A little over five thousand years ago, something bad happened in central and western Europe. Farming had arrived earlier, and flourished for several hundred years, accompanied by population increase (see the graph above, showing estimated population density over time in that region, from a recent paper in Nature Communications.). Then there was a population collapse, on the order of that caused by the Black Death, but longer lasting. It doesn’t look as if this was caused by climate changes.
Ways of life changed. In Britain and Ireland, cereal farming seems to have stopped completely for hundreds of years (except in the Orkney Islands). Instead people were raising cattle and pigs.
But were they the same people? We know that there were big genetic changes in northern Europe somewhere around this time, in which the Sardinian-like farmers occupying almost all of Europe were replaced by another population with substantial amounts of WHG-like ancestry (western hunter-gatherer) and ANE (ancestral north Eurasian: Sibermen) ancestry.
Something similar seems to have happened somewhat earlier in the Balkans: there had been many agricultural settlements, some large, exhibiting advanced metallurgy- but everything stopped. The tell settlements ended. No permanent settlements in the Balkan uplands can be dated between 3900 and 3300 BC.
We’re going to have look again at the archaeological record in the light of what we know and are learning from ancient and modern DNA analysis. Gimbutas and Gordon Childe are looking better and better: most contemporary archaeologists are not.
West Hunter 
Is it possible a new plant pathogen hit local cereal variettiees?
it would have had to hit both wheat and barley, while sparing the Orkneys and many places in Europe and the Middle East. And persist for centuries.
The closest case I know involves the chickpea, which was one of the original founder crops of the Middle East, but disappeared from the archaeological record for about 3,000 years, due to a devastating fungus. It reappeared when a version that could grow in the summer evolved. But there were several other legumes avaiable then: lentils, peas, bitter vetch, grass pea.
short answer: no.
Some have suggested that the soil became impoverished as forests were cleared by Neolithic farmers, reflected in pollen curves and population declines.
But maybe forest clearing enabled Sibermen colonization by providing a highway suitable for mounted raids? Perhaps the growth of Bandkeramic settlement cells along major drainages eventually reached a threshold that allowed easy passage by horseback into areas that were previously heavily forested.
Well I certainly don’t know, but there is an event approximately at the right time – the filling of the Black Sea as in the Ryan & Pitman Noah’s flood hypothesis. I don’t immediately see how that would lead to the effects noted, but I can’t think of any other major outside event in that period. It’s too late for the Younger-Dryas and I don’t think any of the big human pathogens (malaria, measles, small pox, etc.) fit either.
Gimbutas of course is herself revisionist, and she designed her theory to appeal to people after WW2; she edited out a lot of the pre-WW2 stuff and changed the timeline.
The main problem with this post is that if IE languages had dispersed that early they would have already branched into separate language families by historical times.
The linguistic situation in historical Europe (e.g. during Roman times) shows a very recent expansion.
There is also evidence that majority of helots in Sparta didn’t even speak Greek into historical times.
“shows a very recent expansion.”
Greek, Latin, Celtic, and German were more different from each other then than French and Spanish are today, and they’ve been diverging for almost 2000 years.
So you’re utterly wrong.
“Greek, Latin, Celtic, and German were more different from each other then than French and Spanish are today”
I’d be interested to hear your case for this.
But what you miss is that language divergence in PRE-literate societies happens much faster than in literate societies where language is more settled and decided upon.
See this article by Don Rindge, the student of Linear B:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=980
The linguistic situation at the beginning of recorded history in Europe is consistent with an IE expansion of around 1600 BC into Greece, 1500 BC into Italy, considerably later into Western Europe and the English isles probably not until 500 BC.
There is evidence collected regarding the changes in Greek dialects that supports the idea the majority of helots in Sparta (by all accounts an EARLY IE incursion into Europe) were speaking a non-Greek language well after 1000 BC. Please see the appendix to Drews’ “The Coming of the Greeks.”
Please see the latest linguistic study by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov which shows that PIE developed in contact with both Finnic AND Semitic. Indicating a south Caucasus homeland at least at the point just prior to its expansion.
