We report an interesting article published by Center for GeoGenetics of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in 2017 which brings further confirmations to the theories of the great Lithuanian archaeologist and linguist Marija Gimbutas.
How bands of young steppe migrants were civilized by Stone Age agricultural women.
Close encounters. When European genetics – as we still know it today – took shape at the beginning of the Bronze Age, 5000 years ago, it was the product of the meeting between the Yamnaya (Jamna), migrant shepherds from the Caspian steppes and the agricultural civilization of the Stone Age in northern and eastern Europe. An article containing an important summary of the studies carried out on human bone remains and published in the journal Antiquity argues that young Yamnaya warriors belonging to raiding parties “married” Stone Age women, becoming sedentary and adapting to a more agricultural lifestyle. During this process, which shaped the Corded Ware Culture, a new Proto-Germanic dialect also appeared.
In a recent study, Professor Kristian Kristiansen from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and Professor Esce Willerslev from the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, with their team of researchers, demonstrated that the most important demographic changes during the first part of the Bronze Age occurred following the massive migrations of the Yamnaya from the Pontic-Caspian steppes towards Neolithic Europe. They also managed to demonstrate how the plague had spread to both Europe and Central Asia.
Kristiansen and Willerslev provide us with a rather detailed picture of the mechanisms that led to the birth of the Corded Ware Culture: it was the result of an encounter between Yamnaya and European Neolithics. Professor Kristiansen writes:
For the first time we are able to combine findings from genetics, strontium isotopes on mobility and diet, and historical linguistics on language changes to demonstrate how land integration processes unfolded after the Yamnaya migrations from the steppes. In our important summary, we argue that Yamnaya migrants were primarily male, who married women from Stone Age agricultural societies. These Neolithic societies were based on large agricultural communities as reflected in their collective ritual burials in large stone chambers, the so-called megaliths. Very different from the traditions of the newcomers.

THE ORIGINS OF THE YAMNAYA
The Yamnaya people originate in the Caspian steppes, where they lived as herders and ranchers and used wagons as mobile homes.
In their graves archaeologists found remains of plant mats and felt blankets. Their diet was based on meat, dairy products and fish, they were tall and quite healthy with no tooth decay. There are no traces of agriculture.
Mounds were lined up in groups to form lines in the landscape marking their seasonal paths, and after death the sick were placed in individual graves under small family mounds. Their funerary rituals therefore reveal a new perception of the individual and small monogamous family groups as the foundation of society.
The continent that found the Yamnaya people arriving around 3000 BC had experienced the decline of the agricultural societies of the Neolithic, leaving room for new migrations. The causes of this decline probably date back to the spread of the plague from Siberia to the Baltic.
The dynamics of the disease can be compared to that of European colonization in America after Christopher Columbus. Perhaps the Yamnaya brought the plague to Europe and caused a massive population collapse.
“BLACK BANDS” OF MIGRANT MALES AND THEIR MARRIAGES WITH NEOLITHIC WOMEN
In their summary Prof. Kristiansen and his colleagues argue that there was a predominance of males during the first phase after the migration, which corresponds with tales from ancient Indo-European mythology of later times. These sources speak of young men dedicated to war, called "Black Bands", who were used as an active force in pioneer migrations.
The results of strontium isotope analyses, published in 2016 by Kristiansen together with Douglas Price and Karl Goran Sjogren, demonstrate that the majority of women in the burials of the later Corded Ware culture in southern Germany were not local and that they had married coming from Neolithic societies, as they showed that they had a Neolithic diet in their childhood. These results are now an integral part in the new synthesis.
Professor Kristiansen says:
Archaeological evidence of a 90% prominence of males in the early settlement phase of the Corded Ware civilization and single burials in Jutland, Denmark and elsewhere can now be explained by ancient Indo-European traditions of war bands of young males that they had no inheritance to expect. Therefore they were probably much more willing to seek their fortunes as migrant armed gangs.
Neolithic women who came into contact with them brought with them knowledge of pottery production and began to imitate the wooden containers of the Yamnaya migrants with clay. Thus a new ceramic culture was created called Corded Ceramics, due to the rope marks imprinted around the necks of the containers. They were made to drink beer, and the new migrants learned how to grow barley to produce it from the Neolithic women they married.

RAPID GENETIC CHANGES FROM NEOLITHIC TO CORDED POTTERY CULTURES AFTER 3000 BC
Exit Willerslev dedicated himself to the analysis of ancient DNA together with Morten Allentoft and Martin Sikora. Willerslev writes:
In our extensive study of the Bronze Age, published in 2015, we were amazed to see how strong and fast the genetic changes had been from the Neolithic to Corded Ware. There was a heavy reduction in Neolithic DNA in temperate Europe and a dramatic increase in the genomic component of the new Yamnaya, which was only marginally present in Europe before 3000 BC. Furthermore, the apparent suddenness of the change indicates that it was a large-scale migration event, rather than a slow periodic migration of people.
NEW WORDS AND NEW PROTO-GERMANIC DIALECTS
The Yamnaya brought Indo-European languages to Bronze Age Europe but, as pastoralists, they had no words for crops or plants, unlike Neolithic farmers. As the Corded Ware Culture developed, it adopted cultivation words from the native Neolithic peoples with whom they were mixing.
Gauss Kronen, a historical linguist, was able to prove that these new words did not belong to the original Indo-European languages. It was therefore possible to conclude that the Neolithic peoples did not speak an Indo-European language like the Yamnaya migrants.
Thus, the process of genetic and cultural mixing was accompanied by linguistic mixing, called Proto-Germanic, which laid the foundations of subsequent Germanic languages.
THE BIRTH OF THE BRONZE AGE
The migrations of the Yamnaya from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to temperate Europe changed the course of history: they brought not only a new language but also new ideas about social organization now based on small monogamous families with single owners of animals and land.
This new type of society became the foundation of the Bronze Age and the way European societies have continued to develop to the present day.
Translation by Giusi Di Crescenzo
The original article: