I've made a discovery. The Near Eastern-related ancestors of the Yamnaya steppe pastoralists were also the ancestors of present-day Georgian Mingrelians, or their very close relatives, and in all likelihood speakers of Kartvelian, which has a long history in the Caucasus. Here's a nice map from Wikipedia and a pic of some Mingrelians. Check out the impressive headware.
TreeMix is very specific and precise about this. In my analyses, based on a couple of different methods, the Mingrelians are the only population chosen as a source for the Near Eastern-related ancestry in the Yamnaya.
Keep in mind, this is an unsupervised test and the algorithm has an infinite number of choices, because migration edges can run from any part of the tree, and yet it chooses the Mingrelians. By the way, if anyone's wondering, I did also try the Bronze Age Armenians, to no avail.
This outcome is also more or less reproducible with more complex topologies that include samples from Central Asia. In the graph below the Georgian Mingrelians form a clade with the Near Eastern-related ancestry of the Yamnaya. It'd be interesting to see if other Georgian groups, like the Svans, do even better, if that's actually possible, but they're not available at the moment.
I actually came up with basically the same result earlier this year using qpAdm (see here). But at the time I was skeptical of its usefulness because qpAdm only offers a supervised test, so picking Georgians as a reference population and getting a good statistical fit doesn't mean as much as a reproducible unsupervised migration edge.
Now, judging by their ADMIXTURE results, these Georgian Mingrelians do carry some Early European farmer-related ancestry, which is missing in the Yamnaya (see here). Therefore, it's likely that ancient samples from the west or northwest Caucasus will prove to be even better proxies for the Near Eastern-related ancestry in the Yamnaya.
The samples used to produce the above TreeMix graphs are listed here. They're sourced from the Allentoft et al., Haak et al., and Lazaridis et al. datasets. I limited the markers to ~65K transversion (high confidence) SNPs that overlap between these datasets.
Updates...
Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) and the Indo-European question
'Fourth strand' of European ancestry originated with (Caucasus) hunter-gatherers isolated by Ice Age
Mixed marriages on the early Eneolithic steppe
384 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 384 of 384George Okromchedlishvili:
"It looks like only people with Central Asian and South-Central Asian ancestry actively defend a super-eastern ancestry for PIE. Talk about ethnic biases :)"
Obviously incorrect and frankly rather insulting.
German
On this PCA for example.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-f-kkQdPqKmE/VN2QquPvw8I/AAAAAAAAC5A/6NFEE9Edboo/s1600/HaakPCA.png
George explained better than me what makes them so different and polar to each other.
Thanks George.
@George Okromchedlishvili
Thanks for the explanation in terms of WHG/ANE ratios. I like it, it makes sense. I just don't buy Davidski's explanation of ANE is Basques as a later introgression. The pairing of WHG/ANE must have been all over Europe from the Paleolithic - just the ratios fluctuated regionally.
"As for the language groups my guess is ANE might have a lot to do with proposed Sino-Caucasian macro family."
It's just so weird that Kartvelians (and not North Caucasians) got in this mix in my original data. I can explain the absence of North Caucasians (and Kets) as caused by "lexical drift" but the presence of Kartvelians is still a puzzle for me.
Ok, let's say not everyone but the majority of Central Asian homeland supporters)
BTW it is precisely the idea that teal should be derived from some culture that has connection to Central Asian Neolithic is why I am somewhat skeptical of Kartvelian connection. It increasingly look like Kuro-Arax culture was responsible for the (proposed) Alarodian family and that Maykop has roots in Kuro-Arax culture as well (nicely fits with proposed macro family for NWC and NEC families). Kartvelians look like they were more "indigenous" and southern EEF related.
@Aram
Thanks for the PCA.
@Kurti
Thank you for clarifying your position. It seems that most of our disagreement here is just semantics, as a result of a minor geographical and historical real disagreement.
When I say EEF, i mean Early European Farmers. And these are like modern Sardinians, and did pick up a minor amount of WHG (Western Hunter Gatherer) admixture as they slowly spread across Europe.
They are certainly descendants of the Anatolian EEF-like farmers from the soon to be published paper(s).
These EEF did not have WHG, they were a mixture of Basal Eurasian and UHG from the start (Unknown Hunter Gatherer), which is related to WHG, but not the same.
So up to this point. I think we agree actually.
However, you think the Eastern Neolithic Farmers (ENF) are just Anatolian EEF that moved east. Right? And the Southern Neolithic Farmers (SNF) are just Anatolian EEF that moved south. Right?
And I disagree. I think it is much more likely that each group seperately moved out of the Levant area. The ENF are not the result of EEF admixing with other people after leaving Anatolia.
George Okromchedlishvili:
"Ok, let's say not everyone but the majority of Central Asian homeland supporters"
I know of one such supporter and you still seem to imply that the most likely reason to support such a model is personal bias, not rational thought. When all you can do is question someone's motive, you don't have a cogent argument. You're just poisoning the well and hoping for the best.
How about we turn that around and note that the majority of those supporting the Steppe hypothesis are of European ancestry?
Code of conduct here...
"Do not speculate about the people posting here."
Alberto said
"Yes, the 50%-60% admixture of the "Georgian-like farmers" in Yamnaya is impossible to explain by exogamy with women from the Caucasus. As you say, it requires 100% replacement (and more) of the local female population, which is absolutely ridiculous and actually proved wrong by the good amount of HG mtDNA found already in Yamnaya/Afanasievo.
EHGs Y-DNA lineages are probably dead ends."
Correct, what we are dealing here with is a third ANE like population which merges with the local population north of the Caspian becoming EHG and South of the Caspian becoming Teal.
@Va_Highlander said
"What evidence do you have that this had anything to do farmers?"
I don't know who brought up this wise argument, but someone said
"the easiest explanation is most of the time the correct one."
farming leads to overpopulation (farming is actually the Catalyst for civilizations). Overpopulation leads to shortage of farming land.
New families need farming land too.
There is no requirement of 100% replacement for matrilineal admixture. You just need several repeated waves of admixture. It's very easy to model such an event.
Now there could be an argument in favor of r1b teal men going to step but why would they be massively incorporated into new PIE group when EHG and PIE where clearly very patriarchal? Does not make much sense so far. Unless we assume that EHG were matriarchal and then became patriarchal after receiving the teal input. This does no bode well with the evidence we have so far.
Here's my two cents...
Kostenki and Oase-1 are ancestors of WHG. The difference being that they are 28 and 37k years closer to the divergence of East and West Eurasia and OoA, so they sit closer to those populations. It's going go get a lot trickier as we go, so please read carefully. If you look at Ust-Ishim, versus Kostenki, Oase-1, and MA1, you can see the divergence here. It's not that UP Europeans disappeared, but were a step in the drift from Ust-Ishim and Oase1 towards the more recent WHG, EHG, and ANE folks. When East and West Eurasians diverged, it was a gradual process, taking thousands of years. West and East Eurasians didn't diverge one day, and then all of a sudden plot at WHG, ANE, Onge, and Atayal, or whatever, positions on PCA. I think that WHG ancestors broke off before ANE, as the ancient WHG samples are closer to Africans and Basal Eurasian than MA1, but this could also be the fact that MA1 is 12k years younger. The latter may end up being the right guess.
Also, I think that there are likely more than two OoA events, and maybe really just one long even that lasted 70k years. The ancestors of WHG may have extra African affinities as migrations continued out of Africa, prior to this pop moving into Europe. I think that this continued up until near the time of farming, so the farming ancestors never diverged much from this UP population. I think as time went on, African affinity of these migrations increased, moving UP European like populations in West Asia, more towards Africans, and with later UP European migrations into West Asia during the LGM moved it more towards modern WHG.
I think this is where the Basal Eurasian confusion is. I think it is a little absurd to think that a population breaks off from Africans and sits still for 60k years, while the rest of humanity in Eurasia reaches the ice sheet in NW Europe and the southern tip of South America. I think what Basal Eurasian really is, is nothing more than a mix of the UP European ancestors and the continued flow out of Africa, as these UP Africans, which are a mix of the UP European types and Paleo African, continue to spill out into West Asia. I think that African affinity was a slow moving process, which is why we see it go from say, 20% in Egyptians, to 10-15% in Palestinians and 10% in Syrians. This continued up until after the first farmers left West Asia. I know this may seem crazy to some, but I find this to be the most plausible and logical, considering how much our ancestors moved around and just thinking logically about the West and East Eurasian split. These things take time and isolation, not just one day, where... oops, we have a WHG, ANE, and ENA pop cluster.
@George
Exactly.
With a slow influx of women from one genetic group into another. And men having multiple wives... It wont take that long to see this pattern emerge.
But... I have on very good authority that this has never happened in the history of the world.
It was a bit funny that the argument against it happening in Native Americans was because the people with that pattern weren't 'pure' Native Americans. It turns out that they were actually admixed people... Just like the Yamnaya.
Would any of the discussing super-experts condescend to briefly explain to this ignoramus what "Teal" is? I guess I missed this initially and apologize very much for my request. Is "Teal" one of the colours one finds in the Allentoft paper re the autosomals of his samples? Humbly grateful for any response. Thank you.
@Chad
"I think it is a little absurd to think that a population breaks off from Africans and sits still for 60k years"
That is itself an absurd statement.
You don't think populations diverge through isolation? You have no idea where this population sat during these years. That's like saying that Neanderthals couldn't exist because modern humans were nearby for 200,000 years.
Karl,
I don't think you're understanding me. Do you really believe a population can sit in a corner of the world for 60k years and not mix with anyone else or move around at all? It sounds a little far out there. Modern humans and Neandertals were not side by side for 200k years. So, that comment really has no place in the conversation. We mixed with them, when we were side by side, all over Eurasia, so that isn't an argument in your favor.
To think that one day, poof.. we have basal Eurasians... then poof..we have Ust-Ishim, and another poof we have WHG, ANE, and all ENA clusters, does not make sense. Then, in one corner we have Basal Eurasians, just sitting around biding their time.. while refusing to mix with anyone, to stay pure for 3,000 generations. Sure..
I think you need to read my entire post and let it sink in, before commenting. Taking one snippet and making some BS argument, doesn't make you right.
To think that one day, poof.. we have basal Eurasians... then poof..we have Ust-Ishim, and another poof we have WHG, ANE, and all ENA clusters, does not make sense. Then, in one corner we have Basal Eurasians, just sitting around biding their time.. while refusing to mix with anyone, to stay pure for 3,000 generations. Sure..
I think you need to read my entire post and let it sink in, before commenting. Taking one snippet and making some BS argument, doesn't make you right.
@Dmytro
Yes, "Teal" is a stupid word. It really means the same s David called in this post "Georgian-like farmers". It comes from the Haak et al. 2015 paper. More info here:
http://eurogenes.blogspot.mk/2015/04/the-teal-people-did-they-actually-exist.html
We really should get a better word for this population. It's very confusing to use Georgian-like, Armenian-like, Caucasus-like, "Teal people", ANI, etc... to refer to them.
@Chad
You do not know where the Basal Eurasian homeland was. Or do you? It may be exactly like the Neanderthal situation, or unique.
You still haven't read or understood my post. I don't think there is a real Basal Eurasian pop or component. I think it is nothing more than continued movements out of Africa, with groups that share more alleles with Africans. It was never a static or homogeneous thing. If we get samples from West Asia stretching from 40kya to 15kya, I'll bet I'm correct.
I'll also bet that Mesolithic and Neolithic Levantines are the same people, autosomal wise.
So far as I can see Krefter is perfectly correct. All that is needed to explain this is moderately female-biased gene flow into the pre-Yamnaya population followed by a Y DNA founder effect. And we already *know* there was a founder effect, because the Yamnaya Y DNA is all very closely related. So no problem.
