Showing posts with label Mitanni. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mitanni. Show all posts

Monday, November 28, 2022

Mitanni at Hasanlu - Did they have Sintashta ancestry or not?

I want to make a quick post on a new article by Nezih Seven. You can find it here.

A Genetic Analysis of Historical Population Movements Around The Zagros Mountains


He analyzed the NW Iranian samples from the 'Southern Arc' paper and reached some interesting conclusions.

Nezih model hasanlu_lba 85% bmac + 15% sintashta
Model for Hasanlu_LBA_A by Nezih


The p-value of the above model is ~0.20 (therefore passing as p>0.05). His qpAdm output file can be seen here. 

Monday, September 19, 2022

The Lady from Central Asia who was found dead in a Bronze Age Turkish well

 

Site of the Alalakh 'Well Lady'. Courtesy: Skourtanioti et al 2020


The remains of the Alalakh 'Well Lady' were discovered in the archaeological site of Tell Atchana / Alalakh / Alalah, Turkey dating to ~1550BCE. Her aDna was published in 2020 (1) and she was found to be of central Asian origin, far from where she was found. She was found at the bottom of a deep well that was still in use at the time. The individual showed evidence of healed trauma on the skull's frontal bone and two healed fractured ribs, and her manner of death has been suggested as a homicide due to or before being thrown into the well (2). Her teeth also showed clear signs of enamel defects (2), a possible sign of malnutrition during childhood. Her age at death was 40-45 years.

Friday, August 26, 2022

The Southern Arc paper and it's data upends the Steppe Theory in multiple ways


Hasanlu Indra chariot



Lazaridis, Iosif, et al. “The Genetic History of the Southern Arc: A Bridge between West Asia and Europe.” Science, vol. 377, no. 6609, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abm4247.


This is a recently published paper ('the paper', 'this paper') with many new samples from what the authors call 'The Southern Arc'. The authors define it as 'a region centred on the large Anatolian peninsula (Turkey), including in the west (in Europe) the Balkans and the Aegean, and in the south and east, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran.'

The main conclusion of this paper which upends one part of the Steppe theory is that West Asia is now considered to be the homeland of the first Indo-European speakers, and the steppe to be only a secondary homeland. From the paper: