The migration of the so-called Yamnaya-Steppoles from Ukraine in the third millennium BC did not go together with the spread of new cultures across Europe, as is often assumed. Analysis of nearly a thousand C14 daterations throughout Europe show that the cultures associated with that Yamnaya migration spread independently of the Steppe DNA across Europe, even often against the direction of that migration.
This is a team of archaeologists, led by Quentin Bourgeois (Leiden University) this week Science Advances. The discovery of the extensive spread of the Yamnaya-DNA across Europe led in the past ten years to revival of the old idea that cultures often spread through migrations. The current research undermines that conviction again.
In the third millennium BC, the shepherd people of the Yamnaya first spread from the Steppe near the Black and Caspian Sea to the west, to Europe, and later also to the southeast, to India. They were probably the first speakers of Indo-European. In the past ten years, this migration has been found in countless analyzes of genetic patterns in old bones and has led, among other things, that most Europeans can find around 50 percent of their distant ancestors among this Yamnaya.
Visible separation
The expansion of these pastoral step -powered is also always connected to two cultures that spread over almost the same time over almost all of Europe: the rope cup culture and the clock cup culture. Incidentally, in one of the first startling investigations into the Yamnaya-DNA it was noticeable that precisely in the oldest traces of the clock cup culture, in Spain, almost no Yamnaya-DNA was found. That already visible separation between migration and culture distribution is now confirmed by the Bourgeois CS study
“It is not that there is no connection between the step -powered and these cultures, but we have detached them from each other,” says Bourgeois in a telephone explanation. “You have to see the spread of that DNA and the spread of these cultures as two separate phenomena that cross each other. Anthropologists and archaeologists have often argued, but we are now the first to substantiate that with a clear chronology.” With a smile, he explains why this is: “Not everyone is going to sit out a thousand articles on the C14 deater, we have been working on it for two years.”
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The rope cup culture and the clock cup culture derive their name from the characteristic pottery, decorated with the print of a rope or in the form of a church bell respectively. They are further characterized by typical funeral habits, with flint battle hammers and daggers at the rope cup culture, and, for example, a copper dagger at the clock cup culture.
A striking outcome of the new chronology of the two cultures is also that rope cup and clock cup culture have emerged almost simultaneously. The oldest rope cup finds come from Bohemen and the Baltic states, in both areas of approximately 2950 BC. The oldest clock cup finds are only a fraction younger, from around 2900 BC. on the western Mediterranean coast (Northeast Spain and Southeast France).
These early clock cups already have the characteristic pottery, the typical copper daggers and semi-bent body posture, but not yet the big differences between men’s and women’s graves of the later clock cup graves. This may only have arisen after contact with the rope cup culture in the Rhine area, ca. 2600 BC. “In the rope cup culture, women were placed on the left with their head to the east and men on the right side with their heads to the west. In the clock cup culture that was done exactly the other way around, after the two came into contact with each other,” explains Bourgeois. “That must have been a very conscious choice.”
And most importantly: no Yamnaya-Dna can be found in the earliest clock cup, traces of that origin appear in Spain even by 2000 BC. In the earliest rope cup in Bohemia and the Baltic states, Yamnaya-Dna can already be found, but there are also people without any steppeping. Those earliest rope cup tracks arise in a “great genetic diversity, which is even greater than the differences among current Europeans,” the researchers write.
Another striking outcome is that the rope cup culture then extends to the also, against the direction of Westwart step pemigration, which is set at the same time. The youngest finds were found furthest to the east in Europe.
Peak periods
This independence of migration is also found in a general analysis of the places and periods in which the two cultures have had their largest distribution regionally. It turns out not to be related to what is known about the spread of the Yamnaya-Dna across Europe. Bourgeois: “Sometimes traces of that origin appear a few hundred years before that culture, sometimes only a few hundred years later. You can’t throw the two phenomena together.”
The two cultures initially spread slowly across Europe, but in the ‘peak periods’ it goes fast, for the rope cup culture that peak is between 2600 and 2400 BC, for the clock cup culture that is 2400 to 2200 BC. Bourgeois and his colleagues see those periods such as times of great Europe-wide cultural changes on a scale that has never been shown before. Then, in the period 2200-2000 BC, there is immediately a fast decline of the clock cup culture, exactly when a new Europe-wide trade in tin and bronze is created.
That start of the Bronze Age is also such a large cultural change in which relatively large regional differences in culture arise. “All those processes follow each other and intertwine, the spread of the Yamnaya-DNA across Europe is one of those phenomena, over a thousand years full of major changes,” said Bourgeois.
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