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Tuesday, January 1, 2019

The PIE homeland controversy: January 2019 status report


Last year, the preprint that claimed to have presented archaeogenetic data that opened up the possibility of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland being located south of the Caucasus was, ironically, also the preprint that considerably strengthened my confidence that the said homeland was actually located north of the Caucasus.

Of course, I'm talking about the Wang et al. manuscript at bioRxiv, which is apparently soon to be published as a peer-reviewed paper in Nature Communications (see here).

It'll be fascinating to observe if and how the peer-review process has impacted on the preprint, and especially its conclusion. My impression was that the authors seemed pretty sure that the Maykop people gave rise to the Yamnaya culture, or at least Indo-Europeanized it. But, as far as I saw, the archaeogenetic data didn't bear this out at all, and instead showed a lack of any direct, recent and meaningful genetic relationship between Maykop and Yamnaya (see here). Was this also picked up by the peer reviewers? We shall see.

Moreover, there was some exceedingly interesting fine print in the manuscript's supplementary information:

Complementary to the southern [Darkveti-Meshoko] Eneolithic component, a northern component started to expand between 4300 and 4100 calBCE manifested in low burial mounds with inhumations densely packed in bright red ochre. Burial sites of this type, like the investigated sites of Progress and Vonyuchka, are found in the Don-Caspian steppe [10], but they are related to a much larger supra-regional network linking elites of the steppe zone between the Balkans and the Caspian Sea [16]. These groups introduced the so-called kurgan, a specific type of burial monument, which soon spread across the entire steppe zone.

Always read the fine print, they say. And they're right. Imagine if I only read the preprint's conclusion and missed this little gem; I'd probably think that the PIE homeland was located south of the Caucasus rather than on the Don-Caspian steppe.

Wow, proto-kurgans with inhumations densely packed in bright red ochre? A supra-regional network linking the elites of the steppe all way from the Balkans to the Caspian Sea? An expansionist culture? And, as evidenced by the ancient DNA from the Progress and Vonyuchka sites, a people who may well have been in large part ancestral to the Yamnaya, Corded Ware and Andronovo populations, that have been identified based on archeological and historical linguistics data as the main vectors for the spread of Indo-European languages as far as Iberia in the west and the Indian subcontinent in the east.

I wonder if the authors actually asked themselves who these people may have been, before so haphazardly turning to Maykop and, ultimately, the Near East, as the likely sources of the Yamnaya culture? To me they look like the Proto-Indo-Europeans and true antecedents of Yamnaya.

So as things stand, my pick for the PIE homeland is firmly the Don-Caspian steppe. And I genuinely thank Wang et al., and indeed the Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte (aka MPI-SHH), for their assistance.

But, you might ask, what about the Hittites? Yes, I realize that no one apart from me and a few of my readers here can find any steppe ancestry in the so called Hittite genomes published to date. However, consider this: if the PIE homeland really was on the steppe, and a dense sampling strategy of Hittite era Anatolia fails to turn up any unambiguous steppe ancestry in at least a few individuals, then there has to be an explanation for it. But let's wait and see what a dense sampling strategy of Hittite era Anatolia actually reveals before we go that far.

See also...

The PIE homeland controversy: August 2019 status report

Yamnaya: home-grown

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

273 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   201 – 273 of 273
Leron said...

Folker: How do you think Luwian managed to spread so quickly and widely? Hittite was not the language of most of the empire, it was the administrative language. Once the Hittite empire collapsed Hittite language basically disappeared. Even so called Neo-Hittite states had Luwian as their primary language. The Luwians were deep in Anatolia and did not have close access to Babylonian civilization from where they could borrow cuneiform writing and hence why it's attested late relative to Hittite. However, they had Luwian hieroglyphs in Asia Minor (Arzawa) and Troy before cuneiform, it was just difficult to decipher. Later a version of these hieroglyphs appear in Syria.

PF said...

@Dragos
I haven't looked at Mycenaeans closely, but the ~20% figure comes from both Davidski and the original Lazaridis paper. http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/08/steppe-admixture-in-mycenaeans.html

@Folker @Leron
To understand migrations into Anatolia, we're not looking for Hittite or Luwian, but proto-Anatolian. What we know for sure is that by 2000 BC they were completely different languages; linguistic view seems to put 3000 BC as the latest for proto-Anatolian. That's why I suggested the best thing would be to get more samples from Anatolia between ~4500-3000 BC to figure out what really went down (4500 BC date for Varna_outlier and 4300 BC for Armenia_Chl).

Al Bundy said...

Around 20 percent steppe for Myceneans? Is that direct from the steppe, sitting in the Balkans, even EHG from Anatolia? It depends on the proximate sources used, so there is a lot of room for bias.I don't think in the paper they talk about 20 percent anyways,it was in the teens.Anatolian from the steppe, I guess there's always hope,Greek could go either way.If some of you guys started moving with the data now and considering the possibilities, the truth won't come as such a shock.

