Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings

This is a great book that puts together a lot of the recent findings about the peopling of Europe -- and a bit beyond. Fair warning, it is very well written and a good read, but, it refers to lots of genetic terms and labeling. If your not familiar with the vocabulary of haplogroups, mitochondrial DNA and ancestral DNA you'll either have to slow down or take the details on faith. However, the author does a great job of explaining for newbies. I recommend it to all who want to know more than the vague stuff that your DNA test usually provide. For those more familiar with this material this is a nice romp through the current stuff from a bird's eye perspective. Rarely can you find it all put together in such a readable fashion,

The author - while neither an expert geneticist nor an archaeologist - does a fine job of portraying the history and origins of modern Europeans in clear and intelligible terms that don't bog the reader down with overly complex discussions of DNA. Contrary to other reviewers I regret the author did not add more genetic discussions regarding the DNA of modern Europeans given that almost each European nation is somewhat distinct genetically, though its genetic clusters are often closely related to its neighboring countries. Nevertheless there are genetic tables and maps aplenty in this book.All in all this is one of the most interesting books I've ever read on the subject of European origins.The below is intended as a summary of the author's main conclusions rather than a pure review of the book:The author's introductory chapter explains the complexities involved in genetically mapping any people group/ethnicity anywhere and the temptation to make assumptions based on national biases or the historical record. DNA itself is a challenging matter as it tends to break down upon the death of an individual. Hence the overwhelming reliance on DNA from ancient human remains discovered in caves and other frigid places in the Alps or Siberia. The other thorny issue has to do with language and cultures. The temptation is to assume that one's ethnicity corresponds with one's language and one's culture. But what does one do when the famous Beaker culture pots are found as far north as Norway or when the metallurgy of the Celtic La Tene culture first found in France are discovered further afield? Do the spread of those objects guarantee the genetic spread of the respective ethnic group or does it mark the limits of the culture's mercantile interactions? The same applies to the Indo-European languages that dominate most of Europe and extend to this day all the way from Iceland to northern India. Did the arrival of the Indo-Europeans in Europe mark the arrival of the "true" Europeans or were preexisting Europeans absorbed into the dominant Indo-European culture?So when did human beings arrive in Europe? The first homo sapiens entered Europe some 46,000 years ago during the Paleolithic Age. Around 20,000 years ago (the Mesolithic Age) the glaciers of the ice age were at their height and humans retreated from northern Europe. About 10,000 years ago people began to recolonize northern Europe and the British Isles. Around 9,000 B.C. the first farmer began to enter Europe from the Near East. Around 6,200 BC (the Neolithic Age) an environmental crisis caused a new wave of farmers to spread into mainland Europe. Are modern Europeans descended from all of these different migratory waves? Apparently so. Europeans genetically viewed are comprised of these 3 distinct groups: The genes of the above mentioned Mesolithic hunter gatherers (20,000 B.C.) are still be found in almost every fifth European as well as the ancient farmers coming from the Near East around 9,000 BC. The third noticeable genetic group hails from the Ancestral North Eurasians (ANE), a Paleolithic people living in eastern Siberia who survived the Ice Age by hunting mammoth. Surprisingly this mammoth hunting ancestor of modern Europeans also happens to be the genetic ancestor of Native Americans who crossed the Bering Straight after leaving Siberia.The domestication of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs and the cultivation of plants began around 11,000 years ago between the Taurus mountains of Turkey and the Zagros mountains of Iran. Farming and herding of animals then spread to Cyprus by 9000 BC and then from Cyprus to Crete by 6700 BC before reaching the Greek mainland by 6500 BC. These groups of farmers with their herds of livestock in turn were followed by pottery making peoples that settled in Greece and Hungary even as other migrants entered Europe via Spain from North Africa. The beginnings of agriculture were slow but there was a burst of migratory farmers around 6200 BC and another rapid expansion of agriculture as farming spread to the British Isles and Scandinavia by 4000 BC. Having tested 100 Europeans who lived between 8,000 and 3,000 years ago it is clear their DNA is distinct from the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. In all likelihood the hunter gatherers were displaced by these Neolithic farmers.Returning to the question of the Indo-Europeans the author notes it has long been believed the Indo-Europeans originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe that spreads from the southern Ukraine all the way to Kazakhstan. Between 3100 and 2800 BC the Yamnaya culture found in the Ukraine began to flow westward suggesting that the ancestral speakers of Italic (the ancestor of the Romance languages), Celtic (the ancestor of Irish, Gaelic and Welsh) and Illyrian (the ancestor of Albanian) began to split apart. These people settled along the Danube River and in Hungary while others introduced the Bronze Age to Albania and Bosnia. The ancient Greeks were descended from this stock and settled in Bulgaria before colonizing northern Greece even as their Armenian cousins crossed over into modern Turkey. Meanwhile the future Baltic and Slavic speakers headed up the Dnieper river in the Ukraine before separating around 1400 BC. The Balts would eventually reach Latvia and Lithuania whereas the Slavs remained in a much smaller region in the Ukraine before they burst out in all directions around 600 A.D.Why were the Indo-European peoples so successful in occupying Europe and displacing the Neolithic farmers? The answer is their economy and technology. Their technology would grant higher agricultural yields producing a greater population even as their wheeled vehicles and bronze and warrior caste would have given them the military advantage. Nevertheless these highly mobile migrants were illiterate and absorbed a great deal from the cultures they conquered in the Near East and Asia. The genetics also seems to match the startling spread of the Indo-Europeans from northern India to the ends of western Europe. Y-DNA R1 (inherited from one's father), specifically R1a1a (M17) dominates northern India and is also very common in Baltic and Slavic peoples of eastern Europe today. Meanwhile R1b1a2 (M269) is predominant throughout the rest of Europe, making these 2 genetic markers a perfect match for the geography of the Indo-European languages.The Bell Beaker Culture with its unique pots spread over Europe between 2700 and 2000 B.C. This culture arrived with immigrants and spread throughout Europe from southern France,northern Spain and Switzerland to Poland and southern Norway and the British Isles. The Bell Beaker people were related to and partially descended from Neolithic farmers and at some time they came into contact with a Copper Age people known as the Stelae people who also spoke an ancient variant of Indo-European who were moving up the Danube River from the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe. It was here that Proto Italic-Celtic began to split into the languages of the Romans and the Celts. The Etruscans of central Italy divided these peoples linguistically for centuries before the Roman conquest of Gaul reconnected the speakers of Italic and Celtic. But the convergence of the Bell Beaker peoples with other Indo-Europeans from the Steppes of the Ukraine might explain the genetic divergence between the Celtic peoples of the British Isles and the Celtic peoples that inhabited Spain, France and Italy some 3,000 years ago. The modern Celtic peoples of Ireland, Scotland and Wales are known for the Y-DNA R1b-L21 whereas their Iberian cousins in Spain and Portugal carry a slightly different but similar genetic marker, R1b-DF27.The author assumes the Bell Beaker people are the Celts, for they introduced the Bronze Age to Britain around 2450 BC and pumped new genes into a waning agricultural society in the British Isles. The Bell Beaker culture flourished in Cornwall as tin, the necessary ingredient for Bronze was discovered there in large quantities. But why are there 2 distinct Celtic languages in the British Isles today? The author believes Irish and Scots Gaelic arrived earlier along with the Late Bell Beaker Culture while the rest of Britain, England, Scotland and Wales continued to receive waves of immigrants throughout the Iron Age. That would explain the difference between Irish and Welsh.The Iron Age spread throughout Europe, adding greater mobility and much better weaponry to the continent. The famous Hallstatt culture (800 -500 BC) is named after the famous discovery of the Celtic culture in Hallstatt, Austria. This culture eventually encompassed a vast swathe of central Europe, Spain and England earning the Celts the name "the fathers of Europe." But the Celts were not to rule for long as their Indo-European cousins, the Romans, gradually conquered the entire Mediterranean area and moved into the Celtic heartlands of central and western Europe and finally Britain. Nevertheless the Roman gene print on the peoples of Europe is less than would be expected, for the Roman legions were filled with more and more Germanic warriors and fewer Romans. The Roman Empire in turn fell to another Indo-European cousin, the Germanic tribes, as more warlike tribes from the steppes of Asia forced the Germans into the Empire for safety. This in turn caused a spattering of Germanic DNA among the Romanized peoples of Italy, France and Spain. The Germanic people themselves originated in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia and then continued to spread southwards into Celtic territory before overcoming the Romans. To this day the Germanic peoples of Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Austria and England have a number of typical genetic markers. The most typical germanic markers are I1, R1a1a1 (M417), R1b-U106 and the particularly Nordic marker Z284. The fact that the Germani moved south absorbing rather than eradicating the Celtic peoples of central Europe is confirmed by the presence of the "Celtic" genes R1b-P312 and R1b-L21. Conversely the "Germanic" R1b-U106 is dominant in northern Europe and then fans out geographically in a way that corresponds well with the Germanic conquests of the western Roman Empire after 476 A.D. Nevertheless the genetic imprints of the Germanic conquests vary. In England the genetics bears out the fact that the Germanic Anglo-Saxons from Denmark, Holland and Germany wiped out or displaced almost the entire Celtic population, driving the Celts deeper into Wales and Cornwall, whereas the Germanic Franks of Belgium and Holland conquered France at such a rapid rate that the majority of French today are much more closely related to the Celtic Gauls and Romans of Caesar's conquests. The Slavic people today number 270 million people yet they are the most closely related of all the European peoples. They originated in the Ukraine near to Kiev and were unknown to history before the sixth century A.D. when they began to fill the void left by the Germanic peoples in eastern Europe. They surged east into Poland and south into the Balkan states as well as north and east into the Russias. The Slavs derive from a small population whose ancestry dates to some 2000 years ago. The final chapter addresses the Viking contribution to European DNA. The problem is that it is no easy task identifying Viking DNA since it is so closely related to other Germanic DNA. Thus it is currently impossible to distinguish a Dane from an Englishman who has Danish Viking genes given the similarity between Danish and Anglo-Saxon genes. It is, however, possible to identify Norwegian genes in the British Isles. And so one can verify genetically what historians have known all along - that Norwegian Vikings colonized the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, and the Outer Isles of Scotland. The further afield the Vikings went the more one finds men with Nordic Y DNA and Celtic Mt DNA indicating that Viking men took Celtic women for wives. The Viking imprint on the Irish is minimal and the author does not offer any details of how much Viking blood the heirs of Duke Rollo in modern-day Normandy have, though one would suspect the Norman population to be at least 15 % Viking today. More time is given to the Swedish Viking influence in Russia as the Vikings went to great efforts to sail down the Dnieper and Volga rivers to Constantinople to trade with the Byzantine Empire. The Swedes gave Russia its name, for the Viking overlords were known as the Kievan Rus, but the Russian Vikings were a warrior elite whose genetic footprint is barely noticeable today in Russia or the Ukraine.Overall this book does a good job of linking history and ancient archaeological cultures to the genetic evidence that we had as of 2015. I only give the book four stars, for our knowledge of genetics continues to grow at an astonishing rate such that this book may well need significant revisions in just a couple of years.

This is a thoughtful examination of many sorts of evidence, and balancing of several sciences. Eminently readable, and I took notes.

One would not think of anthropology and archeology as being hotbeds of scientific advance but they are. The ability to extract usable amounts of DNA from very old fossilized bone fragments is the most obvious recent development. However, it is combining that new data with ancient artifacts and the ability to reconstruct extinct languages (or at least language groups) from modern languages that brings out the most interesting insights. The fact this the author felt a need to publish this second edition only two years after the first is indicative of how fast this area of study is changing.There are a number of tables and maps that are needed to make sense of the text which quite dense information-wise. (It is very readable, mind you, but there is just a lot to keep tract of..) Those tables and maps are barely usable with a Kindle Paperwhite - reading the book in hardcopy or at least on an iPad or similar device is recomended.If you are alreadyfamiliar with the generally accepted version of European prehistory the extend of the recent surprising revisions may be obvious. To those unfamiliar, the author does a fairly good job of expaining what the prior theories were but you may not appreciate the surprise and significance unless you had prviously internalized the older view point.Living in the southwest US, I wish someone whould write a similar book concerning the migations of peoples in the pre-columbian new world.

I usually read books by Brian Sykes, but ventured out this time. The author is of course very knowledgeable but seems all over the place, making it difficult to read, but I'm not even half way through the book yet, so maybe it's just me, idk.

This excellent book is perhaps best read along with David Reich 's " Who we are and how we got here". Reich's book is somewhat easier to read, while Ancestral Journeys is very heavy in complex DNA and mitochondrial DNA data. To really follow the genetic data it helps to make a flow chart to follow a particular genotype as it travels from Asia into its present place in Europe. That given, it is a pleasure to read the book. Jean Manco is a erudite historian and scientist, and he combines both these fields into deep insights. This is a book from the cutting edge of the new historiography and archeology.

Beautiful narrative of old world population

Full of detailed and recent data in a rapidly changing field. Will probably be out of date in a couple of years. Shame the author is no longer with us to update the story. A good overview that will serve as a reference point for non specialists for the present.

Das Buch beschreibt die Migrationen der letzten 12000 (oder so circa) Jahre innerhalb Europas und Asiens. Die Autorin stellt diese anhand genetischer und linguistischer Forschung dar. Sie hat für alle Aussagen Quellenangaben und ist auch kritisch, wenn widersprüchliche Aussagen zu einem Thema existieren.Das Buch ist wissenschaftlich geschrieben. Es ist kein populärwissenschaftliches Buch, sondern eher trocken und voll mit Informationen.Dieses Buch macht einem klar, warum Nationalismus in Europa keine Grundlage hat. Wir sind eine Mischung aus Ost und West, Nord und Süd. Jeder der in sein Käsebrötschen beisst, dankt das dem Mittleren Osten, dem Kaukasus und dem Balkan.Wer durch die Rezensionen blättert, wird merken, dass diejenigen mit drei Sterne und weniger keine verifizierte Käufe sind.

Back in 2007, David Anthony explicated the connections between archaeology and linguistics in "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes." Now Jean Manco has pulled in a third player, archaeogenetics. The book starts off with a solid explanation of what this is and how it works before plunging into a analysis of the prehistory and early history of Europe.One of the things I like about "Ancestral Journeys" is that Manco makes it clear that hypotheses, unlike archaeological remains, are not set in stone. I read the paperback edition of the book, published a couple of years after the hardcover edition. Manco cheerfully pointed out changes that had occurred in her thinking during this time. She also discusses the effect of "fashions" in scientific thinking, especially with regards to the hypotheses concerning population migrations. (My own education was in geology, where I could see the same sort of thing occurring. Scientists are, after all, human.) I came away from this book with a real sense of the dynamism of this area of research, one that makes me eager to see what coming years bring.

Immensely well documented and informative. A great synthesis of ethnological, archaeological, historical data documented by state of the art genetics.