Over at my Substack I’ve spent more than a year writing about the cultural and genetic impact of the Eurasian steppe. I’ve put out a large number of essays, so I want to post them here in case you missed one. In reverse order…
A Hun by any other name – On the genetic trail of Europe’s enduring bête noire:
The specter of these pitiless barbarians swooping in on horseback had haunted the ancients, their horror recorded in histories that filtered down to modern Europeans. In these classical texts, the Huns were the epitome of brutal and alien savages whose raison d’etre was total victory on the battlefield, punctuated by gluttonous orgies of flesh, food and drink. They were the embodiment of the European cultural imagination’s bête noire, the austere and erudite Roman aristocrat contrasting sharply with the brutish barbarian guzzling mare’s milk and gnawing on a hunk of raw meat while in the saddle.
The wolf at history’s door and Casting out the wolf in our midst are more anthropological and focused on the koryos and their role in shaping Eurasian history. I count these two as steppe-adjacent since they lack the chronological focus of the other pieces.
Dark Horse out of the Steppe Fishing the Sintashta, Scythians and Sarmatians out of obscurity.
The Yamnaya-powered transformation of Europe and Asia more than 5,000 years ago was a social and economic revolution, with the explosion of nomadic pastoralism across the Eurasian steppe. Its downstream linguistic and cultural consequences are with us to this very day: billions of us speak Indo-European languages, and we preserve those ancestral religious beliefs both in the shared mythology of the West and in the living religious traditions of India. To premodern minds untouched by science, the rise of obscure tribes to world conquest would have been evidence of divine providence and fate. Theirs was a world of miracles, and the gods always chose favorites. By the 20th century, supernatural explanations had foundered on the shoals of scientific materialism. But unless you were a Marxist, history was a matter of narrow description of particular places and times, rather than general theoretical narratives that explained the arc and ebb of societies and cultures. It was one damn thing after another, with broader patterns attributed to the vague laws of probability.
Hungarians as the ghost of the Magyar confederacy: The cultural legacy of the Magyars far outweighs their genetic impact. Another steppe-adjacent piece, though this one focuses on one nation so it’s more appropriate.
Steppe 1.1a: A nowhere man’s world and Steppe 1.1b: culture vultures descend are two posts about the Corded Ware, Bell Beakers, and the steppe intrusion into Europe.
Steppe 1.0, Going Nomad: The early Indo-Europeans’ great leap forward:
Today 3.5 billion humans speak Indo-European languages, which dominate Eurasia from Spain to the Indian subcontinent. This is the legacy of the pastoralists who roamed the Pontic steppe north of the Black sea 5,000 years ago. They were the original Indo-Europeans. They pioneered the nomadic lifestyle, leaving behind hard toil at the plow and thankless foraging in cold Siberian forests. They chose instead to wander the open grasslands in search of fresh pastures for their herds. They were the first to unleash young warriors raised as roving nomads upon the world, predatory packs marching the breadth of a continent in a few centuries. We don’t know what they called themselves. We don’t know the names of those who led them. But their cultural innovations and the choices they made transformed our world and made us who we are today. These nameless people left no monuments or seminal texts. Instead, we live with their language, their gods and their genes.
Finally, the two introductory posts, Entering Steppelandia: pop. 7.7 billion: Why the steppe matters to me, and why it should matter to you and Library of the Steppe: They didn’t read, but you should.
I’m a proponent of the “Northern model” for Mycenaean Greeks. Interestingly there are a lot of connections with Catacomb culture and the Greeks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_culture
This culture was also found to be in Italy as well.
“Evidence of Catacomb influence has been discovered far outside of the Pontic steppe. Its burial chambers, metal types and figurines are very similar to those appearing in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, while the hammer-head pin, a characteristic ornament of the Catacomb culture, has been found in Central Europe and Italy. Based on these similarities, migrations or cultural diffusion from the Catacomb culture to these areas have been suggested.[2] Similarities between the Catacomb culture and Mycenaean Greece are particularly striking. These include types of socketed spear-heads, types of cheekpieces for horses, and the custom of making masks for the dead.[14]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_culture
According to an anthrogencia user who attended the new Reich lecture in Israel, there are 700 new samples from the Southern Arc:
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/42606-David-Reich-Southern-Arc-Paper-Abstract/page11?p=651025&viewfull=1#post651025
Razib, can i suggest a title for your next article in the series?
Steppe Right Up!
Reich claims there were two West Asian admixture in Yamnaya. What does he mean? Two pluses of CHG admixture? or is it CHG and Anatolia?
There is also J1 in EHG which they have not addressed in studies so far for some reason. I wonder if this represents first West Asian admixture and later is more CHG related?
@Razib, OT but any plans to blog on the https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)00928-9 – “A Late Pleistocene human genome from Southwest China”? There are some interesting points.
1) the tree structure in their Treemix model. 2) Having enough samples to investigate selection for a lighter skin allele in East Asia (predicted like in West Eurasia seems to begin late at appreciable frequencies in Upper Paleolithic, early Mesolithic, with the first sample with the particular derived allele in South China Neolithic; lacking in the first phylogenetically “East Asian” proper sample at Amur River 19kya). 3) Finally that the Red Deer cave sample here, the previously published Longlin and Salkhit samples, all with different levels of relatedness to present day East Asians, have archaic skulls features without any large excess of ancestry, leading them to be misidentified as potentially archaic – perhaps archaic skull features were selected for in some East Asian populations that are now effectively extinct?
The sample is actually older and southwest of the Longlin sample, and according to treemix is phylogenetically more distant to the main trunk of North Chinese neolithic ancestry than Longlin is. But seems to represent a closely related population to the later South Chinese early neolithic that possibly contributed to the post-LGM populations that expanded in Northeast Asia. So this is possibly some group that migrated to the north but didn’t admix and the Longlin population shows this migration was patchy?
@SBL; nobody knows. (Other than people who attended the conference and they are asked not to talk). There are supposedly 3 different papers (Early Neolithic, Late Neolithic-Chalcolithic-EBA?, MBA-Later?) coming on this topic over the next few weeks from the group (it would make sense to release them in order). So we will wait and see.