kurgan hypothesis debunkedst elizabeth family medicine residency utica, ny
And yet the historians I consulted, specialists in South Asian and Greek history and authorities in the history of Himalayan mountaineering, said that, in recent centuries, there was no evidence of a large group of unrelated people from the eastern Mediterraneanmen and womentravelling in the Himalayas before 1950. (2015) state that "the Armenian plateau hypothesis gains in plausibility" given the Near Eastern ancestry in Yamnaya, but also state that "the question of what languages were spoken" by the ancestral steppe hunter-gatherers and the southern ancestors "remains open. Driven from the Ili Valley shortly afterwards by the Wusun, the Yuezhi migrated to Sogdia and then Bactria, where they are often identified with the Tokhrioi () and Asioi of Classical sources. Without written words, language transmission at the time would have depended largely on face-to-face contact, he says, suggesting the PIE speakers swept well across Europe and Asia. There are also a substantial number of Welsh speakers in the Patagonia area of Argentina. Romance languages are either official, co-official, or significantly used in 72countries around the globe.[233][234][235][236][237]. In the late eighties, he went on the pilgrimage himself, the only Westerner to have done so at that time, after which he published Mountain Goddess. The book describes how the Himalayas, associated for thousands of years in Indias literatures with famous pilgrimage places and powerful, ascetic renouncers, became the setting for followers to show devotion to the goddess by giving suffering to their bodies. Thanks for reading Scientific American. The Anatolian hypothesis asserts that people in Anatolia spoke Proto-Indo-European during the Neolithic era and that the language spread from there starting in 7000 BCE. [116], At ca. Vials of this were sent to Harvard and to other labs in India, the United States, and Germany. [19], Another theory which has drawn considerable, and renewed, attention is the Armenian plateau hypothesis of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, who have argued that the Urheimat was south of the Caucasus, specifically, "within eastern Anatolia, the southern Caucasus and northern Mesopotamia" in the fifth to fourth millennia BCE. , Phrges or Phrges) were an ancient Indo-European people, who established their kingdom with a capital eventually at Gordium. Veena Mushrif-Tripathy, a bioarcheologist on the previous study and a co-author of the new one, pointed out that Roopkund is so remote and inhospitablein 2003, when she and her colleagues went to collect bones, altitude sickness forced her to turn backthere has never been a systematic archeological investigation of the site. Pit Grave culture) spread quickly across the Pontic-Caspian steppes between ca. [101][note 13] According to Anthony (2019), a genetic relationship to Uralic is unlikely and cannot be reliably proven; similarities between Uralic and Indo-European would be explained by early borrowings and influence.[82]. The Balkan languages (Thracian, Dacian, Illyrian) may have developed among the early Indo-European populations of southeastern Europe. Modern Celtic languages are mostly spoken on the northwestern edge of Europe, notably in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man, and can be found spoken on Cape Breton Island. According to Ayushi Nayak, who performed the isotopic bone analyses at the Max Planck Institute, Hindu pilgrims sometimes go barefoot and thinly clothed to sacred sites in the Himalayas as a spiritual challenge. Genetic analysis reveals Europeans descended from at least three ancient groups, West Asian in the flesh (hunter-gatherers from Georgia) (Jones et al. The Anatolian hypothesis, also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory, first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987, proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. ", Wendy Doniger (2017): "The opposing argument, that speakers of Indo-European languages were indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, is not supported by any reliable scholarship. You need a dialogue from the beginning., Reich acknowledges that geneticists need to be careful about how they discuss their work. The evolution of Proto-Greek could be considered within the context of an early Paleo-Balkan sprachbund that makes it difficult to delineate exact boundaries between individual languages. The Kushan empire stretched from Turfan in the Tarim Basin to Pataliputra on the Gangetic plain at its greatest extent, and played an important role in the development of the Silk Road and the transmission of Buddhism to China. [100][82], Bomhard's alternative Caucasian substrate hypothesis proposes a "north-Caspian Indo-Uralic" Urheimat, involving an origin of PIE from the contact of two languages; a Eurasian steppe language from the north Caspian (related to Uralic) which acquired a substratal influence from a northwest Caucasian language. The bones showed no evidence of battle, ritual suicide, murder, or epidemic disease. 