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Where Did the Elamites Come From? Ancient DNA & the Dravidian Mystery [11:28]
YouTube ^ | June 22, 2025 | Dr David Miano, World of Antiquity

Posted on 08/12/2025 11:38:26 AM PDT by SunkenCiv

Join us as we tackle one of archaeology's most persistent puzzles: the origins of the Elamites, the Bronze-Age powerhouses of southwestern Iran. 
Where Did the Elamites Come From? Ancient DNA & the Dravidian Mystery | 11:28 
World of Antiquity | 293K subscribers | 78,800 views | June 22, 2025
Where Did the Elamites Come From? Ancient DNA & the Dravidian Mystery | 11:28 | World of Antiquity | 293K subscribers | 78,800 views | June 22, 2025

(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: anshan; bronzeage; dravidians; drdavidmiano; elamites; epigraphyandlanguage; godsgravesglyphs; helixmakemineadouble; iran; susa; worldofantiquity
--> YouTube-Generated Transcript <--
0:00·For regular videos on ancient cultures and forgotten civilizations, please subscribe.
0:05·If you've been an ancient history fan for a while, you probably have heard
0:08·of the Elamites. They are a people that ruled southwestern Iran for almost three millennia.
0:15·Yet we're still scratching our heads over one simple question: Where did they come from?
0:20·Grab a drink, pull up a chair, and I'll walk you through why historians, linguists,
0:25·archaeologists, and geneticists can't quite agree on the answer.
0:42·Picture the lowland marshes and Zagros foothills of today's Khuzestan province in southwestern
0:49·Iran. From roughly 3200 BCE to 550 BCE, a string of Elamite kingdoms -- centered at Susa and, earlier,
0:57·at Anshan -- built temples, waged wars with Sumer and Akkad, traded lapis lazuli and woolen textiles,
1:06·and left behind hundreds of cuneiform tablets. Yet they never left us an origin story:
1:13·no founding myth survives, no clear "we came from here" inscription. That absence is exactly
1:19·why scholars turn to their other writings, their language, their material remains,
1:24·and now their DNA to chase down their ancestry. Let's start with the Elamite language. After all,
1:31·what makes someone an Elamite is if they speak Elamite. Written texts from ancient Elam come
1:37·mainly from two areas of Iran: the region around ancient Susa in modern Khuzestān, and the region
1:45·around ancient Anshan and Persepolis near modern Fārs. It's possible that Elamite was spoken
1:51·only in and between these areas, but some texts found in ancient Arachosia in modern Kandahar,
1:58·a significant distance from these sites, might suggest that Elamite was spoken more widely,
2:04·perhaps in most of what is now Iran. The extant texts date from between the 23rd and 4th centuries
2:12·BCE, but it is entirely possible the Elamite language was used earlier and later than the dates
2:19·of the existing texts. There are, for example, earlier texts we call Proto-Elamite dating back
2:25·to about 3000 BCE, but they are undeciphered, and so we don't know if they are actually Elamite.
2:31·The earliest known Elamite texts are written in a script we call Linear Elamite. There aren't many
2:36·of them, but recently strides have been made in deciphering it. Somewhat contemporary with them
2:41·are the Old Elamite texts, and there aren't many of these either, but they use the cuneiform script
2:48·of Mesopotamia to write the language. The classic period of Elamite writing is Middle Elamite,
2:54·which was used between around 1500 and 1000 BCE, and this corpus is larger and can be
3:01·used to understand the Elamite language more fully. After that we have the Neo-Elamite and
3:07·Achaemenid Elamite texts, the latter of which is from the time of the first Persian Empire,
3:12·and they often appear in trilingual inscriptions, which of course, helped with decipherment.
3:18·Now, can we use our knowledge of the language to determine where the Elamites came from?
3:24·Theoretically, yes. We would just see where Elamite is on the language family tree,
3:29·look for its closest relatives and where and when they were spoken, and that might help us narrow it
3:34·down. But the problem is: Elamite doesn't slot neatly into any known language family. In the
3:41·1970s, linguist David McAlpin dug into this puzzle and proposed the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis. He
3:50·compared Elamite pronouns and certain verb endings to those in South India's Dravidian tongues.
3:56·Running statistical tests on shared forms, he argued that, perhaps, these two groups split from
4:02·a common ancestor around 5,000 or 4,000 BCE. If true, this would mean that the Dravidian languages
4:11·are not aboriginal to India. They would have entered India from the west at some point during
4:17·the second millennium BCE and would therefore have moved into India at the time of the Harappan
4:23·civilization and may have played a part in it. But here's the rub: similar words can also spread
4:29·through centuries of trade, intermarriage, or simple borrowing -- especially between two
4:35·great agricultural regions linked by early caravan routes. Later scholars pointed out
4:40·that the number of shared morphemes is small, the sound-changes inconsistent, and that we lack any
4:46·bilingual inscription -- our version of a Rosetta Stone -- to pin down one-to-one correspondences.
4:52·What that means is that the similarities between the two languages may not be due to a genetic
4:59·relationship (linguistically speaking). There are also proposals that Elamite is an Afroasiatic
5:04·language. Some have even argued it is Caucasian. This doesn't completely rule out a deep Dravidian
5:10·connection -- some genetic signals hint at early farmer movements
5:14·from Iran into the Indus Valley -- but the linguistic case needs a lot more weight.
5:18·Today most experts call Elamite a language isolate, meaning it
