Latest news with #DavidReich
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Who's a Carthaginian? Genetic Study Revises Ancestry of Rome's Ancient Nemesis
The Phoenicians were a confederation of maritime traders who emerged from the chaos of the Levant about 3,100 years ago and developed the most extensive commercial network in antiquity. Despite their contributions — which included boatbuilding, navigation, town planning and, perhaps most significantly, an alphabet — no literature and few written records survived, beyond funerary inscriptions. The most powerful and prosperous of the Phoenicians' independent city-states was Carthage, founded around the ninth century B.C. in what is now Tunisia. The Carthaginians, also known as the Punic people, established an empire that eventually extended across northeastern Africa and into the south of modern-day Spain. Then came the rivalry with Rome and the three Punic Wars, which ended in 146 B.C. after a brutal siege as the Romans razed Carthage, destroyed its libraries and, tradition says, sowed its ground with salt. For more than 2,000 years, the general assumption was that the Carthaginians derived from the Levant, specifically Canaan, the source of their language and religion. But an eight-year study published on Wednesday in Nature suggests that, from the sixth to the second centuries B.C., Levantine Phoenicians made only a negligible genetic contribution to Punic colonies. 'They preserved Phoenician culture, language, religion and their commercial lifestyle,' said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard whose lab generated the data, 'but passed it to people of biologically different ancestry with whom they mixed after they arrived in these regions.' An international research team analyzed the degraded DNA from the remains of 210 individuals, including 196 from 14 sites traditionally identified as Phoenician and Punic in the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza. The study concluded that the Phoenicians did not intermingle equally with all of the people they met. 'They had little DNA from Sardinians, Iberians or even North Africans,' Dr. Reich said. Only three of the 103 people whose bones were carbon-dated had substantial Levantine heritage, and those three — one from Sardinia, two from Sicily — may have been immigrants who arrived during the Roman period that followed the Third Punic War. Overwhelmingly, the main ancestry of the Phoenicians studied was Greek; these were most likely people whom the Phoenicians encountered and mixed with in Sicily, where Greek and Phoenician colonies existed side by side. Dalit Regev, an archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority who collaborated on the paper, said the research showed that the restless mobility of seafaring Aegean men and women and their descendants powered the expansion not only of the Greeks but of the Phoenicians, too. Before 400 B.C., Phoenicians from the western Mediterranean who lived in North Africa had fairly simple genetic profiles: only individuals who died in North Africa had North African ancestry. After 400 B.C., traces of North African ancestry turn up in limited measure in the bones of Phoenicians unearthed in Sicily, Sardinia and Iberia. According to the authors, that may reflect the growing influence of Carthage. On the other hand, Dr. Reich said, contemporaneous Greek colonists did not integrate with the local peoples; DNA from Empuries in Spain or Himera in Sicily suggests that they kept to themselves. 'Staying culturally Greek in these places meant sticking to yourself, and not incorporating outsiders into your growing communities,' he said. In the foundational myth of Carthage that appears in Virgil's 'Aeneid,' the settlement was founded by the fugitive princess Dido, who acquired land from a local Berber ruler. Dexter Hoyos, the author of several books on Carthage and on its greatest general, Hannibal, said that nothing in the accounts of Greek and Roman historians indicated a steady post-settlement flow of migrants from the city-state's eastern Mediterranean homeland. Phoenicians no doubt traveled to and from Carthage, he said, and over the six or seven centuries of its Punic life many probably relocated there and had families, but they could not have amounted to more than a tiny fraction of the population. 'Certainly there's no evidence of a regular supply of Phoenician women to become male colonists' wives,' Dr. Hoyos said. From the start, he proposed, both male and female settlers found partners in the surrounding regions. 'We know of a few marriages between Carthaginian nobles — two of whom were Hannibal's sisters — with princes of the Numidian peoples to the west of Carthaginian-controlled territory,' he said. Besides aligning with existing theories, the new findings point to a demographic shift around the sixth century B.C., when Carthaginians adopted a new dialect (Punic) and the dominant form of burial changed from cremation to interment. 'The genetic data make it clear that these cultural changes accompanied a profound change in the population,' Dr. Reich said. A goal for future research, he added, should be to better understand the nature of that change, integrating the genetic, archaeological and historical evidence. The relatively small sample size of the new study makes generalization difficult, said Eve MacDonald, a historian at Cardiff University and author of the forthcoming 'Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire,' who was not involved with the project. 'But the paper shows us how we need to broaden our understanding of the ancient worlds beyond simplistic narratives of us and them, or Roman and Carthaginian,' she said. For Dr. MacDonald, the results prove that being Carthaginian was not a specific genetic marker and underscore the complexity of the city-state and its people. 'Today, we are so much more than just our genes, and identity cannot be reduced to a singularity,' she said. 'What made someone Carthaginian would have been many things, including a link to Carthage itself, its myths, stories, cultures and families.'
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Half of global population descended from ancient group in what is now Ukraine, DNA research shows
Half of the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya culture, a group that lived in what is now Ukraine 5,000 years ago, according to new DNA research led by David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, the Wall Street Journal reported on March 8. Around 4 billion people can trace their ancestry to the Yamnaya, a community of cattle herders who lived in the areas that make up the modern-day Ukraine and expanded dramatically across Europe and Asia, the research shows. Researchers identified the village of Mykhailivka, lying in the Russian-occupied part of Kherson Oblast, as the genetic birthplace of the Indo-European peoples who spread across the European continent and West Asia in waves of migrations. The equestrian culture, dubbed Yamnaya after the pits (yama in Ukrainian and Russian) in which they buried their dead beneath mounds called kurgans, is seen as a shared ancestor to various ancient peoples, including the Romans, Celts, Persians, and Macedonians. The new DNA research analyzed remains of 450 prehistoric individuals from 100 sites across Europe and 1,000 previously known ancient samples, reinforcing earlier theories on the spread of the Yamnaya culture based on archeological and linguistic evidence. The ongoing Russian occupation of the Yamnaya culture's cradle undercores the damage wrought to Ukraine's cultural heritage by Moscow's war. As of February, 485 Ukrainian cultural sites have been confirmed as damaged during the war, including two archeological sites. Russia has also consistently looted Ukrainian artifacts from Crimea, Donbas, and elsewhere since 2014, transporting many to Russian museums. Read also: Kyiv, not Kiev — How Ukrainians reclaimed their capital's name We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
New York Times
05-02-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Ancient DNA Points to Origins of Indo-European Language
In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have 'sprung from some common source,' he wrote. Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of so-called Indo-European languages. So do English, Hindi and Spanish, along with hundreds of less common languages. Today, about half the world speaks an Indo-European language. Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago. 'We've been on the hunt for this for many years,' said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard who led part of the new research. Independent linguists had mixed reactions to the findings, with some praising their rigor and others highly skeptical. Many decades ago, linguists began trying to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European language by looking at words shared by many different languages. That early vocabulary contained a lot of words about things like wheels and wagons, and few about farming. It looked like the kind of language that would have been spoken by nomadic herders who lived across the steppes of Asia thousands of years ago. But in 1987, Colin Renfrew, a British archaeologist, questioned whether nomads who were constantly on the move would have stayed in any one place long enough for their language to catch on. He found it more plausible that early farmers in Anatolia (a region in what is now Turkey) spread the language as they expanded, gradually converting more and more land to farm fields and eventually building towns and cities. The archaeologist argued that an Anatolian origin also fit the archaeological evidence better. The oldest Indo-European writing, dating back 3,700 years, is in an extinct language called Hittite, which was spoken only in Anatolia. In 2015, two teams of geneticists — one led by Dr. Reich — shook up this debate with some remarkable data from ancient DNA of Bronze Age Europeans. They found that about 4,500 years ago, central and northern Europeans suddenly gained DNA that linked them with nomads on the Russian steppe, a group known as the Yamnaya. Dr. Reich and his colleagues suspected that the Yamnaya swept from Russia into Europe, and perhaps brought the Indo-European language with them. In the new study, they analyzed a trove of ancient skeletons from across Ukraine and southern Russia. 'It's a sampling tour de force,' said Mait Metspalu, a population geneticist at the University of Tartu in Estonia who was not involved in the research. Based on these data, the scientists argue that the Indo-European language started with the Yamnaya's hunter-gatherer ancestors, known as the Caucasus-Lower Volga people, or CLV. The CLV people lived about 7,000 years ago in a region stretching from the Volga River in the north to the Caucasus Mountains in the south. They most likely fished and hunted for much of their food. Around 6,000 years ago, the study argues, the CLV people expanded out of their homeland. One wave moved west into what is now Ukraine and interbred with hunter-gatherers. Three hundred years later, a tiny population of these people — perhaps just a few hundred — formed a distinctive culture and became the first Yamnaya. Another wave of CLV people headed south. They reached Anatolia, where they interbred with early farmers. The CLV people who came to Anatolia, Dr. Reich argues, gave rise to early Indo-European languages like Hittite. (This would also fit with the early Indo-European writing found in Anatolia.) But it was their Yamnaya descendants who became nomads and carried the language across thousands of miles. Some experts praised the work. 'It's a very intelligent scenario that's difficult to criticize,' said Guus Kroonen, a linguist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the studies. But Dr. Metspalu hesitated to jump from the new genetic data to firm conclusions about who first spoke Indo-European. 'Genes don't tell us anything about language, period,' he said. And Paul Heggarty, a linguist at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, said that the DNA analysis in the study was valuable, but he rejected the new hypothesis about the first Indo-European speakers originating in Russia as 'smoke and mirrors.' In 2023, Dr. Heggarty and his colleagues published a study arguing that the first Indo-Europeans were early farmers who lived over 8,000 years ago in the northern Fertile Crescent, in today's Middle East. Dr. Heggarty suggested that the CLV people actually belonged to a bigger network of hunter-gatherers that stretched from southern Russia into northern Iran. Some of them could have discovered farming in the northern Fertile Crescent, and then developed the Indo-European language, which would align with his findings. These early farmers could have given rise to Hittite speakers thousands of years later in Anatolia, he said, and later given rise to the Yamnaya. The Yamnaya brought Indo-European languages to northern and Central Europe, Dr. Heggarty argued, but they were only one part of a bigger, older expansion. As the Indo-European debate advances, one thing is clear: Our understanding of its history now stands in stark contrast to the racist myths that once surrounded it. Nineteenth-century linguists called the original speakers of Indo-European Aryans, and some writers later pushed the notion that ancient Aryans were a superior race. The Nazis embraced the Aryan myths, using them to justify genocide. But Dr. Reich said that studies on ancient DNA show just how bankrupt these Aryan stories were. 'There's all sorts of mixtures and movements from places that these myths never imagined,' he said. 'And it really teaches us that there's really no such thing as purity.'
