Quote:
Originally Posted by geonuc
As it happens, I just listened to a Hardcore History podcast on the steppe peoples. Dan Carlin, the podcaster, explains that there apparently were caucasian people in east Asia. Writings from ancient China refer to steppe people (they didn't call them that) to thier north and west that had red hair, green eyes, were tall, etc.
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You can be short and have dark hair and brown eyes, and still be caucasian. The steppes, which reasonably includes East Turkestan, are commonly referred to as Central Asia, though "Eurasia" seems to be the term favored by academe now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by geonuc
These weren't travellers, mind you, but rather some of the groups of nomadic herder people that we group together as steppe people today. The Huns, Scythians, Tartars, Mongols, Xiongnu, and many others fall into this category. Some were of Scandanavian origin and had migrated (or were forced by the continual fighting) east.
ETA: Carlin also mentions use of marijuana and lots of other intoxicants by the Scythians. Apparently, they liked to stay blasted pretty much all the time.
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Carlin was probably just repeating something Herodotus told him. The wikipedia article states that genetic studies of remains have connected the Scythians with the Slavs, Persians and east asian peoples. According to Herodotus, the Scythians own account of their origin is that the
first Scythian king, Targitaus, [w]as the child of the sky-god and of a daughter of the Dnieper. While it's nothing special to claim descent from a god, the interesting aspect of this is that the human side of this family comes from the Dnieper, a river of Ukraine. This supports a western origin.