Category Archives: steppe

Over at my Substack I’ve spent more than a year writing about the cultural and genetic impact of the Eurasian steppe. I’ve put out a large number of essays, so […]

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After a long delay, I’ve dropped part 4 of my continuing series on the Eurasian steppe and its history (I am currently planning on going down to the 13th century AD…so this should take me into 2022 since I’ve barely made it beyond 2000 BC as of now). The next installment is planned to be …

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Since this question always comes up at some point, I decided to do a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation of the % steppe across the Indian subcontinent. The way I did it was by taking Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, and estimating the average percentage from the caste breakdowns (e.g., UP is 20% “upper caste” and 20% “Dalit” …

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Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present is one of my favorite books because it combines erudition with trenchent and opinionated analysis. One of the arguments explicit within the author’s narrative is that the geographic parameters of Eurasian steppe created a set of societies and […]

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Ten years ago when I read Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians, its thesis that the migrations and conquests of the post-Roman period were at least in part folk wanderings, where men, women, and children swarmed into the collapsing Empire en masse, was somewhat edgy. Today Heather’s model has to a large extent been validated. The recent […]

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One of the major revisions in my own mind about the demographic and historical processes of the Holocene in relation to humans has been the reality that large and dense agglomerations of agriculturalists could be marginalized by later peoples, to the point of having a smaller genetic footprint in the future than anyone might have […]

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Razib Khan