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Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Mixed marriages on the early Eneolithic steppe


It looks like the Sredny Stog culture was the early vector for the spread of both Anatolian Neolithic and Caucasus hunter-gatherer (CHG) admixture onto the steppe, from the west and east, respectively:

These data testify the assumption about the existence of mixed Tripolye-Sredniy Stog marriages, because Tripolye population represented the Mediterranean anthropological type according to the not numerous Tripolye burials (Потехина 1999, c.154). It is interesting, that the massive Protoeuropoid type was typical for the oldest and the most eastern monuments of Sredniy Stog, while mesomorphic Mediterranean type was typical for the Igren cemetery, which was one of the youngest monuments related to the second and third periods of the Sredniy Stog culture and synchronous to the Tripolye B I and B I-II.

...

Appearance of pottery with pearls at the settlements of the third period of Sredniy Stog culture and glossy ceramics without ornamentation in the eastern variant sites, as well as the group of vessels with the steppe traces at the Svobodnoe settlement, allow me to assume the existence of mixed marriages between the Sredniy Stog and Northern Caucasus population.

Source: Early Eneolithic in the Pontic Steppes, book by Nadezhda Sergeenva Kotova, available at Academia.edu here.

See also...

The beast among Y-haplogroups

Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...

Who's your (proto) daddy Western Europeans?

202 comments:

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FrankN said...

Maybe this word belonged to the vocabulary of the Samara hunter-gatherer or the Karelian hunter-gatherer
Probably. What kind of language did he use, in your opinion?

Kristiina said...

"Maybe this word belonged to the vocabulary of the Samara hunter-gatherer or the Karelian hunter-gatherer Probably. What kind of language did he use, in your opinion?"

Some people would probably refuse to answer to this question due to the lack of data, but I give a try. :-)

In genetic terms the Karelian hunter gatherer was mostly EHG with some Teal and Native American input. On the basis of this, his language should not be very far from the proposed "Nostratic structure" as constructed using IE, Turkic, Uralic and Kartvelian languages as reference. This means that this language should be of nominative-accusative pattern and not of ergative pattern. It should also be an agglutinative language, and it should have several noun cases and a rich verbal morphology. I suppose that this language did not make any major gender distinctions. On the basis of the Native American element, I would presume that this language contained some polysynthetic features, maybe along the lines of Eskimo-Aleut languages.
West Caucasian languages have a very unique structure, but I do not think that EHG-rich people in the Mesolithic Karelia spoke a language structurally close to the West Caucasian languages. To date, I have noticed very few lexical parallels between West Caucasian and North Eurasian languages, and West Caucasian lexicon looks very unique. However, I admit that Caucasian mtDNA H2a2b and yDNA J have been found in Oleni Ostrov. The language of the Samara hunter gatherer may have been more Caucasian, i.e. East Caucasian like (as Nakh and Daghestani languages) and may have contained gender/class distinctions, maybe with ablaut, and be even of some ergative pattern. Here, the question boils down to the origin of R1a1 and R1b, respectively. We need more Mesolithic yDNA in order to be more specific and to be on a firmer ground.

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