This is one of my favorite facts of history that makes me laugh maniacally when I think about it. In some respects, Robert E. Howard’s “Hyborian Age” fantasies of Conan the Barbarian described the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age more accurately than archaeologists and historians managed to during most of the century after the fantasies were published.
(I’m not the first to point this out. Credit goes to Greg Cochran, co-author of “The 10,000 Year Explosion”, on his blog West Hunter.)
How did this happen? Scholars, reacting against 19th century Romanticism (and especially the weird polyp of it that turned into Nazi racial theory) adopted a sort of meta-model of prehistoric civilizations in which they usually evolved peacefully in place, with large-scale migration and warfare being exceptional.
It was only the advent of paleogenetics that shattered this cozy image. We now know that the Cimmerians (the Yamnaya ancestors of modern Europeans) did in fact come storming off the steppes to kill every male in sight and take all the women as sex slaves. We can read the traces of this catastrophe in our chromosomes.
ESR, Twitter, 2025-02-10.
June 1, 2025
QotD: Robert E. Howard was more accurate with Conan than the historians of his day
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