Some myths die hard

Ancient DNA tells us that the Bronze Age wasn't kind to the indigenous populations of Central Asia. It seems to have wiped them out totally. Indeed, Central Asia might well be the only major world region in which native hunter-gatherers failed to make a perceptible impact on the genetics of any extant populations.

Before the Neolithic transition, much of Central Asia was home to hunter-gatherers closely related to those of nearby western Siberia. During the Neolithic, agriculturalists and pastoralists from the Near East gradually moved into the more arable parts of southern and eastern Central Asia, eventually giving rise to the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex, or BMAC, and other similar communities.

It's not clear what their relationship was like with the native hunter-gatherers in these areas. But they did mix with them in varying degrees. This is obvious because genome-wide genetic ancestry characteristic of the Botai people, who hunted and eventually domesticated horses on the Kazakh steppe during the 4th millennium BCE, and were probably the archetypal Central Asians for their time, is found at significant levels in a number of later samples from Central Asian farmer and pastoralist sites, such as Dali, Gonur Tepe and Sarazm.

Thus, even though the Neolithic transition did have a big impact on Central Asia, and clearly led to large scale population replacements in some parts of the region, this was just the beginning of these population shifts. Moreover, in some cases the expanding farmer and pastoralist populations seem to have acquired significant indigenous Central Asian ancestry and spread it with them.

The precise geographic extent of the relatively unique Botai-related ancestry in prehistoric Eurasia is still something of a mystery. But to give you a general picture of where it was found from around 6,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE, here's a map with info about samples with significant levels of this type of ancestry from a wide range of sites in space and time.

Going by this map, I'd say it's safe to infer that the Botai-related ancestry was a major feature of practically all forager populations living between the Caspian Sea and the Altai Mountains. It was also present in the Early Bronze Age (EBA) pastoralist population associated with the Steppe Maykop archeological culture of Eastern Europe, so it may have already been in Europe as early as 3,800 BCE, because that's when the Steppe Maykop culture first appeared.

It's an interesting question where the ancestors of the Steppe Maykop herders came from. I once simply assumed that they were closely related to the Maykop people who lived in the Caucasus Mountains. But it's now clear that the populations associated with these two similar cultures were starkly different, with the Maykop people being basically of Near Eastern origin and lacking any discernible Botai-like ancestry. My guess for now is that the Steppe Maykop herders were in large part the descendants of the Kelteminar culture population from just east of the Caspian Sea, but we'll see about that when more ancient DNA comes in.

The other great mystery is what eventually happened to the Steppe Maykop people. Around 3,000 BCE, their culture vanished from the archeological record and their particular genetic signature disappeared from the steppe ancient DNA record. Where did they go? Did they migrate back east?

I don't know, but at about that time other Eastern European steppe herders, those associated with the Yamnaya and Corded Ware archeological cultures, began to stir and migrate in big numbers in basically all directions, including into Steppe Maykop territory. Indeed, unlike the Steppe Maykop population, these groups weren't closely related to any contemporaneous or earlier Central Asians. But they ended up moving into Central Asia, and in a big way too.

Their impact all the way from the Ural Mountains to what are now China and India was profound. For instance, not only did they end up totally replacing the Botai people, but also their horses. For more details on this topic check out the Youtube clip here. I have a strong suspicion that the same sort of thing happened to the aforementioned Steppe Maykop people. In other words, they may have been forced out from the Eastern European steppe, and perhaps sought shelter in the Caucasus Mountains?

Admittedly, I'm not offering anything new here. I just wanted to emphasize a few key points, because I'm still seeing some confusion online about the population history of Central Asia, and especially how it relates to the population history of Europe, and also the Proto-Indo-European homeland question. Make no mistake, thanks to the ancient DNA already available from Central Asia, we can confidently infer the following:

- the chance that the ancient European populations associated with the Yamnaya, Corded Ware and other closely related archeological cultures formed as a result of migrations from Central Asia is zero

- the chance that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was located in Central Asia is zero

- the chance that present-day Europeans, by and large, derive from any ancient Central Asian populations is zero

See also...

Central Asia as the PIE urheimat? Forget it

The Steppe Maykop enigma

Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...