Author: Bruce Bower / Source: Science News
Hundreds of years before changing the genetic face of Bronze Age Europeans, herders based in western Asia’s steppe grasslands were already mingling and occasionally mating with nearby farmers in southeastern Europe.
That surprising finding, published online February 4 in Nature Communications, raises novel questions about a pivotal time when widespread foraging and farming populations interacted in Eurasia’s Caucasus region. Those exchanges presumably sparked the geographic spread of metalworking, the wheel and wagon, and Indo-European languages still spoken in much of the world.
Archaeologists have often assumed that, as early as around 5,600 years ago, Caucasus farmers known as the Maykop migrated north in big numbers, bringing metalworking and early Indo-European tongues to herders who roamed grasslands on the edge of the region. In that scenario, this cultural exchange led steppe herders to develop a horse-and-wagon lifestyle that the nomads later transported to Europe and Asia, along with Indo-European languages, starting about 5,000 years ago (SN: 11/25/17, p. 16). Researchers call those mobile herders Yamnaya people.
An ancient DNA analysis unexpectedly found signs of mating more than 5,000 years ago between western Asian Yamnaya herders and European farmers, possibly from the Globular Amphora Culture. In another surprise, Maykop farmers thought by many researchers to have dramatically influenced Yamnaya culture left no genetic mark on the herders. The dotted lines represent the suspected spheres of influence exercised by the Globular Amphora Culture and the Maykop people in Yamnaya territory.
The possible intersection of three ancient cultures more than 5,000 years ago
But in an unexpected twist, Yamnaya DNA shows signs of a…
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