A look at Kumsay: The graveyard of Giants

Note: This post will contain quite a lot of skulls, if that isn't your cup of tea be aware.

I sometimes have these days where I just look up something quickly, and end up wasting many hours looking into things which in the grand scheme of things aren't all that important. This time, it was the archaeological site of Kumsay. If this name rinkles a bell you likely spend too much time on much forums. Or you might have been reading about Yamnaya burials in Kazakhstan. 

The Kumsay burial site was first discovered in 2009, and is named after the village it was found nearby, near the Ul river in western Kazakhstan. Roughly this location:

This burial site was classified as being part of the Yamnaya horizon based on the burials rites of the perople. These burials were '"pit graves" covered with an earthen mound. Just like with the Yamnaya. Furthermore, many of the people ad a supine position with flexed legs, similar to the positions seen with the Yamnaya. And the people buried here were sprinkled with red ochre, another tradition also prevalent in the Yamnaya horizon.

The articles dealing with physical anthropologies noted there were strong paralels between these people and Yamnaya burials in other locations, but it noted that there were differences as well, with the people here also having a similarity to the eneolithic populations of Kazakhstan, perhaps the result of these being assimilated by the incoming Yamnaya peoples.

But is that sufficient enough to classify as Yamnaya? I'm not too sure. We already know kurgan burials in the eneolithic were practised by non-Yamnaya peoples such as Steppe Maykop, and the ochre tradition is quite widespread as well. I know there are some burials classified as belonging to the Chemurchek horizon but the people there were local to the region.  Luckily we have ancient DNA nowadays, which is more insightful form of data to determine ancestries than cranial studies are. And luckily these people have been looked at, and were included in Narasimhan 2019.

Here is a summary of what their impressions of these people were in terms of genetics:

Distal modeling of the Central_Steppe_EMBA individuals shows that almost four-fifths of the ancestry is WSHG with additional input from people related to Anatolian and Iranian farmers (Table S 52). However, once again our limited sampling makes it difficult to produce proximal models for the ancestry in Central_Steppe_EMBA and we do not obtain suitable fits for any combination of source populations.

Recreating that in G25 gives me something like this:

Target: KAZ_Kumsay_EBA

Distance: 4.4001% / 0.04400095

77.2 WSHG

18.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N

4.8 Anatolia_N

It's a good effort but using hindsight compare that to this, which is what I think is a somewhat accurate representation of their genetic profile. 

Target: KAZ_Kumsay_EBA

Distance: 1.3212% / 0.01321200

50.2 RUS_Progress_En

45.2 CHN_Tarim_EMBA1

4.4 RUS_Vologda_Veretye_Meso

0.2 TKM_Geoksyur_N

Notice the similarities between the people at Kumsay and these ones here:

Target: KAZ_Mereke_MBA

Distance: 1.8065% / 0.01806518

44.8 RUS_Progress_En

42.4 CHN_Tarim_EMBA1

9.6 RUS_Vologda_Veretye_Meso

3.2 TKM_Geoksyur_N

Target: RUS_Steppe_Maykop

Distance: 1.6172% / 0.01617246

47.0 RUS_Progress_En

37.6 CHN_Tarim_EMBA1

12.2 RUS_Vologda_Veretye_Meso

3.2 TKM_Geoksyur_N

Anyhow, it is interesting how the physical studies here actually fall in line pretty close with what the ancient DNA is suggesting, if you consider that the Eneolithic samples of Progress are quite similar to the Yamnaya, that would make up one half of their ancestry. The other half of their ancestry came by people similar to those of Kazakhstan and southwest Siberia during the Eneolithic. Unfortunately in combination with the burial traditions it seems to be very much like those in Yamnaya, this Yamnaya-related profile could be misinterpreted as Yamnaya proper.

If you like me are wondering how this mixed profile came to be, I think there may be clues in the works of Alexander Vybornov. In several of his articles about the Neolithic in Eastern Europe, Vybornov mentions that during the onset of the neolithic there are two waves of pottery dispersals in far Eastern Europe, one related to the pottery seen at Kairshak in the Volga basin, and the other is the Elshanka pottery tradition. The Kairshak related dispersal went up the Volga River from the western Caspian, by peoples with lithic similarities to contemporary Caucasian foragers. The Elshanka pottery traditions spreading westwards into Eastern Europe was influenced by Central Asian traditions, withstrong links to the traditions Eastern shores of the Caspian Sea.  According to Vybornov this happened very early in the 6th millenium b.c, so it could be that the networks which developed the Neolithic in the region are the context as to how the two streams of ancestry came across one another, and produced this mixed profile. Not too sure this is actually the case, but I think it makes a lot of sense.

Back to the burial site at Kumsay. This place has tons of mounds as you can see below in the burial layout.  Unfortunately in terms of items there wasn't much to be found. Most graves had no  burial items, although I did find one stone macehead.

What is interesting about the people here was that many of them were really big, sturdy people. Aside from the general robust features and all, several of the people here were well over 190 cm, reaching up to and above 2 meters tall! Given the sizes of the mounds these giants were buried in, archaeologists concluded that it is likely that these people were part of the upper strata of their society, perhaps as chieftains. But then you can ask a very interesting question: "Where they large because they were the highest tier of their society, or where they in the highest tier due to their large phyical stature?".

At this point is where the remains come in, first up is the man from Kurgan 1, burial 3 of Kumsay:

Here is a closer look at his skull, the first of many I'll be  sharing:

For comparison, here is the skull of a rather mean looking Yamnaya male from the Ishkinovka I cemetery:

We actually have ancient DNA from this guy, as he was included in the Yamnaya sampleset from Haak 2015.

Ishkinovka I Ishkinovka (or Ishkinino) is a kurgan cemetery located 30 km north of Novotroitsk on a right-bank tributary of the Ural River, among the easternmost Yamnaya sites, 570 km southeast of Lopatino I. The region contains copper ores exploited by miners who were active throughout the Bronze Age beginning in the EBA, which might explain the Yamnaya occupation of this eastern region, 250 km east of the Yamnaya mines at the Kargaly copper ore field. The male individual included in this study is  SVP10/I0370 (Kurgan 3, grave 7, 3300-2700 BCE)

The 'Kumsay giant' may have looked something like this:

That's a giant, scary, mean looking dude. The average yamnaya male, who themselves were very badass and physically intimidating people would look puny next to this guy. Although Yamnaya giants existed as well, so who knows maybe there were King Kong versus Godzilla type scenarios going on in the Caspian steppe?

I'm going to mention it again, this man standing at 2 meters tall was not a single case. There were several individuals his size at the burial site. Keep in mind that the samples we have were pretty much all relatives of one another, so you are likely looking at a burial site of a single tribe. 

Here are some other skulls from the Kumsay site. As far as I know there are no three-dimensional reconstructions made of these. Skull #2  and #4 look similar to that of Mr. Kumsay Giant.

For comparison, here are two individuals from Botai and Steppe Maykop respectively:

Do you see any similarities?

To round it up, these people were classified as part of the Yamnaya horizon but they are clearly not derived from the relatively homogenous Yamnaya population spread throughout the European steppes, or their relatives which migrated to the Altai and Dzungaria. But they were still closely related to them in ways. They are far closer related to the earlier Steppe Maykop peoples seen in the North Caucasian steppes, as well as several other populations found in Central Asia. Additionally, a profile somewhat similar to this seems to be the main source of the WSHG-related ancestry Narasimhan and his team found in the Eneolithic and bronze age samples of Southern Central Asia, like those from the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex or Jiroft.

But despite them not being Yamnaya, they were still an interesting people, unfortunately without any major descendants (particularly in terms of linguistics). Like the Yamnaya they lived their lives as pastoralists, and probably had similar cultural traits. Adding that to the sheer physical size some of these people managed to reach,  I doubt they were puny pushovers who easily made way for the Yamnaya to expand into their territories. It also doesn't seem like they were all immediately replaced in those regions, going off samples from later in the bronze age in this region.

Who would you rather deal with; These folks or the Globular Amphora?

Sources:

• A.A. Bisembaev, A.M. Mamedov, M.N. Duysengali, E.P. Kitov - Preliminary results of the study Kumsay pit burial ground in 2010 
• А.А. Хохлов, Е.П. Китов -  КРАНИОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ МАТЕРИАЛЫ РАННЕБРОНЗОВОГО ВЕКА ДОЛИНЫ Р.УИЛ ЗАПАДНОГО КАЗАХСТАНА (A.A. Khokhlov, E.P. Kitov - Craniological materials of the early Bronze Age of the river Uil of Western Kazakhstan)
• К антропологии раннего этапа бронзового века Западного Казахстана (A.A. Khokhlov , E.P. Kitov - Anthropology of the early stage of the Bronze Age of Western Kazakhstan)
• VM Narasimhan  - The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia