Matriarchal Celts

A new study published in Nature, examining ancient DNA evidence from Iron Age Celtic cemeteries in Southern England, demonstrate that these Celts, at least, were matrilocal. 

It also demonstrates the demic diffusion of Celts from continental Europe to Southern England, displacing Bronze Age Bell Beaker derived populations that were predominant in the rest of England in the first millennium before the common era. 

The paper's abstract says:

Roman writers found the relative empowerment of Celtic women remarkable. In southern Britain, the Late Iron Age Durotriges tribe often buried women with substantial grave goods. 

Here we analyse 57 ancient genomes from Durotrigian burial sites and find an extended kin group centred around a single maternal lineage, with unrelated (presumably inward migrating) burials being predominantly male. Such a matrilocal pattern is undescribed in European prehistory, but when we compare mitochondrial haplotype variation among European archaeological sites spanning six millennia, British Iron Age cemeteries stand out as having marked reductions in diversity driven by the presence of dominant matrilines. 

Patterns of haplotype sharing reveal that British Iron Age populations form fine-grained geographical clusters with southern links extending across the channel to the continent. Indeed, whereas most of Britain shows majority genomic continuity from the Early Bronze Age to the Iron Age, this is markedly reduced in a southern coastal core region with persistent cross-channel cultural exchange. This southern core has evidence of population influx in the Middle Bronze Age but also during the Iron Age. This is asynchronous with the rest of the island and points towards a staged, geographically granular absorption of continental influence, possibly including the acquisition of Celtic languages.

Ethnic Segregation In 8th Century Austria

The Avars from Asia Steppes and European farmers co-existed in segregated communities in the early Middle Ages in Austria for at least six generations.

Researchers carried out an archeogenetic study of human remains from more than 700 individuals from the Early Middle Ages. Two large burial sites, Modling and Leobersdorf, have been genetically analyzed in their entirety. The surprising result was that the individuals from Leobersdorf were mostly of East Asian origin, while those buried in Modling mostly had European ancestry. Both communities lived next to each other for at least six generations. . . . 

[The result] emerged from a genetic study of burial grounds from the Avar period in the 8th century CE. The Avars had arrived in the 6th century from the East Asian Steppes and settled in East Central Europe among a mixed population.

From Science Direct. The article quoted above is based upon the academic paper whose abstract and citation are provided below:

After a long-distance migration, Avars with Eastern Asian ancestry arrived in Eastern Central Europe in 567 to 568 CE and encountered groups with very different European ancestry. 

We used ancient genome-wide data of 722 individuals and fine-grained interdisciplinary analysis of large seventh- to eighth-century ce neighbouring cemeteries south of Vienna (Austria) to address the centuries-long impact of this encounter. We found that even 200 years after immigration, the ancestry at one site (Leobersdorf) remained dominantly East Asian-like, whereas the other site (Mödling) shows local, European-like ancestry. These two nearby sites show little biological relatedness, despite sharing a distinctive late-Avar culture. 

We reconstructed six-generation pedigrees at both sites including up to 450 closely related individuals, allowing per-generation demographic profiling of the communities. Despite different ancestry, these pedigrees together with large networks of distant relatedness show absence of consanguinity, patrilineal pattern with female exogamy, multiple reproductive partnerships (for example, levirate) and direct correlation of biological connectivity with archaeological markers of social status. The generation-long genetic barrier was maintained by systematically choosing partners with similar ancestry from other sites in the Avar realm. Leobersdorf had more biological connections with the Avar heartlands than with Mödling, which is instead linked to another site from the Vienna Basin with European-like ancestry. Mobility between sites was mostly due to female exogamy pointing to different marriage networks as the main driver of the maintenance of the genetic barrier.

Ke Wang, et al., "Ancient DNA reveals reproductive barrier despite shared Avar-period culture." Nature (January 15, 2025) DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08418-5 (open access).

Slavery and Bride Migration In Bronze Age Germany

Germany had slavery and imported brides from outside their communities in social structure that lasted at least 700 years in one community that was studied.

High status families in late Neolithic and Bronze Age Germany kept slaves, genetic analysis reveals.

The finding, reported in the journal Science, provides fresh insight into ancient life in Europe, showing that complex slave-owning societies were well established long before those of classical Greece and Rome.

The research, centred on genome-wide data gathered from 104 individuals buried in Germany’s Lech Valley between about 2500 BCE and 1700 BCE, was conducted by researchers led by archaeo-geneticist Alissa Mittnik from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Jena, Germany.

The scientists gathered nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from each individual and compared it to genetic databases covering ancient and modern humans. They also looked at how the graves were arranged and examined the relationship between the number and type of artefacts buried in each.

The picture that emerged was of a surprisingly stable and enduring society that depended on the import of fertile women and menial underlings. The Lech Valley hosted a farming community, Mittnik and colleagues concluded, that persisted for about 700 years.

The people of the valley were a mixture of Western Hunter-Gatherers, Anatolian Neolithic farmers and Steppe pastoralists, with the farmers’ genetic heritage becoming more dominant as the centuries passed.

Analysis of strontium and oxygen deposits in bone revealed that the men remained in the community across multiple generations – a condition known as patrilocality. The women, in contrast, were largely born outside the area – some, indeed, hailed from a region more than 350 kilometres away, on the other side of the Alps.

The absence of women genetically related to the males strongly indicates that they left the community to join other groups.

Mittnik and colleagues also looked at grave goods as signifiers of social importance.

“Certain types of grave goods, especially weapons – daggers, axes, chisels and arrow heads – in male graves and elaborate body adornments in female graves – large headdresses, massive leg rings – as well as pins in graves of both sexes are likely status-associated,” they write.

Among the cohort of corpses examined, they found examples of children and adolescents who were genetically related to adult males and who had been interred with significant artefacts. This suggests that social standing was inherited rather than earned.

From here. Further analysis at the Old European Culture blog.

The Black Plague Swept Northern Europe Ca. 3400 BCE

We've been aware of the population collapse that hit Northern Europe around 5400 years ago (around 3400 BCE) for a long time, for example, in the article below from 2013. 

But new evidence points to the black plague as a major contributing cause. Climate and exhaustion of soils with primitive Neolithic agricultural methods have also been suggested as causes. Of course, causes can interact and aren't mutually exclusive. For example, people can be much more vulnerable to pandemics during period of famine caused by poor agricultural practices and climate events.

