|
Post by Admin on Jan 1, 2024 22:27:19 GMT
Parallel development of genes and languages in the Volga-Oka interfluve The past 1,500 years of history of the Volga-Oka interfluve are characterized by a gradual language shift from Uralic to Slavic.3 A corresponding pattern emerged from our genetic data. The Iron Age inhabitants of the Volga-Oka interfluve carried Siberian ancestry, which places them on the same genetic continuum with most present-day Uralic-speaking populations. In our modeling framework, the local Iron Age group provided a fitting source of Siberian ancestry for most of our medieval individuals. However, archaeological evidence suggests that the Bolshoye Davydovskoye people represented a unique culture that disappeared already by the 7th century,11 making them an unlikely candidate for the direct ancestors of medieval groups. Thus, although the Bolshoye Davydovskoye group may have contributed to the later population, the Uralic-speaking people who lived in the Volga-Oka interfluve at the time of the Slavic migration likely represented a closely related but separate group. One such group could be Meryans, a now-extinct Uralic-speaking group mentioned in the Chronicles, whose reconstructed speaker area covered the Suzdal region.25,26
Slavic migrations in the latter half of the first millennium shaped the linguistic landscape of northwestern Russia.1,5,27 In the 10th–12th centuries, Slavic and Uralic-speaking groups often formed multilingual communities in the northeastern regions of Kievan Rus’, where Suzdal lies. Concordantly, our dataset captures the arrival of the Slavic ancestry component and the medieval coexistence of Slavic-like and Uralic-like groups. In Shekshovo 9, we detected approximately equal numbers of individuals from both genetic groups, and their burial placement showed no apparent distinction between them. Moreover, some individuals with Uralic-like ancestry were buried with “Slavic” grave goods or a mixture of Slavic and “Uralic” items, indicating cultural integration of the groups. However, our model suggests that the Slavic-like group contributed a major proportion (70%) of ancestry to the later population. Obviously, our medieval sample may be too small to be fully representative, but the difference could also suggest additional contribution from the surrounding Slavic population in the Late Middle Ages.
Whereas historical sources indicate strong Scandinavian influence in early Rus’, we did not detect Scandinavian ancestry in our medieval individuals, which may suggest that the majority of the population in medieval Suzdal comprised of Uralic and Slavic peoples. Alternatively, the individuals with Scandinavian ancestry may have been less frequently buried in the cemeteries we sampled.
Conclusions Our unique time transect of ancient DNA data shows that the Volga area has been at the crossroads of population interaction for the last two millennia. The local Iron Age gene pool carried three main ancestry components resembling populations from Iron Age eastern Baltics, Iron Age Steppe, and Bronze Age Kola Peninsula. Intriguingly, these sources also connected the Iron Age individuals to local Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Meanwhile, their gene pool seemed largely discontinuous from the nearby Bronze Age population of Fatyanovo.28 The early Middle Ages in turn saw a shift in diet and the arrival of a Slavic-like genetic component, which tightly mirrors insights from historical linguistics and written records. The medieval genetic diversity was further bolstered by long-distance migrants with genetic affinity to Central Asia and Iran, underlining the region’s long-distance connections. Admittedly, the dynamics we have discovered may be very local: the genetic structure in present-day Russians suggests that the details of the Slavic admixture process may have varied by area.9,11 Nevertheless, our results indicate that ancient DNA may also provide indirect evidence of language history when linguistic data are sparse.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jan 17, 2024 20:37:13 GMT
A Genetic History of the Balkans from Roman Frontier to Slavic Migrations Summary: The rise and fall of the Roman Empire was a socio-political process with enormous ramifications for human history. The Middle Danube was a crucial frontier and a crossroads for population and cultural movement. Here we present genome-wide data from 136 Balkan individuals dated to the 1st millennium CE. Despite extensive militarization and cultural influence, we find little ancestry contribution from peoples of Italic descent. However, we trace a large-scale influx of people of Anatolian ancestry during the Imperial period. Between ~250-550 CE, we detect migrants with ancestry from Central/Northern Europe and the steppe, confirming that “barbarian” migrations were propelled by ethnically diverse confederations. Following the end of Roman control, we detect the large-scale arrival of individuals who were genetically similar to modern Eastern European Slavic-speaking populations, who contributed 30-60% of the ancestry of Balkan people, representing one of the largest permanent demographic changes anywhere in Europe during the Migration Period. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10752003/
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jan 18, 2024 20:39:03 GMT
At its height in the 2nd century CE, the Roman Empire stretched from Mesopotamia and Arabia in the east to Britain in the west, from the Rhine and Danube rivers in the north, to the Sahara Desert in the south1. The massive extraction and mobilization of resources from western Britain to the eastern desert of Egypt by the imperial polity stimulated the movement of humans, via both coercive and consensual processes, effectively restructuring populations across this vast zone.
