…Raff skillfully reveals how well-dated archaeological sites, including recently announced 22,000-year-old human footprints from White Sands, N.M., are at odds with the Clovis first hypothesis. She builds a persuasive case with both archaeological and genetic evidence that the path to the Americas was coastal (the Kelp Highway hypothesis) rather than inland, and that Beringia was not a bridge but a homeland — twice the size of Texas — inhabited for millenniums by the ancestors of the First Peoples of the Americas.
This is what’s called a paradigm shift. A few years ago people would have been very skeptical of humans in the New World before the Last Glacial Maximum ~20,000 years ago. Now, most people seem to think that they were here. The evidence is too strong.
In 2011, archaeological excavations near the village of Koszyce in southern Poland uncovered a ca. 5,000-y-old mass grave…associated with the Globular Amphora culture and containing the remains of 15 men, women, and children who had been killed, but carefully buried with rich grave goods…Closer study of the skeletons…revealed that the individuals had all been killed by blows to the head, possibly during a raid on their settlement.
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Interestingly, the older males/fathers are mostly missing from the grave, suggesting that it might have been them who buried their kin…
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Although it is impossible to identify the culprits of the massacre that took place at Koszyce around 2880–2776 BCE, it is interesting to note that it occurred right around the time when the Corded Ware complex started to spread rapidly across large parts of Central Europe, and it seems plausible that the group from Koszyce fell victim to some violent intergroup conflict related to the territorial expansion of Corded Ware groups or another competing group in the area. If the general interaction between Globular Amphora people and neighboring, steppe-related cultures (including early Corded Ware) was primarily hostile, it would explain why Globular Amphora individuals carry no steppe ancestry and, in part, why Europe experienced such a dramatic reduction in Neolithic genomic ancestry at this time
If you read the supplements you note that they suggest the blows to the head were struck with stone axes. The killings were like executions since there is no resistance as suggested by cuts to the upper body (where people are resisting). Additionally, the one woman who is not part of the kin group was killed somewhat differently and more deliberately.
Whatever the real story, I want to note that when the Corded Ware arrived in Northern Europe they were often buried with mace pendants. What do you do with maces?
I’ve read War Before Civilization. I am aware that the Neolithic groups were quite violent. I am aware that the violence continued after the Corded Ware. But, reading about the Corded Ware reminds me a lot about reading about the Mongols during the time of Genghis Khan. They were effective.
Many people have recommended I read Johanna Nichols’ Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time over the years. I checked out the book in grad school once but didn’t get around to reading it. But today I see it being referenced in Stephen Oppenheimer’s very strange book about Lemuria-I mean Southeast Asia, Eden in the East.
Both of these books were written in the late 1990s, before the current swell of genome-wide and ancient DNA analysis. Oppenheimer reports Nichols’ comparative analysis of linguistics implies that the ancestors of the Amerindians were not interior Siberians, but coastal people who came up from Southeast Asia.
Today we know this is somewhat wrong.About 30 to 40 percent of the ancestry of modern Native Americans derives from Ancient North Eurasians, who seem to be most commonly found in the great Eurasian heartland, probably to the east of what we think of today as Europe, but west of the Pacific.
But there’s more. Most of the ancestry of Native American peoples seems to be more like that of East Asians. Today this component extends rather far north, into Korea, Japan, and such. But these are consequences of recent demographic movements. Nichols’ Southeast Asian hypothesis may actually not be off-base, in particular in light of other evidence suggesting admixture with an Australo-Melanesian population.
One of the major issues with the field of ancient DNA and the historical inferences people make is that the theories and models are often quite ad hoc, and emerge in response to the data. But these earlier ideas, informed by linguistics and archaeology, are actually a pretty good source of possible ideas. They may not be constrained by genetics, because we didn’t have that information (aside from mtDNA), but are richly informed by other disciplines.
…Burials at Verteba Cave are largely commingled and secondary in nature. A total of 68 individual bone specimens were analyzed. Most of these specimens were found in association with well-defined Tripolye artifacts. We determined 28 mtDNA D-Loop (368 bp) sequences and defined 8 sequence types, belonging to haplogroups H, HV, W, K, and T. These results do not suggest continuity with local pre-Eneolithic peoples, but rather complete population replacement. We constructed maximum parsimonious networks from the data and generated population genetic statistics…We find different signatures of demographic expansion for the Tripolye people that may be caused by existing population structure or the spatiotemporal nature of ancient data. Regardless, peoples of the Tripolye Culture are more closely related to early European farmers and lack genetic continuity with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers or pre-Eneolithic groups in Ukraine.
