European genetic profile changed radically 4,500 years ago
techstepgenr8tion
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http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-europeans ... 46349.html
Wonder what would cause that profound a die-off.
Wonder what would cause that profound a die-off.
When Europeans arrived in the New World, the natives had no resistance to smallpox. 90%+ died off within a few decades. When the Spanish pushed into Florida in the 1550s, they found the land full of abandoned villages peopled only with skeletons. The Spanish were mystified, but modern researchers established that the natives all died of smallpox. So, the right disease can cause massive casualties. It was likely a new illness which nobody had resistance to.
techstepgenr8tion
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Tollorin
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Here are some significant events from the same period and region:
2,650 BCE / 7350 HE (Approximate Year): First stone monuments; the first pyramid was begun in 2686 BCE / 7315 HE.
2,500 BCE / 7500 HE (Approximate Year): Chinese music moves to a five tone scale.
2,500 BCE / 7500 HE (Approximate Year): "Gilgamesh" written by the Sumerians. It is the story of a Sumerian King named Gilgamesh and it includes a great flood story that may have been the inspiration for the Biblical story of Noah.
2,500 BCE / 7500 HE (Approximate Year): Glass is first used by the Egyptians for trinkets (not for drinking glasses or other useful purposes).
2400 BCE / 7600 HE (Approximate Year): The mounted Kurgan move to the north Black Sea area invading and mixing with a culture known as the North Pontic, who lived on the Dnieper River on the north bank of the Black Sea. Their name came from the old name for the Black Sea which was Pontus Euxeinos. From there the North Pontic-Kurgan peoples invaded southeast into the area inhabited by a culture known as Trans-Caucasian. These people lived on both sides of the Caucasus Mountains. From the merging of these people a new people known as the Indo-Europeans developed.
2400 BCE / 7600 HE (Approximate Year): The emergence of the Minoan Culture centered in Crete. This culture developed a trading community that was extensive through out the Aegean Sea and eastern Mediterranean Sea coast and began to reach into the west Mediterranean area. Of particular interest to this study is the establishment of trading settlements on Asia Minor.
2400 BCE / 7600 HE (Approximate Year): The Battle-Axe and Corded Ware Cultures spread from the Danube to the Caspian Sea pushed West into Europe and south from the Caucasus into Asia Minor. The tribes who moved into what we know as Thrace and Macedonia are examples of the former and the Hittites are examples of the latter. Later Indo-European and Celtic peoples will pass over these same territories, even fighting each other as the migrating bands continue to drift. An example of this is the people who were originally in Thrace and Macedonia at about this time migrated to become the Bythians, Phrygians and Lydians that later tribes in Thrace and Macedonia fought during the Trojan wars.
2400 BCE / 7600 HE (Approximate Year): First known calculating device - Invention of the abacus, the first known calculator, in Babylonia.
2400 BCE / 7600 HE to 2200 BCE / 7800 HE (Approximate Years): Evidence from Stonehenge dating to this period indicate that the site may have been used as a place of pilgrimage for the sick.
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techstepgenr8tion
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To what you have above its a shame, they don't really say much about the sophistication or lack there of regarding the (respectively) indigineous Europeans at the time. Your bullet points seem to lean toward superior cultural sophistication and weaponry, that is if the cultures in Europe at that time mimicked the sorts of wild men in the north of the British Isles who essentially lived naked aside from rubbing themselves down with chlorophyll and tattooing themselves. If it were that kind of differential I could see them easily getting wiped out.
I also wonder what kind of volcanic things might have been happening at the time. As far as I know the time frame we're talking about was roughly 1,000 years before Santorini but I wonder if there might have been a similar event. If these tribes came in from the middle-east after a volcanic event or after a major plague that would just amplify the expediency with which they'd be wiped from the pages of history.
6000 BCE / 4000 HE (Approximate Year): Deforestation leads to collapse of communities in southern Israel / Jordan.
2700 BCE / 7300 HE (Approximate Year): Some of the first laws protecting the remaining forests decreed in Ur.
2600 BCE / 7400 HE (Approximate Year): Large scale commercial timbering of cedars in Phoenicia (Lebanon) for export to Egypt and Sumeria. Similar commercial timbering in South India.
2,500 BCE / 7500 HE (Approximate Year): Volcanic eruption at present-day Crater Lake, Oregon (USA) leaves a crater measuring roughly 8 km by 10 km. Approximately 35 cubic kilometers of material was released.
Here is a Link to Other Historical Volcanic Eruptions.
The dispersal of the Indo european languages was about that time.
As pezar said- the two events must be related.
Before this alledged population crash was discovered it had been evident for a long time that something big must have happened around 2500 BC. But that it happened beyond the pale of literate civilizations of the time. There were only three tiny areas of literate civilization back then: Egypt, Sumer, and the Indus Valley ( and the latter got obliertated and we cant read their writing today).
The legacy of this something big was linguistic uniformity over a vast stretch of the Eurasian landmass- the swath of asia and europe encompassed by the Indo european language family ( Northern India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, eastern turkey, and most of europe (including English, and ancient greece and rome).
It makes sense that IF the residents of europe had a population crash - that outsiders would muscle in.
So there may have been both a pull and a push for eastern invaders.
The invaders of the east may have had some advantage over the natives. And/or the natives may have had some calamity happen to them.
This big shift in genetic profile has not been found in the Netherlands. In 2008 a large study of the genome of high school students with a native Dutch lineage showed the following:
77% had the genetic markers of the hunter-gatherers (Cro Magnon) that migrated into Europe 40,000-35,000 years ago
20% carried the markers of a people that arrived with the Neolithic expansion (6,500 years ago) and that originated from a region somewhere between the mouth of the Danube and Thessalia.
The remaining 3% had mixed anchestry from Asia and Africa , which they probably got from our former colonies
The hunter-gatherer Y-chromosome marker is haplogroup HG1 and is also found in abundance in Ireland and Britain. A possible explanation is the relative inaccesibility of these lands. The Low Lands (lower Rhine and its delta) was one great big peat bog 4,500 years ago.
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