Who Are Western Europeans? New Study Reveals True Origins - Archaeology - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2024-01-16/ty-article/who-are-western-europeans-new-study-reveals-true-origins/0000018d-0dfa-de9c-a3df-6ffb44030000
Mesolithic tomb at Téviec, with two women between 25 and 35 with head injuries and arrow wounds.
Credit: Didier Descouens
[…]
Three great migrations
The ancestry of today’s western Europeans was determined largely by three great migrations, the paper sums up. The first was the exit from Africa around 45,000 years ago.
Indeed, representatives of Homo sapiens had been leaving Africa for at least 200,000 years, going by (somewhat controversial) fossil finds in Israel and Greece. But those lineages apparently died out, meaning they have no descendants alive today insofar as is known.
Finally, modern humans who reached Eurasia didn’t die, though it was so cold 45,000 years ago they may have wished they had. But while the chill apparently didn’t deter our ancestors, who plausibly had invented footwear by then, plants can be more persnickety.
The last Ice Age peaked perhaps 26,000 years ago, and some people around the Mediterranean began to abandon the cave. In southeast Turkey, archaeologists have uncovered the stunning prehistoric monumental architecture of the “Gobekli culture” starting about 12,000 years ago, which had been built by hunter-gatherers. There is no sign that agriculture had begun to emerge yet, archaeologists there told Haaretz.
"Urfa Man," a statue found at Gobekli. Now at the Sanliurfa Museum.
Credit: Valence Levi SchusterBut by 11,000 to 10,000 years ago, agriculture and animal husbandry had begun to emerge there and in the Fertile Crescent. That spurred the second great migration that would shape today’s western Europeans: early farmers spreading out of Anatolia.
The Neolithic clime in Anatolia was apparently so gorgeous that some think this is where the legendary Garden of Eden was. Be that as it may, shortly after their newfound knack emerged, early farmers began to disperse. We don’t know why. Possibly the lifestyle based on taming plants and animals combined with settlement could support larger populations and created density that needed alleviating.
These early farmers brought not only knowhow but also their plants and animals with them: cereals, legumes, and cows, sheep and goats. As they spread, they mixed with local hunter-gatherers, begetting early European farmers – but only to the west of that invisible Black Sea-Baltic line.
Simplified diagram of the spread of agriculture between 11,600 and 5,800 years ago (approximated dates and routes of diffusion)
Credit: Detlef Gronenborn, Barbara Horejs, Börner, OberTo its east, hunting and gathering as a subsistence lifestyle persisted for another 3,000 years. This is even though the distances from Anatolia were about the same, the team elaborates.
Why would early farmers penetrate western Eurasia but not the east? Maybe because the entire transition to farming was based on crops and animals of Middle Eastern origin.
Consider the chickpea, a staple in the Middle East that actually has a very small natural stamping ground. The nutritious legume is native only to part of Turkey. Today it grows around the world, including in Israel because we force it to.
Not every crop and animal can thrive wherever we so wish, leaving technology out of it. Plausibly the conditions east of that boundary were unsuitable to farming practices developed in the paradisiacal conditions of the Neolithic Near East and therefore, hunter-gatherer societies persisted there for 3,000 years more than in the West, the team postulates.
And then came the third great migration, which eradicated that invisible boundary once and for all: nomads of the Yamnaya culture riding out of the Pontic steppe 5,000 years ago, on the newly domesticated horse. And they brought a little something with them.
The clue of the multiple sclerosis
The Pontic steppe sprawls from Europe to central Asia. As the Yamnaya nomads raced over the grasslands into western Eurasia, they brought not only their enslaved steeds (who exactly domesticated the horse and climbed on its back is controversial).
The Yamnaya also carried elevated genetic risk for multiple sclerosis, according to a separate paper published in Nature on Thursday by William Barrie of the University of Cambridge, UK.
▻https://img.haarets.co.il/bs/0000018d-0e1e-d71c-ad9f-4f9e988d0000/d8/35/ec60b60e476a80e3c909f649cab2/82194.jpg_Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya steppe pastoralist ancestry into Europe and South Asia from about 5,000 years ago
Credit: פטליפוטרה_
Today, the highest incidences of this incurable neurodegenerative disease are in northern Europe. There is a clear north-south gradient. Now, the genetic information from the Mesolithic onward, compared with information on 410,000 white Europeans, may have solved the enigma of why that is, Barrie and the team posit. Their results indicate that the genetic risk for multiple sclerosis emerged among the Yamnaya.
