Genome-wide Ancient DNA from Historical Siberia as a Lens on Yeniseian Population History

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The relevance of ancient DNA to debates in language prehistory is a noteworthy strand in Eurasian archaeogenetic research, where much effort has gone towards relating these data to Indo-European. We relate new genome-wide ancient DNA data from a historical Siberian individual to Yeniseian, an enigmatic and isolated language "microfamily" at the center of numerous controversial proposals in historical linguistics and cultural interaction. Yeniseian's sole surviving representative is Ket, a critically endangered language of Central Siberia's Middle Yenisei region. In sharp contrast to the present-day situation, Russian imperial records, combined with hydronyms and other argued loans and substrate influences in non-Yeniseian languages, indicate that Yeniseian speakers formerly had a much broader presence in the Siberian taiga, further south in the Altai-Sayan region, and perhaps even further afield. The consilience of these proposals with genetics is problematic and faces a major obstacle in the lack of samples from known speakers of Yeniseian languages other than the Kets, who have had complex ongoing interactions with non-Yeniseians such as the Samoyedic Selkups. We underline the special value even of comparatively recent Siberian aDNA samples, orienting our analyses in a broader landscape of concordance, discordance, and uncertainty at the interface of diachronic linguistics and genetics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26208