The origin and legacy of the Etruscans through a 2000-year archeogenomic time transect:

The origin, development, and legacy of the enigmatic Etruscan civilization from the central region of the Italian peninsula known as Etruria have been debated for centuries. Here we report a genomic time transect of 82 individuals spanning almost two millennia (800 BCE to 1000 CE) across Etruria and southern Italy. During the Iron Age, we detect a component of Indo-European–associated steppe ancestry and the lack of recent Anatolian-related admixture among the putative non–Indo-European–speaking Etruscans. Despite comprising diverse individuals of central European, northern African, and Near Eastern ancestry, the local gene pool is largely maintained across the first millennium BCE. This drastically changes during the Roman Imperial period where we report an abrupt population-wide shift to ~50% admixture with eastern Mediterranean ancestry. Last, we identify northern European components appearing in central Italy during the Early Middle Ages, which thus formed the genetic landscape of present-day Italian populations.

The inference is basically what I concluded and stated this spring in my piece on ancient Rome:

By 1000 BC, on the eve of the Iron Age, a mixed ancestry derived from both Anatolian farmers and Indo-Europeans from the steppe was present all across continental Italy. Only on isolated islands such as Sardinia was the situation different, where Anatolian farmer societies continued unperturbed by Indo-European migrants, giving rise to the Nuragic civilization, with its massive fortifications. All the length of the Italian mainland, the ancestors of the Etruscans, Sabines, and Romans shared roughly the same genetic heritage, despite their ethno-linguistic differences.

The big novel find is that there is nontrivial Germanic ancestral shift after the fall of Rome. Some commenters have suggested this is actually just from rural Italians, who flooded back into the towns. This could probably be tested.

A new preprint, Projecting ancient ancestry in modern-day Arabians and Iranians: a key role of the past exposed Arabo-Persian Gulf on human migrations, finds that Basal Eurasian (BEu) ancestry seems to peak in eastern Arabia, and among Iberomaurusian people of late Pleistocene North Africa. I think reading the preprint is important. But, to be frank, much is left unclear.

In 2014 when BEu was created as a construct to explain the greater affinities of Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers with East Eurasians than modern Europeans*, I probably would have been a little surprised that a mostly BEu individual had still not been discovered in the ancient DNA. After all, we had seen Ma’lta boy answer the question of who the mysterious “Siberians” were that left an imprint all over West Eurasia. Ma’lta was part of an ancient Paleo-Siberian group, the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), who no longer exist in “pure” form, but contributed ancestry (or more precisely were related to groups that did so) to hunter-gatherers in Eastern Europe and the ancestors of New World populations.

No such luck with BEu. In fact, BEu as a construct is so vaguely understood that research groups can estimate that populations are 10% BEu, or 40% BEu, contingent upon various specifications in their model. In the middle 2010’s one of the scientists involved in the groups working in this space and using BEu as a construct even told me that this population may never have existed in pure form anyhow (not Iosif Lazaridis to be clear).

Basically, there is still not a lot of clarity. BEu seems to have diverged before Neanderthal admixture into the non-African lineage ~55,000 years ago. It also seems to have been subject to the long bottleneck of all non-Africans. A very plausible model that BEu occupied the southern Middle East, while non-basal Eurasians occupied the northern Middle East, seem to be the highest probability to me. The authors of this preprint argue that the Basal Eurasian ur-heimat might be in and around the Persian Gulf. I laughed when I read that because it reminds me of the early 20th century “Lost Civilization Underwater” motif. But it could be true.

I would hazard to guess dates, but I think the separation and later (early) admixture of BEu and non-BEu people in the Near East is probably strongly conditional on the paleoclimate data, which I am not fluent in.

* BEu ancestry came into Europe with Neolithic farmers, so affinities between Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and East Asians is higher than between modern Europeans and East Asians.

Human mobility at Tell Atchana (Alalakh) during the 2nd millennium BC: integration of isotopic and genomic evidence:

The Middle and Late Bronze Age Near East, a period roughly spanning the second millennium BC (ca. 2000-1200 BC), is frequently referred to as the first ‘international age’, characterized by intense and far-reaching contacts between different entities from the eastern Mediterranean to the Near East and beyond. In a large-scale tandem study of stable isotopes and ancient DNA of individuals excavated at Tell Atchana (Alalakh), situated in the northern Levant, we explore the role of mobility at the capital of a regional kingdom. We generated strontium isotope data for 53 individuals, oxygen isotope data for 77 individuals, and added ancient DNA data from 9 new individuals to a recently published dataset of 28 individuals. A dataset like this, from a single site in the Near East, is thus far unparalleled in terms of both its breadth and depth, providing the opportunity to simultaneously obtain an in-depth view of individual mobility and also broader demographic insights into the resident population. The DNA data reveals a very homogeneous gene pool, with only one outlier. This picture of an overwhelmingly local ancestry is consistent with the evidence of local upbringing in most of the individuals indicated by the isotopic data, where only five were found to be ‘non-local’. High levels of contact, trade, and exchange of ideas and goods in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, therefore, seem not to have translated into high levels of individual mobility detectable at Tell Atchana.

