The Jamnaja nomadic steppe people are considered a ancestor of today’s Europeans and founders of all Indo -European languages. How exactly the Jamnaja culture and its language developed and spread in the Bronze Age has so far been unclear. Now two research teams have examined the DNA of over 400 people and reconstructed the history of the Jamnaja from their relatives. Accordingly, both the origin and the spread of this culture were more complex than previously assumed. For the first time, there is also evidence that Jamnaja and people in Anatolia and their languages had a common ancestors-the Caucasus-Wolga line and its proto-indo-anatolic language, as the teams in “Nature” report.
The culture of the Jamnaja or Jamna are considered one of the ancestors of today’s Europeans. The riders lived in the steppes in Eurasia at the Bronze Age, north of the Black and Caspian Sea. From around 3100 BC they started to migrate to Eastern Europe and Central Asia and finally lived in an area from Hungary to Kazakhstan until about 1500 BC. Immigration of the quilted nomads to Europe is the most important demographic event of the past millennia. Because the hunters, collectors and cattle breeders not only brought their farm animals and their DNA, who were simple in the genetic makeup of the later Europeans, but also their cultural techniques and above all their language.
This is considered the foundation of all today’s Indo -European languages. These include over 400 individual languages and large language families such as the Germanic, Romanesque, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic and Indo-Iranian languages. Almost half of the world’s population therefore speaks a language that goes back to the Proto-Indo-European Jamnaja. But where the Jamnaja came from Eurasia, despite intensive historical and linguistic research, it has so far been unclear.
The origin of the Jamnaja lies between Caucasus and Volga
In order to find out, researchers around Iosif Lazaridis from Harvard University have now evaluated old DNA. The rehearsals come from the bones of 435 people who once lived in or near the Pontic-Caspian steppe in today’s Ukraine or Russia. The old DNA was recovered from graves and archaeological sites from human settlements that were lived in between 6400 and 2000 BC. These genetic data compared Lazaridis and his colleagues with geographical and other archaeological indications- including the position of the dead, grave goods and appearance of the graves- and reconstructed the history and distribution history of the Jamnaja.
The analyzes suggest that the Jamnaja did not emerge from two, but from three different subgroups, which mixed genetically as previously. Some of her ancestors lived on the copper stone age, between 4500 and 3500 BC, in the area between the Caucasus and the lower Volga, others on the upper Volga in Russia or on the Dnipro in Ukraine. It is the first time that such a Caucasus-Wolga line can be described and occupied, as the team explains. About 80 percent, these people justified the Jamnaja, but about ten percent also contributed to the development of peoples in Anatolia in today’s Turkey, as the team found. This also includes the Hittites, whose language is linguistic and so far as the only Indo -European language has not been seen as the heir of the Jamnaja. However, the new analyzes now prove that the Hittite language also originated in the Eurasian steppe. Their clear differences to other Indo -European languages were created by the fact that this language split off from the others very early on, as Lazaridis and his colleagues explain.
This Caucasus-Wolga line is the common ancestors of the Indo-European or Jamnaja and the Anatols and their proto-indo-anatol language the forerunner of the two language groups Indo-European and Indo-Anatolian, the researchers close. These ancestors probably lived between 4400 and 4000 BC in the Eurasian steppes between the mountains of the Caucasus and the rivers Volga and Dnipro, but spread from there in all directions and mingled with the local hunters, collectors and farmers into new groups and cultures.
Three waves of migration to the west
In order to understand the origin and development of the Jamnaja even better, a second research team led by Alexey Nikitin from the Grand Valley State University in Michigan 81 of the 435 old DNA samples, which come from today’s Ukraine and surrounding countries. From these DNA sequences, Nikitin and his colleagues conclude that the Jamnaja and her ancestors spread into three waves in western Eurasia. In the first wave, representatives of the Caucasus-Wolga line mixed with several local hunters and collectors around 4500 BC. A mixture of the Caucasus Wolga line and the DNIPRO line then led to justification of the so-called Kern-Jamnaja around 4000 BC. This subgroup lived mainly in the area around Mychajliwka in Ukraine-“probably an epicenter of Jamnaja formation”. The oldest DNA samples of a person of Jamnaja culture (around 3635-3383 BC) also come from there.
It was this subgroup, the population of which increased exceptionally strongly and produced the cultural innovations, as the researchers explain. From Mychajliwka, the Kern-Jamnaja then spread out with horse cars to the west, from the steppe, and mingled with the local peasant population. Because of their numerical superiority, the Jamnaja dominated the genetic and linguistic development. “The integrative character of these communities, coupled with their remarkable mobility, undoubtedly contributed to the success of the Jamna to spread their Indo -European language and culture across geographical and population borders,” writes the team. The same was true for the third, the main wave of the west migration of the Jamnaja from the Eurasian steppes from about 3300 BC, as the researchers determined. But not all Jamnaja from this third wave mingled with the local residents, so that in some areas two cultures existed in parallel.
Together, the two studies provide important new information on how the culture of the Jamnaja was created and how it affected the descendants in Europe. The discovery of the Kaucaus Wolga Line (CLV) as ancestors of the Jamnaja also closes a gap in the development of the Indo-European languages. “The discovery of the CLV population as a missing link in Indo-European history marks a turning point in the 200-year-old search for the reconstruction of the origins of the indo-Europeans and the routes through which these people spread across Europe and parts,” explains co- Author Ron Pinhasi from the University of Vienna.
Sources: iosif Lazaridis (Harvard University) et al.; Nature, DOI: 10.1038/S41586-024-08531-5 and Alexey Nikitin (Grand Valley State University) et al.; Nature, DOI: 10.1038/S41586-024-08372-2