This dissertation is concerned with the formation of the Qazaqs in the context of the custom of political vagabondage known as qazaqlïq in post-Mongol Central Eurasia. More specifically, my study addressed the process whereby the Uzbek nomads inhabiting the eastern Dasht-i Qipchāq bifurcated into the Qazaqs and the Shibanid Uzbeks in the sixteenth century in consequence of the qazaqlïq activities led by two rival Chinggisid families: the Urusids and the Abū al-Khairids. Qazaqlïq, or the qazaq way of life, was a form of political vagabondage that involved escaping from one’s state or tribe, usually from a difficult social or political situation, and living the life of a freebooter in a frontier or other remote region. The custom of political vagabondage was by no means an exclusively post-Mongol Central Eurasian phenomenon. It existed in other places and at other times. However, it was in post-Mongol Central Eurasia that it became a widespread socio-political phenomenon that it came to be perceived by contemporaries as a custom to which they attached the specific term, qazaqlïq. During the post-Mongol period, the qazaq way of life developed into a well-established political custom whereby political fugitives, produced by the internecine struggles within the Chinggisid states, customarily fled to frontier or other remote regions and became freebooters, who came to be called qazaqs. Such Chinggisid and Timurid leaders as Muḥammad Shībānī and Temür became qazaqs before coming to power. The Qazaqs came into being as a result of the qazaqlïq activities of Jānībeg and Girāy, two great-grandsons of Urus Khan (r. ca. 1368–78), and of Muḥammad Shībānī, the grandson of Abū al-Khair Khan (r. ca. 1450–70) that resulted in the division of the Uzbek Ulus into the Qazaqs and the Shibanid Uzbeks in the sixteenth century. The Tatar and Slavic cossacks (Russian kazak, Ukrainian kozak) who appeared in the Black Sea steppe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the products of the qazaqlïq, or cossack phenomenon. Significantly, Ukrainian cossackdom led to the formation of the Ukrainian Hetmanate, which eventually contributed to the consolidation of a separate Ukrainian identity.

Humans evolved in a world of giant creatures. Current evidence suggests that most ice age megafauna went extinct around the transition to our current Holocene epoch. The ecological reverberations associated with the loss of over 65% of Earth’s largest terrestrial animals transformed ecosystems and human lifeways forever thereafter. However, there is still substantial debate as to the cause of this mass extinction. Evidence variously supports climate change and anthropogenic factors as primary drivers in the restructuring of the terrestrial biosphere. Much of the ongoing debate is driven by the insufficient resolution accessible via macro-remains. To help fill in the gaps in our understandings of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, I utilized the growing power of sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) to reconstruct shifting signals of plants and animals in central Yukon. To date, sedaDNA has typically been analyzed by amplifying small, taxonomically informative regions. However, this approach is not ideally suited to the degraded characteristics of sedaDNA and ignores most of the potential data. Means of isolating sedaDNA have also suffered from the use of overly aggressive purification techniques resulting in substantial loss. To address these limitations, I first experimentally developed a novel means of releasing and isolating sedaDNA. Secondly, I developed a novel environmental bait-set designed to simultaneously capture DNA informative of macro-scale ecosystems. When combined, we identify a substantial improvement in the quantity and breadth of biomolecules recovered. These optimizations facilitated the unexpected discovery of horse and mammoth surviving thousands of years after their supposed extirpation. I followed up these results by extracting DNA from multiple permafrost cores where we confirm the late survival signal and identify a far more complex and high-resolution dataset beyond those identifiable by complementary methods. I was also able to reconstruct mitochondrial genomes from multiple megafauna simultaneously solely from sediment, demonstrating the information potential of sedaDNA. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / A new addition to the rapidly growing field of palaeogenetics is environmental DNA (eDNA) with its immense wealth of biomolecules preserved over millennia outside of biological tissues. Organisms are constantly shedding cells, and while most of this DNA is metabolized or otherwise degraded, some small fraction is preserved through sedimentary mineral-binding. I experimentally developed new ancient eDNA methods for recovery, isolation, and analysis to maximize our access to these biomolecules and demonstrate that this novel approach outperforms alternative protocols. Thereafter, I used these methods to extract DNA from ice age permafrost samples dating between 30,000–6,000 years before present. These data demonstrate the power of ancient eDNA for reconstructing ecosystem change through time, as well as identifying evidence for the Holocene survival of caballine horse and woolly mammoth in continental North America. This late persistence of Pleistocene fauna has implications for understanding the human ecological and climatological factors involved in the Late Pleistocene mass extinction event. This effort is paralleled with megafaunal mitogenomic assembly and phylogenetics solely from sediment. This thesis demonstrates that environmental DNA can significantly augment macro-scale buried records in palaeoecology.