More than half of the 26 victims of an apparent ambush on a Linear Pottery (LBK) village in Neolithic Germany had their legs broken. The archaeologists studying the site think it was either torture or ritual mutilation. Also note the lack of young women in the death pit. They were probably kidnapped. The paper is behind a pay wall, but there's a news feature on the findings here.
Abstract: Conflict and warfare are central but also disputed themes in discussions about the European Neolithic. Although a few recent population studies provide broad overviews, only a very limited number of currently known key sites provide precise insights into moments of extreme and mass violence and their impact on Neolithic societies. The massacre sites of Talheim, Germany, and Asparn/Schletz, Austria, have long been the focal points around which hypotheses concerning a final lethal crisis of the first Central European farmers of the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik Culture (LBK) have concentrated. With the recently examined LBK mass grave site of Schöneck-Kilianstädten, Germany, we present new conclusive and indisputable evidence for another massacre, adding new data to the discussion of LBK violence patterns. At least 26 individuals were violently killed by blunt force and arrow injuries before being deposited in a commingled mass grave. Although the absence and possible abduction of younger females has been suggested for other sites previously, a new violence-related pattern was identified here: the intentional and systematic breaking of lower limbs. The abundance of the identified perimortem fractures clearly indicates torture and/or mutilation of the victims. The new evidence presented here for unequivocal lethal violence on a large scale is put into perspective for the Early Neolithic of Central Europe and, in conjunction with previous results, indicates that massacres of entire communities were not isolated occurrences but rather were frequent features of the last phases of the LBK.
Meyer et al., The massacre mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe, Published online before print August 17, 2015, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1504365112
137 comments:
Great article.
Long have I argued that internecine strife *within* neolithic communities had more to do with later population collapses and appearance of forts, eg in Lower danube, than unproven speculations about horse-drawn "raiding" and conquest.
According to a German news site, only 2 women “over 40” were among the dead.
In regard to smashing the bones, the Herxheim LBK site also shows this phenomenon and there it is interpreted as ritualistic.
Is the dating listed? I'm guessing 4800-4600 BCE.
I hope DNA testing is done on all of the samples.
The more ancient DNA the better.
Funding of DNA testing of ancient remains must be made a No.1 priority within scientific research budgets.
@creative
The Herxheim LBK site seems to be something completely different, and of a whole different scope. This one appears to be the remains of a massacre, with arrows still associated with the bodies and the legs broken within the context of an entire leg.
The Herxheim site is much more interesting, with all the signs of it being a centralized location for ongoing ritualistic cannabalism. People may have traveled hundreds of kilometers with corpses to bring them to that site.
The leg-breaking makes me wonder about lame blacksmith gods.
I initially thought it may have been an attempt to extract bone marrow, but then I saw that the shins weren't smashed open, just smashed.
Maju, Are you reading this:D?.....
I guess your conception of ''peaceful'' and ''non-violent'' neolithic society is in trouble.
BTW It's easy to counter the case. That's a generalization from what was found in 1 site, as a friend points to me.
"I initially thought it may have been an attempt to extract bone marrow, but then I saw that the shins weren't smashed open, just smashed."
Yes, interesting stuff, not very nice but interesting.
@Nirjhar007
"That's a generalization from what was found in 1 site, as a friend points to me."
There are now at least three sites that are similar. And it would seem very strange for Neolithic villages to start building fortifications for no reason at all.
This one is mostly young men, but also children who were killed. One of the others also had very few young women, but also was missing small children, which were either ignored or taken?
My personal theory is that the young women were the ones behind all this. It is the most obvious explanation. Occam's Razor.
Karl,
I wonder if hunter gatherers were involved, What do you say?
@Nirjhar007
From my archaeological colleagues in France (Didier Binder) there is an impressed ware Neolithic site in a cave north of Nice where there is evidence of cannibalism. So, pace Gimbutas, both LBK and cardial/impressed cultures were not totally gregarious.
@Karl_K
You're right. Amazons, killing the men and recruiting the women. That certainly must be the explanation.
I will go with Hunter Gatherers :D but yes, the idea of peaceful, agrarian society was a pipe dream it seems now, with growing contradicting data.
Roy,
O_o
I imagine that any sort of violent Neolithic conflict would be driven by hunger/starvation. Stationary Neolithic communities would be targets for starving HGs or other Neolithic communities that have fallen on hard times. The leg breaking is probably to ensure that nobody runs away to get help, they didn't have handcuffs or a room to lock people in obviously. I don't see how it would be logistically possible to kidnap someone in the stone age, you'd have to have them tied up 24/7 or they'd just run off.
@Romulus
Stone Age slavery worked just fine in the Americas. You take them back to your own region where everyone knows they are a slave and will help you get them back if they run away, makes it much harder for them to escape. And you *can* keep them tied up (haltered or hobbled) 24/7.
I don’t think that HGs were involved, the oldest child in the mass grave was 9 and the youngest a few month old. According to a German news site the rest of the youth either were abducted or ran away. What would HGs do with a bunch of abducted farmers? It seems more likely that LBKs themselves dragged away the youth to integrate them in their community. Also a larger “growing“ community would provide more future protection.
OK, Evil Farmers.
BTW I was thinking of Hunter gathers attacking invading farmers like American Indians,but obviously also different farming communities could have conflicts.
No special explanations are required for the conflicts
Quite simply, agriculture led to increased population, and attachement to vital arable land. Conflict was an inevitable consequence
Surely due to different circumstances people have different attitudes to life and death. But I wonder to what degree ritual practices influenced violence. If I am not mistaken some LBKs in Herexheim were scraped clean of their flesh. So if people were willing to butcher their relatives, why not butcher your neighbour?
Most of the American Indians fighting with the European colonists *were* farmers, originally Neolithic in fact (the main difference being that they had crops but no livestock). And they fought incessantly among themselves.
You don't even necessarily need any kind of serious resource pressure for people to fight. The Northwest Coast Indians had population well below carrying capacity of the country (except in very bad years), but they still raided each other regularly, for slaves, prestige goods, and revenge (though they also stole stored food).
Karl K:
What neolithic villages do you refere to, that's fortified?
Batman
There are many villages enclosed with palisades and other structures. Sure, not all are for defense, and cannot really be called "forts" by Iron Age standards, for example, but it cannot be denied that some were used for defense, esp from the Middle neolithic onward. This parallel with increased in weapons. The construction of forts reaches its peak in late neolithic South-eastern europe.
Whether or not you need resource pressure, we do know that the late LBK was experiencing a huge crash that produced a collapse of the farming societies that they established and of local populations resulting in a resurgence of HG populations. Indeed, this pattern was seen everywhere that first wave farming was seen. Farming doesn't become sustainable in the long run without reversion of HG until the "second farmers" arrive.
The timing and context relative to earlier LBK sites where this is absent, strongly suggest that the collapse was driving this activity. One sees a similar sudden appearance of violence and creation of forts after a long period lacking it, in late Harappan contexts.
I could imagine either a "HG Indians raiding the village" scenario or a village raids fellow village scenario, and could also easily imagine the LBK dissolving into primarily herder populations incorporating more HGs and primarily farmer populations incorporating fewer HGs, as collapse looms, that get into warfare with each other, or the possibility Vikiing/Vandal like communities surviving primarily by raiding others emerging.
@Nirjahr
"I will go with Hunter Gatherers :D but yes, the idea of peaceful, agrarian society was a pipe dream it seems now, with growing contradicting data."
It was inside the local farming communities nothing to do with H&G.
So much to the peacefull matriarchal theory of Gimbutas. Seems Neolithic farmers were simply the same brutal rituals.
It also seems like we have now evidences of how the farmers became less. They murdered each other for land. So Ötzi was hunted by fellow farmers.
@Mike Thomas
"
Quite simply, agriculture led to increased population, and attachement to vital arable land. Conflict was an inevitable consequence "
^this.
"You're right. Amazons, killing the men and recruiting the women. That certainly must be the explanation"
Or this was a bunch of bandits (mostly male as usual) being punished for marauding. Takes a certain amount of righteous rage to get that tortuous.
Someone buried these guys. Makes more sense that bandits were killed and buried without dignity than a bunch of marauders killed male villagers and then bothered to bury them. Marauders would have moved on taking the women with them. Plus remaining families would have been more respectful of their tortured menfolk.
@Annie
Some of the children were very young, even an infant. Definitely not bandits.
Good, so probably one day we may even found that ''Kurgans'' were actually more peaceful comparatively:P.
"Good, so probably one day we may even found that ''Kurgans'' were actually more peaceful comparatively:P."
Possibly.
After all, there is a stereotype of Southern Europeans (And thats the ones who inheritated the most genetic material from the farmers) beeing less controlled, easier to anger, extroverted, highly emotional, allways carry knives in their pockets and all that while the northern European stereotype is more of introverted, silent people with low temper, slow to anger. *lol*
Current estamination is that introvert/extrovert is 80% genetial and 20% evoiremental. (the most genetic based character trait known)
Those farmers could easily be an angry people. ;)
"So Ötzi was hunted by fellow farmers."
Yeah, the Mafia for sure. ;)
northern European stereotype is more of introverted, silent people with low temper, slow to anger. *lol*
**Stay strictly on topic at all times. Do not post any illegal or defamatory material. Do not make racial or ethnic slurs........
I think the *lol* makes it kosher to say stuff.
e.g... *lol* yes these LBK findings are very NAZI like. OK but more seriously pure HGs could not organize such executions. Its farmer against farmer.. people with high population density.
@Fanty,
"Current estamination is that introvert/extrovert is 80% genetial and 20% evoiremental. (the most genetic based character trait known)"
Where did you read that? The same person growing up in for example Norway vs growing up in an American inner city, will act completely differently in terms of aggression.
Just watch prank videos and you'll see what I mean. See the difference between how suburban people react to threats and inner-city people. Almost every person from the suburbs runs away screaming, while just about every person from the inner-city is throwing punches or pulling out a hand gun/knife.
Conflicts and violence are inevitable in a society where resources are limited. But how conflicts are managed depends from the culture and ideas that are circulating in the population.
Sometimes a community confronted to low fertility/soil fatigue and starvation can make an innovation and create a better farming technique. But most of the time when there are no new ideas and sources of energy/food conflicts become violent. And later the violence can be ritualized and enveloped into an ideas/cult/religious beliefs. In this latter case the violence just perpetuates itself even without economic reasons.
p.s. BTW I don't believe that genetics influences much of human behaviour. It's the culture and environment.
The Mesolithic burial site of Große Ofnet (Germany,Ofnethöhlen ) also shows signs of violence + the dead were ritualistically decapitated for burial purpose. So again, if someone is going to decapitate his relatives what’s going to stop him from trying it out on his neighbours? And apparently, someone tried it out with a blunt object.
“European Prehistory;Sarunas Milisauskas”
The finds at Grosse Ofnet are the most impressive, consisting of two shallow pits, each containing a number of skulls, jaws, and vertebrae. A third pit between these two contained charcoal and charred bone fragments, which may represent the postcranial skeletons. The skulls face west and arc covered with ashes and red ochre. Originally, 27 skulls were reported to be in one depression and 6 in the other, for a total of 33, but more recent analyses suggest totals of 34 (Orschiedt 1998) or 38 (Frayer 1997). Because of this discrepancy in numbers, it is difficult to ascertain the exact age and sex distribution of the skulls, but it is clear that children outnumber adults, and females outnumber males (in the original analysis there were 20 subadults, 9 adult females and 4 adult males). Evidence of bludgeon wounds to the head have been found on 18 of the skulls, but differentially distributed by age and sex: they occur on 100% of the adult men, 23% of the adult women, and 58% of the children (Frayer 1997). As these wounds show no signs of healing growth, they are assumed to have occurred around the time of death, and to be the likely cause of death. A number of the skulls also show cut marks suggesting defleshing. The vertebrae also bear cut marks indicating decapitation by slitting the throat. Goods accompany many of the skulls, perhaps originally as part of necklaces or caps: 215 perforated deer teeth and 4250 shells (Orschiedt 1998). In contrast to original reports in which only women had such associated ornaments, men appear to have some as well, although not as abundantly as adult women and children.
I remember reading a paper by Ziebel (sp?) a few years ago, about the progressive spread of agricultural communities through Europe. One of the points he made was that the retreating HG's seem to have "consolidated" their positions (I forget the boundaries) at some point, making further progress very difficult if not impossible. I wonder if this might have been an indirect cause of tension and warfare among the "blocked" farmer communities (the usual struggle for (suddenly) scarce resources?) Ziebel also contended that the HG's themselves began to switch to farming (rather than the previous "incorporations" into spreading communities). But the date he suggested for this switch was ca. 4000 BCE Still, this "you will not pass" line could perhaps have been a factor earlier?
"After all, there is a stereotype of Southern Europeans (And thats the ones who inheritated the most genetic material from the farmers) beeing less controlled, easier to anger, extroverted, highly emotional, allways carry knives in their pockets and all that while the northern European stereotype is more of introverted, silent people with low temper, slow to anger"
Spain and Italy have one the lowest intentional homicide rate (0,8-0,9 inclunding 20,30% done by immigrants)in the world.
Some of the Motala_HGs were behaded.
Thank god they weren't beheaded instead:D.
@ Aram Palyan - "p.s. BTW I don't believe that genetics influences much of human behaviour. It's the culture and environment. "
http://psychfaculty.gmu.edu/kashdan/publications/genetics_positivetraits.pdf
http://moemesto.ru/rorschach_club/file/6314265/182%2520bouchard%25202003.pdf
http://www.philosophy.dept.shef.ac.uk/AHRB-Project/Papers/BouchardV3ppr.pdf
@Chad: alternate sources (media) I'm reading on this same issue talk of "7000 years ago", giving LBK (senso stricto) a chronology between 5600 and 4900 BCE. They also mention the site, 20 Km NE of Frankfurt, being a border area between different groups (tribes or emerging sub-ethnicities, I guess).
In the case of Talheim, it is believed that a feud played a role. A isotope analysis of the teeth showed that some women, in contrast to the other victims - did not grow up in Talheim . So it was speculated that the Talheim people themselves abducted other women and in consequence were targeted themselves.
A good old southerner blood feud, like the Mardin engagement ceremony massacre in 2009.
"Southerner blood feud", negative South Euro stereotypes...can we stick to facts instead of bullshit? I quite like reading this blog, please don't ruin it by turning it into those ugly anthroforums.
As a half Philistine + G2a man I just was being a bit self sarcastic. After all, if this happened today in the ME, I wouldn't be shocked. ;-)
@Creative: Not quite as you say. There is no isotope analysis but a morphological analysis only. This one suggest that the men were closely related while women were not, suggesting patrilocal exogamy.
There's nothing to claim that the women were "abducted". Patrilocal (or sometimes matrilocal or even ambilocal) exogamy is common. Exogamy of any kind is universal in anthropology of tribal peoples: they are almost always organized in some sort of "clans" or "gens" and they can only marry with people of other clans. Clans tend to display geographic organization of some sort, i.e. you normally live with your "clan brothers" (or "sisters" in the case of matrilocality). When villages grew large into towns, clans tended to form the early neighborhoods. Clans worked as de-facto extended families.
There is no evidence of "abduction" and it is not likely, judging on anthropological literature, because this form of "marriage" (or rather slavery) was exceptional and not the norm. Even in the rare peoples where marriage is ritualized as kidnapping, this takes place at individual level, not group (and there are no murders).
I do agree, it's hard to interpret more from than the absence of young women, than... the absence of young women. I think it's pretty interesting that we can go from "The attackers may have spared the women, if there were in fact any women among the targeted group, and if the people targeted were in fact a single group" to "Women were clearly abducted by one group from another" without much evidence. There are a lot of battlegrounds where a bunch of men die and are placed in a single mass grave, without really involving the abduction of women at all. 26 people, mainly male, "no children aged 9-16 or young women". No real evidence all the dead are from the same cultural group. Why is this a whole community being massacred again? Rather than say, a single, deadly conflict involving the men within a single group...
@Matt: My previous objection was raised to what Creative said about Talheim's teeth and the outlandish extrapolations he made. This case (Shöneck-Kilianstädten) instead seems very clear of female abduction because many of the victims were children but their mothers were nowhere to be seen.
Fair enough, in the article I was reading I confused it with another burial. They were only mostly male though, and how many young women have to be missing from 26 before it is more a case of chance?
Maju, I just commented Prof. Dr. Heidi Peter-Röcher who researches Neolithic violence, its remarked on the Universität Würzburg press room webpage. In regard to abduction of females, this may sound harsh, but the easiest way to integrate a female into a group is simply to impregnate her, either by force or other means. It’s a necessary step in regard to the self survival of a female, if her clan or husband has been killed by another group. I not going to quote the Holy books of the ME, but they have the same opinion.
http://www.vfg.uni-wuerzburg.de/presse_galerie/detailansicht/artikel/was-knoche/
Immer wieder unterlag die Vernunft jedoch dem Gefühl - wie bei Talheim. Dort handelt es sich Peter-Röchers Ausführungen zufolge nicht um Krieg, sondern um eine brutal aus¬getragene, persönlich motivierte Fehde. Wo¬möglich drehte sie sich um verletzte Ehre. Eine Strontium-Isotopen-Analyse der Zähne ergab, dass einige Frauen - im Gegensatz zu den übrigen Opfern - nicht in Talheim aufge¬wachsen sind. Wurde sie einst vom Talheimer Clan geraubt? War es Rache? Die wahren Hin¬tergründe werden wohl im Dunkeln bleiben
Valid points
But 26 seems a high death toll for a neolithic, intra-community battle
I doubt that Yamna were any less violant than farmers. If anything I think of the farming communities more "equal" patrichal/Matriachal, while the Yamna nomad herders/farmers were more patriachal.
I found something Interesting On Sredny Stog HG's-
//The third section of the book surveys the anthropological literature concerning the Sredny Stog and Novodanylovka cultures. For the twenty Sredny Stog burials from Igren, we find the somewhat unusual situation of women outliving males on an average of 7.8 years (males - 35.8 years, females - 43.6); only one individual lived passed 55 years. In terms of the craniological analysis of physical characteristics the Sredny Stog females tend to exhibit a homogeneous Proto-Europoid type that is most similar to the earlier inhabitants of the region. The series of male crania, however, tend to vary more and indicate both more robust Proto-Europoid and more gracile southern European (or Mediterranean) components. The analysis of six Novodanilovka skulls from three sites suggests again the presence of both Proto-Europoid and Mediterranean types. The cranial evidence as a whole suggests a mingling of local Proto-Europoids (seen especially in the east) with more gracial south-east European types in the west, a pattern that might be explained by the flow of populations from the Balkan Neolithic (Tripolje) into the western Ukraine."
Although the origin of the "Mediterranean components" mentioned in this review should be considered with caution.//
Any thoughts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kurgan#Mallory.27s_review_of_Telegin
R1a = Proto-Europoid
Near Eastern women/mtDNA = Mediterranean
Can anyone else say anything? please:D....
@Creative: We all know about the legend (plausibly semi-historical) of The Rape of the Sabine Women. However we also know that early Romans did not kidnap women every generation, that this episode was exceptional. And not just Romans, in all the anthropological and historical knowledge we have kidnapping of foreign women is exceptional, even to some extent where slavery has become common.
Appealing to that as if it'd be a normal kind of behavior owes more to "orientalist" fantasy of modern authors than to anthropological and historical plausibility. Such things happened no doubt but they were not the norm.
Also it is worth mentioning, I think, that when I first came across the German branch of LBK, it stroke me that: (1) burials often included weapons (arrows), unlike its Danubian and Balcanic precursors, and (2) opium cultivation was common. Hence Western LBK appears on first look as an anomalous kind of First Neolithic, possibly more prone to violence, whose emotional consequences would be appeased by opium, as happened among Romans and US soldiers in Vietnam, for example. Of course alcohol would also do but opium is even more effective.
Of course I'm sure all this impression I have since many years ago may be in need of throughout revision but my guess is that, as they adventured in areas with denser aboriginal inhabitation, with other related but possibly competing cultures like La Hoguette (of Cardial derivation apparently), these peoples felt the need to become more "martial".
I also have the impression that the very seed of factional war in Neolithic Germany and surrounding areas may have been what first induced the arrival of Indoeuropeans, possibly as opportunist "mercenaries" of some sort. That only fits if we accept, following Gimbutas and many others, that Baalberge culture (a distant precursor of Corded Ware) is actually Kurgan (burials are). However this clashes with the new archaeo-genetic data that finds that Baalberge and derived groups were still within the "Late Neolithic" (Early Chalcolithic) genetic paradigm and not visibly tainted by steppe inflows yet. If the Kurgan adscription stands (and I think it does), this means that once again we are before a tiny elite that could not make a major genetic impact upon conquest; it'd be only Corded Ware which drew upon colonists from the East in significant amounts.
God's sake Maju
"opportunistic IE merceneries" ? Tiny genetic impact by "elites" ?
There was a major arrival from the east. But these were no more or less aggressive , militaristic or even patriarchal than preceding farmers. And they were more or less heterarchical lineage groups.
The evidence is clear - late neolithic drop, opportunistic arrival - after a hiatus (!) - of pastoral adapted peoples from the forest steppe, steppe and Carpathians.
