How the Indo-Europeans Conquered the World

On the Genius of the Ancient Aryan

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Any article entitled “How the Indo-Europeans Conquered the World” is going to have to pick a side unless it wants to become a book, and a very long book at that. In truth, the Proto-Indo-Europeans’ conquest of the world was ridiculously overdetermined.¹ The accidents of history guaranteed it. Their biology guaranteed it. Their technical innovation guaranteed it. One somewhat underappreciated thing that also guaranteed it was their superior social institutions.

The radical right tends not to like institutional explanations because institutions can (at least sometimes) be transplanted between cultures—the root of the famous “pots are not people” line that anthropologists love so much. If social institutions are the winning ticket, this sounds to us an awful lot like the proposition nation. It sounds to us like Eritrea can just adopt the US constitution and they’re good to go. You can see why these explanations are less than convincing.

And yet, superior social technology is as decisive as superior material technology. And the Indo-Europeans had both. Not for nothing was this prehistorical people the object of veneration by some people who were themselves very impressive.

One other fact that gets overlooked by the right is that social institutions often come as a package deal. This can make it hard to figure out which institutions are actually adaptive and which are just married to the adaptive ones but are themselves neutral or even harmful. Anthropologists call this package deal cultural linkage, and it’s echoed all the way down at the genetic level too; sometimes neutral and even maladaptive genes can “hitchhike” on adaptive genes, thereby propagating themselves in spite of their harmfulness.

Some social institutions don’t become adaptive, or aren’t fully adaptive, until they “meet up” with some other institution. For example, monogamy is mildly dysgenic,² and egalitarianism is mildly idiotic. Put them together though, and you have a formula for success. All of a sudden, all that frustrated incel energy is turned to socially productive ends, since the men who would under polygamy have simply been bred out of the gene pool now have a stake in future generations.

This can happen with two positive institutions too, where they each produce an adaptive advantage alone, but together they produce a dynamic that is totally unbeatable. The Indo-Europeans had a number of these dynamics, but in the present article I am going to focus on one impressive combination: primogeniture and the ancestor cult. This is probably what both motivated the ancient Aryans to conquer vast horizons, and what enabled them to do it too.