Lord Colin Renfrew | Marija Redivia: DNA and Indo-European Origins

my name is Audrey is flawless I'm up my parents escape the ravages of World War two and settled in Toronto Canada where I was born and raised my higher education was here at the University of Chicago the key person in the origins of indo-europeans is the archeologist Murray again with us she also Slovenian and escaped World War two with her husband and two young daughters at the same time my parents did she completed her education archaeology in Germany and then settled in the Boston area her husband iris had a job as an engineer and she continued her professional career at Harvard University who worked there one from 1950 until 1963 in terms of the indo-european hypothesis she came up with what she called the kurgan hypothesis that indo-europeans originated from the steppes of the Caucasus she she felt that Europe had been settled previously by him a true focal society which was agrarian and peace-loving and into Europeans invaded on horseback from the Caucasus who were patrilineal and militaristic and our origins are from a mixture of these juices of societies an alternative hypothesis was one promoted by Lord Colin Renfrew where or in the Europeans originally in central Turkey and then the culture and language slowly diffused across Europe from that particular area now Lord Renfrew and again Buddhist were close friends in the late 60s he conduct archaeological digs in Greece not far away from where she was working in Bosnia they visited each other and actually published articles and books together about the research that they did eventually they parted ways over the issue of origins of into Europeans in studying this question further I came across a DVD called science of time which is a interview with Maria Gilbert us and what I heard they're absolutely shocked me the discrimination and misogyny that she had to go through to see her career a fulfilled it just stunned me the details were confirmed by professor Ernestine Elster a professor of archaeology at UCLA who was a close colleague of Maria's for the time she was at Harvard she was provided a desk in the basement of Peabody Museum where she could work she taught courses as she did her research Harvard University Press published her looks and her articles and she had no title at the University and no salary support in addition there were several research libraries that she was not allowed to enter I said she did not have a faculty position she was not able to join the University Club you know there was she could enter it as if there was a male person physically as cordoning therein and to add insult to injury on many occasions she was asked by male colleagues to translate she was fluent in many European languages and so she provided these translations again at no cost end with no acknowledgement she went through severe misogyny and to continue her career during that time period I strongly suspect that difficulties that she faced weren't simply based on sex that she also was Eastern European immigrant and there was the discrimination against her on that basis also so when I found realized what she had gone through and the difficulties that she suffered and to a certain extent which continue plugging professional women in the United States and internationally today I felt it's important to bring her life story to the attention of the general public so I organized and funded this memorial lecture to honor her this is the first name lectureship in the history of the Oriental Institute and and I'm very pleased that Lord Colin Renfrew agreed to fly in from England to do this presentation during the lecture we had for people affiliated with the archaeology program at UCLA fly in to listen to it and the attendance was really stunningly the it was the room was full and it was only standing room available and nobody's memory was there such a turnout at the Oriental Institute for lecture [Applause] thank you very much for that wonderful introduction and right at the outset I think I should make clear that I'm not from Cambridge Massachusetts but Cambridge England and have no particular associations with the Harvard University I'm happy to say that I knew Maria Gilbert has very well she fell I met first met her when she came to my excavations at salió ghosts in Greece in 1965 and she invited me to have a semester at UCLA in 1967 when I made a lot of interesting friends including Louis Benford and including Ernestine Elsa who is here this evening and so that was a very good opportunity for me and at her invitation I stayed at a house in Topanga Canyon and I have very happy memories not only of lots of breakfast with there with Maria but of driving into UCLA from Malibu it was wasn't so much traffic in those days and that was a very happy experience and so I came to admire her energy her scholarship and the breadth of her interests and so naturally this lecture is dedicated to her memory now her first interest was what she called old Europe and these were the cultures of the Balkans and Greece they used figurines she was fascinated by these prehistoric sculptures which she was quick to interpret in a series of major volumes and these are still good reading she was one of the first people really to get to know this material very well and she saw this as a