Sunday, March 25, 2018
Central Asia as the PIE urheimat? Forget it
Right or wrong, the main contenders for the title of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland, or urheimat, are Eastern Europe, Anatolia and Transcaucasia, in that order. Central Asia, is, at best, one of the also-rans in this tussle, much like India and the Arctic Circle.
However, if you've been following the discussions on the topic in the comments at this blog over the last couple of years, you might be excused for thinking that Central Asia was in fact a natural choice for the PIE homeland, and thanks to new insights from ancient DNA, on the cusp of being proven to be the only choice.
Well, it's already been a very busy year for insights from ancient DNA, including in regards to Central Asia.
For instance, back in February a paper in Science by Gaunitz et al. revealed that the Botai people of Eneolithic Central Asia kept a breed of horse that was ancestral to the Przewalski's horse (see here). This is potentially a crucial fact in the PIE homeland debate, because the horse is the most important animal in early Indo-European religion. However, the Przewalski's horse is a significantly different clade of horse from the modern domestic horse. Thus, even if the Botai people were the first humans to domesticate the horse, then so what, because they didn't domesticate the right type of horse.
It remains to be seen who domesticated the right type of horse, and apparently there's a least one major ancient DNA paper on the way that will try to solve this problem. But we already know that the Middle Bronze Age Sintashta people - who lived on the border between Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Western Siberia - did keep the right type of horse, and it was also phylogenetically somewhat more basal, and thus ancestral, to most modern-day horse breeds.
Interestingly, by far the most basal horse genome within the domestic horse clade is Duk2, from an Early Bronze Age archaeological site near the city of Dunaujvaros in Hungary. But it's not certain who this horse belonged to exactly or where it really came from, because the site in question was probably a major trading post, where livestock and crops were exchanged for bronze articles. In other words, Duk2 may have been imported from somewhere nearby or afar. My bet is that it came from the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Let's wait and see.
Moreover, earlier this week the New York Times ran a feature on the work that David Reich and his colleagues at Broad MIT/Harvard are doing with ancient DNA. The article included an image of Reich standing in front of a whiteboard, and this whiteboard just happened to have on it a migration and mixture model based on ancient human DNA for Central Asia focusing on the period 2200-1500 BCE (scroll down the page here).
I've already analyzed this model in as much detail as I could in an earlier blog entry (see here). However, in the context of this blog entry, it's important to note that the model clearly shows major population movements from Europe and West Asia into Central Asia, rather than the other way around (ie. all of the really big arrows are pointing east). The paper with the final version of this model is apparently coming soon, and after it does come, we'll probably be having our last ever discussion here about Central Asia as a potential PIE homeland. I can't wait.
Update 01/04/2018: The preprint of the paper on ancient Central Asia that I mentioned above is now available at bioRxiv. See here.
Update 03/04/2019: In a surprising twist, Duk2 has significant ancestry from a native Iberian lineage that didn't contribute any direct ancestry to modern domesticates (see here).
See also...
Of horses and men
The mystery of the Sintashta people
Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...
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«Oldest ‹Older 401 – 590 of 590@Rob
Z2103 appears in the Volga area after 3000 BC.
Yamnaya_Samara I0429 R1b1a1a2a2 5079YBP (3339-2918 calBCE)
This guy is also the least Caucasus shifted Yamnaya sample, but has a Caucasus-derived mtDNA haplogroup: T2c1a2.
Meh 3100 BC vs 3000 BC. After reservoir effect, it’s after 3000 BC, as per archaeologists consensus. But whatever, it’s a big cry from 4200 BC
@Rob
I0429 just happens to be either the first ever male with Z2103 in the Volga region, or Z2103 arrived in the area before 3000 BCE, reservoir effect or not.
It's true that there's no Z2103 in Khvalynsk samples (yet), but nevertheless, it seems to me that Z2103 was in the Volga region well before 3000 BCE.
@Rob Can you quote any archaeologist who derives Yamna from anything other than Khvalynsk-Repin? In the Samara region, there is M269, L23* and Z2103 (also present in the Volga-Ural region). Which makes a differentiation of P297 in this region highly likely
Of course there is a change in autosomal admixture from Khvalynsk to Yamna namely increasing southern admixture, but to use this to claim Yamna itself originated from the south is incorrect. This southern admixture could have come from mixing with various North Pontic cultures which already had it.
Also what is the oldest M269 sample from the south dated to?
sure Dave I’ll throw you a bone- Z2103 arrived in the Volga region by 3050 BC
Davidski
We have Z2103 from Armenia also. It is 950Bc. Thus he fall in LBA/IA range.
His ID is Rise397.
@Aram
RISE397 also has steppe ancestry, like Iran_IA F38, but probably more.
So that's two prehistoric R1b-M269 (Z2103+) samples from West Asia with accompanying steppe ancestry.
@ RK
Perhaps you’ve heard of this
“ Emergence of the Ideology of the Warrior in the Western Mediterranean during the second Half of the fourth Millennium BC, Eurasia Antiqua. Zeitschrift für Archäologie Eurasiens 14 (2014), p. 171-184.” by Jeneusse
It’s goea into Majkop , Yamnaya and some the preceding elements
@ Chetan
Nobody thinks Yamnaya derives simply from Khvalynsk
And “maximal diversity” of P297 & derived Clades isn’t in the Volga -Samara region
Rob, that's really a very important paper of jeunesse. Warrior ideology is a key factor to understand IE origins. Jeunesse in another work pointed out the same concept about the origin of stele people culture. He stressed the importance of similar relations between maykop and stele in central western europe.
By the way another cultural trait that should be examined in relations to IE origin is the cremation rite. We know that many IE cultures shared this kind of custom: italic, celtic, germanic and indoaryans. Here we find another cultural trait that is clearly connected with IE ideology. And surprise surprise we find that cremation is older in the west and nonexistent in the steppe before andronovo ( so before the important admixture between old europeans and steppe people in central europe) . I wonder why nobody realize how important is this fact in order to understand ( as I pointed out in my previous posts) the importance of the cultural flow from old europe to the steppe.
"Nobody thinks Yamnaya derives simply from Khvalynsk "
Unfortunately some seem to. Despite all explanations and despite the battling sanity of scholars like "Rob" et al.... The fact remains, established beyond further discussion, that the archaeological reality of "Yamna" does not derive from either Repin or Seredny Stih (Sredny Stog) AS SUCH, but from a reassemblage of their successors with the emergence of a unique "Yamna" set of pots et al. A new mixture (relatively late ca. 3000 BCE roughly). And the contribution of various genetic markers has not yet been fully established since we lack results from a lot of Yamna dominated areas.
Yamnaya largely derives from Khvalynsk. This is rather obvious from aDNA alone, but also from archeology.
Genetic and archaeological continuity from Khvalynsk to Yamnaya
@seinundzeit
Have their been any studies on lactase persistance in Afghanistan/Pakistan? Some maps seem to suggest a peak a in lower sindh/balochistan while some other sources suggest a greater prevalance in northern India than pakistan or leave out data from pakistan altogether. Wondering if the lactase persistance in south asia dates back to the neolithic or related to bronze age movements from the steppe. Even if from the steppe there exists a possibility of it occuring at a low frequency in early settlers and being selected for independently after they settled in India. Have been wondering about this.
I think the importance of the steppe is a key factor not in the birth of the indoeuropean languages as a whole but only in the formation of the satem ones ( balto-slavic and indoaryans). many scholars point out that PIE was a centum like language ( another thing that clearly points out to central western europe...). It isn't strange that the lands ( according to the kurgan theory) that were IEized the last ( western europe) retained this archaic trait of the IE language. We have also to rembre that central wester europe was the big player that in two occasions gave birth to two world expansions
1) 2000/2500 years ago with Alexander the great and above all the Roman empire and
2) 400/500 years ago with the colonial powers ( Spain-Portugal- France and England)
What was possible 2000 years ago and a bunch of centuries ago why was not possible 6000/5000 years ago?
The opposite applies to the steppe . Why a place that was able, according to many, to shape large parts of the euroasiatic continent nearly disappeared from world history ?
@old europe
You can't say that only the satem IE languages came from the steppe, because all prehistoric samples so far in Western Europe and West Asia with R1b-M269 show steppe ancestry.
So there were massive population movements from the steppe all the way to the Atlantic and also south of the Caucasus of people rich in R1b-M269.
Did they speak satem IE languages too? What happened to these satem languages in the western half of Europe?
Why a place that was able, according to many, to shape large parts of the euroasiatic continent nearly disappeared from world history?
And this was a really dumb comment.
Have you ever heard of the Mongolian Empire and the Turkic expansions. What about the Soviet Union and Russia?
Have a look at a world map. What's the biggest country in the world with the second biggest nuclear arsenal?
Mongolia is not on the european steppe( you always remember on this blog that the steppe is in Europe Dave...). The example of the Soviet Union reveals the exact opposite Dave: Communism was born in central western europe . It was precisely a blending of french revolutionary thinking. German idealistic philosophy and english economic theory..... that later conquered Russia.
By the way long live to Russia ( i really love this country ) and all the slavic nations dave
@old europe
The Eurasian steppe is both in Europe and Asia, that's why it's called the Eurasian steppe.
But these are just geographic labels. In reality there are no large barriers on the steppe between the European part and the Mongolian part, so using the Mongolian Empire as a historically documented example to demonstrate that the steppe had the potential to be a region of massive expansions is fully justified.
There was no way that such an expansion would be possible outside of the steppe, unless it was across the seas, which is how Western Europeans expanded. Think about it.
Nope, without the steppe, the Proto-Indo-European expansion wouldn't have happened when it did.
Looks like Dienekes was right and Proto Indo-Europeans were from Eastern Anatolia. Were R1a carriers later Indo-Europeanized by the originals?
"Yamnaya largely derives from Khvalynsk. This is rather obvious from aDNA alone, but also from archeology." (Davidski)
The conclusion is both premature (since the western portion of Yamna is not yet comprehensively diagnosed) and geographically incorrect. There was a morphing into "Yamna" both in the east (the old Repin) and in the West (the old Sredny Stog). There is no archaeological evidence that Repin was the exclusive or dominant predecessor of Yamna in the West (the Morgunova analysis is strictly applicable to the eastern Yamna). And it is also very well known to archaeologists that Khvalynsk itself was a mixture between older locals and incoming Sredny Stog, with the latter dominating. YAMNA is itself a mixture from all preceding cultures, and the suggestion that somehow "Khvalynsk" was the key contributor is just plain wrong. Something nasty may also have happened to Repin since its typical pottery forms disappear West of the Urals but are retained in Afanasievo (chased out?) (:=)) Sapienti sat. You're entitled to your opinion. I won't insist.
Mongolia is not in the part of the eurasian steppe that gave birth ( according to many) to the IE expansion. case closed. The IE steppe is in Europe, not in asia period.
What I want to point out with my posts is that we are confronted with this scenario:
1) Recent studies have clearly demonstrated that CULTURAL TRAITS that were linked to IE ideology are older in western europe: warlike spirit, burial custom cremation rite, antropomorphic stelae. As for the kurgan they're older in the caucasus.
We have indeed a demic expansion in Europe from the steppe that comes with the corded ware culture ( and here I agree with you). R1a from the steppe. case closed.
We have the r1b problem still unclear ( east or west?) Villabruna was big news so the question is too close to call.
NOW
we have to determine if the language went with the other cultural traits ( from west to east or from south to north if we prefer the armenian hypothesis ) or the migration of the corded ware was enough to change the language landscape of europe ( very difficult because corded ware did not penetrate into western europe.
I do not quote the fact that we a gene flow of EEF in the steppe before Yamnaya ( Sredny stog)........
With the R1b problem still unresolved I think that the question is far from over. Or
the IE could a blending of old Europe and steppe much like English for example is a mix of angle saxon and norman french.
@Cpk
Looks like Dienekes was right and Proto Indo-Europeans were from Eastern Anatolia. Were R1a carriers later Indo-Europeanized by the originals?
You might want to wait until this is is actually validated by all of the evidence.
But if it is, then I'm cool with an Anatolian/Late PIE split in eastern Anatolia or Caucasus. If it happened, then it happened.
In any case, it already looks like Late PIE (ie. all surviving Indo-European language groups) came from the steppe, which to me is more interesting.
Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...
@Cpk
Looks like Dienekes was right and Proto Indo-Europeans were from Eastern Anatolia.
No. Some of the genetic make up that gave rise to the population that spoke Proto IE on the East European steppe seems to have come from Eastern Anatolia. Quite a different thing.
Do not tell, Maykop did not use the wagons before Yamnaya culture. The wagon appeared only in Novosvobodnaya culture/stage.
@Palacista Not only does it not mean the same thing, the odds that the language that became PIE came from Anatolia or the Caucasus is practically zero. Believe me when I say Indo-European languages and PIE have been researched like no other for the past 150 years. The closest relatives to Indo-European are all situated in North Eurasia - Uralic, Yukaghir. If anything, IE has north-east Asian connections, no doubt from its ANE element.
PIE could have substratum or other influences from Caucasian or some other southern language family, but like you said that is not at all the same as saying PIE came from Anatolia or the Caucasus. It didn't.
Very difficult to take Yamnaya late PIE, this is clearly a side branch IE that has completely died out leaving no descendants. It was probably the only one PIE in the form of Sredniy Stog/Dereivka/Khvalynsk, and then have the disintegration of the late PIE in the CWC.
"Eneolithic Central Asia kept a breed of horse that was ancestral to the Przewalski's horse"
I disagree with the word "ancestral", the fact is only "ancient", the rest of the interpretation.
@supernord
“Very difficult to take Yamnaya late PIE, this is clearly a side branch IE that has completely died out leaving no descendants. It was probably the only one PIE in the form of Sredniy Stog/Dereivka/Khvalynsk, and then have the disintegration of the late PIE in the CWC.”
Steppe language which predates CWC, i.e. presumably the language of Late Sredny Stog Dereivka culture from which most likely CWC originated, was Balto-Slavic. Read Mittnik et al. 2018.
@Davidski Any info on when the unpublished data Reich cites will be out there?Also a PIE homeland in Central Asia seems to be out which was the point of your post, and Reich apparently is talking about Iran and Armenia not Anatolia.Nothing really surprising there.
EastPole, you are mistake. Nobody wrote, including Mittnick.
Kurgan expansion is undisputable but it was probably a secondary expansion. It never really explained the Anatolian languages.
it is often repeated on various blogs that we don't really know what peoples belonging to a particular archeological culture spoke. That is not entirely true because we can infer the kind of language a culture spoke by examining names the often do not change with the change of culture: that is place names: toponyms. There are number of studies that clearly states that old europe hydronomy and many mountains names too I would say, have clear indoeuropean roots. This is particularly true for the italian and iberian peninsulas ( again our friend central western europe...) besides some part of the baltic region. In order of reconciling this fact with the steppe hypothesis ( it is unlikely that these names are younger than the copper age) only one explanation is possible: that without a demic invasion in western europe ( corded ware never reached this part of the continent) old europe guys renamed every single creek, every single river, every single mountain, every single hill.......even a sick man can understand that this is impossible. So or the steppe theory is reformulated in order to detect an invasion that happened in the 5th or at least 4th millennium or we are again in front of a serious blow to the gimbutians.
the steppe theory cannot simply explain both the anatolians and the centum languages. Kurgans were only the satem guys.
@supernord
“EastPole, you are mistake. Nobody wrote, including Mittnick”
Read Mittnik before you comment:
https://s17.postimg.org/mzy0miwen/screenshot_352.png
@OM
Man, I was wondering when you'd show up. You must be having a laugh over all this discussion
@Seinundzeit: So, the 75% Onge-like + 25% Iran_N-related construct isn't due to some ancient South Indian population being modeled by this lab. Instead, it's just them reassessing their older ghost.
Well, no way I can see that the f4 ratio work they used is going to be confusing Iran_N for Onge related ancestry.... So I don't think there's going to be a huge reassessment of what they found with f4 ratios - the ENA-ASI ghost that contributed about 19% to Pathans, 43% Velamas etc in Reich 2009 (regression adjusted f4 ratio estimate).
However, would say, in a sense they may never have had a "single" ghost!
Priya Moorjani's 2013 ALDER based paper (http://dienekes.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/major-admixture-in-india-took-place-42.html) presented about 29% ASI ancestry in Pathan, 57% in Velama through the linkage disequilibrium signal. That noticeably seems a little higher that the f4 ratio estimate, but if you assume that only 75% of "ALDER-ASI" is ENA-ASI, then that's right back down to more or less the same levels found by Reich 2009.
So it may be that they're reassessing Moorjani's ghost population found through LD (as the most recent paper that actually tried to define ASI), and actually squaring that estimate with the estimate from Reich 2009 (e.g. both estimates are saying the same thing, once you account for some Iran_N related ancestry in "ALDER-ASI" which is in linkage disequilibrium with "ENA-ASI").
(It may make more sense to change the terminology and call a population like Pathans something like 29% Ancestral Indian and 71% Ancestral "Turan" at that point though, if "ALDER-ASI" simply was the population of India at that time and "ALDER-ANI" really was in more Northern South Central Asia. I dunno.).
But you've read the book and I haven't!
@Davidski:But if it is, then I'm cool with an Anatolian/Late PIE split in eastern Anatolia or Caucasus. If it happened, then it happened. In any case, it already looks like Late PIE (ie. all surviving Indo-European language groups) came from the steppe, which to me is more interesting.
No one could ask for a more reasonable stance than that! Though would say "late PIE" is kind of a construction that depends on particular tree phylogenies. Some trees do seem to turn out a separate Italic-Celtic-Germanic-Baltic-Slavic subbranch, and it's plausible for people to argue then that "steppe IE" (if there does turn out to be a steppe and East Anatolian primary split) is only really ancestral to those European groups.
Still, even if the "steppe IE" were only ancestral those groups (ICGBS or some other acronym thereof), there must surely have been influence from the "steppe IE" groups on to other IE groups - there look like there are too many late specific connections between later IE religion and language for it to be otherwise, especially the case for the languages broadly in the "satem" group.
