Massive Migrations? The Impact of Recent aDNA …...massive migration of a larger group of people from the area of the Yamnaya culture (located in present-day Russia and Ukraine) into

Massive Migrations? The Impact ofRecent aDNA Studies on our View ofThird Millennium Europe

MARTIN FURHOLT

Institute of Prehistoric and ProtohistoricArchaeology, Kiel University, Germany

New human aDNA studies have once again brought to the forefront the role of mobility and migrationin shaping social phenomena in European prehistory, processes that recent theoretical frameworks inarchaeology have downplayed as an outdated explanatory notion linked to traditional culture history.While these new genetic data have provided new insights into the population history of prehistoricEurope, they are frequently interpreted and presented in a manner that recalls aspects of traditionalculture-historical archaeology that were rightly criticized through the 1970s to the 1990s. They includethe idea that shared material culture indicates shared participation in the same social group, or culture,and that these cultures constitute one-dimensional, homogeneous, and clearly bounded social entities.Since the new aDNA data are used to create vivid narratives describing ‘massive migrations’, the so-called cultural groups are once again likened to human populations and in turn revitalized as externaldrivers for socio-cultural change. Here, I argue for a more nuanced consideration of molecular data thatmore explicitly incorporates anthropologically informed mobility and migration models.

Keywords: aDNA, migration, Neolithic Europe, Corded Ware, Yamnaya

INTRODUCTION

The cultural landscapes of prehistoricEurope in the third millennium cal BC

have traditionally been classified in arch-aeological discourse in terms of extraordin-arily large cultural units, including those ofthe Bell Beaker, Corded Ware, Yamnaya,or Globular Amphora cultures (Figure 1),which are thought to represent comparablyuniform sets of material culture (Szmyt,1999; Anthony, 2007; Harrison & Heyd,2007; Vander Linden, 2006, 2007a;Shishlina, 2008; Furholt, 2014). Thesesuccessive iterations of archaeological cul-tures were attributed in the early days ofthe discipline to wholesale migrations ofprehistoric peoples (Kossinna, 1910;Childe, 1925; Glob, 1945). Since the

1970s, shifts in cultural groups have beenrefashioned as reflecting changes in socialand economic systems (Kruk, 1973;Sherratt, 1981; Damm, 1991; Müller,2001; Raetzel-Fabian 2001; Hübner,2005; Kadrow 2008), as ideologicalpackages and spheres of interaction(Shennan, 1976), or as referring to distinctmarriage or elite networks, or less con-cretely defined interaction networks(Czebreszuk & Szmyt, 1998; Czebreszuk,2002; Strahm, 2002; Furholt, 2003;Vander Linden, 2007a). Lately, moresophisticated migration models haveemerged (Kristiansen, 1989, 2015;Anthony, 1990, 2007; Prescott, 2013;Prescott & Glørstad, 2015), which havemost recently been reinforced by the newaDNA studies.

European Journal of Archaeology 21 (2) 2018, 159–191

© European Association of Archaeologists 2017 doi:10.1017/eaa.2017.43Manuscript received 3 April 2016,accepted 2 February 2017, revised 7 November 2016

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Although these new aDNA data areoverwhelmingly convincing, the interpret-ational frameworks associated with themrequire more discussion. In a critique ofthe traditional culture-historical approach,two major achievements in how the lin-kages between material culture and socio-cultural entities are conceptualized shouldbe highlighted. The first broke theassumption that shared cultural materialcould be equated with a single culturegroup (best expressed in relation to Beakersand Corded Ware in Clarke, 1968 andShennan, 1976). The second breakthroughcame with the realization that the variabil-ity and multiplicity of social phenomenaand agencies that constructed those seem-ingly homogenous material cultural groupswere in fact underscored by diverseapproaches to subsistence, settlement pat-terns, social practices, and ritual expressions(see Furholt, 2014). How far these twoachievements have truly been accepted inthe mainstream discourse of Europeanarchaeology is, however, open to question.

An inclination to equate archaeologicalclassification units (e.g. archaeological cul-tures) with distinct social phenomena (e.g.a population, an identity or ethnic group, anetwork, an ideology) and a tendency toview such social phenomena as clearlybounded and internally homogeneousremain widespread, even dominant, fea-tures in considerations of European prehis-tory (as discussed in Furholt, 2014). Iargue that the renewed emphasis on migra-tion as an explanatory framework, as it isexpressed in the recent publications ofaDNA studies, promotes an approach tothe archaeological material that neglectsthese two central achievements.

THE ‘ADNA REVOLUTION’

‘The four successive genetic shifts high-light the biological cohesiveness ofarchaeological cultures such as the LBK[Linearbandkeramik], FBC [FunnelBeaker], CWC [Corded Ware], and

Figure 1. Simplified map showing the extent of the most important archaeological units of classificationin the third millennium cal BC in Europe discussed in this text.

160 European Journal of Archaeology 21 (2) 2018





BBC [Bell beaker] cultures …’. (Brandtet al., 2013: 261)

‘Our results support a view ofEuropean prehistory punctuated by twomajor migrations: first, the arrival ofthe first farmers during the EarlyNeolithic from the Near East, andsecond, the arrival of Yamnaya pastor-alists during the Late Neolithic fromthe steppe.’ (Haak et al., 2015: 4)

Our picture of human population dynam-ics during the third millennium cal BC haschanged dramatically in recent years withthe explosion of aDNA research (Brandtet al., 2013; Lazaridis et al., 2014;Allentoft et al., 2015; Haak et al., 2015;Mathieson et al., 2015) indicating that thethird millennium was a period of profounddemographic change. These works havesquarely placed the question of prehistoricmobility and migration back on the tableand sparked lively discussions amongarchaeologists (e.g. Bánffy et al., 2012;Müller, 2013; Hofmann, 2014; Sjögrenet al., 2016; Vander Linden, 2016). Onematter of debate is that these aDNA pub-lications link specific archaeological cul-tures to biological populations. Forexample, Haak et al. (2015) assert that amassive migration of a larger group ofpeople from the area of the Yamnayaculture (located in present-day Russia andUkraine) into central Europe led to thetransformation of the latter region throughthe addition of steppe-related pastoralistways of life to the traditional agriculturalcommunities of central Europe. Amongthese were elements of a pastoraleconomy, distinct mortuary practicesinvolving individual burials under smallbarrows emphasizing gender differences,and the new social role of male warriors,as expressed in burial customs connectedto Corded Ware (Anthony, 2007;Kristiansen, 2015). Additionally, Haaket al. (2015) and Allentoft et al. (2015)

suggest that the hypothesis that at leastsome Indo-European languages had origi-nated in the steppes is supported by thenew data. This is not the place to discussthe Indo-European issue (but see, forexample, Prescott, 2013; Heggarty, 2014a,2014b; Vander Linden, 2016). Here, Iwant to concentrate on the relationshipbetween social processes and the molecularbiological data and the tensions arisingfrom the differential perspectives of arch-aeological and biological research. Thearticles mentioned above provide excitingnew insights into prehistoric demographicprocesses that were previously undetectableby traditional archaeological approaches,but there remains an imbalance in theelaboration of molecular biological workand statistical inferences on the one hand,and social theory applied to interpret theseresults in the context of prehistoric socialand cultural phenomena on the other.Such an imbalance seems to be a wide-spread pattern and source of tensionbetween the genetic and the archaeologicalperspective. Already, in the context of theuse of modern mtDNA studies for theunderstanding of prehistoric processes(Ammermann & Cavalli-Sforza, 1984;Renfrew & Boyle, 2000), Bandelt et al.(2003) criticize the weakness of theconcept of population in general, and spe-cifically how populations are constructedin these studies, where they are more orless equated which modern nation states.They also criticize the use of simplisticassumptions used to model populationhistory (‘models of random-mating popu-lations of constant sizes’), which speaks of‘an insufficient attention to the resourcesof other disciplines’, a kind of positivismwith which the data are used, and a lackof any archaeologically or anthropologi-cally informed theory to take into accountsocial and cultural factors that are knownto influence population history (Bandeltet al., 2003: 103).

Furholt – Massive Migrations? Discussion 161





It seems that the problems pointed outby Bandelt et al. have persisted into thenewer aDNA studies; indeed, they verymuch reflect the main issues discussed,especially the problematic definition ofpopulations, and the simplification ofassumptions and concepts about socialgroups and processes through a lack ofengagement with archaeological andanthropological theory. The early articles(for example Bramanti et al., 2009; Haaket al., 2010) that used prehistoric mtDNAfound a marked and stunning discontinu-ity between European hunter-gatherers andEarly Neolithic individuals. These studieswere, however, also criticized for construct-ing a hunter-gatherer population whereindividuals were scattered in space and time(e.g. Bánffy et al., 2012). Although over-whelming genetic evidence has made thecase for the introduction of Neolithic waysof life into Europe being associated with asubstantial demographic influx (see e.g.Hofmann, 2014), the underlying block-likeconcepts of hunter-gatherers vs farmersand the monolithic use of terms like migra-tion vs diffusion actually obscures theNeolithisation process in all its complexityand diversity (as has been suggested, forexample, by Schade & Schade-Lindig,2010; Bickle & Whittle, 2013; Thomas,2013; Hoffmann, 2014). The same simpli-fications are also applied in studies on thethird millennium, and there they becomeeven more problematic because of the morecomplicated situation regarding archaeo-logical classification in this period.It should be stressed that the imbalance

between the perspective of the naturalsciences and the anthropological viewdescribed here is in part also due to con-ceptual problems within the archaeologicaldiscourse. The reification of classificationunits, the construction of homogeneousand clearly bounded cultural groups, thelack of elaboration in the conceptualizationof migration as a social process can be,

and have been, issues raised against arch-aeological research on the third millen-nium (e.g. by Kristiansen, 1989; Shennan,1989; Anthony, 1990; Roberts & VanderLinden, 2011; Furholt, 2014), where theynevertheless persist as dominant frame-works of reference.

