Latest news with #herders
Bloomberg
5 days ago
- General
- Bloomberg
How Migration and Soft Power Made Indo-European Languages Dominant
About 5,000 years ago, a group of herders living in the grasslands north of the Black Sea headed west, taking their animals with them. They got as far as the Carpathian Basin — the western extremity of the vast Eurasian steppe centered on modern Hungary — but their descendants pushed farther, and within 1,000 years languages related to those of the original migrants were spoken as far west as Ireland's Atlantic coast. That is the leading explanation today for how the majority of Europeans came to speak the languages they do. And not just Europeans. At the same time that those intrepid steppe-dwellers set off west, others speaking related dialects headed east, planting their way of speaking in Asia. Both eastern and western dialect clusters share the label 'Indo-European' because, by the time linguists noticed the family resemblance in the 18th century, they were spoken from Europe to the Indian sub-continent.
Al Arabiya
27-05-2025
- General
- Al Arabiya
At least 42 killed in weekend attacks in Nigeria's Benue state: Local official
At least 42 people were shot dead by suspected herders in a series of weekend attacks across Gwer West district in Nigeria's central Benue state, a local official said on Tuesday. Thirty-two bodies were recovered from Sunday's assaults on the Ahume and Aondona villages, while 10 more were killed in a separate attack on the villages of Tyolaha and Tse-Ubiam on Saturday, said Victor Omnin, chairman of the Gwer West local government. 'It's a pathetic situation. As we speak, we are still recovering corpses,' Omnin told journalists. Benue is in Nigeria's Middle Belt, a region where the majority Muslim North meets the largely Christian South. The region faces competition over land use, with conflicts between herders, who seek grazing land for their cattle, and farmers, who need arable land for cultivation. These tensions are often worsened by overlapping ethnic and religious divisions. Benue Governor Hyacinth Iormem Alia's office said a Catholic priest was also shot in the area by the assailants, and is in critical but stable condition.