Following its initial arrival in SE Europe 8,500 years ago agriculture spread throughout the continent, changing food production and consumption patterns and increasing population densities. 

Here we show that, in contrast to the steady population growth usually assumed, the introduction of agriculture into Europe was followed by a boom-and-bust pattern in the density of regional populations. We demonstrate that summed calibrated radiocarbon date distributions and simulation can be used to test the significance of these demographic booms and busts in the context of uncertainty in the radiocarbon date calibration curve and archaeological sampling. 

We report these results for Central and Northwest Europe between 8,000 and 4,000 cal. BP and investigate the relationship between these patterns and climate. However, we find no evidence to support a relationship. Our results thus suggest that the demographic patterns may have arisen from endogenous causes, although this remains speculative.

Stephen Shennan, "Regional population collapse followed initial agriculture booms in mid-Holocene Europe" 4 Nature Communications 2486 (October 1, 2013).

The new paper is:

In the period between 5,300 and 4,900 calibrated years before present (cal. BP), populations across large parts of Europe underwent a period of demographic decline. However, the cause of this so-called Neolithic decline is still debated. Some argue for an agricultural crisis resulting in the decline, others for the spread of an early form of plague. 

Here we use population-scale ancient genomics to infer ancestry, social structure and pathogen infection in 108 Scandinavian Neolithic individuals from eight megalithic graves and a stone cist. 

We find that the Neolithic plague was widespread, detected in at least 17% of the sampled population and across large geographical distances. We demonstrate that the disease spread within the Neolithic community in three distinct infection events within a period of around 120 years. 

Variant graph-based pan-genomics shows that the Neolithic plague genomes retained ancestral genomic variation present in Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, including virulence factors associated with disease outcomes. 

In addition, we reconstruct four multigeneration pedigrees, the largest of which consists of 38 individuals spanning six generations, showing a patrilineal social organization. 

Lastly, we document direct genomic evidence for Neolithic female exogamy in a woman buried in a different megalithic tomb than her brothers. 

Taken together, our findings provide a detailed reconstruction of plague spread within a large patrilineal kinship group and identify multiple plague infections in a population dated to the beginning of the Neolithic decline.

Frederik Valeur Seersholm, "Repeated plague infections across six generations of Neolithic Farmers" Nature (July 10, 2024).

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Avar Sex And Marriage Patterns From Ancient DNA

The Avars (see also here and here) were a historically attested Altaic (probably Turkic) language speaking people of Eastern Europe who expanded as far as Hungary and included much of what is now Ukraine.

The Avar Khaganate and surroundings circa 602 CE.

Image from Wikipedia

The Avars conquered a region that had previously been Slavic for two or three hundred years, although that linguistic character wasn't all that old at the time. Slavic expansion started sometime around the 200s CE in the Kiev culture.

In Hungary, a couple of centuries after the fall of the Avar Khaganate (567 to 822 CE), a small group of Uralic language speaking barbarian Magyar conquerers from the East would arrive, and transfer their language through elite dominance to Hungary which gave rise to the modern Hungarian language, even though they had little demic (i.e. population genetic) impact.

The Avar Khaganate period overlaps heavily with the Migration Period of "barbarian" peoples in Europe.

The latest 2024 study of ancient Avar genetics, following 2020 and 2022 studies linked above, is making headlines at CNN, mostly because it shows that many elite men had children with more than one woman, and that many elite women had children with more than one man, in many cases the multiple partners were siblings. 

This doesn't necessary indicate polygamy, although that is the mostly likely explanation for the men who had children with multiple partners, as there could be successive marriages in an age where early deaths were common. The women who had children with more than one man were probably widows who remarried a man who was a relative of their first husband.

The detail of the ancient DNA results combined with anthropological data and historical attestations from neighboring literate societies is so fine and rich that one could write an epic historical fiction narrative about it that would correspond fairly closely to reality, with the rise and fall of an empire, the replacement of an Avar lord with a new one in one location, and lots of juicy romantic and marital connections. 

Ancient DNA is spilling more secrets about the Avars, a fearsome people who built a mysterious empire that ruled much of Central and Eastern Europe for 250 years from the mid-sixth century.

Primarily known from the accounts of adversaries, the Avars confounded the Byzantines with formidable horseback warriors who appeared suddenly on their doorstep. The enigmatic nomads came en masse from the Mongolian steppe in what was one of the biggest and fastest long-haul migrations in ancient history.

With opulent graves but no written records, the empire and its people have remained largely in the shadows of history until recently. But a landmark April 2022 study involving ancient DNA taken from the graves of the Avar elite shed light on the empire’s far-flung origins.

Now, a new study analyzing the remains of 424 people buried in four cemeteries unearthed in Hungary has revealed details about Avar family and social life and how the newcomers interacted with the population of their adopted homeland. 

. . .

The researchers were able to build detailed family trees or pedigrees, the largest of which spanned nine generations across 2½ centuries. The team discovered that around 300 of the individuals had a close relative buried in the same cemetery.

The analysis showed that men stayed in their community after marriage, while women married outside their original community — a pattern known as patrilocality.

“For all the mothers, we don’t find the parents. The parents aren’t at the site. While all the males are the descendants of the founders,” said Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone, lead author of the study that appeared Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Study of mitochondrial DNA, which reveals the female line, showed a high variability, suggesting that the women who married into the Avar groups were from different places, according to Gnecchi-Ruscone, a postdoctoral researcher of archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. They still shared a “steppe” genetic ancestry, indicating that they were probably not conquered local people. 

. . . 

What’s more, the study found, it was relatively common for both men and women in Avar society to have children with multiple partners.

In the case of men, researchers found two partners in 10 cases, three partners in four cases and four partners in one case. Having multiple wives may have been relatively common in the general population as well as the elite, the study authors wrote.

The team also uncovered multiple cases of closely related male individuals having offspring with the same female partner: three pairs of fathers and sons, two pairs of full brothers, and one sibling of paternal half brothers and an uncle and nephew.

Similar “levirate unions” that took place after the death of the woman’s husband existed in other Eurasian steppe societies, according to the study, and suggests that the Avars, who abandoned their nomadic way of life based on herding and became more settled shortly after arriving in Europe, clung to some aspects of their former way of life. 

