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Monday, January 7, 2019

PIE Urheimat poll: two or three options left


If we let ancient DNA dictate the terms in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland debate ahead of historical linguistics and archeology, then, as far as I can see, there are two or three realistic options for the location of the said homeland. Here they are, in order of my own preference:

1) The Don-Caspian steppe around 4,300 BCE (see here). The ancestors of the Hittites and other Anatolian speakers also came from this homeland and entered Anatolia via the Balkans (or, less likely, the Caucasus) in fairly small groups sometime between 4,000 and 2,000 BCE. A lot of samples from Bronze Age Anatolia are needed to confirm or debunk the presence of steppe ancestry there.

2) The eastern Balkans during the peak of the ostentatious Copper Age in the region. Proto-Indo-European developed in the wealthy Chalcolithic communities of the western Black Sea coast and quickly spread both into the steppes and Anatolia via elite and trade contacts, and thus with minimal gene flow. Proto-Indo-European minus Anatolian, or PNIE, then spread from Eastern Europe during the Bronze Age with the mass migrations of the Yamnaya and closely related populations. A lot of samples from Chalcolithic western Anatolia are needed to confirm or debunk that people moved from the Balkans into Anatolia at this time.

3) Transcaucasia and/or nearby around 10,000 BCE. Proto-Indo-European, or rather Indo-Hittite, is much older than generally accepted, and came from the Epipaleolithic northern Near East. It was introduced into the steppes by foragers of the so called Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer (CHG) type, where it eventually became Proto-Indo-European minus Anatolian, or PNIE. Proto-Anatolian was spoken by closely related CHG-like foragers who stayed in the northern Near East.

Admittedly, that last theory is way out there, and at the moment, has about as much chance of being accepted by most historical linguists as Out-of-India. But the one advantage that is has over the other two proposals is that it doesn't need any additional sampling of ancient DNA.

I'll probably get grilled in the comments as to why I didn't include a proposal with the Maykop culture as the PIE community, or at least the Indo-Europeanizing agent in the steppe. Honestly, after seeing the ancient DNA from a wide range of Maykop remains courtesy of Wang et al., I think the chances that Maykop was an Indo-European-speaking culture are low. Indeed, both the Maykop genome-wide data and uniparental markers scream "Northwest Caucasian" to me.

Also, if the Caucasus was the PIE homeland, or even a major expansion point for early Indo-European languages, then considering its widely accepted status as a linguistic hotspot and refuge, it's fair to expect that it should still harbor at least one highly diverged Indo-European language. Is there any evidence that it ever did?

Below is an interactive poll. Please vote for one of the three options and feel free to let us know in the comments why you made the choice that you did. I might add more options to the poll if compelling reasons are given in the comments to do so.


PIE Urheimat poll
Don-Caspian steppe around 4,300 BCE
Chalcolithic eastern Balkans
Epipaleolithic northern Near East
Created with PollMaker
See also...

Yamnaya: home-grown

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

On the doorstep of India

200 comments:

andrew said...

With regard to (1), the runaway favorite, I think that there are less far fetched alternatives to the strawmen offered and some related questions that are more interesting.

* Don-Caspian as a secondary expansion from some other source that didn't expand, or with a long standing pre-proto-Indo-European in situ. How old was PIE as a coherent language when it made its biggest expansion(s)?

* Multiphased expansion v. single expansion; various Anatolian/Tocharian hypotheses.

* Was PIE expansion very punctuated in time or gradual?

* Was PIE more of a genetic ancestor of a particular language (perhaps some EHG language) or was it more of a creole type language?

* Some of the tech used by PIE was not home grown. Did it culturally diffuse from Caucasus directly, or did the tech arrive via the Balkans?

* How much cultural commonality was there between the mostly R1a folk in the northern steppe and the mostly R1b folk in the early Southern steppe. What was the nature of R1b migration to Western and Northern Europe?

* Is some of what is attributed to PIE actually due to a shared first wave Neolithic farmer substrate across much of the European region?

* What archaeological litmus tests most closely track the genetics? Which don't?

Andrzejewski said...

We should be voting on this question too:

Did pre-PIE (early PIE) originate with:

1. ANE/EHG component, passed via fathers (R1a1, R1b, Q1a1) - preferred theory, I opt for this option.

2. CHG component, likely passed via mothers (like the switch of CHG/EEF Hurrian speakers to Semitic in the Middle East).

3. An EHG language radically transformed by a strong CHG substratum.

4. A CHG language overhauled by EHG/ANE language.

5. A brand "new" language isolate, arising on the Steppes using original lexical vocabulary.

AWood said...

The odds of #2 being valid are quite low as well, since no doubt the Balkans would have been chock full of EEF at the time it spread east and became "Yamnaya". As the aDNA suggests on the PC steppes, the Balkans, at least at the time when farming arrived 6500 BC, could not have been the source population of Yamnaya. The only way #2 is valid, is if the steppes is thrown out of the PIE debate.

Arch Hades said...

Why does the third hypothesis have to be dated so far back? Why can't it be 4,000 BC or at earliest 5,000 BC like the steppe one? Whenever we see CHG start to influence the steppe is when it spreads to the steppe. Makes sense regarding Anatolia too because 6,000 BC West and Central Anatolia is still near pure Anatolian farmer, it's only in the Chalcolithic the eastern CHG/Iranian strain starts making it's presence known.

Matt said...

@Arch Hades, I think Davidski is assuming zero geneflow between Neolithic Caucasus and Neolithic era steppe. Future samples will tell whether this is realistic.

Ryan said...

@AWoods - the maternal transmission of language is David's preferred theory for Basque last I checked, no? (Correct me if I'm wrong)

Drago said...

I didn't vote. IMO the data currently points toward another option, currently beyond the scope of discussion at present.
However, i will clarify some points

e.g.
- W.r.t A Woods comments- The Kurgan culture, which began c. 4500 BC in areas further west, although we currently lack Suvorovo data, they had plentiful EEF admixture, and even more of an impact culturally, ideologically, religiously, and needless to say, linguistically. . Therefore, the current sample set of Caspian Yamnaya (& Ukrainian females) are not what we should be basing our understanding on (given that the eastern expanding Kurgan set appears to have had their fill of females from the Volga)

- Andrew : I know you're just pointing out the possibility, but PIE is not a creole. People like to discuss about Creoles & pidgins because they're interesting, but theyre rare outside modern Colonialist scenarios. Linguists have gone to pains to point that out (apart from Stefan Zimmer, who's works are quite good).

- Option 3 and option 1 are essentially the same, athough option (3) is an intentional strawman by Davidski ;). Option 1 in its purity is just a Paleolithic Continuity Theory, but going back to Siberia instead of the Magical Island of Atlantis

PF said...

Great summary. I chose 1) as the most likely; however, I think 4300 BC is too late. Something like 5000-4500 makes more sense to me (admittedly simply based on Varna_outlier).

Davidski said...

@Arch Hades

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make?

CHG was on the steppe very early, probably as early as 8,000 BCE, and it's possible that all of the CHG necessary to make the Yamnaya population was there at that time or shortly thereafter. Refer to map A here...

Europe's ancient proto-cities may have been ravaged by the plague

After that, all you're seeing is diffusion of this CHG within the steppe, while, at the same time, unadmixed CHG goes extinct in the Caucasus and becomes mixed with Anatolian farmers, so that by 4,000 BC it's impossible for there to be any significant gene flow from the Caucasus into the steppe, except maybe the parts inhabited by Steppe Maykop (but Steppe Maykop is irrelevant IMO because it disappears when Yamnaya gets going).

Davidski said...

@Andrew

How much cultural commonality was there between the mostly R1a folk in the northern steppe and the mostly R1b folk in the early Southern steppe. What was the nature of R1b migration to Western and Northern Europe?

There's no such distinction.

It seems that R1b was simply more common than R1a practically everywhere until the Corded Ware expansion.

Here's a map with the oldest R1a-M417 and R1b-M269 shown together...

Map Link

PF said...

@Arch Hades

Not sure how much you would consider significant, but Tepecik samples dated to before ~6500 BC already have CHG. The settlement itself goes back a millennia earlier to ~7500 BC. So if that migration in that general time range is indeed related to proto-Anatolian, then around 10,000 BC for PIE at the source, as Davidski wrote, doesn't seem unreasonable.

Also in theory this could be when related CHG migrations to the Steppe occured as well, merging with EHG and ultimately spreading IE (minus Anatolian) via Steppe cultures.

Actually, I think I've mentioned before, irregardless of the options I think the above question is important to investigate closely -- when/how did CHG and EHG come together to form the foundation of the Steppe component?

Ric Hern said...

I chose 1: Yes what about the Steppe destruction of Caucasus Forts ? 5500 BCE if I remember correctly...4300 BCE I think would be closer to the start of expansion towards the West. The CHG admixture I think started taking place around 13 000 BCE till 5500 BCE when it reached its highest levels of admixture.

Davidski said...

@AWood

The odds of #2 being valid are quite low as well, since no doubt the Balkans would have been chock full of EEF at the time it spread east and became "Yamnaya". As the aDNA suggests on the PC steppes, the Balkans, at least at the time when farming arrived 6500 BC, could not have been the source population of Yamnaya. The only way #2 is valid, is if the steppes is thrown out of the PIE debate.

Yamnaya has some cryptic EEF (or rather Europe_MN) ancestry, of around 10% or a bit more. See here...

Yamnaya: home-grown

PF said...

Well, CHG-related migrations were happening way earlier than even 13,000 BC... amazingly it's already present in MA1. :-O

What matters though is how CHG got to ~50% on the Steppe. If it was a gradual process over many millennia representing some sort of North/South EHG/CHG cline then its relation to PIE seems very shaky... but if it was a major movement around 10-8,000 BC then it's still possible.

Drago said...

@ PF

I chose 1) as the most likely; however, I think 4300 BC is too late. Something like 5000-4500 makes more sense to me (admittedly simply based on Varna_outlier).''

According to a new tight chronology offered by Vybornov, Khvalynsk dates to c. 4500 BC, with the Pre-caspanska culture existing 5000 BC. The main difference is the lack of social stratification, copper, and relative paucity of domesticates in the latter c.f. former (i.e. lack of acculturation into Varna-Haemangia ideologies).

@ Rich

'' Yes what about the Steppe destruction of Caucasus Forts ? 5500 BCE ''

The Meshoko forts did not even exist until 4500 BC, so they could not have been destroyed in 5500 BC.
The demise of Meshoko was because of the arrival of new groups from the south - Majkop.
And, at this juncture, it was Eneolithic steppe which apperas to have been drivenout by Steppe Majkop groups. Meshoko are very interesting but not too important in this question - they're just rustic mountain farmers at the end of an exchange chain.

Ric Hern said...

@ Dragos

Yes my mistake. Like I said "If I remember correctly". Well this time I didn't. So 4500 BCE then. So a push from Steppe peoples Southwards and Westwards from the Lower Don...

Ric Hern said...

Some Late Upper Paleolithic/Mesolithic samples from the Caucasus Piedmont and Lower Don would be nice to clear up the issue about CHG and its whereabouts...

Samuel Andrews said...

Armenian never enters the discussion. It's very relevant because it is an Indo European isolate in South Caucasus surrounded by non-Ies. Not just that but Armenians can be modeled with 0% Steppe ancestry!

Armenian looks like something that can be used against a PC Steppe origin of IE languages. South Caucasus IE language, no Steppe ancestry, etc.

But, the Hajji_Firuz_BA I2327 (2400 BC) with R1b Z2103 & 50% Steppe ancestry changed that.

I2327's SW Asian ancestry does not match Iran or Mesoptamia. It looks Caucasian-ish. Armenians live in the Caucasus.....

I2327 is obviously some kind of proto-para-proto Armenian.

Samuel Andrews said...

Steppe ancestry & IE language in SW Asia today can mostly be explained by Iranians (with R1a Z93) which actually very widespread.

But, I2327 demonstrates Yamnya who spoke a different IE language moved in there before Iranians arrived.

-Armenian is the last surviving descendant of their language.
-They didn't contribute much ancestry to SW Asians at all.
-But their Y chromsome R1b Z2103 is common even outside Armenia.

Because of I2327, the Armenian language can be added to the bucket list of IE languages with confirmed PC Steppe origin.....

Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Italic, Thracian, Greek, Illyrian, and now Armenian.

Davidski said...

@Samuel Andrews

Armenian looks like something that can be used against a PC Steppe origin of IE languages. South Caucasus IE language, no Steppe ancestry, etc.

It can't because Armenian is firmly a PNIE language, in other words, not derived from any sort of early split of its own.

And in terms of genetics, there was obviously a fairly sudden pulse of admixture into Armenia from the steppe during the Bronze Age, especially late Bronze Age, so this can easily explain the appearance of Indo-European languages in this part of the Near East, irrespective of whether present-day Armenians show significant genome-wide steppe ancestry or not.

Have a look at the graphic here of the spread of the plague during the Bronze Age. It shows the genetic structure of one of the ancient Armenian samples.

Europe's ancient proto-cities may have been ravaged by the plague

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,

I guess I spoke to soon. I2327 may not be linked to Armeinans but he was some-kind of Indo European.

Samuel Andrews said...


@All,

There needs to be single location for ancient Y DNA data we can all look at. There isn't one. Most importantly to look at the many Bell Beaker, Yamnaya, Andronovo y chromsomes. Why? Because...these were strict patrilocal cultures with massive y chromsome founder effects.


With so many samples we can find most recent 'expansion points': The last stage on Y chromsome tree where many samples share a common ancestor (For Bell Beaker it appears to be two steps below R1b P312)

For these Bronze age cultures, the expansion point will tell us what the lineage of the most recent patrlineal clans. Radiocarbin dating tells us around the time the clan expanded the lineages. Then, check yfull's age estimate for the lineage to see how much it overestimated or underestimated the age is.

Also, each culture lived about 5 centuries apart. Andronovo/Sintashta lived around 1800bc, Bell Beaker around 2300 BC, Yamnaya around 3000 BC.

So, their most recent Y chromosome 'expansion points' should have different age estimates on yfull.

Ric Hern said...

@ JuanRivera

When did the split between Kotias and Steppe CHG take place ? If it was around 27 000 years ago it would be hard to find I think. Maybe Paleolithic Samples from the Near East will show a connection then...

Davidski said...

@Arch Hades

I think I know what the issue is. Your assumptions about the ancestry of Yamnaya are outdated.

Keep in mind that populations very similar to Yamnaya and Corded Ware already existed on the steppe at the very least well over 4,000 BCE. This has been shown with ancient DNA so it isn't just a guess.

And it's highly unlikely that pure CHG populations still existed a this time anywhere, because:

- the CHG groups in the southern steppes mixed with EHG

- the CHG in the Caucasus mixed with Anatolian farmers

So there was no CHG migration to the steppe around 4,000 BCE, or, realistically, even 5,000 BCE.

Conversely, however, as already pointed out, but I'll point it out again, there was CHG admixture in Anatolians already during the early Neolithic, and indeed significant CHG admixture in the farmers from Tepecik Ciftlik.

Davidski said...

Holy crap, I just had a look at the dating of Varna_outlier ANI163. That's the Corded Ware-like sample with lots of Yamnaya-related and CHG admixture, probably from the Eneolithic populations of the Don-Caspian steppe.

It's 4711-4542 calBCE!

AWood said...

I was under the impression that these scenarios were based on migration and/or gene flow, which are in many cases one and the same. My vote or comment wasn't based on cultural exchanges and how it could pass a language. The point is that EEF represents only a tiny sliver of the ancestry in Yamnaya, thus this geneflow does not represent a major migration. The CHG or relative obviously was, as well as local steppe people.

Andrzejewski said...

I’m surprised why that J* in Karelia was classified as “EHG”. Based on what?

Bob Floy said...

@Andrzejewski

Based on his genome-wide structure. He was an EHG with Y-haplogroup J, which is curious for several reasons.

Andrzejewski said...

That’s what I was claiming before: Samara or even pre-Samara was mostly EHG. They were more Eastern/Northern to the CHG. AS they Samara/pre-Samara EHG groups spread South/West, they assimilated the already native CHG populations in areas like Stredny Stog. I believe that warrior PIE using metallurgy and riding horses vanquished the male Hap J carrying CHGs abc took their women as brides. That’s the source of CHG mtDNA in Yamnaya.

My only hope is that unlike in the Levant, where CHG/Anatolia_N Hap J carrying Hurrians took Natufian wives and became Semitic speakers (instead of original AfroAsiatics E1b1b), that on the Steppe it were the EHG MALES who imposed their language on their wives and not vice versa.

Ric Hern said...

@ Davidski

What is 4711 calBCE be in BP and BCE ? I don't know the formula. Not a Maths Genius. Heheheeh...

Drago said...

@ Andrzejewski

''That’s what I was claiming before: Samara or even pre-Samara was mostly EHG. They were more Eastern/Northern to the CHG. AS they Samara/pre-Samara EHG groups spread South/West, they assimilated the already native CHG populations in areas like Stredny Stog. I believe that warrior PIE using metallurgy and riding horses vanquished the male Hap J carrying CHGs abc took their women as brides. That’s the source of CHG mtDNA in Yamnaya.''

That's not quite how it went. Well, of course EHG are more ''northern '' c.f. CHG.
EHG are basically ANE + WHG (its more complicated than that, but no point speculating at present until we have more Paleo data from east Europe).
R1 had arrived, and EHG had formed by, 14000 years at least, probably earlier.
It is J which probably arrived later, in waves, but simply never made a huge impact. Probably R and I are just too adapted and ingrained in northern Europe c.g. G & J.
The big CHG impact came much much later - in the pre-Yamnaya period, between 4000- 3000 BC.


''My only hope is that unlike in the Levant, where CHG/Anatolia_N Hap J carrying Hurrians took Natufian wives and became Semitic speakers (instead of original AfroAsiatics E1b1b), that on the Steppe it were the EHG MALES who imposed their language on their wives and not vice versa.''

It's very much a case by case basis. It depends on culture and circumstances. We still need to clarify the nature of CHG introgression here.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,

Have the Wang authors gotten back to you about releasing the genotype data?

Grey said...

"Transcaucasia and/or nearby around 10,000 BCE"

i think the early sedentary, pottery using wetlands forager cultures around the Black Sea may indicate that instead of two biomes with distinct populations (Caucasus and Steppe) maybe there were three: Caucasus foragers, steppe foragers and Black Sea wetlands foragers and maybe the CHG-like/EHG merger happened between the wetlands and the steppe rather than the Caucasus and the steppe, and earlier.

nb i'm assuming here that sedentary, pottery using cultures imply relatively high population density (for foragers)

Al Bundy said...

I'll vote for none of the above, but no. 3 is closest geographically to my pick as homeland.The timing is off by around 4000 5000 years.How can anyone with a clue vote for any of these?

epoch said...

@andrew

"Some of the tech used by PIE was not home grown. Did it culturally diffuse from Caucasus directly, or did the tech arrive via the Balkans?"

I recall reading somewhere that the copper from the copper beads found in a Khvalynsk grave came from the Balkans. Which points to a long trade route along which all kinds of exchanges might have taken place.

Ric Hern said...

The probable relatedness to the Imereti Culture of Late Upper Paleolithic Settlements at Kammenaya Balka at the Lower Don for me points towards the Contact Zone of ANE and CHG. So I see a migration down the Volga from the Southern Urals to the Lower Don. Minimal admixture of CHG by populations moving West from there and more significant admixture in ANE/EHG moving Southwards towards the Caucasus. The ANE component in EHG/WHG maybe also split at the Lower Don with Karelia ancestors moving up the Don and Villabruna Ancestors moving through Southern Ukraine and Yamnaya Ancestors maybe staying behind in the Don-Caspian accumulating more CHG as time went by and expanding around 5000 BCE....

gj said...

most visitors voted for the. Don-Caspian steppe. Guess Davidski is happy about it.

Davidski said...

@Samuel Andrews

I got a reply from one of the authors. The genotypes will be released when the paper comes out.

@Andrzejewski & Bob Floy

EHG is by definition partly of CHG origin, hence the Y-hg J in some EHG males.

It seems like there was a cline in CHG ancestry on the steppe during the Mesolithic, with the southernmost steppe groups having more CHG than Yamnaya.

@Dragos

It's likely that the Don-Caspian steppe groups that I'm talking about here had at least as much CHG as Yamnaya.

Cpk said...

A question for linguistics experts:
Proto-Indo European doesn't seem to be an agglutinative language. If PIE came with EHG part of Yamnaya, wouldn't you expect PIE to be agglutinative? Languages from North Eurasia are always agglutinative.

Samuel Andrews said...

I wonder if the Globular Amphora Y DNA signature is I2a2a1b2a-L801.
According to yfull.
I2a-L801=formed 9900ybp, TMRCA 4100ybp.

The TMRCA roughly matches Globular Amphora.

All Globular males are I2a2a-M223. One is confirmed I2a2a1b2-L161. If, they got better analysis I bet they'd turn out L801.

I2a-L801 has appreciable frequencies in northern Europe today. Other young I2a2a-M223 are also present.

Davidski said...

@Cpk

If PIE came with EHG part of Yamnaya, wouldn't you expect PIE to be agglutinative? Languages from North Eurasia are always agglutinative.

It's not a question of EHG vs CHG.

Yamnaya-like people probably already existed on the steppe way before PIE was spoken.

So maybe we need a new name for the Yamnaya-like para-PIE steppe foragers?

Cpk said...


@Davidski

Yes but ultimately didn't ANE-EHG (whatever) come from Siberia or somewhere close to Arctic? Native American languages are agglutinative too.

Davidski said...

@Cpk

My point was that PIE isn't really a North Eurasian language. It's a West Eurasian one with partly North Eurasian origins.

It wasn't first spoken by an EHG or ANE population, but an Yamnaya-like one at least a thousand years before Yamnaya existed.

Gabriel said...

Maybe I2a-Din in Slavs comes from GAC?

Drago said...

Maybe its irrelevant. It's probably artificial trying to split which component spake what, if, as it seems, CHG was lurking north of the Caucasus for 6000 years. It's sociolignistically nonsensical to propose an ''ANE language'', because there is no way that ANE all spoke a similar set of languages after 20000 years of drift and isolation, as we know from hunter-gather language diversity. There could have been multiple ANE -rich intrusions into eastern Europe, all speaking divergent languages.
What's more important is to understand where the culture of steppe groups - if we think late PIE exapnded with genetically steppe-rich groups - formed; and also to understand that P-IH belonged to a dilaect chain. HHmm I wonder with what horizon we can link this to ?
We can also dimiss the idea that EEF were Semitic speaking. The majority of their ancestry is highland West Asian, not Afro-Asiatic.

Im also quite skeptical of those fluxus-network type analyses of language lexical sets showing affinities of IE to Yeneisian. Just because you can feed them into a programme, it does't mean the results are valid.

Cpk said...

@Dragos

Obviously many things are possible but i will say that it's more likely that a population originated in Siberia would speak an agglutinative language.

Ric Hern said...

@ Cpk

Apparently agglutination can arise in languages that previously had a non-agglutinative typology and it can be lost in languages that previously were agglutinative. So there need not be a genetic relationship.

Ric Hern said...

@ Cpk

And some languages show both these...So maybe the original ANE language had both.

Ric Hern said...

It is basically the same with the VSO Wordorder which can evolve seperately without any contact from outside.

Davidski said...

@Cpk

The Eneolithic population of the Don-Caspian steppe didn't come from Siberia and Proto-Indo-European was never spoken in Siberia.


Davidski said...

@All

Interesting factoids...

1) The formation of Proto-Indo-European is generally dated to around 4,000 BCE.

2) Proto-Indo-European is generally also accepted to be influenced at some level by Proto-Northwest Caucasian.

3) The colonization of the Northwest Caucasus by the ancestors of the Meshoko and Maykop people from the south Caucasus started just over 4,000 BCE.

4) Meshoko and Maykop genomes are very similar to those of present-day Northwest Caucasians, and indeed uniparental markers show a direct relationship between these ancient and modern populations.

5) Ergo, it looks like Meshoko and Maykop were early Northwest Caucasian-speaking cultures that influenced the Proto and early Indo-Europeans.

EastPole said...

I voted Don-Caspian steppe around 4,300 BCE although I have to admit I don’t have strong opinions about the origin of PIE.

OT, very interesting video about Funnelbeaker culture in Poland (in Polish):

https://www.facebook.com/starozytnapolska/videos/2308682162743552/?t=0

Ric Hern said...

Now I wonder if there was a Proto-Indo-Euro-Kartvelian Language which formed and spoken near the Lower Don with gradual drift in different directions due to respective additional input from the North for Proto-Indo-European and from the South for Proto-Kartvelian, basically pulling these to Languages further apart than they originally were...? Just a thought.

Davidski said...

@Ric

I think it's possible that the Meshoko, Maykop and Steppe Maykop communities included Kartvelian speakers, considering the strong genetic ties between Meshoko and Maykop and the south Caucasus.

But the chances that Proto-Kartvelian was spoken on the steppe are pretty slim unless, say, by migrants within the Steppe Maykop community.

Ric Hern said...

@ Davidski

Yes, however I was thinking along the line of a Language which contributed both to Proto-Kartvelian and Proto-Indo-European.

epoch said...

@Ric Hern

Like a suggested Proto-Pontic?

Ric Hern said...

@ epoch

Yes maybe.

rUdra said...

https://twitter.com/NirajRai3/status/1082618644566364161?s=19 niraj rai says horse DNA found from mature harappan period. Genetic findings to be published soon

Davidski said...

Probably a Botai horse, not an Indo-European-speaking horse. See here...

Central Asia as the PIE urheimat? Forget it

rUdra said...

https://timesofoman.com/article/675610/Oman/Pottery-from-ancient-Harappa-civilisation-discovered-in-Oman#.XDHSthCJC0U.facebook Italian & american researchers find IVC pottery in Oman, dated to 2500-3000bc.

Vara said...

Why it is a surprise that horses were found in IVC? Horses were common all over the Iranian plateau around 3000BCE.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Horse-figurine-from-Mohenjo-daro_fig2_237413669

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surkotada#Horse_remains

http://www.payvand.com/news/11/nov/1059.html

vAsiSTha said...

Probably a Botai horse, not an Indo-European-speaking horse. See here...//

Or a 34 ribbed arabian horse as is desribed in vedic ritual manuals. Trade contact between arab peninsula and IVC is very old.

@vara they could analyze dna from this harappan horse, hence it is important

Andrzejewski said...

I thought that EHG formed as ANE + WHG = EHG. Didn’t know about the CHG part

Andrzejewski said...

Globular Amphora I2a2a-M223 came from their SHG (Scandinavian HG) ancestors. It’s a forager y-dna that existed way before EEF farmers.

Germanic people have a strong forager admixture owing to the Erteboelle Culture, which was situated north to the LBK.

Andrzejewski said...

GAC then has more forager than Farmer ancestry

Ric Hern said...

@ epoch

What do you think ? Was Proto-Kartvelian a Substrate or Abstrate in Proto-Indo-Europeans ? If Maykop or Meshoko was Proto-Kartvelian and was one or the other don't you think that there should be some Gene exchange visible ? I think the kind of language similarities points to a deeper relationship than mere word swopping and for this I think some Genetic exchange was needed. So if Maykop and Meshoko didn't contribute to the PIE Genes, who did to justify the Linguistic similarities between Proto-Kartvelian and Proto-Indo-European ? But I could be wrong...

epoch said...

@Ric Hern

I don't know, I'm merely an interested amateur.

There are linguists who are into the Indo-Uralic idea but they are a minority. However, most other linguists are not so much opposed to the idea as that they think there is too little evidence for it. A very substantial part of these think that at the very least there was a long standing very deep contact.

There also are linguists that favour a NW Caucasian substrate in PIE (Kortland). Also a minority. The agreement is less on this side. However, as we see CHG on the steppe there is bound to be *some* influence.

Kristiina - who is far more knowledgable than I on the subject, mind you - thinks PIE is a mixed language but I also heard objections to that, as PIE seems far too predictably structured to be a mixed language. Have a look at Michif to see that the mixing indeed causes unpredictable language changes. It seems like some inherited French words follow Indian language laws, some don't.

Whatever the case, there is a very old and deep relationship between Uralic and PIE and there is some sort of relationship with NW Caucasian. Maybe Uralic is the mixed language and there is a Caucasian substrate in PIE. Whatever it is, it's clear where PIE originated: Between the Caucasus and the Uralic homeland.

Andrzejewski said...

@epoch @Ric Hern There can’t be any deep genetic relationship between PIE and Uralic: PIE has a rich Hap R1/Q1a ANE-derived population, although Uralic speakers are mostly N1c1 on their paternal side. Uralics therefore cannot be closely related to PIE uniparental carriers. Moreover, the aDNA shows that Uralics have a very substantial BAIKAL HG admixture lacking in PIE. Therefore it rules out Uralics being an EHG population or even closer to it. Mind you, @Davidski said that modern Uralics have 60% European DNA.

Furthermore, there are deeper lexical similarities between PIE and Chukchi-Kamatchadal-Nivkh, another ANE rich population, whereas the lexical similarities between PIE and Uralics are minimal, close to nil.

Besides, there was a one way borrowing from Sintashta Indo-Aryan into Proto-Uralic, words like Wlkas —> Werkes, etc. Some Russian linguist even figured out that the words “water” and “name” are a result of an PIE/IIR —> PU borrowing.

epoch said...

@Andrzejewski

Borrowing extremely daily used words like "name" and "water" (or "knee", "wash" and "give") *is* a very deep relation.

Samuel Andrews said...

@EastPole,

The Funnel Beaker video link doesn't work. Can you paste the video's title?

Arch Hades said...

David wrote


"think I know what the issue is. Your assumptions about the ancestry of Yamnaya are outdated.Keep in mind that populations very similar to Yamnaya and Corded Ware already existed on the steppe at the very least well over 4,000 BCE. This has been shown with ancient DNA so it isn't just a guess.

CHG was on the steppe very early, probably as early as 8,000 BCE, and it's possible that all of the CHG necessary to make the Yamnaya population was there at that time or shortly thereafter. Refer to map A here.."


Well based on Haak et al's 2015 paper, the Samara region of the steppe was pure EHG around 5,500 BC, right? Then by 3,300 BC [late PIE according to the Kurgan model] it's only about half EHG. So it's probably during this time period it's genetic presence increased dramatically.

Also, wasn't Western and Central Anatolia basically pure farmer at least in 6,000 BC? So i see CHG expanding in all directions after 6,000 BC. There's absolutely no reason at all to push it back to 10,000 BC. A Caucasus model would be pretty similar to a Kurgan/steppe model as far as when it expanded. 3,000 BC only represents late PIE according to the Kurgan model. Early PIE is dated to 4,500 BC in the Kurgan model.

Al Bundy said...

@Arch Well said bud, I think the main alternative is exactly what they say in the Wang supplement. I also think it's before Maykop, just reading the tea leaves from knowledgeable, unbiased people.

Al Bundy said...

What group,when exactly, what route not sure, but what languages came from where.




Samuel Andrews said...

@Arch Hades,

Using, David's G25 PCA here are results for ancient Anatolians. My most pure Anatolian reference is Balkans_N:I2533.

Tepecik_Ciftlik_N: 73% Anatolian, 9% Natufian(ish), 17.7% CHG/IranN
Barcin_N: 89.5% Anatolian, 3.1% Natufian(ish), 7.1% CHG/IranN
Boncuklu_N: 83% Anatolian, 1% Natufian(ish), 9% CHG/IranN, 7% RomaniaHG
Anatolia_EBA/MLBA: 51% Anatolian, 12% Natufian(ish), 37% CHG/IranN
Anatolia_BA: 59% Anatolian, 6% Natufian(ish), 35% CHG/IranN


epoch said...

@Arch Hades

" A Caucasus model would be pretty similar to a Kurgan/steppe model as far as when it expanded."

No it wouldn't. It would have to explain that linguists consider Anatolian the earliest split, but that somehow Greek manage to reach Greece going through this Anatolian speaking area, before the late Bronze Age collapse, all without leaving a trace in Anatolian. It would have to explain the deep ties of Uralic an PIE. And it would have to explain why Hittite used non-IE loan words for local flora that are indigenous in the perceived south of the Caucasus homeland. It would have to explain that women brought PIE to the steppe, causing a language change in a highly patriarchic culture, and leave no trace whatsoever of the language these men spoke previously in the form of a substrate.

Davidski said...

@Arch Hades

No one's talking about Samara here except you. You need to update yourself.

Yamnaya-like people already existed on the steppe well before 5,000 BCE, probably just south of Samara.

Otherwise there's no way to explain their presence in the Balkans and the North Caucasus steppes well before 4,000 BCE.

Davidski said...

@Al Bundy

Well said bud, I think the main alternative is exactly what they say in the Wang supplement. I also think it's before Maykop, just reading the tea leaves from knowledgeable, unbiased people.

You mean Meshoko?

Meshoko is practically identical to Maykop and obviously closely related to modern Northwest Caucasian speakers.

It couldn't have been ancestral to Yamnaya because it had too much Anatolian ancestry. And as I keep saying, Yamnaya-like people existed on the steppe already during the Meshoko period.

Al Bundy said...

What if Yamnaya was not IE and IE spread to Europe through Ukraine Eneolithic?Any difference between those groups or pretty much the same?

Andrzejewski said...

But Samara is important, and was important enough for Haak and Lazaridis to talk about in their 2015 paper. The switch from Samara to Khvalynsk was accompanied with a sudden increase of CHG ancestry to 25%-30% plus the domestication of horse that hitterto has been hunted as wild game.

Davidski said...

@Al Bundy

What if Yamnaya was not IE and IE spread to Europe through Ukraine Eneolithic? Any difference between those groups or pretty much the same?

Ukraine Eneolithic is a mix of Ukrainian foragers, Balkan farmers and these guys...so one of the three had to be Indo-Europeans, and it's not the first two.

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.

Andrzejewski said...

Yamnaya was LATE PIE. What I’m trying to figure out is what was early PIE or even pre-PIE she who spoke it

Davidski said...

@Andrzejewski

But Samara is important, and was important enough for Haak and Lazaridis to talk about in their 2015 paper.

That's because they only had samples from Samara at the time.

It turned into a problem since then, because a lot of people made the assumption that what happened at Samara basically represented what happened across the entire Pontic-Caspian steppe.

So everything was built on the assumption that CHG-rich people migrated into the steppe during the Khvalynsk period and gave rise to Yamnaya.

But Yamnaya-like people already existed on the steppe at the time south of Samara, and probably much earlier.

Andrzejewski said...

Here’s what I think happened: CHG pocket in the Caucasus had split from basal Eurasians, first from WHG 45,000 years ago, then from Anatolia_N 25,000 years ago. Post-LGM this population started to expand again, mostly towards the Steppes. But the “pure” Kotias/Satsrublia has meanwhile admixed in the Caucasus with ANE to form Dzudzuana, which is the basis of modern populations living there nowadays.

Starting 5000BC CHG started to replace Anatolia_N in Anatolia, and the linguistic links between Hatti and NW Caucasus on one hand and between Hurrian and NE Caucasus families shows evidence.

At the roughly the same time Anatolia_N started expanding into Caucasus, mostly Southern Caucasus, so now most Caucasus populations have CHG, post-ANE invasion dzudzuana plus EEF. With minor later Steppe components, of course).

Davidski said...

@Andrzejewski

But the “pure” Kotias/Satsrublia has meanwhile admixed in the Caucasus with ANE to form Dzudzuana, which is the basis of modern populations living there nowadays.

Nope.

Kotias/Satsurblia was a mix of Dzudzuana, ANE-related stuff from the steppe and/or Central Asia, plus some extra basal input.

andrew said...

"There's no such distinction. It seems that R1b was simply more common than R1a practically everywhere until the Corded Ware expansion."

Not convinced. The two are quite well sorted in ancient DNA for multi-centuries periods of time, and the after Yamanaya R1b men are replaced by R1a men in the same region, and in the founding populations that went to Europe. Certainly the two populations had common patriline ancestors no earlier than the most basal R1* and given the geography of the oldest ancient DNA sooner than that. But, they clearly did sort for an extended time period. Usually, that kind of sorting in the absence of geographic barriers arises from a cultural fact that keeps the two sorted in a particular time period. It might be a difference in linguistic dialect or language. It might be a religious division. It might be a tribal division. But the Y-DNA patterns we see in ancient DNA do not look like pan-mixia and there has to be a reason for that.

"I know you're just pointing out the possibility, but PIE is not a creole. People like to discuss about Creoles & pidgins because they're interesting, but theyre rare outside modern Colonialist scenarios. Linguists have gone to pains to point that out (apart from Stefan Zimmer, who's works are quite good)."

The way I phrased it was inartful, and I agree that PIE is not a creole. But, while one possibility is that PIE is a genetic descendant of a particular EHG language, it is not the exclusive possibility. Perhaps the better way to pose the question more neutrally would be "What are the deep origins of PIE?", and in particular, did it arise from just random drift from a single language (and if so, whose?), or did it have substantial contributions from more than one language? For example, PIE could have been an EEF language with a strong EHG substrate/adstrate influence or visa versa. Also, while PIE itself is certainly not a creole (among other things, it is too grammatically complex), a language that was a creole in the distant past at the time PIE was spoken and on the verge of expanding could have been a creole that subsequently evolved into a more conventional language.

Another linguistic question is how PIE became the dominant language of the steppe people prior to expansion. Conventional wisdom is to think of HG's as typically having a highly Balkanized collection of dialects and languages within a language family. But, the PIE hypothesis is that pretty much a single language diversified to produce everything from Russian to Hindi to Greek to Catalan to Gaelic to Armenian languages. And, there is precedent in the Bantu Expansion and the Austronesian expansion to Madagascar for major language expansions to have hyper-localized origins in the dialect of a particular area the size of a U.S. county or metropolitan area. Presumably the PIE tribe won over other steppe people somehow or other to their dialect, with expansion then shared by the steppe people collectively. How did that happen?

andrew said...

"Armenian never enters the discussion. It's very relevant because it is an Indo European isolate in South Caucasus surrounded by non-Ies. Not just that but Armenians can be modeled with 0% Steppe ancestry!"

FWIW, my working hypothesis is that Armenian is quite a young language (probably coming into being after Bronze Age collapse ca. 1200 BCE) whose distinctiveness arises from areal influences from Indo-Iranian languages on one side and Greek and/or Anatolian language on the other, most probably with an original source related to Greek that migrated east after the fall of the Hittite Empire, and then having strong substrate/areal influences from greatly diverged Indo-Iranian languages once it gets there. It is only a working hypothesis, but it is one that seems to explain a lot of what is observed. An absence of steppe ancestry, of course, suggests elite dominance language shifts from ruling or neighboring populations that did have steppe ancestry. In my working hypothesis, local South Caucasians adopt the Greek of their rulers, but Persian incursions with Persian rulers before or after this Greek rulership leave a hodge podge of linguistic influences.

Arch Hades said...

_"No it wouldn't. It would have to explain that linguists consider Anatolian the earliest split, but that somehow Greek manage to reach Greece going through this Anatolian speaking area, before the late Bronze Age collapse, all without leaving a trace in Anatolian. It would have to explain the deep ties of Uralic an PIE. And it would have to explain why Hittite used non-IE loan words for local flora that are indigenous in the perceived south of the Caucasus homeland. It would have to explain that women brought PIE to the steppe, causing a language change in a highly patriarchic culture, and leave no trace whatsoever of the language these men spoke previously in the form of a substrate."

Well Greek would still come from the steppe, it's more related to Germanic, Italic, etc than it is to Anatolian IE. In the revised Caucasus model that Reich seems to believe, everything still comes from the steppe except Anatolian. Indo-Iranian still comes from the steppe too. Basically we have pristine PIE, on one side of the phylogeny we have Anatolian, on the other side everything else including Greek and Indo-Iranian...and that explains the Uralic ties. It doesn't matter which homeland you go by, the linguists seem pretty adamant that Anatolian branches off first.


Anyway, i'm just theorizing cause I don't believe in the Caucasus model. And yes, females spreading the languages seems ridiculous. But I don't have absolute confidence in the Kurgan-Steppe one either. Hittites or Luwians with steppe ancestry would definitely help fortify my confidence in the steppe model regarding pristine PIE.

Davidski said...

@andrew

Certainly the two populations had common patriline ancestors no earlier than the most basal R1* and given the geography of the oldest ancient DNA sooner than that.

They had common patriline ancestors on the Don-Caspian steppe during the Eneolithic.

Not sure which ancient DNA you're referring to, but my point is backed up by the presence of various subclades of R1a, R1b and Q in the closely related Eneolithic steppe populations of Khvalynsk, Progress and Sredny Stog II.

Ric Hern said...

@ andrew

I think Steppe people were mostly confined to Big Rivers. And climate change had a big influence on migrations along these river. It was basically impossible not to bump into a big population while migrating, due to this. This is why it was easy to spread the Language or dialect thoroughly among the Steppe populations...

Andrzejewski said...

I thought Khvalynsk was basically Samara after a societal upheaval which I attributed to the CHG element. I believe that’s what Bjørns was referring to on page 54/214 that Epoch/Hern we’re quoting here earlier.

Davidski said...

@Andrzejewski

I thought Khvalynsk was basically Samara after a societal upheaval which I attributed to the CHG element.

Seems like you're conflating CHG with this...

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.

Andrzejewski said...

I agree with @Davidski that the Yamnaya-like admixture in the Steppe was more or less a strong, adhesive element by 5th millennium bc

Andrzejewski said...

Armenian is close to the now extinct Phrygian branch. Or perhaps also to Thracian. BTW, are Cimmerians the ancestors of the Thracians, or is it dated now? Are Cimmerians Iranic like the Scythians?

Andrzejewski said...

You keep referring to Stredny Stog II. Who were SS I?

Davidski said...

@Andrzejewski

You keep referring to Stredny Stog II. Who were SS I?

It was basically Ukraine Neolithic, so without the eastern influences that came later, which included additional EHG and CHG, cord pottery and a heavier reliance on horses.

Andrzejewski said...

So SS-I were basically very close to Yamnaya or any para-PIE speaking populations. Some researchers claim that they were "replaced" by Yamnaya, I essentially think that they got subsumed into Yamnaya. My guess is that there used to be an ancient distinction between Khvalynsk-Repin-Yamnaya etc. v. Sredny Stog I, SS II and Ukraine Neolithic/Ukraine_HG which gave rise to Satemization. I presume that once the area which since prehistory used to be inhabited by R1a1 did speak some sort of para-PIE, along with the differentiation that Andrew stated, and during the Yamnaya period this para-PIE language, becoming a substrate in PIE, underwent Satemization and constituted the language of the CWC.

Davidski said...

@Andrzejewski

SS-I was very different from Yamnaya. SS-II was much more similar to Yamnaya, including the same type of steppe component found in Yamnaya.

Both SS-II and Khvalynsk were created when people with this steppe component migrated in all directions out of the steppes east of Ukraine and south of Samara.

Yamnaya was the result of some of these cultures (Repin or Pit Grave, Khvalynsk and SS-II) coming together again in a new horizon. See here...

Yamnaya: home-grown

I gotta go. I can't type all of the background info in the comments. You have to do some background reading.

Arch Hades said...

"Yamnaya-like people already existed on the steppe well before 5,000 BCE, probably just south of Samara.

Otherwise there's no way to explain their presence in the Balkans and the North Caucasus steppes well before 4,000 BCE"


What sample are you speaking of, when talking about the Yamnaya like people living in the North Caucasus before 4,000 BC? If that's the case, then that could just be that EHG ancestry was making it's way south, right? This sample is a "Steppe EMBA" sample, genetically speaking?

Matt said...

@Arch Hades, yeah, re; series of migrations what you say true if you go with what Reich seems to prefer which is Ringe's tree, where Indo-Iranian and Greco-Armenian break late with Balto-Slavic based on lines of shared morphological/phonological innovations (though there are problems with that), along with a CHG origin for proto-Indo-Anatolian.

What Davidski says (about the series of migrations and it being more difficult, not impossible but adding to complexity) is more true for Gray's model of CHG + Bayesian basic lexicon trees, where Indo-Iranian and Greek split off early from core IE, and as they chose to interpret the tree. Those trees may be compatible with a steppe "origin" for all post-Anatolian IE as well, just not in the way that the Max Planck seem to preferring to interpret them (which is with what they see as "steppe IE" only ancestral to North and West European branches).

Davidski said...

@Arch Hades

If that's the case, then that could just be that EHG ancestry was making it's way south, right?

Unlikely, because we have these samples that could be derived from Yamnaya, except Yamnaya didn't actually exist for another 1000-2000 years...

Khvalynsk_Eneolithic:I0434 5200-4000 BCE

Varna_outlier:ANI163 4711-4542 calBCE

Ukraine_Eneolithic_outlier:I6561 4045-3974 calBCE

Clearly, there's a population similar to Yamnaya already expanding as early as ~4,500 BCE. But it didn't come from the North Caucasus.

You should check out what I wrote here...

The PIE homeland controversy: January 2019 status report

Al Bundy said...

If both BaltoSlavic and IndoIranian came from the PC Steppe, why is BaltoSlavic much closer to II than anything in Europe?Unless he's changed his mind, he seems to be considering a through the Caucasus route for Greek and Armenian in addition to Anatolian.If true, y haplogroup J would be involved in spreading some IE languages , and would be prominent in a S. Caucasus homeland.


Al Bundy said...

You think Davidski option 1 is pretty much where we're at?

Samuel Andrews said...

5000-4500 BC matches the TMRCA of R1b M269 & R1a M417. Pretty dang obvious what's going on.

Samuel Andrews said...

Took another look at ADMIXTURE graph from Wang. The Yamnaya Hungary with no farmer admix looks like Yamnaya on PC Steppe. Yamnaya Hungary with farmer admix have excess WHG. More than Corded Ware. CWC_I0049, is the most similar to them, but less WHG.

Why is this important? R1b P312+ Beaker has lots of WHG. R1b L151 is younger than Z2103. Its TMRCA is 2700 BC (maybe 3000 BC). It fits the time period of Yamnaya Hungary.

@Davidski

Are Yamnaya Hungary BAM files available?

Davidski said...

@Samuel Andrews

Are Yamnaya Hungary BAM files available?

No idea.

As for Yamnaya Hungary, I think we got a sneak preview of their Y-haplogroups in the Beaker paper, because a couple of the Hungarian Beakers are surely of recent Yamnaya origin. Check out the genetic and archeological affinities of I2786 and I2787.

They belong to Y-haplogroups I2a2a and R1b-Z2103. So I reckon this is what Yamnaya Hungary will show, rather than R1b-L51 or R1a-M417.

But I could be wrong.

Grey said...

Andrzejewski said...
"There can’t be any deep genetic relationship between PIE and Uralic: PIE has a rich Hap R1/Q1a ANE-derived population, although Uralic speakers are mostly N1c1 on their paternal side. Uralics therefore cannot be closely related to PIE uniparental carriers."

i don't know about Uralic dna but hypothetically any time there are two distinct biomes you might get a hard but invisible barrier between the two resident populations (cos group A don't know to subsist in biome B and vice versa) but there could still be bride-swapping alliance marriages between the two populations so you could end up with two distinct paternal lines with mixed mtdna and autosomal (and some language shift caused by the mothers).

something like this might explain the ydna/autosomal split in yamnaya - the question would then be what/where were the two biomes.

#

on whether language shifts are more likely male or female driven...

- a 100% male conquest/massacre resulting in 100% captured brides is the only time the population is going to be 50/50 in language terms

- in cases where there's small-scale but regular intermarriage across two populations then at any one time the mothers from the outside population will only ever be a small percentage of the total population and that's very unlikely to cause a total language switch imo - although it's easy to imagine it causing some language shift.

#

wildly speculating...

if language shifts are partly a result of the second option i.e. small number of foreign mothers speaking to their kids partly in their native tongue then has anyone looked into whether some language shifts might be child-related i.e. words/phrasing that are easier to say by children or the most common words used by mothers to young children?

Gabriel said...

If Yamnaya Hungary doesn’t turn out to be ancestral to Beakers, which could be a potential candidate for ancestors of the Beakers?

Ric Hern said...

@ Them meee

I think there is maybe three options here. Bell Beaker Ancestors spread down the Elbe River (Northwards) from somewhere near its origin.

Or a population related to Suvorovo survived in Transylvania between Farmer Settlements using a Nomadic kind of lifestyle and social/economic structure similar to Gypsies and then pushed Northwestwards into Poland just before the Corded Ware expansion and from there pushed Westwards by Corded Ware.

Or they were part of the Usutovo and pushed Westwards hugging the Northern Carpathian foothills till they reached the Elbe.

Davidski said...

@Them meee

If Yamnaya Hungary doesn’t turn out to be ancestral to Beakers, which could be a potential candidate for ancestors of the Beakers?

I don't know, but I think there's a reason why in East Central Europe there's a lot of R1b-Z2103, and that's Yamnaya.

Beakers, even in East Central Europe, are overwhelmingly R1b-L51, unless they come from near Yamnaya sites, probably because they're mixed. And there's another major difference between far western Yamnaya and Beakers: strong brachycephaly in the latter.

I don't like getting into debates about physical anthropology here, but together with R1b-L51, this is a smoking gun that we might be in for some sort of surprise eventually.

I suspect that there's another steppe group, distinct from Yamnaya, that will be shown to be ancestral to eastern Beakers. But like I say, I don't know, and don't have a strong opinion on the matter right now.

Gabriel said...

Can we potentially trace the other ancestors of the Beakers, in case Yamnaya Hungary doesn’t cut it (I kinda agree), and could we already have hints of where they lived or which archaeological cultures can be considered candidates?

Ric Hern said...

@ Them meee

However looking at MtDNA from Ukraine Eneolithic which could be linked to the Rathlin samples my guess would be from somewhere near there. Maybe migrating into Belarus and from there Westwards passing through or near Lithuania, therefore maybe the similarities between the Irish and Lithuanian Folklore with nothing quit as similar inbetween....

Samuel Andrews said...

The mystery of Bell Beaker R1b P312+ is driving me crazy. Thanks to some you archaeological-educated people for sharing possibilities. But there are so many equally unlikely possibilities.

-Their farmer ancestry is heavy in WHG, has Iberian-like stuff. But, Kurgan cultures only ever occupied Danube & Bulgaria where farmers were low in WHG and did not have Iberian-like stuff.

-The only traces of western Yamnaya is in southeastern Europe. They seem to have been R1b Z2103 not R1b L151. Where was R1b L151?

-Beaker R1b P312 tribes were large in number & loud. There were tons of them. They overwhelmed western Europe. This makes it hard to imagine their ancestors were quite & small in number when living in eastern Europe.

Gabriel said...

Or maybe Beakers exploded in population over a relatively short period of time after emerging from a small area in Eastern Europe?

Ric Hern said...

@ Them meee

If that is the case then I think from Transylvania or Slovakia.

epoch said...

@Samuel

Western-Europe had still several pockets of HG left: Blätterhöhle, Vlaardingencultuur, TBR flat graves in North Germany. So did Poland where there was a CWC with R1b found. We haven't got any Y-DNA from the Rhineland CWC.

See if the Iberian is actually a El Miron like admixture. The Dzudzuanna shows a good chunk of El Miron in Latvian HG even in conservative mode.

Chad said...

There's no ancestry like that in Ukraine until after 4300BCE. It's extra Ukraine N and Chalcolithic Anatolian stuff already in Varna via Hamangia.

Ric Hern said...

@ Them meee

When we follow the current MtDNA we see U5a1b at Derievka(Ukraine) around 4500 BCE during the Neolithic, then at Zvejnieki(Latvia) around 3000 BCE and then in Rathlin(Ireland) around 2000 BCE. With Derievka and Rathlin being R1b on the Paternal side.

Davidski said...

@Chad

No it's admixture from the Don-Caspian steppe via Ukraine, which was just starting to be influenced by expansions from there.

Varna_outlier qpAdm

Samuel Andrews said...

@Epoch,

Funnel Beaker, Globular Amphora had some Iberian-like farmer ancestry. That's where Bell Beaker R1b P312+ got it from. They don't have ElMiron-like ancestry like Iberian late Neolithic farmers do (some have 10% Elmiron-like stuff).

Ric Hern said...

@ Them meee

So maybe R1b L51 escaped the Plague by moving into Belarus with its Wetland environment from Ukraine. Then into Latvia/Lithuania and from there towards the Netherland and into Ireland.

John Thomas said...

Strange that the Bell Beaker people are strongly brachycephalic.

It is surmised that the extant population of the British Isles are, more or less, the direct lineal descendants of the Bell Beaker people.

Dolichocephaly is the rule amongst Britons - as opposed to many extant continental folk - and this appears to be true throughout historical times.

Davidski said...

Head shape can change significantly due to selection and environmental factors within a few generations.

So it's not something that can be used to track ancestry across the ages, or even several hundred years, as was once thought.

But the thing with the Beakers is that they turn up suddenly in Central and Western Europe with a new cultural package, genetic structure and paternal ancestry, and a fairly unusual head shape. So they're easy to tell apart from everyone around them on several levels.

I have no idea where they came from though. I'm skeptical that they were an offshoot of Hungarian Yamnaya, but I could be wrong about that.

Drago said...

@ Epoch

''So did Poland where there was a CWC with R1b found''

I thought people doubted that individual was actually R1b (?)

epoch said...

@Dragos

Not that one. You may refer to RISE436 from Tiefbrunn, which is labeled in the Supplementary Information XL sheet from Mathieson as R1b1 but which, according to Richard Rocca, is unambiguously determined to be R1a by several amateurs.

Tesmos said...

@epoch

Do you mean the RISE1 sample that is from CWC Oblaczkowo in Poland? He is confirmed as R1b indeed. To bad it's a low quality sample, because we don't know if this sample is positive for L51.

EastPole said...

News about Rakhigarhi:

“In 2016, archaeologists and scientists from India and South Korea found these two "very rare" skeletons in a Harappan (or Indus Valley) city - what is now Rakhigarhi village in the northern Indian state of Haryana. For two years, they researched the "chronology" and possible reasons behind the deaths; and the findings have now been published in a peer-reviewed international journal.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46806084

They write it has now been published but don’t say where. Anybody heard anything about this new paper?

EastPole said...

In todays “The Times of India” they also write about it:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/in-first-such-finding-couples-grave-excavated-at-harappan-site/articleshow/67445140.cms

and refer to old article:

https://synapse.koreamed.org/DOIx.php?id=10.5115/acb.2018.51.3.200

Davidski said...

There's also this one, if anyone's interested...

Traumatic injury in a cranium found at Rakhigarhi cemetery of Harappan civilization as anthropological evidence of interpersonal violence

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X18305443

Gabriel said...

So much for people who used to say the Harappans were super peaceful or something.

Synome said...

@Davidski

How's something like Vucedol looking as an Eastern Beaker ancestor? I can't recall exactly what we know or don't know about them aDNA wise other than there were 2 R1b samples found in that area and time period.

Andrzejewski said...

@mickeydodds1 said...
"Strange that the Bell Beaker people are strongly brachycephalic.

It is surmised that the extant population of the British Isles are, more or less, the direct lineal descendants of the Bell Beaker people."

No, they are not. 1/2 of English people's Y-DNA came from the Anglo-Saxons, with lots of WHG marker I1, also via Danes and Normans, descendants of the Ertebolle Culture.

Welsh are "Celtic", which arrived most likely from France or Belgium with packs of Neolithic Farmer ancestry.

Andrzejewski said...

@Davidski "But the thing with the Beakers is that they turn up suddenly in Central and Western Europe with a new cultural package, genetic structure and paternal ancestry, and a fairly unusual head shape. So they're easy to tell apart from everyone around them on several levels."

Without getting too much into Physical Anthropology realm, weren't Central European farmers (EEF, Anatolia_N) mostly brachycephalic?

Aren't they the progenitors of the "Alpine type" with broad, round head?

BTW, lots of British Anglo-Saxons DO have that Alpinic, round, broad brachycephalic head type like the actor who plays Richard (Mrs. Bucket's husband on "Keeping up appearances"). Also, Oliver Cromwell and Shakespeare were brachycephalic.

Synome said...

After doing some more reading, I think the EBA Makò culture of Hungary might be an even better candidate for proto-eastern Beaker.

I think the Danubian area is still the best place to look, and although eastern Beaker may not be derived directly from the Western Yamnaya of the mid 3rd millennium BCE , Yamnaya already existed in this area for centuries before that and had plenty of time to mix and interact with the local Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures. Of course, that's already been hypothesised by Gimbutas and others.

The Balkans and Carpathian basin are so crucial to IE questions it's a shame we haven't seen more aDNA from this area yet.

Andrzejewski said...

I guess it has something to do with a Steppe (Yamnaya or related) ancestry with Cucuteni Tripolye sedantary population?

epoch said...

@JuanRivera

There used to be a Dutch Origin Hypothesis for Bell Beaker set up and defended by Lanting. It was based on a typological evolution of the pottery where Maritime beakers evolved from All Over Corded (AOC) beakers. AOC was considered an evolved form of Corded Ware. It managed to get a large backing when it seemed backed up by C14 data.

Then it came to be known that the decay of C14 isn't straightforward for some reason, and all the data from exactly this period was just from a plateau, i.e. C14 date differences were error prone. Then it turned out that Maritime beakers from Iberia were older than Dutch AOC beakers and that was the start of the Iberian Origin Hypothesis.

But as we now know that Iberian BB's weren't the same as the rest, and Maritime beakers are clearly associated with Iberian and Breton BB's, we can speculate that the AOC beaker actually may have come from the Protruding Foot Beakers, as Corded Ware from the Netherland is called. Not t suggest that BB came exactly from the Netherlands but more or less from the most western frontier from the Corded Ware horizon.

One of the oldest BB sites at Bleckendorf had a Corded Ware Beaker in it. It was considered a BB burial on the rest of the burial:
https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?13871-Oldest-Steppe-Bell-Beakers-Saxony-Anhalt-Germany

Gabriel said...

Maybe the steppe ancestors of the Beakers lived in the North Pontic steppe, or around the Don valley?

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

The thing about brachycephalic bell beakers and the yamnaya is that the yamnaya were not brachycephalic at all.

epoch said...

If I force BB Netherlands to be either CWC_germany + Blätterhöhle + Sweden_MN or Yamnaya_Kalmykia + Blätterhöhle + Sweden_MN the first comes out with a distance 1.4 and the latter with a distance of 2,8. Combined I get this:

[1] "distance%=1.2944"

Beaker_The_Netherlands

CWC_Germany,76.4
Sweden_MN,13.6
Yamnaya_Kalmykia,7.6
Blatterhole_HG,2.4

epoch said...

Swap Yamnaya_Kalmykia for Yamnay_Bulgaria and I get this:

[1] "distance%=1.6286"

Beaker_The_Netherlands

CWC_Germany,81
Yamnaya_Bulgaria,9.4
Sweden_MN,5.2
Blatterhole_HG,4.4

epoch said...

The point is that CWC was admixted with farmers so this might skew affinities.

However, if I recall correctly the early Baltic Corded Ware sample was not admixted at all:

[1] "distance%=2.3783"

Beaker_The_Netherlands

CWC_Baltic_early,68.8
Sweden_MN,23.4
Blatterhole_HG,7.2
Yamnaya_Kalmykia,0.6

So I'd say Bell Beaker consistently chooses Corded Ware over Yamnaya.

epoch said...

With what in the list?

Gabriel said...

Or maybe it just means Bell Beakers could derive their steppe ancestry from a group with extra farmer ancestry.

Either way, I’m not sure about Beakers coming from Corded Ware... I mean, it’s almost all R1a-M417 and shows obvious links to Balto-Slavs and maybe Indo-Iranians and Germanics, who all have R1a-M417/Z645. So that muddies the waters.

epoch said...

@Them meee

The early Baltic CWC sample didn't have any farmer admixture but fits better than Yamnaya.

Arza said...

@JuanRivera
For some reason, fits are better with Poland_BA than with CWC_Germany.

Did you use individual samples or averaged coordinates?

Poland_BA consists of 3 very different samples. One is like CWC_Czech, second is not similar to anything else and it is left completely unexplained and ignored, and the third one is basically a Bell Beaker.

Arza said...

@ Davidski
Re: Varna outlier in qpAdm

If it's not a problem I'd like to ask for:

left pops:
Varna_o
Baltic_BA
Sredny_Stog
Trypillia

and:

left pops:
Varna_o
Baltic_BA
Sredny_Stog
TDLN

I wonder if qpAdm result will be in line with Global25.

Gabriel said...

What is that second sample like?

Arza said...

@ Them meee
I6579 is like a mix of Baltic_BA, Central Europeans and steppe with about 10% of SHG/WHG admixture on top of that and it rather doesn't fit into any simple "HG shifted population X" scenario.

EastPole said...

Tony Joseph is publishing fragments of his book "Early Indians: The Story Of Our Ancestors And Where We Came From":

https://www.telegraphindia.com/culture/books/the-battle-over-the-early-indians/cid/1681099

Very interesting reading. Tony Joseph is a very honest and knowledgeable person.
I wish we had such a book about our history.

Drago said...

@ Epoch
Thanks. So what is the one CWC individual whose R1b is thought to be ''real'' ?

Also, Maritime beakers are found also in BB East group, early phases, therefore it is not correct to say that Iberian Beakers were different. The BB is just an evolution of similar ceramics assoc. with alcohol drinking traditions of northern Europe present since 4000 BC.
BB are all one group. It is clear from the brachycephal plano-occiptal nature - a tight group of males from Iberia to central Europe. This business about Mediterranean vs northern Beakers isn't consistent with the evidence.

Some other comments.

@ Andre- ''GAC then has more forager than Farmer ancestry'

This is incorrect. GAC has 75% EEF, 25% extra east-Euro -WHG, on average. You should have a look at the publications


Ric Hern said...

@ Dragos

The early Bell Beaker people in Iberia were different. Later ones more similar to Northern Bell Beaker people...

Bob Floy said...

It's pretty well established that those early Iberian BB guys were different from the central European ones. Let's not start trying to re-write history now.

Gabriel said...

It’s less rewriting and more not moving with the data.

Davidski said...

@Arza

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17-MGSOEUfvT1vh6f2nlOHUC3oOGS0b7-/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_MDgMbnH0ufjI16w4kRucW7yPO3IjVpZ/view?usp=sharing

@JuanRivera

Corded Ware is marked CWC in the G25 datasheets. Poland_BA is not Corded Ware.

@Romulus

From memory, some Yamnaya groups from Kalmykia were brachycephalic.

@Synome

I'm not sure about those old theories positing the origin of the Beakers in the Carpathian Basin based on pottery styles.

It seems to me that new data show that the Beakers arrived in this region from somewhere else already as a cohesive unit, and sometimes mixed with the locals, like with the Hungarian Yamnaya, while at other times they may have been in conflict with them. See page 135 of the Olalde et al. supp info.

Bob Floy said...

Well it's not exactly news.

Gabriel said...

Beakers probably arrived in southern Poland or Slovakia from the steppes.

Drago said...

Nope. I'm guessing you haven't bothered to analyse the data in any detail, or at all.
There is no such thing as early Iberian Beaker. The Maritime beaker is not native to Iberia. Individuals in Iberia with steppe ancestry have clear BB kit asssociation, whilst those which do not either have no BB goods, have a dubious/ unknown contexts, or at most have BB pottery desposited after the fact as part of a closure act.
The early BB dates in Tagus date to 2600 BC, which is well within the time frame of arrival of steppe ancestry north of the Pyrenees. It all fits perfectly.
Claiming BB is from Iberia is like claiming CWC is from the Netherlands. Its ass up.
Not all arcaheologists thought BB was from Iberia, many did not. Even the guy who produced the early C14 dates from Portugal never said that BB originated in Iberia. Common miscopnception

Synome said...

@Dragos

Have you read Olalde et al 2017?

@Davidski

Hints at another mass incursion from the steppe? That would be totally unexpected and overturn decades of archaeological conjecture. I like it. My favorite thing about aDNA is its tendency to surprise. Let's see where L51 turns up.

Ric Hern said...

When looking at MtDNA U5a1b it looks like L51 was either near Derievka or travelled through Derievka taking a Northern Route. Derievka>Zvejnieki>Netherland>Ireland. So maybe hugging the Coastline...

Ric Hern said...

See here.

https://amtdb.org

Davidski said...

@Ric

My view is that the U5a1b at Dereivka and Zvejnieki probably shared an ancestral lineage from the east, and all we can really say is that the U5a1b lineage in Beakers came from somewhere in Eastern Europe.

The interesting thing for me is the obvious maternal influence in Beakers from near the Caucasus foothills. This isn't too surprising, considering the genome-wide affinity between Yamnaya and the Eneolithic steppe individuals from the North Caucasus Piedmont steppe, but it stops me from having any great confidence that the steppe ancestry in the Beakers came from, rather than just via, the North Pontic steppe in Ukraine.

Ric Hern said...

@ Davidski

Yes I agree. U5a1c seems to have been in the Balkans Early, U5a1a in Germany early, U5a1d somewhere near the Balkans and U5a1b seems to have been in the Pontic Caspian Steppe early.

So yes maybe Dereivka wasn't the epicentre of U5a1b however the U5a1b in Rathlin certainly was connected to the Steppe.

So yes R1b L51 maybe started out in the Caucasus foothills and migrated through Dereivka on their way West. However the U5a1b from Dereivka seems to early for a migration from the Lower Don to have brought it there. Unless it was a much earlier migration around or before 5000 BCE.

Drago said...

@ Synome
Wow everyone's a comedian today. :)

Yes I've read the Olalde study, presuming you're referring to the one that showed steppe - via central Europe- movement into Iberia, but no (or minimal) movement out of Iberia during the BB period, with resulting population replacement throughout western Europe as a result.?
If so, how did you fellas come to the conclusion that BB comes from Iberia ? Well i know why, and even the paper itself was non-commital in the conlusions. But it seems the penny has dropped for some of the archaeologists involved in the paper themselves. Writing subsequently:
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2024/IberCrono_12.pdf

John Thomas said...

OT.

A certain well known 'public intellectual' (think of Black Swans) has tweeted recently that 'Khazar' genomes have been analyzed and have come back as 'Mongolian' - the information ultimately coming from David Reich, the 'Horse's Mouth', so to speak.

Davidski said...

I'm pretty sure that Khazars won't be exactly like any Mongolians by and large - probably more like Altaians or closely related folk with a lot of Mongolian-like ancestry.

Gabriel said...

Maybe Mongolian is just a stand in for East Asian?

Synome said...

@Dragos

Wasn't really intending to be sarcastic, it was an honest question because your conclusion seems to contradict what I understand to be in the paper.

You said "Individuals in Iberia with steppe ancestry have clear BB kit asssociation, whilst those which do not either have no BB goods, have a dubious/ unknown contexts, or at most have BB pottery desposited after the fact as part of a closure act."

The authors of the paper appear to be more confident than you are that Iberian individuals without steppe ancestry can be classified as belonging to at least some subset of the overall Bell Beaker culture.

It could be the the inspiration for the first beaker pottery in Iberia came from the east. I don't know the archaeology well enough to say anything on that. Obviously the whole Beaker phenomenon has not yet come close to being completely explained.

Davidski said...

@All

Here's something that I was going to blog about, but don't think I will now, since it's not based on any new samples.

Think and Act. Local Data and Global Perspectives in Bell Beaker Archaeology

The samples that are really needed in this context, apart from Hungarian Yamnaya, are Corded Ware Single Grave samples from The Netherlands and surrounds, and late Yamnaya from near Poland.

It's hard to believe for me that Olalde et al. couldn't get ancient DNA from Hungarian Yamnaya and Single Grave for their Beaker paper.

Synome said...

@Davidski

Any signs of such samples surfacing on the horizon?

Samuel Andrews said...

Thanks, David.

From what I could get from that paper is the idea Bell Beaker originated in Iberia is based solely on origin of Maritime Beaker style. If so, we've been dumped for a long time. Pottery Style=/=culture.

Middle Phase of Bell Beaker (2400-2200 BC), looks like the real emergence of a new culture with more things in common than just pottery style. From DNA, we know people of "eastern" origin were the ones behind this new culture.

That's just my take. It's looks complicated. Archaeologist aren't focused on the same things.

I'd like to know stuff like population density, did Beaker folk live in isolated niches or did they dominate regions, nature of trade & immigration, how & why did Beaker tribes so often migrate and settle in new land.

Davidski said...

@Synome

Any signs of such samples surfacing on the horizon?

I haven't been keeping my finger on the pulse lately in regards to leaks and rumors.

Drago said...

@ Synome
Well I'm not entirely confident in their ascriptions, which is why i checked, and it seems they are not either, because there is missing detail (exactly who is what). A lot of the individuals come from multiphase burial sites. Some of the ascriptions are not properly elucidated. Others are from the BB period (2600-2000), but have no actual BB goods. My view is formed on the basis of my analysis of individuals by site, goods, date, autosomes and uniparentals.
But maybe the next couple of papers will elucidate it further.
All I can say, at this stage, is something is fishy. Farming spread by migrations, Yamnaya has a distinct signature, CWC spread by migration, but BB was a ''spread of ideas'' ? Hhmmm.

Ric Hern said...

Maybe the emphasis on Pottery Style is too much. In modern times we rarely compare our everyday use kitchen items. A functional cup or plate is functional. The only time something like this catch the eye is when it is made of something out of the ordinary eg. Gold rimmed or intricately painted. This is why I think there were so many regional types because they were not really special tradeable goods like Vases etc.

So maybe concentrating on more widespread extraordinary trading goods would be a better indicator of what really bound the Bell Beaker people together. eg. Metals..?

Bob Floy said...

@Dragos

"Farming spread by migrations, Yamnaya has a distinct signature, CWC spread by migration, but BB was a ''spread of ideas''?"

It happens. It's certainly happened with most of the major religions.

Drago said...

Hey did anyone notice that I5117 and I5118 are from Kurgan burials in Hungary (33-3000 BC) ?
They're both G2a2. Isotopic analysis from an different study showed that earlier Kurgan burials had isotopic ''local'' signatures, whilst later ones seemed distant.
Seems like further evidence for Balkan origins of the Kurgan culture.

epoch said...

@Davidski


"Corded Ware Single Grave samples from The Netherlands"

Most of the Corded Ware burials in the Netherlands are from sandy soils and are completely dissolved due to acidity. There is only one male skeleton found, found really close near the the Tuithoorn where the Olalde Dutch samples are from.

The point is that this man is linked with CWC based on pottery and dates from the associated village that was uncovered. His burial was completely unique and totally atypical for CWC: Apparently he was laid on a wooden structure in the open as there are clear signs his legs were chewed on by canines.

https://cultureelerfgoed.nl/sites/default/files/downloads/nieuws/nar45-mienakker.pdf
(from page 175 on)

There is another female skeleton, and that's it from the Netherlands. No other piece of bone found as they were all buried is sands..

epoch said...

There is a paper on the late Neolithic transition in Switzerland in the make and I recall seeing some pictures from a presentation showing it has some Corded Ware samples. Anyone know when that one is due? Any rumours about it?

Samuel Andrews said...

@All,

Please get one of the Bell Beaker enthusiasts to edit the "Genetic studies" section of Beaker culture wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_culture

Drago said...

@ Davidski
That's true, however even earlier mounds, kurgans & monuments are found near Moldova and Romania :)
My point was mostly related to local successions, and slightly tongue-in-cheek', but those R1b-V1636 arent very common anwhere.

I'm pretty sure more Hungarian & Balkan Kurgan genomes will appear this year.

Grey said...

Samuel Andrews
"Beaker R1b P312 tribes were large in number & loud. There were tons of them. They overwhelmed western Europe. This makes it hard to imagine their ancestors were quite & small in number when living in eastern Europe."

mu understanding is that at least some of the time BB lived as a separate population within pre-existing farmer settlements which to me implies they weren't competing over the same resources - a couple of possibilities might be:

1) different land i.e. BB using land the farmers didn't (e.g. pasture land adjacent to rivers too wet for crop farming but ideal for cattle?)(maybe similar to an Akkad-Sumer herder-farmer symbiosis?)

2) some kind of artisanal-trader type population like African blacksmith clans i.e. a third option to add to "pots not people" versus "people not pots" - "potters not pots."

although that would need an explanation for how they later came to dominate genetically (animal diseases?)

Grey said...

Bob Floy

"It's certainly happened with most of the major religions."

right but before mass communication mostly via (small numbers of) people: traders, soldiers, missionaries etc.

epoch said...

@Dragos


"Hey did anyone notice that I5117 and I5118 are from Kurgan burials in Hungary (33-3000 BC)? They're both G2a2. Isotopic analysis from an different study showed that earlier Kurgan burials had isotopic "local" signatures, whilst later ones seemed distant."

Where are they published? Can't find them in Olalde's BB paper or Wang's Caucasus preprint.

epoch said...

@Dragos

Never mind, they are in Olalde et al. Just not in the XL sheet.

Davidski said...

@epoch

Beaker_The_Netherlands I5748, dated to 2579–2233 calBCE, is one of the oldest C14 dated Beakers in the Olalde et al. dataset.

This individual also belongs to R1b-P312. So he's a Beaker alright.

Is there any evidence that this sample might represent a totally new population in the Tui region that eventually replaced the late Corded Ware Single Grave people there?

If not, it looks like the so called eastern Beakers might just be an offshoot of the Single Grave culture from The Netherlands and surrounds, that then expanded back east, as far as Hungary, where they mixed with the Hungarian Yamnaya.

Here's a fairly tight qpAdm model for the most Yamnaya-like Beaker in the Olalde et al. dataset, who also just happens to belong to R1b-Z2103. Basically half Beaker/half Yamnaya.

Beaker_Hungary_I2787
Beaker_The_Netherlands 0.576±0.062
Yamnaya_Samara 0.424±0.062
chisq 11.469
tail prob 0.489238
Full output

I would suggest that while we wait for the Hungarian Yamnaya samples (which might come back R1b-Z2103 and I2 anyway) all of you guys who are really interested in the near and far origins of the eastern Beakers should start looking in detail at how the Single Grave culture came to be exactly.

Schizoanalyst said...

@Davidski

Then where are the Battle-Axes in Beaker graves?

Davidski said...

@Dopa

Then where are the Battle-Axes in Beaker graves?

I don't know? But keep in mind that I was talking about Single Grave Cored Ware not Battle-Axe Corded Ware.

So, did the Late Vlaardingen Single Grave groups from West Frisia use Battle-Axes as grave goods?

epoch said...

@Davidski

"Is there any evidence that this sample might represent a totally new population in the Tui region that eventually replaced the late Corded Ware Single Grave people there?"

Not that I know off. There aren't much finds from the area though. What I do know is that All Over Corded and All Over Ornamented beakers not only popped up in noted beaker sites but also in Vlaardingen sites. Olalde et al co-author Fokkens, while critical of the Dutch origin hypthesis of Lanting, still thinks AOO and AOC are typologically evolved from Protruding Foot Beaker, the local variation of Dutch Corded Ware beakers.

To give an impression of the local geology back then: The area nowadays called North Holland was split in a northern and southern part by a large estuary, with tidal meadows heavily under influence of the sea. Alongside of that area are higher sandy ridges where the BB and CWC settlements and barrows were found. They probably had cattle grazing on the tidal meadows.

South of that were large bogs and fens separated from the sea by dune areas. That's part of the area of the Vlaardingen culture, which focused on fishing and hunting, keeping pigs and agriculture on small plots of land on the strip of dunes. Their local pottery was downright dull, nothing like the prestigious beakers. The AOO/AOC pots do show up in their settlement, by the way.

The only hints of migrations are the Elp culture, which buried in supine position and had Kummerware pottery - "Miserable Ware" - that in my opinion may be tied to Vlaardingen pottery.

This baffles me the most. During the whole Beaker Era pottery was highly appreciated, apparently. Then at the onset of the Bronze Age people completely lost interest in them. Their pottery looks just like dull kitchenware.

Synome said...

I think the western CW fringe is a plausible origin of the Eastern Beakers. I'll do some more reading on it.

However, a CW origin of all steppe bearing Beakers is harder to square with the linguistic evidence. Beaker derived Unetice, Urnfield etc. are typically thought of as the ancestral cultures for Italo-Celtic speakers.

It's much tidier to have CW ancestral to Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Indo-Aryan based on shared features and divergence time estimates, and the same goes for associating an earlier branch off of Yamnaya with Italo-Celtic, which conveniently is found not far from where those languages were historically spoken in the Hungarian Yamnaya.

If some branch of CW is ancestral to all of the steppe bearing Beaker derived cultures of central Europe, we would have to explain the discontinuity between Italo-Celtic and the other CW associated languages.

epoch said...

@Dopa & Davidski

Yes, late Dutch Single Grave culture buried with battle axes. So yes, there is an issue to watch there.

Andrzejewski said...

@Synome "It's much tidier to have CW ancestral to Balto-Slavic, Germanic..."

Germanic is a mixed by-and-large Centum language from Bell Beaker R1b elements with Satem Corded Ware R1a1 elements, whereas a large proportion of up to 1/3 of its vocabulary derives from either the SHG/WHG lexome of the Ertebolle Culture and/or the farmer vocabulary of the LBK.

epoch said...

@Samuel

"I'd like to know stuff like population density, did Beaker folk live in isolated niches or did they dominate regions, nature of trade & immigration, how & why did Beaker tribes so often migrate and settle in new land."

I think every archaeologist would like to know that as well. We don't know much about the past. Which exactly is why ancient DNA is such a thrilling opportunity.

Unknown said...

PIE is from the Don-Caspian Steppe and Pre-PIE is from Eastern side of the Caspian Sea, most likely modern day Kazhakhstan.

It is pretty evident, if you look at the ancestry of a modern day Norwegian or British Individual, they have higher Baloch/Gedrosian ancestry. If the expansion was from the South of Caucusus, the Baloch/Gedrosian type ancestry would not be present at high levels. The same is evident in Yamnaya individuals with a gradient from Caspian Steppe to Central Asia with higher Baloch type ancestry as you get closer to central asia and higher NE Euro ancestry as you get closer to Eastern Caspian Steppe.

Maciamo Hay from Eupedia has always been correct about all his predictions.

Davidski said...

@Matt Thomas

Reality check...

The excess Baloch/Gedrosian ancestry in Northwestern Europeans is an artifact of the analysis run by Dienekes Pontikos with the ADMIXTURE software.

The output from the analysis was wrongly interpreted by Dienekes and many others, because of their lack of understanding that ADMIXTURE runs were not formal mixture analyses.

The reason that the excess Baloch/Gedrosian ancestry appears in Northwestern Europeans is because there is no Northwestern European-specific cluster in this particular ADMIXTURE analysis run by Dienekes. The only Northern European cluster in the analysis is largely based on the allele frequencies in Northeastern Europeans, who generally have more European hunter-gatherer ancestry than Northwestern Europeans.

So to account for this and improve the statistical fit for Northwestern Europeans, the ADMIXTURE algorithm gives Northwestern Europeans a few more per cent of the Baloch/Gedrosian ancestry.

Also, Pre-PIE obviously didn't come from the Eastern side of the Caspian Sea; not from Kazakhstan nor anywhere near Balochistan/Gedrosia.

During the Chalcolithic, what is now Kazakhstan was home to the Botai and similar peoples who didn't contribute any significant ancestry, or probably no ancestry at all, to the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age peoples of Eastern Europe, like the Yamnaya pastoralists. In fact, the Botai people, and even their horses, were mostly forced out of the Kazakh steppe by Yamnaya-related migrants from Eastern Europe. See here...

Major horse paper coming soon

Moreover, Maciamo's theory has always been, and, as far as I know, still is that the Yamnaya population formed as a result of the migration of pre-Yamnaya peoples rich in R1b from south of the Caucasus to the Eastern European steppes. This is false, and you can read about why it's false here...

Genetic borders are usually linguistic borders too

Big deal of 2018: Yamnaya not related to Maykop

Mem said...

But maybe CHG ancestry of Yamna came from kelteminar area from central-south kazakhstan.Botai was populate the west siberian steppe,not all east caspian lands.
Also,as I know,the genetic structure of kelteminar is still not analyze.

Davidski said...

Kelteminar was like Botai but with some Iran_N admixture.

There are samples like that already available from Gonur. They're obviously migrants from the north and might even be from Kelteminar.

Nothing to do with Yamnaya.

Halfalp said...

I dont really understand that fascination to link a Language with an Ancestry instead of a Lineage. Ancestry can be biased by sample bias and timeframe. Typical exemple: Sidelkino is the oldest EHG individual that we have and he shows CHG, then the Samara individual is a little younger and shows no CHG ancestry, then people are writing a story that CHG ancestry might have expand in a later time frame like in the times of Khvalynsk because it's then that the CHG ancestry start to pop a lot. I guess i follow the idea of Davidski that CHG might have been in Steppe Maykop way earlier than let's saying, Neolithic Caucasus. Also, i would not myself give any exeption for a PIE urheimat till, some challenger suspects that some people want credit for ( Shulaveri-Shomu / Leyla-Tepe ) are eliminated just like Maykop and KA. Also, if the origins of Bell Beakers R1b's and therefore all western IE languages are linked somehow with CWC or a CWC outlier and that PBS and PII languages are linked with CWC through Sintashta, what is Yamnaya even relevent for at this point? Tocharians, Anatolians?

Davidski said...

@All

I don't want any discussions about Aryans on this blog unless this is firmly done in the context of linguistics.

Arza said...

@ Davidski
Thanks!

Varna_o
Sredny_Stog
Trypillia

chisq: 8.271 tail: 0.763634757

best coefficients: 0.624 0.376
std. errors: 0.059 0.059

vs.

Varna_o
Baltic_BA
Sredny_Stog
Trypillia

chisq: 6.785 tail: 0.816205595


best coefficients: 0.145 0.480 0.375
std. errors: 0.118 0.129 0.055

So Varna outlier shows not only the steppe ancestry, but also ethnic-specific Balto-Slavic drift. In 4711-4542 calBCE.

BTW don't high std. errors suggest that qpAdm has troubles with clear differentiation between Baltic_BA and Sredny_Stog ergo the non-WHG part of Baltic_BA comes from Sredny_Stog?

Arza said...

qpAdm:
Baltic_BA - 14.5% (2.7-26.3%)

Global 25:
Varna_o
Ukraine_Eneolithic:I6561 42.4%
Trypillia 35%
Baltic_BA 22.6%

Distance 3.8771%

El Lurker said...

In Paraguay and Brazil (a case of 100% male conquest) the conquerors adopted the language of the tupi-guarani natives because the Iberians engaged in polygamy with the native women and the kids learned the language of their mothers.
Paraguay is still 100% Spanish Guarani bilingual and Brazil was Tupi speaking for 2 centuries.

epoch said...

@Synome

There are actually, if I gathered the right info, only two skeletal remains available from the Netherlands. A woman and a man buried in a very, very non-typical way for SGC, but tightly associated with a settlement which is clearly Corded Ware. The rest of the Dutch CWC burials, again if I'm right, are all dissolved to corpse silhouettes, which do give info on the burial position.

https://www.blikopnieuws.nl/sites/default/files/styles/nieuws-full-tn/public/artikel/twello.jpg