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7/17/2025, 9:45:43 AM
>9) Digs at the Indus Valley site Rakhigarhi, from where the woman's skeletal remains were discovered show an archaeological continuity. No signs of destruction. Is it possible to have a shift in a population and even possibly a change in civilisation without a disruption in material culture? Have you see that happen elsewhere?
>This is entirely possible. We discuss this explicitly in our paper by making an analogy to a major and slightly earlier cultural and genetic transformation in western Europe, where we know more accurately what happened because of a richer ancient DNA record
>“If the spread of people from the Steppe in this period was a conduit for the spread of South Asian Indo-European languages, then it is striking that there are so few material culture similarities between the Central Steppe and South Asia in the Middle to Late Bronze Age (i.e., after the middle of the second millennium BCE). Indeed, the material culture differences are so substantial that some archaeologists report no evidence of a connection. However, lack of material culture connections does not provide evidence against spread of genes, as has been demonstrated in the case of the Beaker Complex, which originated largely in western Europe but in Central Europe was associated with skeletons that harbored ~50% ancestry related to Yamnaya Steppe pastoralists (18). Thus, in Europe we have an unambiguous example of people with ancestry from the Steppe making profound demographic impacts on the regions into which they spread while adopting important aspects of local material culture. Our findings document a similar phenomenon in South Asia, with the locally acculturated population harboring up to ~20% Western_Steppe_EMBA–derived ancestry according to our modeling (via the up to ~30% ancestry contributed by Central_Steppe_MLBA groups)”
>This is entirely possible. We discuss this explicitly in our paper by making an analogy to a major and slightly earlier cultural and genetic transformation in western Europe, where we know more accurately what happened because of a richer ancient DNA record
>“If the spread of people from the Steppe in this period was a conduit for the spread of South Asian Indo-European languages, then it is striking that there are so few material culture similarities between the Central Steppe and South Asia in the Middle to Late Bronze Age (i.e., after the middle of the second millennium BCE). Indeed, the material culture differences are so substantial that some archaeologists report no evidence of a connection. However, lack of material culture connections does not provide evidence against spread of genes, as has been demonstrated in the case of the Beaker Complex, which originated largely in western Europe but in Central Europe was associated with skeletons that harbored ~50% ancestry related to Yamnaya Steppe pastoralists (18). Thus, in Europe we have an unambiguous example of people with ancestry from the Steppe making profound demographic impacts on the regions into which they spread while adopting important aspects of local material culture. Our findings document a similar phenomenon in South Asia, with the locally acculturated population harboring up to ~20% Western_Steppe_EMBA–derived ancestry according to our modeling (via the up to ~30% ancestry contributed by Central_Steppe_MLBA groups)”
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