In this article, we approach the Neolithization of southern Scandinavia from an archaeolinguistic perspective. Farming arrived in Scandinavia with the Funnel Beaker culture by the turn of the fourth millennium B.C.E. It was superseded by the Single Grave culture, which as part of the Corded Ware horizon is a likely vector for the introduction of Indo-European speech. As a result of this introduction, the language spoken by individuals from the Funnel Beaker culture went extinct long before the beginning of the historical record, apparently vanishing without a trace. However, the Indo-European dialect that ultimately developed into Proto-Germanic can be shown to have adopted terminology from a non-Indo-European language, including names for local flora and fauna and important plant domesticates. We argue that the coexistence of the Funnel Beaker culture and the Single Grave culture in the first quarter of the third millennium B.C.E. offers an attractive scenario for the required cultural and linguistic exchange, which we hypothesize took place between incoming speakers of Indo-European and local descendants of Scandinavia’s earliest farmers.Rune Iversen, Guus Kroonen, Talking Neolithic: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on How Indo-European Was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia, American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 121, No. 4 (October 2017), pp. 511–525, DOI: 10.3764/aja.121.4.0511 See also... The puzzle of the early Corded Ware grave The genetic history of Northern Europe (or rather the South Baltic) Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
How the Corded Ware people Indo-Europeanized southern Scandinavia
Over at the American Journal of Archaeology at this LINK. Below is the paper abstract. Emphasis is mine.
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Thanks Davidski. These farmers are key to finding out about our roots. (European history). They seem to have reached everywhere except for the Baltic.
ReplyDeleteThere aren't many samples, but Scandinavian Corded Ware seems to have been mostly R1a, just like everywhere else. Most of the ancestry of today's Scandos can probably traced to the Beaker people who arrived suddenly in Jutland and coastal Norway c. 2400 B.C.
ReplyDeleteAs a complete amateur, it's very difficult to gauge how closely related Germanic is to other branches of Indo-European. It's a centum language obviously, but one that apparently has shared vocabulary with Balto-Slavic. Wikipedia is not much help and linguists seem to be losing interest in Proto-Germanic. Who here knows the truth?
Balto-Slavic definitely has Corded Ware origins, Celtic has Bell Beaker origins, but Germanic is a mystery. Corded Ware-derived R1a (Z284) in Scandinavia might be a non-Germanic substrate.
ReplyDeleteIn my humble opinion proto Germans carried R1b L151 or I1 and therefore didn't arrive with Corded Ware. Considering the paternal uniformity of Bell Beaker and Corded Ware I won't be surprised if proto Germans belonged to basically only one paternal lineage (I1 or R1b). I1 looks like the best candidate.
There is lots of shared mtDNA between the British Isles and Scandinavia. Maybe Funnel Beaker has something to do with that.
ReplyDeleteI'd say that the Single Grave Corded Ware dialect contributed substantially to Proto-Germanic, and it was related to the Corded Ware-derived Trzciniec dialect that gave rise to Baltic and Slavic languages. All of these groups were obviously rich in R1a-M417.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm not sure where the rest of the Proto-Germanic package originated and how it got to Scandinavia. Maybe people like Nordic_LN RISE98, who belonged to R1b-U106, were involved in the process. RISE98 basically looks modern Scando. See here...
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/genetic-substructures-among-late.html
But languages can't have multiple origins. So either Germanic is a Corded Ware derived language or not.
ReplyDelete@Sam
ReplyDeleteThough languages are almost always descended, in the strict sense, from only one ancestral language, they certainly can and usually do have influences from other languages. Language contact very often goes along with intermarriage, so there is no reason we can't look for genetic admixture and language contact together.
Besides, at this time depth we could still be talking about mutually intelligible IE dialects.
@Capra,
ReplyDeleteOk sure. Now I'm interested in how autosomally similar R1b L23 tribes and R1a M417 tribes became Indo European and when PIE was spoken. If PIE was spoken in like 4000 BC or even 3500 BC, unless the two different IE groups continued to be in contact with each other, by circa 2500 BC they should have been speaking distinct unintelligible languages.
But languages can't have multiple origins.
ReplyDeleteWTF?
Apparently there was a sea trade route between Denmark and Britain during the Bronze Age and also some Irish Gold found in Germany during this time.
ReplyDeleteThis made me think about some similarities between Celtic and Germanic languages. Celtic wordorder is VSO (Verb,Subject,Object) while Germanic Languages use this wordorder under certain circumstances like while asking questions and in poetry.
Some faint similarities between Irish and Finnish words also made me think of a possible connection maybe through Germanic or maybe something like a Proto-Germano-Celtic with Italic keeping more to the original Proto-Indo-European structure and words.
Interesting Myths about how and when the Finnish Cattle breed which resembles the Irish Moild breed arrived in Finland and some other Scandinavian breeds resembling these two made me think of a Bronze Age Connection.
I definitely think that there was a lot of interaction between Scandinavia Germany,Britain and Ireland during the Bronze Age.
I agree with Derek. BB from Jutland was probably more important, not to mention Jastorf culture in the Iron Age
ReplyDeleteI always wondered about the Athrurian legend and how easily Vortigern invited Angles and Saxons to come and settle in Britain....in my personal view there had to be some kind of not too distant connection between these people....
ReplyDelete@Rob, Derek.
ReplyDeleteIf modern Norse are mostly of Bell Beaker origin why do they have so little R1b? I1 looks like the key to Norse origins. R1b and R1a in Norse just comes from relatives of waves which made bigger impacts in other places.
By Bell Beaker I mean whatever ethnolingustic group R1b P312 carrying Beaker folk belonged to not Bell Beaker culture.
ReplyDelete@Samuel Andrews Languages can gave multiple contributing influences in fact most do. In the case of Proto-Germanic, it shares its Centum affiliation with the Celtic and Italic languages to the south while certain other features like the use of some case endings places it together with Balto-Slavic. I am willing to bet that Proto Germanic developed as a set of fusion dialects from two or more IE dialects and a non IE substratum. Historical contacts and vocabulary exchange between Germanic and Balto-Slavic also seems to have occurred on a large scale since the two families have remained in contact for a long time
ReplyDelete@Sam
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say R1b is rare in Nordics at all (see Myers).
If one were to posit pan-Germanic Y -markers, at least on the basis of modern Germanic speakers, they'd be R1b-U106 and I1, but also some R1a-Z284 and L664 more patchily.
@ Chetan
ReplyDeleteWe have to be careful by what we mean by "fusion". Fusion - as in creoles- doesn't really happen very much.
Better terms would be substratum effects, shifting speakers, etc
Because Corded Ware and Northern Bell Beakers most probably spoke different dialects rather than extremely diverged languages at the time it could be that there was a leveling out effect among the different dialects that merged and became Proto-Germanic ? Maybe Proto-Italic-Lusatanian formed the same way in or around Southern Germany with Proto-Celtic forming somewhere in Central and Proto-Germanic in Northern Germany....
ReplyDeleteThe position of Germanic is ambiguous in Ringe Anthony model.
ReplyDeletehttps://postimg.org/image/9dh0uoojz/
Imho this ambiguity comes from the fact that Germanic was seriously influenced by CWC.
But Germanic is also centum so the core comes from U106 side.
What do we know about I1 origins so far? It could have spread within the established Germanic ethnicity without being of importance to Proto-Germanic.
ReplyDeleteGood news for hg. R1a: Western European R1a-M420 is here from at least 5400 years, whereas the Middle Eastern subclades are there from only 2900 years:
ReplyDeleteR-YP4132 YP4176 * YP4139 * YP4134+51 SNPs 10900 ybp, TMRCA CI 95% 7200 3800 ybp"formed 12600 ybp, TMRCA 5400 ybp
R-YP4132*
⦁ id:YF09838
R-YP4131 YP4221 * YP4204 * YP4137+24 SNPs 3800 ybp, TMRCA CI 95% 1550 500 ybp"formed 5400 ybp, TMRCA 900 ybp
⦁ id:YF04438GBR [GB-LAN]
⦁ id:YF03626USA [US-SC]
R-YP5018 YP5019 * YP5031 * YP5078+72 SNPs 10900 ybp, TMRCA CI 95% 3700 2100 ybp"formed 12600 ybp, TMRCA 2900 ybp
R-YP5018*
⦁ id:YF05993IRQ [IQ-NA]
R-YP5664 YP5664 * Y26647 2100 ybp, TMRCA CI 95% 3700 1900 ybp" class="age"formed 2900 ybp, TMRCA 2700 ybp
⦁ id:YF07377YEM [YE-HD]
⦁ id:YF04806QAT
Of course YF09838 could be also this sample:
ReplyDelete1. M420>YP4141>YP4132>YP6362-x (YP6362 not tested; Big Y needed)
648446 Alkandari Kuwait R-YP4132
13 25 14 10 12-12 12 12 11 13 14 30 16 9-9-9 11 11 25 15 19 30 12-12-12-12-15-15 11 11 19-20 15 16 15 16 33-35-37 12 11 11 8 15-16 8 11 10 8 12 12 12 22-22 15 11 12 13 15 9 13 23 21 14 12 11 13 10 11 12 12 35 15 9 15 13 26 26 19 12 12 12 11 10 9 12 11 10 11 11 30 13 13 24 13 11 10 21 16 17 15 25 15 13 15 26 13 25 18 10 15 17 9 11 11
Anyway Middle Eastern samples, not found so far in aDNA, came from where they in the aDNA have been found:
ReplyDeleteUkraine Vasilyevka 3 [I1819 / skeleton 37] M 8825-8561 calBCE 813114 R1a R1a: L62: 17891241A->G; R1a: L63: 18162834T->C; R1a: L145: 14138745C->A; R1a: L146: 23473201T->A; R1: CTS997: 7132713G->A; R1: CTS2565: 14366723C->T; R1: CTS3123:14674176A->C; etc. U5b2 Jones 2017; Mathieson 2017
Comb Ceramic Estonia Kudruküla, Ida-Viru [3] 5,900–3,800 cal BP R1a5 YP1272 U2e1 Saag 2017
Comb Ware Russia Serteya (Smolenskaya oblast) VIII [А3] M 4000 BC R1a1 ? 16132T, 16163T, 16166G, 16256T. Reported as H Chekunova 2014
The big problem with language contact is that the changes can go in many different ways so that it is easy to create just so stories to explain any feature desired. Having said that some changes in proto germanic do look like contact features, e.g. the remodelling of the verbal system and vocabulary replacement in semantic fields.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the VSO wordorder in Celtic originated due to contact with Hunter Gatherers or would it rather be from Neolithic Farmers ?
ReplyDeleteIf Basque is any indication of what wordorder most Neolithic Farmers used then the VSO would rather come from WHG people.
"Highly speculative" this could also maybe explain how Afro-Asiatic could have ended up with a VSO wordorder if some R1b (V88) people were the carriers and spread from the Balkans to the area where cattle were domesticated in Eastern Anatolia and then to Egypt and beyond...
Afro-Asiantic is associated with Haplogroup E......
ReplyDeleteMostly yes however it does not automatically exclude them from linguistic influence from outside. I'm talking about Proto-Afro-Asiatic. Sorry for not being more clear. However there it is.
DeleteWe see R1b (V88) among many Sahara tribes where E1b1b is also frequent. So it is not a totally crazy idea...
DeletePeople need to stop lumping Haplogroups G, J , E and T together. They are all very different with different origins.
ReplyDeleteI know this blog is about Haplogroup's R1a and R1b and Indo European's. I'm just trying to add to flavour to the blog.
ReplyDeleteI think most of us here are frustrated because we want to see the Finale concerning the PIE question and the two Papers that could make that happen, One concerning the Hittites and the other India are taking Ages to see the Light.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've been told, don't expect any Hittite papers for a good while. The big South Asian paper should be coming soon though, if things go smoothly behind the scenes.
ReplyDelete@ Richard Holtman
ReplyDeleteWe already know that Haplogroup G can be connected to the first Farmers who entered Europe and most probably contributed to the magnificent Tell Settlements.
We already know that Haplogroup J is from the Caucasus Hunter Gatherers and some eventually ended up as being the wonderful Minoan Civilization.
We already know that the Natufians (First Farmers) were Haplogroup E.
We already know that Haplogroup I1+2 were the dominant Haplogroup of Hunter Gatherers in most of Europe.
What we don't know precisely without doubt is where Haplogroup R originated because there are contesting claims and we are not allowed to know precisely where PIE originated because of contesting claims.
If Anatolists and South Asianists
didn't contest the Steppe Theory then we all would have switched of the Light and gone to bed...Heheheeeh....
@ Richard Holtman
ReplyDeleteSo please leave us something like for example the Horse, Apple and Wheel to rejoice in.... :)
David, in what order did R1a and R1b enter Scandinavia?
ReplyDeleteI'll try and keep it on topic. The Indo European homeland. Thanks Davidski for permitting me to go a bit off topic.
ReplyDelete@ Ric Hern
ReplyDeleteThanks for acknowledging the contributions of other Haplogroups in Europes history.
That's my main "emphasis " in everything I'm writing. You get it now.
ReplyDelete@Ric - I wouldn't say there's much contention over the origins of R, or at least R1, which are pretty clearly from Siberia. The disputes are over later stages, and the reasonable disputes are only over the finer details.
ReplyDelete@Davidski
ReplyDeleteRegarding: "But languages can't have multiple origins.
WTF?"
He's right, at least in the sense that German couldn't evolve as a single language in two different places independently. The fact that languages evolve through mixing is true, but it doesn't change the fact that the same language doesn't evolve twice, any more than species evolve twice. Two dialects may start evolving away from each other and then merge, but you're not going to get unique differences evolving twice in the same way. I think that was his point.
There are clear differences in the degree of non-Indo-Europeanness of Indo-European branches. In European IE dialects, Celtic, Italic, the smattering of "para-Celto-Italic" languages like Ligurian, Venetic and Lusitanian and especially Balto-Slavic appear seem to have purer vocabularies and more expected sound-change trajectories than Germanic did. This suggests, at least to me, that the divergence of Germanic as a separate linguistic community supporting an independently evolving branch of Indo-European could not have resulted from the same social processes that characterised the IE speakers to their East and West. Germanic seems more like Greek in this regard, which appears incompatible with how complete the cultural and genetic levelling process looked across Northern Europe, which seems to match Balto-Slavic and Celto-Italic better. The interdigitation and hybridization between IE and pre-IE cultures in a small corner of Northern Europe that the authors propose is interesting in this context, as is the linguistic data. The foreign vocabulary and weird sound changes may have been due to linguistic learning in a subordinate "foreign" community surrounded by all sides by IE groups, similar to the African hunter-gatherers speaking Bantu languages or Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers speaking Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages. This community may then become dominant at a later time, maybe because the hybrid subsistence strategy and remnants of more complex social institutions that the Neolithics contributed were more successful in the Bronze Age environment?
ReplyDeleteA scenario above of imperfect Indo-Europeanisation in a culturally marginal community suggests that the key to the puzzle genetics-wise may lie in I1 instead of any subclade of R1a and R1b. The coalescence certainly coincides well with the proposed scenario, so any community with high I1 may be the smoking gun. If high I1 were found in these East Jutland hybrid communities, that would be something special.
@ Davidski
Previously you suggested that direct influence from the Steppe may have brought Greek. Languages like Thracian and Dacian just North of Greece repeatedly turn up closest to Baltic languages, secondly Albanian, when their limited corpus have been subject to linguistic analysis. Another possibility is that influences arriving directly from the Steppe, whether from Catacomb or Sintashta, created Thracian and Dacian languages and cultures--they were more pastoralist oriented than Greeks were, after all, and closer connections, both genetic and cultural, are found between Balto-Slavic groups and these late Steppe cultures--and the Greek speakers instead derived from Ezero and other older Balkan groups in an earlier wave, as Rob sugggests. Of course, this awaits data.
