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Thursday, February 12, 2015

Eastern Europe as a bifurcation hotspot for Y-hg R1


The main angle of the recently released epic manuscript Haak et al. 2015 is that ancient DNA supports the steppe origin of at least some of Europe's Indo-European languages. That's certainly a move in the right direction, so that we can eventually do away with the Anatolian hypothesis, which was always a failed proposition.

But it's clear that the authors are holding back. They've obviously decided to be very cautious until they've looked at more ancient DNA, particularly from the Near East, Central Asia and India, before backing fully any one Proto-Indo-European (PIE) urheimat model.

That's understandable, considering how much opposition there is still to the steppe hypothesis, even though it does by and large have the support of historical linguists, which is what really counts. Nevertheless, my feeling is that Haak et al. are underselling their data, particularly the stuff from Eastern Europe.

I'm of the opinion that the steppe or Kurgan PIE model works just fine, and also not surprised by the ancient DNA evidence pointing to a massive expansion of people from the western steppe during the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age. So for me, the really big news in this paper is that the only two Eastern European forager samples belong to basal lineages of Y-chromosome haplogroups R1a and R1b. What this suggests, Id' say, is that ancient Eastern Europe was a key bifurcation region for R1.

Remarkably, it's possible to basically lay out the history and phylogeny of R1a in Europe using just three R1a samples from the paper. This can't be a coincidence.

- Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherer from Karelia: R1a (xM198)

- Late Neolithic Corded Ware pastoralist from Germany: R1a (M198, M417, xZ282)

- Late Bronze Age Urnfielder from Germany: R1a (M198, M417, Z282, Z280)

What we can see there is the progression from a basal R1a in pre-Neolithic Northeastern Europe to a derived R1a in late prehistoric Central Europe. The derived R1a is actually R1a1a1b1a2, which is by far the most common subclade of R1a in Europe today, and closely related to the Asian and Indo-Iranian-specific R1a1a1b2.

Interestingly, all seven of the Yamnaya males sampled by Haak et al., mostly from the Samara Valley, belong to R1b-M269, the most common subclade of R1b today. However, five belong to the West Asian-specific R1b-Z1203, but none to the West European-specific R1b-M412. Also, all nine Yamnaya samples show Near Eastern admixture, described in the paper as Armenian-like.

Does this perhaps mean that the Proto-Indo-Europeans (and thus Yamnaya) originated in the Near East, as per the Armenian Plateau hypothesis?

I doubt it. The aforementioned Eastern European R1b forager is also from the Samara Valley, and he clearly lacks Near Eastern admixture. So what are the chances that a Near Eastern population with a frequency of R1b-M269 of around 100% moved into an area of Eastern Europe where a more basal R1b was already present, and in fact in a population with no Near Eastern ancestry? Very slim, I'd say.

So how did the Yamnaya herders acquire their Near Eastern admixture? The answer is obvious if we look at their mtDNA haplogroups. These include H, T and W, all of which might have come to Eastern Europe from the Near East.

Of course this doesn't mean that the Eastern European steppe was overrun by Near Eastern Amazons. It's generally accepted that during the Neolithic the steppe was settled by farmers from the Near East, just like much of the rest of Europe, and I'd say that it was mostly the women from these groups who were incorporated into the later pastoralist societies of the steppe. The men, who probably belonged to Near Eastern haplogroups like G or T, might have been killed or marginalized in some way, so that their reproductive success was seriously hampered.

This is not a far fetched scenario. Typical hunter-gatherer Y-haplogroups like I2 and C6 have already been recorded alongside Near Eastern-specific mtDNA lineages at several Neolithic sites in Western and Central Europe. The social mechanisms for this might have been different there than on the steppe, but in any case, it seems that European hunter-gatherer males shacking up with farm girls of largely Near Eastern ancestry was not an unusual occurrence back in the day.

Now, if Eastern Europe was indeed a bifurcation hotspot for R1, then a large proportion, or even the majority of R1a and R1b in Eurasia today, might well be of Eastern European origin. If so, there should be some support for this in genome-wide DNA of present-day Asians, and indeed I think there is.

Below are a couple of principal component analyses (PCA). The first is from Haak et al. and the second from my own West Eurasia K8 analysis (see here). Unfortunately, I don't yet have access to the Yamnaya genomes, but I think it's petty easy to guesstimate where they will land on my plot when I run them in the K8. I marked this spot with an X.



Note that most of the Near Eastern and Caucasian populations are clearly shifted east towards ANE, and also up towards Europe. Moreover, I'd say many of these groups are specifically pushing up towards the Volga-Ural samples and thus the Yamnaya herders.

There's really no other way to explain this outcome. Quite simply, the vast majority of West Asians have relatively recent (post-Neolithic?) ancestry from the Ural or Kazakh steppe, which manifests itself as a west to east cline on PCA, running from the southern Levant to the north Caucasus. This result is easily reproduced on any decent PCA with West Eurasian populations, and can be seen on the Haak et al. plot.

I'm yet to find solid evidence that Indo-European speakers from the Near East, like Armenians, Kurds and Iranians, don't harbor fairly significant ancestry from this northeastern source.

For instance, unlike many people, I don't find unsupervised ADMIXTURE analyses very convincing when they show these groups to be entirely of Near Eastern ancestry. That's because when ADMIXTURE creates a modern Near Eastern/West Asian cluster, it usually lumps within it all of the ancient ancestral components that are today ubiquitous in the Near East. In other words, the steppe admixture which shows up amongst most West Asians on the PCA above is classified as native to the Near East, even though this is unlikely to be true.

See also...

High female mobility in Bronze Age Europe

Ust'-Ishim belongs to K-M526

594 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   401 – 594 of 594
Marnie said...

@Krefter,

"Americans have the day off today. Suckers!!!!"

Gee, "Krefter", it's nice to know you have such a great positive attitude.

Krefter said...

The Lusatian individual from around 1000BC is one of the most interesting samples.

Wikpedia says Lusatian is descended of Corded ware, likely ancestral to Slavs, and connected to Urnfield(IE), Nordic Bronze age(Germanic?), and Hallstatt(Celtic?). He had typical Balto-Slavic R1a-Z280. Add to this two of the German Urnfield samples from 1000BC had R1a.

Surprisingly he can be fit as a simple Yamna+LBK_EN mix. He appears to be significantly more ENF and less WHG than modern Balto-Slavs.

This leaves room for the possibility that admixture with heavy WHG/SHG-types by the Baltic sea and people movements down south raised WHG in northeast Europe.

Marnie said...

@Krefter

"Wikpedia says Lusatian is descended of Corded ware, likely ancestral to Slavs, and connected to Urnfield(IE), Nordic Bronze age(Germanic?), and Hallstatt(Celtic?). He had typical Balto-Slavic R1a-Z280. Add to this two of the German Urnfield samples from 1000BC had R1a."

I do agree that the German samples in this paper are interesting. From them, quite a lot can be inferred about population processes in and around Germany.

But the inferences being made from the Samara samples are not supported by sufficient sampling in regions and cultures likely to be connected with Samara.

I am fed up with repeating this over and over.

Given your continued avoidance of the evidence, it seems wilful that you continue not to entertain the idea that it is at least possible that the origin of the Samara Culture is somewhere in Eastern Europe, including, possibly, in the Balkans.

Marnie said...

@Roy King

"This result also might suggest a South Mediterranean route to the Cardial Neolithic and the R1b1 samples found at Els Trocs."

Roy, that's interesting.

Unknown said...

That was l23 marnie. Get it right before you act up. It's looking like that will be moving to Yamnaya.

Bmac? What? You're not gonna give up, are you? R1b isn't from Iran, and Yamnaya isn't very near eastern.

Unknown said...

That was l23 marnie. Get it right before you act up. It's looking like that will be moving to Yamnaya.

Bmac? What? You're not gonna give up, are you? R1b isn't from Iran, and Yamnaya isn't very near eastern.

pnuadha said...

@Mike

Pardon the simplicity of the argument , Colin. Spell out your interpretation ?

I can't keep restating the obvious or addressing irrelevant bits; it just kills the fun of coming here.

Put more value on r1b1 being found in hunter gatherer from samara than a farmer from spain. The later has a LOT more mixed ancestry.

pnuadha said...

@RichardRocca

http://www.r1b.org/imgs/Z2103_Yamnaya.png

awesome map, do you think you could include asia? I want to see the if the samara type dna is in the altai and northern china.

Marnie said...

@Chad

"That was l23 marnie."

?

"Get it right before you act up. It's looking like that will be moving to Yamnaya."

?

Chad, I see that many on the Anthrogenica forum agree that it is unlikely that Samara is the "source" for R1b hgs.

"Get it right" ?

You mean, it's not "right" to point out that at least a few of the archaeological dates for regions near Samara don't jibe with your R1B SAMARA ORIGIN theory or the "mass migration" in the title.

Anyway, don't mind me.

However, the Journal Nature might be interested in some of my concerns about the over selling in this paper, as well as the fact that it was pre-announced by Ewen Callaway, before officially being published.

For anyone else who wants to join me in writing to Nature, here's the URL with contact information:

http://www.nature.com/authors/author_resources/about_npg.html

pnuadha said...

You mean, it's not "right" to point out that at least a few of the archaeological dates for regions near Samara don't jibe with your R1B SAMARA ORIGIN theory or the "mass migration" in the title.

Frankly I find it rude. Why the urge to "point out" what YOU think is wrong?

Volodymyr Lutsyk said...

"I would be intrigued to know why you think this culture is associated with R1b hgs"
It's not my personal opinion. They attribute the forager to this culture in the study.
"The individual we refer to as ‘Samara hunter-gatherer’
I0124/SVP44 (5640-5555 calBCE, Beta-392490)
is an adult male from grave 1 in a Neolithic-Eneolithic settlement producing artifacts from the
Elshanka, Samara, and Repin cultures. The specific site is Lebyazhinka IV, on the Sok River,
Samara oblast, Russia. (‘Neolithic’ here refers to the presence of ceramics, not to
domesticated animals or plants.) The radiocarbon date of this individual, based on a femur, is
centuries before the appearance of domesticated animals in the middle Volga region.
Lebyazhinka IV and the neighboring Lebyazhinka V site were occupied seasonally by
multiple cultures between 7000-3500 BCE; a few graves were found in the settled areas." [P. 55 of PDF file "Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe"].
Info on Elshanskaya Culture: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%BB%D1%88%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%82%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B0

Marnie said...

@Volodymyr Lutsyk

Thanks for digging that up. Seems like the authors of this paper need to do a little more comparative archaeology before making some of their grander assertions.

The conference on Balkan pottery was September 2014, so it's not unreasonable to expect that one of the 20+ authors on the paper would have checked this. Actually, from earlier posts on this blog, Brandt at least seemed to have a different view that what made it into the abstract of the Haak et al paper.

Again, Volodymyr, thanks for taking the time to post.

Marnie said...

@Colin

"Frankly I find it rude. Why the urge to "point out" what YOU think is wrong?"

Colin, try not to let royal privilege get in the way of your brain . . . and I'm telling you that not from my American side, but from my Canadian Scots side (also on the Ragman Rolls.)

:)

pnuadha said...

Ok, so you're not going to answer the question but throw out another insult.

Marnie said...

@Colin

It's dumb to even have to entertain such questions, but my intention here is not to be rude.

And I've even read some of your books and thought they were pretty good.

:)

pnuadha said...

I think you're just expecting people to have an explanation that predicts every single detail out there. For you to criticize people on this basis and tell them they are wrong is dishonest IMO.

Thats not the way to move foreword.

Marnie said...

@Colin

"I think you're just expecting people to have an explanation that predicts every single detail out there. For you to criticize people on this basis and tell them they are wrong is dishonest IMO."

No, I am not expecting people to predict every single detail . . . just expecting people to not make claims that carelessly distort the record of the past for years to come.

Colin, my husband and I are home from work today, doing housework. My husband, the one with the Greek Macedonian parents, has a request:

"I've lost my marbles. Regarding my lost marbles, would you kindly return them from the British Museum. I need to sell them to pay off the loans [to the Germans.] Or, alternatively, you can transfer them directly to the Germans as collateral."

:)

pnuadha said...

glad your in a good mood today. it means you can't be trolled easily.

Marnie said...

Must be getting late there. Am siging off for now. Have a good evening.

Unknown said...

@ Colin welling
"Gotta be honest, this reasoning makes no sense. It's also surpassing to hear this type of language from you."

What is it about phylogeography which offends you ? The discipline itself ; or merely your lack of knowledge about it ? Or is it simply a case of you finding the fact that R* ultimately dervived from South-central Asia unpalatable ?

jackson_montgomery_devoni said...

So EHG is not a composite component made up of WHG and ANE alleles? It is a distinct component on it's own?

Unknown said...

The "Neolithic" in Russia was an odd one . No actual farming and domesticated animals ; but rather there is the arrival of ceramics from further East.

David nothing which u state proves that R1b originated in EE.
Malta boy's line likely became extinct ; and his was just one of many radiations of K derived ; ANE rich groups from central Asia toward the North
The Mesolithic was a major discontinuity cf Palaeolithic. Settlement contracted to the Ukrainian refugium; and likely others around Lake Ur & Van; and the Mesolithic groups repopulated the EE & pre-Ural plain from the south, now with radically different economy; switching from big game hunting to more foraging and hunting smaller animals (eg deer).

When u think about the above 3 points ; the centrality and stability of EE as a demographic source wanes considerably

Davidski said...

Mike,

Even if R1b arrived in the Samara Valley from east of the Urals, this doesn't mean that the Yamnaya R1b isn't native to Eastern Europe, and it doesn't contradict my claim that Eastern Europe was a hotspot of R1 bifurcation.

Jackson,

The formal stats in the paper suggest that EHG is an unadmixed population, but nevertheless intermediate between WHG and ANE.

However, to me this seems rather unlikely, and the authors suggest that in fact all of the ancient norther Eurasian groups - WHG, EHG and ANE - might be mixed with each other, which makes more sense.

In any case, the paper isn't concerned too much with the phylogeny of EHG, probably because it's a subject for future work with more relevant ancient samples.

Marnie said...

@Mike

I agree that the Ukraine, Lake Ur and Lake Van (and other sites) were likely refuge sites in the Mesolithic.

But what about this?

http://www.archaeological.org/fieldnotes/reports/14099

"Since the main scope of our research was the recovery of hunter-gatherer sites, the first surveys were undertaken in a few areas where small water basins were known to the local villagers, starting from an altitude of some 1000 m upward. Forty years of research in the Italian Alps have shown that Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers preferred to settle close to passes of easy access, along the shores of small basins of glacial origin, and at altitudes ranging from ca. 1000 to 2500 m. According to these premises, and mindful of the presence of Middle Palaeolithic artifacts recovered around Samarina from the top of the right terraces of the Samariniòtikos by J. Nandris in the 1960s, in October 2001 a first visit was paid to a small, shallow lake located just above Smixi, at some 1250m of altitude where a few typical Levallois flakes obtained from a light grey variety of chert were collected from the surface not far from the lake shore."

In Samarina, a village at a major pass between Epiros and Thessaly, these archaeologists found not only Middle Paleolithic evidence, but also some evidence of sporadic Mesolithic occupation.

I don't get why no one thinks that the Balkans were not a refuge during the Mesolithic.

Unknown said...

Dave
I said "East " (ie Central Asia); "not East of urals ". But I take ur point that R1b might well have developed in EE. But R* in general rose far to the southeast.

Marnie
Few papers have mentioned the balkans as a refuge ; but mostly genetic papers taking about Hg I. Problem is you need to differentiate LGM from the Mesolithic which followed
Unlike ukraine and cantabria; there is little if any evidence for settlements in the northwestern balkans - where roots I argues Hg I took cover . Even in the later Mesolithic period; there are few sites; apart from a few sea side site in Greece and the ones u mentioned ; as well as the danube gorge Region of Serbia

Thus, at least according to traditional archaeology, there mus have been significant colonisation of the Balkans during the Neolithic .
Problem is ; there is no clear land trail: NW anatolia; thrace and eastern macedonia have few neolithic sites compared to the Greek South and western Macedonia .

Ryan said...

So I'll confess I haven't been able to 100% keep up with this but could explain this to me. According to the paper:

1) The most basal R1b found so far is from Spain.

2) The most basal R1a found so far is from eastern Turkey.

3) Therefor they both must be from the Ukraine? (I'd note the paper itself only raises the possibility, but others seem to be taking this more firmly).

I think that's making a bit of a leap.

I do think this study gives pretty compelling evidence that:

A) R1b1a2a1-M412 spread from eastern Europe, either up the Danube in the early Neolithic with a secondary expansion with the Bell Beakers out of central Europe, or with the original Indo-Europeans. (I think the former is more likely but I don't think this paper is conclusive one way or the other).

B) R-M417 spread from eastern Europe, likely with Indoeuropean languages. Likely M198 as a whole did.

"I doubt it. The aforementioned Eastern European R1b forager is also from the Samara Valley, and he clearly lacks Near Eastern admixture. So what are the chances that a Near Eastern population with a frequency of R1b-M269 of around 100% moved into an area of Eastern Europe where a more basal R1b was already present, and in fact in a population with no Near Eastern ancestry? Very slim, I'd say."

The Early Neolithic farmer from Spain with R1b has no discernible ANE ancestry. Either R1b came from near eastern EEF ancestry or from indigenous hunter gatherers. Either way, one cannot say that R1 is purely an ANE marker.

Could this be the result of the choice of reference populations though? Mammoths spread pretty far west. If WHG was already partially ANE in origin would that show up in this?

Keep in mind too that some of the models in section 8 of the paper suggest that there may be more than one type of ANE at work in Europe - possibly some that clusters with Karitiana more than MA-1, or that is equally distant to both, so MA-1 may not be a perfect proxy for ANE either.

Though I think it's just as likely that R1b spread from either the Near East or the Balkans with the neolithic, as V88 needs to be explained somehow.

Davidski said...

Ryan,

The R1a/R1b EHG foragers show no Near Eastern ancestry and are native to where they were sampled.

On the other hand, the R1b farmer is mixed (because EEF contains WHG, and other stuff too).

This could mean that some late WHG foragers in Western Europe carried R1b from EHG paternal ancestors, but no detectable EHG autosomal admixture, or that some early Neolithic farmers in the Near East carried R1b from Central Asian foragers, but again no detectable autosomal admixture from Central Asia.

The suggestion that the data in this paper support the Near Eastern origin of R1b or R1 simply doesn't make any sense.

Unknown said...

"R1b1a2a1-M412 spread from eastern Europe, either up the Danube in the early Neolithic with a secondary expansion with the Bell Beakers out of central Europe"

Doubt it . During the neolithic ; people were spreading into EE; not out of it

Unknown said...

Dave
"
This could mean that some late WHG foragers in Western Europe carried R1b from EHG paternal ancestors, but no detectable EHG autosomal admixture, or that some early Neolithic farmers in the Near East carried R1b from Central Asian foragers, but again no detectable autosomal admixture from Central Asia."

As per last night''s comments ; this scenario requires a bit leap of faith; but is certainly plausible if we make a case that R1 originated in the Ukrainian refugium; differentiated there to R1a and R1b; and from there R1b groups also moved (all the way) to Spain

Davidski said...

The scenarios I outlined do not require leaps of faith, just a basic understanding of genetics.

Chad said...

Ryan,
There could very well be EHG within WHG and EEF. We don't know yet, but there is a decent chance.
Also, the case for R1b diversifying on the steppes is looking very strong. R-M412, did not go with Neolithic farmers. We have 70 Neolithic samples. None are L23. Not even an L278.

There is a good chance that R1b first arose in Central Asia. There is plenty of time for some to end up in the Near East and get transported to Spain as a pretty ancestral clade. To think that R1b only went one place is ridiculous. Ancestral R1b is found throughout Eurasia. The important part is where L23 to L51 happened. The steppes seem as good a place to look as any.

The point is, that we could find out that both WHG and EEF carry components that were originally spread by R and Q. I'm sure we will be close to the answer in the next year or two.

Grey said...

@Mike Thomas

"When u think about the above 3 points ; the centrality and stability of EE as a demographic source wanes considerably"

Right, in the same way Britain couldn't have colonized America because Britain spent the Ice Age under an ice sheet.

Any significant cultural or technological advance that provides a dramatic advantage can turn a population into a demographic source region for as long as that advantage lasts: farming, herding, horses, the wheel, copper, bronze, iron, industrial revolution etc.

#

"David nothing which u state proves that R1b originated in EE."

What's wrong with your argument is you're effectively saying the default hypothesis should be the one you agree with until an alternative is proved beyond any doubt whereas most people operate on the basis that the default hypothesis should be the one that has the most weight - which is clearly the steppe one.

(as of current data)

Unknown said...

Grey

Whilst the LGM is not particularly relevant to 17th century England ; its pretty damn relevant to Mesolithic europe .

Obviously you're a bit "special" so don't you worry your little head

All you need to remember is that 1 + 1 = 2; and you'll be fine . Stove hot

Krefter said...

@Matt,
"Doubt it . During the neolithic ; people were spreading into EE; not out of it"

Matt are you a Funnel Beaker man brought to the present by scientists at Area 51 who's committing a conspiracy against steppe IEs for taking your peoples' land?

Besides that I can't see why you hate ancient steppe people so much. No matter what the subject is you try your best to degrade them.

Pretty much everything the people you argued against said about steppe people before this paper has been proven correct, yet you still argue the same points.

Unknown said...

Krefter, who's Matt ?

"Besides that I can't see why you hate ancient steppe people so much. No matter what the subject is you try your best to degrade them."

How am I degrading them ? Am I saying they're morons ? or stupid bohemoths ?

Im just following facts. Neolithic EE was a receptacle. Period.

Unknown said...

If you want to argue the Mesolithic mammoth hunters somehow migrated to the Sahara, then I think you need to check your cultic obsession with the Kurgan theory.

Davidski said...

Yes, the paternal descendants of mammoth steppe hunter migrated to the Near East and then to the Sahara.

Many of them have also gone into earth's orbit, and some even landed on the moon. So what?

Chad said...

Mike,
They needn't be mammoth hunters. Just hunters, period. Ancestral R1b is found throughout Eurasia. It is perfectly logical that some pre-v88 guys ended up in West Asia, prior pastoralism going to Africa. I don't think anyone is arguing that all R1b was in the steppes, just that what is ancestral to Z2103 and L51 is likely from the steppes, an has a good chance of always being there. L278, P297, L23*, and Z2103 are in a small part of Yamnaya. Sampling the rest is going to make this place pretty diverse.

Grey said...

@Ryan

"The Early Neolithic farmer from Spain with R1b has no discernible ANE ancestry."

His great grandfather might have been a single steppe dude who somehow hooked up with Levantine farmers taking the maritime route to Iberia. It only takes four generations with EEF women for his great grandson to be 90% EEF and if the first guy was 20% ANE and the EEF women were all zero then his ANE would be down to 2% as well.

Having said that I agree actually that if R1 existed over a very wide range across north Eurasia then the ANE percentage might vary across that range even if the original population all had an equal amount because that part of the original population which ended up on the borders and mixed with their neighbors might end up with less (or more) depending on who their neighbors were in that region.

Marnie said...

@Mike Thomas

"Unlike ukraine and cantabria; there is little if any evidence for settlements in the northwestern balkans - where roots I argues Hg I took cover ."

Yes, it does seem like Hg I has a refuge I Northwestern Balkans.

"Even in the later Mesolithic period; there are few sites; apart from a few sea side site in Greece and the ones u mentioned ; as well as the danube gorge Region of Serbia ""

I find it interesting that this paper was published only last year. I was actually in this part of Greece (Samarina, Mount Voio) at the time of the excavations and virtually every village in that part of Greece had an excavation site.

This work is only being published now, almost ten years later.

I think that the central alpine region of the Southern Balkans has received very little attention, archaeologically.

All the archaeological attention up to now has been placed on the Greek coast.

Most people are not even aware that there is a central Alpine region in the Southern Balkans where there are still wolves, black bears and even rupicapra rupicapra balcanica (Balkan chamois).

Grey said...

@Mike Thomas

Do you accept that regions that have never been demographic sources before can become so if they make a cultural or technological advance that confers a significant advantage?

Unknown said...

Chad

"Just that what is ancestral to Z2103 and L51 is likely from the steppes, an has a good chance of always being there. "

Yes. I wasn;t arguing against that, but rather the notion that all R1b arose in eastern Europe. This is not a sustainable hypothesis. Simply, its not parasiminous to argue that EE was the focal point for widesrpead Eurasian radiation of basal R1b caldes. To me, its geographically, demographicallly, economically and socially more likely to be west-central Asia.

Cladistically, look at where R lies within family K. Look where R2 is. So, its not a huge leap of faith to conclude where R1b began and likely began differentiating.

And my objection does not stem from a bias against eastern European foragers, as Krefter would have it, for I know my descent falls to hunter-foragers too. :)

Unknown said...

I don;t think what we're proposing is necessarily radically too different. Im just shifting the emphasis a little further southeast.

Unknown said...

@ Grey

"@Mike Thomas

Do you accept that regions that have never been demographic sources before can become so if they make a cultural or technological advance that confers a significant advantage?"

Yes of course they can
Maybe in Bronze Age ; certainly not the Mesolithic ; or even neolithic

Mark S said...

About what Chad was saying about Loschbour having EHG; I came across this whilst reading about Ertebolle(I know Ertebolle wasn't in Luxembourg, but maybe of some interest?)

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erteb%C3%B8lle_culture


The EBK pot was made by coil technique, being fired on the open bed of hot coals. It was not like the neighbouring Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and appears related instead to a pottery type that first appears in Europe in the Samara region of Russia c. 7000 cal BC, and spread up the Volga to the Eastern Baltic and then westward along the shore.[4]

Krefter said...

@Mike,
"TO me, its geographically, demogrpahicallly, economically and socially more likely to be west-central Asia"

What about tragicomically :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOrH_oRce4g

Ryan said...

"The suggestion that the data in this paper support the Near Eastern origin of R1b or R1 simply doesn't make any sense."

Just put it out there as a possibility. I don't think we can distinguish between the two.

Keep in mind we're talking about a pretty specific part of the Near East too - ie the coastal plain around the Black Sea that's now underwater, or thereabouts. The Bosporus wouldn't have been closed at the time we're dealing with, so the distinction between Eastern Europe and Anatolia would have been nonexistant.

And yah, re: ANE and R1b becoming decoupled - that's precisely my point. Though WHG may have been sufficiently mixed EHG to have been the vector for R1b too (ie R1b was present throughout WHG for some time in lower frequencies).

Even the WHG ancestry is pretty small for the early neolithic Iberian in question though. Need more samples I guess. MOAR. :3

Re: not requiring a lot of faith - Davidski, that's fair enough, but they also don't dispel a lot of skepticism.

And as you see in my post above, I do accept an EE origin for the main R1a and R1b lineages. I don't think it's realistic to think they were confined in the steppe though, so it's not unreasonable to see some lineages as not having come directly from the Ukraine.

Chad said...

Let's wait for the genomes. If we can get Loschbour to look more EHG than something in EEF, then a lot more could be cleared up.

Chad said...

Mark, this would be way older than Ertrebolle. This would be pre-LGM, most likely.

Grey said...

@Mike Thomas

"the notion that all R1b arose in eastern Europe"

I don't think that's the claim (could be wrong).

I'd have thought the logical model for a HG haplogroup like R1b which was spread over a very wide range is that it would initially be split up into lots of little clades.

It's only when one of those little sub-groups develops some advantage or other and expands that its particular clade becomes a bigger deal (and some of the ones they expanded over disappear).

If correct that model is how in theory you can walk back to the source of a particular innovations.

Unknown said...

@Marnie,
"I think that the central alpine region of the Southern Balkans has received very little attention, archaeologically."
Marnie, I agree. Douglass Bailey, an archaeologist at SF State, who published seminal work on Neolithic figurines in the Balkans, told Peter Underhill and me, that the Mesolithic of the Balkans has been totally unexplored for a couple of reasons:
1) The culture-history model of "light out of Orient" privileged the study of the many evident Neolithic tells of the Balkans over the Mesolithic scatters.
2) The archaeology of the Mesolithic is not sexy and has little funding.

Many new Mesolithic sites in the Balkans/Greece are now being discovered including Mesolithic finds in Crete. We know that the Balkans were a refugium for fauna and flora. It is highly like they were also a refugium for hunter-gatherers as well, beyond Franchthi Cave and the Danube Gorge.

Marnie said...

@Chad

"They needn't be mammoth hunters. Just hunters, period. Ancestral R1b is found throughout Eurasia. It is perfectly logical that some pre-v88 guys ended up in West Asia, prior pastoralism going to Africa."

Well, even for Clovis, the idea of specialized Mammoth hunters has been pretty much put to bed.

Regarding many R1b sites during the Mesolithic, mammoths are out.

Much of the rock art in R1b expansion hot spots seems to associated with different types of sheep and chamois:

Ughtasar:
http://www.ughtasarrockartproject.org/

http://ughtasarrockartproject.org/wpimages/wpc532bf1c_06.png

Elangash (Altai)
http://www.rupestre.net/tracce/1-11/bre13a.gif

Kazahkstan (see wild sheep rock art about 3/4rds of way into video)
http://www.linearpopulationmodel.blogspot.com/2015/02/kurgans-and-solar-alignment-structures.html

As I said in the above post, there are native chamois in the Balkans. And it appears that both capra ibex and capra aegagrus once existed in the Balkan peninsula:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13364-012-0094-9#page-1

Capra aegragrus is also native to Armenia and has been found at several late epi-paleolithic sites in Armenia.

Chad said...

If EHG was in the Balkans, the farmers would be loaded with that, instead of WHG. Above and beyond what might be in WHG was certainly well east of the Balkans.

KO1 in Hungary had ZERO EHG. It's not from the Balkans.

Marnie said...

@Roy

"Marnie, I agree. Douglass Bailey, an archaeologist at SF State, who published seminal work on Neolithic figurines in the Balkans, told Peter Underhill and me, that the Mesolithic of the Balkans has been totally unexplored for a couple of reasons:
1) The culture-history model of "light out of Orient" privileged the study of the many evident Neolithic tells of the Balkans over the Mesolithic scatters.
2) The archaeology of the Mesolithic is not sexy and has little funding."

