Croatian Origins | A Genetic and Cultural History

Croatian origins. It begins with a mystery. Potocani is a small farming village in the Croatian interior, closer to the borders of Hungary and Bosnia-Herzegovina than to its own capital, Zagreb. In 2007, a villager in the nearby hills began to dig a foundation for a garage. Heavy rains stopped his work and revealed a small pit. Bones protruded from the earth. The villager knew he had found a mass grave, but to further identify the skeletons, he called the University of Zagreb. By chance, an archaeological team was nearby, working on a highway project. They were able to study the remains on the very same day. Mass graves are an unfortunate part of the landscape in that region. 44 corpses were identified. At first, it was assumed that the bodies were from the recent Balkans conflict, or perhaps from World War II, but they found no modern objects in the pit. Upon inspecting the teeth of the dead, they found no fillings. These were not modern corpses. In fact, they were prehistoric, and they were men and women, old and young, close kin and stranger. Potocani is the oldest indiscriminate massacre ever discovered. Mario Novak, head of the Laboratory for Evolutionary Anthropology and Bioarchaeology at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia, led a team who published a study in PLOS ONE called Genome-wide Analysis of Nearly All the Victims of a 6,200-Year-Old Massacre. It details the genetic characteristics of 41 of the 44 bodies. The remaining three had insufficient material remaining for a genetic sample. What they learned opens a window into ancient Croatia. The paper states, Direct radiocarbon dates, circa 4200 BCE, as well as several recovered pottery fragments, assigned the massacred people to the Middle Eneolithic, Copper Age, Lasinia culture, which was widespread in the region of continental Croatia, northern Bosnia, Slovenia, eastern Austria, and western Hungary. The remains of longhouses, or semi-pithouses, have been found in the region. At Cerji Novo, one longhouse was 30 to 40 meters long and 2.28 meters wide. Above-ground dwellings have also been found in a style that dates back to the previous Neolithic Starcevo culture. At Beketinci, Bentec, half the site contains a working area with pits where clay was extracted, fences, kilns, and wells. Farmhouses indicate settled agriculture. Here, in this otherwise pastoral setting, these 44 people were for some reason executed. Thirteen of the skulls show signs of blunt injuries, with some of the skulls suffering as many as four blows. The injuries are generally in the back of the skull, indicating that the victims may have been kneeling or lying on the ground when they were killed. We know the blows were fatal because there is no sign of healing at the wound sites. Their deaths were likely instantaneous. Of the 41 identifiable bodies, 21 are men and 20 are women. Half were children under the age of 17. From the study, violence on a massive scale has been present in human societies for at least 13,000 years, as evidenced by numerous skeletons of both sexes and all ages showing fatal violent injuries from the cemetery of Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, which is generally regarded as representing the earliest evidence of collective violence or warfare. This hypothesis was additionally strengthened by the recent publication of the massacre of a group of prehistoric hunter-gatherers near Lake Turkana in Kenya, although some doubt the conclusion that this site represents early intragroup violence. In Europe, several similar examples dated to prehistoric periods have been recorded. Paleogenomic and bioanthropological studies of ancient massacres have highlighted sites where the victims were male and plausibly died all in battle, or were executed members of the same family, as might be expected from a killing intentionally directed at subsets of a community, or where the massacred individuals were plausibly members of a migrant community in conflict with previously established groups, or where there was evidence that the killing was part of a religious ritual. When dealing with such events in both ancient and modern contexts, we need a clear definition of the term massacre. Various definitions are used, and here we use the one proposed by Alf's daughter and colleagues in their study of the massacre at Sandy Borg, an act of intentional murder upon a mass of people who were not prepared for battle, with the killing being conducted by a group. Croatia is abundant in archaeological relics. Flints from pre-Neanderthal peoples have been found in caves, and Neanderthal populations have left remains in the northwest of the country, particularly at Hužnjakovo, which is one of the richest Neanderthal sites in the world. The authors state, it is generally believed that the Lasinia culture originated on the substrate of the Lengiel culture. The Lasinia culture belongs to the Copper Age, a period when economic and social changes occurred among the local Neolithic populations, such as the increase in the number of cattle, which requires more frequent habitat changes after cattle deplete the pastures around the settlement. The importance of cattle for the Lasinia people is confirmed by zooarchaeological records, suggesting that cattle husbandry played a significant, even dominant, role in people's lives. The greater mobility probably also led to better and greater communication between different cultural groups. An important factor influencing all these events is the waning and disappearance of the Vinča culture. The other important characteristic of this period is intensified copper mining, and the creation of networks associated with these processes. Although there are only a few copper objects known from Lasinia sites in Croatia, the people inhabiting the region during this period were familiar with copper production, as they used copper objects from different deposits, carbonic and sulfide ore. Previous studies of metal objects from different Copper Age cultures and ore samples from deposits show that the circulation of excavated ore and metal followed a complex network. This is the settled world in which our unfortunate victims lived. The researchers hoped to find further clues in their DNA about the cause of the massacre. Highlights from the study. The analyzed individuals are slightly shifted from the Anatolia Neolithic cluster in the direction of Western European hunter-gatherers, similar to other Middle to Late Neolithic European farmers before the arrival of steppe ancestry, but especially to those from Eastern Europe. The Potocani individuals are a mixture of predominantly Anatolian Neolithic ancestry with nearly nine percent Western European hunter-gatherer ancestry, without any evidence of steppe-related ancestry. Specifically, they possess paternal lineages typical of Balkan Neolithic populations. Overall, our analysis suggests that the Potocani victims belonged to a large community with a diverse pool of female lineages. This is just the latest study of early Croatian peoples. In an open access article published in Nature, Reconstructing Genetic Histories and Social Organization in Neolithic and Bronze Age Croatia, lead author Suzanne Freilich from the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna and the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and her team, write, Croatia, in Southeast Europe, is home to a diverse landscape of contiguous ecoregions with steep mountains separating the eastern Adriatic coast from the temperate Pannonian plain in the north. Its central location at the interface of Central Europe, the Balkan Peninsula and the Mediterranean, has long promoted it as a conduit to Anatolia, the Aegean, and the steppe region as far as the Black Sea, with the northern lowlands connecting it to passes through the Carpathian Basin to Europe beyond. Thus, this region was a significant corridor for the first migrating farmers from western Anatolia, who dispersed throughout the rest of Europe via inland and littoral routes along the Danube River and eastern Adriatic coast, respectively. While this region is important for understanding population and cultural transitions in Europe, limited availability of human remains means that in-depth knowledge about the genetic ancestry and social complexity of prehistoric populations here remains sparse. The eastern region of present-day Croatia demarcates the southern edge of the Pannonian plain, broadly synonymous with the Carpathian Basin, and is intersected by the Danube River, Sava, Drava, and other large tributaries that are the site of many prehistoric settlements, and formed an important part of communication and exchange networks in this area. The emergence of Neolithic here can be traced to the arrival of the Starcevo culture, which spread from present-day Serbia west and northwards into the Carpathian Basin, while at coastal sites the early Neolithic was marked by the presence of the Impressed Ware culture from about 6000 BCE. By 5200 BCE, the Starcevo had been superseded by the Sopot culture, which practiced intramural burial sites, where predominantly children and women were interred under the floors of houses and along walls or other locations within the settlement. One important question ancient DNA can help to address is who was selected for such intramural burials, and whether biological kinship played a role. In addition, we can start to unravel whether genetic ancestry and biological kinship are linked to differences in mortuary rites, such as body position, burial location within a site, or the distribution of grave goods, which can hint at the existence of different social groups, and could represent ascribed or achieved status of the deceased or the mourners. By the late Neolithic in southeast Europe and southern Transdanubia, a new mortuary practice emerged, with the appearance of cemeteries located away from the space of the living. This was accompanied by growing social distinctions among burials, signaling an important change in people's relationship with the dead. The Croatian Copper Age, 4500-4300 BCE to 2400 BCE, saw the settlement of the Lasinja, Badin, Kostolak, and Vučedol cultures, which witnessed the growth of trade networks and more pronounced social hierarchy, as seen in the appearance of high-status burials. The development of more marked social stratification appears to be linked with the growing use of metals in the Bronze Age, from about 2400 to 800 BCE, and saw a further increase in migrations from the Eastern European steppes, the Aegean, and Anatolia, along with a rise in social ranking. One of the numerous Middle Bronze Age cultures to co-exist in the Pannonian Plain was the Transdanubian encrusted pottery culture, which existed in a northern and southern form that extended into present-day eastern Croatia between 2000 and 1500 BCE. To date, predominantly cremation burials have been found associated with this culture, however, now, with the new availability of inhumation burials, we can use ancient DNA to shed light on their genetic and social structure and use the genetic data to learn more about social status, as seen in the distribution of prestige grave goods. At one site, we analyzed 19 specimens from the Middle Neolithic layer of Beli Manastir Popova Zemlija, which constitutes the largest sopot culture habitation site to have been excavated in Croatia to date. Almost half were under the age of 16, suggesting high sub-adult mortality. Two-thirds of these were female, while males and females were represented equally among the adults. Most individuals were inhumed with Neolithic burial rites in contracted position along the walls of large pithouses or in other pits within the habitation site, sometimes with ceramic grave goods placed near their heads and other household items. Three of those sampled were accompanied by a comparatively large number and variety of grave goods consisting of everyday items related to household and economic activities. Another four sampled individuals were deposited mostly in an extended prone or supine position in a channel running along the eastern edge of the site with few grave goods. Approximately 12 kilometers south lies the Middle Bronze Age bi-ritual necropolis of Jagodnjak Kricevni attributed to the Transdanubian encrusted pottery culture. We analyzed a further seven inhumations from this site containing varying degrees of grave good richness ranging from ceramic wares to gold personal ornaments. The Sopot community of Popova Zemlya exhibits genetic continuity from early Neolithic Starcevo predecessors. In addition, the Copper Age individuals from this site represent an early presence of people with steppe-associated ancestry in this region who would have coexisted with pre-steppe Copper Age individuals only 60 kilometers away at Vuchidol. In the Bronze Age, we again observe two genetically distinct yet concurrent ancestries in different ecoregions. Two Dalmatian individuals associated with the Chettina culture are broadly contemporaneous with the latest contextual date for Jagodnjak, yet carry ancestry similar to Copper Age Popova Zemlya. This profile persists in a third Dalmatian individual who postdates the genetically distinct Jagodnjak individuals by almost a thousand years. These insights thus contribute to long-standing debates about the relationships between the different Middle Bronze Age cultural units that coexisted along the Danube and the Carpathian Basin and revealed genetic affinities between populations of present-day Eastern Croatia and the adjacent Carpathian Basin over multiple time periods. We have also gained valuable insights into the demography and social organization of these communities, the unstructured and homogeneous ancestry across the Middle Neolithic site, together with low or no signs of inbreeding in many unrelated individuals, is consistent with this community being part of a large, stable, and exogamous, that is, marrying outside one's clan or tribe, population, supporting archaeological evidence for high population density in this region. Yet we detect a few individuals scattered across the site who exhibit very close parental relatedness. Four of the five belong to the same mitochondrial DNA haplogroup, while two of these also have elevated kinship coefficients and are buried next to each other in the largest pit house. Taken together, it is possible these individuals were contemporaneous and we could be witnessing an example of occasional close relative union. No other detectable differences distinguish these individuals from others buried at the site in terms of their genetic profile or mortuary rights, suggesting this was a socially acceptable alternative mating choice. The first genome-wide study of an intramural burial site in this region also reveals no first or second degree relatives, with only a few individuals sharing more distant consanguinous relationships. The high representation of children, in particular girls, as well as burials of neonates, likely signifies age and sex selection and an ascribed status based around the community's belief systems, for which various explanations have been put forth regarding similar neolithic intramural sites in the region. For example, buildings have been associated with ideas of matrilineality and ancestor worship, and as spaces linked to the reproduction and continuity of society, where the burials within would have provided protection and prosperity. However, a small number of individuals from different age and sex categories have abundant grave good items associated with everyday activity that appear to signal some limited social differentiation based on social and economic status. The youngest of these individuals is estimated to have been 13 to 15 years old, thus all were old enough to participate in adult work, and it is therefore difficult to know whether they achieved or inherited their status. The presence of mixed body positions may represent social groupings adhering to different mortuary customs. At Jagodnyak, we find grave goods comprising prestige items that indicate increased social differentiation compared to the neolithic. Firstly, we observe differences in funerary treatment between closely related kin. One's burial contains a lithic arrow tip, a bronze item, and a perforated shell, together with a number of ceramics, while the other's grave is larger and deeper, yet composed of only a very small number of ceramics and post-cranial bones. This apparent difference in mortuary rights could reflect differential status that was acquired throughout their lifetimes, or birth order may have been a factor in inheritance of wealth or status. One of the most richly furnished graves in terms of number and variety of grave goods belongs to an adult woman. Comprising the highest number of ceramic vessels, as well as gold hair ornaments and numerous other bronze items, her grave furnishings may reflect a high social status that she acquired or inherited through her birth family, or affinal relationships. Bronze items of personal adornment such as pins and jewelry are found in both male and female graves at the site, which likely demonstrates the status or wealth of the person or their family, while arrow tips are only found in adult male graves, indicating these individuals different status in society. We also observe rich infant graves with one containing gold hair ring. Now, back to our mystery. Mario Novak and his co-authors state, the mass burial from Potocani is a result of indiscriminate killing of an unrelated subset of a population with no sex and age bias, rather than a battle between two armed forces where younger middle-aged males are predominant. The Potocani assemblage is almost identical to other prehistoric massacres like Talheim, Aspern-Schletz, Schirneck-Killienstetten, and Kosice, but also to more recent examples where whole or parts of communities were wiped out. The combination of adverse climatic conditions and significant increase in population size is usually provided as the most probable reason for this phenomenon. The examples of modern massacres show that massacres are usually processes and not singular events, with certain patterns of violence that unfold over time and are manifested in a variety of ways. It is crucial to understand the events and actions leading up to and after massacres as these contribute to the emotional conditions necessary for a massacre. According to some authors, massacres are characterized by a mental complex, which involves debasing and destroying the victims, usually viewed by the perpetrators as others. Only after this process is finished, the victims are killed. In other words, leaders blame a certain group for the suffering and hardships present in the society as a whole, while suggesting that the situation will improve after the group is eliminated. Channeling community anxiety into fear of the targeted group results in hatred for the group, the others with hatred finally transforming into a desire to eliminate them, where they are perceived as a threat and leading to the idea that the others must be destroyed in order to save society. Our study is the largest scale genetic analysis of an ancient massacre to date and provides insight into a modality of organized violence prior to the rise of large-scale societies. We find no sign of population turnover around the time of the massacre, contrasting with the pattern at massacres in the early Neolithic Pyrenees or in the globular amphora culture, where the arrival of new people likely played an important role. There is also no evidence of a sex bias in the massacre or age bias or targeting of specific families, as might be expected by a reprisal and or a punitive killing. Instead, the data reveal how organized violence in this period could be indiscriminate, just as indiscriminate killings have been an important feature of life in historic and modern times. An important direction for work will be to study additional massacre sites to determine the prevalence of this pattern of ancient violence.