There is stuff in the preprint about population expansion. My personal opinion is that in most cases genetics doesn’t add much beyond what archaeology does for humans in reconstructing population history. Rather, these results in concern with others are strongly indicative of population turnover. Uniparental lineages are still useful, but only in the context of other data.
The great thing about genetics when it is so clear and striking is that it clears up confusions about relationships in the past that otherwise would be unclear. It’s like having a time machine. So we now know that early European farmers (EEF) were ancestors of this particular culture. Over the next decade or so we’ll get a really granular understanding of the ebb and flow of populations across prehistoric and historic Europe. This won’t abolish all controversy, but it will reduce the space of the unknown….
One of the common elements to both reactions was that the paper’s definition, or reification, of Mycenaean and Minoan constructs was naive. From one of the posts:
In a press interview following the publication of the study, one of the main authors claimed that ‘there is no doubt that our findings reflect historical events in the Greek lands’: ‘the picture of historical continuity is crystal clear, as is very clear the fact that through the centuries Greeks evolved receiving genetic influences from other populations.’ The category of ‘Greekness’ here appears more or less given and stable, despite the ‘influences’, from the Early Bronze Age to the present. It sounds like a version of the 19th-century national narrative of the power of eternal Hellenism to absorb external influences.
Context is important here. The last ten years have seen a massive updating of our assumptions about the nature of demographic change in the pre-modern world. Geneticists using ancient DNA have been central to this process. They’ve overturned a lot of archaeological orthodoxies.
One of the major assumptions seemingly at the heart of the two critical posts is that modern ideas of nationhood were a recent construction. The stylized assertion is that modern nationalism begins with the French Revolution. To me this is like the assertion that the troubadours invented romantic love during the High Middle Ages. While it is true that the troubadours popularized a particular form of romantic love, the core emotional impulses are primal, and didn’t need “inventing.” Similarly, ideas of nationality are clearly primal, because they derive from the tribal structures of prehistoric humanity. Tribes are an evoked part of human culture. That is, given similar cognitive hardware, the same software seems to get installed for the same tasks (group cohesion and inter-group competition).
Ironically, the period between the “rise of civilization” and the modern era may have been one defined by the regression of nationalistic thinking, because tribalism had to be suppressed with the rise of multiethnic agricultural states. Only with early modern information technology, and the spread of a literate middle class culture united by common mores and touchstones, could primal tribalism be transformed into modern nationalism (to this way of thinking it is not a coincidence that German nationalism with the Lutheran Reformation was supercharged by the arrival of the printing press).
Peter Heather in Empires and Barbarians and Azar Gat in Nations outline the revisionist views I’m alluding to in regards to the ancient origins of nationalism. But from a perspective of a geneticist the very high differentiation between nearby groups that persist for hundreds and even thousands of years is indicative of high levels of cultural distinction and consciousness (because only small amounts of gene flow between groups is enough to eliminate differences very rapidly). Genetics can’t maintain these sorts of differences, only strong cultural ideologies can.
Finally, quoting from the same post:
First, there’s not much new here. I mean, the data are new, but the conclusions are largely consistent with the archaeological consensus: there’s no big genetic difference between “Minoans” (Late Bronze Age Cretans) and “Mycenaeans” (Late Bronze Age inhabitants of the Greek mainland), and both are pretty close genetically to Late Bronze Age southwestern Anatolians….
1) the spread of Beaker culture from Southwest Europe to Central Europe was one of cultural transmission (archaeologists would not be surprised).
2) the spread of Beaker culture to England from Central Europe was one of demographic replacement on the order of 90% over a few hundred years (archaeologists would be surprised).
It’s easy for archaeologists to be surprised that geneticists are presenting ideas that they “refuted” in the 1960s. But it turns out that the predictions on a demographic scale are easily refuted in many places and times by genetics. The issue isn’t whether it’s pots or peoples, but what the mix of pots and people are. This research is part of a broad program of nailing down the values in these parameters, as opposed to simply going along with archaeological orthodoxy.
Addendum: The title is somewhat unfair now that I think about it. Many archaeologists have been instrumental in the revolution triggered by ancient DNA. But, the vast majority of archaeologist and historians who are outside of these collaborations, I’m not so sure they are aware of the recent developments.
Did the First Americans Arrive via Land Bridge? This Geneticist Says No:
