Thousands of Bronze Age migrants from the Caucuses came to northern Europe in a major movement of prehistoric people in the third millennium BC
The making of modern Europe began in earnest about 5,000 years ago when a mass migration of people from what is now southern Russia and Georgia introduced new technology, languages and dairy farming to the continent, a study has found
Thousands of Bronze Age migrants from the Caucuses came to northern
Europe in a major movement of prehistoric people in the third millennium
BC, according to the largest research project of its kind that analyzed
the genetic makeup of more than 100 ancient skeletons from the period.
The
migrants brought new metal skills, spoke what became the basis of
almost every other European language – from Greek and Latin to German
and English – and carried a genetic mutation that allowed adults to
drink cow’s milk
This
lactose-tolerance gene, which enables adults to digest the sugar in
milk, is still more prevalent in north Europeans today than in most
other regions of the world. This illustrates the historic importance of
dairy food in the North European diet, the scientists said
The mass migration was one of the most significant in European
history, equivalent to the colonization of the Americas, and was a
transformative period in terms of the change in languages and culture
that it brought about, the researchers believe.
“The single most
important finding from our study is that the Bronze Age, which is
relatively recent, is when the major genetic landscape affecting
modern-day Europeans was formed. It’s a surprise as it happened so
recently,” said Eske Willerslev, professor of evolutionary genetics at
the University of Copenhagen
“Our study is the first, real
large-scale population genomic study ever undertaken on ancient
individuals. We analyzed genome sequence data from 101 past individuals.
This is more than a doubling of the number of genomic sequenced
individuals of prehistoric man generated to date,” Professor Willerslev
said
“The results show that the genetic composition and
distribution of peoples in Europe and Asia today is a surprisingly late
phenomenon, only a few thousand years old,” he said
The genomic
analysis, published in the journal Nature, indicates that the Yamnaya
people who lived in the Caucuses about 5,000 years ago were responsible
for spreading not just their innovative cultural ideas and languages,
but their DNA across a vast area extending from the Urals to
Scandinavia.
They effectively replaced the older Neolithic farmers
and hunter-gatherers who had occupied the northern Europe for thousands
of years previously, presumably aided by the Yamnaya’s ability to smelt
bronze and copper and herd cattle, Professor Willerslev said.
“They
brought with them new technology, new family structures, new religion
and new ways of burying their dead. They also brought the start of
cities. They were a high-tech culture,” he said
The Yamnaya also probably introduced genes for brown eyes, pale skin
and tall stature to northern Europeans in the third millennium BC, which
at that time was inhabited by dark skinned, blue-eyed, short people, he
said.
Crucially, they also brought the lactose-tolerance mutation
that would allow adults to drink cow’s milk, a useful genetic attribute
for healthy nutrition
“Previously, the common belief was that
lactose tolerance developed in the Balkans or in the Middle East in
connection with the introduction of farming during the Stone Age,” said
Martin Sikora of the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen, a co-author
of the study
“But now we can see that even late in the Bronze Age
the mutation that gives rise to the tolerance is rare in Europe. We
think that it may have been introduced into Europe with the Yamnaya
herders from the Caucasus but that the selection that has made most
Europeans lactose tolerant has happened at a much later time,” Dr Sikora
said
Professor
Kristian Kristiansen, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg,
said the study resolves some of the questions about whether this period
in prehistory was dominated by the movement of ideas or the migration
and settlement of people en masse.
“The old Neolithic farming
cultures were replaced by a completely new perception of family,
property and personhood. I and other archaeologists share the opinion
that these changes came about as a result of massive migrations,”
Professor Kristiansen said
The study, led by Morten Allentoft of
the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen, also found that the Yamnaya
people migrated east to occupy parts of Central Asia. They were
eventually replaced by eastern Asians about 2,000 years ago.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/our-european-ancestors-brought-farming-languages-and-a-love-of-dairy-study-shows-10311317.html
