Suchergebnisse

Introduction. The work focuses on anthropological materials of the border between two areals: the Srubnaya and Alakul cultures of the Bronze Age. New data is based on the burial grounds of the Kozhumberdy type of the Alakul culture from Western Kazakhstan. Methods and materials. The authors compare the craniological series which are formed according to the geographical localization of the monuments and modern archaeological ideas about their cultural interpretation.

Analysis. As a result of statistical analysis, the craniological series of the Srubnaya and Alakul cultures are morphologically quite close, but the latter show higher variability of characteristics. More close to each other are samples of female skulls which show that the formation of physical characteristics of these populations occurred on a single anthropological substrate. Initially, carriers of different caucasoid complexes, mainly of steppe origin, and in a small proportion of the uraloid ones took part in the process. The populations of the Srubnaya and Alakul cultures for a long time interacted with each other. This is reflected in the materials of syncretic Srubnaya-Alakul monuments, as well as in the craniological characteristics of the population of these cultural entities. Judging by morphological features of the skulls, the eastern group of the Alakul population also contacted the collectives of the Fedorovo version of the Andronovo culture of Kazakhstan. The participation of any groups of Central Asian origin in the composition of Alakul populations is not denied, but if it took place, it was most likely of a secondary nature due to the incorporation of certain representatives of a foreign population.

Results. The results and conclusions of this work should be used in historical reconstructions of the processes of the formation, development and extinction of the Bronze Age archaeological communities in the area of the VolgaUrals and Western Kazakhstan.

The article examines anthropological materials from the Kos-Oba cemetery of the Savromat-Sarmatian period based on craniometric and paleopathological data from the region located between the Ural and Volga rivers in Western Kazakhstan. The results of craniometric analysis are indicative of the continuity of the population from the 6th century BC to the 1st century AD, as well as the physical resemblance between the people from Kos-Oba and those inhabiting the UralRiver basin. Paleopathological data also indicate that this sample does not stand out in frequencies of traumas and pathologies from the early nomad groups of the Volga-Ural region and Western Kazakhstan. One of the skulls has a trephine opening, possibly performed with medical purposes or representing a result of ritual manipulation. This study shows that the Kos-Oba cemetery can be reviewed as a part of the large Savromat-Sarmatian site systems, which are present not only in the UralRiver basin and the Ustyurt, but also in the Southern Urals, Northern Aral and Northern Caspian region.

The article attempts to generalize the paleoanthropological data of the Saka period from the territory of Alai (Kyrgyzstan), collected over a long period, and a significant part of these materials has been offered for scientific discussion. Comparison of the male and female groups shows their significant similarity, both in average values and in the level and direction of variability. The Alai skulls contain two morphological complexes of characters. One of them is a mesobrachicranial, low-faced Mongoloids with low orbits, a wide nose and alveolar prognathism, expressed mainly in women group. Another morphological complex is characterized by dolichocrania and has a pronounced Caucasoid character of the Mediterranean type, which has local origin. In this case the increase of the Caucasoid characteristics towards the Mediterranean anthropological type is probably associated with ethnogenetic contacts with the Saka of the Pamirs. An analysis of the anthropological materials of the Saka period from the Alai made it possible to obtain new data, clarify the most important milestones in the ethnogenetic history of the Saka of this region and outline their connections with synchronous populations of the Early Iron Age.

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been infecting humans for millennia and remains a global health problem, but its past diversity and dispersal routes are largely unknown. We generated HBV genomic data from 137 Eurasians and Native Americans dated between ~10,500 and ~400 years ago. We date the most recent common ancestor of all HBV lineages to between ~20,000 and 12,000 years ago, with the virus present in European and South American hunter-gatherers during the early Holocene. After the European Neolithic transition, Mesolithic HBV strains were replaced by a lineage likely disseminated by early farmers that prevailed throughout western Eurasia for ~4000 years, declining around the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. The only remnant of this prehistoric HBV diversity is the rare genotype G, which appears to have reemerged during the HIV pandemic. ; The research was funded by the Max Planck Society, the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (771234–PALEoRIDER, to W.H.; 805268–CoDisEASe to K. Bos; 834616–ARCHCAUCASUS to S.H.), the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme and Marie Curie Actions under the Programme SASPRO (1340/03/03 to P.C.R.), the ERA.NET RUS Plus–S&T programm of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (277–BIOARCCAUCASUS to S.Re. and S.H.), the Werner Siemens Stiftung ("Paleobiochemistry", to CW), the Award Praemium Academiae of the Czech Academy of Sciences (to M.E.), the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences (RVO 67985912, to M.Dobe.), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (19-09-00354a, to M.K.K. and V.V.K.; 19-78-10053 to SSh), the German Research Foundation (DFG-HA-5407/4-1–INTERACT to W.H. and RE2688/2 to S.Re.), the French National Research Agency (ANR-17-FRAL-0010–INTERACT, to M.F.D., M.Ri., S.Ro., S.Sai., D.Bi., and P.Le.), the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (9558 to S.Sab.), and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan (AP08856654 to L.B.D., L.M., and E.Kh. and AP08857177 to A.Z.B.).