Priestesses and Warriors

Priestesses and Warriors

A chapter from the forthcoming book The Countercurrents of Prehistory: What Rare Genes Can Tell Us about Early Human Migration © Donald N. Yates, 2025

Patriarchy requires that powerful women be discredited so that its own system will seem to be the only one that reasonable or intelligent people can subscribe to. —Paula Gunn Allen

Europe was settled relatively late. Neanderthals, after blocking humans’ exit from Africa through the lands of West Asia and Arabia, were rapidly subjugated and became extinct. Their genes account for about 3% of Europeans’ (and Americans’) genomic material today. The continent is a peninsula and it was mostly settled from east to west and south to north. The Ice Age forced people to retreat into tightly defined refuges in Spain, Italy and the Balkans. Europeans became remarkably similar and convergent, unlike Africans, the great homeland of diversity. Africans, like American Indians, another very diverse population,  derive a large range of differences within their ranks through adaptation, selection and genetic drift. Europeans are less diverse. Geneticists divide them into three ancient lineages: Western European hunter-gatherers (WHG, from about 50,000 years ago), Early European Farmers (EEF, from about 10,000 years ago) and Ancient North Eurasians (ANE, from about 6,000 years ago).[1]

There are three of the thirty-three Rare Genes from History that are clearly European in their primary expansion phases: the Helen Gene, Odin Gene and Goddess Gene. The Goddess Gene dates back to back to Mesolithic times and is so ancient it has accumulated two different mutations on its locus, D19, over the long millennia. It is common in Greece, Romania, Albania, Armenia, Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bulgaria in frequencies averaging about 5%. Its worldwide occurrence averages only about 1.0%. It seems to hark back to very ancient indigenous people. The top population match for the root form of this haplotype is Kosovo, the center of the Vinča and Starčevo Culture of approximately 7000 years ago (9.6%). Another top match is Romania (ancient Thrace and Thessaly), at 6.3%. We named it the Goddess Gene and postulated we were looking at a rare marker from Old Europe.

9. Old Europe ca. 7000 – 3500 BCE as defined by Gimbutas.

 

10. Marija Gimbutas in 1973.

 

Rank	European Population Matches
1	Romania (n=243)
2	Greece (n = 208)
3	Armenian – (n = 404)
4	Albanian – Kosovo (n = 136)
5	Serbia/Vojvodina/Montenegro (n = 100)
6	Montenegro (n = 200)
7	Croatia (n = 200)
8	Western Sicily (n = 120)
9	Slovenia (n = 207)
10	Macedonian (n = 100)

11. Strongest Population Matches for Goddess Gene.

 

12. Top quartile Goddess Gene distribution.

 

It was UCLA archeologist Marija Gimbutas who first defined, described and wrote about Old Europe’s art, culture and religion. She introduced the term Old Europe. This civilization worshiped a Goddess who ruled the heavens, earth, waters and underworld and presided over birth, love and death. Famous Old Europe sites, many excavated by Gimbutas’ team, are Padina, Hajdučka Vodenica, Lepenski Vir and Vlasac in the Iron Gates region of Serbia, Vinča-Bela Bardo and Starčevo in the same country, and Turdas in Romania. Lepenski Vir has been described as the oldest city in Europe. It flourished in the Stone Age between about 9500 and 6000 BCE.

Under the auspices of her employer UCLA, Gimbutas and her students excavated the seventh-to-sixth-millennium BCE site Achilleion in Thessaly. Of 250 figurines found in one part of the site, only two were judged to be male. All the rest were the sacred feminine or goddess representations. Gimbutas avoided the term matriarchy, however, because of its nineteenth-century connotations of women ruling men. To be sure, Old Europe was matrilinear, matrifocal and egalitarian. Gimbutas called this social system matristic.