@Va_Highlander
The reason the teal people are assumed to be farmers is at the time when everyone was foragers they didn't have teal, then later on when they did have livestock they had also acquired a lot of teal, so it stands to reason that most likely what happened was that teal people brought in the livestock. Also, because the non-EHG component of Yamnaya is related to modern Near Easterners (Haak) or more specifically teal peaks in modern populations which live in places which had farming long before it was present in the steppe. (Most places had farming before the steppe, of course).
Sure, in absence of actual aDNA we don't really know that the teal people were farmers, maybe they were some random lot of hunter-gatherers that swept over the steppe coincidentally just before everyone adopted livestock, but why?
@Chad
I read yor post. Quite clear. I think you are incorrect.
@George Okromchedlishvili :
Do you know about any ancient DNA studies in Georgia? I've heard about one, but it's about Bronze and Iron Age: https://www.facebook.com/events/435304626650215/
Martin, I fully agree with you. IE languages has expanded and changed place, why Kartvelian languages would have not, in particular considering that they share many structural features with North Eurasian languages. Therefore, I agree with David that ANE in Georgians could have come from Central Asia after the early Neolithic with the Proto-Kartvelians.
Kurti, I very much agree with you on almost everything, and I also think that it is not a reasonable theory that all Near Eastern ancestry in Yamna is via female lineages, in particular considering that flow of innovations mainly went from the great centres of the south to the north.
Georgians may autosomally represent (in part) the Caucasian group that mixed with EHG to form Yamnaya but their linguistic identity may in fact go to a Yamnaya group that migrated to the Caucasus. I do not think that their linguistic identity is related to Neolithic farmers. IMO Northeast Caucasian languages are a better fit for that position.
Now that I think about the Bronze Age upheavals and innovations and keep in mind their significance, I think that the origin of Nostratic languages may lie in this development. Kartvelian was the Nostratic branch that first reached Caucasus (Hittite and Ossete came later on), IE languages developed somewhere in southern Western Russia and Uralic languages north of it and Turkic languages somewhere in Kazakhstan/Altai area. Even Dravidian languages could result from this same process, if Dravidian languages reached India first from Central Asia and Indo-Aryan languages came only after them. IMO, Indo-Aryan languages do not seem very ancient or archaic, compared to, for example, Hittite, and they are quite close to Baltic languages, so they are not necessarily so old: either Balto-Slavic is recent in Europe or Indo-Aryan is recent in Central Asia.
Karl_K:
"'Do not speculate about the people posting here.'"
Well said, sir.
Kurti:
"New families need farming land too."
I ask you again, what has the genetic component under discussion have to do with farming? Davidski won't answer this, either. With all due respect, unless you can justify this assumption, imagining what farmers might do is just telling stories.
Alberto:
"We really should get a better word for this population."
The Ariani? The more expansive definitions described Ariana as extending from the Indus to the Caspian Gate. Given the modern peaks of teal in the Caucasus and Afghanistan, with lesser but significant amounts between, that seems to be the area we're talking about.
capra internetensis:
"The reason the teal people are assumed to be farmers is at the time when everyone was foragers they didn't have teal, then later on when they did have livestock they had also acquired a lot of teal, so it stands to reason that most likely what happened was that teal people brought in the livestock."
We have good reason to believe that foragers could have livestock. They could even construct permanent dwellings without adopting other elements of the Neolithic package. To speak of such herders as farmers, even in the loosest sense of the word, is at best misleading and at worst disingenuous.
There is early evidence of incipient goat domestication in the southern Zagros and another apparently separate tradition on the central Iranian plateau. Around 10,000 years before present, a mitochondrial haplogroup originating from this practice expanded rapidly and spread out of this region over most of the natural range of the wild goats from which domesticated goats descend. Modern domestic goats descend from animals that appear to be native to Anatolia, but it looks like the initial adaptation did not necessarily begin there. Hunter-gatherers were managing herds of wild goats before goats were actually domesticated. The people at Aq Kupruq, in northern Afghanistan, may have been practicing incipient herding as well, in that case as early as the ninth millennium BCE.
@Va_Highlander
I'm not sure what you are getting at. Are you suggesting that livestock (other than horses) were independently domesticated on the steppe? Or that livestock were transmitted to foragers without any intermarriage with a new population? Or that the people who brought in the livestock were pastoralists without a history of settled field farming?
The first one seems pretty unlikely, the second one is reasonable but leaves us without a plausible reason for the success of teal, and the third seems irrelevant to the question (however historically interesting it might be once we actually have the data to address it).
"Farmers" in the general sense includes pastoralists. It is usual for pastoralists, and settled crop-raisers as well, to forage on the side. Whether the teal people raised crops as well as livestock prior to moving onto the dry steppe can't be deduced from the limited evidence at hand. Settled field farmers can take their livestock and go out herding, pastoralists can move to a new environment, foragers can acquire herds and become pastoralists. If the environment supports herding and hunting/fishing but not crop raising, then wherever they came from they will end up with same kind of subsistence regime.
Alberto,
The tip was much appreciated. Thank you so much. I suppose there is no hard proof indicating any archaeological culture of the relevant time frame being loaded with this TEAL thing prior to its putative presence in Yamna (other tan Khvalynsk)? How did so much of it get to Khvalynsk? And the near total or total lack of aDNA from Khvalynsk-neighbouring forest cultures doesn't help...
George said
"There is no requirement of 100% replacement for matrilineal admixture. You just need several repeated waves of admixture. It's very easy to model such an event.
Now there could be an argument in favor of r1b teal men going to step but why would they be massively incorporated into new PIE group when EHG and PIE where clearly very patriarchal? Does not make much sense so far. Unless we assume that EHG were matriarchal and then became patriarchal after receiving the teal input. This does no bode well with the evidence we have so far."
So you say it is more likely that EHG groups took over centuries/millenia non stop wives from Teal farmers and this way reached 50-60% Teal ancestry. And you think this scenario appears more likely than the scenario that simply a Teal farming/herding group, who got their R1b from their ANE ancestry moved with their wives to the Steppes mixed with some EHG groups?
KArl said
"It was a bit funny that the argument against it happening in Native Americans was because the people with that pattern weren't 'pure' Native Americans. It turns out that they were actually admixed people... Just like the Yamnaya."
Dear you should think twice before making sarcastic comments.
Here we are dealing with people reporting "Cherokee" ancestry (just because on of their many ancestors was Cherokee) while not beeing more than ~15% at max real Cherokee vs a Yamna group who are halfway Teal and people here claim all of this came via the female lineages. This is so absurd I am really stunned that people still hang on this theory su much: I bet if it was the other way around the same individuals would not even dare to think a second about this theory. It always seem people with opposing agendas favor theory more suitable for their own wishfull believes.
You also claimed that there is a 100% male replacement among Cherokee Indians showing us ONE single study made on few Cherokee individuals I proved that this claim was incorrect by simply linking CHerokee results on ftDNA which 30% of them had Amerindian Haplogroups. And I bet my last money that at least 40% of the reported West Eurasian yDNA in these Cherokee samples are by 50-70% West Eurasian autosomally too.
Now I can't tell you what you have to believe everyone has his own opinion but please don't expect from me to believe that while using common sense.
@Chad Rohlfsen
A few thoughts.
Oase 1 differs quite a lot from Ust-Ishim despite them both being equidistant to WHG and East-Asians. You can see this from the D-stats in the Oase 1 paper. Oase 1 shows only a slight, very slight affinity to K14. Ust-Ishim seems almost equidistant to East-Asians and WHG/Ma-1. But given the choice it will show large affinity to anything but Oase-1.
K14 however clearly shows its ancestral to Loschbour and affiliated to MA-1. It looks very ancestral to WHG.
Also, K14 looks to have contributed to *some* of the Basal Eurasian in some mediterraneans.
The idea proposed in the Oase 1 paper that his people did not contribute to current day Europeans may be right. It may be due to the high Neanderthal load. Hybrids have a tendency to have fertility issues. There are papers suggesting active selection agianst Neanderthal genes.
@Chad Rohlfsen
OTOH, those D-stats could have been skewed by Oase 1's high Neanderthal load...
Dmytro,
Teal is a genetic component; a construct of the ADMIXTURE software.
I think the only reason it exists is because we don't yet have enough Eastern European hunter-gatherer (EHG) samples to create a proper EHG component with enough ANE.
All we can get is a watered down European hunter-gatherer component with not enough ANE.
Thus, ADMIXTURE has to compensate and so it creates teal: a largely Near Eastern component with loads of ANE.
capra internetensis:
"Or that the people who brought in the livestock were pastoralists without a history of settled field farming?"
This is probably closest, yes. In the absence of empirical evidence of farmers wandering onto the steppe, and given what we think we know about the advent of herding, there is no obvious reason to assume that these people were farmers in any meaningful sense.
"Settled field farmers can take their livestock and go out herding, pastoralists can move to a new environment, foragers can acquire herds and become pastoralists."
I don't believe I've claimed otherwise.
"If the environment supports herding and hunting/fishing but not crop raising, then wherever they came from they will end up with same kind of subsistence regime."
That would have to be substantiated or compellingly argued. What we see, in southern Turkmenistan for instance, is a slow spread of agricultural tribes out of Iran into what was likely already a pastoral landscape. The same was true as agriculture spread into the oases to the east. Just because the agricultural package contained a pastoral element does not necessarily imply that agriculturalists were spreading pastoralism.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought much of this thread was about the origin of that teal signal. Saying they were farmers, without empirical evidence of farming, risks focusing too narrowly on settled, agricultural populations when looking for possible sources. This is why I think it's misleading.
I can accept that you find the relationship between hunter-gatherers and herding irrelevant. I think it may tell us something meaningful about how herding spread from herders to hunters, and in the case of sheep possibly herders to herders without an agricultural intermediary. That might explain how the teal signal gets to Yamna and Afanasevo without picking up anything resembling known farmers.
Va_Highlander
>>Foot herders vs mounted herders.
"Ah, that makes sense. They packed their language in saddle bags, I suppose."
You suggest that foot herders moving onto the steppe and losing their language vs mounted herders spreading across the steppe while retaining their language is some kind of special pleading when both are explainable by horses.
1. The foot herders could have lost their language because they lost a conflict with mounted herders.
2. The mounted herders could have retained their language over long distances because they were more mobile - effectively their ratio of distance:time would be different.
.
"Interesting. On what site or sites in India and Kazakhstan are you basing this theory?"
None whatsoever.
However imo farming/herding would have started with sedentary HGs so if you're looking for spots farming/herding may have started (not necessarily only one) then you'd need to look for spots where HGs were likely to have become sedentary i.e. places where there was a major static food source
and southern Kazakhstan (apparently) had/has a huge apple/pear forest along the foothills of the mountains so if there isn't evidence of early sedentary HGs under those forests somewhere i'd be very surprised.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Kazakhstan/@42.0881771,76.703357,7z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x38a91007ecfca947:0x5f7b842fe4b30e1b
.
Kurti
"This combined with the argument/almost fact that a 100% female replacement is impossible"
This can happen any time a mostly male group moves into the territory of another group and marry local women: miners, soldiers etc, and has probably happened 1000s of times in history with only small local impact.
The part that makes such an event seem rare is the rarity of the product of that kind of admixture event then going on to expand so dramatically.
"Teal is a genetic component; a construct of the ADMIXTURE software." (David)
That makes a lot of sense. Best to wait for more aDNA before writing historical genetic novels (:=))
Karl_K
basal eurasian
"You don't think populations diverge through isolation? You have no idea where this population sat during these years."
Yeah but it's not just the suggestion there was a population isolated on some kind of geographical island somewhere for n thousand years it's that this population were also responsible for the spread of farming so
1) completely isolated for n thousand years
2) developed farming
3) spread everywhere
"You do not know where the Basal Eurasian homeland was."
That just makes it worse. You need some region that was both completely isolated and uniquely suitable for the development of farming.
seems a bit unlikely to me - and if it's wrong what are the alternatives?
something like Chad's idea it's connected to a more complex OoA?
(if i understood it right)
Kristiina
"in particular considering that flow of innovations mainly went from the great centres of the south to the north."
I think this assumption is assumed too readily.
Generally it's likely to be true cos population density ~ warmer climate but when a particular innovation is tied to a particular physical resource e.g. horses or metal, then the center of innovation is likely to be from the resource source.
@Va_Highlander
It's an interesting speculation, for sure, but I guess we'll have to disagree about its relevance.
"That might explain how the teal signal gets to Yamna and Afanasevo without picking up anything resembling known farmers."
The only farmers predating Yamnaya and Afanasievo for which we have genetic data are the descendants of Aegean farmers of the 7th M BC (Danubian, Cardial, and now NW Anatolian). In the absence of anything resembling a reference population for pure "teal", I just don't buy that our limited methods can tell us how far away from the source of teal was from the Sea of Marmara, much less what kind of food production they practiced.
@Grey
We all know how much you like horses, but please try to get the chronology right at last.
EHGs never had alive horses. They only had the dead ones. The ones they killed for eating them.
Horses were domesticated when EHGs didn't exist anymore. So there was never an epic battle between mounted EHGs and Georgian-like foot herders.
Georgian-like herders entered the steppe and mixed with EHGs much before they domesticated horses. Once they domesticated horses, it's possible that they did ride them, but by then there were no EHGs left to fight against (and if any of them had survived, then, well, they might have got killed by these horse riders, I can give you that possibility if you'll insist).
When will people understand that EHGs were exactly that, tribes of hunters and gatherers? They were not copper workers, they didn't ride horses (they didn't even have horses), they had nothing to do with PIE cultures, they were not patriarchal (as far as we know at least, no evidence of it), they didn't have land, or livestock, or any wealth, they didn't travel (by foot) 1700 kilometers crossing some big mountains to marry women from the Caucasus who belonged to a completely different world, etc...
Are these basic facts so difficult to grasp?
Capra,
As I've said before, Central Anatolian Neolithic farmers have been tested and they're no different from Western Anatolian Neolithic farmers.
George Okromchedlishvili:
It looks like only people with Central Asian and South-Central Asian ancestry actively defend a super-eastern ancestry for PIE. Talk about ethnic biases :)
Va_Highlander:
Obviously incorrect and frankly rather insulting.
George Okromchedlishvili:
Ok, let's say not everyone but the majority of Central Asian homeland supporters
Well, I am Turkish, so I have Central Asian ancestry, but I do not defend a super-eastern ancestry or a Central Asian homeland for Indo-Europeans.
@Davidski
Cool, I must have missed that one, what study is it from?
Still not very far from the Sea of Marmara.
The results are yet to be published. Some of the sites are quite a distance from the Sea of Marmara.
Alberto
"Georgian-like herders entered the steppe and mixed with EHGs much before they domesticated horses"
And so either the ydna comes from them or the local HGs. I'm easy on either option but taking them in turn if the ydna came from the population that was originally HG the sequence which seems most likely to me is
(based on the assumption that people only take to nomadic herding when there's no choice i.e. not enough water, so the herds have to be moved a lot from pasture to pasture)
1) sedentary farmer-herders move onto the steppe and settle down in the areas watered well enough for sedentary herding. Local HGs pushed out.
2a) HGs pick up herding (maybe as a result of being recruited as stockmen by the farmer-herders like the Aborigines in Australia) and take to nomadic herding deeper in the dryer areas of the steppe (cos the farmer-herders already took all the good land)
or
2b) they stay as HGs deeper into the steppe
3) somewhere along the line horses get domesticated by whoever
4a) the ex-HG now nomadic herders gain more advantage from horses cos nomadic so develop a culture dominated by horses
or
4b) the HGs get hold of horses and use them for hunting
either way they get a military advantage over the farmer-herders and a chance to take the best land back.
(something very similar to this happened in America when Spanish ranchers moved into New Mexico)
Personally I don't think it's 100% settled yet which side the ydna came from and I could see all the EHG dna being absorbed by the farmer-herders if the ydna came with them but if the ydna came from the EHG side then i can't see how it could happen without them developing a significant advantage at some point and the most obvious candidate would be something to do with horses.
@ VA-Highlander to Aram
‘Aram:
"Most probably in West Asia there was a second wave of farmers/herders by J2/ANE people coming from Zagros/Iran. This J2 people assimilated the earliest G2 farmers languages. They moved into Balkans and continued to push into Europe."
On what archaeological site or sites are you basing this theory?”
Yes, seems a rather wishy-washy statement based on personal conjecture rather than any solid evidence or careful scholarly appraisal.
@ VA-Highlander -> Rob (me)
Rob:
"It was a natural progression from farming, so its origins is very wide."
Actually, the evidence we have suggests otherwise. Herding seems to have been a natural progression from hunting, not farming. I think it's unclear whether the adaptation originated at more than one site in Eurasia."
Maybe in Kazakh steppe, as I stated, and maybe Zargos region (Im not too sure about the latter). But this was *not* the case in the western steppe or Europe.
@ VA-Highlander -> Grey
“On what site or sites in India and Kazakhstan are you basing this theory?”
Judging from all his comments “Mounted herders”, "horses", “miners”, Grey doesn’t base any of his thoughts on evidence or facts, but simply blrts out words like someone with Tourett's. I’m surprised you’re even bothering to reply to him.
@ Kurdi
“If the farmers ultimately started off in one society (what they did) somewhere around Southeastern Anatolia (actually North Mesopotamia) and Northern Levant”
But isn’t the consensus that farming started in the Natufian ? That’s central-southern Levant.
@ George Okromchedlishvili:
“Now there could be an argument in favor of r1b teal men going to step but why would they be massively incorporated into new PIE group when EHG and PIE where clearly very patriarchal? Does not make much sense so far. Unless we assume that EHG were matriarchal and then became patriarchal after receiving the teal input. This does no bode well with the evidence we have so far.”
Really ? What evidence ? I ask you the same question I asked Karl:
What do you know about “EHG”? What do you know about their social structure an socio-linguistic dynamics ?
I’ll guess: based on you confusing EHG (a genetic concept) with Yamnaya (an archaeological paradigm) with ‘patriarchy' (a social concept), you know very little. .
@ Alberto
"
When will people understand that EHGs were exactly that, tribes of hunters and gatherers? They were not copper workers, they didn't ride horses (they didn't even have horses), they had nothing to do with PIE cultures, they were not patriarchal (as far as we know at least, no evidence of it), they didn't have land, or livestock, or any wealth, they didn't travel (by foot) 1700 kilometers crossing some big mountains to marry women from the Caucasus who belonged to a completely different world, etc"
Speculating...
Because that would require (1) a base level of knowledge / aptitude and (2) lack of bias / fixation toward a predetermined meta-narrative ?
@Chad
"I don't think there is a real Basal Eurasian pop or component. I think it is nothing more than continued movements out of Africa, with groups that share more alleles with Africans."
People with Basal Eurasian are no more related to Sub-Saharan Aricans than any of the other Eurasian people lacking it are. This component is clearly of the same branch as the rest of the "out-of-Africa" populations, but more divergent, more basally branching. It appears to have the same amount of Neanderthal admixture (otherwise populations carrying a lot of it would have less Neanderthal ancestry, which they do not).
If you are just saying that it is the population left in all of North Africa after becoming more isolated from the south, then I would agree with that. Then later large amounts of Sub-Saharan admixture would have complicated the genetics of the north.
In this case, then North Africa was actually a part of the original "Out-Of-Africa" in terms of genetics. And they were mostly isolated from any other region for an extremely long time.
I was not suggesting that they lived on a farming commune on an island or oasis in the desert.
VA-Highlander, Rob
My statement is based on this preliminary abstract about Late Neolithic Kumtepe having Caucasian connections.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.am/2015/07/a-little-more-on-genome-wide-affinities.html
Early Neolithic Anatolia - > G2a domination, EEF + small WHG ?
Late Neolithic Anatolia - > dominant y dna unknown, EEF + some 'teal'
Modern Anatolian Turks - > J2 and R1b domination, Teal + EEF + some WHG and East Asian
The leak about Greek data suggests that the probably the same stuff happened there also.
very interesting :).
The leak about Greek data suggests that the probably the same stuff happened there also.
Except that Anatolian Greeks apparently do not have the East Asian admixture, which is indisputably from the Turkic immigration to Anatolia.
Aram
Sorry if I misunderstood
I was mostly referring to some of the more hypothetical linguistic connections proposed. Your genetic summary is rather accurate ; although Anatolia is still a relative blank spot
J2 was found in the Late Neolithic Lengyel culture in Hungary. So Aram may very well be right about the association of J2 with a second wave Neolithic expansion to Europe from West Asia.
@Davidski
What is your opinion about this weird Dstats? (http://www.anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?5387-Interesting-Ancient-Dstats/page8). They show for example that Yamnaya got Neolithic Balkan farmer ancestry and that Kalash are close to Ötzi. Both does not sound logical for me but do you think that they are showing a real genetic link between this people?
Onur
j2 and EV13 also (?)
I'm sure we'll soon get a clearer picture on these "waves" (if that is a correct term).
Oetzi probably does share more drift with Yamnaya than early European farmers (EEF) do because he has more hunter-gatherer ancestry so his hunter-gatherer/Basal Eurasian ratio is more similar.
But the population that mixed with EHG to form Yamnaya wasn't much like Oetzi, because Oetzi is way too similar to EEF, and it's been obvious for a while now that Yamnaya doesn't have any EEF ancestry.
@Alberto
"They [EHG] were not patriarchal (as far as we know at least, no evidence of it)"
Well. We do know directly that some groups of them had either R1a or R1b Y haplogroups (or both, not enough data to know the distribution really).
Based on the genetics from Yamnaya, we can see that half of the WHG autosomal component remains, along with very tightly connected Y haplogroups, which are almost all R1b and even mostly R1b1a2a2.
Meanwhile, the Yamnaya mtDNA pool has greatly diversified, and the new haplogroups appear to be connected to the non-EHG side.
The Corded Ware people also have a low diversity of Y haplogroups, mostly R1a1a1. Although they must have come from a population that had a very similar autosomal genetics as the sampled Yamnaya, they have a different tightly clustered group of EHG derived Y haplogroups, while their mtDNA pool is again very diverse.
How can this pattern of very restricted and conservative Y haplogroup diversity remain for many thousands of years, through multiple large admixture events, while the mtDNA diversity in the same populations continues to expand with each of these admixture events?
You might say that these Y chromosomes have a biologic selective advantage. But it would have to date back to before the divergence of R1a and R1b, and then why the tight clustering and pruning of Y lineages in each population?
It is certainly not proof. But, it is extremely strong evidence that the EHG had a patriarchal society where direct male lineages maintained a cultural fitness advantage for hundreds and even thousands of years while the direct female lines constantlt diversified and absorbed new people.
It would be a bit difficult to even suggest that this pattern was simply by chance. And I would love to hear how a society that is not patriarchal could maintain this pattern. Maybe if women recruited other women of diverse backgrounds to their culture while keeping a small pool of men for breeding purposes only?
Re: Basal Eurasian I haven't thought about this topic in a while, but my understanding is based on Laziridis Admixturegraph models is
- Basal Eurasian *could* be closer to Africans via direct admixture. You can't really tell less drift from Africa from admixture with Africans, via D-stats, unless it has a knock on effect on intrapopulations relationships.
- What is not possible, topologically, based on , is that Basal Eurasian could be any part of the West Eurasian clade (WHG / ANE) plus a lot of African admixture, because the relationship to the East Asian outgroups would then be totally wrong relative to distance from Africa.
So you do need a separately evolving population to some degree, whether you believe it is more likely that it was isolated from Africa or not. If an admixture edge from Africa would work, they'd have used it.
(The "Basal Eurasian" group also could've had some admixture from members of a "third split" of the wider West Eurasian and ENA clade which West Eurasian and ENA, actually (e.g. populations like Oase or Ust Ishim). The important thing for BE is that it is unbiased towards WE and ENA, in a way that cannot be explained without African admixture without making a population incorrectly close to Africans, while EEF must be biased strongly towards Loschbour out of all other populations MA1, East Asian, Papuan, etc).
"Based on the genetics from Yamnaya, we can see that half of the WHG autosomal component remains"
I meant EHG. Typo.
@Chad
I agree with what Matt said. I think that is more clear than what I said.
"They [EHG] were not patriarchal (as far as we know at least, no evidence of it)"
That is odd, as the site they took Karelian DNA off is actually one of the few sites that shows some evidence of social stratification.
https://books.google.com/books?id=bmBoAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA348&lpg=PA348&dq=social+stratification+mesolithic+karelia&source=bl&ots=5pz0C6Pwcy&sig=m7PCQECHAlyy4onk2Uvkxcs4iC4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMI9PzT3LGyyAIVwe0UCh3D0AM4#v=onepage&q=social%20stratification%20mesolithic%20karelia&f=false
This is all IMO off the top of my head:
The EHG did not really have a wide mtdna diversity, when they were foragers, is part of the point though. As opposed to Yamnaya. So they had a narrow Y-dna diversity for the same reason as narrow mtdna diversity - low population size over time, frequent crashes.
A society could have a strong pattern of turnover of female lineages while male lineages remain static if they were extremely protective of their territory and property towards other males (as many societies are), and were patrilocal (as most societies are) with women joining male households when marrying (and children are raised with the male households' languages and traditions), together with being open to marrying women from another group.
Seems about possible. If you had two groups of herders on the steppe, a mainly forager descended one and another one from Neolithic background, it could go that way. Then one of these groups might become extinct over time (through chance, bad weather or all their animals get sick, or just growing a lot less or something). If there's any archaeological evidence like that.
Strictly speaking, such a society would probably be patriarchal to some degree. But even societies which lack the above features in a post-forager, pre-modern state world would probably be patriarchal to some a degree in the sense that networks of males would jockey for power in order to provide or buy protection from violence that doesn't exist without a state authority.
@Matt
Sure. We can't say too much about the pure EHG solieties. The book epoch2013 linked to suggests that they traded valuable goods, amassed wealth, had long used cemetaries, and seemed to have social stratification that included small children as important people through inheritance.
At the latest, the partriarchal society could have developed exactly with the admixture event. But not much after.
Onur, Rob
For the sake of truth, that idea about the second wave was expressed by other people also in this blog comments.
I became confident to use that term after this Romanian mtDNA study.
""On the other hand, populations of the Middle-Late Neolithic (Boian, Zau and Gumelniţa cultures), supposedly a second wave of Neolithic migration from Anatolia, had a much stronger effect on the genetic heritage of the European populations. In contrast, we find a smaller contribution of Late Bronze Age migrations to the genetic composition of Europeans. Based on these findings, we propose that permeation of mtDNA lineages from a second wave of Middle-Late Neolithic migration from North-West Anatolia into the Balkan Peninsula and Central Europe represent an important contribution to the genetic shift between Early and Late Neolithic populations in Europe, and consequently to the genetic make-up of modern European populations.""
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0128810
And yes I agree that E-V13 is also important for South East Europe. But understanding it's autosomal impact is more difficult.
Matt, Epoch
Of course hunter-gatherers had social structure, as even animals do, and they have aspects of patriarchy.
However, it would be false to make anachronistic back-analogies from Yamnaya. The social and cultural structure of Yamnaya owes nothing to the Mesolithic of Karelia. However, it would also be incorrect to argue it was transplanted en bloc from southerners, as that makes the error of simplistic centre-periphery models. Clearly, Yamnaya represents a novel adaptive strategy from c. 3000 with roots from c 4000 BC, which shows an original development on the steppe itself. To me, whether the M269-Z2103 which dominated that landscape is 'native' or not from Majkop-Caucasus-south Caspian trajectory is of secondary importance, and IMO not wholly answerable at the moment - as either scenario is possible.
From a genetic-demographic aspect, I think its important we obtain more Mesolithic samples from Europe and the steppe to obtain a clear picture as to how it was varied. Moreover, other issues need to be addressed which affect Y lineage diversity: especially the low Ne of male lineages - much more than corresponding female haploid markers, as men have always had much more variable reproductive success. Additionally, the EE plain was unpopulated until c. 16 000 Bp, and founder effects by a cold-adapted population need to be considered, like Q in north America. From the current data of aDNA there are many aspects yet un-studied. Why did the G2a men fail in Europe ("di-off")? Why were R1 so successful ? Im sure some biological factors were at play over and above that 'ineffable IE spirit' which people keep drumming on about. Once more sampling is finished, and we get representative numbers from all Eurasia, such questions of palaeo-pathology will be the future of aDNA.
@Grey
Thanks, that second post is much better thought out. It's what happens when you do try to follow the facts and use common sense.
@Karl_K
You too are confusing EHGs with Yamnaya. They are two different animals. Don't mix them, please. It makes your whole argument flawed from the start, so no matter how well you argue all the rest, the end result doesn't make any sense.
When you try to talk about EHGs and how they were, just stick to the evidence we have about EHGs. You can even refer to other HGs cultures (like WHGs or any paleolithic group to base your examples upon or gather more data about HGs societies and how they behaved). But just don't use the evidence of cultures like Yamnaya or CW to tell how EHGs were like. It's wrong.
The other aspect about hunter-gatherers is their language(s). yes, they had social -structure, but it was not fixed, but very open. Variation in density and exogamy into low density areas mean significant linguistic flux in an already oligo-lingual linguistic area. To claim language continuity of pre-pre-pro-proto-IE from EHG to yamnaya, on the basis of a general haplogroup R1 trend is tenuous in the extreme.
Perhaps the presence of R1a Z93* in Georgian mountains and of Mtdna U2e explains the high ANE percentage in Georgians.
MDLP k13 ultimate shows me 26.37 percent ANE
That sounds a bit too high. It should be around 20%.
Also, Georgians don't have much R1a, and they don't have much EHG either.
@Alberto
"You too are confusing EHGs with Yamnaya. They are two different animals. Don't mix them, please. It makes your whole argument flawed from the start, so no matter how well you argue all the rest, the end result doesn't make any sense."
I am confusing nothing. The fact is that Yamnaya came from admixture of two different populations (at least). Their direct male lines certainly came from EHG people. Very little of their male lines came from any other group.
Where is the confusion? I am suggesting a logical continuity. If two groups randomly came together as a whole, with no patriarchal continuity, then what is the explanation you propose for the outcome where only the males from one of the group become dominant, and stay dominant, right from the start?
If there was even a very very small period of random mating without keeping track of who men's direct male ancestors were, then the Y haplogroups found in Yamnaya would be a random mix of those from all the groups involved. We know this merger was not a one off event, because there are too many mtDNA lineages involved, and too many Y haplogroups.
When you guys are talking about North Caucasian languages, keep in mind that those peoples migrated in the caucasus after kartvelians. Ancient dna from modern day armenia shows that the people living in ancient armenia were modern north caucasians. With the fall of Urartu and the Indo European invasions they were forced to migrate in north caucasus, While the kartvelians were already living in that place.
The Bronze Age Armenians clearly have more EHG ancestry than present-day Georgians.
So how is it possible for the Bronze Age Armenians to be native to Armenia and Georgians to be native to Georgia, when Armenia is southeast of Georgia?
Maybe because modern Armenians are not natives? Bronze age armenians are more modern north caucasians and not modern armenians.
@Karl_K
"The fact is that Yamnaya came from admixture of two different populations (at least). Their direct male lines certainly came from EHG people."
You have a very low standard for "certainty". Based on one (1) sample (out of 2? Or out of more we we count other R1a's found around?) from EHGs having R1b vs. zero (0) samples from the other population? (Well, we have Bronze Age Armenian samples showing R1b, but they are from a later age to be a proof of the other population being R1b).
I asked early in the thread if we could discuss the possible continuity between the EHGs cultures and the subsequent ones, those that emerged when the "Georgian-like" population arrived to the steppe. After over 200 comments not even one addressed this. I just keep hearing some old urban legends. No one came up with a single piece of evidence of continuity. If you believe in this cultural continuity, this is your chance to elaborate on it. Please go ahead.
Nah, the Bronze Age Armenians we have are in large part descendants of migrants from the north of Armenia and Georgia.
Otherwise, you'd have to explain how Georgians became more southern than them after the Bronze Age.
@Alberto
I have nothing to add about EHG cultures. I have no opinion on where the IE languages arrived from, or at which time, or from which population either. I don't know if EHG were Indo-European speakers.
I am only talking about genetic evidence that strongly suggests that direct male lines from EHG had a fitness advantage, with a pattern that does not look like it is purely biological in origin.
EHG had R1a and R1b from 2 of 2 completely random samples. And the Yamnaya autosomal DNA and the Corded Ware autosomal DNA show that EHG contributed a considerable amount to their genetics as a whole. Disregarding this information because it is not proof is ridiculous.
You are then suggesting that a different, non-EGH population contributed these EGH associated R1 haplogroups to people that have 50% EGH ancestry. Just as a crazy coincidence that you think is just as likely?
I would not call that a very low standard for "certainty". You are presenting data that does not exist as being better than the real evidence that we have.
@davidski
You mean modern georgians southern than modern armenians? or Georgians southern than bronze age armenians?
Modern Georgians are more southern than Bronze Age Armenians.
I hope ancient Georgian Dna will tell how this happened.
@davidski
Do you have some laz dna? The Laz speak a language similar to mingrelian. It would be interesting to compare them.
I do have some Laz samples. They're more Near Eastern and less ANE than the Mingrelians. They're around 17-18% ANE, while the Mingrelians are around 21-22%.
But I can't run them in this TreeMix test because they're genotyped on a different chip.
I have a laz sample tested in ftdna. this is what mdlp k13 ultimate shows
1 Caucas-Gedrosia 48.28
2 ANE 23.03
3 ENF 15.18
4 NearEast 10.20
5 WHG-UHG 1.79
6 ASI 1.19
If ftdna chip works i can give his raw data.
The chip used by FTDNA is no good for this TreeMix test. I need an Affymetrix file.
@Karl_K
Ok, at least you admit to no evidence of cultural continuity that you know of. That's something.
The Georgian-like side, on the other hand, does have some evidence of cultural continuity. Economy + burial rites at least, but probably any other innovation too.
You are suggesting based on 1 R1b sample vs. 0 samples, that these cultural discontinuity between EHGs and Yamnaya came via females, and the cultural continuity was actually kept by these Georgian-like females. And this proves that EHGs were patriarchal.
I cannot strongly argue of the haplogroups of he Georgian-like people based on 0 samples, obviously. But based on the above, I can very rightfully doubt your certainty about it.
Just to be clear: If we do get Georgian-like samples and they turn out to be R1b (or R1a), your whole arguments and hypothesis will fall to the ground and you will change your view of this question radically?
Modern Near Easterners (including Georgians and Armenians) are more southern than ancient ones due to migrations probably from the south of the Arabic peninsula (or some other southern location). We know this already. Ancient Anatolian farmers were also much more northern (WHG) than modern populations of these regions. It's unrelated to any unlikely EHG input into Bronze Age Armenia (EHGs didn't even exist by then, as far as we know or can guess).
The "Georgian-like" people that were part of Yamnaya were themselves much more northern than modern Georgians. Stop twisting the facts to fit your narrative. It gets tiring.
I didn't come up with this narrative. It's been around for a while, and it fits the ancient DNA evidence to date...
"The beginning of mobile populations, marked by kurgans and the contemporaneous building of walls at Shengavit, Mokhra Blur (23, 28, 29), and Ravaz (48), is already evident in the early third millennium BCE. Ultimately, in the homeland, the Kura-Araxes adaptation would be displaced by a more mobile and militaristic one associated with the so-called Kurgan Cultures (15, 49)."
