Prehistory Atlas

These are images from A Feat of Crowds, the fourth volume of the series A Song of Sheep and Horses. This fourth book contains supplementary materials for the other main three books: the first two (A Game of Clans & A Clash of Chiefs) on prehistoric migrations, and the third one (A Song of Sheep and Horses) on Indo-Uralic languages.

The maps are centered on European prehistory and history, and their Eurasian connections, so the borders of cultures and peoples beyond them – especially South-East Asia and Africa – are more inexact.

These maps were drawn to illustrate certain points in the aforementioned series of books, so they are diachronic illustrations of different cultures and peoples not exactly contemporary with each other, but often sequential in time. They are thus used to illustrate certain developments, e.g. the Neolithic expansion of farming, or the Chalcolithic expansion from Yamna. In that sense, they are not different from many maps used to illustrate cultural expansions and migrations of peoples.

Please report any errors by writing an email to cquiles@academiaprisca.org, attaching a link, map, article, or book (with pages) for reference – unless it is a clear mistake -, and I will correct them as soon as possible.

They have been drawn with Photoshop over Natural Earth raster images that are in the public domain.

Natural Earth

You can reuse and modify the images posted here as you see fit. If you can, please cite the corresponding book and – especially if you use these high-quality images – the specific page of this website (indo-european.eu) as the source. Thank you.

NOTE. While the previous license was CC-by-sa, incompatible with copyrighted works and with sites like Wikipedia, I consider these new versions ‘stable’ enough to be reused anywhere, hence the new general CC-by license and the image files without labels available for download, to allow for the most common modifications.

Maps of Indo-European and Uralic migrations

Even the highest quality ones are smaller images than the originals, and they are compressed as JPEG. If you would like bigger and/or higher quality versions, a different content (with changes, omissions and/or additions), or different file formats (e.g. SVG), please write me at cquiles@academiaprisca.org. I really like to work with maps, and if the project is interesting I will probably not mind working on it.

Map series of prehistoric languages

prehistoric-language-maps-indo-european
Tentative maps of prehistoric language expansions.

Maps of cultures and peoples by age

1-out-of-africa
1. Map of migrations of Anatomically Modern Humans.
2-upper-palaeolithic
2. Map of Upper Palaeolithic migrations.
3-epipalaeolithic
3. Map of Epipalaeolithic migrations.
4-mesolithic-early
4. Map of Early Mesolithic migrations.
5-mesolithic-late
5. Map of Late Mesolithic migrations.
6-neolithic
6. Map of expansion of Neolithic and hunter-gatherer pottery.
7-eneolithic-early
7. Map of Early Eneolithic migrations.
8-eneolithic-late
8. Map of Late Eneolithic migrations.
9-eneolithic-final
9. Map of Final Eneolithic migrations.
10-chalcolithic-early
10. Map of Early Chalcolithic migrations.
burials-yamnaya-hungary
10. A. Map of Yamnaya kurgans in Hungary, and contemporary settlements of Baden-Boleráz.
yamna-bell-beakers
10. B. Map of Yamnaya – Bell Beaker migration.
10-steppe-ancestry-300
10. C. Map of “steppe ancestry” evolution: Yamnaya/Bell Beaker vs. Trypillia/Corded Ware.
11-chalcolithic-late
11. Map of Late Chalcolithic migrations.
12-bronze-age-early
12. Map of Early Bronze Age migrations.
13-bronze-age-middle
13. Map of Middle Bronze Age migrations.
14-bronze-age-late
14. Map of Late Bronze Age migrations.
15-iron-age-early
15. Map of Early Iron Age migrations.
16-iron-age-late
16. Map of Late Iron Age migrations.
17-antiquity
17. Map of migrations in Antiquity.
18-middle-ages
18. Map of Mediaeval migrations.
19-palearctic-biomes-300
Map of Biomes: with labels, and without labels.

Y-DNA and mtDNA maps

Maps with Y-DNA, mtDNA, and ADMIXTURE of ancient samples are added to the different map sections above (click on one to access to the different alternative versions).

This post contains instructions for use of the ArcGIS Online WebMap of ancient samples with reported Y-DNA, mtDNA, and ADMIXTURE:

arconline-web-app

In this older post there are other available local GIS files to check ancient samples’ Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroups:

haplogroup-map-physical

There is a static page on maps of modern Y-DNA distribution based on the most recently published data.

haplogroup-r1b-m269

There is also a compilation of posts on maps of ancient and modern ancestry distribution based on the most recently published data.

eba-yamnaya-ancestry