I’ve watched a few videos and read a few papers that help explain the movement of autosomal DNA and MTDNA in a way that makes sense and seems obvious once someone says it. It’s also meshed to the origins of Y haplogroup R-L151 (and then R-U106) corded ware culture and their family ties to the Yamnaya from my previous post.
Referencing Iain McDonald’s draft paper, U106 pops up in the Corded Ware Culture (CWC) in Czechia, but it’s a very small percentage of the Y DNA in the area. Their major expansion requires some migration, but Yamnaya related steppe ancestry is expanding during this time. There (currently) isn’t continuity between the known Yamnaya R haplogroup male lines and the R haplogroup lines in the CWC. They’re related, but one is not necessarily ancestral to the other. So, where is all this Yamnaya ancestry coming from if the CWC male lines appear to be in place during the Yamnaya expansion?
The Moms Who Make Us Who We Are
A while ago, I saw an interview by Dwarkesh Patel with Robert Reich, and in the interview Reich laid out a scenario that makes a lot of sense. The Yamnaya have some technical advantages; horses and carts make them highly mobile, and they expand in a male dominated way. They expand into places that favor horses and carts, basically steppes and plains. Then they hit a couple of walls: forested parts of Europe and the CWC. In Reich’s hypothesis, they lose out one way or another, and the Corded Ware absorbs the Yamnaya women. The men stay put, and the women migrate further into forested Europe. I have to believe they bring their language and culture with them, and then generations of CWC people get Steppe Ancestry and culture mingled with their own.
Reich also points out that the CWC does the same with farmers, they pull in females from neighboring farmer communities. You get a diverse melting pot. At a certain point they then make a push to expand the CWC and carry along farmer and steppe ancestry with them. In that next push, you might see a lot of male movement, but the ancestry and DNA (autosomal and mitochondrial) of those moms from the steppe move along with them.
You can imagine these multi-step migrations of male replacement to a point and then female integration playing out all over the world with different groups ebbing and flowing and interacting in complex ways.
Keeping with the Theme
I also often watch videos from Stefan Milo. One of his recent videos on Neanderthals featured genetic evidence showing Neanderthal males staying put in their home turf and Neanderthal women joining other groups. It’s just amazing that this is so obviously part of human nature, and so easily overlooked.
These videos and papers reminded me of a time when I was a teenager when a Russian girl’s volleyball team came to the U.S. to play exhibition games with our local girl’s volleyball team. That’s a big deal for a town in Michigan. They were housed with the girls from our team while they were here. These Russian girls (and their hosts) with all the issues of differing language and culture had no problem keeping the unwavering attention of clusters of local boys (me included). We dropped all our social and economic barriers to hang out with the girls staying in our neighborhoods while they were here.
Boys who had never spent more than a gym class together or were lifelong enemies were suddenly wingmen for each other in pursuit of these girls’ attention. I can’t remember today what any of these young women looked like; they were just regular girls from a completely different place, but I remember how we instantly rejiggered our social contracts and hierarchy to accommodate them. They may as well have been rock stars with us even though they may have been average girls back home.
Why do a lot of us have Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA? Why do all the Neanderthal males that have been typed have modern human Y DNA? Why are we constantly mixing it up with people from outside groups? It’s just human nature. Here is that great video from Stefan Milo: