Saving Scythians from oblivion

Abstract

The Scythian cultures — Bronze and Iron Age nomadic herders of the Eurasian Steppe — left elaborate burial sites but no written documents, forcing historians to rely on the writings of their neighbours, including ancient Greeks, Persians and Chinese, for testimonies. Now molecular investigations including a study of more than 100 human genomes from Scythian burials bring us closer to understanding who they really were. Michael Gross reports. The Scythian cultures — Bronze and Iron Age nomadic herders of the Eurasian Steppe — left elaborate burial sites but no written documents, forcing historians to rely on the writings of their neighbours, including ancient Greeks, Persians and Chinese, for testimonies. Now molecular investigations including a study of more than 100 human genomes from Scythian burials bring us closer to understanding who they really were. Michael Gross reports. After seeing off the attack from the almighty Persian Empire in the first decades of the 5th century BCE, the ancient Greek city states led by Athens forged themselves a new identity that still lives on in the political thinking of Western societies. They, the (male) Greek city dwellers, who elected their leaders democratically and worshipped their intellectual culture, were the civilised ones. Everybody outside their hallowed circle was barbarian, even if for very different reasons. The Persians, although they were an ancient civilisation too, failed the test because they bowed to despots and showed off their wealth the wrong way. The nomadic tribes of the Eurasian Steppe, such as the Scythians, were freedom loving and modest but failed other tests, seeing as they chose a more primitive lifestyle of moving around with their flocks and didn’t have any of the cultural aspirations of the Greek cities. Only a few years after the naval battle at Salamis in 480 BCE ended the attempted Persian invasion, Greek tragedians in Athens, including Aeschylus (c. 525 – c. 455 BCE) and later Euripides (c. 480 – c. 406 BCE), started assigning all the cruelties that they could think of not to the Persians specifically but to the barbarians in general. This convenient dichotomy not only helped to justify their wars but set the theme for the next 2,500 years of European history. Still, the civilised Greeks had some very good reasons to be curious about the alternative lifestyles that they despised as uncivilised. The allegedly primitive Scythians, for instance, had frustrated an earlier attempted expansion of the Persians mainly by moving much faster than the vast Persian army could. And several Greek trading ports along the northern coast of the Black Sea depended on friendly neighbourhood relations with the Scythians who commanded the area inland from these towns. Therefore, when Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) arrived in Athens and wrote his Histories, an investigation into the background of the war against the Persians, it is understandable that he devoted a large section of his text to the Scythians, providing one of the main sources of contemporary information about this elusive population. Herodotus had visited Greek ports on the Black Sea and mostly relied on the accounts of Greeks he met there. Much of what he reported appeared fanciful to later scholars, from the Romans through to the Victorians, but has been confirmed by twentieth-century archaeology. Although Herodotus was much ridiculed for his story of mythical Amazons hooking up with Scythian men to form equal-opportunity warrior hordes, modern archaeologists have confirmed that the Scythians did have female warriors and leaders. And they did use inhalation tents for their cannabis fix. Their burial mounds, or kurgans, often contained rich golden ornaments, typically representing animals. As these sites were plundered for centuries before a systematic archaeology even began, a large part of the Scythian heritage is lost, but an impressive display of their wealth and imagination remains. Now genomics and other analytical sciences can add another layer of information to our picture of this elusive culture. The Eurasian Steppe extending from today’s Kazakhstan through to the Danube Delta has provided a highway for the movement of agile populations, especially after the domestication of horses. An early wave of westward expansion linked to the Yamnaya and the Corded Ware cultures is likely to have carried the Indo-European languages into Europe (Curr. Biol. (2018) 28, R679–R682). The Scythian cultures formed a later wave and the Greeks met with their farthest western outriders. Due to their lack of written records, we can’t be sure of their language, and it is hard to establish where they came from. Iranian and Far Eastern origins have been considered. Now genome studies are beginning to connect the dots between their burial sites and provide an opportunity to establish their history. An international collaboration led by Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History at Jena, Germany, has now analysed genome-wide information from 111 Bronze Age individuals from Scythian and other cultures in the Central Asian Steppe, in today’s Kazakhstan (Sci. Adv. (2021) 7, eabe4414). The results suggest that there were two separate gene pools associated with Scythian cultures. The eastern pool likely originated in the Altai mountains, which separate the Kazakh Steppe from Mongolia and China, and expanded southwest into the Kazakh Steppe, while mixing with other populations as it moved. In contrast, the western population, likely originating near the Ural mountain range, stayed more isolated as it expanded. This is the population that moved into the Pontic Steppe lining the north coast of the Black Sea, where they encountered the ancient Greeks in their trade colonies. The present study does not include any genomes from that area but provides a reference with which existing and future genomes from there can be compared. In an earlier study of 33 low-resolution genomes from the Pontic–Caspian Steppe covering different eras, including those of 14 Scythians, Maja Krzewin´ska from Stockholm University, Sweden, and colleagues showed that these Scythians were different from the populations that preceded and followed them in the area, the Cimmerians and Sarmatians, respectively, while showing high levels of genetic diversity among themselves (Sci. Adv. (2018) 4, eaat4457). The apparent complexity of their population structure, falling into four separate clusters, will require more data to resolve. This work also pinpointed the southern Ural area as a possible source region for these nomadic populations. Bronze Age genomes from the early civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Minoans in Crete and the Canaanites in today’s Lebanon, are already available and attest to migration and mingling as well as a degree of population continuity (Curr. Biol. (2017) 27, R979–R982). It will be interesting to find out to what extent the cultural division between the Greek civilisation and the alleged barbarians translated to a genetic isolation. Some Scythians reportedly took part in the life of the cities, so a certain extent of admixture would be plausible. The western Scythians were decimated and replaced by subsequent waves of invasions from the East, including first by the Sarmatians, then the Huns and the Mongols, and finally dissolved in the emerging Slav population. To determine the fate of the eastern Scythians, Krause and colleagues also analysed 96 genomes of the modern population of Kazakhstan. They found that migration and mingling had led to a genetically diverse population mixed from many Asian and European contributions, which over the last 400 years has then been homogenised by a strict culture banning marriage between relations. The culture of elaborate warrior graves and the Scythian triad consisting of weapons, horse gear and animal art have been used to bundle together groups across the Eurasian Steppe that may have been quite different from each other. And some of them may even have settled down some of the time. Alicia Ventresca Miller, who moved from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, USA, and colleagues have studied the lifestyle of Scythian-era individuals by analysing the isotope ratios in teeth and bones. The researchers analysed the isotopic composition of the elements strontium, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon of 56 skeletons from three separate burial sites located in the area that is now the Ukraine. Their analyses show that most of the individuals found in the vicinity of settlements appear to have stayed there most of their lives. Only a smaller number seems to have undertaken long-distance movements of more than 90 kilometres (PLoS One (2021) 16, e0245996). This suggests that the more visible mobile groups described by Herodotus and others relied on the backup of more ordinary agricultural settlements in their hinterland. Their nutrition can be analysed based on the fact that the flora of the area consists mainly of C3 plants. Thus, any isotopic (13C) signatures of C4 plant nutrition hints at the use of imported crop species, most likely millet. At the location of Bel’sk, for instance, a large area of burial and residential sites, analyses showed that the local people ate millet as a staple food, while those arriving at the site from elsewhere had consumed less of the grain. This suggests that the mobile populations were more likely to eat pastoral products and local plants. The authors conclude that the Scythians, rather than just being a horde of nomadic warriors, as Herodotus suggested, had a highly complex population allowing for different economic strategies, including agriculture, pastoralism, manufacturing and trade. Only a part of the population displayed the conspicuous mobility that led to the outward impression of a nomadic warrior tribe. Cultural habits and new technology can spread without the need for mass migration. Choongwon Jeong from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and colleagues have investigated the origins of dairy herding in Mongolia before 1,300 BCE and found that the livestock arrived from the West (i.e. the Kazakh Steppe), but there was no invasion of pastoralists to accompany it (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA (2018) 115, E11248–E11255). The ancient Greeks described the barbarian populations at the periphery of their world, including the Scythians, as particularly violent. In the absence of inside testimony, it is difficult to judge whether that was just part of enhancing the idea of Hellenic virtue by attaching all bad things to the barbarians. However, a recently excavated royal burial site in Tuva, southern Siberia, has provided some evidence in support of a rather brutal history. Researchers led by Gino Caspari from the University of Bern, Switzerland, together with Timur Sadykov and Jegor Blochin from the Russian Academy of Sciences, analysed the skeletons of 87 individuals for evidence of injuries (Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. (2021) 174, 3–19). DNA and isotopic investigations on these remains are also underway. Caspari and colleagues found that 22 of the individuals had suffered a total of 130 injuries around the time of their deaths. While most of the victims were male and may have died in combat, there were also women and children among them, and some of the injuries, including signs of beheadings and scalping, appear to suggest ritual sacrifices or trophy preparation. The burials date from a time of political instability towards the end of the Scythian dominance over the Eurasian Steppe, so the high level of conspicuous brutality may reflect this situation rather than a particularly barbarian lifestyle. As new insights from multiple disciplines continue to build up, we can hope to find out more about the real life of the Scythians, including the mundane details that Herodotus, relying mostly on Greek colonists, didn’t report. Without a written legacy, only science can make their shadows speak.