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This is the fifteenth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.
Like I’ve said several times before, please don’t forget that my book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history of ancient Western and Chinese philosophy” is available at Amazon here and also at a much cheaper price and straight from the publisher, which you can contact here. And it’s also free for all paid subscribers of A History of Mankind, who get an electronic copy.
In addition, just a quick note to say that I’m so glad that it’s now clear to everyone that pretty much everybody is at all times thinking about the Roman Empire. Jokes about my surname aside, the History of Mankind project will soon reach the start of the Roman era, and literally dozens upon dozens of posts about all things Roman are coming to your inbox.
Today we’re coming up with a first: this will be the first time that I comment upon an academic paper that pertains to a discussion in an earlier Q&A post. The context is in “The First Pyramids of the Americas & the Indo-Europeans of the Steppes,” the ninth post in the A History of Mankind series, where I wrote:
Thanks to horses and wagons, the steppes became during this era a vast conveyor belt for peoples, a role they would keep for a long time to come. In the Pannonian plain of modern Hungary, the western-most extension of the steppe, the so-called Baden Culture of 3600 BC and following centuries is a tell-tale sign of the first large Indo-European migration, as it shows distinctive copper tools, different from those used by “Old Europeans,” weapons, and ornaments that spread into northern Serbia, western Romania, Slovakia, Moravia, and southern Poland.
Baden-style polished and channeled ceramic mugs and small pots were used across south-eastern Europe by 3000 BC, and this wasn't because of fashion – handicrafts travelled with well-armed warriors who killed and maimed and took the women of the local tribes, imposing their own Indo-European languages to the point that only one “Old European” tongue would survive after just a few centuries: Basque, who has persisted to this day on the extremely rugged south-eastern corner of Biscay Bay.
Similarities between these ceramics and those of northwestern Anatolia in the centuries before Troy I suggest one possible route by which wheeled vehicles could have spread between Mesopotamia and Europe. In fact, the ancestors of the modern Hittites, rulers of much of Anatolia during the second millennium BC, may have driven those vehicles, taking control of the land as they advanced.
Otzi, Europe's oldest mummy, was an “Old European” who lived in this era. A likely descendent of the murderous “Linear Band” Anatolian farmers who two millennia earlier had filled central Europe with mass graves like the Talheim Death Pit[11], he died in middle age at around 3300 BC while attempting a perilous crossing of the Alps, killed by an arrow. It's impossible to say who killed him or why, but his belongings tell the story of an important man armed with an axe which blade was made of almost entirely pure copper from Tuscany.
Now, debate on who exactly the Indo-Europeans of this era were, and where they came from, remains fierce. In the second Q&A, I had to refer to a series of 2022 papers that challenged the idea that Indo-European languages originated in the steppes:
The view that the Indo-European homeland is north of the Caucasus came under strong attack/correction by three papers led by Iosif Lazaridis and published in 2022 by Science magazine: in “Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia,” Lazaridis et al look at population movements centered in Anatolia before the rise of the Indo-Europeans, while “The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe” proposes that the steppe Indo-Europeans were themselves the progeny of Caucasian migrants who moved north between 5000 and 3000 BC, giving rise to the so-called Yamnaya culture of the Ukrainian steppe, which only then served as homeland for Indo-Europeans moving back south and west, and Aryans who migrated north of the Caspian Sea before they turned south towards Iran and India. “A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia” summarizes this theory.
If Lazaridis et al are right, calling Indo-European “Caucasians” would be more accurate than anyone ever suspected in the 20th century. But these papers don’t fundamentally change the narrative I relied upon: the biggest change, if Lazaridis is right, would be that early Indo-Europeans, rather than fundamentally the progeny of Siberian mammoth-hunters, were fundamentally the progeny of Caucasian tribesmen who moved north taking advantage of a better, warmer climate after the Younger Dryas.
Now, we have a valiant, and valuable attempt at making sense of all this. In fact, what we have is nothing short of a possible way to reconcile all the available evidence, suggested by Paul Heggarty et al in “Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages” (Science, 28.7.2023), which makes a decent case for an emergence of Indo-European languages around 6000 BC.
As the authors write: “This is a deeper root date than previously thought, and it fits with an initial origin south of the Caucasus followed by a branch northward into the Steppe region. These findings lead to a “hybrid hypothesis” that reconciles current linguistic and ancient DNA evidence from both the eastern Fertile Crescent (as a primary source) and the steppe (as a secondary homeland).”
Since we are speaking of DNA, let me cite one other paper. In the paper “High-coverage genome of the Tyrolean Iceman reveals unusually high Anatolian farmer ancestry,” (Cell Genomics, 16.8.2023) Ke Wang et al finally declare the famous Austrian mummy Otzi, the most famous European of prehistory, the descendent of relatively recent arrivals from Anatolia: “he retained the highest Anatolian-farmer-related ancestry among contemporaneous European populations, indicating a rather isolated Alpine population with limited gene flow from hunter-gatherer-ancestry-related populations. Phenotypic analysis revealed that the Iceman likely had darker skin than present-day Europeans and carried risk alleles associated with male-pattern baldness, type 2 diabetes, and obesity-related metabolic syndrome.”
This is not a surprise at all, but it’s good to have confirmation that Otzi WAS NOT an Indo-European like, for example, I am. As I wrote in the ninth installment of A History of Mankind:
Otzi, Europe's oldest mummy, was an “Old European” who lived in this era. A likely descendent of the murderous “Linear Band” Anatolian farmers who two millennia earlier had filled central Europe with mass graves like the Talheim Death Pit, he died in middle age at around 3300 BC while attempting a perilous crossing of the Alps, killed by an arrow. It's impossible to say who killed him or why, but his belongings tell the story of an important man armed with an axe which blade was made of almost entirely pure copper from Tuscany.
Otzi was travelling alone in such a desolate mountain area, wearing appropriate but relatively primitive clothing, something that no self-respecting Indo-European would have done – and there's a reason why: Indo-Europeans had evolved in the colder steppe, but Otzi's ancestors lived in a warmer Europe with an Alpine region that was easily traversable without much expertise in dealing with snow: following the Younger Dryas, local glaciers melted and, around 4000 BC, currently snow-capped summits in the Alps were ice-free for much or all of the year.
It’s a lot, I know, but these are fascinating discussions and one must be on top of them! As I tend to do, let me remind you that you can find all posts divided by chronology and theme in the How to Read a History of Mankind guide. And that’s a great way to stay on top of all this, but only paying subscribers can access the whole archive:
Now, beyond the Wall, the questions from those wonderful paying subscribers:
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