The Yamnaya: Armstrongism in Contention with Archaeology

A Yamnaya Woman 

(Fair Use)

The Yamnaya

Armstrongism in Contention with Archaeology

By Scout

We come on the ship they call The Mayflower

We come on the ship that sailed the moon

We come in the age's most uncertain hours

And sing an American tune 

Paul Simon, “American Tune”

 

I am a fan of the Old West. My generation, I guess. I thought Lonesome Dove, the epic cattle drive, was an outstanding mini-series. Woodrow Call and Augustus McRae are among the greats. One of my grandfathers had been a cowboy when he was young, until he took to the oil field and became a driller. He wore Western clothing all of his life. He was taciturn and austere and could tell you stories about the hard life on the range. But my immediate family was a city family and riding the plains was always to me just a dream. Only recently did I discover that the Western Europeans as a whole have an ancient history of horses and herds. They are descended from an ancient people called the Yamnaya who were “cowboys” who rode the Pontic Steppe of Eurasia. Yamnaya, a Russian language name given to them by archaeologists, means “related to pits” because they buried their dead in pits. Who knows what they called themselves in their tongue. But their language was a forerunner, called Indo-European, of the modern Western European languages.

The point of what I am going to write is that the assertions of British-Israelism do not logically or naturally fit into the anthropological history of the British people, descendants of the Yamnaya. And this history is not based on arcane and fallible ancient writings of men who believed in myth but on the hard, verifiable, repeatable science of genetics.

The Flow of Time, the Flow of People

It is common to think that the history of the British people begins with the Celts and Anglo-Saxons but it began much earlier. Genetics provides an audit trail that leads back much further along historic migration pathways. For instance, we can go back to the Yamnaya. The Yamnaya are called by anthropologists Steppe Pastoralists. They lived by herding livestock: cattle, sheep and goats. They were nomadic and rode horses. They worked metal. They had wheeled carts to help them manage their herds. Their range was the Pontic Steppe, an area of dry grasslands in eastern and central Europe. Horses and wagons made this vast plain open to them. They spoke a Proto-Indo-European language. And they were nomads who seemed to have a penchant for migration. The timeline below places them in a chronological context. 

24,000 YA: A mutation from y chromosome haplogroup P occurred giving rise to haplogroup R. It is believed to have arisen 27,000 YA based on the rate of genetic mutation. That rate is theoretical but to verify it, a burial in Siberia near Lake Baikal dated at 24,000 YA contained an early version of haplogroup R – an initial, basal version from which all the subsidiary R subclades are descended. The people who bore this haplogroup are called Ancient North Eurasians. The Tarim Mummies (q.v., Wikipedia) are Ancient North Eurasian. Originally, the Ancient North Eurasians were a dark people but by 17,000 YA they were carrying a mutation for blonde hair. Native Americans are about 30 percent Ancient North Eurasian and are, therefore, related to Western Europeans.

3,000 – 2,600 BC: The Ancient North Eurasians gave rise to the Yamnaya People who were Pastoralists during the Bronze Age and ranged across the Pontic Steppe. The Yamnaya were horsemen and had an economy based on herd animals. Archaeogenetic research indicates that the Yamnaya haplogroup was R-M269. R-M269 is now the most common haplogroup in Western Europe.

3,000 – 2,350 BC: The Yamnaya gave rise, in part, to the Corded Ware people – a people who developed a special kind of pottery. The Corded Ware Culture was a larger tent and included R1a and R1b and various subclades of both. The Corded Ware Culture ranged from the Volga to the Rhine. Genetic studies indicate that they originated from westward migrating Yamnaya.

2,450 – 1800 BC: The Corded Ware people gave rise to the Bell Beaker People who spread throughout Western Europe. They eventually became principally R-M269 as more people migrated in from the East. R-M269 is also denoted by geneticists as R1b1a1b. R1b is the most frequent haplogroup in England at around 67 percent. The Welsh are around 89 percent R1b. Scots are about 73 percent R1b. The Irish are around 82 percent R1b. In some areas of the Iberian Peninsula R1b reaches a frequency of 90 percent.