From CNN. The new study and its abstract are as follows:

From AD 567–568, at the onset of the Avar period, populations from the Eurasian Steppe settled in the Carpathian Basin for approximately 250 years. Extensive sampling for archaeogenomics (424 individuals) and isotopes, combined with archaeological, anthropological and historical contextualization of four Avar-period cemeteries, allowed for a detailed description of the genomic structure of these communities and their kinship and social practices. 

We present a set of large pedigrees, reconstructed using ancient DNA, spanning nine generations and comprising around 300 individuals. We uncover a strict patrilineal kinship system, in which patrilocality and female exogamy were the norm and multiple reproductive partnering and levirate unions were common. 

The absence of consanguinity indicates that this society maintained a detailed memory of ancestry over generations. 

These kinship practices correspond with previous evidence from historical sources and anthropological research on Eurasian Steppe societies. 

Network analyses of identity-by-descent DNA connections suggest that social cohesion between communities was maintained via female exogamy. 

Finally, despite the absence of major ancestry shifts, the level of resolution of our analyses allowed us to detect genetic discontinuity caused by the replacement of a community at one of the sites. This was paralleled with changes in the archaeological record and was probably a result of local political realignment.

Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone, et al., "Network of large pedigrees reveals social practices of Avar communities" Nature (April 24, 2024) (open access). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07312-4

The Imperial Chinese Harem System

The Imperial Chinese Harem System persisted with only brief interruptions over almost all of China's dynasties (when there were splits, most or all of the factions had them) from 220 BCE to 1908 CE, about 2128 years! 

This is a longer period of time, for example, than the entire history of Christianity, and the institution changed far more modestly during that time period than Christianity did.

During last days of China's final Qing Dynasty, which formally ended in 1912 with an Emperor's abdication (with a brief restoration that was not widely recognized later in the nineteen teens), however, it had already started to peter out:

The Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661–1722) holds the record for having the most imperial consorts [in the Qing Dynasty] with 79, while the Guangxu Emperor (r. 1875–1908) holds the record for having the fewest, with one empress and two consorts—a total of just three imperial consorts.

Functionally, this system, somewhat like the Saudi Arabian monarchy's succession system, insured that the hereditary emperorship would not end for lack of an heir. It also provided a pool of potential heirs from which a worthy successor could be chosen, mitigating, although not entirely eliminating, the harm caused by the occasional "mad king". 

Patriarchy In Europe

An new paper takes ancient DNA, radiocarbon dates, and strontium measurements (which are used to determine if people were native to a locale or not) in the context of their burials, from a large sample of about 90 subjects for which this was recoverable, from Neolithic cemetery near modern day Paris (from ca. 4700 BCE to 4300 BCE). 

The paper is Maïté Rivollat, et al., "Extensive pedigrees reveal the social organization of a Neolithic community" Nature (2023) (hat tip to Bernard's blog).

The paper finds that almost everyone in this Neolithic cemetery was a member of one of two families (also grouped by location) that were themselves third or fourth cousins in seven generations of burials spanning a century. The patriarch of the larger family's remains and his wife's remains were relocated to the site, but all of the other bodies, starting in the next generation after him, were buried there in the first place. 

The paper's findings reaffirm a basic fact about the social organization of the first farmers of Europe: The first farmers of Europe were patriarchal and patrilocal.

In other words, adult men lived in the vicinity of their fathers, working the same or nearby land, and generally married women from sufficiently afar to be distinguishable by strontium levels in their remains, who came to live with them. These brides were unrelated to the family of the adult men, a fact that is demonstrated by mtDNA and by autosomal genetics that show that almost all of the adult women were unrelated to all of the other adult women (two of the adult were related to each other in some manner).

An absence of half-siblings in the cemetery also strongly suggests that at least this particular Neolithic community was not polygamous.

This large Neolithic cemetery is a particularly clear example of a patriarchal and patrilocal family system. But the pattern holds not only for essentially all of the first farmers of Europe, but also for the wave of steppe people who replaced most Neolithic men around the time of the early Bronze Age. And, with a handful of notable exceptions or minor introgressions into existing populations, the genetic make up of modern Europe was mostly in place by the end of the Bronze Age at about 1200 BCE.

Patriarchal family organization and patrilocality continued mostly uninterrupted for most of the next three thousand years after Bronze Age collapse. It became less rigid, however, during time periods and in places when forms of economic activity other than farming and herding were important.

Swahili Origins

Swahili ethnogenesis is quite recent and was a Persian Muslim and African hybrid civilization that was roughly contemporaneous with the Norman Conquest of England, the Gypsy migration from India, Leif Erikson's establishment of Viking outposts in eastern Canada, the Viking era in Europe, the Icelandic Commonwealth, the linguistic conversion of Hungary to the current Hungarian language, a major Native American city near where Saint Louis is today, and other notable historical events around Y1K. 

A long history of mercantile trade along the eastern shores of Africa left its mark on the DNA of ancient Swahili people.

A new analysis of centuries-old bones and teeth collected from six burial sites across coastal Kenya and Tanzania has found that, around 1,000 years ago, local African women began having children with Persian traders — and that the descendants of these unions gained power and status in the highest levels of pre-colonial Swahili society.

The findings help elucidate the foundations of Swahili civilization, and suggest that long-told origin stories, passed down through generations of Swahili families, may be more truthful than many outsiders have presumed.

“The genetics corroborate the Swahili people’s own history that they tell about themselves, not what others were saying about them,” said Esther Brielle, a geneticist and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who led the DNA analysis with her adviser, David Reich.

The researchers published their findings on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The Swahili Coast is a narrow strip of land that stretches some 2,000 miles along the Eastern African seaboard — from modern-day Mozambique, Comoros and Madagascar in the south, to Somalia in the north. In its medieval heyday, the region was home to hundreds of port towns, each ruled independently, but with a common religion (Islam), language (Kiswahili) and culture.

Many towns grew immensely wealthy thanks to a vibrant trading network with merchants who sailed across the Indian Ocean on the monsoon winds. Middle Eastern pottery, Asian cloths‌‌ and other luxury goods came in. African gold, ivory and timber‌‌ went out — along with a steady flow of enslaved people, who were shipped off and sold across the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. (Slave trading later took place between the Swahili coast and Europe as well.)

. . .

At first, most scholars thought that the civilization, with its lavish mosques and ornate housewares, must have been the achievement of a foreign ruling class that established outposts in East Africa. But over the past 40 years, archaeologists, linguists and historians have come to see Swahili society as predominantly homegrown — with outside elements adopted over time that had only a marginal impact.

That African-centric version of Swahili roots never sat well with the Swahili people themselves, though.

They generally preferred their own origin story, one in which princes from present-day Iran (then known as Persia) sailed across the Indian Ocean, married local women and enmeshed themselves into East African society. Depending on the narrative source, that story dates to around 850 or 1000 — the same period during which genetic mixing was underway, according to the DNA analysis.

“It’s remarkably spot on,” said Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the Royal Agricultural University of England who has worked on the Swahili coast for decades.

“This oral tradition was always maligned,” added George Abungu, an archaeologist and former director-general of the National Museums of Kenya (who, like Dr. Horton, was not involved in the genetic analysis). “Now, with this DNA study, we see there was some truth to it.”

The ancient DNA study is the largest of its kind from Africa, involving 135 skeletons dating to late-medieval and early-modern times, 80 of which have yielded analyzable DNA.

From the New York Times. 

Cousin Marriage Was Common In Minoan Crete And Bronze Age Greece

The three waves of migration revealed by ancient DNA from Crete conforms to the existing paradigm (and tends to support the connection of the Minoan language with pre-Indo-European Anatolian languages), but the high rate of cousin marriage there was a surprise. 

[O]n Crete and the other Greek islands, as well as on the mainland, it was very common to marry one's first cousin 4000 years ago. "More than a thousand ancient genomes from different regions of the world have now been published, but it seems that such a strict system of kin marriage did not exist anywhere else in the ancient world," says Eirini Skourtanioti, the lead author of the study who conducted the analyses.

From here, discussing the paper whose abstract and citation are as follows: 

The Neolithic and Bronze Ages were highly transformative periods for the genetic history of Europe but for the Aegean—a region fundamental to Europe’s prehistory—the biological dimensions of cultural transitions have been elucidated only to a limited extent so far. 

We have analysed newly generated genome-wide data from 102 ancient individuals from Crete, the Greek mainland and the Aegean Islands, spanning from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. We found that the early farmers from Crete shared the same ancestry as other contemporaneous Neolithic Aegeans. 

In contrast, the end of the Neolithic period and the following Early Bronze Age were marked by ‘eastern’ gene flow, which was predominantly of Anatolian origin in Crete. 

Confirming previous findings for additional Central/Eastern European ancestry in the Greek mainland by the Middle Bronze Age, we additionally show that such genetic signatures appeared in Crete gradually from the seventeenth to twelfth centuries BC, a period when the influence of the mainland over the island intensified. 

Biological and cultural connectedness within the Aegean is also supported by the finding of consanguineous endogamy practiced at high frequencies, unprecedented in the global ancient DNA record. Our results highlight the potential of archaeogenomic approaches in the Aegean for unravelling the interplay of genetic admixture, marital and other cultural practices.

Skourtanioti, E., Ringbauer, H., Gnecchi Ruscone, G.A. et al. "Ancient DNA reveals admixture history and endogamy in the prehistoric Aegean." Nat Ecol Evol (January 16, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01952-3

The body text of the paper relates that:

In addition to this high frequency of distant genetic relatedness, we also report extraordinarily high levels of consanguinity (~50% of the 27 individuals) estimated from the runs of homozygosity (ROH) by performing hapROH on the genotyping data. The individual ROH histograms matched more with the expectations for parents being related to the degree of first cousins, half-siblings and aunt/uncle–nephew/niece. . . . Coupling the evidence for frequent distant relatives and cousin–cousin unions suggests that those individuals formed a small endogamous community that regularly practiced first-cousin intermarriages.

Intriguingly, endogamy is not a unique feature of Hagios Charalambos. We applied the method on another 61 Aegean individuals from all the periods that met recommended SNP coverage thresholds. In total, we found that ~30% of the individuals have most of their ROH in the bin of the longest ROH blocks, consistent with being offspring of parents related to a degree equivalent to first and second cousins. Offspring of close-kin unions were identified from the Neolithic through the LBA but due to the uneven sampling no conclusions can be drawn regarding temporal trends. Consanguinity was also present in higher frequency in the smaller islands of Salamis, Lazarides, Koukounaries and Koufonisia (50%) but overall it seemed common throughout the Aegean. The observed high frequency of endogamy diachronically points to a rather common social practice in the prehistoric Aegean that is so far unattested in the rest of the global aDNA record.

The Toda and Kov People Of India

In anthropology, outlier groups of people are often critical to understanding the big picture.

The Toda people, (previous coverage here) an ethnicity with a current census population counts at about two thousand in number, in the Tamil Nadu state of India in a hill region, which is on the far southern tip of the subcontinent, whom the following excerpts from Wikipedia summarize as follows, are one such people:

Toda people are a Dravidian ethnic group who live in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu. Before the 18th century and British colonisation, the Toda coexisted locally with other ethnic communities, including the Kota, Badaga and Kurumba, in a loose caste-like society, in which the Toda were the top ranking. During the 20th century, the Toda population has hovered in the range 700 to 900. Although an insignificant fraction of the large population of India, since the early 19th century the Toda have attracted "a most disproportionate amount of attention because of their ethnological aberrancy" and "their unlikeness to their neighbours in appearance, manners, and customs". The study of their culture by anthropologists and linguists proved significant in developing the fields of social anthropology and ethnomusicology.

The Toda traditionally live in settlements called mund, consisting of three to seven small thatched houses, constructed in the shape of half-barrels and located across the slopes of the pasture, on which they keep domestic buffalo. Their economy was pastoral, based on the buffalo, whose dairy products they traded with neighbouring peoples of the Nilgiri Hills. Toda religion features the sacred buffalo; consequently, rituals are performed for all dairy activities as well as for the ordination of dairymen-priests. The religious and funerary rites provide the social context in which complex poetic songs about the cult of the buffalo are composed and chanted.

Fraternal polyandry in traditional Toda society was fairly common; however, this practice has now been totally abandoned, as has female infanticide. 

During the last quarter of the 20th century, some Toda pasture land was lost due to outsiders using it for agriculture or afforestation by the State Government of Tamil Nadu. This has threatened to undermine Toda culture by greatly diminishing the buffalo herds. Since the early 21st century, Toda society and culture have been the focus of an international effort at culturally sensitive environmental restoration. The Toda lands are now a part of The Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO-designated International Biosphere Reserve; their territory is declared UNESCO World Heritage Site. . . .