The Balkan Peninsula has been a historic crossroads of eastern and western Mediterranean cultures, as well as continental European influences from the north and Mediterranean from the south. From the 1st to the 6th centuries CE, the Roman Empire’s Middle Danube frontier in present-day Croatia and Serbia was a zone of defense, confrontation, and exchange with populations living north of the frontier. This region was also a source of significant mineral wealth and a crucial hinge in a ~2000 km long corridor of military and communications infrastructure linking the Black Sea to the Black Forest2. Following the establishment of Roman control in the early 1st century CE, the region became increasingly urbanised and culturally “Romanised”. Between ca. 268 and 610 CE, more than half of all Roman emperors belonged to families originating in the Middle Danube3. In late antiquity, the region experienced numerous invading groups labelled by historical sources as Goths, Huns, Gepids, Avars, Heruls, Lombards, or Slavs4; non-Romans also were increasingly recruited into the Roman army from peoples across the northern frontier. Various Germanic groups settled in the Danubian region, and some late antique cultural artifacts (and associated human remains) have been attributed to “Germanic”-related influence4. Nevertheless, the Roman Empire retained some control over this frontier zone into the second half of the 6th century. But over the later 6th and 7th centuries, as the Roman Empire (ruled from Constantinople, ~1000 km away) was confronted by pandemic plague and environmental, political, and military challenges, Roman control over this frontier was lost5,6. The end of imperial hegemony in the Balkans coincided with further population movements patchily attested in the historical record, including the arrival of the Slavs, whose migration to the region was, much like the arrival of Germanic groups in post-Roman Britain, significant enough to have a particularly lasting impact, reflected in the south Slavic languages widely spoken in the Balkans today7. Slavic-associated ancestry8 in present-day populations has been identified as far as the Peloponnese (the southern tip of the Balkan Peninsula in present-day Greece), but the degree, timing and character of permanent demographic impacts across the region have been poorly understood.
While historians have explored Roman imperialism through the lenses of geopolitics, institutions, cultures, and economics, the scale of the Roman Empire’s impact on the population history of its constituent territories is only now becoming understood through the recovery and analysis of ancient DNA. Ancient DNA can complement or challenge conventional archaeological and textual evidence, offering direct insights into individual histories and processes of population change, including social groups whose movements have hitherto been mostly invisible in elite-dominated sources. In fact, archaeogenetic studies are starting to confirm the hints preserved in the documentary record of the empire’s remarkable capacity to foster mobility and mixture9-11. For instance, a man from Roman York in northern England (ancient Eboracum) showed affinities to modern Middle East populations12 and individuals with a high proportion of North African ancestry were found in southern Iberia13. A study of 48 skeletons from Rome’s hinterland in the Imperial period showed that at the height of the Empire, genetic ancestry became much more heterogeneous than in previous periods and shifted towards Near Eastern populations14,15 and a similarly dramatic shift was shown to extend deep into central Italy16. Archaeological DNA is also being used to trace the timing, nature, and extent of migrations and population change in post-Roman Europe, from Anglo-Saxon England17 to Lombard Italy18. The Middle Danube frontier, a crucial axis for the Roman Empire, has not been systematically characterized using archaeogenetic data.
