By sequencing 523 ancient humans, we show that the primary source of ancestry in modern South Asians is a prehistoric genetic gradient between people related to early hunter-gatherers of Iran and Southeast Asia. After the Indus Valley Civilization’s decline, its people mixed with individuals in the southeast to form one of the two main ancestral populations of South Asia, whose direct descendants live in southern India. Simultaneously, they mixed with descendants of Steppe pastoralists who, starting around 4000 years ago, spread via Central Asia to form the other main ancestral population. The Steppe ancestry in South Asia has the same profile as that in Bronze Age Eastern Europe, tracking a movement of people that affected both regions and that likely spread the distinctive features shared between Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages.

Farming is among the three most hazardous occupations in modern society and perhaps also held a similar position during the medieval period. The goal of this study was to determine if there is a significant difference in frequencies and patterns of longbone fracture trauma observed between rural and urban activity bases that distinguish farming as a particularly dangerous occupation during the medieval period. The longbones of 170 individuals excavated from Raunds, a rural medieval British site (10th-12th centuries AD) were examined for fractures and compared to data collected from four contemporary British medieval sites, one rural and three urban. The fracture frequency for the Raunds individuals (19.4%) was significantly different from the urban sites (4.7-5.5%). Female fractures were characterized by injury to the forearm, while the males were predisposed to diverse fracture locations. Clinical research provided a source of documented farm-related trauma from North America and Europe where the crops and animals raised, the manual chores performed, and the equipment used in traditional or small-scale farms have changed little in form or function since the medieval period. Nonmechanized causes of injury contribute to approximately 40% of all modern farm-related injuries and are attributed to falls from lofts and ladders, animal assaults and bites, and falls from moving vehicles. These hazardous situations were also present in the medieval period and may explain some of the fracture trauma from the rural sites. A high fracture frequency for both medieval males and females is significantly associated with farming subsistence when compared to craft-orientated urban dwellers.

Injuries, whether accidental or intentional, have incapacitated humans and their primordial ancestors throughout time, although the injury mechanisms have become increasingly more technologically sophisticated. Interpretation of injury aetiology among past peoples is challenging, and often impossible, however, clinical research from developing countries provides a useful analogy with which to evaluate trauma or health patterns of an ancient society. This paper presents a systematic analysis of cranial and postcranial skeletal trauma among 223 adults who were excavated by George Reisner in 1923 from the city of Kerma (1750-1550 BC), Egypt's ancient nemesis in the struggle for control of the Nile River trade route. A total of 156 injuries (fractures, dislocations and muscle pulls among the skull, long bones, extremities and torso) were observed among 88 individuals, 48 of whom had one injury only. The skull was the most frequently traumatized element (11.2%) followed by the ulna (8.3%); 2.4% (48/2029) long bones were fractured. The modal distribution of the Kerma fractures was compared to the fracture distributions of two samples from India and Nigeria where falls were the most common cause of injury. Some characteristics of the three injury patterns were shared: males suffered the greatest frequency of injury, the economically active people (25 to 50 years of age) presented the most injuries among adults, and a small proportion of the victims had more than one major injury. However, the Kerma distribution of the fractured bones varied dramatically from the clinical injury distributions: the ulna and skull were among the least frequently injured bones in the modern samples, while the radius, humerus and lower leg were the most commonly traumatized elements among the modern people, but rare among the ancients. The configuration of the ulna and skull injuries at Kerma was characteristic of those associated with blunt force trauma in other clinical assessments and the absence of these specific lesions from the modern samples where accident was the primary injury mechanism presents a persuasive argument for interpersonal violence among the ancient Kerma people.

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The genetic formation of Central and South Asian populations has been unclear because of an absence of ancient DNA. To address this gap, we generated genome-wide data from 362 ancient individuals, including the first from eastern Iran, Turan (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan), Bronze Age Kazakhstan, and South Asia. Our data reveal a complex set of genetic sources that ultimately combined to form the ancestry of South Asians today. We document a southward spread of genetic ancestry from the Eurasian Steppe, correlating with the archaeologically known expansion of pastoralist sites from the Steppe to Turan in the Middle Bronze Age (2300-1500 BCE). These Steppe communities mixed genetically with peoples of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) whom they encountered in Turan (primarily descendants of earlier agriculturalists of Iran), but there is no evidence that the main BMAC population contributed genetically to later South Asians. Instead, Steppe communities integrated farther south throughout the 2nd millennium BCE, and we show that they mixed with a more southern population that we document at multiple sites as outlier individuals exhibiting a distinctive mixture of ancestry related to Iranian agriculturalists and South Asian hunter-gathers. We call this group Indus Periphery because they were found at sites in cultural contact with the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) and along its northern fringe, and also because they were genetically similar to post-IVC groups in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. By co-analyzing ancient DNA and genomic data from diverse present-day South Asians, we show that Indus Periphery-related people are the single most important source of ancestry in South Asia—consistent with the idea that the Indus Periphery individuals are providing us with the first direct look at the ancestry of peoples of the IVC—and we develop a model for the formation of present-day South Asians in terms of the temporally and geographically proximate sources of Indus Periphery-related, Steppe, and local South Asian hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. Our results show how ancestry from the Steppe genetically linked Europe and South Asia in the Bronze Age, and identifies the populations that almost certainly were responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across much of Eurasia.One Sentence SummaryGenome wide ancient DNA from 357 individuals from Central and South Asia sheds new light on the spread of Indo-European languages and parallels between the genetic history of two sub-continents, Europe and South Asia.

A topical trend in clinical research has been the study of repeat trauma, referred to by clinicians as ''injury recidivism,'' which lends itself to the assessment of accumulated injuries among ancient people. The present investigation examined the healed injuries among two archaeological skeletal samples from the Kerma period (ca. 2500-1500 BC) of Sudanese Nubia. Both groups were known to have a high prevalence of multiple trauma-80% of 54 adults from the rural sites (O16 and P37) located near Dongola and 42% of 212 adults from the urban site of Kerma sustained nonfatal injuries. It was observed that a higher frequency of multi-injured adults displayed one or more violence-associated injury (cranial trauma, parry fracture). When all injuries were considered 38% of individuals with violence-related injuries had other traumatic lesions in contrast to 22% of individuals who experienced injuries associated with accidental falls (e.g., Colles', Smiths', Galeazzi, and paired forearm fractures), although this difference was not significant. When only the skulls and long bones were evaluated 81% of adults with multiple injuries to these major bones bore one or more violence-related injuries, while 60% of adults with single injuries sustained violence-related injuries. Most individuals with multiple injuries were male and less than 35 years of age; there was no significant difference in the frequency of violence-or accident-related multiple injury between the rural and urban communities. Although it cannot be established whether or not some of an individual's injuries were experienced during simultaneous or independent incidents, the pattern of multiple injury among these two ancient Nubian skeletal samples reflected the profile of injury recidivism observed by modern clinicians cross-culturally.

Modern communities affiliated with the same culture have been shown to experience comparable levels of interpersonal violence, no matter what their size. It was hypothesized that a similar relationship would exist among ancient rural and urban people, but that accident-related trauma may be more prominent among rural dwellers due to their activity base. Through an analysis of antemortem trauma, this investigation contrasted the injury profile of Nubian adult villagers (N = 55) from the Kerma period (2500-1750 BC) to that of their urban neighbors (N = 223) at Kerma (2050-1500 BC). The injury pattern associated with interpersonal violence (cranial injury, direct-force ulna fractures, and multiple injuries) was similar between the two samples, as hypothesized. The rural group sustained significantly more nonviolence-related injuries that suggested occupational or environmental influences. The more severe cranial injuries observed among urban people are attributed to a preference for more lethal hand-wielded objects that may have accompanied increasing local tensions and incursions into Egypt during the 17th Dynasty.

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