@ RK
ReplyDeleteI'm inclined to agree with linguists that Scandinavia was only germanicised at the turn of the common era (Udolph, Schmidt, Osten)
These powerful substrata you describe would be the Nordic Bronze Age
Secondly, I'm afraid Thracian studies are not as optimal as we would like. It was too loosely applied what can be seems Thracian. As appealing as it is, Baltic comes up similar to virtually anything, by account of its "conservativeness" . Of course, I do not doubt the possibility- likelihood even- of said similarities
@David - But I'm not sure where the rest of the Proto-Germanic package originated and how it got to Scandinavia. Maybe people like Nordic_LN RISE98, who belonged to R1b-U106, were involved in the process. RISE98 basically looks modern Scando. See here...
ReplyDeleteWhose metallurgy is the Nordic Bronze Age based on? Is it Unetice-derived, or direct from Bell Beakers?
Either way I think there probably 3 main influences at work:
1) A Neolithic Funnelbeaker substrate
2) A Corded-Ware Culture core.
3) A Bronze Age superstrate from central Europe. Probably from someone IE-speaking like Unetice.
Does that sound about right?
@Ric - Because Corded Ware and Northern Bell Beakers most probably spoke different dialects rather than extremely diverged languages at the time it could be that there was a leveling out effect among the different dialects that merged and became Proto-Germanic ? Maybe Proto-Italic-Lusatanian formed the same way in or around Southern Germany with Proto-Celtic forming somewhere in Central and Proto-Germanic in Northern Germany....
I wouldn't assume northern Bell Beakers were speaking an IE language or that the Bell Beakers left much linguistic or direct genetic legacy in Scandinavia. It is interesting that the part of Scandinavia that saw the most influence from Bell Beakers (Jutland) has the same legacy of vigesimalism that the Altantic coast does though.
I wouldn't assume Basque is representative of Neolithic/farmer languages either. By the end of the Neolithic, Iberia was dominated by WHG Y-DNA lineages, as were other large swaths of Europe. That WHG resurgence in the Middle Neolithic could very well have come with one or more language shifts. IIRC 6/7 Iberian Bell Beaker Y-DNA samples we have were from WHG haplogroups.
@Rob - Germanized from where? The Urnfield Culture seems to have occupied all of the territory to the south and even today there are Celtic place names as for east as Poland.
ReplyDelete@Ryan
ReplyDelete"I wouldn't assume Basque is representative of Neolithic/farmer languages either. "
That is true. Linguists classify Basque as Agglutination language, while Proto-Indo-European is Fusional language.
Both Basque and Proto-Indo-European use SOV word-order grammar. But, Celtic languages have shifted to VSO, a word-order more common in Afro-Asiatic and Slavic has shifted to SVO word-order.
We are looking at various regional Non-Indo-European/Non-Basque layers of stratum influences from unknown/dead languages.
@ Rob
ReplyDeleteI just looked at Word Order specifically and I do not see VSO anywhere near Anatolia...Sumerians,Hurrians,Anatolian, PIE etc...all seem to be SOV....and there is a huge gap and many populations between Semitic Akadian and Celtic....that is why I think that it could be plausible for some WHG language to have been VSO.
Ric
DeleteMaybe coincidence ? If ENF were mostly haplogroup G, does it mean they spoke something like Kartvellian ? (Fun speculation)
Well like you said before Proto-Kartvelian seems to only date linguistically to +-2000 bC. but that is basically only using one most conservative Kartvelian language, Svan.
DeleteThere could have been many more related to Svan that died out and using their combined reconstruction could have pushed back the dates even further...
So in my humble opinion I think what you say could be a possibility. (Fun speculation)
A fanatic panalanist (every hg derives from Alans, from our R-L23 to this R1a), and who isn't anymore in my mail list because, when I was attacked on the YFull FB page he blocked his address, as the other ex-friend Ricardo, but look at my answers there about his J-M365), writes to me through a friend that this R1a-YP5018 may be of Alan origin for having samples from Dersimian tribe. Of course that these recent subclades of R1a-M420 may be due to Alans is possible, also the samples from the Isles and the Italian one. The subclade is recent, and of course they may derive from Eastern European R1a (and some R1b) found in Samara and we now know migrated to central Asia, and they may have ended in Turkish samples and also Alan ones, as some subclades of R1b like R-M73-M478, R-L23-CTS7763 and others of course. This doesn't falsify that R1a and R1b were the haplogroups of European hunter-gatherers and that they may have wintered in the Italian Refugium or R1a in Northern Europe.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately 648446 Alkandari is tested only for Y111 and many of the STRs taken into account from YFull are beyond them, but we may say hat his haplotype is upstream the R1a-YP5018 but downstream the separation with the Western European R1a-YP4131, just for these meaningful values: DYS454=11 and not 12, DYS531=11 and not 9 which link him to the Western European cluster, and DYS437=15 and not 14 and DYS448=19 and not 20 which link him to the Middle Eastern subclade. Thus a deep test of his and the YFull exam would be very interesting.
ReplyDeleteMy hypothesis:
ReplyDeleteR-YP4132 YP4176 * YP4139 * YP4134+51 SNPs 10900 ybp, TMRCA CI 95% 7200 3800 ybp" class="age"formed 12600 ybp, TMRCA 5400 ybp
R-YP4132*
⦁ id:YF09838 [Italy ?]
R-YP4131 YP4221 * YP4204 * YP4137+24 SNPs 3800 ybp, TMRCA CI 95% 1550500 ybp" class="age"formed 5400 ybp, TMRCA 900 ybp
⦁ id:YF04438GBR [GB-LAN]
⦁ id:YF03626USA [US-SC]
R-YP5018 YP5019 * YP5031 * YP5078+72 SNPs 10900 ybp, TMRCA CI 95% 3700 2100 ybp" class="age"formed 12600 ybp, TMRCA 2900 ybp
Alkandari
Haddad
R-YP5018*
⦁ id:YF05993IRQ [IQ-NA]
R-YP5664 YP5664 * Y26647 2100 ybp, TMRCA CI 95% 3700 1900 ybp" class="age"formed 2900 ybp, TMRCA 2700 ybp
⦁ id:YF07377YEM [YE-HD]
⦁ id:YF04806QAT
All that for saying that the Western European cluster is the oldest and 12600 years of the separation may be linked to the expansion after the Younger Dryas as many other subclades of R1 hg.
ReplyDelete@ Ric
ReplyDeleteI think it was George O. who pointed that out :)
Thanks Rob.
DeleteOf course there are also the Yeagers haplotypes:
ReplyDelete_R1a* (M420+ SRY10831.2-) Cluster 2
93721 Yeager Germany R-M173
14 23 15 10 12-12 12 12 11 13 13 29 15 9-9 11 12 25 15 20 31 11-12-15-16 10 10 19-23 15 16 16 18 36-37 12 12 9 8 15-16 8 11 10 8 11 11 12 20-20 16 10 12 12 15 8 11 22 21 13 12 11 13 11 11 12 12
140814 Yeager Germany R-M173
14 23 15 10 12-12 12 12 12 13 13 29 15 9-9 11 12 25 15 20 31 11-12-15-16 11 10 19-23 15 16 16 18 36-37 12 12 9 8 15-16 8 11 10 8 11 11 12 20-20 16 11 12 12 15 8 12 22 21 13 12 11 13 11 11 12 12 35 15 9 15 12 28 24 19 12 12 12 12 10 9 13 11 10 11 11 30 12 12 24 13 11 9 18 15 18 16 23 15 11 16 25 12 24 19 10 15 18 9 11 11
142624 Yeager Germany R-M173
14 23 15 10 12-12 12 12 12 13 13 29 15 9-9 11 12 25 15 20 31 11-12-16-16 11 10 19-23 15 16 16 17 36-37 12 12 9 8 15-16 8 11 10 8 11 11 12 20-20 16 10 12 12 15 8 12 22 21 13 12 11 13 11 11 12 12
that for DYS454=12<11, DYS437=15<14 and DYS531=9<11 are upstream the Eastern R1a cluster.
@Rob Yeah for sure. What I meant was the Germanic familiy of languages exhibits features that places it close both to Balto Slavic and to Celtic. Some kind of interaction between the Corded ware dialects and the older kentum dialects seems to have been crucial in the formation of early Germanic
ReplyDelete@David
ReplyDelete"From what I've been told, don't expect any Hittite papers for a good while. The big South Asian paper should be coming soon though, if things go smoothly behind the scenes."
Aren't there 2 papers on South Asia due out? Then why can't at least one of them be released immediately? Harvard must have long finished up work on this already and could release their paper now, even if the Indian authored paper is taking its time because of the authors' lack of prior aDNA experience. A commentator here had remarked some time back that the Indian authored paper was expected no earlier than late September or early October. But Harvard could be starting work on the Hittite aDNA by then. Furthermore, there's no news yet about which paper will cover Maikop.
Subjectively speaking, it feels like proper aDNA coverage of the rest of the globe is being held up until the Indo-European matter is resolved. It's been interesting and all, but I hope the papers on South (Central) Asia and those on Hittite and the rumoured additional Mycenaean aDNA come out soon, so IE is settled and done with, instead of dragging it out into the new year again.
@Max - I'm not sure how much weight to put on the word order thing. The change for Celtic is probably significant. FYI though Basque is not SVO - it is ergative. I don't think a connection to Afroasiatic is likely though I guess it can't be ruled out. That similarity could just be coincidence. PIE was originally SOV anyways, and in central America there are VSO and ergative languages side by side that couldn't be more distantly related to each other than Afroasiatic languages are.
ReplyDeleteWe also know almost sweet crap all about word order for most continental Celtic languages. Most Gaulish inscriptions are SVO, but a minority were VSO. Celtiberian was VSO. We know next to nothing about the syntax of all Celtic languages to the east of that, from the Alps to Turkey. One of only two inscriptions we have for Noric - the Celtic language spoken in the core La Tene area, just says "Bear Penis of Brodgus." Someone's name was bear penis. Seriously.
So yah... I wouldn't take it as all that clear that Insular Celtic's VSO came from a VSO language, or that it couldn't have been an original development, or from an ergative or other substrate. And even if it was a VSO substrate, I wouldn't take for granted that that substrate was Afroasiatic.
@ak2014b
ReplyDeleteHittites cremated their dead, as Nick Patterson once stated here. There are a few burials but that doesn't mean they will yield something useful.
Ric Hern
ReplyDelete"I definitely think that there was a lot of interaction between Scandinavia Germany,Britain and Ireland during the Bronze Age."
as an exercise, if you limit movement to water based then:
Samara -> Volga -> Baltic -> North Sea -> Atlantic coast
jumps out
#
Samuel Andrews said...
"If modern Norse are mostly of Bell Beaker origin why do they have so little R1b?"
i don't know how accurate this is but it looks like a three-way split with I1 the biggest but R1b and R1a not that far behind
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GOlxR_kKfXM/UHLdwt-k7YI/AAAAAAAAAKo/dqV-xm43f3M/s1600/Genetic+Map+of+Europe.png
#
proto-Germanic
mythology hints at a merger between Vanir and Aesir (and Jotun?)
epoch2013 said...
ReplyDelete"Hittites cremated their dead, as Nick Patterson once stated here. There are a few burials but that doesn't mean they will yield something useful."
a battle field would be useful
@Grey
ReplyDeleteI reckon pretty much *anything* would be useful
@ Grey
ReplyDeleteYes. Two important trade goods were Tin and Amber. A Tin ingot found in Scandinavia had its origin in Cornwall. Amber from the Baltic was found as far as the Mycenaeans and even king Tuts Tomb.
The shortest route via water from the Baltic to the Black Sea is Vistula, Bug, Dniester and that would have been the most probable trade route...
ReplyDelete