by Tony Joseph
Who were the Yamnaya?
Now that we know what happened, let us ask who exactly these Steppe people were that migrated to Europe and to south Asia, spreading their language and leaving a genetic mark on such a large area of the world. The Steppe is a vast region of grasslands, shrublands and savannah that extends from central Europe to China, over an 8000-kilometre stretch that has historically been sparsely inhabited. After the Out of Africa migrants populated much of Eurasia some 50,000 to 35,000 years ago, different regions were inhabited by groups of people who were often isolated from each other by distance and by geographical barriers and who, therefore, grew genetically differentiated from each other. The people who inhabited the Steppe at this time are today classified as Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) of the Steppe region and Ancient North Eurasians (ANE) of the Siberian region, who are related to the people that migrated to the Americas about 16,000 years ago, through the Bering land bridge.
Then, starting around 5000 BCE there was an influx of people from the Caucasus – the region between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea that connects west Asia to the Steppe – into the Steppe, resulting in new settlements. The Yamnaya are the result of this influx, and they draw equal ancestry from the Caucasus and the hunter-gatherer population of the Steppe. By around 3700 BCE, the Caucasus region became the centre of the Maikop culture, which seems to have had a strong influence on the Yamnaya. The practice of building ‘kurgans’ (burial mounds made by heaping stone and earth over a burial chamber, often made of wood) that the Yamnaya are most closely associated with is seen for the first time in the Caucasus, for instance, and it is often argued that the earliest Proto-Indo-European language could have been spoken in the Caucasus before it became the language of the Yamnaya.
There were three technological innovations that the Yamnaya adapted from neighbouring populations such as the Maikop that shaped their role in history: the wheel, the wagon and the horse. We have been unable to zero in on where exactly the wheel was invented because no sooner was it invented than it spread across Eurasia like wildfire. Perhaps it was invented in more than one place at the same time – as we saw in chapter 3, there are clay models of the wheel in the Harappan Civilization dating from before 3000 BCE. The wheel, the wagon and the horse were particularly useful for the Yamnaya because of the geography of their region. Large parts of the Steppe were until then uninhabitable due to a lack of rains that made it unsuitable for agriculture, except along the river valleys, and it had far too few watering holes to maintain large flocks of sheep and cattle.
But with wagons on wheels drawn by oxen or horses, the Yamnaya could take water and supplies with them into the vast Steppe. These draught animals must have enabled the Yamnaya to scale their cattle herding and reap huge productivity gains. From there it would have been but a small step to start trading with cultures such as the Maikop, thereby growing in wealth and influence. That the wagons and horses were crucial to the lives of the Yamnaya is evident from the fact that they were buried with their owners, as seen in the kurgans of the period. The new, mobile lifestyle of the Yamnaya had such an impact on the Steppe that many settlements in the region were abandoned. And the only permanent structures that the Yamnaya themselves left behind wherever they went were their kurgans. In time, owing to the settled communities they traded with, the Yamnaya also mastered the art of metallurgy, a crucial skill for a world of conflict. And conflict was about to break out.
The Yamnaya burst upon Europe around 3000 BCE, a thousand years before their descendants and relatives reached south Asia. In the archaeological record, this new influx into Europe was reflected by a new culture called Corded Ware that started becoming evident from around 2900 BCE. The term ‘Corded Ware’ refers to a distinctive style of pottery with twisted cord impressions on them, and this culture covered a vast swathe of territory from Switzerland to European Russia. In Germany, ancient DNA showed that people who were buried with Corded Ware pottery drew about 75 per cent of their ancestry from groups related to the Yamnaya and the rest from the farmers who had been the previous inhabitants of the region. The incoming Yamnaya were also responsible for spreading the Bell Beaker culture through much of Europe, even though it did not originate with them. (Bell Beaker refers to a style of distinctive pottery that includes vessels shaped like an upside-down bell.)