From a DNA perspective two notable things about this preprint. First, it confirms that there was a massive pulse of Iranian/Caucasus ancestry into the western Fertile Crescent between 5000 and 2000 BC. We don’t have any idea what was going on here, but my own suspicion is that the Uruk period, 4000 to 3100 BC, has something to do with this genetic turnover and assimilation. We don’t know what happened during the Uruk period because there’s no real writing of narrative history (there is proto-cuneiform), but this is when city life really expanded in Mesopotamia. Additionally, there were replica copies of Mesopotamian style towns to the west, and even into Anatolia. The Uruk period was arguably the peak of Mesopotamian political power and influence before the rise of Assyria thousands of years later.

The end of the Uruk period was characterized by a massive collapse. Some archaeologists hypothesize that the catastrophe literature of the Sumerians may reflect memories of the end of the Uruk civilization. In some ways, the Akkadians and Sumerians may have lived in the shadows of their forebears.

The second issue is “the lady in the well”. This is a woman who seems to have been pushed into a well and fallen to her death. She is the major genetic outlier from this site: “Individual ALA019 – the Well Lady – takes up an extreme outlier position in the PCA closest to sampled individuals from Bronze Age Iran/Turkmenistan/Uzbekistan/Afghanistan.”

Her positioning is unambiguous. Unless we’re missing something this woman is of “steppe” heritage. Probably Indo-Iranian. But, the best guess from the isotope work is that she was raised in the region. The data they have indicate she lived between 1550-1600 BC. She was almost certainly from an Indo-Iranian group that had settled in the region. In fact, she was almost certainly associated with the Indo-European element in Mitanni.  But in this region of the world the Dasa in their walled cities overcame the free people and swallowed them up culturally and demographically.

The major lacunae in this paper, and all such papers, is Iraq. There is ancient DNA from Turkey, the Levant, but what about Iraq? I’m sure people are working on it, but this is a region that would give us a better sense of “donor” populations.

The genomic formation of First American ancestors in East and Northeast Asia:

Upward Sun River 1, an individual from a unique burial of the Denali tradition in Alaska (11500 calBP), is considered a type representative of Ancient Beringians who split from other First Americans 22000-18000 calBP in Beringia. Using a new admixture graph model-comparison approach resistant to overfitting, we show that Ancient Beringians do not form the deepest American lineage, but instead harbor ancestry from a lineage more closely related to northern North Americans than to southern North Americans. Ancient Beringians also harbor substantial admixture from a lineage that did not contribute to other Native Americans: Amur River Basin populations represented by a newly reported site in northeastern China. Relying on these results, we propose a new model for the genomic formation of First American ancestors in Asia.

Read the preprint. I’ll note three things

– The authors suggested that differentiation between American native lineages occurred in eastern Siberia, not Beringia. In other words, there’s a lot of ancient structure in the New World that dates to the Last Glacial Maximum

– Speaking of ancient structure, using the new methods in this paper they detect more pervasive “Australo-Melanesian” ancestry in lower quality ancient remains. It seems clear ta this point that this isn’t about Australo-Melanesian, as much as genetic variation in East Eurasia during the Pleistocene that we have a poor grasp of at this point

– In Europe ancient DNA quickly converged on the trihybrid model of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, and early farmers, and steppe pastoralists. The tsunami of ancient DNA has fleshed out a lot of details, but the basic framework has been in place for five years. The situation in other parts of the world seems to be more unsettled and dynamic. More sophisticated models and more ancient DNA keeps returning surprise on the margin

The power of ancient DNA in terms of human evolution at this point is to a large extent the ability to understand the arc of human cultural history as reflected in our genealogies. Archaeologists have long attempted to infer aspects of social and cultural practice from material remains. Now, geneticists are getting into this game, with mixed results.

Today the Bradley lab in Ireland published a paper about the genetics of Neolithic Ireland (i.e., before the arrival of Bell Beakers ~2,500 BC). The first author is Lara Cassidy, who I interviewed last year. There is a reason this paper is in Nature.