Physical anthropologist Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, in 1934, described the Todas as being of the North Indid division of the Indid type, therefore connecting them to ancient Proto-Dravidian population. DNA studies in the early 21st century showed that the Toda and Kota share genes which distinguish them from the other Nilgiri Hill Tribes. . . .

Their sole occupation is cattle-herding and dairy-work. Holy dairies are built to store the buffalo milk.

They once practiced fraternal polyandry, a practice in which a woman marries all the brothers of a family, but no longer do so. All the children of such marriages were deemed to descend from the eldest brother. The ratio of females to males is about three to five. The culture historically practiced female infanticide. In the Toda tribe, families arrange contracted child marriage for couples. . . .

The forced interaction with other peoples with technology has caused a lot of changes in the lifestyle of the Todas. They used to be primarily a pastoral people but now, they are increasingly venturing into agriculture and other occupations. They used to be strict vegetarians but now, some people eat meat. . . .

Registrar of Geographical Indication gave GI status for this unique embroidery, a practice which has been passed on to generations. 

Genetically, the Toda people are the closest modern match to the pre-steppe invasion Harappan people in the Indus River Valley, as we can confirm by matching their ancient DNA to modern Toda genomes. Razib Khan notes at the link that the Toda people: "resembles the IVC population in having less AASI but not too much (if any) steppe."

Their lack of steppe ancestry could just be coincidental. But, their low level of AASI (ancient ancestral South Indian) ancestry in the pinnacle of South India, together with "their unlikeness to their neighbours in appearance, manners, and customs" suggests strongly that they a long distance migrants who might very well be basically unadmixed descendants of the Harappans.

Hinduism is generous and inclusive of considerable internal diversity, but nonetheless the traditional religion of the Toda people appears to be atypical of conventional Hindu practice (with about 88% of ethnic Toda people following the Toda religion, about 11% have converted to Christianity (about 220 people), about 1% are Muslim (about 20 people), and one Toda individual identifies as Buddhist)"

According to the Toda Religion, the goddess Teikirshy and her brother first created the sacred buffalo and then the first Toda man and woman. Many rites feature the buffalo, its milk and other products form the basis of their diet.

The Toda religion exalted high-class men as holy milkmen, giving them sacred status as priests of the holy dairy. According to Sir James Frazer in 1922 (see quote below from Golden Bough), the holy milkman was prohibited from walking across bridges while in office. He had to ford rivers by foot, or by swimming. The people are prohibited from wearing shoes or any type of foot covering.

Toda temples are distinct from Hindu temples and are constructed in a circular pit lined with stones. They are similar in appearance and construction to Toda huts. Women are not allowed to enter or go close to these huts that are designated as temples.

Linguistically, their Dravidian dialect is atypical, which could indicate a substrate Harappan language influence:

The Toda language is a member of the Dravidian family. The language is typologically aberrant and phonologically difficult. Linguists have classified Toda (along with its neighbour Kota) as a member of the southern subgroup of the historical family proto-South-Dravidian. It split off from South Dravidian, after Kannada, but before Malayalam. In modern linguistic terms, the aberration of Toda results from a disproportionately high number of syntactic and morphological rules, of both early and recent derivation, which are not found in the other South Dravidian languages (save Kota, to a small extent.)

Their language is noted for its many frictives and trills.

Other relic populations of the IVC may have blended into the regions of India to which they migrated before jati endogamy took hold, while this singular outlier population may have managed to endure with only minimal accommodation to the local language and the synthesized Hindu religious practices necessary to persist. Places that are highlands and economically marginal for other purposes, like the Nilgiris mountain range in Tamil Nadu, India, are common places to find relict peoples.

It is notable that while they were historically pastoralists, that they herded buffalo (true buffalo, unlike the American bison inaccurately called buffalo), rather than the horses, cows, sheep and goats that steppe herders may have herded. Again, this shows a lack of connection to the Indo-Aryans who were known for their horses and cows.

Fraternal polyandry and infanticide are classic cultural reactions to persistent poverty in a society where inheriting assets is critical. This could flow from their self-imposed isolation from modernity and the larger culture. 

Their kindred Kota people are also quite distinct, although they have embraced the outside world more fully than the Toda people:

Kotas, also Kothar or Kov by self-designation, are an ethnic group who are indigenous to the Nilgiris mountain range in Tamil Nadu, India. They are one of the many tribal people indigenous to the region. (Others are the Todas, Irulas and Kurumbas). Todas and Kotas have been subject to intense anthropological, linguistic and genetic analysis since the early 19th century. Study of Todas and Kotas has also been influential in the development of the field of anthropology. Numerically Kotas have always been a small group not exceeding 1,500 individuals spread over seven villages for the last 160 years. They have maintained a lifestyle as a jack of all trades such as potters, agriculturalist, leather workers, carpenters, and black smiths and as musicians for other groups. 

Since the British colonial period they have availed themselves of educational facilities and have improved their socio-economic status and no longer depend on the traditional services provided to make a living. Some anthropologists have considered them to be a specialized caste as opposed to a tribe or an ethnic group.

Kotas have their own unique language that belongs to the Dravidian language family but diverged from South Dravidian sub family at some time in BCE. Their language was studied in detail by Murray Barnson Emeneau, a pioneer in the field of Dravidian linguistics. Their social institutions were distinct from mainstream Indian cultural norms and had some similarities to Todas and other tribal people in neighbouring Kerala and the prominent Nair caste. It was informed by a fraternal polygyny where possible. Kota religion was unlike Hinduism and believed in non-anthropomorphic male deities and a female deity. 

Since the 1940s, many mainstream Hindu deities also have been adopted into the Kota pantheon and temples of Tamil style have been built to accommodate their worship. They’ve had specialized groups of priests to propitiate their deities on behalf of the group.

. . .

The Indian government considers them to be a scheduled tribe (ST), a designation reserved for indigenous tribal communities throughout India that are usually at a lower socio-economic status than mainstream society. They also have a special status as a Primitive Tribal Group (PTG) based on certain socio economic and demographic indicators. But the Kotas are a relatively successful group that makes its living as agriculturalists, doctors, post masters and availing themselves of any government and private sector employment.

. . .

Although many theories have been put forth as to the origins of Kotas and Todas, none have been confirmed as factual. What linguists and anthropologists agree is that ancestors of both Kotas and Todas may have entered the Nilgiris massif from what is today Kerala or Karnataka in centuries BCE and developed in isolation from the rest of the society. According to F. Metz, a missionary, Kotas had a tradition that alluded to them coming over from a place called Kollimale in Karnatakas. They seem to have displaced the previous Kurumba inhabitants from the higher altitudes to lower altitude infested with malarial mosquitoes.

The Kota tribe shows the maternal haplogroup M frequency of 97%, which is one of the highest in India. Within M haplogroup, M2 lineages are common amongst Dravidian speaking populations of South India. They also demonstrate very low admixture rate from other neighbouring groups. The studies on the hematological parameters of Kota showed that they have a low MCV (mean corpuscular volume) even though there in no trace of anemia. However it is also suggested that there is a probability for G6PD deficiency among this group.

At some point in their history they developed a symbiotic economic relationship with their buffalo rearing Toda neighbours as service providers in return for Todas' buffalo milk, hides, ghee, and meat. They also had a trading and ritual relationship with Kurumba and Irula neighbours who were cultivators and hunter-gatherers. They specifically used the Kurumbas as their sorcerers and as village guards. Origin myth of Kotas postulates that Kotas, Todas, and Kurumbas were all placed in the Nilagiris area at once as brothers by the Kota god. This symbiotic relationship survived until disturbed by the British colonial officers starting in the early 19th century.

Since the early 19th century, missionaries, British bureaucrats, anthropologists and linguists of both Western and Indian kind have spent an enormous amount of time studying the different ethnic and tribal groups; of all, the Todas were the most studied, followed by Kotas. Other groups such as Irulas and various groups of Kurumbars were least studied. The study of the ethnic groups of Nilgiris was instrumental in the early development of the field of Anthropology. Although most groups lived in peace with each other and had developed a symbiotic relationship, taboos and cultural practices were developed to maintain social distance. According to F. Metz, as the original settlers of the highland, Kurumbars were subject to continuous violence including occasional massacres by the Todas and Badagas. According to Kota informants, they had supplied battle drums during periods of war.

Kotas were observed to be domiciled in seven relatively large nuclear villages intercepted between Toda and Badaga settlements. Six villages were within the Nilgiris district in Tamil Nadu and the seventh one in the Wayanad district in Kerala. Kota villages are known as Kokkal in their language and as Kotagiri by outsiders. Each village had three exogamous clans of similar name. Each clan settled in a street called Kerr or Kerri. Clan members were prohibited from marrying within each within the same village but could from the same clan or any other clan from non-native village. The relationship between similarly named clans was unknown and no social hierarchy was evident amongst the inter and intra village clans.

Women had a greater say in choosing their marriage partners than in any mainstream Indian villages and also helped out in many economic activities. They had the right to divorce. They were also exclusively engaged in making pottery. According to early western observers, unlike Toda women, who were friendly towards visitors to their villages, Kota women maintained their distance from outsiders. Wives of Kota priests played equally important ritual role in religious functions. Women who became possessed to flute music are called Pembacol and were consulted during important village decisions. Women also had specialized roles associated with cultivation, domestic chores and social functions.

Unlike Todas, Kotas ate meat and were in good physical condition when met by early anthropologists. Their traditional food is a type of Italian millet known as vatamk. Vatamk is served in almost all ceremonial occasions but rice is the preferred daily food. It is served with udk, a sambar like item made of locally available pulses, vegetables and tamarind juice. Beef is seldom eaten but eggs, chicken and mutton are consumed, when available, along with locally grown vegetables and beans.

Prior to colonial era penetration of the Kota area there was very little if not no formal relationships between neighbouring political entities and Kota villages. It is assumed that political entities from Karnataka made forays into the highland but their control was not permanent. Kotas are the head of the nilgiri. There was no formal differentiation that existed within and outside the village level. Each village had an expectation to meet. The village of Thichgad is famous for its women's song and dance, the funerals are well known in Menad, and the Kamatraya festival and instrumental music are famous in Kolmel. Kota village is led by a village headman called Goethgarn. The Goethgarn from Menad was the head of all the seven villages. Whenever a dispute arose, the Goethgarn will call a meeting known as a kuttim with the village elders and decide the solutions. Within a village, the Goethga-rn and elders decide when festivals are to be held and how to solve problems in the community. Although regular justice is handled through the Indian judicial system, local decisions of Kota cultural requirements are handled by the village kut. 

Kota religion and culture revolved around the smithy. Their major deities are A-yno-r also divided into big or Doda-ynor or small or kuna-yno-r, a father god and Amno-r or mother goddess. Father god is also called Kamati-cvara or Kamatra-ya in some villages. Although there were two male gods, there was only one version of the female goddess. These gods were worshiped in the form of Silver disks at specific temples. Historian Joyti Sahi and L. Dumont notes these deities may have roots in proto-Shaivism and proto-Shaktism.

Kotas had a number of religious festivals during the colonial precontact and immediately after the colonial contact period. It ranged from praying to their rain god Kannatra-ya or titular deity Kamatra-ya. During the seed sowing ceremony, they used to build a forge and a furnace within the main temple and smiths would make avocatory item like axes or gold ornaments to the deity. The head priest mundika-no-n and headmen gotga-rn usually belong to the particular family (kuyt) and it was passed from father to son. Mundika-no-n is assisted by the te-rka-ran, through whom the god (so-ym) communicates with the people while being possessed. Te-rka-ran could come from any family but mundika-no-n comes from a specific family in a village.

Kota funeral rites consist of two ceremonies. The first one is called Green funeral and concerns cremation of the body. The second ceremony is called a dry funeral and involves exhumation of buried bones from the first ceremony, followed by sacrifice of semi wild buffaloes. The second funeral is no longer practiced widely. Kota temples are unique in being run by a variety of people not restricted to original priestly families.

Kotas speak the Kota language or Ko-v Ma-nt and it is closely related to Toda language. It was identified as an independent Dravidian language in as early as 1870s by Robert Caldwell. It diverged from the common South Dravidian stock in years BCE. Kota language speakers became isolated and the language developed certain unique characteristics that were studied in detail and by the prominent Dravidian linguists Murray Emeneau. It is informed by maintenance of words that shows strong affinity to Archaic Tamil. According to Emeneau, Kotas have been living isolated since their separation from the mainstream Tamil speakers in years BCE. Emeneau dates the split to the 2nd century BCE as terminus ante quem ("limit before which") and was unable to date the period earlier than this in which the split may have happened, but it happened after Kannada split from the common Tamil–Kannada stock.

All Nilgiri languages show areal influence and show affinity to each other. Since the reorganization of linguistic states in India, most Kota children study in Tamil at schools and are bilingual in Kota and Tamil. Previously Kotas were multilingual in Kota, Toda and Badaga languages.

What Causes Patriarchy?

Alice Evans, in her blog post "3 Things I Got Wrong About Patriarchy" (June 26, 2022), concludes (convincingly) that:

(1) Patriarchy in a society with plough agriculture arises not mostly due to the importance of men's physical labor relative to women, but instead, as a result of how patrilineal inheritance is used to concentrate wealth and power in a society, to encourage clan-like organization, and to create a need to resolve conflicts between men living in close clan communities over women.

(2) Christian Europe has been surprisingly egalitarian because Christian doctrine was actually followed in the Middle Ages and because rich nobles would use church morals rules against patriarchy as a bludgeon against rivals to prevent them from concentrating power and wealth. Christianity reduced patriarchy relative to many of its immediate predecessor societies in Europe.

(3) Islam promoted patriarchy, when other economic conditions made it feasible, even when the economic and technological conditions didn't compel a patriarchy outcome that wasn't present before a conversion to Islam. But oil wealth didn't change the pre-oil discovery level of patriarchy in an Islamic society very much as many scholars had hypothesized.

She reaches these conclusions, that are not conventional wisdom in anthropology and economics, by looking at more data over longer time periods, with greater detail than other scholars doing the same kind of analysis usually do. 

She was also willing to discount her own cognitive biases, for example, that religion was less important than economics in these matters.

Farming Reduced Inbreeding

Ancient DNA confirms that inbreeding declined with the rising local population sizes facilitated by farming (I may have previously blogged a pre-print of this paper).

Parental relatedness of present-day humans varies substantially across the globe, but little is known about the past. Here we analyze ancient DNA, leveraging that parental relatedness leaves genomic traces in the form of runs of homozygosity. We present an approach to identify such runs in low-coverage ancient DNA data aided by haplotype information from a modern phased reference panel. Simulation and experiments show that this method robustly detects runs of homozygosity longer than 4 centimorgan for ancient individuals with at least 0.3 × coverage. Analyzing genomic data from 1,785 ancient humans who lived in the last 45,000 years, we detect low rates of first cousin or closer unions across most ancient populations. Moreover, we find a marked decay in background parental relatedness co-occurring with or shortly after the advent of sedentary agriculture. We observe this signal, likely linked to increasing local population sizes, across several geographic transects worldwide.

Ringbauer, H., Novembre, J. & Steinrücken, M. "Parental relatedness through time revealed by runs of homozygosity in ancient DNA. "12 Nat Commun 5425 (September 14, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25289-w

Inbreeding Declined In West And Central Eurasia During The Holocene Era

A new paper published in the journal Cell shows that inbreeding has declined over the last 12,000 years, as demonstrated with 411 ancient DNA samples from West Eurasia (defined as Europe) and Central Eurasia (defined as Southwest Asia, the Caucasus and Central Asia).

Extreme consanguineous matings did occur among agriculturalists but were rare, while inbreeding was more common in hunter-gatherers and declined more gradually as farming societies grow more complex. Modern Europe, which has far more people, has even less inbreeding.

The regressions and images above go from the present on left, to the past, on the right. F(ROH) (for runs of homozygosity) is a measure of inbreeding with a higher number indicating more inbreeding in the lineage of the individual whose DNA is examined.

Essentially, the larger the size of the communities involved, as improving food production technology makes possible, the less inbreeding is found.

The detailed numerical data is summarized in the chart below. The key data points (with median F(ROH)) are:

* Hunter-gathers (N=40) 0.0633

* Simple agriculturalists (N=102) 0.0286

* Early complex agriculture (N=230) 0.0250

* Advanced complex agriculture (N=160) 0.0160

* Modern Central Eurasia (N=309) 0.0156

* Modern Europe (N=139) 0.0039

Central Eurasia is less inbred than Europe among hunter-gathers, simple agriculturalists, and advanced complex agricultural societies, but is modestly more inbred in the era of early complex agriculture, although the statistical significance of the differences in these areas is modest.

In the modern era, Central Eurasia with an inbreeding coefficient of 0.0156 (which is more than in Central Eurasia during the advanced complex agriculture phase) is much more inbred than modern Europe which has an inbreeding coefficient of 0.0039. The combined modern inbreeding coefficient is 0.0066.

Prevalence Of Moderate Inbreeding With Some Cousin Marriage

100% of hunter-gatherers, 95% of farmers prior to the advanced complex agriculture phase, 77% of farmers in an era of advanced complex agriculture, and 14% of modern Europeans are as inbred as the median modern Central Eurasian (0.0117). This is what one would expect to arise from endogamy within a community with some cousin marriage (including remote cousins) that is not predominant.

Prevalence Of Cousin Marriage

93% of hunter-gatherers, 5-15% of ancient farmers, and 2% of modern Europeans are as inbred as 23% of modern Central Eurasian are (0.0391), a level typical for first cousin marriages. According to the paper:

Samples from modern groups like the Balochi, the Bedouin, or the Sindhi from Pakistan have the highest proportions of individuals with FROH > 0.0391 (50%, 41.3%, and 33.3% respectively).

Prevalence Of Highly Inbred Mating

10% of hunter-gathers, 1.9% of simple agriculturalists and modern Central Eurasians, 0.4% of farmers in early complex agriculture, and 0% of farmers in advanced complex agriculture and modern Europeans has an inbreeding coefficient of 0.0932. 

This is a level of inbreeding in excess of otherwise unrelated double cousin marriages, and similar to that of marriages between an uncle or aunt and that person's niece or nephew, between half-siblings, between a grandparent and a grandchild, or offspring of closer matings. 

