called Iranian Neolithic farmers, who were settled agricultural people. But they are not settled agricultural people, they're just hunter-gatherers who live in the mountains. Some of these hunter-gatherers in the mountains are mixed with some of these hunter-gatherers of Russia and that's what formed the race that became the Indo-European race which forms about half of northern European ancestry today. But the idea that they came, that the cultural transmission came from the south just doesn't ring true to me because the paternal lineages

of the Indo-Europeans are all from, or almost all from, these Russian hunter-gatherers. So it's like, what happened? How can you imagine? I can't imagine like the women, like they took some women and the women completely changed the culture and the language and it don't buy it. And there's not enough evidence for it. And it just seems a little bit, like it's a bit unfair of me to, you know, to mention the ethnicity of the people involved. But Jozef Lazaridis is a, I think he's a Greek or a Pontic Greek with a very, you know, Southern bias and he's very nationalistic, yes. He's very proud of his Southern, you know, Mediterranean. I wouldn't say he's as bad as Taleb, but you know, he's in that ballpark and David Reich is Jewish. So, I mean, they have cultural connections

to the Southern world. And there's been this bias in Western history because of the Bible and everything, that everything has to come from the South and agricultural settled people, but it's possible, it doesn't have to. Like we know from like the modern day Turkey, like yes, there was a great civilizations in Anatolia for thousands and thousands of years. And the one that was there when the Turks arrived was the, you know, Byzantines or Romans, if you want to be autistic about it, but they're, they just got completely owned by these Turks, like yogurt eating, like Asians. So that's about how it went down. We know that's how it went down and it can go down that way. Well, you know, I agree with you on the, on the major, let's say value judgments you just gave,

that that's, I agree with that. It's more a question of, I don't think Robert Drews would have those motivations. He just doesn't, he's basing his ideas on the unusual status of the Anatolian languages and the fact that he thinks linguistically they must proceed Indo-European proper. But what I found interesting in his theory is not the southern origin, it's the rejection, precisely the rejection of the Southern origin, so to speak. And look, whether or not that's true, I don't know if it's true and you don't have to agree with it. I just wanted to ask you about what you think some of the spirit of the Indo-Europeans is that we started this segment, whether it's reflected in their behavior, their expansionism, maybe their mythology. I am very entranced with the voyage of Jason

and the Argonauts. I see this as the prototype of the Mannerbund, the Koryos, the society of young warriors. But even my three-year-old, he knows the story of Jason the Argonauts, because he got from the library a comic of it, and I thought it was too grown up for him, but he loved it. And when we went to Greece this summer, I told him it was the land of Jason the Argonauts, and he was extremely thrilled by it, and he was always asking where the dragons were, where the harpies are, and this kind of thing. Yeah, I think there was, we just discussed earlier, like I think perhaps even you and I have contributed to this misunderstanding, but there's a sort of like what the distinction is between the old Europeans and the original. And I've, I mean, sometimes like I've said

in some of my films, like, you know, I've quoted back often and like this motor act ideas of like this more of it being, I didn't never, I've never said there were matriarchal, but there were more matriarchal. Perhaps that was true, but I think it's misled people because really to typify the old Europeans as matriarchal is just wrong. Or peace-like, they were not peace-like. They were like, the old Europeans were as brutal and patriarchal as any other human civilization. In fact, all human civilizations are like that because that's what humans are like. There weren't any peace-loving, but there is, and this like sort of thing, the 19th century, like back off an idea like that, They contrasted them, the strong, powerful Indo-Europeans with the weaker settled people.

There was some truth in it. It isn't 100% true in the sense that like, when we like, we memeify it into like the Virgin versus Chad thing, because like there were, I mean, the battle acts of the Corded Ware culture that we would call them the battle acts culture in Scandinavia, they actually took that axe culture from the native Neolithic people. They were, you know, bludgeoning in the skulls of their neighbors, doing massive... I talk about the pre-Indo-Europeans here, they were, like, slaughtering women and children, chucking them into pits and, like, you know, this kind of thing, like, absolutely brutal people, way more brutal than anyone today, like, so it's not fair of us to call them, like, you know, cucky grain cucks or whatever, like, it's not a good...

