what we are seeing here also reflects a deeper continuity of culture-historical development, a process that tended to occur at various points in human history, when modern nation states were not around to order populations into neat ethno-linguistic groups. Arguably, the very idea that the world is divided into such homogeneous units, each with its own history, is largely a product of the modern nation state, and the desire of each to claim for itself a deep territorial lineage. At the very least, we should think twice before projecting such uniformities back in time, on to remote periods of
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