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Friday, October 28, 2016

Steppe boys, farmer girls


I updated my table of Steppe_EMBA mitochondrial (mtDNA) haplogroups with data from Wilde 2014, Broushaki et al. 2016, Sokolov et al. 2016, Jones et al. 2015, and extra data from Lazaridis et al. 2016. The accompanying map is from Wilde 2014 and shows sampling locations of many of the individuals in the spreadsheet.



Last time I looked at this stuff when attempting to find a link between Steppe_EMBA and prehistoric Iran, I couldn't spot anything meaningful (see here). At least now I can see a few shared haplogroups. Some thoughts:

- Despite the small sample set from Neolithic Bulgaria and western Ukraine, two out of the four haplogroups are shared with Steppe_EMBA, including the fairly specific H2a2

- Steppe_EMBA potentially shares very deep ancestry with Iran_Neolithic, via basal clades such as T2c and possibly X2; these markers could have arrived on the steppe in any number of ways, and indeed may have been sitting there since the Mesolithic

- But Iran_Chalcolithic is still a horrible match with Steppe_EMBA, and Maikop no better

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to those new Neolithic Balkan samples from the upcoming Mathieson et al. paper (see here). I'm pretty sure now that at least some Steppe_EMBA groups will show admixture from Neolithic or Chalcolithic populations from the eastern Balkans.

See also...

Mixed marriages on the early Eneolithic steppe

Modeling Steppe_EMBA

Male-dominated conquest of Europe by Bronze Age steppe pastoralists

The story of mtDNA haplogroup U7

205 comments:

1 – 200 of 205   Newer›   Newest»
Olympus Mons said...

By mentioning very specific Mtdna Haplogroups...
* very rare H10e (3300bc Portugal at site were BB were first spotted coming from a Strontium region identified as South portugal (alentejo) ----- H10e in CWC where bell beaker met CWC (eulau, germany) in 2600bc.

H2a (2?) in Stacevo (5500bc?), H2a in Kumtepe (kum6), H2a Kura-araxes land (sevan lake) 4000-3500bc... What does it mean?

Ariel said...

The fact is, there is not enough maternal hg from the middle eastern side in Yamna, you will need close to 100% and it's not the case. Unless all the y-dna is not from the EHG side, or the split between EHG and CHG is not 50/50 (or a founder effect like N in Finland, even if that still does not explain why Yamna had the "wrong" r1b, and western europeans have other clades).

andrew said...

Genetic sharing with Maikop may be very thin, but I think it is pretty hard to discount the cultural/technological borrowings of the Steppe from Maikop, in terms, e.g. of metallurgy and probably even Kurgan burial practices which seem to have occurred there shortly before it reached the Steppe. Maybe this is a case where cultural diffusion rather than demic diffusion is the main story.

Azarov Dmitry said...


@davidski
- Steppe_EMBA potentially shares very deep ancestry with Iran_Neolithic, via basal clades such as T2c and possibly X2; these markers could have arrived on the steppe in any number of ways, and indeed may have been sitting there since the Mesolithic


You make progress, bro. It looks like in a month or two you'll find my theory of 3-waves migration from the Iranian Plateau not so hopeless.
http://s008.radikal.ru/i304/1610/45/39ec6d0c107f.jpg

Ryan said...

Why not include some of the older (in terms of when they were analyzed) mtDNA samples from the region.

http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=theses

Great information there, and even some likely ANE mtDNA.

Ryan said...

@Ariel - "The fact is, there is not enough maternal hg from the middle eastern side in Yamna, you will need close to 100% and it's not the case."

Your assumptions are off here. I do not share mtDNA or a Y chromosome with my maternal grandfather or my paternal grandmother, yet they contributed half of my DNA overall. If it's multiple generations, the haplogroup frequencies can be skewed significantly.

Davidski said...

@Azarov Dmitry

You're obviously an aspiring science fiction writer. Good luck with that.

Davidski said...

@Olympus

Mrs Cow says Mooo!

@Andrew

Didn't the Eneolithic Khvalynsk, Repin and Usatovo already have Kurgans? Maikop just had really big ones with lots of bling, bling.

Olympus Mons said...

@Davidsky.
Here we go. And if I respond in kind, you delete my comment.

What the F*ck is wrong with your ego?

Davidski said...

To quote Walter Sobchak: You're like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie.

Do a bit of reading on pop genetics and ancient DNA and learn the basics. Then join the debate.

Olympus Mons said...

That is a figure of autority speech which diminish you.
All I did was to post a couple more samples that also show correlation.
In a post where you you mentioned Mtdna Hg, I put the spotlight in one of the most intriguing and telling mtdna correlation. Mtdna H10e.
Or how H2a have other correlations...

So you react like a kid everytime someone points out something you dont like. Its strange.


Olympus Mons said...

... and dont worry I am reading and on doing so, everytime you get less interesting and eveytime more wrong! That is the beauty of it.

At the end of the day you will be wrong, dead wrong. A Cat that wont bounce back.

Davidski said...

If you say so Shulaveri boy.

Ric Hern said...

T2c plus X2 from Mesolithic Yangelskaya Culture of the Southern Urals which Archaeologicaly shows a remarkable resemblance to the Zarzian Hunter Gatherers from the Southern Caspian ? So basically a Mesolithic connection....

Ric Hern said...

Why is there so few samples from Northern Kazakhstan ? Ust Ishim is the only one that comes to mind...Mesolithic samples is needed from the area between the Southern Urals and Afantova Gora 3 to understand how Y-DNA Haplogroup R got to Italy.The probable Khvalynsk Basin Flood should not have been such a significant barrier since rivers in the North usually freeze over providing bridges to cross....

Ric Hern said...

Why is there such an emphasis on the Wheel when looking at early PIE expansion.Sleighs and Poledrags could also have been used especially during Winter when this kind of transport is more efficient.

Karl_K said...

@Ric

Sledges were likely used by many cultures for a very long time, so loan words could easily have erased the connection to a single language family.

Wheels, though, were used by various earlier cultures for grinding and sharpening, and maybe for pottery, but the use for transportation seems to have been a major shift, and it seems to be heavily connected to the early Indo-European expansion.

Karl_K said...

There are so few samples from Northern Kazakhstan because few people are looking.

Ust-Ishim was discovered completely on accident by a very experienced fossil collector searching for ancient mammoth ivory to carve.

If they simply taught kids in rural grade schools that they should report when they find any strange bones, then there would be tons of samples.

Karl_K said...

Or, if the financial reward for finding and documenting the exact location of ancient human bones approached that of finding mammoth ivory (or even old old coins on a beach, or bottles to turn in for a deposit), then we would have many people doing it as a hobby.

Anonymous said...

@ Ariel re "Unless all the y-dna is not from the EHG side, or the split between EHG and CHG is not 50/50 (or a founder effect like N in Finland, even if that still does not explain why Yamna had the "wrong" r1b, and western europeans have other clades."

We may very well have a founder effect in Finland, but not related to paternal N, I'd say. Some of of the local N lineages are closer to Migration Era Hungarian N's than to some other type of N's in Finland, which may then be more attached to say Lithuanian type of N, than to this previous example. The differences between the clades were in many cases born already somewhere near Oka, if not already in the Ural area.

Ariel said...

@Ryan

On a large scale my point is perfectly reasonable. On a single case you are right, but for that example to be relevant on a large scale you will need that all the men with CHG y-dna had only daughters (with EHG women) and all the men with EHG y-dna had only boys (with CHG women). Actually you need more time (and the time frame here is limited) or a founder effect, or some kind of bottleneck, or some disrupting social order to really break that paradigm. Unless the assumption of CHG girls and EHG boys is wrong, which happen to be the case.

Ariel said...

My point is simple.

1) There is still plenty of EHG maternal hg in Yamna.
2) Maternal hg rarely shift much and is a good proxy for admixture proportion that came from the maternal side.
3) If you assume that the admixture from CHG only came from the maternal side, there are not enough maternal CHG hg to explain that admixture.

Davidski said...

@Ariel

The Yamnaya samples we have are not 50/50 EHG/Near Eastern. So you need to forget about that for starters.

Yamnaya is more EHG than it is CHG, with the rest, about 10%, Near Eastern and/or EEF. And the thing is, CHG is significantly ANE, which is obviously also a big part of EHG.

The point is, you don't really know with any great certainty which of the mtDNA lineages in Yamnaya are from EHG or CHG. A lot of the U clades might be from CHG.

So why are you expecting around 50% Near Eastern mt-hgs in Yamnaya, when Yamnaya is nowhere near 50% Near Eastern?

Ariel said...

"So why are you expecting around 50% Near Eastern mt-hgs in Yamnaya, when Yamnaya is nowhere near 50% Near Eastern?"

I expect even more if all the ancestry came from the maternal side.

Davidski said...

You shouldn't expect all that much Near Eastern mtDNA in Yamnaya, because Yamnaya is essentially the product of two forager groups from between the Black and Caspian Seas, with minor Near Eastern input.

The fact that Yamnaya has been modeled as ~50% modern Armenian and ~40 Iran_Chalcolithic means sweet fuck all. Yes, I know it was peer reviewed scientific literature. But my point stands, as you shall eventually learn.

Matt said...

I think the point is, if you had 30% Near Eastern ancestry in Yamnaya, and it was all female, then you would expect 60% of their mtdna hgs to be Near Eastern, because 30%*2=60%. (Only if the contribution was 100% EHG males, 30% EHG females, 60% Near Eastern females would you get to 30% overall ancestry).

Only if the contribution wasn't sex biased then you would expect 30% Near Eastern mtdna hgs.

I don't know if you can label the mtdna hgs so precisely to test this properly though.

Davidski said...

As far as I can see, Yamnaya is hardly Near Eastern at all.

It's a mixture of EHG, CHG and bits of Balkan/Ukrainian and probably Caucasian Neolithic farmers who sat around the steppe for a long time before contributing (female input) to the formation of Yamnaya.

The idea that Yamnaya has 50% or even 40% ancestry straight from the Near East seems downright crazy to me.

George Okromchedlishvili said...

Come on, CHG is quite Near Eastern at the end of the day. I mean certainly not less than ENF for example

Matt said...

Sure, but in that case you'd still expect something like 66% of the mtdna to come from "CHG and bits of Balkan/Ukrainian and probably Caucasian Neolithic farmers" if something like 33% of the overall ancestry comes from them, and it's all from females. Whatever those mtdna are.

Davidski said...

@George Okromchedlishvili

Well no, not really.

You can see my surprise, nay, shock, here at the "50% Armenian/Near Eastern" claim when I first got got hold of the Yamnaya samples and tested them for myself.

I have no idea how the EHG/Armenian model worked, unless all sorts of other non-Basal Eurasian stuff in the EHG and Armenians was passing for ANE.

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/ancient-r1a1-and-n1c-from-western-russia.html?commentPage=4

Now I know why I was so shocked.

CHG is not typically Near Eastern, and I'd say the CHG that mixed into Yamnaya was even less typically Near Eastern.

Rob said...

@ Davidski

"CHG is not typically Near Eastern, and I'd say the CHG that mixed into Yamnaya was even less typically Near Eastern"

I'd tend to agree. It's probably Meso-Neolithic Black Sea- Caucasus stuff, with a diverse set of mtDNA lines. Nevertheless, it was this EHG -rich version of CHG which began to 'move' first, mixing with EHG to form Yamnaya & Corded Ware, and SHG-enriched east-central European farmers to contribute to the Balkan Bronze Age.

Rob said...

By 3000 BC, there were distinct sub-sets of CHG-rich populations. Anatolian-Chalcolithic was Levantine admixed, and this was probably proto-Minoan, speculatively. The Iran Chalc version remained predominant in Iran, and there was an Armenian Chalcolithic CHG, which experienced a relative further EHG input in EMBA, probably directly from the steppe (ie the above-mentioned first type).

Davidski said...

I don't think East-Central European farmers were rich in SHG. I think they were the same as German farmers.

But the eastern Balkan farmer girls rich in Near Eastern admixture that contributed to Yamnaya probably did have a fair whack of European forager U4/5 lineages.

Hence, we can't assume that the frequencies of U4 and U5 in Yamnaya will correlate with EHG ancestry. But this is the mistake that Ariel is making.

Rob said...

@ Davidski

"I don't think East-Central European farmers were rich in SHG. I think they were the same as German farmers."

Not east-central Europe as in eastern Germany or Austria, but Ukraine & Romania (perhaps I should just say 'EE").
As I said, I suspect a CHG -like population in Mesolithic Ukraine, which became partly Balkanized in the early Neolithic, and this then moved back west to account for the various samples of BA Hungary which we've already discussed muchly.
On the other hand, Yamnaya & CWC were a more eastern/ northern axis, as was probably BB, unless it to is derived from Copper Age Hungary, but then became re-enriched with EHG via CWC.
Sounds a bit convoluted, but i suspect close to the mark..

Ariel said...

"Hence, we can't assume that the frequencies of U4 and U5 in Yamnaya will correlate with EHG ancestry. But this is the mistake that Ariel is making."t5

That's fair. But you can't be sure of the contrary either. The mtdna in Yamna is inconclusive, and the possibility of male mediated CHG ancestry in the bronze age steppe is still very much open.

Olympus Mons said...

