Botai culture
53°18′11″N 67°38′42″E / 53.303°N 67.645°E
Seima-Turbino phenomenon, Tagar culture |
The Botai culture is an archaeological culture (c. 3700–3100 BC)[2] of prehistoric northern Central Asia. It was named after the settlement of Botai in today's northern Kazakhstan. The Botai culture has two other large sites: Krasnyi Yar, and Vasilkovka.[3]
The Botai site is on the Imanburlyq, a tributary of the Ishim. The site has at least 153 pit-houses. The settlement was partly destroyed by river erosion, which is still occurring, and by management of the wooded area.
Archaeology
The Botai culture emerged with the transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle with a variety of game to a sedentary lifestyle with a diet that heavily relied on horse meat. The settlements of the Botai consisted of pit-houses and were relatively large and permanent, the largest being the type site at Botai with over 160 houses. The population of the Botai culture has been connected to the earliest evidence for horse husbandry. Enormous amounts of horse bones were found in and around the Botai settlements, suggesting that the Botai people kept horses or even domesticated them. Archaeological data suggests that the Botai were sedentary pastoralists and also domesticated dogs.[4]
A number of researchers state that horses were
However, more recent studies analyzing dental calculus suggest an absence of dairy product consumption among Botai culture individuals, which would potentially discard the previously believed milking of the horses assumed from the presence of animal fats on pottery.[13]
Damgaard et al. (2018) confirmed that the Botai horses were not the ancestors of the common modern horse
Although contemporaneous to
Language reconstruction
Asko Parpola suggests that the language of the Botai culture cannot be conclusively identified with any known language or language family.[16] He suggests that the Proto-Ugric word *lox for "horse" is a borrowing from the language of the Botai culture.[a][17] However, Vladimir Napolskikh believes that it comes from Proto-Tocharian *l(ə)wa ("prey; livestock").[18]
Archaeogenetics
Genetic analyses carried out on five Botai specimens, four of which turned out to be male, and one to be female, revealed high genetic affinity between them and "Western Siberian hunter-gatherers" (WSHG), a genetic cluster that is represented by three hunter-gatherer individuals dated ca. 5,000 BCE from the Russian Forest Zone east of the Urals in
The Botai and the WSHG can be modeled as deriving ancestry primarily from an EHG-like and ANE-like source, with some geneflow from an AEA-like population. This model can be simplified into modeling the Botai and the WSHG to derive their ancestry from the combination of an EHG-like population, and from a population similar to the early Tarim mummies from Xinjiang (Tarim_EMBA1), who had the "fitting" combination of Ancient North Eurasian and Ancient East Asian components. The Botai, compared to with the WSHG, however need a small additional AEA contribution. Different models estimated the overall Eastern Asian-related contributions for the Botai to be c. 17.0±2.2% (12—30%), with the remainder being associated with EHG and ANE-like components.[24] The admixture event was estimated to have taken place about 7,000 BCE.[25]
Botai 14, dated to 3517–3108 cal BC, carried a derived allele at
Two more Botai individuals were tested in September 2015. One sample belonged to the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup K1b2 and the paternal Haplogroup O-M268 (with 97.1% probability).[27]
Footnote
- Mansi lū, and Khanty law, all meaning "horse". The word is neither of Uralic nor Indo-European origin, nor does it resemble any of the words for "horse" in known Eurasian language families.[16]
References
- PMID 33157037.
- ISBN 978-1934536698. Retrieved 13 June 2015.
- ISBN 978-90-04-14610-5.
- ^ Olsen, Sandra (27 June 2014). "The Early Horse Herders of Botai". KU Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum. Archived from the original on 1 May 2015. Retrieved 16 September 2021.
- ^ S2CID 5126719.
- ISBN 9780199551224.
- ^ Zaibert, V. F. (2009). Botaiskaya Kultura.
- ^ S2CID 39814042.
- ISBN 978-1-84171-990-0.
- ^ Gaunitz et al. (2018), Supplementary Material pp. 2, 7-9,20-1.
- ^ a b c Damgaard et al. (2018), Supplementary Material p. 3.
- ^ Gaunitz et al. (2018), Supplementary Material pp. 7-9,20-1.
- PMID 34526723.
- ^ Gaunitz et al. (2018), Supplementary Material pp. 8-9.
- ^ "Carnegie Museum of Natural History: Sandra Olsen". Carnegiemnh.org. Archived from the original on 28 January 2012. Retrieved 27 September 2012.
- ^ ISBN 978-952-5667-33-2. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
- ^ "Uralic Etymological Database".
- ^ Napolskikh, Vladimir (1996). "Происхождение угорского названия лошади". Linguistica Uralica (in Russian). 32 (2): 116–118. Retrieved 17 September 2020.
- ^ Blažek, Václav. 2019. Toward the question of Yeniseian homeland in perspective of toponymy. 14th Annual Sergei Starostin Memorial Conference on Comparative-Historical Linguistics. Moscow: RSUH. Quote: The preceding arguments lead to the conclusion that Yeniseians still lived in the steppe region of Central Asia including Kazakhstan in the first centuries of CE and certainly earlier. Northern Kazakhstan, namely the area of the Botai43 culture, was probably the place where the wild horse (Przewalsky-horse, i.e. Equus ferus przevalskii Poljakoff) was already in the mid 4th mill. BCE domesticated (cf. Bökönyi 1994: 116; Becker 1994: 169; Anthony 1994: 194; Outram 2009: 1332-35). The creators of this culture were totally specialized in breeding of horses (133.000 horse bones were found here already in the early 1990s!). The proximity of the Yeniseian *ʔɨʔχ-kuʔs "stallion" and Indo-European *H1ek̂u̯os "(domesticated) horse" is apparent and explainable through borrowing. If the Indo-European term cannot be transparently derived from IE *ōk̂u- "swift" = *HoHk̂u-, while the Yeniseian compound "stallion" = "male-horse" is quite understandable, the vector of borrowing should be oriented from Yeniseian to Indo-European.
- PMID 34707286.
- ^ PMID 31488661
- ^ PMID 31036896.
- PMID 34707286.
- S2CID 240072904.
Applying qpAdm, we successfully modeled the high-ANE group West_Siberia_N as a mixture of Tarim_EMBA1 (67%) and Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) (Supplementary Data S1I). Botai _CA shows a similar profile but requires an additional Eastern Eurasian contribution (5-12%) (Supplementary Data S1I; Extended Data Table 3).
- ^ Damgaard et al. (2018), Supplementary Material p. 16.
- ^ Damgaard et al. (2018), Supplementary Material pp. 27-8.
- ^ Изучение этногенетической истории населения Казахстана [Study of the ethnogenetic history of the population of Kazakhstan] (PDF). Первые результаты работы Лаборатории популяционной генетики [The first results of the work of the Laboratory of Population Genetics] (in Russian). Institute of General Genetics and Cytology, Ministry of Education, Republic of Kazakhstan.
Bibliography
- Damgaard, Peter de Barros; et al. (9 May 2018). "The first horse herders and the impact of early Bronze Age steppe expansions into Asia - Supplementary Material" (PDF). Science. 360 (6396). PMID 29743352.
- Gaunitz, A.; et al. (22 February 2018). "Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski's horses" (PDF). Science. 360 (6384): 111–114. S2CID 3491575.
External links
- "Botai discovery announcement". Carnegie Mellon University.