Migration in Human History

Introduction

0:00Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Tides of History ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible ad.

0:11The spear took the young mammoth in the flank. Its stone tip, razor sharp, drove through layers of hair, fur, skin, fat, and muscle to lodge deeply in a rib. The next two missed altogether, careening into the distance. A fourth followed a moment after, sliding between the ribs and slicing into the heart. The massive animal bellowed once, took two steps, and then dropped to the ground, blood pouring from the wound. The hunters rose from their hiding spot in the dead ground, indistinguishable from the rest of the endless rolling, grass-covered tundra around them, and whooped in triumph.

0:47They didn't know that they were the last of their people to track mammoth across this ground, one destination among many they visited every year.

Environmental Change

0:55Twelve thousand years later, the mammoth and the mammoth hunters were long gone from this place. So too was the grassland, replaced by forests of beech and elm cut through with rivers. The dead ground where the hunters had hidden was a marsh. A hide-covered boat silently cut through the reedy waters. A woman paddled slowly, her keen blue eyes watching for the birds returning to their nests. She was looking for eggs, a delicacy for her people. They had lived in these low valleys of Doggerland for generations.

1:26That was long enough to forget that their ancestors had once called the lands far to the south, near the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea, their home. Seven millennia passed. Year by year, century by century, the seas rose. The dead ground and low valleys became bays and inlets, the hills, island, the high ground, the coastline.

English Channel Voyage

1:49The wood-planked ship wallowed through the waves of the English Channel. It was an ungainly craft, an old merchantman rather than a fast vessel designed to take Saxon warriors on their raids down the coast. It held families rather than fighters. Twenty children, women, and men who had spent a rain-lashed week battling contrary winds and currents to reach their new home in Britain. Their old home was gone now, burned by marauding franks, and they had piled into this scow purely to get away. One of the young men had been to Britain a few years back, looking to sign up with the Romans as a soldier.

2:22He'd ended up doing some light pillaging instead, and remembered a wonderful spot to build a new village. It was the best option they had.

Slave Ship

2:30When the slave ship beat back up the Channel toward London 1,300 years later, fighting a nasty wind out of the north, its captain was in his cabin. He considered the vast sums he had earned, the quickness of the voyage from West Africa to Barbados, the storms between there and Jamaica, and the lucky winds on the return voyage. The boy he had purchased from the slaver at the Bight of Benin was a quick young fellow. The captain couldn't decide whether he would keep the lad and train him as his body servant, or sell him to a London buyer for a healthy profit. People are always on the move.

Migration Theme

3:06Migration is one of the defining themes in human history, and today, we're going to try to understand how it works and why it matters. You know that moment when you order food and suddenly everyone around you gets very interested in your dinner? Yeah, that's what Grubhub does. Gives you deals so good, you'll have to guard them. Gold Days of Grubhub Plus is here. Four weeks of Grubhub's best offers, all month long in May, only for Grubhub Plus members.

3:38And if you're not a member, you can sign up now for just 99 cents a month for six months. That's 90% off. Grubhub Plus membership auto-renews and terms apply. Sign up now on the app or at grubhub.com slash plus slash gold. Don't miss it. Whether you're exploring your fascinations or discovering new ones, Ottawa has stories that will introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romanticy series. Know how true the latest blockbuster movie stayed to the sci-fi story it was based on,

4:10or find unexpected reveals through an exclusive true crime podcast. However you listen, Audible keeps you fascinated, so you can be just as fascinating. Select any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at $8.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating. Hi, everybody. From Audible, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman.

4:41Thanks so much for joining me today.

4:45It sounds like a cliche to say this, but people don't stay put. Individually, our journeys take us from one place to the next as we move through different stages of our lives. We move for all sorts of reasons. For jobs, for love, to get away from the memories of a bad relationship, to escape grinding poverty or ethnic hatred, or because we like the weather better somewhere else. To be human is to move, whether it's for days and across a country, or generations and across continents. At the largest scale, that movement becomes migration,

5:16the permanent, long-distance movement of whole groups of people. Migration is what took our species and our archaic forebears out of Africa and around the planet. It's why English is spoken across much of the earth, why varieties of Chinese are a lingua franca throughout Southeast Asia, why there are horses in the Americas and Afrikaners in South Africa. If we want to make sense of the broad patterns of human history, from the very dawn of our species to the present day, we have to figure out migration. Migration has been a recurring theme throughout our run on tides from the very beginning,

5:49and during fall of Rome before that, because migration has been one of my major concerns throughout my life as a historian. Trying to make sense of whether, how, and why people move is pretty central to just about all the work I've done for a couple of decades, so I've had to do a lot of thinking, reading, and writing about migration as a concept. Today's episode is going to tie together a bunch of those threads. How scholars have understood migration in the past, how we understand it now, and how our current, much-improved grasp of human mobility plays into our answers to some of the big questions about our past.

6:21Before we dive into that, I want you to stop and think for a moment about migration in your life and the lives of your immediate family. Maybe you live in precisely the same place your ancestors have for centuries, and you've never gone more than 20 minutes from where you were born, but I doubt it. That would be a pretty atypical story in the 21st century world. Even if you were one of the few people for whom that was true, you almost certainly have family members who have migrated some substantial distance. Our world is globalized, and even deeply rooted communities tend to have some members who live elsewhere, whether that's the nearest large metropolitan area or an entire continent away.

6:57The possibilities for long-distance migration in our globalized world have never existed before, and, if things go south in the future, might never exist again. But migration has always existed, and will always exist, because people always have reasons to want to be somewhere else. If those conditions are sufficient to draw one person, they're usually part of a group of people, pushed or pulled by the same factors. The existence of migration in any given age is never in question. Only the patterns within humanity's constant flows from place to place vary.

7:30Migration is currently undergoing a bit of a renaissance as a theme in history and archaeology after a few decades in which it fell out of fashion. Now, this applies much more to prehistory and premodern history than early modern and modern. For those periods, large-scale movements of people from continent to continent have defined the age. The transatlantic slave trade was a forced migration of 12 million people. Millions of Europeans left their home continent voluntarily. These phenomena are impossible to ignore, and obviously central to why the world is the way it is.

8:01But for the more distant past, using migration to explain change in the material and historical record wasn't really popular between roughly the 1970s and the early 2010s. That's changed recently, for reasons we'll get into shortly. In the early decades of the 20th century, migration was the default explanation for why things changed in the past. If a new, defining style of artifact showed up, there must have been a new group of people to go with it. Now, I'm obviously simplifying a bit, but that's the basic idea of culture-historical archaeology,

8:33the dominant paradigm in archaeology in the early 20th century. This approach used distinctive types or collections of artifact types to define an archaeological culture. As the defining pieces of that archaeological culture moved across the map through time, the reasoning went, there must have been a defined group of people to go with it. Think of these cultures like billiard balls. When one crashed into another, one lost and was replaced by the other. The exponents of this view often understood these archaeologically defined groups of people in explicitly racial terms.

9:05The Nazis and other racists picked up on this idea, it was perfectly in keeping with the scientific racism of the time, and used it as ideological support for the acquisition of Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. Germanic peoples, defined by an archaeological culture, had once lived in the region, which made it rightfully Germanic property so the Nazis could claim it in the present. Quite understandably, that turned off a lot of people to the whole idea of culture-historical archaeology and the idea of billiard ball groups of people rolling around the map.

9:36In addition to being ideologically toxic, the whole concept was pretty obviously wrong. The fact that a specific artifact type was found at a number of different sites doesn't mean the people who lived there shared an ethnic or racial identity, or even that they felt any kinship at all. Culture-historical archaeology is an example of a monothetic classification system where one single trait, attributed from the outside, not a self-definition, serves to define an entire group of people. In reality, culture is polythetic, defined by a large number of different traits,

10:08some visible in the archaeological record, but most not. The idea that you're part of a culturally and ethnically homogenous group because you use Tupperware obviously has some flaws in it, just to draw a present-day parallel for you. Tupperware might be a way of signaling cultural affiliation in specific contexts. More likely, it's just a widely available container. But this is the kind of reasoning that gave us billiardball ethnic groups rolling around the map. Imagine arguing that the rise of Tupperware in American suburbs after World War II was evidence of a vast new migration of a coherent group of people,

10:40the Tupperware people, from far away, and you're not too far off. It's oversimplifying a bit, but the reasoning that replaced that can be summed up with the phrase Pots, not people. Material culture—pots, to use the prototypical example—were perfectly capable of moving without long-distance migrations of entire peoples. So too could the knowledge of how to make pots in a particular way, which the existing inhabitants of a region might adopt for any number of reasons. Because they wanted to signal allegiance to new political overlords,

11:11because they were suddenly brought into wide-ranging trade networks, because the new type of pot didn't shatter as easily, or because they liked the decorations. New models of explanation for periods before text, or with few texts such as barbarian Europe outside the Roman Empire, focused on cultural diffusion. How ways of doing, making, thinking, and speaking spread without necessarily requiring the movement of large numbers of people. Spanish, for example, isn't the dominant language throughout Latin America because migrating Spaniards replaced all the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas.

11:46Cultural diffusion—the adoption of new cultural traits alongside old ones and newly formed hybrids— is a much better way of explaining what we see in the historical and material record. But, yet again, you can see the obvious problem here. Sometimes people did move, bringing their ways of doing, thinking, and speaking with them. Sometimes they did, in fact, displace the previous inhabitants of a region, though not as often as the culture-historical model suggested. Latin America during the period of Spanish rule was a world of hybridization and cultural diffusion,

12:17but it was also a world of mass migration. Of Africans forcibly transported across the Atlantic, indigenous people moving toward and away from centers of colonial power, and Spanish migrants leaving Iberia in search of a better life. I want to give you a concrete example here. You might have heard the term migration age for the era of the late Roman Empire when barbarian groups were on the move everywhere from Eastern Europe to the North Sea. In the culture-historical model, these processes were discussed as coherent Germanic racial or ethnic groups defined by specific artifact types,

12:49moving across the landscape through time and knocking other groups out of their way, who then moved elsewhere themselves. In the cultural diffusionist model, which is what was popular when I first learned about these topics, the only thing that moved was the concept of the ethnic group. There were no or very few actual Goths moving from the Danube to the Balkans to southern Gaul and Iberia, and only a small number of Anglo-Saxons arriving in Britain. The vast cultural changes of the early Middle Ages were, in this way of thinking, the product of people who had formerly considered themselves Romans adopting new identities.

13:21There were no barbarian invasions or even barbarian migrations, and nothing about this period made it more or less of a migration age than any other. That was the paradigm that dominated the field when I was starting graduate school. This view can no longer hold. It had problems, even at the time. I remember reading these works and thinking the scholars were awfully squirrely about how many people were moving, who they were, and what actually constituted migration. What I didn't realize then was how under-theorized their understanding of the topic was,

13:51how little resemblance their mental model of human movement actually bore to the real patterns and flows of real-world migration. That was also true of the culture-historical model, for what it's worth. Neither seemed to be particularly familiar with what migration looked like in actual practice. More than anything else, that's what has changed in the past couple of decades, and entirely for the better.

14:16I'm Leon Nafok, best known as the host and co-creator of podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Think Twice, Michael Jackson. I'm here to tell you about my show, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions, and vicious onstage fights. But before The Jerry Springer Show became a symbol of cultural decline, its namesake was a popular Midwestern politician and a serious-minded idealist with lofty ambitions.

14:48Through dozens of intimate and revealing interviews with those who knew Springer best, I examined Springer's lifelong struggle to reconcile his TV persona with his political dreams and aspirations. Named one of the best podcasts of the year by The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer is a story about choices, how we make them, how we justify them to ourselves, and how we transcend them, or don't. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or binge the whole series ad-free right now on Audible.

15:18Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic-y series. Become your friend group's sci-fi expert on the latest blockbuster book-to-screen adaptation. Or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated, so you can be just as fascinating.

15:51All in one easy app. With plans now starting at $8.99, you'll get access to over 1 million audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at $8.99. Audible. Be fascinated.

Understanding Migration

16:14Be fascinating. So that's where the study of migration has come from. Now let's talk about where it's at. The fundamental shift in the topic has come from viewing migration as a subset of human movement more generally. That sounds basic, but let me explain. Migration, because it's permanent and seems to involve large numbers of people, often gets treated as an entirely separate category from other, less permanent forms of mobility.

16:47Hunter-gatherers making the rounds of their territory over the course of a year, Neolithic farmers taking semi-annual trips to ritual centers to meet with their compatriots, teenagers going away to college, and snowbirds spending half their year in Minnesota and half in Arizona. The most basic change we can make to better understand migration is to treat it not as a separate category, but as a related manifestation of mobility. How much it overlaps with those other forms varies from instance to instance, but the connection is always, always there.

17:20Now, this sounds like a minor shift, but I promise you it's not, because it requires us to put movement through the world at the very center of how we understand individuals and groups. Instead of viewing people as basically rooted in place, we should view them as basically mobile. Let me explain. Think about the most rooted person you can think of in the past, a peasant farmer working his or her fields of wheat and barley, living in a tight-knit village, part of the same community that's been in place for centuries. That person is still mobile.

17:52They leave their hut to go out and work in the fields. They take their livestock out to pasture in the hills beyond their fields. They travel to the next village over for a cousin's wedding. There isn't enough land nearby for a growing population, and a few of the young men leave to found a new village not far away, still just a day's journey. The rooted villagers in their original home are still in contact with them. This is a prototypical example of a small world, but it's still a world made of movement. It's just that those movements are short distance, quickly done, and habitual,

18:22part of the foundational rhythms of life. But even in that hypothetical scenario of extreme rootedness, there are still connections to the broader world. Maybe traders come by every once in a while with fancy pottery from the town three days away, or the village's young men are expected to go fight for the local chieftain or lord in times of emergency, or raiders occasionally come and snatch individuals and families for sale into slavery. No world, no matter how small, is ever completely isolated from the others surrounding it. Understanding migration starts with these small worlds

18:56and building up a picture of how people move through them. Then we can start to move outward to the larger worlds of which they're a part, visualizing the connections that bind the small worlds into bigger networks. Mobility isn't random, it has patterns. Those patterns might be seasonal, shepherds taking their flocks up into the mountain pastures in the summer, or part of a person's life cycle, such as the Vikings who traveled to Byzantium to fight for the emperors Varangians, and then returned home to Scandinavia laden with prestige and plunder.

19:26Neither of those is migration in the strict sense of the term, nobody's staying anywhere permanently. But, in both of those cases, the horizons of the small world have expanded to match the scale of that temporary movement. Travelers, whether they're on a mountain trackway for a few days or a boat for a few months, learn about what they find away from home and bring that knowledge back with them. That information then becomes vital for people who actually do want to move permanently because it tells them where they can go and what they might find when they get there.

19:57This is absolutely essential. All forms of mobility depend on information. Almost nobody sets out into the complete unknown with no idea of what they'll find when they get there, whether they're going to 7-Eleven or across an ocean. Columbus sailed south to the Canary Islands before he turned west because he knew he would find westerly winds there. The age of voyages into the open Atlantic never would have happened at all if not for the preceding decades in which Iberian and Italian sailors had spent year after year after year mapping the coast of West Africa and learning its currents and winds.

20:30It's not a coincidence that the guy who did try to go due west from Iberia just before Columbus, a Fleming named Ferdinand van Ullman, was never heard from again. He didn't have the necessary information. In the more remote human past, we lack specific knowledge of these failed attempts at exploration and colonization precisely because they failed. Success required preparation, and preparation required prior information. Migrants don't choose their destinations randomly, and they don't set off into the unknown fully

21:02laden to start a new life. They learn about promising possibilities from people who have been to their potential destinations, weigh the risks and costs of moving, and then make a decision. This means that when we want to look for migration in the historical or especially the archaeological record, we should be looking first for signs of contact between regions. We have to try to identify the pre-existing connections that provided information for future migrants. Think about all the many voyages by English mariners along the coast of North America before

21:32the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. Sure, they were looking for trade goods and an easy buck, but they were also explicitly gathering information about this new land. Or consider the Viking settlement at Lanzo Meadows in Newfoundland half a millennium earlier. As garbled as our understanding of its circumstances is today, enough survives to tell us that it was part of an extended series of voyages along the eastern coast of North America. Unfortunately, we'll never know precisely where those voyages went or what they found, but we can still see their echo in that one settlement archaeologists have found and excavated.

22:08That's the key point and the basic underlying pattern. When we can see permanent migrants arriving somewhere, we can be certain that the migrants were not the only people moving. Others had come before them, and once established, others followed, either on a temporary or a permanent basis. Others went, stayed for a while, and then returned home, because every migration flow includes people who go back. I'll give you a concrete example of this in the present. I grew up in a city, Yakima, Washington, that was majority Latino a thousand miles away from

22:41the border. Initially, migrants came as seasonal farm workers for the apple, cherry, and hop harvests, trekking north up the highways from California. As the years and decades passed, some settled permanently and more followed, forever altering the demographic and cultural makeup of central Washington state. We can see the pattern of information gathering followed by permanent migration clearly in that case. If we were looking at an archaeological timescale where we're dealing in decades and centuries and using only material evidence, finding those initial signs would be much more difficult.

23:13I could ask my classmates about their journeys and those of their parents. Archaeologists can't ask Neolithic farmers how they learned about new settlement locations. One of the things I learned from my classmates when I was a kid was that who migrated wasn't random, just as the locations they chose weren't random. Practically all had roots in Mexico, but they weren't a representative sample of the Mexican populace. Michoacan and Oaxaca were the most common origins. Neither of those states is close to the U.S. border. It's actually further from Oaxaca's capital city to the Arizona border than it is from the

23:46Arizona border to Yakima. Michoacan is closer, but not by much. Those folks made the journey because their circumstances at home pushed them away and conditions in central Washington pulled them. Push and pull factors are the basic motive forces behind migration. Push factors are the reasons why someone wants to leave a place, like a drought or a lack of romantic partners or the threat of conscription into the army or ethnic cleansing. Pull factors are the reasons why someone goes to a particular place, like jobs or land or

24:18because a brother lives there or religious freedom.

24:22Now, it wasn't just the availability of work that drew these people to Yakima, but their social networks. They had family, friends, and neighbors from home who had made or were making the journey. Some lived there. Some had gone and then returned to Mexico. Others had spent time there but now lived elsewhere in the United States. All migration flows include people who go and return or who moved to multiple locations in the broad region they're now calling home. The social ties that bound potential migrants to those past movers were essential in providing

24:54the information that helped them make an informed choice about their destination and incentivized them to choose that destination. This is precisely what we call chain migration. Knowing that there will be some people like you, uncles and cousins and brothers and that one guy from your village, already there, is a powerful attractor for migrants. Older work of both the culture-historical and cultural diffusionist schools never really grappled with the reasons behind migration or the actual dynamics of people on the move.

25:25In my earlier years, I never really dealt with it either. I was more concerned with proving that migrations had actually happened, not necessarily understanding them. But that missed the real meat of the issue. Who went where? And for what reasons did they move? And why did it matter? These are the kinds of questions we're asking now. And thanks to some really exciting new tools and approaches, we can actually answer them even for the distant past. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the

26:03stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic-y series. Become your friend group's sci-fi expert on the latest blockbuster book-to-screen adaptation. Or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. All in one easy app with plans now starting at £5.99. You'll get access to over 900,000 audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers,

26:37the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at £5.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating.

26:57I'm Raza Jaffrey, and in the new season of The Spy Who, we tell the story of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the spy who sold nuclear secrets to Iran. He was the scientist spy who stole nuclear technology from the Netherlands and used them to give Pakistan a bomb. But he didn't stop there. He became a black market atomic salesman, a fix-it man for rogue states seeking nuclear weapons, including Iran, Libya, and North Korea. And that left the CIA and MI6 in a race against time to put him out of business, before the

27:34world's most wayward regimes get hold of the world's most destructive weapons.

27:40Follow The Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran, early and at free, on Audible.

27:57In this final segment, I want to run through a few cases of how applying this more nuanced and detailed understanding of migration sheds light on really big developments in the human past. The most important tool we have for this task is, as we discussed last time on Tides, ancient DNA. When we can look directly at the genomes of people who lived in the past and compare them to other ancient people and populations, the question of migration often, not always, but often, becomes pretty straightforward to answer.

28:29We'll start in the mists of the distant past, with the last round of out-of-Africa migrations before the last glacial maximum. So, it's been obvious for a long time that Homo sapiens evolved within Africa and then migrated outward to eventually populate the far reaches of the planet. The earliest fossils associated with our species are found in Africa. Dating of artifacts and sites places anatomically modern humans in Africa before they're anywhere else, and more recent discoveries, namely in DNA, show that populations living within Africa today, like the saan of southern Africa, are the most distantly related branch of our

29:03species. The details get really complicated really fast, but basically, the deepest splits within our family tree happened within Africa, long before the people from whom non-Africans are mostly descended left the continent. Prior to the advent of DNA, the most basic outlines of Homo sapiens' global migration were pretty clear. One early wave of migrants that probably skirted the southern coast of Asia and went from there to New Guinea and Australia, another inland branch that ended up in East Asia, and another that wound up in Europe. Ancient DNA, however, has massively complicated just about every aspect of

29:36that straightforward story.

