DNA reveals early mating between Asian herders and European farmers

[Judi Lynn]

The finding might rewrite the origins and spread of key cultural innovations and languages
BY BRUCE BOWER 6:00AM, FEBRUARY 8, 2019

Hundreds of years before changing the genetic face of Bronze Age Europeans, herders based in western Asia’s steppe grasslands were already mingling and occasionally mating with nearby farmers in southeastern Europe.

That surprising finding, published online February 4 in Nature Communications, raises novel questions about a pivotal time when widespread foraging and farming populations interacted in Eurasia’s Caucasus region. Those exchanges presumably sparked the geographic spread of metalworking, the wheel and wagon, and Indo-European languages still spoken in much of the world.

Archaeologists have often assumed that, as early as around 5,600 years ago, Caucasus farmers known as the Maykop migrated north in big numbers, bringing metalworking and early Indo-European tongues to herders who roamed grasslands on the edge of the region. In that scenario, this cultural exchange led steppe herders to develop a horse-and-wagon lifestyle that the nomads later transported to Europe and Asia, along with Indo-European languages, starting about 5,000 years ago (SN: 11/25/17, p. 16). Researchers call those mobile herders Yamnaya people.

But in an unexpected twist, Yamnaya DNA shows signs of a shared ancestry only with eastern European farmers, not the Maykop people. The genetic analysis, led by population geneticist Chuan-Chao Wang of Xiamen University in China and molecular anthropologist Wolfgang Haak of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, provides the best look to date at Yamnaya herders’ genetic history.

More:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dna-mating-asian-herders-european-farmers?tgt=nr

[a la izquierda]

1. Sweet.

I’m reading this great book called The Horse, the Wheel and Language, about the spread of Indo-European language.