Early Pastoral Economies and Herding Transitions in Eastern Eurasia

Ancient Mongolian aurochs genomes reveal sustained introgression and management in East Asia

Societies in East Asia have utilized domesticated cattle for over 5000 years, but the genetic history of cattle in East Asia remains understudied. Genome-wide analyses of 23 ancient Mongolian cattle reveal that East Asian aurochs and ancient East Asian taurine cattle are closely related, but neither are closely related to any modern East Asian breeds. We observe binary variation in aurochs diet throughout the early Neolithic, and genomic evidence shows millennia of sustained male-dominated introgression. We identify a unique connection between ancient Mongolian aurochs and the European Hereford breed. These results point to the likelihood of human management of aurochs in Northeast Asia prior to and during the initial adoption of taurine cattle pastoralism.

Emergence and intensification of dairying in the Caucasus and Eurasian steppes

Archaeological and archaeogenetic evidence points to the Pontic–Caspian steppe zone between the Caucasus and the Black Sea as the crucible from which the earliest steppe pastoralist societies arose and spread, ultimately influencing populations from Europe to Inner Asia. However, little is known about their economic foundations and the factors that may have contributed to their extensive mobility. Here, we investigate dietary proteins within the dental calculus proteomes of 45 individuals spanning the Neolithic to Greco-Roman periods in the Pontic–Caspian Steppe and neighbouring South Caucasus, Oka–Volga–Don and East Urals regions. We find that sheep dairying accompanies the earliest forms of Eneolithic pastoralism in the North Caucasus. During the fourth millennium bc, Maykop and early Yamnaya populations also focused dairying exclusively on sheep while reserving cattle for traction and other purposes. We observe a breakdown in livestock specialization and an economic diversification of dairy herds coinciding with aridification during the subsequent late Yamnaya and North Caucasus Culture phases, followed by severe climate deterioration during the Catacomb and Lola periods. The need for additional pastures to support these herds may have driven the heightened mobility of the Middle and Late Bronze Age periods. Following a hiatus of more than 500 years, the North Caucasian steppe was repopulated by Early Iron Age societies with a broad mobile dairy economy, including a new focus on horse milking.

Milk proteins from the North Caucasus and Eurasian steppe support the initial development of sheep dairying during the Eneolithic, followed by subsequent intensification and husbandry of different dairy animals during the Middle Bronze Age and later periods.

Central Mongolian lake sediments reveal new insights on climate change and equestrian empires in the Eastern Steppes

The repeated expansion of East Asian steppe cultures was a key driver of Eurasian history, forging new social, economic, and biological links across the continent. Climate has been suggested as important driver of these poorly understood cultural expansions, but paleoclimate records from the Mongolian Plateau often suffer from poor age control or ambiguous proxy interpretation. Here, we use a combination of geochemical analyses and comprehensive radiocarbon dating to establish the first robust and detailed record of paleohydrological conditions for Lake Telmen, Mongolia, covering the past ~ 4000 years. Our record shows that humid conditions coincided with solar minima, and hydrological modeling confirms the high sensitivity of the lake to paleoclimate changes. Careful comparisons with archaeological and historical records suggest that in the vast semi-arid grasslands of eastern Eurasia, solar minima led to reduced temperatures, less evaporation, and high biomass production, expanding the power base for pastoral economies and horse cavalry. Our findings suggest a crucial link between temperature dynamics in the Eastern Steppe and key social developments, such as the emergence of pastoral empires, and fuel concerns that global warming enhances water scarcity in the semi-arid regions of interior Eurasia.

Pastoral subsistence and mounted fighting in the Eastern Tianshan Mountain region: New insights from the Shirenzigou worked bone assemblage

Situated at a geographic crossroads, the eastern Tianshan Mountain region in northwest China is crucial to understanding various economic, social, and cultural developments on the Eurasian Steppes. One promising way to gain a better knowledge of ancient subsistence economy, craft production, and social change in the eastern Tianshan Mountain region is to study the artifact assemblages from archaeological contexts. Here, we present an analysis of 488 worked animal bones from the large site of Shirenzigou (ca. 1300-1 BCE), to date the largest assemblage of this kind uncovered in the eastern Tianshan Mountain region. We classified these worked bones into six categories, including "ritual objects", "ornaments", "tools", "worked astragali", "warfare and mobility", and "indeterminate". The identification of animal species and skeletal elements indicates that worked bones from Shirenzigou are characterized by a predominance of caprine products, particularly worked astragali, which is consistent with the large proportion of caprine fragments found in animal remains associated with food consumption. This demonstrates the contribution of caprine pastoralism to bone working activities at Shirenzigou. The making of most worked bones does not appear to have required advanced or specialized skills. Considering the absence of dedicated bone working space, alongside the variability in raw material selection and in dimensions of certain types of artifacts, we infer that worked bone production at Shirenzigou was not standardized. In terms of raw material selection and mode of production, Shirenzigou differed from their settled, farming counterparts in the Yellow River valley of northern China. In addition, along with the evidence for violence and horseback riding, the increasing use of bone artifacts associated with warfare and mobility during the late occupation phase of Shirenzigou reflects growing social instability and implies the likely emergence of single mounted horsemen, equipped with light armors, in the region during the late first millennium BCE. Our results provide new insights into animal resource exploitation and changing lifeways of early pastoral societies in the eastern Tianshan Mountain region, expanding our knowledge of the economic, social, and political milieu of late Bronze Age and early Iron Age eastern Eurasia.