Let me quote the abstract first:

…The scale and sophistication of megalithic architecture along the Atlantic seaboard, culminating in the great passage tomb complexes, is particularly impressive…Although co-operative ideology has often been emphasized as a driver of megalith construction…the human expenditure required to erect the largest monuments has led some researchers to emphasize hierarchy…Here we present evidence that a social stratum of this type was established during the Neolithic period in Ireland. We sampled 44 whole genomes, among which we identify the adult son of a first-degree incestuous union from remains that were discovered within the most elaborate recess of the Newgrange passage tomb. Socially sanctioned matings of this nature are very rare, and are documented almost exclusively among politico-religious elites—specifically within polygynous and patrilineal royal families that are headed by god-king…We identify relatives of this individual within two other major complexes of passage tombs 150 km to the west of Newgrange, as well as dietary differences and fine-scale haplotypic structure (which is unprecedented in resolution for a prehistoric population) between passage tomb samples and the larger dataset, which together imply hierarchy. This elite emerged against a backdrop of rapid maritime colonization that displaced a unique Mesolithic isolate population, although we also detected rare Irish hunter-gatherer introgression within the Neolithic population.

There’s a lot of moving parts in this research, and the most interesting element isn’t the genetics, but the social structure that you can infer from the genetics. It seems entirely likely that the “Megalithic civilization” of Atlantic Europe was hierarchal. But this pretty much confirms it. As noted in the paper violations of first-order incest taboos as a cultural norm (as opposed to deviancy) are strongly associated with very stratified preliterate or semiliterate societies (with the possible exception of Zoroastrianism). Additionally, this research highlights that a set of individuals, likely paternally related, seem to be enriched in elite burials.

In a few circles, there are ideas that Neolithic Europeans were peaceful and matrilineal. The existence of stratification like this and the likelihood of ‘god-kings’ makes that very unlikely in Ireland. Though there was no doubt some variation in Neolithic Europe, the existence of “long-houses” in Germany from contemporary cultures is ominous. The matrilineal element is distinct. There are matrilineal societies that are quite warlike (e.g., the Nairs of Kerala or the Iroquois). But the possibility of common Y chromosomes suggests that this was a patrilineal society, which is, on the whole, more common anthropologically.

To me this is the most awesome part of the paper:

The Brú na Bóinne passage tombs appear in Medieval mythology that relates their construction to magical manipulations of the solar cycle by a tribe of gods, which has led to unresolved speculation about the durability of oral traditions across millennia…Although such longevity seems unlikely, our results strongly resonate with mythology that was first recorded in the eleventh century AD, in which a builder-king restarts the daily solar cycle by copulating with his sister…Fertae Chuile, a Middle Irish placename for the Dowth passage tomb (which neighbours Newgrange), is based on this lore, and can be translated as ‘Hill of Sin’ or ‘Hill of Incest’…

This is incredible. Unless you are set in your ways I think it is hard to deny that the medieval Irish were passing on a recollection in their myth from an encounter between Bell Beakers and the late descendants of the Newgrange people. In The Isles Norman Davies argues that the Irish, unlike the English and the British more generally (Brythonic), kept their own mythology, and so have a sense of their past in a way that is uncommon among Northern European peoples. The Irish legends imply that there were multiple waves of people, and it is assumed that the people who live in the great mounds are the Tuatha Dé Danann, who became ancient Irish demigods.

I suspect that the early Bell Beakers viewed the monuments of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Newgrange people, like how some Americans view “Indian graveyards.” Even among modern people, there is superstition, so what can we expect from the ancients? The Greeks forgot their heritage and assumed that the cyclopean citadels of their ancestors were built by giants. No doubt agro-pastoralist Bell Beakers looked at the massive ruins, and perceived the work of the gods.

And we shouldn’t underestimate the ability of oral tradition to recall events for premodern people. Mount Mazama blew 7,700 years ago, but native people in the area have legends of that explosion. Australian Aboriginals have myths that clearly outline and detail landmarks that are now underwater due to rising sea levels. The point is that it’s plausible that facts that are 3,000 years old could persist down to Christian Ireland, and be recorded by priests.

There are lots more I could say about this paper in the details. They found an infant with Down syndrome! They show recent introgression of hunter-gatherer ancestry into some Neolithic individuals. Also, they show hunter-gatherer substructure (Irish hunter-gatherers do not have ancestry from Magdelanian populations, only Villabruna). But the biggest aspect here is that this paper now sets a standard for how you can synthesize ancient DNA with archaeology and mythology.

Well done.