Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

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Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Kraut » Tue May 22, 2018 6:07 pm

The text is in German

https://www.academia.edu/36689289/Invas ... der_Steppe

English comment:

https://indo-european.eu/2018/05/copenh ... -caucasus/


Invasion from the steppe
anamnesis
Linguists, geneticists and archaeologists have reconstructed how a people of simple shepherds changed the world - a dramatic tale from the Bronze Age about migrations, wars of conquest, epidemics and the emergence of primitive Europeans.
Invasion aus der Steppe
Vorgeschichte

Linguisten, Genetiker und Archäologen haben rekonstruiert, wie ein Volk einfacherHirten die Welt veränderte –eine dramatische Erzählung aus der Bronzezeit überVölkerwanderungen, Eroberungskriege, Seuchenzüge und die Entstehung der Ureuropäer.
https://www.academia.edu/36689289/Invas ... der_Steppe

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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Iversen » Thu May 24, 2018 9:43 am

My apologies for not commenting in detail here, but I'm going to discuss these themes in Bratislava so when I wrote my comment I felt that it also would be nice to have it in my own multiconfused log ... and then I ended up putting it there.

The German article is quite thorough, and it has the advantage of being written after the latest investigations of the Danish researchers group that includes Eske Willerslev. As far see I can see the new information doesn't change anything about the prehistory of the Germanic languages, as I described it in Bratislava last year, but it has farreaching implications for the interpretation of the prehistory of other Indoeuropean language families.

A few years ago the same researchers proved with genetic arguments based on Y chromosome haplogroups that the population in Denmark represent not two, but three invasions. They examined more than 100 skulls from different prehistoric periods, and it turned out that the oldest fossils represented one single group: the hunter-gatherers who entered the country right after the end of the Ice age. From around 6000 BC a second wave with different genes appear - which coincides with the introduction of agriculture. The farmers didn't exterminate the hunter-gatherers (maybe because they settled in different areas), but more or less outcompeted their way of living. And then a third wave came, arguably with the bronze age which in Denmark would be somewhere around 1800 BC. The crucial new genetic component links us to the Yamnaya tribe, an Asian nomad people representing the last stage of the Kurgan culture. But their migration started already around 3000 BC, and not long after a new culture appeared in Eastern Europe, the Corded ware Ceramic (or Linear Ceramic or Battle Ax) culture, and it also spread into Northern Germany and Southern Scandinavia. This happened around 2800 BC, and soon after the old megalithic culture in Denmark was replaced by a new culture favoring single graves. So now the question is: did the Yamnaya themselves penetrate through Eastern Europe right to Scandinavia, or did they just become the ruling class in a mixed culture, which would allow for a slower mingling.

By choosing to emphasize the onset of the Bronze age the researchers seem to favor the interpretation that the real cultural revolution here at our Nordic latitudes happened about 1000 years after the Yamnaya left their home turf .. but the downfall of the old Megalith culture actually occurred just a few hundred years after the Yamnaya left their home turf. Unfortunately I don't have the original Science article which may have given exact dates for each prehistoric individual in the sample (the article is behind a pay wall), and btw. it would be nice also to have exact dates for all remains found along the track through Eastern Europe, but until I get more information my hunch is that the Yamnaya must have arrived early in the period, and they arrived as people representing a mix culture centered around modern Poland. And then a second cultural revolution, which may not actually have been based on the migration of large populations, brought us the chariot and bronze. This second wawe - which may not have changed the basic composition of the population here - could in principle have taken another path than the Yamnaya route through Eastern Europe. But as I said: everything hinges on the exact date of the oldest skeletons with Yamnaya DNA found here.

.... and gosh, my second commentary somehow became as long as the interminable rant in my log thread ..
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Iversen » Thu May 24, 2018 4:36 pm

Update: since I wrote the lines above I have visited our 'Royal library' (one of two in this country), where they subscribe to a number of expensive academical magazines. Here I found out that the article I was looking for was printed in "Nature" no. 522 from June 2015, and the same issue contained another article about a similar topic. I have now read both - but alas, I still don't know exactly when the first person with a Yamnaya gene came to Northern Europe, and I also wonder whether the researchers actually know enough about matrilinear genealogical trees to say whether it actually was a relatively small number of young male Yamnayas who succeeded in making a lot of local farmer women pregnant (through rape or polygamous marriages). In that case the matrilinear lines should show a higher degree of continuity than the patrilinear lines.

Btw there is one more factor to take into account, namely that the hordes from the Asian steppes apparently carried the pest bacteria Yersinia pesti to Europe, albeit in a form that didn't used fleas as transmitters. And of course it is easier to conquer a local population which is being ravaged by a deadly illness - as evidenced by the harsh fate that befell the precolumbian cultures of Latin America.
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Kraut » Fri May 25, 2018 11:23 am

It's interesting to read how they finally got to the Steppe as Urheimat of the Indo-Europeans.

Here is a summary of what they knew in 2011, before the big wave of Haplogroup studies set in:

INVASION AUS DER STEPPE
https://www.wissenschaft.de/geschichte- ... er-steppe/


15. März 2011

-------------

The father of the Steppe hypothesis is Otto Schrader, it took him three editions of his study to get there, in an environment where the majority of linguists and archaeologists saw the Urheimat in Northern Germany/Skandinavia

Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte. Linguistisch-historische Beiträge zur Erforschung des indogermanischen Altertums
by Schrader, Otto, 1855-1919
http://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/23701/1/ko ... 01-129.pdf
https://ia802708.us.archive.org/17/item ... hrgoog.pdf

Wikipedia:
"Arguments for the identification of the Proto-Indo-Europeans as steppe nomads from the Pontic-Caspian region had already been made in the 19th century by German philologists Theodor Benfey[4] and especially Otto Schrader.[5][6] In his standard work about PIE and to a greater extent in a later abbreviated version, Karl Brugmann took the view that the urheimat could not be identified exactly at that time, but he tended toward Schrader’s view.[7][8] However, after Karl Penka's 1883[9] rejection of non-European origins, most scholars favoured a Northern European origin. The view of a Pontic origin was still strongly favoured, e.g., by the archaeologists V. Gordon Childe[10] and Ernst Wahle.[11] One of Wahle's students was Jonas Puzinas, who in turn was one of Gimbutas’ teachers.Gimbutas, who acknowledges Schrader as a precursor,] was able to marshal a wealth of archaeological evidence from the territory of the Soviet Union (and other countries then belonging to the eastern bloc) not readily available to scholars from western countries,[13] enabling her to achieve a fuller picture of prehistoric Europe. "
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Iversen » Sat May 26, 2018 5:46 pm

The article from 2011 points to a problem which also has puzzled me during my researches - namely the scarcity of information about the weapons of the Yamnaya. In ordinary tombs they might put a small dagger of copper or a copper-arsenic alloy - not even one of bronze, which they hadn't acquired yet. Even in VIP graves they would rather put a heavy fillsize oxcart than a sword. And they left their steppes before the chariot was invented, so apart from the mobility the got from their horses it isn't obvious whether they really had any advantage in weaponry.

But their migrations to Europe gave nevertheless rise to quite warlike local cultures. How come?
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Kraut » Tue May 29, 2018 12:56 pm

Very puzzling how they managed to take over control, especially in Greece.
As we can now see in the gene analysis of the Minoans and Myceneans, the proportion of Indo-European arrivals from the steppe is relatively small.

https://www.mpg.de/11421333/genetische- ... er-mykener
http://www.scinexx.de/wissen-aktuell-21 ... 08-03.html

So how did this minority manage to take over the whole country and shape it linguistically and culturally?

In his book "Buch der Königstöchter" the cultural theorist Klaus Theweleit sees a continuous colonial pattern of conquest by eliminating the local kings and appropriating their daughters and countries by rape or defection. From these connections emerge the heroes of Greek mythology. The indigenous peoples then disappear from Greek history, although, as genetics shows, they are still there.
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Whodathunkitz » Tue May 29, 2018 3:30 pm

Iversen wrote:The article from 2011 points to a problem which also has puzzled me during my researches - namely the scarcity of information about the weapons of the Yamnaya. In ordinary tombs they might put a small dagger of copper or a copper-arsenic alloy - not even one of bronze, which they hadn't acquired yet. Even in VIP graves they would rather put a heavy fillsize oxcart than a sword. And they left their steppes before the chariot was invented, so apart from the mobility the got from their horses it isn't obvious whether they really had any advantage in weaponry.

But their migrations to Europe gave nevertheless rise to quite warlike local cultures. How come?


My thoughts - mobility, reconnaissance through trade and the advantage of timing can be very important.

You attack when the enemy is weak (most attackers are predators at heart, not noble). Perhaps dynastic struggles, weak harvest, disease, recovering from another war, army elsewhere attacking some other settlement.

Steppe peoples have often used ambush, feinted retreats and mobility to overwhelm enemies, sometimes in smaller groups. Mobility is key.

Trade may have been important too for knowledge and raw materials. Without metal, armour is restricted to wood and leather but would need a lot of work which a sedentary people might not bother with for the bulk of military (levee).

The Mongols (a much later people) are probably worth investigating as they are better documented, although they did have gunpowder and siege weapons later on.

As I understand, the Vikings used traders' knowledge and mobility in a similar way but on sea.

Being mobile allowed them access to goods and raw materials such as metals, hard stone (obsidian?), a variety of woods and bones that a sedentary people might not have ready access to.

These aggressors didn't have very vulnerable bases, so they could concentrate on raids and wars with less concern for their families, flocks, homes and other resources.

If domination occurred, it could have happened in waves over decades or centuries, gradually chipping away.

Another possibility is tax. Many settled cultures ratchet up tax on the poorest. Eventually there's no point working or farming and joining invaders can be a better option. I can't find it now, but I remember an account of a Roman who ended up in Attila's camp and was happier to be there than subject to arbitrary taxation. Often invaders lightened taxation to make revolts less likely.

Rome split - due to tax, usury, corruption, political power in the hands of a self-serving elite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_secessio_plebis

Lastly, skill at arms:- co-operative hunting and herding is good training for war. Predators would be defended against, hunted and killed for prestige. All good practice. Settled peoples don't do so much (odd wolf).
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Kraut » Wed May 30, 2018 11:47 am

Wars and clan structure may explain a strange biological event 7,000 years ago

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases ... 052918.php

Starting about 7,000 years ago, something weird seems to have happened to men: Over the next two millennia, recent studies suggest, their genetic diversity -specifically, the diversity of their Y chromosomes - collapsed. So extreme was that collapse that it was as if there was only one man left to mate for every 17 women.

Anthropologists and biologists were perplexed, but Stanford researchers now believe they've found a simple - if revealing - explanation. The collapse, they argue, was the result of generations of war between patrilineal clans, whose membership is determined by male ancestors.

The outlines of that idea came to Tian Chen Zeng, a Stanford undergraduate in sociology, after spending hours reading blog posts that speculated - unconvincingly, Zeng thought - on the origins of the "Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck," as the event is known. He soon shared his ideas with his high school classmate Alan Aw, also a Stanford undergraduate in mathematical and computational science.

"He was really waxing lyrical about it," Aw said, so the pair took their idea to Marcus Feldman, a professor of biology in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences. Zeng, Aw and Feldman published their results May 25 in Nature Communications.

A cultural culprit

It's not unprecedented for human genetic diversity to take a nosedive once in a while, but the Y-chromosome bottleneck, which was inferred from genetic patterns in modern humans, was an odd one. First, it was observed only in men - more precisely, it was detected only through genes on the Y chromosome, which fathers pass to their sons. Second, the bottleneck is much more recent than other biologically similar events, hinting that its origins might have something to do with changing social structures.

Certainly, the researchers point out, social structures were changing. After the onset of farming and herding around 12,000 years ago, societies grew increasingly organized around extended kinship groups, many of them patrilineal clans - a cultural fact with potentially significant biological consequences. The key is how clan members are related to each other. While women may have married into a clan, men in such clans are all related through male ancestors and therefore tend to have the same Y chromosomes. From the point of view of those chromosomes at least, it's almost as if everyone in a clan has the same father.


Dominant Y-DNA haplogroups in Europe
https://www.theapricity.com/forum/showt ... our-region
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Kraut » Sat Jun 16, 2018 9:11 pm

http://insitome.libsyn.com/website/y-chromosomal-stars

This week Spencer and Razib discuss the Y-chromosome as tool for studying human history, from early migrations out of Africa to Genghis Khan and Bronze Age bottlenecks.

------

An interesting talk with Spencer Wells, who has been involved in the study of the Y-chromosome right from the begining. In the second part they

speculate on the reasons of the successful expansion of the steppe herders with who we associate the Indo-European languages today.

https://www.amazon.de/Journey-Man-Genet ... 085&sr=1-2
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Iversen » Sun Jun 17, 2018 3:27 pm

I did my lecture about precisely this subject in Bratislava as planned, and one member of the aufience asked how you could know that a major population change in the population of the area wasn't due to peaceful immigration. And I answered that if the variation in mitochondrial haplogroups remained more or less as before the event, while a new and dominant group suddenly turned up among the male haplogroups, then it was almost certain that the event wasn't peaceful.

Kraut's messages above supports this analysis.
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