Yamnaya - pannous/hieros GitHub Wiki
The now famous Yamnaya culture, strongly linked to the expansion of PIE is better described in other places.
It's relationship with Vinca Cucuteni Maykop and Afanasievo is of utmost importance to the understanding of history.
Mesolithic R1b-M269 lineages from the Caucasus as the source of CHG ancestry to Khvalynsk/Yamna, the reason why Reich wrote about a potential PIE homeland south of the Caucasus
Yamnaya had two components of CHG, together contributing around 50% of its genome: Unadmixed CHG with connections to Iran reaching the Volga in the 5th millennium, correlating with the arrival of agricultural settlements and domestication. Only later CHG admixed with Anatolian Farmers at 10-18%, likely via Tripolye (with signature elements of WHG ⋍3%).
Interestingly Dnieper lacked both CHG and AF and was predominantly haplogroup I2a2.
From 5800 - 4300 BC the Tripolye culture seems to have actively avoided marriage with steppe people, as 95% had no steppe relatives, a tradition only broken by the elite starting in Varna (with recent Khvalynsk ancestors). This is surprising because even before Balkan copper ornaments reached the Volga and Caucasus, either via trade or looting.
Steppe type graves appear on the Danube 4500-4200 BC, by 4300 BC Varna / Karanovo tell towns witnessed a near total collapse. The following Cernavoda culture was relatively impoverished and showed mixture of Old Europe and Steppe customs and genes, at the same time Anatolian Farmer ancestry began to appear in the steppes. A Sredni Stog individual with 20% Anatolian Farmer ancestry, lactose tolerance and haplogroup R1a-Z93 similar to Sintashta is a prime example.
[Anthony 2019]
According Bomhard's hypothesis PIE developed by this melting of EHG and CHG with some late contributions of AF. According to Anthony the 4200 Karanovo collapse marks the division of old Anatolian PIE.
While iranian and caucasian copper kings where closely related, the yamnaya where a different people, maybe strongly influenced by varna/maykop elites:
We are more interested in its formation, suggesting that Yamnaya was just one main late branch of PIE. In fact the whole mental model of languages as branches should be refined into a more complex flow model of recombining waves of linguistic features. Cultures kept mixing and so did their languages, turning PIE into a system of satellites revolving around common patterns, words and phrases.
https://academia.edu/resource/work/39985565
A scenario consistent with the archaeological and genetic evidence presented here, is that there were two phases of interference from Caucasian languages in two periods.
The first, perhaps responsible for some of the basic morphological and phonological traits Bomhard detected, could have occurred in the fifth millennium BC and involved archaic Caucasian languages that had moved to the lower Volga steppes with CHG people, where they intermarried with Samara-based EHG pre-Uralic people to create early PIE and the Khvalynsk culture and a new EHG/CHG genetic admixture; and
the second phase, which left a Northwest Caucasian imprint over late PIE, perhaps more superficial (lexical) than the earlier interference, could have been during the Maikop period, but without a major genetic exchange between Maikop and Yamnaya.
Khvalynsk
Dates c. 4900–3500 BCE
Preceded by Samara culture
Followed by Yamna culture
Received 50% Neolithic CHG genes and technologies of domestication and metallurgy.
Metal was available both in the Caucasus and in the southern Urals. The Khvalynsk graves included metal rings and spiral metal rings. However, there is no indication of any use beyond ornamental. The quality of stone weapons and implements reaches a high point. A long flint dagger and tanged arrowheads are carefully retouched on both faces. In addition there is a porphyry axe-head with lugs and a haft hole. These artifacts are of types that not too long after appeared in metal.
There is also plenty of evidence of personal jewelry: beads of shell, stone and animal teeth, bracelets of stone or bone, pendants of boar tusk. The animals whose teeth came to decorate the putative Indo-Europeans are boar, bear, wolf, deer and others. Some of these teeth must have been difficult to acquire, a labor perhaps that led to a value being placed upon them. Whether they were money is not known.
The hard goods leave no record of any great richness. There is some evidence that wealth may have consisted of perishable goods. In fact, in many similar cultures of later times, wealth was reckoned in livestock. A recent study of the surface of the pottery (also of many cultures), which recorded contact with perishable material while the clay was wet, indicates contact with cords and embroidered woven cloth, which the investigators suggest were used to decorate the pot.
Khvalinsk evidences the further development of the kurgan. It began in the Samara with individual graves or small groups sometimes under stone. In the Khvalinsk culture one finds group graves, which can only be communal on some basis.
A 67 m high earthen kurgan at Nalchik, approximately thirty metres in diameter, contained 121 individual graves of remains placed face up, knees contracted, on ochre with a covering of stone.
Genetics
A male buried at Lebyazhinka, radiocarbon dated to 5640-5555 calBCE, and often referred to by scholars of archaeogenetics as the "Samara hunter-gatherer" appears to have carried the rare Y-DNA haplogroup R1b1* (R-L278*). This individual is ancestral for both haplogroup R1b1a1 and R1b1a2 and is basal to both the predominantly western Eurasian R-M269 lineage and the mainly non-European R-M73/M478 lineage.
A similar physical type prevails among the Sredny Stog culture and the Yamnaya culture, whose peoples were tall and powerfully built. Khvalynsk people were however not as powerfully built as the Sredny Stog and Yamnaya. The people of the Dnieper-Donets culture further west on the other hand, were even more powerfully built than the Yamnaya.[a]
ales of the Khvalynsk culture carried primarily the paternal haplogroup R1b, although a few samples of R1a, I2a2, Q1a and J have been detected. They belonged to the Western Steppe Herder (WSH) cluster, which is a mixture of Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) and Caucasian Hunter-Gatherer (CHG) ancestry. This admixture appears to have happened on the eastern Pontic–Caspian steppe starting around 5,000 BC.[9]
A male from the contemporary Sredny Stog culture was found to have 80% WSH ancestry of a similar type to the Khvalynsk people, and 20% Early European Farmer (EEF) ancestry.
Admixture among them was the result of mixing between EHG and WHG males, and EEF and CHG females. This suggests that the leading clans among the Yamnaya were of EHG paternal origin.
A striking signal of steppe migration into the Southern Arc is evident in Armenia and northwest Iran where admixture with Yamnaya patrilineal descendants occurred, coinciding with their 3rd millennium BCE displacement from the steppe itself.
Anatolia received hardly any genetic input from Europe or the Eurasian steppe from the Chalcolithic to the Iron Age
. This contrasts with Southeastern Europe and Armenia that were impacted by major gene flow from Yamnaya steppe pastoralists. [David Reich 2022]