Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

The brotherhoods of the plains

One of my favorite concepts is “evoked culture.” This is basically pointing to the fact that some human cultural forms and practices aren’t contingent and arbitrary, but naturally emerge due to the canalization imposed by our cognitive biases and the physical and social world around us. An example Spencer Wells likes to use to illustrate this is that indigenous hunters on the Andaman Islanders immediately took to dogs as helpmates when they were introduced to them. The coadaptation between domestic dogs and humans is clearly intense and natural.

Horses are another example. The Plains Indians of the New World became some of the most fearsome mounted warriors in history after the Spaniards introduced domestic horses. By the 18th century some tribes, such as the Comanche, were fully mounted and mobile. This occurred over 200 years.

As documented in 2010’s Empire of the Summer Moon the Comanche recaptiulated some of the patterns of steppe pastoralists of the past: they integrated women of other people into their nation while committing acts of brutal violence against those other people. The last great chief of the Comanche, Quanah Parker, was the son of a white Texan woman.

I think of the Comanche when I wonder what the early steppe peoples were like. The Scythians, Sarmatians, the Sintashtas and Turks. The impact of the horse on their lifestyles, and the centrality of the horse, still echoes down to the present. The Central Asian Turks still drink mare’s milk. Indian grooms still ride on a white mare at their wedding.

But one of the major themes in pastoralist communities seems to be patrilineality and integration of local women. This seems to be illustrated in a new paper, Corded Ware cultural complexity uncovered using genomic and isotopic analysis from south-eastern Poland:

During the Final Eneolithic the Corded Ware Complex (CWC) emerges, chiefly identified by its specific burial rites. This complex spanned most of central Europe and exhibits demographic and cultural associations to the Yamnaya culture. To study the genetic structure and kin relations in CWC communities, we sequenced the genomes of 19 individuals located in the heartland of the CWC complex region, south-eastern Poland. Whole genome sequence and strontium isotope data allowed us to investigate genetic ancestry, admixture, kinship and mobility. The analysis showed a unique pattern, not detected in other parts of Poland; maternally the individuals are linked to earlier Neolithic lineages, whereas on the paternal side a Steppe ancestry is clearly visible. We identified three cases of kinship. Of these two were between individuals buried in double graves. Interestingly, we identified kinship between a local and a non-local individual thus discovering a novel, previously unknown burial custom.

This seems a consistent pattern: “steppe” ancestry seems to be mediated through male migrations. There are likely differences between agro-pastoralists (like the early Germans who moved into the Roman Empire), and full-blown nomads like the Huns, Turks, and Mongols. But overall the trend seems to be the rise of a particular patriarchal culture with the horse people, along with the spread of gods of the sky and lacking attachment to a particular place.

9 thoughts on “The brotherhoods of the plains

  1. Hmm… In general, it seems like expansions into already populated regions often or always tend to be male biased, if the population size is even reasonably equivalent, regardless of biome. (I’m not sure we’ll find any pulses of ancestry that this is not so for other than “virgin soil” farmer migrations; New Guineans->Polynesians, Levant->ancient Rome, China->SE Asia seem to show male bias?). Certainly it seems like the EMBA->MLBA steppe ancestry expansions were generally male biased.

    A question I’m really interested in that follows from this is whether a signal of all this tends to remain on the X chromosome vs autosome today / long after initial migrations.

    It’s easy to imagine situations where initial arrival of steppe related ancestry tends to be male, but the societies that form downstream do not always reflect this in the longer term due to outside male recruitment / dominance by local societies / further migrations.

    For’ex, in the Mycenaean samples so far, no R1, just J2, which suggests be due to recruitment / alliances with local males after steppe ancestry introduced, presumably along with IE language. And for there’s the example of the Swat IA set, who didn’t have very much R1a. (There was a idea proposed this is because non-R1a haplogroups were present but “hidden” on the MLBA steppe, but that seems incredibly unlikely based on our MLBA sample set, which is exclusively R1a except where explained by obvious pulses of admixture. It seems more likely to me that it could also reflect the entry of male biased migrations whose daughters may have tended to marry into local lineages, reversing the bias, or else that this same process had happened at BMAC).

    In terms of attrition over time, Saag’s paper found that https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/6544527 “The high X to A ratio of European-early-farmer-related ancestry observed in Estonian CWC [13] decreases over time and disappears by the MA (Figure S2C–F, Data S1).” I’d speculate the reason for this is due to the migration of males from the south who still mostly had steppe derived y-chromosomes but who were autosomally richer in farmer ancestry, who as males then contributed to local autosomes and reversed the excess of autosomal steppe ancestry. There’s also similar changes in signal on the steppes, with I think an argument that male bias in EMBA-MLBA in interactions with East Asian ancestry is overwritten to neutrality by female bias following Turkic / East Asian ancestry male expansions.

    Another analogy that’s more in historical times is male-biased admixture into African slaves in the New World. One thing a study Goldberg found, if I remember, is that surprisingly this signal on the X:A tended to be reduced by a pattern of ongoing male-biased importation of slaves from Africa (European males who reproduced with African female slaves then tended to have daughters reproduce with African male slaves, and the sons from these relationships not successfully reproduce as much as daughters, which eroded the relationship down to a much lower fraction).

    Looking at present day samples is also good because you can actually probably get in theory enough sites on the X to have results with low standard error with which you can draw some meaningful conclusions.

    There was a paper back in 2010 that ran frappe on 16k SNPs of HGDP chr. X and chr. 16 – https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2010-11-1-r10.

    Didn’t really seem to me to find much of a clear and obvious asymmetry between the components on X and autosome chr 16, not for populations that might be expected to see it based on current results. (If there were asymmetry, we would expected to see lower of what looks like ASI related component on e.g. Kalash autosome than on X, but not really, or we would see more of what looks like the early farmer related component on Basque X than autosome etc). It would be cool to run something like this again with far more available SNPs on modern day data, which should get rid of some noise (such as the whole genome HGDP).

  2. @Roberto, I guess if it’s the “Sky gods vs Earth goddesses” kind of thing (where pastoralists and Indo-Europeans look to the male principle and the open sky, farmers at the feminine principle and down to the dirt), which seems to be an idea that’s about, that never really made any sense to me. Sumerians were all about the sky gods as the centre of the pantheon (Anu is the supreme god), Chinese all about tian (Heaven), Aztecs had plentiful sky gods, Olorun the sky god is the supreme diety of the Yoruba. Etc. These are also male gods, on the whole.

    A lot of this ends up dismissed as “Indo-European / pastoralist contact!” (conjuring up mysterious analogues of the Indo-Europeans / pastoralist group separately in regions where there isn’t much evidence of that, where necessary, in order to somehow fit the supposed pastoralist religious and moral revolution in). But I don’t really think it’s easy to credibly believe that’s the case, given how far flung the motif is and how pervasive it is…

    Razib can of course answer for himself, and this may not be at all what he was talking about.

  3. In “The Cosmic Serpent,” Clube and Napier argue that the gods were an interpretation of a giant comet that entered a short-term orbit maybe 20,000 years ago, and that subsequently slowly broke up, the fragments being the gods.

    Encke would be the modern day remnant.

    Sweatman updates the comet idea to account for the images at Gobekli Tepe in his book “Prehistory Decoded.”

  4. @Razib: I don’t think this patriarchal, warlike and women robbing culture is specific to the steppe or horse domestication at all. Farmers did the same, they acted the same for the same reasons, they spread their genes and culture.

    That narrative of such basic behavioural norms being “invented” by horse riders is just wrong.

    However, the new ways from the steppe might have led to higher speed and greater magnitude because of mobility and superiority.

    Now it was possible for smaller bands of warriors to conquer within a lifetime much larger areas with much more people. So the ratio of conquered people vs. conquerors changed drastically.

    So if they wanted to move on to new pastures and riches, they would have had their females much behind and a whole lot of angry local males waiting for their weakness.
    The logical consequence is to take a local female supply, especially for young warriors which might not even have access to their own brides, and utterly destroy any remaining threat from the locals along your communication and supply lines with the relatives at home.

    Also, the local population was huge and easy to catch for the steppe warriors, they had a lot of women to choose from which had no place to hide.
    The early farmers on the other hand were LESS mobile than the local hunter gatherers and they were more numerous, moving much more slowly inland in comparison with their women.

    So mobility and military superiority is the main thing, warlike and patriarchal is generally more competitive and therefore the human standard, with or without horses.

    If any people could have simply taking the most beautiful women of their enemies and get rid of their foes once at for all, they would have done it.
    Just ask tribal heathen warriors around the world, like Papuans, unless they hate their enemies so much or have a taboo, so that they even kill the pretty girls.
    This is no unique story or motivation.

  5. Razib,

    Did you read “The Comanche Empire”? Would you recommend it, and have written about it elsewhere?

    Thanks

  6. @matt

    “It seems more likely to me that it could also reflect the entry of male biased migrations whose daughters may have tended to marry into local lineages, reversing the bias, or else that this same process had happened at BMAC)”

    1. to show male biased migration, you have to find the R1a. The hypothesis was presented, the samples were tested, and the hypothesis failed.
    2. In the vedic culture, as attested by mahabharata and ramayana, the women could marry up in all cases, whereas no man who was of mixed birth could marry a woman of pure descent.
    eg. Vidura, the uncle of Pandavas, was born to a maid of the queen. So he married the daughter of another king and his shudra wife. whereas his half brothers married daughters of kshatriya king and queen.

  7. If North American colonization had started 200 years earlier with worse firearms, then I wonder if the balance of power v. indigenous plains warriors on horseback would’ve been different, at least for a while.

    BTW I tried fermented mare’s milk in Mongolia, and quickly reverted to Chinese beer.

  8. @vasistha, I mean, I don’t think there was a female-biased movement of actual people; I suspect this never really happens in human history outside marriage networks within a shared culture.

    But a male biased movement does not mean that an initial pulse of men’s sons were more reproductively successful than their daughters, when they arrived (male biased migration; female biased admixture signal).

Comments are closed.