Saturday, January 30, 2016
Ancient Greeks and Romans may have imported a whole new genetic cline into Europe (or not)
Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) below should be self-explanatory. But if you're having problems with the abbreviations and acronyms, consult the list of definitions here.
See also...
First Neolithic genomes from Greece
The enigmatic headless Romans from York
Greeks in a Longobard cemetery
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155 comments:
Davinski
From this you have no way to tell if the extra elements actually came in the classic Roman and Greek times or earlier or in multiple wave and a lot of the earlier. The ancient genomes on the plot are all from outside of the area. We can tell that there was significant change since the Middle Neolithic, but that is about all the time related information this PCA gives for Italy. (One Levantine gladiator from Britain gives no solid base to think that this Levantine element was imported en mass specifically in the Roman times.)
I suspect we'll continue to find near-eastern Romans scattered throughout the former empire. But I don't think it's the major vector of change (but happy to be proven incorrect). Rather, I think there was a large late Neolithic / EBA movement(s) from Anatolia to Southern Europe
@Slumbery
We can tell that there was significant change since the Middle Neolithic, but that is about all the time related information this PCA gives for Italy.
The few ancient Italian samples that we have, which are all featured on the above plot, range in chronology from the Middle Neolithic/Copper Age Iceman to the Bronze Age phase of Remedello. They're all marked as Italy_CA.
So the plot is informative for North Italy, because it's easy to see that North Italian genetic structure shifted east sometime after the Copper Age. It looks almost like a straight shift towards Yamnaya.
What happened exactly in the rest of Italy, and Greece too, is certainly a mystery at this stage, pending the relevant ancient DNA data, but you have to admit that there's a fairly neat cline running from the Levant to North Italy and the Balkans, without much deviation in either direction towards Neolithic Anatolians or Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers/Bronze Age Armenians.
So the Roman or even early Islamic era Levant is looking good as a source of gene flow to Italy and Greece at this stage, IMHO.
What happens when you model modern (non-Crete, non-Cypriote) Greece as ~ EEF + BA_Armenian
This blurry PCA may be of Iron age Thracian P192-1. The dot is just East of EEF territory. Davidski posted a PCA of a Bronze age Montenegrin from Allentoft who clustered in Spain but was of low coverage.
http://www.anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?6322-aDNA-of-South-Eastern-Europe-Catalogue-of-results-amp-impact-in-modern-groups
A PCA with an Iron age Etruscan though from an upcoming paper months ago though had him by Bulgarians, which goes against the idea non EEF West Asian blood came mostly in Roman times. If Etruscans lacked it they'd be clustering pretty far away from Bulgaria.
There's really no way to know when non EEF West Asian blood came into SouthEast Europe. And it's important to remember it looks like it has a presence in Iberia and then it gradually gets weaker but still exists all the way up to France and West Germany.
What happens when you model modern (non-Crete, non-Cypriote) Greece as ~ EEF + BA_Armenian.
Bad fit.
A PCA with an Iron age Etruscan though from an upcoming paper months ago though had him by Bulgarians, which goes against the idea non EEF West Asian blood came mostly in Roman times. If Etruscans lacked it they'd be clustering pretty far away from Bulgaria.
The Etruscans didn't cluster with Bulgarians, they clustered like Bulgarians on a similar plot.
South Italians and Greeks aren't shifted towards Bedouins. They're Neolithic farmers shifted toward CHG, probably because their IE languages came directly from the Caucasus thru Anatolia. North Italians are shifted more toward Yamnaya because they used to speak Celtic languages up there, which came from the north.
The only way your "cline from the Levant to North Italy" makes any sense is if South Italians and Greeks were originally like North Italians, but there's no evidence of that. Your religious commitment to the Slavocentric PIE steppe theory is blinding you to the obvious facts and making you see a mystery where there's none.
South Italians and Greeks aren't shifted towards Bedouins. They're Neolithic farmers shifted toward CHG.
Sure they are, and the fact that there's no hint of any cline from Anatolian farmers to Caucasus hunter-gatherers, but a very obvious cline from the modern Levant to North Italy can just be ignored.
The only way your "cline from the Levant to North Italy" makes any sense is if South Italians and Greeks were originally like North Italians, but there's no evidence of that.
And what evidence is there that most Italians and Greeks aren't largely mixtures of North Italian-like and Near Eastern like populations?
Your religious commitment to the Slavocentric PIE steppe theory is blinding you to the obvious facts and making you see a mystery where there's none.
What's the bet you'll be praying for a Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Levant, when it becomes clear that this is where a lot of your ancestry is from?
Davinski
Thank you for warning me about Italian_CA on the PCA, of course I managed to miss them.
I assume that on this PCA the right side of the Italian amoeba contains the Northern samples. And you are right, a significant shift is visible there. Most of those right side point do not even need anything from the East Mediterranean for that position, since some of the Hungary_BA and some of the Beakers are very good fit (and those make sense historically too).
Although Germanics surely had some impact, I suspect most of this pre Roman (in the sense that it is pre-empire). I even dare to say that Bronze and Iron Age North Italy had more "communication" with the Circum-Alpine region and Central Europa that with the South (population-wise).
South Italy looks more complicated. The interesting part then do not look more EEF like than the North (as I would have expected), just have an extra source of significant mixture. The main reason why I think it is not particularly Roman (empire time), because such a high influx in the time when Italy was politically united should have a more uniform effect, doesn't it?
BTW, Italy seems to be the most diverse population in Europe.
Davidsky is dreaming hard. All those Italians/Greeks plot between Neolitich/Copper Age farmers and CHG, but much closer to the former. I don't see any cline whatever towards the Beduin like ancient Roman.
Real Yamnaya admixture is less than 15% in Southern Europe and 30% in Northern Europe, going by EHG scores. Nothing new under the sun.
I don't see any cline whatever towards the Beduin like ancient Roman.
Which plot are you looking at?
Davidski,
They are obviously having problems reading, just see how they are writing you blog name! ;).
Davinski
I do not have the tools and the data (or the skills) to do further test, so I can talk about only this PCA, but the position of South Italy can be explained a lot of ways that do not involve any significant Beduin-like. Those should be tested (if possible).
While the position can be explained as North Italy + "Beduin", it can be also a triangle with North Italy (or some precursor population that is close enough) + a more Northern (more Caucasus than Arab) population from the East + some extra ENF locally.
Or Northern Italy + a Caucasus population that had higher ENF that modern Caucasus (something like this could have existed in Asia Minor or a Balkan at some point).
How Hungary_BA + Anatolia_EN + Armenia_BA fits for example?
This one.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o3EYTdM8lQMmI4Sm5lREpwR0k/view
Greeks/Italians are intermediate between CHG and Euro Farmers. Beduins are clearly on a different axis.
How Hungary_BA + Anatolia_EN + Armenia_BA fits for example?
Doesn't work with the tools I have, but that's probably because there's been too much gene flow between Anatolia_N and the two others.
Btw, the question of what sorts of populations were living in Southern and Central Italy during the Bronze Age is interesting, but it might be irrelevant to what we're seeing on the plot.
The only thing that might be relevant is what sorts of populations expanded demographically during the industrial era to eventually count millions in Southern and Central Italy.
Attributing that to Romans is at the very least going ahead of the facts, which would need better (paleo-)historical sequences in all relevant regions. What we do know since the Lazaridis is that Sicilians and Maltese (and possibly some other South Italians) do not fit at all with the triangular model and that instead they seem to have a strong extra West Asian component. Greeks instead do fit in it (and usually they don't overlap so well with South Italians in PCAs, being much more drifted towards the steppe and Turkey instead).
I have two tentative opinions on this issue:
1. The York Roman era beheaded sample may be that of some early Christians: beheading was common way of executing rebels and non-lapsing Christians were rebels, as they did not bow to the gods of the state. There might be other kind of rebels but it is precisely the presence of a West Asian immigrant what makes me suspect they could be Christians.
2. The Sicilian peculiarity I suspect it might owe to a Bronze Age collapse period invasion by the Shekelesh, who would have arrived along with the Etruscans (different origin, Aegean, known as Teresh by the Egyptians, Tyrsenians by the Greeks) and probably both sponsored by the Shardana (Sardinians almost certainly, clue: horned helmets), maybe to fence off the Indoeuropean (Italic) invasions that the peninsula was suffering at the time. We know that the Shekelesh were circumcised, what strongly suggests Semitic origin (another clue may be that "shekel" was a concept of weight and payment, later a coin, in Semitic West Asia and hence Shekelesh may just mean "mercenaries"). The Shekelesh would have first attempted to establish themselves in the peninsula but were driven out by the Italics, so they finally settled in Eastern Sicily and Calabria.
I'm not 100% sure of this: I'd need to confirm it (barring future aDNA clues) via archaeological evidence (I don't know much of it) and also by looking at internal Sicilian DNA clines. If the hypothesis has merit, we should find a significant cline between the West and the East of the island, as the West was never inhabited by Sicels but instead by the Western-related Elymni. However it's possible that Carthaginian colonization may have altered the landscape...
In any case food for thought. As for Roman possible DNA reshuffling, we'd need aDNA from the affected areas, at least some of them: we cannot just extrapolate a single sample from Britain, which obviously left no meaningful legacy, to whatever may have happened in Sicily.
Could you rerun the PCA with north African and Sardianian samples also? Curious to see how that affects the placement.
@Davidski
" the question of what sorts of populations were living in Southern and Central Italy during the Bronze Age is interesting"
The answer to that is Illyrian tribes. Differently from Ancient Greeks who migrated through small number of men creating city-colonies (and also came in historic times and not in Bronze Age) we find various tribes of Illyrian origin in Italy; Daunii, Peucetii, Messapii, Calabri, and Sallentini. We also find from linguistic data that even Italic Tribes of Lucani and Brutii show some Illyrian elements. To these tribes we might also add Siculi in Sicily who are often thought to be of Illyrian stock. Greater numbers probably mean greater impact in local population. During Bronze age they were spread in South Italy and also in eastern Adriatic shores of Central Italy. Apart from linguistic data (names, placenames etc) the archaeological remains show a strong link between the Korce basin pottery (nowadays Albania) and Southern Italy pottery. Korce basin also shows strong links to Dimini-Sesklo and also is one of the first colonized areas from Neolithic farmers in the Balkans. Carbon data from Korca basin date those farmers around 6500 BC. This should pull South Italy and also parts of Central Italy towards Anatolia.
I don't think this has anything to do with the Romans. The cline fits geography, the South-East Europe is closer to west-asia thus received more input from them, and the Western-Mediterranean region received the least, thus are at the top of the cline.
It seems likely something could have changed during the Roman Empire, but also maybe before or after. I think the Roman Empire is a nice historical event you could link a population movement to, and other periods seem intuitively a bit less plausible to do. Potentially there is something with Near Eastern Indo-European offshoots moving towards Italy (and even population movements from Central Europe to North Italy could've changed things again).
Sort of off topic actually, but this post prompted me to have a quick look at the Supplementary Material from the "The Italian genome reflects the history of Europe and the Mediterranean basin" late last year to see if there was anything of relevance -
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/suppinfo/ejhg2015233s1.html?url=/ejhg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ejhg2015233a.html
There is this strong peak of "total length of shared IBD blocks" between particularly Calabria with Mozabite and Moroccans, then to a lesser extent Basilicata and Sicily.
Then if you remove Mozabite and Moroccans, you find that the IBD generally tends to rise between Western Europe and North-Central Italy (Aosta, Piedmont, Lombardy, Liguria, Emilia), and then South Italy is more relatively even in sharing and the highest sharing seems for Basilicata to be with Eastern Europe. (Possibly relates to some East Europe->Greece->South Italy links?).
Couple image links for those-
http://i.imgur.com/1hY8e63.png
http://i.imgur.com/asowz3c.png
The differences are pretty small compared to the shared total length of IBD blocks within population (especially for Aosta Valley and Sardinia). Interesting if they're still capturing some signal.
My best guess is that 3DRIF-26 was a soldier from the Roman province of Syria-Palaestina and as far as I know only Roman citizens had the honour to be decapitated, so maybe these men were of higher military "or civilian" rank and were punished for some reason.
(google books link)
Syrian divinities in Britain
Various ADMIXTURE analysis i've seen shows modern Levantines to basically be ENF + CHG + a Bedouin component. The Bedouin component scored only around 3% in Greek mainlanders in Haak 's formal mixture test so it's pretty trivial in most the Balkans, about as trivial as it is in Northern Italy.
@Maju
I wouldn’t make too much of all those speculations in the secondary literature about the names of the various Sea Peoples. The primary sources are extremely light. Shekelesh isn’t related to the Semitic root for “to weigh” which is šql. That’s a transliteration problem. The “q” and “k” are completely different sounds in all Semitic languages except Modern Hebrew. The Egyptian inscriptions refer to the škrš. The reconstruction using an “l” is based on the assumption that the Egyptian inscriptions refer to the same people as the “people of the land of šikalayū” mentioned on a tablet from Ras Shamra in Syria. This is plausible because the symbols for “r” and “l” are sometimes used interchangeably in Egyptian, but it seems far from certain. It’s actually kind of weak linguistically. The text of the supposed depiction from Medinet Habu is fragmentary. All that can be read is š… so it could just as easily be a Shasu, a Semitic individual from the other side of the Jordan.