You're entirely out of touch with current evidence - little wonder when Gimbutas is your bible. Worsened by stupid analogies.
@Mike: I don't think you understood what I just said. Let's recapitulate: Baalberge culture is Kurgan and, via several other cultures (notably Luboń and Globular Amphorae), precursor of Corded Ware. However Corded Ware also has an intrusive element of Catacombs culture (Ukraine-Don area) in its core area of Cujawia (Poland), whose interpretation has always been difficult. Similarly, Baalberge has elements of Funnelbeaker, which is otherwise a Megalithic cultural epi-phenomenon of the European Northwest, and lays on a Danubian substrate.
That's as far as archaeology goes. Now archaeo-genetic data shows that Baalberge and Corded Ware peoples were genetically different: that the former belong to the Early Chalcolithic population (extension of the Neolithic one but with greater Paleo-European admixture), while Corded Ware introduces new elements and clearly has a major demographic impact in the long run (even if attenuated by later admixture). So my reading is that there are two "moments" of IE intrusion in Central Europe: the first one (Baalberge and successors) does not include demic replacement, at least not from the steppes, but has a clear cultural and probably linguistic impact, while the latter (Corded Ware) does bring in the settlers from the East (and also expands into West Germany and Scandinavia).
Besides all this (hopefully now clarified), I do not see any marked "late Neolithic drop" in the available data (more regions here). But much less a demographic expansion with Corded Ware (with maybe a few select exceptions such as parts of Scandinavia). The demographic vigor is much more marked for the arrival of Megalithism instead (where it applies), around 1000 years before Corded Ware.
I'm guessing that you mean the "valleys" after the initial Megalithic expansion, apparent only in some regions (the newly neolithic ones: Britain, parts of Scandinavia and East Switzerland) But in most cases these declines in apparent population densities are not followed by any recovery, much less one we can associate with Corded Ware specifically. The exceptions are in parts of Scandinavia, of Poland (but no Megalithism there) and Eastern Switzerland. "The Lowlands" mentioned in Timpson 2014 seem to correspond to the Benelux and are an area only partly affected by Corded Ware (Belgium remained in the late Megalithic zone, absorbed by the dynamic Artenacian culture of bowmen), so it is unclear to me if this exception corresponds to CW, Artenac or both.
So I don't think you can generalize what is only apparent in two or three very specific regions. Germany in general seems to remain pretty much "flat" for all the period, nearly unchanged in terms of demography by either Megalithism, Corded Ware or Bell Beaker.
"You're entirely out of touch with current evidence"...
I hear that a lot as of late but I never see the "current evidence" pointed to. My impression is that you guys are just entrenched in migrationist dogma and can't weight the evidence (which is the same for all) properly, that you prefer cherry-picking it at convenience.
Maju
Obviously the population drop was variable - chronologically and regionally. I'm not stating that all the population disappeared, nor am I stating that there were millions of pastoralists from the East arriving.
All that matters is relative numbers. Whatever the cause, there was a decline in neolithic groups at the terminal neolithic. This was supplanted by a pastoralist economy, by both adaptation and some frank migration from the east. These *relative* shifts clearly left a genetic mark. You're right, and the population didn't actually recover much until the middle Bronze Age, and in some areas- like Britain- farming didn't really return in any significant anounts until the late bronze ages (I wonder if it is then when R1b groups really became dominant ?).
Your ideas of elite kurgan warriors is simply false, as is your entire construction if what actually occurred in the Eneolithic steppe. It is here where you're out of touch,because you insist on referencing material from 1963 rather than anything from this millenium.
@Maju, I am not suggesting that the lust for females is the driving force for any conflict. Women and children can be seen as a “by-product issue” of a conflict. It is apparent that the older “non fertile” females were thrown into the ditch. Concluding, that younger females had a higher chance of survival due to their fertility.
It is speculated that the Talheim people were killed by surprise; it was even suggested during their sleep. So, I would presume that the attackers had it planned out and it is likely that the two groups knew each other. For whatever reason, the men were deliberately killed. The reason must have been more global/complex then just a bunch of fertile females.
With Indo-Europeans as the genesis of "factional war", I don't know enough about archeology to know if that's the case. It seems not very likely to be of relevance to the Schöneck-Kilianstädten mass grave at around 5000BC (as per https://theconversation.com/mass-grave-reveals-organised-violence-among-europes-first-farmers-46217). Certainly the Yamnaya Culture is dated to around 1400 years later at inception.
I think it is certainly harder to make the case for a cultural change being related to a movement of any people, as "mercenaries" or rulers, without any genetic evidence, than with genetic evidence. You could always have some genetic movement of peoples that reduced to almost nothing, there's just nothing genetic particularly to speak for it.
@Matt: What I'm telling you is that, barring a couple of peripheral areas or so, there was no such decline in population nor such increase with the arrival of Corded Ware. None at all. What I'm telling you, with the data on hand and visible to all, is that, again, you are imagining all that.
"Your ideas of elite kurgan warriors is simply"...
... what fits the data in many cases at the very least.
"you insist on referencing material from 1963"
LOL, I'm citing material from the last few years and you are dismissing it with... nothing at all!, with your mere stubborn opinion! Don't make things up!
In any case I'm not founding my archaeological understanding on Gimbutas directly but on general up-to-date knowledge of the various archaeological cultures involved. And that should be apparent in all what I'm saying, referencing, etc.
You instead are providing nothing at all other than ad-hominem attacks, what is the resource of those who lack arguments (and have poor style).
Sorry, the previous comment was to Mike Thomas, not Matt. :(
@Matt (now yes): I did not mean that this episode is related to Indoeuropeans in any way. I just drifted away when discussing Western LBK peculiarities, which I have the impression that may be somewhat linked to more violence than other related groups. Then I added that I also get the impression that the Chalcolithic changes in North-Central Europe (eventually leading to IEs arrival with Baalberge) were largely driven by this.
It's a somewhat shallow judgment anyhow but I do feel that the various "Neolithic" or "Vasconic" cultures had various differential developments, like for example the more monumental and apparently "aristocratic" (priestly aristocracy eventually evolving to druids?) style characteristic of Armorican Megalithism and later also of Britain. What does it mean that their monuments were larger? What that, after Artenacian conquest, they became smaller, just like in other traditions? Well, it probably indicates some socio-cultural differences. Same for Western LBK and their weapons and opium maybe. Just food for thought in any case.
Ok Maju
Although you have a tendency for confabulation I still enjoy your opinions.
So tell me; what's the evidence for the elite conquest of Yamnaya groups ?
I think this article tells us the how the EEF replaced by the PIE people (or how G2a replaced by r1a and r1b) With violence and massacre.
PS: I have read some comments above. Some people claim that this is a rutial of farmer sociaty. Is there an evidence that its a rutial in articla? Its probably a invasia result with men were killed and women were raped. Its explains why G2a, K and T is so low in europe now.
It's too early for that. The Middle Neolithic still has to come after LBK, and that's a long time before R1a/R1b and ANE show up in Central Europe.
But this massacre is probably a part of the story. It shows that Neolithic farming communities in Central Europe were vulnerable to stress episodes that caused local conflicts and maybe much worse, like famine, epidemics and population crashes.
Thus, the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age invaders from the east were possibly not pushing into densely occupied land, but moving into something of a vacuum.
Pan historically, yeah, population densities should've been low through prehistory. The estimates are like 14 million worldwide by 3000 BC, 27 million by 2000 BC (and the majority of both of those in Asia).
Maybe before the Corded Ware intrusion, whenever a European Neolithic descended culture went bust, eventually another EuroNeo culture moved into the gap and occupied the same site. Or the same for a subset of a culture, when its a wide culture like LBK. Probably not the case after the various IE groups started running up to West-Central Europe, likely with their own share of local busts and collapses along the way to get there.
Also I was just having a look at the Baalberge and Bernburg (Esperstedt MN) Culture samples from Haak, in light of Maju's comments. With the caveat I'm not that knowledgeable about Y-dna compared to some, of course those came back as Bernburg I0172 (Esperstedt_MN) - I2a1b1a (part of the I2 clade, like the Spanish MN and the Funnelbeaker we have), and then Baalberge I0559 as R*? and I0807 F*. The lack of clear assignment for these two is because the read depth is kind of low, I think.
I gather R*? means "some clade within R, we don't which" and F* "some clade within the F (essentially all non-Africans) we don't know which". Although a low sample size I think this is the only Y-Dna we have from Germany and Central Europe at this time (approx 1000 years before Corded Ware). It will be interesting to see if these can be clarified, as if Baalberge does prove to have R type Y-dna, it may strengthen the case that they were influenced by a steppe related population, in language / burial rites, etc, albeit one whose influence on the autosome would have dwindled to nothing.
(Other points on these are for R*? - "An assignment to haplogroup R is possible based on P224:17285993C→T. This may represent ancient DNA damage, so the assignment should be viewed with caution." and for F* - "We could exclude haplogroups G, H1a2a, H1b1, H1b2a, I1a3, I2a1b, J1a2b3a, J2a1h2, J2b2a1a1, L, NO and P1")
That Baalberge sample looks like it is straight R1. Nothing below that is positive, as far as I know. It doesn't necessarily mean steppe stuff. We have an R1b in Early Neolithic Spain that is equivalent with V88.
@Mike: Does Baalberge show Yamna/CW genotypes? Nope. Is Baalberge Kurgan? Yes. That's a case where it seems we have pure elite conquest without replacement. And it makes sense, because the guys with the Kurgan blueprints were crossing all the way from beyond the Dniepr to the Elbe, initially skipping the intermediate areas, so it's a long way to organize a mass migration.
Just saying that the Kurgan phenomenon in Central Europe did not begin with Corded Ware but many centuries earlier, still with ENF genotypes for all we know. Baalberge and CW are strongly related culturally: {Baalberge → Globular Amphora} is the direct precursor of Corded Ware, we can't just scrap that because one has the "right" genotype and the other the "wrong" one.
If the culture is basically the same but the genetics change, it means that it was not the first IE conquest which caused the demic replacement but a secondary development later on. And that is interesting, I believe, especially because this secondary development (Corded Ware) involves renewed interaction with steppe IEs of some sort, as evidenced by the Catacombs culture materials in Cuyavia (or Kujawia or however it's spelled).
I think all this is interesting and relevant and certainly shows or at least suggests a documented case in Europe in which Kurgan conquest is still not associated with demic replacement (or massive admixture with intrusive genetics).
Of course someone can claim that Baalberge and successors are not Kurgan, but the kurgans (steppe-style tumular burials) are there and actually became more prominent as the culture expanded (to parts of Poland and Moravia). Only later, after probably being militarily contained by Baden culture (as suggested by the loss of Northern Moravia), the Baalberge successors become somewhat "less kurgan" but they are still distinct from the previous and sometimes contemporary late Danubian layers and continuous with Baalberge, and eventually they begin expanding again, consolidating their control of Poland, East Germany and the area between Poland and Kiev. And then, one day, after being paid "a visit" by their Catacomb cultural cousins, they become Corded Ware and expand even more dynamically, absorbing West Germany, Escandinavia, etc.
It's a process that takes many centuries, almost a millennium, but we only see the demic replacement in the final phase.
@Matt: I would have to check but, if my memory is correct, the Baalberge R* is actually R(xR1). F* was also tested for several common European clades, I believe. My point anyhow was re. their autosomal DNA, which is indistinct from other "ENF" (early Chalcolithic) populations and hence unaffected by any significant amount of blood coming from the East. Hence my hypothesis re. a "wandering warrior elite" Visigothic or Hun style, with nearly zero genetic influence but a much more prominent cultural one (probably including language).
A characteristic of Baalberge was that they had a "capital" town of sorts in Haale, where pottery was of better quality, so it's plausible that this was the site where most of the invader elite lived. As time passed kurgan burials, initially rare, became more common, so it's plausible that the other peoples involved were being gradually "indoeuropeanized", assimilated into the elite's culture (and possibly being co-opted into it).
It's hard to be sure of what exactly happened but there's a lot of archaeological info that is in any case suggestive, including continuous use of some of those Baalberge kurgans until Corded Ware and Unetice cultures.
Notice please that, unlike Gimbutas, I do not see anything Indoeuropean/Kurgan in Baden culture (south of the Carpathian range) but I rather perceive it as the latest vigorous Danubian culture, which delayed the IE expansion for some centuries and influenced the northern Baalberge-derived cultures. Corded Ware and Vucedol would change that and consolidate the Indoeuropeanization of Central Europe.
@ Maju / Chad
My take on the specific sections of that paper was that they did not have sufficient coverage to disambiguate through defining mutations whether F* was R or not, nor whether the R* was actually R1a, R1b, some subclade of either of those, or something else. If I'm wrong and they did have the right coverage, then that's that.
Sorry I disagree, and so it would seem, most people's inderatand of this entire thread. As Dave summarised - it was more internal problems that cause crisis in neolithic groups, then the eastern types simply filled a niche. Sure, some conflict occurred possibly on arrival , but that was secondary and local thing, not a global / ideological was of "farmers vs kurgan people "
So if Baalberg burial was the first conquest wave, where is the L51, or M417?
There isn't a point debating further though. I just find your reconstructions of history sound like biblical fables, and actually quite clever in their elaborateness (the Baden' first contained the kurgans , visiting "Catacomb cousins", etc.) if they werent so off the mark
Your wondering warrior elite idea is farcical. You can't just indiscriminately apply Somethin that happened with state societies to previous era. To have mercenaries, you need States to employ them- Mesopotamian, roman , greek, Chinese. Local farming tells don't qualify
So let's agree to disagree
I think some guy called Sergey or Smal looked into that extensively didn't he? It's a coverage issue, not true R*
@Maju
The problem I see with your hypothesis about a small elite is that the graves (single grave tumulus) would crucially contain the bodies of those elites. And there's no trace of what we presume to be IE genes in them.
So I think that a more logical (anthropologically speaking) explanation is that the cultural changes that were happening at the time were a general trend, and that they preceded the IE migrations. Social stratification is a natural consequence of more advanced and complex societies. It's not an original invention of IEs, nor did they bring it to Europe. The changes would have been the same even if IEs had never migrated to Europe. It's just a mere coincidence that IEs migrated at the time these changes were happening, and they simply participated of them. The only thing that really changed with their migration was the genetic structure of Europeans and the languages they speak. Everything else is a construct.
@Mike:
Jean Manco's DNA page lists this person "Sergey Malychev" as disambiguating the R1b1 sample from Els Trocs as R1b1c -http://www.ancestraljourneys.org/europeanneolithicdna.shtml - "personal communication". No particular information on how this was done but presumably there is some mutation in the data which the people who published the paper were not aware could be linked to that haplogroup assignment. They checked using http://isogg.org/tree/ISOGG_YDNA_SNP_Index.html.
I think from his https://www.familytreedna.com/public/r1b1asterisk/ page he may be using some alternative phylogeny which members of his project have been working out based on their own data and other published data?
No information that he did anything with that Baalberge group sample in R*.
The authors checked for all the SNPs on the ISOGG 2013 tree, IIRC. So there were lots of other SNPs to check for.
The Baalberge R* last I heard was positive for two SNPs at the R level, and negative for one at the R1b1a2-M269 level, one at R1b1a2a1a-L151, and one at the R1a1a-M17 level.
So, while he isn't Z2103 like Yamanaya, there is nothing to stop him being M73 like the Samara forager, or V88 like the Iberian farmer or pre-M269, or R2, or any of the various rare early branches of R1a or R1b which still exist in Europe.
Maju, I bumped into a German language paper on LBK stone mace heads, it also mentions what you suggested in regard to weapons as statussymbole.
(freely translated)
A strong correlation between blunt head injuries (and their treatment/trepanning) and the use of mace using cultures was already attested by the Viennese anthropologist and Africanist , D. J. Wölfel in 1925 .Two of the rare LBK- trepannings are known from the LBK-Excavations of Hoenheim-Souffelweyersheim and Ensisheim in the Alsace ( Alt/Jeunesse 2006; Gallay 1970, 25; 1969, 40; Rieth Mauser-Goller/Ulrich 1942). From both burial sites, mace grave goods are attested. Of the 22 known LBK-burial sites equipped with stone maces, 20 are from the Upper Rhine region and Alsace. Since all of these findings date to the younger / youngest LBK period, this presumably shows a growing importance of these artifacts in terms of status and prestige.
"Steinerne Keulenköpfe – Die Mesolithische Revolution und die Bandkeramik"
http://www.academia.edu/9112710/Steinerne_Keulenköpfe_Die_Mesolithische_Revolution_und_die_Bandkeramik
It also concludes that shaft-mounted tools/weapons were originally not part of the LBK Neolithic-package, but were integrated into the LBK-culture through exchange with HGs in northern Europe who originally used shaft-mounted tools/weapons.
Also, in regard to Schöneck-Kilianstädten,I was rethinking the killed infant. Till I realized that actually killing a infant, can also be linked to female fertility
,because during breastfeeding there is no ovulation(to a certain degree).
'Is Baalberge Kurgan? Yes. That's a case where it seems we have pure elite conquest without replacement. And it makes sense, because the guys with the Kurgan blueprints were crossing all the way from beyond the Dniepr to the Elbe'
No, elite dominance has nothing to do with this. Yamnaya did not leave traces in Baalberge because Yamanaya lagged behind with a gap of 500 years! Haak's (2015) Baalberge sampes were dated 3887-3510 cal BCE, his Yamnaya sampes just 3339-2622 cal BCE; Allentoft's Yamnaya samples were dated 3334-2143 cal BC. Hence, if Yamnaya and Baalberge were indeed related, then Yamnaya must derive from Baalberge and not otherwise.
BTW, Baalberge was a TRB culture.
Yamnaya has 0% Baalberge admixture, and Baalberge has 0% Yamnaya admixture.
They're not related.
@Rokus: Yamnaya, in spite of some urban legends, is not the origin of the Kurgan phenomenon but just another product of it. The origin is in Samara and Khvalynsk cultures, dated quite earlier. Look them up in Wikipedia.
Still Early Yamna is roughly contemporary of Baalberge, as well as of other early Kurgan offshoots like Afanasevo, Maykop, the scattered Balcans-Tisza Kurgans and the complex Sredny-Stog II phase in Ukraine. As a whole they represent the early divergence of Indoeuropean languages and cultures.
See also my maps illustrating the early Kurgan expansion.
Glad to educate you but I wouldn't mind if you were a bit less pretentious and at least studied the matter before producing such "assessments".
@Mike: I tell you the same as to Rokus.
@David: "Yamnaya has 0% Baalberge admixture, and Baalberge has 0% Yamnaya admixture. They're not related".
They are not related genetically (for what we know, maybe other burials show greater relatedness?) BUT THEY ARE RELATED CULTURALLY (and that's a matter on which archaeo-genetics has no say).
It's debatable or rather questionable whether Baalberge, which is usually designated as part of the TRB culture, is culturally related to Yamnaya.
What isn't debatable is that modern North-Central Europeans are more closely related genetically to Corded Ware than to Baalberge, and Corded Ware is more closely related genetically to Yamnaya than to Baalberge.
So as usual, Rokus got it backwards, and as usual, your attempt to minimise the role of migration in the spread of the Kurgan culture falls flat on its face.
Maju
Once last time - abandon your cartoonish version of kurgan development. It wasn't a linear development from Khvalynsk, or Samara. These were a minority component.
There was a complex, multifaceted process which began with migrations from the forest-steppe, including Cucuteni tripolje culture, expanding onto the open steppe (previously sparsely inhabited).
Numerous cultural influences from Central Europe, the Caucasus and forest steppe acted to form Yamnaja.
There are no kurgan material west of the Black Sea before 3000 BC. (Radiocarbon dated)
All you think your seeing (Gimbutas "first wave") is merely the secondary products revolution, which was a broad phenomenon, and not specifically one of steppic origin (at all). Case in point -Remedello . Gimbutas thought it was a Kurganized culture. but it has nothing to do with it, and is rather continuous with the neolithic. The obvious conclusion is that one needn't have been from the Pontic steppe to show hallmarks of wheels, pastoralism, etc . This is unless, of course, you argue that the Kurgan people had ethereal powers who could posses others' bodily forms (like something out of Star Trek, (original series)).
@ Capra I.
The Samara forager isn't R-M73. He's inbetween R-P297 and R-M73, and hence has to be classified as R-P297.
@David: TRB (Funnelbeaker) is not any single culture but a complex phenomenon. Danish/South Swedish TRB is indeed a distinct Megalithic culture and surely the origin of the phenomenon but once it goes into Germany and other mainland locations it becomes more complicated and each culture must be considered on its own distinct terms. Michelsberg for instance is also Megalithic and is the bulk of that penetration from the North (probably implicating an "Atlantization" of the region, what is reflected in the genetics) but Baalberge and other smaller or more diffusely Funnelbeaker groups are not.
Baalberge seems to have strong links to Nordic TRB but it is not a simply derived culture and it also has kurgans, which become more common as time passes: it is clearly the ultimate origin of Corded Ware via its Cujavian secondary center and this cultural continuity is pretty much impossible to ignore.