3000 BCE a migration of Proto-Indo-European speakers from the Yamna-culture took place toward the west along the Danube river,[4] Slavic and Baltic developed a little later at the middle Dniepr (present-day Ukraine),[5] moving north toward the Baltic coast. According to Anthony, the development of the Proto-Indo-European cultures started with the introduction of cattle at the Pontic-Caspian steppes. The archaeological discovery of the archives of the Hittites and the classification of the Hittite language to a separate Anatolian branch of the Indo-European languages caused a sensation among historians, forcing a re-evaluation of Near Eastern history and Indo-European linguistics. [27], In her later life, Gimbutas increasingly emphasized the authoritarian nature of this transition from the egalitarian society centered on the nature/earth mother goddess (Gaia) to a patriarchy worshipping the father/sun/weather god (Zeus, Dyaus).[28]. [344][web 24][345], The Kassites gained control of Babylonia after the Hittite sack of the city in 1595 BCE (i.e. Kurgan Hypothesis (Vocabulary) The theory that the first Proto-Indo-European speakers were the Kurgan people who were nomadic herders Language (Vocabulary) A system of communication through use of speech, a collection of sounds understood by a group of people to have the same meaning Language Branch (Vocabulary) [8][91][92][93][34][35][36][94][note 11], Anthony (2019, 2020) criticizes the Southern/Caucasian origin proposals of Reich and Kristiansen, and rejects the possibility that the Bronze Age Maykop people of the Caucasus were a southern source of language and genetics of Indo-European. [web 21] During the Viking Age, which began in the 8th century, the North Germanic peoples of Scandinavia migrated throughout Europe, establishing settlements as far as North America. [287] As a result of a modern diaspora, there are also Albanian speakers elsewhere in those countries and in other parts of the world, including Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Hungary, United Kingdom, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. The Spanish conquest of the Americas produced human suffering on a grotesque scalewar, mass murder, rape, slavery, genocide, starvation, and pandemic disease. [312] Beckwith suggests that the Wusun were an eastern remnant of the Indo-Aryans, who had been suddenly pushed to the extremities of the Eurasian Steppe by the Iranian peoples in the 2nd millennium BCE. Wang et al. The term is derived from the Turkic . [30] The first IE-speakers may have reached Anatolia "by way of commercial contacts and small-scale movement during the Bronze Age. [349] Their historical areas of settlement were on the Iranian plateau (mainly Iran, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan) and certain neighbouring areas of Asia (such as parts of the Caucasus, Eastern Turkey, Northeast Syria, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Bahrain, Oman, northern Iraq, Northwestern and Western Pakistan) reflecting changing geopolitical range of the Persian empires and the Iranian history.[350][351]. From the early 6th century they spread to inhabit most of Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Europe. [web 15] The turning point occurred around the 5th to 4th centuries BCE with a gradual Mongolization of Siberia, while Eastern Central Asia (East Turkistan) remained Caucasian and Indo-European-speaking until well into the 1st millennium CE. [330] Several Mitanni rulers, such as Shattiwaza, had names which could be interpreted as Indo-Aryan. [119] The Dniepr-Donets culture kept cattle not only for ritual sacrifices, but also for their daily diet. [307][333] According to Kochhar there were three waves of Indo-Aryan immigration that occurred after the mature Harappan phase:[334], The Vedic Indo-Aryans started to migrate into northwestern India around 1500 BCE, as a slow diffusion during the Late Harappan period, establishing the Vedic religion during the Vedic period (c.1500500 BCE). 3400 BCE. Based on evidence from presumably non-Indo-European lexicon in the European branches of Indo-European, Iversen and Kroonen (2017) postulate a group of "Early European Neolithic" languages that is associated with the Neolithic spread of agriculturalists into Europe. The term is derived from kurgan (), a Turkic loanword in Russian for a tumulus or burial mound. [283] The name Illyrians seems to be the name applied to a specific Illyrian tribe, which was the first to come in contact with the ancient Greeks during the Bronze Age,[284] causing the name Illyrians to be applied to all people of similar language and customs.[285]. "[126] See Suvorovo culture and Ezero culture for details. [155][web 15] These two groups were in competition with each other until the latter overcame the former. [27], Early migrations at ca. During the 19th century, the vast majority of linguistic work was devoted to reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European or its daughter proto-languages such as Proto-Germanic, and most of the current techniques of historical linguistics (e.g. the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction) were developed as a result. [213][note 21], The initial moves of the Bell Beakers from the Tagus estuary, Portugal were maritime. The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), a reconstructed prehistoric language of Eurasia. The term is derived from the Turkic word kurgan (), meaning tumulus or burial mound. Artifacts retrieved included dozens of leather slippers, pieces of parasols made of bamboo and birch bark, and bangles made of seashells and glass. According to Mallory 1991 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFMallory1991 (help), "The origin of the Yamnaya culture is still a topic of debate," with proposals for its origins pointing to both Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog. [327] It was "a syncretic mixture of old Central Asian and new Indo-European elements",[327] which borrowed "distinctive religious beliefs and practices"[135] from the BactriaMargiana culture. They were followed by the Scythians, who would dominate the area, at their height, from the Carpathian Mountains in the west, to the easternmost fringes of Central Asia in the east, including the Indo-Scythian Kingdom in India. The "Kurgan Culture," Indo-European Origins, and the Domestication of the Horse: A Reconsideration' ha,v T)cm4d W A ntthlnn-THE CONCEPT OF A "KURGAN CULTURE" derives ultimately from The Aryans, Childe's (1926) seminal study of Indo-European origins. Bones had been stolen; others had been rearranged in fanciful patterns or piled in cairns. and Harvard, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and the Anthropological Survey of India, where many of the Roopkund bones reside. Language shifts generally flow in the direction of groups that have higher economic status, more political power and higher prestige, Anthony says. We can be reasonably certain that their divergence post-dated the invention of wheeled vehicles, for which we can construct five separate roots (two for wheels, one for travel by wheeled vehicle, one for . [79], Gimbutas' grouping is nowadays considered to have been too broad. The Kurgan model of Indo-European origins draws on both archaeology and linguistics to identify specific archaeological cultures with different stages of the Indo-European expansion. [31] Wells agrees with Cavalli-Sforza that there is "some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East. "[206] In supplementary information to Haak et al. [135] According to Anthony, the Old Indic religion probably emerged among Indo-European immigrants in the contact zone between the Zeravshan River (present-day Uzbekistan) and (present-day) Iran. It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European . It is generally proposed that a proto-Dacian or proto-Thracian people developed from a mixture of indigenous peoples and Indo-Europeans from the time of Proto-Indo-European expansion in the Early Bronze Age (3,3003,000 BCE)[266] when the latter, around 1500 BCE, conquered the indigenous peoples. Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, but basing their work on comparative vocabulary, a number of researchers have attempted to estimate the dates of the splitting up of the various Indo-European languages. Roopkund A had ancestry typical of South Asians. See: Haak et al. Dietary information is stored in our bones, and plants, depending on how they fix carbon during photosynthesis, create one of two chemical signaturesC3 or C4. The Hittite empire reached its height during the mid-14th century BCE under Suppiluliuma I, when it encompassed an area that included most of Asia Minor as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. . Their skeletons are a warning to those who would disrespect the goddess. [6][7][web 1][8][web 2][9], The Proto-Indo-Iranian language and culture probably emerged within the Sintashta culture (c.21001800 BCE), at the eastern border of the Abashevo culture, which in turn developed from the Corded Ware-related Fatyanovo-Balanovo culture. [50][note 2], Indo-European languages probably spread through language shifts. The whine of a sandblaster filled the air as she removed excess bone from a tiny treasure chest of DNAa spiral cavity in the inner ear called the cochlea. [149] By the end of the 2nd millennium BCE, the dominant people as far east as the Altai Mountains southward to the northern outlets of the Tibetan Plateau were anthropologically Caucasian, with the northern part speaking Iranian Scythian languages and the southern parts Tocharian languages, having Mongoloid populations as their northeastern neighbors. There isnt any gold on the skeletons, no rings, necklaces, or anklets on the victims. The clean room is maintained at positive pressure, which keeps the airflow directed outward, to curtail the entry of airborne DNA. [343] With the emerging steppe federations of the Rouran, the Wusun migrated into the Pamir Mountains in the 5th century CE. (2015), German Corded Ware "trace ~75% of their ancestry to the Yamna. According to Narasimhan et al. In 2005, Sax was featured in a National Geographic documentary about the lake. According to Mallory and Adams, migrations southward founded the Maykop culture (c.35002500 BCE). They were unrelated to one another and genetically diverse, apparently coming from various areas and groups in India. [web 18], By the early 1st millennium BC, Proto-Germanic is believed to have been spoken in the areas of present-day Denmark, southern Sweden, southern Norway and Northern Germany. [120] The Khvalynsk culture (47003800 BCE),[120] located at the middle Volga, which was connected with the Danube Valley by trade networks,[121] also had cattle and sheep, but they were "more important in ritual sacrifices than in the diet". The water is frozen most of the year, so the skeletons and artifacts visible on the lake bed have been kept safe from looters and souvenir hunters. The bulk of the Indo-European languages developed from late PIE, which was spoken within the Yamnaya horizon on the PonticCaspian steppe around 3000 BCE. Anthony argues that proto-Indo European formed mainly from the languages of Eastern European hunter-gatherers with influences from those of Caucasus hunter-gatherers,[100] and suggests that the archaic proto-Indo-European language formed in the Volga Basin (in the Eastern European Steppe). Whole-genome studies reveal relations between the people associated with various cultures and the time-range in which those relations were established. Not long before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the U.S., I visited Reich at Harvard Medical School. 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. ", According to Haak et al. [28] According to Anthony, the Anatolian branch,[29][30] to which the Hittites belong,[31] probably arrived in Anatolia from the Danube valley. [325] Finds within BMAC sites include an Elamite-type cylinder seal and a Harappan seal stamped with an elephant and Indus script found at Gonur-depe. 52005000 BCE the Pontic-Caspian steppes were populated by hunter-gatherers. [193] Between 3100 and 2800/2600 BCE, when the Yamnaya horizon spread fast across the Pontic Steppe, a real folk migration of Proto-Indo-European speakers from the Yamna-culture took place into the Danube Valley,[4] moving along Usatovo territory toward specific destinations, reaching as far as Hungary,[194] where as many as 3,000 kurgans may have been raised. 3400 and 3200 BCE. "[133], Although the Hittites are first attested in the 2nd millennium BCE,[31] the Anatolian branch seems to have separated at a very early stage from Proto-Indo-European, or may have developed from an older Pre-Proto-Indo-European ancestor. It originated with a migration of people from the pre-Yamnaya Repin culture, at the Don river,[143] and is related to the Tocharians. As the villagers tell it, long ago Nanda Devi left her home to visit a distant kingdom, where she was treated discourteously by the king and queen. The most widely accepted theory suggests that Latins and other proto-Italic tribes first entered in Italy with the late Bronze Age Proto-Villanovan culture (12th10th cent. Various steppe-cultures show strong similarities with the Yamna-horizon at the Pontic steppe, while the time-range of several Asian cultures also coincides with the proposed trajectory and time-range of the Indo-European migrations. His preferred hypothesis is that the Roopkund B people were Armenian traders. He thinks that its not unreasonable to investigate those differences scientifically, although he doesnt undertake such research himself. [1] Although PIE logically had predecessors,[19] the Indo-Hittite hypothesis is not widely accepted, and there is little to suggest that it is possible to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-Hittite stage that differs substantially from what is already reconstructed for PIE. This area includes the present-day countries of Romania and Moldova, as well as parts of Ukraine,[271] Eastern Serbia, Northern Bulgaria, Slovakia,[272] Hungary and Southern Poland. "Potapovo Burial Ground of the Indo-Iranic Tribes on the Volga" (1994). Nikitin argues the ax-heads were purely decorative, however. [1][2] Recent genetic research has increasingly contributed to understanding the kinship relations among prehistoric cultures. As bizarre as the result seemed, it nonetheless matched an analysis of bone collagen that the Max Planck Institute and the Harvard lab had done on the same individuals, to determine their diet. The most popular hypothesis for the origin and spread of the language is the Kurgan hypothesis, which postulates an origin in the PonticCaspian steppe of Eastern Europe. The origins of the Thracians remain obscure, in the absence of written historical records. He and a friend travelled to the hamlet of Wan, the settlement closest to Roopkund, where a local man agreed to guide them up the pilgrim trail to the lake. "In the following discussion of 'Iranian peoples', the term 'Iranian' may be understood in two ways. Five thousand years ago nomadic horseback riders from the Ukrainian steppe charged through Europe and parts of Asia. [web 27], The Iranian peoples[note 27] (also known as Iranic peoples) are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group that comprise the speakers of Iranian languages. It is generally proposed that a proto-Thracian people developed from a mixture of indigenous peoples and Indo-Europeans from the time of Proto-Indo-European expansion in the Early Bronze Age[266] when the latter, around 1500 BCE, mixed with indigenous peoples. At present, Latin and its daughter Romance languages are the only surviving languages of the Italic language family. [34] He points out: The Kurgan culture was so broadly defined that almost any culture with burial mounds, or even (like the Baden culture) without them could be included. This is the time and place of the earliest domestication of the horse, which according to this hypothesis was the work of early Indo-Europeans, allowing them to expand outwards and assimilate or conquer many other cultures. The northern boundary vaguely corresponds to the beginning of the Taiga. 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. [web 19] During the subsequent centuries, migrating Germanic peoples reached the banks of the Rhine and the Danube along the Roman border, and also expanded into the territories of Iranian peoples north of the Black Sea. The scientists concluded that the dead represented two populations: a group of tall Brahmans from the plains of India and a company of shorter, local porters, whose skulls were marked by years of carrying heavy loads with a tumpline looped over their heads. The second-oldest branch language group, Tocharian, was spoken in the Tarim Basin (now western China), after splitting from early PIE spoken on the eastern Pontic steppe. Although Corded Ware is presumed to be largely derived from the Yamnaya culture, most Corded Ware males carried R1a Y-DNA, while males of the Yamnaya primarily carried R1b-M269. Members of the Kalash tribe, in northern Pakistan, claim to be descendants of Alexanders soldiers. In contrast, the indigenous groups of Old Europe had neither a warrior class nor horses. Archaic PIE for "the last common ancestor of the Anatolian and non-Anatolian IE branches"; Early, core, or Post-Anatolian, PIE for "the last common ancestor of the non-Anatolian PIE languages, including Tocharian"; Late PIE for "the common ancestor of all other IE branches". By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. The term is derived from the Turkic word . All the bones studied so far have been picked up haphazardly, a flawed way of sampling that often skews results. Genetic research suggests that the Kalash have a Western European origin, and one disputed study found Greek heritage. Partly for these reasons, Anthony concludes that Bronze Age Caucasus groups such as the Maykop "played only a minor role, if any, in the formation of Yamnaya ancestry." The position of Albanian is not completely clear, from an insufficiency of evidence. [203] According to Mallory, around 2400 BCE the people of the Corded Ware replaced their predecessors and expanded to Danubian and northern areas of western Germany. And theres absolutely no reason to be up there if they werent on the pilgrimage. The idea of a group of eighteenth-century Greeks on a Hindu pilgrimage seemed far-fetched. The alternative, and for many years, the more accepted view was that Indo-European languages originated around 3,000 years later in the Steppes of Russia (the Kurgan hypothesis). In his writings, known only from secondary sources, Scylax called the river Indos, from which the English name for the subcontinent derives. However, this hypothesis, on which Gimbutas' Idyllic Goddess scenario depends, is far from the foregone conclusion that she . [19] Subsequent expansion beyond the steppes led to hybrid, or in Gimbutas's terms "kurganized" cultures, such as the Globular Amphora culture to the west. [276], The Illyrians (Ancient Greek: , Illyrioi; Latin: Illyrii or Illyri) were a group of Indo-European tribes in antiquity, who inhabited part of the western Balkans and the southeastern coasts of the Italian peninsula (Messapia). The origin of Rus. The research on the Indo-Aryan migrations began with the study of the Rig Veda in the mid-19th century by Max Muller, and gradually evolved from a theory of a large scale invasion of a racially and technologically superior people to being a slow diffusion of small numbers of nomadic people that had a disproportionate societal impact on a large urban population. [web 25] The Kassites were polytheistic, and the name of some 30 gods are known. [164] The Pazyryk burials of the Ukok Plateau coincide with the apex of power of the Yuezhi, and the burials have therefore been attributed to them, which means that the Altai region was part of the Yuezhi Empire.[161]. [173], According to Parpola, this migration into the Danube Valley is related to the appearance of Indo-European speakers from Europe into Anatolia, and the appearance of Hittite.[33]. Among these are the names of gods (Indra, Mitra, Varuna, and Agni) and some personal names. When I visited, a technician was working on a nubbin of bone from an ancient Roman who lived in Belgium. It's a straightforward, compelling idea. The enclave established in southern Brittany was linked closely to the riverine and landward route, via the Loire, and across the Gtinais valley to the Seine valley, and thence to the lower Rhine. ); a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, South Picene; and Latin itself. [1][2] It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). "[32] Nevertheless, the Anatolian hypothesis is incompatible with the linguistic evidence.[33]. [40], The Indo-European eastward expansion in the 2nd millennium BCE had a significant influence on Chinese culture,[148] introducing the chariot,[web 12] horse burials,[web 13][149] the domesticated horse,[148][150] iron technology,[148][web 14] and wheeled vehicles,[151][152][153][154] fighting styles, head-and-hoof rituals, art motifs and myths. At the Balkan, the Vuedol culture (c.30002200 BCE) formed a contact zone between post-Yamnaya and Bell Beaker culture. In Central Asia, the Turkic languages have marginalized Iranian languages as a result of the Turkic expansion of the early centuries CE.