Saudi are 34% red sea on k15, that ancient arab individual was 20%, Southern Italy has 5%, Spain 4%, France 3%. I mean, on those data alone we can safely assume that an arab like population is not the source of that CHG shift and is not a relevant source of admixture into southern europe, period. Romans or not the source population is one that was high on caucaus/chg and relatively low on red sea/arab pensinsula. If that chg shift happened in the roman empire time frame nobody can know (right now), that being said, we know for sure that is not from a saudi/bedouin like population and in my opion is reasonable to assume that since neither France, Spain, or Northern Italy, (all places that were under roman rules for centuries) were not affected by the same phenomena (the one that affected Greece/Southern Italy) the roman empire probably has nothing to do with that event, the chg/caucaus shift in the eastern mediterranea took place before or after.
Anyone who cannot see the cline highlighted in the current post is in big denial.. In fact, the gap seen between the Levant and South Italy (which, if I am not mistaken, is partly filled by Cypriots in David's graph) can be easily filed by sampling a few Greek individuals from Crete and the SE Aegean (Dodecanese). Unfortunately such samples are not publicly available but you can get an idea of what I am referring to in the figure below, from a PNAS article from 2014. Of course the limitation is that no ancient samples are included, but still the cline is quite obvious.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4078858/figure/fig01/
@Arch Hades
Indeed Levantines appear to be a 3-way mix between Anatolian farmers, a CHG-like population, and a Bedouin-like population. The proportions are not uniform throughout the Levant though, with northern and more coastal Levantines (i.e. Lebanese, Druze) having higher CHG-like proportions, while southern and/or more inland Levantines (i.e. Palestinians, Jordanians) having higher Bedouin-like proportions. You are also right that this Bedouin-like component is extremely low in SE European populations. We know for sure that there were population movements from the Levant to SE Europe throughout history and prehistory. David is highlighting a probable large one in the current post. Therefore, could we assume that the lack of the Bedouin-like admixture in SE Europe indicates that it is a late introduction in the Levant (i.e. around the Arab expansion)? I believe probably yes..
Do you realize that South Italians/Greeks are not on the cline between Euro farmers and Levantines? We know that neolitich Greeks were Sardinian like, while modern ones aren't. Greeks/South Italians are clearly on a cline between CHG and Euro farmers, with trivial Steppe and Semitic admixtures. Anyone not seeing that is completely in denial....
There is indeed a lack of cline between EEF and CHG in SE Europe. However, that doesn't look particularly striking. The same empty gap exists between all European populations and their ancestral ones, probably because after enough mixing clines disappear. I don't think that any other option than mostly a mix of EEF and CHG exist to explain modern Italians and Greeks.
Regarding the cline that does exist especially in Italians from south to north, I guess that it could be explained by higher Mediterranean (especially East Mediterranean and North African) contacts in the south and higher Central European (Germanic, mostly, but French too) in the north. However, what is indeed striking is that this cline continues to exist today, probably 1200-1500 after these contacts happened (or became less significant). This is in contrast with other European populations. For example, Iberians are not a cline between Basques and South or Central Italians, even if much of the East Mediterranean and mostly North African influence happened till much later (and this latter one was initially much higher in the south than in the north). This is because in the last 500 years regional exogamy has homogenized Iberians to a high degree (Basques are the exception). But Italy seems to have remained quite regionally endogamous since the early middle ages (and I seem to remember having seen this higher endogamy in Italy than in other European populations somewhere).
The case of Greece might have been more or less analogous: the north having higher Slavic input in the early middle ages, and after that not too much mixing between northern and southern populations (though I don't remember anything specific about Greeks having higher levels of endogamy, so it could be something else).
@Matt: those clines are real but can and should be explained by other reasons. Remember that Romans and Latins were from Central Italy, not Piamonte nor Calabria, and they were (per historical accounts) setting colonies of ex-legionaries all around (of limited impact it seems to me but probably not just zero). If we take in consideration for example the NW Italian affinity to SW Europe in all aspects (including Y-DNA R1b-S116, etc.) the appearance is rather of a flow from the West into that region. When? IDK, maybe Chassey-La Lagozza, maybe Bell Beaker, maybe Gauls, maybe all them - but doesn't look like anything we could associate to Rome, at least in most cases.
When we consider the more complex South Italian landscape, we see something Balcanic but also something (in Sicily at least) that goes beyond merely Balcanic, we also see lesser Western influence. Excepting the Roman Empire, Italy was always a crossroads of influences and Balcanic ones can be tracked in South Italy (and even at times in Central Italy) since very early (late Neolithic, i.e. a thousand years or so after the first Neolithic but before the growing sophistication we call Chalcolithic). However technologically they were always one large step behind the Balcans, so these influences seem to be rather a continuous leak by contact than a sustained migration, at least till the late Bronze and Iron Age, when we see Etruscans, Greeks and others showing up, with apparent or clear Eastern origins, and it is only then when we see a more direct technological transfer. The Balcans or Aegean are in any case not enough to explain Sicilian genetics: it must almost necessarily imply peoples from further East, from the Levant.
@Labayu: The speculations are essentially my own, not something I've borrowed in full from anybody else. For me the key issue is not so much the name (so the "shekel" spelling controversy is secondary) but the fact that they were circumcised and hence almost certainly Semites. Anyhow, Israel also appears by this name among the Sea Peoples of the "second wave" (the Nine Bows coalition, probably led by the Hittites, also mentioned), being the first unmistakable historical mention of this ethnicity, coincident with the approximate time of their coalescence and consolidation. The text is Egyptian in any case, not Semitic, but regardless of what it means (I still lean for the "mercenaries" interpretation) they seem to be one of several Semitic (or at the very least circumcised) peoples mentioned, these are: Sheklesh, Israel and Ekwesh. Of these only the Shekelesh reappear in the third wave, the one probably led by the Greeks (Denejen = Danaoi) which resulted in the destruction of Ugarit and plundering of NW Syria c. 1178 BCE and the subsequent failed invasion of Egypt c. 1175 (which rather unsurprisingly echoes in the Odyssey's "Cretan lie").
The presence of Shekelesh in all these three episodes (while other Semitic groups are only present in the Nine Bows coalition) is at least suggestive of their mercenary character, much as the one of the Shardana, which are the only thread linking all the three phases of the Sea Peoples and seem to have been established by Egypt itself to guard the Levant after Kadesh (they probably held a city in southern Galilee which was later destroyed by the Israelites, judging on the Biblical narrative).
After 1175 some of those heavily armed and war-oriented populations could well have headed to Italy and my speculation here is that the Shardana, still keeping links to the then prosperous Nuraghic Sardinia, may have been conductive of this reorientation of their activities. We cannot discard that prior to that they stopped in Greece to sack Pylos and maybe even Mycenae. We still don't who exactly did that, just that in the case of Pylos they came from the sea, but we know that somehow Greece remained Greek in spite of all, unlike other less fortunate countries, so if they did pay a visit to Greece, they did not remain there for long (or were throughly assimilated). What we know is that around 1100, coincident with the expansion of Italics beyond Lombardy, the Etruscans show up in the middle of Italy and that somehow the Siculi or Sicels were also involved. We also know that we can associate Eastern Mediterranean genetics to both influences/geographies, but they are distinct: the Etruscan signature seems West Anatolian or otherwise Aegean, while the Sicel one seems Levantine, what is in agreement with my attribution to Teresh and Shekelesh origins respectively.
It must be said that Sicilian haploid genetics do tend strongly to the Levant. They also tend to the Balcans (Anatolian Greeks particularly) in the Y-DNA, probably indicating a later historical Greek settlement but in the mtDNA there is no Balcanic tendency whatsoever, yet the Levantine one is even stronger than in Y-DNA. Autosomally speaking the N-S cline in Italy responds to greater Levant affinity (south) or NW European one (north), Sardinia is exceptional in all, of course.
I think that David was suggesting admixture from an arab/bedouin like population, a Kurd/armenian/syrian like population will be a much better fit (less red sea). Also the italian cline seems to be pointed towards the northern levant area (druze, lebanese) and not at the arabian peninsula where that roman-arab dude more or less clusters... I mean, the geographical distance from Greece to the levant is very small, and of course greeks invaded/colonized southern italy, there is no need for historical explanations.
My guess would be that 3DRIF26 is a Phoenician.
Dave / Alberto
I suspect it's hard to model Bronze Age Balkans because we don't have a good proxy for them given the exchanges in the region in late antiquity.
But can you see what modelling Albanians as BA _Hungary, Anatol Farmer & CHG looks like ?
Moi,
Sardinians are already on the plot. I can't put North Africans on this plot due to technical reasons; anyone with well over 10% Sub-Saharan admixture won't be plotted accurately.
If I was to rebuild the analysis so that I could include a fair number of North Africans, it would look something like this.
http://mathii.github.io/review/2016/01/25/spatial-genetics-1/
Alexandros said
"Indeed Levantines appear to be a 3-way mix between Anatolian farmers, a CHG-like population, and a Bedouin-like population."
I have been preaching this on Eupedia and here for more than a year now.
I think there are three sources of farmer/herder ancestry of which one was not yet found and I called "Southwestern/Southern farmers" which was spred predominantly by the Afro_Asiatic speakers.
It is basically Anatolian Neolithic with more Basal Eurasian component with a slight shift towards East Africa (this shift could actually be because of West Eurasian geneflow from Northeast Africa into Sub Saharan Africa).
Rob,
The three-way model is "infeasible", for whatever reason, maybe a technical one?
This two-way model worked though.
Albanian
Hungary_BA 0.420
Kotias 0.580
chisq 0.878 tail prob 0.512597
I think this "Southwestern farmer" component was spred into most of the Levant and the rest of West Asia predominantly by the spred of the Semite(Afro_Asiatic) languages, before that I imagine the Levant (most of Syria, Lebanon and even Jordan) to have been more Anatolian Neolithic like however by late Neolithic the Levant was slowly getting Afro_Asiatic influx which probably brought or gave birth to this Southwestern farmer component.
The problem with positing the existence of a Southwestern or Arabian farmer component is that Africans carry West Eurasian admixture that is best modeled as Sardinian-like.
In other words, the Neolithic farmers who moved into Africa were probably a lot like the Anatolian farmers we have.
So there may never have been any Southwestern Asian Neolithic farmers distinct from Anatolian-related farmers of the Fertile Crescent, although it's possible that some sort of unique admixture from Arabia entered the Eastern Mediterranean during the Islamic conquests.
@Davidski: "Africans carry West Eurasian admixture that is best modeled as Sardinian-like."
That sounds most interesting. Have you ever dwelt on this matter in greater extension (if so, I missed it)? Else, what references do you suggest to understand this issue better?
Also I like Mathieson's migrational barriers' map that you linked to. TY.
Maju,
Ancient west Eurasian ancestry in southern and eastern Africa
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/7/2632.abstract
Davidski
Thanks. Perhaps the 3 -way model for Albanians is "infeasible' because it doubles up on EEF. That is, the EEF is already represented in BA_Hungary, and nil extra is required.
Davidski, any chance we could see the third PCA dimension? Thanks for all your work, I seriously love this blog.
Maju, I think your take on the mercenary character of some of the Sea Peoples is interesting. When reading "Empires and Barbarians", as Heather described how mobile tribal societies (covered the Germans and the Slavs) developed states, a lot of it sounded familiar from the biblical stories. Complex relations with much more developed polities, confederacy formation, ethnogenesis, even kingdoms that turned out premature and didn't outlast the charismatic founder (or 2). It wouldn't surprise me if some of the Sea Peoples had been mercenaries of the states they later attacked, just like Germans or Slavs, and that was an important informational mechanism.
Kurti and Davidski, some of the extra basal could have been long-term absorption of pre-existing fishing (Ichthyophagi in various locations lasted into the historical record) or hunting populations (desert kites). EHG+CGH->IndoEuropean, ArabianHG+ANF->Semitic kinda thing? Are there any Solluba samples?
Dimensions 1&3
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o3EYTdM8lQdTlKbjNyYVZPZjA/view?usp=sharing
Dimensions 1,2&3
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o3EYTdM8lQcTdvUFhuUjF5TVU/view?usp=sharing
@David: that's a very interesting paper, thank you. And I can't but agree that the source population seems EEF-like. Not always Sardinians are the best proxy but the range is an Euro-Mediterranean arch between Orcadians and Druze and it converges indeed to something similar to EEF, although I'd say they were primarily (Y-DNA) J1 carriers, judging on what we see in Ethiopia, and therefore a different subpopulation (also the estimated time is more recent).
However what the authors notice is a flow to the East and Southern Africa and explicitly not to Central and West Africa. I quote:
... the signal of west Eurasian ancestry is present in southern Africa but absent from central Africa, despite the fact that central Africa is geographically closer to the putative source of the ancestry. These geographically specific and asymmetric dispersal patterns are most parsimoniously explained by migration from west Eurasia into eastern Africa, and then from eastern to southern Africa.
How can then we be sure it is related to whatever happened in North Africa?
with Bergamo representing North-italian in all admixture tests and these bergamo always sit near bulgaria, Romania and the sea coast populace of the black sea ( except the north side) then does this not state that old thracians and northern Anatolians are the best fit for these.
The Southeastern farmer would be the source and not the southwestern farmer
"there's no hint of any cline from Anatolian farmers to Caucasus hunter-gatherers, but a very obvious cline from the modern Levant to North Italy"
There's no cline from Anatolian farmers to Yamnaya for North Italians either, but that doesn't keep you from seeing that they're Yamnaya-shifted farmers. Use those same powers of vision to see that South Italians are CHG-shifted farmers, and Central Italians are a little of both.
The cline in Italy is just the end of a larger European cline from North Eurasians (WHG+EHG) to West Asians (EEF+CHG). North Italians obviously have more EHG (from Yamnaya) than South Italians and Greeks.
"And what evidence is there that most Italians and Greeks aren't largely mixtures of North Italian-like and Near Eastern like populations?"
Already answered. North Italians are the way they are because of Yamnaya-rich Celtic ancestry, which South Italians and Greeks never had.
"What's the bet you'll be praying for a Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Levant, when it becomes clear that this is where a lot of your ancestry is from?"
A lot of your ancestry is from there too (Yamnaya were not the blond supermen of your fantasies), and the rest is from somewhere out in Siberia and related to Native Americans. That last part is why you desperately need PIE to be from EHG.
Myself, I don't pray for anything. I go where the evidence points to, and that's PIE in the Caucasus or Armenia, with two routes of IE expansion after that: 1) south thru Anatolia, and 2) north thru the Steppe.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4078858/figure/fig01/
That's the cline I was talking about from north to south in Europe, and the results of that study pretty much destroy Davidski's 'Bedouin Roman' fantasy.
"The only important gene flows from Near East to Europe must have occurred in prehistoric times and, as genetic evidence suggests, the most prominent migrations should have occurred during the Neolithic."
There's no cline from Anatolian farmers to Yamnaya for North Italians either.
There's a cline from Italy_CA to Yamnaya that includes North Italians. You'll see it if you care to pull your head out of your ass.
That's how Italo-Celtic ended up in Italy.
1) south thru Anatolia
That had nothing to do with PIE. It's just some extra West Asian admixture in Southern Europe, and it came with non-Indo-Europeans (like, duh, Etruscans) or very, very late, like during the Islamic conquests.
I don’t see why the Muslim conquest of Sicily wouldn’t explain a lot of what we’re seeing.
From 827 to 1091, Sicily was under Muslim rule. It was initially ruled by the Aghlabids who were an Arab dynasty descended from the Arabs of Khorasan (Eastern Greater Persia) appointed by the Abbasid Caliph. The army they employed in the conquest Sicily included Arabs, Berbers, and Persians, as well as Muslims from Crete and Andalusia. Arabic appears to have become the predominate language since it was widely spoken even by non-Muslims and was still used for administrative purposes to some degree even after the Norman conquest of the island. Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily was fluent in Arabic even though he ruled in the 13th Century. In 1224, a Muslim uprising in Sicily prompted him to deport many of the Muslims to Lucera in southern mainland Italy. Although that wasn’t the first Muslim presence on mainland Italy, there was also the Emirate of Bari which had only lasted for something like 30 years.
Southern Italy and Sicily had also previously remained within the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) sphere for considerably longer than Northern Italy, so that likely also had an effect.
Regarding the Sicels and the Shekelesh, I've recently read that there was also a tribe called Siculotae in what is now southern Dalmatia or Hercegovina, according to Pliny. Since the Sicels in prehistory had been roaming in the Marche region of Italy according to the same author (he even ascribes the foundation of Ancona and Numana to them), it makes sense to assume a Balkan origin for the Sicels of east central Italy, especially given the archaeologically attested contacts with the Balkans.
The Sicel language looks faintly Italic-related to me, so rather IE, but not like just another variety of Latin or Oscan-Umbrian:
"nunustentimimarustainamiemitomestiduromnanepos
duromiemtomestiveliomnedemponitantomeredesuino
brtome"
"tamuraabesakedqoiaveseurumakesagepipokedlutimbe
levopomanatesemaidarnakeibureitamomiaetiurela"
It's also noteworthy that according to Ptolemy there was an apparently related tribe in southern Sardinia, the Siculensii. Since Sardinians are not exactly Near Eastern shifted it follows that we cannot confidently equate Sicel influence with a Near Eastern shift.
As regards the possible relation to the Shekelesh: If they were ultimately from the Balkans, why not?
In the original model the similarity of neolithic farmer samples in Europe to modern near/middle east samples led to the idea that A traveled to B but it was always possible (at least logically if not archeologically) that the population in question traveled from a third region to both Europe and middle/near east.
Might the same logical argument be made of this cline i.e. initially an Aegean/Anatolian farmer wave later partially over-run in the Levant/Anatolia/Greece region by a CHG heavy population coming down from somewhere to the north and east?
Maybe connected to Hyksos / Sea Peoples?
(Maybe non-IE escaping early IE pressure?)
David said
"The problem with positing the existence of a Southwestern or Arabian farmer component is that Africans carry West Eurasian admixture that is best modeled as Sardinian-like."
I don't see that as a problem because in my model this "SOuthwestern/Arabian farmer" DNA would be pretty mich Sardinian like just with an admixture of something East African shifted. Possibly the only difference is that there is some Afro_Eurasian like admixture into the original Anatolian farmer like dna.
In the past I suspected it just being some SSA admixture which created an East African shift now I am not sure if it is really SSA admixture or some kind of mesolithic-Neolithic West Eurasian admixture in Northeast Africa.
As I said in my previous post and to make it clear What I call "A southwestern farmer" component is imo a late Neolithic phenomenon of an Anatolian farmer like proto farmers going into Northeast Africa/Arabia and getting some small additional admixture. Now what this additonal admixture is, (is it SSA admixture or is it West Eurasian admixture that was present in the region since mesolithic-Neolithic) is the question.
For me this Southwestern farmer DNA is a late Neolithic phenomenon what is basically Anatolian farmer with some admixture.
Grey said
"Might the same logical argument be made of this cline i.e. initially an Aegean/Anatolian farmer wave later partially over-run in the Levant/Anatolia/Greece region by a CHG heavy population coming down from somewhere to the north and east?"
Gray it makes archeoligcal no sense. archeologically West-Central Anatolian farming culture is descend from fertile crescend and not vica versa. The archeolical remains point to an fertile crescent to Anatolia and than Europe route.
But if you mean if an CHG like population overrun the Levant and Anatolia and this was the source. Than obviously yes, I thought this was clear enough.
Waves of CHG from the east as well waves from the South (in case of the Levant) created a gab and made the Anatolians and Levantines being more shifted towards Northeast (CHG) and towards SOuth(Bedouin like).
The source of CHG in Italians could be one of these Bronze Age Anatolian farmer-CHG mixed populations who I think might present the early Latin speakers. Wasn't a study recently saying that earliest traces of Italic were found in Crete?
Here are some fits using 4mix and the Eurogenes CHG K10:
Population Anatolia_Neolithic Druze Yamnaya CHG D statistic
Greek 25 48 19 8 0.1100
Greek_Macedonia 22 48 19 11 0.1030
Greek_Peloponnese 24 49 20 7 0.1117
Italian_Bergamo 34 37 26 3 0.1529
Italian_Tuscan 29 46 21 4 0.1315
Population MN_Average Druze Yamnaya CHG D statistic
Greek 35 38 14 13 0.0418
Greek_Macedonia 31 39 14 16 0.0437
Greek_Peloponnese 33 40 15 12 0.0479
Italian_Bergamo 48 22 19 11 0.0600
Italian_Tuscan 41 34 15 10 0.0523
Population MN_Average BedouinB Yamnaya CHG D statistic
Greek 47 12 14 27 0.0313
Greek_Macedonia 43 13 14 30 0.0337
Greek_Peloponnese 45 13 15 27 0.0373
Italian_Bergamo 55 8 18 19 0.0535
Italian_Tuscan 51 11 15 23 0.0429
Population MN_Average Armenian Yamnaya CHG_model D statistic
Greek 32 53 15 0 0.0483
Greek_Macedonia 28 54 15 3 0.0505
Greek_Peloponnese 31 53 16 0 0.0556
Italian_Bergamo 46 32 19 3 0.0646
Italian_Tuscan 39 46 15 0 0.0592
Population MN_Average Armenia_BA Yamnaya CHG D
Greek 36 64 0 0 0.0613
Greek_Macedonia 31 69 0 0 0.0588
Greek_Peloponnese 35 64 1 0 0.0686
Italian_Bergamo 47 44 9 0 0.0640
Italian_Tuscan 42 55 3 0 0.0688
Population MN_Average Armenia_BA Yamnaya Druze D statistic
Greek 32 40 5 23 0.0434
Greek_Macedonia 27 51 2 20 0.0436
Greek_Peloponnese 31 39 6 24 0.0478
Italian_Bergamo 45 33 11 11 0.0607
Italian_Tuscan 38 33 7 22 0.0537
Population Anatolia_Neolithic Armenia_BA WHG Druze D
Greek 24 45 10 21 0.0184
Greek_Macedonia 20 51 9 20 0.0166
Greek_Peloponnese 22 44 11 23 0.0158
Italian_Bergamo 34 46 15 5 0.0246
Italian_Tuscan 29 40 13 18 0.0196
Population Anatolia_Neolithic BedouinB Armenia_BA WHG D statistic
Greek 27 5 58 10 0.0265
Greek_Macedonia 23 4 64 9 0.0284
Greek_Peloponnese 26 5 59 10 0.0219
Italian_Bergamo 34 2 49 15 0.0223
Italian_Tuscan 31 4 52 13 0.0237
Population Yamnaya MN_Average WHG CHG D statistic
Greek 18 50 4 28 0.1140
Greek_Macedonia 18 46 4 32 0.1186
Greek_Peloponnese 19 48 5 28 0.1206
Italian_Bergamo 18 55 6 21 0.0702
Italian_Tuscan 17 53 5 25 0.1036
Population Yamnaya Anatolia_Neolithic WHG CHG D statistic
Greek 17 40 14 29 0.1138
Greek_Macedonia 17 37 14 32 0.1186
Greek_Peloponnese 18 38 15 29 0.1207
Italian_Bergamo 18 44 17 21 0.0699
Italian_Tuscan 17 42 16 25 0.1034
Population MN_Average Armenia_BA Bell_Beaker_Germany Druze D statistic
Greek 26 38 13 23 0.0371
Greek_Macedonia 23 47 9 21 0.0393
Greek_Peloponnese 22 34 17 27 0.0387
Italian_Bergamo 33 31 25 11 0.0454
Italian_Tuscan 29 29 19 23 0.0436
Population Yamnaya MN_Average Druze CHG D statistic
Greek 14 35 38 13 0.0418
Greek_Macedonia 14 31 39 16 0.0437
Greek_Peloponnese 15 33 40 12 0.0479
Italian_Bergamo 19 48 22 11 0.06
Italian_Tuscan 15 41 34 10 0.0523
Population MN_Average Armenia_BA Yamnaya Druze D statistic
Greek 32 40 5 23 0.0434
Greek_Macedonia 27 51 2 20 0.0436
Greek_Peloponnese 31 39 6 24 0.0478
Italian_Bergamo 45 33 11 11 0.0607
Italian_Tuscan 38 33 7 22 0.0537
Functionally the best fits for these Italian and Greek populations with this data are the fits of the set of mixing populations : Anatolia_Neolithic, Armenia_BA, WHG, Druze. No idea about Southern Italians here as I could find any in the CHG K10 spreadsheet.
@EEF and SW Asian are not Brothers
Anatolia_Neolithic and modern SW Asians are very differnt mtDNA wise. They belong to the same Paleolithic clades, but they share hardly mtDNA from within the last 10,000 or 15,000 years.
Because of this I'm very hesitant with treating them as brother farmer(Neolithic not Palaeilthic) clades like some of you are. They are closer to each other than to anyone else in the world(Using WHG and EHG as representative of Europe), but exactly what their relationship is is unknown.
We should do all kinds of tests with D-stats, ADMIXTURE, TreeMix, etc. to figure out what the relationship is before assuming they were so similar. Before anyone does this don't make assumptions.
@No one in Europe is EEF+CHG or EEF+
It's clear looking at ADMIXTURE and PCA Italy, Balkans, and to a lesser extent Iberia and France have SouthWest Asian admixture that isn't exactly like EEF or CHG. CHG was from the Caucasus, the chances a pure CHG population made it to Europe without mixing with non-CHGs is very low.
David, can you fit any other South Europeans besides Albanians as Hungary_BA + CHG?
Basques, North Italians, Tuscans, Greek_Thessaly especially, although you can try South Italy and such too.
One reason why I've usually preferred the explanation that this Bedouin-like admixture is just SSA is because NW Africans don't have particularly high Arabic admixture (if any at all). They're mostly Berbers with SSA admixture. And yet in K15 they score 17.5% in Red Sea while Lebanese_Muslim scores 10.7%.
And then Iberia has some admixture that comes from the East Mediterranean, but again not particularly high. Most of this Bedouin-like in Iberia comes from NW Africa:
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/29/11791/F2.expansion.html
So I don't see a strong reason for connecting this admixture specifically with the Arabian Peninsula or south Levant, but rather with SSA (but I welcome any further tests to determine this, of course).
@Alberto
It would be interesting to see if the Tunisian Berbers lacking all SSA admixture also have this. See this paper:
"Genomic Ancestry of North Africans Supports Back-to-Africa Migrations"
It seems there is a little connection there between Near East and Italy, but the majority of Italy's position seems due to a cross between Neolithic Europe and Caucasus or perhaps Neolithic Anatolia and something from BA Eastern Europe or earlier.
It would make sense for there to be a minor footprint of the Roman/Greek period which did see movement to and from North Africa/Mideast.
For that kind of "Red Sea" or "SW Asian" type ADMIXTURE component, I kind of tend to not be skeptical that as an explanation due to the way the component's FST distances behave.
E.g. on Eurogenes K15:
NE_African Sub-Saharan
North_Sea 0.109 0.144
Atlantic 0.108 0.144
Baltic 0.114 0.148
Eastern_Euro 0.108 0.142
West_Med 0.112 0.149
West_Asian 0.103 0.139
East_Med 0.094 0.132
Red Sea 0.106 0.139
South_Asian 0.102 0.131
and
West_Med East_Med
North_Sea 0.029 0.026
Atlantic 0.028 0.024
Baltic 0.037 0.034
Eastern_Euro 0.038 0.032
West_Med 0 0.027
West_Asian 0.035 0.019
East_Med 0.027 0
Middle_Eastern 0.051 0.038
South_Asian 0.075 0.055
or Eurogenes K13:
NE African Sub-Saharan
North_Atlantic 0.122 0.146
Baltic 0.127 0.15
West_Med 0.124 0.15
West_Asian 0.116 0.14
East_Med 0.108 0.135
Red_Sea 0.121 0.141
South_Asian 0.113 0.133
and
West Med East Med
North_Atlantic 0.028 0.026
Baltic 0.036 0.035
West_Med 0 0.028
West_Asian 0.036 0.021
East_Med 0.028 0
Red_Sea 0.05 0.039
South_Asian 0.076 0.06
Not particularly close to African (Northeast or SSA component), quite far from other West Eurasian components.
Possibly this is all just SSA ancestry in the component behaving in an unintuitive way though. Or a trick of ADMIXTURE. Just doesn't seem intuitive.
Fst-distances can skew up relations of ADMIXTURE components due to drift. I wonder if there's an easy way to run D-stats on them...
Running TreeMix on ADMIXTURE components reveals a lot.
Harappaworld components at 10 edges
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3vEDdpZDjUpaEJGQUVScmtCeVk/edit?pref=2&pli=1
MDLP World-22 at 5 edges
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qzOo1OInoBE/UFTSbwprl3I/AAAAAAAADzM/EQQN9ojGN_U/s1600/MDLD22world-migs.png
Dodecad K12b at 5 edges
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eEjFmaB3KyA/T1zj_uJ_wzI/AAAAAAAAEl4/LuEQ7XXuJCA/s1600/tree.png
The fst-distances for these are around somewhere and I don't think the fst-distances fully correlate with those TreeMix results.
@Karl K
It would be interesting to see if the Tunisian Berbers lacking all SSA admixture also have this. See this paper: "Genomic Ancestry of North Africans Supports Back-to-Africa Migrations"
- I haven't read it yet, but are we sure that study doesn't make an amateur mistake by marking Tunisians as "100% Maghrebi" without SSA admixture?
@Simon: that would explain nothing, what we're trying to understand is why Sicilians are so anomalously slanted to the Levant, not to the Balcans.
Re. the Sicel language it does not look Semitic to me, and I'm sure you'll agree, but it's possible that they switched language at some point in their mercenariate. Doesn't look Italic to me either anyhow and I spot Semitic-sounding words like "bureita" (isnt' that something like "cape"?), while some of the grammar may be vasconic ("-ela" = that...). I don't see anything Italic other than "nepos", which is actually also found in Etruscan.
@Labayu: How do you explain that 800 Arab conquest of Iberia left absolutely no legacy, except maybe a small Y-DNA J1 excess in Granada, as did not the Arab conquest of Crete but a mere 100 years occupation in Sicily would change everything? It must be something older.
@Kurti: I don't think you can justify the claim of "waves from the South". The North→South ones are quite possible, even very likely, but what South? There was no "South" before the domestication of the camel. Arabia itself was only Neolithized from the Levant and Mesopotamia, relatively late and sparsely. Semites almost certainly spread from the semidesertic arch and did so on foot and in limited numbers initially (compared with farmer densities). What we probably see is only Egyptian persistent "leak" through the ages towards the Levant (Egypt has much larger population and it has always been that way). This leaking probably began in pre-Neolithic times and continued in most periods.
@Karl_K
It would be interesting to see if the Tunisian Berbers lacking all SSA admixture also have this.
No such thing.
@Gill
It seems there is a little connection there between Near East and Italy, but the majority of Italy's position seems due to a cross between Neolithic Europe and Caucasus or perhaps Neolithic Anatolia and something from BA Eastern Europe or earlier.
Uniparental marker data doesn't support this.
How do you know? Why would the authors conclude that? Do you have that data?
@Maju How do you explain that 800 Arab conquest of Iberia left absolutely no legacy, except maybe a small Y-DNA J1 excess in Granada, as did not the Arab conquest of Crete but a mere 100 years occupation in Sicily would change everything? It must be something older.
I’m not set on that being the only explanation, but the Arab conquest of Iberia did leave a legacy, just a different one. The army that conquered Iberia were mostly Berbers and politically separated from the greater Caliphate. It was ruled locally and then from Morocco. The army that conquered Sicily included a lot of Easterners, Arabs and Persians both and remained connected to the Abbasid Caliphate centered in Iraq and then the Fatimid Caliphate whose power base was in Egypt. Sicily was under Muslim rule for more than 260 years and the community still existed 200 years after Christian conquest because they weren’t driven out in the same way that was common in Iberia. The last remaining Muslims in Iberia who hadn’t converted were expelled by the Spanish, whereas the Kingdom of Sicily just relocated their Muslim population to Southern Italy.
I do think that Sicily and Southern Italy were also affected by their longer connection to the Eastern Roman Empire and to the Greek world and Phoenicia prior to that. Also check out this map of the IBD sharing Alberto posted: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/29/11791/F2.large.jpg
@Labayu: the Berbers didn't leave any meaningful legacy in Iberia, even less than one would normally expect. In fact the already mentioned J1 excess in East Andalusia (roughly former Granada kingdom, last Muslim stand in Iberia) is the only signature of those Berbers or Arabs. Iberian E1b-M81 doesn't have a distribution (concentrated in the Western third) that can be matched in any way with the Muslim conquest (NOT following any sort of S-N or SE-NW cline at all) and is therefore clearly much older (maybe Neolithic, maybe even Paleolithic).
As for Sicily, the frequency of E1b-M81 is 1.85%, while in Tunisia it is 43% (the lowest of all NW Africa). So the overall male input from Muslim and Punic conquests, both based on Tunisia, and any other flow from that area, is not higher than 4%. Autosomally it is no doubt much smaller (male-biased invasions have small impacts in this aspect, as they procreate with local women as general rule - only a systematic sustained demic colonization would change things but no data supports that hypothesis).
There is however a much larger fraction of J1 (6%), this is just double of what we see in East Andalusia (3%), so it is not that much. Relevant West Asians range from 19% (Lebanese) to 40% (Saudis). But Tunisians have 28%, so (considering what I said about E1b-M81 above) we should reduce the direct West Asian J1 input in Sicily to ~5%. If it is Arab, then the overall Arab male impact would be c. 12%, if it is Phoenician, then c. 25%, if something like Palestinians (33% J1, maybe Shekelesh were from Palestine, maybe not), then c. 15%. Autosomal influence should be significantly smaller in all cases unless we can also track mtDNA to those regions.
And mtDNA, per Samo 2014, tends mostly to the Levant (Lebanon, Jordan, and maybe to some extent to North Africa too), while the Y-DNA has a much weaker Levantine tendency and is instead clearly leaning towards Phocaea and Smyrna. So the conclusion, barring an invasion by the mythical Amazons, should be that the anomaly towards the Levant is generally older than the classical Greek colonization of the island. So no room for Arabs or even Phoenicians: this Levantine genetic signature is older than Magna Grecia almost certainly, still allowing for my Shekelesh hypothesis but not for your Arab Muslim one.
Refs:
· Samo 2014 (discussed by me here).
· Adams 2008.
· Wikipedia: Haplogroup J-M267 (=J1)
@Karl_K
How do you know? Why would the authors conclude that? Do you have that data?
I do have the data. They just made a mistake. Happens all the time.
IMO, there is an evidence of a rather large CHG-rich input into Sardinians. Why not assume that it was similar (Bronze Age) expansion that has touched all of SE Europe?
@George: one thing is the Caucasus component, which may have arrived via Anatolia and the Balcans since the very early Neolithic or maybe the secondary, Halaf-related, wave of Dimini-Vinca, later leaking especially to Italy, and another thing is the Sicilian anomaly, which is more clearly tending to the Levant. Not sure if you mean that.
Anyhow Sardinians are average Western for Caucasus component, just like Iberians or Brits, only exceeded by Basques in this aspect, so it should not have affected them much. If CHG and modern Caucasus component disagree, then this CHG element is probably just apparent, a phantom, and a legacy of EEFs.
@ Maju
I agree with your discussion rejecting significant Arab influences in southern Europe, even south Iberia and Sicily.
As to you rather point about CHG making its way well within the Neolithic- this is unlikely. The late Kumtepe genomes doubtfully had large amounts (I imagine, if/ when Dave can analyse it), and even EBA_Hungary did not have much.
In absence of Copper Age aDNA from the Caucasus, Anatolia and the Balkans, one has to take the current signposts we do posses: it must have arrived during the Copper Age watershed.
@http://italicroots.lefora.com
First of all just to bring to your attention that we are talking about two different clines. I am referring to a cline of modern populations (Levant-Cyprus-Crete-S.Italy-Greece-C.Italy-N.Italy) and you are referring to a cline of both ancient and modern populations (ENF-S.Italians/Greeks-CHG). My cline exists and is quite obvious in David's plot. Your cline does make archaeological and genetic sense, but is not supported by the current data. Although, of course, I do agree that South Italians and Greeks are largely a mix between Anatolian farmers and a CHG-like population (+small amounts of European HG and Bedouin-like admixture).
@Davidski,
Can you post a list of all your DNA samples? The link you gave a few months ago is no longer valid.
@Davidski,
Here are some TreeMix ideas.
Out Group: Mbuti, Yoruba, Han
Western: Anatolia_Neolithic, Loschbour, Karelia_HG, MA1, Cypriot, Assyrian, Druze, Bedouin, Kotias, Georgian
Out Group: Mbuti, Yoruba, Han
Western: Anatolia_Neolithic, Loschbour, Karelia_HG, MA1, Swedish, Yamnaya, Cypriot, Assyrian, Druze, Bedouin, Kotias, Georgian
@Rob: the difference between CHG and modern Caucasus component is probably owed mostly to "Basal Eurasian": CHG were extremely high on this, modern Caucasians are not, EEF were rather high. So it's not "something Caucasus" but something that only obliquely links to CHG and should vanish if you use a proper EEF counter-weight.
Krefter,
I can't take TreeMix requests because the analyses take too long to set up.
You should try and learn how to use it. Might be interesting.
@Maju:
A factor than can explain (part?) of the E1-M81 in Western Iberia is the presence of Moor slaves from the 9th till the 13th centuries.
I know a few tens of medieval charters (from Galicia) where these slaves are given, distributed, or freed. In some royal charter you read how the king give away some _captured_ Moors to a monastery; and there is a very interesting document of the 12th century that follows the genealogy of some of these slaves (because taxes): most were men, artisans and laborers, bought in the south and brought to Galicia; many would baptism and take local names, and marry local women, and after that they or their children would become finally free men (although subject to taxation to their old lords). I know also of some 20 hamlets called Vila de Mouros, Porto de Mouros, Mourelos and the like, all around Galicia.
Why in Galicia and not in Castille? Because in Galicia there's is _one and only one_ documented succesful Arab raid in between 750 and the conquest of the kingdom of Granada, that of Almanzor in 999: he destroyed Santiago de Compostela and took the bells of the church south to Andalusia; it was considered a big success by some Arab chroniclers. Meanwhile, Castille was open to frequent harassment. I mean, by 1000 AD they can had some hundred Moors serfs in Galicia (or Asturias or even Leon) and not worry too much about them being a security risk. But this was not the case in Castille, which was open to frequent harassment. Ok, I doubt that they were more than a few hundred in any given moment in time, but still they must have had an impact. And Galician colonists later repopulated much of central Portugal and western Andalusia in the 13th century.
1º- An example from 911, a royal grant to the church of Santiago de Compostela (34 captured serfs, many of whom already have taken local names): “donamus etiam glorie uestre ex mancipiis quos sca. intercessione uestra de gente hismaelitarum cepimus; nominibus Froilanum, Leodericum cognomento Abdela, Froritum cognomento Abderahamam cum sua muliere Maria et sua filia Guntina, Zahit, Zahim, Scahit, Zahaton, Iausar, Lallus, Fetta, Melchi, Zahit, Aloitus, Fare, Adosinda cognomento Anna, Teodegundia cognomento Anza, Carrataim, Belita, Rahama, Kerita, Aissima cepta cum filia sua. item et alios Zahat, Eikar, Abdel, Gatel, Calaph. item Cahat, Alfarach, Abuzahat, Feta et Alazath.”
(“We give you these serfs that we captured from the Hismaelits”)
2º - Another one of 897, a royal grant to the church of Lugo (50 captured serfs): “mancipia ex Hysmaelitarum Terra captiva duximus L, quibus precipimus expleri obsequia Ipsius Sedis”
(my translation: “50 serfs that from the land of the Hismaelits we brought captived”)
3º - A nobleman donation in Dozón, Pontevedra, 1124 (14 “Ethiopians”): “et cum equitibus indomitis viginti et domatis aliis decem et baciis triginta et ovibus centum et ethiopibus quatuordecim inter sarracenos et sarracenas”
(“and 14 Ethiops, both male and female Saracens”)
4º - A geneology (12th century): “(...) iste Iohannes natus est de alio mauro nomine Mafumate quem duxerat fater Pelagius (…) Iohanne Petri, dictus Galafri, qui fuit filius de Mafumate quod duxit abbas Martinus (…) Petro Nigro de Faro, qui fuit filius de Mafumate (…) de Fernando Nigro qui prius uocatus est Mafumate, natus est Martinus Fernandi et Eluira Fernandi (…) de Mafumate, texilano, qui in babtismo uocatus est Martinus Menendi (…) Iohannes Zada, zarpentarius, uenit de Portugalia et habuit unum filium de muliere galega, et uocatur Petrus Maurus (...)”
(“John is born from another Moor called Mafumate (…) John Pérez, called Galafri, son of Mafumate (…) Peter _Negro_ from Faro, son of Mafumate (…) From Ferdinand _Negro_, who was called Mafumate in the past, are born Martin Fernández and Elvira Fernández (…) Mafumate, weaver, who in baptism is called Martin Méndez (…) John Zada, carpenter, who came from Portugal and have a son with a Galician woman who was called Peter _Moor_ (...)
@ Davidski
"There's a cline from Italy_CA to Yamnaya that includes North Italians."
You're flailing, but you're still wrong. There's very little Modern European variation on the Y-axis, just a few isolated clusters like Sardinians and Basques, and ones with recent Siberian admixture like Finns and Russians (and those shift more towards EHG than to Yamnaya). The only real Europe-wide cline is the one I mentioned before from WHG+EHG to EEF+CHG.
------------------
@ Labayu
"I don’t see why the Muslim conquest of Sicily wouldn’t explain a lot of what we’re seeing."
Because Sicily and the area around Lucera have very low (2-4 %) recent Arab/Berber admixture, and the rest of the South has no more than the North.
http://italianthro.blogspot.com/2011/10/moors-expelled-from-sicily-and-south.html
That's not sufficient to explain the North-South cline, but seeing it as part of a larger older European cline works.
David, how about that qpAdm?
If CHG-BA_Hungary worked for Albanians, it might also work for at least some other South Europeans (N-Italy, N-Greek, Basque?). If it works for those and not others try adding a Near Eastern or N-African third population.
@James
You're flailing, but you're still wrong.
Blah, Blah, Blah...
The Late Bronze Age Tumulus sample from Montenegro clusters with Iberians and North Italians. The Iron Age Tumulus sample from Montenegro is even more northern than that.
http://polishgenes.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/pca-of-rise595-rise596-and-rise598.html
Have a think what that means for the genetic structure of Southeastern Europeans who lived prior to the Roman era.
Here's a clue; why would South and Central Italians during the Bronze Age be much different from the people just across the Adriatic in the Western Balkans, unless they were, say, recent migrants from Asia like the Etruscans?
You are even a better dreamer than Polako. All Muslims of Sicily/Italy were expelled by the Normans, Swabians and Angevins and replaced with North Italians, Tuscans, Swiss, French and to a much lesser extent English and Germans. Whereas Spaniards used to replaced expelled muslims with other Spaniards. That's all well documented just to let you know.
Because the Adriatic Sea is a very strong genetic barrier like the Alps and Montenegro is much closer to WHG/EHG rich populations of Lithuania and Russia, so your comparison makes no sense.
@Cossue
That's really interesting. It might explain why Galicians have a similar proportion of Maghrebi ancestry as Andalusians do.
@http://italicroots.lefora.com
Because the Adriatic Sea is a very strong genetic barrier like the Alps and Montenegro is much closer to WHG/EHG rich populations of Lithuania and Russia, so your comparison makes no sense.
It's not a strong genetic barrier, it just looks like it today.
Present-day Montenegrins are of course Slavic-speakers with admixture from near the Baltic Sea.
@James Because Sicily and the area around Lucera have very low (2-4 %) recent Arab/Berber admixture, and the rest of the South has no more than the North... That's not sufficient to explain the North-South cline, but seeing it as part of a larger older European cline works.
That makes sense. Although, why do you think it's an older cline rather than related to greater and more sustained Greek/Eastern Roman influence in the south? Not that I think the two explanations are necessarily mutually exclusive.
@ Maju There is however a much larger fraction of J1 (6%), this is just double of what we see in East Andalusia (3%), so it is not that much.
It’s not that much, but the relative difference is consistent with the historical record regarding the Muslim presence in each as I described.
I agree that we can assume that most genetic influence from the Muslim conquest would have been male mediated. Although I’d offer the one caveat about interpreting the modern data, that it’s quite possible that the next conquest could have partially erased the Arab influence in the Y-haplogroup frequencies while effecting the autosomal DNA less.
The mtDNA being similar the Levant is interesting, but is the mtDNA of the modern Levant really similar to the Bronze Age Levant? Maybe I’m missing something, but at first glance, I don’t see any mtDNA in Sicily that couldn’t have already been there in the Neolithic. Looking at the PCA in Samo 2014, you could say Sicily’s mtDNA is similar to the Levant, but it’s equally valid to say the appear to be intermediate between North Central Italy and Libya/Algeria with the exception of Agrigento which doesn’t look Levantine at all, but similar to Iberia and North Central Italy. I don’t think that methodology when dealing with uniparental is very solid anyway, because frequencies can easily be skewed by any number of factors, such as founder effect. Looking at median-joining networks seems better.
In any case, the point James made has convinced me that the Muslim conquest doesn’t have enough explanatory power on its own. Of course I was already considering other factors to have contributed.
Cossue,
While what you say is true, I think we're dealing with too sporadic and few in number amount of slaves to have any significant genetic impact. Not even the germanic invasions had a large impact, and they totalled a couple hundred of thousands.
Besides, as you know (likely better than myself), many 'sarracens' were muladi, like Ibn Marwan Ibn al-Djillīqui, whose name clearly indicates he's originally from NW Iberia.
@Cossue: it makes no sense, sorry. The frequencies are not just almost homogeneous through all the Western third of the peninsula but even peak in some mountain areas totally inapt for plantation economy, which is where one would expect to see slaves. We know on the contrary of large farmlands with Muslim workforce in the south (Andalusia) and East (Aragon, Valencia) and that the landowners resisted actively the decrees forcing conversion-or-exile out of fear of losing their workforce. Of all this area of historical Muslim workforce, only West Andalusia fits in the pattern but not better than Asturias, Galicia or León... or even North Wales! Yeah, no kidding, there's a community in North Wales that has frequencies of E1b-M81 much larger than anywhere in Iberia. All this fits much better with founder effects related to Neolithic ("bounce" of Cardial in Morocco?), Megalithism and Bell Beaker (both phenomena rooted in Portugal). But there is a significant chance that it is even older: from the Solutrean-Oranian interaction. Let's not forget that La Braña bros. had a mystery component, absent in other WHGs, that could well be North African and that North Africans have a very strong Iberian-like genetic element, most apparent in autosomal and mtDNA data, indicating surely a flow from Iberia in Paleolithic times, which may well have included a backflow via West Andalusia and Portugal.
"Black" is anyhow not such an uncommon name. It exists in English (more common is Brown however, same meaning), it exists in Basque as first name (Beltza, also Zuria = White), etc. In Spanish exists Moreno, which means "Moor-like" (although it has come to mean of dark hair or tawny skin color; "ponerse moreno" = to get a tan), Pardo (brown) and Prieto (Portuguese and Ladino: "preto" = black). In reality, even when it actually indicated originally a reference to pigmentation, it did not imply "black" as in African-like but rather just of darker complexion than average or maybe even just having black hair. All the other historical references I accept but they are probably of low significance.
Maju said
" I don't think you can justify the claim of "waves from the South". The North→South ones are quite possible, even very likely, but what South? There was no "South" before the domestication of the camel. Arabia itself was only Neolithized from the Levant and Mesopotamia, relatively late and sparsely. Semites almost certainly spread from the semidesertic arch and did so on foot and in limited numbers initially (compared with farmer densities). What we probably see is only Egyptian persistent "leak" through the ages towards the Levant (Egypt has much larger population and it has always been that way). This leaking probably began in pre-Neolithic times and continued in most periods."
I think there is no doubt that the Afro_Asiatic language family spred somewhere around Northeast Africa. So when those Afro_Asiatic speakers reached the Levant through back migration and from there Arabia. There is absolutely no doubt that those Proto Afro_asiatic speakers brought genes with them which they catched up in Northeast Africa and through various Semitic expansions into the North, the Levant and Mesopotamia this Northeast African admixture was brought. What I call "Southwestern Farmer" component is basically Anatolian-Farmer with an Northeast African shift. THis Northeast African shift could represent mesolithic waves of West Eurasians there or a hybrid of West Eurasian and SSA or purely SSA admixture. The whole point is that the Afro_Asiatic speakers brought DNA into the Near East that shifted them southwards.
"it’s quite possible that the next conquest could have partially erased the Arab influence in the Y-haplogroup frequencies while effecting the autosomal DNA less".
But how do you explain in the case of Sicily that the Y-DNA tends to Phocaean Greeks? In your hypothesis it should tend to mainland Italy and/or Western Europe instead.
In the case of Iberia E1b-M81 (Y-DNA) and mtDNA U6 frequencies overlap way too well. Curiously very other few African mtDNA lineages are present (a trickle of some L(xM,N) lines but that's about it and they seem very old anyhow).
"The mtDNA being similar the Levant is interesting, but is the mtDNA of the modern Levant really similar to the Bronze Age Levant?"
That will only be clarified by ancient DNA research, of course. But I have been chewing on even further on the Shekelesh hypothesis and I realized that in the latest Atlantic Bronze, there is a connection via Sicily (and less clearly Etruria) to Cyprus in the import of certain type of fibulae. We know that by the end of the Atlantic Bronze c. 800 BCE, the Phoenicians were already established in Carthage and Gadir, as well as several other settlements. So I'm considering that the Shekelesh/Siculi were pre-Hebrew Cannanites, just like Phoenicians, and somehow instrumental in the western expansion of these, which has no precedents other than the semi-mythical Myceanean incursions to Iberia (which are confirmed by archaeology, notably the switch of the funerary customs of El Argar to Greek-style pithoi burials, while Iberian tholoi reach Greece). Overall what we are discussing is a Mediterranean landscape (or "seascape"?) of growing East-West interactions that culminate in Phoenician colonization but that was not all the time univocal but rather had some level of bidirectionality, with Westerners (notably the very apparent Shardana/Sardinians but also the Berbers and maybe others) also heading East at times. Sicily is just right in the middle of all.
"Looking at median-joining networks seems better".
Indeed, especially when discerning the origin of haplogroups, but not always accessible. In this case nobody seems to question the origin of the lineages, what we are trying to discern is the affinities of Sicilians, and what we see is that the one with the Levant is deeper (mtDNA, autosomal) than the one with the Aegean (Y-DNA mostly). That is something.
@Kurti: but the Afroasiatic expansion is almost certainly Mesolithic. Not only the family is extremely old (at the very limit of linguistic discernment power, which is roughly 10-12 millennia) but the archaeology and the genetics support it. Else how do you expect E1b-M72 (V13 specifically) to have been present in the European Neolithic? EEFs (and other West Asian Neolithic peoples, as we can see in Syrian ancient mtDNA) were already influenced genetically by the Afroasiatic wave even if they may have spoken other languages (I'm tentatively proposing some of the Nubian or East Sudanic family, which seems oddly related to Basque, but there could be others too).
North African in La Brana?
Should be easy to check with things like:
Mozabite Gorilla Loschbour La_Brana
Mozabite Gorilla Loschbour Iberia_EN
Mozabite Gorilla Modern La_Brana
Mozabite Gorilla Modern Iberia_EN
@Saikorth: I'd rather use South Moroccans, because these have more clearly the mystery "Aterian" component that others only have at very low frequencies.
Anyway, apparent African admixture in La Braña appears in Olalde and Lazaridis and elusively in several analysis by Dienekes (echoed here). So it should not take anyone by surprise.
@Maju:
I'm not implying that _all_ E1b1-M81 in Europe is recent, what I am saying is that we have _plenty_ of documents, which should not be neglected, showing that there were an active “importation” of Moor serfs into the NW Iberian peninsula at least during the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, and that this people usually mixed into the local population in just a pair or generations, after becoming Christians. So they were never “expulsed” but integrated (vs most Aragonese/Valencian/Castilian/Ansalusian Moors, who maintained their religion and culture, and were expulsed) and their cultural impact was near null, because of their low social status, but their genetic input is there.
Of course Nigro as a name meant usually simply “swarthy” (we can add Galician surname Pardo = Brown) and not necessarily African, but when we have a geneology of people of recent Moorish origin, and many of these people are surnamed Moor or Black, probably these are _descriptive_ names, with little -if any- derogatory meaning.
Regards.
@Maju
But how do you explain in the case of Sicily that the Y-DNA tends to Phocaean Greeks? In your hypothesis it should tend to mainland Italy and/or Western Europe instead.
It wasn’t so much a hypothesis as a speculation based on my understanding of the history and a question regarding its plausibility. As a result of this conversation, I don’t believe the Muslim conquest is actually capable of explaining the bulk of the phenomenon.
About the Shekelesh (škrš) though, they weren’t circumcised. You could misunderstand line 52 of the Great Karnak Inscription that way, but it’s only referring to the Ekwesh. After that it actually lists 222 Shekelesh foreskins among the spoils and specifically says the Ekwesh did not have foreskins when each are listed separately.
@Maju,
Also, apparently E1b-M81 is not evenly distributed in Galicia: according to a not-that-recent-paper (Brión et al. 2004 “Hierarchical analysis of 30 Y-chromosome SNPs in European Population”), 12 out of 292 men from Galicia (a 4%) were E1b-M81, but of those, 2 men were from Ourense, 2 from the interior of Pontevedra, 2 from Santiago and 5 from Lugo; but for the 120 men sampled from the coastal regions, from the Rías Baixas in the SW till the Mariñas in the limit with Asturias, just one was E1b-M81 (less than a 1%).
So, the further we progress east, to the interior and to León, the old capital of the Kingdom of León, the stronger that this signal gets, but in the coastal areas it is apparently near testimonial. I think that this is compatible with a “recent” arrival, since it is not homogeneous (except if we assume an even more “recent” coastal pop. substitution by a similar population with little E1-M81).
From the numbers in the mentioned article (fast and dirty, don't take as granted):
Galicia (NW Iberia) Interior Coast
n = 292 172 120
E1b-M81 = 4% 6% <1%
E1b-M78 = 2% 3% <1%
G = 3% 2% 4%
I(xM26) = 10% 8% 12%
I-M26 = 2% <1% 3%
J = 18% 17% 20%
R1b = 55% 53% 59%
"but the Afroasiatic expansion is almost certainly Mesolithic."
Defintiely not into the Near East. The earliest evidences of anything Afro_Asiatic (Semites) in the Near East are Akkadians ~23000 BC
And honestly doubt that the formation of the Afro_asiatic language family predates the Neolithic revolution.
@Labayu: we know if a "sea people" was or not circumcised based on how Egyptians abused their dead bodies for trophies: circumcised ones had their hands removed, while uncircumcised ones had their genitals removed instead. Shekelesh had their hands removed based on everything I can find online. For instance:
· Source 1: Egyptian scenes show that the Shekelesh prisoners had their hands removed (and were also circumcised) - these hands were then presented to the pharaoh as a count of the enemy. A Shekelesh prince is depicted wearing a beard and with a prominent, thin nose and a swept-back turban or hair style [typical "Retenu" or Syro-Canaanite look].
· Source 2: the Ekwesh, Shekelesh and Sherden were circumcised.
The Sherden may have adopted the practice of circumcision only after becoming mercenaries of Egypt, 100 years earlier, I speculate. Only Semites and Egyptians were circumcised for all we know: the Libyans were not, the Philistines were not either, for Greeks a circumcised penis was obscene, there's no evidence of circumcision in Europe other than among Jews and Muslims (and more recently some English Christians, to the perplexity of all).
@Cossue: "So, the further we progress east, to the interior and to León, the old capital of the Kingdom of León, the stronger that this signal gets, but in the coastal areas it is apparently near testimonial. I think that this is compatible with a “recent” arrival"...
On the contrary, a recent arrival would leave a stronger signal in the more exposed and cosmopolitan areas of the coast. Mountain areas are always refuges, more conservative.
@Kurti: "The earliest evidences of anything Afro_Asiatic (Semites) in the Near East are Akkadians ~[2300] BC".
That's like saying that the first evidence of Indoeuropean is from c. 2000 BCE, when it was first written down in places distant from its homeland. You just haven't thought about the problem. It's the most lazy kind of thought I could get as answer and I'm so annoyed by that intellectual laziness that I'm not going to bother answering in detail. Just some leads: (1) African influence into Palestine Mesolithi, particularly the semidesert variant of it, (2) circum-arabic pastoralist complex, (3) Mesopotamian semites arrived from the West and did so c. 3900 BCE, much earlier than Sargon.
In The paper Gene Flow From North Africa http://www.pnas.org/content/110/29/11791.full, they reckon that the Maghrebi impact on I Beria is due to the Moors whereas the Near Eastern impact on Europe is much older. It certainly diffused (at low levels) far more widely in Europe with noticeable impacts in France and Switzerland.
@Maju: "On the contrary, a recent arrival would leave a stronger signal in the more exposed and cosmopolitan areas of the coast. Mountain areas are always refuges, more conservative"
Agree: In Galicia, in the Middle Ages, the monasteries and noblemen got their most productive lands in the interior valleys, protected by the mountains; while the coastal areas were more scarcely settled, as they were open to Viking and other peoples incursion and depredation.
So landowners settled their serfs in the interior, protected by the mountains, not in the coast.
@Maju
A Shekelesh prince is depicted wearing a beard and with a prominent, thin nose and a swept-back turban or hair style [typical "Retenu" or Syro-Canaanite look].
That’s what I was referring to when I mentioned speculation in the secondary sources. That image at Medinet Habu has an inscription, it doesn’t say that is a Shekelesh prince, only the first two characters are visible.
This is what is visible: š3…
This is Shekelesh: š'k'rwš
This is Shasu: š3sw
For it to be Shekelesh, it would have to be a variant spelling that we have no evidence for. The Shasu are the people of Transjordan, most likely the ancestors of the Edomites and Moabites, but certainly a Canaanite people. There is no reason to assume that depicts a Shekelesh.
See here: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/371726
Source 2: the Ekwesh, Shekelesh and Sherden were circumcised.
I think that author misunderstands the primary source. This is the text:
[…Sher]den, Shekelesh, Akawasha from the foreign lands of the sea who did not have fore[skins]
[…fore]skins Shekelesh: 222 men
amounting to: 250 hands
Tursha: 742 men
amounting to: 790 hands
Sherden […]
[…Ak]washa who did not have foreskins who were slain and their hands carried off, because they did not have [foreskins…]
In my opinion, only the Akwasha were circumcised according to this, but looking at the first line only, it would be ambiguous. The numbers don't seem to make sense either way.
See page 70 of the PDF (which is page 56 of the book): https://www.academia.edu/323264/The_Great_Karnak_Inscription_of_Merneptah_Grand_Strategy_in_the_13th_Century_B.C
Reading the comments, we've reached a consensus:
Survey says: Womp womp womp.
Davidski grasping at straws, based on not being able to take some challenging comments on the York thread.
@Labayu: I think it's very clear: not only the Sherden, Shekeles and Ekwesh (Akawasha) are listed together as circumcised but also, just after that, the Shekelesh are specifically listed as having their hands (and not their penises) taken as trophy. The Sherden are less clear because the specific passage is lost but the Shekelesh are very clear. Unsuspected to me the Tursha (Teresh) are also losing their hands, so they were probably circumcised. Instead the Rebu (Libu = Libyans) are clearly described as uncircumcissed.
I agree that with so much text lost it becomes confusing at times but in the worst case the interpretation of Shekelesh being circumcised is reasonable.
As for the Shashu, OK.
@Cossue: I think you're distorting things but not really going to enter on a circular discussion about details of a very short and specific medieval period. What matters is that the distribution pattern of the North African markers is very much the same through the Western third of the peninsula and has no possible relation therefore to Muslim occupation. Also no slave trade of black people before the 15th century.
@Maju:
I'm not distorting nothing, man. What I'm saying is that I've read many times: “the presence of E-M81 in Western Iberia and Western Europe must be old, because it is present in Galicia, and Galicia was never under Muslim rule”; but I say “but there is a documented presence of Moors in Galicia, not as lords, but as forced labour – and this people married locals, had children, changed their names and became Christians”. So, I'm speaking of historical evidence, not of conjectures. Also, this presence of E-M81 in Galicia is non homogeneous, being some 5% in the interior and just a 1% in the coast, while apparently there is not that large difference in the distribution of other Y haplogroups.
So, I'm warning against neglecting written evidence. And in this case written evidence -written records from Galicia- include even proper names and jobs, as well as family relations.
Do this written records rule out an old North Affrican penetration into Western Iberia? Not, at all, but introduce another factor , a medieval factor, that is not just plausible, is real and tangible.
Now, for the Arab slave commerce in Africa, I don't know when it began, but I would just say that there are serfs that are called “Ethiops” in the 12th century in Galicia, and depiction of black people among the Moors in the illustrations of the Galician 13th-century “Cantigas de Santa Maria” and in the 15th century frescos of the Cathedral of Mondoñedo, in northeastern Galicia.
Anyway, if North-African presence in Iberia is old, we must have many small chunks of DNA evenly distributed; if it is recent we must have large chunks unevenly distributed. I'm rather sure that we'll know for sure in the next 10 years.
@ Davidski
"The Late Bronze Age Tumulus sample from Montenegro clusters with Iberians and North Italians. The Iron Age Tumulus sample from Montenegro is even more northern than that."
Which has nothing to do with Southern Italy or Greece.
"they were, say, recent migrants from Asia like the Etruscans"
Etruscans from Anatolia, maybe (or even IEs from the Caucasus). But "Bedouins"?...not so much.
------------------
@ Labayu
"That makes sense. Although, why do you think it's an older cline rather than related to greater and more sustained Greek/Eastern Roman influence in the south? Not that I think the two explanations are necessarily mutually exclusive."
I agree with you that the Greek influence in Southern Italy played a big role (extra EEF+CHG). But the Greeks themselves were part of the older European cline, so like you say, not mutually exclusive.
@James
Or even IEs from the Caucasus.
You're not making any sense.
Both Italic and Greek are ultimately from the western steppe.
"
That's like saying that the first evidence of Indoeuropean is from c. 2000 BCE, when it was first written down in places distant from its homeland. You just haven't thought about the problem. It's the most lazy kind of thought I could get as answer and I'm so annoyed by that intellectual laziness that I'm not going to bother answering in detail. Just some leads: (1) African influence into Palestine Mesolithi, particularly the semidesert variant of it, (2) circum-arabic pastoralist complex, (3) Mesopotamian semites arrived from the West and did so c. 3900 BCE, much earlier than Sargon. "
Maju when I said the earliest evidences of Semitic in the Near East are 2300 BC I didn't tried to conclude the Semites appeared exactly at this time. TAKE IN MIND. I said Akkadians came from the Levant into Mesopotamia and there they are mentioned 2300 BC.
However since they came from the Levant and the Levant is close to Northeast Africa this indicates they might have been around the Levant for around 4000 or 5000 BC.
And I repeat again there is absolutely no way in earth that ANY modern language family (at least in West Eurasia) that is a survival from Mesolithic and predates the Neolithic revolution. I simply can't think of any logic that would claim the Afro_Asiatic speakers predate the Neolithic simply cause their aDNA is obviously Neolithic farmer derived. I generally it is accepted that the oldest Afro_Asiatic language is ancient Egyptian which is dated to 4000 BC however since people know the earliest evidence of a language doesn't equate it's earliest appearance, we can add another 1-3 thousand to it and say the Afro_Asiatic family is around 5-7 thousand years old.
But thats my opinion you don't have to agree.
@André,
I think that Marwan al-Yilliqi was in fact from the Spanish Extremadura, although his father was from northern Portugal; for the Arabs of Andalusia, the Christians of Western Iberia were usually all Galicians (or even Franks), and those from the East (Catalans and Aragonese) just Franks. Basques were majus, pagans, ;-)
Some documents reunited in a pair of hours:
*) “mancipia, quae ex Hismaelitarum terra captiva duximus quinquaginta” Lugo, 897
*) “et IIIs suas mancipias nominatas ipsas maura Mariame, et Sahema, et Zafara” Braga, 908
*) “donamus etiam glorie uestre ex mancipiis quos sca. intercessione uestra de gente hismaelitarum cepimus; nominibus...” Santiago, 911
*) “ego Rudesindus episcopus, tibi liberte mee Muzalha, salutem (...)” Celanova, 943
*) “et mando liberare meas mauras nomine Fotema et Mariam cum suo genere et Farfixa” Coimbra, s.d.
*) “quindecim iuga bouum. mauros II et redemptio de tertio, solidos ducentos. equas maiores XL” León, 950
*) “Fees, mauro de Monte Corduba, genuit Santio Fees et Gemondo Fees” Ourense, 10th century
*) “quam nobis pariauit congermanus noster Gundesindus Suariz pro nostro mauro que nobis fidiauit pro DCC solidos et fugabit illo “ Sobrado, A Coruña, 966
*) “mancipios et mancipellas quos fuerunt ex gentes mahelitarum et agarini, id sunt: Petro, Martino, Domengu, Halephe. item post Alveidar, Maria, Gigenia, Marina, Semza” Celanova, 1029
* ) “et mando et absoluo illos mauros ab omni fece seruile” Santiago, 1094
*) “ad obitum nostrum in nostra potestate fuerint, et mauros et mauras qui in ipso tempore in nostra potestate fuerint”, Coimbra, 1116
*) “In Ribas Iº kasal et IIIes mauros et IIIes mauras, totas suas equas bravas et totas meas vaccas” Pontevedra, 12th century
*) “et de ipsa hereditate sanet meas mauras et post obitum suum reliquat eam fratribus meis” Lugo, 1116
*) “et ingenuo illo meo mauro Giraldo tali pacto ut [se]ruiat illo meo filio” Santiago, 1131
*) “aliud quod comparavi pro solidos centum et decem; mauros tres” Ourense, 1158
*) “Sendimiru fuit sarracenum et comparauit eum Ueremudus Cresconiz” Sobrado, 12th c.
In Galician and Portuguese:
*) “Iten se alguun extranyo uender mouro ou moura, de in portagen xij dñ., e se in casa do ospede uender, de a el otros xij dñ.” Ourense, 1230 (Foros do Bo Burgo de Caldelas)
*) “Tod omne que ferir ou mesar mouro ou moura alleo, peyte . II. Mor.” Castelo Rodrigo, 1280
*) “Joham Fernandiz, aqui é chegado | un freyr ' e anda un mouro buscando, | e anda dele os sinaes dando: | e diz que é cresp[o] e mal tal[h]ado” Roi Gomes de Briteiros, 13th century
*) “dizen que fode quanto mais foder | pode o vosso mouro a vossa molher.” Joan Soares Coelho, 13th c.
*) “se xe foss ' en corredura e podesse prender mouro, | tenho que x ' o venderia” Pero da Ponte, 13th c.
*) “grad ' a Deus, con mia espada | e con meu cavalo louro, | ben da vila da Graada | tragu ' eu o our ' e o mouro.” Pero Gomes Barroso, 13th c.
@André,
Also, these are the 15th-century frescos of the Cathedral of Mondoñedo. They depict the New Testament "Massacre of the Innocents" by the soldiers of Herod. The soldiers of Herod are depicted surely as local soldiers, while the mothers and children are depicted either as Christians, or as Moors (wearing a turban), and show contrasting phenotypes:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ary6PkxA3MA/Ue0WuREFCsI/AAAAAAAAMDQ/5ZDt7BIoUbU/s1600/20121103+-+1202+-+Canon+PowerShot+G12+-+34149+-+Mondo%C3%B1edo+Catedral.jpgç
Also, here a 13th illustration of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, with mixed groups of Christian and Muslims in the army, and Christian and Muslim prisoners; these Cantigas were composed in Galician, but the books were illustrated in Toledo:
http://www.moorishmaiden.org/alhambra/Images/war_scene.jpg
Why can't the shift be explained by additional pre-farmer CHG ancestry in Greeks and Central/South Italians? You cant just assume every population in these areas had as much CHG as those farmer samples. It's like claiming that every central European had as much WHG as Stuttgart sample.
But in any case, what I see is the vast majority of modern Greek samples sitting on a line between Yamnaya and Anatolia_N or even Europe_EN, so where is the problem exactly?
@Kurti: Afroasiatic is obviously (ask any linguist) much much older than Indoeuropean, to the point that it was only "recently" identified as unitary family and even now some people question its unity. My argumentation is not merely genetic: it fuses linguistics, archaeology and genetics.
In NW Africa for instance the only possible time-frame for the arrival of Afroastic (proto-proto-Berber, as it's obvious that proto-Berber is quite recent, fruit of almost historical internal processes of unification) is Capsian culture. Neolithic? Neolithic is also Capsian in NW Africa but Capsian is Epipaleolithic in time frame. And Capsian fits well with with Upper Egyptian origins.
In Palestine/Levant the presence of Mesolithic influences from Egypt is also well known. Add to all that genetics and linguistics and you get a very consistent picture.
Recently I've come to caress the idea that maybe it was not just Afroasiatic the only family expanding from the Nile but also maybe Eastern Sudanic (Nubian, etc.) That would add some colorful complexity but it's in general terms part of the same process.
PAOK4
But in any case, what I see is the vast majority of modern Greek samples sitting on a line between Yamnaya and Anatolia_N or even Europe_EN, so where is the problem exactly?
There's no problem, and you're correct; most present-day Greeks look like a mixture of Ancient Anatolians and Yamnaya.
I'm simply making the point that it appears as if the ancient Greeks and/or Romans imported a whole new genetic cline into Europe that didn't exist before the Iron Age.
However, I might be proven wrong if it turns out that this cline started forming during, say, the Minoan era, and was only augmented by continuing gene flow between southeastern Europe and the Near East during the ancient Greek, Roman and medieval times.
But if so, that's OK. It'll be interesting to find out in any case.
When you say cline do you mean like a new ancestral "strain"? Yeah it's that component that peaks in Bedouins, but it's pretty minimal in most areas. In Sicily and Malta it may reach up to 10-15% but we need genomes from these areas from a variety of times to understand how much and when. Some of it could be from the Greco-Roman era and gradual geneflow from the Levant to SE Europe. But it could also be various Bronze age expansions that happened before, or from a partial legacy from the Ancient Phoenicians and their colonies.
A new cline doesn't necessarily mean a new strain or whatever, just more of what already exists.
@Davidski
The only gene flow which affected Southern Europe during the Roman Age came from Germanic and Slavic horny barbarians who migrated by millions. The rest is just mental masturbation.
The only gene flow which affected Southern Europe during the Roman Age came from Germanic and Slavic horny barbarians who migrated by millions. The rest is just mental masturbation.
If that's true then it means that much of Italy was inhabited by a Near Eastern population until the Migration Period, and the reason that most Italians today don't cluster with, say, Lebanese, is because of very recent Northern European admixture.
Are you sure you want to go there?
@ Davidski
"Both Italic and Greek are ultimately from the western steppe."
That *hasn't* been proven.
The Armenian plateau hypothesis gains in plausibility by the fact that we have discovered evidence of admixture in the ancestry of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists, including gene flow from a population of Near Eastern ancestry for which Armenians today appear to be a reasonable surrogate (SI4, SI7, SI9). However, the question of what languages were spoken by the “Eastern European hunter-gatherers” and the southern, Armenian-like, ancestral population remains open. . . . It is still possible that the steppe migration detected by our study into Late Neolithic Europe might account for only a subset of Indo-European languages in Europe, and other Indo-European languages arrived in Europe not from the steppe but from either an early “Neolithic Anatolian” or later “Armenian plateau” homeland.
http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/02/10/013433
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@ http://italicroots.lefora.com
"The only gene flow which affected Southern Europe during the Roman Age came from Germanic and Slavic horny barbarians who migrated by millions."
That's bullshit.
On the other hand, we find that France and the Italian and Iberian peninsulas have the lowest rates of genetic common ancestry in the last 1,500 years (other than Turkey and Cyprus), and are the regions of continental Europe thought to have been least affected by the Slavic and Hunnic migrations. These regions were, however, moved into by Germanic tribes (e.g., the Goths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals), which suggests that perhaps the Germanic migrations/invasions of these regions entailed a smaller degree of population replacement than the Slavic and/or Hunnic, or perhaps that the Germanic groups were less genealogically cohesive. This is consistent with the argument that the Slavs moved into relatively depopulated areas, while Gothic “migrations” may have been takeovers by small groups of extant populations [54],[55].
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555
@James
The Armenian plateau hypothesis gains in plausibility by the fact that we have discovered evidence of admixture in the ancestry of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists, including gene flow from a population of Near Eastern ancestry for which Armenians today appear to be a reasonable surrogate.
Bollocks they are.
Try and move on from 2015. Here's something that might help you out.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KeseDAuCy7Y/Vn_jpuIBQaI/AAAAAAAAD2Y/-Yqed6n86Ig/s1600/Kotias_%2526_Yamnaya_TreeMix.png
@Davidski
No both Italians and Levantines are a mix of CHG and Anatolian farmers, which explain the casual similarity, but the Italians have extra WHG/EHG while the Levantines have extra SSA and South West Asian. Levantines are still 5-6 times closer to Saudi Arabians than to any Southern European in any plot I've seen so far.
@Italicroots: Regardless of the merit of what you say, Sicilians and Maltese spefically scored out of the triangular model in Lazaridis. The tests were pretty convincing and basically suggest that Sicilians have a lot more "something else" than any other European population. This "something else" appears to be extra Levant admixture.
I am however of the opinion that it has nothing to do with Romans and I have argued why in previous comments: the mtDNA pool of Sicily tends strongly to the Levant, while the Y-DNA pool tends to the Aegean largely: all this suggests that the extra Levant element in Sicily is older than Magna Grecia (possibly late Bronze Age and related to Etruscan genesis and Sea Peoples' disturbances). What is clear is that the Sicilian anomaly cannot be interpreted in merely Balcanic or Aegean inputs, much less Western ones.
@David: I have previously argued with sound arguments that the age estimates of Ralph & Cooper must necessarily be corrected by a factor of circa 2x. For example they claim an Ashkenazi bottleneck some 600 years ago (c. 1400 BCE) but that makes no sense when actual history is taken into account: the most plausible date for the bottleneck is c. 700 BCE, i.e. a bit larger than 2x the proposed time-span. And they are not the only case: everything is much older than Ralph & Copper claim.
In the case of Italy it means that the last time for strong intra-peninsular interaction was c. 3000 years ago, c. 1000 BCE, roughly the time of Italic (and other peoples') penetration in the late Bronze Age. Romans seem to have been pretty much meaningless in terms genetic, let alone Goths.
@ Davidski
"Try and move on from 2015."
It's hilarious how you keep trying to "win" by acting like a study from a few months ago is outdated, and like you know better than all the experts. It didn't work for you last time either.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2015/12/mixed-marriages-on-early-eneolithic.html?showComment=1450433231986#c5887380730878379613
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@ Maju
"Sicilians and Maltese spefically scored out of the triangular model in Lazaridis. The tests were pretty convincing and basically suggest that Sicilians have a lot more "something else" than any other European population. This "something else" appears to be extra Levant admixture."
Lazaridis didn't have Anatolian farmers or CHG yet. That's what the "something else" seems to be, and now Sicilians and Southern Italians look more like a mix of those. Some could have come from Etruscans/Sea People. And Maltese are basically Sicilian, just a little farther out. But they speak a Semitic language, so they might have a little extra "Bedouin" admixture.
@James
Try and get it through you thick head that Haak/Lazaridis were wrong.
Yamnaya is a mixture of EHG and CHG, not EHG and Armenians.
I saw this before the CHG genomes were published, and it fits with the theory of Kartvelian influence in Proto-Indo-European.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/yamnayas-exotic-ancestry-kartvelian.html
You're beyond stupid. You're actually mentally unstable.
@James:
"Lazaridis didn't have Anatolian farmers or CHG yet".
How does it matter? Northwestern Anatolian farmers are per all accounts not significantly distinct from Stuttgart or other EEF-aligned samples like Ötzi, KO2, etc., while CHG only seem to have left a strong legacy precisely in the Caucasus. In any case CHG was NOT in the triangular model and integrating them in it would be utterly complicated (Yamna is a better replacement for what "ANE" attempted to cover for and the weak relatedness of CHG to Sardinians is much better explained by the so-called "Basal Eurasian" thingy).
"And Maltese are basically Sicilian, just a little farther out. But they speak a Semitic language, so they might have a little extra "Bedouin" admixture".
They speak Sicilian Arabic. It's not just a Semitic language but in fact an Arabic dialect of recent arrival and therefore unrelated to the "Sicilian anomaly", which must be much older.
@Davidski:
"Yamnaya is a mixture of EHG and CHG"
Sounds plausible... until we consider the so-called "Basal Eurasian" thing. Because AFAIK Yamna or even modern day Caucasus people do not score high in this aspect but CHG did, even higher than EEF. So how do you explain this? Shouldn't we first consider a transition (admixture with people coming at least partly from the south but maybe also from the north) between CHG and modern Caucasus (Neolithic Caucasus?) and only then factor the latter as component of Yamna?
@Maju
Modern Northern Caucasians clearly IE ancestry which is evident both from genetics and phenotypes. South Caucasians are actually pretty and can simply be modeled as CHG/ENF mix.
@George:
"Modern Northern Caucasians clearly IE ancestry"
IE or EHG? It's a principled question because we don't know enough about the ethnogenesis of those populations. Maykop may have influenced NW Caucasians but NE Caucasians? Lots of questions...
"South Caucasians are actually pretty and can simply be modeled as CHG/ENF mix".
I doubt it. It may work that way for lack of better proxies but I strongly suspect that what we see in the Aegean and Europe is: (1) already mixed with Paleoeuropean HGs and (2) the part that originates in West Asia (maybe 75%) only represents some subpopulations of the sheer diversity that the Fertile Crescent Neolithic must have got.
One of the key issues is that the spread of Neolithic to Iran and India clearly corresponds not with a genetic pool like that of European EEF or Aegean ENF but with what is generally called ANI, which is in essence the same as the modern Caucasian component. A possible simplistic explanation is that the European Neolithic immigrants correspond to the PPNA/B genetic pool, while the Indian ones do to the M'lafatian (Jarmo) one.
In order to fully clarify the matter we need variegated ancient Fertile Crescent DNA. Sadly the ongoing wars are a major obstacle and we will probably not get those key data points in many years. Meanwhile we may all just be conscious about this important issue and do not assume too many things about areas not yet properly researched: just as CHG surprised us all (to some extent at least) other data points will surely do when they come out.
@Maju,
" doubt it. It may work that way for lack of better proxies "
Exactly!!! I'm creating D-stats, F3-stats, TreeMix for Davidski or Chad to do to test exactly what the relationship West Asians have with EEF/CHG and others to know how good of proxies they are.
"Try and get it through you thick head that Haak/Lazaridis were wrong. Yamnaya is a mixture of EHG and CHG, not EHG and Armenians."
Idiot, I already showed you last time that CHG and "Armenian-like" are the same damn thing. Haak isn't wrong, because Jones confirms that CHG has a *southern* origin...
Given their geographic origin, it seems likely that CHG and EF are the descendants of early colonists from Africa who stopped south of the Caucasus, in an area stretching south to the Levant and possibly east towards Central and South Asia.
If you don't like the name "Armenian hypothesis" then call it the "Caucasus/CHG hypothesis." Either way, PIE could have originated in that population, and some IE languages spread to Greece and Italy directly from there without going thru the steppe. That's Haak's whole point here...
It is still possible that the steppe migration detected by our study into Late Neolithic Europe might account for only a subset of Indo-European languages in Europe, and other Indo-European languages arrived in Europe not from the steppe but from either an early “Neolithic Anatolian” or later “Armenian plateau” [or, if you want, "Caucasus/CHG"] homeland.
Wake up from your Slavocentric wet dream!
@James
Idiot, I already showed you last time that CHG and "Armenian-like" are the same damn thing.
We now know that Yamnaya is a mixture of EHG and CHG, and not a mixture of EHG and anything even close to Armenians.
This kills the Armenian hypothesis, and backs the steppe hypothesis, in which PIE has influence from Kartvelians (you know, like those living in Georgia, where the CHG genomes were dug up).
There's nothing to support the Armenian hypothesis, except some speculation in an outdated paper which you can't stop quoting, because it's the only thing you have left.
South Caucasians groups like Georgians, can clearly be modelled as a mix of 65% CHG and 35% South West Asian. Unlike Southern Euro and to a much lesser extent Levantine, they lack the WHG from the Euro farmers.
"This kills the Armenian hypothesis, and backs the steppe hypothesis, in which PIE has influence from Kartvelians (you know, like those living in Georgia, where the CHG genomes were dug up)."
Have you ever looked at a map before? Armenia borders Georgia, and the Armenian Plateau even *includes* part of Georgia. We don't need the Steppe (or much less those Siberian EHGs) to have Kartvelian influences in PIE. The two languages were likely neighbors.
"...speculation in an outdated paper...not a mixture of EHG and anything even close to Armenians..."
Why don't you write to Haak, Lazaridis or any of the 40 authors of that paper and inform them that their work from last year is already outdated, and that CHG is "not even close" to their Armenian-like component. I'm sure they'll appreciate it and tell you how smart you are. LOL
But Yamnaya and Afanasievo clearly don't have admixture from a population resembling modern or Bronze Age Armenians.
You do realize this, no?
@Davidski
But Yamnaya and Afanasievo clearly don't have admixture from a population resembling modern or Bronze Age Armenians.
You do realize this, no?
What James fails to realize is that CHG is not genetically close to any modern population. Back in the day, due to the absence of the CHG genomes Haak et al. used Armenians to represent the non-EHG part of the ancestry of Yamnaya and Afanasievo and you used Georgians instead for that purpose. But none of them were sufficient to represent it whereas CHG is apparently.
1. Bronze Age Armenians clearly carry a Northern European admixture. This is evident both from formal tests and their position on PCA plots
2.BA Armenians are a worse proxy for Teal ancestry than CHG. So they could not have contributed to the formation of Yamnaya
3.Kartvelians are IMO also a poor proxy for potential CHG language family as I suspect that the prevalence of G2a among core Kartvelian groups like Svans and general Western Georgians is not a coincidence
4.NC language family is a very good candidate for something that the CHG might have spoken
"What Davidski fails to realize is that CHG is not genetically close to any modern population."
^ Fixed that for you.
I never said CHG was the same as Armenians or Georgians or any other modern population. What I said was that Haak's "Armenian-like" mystery component turned out to be CHG. We know this because Jones references Haak as a previous study that showed the same thing that his does, and CHG is a West Asian population (like Armenians, and unlike EHG). It has Near Eastern haplogroups J, J2a, H13c, and K3, and is a sister group to Neolithic farmers, with lots of Basal Eurasian. It's got nothing to do with the steppe. That's just a Slavocentric fantasy, like when Afrocentrics say Egyptians were black because they lived in Africa.
Four major problems in making Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers Proto-Indo-Europeans from the Near East, as James is attempting to do here.
1) Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers were never really native to the Near East. They lived in the Western Caucasus near the steppe since the Upper Paleolithic.
2) Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer ancestry makes up the highest ratio of West Eurasian ancestry in Georgians, Abkhasians and Dravidians, obviously none of whom are Indo-Europeans.
3) Y-HG J looks like the Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer signature, and it's totally missing from Kurgan remains on the Pontic-Caspian steppe of the Early Bronze Age and in elite Corded Ware remains.
4) The theory of a non-Indo-European Caucasian substrutum in Proto-Indo-European has been suggested in various forms by mainstream scholars, and correlates with the discovery of Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer mtDNA in Early Bronze Age steppe groups. Example...
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/the-origins-of-proto-indo-european.html
Only someone who is completely dishonest and/or extremely stupid can accuse me of something like Afrocentrism based on what I've just said.
James is both dishonest and stupid.
@James
Modern Armenians are a population that shares very strongly with ENF compared to the majority of modern West Asians and MENAs.
Bronze Age Armenians are like modern ones plus Corded Ware/Andronovo admixture. They obviously look like people who have been indoeuropeanized.
Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers were absolutely native to the Near East. Like I said, all of their haplogroups originated in the Near East, and CHG is a sister group to Neolithic farmers. Haak - which I told you Jones references as describing the same thing - calls them "a population of Near Eastern ancestry." You trying to make them into a steppe population that's more related to EHG than to EF is just like Afrocentrism trying to make Egyptians more related to SSA than to EF. It's Slavocentrism.
As for what languages CHG and EHG spoke, nobody knows...not even you.
However, the question of what languages were spoken by the “Eastern European hunter-gatherers” and the southern, Armenian-like, ancestral population remains open.
James,
I think you should take it easy ;), as many more samples from relevant places and time are coming.
James,
The theory of Proto-Indo-European as a North Eurasian language influenced by Caucasian languages has a long history in mainstream academia outside of Slavic countries.
It fits very nicely with the discovery that Khvalynsk, Afanasievo and Yamnaya were a mixture of EHG and CHG, which correlate with the pre-Proto-Indo-Europeans and Caucasians who influenced them, respectively.
You know this, so you're being dishonest. In fact, you're both stupid and a liar.
Even if I tentatively lean for an Eastern HG (Epigravettian) origin of proto-Indoeuropean, I'm with James: the question remains open. It's also possible that it has another origin or, more likely even, that its origin is hybrid, as are the genetics we find in the early Kurgan peoples. An argument in favor of a West Asian origin could be precisely the association of Indoeuropean languages with Y-DNA R1a, which has quite clear West Asian origins and at least partly a Neolithic expansion pattern, however I for one think that those R1a Neolithic migrants did not yet speak a precursor of proto-Indoeuropean.
The theories associating IE with Uralic, Altaic and other Northern European languages seem to be mostly misconceptions based on the sprachbund phenomenon of horizontally shared vocabulary. There are major logical problems against the never satisfactorily proven pan-Eurasian superfamilies like Nostratic, Eurasiatic or Dené-Caucasian.
In any case, disagreement on these most obscure matters is no grounds to call anyone names, Davidski. You should be aware that behaving like that does not help your cause but rather detracts from your credibility, as it makes you appear as immature and that impression is very strong, overshadowing whatever part of reason or good arguments you may have. I would suggest yoga: helps a lot.
Which Neolithic R1a migrants?
What are you blathering about Maju? R1a is a marker of Eastern European hunter-gatherers.
Because you say so... We have discussed the matter many times (ref. Underhill 2015 and particularly how Z93 clearly must have expanded from south to north, with Samara branches being terminal and not at all ancestral). We disagree but the issue, the doubt, the controversy is clearly there no matter how much you want to stick to your pet hypothesis.
Anyhow, what I meant to underline is that answers are not always clear cut and that people have the right to disagree, particularly when they have reasons to think different than you or me or whoever does. That's how science progresses and that's part of its appeal (although obviously not for all types of mindsets, there's also people who prefer an absolute god-inspired "truth" but these are mostly irrelevant to science).
@ Maju
The oldest R1a so far is from a EHG.
@"Truth": the oldest KNOWN one! We have discussed that issue before: you cannot ignore modern data, much less in the areas where there is not a single ancient specimen sequenced, you have to consider the hierarchical structure of the haplogroup on the map, what I call the "geo-structure", ancient datapoints are welcome but they do not override automatically modern ones, because these are much more readily available and come in large numbers, something you'll never get, at least not anytime soon, from aDNA. Remember: much of the world is still without a single ancient DNA sample from the periods that interest us, and that is painfully true for the areas that interests us more here: the Zagros Neolithic province and the Irano-Indian one of a more recent chronology. IMO if (pre-Cemetery H) IVC aDNA were to be sampled in significant numbers (to avoid randomness) we should find R1a of the Asian variant there very easily. They would still speak Dravidian and not Indo-Aryan (not yet).
R1a is an Eastern European Hunter-Gatherer marker.
The Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers that carried R1a mixed with Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers on the European steppe, and then moved deeper into Europe and Asia.
All of the R1a in Asia comes from the European steppe and is associated with the expansions of the early Indo-Europeans.
If Maju can't put this simple puzzle together, then nothing he says about European genetics has any merit.
"All of the R1a in Asia comes from the European steppe and is associated with the expansions of the early Indo-Europeans."
This is the main point of discrepancy and we have also gone over it before: Samara Z93 branches are terminal, at least the modern ones, i.e. necessarily derived from where the more basal haplotypes are concentrated, which is Iran & Kurdistan, the southern parts of Central Asia and even India (in this order of hierarchy, all them preceding the steppe, be it Central or Western).
You argue that there is Z93 in Samara district in the context of Sintashta culture but not that their haplotypes are basal in the internal Z93 structure, so it's perfectly possible that, as Sintashta culture itself, they arrived from further East, from the Siberian steppe, where the naming sites of Sintashta and Petrovka are in fact. While Sintashta sites are built over Poltavka ones (or near its cemeteries, clearly indicating continuity in identity), Poltavka peoples carried mostly R1b-Volga lineages, except the outlier, which does carry Z93 (Z94 to be more precise: an already derived sublineage). You argued on your dedicated entry that this outlier (and Sintashta) "must" have originated in Corded Ware context or something like that because of his autosomal DNA (actually even "too Western" for Corded Ware) but we know well that autosomal and Y-chromosome DNA do not need to be related. In any case all the lineages are too evolved downstream of Z93-root (even by mere SNP typing, that is all I know of them: Z94, Z2124, Z2123) to be the mythical ancestors you'd like to find, which should be Z93* at least in some cases.
We have gone over all this before in greater or lesser detail: you remain convinced of your position for your own reasons (which I don't share) and I will remain convinced of mine until someone publishes a detailed and convincing critique of the structure that appears to be revealed by Underhill 2015 and that I discussed in some detail back in the day at my blog.
R1a-Z93 rich Sintashta and Srubnaya arrived in the Volga-Ural region from the west, you buffoon. Their ancestors began moving into the region during the Poltavka period.
Here's a map.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/the-poltavka-outlier.html
The ancestral mutation to R1a-Z93 is Z645, which is found in Corded Ware remains.
@Davidski: "you buffoon".
I insist: you seem to need anger management therapy, yoga or something. I have a thick skin most days and your unnecessary aggression only makes me smirk, rather sad than happy anyhow.
But particularly you need to insist less on what you belief is the truth and address more the concerns of others. Because you say so is not a serious argument. Re. the map, it's implicit in what I say above, explaining your own position, I still have it open in another tab, so no need to insist on something I already know and that I was telling you and the rest I know about. Autosomal DNA is not a good argument for Y-DNA: at the very least it would need complementary evidence, which is absolutely missing.
"The ancestral mutation to R1a-Z93 is Z645, which is found in Corded Ware remains".
This is something that we have also discussed before: it belongs to the transitional phase that I describe (following Underhill's choice of nodes) as M417: it is equally "ancestral" or not for all major sub-branches of R1a under M417, so it's the same problem: that step is blurry because way too few people with the paragroup have been sequenced today (not only in Europe but also in West Asia). So we can skip that part because we will reach nowhere. What matters is the internal structure of Z93 and the very serious possibility that this haplogroup originated in M417 (or Z645, not tested for in Underhill's paper) derive from the West Asian population with this marker and not the European one. Else it would still need to have migrated via West Asia and not via Europe, where the necessary links are totally missing.
PS- It's Underhill 2014, not "2015" (got the date wrong).
James you're banned from this blog.
Comparing the Kurgan steppe hypothesis to Afrocentrism, especially in the light of the latest ancient DNA evidence, is dishonest and idiotic.
Go and spread your bullshit elsewhere.
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