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THE TRIBE THAT

REWROTE HISTORY
DNA reveals the untold story
of the ultimate Stone Age conquerors

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 COVER STORY

HI STORY OF
V IOL E NCE
TO
O

eolithic urope was subjected to a

devastating conquest. Colin Barras discovers
the untold story hidden in ancient

T
HE iconic sarsen stones at Stonehenge
were erected some 4500 years ago.
Although the monument’s original
purpose is still disputed, we now know that
within a few centuries it became a memorial
to a vanished people. By then, almost every
Briton, from the south coast of England to the
north-east tip of Scotland, had been wiped out
by incomers. It isn’t clear exactly why they
disappeared so rapidly. But a picture of the
people who replaced them is emerging.
The migrants’ ultimate source was a group
of livestock herders called the Yamnaya who
occupied the Eurasian steppe north of the
Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains.
Britain wasn’t their only destination. Between
5000 and 4000 years ago, the Yamnaya and
their descendants colonised swathes of
Europe, leaving a genetic legacy that persists
to this day. Their arrival coincided with >

30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 29

 Ancient DNA Kristiansen calls “mega-settlements”
analysis reveals with populations of up to 15,000 people.
that Corded Ware In other words, Neolithic Europe appears to
people, who made have been prosperous, community-minded
these pots, were and relatively peaceful. Then everything
Yamnayan in origin changed.
Starting about 5000 years ago in south-east
Europe – a region bounded today by Ukraine
in the east and Hungary in the west – a new
style of burial custom appeared. The dead
were interred alone in what archaeologists
call “pit graves” rather than in communal
structures. The body was decorated with a red
pigment called ochre, and the grave chamber
covered with wooden beams and marked by
a mound of earth a few metres tall, dubbed
L O T/

a kurgan. This distinctive burial custom

originated on the Eurasian steppe where it
was associated in particular with the Yamnaya.
.

According to archaeologist Volker Heyd at the

profound social and cultural changes. Burial
practices shifted dramatically, a warrior class
appeared, and there seems to have been a
sharp upsurge in lethal violence. “I’ve become
increasingly convinced there must have been
a kind of genocide,” says Kristian Kristiansen
at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
As he and others piece together the story,
one question resounds: were the Yamnaya
the most murderous people in history?
Before about 5000 years ago, Neolithic
Europe was inhabited by people much like
those who raised Stonehenge. They were
farmers with an urge to work together and
build large stone structures. “It looks like
these people were quite communal,” says
Kristiansen. And that community spirit
continued into the afterlife: many of their
megalithic monuments served as shared
graves – some containing the remains of
up to 200 people.
They were also innovators. Patterns of
wear on ancient cattle bones suggest they had
worked out how to use livestock to pull heavy
loads. They probably had wheeled vehicles
and there may even have been proto-roads
connecting communities. It looks like
they were coming together to live in what
University of Helsinki, Finland, its appearance
in Europe indicates a traumatic shift that
disrupted existing social patterns.
The disruption soon spread. In subsequent
decades, Yamnaya-like artefacts and
behaviour started popping up elsewhere on
the continent. By 4900 years ago, the Corded
Ware people – named after their distinctive
pottery and adopting many Yamnaya
customs – began to appear in central and
northern Europe. The big question is: how
and why did Yamnaya practices spread so
far and so fast?
Until about five years ago, most
archaeologists were convinced that this

EUROPE IS NOT ENOUGH

Almost all people of European
descent can trace their
paternal origins back to
inhabitants of the Eurasian
steppe. In recent years, it
has become clear that these
people, known as the Yamnaya,
and their descendants
travelled across the continent
during the Neolithic replacing
locals – particularly the men –
as they went (see main story).
Now we have discovered the
Yamnaya also migrated east.
A study by David Reich at
Harvard Medical School and
his colleagues posted to the
bioRxiv preprint server in 2018
gives us an idea of when and
how this happened. Using
DNA samples from the remains
of hundreds of people who
lived across south Asia
between about 7000 and
3000 years ago, the team
found evidence that Yamnaya-
related DNA began appearing
there between 4000 and
3000 years ago.
Those steppe pastoralists
mingled with people who
may have been related to the
inhabitants of the famous
Indus Valley Civilisation. In
doing so, they formed an
“Ancient North Indian”
population, one of the two
ancestral populations that
define the ancestry of most
people living in the Indian
subcontinent today. What’s
more, incomers from the
steppe may have brought
major cultural changes.
Speaking at New Scientist Live
in September, Reich pointed
out that people in the Indian
subcontinent today who carry
the largest amounts of Ancient
North Indian ancestry tend to
speak similar languages to one
another, and often (but not
always) belong to upper castes.
As in Europe, it looks like the
steppe migrants were largely
young, male and violent. A
study by Martin Richards at
the University of Huddersfield,
UK, and his colleagues found
that maternally inherited
mitochondrial DNA sequences
changed relatively little when
they arrived. By contrast,
between 60 and 90 per cent of
men now living in the area can
trace their paternally inherited
Y chromosome to Yamnaya-
related migrants.
“Indigenous males seem to
have been marginalised by the
new arrivals much more than
the women and were unable
to have children to the same
extent,” says Richards. “This
seems unlikely to have been
a wholly benign process.”

