My European Family
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His new three-volume doctoral thesis complements the new DNA findings well, for readers who wish to study the subject in some depth.
Jennbert, K. (1984). Den produktiva gåvan: tradition och innovation i Sydskandinavien för omkring 5300 år sedan. Diss. Lund: University of Bonn.
Skoglund, P., Malmström, H., Omrak, A., Raghavan, M., Valdiosera, C., Günther, T., et al. (2014). Genomic diversity and admixture differs for Stone-Age Scandinavian foragers and farmers. Science, 344 (6185), 747–750. doi:10.1126/science.1253448
Sørensen, L. & Karg, S. (2012). The expansion of agrarian societies towards the North – new evidence for agriculture during the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition in Southern Scandinavia. Journal of Archaeological Science, doi:10.1016/j.jas.2012.08.042
Sørensen, L. (2014). From hunter to farmer in Northern Europe. Vol. 1–3:
migration and adaptation during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Diss. Copenhagen: Oxford.
Andersson, Magnus. Interview, February 2014.
Broström, Anna. Interview, February 2014.
Jennbert, Kristina. Interview, February 2014.
Magnell, Ola. Interview, February 2014.
Ötzi the Iceman
I visited the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano (Bozen) during a skiing holiday a few years ago. The extra train journey, which took a few hours, proved well worth the effort. Ötzi, the well-preserved ice mummy, along with his clothes and his gear, provides insights into the prehistoric past that it would be difficult to come by in any other way.
DeSalle, R. & Grimaldi, D. (1994). Very old DNA. Current Opinion in Genetics
& Development, 4, 810–815. doi:10.1016/0959-437x(94)90064-7
Ermini, L., Olivieri, C., Luciani, S., Marota, I., Rollo, F., Rizzi, E., et al. (2008). Complete mitochondrial genome sequence of the Tyrolean Iceman. Current Biology, 18 (21), 1687–1693. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.09.028
Keller, A., Graefen, A., Ball, M., Matzas, M., Boisguerin, V., Maixner, F., et al. (2012). New insights into the Tyrolean Iceman’s origin and phenotype as inferred by whole-genome sequencing. Nature Communications, 3, 698. doi:10.1038/ncomms1701
Müller, W., Fricke, H., Halliday, A., McCulloch, M., & Wartho, J. (2003).
Origin and migration of the Alpine Iceman. Science, 302 (5646), 862–866.
Sikora, M., Carpenter, M. L., Moreno-Estrada, A., Henn, B. M., Underhill, P. A., Sánchez-Quinto, F., et al. (2014). Population genomic analysis of ancient and modern genomes yields new insights into the genetic ancestry of the Tyrolean Iceman and the genetic structure of Europe. PLOS Genetics, 10 (5), 1–12. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1004353
Spindler, K. (2000). Mannen i isen. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur.
Sjövold, Torstein. Email, March 2015.
South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Bolzano (Bozen). Visited in December 2009.
The Falbygden Area
The Falbygden Museum in Falköping is small, but pleasant and interesting. Exhibits include one of the world’s oldest dogs and the mysterious Raspberry Girl. A replica of a stone burial place gives a good idea of how they were constructed.
The ‘prehistoric village’ at Ekehagen (Ekehagens forntidsby) brings history to life for both children and adults.
I would recommend that visitors to the Falbygden region fit in a visit to ‘naturum Hornborgasjön’, an information centre at Lake Hornborga, which provides information not only about cranes and other birdlife, but also about the first inhabitants of Sweden during the Palaeolithic period.
See Chapters 14 and 22. In addition, the following may be of interest:
Fu, Q., Pääbo, S., Rudan, P., & Krause, J. (2012). Complete mitochondrial genomes reveal neolithic expansion into Europe. PLOS ONE, 7 (3), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032473
Gamba, C., Jones, E. R., Teasdale, M. D., McLaughlin, R. L., Gonzalez-Fortes, G., Mattiangeli, V., et al. (2014). Genome flux and stasis in a five millennium transect of European prehistory. Nature Communications, 5 (10), 5257. doi:10.1038/ncomms6257
Isaksson, S. & Hallgren, F. (2012). Lipid residue analyses of Early Neolithic funnel-beaker pottery from Skogsmossen, eastern Central Sweden, and the earliest evidence of dairying in Sweden. Journal of Archaeological Science, 39, 3600–3609. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2012.06.018
Malmström, H., Linderholm, A., Skoglund, P., Storå, J., Sjödin, P., Gilbert, M. P., et al. (2014). Ancient mitochondrial DNA from the northern fringe of the Neolithic farming expansion in Europe sheds light on the dispersion process. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 370, doi:10.1098/rstb.2013.0373
Salque, M., Bogucki, P. I., Pyzel, J., Sobkowiak-Tabaka, I., Grygiel, R., Szmyt, M., & Evershed, R. P. (2013). Earliest evidence for cheese making in the sixth millennium B.C. in Northern Europe. Nature, 493 (7433), 522–525. doi:10.1038/nature11698
Wilde, S., Timpson, A., Karola, K., Kaiser, E., Kayser, M., Unterländer, M., et al. (2014). Direct evidence for positive selection of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in Europeans during the last 5,000 years. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111 (13), 4832–4837. doi:10.1073/pnas.1316513111
Jakobsson, Mattias. Interview, November 2014.
Ekehagen prehistoric village (Ekehagens forntidsby). Visited in July 2014.
Museum of the Falbygden region (Falbygdens museum). Visited in July 2014.
Hunters’ and Farmers’ Genes
Axelsson, E., Ratnakumar, A., Arendt, M., Maqbool, K., Webster, M. T., Perloski, M., et al. (2013). The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet. Nature, 495 (7441), 360–364. doi:10.1038/nature11837
Bos, K. I., Harkins, K. M., Herbig, A., Coscolla, M., Weber, N., Comas, I., et al. (2014). Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes reveal seals as a source of New World human tuberculosis. Nature, 514 (7523), 494–497. doi:10.1038/nature13591
Freedman, A. H., Gronau, I., Schweizer, R. M., Ortega-Del Vecchyo, D., Han, E., Silva, P. M., et al. (2014). Genome sequencing highlights the dynamic early history of dogs. PLOS Genetics, 10 (1), 1–12. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1004016
Henry, A. G., Brooks, A. S., & Piperno, D. R. (2014). Plant foods and the dietary ecology of Neanderthals and early modern humans. Journal of Human Evolution, 69 44–54. doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2013.12.014
Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Mittnik, A., Renaud, G., Mallick, S., Sudmant, P. H., et al. (2013). Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans. Nature, 513, 409–413. doi:10.1038/nature13673
Marlowe, F. W., Berbesque, J. C., Wood, B., Crittenden, A., Porter, C., & Mabulla, A. (2014). Honey, Hadza, hunter-gatherers, and human evolution. Journal of Human Evolution, 71, 119–128. doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2014.03.006
Mathiesen, I. (2015). Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe. bioRxiv preprint, first published online on 14 March 2015.
Perry, G. H., Dominy, N. J., Claw, K. G., Lee, A. S., Fiegler, H., Redon, R., et al. (2007). Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation. Nature Genetics, 39 (10), 1256–1260. doi:10.1038/ng2123
Revedin, A., Aranguren, B., Becattini, R., Longo, L., Marconi, E., Lippi, M. M., et al. (2010). Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 44, 18815–18819. doi:10.1073/pnas.1006993107.
Henry, Amanda. Telephone interview, November 2014
Lindblad-Toh, Kerstin. Interview, December 2014.
The First Stallion
Anthony, D. W. (2007). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: how Bronze-Age riders from the Eurasian steppes shaped the modern world. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Ardvidsson, S. (2006) Aryan idols: Indo-European mythology as ideaology and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bendrey, R. (2012). From wild horses to domestic horses: a European perspective. World Archaeology, 44 (1), 135–157. doi:10.1080/00438243.2012.647571
Gamba, C., Jones, E. R., Te
asdale, M. D., McLaughlin, R. L., Gonzalez-Fortes, G., Mattiangeli, V.,et al. (2014). Genome flux and stasis in a five millennium transect of European prehistory. Nature Communications, 5, 5257. doi:10.1038/ncomms6257
Gimbutas, M. (1989). The Language of the Goddess: unearthing the hidden symbols of Western civilization. London: Thames & Hudson.
Lindgren, G., Backström, N., Hellborg, L., Einarsson, A., Vilà, C., Ellegren, H., et al. (2004). Limited number of patrilines in horse domestication. Nature Genetics, 36 (4), 335–336. doi:10.1038/ng1326
Mallory, J. P. (1989). In Search of the Indo-Europeans: language, archaeology and myth. London: Thames & Hudson.