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/early-bronze-age-migrants-and-ethnicity.html
@Alberto
"Just to be clear: If we do get Georgian-like samples and they turn out to be R1b (or R1a), your whole arguments and hypothesis will fall to the ground and you will change your view of this question radically?"
Absolutely. If they have 0% EHG ancestry, but R1a and R1b that could reasonably be the ancestors of the Yamnaya and Corded Ware and Afanasievo people, and we get some more EHG samples that are not R1a or R1b, then yes. That would change everything. I am a very reasonable person.
But I hope you realize how far-fetched that scenerio is.
You are suggesting that people largely sharing ancestry with EEF people, whose decendants today have the highest surviving levels of G2a (the predominant EEF Y haplogroup) would have either:
donated their own R1 haplogroups to EHG people (who are more closely related to ANE people that also carried R haplogroups),
or:
that the Georgian-like population randomly (not related to a patriarchal social structure) absorbed R1a and R1b from EHG people and then these haplogroups later became dominant when they admixed with the EHG people. But then later their Georgian descendants lost most of these haplogroups and reverted back to being mostly G2a.
Am I understanding your position? Or perhaps you have a different hypothesis than these two?
@Karl_K
Good, you're reasonable then. And your arguments rely basically on R1 haplogroup. Those are two important points.
But no, you're not understanding my position regarding these "Georgian-like" people. I wrote about it above (and so many times the last year...), but I will repeat myself for you here:
EHGs were some 50/50 mix (give or take) of WHG and ANE.
"Georgian-like" people were some 50/50 mix (give or take) of ENF and ANE.
We know that neither WHGs or EEF were R1. But we have MA-1 being R*. This clearly suggests that the origin of R1 comes from the ANE side of EHGs, not from their WHG side. Agreed?
Now, if the Georgian-like farmers had as much ANE as EHGs, what makes it so improbable that they were R1 too? Especially when their mtDNA looks Near Eastern in origin. It probably means that their Y-DNA came from the ANE population too.
Anything that sound strange to you there? Any question?
@Alberto
Fine. If you don't agree with patriarchal, then maybe patrilineal is better for you.
We don't know how the power structure was set up, and I agree that most of the archaeologically relevant culture came from the farmers. But this makes sense, as they were a sedentary people that made things that last. The cultural contributions of foragers is not transmitted in stone monuments.
But we can assume that male children of men with R1 haplogroups had much greater reproductive success over the period of many generations while the new hybrid culture evolved. And then later, as they moved west, the men with R1 haplogroups again had greater reproductive success.
This strongly implies that property and wealth were passed preferentially from father to son, or that women were permitted to join the R1 containing societies, but not men.
As they couldn't do DNA tests, how else can you restrict Y haplogroups in this way? There are several genetic ways, but there is no evidence that there were selective sweeps in genes that make sense both historically and biologically.
@David
You didn't invent the narrative, but you twist the arguments to support it. You know perfectly well (your own oracle at the time showed Tabassaran and Tajik as the closes to the "Georgian-like" population from Yamnaya) that this population was more northern than modern Georgians. It had nothing to do with EHG admixture, since the EHG admixture was accounted for in the mix already.
Regarding the Kura-Arax successor, maybe you are referring to the Trialeti culture?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trialeti_culture
Alberto
The corollary of what you're proposing would require that there was (1) a significant shift of south Caucasian Y DNA from R1 to groups like G2a and J2 sometime after the Copper Age, coinciding with the southward shift seen in the genome-wide perspectives from Bronze Age to modern Armenians; (2) R1 was present in Transcaucasia prior to 3000 BC.
Correct ?
@Alberto
"We have MA-1 being R*. This clearly suggests that the origin of R1 comes from the ANE side of EHGs, not from their WHG side. Agreed?"
Agreed.
So I totally get what you are saying. But I think it is a huge stretch. You are definitely going the long way around. We know ANE had R1* 24,000 years ago. But we also know that EHG had R1b1 and R1a at only 7,500 years ago. That is a really big difference! You have no evidence that ANE ever even had the R1a and R1b mutations.
@Rob
Yes, basically correct. Modern Georgians are not exactly the "Georgian-like" population that entered Yamnaya. They are probably 60-65% of that ancient population. The rest comes from Anatolian farmers that they met in Transcaucasia and later migrations from the south (probably).
In the end, haplogroups could come from anywhere. R1b could come from EHGs for any strange reason (Grey above outlined some strange scenarios that would result in R1b coming from EHGs). So this point is not too important for me. But it is CRUCIAL to the ones supporting a different hypothesis. As Karl_K admitted above, if R1a/b turns out not to be from EHGs the whole house will fall down.
For me, if Georgian-like farmers are not (or not exclusively) R1a/b, it wouldn't mean that much. The picture will still be the same, only that for some random reason the R1 haplogroups become the lineages that were successful.
It's rather difficult to see how the 4,000BCE Serteya R1a could be of "farmer" origin...
@Karl_K
Yes, there is a huge gap in the data. But the lack of data doesn't make it such a huge stretch. The EHGs couldn't have acquired R1 much before the samples we have. So this likely means that an ANE population did have R1a/b at that time. Speculative? Yes, sure. Everything that is not proved with samples is speculative. If it wasn't, we wouldn't even be discussing about it.
It's all about degrees of likeliness. For example, that hypothetical (but obviously real) ANE population, could have turned out to be R2 instead of R1. And R1 developed post-admixture with WHGs (to create EHGs). But think about it and you'll see that this is far more unlikely.
In the absence of data, I go for likely scenarios when possible.
@Dmytro
That R1a was of ANE origin. I thought that was clear by now.
TSsharaba
When You say Georgians are the most native in Caucasus what You mean? You mean that ENF farmers (G2a) came the first into Georgia and later came the ANE from East/Central Asia or You want to say that ANE/teal was natively present in South Caucasus before the ENF/G2a.?
Dmytro
Alberto is saying that R1 groups could have existed over a broader area than just north of the Caucasus; but also south. This doesn't mean that foragers from EE came from south or were farmers.
@Alberto
"That R1a was of ANE origin. I thought that was clear by now."
On the contrary, that is not in any way clear. Which DNA sample of an ANE with R1a are you referring to? I know that the Karelian EHG guy was R1a. Is this the one you mean?
@Dmytro
"It's rather difficult to see how the 4,000BCE Serteya R1a could be of "farmer" origin..."
I totally forgot about that study. It was actually even R1a1 I think. And at 6,000 years ago that far north. I hope we get some autosomal DNA from those people some time.
@karl_K
We don't have "modern" (like Mesolithic) ANE samples. We absolutely lack that data. But we have to deal with the fact that data is missing. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, as has been repeated many times.
Again, you can go for an hypothesis that ANE was mostly (or exclusively) R1 or that it was mostly (or exclusively) R2. Or maybe there is even some other option?
You can argue against ANE being R1 (that's why we're here for). But I'd like to hear the alternative that you suggest before deciding if it's convincing enough to change my mind about it.
"You can argue against ANE being R1 (that's why we're here for). But I'd like to hear the alternative that you suggest before deciding if it's convincing enough to change my mind about it."
It is simply about being in the right place at the right time.
The EHG samples from the steppe within 1 or 2 thousand years of Yamnaya (and much closer in time to Khvalynsk) have R1b1 and R1a1 haplogroups.
There are several independent mutations from the R* haplogroup seen in MA-1 needed to arrive at these, and they did not happen twice in two different populations.
These EHG people do not appear to have recent 'pure' ANE admixture (they can not be modeled as simply WHG/ANE hybrids).
It is more than a little bit unreasonable to assume that a quite distant group of ANE people also had these exact same haplogroups some time previously, and that they mixed into a population of farmers at a previous time somewhere else, and then later that mixed population admixed with the population that already has the haplogroups at the right time and right place.
@Davidski
"I do have some Laz samples. They're more Near Eastern and less ANE than the Mingrelians. They're around 17-18% ANE, while the Mingrelians are around 21-22%."
Do you have Svan samples? Svan is the most divergent of Kartvelian languages.
"Nah, the Bronze Age Armenians we have are in large part descendants of migrants from the north of Armenia and Georgia.
Otherwise, you'd have to explain how Georgians became more southern than them after the Bronze Age."
Georgians are a modern population. they probably became more ANE after the bronze age due to influx from iran and the south. E.g chechens to the northwest and azeris to the east are muslim. Obviously there was some demographic impact in recent times. Their R1a is mostly z93. The downstream z93 snps will tell us how parsimonious their z93 is.
It also looks like BA armenians moved north over time
@Karl_K
Fair enough. Though I clearly don't go for the mutations happening 2 times in two different populations. I go for them happening in a single ANE population, being somewhere around Central Asia (South and East of the Caspian) from where they could mix with both WHGs from the north and Near easterners from the south (or west).
The model with EHGs being a mixture of WHG and ANE fails marginally (Haak et al. 2015), but that's because ANE is MA-1. So it should obviously fail (this is like if we didn't have Loschbout/KO1/La-Brana and we had to model MN European Farmers as EEF + Kostenki).
If instead we had a Mesolithic ANE around the Caspian Sea, then the model would probably fit perfectly.
But why to go with this apparently very speculative hypothesis? Because somehow we have to explain those Georgian-like farmers having as much ANE as EHGs. We can't ignore that fact.
So when you have to explain these farmers, that's (in my mind, and until someone gives me a better one) the best option.
If we hypothesize that EHGs and Georgian-like people got ANE from 2 different populations, one being R1 and the other one being... R2? We have quite a problem. These Georgian-like people apparently went everywhere, but I don't see R2 everywhere. Maybe if they were J2... but then it wouldn't come from ANE. Maybe from the Near Eastern side? Both mtDNA and Y-DNA? Yes, it's possible. But I still prefer R1. Looks more parsimonious to me.
So that's my solution to the problem. I'm open to better ones, though.
actually I would not say BA moved north rather they were gradually replaced in the south.
I'm not saying it's modern SSA. Maybe, I didn't make this clear. Modern Africans have their own drift. I think Paleo Africans will be closer to Basal Eurasian. People with Basal Euasian are not the same as those without it. I'll post Dstats and explain it better later on today.
@Alberto
"It's all about degrees of likeliness. For example, that hypothetical (but obviously real) ANE population, could have turned out to be R2 instead of R1. And R1 developed post-admixture with WHGs (to create EHGs). But think about it and you'll see that this is far more unlikely."
All right. I just re-read this a little bit slower. So you probaby just need to read up a bit on genetics and mutations and haplogroups. R1 could never develop post-admixture with WHG from R2.
R1 and R2 are different forks in the road. There won't be a series of mutations occur that converts one into the other. This is the fundamental basis of the tree-like structure of Y haplogroups.
Maybe there could be a single SNP back mutation, but this is usully seen only in mtDNA because it is much smaller and more functional on a biochemical level. Most of the Y chromosome only exists so we can make trees and define haplogroups.
@Chad
"I'll post Dstats and explain it better later on today."
I can't wait. And if it looks legit, we should write it up and submit it.
Doesn't it seem a little paradoxical that we would dismiss the ancestral associations of El Torcs and ATP3 as a situation in which the Y-chromosome has been disassociated with its native origin...
And on the other hand assume that the Samara bend woodsman could not be the same?
It could be that the Samara frontiersman is the oddball, not what we have assumed is later admixture.
@Highlander
Herding is am agricultura technique evolved in regions were classical cereal farming is not so much possible.
Herding in fact is and was always part of the bigger farming package, just that the herders specialized on this specific technique.
So what is the problem about calling those people "farmers/herders"?
Even for herding you need land where your animals can graze.
Alberto said
"@Grey
We all know how much you like horses, but please try to get the chronology right at last.
EHGs never had alive horses. They only had the dead ones. The ones they killed for eating them.
Horses were domesticated when EHGs didn't exist anymore. So there was never an epic battle between mounted EHGs and Georgian-like foot herders.
Georgian-like herders entered the steppe and mixed with EHGs much before they domesticated horses. Once they domesticated horses, it's possible that they did ride them, but by then there were no EHGs left to fight against (and if any of them had survived, then, well, they might have got killed by these horse riders, I can give you that possibility if you'll insist).