culture in which women had a leading role although not a dominant role which he felt who was exercised by the succeeding cultures the so called Corgan cultures as she termed them which she associated with the indo-european incursion of around 3000 BC and and so she saw a Europe not as a matriarchal society but as what she called an equalitarian male-female society a more balanced one a Jelani to use the term which Ariane Elsa Ariane I so I should say later introduced and with her emphasis on the role of women in Old Europe and on what she interpreted as mainly female divinities among the figurines she became I think rather to her surprise one of the pioneers among the first Ahrens of the feminist movement in California and the chalice and the blade by Rihanna and Heisler are published in 1987 was one of the key works of the feminist movement of the so called a second wave and was significantly influenced by Maria's work now one important component of her work was although not her first interest I think her first interest was those cultures of Old Europe and they're very creative iconography but certainly they were followed by cultures of a different kind and she regarded these as being introduced by an invasion from northa of the Black Sea from the steppe lands what she called the corgin a culture and Corgan simply means burial mound it's the meaning of of the term but these cultures these incoming people as she saw them buried their dead in burial mounds single graves essentially and were associated in Germany with with corded well and so she saw this as the coming of the indo-europeans and therefore has a solution to a very long-standing problem namely indo-european origins so what I'm going to do this evening is first of all talk about the indo-european problem and its beginnings and then talk about various proposed solutions perhaps none of them entirely satisfactory including my own preferred solution and then at the last part of my talk I'm going to talk about the remarkable impact in just the past two or three years just in the past three years of analyses of ancient DNA and that is to say DNA recovered from skeletons of prehistoric individuals in the cultures in question and the work on the ancient DNA has completely rejuvenated maria gilbert asses kurgan hypothesis because it has supported strongly some not all but some of the elements which she emphasized so had I been invited to give this lecture two or three years ago it would have been a lecture which might have ended up rather critically of Maria's ideas on the indo-europeans but as you will see she ends up as the triumphant a precursor of much current work and so she ends up very triumphantly at the end of the lecture as you will see so the in European problem is an older problem and I'm going to refer to the impact of a ancient DNA and I'll talk about the gaps in the evidence one of the main gaps being the lack of ancient da in evidence from ancient Anatolia and that's a problem that still remains so what we're talking about now is the in act of new ancient DNA work just in the past three years which brings back into prominence some of Maria Gimbert asses ideas but it doesn't answer all the problems and we'll have to wait another decade or so because before we can really hope to answer those so we're revisiting the Quran hypothesis and there is a rather attractive illustration from the 19th century that summarizes some 19th century ideas about the indo-europeans so we're talking about an old problem the problem of the origins of linguistic diversity and I had Ahad I more time I would remind you of the biblical passages from the book of Genesis where the Lord were said go to and I will dismiss their their arrogance this is the Tower of Babel is represented by Pieter Bruegel via the the older and so it was the Lord in the book of Genesis who went down and dispersed them into all lands and was the this is the first theory the first serious theory for the origins of linguistic diversity but there are of course many theories subsequently and many of them depend on migrations on prehistoric migrations and I like many other archaeologists in the sixties and seventies of the new so-called new archaeology or process oral archaeology came to feel that migrations had been exaggerated in interpretations of the prehistoric archaeological record and so my own position was it tried to be a processional one and often migrations are not a very satisfactory answer it's not always clear why a migration would take place and indeed it's not very clear now why the corgin migration took place what is clear from the agent DNA evidence though there was such a migratory process and that is where Maria Gimbert s was so transparently and convincingly vindicated by these recent developments so the indo-european problem let's just remind ourselves of what it is was first clearly summarized he wasn't the first person to refer to it by Sir William Jones in the year 1786 and he was a judge in the in the in India and he made a very interesting statement about the about the indo-europeans and he became familiar with the Sanskrit language which was the language of early India the first recorded language that is readable of early India and he said and I'm quoting now in in his third anniversary discourse in in in India they are 1786 the