In 2023, the archaeological research team ‘TEECA’ funded by Nazarbayev University published on the oldest human burial in Kazakhstan recovered from the Neolithic site of Koken. Their discovery of two partial skeletons buried 7,500 years ago provided an initial glimpse into the lives of the earliest known hunter-gatherers from the Kazakh steppes. Most recently, the team released a new publication where they shed unexpected new light onto this period through a cutting-edge study of the ancient human genomes (aDNA) from Koken.
The scientific paper “Ancient genomes from eastern Kazakhstan reveal dynamic genetic legacy of Inner Eurasian hunter-gatherers” was published in the prestigious Science Advances journal by the international team of researchers from Kazakhstan, Germany, South Korea and the USA. The main result of the aDNA study was that the Neolithic burial from Koken contained bones belonging to two different people who were close family members. Both were male and paternal second-degree relatives, which mean they were either an uncle and nephew or two half-brothers.
Close kinship ties shared by the two males imply that during Neolithic Kazakhstan, family held symbolic weight that influenced decisions on how to bury people and with whom. Moreover, one male was buried without his body, and the other was buried without his head. The fact that the grave contained only partial skeletons further hints at a tradition of honoring lost family members whereby graves were reopened and added to or had parts removed and relocated over time. Another important contribution of the aDNA study was that the Neolithic humans from Kazakhstan provided the missing link needed for scientists to understand ancient hunter-gatherer population structure throughout Eurasia’s vast landmass.
The team compared their sample with other published human genomes from Eurasia and were then able to see that distinct communities congregated and clustered around major rivers, such as the Ob, Irtysh and Ishim. Riverine geography provided important food resources and opportunities for local social networks to develop thousands of years ago, and this process had a sustained effect on later populations in the region. The scientists took their study a step further to observe the legacy left by hunter-gatherers on later pastoralists. For this, they focused on Koken’s Bronze Age cemetery that was used by early cattle herders who settled in the region around 4000 years ago.
The aDNA analysis of 19 herders exposed a very different scenario compared to the Neolithic. Specifically, close family relationships were entirely absent in the Bronze Age graveyard despite all the people belonging to the same general gene pool. The graveyard held additional secrets. Some people had retained traces of earlier hunter-gatherer ancestry which tells us that local hunter-gatherers and incoming herders sometimes mixed together, as opposed to remaining separate. 4000 years ago in the Kazakh steppe, diverse genetic and economic backgrounds did not pose a barrier to cultural integration.
Scientists are now in a much better position to describe the various kinship structures present in the steppe and the dynamics that went on to influence the unfolding story of nomadic cultures at a Trans-Eurasian scale. The Koken humans are recognized as exceptional and priceless components of Kazakhstani heritage today while also contributing broad scientific value for studies of all humankind. Steady improvements and refinements in our scientific knowledge are considerably altering how we think about the past as well as the people in it. We can retrieve information about our shared history at a level of detail never thought possible by the forebearers of archaeology.