But then I have to explain, like, your question, like, why... What's the difference? What is it that the Indo-Europeans brought? but the fact is that they were more warlike, and more brutal. And I really like a new way of expressing it in the paper by Trautman, Ramp, and Kuljuka, the Finnish name, is more to do with the fact that, they're trying to say that the physical advantages of the Indo-Europeans, which by the way, has been really well documented long ago, long before the genetic stuff, like Isaac Taylor, I've got his book, the origin of the Aryans. I can read some quotes to you from that later if you like about all about the about the physical imposing nature of the the Indo-European people but they're like a lot bigger

a lot stronger and we can see like genetically today in Europeans the trait of being having wider shoulders a broader rib cage and chest like strong broader hips as well a sturdier skeleton larger muscle mass all those things are correlated with Yamnaya genes so like yes we generally just look at their skeletons, they've got bigger, thicker skulls, like they've got more robust features on their skulls, like stronger jaws, stronger brows and bigger skeletons that taller. And that this paper is trying to say that the reason for that is because there was a cultural tendency that led to a need for this kind of phenotype, this kind of look. So it typifies the old Europeans as being a culture of consent, based on cooperation, community, conformity, sharing, appeasement, reconciliation,

conservativeness, stable hierarchies and established rule sets, and the culture of confrontation of the incoming steppe people as being one of competition, individuality, ambition, taking rather than sharing, deterrence rather than appeasement, retribution rather than reconciliation, progressive meaning I guess more of a more like a disruptive and changing ideology rather than conservative, and dynamic dynamic hierarchies rather than stable hierarchies, and instead of established rule sets displays of dominance. And that idea of like dynamic hierarchies is borne out quite well by the fact that, like there's an argument in the European studies about whether Corded Ware are descended from Yamnaya or not. And one of the arguments that like, I'm not sure actually, I think they could both be,

everyone knows they're related. Either Corded Ware is a cousin with a, or a brother with a mutual father, which could be Shredding's dog, or Yamnay as the father of corded ware. But the problem is that they have different defining paternal haplogroups, which doesn't make sense. Like how can like two races, very similar in culture, very similar in their overall genetic heritage, they have completely different paternal lineages. And that happens again with the bell beaker culture, which we know is derivative of corded ware, but has completely different paternal lineages. Well that because they have this dynamic hierarchical structure where there was this one old guard, and then suddenly some event happens, and then you get a new, the dynasty just takes over,

and just orders the old guys in charge, and suddenly all the guys who get buried in the barrows, which are the only guys we actually get to look at genetically, the big chots, like the big man who was in charge, they cannot, they're not always the same. So that explains a lot, and I think this is what we're really seeing, like some of the things that actually we like about the Western civilization today can be traced to the Indo-Europeans, but also some of the things we don't like, perhaps, like some of the things that right-wing people complain about could potentially be of Indo-European origin, this sort of like protean, changeable, and like challenging and progressive sort of aspect of Western civilization could be of Indo-European origin. Yes, this is very interesting, Tom,

and very rousing precisely the way you make connection between life, the potentialities of life, and the study of these ancient things. I think it's very inspiring. I've kept you long for this segment. Do you have time for another one? I want to ask you more about this and the current debates. Is this okay if we come back for another short segment? Yeah, let's do it. Very good. We will take coffee smoke break then and we'll be right back. On the show, talking with historian Tom Roswell about Roswell, about history, Indo-European remote history, prehistory, and also connections to modern politics. And I want to read this passage because we're talking about the ancient Aryan spirit, or as you want to call it differently, ancient Proto-Indo-European spirit.

There's a passage in Nietzsche on genealogy of morals, essay one, section five, which I'm going to read now with respect to our problem, which for good reasons, we call a quiet problem and which addresses in a refined manner only a few years. There is no little interest in establishing the point that often in those words and roots which designate good, the word good, that still shines through the main nuance of what made the nobility feel they were men of higher rank. It's true that in most cases they perhaps named themselves simply after their superiority in strength as the powerful, the masters, those in command, or after the most visible sign of this superiority, for example, as the rich or the owners. That is the meaning of aria, noble,

and the corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic. But they also named themselves after a typical characteristic. And this is the case which is our concern here. For example, they call themselves the truthful, above all the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis. The word developed for this characteristic, est-clos, meaning noble, indicates according to its root meaning a man who is, who possesses reality, who really exists, who is true. It comes from Greek word to be, estai. Then, with a subjective transformation, it indicates the true man as the truthful man. In this phase of conceptual transformation, it becomes the slogan and catchphrase for the nobility, and its sense shifts entirely over to being aristocratic, to mark a distinction from the lying common man

as the oddness takes and presents him. And until finally, after the decline of the nobility, The word remains as a designation of spiritual noblesse and becomes, as it were, ripe and sweet. In the word cacos, as in the word deilos, meaning on one hand weak and worthless, and deilos meaning cowardly, the plebeian, in contrast to the agathos, the good man, the cowardice is emphasized. This perhaps provides a hint about the direction in which we have to seek the etymological origins for the multiple meaning of agathos. In the Latin word malus, bad, which I place alongside melas, black, dark, the common man could be designated as the dark colored, above all as the dark haired, hic niger est, as the pre-Aryan inhabitant of Italian soil, who through this color stood out most clearly

from those who became dominant, the blondes, that is the conquering races of Aryans. At any rate, Gaelic offers me an exactly corresponding example, the word fin, for example, in the name fin gall, the term designating nobility, And finally, the good, noble, and pure originally referred to the blonde-headed men in contrast to the dusky, dark-haired original inhabitants. Incidentally, the Celts were a thoroughly blonde race. People are wrong when they link those traces of a basically dark-haired population, which are noticeable on the carefully prepared ethnographic maps of Germany, with any Celtic origin and mixing of blood, as Virchow still does. It is much rather the case that in these places, the pre-Aryan population of Germany predominates. This same is true for almost all of Europe.

Essentially, the conquered races have finally attained the upper hand for themselves, once again, in color, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts. Who can confirm for us that modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and indeed that preference for the commune, for the most primitive form of society, which all European socialists now share, does not indicate for the most part a monstrous throwback and that the conquering master race, the race of Aryans, is not being physiologically defeated too. The Latin word bonus, good, I believe I can explicate as the warrior provided that I am correct in tracing bonus back to an older word, duonus. Compare bellum or to dwellum or, duendulum, which seems to me to contain the word duonus.

Hence bonus as a men of war of division, duo, as a warrior. We see what constituted a man's goodness in ancient Rome. What about our German word gut itself? Doesn't it indicate then Gottlichen, the man of Gottlichen, I'm not going to try to read German since I can not do good, but he's saying the family of gods. And isn't that identical to people's, originally the noble's name for the gods? The reasons for this hypothesis do not belong here. Anyway, I finish reading this. This and passages like this from Nietzsche who have always been important to me. I tried also to talk about them in my book in a different way. What do you make of this? I think he's really onto something. And I know there'll be like contrarians who will try and point out like, oh, you know, like actually the Yamnaya

didn't have blonde hair and some of the very few cultures of the Neolithic Europeans, namely globular and foreign culture, and Funnelbeaker did have blonde hair, so it's wrong or backwards or something. But actually, it is correct if you actually understand the way that these phenotypes were disseminated because the first Indo-Europeans were mostly brown-haired and black-haired. They also had some red hair among them. The red-haired genes were common among them. And although there are two blonde cultures, which is one is derivative of the other, only one blonde culture in all of Europe of the old European cultures that that they mixed with corded wear and corded wear were the ones who spread blondism around Europe not neolithic

Europeans it was indo-europeans who spread that blondest blonde phenotype around even if it did it was previously more common in the neolithic population during the bronze age this was like the spreading of indo-european genes was associated with the spread of red and blonde hair And even before we had DNA, but he talked about skull shapes in there. And like, he's on to something there, because that was like, the time at the time, like, before we had genetics, that we could actually say, like two different skeletons with two different races, people noticed, like, the guys in the long barrows for the Neolithic and in these Neolithic tombs, were what they called the Iberian type, meaning it corresponded to modern day Spaniards and whatnot, with like a narrow

skull, like a more gracile appearance. Whereas the ones in the round barrows or kurgans what what they they call that like in isaac taylor in 1892 refers to that as the celtic type he says you know he knows for well that not all these people spoke celtic languages and they're not necessarily kelts some of them predate kelts by a long way but they call it the celtic type there's this large robust skull corresponds to the sort of skull you see in some modern irish people they make excellent boxes because of the robust heads uh and i'd just like to read from his book The Origin of Arians in 1892. It sort of echoes some of what Nietzsche was saying. Excuse me, 1992? No, 1892. Oh, 1892. 1892. So this is all this is like him talking about