Sanskrit language whatever may be its antiquity is of a wonderful structure more perfect than the week more copious and the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar that could possibly have been produced by accident so strong indeed that no Fela Raja could examine them all three without believing believing them to have sprung from some common source and he went to talk about the Germanic languages and the Romance languages and so here was the first clear statement of the indo-european phenomenon namely that these languages of which he was speaking and there they are on the on the map and the most of the shaded areas are indeed indo-european languages from the Celtic languages of Iberia up to Britain and extending as you see into Turkey ancient Anatolia and then to Iran and to India and Pakistan and that is the vast extent of the languages which undoubtedly are related to each other in the manner that Sir William Jones described and so let's be clear the problem we are discussing is how or why did these languages become dispersed over such a widespread area how or why did languages sprung from some common source as a William Jones put it how did they get to have this remarkably widespread distribution and it's a problem which is still not fully understood but we're talking when we speak of Maria's work of important developments so there are the numerals in English gothic Latin Greek Slavic Sanskrit and then at the right Chinese and Japanese which are definitely not in the European language and if you just cast your eye down there just by scanning those numerals you can see how how it seems that the the languages which are in the indo-european family have all except Chinese and Japanese really seem to be related in some way so you don't have to be a great authority to see that there are relationships and then the same is true if you look not just at the at the the nouns but if you look at the grammar and so there is the that to the the verb to bear in English and you can see how the inflections in these other indo-european languages are clearly similar and clearly related well it was just a few years after Darwin's Origin of Species when he was talking about the evolution of species the idea of evolutionary development became very clear and so this is the first family tree that was ever produced of before as the indo-european languages by Augustus Schleicher in 1862 and it's influential and much later worker there it has variations follows similar lines with the assumption because it is an assumption that ancestral to those language on the right hand side which are languages we we know or can learn and which are spoken today or not all spoken today Latin isn't spoken today now but hope accessible today and so you have this assumption it is an assumption of an ancestry from a common ancestor which we tend to call proto indo-european there are other ways of approaching the problem but that is the way that most people do approach it and so here is a sort of summary of the the problem and I think different disciplines have different contributions to make and historical linguistics is obviously crucial because we are talking about languages but prehistoric archaeology is the material evidence which now we can date with radiocarbon dating and so on and then you have molecular genetics which is increasingly making a contribution and so this is the the complexity of the problem which makes it so difficult to come upon a very simple and easy solution and it was Darwin himself said in 1859 if we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken in the world and so that was one important point and he was thinking in evolutionary terms about the development of languages but it was his follower thomas henry huxley who said that he said it cannot be held to prove that unity of stock unless philologists are prepared to demonstrate that no nation can lose its language and to acquire that of a distant nation without a change of blood corresponding with his change of language well I think we know now that indeed different groups can indeed change their language without a change of blood but he was highlighting the point that our care genetics or genetics descent what he turned in have blood and indeed that's the way we still think about genetics he was making the point that that is that is not enough well now since their day there's been an enormous amount of archaeological research and these we're starting now with recent discoveries this discovery not so recent these are the Ashoka pillars of India which date from the 3rd century BC and these have the first inscriptions in Sanskrit which has Sir William Jones realized was one of the fundamental indo-european languages and so here you see in the pink areas the areas where high the Sanskrit or indo-iranian where the iranian language which is also an indian language that's that part family and a match has been learnt from the inscriptions of Persepolis and here is one of these which is an inscription now as you see it's in cuneiform script but don't let scan confuse the issue of script the way it's written with what the languages and that is one of the earliest surviving inscriptions in the old Iranian language which is one of the early recorded indo-european languages then we move on here is prehistoric gnosis in Crete