Yamnaya culture
The Yamnaya or Yamna culture, also known as the Pit Grave culture or Ochre Grave culture, is a late Copper Age to early Bronze Age archaeological culture of the region between the Southern Bug, Dniester, and Ural rivers, dating to 3300–2600 BC. It was discovered by Vasily Gorodtsov following his archaeological excavations near the Donets River in 1901–1903. Its name derives from its characteristic burial tradition: is a Russian adjective that means , as these people buried their dead in tumuli containing simple pit chambers. Research in recent years has found that Mykhailivka, on the lower Dnieper River, Ukraine, formed the core Yamnaya culture.
The Yamnaya culture is of particular interest to archaeologists and linguists, as the widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis posits that the people who produced the Yamnaya culture spoke a stage of the Proto-Indo-European language. The speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language embarked on the Indo-European migrations that gave rise to the widely dispersed Indo-European languages of today.
The Yamnaya economy was based upon animal husbandry, fishing, and foraging, and the manufacture of ceramics, tools, and weapons. The people of the Yamnaya culture were nomads or semi-nomads, organized in a chiefdom system, and relied on horse riding to manage large herds as well as wheeled carts and wagons for long-distance travel. They are also closely connected to Final Neolithic cultures, which later spread throughout Europe and Central Asia, especially the Corded Ware people and the Bell Beaker culture, as well as the peoples of the Sintashta, Andronovo, and Srubnaya cultures. Back migration from Corded Ware also contributed to Sintashta and Andronovo. In these groups, several aspects of the Yamnaya culture are present. Yamnaya material culture was very similar to the Afanasievo culture of South Siberia, and the populations of the two cultures are genetically indistinguishable. This suggests that the Afanasievo culture may have originated from the migration of Yamnaya groups to the Altai region or, alternatively, that both cultures developed from an earlier shared cultural source.
Genetic studies have suggested that the people of the Yamnaya culture can be modelled as a genetic admixture between a population related to Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers and people related to hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus in roughly equal proportions, an ancestral component which is often named "Steppe ancestry", with additional admixture from Anatolian, Levantine, or Early European farmers. Genetic studies also indicate that populations associated with the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker, Sintashta, and Andronovo cultures derived large parts of their ancestry from the Yamnaya or a closely related population. Recent genetic analyses indicate that the Anatolian component in the Yamnaya comes via the Caucasus Neolithic population and not Anatolia-derived European farmers.
Origins
The Yamnaya culture was defined by Vasily Gorodtsov in order to differentiate it from the Catacomb and Srubnaya cultures that existed in the area, but were considered to be of a later period. Due to the time interval to the Yamnaya culture, and the reliance on archaeological findings, debate as to its origin is ongoing. In 1996, Pavel Dolukhanov suggested that the emergence of the Pit-Grave culture represents a social development of various different local Bronze Age cultures, thus representing "an expression of social stratification and the emergence of chiefdom-type nomadic social structures" which in turn intensified inter-group contacts between essentially heterogeneous social groups.The origin of the Yamnaya culture continues to be debated, with proposals for its origins pointing to both the Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog cultures. The Khvalynsk culture and the Don-based Repin culture in the eastern Pontic-Caspian steppe, and the closely related Sredny Stog culture in the western Pontic-Caspian steppe, preceded the Yamnaya culture.
Further efforts to pinpoint the location came from Anthony, who suggested that the Yamnaya culture originated in the Don–Volga area at, preceded by the middle Volga-based Khvalynsk culture and the Don-based Repin culture, arguing that late pottery from these two cultures can barely be distinguished from early Yamnaya pottery. Earlier continuity from eneolithic but largely hunter-gatherer Samara culture and influences from the more agricultural Dnieper–Donets II are apparent.
He argues that the early Yamnaya horizon spread quickly across the Pontic–Caspian steppes between and 3200 BC:
Alternatively, Parpola relates both the Corded ware culture and the Yamnaya culture to the late Trypillia culture. He hypothesizes that "the Tripolye culture was taken over by PIE speakers by c. 4000 BC", and that in its final phase the Trypillian culture expanded to the steppes, morphing into various regional cultures which fused with the late Sredny Stog pastoralist cultures, which, he suggests, gave rise to the Yamnaya culture. Dmytro Telegin viewed Sredny Stog and Yamnaya as one cultural continuum and considered Sredny Stog to be the genetic foundation of the Yamna. Telegin's view has been recently confirmed by genetic analyses.
The Yamnaya culture was succeeded in its western range by the Catacomb culture ; in the east, by the Poltavka culture at the middle Volga. These two cultures were followed by the Srubnaya culture.
Characteristics
The Yamnaya culture was nomadic or semi-nomadic, with some agriculture practiced near rivers, and a few fortified sites, the largest of which is Mikhaylivka.Characteristic of the culture are the burials in pit graves surmounted by kurgans, often accompanied by animal offerings. Some graves contain large anthropomorphic stelae, with carved human heads, arms, hands, belts, and weapons. The bodies were placed in a supine position with bent knees and covered in ochre. Some kurgans contained "stratified sequences of graves". Kurgan burials may have been rare, and were perhaps reserved for special adults, who were predominantly male. Status and gender are marked by grave goods and position, and in some areas, elite individuals are buried with complete wooden wagons. Grave goods are more common in eastern Yamnaya burials, which are also characterized by a higher proportion of male burials and more male-centred rituals than western areas.
The Yamnaya culture had and used two-wheeled carts and four-wheeled wagons, which are thought to have been oxen-drawn at this time, and there is evidence that they rode horses. For instance, several Yamnaya skeletons exhibit specific characteristics in their bone morphology that may have been caused by long-term horseriding. The evidence is disputed by archaeozoologist William T. Taylor, who argues that domestication of the horse long postdates the Yamnaya culture. Recent genetic studies indicate that horse domestication in Eurasia happened after c. 2700 BC.
Metallurgists and other craftsmen are given a special status in Yamnaya society, and metal objects are sometimes found in large quantities in elite graves. New metalworking technologies and weapon designs are used.
Stable isotope ratios of Yamnaya individuals from the Dnipro Valley suggest the Yamnaya diet was terrestrial protein based with insignificant contribution from freshwater or aquatic resources. Anthony speculates that the Yamnaya ate meat, milk, yogurt, cheese, and soups made from seeds and wild vegetables, and probably consumed mead.
Mallory and Adams suggest that Yamnaya society may have had a tripartite structure of three differentiated social classes, although the evidence available does not demonstrate the existence of specific classes such as priests, warriors, and farmers.
Archaeogenetics
According to Jones et al. and Haak et al., autosomal tests indicate that the Yamnaya people were the result of a genetic admixture between two different hunter-gatherer populations: distinctive "Eastern Hunter-Gatherers", from Eastern Europe, with high affinity to the Mal'ta–Buret' culture or other, closely related people from Siberia and a population of "Caucasus hunter-gatherers" who probably arrived from the Caucasus or Iran. Each of those two populations contributed about half the Yamnaya DNA. This admixture is referred to in archaeogenetics as Western Steppe Herder ancestry.Admixture between EHGs and CHGs is believed to have occurred on the eastern Pontic-Caspian steppe starting around 5,000 BC, while admixture with Early European Farmers happened in the southern parts of the Pontic-Caspian steppe sometime later. More recent genetic studies have found that the Yamnaya were a mixture of EHGs, CHGs, and to a lesser degree Anatolian farmers and Levantine farmers, but not EEFs from Europe due to lack of WHG DNA in the Yamnaya. This occurred in two distinct admixture events from West Asia into the Pontic-Caspian steppe.
File:Admixture proportions of Yamnaya populations.png|thumb|upright=1.5|Admixture proportions of Yamnaya populations. They combined Eastern Hunter Gatherer, Caucasian Hunter-Gatherer, Anatolian Neolithic and Western Hunter Gatherer ancestry.
Haplogroup R1b, specifically the Z2103 subclade of R1b-L23, is the most common Y-DNA haplogroup found among the Yamnaya specimens. This haplogroup is rare in Western Europe and mainly exists in Southeastern Europe today. Additionally, a minority are found to belong to haplogroup J2 and I2. They are found to belong to a wider variety of West Eurasian mtDNA haplogroups, including U, T, and haplogroups associated with Caucasus hunter-gatherers and Early European Farmers. A small but significant number of Yamnaya kurgan specimens from Northern Ukraine carried the East Asian mtDNA haplogroup C4.
People of the Yamnaya culture are believed to have had mostly brown eye colour, light to intermediate skin, and brown hair colour, with some variation.
Some Yamnaya individuals are believed to have carried a mutation to the KITLG gene associated with blond hair, as several individuals with Steppe ancestry are later found to carry this mutation. The Ancient North Eurasian Afontova Gora group, who contributed significant ancestry to Western Steppe Herders, are believed to be the source of this mutation. A study in 2015 found that Yamnaya had the highest ever calculated genetic selection for height of any of the ancient populations tested. It has been hypothesized that an allele associated with lactase persistence was brought to Europe from the steppe by Yamnaya-related migrations.
A 2022 study by Lazaridis et al. found that the typical phenotype among the Yamnaya population was brown eyes, brown hair, and intermediate skin colour. None of their Yamnaya samples were predicted to have either blue eyes or blond hair, in contrast with later Steppe groups in Russia and Central Asia, as well as the Bell Beaker culture in Europe, who did carry these phenotypes in significant proportions.
The geneticist David Reich has argued that the genetic data supports the likelihood that the people of the Yamnaya culture were a "single, genetically coherent group" who were responsible for spreading many Indo-European languages. Reich's group recently suggested that the source of Anatolian and Indo-European subfamilies of the Proto-Indo-European language may have been in west Asia and the Yamnaya were responsible for the dissemination of the latter. Reich also argues that the genetic evidence shows that Yamnaya society was an oligarchy dominated by a small number of elite males. Recent publications confirmed the tight clustering of most of Yamnaya genetic profiles, but shifted the origins of PIE towards the Caucasus-Lower Volga region.
The genetic evidence for the extent of the role of the Yamnaya culture in the spread of Indo-European languages has been questioned by Russian archaeologist Leo Klejn and Balanovsky et al., who note a lack of male haplogroup continuity between the people of the Yamnaya culture and the contemporary populations of Europe. Klejn has also suggested that the autosomal evidence does not support a Yamnaya migration, arguing that Western Steppe Herder ancestry in both contemporary and Bronze Age samples is lowest around the Danube in Hungary, near the western limits of the Yamnaya culture, and highest in Northern Europe, which Klejn argues is the opposite of what would be expected if the geneticists' hypothesis is correct.