5:22·stands alone on the linguistic family tree. Does archaeology help us in determining the origin
5:28·of the Elamites? When archaeologists dig at Chogha Mish, Anshan, or Susa, they don't find a sudden
5:34·invasion layer -- no smashed cities or abandoned pottery kilns packed up and carted off, which
5:37·could indicate a time when Elamites arrived. Instead, the story unfolds gradually. Early
5:42·farming villages in the 5th millennium BCE gave way to Bronze Age towns where you start seeing new
5:48·pottery shapes -- some that remind us of the Zagros highlands, some that are uniquely Elamite. That
5:54·subtle shift could mean potters moved down from the mountains, or that local craftsmen
5:58·simply picked up new styles from traders who passed through. Either way, there's no dramatic
6:04·rupture -- just evolving tastes over centuries. This could mean the Elamites were there a long time.
6:11·So let's turn now to the DNA evidence. Back in 2018, a team of geneticists took samples
6:18·at the archaeological site of Haft Tepe -- right in the heart of Middle Elam -- pulling mitochondrial
6:24·DNA (that's the female line) from ten burials dated around 1500–1300 BCE.
6:31·When the sequences came back, every individual belonged to haplogroups R2 or R5 -- lineages we
6:38·know from Bronze-Age Iran and the Indus Valley. That was our first big insight: these haplogroups
6:44·are probably to be associated with the Elamites. In 2024, a multinational team published a study
6:50·investigating whether a rare Y-chromosome marker might map a real connection between
6:55·Bronze-Age Iran and South Asia. They zeroed in on haplogroup L1-M22, pulling together
7:01·both ancient samples -- from Chalcolithic Armenia and early Bronze-Age sites in what was once
7:06·Elam -- and a broad set of modern Y-chromosomes. What emerged was striking. L1-M22 first appears
7:15·on the Iranian Plateau during the Last Glacial Maximum -- around twenty-thousand years ago -- and
7:20·then expands with the Neolithic farming boom. By tracing branching patterns and applying Bayesian
7:27·dating methods, the team showed that one sister branch of L1-M22 stayed rooted in southwestern
7:34·Iran (ancient Elam territory), while its sibling veered east into the Indus Valley
7:41·sometime between 6000 and 4000 BCE. In other words, the very same paternal lineage that
7:47·cradled early farmer communities in Khuzestan also turns up among many modern Dravidian speakers.
7:54·This coincides with McAlpin's Elamite-Dravidian hypothesis. But that doesn't mean we've "proven"
8:01·Elamite was a Dravidian language -- genes aren't words -- but it does give us a tangible male-line
8:07·corridor along which language, ideas, or small groups of people could have traveled. At the
8:13·same time, the pattern rules out any need for a massive, rapid invasion; instead it fits
8:19·with low-volume migrations, elite marriage ties, or artisan exchanges unfolding over millennia.
8:26·The L1-M22 story shows a clear genetic link between Elamite-land and the early Dravidian
8:32·world, but please note that the study draws on limited samples from Bronze-Age
8:38·Elamite cemeteries. Until we get more Y-DNA (and especially genome-wide data) from multiple Elamite
8:45·sites, we won't know whether L1-M22 was ubiquitous or confined to specific elites or locales.
8:52·And finally, in 2025, another scientific team gave us a wide-angle shot: fifty whole genomes
8:58·from across the Iranian Plateau, spanning 4700 BCE to 1300 CE. Working in clean‐room labs, they
9:07·pulled DNA from petrous bones and tooth cementum, sequenced it, and ran Principal Component Analysis
9:14·against Neolithic Zagros farmers, Anatolians, and Levantines. The result? Bronze-Age Elamite-era
9:21·individuals fall on a smooth gradient -- a ‘cline' -- between those populations. In
9:27·plain speech: most people in ancient Elam were rooted in local farming villages,
9:31·with only small pulses of outside ancestry over millennia. This coincides with the archaeology,
9:37·which suggests no invasion of Iran by the Elamites, but rather a long history in the land.
9:44·So, after all that, do we finally know the Elamites' origin story? Not quite. We still
9:49·haven't deciphered the proto-Elamite tablets -- were those scribes locals inventing writing,
9:55·or specialists brought in from elsewhere? We need more DNA from ordinary village burials,
10:02·not just elite tombs at Susa. And if a bilingual inscription ever surfaces, it could rewrite
10:04·everything we think about Elamite's language family. That's why this mystery is so thrilling:
10:15·every shard of pot, every bone fragment, every genome has the power to shift our understanding."
10:22·In the next few years, watch for three big advances: targeted DNA digs in Khuzestan's
10:28·rural cemeteries, stable-isotope studies on tooth enamel to track childhood origins, and
10:35·machine-learning projects tackling proto-Elamite signs. Piecing those together will get us closer
10:42·to not just where the Elamites came from, but how their distinct culture took shape.
10:47·So that is the mystery of Elamite origins that we are still working on. Let me know
10:52·what you think in the comments -- especially if you've read a paper I missed. And if you
10:57·love digging into Ancient Mysteries -- where the real story is how much we don't know -- please
11:00·subscribe, and I'll see you next time. You might like my little e-booklet, Why
11:03·Ancient History Matters. It's designed to persuade people that the subject is important, even in the
11:08·modern world. You might also wish to use it to help spread the word, so feel free to share it
11:13·with someone you know. It's free for anyone who wants it. I've left a link in the description box
11:17·below the video for you to grab a copy. Catch you later.

1 posted on 08/12/2025 11:38:26 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
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To: StayAt HomeMother; Ernest_at_the_Beach; 1ofmanyfree; 21twelve; 24Karet; 2ndDivisionVet; 31R1O; ...

2 posted on 08/12/2025 11:39:55 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (The moron troll Ted Holden believes that humans originated on Ganymede.)
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To: SunkenCiv

3 posted on 08/12/2025 11:40:47 AM PDT by Eccl 10:2 (Prov 3:5 --- "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding")
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To: Eccl 10:2

😊


4 posted on 08/12/2025 11:41:58 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (The moron troll Ted Holden believes that humans originated on Ganymede.)
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To: SunkenCiv

Jack Elam of course!.................


5 posted on 08/12/2025 11:50:21 AM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegals are put up in 5 Star hotels....................)
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The rest of the Elam/ite/s keywords, sorted:

6 posted on 08/12/2025 12:00:35 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (The moron troll Ted Holden believes that humans originated on Ganymede.)
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To: SunkenCiv

bkmk


7 posted on 08/12/2025 12:06:51 PM PDT by sauropod
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To: SunkenCiv
In Genesis 14, Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, rules places in the vicinity of the Dead Sea for 12 years. After they rebel he comes with allies, takes prisoners including Lot, but is defeated by "Abram the Hebrew" (who rescues his nephew Lot). A rather mysterious chapter.

Elamites are also mentioned in Act 2.9.

8 posted on 08/12/2025 12:09:31 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: SunkenCiv

I always figured they were related to the Elabedbugs. (The Jack Elam jokes were all taken.)


9 posted on 08/12/2025 12:32:43 PM PDT by chajin ("There is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12)
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To: Verginius Rufus
That's the guy, Kudur-Lagamal. Like later Middle Eastern empires, he relied on manpower from tributary cities to keep the rest in line. The exact number of fighters Abraham had with him is in the OT acc't, and it's pretty small, suggesting that the Elamite king was A) killed in the battle, B) had something else to deal with and marched out with the bulk of his forces, leaving a skeleton crew to herd the booty caravan back to Elam, and/or C) had a rebellion break out among one or more of his allies, or even a coup back in Elam itself.

10 posted on 08/12/2025 12:34:22 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (The moron troll Ted Holden believes that humans originated on Ganymede.)
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To: chajin

😊


11 posted on 08/12/2025 12:35:48 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (The moron troll Ted Holden believes that humans originated on Ganymede.)
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To: SunkenCiv
I hadda look...

Elam is an English last name. Cf here. It's a Hebrew first name.

12 posted on 08/12/2025 12:42:25 PM PDT by chajin ("There is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12)
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To: SunkenCiv

But I’m sure the scientists and theologians kept telling the locals that they were wrong and stupid when they kept repeating “But... We have been here living unfettered forever”.


13 posted on 08/12/2025 1:43:23 PM PDT by Openurmind (AI - An Illusion for Aptitude Intrusion to Alter Intellect. )
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To: chajin; SunkenCiv

In Tamil, Eelam (ஈழம்) is the ancient name for Sri Lanka


14 posted on 08/12/2025 1:47:44 PM PDT by Cronos
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To: Eccl 10:2

Those eyebrows!


15 posted on 08/12/2025 2:07:05 PM PDT by larrytown (A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. Then they graduate...)
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To: Eccl 10:2

Elam’s coming
Hide your hearts girls


16 posted on 08/12/2025 8:55:18 PM PDT by tumblindice (America's founding fathers: all armed conservatives)
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To: Cronos

Thx


17 posted on 08/13/2025 12:06:16 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (The moron troll Ted Holden believes that humans originated on Ganymede.)
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To: SunkenCiv; Cronos; chajin

Very interesting indeed🙂

Still I am asking myself whether this could not be a strange coincidence, like in Europe, where there is a historic region named „Galicia“ in Northwestern Spain and another one with the same name, which is situated in present-day Southeastern Poland and Western Ukraine 🙂


18 posted on 08/14/2025 5:00:48 AM PDT by Menes
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To: Menes

Yes, usually a coincidence. There was an Eryrthraea in Greece, but the Greeks also referred to the Indian Ocean (along with its ‘fingers’ like the Red Sea, Gulf of Suez, etc) as the Erythraean Sea.


19 posted on 08/14/2025 7:01:45 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (The moron troll Ted Holden believes that humans originated on Ganymede.)
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