Genetic data is great but on its own it’s misleading. An elite expansion wouldn’t have left a trace. What can be reconstructed from IE culture also shows it was an aristocratic culture. But we’ve been over this before.
“But what you miss is that language divergence in PRE-literate societies happens much faster than in literate societies where language is more settled and decided upon.”
And moreover, writing and particularly the presence of medieval Latin in the picture encouraged the Romance languages both to have a slower rate of innovation and to share innovations (particularly in vocabulary). IE languages in preliterate Europe should have innovated much more independently from each other than Romance languages in the Christian era, so even the same amount of difference as we see between Spanish and French should imply a shorter period of separation.
One possibility is that the initial 3000 BC expansion was IE-speaking but that attested IE languages in Europe are part of some subgroup with a more recent common origin, and the other branches that formed in the initial wave died out.
“if IE languages had dispersed that early they would have already branched into separate language families by historical times.”
I don’t know enough to argue about that but I wonder if there’s a second option: an early I-E expansion in the regions around their starting position which *displaced* the peoples living to their west and those people in moving west trashed LBK in a domino effect. This first wave only becoming I-E speakers later when the fully developed I-E culture expands more dramatically in the Bronze Age.
So a Copper Age displacement wave (displaced by I-E but not themselves I-E) followed by a later Bronze Age I-E conquest wave – with this second wave missing the Basques.
This is interesting and a possible solution. I wouldn’t deny that the same genetic stock that brought IE language in the Bronze Age brought a more “popular” expansion earlier.
“There is also evidence that majority of helots in Sparta didn’t even speak Greek into historical times.”
I guess Chadwick thought something like that (not necessarily that they wouldn’t have been Greek-speaking that late but they represented the descendants of an originally non-Greek speaking element – duh, though the arrival of proto-Greek to the South Balkans might have been quite a bit older than the 17th century BC) but what evidence are you referring to?
The ancients (e.g. Thucydides, Theopompus) thought that the Laconians had enslaved fellow Greeks, first in Laconia (“Achaeans,” probably what we’d classify as Arcado-Cypriot speakers today; there is some linguistic evidence about the Arcadian influence on Laconian) and then Messene (perhaps fellow Dorian speakers even before the Laconian takeover), with the Messenians representing the majority of the enslaved, so that gives us an idea of who the “helots” were (or were thought to be) in historical times, at least.
Please see appendix to Drews’ “The Coming of the Greeks.” He tracks the language change in Messenia and Sparta proper. It is consistent with helots adopting Doric in its “pure” state, which wouldn’t have been possible if they had spoken a non-Doric but still Greek dialect (there are tell-tale signs when a population picks up a related dialect as opposed to a totally foreign language).
You were banned before. And will be banned each time you show up.
Perhaps they had to relearn from the birds and monkeys how to talk?
mirror neurons, monkey see, monkey do
“…most contemporary archaeologists are not”. True! It’s worth noting that the modern exceptions, including the archaeologists who wrote the paper you cite, work in a Darwinian framework. But they are a tiny minority in the discipline and there are no signs that will change any time soon, especially in North America where s-c anthropologists control the departments in which archaeologists work.
But then, where would they get their MC1R haplotypes related to skin color?
Don’t mention the Goddess Religions!
The beauty of the Gimbutas theory is that not only does it explain cultural (and, as we now know, genetic) turnover in Europe with an invasion from the steppes, it also explains why Old Europe was bound to lose.
Would this be a reference to patriarchal societies necessarily and always defeating matriarchal ones in conflicts?
Matriarchal societies are roughly as easy to beat as the giant chickenheart Bill Cosby heard on the radio as a child. All he had to do was it turn off. There are no matriarchal societies, nor have there ever been any. All you have to do is shut the book.
I have long held that there is no such thing as a matriarchal society, myself. That said, I was previous unacquainted with Gimbuta and I was trying to understand the comment you made about the explanatory value of her theory.
I have a question about how population density is calculated. According to the paper cited, “The basis for this demographic proxy is the assumption that there is a relationship between the number of dated archaeological sites falling within a given time interval in a given region (or their summed date probabilities) and population density.”
So they count graveyards and the number of bodies within them, put a date on them, and then approximate the population on the basis of this information?
Wouldn’t bodies decompose entirely in some areas, and be relatively preserved in others? And, if so, I can’t see how we could get even an approximate count in areas where preservation is rare or nonexistent.
GCochran, I asked this question back in February but you didn’t really reply except to say the answer was obvious. I’m just trying to understand your reasoning, not trying to dispute it. So I just repeat myself : I can understand that France, Italy and the Balkans would have a north-south gradient when it comes to WHG+ANE. But why should Scotland and Norway have about the same amount of WHG+ANE as Eastern Europe ? Shouldn’t there be an east-west gradient as well if WHG+ANE was an IE marker ?
Not if they killed everyone in northern Europe, all the way from Lithuania to Ireland. I have trouble coming up with another scenario that works. Can you? Look at the gradient of Amerindian ancestry going from Maine to Iowa: almost none, all the way across. Near-total replacement.
So your view is that in the northern latitudes the preexisting population was wiped out but in the more southern latitudes this happened less. Because the north was less demographically dense than further south ? I guess that would be consistent with the Amerindians in the Americas : survival rates in the face of European contact were highest in those parts of the Americas that had been demographically densest in 1492, for obvious reasons.
Yet…the Amerindians were mostly wiped out by disease. Is there some reason invader-conquerors would wipe out whole populations as thoroughly from east to west, as diseases would ? I mean, even genocidal invader-conquerors advance in waves and should show receding strength over distance, no ?
The west coast of ireland Scotland and Sweden are all the same population and the differences in appearance are due to them having diverged in 5000 years. I think people who have visted those countries might doubt that
But achieved not just by butchery end ethnic cleansing, but also by Old World diseases. Could Old World diseases kill off Old-Worlders?
Anyway, why kill ’em all if you can enslave them?
Selection. Survival rates of the HG could have been higher in northern latitudes (lactose tolerance would have played bigger role north than south) than in southern latitudes (malaria would have favoured people with higher EF ancestry). Neolithic farmers population would have recover faster south than north – which we see in Thracian DNA samples – all with serious degree of NE/EF admixture.
Doesn’t the survival of y dna I in the far north imply that didn’t happen though?
It does seem to have *mostly* happened in the central band of Europe where LBK were but not in the most mountainous/forested areas in the far north (which is what you’d expect imo as they still protected Europe from the Mongols much later).
*If* total replacement didn’t happen in the most mountainous/forested areas of the far north (which unless i’m missing something the y dna I distribution proves) then that implies there was some ANE already there meaning ANE weren’t the more localized “Sibermen” but the more widespread “Hyperboreans” living in a great swathe all along the north Eurasian plain from France to Siberia and mixed with WHG in the west so WHG/ane in the far west and ANE/whg or ANE to the east (both with an increasing northern cline).
#
Separate to that thought is I wonder if these ancestral components had specific advantages that led to selection in place after initial migration/conquest e.g. what if ANE had specific cold adaptations?
@pseudoerasmus,
Norway:
The explanation is that Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers (SHG), already had some ANE-like ancestry prior to the IE invasion/expansion – as they are ANE shifted in some of the graphs..
Scotland:
Ireland has about 16% ANE (based on my parents percentages), and Scotland 18%. The difference can be explained by greater Viking influence, or that the Caledonians had a somewhat Scandinavian ethnogenesis. Or from the historic relocation of Alano-Sarmatians from North of the Caucasus to Hadrians Wall – as I suggested previously.
The Scandinavians, I can see. But the Alano-Sarmatians ? You’re not a proponent of the “Alano-Sarmatian theory of the Arthurian legends”, by any chance ?
@pseudo,
No, as King Arthur or the Britons is based on the life and times of Muirchertach mac Erca, High King (Ard Ri) of Ireland.
Here are some useful links on this:
http://www.thejournal.ie/was-king-arthur-an-irishman-206434-Aug2011/
http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100214836
http://childofdanu.blogspot.ca/2011/08/joys-of-local-journalism-or-how-i.html
http://www.iamthetwinflame11-11.com/king-arthur-vs-muirchertach-erca.html
No, no, no, Arthur was a Breton. Alternatively he was a Kelso boy. Or maybe he was just a folk name attached to Aurelius Ambrosius (spellings differ). Or he’s as mysterious as that other Dark Ages figure, Mahomet. Opinions differ. I’d be really impressed by a “Mahomet was Irish” website, mind.
If you reckon that an older spelling of McHomet would be M’Homet you’ve got the start of a thesis here.
@dearieme,
Did you read the last link,it’s Dane Pestano’s own website, and details the life, times and exploits of the very real Muirchertach mac Erca, and juxtaposes them with the legendary King Arthur? IMO, the correspondences are too many and too specific to be random.
I incline to Arthur being a Roman soldier. Specifically Artorius is an Etruscan name. The oldest visual reference to King Arthur is on the door of Modena cathedral. Modena is the furthest part from Rome of ancient Etruria. I assume he was seen as a local boy made good.
Apparently some new paper is continuing to insist there’s been a huge decline in IQ over the 20th century:
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.ca/2014/06/woodley-launches-his-victorian-defence.html
doesn’t the evidence used only apply to certain countries?
What is the relation, if any, between this population decline and the Great Elm Decline?
Did Central/East-Asian Admixture of Northern Europeans come with Indo-Europeans?
They didn’t kill everyone across Northern Europe. There are plenty of Western European specific uniparental markers in northwestern Europe, like mtDNA U5b, which had to have been there before the Indo-Europeans came.
It’s difficult to say what happened until we see the Samara Valley genome-wide data and the models that Reich et al. come up with for the spread of admixture from the Copper Age steppe into Europe, and presumably the Near East and South Asia.
But I’ll take a guess and say that the steppe nomads of the Copper Age had relatively high ratios of ANE, certainly higher than any populations studied so far except possibly the Karitiana Indians (42%). But they also had to have fairly even ratios of EEF and WHG, because this would allow them to spread about 15% of ANE from Greece to Ireland without disturbing too much the south to north cline of EEF/WHG present across Europe.
Let’s be conservative and say they had something like 30% of ANE, just slightly higher than present-day Lezgins of the Northeast Caucasus. So if Northern Europeans today have around 15% of ANE from the Copper Age steppe, then they also have around 15% of EEF and 15% of WHG from there. That leaves around 50% of DNA from whoever was in Northern Europe before the Indo-Europeans.
However, I just drank a bottle of red wine and started another, so I can’t guarantee those calculations make any sense.
Wait, the Copper Age steppe nomads couldn’t have spread 15% of WHG to Greece, because Greeks only have 6% of WHG.
So the ratio of ANE among the steppe nomads had to have been higher than 30%. Although we also have to factor in that some WHG and ANE was spread to Greece later, during the Slavic expansions.
Here is an excellent lecture by David Anthony, writer of the book “The Horse, the Wheel and Language, How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.” The book itself is chock full of endless detailed descriptions of archeological digs, so I recommend this lecture. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d864bwyCAoA. It is a great place to start for history buffs like myself who don’t really know much about the bronze age but would like to know more. It’s pre-history, it seems nobody does.
It would not surprise me in the least if Cochran is on to something regarding a black death like plague that swept through fixed in one place agricultural cultures but was far kinder to the nomadic steppe herders since they were always on the move. This would help pave the way for the near replacement of the Sardinian like people in the Danube river basin by the Eurasian Sibermen. Disease was incredibly important in the near replacement of the amerinds by pale folks dependent on horse drawn wagons just a few centuries ago, could a similar event have happened in our unrecorded past when the graph shows a population down turn? As Mark Twain once said “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
A lot of nasty human diseases started out as diseases of livestock that jumped into human populations. It’s possible that people who were especially heavily involved in cattle herding and dairying got a head start in adapting to these diseases, both genetically and through immune responses. In a later period, being exposed to cowpox by working around cows gave you immunity to smallpox. This might have been important in the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire, or even the Aryan invasions of India. My impression however is that it’s hard to make a case for smallpox being important, or even present, really early in Europe — i.e. ancient Greeks don’t seem to be familiar with it. Is this correct? Could some other disease have been important in helping early Indo-European invaders?
