Tuesday, May 7, 2019
The execution
Around 2,800 BCE, in what is now southern Poland, a family group of fifteen individuals associated with the Globular Amphora culture (GAC) were massacred. They were probably captured and executed, because each victim was killed with a blow to the head from the same type of weapon, possibly a stone axe, and lacked defensive wounds. The dead were mostly women and children. They were buried in a mass grave, but with great care and very likely by someone who knew them well.
This Late Neolithic mass grave is the focus of a new ancient DNA and archeological research paper at PNAS by Schroeder et al. (see here). The authors tentatively attribute the massacre to the Corded Ware culture (CWC) people, who were expanding rapidly at the time across much of Europe from their homeland on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.
The CWC people may or may not have been responsible; we'll never know for sure. The perpetrators could just as easily have been a competing GAC family group.
In any case, it's interesting to see that the GAC males belong to Y-chromosome haplogroup I2a-L801. This is today a rather uncommon subclade of I2, and almost exclusively found in Germanic-speaking populations, especially Scandinavians. To me this suggests that some Polish GAC males were incorporated into Indo-European-speaking CWC populations that ended up in Scandinavia, and their paternal lineages eventually became a part of the Proto-Germanic gene pool. Admittedly, though, that's just one of many possible scenarios.
See also...
Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...
Corded Ware people =/= Proto-Uralics (Tambets et al. 2018)
Inferring the linguistic affinity of long dead and non-literate peoples: a multidisciplinary approach
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249 comments:
1 – 200 of 249 Newer› Newest»David interesting! TRB and GAC are connected and GAC is IMO just a later phase of TRB. See B all mixtures of HG and Anatolian Farmer. Have you analyzed the TRB Sorsum sample yet? Would be interesting.....
(Is R1a, starts humming Billy Joel's "An Innocent Man"). I know it's too early for R1a-M458, but I'd like to finally have some ancient samples of it. I think they found a ton of it in the Tollense Valley battle site, but they won't publish it because German nationalists would freak out that the indigenous people of their land were ancestral to the Slavs.
Perhaps the men left during a conflict, only to return and find their families dead?
If the perpetrators were CWC, it would be interesting that they killed the women instead if assimilating them.
"To me this suggests that some Polish GAC males were incorporated into Indo-European-speaking CWC populations that ended up in Scandinavia, and their paternal lineages eventually became a part of the Proto-Germanic gene pool. Admittedly, though, that's just one of many possible scenarios."
An alternative scnearia is that I2 is an old HG line and was already there in Ertebolle and Funnelbeaker and GAC times.
From 2900 BC and beyond the CW pastoralist came in. This eventually has lead to a mixture with the Neolithic population. But not at once. See the difference in HG level between CW/BB in North Europe and
nowadays!
So I2 was not brought in by a CW/GAC mix but was already there....
If it was an act of Corded Ware then it could point to Corded Ware not being able to keep or invest time in Slave Keeping. Slaves need exstra resources to maintain...and extermination of young women could also point to Corded Ware Resources being stretched to their limits...?
Mittnik ea
The Genetic History of Northern Europe
“The two male Narva individuals carry Y-chromosomal haplogroups of the I2a1 clade) and Y-haplogroup I has been most commonly found among WHG and SHG.”
“This impact is also reflected in the uniparental markers where we see novel mitochondrial haplogroups (I, J, T2, W), not found in the preceding foragers, in half of our samples (Extended Data Figure 5), and I2a Y-chomosomal haplogroups replaced by R1a types.”
What is also interesting is the Brown, Hair, Skin and Eyes of this GAC family...
The raiders might have been out for a cruel vendetta with no mercy, or they might have been vulnerable and had not much time.
For example a small raiding party, or a defeated army on its retreat.
If they were followed by GAC warriors, to which the local males belonged , they had not much time and couldnt take prisoners, but inflict as much damage as possible.
If they were more mobile, they could do so and ruin the enemies base even without winning every battle.
@Ric
are you commenting on the artistic recreation or the phenotype data?
Village raid timed when you know the men are away (hunting or whatever) was a classic tactic in North America.
This is a summary of the relationship between the victims. There were three family groups.
Family 1: Indi8 (Mom), Indi9 (teenage daughter), Indi13 (young son), Indi7 (Baby boy cousin).
Family 2: Indi12 (Mom), Indi6 (teenage daughter), Indi4 (teenage son).
Family 3: Indi14 (Mom), Indi5 (adult son), Indi15 (adult son).
Family 3a: Indi10 (adult brother), Indi11 (adult brother). Half brothers of indi5, 15. They have same Dad.
Family 3b: Indi5 (Dad), Indi1 (Mom), Indi2 (Infant son).
These are clearly matrilineal family groups. The mom of each family is represented. The kids in two families are exclusively non-adults. Where are the dads? For, very intentional reasons the fathers of these families were not buried in this grave. Either they were killed in a raid or they escaped.
They also sequenced DNA from three other Globular Amphora burials...
grave 8; sk 3 J1c4 I2a2a-L801 GAC-Sandomierz n/a
grave 3ZC; ind 7 J1c3f - Złota-Ksiaznice fetus (30 weeks)
grave 3ZC; ind 4 K1a+195 - Złota-Ksiaznice adultus/maturus
grave 3ZC; ind 3 H5a1 - Złota-Ksiaznice infans I (1-2)
grave 3ZC; ind 2 H5a1 - Złota-Ksiaznice adultus/maturus
grave 3ZC; ind 1 J1c3f - Złota-Ksiaznice adultus
grave 2 U5b2 I2a2a-L801 GAC-Sandomierz n/a
grave 3 H I2a2a-L801 GAC-Mierzanowice adultus
grave 10; sk 3 U5b I2a2a-L801 Złota-Wilczyce 10-11
In the second Zlota burial, most people are also women & children.
On second thought the scenario of Davidski:
"This is today a rather uncommon subclade of I2, and almost exclusively found in Germanic-speaking populations, especially from Scandinavia. To me this suggests that some Polish GAC males were incorporated into Indo-European-speaking CWC populations that ended up in Scandinavia, and their paternal lineages eventually became a part of the Proto-Germanic gene pool."
Is not very likely. At about 2900-2800 BC the CW-Pastoralist didn't stop in Polen, mixed a few generations and then went on to the rest of the Northern Plain and Scandinavia.
I guess the CW scattered between 2900-2800 BC through the whole Northern Plain and Scandinavia. And met the GAC and TRB. This Poland example shows this went together with hostilities. But of course in the end they blended (with a quite dominant CW layer.....).
They had a pale skin. But they did look like a modern White population
@ Romulus
That is basically what is said in the Paper...So phenotype data.
Wasn’t it quite common amongst early Neolithic LBK/TRB Culture?
https://www.livescience.com/63009-neolithic-mass-grave-violence.html
@Sam @weure this is far from unusual or extraordinary https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/08/archaeologists-uncover-neolithic-massacre-early-europe
Ric Hern said...
"...not being able to keep or invest time in Slave Keeping..."
yeah, Romans could harvest vast numbers of slaves because they had mines, plantations (latifundia), galleys etc to fill but less sophisticated societies probably only had room for a very few captives/slaves if any.
The violent deaths from head trauma are similar to the Eulau burials, except those belonged to R1a.
@Andrzejewski of course I don't deny that, but I guess CW didn't get on hold on Poland, blended and went on....
What we see here in Poland could have been more often the case in whole Northern Europe, incoming CW pastoralist conflicting with TRB/GAC people.
Keep in mind that TRB and GAC are a mixture of I2/HG and Neolithic Farmers.
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/04/30/1820210116
“To further investigate the ancestry of the Globular Amphora individuals, we performed a supervised ADMIXTURE (6) analysis, specifying typical western European hunter-gatherers (Loschbour), early Neolithic Anatolian farmers (Barcın), and early Bronze Age steppe populations (Yamnaya) as ancestral source populations (Fig. 2B). The results indicate that the Globular Amphora/Złota group individuals harbor ca. 30% western hunter-gatherer and 70% Neolithic farmer ancestry, but lack steppe ancestry. To formally test different admixture models and estimate mixture proportions, we then used qpAdm (7) and find that the Polish Globular Amphora/Złota group individuals can be modeled as a mix of western European hunter-gatherer (17%) and Anatolian Neolithic farmer (83%) ancestry”
So how much Farmer v. Forager ancestry was recorded? 83%:17% or 70%:30%?
The men may have been on the fields when the raid came. That would indicate a very short and fierce hit and run raid.
My point is that the massacres betweeen LBK groups are much older, going back all the way to 5,000 BCE. It might be that GAC had the same interfamily conflict like their LBK predecessors, maybe even continuing the practice of killing off the competition
@weure
Still, both in Poland and in the Netherlands we see signs neolithic continuity. The TRB graveyard from Dalfsen, the largest of the Netherlands, was almost entirely contemporaneous to Protruding Foot Beaker culture.
@Andrej, point taken point clear.
But the departure point si the scenario of Davidski, I2 went with a CW/GAC from Poland to Scandinavia/North German Plain.
For more reasons not likely:
1. I2 was already a SHG/WHG haplotype, also part of the TRB blend.
2.No reason why CW blended first with GAC Poland and then went into Scandinavia/North German Plain, the hostility doesn't point at a 'fast' blend....keep in mind that at the same time of the massacre CW was already in the Netherlands!
So most likely scenario:
CW blended in the end with neolithic TRB population in Scandinavia and on the North German Plain. The I2 part came from the TRB. No reason to see it otherwise....you see one?
@epoch indeed coexistence not a blend, we don't now when the populations CW/TRB blended, may be for generations they lived besides each other.....more often in a kind of hostility? We simply don't know. Only that in the end the CW genes make about half of modern NW Euro and Scandic genes....so we only know the outcome, how this proces went on is still full of mysteries.....But it's not likely that the TRB genes evaporated complete....(when this was the case the modern NW genetic profile would be more like a Baltic one, and that's not the case).
Luckily, these savages did not arrive in southern Europe. These Polish farmers seem to have inherited in part the dark color of the WHG, as the rest of Europeans
What dark colors?! These people had light skin and looked indistinguishable from modern European populations.
To me it looked like an inter-Neolithic massacre:
7,000 years ago the expanding LBK had a population explosion so they raided neighboring villages. And 5,000 years ago their descendants, the GAC had a plague and a climate change so the survivors fought with other families over resources
The care taken to arrange the dead suggests to me some sort of sacrifice/ritual murder or maybe a clan conflict of some kind. Genocidal CWC raiders wouldn't have painstakingly buried them with grave goods.
@Andrej can't be complete excluded but exactly at this time CW expanded, there are no indices of a kind of neolithic clash.
@Andrzejewski
"What dark colors?!"
WHG samples have been reported many times previously as having dark skin.
"These people had light skin and looked indistinguishable from modern European populations."
No, according to the paper the GAC folks sampled "had mostly brown eyes, dark or dark-blonde hair, and intermediate to dark skin".
Of course GAC groups probably varied in appearance, but ancient fair hair and skin sure is elusive, isn't it?
What is also interesting is the Brown, Hair, Skin and Eyes of this GAC family...
That shouldn't be surprising, given that their EEF ancestry is about the same as that of the Sardinians, at 75 or so percent. Have you ever been to Sardinia? People are not overly pale, blond and blue-eyed in Sardinia either.
@Bob Floy,
"The care taken to arrange the dead suggests to me some sort of sacrifice/ritual murder or maybe a clan conflict of some kind. Genocidal CWC raiders wouldn't have painstakingly buried them with grave goods."
The killing is hard to explain. It Doesn't look like religious human sacrifice. But it also doesn't look like war. Why were these families killed?
-Tied up, Executed entire families along matrilineal lines. (Mom & her kids).
-Didn't bury the husbands/fathers but probably killed them as well.
-Buried the victims with grave goods.
@Desdichado
"Have you ever been to Sardinia? People are not overly pale, blond and blue-eyed in Sardinia either."
No, but GAC and other WHG-heavy eastern farmer groups have been proposed as the source of fair hair/fair skin(apparently lacking in Yamnaya) in modern northern Europeans, so this could be seen as a little surprising.
@Sam, I had to think for a sec about what you're saying, and I think the proper term is that these are nuclear family groups. We can't really call them matrilineal unless it is an extended family connected by the matriline - as is these are nuclear groups which are probably united by a father and a mother. These are nuclear families within a patrilineal society.
But you are right to observe that it is interesting that they would bury them them this way, rather than something like place all the females together regardless of nuclear family connection. It shows that, at least in this context (and perhaps due to this violent context), it was important to these people (perhaps the men who buried them, perhaps also female survivors if there were any) to keep the women and their children together.
@capra, yep. (It's probably drawing too much to suggest that this was necessarily the work of Corded Ware, but if so, perhaps has more to do with restricted male patrilineages imprints than ideas of men *very*, very commonly taking women? If neolithic people's settlements are based around patrilineages and an incoming group kill all the women and children in a sneak attack, something a very mobile horse using pastoralist groups would be well placed to do, the community will die and the patrilineage with it.)
@ Andrzejewski
You didn't read the paper...
@Desdichado,
The first six Globular Amphora samples were all blonde/blue eyed. They looked like a plausible source for fair complexion in Sintashta & Corded Ware Germany/Poland & Bell Beaker. So, it is surprising to see all these new samples have typical EEF Mediterranean complexion.
@ Samuel
I wonder if this was due to some Baden Culture influence ?
@Sam
I'm not sure that we necessarily know what a neolithic European religious sacrifice would have looked like, so we can't rule it out. The brutal murder of these people coupled with the careful deposit of grave goods to me suggests that, but admittedly I'm spitballing. The circumstances of this killing are odd, and occurred in a pre-literate society whose religious habits we know almost nothing about, so we should be thinking outside the box here. It's too often forgotten that these ancient cultures we're constantly talking about were very religious, probably most of them were effectively theocracies. What I'm almost certain of is that this wasn't any kind of genocidal raid. A bunch of murderous foreign invaders aren't going to slaughter an entire family and then ritualistically bury them with goods they could have kept for themselves.
@Sam quote from a previous Eurogenes posting:
"SHG is inferred to have had fair skin and varied blue to light-brown eye color, which makes sense considering that it was a mixture of apparently fair-skinned/brown-eyed EHG and dark-skinned/blue-eyed WHG."
So fare the HG's had all kind of variety, And HG combined with Neolithic Farmer (=GAC)? Could be a broad range including: "mostly brown eyes, dark or dark-blonde hair, and intermediate to dark skin".
Never mind the skin color: Their physical appearance looked almost indistinguishable from modern White people: skull shapes et al.
@desdichado said "That shouldn't be surprising, given that their EEF ancestry is about the same as that of the Sardinians, at 75 or so percent. Have you ever been to Sardinia? People are not overly pale, blond and blue-eyed in Sardinia either"
Some (not all) of the WHG were dark-skinned and blue-eyed, meaning all Europeans (including Poles and Sardinians) have inherited part of those genes to a greater or lesser extent. I do not think there's anything to be ashamed of in that. Regarding the EEF, most were skin white and even some had blue eyes.
World Population-8% blue-eyed
Estonia-89%
United States-16%
Italy
Toscana 31,5%
Lazio 26,2%
Calabria 19,6%
Sicilia 23,7%
Sardinia 13,9%
Spain
Basque country-20%
Galicia-35%
Regarding the published paper, it was obviously an execution, no arches or daggers were used but stone axes, with which the best candidates are the men of the CWC. The death of the children was obviously intended to exterminate the families. I do not understand very well how those GAC men, could join the CWC as you are saying, if I were them and had survived I would only try to avenge myself.
If GAC were dark and Yamnaya was regarded as medium to dark skin, then where did the light skin attributes arrive in CW populations all the way to most modern Polish ones?
I clearly remember Davidski telling us in a previous recent post that genetic drift and other unknown factors may contribute a lot to physical appearance and that we shouldn’t just attempt to analyze the major population components (WHG, EEF, CHG and EHG) in order to figure out how peopke belonging to ancient populations looked. I guess I was wrong...
I remember also that commentators here said that ALL GAC samples so far turned out to be blonde.
Unless the Nordicists were right all along, and it was Kurgan Steppe groups who were blond hair blue eyes fair skin...
Do these massacres have anything to do with THESE massacres like the Talheim one 2,000 year before? Was that a Neolithic tradition?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talheim_Death_Pit
@ Sam said...."The first six Globular Amphora samples were all blonde/blue eyed. They looked like a plausible source for fair complexion in Sintashta & Corded Ware Germany/Poland & Bell Beaker. So, it is surprising to see all these new samples have typical EEF Mediterranean complexion.
It seems to me a miracle that the GAC (3,400-2,700 BC) has inherited the blond hair and blue eyes of the Sintashta culture (Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia-Bronze age-2,100-1,800 BC), the BBeaker culture (2,750-2,000 BC) or the CWC (2,900-2,300 BC). In addition the CWC apparently did not mix with those Polish farmers, they simply exterminated them
You have no idea what the typical EEF Mediterranean complexion was, among other things because you should know that the EEF complexion was common to all of Europe and its uniparental markers identical in all regions
@Bob Floy,
"I'm not sure that we necessarily know what a neolithic European religious sacrifice would have looked like, so we can't rule it out. The brutal murder of these people coupled with the careful deposit of grave goods to me suggests that, but admittedly I'm spitballing."
Fair enough.
@Andrzejewski
"If GAC were dark and Yamnaya was regarded as medium to dark skin, then where did the light skin attributes arrive in CW populations all the way to most modern Polish ones?"
Like Sam said, about half a dozen GAC individuals did have the fair hair/skin blue eyes, etc., but it dosen't look like it was very common, so it's interesting. It's almost as if the traits of a very small group were heavily selected for and became the standard.
Or...the Nordicists were right all along, and it was the Steppe Kurganite bands who introduced blond hair and fair skin along with R1 and IE speech to the rest of Europe
Fair Haired and Light Eyed kinda screams Baltic Region to me....
@Andrej the most important thing looks to me that TRB and GAC people like this one in the massacre were an EEF/HG blend. Per region the blend could be different 70% EEF and 30% HG (other model 83% EEF and 17% HG) her in this Poland example up to EEF 50% and HG 50% in Sorsum TRB. the I2 is mort probably a HG haplo.
CW-pastoralist rushed in about 2900-2800 BC, and in the end (much later) we got in NW Europe/Scandinavia about 50% CW the rest is TRB/GAC heritage (short version ;)))
Or not, since none of the steppe samples show any indication of having blonde hair, fair skin, etc., but a handful of GAC samples do. This is complicated, you aren't going to find any easy answers here.
But Baltic region was mostly HG + later Kurganites. According to some papers it was the EEF who introduced fair skin to Europe from...Anatolia...
WHG some Blue Eyes and Afontova Gora some Light Hair. So basically WHG/EHG mix most probably near the Baltic or Between the Baltic and Urals along the Forest Steppe region...
Most Baltic HG's were light skinned only few were predicted to have medium complexion, absolute majority were also blue eyed individuals also one was blond haired, but most had black to brown/dark brown hair. With no EEF or Steppe ancestry if we're going by genetikers table.
The Light Hair and Eyes among the Later Corded Ware descendant groups who migrated Eastwards along the Forest Steppe maybe point towards the Baltic area...
Don't know what you mean with this because clearly Sam basically said that those Globular Amphora samples looked like a plausible SOURCE...
"It seems to me a miracle that the GAC (3,400-2,700 BC) has inherited the blond hair and blue eyes of the Sintashta culture"
"It seems to me a miracle that the GAC (3,400-2,700 BC) has inherited the blond hair and blue eyes of the Sintashta culture"
Ha!
The fact that *all* of the GAC Y chromosomes are I2 should tell us something.
So how come were Yamnaya so “dark” if EHG was light skinned?
CHG had alleles for light skin so it wouldn’t cut it
@ Bob Floy
The Maternal populations had a far greater impact on the physical appearance of groups ?
The fact that Steppe ancestry was reduced from CW 75% to 40%-50% in B.B./Western Europeans indicates some admixture with EEF/WHG. But most NW Euros have light features
Note that I am talking about Hair and Eyes while you are talking about Skin....
"Or...the Nordicists were right all along, and it was the Steppe Kurganite bands who introduced blond hair and fair skin along with R1 and IE speech to the rest of Europe"
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha The first thing that these gentlemen have to learn is that we all have our origin in Africa, including the Poles, the Swedes and the Basques.
The phenotype is also very influenced by the environment. The Baltic countries are where the highest percentage of blue eyes are, and interestingly, it is where the highest percentage of Hg has survived in Europe. The Latvian hunter gatherers R1b-P297 were 30% WHG and 70% EHG. The result of this mixture is obvious, if you join a cold climate that favors a clear skin tone due to the shortage of hours of sunshine, then the result is people with very white skin. There is no mystery about it. The blue eyes of the WHG are not originally linked to other physical features such as blond hair or fair skin, but it is undoubtedly a mutation that has had great reproductive success.
@Bob said "The fact that *all* of the GAC Y chromosomes are I2 should tell us something".
I do not know the antiquity of I2a in Poland, but in Spain it is a lineage linked to the WHG and therefore the dark tonality of the Polish GAC can come from those men and not from the EEF women
@ Davidski
'The CWC people may or may not have been responsible; we'll never know for sure. The perpetrators could just as easily have been a competing GAC family group.''
That's a good point. It could be any inter-tribal or inter-family conflict. Whatever the case, when there incoming groups and in the setting of LN tribal, mobilse societies, potential for conflict is high
But very impressive use of DNA, kinship, etc to bring out scenarios around social conflicts by the authors.
''I2a-L801 ..is today a rather uncommon subcladand almost exclusively found in Germanic-speaking populations, especially from Scandinavia. To me this suggests that some Polish GAC males were incorporated into Indo-European-speaking CWC populations that ended up in Scandinavia, and their paternal lineages eventually became a part of the Proto-Germanic gene pool''
From the handful of Iron Age & early Medieval samples, I2a-801 and similar groups might have been more common in the groups which were around central Europe, eg Lombards, Wielbark culture, etc. - more so that R1a-Z280.
In other words, they did not only end up in Scandinavia, but remained around Poland, Germany, and their current dearth is not due to arrival of CWC; but very recent phenomena
Just some other aspect of the paper which are problematic, which I pointed out on last thread
1) ''“If the general interaction between Globular Amphora people and neighboring, steppe-related cultures (including early Corded Ware) was primarily hostile, it would explain why Globular Amphora individuals carry no steppe ancestry and''
GAC don't have steppe ancestry because they're not from the steppe, but appear to have formed in central- north Poland, as the collaborating archaeologists in the paper have described. The 2 groups aappear to have maintained bounderies, and we might expect only certain individuals to show admixture between the 2, and more as time progresses.
2) ''why Europe experienced such a dramatic reduction in Neolithic genomic ancestry at this time''
That might be the case in northern Europe; but not in southern Europe.
Even in the north, the final result is 50% replacement, which suggests a gradual fusion between groups which have some common cultural forms but might be genetically distinctive (e.g. steppe, MNE). Furthermore, it might not be correct to extrapolate the high steppe admixture in early Central European CWC, or Dutch Beaker individuals, onto all of central Europe.
The problem is that we don't have enough samples and we don't know what kind of sampling bias we've got sure to social conditions affecting who was buried the way that they were. The idea that the Yamnaya were fairly dark even though most of their immediate descendants were not, or that the EEF populations of central Europe were fair even though all existing populations with high EEF ancestry are not should have had people suspecting sampling bias and insufficient sampling. Super fast cosmetic evolution is a much less parsimonious solution than almost any other alternative.
But no: it seems most people were sure that the Yamnaya were dark when though the 75% Yamnaya CWC were fair and blue eyes and blond hair are recessive never made a whole lot of sense.
@ Davidski
'The CWC people may or may not have been responsible; we'll never know for sure. The perpetrators could just as easily have been a competing GAC family group.''
That's a good point. It could be any inter-tribal or inter-family conflict. Whatever the case, when there incoming groups and in the setting of LN tribal, mobilse societies, potential for conflict is high
But very impressive use of DNA, kinship, etc to bring out scenarios around social conflicts by the authors.
''I2a-L801 ..is today a rather uncommon subcladand almost exclusively found in Germanic-speaking populations, especially from Scandinavia. To me this suggests that some Polish GAC males were incorporated into Indo-European-speaking CWC populations that ended up in Scandinavia, and their paternal lineages eventually became a part of the Proto-Germanic gene pool''
From the handful of Iron Age & early Medieval samples, I2a-801 and similar groups might have been more common in the groups which were around central Europe, eg Lombards, Wielbark culture, etc. - more so that R1a-Z280.
In other words, they did not only end up in Scandinavia, but remained around Poland, Germany, and their current dearth is not due to arrival of CWC; but very recent phenomena
Just some other aspect of the paper which are problematic, which I pointed out on last thread
1) ''“If the general interaction between Globular Amphora people and neighboring, steppe-related cultures (including early Corded Ware) was primarily hostile, it would explain why Globular Amphora individuals carry no steppe ancestry and''
GAC don't have steppe ancestry because they're not from the steppe, but appear to have formed in central- north Poland, as the collaborating archaeologists in the paper have described. The 2 groups aappear to have maintained bounderies, and we might expect only certain individuals to show admixture between the 2, and more as time progresses.
2) ''why Europe experienced such a dramatic reduction in Neolithic genomic ancestry at this time''
That might be the case in northern Europe; but not in southern Europe.
Even in the north, the final result is 50% replacement, which suggests a gradual fusion between groups which have some common cultural forms but might be genetically distinctive (e.g. steppe, MNE). Furthermore, it might not be correct to extrapolate the high steppe admixture in early Central European CWC, or Dutch Beaker individuals, onto all of central Europe.
The Danish team seems to be consistently perpetuating this (basic) error.
@Bob Floy
An enemy group killed them, probably while most of the men were away, and then the ones who were away, or relatives in other groups, found the victims and buried them properly. And then probably went and did the same thing to some of the other guys in revenge. There's nothing particularly mysterious or unusual about it.
@Capra
I see. Is there a video up on youtube or something? Gotta link?
@Ric
Also, it's just interesting in general that the EEF paternal lines seem to have been largely replaced in the GAC zone, by WHG lineages.
No Steppe in GAC could mean that GAC Men were not successful with acquiring Steppe Women or simply did not want Steppe Women, or Steppe Women did not want GAC Men. While Steppe Men were less choosy or just more successful or GAC Women were less choosy...Maybe the Culture of the one were more appealing to the other ?
@Bob Floy
If evidence can readily be explained by normal things people do, rather than something bizarre, we should go with the normal things.
@Ric Hern said..."Don't know what you mean with this because clearly Sam basically said that those Globular Amphora samples looked like a plausible SOURCE..."
"It seems to me a miracle that the GAC (3,400-2,700 BC) has inherited the blond hair and blue eyes of the Sintashta culture"
I suppose Sam and you referred to this culture-The Sintashta culture, also known as the Sintashta-Petrovka culture, or Sintashta-Arkaim culture,is a Bronze Age archaeological culture of the northern Eurasian steppe on the borders of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, dated to the period 2100–1800 BCE
Do not you understand that I find funny that someone could think that a culture of the Bronze Age as the Sintashta culture is a plausible source of blond hair... for a neolithic culture hundreds of years older? Does not it seem like a miracle?
It is just as impossible to think that the horses of that culture, have anything to do with the genetic composition of the BB horses, because obviously this culture is older than the first.
Gimbutas claimed GAC practiced suttee. It's also possible (although admittedly not likely) that this is an extremely dramatic example of it.
@Capra
Yeah, or maybe not.
There were five grown men among the victims.
@Desdichado, the Yamnaya probably did have low frequencies of variants related to European light skin pigmentation and light eyes today. Possibly they did still have light skin, eyes, hair, etc. and the models are not accurately capturing that. Going by present day populations means that most EEF pops are going to be living in South Europe and more steppe related in North Europe and this is a big confound to results (likely differential natural selection). If we had some surviving MN European pop in Northern Europe after 4000 years, would be an easier comparison, unfortunately we don't.
@Ric, more likely that Corded Ware men were often migrants beyond the frontier of where their society lived without much choice but the women of GAC or whomever they encountered. Not so much for GAC men. I would guess GAC also outnumbered Corded Ware people, at least initially, so the maths tends to favor CW augmenting pool of mates by picking up GAC than vice versa.
If you are part of a small migrating pool of males without any other choice of females, then selecting some females from the larger population around you makes some good sense perhaps, while if you are a male from a large population which is established and has more females, you are not so likely to bother to seek out females from some small population that has shown up.
As a guage we can determine residual MNE ancestry through Bronze Age Europe (e.g. modelled on GAC -like groups)
Hallstatt_Bylany:DA111
Globular_Amphora 66%
Yamnaya_Samara:I0370 34%
Halberstadt_LBA:I0099
Yamnaya_Samara:I0370 51.5%
Globular_Amphora 48.5%
Croatia_BA
Balkans_N 61.4%
Yamnaya_Samara:I0370 35.2%
WHG 3.4%
The latter is the peak in the SEE.
Cleaerly, Morten has overstated his case :)
I'll help him out
@ Ric
''No Steppe in GAC could mean that GAC Men were not successful with acquiring Steppe Women or simply did not want Steppe Women, or Steppe Women did not want GAC Men. While Steppe Men were less choosy or just more successful or GAC Women were less choosy...Maybe the Culture of the one were more appealing to the other ''
Maybe, but the real reason is - c. 2800 BC CWC was only jsut arrived. We cannot expect panmixia amongst territorial tribal groups.
GAC don;t have steppe admixture because theyre not from the steppe. Just like some early CWC have barely MNE admixture
@Bob Floy
Normal village raid either way.
@Capra
I didn't know that "normal" village raids were accompanied by ritualistic burials. That kind of thing didn't happen much in Bosnia, for example.
Also, in a "normal" village raid, five men of fighting age will put up a fight. These people look like they were executed.
@Capra, you beat me to the punch, I assumed exactly the same thing (women and kids killed by enemy round, found and buried by the men who loved them). I'm going to try not to think about this anymore, because...brutal.
@Capra,
"Yeah, or maybe not.
There were five grown men among the victims."
There were two adult men. The others were teenage boys buried near their moms so....
@Sam
"There were two adult men. The others were teenage boys buried near their moms so...."
And you don't think that a 17 year old male is going to fight if his home is attacked?
@Bob, from the paper:
"Neolithic cases of intergroup violence appear to fall into one of two categories, either targeting whole communities (11, 20) or aimed specifically at males from competing groups (21)....Although alternative scenarios (e.g., ritualistic violence or familicide) cannot be ruled out, it seems most plausible that the massacre at Koszyce falls in the former category. The fact that most adult males of the group are missing from the grave most likely reflects that they were away (or fled) when the raid occurred, leaving the remaining group vulnerable."
They may have been surprised by a large, well armed group of men, quickly rounded up, and executed one by one.
Re; absence of parry fractures, it's not like they couldn't kill the males with spears or arrows (perhaps little blunt trauma to bone), then finish everyone off with stone axes. Maybe they made them submit because they were outnumbered and then put them to death. It is hard to knows much about the precise scenario, and it's hardly unimaginable that a raid could take place without much in the way of detectable parry fractures among the male dead.
@Taymas
Yeah, I read the paper, and still think that different scenarios are worth considering. Also, the authors and a lot of the commentators here seem to be looking at this through modern goggles. Half of the soldiers in the Revolutionary war were 16 or 17, I'm sure that in the neolithic period a male of that age would have been used to fighting, and was probably not unfamiliar with weapons.
@Taymas
Yeah, honestly I kind of regret having read up on primitive warfare.
The character of the described injuries appear consistent with the epnoymous battle axe which, however, was around even before CWC (e.g. TRB, GAC).
Klochko has suggested that male groups of around 25 were operational units, in their journeys and deeds.
@ Gaska
Clearly you did not understand what Sam wrote. He did not say Sintashta was the Source, he said GAC was the Source. Source usually Means Original Ancestor from which other Descended in this context. So how you got to the conclusion that Sam said GAC "INHERITED" Sintashta features is beyond me....Go read what he wrote again.
The slight EHG / Yamnaya related ancestry in Książnice (Złota) is interesting... they suggest either are viable as ancestry sources (https://imgur.com/a/luD4wbN). Złota could be a group with some SHG-ish / Ukraine HG-ish ancestry rather than Yamnaya/EHG?
@Andre: "Do these massacres have anything to do with THESE massacres like the Talheim one 2,000 year before? Was that a Neolithic tradition?"
That's no special tradition, that's just warfare. Your people fighting the other people to the death. If you want or need more young, fertile women, you take them, if you don't, or can't take them with you, you kill them all. Those which are able to defend their base, consisting of THEIR women and children, later lifestock and other resources, prevail and can expand.
You have similar finds in Precolumbian America and whereever you have enough data points.
GAC is interesting because they were like the steppe people in a lot of ways. They were patriarchal, patrilocal pastoralists and warriors. They were the stronghold which kept the steppe warbands from moving further into Central, Northern and Western Europe. When the defense of GAC collapsed, the CW warbands flooded Europe North of the Alps. It might be just a coincidence that this massacre happened when these major events took place, but I doubt it.
The GAC were no easy target, they were able to put up a resistance and most likely they themselves might have expanded into the forest steppe and attacking CW groups as well until they were overwhelmed.
Clearly most males fit for action were on the move when the killings happened, probably they tried to intercept the raiders and were defeated or unable to catch them. Something like that happens quite often. You form an army, move out to catch the invaders, no defenders at home, so even small units of raiders can massacre what is left of the village. The invaders didn't conquer the area, didn't secure it for themselves, because otherwise it would have been impossible that their relatives gave them such a good funeral. So the attackers moved on, probably because they were the weaker force and had to run.
This was clearly an execution by a hostile group, but whether they were CW warriors or some internal fights in the GAC spectrum is not for certain. In the case of Eulau the women killed and the weapons used gave hints.
The women seem to have been from another Neolithic culture group, so were the weapons. So relatives of the robbed or traded women killed the village population in a similar situation, probably because of a vendetta.
Now in this case from Poland archaeologists and forensic scientists should work out which weapons were used to kill the villagers. Probably it was a specific tool, a special axe used only by GAC or CWC?
As for the mobility of the raiders, horses would have given CWC a big advantage. Even if they lost battles, they could flee. Hit and run tactics would have been easier. But is there any actual proof for CW warriors using horses in fights and GAC not at this time and in this region?
And yes, HG males seem to have overtaken the Neolithic societies long before CWC and they preferred the transition to pastoralism, which was better suited for Northern Europe then.
Does anyone have data for height and stature of the GAC males? Were they significantly shorter and more delicate in comparison to steppe males?
It is obvious that there were significant differences for HG males vs early Neolithic males, and for later Neolithic vs steppe males, but I'm not so sure about GAC in particular and haven't seen any data for this population, especially for the time when they were overrun by CWC.
@Ric-
My mistake, obviously you're right. I hope you understand that English is not my native language. In any case, to think that GAC is the source for the color of hair and eyes in the Sintashta culture, the CWC and the BB culture does not make much sense either, especially after reading the paper
@Matt Ukraine HG —> Stredny Stog II + Yamnaya
No problem, my first language is also not English and sometimes I also rush in to fast. Heheheeh. Yes this paper says this but other GAC samples elsewhere previously tested shows another story. So it is basically clear that GAC people differed in physical features depending on location.
@Gaska
"In any case, to think that GAC is the source for the color of hair and eyes in the Sintashta culture, the CWC and the BB culture does not make much sense either, especially after reading the paper"
It does if you consider that other GAC communities apparently had blonde hair and blue eyes.
It is easy to immobilize a family. We see it happen here by us. Usually the children or women are held at blades end and the rest of the family complies to demands in the hope that the childrens or womens throats will not be slit....
This scenario reminds me more of a robbery where the criminals exterminate all eye witnesses. Or pure Hate Crime.
In desperate times things can escalate very quickly, and very basic animal instincts kick in.
That's why it's just as likely that this was done by another GAC group as it is that it was done by CWC newcomers.
So it might be useful to work out if these were indeed desperate and stressful times, with resulting conflict and competition between rival GAC groups, or, alternatively, if the GAC groups were living in a land of plenty and CWC pushed in to try and take a slice, resulting in a state of war between the two ethnic groups.
@ Davidski
Yes, if towns grew more rapidly during this time it could be due to migrants from more isolated areas seeking safety in numbers. Then it could have been psychological warfare to attain land....
I wasn't aware there were any towns in Neolithic Poland (?)
This is what I think happened: EHG and CHG were both ANE-descended so they had alleles for light skin and blond hair. In addition, Yamnaya and Sredny Stog has lots of Ukraine HG in them which I assume were similar to Baltic HG groups. So they were expanding from the Steppe and assimilating EEF and WHG bands in the process. WHG were relatively dark skinned and EEF had lots of Levant_N ancestry from the ME so they had a swarthy complexion. Case in point; the pre-BB Stonehenge builder Neilithics of England.
So either it was the ANE part in Yamnaya or natural selection processes such as lactose tolerance made Steppe groups look like modern Scandinavians and it shows in the fact that some Scythians, Andronovo, Tarim Basin Mummies, East Slavs and ancient Germanic all had blond hair blue eyes and fair skin.
@ EurDNA
I'm not an expert on this, but what I found is mention of a fortified settlement within the Lublin-Volhynian Culture dated to around 2800 BCE. ? Apparently some other settlements also existed....
@ EurDNA
Yes maybe the wording was wrong. Settlements insted of Towns ?
@ Ric
Some form of greater agglomeration existed during the Lublin-Volhyn culture in southern Poland, which was a typical EEF cutlure, but that was already gone by the time CWC arrived. I even suspect GAC might have even contributed to the decline of Cucuteni-Triplje groups. GAC had some settlements and homesteads, nothing very large, however. They were probably competing with CWC for pasture lands & trade routes, and CWC got the upper hand for the most part.
@zardos the TRB people were about 1.65 meter.
My discussion with the Vlah user:
Vlah:
I show quite a similarity to RISE1168 (Globular Amphora Culture). Three common segments, the longest 5.2 cM. Interestingly, the sample is from Małopolska and I also come from Małopolska ...
I also have a matche with:
- EH4045933 the same spherical amphorae culture, only from Podolia,
- QC4071388 funnel-bowl culture from Kujawy,
- DQ8464019 kyjaticka culture from Hungary
ambron:
5.2 cM is a very long segment, as for this distance of time. You would rather expect 2-3 cM. Are you sure of this result? He would clearly indicate this Małopolska GAC as your ancestor.
Vlah:
That's how it comes from the genesis.gedmatch analysis.
In addition, I know which line of ancestors I am related to this GAC, because one of my cousins also has segments with him (two of the same as mine). Common segments of this length as with GAC are for example with people whose ancestors separated from mine in the first half of the 18th century.
I wonder if there could be continuity of living in Małopolska from GAC to me - anyway, this is an argument for the autochthonism of some of my ancestors.
New mtDNA haplogroups in Globular Amphora...
New H5a1 in Globular (in different burial than the mass grave). The douche bag Chad Rofhlston's haplogroup. H5a1 is (relatively) common in northern/eastern Europe, was 'common' in Andronovo, would become 'common' in Indo-Iranians.
New J1c3f. Today, this is a rare & almost exclusively eastern European/'Slavic' haplogroup.
New H27+16093. Rare. Primarily in northeast Europe: Estonia, Finland, Russia, Latvia. H27*, is present throughout Europe & mostly in northern-eastern Europe.
New HV0a*. Already found in Neolithic Hungary, Funnel Beaker, Corded Ware. Rare.
New K1a1b1e. Giolleo's haplogroup! Very rare. Three from Italy (includion Gio), England, Ireland, Armenia.
H1b1, H1b2, J1c3f, H28a, U5b2b1a1, are all mostly eastern European ('Slavic') mtDNA haplogroups found in Globular Amphora. Which supports the idea Corded Ware+Globular Amphora explains much of Slavic origins.
Dawid, did you try modeling Sintashta, Polish and German CWC with Polish GAC?
@Sam it's broader CW+TRB is someone like me ;)
Table S2 with qpAdm results show that the Książnice (Złota)samples can be modeled with a 9.6% Yamnaya (P value of 6) or 7.4% EHG (P value of 17). That's interesting.
Now I wonder with that 9.6% Yamnaya in mind, if R1b L51 lurked nearby....?
@Sam
You know that if you mention the "G"'s name, he'll appear, don't you?
@Bob said.."It does if you consider that other GAC communities apparently had blonde hair and blue eyes"
For any group of people, or culture to fix certain phenotypic traits, they must be genetically homogeneous, and of course neither the GAC nor the TRB or LBK or CWC or Yamnaya or any culture of the steppes met those conditions in the year 3,000 BC. Not even the WHGs or the SHGs were. The human population was already very mixed at that time. Another thing is that a small group of people who for example were blond, settled in a territory and produced a founder effect, so that the majority of their descendants inherited their physical features and did not mix with other populations.
In Spain the physical characteristics of Bbs men, have been well studied-There were brachycephalic and dolichocephalic. Some were very high (even 1.85 meters) and others were short (1,60/1.65 meters). Some had brown hair and other redheads, some had blue eyes, and others brown and 100% were R1bP312/Df27.That is, they inherited those physical characters of their ancestors without following a certain pattern. Everything is the product of chance and natural selection.
Regarding the execution that we are commenting, we have also seen violence in some Spanish Neolithic sites. In Ávila there is a grave with 6 dead, five of them with arrowheads stuck in the back (also using tanged and barbed arrowheads, which are more lethal). We have also seen skeletons buried in individual pits with signs of violent death (blows to the head with mallets or stone axes), what I had never seen is a family execution like the one we are discussing. Obviously the assassins took advantage of a moment when most of the men in the village were not there (they could have died before or they were out with the cattle). Then they executed teenagers, women and children with blows of stone axes on their heads. No doubt the men returned and buried their dead. It does not matter much if they were other rival GACs or if they were the newcomers CWC, in any case, the episode is terrifying. The death of women and children implies a willingness to exterminate the competing group, obviously they did not intend to capture women or slaves.
You also have to remember that both in Yamnaya and in CWC there were men I2a
@ambron
Yes, of course I did.
Dawid, and...
I posted the results and you saw them.
I can't continue this discussion. You should try it yourself. All of the data and programs are online.
@Sam
HV0a-Iberia-Cuarenta Cave, Guadalquivir, Megalithic culture-3.648 BC
HV0a- Sweden, Ansarve, Gottland, Megalithic culture- An17--3.130 BC
HV0a- Lebanon, Sión. Iberian Crusader-SI41-HapY-R1b-Df27-1.226
The rest of the haplogroups that you mentioned have never been seen in Iberia, but some of them are found in the GAC as well as in the CWC and BB Culture-H5a1 J1c4. These haplogroups do not come from the steppes-H5-(Barcin, Anatolia-6.350 BC), J1c (Iberia Can Gambús-Neolithic Cardial Culture-5.000 BC), then they are European Neolithic women who joined those cultures. We have already seen that the CWC and the BBC share some mitochondrial haplogroups
@Gaska
"For any group of people, or culture to fix certain phenotypic traits, they must be genetically homogeneous"
I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make, but GAC covered a large area, and they seem to have varied quite a bit. I see no problem with one GAC subset becoming predominately blonde haired/blue eyed, and then mixing with incoming steppe groups, in whatever way they did. And it dosen't surprise me at all that we see a lot of steppe men with I2a, I've never bought the idea that every last farmer male was wiped out wherever steppe groups expanded. In fact, I'm starting to think that the steppe-heavy Bell Beakers who colonized western Europe were speaking a farmer language.
This idea won’t be popular here; but I think once we get widespread and representative data; it’ll show that PIE originated in an EEF-rich group; not the Volga steppe
Celts, Germanic, Slavs, Greeks , I-As were predominantly farmers and cremators
The etymology of the kurgan speaks volumes
David, thank you and I'm sorry! I understand that the fit is better with the Ukrainian GAC.
@Bob
My point is that GAc as a whole was a heterogeneous culture (like all the European ones), that's why I mentioned before that the only possibility of fixing phenotypic characters is that a kind of founder effect produced by a GAC subset. But I do not think that this happened because we have seen that some women (and maybe men) of that culture joined the CWC and the BBC, which makes it very difficult for them to fix certain features of their own (I think that for that, they would need prolonged isolation, or a practically uninhabited territory)
European farmers were not wiped out? So I thought. Of course the women were never exterminated (because they are absolute majority in the contemporary Spanish population)
and I doubt the men, because for example the Basques we have 5-6% of I2a that I suppose come from the Iberian WHgs. We need more ancient dna because in Iberia the truth is that the Bronze Age and Iron Age is 100% R1b-P312. Obviously C1a2 and H2 were extinguished but what happened with I2a and G2a?
@Bob said... "I'm starting to think that the steppe-heavy Bell Beakers who colonized western Europe were speaking a farmer language"
The issue of languages is a damn puzzle especially in Spain, I also think that it is very very very difficult to link P312 with the IE language, because of the evident genetic continuity of Iberian, Basques and Tartessians between 2,500 and 100 BC. However, I believe that this genetic continuity can also be demonstrated for historic peoples that spoke IE-Lusitanian (vettones, vacceos, Cantabrian ...)which is much older than the continental Celtic. When we have ancient dna of those peoples (Iron Age-1000-100 BC) then we will realize that the descendants of R1b-P312 being genetically equal, spoke IE languages and NO-IE languages. This seems impossible, right?
However, even in Iberian territory (NO-IE) there is an important IE substrate (35-50%-toponyms, hidronyms etc), so we can not rule out that all Iberia spoke IE in the chalcolithic and that for example the Iberian was a kind of lingua franca/commercial that spread during the Iron Age. That does not mean that the IE comes directly from the steppes with the CWC, maybe all the European Neolithic cultures spoke IE from the Neolithic. Why not? Imagine that L51 really had its origin in the steppes, could migrate to mainland europe in the V-IV millennium and impose its language. Or maybe IE was also spoken in the Balkans and spread with the Neolithic farmers ???
David, I'm sorry again. I have just noticed that you have used the Polish GAC in these models.
I'm still on board with a PC steppe origin for PIE, but more and more the steppe/farmer relationship looks complicated. I think that overall there was more of a blending, rather than a simple conquest/extermination. It looks like true replacement only happened in certain areas, like the British Isles, while in eastern Europe there's obviously a lot of overlap. Complicated.
@Gaska
"we can not rule out that all Iberia spoke IE in the chalcolithic"
Seems pretty unlikely, considering the trajectory of IE's(known) spread in the bronze age. More likely IE reached Iberia in the iron age, with the Celtic-speaking Hallstatt satraps who settled there.
Wasn’t HVOa common in Tripolye Cucuteni?
Sam, if you looked at their faces and crania you’d see (apart from skin color today common in Southern populations!) that they don’t look so different from modern White people, in spite of their lack of Steppe admixture
Seems like that with the Basques: BB people speaking a Farmer language
There was a strong agricultural vocabulary e exerted on PIE indeed. Would you say it cake from CT?
Maybe GAC spoke a forager language rather than a Farmer one, given that it’s I2a Haplogroup y-DNA is all forager based, the same way Floy thinks that B.B. spoke Farmer
@ Desdichado
I didn’t think I was speaking literally
@Gaska Caucasus hunter-gatherers -CHG- Both Kotias and Satsurblia CHGs were predicted by Hirisplex to have brown eyes (>0.96) and a dark hair shade (>0.92). Looking at skin-pigmentation sites, both individuals carried the dark-skin allele at rs16891982 and the light-pigmentation allele at rs1426654. Similar to the Hum2 and Motala12 individuals, Kotias showed exclusively haplotype-associated alleles at the C11-defining positions (with at least 5 reads of such alleles per site), suggesting it carried the C11 haplotype”.
What does it mean in plain English? Were CHG light skinned or not?
Motala were light skinned as you know...
@Andrei
It suggested that selective sweeps on rs1426654 and rs16891982 (light-pigmentation alleles), started at between ~15-19 kya (under a dominant model) and ~11-13 kya (under an additive model), respectively. In a comparison of SNP capture data of hunter-gatherers of mixed geographic origin, early farmers and modern-day Europeans, Mathieson et al suggested that while light pigmented alleles frequencies in extant Europeans at rs1426654 could be explained by demography, variation at the rs16891982 locus produced the second highest genome-wide selection signal observed in their study. These results, of a high frequency of rs1426654 light-skin allele in Mesolithic Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, at a time when it is not seen in central Europe, supports a scenario of environmental adaptation to northern latitudes.
The derived alleles at both rs1426654 and rs16891982 positions are found at extremely high frequencies in present-day European populations (where the former allele is virtually fixed and the latter is ~90%), an observation that has been interpreted as the signature of recent positive selection in Europeans.
That is, all the groups we have mentioned-WHG, SHG, EHG, CHG, EEF are responsible to a greater or lesser extent for the blue eyes, blonde hair and whiteness of Europeans (rs1426654-FIXED). The different percentages also depend on the adaptation to the environment and the relative isolation of populations. In any case, I think there is still a lot to be learned about the genes of whiteness, because many Asians are very white (Japanese) and I do not think they have those European alleles.
The wounds seem to indicate inter-GAC violence:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298731033_Evidence_of_interpersonal_violence_or_a_special_funeral_rite_in_the_Neolithic_multiple_burial_from_Koszyce_in_southern_Poland_-_a_forensic_analysis/download
"The shape of the cross-section of the Globular Amphora Culture axe or chisel corresponds to the shape of rectangular openings found in the skulls of adolescents No. 4 and 9"
The PIE lads are off the hook. For now, that is. On a more serious note, this goed to show that the Middle Neolithic was a very violent era.
@Gaska No. first of all, light skin had something to do with lactose tolerance and vitamin D absorption (environmental factors) but Yamnaya, CHG and EHG all have a very prominent ANE ratio, notably from AG3 which turned out to be the first blond population circa 24,500 YBP.
If you read my links re: Talheim and co. then you’d have realized that Early neolithic era eg LBK Culture was too...
BTW Did C-T Culture contribute ANYTHING to any extant modern population other than admixture with SS II groups? Do Illyrians have any?
@ epoch
Thanks.
Here’s my points:
1. GAC mass murder doesn’t strike me as utterly different than similar mass graves stemming from inter group violence in the EARLY Neolithic like 5000 BCE LBK eg Talheim, which put to rest notion Gimbutas had about farmers of Old Europe being lately “peaceful” vis a vis Kurganites
There's no rational (even brutal) reason to kill the women and children. They're not a threat.
This has personal feud written all over it. Someone wanted the male relatives of these women and children to suffer.
3. Your favorite Basques turn out to be a B.B. population not unlike other Spaniards whose ancestors are Steppe/Farmer mix. Their language arrived probably from some Dutch/Northern France farmer group whose language (according to Wikipedia) was close to NW Caucasus ones like Adyghe and which was a likely substrate in NW IE block (like Ancient Belgic).
Huh ??? Sitting the Pot miss there...
@Ryan
If you let the children grow up they'll just come seeking revenge later. (Actual historically documented justification.)
There's no rational (even brutal) reason to kill the women and children. They're not a threat.
You're kidding, right? In the Animal Kingdom, when a lion kills a rival and takes over the pride, the first thing he does is kill the juvenile offspring of the dead male. This not only puts the mothers back in heat, but it also ensures that his lineage and not that of the other guy, is what is propagated. Nobody wants to be cuckolded.
The women and children weren't a threat in the sense that they were going to attack anyone; they were a threat in the sense that as long as they were there, you're own women and children couldn't use the same resources that they were using, and they might even grow up to eventually overpower your women and children and their descendants.
1. GAC mass murder doesn’t strike me as utterly different than similar mass graves stemming from inter group violence in the EARLY Neolithic like 5000 BCE LBK eg Talheim, which put to rest notion Gimbutas had about farmers of Old Europe being lately “peaceful” vis a vis Kurganites.
To be fair to Gimbutas, she thought that the GAC culture was "kurganized." Still, yeah—her ideas of "peaceful" Old Europe were kinda silly. The Old European Ertebølle culture seems to have engaged in plenty of conflict, and even cannibalized their rivals. It's very unlikely that the early Indo-Europeans were more warlike than other peoples, although it does seem to be the case that they were better at it than others around them due to their social organization and domestication of the horse.
And they probably benefited from a collapse/apocalypse of some sort in Old Europe, particularly of the Tripolye culture in the Balkans, that their socio-economic system was much better poised to take advantage of than the leftovers of Old Europe.
