Afanasievo culture

Afanasievo culture
Afanasievo culture and contemporary polities c. 3000 BCE.
: Original site of Gora Afanasieva, Minusinsk Basin.[1]
: Ukok Plateau Afanasievo burials.[2]
: Ürümqi (Tuqiu) Afanasievo burials.[3] The area of Dzungaria also had Afanasievo burials and close genetic connection.[4]
: Afanasievo burials at Altan Sandal and Shatar Chuluu in central Mongolia.[5][6] See Afanasievo sites in Mongolia
Alternative namesAfanasevo culture; Afanasevans
Geographical rangeSouth Siberia
PeriodBronze Age
Dates3300 BCE — 2500 BCE
Type siteGora Afanasieva (Minusinsk Basin)[7]
Followed byChemurchek culture, Okunev culture, Karakol culture, Andronovo culture, Deer stones culture[8]

The Afanasievo culture, or Afanasevo culture (Afanasevan culture) (Russian: Афанасьевская культура Afanas'yevskaya kul'tura), is an early archaeological culture of south Siberia, occupying the Minusinsk Basin and the Altai Mountains during the eneolithic era, c. 3300 to 2500 BCE. It is named after a nearby mountain, Gora Afanasieva (Russian: Гора Афанасьева, lit.'Afanasiev's mountain') in what is now Bogradsky District, Khakassia, Russia, first excavated by archaeologist Sergei Teploukhov in 1920-1929.[9] Afanasievo burials have been found as far as Shatar Chuluu in central Mongolia, confirming a further expansion about 1,500 km beyond the Altai mountains.[5] The Afanasievo culture is now considered as an integral part of the Prehistory of Western and Central Mongolia.[10]

According to David W. Anthony the Afanasevan population was descended from people who migrated c. 3700–3300 BCE across the Eurasian Steppe from the pre-Yamnaya Repin culture of the Don-Volga region.[11] It is considered as "intrusive from the west", in respect to previous local Siberian cultures.[12] According to Anthony, "The Afanasievo culture migration to the Altai was carried out by people with a Repin-type material culture, probably from the middle Volga-Ural region."[11]

A 2021 study by F. Zhang and others found that early Tarim mummies from the late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BCE were unrelated to the Afanasevians, and came from a genetically isolated population derived from Ancient North Eurasians, that had borrowed agricultural and pastoral practices from neighboring peoples.[13]

Because of its geographical location and dating, Anthony and earlier scholars such as Leo Klejn, J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair have linked the Afanasevans to the Proto-Tocharian language.[14][15][16][17] Afanasievan ancestry persisted in Dzungaria at least until the second half of the 1st millennium BCE.[13] The Shirenzigou culture (410–190 BC), just northeast of the Tarim Basin, also appears to have been derived from the Afanasievans, which, in addition to linguistics, further reinforces an Afanasievo hypothesis for the Tocharians.[18]

  1. ^ Svyatko, Svetlana V; Mallory, James P; Murphy, Eileen M; Polyakov, Andrey V; Reimer, Paula J; Schulting, Rick J (2009). "New Radiocarbon Dates and a Review of the Chronology of Prehistoric Populations from the Minusinsk Basin, Southern Siberia, Russia" (PDF). Radiocarbon. 51 (1): 243–273. doi:10.1017/S0033822200033798.
  2. ^ Pilipenko, A. S.; Trapezov, R. O.; Cherdantsev, S. V.; Pilipenko, I. V.; Zhuravlev, A. A.; Pristyazhnyuk, M. S.; Molodin, V. I. (31 December 2020). "The Paleogenetic Study of Bertek-33, an Afanasyevo Cemetery on the Ukok Plateau, the Altai Mountains". Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia. 48 (4): 146–154. doi:10.17746/1563-0110.2020.48.4.146-154. ISSN 1563-0110.
  3. ^ Kuzmina, E. E. (2008). The Prehistory of the Silk Road. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4041-2.
  4. ^ Doumani Dupuy, Paula N. (2021). "The unexpected ancestry of Inner Asian mummies". Nature. 599 (7884): 204–206. Bibcode:2021Natur.599..204D. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02872-1. PMID 34707262. S2CID 240072156. Afanasievo cemeteries have been found in the Dzungarian Basin, and Zhang and co-workers found that individuals from some Dzungarian cemeteries share a close genetic relationship to west Eurasian (Afanasievo) populations.
  5. ^ a b Jeong, Choongwon (12 November 2020). "A Dynamic 6,000-Year Genetic History of Eurasia's Eastern Steppe". Cell. 183 (4): 890–904.e29. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.10.015. ISSN 0092-8674. PMC 7664836. PMID 33157037. Although the majority of Afanasievo burials reported to date are located in the Altai mountains and Upper Yenisei regions, the Early Bronze Age (EBA) site of Shatar Chuluu in the southern Khangai Mountains of central Mongolia has yielded Afanasievo-style graves with proteomic evidence of ruminant milk consumption (Wilkin et al., 2020a) and a western Eurasian mitochondrial haplogroup (Rogers et al., 2020). Analyzing two of these individuals (Afanasievo_Mongolia, 3112–2917 cal. BCE), we find that their genetic profiles are indistinguishable from that of published Afanasievo individuals from the Yenisei region (Allentoft et al., 2015; Narasimhan et al., 2019) (Figure 2; Figure S5C; Table S5B), and thus these two Afanasievo individuals confirm that the EBA expansion of Western Steppe herders (WSH) extended a further 1,500 km eastward beyond the Altai into the heart of central Mongolia
  6. ^ Honeychurch, William; Rogers, Leland; Amartuvshin, Chunag; Diimaajav, Erdenebaatar; Erdene-Ochir, Nasan-Ochir; Hall, Mark E.; Hrivnyak, Michelle (1 June 2021). "The earliest herders of East Asia: Examining Afanasievo entry to Central Mongolia". Archaeological Research in Asia. 26: 100264. doi:10.1016/j.ara.2021.100264.
  7. ^ Coordinates: 54°36′24″N 90°57′50″E / 54.606577°N 90.963965°E / 54.606577; 90.963965
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference Allentoft 2015 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Vadetskaya, E.; Polyakov, A.; Stepanova, N. (2014). The set sites of the Afanasievo culture. Barnaul: Azbuka.
  10. ^ Gantulga, Jamiyan-Ombo (21 November 2020). "Ties between steppe and peninsula: Comparative perspective of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages of Мongolia and Кorea". Proceedings of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences: 66. doi:10.5564/pmas.v60i4.1507. ISSN 2312-2994. S2CID 234540665.
  11. ^ a b Anthony, David W. (26 July 2010). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press. pp. 305–310. ISBN 978-1400831104. Retrieved 18 January 2015.
  12. ^ Fagan, Brian M. (5 December 1996). The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. Oxford University Press. pp. 644–645. ISBN 978-0-19-977121-9.
  13. ^ a b Zhang, Fan; Ning, Chao (2021). "The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies". Nature. 599 (7884): 256–261. Bibcode:2021Natur.599..256Z. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-04052-7. ISSN 0028-0836. PMC 8580821. PMID 34707286. S2CID 240072904.
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference EOIC was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Anthony, David W. (26 July 2010). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press. pp. 264–265, 308. ISBN 978-1400831104. Retrieved 18 January 2015.
  16. ^ Mallory, J. P.; Mair, Victor H. (2000). The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-05101-1.
  17. ^ Клейн Л. С. Миграция тохаров в свете археологии // Stratum plus. Т. 2. С. 178—187.
  18. ^ Cite error: The named reference CN was invoked but never defined (see the help page).