Yamnaya

[jsburbidge]

From a BBC article on recent DNA studies in European archaeology:

"In a paper published in the journal Genetics in 2012 , Reich and his colleagues had spotted that Northern and Central Europeans appeared to have received genetic input from a population related to Native Americans.

Further evidence from ancient DNA would confirm that this distinctive genetic signature had entered Europe for the first time during a mass migration of people from the steppe , on Europe's eastern periphery.

These nomadic steppe pastoralists, known as the Yamnaya, moved west in the late Neolithic and Bronze Age, around 5,000 years ago. In some areas of Europe, they replaced around 75% of the ancestry of existing populations."

What the article doesn't mention is that the Yamnaya are the people who, following the Kurgan hypothesis, spoke PIE; this provides some fairly good backup for the theory. It indicates, as well, that the language overlay came with an influx of a significant body of people, and not simply as a cultural overlay associated with the wheel and a sky-father based religion.

The Yamnaya - Western Europe's cultural as well as genetic ancestors - look like an early instance of the later waves of pastoralists who came west (and east - don't forget Tokharian) as migrant conquerors: Huns, Magyars, Mongols, and Turks.

The findings reported on in the article, in general, suggest that models of prehistory emphasizing peaceful transfer of cultures (such as that in Francis Pryor's Home) are unfortunately wildly optomistic: just as there's evidence for continuity of populations, there's also now evidence for the types of admixture which come from conquest. (The combination is quite believable: if you come riding in as a conqueror you're more likely to want to keep the locals to provide rents in the form of food and service rather than putting them to the sword.)