how the the Celts in quote in from classical depictions correspond to a survival of this ancient Indo-European type. The stature of the Celts struck the Romans with astonishment. Caesar speaks of their mirifica corpora and contrasts the short stature of the Romans with the magnitudo corporum of the Gauls. Straber, also speaking of the corritavi, a British tribe in Lincolnshire, after mentioning their yellow hair, says to show how tall they are I saw myself some of their young men at Rome and they were taller by six inches than anyone else in the city. This might seem an exaggeration but is borne out by by the bones found in some round barrows. In actual fact, the round barrows are pre-Celtic. They're the original Indo-European arrivals in Britain,

but it doesn't matter, it's the same racial type. For instance, at Grisford in the East Riding, a round barrow was opened containing the skeleton of a man whose stature must have been six foot two inches. There can be little doubt that the Iberian race was dark in complexion with black hair and eyes. As to the Celtic race, it is almost certain that they were fair with red or yellow hair and blue or blue-grey eyes. The most conclusive statement comes from Diocasius, who has left us a description of Boudica, who almost certainly belonged to this race. He describes her as of great bodily proportions. The fierceness of her appearance struck beholders with awe, and the expression of her countenance was exceedingly severe and piercing. Her voice was harsh, and she had a profusion of tawny hair,

which reached down to her hips. The word for tawny is used, It could be golden or auburn or with a tinge of red. And we have other testimonies to the same effect. Lucan says the Britons were flabby. Silius Italicus describes their hair as golden. And Vitruvius, referring seemingly to the same race, speaks of their huge limbs, their gray eyes, and their long, straight red hair. And what we now know from genetics is that the so-called Celtic peoples of the British Isles don't descend very much from the actual Celtic Gauls of the continent, but especially the Irish and Scottish to send almost entirely from the original Bronze Age Indo-European invaders of the Beaker culture who had these very robust brachycephalic skulls and were, genetics shows, fair-haired.

They had possessed red hair, blonde hair. And so, yes, it's absolutely true, as Nietzsche describes, at least in some parts of Europe, like Britain and Iberia, when the Indo-Europeans came, they were much fairer in complexion and hair than the previous inhabitants had been. And I think that's generally gonna be the case in most parts of Europe, although Northern Germany, no, not in Northern Germany, I think in Northern Germany, the Indo-Europeans would have been a bit darker than the Neolithic inhabitants. Yes, no, this is very interesting, and it ties in, I think, to current debates that I've seen you attack these people who are claiming that the ancient Britons were dark, or even they depict them as black. And I just want to say, prehistory has always been used

by states, especially for political jiggering purposes, let me put it that way. And you still have this problem now. The Egyptian state is refusing to release the genetics of Tutankhamen and some other pharaohs, I think the Greek state still has to release a full genetic profile of the Mycenae grave circle B, which are also, by the way, described by Drews as these very large, robust skeletons as opposed to the non-royal people of that time. Or in the United States, the Kennewick Man Controversy, where the local Indian tribes wanted to destroy the remains of Kennewick men because his genetic profile might not come out as their genetic profile, which would contradict their claims that they were the oldest inhabitants. And many such things around the world, I think right now with genetics,

it's becoming especially charged because once a genetic study comes out, how can you contradict what that says? But even before this, states have always used the vagueness of prehistory to bolster their claims of autochtony. Or on the other hand, excuse me, as it appears the British media is doing now, to support mass immigration, they're coming up with this completely bogus claim that ancient Europeans were not only dark-skinned, but who looked like modern-day sub-Saharan Africans, which has no basis for this claim at all. and given what we've just read, it's not just what we've just said, but anyone who reads ancient Greek poetry, mythology and such, comes upon the fact that so many of their gods and ancient heroes are red-headed or blonde, golden-haired and such.