1800 BC: According to Jewish tradition Abraham lived around this time.

450 AD: Anglo-Saxons invade Britain.

For me, there is a personal dimension to this. One of my very distant genetic relatives, having my identical R1b subclade haplogroup (think of it as a sub-tribe or clan) was found buried near Evergreen House, Longniddry, East Lothian, Scotland. My haplogroup is a subclade of R-M269, the Steppe haplogroup. The grave dates from about 2000 BC and he was a member of the Bronze Age Bell Beaker Culture. He was found in a Cist Grave along with two other individuals. One person was an elderly woman. His matrilineal haplogroup (mtDNA) is H2a1a. This indicates that his mother was also of Yamnaya or Steppe ancestry.

The point of the chronology above is that it shows there is an unbroken line across 24,000 years established through Archaeogenetics that the ancestors of the Celts and Anglo-Saxons originated in Eurasia well before the patriarchs of the Old Testament. The basal R haplogroup that existed 24,000 years ago in Eurasia is the source of the R1b haplogroup that exists in Britain today. The R1b haplogroup of the Celts and Ango-Saxons did not just suddenly appear in the British Isles sometime after the Northern Ten Tribes fell to Assyria around 732 BC.

Modern Nations with Yamnaya Heritage

No modern nation is purely of Yamnaya descent. The modern nations of Western Europe are comprised principally of three peoples: Early Hunter-Gatherers (earliest residents of Western Europe), Anatolian or Neolithic Agriculturalists (First Invasion) and Steppe Pastoralists (Yamnaya, Second Invasion). The names of these three groups vary in the literature. I will refer to these three groups as a triad. There are small traces of other y chromosome haplogroups among Europeans, principally from North Africa and the Middle East. Not all the details of this ancient convergence of peoples have been resolved. But final resolution will not overturn these events but strengthen them with detail. The chart below reflects this heritage triad. It shows Yamnaya or steppe ancestry, color-coded green, being largest in the north and declining as one moves south in Western Europe.

 

The Europeans having the largest degree of Yamnaya heritage are found in Northwest Europe. Note that the lower section of the chart deals with research on ancient DNA and shows general compositions for the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker peoples. It also shows a line for Otzi the Iceman, circa 5,000 YA, found frozen in the Alps. He had a tiny bit of Yamnaya ancestry. Note also, that the Germans are not included. This is likely because they are a composite nation. They are R1b in the western areas, related to other Celtic-derived West Europeans and R1a in the eastern areas related to the Slavic people such as the Poles. The boundary among the German people between “Celtic” R1b and “Slavic” R1a seems to have been somewhere in central Germany.

The Celts and Anglo-Saxons are just sub-tribes in the Yamnaya domain. While the Celts and Anglo-Saxons differ in culture and language, in genetics or biologically, they are close to being the same. This is true of the people of Western Europe in general. The Herman Hoeh view that the Italians are Japhetic and the British are Semitic and are two different races is without predicate in genetics. Certainly, this common Yamnaya heritage does not assert that the British, Germans and Italians are all the same culturally or linguistically. Even biologically, they are different proportions of the same triad of peoples and with trace heritages from yet different peoples such as North Africans and Middle Eastern people. But the nations of Western Europe do not constitute different races except by dubious standards taken to excess. What this also means is that the European derived people of North America are variations of the same ancestral peoples. North America is not as much of a melting pot as we have concluded in the past without the help of genetics.

Even though there is a history of admixture of three groups, in Western Europe R1b dominates. The Yamnaya intrusion on Western Europe was apparently not peaceful. For more information about why R1b dominates, refer to the following:

Bubonic Plague, Massacres, Captive Women and What this Means for British-Israelism

The Challenge for Believers in British-Israelism

Excavations that identify ancient haplogroups give us a migration scenario for the British and other peoples of Western Europe. The migration of these peoples wearing the R1b label starts in Siberia, moves to the Pontic Steppe, then to Eastern Europe, then to Western Europe and the British Isles. These Steppe peoples collided with other people who were already living in these areas and interbred with them. Hence, the racially triadic modern Western Europeans. This scenario results in specific challenges to the theory of British-Israelism that must be met if the theory is deemed to be credible. The points of contention are:

1. If the British are “Israelites” and are R-M269, then Abraham must have been R-M269. If this is true, this changes Biblical history. It means that the Jews who are haplogroup J are an imposter people. And Jesus is fallible because when he came to his own, he mistakenly came to the allegedly imposter Jews of Palestine. 

 

2. If the British are “Israelites” and are R-M269, then the area of the Ten Tribes in Palestine must contain burials of this same people in density. Excavation will establish this in the future. The impediment is that the Israelis, like Native Americans, believe it is sacrilege to disturb graves. So far only one ancient family has been excavated and they were haplogroup J. The grave was disturbed by natural events.

3. If the British are “Israelites” and are R-M269, then somehow a group of Steppe people had to leave the great stream of Steppe people migrating off the Pontic Steppe into Western Europe and had to migrate instead to Palestine forming an enclave of R-M269 people among the haplogroup J people of the Middle East. This people would be the source of the Biblical patriarchs and Abraham. There should be physical evidence of this migration – Steppe artifacts found in Palestine at the appropriate time horizon, for instance. 

 

4. If the British are “Israelites” and are R-M269, then there must be archaeological evidence of their migration from Palestine to the British Isles – probably in the form of a sudden upsurge in population in Britain associated not with the British Bronze Age artifacts but with non-British artifacts at the same time horizon. The marked shift in artifacts should be obvious. 

 

If all the boxes can be checked as true on the if-then points above, British-Israelism will stand. Otherwise, it has no credibility. Those who are confident that British-Israelism is true, should be willing to financially support projects establishing the validity of British-Israelism for the entire world. After all, the identity of Israel, we have been told, is an essential part of the prophetic message that Armstrongism has a responsibility to deliver at the end of the age. In the truest sense, this archaeological research is “The Work.”

Much of this haplogroup/migration scenario played out before the time of Abraham and the Tribes of Israel. And if Abraham is the progenitor of the Jews and the Adnani Arabs, as these two peoples claim, he was y chromosome haplogroup J instead of Western European haplogroup R1b. And there is no scenario with archaeological or genetic substance in which “Israelites”, as the Lost Sheep of the House of Israel, bearing haplogroup R1b migrated into the British Isles sometime after 732 BC when the tribes went into captivity to the Assyrians.

Resorting to the Supernatural: The Last Redoubt of British-Israelism

As archeological research advances, the credibility of BI will continue to erode. The Bible is the Book of God’s Words but the Cosmos is the Book of God’s Works. The only way BI can be defended is for its followers to retreat further from the scientific study of the Cosmos, in this case genetics, into supernatural fantasy. For instance, I recall talking to an “old time” Armstrongist, one of the first AC Pasadena students, and he told me that God could miraculously change Gentiles into Israelites. So, perhaps God would change the haplogroup of Israelites into a Gentile haplogroup to hide their identity from the world and, apparently, from themselves. But God does not bear false witness. And that is the fundamental issue with some of the imaginative and creative fantasies, involving concealed identity, that emerge in defense of BI. 

Summary Argument

The genetic history and migrations of the people of the British Isles and other Western European nations has been established. It is not a grand mystery that requires esoteric Bible interpretation or arcane historical sources to understand. The evidence is physical and measurable to science. Though it is a remarkable history that begins with the Yamnaya, a people of horses and herds on the Pontic Steppe, and ends with their descendants walking on the moon, the drama of this history alone does not place it in the pages of the Bible. The Bible is about the Jews and a special message to mankind. Its setting is in the Middle East and not Western Europe. Jesus stated that his personal ministry was to the Lost Sheep of the House of Israel and he never set a foot outside of Palestine. I believe it is obvious that Jesus accomplished his mission to the Lost Sheep through preaching the Gospel among the Jews of First Century Judea.

References

Eupedia, “Haplogroup R1b”, https://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_R1b_Y-DNA.shtml

Oguzhan Parasayan, Christophe Laurelut, Christine Bole, et al. “Late Neolithic collective burial reveals admixture dynamics during the third millennium BCE and the shaping of the European genome”, Science Advances, June 2024.

Reich, David. “Who We are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past,” Pantheon Books, 2018.

Wolfgang Haak, Iosif Lazaridis, et al. “Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe”, Nature, June 2015.

“Yamnaya Culture”, Wikipedia article.