Even remote cousin over many generations in a small community, however, can elevate the inbreeding coefficient of mere cousin marriages or of a double cousin marriage, above this threshold. The genetic evidence indicates that this sort of genetic drift was involved in the early hunter-gatherer communities, while cousin and/or closer marriage was a major factor in other genomes studied.

The high inbreeding coefficients in modern "Central Asians" are largely a product of Islamic law's acceptance of cousin marriage and of traditional cultures in some (but not all) Islamic societies, that favor high rates of cousin marriage of 10% to more than 50%, as shown on the map below. 

Cousin marriage is uncommon, however, despite being at least nominally legal under Islamic law, in countries that are predominantly Muslim where Muslims predominantly follow the school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence that is predominant in Southeast Asia (i.e. the Shafi'i school of Sunni Islamic law).

Some concluding comments of the paper bear repeating in their entirety so as not to lose the nuance of these important caveats to its findings:

Three points further deserve mention regarding mating patterns in human societies. 

One is the seeming contrast between the high levels of drift-driven autozygosity (panmictic inbreeding) we report for ancient hunter-gatherer societies and ethnographic studies showing low levels of inbreeding among modern-day hunter-gatherers. For instance, a comparison of inbreeding patterns in a worldwide sample of contemporary hunter-gatherers with Amazonian horticulturalists reported lower inbreeding in hunter-gatherer groups. Hill and colleagues also report low levels of relatedness within modern-day hunter-gatherer bands. However, the mentioned ethnographic findings rely on genealogies and report the prevalence of inbreeding by consanguinity, not inbreeding by drift. In fact, we also find consanguinity to be rare among early Holocene Eurasian hunter-gatherers relative to agriculturalists, consistent with widespread exogamy in modern-day hunter-gatherers. This raises the possibility that reciprocal exogamy and consanguinity avoidance traditions may have been predominant among human foragers since prehistory (but possibly not in archaic hominins).

Second, our results lend support, albeit with limited data, to the hypothesis that extreme consanguinity may have become more common with farming. This result parallels higher within-group marriages among modern-day horticulturalists than foragers. It is also consistent with singular reports on ancient agriculturalist genomes, such as evidence for consanguinity identified in an early Neolithic farmer from Iran, a first-degree incest case from Neolithic Ireland, as well as a recent report on close-kin unions in the central Andes after 1000 CE. 

In our analysis, among the seven individuals with the highest level of inbreeding (with FROH > 0.125), all four hunter-gatherers appear autozygous by drift, while all three agriculturalists appear autozygous by consanguinity. This appears unlikely to happen by chance (Fisher’s exact test, two-sided p = 0.029). These results are consistent with the view that consanguineous traditions could have thrived in class-based agricultural societies with private property more readily than in more egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups.

Finally, we report higher consanguinity in Central versus West Eurasia in contemporary societies, in parallel with earlier work. This is consistent with widespread first- or second-cousin marriage practices in agricultural societies in Middle Eastern and North African countries and in South Asia, including Muslim and Jewish groups, as documented by ethnographic or genomic studies. We note that cousin marriages were also common among royal dynasties and upper classes of Europe until the 20th century, and many prominent European scientists of that period are known to have married their first cousins, including Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. These traditions are thought to have arisen through various social factors, including the inheritance of property in class societies.

Interestingly, we do not observe the relatively high rates of consanguineous marriage observed in modern-day Central Eurasia in any of the past societies we studied, in Antiquity or earlier. We naturally prefer to remain cautious, especially given the limited sample size of our advanced complex agriculturalist samples from West and Central Eurasia (n = 9 and n = 30, respectively). Nevertheless, it appears possible that present-day cultural patterns may have emerged relatively late in time.

Data Points Regarding Bell Beaker Origins

Razib Khan notes that the Yamnaya (or at least the Eastern Yamnaya for whom we have ancient Y-DNA samples, it is plausible that Western Yamnaya might have a clad of Y-DNA R1b closer to the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans) cannot be the directly ancestral population to either the Corded Ware culture, or the people with steppe ancestry within the Bell Beaker culture, the two main archaeological cultures that brought the Indo-European languages to Europe. 

Instead, when the Yamnaya culture collapsed, Y-DNA suggests that some of its men (at least in the East) fled to Central Asia, and a minority were integrated into Indo-Iranian society. Most of their men were probably slaughtered or died from other conditions that precipitated their collapse and replacement.

"Matt" commenting at the same post, provides a link to a March 2021 talk by David W. Anthony (author of "The Horse, Wheel, and Language") comparing various autosomal ancient DNA samples in a PCA chart which Matt extracted from the presentation and annotated. Matt carefully provides a chart with and without his contributions to clearly attribute with comments are his, but I will include only the one he has marked up below.

This chart, labels notwithstanding, doesn't have any true Bell Beaker individuals shown, only members of the Unetice culture (a probably Indo-European culture ca. 2300 BCE to 1800 BCE in Central Europe including Southern and Central Germany, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, parts of Poland, and Western Ukraine whose link to Corded Ware or Bell Beaker culture is unclear), and the Corded Ware culture. 

But the chart does suggest that Yamnaya people from Moldova, Hungary and Bulgaria (and less clearly culturally identified people from copper age Bulgaria and from Romania), who show an admixture pull towards the Neolithic farmer cultures of the Central and Eastern Europe, are a close genetic match for the subsequent Corded Ware culture and Unetice culture people. 

And, while the respective cultures were very distinct in Y-DNA (three of the ancient Unetice Y-DNA samples are I2 while one is R1b, those Y-DNA haplogroups plus a predominance of R1a are found in Corded Ware, and Bell Beaker is predominantly R1b), the autosomal DNA of steppe migrants to Europe was quite similar.

Thus, if you are looking for a launching point for the Bell Beaker culture, Southeast and Central Europe is a very plausible place to look.

Also, the original Bell Beaker culture in Iberia, according to ancient DNA, was probably not a product of steppe people. Instead, as it expanded out of Iberia, this culture was adopted by steppe migrants in Western Europe via central Europe, perhaps, in part, adopting some of the culture of their local wives.

The map below from Wikipedia places several of the cultures. The Neolithic farmer Globular Amphora culture (ca. 3400 BCE to 2800 BCE), immediately preceded the Corded Ware culture.

This map from Wikipedia places the Neolithic farmer Tripolye culture (ca. 5500 BCE to 2750 BCE) to the South of the Globular Amphora culture.