Mallory, J. P. & Adams, D. Q. (2006). The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and The Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Outram, A., Kasparov, A., Stear, N., Evershed, R., Bendrey, R., Olsen, S., et al. (2009). The earliest horse harnessing and milking. Science, 323 (5919), 1332–1335. doi:10.1126/science.1168594
Vilà, C., Leonard, J. A., Götherström, A., Marklund, S., Sandberg, K., Lidén, K., et al. (2001). Widespread origins of domestic horse lineages. Science, 291 (5503), 474–477.
Warmuth, V., Eriksson, A., Bower, M., Barker, G., Barrett, E., Hanks, B., et al. (2012). Reconstructing the origin and spread of horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 (21), 8202–8206. doi:10.1073/pnas.1111122109
Anthony, David. Email, September 2014.
Eriksson, Anders. Email, September 2014.
Kveiborg, Jacob. Email, May 2015.
Mallory, James P. Interview, January 2015.
Vandkilde, Helle. Email, May 2015.
DNA Sequences Provide Links with the East
It was tricky writing the chapter about DNA and the arrival in western Europe of the herders from the steppe, as this is an area of cutting-edge research. The target kept on advancing rapidly throughout the time that I was writing the book.
The groundbreaking Boston study by Lazaridis et al. was only published on Nature’s site in September 2014. Fortunately, I was able to read a preliminary version several months in advance.
The most decisive study, which amounts to a revision of European history, is Haak et al., also from Boston. This was published in Nature in March 2015, by which time I had already submitted my manuscript. Still later, in June 2015, the rival team from Copenhagen and Gothenburg was able to confirm the scenario of the dispersal of the Indo-European languages through migration from the steppes in the east. Batini et al. (May 2015) shows, on the basis of Y chromosomes from men living today, that two thirds of the patrilineages in Europe can be traced back to these Bronze Age clans.
So a number of competing research teams that are world leaders in their field have now shown how the population of Europe changed at the dawn of the Bronze Age.
The State Museum of Prehistory (Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte) in Halle an der Saale, Germany, is another excellent source of information about this period.
Both James P. Mallory’s In Search of Indo-European Languages and David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language are worth reading. However, even though many of Mallory’s and Anthony’s hypotheses have proven to be correct, their books are now slightly outdated in the light of the latest DNA findings.
Allentoft, M. E., Sikora, M., Sjögren, K., Rasmussen, S., Rasmussen, M., Stenderup, J., et al. (2015). Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia. Nature, 522 (7555), 167–172. doi:10.1038/nature14507
Batini, C., Hallast, P., Zadik, D., Delser, P. M., Benazzo, A., Ghirotto, S., et al. (2015). Large-scale recent expansion of European patrilineages shown by population resequencing. Nature Communications, 6, 7152. doi:10.1038/ncomms8152
Chunxiang, L., Hongjie, L., Yinqiu, C., Chengzhi, X., Dawei, C., Wenying, L., et al. (2010). Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age. BMC Biology, 8, 15. doi:10.1186/1741-7007-8-15
Haak, W., Brandt, G., de Jong, H. N., Meyer, C., Ganslmeier, R., Heyd, V., et al. (2008). Ancient DNA, Strontium isotopes, and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the later Stone Age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 47, 18226–18231.
Haak, W., Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Rohland, N., Mallick, S., Llamas, B., et al. (2015). Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. Nature, 522 (7555), 207–211. doi:10.1038/nature14317
Keyser, C., Bouakaze, C., Crubézy, E., Nikolaev, V. G., Montagnon, D., Reis, T., et al. (2009). Ancient DNA provides new insights into the history of south Siberian Kurgan people. Human Genetics, 126 (3), 395–410. doi:10.1007/s00439-009-0683-0
Lazaridis, I., Mallick, S., Nordenfelt, S., Li, H., Rohland, N., Economou, C., et al. (2014). Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans. Nature, 513 (7518), 409–413. doi:10.1038/nature13673
Underhill, P., Poznik, G., Rootsi, S., Järve, M., Lin, A., Wang, J., et al. (2014). The phylogenetic and geographic structure of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a. European Journal of Human Genetics, 23, 124–131. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2014.50
Battleaxes
Allentoft, M. E., Sikora, M., Sjögren, K., Rasmussen, S., Rasmussen, M., Stenderup, J., et al. (2015). Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia. Nature, 522 (7555), 167–172. doi:10.1038/nature14507
Haak, W., Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Rohland, N., Mallick, S., Llamas, B., et al. (2015). Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. Nature, 522 (7555), 207–211. doi:10.1038/nature14317
Larsson, Å. M. (2009). Breaking and making bodies and pots: material and ritual practices in Sweden in the third millennium BC. Diss. Uppsala: University of Uppsala.
Malmer, M. P. (2002). The Neolithic of South Sweden: TRB, GRK, and STR. Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.
Mathiesen, I. (2015) Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe. bioRxiv preprint, first published online in 14 March 2015.
Brink, Kristian. Telephone interview, September 2014.
Kristansen, Kristian. Interview, August 2014.
Larsson, Lars. Interview, August 2013.
Larsson, Åsa M. Email, September 2014.
Sjögren, Karl-Göran. Interview, August 2014.
Bell Beakers, Celts and Stonehenge
I had the privilege of touring Stonehenge with Pat Shelley, a knowledgeable guide from Salisbury and Stonehenge Guided Tours.
Several times a year he leads special tours that start at sunrise and continue till lunchtime. You can actually go inside the stone circles, which visitors are not normally allowed to do. One exception is at midsummer, when the public are allowed right up to the monument – but then the area is far too crowded. Pat Shelley’s special tours start in the early morning from nearby Salisbury. For practical reasons, it may be advisable to spend the night there; this also has the advantage of allowing some time to visit Salisbury Museum, where the Amesbury Archer is displayed.
It is best not to visit Stonehenge in the high season, if you have any choice in the matter. Spring, autumn and winter are better. If you visit in winter, don’t make my mistake of not dressing warmly enough!
Anthony, D. W. (2007). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: how Bronze-Age riders from the Eurasian steppes shaped the modern world. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Clark, P. (ed.) (2009). Bronze Age Connections: cultural contact in prehistoric Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Lee, E. J., Makarewicz, C., Renneberg, R., Harder, M., Krause-Kyora, B., Müller, S., et al. (2012). Emerging genetic patterns of the European Neolithic: perspectives from a late Neolithic Bell Beaker burial site in Germany. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 148 (4), 571–579. doi:10.1002/ajpa.22074
Mallory, J. P. (1989). In Search of the Indo-Europeans: language, archaeology and myth. London: Thames &
Hudson.
Myres, N., Rootsi, S., Järve, M., Kutuev, I., Pshenichnov, A., Yunusbayev, B., et al. (2011). A major Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b Holocene era founder effect in Central and Western Europe. European Journal of Human Genetics, 19 (1), 95–101. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2010.146
Parker Pearson, M. (2012). Stonehenge: exploring the greatest Stone Age mystery. London: Simon & Schuster.
Parker Pearson, M. (2015). Stonehenge: making sense of a prehistoric mystery. York: Council for British Archaeology.
Richards, J. C. (2007). Stonehenge: the story so far. Swindon: English Heritage.
Wessex Archaeology. (2014). The Amesbury Archer. Downloaded on 25 September 2014 from www.wessexarch.co.uk/book/export/html/5
Gaffney, Vincent. Interview, January 2015.
Shelley, Pat. Guide at Salisbury and Stonehenge Guided Tours.
Underhill, P. Email, September 2014
Stonehenge. Visited in January 2015.
The Nebra Sky Disc in Halle
The Nebra sky disc is the main attraction at the excellent State Museum of Prehistory (Landesmuseum fur Vorgeschichte) in Halle an der Saale (see previous chapters).
There is also a good exhibition at a purpose-built centre near the site of the find. The Nebra Ark (Arche Nebra) is just outside the town of Nebra. The nearest train station is at Wangen; the nearest bus stop is marked Großwangen.
Kristiansen, K. (1989). Prehistoric migrations – the case of the Single Grave and Corded Ware cultures. Journal of Danish Archaeology, 8 (1), 221–225. doi:10.1080/0108464X.1989.10590029
Lappalainen, T., Hannelius, U., Salmela, E., von Döbeln, U., Lindgren, C. M., Huoponen, K., et al. (2009). Population structure in contemporary Sweden – a Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA analysis. Annals of Human Genetics, 73 (1), 61–73. doi:10.1111/j.1469-1809.2008.00487.x
Ling, J., Hjärthner-Holdar, E., Grandin, L., Billström, K., & Persson, P. (2013). Moving metals or indigenous mining? Provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age artefacts by lead isotopes and trace elements. Journal of Archaeological Science, 40, 291–304. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2012.05.040
Ling, J., Stos-Gale, Z., Grandin, L., Billström, K., Hjärthner-Holdar, E., & Persson, P. (2014). Moving metals II: provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age artefacts by lead isotope and elemental analyses. Journal of Archaeological Science, 41, 106–132. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2013.07.018