in Minoan Crete excavated by Sir Arthur Evans from 1899 onwards and inked no sauce he found a series of inscriptions clay tablets and he found amongst those clay tablets with hieroglyphic inscriptions which is still not properly read he found a clay tablets in the Minoan Linea a script which inscribed a language which is still not well understood but he found tablets also like one that you see here in the Minoan Linear B script and that was with the great decipherment of Ventress and Chadwick in the 1950s revealed to be Mycenaean Greek so the Linear B script records the Mycenaean Greek language which indeed is an early form of the Greek language which is of course a member of the indo-european family so we're you know looking now at inscriptions taking us back to twelve 1300 BC recording an early form of indo-european then the earliest inscriptions that we have of indo-european languages are the languages of Anatolia principally the Hittite language and you see at assess the Hittites capital in shown there and here is some of the monuments at hat with sass and it was frozen e the the czech scholar who in around 1920 deciphered hittite and realized that it is indeed an Indian language he was able to come to a translate a hit I'd really quite successfully and here is one of the figures of a hit eyed warrior and here is an inscription in a hieroglyphic Hittite an inscription in the Louvre e'en languages which is one of the languages of ancient Anatolia one of the indo-european languages of ancient Anatolia so here I'm showing you how our knowledge of the indo-european languages has been developed and extended by archaeological work over the past century and the last good example of that is the eastern most known in European language from the Taklamakan desert in what is now Chinese Turkestan or the shinjang province of China and it was here that the Aurel Stein was able when he visited the Tamlyn desert to find and to acquire in rather dubious circumstances which we needn't go into this evening but he acquired an extensive library of manuscripts which included manuscripts written in what was then termed and is still termed the tellurian language so these are manuscripts of the tacorian language dating from the 7th or 8th century AD but some form of the tacorian language may have been spoken much earlier and the talk Aryan language also falls within the European language family so it's a problem which has been discussed and argued since the time of Sir William Jones and became a very lively problem in the 19th century but until these different discoveries which I have just mentioned discoveries mainly of the 20th century there wasn't really enough evidence to get to grip with the indo-european problem and to ask oneself first of all was there an in the European homeland and if so where was it so here are some of the competing theories and certainly India is a strong possibility one was taken very seriously at the time of Sir William Jones when the Sanskrit language was well understood and very well documented and it's still the the favourite theory of the the relevant party in in India today and it's a matter of great political argument and indeed that I am NOT going to politics this evening as you as you well know the Aryan hypothesis was one of the key themes of the National Socialist government the Nazi government in Germany up to and during the Second World War and so all kinds of very racist literature were associated with this discussion so be aware that we're trying to treading on tricky ground dangerous ground when we didn't talk about the in European languages because they have often in the past been associated with racist and racialist thinking which most of us would deplore today but that is an inescapable part of their recent history and indeed that's one of the reasons that Maria Gilbert asses work was rather brave she was one of the first people after the Second World War to return to the indo-european problem and rekindle our interest because it is a lively problem still without definitive solution and and she was one of the first people to write about it after the Second World War and rekindle our interest until that time it had been rather avoided because of its associations with Nazi National Socialist extremism in Germany of course was one of the home lands which boost of Cocina very early in the 20th century advocated and then he was followed by some of the National Socialist extremists then the Pontic steps was Maria's theory although she was following the Great Australian pre historian Gordon child whose book the Aryans was published in 1923 and he came up with the Pontic steps as his favorite theory for the starting point for the indo-european languages although actually he later on moved away from that view and then East Anatolia was the answer produced by a gam credit see and even of some very distinguished Russian linguists and then I've systematically argued Anatolia modern Turkey although I should emphasize that I'm not a linguist I'm an archaeologist and so I don't really have any linguistic expertise and so this complicated situation is summarized in this map which shows you favorite names for favorite home lands and you will see in butas the north of the Black Sea and you'll see my own name there in Anatolia and a lot of other very