The Most Popular Bad History Theory I've Encountered: Proto-Indo-European Religious Reconstruction

Companion Doc here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c...

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I made one comment on my Roman paganism video that got me more angry comments than I've ever gotten before: when I reiterated what other scholars said about the theories of George Dumezil.

So I've spent the past two months digging. I've read over 1000 pages, most of them books, and around 15 scholarly articles on the subject of Indo-European mythological reconstruction. This is to say nothing of the handful of archaeogenetic studies on Yamnaya migration I poured over (including the supplementary materials).

And at the end of it all... my opinion has barely changed. A bit more nuance, but seriously, there's so little here.

But I think there's a bigger story here, honestly. I think the theory of PIE mythology, speaks to a much larger problem. How the wealth of information at our fingertips, is falling prey to pattern-seeking brains, and good stories.

So join me, as we try to untangle it all, and find out, if everything is so wrong, why are professors still teaching classes on PIE mythology?

00:00 intro
03:45 An Overview of Philology, Sound Change Laws, and Their Pitfalls
06:42 How the Proto-Indo-Europeans Were Discovered
10:04 Watch This Part (Car for Ukraine)
11:59 The Basics of Proto-Indo-European Cultural Reconstruction
13:29 The Inherent Problems with Building a Culture from just a Language
22:34 A Brief Overview of The Logic of Proto-Indo-European Mythological Reconstruction
24:49 Dumezil: His Early Work
31:46 Dumezil: His Magnum Opus: Tripartite Ideology
36:13 Some Scholarly Opinions on Dumezil
37:45 The Problems with Mythological Reconstruction
46:14 Another Structuralist, and Other Reconstruction Methods
48:24 Archaeogenetics (the DNA evidence)
01:00:56 A Specific Look at Rome's DNA Evidence
01:10:38 A Far Too Brief Look at Modern Academic Comparative Mythology
01:15:39 The Problem of Good Stories
01:17:27 Outro and Seriously Donate to Car4Ukraine