DEA/G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty
Artifacts
similar to these pottery vesssels from Sweden are found across northern
Europe, and give the Corded Ware culture its name. Ancient DNA suggests
that the group was related to the Yamnaya people who lived in
present-day Russia.
A mysterious group of humans
from the east
stormed western Europe 4,500 years ago — bringing with them
technologies
such as the wheel,
as well as a language that is the forebear of many
modern tongues, suggests one of the largest studies of ancient DNA yet
conducted. Vestiges of these eastern émigrés exist in the genomes of
nearly all contemporary Europeans, according to the authors, who
analysed genome data from nearly 100 ancient Europeans
1.
The first
Homo sapiens to colonize
Europe were hunter-gatherers who arrived from Africa, by way of the
Middle East, around 45,000 years ago. (Neanderthals and other archaic
human species had begun roaming the continent much earlier.) Archaeology
and ancient DNA suggest that farmers from the Middle East started
streaming in around 8,000 years ago, replacing the hunter-gatherers in
some areas and mixing with them in others.
But
last year, a study of the genomes .... echoes not only of these two waves from the Middle East, but also
of an enigmatic third group that they said could be from farther east....
Ancient genes
To
further pin down the
origins of this ghost lineage, a team led by David
Reich, an evolutionary and population geneticist at Harvard Medical
School in Boston, Massachusetts, analysed nuclear DNA from the bodies of
69 individuals who lived across Europe between 8,000 and 3,000 years
ago. They also examined previously published genome data from another 25
ancient Europeans,
including Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old 'ice man' who was
discovered on the Italian-Austrian border.
Their
analysis
confirmed the arrival of Middle Eastern farmers in Europe
between 8,000 and 7,000 years ago. But the team also found proof of a
previously unknown migration, beginning several thousand years later.
DNA recovered from steppe herders that lived in western Russia around
5,000 years ago closely matched that of 4,500-year-old individuals from
Germany, who were part of a group known as the Corded Ware culture.
The
herders, named the Yamnaya, lived in present-day Russia and Ukraine and
represent “a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its
eastern periphery”, Reich and his team say in a paper posted on the
bioRxiv preprint server on 10 February
1.
Yamnaya ancestry survives in varying degrees in the genomes of
contemporary Europeans, with northern groups such as Norwegians, Scots
and Lithuanians maintaining the strongest link. The geographical extent
of the Yamnaya migration is not clear, nor is its nature
. But Reich's
team says it is possible that the eastern migrants completely replaced
existing populations in Germany.
Linguistic spread
The
Yamnaya, the researchers also contend, imported at least part of the
Indo-European language family into Europe. The origin of these languages
— which include Germanic, Slavic and Romance languages as well as many
of the languages spoken on the South Asian subcontinent — is mired in
controversy. Some researchers say that the tongues were spread by Middle
Eastern farmers around 8,500 years ago. But Reich and his team say that
their data are more consistent with the 'steppe hypothesis' favoured by
other researchers, according to which herders living around the Black
and Caspian Seas spread the languages around 6,000 years ago, after
horse domestication and the invention of the wheel allowed them to start
travelling great distances.
"It’s wonderful
work. It’s a big leap forward in many respects," says Stephan Schiffels,
a population geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in
Hinxton, UK, who studies ancient DNA. "
We can now sequence whole
populations from the past, not just single individuals.”
Pontus
Skoglund, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School who works
with Reich but is not a co-author of the latest study, says that the
link between the Yamnaya and the Corded Ware people is a “smoking gun”.
“You don’t need any fancy genetic profiling. It’s
as direct evidence as
you could hope for.”
Less clear is
whether all
Indo-European languages derive from this group, or whether just a
subset do, says Paul Heggarty, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He suspects that the
Yamnaya spoke a language that later developed into Slavic, Germanic and
other northern European tongues, but he doubts that they imported the
predecessor of southern European languages such as ancient Greek, or
those of eastern Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit.
....
ssi; Foto oben: 
