Comment by hopelite

If you start looking into it, you will surely be astonished at just how much “cultural exchange” there must have been going back even into the Paleolithic time, and definitely during the period of the OP article is touching on.

People have an extremely distorted perspective on European history for many reasons, but the late industrial age nation state probably had the biggest impact on that mental model people still have today in many ways. By all evidence I’ve seen, the cultural exchange in the distant past was far more organic than most people can easily imagine today for many reasons. Trade and cultural communion, religious exchanges and defensive unions all made that possible in a world that was not at all as controlled and authoritarian as we even experience today. It all waxed and waned over the centuries and regions of course, in a rather organic manner; but due to practical limitations a lot of the authoritarian restrictions we are all subject to today simply did not exist.

In some ways the USA until about 1960, is probably the most similar analogue of how Europe seems to have generally been for the longest time leading up to the Industrial Revolution. It was a land of general regions of self-regulating, cultural clustering with local levels of varying jurisdictions and power structures which to a large extent kept most people in their home region, if not their place of birth. By the latter part of that period the identity with one’s state and region and local culture had already largely succumbed to the oppressive force of the centralized dominating power of the federal and global power, but your region was still largely your cultural identity as a person and community.

That of course has all been totally razed and destroyed now and the USA effectively exists in name only today, which has been the case for an even longer time, but that’s a different topic altogether.