[INDOLOGY] New Scientist article about the Yamnaya migrations (27 March 2019 )

Sun Aug 25 16:52:35 UTC 2019

Dear List,
The issues brought up in this article are quite relevant to Indology as well as my wider interest in the Indo-Europeans. Since I'm working on a publication that deals with some of these issues, I thought I'd give an overview of some salient points. I've also included references for those who might want to go deeper.

Regarding the genetics, I think the main thrust of this article (1) is hyperbolic. It actually empowers those “narratives of violence” by giving them an appearance of scientific respectability which is not currently supported by the evidence. More importantly for this forum, I think it is an inaccurate portrayal of the era. I should point out that the article is in the popular science magazine New Scientist and thus increasing sales was at least one reason why this article hyping "genocide" was on the cover and accompanied by lurid illustrations and quotes. In the past, other scientists have criticized them for this kind of approach. (2, 3)

There are two invasionist scientists who are prominently featured in the article. I'll deal with the sidebar first since it is less significant. It quotes British geneticist Martin Richards who has recently published an important paper relevant to Indology (4) and also cites another important study by Reich et al. (5) Richards concludes, 
“Indigenous males seem to have been marginalised by the new arrivals much more than the women and were unable to have children to the same extent,” says Richards. “This seems unlikely to have been a wholly benign process.”

Even given the standard scientific reticence and British understatement, saying that it was "unlikely to have been a wholly benign process”, is basically a non-statement that could describe most of human history. The same could be said about walking down the streets of modern Manhattan after dark! It can hardly be extended to support the large-scale genocidal conquests claimed by the article.

In the past I have warned in this forum about trying to draw sweeping conclusions from genetic studies and, while the two studies above are important advances, the authors themselves, and many other geneticists, make it quite clear that this area is still in its early stages. We should be wary of any claims that the issues concerning us have been finally resolved by genetics. In fact, the successes of the studies mentioned here are good examples because their improved methodologies often argue against earlier widely heralded findings.

The main article starts by saying: "Neolithic Europe was subjected to a devastating conquest." It then quotes Kristian Kristiansen (6) who says,  “I’ve become increasingly convinced there must have been a kind of genocide."

Moving deeper into the main article, however, we see that Kristiansen's genocide interpretation is not widely accepted. In fact, there is much to argue against it. (7)

The article goes on to say that Volker Heyd (8) "cautions that it is based on evidence snatched from a few isolated sites. It is still far from clear, he says, that such a simple model can explain the spread of the Yamnaya and the rise of the Corded Ware people in its entirety. ... 'Geneticists are basically looking at ethnicity. But archaeologists are foremost looking at identity'".

Martin Furholt (9) concurs. The article quotes him as saying, "The idea that archaeological units of classification represent human groups of a shared social, or ethnic identity has been proven wrong many times during the history of research".

In his well-known article defending the Aryan Migration Theory, our own Michael Witzel points out that “pots don't speak”. (10) His point is that the Vedic Aryans, like their wide-spread early Indo-European forebears, are a cultural and linguistic group, not an ethnic group or one that can be identified by their pots, or, in this case, genes. Any genetic group can learn an Indo-European language or adopt an Indo-European culture. There was no Aryan race; the term conflates two quite different realities.

Regarding the conclusion that mixed DNA is a sign of violent invasions, George Hart commented in this thread, "Perhaps it’s worth pointing out that current research suggests that Ashkenazi Jews also have a mixture of DNA — paternal DNA from the near east but maternal DNA mostly from Europe. I don’t think anyone has suggested that the Jews have a violent history as anything but victims in Europe. It seems to me that Richards’ suggestion is irresponsible and almost certainly inaccurate." There is some controversy over Jewish maternal origins (11, 12, 13) but his basic point is well taken: there are numerous examples of major cultural change that did not involve invasions or even major migrations. 

The late Gregory Possehl, one of our greatest Harappan archaeologists, proposed the Middle Asian Interaction Sphere (MAIS) (14) which covered not just South Asia but "the interaction and trade between distant lands stretching from Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, the Iranian Plateau, and Central Asia". (15) Other scholars think along the same lines. (16, 17, 18, 19) Based on his work, I propose the Middle Asian Interaction Theory (MAIT) to explain early Indo-European influences. It emphasizes several forms of interaction, including but not limited to invasion or migration, and which postulates a longer time frame than is generally considered for Eastern Middle Asia. There are half a dozen nonviolent reasons for the small, localized cultures of this early period to have adopted Indo-European culture depending on the time and their level of development. I call this the Indo-European Cultural Package.

I had considered going into other examples of linguistic and cultural transfer that did not involve significant invasions or migrations but this has gone on longer than I'd planned. They include not just the modern Jews, but also the spread of Buddhism and other cultures in Central Asia, and even ancient Israel. I'm not sure how much interest there is about this discussion so I'll end it now.

I will let Heyd summarize what I consider to be the most important issue in this article, although it is often overlooked. I suggest it can be generalized to shed light on much of the early Indo-European period, including South Asia. I deal with this and other issues in my publication that is in preparation. 

Archaeologist Volker Heyd: "Rather than a single genetic transmission from Yamnaya to the Central European Corded Ware Culture, there is considerable evidence for centuries of connections and interactions across the continent, as far as Iberia." (20)

--

(1) Barras, Colin. 2019. “Story of Most Murderous People of All Time Revealed in Ancient DNA.” New Scientist. March 27, 2019. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132230-200-story-of-most-murderous-people-of-all-time-revealed-in-ancient-dna/.
(2) Paul Z. Meyers. 2009. “New Scientist Flips the Bird at Scientists, Again | ScienceBlogs.” March 21, 2009. https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/03/21/new-scientist-flips-the-bird-a.
(3) John Baez. 2006. “The N-Category Café.” September 19, 2006. https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/09/a_plea_to_save_new_scientist.html.
(4) Moorjani, Priya, Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Nick Patterson, Mark Lipson, Po-Ru Loh, Periyasamy Govindaraj, Bonnie Berger, David Reich, and Lalji Singh. 2013. “Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India.” American Journal of Human Genetics 93 (3): 422–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.07.006.
(5) Silva, Marina, Martin Richards, Daniel Vieira, Andreia Brandão, Teresa Rito, Joana B. Pereira, Ross M. Fraser, et al. 2017. “A Genetic Chronology for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-Biased Dispersals.” BMC Evolutionary Biology 17 (1): 88. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-017-0936-9.
(6) Kristiansen has published several papers on his theory including:
Kristiansen, Kristian, Morten E. Allentoft, Karin M. Frei, Rune Iversen, Niels N. Johannsen, Guus Kroonen, Łukasz Pospieszny, et al. 2017. “Re-Theorising Mobility and the Formation of Culture and Language among the Corded Ware Culture in Europe.” Antiquity 91 (356): 334–47. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2017.17.
(7) Quiles, Carlos. 2017. “The Renewed ‘Kurgan Model’ of Kristian Kristiansen and the Danish School: ‘The Indo-European Corded Ware Theory’ – Indo-European.Eu.” November 18, 2017. https://indo-european.eu/2017/11/the-renewed-kurgan-model-of-kristian-kristiansen-and-the-danish-school-the-indo-european-corded-ware-theory/, https://indo-european.eu/2017/11/the-renewed-kurgan-model-of-kristian-kristiansen-and-the-danish-school-the-indo-european-corded-ware-theory.
(8) Heyd, Volker. 2017. “Kossinna’s Smile.” Antiquity 91 (356): 348–59. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2017.21.
Olalde, Iñigo, Selina Brace, Morten E. Allentoft, Ian Armit, Kristian Kristiansen, Thomas Booth, Nadin Rohland, Volker Heyd, et al. 2018. “The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe.” Nature 555 (March): 543–543. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature26164.
(9)  Furholt, Martin. 2018. “Massive Migrations? The Impact of Recent ADNA Studies on Our View of Third Millennium Europe.” European Journal of Archaeology 21 (2): 159–91. https://doi.org/10.1017/eaa.2017.43.
(10) http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/AryanHome.pdf Page 7. 

(11) Costa, Marta D., Joana B. Pereira, Maria Pala, Verónica Fernandes, Anna Olivieri, Alessandro Achilli, Ugo A. Perego, et al. 2013. “A Substantial Prehistoric European Ancestry amongst Ashkenazi Maternal Lineages.” Nature Communications 4 (October): 2543. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3543.
(12) Behar, Doron M., Ene Metspalu, Toomas Kivisild, Alessandro Achilli, Yarin Hadid, Shay Tzur, Luisa Pereira, et al. 2006. “The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event.” American Journal of Human Genetics 78 (3): 487–97. https://doi.org/10.1086/500307.
(13) Das, Ranajit, Paul Wexler, Mehdi Pirooznia, and Eran Elhaik. 2017. “The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish.” Frontiers in Genetics 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2017.00087.
(14) Possehl, Gregory L. 2002. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
(15) Possehl, Gregory L. 2007. “The Middle Asian Interaction Sphere | Expedition Magazine.” Expedition 49 (1): 40–42. https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-middle-asian-interaction-sphere/
(16) Kohl, Philip L. 2011. “World-Systems and Modelling Macro-Historical Processes in Later Prehistory:: An Examination of Old and a Search for New Perspectives.” In , 77–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvh1dr2k.11.
(17) Kohl, Philip L. 2007. The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia. Cambridge World Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511618468.
(18) Drews, Robert. 2000. “Medinet Habu: Oxcarts, Ships, and Migration Theories.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 59 (3): 161–90.
(19)  Sherratt, Susan. 2010. “The Aegean and the Wider World: Some Thoughts on a World-Systems Perspective.” M. Galaty and W. Parkinson (Eds), Archaic State Interaction: The Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. The Aegean and the wider world: some thoughts on a world-systems perspective
(20) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/kossinnas-smile/8ABA3BD9132B7605E8871236065CD4E3 summary conclusion of Heyd, Volker. 2017. “Kossinna’s Smile.” Antiquity 91 (356): 348–59. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2017.21.

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