High altitude hunting, climate change, and pastoral resilience in eastern Eurasia

The transition from hunting to herding transformed the cold, arid steppes of Mongolia and Eastern Eurasia into a key social and economic center of the ancient world, but a fragmentary archaeological record limits our understanding of the subsistence base for early pastoral societies in this key region. Organic material preserved in high mountain ice provides rare snapshots into the use of alpine and high altitude zones, which played a central role in the emergence of East Asian pastoralism. Here, we present the results of the first archaeological survey of melting ice margins in the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia, revealing a near-continuous record of more than 3500 years of human activity. Osteology, radiocarbon dating, and collagen fingerprinting analysis of wooden projectiles, animal bone, and other artifacts indicate that big-game hunting and exploitation of alpine ice played a significant role during the emergence of mobile pastoralism in the Altai, and remained a core element of pastoral adaptation into the modern era. Extensive ice melting and loss of wildlife in the study area over recent decades, driven by a warming climate, poaching, and poorly regulated hunting, presents an urgent threat to the future viability of herding lifeways and the archaeological record of hunting in montane zones.

Zoonotic enteric parasites in Mongolian people, animals, and the environment: Using One Health to address shared pathogens

BACKGROUND

Cryptosporidium spp. and Giardia duodenalis are important zoonotic enteric pathogens of One Health concern for humans, animals, and the environment. For this study, we investigated parasite prevalence and risk factors among rural, peri-urban, and urban households and environments of Mongolia.

METHODS

This cross-sectional study implemented a household risk factor survey at 250 home sites along with sample collection from humans, animals, flies, and drinking water. Multiplex real-time PCR analysis was conducted to look for Cryptosporidium spp. and/or Giardia duodenalis within household samples.

RESULTS

Lab analysis found one or both zoonotic parasites at 20% of the participating households (51/250). Human samples had a parasite prevalence of 6.4% (27/419), domestic animals at 3.3% (19/570), pooled filth flies at 14.8% (17/115), and drinking water samples at 2% (5/250). Parasite presence at the household was significantly associated with a household's use of an improved drinking water source (OR 0.27; CI 0.12-0.61; p = < 0.01), having an indoor handwashing site (OR 0.41; CI 0.19-0.92; p = 0.03), domestic animal ownership (OR 2.40; CI 1.02-5.65; p = 0.05), and rural location (OR 0.50; CI 0.25-0.98; p = 0.04). Household use of an improved drinking water source remained significant in the multivariate model (OR 0.16; CI 0.04-0.68; p = 0.01).

CONCLUSION

In Mongolia, public and veterinary health are intertwined, particularly for rural herding households. Increased access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure could help prevent further transmission of zoonotic enteric parasites. Public health interventions, policy and messaging should utilize a One Health framework employing joint leadership from local human and animal health sectors.

Pastoralism at Scale on the Kazakh Rangelands: From Clans to Workers to Ranchers

Eurasia contains the world's largest contiguous rangelands, grazed for millennia by mobile pastoralists' livestock. This paper reviews evidence from one Eurasian country, Kazakhstan, on how nomadic pastoralism developed from some 5,000 years ago to the present. We consider a timespan covering pre-industrial, socialist and capitalist periods, during which pastoral social formations were organized in terms of kinship, collective state farms, and private farms and ranches. The aim is to understand how events over the last 100 years have led to the sequential dissolution and re-formation of the social units necessary to manage livestock across a wide expanse of spatially heterogenous and seasonally variable rangeland ecosystems. It is argued that the social scale of extensive livestock management must be tailored to the geographical scale of biotic and abiotic conditions. The paper starts by pointing out the long duration of mobile pastoralism in the Kazakh rangelands and provides an overview of how events from the late 17th C onwards unraveled the relationships between Kazakh nomads' socio-economic units of livestock management and the rangeland environment. At present, mobile animal husbandry is not feasible for the majority of Kazakh livestock owners, who operate solely within small family units without state support. These reformulated post-Soviet livestock grazing patterns are still undergoing rapid change, influencing the composition of rangeland vegetation, wildlife biodiversity, and rates of carbon sequestration. By concentrating capital and landed resources, a minority of large-scale pastoralists have been able to re-extensify by combining mobility with selective intensification, including an increased reliance on cultivated feed. Current state and international efforts are leaving out the majority of small-scale livestock owners and their livestock who are unable to either intensify or extensify at sufficient scale, increasing environmental damage, and social inequality.

Dairying enabled Early Bronze Age Yamnaya steppe expansions

During the Early Bronze Age, populations of the western Eurasian steppe expanded across an immense area of northern Eurasia. Combined archaeological and genetic evidence supports widespread Early Bronze Age population movements out of the Pontic-Caspian steppe that resulted in gene flow across vast distances, linking populations of Yamnaya pastoralists in Scandinavia with pastoral populations (known as the Afanasievo) far to the east in the Altai Mountains^1,2 and Mongolia³. Although some models hold that this expansion was the outcome of a newly mobile pastoral economy characterized by horse traction, bulk wagon transport^4-6 and regular dietary dependence on meat and milk⁵, hard evidence for these economic features has not been found. Here we draw on proteomic analysis of dental calculus from individuals from the western Eurasian steppe to demonstrate a major transition in dairying at the start of the Bronze Age. The rapid onset of ubiquitous dairying at a point in time when steppe populations are known to have begun dispersing offers critical insight into a key catalyst of steppe mobility. The identification of horse milk proteins also indicates horse domestication by the Early Bronze Age, which provides support for its role in steppe dispersals. Our results point to a potential epicentre for horse domestication in the Pontic-Caspian steppe by the third millennium BC, and offer strong support for the notion that the novel exploitation of secondary animal products was a key driver of the expansions of Eurasian steppe pastoralists by the Early Bronze Age.

On the standardization of ZooMS nomenclature

Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) is rapidly becoming a staple in archaeological and cultural heritage science. Developed a decade ago, this peptide mass fingerprinting technique is expanding from a small group of researchers mainly involved in method development to a broader group of scientists using it as another tool in their toolboxes. With new researchers beginning to use the method, it is imperative that a user-friendly, standardized approach be established. A major barrier has been the often haphazard and changing nomenclature used to label peptide markers necessary for taxonomic identification. Consistent, reliable, and easy-to-understand nomenclature is key to the growth of ZooMS, particularly as the reference library continues to expand. We propose a new set of standardized guidelines for peptide markers based on their position in the type I collagen sequence from the beginning of the highly conserved, helical region. Since this region has no insertions or deletions over a wide range of taxonomic groups, the proposed nomenclature system can be used reliably and consistently across all vertebrate taxa. We propose to label ZooMS peptide markers with the gene, followed by the position of the first and last amino acid of the marker from the start of the helical region. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: We propose a standardized nomenclature system for ZooMS peptide markers that provides consistent labels across multiple, broad taxonomic groups. This system unambiguously locates the marker peptides in the type I collagen sequence, avoids duplication of marker names, and facilitates the creation of large ZooMS databases which can include all vertebrates.

High mitochondrial diversity of domesticated goats persisted among Bronze and Iron Age pastoralists in the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor

Goats were initially managed in the Near East approximately 10,000 years ago and spread across Eurasia as economically productive and environmentally resilient herd animals. While the geographic origins of domesticated goats (Capra hircus) in the Near East have been long-established in the zooarchaeological record and, more recently, further revealed in ancient genomes, the precise pathways by which goats spread across Asia during the early Bronze Age (ca. 3000 to 2500 cal BC) and later remain unclear. We analyzed sequences of hypervariable region 1 and cytochrome b gene in the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) of goats from archaeological sites along two proposed transmission pathways as well as geographically intermediary sites. Unexpectedly high genetic diversity was present in the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC), indicated by mtDNA haplotypes representing common A lineages and rarer C and D lineages. High mtDNA diversity was also present in central Kazakhstan, while only mtDNA haplotypes of lineage A were observed from sites in the Northern Eurasian Steppe (NES). These findings suggest that herding communities living in montane ecosystems were drawing from genetically diverse goat populations, likely sourced from communities in the Iranian Plateau, that were sustained by repeated interaction and exchange. Notably, the mitochondrial genetic diversity associated with goats of the IAMC also extended into the semi-arid region of central Kazakhstan, while NES communities had goats reflecting an isolated founder population, possibly sourced via eastern Europe or the Caucasus region.

Mapping and Damage Assessment of “Royal” Burial Mounds in the Siberian Valley of the Kings

The Valley of the Kings in Tuva Republic, southern Siberia, is arguably one of the most important archaeological landscapes in the eastern Eurasian steppes. Nonetheless, little information exists about the spatial characteristics and preservation conditions of this burial ground consisting of large “royal” mounds. We map the large monuments of the Uyuk Valley’s northern river terrace and assess their state of preservation based on high-resolution optical satellite data. The burial site consists of several hundred mounds, over 150 of them with diameters of more than 25 m, the largest monuments are bigger than 100 m in diameter. This makes the Valley of the Kings in Tuva Republic one of the largest Early Iron Age burial sites in the Eurasian steppes. Unfortunately, around 92% of the large monuments are in bad condition, mostly due to looting.