Ric Hern said...

@ JuanRivera

I think Sidelkino ancestors migrated from the Lower Don where they encountered CHG back up the Volga when the climate improved. Some EHG migrated South into the Caucasus Piedmont area and others migrated into the Crimea and West along the Northern Carpathians as far as Southern Poland from where they migrated South to Villabruna and eventually down the Danube Eastwards.

Davidski said...

@Al Bundy

Around 20 percent steppe for Myceneans? Is that direct from the steppe, sitting in the Balkans, even EHG from Anatolia?

There's a genetic shift across the entire Balkans from the Chalcolithic to the Bronze Age from practically 0% steppe to over 20%, so I'm pretty sure that the Mycenaeans don't have to rely on EHG from Anatolia to get their steppe level up to around 20%.

Here you go, a graphic representation of the genetic shift in the Balkans. Hope it helps.

Balkans_BA vs Balkans_ChL

Al Bundy said...

There were movements to Greece from both directions , I just doubt a small amount of EHG could affect language. Yamnaya Bulgaria, Baden Kofeni something, Thracian Yamnaya.Yea, you're right about EHG probably coming there.I don't see how it can be linked to language change though.

Al Bundy said...

There were movements to Greece from both directions , I just doubt a small amount of EHG could affect language. Yamnaya Bulgaria, Baden Kofeni something, Thracian Yamnaya.Yea, you're right about EHG probably coming there.I don't see how it can be linked to language change though.

Drago said...

@ PF

''I haven't looked at Mycenaeans closely, but the ~20% figure comes from both Davidski and the original Lazaridis paper. http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/08/steppe-admixture-in-mycenaeans.html''

The Lazaridis paper has a figure of 13% EMBA steppe, up to 17% LNBA steppe, which is precisely what I said. At the time of writing, they did not have a sample like Varna outlier or Yamnaya Bulgaria to model on, so they had to make do with ''LNBA steppe/ central Europe'', the latter of which are unlikely to be the source of admixture in Myceneans. Moreover, to make solid deductions, one needs to look at uniparentals of both anceints & moderns of the region, understand the entire prehistory of the region, so we no longer make silly hypotheses that Greece used to be super-steppe which was subsequently diluted with time due to the Roman Empire, etc.

* ''To understand migrations into Anatolia, we're not looking for Hittite or Luwian, but proto-Anatolian. What we know for sure is that by 2000 BC they were completely different languages; linguistic view seems to put 3000 BC as the latest for proto-Anatolian. That's why I suggested the best thing would be to get more samples from Anatolia between ~4500-3000 BC to figure out what really went down (4500 BC date for Varna_outlier and 4300 BC for Armenia_Chl). ''

A true and, one would think common sense, statement. Yet it keeps being lost on one certain, omniscient individual.

Drago said...

@ Leron

''The steppe in Hittites would have been completely flushed out by the time they engaged in Near East affairs. With all the intermarriages that occurred with Semitic groups, Hattians, Hurrians, Egyptians and whoever else along the way. Even in the stone depictions of their royals and gods they exhibited the so called “Armenoid” morphology (to borrow an outdated term). But meaning they were basically indistinguishable from their genetic brothers east of the Euphrates except preferring to shave their beards and wear their hair long''

Agree with what you say, but I still think a signature for IE-Anatolians can be found, perhaps not those too far East who are too mixed, but those in the West. Reading around some of the links which have been posted here of historians talking about the political history of Hittites and ethnicity, they were written in the midst of the instrumentalist era. Essentially, the general gist begins with bagging out Kossina, pots-people ideas, etc. They also claim there is no link between genes, culture, language, & identity, often without any empirical backing, but simply stating that ''it is out of fashion''. They said , and continue to say, the same thing about CWC and BB, despite the fact that we know these were closely related groups, esp. the males. The point is, a similar but more attenuated picture should be reconstructable for any other group. We just need some more aDNA, which several teams are working on, an understanding of the culture-history, and the continued work of the Y-DNA parsers who pull out higher clarity calls.

Davidski said...

@Dragos

From the relevant paper...

However, we do notice that the model 79%Minoan_Lasithi+21%Europe_LNBA tends to share more drift with Mycenaeans (at the |Z|>2 level). Europe_LNBA is a diverse group of steppe-admixed Late Neolithic/Bronze Age individuals from mainland Europe, and we think that the further study of areas to the north of Greece might identify a surrogate for this admixture event – if, indeed, the Minoan_Lasithi+Europe_LNBA model represents the true history.

A very similar figure of steppe-related ancestry shows up in my qpGraph model.

