Ancient DNA from the Balkans

This study has been for several months around but I have not discussed until now and is well worth a mention.

Ian Mathieson et al., The Genomic History Of Southeastern Europe. BioRXiv (pre-pub) 2017. doi:10.1101/135616

There is a lot of ancient autosomal DNA from the region but it basically says one thing: everything was almost exactly as expected from archaeology. The Karanovo-Gumelnita people, famed for inventing the Bronze Age a whole millenium earlier than anyone else, and nearby related cultures, were within the mainstream (Vasconic) Neolithic genetic grouping. This changed however with the kurgan invasion expressed primarily in the Ezero culture, which I've been told should be considered direct precursors of Thracians. But the change is not something radical: more genetic affinity with the steppe is visible than before and more generalized through all samples. 

Fig. 1-D - Supervised ADMIXTURE plot, modeling each ancient individual (one per row), as a mixture of
populations represented by clusters containing Anatolian Neolithic (grey), Yamnaya from Samara (yellow), EHG (pink) and WHG (green).  (click to expand)

Well, it is not exactly everything what is as expected, if we consider Polish Globular Amphorae culture, which I would have expected to be at least somewhat steppary, Indoeuropean, already but were not. Thus it seems I have to concede on this culture and its precursors being still part of the Vasconic Neolithic. This makes Indoeuropean penetration into Central-North Europe a much more sudden episode and one directly tied to Corded Ware culture and nothing else. It must have been perceived by its victims like a massive catastrophe, because it was a huge area which they conquered and to a large extent colonized in a very short span of time.

Lots of R1b in Epipaleolithic Balkans

Most interesting anyhow is the huge hoard of ancient Y-DNA R1b in the Iron Gates region (Lepenski Vir) before the Neolithic. This not only demonstrates, again, that this haplogroup is Paleoeuropean, at least in part, but, quite intriguingly makes earlier findings on modern data suggesting a possible origin or R1b-M269 in or near modern Serbia (Morelli 2010 and Myres 2010) at least somewhat plausible. However none of the Iron Gates R1b is described as R1b-M269 and in some cases it is excluded that it could be this sublineage. 

Thus the issue of the ultimate origins of this key lineage remains open, but let me underline that these Iron Gate individuals belonged to the WHG grouping, as did Villabruna (so far the oldest R1b carrier kown) and that they breach this way the assumed haplogroup homogeneity I2 conceived on merely Central and Northern European samples. Just as happened with mtDNA U haplogroup homogeneity when mtDNA H was detected by several independent studies of Iberian ancient DNA. It is normal to expect more diversity towards the south for several reasons but maybe the most critical of them is just average temperature, which makes the southern lands naturally more fertile (notably so for crops domesticated in the Middle East) and easier to inhabit. 

This trend was only broken in the Middle Ages when the heavy plough allowed the improved exploitation of deep Oceanic soils, being useless in the Mediterranean region of shallow soils however. It was only then when the center of European development moved from south to north, to Belgium specifically, where it remains till present day. So let's take Southern Europe a bit seriously, please.

Everything you wanted to know about Balcan and Carpathian Neolithic

Prolific researcher Esther Bamfy recently uploaded to her academia.edu page this most interesting publication, which, even if it is not "recent", has a load of information on the Neolithic of the Balcans, which is crucial to understand that of Europe in general.

Various authors. A SHORT WALK THROUGH THE BALKANS:THE FIRST FARMERS OF THE CARPATHIAN BASIN AND ADJACENT REGIONS. Proceedings of the Conference held at the Institute of Archaeology UCL on June 20th - 22nd, 2005. Freely available at academia.edu → LINK.

The collection is pretty much exhaustive but the paper that most caught my attention was the one by J.K. Koszlowski, titled "Western Anatolia, the Aegean Basin and the Balcans in the Neolithisation of Europe", which underlines that, contrary to pop culture ideas, often making headway into flawed genetic or linguistic studies, the first European Neolithic of Greece (Thessaly and Argolid) can't be related to Western Anatolia, where there was no such Neolithic yet but probably arrived, maybe via Cyprus, by sea.

This is coincident with what I wrote months ago at PPNB ancient mtDNA and its legacy.

But all 18 papers are very much worth reading anyhow, take a look. 

First ever bronze was smelt in the Balcans

It seems that West Asia is losing a bit of its relevance as the origin of nearly every development. Much as the first steel is now known to have been made in Central Africa several centuries before the Hittites (or not: see update below), the first bronze ("tin bronze" to be specific) seems now to have been made in the Balcanic peninsula, more than a thousand years before it was in Mesopotamia.

Miljana Radivojevíc et al. Tainted ores and the rise of tin bronzes in Eurasia, c. 6500 years ago. Antiquity 87 (2013). Freely accessible → LINK

Abstract

The earliest tin bronze artefacts in Eurasia are generally believed to have appeared in the Near East in the early third millennium BC. Here we present tin bronze artefacts that occur far from the Near East, and in a significantly earlier period. Excavations at Plocnik, a Vinca culture site in Serbia, recovered a piece of tin bronze foil from an occupation layer dated to the mid fifth millennium BC. The discovery prompted a reassessment of 14 insufficiently contextualised early tin bronze artefacts from the Balkans. They too were found to derive from the smelting of copper-tin ores. These tin bronzes extend the record of bronze making by c. 1500 years, and challenge the conventional narrative of Eurasian metallurgical development.

The specific well-dated finding is from Plocnik, Southern Serbia, however as we can see in the map below, most 5th millenium bronze sites are from Bulgaria.

This highlights the likely central role in this earliest bronze metallurgy of the Karanovo-Gumelnita culture (very likely a full-fledged state older than dynastic Egypt), which spanned most of Bulgaria, as well as some nearby regions by the south and the north. However the neighbor cultures of Gradesnica-Krivodol (NW Bulgaria and nearby Romanian areas) and Vinca (Serbia) were also involved.

The highest quality alloys (stannite bronzes) belong to this core area of Thrace (Karanovo, Smjadovo and Bereketska Mogila), as well as Southern Serbian sites (Plocnic and Lazareva) while a second category, "high tin fahlore", seems to concentrate along the Danube (Gomolava and Ruse). A "low tin fahlore" category is rarer and seems centered in the Gradesnica area.

For some reason, maybe the disruptive Indoeuropean invasions of the 4th millennium, this technology was apparently lost later on, only to be regained from a West Asian source (Troy) already in the 3rd millennium.

An interesting question is the source of tin, which was in many cases the mineral stannite. The authors suggests further research on isotopes but also consider ancient mines that could have been sources:

Stannite is present in the Bronze Age mines of Mushiston in Tajikistan (Weisgerber & Cierny 2002), Deh Hosein in Iran (Nezafati et al. 2006), the Bolkardăg mining district in Turkey (Yener & ̈Ozbal 1987), as well as in Iberia (Rovira & Montero 2003).

The West and Central Asian mines are often argued not to have been sizable enough to be a major source of tin in the Bronze Age proper but, considering that this is a very early and limited bout of advanced metallurgy, I guess that they are also possible sources.


Update (Jan 22): I must (partly) take back my initial comment on steel metallurgy being older in Niger than Turkey: while the discovery of Nigerien steel-making c. 1500 BCE stands, other recent findings in Turkey seem to push back steel metallurgy in Anatolia to c. 1800 BCE (instead of the c. 1300 BCE date accepted before). Thanks to Aeolius for making us aware of this important detail.


Note: thanks to the Stone Pages newsletter ArcheoNews for directing me to this most interesting study.