The 3rd millennium BC aDNA evidence

Brandt et al. (2013) already highlightedthe significance of third-millennium trans-formations using mtDNA, pointing totwo major events in population dynamicsaffecting their central German sample,which they identify with genetic influxfrom the east, connected to the archaeo-logical Corded Ware and Kurgan, orYamnaya, cultures, and from the West,linked to the archaeological Bell Beakers(Brandt et al., 2013: 261). This immedi-ately seemed convincing, given the geo-graphical location of these archaeologicalunits of classification, the Corded Wareand Yamnaya encompassing central andeastern Europe, the Bell Beakers stretch-ing from Morocco and the Iberian penin-sula into central and northern Europe (seeFigure 1). Not much later, Lazaridis et al.(2014), Haak et al. (2015), and Allentoftet al. (2015) presented patterns of similar-ities/distances of nuclear SNPs (singlenucleotide polymorphisms) of a constantlygrowing number of prehistoric individualsfrom the Palaeolithic to the Early BronzeAge, and convincingly argued that themodern central and northern Europeangene pool can best be explained whenthree distinct sources are assumed. Theseare: 1) the Early Neolithic farmers ofEurope; 2) European hunter-gatherers(western European and Scandinavian); and3) ancient north-Eurasian hunter-gath-erers (Lazaridis et al., 2014) or easternEuropean hunter-gatherers (Haak et al.,2015). These three sources are represented






as clusters or isolated instances of sampleswhen they are projected onto the first twoaxes of a principal component analysis(PCA) of a dataset of 2345 modernwestern Eurasian individuals (seeFigure 2) and ADMIXTURE analysis.Since in the Haak et al. (2015) sample allindividuals dating to after 2500 cal BC—starting with four Corded Ware indivi-duals—are clustered separately from theNeolithic individuals dating to before3000 cal BC, the impact of the thirdsource, the northern Eurasian/easternEuropean source, must have reachedcentral and northern Europe at that time.

However, in line with what Pattersonet al. (2012) and Gómez-Sánchez et al.(2014) had previously indicated, these newnuclear SNP studies did not replicate theBrandt et al. (2013) finding of a geneticinflux from the Iberian peninsula intocentral Europe in connection with BellBeakers. Consequently, they place a newemphasis on migration from the east.The findings of Haak et al. (2015) were

replicated, with a constantly growing baseof individuals sampled, by Allentoft et al.(2015) and Mathieson et al. (2015).However, when it comes to working outthe processes underlying the social,

Figure 2. The main similarity patterns indicated by a principal component analysis (PCA) for modernand prehistoric samples as published by Haak et al. (2015), re-drawn from their fig. 2. The mostimportant feature for the third millennium cal BC is the gap between the Early and Middle Neolithiccluster and the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age cluster, closer to the Yamnaya cluster.






economic, or demographic phenomenathat could explain these patterns, all thesestudies contain issues that require morediscussion from an anthropological andarchaeological point of view.To illustrate some of these problems, I

shall concentrate on Haak et al. (2015),because they most explicitly spell out theirpremises and arguments.The first major issue is that the use of

archaeological cultures as indicators ofhuman biological populations has its pro-blems (Clarke, 1968; Shennan, 1989;Wotzka, 1993; Furholt, 2008a). One canargue that such a procedure is acceptable asa heuristic tool to provide some spatial andtemporal proximity in a sample of indivi-duals, but there is a real and high danger ofreifying these populations—to start treatingthem as genuine biological and even socialgroups. This can be seen, for example, informulations like ‘a new social and eco-nomic formation, […] named CordedWare’ (Allentoft et al., 2015: 168), or ‘anew class of master artisans known as theSintashta culture emerged in the Urals’(Allentoft et al., 2015). It is also visible inthe following quotation, which interpretsand contextualizes the similarity of thegenetic profiles shown in Figure 2:

‘The Corded Ware shared elements ofmaterial culture with steppe groups suchas the Yamnaya, although whether thisreflects movements of people has beencontentious. Our genetic data providedirect evidence of migration and suggestthat it was relatively sudden.’ (Haaket al., 2015: 2)

This illustrates very well some of themain points which distort our archaeo-logical debates on third-millennium socialand cultural processes, and these (primarilyarchaeological) issues are, it seems, adoptedinto the interdisciplinary approach. A firstissue concerns the four individuals from asingle cemetery in Esperstedt, central

Germany, taken to represent the wholeCorded Ware culture; this unit of classifi-cation for archaeological features and findsis implicitly treated as if it represented aspecific group of people. One can agreethat a high degree of genetic similarity insamples that are located 2600 km fromeach other is an indication for some kindof long-distance movement, but what isbeing proposed here in decisive terms is avery specific scenario. The Yamnaya, aterm referring to a set of specific traits ofburial practice and material culture, andthe Corded Ware, also referring to particu-lar types of pottery, weapons, tools, andburial practices, are used as if theyrepresent distinct social groups, as becomesclear in the language used: ‘The CordedWare are genetically closest to theYamnaya’ (Haak et al., 2015: 2).The equation of biological groups with

archaeological cultures claimed by Kossinna(1911) had already been dismissed byChilde (1929). Moreover, the notion thatarchaeological cultures could represent evendistinct social groups has also been dis-missed, as anthropological research hasshown that the relationships betweenmaterial culture and social identities aremuch more complex (Hodder, 1982;Wotzka, 1997; Hahn, 2005; Brather &Wotzka, 2006). It should not be claimedthat there is absolutely no connectionbetween cultures (or better, traits of mater-ial culture) and social identities (e.g. Barth,1982), but anthropology shows us thatmaterial culture may be linked to diverseand changing layers of identities, may beactively used for different purposes by socialactors, and may have a different and chan-ging impact on social interaction.Additionally, archaeological cultures likethe Corded Ware, with a distribution areaextending from Switzerland to Russia (seeFigure 1) and a considerable variability ofthings and practices within this area, arehighly unlikely to represent a particular






social group or population (Furholt, 2014).The same is true for the Bell Beakers(Vander Linden, 2006, 2007a).The argument that the Corded

Ware phenomenon ‘shares elements ofmaterial culture with steppe groups,including Yamnaya’ is correct, but shouldbe seen in the light of Corded Ware actu-ally sharing elements of material culturewith more or less every contemporary, pre-ceding, or subsequent archaeological unit,be it Funnel Beakers, Pitted Ware,Globular Amphora, Baden, Bell Beakers,Unetice, Mierzanowice, and others (Beran,1992; Bertemes et al., 2002; Furholt,2003; Hübner, 2005; Wl=====odarczak, 2006).Finally, the argument about whether

these shared elements of material cultureactually reflect movements of people illus-trates an underlying (and very common)conceptual problem. What the debatesreally should address is what specific kindsof movement we are dealing with. All toooften this question is reduced to a binarychoice between migration and diffusion, asif only these two scenarios were possible.Our conceptions of the movement ofpeople are sorely underdeveloped, whichapplies as much to those who have favouredmigration as an explanatory framework asto those who have opposed it. It is one ofthe great achievements of studies like Haaket al. (2015) to make clear that we mustconfront such migration phenomena, butthe challenge is to realize that there is nosuch thing as a migration that would eitheroccur or not occur; instead there is a widerange of processes involving human mobil-ity, which are subsumed under the conceptof migration (e.g. Anthony, 1990, 1997;Chapman & Hamerow, 1997; Burmeister,2000; Prien, 2005; Cabana & Clarke,2011; Cameron, 2013; Kaiser & Schier,2013; van Dommelen, 2014; Brettell,2014) and that of diffusion. In archaeo-logical discussions, migration is all toooften seen as a unified and clearly bounded

phenomenon—a single-event mass migra-tion—in the same way as the Yamanyaculture is seen as a single social entity, andthe Corded Ware culture a different one,and this paradigm of ‘wholeness’(Greenblatt, 2009) clearly forms the back-ground of the emphasis laid on this specificform of migration.It seems that in the current boom in

aDNA studies, this specific model ofmigration—the single-event-mass migra-tion—is dominant, as the term ‘massivemigration’ features prominently in the titleof the Haak et al. (2015) article, and theystress that ‘this migration was relativelysudden’ (Haak et al., 2015: 2).This argument has, however, some flaws.

The time between the latest individual ofthe Middle Neolithic without the easternEuropean genetic component (dating tobetween 3300 and 3100 cal BC) and theearliest Corded Ware individual sampled inHaak et al. (2015; dating to around 2560cal BC to 2470 cal BC) is about 700 years.The argument for a relatively sudden eventrests on the time assigned to whole arch-aeological cultures, in the sense that, if thesignal of eastern European influence ispresent in one individual connected to oneculture (like the Corded Ware), then it ispresent during the whole period covered bythat culture. This is stated in the followingsentence, which only makes sense if arch-aeological cultures are seen as reflectingbiologically uniform populations:

‘If continuous gene flow from the east,rather than migration, had occurred, wewould expect successive cultures inEurope to become increasingly differ-entiated from the Middle Neolithic,but instead, the Corded Ware are boththe earliest and most strongly differen-tiated from the Middle Neolithic popu-lation.’ (Haak et al., 2015: 2)

If we leave the level of whole archaeo-logical cultures and take a closer look at






the individuals sampled, there is no evi-dence to suggest a period of continuousgene flow shorter than several centuries.Allentoft et al. (2015) have sampled add-itional Corded Ware individuals, somedated to between 2800 and 2600 cal BC,who show a strong affinity to the contem-porary Yamnaya samples (although less sothan the Esperstedt individuals presentedby Haak et al., 2015), so that one couldmake a case for a shorter ‘gap’ between thesamples, but this is not the main point.The argument of Haak et al. (2015) restson the assumption that the Corded Warerepresents a single distinct population andthat one would need evidence of Yamnayaaffinity in an earlier archaeological cultureto make a case for a continuous gene flow.This model seems to exclude the possibil-ity that such a continuous gene flow couldtake place within the Corded Ware, whichlasts for up to 800 years.From an archaeological perspective,

there is evidence that would speak infavour of a longer-term process. Forexample, the appearance of steppe-relatedelements in south-eastern and centralEurope, like kurgan graves and specificburial rituals, can be traced back to thefifth millennium cal BC with the so-calledearly ochre graves, or Suvorovo-Novodanilovka graves in Romania andHungary (Govedarica, 2004; Anthony,2007), regions in which we later findYamnaya graves (Frînculeasa et al., 2015).This could provide a suitable archaeo-

logical basis for a model envisaging along-lasting, continuous gene flow.The real issue here is that the authors

do not make explicit what they mean bythe term migration. The suggestion thatcontinuous gene flow would be somethingdifferent from migration is not consistentwith the archaeological debates on thematter. One of the authors in Haak et al.(2015), David Anthony, has explicitly ela-borated on the concept of migration (e.g.

