RE: The Case for N. American Denisovan Presence
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Recently became interested in the Yamanaya Culture which originated in the Volga/Urals region that probably first figured out Horseback Riding and settled most of Europe.
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I have read also they invented dairy, as well as horse drawn carts, and these technologies were together massive economic advances that made the Yamnaya all but indomitable when competing with cultures without them. The Yamnaya steppe people began an expansion that eventually conquered the region between Xinjiang and Tunisia, from India to Norway, a greater extent than any single imperial polity in history.
This expansion of that demographic appears to be how PIE (proto Indo European) languages spread, and the linguistic comparison between these related languages enables some ability to track that expansion across time. Another interesting result of my research is that the majority of peoples conquered by the descendants of the Yamnaya seem to have suffered the complete eradication of Y DNA, the chromosome passed exclusively from father to son, while not having a similar impact on mtDNA, that passed from mothers to their children. This suggests that all males were put to the sword by the conquerors, while the women were put to work.
The Norse are said to have been overwhelmed and to have survived only in the far north of Scandinavia for ~1000 years, purging from that people most of the variation in their Y DNA. After that bottleneck, the Norse exploded out of Gutland and began a reconquista of Europe, N. Africa, and W. Asia that subsequently replaced Y DNA of the descendants of the steppe people with that of the Germanic tribes, eventually resulting in the modern distribution of Y DNA across these regions today.
It is certainly a fascinating area to research, productive of consideration of modern people and polities that exist today. It is easy to condemn what appears to have been genocidal violence these migrations seem to have employed, but when viewed in context of the times as the Bronze age arose from the Neolithic, the comparison with the emergence of the Neolithic makes it seem almost gentle. The evidence suggests that as the less developed cultures were faced with the technological advances of the Neolithic revolution, ~95% of men were genocided.