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Sunday, March 25, 2018

Central Asia as the PIE urheimat? Forget it


Right or wrong, the main contenders for the title of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland, or urheimat, are Eastern Europe, Anatolia and Transcaucasia, in that order. Central Asia, is, at best, one of the also-rans in this tussle, much like India and the Arctic Circle.

However, if you've been following the discussions on the topic in the comments at this blog over the last couple of years, you might be excused for thinking that Central Asia was in fact a natural choice for the PIE homeland, and thanks to new insights from ancient DNA, on the cusp of being proven to be the only choice.

Well, it's already been a very busy year for insights from ancient DNA, including in regards to Central Asia.

For instance, back in February a paper in Science by Gaunitz et al. revealed that the Botai people of Eneolithic Central Asia kept a breed of horse that was ancestral to the Przewalski's horse (see here). This is potentially a crucial fact in the PIE homeland debate, because the horse is the most important animal in early Indo-European religion. However, the Przewalski's horse is a significantly different clade of horse from the modern domestic horse. Thus, even if the Botai people were the first humans to domesticate the horse, then so what, because they didn't domesticate the right type of horse.

It remains to be seen who domesticated the right type of horse, and apparently there's a least one major ancient DNA paper on the way that will try to solve this problem. But we already know that the Middle Bronze Age Sintashta people - who lived on the border between Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Western Siberia - did keep the right type of horse, and it was also phylogenetically somewhat more basal, and thus ancestral, to most modern-day horse breeds.

Interestingly, by far the most basal horse genome within the domestic horse clade is Duk2, from an Early Bronze Age archaeological site near the city of Dunaujvaros in Hungary. But it's not certain who this horse belonged to exactly or where it really came from, because the site in question was probably a major trading post, where livestock and crops were exchanged for bronze articles. In other words, Duk2 may have been imported from somewhere nearby or afar. My bet is that it came from the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Let's wait and see.


Moreover, earlier this week the New York Times ran a feature on the work that David Reich and his colleagues at Broad MIT/Harvard are doing with ancient DNA. The article included an image of Reich standing in front of a whiteboard, and this whiteboard just happened to have on it a migration and mixture model based on ancient human DNA for Central Asia focusing on the period 2200-1500 BCE (scroll down the page here).

I've already analyzed this model in as much detail as I could in an earlier blog entry (see here). However, in the context of this blog entry, it's important to note that the model clearly shows major population movements from Europe and West Asia into Central Asia, rather than the other way around (ie. all of the really big arrows are pointing east). The paper with the final version of this model is apparently coming soon, and after it does come, we'll probably be having our last ever discussion here about Central Asia as a potential PIE homeland. I can't wait.

Update 01/04/2018: The preprint of the paper on ancient Central Asia that I mentioned above is now available at bioRxiv. See here.

Update 03/04/2019: In a surprising twist, Duk2 has significant ancestry from a native Iberian lineage that didn't contribute any direct ancestry to modern domesticates (see here).

See also...

Of horses and men

The mystery of the Sintashta people

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

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