Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World (23 page)

Between 34,000 and 40,000 years ago, the world remained dry and cold, and there was no significant Indian monsoon. The prolonged warming that began again 34,000 years ago invited reoccupation of the drier parts of the Levant.
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This time there was another reoccupation, of a famous cave far to the north at the top of the Fertile Crescent in the northern Zagros Mountains. Shanidar Cave nestles at the southern gate of the Caucasus corridor.

Shanidar Cave (see
Figure 3.1
), near where the modern-day borders of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq come together in northern Kurdistan, just south of Armenia, was made famous at the end of the 1960s by Ralph Solecki, an archaeologist who discovered what he regarded as evidence of Neanderthal burial with flowers. The Neanderthal occupation lasted from over 50,000 years until about 46,000 years ago. Then, after a climatic gap of 10,000 years, another human species became its new tenant. A transitional Upper Palaeolithic industry known as Baradostian appeared in Shanidar Cave around 35,500 years ago and lasted until 28,700 years ago. This is presently the best evidence for modern human occupation at the southern entrance to the Caucasus around that time.
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Also about this time, 36,400 years ago, the first Upper Palaeolithic colonization of European Russia appeared high up the river Don, at Kostenki, due north of the Caucasus.
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The so-called Spitsynians made tools from flint imported from 150–300 km (100–200 miles) away. The Kostenki location later became famous for its extraordinary complex mammoth-based culture, between 24,000 and 33,000 years ago, but the pioneer Spitsynians showed nothing of this.

Several archaeological experts on Europe before the ice age see European Palaeolithic prehistory as having several distinct early
phases of increased occupation corresponding to climatic improvement. The first of these, the Earliest Upper Palaeolithic between 33,000–45,000 years ago, was characterized by the spread of the earliest Aurignacian technology, which we have already discussed. The second phase, the Early Upper Palaeolithic between 24,000–33,000 years ago, heralds the start of the high cultural peaks of the Upper Palaeolithic. Cultures taking off from around 30,000 years ago, during this phase, are known collectively as ‘the Gravettian technocomplex’, although local name variations add confusing variety. Although the Graveltian really constitutes a third phase of high occupation and new culture in Europe, Palaeolithic expert Clive Gamble argues that the important cultural threshold of this second era in Europe as a whole started in north-eastern Europe around 33,000 years ago, for example at Kostenki on the Don, and not with the Gravettian, farther south-west, 30,000 years ago.
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The main cultural innovations of the Gravettian were the systematic mining of high-grade raw materials, high-grade cave art, elaborate burials, large bone tool sets, the use of bone – particularly mammoth – for houses (see
Plate 22
), and highly specialized mammoth-hunting. In summary, the Early Upper Palaeolithic cultures not only reveal an accelerating advance in European representational art, use of exotic materials, and burial practice, but may also have represented an intrusion of peoples carrying the seeds of such cultural practices from Eastern Europe. This invasion of culture and people did not remain in Eastern Europe, finding some of its highest artistic expression in southern France and northern Spain.
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Can we reconcile the HV genetic signal of modern human expansion into Northern and Western Europe with the arrival of the Early Upper Palaeolithic around 33,000 years ago? The short answer is yes: there is a clear, single female genetic signal at the right date, there is an obvious route for her to have taken, and there is a male counterpart. The HV clan may thus represent the earliest movement of modern humans into northern Europe via the Trans-Caucasus.

Where did she go next? Probably everywhere. As we have seen, HV is the commonest clan in Europe, but her descendants are still commoner in northern and south-western Europe than around the Mediterranean coast. She had a daughter – the European V clan – much later, around the Pyrenean area, but recent studies show an older pre-V type in the Trans-Caucasus, the northern Balkans, southern Spain, and Morocco, suggesting an early westward progression across Europe from the Ukraine.
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(See
Figure 3.4
.)

Could the ancestors of the Early Upper Palaeolithic people have come from farther east?

There is, however, just the possibility that HV’s homeland before she moved into Europe was not the Trans-Caucasus but further east, across the Central Asian steppe. In this scenario the north Caucasus region would have received migration from Central Asia, east of the Caspian Sea, rather than from Armenia in the south. Essentially this means moving north into Russia via a route to the east of the Caspian Sea rather than to the west of it.

Much has been made of a group of perfectly preserved Caucasoid mummies found in Urumchi, Chinese Turkestan, and dated to about 3,000 years old, and others in Central Asian locations along the Silk Road. Whether these represent a Neolithic spread of Indo-European-speaking tribes towards the East or descendants of some more ancient local population, there is actually archaeological evidence for the occupation of Central Asia by modern humans from before 40,000 years ago. Early Upper Palaeolithic technology has been found in two sites in the Russian Altai, spreading to south-east Siberia by 39,000 years ago. This does mean there were modern humans in Central Asia early enough to have provided the base for an invasion into Europe through Russia.
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A third of today’s Central Asian genetic stocks are West Eurasian ‘Nasreen’ maternal lines. Half of these consist of HV stock. The usual explanation for this ‘Europe in Asia’ presence is a recent
eastward European emigration along the Silk Road. The problem with this argument is that HV’s common European daughter V, who might be expected to have joined such a movement, is absent from Central Asia. Furthermore, most of the other West Eurasian Nasreen lines in Central Asia look more like they have come directly from India than from Europe. In other words, HV could have originally come from South Asia, round the east of the Caspian Sea, and then gone the other way, westward into Europe (see
Figure 3.4
). There is Y-chromosomal support for this view of an alternative east-west route for South Asian genetic clans entering Europe via a Central Asian detour.
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Asian men in Europe