distinguished scholars around and about the place well here is this wonderful diagram and and I'm going to go through some theories very rapidly now in the early days the one theory was that horse riding military horse riding was the key to understanding the arrival of the indo-european languages and so here is the the summary of the position of the horseman horizon but the great point is at the bottom line there there is no evidence for warrior Horseman before about 1200 BC so that doesn't really work very well here is one a nice Mycenaean figure of a priestess and that is around 1200 BC and then you find inscriptions or reliefs in Anatolia of roughly that period and here is a wonderful city and burial from Patrick those of you who don't imagine who remember many of you remember from television who was the great great British archaeologist sir Mortimer wheeler but if you knew some Mortimer wheeler that looks very much like some Mortimer wheeler riding his horse but anyway the horseman theory is much too recent to be of much use and then another theory that was very popular was well if it wasn't horse riding maybe it was horse-drawn horse-drawn chariots and so there was a lot of emphasis on the so called chariot horizon and chariots do appear in the shaft graves of Mycenae around 1600 BC and so here is one of the earliest finds of a horse-drawn chariot from sint asta and north of the Black Sea around 2000 BC here is the one of the seelye from the shaft graves of Mycenae around 1600 BC and here's a very beautiful fine from Scandinavia the so called a true home cart but that is all too late or also really but then we move on to the corgin migration and this was first developed as an idea by Otto Shraddha in 1890 he was the first person to seriously suggest the the Pontic steps north of the Black Sea as the homeland of the indo-europeans but he didn't really have much heart illogical evidence to go on so but anyway he was the first person to argue the case seriously it was Gordon child who in 1923 did develop the case seriously using the ark Raja archaeological evidence as it was then which he knew very well and so he was the first archaeologist really to put it forward seriously but then it went out of fashion when the National Socialists as I said began to make a lot out of it then most civilized scholars didn't want to get involved in that and it was Maria with her writings first of all it I think in 1963 and then subsequently arguing the what she called the corgin hypothesis as I think I said before the corgin simply is a Russian word for burial mound and and so she was saying that these were the people who came from north of the Black Sea they are bringing new burial customs also bringing to an end the cultures of Old Europe which Maria so much admired which I referred to earlier with their beautiful figurines and so on and and these invaders from north of the Black Sea came with their corded we're too many of us rather unattractive pottery so and here is some of the the Chinook hammock which simply means corded wear and so there you see typical corded wear ceramics and you see the battle axes the stone battle axes which were a feature of the culture and so that's I think why Maria took against them and thought that they were warlike which may have been indeed have been the case and here is a distribution map of corded wear Schnoor kara meek and these maps were already being drawn before the Second World War by the scholars very distinguished scholars who were looking at the pattern and then here is one of Maria's early maps this is one of our maps where she says with these rather frightening arrows the the Gorgon culture spreading out from the lands north of the Black Sea and moving westwards and down into Greece and into Turkey perhaps ancestors of Hittite ancestors of Mycenaean Greek and ancestors of the other indo-european languages and so that's one of her early diagrams well I became skeptical of all this emphasis on migrations I'm still surprised by the results which seem to support the recent results we're coming to support migrations but I think rather than equating a language with the people with the material culture it's better to think in terms of change and then you can have different models for change initial colonization divergence convergence or language replacement and then when you come to talk about language replacement you can have different models for language replacement one is demographical subsistence model and the elite dominance model is the migration area more and so that was one would probably put the corgin hypothesis in the elite dominance context well I'm just going to say a few words about the the processor model that I initially preferred and still see merits in and so the idea is and I think it's still a powerful idea that it was the coming of agriculture to Anatolia and then to the rest of Europe spread by people arriving with the new crops the new domesticated plants the new domesticated animals that allowed the great population increase which powered the spread of the population and presumably the spread of the language of the population and that is a processor model because it contains within it the mechanism the dynamic mechanism for the spread of the language which is the spread of the population which is generated by the demographic