Before Minoan Crete, the first urban societies in Europe appeared in the Danube River’s fertile valleys, where vast, rich plains were exploited by Neolithic farmers. Some of them grew to substantial size, with populations reaching upward of 10,000 people. Around 6000 BCE the writing system called the Vinča script was developed. This was the epicenter of the Goddess Gene.

At a time when the archeological world had forsaken trying to read anything about religion into their subject matter, Gimbutas singlehandedly developed the field of archeomythology, “an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship that combines archaeology, mythology, ethnology, folklore, linguistic paleontology, and the study of historical documents.”[2] She catalogued and investigated more than 30,000 miniature sculptures of goddesses from 3,000 sites dating to ca. 7000 to 3500 BCE, an abundance of material which spoke for itself. She was also instrumental in helping the Getty Villa assemble a collection of very precious “stiff nudes,” as they have been called, which are among the oldest and most valuable treasures of any museum in the world.

Gimbutas brought the civilization of the Goddess and spirituality of Old Europe to life, but she went against the dominant patriarchal mindset of the archeological establishment to such an extent that her name is rarely mentioned today. Her ideas are considered dubious by most academics and the public at large, though in some circles her work is looked upon as brilliant, even epoch making. Gimbutas avoids the term grave goods (a patriarchal concept) but she documents hundreds of offerings and sacrifices to the Triple Goddess. Some were objects buried with the deceased or thrown into pits in temples; some were scatterings of valuable items in the open fields or groves; some were ornaments and precious artifacts deposited in watery places like streams, peat bogs and wells. Women’s burials were often richer than men’s. Temples, household shrines and other religious sites were carefully catalogued, described and, in many instances, depicted with drawings of masks, querns and other religious paraphernalia. No detail was left unrecorded.

In early Neolithic Anatolian villages, only women were considered important enough to be given special burial and remembrance by the community. Men’s corpses were disposed of in peremptory fashion. The male was not the source of life or sacred. In Predynastic Egypt, women’s burials were invariably bigger than men’s.

In a society like ours where funerals are usually conceived as endings, it is hard to relate to ancient peoples, who thought of death as a return to the giver of life and a transformation. Hopefully the soul of the deceased would be reborn as a child into the same clan. It was a communal celebration, not a lonely transition to the unknown. Death was part of life. The rite was sacred, normal and customary. Nothing inexplicable and awkward. The very term “grave goods” betrays a consumer society’s assumptions. The value system of the past was spiritual and communal, not materialistic and individualistic.

In Gimbutas’ last book The Civilization of the Goddess, which synthesizes the work and theses of her previous books, she wrote, “The primordial deity for our Paleolithic and Neolithic ancestors was female, reflecting the sovereignty of motherhood. In fact, there are no images that have been found of a Father God throughout the prehistoric record. Paleolithic and Neolithic symbols and images cluster around a self-generating Goddess and her basic functions as Giver-of-Life, Wielder-of-Death, and as Regeneratrix.”[3] Although she did not use the term matriarchy, she described societies where the female was honored as embodying the principle of primacy for women, something almost impossible for a modern person to imagine.

As confirmed in Jane McIntosh’s Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe, there was a sweeping change separating old and new Europe, from the Balkans to Britain, from Spain to Scandinavia. The archeological record tells the story of an abrupt end. The first metal weapons appear in the graves of elite males called kurgans along with masses of gold and jewels. Axes previously used to clear forests for agriculture are now battle-axes. Burials are single rather than family and clan-oriented or communal. Whole villages were massacred and depopulated. Fortifications grew as violence escalated. The horse, venerated as just one of the totem animals of the Goddess since the early Stone Age, becomes the symbol of the warrior, along with the chariot and boat. Rock art features ithyphallic warriors wielding weapons or shooting arrows at each other. In many places, warfare became endemic. The transition can also be seen in the establishment of the Pharaohs in Egypt about 3500 BCE.[4]

 

Small Cloud on the Horizon

It is said that the invasion from the east took place gradually in three phases: 1) from ca. 4500 BCE, when the pastoralists first spoke Indo-European languages and raised horses), 2) 3400 – 3200 BCE, when they were  half-settled nomads or horse-warriors with wagons and carts, and 3) after 2800 BCE (Middle Bronze Age), when they became fully nomadic and began to act as a conquering population subjecting Old Europeans to their beliefs and way of life, all the way to Britain and Spain.  At first, like the proverbial cloud in the Bible no bigger than a man’s hand, “the activities of seemingly insignificant nomadic bands roaming the less desirable fringe areas of our globe seeking grass for their herds” seemed no cause for alarm. “Over millennia they were apparently out there in the harsh, unwanted, colder, sparser territories on the edges of the earth, while the first great agricultural civilizations spread out along the lakes and rivers in the fertile heartlands.” Riane Eisler says, “To these agricultural peoples, enjoying humanity’s early peak of evolution, peace and prosperity must have seemed the blessed eternal state for humankind, the nomads no more than a peripheral novelty.”[5]

The invaders brought their male pantheon of war gods, Indo-European languages, aristocratic forms of government and Central Asian/Caucasian genes. The goddess cult underwent radical male adaptations, surviving in out-of-the-way places like Crete and Brittany. So, rather than one transformation, European civilization first went through a Neolithic Revolution, then conversion to warrior-dominated patriarchal societies. It could be postulated that the matriarchal societies eagerly adopted agriculture, but exhausted soils destroyed vital forests and crops and Europeans became weaker and smaller-bodied due to a changed diet, falling prey after 3000 BCE to the barbarian warriors of the steppe, who found the accumulation of wealth and unprotected agrarian settlements of Old Europe easy pickings. Climate change was certainly a contributing factor.

Patriarchies are not created overnight. Their histories are never linear and rarely obvious, but extremely complex and nuanced  over different regions and through the centuries. Heide Goettner-Abendroth, in her multivolume work on matriarchal societies (not matriarchy, a misunderstood term) and the rise of the patriarchate, summarizes the many events and coincidences that fed into the demise of Old Europe in the Neolithic Age. Worsening ecological, economic and social conditions on the steppes in the 6^th to 4^th millennia put increasing pressure on those who lived there. Before this, there were no patriarchal forms of society anywhere, apparently. Copper weapons, the wheel and the horse armed these restless peoples, while agriculture and animal husbandry gradually became impossible.

13. Reconstruction of Yamnaya man from a Sredny Stog site at Aleksandriya, Ukraine, 4750-3900 BCE. Dmitriy Y. Telegin.

The Early Bronze Age brought a “whole chain of negative, cascading causes and effects.” With the beginnings of organized warfare the end result came into clear view. Men ruled, women were slaves to their husbands, and children belonged to the father. Mutterecht (mother-right) was replaced by the Patriarchate, the state in which we still live today as heirs of ancient European civilization.[6]

The Goddess religion ruled for thousands of years before Christianity and other major state religions gained sway: “Goddess had had the preeminence of what we now think of as God for at least 25,000 years in most parts of the world. The male oriented view that eventually achieved supremacy can claim only some 5,000 years of history.”[7]

 

As my wife Teresa put it:

 

The Goddess was viewed as pernicious, the source of all evil from the beginning of the patriarchal period. She was a monster who had to be subdued, raped, silenced, murdered. “This assimilation of all that is feminine into the masculine is dramatically represented in Zeus’s literal swallowing of Athena’s mother before she can give birth to her.”[8] Zeus then delivers Athena from his own head. She springs to life fully armed and exhibits many male attributes. Zeus has stolen the magic of a woman creating life from within her. This becomes a common theme, as are tales of the rape and murder of goddesses by lesser gods, who thereby gain dominance. The stature of women overall falls.[9]

 

It has even been suggested that the Goddess was blamed by ruling male elites for natural disasters like floods and famines.[10] Until recent times, hurricanes were given only female names. The rise of patrimony was often associated with degradation of the land and processes like desertification, volcanic eruptions and inundation by the sea.[11]

Curiously, the Goddess Gene  (as we have dubbed it) is very prominent in Gimbutas’ native Lithuania, with a frequency of 8.6 %.[12]

 

Legend of Donají

When we last took a trip to Mexico, we were surprised to find that Oaxaca in the south-central region has its own version of the Goddess, Our Lady of Solitude, a title of Mary. Soledad is the patroness of Oaxaca, dating back to 1692. But as with the national saint the Virgin of Guadalupe,[13] she had an indigenous figure behind her. This was Donají, the Lady of the Land, whose name in Zapotec is said to mean Large Soul or “generous spirit.” Donají was the daughter of the king of Zaachila and is buried within the ruins of the never-finished Dominican ex-convent of Santiago Apóstel located in the town of Cuilápam de Guerrero outside Oaxaca. The beloved protector of the people is the subject of costume dramas performed during Guelaguetza, the largest folklore festival in the world, held during July.[14]

The legend goes that in the pre-Hispanic era, the Zapotecs of Zaachila and the Mixtecs of Monte Alban lived in constant war. Once, when the Mixtecs got the upper hand, they forced the Zapotec king to deliver his daughter as a hostage to them to ensure their enemies would not attack further. The Zapotecs attempted to rescue the captive princess, but before they could, the Mixtecs decapitated her and hid her body so she could never be found.

The years passed until, a shepherd boy who was walking near the Atoyac River discovered a lily. It was blooming out of season, and he decided to uproot it and take it with him. As he was digging it up, he discovered to his surprise that the flower grew from the head of the corpse of the lost princess. When the people learned that the corpse was uncorrupted, a miracle was declared and the deathless woman was buried with great ceremony in the nearby convent, still being constructed. The princess was seen as a goddess defending her land and people. Ever since then, her head has served as an emblem of Oaxaca.

The name Donají seemed to us to invoke one of the names of the Great Goddess of Old Europe. The Danube (Donau) was named for her as well as the Don and other rivers in Europe and streams as far away as in Nepal. (Note that the myth of Donají  plays out along the Atoyac River.) The Old World name was enshrined in Danu (De-Anu), mother of the Danavas (demonized water beings in India, vanquished by thunder god Indra); the Danaides in Greece, punished by being forced to carry water in sieves eternally; Ireland’s Danand or Donand and the Tuatha Dé Danann; Danaë with her golden rain; Don in Wales; and the use of Danaoi or Danann and Danaya (Egyptian) for the Hellenic or Greek people.

In all the myths surrounding these water deities or nymphs, women are defeated by armed men and quite literally put into their proper places. The Danaides were demonized as husband-killers, Donají was beheaded by soldiers, the Lemnian women were made to carry water in sieves forever in futility instead of being water-givers. Nothing could be plainer than that these fables marked the real historical downfall of matriarchy and triumph of patriarchs.

14. Official seal of City of Oaxaca depicts Donají’s severed head.

 

The Goddess Gene is thinly spread all over the world, though it has some hot spots. In Equatorial Guinea it reaches levels as high as 6.0%–on a par with Greece and Romania—and in other countries of Africa, where queenship has been noted by anthropologists, it also has elevated percentages. Modern populations seem to have lower levels than ancient ones. On the opposite end of the scale, countries like the Netherlands and Poland exhibit less than 1.0%–the haplotype may be said to have died out here. White British have it at low levels ((1-2%). The Tarahumara, also known as the Rarámuri, who live in the state of Chihuahua, in the highlands of the Sierra Madre Occidental and in the gorges of the Sierra Madre, seem to have the highest rate of the Goddess Gene in Mexico, at 10.3%.[15]

