In the earliest historical record, we get evidence of this as well. It seems clear that on the very eve of records being kept by the Greeks and Romans that would give us the detail we'd like to see on this particular question, the Celts had expanded explosively across much of Central, Western, and even much of Eastern Europe from a more localized center of development within the Hallstatt material culture somewhere. Reading Caesar, Ptolemy and others, one comes to the conclusion, as said on Infogalactic, that the Volcae, for instance, were "[d]riven by highly mobile groups operating outside the tribal system and comprising diverse elements, the Volcae were one of the new ethnic entities formed during the Celtic military expansion at the beginning of the 3rd century BC. Collecting in the famous excursion into the Balkans, ostensibly, from the Hellene point of view, to raid Delphi, a branch of the Volcae split from the main group on the way into the Balkans and joined two other tribes, the Tolistobogii and the Trocmi, to settle in central Asia Minor and establish a new Gaulish identity as the Galatians." The history of the jostling and replacement of various ethno-linguistic identities (even if the genetics didn't necessarily see turnover; although often they did) across Europe continues apace; the Roman expansion over various Celtic territories, only to in turn have Dacians, Germanic peoples, and Slavic peoples spread over the same areas to gradually form the modern face of Europe as we know it The example above is telling; it was outside of the formal tribal system, probably gobbled up numerous people from other Celtic identities as well as non-Celtic identities as well. The archaeology is interesting; Hallstatt is usually pointed at as a Celtic archaeological identity, but Hallstatt was an interesting elite dominance kind of culture that was broad and seemed to be heavily focused on luxury Mediterranean goods too. The Illyrians may well be associated with the Hallstatt culture in the east, so Hallstatt = Celtic is probably too simplistic. Archaeologists who look at the broad cultural similarities between Hallstatt and the previous Urnfield culture seem confident in assigning a proto or archaic Celtic identity to the Urnfield culture too, but given the broad cultural Urnfield system, and its many regional cultures which can just as confidently be assigned to other linguistic identies (Lusatian to Balto-Slavic, for example, Golasecca as early Italic, etc.) The situation is probably way too fluid to confidently assign proto linguistic identities to very many archaeological cultures from before the historical period; it's only after the historical period that we can have much hope of doing that, and even then for only limited areas; i.e, La Tene as Iron Age Gauls/Celts is pretty secure, but as mentioned above, even the preceding Hallstatt culture is not quite as simple as one would hope, and more than one ethno-linguistic identity known to the Greeks and Romans may have had its genesis within that sphere.
For that reason, as we go back further in time, we have to be a bit more handwavy and less insistent that sharp lines and one to one correspondences between archaeological, genetic and linguistic groupings can be observed. If one looks at, for example, the Bell Beaker culture of 2,800-1,800 BC; several material cultures previous to the Urnfield, not only can we never hope to assign a very specific ethnolinguistic identity to them within the Indo-European sphere (there are even some calls that associating them with Indo-Europeans is iffy, although I don't believe that at all) one must keep in mind that the Beaker phenomena clearly represents a rather cosmopolitan group of people who moved around throughout much of Europe; British Beaker burials show signs of having originated in various locations including what is today France, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, and goods people seem to have been very mobile and transient. In fact, many people believe that the entire Beaker phenomena was an elite subset that had access, for whatever reason, to trade networks throughout Europe. One must also keep in mind that post-Corded Ware Europe still shows lots of signs of there having been contacts and interaction between post Corded ware material cultures; Sintashta to Nordic Bronze Age, otherwise separated by vast gulfs of space, apparently were either recently split from each other, or remained in contact with each other, given the high degree of specific cultural details that they shared.
In any case, the point is that much of Bronze Age Europe must remain historically somewhat anonymous unless we discover that someone we don't know about was keeping records somewhere that will eventually turn up, but we should be very wary of thinking that the steppe population that invaded, conquered and colonized Central, Northern and Western Europe was already dividing into groups that we'd recognize today; they must remain a still somewhat amorphous and fluid mass of just being "steppe peoples", and finer degrees of ethnic and linguistic identities probably rose and fell many times across the Bronze Age to be assimilated into subsequent waves. The more interesting question is where did all of these steppe peoples come from? I mean, the steppes, obviously, but more specifically, how did they get into the rest of Europe?
For quite some time, going back to Marija Gimbutas at least, although she was largely refining the ideas of predecessors like Childe and others, the "final" stage of unified proto-Indo-European has been considered to be the Yamnaya culture of the Pontic-Caspian Sea area, which spread a very unified material culture originating far to the eastern portion of the steppes in the Repin culture and introducing a leveling effect over previously broadly similar and connected, yet also obviously distinct steppe cultures that ranged from the eastern end of the Carpathian Basin to the Samara river bend and possibly a bit beyond. The Afanasievo culture farther east was found to be genetically identical to the Yamnaya and was therefore seen as a likely vector for the spread of the earlier separating Tocharian languages, and the Usatovo culture, earlier than Yamnaya, but obviously coming out of the same broad origins as Yamnaya itself, (like Sredni Stog) was seen as the antecessor of the Anatolian language family; separating so early that it predates the unity achieved under Yamnaya. Haak's 2005 ancient DNA paper, which bridged one of the remaining archaeological problems; the connection between Yamnaya and the Corded Ware were always archaeologically fuzzy, and many workers didn't recognize them; but Haak's analysis showed that the Corded Ware was 75% identical autosomally to the Yamnaya. So now, it was clear that the Corded Ware came from the steppe, but exactly how was still unclear.
However, similar genetically to Yamnaya and derived from the Yamnaya genetically are not the same thing, and as more and finer detail became available, it became clear that it was impossible to derive the y-DNA haplogroups in particular associated with the Corded Ware and later expansions into Central, Western and Northern Europe out of the Eastern European steppe directly from the Yamnaya; it had to have come from a very similar yet distinct population. Since the Yamnaya horizon can be derived specifically from an eastern variant of the pre-Yamnaya steppe, the expansion of the Corded Ware was looked for in a western variant. The Usatovo and Middle Dnieper cultures, which integrated late Sredni Stog with Old European cultures like Cernavodă or others; again speaking very broadly. While there was some obvious hybridization, and the Old European cultures were clearly EEF in origin, genetically the Corded Ware picked up relatively little from this hybridization; enough to be notable, but not enough to fundamentally change its clear relationship with Yamnaya.
It's from this complex that the R1a-Z93 and related claims spreads, and now there's at least one R1b-L51, and Davidski is telling us that he's aware of many more soon to hit print that will pop up from among this para-Yamnaya proto-Corded Ware complex. Meanwhile, the R1b-Z2103 haplogroup of the Yamnaya and its related clades is not actually associated with any later appearing Indo-European group. So, we have the following situation, based on the known language families of Indo-European:
- Anatolian - from Usatovo or similar culture that extended westward from the western steppes through the Balkans.
- Tocharian - unknown; appears to be a branch isolate, often associated with the Afanasevo culture, but genetic evidence is spotty, and finding clear connections with Afanasevo remains elusive. One of the only ones that might not derive from a Corded Ware or proto-Corded Ware population.
- Italo-Celtic - derived most likely from the Tumulus culture, or other post-Unetice cultures, which are in turn derived from the Bell Beaker complex, which are in turn derived (mostly) from the Single Grave variant of the Corded Ware culture.
- Germanic - Derived from the Nordic Bronze Age, which in turn owes its likely genesis to the Unetice culture too.
- Balto-Slavic - derived from (probably) the Lusatian culture or earlier Trziniec-Komarov culture, which also ultimately derives from the Tumulus culture; a post Bell Beaker phenomena.
- Indo-Iranian - derived from Andronovo, which is in turn derived from Sintashta, which is in turn derived from the Abashevo variant of the Corded Ware culture. It's curious that most post-Yamnaya steppe cultures that followed in the same territory show both genetic and archaeological links with Sintashta and Corded Ware than they do with Yamnaya; it looks like a reflux migration of western steppe peoples admixed with European central European farmers and northern European hunter gatherers in turn replaced the Yamnaya, which had earlier replaced them across the western steppe.
- Paleo-Balkan Indo-European languages - which include the current languages Greek, Armenian and Albanian, as well as several extinct languages like Illyrian, Phrygian, Thracian and Dacian. The relationships between most of these are unclear, although if not somewhat genetically related, they are clearly benefiting from long contact relationships with each other (and in some cases with Indo-Iranian too.) This is another one that may possibly have a linguistic connection to Yamnaya instead of Corded Ware, although there are plenty of candidates for Corded Ware derived (or even proto-Corded Ware derived) Central European antecedents to give rise to them without needing to call for late steppe Yamnaya people.
Almost every Indo-European language, even ones that belong to branches nobody still speaks, is almost certainly derived from a Corded Ware or proto-Corded Ware population, not a Yamnaya population The only possible exceptions are Tocharian and the paleo-Balkan languages, but even in those cases, a Corded Ware derivation is just about as attractive a null hypothesis as a Yamnaya derivation. Now, of course, the Yamnaya people were genetically and culturally and almost certainly linguistically closely related to the Corded Ware people, even if they weren't ancestral to them. They were more like brothers or cousins instead of fathers and grandfathers, and there were obviously lots of interactions between the Yamnaya and the Corded Ware on the steppes; it's difficult to imagine a situation in which Yamnaya women, at least, weren't incorporated into expanding Andronovo peoples, for instance. Just as much, the proto-Yamnaya and proto-Corded Ware populations while on the steppe clearly interacted with each other a great deal, and probably saw each other as broadly culturally and linguistically similar; when the Yamnaya expanded out of a Repin origin in the eastern corner to incorporate the entire steppe, it may well have forced out proto-Corded Ware people, but probably assimilated a great deal of them as well, just as later Srubnaya or Andronovo peoples derived from Corded Ware probably did the same thing with lingering Yamnaya peoples
Anyway, this may seem like a small thing, but I find it very fascinating. As I said at the beginning of the post, just because this stuff predates written history doesn't mean that there wasn't a lot more complexity and fluidity going on than we are able to perceive. Simplistic one to one correspondences are proving time and again to be too simplistic, and the idea that the Indo-European languages may have developed out of only a subset of a related group of populations is hardly revolutionary; but having the ability to see it is.
Anyway, this may seem like a small thing, but I find it very fascinating. As I said at the beginning of the post, just because this stuff predates written history doesn't mean that there wasn't a lot more complexity and fluidity going on than we are able to perceive. Simplistic one to one correspondences are proving time and again to be too simplistic, and the idea that the Indo-European languages may have developed out of only a subset of a related group of populations is hardly revolutionary; but having the ability to see it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment