Why Did Ancient Europeans Just Disappear 14,500 Years Ago? | Live Science
this is something I saw pop up today. Apparently in the distant past in Europe... some sort of mass migration happened... then the males of group M almost all died off, and the descendants were fathered by group N. But there's the kicker... group M was genetically similar to the Aborigines of Australia... where did group N even come from?
This exerpt is from an article posted by
@EnolaGaia on the 'Roopkund skeletons' thread.
Last year, Reich led a team of more than a hundred researchers who published a study in
Science that examined the genomes of some two hundred and seventy ancient skeletons from the Iberian Peninsula. It’s long been known that, from around 2500 to 2000 B.C., major new artistic and cultural styles flourished in Western and Central Europe. Archeologists have tended to explain this development as the result of cultural diffusion: people adopted innovations in pottery, metalworking, and weaponry from their geographic neighbors, along with new burial customs and religious beliefs. But the DNA of Iberian skeletons dating from this period of transformation told a different story, revealing what Reich describes as the “genetic scar” of a foreign invasion.
In Iberia during this time, the local type of Y chromosome was replaced by an entirely different type. Given that the Y chromosome, found only in males, is passed down from father to son, this means that the local male line in Iberia was essentially extinguished. It is likely that the newcomers perpetrated a large-scale killing of local men, boys, and possibly male infants. Any local males remaining must have been subjugated in a way that prevented them from fathering children, or were so strongly disfavored in mate selection over time that their genetic contribution was nullified. The full genetic sequencing, however, indicated that about sixty per cent of the lineage of the local population was passed on, which shows that women were not killed but almost certainly subjected to widespread sexual coercion, and perhaps even mass rape.
We can get a sense of this reign of terror by thinking about what took place when the descendants of those ancient Iberians sailed to the New World, events for which we have ample historical records. The Spanish conquest of the Americas produced human suffering on a grotesque scale—war, mass murder, rape, slavery, genocide, starvation, and pandemic disease. Genetically, as Reich noted, the outcome was very similar: in Central and South America, large amounts of European DNA mixed into the local population, almost all of it coming from European males. The same Y-chromosome turnover is also found in Americans of African descent. On average, a Black person in America has an ancestry that is around eighty per cent African and twenty per cent European. But about eighty per cent of that European ancestry is inherited from white males—genetic testimony to the widespread rape and sexual coercion of female slaves by slaveowners.
In the Iberian study, the predominant Y chromosome seems to have originated with a group called the Yamnaya, who arose about five thousand years ago, in the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. By adopting the wheel and the horse, they became powerful and fearsome nomads, expanding westward into Europe as well as east- and southward into India. They spoke proto-Indo-European languages, from which most of the languages of Europe and many South Asian languages now spring. Archeologists have long known about the spread of the Yamnaya, but almost nothing in the archeological record showed the brutality of their takeover. “This is an example of the power of ancient DNA to reveal
cultural events,” Reich told me.
It also shows how DNA evidence can upset established archeological theories and bring rejected ones back into contention. The idea that Indo-European languages emanated from the Yamnaya homeland was established in 1956, by the Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas. Her view, known as the Kurgan hypothesis—named for the distinctive burial mounds that spread west across Europe—is now the most widely accepted theory about Indo-European linguistic origins. But, where many archeologists envisaged a gradual process of cultural diffusion, Gimbutas saw “continuous waves of expansion or raids.” As her career progressed, her ideas became more controversial. In Europe previously, Gimbutas hypothesized, men and women held relatively equal places in a peaceful, female-centered, goddess-worshipping society—as evidenced by the famous fertility figurines of the time. She believed that the nomads from the Caspian steppes imposed a male-dominated warrior culture of violence, sexual inequality, and social stratification, in which women were subservient to men and a small number of élite males accumulated most of the wealth and power.
The DNA from the Iberian skeletons can’t tell us what kind of culture the Yamnaya replaced, but it does much to corroborate Gimbutas’s sense that the descendants of the Yamnaya caused much greater disruption than other archeologists believed. Even today, the Y chromosomes of almost all men of Western European ancestry have a high percentage of Yamnaya-derived genes, suggesting that violent conquest may have been widespread.
The team members of the Roopkund study planned a variety of tests for the bones. DNA sequencing would show the ancestry of the victims and whether they were related to one another, and carbon dating would estimate when they died. The researchers would test for disease, and analyze the chemistry of the bones to determine the victims’ diet and where they might have grown up. Under sterile conditions, the scientists in Hyderabad drilled into long bones and teeth, producing a powder. Vials of this were sent to Harvard and to other labs in India, the United States and Germany.
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An ancient human bone is packed with DNA, but, in many cases, ninety-nine per cent or more of that is not human. It is the DNA of billions of microbes that colonized the body during the decomposition after death. To tease the tiny fraction of human DNA from this mass of microbial debris requires a chemical ballet of enormous delicacy, and the risk of contamination is high. Stray DNA molecules from people who handled the remains can ruin an entire sample.
Its not directly linked but is, i think relevant.
Full link to article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/the-skeletons-at-the-lake
My family has higher than "normal" neanderthal DNA, a lot of red heads and seem to be more intelligent than average, also a lot of left handers and ambitextrous. Is this guy afraid the neanderthals will make a come back and take over the world? What does socialism have to do with neanderthal genes?
