This definitively established that the Corded Ware’s
long-debated roots ultimately lay in the Pontic steppe; they were
Yamnaya with cultural adaptations and local genetic accretions. Later
work from Reich’s group showed 90% population replacement in Britain
around 2500 BC, and Kristian Kristiansen, a Willerslev collaborator, has
written of the Yamnaya-descended Battle-Axe Culture totally replacing
the Neolithic Funnelbeaker society in Scandinavia. Even the Indian
subcontinent absorbed a substantial demographic impact, and this in a
region that classical observers as far back as Herodotus believed was
the most populous on earth (how little has changed!). About 20% of the
ancestry of people in the northwestern quadrant of South Asia, home to
nearly 300 million people today, can be traced back specifically to the
Yamnaya (and fractions even higher if you stipulate steppe pastoralists
more broadly). The fractions are lower in other parts of the
subcontinent, but even at India’s far southern tip, castes like Tamil
Brahmins harbor some 15% Yamnaya ancestry and the least steppe-enriched
groups in Southern India still show high single-digit steppe ancestry
rates.
very fascinating stuff!! Razib Khan's own DNA traces all the way back around - that red line -
some 700 million pure Yamnaya walking among us today. All this
from a very small founding population, perhaps just a few allied tribes.
A 2025 Reich-lab paper
with a large dataset of Yamnaya genotypes estimates an initial
ancestral breeding population of about 5,000 at the start of the major
expansion phase out of their Pontic steppe homeland into Europe in 3000
BC (up from a population as small as 2,000 in 3500 BC, when we estimate
the Yamnaya had truly coalesced as a coherent genetic population
cluster). ....
This means 5,000 years ago, with the Yamnaya on the cusp of their
world-altering expansion, as few as 10,000 nomads scattered between the
Dnieper and Don rivers in what is today Ukraine were about to run the
table from the Altai to the Atlantic....
Between 3000 and 2900 BC, a new culture arrived in what is today
Poland, long ago detected in archaeology’s traditional fashion by the
propagation of a new pottery tradition. These were the Corded Ware, a
people who would become the subject of a century of speculation in
European archaeology. To the shock of many, it quickly became clear that
genetically many Corded Ware were basically interchangeable with the
people buried in the kurgans; some of the Corded
Ware samples are actual close genetic kin to the steppe probands, second
and third cousins who might even have known one another’s families by
name. After 2900 BC, most of the Corded Ware also show a substantial
minority (about 30%) of ancestry derived from the region’s previous
occupants, the Neolithic Globular Amphorae Culture (GAC).....
A small number of tribes from the bleak Pontic steppe largely replaced
Northern Europe’s great megalith-building civilizations, overthrew
Europe’s first literate society in Greece, the Minoans, and erased the
memory of the people who had built the grand Indus Valley Civilization. The only remaining plausible candidate for who these people were is
Indo-Europeans, ethnolinguistic forebears of today’s Europeans, Iranians
and Indians alike.
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/two-steppes-forward-one-step-back?publication_id=94899&post_id=180577599&isFreemail=true&r=52gyl&triedRedirect=true
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