My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  ***

  Finally, the long-awaited DNA study comes out. It is published in Nature, and, to my relief, I manage to incorporate the results before this book goes to print. These were the results that convinced James Mallory from Belfast that he had been on the right track for the last 40 years as regards the origin of the Indo-European languages.

  A large international team of researchers has compared nuclear DNA from a total of 94 individuals from Russia and the rest of Europe. The oldest of them lived in the Old Stone Age or Palaeolithic, the most recent in the Bronze Age. The researchers analysed the DNA of 69 of these individuals themselves, while the other 25 DNA sets had already been published previously.

  On seeing the results, I understand Mallory’s relief. The new comparison shows very clearly that the Corded Ware culture, which turned up suddenly in central Europe 4,800 years ago, was associated with a major migration from the eastern steppes – just as Gimbutas, Anthony, Mallory and many others had claimed. Three quarters of the German Corded Ware people’s DNA matches that of the Yamnaya people from the pastoral culture of the Russian steppes – 2,600 kilometres (1,600 miles) away.

  The Yamnaya people, in their turn, were also a mixture, bearing DNA from two separate sources. Their origins can be traced in part back to earlier Stone Age hunters in Russia. They have a distinctive north-eastern genetic signature, which researchers have found in Stone Age hunters all the way from Karelia to Lake Baikal in Siberia. However, the Yamnaya also bear genetic material from the south, from farmers who had started their journey in eastern Anatolia or Armenia. This result also ties in neatly with David Anthony’s hypothesis that horses were domesticated when newly arrived farmers from the south and hunters already living in the steppe met and inspired each other.

  What also emerges clearly from the new study in Nature is that Y chromosomes belonging to haplogroups R1a and R1b, which hardly ever occurred in western Europe before the Corded Ware culture, were very common in Russia. The type of Y chromosomes that now predominate in European men thus originated in the eastern steppes.

  I recognise most of the names in the study’s long list of authors. I have interviewed many of them for my research over the last few years: the first author, Wolfgang Haak, from Australia; the Swede Fredrik Hallgren, who contributed DNA samples from the Stone Age people of Motala; Johannes Krause from Tübingen; the Hungarian archaeologists Eszter Bánffy and Anna Szécsényi-Nagy, whom I met at the seminar in Pilsen; and, of course, Guido Brandt, the doctoral student from Mainz whom a more high-tech rival on the tram in Pilsen called an ‘idiot’ on account of the comparatively simple DNA technology he uses.

  However, I have not met the main author of the study, the geneticist David Reich from Boston, or his collaborator, the mathematician Nick Patterson. The latter has a background in military code-breaking in the UK and the US during the Cold War and has also worked in finance, developing data models to predict stock exchange movements.

  That combination of relatively simple DNA technology and mathematics is one of the keys to the groundbreaking Nature study of European history. The research team analysed a limited but carefully selected amount of nuclear DNA. Restricting their study to a comparatively small quantity of DNA freed up enough financial and other resources for them to analyse more than twice as many Stone Age and Bronze Age individuals than all previous studies put together. And it was this balance that enabled them to draw their conclusions.

  Science is not just about using the most cutting-edge technology available. It is also about asking the right questions, and using exactly the right level of technology to answer them.

  Only three months later another major study is published in Nature, led by researchers in Gothenburg and Copenhagen. They have examined even more individuals from the period in question, a total of about 100 from both Europe and Asia. The results support the theory that the Indo-European languages were disseminated by Yamnaya pastoralists from the Russian steppes. First they spread Indo-European languages to the west, throughout Europe, via the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures. About 1,000 years later, a wave spread from the steppe eastwards and southwards, towards India, Afghanistan and Iran. Horses and horse-drawn wagons played a decisive role in the latter wave of migration.

  The new DNA results show that the Yamnaya herders were genetically predisposed to be tall. Archaeologists had already noted their unusual height, judging on the basis of the skeletons found in graves from that period. Their height was not just a result of the large herds they kept as steppe pastoralists, giving them access to ample amounts of nutritious food; it was also a specific genetic trait.

  The new DNA studies provide no support for the old notion that ‘Aryans’, the first speakers of Indo-European languages, were particularly blond or blue-eyed. The Yamnaya herders seem to have been quite dark, both in comparison with today’s Europeans and with their contemporaries, the farmers of western Europe. On average, they seem to have been even darker-skinned than the Stone Age hunters of Scandinavia. Nearly all Yamnaya pastoralists seem to have been brown-eyed, while blue eyes appear to have been common in western and northern Europe for several millennia.

  The two new Nature studies now provide far clearer confirmation of the picture we have sketched. Europe’s population was largely formed by three major waves of immigration. The Ice Age hunters were the first to arrive, followed by the farmers from the Middle East just over 8,000 years ago. Later, about 4,800 years ago, came a wave of pastoralists from the eastern steppes. But when did this third wave arrive in Sweden?

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Battleaxes

  The local Swedish variant of the Corded Ware culture is now known as the ‘Battleaxe culture’, an older name being the ‘Boat Axe culture’. It came into being about 4,800 years ago, and its main distinguishing feature is its charac­teristic stone axes. The several thousand that have been found resemble upside-down boats, hence the older name.

  In the past, it was generally assumed that these axes were used to crush enemies’ skulls. Old-school historians imagined hordes of rampaging men thundering into the country on horseback, battleaxes at the ready. It is an image still conveyed today by some popular history books. However, when later archaeologists examined the facts more precisely, they found no support for this view.

  For four decades, beginning in the 1960s, the archaeologist Mats Malmer published a series of extensive compilations of finds from the Battleaxe period in Sweden and Norway. These provide detailed lists of the many stone axes, terracotta pots, tools, items of jewellery and other artefacts found in hundreds of graves.

  One of the points he makes is that these battleaxes were not particularly useful in a battle, being so delicate that they would have cracked if anyone had tried to use them to fight. When it came to crushing someone’s skull, a good old cudgel was a far superior weapon. Nor is there any evidence that the Battleaxe period in Sweden was any more violent than any other period. The skeletons found in burials from this period all belong to people who seem to have died a natural death.

  Malmer concluded that the Battleaxe culture could best be compared to a religious revival. In his view, the new ideas spread like wildfire in association with the arrival of copper axes. Admittedly, no copper axes have been found in Battleaxe culture burials, just odd items of copper jewellery. But Malmer remained convinced that copper axes existed, and that they were so prized that they revolutionised trade and culture within a short space of time. In the past, property had been collective, and it had been bound up with the whole group and the earth. Copper axes suddenly made it individual and mobile, according to Malmer’s theories. He thus stressed the significance of trade and religion. In his view, immigration had no significant impact on the course of events.

  Some of today’s archaeologists agree with Malmer that the Battleaxe culture was barely anything more than a gradual development among people already living in Sweden and Norway. ‘The ceramics were new. But in other respects one can hardly speak of s
ignificant inward migration; it was more a continuation of an existing culture,’ says Karl-Göran Sjögren from Gothenburg, for example.

  Others give more credence to outside influences. One of them is Lars Larsson, a professor emeritus from Lund, who, in other contexts, prefers to downplay the role of immigration in early Swedish history. The Battleaxe culture, in his view, is an exception. Larsson believes that its exponents lived mainly as pastoralists and that they were far more mobile than the earlier farming population. Their nomadic lifestyle, he argues, explains why archaeologists have found compar­atively few settlements reflecting this culture. Even small groups of immigrants may have had a major impact on development, he thinks, introducing a new economy and ideology.

  Åsa Larsson from Uppsala, who wrote her doctoral thesis in 2009, turns these ideas upside down. She also thinks the Battleaxe culture was spread to some extent by immigrants. However, in her view they came not from the lands south of Skåne, but from Finland and the Baltic. And they were not men on horseback with battleaxes at the ready, but women with specialised skills in pottery. They came by boat via the Åland archipelago to marry men living in Uppland and Södermanland. From these provinces, the Battleaxe culture subsequently spread to southern and western Sweden and to Norway, according to Åsa Larsson’s theory.

  Her conclusions are based mainly on the appearance of the ceramics and the burials of this culture. Within the Corded Ware culture, there are considerable similarities between Ukraine and the Netherlands. But there are also some regional differences. Corded Ware people everywhere had strict rules on how the bodies of men, women and children were to be positioned in their graves: on which side they were to be laid, in which direction the head was to face, and where battleaxes and terracotta vessels were to be placed. However, these strict rules varied somewhat from place to place. Similarly, there were subtle variations in their pottery.

  Corded Ware pottery differed in several respects from that of earlier cultures. The pattern, embossed with twined cords, was new, and it was applied in a very uniform fashion. The most common type of vessels, by a long way, were small hemispherical cups.

  Another typical feature was that the Corded Ware people mixed clay with crushed fragments of pottery from older pots. Mixing clay with hard material is known as adulteration, and potters have used different types of material for this purpose almost since the birth of ceramics: sand, grit, crushed seashells, chaff and so on. Incorporating crushed pottery, however, is a typical feature of the Corded Ware/Battleaxe culture.

  Researchers in Finland with whom Åsa Larsson collaborates have shown that Finnish pots from the Battleaxe period sometimes contained crushed pottery from Sweden. And the same applies in reverse; there are Swedish ceramics incorporating fragments of pottery from Finland. Such pottery, made of clay from Sweden mixed with pottery fragments from Finland, has been found as far south as the area around Kristianstad. Åsa Larsson believes the Corded Ware people saw a deeper meaning in mixing crushed fragments of old pots into new ones. This was a way of making links with older and dead kinsmen and of imbuing ceramic vessels with eternal life.

  To be nitpicking, Åsa Larsson has relatively little support for her view that it was women who produced the terracotta vessels of the Battleaxe culture and migrated over the Baltic Sea. She, however, thinks this was the case, partly because women are the main potters in contemporary cultures that anthropologists have studied.

  A number of researchers, including Marija Gimbutas, have claimed that the early Indo-European cultures of the steppes were strongly male-dominated societies. Finds from the eastern regions of the steppe support this view; the finest graves belong almost exclusively to men. By contrast, the burials of the Swedish Battleaxe culture show no difference in status between the sexes. Both were given grave goods in the form of terracotta vessels, bone and stone tools, and haunches of roast venison and mutton.

  The big difference seems to be that only men and boys were buried with battleaxes. Men were accompanied by large, beautifully polished axes and small boys by miniature versions. Women, on the other hand, seem to have been given jewellery such as amber rings and beads, and, in a few cases, copper bracelets and beads.

  ***

  Kristian Kristiansen is Danish but works as a professor of archaeology in Gothenburg. At least four other archaeologists warned me about him. ‘He has a very broad-brush approach,’ is the most diplomatic comment. ‘He has his theses which he wants to try and prove,’ says one. ‘He was good when he was younger, but now he’s lost himself in Vedic scripts,’ claims another.

  I read a series of articles and a substantial book by Kristiansen before going to Gothenburg to interview him. The comment on his broad-brush approach turns out to be true; he seeks to discern patterns across millennia and extensive geographical areas. In other respects, however, I think his peers’ judgements are unfair. Kristiansen is exceptionally well read. I find him less dogmatic than many other archaeologists I have met as regards his views on both migrations through history and DNA. And I like the fact that he does not speak ill of his competitors – unlike many of them. The most critical remark he makes is that some of his peers ‘have a very local perspective’.

  Like Lars Larsson, Kristiansen thinks the Battleaxe culture was associated to some extent with immigration, but that the immigration was limited in scale. The immigrants nonetheless became very important through their networks with similar Corded Ware cultures elsewhere in Europe. The people who arrived with the battleaxes brought with them new deities, new rites, new tales and songs, and a new relationship with property, inheritance and rights – in short, an entirely new social structure.

  The people of the Battleaxe culture came to Sweden by water, and they may have arrived from different directions. Åsa Larsson may be right; some may have come from Finland and the Baltic countries. But others came from the south, from Poland, Germany and Denmark. Kristiansen believes that an Indo-European language arrived in Sweden at around that time and that it was probably an early form of Gothic. Mastery of that language was part and parcel of belonging to the new network.

  Personally, I would like to leave open the question of whether this language was Gothic. After all, we are talking about a period almost 5,000 years ago, and the oldest samples of Gothic are only about 2,000 years old.

  The pattern was far clearer in Jutland, says Kristiansen. Pollen analyses conducted there show a dramatic change in the landscape that started about 4,800 years ago. In the course of only a century or so, large quantities of trees disappeared and were replaced by open grassland – exactly what you would expect when an expansive pastoralist culture becomes prevalent.

  The burials typical of this culture emerged during the same period. The Danes call their local variant of the Battleaxe culture the ‘Single Grave culture’. The name is based on the obvious difference between burials belonging to this culture and those of the earlier farming culture, in which the same burial chamber was used for a group of people. Graves belonging to the Corded Ware/Single Grave culture mostly held just one individual or at most a very few people. Researchers generally interpret this different burial pattern as signifying that individuals and their immediate family were starting to play a more important role, while the group and collective interests were declining in importance.

  Although Kristiansen is nearing pensionable age, he is definitely not one of the band of older archaeologists who regard DNA technology with suspicion. In fact, he has applied for and been awarded a huge EU grant in cooperation with leading DNA researchers from Copenhagen.

  These researchers have analysed over 100 individuals from Europe and Asia. In June 2015 they published their results in Nature. The Danish–Swedish team confirms the picture drawn by their competitors in Boston a few months previously: about 4,800 years ago, a substantial wave of immigration reached central Europe from the Russian steppes. With it came a whole new culture and, almost certainly, Indo-European languages. Pastoralists from the Yamnaya culture of the
steppes migrated both westward and eastward, even reaching China. This was followed somewhat later by southward migrations that dispersed Indo-European languages to India, Afghanistan and Iran.

  The Boston team and their competitors from Gothenburg and Copenhagen have reached exactly the same conclusion: European prehistory can be summarised in terms of three substantial waves of immigration.

  The Danish–Swedish team has also been able to provide information about the Battleaxe culture, the subject of disputes between archaeologists for many decades. The 100-odd individuals whose DNA they analysed include several from Sweden, one of whom was a man buried about 4,500 years ago in a Battleaxe culture grave in Viby, near Kristianstad.

  This man has genetic traits resembling those of people from the Yamnaya culture. His DNA shows he originated from the steppes of eastern Europe, just like the Corded Ware people of Poland and Germany. His Y chromosomes belong to haplogroup R1a. The material also includes a slightly more recent member of the Battleaxe culture from Lilla Beddinge near Trelleborg. He, too, shows strong Yamnaya genetic traits and belongs to haplogroup R1b.

  This means the legendary archaeologist Mats Malmer was mistaken. DNA researchers have finally settled the old controversy that divided Swedish archaeologists for so long.

  It is now clear that immigrants brought the Battleaxe culture to Sweden. There may not have been large numbers of incomers initially, but they played a decisive role in the fundamental social changes that began to take place. With their common origin, culture and language, they were able to maintain networks extending over vast distances.

  It is unclear whether the first Battleaxe people in Sweden actually brought horses with them. Only a few horse bones have been found, and it has not been established that they belonged to domesticated horses. The knowledge we have today means the old image of hordes of violent men riding into Sweden with their battleaxes at the ready needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt.