Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2024 18:17:51 GMT
Indeed, the archaeological record attests to critical innovations in herd management, dairying practices, and mobility such as wheels and wagons, of mobile architecture, and the incipient horse domestication, besides many more.
"The global dairy industry today is built on the back of these Bronze Age innovations," says Prof. Christina Warinner, co-author and professor of anthropology at Harvard University. "They turned a somewhat niche practice into a multicontinental phenomenon."
Durable foodstuffs such as the early forms of cheese, together with innovations in transportation, made it possible to populate the Eurasian steppe permanently and establish continent-wide networks of communication.
The combination of innovations paved the way for a fully nomadic pastoralist life-style at the turn of the 3rd millennium BC, practiced for instance by groups associated with the Yamnaya cultural complex, which soon after expanded across the entire western steppe zone, as far as Mongolia in the east, and the Carpathian Basin in the west.
Interestingly, it was also a time when Caucasus groups expanded to the south, such as the Kura-Araxes culture of Georgia, which extended to regions in east Anatolia, the Levante, and Iran, albeit with little or no connections to the steppe zone in the north.
The team also explored the social structure of prehistoric groups by analyzing patterns of biological relatedness and consanguinity and found differences between the steppe and the Caucasus groups.
The more stationary Caucasus groups showed higher levels of consanguinity and close connections between individuals buried in the same and/or nearby kurgans, whereas the steppe groups revealed very few of such connections, hinting at a different form of social organization of mobile pastoralist groups.
Dissolution and transformation
However, the turn to the 2nd millennium BC represents another period of interaction between the steppe and Caucasus populations. Triggered by a period of aridification and possibly over-exploitation of the ecologically fragile steppe environment and unreliable levels of precipitation, the steppe zone became largely depopulated.
The archaeogenetic study finds clear evidence of assimilation and mixture of Caucasus groups, while the resulting Middle and Late Bronze Age groups retreated further into the Caucasus highlands where they established a sedentary mountain economy. This transformation also formed the cultural and genetic basis for the present-day populations of the North Caucasus.
"Our integrated study is a beautiful example of human resilience, adaptability and innovation in the light of ecological, economic and socio-political changes," concludes Prof. Svend Hansen, director of the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute, and co-senior author of the study.
More information: Ayshin Ghalichi et al, The rise and transformation of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Caucasus, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08113-5. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08113-5