Dairying enabled Early Bronze Age Yamnaya steppe expansions

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Wilkin, Shevan
Miller, Alicia Ventresca
Fernandes, Ricardo
Spengler, Robert
Taylor, William T-T
Brown, Dorcas R
Reich, David
Kennett, Douglas J
Culleton, Brendan J
Kunz, Laura
Fortes, Claudia
Kitova, Aleksandra
Kuznetsov, Pavel
Epimakhov, Andrey
Zaibert, Victor F
et al.
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2021
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During the Early Bronze Age, populations of the western Eurasian steppe expanded across an immense area of northern Eurasia. Combined archaeological and genetic evidence supports widespread Early Bronze Age population movements out of the Pontic–Caspian steppe that resulted in gene flow across vast distances, linking populations of Yamnaya pastoralists in Scandinavia with pastoral populations (known as the Afanasievo) far to the east in the Altai Mountains1,2 and Mongolia3. Although some models hold that this expansion was the outcome of a newly mobile pastoral economy characterized by horse traction, bulk wagon transport4–6 and regular dietary dependence on meat and milk5, hard evidence for these economic features has not been found. Here we draw on proteomic analysis of dental calculus from individuals from the western Eurasian steppe to demonstrate a major transition in dairying at the start of the Bronze Age. The rapid onset of ubiquitous dairying at a point in time when steppe populations are known to have begun dispersing offers critical insight into a key catalyst of steppe mobility. The identification of horse milk proteins also indicates horse domestication by the Early Bronze Age, which provides support for its role in steppe dispersals. Our results point to a potential epicentre for horse domestication in the Pontic–Caspian steppe by the third millennium bc, and offer strong support for the notion that the novel exploitation of secondary animal products was a key driver of the expansions of Eurasian steppe pastoralists by the Early Bronze Age.

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598

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7882

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© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Anthropology

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Wilkin, S; Miller, AV; Fernandes, R; Spengler, R; Taylor, WT-T; Brown, DR; Reich, D; Kennett, DJ; Culleton, BJ; Kunz, L; Fortes, C; Kitova, A; Kuznetsov, P; Epimakhov, A; Zaibert, VF; Outram, AK; Kitov, E; Khokhlov, A; Anthony, D; Boivin, N, Dairying enabled Early Bronze Age Yamnaya steppe expansions, Nature, 2021, 598 (7882), pp. 629-633

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