Graeco-Aryan parallels

Basically the same genetic shift is seen in the rest of the Balkans from the Chalcolithic to the Bronze Age.

So it looks like there was a rather sudden pulse of widespread and significant admixture into the Balkans (including Greece) during the Bronze Age.

Davidski said...

In other words, there was practically zero Europe_LNBA/Steppe_MLBA admixture across the Balkans during the Chalcolithic apart from some highly steppe-admixed individuals here and there.

Then, suddenly, steppe-related admixture rose to over 20% across the Balkans.

Was Greece different from the rest of the Balkans? Why would the Mycenaeans get their steppe admixture from the Chalcolithic outliers, rather than the widespread admixture that entered the Balkans during the Bronze Age?

Folker said...

@Leron
The spread of Luwian « so quickly and widely » took several hundreds of years.
Again, we know very little about languages distribution in Anatolia around 2000 BC. Luwians were probably more numerous from the start. What is clear, is that Luwian was a lingua franca, and a trade language. The way some Luwians created independant states in Kizzuwatna and Arzawa must be explained. Was Luwians used as administrators by Hittites? Various theories exist. Anyway, you can use languages distribution which existed in the XIIth century to deduce the one which existed 800 years earlier. We know for sure it was different.
@PF
You are assuming a unique wave of migration in Anatolia. The consensus in Hittitology is different migrations of small groups. Aka differenciation of proto-anatolian outside Anatolia, and migration of proto-hittites, proto-palians, proto-luwians in separate waves. Which is making sense given that Hattic influenced differently each IE Anatolian language, and some specificities exist between them wich can not be connected to local influence.
By the way, no Steppe admixture has been found in Anatolian samples before MBA. Even if we need more samples, It is difficult to explain a long presence in Anatolia without any diffusion of Steppe admixture (given that Steppe admixture is found in the Balkans for quite a long time and widely diffused).

Davidski said...

By the way, it seems that there's some confusion here about how genetics applies to language change.

Keep in mind that you don't need a high level of a highly differentiated genetic component to initiate language change.

Ideally, what you need is a relatively sudden and significant pulse of admixture, and it doesn't matter if this admixture is very similar to what is already found in the region in question.

In other words, yeah, the people who initiated language change in the Balkans had a high level of EEF ancestry, which was already in the Balkans before they came, but so what, since this was part of a major genetic shift?

This is all very basic and logical, but, it seems, often not taken into account in these sorts of discussions. More often what we hear is "but there's only 5% of EHG, blah, blah".

Andrzejewski said...

@Davidski " Davidski said...
By the way, it seems that there's some confusion here about how genetics applies to language change.

Keep in mind that you don't need a high level of a highly differentiated genetic component to initiate language change.

Ideally, what you need is a relatively sudden and significant pulse of admixture, and it doesn't matter if this admixture is very similar to what is already found in the region in question."

That's what I've read about in regards to the sudden increase in CHG ancestry which was allegedly responsible to the sudden switch from Samara to Khvalynsk. It was written that horse domestication was brought about by this sudden abrupt jump in CHG ancestry (previously during Samara or beforehand they were hunted as wild game). The same researchers assert that this bounce in CHG at once was also responsible to the switch of Indo-Uralic into a more CHG based lexicon.

I don't believe these hypotheses but they need to be addressed.

Davidski said...

@Andrzejewski

Which researchers are you talking about?

Ric Hern said...

@ Andrzejewski

A sudden increase in CHG without changing the Y-DNA much....So you have a bounce of Samara related but earlier Y-DNA into the Caucasus Piedmont with Language change then a bounce back North with much less Language change due to the relatedness of the Y-DNA side to the earlier bounce. So I do not see any major Language change on Language Family Scale happening...

Davidski said...

I don't think the theory that Andrzejewski is citing is from a legitimate source.

It's probably from one of the crazier, fringe sites like Maciamo's Eupedia or Carlos' Indo-European.eu blog, so it doesn't require an explanation and can be safely ignored.

I know that Maciamo has an obsession with making out that R1b-M269 came from south of the Caucasus and entered the steppe with, as far as I can remember, Kura-Araxes populations that mixed with indigenous Eastern Europeans rich in R1a to give rise to the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Maybe once upon a time this was worth considering based on modern DNA, but it hasn't looked plausible for years. Sounds like Maciamo will go to his grave believing in this nonsense. People can be so strange.

Ric Hern said...

@ Davidski

Yes. Considering the Bounce. If a Bounce happened from ANE/EHG into CHG (Lower Don/Caucasus Piedmont) it is probable that those CHGs adopted the ANE/EHG related Language. So now this ANE/EHG/CHG Bounce back North with a lot of CHG however not with a CHG Language but with the related Earlier Bounce ANE/EHG language...

Bob Floy said...

@Davidski

There's still no mention of Villabruna on the Eupedia R1b page.

Ric Hern said...

@ Bob Floy

I think it is because the R1b from the Southern Caucasus/Middle East Hypothesis didn't work out....

Bob Floy said...

@Ric

That would be my guess.

Addressing the R1b in the Samara culture, he just says "It is not yet entirely clear when R1b-M269 crossed over from the South Caucasus to the Pontic-Caspian steppe".

Lol.

Ric Hern said...

The ANE splits apparently:Botai/Yamnaya 17000 years ago. Sidelkino/Yamnaya 11000 years ago. Seeing R1b at Villabruna 14000 years ago I think the Villabruna R1b split close to the Botai/Yamnaya ANE split. If Sidelkino already had some CHG then the CHG admixture happened somewhere between 17000 and 11000 years ago. This puts CHG nicely around the Lower Don Kamennaya Balka area. Just a thought.

Folker said...

oops,read "Anyway, you CAN'T use languages distribution which existed in the XIIth century to deduce the one which existed 800 years earlier"

By the way, I've already mentioned this, but there are several populations in the Balkans which are good candidates to be the Anatolian ancestors. My 1st candidates are the Yamnaya from Thrace and Bulgaria, because they were culturally different from mainstream Yamnaya (Russian acheologists don't class them as Yamnaya), developped in different cultural traditions (with probably use of cremation in later times), and because they vanished in the middle of the IIId millenium which could be explained if they crossed the Bosphorus. They were very likely a mix of local evolution of previous steppe-derived population and of new migrants from the Steppe (which could explain the datation of the linguistic split by limited linguistic influence of new migrants).
Other populations in Balkans can also be the ancestors of the Anatolian IE. But in any case, they were heavily admixed with local populations, and therefore with a limited Steppe derived ancestry.
So if those populations are the source for Hittites admixture (and given that Hittites got very likely a good chunk of Hattian and other native anatolian ancestry), the size of Steppe admixture is probably at low levels (probably similar to the one in Myceneans or lower). Uniparental markers could be deceiving as Hittites could make heir an adopted son or the son-in-law, not always an ethnical Hittite.

Folker said...

From Yakubovitch: http://web-corpora.net/LuwianCorpus/library/Luw-grammar.pdf
"The local homeland of the Luwians can be reconstructed in the central part of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), including the Konya Plain and Sakarya River valley. Already for the first part of the 2nd millennium BC one can postulate widespread Hittite-Luwian bilingualism, which speaks for the contiguity of the areas where these two languages were spoken (Yakubovich, 2010: 161-205). There are grounds to believe that Luwian functioned as an acrolect in one or several Anatolian principalities during this period."

"The Kingdom of Hattusa, which was formed in central Anatolia in the 17th century BC, was traditionally called Kingdom of the Hittites in secondary literature, because Hittite was the main language used there for purposes of writing cuneiform. This kingdom, however, was multiethnic from the very beginning. Luwian, alongside Palaic, enjoyed there the status of a regional language, witness the Luwian and Palaic formulae embedded in the Hittite religious texts pertaining to the official state cult. Beginning in the 14th century BC one can trace the presence of large groups of Luwian speakers in Hattusa, although the Luwian language initially functioned there as a basilect, while Hittite was an acrolect. In the 13th century BC Luwian became the main vernacular of Hattusa, although Hittite retained its role in the official sphere."

Andrzejewski said...

@JuanRivera The Spaniards destroyed 95% of the Indian populations by means of infectious diseases to which the latter had not had immunity. Most of the rest were enslaved, forced to convert to Christianity, and the Spaniards took local women as wives and comcumbines. There was an added effect that Indians realized Spaniards’ superiority when it came to war and relinquished their native tongues, religions etc. Plus the inquisition burnt sacred Inca, Aztec books. Nevertheless, even today pure Amerindians speak Quetzua, Aimara and so forth rather than Spanish.

Regarding the Russians and the Middle Finns - all the Russian Volga Uralic ethnicities have as @Davidski has stated earlier in this thread at least 60% European DNA, which reflects on their appearance: Modern Mari or Mordvin look like the average Irish or Scottish including freckles and red hair. Whether it came with the Sintashta culture, Finns marrying East Slavs or medieval Russians raping Finn females, the outcome is the same. And as you see, those remnant populations point to incomplete assimilation.

Andrzejewski said...

@Davidski I was NOT quoting from Maciano or let alone Carlos Quiles. I am a strong proponent of out-of-Steppe, modified-Kurgan theory, a-la-Gimbutas and David Anthony, even though I do acknowledge that recent advances in science, archeology, physical anthropology and genetics have overhauled the field, that even Anthony's 2007 book is largely dated by 2019. Nevertheless, I was actually referring to the website that @epoch posted earlier in the thread in his answer to @Ric Hern, posting this link below:

"epoch said...
@Ric Hern

If you look at the oldest language contacts of PIE you see evidence both contacts with Uralic and Semitic languages. However, the Semitic cognates are some numbers, mead, donkeys, a word for paying and a word for a ritual. Whereas the Uralic cognates are "knee", "water", "(large) fish", "name". We can be pretty sure PIE cannot have been adjacent to both the proto-Uralic homeland and the proto-Semitic homeland so one of these sets must have arrived as Wanderwörter. I'd say that is Semitic and it seems trade related.

http://loanwords.prehistoricmap.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Bjørn-2017-Foreign-elements-in-the-Proto-Indo-European-vocabulary.pdf

January 4, 2019 at 12:46 AM"

____________

So I read the PDF, and on page 54/214 in Bjorn's paper it said:

"4) (Tentative) Fundamental substitution of the vocabulary occurs in one of the
constituent families (perhaps most likely PIE - from Caucasian)"

_______________

So, all I did is quote Bjorn's 2017 paper about possible foreign elements in (early? middle?) PIE, hoping that you could come up with a credible, fact-based hypothesis that would back up my "Indo-European as an ANE language" and rebut Bjorn and the "Out-of-anything-but-Steppe" commentators in here.

Andrzejewski said...

@All It seems to me that the CHG in Steppe populations stem from assimilated native populations into the ANE/EHG language and cultural communities deriving from Samara/Khvalynsk and down. That's why in my opinion Yamnaya-Samara was 57:43 EHG:CHG but 50-50 in Sredny Stog and more Westernly areas.

Ric Hern said...

@ JuanRivera

Yes at one stage I to thought R1b could have come to the Steppe via the Southern Caspian until the Caves in that area produces Haplogroup J...and I realized that people can cross frozen waterways in Winter and if the Volga had a huge delta back then there was still some dry land a littlebit to the North at the same latitude as the Southern Urals. Heheheeh..

Andrzejewski said...

@Ric Hern I wonder why so many Semitics have a J1/J2 CHG Y-Hap and why they speak Afroasiatic rather than CHG languages?

Ric Hern said...

@ Andrzejewski

Probably because of E1b1b....

Ric Hern said...

@ Andrzejewski

Natufian influence.

Ric Hern said...

@ Andrzejewski

When we look at all the Women Figurines in the Middle East and Anatolia then maybe the Mothers languages was more important at an early stage. The Epics of Gilgamesh seems to show when the Men became more important in the Middle East...

Andrzejewski said...

@Ric Hern I’m just afraid that the same maternal-transmission of language in the case of the Semites would be applied by the Anti-Steppe commentators here to rule out PIE as an EHG language and opt instead for a CHG one

Andrzejewski said...

So what you’re saying is that CHG (like the prototype of “Abraham”) and the Hurrian groups in the ancient ME switched their languages to AfroAsiatic because they married Natufian women? I’m afraid it bodes well for our IE ancestors because someone like @Dragos would apply the same logic to justify PIE/pre-PIE as being CHG transmitted via fems and not an EHG one transmitted via fathers.

Ric Hern said...

Andrzejewski

Don't know. Are there Women Figurines in Samara or Khvalynsk, Sidelkino or Mesolithic Ukraine ?

Ric Hern said...

@ Andrzejewski

I didn't know that Akkadians/Assyrians were Hurrians ? Akkadians as far as I can remember were the earliest attested Semitic Peoples...

Andrzejewski said...

@Ric Hern J1/J2 is a Caucasus Hunter Gatherer marker, common in Greece, Italy and the Middle East. The fact that Semitic people bear CHG markers but speak a completely different language perplexes me. I do however believe that in IE society the EHG component is what gave rise to PIE and NOT the CHG one.

Ric Hern said...

@ JuanRivera

Yes Mal'ta Buret seems to show both genders in their figurines.

Drago said...

@ Davidski

'' often not taken into account in these sorts of discussions. More often what we hear is "but there's only 5% of EHG, blah, blah".''

Correct, you can have up to 70% turnover in total. But if overall proportion of steppe/ EHG/ steppe uniparental markers remains low, then it means proto-Greeks aren;t from the steppe, but somehwere closer to the steppe than the original Greek Neolithic population.

Drago said...

''from Yakubovitch..

Yeah but Yakubovich thinks PA arrive in M5 or M4. I know that personally.
So stop misattributing authors.
Cite specific & sentences to back up your claims, instead of uselesss statements like ''consensual Hittotologists''.

Leron said...

I think the Hittite question will eventually be satisfactorily answered when we get genetic concordance with the following population movements.

Ezero Culture to northwest Anatolia EBA > Proto-Anatolian

- split migration

following the Sakarya river into central Anatolia > Hittite (Nesitic)

Black Sea coast > Palaic

along Asia Minor coast and south Anatolia > Luwian

Andrzejewski said...

Kostenki-14 has in him close relationships with the three main founding lineages that formed modern Europeans: WHG, EEF and PIE/ANE:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kostyonki-Borshchyovo_archaeological_complex

“A male from Kostenki-14 (Markina Gora), who lived approximately 35–40,000 BP, was also found to belong to mtDNA haplogroup U2. His Y-DNA haplogroup was C1b* (C-F1370). The Kostenki-14 genome represents early evidence for the separation of Western Eurasian and East Asian lineages. It was found to have a close relationship to both "Mal'ta boy" (24 ka) of central Siberia (Ancient North Eurasian) and to the later Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe and western Siberia, as well as with a basal population ancestral to Early European Farmers, but not to East Asians.”

J.S. said...

Hi David,
Some news from France:

The multiple maternal legacy of the Late Iron Age group of Urville-Nacqueville (France, Normandy) documents a long-standing genetic contact zone in northwestern France

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0207459#pone.0207459.s008

MaxT said...

@Andrzejewski
"Bjorn's 2017 paper about possible foreign elements in (early? middle?) PIE"

Can you quote what he says in the study about that or link it here? Thanks.

I'm wondering if Bjorns sources are from Kortlandt, for example:

Kortlandt (2001: 1) “we may think of Indo-European as a branch of Indo-Uralic which was transformed under the influence of a Caucasian substratum.”

Andrzejewski said...

@MaxT from Bjørn:

“From what have been gathered above, a hypothesis that can be tried against further evidence may be constructed as a tentative relative chronology of an Indo-Uralic language family with established events:
1) (Tentative) Common Indo-Uralic proto-language is spoken by hunter-gatherers in the forests of the Volga-Ural region. The stop inventory conceivably medium sized.
2) (Established) The PIE language community experiences great societal change on the Pontic-Caspian steppes.
3) (Tentative) Meanwhile, what later becomes the Uralic language community remains on the northern fringes of the IU dialect continuum and partook in the regional palatalization known from the IE satəm languages.
4) (Tentative) Fundamental substitution of the vocabulary occurs in one of the constituent families (perhaps most likely PIE - from Caucasian)
5) (Established) Anatolian leaves PIE before the development of the Core-IE aspect system; the nature of the stop system is inconclusive.
6) (Established) Tocharian similarly departs at an early stage. The stop system is still inconclusive.”

Simon_W said...

To all those passionate about Italy, let me just point out that I've just added three more comments to the post about the Raveane et al. preprint:

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/12/italians-are-interesting-people-raveane.html

Sorry for the interruption, but I suspect that hardly anyone would notice without this alert.

Al Bundy said...

@Dragos Other things to consider about Greek, if I'm off the mark please say so.1 Greek as a distinct language probably already 2000bce.2 Must have split from PIE at least 1000 years earlier.3 Mycenean fairly close to PIE, except some lexical terms.



Ganesh hatwar said...

Hittite might not be an Indo European language. after all. How strong is the evidence? This article mentions major differences between other IE and Hittites https://www.revolvy.com/page/Hittite-language. May be a thourogh reexamination is needed based on emerging genetic evidence.

Folker said...

@Dragos
I’ve posted links to articles by Freu, Mouton or Knock-Fontanille... some times ago. I will not repeat myself. Sufficient to say that (as it was said to you) there is large consensus about Hittitologists about how and when IE came in Anatolia.
I’ve cited Yakubovitch only to explain the differences between the diffusion of Luwian in the LBA and early MBA. Nothing more. His position about the date of the split is indifferent to me (and why should I be agree with all his works or theories? Strange idea).
@Leron
The theory that Ezero was somewhat connected to Proto-Anatolians is not new. Freu seems rather in favor of this solution. But Ezero seems to be a bit too « Old Europe » to me.
In any case, if you are following some linguists like Melchert, Hittite was influenced early by Luwian (at a time when it was already 2 different languages), and a second time later. And the idea that proto-Luwians followed a southern route is not endorsed by what we know about the early location of Luwians (mainly in the Konya plain). Again, Luwian is not attested in Arzawa before the Hittites conquest.

Samuel Andrews said...

Some Bell Beaker results to look at...which may show different kinds of farmer ancestry but equally high Yamnaya ancestry.

*Lepenski_Vir:I5407 is a Balkan hunter gatherer.

2.5398"

Beaker_Worms_Germany:I5836

Yamnaya_Samara,61.1
Germany_MN:I0172,18.8
Globular_Amphora:I2433,13
Ukraine_N,3.9
WHG:I1875,2.5
Globular_Amphora:ILK002, 003,0.7

1.8562"

Beaker_The_Netherlandsavg_nooutliers

Yamnaya_Samara,56.7
Globular_Amphora:ILK002, 003,29.5
Globular_Amphora:I2433,7.9
Lepenski_Vir:I5407,5.6
Ukraine_N,0.3

2.6061"

Beaker_Zer_Czech:I4253

Yamnaya_Samara,52.2
Vucedol_no_steppe,23.9
Globular_Amphora:ILK002, 003,19.4
Loschbour,4.5

Samuel Andrews said...

Beaker Netherlands/Britain is 40% Globular_ILK002+ILK003-like (they're outliers in Globular amphora). Some central European Beakers are 60% of the same kind of farmer which I think confirms the signal in Beaker Neth/Britain is real.

Samuel Andrews said...

Does it prove G25 can detect different kinds of farmer ancestry if two Beaker brothers score the same kind of farmer ancestry? I7214 & I7289 are brothers.

Germany_MN_I0172 & SwedenEN are closely related.

2.2244"

Beaker_Central_Europe:I7214

Yamnaya_Samara,41.4
Sweden_EN,28.3
Germany_MN:I0172,25.6
Romania_HG,2.8
WHG:I1875,1.9

2.4608"

Beaker_Central_Europe:I7289

Germany_MN:I0172,46.2
Yamnaya_Samara,42.4
Sweden_EN,7.6
Villabruna,2.9

Davidski said...

@Al Bundy

Don't worry about dating the splits in the Indo-European phylogeny. Even linguists at the highest level can't seem to be able to do that well.

You should focus on the Bronze Age genetic shift in the Balkans instead, because it's empirical evidence attested with ancient DNA and the smoking gun for the spread of Greek and other Indo-European languages to the region (ultimately if not directly) from the steppe.

These findings push back the first evidence for steppe-related ancestry this far west in Europe by almost 2,000 years, but it must have been sporadic because other Copper Age (approximately 5000–4000 bc) individuals from the Balkans have no evidence for such ancestry. Bronze Age (approximately 3400–1100 bc) individuals do have steppe-related ancestry: we estimate that they have about 30% (confidence interval: 26–35%), with the highest proportions in the four latest Balkan Bronze Age individuals in our data (later than roughly 1700 bc) and the least in earlier Bronze Age individuals (3400–2500 bc; Fig. 1d).

Mathieson et al. 2018 page 4

Ric Hern said...

@ JuanRivera

"As for how K14 is close to WHG, ANF and ANE,..." I wonder if this proves that Haplogroups I,J and K originated in the Caucasus/Anatolia/Zagros area rather than in Southeast Asia...Haplogroups G and H also. So maybe Ust Ishim Man's Ancestors migrated from the Caucasus/Anatolia/Zagros rather than from Southeast Asia.

Drago said...

@ Al

''ther things to consider about Greek, if I'm off the mark please say so.1 Greek as a distinct language probably already 2000bce.2 Must have split from PIE at least 1000 years earlier.3 Mycenean fairly close to PIE, except some lexical terms.''

Seems to make sense. Garrett's overview is similar.
Davidski seems to take the MLBA Individual from Bulgaria, an steppe immigrant c. 1700 BC to be a proto-Greek. I doubt that because he's too late, also because he is buried at the edge of a pre-existing burial mound in a un-impressive accoutrement. Really doesn't look ''proto-Mycenean''.
IMO The steppe ancestry in southern Balkans mostly relates to Cernavoda-immigrants which fused with other Balkan groups and immigrants from west Anatolia. Of course, steppe migrants might have come later also, but I don't think they were formative. We can guess this because there isn't any Z93 in the Balkans, apart from individuals who are of Romani descent, or have recent west Asian ancestry.

Davidski said...

@Dragos

It makes no difference whether the Z93 individual from southern Bulgaria was a Proto-Greek or not. That's just an interesting detail that may or may not be right, and one day we might see.

What really matters is that there was a widespread and relatively sudden pulse of admixture into the Balkans during the Bronze Age.

That's a classic recipe for language change and there aren't any other realistic options for the arrival of Indo-European languages into the Balkans including Greece.

What I'm saying is that it's basically over, and all that's left to debate now are the details.

Drago said...

@ Davidski
If Mycenean shaft graves are R1+, then your scenario is correct. If not, then the issue is more complex, and the question will blow open. Let's see, otherwise its too speculative at this stgae. As Ive mentioned, your views are too one-sided/

Andrzejewski said...

@Ric Hern "As for how K14 is close to WHG, ANF and ANE,..." I wonder if this proves that Haplogroups I,J and K originated in the Caucasus/Anatolia/Zagros area rather than in Southeast Asia...Haplogroups G and H also. So maybe Ust Ishim Man's Ancestors migrated from the Caucasus/Anatolia/Zagros rather than from Southeast Asia."

Ust'Ishim Man was closer to today's East Asians more than to West Eurasians; Kostenki is somewhere in between.

The funny thing is that now scientists claim that Mal'ta Boy (MA-1) looks closer to East Eurasian (="Mongoloid") but we all know that ANE/EHG were Caucasoid-looking.

Drago said...

@ Folker

Yes Freu and other text-based historians can only offer their views and sentiments like ''it is assumed that Anatolians arrived at X, Y or Z date..''
The breakthrough will come from new -ages scholars who work in concert with feild-archaeologists, linguistic specialists and aDNA.

@ Leron

''I think the Hittite question will eventually be satisfactorily answered when we get genetic concordance with the following population movements.

Ezero Culture to northwest Anatolia EBA > Proto-Anatolian ''

Except the Ezero culture isn't a steppe culture, and the movement is Troy -> middle phase Ezero culture, not vice-versa. I think some of th more flexible views, like those you have expressed will turn out to be closer to the mark, instead of 1-dimensional fascination with 'steppe ancestry''.

Ric Hern said...

@ Andrzejewski

Closer to East Asians today means basically nothing. The East Asian likeness could have been spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific around 40 000 years ago...After all not all Haplogroup K ancient samples had Denisovan admixture....

Mem said...

The crania of ANE/EHG was between Mongoloid and Caucosoid.

Davidski said...

@Dragos

Even if the people in the shaft graves are very similar to Sintashta and pack a lot of R1a, then this will just corroborate one theory about the origin of the Proto-Greeks, but it won't prove it, because they may just have been Indo-Iranians who spread the horse chariot complex into the Balkans.

The important point is that there was widespread and sudden admixture into the Balkans from the north during the Bronze Age, and it started even before the spread of the horse chariot complex.

So if Greek and other Balkan Indo-European languages weren't introduced into the Balkans during the Neolithic, then this is just about the only plausible explanation that exists for their appearance there.


Of course, you and Al Bundy know this by now and I don't think that you'll fall back on the Neolithic theory to get around this problem. So I don't see the need to continue this debate.

Tesmos said...

@JuanRivera

ANS is not specifically from Kostenki-Sunghir and Tianyuan:

"Symmetry tests using f4 statistics reject tree-like clade relationships with both Early West Eurasians (EWE; Sunghir) and Early East Asians (EEA; Tianyuan); however, Yana is genetically closer to EWE, despite its geographic location in northeastern Siberia (Extended Data Fig. 3d, Extended Data Table 2; Supplementary Information 6). Using admixture graphs (qpGraph) and outgroup-based estimation of mixture proportions (qpAdm), we find that Yana can be modelled as EWE with ~25% contribution from EEA (Figure 2; Extended Data Fig. 3; Supplementary Information 6). "

Folker said...

@Dragos
You should take time to read a bit about who are talking about. If Freu is an historian, Klock-Fontanille is a linguist. Among the papers I cited, some authors are archeologists.
As said to you be several posters, there is a large consensus among specialists of Hittites.
You are lacking of real arguments, hence your answer.

Ric Hern said...

@ JuanRivera

The thing is that Yana and Kostenki/Sunhgir remains are basically at the same timedepth. So a common Ancestor is basically the thing. We already see K2a in Ust Ishim and Oase. So why would K2b not also be in the North. We see the descendants of F (G,H,I,J) around the Caucasus/Anatolia/Zagros up until as late as the Neolithic. We see Neanderthal in both and we know Neanderthal had higher concentrations West of the Altai particularly around the Caucasus and Denisovans East of the Altai. So my personal feeling is that K originated in the Caucasus/Anatolia/Zagros area and from there migrated in all directions.

Draft Dozen said...

@Mem

Well, EHG Popovo male was Europeoid looking, with well-profiled face and protruding nose, Bizygomatic breadth - 144; Nasomalar angle - 136,8; Zygomaxillary angle - 123,3
http://oi530.photobucket.com/albums/dd348/meon7/popovo1.jpg

Davidski said...

@All

Please no physical anthropology on this blog.

blogmaster said...

Not true at all. Very early forms of R jave been found through Iran

Davidski said...

All of the R1a and R1b in Iran is from the steppe.

The Hajji Firuz R1b-Z2103 is much younger than Yamnaya R1b-Z2103, and it comes from the steppe.

You'll see in the paper.

blogmaster said...

A recent study actually did support a partially iranian origin for mycenaens

Davidski said...

LOL

There's nothing in Mycenaeans from Iran.

But that Hajji Firuz Z2103 is definitely from the steppe.

blogmaster said...

Mind boggling because you have a low Iq and lack intuition, not because the laws of of the universe have been shattered.

Davidski said...

The PIE homeland definitely wasn't in Iran. The linguistic and genetic data are totally against this crazy idea.

Indo-European languages only arrived in Iran during the Middle to Late Bronze Age.

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