I first came across Marija Gimbutas’ work when I was a linguistics student in the 90s. At the time her Kurgan hypothesis (steppe origin of Proto-Indo-European/PIE) was less popular than Colin Renfrew's Anatolian (farming) hypothesis. The main problem with Renfew’s hypothesis was that farming in Europe was much older than any calculated date for PIE, which has a Copper Age origin and not a Neolithic origin. One of the biggest problems with Gimutas’ hypothesis was imagining how a small pastoralist tribe from the Pontic Steppe could have been responsible for the spread of languages that are now spoken by almost half of the world’s population.
The steppe homeland thesis for PIE has a long history. It was proposed in 1890 by the German linguist Otto Schrader. Marija Gimbutas developed the idea in the 1950s. Although her core concept of the place and time of PIE has stood the test of time, other aspects of her case have since been drastically revised. She pictured the spread of PIE by force. How else could Indo-European languages have overcome those spoken by established Neolithic communities? As we have seen, the staying power of European Neolithic communities has been overestimated. In places Indo-European languages entered empty territory. In others, though, the question remains. (from: Ancestral Journey, 2013)
However, only a few years later the tables turned again in Gimbutas’s favour. In Who We Are and How We Got Here David Reich writes about how a few men from the Bronze Age left an enormously disproportionate amount of offspring (star clusters):
In East Asians, Europeans, Near Easterners, and North Africans, the authors found many Star Clusters with common male ancestors living roughly around five thousand years ago.
The time around five thousand years ago coincides with the period in Eurasia that the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt called the “Secondary Products Revolution,” in which people began to find many uses for domesticated animals beyond meat production, including employing them to pull carts and plows and to produce dairy products and clothing such as wool. This was also around the time of the onset of the Bronze Age, a period of greatly increased human mobility and wealth accumulation, facilitated by the domestication of the horse, the invention of the wheel and wheeled vehicles, and the accumulation of rare metals like copper and tin, which are the ingredients of bronze and had to be imported from hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. The Y-chromosome patterns reveal that this was also a time of greatly increased inequality, a genetic reflection of the unprecedented concentration of power in tiny fractions of the population that began to be possible during this time due to the new economy. Powerful males in this period left an extraordinary impact on the populations that followed them—more than in any previous period—with some bequeathing DNA to more descendants today than Genghis Khan.
We know how Genghis Khan spread his genes. Of course, the situation for the Yamnaya was a bit different. We cannot picture Bronze steppe pastoralists taking Europe and Western Asia in a single military campaign. However, they did again and again become overlords of small farming populations throughout the Bronze Age, in a domino-effect way. Even repeatedly conquering settlements that had already been conquered by Yamanya previously in the process.
The dominant haplogroups R1a and R1b of the Yamanya are almost ubiquitous nowadays in Europe.
Of course, the pastoralists also moved into open ecological spaces without dominating any previous populations. However, there is no reason not to believe that the Ymanya culture was a very martial culture, at least towards outgroups. Famously, pastoralists often exhibit a strong cultural ethos of valor and physical prowess (91% of the recorded populations have an ideology of “male toughness”), in some groups exemplified by special institutions for warriorhood, often embodied in age-set systems and associated gerontocratic institutions.
Putin’s war against Ukraine can be seen historically in the tradition of pastoralist steppe raiders like the Huns and Mongols.
Comments
Post a Comment