increase that comes about with the adoption of farming and so I will just skip over that which relates to the basic areas and this is evidence for early farming from the archaeological record but I don't want to spend time on that but here is a here is a diagram produced by Albert animun and luca cavalli-sforza emphasizing the increase in population which generates the wave of advance to use their term which comes about from the center of domestication outwards in all directions and so I supplied this idea to prehistoric Europe so at the bottom right you see Turkey Anatolia and that was undoubtedly where farming came to Europe from to Greece and then up by the Danube route and along the Mediterranean route so there that diagram his would still be regarded as a reasonable diagram for the spread of farming but I propose that that was also the spread of proto-indo-european to Europe which is now more problematic and so there are some of the along the Mediterranean route there were enclaves of the new population and so that is simply saying much the same thing and so is that that applies the term old Europe which Maria would have been quite happy with to these early farming cultures in in Europe at that time in the early and then the later Neolithic and here is the so called Anatolian diagonal and it is the case that west of that line all the early inscriptions known are of indo-european languages that's of course early in European it I'd love Ian and Peleg and so on so that's a relevant point and here just referring brief briefly to a more recent theory of the tartessian building on the decipherment of tartessian which is one of the early languages of spain from the about the 8th century BC which has given rise to theories of the Celtic homeland being in the West but if the Celtic homeland the homeland of Celtic languages which of course are in the European languages if the Celtic homeland is in the West that means that you've got to get proto Carrick into the West and so how that happened is a matter for discussion well now I've got a series of sites which I better move through very rapidly because I want to get on to the ancient DNA these slides show the notion of the wave of advance if you have in that central area you have the emergence of the first development of farming then you can expect you're going to have the expansion of the population or populations in those different directions and that is what I argued may have happened with the indo-european languages coming to Europe and the afro-asiatic languages going southwards and maybe even the Dravidian languages going southeast to India and then one can look at the history of early crop domestication which I don't think we have time to do now but the bantu languages the Niger Quarter Fenian languages would be a good example of this and many specialists in the United Cordova Quarter Fenian languages would feel that the the farming language dispersal model is appropriate for that area and the same is true I think for the Pacific languages specifically the Polynesian languages where a farming language dispersal model makes very good sense and it was the development of farming in the western Pacific that allowed the successful dispersal of the Polynesian languages so that this is summarizing that point and there was some evidence which I'm going to move through very rapidly analyzing the Indian languages and trying to look at the chronology and this is the work of gray and Atkinson who tried to use linguistic data working purely from linguistic data says they were not themselves linguists to try and talk about the dating of these these movements and you see on the right hand side you see different models but all of the models that they that they applied reached a conclusion for the chronology that would be equivalent with the spread of farming model for the early distr Li distribution of the Hindi European languages or a proto-indo-european so we'll move quickly through these slides and this is a later work by a colleague of these those das Buch out who came to much the same conclusions but let's move now towards the DNA and here is a very standard family tree which a linguist sat for many years constructed for the indo-european languages and hasn't changed very much and a proto indo-european is at the top and hit height is certainly one of the earliest documented in European languages as we've seen and in this tree talk re in which we already spoke of separated next if you believe in this sort of model and then Roman and the italic language and the Celtic language then Greek and so on down to the Sanskrit Avastin and Vedic Sanskrit at the bottom and here was my own attempt to put a chronology to that following a very similar family tree and so we'll go back to the distribution map which I showed you earlier earlier of the the indo-european language distribution but now to move on to DNA and the the earliest DNA work which was undertaken about 20 years ago now used DNA from living populations it wasn't at that time possible to recover DNA from old remains earlier remains and so the early work using DNA from living populations and trying to extrapolate back and this was mainly mitochondrial DNA and so they reached some conclusions and they were quite willing to see that the Neolithic the spread of the Neolithic was an important part of the population history of Europe but now let's move on to what is new about this lecture and that is the impact of ancient DNA and as I said at the beginning this is something that has really only hit us over the past three or four years and there are a number of laboratories involved but I think the most influential one is David Wright's laboratory in Harvard I'm afraid we have to say something nice about Harvard at this point David Wright's laboratory in Harvard and these three papers all emerge from his laboratory as I've only mentioned the first author some of the authors I mean if you are very systematic about doing a bibliography and if it's somebody at all and you're doing the bibliography and you feel you have to type out the names of all the authors you'd Blanche when you see the list of co-authors which can be 50 or 60 individuals so it's a day's work just typing out the co-authors of the paper so you have Harkin and others and this is the key paper that we're talking about this evening massive migration from the step was a source for indo-european languages in Europe initially they were going to say these source but some of us pointed out that that was jumping too many guns but a sauce for indo-european languages in Europe and then just this year a paper from the same laboratory by Lazar Eva's and colleagues genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans and this of course is using DNA extracted from human remains from Mycenaean to and from Minoan tombs and that's the great thing about ancient DNA you're really working with the bones of the people in question and then one which has not yet been published but which I've had the opportunity of reviewing and so I can mention it today without spilling any secrets is the beef phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe and that has very interesting results which I'm sure will be published in the next month or so by Nature so you should look out for that now the next few slides are sometimes rather difficult to read and I don't want to spend too long on them this is from the first of these papers by Harker and colleagues and identity I have time to try and discuss all that is implied there but there are simplified simpler versions available and here you see the coming of the green elements there which on that diagram are the elements of what Maria Gimbert us would call the corgin migration and which these authors refer to as the yam nya culture so that's another word you have to make a note of yam nya that simply refers to the culture north of the Black Sea north east of the Black Sea where many of the samples came from many of them are provided by David Antony who had worked in that area and this slide shows the yam nya that the green and this includes modern as well as ancient samples but you see the you have the Western European Paleolithic the Western European hunter-gatherer which is the blue element you have the early Neolithic which is the the brown element and then the yam nya is the green there and the green makes its appearance not very clear on that diagram that the green makes its appearance with the arrival of these immigrants as they seem to be from the steppe lands and so there are two related slides here this is illustrating the Anatolian hypothesis the hypothesis that the proto-indo-european reached Europe from Anatolia and this illustrates the steppe hypothesis that proto-indo-european are reached Central Europe from the Yan Maya culture area you see the word yam nya on the screen there and you see that the relevant evidence is the corded wear which we were speaking of earlier and it has to be said that the the evidence now from this work by hark and colleagues from David Wright's laboratory very convincingly supports the yam nya hypothesis that is to say the steppe hypothesis which in many ways doesn't differ very significantly from Maria Gilbert Aziz kurgan hypothesis and here is the position as summarized by Michael Baltar in a an article in Scientific American just last year but it must be said though that when we look at the mean urns and Mycenaeans paper which you remember was the second paper I referred to by Lazar Eddie's and colleagues then the situation is less clear this is not a little nervous from that paper doesn't contain very many suitable illustrations but in that paper they concluded that the Minoan population who arose essentially by migration from Anatolia and the Mycenaean population and remember those are the people speaking an early form of Greek in Greece the Mycenaean population had a major contribution from Anatolia but a further contribution of about 20 percent that might have come from the north and might have been part of that step phenomenon or might have come from further east from from Armenia and the problem is that at the present time we have almost no ancient analyses from Anatolia itself from the Hittites homeland and the Hittites remain the earliest documented in the European population so on the one hand there is no doubt that the was a kurgan invasion or migration you can use different terminology just as Maria Gimbert us following Gordon child had suggested and that is massively supported by the work of hearken colleagues from David Wright's laboratory so that is the case but what is still not clear is what was the Anatolian contribution in other words it's not clear whether the steppe incursion the corgin migration was the first in the European migration or was it maybe not the first but the subsequent in the European migration with a migration from Anatolia to Europe being the earliest and that is still are not clear but just to finish with another series of slides to mention the new paper about the beaker cultures now this is an example what is meant by a bell beaker there's not so different in shape from the corded wear vessels but has a nice curve and it has this handsome in size decoration and that is a fairly typical a bell beaker this particular one comes from Hungary and here is the distribution and you see very odd not very coherent distribution of the major finds of bell beaker burials in Europe and they overlap with the corded wear distribution which was essentially further east and as we will see this no doubt that some of them were influenced by contact with accorded wear populations but it still seems that the earliest Bell beakers were from Liberia and the interesting result and I think rather confusing result of the paper by Reich and his colleagues for the beaker population is that there is no coherent unity in genetic terms in in ancient DNA between the different mica populations of Europe and on the one hand the beaker population of Iberia which seems to be the earliest phenomenon of the Bell beakers with their with their dagger which is one of these as a bronze dagger or copper dagger are one of the characteristic accompaniments of the beaker burials it's not a unity on the other hand they do conclude early odd and Reich and colleagues that the beakers that came to Britain it came to Britain from the Low Countries from the Netherlands and that there they did have the same ancient DNA has the corded where cultures had which was the same DNA that came in that Eon ayah migration which we can call if we like the corgin migration so it's not at all clear how we explained the beaker phenomenon it can't have a single explanation and here is a reconstruction of a beaker burial from from Iberia and here is a beaker burial from the from the Amesbury Archer in in Britain this is a tip typical beaker barrier with a number of individuals buried and and so we have still something of a puzzle to explain how we integrate the beaker story in all of this but the positive result is that we do now have ancient DNA from a large number of Bell beakers and I think the matter will clarify in five or ten years when we have more analyses and when we have analyses particularly of ancient DNA from the high tide population this is another bell beaker burial from South Britain the Boscombe Bowman so if I'm leaving you a little confused don't feel to blame yourself I may be to blame but don't feel blame yourselves because the situation is not yet a very clear one the answer to how we interpret all this ancient DNA evidence is not yet entirely clear but I don't doubt for a moment that the work is good work and that the work of David Wright's laboratory is likely to stand the test of time so I'm not yet wasting your time I'm telling you these new beaker results and the new me known and mycenaean results and indeed the results of the step migration the art paper these are going to be continued to be discussed for many years along with succeeding work now I still feel myself that the Hittites have an important role in all of this and it's the absence of good ancient DNA material from Anatolia that is obscuring the problem and I think that the Anatolian part of the picture is at the moment devalued through the lack of that material but don't forget that the Hittites in Scripture inscriptions and the lluvia inscriptions and the palais inscriptions these are all the old Anatolian languages are the earliest documented inscriptions we have of any hand at any indo-european languages anywhere so I think the matter is not yet clear but what is clear however is that Maria Gimbert us showed a series of remarkable insights when she emphasized the importance of what she called the corgin invasion what we might now call the yam nya invasion perhaps invasion isn't quite the right term but it was a migration or least it was a demographic process which is now abundantly documented by ancient DNA and some of our observations also about beaker populations certainly bear rereading so I think how though not all problems are solved I think Maria's Corgan hypothesis has been magnificently vindicated by recent work and that is a very good note on which to end the first maria gilbert s memorial lecture thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: The Oriental Institute

Views: 88,589

Rating: 4.7658777 out of 5

Keywords: DNA, Marija Gimbutas, Colin Renfrew, Indo-European

Id: pmv3J55bdZc

Length: 62min 57sec (3777 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 14 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/JuicyLittleGOOF]

400 members, this subreddit is growing! Cheers everyone

[u/ImPlayingTheSims]

Renfrew being a proponent of the Anatolian hypothesis kind of surprises me because it seems so unlikely. He's a very knowledgeable man and to be a spokesman of such an unlikely theory... hmmm.

Well, someones gotta do it. Is it also him that argues the Celts arose in the west?