Migratie is van alle tijden. Doch nieuwe inzichten in archeologie en DNA onderzoek brengen
verrassende inzichten in de grote en kleine West-Europese volksverhuizingen.
In onderstaand
artikel van Science gaat over de grote lijnen van drie invasies maar
in de werkelijkheid is er zo veel groot als klein gemigreerd dat volkeren
mengpopulaties zijn.
De oude verhalen
over ‘zuivere’ volkeren die stamtrouw bleven zal afgewisseld zijn in opgaan,
vergaan met invasieve culturen. Mogelijk zitten we nu weer in een tijd van
zuidelijke en zuidoostelijke menging. En passend in de oude bewegingsrichting
vanuit het zuidoosten.
En de oude
landsmythen worden ontkracht. Zeer
interessante feiten die in de nabije toekomst een geheel ander licht laten
schijnen op voorgeslachten!
En een kans om de
huidige invasie te bezien met historische blik.
Genetisch mengen is de oude oplossing.
Wie durft het aan
om het Friese volk als cultuurgroep eens onder ogen te nemen?
Daar zijn
historische feiten en mythische feiten als in het Oera Lindaboek.
Wie weet wat dat
brengt!
Nu het artikel
met een aantal van zijn belangrijkste alinea’s
“In fact, the German
people have no unique genetic heritage to protect. They—and all other
Europeans—are already a mishmash, the children of repeated ancient migrations,
according to scientists who study ancient human origins. New studies show that
almost all indigenous Europeans descend from at least three major migrations in
the past 15,000 years, including two from the Middle East. Those migrants swept
across Europe, mingled with previous immigrants, and then remixed to create the
peoples of today.
His team studied DNA from 51 Europeans and Asians who lived
7000 to 45,000 years ago. They found that most of the DNA in living Europeans
originated in three major migrations,
- starting with hunter-gatherers who came from the Middle East as the glaciers retreated 19,000 to 14,000 years ago.
- In a second migration about 9000 years ago, farmers from
northwestern Anatolia, in what is now Greece and Turkey, moved in.
That massive wave of farmers washed across the continent.
Ancient DNA records their arrival in Germany, where they are linked with the
Linear Pottery culture, 6900 to 7500 years ago. A 7000-year-old woman from
Stuttgart, Germany, for example, has the farmers' genetic signatures, setting
her apart from eight hunter-gatherers who lived just 1000 years earlier in
Luxembourg and Sweden. Among people living today, Sardinians retain the most
DNA from those early farmers, whose genes suggest that they had brown eyes and
dark hair.
The farmers moved in family groups and stuck to themselves
awhile before mixing with local hunter-gatherers, according to a study in 2015
that used ancient DNA to calculate the ratio of men to women in the farming
groups.
- That's a stark contrast to the third major migration, which began about 5000 years ago when herders swept in from the steppe north
of the Black Sea in what is now Russia. Those Yamnaya pastoralists herded
cattle and sheep, and some rode newly domesticated horses, says
archaeologist David Anthony of Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York (Science,
24 July 2015, p. 362).
In the journal Antiquity last month, Kristiansen and
paleogeneticist Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen reported that
the sex ratios of the earliest Yamnaya burials in central Europe suggest that
the new arrivals were mostly men. Arriving with few women, those tall strangers
were apparently eager to woo or abduct the local farmers' daughters. Not long
after the Yamnaya invasion, their skeletons were buried with those of women who
had lived on farms as children, according to the strontium and nitrogen
isotopes in their bones, says Price, who analyzed them.
The unions between the Yamnaya and the descendants of
Anatolian farmers catalyzed the creation of the famous Corded Ware culture,
known for its distinctive pottery impressed with cordlike patterns, Kristiansen
says. According to DNA analysis, those people may have inherited Yamnaya genes
that made them taller; they may also have had a then-rare mutation that enabled
them to digest lactose in milk, which quickly spread.
It was a winning combination. The Corded Ware people had
many offspring who spread rapidly across Europe. They were among the ancestors
of the Bell Beaker culture of central Europe, known by the vessels they used to
drink wine, according to a study by Kristiansen and Reich published this month.
“This big wave of Yamnaya migration washed all the way to the shores of
Ireland,” says population geneticist Dan Bradley of Trinity College in Dublin.
Bell Beaker pots and DNA appeared about 4000 years ago in burials on Rathlin
Island, off the coast of Northern Ireland, his group reported this year.
This new picture means that the Hermann of lore was himself
a composite of post–ice age
hunter-gatherers, Anatolian farmers, and Yamnaya herders. So are most other
Europeans—including the ancient Romans whose empire Arminius fought.
THE THREE-PART European mixture varies across the continent,
with different ratios of each migration and trace amounts of other lineages.
But those quirks rarely match the tales people tell about their ancestry. For
example, the Basques of northern Spain,
who have a distinct language, have long thought themselves a people apart. But
last year, population geneticist Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in
Sweden reported that the DNA of modern Basques is most like that of the ancient farmers who populated
northern Spain before the Yamnaya migration. In other words, Basques are
part of the usual European mix, although they carry less Yamnaya DNA than other
Europeans.
Farther north, the Irish
Book of Invasions, written by an anonymous author in the 11th century,
recounts that the “Sons of MÃl Espáine … after many wanderings in Scythia and
Egypt” eventually reached Spain and Ireland, creating a modern Irish people
distinct from the British—and linked to the Spanish. That telling resonates
with a later yarn about ships from the Spanish Armada, wrecked on the shores of
Ireland and the Scottish Orkney Islands in 1588, Bradley says: “Good-looking,
dark-haired Spaniards washed ashore” and had children with Gaelic and Orkney
Islands women, creating a strain of Black Irish with dark hair, eyes, and skin.
Although it's a great story, Bradley says, it “just didn't
happen.” In two studies, researchers have found only “a very small ancient
Spanish contribution” to British and Irish DNA, says human geneticist Walter
Bodmer of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, co-leader of a
landmark 2015 study of British genetics.
The Irish also cherish another origin story, of the Celtic
roots they are said to share with the Scots and Welsh. In the Celtic Revival of
the 19th and 20th centuries, writers such as William Butler Yeats drew from
stories in the Book of Invasions and medieval texts. Those writings described a
migration of Gaels, or groups of Celts from the mainland who clung to their
identity in the face of later waves of Roman, Germanic, and Nordic peoples.
But try as they might, researchers so far haven't found
anyone, living or dead, with a distinct Celtic genome. The ancient Celts got
their name from Greeks who used “Celt” as a label for barbarian outsiders—the
diverse Celtic-speaking tribes who, starting in the late Bronze Age, occupied
territory from Portugal to Turkey. “It's a hard question who the Celts are,”
says population geneticist Stephan Schiffels of the Max Planck Institute for
the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
Bodmer's team traced the ancestry of 2039 people whose
families have lived in the same parts of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales
since the 19th century. These people form at least nine genetic and geographic
clusters, showing that after their ancestors arrived in those regions, they put
down roots and married their neighbors. But the clusters themselves are of
diverse origin, with close ties to people now in Germany, Belgium, and France.
“‘Celtic’ is a cultural definition,” Bodmer says. “It has nothing to do with
hordes of people coming from somewhere else and replacing people.”
English myths fare no better. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
recounts that in 449 C.E., two Germanic tribespeople, Hengist and Horsa, sailed
from what is now the Netherlands to southeast England, starting a fierce
conflict. As more Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived, violence broke out with
the local Britons and ended in “rivers of blood,” according to accounts by
medieval monks. Scholars have debated just how bloody that invasion was, and
whether it was a mass migration or a small delegation of elite kings and their
warriors.
An answer came in 2016 from a study of the ancient DNA of
Anglo-Saxons and indigenous Britons, who were buried side by side in the fifth
and sixth centuries in a cemetery near Cambridge, U.K. They lived and died
together and even interbred, as shown by one person who had a mix of DNA from
both Britons and Anglo-Saxons, and a genetic Briton who was buried with a large
cruciform Anglo-Saxon brooch. Although the stories stress violence, the groups
“were mixing very quickly,” says Duncan Sayer, an archaeologist at the
University of Central Lancashire in Preston, U.K., who co-wrote the study.
The team went on to show that 25% to 40% of the ancestry of
modern Britons is Anglo-Saxon. Even people in Wales and Scotland—thought to be
Celtic strongholds—get about 30% of their DNA from Anglo-Saxons, says co-author
Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust's Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K.
“Ethnic groups in the past and present create an
‘imagined past’ of the longtime and ‘pure’ origins of their group,” Maeir
says. But that created past often has “little true relation to the historical
processes” that actually created the group, he says.”
Hele artikel lezen op:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6339/678.full