When will people understand that EHGs were exactly that, tribes of hunters and gatherers? They were not copper workers, they didn't ride horses (they didn't even have horses), they had nothing to do with PIE cultures, they were not patriarchal (as far as we know at least, no evidence of it), they didn't have land, or livestock, or any wealth, they didn't travel (by foot) 1700 kilometers crossing some big mountains to marry women from the Caucasus who belonged to a completely different world, etc...
Are these basic facts so difficult to grasp?"
Nothing to add, simply common sense and logic.
@bellbeakerblogger
Could you clarify? I am intrigued by your paradoxical statement.
Rob said
"But isn’t the consensus that farming started in the Natufian ? That’s central-southern Levant. "
Natufian is North_Central (Syria, Israel and Lebanon) Levant by any means.
It doesn't even reach Jordan and Northwest Arabia, what is in my book "South Levant"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian_culture
But than this is still just a strong theory that it might have started there and even if it was the Proto farming culture and even if it was located in South_Levant, it still doesn't go against my theory, because according to my theory the Proto farmers would have mixed with other groups by mid-late Neolithic when expanding towards the East and towards Northeast Africa/Arabia.
@Kurti
'Are these basic facts so difficult to grasp?'
"Nothing to add, simply common sense and logic."
You people crack me up! Basic facts? Common sense? Logic? And at the exact same time you insist that others know nothing about EHG culture. Because there is no evidence. Hilarious.
Please enlighten me some more.
@Karl_K
:)
Sorry, I obviously didn't explain myself good enough or you misunderstood me. I meant:
Option 1:
ANE was R*. Part of them admix with WHG, who become EHGs. Then these EHG evolve into R1. The ANE population who remained unadmixed, evolves into... R2?. Then they admix with Near Easterners, who inherit R2.
Option 2:
ANE evolves into R1 (R1a/b), and after they admix with WHG and Near Easterners, so that both EHGs and Georgian-like population inherit R1a/b.
I meant that I see option 1 as unlikely. I see option 2 as more likely.
I think you were suggesting that what happened is option 1. That is, that R1 evolved already in EHGs, not in ANE. And therefor it was exclusively from EHGs.
Arame said
"For the sake of truth, that idea about the second wave was expressed by other people also in this blog comments.
I became confident to use that term after this Romanian mtDNA study."
Not to sound arrogant here but this was again me stating this on Eupedia and even here quite a few times that J2 is the result of a second neolithic wave coming during mid-late neolithic and being of the "Teal like" ancestry. But people were also against this theory.
But good that Arame is a honest guy and more important to me is that people agree on me rather than having all laurels :)
Here is one of my comments regarding this J2 issue on Eupedia
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/31364-Hg-J2-M172-middle-late-neolithic-Hungary-%28Sopot-amp-Lengyel-Culture%29?p=461271&viewfull=1#post461271
I had made quite a few other stating it coming with a second wave during the mid-late neolithic to Bronze Age. Unfortunately can't find them anymore.
Now have to leave this comment section for now.
@Karl,
The Samara and Karelia woodsmen might only represent marginal frontier communities, meaning high status immigrant men (more Yamnaya like) were taking native wives and the native communities were small enough where this would make a difference in a short time.
Also likely, a very large region was affected by the influx of nomadic Central Asian ceramic users in an earlier time (from the lower Volga to Southern Iran), creating a mosaic of peoples, sometimes with shared male ancestry.
And like again, the 43,000 square miles under the North Black Sea may have been home to farmers of a sort.
So I don't see any need for women with hairy armpits, mobile populations were definitely moving from south to north. Lithics, pottery, livestock, culture.
Lots of people here are generally naive about the nature of prehistoric societies, and specifically the steppe societies that we’re currently discussing. ***Of course*** they were “patriarchal.” ***Of course*** the intrusive ANE/EHG side TOOK the farmers’ women; either killed the men or otherwise prevented them from breeding, or absorbed their women as tribute while preventing the men from entering society. A near-total replacement of one haplogroup and the explosion of another on such a scale doesn’t just happen “accidentally.”
There are multiple lines of evidence but I’ll just discuss one since others brought it up. Look at the current distribution of G2a.
G-P16 is the main Caucasian hg — old, quite upstream, and basically absent from everywhere else. So it’s almost guaranteed it was there way before the steppe cultures formed. If R1a/R1b came from them, why didn’t G2a come with them to Europe also?
I mean, one day G2a is everywhere, and the next it’s only way up in the mountains. Why?
Basically the R1 lineages can’t be from the Georgians’ ANE side, as a G2a-led intrusion into the Caucuses that post-dates the creation of the Steppe cultures makes very little sense.
Hopefully my statement wasn't paradoxical, I meant to state a paradox.
Ha ha
@PF
I think your ***'s and maybe sarcasm? are a bit hrd to follow. But I think I agree, unless you are sayingvyou disagree with me. In which case I do not agree.
@bellbeakerblogger
Maybe I get what you are saying. It's like... only the high status guys get good long lasting graves that survive for thousands of years... am I right?
I actually understand this first hand. I once came across a site with a very large number of human bones that were ~1,000 years old ( a huge tree upturned in an ancient unmarked cemetary ). Nearly all that remained were the petrous parts of the temporal bones and teeth. This is how the local archaeologists eventually determined how many people were buried there.
So only very special people are likely to be buried very deep in a mound or stone covered grave that will leave their skeleton intact for a very long time.
@Karl_K
Not sarcastic, so yes, I agree. :)
@Alberto
"ANE evolves into R1 (R1a/b), and after they admix with WHG and Near Easterners, so that both EHGs and Georgian-like population inherit R1a/b."
OK. I understand your position.
But if EHG had both R1b1 and R1a1 (which require several more mutations), then there just won't be enough time and coincidences for this to happen. The Georgian-like farmers may have gotten their ANE from even R1* people, but it is a bit crazy to think that this is where Yamnaya inherited their R1 haplogroups from. It is like suggesting that Native Americans inherited their R1b1a2 from their MA-1 like ANE ancestors who crossed over from Asia 15,000 years ago.
Kurti
>>EHGs never had alive horses. They only had the dead ones. The ones they killed for eating them.
>>Horses were domesticated when EHGs didn't exist anymore.
>>Are these basic facts so difficult to grasp?"
"Nothing to add, simply common sense and logic."
So you and Alberto's particular brand of common sense and logic says there wasn't a frontier, the intrusive farmers expanded over *all* the steppe and absorbed *all* the EHG.
Is this sudden outbreak of "impossible" things one of those stages of grief?
@Karl,
"only the high status guys get good long lasting graves that survive for thousands of years... am I right?"
There is some archaeological selection bias, this is why Beaker warriors will likely continue to be overwhelmingly or exclusively R1b, and Corded warriors will likely continue to be R1a, even though they may actually be a minority for the region and times they lived in. Many graves lack diagnostic features completely or were buried in shallow graves.
But to the point, I'm not totally convinced that Yamna is half Samaran-like with the recent addition of a foothill farmer women. Not because the Samaran is older. They are either half-brothers to begin with or Yamna-like people already existed in the 5th mil.
By Yamna-like, I mean the genetic profile, not the culture.
@Karl
This just depends on how old are those haplogroups in EHGs and how old are the admixture events between the ANE population with the other 2 groups.
If those haplogroups are 13-15 thousand years old, there is no problem at all. I guess these admixtures happened maximum 9-10 Kya.
If we find an EHG that is R1a-M417+, then things will change and it will be clear that R1a came from them. The same if we find an EHG with R1b-L23+.
Till then the options are open.
It's not that crazy. We have 2 R1b samples in Iberia. 2 in Bronze Age Armenia. We obviously lack many more samples to really know, but once Asian ancient DNA starts to show up we will find out.
@Grey
We don't have enough samples to know exactly how it happened. But I don't see where you want to get at. As I said, there is a chance that a few EHGs survived somewhere even at the time of the Yamnaya culture. But at some point, for whatever reason, they vanished (absorbed, whatever).
The pastoralist, mixed population is the one that survived and thrived. This is the population that had domestic horses. I don't think that the horses are only reason why they had an advantage over EHGs, though they probably helped.
In which part of this do you disagree?
@Karl
Or to make it another way. What do you think it's easier, that the R1b-M269 from Iberia mixed with farmers who went to Europe from a "Georgian-like" population from around North Iran or that it mixed with farmers who went to Europe from an EHG from around Samara?
4500 year old genome from Ethiopia: http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2015/10/west-eurasian-admixture-throughout.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/10/07/science.aad2879.abstract?sid=a6087eb0-70a4-4608-a9aa-90bcfd302565
@Alberto
G2a-P16 is clearly a Neolithic founder effect in the Caucuses, long before any steppe population was formed. If the R1 lineages come from the non-farmer side of the ancient Georgians, and this population existed as a singular "teal" for a while, how come only the R1 lineages went on to colonize Eurasia?
You have to show that G2a-P16 in the Caucuses postdates the creation of the steppe populations, which just looking at G2a's current distribution and phylogeny makes it *extremely* unlikely.
@PF
You mean prehistoric people were capable of... violence? :( Wow, that changes everything! ;)
Yes, men massacre other men and steal their women. And men defend themselves from other men. And their friends and relative go on revenge raids. Saying that "*of course* the intrusive EHG side took the farmers' women", apart from the *farmers* being intrusive, does not explain *how* the foragers got the upper hand. The farmers didn't just passively let themselves be slaughtered.
Grey here has suggested the "mothaflippin' Comanche scenario" where the foragers were the first to have horses, giving them an advantage at both raiding and herding. Alberto is suggesting that it was in fact the more advanced food producers who won out, and that their ANE contribution is inflating apparent EHG ancestry. Others have suggested that the steppe being marginal for farming, and the foragers knowing the best fishing spots and so forth, that they engaged in (not necessarily always voluntary) bride exchange with farmers, leading to gender biased hybrid herder populations, and that the it was a one of the populations with a higher forager male contribution which happened to become top dog later on.
I will add that since we are looking at a recent founder effect there is no need to seek any explanation other than pure chance for which paternal lineage ended up dominating. The only *real* evidence of gender bias is in the mitochondrial lineages. (All this is assuming that our sample is representative and there was no selection operating.)
Some male lineage did indeed have outsize success, but it was one clan - a young founder effect. Not a general male success of EHGs, nor of teal farmers, or there would be many lineages, not one.
That's why Caucasus G2a doesn't prove anything. Maybe some did come, and some of the existing minor G2a lineages in Europe may well have spread from the steppe. But they didn't hit it big with the founder effect, nor did the vast majority of EHG or farmer lineages.
In any case the Caucasus was not and probably never has been any kind of monoculture. In particular, Western Georgia and the NW Caucasus was distinct from Eastern Georgia, Daghestan, and Azerbaijan during the Neolithic, the Kura-Araxes period, and as far as I know during the Chalcolithic as well.
@Chad
Maybe we should hold off on that Dstat publication about the Basal Eurasians until the Ethiopian genome is available. It looks like maybe the isolation was to a similar extent, but the admixture was extensive in both directions. So probably a very complicated history. But still involving a unique Basal Eurasian population that no longer exists in unadmixed form.
@capra
"Some male lineage did indeed have outsize success, but it was one clan"
But it was not one clan. First, this happened with R1a and R1b and not just a single lineage in either one. Yamnaya were R1b, Corded Ware were R1a, Bell Beaker were R1b, some group that went into India was a different R1a. None of these groups were all lineages.
So. Either the first admixed group had a spontaneous drift to only R1 males of several different lineages after the original admixture event, or there was a father to son advantage from the start.
And then why didn't they have a greater and greater proportional increase in non-R1 haplogroups after that? They clearly had ever increasing admixture with other populations. This can be seen in mtDNA, but not Y haplogroups.
To sum up... it was an ongoing process. It was not a simple founder effect.
Grey:
"1. The foot herders could...
"2. The mounted herders could..."
So possible, but nothing that compels us to agree. Therefore, yes, this is special pleading.
"None whatsoever."
Thanks.
capra internetensis:
"The only farmers predating Yamnaya and Afanasievo for which we have genetic data are the descendants of Aegean farmers of the 7th M BC (Danubian, Cardial, and now NW Anatolian). In the absence of anything resembling a reference population for pure "teal", I just don't buy that our limited methods can tell us how far away from the source of teal was from the Sea of Marmara, much less what kind of food production they practiced."
I get the impression we're participating in different discussions.
Rob:
"Maybe in Kazakh steppe, as I stated, and maybe Zargos region (Im not too sure about the latter). But this was *not* the case in the western steppe or Europe."
I was thinking of goats in that comment. If the date for alleged herding in northern Afghanistan is accurate, then it seems to predate the inferred domestication event in southwest Iran.
Otherwise, yes, exactly. Botai aside, the steppe domesticates came from the south. I've seen 6000 BCE for sheep reaching the southern Urals.
"I’m surprised you’re even bothering to reply to him."
You should be. At this point, I'm surprised at myself.
Aram:
"My statement is based on this preliminary abstract about Late Neolithic Kumtepe having Caucasian connections."
Okay. Thanks. I see what you're saying.
I wonder whether it had something do with the second Neolithic wave, the "Pre-Pottery Neolithic B"?
Rob:
"Why were R1 so successful ? Im sure some biological factors were at play over and above that 'ineffable IE spirit' which people keep drumming on about."
Good lord...
Kurti:
"Herding in fact is and was always part of the bigger farming package, just that the herders specialized on this specific technique."
I don't think that is at all clear. The evidence for the management of wild goat herds does not suggest that this adaptation was necessarily associated with agriculture. It was that management that led to domestication. This suggests that you cannot assume this teal signal is associated in any informative way with agriculturalists.
"So what is the problem about calling those people "farmers/herders"?"
They're more often referred to as, "farmers", in this thread, wouldn't you say? There's even been some speculation based on the assumption that these were agriculturalists.
Alberto
>>EHGs never had alive horses. They only had the dead ones. The ones they killed for eating them.
>>Horses were domesticated when EHGs didn't exist anymore.
>>Are these basic facts so difficult to grasp?"
"As I said, there is a chance that a few EHGs survived somewhere even at the time of the Yamnaya culture."
You seem to be having difficulty grasping the things you claim to be facts.
capra
"Grey here has suggested the "mothaflippin' Comanche scenario" where the foragers were the first to have horses"
Just to be clear I'm not saying they were first (in the same way the Comanche weren't either, they got their horses from the Spanish ranchers).
I'm saying if either
a) the steppe dudes had remained as HGs beyond the range of the sedentary farmers and so went from foot hunters to mounted hunters
or
b)the steppe dudes had turned into nomadic herders on more marginal land beyond the farmer frontier and so went from nomadic herders on foot to mounted nomadic herders
then the domestication of horses would have had a greater *relative* impact on them then the sedentary farmers.
@Alberto
"EHGs never had alive horses. They only had the dead ones. The ones they killed for eating them. Horses were domesticated when EHGs didn't exist anymore."
Take for instance the Yakut or Saami. They follow(ed) herds of Reindeer. Managing them, taking out the ones they want. Are those reindeer domesticated? If so, when exactly did that happen? We know that the following of Reindeer herds is very old (Ahrensberg culture). Where exactly did they turn into domesticated reindeer, if ever?
Horses DNA will be necessary. Cows are, for instance, were most certainly introduced by the neolithic immigrants. Pigs however are mostly of local European origin. It is known that certain neolithic HG cultures kept pigs: Ertebolla, Pitted ware. The latter turned out to be mesolithic continuity.
Epoch
By 3000 BC horses are only beginning to be domesticated, and the archeozoology shows that they were still mostly slaughtered for food as wild species.
How do your anecdotes of Uralic reindeer hunters change this fact?
Rob
It's meant as just a suggestion. But would you be able to tell the difference between a wild herd of reindeer being followed and hunted and managed herds from archaeological finds? If so, based on what?
@Chad
"I'm not saying it's modern SSA. Maybe, I didn't make this clear. Modern Africans have their own drift. I think Paleo Africans will be closer to Basal Eurasian. People with Basal Euasian are not the same as those without it. I'll post Dstats and explain it better later on today."
That would be interesting.
Epoch
Well yes; yes you can- at least for horses .
That's why am stating the facts above,
That is what the entire discipline of Archaeozoology is about. They look at age of culling, herd composition, skeletal wear/ tear etc
What appears to have happened is that around 4,000 BC during the Khvalynsk phase, highly patriarchal, patrilocal, and territorial bands of young males of steppe hunter-gatherer ancestry got their women from wherever they could, and probably because more southerly populations with a longer history of agriculture and pastoralism had bigger populations, most of the women came from these societies, one way or another.
This process continued until the genome-wide makeup of the steppe groups was ~50% Georgian-like, and it seems that at this point the population density on the steppe was high enough so that it was no longer necessary to import women from the edges of the steppe.
That's pretty much it. More data from the steppe and Asia won't change this.
Dave
That's probable. But why during the catacomb phase does the mtDNA profile go back to a fully "forest"/ northern/ EE profile
Catacomb has a higher frequency of forager derived mtDNA haplogroups like U4, but overall it's still very similar to Yamnaya.
It's during this time that the aridization of the steppe really kicks in and also mobility increases, so these factors might be responsible.
Ok, ok. I am on Davidski's side in this debate but I can actually see how we can reconcile G2a being old with R1b-teal people theory. R1b is brought to photo-Yamnaya by NW-Caucasian Maykop people who are then in turn flooded by G2a Kartvelians that have finally decided to cross Caucasus mountain range.
Now the only problem is that you have to assume that these R1b Teal farmers who certainly could not have spoken IE managed to take local wives and import some of their cultural norms with the primary one being patriarchal social structure but at the same time failed to spread their language. Looks very unlikely to me.
George
Say again ?
I'm having difficulty following your logic, and English
I think it should be pretty obvious. None of the potential candidates for Teal people could have spoken IE language. If you assume that they have brought the Near Eastern ancestry through male lineages you have to explain how they have managed to make EHG patriarchal but at the same time failed to impose their language.
George
"I think it should be pretty obvious. None of the potential candidates for Teal people could have spoken IE language. "
That so ? I mean, I'm not saying they did. I just want to know which crystal ball you used to conclude they definitely didn't ? :)
" If you assume that they have brought the Near Eastern ancestry through male lineages you have to explain how they have managed to make EHG patriarchal but at the same time failed to impose their language."
"
Err... I'm not following. You're conflating / mixing up wholly different concepts.
EHG were the foragers which existed before NE admixture arrived. So they weren't "made patriarchal" because they were gone by 4000- 3000 BC, culturally if not genetically speaking.
Yes, Yamnaya are patriarchical, but that's not automatically due to the EHG being so. Anyhow, lets get more than 2 samples from EHG to see how mixed they were. Moreover, you're not appreciating that the apparent patrilocailty seen by Y DNA is a world-wide phenomenon, not related directly to be "I.E.". European farmers were 90% G2a, European (WHG) foragers were mostly I2a. Have you considered the inherent nature of Y DNA haplogroups themselves, in addition to social mechanisms ? (esp in a low density region like the east European plain and Eurasian steppe, which were scantily populated until M4 ?)
"....but at the same time failed to impose their language."
Again, which crystal ball/ time machine ?
Here is some of what I'm talking about. Yes, I know that geneflow is back and forth between African and Eurasians. This is just another reason why I don't think that a real basal population existed. I think it is just layer upon layer of migrations out of Africa, with groups that share more alleles with UP Africans, as they split with Eurasians. I think that a single pop breaking off in Africa, never mixing with Africans and not with UP West Asians is not very logical. Here are the Dstats which show that those with "Basal Eurasian" are closer to Africans. Loschbour is closer to Africans than East Asians, but not very significantly. However, EEF folks are closer to Africans, from Ust_Ishim, than Loschbour and ENA pops. I repeat, that this isn't some group that is the same distance from Africans as other Eurasians, but a population that was African shifted, and continued flow into West Asia. This was later covered over by West Eurasian movement into Africa, and African movement into West Asia.
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Atayal 0.0025 0.410 16338 16258 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Dai 0.0064 1.082 16374 16167 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Japanese 0.0060 1.063 16341 16146 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Han 0.0046 0.820 16330 16179 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Motala_HG -0.0051 -0.868 13408 13545 318303
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Karelia_HG -0.0081 -1.052 14110 14339 314097
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour French -0.0156 -3.059 14752 15220 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour English -0.0137 -2.644 14713 15122 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Stuttgart -0.0175 -2.699 14805 15332 320669
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour LBK_EN_NE -0.0210 -3.086 14512 15135 315724
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour BedouinB -0.0419 -7.916 15142 16467 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Palestinian -0.0424 -8.210 15155 16498 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Armenian -0.0192 -3.583 15290 15888 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Yoruba -0.2693 -52.400 14092 24481 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Mbuti -0.3432 -63.487 13142 26874 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Mandenka -0.2634 -50.148 14127 24228 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Biaka -0.3284 -63.099 13321 26345 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Ju_hoan_North -0.3754 -72.009 12824 28240 325704
result: Gorilla Ust_Ishim Loschbour Khomani -0.3364 -64.971 13151 26486 325704
I think a UP West Asian, N African, and E African will clear this up. It will show that some unadmixed BE group never existed.
"Most probably, North Mesopotamian and West Iranian cultural and production traditions penetrated to the North Caucasus along the Zagros foothills via the zone of the Lake Urmia and Eastern Daghestan."
So early farmer, early pastoralists, earliest metallurgists. If the theories of archaeologists are correct; one might purport that the Cetral-west Asian highlanders would easily have overcome the Flint using fishermen of the Dniepr- Volga River basin, although we should not discount the tenacity of foragers.
I guess we might have to wait till we get pre- Bronze Age Central Asia genomes to confirm/ retort this idea .... And to see if their gene flow went beyond the Caucasus foothills or simply halted at the Kuban.
"That so ? I mean, I'm not saying they did. I just want to know which crystal ball you used to conclude they definitely didn't ? :)"
Regardless of whether "Eurasiatic" language family really exists or not it is clear that IE family is much more similar to a certain group of North Eurasian language families. So it is most probably related to something EHGs have spoken.
@Chad
Did you read that new Science paper yet?
"Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture throughout the African continent"?
Yes. That's old news. There was a paper on that many months ago.
Does that not change your idea? How can the Eurasian backflow be much more like EEF people than WHG, if EEF are just WHG-like with continued input from Africa and Basal Eurasian doesn't exist?
You are claiming that your statistics show that EEF is closer to Africans because it has more African ancestry. But the ancient Ethiopian does not show that affinity, and demonstrates that your results are because all modern Africans have gene flow from EEF into Africa.
@ George
"Regardless of whether "Eurasiatic" language family really exists or not it is clear that IE family is much more similar to a certain group of North Eurasian language families. So it is most probably related to something EHGs have spoken."
You mean closer to Uralic ? We've already established that IE-Uralic similarities aren't definitive proof of exact locality, and certainly does not contradict the possibility of a more southern IE origin. Just because the Zargos region is south of the Caucasus, it doesn't mean that the indigenous languages spoken there should be Semitic, proto-Dravidian, etc. Whatever the case, the "southern" contacts of IE are rather well documented but often ignored.
In fact, given the mobility of ANE-foragers - which possibly existed both on the north and southern shore of the Caspian by way of the pre-transgression East Caspian communication route (documented archaeologically), the Zargos proto-Majkopians could very well have been "north Eurasian' speakers who came from the same met-population which also drifted north to mix with WHG to form -> EHG.
"In fact, given the mobility of ANE-foragers - which possibly existed both on the north and southern shore of the Caspian by way of the pre-transgression East Caspian communication route (documented archaeologically), the Zargos proto-Majkopians could very well have been "north Eurasian' speakers who came from the same met-population which also drifted north to mix with EHG to form -> EHG."
That's what I actually believe. Now one little problem here is that Maykop can only be attributed tp either North-Western Caucasian or (less likely) Kartvelian group as the latter two could not have arrived to the places they occupy at much later stages.
Is there ancient R1b sample that supports our Zagros/Central Asia/whatever route of teal people to Caucasus? Sure, there is. And it's right where Hurrians have lived. Face it - it is much more likely that teal people were some kind of a (proposed) Sino-Caucasian family offshoot that has mixed early with the farmers than that they were PIE carriers. At the end of the day your theory is not much different from standard Anatolian narrative - only in the way of PIE spread to Europe.
There is older Eurasian in Africans. Just wait. You're still not understanding me.
If there were no African affinity in "BE", then EEF would be as close to Ust Ishim as Loschbour and ENA. You continually miss the point.
@ George
"Now one little problem here is that Maykop can only be attributed to either North-Western Caucasian or (less likely) Kartvelian group as the latter two could not have arrived to the places they occupy at much later stages."
"Can only" ? "Can't have" ? These words don't exist in sociolinguistics (within limits of course :) )
"And it's right where Hurrians have lived"
They were concentrated further south. And lived later, during the MBA onwards, after marked shifts and moves into south Caucasian piedmont from all osrts of directions. There is no reason to assume that Caucasian lanugages are static and ancient, and everything else is not.
"that teal people were some kind of a (proposed) Sino-Caucasian family offshoot that has mixed early with the farmers than that they were PIE carriers"
Maybe it is more likely, maybe you're right. But you haven't presented any really convincing evidence to suggest so. Rather, you're trying to sell as definitive conclusions assumptions based on hypotheses.
" At the end of the day your theory is not much different from standard Anatolian narrative - only in the way of PIE spread to Europe."
Not exactly. My theory stipulates that the question of where IE actually began is difficult to discern, and many convictions currently held are a little shaky. The west Asian piedmont was at a cultural and political centre, with a zenith beginning in the Copper Age. Numerous languages traversed its extensive links south, west, north and east. One of these might indeed have been IE, as well as Caucasian, and other now extinct languages.
@Chad
"If there were no African affinity in "BE", then EEF would be as close to Ust Ishim as Loschbour and ENA. You continually miss the point."
All Africans have EEF admixture since the Neolithic. This is why EEF in particular are closer to MODERN Africans. You are the one missing the point.
@Chad
I have this idea on it:
If Basal Eurasian split off early it would have experienced its own drift while the rest of Eaurasian would all share its own drift. That could account for the difference between them.
If Basal Eurasian split off early it would also share with SSA a number of ancestral allels that the rest of the Eurasians don't share. I can imagine that software such as TreeMix would, in the absence of a pure BE instance, consider SSA admixture in EEF and so on.
Rob
"If the theories of archaeologists are correct; one might purport that the Cetral-west Asian highlanders would easily have overcome the Flint using fishermen of the Dniepr- Volga River basin, although we should not discount the tenacity of foragers."
Straw man - no-one is saying the foragers prevented the farmers moving onto the steppe.
The farmers would likely have pushed the HGs off the viable land simply through weight of numbers the same as they did everywhere else neolithic farming was viable.
The question is did the farmers expand all over the steppe and absorb all the HGs or did they only spread to the edge of viability.
Now some people have been implicitly saying the farmers spread everywhere and absorbed all the HGs but they haven't said it explicitly (cos it is obviously very silly) so if the answer to the question is the farmers only spread to the edge of viability then by definition that means there was a *frontier*.
The question then is could the domestication of horses (possibly in conjunction with the farmer land becoming less viable) have changed the balance of power along that frontier.
George
What language was spoken in Yamna by R1b-Z203 people?
For the sake of argument taking Basal Eurasian at face value what candidates are there for a source region given that it had to be both isolated and somehow particularly good for farming?
It's easy to imagine isolated populations on islands, deserts, mountains etc but for this you need isolation plus prime farming potential so for example
- a fairly remote island or not so remote but no fish (so no fishermen)
- a big mountain range with an island of fertility tucked in the middle
- a desert with an island of fertility tucked in the middle
The only place I can think of off hand is that green Sahara thing where mountain ranges in the middle of the Sahara were apparently very fertile at some point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Subpluvial
Mountains inside a desert sounds like the sort of place a population could stay isolated for a long time.
Any others?
@Grey
"For the sake of argument taking Basal Eurasian at face value what candidates are there for a source region given that it had to be both isolated and somehow particularly good for farming?"
There is no reason to assume that isolated Basal Eurasians were the very first farmers. EEF-like people also all have a WHG-like component (or UHG).
If farming started in this UHG population, they would have rapidly spread, and then absorbed other populations.
Or, farming may have developed only after the mixture of the Basal Eurasians with the UHG. In that case, there was no longer any isolated populations, and it could have occurred anywhere near the Middle East or Anatolia
@Chad Rohlfsen:October 8, 2015 at 5:51 PM
How do you get from that D-stat that BE has African gene-flow? All I see is that Ust-Ishim is very un-African.
@Karl_K
"There is no reason to assume that isolated Basal Eurasians were the very first farmers."
Ah fair enough. I got the impression that was originally the assumption.
George Okromchedlishvili:
"Now the only problem is that you have to assume that these R1b Teal farmers who certainly could not have spoken IE..."
"I think it should be pretty obvious. None of the potential candidates for Teal people could have spoken IE language..."
What is obvious, I think, is that you are assuming facts not in evidence.
Rob:
"In fact, given the mobility of ANE-foragers - which possibly existed both on the north and southern shore of the Caspian by way of the pre-transgression East Caspian communication route (documented archaeologically), the Zargos proto-Majkopians could very well have been 'north Eurasian' speakers who came from the same met-population which also drifted north to mix with WHG to form -> EHG. "
It's believed that during the LGM, most of the lowlands of Central Asia were probably uninhabitable, except for the deltas of the Caspian littoral and other riparian environments. Therefore, perhaps it wouldn't be at all surprising to find an ANE population retreating south and finding refuge, there. The deserts of Central Asia became inhabitable again, as the climate warmed and grew wetter, then probably became uninhabitable during the Mangyshlak regression, associated with Europe's Younger Dryas. I suspect that might partially explain the origin of this teal signal.
@Rob
"We've already established that IE-Uralic similarities aren't definitive proof of exact locality, and certainly does not contradict the possibility of a more southern IE origin. "
Well, it may not be certain proof, it sure is a very convincing clue in the direction to the North. You came up with an extinct language, which contributed to both IE and Uralic. However, we see continuous contribution from IE to Uralic over the course of time. See the example of sata for hundred. That would mean your hypothetical contributor would exist for exactly as long as is convenient for your hypothesis only to be replaced by real IE later.
I start humming the hum ("Hm. Hmmmm") whenever I see constructions like that ;) Not impossible, but also not plausible. Also, the burden of proof lies with you. I'd say linguistically maybe some trace of that mysterious language should be visible.
Keep in mind that its not just loanwords that IE and Uralic share. We see personal pronouns and "ne-" for negation. And the Latin "-que" as "and" has a similarity in Uralic. Very basic, deep stuff. If your hypothetical language leaves such basic traces, it must be other discernible traces are left, identifying it.
@VA_Highlander
"It's believed that during the LGM, most of the lowlands of Central Asia were probably uninhabitable, except for the deltas of the Caspian littoral and other riparian environments."
http://anthro.unige.ch/lgmvegetation/download_page_js.htm
I saw that same map in an image in the paper of Kostenki 14, but this seems clearer
@Karl_K
I am talking about the founder effect in the admixed population on the steppe, that is R1b-M269 (almost all >L23>Z2103 in Yamnaya). Yes, these guys kept expanding with further downstream founder effects, so it was ongoing. But that's the point, we are talking about the expansion of a single very successful (probably pastoralist) lineage, not a series of independent successes of forager men. (From the estimated TMRCA, most likely the expansion started in the Khvalynsk/Skelya era, though the confidence interval is much too large to be sure.)
R1a-M417 was an independent (and probably even younger) founder effect, but it isn't yet clear how it is related to Yamnaya and the steppe.
epoch2013:
"I saw that same map in an image in the paper of Kostenki 14, but this seems clearer"
Many thanks. That's quite useful and agrees with what I've gleaned here and there. Most of Afghanistan and Iran were "Tropical semi-desert". The monsoons were farther north, apparently. There may have been enough water to survive in the main drainages and basins.
@Rob
You came up with an extinct language, which contributed to both IE and Uralic.
I reread the posts we exchanged, and fair is fair: You merely mentioned such possibilities to stress the point we can't know for sure. However, what I wanted to point out was that the simple idea of a Indo-Uralic language on a Caucasian substrate up until now neatly fits the data.
So, is there anything shaking the foundations of that view?
@epoch
"However, what I wanted to point out was that the simple idea of a Indo-Uralic language on a Caucasian substrate up until now neatly fits the data.
So, is there anything shaking the foundations of that view?"
I think that for now everyone is still assuming that Khvalynsk/Yamnaya spoke some form of PIE. So even if the language came from the "Georgian-like" people it wouldn't have any effect on those foundations that you speak about. The IE-Uralic connection goes from IE to Uralic. Uralic is not supposed to have influence IE, only the other way around. And the Caucasian substrate/contact would happen in the south.
So for this specific case of Indo-Uralic on Caucasian substrate it's mostly irrelevant who spoke the language (though it favours slightly the "Georgian-like" population, due to the southern location of Caucasian languages, which are the ones that might have influenced IE. If it was EHGs who first spoke IE, it would more likely be the other way around: Uralic substrate/influence in IE, then IE influence on Caucasian languages).
@ Epoch
No I wasn't stating that IE-Uralic connections were mediated by an extinct language. I very much accept that they're real and 'direct'.
Rather my argument is that 'cultures' like Yamnaya, Majkop and K-A had severallanguages being used, criss-crossing around the place.
My point about lost languages is to counter the alleged weight of evidence for IE - uralic contact above all else, thereby cristalizing its northern (~ steppic) Ur-locale. However, a continuum of "northern-like' languages existed south of the Caucasus, but this is not visible due to (1) 90% being long extinct, and what we see now is truncated stumps who then expanded greatly (like IE, and Uralic) after the Copper Age (2) the linguistically diverse an fluctuant landscape of the west Asian highland region
So I am not insisting on a southern origin of IE , rather I am stating that it cannot be excluded. I highlight that the "palaeolinguistic" conclusions often brought forth are far less definitive than often claimed.
In fact, if one has to look for the most likely place of language expansion, then it is highland west asia - which was very much 'amongst' it all long before the steppe assumed any importance. In fact, what the upcoming (Dave's new thread) new aDNA is showing (what I always predicted it would), is that the steppe was a mere vector, a conduit, but not a vagina natiatorum.
Aram, Va_Highlander, Rob, also Kurti I think
There may have been secondary waves of Neolithic Anatolian farmers into the Balkans, changing frequencies of uniparental markers. However, these didn't introduce ANE, nor teal, nor the modern West Asian component. Simply check out the development of ADMIXTURE components in the Hungarian farmers from Gamba et al., and from the more recent papers. Autosomally, the Hungarian farmers stay more or less the same, with minor fluctuations, until the Bronze Age changed it all. Speaking in K15 terms: The strongest West Asian and Red Sea components were in the earliest Neolithic farmers, not in the later ones. Also, I've heard from knowledgable sources that Late Neolithic Kumtepe had no ANE.
So the idea that a J2 dominated population, hailing perhaps from the Zagros/Iran area, carrying some amount of ANE and teal, made a secondary Neolithic invasion of southeastern Europe is falsified by existing data. However, this doesn't rule out that EEF-like people from Eastern Anatolia made it to Southeastern Europe in the developped Neolithic.
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