Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
- 12,325
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
The samples are already available.
See:
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJEB20658
"DescriptionThe Eurasian steppe, stretching about 8000 kilometres from Hungary and Romania in the west to Mongolia and western China in the east, is culturally among the most dynamic areas in the world. In the past four millennia, it has been variously dominated by Iranian-, Turkic- and Mongolic-speaking groups, and its temperate grasslands have been a crossroad for extensive movements of peoples, goods, and ideas between Europe, Siberia, South and East Asia. In order to understand the genetic history of the Eurasian steppe populations, we have sequenced 137 ancient genomes (~1X average coverage) spanning a 4000 years time series. We also genotyped 502 individuals from 16 contemporary self-reported ethnicities. We find evidence of a highly dynamic population history; the Iranian-speaking Scythians that dominated the Eurasian steppe throughout the Iron Age (~1 millennium BCE to common era) emerged following admixture between Late Bronze Age herders of western Eurasian descent and East Asian hunter-gatherers. The steppe nomads later further admixed with Turkic-speaking groups of East Asian ancestry that spread westward across the steppe in multiple waves: firstly, the Xiongnu confederations that emerged in Mongolia around the 3nd/2nd century BC; secondly, the Huns (4-5th century CE), infected with plague basal to the Justinian Y. pestis strain that destabilized the eastern Roman Empire in the 6th century CE; and thirdly during various short term dynasties, including the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and his descendants. These recent historical events transformed the Eurasian steppe populations from being Indo-European speakers of largely western Eurasian ancestry to the present-day Turkic-speaking groups, primarily of East Asian ancestry."
Many of the movements from the steppe seem to have been aided by plague.
The same thing happened with the Black Death. The Genovese were infected in the Crimea and it then spread all over Europe.
This is an excellent article on the subject, indeed on the plague in general, although the Mongols catapulting corpses over the walls may be apocryphal.
http://www.haplogruplar.com/the-gen...a-from-the-neolithic-to-the-oghuz-migrations/
"The plague bacteria is thought to have spread from the arid plains of central Asia. The plague generally left untouched the indigenous nomad population, because rat fleas do not like the smell of horses, with which the nomads lived in close proximity. However, from the mid-thirteenth century, increased commercialisation in Europe opened up silk routes through the steppelands, and the trading posts set up to service this trade formed convenient stepping-stones for infected fleas to break out of the area.
The first known victims of plague were probably a community of Nestorian Christians at Issyk Kul, south of Lake Balkash, whose cemetery explicitly records three plague victims in 1338-9, a year in which there were unusually heavy mortalities. In 1343, it had reached the Black Sea port of Kaffa (Theodosia) in the Crimea. There, a Genoese colony was under siege from a khan of the Golden Horde named Yannibeg, when his army was decimated by an outbreak of plague. Determined to make his enemies suffer the torments of his men, he ordered that bodies of plague victims be catapulted into the city.
The Genoese hurriedly dumped these into the sea, but the plague spread anyway. Taking to their ships, the fleeing Genoese carried the plague far and wide."
That's an interesting point about the smell of horses repelling the flees. Perhaps that's why the steppe people were able to survive in greater numbers?
See:
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJEB20658
"DescriptionThe Eurasian steppe, stretching about 8000 kilometres from Hungary and Romania in the west to Mongolia and western China in the east, is culturally among the most dynamic areas in the world. In the past four millennia, it has been variously dominated by Iranian-, Turkic- and Mongolic-speaking groups, and its temperate grasslands have been a crossroad for extensive movements of peoples, goods, and ideas between Europe, Siberia, South and East Asia. In order to understand the genetic history of the Eurasian steppe populations, we have sequenced 137 ancient genomes (~1X average coverage) spanning a 4000 years time series. We also genotyped 502 individuals from 16 contemporary self-reported ethnicities. We find evidence of a highly dynamic population history; the Iranian-speaking Scythians that dominated the Eurasian steppe throughout the Iron Age (~1 millennium BCE to common era) emerged following admixture between Late Bronze Age herders of western Eurasian descent and East Asian hunter-gatherers. The steppe nomads later further admixed with Turkic-speaking groups of East Asian ancestry that spread westward across the steppe in multiple waves: firstly, the Xiongnu confederations that emerged in Mongolia around the 3nd/2nd century BC; secondly, the Huns (4-5th century CE), infected with plague basal to the Justinian Y. pestis strain that destabilized the eastern Roman Empire in the 6th century CE; and thirdly during various short term dynasties, including the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and his descendants. These recent historical events transformed the Eurasian steppe populations from being Indo-European speakers of largely western Eurasian ancestry to the present-day Turkic-speaking groups, primarily of East Asian ancestry."
Many of the movements from the steppe seem to have been aided by plague.
The same thing happened with the Black Death. The Genovese were infected in the Crimea and it then spread all over Europe.
This is an excellent article on the subject, indeed on the plague in general, although the Mongols catapulting corpses over the walls may be apocryphal.
http://www.haplogruplar.com/the-gen...a-from-the-neolithic-to-the-oghuz-migrations/
"The plague bacteria is thought to have spread from the arid plains of central Asia. The plague generally left untouched the indigenous nomad population, because rat fleas do not like the smell of horses, with which the nomads lived in close proximity. However, from the mid-thirteenth century, increased commercialisation in Europe opened up silk routes through the steppelands, and the trading posts set up to service this trade formed convenient stepping-stones for infected fleas to break out of the area.
The first known victims of plague were probably a community of Nestorian Christians at Issyk Kul, south of Lake Balkash, whose cemetery explicitly records three plague victims in 1338-9, a year in which there were unusually heavy mortalities. In 1343, it had reached the Black Sea port of Kaffa (Theodosia) in the Crimea. There, a Genoese colony was under siege from a khan of the Golden Horde named Yannibeg, when his army was decimated by an outbreak of plague. Determined to make his enemies suffer the torments of his men, he ordered that bodies of plague victims be catapulted into the city.
The Genoese hurriedly dumped these into the sea, but the plague spread anyway. Taking to their ships, the fleeing Genoese carried the plague far and wide."
That's an interesting point about the smell of horses repelling the flees. Perhaps that's why the steppe people were able to survive in greater numbers?