[Trio of studies suggests new homeland for earliest Indo-European
speakers and traces movements of ancient Greeks, Imperial Romans]
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‘PHENOMENAL’ ANCIENT DNA DATA SET PROVIDES CLUES TO ORIGIN OF
FARMING AND EARLY LANGUAGES  
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Andrew Curry
August 25, 2022
Science
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_ Trio of studies suggests new homeland for earliest Indo-European
speakers and traces movements of ancient Greeks, Imperial Romans _

Researchers sampled DNA from individuals including this man, buried
about 8000 years ago in Turkey., Jacob Roodenberg

 

Few places have shaped Eurasian history as much as the ancient Near
East. Agriculture and some of the world’s first civilizations were
born there, and the region was home to ancient Greeks, Troy, and large
swaths of the Roman Empire. “It’s absolutely central, and a lot of
us work on it for precisely that reason,” says German Archaeological
Institute archaeologist Svend Hansen. “It’s always been a bridge
of cultures and a key driver of innovation and change.”

But one of the most powerful tools for unraveling the past, ancient
DNA, has had little to say about this crucible of history and culture,
in part because DNA degrades quickly in hot climates.

Now, in three papers in this issue, researchers present DNA from more
than 700 individuals who lived and died in the region over more than
10,000 years. Taken together, the studies survey the history of the
Near East through a genetic lens, exploring the ancestry of the people
who first domesticated plants and animals, settled down into villages,
spread the precursors of modern languages, and peopled Homer’s
epics.

The massive data set includes DNA from burials stretching from Croatia
to modern-day Iran, in a region the authors call the Southern Arc.
“The sample size is phenomenal, and fascinating,” says Wolfgang
Haak, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology who was not part of the team. “The beauty of this is
it’s bringing it all together in a bigger narrative.”

That narrative is no simple tale. The geneticists, led by David Reich
and Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard University, worked with archaeologists
and linguists, gathering thousands of skeletal samples and extracting
and analyzing DNA, mostly from the dense petrous bone of the ear, over
nearly 4 years. They applied better extraction methods and compared
new samples with existing data, allowing them to identify even short
bits of DNA.

Their genetic story starts with the early days of farming, a period
known as the Neolithic. Farming began in Anatolia in what is
present-day Turkey. But the DNA shows that the people who experimented
with planting wheat and domesticating sheep and goats starting about
10,000 years ago weren’t simply descendants of earlier
hunter-gatherers living in the area. Dozens of newly sequenced
genomes suggest Anatolia absorbed at least two separate migrations
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about 10,000 to 6500 years ago. One came from today’s Iraq and Syria
and the other from the Eastern Mediterranean coast. In Anatolia they
mixed with each other and with the descendants of earlier
hunter-gatherers. By about 6500 years ago, the populations had
coalesced into a distinct genetic signature.

Another genetic contribution came from the east about 6500 years ago,
as hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus entered the region. Then about
5000 years ago, a fourth group—nomads from the steppes north of the
Black Sea, known as the Yamnaya—arrived, adding to the genetic
picture but not fundamentally redrawing it. “The people of the
Southern Arc are mostly coming from Levantine, Anatolian, and Caucasus
components,” Lazaridis says. “The Yamnaya are like a layer of
sauce, added after 3000 B.C.E.”

Excavated near Pylos, Greece, in 2015, a 3500-year-old skeleton dubbed
the Griffin Warrior helped researchers better understand the roots of
Mycenaean society. Jack Davis

This scenario supports existing evidence that agriculture arose in a
network of people interacting and migrating in this region, others
say. “This fits really well with archaeological data,” says
Barbara Horejs, scientific director of the Austrian Archaeological
Institute, who was not part of the team.

But other scholars question the team’s conclusion about the origins
of a different cultural shift, the spread of Indo-European languages.
Nearly every language spoken in Europe today stems from a common root,
shared with Indian languages. Researchers have for years traced it to
the Bronze Age Yamnaya, who rode both east and west from the steppes.
But the authors of the new papers argue the Black Sea steppe wasn’t
the birthplace of Indo-European, but rather a stop along a journey
that began earlier and farther to the south, perhaps around modern-day
Armenia.

Because of similarities between Indo-European and Anatolian languages
such as ancient Hittite, linguists had guessed the Yamnaya had left
both genes and language in Anatolia, as well as Europe. But the new
analysis finds no Yamnaya ancestry among ancient Anatolians. The team
suggests they and the Yamnaya instead share common ancestors in a
hunter-gatherer population
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the highlands east of Anatolia
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including the Caucasus Mountains. That area, they argue, is the most
likely place for people to have spoken an Anatolian-Indo-European root
language, perhaps between 5000 and 7000 years ago. “That Caucasus
component is a unifying type of ancestry we find in all places where
ancient Indo-European languages are spoken,” says Lazaridis, who is
first author on all three papers.

However, Guus Kroonen, a linguist at Leiden University, says this
contradicts linguistic data. The early people of the Caucasus would
have been familiar with farming, he says, but the deepest layers of
Indo-European have just one word for grain and no words for legumes or
the plow. Those speakers “weren’t very familiar with
agriculture,” he says. “The linguistic evidence and the genetic
evidence don’t seem to match.”

Lazaridis says it’s possible the root tongue “was originally a
hunter-gatherer language,” and so lacked terms for farming. The team
agrees more evidence of “Proto-Indo-Anatolians” is needed, but
says the Caucasus is a promising place to look.

Throughout, the papers address some critiques of previous ancient DNA
work. Some archaeologists have complained that earlier research
attributed almost everything—status, identity, power shifts—to
pulses of migration recorded in DNA. But the new papers acknowledge,
for example, that some migrations into Anatolia may not have been
relevant or even perceptible to those living at the time. “That’s
a response to criticisms coming from the archaeological literature,”
says Hartwick College archaeologist emeritus David Anthony, who is not
a co-author but has worked with the team. “It’s really healthy.”

In another example, Yamnaya were buried in elite tombs after they
moved into the region north of Greece, suggesting a link between
ancestry and social status. But during the later Mycenaean period in
Greece—the time Homer mythologized—the new data suggest Yamnaya
descendants had little impact on Greek social structure.

The beauty of this is it’s bringing it all together in a bigger
narrative.

Wolfgang Haak, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Evidence comes in part from the spectacular Mycenaean burial of
the Griffin Warrior [[link removed]], a man who died
in 1450 B.C.E. near Pylos, Greece. He carried no traces of steppe
ancestry
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though dozens of both elite and humbler graves in Greece did.
University of Cincinnati archaeologist Shari Stocker, who helped
excavate the tomb in 2015 and collaborated on the new studies, says
the lack of correlation between social status and steppe ancestry is
no surprise—and a welcome dose of nuance from geneticists.

The papers also acknowledge the nuances of identity in later periods,
for example in Imperial Rome. Previous genetic studies had shown that
as the empire coalesced, the ancestry of people in and around the
city of Rome shifted
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having roots not in Europe, but farther east.

After obtaining dozens of additional Roman-era genomes from the
region, the team zeroed in on the source of those newcomers: Anatolia.
But the researchers agree that people with “Anatolian” DNA moving
to the Italian peninsula likely saw themselves as citizens or slaves
of Rome, rather than as part of a distinct “Anatolian” ethnic
group. Contemporary chroniclers remarked on the new faces in
Rome—and referred to many of them as “Greeks,” perhaps because
the eastern peoples had spoken Greek for centuries, Lazaridis says.

Some archaeologists still think the papers claim too much influence
for ancestry. “DNA cannot tell us anything about how people shape
their life worlds, what their social status was,” says archaeologist
Joseph Maran of Heidelberg University. He says terms like “Yamnaya
ancestry” suggest the Yamnaya spread by moving directly from place
to place, rather than through a complex mingling of their descendants
with local populations over centuries or more. “Equating history
with ‘mobility’ and ‘migrations’ is … old-fashioned.”

And although the studies are a big step forward, in covering 10,000
years with 700 samples, they leave plenty of questions unanswered,
with large stretches of time and space represented by a handful of
samples.

All the same, several archaeologists including Horejs think this
injection of DNA data will shape research going forward. “It’s our
task now, and obligation as archaeologists, to use this new data to
rethink archaeological models,” she says.

_A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 377, Issue 6609._

_ANDREW CURRY, Journalist
I am an award-winning journalist with more than 20 years of experience
reporting from five continents. I cover science, travel, history,
politics, cycling and more._

_I have written for a wide variety of publications, from Architect and
Bicycling to National Geographic, The New York Times, Rouleur, and
Wired. I am a contributing correspondent for Science and a
contributing editor at Archaeology._

_I live in Berlin, Germany._

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* Science
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* archeology
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* anthropology
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* genetics
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* linguistics
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* language
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* farming
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* History
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* DNA
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