Got Milk! | Yamnaya Culture...Anatolians or Asian Nomads

The research by an international team is published in Nature journal. At the end of the Bronze Age, this genetic ability is still extremely rare Prof Eske Willerslev, University of Copenhagen The findings illuminate a debate over migrations during the Bronze Age (3,000-5,000 years ago), which - according to the picture emerging from ancient DNA research - was a particularly dynamic period. "It seems like the Bronze Age is the period where the genetic diversity and distribution that we know today is basically formed," co-author Prof Eske Willerslev, from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, told BBC News. 

The study shows that people of European origin penetrated en masse into Central Asia where they became known as the Sintashta culture. And a population from Europe's eastern periphery called the Yamnaya, who carried ancestry also found in Native Americans, pushed far into northern and central Europe. "The ability to drink milk is a very unique European feature - you also find it in a few African groups, but there it is due to different mutations," said Prof Willerslev. There are a range of other explanations. One is that milk is just good for you - it's a 'superfood Dr Mark Thomas, UCL 

Researchers had previously linked the emergence of lactose tolerance to the Neolithic period, when domestic cattle were introduced to Europe by Anatolian farmers. But Neolithic genomes haven't turned up any evidence of an increase in the trait at this time.

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Also known as the Yamnaya[1] Culture, Pit Grave Culture or Ochre Grave Culture.
Generally considered by linguists as the homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language.

Probably originated between the Lower Don, the Lower Volga and North Caucasus during the Chalcolithic, around what became the Novotitorovka culture (3300-2700 BCE) within the Yamna culture.

Highly mobile steppe culture of pastoral nomads relying heavily on cattle (dairy farming). Sheep were also kept for their wool. Hunting, fishing and sporadic agriculture was practiced near rivers.

First culture (along with Maykop) to make regular use of ox-drawn wheeled carts. Metal artefacts (tools, axes, tanged daggers) were mostly made of copper, with some arsenical bronze. Domesticated horses used as pack animal and ridden to manage cattle herds.

Coarse, flat-bottomed, egg-shaped pottery decorated with comb stamps and cord impressions.

The dead were inhumed in pit graves inside kurgans (burial mounds). Bodies were placed in a supine position with bent knees and covered in ochre. Wagons/carts and sacrificed animals (cattle, horse, sheep) were present in graves, a trait typical of later Indo-European cultures.

[1] The discovery that the Yamnaya, or a population like them, left an important mark on the genetic landscape of Europe backs up previous findings by a team led by Prof David Reich of Harvard Medical School, US. Variation in the amount of Yamnaya ancestry seems to account for many of the genetic differences between people in southern and northern Europe. 

These nomadic, horse-riding pastoralists, with their ox-driven wagons, buried the dead in earthen mounds called kurgans. They may also have helped spread languages belonging to the Indo-European family. Today, most of the languages spoken in Europe belong to this group, with a few exceptions such as Basque. "Here we can see from the data that the spread of Indo-European languages fits very well with the spread of the Yamnaya culture," said Eske Willerslev. The study also shows that the Yamnaya spread east into Central Asia, only to be replaced around 2000BC by a warlike, chariot-riding group that archaeologists know as the Sintashta culture. 

Contrary to suggestions, these incomers had an Asian origin. Analysis of their genomes links them to Bronze Age Europeans, suggesting a mass movement from west to east.