Ancient herders, who rode horses and drove ox-drawn carts west out of their grassy homelands in southwest Asia, erased a DNA divide between far-flung farmers and hunter-gatherers-fishers around 5,000 years ago.”>000 years ago.
The new DNA evidence fleshes out what’s known about the extent of Yamnaya people’s genetic reach. It reveals that the Yamnaya mated with members of a distinctive eastern European culture — named the Globular Amphora Culture for its large, globe-shaped vessels — before expanding into northern Europe, say evolutionary biologist Morten Allentoft, of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and colleagues. That hybrid population adapted rapidly to its new surroundings and formed a dominant culture that archaeologists call the Corded Ware Culture, Allentoft’s group hypothesizes (SN: 11/15/17).
These genetic discoveries align with previous archaeological evidence, says archaeologist Volker Heyd of the University of Helsinki, who did not participate in the new research. Corded Ware Culture artifacts also display stylistic contributions from non-Yamnaya people who came from northern, forested parts of western Asia, Heyd notes.
To conduct their analysis, Allentoft and colleagues combined newly extracted DNA from the bones and teeth of 317 Europeans and western Asians with previous genetic data from more than 1,300 ancient Europeans. Most sampled individuals lived between 11,000 and 3,000 years ago.
2024-01-10 11:05:56
Source from www.sciencenews.org