[175][note 16] Three genetic studies in 2015 concluded that subclades of Y-DNA haplogroups R1b and R1a and an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans were introduced by Yamnaya-related populations from the West Eurasian Steppe, along with the Indo-European languages. It is, first of all, a linguistic classification, intended to designate any society which inherited or adopted, and transmitted, an Iranian language. Harney wrote up the findings, in a paper co-authored by twenty-seven other scientists. In Fr. found that four late Corded Ware people (25002300 BCE) buried at Esperstadt, Germany, were genetically very close to the Yamna-people, suggesting that a massive migration took place from the Eurasian steppes to Central Europe. [316], The Sintashta culture emerged from the interaction of two antecedent cultures. [116], At ca. Devotees of Nanda Devi carry parasols and wear bangles on the pilgrimage. "[197], According to Anthony (2007), the Corded Ware originated north-east of the Carpathian mountains, and spread across northern Europe after 3000 BCE, with an "initial rapid spread" between 2900 and 2700 BCE. Aside from a single iron spearhead, no weapons were found, and there was no trace of horses. The last mention of the Phrygian language in literature dates to the fifth century CE and it was likely extinct by the seventh century.[305]. The Germanic languages are also related to the Baltic and Slavic languages, which in turn share similarities with the Indo-Iranic languages. [136] According to Anthony, descendants of archaic Proto-Indo-European steppe herders, who moved into the lower Danube valley about 42004000 BCE, later moved into Anatolia, at an unknown time, but maybe as early as 3,000 BCE. (2015) confirms the migration of Yamnaya-people into western Europe, forming the Corded Ware culture. Reich and Harney reject Fiedels genetic interpretation. [59] Similarly, according to Marija Gimbutas, the Corded Ware culture, after migrating to Scandinavia, synthesized with the Funnelbeaker culture, giving birth to the Proto-Germanic language. A simpler explanation would be that the Roopkund B bones somehow got mixed up while sitting in storage. However, the appearance of the Kassites in Mesopotamia in the 18th century BCE has been connected to the contemporary Indo-European expansion into the region at the time. [203] According to Mallory, around 2400 BCE the people of the Corded Ware replaced their predecessors and expanded to Danubian and northern areas of western Germany. Iran Chalcolithic people with a Caucasian hunter-gatherer component. [258] Every Slavic ethnicity has emigrated to other parts of the world. 2008. In other words, he adds, it wasn't a one-way trip.. Nevertheless, these days the Anatolian hypothesis is generally rejected, since it is incompatible with the growing data on the genetic history of the Yamnaya-people. An origin at the Pontic-Caspian steppes is the most widely accepted scenario of Indo-European origins. The most popular hypothesis for the origin and spread of the language is the Kurgan hypothesis, which postulates an origin in the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe. Because carbon-14 dating is difficult to interpret for the period between 1650 and 1950, the deaths could have occurred anytime during that span, but with a slightly higher probability in the eighteenth century. [279] The first account of Illyrian peoples comes from the Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax, an ancient Greek text of the middle of the 4th century BCE that describes coastal passages in the Mediterranean. The new study established that multiple groups had died at the lake centuries apart. According to this model, the Kurgan culture gradually expanded to the entire PonticCaspian steppe, Kurgan IV being identified with the Yamnaya culture of around 3000BC. [42][web 8], Late PIE is related to the Yamnaya culture. This story is retold in Mountain Goddess, a 1991 book by the American anthropologist William Sax. According to the latest study by Kassian et al. [web 1][196] BCE) probably played an essential role in the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages in Europe during the Copper and Bronze Ages. [19] The first strong archaeological evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from the Sredny Stog culture north of the Azov Sea in Ukraine, and would correspond to an early PIE or pre-PIE nucleus of the 5thmillenniumBC. It also shows how DNA evidence can upset established archeological theories and bring rejected ones back into contention. Ad Choices. Alexander the Great invaded India in 326 B.C., having previously swept through what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan. [40], The Indo-European eastward expansion in the 2nd millennium BCE had a significant influence on Chinese culture,[148] introducing the chariot,[web 12] horse burials,[web 13][149] the domesticated horse,[148][150] iron technology,[148][web 14] and wheeled vehicles,[151][152][153][154] fighting styles, head-and-hoof rituals, art motifs and myths. Kurgan hypothesis - Wikipedia The pits into which they are said to have sunk are still visible high on a mountainside. [251][252][253], The Balts or Baltic peoples (Lithuanian: baltai, Latvian: balti) are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group who speak the Baltic languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family, which was originally spoken by tribes living in the area east of the Jutland peninsula in the west and west of Moscow and the Oka and Volga rivers basins in the east. They then expanded into northern South Asia, where one branch of the Yuezhi founded the Kushan Empire. An ancient human bone is packed with DNA, but, in many cases, ninety-nine per cent or more of that is not human. It is generally proposed that a proto-Thracian people developed from a mixture of indigenous peoples and Indo-Europeans from the time of Proto-Indo-European expansion in the Early Bronze Age[266] when the latter, around 1500 BCE, mixed with indigenous peoples. (2018), in the linguistic supplement to Damgaard et al. [38] The Tarim mummies were thought to represent a migration of Tocharian speakers from the Afanasevo culture into the Tarim Basin. The populous Sarmatian tribe of the Massagetae, dwelling near the Caspian Sea, were known to the early rulers of Persia in the Achaemenid Period. The second-oldest branch language group, Tocharian, was spoken in the Tarim Basin (now western China), after splitting from early PIE spoken on the eastern Pontic steppe. In 2008, David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, made the first of many trips to the country, and visited a leading life-science research institution, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, in Hyderabad. There isnt any gold on the skeletons, no rings, necklaces, or anklets on the victims. The history of the Hittite civilization is known mostly from cuneiform texts found in the area of their kingdom, and from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in various archives in Egypt and the Middle East. The study argues that more than 90% of Britain's Neolithic gene pool was replaced with the coming of the Beaker people,[180] who were around 50% WSH ancestry. Arguments for the identification of the Proto-Indo-Europeans as steppe nomads from the PonticCaspian region had already been made in the 19th century by the German scholars, Theodor Benfey (1869) and Victor Hehn[de] (1870), followed notably by Otto Schrader (1883, 1890). [82] According to Anthony, hunting-fishing camps from the lower Volga, dated 62004500 BCE, could be the remains of people who contributed the CHG-component, similar to the Hotu cave, migrating from northwestern Iran or Azerbaijan via the western Caspian coast. It's a straightforward, compelling idea. The lake, some thought, was a place where holy men committed ritual suicide. Alister Hardy: Aquatic ape theory: our species evolved in water. [168], The Yamnaya horizon (a.k.a. You need a dialogue from the beginning., Reich acknowledges that geneticists need to be careful about how they discuss their work. The Criticism of Kurgan Theory Forgotten History 185 subscribers Subscribe 5.6K views 3 years ago In this episode I discuss why I don't believe in the Kurgan theory. By the middle of 2017, it was apparent that the Roopkund bones belonged to three distinct groups of people. [342] They are last mentioned in 938 when a Wusun chieftain paid tribute to the Liao dynasty. In other words, most of the Roopkund dead probably perished as Sax almost did, when he was an undergraduatestaggering around in a sudden blizzard and looking for their companions. She defined the "Kurgan culture" as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures of the Dnieper/Volga region in the Copper Age (early 4th millennium BCE). The Anatolian languages have also spurred a major re-evaluation of theories concerning the development of various shared Indo-European language features and the extent to which these features were present in PIE itself. Everybody in the Roopkund B population is mature. He said that the majority of archeologists and anthropologists welcome the insights that genetic research provides, although there are a small number of Luddites who want to break our machines. In our conversations, Reich emphasized that the findings of geneticists were almost always unexpected and tended to explode stereotypes. Reich wrote back to him saying that the full DNA from Roopkund B was extremely different from Armenians both modern and ancient. Whats more, scholars increasingly view British reports about Thuggees as inaccurate or embellished, reflecting the colonialist fear and incomprehension of the country they occupied. [220], According to Herrin, the Germanic peoples are believed to have emerged about 1800 BCE with the Nordic Bronze Age (c.1700-500 BCE). However, Eric P. Hamp suggests that Phrygian was related to Italo-Celtic in a hypothetical "Northwest Indo-European" group. Last year, Reich led a team of more than a hundred researchers who published a study in Science that