Luwians vs. Hittites and Mycenaeans vs. Luwians

A rather imaginative reconstruction of the events surrounding the Sea Peoples and the ending of the end of the Bronze Age.

Bronze Age war in northern Germany

Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle

About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.

...

In 1996, an amateur archaeologist found a single upper arm bone sticking out of the steep riverbank—the first clue that the Tollense Valley, about 120 kilometers north of Berlin, concealed a gruesome secret. A flint arrowhead was firmly embedded in one end of the bone, prompting archaeologists to dig a small test excavation that yielded more bones, a bashed-in skull, and a 73-centimeter club resembling a baseball bat. The artifacts all were radiocarbon-dated to about 1250 B.C.E., suggesting they stemmed from a single episode during Europe’s Bronze Age.

...

Northern Europe in the Bronze Age was long dismissed as a backwater, overshadowed by more sophisticated civilizations in the Near East and Greece. Bronze itself, created in the Near East around 3200 B.C.E., took 1000 years to arrive here. But Tollense’s scale suggests more organization—and more violence—than once thought. “We had considered scenarios of raids, with small groups of young men killing and stealing food, but to imagine such a big battle with thousands of people is very surprising,” says Svend Hansen, head of the German Archaeological Institute’s (DAI’s) Eurasia Department in Berlin. The well-preserved bones and artifacts add detail to this picture of Bronze Age sophistication, pointing to the existence of a trained warrior class and suggesting that people from across Europe joined the bloody fray.

...

There was reason for skepticism. Before Tollense, direct evidence of large-scale violence in the Bronze Age was scanty, especially in this region. Historical accounts from the Near East and Greece described epic battles, but few artifacts remained to corroborate these boastful accounts. “Even in Egypt, despite hearing many tales of war, we never find such substantial archaeological evidence of its participants and victims,” UCD’s Molloy says.

...

Ancient DNA could potentially reveal much more: When compared to other Bronze Age samples from around Europe at this time, it could point to the homelands of the warriors as well as such traits as eye and hair color. Genetic analysis is just beginning, but so far it supports the notion of far-flung origins. DNA from teeth suggests some warriors are related to modern southern Europeans and others to people living in modern-day Poland and Scandinavia. “This is not a bunch of local idiots,” says University of Mainz geneticist Joachim Burger. “It’s a highly diverse population.”

West_Asian in the flesh (hunter-gatherers from Georgia) (Jones et al. 2015)

Years ago, I detected the presence of a West_Asian genetic component (with dual modes in "Caucasus" and "Gedrosia") whose origins I placed in the "highlands of West Asia" and which I proposed spread into Europe post-5kya with Indo-European languages.

Earlier this year, the study by Haak et al. showed that steppe invaders after 5kya brought into Europe a 50/50 mix of "Eastern European Hunter-Gatherer" (EHG) ancestry/An unknown population from the Near East/Caucasus. The "unknown population" was most similar to Caucasians/Near Easterners like Armenians but did not correspond to any ancient sample.

A new paper in Nature Communications by Jones et al. finds this "missing link" in the flesh in Upper Paleolithic/Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Georgia which they call "Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers" (CHG). From the paper:

The separation between CHG and both EF and WHG ended during the Early Bronze Age when a major ancestral component linked to CHG was carried west by migrating herders from the Eurasian Steppe. The foundation group for this seismic change was the Yamnaya, who we estimate to owe half of their ancestry to CHG-linked sources.

The authors also make the connection to South Asia:

In modern populations, the impact of CHG also stretches beyond Europe to the east. Central and South Asian populations received genetic influx from CHG (or a population close to them), as shown by a prominent CHG component in ADMIXTURE (Supplementary Fig. 5; Supplementary Note 9) and admixture f3-statistics, which show many samples as a mix of CHG and another South Asian population (Fig. 4b; Supplementary Table 9).

Also of interest:

Both Georgian hunter-gatherer samples were assigned to haplogroup J with Kotias belonging to the subhaplogroup J2a (see methods).

The paper is open access, so go ahead and read it for other details.

Nature Communications 6, Article number: 8912 doi:10.1038/ncomms9912

Upper Palaeolithic genomes reveal deep roots of modern Eurasians

Eppie R. Jones et al.

We extend the scope of European palaeogenomics by sequencing the genomes of Late Upper Palaeolithic (13,300 years old, 1.4-fold coverage) and Mesolithic (9,700 years old, 15.4-fold) males from western Georgia in the Caucasus and a Late Upper Palaeolithic (13,700 years old, 9.5-fold) male from Switzerland. While we detect Late Palaeolithic–Mesolithic genomic continuity in both regions, we find that Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) belong to a distinct ancient clade that split from western hunter-gatherers ~45 kya, shortly after the expansion of anatomically modern humans into Europe and from the ancestors of Neolithic farmers ~25 kya, around the Last Glacial Maximum. CHG genomes significantly contributed to the Yamnaya steppe herders who migrated into Europe ~3,000 BC, supporting a formative Caucasus influence on this important Early Bronze age culture. CHG left their imprint on modern populations from the Caucasus and also central and south Asia possibly marking the arrival of Indo-Aryan languages.

Link

Bronze Age Plague

This paper used the same data as the Allentoft et al. paper, but instead of focusing on the human DNA recovered from ancient Eurasians, it went looking for interesting stuff in the non-human DNA (the stuff that is usually thrown away).

The result: 2,800-5,000 year old Yersinia pestis from Europe to the Altai. It will be cool to look at even older remains than the Bronze Age, but this already pushes the date for plague by a couple thousand years, and implicates steppe people in its earliest spread.

Cell Volume 163, Issue 3, p571–582, 22 October 2015

Early Divergent Strains of Yersinia pestis in Eurasia 5,000 Years Ago

Simon Rasmussen18, Morten Erik Allentoft18, Kasper Nielsen, Ludovic Orlando, Martin Sikora, Karl-Göran Sjögren, Anders Gorm Pedersen, Mikkel Schubert, Alex Van Dam, Christian Moliin Outzen Kapel, Henrik Bjørn Nielsen, Søren Brunak, Pavel Avetisyan, Andrey Epimakhov, Mikhail Viktorovich Khalyapin, Artak Gnuni, Aivar Kriiska, Irena Lasak, Mait Metspalu, Vyacheslav Moiseyev, Andrei Gromov, Dalia Pokutta, Lehti Saag, Liivi Varul, Levon Yepiskoposyan, Thomas Sicheritz-Pontén, Robert A. Foley, Marta Mirazón Lahr, Rasmus Nielsen, Kristian Kristiansen, Eske Willerslev

The bacteria Yersinia pestis is the etiological agent of plague and has caused human pandemics with millions of deaths in historic times. How and when it originated remains contentious. Here, we report the oldest direct evidence of Yersinia pestis identified by ancient DNA in human teeth from Asia and Europe dating from 2,800 to 5,000 years ago. By sequencing the genomes, we find that these ancient plague strains are basal to all known Yersinia pestis. We find the origins of the Yersinia pestis lineage to be at least two times older than previous estimates. We also identify a temporal sequence of genetic changes that lead to increased virulence and the emergence of the bubonic plague. Our results show that plague infection was endemic in the human populations of Eurasia at least 3,000 years before any historical recordings of pandemics.

Link

Ancient mtDNA from cis-Baikal area

Russian Journal of Genetics: Applied Research January 2015, Volume 5, Issue 1, pp 26-32

Mitochondrial DNA diversity in the gene pool of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Cisbaikalian human population R. O. Trapezov, A. S. Pilipenko, V. I. Molodin

This paper presents the results of a study of a mitochondrial DNA sample (N = 15) from the remains of representatives of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (VI–III millennia BC) Cisbaikalian human population. It was found that the mitochondrial gene pool of the ancient population under study contains lineages of East Eurasian haplogroups D, G2a C, Z, and F1b. The results of the comparative analysis of the group under study with ancient and modern Eurasian populations suggest that the development of autochtonous East Eurasian genetic components was the main mechanism of the formation of the population of the Baikal region. Genetic contacts with populations of neighboring regions of Central Asia also contributed to the formation of the gene pool of the Cisbaikalian population.

Link

Natural selection and ancient European DNA

A new preprint on the bioRxiv studies the same data as the recent Haak et al. paper, but focuses on natural selection in Europe. Until recently, selection could only be studied by looking at modern populations, but since selection is genetic change over time effected by the environment, it's possible that studies like this will be the norm in the future.

The new study seems to confirm the results of Wilde et al. on steppe groups, as the Yamnaya had a very low frequency of the HERC2 derived "blue eye" allele and a lower frequency of the SLC45A2 "light skin" allele than any modern Europeans. The Yamnaya seem to have been fixed for the other SLC24A5 "light skin" allele which seems to have been at high frequency in all ancient groups save the "Western Hunter Gatherers".

It seems that light pigmentation traits had already existed in pre-Indo-European Europeans (both farmers and hunter-gatherers) and so long-standing philological attempts to correlate them with the arrival of light-pigmented Indo-Europeans from the steppe (or indeed anywhere), and to contrast them with darker pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Europe were misguided. If anything, it seems that the "fairest of them all" were the Scandinavian hunter-gatherers, and a combination of light/dark pigmentation was also present in Neolithic farmers and Western Hunter Gatherers in various combinations.

