alt Hacker NewsIt 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).
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Do you know of any good books or sources about this viewpoint?
When I read about history of Europe/Old World in Roman and post Roman times, it's clear that large scale movements of whole groups of people is very common in the historical record.
I wonder why such views were ever resisted in prehistory, a time when such movements were simpler and their motivations more likely to arise?
The Nazis did do a lot of damage - far more than any benefits from the science would balance - and the 'science' contributed to it. The Nazis and many other racists have long argued that they are just being objective and the other side is biased.
How will you prevent that harm from recurring? Ignoring it hasn't worked, and doesn't distinguish the program you propose from a long line of racist programs and propaganda - that is, nobody can tell whether it's sincere or just another cover story.
But people can tell that it's not responsible, which is a clue about the thought behind it. We can't wash our hands of the consequences of our actions. If you don't prevent the next racist catastrophe, who will? Will you just do it and leave the consequences for others to clean up (and suffer from)?
Politicization of science is never good.
The "pots aren't people" wave wouldn't be problematic per se (e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life), rather because it sought to be the dominant theory.
We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing - defeat of the Nazis, which made some ideas extremely dirty and other ideas very attractive.
This has an interesting consequence in that we do not know much about natural human intelligence today, which is coming back to bite us in the age of emerging artificial intelligence. The topic of human intelligence has been a political minefield for nearly a century now. It is probably safer and easier to study intelligence of octopuses and crows than that of humans. You're definitely freer from political repercussions there.
Language etymology is a fascinating study. This is very far from my own expertise, but I have family that have made it more of a vocation.
Languages can spread by utility, rather than culture.
For example, "Low German" was a common trade tongue, and shows up in parts of the world, where Germans never set foot.