During the Civil War, the Comanche pushed the white settlement frontier in Texas back something like 100 miles, because there was no organized force available to stop them. I doubt if disease had much to do with it, in this case.
Raiding, killing -> new pastureland, more raiding, more killing.
It’s happened elsewhere.
Something I hadn’t really thought about until reading “Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World,” (John F. Richard) was just how disruptive large-scale cattle herding is to agriculture. Even beyond disease and direct people-on-people killing, the introduction of cattle ranching in early colonial Mexico had a devastating impact on local farmers because cattle destroyed crops, and locals didn’t have cost-effective protection. Lots of Mexico shifted over to ranching in this period because of the asymmetry in property-rights enforcement. Maybe if the Old Europeans had had cheap barbed wire they would have found it easier to coexist with the new guys, to the tune of “The farmer and the cowman must be friends.”
This makes sense. Grazing animals are going to make a bee line towards the highest nutrition vegetation which would be crops. This alone would have set up a violent scenario even if the dirt farmer and the herdsman wanted to avoid fighting each other. If the guy on horseback wins more than he loses which of course he would than eventually it is population replacement by the horsemen.
“It doesn’t look as if this was caused by climate changes”: I wonder how good knowledge is about that. In my experience you’ll find one author using tree rings as thermometers and another author using them as rain gauges. Still, there can be many lines of argument beyond tree rings.
Tree rings can certainly be used to provide proxy climate data, but you have to know what you’re doing, which a lot of people who try to use them do not. As we have seen recently, a lot of tree-ring studies lack adult supervision, at the very least.
@Asher
“Would this be a reference to patriarchal societies necessarily and always defeating matriarchal ones in conflicts?”
Not addressed to me but my answer to that would be herders vs farmers. Herder cultures encourage raiding and through that violence. Farming cultures encourage pacification. The farmers generally have the advantage of numbers (and much later a dramatic advantage in technology) but the herders have the advantage in percentage of psychos so there’s a balance of power there which the farmers have to be ahead in all the time while the herders only have to be ahead once.
@Anonymous said:
“The west coast of ireland Scotland and Sweden are all the same population and the differences in appearance are due to them having diverged in 5000 years. I think people who have visted those countries might doubt that”
It’s not whether you think these populations look similar, it’s whether they are genetically similar, right?
Doug McDonald of UIUC, who wrote the code for the original autosomal ancestry for FTDNA, has frequently said that based on tens of thousands of samples he has seen, the closest Isles population to Scandinavians are Irish, and not any population from Britain, that’s maybe somewhat unexpected to some, but that’s a fact.
As an example, my father, who I reference as an unadmixed Irish person, has a FTDNA Autosomal match in Lillehammer, Norway – near Sweden – to a person who is 100% Norwegian, and although their longest shared segment is only 8 cM, they share no less than 19 segments of 1.5 cM or greater, for a total of 58 cM – which is an exceptional amount of sharing for 2 people whose Most Recent Common Ancestor may have lived from 1 to 3 thousand years ago.
Scandinavians and Irish also have roughly the same proportions of Blue Eyes, the difference being that the Scandinavians are very blonde and the Irish are brunettes by and large.
Now my father’s ancestry goes back to the Slieve Bloom mountains – the only mountains in the great central plain of Ireland, and an area never colonized by any recent invader – and this Norwegian’s ancestry is in the central Scandinavian mountains, well inland.
“”the difference being that the Scandinavians are very blonde and the Irish are brunettes by and large.”
Why the all the non synonimous varability in the alleles for hair (and eye) colour? The MC1R gene alone has 11 alleles in Europeans. Those are nonsynonymous alleles that each confer a certain phenotypic variant. Hair colour does not vary in a single hue, diversity in colours other than blonde or brunnete, such as red or golden, is relatively speaking vastly more common in Scotland and Ireland than in Sweden. One must assume there was genetic diversification within a population for 11 alleles to be extant.
I’m going to watch Conan tomorrow on blue ray.
Pseudoerasmus: “I can understand that France, Italy and the Balkans would have a north-south gradient when it comes to WHG+ANE. But why should Scotland and Norway have about the same amount of WHG+ANE as Eastern Europe ?”
I have some thoughts linked to all of this:
– The presumably pre-IE people do seem plausibly to have gradients in their level of WHG mixture. The TRB culture Gokhem sample (2750-3050 BC) is around 75% WHG, 25% “Basal Eurasian”, which seems more Basque-like, while Oetzi (3300 BC) and the Linearbandkeramik Stuttgart (5100-4800 BC) sample are around 50:50, and more Sardinian-like.
So there isn’t total homogenity and lack of admixture among these pre-IE cultures, even if we assume LBK is essentially 100% Near Eastern.
– Although the ANE+WHG estimates in the paper produce similar outcomes for far Germanic-Celtic Northwest Europeans and Balto-Slavic Europeans, principal components analyses, do show a Basque-Sardinian shift in Northwesterners, and Basque sharing in terms of overall genetics. So it is possible that this is correct and the estimates are slightly wrong.
– On the paper Cochran links, the rapid decline of grain agriculture in favor of pastoralism in Britain is dated to 3000BC and is linked to a period of megalithism in the British Isles – quote “Part of the reason why pastoralists built monuments such as Stonehenge lies in the importance of periodic large gatherings for dispersed, mobile groups.”. And that seems like a common explanation of Stonehenge I’ve heard recently – a place for a mobile cattle based population with a communal tradition to meet and sacrifice.
Megalithism is not normally linked to the Indo-Europeans. Stonehenge specifically is associated to the Windmill Hill culture, who practiced typical Neolithic style collective burial and who also seem ambiguously pastoral in their subsistence. The agro-pastoralist Corded Ware culture at least tentatively identified with Indo-Europeans would not have been in Britain then, nor the Bell Beakers.
(The TRB Gokhem sample mentioned above is from a megalithic burial structure of a similar era.)
So this makes me wonder whether the situation in Britain and far Northern Europe involved a clash between two broadly pastoralist cultures, one Indo-European (whatever actual ancestry blend that was) and the other of mostly Early European Farmer stock. That might have been by its nature more mutually “to the death” than others clashes between farmers and herders on the continent, and one of these cultures was tightly linked into a continent dominating, less communal and war seasoned continental wave, that had emerged to dominance due to a worsening agricultural climate.
“The presumably pre-IE people do seem plausibly to have gradients in their level of WHG mixture. The TRB culture Gokhem sample (2750-3050 BC) is around 75% WHG, 25% “Basal Eurasian”, which seems more Basque-like, while Oetzi (3300 BC) and the Linearbandkeramik Stuttgart (5100-4800 BC) sample are around 50:50, and more Sardinian-like.”
where do those numbers come from? Because I have a theory about their origin.
That’s how it looks in the Skoglund et al 2014 paper – http://dienekes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/more-ancient-scandinavians-skoglund.html
“Maybe if the Old Europeans had had cheap barbed wire”: in a figurative sense, the British Isles did.
Cochran, the complete population replacement theory doesn’t work. From memory, Jean Manco is a proponent of it, but if so she’s pushing the smelly stuff up a very steep hill because, like I said, there are too many uniparental markers in northwestern Europe that don’t look like they came from anywhere east of the Vistula.
Also, Matt is correct in pointing out that:
a) Northwestern Europeans, especially Brits, show strong autosomal links to the western Mediterranean and Basque country, which would be very curious if they were entirely of far eastern European origin.
b) The ANE figures in Lazaridis et al, for the Basques and North Spaniards are likely wrong, because the authors themselves argue that these groups can be modeled as two way mixtures of EEF and WHG, with 0% ANE, just like Sardinians.
So the answer to this riddle is in the ratios of the ANE, EEF and WHG that the Copper Age Samara nomads carried, and the real ratios of ANE in Northwestern Europe, which might not be as high as reported thus far, especially for the four Argyll Scots (a ridiculous average of 18%).
Back migration of Eurasian genes into Africa
So what is the idea, that this was caused by the arrival of the Indo Europeans, and that it was basically massive slaughter?
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