Yamnaya: Faces of the Indo-Europeans - Bilingual Subtitles
About 46%
of the world's population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language,
and the majority of humans on Earth can speak at least one Indo-European language, such as English, Spanish, or Hindi.
These languages all come from proto-Indo-European speakers of the Yamnaya and corded were cultures.
The Yamnaya people were indigenous to the Eastern European steppe during the Neolithic and early Bronze Age.
Using their skulls and the latest genetic data about their appearance,
the 3D artist Robert Molyneux was able to create realistic reconstructions of Yamnaya people for this video.
So at last, we can get a good idea of what they looked like.
But before we look at those, let's talk about who the Yamnaya were.
And what does Yamnayan mean anyway?
The name Yamnaya was given to them by archaeologists, and simply means related to pits.
Because these people buried their dead in pits,
sometimes with stairs leading down into them, and usually with an enormous barrow, also known as a Kurugan, erected on top of them.
The dead and the pits are sometimes sprinkled with red ochre,
such that the Yamnai culture is also called the late ochre grave culture, and they're typically oriented west-east.
lying on their backs with their knees raised, although later on, their dead were sometimes buried on their sides.
The high status males are often accompanied by weapons such as stone axes and bronze Bronze weapons would have been elite status symbols.
A stone was still widely used for many tools and weapons.
While the first iron smelting is generally associated with Hittite Anatolia from as early as 2000 BC, maybe.
There were actually experimental examples of smelted iron blades and pins from the early Bronze Age step centuries earlier.
This Yamnaya blacksmiths were pioneering innovators and that their historical significance is undervalued.
Some of the Barrow burials were accompanied by stone's deli, which give us some insight into the way these people looked.
They are depicted with multiple weapons in their belts,
or with shepherd's crooks,
sometimes wearing tunics and sandals, other times naked, except for a belt, and shaping their beards into points, just as the Vikings did.
At least 300 steel I have been found in Yamnaya and Katko.
in the North Pontic steps, usually reused as grave pit covers.
It is impossible to say whether the stelei represent gods or ancestors, or whether these people even thought that distinction was meaningful.
The stelei tradition continued on the steps among iron-aid stelei.
Scythians and medieval Turkic cords for long time afterwards.
The grave fields of Yamnai Barrows are mainly found in the river valleys,
while Barrows in the open step are less common, and date to a later period.
perhaps when attitudes to the step were changing and the Amna'i people sought to claim portions
of it using the Barrow as a territorial marker.
The Barrow so typifies the Amna'i people that some call them the Kurugan people.
a convention established by Maria Gimbutas, and Kurugan means Barrow.
The Barrows spread with Indo-European languages,
such that ancient Greeks, Celts, Vikings, Slavs, Anglo Scythians and others preserved the custom for thousands of years after the Yamnaya.
Archaeologist Arlin Frinculeza wrote that the Yamnaya Barrow seems a monument and at the
same time a representation of the ideological power of this intrusive group.
The establishment of lineage could ensure the passage in time and space of the unity of tradition and the relevance of ideology.
At the top of the social pyramid stood a male figure symbolically endowed with the power of representing the continuity, stability, cohesion unity of society.
The homogeneity of this funerary phenomenon was visible for more than half a millennium
and preserved the same coordinates until the end of the evolution of this tradition.
We can assume that heredity, the the heredity, was an important landmark in the Yamnaya society.
The culture was preceded by other archeologically and genetically similar ones,
such as Srebny Stok, Repin culture around the Don, and further to the north, toward the Middle Volga, the Falensk culture.
The skulls of people around the Volga, in the late Stone Age, are very robust.
If anyone has a skull like this today, then you had better hope he is in prison, because he is likely a dangerous man.
Yamnara skeletons are not quite...
robustly built, nor their skulls typified, by such robust features, but they are still pretty robust.
Look at the chin on this Yamnaya guy's skull.
He almost reminds me of Giga Chad.
The Yamnaya spread rapidly across the Pontic Caspian steps between about 3400 and Then,
from 3000 BC to 2500 BC, it pushed westward into Romania and Hungary.
David Antony,
a renowned expert on Indo-Europeans,
notes that Yamnaya's settlements are limited to the region west of the Don River in Ukraine,
but the eastern Yamnaya territories,
east of the Don in South Russia,
are devoid of settlements, and that this is most likely because the eastern Yamnaya were more nomadic, living out of wagons and tents.
The Yamnaya expanded northeastward up the Volga,
and also west towards the Carpathians,
and the area north of the Danube in modern Romania, as far as Transylvania, and even into the plains of Hungary.
Despite being genetically very homogeneous,
the skull type varies among Yamnaya people,
with northeastern Yamnaya towards the Volga exhibiting Dolica syphallic skulls, while Yamnaya neuro to the The sea are brachycephalic, meaning they have rounder skulls.
Males and females are typified by straight forests, broad faces, prominent nasal bones and straight jaws.
The males have prominent brow ridges.
The East-West divide among Yamnai peoples is evident not only in their skulls,
but also in the impressions of cultivated grain found in western Yamnai pottery, which are absent in eastern Yamnai pottery.
Those in the West had stronger contacts with their semi-urbanised neighbours of the Neolithic
cucutanic trapelya culture and so grain formed the larger part of their diet.
While Eastern Yamnaya remained less civilised and maintained contacts with forager peoples in Russia.
The massive skull type of Yamnaya males is not typical of any people alive today.
But is most common in Northern Europe where levels of Yamnaya admixture are higher and height correlates with increased Yamnaya ancestry among Europeans.
However, the average male Yamnai height varied from 170 to 177 centimeters, which isn't that tall today.
But was tall for especially compared to contemporary farmers of Western Europe.
However, at least some of the Yamnaya were a lot taller.
A male Yamnaya skeleton found in a barrow in the village of Vittrino in Bulgaria been dubbed Hercules by the locals.
Judging by femur length, they can be certain he was at least 190cm tall, and possibly taller.
A new study this year looked at the DNA of Estonian people and found that the genomes
of taller individuals tend to be more similar to Yamnaya.
They also found that Yamnaya ancestry correlated and is linked to higher rates of cholesterol and stronger bodies, and larger hip and waist circumference.
Yamnai DNA was also linked to dark hair and eye colour in modern Estonians and by inference other Northern Europeans,
and also with lower rates of caffeine consumption.
reveals that Yamnaya people were light-skinned, like Europeans, but were darker than the average northern Europeans today.
The 2017 study by Hayde showed that Yamnaya inherited the allele associated with blonde hair from their ancient North Eurasian ancestors.
blue eyes inherited from western hunter-gatherers.
However, all of the Yamnaya skeletons tested are predicted to have brown or black
hair, and most have brown eyes, suggesting that blue eyes and blonde hair were both rare among them.
But over the course of the Bronze Age,
Yamnai descended people's underwent selection pressure that favoured lighter skin and higher rates of blonde hair and blue eyes,
meaning that these dormant genes were more commonly expressed by the late Bronze Age, even though they had been present.
Therefore, this why Europeans with lighter skin and blonde hair are likely to have
more Yamnaya DNA than darker Europeans, even though the Yamnaya themselves were less fair.
This first reconstruction is of a Yamnai male, interred in the lower Volga region, in the Eastern Yamnai territories.
His features are also notably robust, particularly his chin and brow, but his skull is long, typical of the Dolica Sephalic Eastern Yamnai type.
The artist Robert Molinin used photos of the skull to create a 3D model of it to work from.
Then, following the revised Karazimov method described by Ulrich and Stefan, he was able to calculate precise flesh thickness around each part of the skull.
skin, referring to genetic data on the most plausible complexion of the Amnaya people.
We have reconstructed him with brown eyes and dark hair,
which is statistically likely for people, although we don't have his personal DNA to check what colour hair he specifically had.
His beard is pointed, just like the steel eye, and his skin tone is at the darker end of the European spectrum.
Compare him to this more Western man from Novo-Alexivka near the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine.
He is more brachycephalic than the Volga man, but actually there are much rounder Western yam nascos in this one.
We depicted him with silver hair coils,
as these are found in numerous Yamnai burials, although we cannot know for sure how they were really worn.
This map shows the amount of Yamnaya admixture present in modern populations.
It is highest in the parts of northern and eastern Europe,
which were less densely populated when Yamnaya related peoples,
known by geneticists as western steppe herders, spread across the continent between 5,000 and 4,200 years ago.
The southern regions were also impacted by invasions of Yamnaya related peoples,
such as the catacomb culture and the bell beaker folk,
but the population was not as extreme as it was in places like Britain,
where it resulted in over 90% of the population being replaced by Belbica folk from Holland.
David Antony wrote that the rapid spread of Yamnai peoples suggests a competitive advantage and an aggressive exploitation of it.
studies, give us hints at what these advantages were.
We have already established that they were taller than their neighbors in the West, but they also seem to have been more war-like.
Neolithic Europeans had stone axes and stone-tipped arrows and are known to have slors at each other, so they were no pacifists.
But the presence of weapons in Yamnai burials,
some of them made from state-of-the-art bronze,
hints that perhaps these were a particularly war-like people, even more so than Neolithic Europeans.
In Euler, Germany, a mass grave of late Neolithic globula and foreign people was born.
found, who it is presumed were massacred by the Yamnai related corded wear invaders of the time.
decent quality.
Europeans may not be entirely down to sheer force of violence.
A study by Berence and colleagues in 2017 entitled The Genomic Health of Ancient hominins claimed
that ancient pastoralists may have had healthier genomes than hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists.
They found that in general, pastoralists possess extremely healthy genomes, especially for cancers and immune-related periodontal and gastrointestinal diseases.
Back in 2015,
Garnier and colleagues used linguistic evidence to argue that Yamnaya Indo-Europeans were among the first people with the ability to digest raw milk in their adult lives.
This was argued just on the basis of words for milk and milk products in Indo-European vocabulary.
If correct,
this would give them an edge over other people since they benefit from the highly nutritious fats and proteins of milk without having to process it into cheese like
others had to in order to digest it.
This theory was somewhat vindicated in a 2020 genetic study by Sarg and colleagues which showed that about a quarter of tested,
had the genes for lactase persistence, which would make them lactose tolerant in adulthood.
These genes became much more common over the Bronze Age, through a process of selection which also resulted in lighter skin and hair.
there.
Even if only a quarter of Yamnai men could drink raw milk,
that would still bestow an advantage, and may have contributed to their tall, strong bodies.
Hot Off the Press,
a new study by Wilkin and colleagues published in September 2021 has analysed protein on the teeth of Yamnaya and other steppe peoples to determine their diet.
The oldest samples dated from 4,600 to 4,000 BC and came from five Neolithic sites in South Western Russia,
some associated with the Kvalensk culture.
Of the 11 which yielded results, none are confirmed.
But 15 of the 16 early Bronze Age Yamnai Horizon samples were yielded results,
were found to consume dairy, and two of these specifically consumed horse milk.
This not only proves the Yamnai diet was high in dairy, but also proved they domesticated horse milk.
This lends weight to the theory that they also rode their horses since they got much more milk from cows and didn't need horses just for milk.
The results point to a potential epicenter for horse domestication in the Pontic-Caspian steppe by the 3rd millennium BC.
And also shows that Yamnaya were the specific steppe culture which instigated the tradition of consuming dairy.
Archaeological evidence indicates they had a diet of beef,
mutton, siger venison, horsemeat, pork, fish which they caught in the rivers of the valleys,
yogurt, butter, cheese and soups made from wild chonopodium seeds and wild greens.
Structured Proto-Indo-European vocabulary tells us that honey and honey-based need were also consumed,
probably on special occasions,
and some of their pots and beakers were likely used in ceremonial mead-drinking rituals, the sort we see in other later Indo-European cultures.
The of Yamnai pots shows that most have no trace of grains,
and the Yamnai teeth are usually free of tooth decay, which occurs when people eat starchy and grain-based diets.
However, some, particularly in the West, did rely a bit on grains like millet.
The Yamnai were very strong and healthy because their diet was similar to that of hunter-gatherers,
except for the fact it was so high in dairy.
So high, in fact, that some Yamnai children from the Middle Volga area were in need.
likely due to excessive dairy consumption, which can block iron absorption.
But this was not so widespread as to have changed the fact that they were generally
a very big and strong race compared to their neighbours to the west and to the south.
