Amazing stuff! Stunning! Very recommendable! The discovery of a missing link or the melting pot of the Indo-European languages.
Plus, it is even relevant for the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War!
"... A pair of landmark studies ... has finally identified the originators of the Indo-European family of 400-plus languages, spoken today by more than 40 percent of the world’s population.
DNA evidence places them in current-day Russia during the Eneolithic period about 6,500 years ago. These linguistic pioneers were spread from the steppe grasslands along the lower Volga River to the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, with researchers dubbing them the Caucasus Lower Volga people. Genetic results show they mixed with other groups in the region. ...
These nomadic pastoralists ... The Yamnaya were probably the first to herd on horseback and early adopters (if not inventors) of oxen-towed wagons. ...
The influential 2007 book “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World” ... represented a deep dive into the Yamnaya’s role in disseminating a proto-Indo-European language that predated writing.
With larger herds and superior mobility, the Yamnaya started exporting their economy — and their language — about 5,000 years ago. “They spread from the steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas all the way to Mongolia on one side and as far as Ireland on the other — 6,000 kilometers!” ...
The 2015 Nature paper credited the Yamnaya with carrying Indo-European languages across Europe and into the Indian subcontinent. Later papers ..., followed their genetic footprints into Greece, Armenia, India, and China. ...
The Caucasus Lower Volga people appear to be that original source, with newly uncovered links to both the Yamnaya and the ancient Indo-Anatolian speakers who inhabited an area that is now part of Turkey. ...
“It’s the first time we have a genetic picture unifying all Indo-European languages,” ...
But the Russia-Ukraine war forced an unusual splintering of the findings.
A first paper, focused on the origins of Indo-European languages, draws on the ancient DNA of 354 individuals at archaeological sites in Russia and Southeastern Europe.
A second [paper], authored with researchers in Kyiv, is based on 81 ancient DNA samples drawn from Ukraine and Moldova. Also part of the analyses are genetic data on nearly 1,000 previously reported ancient individuals. ...
The first paper traces various lineages from the Caucasus Lower Volga people, including the Yamnaya and the Anatolians, while samples analyzed for the
second [paper] provided rich new context on the “Yamna” (the Ukrainian term for Yamnaya). The paper finds evidence that the culture may have taken root somewhere near the small town of Mykhailivka in the southern part of the war-torn country. ...
What is now clear is that a population of Caucasus Lower Volga people moved west and started mixing with locals, thereby forming the distinct Yamnaya genome. ...
Language isn’t the only tradition the Yamnaya carried on from their Caucasus Lower Volga forebears. Both cultures buried their dead in kurgans, or large tombs with earth mounded on top. These graves, which still dot the region’s flat landscape, attracted generations of archaeologists and have now enabled “the genetic reconstruction of their makers’ origins presented here,” ..."
From the abstract (1):
"The Yamnaya archaeological complex appeared around 3300 bc across the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and by 3000 bc it reached its maximal extent, ranging from Hungary in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. To localize Yamnaya origins among the preceding Eneolithic people, we assembled ancient DNA from 435 individuals, demonstrating three genetic clines.
A Caucasus–lower Volga (CLV) cline suffused with Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry extended between a Caucasus Neolithic southern end and a northern end at Berezhnovka along the lower Volga river.
Bidirectional gene flow created intermediate populations, such as the north Caucasus Maikop people, and those at Remontnoye on the steppe. The Volga cline was formed as CLV people mixed with upriver populations of Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry, creating hypervariable groups, including one at Khvalynsk.
The Dnipro cline was formed when CLV people moved west, mixing with people with Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry along the Dnipro and Don rivers to establish Serednii Stih groups, from whom Yamnaya ancestors formed around 4000 bc and grew rapidly after 3750–3350 bc. The CLV people contributed around four-fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya and, entering Anatolia, probably from the east, at least one-tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, who spoke Hittite.
We therefore propose that the final unity of the speakers of ‘proto-Indo-Anatolian’, the language ancestral to both Anatolian and Indo-European people, occurred in CLV people some time between 4400 bc and 4000 bc."
From the abstract (2):
"The North Pontic Region was the meeting point of the farmers of Old Europe and the foragers and pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe, and the source of migrations deep into Europe.
Here we report genome-wide data from 81 prehistoric North Pontic individuals to understand the genetic makeup of its people. North Pontic foragers had ancestry from Balkan and Eastern hunter-gatherers as well as European farmers and, occasionally, Caucasus hunter-gatherers.
During the Eneolithic period, a wave of migrants from the Caucasus–Lower Volga area bypassed local foragers to mix in equal parts with Trypillian farmers, forming the people of the Usatove culture around 4500 bce.
A temporally overlapping wave of migrants from the Caucasus–Lower Volga blended with foragers instead of farmers to form Serednii Stih people.
The third wave was the Yamna—descendants of the Serednii Stih who formed by mixture around 4000 bce and expanded during the Early Bronze Age (3300 bce). The temporal gap between Serednii Stih and the Yamna is bridged by a genetically Yamna individual from Mykhailivka, Ukraine (3635–3383 bce), a site of archaeological continuity across the Eneolithic–Bronze Age transition and a likely epicentre of Yamna formation.
Each of these three waves of migration propagated distinctive ancestries while also incorporating outsiders, a flexible strategy that may explain the success of the peoples of the North Pontic in spreading their genes and culture across Eurasia."
The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans (no public access)
A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age (no public access)
Genetic reconstruction of the ancestry of Pontic-Caspian steppe and West Asian populations points to four key locations.
No comments:
Post a Comment