In Oaxaca, the Goddess Gene has a peak of 8.3% in the remote and isolated Amuzgo people of the northern mountains, while the Mazatec, related to the ancient Popoloca people of Tehuacan’s cactus jungles, the home of Citlalicue, have it at a frequency of 4.8%, also quite high. Oaxaca’s Juchitán is world famed for its  matriarchal form of society and commerce.[16]

 

Name	Location	Frequency
Amuzgo (n=30)	San Pedro Amuzgos	8.3%
Chinanteco (n=40)	San Lucas Ojitlan	2.5%
Chontal (n=29)	Morro de Mazatlan	5.2%
Huave (n=29)	San Dionisio del Mar	6.9%
Mazateco (n=31)	San Felipe Jalapa del Diaz	4.8%
Mixteco (n=30)	Santiago Juxtlahuaca	1.7%
Trique (n=37)	San Juan Copala	8.1%
Zapoteco del Istmo (n=30)	Ciudad Ixtepec	5.0%

15. The Goddess Gene in Oaxaca Indigenous Populations[17]

 

16. Pre-Columbian vessels from the cult of the Triple Goddess in Oaxaca’s Museum of Cultures, Santo Domingo. Right: brazier or food dish. Left: bottle goddess. Photo by the author.

17. More Zapotec or Mixtec ceramics in Oaxaca Museum of Santo Domingo with swollen or egglike features characterizing the triune Goddess. Photo by the author.

 

 

 

18. Guelaguetza Sunday parade honoring patroness of the Zapotec people, Donají, outside the ruins of ex-convent of Santiago Apóstel in Cuilápam. She is associated with flowers, stars, fruit, palm fronds and an abundance of food. Photo by the author.

19. Europa Gene.

 

Gene Specific to Europe

The next rare gene, the Europa Gene, hardly crops up in Asia or Africa. It is concentrated in Europe, to which it is virtually specific and almost diagnostic. Anyone who has it probably has prevailing European ancestry. On average, 1 in 7 Europeans or European Americans possesses this autosomal ancestry marker. It is low or lacking altogether in Asians, Africans, American Indians and African Americans. It is deeply seated in continental Europe, where the leading populations, all with a frequency of as much as 20%, are Slovakian, Sardinian, Romani, Albanian, Flemish, Basque, Austrian, Spanish, Lithuanian and Swiss. Europe-wide, the average is 15.4%. Worldwide it is 10.6%. In mythology, Europa was a Canaanite princess ravished by Zeus in the form of a bull and borne away across the sea to become the mother of nations. The Europa Gene can be compared to the Helen, Odin, Goddess and Circassian genes.

Notice that the Europa Gene covers North African populations, which have affinities with European populations, as opposed to Sub-Saharan Africa. And it shows no origin or extension to Central Asian, East Asian or Southeast Asian peoples. There is also no Austronesian or Australoid presence. It is almost entirely a European phenomenon.

Or is it utterly confined to Europe? The second highest match is Mexico/U.S. – Kumayaay/ Diegueño Indians (n=15), with 23.3% of those tribespeople sampled carrying. How to account for this?

There are several explanations for a lone American Indian population vying for top spot in a crowd of European matches. The Europa Gene, like all others, has a thin distribution all over the world. It’s possible for it to occur and be handed down in any population. It’s also possible for it to become subject to genetic drift and become more and more common in a random way. An alternative explanation is that there was an episode, or more than an episode, of gene flow from Europe, where the gene is common, into the Diegueño Indians, and that over time the European gene became magnified compared to the rest. A third explanation is that its salience is the result of a branch of the allele or haplotype and has nothing to do with Europe. A fourth is that we are not looking at a coherent pattern with a reasonable cause but at a coincidence with no significance.

