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Post by Admin on May 28, 2018 18:21:28 GMT
The ANE genetic element was 75% of the ancestry in the sampled EHG and 40% in American Indians, so seems to have been widely spread across northern Eurasia during the Late Pleistocene (Lazaridis et al. 2016). In western Europe, the WHG had only a minor component of ANE ancestry, while skin color and some other traits separated the SHG (paler skin) from the WHG (darker skin, sometimes with blue eyes). All three European Mesolithic populations were genetically distinct from the Neolithic Starčevo-Criş/Cardial-Impressed/LBK farmers whose ancestors migrated from Anatolia to Greece and Crete about 6500 BCE (Deguilloux et al. 2012; Lacan et al. 2011). These Early European farm-ers (EEF), whether in Greece (Early and Late Neolithic), Spain (Cardial-Impressed), Hungary (Starčevo-Criş), or Germany (LBK), were very similar to each other genetically (Skoglund et al. 2012; Haak et al. 2015). All shared a common genetic origin in Neolithic western Anatolia, as represented by five individuals from Menteş e Höyük and 21 individuals from Barcın Höyük in the northwest; how representative they are of other regions in Neolithic Anatolia is not known (Mathieson et al. 2015). After their migration to Europe, most of the EEF populations remained genetically distinct from the indigenous hunter-gatherers for the first one to two thousand years of the Neolithic, exhibiting a rate of admixture with the WHG, the foragers with whom they were most directly in contact, that is now estimated to have been only about 7–11% higher (Mathieson et al. 2015:529) than the Neolithic western Anatolians, who had little or no WHG admixture (Brandt et al. 2013; Bollongino et al. 2013; Szécsényi-Nagy et al. 2015; Haak et al. 2015). The very low initial level of genetic admixture with foragers among the EEF is unexpected, given that foods and raw materials were exchanged (Bogucki 2008; Oross and Bánffy 2009; Smith et al. 2015). It suggests that the initial expansion of farming was accomplished largely by immigrants who were genetically about as different from the indigenous foragers as modern western Europeans are from East Asians. The immigrant farmers traded with the indigenous foragers, but were reluctant to exchange mates with them and so retained 90% endogenous EEF ancestry across large regions and many centuries of time, challenging scenarios (Robb 1993; Thomas 2006) of a border-less flow of people and ideas between farmers and forag-ers. In the Middle Neolithic, during the late fifth and fourth millennia BCE, EEF individuals from a megalithic grave in Spain and from the Baalberge, Salzmunde, and Bernburg cultures in Germany showed higher percent-ages of WHG genes, indicating that by this time—after most of the former WHG population had adopted agricultural economies—significant inter-marriage between these populations began. The biggest surprise of the new genetic research was a genetic shift dated to the Late Neolithic in Germany, 3000–2500 BCE, when the Corded Ware horizon spread across most of northern Europe (Fig. 2.2).
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Post by Admin on May 30, 2018 18:47:42 GMT
Childe (1950:133–38) and Gimbutas (1963) speculated that migrants from the steppe Yamnaya culture (3300–2600 BCE) might have been the creators of the Corded Ware culture and carried IE languages into Europe from the steppes. Yamnaya was the first steppe culture to take advantage of both wagons (for bulk transport) and horseback riding (for rapid transport), cre-ating a new and more mobile form of pastoralism in the steppes (Anthony 2007:300ff.). But the similarities between Yamnaya and Corded Ware were rather general—single graves under mounds, weapons in the grave, promi-nent gender distinctions in graves—rather than typologically specific, leav-ing open the possibility of a diffusion of ideas rather than people. Recent scholarship suggested that Corded Ware could be regarded as an indigenous northern European development without a necessary external component (Furholt 2003, 2014). However, aDNA from Corded Ware graves provided surprisingly strong evidence supporting the steppe migration theory (Haak et al. 2015; Allentoft et al. 2015). Four Corded Ware individuals buried at Esperstedt, Germany between 2500–2300 BCE, found in typical Corded Ware graves according to body po-sition and pottery, along with an additional Corded Ware individual buried in an atypical ritual in an older Baalberge monument at Karsdorf, exhib-ited genomes that were a mixture of Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) and a previously unseen Near Eastern ancestry most similar to individuals from prehistoric northwestern Iran and the Caucasus. This EHG/Caucasus an-cestry, measured at 390k locations across the whole genome, was very dif-ferent from the local WHG, EEF, or the admixed WHG/EEF Middle Neo-lithic population in western and northern Europe. The new type was very similar to the EHG/Caucasus mixture that characterized nine Yamnaya-culture individuals from six kurgan cemeteries in the Volga-Ural steppes, dated 3200–2800 BCE (Haak et al. 2015), obtained during the Samara Valley Project (Anthony et al. 2005; Anthony et al. 2016). The tested Corded Ware individuals are modeled as having an ancestry 79% derived from Yamnaya, 4% from WHG, and 17% from EEF (Haak et al. 2015). Moreover, an in-dependent, even larger study of Corded Ware individuals from Estonia, Poland, and Germany found a similarly high average proportion of Yam-naya ancestry, in this case using as the steppe example aDNA from a group of Yamnaya graves in the North Caucasus steppes, which turned out to be very similar genetically to the Yamnaya from Samara on the middle Volga (Allentoft et al. 2015). The strength of Yamnaya ancestry in all of the tested Corded Ware people is surprising, given that many were late Corded Ware individuals, not first-generation migrants, and they lived 3000 km west of the region from which the Yamnaya aDNA was recovered.
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Post by Admin on Jun 1, 2018 18:34:22 GMT
In addition, uni-parental markers also changed suddenly as mtDNA haplogroup N1a and Y haplogroup G2a, which had been very common in the EEF agricultural population, were replaced by Y haplogroups R1a and R1b and by a vari-ety of mtDNA haplogroups typical of the steppe Yamnaya population. The uniparental markers show that the migrants included both men and women from the steppes.The Corded Ware individuals were not the only ones to show strong steppe ancestry. Ten Bell Beaker individuals dated 2500–2100 BCE from five cemeteries in Germany and nine Únětice individuals dated 2100–1900 BCE from four cemeteries all showed 50–70% Yamnaya-like ancestry (Haak et al. 2015: S.I. 3), but they also showed a resurgence of ancestry from the WHG and EEF inhabitants. Again, Allentoft et al. (2015) found the same pattern in a separate sample of Bell Beaker and Únětice samples. This more admixed Bell Beaker and Únětice sample was almost indistinguishable ge-netically from many modern Europeans. After the Bell Beaker period, the genetic composition of Europe continued to the present day without an-other demographic discontinuity comparable in scale to the Late Neolithic transition. The steppe-derived languages spoken by the Yamnaya migrants between 3000–2500 BCE, arguably the post-Anatolian variety of Proto-Indo-European with the shared wheel vocabulary, also could have continued to evolve in Europe without another major break. The languages spoken by the local Middle Neolithic population must have declined with the sudden reduction in its size.
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Post by Admin on Jun 2, 2018 18:22:53 GMT
Central and Eastern Europe ca. 3000–2500 BCE showing the early Yamnaya culture area 3300–2700 BCE and the Yamnaya migration up the Danube Valley with related/offshoot Makó and Vučedol sites; also the distribution of Corded Ware sites in northern Europe; and site areas sampled for aDNA in Haak et al. (2015). The oldest Corded Ware radiocarbon dates are from southern and central Poland. The Yamnaya cemeteries in the Danube Valley are after Heyd (2011), the shaded Globular Amphorae site area is after Harrison and Heyd (2007); the Corded Ware and Globular Amphorae sites in southern Poland are after Machnik (1999); and the blue dots were all Corded Ware sites with radiocarbon dates as of Furholt (2003). Bell Beaker period. However, the resurgence is more visible in mtDNA than in Y-DNA (Szécsényi-Nagy et al. 2015), suggesting that men of the older EEF heritage were disadvantaged more than women. Corded Ware represented a non-local extreme both genetically and economically. A systematic comparison of animal bone, feature, and sherd counts from broadly contemporary Globular Amphorae and Corded Ware sites in Kujavia, Poland (Czebreszuk and Szmyt 2011:251–52) showed that Corded Ware sites exhibited the fewest in all three counts, suggesting greater settlement mobility. Settlements were more permanent before the Corded Ware migration, and remained so among the Globular Amphorae people, who continued to create more localized site-and-cemetery groups in the same landscape with the more mobile immigrants. Afterward, during the Bell Beaker period, when local genetic ancestry rebounded and the population became more admixed, settlements again were more per-manent. The Corded Ware culture introduced both a large, steppe-derived population and an unusually mobile form of pastoral economy that was a regional economic anomaly, but nevertheless survived in varying forms for centuries before the regional economic pattern was re-established. A steppe language certainly accompanied this demographic and economic shift. As we have seen above, there are good independent reasons (loans with Uralic and South Caucasian) to think that PIE was spoken in the steppes. It is likely that the steppe language introduced between 3000–2500 BCE was a late (post-Anatolian) form of PIE and survived and evolved into the later northern IE languages.
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Post by Admin on Jun 4, 2018 18:32:16 GMT
CONCLUSION Integration between formerly separate disciplines has changed how ar-chaeologists can approach the problem of Indo-European origins and dis-persal. New methods in computational phylogenetic linguistics and aDNA analysis have provided two independent sources of information about the timing of prehistoric language splits and the timing and demographic strength of ancient population movements. These new sources of informa-tion have expanded the tools available to archaeologists, permitting us to incorporate language history and reconstructed vocabularies into archaeo-logical interpretation in new ways. The combination of these data sets is already challenging purely archaeological understandings of the past.
The connection between the Yamnaya migration that flowed from the steppes into the Danube valley beginning about 3000–2800 BCE and the Corded Ware culture north of the Carpathians was archaeologically ob-scured by the rapid evolution among the Corded Ware people of a new material culture. Corded Ware material culture emerged out of an experi-ence of cultural opposition between the immigrant pastoralists and the in-digenous Globular Amphorae culture, tempered by centuries of continuing co-residence in the same landscape (Machnik 1999; Czebreszuk and Szmyt 2011). The migrants retained cultural preconceptions (the importance of individual distinction and warfare), economic patterns (mobile pastoral-ism), and genetic traits typical of the steppe Yamnaya culture as they moved into southern Poland, but they adopted new material types and variant ver-sions of their ancestral funeral rituals, creating a set of customs that were neither simple copies of local ideas nor simple imports of Yamnaya behav-iors. Instead they created a new hybrid material culture. Analysis of aDNA shows that they included both steppe men and steppe women and that few marriages occurred with the local inhabitants for many centuries. After de-cades of archaeological debate and analysis by very good archaeologists, archaeological evidence alone was not sufficient to reveal the scale and de-mographic nature of this migration.The element still missing, from this article as well as from the new pub-lications on phylogenetics and DNA, is information derived from the recon-structed PIE vocabulary and comparative IE mythology.
These sources can inform us about the cultural models, beliefs, and institutions that guided the migrants. However, European archaeologists have not yet decided if this is an admissible source of data, for a variety of reasons outlined at the beginning of this essay. If it is an admissible source, PIE contains vocabulary that can help to explain the process of language expansion and recruitment (Anthony and Ringe 2015:210–14). Patron-client relationships extended po-litical protection to outsiders, guest-host relationships offered reciprocal obli-gations of hospitality, and feasting and praise poetry enhanced the individual prestige of patrons and hosts at public events, recruiting some local people into the IE social and political world.
Balancing these positive attractions were negative compulsions: youthful warbands were a predatory IE institu-tion that threatened the livestock and families of outsiders, and restitution for their depredations was possible only by appealing to IE institutions and patrons. These institutions, while not unique to the PIE community, were certainly present in it, and can help to explain the eventual recruitment of non-IE people into IE communities.This essay is dedicated to the memory of Bernard Wailes, who was my first archaeological field director, my patient dissertation advisor, my fre-quent host, my co-author (Anthony and Wailes 1988), my guest at the first field school I directed, and my fond friend.
Archaeology and Language: Why Archaeologists Care about the Indo-European Problem David W. Anthony
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