But I know you have many opinions on this and you've been humiliating these kinds of liars who come on Twitter on behalf of British media, and in fact, maybe the British state to make such arguments. Yeah, I think there's something, there's been a deep attempt to try and undermine British identities. And sometimes that's openly stated, like by, for example, one of the people involved behind the original Tereman paper that was then informed the reconstruction was Tom Booth. And he had previously, the year before, that was in 2018, and in 2017, he published a paper saying that it was necessary for people in his field to undermine certain narratives of like belonging and identity among the natives, because it feeds into white supremacist narratives that lead to Brexit, paraphrasing there,

but that's actually what he said. So in a published, you know, public paper. So you can see they're very open about their reasoning for it. They want to undermine our identity. And it's the same reasoning that has led to a number of scholars, mainly American scholars to be fair, but they have some influence in Britain who want to deny that the Anglo-Saxons even exist. and I've been fighting them since 2019, but even this year, Cambridge University has decided to make a statement in June saying that there is no such thing as Anglo-Saxon ethnic group. So obviously these American radicals had influence even at the highest cause of academic power in Britain. But as for the idea that the depiction of substance, for those aren't aware, Mesolithic Europeans

in Western Europe had an unusual phenotype, probably wouldn't see today. They're the source of blue eyes today, so they all had blue eyes. They had brown hair like Europeans and black hair, but straight, not like black people, straight hair, sometimes wavy, sometimes brown, sometimes black, eyes always blue. Not total body pubic. No, no, no. They didn't have like African phenotypes in any way. Their skulls are what's used to be called cromagnon, which is like a robust Europoid skull, but they weren't like big and strong like Yamnaya. They were like a bit smaller than that, but they were like, you know, robust heads. They were chewing, you know, unprocessed foods and like they didn't have any farming. They were eating a lot of oysters and stuff.

And so that might explain how it's the predictions for their, based on their DNA, so they probably had darker skin than us. Maybe they got all their vitamin D from their diet. It's hard to say for sure, but it does seem likely they had darker skin than us. And that lighter skin became more necessary after the introduction of agriculture. Anyway, I knew as soon as I read about that in 2017, and I started understanding that these people had this complexion. I knew that this was gonna be seized. As soon as the left had got hold of this, they would try and use it as a political tool to undermine sense of identity. But I didn't know it would be as severe as it was with actually depicting them as Sub-Saharan Africans. The Tom Booth wouldn't go that far. And the Natural History Museum,

when they did the documentary on the original Cheddar Man thing, the reconstruction actually, although it's very, very dark and that's a bit bad, They never, they specifically say he was not an African when interviewed about it. But they allowed others like race activist Afua Hirsch to publish in National Geographic that same year an article where she describes him as Africans. She said the first people, you know, Africans were here first or whatever, like, and they weren't African, they didn't have any African DNA. I'm more black than any of those people were. Like any European today has more like genetic affinity with black people than these people. They're less black than any people alive today. They're extremely European, but not quite the same in appearance of the modern European.

Maybe a bit, it's hard to say exactly. I think that my personal belief, I did a reconstruction of CGI, not CGI, AI, where probably they would look like a Finnish person because they had these big high cheekbones, bright blue eyes, but then with a dark tan. So imagine a Finnish surfer, maybe something like that. But anyway, the British aren't the only people to do it because the Dutch newspapers depicted WHG, Western Hunter Gatherers, they're called, with a picture of the black man with dreadlocks. The Irish media, the state media did, on their television program, they did a television program, where an actress with, black actress with dreadlocks played at WHG. Swedish media- But this reminds me, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt. Please keep going. Don't lose your trade of thought.

But I must interject to say, I have a friend who was pointing out that obviously the Jamaicans, the modern Jamaicans, are some of the most faithful preservers of ancient Indo-European steppe culture because they have dreadlocks, they eat goat stew, and they smoke ganja. And so obviously this is what Herodotus described the Scythians as being like. I'm sorry to interrupt. The Jamaicans are the real Scythians for sure, yeah. There's luck in the horses, that's all. But yeah, also Irish media did the same thing and Swedish media, the SVT, they did a documentary. They're depicted with a black actor wearing blue contact lenses as a double AC light. And I keep, it's gonna keep happening. Why? There are mulattos now who have blue eyes naturally. Why would they do that? I'm sorry to interrupt.