Anthony, 1990, 1997) and described it asa well-structured social process whichinvolves different actors and follows differ-ent stages, including scouting for potentialareas and routes, flows of informationbetween regions, return migration, and soon; in any case, it is a continuous processof varying duration. Among different var-iants of migration, Anthony also namesmigration streams, thus clearly undermin-ing the opposition created between con-tinuous gene flow and migration.To back up the claim of a massive and

rapid migration, Haak et al. (2015) use anadditional argument, namely the highdegree of similarity between individualsconnected to the Corded Ware andYamnaya material cultures, seen in thedata clusters in the PCA (Figure 2) and inthe values achieved by ADMIXTUREanalysis, as opposed to the other LateNeolithic and Bronze Age individuals. Asthe PCA shows, the four individualsassigned to the Corded Ware fromEsperstedt are said to be the earliest indi-viduals, and they are additionally placedclosest to the ten individuals connected toYamnaya and furthest away from theEarly and Middle Neolithic individuals.Haak et al. (2015) interpret this as con-sistent with a single migration event and asuccessive resurgence of the local popula-tion, visible in the position of the LateNeolithic and Early Bronze Age indivi-duals closer to the earlier, Early andMiddle Neolithic individuals. This inter-pretation of the patterns seems to overstatethe explanatory powers of the PCA. Thenotion of a generally closer connection ofCorded Ware individuals to Yamnayaindividuals than the other Late Neolithicsamples is much less clear in a differentstudy using different samples connected toCorded Ware (Allentoft et al., 2015).Here, seven individuals with Corded Wareconnections from Sweden, Poland, theBaltic, and southern Germany are placed






just within the Late Neolithic/EarlyBronze Age cluster, more clearly separatedfrom the Yamnaya cluster (Allentoft et al.,2015: fig. 2). Allentoft et al. write:

‘Although European Late Neolithicand Bronze Age cultures such asCorded Ware, Bell Beakers, Unetice,and the Scandinavian cultures are gen-etically very similar to each other [andplaced clearly outside the Yamnayacluster; addition by author], they stilldisplay a cline of genetic affinity withYamnaya, with highest levels in CordedWare, lowest in Hungary, and centralEuropean Bell Beakers being inter-mediate.’ (Allentoft et al., 2015: 169)

Thus, although Allentoft et al. (2015) alsosubscribe to the notion of highest geneticaffinity between individuals connected toCorded Ware and those connected toYamnaya, in this respect there are cleardifferences between the individualssampled by Haak and colleagues and thosesampled by Allentoft’s team. This reflectsa marked variance in the genetic compos-ition of individuals subsumed under theCorded Ware label, a variance comparableto that between all the individuals assignedto the numerous archaeological cultureswithin the period between 2500 and 1000cal BC. This undermines the assumption ofgenetic homogeneity between individualsconnected to specific archaeological cul-tures, which again shows up in the waythe Corded Ware individuals are uni-formly characterized by Allentoft et al.In Mathieson et al. (2015: fig. 1), the

Late Neolithic-Early Bronze Age clusterhas, through the increase in sample size,been extended so much that it almosttouches the Early Farmers cluster; espe-cially the Central Late Neolithic, includingCorded Ware individuals, show a remark-able diversity. Unfortunately, it is not pos-sible from the publications to identifyindividuals sampled within each cluster,

which would be very helpful for thedebate.Based on multiple statistical analyses

and tests, Haak et al. (2015) deduce thatthe ancestry of the Corded Ware was 79per cent Yamnaya-like, 4 per cent westernhunter-gatherer, and 17 per cent EarlyNeolithic (Haak et al., 2015: 4). Thesefindings are then implicitly connectedwith a statement concerning the evident‘magnitude of population turnover’ (Haaket al., 2015: 4) that occurred, as ‘thesteppe migrants might well have mixedwith eastern European agriculturalists ontheir way to central Europe. Thus wecannot exclude a scenario in which theCorded Ware arriving in today’s Germanyhad no ancestry at all from local popula-tions’ (Haak et al., 2015: 4).Arguably, this is a possible scenario, but

it is also rather extreme. Again, we arelacking some more concrete and in-depthconsiderations about what specific socialprocesses are assumed, which would behelpful for the argument. The authorsadvocate a scenario in which the four indi-viduals from Esperstedt assigned toCorded Ware do not have any local ances-try, which of course could be the case forthese four individuals. However, as Haaket al. (2015) take these individuals to berepresentative of the whole Corded Ware,which is seen as one uniform population,the argument of a population turnoverbecomes more serious when one thinksabout the scenario suggested. Although wedo not know how many people actuallylived in central Europe towards the end ofthe Middle Neolithic, we might assumethat it was somewhere around 1 or 2million (Müller, 2015). A sudden turnoverof the whole population, as suggested byHaak et al. (2015), would be a truly dra-matic, even genocidal, event, which is apossibility. But it is also a quite extremescenario, for which one would like tohave some additional arguments. If, on the






other hand, we argue solely on the level ofbiological ancestry, populations, and thetiming of events or processes, much lessdramatic scenarios should have the sameprobability. For example, one could askhow many newcomers would be requiredto create a population turnover of 79 percent, or even a total exchange of popula-tions by 2500 cal BC, assuming 1 millioninhabitants in central Europe around 3000cal BC. Given the characteristics of expo-nential growth, the number of newcomersis close to being irrelevant. Consideringthe length of the period in question, thecrucial variable is the population growthrate, or rather the difference between thegrowth rates of two populations. Forexample, if we have a 3.5 per cent annualgrowth rate in the newcomer population,200 newcomers would be enough to reacha population of 1 million after about 250years, and after 300 years it would exceed6.5 million. Such an annual growth rate israther high (Hassan, 1981) and it beingcontinuous over 300 years is probably alsounrealistic; nevertheless, this calculationillustrates that there is a possibility thatthis population turnover does not have toinvolve the kind of massive migration sug-gested by Haak et al. (2015). If we, forwhatever reason, see stagnation or a nega-tive growth rate in the native populationor lineages, a difference in growth rates ofthe order of 3.5 per cent between twolineages would be more realistic. Forexample, one lineage could have a bio-logical evolutionary advantage over theother. Allentoft et al. (2015: 171) havefound a remarkably high rate of lactosetolerance among individuals connected toYamnaya and to Corded Ware, asopposed to the majority of Late Neolithicindividuals. Different immunity rates tocontagious diseases could have played aneven more drastic role (e.g. Yersinia pestisor bubonic plague: Rasmussen et al.,2015). Apart from biological factors,

cultural, economic, or social patterns couldalso cause different growth rates betweenlineages, which of course would be harderto identify archeologically. But they couldbe integrated into models of diverse nutri-tion, social status, or political powerbetween, for example, people found inCorded Ware burials and others (see, forexample, Sjögren et al., 2016). Such kindsof models should be discussed and com-pared to others, if we want to understandprocesses of transformation in the thirdmillennium. We need a debate aboutwhich scenarios are conceptually convin-cing and empirically verifiable.A further issue is that the current

debate concentrates too much on theYamnaya culture as the only possiblesource for the eastern European geneticcomponent in central Europe. Otherpotential routes of migration are not con-sidered. For example, in theirSupplementary Information 2, Haak et al.(2015) demonstrate that three individualsconnected to the Pitted Ware culture inSweden (taken from Skoglund et al.,2012) are clearly under that easterngenetic influence. The pottery, after whichthis archaeological culture is named, showsa much stronger connection with the vastareas of north-western Eurasia (Iversen,2010; Piezonka, 2015) than is the casewith the Corded Ware connection toYamnaya. Pitted Ware appears in northernDenmark between 3100 and 2600 cal BC

(Iversen, 2010), while in Sweden and theeastern Baltic it is already known from theearly fourth millennium, and it can beconnected to much older pottery traditionsin the east (Piezonka, 2015).Overall, regardless of a convincing

identification of a significant easternEuropean input into central Europeanpopulations sometime before 2500 cal BC,the preference for the social scenario thatfavours a single-event mass migration ismuch less well backed up by the






archaeological data than has been sug-gested. It will need a more elaborate dis-cussion of the archaeological andconceptual background.

LESSONS FROM THE ADNA STUDIES

The aDNA studies discussed here haveconvincingly demonstrated that move-ments of people from one social context toanother (migration) play a much moreimportant role in the third millennium calBC than most archaeologists, including thecurrent author, would have admitted, andalso that the input of eastern Europeanlineages is most crucial. The studies ofHaak et al. (2015), Allentoft et al. (2015),and Mathieson et al. (2015) reproduce themain patterns, and there are good reasonsto believe that the still relatively smallsample size (230 individuals in Mathiesonet al., 2015) provides a robust picture ofbiological relatedness in time and space.Critiques of culture history in archaeologyhave given rise to widespread scepticismagainst migration as an explanatory factor,and thus encouraged the mainstream toneglect all kinds of issues related to themovement of people in prehistory (but seeKristiansen, 1989; Anthony, 1990, 1992;Burmeister, 2000; Prien, 2005; Prescott,2013; Prescott & Glørstad, 2015). Thenew aDNA evidence has demonstratedthat it is possible to identify periods andregions with differential human migrationprocesses, and even main directions inwhich movement took place.One major reason for the abandonment

of migration as an explanatory concept inarchaeology was the crudeness of its con-ceptualization and application in archae-ology. It often constructed an artificial andunrealistic opposition between migration(meaning the stereotypical single-eventmass migration) and ‘non-migration’, ordiffusion, and, in applications to the

archaeological evidence, it built on long-disproved notions which equated archaeo-logical cultures with specific social groups(e.g. Brather, 2004; Brather & Wotzka,2006). These hypothetical social groupsare frequently portrayed as homogeneoussocial units with a collective agency, andthus the expansion or movement of mater-ial culture traits is taken to be the result ofmass migrations (for a critique, seeChapman & Dolukhanov, 1992; Furholt,2008b). Often the link between migrationtheory and its archaeological application isthe main problem. Even though pioneerslike Kristiansen (1989), Anthony (1990),or Burmeister (2000) have formulatedelaborate models of migration as complexand highly variable processes, the main-stream migrationist argument often fallsback to a Kossinna-like approach of takingthe appearance of similar material culturein two regions as an indication of a single-event mass migration from one region toanother, while their opponents (e.g.Furholt, 2003) would likewise rejectmigration as if it constituted a binary yes-or-no question. With all theoreticalsubtlety gone, a block-like movement ofYamnaya people, based on some typo-logical premises of material culture orburial customs, is used in support of amigration or its supposed opposite, be itdiffusion, contacts, trade, or networks.This prevalence of wholeness and homo-geneity in our conceptualization of socialphenomena, although it seemed to havebeen overcome by post-modern critique,has proved to be much more resilient(Goldstein, 2000; Bernbeck, 2008;Greenblatt, 2009), and it has been at thecore of many archaeological debates.It would be useful to elaborate on pre-

cisely what kinds of migration and mobil-ity are likely to have taken place, especiallyin the light of our well-studied archaeo-logical record, approached from the per-spective of anthropological theory (Hahn &






Klute, 2007; Greenblatt, 2009; Vertovec,2010; Cabana & Clark, 2011; Cohen &Sirkeci, 2011; Brettell, 2014). It does nothelp to presuppose or reject an ill-defined,rather stereotypical migration concept(single-event mass migration) or to denythe role of migration altogether, substitut-ing human mobility with airy concepts likediffusion. The articles discussed (Brandtet al., 2013; Allentoft et al., 2015; Haaket al., 2015; Mathieson et al., 2015) havenot given answers to our questions aboutthe social processes involved in the trans-formations deduced from the archaeologicalrecord, but they have opened new perspec-tives, given us additional information, andraised more questions.In order to understand the social phe-

nomena connected to the fascinating newdata obtained by molecular biologists, thediscussion of the archaeological evidencefrom local and regional contexts is asimportant as ever. Perhaps it is even moreimportant for our view of the third millen-nium cal BC, since the long shadow ofKossinna and ethno-essentialism inarchaeology seems to be gaining groundonce again in the slipstream of the aDNArevolution (see also Müller, 2013). In fact,studies like those of Brandt et al. (2013)and Haak et al. (2015) clearly show aremarkable and highly relevant image ofpopulation admixture and heterogeneitygenerating new epochs, but their resultshave been presented to the public (e.g.Schöne, 2013; Barras, 2015) as if they buyinto the narrative of whole and homoge-neous cultures representing distinct bio-logical populations with a single unifiedagency embarked on migration, accom-panied by maps suggesting ethnicallyclosed populations sweeping across theEuropean continent.This is especially critical in the current

socio-political situation, where citizens ofmany European countries, unsettled byeconomic and political crises and now

directly confronted with the phenomenonof large-scale immigration, are increasinglyturning to stereotyping, ethnic essential-ism, and racism (e.g. Worth, 2013;O’Hara, 2014; Genova, 2017; Sierp &Karner, 2017) which fits into long defunctconcepts of cultural wholeness. In thissituation, the archaeological discussion justdescribed, on whether we conceptualizeprehistoric communities as whole, uniform,and bounded entities or whether we seethem as constituted by individual actorswith potentially diverse and heterogeneousbackgrounds and intentions, and individ-ual agencies, becomes a highly politicalissue. The same is true for the conceptualblurring of genetic descent and culturalidentity. By integrating such residues ofKossinna-like ethno-essentialism andbiologism, whether intentional or not, intomodels of population history that arecombined with cutting-edge scientificmethods, we run into the danger of pro-viding supposedly scientific support forpolitical forces who build their demagogieson exactly those assumptions about thenature of societies, ethnic identities, andbiologic relatedness. As scientists dealingwith these topics, we need to be moreactively aware of the political dimension ofour work.

OUTLOOK

Within the interdisciplinary effort requiredto deal with the new aDNA data, it isespecially important to further develop ouranthropological and archaeological con-cepts and their application. To acknow-ledge that migration occurred tells usnothing about social realities, unless weengage in greater detail with the widespectrum of phenomena subsumed underthis term. We need to deal with theimpact these phenomena had on prehis-toric communities, and how it is reflected






in our archaeological data. A fundamentalstep consists of rejecting the level of wholeand bounded groups on a European scale,abandoning the narrative of unified groupsof people jointly migrating from one areato another. Instead, although there may beoverarching reasons or incentives tomigrate, migration is borne by individualactors and affects individual communitiesin different ways. While migration is oftentreated as an external driver for social orcultural change, migrants and migrationphenomena should, I argue, be studied asan internal factor in the development ofthe communities in whose context migra-tion takes place.Migration can obviously take very dif-

ferent forms (e.g. Cameron, 2013). Therecan be individuals migrating into localcommunities, or groups of people. Theymay or may not maintain contacts withthe communities from which they origi-nated, they may travel back and forth, theymay stay in one community or continue tomigrate into further communities. Wholeresidential communities might break up,or merge together in processes of fissionand fusion (Leppard, 2014). Migrants mayonly partly take on cultural characteristicsof the new communities they live in andmaintain continuous contacts with othermigrants in other communities, or theymay become totally assimilated. Althoughwe often tend to see migration as some-thing exceptional, we must also reckonwith periods and areas in which migrativebehaviour is the norm (Hahn & Klute,2007). All these possibilities will obviouslyaffect community structures and the waysin which communities interact with eachother.A way forward would be to systematic-

ally investigate four main sources ofinformation, namely: 1) the compositionof local communities with regard to theirhomogeneity or diversity of economic andsocial practices and things produced,

which can potentially indicate the pres-ence of people with different social back-grounds; 2) their genetic signatures inorder to assess potential biologicalrelatedness; 3) the patterns of mobility ofindividuals connected to these communi-ties; and 4) the structure of local andregional networks as inferred from simi-larities in material culture, ideally in adiachronic perspective. With these dataavailable, it should be possible to distin-guish between different scenarios ofmigration, which can be pre-formulated,or modelled along the lines touched onabove.Given the potential diversity of migra-

tion scenarios, it is clear that we will notbe able to investigate the third-millenniumcal BC evidence from a top-down perspec-tive. For example, the local communitieswhich are classified as belonging to theCorded Ware demonstrate a huge varietyof subsistence strategies, settlement pat-terns (Dörfler & Müller, 2008), commu-nity structures, and local and regionalnetworks (see Furholt, 2014). In the sameway, it can be shown that Corded Warematerial culture plays very different rolesin different regions (Furholt, 2016). It isalso to be assumed that the mechanismswith which such things and practices enterand become common in these communi-ties, and the kinds and impact migrationhad, are potentially diverse. In order toidentify these mechanisms, we need tostudy local communities from a bottom-upperspective.Fortunately, such data are already avail-

able. Sjögren et al. (2016) have recentlydemonstrated that isotopic evidence fromseveral German Corded Ware cemeteriesindicates a considerable variability withregard to nutrition between sites andwithin sites, as well as a high percentage ofnon-local individuals, who seem to persistover several generations. This is in linewith the variable patterns of diet among






individuals connected to the Corded Waregroups of the Baltic states and Poland(Eriksson et al., 2003; Antanaitis-Jacobset al., 2009; Pospieszny, 2015), and withthe substantial proportion of mobile indivi-duals in southern central European BellBeaker burial contexts (Price et al., 2004).Several new studies have been able to shedlight on the markedly diverse structure oflocal Corded Ware communities (forexample Müller et al., 2009; Smit et al.,2012; Kleijne et al., 2013; Beckerman,2015), and the regional structure of mater-ial culture has been studied by Hübner(2005), Furholt (2011), and many others.All these works point towards a highdegree of social heterogeneity at local andregional scales.Thus, notwithstanding the necessity of

a bottom-up approach, a more top-downobservation of the data at hand could bethat the widespread (relative) homogeneityof material culture behind terms likeYamnaya, Corded Ware, or Bell Beakers(Figure 1) is connected to a widespreadchange in community composition andregional social relations. This change maybe interpreted as a transition from a moreimmobile, stable, and homogeneous stateof settled communities to a situationwhere movement between communities(migration) becomes much more common,resulting in both social heterogenization ofcommunities and homogenization ofmaterial culture. Such phenomena havebeen discussed for the third and earlysecond millennia cal BC by Vander Linden(2007b, 2012), Frieman (2012), andFurholt (2016). It is a change from asystem dominated by small-scale socialrelations, in line with the smaller-scalearchaeological classification units in thefifth and fourth millennia cal BC, from lessmobile individuals and a lesser degree ofpopulation intermixture to a widespreadculture of migration in the thirdmillennium.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Martin Furholt is a prehistorian investi-gating the role of material culture inshaping social practices, early monumen-tality, and the development of socialorganization during the Neolithic andCopper Age in northern and centralEurope and the Aegean. He is currentlyengaged in fieldwork in Slovakia andSerbia and is Lecturer for PrehistoricArchaeology at Kiel University.

Address: Institute of Prehistoric andProtohistoric Archaeology, KielUniversity, Johanna-Mestorf-Strasse 2–6,24118 Kiel, Germany. [email: [email protected]]



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mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]




Des migrations en masse ? L’impact des nouvelles études d’ADN ancien sur nosperspectives sur l’Europe du troisième millénaire av. J.-C.

Les nouvelles études d’ADN ancien (ADNa) ont renouvelé les questions portant sur le rôle que les mouve-ments de population et les migrations ont joué dans les phénomènes sociaux en Europe au cours de lapréhistoire. L’importance de ces processus a été minimisée dans le cadre des théories archéologiques de cesdernières années qui les a reléguées au niveau d’interprétations surannées liées à l’histoire culturelle tradition-nelle. Les nouvelles données génétiques ont bien sûr apporté des perspectives nouvelles sur l’histoire des popu-lations préhistoriques de l’Europe mais elles ont souvent été présentées et interprétées de façon qui rappellecertains aspects de l’histoire culturelle traditionnelle critiqués à juste titre pendant les années 1970 à 1990 :entre autres l’idée qu’une culture matérielle partagée représentait un même groupe social ou culture, et que cescultures constituaient des ensembles unidimensionnels, homogènes et bien définis. Etant donné que les nou-velles données ADNa sont à l’origine de reconstitutions colorées de « migrations en masse », ces groupesculturels sont à nouveau évoqués comme caractérisant des populations humaines et revitalisés comme moteursexternes de transformations socio-culturelles. Ici nous plaidons en faveur d’une prise en considération plusnuancée des données moléculaires qui intègrerait plus explicitement les modèles de migration et de mobilitéque les études d’anthropologie sociale et culturelle nous livrent. Translation by Madeleine Hummler.

Mots-clés: ADNa, migrations, Néolithique européen, culture de la céramique cordée, culture Yamnaya

Massive Wanderungsbewegungen? Der Einfluss von aDNA Untersuchungen aufunsere Perspektive über das dritte Jahrtausend v. Chr. in Europa

ZusammenfassungNeue Studien alter DNA haben die Rolle von Mobilität und Migration in der sozialhistorischen

Entwicklung der Europäischen Vorgeschichte wieder auf die Tagesordnung gebracht, nachdem diese Konzeptelange Zeit als rückständige und überholte Reliquien einer traditionellen kulturhistorischen Archäologie abge-lehnt worden waren. Während die neuen molekularbiologischen Daten neue Erkenntnisse über diePopulationsgeschichte des prähistorischen Europa geliefert haben, werden sie häufig in einer Weise interpre-tiert und präsentiert, die an solche Elemente der traditionellen kulturhistorischen Archäologie erinnert, die inden 1970er bis 1990er Jahren zu Recht kritisiert wurden. Dies betrifft die Vorstellung dass eine gleichartigematerielle Kultur die Zugehörigkeit zu einer gemeinsamen sozialen Gruppe, oder Kultur, anzeige, und dassdiese Kulturen eindimensionale, homogene, klar abgegrenzte soziale Einheiten darstellen würden. Währenddie neuen aDNA-Daten benutzt werden, um anschauliche Narrative über ‘massive Völkerwanderungen’ zuerzeugen, werden wieder archäologische Kulturen mit menschlichen Populationen gleichgesetzt, und derenvermeintlich kollektive Migrationen als externe Faktoren für soziokulturellen Wandel interpretiert. DieserArtikel argumenitert für eine differenziertere Auseinandersetzung mit den molekularbiologischen Daten, diedas weite Feld kulturanthropologischer Forschung zum Thema Migration für die Diskussion expliziterMobilitäts- und Migrationsmodelle in der Vorgeschichte nutzbar macht. Translation by Martin Furholt.

Stichworte: aDNA, Migration, Europa im Neolithikum, Schnurkeramik, Yamnaya

Comments

COMMENTS ON FURHOLT’S MASSIVE

MIGRATIONS?

As a reviewer and now discussant, I readMartin Furholt’s important article

‘Massive Migrations? The Impact ofRecent aDNA Studies on our View ofThird Millennium Europe’ with greatinterest. I fully support this crucial dia-logue and hope this publication and its






discussion will motivate and foster manyfuture collaborative studies that aim tointegrate archaeology, anthropology, gen-etics, and perhaps linguistics. In whatfollows, I will add a few technical pointsfor consideration:Martin Furholt directly engages with

work done by myself and my colleagues inthe ancient DNA field, writing ‘Allentoftet al. (2015) have sampled additionalCorded Ware individuals, some dated tobetween 2800 and 2600 cal BC, who showa strong affinity to the contemporaryYamnaya samples (although less so thanthe Esperstedt individuals presented byHaak et al., 2015)’ (p. 166).It is important to co-analyse data from

the two studies in order to make directcomparisons. As shown in Figure 1, allCorded Ware-associated individuals pub-lished to date show very similar propor-tions (and can be shown to form a cladeto the exclusion of other ancient indivi-duals by formal statistics). Of note, theamount of ‘early European farmer’-ances-try (orange component) also varies amongthe individuals from Esperstedt. For com-parison, I also include data from additionalCorded Ware-associated individuals fromthe Baltic region (Allentoft et al., 2015;Jones et al., 2017). Additional data fromBaltic Corded Ware individuals will beavailable shortly (Saag et al., 2017;Mittnik et al., 2017). Admixture propor-tions (linkage disequilibrium-pruned;k = 12) show that in both central Europeand the Baltic region, CW-associatedindividuals are the first group to carry‘Yamnaya-like’ steppe ancestry (a blend ofthe blue and green component) and ‘earlyEuropean farmer’-ancestry. The latterancestry is varying during the time-spanand geographic area covered by these indi-viduals, which is seen both in the Balticregion as well as central Europe(Mittelelbe-Saale and Bavaria), and sug-gests that the period of the Corded Ware

is the time of admixture of ‘EarlyFarmer’ and ‘Steppe’ ancestry, a processthat eventually results in more balancedproportions in the subsequent Únetice-associated individuals of the Early BronzeAge.As Furholt continues his argument,

much of his subsequent debate revolvesaround the term ‘migration’ and (asopposed to) ‘gene flow’ as, for example,when he writes, ‘The argument of Haaket al. (2015) rests on the assumption thatthe Corded Ware represents a single dis-tinct population and that one would needevidence of Yamnaya affinity in an earlierarchaeological culture to make a case for acontinuous gene flow. This model seemsto exclude the possibility that such a con-tinuous gene flow could take place withinthe Corded Ware, which lasts for up to800 years’ (p. 166); and, additionally, ‘thereal issue here is that the authors do notmake explicit what they mean by the termmigration. The suggestion that continuousgene flow would be something differentfrom migration is not consistent withthe archaeological debates on the matter’(p. 166).I agree that there is no clear definition

of migration in our manuscript, which, asthe author admits, remains an elusiveterm. However, the model proposed inHaak et al. is based on the possibility ofdistinguishing between migration andcontinuous gene flow, wherein the latterbecomes somewhat easier to demarcate.Under the assumption of continuous geneflow between the east (here, the northPontic steppe) and the west (here, centralEurope), we would not expect such a cleardistinction between the genetic profiles ofboth. Instead, we would expect to see agradient of shared ancestry in which therespective proportions would be maxi-mized on one side (here ‘Early Farmer’ancestry in the west and ‘Iranian Neolithic’ancestry in the east), minimized in the

Furholt – Massive Migrations? Comments Reply 179





opposite direction, but present nonethe-less. However, this is not the case, as seenfrom individuals that span the time frame8000-3000 BP. Ancestry profiles remainexclusive until the time of the CordedWare.Of note, new data from Globular

Amphorae-associated individuals fromPoland and the Ukraine show no steppeancestry, that is, they very closely resemblethe Middle Neolithic farmers in Figure 1(Mathieson et al., 2017, available onbiorxiv: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/09/135616), which is intriguinggiven the geographical proximity and con-temporaneity with Yamnaya individuals.Likewise, as also seen in Figure 1, oneindividual associated with the CordedWare in the Baltic region lacks ‘farmer-ancestry’ (CW Latvia from Jones et al.,2017) and, thus, resembles the steppeancestry profile of Yamnaya individuals.Both observations narrow down the

remaining time window for the expansionof steppe ancestry into central Europe to afew hundred years at best or perhaps fiveto ten generations. Given that we do notobserve the signal of continuous gene flowover longer time periods (where the for-mation of steppe ancestry 5000–6000years ago would pose a time constraint),we were inclined to call this process‘migration’. Given the time window

between the Globular Amphorae indivi-duals with no ancestry and the earliestCorded Ware individuals with very largeproportions, this process is still considered‘rapid’ in biological terms and ‘massive’ incomparison.As a further consideration, Furholt

argues that, ‘this interpretation of the pat-terns seems to overstate the explanatorypowers of the PCA. The notion of a gen-erally closer connection of Corded Wareindividuals to Yamnaya individuals thanthe other Late Neolithic samples is muchless clear in a different study using differ-ent samples connected to Corded Ware(Allentoft et al., 2015)’ (p. 166). PCA andADMIXTURE are qualitative methodsthat are used to characterize the ancestryprofiles of prehistoric individuals. Allobservations from PCA andADMIXTURE are backed by formal sta-tistics (f- and D-statistic, etc.), which arequantitative methods and which weredescribed in detail in the respective papers.As such, formal admixture tests werecarried out to explain the genetic profilesof Corded Ware-associated individualsand the likely source populations (e.g.Haak et al., 2015: SupplementaryInformation 7, page 75 onwards andSupplementary Information 9, page 101onwards). The observed ancestry compo-nents as well as the positioning of Corded

Figure 1. ADMIXTURE plot of select ancient individuals (data from Allentoft et al., 2015; Haak etal., 2015; Mathieson et al., 2015; Jones et al., 2017). CW = Corded Ware; MN =Middle Neolithic.



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Ware individuals in principal componentspace are reliable and remain stable in allsubsequent studies, which include thesedatapoints (e.g. Günther & Jakobsson,2016; Jones et al., 2017; Mittnik et al.2017, http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/03/113241; Saag et al., 2017).Finally, I would like to address Furholt’s

statement that ‘for example, in theirSupplementary Information 2, Haak et al.(2015) demonstrate that three individualsconnected to the Pitted Ware culture inSweden (taken from Skoglund et al., 2012)are clearly under that eastern genetic influ-ence’ (p. 168). Supplementary Information2 describes the mitochondrial DNA data.Individuals associated with the PittedWare show high proportions of mtDNAU4 and U5 lineages (∼74%), which arevery common among all Holocene hunter-gatherer individuals reported so far. ThismtDNA profile thus equates to the bluecomponent of the autosomal data and notto ‘steppe ancestry’ per se.Overall, I welcome this opportunity of

interaction and open discussion. It isimportant that archaeologists shed a crit-ical light on the recent findings of archae-ogenetics in order to put these into abalanced and well-contextualized perspec-tive. Likewise, I am grateful for the oppor-tunity to clarify a few technical aspects ofour genetic work, which might relativizesome of Furholt’s arguments.

REFERENCES

Allentoft, M.E., Sikora, M., Sjögren, K.-G.,Rasmussen, S., Rasmussen, M.,Stenderup, J., et al. 2015. PopulationGenomics of Bronze Age Eurasia. Nature,522: 167–172.

Günther, T. & Jakobsson, M. 2016. GenesMirror Migrations and Cultures inPrehistoric Europe: A PopulationGenomic Perspective. Current Opinions inGenetics and Development, 41: 115–23.

Haak, W., Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N.,Rohland, N., Mallick, S., Llamas, B., et al.2015. Massive Migration from the Steppewas a Source for Indo-European Languagesin Europe. Nature, 522: 207–11.

Jones, E.R., Zarina, G., Moiseyev, V.,Lightfoot, E., Nigst, P.R., Manica, A.,et al. 2017. The Neolithic Transition inthe Baltic Was Not Driven by admixturewith Early European Farmers. CurrentBiology, 27: 576–82.

Mathieson, I., Lazaridis, I., Rohland, N.,Mallick, S., Patterson, N., Roodenberg, S.A., et al. 2015. Genome-wide Patterns ofSelection in 230 Ancient Eurasians.Nature, 528(7583): 499–503.

Mathieson, I., Alpaslan Roodenberg, S.,Posth, C., Szécsényi-Nagy, A.,Rohland, N., Mallick, S., et al. 2017. TheGenomic History Of SoutheasternEurope. bioRxiv. doi:10.1101/135616

Mittnik, A., Wang, C.-C., Pfrengle, S.,Daubaras, M., Zariņa, G., Hallgren, F.,et al. 2017. The Genetic History ofNorthern Europe. bioRxiv. doi:10.1101/113241

Saag, L., Varul, L., Scheib, C.L.,Stenderup, J., Allentoft, M.E., Saag, L.,et al. 2017. Extensive Farming in EstoniaStarted Through a Sex-biased MigrationFrom the Steppe. Current Biology, 27:576–82.

Skoglund, P., Malmström, H., Raghavan, M.,Storå, J., Hall, P., Willerslev, E., et al.2012. Origins and Genetic Legacy ofNeolithic Farmers and Hunter-gatherersin Europe. Science, 336: 466–69.

WOLFGANG HAAK

Max Planck Institute for the Science ofHuman History, Jena, Germany

THE LESS HARMONIOUS PAST

Although this paper is focused on theCorded Ware, it makes several excellentpoints about aDNA data and their inter-pretation in archaeology generally. This isa topic of obvious interest both toresearchers and to the wider public, but









archaeologists have been uncertain how toreact to the flood of new information andthe associated interpretations. On the onehand, genetics have been enthusiasticallyembraced as part of a third science revolu-tion which will finally free us from self-absorbed theorizing and mere ‘storytelling’(e.g. Kristiansen, 2014; Gerbault et al.,2017), but alongside the explicit criticalvoices (see e.g. Niklasson, 2014) many col-leagues have preferred to remain on thesidelines of the debate.As Furholt points out, this is largely

because they feel uncomfortable with the‘Kossinna-like’ interpretative shorthandemployed in such studies (see also Heyd,2017). Also, assumptions inherent in themethodologies are often difficult to pin-point and critique for those not familiarwith statistical or genetic terminology. Forinstance, the closedness of the ‘popula-tions’ under study, their internal homo-geneity, and the timings and speed ofgene flow are all far from proven (asFurholt recognizes), although they arewritten about with considerable assertive-ness. Sometimes, the number of indivi-duals taken as representative for a given‘culture’ is extremely low and/or from arestricted area; and it is not yet possible toinvestigate trends over the whole durationof often long-lived cultural phenomena.As a result, we seem to be re-creating theinternally homogenous and static ‘cultures’which then need a revolutionary event tobe transformed—the population revolutionwhich goes with our science revolution inan increasingly hyperbolic rhetoric.Furholt’s paper takes an important and

necessary step in highlighting the potentialarchaeological contribution to the mobilityand migration debate. This is especially sobecause he does not stop at criticism, butsketches plausible alternatives to the scen-arios proposed on the basis of geneticwork. These can now be researched further.In particular, the idea that more mobile

communities will be internally more hetero-geneous and, therefore, materially moreuniform is interesting and deserves to becompared with other case studies makingsimilar points, for instance for the LBK(Hofmann, 2016) or the lake villagehorizon (Ebersbach et al., 2017), and prob-ably well beyond the Neolithic, too.But there remains a general sense of dis-

satisfaction with how archaeological inter-pretations are generated by those outsidethe discipline. Even in times of inter- andincreasingly trans- or even meta-disciplinar-ity, communication does not appear to beworking terribly well, at least not at thescale beyond individual research projects(see e.g. Bánffy et al., 2012). Indeed, associal/‘soft’ and natural/‘hard’ scientists, wehave caricatures of each other firmly inmind: one lot are fluffy storytellers,obsessed with details, who only claim to beworried about new results because theydon’t understand the maths, the other lotare boors, unaware of their own inbuiltsubjectivity, who just want the fame ofsolving an age-old mystery, ideally on thefront page of the right magazine. I’ll leaveyou to figure out who’s who.Thus, although the entrenched opposi-

tions between the humanities and scienceshave been declared over (e.g. Robb, 2014),the truce seems a little uneasy in places.This may not be a bad thing.Disagreements are, after all, fertile groundfor new research endeavours. For the pur-poses of the present discussion, twoaspects deserve to be drawn out.First, to work together better, we need

to find common concerns and vocabular-ies. From an archaeological perspective, ifour theoretically aware models have beenignored, we are a little bit to blame our-selves. It is not just that, as Furholt out-lines, some theoretically less enthusiasticarchaeologists have continued to use cul-tures as an all-too-convenient shorthand.There has also been a tendency among






some of those who do enjoy theorizing toremain aloof with regard to scientificapproaches and to refrain from ‘big ques-tions’ concerning ‘origins’, widespreadmaterial culture patterns, or convergentsocial trends at the continental or globalscale. These topics brush over localnuance, which so many of us are accus-tomed to put centre-stage. Because geneti-cists, partly by training and partly due tothe available data, tend to look at broadtimescales and large regions, there is amismatch of scales here.This is only a problem if the genetic

data as a palimpsest of timescales andregions are interpreted in terms of short-term ‘events’, but with a sketchy grasp ofthe details, or, indeed, if the increasinglydetailed material entanglements archaeolo-gists write about disregard a wider andpotentially unsettling context. As Furholtpoints out, it should be possible for geneti-cists to write about scenarios other than animplicitly bloodthirsty replacement of oneset of populations by another. Yet, by thesame token, it should be possible to writenarratives of power imbalance, exploitation,and upheaval within symmetrical, network,and similar approaches. As yet, the over-whelming majority of these (and I mustadmit this is largely an outsider’s perspec-tive) seem to prefer a cosier view. We havemoved away from debates in which we pas-sionately argued about the differencesbetween people, things, and practices towritings in which all capacity for action isdiffused across very complex but ultimatelysimilar networks (or meshworks, etc.),largely ignoring the social constellations sup-porting them, including institutions, norms,and power relations (as criticized e.g. inStrathern, 1996; Glørstad, 2008;Burmeister, 2013). This lends itself mosteasily to narratives of sedate paces andsteady flows, as for instance inNeolithisation debates (e.g. Cummings &Harris, 2011; Jones & Sibbesson, 2013) and

recreates human actors as the ‘faceless blobs’long critiqued in feminist writing(Tringham, 1991: 94). It is good to havethis comfort challenged, also to reveal thefull potential of these theoretical approaches.Second, power differentials are not just

part of the pasts we study, but also of theresearch contexts within which we work.There is no point denying that, in thecurrent climate, archaeologists feel verymuch like the junior partner, with fundingand fame on the side of the geneticists.Joining in the debate more actively, there-fore, holds the promise of considerablegains; but this does not mean that we haveto act as mere sample providers and‘culture consultants’. Instead, we must begenuinely interested in outcomes, find avocabulary that makes sense to others andbrings our concerns across clearly, and alsostand by those concerns, even if they aretemporarily unfashionable. Indeed, thiskind of debate is something severalarchaeogeneticists explicitly value (e.g. seeHaak’s comments on this article).One can only agree with Niklasson

(2014: 59) that we need to question andcritique the reasons archaeogenetics are sopopular right now, and why these ‘facts’are happily accepted within an otherwiseallegedly facts-hostile climate. We mustalso continue to challenge the idea thatgreater simplification always makes betterexplanations (Gerbault et al., 2017; forcriticism see e.g. Mizoguchi, 2017: 20). Aswe are no longer in a position in whichchoosing a bottom-up instead of a top-down approach will gain anything, wehave to argue clearly why diversity andinternal complexity is the more fascinatingquestion, at whatever scale (local commu-nity or ‘culture’) we are seeking the answer.Judging from the controversies surround-

ing other newly introduced techniques (forinstance, 14C-dating or strontium isotopes),we can expect that, after an initial phase ofunbridled enthusiasm, it will become clear






that the new technique does not serve easyanswers up on a plate. That is the point atwhich common ground can be found, andit is a process we can actively initiate andshape. Papers like Furholt’s are key firststeps. My hope is that this will inspiremore people from across the theoreticalspectrum to incorporate the results of gen-etics explicitly into their own writings,identifying and working through alternativeperspectives and scenarios. Then we’ll haveplenty to talk about.

REFERENCES

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DANIELA HOFMANN

Vor- und Frühgeschichtliche Archäologie,Universität Hamburg, Germany

COMMENT ON: MASSIVE MIGRATIONS?THE IMPACT OF RECENT ADNA STUDIES

ON OUR VIEW OF THIRD MILLENNIUM

EUROPE

In the present manuscript, the author revi-sits the contribution of recent ancientDNA studies to the knowledge of thirdmillennium cal BC societies in Europe






while stressing their main conceptualflaws. The main critique revolves aroundthe equation of archaeological cultures andbiological/genetic population distinctive-ness, and three main aspects are high-lighted: a) the (lack of) representativenessof the studied samples; b) the lack of bio-logical/genetic homogeneity of themembers of a particular archaeologicalculture; and c) the ambiguous use of theterm migration in those publications.I find this paper both timely and neces-

sary. It comes at a time when the popular-ity of ancient DNA studies hastranscended the scientific community toseize the holders of popular media in atime of economic and political instability,where the debate on immigration and itssubsequent ramifications are on the table.Hopefully, this manuscript will serve asinspiration for a constructive dialoguebetween geneticists and archaeologists inthe search for a more holistic and realisticinterpretation of the dynamics of prehis-toric populations.One of the practices criticized by the

author of this manuscript is the use of ahandful of samples as representative of awhole period or archaeological culture, andhe cites the four individuals fromEsperstedt that signify the whole CordedWare culture in Haak et al. (2015) as anexample. While this is a widespread prac-tice in ancient DNA studies, it should beseen as a result of the limitations imposedby the small working sample size. It isimportant to highlight at this point thatancient DNA results are heavily con-strained firstly by the availability of suit-able samples and, ultimately, by theirbio-molecular preservation. While this biasis insurmountable, it is our responsibility torecognize the limitations of the data, and Iagree with the author that some of thecited papers have failed in adequately inte-grating the obtained genetic data with theevidence from other sources.

Turning into other sources of evidenceto fill in the gaps and using the author’swords ‘engagment with archaeological andanthropological theory’ (p. 162) is undoubt-edly the right path to follow; however, Ifeel that much more can be done from thegenetics side itself. Even with a limitedsample size, two independent teams havereported that a new genetic componentnearly absent in the preceding Europeanpopulations appears in several individualsbelonging to the Corded Ware culture,thus indicating an exogenous genomicinfluence during the third millennium calBC (Allentoft et al., 2015; Haak et al.,2015). The questions to be answered are:1) how much of the original genetic diver-sity that existed in these cultures has beencaptured by the studied samples; and 2) ifa pan-cultural pattern can be inferred, asdefended by the authors of these studies.Ultimately, this leads us to the question

of how the resolution of these studies canbe improved. In my opinion, in a timewhere ancient genomic studies havegained considerable success due to newtechnical advances and a targeted samplingof certain skeletal elements, we should aimfor a more complete chronological andgeographical genetic dissection of the dif-ferent cultural/populational sub-units as away to assess the genetic substructure ofthese big cultural units (e.g. Corded Wareor Yamnaya). This can only be achievedthrough a combined effort of archaeolo-gists and geneticists towards an informedsampling protocol followed by a holisticinterpretation of the data.During the time of revision of the

present paper, interesting additions to thedebate have been published. The most sig-nificant one is the work of Kristiansenet al. (2017) in Antiquity. In this paper,some of the authors of Allentoff et al.(2015) re-theorize their original ‘massivemigration’ hypothesis towards an integra-tive model that places more emphasis onto






‘social’ factors rather than on migrationand assimilation to explain the observedconnections between the Yamnaya and theCorded Ware people. This reworkedversion of the original paper incorporatessome of the lacking “cultural and socialelements to explain population history”and is more in line with the views of theauthor of this manuscript about a constantgenetic flow between both cultural units,explained by Kristiansen et al. (2017)through a pattern of female exogamy.However, the most revealing paragraph

brings up a point that is also central to thepresent manuscript, the recognition that‘the exact source [referring to the easterngenetic component found in the studiedCorded Ware individuals] could have beenanother, yet unsampled group of people’(Kristiansen et al., 2017: 335). This illus-trates very well some of the limitations ofgenetic data as a single predictor of pastpopulation movements. Ultimately, humanpopulation genetics needs to feed morestrongly on other disciplines to be able todisentangle the biological, social, and cul-tural mechanisms behind the observedgenetic patterns.

REFERENCES

Allentoft, M.E., Sikora, M., Sjögren, K.-G.,Rasmussen, S., Rasmussen, M.,Stenderup, J., et al. 2015. PopulationGenomics of Bronze Age Eurasia. Nature,522: 167–72. doi:10.1038/nature14507

Haak, W., Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N.,Rohland, N., Mallick, S., Llamas, B.,et al. 2015. Massive Migration from theSteppe was a Source for Indo-EuropeanLanguages in Europe. Nature, 522: 207–11. doi:10.1038/nature14317

Kristiansen, K., Allentoft, M.E., Frei, K.M.,Iversen, R., Johannsen, N.N.,Kroonen, G., et al. 2017. Re-theorizingMobility and the Formation of Cultureand Language Among the Corded Ware

Culture in Europe. Antiquity, 91: 334–47.doi:10.15184/aqy.2017.17

EVA FERNÁNDEZ-DOMÍNGUEZ

Department of Archaeology, DurhamUniversity, United Kingdom

TOUCHING THE VOID

Hardly a single week seems to passwithout the publication of another aDNApaper on later European prehistory, bring-ing its sense of repetition in terms ofmethods and, most worryingly, results andlimited archaeological contextualization.And yet, despite the magnitude of thisdata-cascade, archaeological reactionsremain comparatively limited and subdued(but see Hofmann, 2014; Vander Linden,2016). From this point of view, thisimportant contribution by Martin Furholt,and the decision by the EJA editorial teamto attach to it a full discussion, must beapplauded. Obviously, the relevance ofFurholt’s piece reaches well beyond itsmere existence and lies first and foremostin its intrinsic quality and the key points itraises.Furholt rightly stresses the uncomfort-

able position of archaeologists regardingaDNA. On the one hand, here is amethod which demonstrates exquisitetechnical refinements, but, on the otherhand, its interpretations are plagued, atleast to the archaeologist’s trained eye, byan outdated framework which treatsmigrations as securely identified historicalevents to be mapped and documented,rather than explained and understood.Even if these papers are published in thehighest-ranking journals, one is left withthe uneasy feeling that, in archaeologicalterms, very little has actually been learned.Whether for the Early or the LateEuropean Neolithic, the existence ofmigrating populations has indeed been






long suspected; although, as any studentof our discipline knows all too well, theirexact role in explaining change in pasthuman societies has been systematicallyminimized since the 1960s.The point is simple. As processual

archaeology rose from the ashes of thepyre it had set on migration, the topicbecame, until relatively recently, a no-goarea for most archaeologists. Furholtmight be able to invoke several key paperswhen advocating a more complex take onmigration, but the field remains in itsinfancy. Likewise, the excessive libertytaken by geneticists with archaeologicalcultures reflects, in a distorted way, theunease of our discipline with this coreconcept and, beyond that, how poor wegenerally are at describing material vari-ability, let alone interpreting it (seeShennan, 2013). All in all, Furholt’soutlook reflects the state of uncertaintywhere the discipline has been lingering fortoo long.In many respects, thus, we created a

void waiting to be filled, which geneticistsdid on the back of undeniable technicalprowess. This being said, it is obvious thatgeneticists do not engage that much witharchaeology and archaeologists, the latteroften appearing as passive sample provi-ders rather than active intellectual contri-butors in these publications. At the core ofthe problem lies the assumed identitybetween biological populations and arch-aeological cultures, both considered asexpressions of coherent, self-boundedunits, a fallacy denounced fifteen years agowhen modern DNA was hailed as revolu-tionary (e.g. MacEachern, 2000). Twosimple points, also made by Furholt, dem-onstrate the negative impact of this sim-plistic and false assumption.Firstly, aDNA papers often stem from a

limited number of samples, from whichany pattern is then generalized across theentire geographical and temporal extent of

the corresponding archaeological culture.The nature of aDNA data partly over-comes this problem (Li & Durbin, 2011)and further—hopefully more systematic—sampling will by definition improve theresolution. However, the limitations ofthis approach are obvious as the narrowrange of samples does not allow one toexplore possible differences within thegeographical and temporal lapse of a givenarchaeological culture. Secondly, the ques-tion of relatedness between populations iscentral to the genetic entreprise, andreflected in ADMIXTURE and PCAgraphs which provide statistically-informed depictions of this measure. Thereasons for this preference lie deeply in theproject of describing and understandingthe variation of the modern Europegenetic variation. The difficulty lies whenone attempts to translate biologicalrelatedness in social terms, materialized byarchaeological artefacts. This tension iswell exemplified when genetic relationsbetween central and eastern Europeanthird millennium BC samples are linked tocorresponding material affinities betweenthe Yamnaya and Corded Ware complexeswhile, as Furholt elegantly reminds us, thelatter is pretty much typologically-relatedto all archaeological cultures before, after,and around it.The above remarks arguably stem from

a genuine lack of archaeological sophistica-tion in most aDNA papers, in many waysrepeating and prolonging the mistakesmade by archaeologists for several decades.Are we thus in a theoretical impasse? Oris it that aDNA can only provide informa-tion with which we cannot do much?Most surely not. The bulk of the workhas, so far, been carried out in a decep-tively empirical way, taking advantage of aso-called golden phase where each sampleis bound to tell us something that we bydefinition did not know about the geneticmake-up of past populations. This






strategy, while efficient in the short term,is hardly sustainable. The only viable alter-native lies in complex hypotheses, informedand tested by several categories of evi-dence, all considered on equal footings.Population history, including migration,

provides a robust framework for suchhypotheses to be elaborated. Indeed, themain result gained from aDNA, as well asfrom other studies, is that Neolithicpopulations were in constant flux, assuggested by ever-changing levels ofadmixture. This simple observation openscountless possibilities for future research.For instance, reading the literature, onecan be left with the impression that theEarly and Late Neolithic migration eventswere interchangeable, while they obviouslyhappened under different demographicregimes, under different logistics, that is,in fundamentally different ways. Weresmall or large groups moving? Did themigration involve all categories of people,or were they sex-biased? Both questionscan partly be answered by bioinformatictreatments of the data (e.g. Pembertonet al., 2012; Goldberg et al., 2017).Further fine-grained structure in thesemigrations will, without doubt, be unrav-elled by re-examining in parallel theaDNA and wider archaeological records.However, when doing so, and as hinted atby Furholt, we need to drive away fromour implicit will to align neatly all signalsto write simple, elegant, yet inherentlyfaulty narratives. Genes and materialculture, in their own complexity, do notoperate in the same spheres of action, nordo they unfold upon the same spatial andtemporal scales. We need to take advan-tage of their respective complexity to testalternative hypotheses, and get towards amore textured representation of the past.To conclude, aDNA is, without any

doubt, a fantastic technique, whoseamazing potential we only begin to grasp.It is, however, worth remembering that

this potential only applies to a narrow partof the archaeological agenda (e.g. Kintighet al., 2014) and will only be unfolded bytesting proper hypotheses, rather thanchasing ghosts of our discipline’s past. Ofall social sciences, archaeology hasassuredly the best track record at inter-dis-ciplinarity and, thus, at overcoming arange of responses from extreme confi-dence to total disenchantment with newtechniques. In this sense, the difficultieswe encounter with aDNA are hardly new.Let us just not forget that any improve-ment will not simply come from ‘us’ teach-ing ‘them’, but also from us giving a hardlook at ourselves in the mirror.

REFERENCES

Goldberg, A., Günther, T., Rosenberg, N.A.& Jakobsson, M. 2017. Ancient XChromosomes Reveal Contrasting SexBias in Neolithic and Bronze AgeEurasian Migrations. Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences, 114: 2657–62.

Hofmann, D. 2014. What Have GeneticsEver Done for Us? The Implications ofaDNA Data for Interpreting Identity inEarly Neolithic Central Europe. EuropeanJournal of Archaeology, 18: 454–76.

Kintigh, K.W., Altschul, J.H., Beaudry, M.C.,Drennan, R.D., Kinzig, A.P., Kohler, T.A.,et al. 2014. Grand Challenges forArchaeology. Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences, 111: 879–80.

Li, H. & Durbin, R. 2011. Inference ofHuman Population History fromIndividual Whole-genome Sequences.Nature, 475: 493–96.

Pemberton, T.J., Absher, D., Feldman, M.W.,Myers, R.M., Rosenberg, N.A. & Li, J.Z.2012. Genomic Patterns of Homozygosityin Worldwide Human Populations. TheAmerican Journal of Human Genetics, 91:275–92.

Maceachern, S. 2000. Genes, Tribes, andAfrican History. Current Anthropology, 41:357–84.

Shennan, S.J. 2013. Review of BenjaminW. Roberts and Marc Vander Linden,






eds. Investigating Archaeological Cultures:Material Culture, Variability andTransmission. European Journal ofArchaeology, 16: 729–36.

Vander Linden, M. 2016. Population History inThird-Millennium BC Europe: Assessing theContribution of Genetics. World Archaeology.doi:10.1080/00438243.2016.1209124

MARC VANDER LINDEN

Institute of Archaeology, University CollegeLondon, United Kingdom

REPLY TO THE COMMENTS

The comments from two archaeologistsand two geneticists represent a spectrumof critique, approval, and extension of themain issues discussed in my article, andwill hopefully help to push forward thenecessary interdisciplinary dialogue.Wolfgang Haak defends his view that thedata indicate a rather rapid migrationprocess that would coincide with thebeginning of the Corded Ware, arguingthat the ever-increasing number ofsamples has now confirmed that all indivi-duals connected to Corded Ware so faranalysed have steppe ancestry, while thoseconnected to the slightly earlier GlobularAmphora Complex do not. Of course, it isnot impossible that the first appearance ofsteppe ancestry in central Europe coincidessharply with the first appearance ofCorded Ware, and I have no problemwith this interpretation, as long as it isempirically proven. What I criticize in mypaper is the presupposition of a biologicalsimilarity of individuals connected to spe-cific units of archaeological material. Thisis a premise that derives from and feedsinto an unholy reification and biologisa-tion of cultures as closed and homoge-neous social units. More importantly, it isempirically false. Looking at the clusters ofsamples on the PCA in Figure 2 (i.e. the

Early/Middle Neolithic cluster or the LateNeolithic/Steppe ancestry cluster), one cansee that they contain a mix of samplesassociated to different archaeological cul-tures. This is even more obvious in thenewer, updated versions of the same PCA(i.e. Mathieson et al., 2017: fig. 1). Theseclusters represent units in space and time(i.e. sixth to fourth millennia BC in south-ern and central Europe, or third andsecond millennia BC in central Europe);they do not differentiate between archaeo-logical cultures. Clearly, by the third mil-lennium cal BC, a major change in thegenetic pool of central Europe has takenplace; but the data do not, at present,suggest a very rapid, event-like process.Nine individuals from two sites connectedto Globular Amphora from Poland andUkraine without steppe ancestry do notadequately represent the entire pre-CordedWare situation in Europe. As I argue inthe article, and as was recently stressed byVolker Heyd (2017) archaeologically,steppe influence, which is visible in burialrites among other practices, can be tracedback to the fifth millennium cal BC insouth-eastern Europe and the Carpathianbasin; and it clearly played an importantrole during the fourth millennium cal BC

in different parts of Europe. The studyHaak mentions (Mathieson et al., 2017)also presents two individuals fromBulgaria who date to the fifth millenniumcal BC (Varna I and Smyadovo) and showa stronger steppe ancestry component inthe ADMIXTURE plot. All this indicatesthe possibility of a deeper, longer-termhistory of interaction, characterized byregular and repeated human movementbetween the steppes and south-eastern andcentral Europe, instead of a rapid, massivemigration event.However, to move forward it is not

enough to dissect the details of every datapoint and archaeological observation. It isabout creating a better interdisciplinary






discussion. Daniela Hofmann’s commen-tary broadens the perspective of the scien-tific and social context in which thisdiscussion should be viewed. She targetsthe apparent opposition between broad-stroke narratives and detailed critiques.The assessment of regional and diachronicpatterns should go hand in hand with theexploration of local and historical variabil-ity. I agree with her argument that boththe top-down and the bottom-up perspec-tives would profit from a more directengagement with real social processes,which involve active individuals, socialnorms, institutions, and power relations.Without such an engagement ‘migration’will remain a hollow phrase. This reso-nates well with Marc Vander Linden’s callfor more elaborated migration scenarios,testing of complex hypotheses, and theexploration of the social consequences ofmobility for prehistoric communities.Vander Linden rightly warns us againstthe tendency to choose the simplest pos-sible explanation of a set of data.However, as Eva Fernández-Domínguez

makes clear, the geneticists also have todeliver in order to enable a more sophisti-cated interdisciplinary discussion, be moreaware of the limitations of their datasets,and take seriously the conceptual pitfalls—sample size, the reification of cultures,ambiguous use of the term migration—andwork on ways to avoid them through amore intensive collaboration across discip-linary borders. She positively evaluates thenew paper by Kristiansen et al. (2017) asan example of a more elaborated re-theor-ization of the Allentoft et al. (2015) migra-tion narrative. This new scenario—CordedWare being formed as a consequence ofmigration of individuals with steppe ances-try into central Europe, followed by inter-action with local individuals, adaptation,admixture, and hybridization—is a

hypothesis that can be tested against thebiomolecular and archaeological datasets.For example, in such a scenario, we shouldexpect to find steppe ancestry in centralEurope connected to pre-Corded Warearchaeological complexes. Yet, to returnagain to Hofmann’s and Vander Linden’scommentaries, although Kristiansen et al.(2017) provide an appealing broad-strokenarrative, and propose concrete socialmechanisms (female exogamy), it is a one-size-fits-all approach that should be elabo-rated by incorporating a stronger acknowl-edgement of and emphasis on localvariability and potentially different socialmechanisms that are strongly suggested bythe variability visible in the archaeologicalrecord.Although discussions of these topics are

already gaining speed, we still have a longway to go until we will have developed ananthropologically informed integration ofbio-molecular and archaeological data,yielding an identification of realistic socialprocesses. While a stronger bottom-upcomponent is surely crucial, we should alsoexplore a broader range of anthropologicallystudied mechanisms of mobility, migration,and population circulation, and systematic-ally explore the ways in which such phe-nomena are discernible by studying thearchaeological record and genetic datasets.

REFERENCES

Allentoft, M.E., Sikora, M., Sjögren, K.-G.,Rasmussen, S., Rasmussen, M.,Stenderup, J., et al. 2015. PopulationGenomics of Bronze Age Eurasia. Nature522: 167–72. doi:10.1038/nature14507

Heyd, V. 2017. Kossinna’s Smile. Antiquity,91 (356): 348–59.

Kristiansen, K., Allentoft, M.E., Frei, K.M.,Iversen, R., Johannsen, N.N.,Kroonen, G., et al. 2017. Re-theorising






Mobility and the Formation of Cultureand Language Among the Corded WareCulture in Europe. Antiquity, 91: 334–47.doi:10.15184/aqy.2017.17

Mathieson, I., Alpaslan Roodenberg, S.,Posth, C., Szécsényi-Nagy, A., Rohland, N.,Mallick, S., et al. 2017. The Genomic

History Of Southeastern Europe. bioRxiv.doi:10.1101/135616.

MARTIN FURHOLT

Institute of Prehistoric and ProtohistoricArchaeology, Kiel University, Germany






Documents

Massive Migrations? The Impact of Recent aDNA …...massive migration of a larger group of people from the area of the Yamnaya culture (located in present-day Russia and Ukraine) into