It also seems that both the theory that lactose tolerance started with LBK farmers and the theory that it came to Europe from milk-drinking steppe Indo-Europeans were wrong, as this trait seems to be altogether absent in European hunter-gatherers, farmers, and Yamnaya, and make a very timid appearance in the Late neolithic/Bronze Age before shooting up in frequency to the present.

Another new development is the ability to predict "genetic height" from ancient DNA. I think this may be a little bit superfluous as you can predict "actual height" by measuring long bone lengths. On the other hand, actualized height depends not only on genetics but also on diet, disease, etc., so it's useful to look at genetic changes in such polygenic traits directly.

A big surprise was the presence of the derived EDAR allele in Swedish hunter-gatherers. This allele is very rare in modern Europeans and seems to have pleiotropic effects in East Asians. This raises the question why this allele (that was so successful in East Asians), never "took hold" in Europeans. One possibility is that it never provided an advantage to Europeans (I don't think anyone really knows what it's actually good for). Another is that Swedish hunter-gatherers simply didn't contribute much ancestry to modern Europeans and so the allele never got the chance to rise in frequency by much.

bioRxiv http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/016477

Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe

Iain Mathieson et al.

The arrival of farming in Europe beginning around 8,500 years ago required adaptation to new environments, pathogens, diets, and social organizations. While evidence of natural selection can be revealed by studying patterns of genetic variation in present-day people, these pattern are only indirect echoes of past events, and provide little information about where and when selection occurred. Ancient DNA makes it possible to examine populations as they were before, during and after adaptation events, and thus to reveal the tempo and mode of selection. Here we report the first genome-wide scan for selection using ancient DNA, based on 83 human samples from Holocene Europe analyzed at over 300,000 positions. We find five genome-wide signals of selection, at loci associated with diet and pigmentation. Surprisingly in light of suggestions of selection on immune traits associated with the advent of agriculture and denser living conditions, we find no strong sweeps associated with immunological phenotypes. We also report a scan for selection for complex traits, and find two signals of selection on height: for short stature in Iberia after the arrival of agriculture, and for tall stature on the Pontic-Caspian steppe earlier than 5,000 years ago. A surprise is that in Scandinavian hunter-gatherers living around 8,000 years ago, there is a high frequency of the derived allele at the EDAR gene that is the strongest known signal of selection in East Asians and that is thought to have arisen in East Asia. These results document the power of ancient DNA to reveal features of past adaptation that could not be understood from analyses of present-day people.

Link (pdf)

Oxhide ingots in Scandinavian rock art

Antiquity / Volume 89 / Issue 343 / February 2015, pp 191-209

Representations of oxhide ingots in Scandinavian rock art: the sketchbook of a Bronze Age traveller?

Johan Ling and Zofia Stos-Gale

Bronze Age trade networks across Europe and the Mediterranean are well documented; Baltic amber and bronze metalwork were particularly valued commodities. Here it is argued that demand for copper and tin led to changes in Scandinavian trade routes around 1600 BC, which can be linked to the appearance of figurative rock art images in southern Scandinavia. Images identified as oxhide ingots have been discovered in Sweden and suggest that people from Scandinavia were familiar with this characteristically Mediterranean trading commodity. Using trace element and lead isotope analysis, the authors argue that some bronze tools excavated in Sweden could have been made of Cypriot copper; these two discoveries suggest that Scandinavians were travelling to the Mediterranean, rather than acting through a middle man.

Link

Scandinavian team looking for Indo-Europeans in Kazakhstan

An article in the Astana Times. If anyone has any additional information via Kazakh or Scandinavian media, or can find the press release referred to in the article, feel free to share.

  Scandinavian Team Searches for Indo-European Homeland through Kazakhstan DNA

A Scandinavian team has come to Kazakhstan in search of the common homeland of all Indo-European peoples, collecting bone fragments for analysis in the Centre for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen.

The researchers are looking for a genetic connection to match the linguistic connections that have already been drawn, Norwegian historian Sturla Ellingvag of the Explico Historical Research Foundation told The Astana Times on Feb. 20. “We’re trying to find a connection in science, in our DNA, to prove that there is indeed a connection, between, for example, Norwegians and the people in Kazakhstan. And also we are looking for a homeland, which is somewhere on the Caspian steppe, or in Russia, or some say it’s in Armenia or Ukraine. There are many different theories.”

The researchers collected about 120 Bronze and early Iron Age bone samples in total from Pavlodar, Kostanai and Karaganda during their week-long trip to Kazakhstan, from Feb. 14 – 21. Kazakhstan is fascinating, the researcher says, because it contains human remains that are “so far back on the DNA map.”

The 4,000 year old samples they’ve found have been very well preserved, Ellingvag said. “I can only speak from meeting archaeologists in Astana and here in Karaganda, but I’m very much impressed by the professionalism and also by the exhibitions they have,” he said.

The project to search for the ancestral homeland of the Indo-European peoples falls under the umbrella of a large grant from the Danish government and is being supported by the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Gotenburg University in Sweden and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, which has one of the best historical DNA analysis labs in the world and which is where the analysis on the Kazakh remains will actually be done. Universities in Karaganda, Pavlodar and Kostanai are also involved.

The Kurgan hypothesis posits that the speakers of proto-Indo-European, the hypothesized common ancestor of the massive Indo-European language group, originally lived on the Pontiac-Caspian steppe, an area of land stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and including parts of Russia, Ukraine and northwest Kazakhstan, beginning around the fifth millenium B.C. The hypothesis describes the spread of the language family from the steppe in every direction. “Kurgan” is a term for a type of burial mound common in the Caucasus, across Kazakhstan and beyond.

“Two thousand years ago, we started having Kurgan graves in Scandinavia,” said Ellingvag. The commonalities between burial mounds in Norway and Scythian/Saka mounds in Kazakhstan are striking, he said. “[The Scythian people] had these ornaments, these animal ornaments, which are very, very important in Scandinavian art … and the ornaments are actually quite similar, which is striking, it’s very special.”

The Kurgan hypothesis has been somewhat substantiated by genetic evidence so far, according to a press release by the Kon-Tiki Museum on the project, and advances in the technology for doing historical DNA research over the past few years means it is now possible to get closer to finding this genetic and linguistic starting point for most of the peoples of Europe.

“During the past 15 years, the Y-DNA R1a haplogroup has been characterised as a genetic signal of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The theory now looks more plausible than ever, thanks to recent discoveries about its structure and phylogeography. Moreover, the Y-DNA R1a haplogroup has been found in numerous ancient remains supposedly belonging to early Indo-Europeans,” the press release explains.

A separate but related project is looking into the DNA of ancient horses. The Kurgan culture is credited with being the first to domesticate the horse.

The research team includes Ellingvag, Danish DNA-scientist Peter Damgaard and Bettina Heyerdahl, daughter of Norwegian archaeologist and explorer Thor Heyerdahl. They are also working with Kazakh researcher Emma Usmanova.

I could also find this Youtube video from this expedition.

Italic "Eteocretan" Sea peoples?

Stranger things have happened...

TALANTA XL-XLI (2008-2009), 151-172

AN ‘ETEOCRETAN’ INSCRIPTION FROM PRAISOS AND THE HOMELAND OF THE SEA PEOPLES

Luuk de Ligt

The whereabouts of the homeland or homelands of the so-called Sea Peoples have been endlessly debated. This article re-examines this problem by looking at one of the ‘Eteocretan’ inscriptions from the town of Praisos. It is argued that this text is written in an Indo-European language belonging to the OscanUmbrian branch of the Italic language family. Based on this finding it is suggested that this language must have arrived in eastern Crete during the Late Bronze Age, when Mycenaean rulers recruited groups of mercenaries from Sicily, Sardinia and various parts of the Italian peninsula. When the Mycenaean state system collapsed around 1200 BC, some of these groups moved to the northern Aegean, to Cyprus and to the coastal districts of the Levant. It is also suggested that this reconstruction explains the presence of an Etruscan-speaking community in sixth-century-BC Lemnos. An interesting corollary of this theory is that the Sea Peoples were present in the Mycenaean world some considerable time before its collapse in the early twelfth century

Link (pdf)

Bronze Age mixing of multiple populations => Armenians (?)

As far as I can tell, the hypothesis of "several mixtures" comes from looking at many pairs of populations and seeing that different types of pairs seem like they mixed to make Armenians. Possibility (1) is that Armenians have multiple mixtures, and possibility (2) is that none of the sources work very well.

Hellenthal et al. did not find mixture in Armenians, but they worked with a different methodology and smaller sample size. Either, the N=173 sample size enabled detection of this admixture, or differences in methodology account for differences in conclusions. If true, the admixture dates in this paper would be some of the earliest discovered by looking at modern populations (without the help of ancient DNA).

The TreeMix analysis (Figure 4) is inconclusive about admixture from a population best represented by Neolithic Europeans. There is no plot of residuals in this figure, so this model with one migration event may not be adequate. Prior knowledge suggests that it isn't, as Pakistani and European populations have no admixture in Figure 4.

It's great that the authors will share their data!
ftp://ngs.sanger.ac.uk/scratch/project/team19/Armenian
As of this writing, the data is not "live"; it might appear when the paper is published.

bioRxiv doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/015396

Genetic evidence for an origin of the Armenians from Bronze Age mixing of multiple populations

Marc Haber et al.

The Armenians are a culturally isolated population who historically inhabited a region in the Near East bounded by the Mediterranean and Black seas and the Caucasus, but remain underrepresented in genetic studies and have a complex history including a major geographic displacement during World War One. Here, we analyse genome-wide variation in 173 Armenians and compare them to 78 other worldwide populations. We find that Armenians form a distinctive cluster linking the Near East, Europe, and the Caucasus. We show that Armenian diversity can be explained by several mixtures of Eurasian populations that occurred between ~3,000 and ~2,000 BCE, a period characterized by major population migrations after the domestication of the horse, appearance of chariots, and the rise of advanced civilizations in the Near East. However, genetic signals of population mixture cease after ~1,200 BCE when Bronze Age civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean world suddenly and violently collapsed. Armenians have since remained isolated and genetic structure within the population developed ~500 years ago when Armenia was divided between the Ottomans and the Safavid Empire in Iran. Finally, we show that Armenians have higher genetic affinity to Neolithic Europeans than other present-day Near Easterners, and that 29% of the Armenian ancestry may originate from an ancestral population best represented by Neolithic Europeans.

Link

Bronze Age warrior from Poland

Google translation of original article:

Skull warrior was in such good condition that the museum was tempted by an experiment - a reconstruction of his face. Tasks undertaken by the research team of Dr. Dorothy Lorkiewicz-Muszyńska of the Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Medical Sciences. Every day with their ability to use the police, for example, when you need to identify a murder victim. The first step was to make a 3D scan of the skull.

- At the base using a special computer program was applied to the muscle tissue - explains the director Bartecki. - Method shows more than 90 percent. compliance with the real appearance of a man - says.

Proved invaluable assistance skeleton results Rogalin. Also genetic. Thanks to them, we know that the warrior had a dark complexion, dark hair and eyes.

This combination of traits is rather uncommon in modern Poles. It seems that eastern Europeans looked quite different four thousand years ago than they do today.

Y chromosome super-fathers

This is a very exciting paper. Most of these lineages are so young that there are good chances that their founders were figures from history or mythology.

The most interesting one is DC2 which was also found in south Siberian Kurgans, belongs to haplogroup R1a1 and is given an age of 3,284 years by the authors (with some almost impossibly wide confidence intervals). Based on its distribution, and if a Bronze Age date is right, it is difficult to see in it anything other than a patrilineage that was present in Proto-Indo-Iranians.

European Journal of Human Genetics advance online publication 14 January 2015; doi: 10.1038/ejhg.2014.285

Y-chromosome descent clusters and male differential reproductive success: young lineage expansions dominate Asian pastoral nomadic populations

Patricia Balaresque et al.

High-frequency microsatellite haplotypes of the male-specific Y-chromosome can signal past episodes of high reproductive success of particular men and their patrilineal descendants. Previously, two examples of such successful Y-lineages have been described in Asia, both associated with Altaic-speaking pastoral nomadic societies, and putatively linked to dynasties descending, respectively, from Genghis Khan and Giocangga. Here we surveyed a total of 5321 Y-chromosomes from 127 Asian populations, including novel Y-SNP and microsatellite data on 461 Central Asian males, to ask whether additional lineage expansions could be identified. Based on the most frequent eight-microsatellite haplotypes, we objectively defined 11 descent clusters (DCs), each within a specific haplogroup, that represent likely past instances of high male reproductive success, including the two previously identified cases. Analysis of the geographical patterns and ages of these DCs and their associated cultural characteristics showed that the most successful lineages are found both among sedentary agriculturalists and pastoral nomads, and expanded between 2100 BCE and 1100 CE. However, those with recent origins in the historical period are almost exclusively found in Altaic-speaking pastoral nomadic populations, which may reflect a shift in political organisation in pastoralist economies and a greater ease of transmission of Y-chromosomes through time and space facilitated by the use of horses.

Link

Ancient DNA from prehistoric inhabitants of Hungary

A very interesting new article on Europe describes new data from ancient Hungary from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. It is open access, so go ahead and read it. I will update this entry with some comments after I read the paper myself.

UPDATE I (The petrous bone):

The authors write:

The endogenous DNA yields from the petrous samples exceeded those from the teeth by 4- to 16-fold and those from other bones up to 183-fold. Thus, while other skeletal elements yielded human, non-clonal DNA contents ranging from 0.3 to 20.7%, the levels for petrous bones ranged from 37.4 to 85.4% (Fig. 1).

This seems like a very exciting technical breakthrough that will increase DNA yields in future studies.

UPDATE II (PCA):

The Neolithic Hungarians are close to Sardinians (this has been replicated in study after study, so it's no longer a surprise when you find Neolithic Europeans that look like Sardinians).

What is surprising is that one KO1 Neolithic European is with the hunter-gatherers (top of the plot). At some level you would expect to find some hunter-gatherers in the earliest Neolithic communities in Europe as Europe wasn't empty land when the early farmers showed up. And KO1 appears one of those guys, "caught in the act" of first contact between the two groups.

The two Bronze Age samples are more like modern continental Europeans but not exactly like modern Hungarians. The Iron Age sample is in the no-man's land between Europe and the Caucasus and his "Asian" Y chromosome and mtDNA seems to agree that this is no ordinary European.

UPDATE III (How they looked):

I really like the visualization of hair and eye color predictions of the last two columns of the table on the right. It seems that the ancient Hungarians had mainly brown hair with more variability after 5,000 years ago. They mostly had brown eyes except three individuals.

An interesting thing is that NE7 who seems to have light hair and blue eyes is just like other Sardinian-like farmers of the Neolithic and also has the mtDNA haplogroup N1a1a1a that is ultra-typical for Neolithic people from Europe. So this is a warning not to conflate appearance with ancestry.

UPDATE IV (Y chromosomes):

As always, the supplement has many of the interesting details. Two Neolithic males were C6 which is the same "weird" haplogroup that La Brana hunter-gatherer from Spain had. Two other ones were I2a which is what Loschbour and Swedish hunter-gatherers had. Strangely, no Neolithic males had G which was found before in many Neolithic Europeans.

A new finding is that the Bronze Age individual BR2 belonged to haplogroup J2a1. I think this is the first time this has been found in ancient DNA and it falsifies the Phoenician sea-faring theory of the dispersal of this lineage.

Finally, the Iron Age Hungarian belonged to haplogroup N. I believe this was found in ancient Magyars from Hungary before, but apparently it existed there long before them.

Nature Communications 5, Article number: 5257 doi:10.1038/ncomms6257

Genome flux and stasis in a five millennium transect of European prehistory

Cristina Gamba et al.

The Great Hungarian Plain was a crossroads of cultural transformations that have shaped European prehistory. Here we analyse a 5,000-year transect of human genomes, sampled from petrous bones giving consistently excellent endogenous DNA yields, from 13 Hungarian Neolithic, Copper, Bronze and Iron Age burials including two to high (~22 × ) and seven to ~1 × coverage, to investigate the impact of these on Europe’s genetic landscape. These data suggest genomic shifts with the advent of the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages, with interleaved periods of genome stability. The earliest Neolithic context genome shows a European hunter-gatherer genetic signature and a restricted ancestral population size, suggesting direct contact between cultures after the arrival of the first farmers into Europe. The latest, Iron Age, sample reveals an eastern genomic influence concordant with introduced Steppe burial rites. We observe transition towards lighter pigmentation and surprisingly, no Neolithic presence of lactase persistence.

Link

4,000-year old chariot burial from Georgia

This would make it roughly contemporaneous to the chariot burials of the Sintashta-Petrovka culture of the European steppe.

4,000-Year-Old Burial with Chariots Discovered in South Caucasus

An ancient burial containing chariots, gold artifacts and possible human sacrifices has been discovered by archaeologists in the country of Georgia, in the south Caucasus.

The burial site, which would've been intended for a chief, dates back over 4,000 years to a time archaeologists call the Early Bronze Age, said Zurab Makharadze, head of the Centre of Archaeology at the Georgian National Museum.

Archaeologists discoveredthe timber burial chamber within a 39-foot-high (12 meters) mound called a kurgan. When the archaeologists reached the chamber they found an assortment of treasures, including two chariots, each with four wooden wheels. [See Images of the Burial Chamber & Chariots]

...

The burial dates back to a time before domesticated horses appeared in the area, Makharadze said. While no animals were found buried with the chariots, he said, oxen would have pulled them.

Dark pigmentation of Eneolithic and Bronze Age kurgan groups from eastern Europe

This is a very exciting new study that seems to parallel some results from early west Europeans. The authors invoke selection as a possible cause for the massive change in frequency between the Bronze Age and present-day Ukrainians.

An invocation of selection as an explanation requires evidence population continuity, otherwise changes in allele frequency may involve migration of a new frequency-differentiated new population; for example, the massive change in pigmentation in North America over the last 500 years is not due to selection but to migration of Europeans. The authors cannot reject population continuity on the basis of mtDNA haplogroup frequencies, although autosomal data may be more informative for that purpose.

In any case, the fact that the limited sample from western Europe and the much more extensive sample from eastern Europe both show a darker pigmentation than modern Europeans does suggest that interesting changes happened in Europe over the last few thousand years and samples from more recent time periods may better determine the pace of this change.

