Re: Brexit 2: Happy Halloween
Finns, Estonians, and Hungarians are all related, right? Descendants of the Golden Horde?
The Golden Horde (13th century) is way too late.
The Hungarians spread west with Attila in the 5th century and eventually reach the area of modern Hungary in the 9th century.
The Finns and Estonians are MUCH earlier, with Finnish being spoken in Finland as early as 4000 BC. Therefore Uralic has developed as a language group throughout north eastern Europe and northern Asia by the Bronze Age, and all those peoples who come after speaking varieties of it (Finnish, Estonian, Mongol, Hungarian) are all splinters of the original parent language.
It's probably more accurate to think of Uralic as a root language which breaks into lots of regional dialects over the whole area now covered by Mongolia, Russia, and Scandinavia. In the course of history it bumps up against Indo-European along the western and southern edges (central Asia, northern Iran, Turkey, eastern Russia) while meanwhile there are westward waves of migrations within the region, constantly shuffling up the languages and ethnicity.
So, for example, you wind up with "Turkic" people in say the Balkans, but which wave did they come from? You've got choices every 300 years or so in recorded history and nothing to prevent us from assuming those were still happening before there were Greeks to complain about it.
There's a theory that those migratory waves were driven by climate -- the steppe populations were pastoral nomads and they had to go where their animals took them. As the climate changed the feeding areas changed and they came into contact with their neighbors whose land was suddenly a prized resource. Since the Mongols had large horses which they could ride, which people in the west hadn't even seen before, they won. Light cavalry > infantry.
Centaurs are an Anatolian cultural memory of seeing these eastern interlopers for the first time and thing, "oh sh-t, that's a man-horse!" Just like the Aztecs thought when they saw Cortez.