In Britain, the incoming Indo-European-language-speaking people with the Bell Beaker culture more or less replaced the earlier people of the island who had built the Stonehenge. ‘British and Irish skeletons from the Bronze Age that followed the Beaker period had at most around 10 per cent ancestry from the first farmers of these islands, with the other 90 per cent from people like those associated with the Bell Beaker culture in the Netherlands. This was a population replacement at least as dramatic as the one that accompanied the spread of Corded Ware culture,’ writes David Reich in Who We Are and How We Got Here.
The Lithuanian–American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who was the first to propose the Kurgan Hypothesis in the 1950s (which said that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken by the people of the kurgan burial culture in the Steppe, the Yamnaya), thought the influx of the Yamnaya into Europe brought about major cultural changes. She said, ‘The process of Indo-Europeanization was a cultural, not a physical transformation. It must be understood as a military victory in terms of successfully imposing a new administrative system, language and religion upon the indigenous groups.’
Gimbutas characterized the nature of transition from the Mediterranean cult of the Mother Goddess to a patriarchal society and the worship of the warlike Thunderer (Zeus, Daeus) as violent. Even though her Kurgan Hypothesis has more or less stood the test of time, her characterization of the transition in such stark terms is contested by many who believe it was more gradual and peaceful. The migrations, in their view, were not a concerted military operation, but a gradual expansion of many different tribes and cultures, over many generations. The criticism of Gimbutas has merit, but there is a valorization of violence and a male-centredness that is noticeable in the cultures the new migrants created – their burial mounds had mostly males, often with evidence of great wounds, and many graves contained impressive battleaxes.
There is also genetic evidence for the fact that the Yamnaya expansions were male centred. According to David Reich:
The Y-chromosomes that the Yamnaya carried were nearly all of a few types, which shows that a limited number of males must have been extraordinarily successful in spreading their genes. In contrast, in their mitochondrial DNA, the Yamnaya had more diverse sequences . . . The Yamnaya expansion also cannot have been entirely friendly, as is clear from the fact that the proportion of Y chromosomes of Steppe origin in both western Europe and India today is much larger than the proportion of the rest of genome. This preponderance of male ancestry coming from the Steppe implies that male descendants of the Yamnaya with political or social power were more successful at competing for local mates than local groups.
Reich takes the example of Iberia in far south-western Europe, where Yamnaya-derived ancestry arrived suddenly between 2500 BCE and 2000 BCE. Based on ancient DNA from this period, it was found that approximately 30 per cent of the Iberian population was replaced with the arrival of Steppe ancestry. But the replacement of Y chromosomes was much more dramatic, writes Reich, adding: ‘In our data, around 90 per cent of males who carry Yamnaya ancestry have a Y-chromosome type of Steppe origin that was absent in Iberia prior to that time. It is clear that there were extraordinary hierarchies and imbalances in power at work in the expansions from the Steppe.’
Genetics cannot answer what manner of force was used to ensure that local Iberian males left few children behind in comparison to the newly arrived Yamnaya males. Were they killed, driven away or just marginalized? We do not know. Genetics can only show what the result was: the substantial elimination of the local males from the genetic pool.
East, west and east again
Around the same time as they were pour
ing into Europe, the Yamnaya also sped east across the Steppe to the Minusinsk basin and the Altai mountains in south Siberia, to create there what came to be known as the Afanasievo culture, probably speaking an early version of Tocharian, an extinct Indo-European language. But a more crucial expansion from the south Asian perspective came after the Yamnaya went into western Europe and created the Corded Ware culture. Genetic evidence suggests there was then an ‘eastward reflux’ back beyond the Urals of western Russia after 3000 BCE, carrying the typical Corded Ware genetic mixture of Yamnaya and European Middle Neolithic (Europe_MN) farmers. By around 2600 BCE, the Yamnaya had splintered into many different successor cultures, from Corded Ware and Sintashta to Srubnaya and Andronovo across the vast Steppe, each one with its own unique style and practices.
