Thursday, March 05, 2020

Our long-lost Eastern cousins

While the spread of Indo-European languages into Europe (especially northern Europe) was the spread of Indo-European people with significant, but relatively little admixture of indigenous peoples, meaning that Europeans can be seen as the descendants of the Indo-Europeans with some hybridization, but broad continuity and connections still to the original Proto-Indo-Europeans of the Corded Ware culture and its antecedents.

In the east, the case was similar for a time, but the Indo-Europeans eventually became genetically swamped. In India, some Y-DNA haplogroups can be traced to post-Corded Ware cultures (like Andronovo), they speak Indo-European languages (in the north, anyway), and they have some cultural traits that are obviously still rooted in the post Corded Ware traditions. But they have also been sufficiently genetically and culturally swamped that nobody looks at them and thinks that they seem to be similar peoples to, say, the Slavs or Balts. But they would have been, in the Bronze Age and even to some degree the Iron Age.

The other huge expansion of European Indo-Europeans in the east was that of the Iranian language families, represented in Classical history by the Medes, Parthians, and Persians, but also the vast nations of "barbarians" known to many literate societies of the age, like the Scythians and the rest of the related peoples; the Saka, the Sarmatians, etc. This was a vast confederation of closely related peoples of clearly European extraction in both physical features, genetic roots, archaeological roots, etc. that follows and is descended from the Andronovo horizon, which was an outgrowth of the Sintashta tradition, which was a descendant of easterly Corded Ware variants, like Abashevo. In other words, the Indo-Iranian peoples were originally closely related in most respects to the Balto-Slavic peoples. And that was still true during the time of the Scythians and their related splinter cultures.  The Scythians were eventually swamped. Their far eastern branches were overwhelmed genetically and culturally by the Han Chinese, and other Asian populations, as wave after wave of Hun, Mongol, Turk, etc. populations surged westward at their expense. Quite probably as the Slavic peoples expanded eastward they assimilated what was left of the Scythians; I suspect, for instance (although I don't know that there's any genetic evidence to back this up) that the Cossacks still maintained some Scythian genetics. The Cossacks were an interesting example of how the Scythian lifestyle paralleled the original Balto-Slavic lifestyle, which paralleled the original Indo-European lifestyle, for that matter.

I miss these guys. Iranians are the fairly heavily admixed remnants of some of them, but after centuries of heavy exposure and admixture with Middle-Eastern populations as well as the yoke of bondage that is the Moslem conquest, they've lost most of their connection to western peoples, or even Slavic peoples—although I also suspect that without the tyranny of the Ayatollah and his folks, and the meddling that our foolhardy government did with the government of the Shah, we'd actually find that we had more in common with the Iranians than we thought. The more "barbarian" Iranians, on the other hand, we'd have had as much in common with as we do the Russians, at least, and it'd be easier to recognize our common ancestors if they had been able to maintain some version of their culture since the Iron Age.

Let's talk about some of the very far eastern expansions of "our people" deep into what is today the territory of China, but which was not populated by any Han Chinese at the time. This map of the Qin Empire shows some of the groups I want to talk about:



Ordos: The Ordos were a very definitely Scythian people, based on their material culture. While today a desert, in the first millennium BC, it would have been very productive grassland and pasturage, very attractive to the horse-culture centric Scythians. They came under cultural influence from a variety of neighbors, including both the Han and the Dong-Hu, and their relationship with the Xiongnu and the Yuezhi is unknown, but archaeologically (and from a physical anthropology perspective) they are almost identical with the Scythians/Saka from much further West, and it clearly seems that this is where they came from. There are numerous hints in Chinese texts and culture that suggest that they may have employed Scythian magi as oracles or as some other type of expert advisors of sorts, who may well have come from this culture as well.  They appear on the territory formerly occupied by the hunter-gatherers of the Zhukaigou culture, who are perhaps related to some paleo-Siberian and/or Mongolian peoples that still linger, like the Evenks or the Daurs, and presumably acquired a genetic and cultural substrate as they did.

Dong-hu: Generally assumed to be proto-Mongols, along with the Xianbei and Wu-huan. There is some influence found in the Ordos culture, although the proto-Mongolians also adopted, largely, the way of life of the Scythians and became a horse-centered pastoralism and raiding culture. Curiously, the Mongols may have absorbed more than just the economic system of the Scythians; Genghis Khan himself was reported at various times to have had red hair and green eyes, the only credible source of which would have been European ancestry. Even if he'd also clearly shed his European language by then. Of course, if the Dong-hu had Scythian admixture, then that puts the Scythians' range even further to the east; almost all the way to the coast, in fact. That may be the real legacy of the Eastern Indo-Europeans that eventually got assimilated, though—their lifestyle was adopted by Turks, Mongols and many others, and while those groups may not have all that much (if any) linguistic or genetic ties to them anymore, they did, essentially, adopt their culture. Even the chariots that the early Chinese used almost certainly came from the proto-Scythian Andronovo peoples.

Xiong-nu: The Xiong-nu, or Huns as they are often called (in spite of the fact that their connection to the Huns as known to the Romans is debatable), were probably a multi-ethnic confederation of horse-nomads. However, almost certainly Scythians were a component, and maybe even the founding component. Some historians point out that the earliest names that appear of Xoing-nu kings seem to be Iranian in character and that the majority of the founding Xiong-nu would have been Scythian. However, there are other theories that favor a primacy of Turkic, Mongolic, Yenesian or other Uralic or paleo-Siberian group. Some genetic research suggest that a significant minority of mtDNA (i.e., women) were of European origin, and at least one elite Xiong-nu burial has the classical European R1a Y-DNA haplogroup that would indicate a Scythian origin. But the majority of genetic evidence, to the extent that it can even be confidently pinned to the Xiong-nu, seems to be more easterly and paleo-Siberian in origin.  While it's clear that Scythians were a component of its genetics, and it appears of its culture, and possibly of its linguistics, if they were, they did not maintain that level of dominance in any axis.

Yuezhi: The Yuezhi are relatively well known from Chinese historical texts, but their affinities are less well known. They, or at least a subset of them, are credited with founding the Kushan Empire in Bactria after losing wars with some of their barbarian neighbors. While their affinities are unknown, the most popular are that they are either a Tocharian-speaking group related to some of the earliest Tarim basin mummies, or they are a Scythian people related to the Pazyryk culture. The modern day Uighurs, while of course speaking a Turkic language, do share a great deal of genetic relatedness to these ancient cultures, so it's possible that they were culturally swamped but still remain.

Wusun: A barbarian tribe that were, at one time, vassals of the Yuezhi, later of the Xoing-nu, hammer of the Sai (Scythians) and possible ancestors of the Hephthalites. Described by at least one Chinese observer as having red hair, green eyes, and looking like monkeys, their generally European character is not in doubt, and it is assumed by almost all that they spoke an Indo-European language, although Tocharian and some form of Scythian are both equally in play.

Qiang: While generally assumed to be a Tibetan ethnic group by most, there are lingering hypotheses that suggest that there was a strong Scythian influence among the Qiang, and some have wrested Eastern Iranian etymologies out of the name Qiang. Much of this is based on their reputation as horsemen and charioteers, though.

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