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Wednesday, October 16, 2019

The Battle Axe people came from the steppe (Malmstrom et al. 2019)


It's been obvious for a while now that the Corded Ware culture (CWC) and its Scandinavian variant, the Battle Axe culture (BAC), originated on the Pontic-Caspian steppe. However, Malmstrom et al. drive the point home in a new open access paper at Proceedings B [LINK]. From the paper, emphasis is mine:

The Neolithic period is characterized by major cultural transformations and human migrations, with lasting effects across Europe. To understand the population dynamics in Neolithic Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea area, we investigate the genomes of individuals associated with the Battle Axe Culture (BAC), a Middle Neolithic complex in Scandinavia resembling the continental Corded Ware Culture (CWC). We sequenced 11 individuals (dated to 3330–1665 calibrated before common era (cal BCE)) from modern-day Sweden, Estonia, and Poland to 0.26–3.24× coverage. Three of the individuals were from CWC contexts and two from the central-Swedish BAC burial ‘Bergsgraven’. By analysing these genomes together with the previously published data, we show that the BAC represents a group different from other Neolithic populations in Scandinavia, revealing stratification among cultural groups. Similar to continental CWC, the BAC-associated individuals display ancestry from the Pontic–Caspian steppe herders, as well as smaller components originating from hunter–gatherers and Early Neolithic farmers. Thus, the steppe ancestry seen in these Scandinavian BAC individuals can be explained only by migration into Scandinavia. Furthermore, we highlight the reuse of megalithic tombs of the earlier Funnel Beaker Culture (FBC) by people related to BAC. The BAC groups likely mixed with resident middle Neolithic farmers (e.g. FBC) without substantial contributions from Neolithic foragers.
...

By contrast, the CWC individuals from Obłaczkowo in Poland (poz44 and poz81) show an extremely high proportion of steppe ancestry (greater than 90%), which is different from the later CWC-associated individuals excavated in Pikutkowo (Poland) [23], but similar to some other CWC-associated individuals from Germany, Lithuania, and Latvia [2,8,31]. Interestingly, these individuals with a large fraction of steppe ancestry have typically been dated to more than 2600 BCE, making them among the earliest CWC individuals genetically investigated. This observation, i.e. early CWC individuals resembled (genetically) Yamnaya-associated individuals, while later CWC groups show higher levels of European Neolithic farmer ancestry (Pearson's correlation coefficient: −0.51, p = 0.006) (figure 2), suggests an initial dispersal that occurred rapidly.

See also...


751 comments:

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Vladimir said...

Archie The data shows where they are. Based on this and argue. If the data is not found then they are not there until they are there will not be found.

Anonymous said...

Vladimir, You're deeply mistaken. The statement of absence is not the same as the statement of presence. Presence is a fact, absence is a statistic. This is a huge difference.
Moreover, when it comes to rare single cases of slightly more complete testing of samples.

Vladimir said...

zardos Abashevo-Sintashta. Yes. Archaeology also shows this. Fatyanovo and Balanovo until question. Abashevo apparently gave and Babino, who became in the future Cimmerian and Srubnaiy, future Scythians

Anonymous said...

@Vladimir
"Abashevo apparently gave and Babino, who became in the future Cimmerian and Srubnaiy, future Scythians"

No, Cimmerian and Scythians from Andronovo / Tuva-related region.

Vladimir said...

There will not argue because there is no data on Abashevo and Babino. Neither hypothetically can the Cimmerian be from Tuva. Scythians still can be. On the other hand both Abashevo and Andronovo are two branches of Z93

Anonymous said...

@Vladimir "Neither hypothetically can the Cimmerian be from Tuva. Scythians"

It's a proven genetic fact! Not Tuva, but Tuva-related.
For some reason you perceive your fantasies as facts, and the facts you perceive as fantasies.

"On the other hand both Abashevo and Andronovo are two branches of Z93"

Again the same statement as if Abashevo = Z93 is the fact! Andronovo and Srubnaya is Z93 is fact, but not Abashevo!

Vladimir said...

Archie/ proven by whom? do not invent. The Cimmerians are Caucasians. Yeah, but how did you just say that the lack of data does not indicate a fact? :) At Abashevo just not data yet, so I will not argue.

Anonymous said...

@Vladimir "The Cimmerians are Caucasians."

Again a fantastic statement that contradicts all known data and researches.

Anonymous said...

@Vladimir

Read https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?15533-Ancient-genomes-of-Srubnaya-Cimmerians-Scythians-and-Sarmatians(Science-2018)/page13

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,
"First the Usatovo culture appeared on the western edge of the steppe, and that's probably the same time that the ancestors of Corded Ware people moved out of the steppe to the northwest."

That's interesting, if Usatovo and Corded Ware moved west but into different places at the same time.

"Then eventually Yamnaya expanded and moved through Usatovo territory. The two had a guest/host relationship according to Anthony."

But, Anthony also said Usatovo were guests/hosts of Funnel beaker who together created Corded Ware. He liked the idea Indo Europeans were "hosts" to Neolithic farmers instead of invaders. He was wrong about that, he could be wrong about Yamnaya being hosts of Usatovo. I'm not super opinionated on the interaction between R1a M417 and R1b Z2103.

a said...

"But, Anthony also said Usatovo were guests/hosts of Funnel beaker who together created Corded Ware. He liked the idea Indo Europeans were "hosts" to Neolithic farmers instead of invaders. He was wrong about that, he could be wrong about Yamnaya being hosts of Usatovo. I'm not super opinionated on the interaction between R1a M417 and R1b Z2103."

IMO-Even now thousands of years into the future, you can't make such generalized statements. You have to take every ancient snp/Archaeogenetic on an individual basis[that we are discovering]. Khvalynsk obviously had R1a/R1b as well as other branches of ydna I2/J etc... not from R1*.Yet we know that R1a and R1b both extinct or low level survival branches in Khvalynsk region had a common language for copper[Balkan copper] found in graves of both R1a/b[6000k+/-YBP]. There is no getting around they had acquired a linguistic term for their need for their burial copper. By magnitude perhaps 1000's of years before India and Iberia R1a and R1b's burial copper lines.

Dita said...

This is false. We know R1a is not involved in Proto-Albanian from the Albanian bloodlines group.

R1a seems to be responsible for the Satem-proper isogloss that is shared between balto-slavic and indo-iranian, but not armenian and other non Satem-proper languages.

a said...

Dita said...
"This is false. We know R1a is not involved in Proto-Albanian from the Albanian bloodlines group.

R1a seems to be responsible for the Satem-proper isogloss that is shared between balto-slavic and indo-iranian, but not armenian and other non Satem-proper languages."

Better to remain neutral on the subject, until more data comes in. Who would have imagined a European 14k R1b or L51 in Corded Ware, Baltic Corded Ware R1a samples being tied in with Afansievo and Vucedol via transmission of an extinct branch of plague bacteria? There is probable only a small fraction of relevant ancient dna related to ancient Albanian if any. Like the above example of Khvalynsk we don't know the exact dynamics of the archaeogenetic spread of PIE and Albanian. We can only speculate, leading to endless debates.

Anonymous said...

@Dita "We know R1a is not involved in Proto-Albanian from the Albanian bloodlines group."

Satem is only responsible for R1a-Z645 level for, but not older!

Albanian genetics is a completely dark forest, especially since the Albanians themselves were immigrants in the late Roman era, who were resettled by the Romans from the East. After the resettlement, the Albanians survived only somewhere high in the mountains, the modern spread of which is quite late.
Their language is the Thracian-Illyrian-Latin pidgin, which turned into a creole, therefore linguists are absolutely unable to solve its origin.


zardos said...

@Archi: Interesting, Albanians "survived high in the mountains".
But you were criticising my comments on the mountain habitat and questioned every word I used. :)

Anonymous said...

@zardos

The Albanians didn't go far by the mountains, they were moved to a place where they experienced the bottle neck. And they were resettled inside the Balkans(-Carpaths).

zardos said...

Just read your comments about my idea of BB living in a mountain habitat. Obviously Albanians didnt live on the rocky mountain tops, but thats something you didnt want to imply, neither did I before...

Anonymous said...

@zardos
There is no argument in any of the questions that would be for the fact that BB lived in the mountains. You have not given any arguments, but all known arguments are only against it. There is nothing to discuss about.

Dita said...

You can rest assured that linguistics has come very far in the last twenty years on Albanian. The Albanian language is 100% not a creole language. This isn't a tenable position from the linguistic view for at least a hundred years, lol.

Secondly, Albanians were not "resettled by romans". This is ridiculous from the historical perspective, and entertaining this exposes a lack of information on this subject.

Thirdly, Albanian dna is not a "dark-forest". Maybe it is for you, but for those of us following the Alb bloodlines group for years, who are also Albanians that study the ethnographic and linguistic heritage of differing zones all over Albanian regions, it is more akin to an open field that has just begun to blossom. We now have upwards of 700 tests from a majority of Albanian regions, and R1a has no role in Proto-Albanian. To argue so is a gargantuan feat with no correlation to reality.

This is the state of affairs on the ground.

Anonymous said...

This is not true, all linguists have unequivocally proved that Albanian is a Creole with Latin language.
Actually, there are very few Albanian words left.

The fact that Albanians in ancient times lived much to the east of the modern situation is asserted by everyone. There is a very reasonable opinion that in ancient times they lived in the Carpathians.

Albanian genetics is the genetics of migrants who passed through the bottleneck and spread to the Illyrian territories, it does not show anything.

Albanian language does not play any role in Indo-European reconstructions, because it is the worst-preserved Creole, which even on the tree of IE languages there is no certain place, every linguist draws it where he wants - because too little has survived from the native language to determine its place and it is not clear how it relates to Thracian and Illyrian, what he borrowed and what is native.

Dita said...

I say this to educate you and save you from wasting your time if you think that R1a has anything to do with proto-Albanian. You have a lack of knowledge on Albanian linguistics, and probably linguistics in general to be making claims as you are.

There are three dorsal series in Proto-Indo European:

1. Palatal-Velar
2. Plain-Velar
3. Labiovelar

In Centum groups, 1 and 2 merged, yielding only the form of 2(plain velars), and 3 remained.

In Satem groups, 1 remained, but became assibilated. 2 and 3 merged, yielding only the form of 2.

In Albanian, all three rows remained. So not only is what you write a poor attempt at trolling, but it's false, as we can see that Albanian has proven even more conservative in regards like this than the majority of IE languages. Luwian is another language that has preserved the three rows, and Armenian also shows reflexes of this, but not as confirmed.

For the serious and curious readers here, feel free to ignore cheap provocation, not one single linguist calls Albanian a creole.

For the most updated work on the Albanian language, read:

Matzinger and Schumacher: Die Verben Des Altalbanischen: "Belegworterbuch, Vorgeschichte Und Etymologie" (Albanische Forschungen) 2014,

Arza said...

Puzzling artifacts found at Europe's oldest battlefield



Preliminary aDNA results fueled speculation that the massive battle was regional, not local. In 2016, Joachim Burger, a population geneticist at the University of Mainz, told Science that initial aDNA analysis suggested a “highly diverse” group of warriors with genetic links from as far as southern Europe.

But now, more complete DNA results obtained by Burger’s team earlier this year throw water on the theory, at least from a genetic perspective. “We don't see any sign of two different groups fighting against each other from our sample,” he tells National Geographic.

Back in 2016, says Burger, one of the bones he was given to analyze actually ended up being from the Neolithic age, which predates the Tollense battle by between 8,750 and 3,250 years. A larger sample size and longer analysis revealed a more homogenous population, DNA-wise, than he initially thought. “They just look like Central and Northern Europeans,” he says.

The new DNA analysis did rule out the possibility of the battle being among family members. But it didn’t make a compelling case for the two-group theory.

Burger’s yet-to-be-published analysis may cast a dull shadow on the far-flung warriors thesis, but it doesn’t rule out the possibility of participants from places like Bohemia. “We can exclude Southern Europe—places like Serbia or Hungary,” he says. “But even with modern genomes, you can’t make that much of a distinction between Bohemia and [northern] Germany.


Now it becomes clear how they will try to explain the results. Pomeranian Germans are similar to Slavs (wonder why!), but they are, well, German! So Tollense warriors similar to Slavs were... German of course! Because remember - even with modern genomes, you can’t make that much of a distinction!

BTW double standards as usual:
one group of northern German locals
vs.
a historical region (...) of what is now Czechia

Anonymous said...

I know exactly what linguistics is, your are not. And I know it's just an unsubstantiated fiction. They have taken the words that are Illyrian borrowings and have a certain position of the nobles in front of the vowels, and only this position, without an alternative position even in Albanian itself, so there is no evidence of this statement.

I just don't give a damn about erroneous statements, just so everyone understands that Albanian proves nothing, because it is the worst language, which even in many scientific trees of the IE languages are not placed, because it has not saved much and can not be counted correctly.

Simon_W said...

@Arza

LOL, you gotta calm down man. I can understand your hatred and distrust against Germans well, for obvious historical reasons. But Germans, especially scientists, historians and intellectuals are no longer obsessed with proving German ethnic continuity everywhere, in order to justify the modern German presence there. In Germany this type of reasoning has been discarded long ago. It's something that was fostered in the 19th century, and continued into the NS time. But apparently there are still many Poles passionately caring about the exact percentage of Poles and Germans in formerly ethnically mixed territories. You have to understand that nobody wants to shift the borders of Poland again.

We do have 7 of these Tollense Valley samples in the Global25 PCA. Indeed most of them form quite a homogenous group, there are just 2 outliers. If Burger now claims they are exactly like modern central or northern Europeans he appears not to have worked very thoroughly, because in the Global25 they are cleary not like any modern population, their WHG is inflated to a level that beats even Lithuanians, while their Steppe ancestry is lower even than in modern Germans:

[1] "distance%=4.9069"

DEU_Welzin_BA

Yamnaya_Samara,38.2
Barcin_N,37.3
WHG,24.5

[1] "distance%=6.0598"

Polish

Yamnaya_Samara,50.6
Barcin_N,33.4
WHG,16

[1] "distance%=3.8874"

German

Yamnaya_Samara,46
Barcin_N,40.8
WHG,13.2

[1] "distance%=8.4212"

Lithuanian

Yamnaya_Samara,52.4
Barcin_N,25.9
WHG,21.7

And this is supposed to be boring? Hell no! It shows that the professional geneticists should take the Global25 seriously.

So in any case these people were neither Germans nor Slavs. They do have some Slavic-specific drift, judging from David's North European PCA, but they are not like modern Slavic peoples.

zardos said...

I think you overinterprete things, because those people were no modern Germanics, yet Germans, nor Slavs. Their exact relationship is unknown.

The only thing you can say is, that the majority was from the region, but some, apparently some of the best equipped warriors, were from Southern Central Europe, like Bohemia.

Read here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/lost-in-combat-a-scrap-metal-find-from-the-bronze-age-battlefield-site-at-tollense/9984BB85B2126C139E5ACA5111236307

It was my first impression we deal with a regional conflict, but one or even both sides recruited allies or even mercenaries from further South.

I also just read the latest articles about the social stratification inside of BB households.
Now its proven and official: They had maids/concubines and servants/slaves in their households which were no equals to them!

It was always highly likely from the burials and the associated physical types: Most wealthy and typical burials contained typical specimen, those were rarely layed down without a proper equipment, while both male and females of other physical types (eg dolichocranic, smaller facial features etc) were much more often poorly equipped, rarely with the full inventory in CE.

So all samples need to be looked at with great care, because the poor burials might not even be directly related to the caste like BB which might even have preferred typical specimen in their marriage policy.
They married over wide distances, but most if the time inside of their networks and between the very same clans.
A distinction between the poor and the typical/wealthy burials is absolutely important. The poor ones might be slaves from any kind of people.

Anonymous said...


About the fact that they were not there - I'm sorry, but between the date of the battle and the appearance of the Slavs in the historical arena almost 2000 years have passed, during this time, no one will be absolutely the same as 2000 years ago.

Anonymous said...

This battle is not local, it's global, people were there from almost all over Europe. And at the same time, the same battle will be in Greece, in Troy, in the Hittite Empire, in Egypt, etc.

epoch said...

@Simon_W and Arza

"I can understand your hatred and distrust against Germans well, for obvious historical reasons."

I don't. "Obvious historical reasons" are three quarters of a century ago. You could have been born after it and be great-grandfather.

EastPole said...

@Archi
„About the fact that they were not there - I'm sorry, but between the date of the battle and the appearance of the Slavs in the historical arena almost 2000 years have passed, during this time, no one will be absolutely the same as 2000 years ago.”

And even earlier than 2000 years before the „appeareance of the Slavs in the historical arena” Slavic words, Slavic first names, religious terms which have Slavic etymology, Slavic poetry meters etc.. and and very similar to modern Slavic genes appeared in India. This is the real puzzle you should solve first before starting any speculations concerning Slavs.
The only reasonable explanation of this for me is that Corded Ware and the expansion of R1a–Z645 had something to do with Slavs.
You can see it on this Slavic issoglosses diagram:

https://i.postimg.cc/wT3wnvKb/slavic-issoglosses.png

Anonymous said...

@EastPole
"Slavic words ... ery similar to modern Slavic genes appeared in India."

What other Slavonic words in India? It's all muddy.

"The only reasonable explanation of this for me is that Corded Ware and the expansion of R1a–Z645 had something to do with Slavs."

To tie R1a-Z645 only to the Slavs is a complete nonsense a la Klesov, it is to @Vladimir. R1a-Z645 is Proto-Satem group.
Proto-Slavic Z280 was present in Central Europe long time ago, the first sample from the Urnfield culture is Z280

Urnfield Germany Halberstadt [I0099 / HAL 36] 1193-979 calBCE (2889±30 BP, MAMS-21484) M R1a1a1b1a2 (Z280)

Speaking of Tollense battle.

Dmytro said...

EastPole said...
Corded Ware and the expansion of R1a–Z645 had something to do with Slavs.
You can see it on this Slavic issoglosses diagram:

https://i.postimg.cc/wT3wnvKb/slavic-issoglosses.png

I clicked on this and my antivirus stated this had a "malicious" link to a "malicious" web page... Please verify.

M.H. _82 said...

Dita
If you’ve been studying the matter for many years, then I’m sure you’re aware that Proto-Albanians formed in the Middle Ages; and they have not insignificant amounts of R1a , and I2a1b-CTS10228

Arza said...

@ Dmytro
When you visit a link for the first time postimages redirects you from an image (.png, .jpg) to their web page. Probably this behaviour have triggered a response from your anti-virus software.

Try this link: https://postimg.cc/nCbKDnhv

Aigest said...

@Archi. Apparently you don't have a minimal clue about the Albanians. Their genetic profile is clearly Mediterranean.. Y haplogroups % are around 60% E and J. Another 20% R1b. Practically Albanians and Greeks have pretty much same % on Y haplogroups profile. Now as historically Albanians are attested as patriarchal society,till 20th century (Albanian tribes are still in function.in parts of Albania), how do you explain the linguistic assimilation proçes if they moved from areas close to slavic areas where they should have had a slavic profile,(Y haplogroups %) to south Europe while they "imposed" their language but they totally changed their Y-genetics while being a patriarchal society? Come on. And I am not talking about Linguists because if you have problem grasping such simple things..

Anonymous said...

@Aigest

Do not carry crap, Albanians did not have Slavic profile, living in the Balkans or the Carpathians, they were close to the Thracians, actually their language is closely related to the Thracian language if not a branch of the Thracian language. Modern Albanians are also of Illyrian origin and from other local pre-Albanian peoples. You don't understand anything about linguistics, even in its simplest part.

@natsunoame

The common origin of the Satem group is not related to "Slavic words in India".

EastPole said...

@Archi
„To tie R1a-Z645 only to the Slavs is a complete nonsense a la Klesov, it is to @Vladimir. R1a-Z645 is Proto-Satem group.
Proto-Slavic Z280 was present in Central Europe long time ago, the first sample from the Urnfield culture is Z280

Urnfield Germany Halberstadt [I0099 / HAL 36] 1193-979 calBCE (2889±30 BP, MAMS-21484) M R1a1a1b1a2 (Z280)”


Problem is that Proto-Satem homeland is Proto-Slavic homeland. You cannot argue that those R1a-Z645 populations which formed Proto-Satem group were not Slavic ancestors and Slavs were indoeuropeized by them. Slavs unlike Indians or Greeks were not indoeuropized by some tribes arriving from Eastern Europe, they were the Indo-Europeans who originated in Eastern Europe.

https://i.postimg.cc/q7GNL3T5/Slavic-Homeland.png

Davidski said...

@Dita

You're taking the associations between Y-haplogroups and Indo-European branches too literally.

Just because Albanians don't carry much R1a doesn't mean that Albanian isn't related to Slavic.

If linguistically Albanian is said to be related to Slavic, and it is, then Y-haplogroups are irrelevant.

Arza said...

@ epoch & Simon_W
Do you agree with Burger that it's not possible to "make that much of a distinction between Bohemia and [northern] Germany"? Especially if we would have thousands of high coverage samples from both regions (think of Icelandic study)?

@ epoch
"Hatred" and "historical reasons" are Simon's invention.

@ Simon_W
I'm calm and you clearly don't know what hatred is. I care only about honesty in science and I'm _extremely_ sensitive to any form of manipulation.

It's not a good sign when Burger suddenly tries to intentionally depreciate the capabilities of modern genetic studies.

Year 2013:
A pilot study carried out by the applicants confirmed that the preservation of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA is excellent. The latest developments in DNA sequencing technology (next generation sequencing, NGS), and especially the progress in modeling prehistoric population structure through computer simulations, enables the precise reconstruction of the population history of such a large coherent site.

Furthermore, the excellent preservation of these samples will allow us to conduct a population-genetic analysis of paternal lineages.

We plan to use (...) technology to generate the most comprehensive prehistoric DNA data set to date.

This study will (...) undoubtedly set a new standard for human population genetics.


Year 2019:
you can’t make that much of a distinction between Bohemia and [northern] Germany

Sounds like Rakhigarhi 2.0
____

One more time - IBD sharing with a guy (BR2) who lived near the place of origin of the Tollense warriors and who potentially was alive when the battle happened:
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/113/2/368/F3.large.jpg

Contrary to what Burger says, we can make a distinction, especially when "the preservation of DNA is excellent".

Dmytro said...

Arza said...
@ Dmytro
When you visit a link for the first time postimages redirects you from an image (.png, .jpg) to their web page. Probably this behaviour have triggered a response from your anti-virus software.

Try this link: https://postimg.cc/nCbKDnhv

Thank you for the suggestion. Tried, and got the same "malicious" + "malicious" response. (P.S. My antivirus is Kaspersky)
I did get the same image ("burst of R1a-Z645"). But I don't understand how this notion relates "foundationally" to a linguistic group which almost certainly only got underway only in the final centuries BCE...Slavic is obviously an IE speech. But I don't see how it could have existed as such that early.

M.H. _82 said...

@ Davidski
We have no strong evidence for Patron-Client relationship between Usatavo & Yamnaya because they did not co-habit
Rather; Yamnaya always post-dates Uasatavo, in the layers above
So if we want to think about Yamnaya & “patron-client” concept; then we’d need to look at its relationship with Cotofeni, Baden, GAC.
And this is still not entirely clear pending more samples

Orthogonal said...

@Dmytro
"EastPole said...
Corded Ware and the expansion of R1a–Z645 had something to do with Slavs.
You can see it on this Slavic issoglosses diagram:

https://i.postimg.cc/wT3wnvKb/slavic-issoglosses.png

I clicked on this and my antivirus stated this had a "malicious" link to a "malicious" web page... Please verify."

Mine went off too and all the image is is just some figure on IE languages that someone edited R1a z645 on with arrows showing it coming from Slavs to all other groups.
Jeez, totally proves the point.

Dita said...

Albanian isn't of the Balto-Slavic branch linguistically. Eventually it is related as they are both indo-european, but how that relation exists is not yet clear.

Albanian R1a is near negligible as is I2a. It's the lowest of any Balkan population, and all R1a we have is post slavic migrations, and shows up in regions of Albania where there is or was in middle ages, a bulgarian minority or presence, such as Kutmichevitsa. Also, the Y-dna corresponds pretty well with language features. There were slavic haplos are most present is where we see most linguistic "balkanisation" (shared features with bulgarian and new greek) and other slavic influences in language. Again this is relative to Albanians, as we still have the lowest slavic input.

Bob Floy said...

It's incredible that in 2019, it still has to be explained to so many that haplogroups don't speak languages, ethnic and social groups speak languages.

Also, everyone should pay close attention to their thought process. If you notice that your own ethnic groups keeps ending up at the center of everything for you, then there's probably something wrong with your reasoning.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Arza,
"Do you agree with Burger that it's not possible to "make that much of a distinction between Bohemia and [northern] Germany"? Especially if we would have thousands of high coverage samples from both regions (think of Icelandic study)?"

I think the article meant (north)East Germans. East Germans & Bohemians (Czech) are similar. They are both Slavic, German mix. But, Northwest Germans have no Slavic ancestry and basically are direct descendants of Germanic tribes.

But, neither of them are descendants of the Tollense Valley Bronze age warriors. This population trhived in Central Europe from 2500 BC till at least 500 BC. They went extinct in the Middle Ages. Central/East Europeans have some ancestry from this population but probably very little.

The Tollense Valley Warriors cluster are similar to modern mainland Europeans but not an important direct ancestor of anyone. The people studying their DNA don't have enough knowledge to see that Tollense Valley Bronze age is vaguely similar to modern Central Europeans but not an important direct ancestor of anyone today.

Davidski said...

@Dita

Albanians show genome-wide ancestry and haplogroups that expanded across the Balkans from the east to west during the Bronze Age, right? So what's the problem?

It doesn't matter that Albanians don't carry much R1a, since they still show a lot of ancestry from what is now Ukraine and surrounds.

This easily explains the linguistic ties between Albanians and Balto-Slavs.

zardos said...

If the recent results being confirmed, I finally have a viable solution for the language shift problem.

Lets assume the Proto-BB were a splinter group of CW and IE speakers indeed, but unlike the CW at some point they formed a caste, only pure or higher status people were allowed to join and get their full membership with all rights, in the marriage circle, they would have lived more endogamous in marriage networks forming tribes and ethnicities.
Yet they had slaves or servants, maidens and concubines and a lot of those might have come from unions with non-BB females. Those mixed people were considered lower caste, they were not allowed to move up the social ladder usually and the children lived with the mother, especially if the father had a "pure" BB wive.

Whole populations in the population might have been created that way, from POW and in concubinage and these mixed lower caste men had the following choices:
- Live as a low caste member with bad chances for social improvement, probably not even getting a wife.
- Rebel against the pure caste masters and overturn them, like in the Scythian tale of the slave rebellion (https://lexundria.com/hdt/4/mcly)
- Moving out to conquer their own land, with or without the allowance and help of their fathers.

This would explain why from a patriarchal society, in which there can be little doubt that the people spoke the same language in a marriage network, different languages could spread. Because the mixed sons were raised not by the father or they were not accepted as full members, they had to either rebel or conquer their own land and chances would be high they had no great need to keep up the tongue of the father's group, but rather adopt the one of their mothers.

Such a scenario is less likely for CW, because they took wives on the way and formed new communities much more often. BB did the same but at some point they stopped and you find the typical physical specimen and genetic profile being kept alive as long as their endogamous marriage, trade, military nad political networks were up and running.

This could also explain why communities with the same paternal lineage, living side by side, having a very similar material culture, could still speak different languages: Because it depended on whether the pure BB (whatever was their original language) prevailed or a mixed community formed a new regional ethnicity, probably even caste again, for themselves.

To me, that's the only reasonable explanation I can think of, the first which would make any sense. If the BB women had such a high status and the pure bred were these people the only fully accepted, rightful and free BB members and warriors by law in the established communities, the offspring from slaves and concubines, or other wives outside of the caste tradition, would have formed, even forced to form, new communities on their own.

This could really result in two neighbouring groups, being bred by the same fathers, speaking different languages. If the father's group prevailed, the spoke the original BB language, if a new rule and community was formed, they spoke the language of the local women. The sons would have had no big issue with this, because they were no full members of the fathers community anyway and most likely almost exclusively raised by the mothers.

The more distant a daughter group was from the pure BB founding fathers, the more likely it would have been that they adopted a new language, because they wouldn't have been accepted in the homeland as full caste members, but had to create their own identiy, like BB did when splitting from CW (if true and proven) intentionally with some of their directly reversed customs.

This way they could still be patriarchal and patrilocal, even patrilinear still (though can be debated), because the rules were different for the pure and mixed offspring of the BB warriors.

M.H. _82 said...

@ Dita

''Albanian R1a is near negligible as is I2a. It's the lowest of any Balkan population, and all R1a we have is post slavic''

For Albanians, it's 15-25 %, so not exactly negligible. The autosomal ancestry is input is ~ 20%. Your 'Albanian Bloodlines' project is a non-reliable source, because it hides 'Slavic' I2a & R1a.

Im not sure why you're causing it 'post-Slavic' when it is indisputable that Slavs settled around Epirus .

zardos said...

The decisive issue is, they were not allowed to become full members and such mixed low caste subpopulations could have existed within a BB realm for generations. The servants, the low caste people were never integrated as long as the BB system was active. Even if they had BB paternal ancestors and the same material culture, they spoke a different language (too).

Similar to modern household staffs from other ethnicities. Even new dialects and mixed languages could have been created in those communities of dependent people.
Because so far I assumed a present father which keeps his tradition äs up. But the kind of social organisation observable allows sonst to be raised by low status mothers more independent from the high caste legitimate family.

Actually some of the BB fathers founding new families abroad might have even supported the establishment of new, rather independent communities for their mixed sons, because they would not be accepted as full members by his relatives at home.

And once the elite dominance collapsed, the language of the lower strata could rise again as well, with such a clear social distance. The high BB caste might not have cared for the idiom their servants spoke at home,because even if half-breeds,if they were not high caste from father and mother, they were considered different people anyway.

zardos said...

@Andre: You are asking the wrong questions and NS Germany had a completely different approach which is not the topic however.

BB considered themselves a sacred and knowledgeable people which used its advantages to create a privileged position for themselves and to keep up bonds between the communities and strengthen their cohesion over wide distances.

If they would have married indiscriminately with locals, they would have lost their privileged position and alienated themselves from the other regional groups. But they did not care for the locals. but their sacred group.

Instead they kept their bonds over huge distances by constantly meeting and intermarrying, keeping their religion and traditional customs.

They fathered children with women outside of their traditional caste, but those had to care for their own communities.

You can see their sense for being special and secret-sacred rituals in their whole culture.

M.H. _82 said...

@ Zardos
I think the question is what caused that metamorphosis

Davidski said...

I'd say the most sensible explanation for the formation of the BBC is relative isolation from other CWC groups, plus cultural impulses from Atlantic and Danubian Europe.

Andrzejewski said...

@zardos So the B.B. were a ruling elite, basically, just like the French aristocracy before the revolution, and once their socio-organizational structure crumbled they collapsed just like the pre-1791 French lords?

Or do you equate them with other ancient groups, like the Aryan Brahmins in Rig Veda India who established the caste system in order to protect their alleged “racial purity” vis-a-vis the “dasas”, who were mostly the Dravidian/IVC descendants/Munda etc non-Andronovo IE’s masses? It also reminds me of the “Cohenite” caste (equal to Brahmins in India) who were attempting to preserve their status as the religious elite of the Israelites by forbidding intermarriage with the subjugated Canaanites?

If we assume then that the Beakers were just a small percentage minority ruling over masses of slaves, it’s no wonder that they went with the wind once the Hallstatt people rose up and replaced them.

In any case, I’m fascinated who come the BBC became such an extremely endogenous cult, bearing in mind that their immediate and far predecessors - CWC, Yamnaya, EHG, CHG and so on were radical exogamous.

And after all, I still fail to see how they differ from other groups who had a monopoly over certain political and economic organizations: CWC was just as innovative and strong, Sintashta were horse riding pioneers, etc. Only BBs shunned intermarriage with foreign groups, however.

Do you think that the Greek and Roman societies with their abundance of slave labor (which their entire economic order depended upon) was due to the Bell Beaker system?

Cre Atee said...

I wonder why language is not brought up more often here. The two major language groupings of European IE languages are the Western branch (Italic, Celtic) and Central/Eastern branch (Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian). Greek leans towards the Western branch, while Armenian and Iranian towards the Central/Eastern branch. Albanian, or at least Proto-Albanian, through mathematical modelling is said to actually be closer to Proto-Germanic than Proto-Balto/Slavic, although as mentioned, they are all part of a larger grouping Central/Eastern grouping.

It's highly unlikely that all these modern languages split apart at the exact same time. Germanic and Slavic or Albanian could have been one language for an extra 1,000 years in the Central European area before they spread out. Italic, Celtic and Greek could have been the same as well. I wonder how this reflects in these cultures.

Which branch did Corded Ware people represent? Did the Bell Beaker folk represent Italo-Celtic while Corded Ware the Germanic/Slavic/Thraco-Illyrian, and then the Battle Axe culture became Proto-Germanic?

Cre Atee said...

Btw, don't place too much emphasis on Y-Dna. Y-Dna is great for studying ancient large scale migrations, but it's very incomplete when it comes to modern genes, especially in smaller populations.

Smaller populations are very susceptible to genetic variations due to founder effect. While autosomal component of a smaller population might not change, Y-DNA can fluctuate greatly simply by way of things like the people of Clans A, B, C took control of Region X, and were able to reproduce more.

Bob Floy said...

@Andre

"So the B.B. were a ruling elite, basically, just like the French aristocracy before the revolution, and once their socio-organizational structure crumbled they collapsed just like the pre-1791 French lords?"

Dude. You are way, wayyy out on a limb here.

@Cre Atee

"Did the Bell Beaker folk represent Italo-Celtic while Corded Ware the Germanic/Slavic/Thraco-Illyrian, and then the Battle Axe culture became Proto-Germanic?"

The Basque situation(and other factors)seems to imply that things were a little more complicated than that.

Davidski said...

@Cre Atee

I wonder why language is not brought up more often here.

That's actually a good thing. Maybe you haven't noticed yet, but in discussions about the Proto-Indo-European homeland, many people who are usually quite normal suddenly become irrational, neurotic and stupid.

I'm actually thinking about banning discussions about languages here until enough ancient samples are available to settle the PIE homeland debate.

Cre Atee said...

@Davidski

Maybe ban irrelevant language discussions, but the whole premise of PIEs is based on language. That is the only thing we know for sure, because it's based on inductive reasoning, by working backwards from modern languages.

By studying kinship between different branches of IE, you can tell migration patterns. For example, you don't even need genetics to show that ancient Celtic and Indo-Aryan people split very early, and travelled in different directions. You can prove that entirely linguistically. We also know that IE Anatolians were the first IE split that migrated into modern Turkey, simply by language.

The problem with cultural horizons is that they are very elastic genetically. We know from DNA evidence that even a "modern" group like the Scythians different greatly from West to East genetically. Bell Beakers and CWC could have been an umbrella for all sorts of people. Your study even mentions that early CWC and late CWC differ significantly genetically.

Davidski said...

@Cre Atee

Confounding factors such as admixture and founder effects can be accounted for and explained so that ancient DNA can still more or less match linguistic and archeological data.

The real problem is the crazy factor I mentioned.

The finding that 25, or whatever it's now behind the scenes, Hittite genomes dating to ~1,600 BCE don't show any unambiguous steppe ancestry, more than a thousand years after their language split from the rest of Indo-European languages, will be wheeled out on every occasion to argue that the Indo-European homeland couldn't have been on the steppe.

This is obviously a classic tail wagging the dog scenario, but it's being taken very seriously at all levels of the debate, including at Harvard and Max Planck.

And as you can imagine, since this is a blog and not Harvard or Max Planck, things can get a lot crazier here. So considering that this is a genetics blog, rather than a linguistic one, then banning linguistic debates is the way to go.

Vladimir said...

@Archie. I didn't say that at all. Modern ethnic groups, mostly formed later, when the haplogroup is already quite mixed. Another thing is archaeological cultures that existed before the formation of proto-States formed on the territorial principle. Roughly speaking, up to the 1st Millennium BC, haplogroups can be conditionally correlated with archaeological cultures, but not with ethnic groups, especially not with modern ethnic groups. So that battle was probably between the emerging culture of the burial urn fields and the culture of the Scandinavian bronze age. In Russia I know of two such epic battles. One was between Abashev culture and catacomb culture, i.e. R1a-Z2124 knocked out R1b-Z2103 from the European territory of Russia. The second battle was between the mesh ceramics culture entering the territory of Russia and the Abashev culture. I. e. haplogroup N1a-L1026 knocked out haplogroup R1a-2124 from the Volga region.

Davidski said...

@Mammoth_Hunter

I don't have a strong opinion about the language of the Bell Beakers. They may have been mutes for all I care. But I'm not bothered if for the time being others want to speculate that they were Italo-Celtic speakers, or whatever.

Soon we'll probably have enough early attested Celtic and Italic samples to be able to work out which archeological culture their ancestors came from.

Davidski said...

@Vladimir

There's no evidence that the Abashevo culture fought the Catacomb culture.

The archeological evidence points to a struggle over copper mines between the Abashevo and Fatyanovo cultures, and apparently Fatyanovo lost.

M.H. _82 said...

@ Cree Atee

“The problem with cultural horizons is that they are very elastic genetically. We know from DNA evidence that even a "modern" group like the Scythians different greatly from West to East genetically. ”

Thats not true. LBK are very connected; early CWC are connected; BB are tethered around a core group. Even the far flung Scythian- Sakae complex has a very clear genomic connection

Matt said...

@Arza, re; Tollensee, my impression is that when Burger is saying the samples aren't really distinguishable from other North Europeans, this is probably because Harvard school ancient dna influence probably overemphasizes deep ancestry through formal f3 and f4 stats.

Not f2 / fst stats, or IBD segements / chunkcounts.

And intra-North European differentiation tends to gives weak signals on those measures.

MH: I think the question is what caused that metamorphosis

Indeed was there ever any "metamorphsis" from a culture that had converged on a set of shared Corded Ware burial / material features, or is BB (if a branch from the same ancestor) more a separate development from a point before those features had ever developed?

Since we know CW material culture and burial features have variability and regionality, and emerge over time.

Vladimir said...

@davidski Rather, in the first case, we are talking about volsko-lbischevskaya culture (considered an element of Abashevskaya culture) and Poltava culture (considered part of the catacomb culture). Here is that writes Russian researcher Khokhlov: "From rassledovannnykh yamno-poltavkinskikh skulls 31% bear on itself traumatic damage, many of which were lethal. In some cases, there is a lifetime scrapping of nasal bones, obtained, probably, in a hand-to-hand collision (Kuznetsov P. F., Khokhlov A. A., 1998. Pp. 32, 33)."
"The local population of Poltava, unlike yamnoye, is more heterogeneous."(It is now known that pit-Poltavchenko people were subjected to the invasion of the vol-lbischenskogo culture in which pit-poltavshiny suffered destruction, and many burial Poltavchenko culture is the burial of volkoviski.)
"Assumed (Shevchenko A.V., Yusupov R. M., 1991. P. 107; Shevchenko A.V., 1993. P. 103), that the populations of these areas can genetically ascend to the carriers of the hypermorphic Caucasoid type, common in the early and middle bronze ages among the steppe, including the yamno-Poltavka and late catacomb tribes. Apparently, the areas of the forest-steppe Urals in the late bronze age became the last stronghold of the creators of the once unified culturally largest cattle-breeding province, the refuge of the last "Mohicans" of the steppes. By the period of the final bronze, the anthropological type, peculiar initially to many ancient Jewish collectives, practically disappears in the Volga-Ural". (They disappear last. These are the isolated ancestors of the Bashkirs, Z2103 is known to exist now.)

M.H. _82 said...

@ Matt

“Indeed was there ever any "metamorphsis" from a culture that had converged on a set of shared Corded Ware burial / material features, or is BB (if a branch from the same ancestor) more a separate development from a point before those features had ever developed?

Since we know CW material culture and burial features have variability and regionality, and emerge over time.”

I think there was; because the variability can be accounted for by time; place & person. I.e. it was not a random variability. But it really is essential to see some early CWC analysis from the furthest west .

Matt said...

MH: If I'm understanding you correctly then, and this is perhaps a simplification, your proposal is that the patterns where Corded Ware may look like a "work in progress" (apparently to Kristiansen etc.) is actually a pattern of deviation from a culture which had already formed as moved that culture expanded over time and space? Not a pattern of formation over time.

zardos said...

@Andre "@zardos So the B.B. were a ruling elite, basically, just like the French aristocracy before the revolution..."

No, they were like Lombards in Pannonia and Northern Italy ("pure" Lombard upper class, local servant class of Pannonians and Northern Italians), just with the difference that they somehow did produce more offspring with the servant class or pushed their own defeated relatives in this class too. That way they kept a stratified society with different layers, minimum one of high borns, high caste, with elite mothers, and one with low caste, slave or local, in any case not traditionally accepted maternal lines.
These could form new elite networks by themselves on the long run, copying what thier forefathers did, but they were usually not accepted into the high caste with non-traditional mothers.

"Or do you equate them with other ancient groups, like the Aryan Brahmins in Rig Veda India
[..]
If we assume then that the Beakers were just a small percentage minority ruling over masses of slave"

The percentage was much less skewed it seems. And most important: They had their active networks. So they could, over wide distances, call for help! Imagine in an Alpine village, there was a problem with the servants and a local tribe and they were facing superious numbers: They would have called all their cousins from their marriage network to help!

"And after all, I still fail to see how they differ from other groups"

The CW culture and most IE were agnatic, which means they counted mainly the paternal ancestry. This made it easy to form wide networks in which attractive and skilled brides could be exchanged like they wanted.

The BB did at some point prefer an endogamous high caste network, they did produce offspring with local and slave women too, but they were not fully accepted for the high caste, in which there was, quite obviously, a cognatic marriage pattern. Which means that the male and the maternal lineage was fully counted. They were patrilocal, most likely patrilinear, but cognatic. CW was, quite obviously, not.

In India the incoming Indo-Aryans made a combination of the too, because hypergamy was allowed to some degree, this would be closer to CW, but at some point they castes became more strictly endogamous overall, which would be closer to BB and Celts.

"Do you think that the Greek and Roman societies"

No, because the BB didn't invent it, what did surprise the researchers and even me to a certain extend is that how stratified their household economies were, even on a much lower cultural stage than later urban cultures like that of Greece and Rome.
The surprise is that they had such a servant based economy and caste system on this cultural and complexity level, not that they had it at all.

The big thing for me is not whether these BB high caste people from Central Europe spoke Proto-Italo-Celtic or not, but that this kind of expansion in different social strate and castes, while forming new marriage networks with local women, can much more easily explain the language chaos in the aftermath of BB.

They never fully assimilated all the people, not even those in their own households, not even their mixed sons every time, because they didn't care!
They were their own masters and cared most for their high status cousins in the marriage network, not the local nobodies around them. They could have forced the people to speak their language, but they didn't do it because they didn't care to form a homogeneous ethnos, since they preferred to set themselves, their pure lines, apart in a privileged manner.

That's what the Lech study really shows, its amazing how everything makes sense now and its no longer a problem that in the aftermath of BB different languages were spoken by its obvious descendents.

I mean it might still be possible to find newcomers which brought Celtic and so on, but the issue with eg Basque and Etruscan, two language with no clear connection, would be no more anyway.

Davidski said...

@Matt

The CWC and BBC overlap chronologically and geographically, but they peak at different times.

This surely has to tell you something.

Sintashta barely overlaps chronologically with the CWC, but few have a problem in deriving it from the CWC, even though it's more different from the CWC than the BBC is.

Matt said...

@zardos, the Lech paper emphasizes how the socially stratified households all exist within the EBA period (roughly 2050 BCE onwards in their sample set or 2150 BCE by their dates?), so what's up with placing it into the Beaker period? Leaving aside and not touching the assertions about an endogamous caste network within the Beaker culture.

Anonymous said...

@Vladimir
What's wrong with you? It wasn't all to you, except for Klesov, it was for you. What other battle between Abashevo and Catacomb? Well, you have fantasies.


"in the first case, we are talking about volsko-lbischevskaya culture (considered an element of Abashevskaya culture) and Poltava culture (considered part of the catacomb culture)."

Don't be ridiculous - nobody ever considered Volsko-Lbischenskaya culture as a part of Abashevo (it is impossible), it's just your personal fantasies that you invented just when you found out the name.
Poltavka culture is not catacomb culture, but a continuation of Yamnaya culture with the influence of catacomb culture, but not part of catacomb culture. So don't fantasize.

See "Khokhlov: "Yamno-Poltavkinskaya""
Do not throw in false information.


-----------------


It's not about the amount of R1a, let's take Bulgar, they don't have a lot of R1a too, which means they're not Slavs? The problem of the substrate in the PalaeBalkan languages is the most acute.

Linguists have been dealing with the substrate in the Balkan languages for a long time, and this is what they have established:
Albanian language contains Thracian and Illyrian substrate words, Albanians now live in Illyrian territory, but not Thracians. Consequently, they used to live in Thracian territory.

The Ro(u)manian language contains numerous substrate Albanian words, so he borrowed them when Proto-Albanians was still living in the territory of Ro(u)mania.

zardos said...

@Matt: The answer is twofold:
1st: The Lechtal inhabitants show a great deal of continuity from the BB tradition. They are not like the Unetice people in eg. Poland and Czechia.

You might also read this great article in German (use translate) about the Lechtal, they write, among other things:

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/archaeologie-bronzezeit-ungleichheit-lechtal-1.4636575-2

Article in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03046-w

This means that about 1700 BC, the time shortly before the complete Unetice collapse, new people immigrated to the Lechtal and they destroyed the tradition!
Like I always said: Great turmoil at the end of Unetice, even in areas which were able to stay rather stable between BB and Unetice, like the Lechtal.

There is no reason the situation changed from BB to Lechtal fundamentally, but rather they increased the complexity and social stratification which present from the start, because:

2nd: Like I always said, it was long known that the typical BB specimen (planoccipital brachycephals with large facial features etc.) were much more often in the wealthy-typical burials than the deviating people (shorter, more delicate Neolithic or dolichocranic CW-like too). They were quite often buried very poor or without any grave goods at all.

Now we can say for sure why: They were part of the household, but they were not high caste people with full rights and wealth, like the typical BB. They were slaves, servants and mixed people.

Isn't it typical the pattern persisted from early BB times (it was their fundament!) to the final destruction of their tradition? In Unetice they simply formed new networks, might have connected themselves to the new masters in Czechia, Eastern Germany and Poland by intermarriage.
But locally, they just proceeded as they always did in places like the Lechtal. Until new immigrants (from the East?!) put an end to their system.

This comment makes this really clear:
"Grave goods from these burials, such as daggers, arrowheads and ornaments, suggest that many Lech Valley inhabitants were well off, although the region lacks the mound-like ‘princely graves’ found elsewhere in Bronze Age Europe."

They lived on their BB tradition with a broad caste of wealthy people, rather than a pyramidal system like in Unetice.

zardos said...

Also compare with this thesis, map on page 21 which clearly shows the "South German early Bronze Age" which is the direct inheritor of BB in Southern Germany:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/32580117.pdf

They were part of the Straubinger Gruppe, which together with the Adlerberg Kultur, has the greatest deal of continuity. Unlike further North, in Unetice proper.

But they connected themselves to Unetice, as is shown:
"The role of the high-status females is even more enigmatic. These women, who were buried with ornaments and jewellery similar to those of the female family members, grew up hundreds of kilometres away, Stockhammer says: the levels of strontium isotopes in their teeth are unlike those present in southern Germany. The levels of these isotopes vary with local geochemistry, and the women showed levels more similar to those found in eastern Germany and the Czech Republic.

But no children of theirs were found in the Lech Valley graves. One possibility is that females travelled hundreds of kilometres to the Lech Valley as part of alliances between wealthy families, and that any children were then returned to their mothers’ native lands. The grave goods of some of the foreign females resemble those of the Únětice culture in the Czech Republic, Eastern Germany and Poland from around the same time."

Isn't that remarkable? They lost ground heavily in the North, made new alliances, they allowed foreign women to travel to them, live among them like princesses, but they didn't interbreed and if they did they send the descendents away!!!
That tells you something about their ethnos and spirit! They really thought of themselves as a people apart until another, stronger group smashed their system.

Its true, papers like that really are game changers, because they give you a much deeper inside into the dynamics at play.

Aigest said...

@Archi well It doesn't look like Carpathians area was like 60% E and J in historical times. Both those haplogroups are of Mediterranean origin. Another point you dismiss caressly.. Guess which population lived north of Carpathians in times you speak of? Let me help you with that. Slavic and Cymerians. Not properly the Mediterranean type. Just an example for that about E V13 found in Neolithic Spain (Cardium pottery culture) which "It appeared identical at the seven markers tested to five Albanian, two Bosnian, one Greek, one Italian, one Sicilian, two Corsican, and two Provence French samples and are thus placed on the same node of the E1b1b1a1b-V13 network as eastern, central, and western Mediterranean haplotypes".. (Ancient DNA suggests the leading role played by men in the Neolithic dissemination.. Marie Lacan et al.) The same goes for J haplogroup. Yep the population living in the current territory of Albania is a Neolithic one. Mostly descending from Anatolian farmers. Being a patriarchal society organized in tribes (Albanians) that assimilation process you mention is simply not possible. If a patriarchal type population from Carpathians moves to Mediterranean and lost its man but imposed its language, simply doesn't make any sense. Again I am not talking about linguistics, because the moment you said Albanian is a creole language(wth!) you lost all your credits on that. And again this is a genetic blog, not the right place for that unless the owner gives us the permission. Summing up. Please explain how can a CE patriarchal tribes move south and lose their ydna become Mediterranean but keep their language. And plz don't use examples with the involvement of state structures. Albania tribes still existed up to xxth century living like in ancient times.

Dagne said...

Hunter Gatherers and Steppe Pastoralists lived in the Eastern Baltic as two different peoples and it took very many generations until they started to mix. Hunter gatherers were mobile and invisible, they lived in small groups, in swampy forests, near rivers and lakes, while pastoralist needed to clear forest for better herding, and they lived in larger settlements near big rivers which allowed them to travel long distances and trade with other remote areas. These two cultures can be traced archeologically living in two parallel worlds.

Why pastoralist did not take wives from hunter gatherers like they did with farmers? Well, it is quite obvious, farmer women could be traded or stollen like cattle, farmers lived in compact settlements, farmer women had more children and thus they were an easy target. While with hunter gatherers, it is much more complicated - they all could use weapons for defence, they are difficult to spot, they are hunters, after all. And most importantly, when captured farmer women would stay, even if they did not want to because they could not live on their own, while it was virtually impossible to keep hunter gatherer women - forest was her home, which would provide with everything, she was self-sustaining. For experienced fisher to get some fish is a piece of cake, or to find something to eat in the forest. So, hunter people were naturally better adapted to local environment, and I bet they as hunters were true "escape artists". In short. hunter-gatherer women would be just too wild and too difficult to domesticate for pastoralists.

zardos said...

"that any children were then returned to their mothers’ native lands."

That also explains the spread of R1b into territories of other groups if true. I don't know why the other side should have agreed upon such a deal (forced to? the high status women were hostages? They had a strange matrilinear inheritance pattern?), but if it happened, for whatever reason, the male children would have brought R1b home and build up a connection to the BB communities one way or another, but without changing local languages.

Unless they were virgins, court ladies, priestess or whatever, never touched, so had no offspring at all.

In any case, BB seem to have been very, very strict about which people with which ancestry were allowed to enter their caste and marriage circles. That was likely from the start, because their extreme phenotype is the result of phenotypical and genetic inbreeding. You don't get such percentages otherwise.

Probably those BB moving to Britain were among the very strict sects of their realm, thats why they were so typical and had almost no intermixture with the British locals, but preferred to cleanse the land and form a "pure colony".

Interestingly BBCs colonisation of Britain and Iberia resemble in a lot of ways the colonisation of North and South America thousands of years later. Even if its pure coincidence (climate, cultural level, population density and agriculture etc.), its still remarkable.

Anonymous said...

@Aigest "north of Carpathians in times you speak of? Let me help you with that. Slavic and Cymerians."

What's this got to do with north of the Carpathians? And what time are you talking about? The Cimmerians never lived north of the Carpathians, nor did they live south either. You are engaged in substitution of notions. Assimilation can even occur from 1% of the population, see Hungarians!
You do not understand that 3000 years have passed between the end of CWC and the beginning of the Albanians! You are specifically replacing the Thracians with the Slavs. Albanians are not close relatives with the Slavs, their whole relationship ended with CWC. Ancestors of Albanians have left and if to assume that Albanian language concerns Thracian languages then have left in KMK further in Sabatinovka culture and Noua to Balkans/Carpathians. But I have written to you, but you ignore that modern Albanians are mostly Illyrian substrate and other pre-Albanian substrate.
So your arguments are worthless.

M.H. _82 said...

@ Archie

''Linguists have been dealing with the substrate in the Balkan languages for a long time, and this is what they have established:
Albanian language contains Thracian and Illyrian substrate words, Albanians now live in Illyrian territory, but not Thracians. Consequently, they used to live in Thracian territory.

The Ro(u)manian language contains numerous substrate Albanian words, so he borrowed them when Proto-Albanians was still living in the territory of Ro(u)mania.'


Hhm but one can argue that proto-Romanians came from Balkans.
Because the 'Daco-Roman' theory isn;t exactly rock solid.
1) I find it hard to belive that the Bbritish 'war lords' reverted to Brythonic after Roman withdrawal - & they had been under Rome for much longer than Dacia - whilst 'the native Dacians' remained Romance-speaking after their brief ROmanization, not to mention waves of GOths, Huns, Sarmatians which then flooded the region
2) Romanians plot with Bulgarians, Serbs & Macedonians.
3) The material remains of 5-7th century AD Romania look Slavic.
4) the earliest sources attesting Vlachs are in central Balkans; followed by their dispersal east & north after Basil slayed all the Bulgars. Indeed, there is hardly any continuity between 1st Bulgarian Empire & 2nd, the latter of which was heavily Vlach-led
5) The Vlachs & proto-Rumans were the last of the ROmance speakers in central -south Balkans, centred around Via Egnatia.

M.H. _82 said...

@ Zardos
Sounds like Normans then. They barricaded themselves in castles, ruled from them but within them, created a diglossia, with a lower English class, and high French-speaking class, which did not really mix .
Interestin idea. Perhaps a bit broad brushed, e.g. it'd require detailed regional analysis, as the situation might be different for each region.

Dibran said...

What is your view with regards to R1a-M458 and where it may have originated?

I noticed a lot of people speak definitively on this lineage despite only post migration DNA samples and nothing earlier.

People seem quite adamant that it will not show up in Central Europe somewhere as if this will ruffle some feathers of the German government due to its probable Proto Slavic origin. People seem to want to push it to the pripyat as if it was trapped like titans in Tartarus conveniently spilling out in the Middle Ages stealing “German lands”.

I don’t see how M458 could be located so far away from its brother clades which all seem to have been found within a somewhat close proximity in the corded Ware culture.

As far as I understand it is hypothesized M458 was also apart of this culture. Some old outdated theories proposed an origin in western Carpathians. Idk what the basis is for such a claim though.

Why do you think they have yet to test the 2000+ male remains of Tollense battle finds in northeast Germany after some 5-8 years?

At least we will have that upcoming study on central and central East Europe spanning 400-900CE coming in a few years. Doesn’t really tell us where they may have been in the Bronze Age though.

With Z283 pipping up so far north and the formation of most of its children clades being the same, I don’t see them being so far apart.

Matt said...

I don't think there are any genetic signs of inbreeding in any of the Beaker samples so far, but it's not like Olalde looked at it in his studies.

The Rathlin Island pair certainly not - "The Bronze Age genomes, Rathlin1 and BR2, both show further reductions of ROH, producing distributions similar to each other and to that of modern Europeans.". No unusual ROH patterns indicating strong founder effect or consanguinity. But BA - (2026–1534 cal BC).

Nothing like this called out in Lara Cassidy's thesis either - http://www.tara.tcd.ie/handle/2262/82960 (Neolithic period and megaliths in Ireland apparently linked to some ROH indications of inbreeding; nothing similar in BA)

(More teasers on this thesis at a presentation in Ireland today https://ggi2013.blogspot.com/search/label/GGI2019%20Dublin

Following on from teasers last year: https://imgur.com/a/NRSqO9h

But actual work will be under embargo until next year.)

zardos said...

Indeed, but its exactly that this scenario opens up so many different possibilities for the long term regional development which makes it so attractive to me.
You can start with BB rule, even R1b lineage dominance, and still end up with a lot of different ethnicities and languages. Because small changes could result in the idiom of the original Beakers being spoken, one of their second level mixed groups brought from one region to another or just local continuity by the mothers of the mixed offspring and/or local populations language dominance on the long run.

When assuming BB fathers in core families, this made no sense, but with different castes and social traditions living side by side for many generations, things got different.

@Matt: No inbreeding at the villages, the marriage networks were fairly big, probably bigger than in many later times. But among the same caste.

zardos said...

The crucial phase for their breeding was at the very start of their core groups formation. Since they did keep up marriage circles over such wide distances, they were not more inbred than most farmers in 19th century Europe most likely.
No high frequency of close cousin marriages.

Dibran said...

Proto Albanian only covers 100BC-600CE. So I’m not sure you’re using the correct labels to illustrate your point.

The early phase of Proto-Albanian is only 100BC. Proto-Slavic among Germanic and other lineages participated in middle and late phases of proto-Albanian development as they transitioned into old Albanian.

There are already Albanian haplotypes of slavic and germanic lineages that date between 300-700CE. Myself included. They aren’t found outside of Albanians.

Perhaps you’re referring to the Pre-Proto-Albanian phase of development which was likely illyrian. Then you may have a point.

I have an Albanian haplotype of R1a only found in Albanians and it likely entered in the late Proto Albanian phase taking part in later old albanian ethnogenesis between 6-8th century and onward.

Dibran said...

You know nothing about Albanians or their origins and are probably a southern Slav troll. You literally comment like you have authority over everyone with knowledge.

Best keep to the subject in this thread rather than spread your anti albanian propaganda. They already are mainly paleo Balkan by their Ydna. So it’s best not to open your mouth for the sake of letting out hot air.

Davidski said...

@Dibran

What is your view with regards to R1a-M458 and where it may have originated?

Don't have one at the moment. We need many more Late Bronze Age and Iron Age samples from East Central and Eastern Europe to sort this out.

Dibran said...


Again, whilst archi is likely Serb or some other anti albanian troll, you’re wrong about the Proto Albanian development. You are probably referring to pre-proto-Albanian which was in the Iron Age. Proto-Albanian is only between 100BC-600CE. R1a surely participated in the LATER phase of the Proto Albanian ethnogenesis as it transitioned into old albanian between 6-8th century CE.

There are already Albanian haplotypes strictly found in Albanians for R1a-M458/R1a-Z280 dating to 1200+ ybp. No where else to be found. We only have between 800-900 samples in the project to make any conclusive statements.

Also, a good many I2a/R1a Albanians haven’t even done bigY.

There’s also large areas of Albania that either have zero samples or very few. That’s hardly representative for us as a people. It’s true most lineages are paleo Balkan but you cannot treat proto albanian and later albanian phases of development the same as pre-proto-Albanian/Illyrian.

Dibran said...

He’s probably an anti Albanian Serb. I wouldn’t pay attention to him. He’s a moron.

Anonymous said...

The correct CWC dates are shifted by 150-200 years to the top.

Dibran said...
" Again, whilst archi is likely Serb or some other anti albanian troll"

You confuse science with your propaganda, you know nothing about Albanians. You are no different from the Hindu nationalists who squeal that Aryans has left India. Absolutely the same, complete disregard for scientific data. I didn't write anything against the Albanians, you're a liar and political troll and that's why I was accused of trolling. I will find out from you the same style of nationalists as the Indians.

Dibran said...

Are you stupid or something? Lol. Our project doesn’t hide R1a/I2a. It’s public for all to see. I2a/R1a makes up between 15-25 percent in Albania proper and negligible amounts in Kosova for instance. Don’t run your mouth for the sake of speaking absent knowledge.

She is wrong but you are doubly wrong. She can’t seem to differentiate between pre-proto-Albanian(Bronze/Iron Age) and proto Albanian(late iron/early Middle Ages) phases.

We already have strictly Albanian haplotypes of R1a. MYSELF INCLUDED. Found no where else, with forming sub clusters as well. TMRCA between 1200-1400ybp in most cases. Even for I1 lineages.

Also, most I2/R1a Albanians haven’t even done bigY. So they have basic assignments until further investigation. We already have another albanian haplotype in L1029 coming from bigY. Including one in a Z280 clade.

You want to talk about hiding results? Go ask Poreklo with all the results and strs hidden by Serbian dna project. Whilst our projects FtDNA yseq and gjenetika are completely public even listing surnames and regions of origin.

Please don’t run your mouth when you have no idea what you’re talking about. There are more bigy Albanians in our project than any sourced from any study which stayed at the basic classification level.

We went from 300 to nearly 900 in 2 years and growing. We hide nothing. No one is forced to join our project and some get sour because they have a Gypsy or slavic haplogroup and don’t participate.

No ones holding a gun to anyone’s head. Now sit down and shut up.

Dibran said...

You are spewing nonsense on the origin of Albanians that has no basis other than Serbian propaganda. You also didn’t deny you’re Serbian so I was probably right on that guess.

The only people I hear claiming albanians are a creole originating from Thracians are Serbs terrified of the idea that Albanians are descended from Illyrians, disintegrating their hogwash claim over Kosova.

I have seen your type before. Don’t pretend to be a unbiased intellectual. Others in this thread have already called out your nonsense.

You know nothing about albanian language or genetics. Best to shut your mouth about our language. You’re not well equipped even for a laymen.

Stick to the subject in this thread and zip it. Davidski already mentioned banning linguistic discussions.

Do us a favor and sit down and shut up.

Anonymous said...

Dibran said... "No ones holding a gun to anyone’s head. Now sit down and shut up. "
You're a sick Nazi, you don't even read other people's messages and your argue with your fantasies. So shut your own mouth, you scoundrel. I'm talking about science, he's talking to me about his bullshit, which he didn't know where he saw.


Bulgarians have R1a~17% too, and what of that? But they came to the Balkans only 1500 years ago, and did not differ initially from other Slavs. The Abanians in the Balkans (and/or South Carpathians) are 4000 years old.

Ric Hern said...

@ zardos

I think the Irish Ancient Laws describe nicely what could have happened during the Bell Beaker period. I think the Druids had a part in keeping breeding lines. Plus the practice of Fosterage I think also contributed....

epoch said...

@Matt

This teaser is a interesting:

9 Mesolithic formed in three southern refugee (refugia?), Iberia, Italy, Caucasus.

Dibran said...

Very true. It’s a shame that people speak definitely in its origin and leave no room for debate/discussion, when we don’t have any samples from the time periods you refer. Hopefully we will get something eventually.

I actually form a Albanian founder effect under L1029. My TMRCA with other Albanians is estimated at 1200ybp. There is already a southern sub-cluster forming among us.

There’s currently 6 in the project and 7 Albanians confirmed from various studies to form in this albanian clade which is currently represented by 8 SNPs. I had other novels yet they were in problematic zones per YSEQ so they weren’t tested on matches.

It seems restricted to Eastern Albania(mostly north) and western Macedonia. Given its TMRCA I presume it entered sometime during the late Proto Albanian phase with the first proto slavic slavic contact in eastern Albania.

However it’s all guesswork given that there is a gap of 800 years between the haplotype and basal L1029.

Currently I am on Yfull as L1029*. No matches did Yfull.

Dibran said...

Zip it. None of my response was to you. And none of your response to me has anything to do with what I said to him regarding his false comments. Red herrings. I’m a nazi? Lol. You’re a moron.

Anonymous said...

Dibran said...
" The only people I hear claiming albanians are a creole originating from Thracians are Serbs terrified of the idea that Albanians are descended from Illyrians, disintegrating their hogwash claim over Kosova."

It's a fascist lie. Look, we have a lying fascist Enver Hoxha, he wrote all the linguists in the Serbs.


Dibran said...

English must not be your first language mr Dyslexia.

My family fought the communists including that dog Hoxha.

What’s that to do with your Serbian propaganda against my people?

Now stop with the red herrings. Stay on subject of the thread.

NeilB said...

It's RADOM not Radon numbn*ts! Get it right.

Vladimir said...

Archie. First, consider the Abashevo and Vol-Lbischenskogo culture related. P. D. Liberov (1964, p. 150-152) expressed an opinion about the Abashev attribution of the Volsky settlement. O. V. Kuzmina believes that the monuments of volsko-lbischensky type are a reflection of contacts between abashevsky and the late catacomb population (O. V. Kuzmina, 2001, pp. 157-158). And Poltavschina too. (Melnik V. I., 1990, pp. 103-107; Kuznetsov P. F., 1991, pp. 3-5) in General, Poltava culture is considered the culture of the catacomb cultural circle. So don't tell stories.

Gaska said...


It seems that after having completely destroyed the possibility that the Yamnaya culture is the origin of M417 and L51, the Kurganists have found in the CWC the solution of all their problems to continue linking L51 with Eastern Europe and the IE-Suddenly everyone seems to agree that the CWC is the panacea, and in this way, has become the new steppe Dogma. Now we hear that L51 is a typical marker of the CWC???, that the BBculture is an offshot of the CWC ????, and that the most sensible explanation for the formation of the BBC is relative isolation from other CWC groups?????

WHAT A RED HERRING!!!!!!

There is not a single anthropological, linguistic genetic or archeological argument that can support these claims-Just remind you that there are several CWC genomes analyzed and nowhere has R1b/L51/P312 appeared. Neither in Estonia, Lithuania, Scandinavia, Denmark, Holland, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia or Moravia- They are all R1a (from 2,900-2,200 BC) with the exception of a very late case (Leki Male-Proto Unetice in Poland)- On the other hand, RISE1 is a Grossly Mistake and ALt4 has no associated grave goods and is clearly an outlier of the BB culture.

Gaska said...

I will remind you of two studies so that everyone understands that this theory has no scientific basis

+ Bell beakers and Corded Ware people in the Little Poland upland, an anthropological point of view- Elzbieta Haduch- “The Corded Ware culture skeletons, includes medium robustness of bones and dolichomorphic stature, associated with previous populations such as the FBC. Most skeletons from the BBC graves are distinct in that they have a set of characteristics differing from those commonly observed in Neolithic populations and the early Broze period, demonstrating high uniformity of many morphological traits and proportions. Skulls are short or very short (breadth/width index above 80.0) with a non prominent or weakly prominent occiput, usually accompanied by a flattened rear part of the neurocranium in the obelica and lambdoidea section of the intraparietal suture and the upper part of the occipital squama. BBC skulls nº 5 and 2A fits within the mesocephalic category the rest are short skulls. A much greater diversification of dimensions is observed in female skulls of which only two are short the remaining ones have a smaller maximum cranial width. Allochthonous origin of BB means that the groups of the BB people are the stranger ethnic element not only in Central Europe (Desideri, Eades, 2.002). There is no doubt, from the anthropological point of view, that the BB communities are distinguished from the Corded Ware culture people. In particular, these differences are visible in the physical traits. This concerns the metrical parameters and skull proportions as well as morphological characteristics. The BB skulls are short (brachycranial) with flat of the nape area, in contrast the CWC people had the longer ones (meso or dolichocranial) with concave occipital region. The biological differences are confirmed in the sphere of material culture and funeral practice bring out BBs strangeness with respect to local societies. The presence of long-headed female skeletons in the BBC indicates their local origin and a great probability of incorporation local inhabitans to the newcomer groups.”

"Decorated bell beakers and some other associated artefacts (so-called "Beaker package") were adopted by the local communities in Bohemia and Moravia in an already developed form. There is no suggestions of any local development towards the shape of bell beakers"

Gaska said...

That is to say for many cases of P312 that appear in the CWC, in Bohemia or wherever, this would not mean that the BB culture is an offshot of the CWC, it only means that upon the arrival of that culture in Central Europe, that region was plagued with R1b-P312 and that some of her individuals joined it. LA BBc is an absolutely Western culture, with a different ideology, different customs and much more technologically advanced than CWC-It seems incredible that we still have to discuss these things

Vladimir said...

Archie. All the more strange that the refute now, when we know, that roughly after 3,000 year until our era on territory modern European Russia remained two haplotype R1b-Z2103 and R1a-Z94, which flrmirovali various culture and fought between themselves. After 2000 BC came another N1a-L1026. More then anyone and it was not until the turn of the eras nomads of haplogroup Q with Okulovsky culture (apparently Turks). Except that R1a-Z92 , but it seems the Eastern Balts, maybe they have Fatyanovo culture, but most likely this Z94 Fatyanovo and middle Dnieper Z92 is late.

zardos said...

@Gaska: The problem with the planoccipital cranial shape is, that it has a subdominant inheritance pattern. So it could have been present as a minority element in various populations for a long time, and like depigmentation in the North, it got widespread over time in specific populations.
Bell Beakers were, must have been, for some generations rather inbred and endogamous before spreading their new physical and cultural traits. This however could have happened in a couple of generations.
The real question is where did they mature, where was their core area. If we know that, we know with whom they mixed (they deviate from CW), which side it was (paternal or maternal) and to which habitat and culture they adapted. So far this is still all conjecture.

You should not forget, that beside the differences they had a lot in common physically and genetically with CW. So its clear they were related, but how exactly, I don't know.
The undersampled parts are exactly along the Southern route I propose and do not forget, the Southern CW from which they stem don't need to be all R1b, because it was one group within that Southern CW network which established itself as the new elite caste.
It definitely was not the whole group, because that would make no sense from the cultural and anthropological side. They needed to get new cultural and genetic impulses and isolate themselves from other CW before they emerged out of this "regional cocoon". This could have been a fairly small group, as CW was originally no huge, widespread lineage neither but became one when their kind got the sucessful ones.

Anonymous said...

@Vladimir "First, consider the Abashevo and Vol-Lbischenskogo culture related. P. D. Liberov (1964, p. 150-152) expressed an opinion about the Abashev attribution of the Volsky settlement."

Don't be ridiculous, in 1964 the Volsko-Libischenskaya culture was not yet singled out, that's why people made assumptions about individual found monuments what they wanted. Don't talk nonsense about Kuzmina, she never wrote that Volsko-Libischenskaya culture is Abashevo, because Volsko-Libischenskaya culture is older than Abashevo.

"And Poltavschina too. (Melnik V. I., 1990, pp. 103-107; Kuznetsov P. F., 1991, pp. 3-5) in General, Poltava culture is considered the culture of the catacomb cultural circle. So don't tell stories."

You write delirium and deception, here even paper said that many scientists consider Poltavkinskaya culture just a stage of Yamnaya.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a26c/7db05f4cc932502cbb221cacca88d4e27652.pdf

Don't stick in false fairy tales, don't give false references.

Anonymous said...

@Vladimir "All the more strange that the refute now, when we know"

Refuted is not an invasion of the Volsko-Libischenians at Yamnata-Poltavkino, it is a fact well known without you. And your fantastic statements that this is the Abashevo vs. Catacomb, and that this invasion is a kind of battle, just like the Tollenze battle. These invasions are migrations, but the battle!

Vladimir said...

Unlike you, I gave references to the work of scientists, and if you do not agree with the scientists, it is worse for you. What kind of migration is it when hundreds of corpses with wounds? This battle

Anonymous said...

@Vladimir, you give false references that say the wrong thing. You don't understand anything that happened in Yamno-Poltavkinskaya culture, there is no battle there, there are punctured skulls in all the time of existence of this culture and everywhere in this culture, even Khokhlov wrote it to you, but you don't understand anything. There are things of Volsko-Libischenskaya culture everywhere, on almost all sites.
No one battle, but permanently invasion everywhere!

Gaska said...

@zardos said-The real question is where did they mature, where was their core area.


Obviously a mountainous area, probably the Alps. its physical characteristics have nothing to do with the Yamnaya culture or with the CWC. I don't know if you have also become a supporter of the CWC theory, but in that case you and Davidski should explain to us how it is possible that if R1b-P312 and R1a-M417 are typical markers of that culture, it has not appeared nor a single case of R1a in BB culture. I guess they would not need a passport to travel with their new culture, although given the degree of imagination that Kurganists are demonstrating, I would not miss any explanation

@zardos said-"You should not forget, that beside the differences they had a lot in common physically and genetically with CW"

Really? Could you explain what you mean?

@zardos said-"The undersampled parts are exactly along the Southern route I propose and do not forget, the Southern CW from which they stem don't need to be all R1b, because it was one group within that Southern CW network which established itself as the new elite caste"


Which is the southern route?
On what dates do you think that supposed migration occurred?

Roidrage said...

Davidski,where do you think R1a and R1b originates from?I mean you said the oldest R1a samples can be found on the Pontic-Caspian steppe but what about R1b?Do you think R-L51 and R-Z2103 spread separately as it seems to be indicated by the data so far?If so what is your opinion about their origin?South of Caucasus?East of the Steppe?Maybe West?

natsunoame said...

cataloged documents 1516 A b 01 lxxxvii, 1173 bEx 225, 1197 Еa 302 lxxxi, 473Rq 61xcii etc by Evans

documents 1084, 1280 E, 1293 E, 1421 X, 482 U, 1516 A b 01 lxxxvii by Evans and Chadwick

Who is the liar archi, I always quote and can give the exact page from scientific literature!

Aigest said...

@Archie. I can't really follow you on this. What is the time period of this presumed movement south from Carpathians to Mediterranean area of proto Albanians you speak about? You said 4000 years ago.. Then it means 2000BC. Is that what you have in mind or 1000BC? 0AD? 500AD? 1000AD? Can you be more specific on that please?

Aigest said...

@Davidski. It looks to me that the vigesimal system is a Bell Beaker legacy thing. It is not an IE thing and exist today in parts of Europe where their (BB) influence was strong. Among the Balkan populations Albanians are the only one that have signs of original vigesimal system in their numerals. Albanians have low R1a and are also rich in R1b (some 20%) which now appears to be somewhat of a BB thing. Is that some kind of connection between these two populations (Rich R1b BB culture in CE with its follower Unetice culture and current Albanian R1b) albeit minimal? Can it be traced down by the actual genetic data?

Anonymous said...

Aigest said...
" @Archie. I can't really follow you on this. What is the time period of this presumed movement south from Carpathians to Mediterranean area of proto Albanians you speak about? You said 4000 years ago.. Then it means 2000BC. Is that what you have in mind or 1000BC? 0AD? 500AD? 1000AD? Can you be more specific on that please?"

I described the movement, but it was erased like everything else. I repeat, read it immediately or it will be wiped out, although it is pure academic science.
If we hold on to the reasonable version that the Proto-Albanian language is a branch of the Thracian language, it means that there was a movement like all the Getae-Thracians: from the CWC to the KMK and the Srubnaya culture, then the the Sabatinovka culture and the Noua culture in the Carpathian-Balkan Mountains, in Illyria they have already got in late Roman times. In this case, they came to the Carpathian-Balkan Mountains a little later than 4000 years ago (3400), if they did not belong to the Carpathian CWC. If they are not a branch of the Getae-Thracian languages, and closely related to them, they could get with other cultures 4000 years ago, the movements in the Carpathians there were many.


I won't write more about Albanians and Bulgarians on this one, or else they will get inadequates again, who see politics in every scientific theory. As if there are not enough Indians for us.

Ric Hern said...

I think the best thing to do now is to wait for results from samples from the Lower Don area.

Dibran said...

Mr. Archie,

what you have just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Roidrage,

Look at.....

Mathieson 2018
The genomic history of southeastern Europe
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25778

This study sequenced DNA from some of the largest cemeteries in Mesolithic Europe. R1b1a was the most frequent haplogroup in each cemetery.

R1b1a1a-P297 (the direct ancestor of M269, L23, L51, Z2103) is found in Mesolithic hunter gatherers in Latvia & Russia. R1b1a2-V88, the only R1b subclade found in Asia/Africa but rarelly in Europe, is found throughout Mesolithic Europe. Lastly, the oldest R1b1a sample comes from Italy dating 14,000 years old.

Looking at this data, it is very obvious R1b1a* distant Stone age origins are in Europe. Even the African subclade R1b V88 originated in Europe. This is a suprise. As you can see, Wikipedia still thinks R1b1a's early history is in either the Middle East or Central Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b

23andme says the same. They claim R1b1a originated in the Middle East even though there are no pre-bronze age samples from the Middle East. All pre-Bronze age Y DNA samples from the Middle East belong to Ydna J, G, E1b.

The R1b M269>L23>Z2103 in yamanya and R1b M269>L23>L51>P312 in Bell beaker both ultimately derive from Mesolithic hunter gatherers from eastern Europe. As David has pointed to, there are pre-Bell Beaker R1b L51 samples from Eastern Europe.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Roidrage,

R1a was less frequent in Stone age Europe than R1b was. It has been found in Karelia Russia, Estonia, and Ukraine. The oldest example comes form Ukraine and dates about 11,000 years old. It is likely R1a was common in Mesolithic hunter gatherers in Russia (but there aren't enough samples to prove it).

The oldest R1a M417 sample comes from Sredny Stog in Ukraine and dated 6,000 years old. R1a M417 was the main haplogroup of pre-Yamnaya populations in Ukraine from 6,000-5,000 years ago. But, those populations were native to Ukraine. The native hunter gatherer populations of Ukraine belonged to R1b1a and I2a2a1b.

R1a M417+ populations arrived in Ukraine about 6,000 years ago from southern Russia. This is probably where R1a M417 originated. It's also likely R1a

John Thomas said...

This blog more and more resembles that classic 1970s British TV sitcom 'Mind your Language' (which was set in an evening class teaching various foreigners to speak English, the foreigners all having gripes and agendas against each other).

Aigest said...

@Archie and if Albanian is a descendant of Illyrian than all what you are saying is wrong? I am really open to anything and I don't mind even if Albanians come from Mars but what are you basically saying is that after you decide that linguistically Albanian language comes from Thracian you make this kind of reasoning. Given that we know too little about ancient languages of th. Alkans this looks like a moot. I was more interested in what can we say from the genetic side.any idea on that?

Dibran said...

Asking a biased Serb’s opinion on the genetic origin of the Albanian people is like asking Hitler his view on the Jews. You’re not likely to get any response resembling the truth.

Aigest said...

@Gaska I am asking the same questions I asked to Davidski. It looks to me that the vigesimal system is a Bell Beaker legacy thing (Basques have it). It is not an IE feature and exist today in parts of Europe where their (BB) influence was strong. Among the Balkan populations Albanians are the only one that have signs of original vigesimal system in their numerals. Albanians have low R1a and are also rich in R1b (some 20%) which now appears to be somewhat of a BB thing. Is that some kind of connection between these two populations (Rich R1b BB culture in CE and current Albanian R1b) albeit minimal? Can it be traced down by the actual genetic data?

natsunoame said...

Aigest
I only can give you an output point from where you can start your own research and the most logical connection in my opinion.
In his book The Illyrians, author John Wilkes (1995) writes that Albanians are most likely to have origins other than Illyrians. Most likely, the Albanians contain a substrate from the local, welded population and a massive superstratum from an indigenous population of Indo-European origin. The origin of this superstratus must be sought in an area beyond the borders of the Greek and Roman states and influence, that is, beyond the borders of the Balkan Peninsula.
In a Modern Study (Source of information: Russell D. Gray & Quentin D. Atkinson. Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin. Nature. Vol. 426. 27 November 2003. P 435-438) on speed a change in the words from the most conservative core of languages ​​of the Indo-European family showed that the likelihood of the Albanian language being in the Indo-Iranian group was 36%. This is not great, but it is still a significant probability that, despite the territorial and temporal boundary between the Albanian and Indo-Iranian languages, there is a highly perceptible connection and similarity between them.
A very important argument in favor of the Iranian character in the Albanian language is the presence in the early and present Albanian of a grammatical construction coinciding with the so-called Iranian isafet !! The Iranian languages ​​have a characteristic syntactic construction known as the Iranian isafet.

Aigest said...

@natsunoame I beg to differ on this. I've read Wilkes, Hammond, Cabanes, Stipcevic, Georgiev, Benac, just like Pedersen, Kretchmer, Jokl, Meyer, Çabej, Hamp, Demiraj, Orel, Friedman and many, many more authors on that matter and I have a pretty formed idea on archaeology, history and linguistics on that matter. Sincerely, I am not interested on other debates on those topics. I am more fascinated and interested by what the genetic data might say.

zardos said...

Unetice is not in the direct BB tradition, but has very strong CW and probably Carparthian influences.
Only Adlerberg is in a direct tradition and Straubing (including Lechtal) mostly so.
In the following period after Unetice the BB legacy was even more diminished.
Which language they spoke and how much of it survived is open to debate with little good evidence.
However, their social organisation makes it after the latest studies easier to explain how different languages could appear in former BB territory.

Gaska said...

@Aigest

Yes the vigesimal system is typical of Basque/Iberian-
hogei 'twenty/veinte',
hogeita hamar 'Twenty and ten-veinte y diez',
berrogei 'two twenties-dos veintes',
berrogeita hamar 'two twenties and ten-dos veintes y diez'..

BUT, according to the German linguist Theo Vennemann, the vigesimal system found sporadically in certain languages ​​of Europe would be an influence of a Vasconic substrate, which would later have been extended to other languages.

We do not know what language BB culture spoke but of course in Iberia IE was never spoken until the arrival of the Romans, and of course P312 is not linked to IE because neither the Basques nor the Iberians nor the Tartessians spoke IE and all of them alike that the vast majority of Basques and the rest of Spaniards are overwhelmingly R1b-P312- Linking this lineage to IE does not make much sense after having demonstrated its genetic continuity in Iberia from the BB culture to the present day-In other words, I believe that if the vigesimal system can be associated with R1b-P312 at least in Iberia.

Although the Indo-European numbering system is decimal based, in many European languages ​​there are residues of the vigesimal system, attributed to the Celtic system, which as mentioned before may have been influenced by pre-European European languages. I don't know if Albania had a connection with the Celts and I don't know where its R1b comes from, but I know that BB culture did not reach those lands-So I cannot comment on Albania (it seems to me that 20% of R1b is not a large percentage to be able to impose a certain linguistic system or a language)-I'm not a linguistic expert either

I do not understand very well the disputes I am seeing in this blog between Albanians and other people. I just hope they can soon enter the European Union












Aigest said...

But vigesimal system looks like a BB legacy. Just take a look at the map of countries who have signs of it on their vocabulary. Basques in Spain and coastal area from Atlantic up to Denmark.

Anonymous said...

W. Porzig "Die Gliederung des indogermanischen Sprachgebiets" (autotranslated)

"From these comparisons it follows that the big the number of innovations and other dialectal features combines Albanian with the eastern Indo-European languages. On the contrary, among the Western languages only the Illyrian Albanian language is associated with a closer a relationship that is explained by the special historical the fates of both languages. Within the eastern group, Albanian is the closest to its western representatives.
In the eastern group, Albanian is the closest to its western representatives. The latter have the closest relationship with the Albanian language to the Balto-Slavic region."

Aigest said...

@Gaska It seems to me that the vigesimal system is more of a BB culture thing not of a Celtic. It is an integral part of Basque language and fits perfectly BB expansion on coastal Europe and British Islands. Albanian is an IE language however has this feature although not being part of neither BB expansion, nor a Celtic one. After E1b and J (which are Mediterranean types) which make 60% of male population the other major one is R1b. This differs from the neighbouring slavic population rich in R1a. I was interested on the BB - R1b - Vigesimal-Albanian connection. Do Albanian R1b derives from R1b attested in CE Beaker culture samples you have spoken of? Or is it completely different and unrelated? Can we distinguish if this R1b among Albanians comes from Bronze Age Bell Beakers in Central Europe (which has a Yamnaya component) and not from directly from Yamnaya?

Gaska said...

@Aigest-But vigesimal system looks like a BB legacy. Just take a look at the map of countries who have signs of it on their vocabulary. Basques in Spain and coastal area from Atlantic up to Denmark.

Yes, that is what I have told you that is typical of BB culture and R1b-P312 at least in Iberia- I think that BB culture never spoke an IE language, but that is very difficult to prove except in Spain and such time in Italy when the results of the Etruscans are published

But I'm sorry, I can't give you an opinion about Albania and its R1b, nor where does its language come from

Gaska said...

@Aigest

Forget the Yamnaya culture, it was not the source of anything but the sink-R1b-P312 does not come from that culture is an absolutely western lineage

What are the subclades of R1b typical of Albania?, and how old are they?. Maybe they are recent lineages. I guess there will be no Df27 or L21 and maybe there is U152? If it were this last lineage, surely the Albanians-R1b have their roots in the BB culture of Central Europe where all Czech and German BBs are U152

zardos said...

Gaska said...
"Obviously a mountainous area, probably the Alps. its physical characteristics have nothing to do with the Yamnaya culture or with the CWC."

I agree with mountainous habitat, but I don't agree with nothing in common, but that would mean we start a longer debate about physical anthropology which is unwanted and won't solve the issue at hand. The most obvious physical characteristic which was repeated in modern studies is height. BB were simply taller than your average Neolithic and Western Mesolithic (but not CW or Yamnaya!), especially the more typical specimen.

"I don't know if you have also become a supporter of the CWC theory"

I simply trust the blog owner on the issue. And while contemplating about it, other sources online repeated the "soon to come news" as well. So I simply go with the new data. I always thought R1b to be rather from the East, but I failed to see the detailed solution. What I recently wrote are my new solutions at hand and they make more sense that what I could come up with before.

For all we know R1b clans could even have been the founder of CWC and R1a ones being the later assimilated! Because we know more about the origin of Cw than BB, but not much more. In both cases we deal with demographic bombs. We see the splinters and impact of the bomb, but we can't reconstruct who built it and where it detonated.
We know more and more about the ingredients of the explosive, but still not enough. In part because the bomb was comparably small, but its effects and impact huge.


"but in that case you and Davidski should explain to us how it is possible that if R1b-P312 and R1a-M417 are typical markers of that culture, it has not appeared nor a single case of R1a in BB culture."

Because BB was founded from a rather small splinter group inside of the wider CW horizon. The clan which build the new cult rather than culture up, was just one or a very, very small number of related paternal lineages. Its like it is with a single European founding a mixed Euro-Indian population in America. They count thousands, but it all started with his family, his sons.
That happened quite often in (pre-)history. This original clan group defined new rules and was so successful with this strategy, that they were able to expand and roll over other people.
Whether they were a tribe or people apart from the start, even if they would have shared the CW material culture while moving out to the West, doesn't make a big difference in this respect. They were in any case closely related to CW.

"Which is the southern route?"

Through the Carpathian mountain passes West, if not through Pannonia, rather through Ruthenia, Slovakia, Southern Poland, Moravia-Bohemia-Austria until they reached Southern Germany. Places like Tiefbrunn and Esperstedt would be perfect for some of them to arrive in Southern Germany.

"On what dates do you think that supposed migration occurred?"

I would expect early migrations to bring them West, so you should be able to find traces in eg. Slovakia/Hungary/Southern Poland around 2.900-2.700 BCE.

Tiefbrunn is really interesting, because it could be that we have proof for a direct connection to the PC steppe there:
"Such pins are rare in the CW of Central Europe, but common in the Pontic Steppe region where they occur in a variety of forms until they disappear around 2600 BC"

"The 14C dates indicate that the Tiefbrunn grave belongs to an early phase of the German CW"

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155083#pone.0155083.s002

Aigest said...

@ Gaska.. I am not very familiar with R1b among Albanian however you can find data on this link..
https://www.familytreedna.com/public/AlbanianBloodlines?iframe=yresults

And also some texts from wiki who claims that "Kosovo is notable in having a high percentage of descendant L23* or L23(xM412) at 11.4% unlike most other areas with significant percentages of M269* and L23*" While I can speak hours on E1b, I admit that I am totally ignorant on R1b details.

zardos said...

So we have a very early burial from CW, with more direct connections to the PC steppe probably and if I'm not mistaken one of the first findings of R1b in a CW context. Close to the mountain passage I propose, in the time of an early CW dispersal.
Now the only thing I need is the proof for R1b in Tiefbrunn (and Esperstedt) being real and probably even ancestral to R1b in BB. Does anyone know?

If they don't do it, we need more samples from along the route and if I'm right about that, you will get very old CW samples with R1b. So they might actually have been the oldest and most conservative CW people we know of, if more results from Southern Germany/Austria/Czechia etc. will prove the point.

The Southern route (South of the Polish-Northern German low lands) will be proven soon. They will find R1b in the older layers of CW. The newer ones will push them even further South and one of these old, conservative CW groups might have, somewhere close the mountain ranges of the Carpathians, Sudeten and Alps, have had the great idea to develop something new and roll back and beyond.
As far as I can tell that will be proven soon, I would be really surprised if it would be anything else by now, after having gone to the results which people talk about.



Anonymous said...

About Illyrian language, which is connected with Germanic, while Albanian has no connections with Germanic.

W. Porzig "Die Gliederung des Indogermanischen Sprachgebiets" (autotranslated)
"There is a significant difference in the number and characteristics of correspondence between Illyrian and Germanic, with one the 'sides' and between the Illyrian language and Greek, on the other hand, is an indication that
Western languages will unite with each other in a closer than any of the Indo-European languages that do not belong to the Western group.

Special matches between Illyrian and Aryan, Illyrian and Armenian, Illyrian and Tocharian or in the Hittite languages have not yet been established.

Study of special similarities between the Italian languages, the Celtic, Germanic and Illyrian languages have shown that languages are more closely related than each other's languages. Of course, this conclusion is not binding on the Illyrian language, but what we know about this language is at least not contrary to it. Not in all cases the features of these languages, which are revealed by comparison, correspond to their distribution in the historical epoch."

Bob Floy said...

@Gaska

"R1b-P312 does not come from that culture is an absolutely western lineage"

Ok, but what are you going to do when L51 and P312 show up deep in eastern Europe, during the Corded Ware phase? How are you going to fit that into your worldview? You realize that Yamnaya and the CWC are very closely related, right? You may want to start thinking about that, David has told us again and again that these genomes are coming, I doubt very much that he's just making it up.

"of course in Iberia IE was never spoken until the arrival of the Romans"

You should learn about a group called the Celtiberians, they're a pretty important part of Iberia's ancient history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtiberians

"according to the German linguist Theo Vennemann, the vigesimal system found sporadically in certain languages ​​of Europe would be an influence of a Vasconic substrate, which would later have been extended to other languages."

Theo Vennemann is taken seriously by fewer and fewer people, and a lot of his ideas are outdated now, but there may well be something to this. It's entirely possible that the eastern Europeans who probably brought proto-Vasconic to Iberia may have also brought the vigesimal counting system, rather than Celtic speakers much later on, although it's important to note that this is mostly associated with Celtic speaking areas.

Oh, and when Zardos said that CWC and BB had a lot in common genetically, you said, "Really? Could you explain what you mean?". So I guess you're not aware that, for example, the Rathlin island beakers and Sintashta are almost identical, autosomally speaking? The only difference is that they carry different strains of R1, which is no big deal, since we know that R1a and R1b were living right next to each other on the steppe as early as Khvalynsk.
You should bear in mind that the Y chromosome is only a small part of a man's genome.

Aigest said...

@Gaska, someone claims that "Most of the Albanian R1b-CTS9219 belong to the so called "Balkan cluster", with 393=13 and 385=11,11.
It is proven to have its own subbranch A1777/BY611/Y10789 different than "East European" and surprisingly it clusters with samples from Spain."

Gaska said...

@ob Floy

You should bear in mind

1- L51 and P312 will not appear in Eastern Europe during the Corded Ware Phase, because researchers would have already detected it in any of the varieties of that culture-It is neither in the Baltic nor in Scandinavia, nor in Denmark, nor in Holland, nor in Germany, nor in Poland nor anywhere else up to date. If it appears in Bohemia we will see what the sites are, their dates and their autosomal composition and then I will give you my opinion. Until rumors are confirmed, there is no R1b in the CWC. I guess you can understand this perfectly

2-Obviously Celtiberians spoke a variant of Celtic, but I suppose you will remember the funniest of all, don't you? They were not R1b but I2a (at least in Iberia)-Then R1b-P312 has never been linked to the Indo-European language in the Iberian Peninsula.

3-I suppose you will know that BB culture was not genetically homogeneous, not only in reference to uniparental markers, nor in its autosomal composition. The first BB in the British Isles is the one with the lowest percentage of steppe ancestry. There are cases in France, Spain and Italy of Bbs without steppe ancestry or with a very small percentage, both women and men. Rathlin's cases are very modern in time to be taken into consideration.

Gaska said...

Sorry Bob

Davidski said...

@Gaska

Tauber_CWC ALT_4

FGC1168 = R
M734 = R
CTS207 = R
CTS3321 = R1
L754 = R1b1a
L150.1 = R1b1a1a2
L757 = R1b1a1a2
P310 = R1b1a1a2a1a

And there are more CWC/L51 samples to come from Central and Eastern Europe.

Davidski said...

@Roidrage

R1b has been in Europe since the Upper Paleolithic and probably originated in Europe or Siberia.

The earliest instance of R1b south of the Caucasus is from the Early Bronze Age, and it obviously got there from the Eastern European steppe to the north.

zardos said...

@Gaska: Some of the samples of CW which might be R1b were so far of low quality, so their R1b status was not officially confirmed and they lacked proven mutations. The simplest thing they could do was to re-test, which was done for some samples already in the past and some new might be added as well.

If those rumours and first leaks are true, you will find a first proof for my interpretation of the Southern route from Poland, Czechia to Southern Germany very soon. So you have one part of it, the Westenr part. Funnily this won't solve the ultimate origin quest for CW nor BB, but it will prove (if true), that it was an early, still closely steppe associated (really close) wave of rather conservative CW people which moved in in the first phase, with higher than later CW steppe ancestry (!), which carried R1b to Central Europe.

So this will not only prove the more likely origin of BB-R1b in a Corded Ware expansion, but also, even more clearly than that (which can still be doubted, because there could be different R1b lineages moving around, even further South still) the steppe and Yamnaya-related (very close) origin of CW.

The first genomes from early, conservative, high steppe ancestry samples in Poland point in the right direction:
"Some individuals from CWC contexts, including the two from Obłaczkowo, cluster closely with the potential source population of steppe-related ancestry, the Yamnaya herders. Notably, these individuals appear to be those with the earliest radiocarbon dates among all genetically investigated individuals from CWC contexts. Overall, for CWC-associated individuals, there is a clear trend of decreasing affinity to Yamnaya herders with time"

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.1528

It might be that most samples were not just from the wrong places (too far North), but also the wrong time (too late) for getting the R1b!
It seems to have been a more Southern route and the earlist wave which might have carried R1b.


Gaska said...

@zardos said-"I simply trust the blog owner on the issue. So I simply go with the new data

Everyone is free to trust whoever they want, but you look like a politician because every day you have a different opinion- You could expect to see the new data and then give your opinion, in the meantime all your opinions, routes, theories etc. seem incongruous, risky and hasty.

@zardos said-"For all we know R1b clans could even have been the founder of CWC and R1a ones being the later assimilated!"

This is one of the best phrases that you have said, it shows that you do not know the CWC at all and therefore you have no idea of ​​the uniparental markers and dating related to it. You should study all published papers again

@zardos said-Because BB was founded from a rather small splinter group inside of the wider CW horizon

At least that is a fairly reasonable explanation.

@zardos-Places like Tiefbrunn and Esperstedt would be perfect for some of them to arrive in Southern Germany-

Esperstedt and Eulau are in Saxony-Anhalt and all cases of the CWC are R1a

Tiefbrunn and Bergrheinfeld are in Bavaria and they are also R1a-There is only one doubtful case of R1b in Tiefbrunn, but it is not L51 or P312- Look at the dates of these samples and remember that there is NO L51 / P312 in Poland or in the Baltic Countries, or in any other region where the CWC arrived.

@zardos-"The Southern route (South of the Polish-Northern German low lands) will be proven soon"

Wishful thinking-Do you know the published results of the CWC in Bohemia? I repeat that you have to reread a lot of papers related to this culture

Bob Floy said...

@Gaska

"L51 and P312 will not appear in Eastern Europe during the Corded Ware Phase"

Well no, they already have. You've heard this from a reliable source again and again, so I'm not sure what you're confused about. That same source has told you that Tauber is the tip of the iceberg, and that L51 is even further east than that, in Russia, presumably at a time depth which would preclude it's having come from the west. So, it's a fact that L51 isn't a western lineage, and it dosen't matter how you feel about that. Facts come before feelings.

"They were not R1b but I2a"
Yeah, that's not a big surprise to me, because I don't think that Celtic came with Bell Beaker, it's too young and the new evidence from Iberia makes it unlikely. I'm partial to the idea that Celtic has it's deep roots in Unetice, where there was a bunch of I2. I also don't think that the entire Corded Ware horizon necessarily belonged to a single language family. So, none of these things are a problem for me, in the way that the origin of P312 is a problem for you.

"I suppose you will know that BB culture was not genetically homogeneous, not only in reference to uniparental markers, nor in its autosomal composition."

Yes, and I also know that the central and northern Beakers by and large look an awful lot like CW. When you take the Y DNA into account, and then look at the mounting archeological evidence that BB was a CWC splinter group, it dosen't take a genius to figure out what happened.

Anonymous said...

@zardos said "For all we know R1b clans could even have been the founder of CWC and R1a ones being the later assimilated!"

Well, that's fantastic.

"The Southern route (South of the Polish-Northern German low lands) will be proven soon"

Your lips to drink honey. You are so insistent on your assumption that you would have at least one argument to support them. Your insistence on your unsubstantiated hypothesis has too many words. One thing's great about it is that you've already lost someone who's been bouncing around the mountains like goats.
You can't convince anyone, because there are no facts.

zardos said...

@David:
"Tauber_CWC ALT_4"

There are many burials from the Taubertal, do you know if its one of the old ones? Most of the calibrated ones are younger, but some (at least one) are/is very old, come from the first wave. If its from the oldest layer, that would be amazing!

@Gaska: "This is one of the best phrases that you have said, it shows that you do not know the CWC at all and therefore you have no idea of ​​the uniparental markers and dating related to it. You should study all published papers again"

What do we have about the start of Corded Ware? Not enough to be sure of a lot. Or did you find the ultimate origin? If R1b was in the early, conservative wave of CW (sometimes still ceramic-less, because it was first groups of male warriors to arrive, they made no pots and females were taken but not fully integrated yet), everything is possible.

"Wishful thinking-Do you know the published results of the CWC in Bohemia? I repeat that you have to reread a lot of papers related to this culture"

Don't overreact, but really it seems to be done (Poland, Czechia, Southern Germany) and everything looks like CW brought it. Probably in a year they find another migration or a people which have R1b too, who knows, but everything considered, it looks like the case might be closed soon.

Gaska said...

@Bob Floy

Do you know when R1b-L51 was formed and what is its TMRCA? Davidski and the Spanish archaeologists who say that L51 has its origin in Northern Russia may be right - for me it will be great news because this lineage will be definitely disconnected from the Yamnaya culture and the IE language.

@Bob Floy said-"Look at the mounting archeological evidence that BB was a CWC splinter group"

hahahaha you're kidding right? Maybe you could tell me how you came to this conclusion because it is simply fascinating

Davidski said...

@zardos

Currently, there's no unambiguous R1b in any of the really early Corded Ware males, from the Baltics, Poland (Oblaczkowo) or Germany. They're all R1a.

In fact, the Corded Ware and Corded Ware-related Bronze Age samples from the Baltics are uniformly R1a until finally a singleton R1b shows up during the Bronze Age, but that's probably from a native forager Baltic line.

Also, as far as I know, the soon to be published Corded Ware samples from the Swiss Plateau don't belong to R1b. So they're probably R1a.

However, sooner or later Tauber_CWC ALT_4 will definitely be joined by other R1b-L51 Corded Ware samples from further east, including some early ones, and then we can discuss how they fit into the picture.

Gaska said...

@Davidski-

You have been defending the origin of L51 and M417 in the Yamnaya culture for many years, now you have said that

1-L51 is a typical marker of the CWC
2-The BBculture is an offshot of the CWC
3-The most sensible explanation for the formation of the BBC is relative isolation from other CWC groups

And I say- WHAT A RED HERRING!!!!!!, even if another five years pass you will not be able to explain those words and in the end you will have to retract yourself-

1-Typical? Does that mean majority? In which of the CWC subcultures is L51 the majority?
2,3-I don't think you think what you're saying

Anonymous said...

"2-The BBculture is an offshot of the CWC"

That's what archaeologists will never agree with.

Jatt_Scythian said...

Is the R1b L51 in one of Middle Dnieper-Fataynovo-Balanovo-Abashevo?

Also what do we make of the R1a(xZ93) that has been found in the Tarim. Did anyone also test the Tarim mummies and Afansievo as well for eye color, skin color, hair color, lactose tolerance and height?

And if Central Asia had not been turkified what would the ratio of MLBA and Iranian farmer have been there? What about in the Kazakh steppe? Euro steppe?

zardos said...

@Gaska: We don't have so many CW samples successfully tested for their paternal DNA yet, particularly few from the early phase and the Southern provinces.

I mean some days ago the individuals with exceptionally high Yamnaya related steppe ancestry in the Baltic North might have been seen as an unusual exception, but now we might conclude they were not. They were the typical CW warriors bringing the culture and ancestry West, not the 75 percent, already mixed guys.

And guess what, some early samples even as far as Southern Germany might be similar. Especially from the ceramic-less phase after the fresh conquest. Interestingly you sometimes have local dynasties founded, local pot styles etc. in this first phase which formed a tradition. I don't know for sure, granted, I might be proven wrong about that, and you might still be right somehow, someway.
But there were probably hundredst of these regional dynasties and traditions. If R1b was just common in one or two branches and they were able to form just a couple of such local dynasties, it will be hard to find them in the record, but they were there nevertheless.

And it will suffice that one of these dynasties, exemplified by their burial ground quite often, transformed to the new BB cult. I'm sure they had other influences, genetically and culturally, working on them. But there is no need for a foreign paternal lineage to come in, not at all. And the more we get, the more likely it seems it was a CW lineage, even if the final proof is not there yet.

It might be all concentrated, packed in a group like the Lower Don culture before the first expansion, then a group containing R1a and R1b for early CW and since it was a local dynasty somewhere in Central Europe, R1b was left for BB and became the highly successful lineage we all talk about.

Davidski said...

@Gaska

Obviously, the Yamnaya groups rich in R1b-Z2103 never looked like the direct ancestors of Central and Northern Europeans. So the idea was that there were as yet unsampled Yamnaya groups rich in R1a-M417 and R1b-L51 that would fit the bill.

But it's starting to look more and more that such Yamnaya L51/M417 groups won't turn up in the ancient DNA. In fact, there are other, pre-Yamnaya steppe groups, some yet to be officially revealed, that belong to M417.

So it seems that the origin of the Corded Ware people was in some pre-Yamnaya, but still Yamnaya-related, steppe population rich in M417 and L51. But in any case, like I said, eventually you'll have to accept that L51 was also a Corded ware marker and work with that.

zardos said...

@Gaska: Forgot that:
"Esperstedt and Eulau are in Saxony-Anhalt and all cases of the CWC are R1a"

Well, the Tauber valley is in Southern Germany too and fairly close to Tiefbrunn, so if Tiefbrunn would be confirmed as well, just saying, might be wrong, you end up with a path along the Danube and then some march, all in all 200 km West in the direction of Stuttgart. Tiefbrunn would be on the way from Czechia West to Baden-Württemberg.
Even if Tiefbrunn might be just R1a, it might have been the same clan/tribe which settled in Taubertal.
Tiefbrunn is early, and its on the way. Lets see.

And even if I'm wrong about the Southern route, most of the pre-BB R1b will eventually have been brought by CW (most likely right now, might be still disproven though) and ended South of the line I have in mind. Because thats were BB were born, regardless of how they came there.

zardos said...

@David: But was the paper wrong or at least premature in writing this, if just the Tauber valley is confirmed?

"while a smaller fraction belonged to R1b [3/24] or I2a [3/24] lineages (Tiefbrunn and Esperstedt in Germany, Pikutkowo and Łęki Małe in Poland, and Brandýsek in the Czech Republic)"

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.1528#RSPB20191528C37R

They clearly write as if 3 cases of R1b in CW contexts is a sure thing for the mentioned locations.

Bob Floy said...

@Gaska

"Do you know when R1b-L51 was formed and what is its TMRCA?"

Yeah, I do. What about it? Focusing on things like that isn't going to help you, you're not going to dig yourself out of the hole you're in.

"hahahaha you're kidding right? Maybe you could tell me how you came to this conclusion because it is simply fascinating"

No, I'm not kidding, and plenty of evidence for this has been shared in discussions here just over the past few weeks, it's already been put in front of you. Genetic and archeological evidence. But you chose to ignore it because you're too heavily invested in an Iberian origin for BB. You're too biased to be any good at this, you simply ignore facts that don't suit your preferences. You understand that Yamnaya and CWC are siblings, right? No one cares that Samara-area Yamnaya isn't directly relevant to the story. No one.

Davidski said...

@zardos

I'm not sure why this new paper makes those claims, since the three instances of R1b in question can't be confirmed due to the low coverage of the samples, and the two males from Germany probably belong to R1a. For instance, see here...

Identical radiocarbon dates do not help to indicate a chronological order, but based on their Y-chromosomes (all likely R1a, S1 Table), one can suggest that they all represent a paternal line of ancestry. I1540 is classified as R1a1, but the Y-chromosomal marker this call is based on (L120) is missing in individuals I1538 and I1541, so they could all carry the same haplotype. In addition to these three individuals, I1534 is a second degree relative of I1538 and I1541, who was carrier of R(xR1b) but a more detailed classification was not possible due to the low coverage. I0104, who is a second degree relative to I1541, might also carry the same Y-chromosome as I1534, I1538, I1540 and I1541, but that cannot be determined due to low coverage in those individuals. Generally, the data would be consistent with all five individuals carrying the same Y-haplotype as there are no contradicting calls for R1a defining markers (S1 Table), which would suggest paternal relationship among them. In total, 13 Corded Ware individuals from Esperstedt were analyzed, nine of them were males.

Estimating genetic kin relationships in prehistoric populations

zardos said...

@David: I wondered too, because they didn't quote a new paper for Germany nor Poland. But probably even if they didn't have it from a yet not published new paper, there was some re-testing? Only they might know.
They can't have written down the wrong category, that would be a big mistake.

Davidski said...

@zardos

They didn't re-test those samples. They just sourced the results from the old papers that they cited. This sort of thing happens a lot, simply because peer-revieved literature carries weight, even when it's wrong.

See that's why Tauber_CWC ALT4_4 is such a big deal, for now.

I don't know what the instances of R1a-M417 and R1b-L51 in the Corded Ware samples mean exactly. They might not represent anything more than just two Y-haplogroups distributed fairly randomly in the Corded Ware population across space and time.

But to date, poz81 from Oblaczkowo is the oldest Corded Ware sample with a reliable Y-chromosome classification (R1a-M417, 2880-2630 BCE), and this individual appears to be very similar to Yamnaya samples.

Gaska said...

Zardos the only case of R1b in the CWC is Alt4. There is no R1b in Eulau, Esperstedt, Tiefbrunn etc. Nor is there in Poland because RISE1 is a gross mistake. One of 3/24 is Leki male, which is a very late sample in Poland related to the Unetice culture (2.167 BC). I think the other is a sample in Esperstedt that is also very late. Then for the moment your theory of the southern route for the migration of that lineage makes no sense unless you think it was the other way around, that is to say in a west-east direction, because obviously the BB culture moved from Bohemia to Silesia, and from Moravia to Malopolska and HUngary. In other words, Malopolska-CWC is an OFFSHOT from Moravian BBs- The rest of the CWC is absolutely R1a

Estonia (Ardu, Kunila)
Lithuania (Gyvakarai, Spiginas)
Sweden (Viby, Bergsgraven, Ölsund)
Denmark (Kyndelose)
Poland (Obłaczkowo)
Germany (Tiefbrunn, Esperstedt, Eulau, Bergrheinfeld)
Bohemia (Brandysek, Radovesice)

Although there is also I2a

Poland (Pitutkowo)
Zlota culture-Poland-(Wilczyce)
Bohemia (Brandysek)

Only missing to analyze ancient genomes from SGC and Moravia- We will see what happens, but of course suddenly think that the CWC is R1b and that the BBC is an offshot of the CWC is a joke-If r1b-P312 is a typical CWC marker why it has not appeared in those regions. Can you explain it to me?

Davidski said...

@All

I wouldn't get too dogmatic about this at least until there are something like 50 reliable Corded Ware Y-DNA samples from several different countries to look at.

Ancient DNA has a habit of destroying unsubstantiated pet theories, so always try to be sensible instead of doing a Carlos Quiles impersonation.

Speaking of Carlos, his Corded Ware = Uralic theory is going to get an ass whooping next year, with some very ironic twists too. I'm actually starting to feel sorry for the guy. But it's his fault.

zardos said...

No, but I can see viable scenario in case R1b shows up in a properly tested and categorised earlier CW sample, which is what I have already written.

The early Neolithic seems to have carried one main lineage, G2, and a minority one, E, mainly v13.
Think about how many G2 samples were found and how few of E.
It was good luck to find it at all, but it was there snd now E is in a lot of regions more dominant than G2.

In the CW the foundation of local dynasties was even more important, so regardless how few they were originally, the pre-BB could easily be explained.

Probably something else happened, but like I said, right now CW is the best option.

They just need to be in an early wave or forming a migratory chain which was under the radar so far. We'll see.
Thought it was over, but no, too early.

Davidski said...

@zardos

Are there any obvious similarities between early Bell Beakers and eastern Corded Ware groups like Abashevo and Fatyanovo, like in terms of metallurgy and weapons?

Open Genomes said...

The Y-DNA SNPs of the Malmstrom et al. (2019) individuals

poz81 from Poland, one of the earliest Corded Ware samples and who has over 90% Steppe ancestry, is in haplogroup R-CTS4385* (ancestral for both subgroups).

R-CTS4385 on the YFull tree

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

As far as I can see, Beakers were poor in metal and only rarely had copper daggers. Their culture was based around archery. That Lech valley paper did a really thorough analysis on the grave goods. The women had more metal than the men.

CWC on the other hand, do they have metal at all? Doesn't really look like it.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185971

Davidski said...

Eastern Corded Ware groups, namely Abashevo, Balanovo and Fatyanovo, seemed to have been into metallurgy in a big way.

Apparently, competition over copper ores around the Urals may have led to the appearance of the Sintashta culture there, with new weapons and fortified settlements.

Bob Floy said...

Mallory on Fatyanovo, from his "encyclopedia":

"That the culture produced its own metal objects is
attested to by the finding of metal-working implements in
graves suggesting the presence of local smiths."

M.H. _82 said...

@ Romulus

“As far as I can see, Beakers were poor in metal and only rarely had copper daggers. Their culture was based around archery. That Lech valley paper did a really thorough analysis on the grave goods. The women had more metal than the men.

Seems like how BB got the edge and became enable to expand west

Cre Atee said...

@Davidski

The Hittite findings are just piling on the pre-historic European R1b findings. I think it's very clear at this point we have to very seriously consider the Steppe people as the SPREADERS of IE, and not necessarily as the SOURCE of IE. CWC could have just branched into Sintashta out east, and Battle Axe up north after adopting the language in central Europe.

It's very possible that IE might be an ancient European language that the Steppe people might have adopted from the farmers, and spread to Iran, China, and India. After all, we know Sintashta is a descendant of CWC by the Farmer admixture they carry.

Davidski said...

@Cre Atee

Well, I'm pretty sure that steppe ancestry will pop up in Bronze Age Anatolia when enough of the right samples are tested.

Also, I wouldn't say that Sintashta necessarily derives from Corded Ware. Another option will reveal itself soon when more samples are published from the western steppe. But I'll leave it at that for now.

As for Proto-Indo-European being a farmer language, I don't think that'll go down too well among most historical linguists. You would really need to come up with something special to swing things in favor of the farmers. Just saying.

Cre Atee said...

@Davidski

Well the Hittite findings are a pretty big lean towards that. My point being is that just because say, the British brought a Germanic language all over the world, it doesn't mean Proto-Germanic was formed in the British Isles. They were simply the spreaders of it. The steppe people could have played the same role. I think linguists erroneously assume because X or Y terms were used, therefore a language "originates" in a place with X or Y. Languages easily adapt and lose/gain vocab on the need.

The thing about hunter gatherers, farmers, herders, etc... is that these we are considering their roles ONLY AT EBA. Those "farmers" were hunter gatherers at one point too, and then they adapted, just like the "WHGs" adopted farming as well. Who the fuck knows at which point, which group borrowed terms from whom, and when terms were lost/gained.

M.H. _82 said...

@ Davidski


“As for Proto-Indo-European being a farmer language, I don't think that'll go down too well among most historical linguists. You would really need to come up with something special to swing things in favor of the farmers. Just saying.


Nothing precludes the possibility. Forget the simplistic narratives & false dichotomies
All IE speakers have EEF ancestry

Bob Floy said...

I have to agree with Mammoth Hunter on this one. PIE from farmers is definitely a possibility. I wouldn't say it's the best possibility, but I trust historical linguistic models less and less.

Davidski said...

Hopefully we'll have enough data of different types very soon, maybe in a few months, to be able to figure out who bleated out the first sentence in Indo-European, but I'm not sure that'll ever be possible.

I think as close as we'll ever get is finding a general time and place where Indo-European languages and associated genetic ancestry first radiated from.

My prediction is that this will be the northwestern Black Sea coast during the Early Bronze Age, and if so, then most of the relevant people will consider that the steppe hypothesis has been proven, more or less.

I seriously doubt that the debate whether it was the farmers or herders who were first will be taken seriously.

M.H. _82 said...

@ Bob

''I have to agree with Mammoth Hunter on this one. PIE from farmers is definitely a possibility. I wouldn't say it's the best possibility, but I trust historical linguistic models less and less.''

I dont think it's the best model either, because the 'European hunter-gatherers' seem to have got the upper hand by 4000 BC.


@ Davidski

''I seriously doubt that the debate whether it was the farmers or herders who were first will be taken seriously.''

Well yes, because its somewhat of a false dichotomy in 2500 BC E.C.E.
In fact, animal husbandry became the main economy in Baden, Tiszapolgar, etc (and the classic legume package was abandoned); leading to a more male -oriented society. This is why Gimbutas thought they were 'kurganised' cultures to be explained as subjegated by steppe invasions.

Bob Floy said...

@Davidski

"I think as close as we'll ever get is finding a general time and place where Indo-European languages and associated genetic ancestry first radiated from."

It's hard to see how anyone could expect more than this. The whole Z93/Sintashta/indo-Aryan chain of evidence we now have is probably an example of what "confirmation" should look like, I'd say.

Cpk said...

I'm still waiting for the Arslantepe samples for the Anatolian question. If they are no steppe and no r1b-a like the previous samples it's a problem because the location is extremely close to the Ebla-Armi IE merchants from 2500 BC.

Matt said...

@Cre Atee: The thing about hunter gatherers, farmers, herders, etc... is that these we are considering their roles ONLY AT EBA.

Part of the issue is that there is no agreed split pattern (phylogeny) of the IE languages, so you can get a person going "Oh, well the primary split is Celtic and Baltic. Hittite actually just looks like a primary split due to 'substrate effects'. So if an item is present in Celtic and Baltic, that suggests items present at first split", and come to radically different conclusions than models that present this as instead a relatively downstream split.

In the same way historical linguistics tend to talk about the independent invention of wheeled vocabulary in all the Indo-European branches being difficult. But if it only really happens independently in say, 3 branches which have already split, most of which are in contact, and we have evidence from beyond IE that basically the same linguistic derivations are copied for wheel vocab between different languages then (e.g. Semitic, Hurrian, Northwest Caucasian all seem to follow the same underlying "formula" for wheel words)... is it really that difficult? But since no one agrees on the tree structure no can really say much about this...

Re; IE being a language which comes ultimately via EEF groups of either a SE European, NC European sort, I think this does tend to be difficult in that you're either assuming upstream either

1) that the language moves ultimately into Europe via the Anatolian farmers, in which case there are still some questions to be answered about why you don't see other branches elsewhere in Europe and West Asia which can be linked directly to this primary movement (unless you do?)

2) the language is from Euro HG, which is relatively less plausible and more difficult given the relatively limited influence of Euro HG. Particularly in SE Europe and thereabouts - in that instance you have a relatively complex chain of transmission from Euro HG->composite with farmers (despite low admixture ratios in samples)->mixed composites with steppe eneolithic population (despite low admixture ratios again)->back to "non-steppe Europe" again via these composite populations. Possible but hard to actually demonstrate (probably practically impossible).

I'm confident that linguistic models will get better though, allowing more time and date resolution from the primary language data, which archaeological and genetic data can then be interpreted around the scaffold of.

Anonymous said...

Cre Atee, there is absolutely nothing in the PIE language that points to Anatolia or the agricultural character of its carriers. Therefore, the farmer's version is ridiculous.

Davidski, Sintashta comes from CWC, this is clearly indicated not only by genetics, but also by the archaeology of the funeral rite. One should only remember that CWC belongs to the Eneolithic, and Sintasht belongs to the MLBA, near the west of Sintasht found Central European things belonging to epi-CWC cultures.

In my opinion, the discussion about the origin of BB should be postponed until the appearance of new data, because now there is no data and everything is poured out in a set of words. CWC is a more advanced culture in terms of attribution - Battle Axes and Corded Ware pottery are more advanced attributes than BB knives and pottery. It is absolutely not clear why if the BBC occurred from CWC it did not borrow these advanced attributes.

We need to test the BB-like cultures of the coast of Poland and the Vistula (<- Narva R1b1a1a and Dnieper-Donetsk R1b), not to mention the fact that we need to deep test CWC and Eastern Europe, and then we'll see.

Davidski said...

@Cpk

I'm still waiting for the Arslantepe samples for the Anatolian question. If they are no steppe and no r1b-a like the previous samples it's a problem because the location is extremely close to the Ebla-Armi IE merchants from 2500 BC.

It's not a problem because there's no evidence of any IE merchants at Arslantepe or Ebla-Armi.

Anonymous said...

Bob Floy said...
" I have to agree with Mammoth Hunter on this one. PIE from farmers is definitely a possibility. I wouldn't say it's the best possibility, but I trust historical linguistic models less and less."

No one doubts about you. Linguists are fools, one Bob Floy is smart.

There is no developed agricultural vocabulary in the PIE, it is very primitive.

Cpk said...

There certainly is.

Ric Hern said...

I think we should not forget the proposed Early, Middle and Late Proto-Indo-European. Looks like all Languages today derive from Late Proto-Indo-European and reconstructions of PIE could be biased in that direction.

Early PIE reconstruction is a gamble because arguably the closest thing we have to it is Hittite which was already significantly distant from the original by the time it was written down....

Ric Hern said...

I wonder if certain dialects within certain Languages are maybe closer to PIE than the Language as a whole ?

Davidski said...

Ah, I see what Cre Atee was suggesting now.

Well, if anyone thinks that Proto-Indo-European spread from Anatolia to Europe with Neolithic farmers, and that's the way to explain the presence of Hittites in Anatolia and Late Proto-Indo-Europeans on the steppe, then nope, that won't work out.

For one, Anatolia never really made any sense as the PIE Urheimat, and it still doesn't. Also, I'm very confident that sooner or later someone will find solid evidence of gene flow from Southeastern Europe to Anatolia during the Copper and/or Bronze Age. Exceedingly confident, in fact.

CrM said...

@Davidski

I remember you mentioned an upcoming Hittite paper few months ago. Any news on that?

Davidski said...

@AuckeS

I think there might be a couple of papers with Hittite era Anatolian genomes coming soon, probably next year.

But I'm not in a position to provide any scoops, mostly because I don't really know any details. Let's wait and see what they show.

zardos said...

@David: Unfortunately that's beyond me, I'm definitely not competent to answer this.
The best answers for these questions came so far from Archi imho.

The main reason is the lack of English/German literature on the subject and that I see a general problem in archaeology, being usually more regionally oriented. Eg. when I studied archaeology, it was all about Central Europe by and large. And if you did classic archaeology, they still concentrated more on the area in which excavations took place. So you being trained primarily for the jobs most graduates will do (doing rescue excavations and long term projects of the institution), not for comparing cultures from the whole world.

If I need to know something about Central Europe, I can inform myself in English and German pretty well, but if its about Russia, things are not that good. Take for example the Lower Don culture. Its a real pity how bad and limited the material available in German and English is.

But very generally speaking, from the little I know, I see little relationship between Fatyanovo-Balanovo and BB, neither culturally nor anthropologically they are any closer, but who knows, a true expert might see something I missed.

As for the debate about the original PPIE speakers: Dnepr-Donets related HG developing agro-pastoralism on the Pontic Caspian steppe, forming a regional culture when the Neolithics were pushed back, like Lower Don and expanding from there through the whole PC steppe until reaching the West, where, from SSC related groups, they split into Northern (CW) and Southern (Cernavoda-Usatovo) branches.
There is no space, not an inch, for any of these people having spoken anything like a Neolithic farmer language, that's impossible. What's possible is CHG/Caucasian related, but that's highly unlikely too.

Hittites as an early split coming from groups like Cernavoda were mixed and mixed thoroughly, were for a long time among a majority Balkan farmer related population and reached finally, after many stages, Anatolia. At the time they reached Anatolia, who knows what was left from the original PC steppe tribals? There must be traces, but neither is there a necessity for R1-lineages nor a large amount. It must be just there, something, in the elite, the primary carriers of the Anatolian language, that will suffice.

The pre-steppe European landscape was, like Mammoth said, for sure not uniform any more. TRB and GAC were NO ANATOLIAN FARMER CULTURES in the classic sense. They are likely to have spoken Northern HG idioms and were becoming warlike agro-pastoralists similar to CW. The original farmer lineages (G2 and E) were long gone and in the South East we see new elements from the Levante, which however never made it up to the North in any significant way.

While we have a direct link and continuity from CW to most IE speakers later, we have nothing, no other group, which had a similar impact. And CW was not the only descendent from the Western steppe group, there is Cernavoda and Usatovo among others which split earlier and moved South. It is highly like that Anatolian speakers were among those. The South East of Europe was "steppified" culturally too, its just the genetic impact was not as big at that time.

M.H. _82 said...

Abashevo & Sintashta metallurgy can probably be understood as incorporating CBMP & CircumPontic traditions. It’s rounded ‘fortified villages ‘ are fairly original although parallels have been suggested with Demircihoyuk in northwest Anatolia (Sharapov). Z93 must expand from souhthwest of Z280, between Dnieper & Carpathians

Matt said...

Zardos: It must be just there, something, in the elite, the primary carriers of the Anatolian language, that will suffice.

Though, what elite are we speaking of, where?

Now the Hittites of the empire at 1600BCE were an elite over a Hurrian speaking population.... but they almost certainly were not recently an elite from either the Balkans, or even less from the steppes (which seems to be a notion in the minds of some who've only heard of the Hittites and know no more of the Anatolian family).

In Central, West, and Southwest Anatolia, when these enter into writing, we find only Anatolian languages when writing is attested, and no indication of any other family (which was separate from some elite). These Anatolian languages have deeply splitting roots.

If these had an external origin, it seems fanciful to imagine that they are all explained by some kind of parallel elite migration, where they all differentiated within the Balkans, then diffused separately, as only elite languages to Anatolia, none of them bearing any autosomal impact.

(Which even leaving the autosome aside is kind of an odd scenario; What is the basis by which Anatolia speakers would establish themselves in the Balkans along the margins of the Black Sea, differentiate into numerous different linguistic groups, then somehow suddenly pulse into Anatolia alone as separate an intrusive elite (driven by who knows what mechanism), leaving no linguistic signature of any of this in the Balkans at all (guess those "Pelasgians" and Minoans or whatnot were really tough customers huh?), nor any indication of any other languages in west and southern Anatolia?)

(Bryce, on the history of the Anatolian languages, and their open questions: https://imgur.com/a/ypqY5C5).

Most likely the Hittites were a foreign elite to the people of Hattusa.... but a foreign elite that originated immediately from within Anatolia, to the south and the west.

If that follows, it's unlikely that we will find some ancestry within a Hittite elite then, which is not also present in the general population of Central, Western and Southern Anatolia of the time...

zardos said...

The Carparthians are a real doorstep and hub throughout the whole period in all directions. If you look at the wealthy burials from the region, you see how much wealth and power they accumulated and how far ahead they were.
At the same time they were under constant pressure from the surrounds.
The Carparthians could be a link for early BB and Sintashta.
Would look closely at the aDNA from the region, unfortunately its rather undersampled afaik.

zardos said...

@Matt: True, but think about BB social stratification. How long it lasted and that it was brought hundreds of years after its foundation in the same way to new regions.
Or the Aryan caste expansion bringing the same system to different regions.

So yes, most likely you are right, but samples from any kind of inhabitant of eg. the Luwian period would be not as informative and secure as an elite burial.

Andrzejewski said...

@Matt I hope you’re not implying that the Hittites didn’t come from the Steppes, or that you’re a follower of the obsolete Indo-Hittite or South-of-Caspian origin theories

Jatt_Scythian said...

What other option is there than Sintashta beind derived from CW/Abashevo? Is it directly descended from Sredny Stog?

Anonymous said...

Matt said...
"Anatolia, when these enter into writing, we find only Anatolian languages when writing is attested, and no indication of any other family (which was separate from some elite)."

What are you talking about? Not Indo-European language of Hatti is well known.

zardos said..
"The Carparthians could be a link for early BB and Sintashta."

What are the useless fantasies about BB relationship with Sintasta? There are no such in nature. Complete absence of any presence.

"Or the Aryan caste expansion bringing the same system to different regions."

The Aryans did not have castes, the castes appeared in India only after the Vedic period.



Anonymous said...

Jatt_Scythian said...
" What other option is there than Sintashta beind derived from CW/Abashevo? Is it directly descended from Sredny Stog?"

It is impossible, because Sredniy Stog is the culture of the early Eneolithic, but Sintasht is (M)LBA, the difference between them is 2000 years, and there is no continuity.

Sintashta has a lot in common with Abashevo, but these are rather cultural contacts. Battle axes and rite rituals connected with CW, and Potapovka has still corded ware pottery. Archaeologically, the migration from Central Europe to the Urals region is visible, bringing things to the epi-CW cultures.

Matt said...

@zardos, but those seem like counterexamples? There may be a kind of caste like structure that forms in Europe in BB era or early Indo-Aryan speaking populations moving into India that falls beneath the resolution of big ancestry components.

But steppe related ancestry clearly moves outside any core group, and we are unable to see any social structure in the early population we have which correlates with steppe ancestry.

That is, in the case of the Bell Beakers, there isn't anything genetically clear that actually can disprove your idea that there was a core Beaker vs other population ethnic split, and that this is linked to social stratification as in Lech Valley. There could be some ethnic split that is beneath the resolution of the markers we can see from unlinked autosomal ancient dna at low coverage. Though this is an argument from absence in my opinion.

But to the extent there was, this clearly had nothing to do with a difference in steppe related ancestry components in any population, as this is not evident at all in Lech Valley (no correlation between steppe ancestry and social status).

Perhaps there were populations that were seen as Bell Beakers and not seen as Bell Beakers, and who had different processes of group formation, did not intermix much, and perhaps spoke different languages - but they obviously were not different in paternal ancestry, nor detectably different in steppe ancestry.

@andrezj, I am simply saying that in any case, a migration ultimately from the steppes seems unlikely to be me evident in some elite samples. Even though the Hittites were an elite over the Hatti, they don't seem less likely to become that from being a small elite population from Anatolia that itself was intrusive to Anatolia, rather a population that was long since from Anatolia and had no elite or separate status within Anatolia (and neither do Anatolian speakers in general in Anatolia seem likely to have had this status). If Anatolian speakers were intrusive to Anatolia, they probably were not intrusive at anything close to 1600 BCE.

It doesn't seem to me then that it will be too tenable to either claim that samples which lack steppe ancestry are insufficiently elite (and particularly not to then do this and then switch around to the reverse should some level of steppe ancestry be then found in some random later person who is not one of these elites, as if some steppe ancestry, anywhere, in any form, at any level, at any time, proves a migration of speakers with steppe ancestry linked to Anatolian, while its absence proves nothing).

@archi, you have chosen to set begin quote at a strange location in my paragraph, what you are quoting in fact properly that I said is:

In Central, West, and Southwest Anatolia, when these enter into writing, we find only Anatolian languages when writing is attested, and no indication of any other family (which was separate from some elite). These Anatolian languages have deeply splitting roots.

Hatti is of course in Northeast Anatolia, and I am well aware of its non-Indo European character. There is no indication of non-Indo-European languages in the parts of Anatolia which I have specified, when they enter into writing.

zardos said...

@Archi: Yes, there is no direct relationship of BB and Sintashta, but both were influenced from the Carpathian region.

The rest is semantics, like our useless debate about the "mountainous habitat".

As for the Carpathian region, its a real pity this study was not done with full scale autosomal analysis. If they would do the same samples with autosomal analysis and yDNA, this would be really, really huge! Could be decisive for a lot of questions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4460020/

Its interesting nevertheless for the debate, even if its old news for most, it proves the point:
"Generally, archaeologists consider that the Decea Mureşului culture is the result of a migration of non-indigenous populations coming from the North Pontic steppes [31]. The material culture of these intrusive communities differs fundamentally from that of the local Eneolithic cultures (e.g. Boian, Gumelniţa, Petresti, Cucuteni, Tiazapolgar, etc.)"

"Important population shifts due to migratory events coming especially from the East occurred in the Bronze Age on the present territory of Romania. The Early Bronze Age II phase of Florești-Polus site is represented by a novel culture (Copăceni group) characterized by the presence of tumuli and megaliths, and associated with the Yamnaya culture from the Crimea/Volga basin"

Compare Cernavodă/Coțofeni and relationships to Noua/Usatovo.

"Therefore we compared the mtDNA haplogroup frequency of L_BA individuals from Polus with a Bronze Age group from Ukraine [39] (S7 Fig). These two Bronze Age populations shared haplogroups H, U and W, with the largest differences referred to the frequency of haplogroup W. The Bronze Age Ukraine population presented the highest mtDNA haplogroup diversity, due most likely to its large sample size. Significant statistical differences between these groups have not been detected."

"Lastly, the Late Bronze Age Romanian group is closer to Bronze Age from Ukraine than to the M_NEO_Romania (Fig 3)."

I don't know of autosomal results from these groups, anyone knows of some or whether something in the pipeline in Harvard et al?

zardos said...

@Matt: "Perhaps there were populations that were seen as Bell Beakers and not seen as Bell Beakers, and who had different processes of group formation, did not intermix much, and perhaps spoke different languages - but they obviously were not different in paternal ancestry, nor detectably different in steppe ancestry."

That's because BB expanded in many areas, including Lech Valley, over already steppified people. Their caste/clan system was established above an already CW layer and they wouldn't have spared even competing BB groups from being pushed down the social ladder.
So I would expect a different proportion of steppe ancestry primarily outside of the formerly CW influenced realm. So this is definitely beyond Southern Germany. Actually, in some parts of Germany, I would expect non-BB people having, at times, even more steppe ancestry than BB proper.

Anonymous said...

@Matt

Don't make it too complicated. The kingdom of Hittite was in Northeast Anatolia, exactly what was in the territory of Hatti. There are no remnants of the local languages in the other territories, not because they were not there, but because there was no writing at all during the Hittite Period. Nobody wrote in the Hittite period except for the Hittite kingdom, only at the end of the Hittite period there was a Luwian hierographic inscription.

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