Other apparent intrusive outcroppings of the Europa Gene in Native American populations are in Florida Native Americans (Seminole, Creek, Choctaw and others), Texas Cherokees, Euchee, Lumbee, Belem Amazonians, Pai Pai Indians (related to the Kumayaay/ Diegueño), Seri, Chippewa and Shawnee. Do all these tribes have some genetic input from Europeans? Or admixture with Europeans? Or is it, again, a branch of the gene? Each case would have to be decided on its own merits, with the testimony of other matches, such as those reported to Gedmatch, an analysis tool for whole genome comparisons. No genetic marker result is unequivocal.

 

Circassian Gene

The Caucasian or white race derives its name from Circassian beauties prized in the ancient slave trade and medieval harems.[18] This rare lineage attains high points in Russian, Turkish and Syrian populations. In Russia’s Belgorod (whose name means “white city”), it has a frequency of 11%. It is relatively common also in Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, the Caucasus, Croatia, Slovenia and (naturally) Belarus (“White Russia”). There are few matches in African, Middle Eastern, East Asian and Native American populations.

The Circassian Gene is essentially non-African and non-Asian. One could stretch a point and say it is “private” to Europeans, a bit like the Europa Gene. It does have a sprinkling in Bali, though, in Sioux Indians and India, for whatever reasons. In Bali it reaches a frequency of 21.5%, in the Sioux 20.0% and among the Lepcha of India 9.1%. Its worldwide incidence is only 3.1%. The top three metapopulations are Lithuanian, Russian and Ukrainian.

 

20. Circassian slave girls and boys were the ideals of beauty in antiquity and the Muslim world, creating the notion of a “white” or Caucasian race at the top of a hierarchy of races in eighteenth century England and Germany. Even today, the inhabitants of the Caucasus region are reputed to be very handsome.

 

Scythian Gene

Throughout history, the very mobile pastoral tribes of the Russian Steppes have descended on the seats of civilization in Europe and the Middle East. They have been called variously Scythians, Thracians, Thessalians, Cimmerians (and Kurgan Culture), Sarmatians, Indo-Europeans (though they were neither from Europe nor from India), Aryans (though few of them were blond and blue-eyed, as Nazi propaganda would have it), Cumans, Alans, Huns, Tatars, Turks, Slavs, Bulgars and Goths.[19]

In Saratov on the Lower Volga River in Russia, up to 1 in 3 to 4 people possess this distinctive marker. In Slovenia, at the crossroads of Barbarian incursions into the Roman Empire, as many as 22% of the inhabitants carry it. It is also notable in Ashkenazi Jews, certain Mongols and some Turks. Minimal frequencies occur, on the other hand, in Asians like the Chinese or Indians. One minor branch is found in Malaysia and Australian Aboriginals, pointing to the relatedness of all humans. The worldwide average is 13.2%. Another expansion centered on Egypt and became prominent among Berbers. It was passed down in the pharaohs—perhaps a vestige of the conquest of Egypt by a horse-bound warrior culture around 3000 BCE. Surprisingly, the Metis of Canada have a frequency of 27% of the Scythian Gene, and the Shawnee and Texas Cherokee also have a high incidence. Many Indian tribes are believed to be related to the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Siberia.

This same timeframe—ca. 3000 BCE—corresponds with a general epoch in world history that marks a widespread switch from female-centered societies and the Goddess religion to patriarchy and a male pantheon. Between 2 and 5 percent of Europeans on average possess the Scythian Gene, depending on how far east their main ancestry originates.

 

 

21. Scythians and other Steppes Peoples invaded Europe, the Middle East and South Asia in three phases over as many millennia. Map by Richard Thornton.

 

1	Caucasus
2	Lithuanian
3	Hungarian
4	Romanian
5	South Slavic Balkan
6	Egyptian
7	Polish
8	Russian
9	Spanish
10	Ukrainian
11	Swedish
12	Atlantic Islander
13	Belarusian
14	Dutch
15	German

22. Top Scythian Gene Populations.

Yamnaya and Indo-Europeans

The Scythian Gene as well as the Peoples of the Steppes Gene both correspond to the Central Asian invaders who overthrew the matriarchies of Old Europe.

The Yamnaya, as they are known to archeologists, were one of the most brutal and aggressive societies in history. Geneticists call them a ghost people because few traces of them remain except embedded in the genetic record, and most Europeans have a lot. They arrived from the steppes in force about 2,800 BCE, when a mysterious plague swept through the farming communities of Old Europe. They were not the first invaders; the pre-Kurgan and Kurgan people were. Eighty percent of this wave of marauders were males. Tall, young, strong and well-fed, the warriors butchered the local men and took their daughters to wife. Their conquests put an end to the relatively peaceful agricultural Neolithic and ushered in the violent Bronze Age.[20]

Wolfgang Haak of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology describes a mixture of Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) and Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (CHG) in roughly equal proportion. This mixture became part of the genetic makeup of all modern Europeans through large-scale migrations. It was particularly noticeable with the Corded Ware culture, which is believed to have been linked to the spread of Indo-European languages.

According to a major article authored by nearly 100 geneticists published in 2022:

 

Steppe pastoralists of the Yamnaya culture initiated a chain of migrations across Eurasia, linking Europe in the west to China and India in the east. We find people throughout the Balkans who traced almost all their ancestry to this Yamnaya expansion (~5,000-4,500 years ago). These steppe migrants soon admixed with locals to create a tapestry of diverse ancestry from which speakers of Greek, Paleo-Balkan, and Albanian languages emerged. The Yamnaya expansion also crossed the Caucasus and by about 4,000 years ago, Armenia had become an enclave of low but pervasive steppe influence in West Asia, where the patrilineal descendants of Yamnaya men, virtually extinct across Europe and the steppe, persisted. The Armenian language was born there and its relationship with faraway Indo-European languages of Europe such as Greek reflects their shared Yamnaya heritage.[21]

 

The Yamnaya victory was not over people alone. The defeat of the European farmers fundamentally changed the course of religion from the Mother Goddess to the Sun God, from the Chalice to the Blade. The invaders also brought Indo-European languages like German, French and Latin from their steppes heartland, spreading them all the way to the British Isles, Iberian Peninsula and tip of the Indian Subcontinent.

The Yamnaya originated in Southern Siberia. Thus, the highest incidence of the Peoples of the Steppes Gene occurs in the Tuva region of Russia, at 40%. The average throughout Central Asia is 26%. Related peoples are Evenks (30%), Turkic (28%) and Mongols (25%). American Indians and East Asians have the lowest frequencies. In Europe, the highest incidences are in countries where the Indo-European invasion was most immediate and forceful:  Armenia, Turkey, Russia, Poland, France and Hungary. There are also African and Australian branches, but they are not related historically to the steppes peoples.

22. Peoples of the Steppes Gene started out in Africa and expanded throughout the world, including India, Southeast Asia and the Americas.

 

Each of the seven markers highlighted in this chapter as European—Helen, Odin, Goddess, Europa, Circassian, Scythian, Peoples of the Steppes—are autosomal. They can be detected in males and females. They are passed down by mothers and fathers. It must be emphasized they all originated in Africa during the past 200,000 – 100,000 years. They all took different travels around the planet. They occur now in all populations of the Earth to some degree or another, with interesting geographical contours due to migrations, expansions and genetic drift. We all carry all of these genes. As the Lakota Sioux people say, Mitakuye Oyasin. We are all related. The names are just names.

 

 

 

[1] I. Lazaridis et al., “Ancient Human Genomes Suggest Three Ancestral Populations for the Present-day Europeans.” Nature 513/7518:409-13. See also the very readable book by Jean Manco, Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Ventures to the Vikings, rev. & updated ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015).

[2] See the sketch of her life and accomplishments by Joan Marler, “The Iconography and Social Structure of Old Europe: The Archaeomythological Research of Marija Gimbutas,” in Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present and Future, ed. Heide Goettner-Abendroth (Toronto: Inanna, 2009), pp. 283-96.

[3] Marija Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses,  ed. and suppl. By Miriam Robbins Dexter (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999); The Language of the Goddess, foreword by Joseph Campbell (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006); The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 6500 – 3500 BC: Myths and Cult Images, new & updated ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 2007). For a popular account, geared more to folklore and psychology than archeology and art, cf. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine, 1992).

[4] Jane McIntosh, ed., Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe (New York:  Oxford UP, 2009).

[5] Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 43.

[6] Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Geschichte Matriarchaler Gesellschaften und Entshehung des Patriarchats, vol. III: Westasien und Europa (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2019), pp. 223-75. Old but still useful are Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht : Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur (London: Wentworth, 2018; orig. published Stuttgart: Krais & Hoffmann, 1861) and Robert Briffault, The Mothers, abr. with an intro. by Gordon Rattray Taylor (New York: Atheneum, 1977).

[7] David Leeming and Jake Page, Goddess: Myths of the Female Divine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 47.

[8] Leeming and Page, pp. 134-35.

[9] Teresa A. Panther Yates, Journeys to Mexico (Longmont: Panther’s Lodge, 2023), p. x.

[10] Steven Sora, The Triumph of the Sea Gods: The War against the Goddess Hidden in Homer’s Tales (Rochester: Destiny, 2007).

[11] On the replacement of matriarchal societies by patriarchates, from Egypt and Israel to Anatolia and India, see Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (Orlando, Harvest, 1976). For a grand historical framework, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986). On the complex absolutism of patriarchies, including “the inner colonization of women’s minds,” see The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins, History and Impact of Patriarchy, ed. Cristina Biaggi (Manchester: Knowledge, Ideas and Trends, 2005). For a theory that may explain many of the extremes of history, see James DeMeo, Saharasia: The 4000 B.C. Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, in the Deserts of the Old World (Ashland: Natural Energy, 1998). How waves of refugees and invaders from arid lands, from China to Europe, have influenced civilizations in green borderlands, see Brian Griffith, The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History  (New York: Palgrave, 2001). See also Heide Goettner-Abendroth’s important “Notes on the Rise and Expansion of Patriarchy,” in Societies of Peace, pp. 424-33.

[12] See “Lithuania” population page available at:  https://dnaconsultants.com/lithuania/.

[13] Ana Castillo, , Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. (New York: Riverhead, 1996).

[14] La Guelaguetza in the indigenous Zapotecan language means “You give to me, and I give to you.” For a succinct declaration by a Zapotec midwife and healer on the matriarchy of this mountain people in northern Oaxaca, see Doña Enriqueta Contreras, “Matriarchal Values among the Sierra Juárez Zapotecs of Oaxaca,” in Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present and Future,” ed. Heide Goettner-Abendroth (Toronto: Inanna, 2009) , pp. 76-79.

[15] The adjacent Texas Cherokee sampled in a DNA Consultants study (n=54) have a rate of 9.8%. See their population page at: https://dnaconsultants.com/texas-cherokee/.

[16] See Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures Across the Globe, trans. Karen Smith (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), esp. pp. 253-268. Goettner-Abendroth also mentions the Tarahumara in her research.

[17] Data from Consuelo D. Quinto Cortés et al., “Genetic Characterization of Indigenous Peoples from Oaxaca, Mexico, and Its Relation to Linguistic and Geographic Isolation,” Human Biology 82/4 (Aug. 2010), pp. 409-32.

[18] See Nell Irwin Painter,  The History of White People, reprint ed. (New York : Norton, 2011).

[19] David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007).

[20] See W. Haak, “Massive Migration from the Steppe Was a Source for Indo-European Languages in Europe,” Nature 522 (2015) pp, 207–211.

[21] I. Lazaridis et al, “The Genetic History of the Southern Arc: A Bridge between West Asia and Europe,” Science 377/6609 (2022), doi: 10.11261/science.abm4247.