There are clear differences in the genetics in East Germany but what do we know of its Polish branch? Assuming everything was like in Germany, then we should attribute the novel genetic component of Corded Ware to the Catacombs intruders (who are in some way implicated in the Globular Amphora → Corded Ware shift but can't explain the bulk of the culture). But IMO it's very possible that the R1a and Yamna-like autosomal genetics were first accumulated in Polish Baalberge and/or its proto-CW successors. How exactly? I can't say for sure (the data is not yet there) but it makes some good sense re. R1a-Z282 in any case, which is unlikely to have arrived from the Volga (Upper Dniepr at the farthest).
@Mike: "Once last time - abandon your cartoonish version of kurgan development".
Or what? Will you attack my computer with candy bombs? I'm panicking.
Anyway, it's not "cartoonish". What is cartoonish is to pretend that all the answers are in a very particular one-sided over-simplistic model based ONLY on cherry-picked genetic factoids, ignoring not just the archaeology but also all the other inconvenient genetic facts.
And the way you "defend" your model is very telling of the dogmatism involved, mind you.
"There was a complex, multifaceted process"...
This part sounds good: complex, multifaceted: I like that.
"... which began with migrations from the forest-steppe, including Cucuteni tripolje culture".
Sorry but Cucuteni is totally unrelated. Cucuteni is an LBK offshoot, with whatever complexity because of the previous "aboriginal Neolithic" layer in the area. Also Kurgans just slashed Cucuteni out, slowly but steadily.
However it is probably a good idea to consider the Dniepr-Don → Pitted Ware flow as precursor of the Kurgan migrations in a restricted way. So far most of the Pitted Ware data we have is from Gotland and we know nothing about Dniepr-Don's autosomal genetics but there may be something going on with all that. In any case the impact was limited to parts of the Southern Baltic area and these cultures, even if maybe related in the genetics to Kurgans, were not part of the Kurgan expansion but rather other "victims" of it. But we can't say for sure that some of them were not co-opted in Sredny-Stog II or other transitions like maybe the "Polish" Kurgans.
@Mike: "There are no kurgan material west of the Black Sea before 3000 BC. (Radiocarbon dated)".
That is just not true. Even ignoring the issue of the NW Kurgans (Baalberge → CW), there are indeed a large number of kurgans in Romania and East Hungary that are older. Before 3000 BCE we also have at least one consolidated and unmistakable Kurgan culture in the Balcans: Cotofeni culture, while another novel culture with steppe roots (not strictly Kurgan but rather with burial practices related to Dniepr-Don) is Ezero (in Bulgaria), usually considered at the origin of historical Thracians. See for example this paper.
So, even if you could justify your negative to accept the Kurgan presence in the Northern plains (what I strongly dispute), you still have to admit that they were in the Eastern Balcans and East Hungary long before that 3000 BP date. The initial Kurgan expansion was indeed somewhat complex but also very much "sudden" and cuasi-simultaneous in all directions (and particularly strong towards the West). Corded Ware is just the consolidation, not the origin.
'Yamnaya has 0% Baalberge admixture, and Baalberge has 0% Yamnaya admixture. They're not related.'
This might be due to the shortcomings of the method. Like saying that water has zero oxygen and vice versa. And 500 years is a hell of a lot of time for genetic change, any idea how much western Europe changed the last 50 years? It may take a little longer to homigenize with colonial offspring and immigrants due to sheer numbers only. Let's rather go back to the roots: how much WHG, EEF and ANE has Yamnaya? Modern Europeans could be described by these three components, wasn't it? So Yamnaya also. And Baalberge is EEF+some WHG. Then what will be the result for Yamnaya if EEF is replaced by Baalberge? We also have to take into account that EEF is another hybrid and probably not universal to all Neolithic cultures. Deviations from this model will only appear when more hybrid or exotic components are included into the equation. We have to question the mechanism that brought exotic elements in the equation, do we have to reinvent the already heavily transmuted Kurganic system all over again and assume an Asiatic origin of IE instead? Or should we be more parsimonic and search for exotic substrates readily at hand? At least Baalberge YDNA R is a strong indication that R1a-M417 and R1b-L51 weren't necessarily absent in Central Europe. Indeed, it may be quite productive to investigate aDNA of cultures ancestral to Baalberge and TRB.
Nope .
Groups like Cotofeni and Cernavoda is very much thought of as offshoots of CT, and not Yamnaya. But aDNA will be interesting , a things possible
"Cherry picked" nothing. I stayed that there were several formative influences on Uamnaya, which cannot be directly and simpicitically linked to anyone predecessor like Khvalysnk, like you and your sources from 1956 maintain.
"Ezero... Linked to historical thracians"
Again your outdated ideas from outdated sources. Calling anything from 3000 BC "thracian" is absurd. Historical Thracians emerged in the Iron Age only, and more proximately due to influences from Greece, Macedonia and La Tene Europe than anything 2000 years earlier.
'Before 3000 BCE we also have at least one consolidated and unmistakable Kurgan culture in the Balcans'
All of these dates are suspect nowadays, especially since these were linked with contemporary Kurgan dates. Quoting the Allentoft (2015) supplement:
'We have in recent years witnessed a new 14C-dating programme of Russian samples from burials. Due to the reservoir effects from freshwater diet, many previous 14C-dates of human bone can now be demonstrated as being too old - sometimes by 300-400 years. This has been demonstrated by systematically dating objects of animal bones, or objects made from animal bone, and of short lived timber from graves. We have therefore here lowered the absolute chronology of Yamnaya and related cultures in accordance with these new results.'
'1.3 Yamnaya (3000-2400 BC)'
'Around 2900 BC, the western Yamnaya culture continued its expansion into the Carpathian basin to the Hungarian plain, as well as north of the Carpathians.'
@Mike: a kurgan is a very specific kind of monument and in most cases there is no doubt, particularly because other groups did not use anything similar at all (only megalithic tumuli could be confused, but not quite, because there are other details). Furthermore, Balcano-Tsizan kurgans often have gold hoards with a clear signature of the gold coming from the Ural mountains (platinum traces) - of course this only implies trade but it is something novel that points in the same direction as the kurgans themselves. Even David discussed some months ago the Tsiza kurgans (not sure if in entry or comment), which he and the paper he referenced described as "Yamna".
""Cherry picked" nothing".
You (and some others) are all the time dismissing the inconvenient evidence, be it genetic (like the geostructure of Z93 or R1a in general) or archaeological (like the early kurgans West of the Odessa-Gdansk isthmus). You are also making outlandish claims about Cucuteni that just do not stand any minimally serious scrutiny. That's what I mean by "cherry-picking": aggrandizing the importance of certain pieces of data and simply denying the rest, so you can push ahead with your simplistic model without contradictions. But the contradictions, the complexity, are there, you know: eppur si muove.
"Again your outdated ideas from outdated sources. Calling anything from 3000 BC "thracian" is absurd".
Proto-Thracian obviously. Even continuous cultures do evolve.
"Historical Thracians emerged in the Iron Age only, and more proximately due to influences from Greece, Macedonia and La Tene Europe than anything 2000 years earlier".
While I would not like to dismiss those "influences", influences alone do not cause ethnogenesis, something more dramatic is needed, something like an invasion for which only Ezero fits.
It's like saying that historical Iberians emerge because of Greek influences (some do). But, while that Greek influence is undeniable and even probably helped the military-cultural re-expansion of the Iberians towards the North (previously IE), the roots of Iberian culture are much older and certainly not Greek, we can in fact track them to at least El Argar culture and its Los Millares precursor and, beyond them, probably to the local Cardial Neolithic. Of course we can argue against the usage of the term "Iberian" for those cultures but we are justified to use the term "proto-Iberian" indeed and trace Iberian the roots to them and not to Phocaea.
@Rokus: you can't extend what you say about Yamna and Russia to the Balcans just because. I of course remain open to any serious redating and its implications but:
1. Even if what Haak et al. say about Yamna is correct, that would still make early Yamna c. 3300 or 3200 BCE (previous older dates are of c. 3600 BCE), and:
2. Kurgans did not begin with Yamna. Khvalynsk is much older and Samara even older. Yamna-centrism is a vice that we should quit (seems highly addictive for some reason).
Ethnogenesis is a cultural and social phenomenon as much as demic . There were no Thracians or proto-Thracians 3000 BC. Try reading the seminal works of the Cohens, Sian Jones, et al to bring you up to speed on what ethnicity is, and how it forms as an us versus them phenomenon.
Again, there are no Kurgans before 3000 BC in Europe , no "Tisza-Balcanic" or otherwise.
@Mike: of course that Ethnogenesis is certainly something "cultural". This is normally my point. However ethnic identity (linguistic, etc.) changes do require of some critical catalyst and not mere snail-paced internal evolution loose external influences. Typically it requires an invasion that imposes new language and cultural standards, while not necessarily implicating any major demic impact (elite domination works as well). For example Berbers became Arabs only after the Islamic invasions, Iberians became Romans only after the 2nd Punic War, Anatolians became Turks only after the Seljuk invasions and their Ottoman offshoot, Hurrians became Kurds because of the Medic invasion and Persian consolidation. Etcetera. In all cases something changes and that is the nature of the elites via military-political invasion. Success in this ethno-linguistic change is not assured (for example Normans failed to make England a French-speaking country, but almost) but without the invasion there is no chance that the change happens at all.
"Again, there are no Kurgans before 3000 BC in Europe , no "Tisza-Balcanic" or otherwise".
Don't lie, please.
BTW, in Haak (2015) Figure S9.5 Baalberge_MN was presented as a mixture of 88.4% LBK_EN+11.6% Yamnaya, or 92% Spain_EN+8% Yamnaya. Like with Yamnaya, the Neolithic component in Baalberge did not derive from LBK, since another result for Baalberge was 0% LBK_EN+100% Spain_EN. Less Yamnaya admixture is necessary to compensate for the Spanish EN component, what also implies that the 'eastern' Neolithic component in Yamnaya resembles Spain_EN more than LBK_EN.
'Kurgans did not begin with Yamna.'
Kurgans, crouched supine position and socially differentiated grave furnishings only appeared occasionally in the North Pontic Eneolithic burial customs before Yamnaya, where they became the rule. I doubt that pre-Yamnaya kurgans may even be diagnostic for an ancestral culture, since indeed it might be hard to distinguish non-fully developed kurgans from tumuli elsewhere.
"You're right. Amazons, killing the men and recruiting the women. That certainly must be the explanation." Smith College Rugby Team
"What would HGs do with a bunch of abducted farmers? " Sell them for beer money, trade them for trinkets, like the vikings did with Saxon thralls
" And not just Romans, in all the anthropological and historical knowledge we have kidnapping of foreign women is exceptional, even to some extent where slavery has become common." I disagree, see above and http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/whtslav.htm or https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/bxi01. Kidnapping people was quite a common pastime for fun and profit
In Haak (2015) Figure S9.5 Baalberge_MN was presented as a mixture of 0% LBK_EN+100% Spain_EN, what simply means that Baalberge did not derive from their local LBK predecessors but instead had a more Atlantic precedence. Hence, the transition to Middle Neolithic can't denied to have been devastating and induced by intruders rather than internal strike between LBK parties. Of course, due to a lack of samples the precise origin of MN-Neolithic may differ from Iberia.
BTW, this may imply that Baalberge YDNA R has an Atlantic/Iberian origin. I also noted that SPAIN_EN is more similar to the Neolithic component attested in Yamnaya, 500 years later than Baalberge.
@ Rokus
You don't see the wood for the trees! What Figure S9.5 in Haak et al. suggests, is that Baalberge is best modeled as a mix of 64.3% LBK_EN + 19.6% Spain_EN + 16.1% Loschbour. This model has the best fit, therefore it's reasonable to suppose it's closest to the truth. Baalberge doesn't have any ANE, in the PCA in Haak et al. as well as in the Eurogenes K8 PCA it's completely without ANE shift and clusters with other Middle Neolithic samples.
Spain_EN and LBK_EN are very similar anyway, because they go back to a similar source of early farmers. And if in some cases Neolithic samples from central Europe show relatedness with Spain_EN, that may be because of Cardium derived La Hoguette influence and/or Atlantic Megalithic influence.
The West Asian influence in Yamnaya on the other hand is very different, because it had an ANE shift itself, and it's most similar to Caucasus populations. Whereas the West Asian influence in EEF is most similar to Saudis and Bedouins, probably also North Africans (minus the Sub-Saharan admixture).
It's all rather clear now and I have the impression you're still trying to turn the 1 + 1 into a 3, by hook or by crook, so that Yamnaya is derived from TRB and the obvious east-> west migration can be turned into a west -> east migration.
@Rokus: "in Haak (2015) Figure S9.5 Baalberge_MN was presented as a mixture of 88.4% LBK_EN+11.6% Yamnaya, or 92% Spain_EN+8% Yamnaya. Like with Yamnaya, the Neolithic component in Baalberge did not derive from LBK, since another result for Baalberge was 0% LBK_EN+100% Spain_EN".
That is interesting because Baalberge has no relationship whatsoever with Iberia or the Mediterranean in general, or even the Atlantic. At most with Denmark (via Funnelbeaker). So, contrary to what you claim later the first figure, with 12% Yamna-like admixture should be the correct one.
The best way to test the various models would be testing for IBD but I'm pretty sure that it will confirm my belief because the cultural relationship with the SW is just non-existent.
"What Figure S9.5 in Haak et al. suggests, is that Baalberge is best modeled as a mix of 64.3% LBK_EN + 19.6% Spain_EN + 16.1% Loschbour".
This one could be an alternative configuration IF (and only IF): (1) Baalberge's new blood came from Denmark exclusively and (2) these Danish Megalithic farmers (who oddly enough did not carry their Megalithism with them) would be much more WHG than Gokhem (the only available reference) are, something like modern Basques in fact.
I personally doubt it and I insist that IBD analysis should clarify.
'What Figure S9.5 in Haak et al. suggests, is that Baalberge is best modeled as a mix of 64.3% LBK_EN + 19.6% Spain_EN + 16.1% Loschbour. This model has the best fit'
You can also see in the same figure that there isn't any significant decrease of resnorm for N=3 in comparison with N=2, while the absolute value of the z-score is meaningless for a random sample, what means there isn't much of a compelling reason to include LBK_EN as a component for Baalberge_MN at all. In (b) you can see that for N=2 ‘0% LBK_EN+100% Spain_EN’ has a low resnorm and thus should be considered a valid result.
I wonder how random or secure 64.3% LBK_EN at N=3 might be, knowing that at N=2 '0% LBK_EN+100% Spain_EN' is a valid result. Possibly this percentage rather reflects a maximum where just the LBK_EN component includes all shared Neolithic DNA? Like you say: 'Spain_EN and LBK_EN are very similar anyway, because they go back to a similar source of early farmers.'. Indeed, nothing else occurs to me to solve these contradictory results.
'Baalberge doesn't have any ANE'
A little off-topic, though apparently not any obstacle for Baalberge to be found '88.4% LBK_EN+11.6 Yamnaya' or '92% Spain_EN+8% Yamnaya' at N=2 at low resnorm.
'Yamnaya on the other hand is very different, because it had an ANE shift itself, and it's most similar to Caucasus populations. '
The ANE shift is not contemporaneous to Baalberge. The 'Caucasus' component was 'Armenian', not even contemporaneous to Yamnaya and rather a derived component.
'Cardium derived La Hoguette influence and/or Atlantic Megalithic influence.'
Apparently, though still at odds with the TRB identity of Baalberge. Obviously here we are missing data.
'[Affinity with Spain_EN rather than LBK_EN] is interesting because Baalberge has no relationship whatsoever with Iberia or the Mediterranean in general, or even the Atlantic. At most with Denmark (via Funnelbeaker).'
It would be nice to find out if also Gök2 was Spain_EN admixed. This sample seems to be all we have at the moment of the extensive TRB culture.
To be honest, I'm growing a bit sceptical about that method used in Figure 9, which seems similar to qpAdm.
When Spain_MN also can be modelled as 90% Spain_EN + 10% Yamnaya or 87% LBK_EN + 13% Motala_HG with almost the same good result as others that actually make sense, it doesn't seem to be too reliable.
Corded Ware = 25% LBK_EN + 75% Motala_HG is as good any others. Even 100% Loschbour is not a much worse fit than the best ones.
Unetice_EBA's best result is 56% Motala_HG + 44% Spain_MN, but even 98% Loschbour + 2% Karelia_HG doesn't work too bad.
@ Maju
"Dont lie.."
please note :
""all data..when calibrated..fall consistenty between 2950 BC and 2500 BC (1 sigma) and 3100 and 2450 (2 sigma) cal BC"
V Heyd, 2011. Yamnaya Groups and Tumuli West of the Black Sea. (Summary of ~ 500 known Balkan and central European kurgans)
Maju. It's one thing to be hopelessly out of date - not only methdologically/ theoretically, but also empirically - but another to be smug/ arrogant about it too.
BTW, @ Maju
I'm not ignoring any geogenetic evidence. You were probably alluding the R1a question. I used to take Underhill's phylogeographic conclusions very seriously, if you needed proof for this I could show you links to old comments of mine. But what you failed to see is that the ancient DNA evidence has effectively falsified Underhill's conclusions. Phylogeographic considerations are not the absolute and unbeatable proof you believe them to be! They are just that: Considerations, which are most useful as long as there is no other evidence.
But to elaborate a little, the basic idea of phylogeography is this: You have old clades in places A and B and you have derived, younger clades in places C and D. And then you conclude that the younger clades arose through migration and founder effects from people originating in places A and B.
IIRC Underhill found basic variants of R1a1* only in West Asia, and he found basic variants of R-M417* only in West Asia and the Caucasus. From this he could rightly draw the conclusion that derived variants of R-M417 are descended from people originating in West Asia or the Caucasus.
However, what ancient DNA evidence has shown: Basic variants of R1a1* were present in northeast European hunter-gatherers, and basic variants of R-M417* were present in Corded people in central Europe.
It's vital to note that what has been found there are really basic variants, and not derived variants which could not be recognized as such because of DNA decay. For instance, RISE446, a Corded Ware male from Germany, was positive for markers corresponding to R-M417, but he was negative for markers corresponding to CTS4385 and Z645, and thus he is really a basic R-M417 without any derived branch. Likewise the Karelian EHG from Haak et al. was positive for M459, and thus he's at least R1a1, but he's negative for M512 and M514, he therefore cannot be R1a1a, he's therefore a basal variant of R1a1*.
And this at least proves that basal variants of R1a1 and R-M417 were not at all confined to West Asia and the Caucasus! And it logically follows that it's not at all compelling to assume that derived variants are descended from people originating in West Asia or the Caucasus. R-M417 might just as well have sprung from an EHG R1a1. And the EHG R1a1 need not have originated in West Asia. While this line of thought just seems to propose equality of possibilities, in fact the ancient DNA evidence has even some priority, because it's a direct verification that these variants were present at a certain time and place in the past. Whereas modern day distributions leave some doubts as to whether the old variants have migrated a lot or not, since their first occurrence.
This effective falsification of Underhill's conclusion regarding the origin of R-M417 is so obvious, logical and compelling that it's a mystery to me why it doesn't enter your brain.
@Mike: Cernavoda Kurgans (Vallachia):
→ http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/en/publications/pitgraves-yamnaya-and-kurgans-at-the-lower-danube-disentangling-late-4th-and-early-3rd-millennium-bc-burial-customs-equipment-and-chronology%28c1537f85-8aa5-45b8-9e35-a5dfedea5a0b%29/export.html
"By using some already published and the newly obtained 14C dates from the graves 3B and 5B of Aricești IV (and partly grave 2/3 of Păuleşti II), all jud. Prahova, we demonstrate this group to date to before c. 3050/3000 cal BC, probably covering the whole last third of the IVth millennium BC".
West of the Black Sea. Let's try not to be so Nordocentric.
@Simon:
First of all a word of caution: there are not "basic" and "derived" clades, all are similarly derived (unless we are talking aDNA). "Asterisk" paragroups are just catch-all categories for what is not classified otherwises, so R1a* just means R1a-others. They can all be one or few not yet described subclades or they can be a diversity of totally unclassifiable "private" lineages. It's difficult to assess how to weight "asterisk" pseudo-basal paragroups but at the very least they count as one other branch hanging from that node, and probably as several. So they should not be ignored but not considered "ancestral" either (sometimes geneticists use that term but it can convey confusion because they do not mean it's truly ancestral, just that they directly hang, undescribed, from the ancestral node).
Then you say: "And this at least proves that basal variants of R1a1 and R-M417 were not at all confined to West Asia and the Caucasus!"
Well, for M417* that changes nothing re. Underhill. However for R1a1* it does in the way you say. But that the ancient R1a1* area was larger than Underhill could infer from modern data does not in any case mean that the abundance of R1a1* in West Asia should be ignored or dismissed: it just has to be reweighted in favor of Eastern Europe but, after doing that, the overall weight still seems to point to West Asia.
Further research is needed, yes, but: (1) there's no possible argument so far against the West Asian centrality of its descendant Z93 and (2) the finding of R1a1* in East Europe does not automatically make this region the origin of R1a1 as a whole, just part of the expansion of the R1a1 node.
Yep exactly. Cernavoda are derived from CT, which in turn inspired Yamnaya.
You might be unaware that there was a kurgan "hiatus " on the steppe, ie a kurganless period characterised by only flat burials. When kurgans reappear, they do so under CT and Caucasian influence .
So, again, your samara & khvalynsk-> Yamnaya construct is baseless.
@Mike: Cernavoda is not any simple culture but three different ones that overlap and each has its own complex relations with all the area.
My point was: (1) Kurgans, (2) well before 3000, (3) West of the Black Sea.
"You might be unaware that there was a kurgan "hiatus " on the steppe, ie a kurganless period characterised by only flat burials. When kurgans reappear, they do so under CT and Caucasian influence".
On the steppe? On what part of "the steppe": the Volga-Ural region of Yamna genesis?, the North Caucasus region of Maykop genesis?, the Altai region of Afanasevo?, the Western Dniepr regions of the complex overlay Kurgan/pre-Kurgan that is Sredny-Stog II?
Yes I'm "unaware" unless you are more specific and post a relevant informative link.
Notice that not all "Kurgan cultures" use Kurgan burial but, when they do, it is very telling.
When you are talking about CT influence you are probably talking of the small hybrid Usatovo culture, what is in fact a sign of the Kurgan pressure against Cucuteni, with groups already "switching sides" at the edges, in this case the southern edge (lower Dniester-Bug area, which can hardly be considered "the steppe").
@Mike: Exactly which 500 years. You are not being specific at all, so I can't analyze your claim, which as far as I know is not correct.
Maju
Quite simply; hundreds of radiocarbon dates exist, calibrated and summarises. The kurgan phase was distinct and short- ~ 3000 BC To 2500. (!) {the odd one dating to 3050 doesn't change this}.
So if kurgans in Bulgaria and Hungary only date to 3000 at the earliest, how can they date in central germany to 3500 Bc, as per your original claim ?
'I'm growing a bit sceptical about that method used in Figure 9'
However, according to graph 3 of Eurogenes' 'Pre- and Post-Kurgan Europe' I was right in two things:
1. Spain_EN and Baalberge_MN emerge are almost identical. LBK_EN apparently vanished due to an expansion of a Spain_EN-like population at the end of the Early Neolithic, consistent with the violence as observed in Schöneck-Kilianstädten and other LBK sites; Since these points cluster with Remedello_CA as well, this Neolithic component must have played a major role in Europe's cultural evolution towards the Middle Neolithic
2. Spain_EN resembles 'modern European' better than LBK_EN.
I gather that Lazaridis (2013)'s three-way model of inferred ancestral populations (EEF, ANE and WHG) to describe 'European' might work better using Spain_EN instead of EEF.
Oh about the "kurgan hiatus" in the steppe?
It oxxurred after the Skelia stage, during the Sredny Stih II stage (c. 4200-3900/800).
The "emergence of these constructions is inluenced by external impulses. The first one is connected development of the Balkan-Carpathian metallurgical province (Chernykh et al. 1991) and the shaping of an exchange system of prestige goods. The second one is connected to the new Pre-Maikop cultural system (settlements of Svobodnoe, Meshoko, etc.)"...
From "Eneolithic burial mounds in the Black Sea steppe from the first burial symbols to monumental ritual architecture". Y Rassamakin.
@ Maju
Alright, so you don't put much weight on the distribution of asterisk paragroups.
I just noticed that you discussed the same topic recently in another thread and checked your arguments there. So your main argument is the haplotype network.
However, all this shows is what haplotype clusters there are, and how they are distributed today. But all people with Z93 are descended from one single man who first had Z93, and it's hard to infer where this guy lived just based on the distribution of modern clusters. The clusters mean groups of related people. It's natural that they occur within geographical or ethnic/cultural units. But what do these say about the origin of the common ancestor? Imagine someone spilling out a bucket of water over a 3 dimensional landscape model with mountains, river valleys and cavities. The water flows down the mountains, through the river valleys and gets accumulated in the cavities in form of lakes. Now you study the distribution of these lakes. What do they reveal about the position of the guy who spilled out the water?
You can list and study where all the various, distinct branches of the haplotype network are found today, where the people having the haplotypes live, and where these clusters are „at home“. But this tells us very little about where the single man who was their progenitor, lived. Where the genetic stream flows to in the course of history is only partly determined by its origin. To a large part it depends from many other factors and also from chance.
What your list shows, is that Z93 is mostly an Asian R1a branch, as far as present-day distribution is concerned, and nobody would deny this.
But ancient DNA evidence strongly suggests that Z93 wasn't from West or South Asia:
The Corded Ware had basal M417, Sintashta had Z93, and Sintashta people were very similar to Corded people in the autosomes. The most parsimonious explanation for this would be: Sintashta Z93 is descended from Corded Ware M417. Of course this evidence doesn't prove beyond any unreasonable doubt that this connection holds true, but it's by far the most natural explanation.
According to the latest calculations, Asian centered Z93 split from European centered Z283 about 4000 BC, that's roughly the PIE time. So it's likely that the expansion of R-M417 was somehow connected with the IE expansion, especially given its connection with eastern Europe and Corded people.
In an alternative scenario to explain the above ancient DNA findings, unless the PIE homeland was in West Asia, we would have to presume a „shadow movement“ at exactly the same time as the PIE expansion of some completely unknown people which expanded greatly and mixed with the expanding PIE not only once, in Europe, but twice, also in central Asia, just to be assimilated by them immediately afterwards. That's hard to swallow.
Moreover, as mentioned, the Sintashta people were autosomally very similar to Corded people and to northeastern Europeans, they don't have any detectable amount of South Central Asian admixture. So if their yDNA was from SC Asia, it must have been from a very small elite that strongly dominated their yDNA without influencing their autosomes detectably.
Moreover, since the Sintashta people were more similar to Europeans than the Yamnaya and Afanasievo people, they must have been recent intruders from the west. And because of the young age of Z93, a SC Asian origin of Z93 would mean that there were also recent intruders from the south, which however didn't leave any trace in the autosomes. Again hard to believe.
Yes Simon
Haplotypes - some would say are wholly irrelevant in today's age of full sequencing, although I wouldn't dismiss them fully. Maju is basing he conclusions in haplotyoe networks *within* Z93. At best , they can tell us about possible movements within Z93 - and even then, not too well. Certainly, it doesn't tell us anything about the overall age and movements of all M417 lineages. Maju favours it because he agrees with underhill , but it's unfortunately a case of an outdated methodology.
The only potential grain of truth in his arguement for a more southern origin for R1a is to go back to the palaeolithic. Arguably, at some point, R1 groups arrived North from somewhere, but it wasn't South Asia.
@Mike: they are not saying "3050 BCE" but well before that date (whole last third of the 4th millennium is argued for, although IMO that's a bit short). It'd still be more recent than Baalberge but significantly more recent than Corded Ware (and Catacomb culture) and about the same age as Yamna.
Corded Ware pottery is found abundantly in the Sredny-Stog II phase of the Dniepr-Don region, which begins c. 4000 BCE. Sredny-Stog II ("kurganized" Dniepr-Don) explains the possibility of these more westerly offshoots, be them Baalberge or the Cernavoda kurgans → Cotofeni. The East Balcanic kurgans are also important in explaining the rather sudden decay and collapse of the rich Karanovo-Gumelnita culture, which they probably looted mercilessly until it could not stand anymore. Then the whole "old Europe" cultures of the area were replaced by Indoeuropeanized cultures like Ezero and Cotofeni, which are also older than Corded Ware and, in the case of Ezero, seems to show continuity to historical Thracians.
There's no obvious reason for the already expansive Kurgan peoples (early IEs) to be just holding back in the steppes, particularly considering the "chaos" of North-Central European Chalcolithic and the magnetic attraction of the wealth of the contemporary Eastern Balcans, quite apparently not ready to withstand. Only Baden culture (if my Danubian continuity interpretation is correct) was dynamic enough to withstand the pressure and even counter it for some time, all the others seem to have been too weak on the face of the new challenge.
@Rokus: "I gather that Lazaridis (2013)'s three-way model of inferred ancestral populations (EEF, ANE and WHG) to describe 'European' might work better using Spain_EN instead of EEF".
Quite apparently there is a variability (mostly defined by WHG admixture) in the Neo-European (pre-IE) substrate, so Lazaridis' EEF and WHG do the job quite well but I guess that Starcevo_EN and Sweden_MN could fine-tune the "triangle". There are still some Central-East Mediterranean populations that fall out of it, tending towards West Asia in excess. But, excluding them and any other influence of that extra West Asian admixture, the "shape" is still a triangle and not a mere bipolar axis.
Admittedly, if you use Spain_EN, you get something like the median but the overall shape of the modern and paleohistorical spread of Europeans is quite triangular, so we can't ignore the dimension 1 and the effect of the different apportions of WHG admixture that it indicates among Neo-Europeans (pre-IE Europeans).
Notice also that in the linked graph the dimension 1 is shrunk and probably expanding the graph vertically to at least double size would be a more accurate visualization of the actual spread. What I mean is that the cuasi-vertical Starcevo-Gokhem axis is at least as important as the horizontal or dialgonal axes between these and Corded Ware. We cannot oversimplify that.
Maju
Your arguing against genetic and radio-dated archaeological evidence .
Simply: the "decay" of Balcanic copper age culture occurred c. 4500 BC, due to internal changes and conflict.
No kurgan or Yamnaya like groups entered until 3000 BC, filling specific niches- like the east Tizsa region and North bulgarian plain.
I really don't know how else I can explain it.
I'm starting to feel like im talking to a brick wall.
PS- Actually it's at least four times (!!!) exaggerated in the horizontal dimension. You can measure the marked distances at the axes and Dim1 is always more important than Dim2. So really there is at least as much variance affecting modern Europeans between Gokhem and Starcevo as between Gokhem (or any other Western Neo-/Chalcolithic sample) and Yamna (if we used Corded Ware instead, it'd be even more marked, but Yamna seems better to include the Balcans particularly, and the Balcans fit in Lazaridis' triangle, unlike Sicilians, who still fall apart in that graph).
@Mike: we do not agree and you are not providing any documentation in any case.
I already have
U just are either unwilling or incapable of accepting facts. And that's not just my opinion here , sorry to say
Baalberg is not kurgan, Baden is not kurgan, Remedello is not kurgan. This has been proven. You're still clinging to your
Socialist doctrines instead of seeking current scientific facts . It's deplorable
@Simon: "Alright, so you don't put much weight on the distribution of asterisk paragroups".
I do. I just say that they are difficult to properly weight without further data. An option is considering each "dot" (individual sample) as a full-weight lineage comparable to larger branches but more likely it's better to consider each geographic grouping of them instead as pseudo-subclades and also their frequency. It's not "rocket science". I just warn against considering them "ancestral".
"So your main argument is the haplotype network".
When no other info (SNPs) is available, that's the most useful tool.
"But all people with Z93 are descended from one single man who first had Z93, and it's hard to infer where this guy lived just based on the distribution of modern clusters".
Surely you are right. However if we stop considering that "first ancestor" and we consider his descendants just a few generations later (one or two centuries maybe), then it's hard to argue the same. We cannot pinpoint the single "grandfather", but we can pinpoint the cluster of early "grandsons" and it is hard to argue past a point that all them just went extinct at the original area but had a lot of descendants precisely in an unrelated one. It's not so much the "single man" but the "family" what matters and, as detectable (SNP-defined) diversity for R1a-M417 seems to correspond to a period of less than 1000 years, we cannot track the individual stories in any precise way but we can track a more blurry general story for the "family".
"Imagine someone spilling out a bucket of water over a 3 dimensional landscape model with mountains, river valleys and cavities. The water flows down the mountains, through the river valleys and gets accumulated in the cavities in form of lakes"...
A similar concept is used in chaos science but "the water" is not as passive and actually has energy of its own and jumps from basin to unstable high spots until it falls in another basin of stability. The issue is that unstable "mountains" are almost certainly not the source but just corridors, precisely because they are not stable. So I would rather discard the "mountains" as origins of anything because, unlike water, humans don't fall from the sky and also they do have energy of their own.
So they are likely to leave a quite clear signature in their original "basin" or "basins". Also, as we do not have any relevant West Asian aDNA we can only work with modern. Even if we had some and wouldn't be there, it can always be a fluke, so only wide comprehensive ancient samples can ultimately contradict the evidence that modern DNA distribution provides. I cannot come to fully discard what what modern DNA data (which is made of much much better samples almost invariably, eliminating the risk of flukes) just because of one or two aDNA samples. These can be complementary but hardly an absolute contrary evidence to what modern data says. They should be combined rather than presented as one denying the other.
"But ancient DNA evidence strongly suggests that Z93 wasn't from West or South Asia"...
Not at all. We don't have any single instance of West or South Asian ancient Y-DNA. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
AFAIK nobody has bothered creating a haplotype network integrating both modern and ancient samples of this lineage. Until that happens, I contend that the Sintashta Z93 is most likely of the same type as modern Samara oblast Z93: terminal branches. It's just Occam's Razor at work.
All the rest you add is just speculation based on nothing that I can discern as meaningful, sorry.
To be more precise: in real life the water actually "falls" from the basins. When it gathers energy (heat), it evaporates and climbs to unstable "mountains" (clouds) until it falls. Water also follows the same general principle of originating in the basins before energy-induced transport via high points of instability.
'Quite apparently there is a variability (mostly defined by WHG admixture) in the Neo-European (pre-IE) substrate'
Referring to the same graph, the extreme location of Sweden_MN on it, having 'component 1' already within PIE values, gives some confirmation that Spain_EN is more likely to have been influenced at an early stage by another type of 'WHG' (if you could call it thus) than LBK_EN. While LBK must have been admixed up to a non-trivial 80% WHG, it doesn't show by far the same shift on 'component 1' as Spain_EN. Since Spain_EN probably wasn't much more WHG-hybrid than LBK_EN, Early Neolithic Spain must have been already within the hemisphere of an ancestral or proto-TRB population, that by then did NOT include Central Europe. At least the LBK hybrids seem to imply that continental WHG was low on this same 'component 1.' Maybe Meolithic-Iberian La Braña had it, otherwise - IMO most likely - it should have been due to an early Atlantic extension of a northern population. Similar to Swifterbant?
In regard to the massacre of Asparn/Schletz, this PDF may be of interest.
(What struck me is the complex trench system created around the settlement + gate-constructions, as if they knew that something was coming their way.)
PDF-Link
http://www.inrap.fr/userdata/c_bloc_file/15/15763/15763_fichier_Teschler-Nicola.pdf
Traces of violence in the earliest European societies: the example of Asparn/Schletz in Lower Austria (5,000 BC) Maria Teschler-Nicola Department of Anthropology Natural History Museum Vienna.
Conclusion
•Demographic analysis presents the pattern of a complete population that
has been extinguished. Furthermore, the age and sex distribution reveals a
lack of young females, interpreted as due to abduction by aggressors.
•All observed skull remains exhibit peri-mortal injuries; thus the inhabitants
of the Asparn/Schletz settlement became most likely victims of a violent
attack, a scenario, which is most probably responsible for the final demise of
this settlement (there is no archaeological evidence so far which may
indicate a continuity in using this residential area).
•The incompleteness of the skeletal remains is based on carnivore
scavenging. We conclude therefore that there were no survivors who could
have buried the dead.
Up to now it is unclear, which population dynamic processes or cultural and
societal changes are responsible for the massacre of Asparn/Schletz. But
we have some evidence that the people at the end phase of the LP and the
middle Neolithic were less adequately supplied than the earlier farmers.
That would point to a shortness of economic resources.
@Rokus: what you say about the Spanish Neolithic sample (and even more for the Chalcolithic, aka "MN" one) is quite plausible. Sadly this crucial aspect of the European populations' genesis has not been much studied and has often been overshadowed by hammering insistence on the ANE/Kurgan influence, which is of course interesting and important but not the only thing going on here. The distortion of the PC dimensions is very symptomatic of this tendency to exaggerate one axis of admixture and minimize the other.
"While LBK must have been admixed up to a non-trivial 80% WHG"...
I don't think so. The EEF reference is Stuttgart, which is an LBK sample, and the general estimate is approx. 50% (Arab-like) West Asian - 50% Paleoeuropean (quasi-WHG, rather something related called "UGH" by Lazaridis). 80% is an excessive figure and, considering they are the baseline reference for EEF, we can equally talk of 0% (relative to that EEF baseline, rather than to West Asia).
"Since Spain_EN probably wasn't much more WHG-hybrid than LBK_EN"
Well, if you look at the original entry by Davidski (which you may have missed but is clearly interesting and relevant), it is clear that the Starcevo-Gokhem (or in general Neo-European axis of diversity, including near the extremes LBK and Spain_MN, Spain_EN is more intermediate), corresponds to the WHG (or SHG?) admixture vector. Basically PC1 is defined by the WHG/SHG tendency, so this is non-trivial, particularly as it's taking up the whole Dimension 1 of European (or West Eurasian) variation, which is at least as important as the EEF-Yamna axis. More so if we focus on their impact on modern populations (Yamna is diluted enough that we can actually talk of "half-Yamna" as the actual influence on Europeans, nobody out of the most remote areas of Eastern Europe is more than ~40% Yamna). There is a whole Atlantic-Mediterranean axis that is being trivialized and corresponds in essence to the Gokhem-Starcevo (or Gokhem/Spain_MN vs LBK, or largely even to MN vs EN) axis of EEF-WHG admixture. Maybe the extra WHG is not "that much" but it is still defining the genetics of modern Europeans more than Yamna is. Of course the modern populations closest to that Gokhem/Spain_MN pole are Basques and Gascons but mainline Western (or NW) Europeans are also in a very similar position, just that more influenced by Yamna-like admixture from the East.
...
...
"Maybe Meolithic-Iberian La Braña had it, otherwise - IMO most likely - it should have been due to an early Atlantic extension of a northern population. Similar to Swifterbant?"
Not sure what you mean by Swifterbant. Anyhow, the problem is that we don't have a valid archaeologically-based explanation for that. In fact what we see in the "Middle Neolithic" (Early and Chalcolithic) is a S→N epansion if anything: Britain was clearly colonized from France in that time, while simultaneously Denmark was also (re-)settled by people bringing Megalithic culture from somewhere in the South and with genetics that resemble Spain_MN and modern Basques.
Recently it was known that Neolithic "North French" carried a "modern" mtDNA pool much like Neolithic "Basques", while we still have the issue of the "hyper-modern" (lots of H, including H1) Neolithic "Portuguese" samples. So my impression is that it is something Atlantic and South-Western (considering as SW: France and Iberia, roughly), rather than Northerner, what was driving these changes. These areas are also the craddle of Megalithism and later Bell Beaker, however the Portuguese centrality (and peculiarity) must be emphasized here, as it is very likely that both cultural phenomena stemmed ultimately from Portugal. That does not make ancient Portuguese the ones actually settling the NW (or only them) but is still something that cannot be ignored.
In general terms I advocate a W-E approach rather than a N-S one, which only becomes clear when we move eastwards in the geography (much more marked in East Europe vs West Asia than in NW Europe vs Iberia).
Rokus,
The reason Sweden_MN is higher up the plot than the other Neolithic samples is because it has more WHG.
'The reason Sweden_MN is higher up the plot than the other Neolithic samples is because it has more WHG.'
This may be verified by La Braña: Was 'component 1' also available at high levels here? Then we know for sure that Spain_NE had its MN-levels of component 1 from WHG of an Iberian Mesolithic population. Otherwise there must have been internal structure in European HG populations beyond ANE.
One ever greater mystery to me is why Yamnaya should have an eastern Neolithic component, if according to another quote 'EEF is basically identical to everything that stretches near the South Caucasus region.' I would say that Sweden_MN would be much more credible as a Neolithic mixed-base component if this was indeed the case.
There's not much structure within WHG, even when comparing the samples from Iberia and Hungary.
There also isn't much structure within Neolithic farmers. But it seems that the Spanish EN and Western & Central European MN farmers are more western shifted than LBK. This is possibly due to drift in the west, and then perhaps an expansion from there to Central Europe during the Middle Neolithic, which may have in large part replaced the LBK population.
The Near Eastern-related admixture in Yamnaya and almost all post-Neolithic Europeans is still a mystery, but it does appear to be very different from Western and Central European Neolithic ancestry, and might be from an as yet unsampled population from the North Caucasus, which had a high level of ANE.
@David: "But it seems that the Spanish EN and Western & Central European MN farmers are more western shifted than LBK. This is possibly due to drift in the west, and then perhaps an expansion from there to Central Europe during the Middle Neolithic, which may have in large part replaced the LBK population".
Yes! Now you got it. :)
@ David
"The Near Eastern-related admixture in Yamnaya and almost all post-Neolithic Europeans is still a mystery, but it does appear to be very different from Western and Central European Neolithic ancestry, and might be from an as yet unsampled population from the North Caucasus, which had a high level of ANE."
I really doubt that any pre-Chalcolithic (pre-Majkop) group in the north caucasus would be any different to other EHGs. They'd have the same mesolithic background. Quite literally, the start of Majkop was like something out of nothing.
Post a Comment