Yamnaya People: Characteristics, Culture and Migrations | Early European History And Religion

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YAMNAYA CULTURE

Yamnaya culture at its largest expansion: the Usatovo culture originated around 3500 BC; the Yamnaya culture originated around 3300 BC and expanded across the Pontic-Caspian steppe from c 3300–3200 BC; the Yamnaya expaned into the Danube Valley from 3100–2600 BC; Around 2700 BC, after the end of Trypillia culture, the Yamnaya culture transformed into Corded Ware culture in the contact zone east of the Carpathian mountains

The Yamnaya culture is an ancient culture that existed in present-day Ukraine and Russia between the Southern Bug, Dniester, and Ural rivers from 3300 B.C. to 2600 B.C. Regarded as the source of Indo-European languages and pioneers of wheeled vehicles, it was discovered by Vasily Gorodtsov during archaeological excavations near the Donets River in 1901 — 1903. Its name is derived from Russian adjective “yama” which means “related to pits” — a reference to the Yamnaya culture custom of burying their dead in kurgans (tumuli) that contained simple pit chambers. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Yamnaya culture is also known as the Yamna culture, the Pit Grave culture and the Ochre Grave culture. Its economy was based on animal husbandry, fishing, and foraging, and produced ceramics, tools, and weapons. The people of the Yamnaya culture lived primarily as nomads under a chiefdom system and used wheeled carts and wagons to get around and manage large herds of animals. They are also closely connected to Final Neolithic cultures — namely the Corded Ware people, and the Bell Beaker, Sintashta, Andronovo, and Srubnaya cultures — which later spread throughout Europe and Central Asia, Yamnaya material culture is very similar to the Afanasevo culture of South Siberia, and the populations of both cultures are genetically indistinguishable. This suggests that the Afanasevo culture originated from a migration of Yamnaya groups to the Altai region or, alternatively, that both cultures developed from an earlier shared cultural source.

Ann Gibbons wrote in Science: “5000 to 4800 years ago, the Yamnaya swept into Europe. They were an early Bronze Age culture that came from the grasslands, or steppes, of modern-day Russia and Ukraine, bringing with them metallurgy and animal herding skills and, possibly, Proto-Indo-European, the mysterious ancestral tongue from which all of today’s 400 Indo-European languages spring. They immediately interbred with local Europeans, who were descendants of both the farmers and hunter-gatherers. Within a few hundred years, the Yamnaya contributed to at least half of central Europeans’ genetic ancestry. [Source: Ann Gibbons, Science, February 21, 2017 +++]

Good Websites Archaeology News Report archaeologynewsreport.blogspot.com ; Anthropology.net anthropology.net : archaeologica.org archaeologica.org ; Archaeology in Europe archeurope.com ; Archaeology magazine archaeology.org ; HeritageDaily heritagedaily.com; Livescience livescience.com/

Yamnaya People

The Yamnaya were horse-riding cattle herders who built imposing grave mounds called kurgans. Andrew Curry wrote in National Geographic: The Yamnaya were “some of the first people in the world to ride horses and master the wheel. They were building wagons and following herds of cattle across the grasslands. They built few permanent settlements. But they buried their most prominent men with bronze and silver ornaments in mighty grave mounds that still dot the steppes. [Source: Andrew Curry, National Geographic, August 2019]

"The Yamnaya were Europe's first true nomads. They used domesticated cattle and horses to access the interiors of the Asian Steppe, where there is little to eat or drink, so carried everything with them on wagons. Physically they were unusually large, which we can see by measuring the skeletons and also genetically, and apparently fairly violent," University of Cambridge geneticist William Barrie said.

According to the widely-accepted Kurgan hypothesis, of Marija Gimbutas, the people that produced the Yamnaya culture spoke a stage of the Proto Indo-European language, which later spread eastwards and westwards as part of the Indo-European migrations. The Yamnaya culture also brought domesticated horses and a mobile lifestyle based on wagons into Stone Age Europe. Their innovative metal weapons and tools, helped bring the Bronze Age to Europe.

Origins of the Yamnaya Culture

Corded Pottery from Corded Ware Culture

The origin of the Yamnaya culture continues to be debated today. Possible sources include 1) the Khvalynsk culture (4700 — 3800 B.C.) from the middle Volga River region in present-day Russia; 2) the Don-River-based Repin culture (c. 3950 — 3300 B.C.) in the eastern Pontic-Caspian steppe; and 3) the closely related Sredny Stog culture (c. 4500 — 3500 B.C.) in the western Pontic-Caspian steppe. All three of these cultures preceded the Yamnaya culture (3300 — 2500 B.C.). [Source: Wikipedia]

The Pontic — Caspian Steppe is a huge area extending across Eastern Europe to Central Asia from the northern shores of the Black Sea (Pontus Euxinus of antiquity) across areas north of the Caspian Sea, to the Kazakh Steppe in Central Asia, which it part of the larger Eurasian Steppe. In 2007, David Anthony suggested that the Yamnaya culture B.C.) originated in the Don — Volga area around 3400 B.C., preceded by the middle Volga-based Khvalynsk culture and the Don-based Repin culture (c. 3950 — 3300 B.C.), arguing that late pottery from these two cultures can barely be distinguished from early Yamnaya pottery. He argues that the early Yamnaya people spread quickly across the Pontic — Caspian steppes between c. 3400 and 3200 B.C.:

Yamnaya, Sintashta and Corded Ware Cultures

The Sintashta culture is a Middle Bronze Age archaeological culture that existed into the Southern Urals from 2200 B.C. to 1900 B.C.. It is the first phase of the Sintashta — Petrovka complex (c. 2200 — 1750 B.C.). The culture is named after the Sintashta archaeological site, in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, and spreads through Orenburg Oblast, Bashkortostan, and Northern Kazakhstan.. It is widely regarded as the origin of the Indo-Iranian languages (Indo-Iranic languages), whose speakers originally referred to themselves as the Arya. The earliest known chariots have been found in Sintashta burials. According to Allentoft (2015), the Sintashta culture probably derived from the Corded Ware Culture. It is thought the Sintashta culture represents an eastward migration of peoples from the Corded Ware culture. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Corded Ware culture comprises a broad archaeological horizon of Europe between c. 3000 B.C. and 2350 B.C. — from the late Neolithic, through the Copper Age, and ending in the early Bronze Age. The Corded Ware culture resided in a vast area, stretching from the contact zone between the Yamnaya culture and the Corded Ware culture in south Central Europe, to the Rhine in the west and the Volga in the east — occupying parts of Northern Europe, Central Europe and Eastern Europe.

The term Corded Ware culture was first introduced by the German archaeologist Friedrich Klopfleisch in 1883. He named it after cord-like impressions or ornamentation characteristic of its pottery. Early autosomal genetic studies have suggested that the Corded Ware culture originated from the westward migration of Yamnaya-related people from the steppe-forest zone into the territory of late Neolithic European cultures, however, paternal DNA evidence fails to support this hypothesis, and it is now proposed that the Corded Ware culture evolved in parallel with (although under significant influence from) the Yamnaya, with no evidence of direct male-line descent between them.

Yamnaya Culture Characteristics

Depiction of Yamnaya culture life, except maybe they didn't fish so much

Yamnaya people were buried in pit graves under kurgans (tumuli), often accompanied by animal offerings. Some graves contain large stelae, with carved human heads, arms, hands, belts, and weapons. Dea dead bodies were placed in the graves face up with their knees bent, covered in ochre. Some kurgans contained "stratified sequences of graves". Kurgan burials may have been rare, and were perhaps reserved adults of high status. Most were males. Status and gender can be determined by grave goods and position. In some places, elite individuals are buried with complete wooden wagons.

The Yamnaya culture herded cattle and sheep. Stable isotope ratios of Yamna individuals from the Dnipro Valley suggest the Yamnaya diet was mainly from land animals. The amount protein derived from fish is negligible. Anthony theorizes the Yamnaya ate meat, milk, yogurt, cheese, and soups made from seeds and wild vegetables, and probably consumed mead.

