Post by Διαμονδ on Feb 26, 2018 11:39:05 GMT
Origins of the Germanic tribes:
The Germanic tribes moved out from southern Scandinavia and northern Germany, both of these places are the ancestral home of Germanic peoples, if one goes looking for a Germanic heartland this is it.
From there the Germanic tribes spread in all directions literally. Starting in around 1000 BC they spread south in to the lands between the Elbe and Oder.
They went north colonizing the rest of Scandinavia driving the Ugric peoples before them and basically exterminated them in the areas they made their own.
They went east not yet over the baltic sea to Finland but down near the mouth of the Vistula river in to Poland and most of Magna Germania which later on in history were gradually made Slavic by settling Slavic tribes.
They went south to the Roman province of Gaul where they were at first stopped by Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar. By this time most of southern Germany was already inhabited by Germanic tribes and made firmly Germanic, as much homelands as their heartland though in southern Germany when they first arrived and in Austria lived Gauls, hence why defining the ethnicity of the Suebi tribes are hard since they were a mix of both while northern Suebi were more Germanic and southern more Gaulish.
They went west to the lands of the Rhine and pushed away the Gauls who lived east of the Rhine in to the lands of the Belgae which is written about in Roman sources telling that before Roman invasion their had been an influx of tribes from the east hence the creation of Germani Cisrhenani which I wrote about in my Belgae post which just gives further evidence to the Celticity of the Belgae as while mixing occured it was not as common as many people seem to think and certainly not with non Indo-Europeans as the Ugric peoples.
Tribes moving south and west were the tribes of Tencteri, Cheruschi, Chatti and Hermunduri who through alliance, federation and inter marriage created the very well known tribes of the Alemanni, Franks, Frisians, Saxons and Thuringians.
The Germanic ethnogenesis took place, as already explained by Son of Sviar, in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. That is our urheimat. However, it could also be of interest to take a quick look at the ancient migrations that came to forge our culture, language, and genetic composition. Quickly summarized, it was three major population elements whose combination gave birth to the Germanic type: 1, the original Nordic hunter-gatherers, the first group to settle in northern Europe after the ice retreated; 2, farming people from farther south on the European continent; and 3, the 'Aryan' migration from eastern Europe which most definitely introduced the Indo-European language-family to northern Europe through the Corded Ware horizon. ('Battle Axe people'). It was the merging of these population elements that made the Germanic people, culture and language possible. Racially, they were not very different, but had still been isolated from one another long enough to develop certain characteristic genetic signatures and probably some different traits in the physical phenotype, too. The Y-DNA haplogroups that roughly correspond to these three ancient elements are I1 for the first, R1b for the second, and R1a for the third. While there is nearly a universal agreement between researchers that R1a is linked to an Indo-European-speaking migration from the east, and that I1 corresponds to an ancient northern hunter-gatherer element, the history of R1b is at this point more controversial and still subject for a broader debate. Whether or not the migration of R1b-people to northern Europe was partly tied to the spread of Indo-European language and culture is not completely clear.
It should be noted that the Germanic people over time became a harmonized blend of these elements; while for example the ancient northern hunter-gatherer element surely is stronger in some of us than in others, there are no such separate groups in Scandinavia or elsewhere in the Germanic world today. Scandinavians, for example, all genetically cluster as one ethnos, because these elements are quite harmonized in all of us to constitute the Germanic type. These bloodlines meet in all of us, and our individual haplogroup only shows one small part of the entire picture.
Let me share a short, but very interesting, excerpt from Eupedia's (a highly informative site about European population genetics among other things) article about Y-DNA R1a, which concerns the genetic origin of the Germanic ethnos. Not all of this is yet completely confirmed by science, but is still at the hypothetical stage, so you may need to take some of it with a grain of salt.
The Germanic tribes moved out from southern Scandinavia and northern Germany, both of these places are the ancestral home of Germanic peoples, if one goes looking for a Germanic heartland this is it.
From there the Germanic tribes spread in all directions literally. Starting in around 1000 BC they spread south in to the lands between the Elbe and Oder.
They went north colonizing the rest of Scandinavia driving the Ugric peoples before them and basically exterminated them in the areas they made their own.
They went east not yet over the baltic sea to Finland but down near the mouth of the Vistula river in to Poland and most of Magna Germania which later on in history were gradually made Slavic by settling Slavic tribes.
They went south to the Roman province of Gaul where they were at first stopped by Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar. By this time most of southern Germany was already inhabited by Germanic tribes and made firmly Germanic, as much homelands as their heartland though in southern Germany when they first arrived and in Austria lived Gauls, hence why defining the ethnicity of the Suebi tribes are hard since they were a mix of both while northern Suebi were more Germanic and southern more Gaulish.
They went west to the lands of the Rhine and pushed away the Gauls who lived east of the Rhine in to the lands of the Belgae which is written about in Roman sources telling that before Roman invasion their had been an influx of tribes from the east hence the creation of Germani Cisrhenani which I wrote about in my Belgae post which just gives further evidence to the Celticity of the Belgae as while mixing occured it was not as common as many people seem to think and certainly not with non Indo-Europeans as the Ugric peoples.
Tribes moving south and west were the tribes of Tencteri, Cheruschi, Chatti and Hermunduri who through alliance, federation and inter marriage created the very well known tribes of the Alemanni, Franks, Frisians, Saxons and Thuringians.
The Germanic ethnogenesis took place, as already explained by Son of Sviar, in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. That is our urheimat. However, it could also be of interest to take a quick look at the ancient migrations that came to forge our culture, language, and genetic composition. Quickly summarized, it was three major population elements whose combination gave birth to the Germanic type: 1, the original Nordic hunter-gatherers, the first group to settle in northern Europe after the ice retreated; 2, farming people from farther south on the European continent; and 3, the 'Aryan' migration from eastern Europe which most definitely introduced the Indo-European language-family to northern Europe through the Corded Ware horizon. ('Battle Axe people'). It was the merging of these population elements that made the Germanic people, culture and language possible. Racially, they were not very different, but had still been isolated from one another long enough to develop certain characteristic genetic signatures and probably some different traits in the physical phenotype, too. The Y-DNA haplogroups that roughly correspond to these three ancient elements are I1 for the first, R1b for the second, and R1a for the third. While there is nearly a universal agreement between researchers that R1a is linked to an Indo-European-speaking migration from the east, and that I1 corresponds to an ancient northern hunter-gatherer element, the history of R1b is at this point more controversial and still subject for a broader debate. Whether or not the migration of R1b-people to northern Europe was partly tied to the spread of Indo-European language and culture is not completely clear.
It should be noted that the Germanic people over time became a harmonized blend of these elements; while for example the ancient northern hunter-gatherer element surely is stronger in some of us than in others, there are no such separate groups in Scandinavia or elsewhere in the Germanic world today. Scandinavians, for example, all genetically cluster as one ethnos, because these elements are quite harmonized in all of us to constitute the Germanic type. These bloodlines meet in all of us, and our individual haplogroup only shows one small part of the entire picture.
Let me share a short, but very interesting, excerpt from Eupedia's (a highly informative site about European population genetics among other things) article about Y-DNA R1a, which concerns the genetic origin of the Germanic ethnos. Not all of this is yet completely confirmed by science, but is still at the hypothetical stage, so you may need to take some of it with a grain of salt.
