alt Hacker NewsThe article explains
> The findings challenge decades of scholarship that played down the importance of migration and emphasized the spread of language and culture between settled populations.“
> “What the genotyping is showing is what the ancient sources report, and what late–20th century historiography has been working very hard to deny,” says Yale University historian Noel Lenski, who was not involved in the work. “We have to … admit the sources knew more than we thought they did.”
If I'm reading that right they are implying academics were pushing the idea of cultural exchange being the most valuable thing, a vague menagerie of local and foreign cultures coming together, rather than a specific set of people arriving from a far off land to dominant an existing empire and influencing the entire region in the process.
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It was the post-WW2 hangover of "pots aren't people" (reaction to Kossinna and other racist archeologists favored by the Nazis). There was a lot of resistance from archeologists and anthropologists to ancient DNA findings in the 2010s vindicating mass migration but they ultimately had to fold (and admit that the historical linguists were right all along). Now we have a more balanced perspective and can see that language and material culture can be transmitted via either cultural diffusion or mass migration, and we have to look at the actual evidence in each case to identify the transmission mechanism. An interesting example of how both transmission mechanisms can be involved in one cultural-linguistic phenomenon is the Bell Beaker culture (associated with the spread of an Indo-European language family possibly ancestral to Italo-Celtic), which spread east from Iberia to Central Europe via cultural transmission, and then back west to the Atlantic via mass migration (reaching all the way to Britain, where they appropriated Stonehenge from its Neolithic builders, who went virtually extinct within a century).
The cultural exchange part was more a post punk thing. The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees.
And what's the difference exactly? We knew that e.g. the Visigoths had Scandinavian ancestry, but we also know that by then they had lots of other ancestry, too.
To me this reads like Lenski (not affiliated with the authors!) trying a little too hard to make it into an academic culture war issue.
If I understand the article correctly, there is DNA evidence of mass migration from Scandinavia to Northern Poland, but going further south, the evidence points to migration of a smaller elite rather than mass migration.
> In the beginning, there was a big migration, but later they started mingling, and the transmission of Gothic was more of a cultural nature.
In this comment section it seems people really want it to be one or the other, evidence be damned.