"Hence, we can't assume that the frequencies of U4 and U5 in Yamnaya will correlate with EHG ancestry. But this is the mistake that Ariel is making."t5


And the only reason you say that is because it would imply that CHG loaded up MALES from elsewherer would be the responsible (at least in a fairly large percentage) for Ydna Haplogroups in steppe. Especially "that one".
Had you the oposite view from the one you have ... and that R1b in the steppe with so much paleolithic U5 and U4 would make be quite rude with anyone who dare to say otherwise.

Davidski said...

The steppe was obviously "loaded up" with R1 before Yamnaya, and there's not a single recorded case of R1 in the Near East prior to the Bronze Age.

So it's not as open as you and Ariel are hoping.

Gioiello said...

@ Davidski

"The steppe was obviously "loaded up" with R1 before Yamnaya, and there's not a single recorded case of R1 in the Near East prior to the Bronze Age".

Middle East didn't, but Western Europe did.

Olympus Mons said...

"there's not a single recorded case of R1 in the Near East"

Absolutly. If ever an R1b is found earlier you will become a dead cat no bounce.

There is still a couple of large populations movement in the near east (kinda) not yet sampled. One of those, yes, the circum black sea ------ (? , Bulgaria (east black sea), Anatolia (south shores), east shores (shulaveri shomu) mixing with CHG.

Maybe I an wrong. but its too early to tell - A procissao ainda vai no àtrio.



Olympus Mons said...

By the way... does anyone knows if those Khvalynsk yamnaya steppe boys were mesured for strontium? Were they local?

Gioiello said...

@ Olympus Mons

"A procissao ainda vai no àtrio"

The problem is where the processions starts from.

MfA said...

@Gioiello

This is offtopic but could you tell me if "Zardini" surname is a corruption of Sardinian or have someother meanings in Italian?

Gioiello said...

@ MfA

I think that Zardini has nothing to do with Sardinia, but it is a Northern Italian surname, derived from "Zardo" in the deminutive form and in Italian would be "Giardini". "Zardo" could be a German name, but I should do some research.

Olympus Mons said...

@Gioiello.
That I don't know. but lots its lost. for eg many forget that most of circum black sea or caspian settlements and inhumation evidence are currently gone under water...

So, from what is left we need lots of more samples...

MfA said...

Thanks Gioiello.

It makes sense if it's Germanic, He's from Cortina d'Ampezzo, so NE Italy.

Gioiello said...

@ MfA

Zardo, Zardi, Zardini are diffuesed in all Northern Italy, above all Veneto, as Giardo, Giardi, Giardini etc are diffused in the rest of Italy. We should investigate the origin of "Giardo", that for -ardo could be German in origin: see -hardt, English -hart etc.

@ Olympus Mons

Also half of the Adriatic is now submerged, but very likely there began the pile dwellers...

Chad said...

BB from CA Hungary? Very doubtful. L51 and Z2103 come from someone that lived after the start of Khvalynsk. L51 men come from the same culture as the Z2103, and vice versa.

MfA said...

Gioiello, this is the full list of names that's listed if it helps anything; "Zardin de Zardin Zesta"

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,

If Yamnaya is barely Near Eastern then Near Easterners are sort of Near Eastern. Basal Eurasian isn't the only part of Near Easterners which is Near Eastern. The WHGish stuff in EEF doesn't have to be from Europe and the ANEish stuff in CHG doesn't have to be from Europe/Siberia. Secondly if Yamnaya's Near Eastern ancestors lived in Europe before mixing with EHG this doesn't make them any less Near Eastern. 50% is a lot!

Other posters have made a good argument; EHG's Near Eastern ancestry can't only be from women because they have a lot of EHG mtDNA.

There's a 0% chance all of their Near Eastern ancestry is from women. Most of their mtDNA is Near Eastern but EHG women and Near Eastern immigrant men didn't suddenly stop reproducing. The mega-founder effects in BA Steppe people are from EHG men but all of their Mesolithic male ancestors weren't EHG men.

The only admixture we have prove was definitely sex bias is Steppe/EEF+WHG in Central Europe. Even there you can't simplify things by describing the admixture as "--girls+---boys". EEF/WHG's men's penises weren't cut off. IMO, it's insane to think a subsection including millions of people will suddenly stop reproducing. Do we have any examples of this occurring? I don't think so. BTW, the Americas aren't an example because Native American male lines died out through death by methods no one used before modern times.

Samuel Andrews said...

.....All of our supposed examples of an end of reproduction by men or women in a population are probably simply mega-founder lineages. The population we think replaced the other probably is the source of the mega-lineage but not all of the ancestry from a single gender. Gender bias admixture has occurred many times before but who's crazy enough there was a social order able to prevent 100,000s of Native American men in Puerto Rico or EEF/WHG men in Ukraine from reproducing?

Gioiello said...

@ MfA

If "Zardin de Zardin Zesta" is a document, thus Zardin is the name (very likely from "Riccardo/Rizzardo" in the deminutive form) and "Zesta" is the surname, but surname "Zesta" isn't documented in Italy, but very likely is the Italian Cesta.

Grey said...

Samuel Andrews
"it's insane to think a subsection including millions of people will suddenly stop reproducing. Do we have any examples of this occurring?"

"A Farewell to Alms" maybe

group A conquers group B and group B becomes a lower class for long enough

it doesn't have to happen in one generation

(for example the "Colored" population in south Africa)

the factors involved would be:
- scale of class difference
- relative population size
- number of generations it lasted

for example if AA and AB reproduction had a TFA of 2.5 while BB and BA reproduction had a TFA of 1.5 how long would it take for B ydna to become rare?

(i have no idea but i guess it's calculatable?)

Alberto said...

Not directly related to a possible sex bias in admixture, but more generally, why this idea that elite dominance gives a reproductive advantage? I'd think it's the other way around. Lower classes usually outbreed higher classes.

I don't think that most of us (say, of European ancestry), if we go back to the middle ages, we descend from the aristocracy. I think that aristocratic lineages are probably dead (most of them), while most of us descend from the peasants of that time.

During the last, say, 50-80 years, have "white" Americans been outbreeding the rest of the populations in the country? I don't have official numbers right here, but it's probably the other way around. Poor immigrants tend to have more children than local higher classes. In the case of America (USA) of course immigration itself is a big factor in the demographics, but still.

In South Africa where immigration in the last 50-70 years is not such a big factor, have the "white" elite been outbreeding the lower classes (natives)? From Wikipedia:

"The first census in South Africa in 1911 showed that whites made up 22% of the population; it declined to 16% in 1980, and 8.9% in 2011."

In Kosovo it was happening the same, the ruling Serbian class was being outbred by the low class Albanians (though the historical details might be more complicated than they were put at the time of the conflict, but that's not relevant here).

The Spanish once ruling class in Philippines has gone extinct (or almost) by now.

Has the not long ago so called "first world" countries been outbreeding the back then so called "third world" countries? Quite the contrary. Poor countries had a much higher population growth.

Whoever the IE migrants into Europe were, they needn't have been an elite. Just to have more children, as it usually happens with migrants, especially low class ones.

Grey said...

Alberto

if correct the model would be along the lines of

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

This is before welfare systems and modern medicine of course.

"In South Africa where immigration in the last 50-70 years is not such a big factor"

IIRC there was always a lot of immigration related to people coming to work in the mines.

However that's not the main point which was the Colored population as an example of dramatic class difference leading to a dramatic difference in ydna.

It doesn't *necessarily* require massacres.

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

It's funny that you made this post almost simultaneously as this popped up on the internet. It's like Krause is your nemesis or something. Yay Krause.

http://www.topoi.org/event/36767/

FEMALE EXOGAMY AND PATRILOCALITY AT THE TRANSITION FROM FINAL NEOLITHIC TO THE EARLY BRONZE AGE IN SOUTHERN GERMANY

The transition from the late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in Central Europe is a time period for which human mobility has been vividly debated in archaeological research. This presentation contributes to these considerations using an interdisciplinary approach that integrates ancient mitochondrial DNA analysis, the determination of stable isotope ratios of strontium and oxygen in tooth enamel, and archaeological analysis of radiocarbon dated skeletal remains. They represent 83 human individuals from 6 sites of the Bell Beaker Complex and the early Bronze Age in the Lech Valley in Southern Bavaria, Germany. Mitochondrial DNA analysis documented a diversification of haplogroups over time. Strontium and oxygen isotope ratios disclosed more than half of the females to be non-local, while there were only single occurrences among the male and subadult individuals. This striking pattern of patrilocality and female exogamy prevailed between about 2500 and 1700 BC. It was independent of individual sites and their archaeological assignments to the Bell Beaker Complex or the Early Bronze Age. While the males ensured settlement continuity in a spatially limited area, the results indicate that the females were driving forces for regional and supra-regional communication and exchange at the dawn of the European Metal Ages.

Rob said...

Chad
No I mean BB spread via Hungary, late copper age.

Rob said...

Yes I remember this abstract ...

Samuel Andrews said...

I am so tired of abstracts!! It takes them years to become papers.

Davidski said...

@Romulus

You don't understand the abstract.

It actually backs up what I've been arguing, which is that during the Early Bronze Age in Europe men did all they could to stay in the land of their ancestors, and it was the women who migrated great distances for marriage.

This is what happened on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, and the reason it also happened in Southern Germany is because the people there were largely of steppe origin so they practiced the same culture.

However, when men had to migrate from the steppe, maybe because of overcrowding and conflict, they often went without women, and so ended up taking farmer women in their new homes, probably at the expense of the farmer men.

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

So what do we take away from all this?

1 - Non mobile males
2 - Mobile females
3 - Greater farmer ancestry on the X chromosome
4 - Y Chromosomes from Yamnaya incompatible with a migration into Western Europe
5 - EHG/SHG ancestry in Balkan Farmers

I'll help you

*Bronze age genetic shift was female mediated. Children learn language from their Mothers.

*European Y chromosomes were established in the Paleolithic and didn't expand until Bronze age subsistence strategies came into play.

*Neolithic farming Y chromosomes were always a minority, only plentiful in their own patrilocal communities. Exception being the Mediterranean coast where they are the oldest.

Davidski said...

Wrong.

Women were basically a commodity in the patriarchal cultures on the steppe.

So they were traded for marriage or as slaves. Hence the change in the autosomal makeup and mtDNA of steppe populations.

But when the steppe men moved, they really moved. And they moved en masse into Europe during the LNBA period, eventually taking over the continent.

Get yourself used to this story.

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

non mobile males =/= highly mobile steppe pastoralists

Gaspar said...

@MFA

Zardin de Zardin Zesta is typical Venetian. Zardin comes from a surname Zardo.

Zardo, tipicamente veneto, è diffuso nel vicentino, trevisano, padovano e veneziano, questi cognomi dovrebbero derivare da una forma aferetica del nome medioevale di origine germanica Guizzardo

Basically from the German Guizzardo

Zardin can also be a surname coming from Zardo also

Zardin in venetian is Italian Giordano

many venetian Z names ( not all ) are G in italian
like
Zane = Giovanni
Zorsi = Giorgio
Zanipolo = GiovanniPaolo or John Paulin English

Chad said...

Romulus,

Germany and surrounds is where large demic movements started from. Remember the Rarecoal on English and Irish remains? The fact that, as you mentioned, greater farmer ancestry is on the X shows males came from Eastern Europe and took in a variety of women and then replaced most of the preceding pops in Western Europe. Use a little logic here!

Davidski said...

@Romulus

non mobile males =/= highly mobile steppe pastoralists

Flawed reasoning.

Just because steppe males dominated the territories that they lived in and imported women from far away places to their homeland doesn't mean they were not mobile (which they obviously were, since they often lived in wagons) or that they didn't migrate (which they obviously did, even as far as Mongolia and eventually South Asia).

You won't convince anyone that there was no massive migration of steppe males to Europe during the LNBA period.

It's now the consensus that this is indeed what happened. Even the Max Planck crowd are saying that it happened.

Samuel Andrews said...

David do you understand that Yamnya was %50 Near Eastern but had %25 EHG mtdna. All of their Near Eastern ancestors being Near Eastern is impossible. So, you're theory probably has truth to it but can't explain all Near Eastern ancestry in Yamnaya.

Samuel Andrews said...

I meant to say "all of their Near Eastern ancestors being female"

Davidski said...

By the way, in regards to the question of forager/farmer mtDNA in Yamnaya, we already know that some Balkan farmer populations carried as much as 30% forager admixture from somewhere, probably near the steppe.

Moreover, this was apparently female mediated gene flow, which means that in some of the farmer groups the mtDNA gene pool may have been largely derived from foragers.

If we assume that the ancestors of Yamnaya then picked up women from such communities, then not only would they acquire a lot of forager mtDNA along with farmer mtDNA, but also largely forager admixture on the X chromosome. But, at the same time, they'd also get a lot of farmer genome-wide admixture.

So this is a very complex scenario, and it won't be easy to demonstrate without a lot of quality samples from across space and time.

zardos said...

Patrilocality doesnt mean you don't move, but it means you don't leave your paternal kin, brothers and cousins, unless there is a damned good reason to. If you move, you move together. So when they didn't move, women were brought to where they lived, when they had to move, they took women on the way. But the male lineage stood together, that's what we see. Females moved to foreign clans, men didn't most of the time, only in exceptional cases. That's why we see dominant male lineages in most prehistoric populations. And the strictly patriarchal and agnatic Indo-Europeans should show that pattern, anything else would make no sense at all.

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

Steppe types weren't exclusively Patriarchal, all human societies and cultures are all patriarchal except in the minds of some deluded feminists. Are Gorillas and Chimps also descended from the Steppe as well because I see them displaying some patriarchal behavior.

Davidski said...

The discussion isn't about "steppe types" but about the pastoralists of the Early Bronze Age steppe.

They were obviously very clanish, patriarchal and agnatic. We can clearly see this in their DNA and burials.

And this fits the inference from Indo-European culture and historical linguists data that the early Indo-Europeans were the same.

Samuel Andrews said...

OK I understand that. The definition of EHG changes if much of Yamnya's EHG came from outside the Steppe(or only their part of it). Also, most of their ancestry would have to be from non-local females. This isn't impossible but important to be aware of.

Anonymous said...

@Alberto

"I'd think it's the other way around. Lower classes usually outbreed higher classes."

That is only recently the case. The introduction of potatoes in Europe gave a boost.

http://business.time.com/2009/07/13/behold-the-power-of-the-potato/

John Thomas said...

Alberto,
No. In fact, most living Europeans today do, in part, actually descend from 'aristocratic' lines. It is simply a matter of arithmetic. Also, as the correspondent said it is only in recent times that the poor have out bred the rich. In all previous ages the exact opposite was true.

John Thomas said...

In all ages previous to this one, the excess children of the very poor and landless would simply have starved to death - or in the pre christian era they would have been 'exposed' to spare their suffering.
It is a certainty that pre agricultural Europeans practised exposure of infants on an enormous scale.
Again, simple arithmetic tells us this, since exponential growth of even the smallest greater than unity value would have resulted in enormous populations when considering the relative time scales involved.
Hunter-gatherers were fully aware of 'Malthus' and the need to avert its horrifying effects.

Olympus Mons said...

And then we have that Oleg guy stating the steppe haplotype boys went nowhere.

@Zardos,
Thank you. people tend to overlook that over time firts of all kinship has been what binded people, especially at a point when we were a lot more diferent than today.
Secondly using those germany samples for the all bell beaker period to state what they did is telling always the same story. -- The boehemia group bell beaker were involved in heavy exogamy between BB and CWC groups. That is why shortly after they show so mixed traits at a point to some contest if they should be called BB at all. BB was the first identified network of people.

...and remember the first comment of this post is me telling about a very rare h10e haplogroup individual by 3500bc that showed up at the birth place of BB (near Zambujal) and then by 2600bc in an Eulau (germany) Cwc individual.

Olympus Mons said...

By the way, regarding that H10e indivudual in late neolithic Portugal... he wasn't also local.
Strontium puts in the alentejo region. So Perdigoes, Porto Torrao etc. Funny enough, its sheep strontium values show north africa values... but dont want to go there.

Volodymyr Lutsyk said...

Intermarriages between different cultural groups have been common in Tripolye-Cucuneti culture as well. In his book (http://litopys.org.ua/segeda/se.htm) S. Segeda points out that borderline groups of this culture (near Kyiv) had much more robust women that display similiarities with the neighbouring Sredni Stog culture rather than with their gracile husbands.


Gioiello said...

@ micheydodds 1
"In all ages previous to this one, the excess children of the very poor and landless would simply have starved to death - or in the pre christian era they would have been 'exposed' to spare their suffering".

To say that does mean not having any knowledge of History. Of the oldest noble families from Medieval Tuscany I remember only a few della Gherardesca (the family of Count Ugolino, Dante, Inferno, XXXIII), no one of the other families.
My family of the "del Badia" from Castelfiorentino, the family of Pompeo Neri Badia, continued in the noble family of the Spannocchi of Siena from the feminine line, went extint, and his Y survives only because "Antonio del Badia" migrated dduring the XVth century to Pisa, they lost their propriety, became peasants and survive in Togni, Tognoni a perhaps other lines from his name "Antonio".
Noble families went extinct because only one male wed and neither females if they hadn't the "dote", and both males and females got ecclesiastic life.
Noble "Tognoni" from Florence during 1700 had many children but no line survives to-day. Peasants of my line had ten children on average till my grandfather's time.

Alberto said...

@mickeydodds1

"No. In fact, most living Europeans today do, in part, actually descend from 'aristocratic' lines. It is simply a matter of arithmetic."

I'd like to see that arithmetic, please. For example one that shows that most Frenchmen descend from Charlemagne and a few other noble families and not from the masses of peasants and other commoners from that time.

Do you know of any study that shows that? Or can you just outline the simple arithmetic that shows how that principle works?

@epoch2013

That is only recently the case.

Based on what? Potatoes, like many other agricultural innovations, allow for higher population growth, but don't change social dynamics, as far as I know. Can you elaborate on how before potatoes elites were outbreeding masses and masses were going extinct?

John Thomas said...

To labour the point further, in those far off bronze age times, the elitist literally had the power of 'life and death' over their defeated subordinates.
Do you really think that elitists would let their own children starve whilst allowing the children of their subjects to thrive?
Today's state of play is the anhistorical abberation.
As recently as the 1840s, the Irish starved to death in their thousands, whilst in another part of the same Kingdom, prosperous, absentee landlord fat gentlemen were afflicted by gout after stuffing themselves with too much rich food.

John Thomas said...

Alberto

Do you understand exponential growth and the fact that every persons number of ancestors double in each generation?
Do you realise that typical generation size is taken as 25 years?
I can't do the math now, but going back to the time of Charlemagne, every European alive today has an absolutely ridiculous number of putative 'distinct' ancestors.
Vastly more, in fact, than the number of persons alive in Europe at that time.
Even allowing for so called 'pedigree collapse' it is safe to say that every European who was alive at the time of Charlemagne, including Charlemagne himself, who left a non extinct line, is an ancestor of every European now living.
It's purely a matter of straight forward arithmetic.

Alberto said...

@mickeydodds1

Ok, if what you meant when you said that most of us descend in part from the aristocracy is that we have a tiny percentage of ancestry from them, then yes, that math works and we're in agreement.

Anonymous said...

@Alberto

It was in an article on the middle ages. Can't find it anymore.

postneo said...

"I'd think it's the other way around. Lower classes usually outbreed higher classes."
"That is only recently the case. The introduction of potatoes in Europe gave a boost."

It has always been the case. Differential advantages whether its modern welfare(with its mix of medical breakthroughs), potatoes, lithic technology or immune resistance, smart phones etc always trickle down. demographics favor the Mass adoption phase more than aristocracy.

As for patriarchy....
IE speakers did not have a copyright to patriarchy. male status burials cannot be used as some magic litmus test of language. There are more mummified male pharaohs than female. Does it prove they were IE speakers?

John Thomas said...

Postneo,
In a Darwinian sense, it cannot be true. 'Fitness', meaning reproductive success is the essence of Darwinism. In prehistoric times, those who had more reproductive success passed on their genes, those who did not did not pass on their genes. Now, in the context discussed, we are talking about the socially and 'politically' dominant having privileged access to scarce resources, and thus having the edge in the 'struggle for existence'.
You might argue otherwise.

These days, we are so preoccupied with frank nonsense such as mobile phones and computers falling dramatically in price over the past decade that we have lost sight of the real struggle for life as it had always existed.

John Thomas said...

Furthermore, in any case, it is an unquestionable fact that today, year 2016, that most of the *working population* of the USA, if 'government redistribution' programs were 'magically' ended tomorrow would not earn enough money through selling their labor to pay for their lifetime medical costs - let alone pay for their food, shelter, clothing, utilities,pensions, education etc etc. A simple fact of the realities of capitalist economic life.
Now, I'm NOT arguing whether that this is good or bad - I'm just stating a concrete fact, though some, I'm sure, will quibble with it.

My point is that the age old Darwinian/Malthusuan dilemma is, really, still there.
It's just that it's 'masked'.

Jijnasu said...

Isn't the fact that 0.5% of men can trace their Y chromosomes to the Genghis khan and his clansmen an excellent example of how influential the genes of an elite male can be

Jijnasu said...

It doesn't make much sense to superimpose the conditions of medieval europe to the bronze age or elsewhere in the world. In a society in permitting polygyny a nobleman is likely to have a far larger number of wives and concubines than a layman. Most ordinary men were likely monogamous and consequently had far fewer offspring

Ryukendo K said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Matt said...

I think there is some argument that people at the top of the social tree might tend to have fewer children than people at the middle, because they're trying to conserve resources so their children can have high status.

Like if you have the very largest herds, or lands, and then you have to split it three ways between three children then you might choose to have one to only split it one way, or if you have a primogeniture inheritance system you might not bother having a lot of children because only one inherits and the others don't.

I've not kept up to date on the state of the art on this.

But I think most people would agree that fertility was certainly very low for people at the bottom of the tree.

Jijnasu said...

Since we're discussing patriarchy of early IE societies, its interesting that kuz'mina points out that the andonovans were matrilocal. children were burried with their marriages. She attributes this to endogamy as practiced amongst iranic peoples. She also links this to caste, but this is deeply problematic caste even well into the first millenium meant usually meant hypergamy rather than strict endogamy was the norm. At the same time Indo-Aryan traditions strictly prohibited marriages amongst kinsmen. A strict clan exogamy is observed to this day in NW India and all the texts on hindu law prohibit marriages amongst kinsmen upto the 7 degree. The definitiveness of indentifying andronovo as indo-aryan rather than iranic is suspect

Davidski said...

@postneo

There are more mummified male pharaohs than female. Does it prove they were IE speakers?

Egyptians didn't roll into Europe and South Asia during the Bronze Age. The steppe pastoralists did.

martin said...

Est ce possible, le seul exemple que je connais ressemblant à ce modèle est l'épisode de la reconquista espagnole qui amène l'expansion de df27 par des méthodes souvent violentes, mais là il s'agit d'une armée et venant de Navarre ce qui n'est pas si éloigné dé l'Andalousie et même avec le char à boeufs. Ce n'est pas dans l'autre cas Les mêmes proportions, et ils auraient l'organisation d'une armée ?
Et combien de temps avant de pouvoir se reproduire ?
Tout cela était nécessairement très rapidement dans le temps.

martin said...

Davidski :
Voilà le problème ; ma ligne maternelle est basque et pourtant on est Mt DNA T1a1, cela devrait être impossible, et en plus je suis R-df100 ce qui devrait être inconcevable puisque les basque sont le peuple du mésolithique européen, j'ai la sensation que cela n'est pas trop logique. Qu'en pensez-vous ?

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

Status is relative therefore low status will always out-breed high status. You are not high status unless your status is exceptional compared to the average. High status is a minority otherwise it would be average or low status.

Davidski said...

@Martin

You seem to be suggesting that Basques are of Mesolithic European origin? If so, that's not correct. Mesolithic European ancestry easily peaks in the Eastern Baltic region.

Basques are made up of the same ancient ancestral components as all Europeans, but in somewhat different proportions. See here.

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/basques-are-not-simply-fusion-of.html

So the presence of certain uniparental markers in Basques, even at high frequencies, cannot be used as an argument to support their presence in Mesolithic Western Europe.

Alberto said...

@RK

Nice to see you around.

The whole debate would be complicated, and long. But the basics are more or less simple, and like Romulus said above, if we go to a pyramidal society, the very definition of high status implies being a minority. The top of the pyramid cannot outgrow the middle and bottom, or it would continually collapse.

Examples from modern societies are clear, and there's no strong reason to think it could be very different in preindustrial societies (industrialization probably allows for a bigger middle class, but otherwise the principle is more or less the same).

But not to go into philosophical debates, sticking to the IE expansions into Europe:

- We have D. Anthony's model of elite expansion, where there are incoming patrons who acquire local clients, and through prestige they spread language and cultural traits. This model was a good effort to explain how a small population could have a big cultural and linguistic impact in much larger ones across vast areas. But it implies that IEs would have a very small genetic impact, and it's basically disproved by ancient DNA (in both the overall genetic impact and in the composition of the incoming populations themselves, which are homogeneous and not a non-local patron with local clients).

So from the data we have, we need 2 basic things:

- First a big movement of people, a whole population that on arrival already represents a significant percentage of the total (say, 10% or 20%, not 1-2% as in the elite model).

- Second, a faster growth rate that brought them to end up representing some 70% of the total population during the whole process, which might have lasted some 1000 years.

The admixture being sex biased doesn't seem such a big problem overall. It's true for most cultures across time that in intermarriages it's usually the wife who moves to live with the husband's group and not the other way around. So this was probably the case in BA Europe too.

As for the higher population growth, one can speculate about the reasons, but they end up being economical. For example:

- There was a vertical integration of both populations in which the incoming one slotted itself into the mid and lower part of the pyramid (where there's not only room for growth, but the growth would even be helped and promoted by the population on the upper part of the pyramid, who needs a larger population that produces more than they consume so that the ones in the top can consume more than they produce).

- The two population didn't integrate and lived side by side, with one being more efficient in the use of resources allowing them for faster growth.

I think the second choice is more likely with what we know. And being more efficient does somehow imply using less resources to survive. After all, the putative IEs didn't have the need to own land, houses, build villages,... The chief of each clan probably had a wagon, and a couple of horses. The rest maybe nothing, but could feed on the chief's goats and cattle in exchange for herding them. That looks like a much more efficient economy.

Or some other variant that someone can think of.

Or else, we can go for the "Mexican" model that some people seem to prefer, in which steppe men migrated and were killing or enslaving all the local men and taking (also enslaving) all the women. But this model has too many problems and it's probably too unrealistic to consider it seriously.

Davidski said...

Anthony's model is outdated. It was based on the archaeological paradigm that people didn't migrate very much during the Copper and Bronze Ages.

The South American, or as you call it, Mexican model is just fine, for both Europe and South Asia. It totally fits ancient and modern genetic evidence.

Rob said...

The Mexico model isn;t correct archaeologically.
It's more likely to be Alberto's model #2, But we need more than 3 Unetice samples to move forward with definite conclusions.

Davidski said...

Why isn't the Mexico model correct archaeologically?

It looks fine from all angles.

Rob said...

Dave.

It isn't quite fine, and I have already in the past intimated why.
First of all, the 'first hit' to Neolithic lineages appears to have occurred long before pastoral arrivals.
Secondly, the newly arriving pastoralists appear to have often co-existed with preceding groups (GAC, TRB, etc) for up to 1, 000 years, as Alberto intimated.
So what appears to have happened is c. 2200 BC, there was another round of social upheaval, ecological crisis & ideological re-allignment in many parts of Europe.
Further elaboration will come in the future..

Ryan said...

@Davidski - "So the presence of certain uniparental markers in Basques, even at high frequencies, cannot be used as an argument to support their presence in Mesolithic Western Europe."

Pretty sure the fact that the oldest R1b sample we have is from mesolithic Western Europe does though. :3

If you scroll up to the links I posted early on, there actually is mtDNA turn over in Yamnaya. Quite a bit. The Siberian component of their mtDNA gets wiped out. Which makes me think a lot of the later WHG mtDNA could have been from an external source too.

Davidski said...

WHG can't be the source of Western European R1b, because if it was, then we'd see R1b throughout Western Europe during the Middle Neolithic, when WHG ancestry bounces back in a big way.

This is also the time when I2 bounces back, and again becomes the predominant Y-haplogroup in much of Western and Central Europe like it was during the Mesolithic.

R1b-M269 comes in from the east much later, along with a sharp rise in steppe ancestry. It's likely to be derived from an Villabruna-related population in Eastern Europe.

And as far as I can see, there are no recorded instances of "Siberian" mtDNA in Yamnaya. The paper you linked to doesn't appear to have any Yamnaya samples. That's not to say we won't ever see Yamnaya individuals with weird mtDNA like C1, but it's unlikely to make up a large portion of any Yamnaya sample set.

Ryukendo K said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

@Davidski

That is total bullshit and exactly where you are wrong. Villabruna is the proof. There will be more.

Ryan said...

@Davidski -

Agreed re: R1b - just saying, we *do* know it was present in Western Europe pretty early.

"And as far as I can see, there are no recorded instances of "Siberian" mtDNA in Yamnaya. The paper you linked to doesn't appear to have any Yamnaya samples."

L8 is Yamna and C4a.

Aram said...

Jijnasu

"Isn't the fact that 0.5% of men can trace their Y chromosomes to the Genghis khan and his clansmen an excellent example of how influential the genes of an elite male can be"

It is a legend. Nobody has found such a big Y dna cluster with appropriate age.

Davidski said...

That is total bullshit and exactly where you are wrong. Villabruna is the proof. There will be more.

No bullshit sunshine. You'll have to come to terms with it sooner or later.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Ryan,

There's no mtdna haplogroup named L8.

The only instance of non-typical West Eurasan mydna in BA Steppe is a single C1 and the only example in EHG is a single C1(several relatives carried it).

The C4as from Ukraine are from an old study and so not confirmed. Even if the results are confirmed mtdna C was a very insignifant lineage in Steppe people.

Gioiello said...

@ Davidski

"R1b-M269 comes in from the east much later, along with a sharp rise in steppe ancestry. It's likely to be derived from an Villabruna-related population in Eastern Europe".

I think having demonstrated which Samara haplotypes derived from Villabruna descendants and which not, and, above all, when the migration happened: i.e. about 7000 years ago between the two subclades of R-L23-Z2109*.
I, as usual, make previsions based on scientific inquieres and wait for the proofs.

Garvan said...

Blogger Samuel Andrews said..."There's no mtdna haplogroup named L8."

Hi,

I think you misread what Ryan said. If you refer to the paper he referenced you will find that "Specimen L8 was assigned to the Yamna (Pit Grave) archeological [sp.?] culture"

Garvan

postneo said...

@davidski
"Egyptians didn't roll into Europe and South Asia during the Bronze Age. The steppe pastoralists did."

Can you prove that the steppe pastoralists spoke IE? real proof not models.


Davidski said...

They spoke a language that was closely related to the languages spoken today in Eastern Europe and South Asia.

There's only one possible candidate. You know that as well as I do.

Gioiello said...

@ Davidski
"They spoke a language that was closely related to the languages spoken today in Eastern Europe and South Asia.
There's only one possible candidate. You know that as well as I do".

But consider that it could be a satem Indo-European and not the Indo-European tout court. The descendants of Samara, from Central European Slavs to Indians from Sintashta Andronovo speak all satem languages or partially satemizated like Albanian, and probably the expansion from Samara didn't reach westernmost the land where Albanians formed, which could be somewhere in the Balkans.

Davidski said...

The Indo-European homeland was not in Italy. You need to move on from that.

Folker said...

Alberto, if you look at medieval ages, polygyny was the rule for notables and nobles. When you find last will of near every noble or burgess, merchant, banker..... you'll find bastard. Not all of them, only the prefered ones.
I know the case of low noble from Lille in the late XVth century: not married, no legitimate children, but 42 bastards!
yes, legitimate children tended to be restricted in reproduction (the oldest son inherited the land, some daughter got dowries, the rest went into church). But it is not taking into account illegitimate lines. Even priests did have bastards.
Nobogy knows how many modern lines come from this highest part of the society, as most of the times, bastards did have difficulties to marry in their father's class, and usually became integrated with the non noble landowners or similar economic class.
So, it is extremely clear that even in the XVIIIth century, the notables did have usually more offsrping than the poor. By notable, I also mean local notable (village mayor by example), so it means more around 20% of the society, than a very small elite.
In the BA, society was structured around small units, so notables (chief and their close relatives) were probably more something like village chief then king or the sort. So more around 20% of the overall population than to 2%.
It is extremely clear that the Steppe migrants were the Elite, the notables, not the poors. If they were on the bad side of the social stairs, they would have no male offspring surviving. Female is another case (female servants tend to be used as concubines, aren't they?).

Gioiello said...

@ Davidski
"The Indo-European homeland was not in Italy. You need to move on from that".
I haven't said that. Even though the Indo-European derived from the Villabruna clan, from 14000 years ago their descendants migrated elsewhere, beginning from 10200 years ago, which is the date, as to YFull (but I'd multiply that for at least an 1.17 factor), of the differentiation of the subclades of R-V88, R-L389 and R-M335. Of course IE may be formed also in Central Europe, the Balkans, etc. , but I wouldn't go far from Italy.
About me, I remember you that I am theorizing "Villabruna", i.e. a refugium of R1b in the subalpine region Northward Adriatic, from ten years. And about my knowledge in linguistics I am taken seriously from many years (already on "Dienekes' Anthropology blog") from the best cathedratic in linguistics who writes on this blog.

Alberto said...

@RK

I'll read your references in more detail as soon as I can. But notice that I'm not reasoning my way out against empirical evidence. On the contrary, I'm exclusively referring to real world examples and not to theoretical models or small-scale studies.

So we agree on the obvious part: high classes cannot overgrow and stay as high classes. So you suggest that there is a continuous downward movement of high classes becoming middle and eventually lower classes. That could work, but how many real world examples can you find that support this model and how many that don't? The majority I can think off don't really show that trend. Modern are the easiest to find, but even if we go to preindustrial societies I still can't see that happening, not often. Otherwise I'd see Iberians being mostly descended from Romans or from Visigoths or from Arabs. The number of offspring that ruling classes might have seems to be anecdotal in the real world.

In that model, the Romani people (gypsies) would have long gone extinct. They've always been at the bottom of European societies. And throughout history they've suffered many episodes of active persecution and attempts of extermination. And yet, there they are, reaching almost 10% of the population in several Balkan countries.

There is just too much real world evidence to be ignored.

But back to IE expansions into Europe (to avoid straying too much from the main topic), if you still prefer a model similar to the Mexican one, I'm open to be convinced because there are always exceptions in history (not just the discovery of America by Europeans). For now I see many problems trying to apply that model to BA Europe (unless we start finding firearms in those kurgans), but if you do have good reasons to support it I'm definitely interested in hearing them.

Ryukendo K said...
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John Thomas said...

The European 'Romany' have found a particular 'ethnic genetic interest' strategy niche, and have stuck to it - as reproductive strategies go it is successful, but that's perhaps all that could be said of it.
Neither the Romans nor the Goths held Spain for any great course of time, the actual number of Roman colonists was likely small. I don't know if the Gothic invasion wax numerically disproportionate.
There were quite a number of 'Morenos' or Moorish descendants in 'reconquered' Spain. A large proportion were, apparently, repatriated back to north Africa, a large number Aldo emigrated to Mexico or 'New Spain'. Also their contribution to the modern Spanish gene pool, particularly in the south of Spain,cannot be ignored.


André de Vasconcelos said...

@mickey

Goths mostly crossed the Pyrenees in 490/500, no one knows exactly how many they were, but the estimated total of Suebi/Goths/Alani/etc in Iberia is around 250/300k tops, so at most 5% of the total population. Yet, according to Eupedia map, you only have relevant values of germanic yDNA in the NW of the peninsula (where the Suebi peoples settled). Their overall genetic contribution to modern Iberians is probably very small, borderline irrelevant.

A similar trend happened centuries after. Most of the muslim comunities in Spain were local converts, the top classes did indeed have foreign ancestry (not always though, e.g. Ibn Marwan), but also - mostly - local. For instance Caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III was at least 75% Iberian, described has having light skin and blue eyes, but his paternal line was Arab (Ummayad).

Honestly this is not that surprising.
In the first case you had an actual migration, but their numbers were comparatively small. Eventhough they were the elite, local society, while collapsing, did not cease to exist, and many local powerful men kind of retained their influence - sometimes allying themselves against central Roman rule. The result was that the new elite filled a partial-vacuum, but did not end up dominating the paternal lines afterwards. Not even close.

In the second case, like in the early Roman times, it's not a migration we're dealing with, but a military conquest by an organized society against another. While people may have moved across the Mediterranean, muslim Spain was for the most part independent from the rest of the muslim world following the Berber revolt, just like Asturias was independent from Francia. Some people stayed (which is why the Berbers revolted as they were granted poorer lands), others went back to their homes. The small elite controlled (kind of) the lands and began a cultural and social shift, but the genetic impact is not something taken for granted. African ancestry peaks in west Iberia, rather than south. Compare Galicia to Valencia. Looking at the geographic distribution it does seem to be older than the middle ages. http://cdn.eupedia.com/images/content/African-admixture.gif

If that is the case, then the elites really did not manage to produce significant amounts of descendants when compared the the vast majority of the common folk, as Alberto said - indeed it seems Iberians did not change massively since the Copper age. Steppe ancestry entered the genepool, but not nearly as much as other places in Central or Northern Europe.
Whether this can be applied to Bronze Age societies, I don't know, but I suspect not. The medieval world was more structured and organized than the neolithic-to-bronze age one, aswell as more densely populated making the impact of people movements less significant.
Possibly the early IEs who moved into Central Europe could have co-existed with locals with ocasional violence happening. Their lifestyle might have made them more resilient to climatic changes that had devastating consequences on farmer societies, and they ended up being more successful. I have little doubt that they became the elite, but many of them were not (we can't all be elite status, can we?).

Grey said...

Alberto
"So we agree on the obvious part: high classes cannot overgrow and stay as high classes. So you suggest that there is a continuous downward movement of high classes becoming middle and eventually lower classes."

and

Matt
"I think there is some argument that people at the top of the social tree might tend to have fewer children than people at the middle, because they're trying to conserve resources so their children can have high status."

That would be my guess - plus a warrior elite have a casualty rate issue - the elite surplus overflow into the equivalent of the middle class at the time (e.g. small farmer with good land able to pump out 8 healthy kids per generation) and as this 2nd group are larger they become the main engine.

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

@Chad

The Rathlin beakers are more closely related to KO1 and Lochsbour than any other samples. They also carry WHG mtdna.

Alberto said...

@RK

I haven't read the Clarke's books you mention, but if Wikipedia's commentary does any justice to them... Jesus Christ.

The Portuguese study has nothing to do with general demography. It's centred in studying within elite reproduction strategies.

The main reason why genealogies have not been more extensively used in historical demographic studies is that they generally exist only for elite lineages, which are usually considered unrepresentative of the general population. Since elite family reproduction is the central focus of this study, however, this problem will not concern us.

The PNAS article I can't make too much of it. Between small scale and large scale dynamics there are many factors that can have a big influence. As you mentioned, timespan of elite stability is one, and that's often rather short. Elites replace each other fast, even if they belong to the same population for quite a long time. In the end, even if the richest families at one time have more descendants it's still unclear how this affects things in a large scale.