Well, Roy, that's a pretty juicy piece of info. I guess I will be talking to Douglass Bailey in pretty short order. And you're right about funding. Even professors at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki are crippled in their work by a lack of funding.

Anyway, Roy, that's pretty amazing. My husband's village is actually less than ten miles from the Samarina site.

My first impression of the place when I first went there in 2002: Tyrolia or parts of Switzerland. Even the cows look like cows from the Alps.

Marnie said...

@Chad

"If EHG was in the Balkans, the farmers would be loaded with that, instead of WHG. Above and beyond what might be in WHG was certainly well east of the Balkans. "

There's a lot of genetic variability in the Balkans. I don't think that R1b is strongly associated with a particular autosomal profile.

There could be R1b rich populations in Armenia and the Caucasus that have a profile that is autosomally EHG rich, and at the same time, R1b rich populations in the Balkans might have had more "WHG" or "farmer" ancestry. We don't know because we don't have much ancient DNA from the Balkans, and none from the Central Southern Balkans.

"KO1 in Hungary had ZERO EHG. It's not from the Balkans."

Again, I don't think that EHG is necessarily the universal signature for early R1b populations.

Chad said...

R1b isn't from the Balkans. You'll run into all kinds of problems with aDNA, yDNA, and archaeology, doing that. There's nothing that ties the Balkans to the Samara culture. You're grasping at straws and disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing.

Chad said...

The main thing here is the diversity on the steppe and stuff closely related to L51 being in Yamnaya. No logical person throws that out as unimportant.

You're obviously not paying attention to the conversation about EHG, that could tie it all together. I'm not going over it again and again.

Marnie said...

@Chad

You're the one doggedly pressing for the Steppe only origin.

I'm not even disagreeing that there is a Steppe connection for R1b and R1a, just saying that R1b and R1a seem to have different zones of expansion, including the Southern Balkans for R1b.

I'm not into the conversation about EHG? Where is EHG centered? In which pop and in which time periods?

Note, I'm not engaging in a character assignation the way you are. Just asking you a few questions and trying to make an argument for considering something other than *only* the Steppe as a zone of expansion for R1a and R1b.

Chad said...

I didn't press the steppe origin only. Go back and read what I've posted today. Paying attention is key.
As for character assassination, don't even go there. You're the one on here and on your blog bad mouthing me and telling lies. Grow up!

Marnie said...

@Chad,

I read your earlier comments and you seem to have changed your position on Samara in the last few days. OK.

Could you tell me where is EHG centered? In which pop and in which time periods? Since you seem to think that R1b has a strong association with EHG.

Again, I'm just pointing out that it is odd that you don't consider the Central Southern Balkans as a zone of expansion for R1b, for the following reasons:

Similar ecozones between the central southern Balkans, Armenia, Kazahkstan, the Altai, Italy, and the Pyrenees, which are all known locations today and in the past for rupricapra rupricapra (chamois), ibex, and capra aegagrus.

Moreover, rock art sites in Armenia, the Altai and Kazahkstan indicate that these species were often hunted.

Regarding you comment about "WHG" or "EHG" in the Balkans, it suggests that you might know very much about the diversity of cultures in the Balkans.

Unknown said...

I agree with marnie and Ryan
The spread of R1b toward near East has likely tondo with pastoralist strategies from the southern caspian corridor rather than hunters from eastern europe forst zone

Marnie said...

@Mike Thomas

Thank you.

That paper I posted on the ibex and capra agragrus gives us a big hint about the interaction between the Balkans and Armenia.

capra agragrus appears to have been introduced into the Balkans in the Neolithic.

Marnie said...

@Mike Thomas

capra aegagrus and ibex paper:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13364-012-0094-9#page-1

"C. aegagrus constituted an exotic in Europe. Man introduced it to insular and mainland Greece (between 35–40° N and 19–26° E) from around 8600 and 7000 BC, respectively. It went extinct on the mainland probably before 6000 BC."

. . . which is pretty significant when you look at the distribution of R1b1a2* or M269(xL23)

http://linearpopulationmodel.blogspot.com/2015/01/r1b1a2-or-m269xl23.html

Chad said...

What position changed? I've said for a long time that R1b is from Central Asia, and that there could be two routes for it. One group to the south and West Asia, another, which leads to L23* goes to the steppes. I based that on V88. It looks like two separate branches. Not only that, those timeframes stressed by Nirjhar are totally out of line with the fact that Iran was Neolithic by 8000BCE, and into Turkmenistan by 6500BCE, and crossing the Caucasus in 6000BCE. It doesn't match up. I won't deny that there could also be some R1b jumping across the Caucasus, before the Neolithic. I won't rule that out. However, the separation of L23 branches from V88 suggests a long separation, and that European and West Asian L23 likely have their origin to the steppe region.

As for EHG, I've said that I don't think it is one thing, but probably two. Obviously, with only two samples like it, we don't have much to go by. However, I think this is the one that is important to Europe. I don't see a homogenous group stretching from near Finland to South Central Asia. They are probably related through a UP that makes up most of the shared ancestry. Probably, via that R* lineage. We need UP samples to make any kind of inference. It's just speculation right now.

Chad said...

Just for clarity here, I think MA-1 and EHG have different out groups, but share a hell of a lot.

capra internetensis said...

Okay, some interesting suggestions are being thrown around here, but it is hard to follow what is meant.

R1b is a haplogroup that probably originated around 20 000 years ago, around the Last Glacial Maximum. Since then numerous subclades of R1b have arisen and had very different histories.

So please can people specify which clade of R1b they are talking about? Mike, if you say R1b spread to the Near East via South Caspian pastoralists, are you talking about all R1b? R1b-M269? R1b-L23? If R1b spread from the steppe or the Balkans, which R1b are we talking about?

Chad makes clear which clades he is talking about, and I agree with him that present evidence suggests they spread into Europe from the Yamnaya region, or at least from some related culture nearby.

On the other hand we don't know where L23 ultimately originated, much less R1b itself. Which should not be a controversial position, since the study itself says the same thing.

Ryan said...

So we've talked about the Y DNA at some length. What about the mtDNA? I noticed C1g in the mtDNA for our Karelian HG friend. C1 is mostly a Native American haplogroup today isn't it? Not familiar with that subclade though. I recall C4 being found in some early kurgans too, which is another group found in North America (and Siberia, NE Asia, E Asia).

Any thoughts? They couldn't tell if EHG is closer to Karitiana or MA-1, or if he was equidistant between the two. Any bets on which?

Marnie said...

Here is what I am talking about:

R1b1a2* or M269(xL23)

with nexus in the Southern Balkans, but also fanning out to the Southern Caucasus, Poland, Italy, Anatolia and perhaps the Altai.

That's what the Myres paper says, anyway.

http://linearpopulationmodel.blogspot.com/2015/01/r1b1a2-or-m269xl23.html


Next step:

L23 (xM412) fans out to the Caucasus, the Steppe, the Alps, Poland again.

So I think the expansion from M269 to L23 is from the Southern Balkans fanning out both east and west, baste on the Myres paper data.

http://linearpopulationmodel.blogspot.com/2015/01/r1b-l23xm412.html

This could have changed with more sampling.

The existence of very early R1b in Iberia indicates that R1b could have been sloshing around in these Alpine zones all the way between Iberia (maybe even the Atlas mountains) and the Altai for quite a long time.

I don't know how old the R1b-R1a split is, but the introduction of C. aegagrus at 10,600 BP in the Balkans suggests that the R1b-R1a split is older than 10,000 years ago.

Marnie said...

Here's a nice map of Europe, about 20,000 years ago:

http://www.diercke.de/bilder/omeda/501/100770_101_2.jpg

http://www.diercke.de/kartenansicht.xtp?artId=978-3-14-100751-0&stichwort=Altmensch&fs=1

Note the light green "tundra" zones running down the spine of Italy and the Balkans, across the southern lip of the Black Sea into the Zagros.

Along the eastern edge of the Alps, you can see a path through Austria, running up to Poland.

There is a narrow wedge of tundra running along the southern edge of the Alps that connects Italy to Southern France to the Pyrenees.

These tundra zones seem to have a loose connection with R1b rich pops.

Again, I'm not necessary suggesting that R1* was in Western Europe during the Ice Age, just that R1b seems to be connected with the southern regions of this tundra zone, possibly because of their propensity to hunt or herd the ibex/capra/chamois.

Marnie said...

@Mike Thomas

"I'd fall back to a more generalised "circum-Ponto-Caspian" one "

sounds good to me.

our problem with understanding the spread of R1b is a problem with understanding the mobility of shepherd's.

Even today, a few shepherd's in Greece regularly move their herd's up and down the Eastern Edge of the Pindos Range more than a hundred miles. They have a winter and summer pasture.

They use trucks now, but only a hundred year ago, it was all walking. I've even met a Sarakatsanoi shepherd who told me he regularly herded over a range of about two hundred miles. His wife would sometimes go with him.

So I think these people must have been on the move all the time, moving their herds to "greener pastures."

Here's a youtube video on some of the last remaining nomadic shepherd's in Greece, the Sarakatsanoi. It's in Greek, no subtitles!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTzA76Df2X0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOaAZoBXH18

Unknown said...

I was talking about M343 being Central Asian, where it likely differentiated into multiple sub-clades

Where P297 began is more difficult to state . Whilst some of the guys here are confident in their proposals of the steppe; I'd fall back to a more generalised "circum-Ponto-Caspian" one.

If you consider the Samaran steppe and lands to its south as one geographical unit; then the equation of 'north vs south' becomes redundant .

This area was sharing genes from earlier, more basal Clades to later, more derived ones

(corrected typo)

Tobus said...

@Ryan: They couldn't tell if EHG is closer to Karitiana or MA-1

I thought it was pretty clear that EHG is closer to MA-1 than to Karitiana.

Unknown said...

"Where P297 began is more difficult to state"

In my opinion, probably West Asia. R-P297 & R-M269, separate and distinct from African R-V88, are present in the pygmies of central Africa, the Khoisan, and nearby populations, and are found alongside other Y DNA markers from West Asia in these populations [eg. G, J, T, etc.] which are likely not recent entrants.

Unknown said...

Certainly that was my initial opinion simply by following the phylogeography of the 3 main clades of M269 (ie V88, M 335, P-297). I know such approaches have pitfalls, which is perhaps why Lord Colin Welling got his panties in a twist when I mentioned it.

Given their distributions, and your remarks, it makes geographic sense that West Asia is the origin of R1b-343, at the very least.

But never understimate the migratory power of Mesolithic nut gatherers from Volgaristan, qho colonized much of the globe but could barely survive in their own homeland !

(Its a joke Krefter)

Davidski said...

Bell Beaker blogger has made the North Eurasian connection, like all sensible people.

http://bellbeakerblogger.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/r1-and-dispersal-of-ceramic-from-far.html

But he's still infatuated with West Asia, it seems, like many here, and wants to see it as a secondary expansion point for R1 into Europe.

R, R1,R1a and R1b are markers of the northern man. The fact that this northern man got around, in more ways than one, doesn't change the location of his homeland.

Unknown said...

Perhaps ; but "northern man's" roots lie in South Asia care of haplogroup K.

R* probably arose around the Indus- Caspian region, and from there spread north and west.

Unknown said...

@ Marnie

"@Mike Thomas

"Unlike ukraine and cantabria; there is little if any evidence for settlements in the northwestern balkans - where roots I argues Hg I took cover ."

Yes, it does seem like Hg I has a refuge I Northwestern Balkans."

I mistyped. I stated that it was the author- Rootsi - who has argued that haplgroup I took refuge in the Balkans. But as Roy points out, that period in the Balkans, and into the Mesolithic, has not been studied much, and currently there is little direct proof for a Balkan refuge; a situation which will probably change in the future.

But in any case, the current eastern - European - Balkan branch of Hg I (M438) looks very young and recently expanded- undoubtedly a 'proto-Slavic' clade which is found in significant proportions as far as Belarus. My guess is it expanded from the middle Danube region or east-Carpathian- middle Dnieper region. The more westerly direction is suggested by the fact most other sublades within I2a appear to have a distinctly western orientation (ie are found in Britain, Alps-Rhine region, Sardinia, etc), as well as more distantly, to "Scandinavian" I1.)

Nirjhar007 said...

@Chad
'' Not only that, those timeframes stressed by Nirjhar are totally out of line with the fact that Iran was Neolithic by 8000BCE, and into Turkmenistan by 6500BCE, and crossing the Caucasus in 6000BCE.''
Jarmo Moved Into Urals From Zagros area around 6000 BC and from Before from the route East of the Caspian and Maykop Intruded Samara area Via Caucasian route, the Yamnaya aDNA is majorly post 4000 BC.
It Is quite impossible to point Which migration brought which Y-DNA in a definite way i think....

Nirjhar007 said...

@Chad
Also Stock-breeding was not an invention of the Yamnaya people. They learnt it from the west Siberian tribes, their eastern neighbours, and it was of Central-Asiatic, Iranian derivation.
Also read this Book-
//Hunters in Transition: Mesolithic Societies of Temperate Eurasia and Their Transition to Farming// by G. Matyushin

Marnie said...

@Mike Thomas

"But in any case, the current eastern - European - Balkan branch of Hg I (M438) looks very young and recently expanded- undoubtedly a 'proto-Slavic' clade which is found in significant proportions as far as Belarus. My guess is it expanded from the middle Danube region or east-Carpathian- middle Dnieper region. The more westerly direction is suggested by the fact most other sublades within I2a appear to have a distinctly western orientation (ie are found in Britain, Alps-Rhine region, Sardinia, etc), as well as more distantly, to "Scandinavian" I1.)"

All the more reason to have a second look at the preponderance of R1b found in Sarakatsanoi and Vlach Shepherd's found in the Balkans.

Personally, I don't buy into the displacement theory of I in the Balkans or a late introduction of I in the Balkans.

The Balkans is a huge place, three times the size of Italy. During the Ice Age and Mesolithic, it would have had a huge habitable alpine zone full of game animals and plenty of water.

So it does not make any sense at all to think that all of the I and R rich pops in the Balkans suddenly appeared from somewhere else in the Neolithic.

There's just an overwhelming amount of evidence that R1b (and I, G and J lineages) occupied the southern Alpine zones of Europe, Anatolia, the Caucasus, Armenia, Iran and even Pakistan. R seems to have had a thing for sheep and goats.

Apparently, the idea that R1b's ancestors were alpine shepherds isn't groovy enough for you guys.

The historical record does matter and does have huge political implications. I don't consider it a trivial matter to be toyed around with by a few people who have an Invaders-On-Horse-Drawn-Chariots fixation.

Marnie said...

@Nirjhar

"Also Stock-breeding was not an invention of the Yamnaya people. They learnt it from the west Siberian tribes, their eastern neighbours, and it was of Central-Asiatic, Iranian derivation. "

I do think this is where the idea of stock breeding came from - Iran-Anatolia-Armenia.

Nirjhar007 said...

@Marnie
'' R seems to have had a thing for sheep and goats.''
There is a thing to note on the book i suggested to Chad on Page 138 we get informed that-
''the geometric microliths and points found in the mesolithic sites of the southern Urals are identical with the inventory of the remains found in Belt Cave, Hotu, Shanidar B, Karim Shahir, Zawi Chemi Shanidar, Jarmo and other sites in southwestern Asia - the area of the origin of domestication during the tenth to eighth millennium bc.''
At p.124, Dolukhanov writes about the cave sites at Dam-Dam-Cheshma 1 and 2, and Dzhebel in Western Turkmenistan (east of the Caspian sea, as already said), that their Mesolithic assemblages belonged, according to Korobkova, to two kinds of industries: one related to the Belt and Hotu caves, one to the Zarzian. The Zarzian again, confirming what was said by Sergent. So, we have a route going from the northern Zagros to the South Caspian to the East Caspian to the southern Urals. A route followed by Mesolithic hunters, but in the same sites we often find later domesticated goats and sheep. And, as observed by Matyushin at p.141:
''Taking into account that wild sheep are absent from the Urals and the surrounding areas, and that their region of origin was northern Mesopotamia and northern Iran, it can be assumed that stockbreeding was introduced to the Urals from Iran and the southern shores of the Caspian. The introduction of the 'southern' stockbreeding elements may date well back into the Mesolithic, possibly to the date of the appearance of the geometric microliths (ninth to seventh millennia bc).''
Though the table that he gives at p.143, ovicaprids are attested in South Urals only a short time before 6000 BC.

Ryan said...

@Nirjhar007

Davidski himself provided some of the best explanations for this just a year ago too. http://eurogenes.blogspot.ca/2014_01_01_archive.html

He suggested the spread of haplogroups R and Q were tied to the dispersal of microblade technology from around Lake Baikal and included this figure: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o3EYTdM8lQb1JScVI1TXpxaTA/edit

Notice the dispersals to Karelia, the Pontic Steppe, and to Guran in the Zagros mountains of Iran!

I definitely think a Baikal->Zagros->Ukraine route is plausible. I don't think we can distinguish between that and a Baikal->Ukraine/Karelia route though based on the available data. The R1a* in Kurdistan could be from a parallel dispersal and not necessarily the ancestor of R1a1.

@Tobus - I'm referring to the phylogenic relationship. Obviously Karitiana has a whole bunch of East Asian DNA that pushes them away from WHG/EHG quite a bit.

Take a look at figure 8.6 onward for example. They don't seem to have been able to construct a clean relationship between MA-1, Karitiana and WHG/EHG.

Marnie said...

@Nirjhar

Sounds fascinating. I'm going to try to order the book tonight and will have more to say in the coming week.

Marnie said...

The Siksika (Blackfoot), Cheyenne, Assiniboine, Hidatsa, and Mandans hunted Bighorn Sheep (Ovis canadensis) and Mountain Goats (Oreamnos americanus).

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=4362

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=4054

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=4274

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=4275

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=3878

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=4271

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=4477


Mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_goat

Bighorn Sheep (Ovis Canadensis):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bighorn_sheep

Bighorn Sheep range:
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/rocky-mountain-bighorn-sheep/

Unknown said...

Nirjhar,
You can't link that with Samara R1b. They had no Near Eastern ancestry and pre-date farming and animals by 1000 years.

Marnie said...

Ibex range:

http://www.scirecordbook.org/siberian-ibex/

Marnie said...

Capra aegagrus range:

http://www.lhnet.org/bezoar-wild-goat/

Krefter said...

@Davidski,
"R, R1,R1a and R1b are markers of the northern man. The fact that this northern man got around, in more ways than one, doesn't change the location of his homeland."

I was critical about your ideas about MA-1, ANE, and R-Q which mostly came out true, but I still think you're over looking a more complex history of R.

Sure MA-1's R* and Q in NAs suggests both lineages originated in the WHG-ANE-EHG branch but that doesn't mean key P1 lineages could not have originated outside of north Eurasia.

ANE-EHG-WHG ancestry exists in south Asia and west Asia, which leaves room for key moments in P1's history to have occurred there.

Krefter said...

@Marnie
"The historical record does matter and does have huge political implications. I don't consider it a trivial matter to be toyed around with by a few people who have an Invaders-On-Horse-Drawn-Chariots fixation."

No one here sides with massive steppe gene flow into Europe because of fantasies about chariots, etc. It's because it has been PROVEN.

Even after Haak 2015 you guys still act as if a massive migration from the steppe after the Neolithic didn't occur.

Are you afraid of the spread of genes not just ideas?

Unknown said...

Marnie

"Personally, I don't buy into the displacement theory of I in the Balkans or a late introduction of I in the Balkans.

The Balkans is a huge place, three times the size of Italy. During the Ice Age and Mesolithic, it would have had a huge habitable alpine zone full of game animals and plenty of water.

So it does not make any sense at all to think that all of the I and R rich pops in the Balkans suddenly appeared from somewhere else in the Neolithic".

You might be right. At least for I ; it obviously came through Europe via the Balkans . It's just that most current I in the Balkans (re-)expanded recently

I too suspect that at least some R1b also came up via the Balkans. Naturally, I'm sure we're all waiting for aDNA from the balkan Mesolithic, neolithic and bronze ages

It might totally upturn what we think we know

Marnie said...

@Krefter

I'm fed up with your simplistic theory that has no ancient DNA from the Balkans, and very little from Iberia or the Alpine and Sub-Alpine zones of Europe and the Near East.

Given the lack of Archaeology in many parts of the alpine and sub-alpine regions of Europe and the Near East, the very regions which many Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic peoples are likely to have inhabited, a statement like "Massive migration from the steppe" in the title of the paper is not supportable.

I've tried to illustrate to you and the other researchers here (who, by the way, are all posting anonymously, which I'm sure is a violation of your research institute's ethics policy) why some of the assertions in the Haak abstract are "overstated".

Instead of trying to accommodate some of my concerns, as well as others, you instead persist single mindedly with the paper, unchanged. You also insist on anonymously bullying anyone who points out weakness in the central thesis of the paper "Massive migration from the steppe" after the Neolithic.

I'm taking the matter up directly with

Nature,

Harvard,

the University of Adelaide,

the Johannes Gutenburg University of Mainz,

the University of Tubingen,

the Hungarian Academy of Science,

Stockholm Univeristy,

State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt and State Heritage Museum,

Universidad Autonoma de Madrid,

Cultural Heritage Foundation Sweden,

Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography RAS St. Petersburg,

the Volga State Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities,

Universidad de Valladolid Spain,

State Office for Cultural Heritage Management Baden-Wurttemberg,

the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig,

and

the Anthropology Department Hartwick College (New York State).

I'll also be informing the AAPA of my concerns and posting the letter online.

Seinundzeit said...

I finally gave the paper a good/detailed read (previously, I just quickly skimmed through the thing, and even skipped certain sections). There is a lot of exceedingly fascinating information to digest, but I found these comments to be quite pertinent, as far as David's K8 test is concerned.

“Next, we added the Karitiana Native Americans, to account for the different relationship between Native Americans to west Eurasian groups, as they share more alleles with MA1 and EHG than with Loschbour. 8). They can, however, be modeled as a 2-way mixture, with successful (|Z|<3) models shown in Fig. S8.9. Thus, for every model we analyzed, our results support ref. 9 that Native Americans are anciently admixed.

In Fig. S8.9a (when MA1 is admixed), Native Americans shown to be a mixture of a population J related to the Onge. Note that this model accounts for the symmetry in the relationship of Native Americans to MA1 and EHG in a different way than that of Fig. S8.6. In Fig. S8.9a, Native American ancestry is more closely related to MA1 than to EHG, however, it is MA1 that derives part of its ancestry from an early node C which “dilutes” its affinity to Native Americans... Fig. S8.9b and Fig. S8.9c present two different solutions (when Loschbour is admixed). Both (b) and (c) agree with (a).”

"The models of Fig. S8.6 have an advantage in postulating that EHG are a mixture of populations related to MA1 and Loschbour, which are actual individuals, while those of Figs S8.10, 11, 12 propose that MA1 or Loschbour are admixed populations, although at present there are no actual individuals that represent some of the admixing populations. Nonetheless, all these models agree on several points: the existence of Basal Eurasian ancestry in Early Neolithic Europeans, the fact that MA1 shares more alleles with Karelia_HG than with Loschbour, but MA1 and Karelia_HG are symmetrically related to Native Americans, and, finally, the fact that the three group of Eurasian hunter-gatherers (EHG, WHG, and ANE) cannot be related to each other by a simple tree, and at least one of them must be admixed.”

I think this means that the non-ENA portion of Karitiana ancestry is from an unadmixed source. So, David's “ANE” cluster is unadmixed (at this scale of resolution), as it is based on Karitiana samples. Yet, despite not being possibly admixed like MA1, David's ANE cluster behaves just like MA1 (in terms of what percentages it yields for contemporary populations, around 40%-43% in Karitiana, 33%-37% in Burusho, 26%-29% in Lezgians, etc). This tells us a lot about the relationship between WHG, ANE, and EHG.

Alberto said...

"No one here sides with massive steppe gene flow into Europe because of fantasies about chariots, etc. It's because it has been PROVEN."

Yes, I agree, to a point. For now it has been proven that there was a massive migration from the steppe (Yamnaya) to the CW area. But this was never something that anyone doubted in the first place.

The migration to the rest of Europe is still not proven. It could all come from Yamanaya, but it could have come from another route too. We still don't know for sure.

However, what the paper proves too is that this mass migration first started because there was a mass migration from OUTSIDE the steppe and INTO the steppe. I don't know why this part is easily overlooked when talking about migration FROM the steppe.

And that this mass migration into the steppe not only seems to have been the catalyst of the later migration from the steppe (which explains why there was no depopulation of the steppe - there were as much or more people coming in than going out). But more importantly, that this migration INTO the steppe SEEMS (not proven 100%, could be just a happy coincidence) to be also the catalyst of the Kurgan burials, which actually define the Yamnaya culture (and by extension the PIE culture).

This is a whole new History, and people are wasting time with Y-DNA stories (Y-DNA does lend to very interesting stories, unlike autosomal DNA that actually tells more realistic ones).

Or are you buying also the argument of the stolen farmer's wives as the most plausible interpretation of the data?

Krefter said...

Marnie,

Massive migration from the steppe has been proven by ancient DNA. What are the chances an identical pop lived in the Balkans? Lack of research isn't evidence.

I'm not ganging up on you.

I'm not a researcher. Besides my identity doesn't matter.

Marnie said...

@Alberto

"For now it has been proven that there was a massive migration from the steppe (Yamnaya) to the CW area."

When you think about the Karelian ancient DNA, and the retreat of glaciers in Scandinavia, it's somewhat obvious that pool of Karelian like people in Scandiavia in the Mesolithic and Neolithic would eventually merge with people directly too the south.

This does not necessarily imply "mass migration". It's a rather inevitable effect of

1. "ANE" rich pop from the Steppe moves into newly available area in Scandinavia as the ice melts.

2. Doggerland and the Baltic Sea flood

3. Some of the people who moved into Scandinavia are pushed south by the flooding of the Baltic Sea and Doggerland into the CW area.

Not surprising. But also not all of Europe by any means.

Marnie said...

@Krefter

Marnie,

"Massive migration from the steppe has been proven by ancient DNA."

See my comment above regarding Karelian sample, flooding of Doggerland and Baltic, and CW.

"What are the chances an identical pop lived in the Balkans? "

Pretty likely, give high WHG, high "farmer" and high level of R1b in Balkans.

"Lack of research isn't evidence."

You're right, which is why Haak title is overstated.

"I'm not ganging up on you."

I don't care if you're ganging up on me or not. This is a matter of academic honestly. I'm taking the matter up at the formal level.

Alberto said...

@Marnie

I don't disagree with you, but the people who migrated to CW were not EHG, but rather that "Armenian-like" population mixed with EHG. So it's unlikely that a similar mix existed in northern areas.

And I was the first one to put the meaning of "mass migration" into context. The NE part of Europe 5000 years ago had a very low population density, so you don't need the migration to be so massive to have a big impact in the local one.

In any case, I still think that the other part of what I said should be the important one. Why ignore the "massive" migration INTO the steppe that preceded the "massive" migration out of the steppe? Why ignore that the EHG were not buried in Kurgans, but that this new population (mixed with locals) was? Isn't this a really important and new data point in the whole "kurgan/PIE" studies?

I only see it ignored, overlooked,... as if nothing of that really happened (despite the data being there in the paper, though ignored in the title of it).

Marnie said...

@Alberto

"Why ignore the "massive" migration INTO the steppe that preceded the "massive" migration out of the steppe?"

Yes.

"Why ignore that the EHG were not buried in Kurgans, but that this new population (mixed with locals) was?"

Yep.

"Isn't this a really important and new data point in the whole "kurgan/PIE" studies?"

One of thing things that really hit me about this research, when I first heard about back in November, was the over simplification.

See here, for instance:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/science/from-ancient-dna-a-clearer-picture-of-europeans-today.html?_r=0

"But most living Europeans also carry genes from a third population, which appears to have arrived more recently. Dr. Reich and his colleagues found the closest match in DNA taken from a 24,000-year-old individual in Siberia, suggesting that the third wave of immigrants hailed from north Eurasia."

Almost 20,000 years of history, garbage bagged into one neat little package so as to be regurgitated under the byline "Science" in the New York Times.

This really pissed me off.

Marnie said...

@Mike Thomas

"I too suspect that at least some R1b also came up via the Balkans. Naturally, I'm sure we're all waiting for aDNA from the balkan Mesolithic, neolithic and bronze ages."

Thanks, Mike.

PersonaMan said...

@Marnie

Massive migration from the steppe post middle Neolithic does seem to be supported in terms of autosomal genetics. It wouldn't make sense for this ancestry to have spread from the Balkans in this time, unless the farmers skirted around the Balkans completely and didn't pick up any of their DNA. I guess there is always room for surprises though.
----------------------------------
Also, with all due respect i think your ideas on a number of the posters here being from academic institutions but hiding their identity is a little far-fetched, at least in it's totality. Some of them have been around for quite a while on various forums and have developed over that time. Also it's easy to judge who is who based on their writing style most of the time, even if they have a different name - or of course they may openly state that they are this person.

Why is it difficult to believe for example that many of these people you list on your website are simply knowledgeable and interested hobbyists. It's not as if someone has to be working for an academic institution to be up-to-date with current research and publications in their area of interests, or even to have a means of contacting some of the people involved.

Davidski said...

PersonaMan, congratulations on your doctorate.

Unknown said...

Marnie,
Doggerland was done around Loschbour's time... Second, there is no eastern ancestry in the farmers. All additional hunter ancestry lacked eastern aDNA.

ADNA refutes everything you say. Plain and simple. You have not the slightest support for your argument.

PersonaMan said...

@Marnie

I do agree though that the Balkans seems to be something of an overlooked area, and my knowledge of the area is not as good as i would like, indeed. I don't think that living in the modern area is a neccesary prerequisite for learning about the same area many millenia ago, although i'm sure that both in conjunction are very rewarding.
-------------------------
My main point really (although not expressly expressed in my previous post) is that from what I've read on these blog comment sections the allegations of bullying seem a bit flimsy, and that i'm pretty certain that your assignment of these individuals as particular academics is quite mistaken.
All I've seen is discussion, sometimes heated, although perhaps there are things going on behind the scene that i don't know about.

I won't talk anymore about this though, it just diverts from the blog topic and it's something i'm not involved in, just felt i needed to say something.

Also, i hadn't heard of Steve Sailer but i'll check out the blog for the sake of interest.

Btw your presentation on pre-Neolithic time keeping looks interesting, will give it a read tomorrow. :)

@David, Thanks, a cause for celebration.

Marnie said...

@PersonaMan

Hope you enjoy the Timekeeping slides.

Unknown said...

@ Alberto

"Yes, I agree, to a point. For now it has been proven that there was a massive migration from the steppe (Yamnaya) to the CW area. But this was never something that anyone doubted in the first place"

IMO, this has not been demonstrated. It shows that CWC and Yamnaya are similar, and CWC might be derived from Yamnaya, but this is based on Haak et al's modelling which is still missing aDNA from large swathes of EE. My prediction is that the ANE-rich CWC people which invaded Germany were already in central-eastern Europe, and not all the way from Yamnaya.

"The migration to the rest of Europe is still not proven. It could all come from Yamanaya, but it could have come from another route too. We still don't know for sure."

Sensible.

"However, what the paper proves too is that this mass migration first started because there was a mass migration from OUTSIDE the steppe and INTO the steppe. I don't know why this part is easily overlooked when talking about migration FROM the steppe.'

I do. Its becuase bloggers, and apparently, academics are either biased or not as expert on the matter as they claim. Typifies the reductionism, circular argumentation, and pick-and-choose type approaches which characterises the Kurgan construct.

"Or are you buying also the argument of the stolen farmer's wives as the most plausible interpretation of the data"

LOL. Yes, Alberto, David's theory of mass mail order brides is sure to be the next big topic diskuse in Current Antrhopology.

@ Marnie

"This does not necessarily imply "mass migration". It's a rather inevitable effect of

1. "ANE" rich pop from the Steppe moves into newly available area in Scandinavia as the ice melts.""

But this would have been c. 12 kya. The 'steppe' was a very different place then, and it wasn;t the 'steppe', but the Ukrainina LGM. It has nothing to do with Yamnaya, which occured 7 kya later.

@ Marnie.
Yes, I also have to say the chaps here are rather fair, ease off on them. In fact their very open to critiques, and its not like other bloggers like Maju who overrides or removes any critique aimed at him. You can criticize their theoretical reasoning, but I don;t think they're academic fat-cats in disguise doing a conspiracy theory. Their only bias is is that they like the idea that they're descended from big bad Conan barbarians. Innocent boyish ideology, IMHO.

Marnie said...

@Mike Thomas

"Their only bias is is that they like the idea that they're descended from big bad Conan barbarians. Innocent boyish ideology, IMHO."

Yes, it's funny. But with all sincerity, I think the attitude also reflects a long standing antipathy that some Northern Europeans have for people from the Balkans.

It has real economic impact.

Many people from Western and Northern Europe would rather envision blond haired blue eyed Russian Conan Barbarian ancestors for themselves, rather than brown haired, hazel eyed shepherds.

When it appears in Nature, I'm not going to stand around and say nothing.

Frankly, the fact that David Reich has his name on this paper is outrageous. He, at least, should know better.

http://www.academia.edu/1826205/The_History_of_the_Jews_of_Thessaloniki_and_the_Holocaust

Or do none of us learn anything from history, no matter the toll?

Nirjhar007 said...

@Chad
''You can't link that with Samara R1b. They had no Near Eastern ancestry and pre-date farming and animals by 1000 years.''
That's why i suggested Mesolithic and People from PIE cradle( When They Were Simply Hunter-Gatheres) were coming in Russian area from Very Early times following the East of Caspian route and later also bringing Stock-Breeding, Farming etc....
The Near East is not the Question here and the intrusion around 4000 BC to Samara followed the Caucasian Route which took along near eastern affinity as should be expected but they didn't come from near east but N Iran-C Asian area, Maykop was just a Bridge.

Krefter said...

@Marnie
"Yes, it's funny. But with all sincerity, I think the attitude also reflects a long standing antipathy that some Northern Europeans have for people from the Balkans."

You're from the Balkans, right?

I for one don't have anything against Balkan people. In the modern world I'm more fond of Balkan people than I am of far-left wing western Europeans. The whole charlie hebdo reaction for example is superficial patriotism coming from self-haters.

BTW, Americans view Balkan people the same way they view Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhstan, Georgia, etc. They're all undeveloped and undemocratic.

I think I do understand the issue your have though.

Americans and west Euros(IMO, especially British) have a sense of superiority over the entire world. The "white man's burden", "manifest destiny", Anglosim, and Nordicism from the 1800s still have influence in the way people think today.

It ticks me off!! All the various DIFFERNT people around the world are put under the same category and treated as helpless infants. Maybe you feel Balkan people are seen this way. Just a guess.

It's insulting and degrading to eastern Euros, Middle easterns, south Asians, etc. and it's also insulting to west Euros.

I always do my best to treat internationals with dignity, and not like victims or sterotype them all as the same. They're all unique individuals just like Americans.

The way west Euros have viewed themselves in the last few hundred years isn't exactly very masculine or romantic. Western men in particular I think are ashamed of it and try to distant themselves from it.

This is part of the reason there are wanna-be African-Americans, and western people who are ashamed of being western. They can't find a masculine row model in their safe cushioned suburban world.

Unknown said...

I agree
Theoretically, it is possible if not probable that the Central Asian peoples had little to do with the Levantine farmers who contributed to EEF

Theoretically; they were an ANE, R* pool from which multiple dispersions to North and west occurred
But this must be tempered and we shouldn't make blanket aspersions .

Nirjhar007 said...

@Mike
''I agree
Theoretically, it is possible if not probable that the Central Asian peoples had little to do with the Levantine farmers who contributed to EEF

Theoretically; they were an ANE, R* pool from which multiple dispersions to North and west occurred
But this must be tempered and we shouldn't make blanket aspersions .''
Of Course....

Krefter said...

@Marnie,
"Many people from Western and Northern Europe would rather envision blond haired blue eyed Russian Conan Barbarian ancestors for themselves, rather than brown haired, hazel eyed shepherds."

True for some people, but probably no one on this blog is being biased about this.

The west Euros who would want to be descended of Conan Barbarian steppe people are going to know a thing or two about ancient history and almost always male.

Actually many white-Americans would be jumping out of their seats in joy if they learned they had anytype of non-white dark pigmented ancestry. This is because white people are viewed as boring, un-ingenious and ancient, civilized, and weak. Most people want to be wild, primitive, and tough.

Europeans being about 50% Middle eastern and brown skinned till 6,000-3,000YBP should be kept a secret till the public is ready, LOL.

There's just too much racial stigma in America and western Europe that you don't see in other parts of Europe. For example, I bet this info would be no big deal to Finns. They don't have the same world revolving around them superior identity Americans do.

There was a show which took DNA tests and traced the origins of American celebrities, and I can show you several examples of Europeans who were disappointed to learn they were European.

African-Americans were the ones who were most unbiased and accepting of whatever their results gave.

There was a Latino who for whatever reasons was ignorant of the Spanish origins of Latinos(go figure). She was openly disappointed to learn she was over 70% European and very happy to learn she was 15% west African.

Krefter said...

@Marnie,


Haak 2015 proves that what makes Late Neolithic Germans differnt from Middle and early Neolithic Germans is EHG ancestry. I highly doubt EHG like in Russia existed in the Balkans.

There's no disputing "eastern" people(heavy in ANE) stormed into Europe during the late Neolithic and bronze age. They very likely did not come from the Balkans.

They migrated to the Balkans, but that's it. I doubt many of their "eastern" genes came from the Balkans.

We already have K01 from Hungary which is close to the Balkans and he was "WHG" with no obvious signs of "ANE". There's a mtDNa sample from Mesolithic Croatia and it's U5b, typical of Mesolithic west Euros.

Marnie said...

@Krefter

"You're from the Balkans, right?"

I'm not from the Balkans, not in the last few thousand years, anyway, as far as I know.

My husband's parents are from Western Greek Macedonia.

"I for one don't have anything against Balkan people. In the modern world I'm more fond of Balkan people than I am of far-left wing western Europeans. The whole charlie hebdo reaction for example is superficial patriotism coming from self-haters."

??

The political opinions of people in the Balkans span the entire political spectrum, from far right to far left. I'm not sure what you mean by the above statement or what this has to do with recent [very sad] events in France.

"BTW, Americans view Balkan people the same way they view Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhstan, Georgia, etc. They're all undeveloped and undemocratic."

??

My husband is American. "Undeveloped and undemocratic??" This must reflect your own opinion about people from the Balkans. It's not a common American view, not at least in the Bay Area where I live. Perhaps, though, this kind of attitude is common for people, from say, Austin, Texas.

"I think I do understand the issue your have though."

Really?

"The "white man's burden", "manifest destiny", Anglosim, and Nordicism from the 1800s still have influence in the way people think today."

??

Krefter, the main issue here is the fact that the Haak paper has made a sweeping statement about "mass migration" into Europe from the Steppe after the Neolithic.

It does appear from this data, that you can make some deductions about population processes in Germany. There is sufficient ancient DNA sampling coverage for this.

However, regarding the rest of Europe (Western Europe (excluding German), Iberia, the Balkans, Italy, the Near East), you do not have enough ancient DNA to make the kinds of assertions you are making.

Most of the ancient DNA samples are from Germany. Most of the papers' authors are from Germany, Australia, the United States, Russia and Spain. NO ONE is from the Balkans, Italy, Armenia, or the Near East is an author. Moreover, the archaeology of the Balkans and Armenia is spare to none (some of the very areas your are making deductions about.)

On top of that, and I can tell from the various posted comments, people on this blog seem to be hopelessly ignorant about the Southern Balkans, including Albania, Greece (including Greek Macedonia), the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria.

They also, for the most part, don't seem to have a clue about the Near East, Southern Russia, and the much discussed Armenia.

Again, it's sad when these kinds of issues come up on comment threads on blogs, but quite another when papers appear in Nature making blanket statements about all of Europe, when most of the data comes from only two countries, Germany and Russia.

Unacceptable.

Unknown said...

Yes, there is no real evidence for Yamnaya migrations beyond Romania and Hungary, according to traditional archaeology. I think there are 3 (!) kurgans in Western macedonia - where Hammond placed the origin of proto-Greeks.

AS i said elsewhere, we need to start with the Balkans, esp Mycenenans then move elsewhere. That'll give us the answer.

Because, contrary to Haak's sensationalist title, all his paper proves is that some kind of population replacement occurred in late Neolithic Germany.

Krefter said...

Marine,

The Balkans will not produce high EHG and Yamna. There's no disputing steppe migrations. The same process that occurred in Germany occurred in Hungary, and probably most of Europe(because modern DNA suggests it).

No one is ignorant of the Balkans, it's that the Balkans aren't on topic. There's not much reason to discuss it being a source of gene-flow.

Yes I rambled but it was somewhat on topic.

Unknown said...


But would be interesting to see exactly what was happening there also . Eg just how EEF they were ?

Krefter said...

@Marnie,

Just watch family guy or any other popular adult show. You'll see what I mean. It's one of the biggest problems in our society, and no is standing up to it.

I'm done.

Marnie said...

@Mike Thomas,

"Yes, there is no real evidence for Yamnaya migrations beyond Romania and Hungary, according to traditional archaeology."

OK. That is helpful to know.

"I think there are 3 (!) kurgans in Western macedonia - where Hammond placed the origin of proto-Greeks."

Hammond was very astute.

I've heard of the Western Macedonian kurgans. Kokino is also very interesting:

http://kokinoobservatory.mk/

also, the dolmens in Bulgaria, which are very similar to Karahunj in Armenia.

"AS i said elsewhere, we need to start with the Balkans, esp Mycenenans then move elsewhere."

I was amazed by your statement about proto-Mycenaean. In parallel, people have started to formally analyze Albanian. It's considered to have some highly preserved aspects, like Lithuanian.

"Because, contrary to Haak's sensationalist title, all his paper proves is that some kind of population replacement occurred in late Neolithic Germany."

I think it's an interesting result. Too bad about the title and the rest, as I've already stated.

Mike, I really have to thank you for the time you've spent on this blog. I've learned a lot from you.

Unknown said...

Krefter
" one is ignorant of the Balkans, it's that the Balkans aren't on topic. There's not much reason to discuss it being a source of gene-flow."

Wtf ? Palaeolithic and neolithic ; if not also bronze age; "gene flow" came via the Balkans; which is better called "southeastern Europe".

Northern and western is just a smaller; younger and more endogamous subset of the SEE genetic make up

Marnie said...

Yamna is an archaeological region, not DNA.

"Yamna" is what causes the shift in Northern Europeans. It does not easily account for the "shift", in say, the French.

Even Oetzi shifts east, compared to some of the other "farmer" DNA or Sardinians. Ask yourself why. Oetzi . . . Tyrolia . . .

Tyrolia . . . is next to . . . the Balkans!!

You don't need EHG or "Yamna" admixture to get an eastward shift in Europeans. Tyrolia-Dinaric Alps-Pindos DNA would also cause an "eastward" shift.

That's what I thought the moment I looked at the original Lazarides data in 2013.

Yamna? Forget it. It's a secondary effect impacting only CW cultures.

Unknown said...

Marnie
Yamnaya *derived* from west Asia in the east; and the Balkans in the west . Yamnaya didn't shift anything except itself

Marnie said...

@Krefter

"Just watch family guy or any other popular adult show. You'll see what I mean."

We don't have a TV.

"It's one of the biggest problems in our society, and no is standing up to it."

One of the biggest problems . . .

Well, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Regarding the Balkans, one of their biggest problems is crushing unemployment and lack of industry.

And it doesn't help that the European banks swooped in in the Early 2000s to offer loans that they knew the Greek government could not pay back. But regarding real investment in industry . . . nope. The big European banks: NOT INTERESTED IN GREECE.

By the way, my husband thinks that Christine Lagarde has a big nose, and a snooty attitude to go with it.

Marnie said...

Mike,

"Yamnaya *derived* from west Asia in the east; and the Balkans in the west . Yamnaya didn't shift anything except itself "

OK. I will take note.

Unknown said...

Read :
IGOR MANZURA
STEPS TO THE STEPPE: OR, HOW THE NORTH PONTIC
REGION WAS COLONISED

If U can't access it let me know; I'll email u

Unknown said...

And I don't like to get into politics
But one can't lay the blame solely at the door of Western antipathy
Southern Europe needs to also pull its finger out. Can't expect siesta time ; retirement at 55; and great social welfare, etc :)
Greeks cry victim but they happily bully their smaller neighbour , Macedonia, all over a silly non-issue like the name of a peole who no longer exist

Marnie said...

@Mike Thomas

"Southern Europe needs to also pull its finger out. Can't expect siesta time ; retirement at 55;"

Well, we agree.

"Greeks cry victim but they happily bully their smaller neighbour , Macedonia, all over a silly non-issue like the name of a peole who no longer exist"

Well, not all Greeks cry victim, and there are lots of Greeks trying to carry on, in spite of it all.

Regarding the Republic of Macedonia, very few actual Greek Macedonians have any problem with the Republic of Macedonia. They go there all the time, and many own property on both sides of the Macedonia/Greek border.

Macedonians, on both sides, still do "exist", by the way.

Most of the hubbub on this issue comes from Southern Greece, who do not particularly like Macedonians, Greek or otherwise. Athenians even correct a Northern Greek speech inflection if they hear it.

:)

Marnie said...

"Read :
IGOR MANZURA"

OK. I vill add it to da list.

Grey said...

@Alberto

Didn't pretty much everyone assume there was a steppe intrusion by farmers?

The question was why would the agricultural words in the PIE language seem to be loan words as generally you'd expect the language of the more advanced farming culture to win the language contest.

One possible explanation would be a reflux event i.e. a farmer intrusion followed by a retreat (which might also explain the Kartvel problem) so the intrusion added the pastoralist element and the reflux is why it didn't replace the language.

The Haak data seems to reinforce that option: a farmer intrusion followed by a retreat.

The most likely explanation for why (unusually) the HGs won out over the farmers is horses.

#

A possible model for this is what happened on the Great Plains when plains HGs got horses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_Indians#The_Horse

Unknown said...

@ Grey to Alberto

Alberto , feel free to ignore Grey's stupid analogies, for which he has zero empirical evidence for. Rather he appears to just concont theories out his childhood favourite games - Cowboys & Indians.

"The Haak data seems to reinforce that option: a farmer intrusion followed by a retreat."

Where is that 'retreat" quoted exactly ?

"The most likely explanation for why (unusually) the HGs won out over the farmers is horses."

Which hunter-gatherers and what horses ? Please quote direct evidence for these horse-riding hunter-gatherers chasing off farmers ?


Simon_W said...

What, the holocaust disproves the thesis of this paper? What kind of weird logic is that supposed to be? I'd say the holocaust (horrible and despicable as it is) is simply not relevant to the topic of this paper. Politics isn't relevant either, period!

And IMO Corded Ware is not descended from Yamnaya, but from an autosomally very similar population carrying a different yDNA signature. All Corded Ware specimens tested so far were from central Europe and already admixed with EEF, but I think the original Corded people were like Yamnaya, but with R1a instead of R1b.

Personally I think that R1b and Italo-Celtic spread from the Yamnaya in the Carpathian Basin. Archeologically there's no Yamnaya west of the Tisza, but that's because they changed their culture and picked up local influences. However, the rather low Yamnaya ancestry in the HungaryGamba_BA sample according to Figure 3 seems to call this theory into question. But upon closer inspection it becomes clear that this sample has rather strong WHG ancestry which wasn't present in the preceding HungaryGamba_CA sample – quite in line with David's analyses. The explanation being straightforward: The Yamnaya in the Carpathian basin differed from the Yamnaya of Samara by having much stronger WHG ancestry, which would be natural if it came from a more western part of the steppe. If that line of reasoning is correct, then West European R1b is descended from a population with rather low West Asian admixture (0% in most supervised analyses of BR1).

There seems to be a connection between the above observations and the fact that BR1 has 0% of the Dodecad K12b Gedrosia component. Likewise, the surprisingly strong Yamnaya-like ancestry in Norwegians, Icelanders and Scots seems to be related with their strong Gedrosia component (European peak in Scots), also with their relatively strong MDLP World-22 Indo-Iranian component (European peak in Norwegians). Hence, I don't think that their strong Yamnaya-like ancestry is the result of a contamination of the MA-1 sample. Apparently, in Norway there is still a lot of Corded Ware ancestry around, at least autosomally - although haplogroup I1 managed to become the predominant clade of yDNA.

Similarly, according to Figure 3, populations like the French and the Northern Spanish have more Yamnaya-like ancestry than the HungaryGamba_BA sample, and this seems to imply that a lot of this is actually from the central European Corded people, even though the latter were dominated by R1a. This R1a seems to have got displaced by Bell Beaker R1b, but the autosomal Yamnaya-like ancestry of the Corded people got absorbed by the Bell Beaker people.

So, if my above reasoning is correct, then Gedrosia and MDLP Indo-Iranian were not always associated in Europe with haplogroup R1b. Rather they are an expression of the specific local NW European mix with strong ANE.

Simon_W said...

Also, I noted that Halberstadt_LBA, the sample from late Bronze Age Germany, again has somewhat stronger Yamnaya-like ancestry than the earlier Bell Beaker and Unetice. I suppose we don't have to invoke Grigoriev's Bronze Age migrations from Siberia to explain this. The most simple explanation is probably that the local Urnfield culture north of the Harz was related with the Lusatian culture to the east, which is also reflected in this individual's haplogroup, R1a-Z280. And the difference was minor anyway, so it can't explain the strong ANE in northwestern Europe.

Unknown said...

Thanks for your overview Simon

I agree with you for CWC

I guess the near future will clinch the question of west european R1b
I hadn't picked up on the low Yamnaya levels in Hungary. Unless a one -off odd result, it doesn't quite sit right, esp. given its location as a launching point for European expansion.

I agree that your point that ANE cannot be correlated singly with R1b or R1a alone.

I suspect there is always the remote possiblity that we are seeing a "confounding effect", ie that the eastward shift is due to various factors, some of which are not yet accounted (sampled) for.

Alberto said...

@Mike

Yes, I really don't see great arguments there.

First, no, not everyone accepted an intrusion into the steppe. They rather went off with some exotic theories about farmer's wives theft.

Second, there are clear signs of intrusion and genetic and cultural impact. But where are the signs of "retreat" that you speak of?? The signs clearly point to "expansion", not to retreat.

And about horses, the population that entered the steppe had millennia of experience in domesticating wild animals. If someone tamed the horse on the steppe, it must have been them, not the hunters who had been hunting them for those same millennia and more (at least, it's the most reasonable argument till we have any evidence that proves or disproves it).

@Marnie

"Regarding the Republic of Macedonia, very few actual Greek Macedonians have any problem with the Republic of Macedonia. They go there all the time, and many own property on both sides of the Macedonia/Greek border."

Agreed. I am original from Madrid (Spain), but I live in Skopje (Rep. of Macedonia) for 4 years now. And fortunately there is no problem among Macedonian people from both sides of the border. It's all just a political issue (that unfortunately has had bad consequences for the Rep. of Macedonia that has been repeatedly vetoed by Greece from entering the EU unless they stop calling themselves Macedonians). Silly politicians getting in the way of normal people.

Grey said...

@Alberto

"First, no, not everyone accepted an intrusion into the steppe. They rather went off with some exotic theories about farmer's wives theft."

Fair enough. I thought it would be obvious that one required the other
- intrusion
- raiding
- retreat
for example the advance of Cucuteni onto the steppe followed by its sudden disappearance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni-Trypillian_culture#Late_period_.283500-3000_BC.29

Grey said...

@Alberto

"If someone tamed the horse on the steppe, it must have been them,"

The steppe people don't need to have domesticated horses - only have them.

The Pueblo Indians didn't domesticate horses either and yet they provide a clear example of an intrusive farming culture (with guns not spears) being ejected from New Mexico.

1592-1680

"In 1592, however, Juan de Onate brought 7,000 head of livestock with him when he came north to establish a colony in New Mexico."

"Pueblo Indians learned about horses by working on the ranches of the Spanish colonists. The Spanish attempted to keep knowledge of riding away from Indians, but the Indians learned and some fled their servitude to Spanish masters—and took the horses with them. The Indians adopted the horse into their culture and built up the numbers in their herds."

"By 1659, the Navajo from northwestern New Mexico were raiding the Spanish colonies to steal horses."


"By 1664, the Apaches of the Great Plains were trading captives from other tribes to the Spanish for horses."

"The real beginning of the horse culture of the plains began with the expulsion of the Spanish from New Mexico in 1680 when the victorious Pueblo Indians captured thousands of horses and other livestock."

Davidski said...

Based on the data that just came out, with the two Eastern European foragers belonging to R1a and R1b, the idea that the Near Eastern mtDNA and genome-wide admixture among the Yamnaya came from women who were kidnapped or traded from farming communities near the Black Sea and Caucasus makes good sense.

I don't see the problem with this theory at all. You really have to have your head in the sand (or firmly up your ass) not to consider it.

PersonaMan said...

One of the main reasons why people are making assumptions regarding populations that weren't covered by aDNA from this paper is that a lot of populations are genetically similar. So far example Germans and French both have a substantial amount of Yamnaya/EHG ancestry that wasn't there in the Middle Neolithic, but that persists now. So clearly something has happened between the Middle Neolithic and modern period that gave similar results to what happened in Germany, so obviously you look for parallels, especially when R1b Bell Beaker period individuals are a common link of the right period. It may be that for example the French didn't become Yamnaya/EHG influenced until a couple of millenia later, but it seems pretty unlikely. It's one of those things where although the speculation is still speculation until aDNA confirms or disproves it, it is at least substantiated speculation. Ie yes we only have evidence of this happening in Germany from an aDNA practice, but it's obvious it must have filtered through to other areas because otherwise Germany would be genetically very distinct from all it's neighbours, which it isn't. There's nothing unreasonable about speculating like that, after all none of this speculation is written in stone - people will change their opinion based on new evidence or arguments.

So while the process could have been different in the Balkans, the end result was somewhat similar. Until we get lots more aDNA from the Balkans we won't know for certain exactly what happened, but we're free to speculate based on what there is available until then, and make logical inferences that may or may not be correct.

PersonaMan said...

@David
I'm not sure if it was posted on here or at Anthrogenica, but someone looked into the Yamnaya mt-DNA to date and concluded it was more or less half an half hunter-gatherer like and west Asian like.
Surely a more likely option is that the R1 is associated with the hunter-gatherers, and that there are males of different lineages who were perhaps of lower status, or in a small minority? It's possible that because of their patriarchal culture and other factors that their y-DNA diversity was reduced because the R1b men may have been more successful overall, having multiple wives as well as concubines and that sort of thing. That sort of situation makes more sense to me than a community propagating itself almost entirely by stealing women from abroad, and has precedent as there are places dominated by one or two y-haplogroups (E.g Ireland) but having a greater diversity of mtDNA.
I mean there's a few U5/U4, H etc as well as the T and W.

Grey said...

@Davidski

"Based on the data that just came out,"

Exactly.

Before the Haak paper I would have guessed an at least 60% chance the y dna at Samara would show two distinct populations: a farmer one and a forager one, with probably the farmer one dominant

but it didn't.

Grey said...

@Personaman

"Surely a more likely option is that the R1 is associated with the hunter-gatherers, and that there are males of different lineages who were perhaps of lower status, or in a small minority?"

That would also be consistent with captives though.

.

"That sort of situation makes more sense to me than a community propagating itself almost entirely by stealing women from abroad"

That's not necessary though.

Imagine how it would work as a process.

Say you have a band of hunters, male and female, and they rustle a lot of sheep/cattle and take a few captives to herd them.

If this process was repeated over multiple generations the percentage of originally farmer autosomal dna would go up with each generation.

This is the paradox of a raiding culture - they can gradually turn into the people they raid.

PersonaMan said...

@Grey

That is reasonable, i was envisioning something less believable from other descriptions of what could be the case.

I expect other lineages should turn up though in time.

Ryan said...

Re: assimilation by raiding, the Iroquois might be a useful parallel. When they conquered/raided other aboriginal peoples, the children, young men and women would be adopted into their nation without prejudice. This practice, combined with their early adoption of agriculture, allowed them to expand their territory extremely quickly. It might be a useful parallel to consider here.

It's also worth noting that the clan structure for the Iroquois was matrilineal. Protoindoeuropeans were patrilinear, but does anyone know if this was true for the hunter gatherers that preceded them?

Marnie said...

@Alberto

"Agreed. I am original from Madrid (Spain), but I live in Skopje (Rep. of Macedonia) for 4 years now. And fortunately there is no problem among Macedonian people from both sides of the border."

I'm looking forward to visiting my husband's cousins in Salonika this summer. Through marriage, one of the cousins owns a house in one of the villages, up in the mountains near Skopje. They often vacation there.

"It's all just a political issue (that unfortunately has had bad consequences for the Rep. of Macedonia that has been repeatedly vetoed by Greece from entering the EU unless they stop calling themselves Macedonians). Silly politicians getting in the way of normal people."

It's not good for either Greece or the Republic of Macedonia to have this going on.

My husband's grandparents were born about a hundred years ago. They remember when Salonika, Skopje, Sofia, Yannina, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik and Istanbul/Constantinople were primary South East European trading centers.

The level of separation between Greece and Macedonia didn't exist a hundred years ago. Many people spoke multiple languages, including Albanian, Greek, Macedonian, and French.

Hopefully, the whole ultra-nationalist spat between Macedonia and Greece will calm down, and people will be able to get on with there lives and livelihoods.

Marnie said...

@Simon_W

"What, the holocaust disproves the thesis of this paper? What kind of weird logic is that supposed to be? I'd say the holocaust (horrible and despicable as it is) is simply not relevant to the topic of this paper. Politics isn't relevant either, period!"

The Haak paper ignores the obvious population contribution of the Balkans to Western Europeans. Many papers, which I've already posted, indicate this.

Also, it's clear that at least some of the people involved in funding the research of the paper, have a big problem with the idea that there is at least a partial contribution to R1b rich populations from the Southern side of the Black Sea.

Given the obvious lack of ancient DNA from the Balkans, compared to Germany, in concert with the sweeping generalization in the title, it's hard not to at least note that the Balkans were targeted by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

I've actually spoken to many older Greek people about what happened when the Germans and Italians invaded Greece. Not only Jews were killed. Most of the Greeks who were executed were either Orthodox priests who tried to give refuge to Jews, Roma people, and dark haired/dark eyed Greeks.

This is not a political matter.

It's a matter of making a sweeping statement about the population of Europe, when it appears that ancient DNA for most of South Eastern Europe has been excluded. Given the history of eugenics and its dark relationship with Southeastern Europe, to *not* point out what can ultimately happen would be to ignore the elephant in the livingroom.

Unknown said...

Remember, again, these are the elites. Communal flat graves could contain G2 and J2, with other R1b's and maybe R1a.

Krefter said...

@Marnie,

"The Haak paper ignores the obvious population contribution of the Balkans to Western Europeans."

It's good logic to say we can't ignore the ancient Balkans because we lack genomes from there.

It is also bad logic to act as if there are no clues as to what the ancient Balkans were like.

There's a very low chance the Balkans instead of the steppe is the source of EHG ancestry in modern Europeans. An EHG pop did not live there, at least not as strongly as in the steppe.

we don't have any samples from the land in-between Germany and Russia and in-between Sweden and Karelia.

We aren't discussing the possibility of mass migrations from Finland for the same reason we aren't for the Balkans.

Unknown said...

There's plenty of comparison within Europe. As farming goes north it's hijacked by I1 and I2. It's well within reason the steppes had the same thing happen.

Unknown said...

@ Davidski

"" Based on the data that just came out, with the two Eastern European foragers belonging to R1a and R1b, the idea that the Near Eastern mtDNA and genome-wide admixture among the Yamnaya came from women who were kidnapped or traded from farming communities near the Black Sea and Caucasus makes good sense.""

So you're still happy to explain a relatively sudden and major West Asian DNA, not to mention cultural (with clear references to West Asian precedents), intrusion into Yamnaya and related regions to a practice of mass -woman kidnapping ? Your support for this, apart from Grey's unsubstantiated gobbledegook on raiders (I think he has some weird homo-erotic fixation on cowboys and horses), is that 2 samples had upstream P 297. You refuse to accept the possibility that P-297 was something of shared ancestry between Russia and adjacent parts of central -western Asia, and if anything, this Yamnaya region was the receiver of genetic inflow. MOreover, this line more or less died, and did not expand with their (non-existent) horses.


"You really have to have your head in the sand (or firmly up your ass) not to consider it."

Looks like we agree on something.

Davidski said...

Even after seeing the data in this paper you're still not making any sense. At some point you'll have to realize that reality doesn't share your bias, and if not, then you'll simply have to make an appointment with a good mental health professional. All the best with that.

Unknown said...

Maybe I do need to . But its not because of seeing the problems with your interpretation.

If anything, lets look at your track record over the years of blogging. Wrong for everything thus far. This case will be no different.

Grey said...

@Personaman

" i was envisioning something less believable from other descriptions of what could be the case."

Fair enough. I tend to jump to the conclusion rather than step by step.

Grey said...

@Mike Thomas

"So you're still happy to explain a relatively sudden and major West Asian DNA, not to mention cultural (with clear references to West Asian precedents), intrusion into Yamnaya and related regions to a practice of mass -woman kidnapping ?"

Cucuteni late period

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni-Trypillian_culture#Late_period_.283500-3000_BC.29

1) intrusion (check)
2) raiding (unknown)
3) retreat (check)

Grey said...

@Ryan

"It's also worth noting that the clan structure for the Iroquois was matrilineal."

Did they develop a caste society as a result?

If a population is rapidly increasing their size through captives then matrilinearity could be used to maintain the original population as an upper caste.

Chad said...

Haplogroup G has its greatest modern concentration and diversity near the Caucasus Mountains (which it why it is thought to have originated there). Haplogroup G includes about 60 percent of Ossetians; 30 percent of Georgians, Kabardinians and Balkarians; and lesser percentages in Azerbaijan (18 percent) and Armenia (11 percent) .

In a study conducted in 2014 by VV Ilyinskyon on bone fragments from 12 Alanic burials on the Don River, 6 samples turned out belonging to yDNA Haplogroup G2 and 6 samples belonging to mtDNA I.

As I've said, it is perfectly plausible that the Near Eastern part was brought with G2 and maybe J2 men, with Near Eastern mtDNA too. J2 and G2 dominate the Caucasus region. Don't be surprised if non-elite Yamnaya burials contain both of them.

It wouldn't make sense for P297 to split M269 and M73 in West Asia. That was a long time before Yamnaya.

Unknown said...

Chad

The Alan period was in the medieval period, was it not ?
Whatever the case, R1b could also be a West Asian marker, apart from J2 and G. And my comments that it might be wrong to view Sth Russia and West Asia as separate genetic-geographic units appear to fall on deaf ears (mostly). Ie, at least until we get more evidence to the contrary, M269 could be a circum-Pontic marker just as much , if not more, than being an exclusively steppe one. That J2 and G also aren;t also found in Bronze Age and Neolithic Sth Russia doesn;t mean too much.


But I'm not arguing specifically for or against the origin of M-269.
What I'm stating is that I find it hard to believe that Yamnaya would derive almost 1/2 their autosomal DNA from stolen women. Its a hair-brained proposal.

Sounds like some people are willing to uphold the Kurgan hypothesis with Cultic fervor, at the expense of honesty and sheer logic. Happily pick and choose which parts of the evidence they contort and beat into their pre-contrived framework.

Its all too obvious.

Unknown said...

And by West Asia, I mean the Armenian - Zargos highlands, and not the entirety of the Middle and Near East. Dave seems troubled by that simple geographical distinction.

Unknown said...

@ Grey

"Intrusion, raid, retreat" ? Please. This is not the Battle of Gettysburg, but a gradual process of secondary colonization from the forest-steppe to the steppe, then some partial 'reflux' back.


U still haven't produced a single piece of evidence or peer reviewed paper to support your baseless speculations. That you're now directing me to Wikipedia only confirms this .

Until you start making justifiable statements nbased on actual data and empirical models instead of baseless and half-witted analogies to the American Wild West, and cowboy movies, I'm ignoring all your posts

Bye now

Chad said...

Mike, That is probably not going to be the case. M269 is not in European farmers, of any period. It can't be by the farmer populations heading to Europe.

Remember, you need a single L23* male that leads to L51 and Z2103. If you leave P297 in West Asia, then where is M73 across West Asia, Africa, etc? I think a split near the Urals makes more sense. Again, I do not dispute some R1b in the Near East. We need a v88 branch that doesn't touch the others. However, to put both branches together in West Asia runs into problems as to no M73 in Africa and no V88 in Asia.

Chad said...

I would bet money that any M73 in West Asia is from Turkic nomads. That would post-date Islamic expansion to Africa, and keep M73 out. So, M73 and M269 should be from the same region. The Urals seem quite probable. Our Samara hunter isn't far from that.

Chad said...

It can transfer over to just showing on the mtDNA side. Just like in Europe. G2a gave way to I1 and I2. Similar story... I think G2a and J2 were in Yamnaya non-elites. Look at the spread of the two, on maps.

Mark S said...

@PersonaMan

Yes, the total Yamnaya mtDNA is as follows(I feel like I'm reading out the results for the eurovision song contest,lol...)

N1a 2.8%
I 2.8%
W 8.3%
X 2.8%
H 25%
T1 5.6%
T2 11.1%
J 5.6%
U 2.8%
U2 2.8%
U4 5.6%
U5a 16.7%
K 8.3%

From 36 samples

Source Haak 2015

Table S2.2. Haplogroup frequencies of 24 ancient populations used for principal component analysis

Tallies with the 50/50 EHG/near eastern estimate?

Grey said...

If there were farmer intrusions onto the territory of steppe foragers then there are logically only three options for the R1b y dna at Samara.

1) The R1b males represent the farmers

2) The R1b males represent the foragers

3) The R1b males represent both farmers and foragers i.e. R1b farmers from one region moved onto the territory of R1b foragers in the steppe region.

I don't think that part is debateable so the next question is what are the possible models for each of the three options.

.

Personally I find it hard to reconcile option (1) with the agricultural words in PIE being loan words but other people may differ.

The simplest model for option (2) is violence.

A model for (3) (and a possible alternative explanation for (2)) might be the farmer and forager cultures in the process of merging met with climate change which the recently ex-hunters were better able to adapt to than the ex-farmers.

There are no doubt others I haven't thought of.

So personally I'd currently go
1) 40% - violence, foragers won for a change cos horses
2) 20% - climate change, foragers disproportionately survived
3) 40% - other options that will come to light with more data

Unknown said...

@ Chad

"That is probably not going to be the case. M269 is not in European farmers, of any period. It can't be by the farmer populations heading to Europe. "

BUt you have 0 samples from Anatolia and the Balkans. your conclusion is a little presumptuous ?

"I would bet money that any M73 in West Asia is from Turkic nomads. That would post-date Islamic expansion to Africa, and keep M73 out. So, M73 and M269 should be from the same region. The Urals seem quite probable"

Possibly. But in reality, M73 could have split off anywhere.

"It can transfer over to just showing on the mtDNA side. Just like in Europe. G2a gave way to I1 and I2. Similar story... I think G2a and J2 were in Yamnaya non-elites. Look at the spread of the two, on maps."

Agree. But no need to invoke arguements about who was "elite' and who wasn't. Y DNA is notoriosly liable to drift. In a relatively sparsely populated region liek the steppe, the survivial fo R1 over G and J needn't have had 'social' reasons.

Marnie said...

@Mike

"BUt you have 0 samples from Anatolia and the Balkans. your conclusion is a little presumptuous ?"

Mike, at this point, I think we should just let them wander around in the dark.

Who cares? Their Steppe invasion only hypothesis will be thrown into the thrash bin of stupid theories pretty soon. Hey, and no Day Job for most of these guys to fall back.

It's their sword to fall on.

Having looked at some recent Southern Balkan-Greece Mesolithic and early Neolithic archaeology today, I'm even more convinced of the centrality of Anatolia and the Balkans to the early development of IE languages.

Unknown said...

The Neolithic is out of the Balkans... Just G, I, and C.

Krefter said...

@Marnie,

"Who cares? Their Steppe invasion only hypothesis will be thrown into the thrash bin of stupid theories pretty soon. Hey, and no Day Job for most of these guys to fall back. "

You claim we're biased, yet all you can talk about are the Balkans. Even though there's no ancient DNA data from there and your only evidence is "we don't know". The Balkans were nothing more than a stopping point for IEs, and maybe the same for EEFs.

"thrown into the thrash bin of stupid theories pretty soon".

You have a personal dislikement for the steppe theory that much is clear.

You see this is why I get irritated by you. You're arrogant.

A ginormous paper from 2015 supports the steppe hypothesis with a gazillion ancient genomes, and you still see it as unlikely?!

If you didn't have a bias in all of this you would at least consider the steppe theory.

Krefter said...

@Marnie,
"Having looked at some recent Southern Balkan-Greece Mesolithic and early Neolithic archaeology today, I'm even more convinced of the centrality of Anatolia and the Balkans to the early development of IE languages."

I first got interested in pre-history about 2 years ago and the first thing I learned is IEs most likely came from the steppe, they made a big genetic impact on north Europe, and brought most R1b and R1a lineages to Europe.

As a complete nub this was obvious to me. I've agreed with what Haak 2015 said since 2013. There are people who have been saying this stuff for nearly 10 years.

Over all those years people like you have been arrogantly putting down this idea. Back in 2006 it was R1b-Paleloithic, then it was R1b-Neolithic, now it is R1b-anything non steppe.

It's hard to believe after Haak 2015 going along with what we've been saying for years and you guys still are just as doubtful.

Marnie said...

@Krefter

"You claim we're biased, yet all you can talk about are the Balkans."

Like other people and several papers have pointed out, there is continuity with the Steppe and Altai from the Balkans and Eastern Europe from the Mesolithic and probably from the UP.

I have said many times that the assertion of the paper that there is a contribution to CW from the Steppe seems to be well supported. It's just not the only source for the "eastward shift" in Europeans.

"Even though there's no ancient DNA data from there"

So why isn't there ancient DNA from the Balkans? Don't you think that someone should invest some buck to find some of this Balkan DNA before making the grand assertions of the Haak paper. ??

"The Balkans were nothing more than a stopping point for IEs, and maybe the same for EEFs."

I'm confused, Krefter. I thought Chad just said that the Balkans is full of WHG. So which is it, EEF or WHG? How do you know that the EEF wasn't in the Balkans from the Mesolithic? It looks like there is archaeological evidence for continuity at the Mesolithic to Neolithic continuity in Northern Greece. Yet, you're ignoring that.

Also, how do you account for the fact that Oetzi, Mr. Tyrolia, shifts east compared to Sardinians?

Hey, like I said, don't mind me. Go ahead and ignore the evidence. Feel free to invent a bogus theory that will be chucked out the door in no time.

"You have a personal dislikement for the steppe theory that much is clear. "

No, I have a personal "dislikement" for people who ignore obvious lines of evidence to support pseudoscience, especially when this appears in Nature and Science Magazine.

"You see this is why I get irritated by you. You're arrogant."

Good, I'm glad I'm irritating you.

"A ginormous paper from 2015 supports the steppe hypothesis with a gazillion ancient genomes, and you still see it as unlikely?! "

You mean, that "paper" that hasn't been published yet that has somehow received a special write up in both Science and Nature News? That "paper"??

"If you didn't have a bias in all of this you would at least consider the steppe theory."

My objection is not with the "steppe theory". it is with the steppe *only* theory, as I have stated many times.

Also, as noted by Alberto and Mike, the immediate ancestors of the Steppe people of Samara sample fame were probably not from "the Steppe".

And again, no Balkan ancient DNA.

Unknown said...

@ Chad

"The Neolithic is out of the Balkans... Just G, I, and C."

You mean you're confident that there was no R1 M269 in the Balkans ? Maybe

@ Marnie

What I said earlier about 'no Macedonians' is those ancient macedonians no longer exist. Sure, here and there people on both side of the border are descended from them, but as a distinct people they're long gone. That's why people arguing about who's 'more Macedonia' is stupid. :)

@ Krefter:

I like you as a nube thought the Kurgan hypothesis was right. Certainly the Anatolian Neolithic hypothesis seem far fetched to me. But as yu read more archaeology, which most people here apparently haven't, then it becomes clear that it has problems. Granted, its still the best of a bad bunch, a Mallory states. But I think we can do better.

Now this aDNA evidence, IMO, still isn't decisive. The eastern shift could have come from a 2000 km arc of eastern Europe. laying it solely at the door of yamnaya appears a little post-hoc to me, certainly given that what data we currently have is still limited and does not show 'direct causality'. But hey, maybe future work will show it was right, at least broadly. But My prediction is it will show a far more complex pattern than Yamnaya -> all Europe
-> western Asia
-> central Asia/ Siberia
in fact, we know this simple scenario is already wrong.

Marnie said...

@Mike

"What I said earlier about 'no Macedonians' is those ancient macedonians no longer exist. Sure, here and there people on both side of the border are descended from them, but as a distinct people they're long gone. That's why people arguing about who's 'more Macedonia' is stupid. :)"

Mike, I'm not going to get into a hypothetical argument with you about it.

If you ask old people in Avgerinos, Voio, Kozani, Western Macedonia, Greece, where they are from, they wave north and point to Albania.

The village has been there for three hundred years, for sure.

A nearby monastery has been there for eight hundred years.

The area formed one of the Macedonian "out kingdoms" during the time of Philip II.

The property in the village has been passed down for at least three hundred years in the same families. (We have the written records.)

They still celebrate Ragoutsaria at New Years, which is a pre-Christian Macedonian festival.

The music is similar to that of Epiros. Many people in the village can sing polyphonically. Macedonia has a tradition of violin playing. An uncle of my husband was a violin maker.

The area is known for having many stone masons who, during Ottoman times, built many beautiful buildings as far away as Russia and Azerbaijan. The stone houses in the village are beautifully constructed by hand.

The old style dress is highly traditional, and more like Macedonian dress, than Southern Greek dress.

The spoken language in the village, up to about thirty years ago, was a dialect of Greek, with many loan words from Macedonian and Albanian.

The village is full of springs, which seem to have a sacred significance to the villagers.

The names of people in the village are traditional Macedonian names like Achelaus, Antigone, Philip, George and Timothy.

After the civil war in 1952, many of the villagers immigrated to Massachusetts and Philadelphia. Most have become highly successful in the US. (My husband, the son of one of these immigrants, went to MIT and is a Silicon Valley executive.)

So, you be the judge. Does Macedonia still exist? In so far as England still exists, or France does, Macedonia still exists, as far as I am concerned.

Unknown said...

Marnie

You have misunderstood

Of course Macedonia , and Macedonians exist. Slav, Greek, Vlach, Albanian speaking Macedonians have all lived there for hundreds if not over a thousand years, and happily called themslves Macedonians. It is only modern nationalism, politics and war which made them "choose' to either be Greek, or Slav, or Albanian, or whatever. But the blame mostly lies with the fascist Athenians, their terror tactics in the 1950s, and their continued cultural suppression of macedonians, forcing "Hellenization".

But my point was - the people of Philip, Alexander - the 'ancient Macedonians' - are long gone. They no longer exist, like the Etruscans, or ancient Celts. Massive cultural and demographic changes through the ages make this pretty obvious.

Marnie said...

"It is only modern nationalism, politics and war which made them "choose' to either be Greek, or Slav, or Albanian, or whatever."

Well, I never hear anyone in the village talk about Alexander the Great, if that's what you mean. They're not particularly overtly nationalistic.

I think you would like Salonika. It's more low key, and safer, than Athens. Great cafes, amazing food, inexpensive, and a great museum.

Unknown said...

Yes I've been and it is very nice

Marnie said...

Glad you liked Salonika.

Simon_W said...

Marnie, some of the people funding the paper have a big problem with a partial contribution to R1b rich populations from the southern side of the Black Sea? Really?? :-D Then they must be terribly disappointed about the result that, according to the paper, Yamnaya was 50% West Asian! :-D Apparently the authors didn't care about the alleged wishes of their sponsors.

Yes, the Nazis commited war crimes in Greece, as they did in many other countries. And many other countries did and do commit war crimes. Also Balkan populations, not so long ago by the way. This tells us something about human cruelty. So if there's something to learn from this about our past, then that people probably were not always behaving like peaceful hippies.

Apart from that the argument from eugenics and shoah is really not convincing. Even if it had turned out that the PIE were pure Skando-Nordids from Atlantis, like in Alfred Rosenberg's fantasies, this finding shouldn't be denied, if there was good evidence for it. Prehistory is about what happened in the past, not about what the past ought to have been like, in order for us to behave humanely. It's not a source for ethics, but a source of knowledge. And, incidentally, the finding of 50% West Asian ancestry in what may have been the PIE is really far from anything the Nazis had believed in.

Really, I don't care about Reich being Jewish, I don't even know it for sure, well I guess he is.

Davidski said...

Yamnaya were 50% like modern West Asians, not 50% West Asian.

We don't know what West Asians were like during the Neolithic, but it's a good bet that they didn't have any ANE admixture, and if so, this means Yamnaya were less than 50% West Asian.

Simon_W said...

Another thought about the low Yamnaya-like admixture in Bronze Age Hungary:

Maybe BR1 and BR2 are not indicative of the Yamnaya in the Carpathian Basin. BR1 lived several centuries after the Yamnaya incursion, and after the appearance of R1b in German Bell Beakers, moreover in the fully fledged Bronze Age, instead of the Copper Age. I think it's possible that BR1 was partly descended from eastern Balkan people who may have had admixture from western steppe people predating Yamnaya. If that's the case, the German Bell Beakers may have had stronger and more regular Yamnaya ancestry, quite independently from Corded Ware admixture.

Yet, the Yamnaya-like ancestry in German Bell Beakers is too weak to explain Yamnaya-like ancestry in western Europe. They had less than the present-day Scottish! So either some heavily Corded Ware admixed Bell Beaker groups migrated West, or Iron Age steppe groups like IR1 had more influence than I expected.

Marnie said...

@Mike

Since you asked, I did a google search and found more recent archaeological information about the part of Western Macedonia my husband is from. Archaeology does seem to be turning up a link between this part of Greece, the Myceneans, and Phrygian cities in Asia Minor.

Here's the link:

http://historum.com/ancient-history/36304-ancient-graves-greece-shed-light-early-macedonia-2.html

and a cut and paste of the relevant information that "Midas" put up posted on January 4th, 2012:


"Ok, people!
Basically lets clarify some things here in order for everybody to know what area we are talking about. We're talking about the area that stretches east-west from Olympus to Pentalofos and north-south from anything below Aliacmon river. More or less the historical Macedonian Kingdoms of Elimeia and Orestis. It is here we're talking about Mycenaean Macedonia and lets clarify what that means."

"By Mycenaean we're not talking about simple Mycenaean settlements that are a kind of satellite colonies of southern Greece, but organized polis such as Aiani. We're talking about a dominant material culture and burial customs that are in par with those in southern Greece."

"Now, above those areas there is the rest of the classical age Macedon, such as Lynkestis, Eordea etc. Here, we cannot talk about a constant, dominant and continuous culture resembling that of the south. If I am not mistaken it was N.L.G Hammond who first talked about the material culture in Aegae/Edessa during 1100-900 BCE which has striking resemblance with the Phrygian cities in Asia Minor. There are other signs of invasions/inhabitants as well. Especially the area of Eordea gets "homogenous" with the southern Kindoms after the 9-8th century BC. Lets not forget the work of C. Brixhe & A. Panayotou from 1994 about Macedonian, where a supposed Phrygian or better Brygian substrate exists."

"Back to the southern "upper" Macedonia. I have the full archaeological report on paper (2007) for the areas of Boion and Orestis, but unfortunately it is all in Greek. I have not been able to find complete reports in English for public view online. In any case, we're talking about Mycenaean commentaries and locally made pottery. Most interesting though is the inscriptional evidence which is the earliest in Macedonia. There is an online report in Greek from 2008 for anyone who understands."

http://media.ems.gr/ekdoseis/makedon...ntesidi_43.pdf

"Even if you don't understand, have a look at page 81 (79 on the PDF) , image 69, where you will see a photo of a fragment of Linear writing. This is the oldest inscription from Northern Greece. Unfortunately the fragment is damaged and incomplete, therefore there's no report about its context. So far the Linear scripts (A, B and Cypriot Syllabic) have been used by Mycenaeans, Iron & Archaic age Cypriots and last but not least the Minoans."

"I hope that was a fairly good summary about how things have developed in the last 8-10 years. Visited the highlands of Elimneia 4 years ago and I have to say the findings are truly astonishing!"

Unknown said...

Simon W
Your explanations interesting ; but to me the low Yamnaya reading in the Carpathian bronze sample is a little problematic. Unless a sample bias; it might be that ANE source was decoupled to the R1b source for europe

Shaikorth said...

David, I had an idea while having a discussion with Maju about how informative an Europe-only PCA with ancient genomes included is compared to one with other West Eurasians that might be interesting to test. Could you do a PCA with your dataset (since it has more populations with breakdowns) like this one:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o3EYTdM8lQaHhna1ZsSnNJem8/view?usp=sharing
but removing the MENA pops, West Asians, Tatars, Chuvash and Ust-Ishim.

I figure that Sardinians would move to opposite end compared to Loschbour, and that we'd see Loschbour define both dimensions of the PCA. There should also be a slighter change in Basques.

Krefter said...

"Really, I don't care about Reich being Jewish, I don't even know it for sure, well I guess he is."

And Laz is Greek, some say he's dienekes. So, I don't want to hear anyone say this paper is ethnocentric. This isn't personal to Reich because I'm sure he'd much rather write a paper about Jewish history.

Davidski said...

The West Eurasian PCA correlates much better with ancient components because it's less heavily impacted by very recent drift and inflated IBS/IBD sharing.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XSV9HEoqpFMVNnd2RkSXNiTUE/view?usp=sharing

Shaikorth said...

Thanks. I don't think that's too much of a problem as Loschbour defines both dimensions. If the PCA was hijacked by a modern population's drift it would look something ridiculous like this:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/08/23andmepcazoom1.png

I'd say the main difference is that a West Eurasian PCA with Loschbour on it has no Sardinian-Loschbour dimension which hides WHG compared to a Loschbour-Bedouin dimension which is really more of a "lack of WHG".

Ryan said...

@Grey

"Did they develop a caste society as a result?"

No, they assimilated and adopted people without prejudice. They were very very successful at this.

Grey said...

@Ryan

ty

Matt said...

David: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XSV9HEoqpFMVNnd2RkSXNiTUE/view?usp=sharing
Shaikorth: Thanks. I don't think that's too much of a problem as Loschbour defines both dimensions. If the PCA was hijacked by a modern population's drift it would look something ridiculous like this:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/08/23andmepcazoom1.png
I'd say the main difference is that a West Eurasian PCA with Loschbour on it has no Sardinian-Loschbour dimension which hides WHG compared to a Loschbour-Bedouin dimension which is really more of a "lack of WHG".


Interesting PCA. I know not to get bogged down in overanalyzing these, still putting them through a rotation to match the "normal" orientation of David's WE plots (so that the European samples can mostly map onto where they fit on David's WE plots)-

http://i.imgur.com/MtLCSH1.png
http://i.imgur.com/fAQDewe.png

Comparing the rotation to PCA with West Eurasia plus Loschbour, it seems like it's the introduction of Near Eastern and West Asian samples that pushes both Sardinians and Loschbour out west compared to other Europeans (and they're less west shifted compared to Southern Italians and Northern Europeans respectively in PCA without those references).

Whatever the reason (more representation of ANE, more representation of "West Asian", lesser effect of drift from Basques and drift plus admixture for Finns, etc.).

Simon_W said...

Let's recapitulate: There was R1b1 in early Neolithic Spain and there was R1b1 in EHG in Samara. This means R1b1 was spread over a vast geographic area. We have no data from West Asia, but it's conceiveable that R1b1 was present there as well. Then, we have, a little closer to modern west European R1b, R1b1a in Yamnaya, and quite a bit closer, R1b1a2a. However, since there is obvious cultural and autosomal West Asian admixture in Yamnaya, we cannot rule out that these latter haplogroups came together with this admixture from West Asia. And if that really was the case, then we cannot rule out that R1b1a2a in German Bell Beakers merely shared the common West Asian source with Yamnaya, instead of being descended from it.

As has often been pointed out, the Bell Beaker people were often of a brachycephalic, planoccipital type with big, convex nose, reminiscent of modern-day West Asians. So it would seem plausible at first sight that their R1b1a2a had rather come from West Asia than from Yamnaya.

But it's revealing to study their results in the ADMIXTURE analysis. There it's undeniable that the Bell Beaker samples have less of the greyish West Asian component than the Corded Ware samples have, which in turn have less than Yamnaya has. So they were definitely not particularly West Asian admixed people. But they not only have absolutely less of it, but also relatively, in relation to the blue HG component. In Yamnaya the proportions between greyish West Asian and blue HG component are roughly 50 : 50. In Corded people the West Asian component is a little weaker than the blue HG component. And in Bell Beaker people the ratio HG : West Asian component is about 3:1. Now if we also look at BR1, the first of the HungaryGamba_BA samples, the same trend is even more accentuated. Here, the West Asian component is tiny compared to the blue HG component.

And I think here lies the solution to the puzzle of the apparently much too low Yamnaya ancestry in BA Hungary. The problem is that there is only one Yamnaya-like component in Figure 3, this distorts things. Conceivably, westernmost Yamnaya wasn't necessarily like Yamnaya in Samara. At the western end of the steppe, the EHG must have been closer to WHG, and there was less of the West Asian component. These groups migrated into the Carpathian Basin and mixed with the EEF locals, which resulted in people like BR1, with strong WHG component and modest „Yamnaya component“, also weak West Asian component in ADMIXTURE. And if you mix someone like BR1 with Corded people, you get something like German Bell Beaker people! This explains their stronger „Yamnaya component“ in Figure 3. That they did admix is quite a natural assumption. The PCA shows that they varied quite a bit in their Corded Ware admixture. Some were very close to BA Hungary, others clearly on the way towards Corded people. But since the Corded people had much more R1a than R1b, the R1b in Bell Beaker people came from another source, and that was probably the BR1-like people from the Carpathian Basin, who probably had it from Yamnaya. I have to stress here that BR1's West Asian component is very weak. In Dodecad K7b she has 0.01% West Asian, and in Dodecad Globe13 it's 0.00%. In the unsupervised ADMIXTURE run in this paper she does have a little bit of the West Asian component. But the fact remains, that the change from CO1 to BR1 was mostly one of increasing HG ancestry.

That the main source for German Bell Beakers was neither Corded-like, nor Samara-like, nor West Asian can also be seen in the fact that, according to table S7.1, Bell Beakers share the largest portion of common drift with KO1, the HG-like early farmer from Hungary. He was probably close to EHG in the westernmost steppe.

It's also interesting to note that, according to figure S9.8, German Bell Beakers can be modelled as a mix of Spain_MN, Esperstedt_MN and 24.2% Karelia_HG. This again shows that the West Asian impact was not very important in them.

Shaikorth said...

Matt, I think that the main change between a PCA like that and a West Eurasian PCA is the addition of WHG-less Southwest Asian populations like Saudis or Bedouins. That allows them to form Loschbour's opposite and moves some populations closer to Loschbour, while Sardinian-relatedness moves to dimension 2.

That Euro PCA with Loschbour isn't that different from this one (ignore the ancients, they don't affect formation of the PCA): http://oi57.tinypic.com/t9dzr5.jpg although Basques create less differentiation than Loschbour alongside Dimension 2, or Lazaridis' Europeans-only PCA (was it figure S10.5?).



The basic form of an European PCA doesn't change when Chuvash or West Asians are added without pure near easterners, as I told to Maju, seen here:

http://s24.postimg.org/zd5ja4qet/Engl_Europe_2_1.png

Srkz said...

Smolensk hunter-gatherer ~4000 BC was R1a !
http://www.academia.edu/9452168/Archaeology_of_lake_settlement_IV-II_mill._BC_Mazurkevich_A._Polkovnikova_M._Dolbunova_E._ed (table is on page 294)

Davidski said...

Thanks, I just had a quick look. Are they saying that they also found mtDNA H in the remains from foragers?

Srkz said...

Yes, the H subclades

Joe Flood said...

I find ADMIXTURE to be a deeply flawed concept and PCA to be an unscientific methodology dropped by every other discipline except population genomics - where it continues to be used in statistically unsound ways for which it was never designed.

I do not think that the Anatolian hypothesis is a dead duck at all, it is almost certainly true, just mishandled by a generation of population geneticists It is plainly clear from the Y-haplotree to even a casual observer that Armenia and Northern Italy are R1b Central, and that the Pontic steppe has just one minor branch, admixed in small quantities with R1a wherever R1a occurs.

Haak et al was a terrible paper that should never have been published, full of selection bias, unsupported statements and a ridiculous title that is never mentioned or supported within the paper.

One also has to ask - what were all these characters doing testing ancient DNA from the steppe as their first port of call instead of the thousands of other possibilities?

Davidski said...

@Joe Flood

Your comment is one of the most bizarre things that I have read here in a long time. You appear to be totally out of touch with reality.

For one, ADMIXTURE and PCA are only used in ancient DNA papers to broadly illustrate and back up the main findings from formal statistics analyses, like those with f4-stats, D-stats and f3-stats, and formal stats-based mixture modeling.

Also take note that R1b appears in ancient European samples dating to the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age, while it doesn't show up in any Near Eastern C14-dated samples until the Bronze Age.

I wrote this blog post back in 2015, and now, four years on, with a lot more ancient DNA available, it looks even better than it did in 2015.

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