It's obviously not logical because everyone knows that black people, as what we mean by black people, it means Sub-Saharan Africans. And when you see them, they have features that are readily recognizable as Sub-Saharan African that aren't their complexion. And this idea that the complexion and the other associated looks are one and the same is just bizarre or dishonest. Like they have very specific nose shape, skull shape, everything like that, the prognosis of the projecting of the jaw, this is all absent from Western hunter gatherers. They had snub nose associated with Northern Europeans. We can see that's a predicted phenotype from their genetics. So why they do this when they could just more accurately give a spray tan to a white guy and it would probably be more accurate.

And anyway, we don't even know. And the reason why, of course, everyone listening to this knows fully well, the idea is to, partly, they claim is maybe to make Sub-Saharan African immigrants who arrive feel like they have more of a stake in the history and culture of this part of the world and to give them a sense of belonging, maybe, or maybe it's a side effect. And the main thing is to disrupt senses of like, you know, indigeneity and nativism among the actual indigenous people of Northern Europe. Yes, it's a bizarre argument to start with because of course they're not right, but even if they are right, that in, let's say, remote prehistory, peoples in various parts of Europe looked or were different, which is actually what Nietzsche is describing too,

That doesn't mean that the people there today descend from them in any direct way or owe any allegiance to that population that existed before them. And to make the argument for mass immigration with analogy to these ancient population movements, which are often exterminationist, or at least included the subjugation and enslavement of local populations, the rape of their women and so on, It's just a bizarre thing to me. It doesn't follow. It doesn't follow logically, even if even if you take that argument for what it is. But yeah, but they do that with the count. They say, what about the Celtic Anglo-Saxons? All those people came with sword in hand. Like it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't. They haven't really thought through what they're saying.

No, well, it's it's it's a female emotional argument. Sorry, I know we have to respect women. I shouldn't say that. I wanted to ask you, I don't want to keep you too long. I know you're busy, Tom. But before, I have two more questions. First, quickly, did you ever hear this strange theory that much of English culture is, it comes from the Kipchaks, that the Kipchaks invaded England and gave it things like milk tea and polo, and have you seen this? It's one of these funny internet theories. I don't know. No, that does sound amusing. Like, it sounds like, yeah, I guess it sounds like- And fox hunting. Oh yeah, fox hunting. Well that came- Fox hunting, milk tea, polo, these are all Central Asian specialties, you know? Well, yeah, I hadn't heard that,

but I guess a Central Asian person invented it as a theory. Yes, the Kipchaks are of special interest to me, not that we should talk about them now, But they appear to have been a light complexion, but Turkic-speaking people. And they provided kings to many different nations. I think the founding royal house of Wallachia was from Kipchak family, not to speak of the fact that the Mamluk leaders were Kipchaks and several other peoples, too. I think that they're very interesting people, I think. The Qumans, yeah, the Qumans. They have a lot of Scythian ancestry, the Central Asian Turkic people. They still do. They have quite significant. Like, the Scythian, we were Scythian-sing is quite amusing because so many people want to claim to be Scythians. And some of them, there's Iranic people.

Iranians want to have this affinity based on the fact that their language is related. Turks want to claim that the Scythians, who are indeed their ancestors, they're correct, but they want to claim that the Scythians spoke Turkic and they want to project their language back onto them. And then some Russians living in Scythia want to have that connection because of the land and say that it looks like probably Slavs don't have very much of any Scythian ancestry actually, quite surprisingly. And then there's also this problem with the medieval scholars of Europe getting confused about origins of people. so many, like, saying that even some Germanic people, I mean, like, the Byzantine Greeks referred to Vikings as Scythians, and they even referred to the Goths as Scythians earlier on,

so, like, there wasn't a very, I mean, early on, some Germanic and, you know, other, like, Balkan peoples were being referred to as Scythians, even though they weren't Scythians, so some people, when you got people in the Balkans, and even some, like, Germanic people trying to say that they were Scythians, there's a bit of a mess there. yes and I assume that there must have been some interchange of languages happening where you would have a tribe that had originally spoken Germanic or something like that or was of that origin anyway but picking up a Scythian or even later a Turkic language I don't know if that's true or not probably I think I think the goths mixed out with them the goths the east the oscar

goths that went on the onto the steppe whatever they just mixed out with those with those Turkic people like post-Scythian people and the Greeks in the south weren't so bothered about being specific in their anthropology so as far as they're concerned they can just call them all Scythians or whatever yes on world maps for red-headed people two of the bright spots on the world map is Ireland and then somewhere around the Volga region in Russia I think the mauled in phoenix they currently speak phoenix but if you look at ancient uh not ancient but medieval sources on the Khazars, Armenian, Georgian sources. I think even Arabic described them as red-headed and blue-eyed, but they spoke a Turkic language. I think that's interesting, you know.

Yeah, I think the Khazars are misunderstood because of popular history. They were probably very significantly descended from Scythians, and I don't think very many of them converted to Judaism, and the actual contribution genetically of the – it's possible that there is some Ashkenazi DNA that comes from Kassar's, but it's not very much. It's like a tiny, tiny little sliver. That's a sliver that's barely even noticeable, like, but it's not even in all Ashkenazi. But it would explain perhaps, well, it doesn't really explain because I know the actual explanation, but it would be a neat little sort of bow in the fact that Ashkenazi derives from Iskuzi, which is the Assyrian name for the Scythians. So it's not

actually the reason why they're I'm sure I don't know if you know the real reason why I think it's because there was Ashkenaz became among the Jews the name for a giant who inhabited the west and they then associated that with the German people and then the Ashkenazi Jews living in Germany got called Ashkenaz Ashkenazi because they lived in Germany the land of Ashkenaz but the fact that that uh it's possible that from yes Khazar and Agnich they may descend from the real Iskuzan with an ironic sort of twist. No that's very interesting and of course the ruling house of the Khazars was the Ashina clan which was this steppe clan that founded many steppe peoples and had its origin in the uh I think the Goktur khanate and when that fell apart some of them

moved west some became leaders of the Khazars some became leaders of others but we were talking earlier about Romulus and Remus the Ashina clan this founding clan of the Turkic peoples you know they also claim descent from a she-wolf, you know, that's very interesting, I thought. The wolf is really important in Turkic mythology, I should learn more about it, I don't know a lot about Turkic mythology but I think I'm going to guess a significant part of it is going to be inherited from Scythians and some of the rest of it will be the original, I think the original Turks, because the first proto-Turks won't have been on the steppe, they'd have been up in Siberia and they would have practiced the shamanic religion and that could well have had important wolf totems already in it

as you know the wolf is often an important animal for shamanic cultures anyway so then it maybe moved into the steppe adopted scuffian step package lifestyle with horses and everything and then ended up surpassing the scuffians and becoming better at horsemanship even than they were no these questions are all extremely interesting i have a friend who actually has wild theory that the wolf cult even originates in Sundaland in remote history. But what I mean to drive at these large questions and exciting Indiana Jones type questions that you and I are animated by, the origin of peoples, you know, whether there was something like a back migration from the Americas or such big questions. They are disdained, or not even disdained, they are ignored completely, especially in

your field in academic circles. There's been some change lately with study of ancient genetics and so on, but for the most part archaeology departments, anthropology departments, want to ignore these questions completely. And it's not even just a political ideological thing, the denial of greatness or attempt to deny the identity of certain groups. There's some intense mediocrity and just attempt to make things boring in these, which is why I think for a long time, many of us have admired your videos, Tom. I have friends who've watched you from the beginning and you are stopped at borders and so on and you drive academics around the world insane because you have these videos that make claims with very close documentation and you are a much better historian than they are

and it's making all these academic time servers rage at you for years now and it's been a pleasure to watch this. I don't know if you want to maybe and show on some reflections on this, on the rage that academics have had at you and on what this says about the state of archeology and anthropology in our world. I think, yeah, I really appreciate those kind words, but I should say that I'm not a great historian. I'm probably not even a very good historian. The thing that distinguishes me from other historians is to, one, that I'm actually, I know how to operate a camera and edit video, which a lot of you don't. And secondly, I'm willing to say things that they're not willing to, and I don't have any of the consequences that they would, because I'm not actually in academia.

I'm on the outside of it, so I can't be, no one can hurt me in front of it, except like the deep state or whatever, but no academic organization can hurt me. So I'm free to say things that they aren't. And they also have to like get stuck into like a really deep research topic where their research topics are limited to those that they can get funding for. So they might not even be able to pursue the things that they find interesting and they might be stuck. I think a lot of academics end up feeling stuck studying stuff they don't even want to study and getting like knee deep in books they don't want to read and stuff and then they see someone else who's sort of breezing through it getting way more attention and having a good time and they get angry and jealous and so I can

understand in a way but why that happens but um those ones I have a lot of respect for like proper academics because you actually because when when I do my masters I have to do the level of research I have to go into to produce a paper is a lot deeper than what I have to do to go produce a a video. Because I'm trained as a communication. My first degree before I hit my secondary in history was communications. And for WHO, I'm working in science communication. So I see myself, my work in like these making these films as a communicator, I want to make this popular and understand and understood to more people. Because I think like so much of what's really interesting is that it's all out there in papers, but it's just not communicated in a narrative that people can comprehend and

swallow. And that's what I'm trying to do, like condense it, put it in a neater format and make it exciting and interesting, which is what like, popular stories like Thomas Carlisle and all these people in Victorian England were doing. And that's what made history like something that everyone, normal people could engage in and actually have conversations about, because history has to be something that is shared. Like if history is what defines a people, their history is what's shared. But if only like an elite, a very small amount of like, academics discuss it and journals that hardly on Reed, and it isn't Chad. Yes. Well, I didn't mean to insult all academics. Not all are like that, right? There are some who are very good, some who are friends behind the scenes and so on,

and they are dedicated scholars, and they probably feel stifled too, though. But overall, there is this glut of time servers and ideologists and people who abuse scholarship for political reasons while pretending to be objective scholars which you and I don't do but um before we leave do you want to say to the audience is there anything coming out especially out of let's say uh current scholarship whether in population genetics or or antiquity that that you find interesting or exciting or anything that you are working on next that the audience should know about? Well, I think there's so much coming out, like, with population genetics especially has just made history so much more fun, especially to, like, people like me and probably like

you and your friends, because it's like, instead of having to, like, wrangle over the ifs and maybes about this, what this text meant or whatever, you've got, like, a concrete thing, like, DNA is very, like, here it is, here's it on a plate, like, the Anglo-Saxon invasion, we're never gonna have the debate about whether the Anglo-Saxon invasion happened again. We never have to have the debate about whether the Aryan invasion happened again. We know they happened, these things happened, and there's no arguing with it. I love that certainty and the absolutism of it. And I think that there's some certain kinds of academics I don't like, the ones who thrive on ambiguity and use these sort of dark corners of uncertainty to sort of push through things that are, you know,

quite egregious nonsense. But yeah, like I'll be posting anything cool I find on my telegram and on Twitter and on YouTube. my, I'm not sure what my next step I've got an idea to do a thing on Celtic hill forts because I've got lots of collective footage of that. I also got a plan for my pagan audience because I think like my most some of my most loyal audience are practicing pagans but they don't make up a large proportion. So what I thought I'd do is make a course course for pagans to help them with their daily practice. I'll be selling online at some point for them but rather than doing videos because they're too small a proportion of your audience. So look out for that. If you want to learn how, if you think you want to practice paganism,

but you don't know how to get started and you want like an easy guide that talks you through it and all the details of how to, how to begin worshiping gods. I will link that so that, so that my audience can have access to this. I link all these things you're just talking about and I hope you come back next Last time, perhaps we can talk in more detail about this matter of paganism and the possibility of reviving ancient paganism in our world. I was very much moved by one throwaway line from Mishima's Runaway Horses where he's describing the sentiments of the young man behind the League of the Divine Wind who say that they are afraid that in the democratic age the gods will not be honored properly, they will

be forgotten. They are only properly honored by a military aristocracy and without that honor, they will devolve to superstition and to spirits lonely among the reeds, hiding. And that was a very powerful image for me. I've always had, since I don't want to get too personal on such a show, but since I was a small boy, I've had intimation that in the near future, there will be a new secret god reborn, Tom. I don't want to say more, but do you have such sentiments also before we go? I think so. I think there are deep and ancient energies that can't ever die, and they come back in one form or another. The energy, as Jonathan Bowden said, doesn't die, it always transforms, and that's a key part of pain. History never finishes, unlike what

Fukuyama did. It's eternal, it goes round and round, and we'll see the re-emergence in a strange in unforeseen ways of ancient energies. I believe in this, Don. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been an honor. I hope you come back. I'll be glad to. Thank you so much for having me. It's a great podcast. Very good. Until next time, Bap out.