29:41Learning that our anatomically modern human ancestors had interbred with other species of archaic humans not just once, but multiple times, was the first major complication. Everyone whose recent ancestors lived outside Africa derives a few percent of their ancestry from Neanderthals. That archaic ancestry comes from a single interbreeding event probably around 45-50,000 years ago, almost certainly somewhere in Western Asia. This much we've known for a while. But ancient DNA has also shown us that there were other interbreeding events.

30:11One of the individuals found at the cave of Pestera Kuoase in Romania, dating to around 34-36,000 years ago, had a Neanderthal ancestor in the previous four to six generations. But this was not the same event that gave all people today their Neanderthal ancestry, and it wasn't the same population of Neanderthals. Moreover, the genetic population to which that individual belonged, the modern human population, was effectively a dead end. They're not related closely to any other group afterward.

30:41Other ancient DNA samples from Paleolithic Europe, long before the last glacial maximum, show a similar pattern. Distinct groups of Homo sapiens colonized Europe time and again in the distant past. They interbred with archaic humans, roamed the continent for decades or millennia, and then disappeared, lost in the mists of time. This is a massively important thing for us to understand because it shows that once established, societies or genetic populations, or whatever you want to call them, don't necessarily last.

31:13They can die out or be replaced fully. Migrations are not a one-time thing, not in the distant past, and not in more recent periods. People are constantly on the move over every timescale and distance, and tracking the interactions between different populations of Homo sapiens and various archaic human species revealed through our genes helps us place those movements in space and time. We now know that instead of single migratory flows, early groups of Homo sapiens were all over the place, interacting in a variety of ways with their neighbors, and a great many of those groups

31:46didn't leave descendants. Migration is messy, and often, for lack of a better term, simply fails. But the further back we go, the harder it is to see those failures and experiments. Ancient DNA clarifies more recent migrations as well. Language, ethnic identity, and genetic ancestry aren't always tied in obvious ways to the material objects people make, use, and leave in the ground for archaeologists to find. One of the major conclusions of ethnoarchaeology, the study of present-day groups and how they use the objects around them,

32:18is that material culture maps pretty uneasily onto self-understanding. A brooch might be a symbol of belonging to a distinctive lineage, or it might just be a brooch. A funerary urn might just be a funerary urn, or it might be the foundational element of how a whole society defined itself. Sometimes, as the cultural diffusionists rightly point out, the appearance of new material styles has nothing to do with the movement of people. But people can also move without leaving any obvious material sign of their migration for archaeologists to find. That's a situation that both culture-historical and cultural

32:52diffusionist models simply can't explain. DNA, however, has a great deal to say about these cases. It's revealed a number of migrations that we simply weren't aware of before, particularly when we use it in conjunction with other tools of archaeological science. I want to talk about Iron Age Europe for a moment, because it lays out these dynamics so clearly. The two major divisions of Iron Age material culture are Hallstatt and Latenn. The Hallstatt culture peters out around 400 BC, and the Latenn culture is what we associate with the Celts of

33:24the Iron Age, the groups Julius Caesar conquered in Gaul and encountered in Britain. When you think of prototypically Celtic art and design, you're thinking of Latenn. Many scholars have argued that the spread of these material packages was driven by the migration of Celtic-speaking groups across the continent. When we dig into the DNA evidence, however, that picture gets a lot more complicated. There was a wave of migration, but it happened before the Iron Age. The Late Bronze Age, as it turns out, was when people were really on the move, but the material signs of their migration are pretty scant.

33:58The Hallstatt and Latenn material cultures that we see so strongly in the archaeological record were diffusing among a genetically and probably linguistically related series of communities spread across the continent. The migration had already happened centuries earlier by the time the material markers we recognize appeared. If we move past the Iron Age and into the first millennium AD, we see still more previously unrecognized instances of migration in the DNA evidence. A 2025 paper led by the geneticist Leo Speidel examined a truly enormous number of ancient DNA samples from

34:34this period, 1,556 individuals in total. Speidel and his colleagues identified not one but two migration events. One out of Scandinavia in the early first millennium, plausibly associated with the speakers of Germanic languages who eventually became Goths, Vandals, and Franks, and a second one after 500 AD into Scandinavia, which was probably tied to the raiding, trading, and warring of the Viking Age. I loved this study because it shows just how constant migration flows are even when we

35:06lack an overarching story for that migration. Thousands of people were on the move every year in the first millennium AD, both voluntarily and not, and the ancient DNA allows us to track the outlines of those migrations in ways that simply do not appear in the textual evidence. Many potential cases of migration simply aren't that complicated, though, and ancient DNA has effectively answered the question. That's the case for the expansion of Neolithic farmers throughout Europe and, indeed, most Neolithic societies around the globe. Food production stimulated population growth, which led to rapid expansion of related

35:41individuals and groups over a large area. The Indo-European languages came from the Bronze Age steppe, and their expansion was driven by long-distance migration. The expansion of the Austronesian languages across islands Southeast Asia and Oceania were likewise the product of demographic expansion and migration. There are still a few cultural diffusionist holdouts left, but it seems almost certain that the cultural shifts of the early Middle Ages in Britain were driven by large-scale migration across the North Sea. In other words, the Anglo-Saxon migration was a real thing, and thousands

36:12upon thousands of people moved from the continent to Britain between 400 and 600 AD. Whether we want to call this a migration age or not, and I'm inclined not to just because I don't think it's all that outstanding compared to any others, there were Germanic-speaking people moving substantial distances to new homes. But conversely, not everything is migration. A recent paper looking at the spread of Indo-European languages tied itself into absolute knots trying to find genetic evidence to support

36:42migration into Anatolia, where the Indo-European languages are first attested. They did not find that evidence. Either the samples they had access to didn't provide the link, or, in my view, the more likely scenario, the Indo-European languages entered Anatolia without mass migration that left a genetic signal. The Laten archaeological complex of the late Iron Age, so distinctive in its artistic style, weaponry, and ways of life, was almost pure cultural diffusion except at the very uppermost elite level. I think the main takeaway should be this. Because the relationship between material

37:17culture, identity, language, and migration isn't constant, that means we need to treat every instance and potential instance of migration as sui generis. I talked about the broad patterns we see in migrations earlier, the exploratory phase and information gathering, the importance of social networks in determining who goes where, the push and pull factors that drive people out and bring them in. Those things are constant in any instance of migration, but they can look very different from case to case. For the Indo-Europeans moving outward from the Pontic-Caspian steppe into Eastern

37:48Europe and Central Asia 5,000 years ago, information gathering came from raids and the search for new pastures, and the information was transmitted through kin networks. The resulting migrations were male-dominated and violent because the migrants were warriors seeking out new realms in which they too could be powerful, like their chiefs back home. That often meant killing indigenous men in the regions they came to and taking the women. For Neolithic farmers in Europe 8,000 years ago, whole family groups were on the move, not just or primarily young men. They were looking for arable land, not

38:21pastures or prestige in war. And while they certainly weren't peaceful folk, Neolithic farmers also weren't particularly interested in exterminating their Mesolithic hunter-gatherer neighbors. One of my dear internet friends comes from a family of Bosnian refugees. War drove them into refugee camps and from there eventually to the United States, a push factor if ever there was one. My Irish ancestors, by contrast, were mostly pulled to the United States by the promise of better jobs and better lives. They went to Butte, Montana, and Portland, Oregon because they already had family and friends

38:54there. Every individual's story is different, but individual stories aggregate into clearly understandable patterns. At least, understandable if we're using the right tools. We need those tools because migration is one of the defining features of the human experience. But that's not enough to say. It's a cliche, and we can only grasp why migration really matters if we go beyond the mere fact of its existence to the dynamics that power it. We have to understand the hows, whys, and whos if we're going to place human movement in its central place in the past, present, and future.

39:30In ways large and small, migration has defined your life and mine. And the more we unpick those patterns, the better we understand ourselves and our world. Next time on Tides, we're going to talk about one of my favorite subjects, the differences between academic history and history for popular audiences, and why we absolutely need both to make sense of the past. Follow Tides of History on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen

40:00to all episodes of Tides of History ad-free by joining Audible.

40:06Tides of History is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. Sound design by Molly Bach for Airship. The sound engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffe. From Audible, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Louis. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Audible, this has been Tides of History.