So what was the scale of destruction / cultural replacement / economic and political change on Salisbury Plain at the time? This one will run and run.....
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Salon: Issue 425
9 April 2019
https://mailchi.mp/sal/salon-newsletter-546589?e=c1fc1be8dc#mctoc5
Let’s forget about all the nonsense about Brexit, and concentrate on this:
Drawing on recent aDNA research, science writer Colin Barras claims that Stonehenge is ‘a memorial to a vanished people … wiped out by incomers,’ the Yamnaya and their descendants from northern Europe, who might be ‘the most murderous people in history’. Media picked up the theme. ‘The most violent group of people who ever lived,’ headlined Mail Online: ‘Horse-riding Yamnaya tribe who used their huge height and muscular build to brutally murder and invade their way across Europe than 4,000 years ago.’ The Sun ran a similar story, and both quoted the archaeologist who was Barras’s main source: Kristian Kristiansen FSA.
The controversy dates back to 2017, when a large aDNA study went online ahead of peer-review publication in Nature (March 2018). As I wrote in Salon at the time, the paper (among whose many authors were at least 11 Fellows) argued that a substantial immigration into Britain from around 2500 BC was followed by the almost complete replacement of the native genome – reported in the press as ‘Intruders forced out ancient farmers that built famous relics such as Stonehenge.’ A debate followed about the extent to which aDNA and archaeological data were revealing different narratives about the same societies, the dangers of creating sweeping theories that relied on small and possibly unrepresentative samples, and ways of interpreting the evidence that did not involve great migrations (such as the movement of women at marriage).
Nuance was not the first concern of the other New Scientist feature. Supported by dramatic illustrations by Simon Pemberton – perceptively analysed in a blog by Katy Whitaker FSA (5 April) – Barras focuses on the idea that genome change, both on the continent and particularly in Britain, was the outcome of a violent annihilation of an earlier native population. ‘I’ve become increasingly convinced there must have been a kind of genocide,’ Kristiansen tells Barras, perpetrated, explains the science writer, by horse-riding people represented in the ground by ‘Yamnaya-like artefacts and behaviour’. David Reich, a lead geneticist in the research, supports this view, referring to an aDNA study in Iberia where he sees ‘males from outside … displacing local males ... almost completely’. Barras also talks to Volker Heyd, an archaeologist who is sceptical of the violent migrants thesis, and qualifies his conclusions (‘Even if they weren’t the most murderous people in history, there is no doubting that they spread far and wide’). But it was New Scientist that upset some archaeologists.
Tom Booth, a bioarchaeologist at the Natural History Museum, argued on Twitter that there are many other possible readings of the data: ‘my view is that all the ancient DNA can say on its own at the moment is that there were large-scale population shifts across Europe resulting from movements of people carrying ancestry originating in the Pontic steppe … certainly in Britain, there is no evidence for a surge in violence at the beginning of the Beaker period’ (@Boothicus, 31 March).
=============================
Salon: Issue 425
9 April 2019
https://mailchi.mp/sal/salon-newsletter-546589?e=c1fc1be8dc#mctoc5
Let’s forget about all the nonsense about Brexit, and concentrate on this:
Drawing on recent aDNA research, science writer Colin Barras claims that Stonehenge is ‘a memorial to a vanished people … wiped out by incomers,’ the Yamnaya and their descendants from northern Europe, who might be ‘the most murderous people in history’. Media picked up the theme. ‘The most violent group of people who ever lived,’ headlined Mail Online: ‘Horse-riding Yamnaya tribe who used their huge height and muscular build to brutally murder and invade their way across Europe than 4,000 years ago.’ The Sun ran a similar story, and both quoted the archaeologist who was Barras’s main source: Kristian Kristiansen FSA.
The controversy dates back to 2017, when a large aDNA study went online ahead of peer-review publication in Nature (March 2018). As I wrote in Salon at the time, the paper (among whose many authors were at least 11 Fellows) argued that a substantial immigration into Britain from around 2500 BC was followed by the almost complete replacement of the native genome – reported in the press as ‘Intruders forced out ancient farmers that built famous relics such as Stonehenge.’ A debate followed about the extent to which aDNA and archaeological data were revealing different narratives about the same societies, the dangers of creating sweeping theories that relied on small and possibly unrepresentative samples, and ways of interpreting the evidence that did not involve great migrations (such as the movement of women at marriage).
Nuance was not the first concern of the other New Scientist feature. Supported by dramatic illustrations by Simon Pemberton – perceptively analysed in a blog by Katy Whitaker FSA (5 April) – Barras focuses on the idea that genome change, both on the continent and particularly in Britain, was the outcome of a violent annihilation of an earlier native population. ‘I’ve become increasingly convinced there must have been a kind of genocide,’ Kristiansen tells Barras, perpetrated, explains the science writer, by horse-riding people represented in the ground by ‘Yamnaya-like artefacts and behaviour’. David Reich, a lead geneticist in the research, supports this view, referring to an aDNA study in Iberia where he sees ‘males from outside … displacing local males ... almost completely’. Barras also talks to Volker Heyd, an archaeologist who is sceptical of the violent migrants thesis, and qualifies his conclusions (‘Even if they weren’t the most murderous people in history, there is no doubting that they spread far and wide’). But it was New Scientist that upset some archaeologists.
Tom Booth, a bioarchaeologist at the Natural History Museum, argued on Twitter that there are many other possible readings of the data: ‘my view is that all the ancient DNA can say on its own at the moment is that there were large-scale population shifts across Europe resulting from movements of people carrying ancestry originating in the Pontic steppe … certainly in Britain, there is no evidence for a surge in violence at the beginning of the Beaker period’ (@Boothicus, 31 March).
1 comment:
London University has licensed wide ranging and imaginative rewriting of history based on scanty science. It is not surprising others follow the lead - funding might follow.
DNA studies are exciting but early stage. The methodologies and techniques are in their infancy. Sample sizes are small.
Pre-Yamnaya we had the puzzle of long head vs round head in the Long Barrows. And as a species we are prone to Genocide. The new theories are all plausible but theories is what they are.
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