A study titled ‘Population Genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia’ published in Nature in June 2015 says, ‘From the beginning of 2000 BC, a new class of master artisans known as the Sintashta culture emerged in the Urals, building chariots, breeding and training horses, and producing sophisticated new weapons. These innovations quickly spread across Europe and into Asia where they appeared to give rise to the Andronovo culture.’ Both the Sintashta and the Andronovo cultures are of relevance to the migration of Steppe people to south Asia, as documented by David W. Anthony, the American professor of anthropology who specializes in Indo-European history and languages.
Adapted from ‘Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia’, bioRxiv, 2018
In The Horse, the Wheel and Language, Anthony explores in detail the similarities between the rituals uncovered during excavations at the Russian archaeological sites of Sintashta and Arkaim and those described in the Rigveda – the earliest of the Vedas, variously dated to sometime between 1700 BCE and 1100 BCE,3 though there is no unanimity on whether parts of it were composed by the ‘Aryans’ before they reached India. The similarities go to buttress the argument that the ‘Aryans’ who composed the Vedas and brought Indo-European languages to India were related to the people who left behind evidence of their cultural practices in places like Sintashta and Arkaim.
To quote Anthony:
The parallels include a reference in Rigveda 10.18 to a kurgan (‘let them . . . bury death in this hill’), a roofed burial chamber supported with posts (‘let the fathers hold up this pillar for you’), and with shored walls (‘I shore up the earth all around you; let me not injure you as I lay down this clod of earth’). This is a precise description of Sintashta . . . grave pits, which had wooden plank roots supported by timber posts and plank shoring walls. The horse sacrifice at a royal funeral is described in Rigveda 1.162: ‘Keep the limbs undamaged and place them in the proper pattern. Cut them apart, calling out piece by piece.’ The horse sacrifices in Sintashta . . . graves match this description, with the lower legs of horses carefully cut apart at the joints and placed in and over the grave.
Anthony describes a Srubnaya site excavated by him that contained surprising evidence of the connection between archaeological evidence in the Steppe and the myths of Indians and Iranians.4 The evidence related to the mid-winter New Year’s sacrifice and initiation ceremony, held on the winter solstice. Anthony writes:
Many Indo-European myths and rituals contained references to this event. One of its functions was to initiate young men into the warrior category and its principal symbol was the dog or wolf. Dogs represented death; multiple dogs or a multi-headed dog guarded the entrance to the Afterworld. At initiation, death came to both the old year and boyhood identities, and as boys became warriors, they would feed the dogs of death. In the Rigveda, the oath brotherhood of warriors that performed sacrifices at midwinter were called the Vratyas, who also were called dog-priests. The ceremonies associated with them featured many contests, including poetry recitation and chariot races. At the Srubnaya settlement of Krasnosamarskoe in the Samara river valley, we found the remains of a late bronze age midwinter dog sacrifice . . . dated about 1750 BCE . . . At least 18 dogs were butchered, probably more.
Anthony says the chariot-building, stronghold-based chiefdoms of Sintashta armed themselves with new kinds of weapons, created a new style of funeral rituals that involved spectacular public displays of wealth and generosity and began to mine and produce metals on a scale previously unimagined in the Steppe. Sometime around 2000 BCE, they finally broke through – or went around – the Ural mountains and spread eastward across the Steppe. He writes, ‘With them went the eastern daughters of Sintashta, the offspring who would later emerge into history as the Iranians and the Vedic Aryans. These eastern and southern connections finally brought northern Steppe cultures into face-to-face contact with the old civilizations of Asia.’
Anthony wrote his book with the backing of archaeological data, mostly. But now, ancient DNA has shown that he was on the mark. ‘The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia’ confirmed that between 2000 BCE and 1400 BCE, a vast region of the eastern European and trans-Ural Steppe had a relatively homogeneous population that was different from those who populated the region earlier. The distinguishing feature of this population was ancestry from the European farmer. The ‘eastward reflux’ that was mentioned earlier, carrying the genetic mixture of the Corded Ware culture, was now common across the Steppe.
But there’s a further distinction. As you move farther east, to present-day Kazakhstan and as far as the Minusinsk basin in Russia, the ancient DNA samples reflect the addition of another ancestry that the 2018 genomic formation study calls West Siberian Haplogroup or West Siberian_HG. This shows that as the ‘eastern reflux’ reached Kazakhstan and farther east, it encountered and mixed with a population that already had a West Siberian_HG ancestral component. So the study created a new group, Steppe-MLBA_East, to separate it from the Steppe-MLBA_West, with no such ancestry.
This is important for us because it is probably this Steppe-MLBA_East that finally moved south from the Steppe to the BMAC and Turan, and then farther south to the Indian subcontinent. The genetic study characterizes the Steppe influx into south Asia only as Steppe-MLBA, since both MLBA_West and MLBA_East fit as sources for Indian ancestry. But it is likely that MLBA_East is what reached south Asia since it is geographically much closer to the subcontinent. The strong presence of R1a-Z93 – the Y-chromosome haplogroup of Steppe origin found in India – in Kazakhstan is another reason.
Does the study take us any closer to the date of the ‘Aryan’ migration into south Asia? In many ways, it does. Since the BMAC ancient DNA shows Steppe presence only after 2100 BCE and is conspicuously absent before that, it is clear that a Steppe migration to south Asia through this route could not have happened earlier. Considering that the BMAC isn’t very far from south Asia and that it had had strong trade relations with the Harappans, it couldn’t have been much later either. There is existing archaeological evidence that suggests that migrations towards south Asia from the BMAC may have started happening soon after. The first non-controversial evidence for the horse in the Harappan region comes from Pirak in Balochistan, and it is dated to 1800 BCE, in the Late Harappan phase. Pirak also had figurines of horses made in terracotta and unburnt clay – remember that there is no representation of the horse in any other Harappan seal or artefact. This means that the first Steppe migrations into the Indian subcontinent could have almost coincided with the decline of the Harappan Civilization.
Parallels between south Asia and Europe
There are unmissable parallels between the history of migrations into south Asia and the history of migrations into western Europe, though they differ in the details. In western Europe, agricultural technology was brought from west Asia by migrating Anatolian agriculturists between 7000 BCE and 5000 BCE. South Asia saw the arrival of Zagros herders around the same time, although it is open to question whether they brought a full-fledged agricultural package with them. As mentioned before, it is possible that early agricultural experiments had already begun in places such as Mehrgarh in Balochistan and Lahuradewa in Uttar Pradesh, and the migrants m
ay only have catalysed the transition to agriculture by bringing in new domesticates. In western Europe, the incoming Anatolian agriculturists and the resident hunter-gatherers mixed in varying degrees and gave birth to many Neolithic cultures. In south Asia, the incoming herders from Zagros mixed with the First Indians and went on to create the Harappan Civilization. Europe later saw the arrival of Steppe pastoralists who mixed with the local inhabitants to produce new population groups that created and/or spread the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and other cultures. In south Asia, the incoming Steppe pastoralists mixed with the Harappans to create the new genetic cluster ANI, while the Harappans mixed with the inhabitants of south India, the direct descendants of the First Indians, to create the new genetic cluster ASI. Both groups mixed again, to varying degrees in different regions and during different periods, to create the population of India as it is today.
There is also a parallel between Europe and south Asia in the gender bias that is reflected in the Steppe migrations, as pointed out by Reich earlier in this chapter. As long as Indian geneticists were only looking at mtDNA of present-day Indians, they could not detect the Steppe migrations. It is only when they began looking at the Y-chromosome ancestry that the reality of Steppe migrations became clear. To quote Reich again: ‘The preponderance of male ancestry coming from the Steppe implies that male descendants of the Yamnaya with political or social power were more successful at competing for local mates than local groups . . . It is clear that there were extraordinary hierarchies and imbalances in power at work in the expansions from the Steppe.’