The Yamnaya culture built imposing grave mounds like the one near Žabalj, Serbia. Yamnaya artifacts from their homeland in Russia and Ukraine include a 3.3 meter (four-foot) -tall anthropomorphic stela from 3000 B.C. featuring axes and horses; knife blades and other tools made of bronze; and necklace made of fish teeth. Archaeologists have found a human skull painted with ocher, a natural clay pigment and sheep ankle bones were used for games. [Source: Andrew Curry, National Geographic, August 2019]

Mallory and Adams suggest that Yamnaya society may have had a tripartite structure of three differentiated social classes, although the evidence available does not demonstrate the existence of specific classes such as priests, warriors, and farmers. Geneticist David Reich argues that the genetic evidence shows that Yamnaya society was an oligarchy dominated by a small number of elite males. Metal workers and other craftsmen are given a special status in Yamnaya society. Metal objects are sometimes found in large quantities in elite graves. New metalworking technologies and weapon designs were developed during the Yamnaya culture period.

Yamnaya Culture, Carts, Chariots and Horses

Yamnaya wagon

The Yamnaya culture used two-wheeled carts and four-wheeled wagons, which are thought to have been pulled mainly by oxen. There is evidence that they rode horses. Several Yamnaya skeletons appear to have bone morphology characteristic of people who engage in long-term horseback riding. The Sintashta culture is thought to have evolved from the Yamnaya culture. The earliest known chariots have been found in Sintashta burials.

According to Archaeology magazine: Horses were first domesticated around 5,500 years ago on the Eurasian steppe and were bred for their milk. Just a few centuries later, researchers have discovered, the people of the Yamnaya culture became the first to ride them. Archaeologists examined the skeletal remains of Yamnaya burials across Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. They noticed considerable musculoskeletal damage to the femurs, hips, and vertebrae of some individuals, which they believe was caused by the trauma of frequent horse riding. [Source: Archaeology magazine, May 2023

“The culture of the Russian and Kazakhstan steppes was virtually unknown until” the early 1980s, John Wilford wrote in the New York Times, “when Russian archeologists began systematic excavations at several sites east of the Ural Mountains. One of the first sites explored was at a place called Sintashta, southeast of the city of Magnitogorsk. At Sintashta, archeologists uncovered a large settlement of about 50 rectangular structures arranged in a circle within a timber-reinforced earthen wall. They found slag deposits from copper metallurgy, bronze weapons and gold earrings and the remains of six chariots in a cemetery of elite graves covered by earth mounds, or kurgans. Similar artifacts, and more chariots, were discovered at several other sites. [Source: John Noble Wilford, New York Times, February 22, 1994]

Yamnaya Culture Genetics and DNA

DNA studies indicate the the Yamnaya culture is a genetic admixture of hunter-gatherers related to Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) from eastern Europe and Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (CHG) from the Caucasus or Iran and people "Steppe ancestry", with smaller amounts of admixture from Anatolian, Levantine, or Early European farmers. Admixture between EHGs and CHGs is believed to have occurred on the eastern Pontic-Caspian steppe starting around 5,000 B.C., while admixture with Early European Farmers (EEF) happened in the southern parts of the Pontic-Caspian steppe sometime later.

People of the Yamnaya culture are believed to have had mostly brown eyes, light to intermediate skin, and brown hair, with some variation. Some Yamnaya individuals are believed to have carried a mutation to the KITLG gene associated with blond hair, as several individuals with Steppe ancestry are later found to carry this mutation. The Ancient North Eurasian Afontova Gora group, who contributed significant ancestry to Western Steppe Herders, are believed to be the source of this mutation. A study in 2015 found that Yamnaya had the highest ever calculated genetic selection for height of any of the ancient populations tested. It has been hypothesized that an allele associated with lactase persistence (conferring lactose tolerance into adulthood) was brought to Europe from the steppe by Yamnaya-related migrations.

Yamnaya Culture Language and Proto-Indo-European (PIE) Language

Yamnaya daggers, arrowheads and bone artefacts

Marija Gimbutas identified the Yamnaya culture with the late Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE) in her Kurgan hypothesis. In the view of David Anthony, the Pontic-Caspian steppe is the strongest candidate for the Urheimat (original homeland) of the Proto-Indo-European language, citing evidence from linguistics and genetics which suggests that the Yamnaya culture may be the homeland of the Indo-European languages, with the possible exception of the Anatolian languages. On the other hand, Colin Renfrew has argued for a Near Eastern origin of the earliest Indo-European speakers.

According to David W. Anthony, the genetic evidence suggests that the leading clans of the Yamnaya were of EHG (Eastern European hunter-gatherer) and WHG (Western European hunter-gatherer) paternal origin and implies that the Indo-European languages were the result of "a dominant language spoken by EHGs that absorbed Caucasus-like elements in phonology, morphology, and lexicon." It has also been suggested that the PIE language evolved through trade interactions in the circum-Pontic area in the 4th millennium B.C., mediated by the Yamna predecessors in the North Pontic steppe.

Guus Kroonen et al. 2022 found that the "basal Indo-European stage", also known as Indo-Anatolian or Pre-Proto-Indo-European language, largely but not totally, lacked agricultural-related vocabulary, and only the later "core Indo-European languages" saw an increase in agriculture-associated words. According to them, this fits a homeland of early core Indo-European within the westernmost Yamnaya people, around and west of the Dnieper, while its basal stage, Indo-Anatolian, may have originated in the Sredny Stog culture, as opposed to the eastern Yamnaya people.

Yamnaya Culture and the Spread of Indo-European Language

Harvard geneticist David Reich has argued that the genetic data supports the likelihood that the people of the Yamnaya culture were a "single, genetically coherent group" who were responsible for spreading many Indo-European languages. Reich's group has suggested that the source of Anatolian and Indo-European subfamilies of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language may have been in west Asia and the Yamna were responsible for dissemination it. [Source: Wikipedia]

The genetic evidence for the extent of the role of the Yamnaya culture in the spread of Indo-European languages has been questioned by Russian archaeologist Leo Klejn and Balanovsky et al., who note a lack of male haplogroup continuity between the people of the Yamnaya culture and the contemporary populations of Europe. Klejn has also suggested that the autosomal evidence does not support a Yamnaya migration, arguing that Western Steppe Herder ancestry in both contemporary and Bronze Age samples is lowest around the Danube in Hungary, near the western limits of the Yamnaya culture, and highest in Northern Europe, which Klejn argues is the opposite of what would be expected if the geneticists' hypothesis is correct.

The Corded Ware culture may have acted as major source for the spread of later Indo-European languages, including Indo-Iranian, while Tocharian languages may have been mediated via the Catacomb culture. Guus Kroonen et al. 2022 argue that their data contradicts a possible earlier origin of Pre-Proto-Indo-European among agricultural societies South of the Caucasus, rather "this may support a scenario of linguistic continuity of local non-mobile herders in the Lower Dnieper region and their genetic persistence after their integration into the successive and expansive Yamnaya horizon". Furthermore the authors mention that this scenario can explain the difference in paternal haplogroup frequency between the Yamnaya and Corded Ware cultures, while both sharing similar autosomal DNA ancestry.

Indo-European migrations

Yamnaya Culture Migrations — the Genetic Evidence

Genetic studies have found that Yamnaya autosomal characteristics are very close to the Corded Ware culture people, with up to 75 percent Yamnaya-like ancestry in the DNA of Corded Ware skeletons from Central and Eastern Europe. Yamnaya — related ancestry is found in the DNA of modern Central, and Northern Europeans (c. 38.8 — 50.4 percent), and is also found in lower levels in present-day Southern Europeans (c. 18.5 — 32.6 percent), Sardinians (c. 2.4 — 7.1 percent), and Sicilians (c. 5.9 — 11.6 percent).

However, according to Heyd, et al. (2023), the specific paternal DNA haplogroup that is most commonly found in male Yamnaya specimens cannot be found in modern Western Europeans, or in males from the nearby Corded Ware culture. This makes it unlikely that the Corded Ware culture can be directly descended from the Yamnaya culture, at least along the paternal line.

Autosomal tests also indicate that the Yamnaya are the vector for "Ancient North Eurasian" admixture into Europe. "Ancient North Eurasian" is the name given in literature to a genetic component that represents descent from the people of the Mal'ta — Buret' culture or a population closely related to them. That genetic component is visible in tests of the Yamnaya people as well as modern-day Europeans.

Yamnaya Culture Migrations into Europe

Three waves of immigrants settled prehistoric Europe. The last, some 5,000 years ago, was by the Yamnaya. Among modern Europeans Yamnaya bloodlines are strongest in the north. Those of Neolithic farmers from the second wave are strongest in the south. In the Baltic, Jones et al. (2017) found that the Neolithic transition — the passage from a hunter-gatherer economy to a farming-based economy — coincided with the arrival en masse of individuals with Yamnaya-like ancestry. This is different from what happened in Western and Southern Europe, where the Neolithic transition was caused by a population that came from Anatolia, with Pontic steppe ancestry being detected from only the late Neolithic onward. Per Haak et al. (2015), the Yamnaya contribution in the modern populations of Eastern Europe ranges from 46.8 percent among Russians to 42.8 percent in Ukrainians. Finland has the highest Yamnaya contributions in all of Europe (50.4 percent). [Source: Wikipedia]

Horses were domesticated on the Pontic-Caspian steppe where the Yamnaya were from; perhaps they introduced them to Europe

Andrew Curry wrote in National Geographic: By 2800 B.C, archaeological excavations show, the Yamnaya had begun moving west, probably looking for greener pastures. Włodarczak’s mound near Žabalj is the westernmost Yamnaya grave found so far. But genetic evidence, Reich and others say, shows that many Corded Ware people were, to a large extent, their descendants. Like those Corded Ware skeletons, the Yamnaya shared distant kinship with Native Americans — whose ancestors hailed from farther east, in Siberia. [Source: Andrew Curry, National Geographic, August 2019]

“Within a few centuries, other people with a significant amount of Yamnaya DNA had spread as far as the British Isles. In Britain and some other places, hardly any of the farmers who already lived in Europe survived the onslaught from the east. In what is now Germany, “there’s a 70 percent to possibly 100 percent replacement of the local population,” Reich says. “Something very dramatic happens 4,500 years ago.” Until then, farmers had been thriving in Europe for millennia. They had settled from Bulgaria all the way to Ireland, often in complex villages that housed hundreds or even thousands of people. Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, Finland, estimates there were as many as seven million people in Europe in 3000 B.C. In Britain, Neolithic people were constructing Stonehenge. “When construction of Stonehenge began about 3000 B.C., Britain was inhabited by Neolithic farmers. A millennium later, when it was finished, the Neolithic population had been replaced by descendants of the Yamnaya — perhaps because the latter carried plague.

Genetic Evidence of Yamnaya Culture Displacement in Europe

Andrew Curry wrote in National Geographic:“To many archaeologists, the idea that a bunch of nomads could replace such an established civilization within a few centuries has seemed implausible. “How the hell would these pastoral, decentralized groups overthrow grounded Neolithic society, even if they had horses and were good warriors?” asks Kristian Kristiansen, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. [Source: Andrew Curry, National Geographic, August 2019]

“A clue comes from the teeth of 101 people living on the steppes and farther west in Europe around the time that the Yamnaya’s westward migration began. In seven of the samples, alongside the human DNA, geneticists found the DNA of an early form of Yersinia pestis — the plague microbe that killed roughly half of all Europeans in the 14th century.

Yamnaya kurgan in Prydnistryanske, Ukraine

“Unlike that flea-borne Black Death, this early variant had to be passed from person to person. The steppe nomads apparently had lived with the disease for centuries, perhaps building up immunity or resistance — much as the Europeans who colonized the Americas carried smallpox without succumbing to it wholesale. And just as smallpox and other diseases ravaged Native American populations, the plague, once introduced by the first Yamnaya, might have spread rapidly through crowded Neolithic villages. That could explain both their surprising collapse and the rapid spread of Yamnaya DNA from Russia to Britain. “Plague epidemics cleared the way for the Yamnaya expansion,” says Morten Allentoft, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who helped identify the ancient plague DNA.

“But that theory has a major question: Evidence of plague has only just recently been documented in ancient Neolithic skeletons, and so far, no one has found anything like the plague pits full of diseased skeletons left behind after the Black Death. If a plague wiped out Europe’s Neolithic farmers, it left little trace.

How the Yamnaya Genetically Reshaped Europe’s Population

High Yamnaya-related ancestry exists in Northern Europeans, peaking in Ireland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and decreasing further south."We think that much of the replacement that happened involved warfare," University of California, Berkeley population geneticist Rasmus Nielsen said. Because the Yamnaya were genetically predisposed to being tall, present-day Northern Europeans tend to be taller than Southern Europeans, who have greater ancestry from Neolithic farmers who were genetically predisposed to being short. [Source: Will Dunham, Reuters, January 11, 2024]

After the Yamnaya swept into Europe they left behind their DNA with European women who passed the DNA on down through the generations. The mostly male migration may have persisted for several generations, leaving a lasting impact on the genomes of living Europeans. “It looks like males migrating in war, with horses and wagons,” says Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in Sweden, a population geneticist and lead author of a study on the migration.[Source: Ann Gibbons, Science, February 21, 2017 +++]

Ann Gibbons wrote in Science: ““To find out why this migration of Yamnaya had such a big impact on European ancestry, researchers turned to genetic data from earlier studies of archaeological samples. They analyzed differences in DNA inherited by 20 ancient Europeans who lived just after the migration of Anatolian farmers (6000 to 4500 years ago) and 16 who lived just after the influx of Yamnaya (3000 to 1000 years ago). The team zeroed in on differences in the ratio of DNA inherited on their X chromosomes compared with the 22 chromosomes that do not determine sex, the so-called autosomes. This ratio can reveal the proportion of men and women in an ancestral population, because women carry two X chromosomes, whereas men have only one. +++

Yamnaya tomb

“Europeans who were alive from before the Yamnaya migration inherited equal amounts of A from Anatolian farmers on their X chromosome and their autosomes, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This means roughly equal numbers of men and women took part in the migration of Anatolian farmers into Europe. “But when the researchers looked at the DNA later Europeans inherited from the Yamnaya, they found that Bronze Age Europeans had far less Yamnaya DNA on their X than on their other chromosomes. Using a statistical method developed by graduate student Amy Goldberg in the lab of population geneticist Noah Rosenberg at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, the team calculated that there were perhaps 10 men for every woman in the migration of Yamnaya men to Europe (with a range of five to 14 migrating men for every woman). That ratio is “extreme”—even more lopsided than the mostly male wave of Spanish conquistadores who came by ship to the Americas in the late 1500s, Goldberg says. +++

“Such a skewed ratio raises red flags for some researchers, who warn it is notoriously difficult to estimate the ratio of men to women accurately in ancient populations. But if confirmed, one explanation is that the Yamnaya men were warriors who swept into Europe on horses or drove horse-drawn wagons; horses had been recently domesticated in the steppe and the wheel was a recent invention. They may have been “more focused on warfare, with faster dispersal because of technological inventions” says population geneticist Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley, who is not part of the study. But warfare isn’t the only explanation. The Yamnaya men could have been more attractive mates than European farmers because they had horses and new technologies, such as copper hammers that gave them an advantage, Goldberg says. +++

“The finding that Yamnaya men migrated for many generations also suggests that all was not right back home in the steppe. “It would imply a continuing strongly negative push factor within the steppes, such as chronic epidemics or diseases,” says archaeologist David Anthony of Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, who was not an author of the new study. Or, he says it could be the beginning of cultures that sent out bands of men to establish new politically aligned colonies in distant lands, as in later groups of Romans or Vikings.” +++

Yamnaya Culture and the Introduction of Indo-European Languages to Europe

Andrew Curry wrote in National Geographic: The arrival of Yamnaya culture to Europe “matches the time linguists pinpoint as the initial spread of Indo-European languages. All are thought to have evolved from a single proto-Indo-European tongue, and the question of where it was spoken and by whom has been debated since the 19th century. According to one theory, it was the Neolithic farmers from Anatolia who brought it into Europe along with farming. [Source: Andrew Curry, National Geographic, August 2019]

recreation of a Yamnaya burial

“Another theory, proposed a century ago by a German scholar named Gustaf Kossinna, held that the proto-Indo-Europeans were an ancient race of north Germans — the people who made Corded Ware pots and axes. Kossinna thought that the ethnicity of people in the past — their biological identity, in effect — could be deduced from the stuff they left behind. “Sharply defined archaeological cultural areas,” he wrote, “correspond unquestionably with the areas of particular people or tribes.”

“The north German tribe of proto-Indo-Europeans, Kossinna argued, had moved outward and dominated an area that stretched most of the way to Moscow. Nazi propagandists later used that as an intellectual justification for the modern Aryan “master race” to invade eastern Europe. Partly as a result, for decades after World War II the whole idea that ancient cultural shifts might be explained by migrations fell into ill repute in some archaeological circles. Even today it makes some archaeologists uncomfortable when geneticists draw bold arrows across maps of Europe. “This kind of simplicity leads back to Kossinna,” says Heyd, who’s German. “It calls back old demons of blond, blue-eyed guys coming back somehow out of the hell where they were sent after World War II.”

“Yet ancient DNA, which provides direct information about the biology of ancient humans, has become a strong argument against Kossinna’s theory. First, in documenting the spread of the Yamnaya and their descendants deeper and deeper into Europe at just the right time, the DNA evidence supports the favored theory among linguists: that proto-Indo-Europeans migrated into Europe from the Russian steppe, not the other way around. Second, together with archaeology it amounts to a rejection of Kossinna’s claim that some kind of pure race exists in Europe, one that can be identified from its cultural artifacts.

Yamnaya Culture Migrations into Asia

Studies indicate a strong Yamnaya presence in South Asia, especially in groups that are referred to as Indo-Aryans. According to Pathak et al. (2018), the "North-Western Indian & Pakistani" populations (PNWI) showed significant Middle-Late Bronze Age Steppe (Steppe_MLBA) ancestry along with Yamnaya Early-Middle Bronze Age (Steppe_EMBA) ancestry, but the Indo-Europeans of Gangetic Plains and Dravidian people only showed significant Yamnaya (Steppe_EMBA) ancestry and no Steppe_MLBA. The study also noted that ancient south Asian samples had significantly higher Steppe_MLBA than Steppe_EMBA (or Yamnaya). The study identified the Rors and Jats as the population in South Asia with the highest proportion of Steppe ancestry. Lazaridis et al. (2016) estimated (6.5 — 50.2 percent) steppe-related admixture in South Asians, though the proportion of Steppe ancestry varies widely across ethnic groups.

Yamnaya metal objects from Russia

According to Narasimhan et al. (2019), the Yamnaya-related ancestry, termed Western_Steppe_EMBA, that reached central and south Asia was not the initial expansion from the steppe to the east, but a secondary expansion that involved a group possessing ~67 percent Western_Steppe_EMBA ancestry and ~33 percent ancestry from the European cline. This group included people similar to that of Corded Ware, Srubnaya, Petrovka, and Sintashta. Moving further east in the central steppe, it acquired ~9 percent ancestry from a group of people that possessed West Siberian Hunter Gatherer ancestry, thus forming the Central Steppe MLBA cluster, which is the primary source of steppe ancestry in South Asia, contributing up to 30 percent of the ancestry of the modern groups in the region.

According to Unterländer et al. (2017), all Iron Age Scythian Steppe nomads can best be described as a mixture of Yamnaya-related ancestry and an East Asian-related component, which most closely corresponds to the modern North Siberian Nganasan people of the lower Yenisey River, to varying degrees, but generally higher among Eastern Scythians.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu, gutenberg.org National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Encyclopædia Britannica, "The Discoverers" and "The Creators" by Daniel Boorstin, Wikipedia, “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books) and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024