There's been a lot of talk lately about the finding that the peoples associated with the Corded Ware and Yamnaya archeological cultures were genetic cousins (for instance, see
here). As I've already pointed out, this is an interesting discovery, but, at this stage, it's difficult to know what it means exactly.
It might mean that the Yamnayans were the direct predecessors of the Corded Ware people. Or it might just mean that, at some point, the Corded Ware and Yamnaya populations swapped women regularly (that is, they practiced female exogamy with each other).
In any case, I feel that several important facts aren't being taken into account by most of the interested parties. These facts include, in no particular order:
- despite being closely related, the Corded Ware and Yamnaya peoples were highly adapted to very different ecological zones - temperate forests and arid steppes, respectively - and this is surely not something that happened within a few years and probably not even within a couple of generations
- both the Corded Ware and Yamnaya populations expanded widely and rapidly at around the same time, but never got in each others way, probably because they occupied very different ecological niches
- despite sharing the R1b Y-chromosome haplogroup, their paternal origins were quite different, with Corded Ware males rich in R1a-M417 and R1b-L51 and Yamnaya males rich in R1b-Z2103 and I2a-L699
I suppose it's possible that the Corded Ware people were overwhelmingly and directly derived from the Yamnaya population. But right now my view is that, even if they were, then the Yamnaya population that they came from was quite different from the classic, R1b-Z2103-rich Yamnaya that spread rapidly across the steppes.
Indeed, perhaps what we're dealing with here is a very early (proto?) Yamnaya gene pool located somewhere in the border zone between the forests and the steppes, that then split into two main sub-populations, with one of these groups heading north and the other south?
I do wonder what David Anthony would say if he was made aware of the above mentioned facts? Then again, perhaps he's already aware of them, and simply chose to ignore them when formulating his
latest theory about the origin of the Corded Ware people?
See also...