From the paper:

In sum, a combination of selective pressures associated with living in northern latitudes, the adoption of an agriculturalist diet, and assortative mating may sufficiently explain the observed change from a darker phenotype during the Eneolithic/Early Bronze age to a generally lighter one in modern Eastern Europeans, although other selective factors cannot be discounted. The selection coefficients inferred directly from serially sampled data at these pigmentation loci range from 2 to 10% and are among the strongest signals of recent selection in humans.

UPDATE: 

The classical Greeks did of course notice that the inhabitants of the north Pontic hinterland, collectively known as Scythians, were extraordinarily light-pigmented. This would imply that major pigmentation change occurred in the steppe over a time span of Bronze Age-Classical Antiquity rather than Bronze Age-present; this would imply even higher selection coefficients (if selection over a population exhibiting continuity is at play).

The Scythians were also thought to be recent arrivals from the east so it is not clear if they were descended from the Bronze Age population of eastern Europe; the crazy selection coefficients that would need to be assumed if there was indeed population continuity might imply that Herodotus got it right again, and the Scythians did in fact arrive from elsewhere. That would of course also imply that people from Central Asia and Siberia (where the Scythians may have come from) were originally lighter than Europeans which does find support from an older study on southern Siberian remains. Ironically, if that is the case, it would mean that the famous light-pigmented mummies of different parts of Inner Asia may not be long-lost European descendants -- as it has sometimes been presumed on the basis of modern-day clines of pigmentation. As usual, ancient DNA continues to surprise.

PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1316513111

Direct evidence for positive selection of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in Europeans during the last 5,000 y

Sandra Wilde et al.

Eye, hair, and skin pigmentation are highly variable in humans, particularly in western Eurasian populations. This diversity may be explained by population history, the relaxation of selection pressures, or positive selection. To investigate whether positive natural selection is responsible for depigmentation within Europe, we estimated the strength of selection acting on three genes known to have significant effects on human pigmentation. In a direct approach, these estimates were made using ancient DNA from prehistoric Europeans and computer simulations. This allowed us to determine selection coefficients for a precisely bounded period in the deep past. Our results indicate that strong selection has been operating on pigmentation-related genes within western Eurasia for the past 5,000 y.

Link

6,500-year old tin bronze from Serbia

Antiquity Volume: 87 Number: 338 Page: 1030–1045

Tainted ores and the rise of tin bronzes in Eurasia, c. 6500 years ago

Miljana Radivojević et al.

The earliest tin bronze artefacts in Eurasia are generally believed to have appeared in the Near East in the early third millennium BC. Here we present tin bronze artefacts that occur far from the Near East, and in a significantly earlier period. Excavations at Pločnik, a Vinča culture site in Serbia, recovered a piece of tin bronze foil from an occupation layer dated to the mid fifth millennium BC. The discovery prompted a reassessment of 14 insufficiently contextualised early tin bronze artefacts from the Balkans. They too were found to derive from the smelting of copper-tin ores. These tin bronzes extend the record of bronze making by c. 1500 years, and challenge the conventional narrative of Eurasian metallurgical development.

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New aDNA capture method (plus some data on ancient individuals from Bulgaria, Denmark, and Peru)

This seems to present an alternative method for capture of ancient DNA libraries than the one used on the Tianyuan individual. It is mostly a methods paper, but also has some initial analysis of some ancient individuals. From the paper:

We were able to tentatively call mtDNA haplogroups for these samples (Table S1). The two Bulgarian Iron Age individuals (P192-1 and T2G5) fell into haplogroups U3b and HV(16311), respectively. Haplogroup U3 is especially common in the countries surrounding the Black Sea, including Bulgaria, and in the Near East, and HV is also found at low frequencies in Europe and peaks in the Near East.41 The three Peruvian mummies fell into haplogroups B2, M (an ancestor of D), and D1, all derived from founder Native American lineages and previously observed in both pre-Columbian and modern populations from Peru. 

P192-1 was an Iron Age Thracian; T2G5 was from an Iron Age Thracian tumulus burial.

Also:

For the Peruvian mummies, we also included 10 Native American individuals from Central and South America in the PCA (Figures 3E and 3F). Interestingly, all of the mummies fell between the Native American populations (KAR, MAY, AYM) and East Asian populations (JPT, CHS, CHB), as would be expected for a nonadmixed Native American individual (Figures 3E, 3F, and S2). These mummies belonged to the pre-Columbian Chachapoya culture, who, by some accounts, were unusually fair-skinned,39 suggesting a potential for pre- Columbian European admixture. However, based on our preliminary results, these individuals appear to have been ancestrally Native American. 

The Peruvian mummies were from 1000-1500AD, so it's not very surprising that they don't appear to have European admixture and to be "ancestrally Native American".

Hopefully a more complete analysis of this data and production of more data with this method will follow in the future.

The American Journal of Human Genetics (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.10.002

Pulling out the 1%: Whole-Genome Capture for the Targeted Enrichment of Ancient DNA Sequencing Libraries

Meredith L. Carpenter et al.

Most ancient specimens contain very low levels of endogenous DNA, precluding the shotgun sequencing of many interesting samples because of cost. Ancient DNA (aDNA) libraries often contain less than 1% endogenous DNA, with the majority of sequencing capacity taken up by environmental DNA. Here we present a capture-based method for enriching the endogenous component of aDNA sequencing libraries. By using biotinylated RNA baits transcribed from genomic DNA libraries, we are able to capture DNA fragments from across the human genome. We demonstrate this method on libraries created from four Iron Age and Bronze Age human teeth from Bulgaria, as well as bone samples from seven Peruvian mummies and a Bronze Age hair sample from Denmark. Prior to capture, shotgun sequencing of these libraries yielded an average of 1.2% of reads mapping to the human genome (including duplicates). After capture, this fraction increased substantially, with up to 59% of reads mapped to human and enrichment ranging from 6- to 159-fold. Furthermore, we maintained coverage of the majority of regions sequenced in the precapture library. Intersection with the 1000 Genomes Project reference panel yielded an average of 50,723 SNPs (range 3,062–147,243) for the postcapture libraries sequenced with 1 million reads, compared with 13,280 SNPs (range 217–73,266) for the precapture libraries, increasing resolution in population genetic analyses. Our whole-genome capture approach makes it less costly to sequence aDNA from specimens containing very low levels of endogenous DNA, enabling the analysis of larger numbers of samples.

Link (pdf)

Migration from Sweden to Poland during the Early Bronze Age

Proof of human migration from Sweden to Poland during the Early Bronze Age

During the Early Bronze Age there was a very high level of territorial mobility of the Únětice culture in Silesia, a large community inhabiting the south western territories of Poland approximately 4 000 years ago. This is found in a new doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg which also conclusively confirms the first case of human long-distance overseas journey to Silesia from Scandinavia, probably from southern Sweden.

'Over 3800 years ago, a young male, possibly born in Skåne, made a journey of over 900 kilometers south, to Wroclaw in Poland. He died violently in Wroclaw, killed by Úněticean farmers, possibly due to romance with two local females, who were murdered together with him. This 'Bronze Age love story', with no happy end today is the first case of Swedish-Polish contacts in history ever', concludes archaeologist Dalia Pokutta, author of the thesis.

Here is the thesis, titled:  Population Dynamics, Diet and Migrations of the Únětice Culture in Poland.

Oldest gaming tokens from Başur Höyük

Oldest Gaming Tokens Found in Turkey

Small carved stones unearthed in a nearly 5,000-year-old burial could represent the earliest gaming tokens ever found, according to Turkish archaeologists who are excavating early Bronze Age graves. 

Found in a burial at Basur Höyük, a 820- by 492-foot mound near Siirt in southeast Turkey, the elaborate pieces consist of 49 small stones sculpted in different shapes and painted in green, red, blue, black and white. 

"Some depict pigs, dogs and pyramids, others feature round and bullet shapes. We also found dice as well as three circular tokens made of white shell and topped with a black round stone," Haluk Saglamtimur of Ege University in Izmir, Turkey, told Discovery News.

This is a nice illustration of people's familiarity with several abstract geometrical shapes for the purposes of gaming.

Climate caused the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean

PLoS ONE 8(8): e71004. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0071004

Environmental Roots of the Late Bronze Age Crisis

David Kaniewski et al.

The Late Bronze Age world of the Eastern Mediterranean, a rich linkage of Aegean, Egyptian, Syro-Palestinian, and Hittite civilizations, collapsed famously 3200 years ago and has remained one of the mysteries of the ancient world since the event’s retrieval began in the late 19th century AD/CE. Iconic Egyptian bas-reliefs and graphic hieroglyphic and cuneiform texts portray the proximate cause of the collapse as the invasions of the “Peoples-of-the-Sea” at the Nile Delta, the Turkish coast, and down into the heartlands of Syria and Palestine where armies clashed, famine-ravaged cities abandoned, and countrysides depopulated. Here we report palaeoclimate data from Cyprus for the Late Bronze Age crisis, alongside a radiocarbon-based chronology integrating both archaeological and palaeoclimate proxies, which reveal the effects of abrupt climate change-driven famine and causal linkage with the Sea People invasions in Cyprus and Syria. The statistical analysis of proximate and ultimate features of the sequential collapse reveals the relationships of climate-driven famine, sea-borne-invasion, region-wide warfare, and politico-economic collapse, in whose wake new societies and new ideologies were created.

Link