[23] The question of further Indo-Europeanization of Central and Western Europe, Central Asia and Northern India during the Bronze Age is beyond the scope of the Kurgan hypothesis, and far more uncertain than the events of the Copper Age, and subject to some controversy. [59] Similarly, according to Marija Gimbutas, the Corded Ware culture, after migrating to Scandinavia, synthesized with the Funnelbeaker culture, giving birth to the Proto-Germanic language. "[30], Mathieson et al. [114] The adjacent BugDniester culture (63005500 BCE) was a local culture, from where cattle breeding spread to the steppe peoples. [337] Around the beginning of the Common Era, the Vedic tradition formed one of the main constituents of the so-called "Hindu synthesis"[338], According to Christopher I. Beckwith the Wusun, an Indo-European Caucasian people of Inner Asia in antiquity, were also of Indo-Aryan origin. Bones had been stolen; others had been rearranged in fanciful patterns or piled in cairns. All rights reserved. note the absence of "large amounts" of steppe-ancestry in the Balkan peninsula and Anatolia, which may indicate that archaic PIE originated in the Caucasus or Iran, but also state that "it remains possible that Indo-European languages were spread through southeastern Europe into Anatolia without large-scale population movement or admixture. Nevertheless, these days the Anatolian hypothesis is generally rejected, since it is incompatible with the growing data on the genetic history of the Yamnaya-people. In Iberia during this time, the local type of Y chromosome was replaced by an entirely different type. There isnt any gold on the skeletons, no rings, necklaces, or anklets on the victims. The origins of the Thracians remain obscure, in the absence of written historical records. It was the Roopkund B group, a mixture of men and women unrelated to one another, that confounded everyone. The rapidly developing fields of archaeogenetics and genetic genealogy since the late 1990s have not only confirmed a migratory pattern out of the Pontic Steppe at the relevant time[6][7][8][24] but also suggest the possibility that the population movement involved was more substantial than earlier anticipated[6] and invasive.[24][25]. [267] We speak of proto-Thracians from which during the Iron Age[268] (about 1000 BCE) Dacians and Thracians begin developing. But critics do exist and their objections can be summarized quite simply: Almost all of the arguments for invasion and cultural transformations are far better explained without reference to Kurgan expansions, and most of the evidence so far presented is either totally contradicted by other evidence, or is the result of gross misinterpretation of the cultural history of Eastern, Central, and Northern Europe. An origin at the Pontic-Caspian steppes is the most widely accepted scenario of Indo-European origins. The history of the Hittite civilization is known mostly from cuneiform texts found in the area of their kingdom, and from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in various archives in Egypt and the Middle East. But he contends that his new results also show the migration was on a smaller scale than previously speculated; the more recent specimens apparently only made it as far as central Europe before returning, even though the language eventually spread as far as the British Isles. The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory or Kurgan model) is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homelands from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe and parts of Asia. Kassian, Alexei S., Mikhail Zhivlov, George Starostin, Artem A. Trofimov, Petr A. Kocharov, Anna Kuritsyna and Mikhail N. Saenko (2021). [75][1], The Pontic steppe is a large area of grasslands in far Eastern Europe, located north of the Black Sea, Caucasus Mountains and Caspian Sea and including parts of eastern Ukraine, southern Russia and northwest Kazakhstan. [306][307] The first wave consisted of the Indo-Aryan migration into the Levant and a migration south-eastward of the Vedic people, over the Hindu Kush into northern India. Alexander left behind commanders and soldiers in some of the territories he conquered, many of whom stayed. Climate change and drought may have triggered both the initial dispersal of Indo-European speakers, and the migration of Indo-Europeans from the steppes in south central Asia and India. (2018), the expansion of the Andronovo culture towards the BMAC took place via the Inner Asia Mountain Corridor. DNA sequencing would show the ancestry of the victims and whether they were related to one another, and carbon dating would estimate when they died. The lake, some thought, was a place where holy men committed ritual suicide. The Anatolians were a group of distinct Indo-European peoples who spoke the Anatolian languages and shared a common culture. [2] The Iranian languages spread throughout the steppes with the Scyths and into Iran with the Medes, Parthians and Persians from c.800 BCE. [82], The primary competitor is the Anatolian hypothesis advanced by Colin Renfrew,[76][19] which states that the Indo-European languages began to spread peacefully into Europe from Asia Minor (modern Turkey) from around 7000 BCE with the Neolithic advance of farming by demic diffusion (wave of advance). Phrygian is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek. [317] Allentoft et al. [164] The Pazyryk burials of the Ukok Plateau coincide with the apex of power of the Yuezhi, and the burials have therefore been attributed to them, which means that the Altai region was part of the Yuezhi Empire.[161]. Contemporary claims of Indo-Aryan migrations are drawn from linguistic,[331] archaeological, literary and cultural sources. [110] According to Vasiliev, the Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog cultures show strong similarities, suggesting "a broad Sredny Stog-Khvalynsk horizon embracing the entire Pontic-Caspian during the Eneolithic. In a study published last June in the Journal of Human Genetics, researchers sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of 12 Yamnaya individuals, along with their immediate predecessors and descendants. However, after Karl Penka's 1883[14] rejection of non-European PIE origins, most scholars favoured a Northern European origin. In the decades since Sax first visited, the lake had become a popular destination in the trekking community and the site was being ruined. [34] He points out: The Kurgan culture was so broadly defined that almost any culture with burial mounds, or even (like the Baden culture) without them could be included. Carolita Johnson demonstrates how to draw wedding dresses and explains why no one invites her to weddings anymore. 4000 and 3000 BCE, Neolithic populations in western Europe declined, probably due to the plague and other viral hemorrhagic fevers. Their current distribution spreads across the Iranian plateau, and stretches from the Caucasus in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south, and from the Indus River in the east to eastern Turkey in the west a region that is sometimes called the "Iranian cultural continent", or Greater Iran by some scholars, and represents the extent of the Iranian languages and significant influence of the Iranian peoples, through the geopolitical reach of the Iranian empire.[352]. [75] According to Cunliffe, most of the expansion was clearly intrusive. These people were called "Tocharian" by late 19th-century scholars who identified them with the Tkharoi described by ancient Greek sources as inhabiting Bactria. Anthropologists and geneticists are two groups speaking different languages and getting to know each other. Research into human origins and the differences between populations is always vulnerable to misuse. This area extended over most of the Balkans region, and the Getae north of the Danube as far as beyond the Bug and including Panonia in the west.[265]. A northern move incorporated the southern coast of Armorica. [8][web 2][9][205] According to Haak et al. [202] According to Anthony, the Corded Ware horizon may have introduced Germanic, Baltic and Slavic into northern Europe. [254] Among the Baltic peoples are modern Lithuanians, Latvians (including Latgalians) all Eastern Balts as well as the Old Prussians, Yotvingians and Galindians the Western Balts whose people also survived, but their languages and cultures are now extinct, and are now being assimilated into the Eastern Baltic community. In other contexts, "Hellenic" and "Greek" are generally synonyms. "[125] From this horizon arose the Yamnaya culture, which also spread over the entire Pontic-Caspian steppe.[125]. Most Indo-Europeanists classify Baltic and Slavic languages into a single branch, even though some details of the nature of their relationship remain in dispute[note 23] in some circles, usually due to political controversies. Meanwhile, the Phrygian Kingdom was overwhelmed by Cimmerian invaders around 690 BCE, then briefly conquered by its neighbour Lydia, before it passed successively into the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great and the empire of Alexander and his successors, was taken by the Attalids of Pergamon, and eventually became part of the Roman Empire. The term is derived from the Turkic word . They might have been hanging with some major Hindu party trying to sell them stuff, Fiedel said. [279] The first account of Illyrian peoples comes from the Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax, an ancient Greek text of the middle of the 4th century BCE that describes coastal passages in the Mediterranean. That is the most widely accepted explanation for the origin of this ancient tongue, termed Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Kurgan_hypothesis - bionity.com [27] Recent research by Haak et al. According to Ayushi Nayak, who performed the isotopic bone analyses at the Max Planck Institute, Hindu pilgrims sometimes go barefoot and thinly clothed to sacred sites in the Himalayas as a spiritual challenge. [330] Several Mitanni rulers, such as Shattiwaza, had names which could be interpreted as Indo-Aryan. Invasion versus diffusion scenarios (1980s onward), Alignment with Anatolian hypothesis (2000s), harvnb error: no target: CITEREFAnthony1986 (, harvnb error: no target: CITEREFAnthony1991 (, The New Encyclopdia Britannica, 15th edition, 22:587588, sfn error: no target: CITEREFMallory1991 (, sfn error: no target: CITEREFCavalli-Sforza2000 (, harvnb error: no target: CITEREFPiazzaCavalli-Sforza2006 (, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wrterbuch, "Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia", "Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians", "The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia", "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers", "The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years", "The Indo-Europeanization of Europe: the intrusion of steppe pastoralists from south Russia and the transformation of Old Europe", "The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives", Lexikon der indogermanischen Partikeln und Pronominalstmme, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kurgan_hypothesis&oldid=1149228162, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from July 2021, Articles containing Russian-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, 40003500: The Pit Grave culture (a.k.a. It originated with a migration of people from the pre-Yamnaya Repin culture, at the Don river,[143] and is related to the Tocharians. The Illyrian tribes never collectively regarded themselves as 'Illyrians', and it is unlikely that they used any collective nomenclature for themselves. But, again, Roopkund B didnt resemble any populations living there now. [163] They were considered the predominant power in Central Asia. [342] In return the Wusun settled in the former territories of the Yuezhi as vassals of the Xiongnu. Gimbutas traced the language back to the Yamnaya people, herders from the southern grasslands of modern-day Ukraine who domesticated the horse. [41] Yet, according to Mariya Ivanova the Maykop origins were on the Iranian Plateau,[42] while kurgans from the beginning of the 4th millennium at Soyuqbulaq in Azerbaijan, which belong to the Leyla-Tepe culture, show parallels with the Maykop kurgans. [240] By the later La Tne period (c.450 BCE up to the Roman conquest), this Celtic culture had expanded by diffusion or migration to the British Isles (Insular Celts), France and The Low Countries (Gauls), Bohemia, Poland and much of Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula (Celtiberians, Celtici and Gallaeci) and Italy (Golaseccans, Lepontii, Ligures and Cisalpine Gauls)[241] and, following the Gallic invasion of the Balkans in 279 BCE, as far east as central Anatolia (Galatians). Analysis of the human remains found at Roopkund, in the Himalayas, has raised baffling questions about who these people were and why they were there. Harney wrote up the findings, in a paper co-authored by twenty-seven other scientists. They were unrelated to one another and genetically diverse, apparently coming from various areas and groups in India. [122] The Samara culture (early 5th millennium BCE),[note 15] north of the Khvalynsk culture, interacted with the Khvalynsk culture,[123] while the archaeological findings seem related to those of the Dniepr-Donets II culture. Whether we like it or not, people are measuring average differences among groups, he said. The Kurgan's thesis is the predominant model of Indo-European origins. Since the study was published, one of the most determined investigators of the mystery has been a recently retired archeologist named Stuart Fiedel, whose main research focus is the migration of Paleo-Americans into the New World from Asia. Archeologists have long known about the spread of the Yamnaya, but almost nothing in the archeological record showed the brutality of their takeover. That "hygiene hypothesis," first proposed in 1989 ( 3 ), has become enshrined in popular culture: We're too clean for our own good. Perhaps this was hallowed ground, an open-air cemetery, or a place where victims of an epidemic were dumped to prevent contagion. "the Afanasievo herders of the AltaiSayan region in southern Siberia (31502750BC), who in turn have close genetic ties with the Yamnaya (35002500BC) of the PonticCaspian steppe located 3,000km to the west"- before being recorded in 5001000 CE's Buddhist scriptures. [66][note 4], Since the 2000s genetic studies have been assuming a prominent role in the research on Indo-European migrations. [100][82], Bomhard's alternative Caucasian substrate hypothesis proposes a "north-Caspian Indo-Uralic" Urheimat, involving an origin of PIE from the contact of two languages; a Eurasian steppe language from the north Caspian (related to Uralic) which acquired a substratal influence from a northwest Caucasian language. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. On investigation, Reichs team found that the modern genetic profile of the Kalash did not resemble that of Roopkund B. The evolution of Proto-Greek could be considered within the context of an early Paleo-Balkan sprachbund that makes it difficult to delineate exact boundaries between individual languages. [149] By the end of the 2nd millennium BCE, the dominant people as far east as the Altai Mountains southward to the northern outlets of the Tibetan Plateau were anthropologically Caucasian, with the northern part speaking Iranian Scythian languages and the southern parts Tocharian languages, having Mongoloid populations as their northeastern neighbors. But a recent landslide had exposed a cache of fresh bones and artifacts. The Kurgan theory centres on possible archaeological evidence for an expansion into Europe and the Near East by Kurgan horsemen beginning in the sixth millennium BP7,8. The name comes from the Russian term of Turkish origin, "kurgan", which means tumuli characteristics of these peoples and mark their expansion in Europe. In Pavel S. Avetisyan, Yervand H. Grekyan (eds. Gimbutas defined the Kurgan culture as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures of the DnieperVolga region in the Copper Age (early 4th millennium BC). Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. 1531 BCE per the short chronology), and established a dynasty based in Dur-Kurigalzu. The pits into which they are said to have sunk are still visible high on a mountainside. Completing the pilgrimage in this way is a sign that the goddess favors you and wants you to survive. This could imply that they are descended from a common ancestor and/or Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic developed in close proximity over a long period of time. Researchers in New Zealand led by Dr. Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland have now applied research techniques used to trace virus epidemics to the study of . Gimbutas traced the language back to the Yamnaya people, herders from the. [20], Frederik Kortlandt postulates a shared common ancestor of Indo-European and Uralic, Proto-Indo-Uralic, as a possible pre-PIE. [note 24][note 25], A Proto-Balto-Slavic language is reconstructable by the comparative method, descending from Proto-Indo-European by means of well-defined sound laws, and out of which modern Slavic and Baltic languages descended. Members of the Kalash tribe, in northern Pakistan, claim to be descendants of Alexanders soldiers. [note 28][web 29], Since 2004, an informal workgroup of scholars who support the Paleolithic Continuity hypothesis has been held online. While the Armenian hypothesis has been criticized on archeological and chronological grounds, recent genetic research has revived debate. Genetic analysis and new carbon dating revealed that a significant proportion of the Roopkund remains belonged to people from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, most likely near Crete, and that they had perished at the lake only a couple of centuries ago. Noting that nothing of value was found on the bodies, he speculated that the travellers were killed by Thuggees, a cult of robbers and murderers whose fearsome reputation in British India gave us the word thug. Thuggees were said to attach themselves to travellers or groups of pilgrims, gaining their trust and then robbing and murdering them on a remote stretch of road. But that's [unlikely to have been] the case, he says. (2016) further note that "Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) belong to a distinct ancient clade that split from western hunter-gatherers ~45kya, shortly after the expansion of anatomically modern humans into Europe and from the ancestors of Neolithic farmers ~25kya, around the Last Glacial Maximum. From ca.58005200 it was inhabited by the first phase of the Dnieper-Donets culture, a hunter-gatherer culture contemporaneous with the Bug-Dniestr culture. In Central Asia, the Turkic languages have marginalized Iranian languages as a result of the Turkic expansion of the early centuries CE. "[web 8] This model was confirmed by a genetic study published in 2018, which attributed the origin of Maykop individuals to a migration of Eneolithic farmers from western Georgia towards the north side of the Caucasus. Kurgan Hypothesis (Vocabulary) The theory that the first Proto-Indo-European speakers were the Kurgan people who were nomadic herders Language (Vocabulary) A system of communication through use of speech, a collection of sounds understood by a group of people to have the same meaning Language Branch (Vocabulary) [16] Indo-Aryans moved into the BactriaMargiana Archaeological Complex (c.24001600 BCE) and spread to the Levant (Mitanni), northern India (Vedic people, c.1700 BCE). Then, according to the legend, she sent down a blizzard of hail and a whirlwind, which swept all the pilgrims on the Path of Death into the lake. Even today, the Ychromosomes of almost all men of Western European ancestry have a high percentage of Yamnaya-derived genes, suggesting that violent conquest may have been widespread. [160] The Yuezhi were originally settled in the arid grasslands of the eastern Tarim Basin area, in what is today Xinjiang and western Gansu, in China. When the carbon-dating results came back, there was another surprise: there appeared to have been multiple mass-death events at Roopkund. [131], Damgaard et al. [29], In the 2000s, Alberto Piazza and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza tried to align the Anatolian hypothesis with the steppe theory. [web 15] The turning point occurred around the 5th to 4th centuries BCE with a gradual Mongolization of Siberia, while Eastern Central Asia (East Turkistan) remained Caucasian and Indo-European-speaking until well into the 1st millennium CE. The Andronovo culture is a collection of similar local Bronze Age Indo-Iranian cultures that flourished c.1800900 BCE in western Siberia and the west Asiatic steppe. Although the Hurrian language is non-Indo-European, yet there are certain names and words found in the texts which suggest an Indo-Aryan influence. For example, the date for the Tocharian break-off corresponds to the migration that gave rise to the Afanasievo culture; the date for the Balto-SlavicIndo-Iranian break-up may be correlated with the end of Corded Ware culture around 2100 or 2000 BC; and the date for Indo-Iranian corresponds to that of the Sintashta archaeological culture, frequently associated with Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers. [86], The proto-Indo-Europeans, i.e. We can get a sense of this reign of terror by thinking about what took place when the descendants of those ancient Iberians sailed to the New World, events for which we have ample historical records. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. He went on to write a doctoral thesis about the local traditions surrounding Nanda Devi. [web 7], The Hittites, who established an extensive empire in the Middle East in the 2nd millennium BCE, are by far the best-known members of the Anatolian group. The team concluded that, around the year 800 A.D., a group of pilgrims were caught in a storm on the exposed ridge above Roopkund and were pummelled to death by giant hailstones. Various steppe-cultures show strong similarities with the Yamna-horizon at the Pontic steppe, while the time-range of several Asian cultures also coincides with the proposed trajectory and time-range of the Indo-European migrations. [77][78][13][19][note 7], Marija Gimbutas formulated her Kurgan hypothesis in the 1950s, grouping together a number of related cultures at the Pontic steppes. Similarly, "sell" and "wash" were borrowed in Proto-Ugric. Some archaeologists would extend the time depth of PIE to the middle Neolithic (5500 to 4500 BCE) or even the early Neolithic (7500 to 5500 BCE), and suggest alternative Proto-Indo-European original homelands. (2015) also found close autosomal genetic relationship between peoples of Corded Ware culture and Sintashta culture. [162][163][164] This territory has been referred to as the Yuezhi Empire. We dont want to discredit other peoples beliefs, but we dont want to censor our research based on those beliefs. Archeologists have tended to explain this development as the result of cultural diffusion: people adopted innovations in pottery, metalworking, and weaponry from their geographic neighbors, along with new burial customs and religious beliefs. In 2008, David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, made the first of many trips to the country, and visited a leading life-science research institution, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, in Hyderabad. DNA analysis showed that all the victims appeared to have a genetic makeup typical of South Asian origin. [287] As a result of a modern diaspora, there are also Albanian speakers elsewhere in those countries and in other parts of the world, including Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Hungary, United Kingdom, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil, Canada, and the United States.
kurgan hypothesis debunked
