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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

> Around 3000 BC, a group of savage tribes now known as the Indo-Europeans invaded Europe from eastern Ukraine and southern Russia, destroying the EEF civilizations east of the Rhine in at most two centuries.

It detracts from the writer's argument to uniquely characterize the IE Europeans as savage here. Savagery was the norm for all groups at the time. Monopolies of violence didn't exist in any significant way, and institutions were also non-existent.

Some civilizations appear more egalitarian than others, i.e Crete, Indus Valley, but the idea of non-savagery as a virtue didn't emerge until much later, and we don't know how much savagery those civilizations might have engaged in because we have lost their histories.

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“Savage tribes” in this context means something like “less settled with a less specialized society/economy”, and is not intended to be a value judgment or indication of some ethnic group’s inherent qualities, or even a comment on their level of violence: it is possible for a tribe to be both peaceful and “savage”/“barbaric”/“uncivilized”, or both “civilized” and brutally violent.

For example, notice the author of this blog post starts with a description of a campaign of horrifying brutal violence perpetrated by “civilized” Greeks.

One feature of language (for better or worse) is that words whose denotation involves some associations considered to be negative in one context tend to be used as slurs, adding and intensifying negative connotations until they eventually become confusing when used in the original non-normative sense.

The word “savage” originally just meant “wild” (literally, “from the forest”), i.e. not domesticated. Under this original definition, a rabbit is “savage” but an aggressive guard dog is not.

I understand what you are saying, but why then didn't the writer apply the term "savage" to the "Western Hunter Gatherer" groups they describe earlier:

> By the mid to late 5th millennium, the peoples of Greece had diverged from their cousins. Europe was convulsed in a parallel set of conflicts involving tribes of WHGs conquering their EEF neighbors and establishing themselves as a new ruling class, catalyzing a new synthetic culture with their new subjects.

The WHG by your definition are just as "savage" than the Indo-Europeans but they are described as "conquering" (which is a term of glorification), and "catalyzing a new synthetic culture". In contrast, the Indo Europeans are described as "destroying" and "not content their new lands".

I have a hard time believing the intent, process, and outcome behind either circumstance was appreciably different from the other, at least in any way we can infer from archaeology.

If the term "savage" as used in the article is simply a matter of "civilization" and not brutality, then the Indo-Europeans should be considered far less savage than the WHGs, since they had created the spoked wheel and chariot technologies, and were pastoralists who practiced wheat/barley agriculture and animal husbandry - they were not forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers. In this way, they were far more similar to the EEF in lifestyle.

Therefore, I don't think that the author is using the term "savage" denotatively as you suggest, but rather is coloring their otherwise fascinating article with their own anachronistic opinions of the ancient Indo Europeans.

I did not get the impression that the author intended to uniquely characterize them as savages. Yes, it's the first instance of that word, but the preceding paragraphs are about replacements/displacements/invasions by other groups.

Well said

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