Comment by TFNA
2 hours ago
Archaeogenetics is a new field in archaeology and linguistics, it only started to really make an impact in the last 15 years. No one was "looking into it let alone saying it" before that simply because DNA from dated archaeological sites hadn't yet been extracted, sequenced, and made available to researchers.
You rushed here to slander people working in the field without familiarizing yourself with the first things about it. Shame on you.
I suspect the academic community had a bias towards nationalistic interpretation of history. We see this both from Russian and Polish/Ukrainians, whose history is totally interlinked, making it plausible for both sides to make claims favoring what their national identity would prefer, rather than the truth.
Again, why "suspect" something about a field of scholarship? You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others. The Goths left no descendants identifying as such, their entire branch of the Germanic language family went extinct, and no scholar working today is emotionally invested in them for nationalist reasons, nor would they resist particular interpretations because anyone else was.
I mean, the academic community deliberately went against historical sources without much evidence-based arguments to do so. Turns out that denying DNA data is not doable, and now they have to do a 180.
I personally wouldn't put the “shame” onto GP.
Again, anyone actually familiar with Gothic studies (I trained in the field and remain employed in a closely related one) would know that people didn't outright "go against Jordanes", but rather the Gothic Urheimat was always discussed as a matter of controversy, with Jordanes' claims one version but external evidence lacking. Now there is some external evidence.
Historians hold out on claims made in historical sources -- especially when written centuries after the fact -- all the time, it is a standard scientific practice to seek external evidence.
And for having worked in a similarly behaving field, there is a big difference between “yeah we're not sure yet” and “no the ancients are most certainly wrong because our Modern Thinking is necessarily better (wink wink)”.
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