But back to the main topic, I have to insist on the main point. Not only there is no evidence that these putative IEs became an elite on arrival, when they were still the smaller population. Their growth is unlikely to have happened because they were an elite, but because they had a good subsistence strategy. They were not rich guys, sitting on a throne, getting fat and having offspring with concubines. These were fit and healthy people, with an active life, used to hard conditions and to survive in difficult environments. They were probably more resilient to climatic changes (as André has pointed out above). This, and not a systematic use of violence, is what most likely made them successful.

Karl_K said...

@Alberto

"Their growth is unlikely to have happened because they were an elite, but because they had a good subsistence strategy. They were not rich guys, sitting on a throne, getting fat and having offspring with concubines. These were fit and healthy people, with an active life, used to hard conditions and to survive in difficult environments."

You are somehow failing to incorporate the main issue that has actually provided the hard data to this situation.

You don't have to think about whether it happened or not.

Y-chromosome lineages (from the incoming IE populations) didn't simply grow at a faster rate in a similar tree-like fashion as the Neolithics of Europe. Instead they produced 'star-like' phylogenies.

We can assume that many thousands of men migrated to Europe during the early Bronze Age.

But one of two things must be true of those men. Either they were already all quite close cousins of a few seperate Y-chromosome based families before they migrated, or there was a massive amount of male biased reproduction once they arrived in Europe.

We are talking about something like 100x more reproduction per man than in the previous Neolithic societies.

That is what we know about what actually happened. Not a made up story or a guess.

You need to have a hypothesis that matches the data.

The most likely fact is that (unlike today, or the middle ages) in the Bronze Age, high status men had a huge amount of children, and sons of those particular men (but not daughters) also had huge amounts of children, etc.

This had to be what happened.

The sex difference tells you that the men were producing many children that they did not have to actually directly provide for. But within their positively known family, the sons (and probably with a strong heirarchy) were given all of the wealth.

You suppose that a fortune must be split evenly between the children, but that is farmer logic.

Pastoralists have no such system. Especially if they may have thought there was no limit to the pasture.






Ryan said...

@Sam

Garvan is correct. It's specimen L8 that is both C4a and from a Yamna grave.

The paper as a whole shows C4 intially with a significant presence on the steppe, with the frequency declining over time.

John Thomas said...

Karl K,

Just hypothesising here, but it's perhaps relevant that up until very recently, 'traditional' cultures in the east treated the birth of son in as much the same way as the birth of a 'god'. Female births, on the other hand, were simply one of life's events.

MaxT said...

@Gioiello

Yamnaya does not cluster with Villabruna, that pretty much says it all.

R1b did not come from Italy to Steppe but from steppe to Italy. whether it's mesolithic or bronze age.

Gioiello said...

@ MaxT

"@Gioiello
Yamnaya does not cluster with Villabruna, that pretty much says it all.
R1b did not come from Italy to Steppe but from steppe to Italy. whether it's mesolithic or bronze age".

Of course. Villabruna is 14000 years old and Yamnaya more than 10000 years later. I said that these R-L23 migrated from Western Europe to Yamnaya 7000 years ago, and they may have come from everywhere in Western Europe or the Balkans, because after the Younger Dryas the Villabrunas expanded everywhere, also in Anatolia, Middle East and Iran beyond Eastern Europe.
I study the haplotypes and have infinite proofs that my R-L23-Z2110* is rooted and diffused in Italy or at least in Western Europe.
Next tests will say if you are right and I wrong or the other way around.

MaxT said...

@Gioiello

That could simply mean that 'some' Western European R1b in Europe (like R1b in West Africa) is Non-Indo-European related. Most R1b in Europe emerged in late Neolithic and bronze age, with Yamnaya-related migration.

I don't see R1b from Western Europe/Balkans populating the steppes, the other way around seems realistic from all the aDNA evidence and Y-DNA found in Mesolithic Europe so far, which is mostly I and C, Balkans like Razib conformed is G2a.








Gioiello said...

@ MaxT

Of course I don't agree with you. I have written more than 10000 letters about that (as not only Gioiello, but also Maliclavelli, Rathna, Claire etc.) and, like Paganini, I didn't repeat. Yamnaya lacks all the upstream and downstrean subclades of R1b1 and I am sure it isn't at the origin of the haplogroup neither of the IE languages, if not the satem ones. We all are waiting that labs publish the tests about aDNA they surely have.

Alberto said...

@Karl_K

I'm saying exactly that. This population that carried uniformly R1a or R1b moved into Europe in big numbers (I said it might have represented 10%-20% of the total population) and then it grew much faster than the local ones, so that it became like 70% of the total.

Which part is not matching the data? Do you mean that they should grow even more? Faster?

Ryukendo K said...
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Ryukendo K said...
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postneo said...

@mdodds
"My point is that the age old Darwinian/Malthusuan dilemma is, really, still there.
It's just that it's 'masked'."

darwinian and malthusuan don't go together. The latter seems myopic.
The rich get richer and get some attention, but they do not multiply at the same rate.

Smart phones, compilers, hardware are also driven by evolutionary constraints just like speech, fire, wheels, agriculture.

Newer innovations just take the place of older ones and the cycle repeats and they die off as well.

Differential advantages by their very nature do not last long. The window is small. Yes a few elites and early adopters will be able to spread genes in the beginning, but only for that specific advantage.
Soon they are subsumed by masses of adopters. The odds are that the next winning mutation will not occur among the descendants of the same aristocracy.

EEF did not succeed in europe because they were elites but because they were already large, like virus post gestation or infection.


"if 'government redistribution' programs were 'magically' ended tomorrow would not earn enough money through selling their labor to pay for their lifetime medical costs - let alone pay for their food, shelter, clothing, utilities,pensions, education etc etc. A simple fact of the realities of capitalist economic life."

Government "distribution/redistribution" is secondary.
Subsistence itself is masked by something called money. Its the biggest illusion of all.
Both Mitt Romney and his "freeloaders" are parasites far removed from subsistence.
The fed prints dollars by betting on the amount of natural gas an american will consume in unit time to stay alive.

Forget junk like transport, computing, telecom, etc.. Apart from breathing all human metabolic processes are governed by fossil energy consumption.

The rest of the world bets on stable consumption of energy units(dollars) by americans.
why did such a system come about ??
The transient aristocracies and the base they depend have wished it so .... for their short term advantage.
bets are placed and deals made to perpetuate equilibrium. Is not so much redistribution its a transaction.. a symbiosis.



@jijnasu.
"Most ordinary men were likely monogamous and consequently had far fewer offspring"

Aristocracy by its nature means minority and does not happen in vacuum. The only reason a few males had harems was by means of a vast social support system of surplus food and security.
It presupposes a very large non aristocratic base.

harems get disproportionate attention vs statistical reality.

Ryukendo K said...
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Ryan said...

The far simpler model is that R1b spread to multiple locations at once, one of which happened to be in Italy.

Matt said...

Though in some conditions harems might also even raise the reproduction of non-elite females compared to monogamy. Because female concubines and second wives = generally not so elite (or else they'd be a first wife). So you've maybe got more elite men having kids, and also they're having them with pretty milkmaids and fieldhands. With one wife, a man has to be more choosy. There'd be a female and male side to greater elite reproduction. (Though the effect of harmems and concubines obviously small on a mass population scale, because it's expensive).

Samuel Andrews said...

@Ryan,
"The paper as a whole shows C4 intially with a significant presence on the steppe, with the frequency declining over time."

There is one study with mtdna C4 from ancient Ukraine. That isn't enough evidence to say C4 gradually decreased in popularity. The data set for post Mesolithic and pre Yamnya mtdna is too small to make such a big claim. The data speaks against C4 ever having a strong presence in the Steppe becausei it doesn't appear in countless sites outside of that one in Ukraine.

Karl_K said...

@Alberto

"I'm saying exactly that. This population that carried uniformly R1a or R1b moved into Europe in big numbers (I said it might have represented 10%-20% of the total population) and then it grew much faster than the local ones, so that it became like 70% of the total.

Which part is not matching the data? Do you mean that they should grow even more? Faster?"

How can you explain how nearly all Corded Ware men were R1a M417, when the age of that haplogroup was less than 2000 years (and likely much less than 2000 years) old at the time of the earliest Corded Ware Culture in Europe?

We also can be sure that Yamnaya and probably lots of the steppe was not dominated by R1a M417.

It is very unreasonable to suggest that there were such a huge number of migrants, the men of which ALL had many children because of the same economic advantage.

If that was the case, then we would have many more Y haplogroups in Corded Ware men. But instead, they are all close cousins on the paternal line, and the numbers of direct paternal (Y-chromosome) relatives expanded much greater (100x greater) than the general population expansion.

And it doesn't stop with Corded Ware. Bell Beaker R1b had the same kind of Y-chromosome expansion in Western Europe.

And then we see the same thing with R1a Z282 and Z93.

This can not be that the whole population shared the same advantage in reproduction.

The males of very specific lineages had a massive advantage over most other male lines.

This has to be because these high status men had tons of children that they did not have to physically support. The sons of these men then inherited some of the ability to also have tons of children that they did not have to support.

There is no other way for the Y-chromosome phylogenies to make sense in the context of the autosome, X-chromosome, and mtDNA.

Alberto said...

@Karl_K

Well, I don't know if things are really as radical as you seem to be suggesting. IIRC the number of sons per generation during those explosive phases were like 1.3-1.5? Which must be a lot, but not something totally unreasonable.

But if what you say is strictly correct, are you suggesting that from those R1a/b populations, only a very small number of men had rights to reproduce while all the others didn't? Like a religious sect in which the leader could have offspring with all the women in the tribe while all the other men were celibates?

That sounds a bit crazy to me.

Gioiello said...

Alberto, I think that all are out of road in their explanations. There is only a theory that explains that: a people of related Y tends to reduce to only 1 survivor and he comes out from a bottleneck.
Those who are speaking about Villabruna don't consider that having found it isn't by chance, but because there were many related Y at R1b1-L297 level and only one survived and gave Birth to the Whole descent.
Of course this is a strong proof of my "Italian Refugium" of R1b1-L297* and subclades.
Also from the R1b of Yamnaya only a few survived and had descent, but they were many at the R-L23 level.

Karl_K said...

@Alberto

"are you suggesting that from those R1a/b populations, only a very small number of men had rights to reproduce while all the others didn't?"

Absolutely not.

Look at it this way.

You earlier suggested that direct steppe migrants would have numbered 10-20% of the Neolithic population density (in the early Corded Ware regions?). If so, that would have been many thousands of men.

We don't know where they exactly came from, but their genetics suggest that they were highly related to the sampled Yamnaya.

However, the sampled Yamnaya were highly enriched in R1b, while Corded Ware were highly enriched in R1a, and a very young branch of R1a at that.

So there had been a nearly complete bottleneck in the Y-chromosomal line of the men that made up the Corded Ware population not long before (but possibly at the same time as) the mass migration.

How can you explain that? Do you think there was a population on the steppe with several thousand very closely paternally related men that all migrated at about the same time?

Why didn't many of the R1b men migrate to Eastern Europe? How could a man know if he was R1a or R1b or something else?

This wasn't a 1.5x expansion of R1a M417 over other Y lines, because nearly all of the Y chromosomes were R1a M417 from quite early Corded Ware.

Yet the female reproductive pool clearly had mostly EEF-like X-chromosomes.

What this suggests is that the sons (but not the daughters) of high status men inherited an ability to have many extra children, well above the average for other low status men or all women.

This ability to have many children followed the Y chromosome. So there must have been cultural mechanisms to maintain that reproductive advantage for thousands of years.

Karl_K said...

@Alberto

As for this all sounding crazy to you, you can just look into the marriages of different tribal chiefs, even today.

For example, I believe the current king of Swaziland is 48 years old, and has 15 wives and at least 30 children. He takes a new young wife every year, and could have hundreds of children, and even hundreds of grandchildren before he dies. His father had 210 known children, and over 1000 known grandchildren when he died. One of his sons will also inherit this ability to have many wives and children.

Moulay Ismaïl of Morrocco is alleged to have fathered a total of 867 children, and only acknowledged 11 of them.


And many women would be perfectly happy to have a child by a king, or prince, or rock star, or professional athlete, or movie actor, or other high status men. Only now that men may be accountable for providing for these children have things changed.

This is not a religious cult, it is high status men having lots of children, and passing that status on through their sons.

Rob said...

Imaginably, only couple of sons would in turn inherit the privilege, as the women would simply run out. Which means the other 197 sons were ? use to plow the fields .

Karl_K said...

Not if you are going into new territory. Many sons could inherit the advantage, at least for the first few generations.

After that, the families that found new advantages and territories would carry on the tradition, even back toward the East and into South Asia.

How else can you explain all the Z282 and Z93?

Ric Hern said...

Droit du seigneur/jus primae noctis ?

Rob said...

@ Karl
Yes I think teritory has something to do with it. It could be as simple as having one wife in Central Europe, the other in Russia, along their seasonal routes .
If these men were travelling, they must have been bringing *something*. Ergo prestige, whatever commodity it was.

Alberto said...

@Karl_K

If we also look at the autosomal level, we see that Northern Europe has some 40-45% admixture from a Yamnaya-like population. This makes it necessary that this population was big enough before they started mixing with Neolithic Europeans. Had they been a tiny percentage of the total, no matter how successful their Y-chromosome was, their autosomes would have diluted into an insignificant level.

So yes, I think you need a big movement of people to start the model.

As for the mode in which they grew so fast, you basically attribute this growth not to all of the members in each clan having a relatively big number of sons, but to the chief of the clan alone having a disproportionate number of sons. Ok, but...

If one chief has 100 sons, then those sons inherit the Y chromosome from that same father. So then on a second generation, how would you tell the difference between one of those sons inheriting this "privilege" and having another 100 sons himself from those 100 sons having one son each? They would still all share the same Y chromosome.

So yes, it's possible that the chiefs had 15 wives each and lots of sons. But I don't think it's really necessary. What is necessary is the initial bottleneck/founder effect. The reasons for this could be chance or indeed one very successful male with a big number of descendants.

John Thomas said...

Alberto,
It's not 'crazy'. It's what men are hard-wired to do.

Rob said...

15 wives and no dramas?
Sign me up

Garvan said...

I am reading a book by J.P. Mallory, one of the authors of the Rathlin paper. He says that Beakers arrive in Ireland about 2500 BC, from both northern Britain and continental Europe, 1000 years before the emergence of elites, or a wealthy class, becomes evident in the archaeological record. There is no hard evidence to date that they had horses. Their encampments indicate they traveled in small groups of a few families.

In the case of Ireland, they must have arrived in numbers, and the wealthy chief with 25 wives dates from considerably later.

Folker said...

@Ryukendo

As you posted twice about the link between the Queen Elizabeth and the Prophet Muhammad, I feel that I must correct your data.
There is no known genealogical link between both.
In fact, there is no genealogical link between Medieval Christian nobility and Medieval Muslim nobility, in the way that Christian nobles could be the descendant of Muslim nobles. The other way is correct: many Muslim are descendants of Christians.
The alleged link between Muhammad and Iberian kings has been studied many times, but the last big study to date (to my knowledge), has been done by Christian Settipani, a specialist of genealogies in High Middle Ages and Antiquity, and published by the University of Oxford:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~prosop/publications/volume-five-abstract.htm
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~prosop/publications/volume-five.htm
Settipani disregards any possibility to link Muhammad to the Iberian kings.

About demography, there are many studies about difference of reproduction between social classes in History, and there is more genealogical trees in Western European of common people proving that there is some bias toward upper middle class families, as most of our ancestors on the long run are from local landowners, with big families, often marrying in the same social class or above. Often, on average, those middle class landowners were farmers, and often small local notables. They account for more than 90% of a generation if you go back 400 or 500 years. And many of them are multiple times your ancestors. Statiscally, given the high number of genealogical trees known in Europe, it was clearly the rule in all Europe. And it was in a non so much patriarcal society, as polygamy was forbidden, and women did have some social status. If you look at modern Magreb, you still find many example of polygamy, with only the limit of 5 wives. And the men are not high notables, but mere by-standers.
If, as it is guessed Steppe migrants were highly patriarcal, and practiced either polygamy or polyginy, if we reason on a village size scale (200 people, perhaps less), most of the men will have the founder haplogroup in less than one century. If 2000 male migrants were doing the same, virtually all the CWC area could be covered with the same haplogroup in less than 300 years. This is similar to how Merovingians seized power in Gaul: all were part of the same family, all related by their male-line (women were excluded), each of them took power in a different town, covering all the Franks territory with chiefdoms of petty kings, all related by their common male ancestor. And only the fact they were descendants of this sole ancestor gave them the possibility to be elected as king. When Clovis tried to unified all the Franks, he killed his cousins to take their place. That's also why Carolingians seeked another legitimacy: as they were from another male line, they needed God to legetimate their power (hence the coronation). I think it was pretty similar in the Bronze Age: only one male line was recognized to be legitimate to rule. If you want your part of the cake, and you were not of this line, the only solution was to create your own clan and migrate.

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

@Alberto

"If we also look at the autosomal level, we see that Northern Europe has some 40-45% admixture from a Yamnaya-like population"

No they don't. Haak massively overestimated Yamanaya like admixture in Nothern Europe. Allentoft corrected this and it is drastically reduced.

Karl_K said...

@Alberto

"If we also look at the autosomal level, we see that Northern Europe has some 40-45% admixture from a Yamnaya-like population"

I don't think that is a problem. It just means that older (and therefore more autosomally steppe-like) migrants had many additional children, and their oldest sons (most likely to be from women with the most steppe ancestry) also had the greatest advantage in the next generation.

I am not claiming that anything is simple here, but you can't really claim that R1a Z282 or Z93 just arose to dominance by random fluctuations. We know there was not a massive die off at those points, the population was still expanding rapidly.

So how did they have such massive founder effects in Eastern Europe and South Asia?

It is reasonable to suspect that this was the continued result of long standing cultural traditions in the early IE populations.

Grey said...

Karl-K

"And it doesn't stop with Corded Ware. Bell Beaker R1b had the same kind of Y-chromosome expansion in Western Europe."

Is it confirmed that the western R1b expansion had the same disproportion on ydna?

I'd have thought the elite conquest model based on military advantage was more likely in the later period than the earlier?

Ric Hern said...

As we can see Lords did not need to marry everyone they bedded. Prima Noctis seems to be a very old IE law....

Grey said...

Alberto

"But if what you say is strictly correct, are you suggesting that from those R1a/b populations, only a very small number of men had rights to reproduce while all the others didn't? Like a religious sect in which the leader could have offspring with all the women in the tribe while all the other men were celibates?"

I think the more likely possibilities are:

1) "Farewell to Alms" scenario of cascading status / inheritance over time

Say you have a conquering elite who have endogamous legitimate marriages producing legitimate inheritors plus a surplus.

If a Count has only daughters or dies with a young widow then who wins the competition to marry the heiress/widow? The King's spare younger son if he has one.

If a Knight has only daughters or dies with a young widow then who wins the competition to marry the heiress/widow? The local count's spare younger son if he has one.

A prosperous miller has only daughters or dies with a young widow then who wins the competition to marry the heiress/widow? The local knight's spare younger son if he has one.

(I think the only daughters thing must be significant in this.)

(To a varying extent this could apply to illegitimate children also - married off to spare daughters maybe a couple of ranks down rather than one rank)

#

2) Pastoralist Polygyny

There's a lot of populations still like this where the guy who owns the herd has all the wives and the younger men have to wait their turn until they inherit.

And in a lot of those population this leads to young men banding together to raid neighboring populations - either for animals to use as dowry or actual brides.

It's easy to see how something like this could lead to a rolling conquest over time as one group of young men take some territory and settle into being the big guys and then their sons get fed up and attack the next region along.

#

The second option fits direct conquest.

The first option might also fit infiltration migration i.e where herders moved into farmer territory but on land that was unused as marginal for crop farming (like Akkad/Sumer) - especially if climate change was gradually increasing the amount of land that was marginal and herding was gradually becoming a more viable option.

The first option might also fit as a later second stage of a post-conquest scenario.

Grey said...

Garvan

"In the case of Ireland, they must have arrived in numbers, and the wealthy chief with 25 wives dates from considerably later."

It depends if the measured ydna disproportion applies everywhere (to the same extent). If parts of the Atlantic coast had lots of land that was marginal for neolithic crop farming but good for dairying then you might see a rapid population explosion after herders arrived but with a ydna disproportion markedly less than the R1a explosion later and further east.

Davidski said...

FYI everyone reading this discussion, Romulus is talking nonsense.

The estimates of Yamnaya-related ancestry for Europeans from Haak et al. are still current, and can be reproduced, more or less, using the new 1.2 million SNP ancient DNA dataset and qpAdm software from the Reich lab website.

https://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reich/Reich_Lab/Datasets.html

Ryan said...

@Sam - "There is one study with mtdna C4 from ancient Ukraine. That isn't enough evidence to say C4 gradually decreased in popularity. The data set for post Mesolithic and pre Yamnya mtdna is too small to make such a big claim. The data speaks against C4 ever having a strong presence in the Steppe becausei it doesn't appear in countless sites outside of that one in Ukraine."

Agreed, though I believe there's more than one site in that paper.

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

I'm not talking nonsense, I'm quoting Heggarty. You can cry about it all you want.

"Indeed, although Haak et al.’s (2015) Figure 3 can seem to present strikingly high rates of Yamnaya ancestry in some parts of Europe, things look much less clear-cut in the alternative presentation in Allentoft et al.’s (2015), Figure 2: “Genetic structure of ancient Europe and the Pontic-Caspian steppe.”

http://dlc.hypotheses.org/807

Davidski said...

Nothing in Allentoft et al. or the link you provided contradicts the estimates of Yamnaya-related ancestry for Europeans given in Haak et al.

There are no estimates of Yamnaya-related ancestry in Allentoft et al. based on formal stats, only an ADMIXTURE run.

It looks like Heggarty doesn't know the difference between models based on formal stats and ADMIXTURE output, hence that's why things look "much less clear-cut" to him.

In other words, my point stands, and you have no argument.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,

This is a response to old posts you made. You have said several times Yamnya isn't 50% Near Eastern or is barely Near Eastern. The only way this could be true is if you change definition of Near Eastern from being CHG/EEF/IRAN NEO/LEVANT NEO to being something else.

Every method I've seen says Yamnya is about 50% Near Eastern.

You have also claimed their typical EHG mtdna can be of CHG origin. There's no evidence supporting this but there is evidence not supporting it. The evidence not supporting it is the near non existence of typical EHG mtdna in West Asia.

The fact is a big chunk of Yamnya and even Andronovo-related people is almost definitely of EHG origin and if it is then not all or even the vast majority of their Near Eastern ancestors were female.

Your theory that Neat Eastern ancestry arrived into the Steppe already with femakes, witg loads of EHG, and not directly from Asia makes sense. If this is true it means a large amount of pre-Steppe EHG/Near Eastern admixture included Near Eastern males and that the majority of BA Steppe's ancestry is from foreign EHG/Near Eastern hyprid females.

Davidski said...

Near East is an geographic term and EHG are not the only group that can be said to have been native to Eastern Europe.

So if we ask the following question: does Yamnaya have 40-50% ancestry from an migration or migrations directly from the Near East to the steppe, the answer is no.

This is what is being pushed and it's false. It's important to understand that it's false, because the issue has a major bearing on the Indo-European homeland question.

Like I said above, Yamnaya has "southern" non-EHG admixture from groups already with very complex ancestry that have been sitting in Europe or on the generally accepted border of Europe for thousands of years.

It sure as hell doesn't have any ancestry from a migration of "Proto-Indo-Europen speakers" from Iran. To suggest this is sheer lunacy.

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

Rather than split hairs about the validity of ADMIXTURE when it's used as a staple in every single aDNA paper released, I'll just make my point.

In the Rathlin paper they estimate the Beakers Yamnaya ancestry at 32% (Both ADMIXTURE and formal stats), 40% of which is Caucasus related (CHG) ancestry. Given that we have evidence of EHG in Europe in the Mesolithic by way of SHG & Villabruna & now EHG ancestry in Balkan Farmers, that means the only objective evidence of migration we have is the CHG ancestry which at 40% of 32% is only 12.8%.

I don't think 12.8% CHG related ancestry necessarily needs to come from the Yamnaya culture when we already have evidence CHG has been floating around in Eastern Europe for a long time prior (i.e. I0221, the J1 from 5,500 B.C. Karelia).

Davidski said...

Nothing has changed in regards to the Yamnaya-related ancestry proportions for Europeans since the Haak et al. paper.

In fact, as I pointed out, new datasets have been released with four times as many markers and the results are essentially the same.

E-mail Lazaridis, Patterson or Mathieson from Harvard and ask them.

Samuel Andrews said...

@David,

So is this your opinion and its reasons?

Opinion: Chalcolithic-BA Steppe cultures had a tradition in which men would often go to foreign territory to find women. Some of these women were mostly Near Eastern and so eventually Steppe people became 50% Near Eastern(not directly from the Near East).

Reasons: Archeology, linguistics, domance if R1 Y DNA, and the culture of early literate IE speakers.

I don't see that as good enough evidence. There's simply no explaining away EHG mtdna in the BA Steppe. Yes uniparental markets suggest admixture was gender bias but no way was admixture strictly EHG male/nonEHG female. At some point whether on the steppe or not there were plenty of Near eastern male/ehg female couples.

Also let's wait till we get more X-Chromsome analysis from BA Europe from saying admixture was "Farmer girls, Steppe boys". It largely was in Central Europe. Maybe it was in all of Europe but describing the admixture as simplly Steps boy/farmer girl us probably over simplistic. Y DNA I1 is of WHG origin.

Ric Hern said...

What about an Epi-Paleolithic contribution of CHG. We know that there were lithic technology from Yangelskaya Culture in the Southern Urals that show remarkable similarities to lithic technology from the Southern Caspian. Probably Zarzian Culture. Yangelskaya remains also show skeletal similarities. So if Yangelskaya people carried CHG then CHG were certainly present in the Steppe since the Epi-Paleolithic which would make that group relatively indigenous...

Aram said...

Let's do math. L51 Tmrca is 5800. That is 200 generation. If in each generation there is a 1.1 male offsprings this give us 1.1^200 ~ 200 million males today.

Ric Hern said...

Where did R1 originate ? Southern Siberia and the Altai,Romania or Kazakhstan and the Southern Urals ? The oldest R sofar is Malta Buret.If it originated in the East then somehow it had to have migrated to where Villabruna R1b was eventually found.Did R1 take a Northern Route from the Altai through Northern Kazakhstan and the Southern Urals into the Pontic Caspian Steppe ?

Karl_K said...

@Aram

That's nice math.

But everyone knows that that is not how it works in reality. Each man didn't have 1.1 sons for 200 generations, or the phylogenies of all the haplogroups would look like identical gently branching trees.

They don't look like that at all.

Some men had a lot of sons, and others had few or none. And that trend was passed down the paternal line for at least a few generations at several points in time, where the star-like structure arises in only certain haplogroups, but not others.

Gioiello said...

@ Samuel Andrews

"Y DNA I1 is of WHG origin".

Not only you will see next that WHG were not only hg. I, but also R1a and R1b and, surprisingly for you, hg. J (I have said that I am expecting that the oldest J1* will be found in Palaeolitic Italy, older than Satsurblia 13000 ya).
But having chosen I1 demonstrates all your knowledge of Genetics, History and all the rest.
Hg. I1 came out from a bottleneck of 22800 years only 4700 years ago (Ken Nordtvedt thought 6000) in an unique ancestor. Thus... use all your IQ!

I1 Z2864/L509 * Z2845/S22865 * P30+299 SNPs formed 27500 ybp, TMRCA 4700 ybp [from YFull]

Matt said...

@ Romulus : In the Rathlin paper they estimate the Beakers Yamnaya ancestry at 32% (Both ADMIXTURE and formal stats), 40% of which is Caucasus related (CHG) ancestry. Given that we have evidence of EHG in Europe in the Mesolithic by way of SHG & Villabruna & now EHG ancestry in Balkan Farmers, that means the only objective evidence of migration we have is the CHG ancestry which at 40% of 32% is only 12.8%.

I do think that multiple methods should be used to check estimates. There are at least a couple of questions around that specific estimate for me though, which is a composite of three estimate methods:

1) With the ADMIXTURE based method, if you follow that method (using the % of their South Asian modal component prominent in Yamnaya and present in post Neolithic Europeans to estimate Yamnaya ancestry), for one, then the Hungarian Bronze Age samples would have no Yamnaya ancestry! Also note, as far as I can tell the South Asian modal component here peaks in population that forms its own cluster at higher K, probably the Kalash.

2) The other estimate using qpAdm requires Yamnaya to mix with a Loschbour:Neolithic ratio of 26:35, or 42:58. That's pretty high. (Though strangely very consistent with their "To gauge the proportion of Ballynahatty’s ancestry derived from WHG, we used the f4 ratio, f4(Mbuti, Loschbour; Ballynahatty, Dai)/f4(Mbuti, Loschbour; KO1, Dai) (29), to estimate a hunter–gatherer component of 42 ± 2% within a predominantly early farmer genome.") That's high compared with most estimates of Middle Neolithic populations as around 25:75 WHG:Anatolian.

I'd be happy with that estimate if true, since I personally have no preference for a high or low Yamnaya ancestry level in Europe. There are some reasons to doubt it.

batman said...

@Karl K:

"You need to have a hypothesis that matches the data.

The most likely fact is that (unlike today, or the middle ages) in the Bronze Age, high status men had a huge amount of children, and sons of those particular men (but not daughters) also had huge amounts of children, etc.

This had to be what happened."

To have a tribe thrive across regions, continously through numerous generations, a specific pattern ('system') of reproduction is needed. We may call it a "principal breeding-system".

Most people are unable to modell any such system other than the presently known monogamy, eventhough this system came about first with the organized religions. Extending the view one may turn to the relict breeding-system known as polygamy and noblemens harems.

To explain the ancient kingdoms none of these models will do. In concording with old myths we may start with a small, core population - built on a specific y-line – to create a patrilinear continuation and stability. Consequently we (may) need the matrimonial participants to rotate, creating a genetic variability, change and/or renewal.

To create a tribe a stable, patrilocal famlily would grow and create outliers that establish new yards and homes, with new localities of economical sustainability and development of (new or more) available resources. Thus we got inter-related communities across larger areas, ran by a family-core, as an "extended family".

Thus the early farmers bears hg I in the north-west, hg G in the south-west, hg N in the north-east, with hg H and (later?) hg J in the south-east. This distrubution-pattern is pretty much confirmed by the ancient DNA so fra analyzed.

All forming similar dynasties and thus «etnicities» - ultimately with a variety of regional 'tribes', as the adaption to various climates created mixes between descendants of the arctic cro-magnons and the tropical tribes of native chineese, indians, arabs and proto-africans.

Thus the descendants of y-dna CF split into a number of ancient civilizations - all known as pyramidal kingdoms, divided in five casts. Today we also know that they used the patrilinear principle to define their 'family-lines'. Which means they formed agnatic monarchies based on the «royal seed» of their respective kings and thus forming the dynasties nessecary to produce entire 'etnicities', as the arctic and the tropic refugias got around to interact and re-create the paleolithic sub-species of the human genome. The principal distribution of the palearctic y-dna should be confirmed by the palearctic mt-dna, seemingly descending from hg R.

As the large farming could turn the open Eurasian steppe-lands into agricultural fields a high number of new villages occurred, populating vast areas by turning rich sediments into fields of black soil and (thus) agriculture. To make this success possible you need a specialized tribe of cattle-farmers, adapted to the digestion of starch and diaries. Consequently we got to new y-lines growing exponentially, organised as independant kingdoms – forming tribes and entire entnicities - from the very start. One became highlanders, the other one lowlanders. R1a populated the colder climate of the northern highlands and eastern steppes, R1b stuck to the milder lowlands of the west, with outliers to the far south and the milder steppes of the south-east.

Thus we got one dynasty formed of R1a and anothner, brother-line of R1b. As they both grew across continents they did exchange areas as well as goods, cattle and wives, all the while they interacted with the old boat-builders, fishers and pastoralists, who bred goats and sheep along coastlines and archipelagos, as well as within the woodlands - along rivers and inland lakes, where the waterays would connect districts and regions – from westcoast Iberia to eastcoast Siberia.

batman said...

In the ancient, agnatic tribe-setting the «royal seed» was considered a historic origin and root of the respective «stems» (tribes, etnicities) - branching out as their populations grew. In the pyramidal breeding-system this would mean that every generation of kings would «renew» the entire population – through his sons, son-sons and son-son-sons – who where the only ones allowed to reproduce. Thus ALL members of the kingdom would share be sharing the same, royal y-dna, renewed at large from every new chrown-prince.

The mutation of the royal seed would be 'driected' from within the king-family, as only the sons of the king could become new dukes, who were the only allowed to produce new earls, whose duty as to create all the new farmers – who finally were the only locals allowed to make new children within every local household. Consequently the entire etnicity would be related, to the original, first family – where the agnatic principle were held as a consequence of nature and time – and thus described in common traditions, in rational and historic terms as 'chronicles' based on a (royal) chronoplogy, as well as in symbolic, artistic and poetic terms like «holy» and «sacred».

Following the basic symbolism shared within the I-E area we may find the decorations of this royal Idol contains several clues:

http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/n0379-revelations-on-shigir-idol-change-our-understanding-of-ancient-civilisations/

batman said...

@ Karl K:

"You suppose that a fortune must be split evenly between the children, but that is farmer logic."

"Splitting" requires "individual property-rights" that did not exist before the mercantilism took hold of our Eurasian cultures. Before the old civilizations and societies were overrun and new, religious and mercantile laws were enforced there were no "private property" to be divided.

In the historical kingdoms the first son always inherritted the Chrown and the Castle, while the younger brothers became dignitaries to support the Elder and the family affairs.

Moreover, the king would have to produce sons and daugthers in every region, where a royal estate were to be ran by a duke and a duchess - who passed the royal genetics down to the middle nobility, as the new chieftains of the various counties. Who in turn made sure that they reproduced with women from each farm, to make the next farmer, i.e. as the new male head of the farm.

A system like this is described – in part or as principle - in several annals, such as mayan, vedic and european myths – as well as the old, germanic laws. Ancient chess-boards found from Ireland to Indonesia describes several slightly different modells, all describing the same, 5-cast sytem.

Following the dynastical spread of y-dna O and Q we find the exact breeding-system set up to create, build and identify the social construct of the post-glacial civilizations of tropical America:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/72/ae/14/72ae1467e0d5b3a74d8b32058c2225b3.jpg

batman said...

@ Gioello

You may find this repport of interest, explaining the first marine cultures of the Med, who founded the first, known dynasties in the Med, based on hg G.

http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2871

As you may learn from the spread of the I-E/Uralian languages they concur with the spread of the mesolithic y-lines descending from a LCA of macrogroup CF that survived the long, cold LGM as well as the sudden cold and mass-extinction of the Younger Dryas.

http://geschichte-wissen.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/www.nceas.ucsb.edu_~alroy_pdfs_2001-Science-292-1893.pdf

Gioiello said...

@ batman
"You may find this repport of interest, explaining the first marine cultures of the Med, who founded the first, known dynasties in the Med, based on hg G.

http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2871"


I thank you. I'll study the paper again, but very likely I studied it and wrote about it in the Stephen Asciak blog at FB.
Anyway the oldest hg. G are:
G-CTS11562 Z26921/Y11756 * PH361/Y11750 * Z3389+30 SNPs formed 19600 ybp, TMRCA 15600 ybp
G-CTS11562*
id:YF04165 GBR

G-Z3353 Z3175 * BY2148/GG148/Y11757 * BY1124/PH1488/GG353/Y11746+9 SNPs formed 15600 ybp, TMRCA 14600 ybp
G-Z3353*
G-GG362 GG372/Z3377 * GG367 * GG362/Z3189+8 SNPs
id:NA20870 GIH
id:NA20858 GIH

and also in Italy they are long before Greece:
G-Z17775 Y7123 * Z17774 * Y7122+3 SNPs formed 9600 ybp, TMRCA 5600 ybp
id:YF01801 ITA [IT-CS]
id:HG03708 PJL

G-FGC6669 Y14937/FGC6632 * Y14925/FGC6613 * Y14918/FGC6593+36 SNPs formed 10800 ybp, TMRCA 10400 ybp
G-FGC6669*
id:ERS256110 ITA [IT-CA]

G-Z6128 Z6128 formed 9300 ybp, TMRCA 8800 ybp
G-Z6128*
id:ERS256116 ITA [IT-CA]

G-Y19004 S25020/Z6862 * S22685/Z6870 * Z30798+5 SNPs formed 8600 ybp, TMRCA 7400 ybp
G-Y19004*
id:ERS256150 ITA [IT-CA]

G-U1U1 * Z6396 * FGC7570/Z6766+4 SNPs formed 10800 ybp, TMRCA 10800 ybp
G-U1*
G-Z6779 Z6779/FGC7568/S22146 formed 10800 ybp, TMRCA 10800 ybp
G-Z6779*
id:YF05227 ITA [IT-CZ]

and so on.

batman said...

@ Gioiello


As said - the spread of the I-E/Uralian languages concur with the spread of the mesolithic y-lines descending from a LCA of macrogroup CF that survived the severe but not terminal LGM - as well as the sudden cold, deadly and terminal cold-dip of the Younger Dryas.

The bottle-neck of Eurasias arctic species - humans included - was NOT created by the LGM, as many archaologers and genetists seem to assume; but by the mass-extinctions of the YD, when the major part of mammals died out - all across North-America and northern Eurasia - south to the Meds, the Middle East and the Himmalayas...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas#Abrupt_climate_change

Gioiello said...

Thus... If you want to say that R1a and R1b expanded from Baltic, show me R-V88, R-V88-M18, R1b1-L389+, R-M335, R-M269*, R-Z2110*, R-L51* from Baltic, and why to link Uralic with IE? The link is very old, at a post-Nostratic level, and you know very well that what is in the Baltic was before Southward, both the mt and the Y. Those places are cold: you shouldn't have problem to find there aDNA to test.

batman said...

The first, initial spread after the Mass Extinctive period called Younger Dryas is normally seen as the start of "The Mesolithic" - performed by the few refugiants that survived.

The result of the Paleolithic/Mesolithic transitory phase are today somewhat known, in terms of archeology and genetics. The linguistic story is still to be defined by facts, although the later discoveries of patterns and semantics of the symbols used across ancient Eurasia - seen by excavated figurines, pots and petroglyphs - describes a common cultural core of the early I-E and Uralic speakers. The broad range of cognates (like "sisar"/"sistar"/"syster"/sister, sib-ling, etc.) confirms this common origin.

We know that the first mesolithic spread of CF-decendants produced y-dna GHIJK. All of these lines seem to have funded their own dynasties - in various regions of Eurasia, as described above.

We also know that a later, mesolitic origin of y-dna K2/R1 occured, which bi-furicated into R1a and R1b. They both formed independant dynasties, that grew remarkably during the Holecene climatical optimum, when the old, gerat, morrain-clad plains of north America, Europe and northern Asia turned from taiga and tundra to heaths and meadowlands - lush with grass and greeneries, to be fertilized by cowdung and horsemanure...

batman said...

he success-rate of the famer-kings and their entire "aets" (tribes/etnicities) were formidabel, as can be seen in the archaeological records of the milk- and starch-consuming cattle- and cereal-farmers of Europe and northern Asia. Who eventually, some 7.000 yrs ago, reached northern Africa.

The connection between the spread of agriculture, diary-consumprion and hgs R1a/R1b is pretty well documented. Thus they obviously represent the branching of two brother-clades, that both formed dynasties - of which one adapted to the inlands and highlands, while the other adapted to the warmer climate and moist biosphere of the Eurasian lowlands - all along "the Atlantic facade".

Consequently we may need a heartland of early cattlers and horsebreeders to explain the "bi-furication-zone" between R1a and R1b.

Looking at the oldest subtypes of R1a we have to place it close to the Baltic ocean. As the oldest known burials of oxes and horses have been found withing the realm of old settlements - between the Western Baltics and the North Sea - confirms that the early Scanians were onto cattles just as early as anyone else.

Moreover, as the Ertebolle ceramics seem to be among the oldest in Europe - besides the Sperrings/Kunda-ceramics - it seems that Cunliffe concept of an old, European culture of travel, trade and inovation - "Between the Oceans" - is a resonable area to start. Consequently we may look further into the maritime culture that survived the Younger Dryas in NW Europe, as a initing factor across Mesolithic Eurasia.

batman said...

Looking at the present distribution of R1a/R1b it's pretty obvious that the Eurasian variations of R1 have divided east versus west, from a common origin in the central part of Europe. The split could have happened before or at the very start of the Holocene optimum, some 9.000 yrs ago. Though, it would still take some millenia before these cultures had evolved and reached the numbers nessecary to spread and populate wider areas, before the cattle-farmers where properly established and a more rapid reproduction - in dynastical clads - would make the increasingly effective cattle-farmers dominant compared to the goat-, sheep- and reindeer-herders.

The 7.500 yrs old Carelian R1a shares origin with the oldest Scandianvian farmers of R1a. Since the discovery of 7.300 yrs old agriculture in eastern Finland, we may rename the R1a from Oleni Ostrov - from "HG" to "EEF".

Than we may view how the 8.000 year Old Beakers of Ertebolle and Kunda would evolve into "TRB", "LBK" and "Butovo" - later to develop into TRB/BB/Corded in the west and CW/CWC/Yamna in the east - leaving LBK/Lengyel/Vinca inbetween.

The river-routes of Dvina/Djepr, Vistula/Bug and Vistula/Donau became vital to the lingusitic and diplomatic relationships that could uphold a steady stream of travel and trade, communication and communion "between the oceans" of the Baltics and the Atlantic Facade as well as the Mediterranean Sea - where the Minoan cultures developed into the Egyptian, Greek, Latin and Algerian cultures.

Moreover - from the southern Baltic the cattle-breeders could follow the travel-routes of the traders of y-dna G/I/J. Thus they could reach the White Sea as well as the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. Thus we may find Yamna to be a product of CWC, later joined by cousins from the TRB/BB with larger cattle and R1b. At the heart of this communicative and cultural network we find the Vistula/Bug connection, from which the Djepr-Bug culture became essential.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug-Dniester_culture

batman said...

One may even note the myths of the river Bug, named after the dynastical ancestor (Bug, Bog, Bok) of the old, agricultural populations of SE Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_River#/media/File:Man_statue_in_Lazenki.JPG

Ryukendo K said...

Just wanted to point out that nothing in the evidence would indicate extensive polygamy or great hierarchy in CW or BB, certainly nothing like level of complexity and hierarchy seen in early modern Swaziland or Morocco, which spanned 10,000s up to millions of individuals. I would argue that the level of social hierarchy in EBA Europe N of the Alps may even be lower than the level found among Tuaregs; maybe close to or lower than that found in pre-state nilotic South Sudanese such as Dinka or Nuer, or close to the level in Papua New Guinea, where no positions were hereditary. Not even positions in the Germanic tribal confederations of the Iron Age were securely hereditary, much less positions in a society at much smaller scale and much greater degree of armament.

Gioiello said...

@ batman
"The broad range of cognates (like "sisar"/"sistar"/"syster"/sister, sib-ling, etc.) confirms this common origin".

I have extensively spoken about that here in this blog answering Kristiina who didn't answer me: I think that these words entered Uralic languages (and others in Altaic ones) from an Indo.European community speaking a satem IE language linked to Sanskrit and cannot be taken as a demonstration of old links between IE and Uralic. Very likely those IE communities were some extinct relatives of the people who migrated to India from Sintashta Andronovo.

Batman, show me aDNA from Baltic and not smoky theories!

Karl_K said...

@RK

"Just wanted to point out that nothing in the evidence would indicate extensive polygamy or great hierarchy in CW or BB, certainly nothing like level of complexity and hierarchy seen in early modern Swaziland or Morocco"

Of course. But you don't need extensive polygamy, just a little.

And even in totally monogamous cultures, if wealth and status are able to accumulate, then you have old men who have had many sequential young wives. I have ancestors born in the late 1700s who had five or six wives over their lifetime, and 20 children.

My own great-great-great-grandfather had three wives and 13 children who grew to adulthood. He had over 100 grandchildren, mostly by his sons. Even my own grandmother had 14 adult siblings by the same father, and my dad has around 60 first cousins, mostly through my grandmother's brothers.

A conservative estimate is that I have around 30,000 5th cousins through only one male ancestor who was born only 225 years ago. A very significant portion of them have the same Y chromosome, because the male children usually had 2-3x as many children as the female children, because the men inherited most of the wealth and status and even if they were quite old, could easily find a new young wife if their first or second wives died.

And this is in a basically modern farming society, where wealth could be accumulated and passed on in land, cattle, and money.

A child from a random poor family could not ever have that kind of success except in very lucky circumstances, whereas the child of a wealthy agriculturalist was basically assured of success from birth.


Karl_K said...

"A child from a random poor family could not ever have that kind of success except in very lucky circumstances, whereas the child of a wealthy agriculturalist was basically assured of success from birth."

And by "child" I actually mean son. This kind of skewed haplogroup statistic wouldn't really appear if the wealth was passed down through the female line, because females on average have less children than men on average, so the mtDNA line just can not grow at such an exponential rate. Most women physically could never have 20 children in their lifetime, whereas nearly all men could easily if given the chance. Men of wealthy high status families were often given that chance because of the wealth and status of their father.

postneo said...

@karlk
OK finally a good case for a Malthusian scenario.
Accumulated resources/wealth being a component reproductive success

An equilibrium is still needed between say a coal miner in pre-industrial Britain ... an actual wealth creator vs someone who accumulates/trades in coal.

What differential advantage would a a steppe pastoralist have vs a central european farmer in terms of accumulated resources. Cattle does not seem likely since both had them. Perhaps it was a social/legal/commercial innovation that does not leave physical trace.

batman said...



@ RK

"Just wanted to point out that nothing in the evidence would indicate extensive polygamy or great hierarchy in CW or BB, certainly nothing like level of complexity and hierarchy seen in early modern Swaziland or Morocco"


To investigate this further you may need to check how the mutational processes would look like in a dynastical breeding-system, where the initiating y-line get re-inforced every 5th generation due to a tribal hierarchy - based on an agnaticly inherritted king-line, where every chrown-prince would act as the start of the next generation of children throughout the entire pyramid, as he was the sole father to the princes that became the the higher nobility (dukes/duces(dux)/maharajas) with the sole right to produce the local chieftains (earls) of their respective regions. Thus every local chieftain became a son-son of the king himself.

Suppose that these chieftians (eorls/markis/raja) were the only ones allowed to produce the new farmers within their respective districts. Thus all farmers (Sirs/Kars/Gars) would be grand-grand-children of the said king. Since the farmer was the only one on the farm with inherritted rights to create new children on the farm, every farmer-child would be the grand-grand grand-child of the said King, just as their contemporary chrown-prince.

This model is actually reffered to in several old sources, such as the old, pre-roman laws of European antiquity. The very same breeding-system was obviously at work in both Europe and Asia, creating the various "etnicities" as well as their respective 'casts' from a common 'stem'.

Please note that the Indian caste-system, where people from each cast only merry their own cast - cutting the old, close relations between the casts - seems to be a product of strife and social turmoil on a grand scale, described in the Mahabarata and the Ramanyana. Similar break-downs seem to have followed the greater wars of world history, as it spread to the Persian Bay and the Middle East, later also to the northern hemisphere where a similar, five-cast structure is described. The same, five-cast structure seem to have been the ancient traditions of Meso-America, too, until the Conquistadors came around to conquer them all and deplore of the entire, ancient nobility.

Thus we may understand the need to old conqerors had to catch and kill the indigenous and legal noblemen of any population they succeeded to invade. As the warlords could preogress they ultimately would surround and extinguish the royal family itself - and thus overtake the entire kingdom.

When the populations/civilisations was conquered and subdued by criminal means the new, criminal rulers had to get rid of the very stem of the old laws and traditions, where a specific family was appointed - by history - to act as the central hub of the population.

Thus the ancient wars became etnic wars, where the criminal intruders had to extinguish the rightful rulers and all their heirs - i.e. anyone that may grow up to claim a legal heritage and become leaders of upprisings aimed to overthrow the tyrants, liberate the population and re-instate the old laws, traditions, culture and economy. Later the rule was modified, where the king-family could remain as rulers without consequence, as mere symbols.

The old hierachical, five-cast breeding-system were obviously a basic structure of the antique civilizations of America, Asia and Europe. North of the Baltic Ocean, where foreign invasions was unknown before the 10th century, the old, etnic pyramids remained intact until foreign warlords and their teocratic emmisaries succeeded to conqer all of the Old Europe - and rid the continent of the last, ancient dynasties.

batman said...

@ Gioiello

There are some very interesting threads between the Vendic/Uralian and the Vedic, Sumeerian and Old-Egyptian languages, that may indicate ancient connections. I think Asko Parpola is still working on these issues.

Though - around the Baltics we have some millennia of known inter-action between 'vends' and 'goths' of the Baltic Ocean. Moreover - the veneti/vendi/fenni/finnish language have some 40 % cognates ( at root-level) shared with their closest, I-E neighbours in the Western Baltics, who still speak (old) "gothic".

Which have either "centum" or "satem" - while the Fenno-Uralic have both...

Concerning the Nostratic hypothesis we may note that it's been under quite strong revision over the past two decades. Just as the old dogmas known as ("modern man") Out-of-Africa and ("agriculture") Out-of-Anatolia. You may enjoy looking into Mario Alineis lifelong effort to find the roots of the I-E languages, as a professor of linguistics. (www.continuitas.org)

@ Olympus

You may find some intresting connections along ancient Eurasias largest and most important waterway, commonly known as the Onega-Volga/Ob-route, the first silk- and spice-road between S/SE Asia and Europe. The same route were essential to the spread of ceramics, tumuli and agriculture along the east-western zone of the artic climate and biosphere, from the milder occident to the colder and dryer orient.

http://cacti.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Europa-USDA-Zone.gif

Populating the Eurasian Woodlands - Kurgans among Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic speakers.
http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/btn_Archeology/Kurgan_CultureEn.htm

Populating the Taiga - Stone-age/Bronze-age:
http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Fig12.png

Matt said...

Karl_K because females on average have less children than men on average

Mathematically, it would be difficult for that to be true! But I know what you mean - explosive lineage growth for females, is more difficult.

Ryukendo K said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rob said...

@ RK

"However what about the Bronze Age specifically made it such that the ratio crashed to 1:17"

Let's enumerate the Bronze Age lineages we have so far:

Unetice
R1a
I2a2
I2c

BA Hungary
I2a2 x4
J2
R1b x2

Late copper age/ Bronze Age Spain
I2a2 x 3

Sweden
I1, R1a, R1b

Italy:
I2a1 (EBA)

This certainly doesn't appear to mirror the 1:17 lineage crash purported to have occurred in the Bronze Age

Karl_K said...

"Mathematically, it would be difficult for that to be true! But I know what you mean - explosive lineage growth for females, is more difficult."

Good catch. I guess 'on average' was the wrong way to phrase it. On average every child has exactly one mother and one father.

I meant that men have a much higher variance in their number of children.

Karl_K said...

@Rob

"This certainly doesn't appear to mirror the 1:17 lineage crash purported to have occurred in the Bronze Age."

This only becomes really obvious when looking at the whole Y chromosome trees.

Starting in the Bronze age, there is a major shift in the pattern of divergence (the tree-like structure) of the population, but only for men, and only some lineages.

Karl_K said...

@RK

"However what about the Bronze Age specifically made it such that the ratio crashed to 1:17?"

The most obvious answer is metals. Flint or chert or (later) other hard stones did not require any non-obvious technology to produce. You just had to know where to look. Copper too was pretty simple, but required some technology, but overall no harder to produce than pottery (but only if you had the ore).

But starting with Bronze, the technology and specific mines for specific ores became more difficult to reproduce, find and coordinate.

The knowledge of this technology allowed monopolies to take hold in mining regions, and trading monopolies to take hold everywhere else. It probably helped that this new commodity (unlike gold or silver) was also used to make physical weapons.

Rob said...

@ KarlK

Ok. So we should probably rephrase what we're discussing to 'the Northwest Fringe of Europe'.
In addition, some more aDNA from Bronze Age Western Europe would be helpful, in addition to resolving the lingering dating issues, so we can more concretely establish the pace of these hypothesized changes.
Indeed, the rapid growth of major lineages of L11 could be the result of demographic optima associated with the re-establishment of agricultural pre-eminence during the LBA - Iron Age chiefdoms, black plague or even industrial Revolution.

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