DNA Forums: DNA Forums -> Maikop crania

A.A. Kazarnitsky of the Russian Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography has published what I previously searched for in vain - a study of the crania from the Copper Age Maikop Culture of the North Caucasus.* These fascinating people seem to pop up out of nowhere, which has long been a puzzle. I suspected that they had arrived from the south. The astonishingly rich tombs of their chiefs seem to be one end of a cultural trail linked to the palace and tombs at Arslantepe in eastern Anatolia, and on to the cities of Sumer.

This study does not prove that. The author concluded that, while certain parallels seem to point to the Near East, they are too few to warrant definite conclusions. However it does show pretty clearly that the Maikop were distinct from the peoples of the steppe. This makes it possible to deduce that the Late Maikop burials on the steppe were of actual Maikop individuals, rather than simply adopting a Maikop fashion. That settles one archaeological dispute. So it's reasonable to see one strand of the Maikop throwing in their lot with the Yamnaya, and travelling westwards up the Danube in the Indo-European migrations.

The study settles another point that I had found hugely confusing. The Maikop crania are dolichocranic. They therefore cannot be related to the Bell Beaker series over most of Europe (which are notably brachycephalic), but only some of those of Italy and Portugal. So while that may boost my theory of the southern route of R1b1b2 into Europe (via the Stelae People), it leaves me no wiser about the main route of R1b1b2. There were more brachycephalic people on the steppe. But how did they get there? It is at this point that I usually start screaming for ancient DNA. And I am going to do it again.

[Added 9 July]




In the comparison above, traits with the highest loadings on the first canonical vector (CVI) are cranial length and byzygomatic breadth. Those most relevant for CVII are orbital and nasal width.

* A.A. Kazarnitsky, The Maikop crania revisited, Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia, vol. 38, no. 1 (March 2010), pp. 148-155.