Knowing The Face Of Your Father, or, The Best Post I’ve Ever Written About Bronze Age Europe

(Inspired by a comment on Monday’s post)

“It is indeed a pleasure to introduce to you a gentleman we picked up in medieval Mongolia, please welcome the very excellent barbarian Mr. Genghis Khan!” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I wonder if the most common sandwich in Rome was a plebian J?

The rooster crowed. 

Tark opened one eye, peering through the heavy hide covering him.  He could see light.

Motion was already starting in the longhouse, and he could see the oak beams above him dimly in the firelight.  He could smell the barley and mutton stew that would be his breakfast.  Always in a hurry, he jumped up and dressed into his pleasantly cool tunic and pants and bolted down a bowl of the stew.  It was warm.  It was good.

Tark was eight.

Tark hummed a song to the sky father, the one who had spoken the world into existence, according to the stories the men told around the fire.  Tark’s first job was to feed the chickens so mother could get the eggs for tomorrow.

His father, Wulfric, was already up, as usual.  Tark had seen that his father was up later and up earlier.  Tark noticed that Wulfric always had a wary look in his eye, as if he was never relaxing, always assessing.  When other men talked after too much drink, Wulfric listened.  Wulfric was tending the tribe’s cattle, their major stock of wealth and the way that they would be sure that they would make it through the winter, even if it was a long one. 

Tark’s older brother Branoc, now 16, was already up and practicing with a battle axe – sweat already dripping from him despite the cool air.  Branoc was a man, and to be a man, one fought.  And to be a man, one married.  Branoc would soon be bonded to Lunara.  A man protects his woman, a man protects his family.  All is right with the world.

Tark and Branoc go through the forest, intermittent sunlight flashing in Tark’s light blonde hair. His blue-gray eyes lit up as they caught deer sign.  Maybe a hunt soon.  That would be good. 

Later, after a day of work and mock combat with wooden weapons and a laughing Branoc, Tark and the family gathered by the fire.  Wulfric speaks slowly, telling the stories of their Yamnaya ancestors who rode the steppe and died valiantly.  Those tales are the last thing that Tark heard as he drifted off to sleep – dreaming of becoming worthy enough to have a final burial place, a kurgan, worthy of a man of honor.  The last thing he saw in the flickering firelight was the face of his father.

Okay, enough of Tark’s life.

Tark was a member of the Corded Ware people, a successor to the Yamnaya.  This culture (and its associated genetics) first show up on the steppe in what is today Russia and the Ukraine thousands of years ago and then spread throughout Europe during the thousands of years that followed.

Blockbuster™ franchises followed the Corded Ware people wherever they went, but were ultimately unsuccessful because the VCR had not yet been invented. 

This land was harsh, and not only in climate – some writers have referred to it as the bloodlands.  Steppe warriors.  These were the first humans to effectively use the horse as transport, and were fierce warriors.  Most of the skeletons that we’ve found of these people have evidence of combat injuries.  This isn’t uncommon.

In roughly 1250 BC, a band of warriors descended on a settlement in the Tollense Valley.  The Tollense Valley is in present day Germany.  On the day of the battle, current estimates are that perhaps 2,000 warriors fought during the battle – an immense battle for that time in Europe.

Who won?  Civilization won.

Steppe warriors have been a sort-of periodic vaccination against societal complacency.  Urban areas exist, and the steppe warriors, be they Mongol, Hun, Turk, Scythian, or Yamnaya, have been a cleansing fire that keeps those urban and settled areas vital.  I mean, would you build a giant great wall to protect you from cosplay LARPers or furries?

No, not from LARPers. But I would build a fiery moat to keep furries out.

The Corded Ware people were also known to avoid video games. (meme as found)

This crashing wave of martial prowess was built on a selection process that favored honor, planning, and daring.  Genghis Khan is related to something like one out of eight east Asians, so I think his strategy paid off.  It also forced societies out of their complacence, and kept them invigorated.  Stagnant empires in decline were exactly the sort of thing these steppe barbarians were looking for.

I mean, don’t threaten them with a good time.

Wave after wave of first Yamnaya and then Corded Ware people replaced almost all of the neolithic farmers in the region from the Volga to the Rhine on the east and west, and from the Arctic in the north to the Alps in the south, a huge range.

But they also pushed into places like Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, and into Italy.  In the Iberian Peninsula, for instance, many villages consist only of the offspring from the Y chromosome of the Yamnaya/Corded Ware people.  They invaded, killed all the men and male children, and took over.  The men from those places are erased from genetic history.

Is this how you retrace your steppes? (meme as found)

To a lesser extent, this happened in both Greece and Italy.  The early emperors were blonde or sandy brown in hair color, with eyes that were light grey or blue – the Steppe Chads like Tark had found a home, and their genes lived on in emperors.  And in people like Alexander the Great, who had heterochromia.

What’s heterochromia?  One blue eye, one brown.  Steppe Chad’s blood flowed in Alexander’s veins, and probably made up 30% of the genome of some populations of the ancient Greeks and Macedonians.

In Italy, it was also pronounced, with early Latin DNA being 30% or more of Corded Ware origin.  Nero was blonde and had blue eyes.

I guess that makes the Yamnaya steppe daddies?

The Italians and Greeks of today are, of course still related to the Italians and Greeks of 2,000 years ago, but there has been a huge admixture of the peoples of the Mediterranean because these were the capital cities of empire.  Think New York of 2025 is genetically even remotely close to New York of 1825?

Nope, not at all.  And neither was Rome of 200 AD genetically similar to Rome of 100 BC, except, perhaps, in the royal families.

I hear that Nero hid when they went to find him to execute him, covering himself in a cloak.  I guess that makes that coat the first chicken Caesar wrap.

The genetics of three to five thousand years of brutal struggle in the bloodlands were flowing in the veins of Octavian, even until the years just before his death . . .

A rooster, somewhere, crowed.  Augustus (who had been Octavian) opened one eye.  A servant was already there. 

One of the joys of youth was solitude, one of the banes of being Caesar was never being really alone.  After Julius was murdered, Octavian never let a single man guard him.  That would be folly.  Besides, Augustus was 74, and when he woke, everything hurt.  He remembered bounding up as a boy, but now everything was slow.

Even his waking was an event that set in motion a cascade of events.  Three men entered the room.  His bath was ready, and, as usual, already at perfect temperature.  One had deeply absorbent towels.  One had a chalice of wine.  The third had brought in a fresh toga, trimmed in the Tyrian murex that was the amazingly expensive purple coloring of the Caesar.

The gardens of his palace by the Tiber were a place of quiet contemplation.  He walked them slowly, in silence, his formerly blonde and now grey hair catching the morning Sun, reflecting off of his blue-gray eyes.

A soft echo of the sounds of his guard, training, bring Actium back to his mind, where he finally ended Mark Antony’s planned usurpation of his power.  Such glory.  The entire world in the balance!

In the afternoon, Senators.  Roads.  Gaul.  Plans of Empire, details for lesser men.

That night, Augustus sits by the fire.  Alone.  In an unguarded moment, he allows himself to think about what he already knows awaits him: a marble tomb. 

He pondered:  was he a man of honor?  He thought, briefly, of a memory from when he was a child of perhaps four, of the face of his father in dim light, illuminated by the flickering light of a lamp.

The blood of Tark had made a very long journey, indeed.