To explore the population history of the Balkans (bounded by the Adriatic, the Central Mediterranean, the Aegean Seas and, to the north, by the Middle and Lower Danube and Sava rivers) in the high Imperial (ca. 1-250 CE), late Imperial (ca. 250-550 CE), and post-Roman (ca. 550-1000 CE) periods, we present new genomic data from 136 ancient individuals from present-day Croatia and Serbia, and 6 from Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, along with information on the archaeological context of their burial (Data S1, section 1). This dataset furnishes insights into the population dynamics of a vital frontier zone, including changes likely associated with the introduction of Slavic languages and the making of modern Balkan populations.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jan 20, 2024 0:27:16 GMT
Results Data generation We extracted DNA from 146 ancient Balkan samples (Data S2, Table 1), of which 136 yielded genome-wide data after in-solution hybridization enrichment with either the ‘1240k’19,20 panel of about 1.23 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or the “Twist” panel which targets an enlarged set of 1.43 million SNPs (the same set of core SNPs and supplementary content)21 (STAR Methods). The individuals were excavated from 20 different sites (Figure 1A--B)B) representing a variety of regions and archaeological contexts including, among others, Viminacium (Kostolac, Serbia), the capital of the Roman Upper Moesia province located at the confluence of the Mlava River and the Danube, where we report data from 57 individuals from 6 different necropolises22 (Data S1, section 1), Roman colonies such as Iader (Zadar, Croatia) on the Adriatic coast and Siscia (Sisak, Croatia) and Mursa (Osijek, Croatia) on the Pannonian road from the Adriatic to the Danube, military fortresses such as Tilurium (Gardun, Croatia) and Timacum Minus (Ravna, Serbia)23, and early medieval necropolises such as Jagodnjak (Croatia) and Nuštar-Dvorac (Croatia). To place the results in a geographic and temporal context, we also generated genome-wide data from six early medieval central European individuals from Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Affymetrix Human Origins SNP array24 data from modern Serbs (n=37) (Data S2, Table 2), and 38 new radiocarbon dates (Data S2, Table 9). Figure 1. Overview of ancient Balkan individuals analyzed in this study. (A) Chronological distribution. Individuals with newly reported data are represented by symbols with a black outline. (B) Geographical location of archaeological sites. (C) PCA of the West-Eurasian genetic variability showing present-day individuals as grey circles (except present-day Balkan populations that are displayed with open colored triangles), and relevant ancient populations as colored polygons (Balkan Iron Age groups in blue, Southern European Iron Age groups in light blue, ancient Near Easter groups in red and ancient Steppe, Central, Northern and Eastern European groups in green) including all individuals in each population (Data S2, Table 3). Ancient individuals were projected onto the PCs computed on present-day West Eurasians; their shape and color are the same as in panels (A) and (B). This PCA is a zoom-in version of Figure S1. (D) Closer view of the present-day Balkans genetic cline from panel (C). CNE: Central/Northern European; CEE: Central/Eastern European; BA: Bronze Age; IA: Iron Age.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jan 22, 2024 21:48:52 GMT
For genome-wide analyses, we filter out 13 newly reported individuals with fewer than 20,000 SNPs and/or with evidence of contamination (STAR Methods), and include 15 individuals with previously reported genomic data25 from present-day Croatia, Albania, North Macedonia, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, for a total of 138 Balkan individuals mostly dated to ~1-1000 CE (Data S2, Table 1; Figure 1A--BB).
High ancestry heterogeneity To study the 138 Balkan individuals, we performed Principal Component Analysis (PCA) by projecting them and other ancient individuals from relevant periods and regions onto the axes computed on 1036 present-day West-Eurasian (WE) individuals (Figure 1C; Figure S1) genotyped on the Affymetrix Human Origins array.
A key feature of the data is the presence of two parallel genetic clines running along PC1 (Figure 1C). The first, which we call the “Bronze-Iron Age Balkan cline”, includes southern (Aegean) Bronze and Iron Age groups on the right extreme closer to Near Easterners (larger values in PC1), and northern Bronze and Iron Age groups from modern Croatia and Serbia on the left extreme closer to Central/Northern/Eastern European populations (lower values in PC1); Bronze-Iron Age groups from Bulgaria and Albania take intermediate positions. This Bronze-Iron Age cline is paralleled by the “present-day Balkan cline”, which is shifted upwards (higher values in PC2) with respect to the Iron Age cline but displays in PC1 the same geographical pattern of southern Balkan populations such as the Greeks on the right, and northern Balkan populations such as Croatians on the left (Figure 1D). The maintenance of the same geographical pattern along PC1 in both clines points to some degree of local continuity from the Iron Age across the entire region, along with the strong impact of migration from outside the Balkans, affecting all groups from North to South over the past 2,000 years. Irrespective of modern nation-state boundaries, populations in our study area have been shaped by similar processes of migration and change.
Balkan individuals in our 1st millennium CE transect showed higher ancestry heterogeneity in PCA compared to previous Iron Age Balkan populations (variances in PC1 and PC2 values are significantly different with p = 0.045 and 0.0046, respectively), with most spreading along either the present-day or the Bronze-Iron Age Balkan clines. This suggests that key demographic events involved in the formation of present-day groups had already taken place by ~1000 CE. The remaining individuals plot far beyond the two Balkan genetic clines and likely represent cases of sporadic long-distance mobility that provide evidence concerning the regions acting as demographic sources for the Balkans during this period.
Given the high ancestry heterogeneity observed in our dataset, even within the same sites and necropolises, we estimate ancestry proportions separately for each individual. We used qpAdm 26,27 with Balkan Iron Age populations as the local ancestry source, and earlier and contemporaneous populations from neighboring regions as proximate sources for newly arriving ancestries (Data S1, section 4).
Large-scale demographic input from Western Anatolia
|
|