It has been argued by some scientists.
tests, that Yamnaya carried some immunity to the plague virus, which they carried into Neolithic Western and Northern Europe, devastating the indigenous populations.
This was based on a 2015 study which found that the earliest version of the plague virus,
which later devastated Europe in the medieval era,
and before that during the reign of Justinian in Roman times, was first present in the Yamnaya people.
However, in 2018, a paper titled, Emergence and Spread of Basil Lineages of Yersinia pestis
during the Neolithic Decline,
reported the discovery of an earlier lineage of the plague,
present in the Neolithic funnel-beaker culture of Sweden, predating the arrival of steppe herder D&M.
The authors,
Rasmussen and Raskovin,
proposed that this early strain may have contributed to a neolithic collapse,
the first ever pandemic, which they alleged facilitated the rise of the Yamnaya later on, who themselves brought a second variant of plague.
which we assume the natives were not as resistant to, thus helping Yamnai people to dominate.
This year, another paper has found an even older strain of plague in a hunter-gatherer from Latvia.
I personally think that the role of plague in the spread of steppered DNA is exaggerated and lacks evidence.
Another advantage that can explain the success of Yamnai people was their mobility.
The weather on the steps became warmer and drier at the end of the anyolithic, between 5,000 and 5,500 years ago.
And this may have contributed to the shift to trans-humans among the sheep-herding pastoralists of the region.
The Yamnaya people became more using wagons to move their homes with the seasons and drive their sheep and cattle to seasonal pastures,
driving their herds on the open step in summer and frequently moving them around during the winter, often through the sheltered and forested river valleys.
Antony writes The behaviour that really set the Yamnai people apart was living on wheels.
Their new economy took advantage of two kinds of mobility –
wagons for slow bulk transport, water, shelter and food, and horseback riding for rapid light transport, scouting for pastures, herding, trading and raiding expeditions.
Together, they greatly increased the potential scale of herding economies.
David Antony has essentially argued that Yamnai people invented and pioneered this way of life.
Reconstructed linguistics show that Proto-Indo-Europeans had words for horses and wheels.
and the Yamnai archaeology confirms that they did have access to both, but they didn't invent wheels or wagons.
The oldest image of a wagon is on a clay cup, securely dated to 3500 to 3300 BC from Bronachica in southern Poland.
And the oldest wheel ever found was in the Loblania marshes in Slovenia,
dated to approximately In which case, Yamnaya took this technology from their neighbours to the west.
However, many insist, despite lack of evidence, that Middle Eastern people surely invented wheels and wagons even earlier.
In which case, Yamnaya could have learned the technology from someone to their south, most likely the Mycop people.
The largest concentration of yamnaa wagon burials is in the region adjacent to the steppe mikop culture.
So there is the In any case, the Wheel and Wagon were both essential to the Yamnai culture.
Not only for practical purposes like moving their tents and belongings, but also as part of their funerary customs.
Wagon burials are found in all Yamnai territories,
but among the furthest western Yamnai near the Danube, the customs seem to have been associated mainly with female graves.
The oldest excavated wagon graves in the steppes are radiocarbonized.
3,100 to 3,000 BC, but it is unlikely they were the first wagons on the step.
Wagons were likely on the step before a wagon-dependent Yamnaya culture ever developed.
The wagons were not necessarily drawn by horses either.
People in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
East, who used wagons at that time, and earlier than Yamnai did, drew them with oxen, but
the Yamnaya were among the first people in the world to write domestic horses.
It was previously believed that the Batai people in Kazakhstan were the first to domesticate horses.
But DNA evidence shows that their horses became the modern Cravalski's horse breed, which wild in Mongolia today.
A new paper by Taylor and Ortiz says that there is no solid evidence that Batai ever domesticated their horses.
All modern horse breeds take only about 2%
of their DNA from batai horses,
and descend mainly from another group of domesticated horses, which in all probability are related to those of the Yamnaya.
Now when we get to later cultures in the Bronze Age,
the and Sintashta,
the advantage might well have been considerably greater,
but it might have been much heavier equestrian use of horses,
allowing them meditation, better trade, but also considerable military advantage over other people, allowing those cultures to spread.
And we know that both those cultures did major spreading, so it could have aided them in their conquest of other areas.
They were quite clearly seen by those people as something of a status symbol,
particularly in the later cultures, the horses are often buried in graves illustrating that they were a high status thing to have.
So if you start combining military prowess,
warrior peoples with that, you can see how that develops into a completely different sort of culture that is engaged in conquest.
And it may well have helped them spread their form of technology and language, et cetera, around.
The whole question of the status of the horse with the Yamnaya is actually not completely clear.
There is no question that the Yamnaya had some horses in their formal assembly.
but there's actually not such good evidence as to exactly how they were used.
So what do we know?
We know the Amnaya had wheeled vehicles.
They weren't chariots.
They were heavier solid wheeled carts.
Those carts could have been pulled by horses, but could equally have been pulled by oxen.
We very much suspect the horses in the Amnaya are domestic horses.
ones because of the way they appear in the assemblages and they might well have been used in assisting them in herding and transport.
But it is much less obvious in Yamnaya at the current level of research as to exactly what the role of the mean.
we equally don't know much about the genetics yet of Yamnaya horses and we will do very shortly
I mean within a year probably less than that within months we'll know a lot more about the genetics of Yamnaya horses.
So it's not entirely clear to what extent the horses were spread by the Yamnaya or by Bronze Age peoples following them in terms of their interaction with
European horses.
But that is something we will know very shortly.
I recently made a video about the importance of horse sacrifices in Indo-European cultures,
where they generally seem to relate to the cult of the king.
This custom undoubtedly originates in the Yamnaya culture.
A yamnaa baro near Tsatsa south of the Volga contained a horse skull, likely from a sacrifice.
A neighboring baro in the same cemetery,
dating to 2500 BC, the time of the Catacomb culture, just after the yamnaa period, contained 40 horse skulls, neatly arranged in two rows.
40 horse would provide enough meat to serve 4,000 portions of horse meat.
So we can imagine an enormous funeral event with a very bloody sacrificial scene and thousands
of people in attendance enjoying the meat in the company of their gods and their honoured dead.
But how would wagons and horses have helped Western step herders to spread into the forested regions of northern and western Europe?
Forests are not very good for pastoralists.
A 2020 study by Erasimo and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen and the University of
Plymouth determined that the arrival of steppe pastoralists at the end of the Neolithic was
associated with even more deforestation than the arrival of the Anatolian farmers when they brought farming to Europe at the start of the Neolithic.
This is surprising since comparative mythology proves the Indo-Europeans considered some trees, such as the oak, to be sacred.
But even so, they needed to graze their vast herds of cattle, and for that they needed grasslands.
The herds required even more land than the wheat.
fields of the Neolithic Europeans, since the pastoralists needed both summer and winter pastures.
The scientists in Devon and Denmark were able to demonstrate how this deforestation with the spread of steppe herder DNA,
associated first with the Yamnaya and later with the corded wear culture.
These pastoralists turned fast swathes of broadly forests into a landscape which resembled their original home on the steppes.
The Jutland Peninsula in Denmark remained mostly treeless since the but was once covered in forests.
The initial expansion of Yamnai and Kordid where people might therefore be explained partly by the need for more pasture land,
but later expansion of the related bellbeaker people is more plausibly explained by an ambition
to acquire control of the tin mines in Britain and Iberia.
Male lineages can be detected and traced genetically through the Y haplogroup.
And the haplogroup phylogenies of the Yamnaya people indicate they had patrilineal social organizations.
The main haplogroup among them is overwhelmingly R1BZ2103.
R1B haplogroups today are mainly associated with Western and Northwest.
although people in these regions carried different subclades from the Yamnaya and
these different subclades of R1B were brought to the west of Europe by Yamnaya related peoples
And we know they were related to the Yamnai people because of their autosomal DNA,
even though their sub-clade has not yet been found among Yamnai skeletons.
The vocabulary for kin-relations in reconstructed proto-Indo-European also supports what the haplogroups show,
that they lived in a patrilineal, patrilocal social world in which rights, possessions and responsibilities were inherited from the father.
families to be with the families of their husbands.
Related kinship terms referring to grandfather,
father, brother and husband's brother survive in nearly all Indo-European languages, but the equivalent terms for the wife's family
are less certain and more variable.
Our archaeological evidence of Yamnai people is mainly limited to the high status individuals who were buried in the Barrows.
This might somewhat distort our idea of them as a people, but the Barrows don't always just contain one man.
Frequently, there is one person in a central burial, and few other adults and children are buried adjacent to them.
Children never take the central place in a barrow, but women sometimes do.
Which shows that despite having a patriarchal war certain women held high and respected positions in Yamna society.
The prominence of women in Barrows varies regionally.
In the lower and the middle Volga regions,
80% of the Yamna graves contained males, suggesting a more patriarchal regional culture for the Volga Ur region.
In Ukraine, males also predominated, but not as strongly.
While in the region north of the Caucasus adjacent to the Mycop culture,
men and women are nearly equally represented in the central graves of Barrows as well as in Barrows in general.
Perhaps, this is due to the influence of a less patriarchal mycop society in the Caucasus.
It is worth noting though that even in the Volga region, the central graves in Barrows were not always occupied by men.
So even in the most grug-like Yamnaya territories, they knew how to respect women.
Since at least 2015, genetic evidence has conclusively proven the step hypothesis to be correct.
At least insofar as the step is the source of the majority of Indo-European languages in Europe and Asia throughout history.
However, Sir Colin Renfrew's Anatolian origin hypothesis, which he himself has abandoned,
lingers on in a new form among the very geneticists who disproved his theory.
The debate now centers on the origin of the Yamnaya themselves,
since it is widely agreed they did speak at least a late form of Proto-Indo-European.
As a group,
they are extremely homogeneous,
even across vast distances,
such that Yamnaya related peoples in Slovenia share recent ancestors with orthosomally similar people
of the Athanasievo culture all the way in the Altai 4,000 odd miles to the east.
So they were not prone to mixing.
However, their genetic profile can be modeled as a two-way mixture event between indigenous hunter-gatherers from
the Volga region known as Eastern hunter-gatherers or EHG and another
population from who were related to people from the Caucasus and are thus named Caucasian hunter-gatherers or CHG.
But where did the CHG signal in Yamnaya people come from?
The paternal lineages of Yamnaya related peoples can be attributed without controversy to the EHG people, who can be identified.
as a people who lived near or on the steps in the mesolithic,
but the origin of the CHG-related signal is yet to be conclusively proven.
Top genetic scientists at Harvard and others associated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig
have argued in various ways that the CHG signal comes from the south of the A paper by Lazaridis and colleagues,
published in 2016,
associated the signal with Neolithic farmers from what is now Iran,
while a 2019 paper by Wang and colleagues is certainly claimed,
in the preprint,
that the source of CHG-like DNA in Yamnaya was the Mycop culture,
which would make the Mycop the original Proto-Indo-Europeans, but this controversial idea is by no means universally accepted.
There are problems with these ideas.
The CHD signal in Yamna is more closely related to hunter-gatherers from what is now Georgia and to Iranian Neolithic farmers, which makes sense.
Why Neolithic Middle Easterners cross the mountains to live with hunter-gatherers on the harsh depths of Russia,
and then interbreed with them, but leave no male lineages?
Professor David Antony who is himself now part of the Harvard team working on the David Reich,
appeared on Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning Podcast this year, and some light on the issue.
are, surprisingly homogeneous genetically, which means that they've gone through a bottleneck.
There is a bottleneck at the origin of the omnia, or before the origin of the omnia, that we have to explain.
And you see the same...
formula with EHD and CHG in these populations with a climb that goes from
more CHG in the south to less CHG in the north and then once you get into the
forest zone you're into pure EHD with no CHG at all.
Follings is the largest cemetery of the pre-Honnaiya era in this eastern And it has everything except the added ancestry from European farmers.
It's just pure EHG and CHG.
And you can see these two components coming together from the north and the south.
The-umni population was.
Add mixing as a process between a northern forest derived population coming down these ribbon-like
river valleys and a southern derived population that we actually don't have the origin of yet.
A pure CHG population, we have not found in the steps, but they have gotten into the steps from the caucus this before 6500.
because after that date was a long time before Jan Naya,
because after that date,
the populations in the Caucasus were admixed with Anatolian farmers from western Anatolia,
and the populations in the steppes don't have any Anatolian farmers at all.
So this pure CHG had to have left.
the caucuses that admixture with Anatolian farmers happened.
And that had to have been before 6,500 BC.
By 6,000 BC, people in Western Iran and the caucuses and Anatolia are completely admixed with Anatolian farmer and the CH2.
and up in the steps you just get the CHG by itself mixing with EHG.
Where does the mix happen and when does it happen?
If it happens,
And I think I took this from your your discussion with David Anthony
that believes that it looks likely how to happen very early at around you know 6,000 BC or something like that.
That is I think sufficiently early that it would put the entire homeland somehow north of the Black Sea.
We now know that the CHG-like component was on the steps and up the vulgar long before Yamnai culture appears,
as early as 8,000 years ago.
And that it can't have come from any Neolithic population south of the mountains because those populations all had Anatolian DNA,
which is absent from the early Yamnai people.
David Antony doesn't say it here,
but this so-called CHG signal likely originates in the northern part of the Caucasus or on the steppe itself,
and in any case was likely in the steppe before the Neolithic even started,
when it was still all just hunter-gatherers, and therefore the earliest who were pastoralists must have lived on the steps.
I should also specify that Yamnaya and also even earlier step peoples were not just EHG and CHG,
but they also had admixture from Western European hunter-gatherers,
WHG, as well as from Neolithic European farmers, but these genetic signals seem to enter the sept gene pool
after the CHG and EHG mixing event.
You can learn more about Mesolithic European hunter gatherers like Cheddar Man in my video on that subject.
In conclusion, if a Yamnai person was walking in my down the street today, providing he was dressed in modern clothes.
He wouldn't actually stand out from the crowd much.
He would look like a well-built white man.
Phenotype is inherited from one's ancestors, but selective pressure over time can change the way people look without influence from foreign populations.
Hence, the people with the most Yamnai DNA alive today have fairer skin than Yamnai people.
Besides our looks,
the main thing modern people have taken from the Indo-European steppe herders is their language,
which like their looks, has also changed over time, evolving into languages like the one I'm speaking now, English.
A quick thank you to the artists who contributed work for this video.
Besides the incredible facial reconstructions by Robert Molinue,
there were also these two beautiful paintings by Christian Sloan Hall,
one depicting a Yamnaya man and woman at sunset, their horses, and the other the painting a fierce Yamnaya warrior.
I hard with him to get the weapons, hair and clothing right for these images.
The warrior is available on a range of garments in my store.
A 3D model of Christian's Yamnaya warrior was also created by Roy Douglas, adding another dimension to this character.
The Twitter artist known as Grahman created this artwork of a Yamnaya burial.
And the Ukrainian artist, Valentin Kalontai, created this art of the famous Karunasovsky Yamnaya Idol, which is also available on shirts in my spring shop.
See the links below the video.
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But the biggest history broadcasting in a time where lies and propaganda abound.
Unlock More Features
Install the Trancy extension to unlock more features, including AI subtitles, AI word definitions, AI grammar analysis, AI speaking, etc.
Compatible with Major Video Platforms
Trancy not only provides bilingual subtitle support for platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Udemy, Disney+, TED, edX, Kehan, Coursera, but also offers AI word/sentence translation, full-text immersive translation, and other features for regular web pages. It is a true all-in-one language learning assistant.
Supports All Platform Browsers
Trancy supports all platform browsers, including iOS Safari browser extension.
Multiple Viewing Modes
Supports theater, reading, mixed, and other viewing modes for a comprehensive bilingual experience.
Multiple Practice Modes
Supports sentence dictation, oral evaluation, multiple-choice, dictation, and other practice modes.
AI Video Summary
Use OpenAI to summarize videos and quickly grasp key content.
AI Subtitles
Generate accurate and fast YouTube AI subtitles in just 3-5 minutes.
AI Word Definitions
Tap on words in the subtitles to look up definitions, with AI-powered definitions.
AI Grammar Analysis
Analyze sentence grammar to quickly understand sentence meanings and master difficult grammar points.
More Web Features
In addition to bilingual video subtitles, Trancy also provides word translation and full-text translation for web pages.