@Desdichado "All that said, yeah—I suppose that's why some people were shocked that these GAC burials are claimed to have dark hair, eyes and relatively dark skin, and some were not."
I sort of suspect that a natural selection process was involved in it, but if I recall vaguely some paper that Lazaridis (BROAD) wrote a few years back, the turnover between Early to MNE was due to a population turnover from LBK to TRB/Funnel Beaker and I think he said something that a non-Steppe CHG population was involved in the process. If so, then the idea/notion that one or more substrate languages spoken in the Netherlands were related to NW Caucasus languages like Adyghe aren't far fetched after all...
I believe that Lazaridis attributes the CHG incomers/interlopers to an increase in mtDNA H ratio from 19% (currently the average in West Asia/ME/Levant) to 40%-50% now.
Whether the CHG lightened the skin of MNE Europeans is left to be seen...
@Desdichado
"The Old European Ertebølle culture"
The Ertebølle culture was 100% WHG and I think that Gimbutas meant true farmer culture with Old Europe.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/12/13/493882.full.pdf
@Desdichado "The Old European Ertebølle culture seems to have engaged in plenty of conflict, and even cannibalized their rivals. It's very unlikely that the early Indo-Europeans were more warlike than other peoples, although it does seem to be the case that they were better at it than others around them due to their social organization and domestication of the horse.
And they probably benefited from a collapse/apocalypse of some sort in Old Europe, particularly of the Tripolye culture in the Balkans, that their socio-economic system was much better poised to take advantage of than the leftovers of Old Europe."
1. Ertebolle was the frontier culture interacting with LBK to later on form FunnelBeaker/TRB. Just wondering if I2a haplogroup came from Ertebolle or/and from another HG culture: Kunda, Narva, etc.
Going off on a tangent here, I have read an interesting article a while back concerning the considerable (30%) non-Uralic substrate in Saami languages, and the underlying conclusion was that WHG groups were largely responsible for that substate. Therefore I am in a quandary whether the Grimm Sound Shift and other phenomena in the creation and evolution of Germanic languages was owed mostly to WHG influence or mostly to the Farmer non-IE part in South of Germany. If WHG substrate in German is similar to the one in Saami then we know that it stems from Ertebolle. However, many linguists tend to attribute it to Farmer languages instead, preferably all the way to Anatolia.
2. What the heck happened to CT culture??? It can't be that they went completely the way of the dodo (and the Botai Culture) whereas GAC left a lasting legacy.
@epoch ""The Old European Ertebølle culture"
The Ertebølle culture was 100% WHG and I think that Gimbutas meant true farmer culture with Old Europe."
OK. So WHO were the SHG there? Wasn't Motala a SHG sample? What happened to them?
They keep on bundling together La Brana, Lochbucher and Villabruna as "WHG" although LB was C1 Haplogroup (Nowadays common in East Asia), L was Y-DNA I and Villabruna was R1b like Yamnaya...
Even if you don't like Ertebolle, the LBK was a farmer culture, notable for mass murders, ritual cannibalism, and fortifications driven by violence in the area, as did its successor cultures like Cris-Tripolye.
Gimbutas' idea that everything was happy until steppe peoples came to the rest of Europe is kinda absurd.
@ Andrzejewski
The fact that Villabruna was so WHG like could just be because R1b spent many generations among WHG Haplogroups I populations. Villabrunas MtDNA basically proves it....
A minor side note on humanoid behavior, group interaction, group competition and the good old primeval broth. There’s an insightful documentary on a troop of chimpanzees in Uganda, who engage in warfare internally and externally via social-interaction.The full documentary can be found, you know where. “Rise Warriors Ape” Or was the title freaking animals behaving like hominids,or hominids acting like animals? I’m confused. lol
Anyway, I already spotted Conan the Barbarian = Lofty.
Bob Floy said...
"The care taken to arrange the dead suggests to me some sort of sacrifice/ritual murder or maybe a clan conflict of some kind. Genocidal CWC raiders wouldn't have painstakingly buried them with grave goods."
- buried with grave goods
- women with their kids (would raiders have known that?)
- lack of adult men
seems to me more likely they were buried by their kin but...
i don't know what the local burial customs were but if the adult men were away and came back to bury them would they have lumped them all together like that or in separate family groups?
kinda makes me feel someone was trying to reduce the total amount of digging.
visual i get is the men were ambush-killed in a fight somewhere outside the settlement and some kid herding sheep was the only one who survived and he/she buried all of them but separately cos he/she wasn't strong enough to drag the men back to the settlement to bury them all together.
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Ryan said...
"There's no rational (even brutal) reason to kill the women and children. They're not a threat."
no rational reason to plant trees only your grand-children will see.
apex predator = not very nice
slightly better maybe since we were domesticated by cereal
@Grey
"seems to me more likely they were buried by their kin but..."
Very possibly. Like I said, different scenarios are worth considering.
One issue I have with the idea of the victims being discovered and buried later is decomposition. The way they were buried suggests to me that they probably were buried very soon after the killings took place. But again, I don't know, just spitballing.
@Andrzejewski
I believe that Lazaridis attributes the CHG incomers/interlopers to an increase in mtDNA H ratio from 19% (currently the average in West Asia/ME/Levant) to 40%-50% now.
This is false.
I2-M223 is one of those ancient haplogroups that should simply be labeled "pan-European". It doesn't really seem heavily Scandinavian to me at all, at least not the L801 subclade which seems mostly linked to west-central Europe. To my eyes, I2-M223-M284 is most definitely Atlantic-Iberian and spread with the western Mediterranean farmers. (Maybe linked to Neolithic Sardinians since M223 was found in aDNA?) However L701, also heavily west/central European seems to pop up in some west Asian and Balkan communities and may have been part of the Yamnaya spread if I'm not mistaken. So if anything, I2-M223 is very much continental European, especially west-central European and was most definitely part of the spread of any culture in those territories after the stone age.
R1a in Scandinavia is only a small handful of subclades that seem to go back to a founder effect around CWC/Battle Ax timeframe. The only R1b subclade that looks similar to that is R1b-L238. On the other hand R1b-U106 probably arrived a little bit later from central Europe but is far more widespread than L238 which is why I do not think they are linked to the same time. Also, other minor lineages of R1b in Scandinavia such as DF27, U152, and L21+ are linked to the migration period of barbarians throughout central Europe, the Atlantic Bronze Age, or even medieval times with Christianity and skilled trades. Then there is the big whopper I1 which takes a good deal of analysis that I haven't even begun to look at in detail. Possibly an older layer of HG in Denmark and northern Germany. (Off topic a bit I know) So did CWC bring Germanic languages, or some dead unattested Baltic language?
@Andrezejewski
Y DNA C2(old C3) is East Asian haplogroup.C1 mostly belong to West Eurasian folks,only Ainu and some Japanese have C1 and this Japonic clade is fairly distinct from West Eurasian C1.
@AWood
So did CWC bring Germanic languages, or some dead unattested Baltic language?
The consensus is that CWC brought Germanic languages to Scandinavia.
That may or may not be correct, but I've never seen any academic work arguing that CWC brought Baltic languages to Scandinavia.
@Vinitharya
"I know it's too early for R1a-M458, but I'd like to finally have some ancient samples of it. I think they found a ton of it in the Tollense Valley battle site, but they won't publish it because German nationalists would freak out that the indigenous people of their land were ancestral to the Slavs."
That's a very unlikely conspiracy theory. No one in the intellectual mainstream of present-day Germany has any respect for the sentiments of German nationalists.
I thought that Germanic languages were created by a CWC R1a1 Satem layer with a much later and larger B.B. R1b one
@ Davidski
but I've never seen any academic work arguing that CWC brought Baltic languages to Scandinavia.
There is a possibility that speakers of languages closely related to Baltic were present in Scandinavia (preprint of Mittnik et al.):
qpWave rejects both Scandinavia LNBA and Baltic LN as single sources for Olsund
and all tested models of two-way admixture between Baltic LN or Scandinavia LNBA
and other contemporaneous groups (Supplementary Information Table S5). However,
in all tests Baltic LN consistently provides higher p-values over Scandinavia LNBA
suggesting the former population in more closely related to the potential source of the
Olsund individual. This could indicate that the route of CWC expansion into Northern
Sweden might have not been northward from Southern Scandinavia but instead
westward across the Baltic Sea either by boat or over the frozen sea during winter33.
Assemblages similar to the early CWC of Sweden have been found in south-western
Finland, across the Bothnian Sea34,35 which could be considered a geographically
closer source than Southern Scandinavia.
@Bob Floy
yes, no way of knowing for sure
"I'm still on board with a PC steppe origin for PIE, but more and more the steppe/farmer relationship looks complicated."
i still wonder if the farmers may have come under attack from both west and east with ertobolle-like hybrid wetlands foragers cum farmers from the west and steppe peoples from the east - possibly after some kind of environmental calamity which weakened them.
Davidski said...
"That's why it's just as likely that this was done by another GAC group as it is that it was done by CWC newcomers."
there's also the possibility of a domino effect - pressure on a border region pushing people to move away and as a result causing conflict away from the border.
@Arza
Corded Ware populations may have spread from Sweden to Finland and Estonia.
Bronze Age coastal burials in Estonia show very strong links to the Nordic Bronze Age culture, and all the samples belong to R1a and are obviously direct descendants of Corded Ware people.
So there may have been more or less continuous migrations from Scandinavia to Finland and Estonia from the Corded Ware period to the Iron Age.
I'm not aware of any such unambiguous links between Scandinavia and Latvia or Lithuania.
Andrzejewski said...
"1. Ertebolle was the frontier culture interacting with LBK to later on form FunnelBeaker/TRB. Just wondering if I2a haplogroup came from Ertebolle or/and from another HG culture: Kunda, Narva, etc."
i wonder about that as well
Andrzejewski said...
"BTW Did C-T Culture contribute ANYTHING to any extant modern population other than admixture with SS II groups? Do Illyrians have any?"
i find it surprising people who were so ahead of the game back then didn't survive at all *somewhere*
even if it was a long way away from their original home.
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Gaska said...
"Cheddar man was more black than coal, He lacked the derived alleles for SLC24A5 rs1426654 and SLC45A2 rs16891982, which indicates he did not have pale skin like modern Europeans. But do not worry because all Europeans were black 50,000 years ago."
right but neither do khoisan and which is the more likely OoA phenotype?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/San_tribesman.jpg
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Ric Hern said...
"Fair Haired and Light Eyed kinda screams Baltic Region to me...."
yeah the modern distribution radiating out from the Baltic always struck me that way.
if the modern distribution mirrors the past my pet theory is an east asian depigmentation gene came west across the top of the world and down south via the Baltic and it had an additive effect on the pre-existing northern euro phenotype.
@Grey
Maybe, but whatever the specifics, it looks like there was a large scale replacement of farmer lineages by WHG ones in eastern Europe during the middle neolithic period. It almost looks similar to what happened in Iberia with the steppe folks later on. Near total replacement of native paternal lineages, while the population remains mostly(or, more than half, anyway)native in terms of aDNA. Or something like that.
Some paper talked about a migration entering from the North into Sweden and downwards towards Denmark...?
@EurDNA
They have to also account for the appearance of U106, I2a2, I1 in Scandinavia.
All of these markers could easily be associated with the descendants of Single Grave (Corded Ware) culture. The I2a2 and I1 are likely to be ultimately of GAC and TRB origin, but that's OK.
And I've blogged a lot recently about how the P312-rich Dutch Beakers and the Late Neolithic U106 sample from Sweden might be of Single Grave origin. I haven't changed my mind about that since then.
Check out the original paper by Konopka, Szczepanek, Przybyla and Wlodarczak in English:
DOI: 10.1515/anre-2016-0006
Looks like the original team changed their mind on the killers' identity, maybe after the DNA. These people's faces were totally pulverized. The holes in the heads look more like a pole axe or maybe a boat-axe, something with some real force. The GAC flint axe just doesn't look like the weapon used.
@ Davidski
''All of these markers could easily be associated with the descendants of Single Grave (Corded Ware) culture. The I2a2 and I1 are likely to be ultimately of GAC and TRB origin, but that's OK.''
The earliest appearance of I1 in Nordic Bronze Age elite graves (c. 1400 BC) makes a direct connection with SGC/ CWC diffult
''And I've blogged a lot recently about how the P312-rich Dutch Beakers and the Late Neolithic U106 sample from Sweden might be of Single Grave origin. I haven't changed my mind about that since then.''
It might be. Regardless, in Scandinavia, U106 appears appear after the main CWC/ Battle Axe period, so the appearance of U106 represents an entire horizon that is unaccounted for in their models.
That’s because Proto-Germanics (=Nordic Bronze Age?) seems to be a hybrid population of R1a1 Satem speakers CWC (founder effect?) with a much later Celtic-like R1b Bell Beakers who had a much more lasting and profound impact on the language’s evolution + a considerable (up to 1/3!) of lexicon stemming from WHG & EEF vocabularies and sound shifts.
@EurDNA
Regardless, in Scandinavia, U106 appears appear after the main CWC/Battle Axe period, so the appearance of U106 represents an entire horizon that is unaccounted for in their models.
There aren't enough samples from space and time in Scandinavia for this to be relevant. For instance, there are a couple of Battle-Axe samples, but there are no Single Grave samples.
Take a look here at the Corded Ware-like genetic structure of the Dutch Beakers and the Swedish LN sample that belongs to U106.
The Boscombe Bowmen
This needs some explaining if we assume that P312 and U106 suddenly appeared in the region after the CWC from another horizon. It doesn't seem like a plausible theory to me.
@ Davidski
''This needs some explaining if we assume that P312 and U106 suddenly appeared in the region after the CWC from another horizon. It doesn't seem like a plausible theory to me.''
Not only is it plausible, but its a done deal
@EurDNA
Not only is it plausible, but its a done deal.
Absolutely not.
You need to take a closer look at those Dutch and British Beakers. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of those guys were buried with battle axes and in graves reminiscent of Single Grave traditions.
@EurDNA
Like I said, take a closer look at the Rhenish and British Beakers; their genetic structure and archeology.
They're descendants of Single Grave (not Battle-Axe) people.
The transition from CWC to BB in northern Europe is indeed still in need of resolution. However, that doesnt change the fact that c. 2200 BC occurred an entirely new horizon moving into Scandinavia. Then perhaps several ones later too, even if they werent mass migration of the BAx degree
If you mean I1 = IE then you may be right because Yamnaya had an abundance of this Haplogroup so they may’ve ultimately arrived with the CWC or other Steppe groups
@Andrzejewski
If you mean I1 = IE then you may be right because Yamnaya had an abundance of this Haplogroup so they may’ve ultimately arrived with the CWC or other Steppe groups.
What are you babbling about here?
There's no I1 in Yamnaya or Corded Ware. It's a TRB marker that was incorporated into some late Scandinavian Corded Ware group IMO.
Likely that the transition from CWC —> B.B. horizon is a consequence of more acquisitions of EEF genome along the way. Still I am puzzled as to how come the overwhelming majority of CWC samples were R1a1 where on the other hand B.B. was almost entirely R1b...
The theory, handwaved though it may be, is that late Western proto Indo European came to Denmark, southern Sweden and sooner of the North Sea coast with the CWC where it merged with the native TRB/GAC, but it didn't start really resembling pre proto Germanic until the Unetice came along as a superstrate. This supposedly explains both the linguistic data (similarities to italic and Celtic as well as to Balto Slavic, Germanic substrate hypothesis, etc.) as well as the genetic (reasonably rich population in I1, r1a and r1b).
I thought that it was a minority Haplogroup among some Ukraine Neolithic/HG that morphed into Sredny Stog and Yamnaya but I guess I was wrong
@EurDNA
The transition from CWC to BB in northern Europe is indeed still in need of resolution. However, that doesnt change the fact that c. 2200 BC occurred an entirely new horizon moving into Scandinavia. Then perhaps several ones later too, even if they werent mass migration of the BAx degree.
In terms of cultural changes, the impulses may have come from far from Scandinavia, but the genetic shifts that happened there can be explained by in-situ expansions.
Otherwise, it's hard to explain the strong genetic continuity from Corded Ware to northern Beakers to Bronze/Iron Age Scandinavians to modern Scandinavians.
Modern Scandinavians are largely of Single Grave, TRB and GAC origin IMO. And I would need some very solid data to convince me otherwise.
@Desdichado along with the unique and peculiar spot on the IE tree for Germanic languages
Another group that seemed to go the way of the Botai Culture and the Cucuteni Tripolye Culture was that of the SHG e.g. Motala. Seems as if wiped off the face of the earth
Is Catacomb descended from GAC?
Andrzejewski said...
"I thought that it was a minority Haplogroup among some Ukraine Neolithic/HG that morphed into Sredny Stog and Yamnaya but I guess I was wrong"
iirc the ydna I from the Ukraine region is I2?
@ Andrzejewski @ Grey
Maybe this will help.
https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/ancient-human-dna_41837#8/50.106/18.397
@ Davidski
With autosomal analysis, there is an appreciable shift from Battle Axe to the Nordic LN/BA
https://imgur.com/a/H80nOqz
Battle Axe migrated to Sweden via the East Baltic. There was then U106 migration several hundred years later, coming from Denmark (whether one argues the transition from SGC to BB in the Rhine-Weser region was continuous or not is beside the point). There were then migrations associated with the Nordic Bronze Age, and the latter are arguably the earliest tangible link to IE's in northern Europe.
I'm talking about Single Grave, not Battle-Axe.
It makes no difference in this context that Battle-Axe was largely replaced, if the replacing was done by the descendants of Single Grave.
Single Grave was all over Denmark, and there's archeological continuity there from Single Grave to Bell Beakers, much like in the Lower Rhine region.
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