The earliest steppe connections - the ochre graves in east-central Europe

[alan]

This is an interesting pair of reviews on a book that deals with the subject of the early Ochre graves. They seem very early indeed, older in the steppes but in Old Europe by 4350BC linked by a thin spread of related graves from the north Caspian to Hungary.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/prehistoric/rev...govedarica.htm

http://www.academia.edu/2056814/2005...oje_Govedarica

To me these early connections tend to be brushed aside I think because Anthony wishes to relate them to Anatolian. However, can we really tell the difference between a word that was known before migration and one that diffused after the invention of the wheel maybe 500 or so years later? I doubt it. So, I dont think we should be tied too tightly to the invention of the wheel c. 3500BC as an earliest date for PIE dispersal. I think there is a lot of wriggle room here and its not impossible that some of these movements could be related to Celto-Italic. These papers are pushing this influence way back towards 4500BC, a period when the Neolithic had not even arrived in northern Europe.

This book notes in discussions on this a stone stele at Capli. It seems to be putting this stele in the early ochre grave period. Where is Capli? Jean- do you know anything about this stele? It sounds interestingly early.

[alan]

Sorry redrafted the gibberish in my first post. What interests me is the extreme mobility of this group and their connection to the Balko-Carpathian trade into the steppe.

If, as seems strongly possible if one is not an anti-migrationist, this implies steppe elements involved in trade into the steppes from the Balkans in and around places like Hungary as early as 4350BC, it does make one wonder if this actually could have been early enough to have had some influence on other middle Neolithic cultures and on the late first Neolithic cultures further north. It does give pause for thought that the steppe movements may have began into Old Europe on a small scale 600 years before the first farmers had even reached Ireland in the west.

[alan]

I suppose an immediate DNA question is who would steppe peoples spreading into east-central Europe/the Balkans as early as 4350BC be. Apparently Mallory sees them as mobile steppe groups, presumably on horses, that controlled the steppe flow of Balko-Carpathian metals. What yDNA lineages are even possibly old enough? Could these kind of elements be represented by M269* and/or some of the oldest 'old Europe' R1a clades? Other than them, assuming variance estimates are close to reality, there are not many options. The oldest dated of these type of graves are meant to be Sredny Stog.