30 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019

largely reflected the movement of ideas and
technology while people stayed put – in much
the same way that Nokia mobile phones swept
across Europe in the late 1990s and early
2000s. But, in 2015, geneticists suggested
an alternative. Teams led by David Reich at
Harvard Medical School and Eske Willerslev
at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark
announced, independently, that occupants
of Corded Ware graves in Germany could
trace about three-quarters of their genetic
ancestry to the Yamnaya. It seemed that
Corded Ware people weren’t simply copying
the Yamnaya; to a large degree they actually
were Yamnayan in origin.
Disease, warfare and death
Many archaeologists found the idea
implausible. It is one thing to accept that the
Yamnaya migrated from the Eurasian steppe
to the steppe-like environments of south-east
Europe, says Heyd, but quite another to argue
for onward migrations into the heavily
forested central and northern Europe. This
implies that they spread into an environment
they didn’t have experience exploiting,
that they somehow displaced large numbers
of people who were adapted to that
environment – and that they did all of this
in a just a few generations. To this day,
Heyd struggles to understand how and why
such rapid migrations could have occurred.
Kristiansen, however, believes it is now
possible to reconstruct a likely scenario. His
model involves disease, warfare and death.
The first thing to appreciate, says
Kristiansen, is that Neolithic Europe was
in crisis just before the Yamnaya’s arrival.
Using the pollen record from archaeological
sites as a proxy for levels of agricultural
activity, archaeologists have concluded that
populations in northern and central Europe
began shrinking about 5300 years ago.
In December 2018, Kristiansen and his
geneticist colleagues suggested an
explanation. Examining the teeth of Neolithic
people who lived in what is now Sweden about
5000 years ago, they found plague-causing
bacteria – the earliest known relative of the
Black Death. Further analysis suggested the
disease began spreading across Europe
perhaps as early as 5700 years ago.
Kristiansen thinks it is no coincidence that
this is also when the settlements of south-east
Europe reached their greatest size. Within
those settlements, thousands of people
lived in unhygienic conditions and in close
contact with livestock, providing a perfect
ow the Yamnaya spread
A mixture of archaeological and genetic evidence reveals that it took just a few hundred
years for the Yamnaya people from north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains to
spread through Europe
DNA evidence of Yamnaya takeover
spread of Bell Beaker culture (but not people)
spread of people
6
4
2
5 Black Sea
3
Yamnaya arrive in south east
1 4
urope ~5000 years
2 ome orded Ware people
5
have substantial Yamnaya
ancestry ~4900
3 irst ell eaker people 6 ‘Yamnaya’ eakers reach
appear ~4700
environment for plague to emerge. From
there, the disease could have spread rapidly
into central and northern Europe via the
wheeled vehicles and proto-roads appearing
at this time. “These mega-settlements were
beginning to be abandoned and burned down
a little after 5700 years ago,” says Kristiansen,
which would make sense if they were
becoming centres of death and disease.
“By 5400 years ago, they were gone.”
This means that when the Yamnaya arrived
a few centuries later, they were entering a
Europe with a small and weakened indigenous
population that could offer little resistance.
Even so, says Kristiansen, this on its own
cannot explain why the Yamnaya spread
“The sheer speed o
change hints that the
Yamnaya were aggressive”
1
Caucasus mountains
ell eaker culture spreads eastwards, and
some Yamnaya descended orded Ware
people become eakers ~4600 4500
‘Yamnaya’ eakers reach
beria ~4500
ritain ~4400
so rapidly, morphing to become the Corded
Ware people. He thinks the sheer speed of
this change hints that the Yamnaya migrants
were dynamic and aggressive. This might
suggest they were mainly young male
warriors, riding into new territory. Most
Yamnaya women don’t seem to have joined
the migration until later.
In line with this idea, a controversial 2017
genetics study concluded that the DNA signal
left in ancient European bones from the time
is easiest to explain if there were between
five and 14 male migrants for every female
migrant. Archaeological evidence also points
to most immigrants being men. For instance,
a 2017 analysis of Corded Ware burials across
a vast region from north-west Denmark to
south-east Czech Republic concluded that
male graves were very similar in style to one
another – but female graves showed local
variation. That would fit with the idea of male
migrants with a shared sense of identity >
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 31
“The genetic analysis
showed that the
ritons who built
tonehenge all but
disappeared within
a ew generations o
the Yamnaya’s arrival”
TO
O
having children with Neolithic women
who still retained some local traditions.
If the Yamnaya migrants did behave as
Kristiansen suggests, Neolithic Europe’s men
are likely to have objected, setting the stage for
violent encounters. Some evidence that this
was the case comes from a remarkable Corded
Ware site called Eulau in Germany. Here,
a handful of unusual graves each contain
between two and four bodies – mostly women
and their children. Analysis of isotopes in the
women’s teeth reveals that they did not grow
up locally. And injuries on five of the 13 bodies
indicate that they met a violent end.
Kristiansen interprets this as evidence of a
brutal raid by Neolithic men taking revenge
on migrants who had stolen “their” women.
The absence of male burials suggests they
waited until the village’s men were out
tending their cattle before making the attack.
This sort of mass killing wasn’t unheard of
in Neolithic Europe, says Christian Meyer at
the OsteoArchaeological Research Centre,
Germany, who was involved in the Eulau
32 | NewScientist | 30 March 2019
analysis. Nevertheless, it hints at an upsurge
in violence about 5000 years ago. And there
are other signs. “We do see a rather high
number of trepanations [holes drilled in
skulls],” he says – people may have undergone
this procedure as a therapeutic measure after
bad head injuries.
Axe-wielding warriors
However, if Eulau is an example of the
violence that accompanied an influx of
Yamnaya and their descendants, it is arguably
not particularly representative. Kristiansen
suspects it was the migrants who usually came
out on top, judging by the fact that Corded
Ware groups quickly multiplied and spread.
There may have been good reasons for this.
Some archaeologists argue that the Yamnaya
were accomplished horse riders. Even before
they left the Eurasian steppe, some had
become axe-wielding warriors – as depicted
on ancient standing stones in the steppe
landscape. They were also probably in better
shape to fight too. Ancient DNA suggests they
were unusually tall for the time. And they
had a highly nutritious diet. “It looks like
they lived mostly on meat and milk products,”
says Kristiansen. “They were healthier and
probably physically quite strong.”
This scenario of young warriors moving
through the landscape makes sense to Heyd.
However, he cautions that it is based on
evidence snatched from a few isolated sites.
It is still far from clear, he says, that such a
simple model can explain the spread of the
Yamnaya and the rise of the Corded Ware
people in its entirety.
Indeed, many archaeologists think the
wider narrative emerging from genetic studies
oversimplifies things. The trouble, according
to Martin Furholt at the University of Oslo,
Norway, is that geneticists divide prehistoric
Europe into a series of large cultural blocks –
Yamnaya in the south-east, Corded Ware in
the north and so on – each of which represents
a population with a shared sense of self.
“The idea that archaeological units of
classification represent human groups of a
shared social, or ethnic identity has been
proven wrong many times during the history
of research,” says Furholt. Ethnicity is founded
on shared ancestry, whereas identity is more
about culture. “Geneticists are basically
looking at ethnicity. But archaeologists are
foremost looking at identity,” says Heyd.
A striking example of this distinction is a
discovery made near the town of Valencina
de la Concepción in southern Spain.
Archaeologists working there found a
Yamnaya-like kurgan, below which was
O
TY O
the body of a man buried with a dagger and
Yamnaya-like sandals, and decorated with
V
red pigment just as Yamnaya dead were.
/
But the burial is 4875 years old and genetic
L
information suggests Yamnaya-related
people didn’t reach that far west until perhaps
T L
4500 years ago. “Genetically, I’m pretty
sure this burial has nothing to do with the
Yamnaya or the Corded Ware,” says Heyd. “But
culturally – identity-wise – there is an aspect
that can be clearly linked with them.” It would
appear that the ideology, lifestyle and death
rituals of the Yamnaya could sometimes run
far ahead of the migrants.
Geneticists are now beginning to realise just
how complex things were, says Heyd. This was
highlighted in a study published last year – the
one that suggested the ancient Britons who
built Stonehenge disappeared, as few of their
genes survive to the present day – which
brought together an enormous group of
geneticists and archaeologists including
Reich, Willerslev, Kristiansen and Heyd.
There has been talk in the popular press
recently about geneticists marginalising their
archaeological collaborators in such studies.
This wasn’t Heyd’s experience. “David [Reich]
listened. He is listening,” he says.
The collaboration was an attempt to shed
light on another group, the enigmatic Bell
Beaker people, who emerged in Europe
slightly later than the Corded Ware people. In
some ways, they were similar to the Yamnaya:
they buried their dead in single graves, had
recognisable warriors and celebrated these
warriors by occasionally carving their
images on standing stones. As a result, the
geneticists suspected that Bell Beaker people
descended from the Yamnaya. However, the
archaeologists convinced them this was only
partially true.
The collaboration revealed that the origin
and initial spread of Bell Beaker culture had
little to do – at least genetically – with the
expansion of the Yamnaya or Corded Ware
people into central Europe. “It started in
Individual graves containing a body
decorated with ochre are a hallmark
of Yamnayan culture
western Iberia,” says Heyd. It is in that region
that the earliest Bell Beaker objects – including
arrowheads, copper daggers and distinctive
Bell-shaped pots – have been found, in
archaeological sites carbon-dated to
4700 years ago. Then, Bell Beaker culture
began to spread east, although the people
more or less stayed put. By about 4600 years
ago, it reached the most westerly Corded Ware
people around where the Netherlands now
lies. For reasons still unclear, the Corded Ware
people fully embraced it. “They simply take
on part of the Bell Beaker package and become
Beaker people,” says Kristiansen.
Genetic wipeout
In other words, there were now two types of
Bell Beaker people: one with roots in Iberia
and one with Corded Ware (and ultimately
Yamnaya) roots. Kristiansen thinks the
Yamnaya Beakers then took advantage of the
maritime know-how of their Iberian friends
and voyaged to Britain some 4400 years ago
(see map, page 31). The fact that the genetic
analysis showed the Britons then all-but
disappeared within a couple of generations
might be significant. It suggests the capacity
for violence that emerged when the Yamnaya
lived on the Eurasia steppe remained even as
these people moved into Europe, switched
identity from Yamnaya to Corded Ware,
and then switched again from Corded Ware
to Bell Beaker.
In fact, there is much stronger evidence that
these Yamnaya Beakers were ruthless. By about
4500 years ago, they had pushed westwards
into the Iberian Peninsula, where the Bell
Beaker culture originated a few centuries
earlier. Within a few generations, about
40 per cent of the DNA of people in the region
could be traced back to the incoming Yamnaya
Beakers, according to research by a large team
including Reich that was published this month.
More strikingly, the ancient DNA analysis
reveals that essentially all the men have Y
chromosomes characteristic of the Yamnaya,
suggesting only Yamnaya men had children.
“The collision of these two populations was
not a friendly one, not an equal one, but one
where the males from outside were displacing
local males and did so almost completely,”
Reich told New Scientist Live in September.
This supports Kristiansen’s view of the
Yamnaya and their descendants as an almost
unimaginably violent people. Indeed, he is
about to publish a paper in which he argues
that they were responsible for the genocide
of Neolithic Europe’s men. “It’s the only way
to explain that no male Neolithic lines
survived,” he says.
Surprisingly, this isn’t a new idea. Some
prominent 20th century archaeologists were
convinced that migrants from the steppe
arrived in Europe about 5000 years ago. One
of them, Marija Gimbutas, even argued that
they were exceptionally aggressive individuals
who brought violence and social change to the
continent. Her ideas were deeply controversial
in her lifetime. “But ironically, the geneticists
are now coming quite close to what Gimbutas
was writing about in the 1960s,” says Heyd.
What’s more, it is now emerging that the
Yamnaya didn’t limit their sights to Europe.
The latest genetic evidence reveals that they
also went east into the Indian subcontinent
(see “Europe is not enough”, page 30).
Even if they weren’t the most murderous
people in history, there is no doubting that
they spread far and wide. This may be another
reason the Yamnaya story is gaining traction
now. A few decades ago, mass migration was
far from our minds, says Heyd, but the present
social and political environment has changed
that. Now we are acutely aware of the many
forces that can spur huge groups of people
to traverse the globe. ■
Colin Barras is a writer based in nn rbor, ichigan
To see David Reich’s talk “The truth
about us, and where we come rom”
go to newscientist.com/David-Reich
30 March 2019 | NewScientist | 33