Now we get into Maykop. There is no doubt that Maykop had a massive influence on the Proto-Indo-Europeans, culturally-speaking, and Drews’ triangulation of the geography here maps nicely to what the recent 2025 papers (“The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans” and “A Genomic History of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age”) show, but his particular foundations are all wrong, as we’ve seen. Moreover, there is actually no evidence that Maykop was itself part of the Proto-Indo-European linguistic or cultural horizon. For one thing, Yamnaya doesn’t actually have admixture from Maykop people, as we can see from the genetics, although to my understanding all the relevant papers have been published after Drews published his book (such as Wang et al 2019 and discussions by Eurogenes (just search “Eurogenes Maykop” on Google)).

The problem even at the time of the publication of “Militarism”, however, is that there was already a difference in terms of mitochondrial DNA between Maykop samples and Yamnaya samples (“Six complete mitochondrial genomes from Early Bronze Age humans in the North Caucasus”, Sokolov et al 2016), and Y-chromosomal lineages available from the steppe and the historical & modern Indo-European worlds showed that Indo-European languages were strongly associated with subclades of P (R1 & Q), which were robustly present in the steppe, and this region is also where we see antecedents of Indo-European culture, such as in Khvalynsk and Samara (Drews has already mentioned Khvalynsk at this point, but there wasn’t really a strong reason to tie Khvalynsk to Maykop). The lineages in the Caucasus now are largely J & G, and, besides the Indo-European language of Armenian, male speakers of which carry the Yamnaya-associated R1b-Z2103 subclade, Indo-European languages are not spoken in these regions, and they don’t have much Western Steppe Herder autosomal, besides Dagestanis (who are on the opposite side of the north face of the Caucasus compared to the Maykop culture). I personally also think it’s doubtful that a sedentary society like Maykop would migrate onto the harsh steppes. Usually the trend, if anything, is for pastoralist peoples to sedentize, not the other way around. That’s what happened with many Indo-European groups themselves, along with many Turkic groups, the Magyars, the Amorites, etc.

I will also take this opportunity to speak about a heretofore-unmentioned elephant in the room: there are no farmer lineages found in the steppe people. There is no Haplogroup G or Haplogroup E found among the male lineages on the steppes. There are some J samples, but these almost assuredly come from CHG, as J was an uncommon lineage in the European Neolithic and is very common in peoples of the Caucasus: we also knew at the time that Western Steppe Herder was [largely] a combination of EHG + CHG. If the Early European Farmers brought a culture to Mesolithic people which the hunter-gatherers adopted, it stands to reason that some of the Farmer lineages would have persisted, because they would have been in a prestigious position relative to the people who were hunter-gatherers before. Even if they wound up in a subordinate position, we still might expect their lineages to persist: EEF-associated Y-DNA does indeed persist to this very day in Europe, despite an enormous reduction of the presence of those lineages and their large-scale replacement by Indo-European-associated ones. The weak EEF autosomal signal in WSH also doesn’t match Drews’ expectation: it’s not in our earliest relevant samples, and is best explained by the model put forward by Anthony, where we know there was much contact and mingling between steppe peoples and the very-much-land-based Globular Amphora & Cucuteni-Trypillia cultures (especially Globular Amphora, which was spread from Germany to northwestern Ukraine: not exactly prime candidates for Drews’ model of diffusion-by-sea).