di Luciana Percovich
Il The New Yorker of 14 December 2020, in the Annals of Science column, publishes an article that attempts a synthesis of the results of population genetic studies within a project to map the human species, its movements and interbreeding over the millennia. Douglas Preston's article is titled “The Lake Skeletons. Genetic analysis of human remains found in the Himalayas raises puzzling questions about who they were and why they were there” (Source: The New Yorker)
The “disconcerting questions” start from the book Mountain Goddess (1991) by the American anthropologist William Sax, fascinated by local legends about a discovery in 1942, near the Roopkind glacial lake in the Himalayas, of a few hundred human skeletons, including an almost intact woman's body. Over the years, Sax has continued his research on what was one of the routes of ancient pilgrimages (in this case, in honor of Nanda Devi, a manifestation of Parvati) which, overcoming a rugged pass and skirting the lake in question, crosses the mountains connecting central Asia with India. The first disconcertion that Preston finds is that the DNA analyzes carried out on these human remains of women, men, children, without weapons or horses, can be dated back to 800 AD and identify the area of origin as none other than the Middle Eastern area of the Mediterranean. , Crete or vicinity.
The very detailed studies that have developed around Roopkund's bones bring into the picture another character, the Harvard geneticist David Reich with his Indian laboratory in Hyderabad, who ends up involving the Pennsylvania State University, the Broad Institute of MIT in the research of Harvard, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the Anthropological Survey of India. A research, therefore, with the chrism of the most prestigious science and everything comes together in an ambitious project to create an atlas of human migrations and their diversity, which allows us to delve deeply into the roots of the most distant past. To define, with data in hand, who we are as a species, where we come from and what we have done to each other over the millennia. Hidden and recorded in the human genome, it is possible to find evidence of the displacement of different human groups, and therefore also of invasions, mass rapes and massacres of entire populations. The dead speak.
Jeannine Davis-Kimball's research described in her book had already shown that the movement of the Kurgan peoples from the Eurasian steppes corresponded to a counter-exodus of ancient European and Mediterranean peoples. Women Warriors. The shamans of the Silk Roads (2002) and thanks to the discovery of well-preserved women's bodies like that of Roopkind. But what is gradually highlighted in the article is the validity of the theory formulated by Marija Gimbutas in 1956 with her Kurgan Hypothesis (i.e. the waves of peoples called Yamnaya who put an end to the peaceful and evolved "Civilization of the Goddess ” of Ancient Europe of the Neolithic).
David Reich's "disconcerting" conclusions are published on Science in 2019 and are the result of collaboration with over one hundred researchers on the genome of approximately 270 ancient skeletons from the Iberian Peninsula and dated around 2500-2000 BC
The DNA of the Iberian skeletons in fact tells a slightly different story from the traditional archaeological narrative, revealing that this period of transformation affecting south-western Europe was caused by a dramatic invasion that left evidence in an evident "genetic scar". ”. In 2018, Reich recounted in a book, Who we are and how we got here how genetics is revolutionizing understanding about our species, particularly about “whites” – the light-skinned population in Europe and parts of western Asia. It had always been assumed that “white people” were the “natives” of Europe, a relatively homogeneous population that constituted a stable lineage scattered as far as the westernmost parts of Europe from tens of thousands of years ago. But the book shows how up to 8.000 years ago there were at least 4 distinct groups of "native" Europeans, different from each other genetically as an Englishman is today from a Chinese, and that some had dark skin. In his words “white people simply did not exist 8.000 years ago” in Western Europe.
The last European stage of the Yamna "culture", between 2500 and 2000 in the Iberian Peninsula the local Y chromosome type was replaced by a completely different one. Since the Y chromosome is found only in males passing from father to son, this means that the local male genetic line was almost extinct: as if a population of newcomers had perpetrated a large-scale massacre of the local males, men, boys and even newborns. Even assuming that not all the local males had been eliminated, the surviving males were certainly put in the position of no longer being able to reproduce or placed in such an unfavorable position in the selection of a partner that their genetic heritage was completely eliminated. The complete genetic sequence, i.e. of males and females, however, reveals that around 60% of the local lineage continued to exist, meaning that women were not killed but subjected to total sexual coercion and perhaps even mass rape.
We can get an idea of this regime of terror by thinking about what happened when the descendants of those ancient Iberians landed in the New World, an event that has ample historical documentation. The Spanish conquest of the Americas generated human suffering on a truly grotesque scale – war, mass murder, rape, slavery, genocide, starvation and pandemics. Genetically, as Reich notes, the result was very similar: In Central and South America, a large amount of European DNA mixed with the local population, almost all of it from European males.
The same twist in the Y chromosome is also found in Americans of African descent.
On average, a person of color in America has an ancestry that is 80% African and 20% European. But about 80% of European ancestry is inherited from white males. A genetic confirmation of the violence and sexual coercion suffered by female slaves at the hands of male slavers.
In the study conducted in Iberia, the predominant Y chromosome appears to derive from the group of populations called Yamna, which appeared on the scene about 5.000 years ago, in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas. Equipped with wheels and horses, they spread in successive waves, overwhelming all resistance, heading west (Europe) and south-east (India). They spoke Proto-Indo-European languages, from which most current European languages and also some languages spoken in South Asia descend. And if the DNA of the Iberian skeletons cannot tell us much about what the original and native European culture was like - well documented instead by archaeological discoveries starting from the second half of the last century - it can instead confirm once again the farsightedness of Gimbutas' vision, which highlights a real arrest and retreat of civilization clearly evident in the excavation finds after the arrival of the proto-Indo-Indo-Europeans: the Yamnaya caused much greater damage than academic archaeologists continue to believe.
And even today, the Y chromosomes of nearly all males of European ancestry have a high percentage of Yamnaya-derived genes, showing how widespread violent conquest was.
Luciana Percovich, February 2021