The Y chromosome, being so much larger, should hold far more secrets of our past than does mitochondrial DNA, that tiny trace of our ancient microbial invader. But geneticists are only beginning to unravel it, and have yet to fully master the trick of Adam’s genetic clock. Dates of branches vary enormously from one research group to another, and are generally anything from twice to five times younger than the equivalent dates on the mtDNA tree. In other words, there is a good Y trail but researchers often underestimate how old it is. Luckily, the careful analysis of founder lines and mtDNA dating carried out by Martin Richards and his colleagues, and others such as Toomas Kivisild, provide a framework of genetically dated routes on which to fit the Y trail. Here for the moment we can use the Y tree to look much more closely at the geographical routes of spread.
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Stanford geneticist Peter Underhill’s extraordinary achievement at the end of 2000 of building a world tree with 150 Y markers was quickly followed by a more detailed look at Europe by Ornella Semino and colleagues in Underhill’s team.
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This showed even more clearly than the mtDNA story that Europe must have had several routes of colonization.

We have seen how, in parallel with the daughters of Europa, Jahangir, a grandson of the out-of-Asian founder line through Seth, may have spread up the Fertile Crescent from the Gulf, thus making the first southern entry through Turkey and into Europe. Can we see any other male lines – apart from Inos – to parallel HV, who came out of the Caucasus, or even further east in Russia, and travelled through the Ukraine to western Europe? The answer is yes, and with much clearer trails. I have already mentioned Inos as type who could mirror HV in the north Caucasus. There are three more candidate genetic lines for an eastern entry to Europe that tease geneticists with their distribution, age, and origin. Like Inos (and Jahangir), they are all ultimately descended from Seth, the third son of Out-of-Africa Adam. Two of these lines very clearly come from the East, probably Central Asia, but how recently did they arrive, and where did they ultimately come from?’ They are both descendants of the most prolific of Seth’s five genetic sons, ‘K, whom I shall call Krishna after the Indian deity of the same name.
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(See
Figures 3.4
and
3.5
)

One of these two eastern genetic lines is called TAT, after its signature mutation, and by remarkable coincidence echoes the name of the Oxford-based geneticist Tatiana Zergal, whose name is most associated with him. In Europe he is confined to the eastern fringe, where he is most evident among eastern Baltic Finns and Russians. His origin is most likely to be Central Asian, although his genetic father and grandfather derive ultimately from Kashmir and South Asia. He is found in low frequency in the Far East as well. Again the dates are vague because we are looking at Y chromosomes, but the very local distribution (mainly among Uralic speakers) and low diversity in Europe suggest a migration from Central Asia.
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The other European intruder from Krishna’s line is defined by the M17 mutation. The Hungarians achieve the highest frequency of this M17 line, at 60 per cent. The M17 line dominates Eastern Europe, and although he spread to all parts of western and southern Europe and the Levant, he is always found at low frequency in those places.
His low frequency in the Levant tends to undermine that region as a route into Europe. Lluís Quintana-Murci, Peter Underhill and their colleagues see Central Asia, especially the Altai, as the most likely source of the European M17 line. This is a necessary argument for Underhill and co-workers since they see the whole Seth clan as coming separately out of North Africa into the Levant and proceeding directly to Central Asia.
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(See
Figure 1.3
.)

For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity
characterizes
its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India. One estimate for the age of this line in India is as much as 36,000 years while the European age is only 23,000. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming to Europe. As an aside, these and similar observations for other Seth lines in South Asia form an important part of my counter-argument to the view of Seth entering Central Asia from North Africa and the Levant (rather than by my preferred single, southern out-of-Africa route).
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To return to Europe, while the origins of the European M17 line to the east of Europe in the Altai or beyond seem clear, the dates of that east–west migration are anything but. Semino and colleagues dispense with genetic dating and instead have both M17 and his father, M173, as part of an archaeologically dated Palaeolithic movement from the east to the west 30,000 years ago. Which brings us to M173, the other strong candidate male Asian line in Europe. He belongs to a very large clan that I shall call Ruslan, after a Russian folk hero.
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Ruslan: Asian progenitor of half of Europe’s men

Spread throughout the Old World from England to South and Central Asia, Siberia, and beyond – even to Australia and America, the Ruslan clan is well travelled, and his root type is the commonest single Y type in the world according to one study. Yet Ruslan’s genetic father, P, whom I shall call Polo after the family of Silk Road explorers, is confined to India, Pakistan, Central Asia, and America. Study of the geographical distribution and the diversity of genetic branches and stems again suggests that Ruslan, along with his son M17, arose early in South Asia, somewhere near India, and subsequently spread not only south-east to Australia but also north, directly to Central Asia, before splitting east and west into Europe and East Asia (see
Chapters 5
and
6
).
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Unlike his son M17, Ruslan does not lurk at the threshold in Eastern Europe. In fact he is very much commoner in the west, reaching 86 per cent in Basques and similar high rates in the British Isles. This back-to-front distribution of father and son suggests that the former may have arrived in Europe earlier. As we shall see in
Chapter 6
, this can be explained by the ice age. Suffice it to say here that although M17 may be a relative newcomer to Europe, his father Ruslan is possibly the strongest male marker line for the original Early Upper Palaeolithic invasion of western Europe from the east around 33,000 years ago. Between them, this father-and-son team account for 50 per cent of extant European male lines today.
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