"Scythian" (sensu lato) population genetics

Here's a paper that's hot off the press (it came out in Nature Communications yesterday). The tl;dr is that Eurasian steppe nomads were highly mobile in the Iron Age to the point that there was a lot of genetic exchange between East and West.

Of Ancient Norse, Egalitarian Societies, and Burial Practices

Some of you may have seen an internet article like this one going around recently for a study that was actually published three years ago. But if your local library doesn't have the access to go behind the paywall of the original article, you might also find yourself being mislead. Here's a more accurate write-up of it close to the time of publication, and here's a write-up explaining where the newer misleading ones went wrong. I recommend reading through the comments of the last one; some of them are quite informative.

I first got wind of this study through one of the newer studies. I had a brain fail and didn't check the primary reference (shame on me!) before commenting on a friend's post that I wasn't surprised. The Norse did give us Valkyries and shieldmaidens, after all. And I'd heard from SCAdians with Norse personas that women in those cultures had much more freedom than more stereotypical medieval European societies. But then I saw the post explaining the errors and I was also not surprised. The game of Internet Telephone and bad science journalism strike again...

One of the comments reminded me of something that I've never explicitly stated (and I apologize for not doing so before)—when you hear or read about egalitarian societies of the past (or today)—it doesn't necessarily mean they're egalitarian because they believe in equality. It might be because they don't really have a choice.

<tangent>To bring in another of my bio/paleo analogies, terrestrial vertebrates can be bipeds or quadrupeds, but the description doesn't end there. They can be obligate or facultative bipeds or quadrupeds. There's a difference between an organism being bipedal because it has to be vs. bipedal because it wants to be. Raccoons, for example, are quadrupeds normally, but I've seen them pick up food in their front paws and run away on their hind legs. It was more useful for them to be bipedal at that point in time because they could carry more food that way.
</tangent>

In her book, Davis-Kimball recounts some time spent with a modern nomad group. Their chief was a woman. She asked the men what they thought about having a female leader. They looked at her like she was an idiot and told her she was their chief because she was the most qualified to be their chief. End of story.

If you're like me, you probably have a pretty privileged life. Living inside a decent building. Your access to the internet is good enough that you can afford to spend time on it reading my blog instead of doing necessary things like checking if your boss has e-mailed you recently. You can likely go to a nearby grocery store to buy your food. Maybe you even have the fallback of living with your parents if your job doesn't pan out.

But if you live a nomadic life on the steppes, or you're looking for new farmland across the sea, the future quality of your life is much less certain. You can't afford to tell half the population "No, stay home. We'll take care of everything here" or "You can't fight or be a leader because we want you to sew things and cook, even if you aren't terribly good at it". What an individual does is dictated by necessity as much as by their skill. If a male Viking spends all day raiding a nearby village, he's not going to be able to stay home and tend the fields. If your group needs a leader, you pick the best because you may not fare well in the winter if you don't. The way "civilized" society has been set up, we have more leeway with the mistakes we make. Crops didn't do well this year? That's okay. We've got plenty from last year in the freezer.

But having all that leeway means the powerful also have more wiggle room to let their personal preferences creep in. And in Western society, that means assuming males are more competent than females in many jobs and deserve more pay. Now before you counter that the pay gap is false, I've read the same 70% statistic as you and, like you, disregarded it because the study that number came from failed to account for various factors that would cause it to look more serious than it should. I didn't see any reason to believe the pay gap diatribe until I read this horrifying study. It's in an open access journal, so you have no excuse not to read it.

But if you're in a rush, here's the take-home message (before you go read the full thing later): Give people (male or female; it's so ingrained in our culture that it doesn't matter!) the resume of an applicant for a STEM field position. If the gender of the name is masculine, they are more likely to hire that person, offer them a higher salary, give them more career mentoring, and consider them more competent.

The thing that makes this study so convincing is that the only thing that changed on the resume was the gender of the name. Everything else on the resume—the achievements that actually tell you how good a candidate a person is—was the. Exact. Same. And there have been plenty of other studies showing similar biases (which is why female authors often abbreviate their names).

...So back to my original point—when you read about female warriors of the past, or female leaders of modern nomadic tribes, don't assume it means that society believes/d everyone is created equal. It might just be because they had/ve no choice but to act that way.

Remember the post on the Nart Sagas I linked to? Where there's a prophecy that "one day men and women will live peacefully as equals"? At first glance, it sounds all warm and squishy because it means they accept that it's possible for people to be equal regardless of gender. But also remember that wife kidnapping was a thing there. And forcing an unrelated woman to treat you like a son by doing something that, in our society, is sexual harassment was an accepted practice.

Early Sarmatian (or maybe just Sauromatian, I forget if it stopped with them) graves with weapons may have been 20% female, but that practice died off. By the time you get to Late Sarmatians, there are no more female warriors defending their tribes against the Huns or raiding nearby Roman settlements. And as for that 20% number, again, things aren't necessarily what they seem. Just because someone is buried with an object doesn't always mean they regularly used that object in life. Ancient Egyptians were buried with a book; that doesn't mean they were all librarians.

Like the Book of the Dead, the steppe nomad practice of burying weapons with people could be a ceremonial or religious thing (from what I've read, they did practice a sort of sword worship). Maybe that noblewoman was buried with a sword because her tribe felt that people of note should be buried with a symbol of power. Or maybe their mythology had dead souls paying their way to the afterlife with a sword, like the coins for Charos (note: I completely made that one up; I have no reason to actually believe that). Who knows? One could come up with any number of theories, both substantiated and unsubstantiated. The same goes for the occasional steppe nomad man buried with both weapons and mirrors (normally associated with female graves)—doesn't necessarily mean he was something like a Two-Spirit, which Davis-Kimball suggested. The assumption that grave goods are solely representative of use in life is rife with errors and where Davis-Kimball's book falls flat.

On the other hand, it doesn't mean that every case of being buried with weapons was like that. It is common practice, after all, to bury people with things they were attached to in life. Just remember that's it's not going to be a 1:1 correlation. If you want to be sure about a particular find, look for data like whether a particular sword was worn from use and whether the skeleton shows skeletal pathologies consistent with being a warrior.

A Sarmatian timeline

Below is a general timeline of Sarmatian activities. Much of it is taken from the New Penguin atlases, and sometimes the only information given is their spot on the map. Other times, they're discussed in more detail in the text. I've supplemented in a few additional notes from elsewhere and will continue to update this post as needed.

Note that overall, there is a general trend among western steppe nomads to eventually be pushed westward by tribes moving in from the east.

• By 415 BC, the Sarmatians are inhabiting the Russian steppes north of the Caspian Sea.
• By 192 BC, the Sarmatians are pushing the Scythians westward.
• By 145 BC, Sarmatians can be divided into three sub-groups (Jazyges, Roxolani, and Alan), each group's area is delineated east-west by major rivers. 
• By 79 AD, the Sarmatians are being pushed westward to the point that the Roxolani cause the Jazyges to be displaced to the Hungarian steppes.
• By 230, the Jazyges have been further restricted by Vandals moving in from the north, while the Roxolani are actually pushed back toward the Alans by the Goths moving in from the west.
• By 305, the Roxolani and Jazyges are no longer on the map. Their areas have been taken over by Asding Vandals and Ostrogoths.
• By 362, the Alans are feeling the heat from three sides- the Ostrogothic Empire to the West, the Finns to the north, and the Huns to the east. They live in a small area between the Black and Caspian seas north of the Caucasus Mountains. They then expand south into  the mountains.
• Throughout all this, approximately 250,000 people live on the steppes between those two seas at a given time.
• By 406, the Huns have taken over the steppes, pushing Germanic tribes west- along with a clan of Alans. The Vandals, Suevi, and the Alan clan invade Gaul at the end of the year.
• By 420, the aforementioned barbarian pillagers have moved into the Iberian peninsula. As part of a bargain with Rome, the Visigoths pushed most of them into the northwest corner before returning to Gaul.
• In 429, the Asding Vandals leave their corner of the Iberian peninsula, pick up the Siling Vandals and Alans left in the south, and 80,000 men, women, and children cross the Straight of Gibraltar into Africa. Rome has to cede the western provinces (the northernmost parts of modern Morocco and Algeria) to them in 435. In 442, they trade them for modern Tunisia. The Alan king had died in battle before this and the clan was absorbed by the Vandals they traveled with.
• By 476, the Alans who stayed behind during the Huns' rule have regained ground in and around the east Caucasus.
• By 600, the Khazar Turks have pushed the Alans out of their northern reaches. The Alans are able to push the Huns back slightly to the west.
• By 661, the Khazars have expanded and now rule the Alans.
• By 1030, the Alans are back on the map in the east Caucasus. (It's a long stretch of time, but stuff happened in between which was not intimated in the book.)
• By 1071, the Alans now hold almost all of the steppes between the Black and Caspian seas and north of the Caucasus. The Kingdom of Georgia is to their southwest.
• By 1092, the Alans have lost some of their northern lands and gained some in the eastern Caucasus.
• From 1221-1222, a group of Mongols originally sent to pursuethe Shah out of his empire to the south fights their way through several groups' lands, including the Alans, and deep into Russia. The Mongol attacks are damaging, but Genghis Khan dies before he can take advantage of them.
• In 1236, the Mongols return to the Russian steppes. No one has bolstered their defenses and the Alans fall under Mongol subjugation along with other groups. 

That is the last they are mentioned in the New Penguin books, but the Encyclopaedia Iranica gives more information on their eventual fate from other references. After devastating wars in the 14th centuries, the Alans split into three groups- one moved into the foothills of the central Caucasus and became the Iron and Digor Ossetians still around today. Another migrated to Hungary and became the Jasz (It seems I was wrong before about them being descended from the Jazyges. Though I'm still puzzled by the name parallel.) The third took up with the Mongols and were sent to China as guards (the Mongols and Chinese called them "Asu" or "As"), where they were eventually absorbed or killed in battle.

McEvedy, C., 2002, The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, 2nd ed., Penguin Books.
McEvedy, C., 1992, The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, Penguin Books.
Yule, H., 1913, Cathay and the way thither: being a collection of medieval notices of China, Vol. III, Hakluyt Society, London.
The History of Yuan (pīnyīn: Yuán Shǐ), 1370, ed. Song Lian, Ming Dynasty Bureau of History, China.

Literature Review: The New Penguin Atlas of---

   This review is actually for two books in a series which both contain information on the Sarmatians and later Alans- The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History and The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History by Colin McEvedy. The sheer amount of work that must have gone into compiling all of the information contained therein is staggering. And the concise way in which it's presented is brilliant. The commentary is pretty hilarious at times, too. If you're a map or history buff, no matter what culture you care about, if it was in Europe or the parts of Asia and Africa near it at some point in history (and even pre-history) before the end of 1483, you'll enjoy this book. Best of all, the author is candid about the instances where he makes assumptions that are not well-established. I cannot recommend it enough.

  Each book consists of a collection of maps showing the large-scale evolution of such cultural features as language, writing forms, migration, borders, and population size with a running commentary on the side. Most history books will pick a time and place and talk about it in detail (such as the Italian Renaissance or Tudor England) and they're great for diving into narrow subjects. The purpose of this book is to see the big picture, so it doesn't provide the fine level of detail you can get elsewhere, but is equally as valuable for a different reason. It puts things into perspective. Instead of jumping from Greece to Rome in your history book, you actually get a vague idea of whats going on with the "barbaric" Germanic tribes at the same time (using that word in its original sense). You see the kingdoms of France and Armenia showing up at about the same time on opposite ends of the map. It really helps to remind one that things do not exist in isolation.

  There was enough information about the Sarmato-Alans in the two books that it warrants an entire other post. Be expecting a Christmas present from me. :)

McEvedy, C., 2002, The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, 2nd ed., Penguin Books.
McEvedy, C., 1992, The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, Penguin Books.

Literature Review: Gonzales-Ruiz et al., 2012

  I can't believe I've only done one lit review so far... Time to fix that with a discussion of a fun paper (Gonzalez-Ruiz et al., 2012) that was brought to my attention recently on the haplotypes of people buried in Pazyryk graves (The Pazyryk culture is the one that gave us the dozens of golden deer statues I discussed previously. Ethinically, they were "Eastern Scythians", a.k.a. Saka.). The best part is that it's in PLOS ONE, which is a completely open source peer-reviewed journal. No paying $30+ for an article when you don't have a university library to use. :) I won't go into detail since you can read the entire thing for yourself with a click of a button, but here are the main points. If you aren't a geneticist, don't worry about the methods; there's a lot of jargon involved. Try reading the introduction, then skipping to the discussion.

  Haplotypes are particular sequences of DNA which are very useful in biogeographic studies of humans. They evolve at just the right rate to tell us about the worldwide expansion of our species throughout, then out of, Africa when considering particular combinations of haplotypes (haplogroups). The haplotypes used for these type of studies have pervaded the populations they evolved in. Some of them were carried to new regions when a population migrated or when adjacent groups sequentially interbreed, thus transporting the haplotype that way even if the original population didn't move much.

  Central Asia and the adjacent steppes are at a crossroads between "Europe" and "Asia" insofar as the ethnicities living there are concerned (despite the name of the region itself). There are high number of diverse ethnicities living there- some seem more European and some seem more Asian. The purpose of this paper was to add more information to our understanding of the ancient genetic flow in the region.
  The authors extracted DNA from skeletal material in Iron Age Pazyryk burials and compared it to other DNA from both Bronze Age and Iron Age burials in Central Asia. What they found is that during the Bronze Age- after humans had initially expanded into the Far East- the Altai mountains were acting as a barrier. East was east, west was west, and there's no evidence for any genetic flow between them. At some point in the Iron Age, things changed. The haplogroups go from being East Eurasian (i.e. Turkic nomads) on the east side of the mountains and West Eurasian (i.e., Iranian nomads) on the west side of the mountains to about half and half on both sides.
  Today, steppe nomads are Turkic. The few remaining ethnicities in the same larger language group as the Iranian steppe nomads are sedentary now. They were driven off the steppes and diminished in prominence by the westward-expanding Turkic nomads within history. What this study shows is that during prehistory, it was the Iranian nomads who did the expanding (toward the East). They initially stopped at the Altaic mountains, then the groups living in that area started expanding outwards-or rather, their genes did. There were no new West Eurasian haplotypes showing up, just the local ones increasing in geographic range. This study adds another line of evidence for our understanding of the ancient biogeography of steppe nomads (on top of cultural and linguistic data), and give us some hard boundaries (both spatial and temporal).

Knowne Worlde Academy of Rapier and Clothing Symposium

  The annual SCA-wide fencing and clothing event was this past weekend (as was Calontir's Crown Tourney- congrats to Their new Excellencies Donngal and Catalina!).

  Unfortunate circumstances led to me missing all the morning classes I wanted to go to on subjects such as body mechanics and single rapier fundamentals, so the only fencing class I went to was the rapier and dagger master class. I got some good tips out of it for future reference, but I don't own a dagger yet and the room was waaaay too crowded, so I didn't get to actually try anything.

  The clothing class, however, was extremely beneficial. It turns out I took a class from the same teacher at Dragon*Con two years ago. She taught back-to-back classes on making patterns for Central Asian kaftans (caftans with her spelling; it doesn't really matter). She also gave us background info (hurray!) on why kaftans were constructed the way they were. Having two layers in front with a wrap kaftan I knew about- it combats the cold wind blowing straight at you when you're riding a horse. She also talked about the vestiges of those original purposes which were retained in later period sedentary cultures. One thing she pointed out (which she also talked about in the D*Con class) was how she'd spent a long time trying to figure out the neckline in a Persian (I think) kaftan, only to realize that it was the same pattern used by Turkic nomads, just the two sides attached down the center instead of wrapped.
  She had this brilliant method of teaching us a basic Turkic nomad kaftan pattern. She passed out pieces of fabric for us to cut the pieces for miniature kaftans out of. The fabric was black and white checked, which meant you could designate each small square as being a certain number of inches. It works brilliantly! I need to find some of that now.
One of the things she pointed out that had been bothering me when trying to draft patterns was shoulders. I couldn't figure out how to get the shoulder seams to lay flat against me. Turns out they aren't supposed to (at least not before later period kaftans). Shoulder seams should be straight and the pooching in front is supposed to be there.
Her name is Jadi Fatima. She primarily researches Ottoman, Mongolian, and Persian culture, textiles, and dance. She does brilliant work and I highly encourage visiting her website.

There was a ball Saturday night, for which my ride and I were the only musicians. Christian is a music Laurel (he mostly played recorder with a little guitar) and I played the drum. ...That was the second time I've picked up a bodhran. I think I did okay. o_o As he described the situation, all the musicians were from Calontir and we definitely stayed in tune the entire time.