Anthony (2021): Migration, ancient DNA, and Bronze Age pastoralists from the Eurasian steppes

Recently uploaded Migration, ancient DNA, and Bronze Age pastoralists from the Eurasian steppes, by David W Anthony in press 2020. IN: Daniels, Megan (ed.), Homo Migrans: Modeling Mobility and Migration in Human History. Albany: SUNY-Press, IEMA Distinguished Monograph Series.

Relevant excerpts:

Almost all sampled Yamnaya males were members of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b1a. Older Eneolithic cemeteries had yielded a more diverse set of patrilines (R1b, R1a, Q1a, J, Ia2a). Later Corded Ware populations, although derived from Yamnaya ancestry, were largely Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a, which had been present in the steppes during the Eneolithic and could have remained present but been excluded from kurgans through the Yamnaya era, re-emerging as a dominant male lineage in in the Corded Ware population. This shifting of male lineages within a broadly related set of steppe-derived populations could indicate a succession of restricted male-defined clans gaining access to political power and to memorialization under prominent burial mounds while excluding other males from such positions. The regionally suppressed patrilines such as those that inherited the R1a haplotype would in this case have become almost invisible archaeologically in the steppes because of their exclusion from Yamnaya kurgan graves, but then emerged as migrants in central Europe. (…)

The creation of the Corded Ware package was an active and creative use of material culture to both represent and actively forge a new cultural identity among mobile, pastoral migrants. They separated geographically from their Yamnaya parent group by migrating into the mountains of Slovakia and the Czech Republic north of the Carpathian Basin, where they quickly created a new package of customs that borrowed from local practices more than their Yamnaya parents in Hungary had done. Whole genomes testify that immigrant Corded Ware and local Globular Amphorae mating networks remained largely distinct and separate for 500 years while they shared the same landscapes. So the integration of local Middle Neolithic weapon and pottery styles into Corded Ware migrant material culture was not equated with an equivalent level of integration in mating behaviors or kin-based networks.

Based on the references of 2019, it looks like a revised version of his oral communication in the conference of 2018 the book refers to.

So, it looks like David W. Anthony is still in favour of an origin of Corded Ware in Yamnaya Hungary, which is even weirder today, since he himself reported that most pre-Yamnaya males from Khvalynsk were also an R1b-rich population…

His explanation is exactly what Furholt criticizes as the theory of “disenfranchised lineages” that goes against Occam’s razor, and reveals that “the fixation on Yamnaya as the source for Corded Ware formation is not a result, but rather a premise” now also for archaeologists like Anthony or Heyd, who clearly didn’t believe that both cultures were genetically or culturally related, but somehow became convinced that the infamous 2015 papers prove something they do not.

More on Anthony and this theory of CWC from Yamnaya Hungary:

The new “Indo-European Corded Ware Theory” of David Anthony

The Great Hungarian Plain in a time of change in the Balkans – Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age