User:Tewdar/sandbox/Kossinna's smile

Kossinna's smile

Background

In the early twentieth century, German archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna promoted the idea that historical cultures over large geographical areas could be identified by their shared material culture, and that these archaeological cultures could be equated with specific ethnic groups. Kossinna originated the idea that ancient large-scale population migrations could be seen in the archaeological record by the dispersal of their maerial culture, which he called settlement archaeology (German: siedlungsarchäologische Methode).

Kossinna believed that the origins of the German people and German language were in the Corded Ware culture, and that because this culture included areas of modern Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and western Russia, Germany had a right to claim these territories. Kossinna's ideas were later used by the Nazis to justify their invasion of Eastern Europe.

After the Second World War, these ideas fell out of favour among European archaeologists, and the focus shifted to local innovation or spread of ideas instead of migration when seeking explanations for major cultural changes.

Recent archaeogenetics

In 2015, two research papers on ancient DNA, Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe and Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia, concluded that a Yamnaya-related population from Eastern Europe had replaced the majority of the gene pool of central and western Europe in the third millennium BCE, along with a change in pottery and burial styles at the same time.

Archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen described these results as "a shock to the archaeological community". When a draft of the Haak paper was circulated, several archaeologists resigned from the project, due to the perceived similarity of its conclusions with Kossinna's earlier ideas, later returning when the paper was modified to explicitly reject Kossinna's theories and emphasise the eastern origins of the Corded Ware culture.

Kossinna's smile (Heyd 2017)

In the essay Kossinna's smile, archaeologist Volker Heyd suggests that June 2015, the publication date of the two ancient DNA papers, might be viewed as a "turning point for archaeologists dealing with the third millennium BC and the approximately 30 centuries thereafter" with "far-reaching implications for our understanding of the later prehistory of Europe and Western Asia."

Heyd summarizes the findings of these papers under five main points:

1. The discovery of a third ancestral component of all modern European populations, which is lower in southern Europe and higher in northern Europe.
2. This ancestry originates from the westward migration of Yamnaya populations from the Eurasian steppe around the turn of the third millennium BCE.
3. The people of the late Neolithic Corded Ware culture from eastern Germany traced 75 per cent of their ancestry to the Yamnaya.
4. The importance of large-scale migrations and population replacements in third millennium BCE Europe are highlighted.
5. These results are associated with the spread of Indo-European languages in Europe.

Sources

• Heyd, Volker (2017). "Kossinna's smile". Antiquity. 91 (356): 348–359. doi:10.15184/aqy.2017.21. ISSN 0003-598X.

• Callaway, Ewen (2018). "Divided by DNA: The uneasy relationship between archaeology and ancient genomics". Nature. 555 (7698): 573–576. doi:10.1038/d41586-018-03773-6.

• Reich, David (2018). Who we are and how we got here : ancient DNA and the new science of the human past (First ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom. ISBN 0-19-882125-5. OCLC 1006478846.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

• Haak, Wolfgang (2015). "Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe". Nature. 522 (7555): 207–211. doi:10.1038/nature14317. ISSN 1476-4687. PMC 5048219. PMID 25731166.

• Allentoft, Morten E. (2015). "Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia". Nature. 522 (7555): 167–172. doi:10.1038/nature14507. ISSN 1476-4687.