examined the genomes of some two hundred and seventy ancient skeletons from the Iberian Peninsula. Proposals for its origins point to both the eastern Khvalynsk and the western Sredny Stog culture;[43] according to Anthony it originated in the Don-Volga area at ca. [144], Radiocarbon gives dates as early as 3705 BCE on wooden tools and 2874 BCE on human remains for the Afanasievo culture. The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), a reconstructed prehistoric language of Eurasia. I never heard a word, not a hint of a story, no folktale or anything, Sax told me. Brixhe, Cl. ", Mallory: "The Kurgan solution is attractive and has been accepted by many archaeologists and linguists, in part or total. The data suggest that around 3500 B.C.roughly the same time that many linguists place the origin of PIE and that archaeologists date horse domesticationYamnaya genes replaced about 75 percent of the existing human gene pool in Europe. [14], The Bactria-Margiana Culture, also called "Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex" (BMAC), was a non-Indo-European culture which influenced the Indo-European groups of the second stage of the Indo-European migrations. Then, according to the legend, she sent down a blizzard of hail and a whirlwind, which swept all the pilgrims on the Path of Death into the lake. Most linguists recognize there is a limit to linguistic reconstruction, and that reconstructing an ancestral language to Proto-Indo-European might not be possible. Climate change and drought may have triggered both the initial dispersal of Indo-European speakers, and the migration of Indo-Europeans from the steppes in south central Asia and India. After the Yuezhi were defeated by the Xiongnu, in the 2nd century BCE, a small group, known as the Little Yuezhi, fled to the south, while the majority migrated west to the Ili Valley, where they displaced the Sakas (Scythians). Anthony additionally suggests that the proto-Indo-European language formed mainly from a base of languages spoken by Eastern European hunter-gatherers with influences from languages of northern Caucasus hunter-gatherers, in addition to a possible later, and minor, influence from the language of the Maikop culture to the south (which is hypothesized to have belonged to the North Caucasian family) in the later Neolithic or Bronze Age involving little genetic impact. To tease the tiny fraction of human DNA from this mass of microbial debris requires a chemical ballet of enormous delicacy, and the risk of contamination is high. Indo-Iranian peoples are a grouping of ethnic groups consisting of the Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Dardic and Nuristani peoples; that is, speakers of Indo-Iranian languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family. [195] According to Anthony (2007), Bell Beaker sites at Budapest, dated c.28002600 BCE, may have aided in spreading Yamnaya dialects into Austria and southern Germany at their west, where Proto-Celtic may have developed. [51] These migrants had an attractive social system and good weapons, and luxury goods which marked their status and power. The whine of a sandblaster filled the air as she removed excess bone from a tiny treasure chest of DNAa spiral cavity in the inner ear called the cochlea. It is likely that the newcomers perpetrated a large-scale killing of local men, boys, and possibly male infants. [135] The Indo-Iranians also borrowed their distinctive religious beliefs and practices from this culture. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707.[244]. It was the densely populated area of the Pontic-Caspian steppes at the time, and had been inhabited by various hunter-gatherer populations since the end of the Ice Age. Subsequently Indo-European split into four branches ca. 2016), Caucasus and Swiss hunter-gatherer genomes, "European languages linked to migration from the east. [287] As a result of a modern diaspora, there are also Albanian speakers elsewhere in those countries and in other parts of the world, including Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Hungary, United Kingdom, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. Harney and Reich began exploring the ancestry of the Roopkund B group, comparing the genomes with hundreds of present-day populations across Europe, Asia, and Africa. [135] It is likely that their arrival was one of gradual settlement and not as an invading army. The most popular hypothesis for the origin and spread of the language is the Kurgan hypothesis, which postulates an origin in the PonticCaspian steppe of Eastern Europe. 2023 Cond Nast. (2018), aDNA studies in Anatolia "show no indication of a large-scale intrusion of a steppe population", but do "fit the recently developed consensus among linguists and historians that the speakers of the Anatolian languages established themselves in Anatolia by gradual infiltration and cultural assimilation. [349] Their historical areas of settlement were on the Iranian plateau (mainly Iran, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan) and certain neighbouring areas of Asia (such as parts of the Caucasus, Eastern Turkey, Northeast Syria, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Bahrain, Oman, northern Iraq, Northwestern and Western Pakistan) reflecting changing geopolitical range of the Persian empires and the Iranian history.[350][351]. (eds.). The Kurgan hypothesis is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe and parts of Asia. [20] The Kurgan archaeological culture or cultural horizon comprises the various cultures of the PonticCaspian steppe in the Copper Age to Early Bronze Age (5th to 3rd millennia BC), identified by similar artifacts and structures, but subject to inevitable imprecision and uncertainty. Contemporary claims of Indo-Aryan migrations are drawn from linguistic,[331] archaeological, literary and cultural sources. After 1180 BCE, amid the Bronze Age Collapse in the Levant associated with the sudden arrival of the Sea Peoples, the kingdom disintegrated into several independent "Neo-Hittite" city-states, some of which survived until as late as the 8th century BCE. Gimbutas, who acknowledged Schrader as a precursor,[17] painstakingly marshalled a wealth of archaeological evidence from the territory of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc that was not readily available to Western scholars,[18] revealing a fuller picture of prehistoric Europe. We can get a sense of this reign of terror by thinking about what took place when the descendants of those ancient Iberians sailed to the New World, events for which we have ample historical records. The Kurgan hypothesis is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out (map). Geneticists have sampled the DNA of hundreds of living populations, making India one of the most genetically mapped countries in the world. Roopkund C was a lone individual whose genome was typical of Southeast Asia. (2015), "the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. note the absence of "large amounts" of steppe-ancestry in the Balkan peninsula and Anatolia, which may indicate that archaic PIE originated in the Caucasus or Iran, but also state that "it remains possible that Indo-European languages were spread through southeastern Europe into Anatolia without large-scale population movement or admixture. [web 22] For a more comprehensive list, see the ethnocultural subdivisions. According to Mallory and Adams, migrations southward founded the Maykop culture (c.35002500 BCE). [21] According to Kortlandt, "Indo-European is a branch of Indo-Uralic which was radically transformed under the influence of a North Caucasian substratum when its speakers moved from the area north of the Caspian Sea to the area north of the Black Sea. The scientists concluded that the dead represented two populations: a group of tall Brahmans from the plains of India and a company of shorter, local porters, whose skulls were marked by years of carrying heavy loads with a tumpline looped over their heads. Fol 2002, p. 225: "Romanisation was total and complete by the end of the 4th century A.D. [20], Frederik Kortlandt postulates a shared common ancestor of Indo-European and Uralic, Proto-Indo-Uralic, as a possible pre-PIE. The Armenian language was first put into writing in 406 or 407AD when a priest known as Mesrop developed an Armenian alphabet. It makes zero sense that a party of male and female Greek islanders would be participating in a Hindu pilgrimage around 1700 or 1800. [292] In traditional classifications, Hellenic consists of Greek alone,[293][294] but some linguists group Greek together with various ancient languages thought to have been closely related or distinguish varieties of Greek that are distinct enough to be considered separate languages. Elizebeth Friedman: Became the world's most famous codebreaker. PIE was the first proposed proto-language to be widely accepted by linguists. This area includes the present-day countries of Romania and Moldova, as well as parts of Ukraine,[271] Eastern Serbia, Northern Bulgaria, Slovakia,[272] Hungary and Southern Poland. Marija Gimbutas - Wikipedia [web 31] They support the controversial[web 31] hypothesis that the Indo-Aryan civilization was not introduced by Aryan migrations, but originated in pre-Vedic India. [web 27], The Kassite language has not been classified. It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language . In 2005, Sax was featured in a National Geographic documentary about the lake. By the late third millennium BCE, offshoots of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had reached Anatolia (Hittites), the Aegean (Mycenaean Greece), Western Europe, and southern Siberia (Afanasevo culture). At the peak of their power in the 3rd century BC, the Yuezhi are believed to have dominated the areas north of the Qilian Mountains (including the Tarim Basin and Dzungaria), the Altai region,[161] the greater part of Mongolia, and the upper waters of the Yellow River. [171] Anthony excludes the Globular Amphora culture.[1]. All the bones studied so far have been picked up haphazardly, a flawed way of sampling that often skews results. [19] Subsequent expansion beyond the steppes led to hybrid, or in Gimbutas's terms "kurganized" cultures, such as the Globular Amphora culture to the west. Under sterile conditions, the scientists in Hyderabad drilled into long bones and teeth, producing a powder. (2015), "both south-north and north-south genetic influence across the Caucasus is plausible.". [39] yet a 2021 study demonstrates that the mummies are remains of locals descending from Ancient North Eurasians and ancient Northeast Asians; meanwhile, the study suggests instead that Afanasevo migrants might have introduced Proto-Tocharian into Dzungaria during the Early Bronze Age before Tocharian languages were recorded in Buddhist texts dating to 500-1000 CE in the Tarim basin. Noting that nothing of value was found on the bodies, he speculated that the travellers were killed by Thuggees, a cult of robbers and murderers whose fearsome reputation in British India gave us the word thug. Thuggees were said to attach themselves to travellers or groups of pilgrims, gaining their trust and then robbing and murdering them on a remote stretch of road. During the 19th century, the vast majority of linguistic work was devoted to reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European or its daughter proto-languages such as Proto-Germanic, and most of the current techniques of historical linguistics (e.g. the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction) were developed as a result. Gimbutas's actual main scenario involved slow accumulation of influence through coercion or extortion, as distinguished from general raiding shortly followed by conquest: One might at first imagine that the economy of argument involved with the Kurgan solution should oblige us to accept it outright. (2018),[note 12] the Maykop-culture had little genetic impact on the Yamnaya, whose paternal lineages were found to differ from those found in Maykop remains, but were instead related to those of earlier Eastern European hunter-gatherers. To the north is a vast wall of Himalayan peaks, some of the highest in the world. [1] The Indo-Iranian language and culture was further developed in the Andronovo culture (c.1800800 BCE), and influenced by the BactriaMargiana Archaeological Complex (c.24001600 BCE). Yet, Reich also notes that "the evidence here is circumstantial as no ancient DNA from the Hittites themselves has yet been published,", Wang et al. Phrygian is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek. ", "Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. The domestication of the horse created a steppe bridge into India and Iran on the one side and Europe on the other side, Anthony says. The largest developments of the 20th century have been the discovery of Anatolian and Tocharian languages and the acceptance of the laryngeal theory. With written attestations appearing from the Bronze Age in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean Greek, the Indo-European family is significant in historical linguistics as possessing the second-longest recorded history, after the Afroasiatic family. Many other social and cultural forces were at play. Myth of the light pigmented "Nordic looking" Proto Indo-Europeans debunked. But a recent landslide had exposed a cache of fresh bones and artifacts. Introduced by Marija Gimbutas in 1956, it combines kurgan archaeology with linguistics to locate the origins of the peoples who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language. "[21][subnote 1], Proto-Finno-Ugric and PIE have a lexicon in common, generally related to trade, such as words for "price" and "draw, lead". This contrasts with the model of Indo-Aryan migration which posits that Indo-Aryan tribes migrated to India from Central Asia. The Kurgan model is the most widely accepted scenario of Indo-European origins. [45], In the northern Don-Volga area the Yamnaya horizon was followed by the Poltavka culture (27002100 BCE), while the Corded Ware culture extended eastwards, giving rise to the Sintashta culture (21001800). But he contends that his new results also show the migration was on a smaller scale than previously speculated; the more recent specimens apparently only made it as far as central Europe before returning, even though the language eventually spread as far as the British Isles. Modern Celtic languages are mostly spoken on the northwestern edge of Europe, notably in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man, and can be found spoken on Cape Breton Island. ", According to Haak et al. Their genomes did not look Indian or even Asian. the Yamnaya people and the related cultures, seem to have been a mix from Eastern European hunter-gatherers; and people related to the Near East,[87] i.e. [1] It is probably the archaeological manifestation of the Indo-Iranian language group. [17][web 3] From his initial intuitions there developed the hypothesis of an Indo-European language family consisting of several hundred related languages and dialects.
kurgan hypothesis debunked