(Related though, if genetics suggest, somehow, that IE does not coalesce at the steppe in the earliest stage, then some of the interpretations of reconstructed proto-IE religion, and how that is supposedly the product of an open steppe environment become open to question,)
@Seinundzeit and Matt
Reich is most likely talking about Neolithic Rakhigahri samples in context of "ASI" being Iran_Neolithic & ASI.
They probably don't have Mesolithic Indian samples and Reich is not involved with Max Planck institute (I think?) since these samples seem to be with them.
This is my guess on how ancient DNA will South Asia.
Paleolithic samples from Sri Lanka (30ybp) = purely ASE/ENA.
Mesolithics samples from India (10-8 YBP) = ANE-ASE, creating a "ASI".
(This above scenario will explain additional ANE admixture in Indian tribals)
Late Neolithic & Bronze age (5-4 YBP) = arrival of Basal admixture with Iran_Neo. Later, arrival of steppe admixture.
Oh yeah,
@cpkLooks like Dienekes was right and Proto Indo-Europeans were from Eastern Anatolia. Were R1a carriers later Indo-Europeanized by the originals?
Damn, old skool. Hmm.... As I recall, Dienekes original theory was that IE expansions reflected a group of Caucasian metalworkers (West Asian component), in his words "a trading/military elite centered around metallurgy and its products" spreading across Europe and down towards India.
When he realized that a HG bounceback in Europe was inevitable (which didn't take too long because he damn smart and understood the data), he added an epicycle that this intrusive "elite" group must have caused a mixture process between separated HG and Early Farmers as well (to account for why HG bounceback "appeared" to correlate with IE spread).
Now that specifically is not really gonna be so right. But some form of Caucasus related early split of IE ... Maybe.
The geographic zone of the ancient seat of the Indo-Iranians is indicated by the absence in the Indo-Iranian languages of the common Indo-European words for ‘spruce’ and ‘bog’. This makes it possible to localize them in the steppe (Schrader 1913). The suggested identification of the legendary river Ra (Sanskrit Rasa, Iranian Raŋha) with the Volga and the Ripa mountains with the Urals (Marquart 1938; Grantovsky and Bongard-Levin 1970; 1998; Grantovsky 1976 supported by A. I. Dovatur, D. P. Kallistova et al. (1982: 248-249) and N. L. Chlenova (1983: 56-60;1989)) is extremely important for locating the Indo- Iranian homeland. V. Miller (1887) recognized the Iranian etymology of a number of geographical names in the North Pontic, later augmented by V. I. Abaev (1949). A large number of Iranian hydronyms with the root don (Iranian ‘water’) has been revealed for the drainages of the Dnieper, Desna, Seim, Severny Donets and the Poltava region (Toporov and Trubachev 1962; Strizhak 1965). The Indo-Iranian treatment of toponyms in the North Pontic has also been supported in a series of works by O. N. Trubachev (1975; 1976; 1999) and L. A. Lelekov (1980) while E. A. Grantovsky and D. S. Raevsky (1984: 47-62) agreed that the Iranian element is “the only undisputed (element) in the North Pontic.” S. S. Berezanskaya (1982: 206-209) in charting the hydronyms of the Upper and Middle Dnieper area on an archaeological map showed that the area of the Iranian names does not coincide with the distribution of the Scythian culture but correlates completely with the territory of the Timber-grave culture, which is a strong argument in favor of assigning a Proto-Iranian identity to the Timber- grave people.
Indo-Iranian toponyms are also found on the Middle Volga and the Urals (Popov and Loyfman 1962). N. L. Chlenova (1983a; 1984) plotted the toponyms and demonstrated that Iranian toponyms were spread over Timber-grave and Andronovo territories, but part of the Andronovo toponyms can only be interpreted as Indo-Aryan; here also was included the Altai by A. M. Maloletko (1986: 70-75). These data are extremely important for the final resolution of the problem of the cultural and ethnic attribution of the Fedorovo complex. Due to the fact that Indo-Iranian toponyms of the pre-Scythian period have been found on the territory populated only by Fedorovo tribes, the hypothesis identifying the Fedorovo population as Ugrian that has been proposed by V. N. Chernetsov must be rejected, and the hypothesis of the Indo-Aryan attribution of Andronovans can be supported.
This is a quote from the famous book of kuzmina. If the steppe, volga etc. are the IE homeland why in these regions we find only an indoaryan kind of place names. It shouldn't be a common indoeuropean kind of toponym ( like in portugal spain, italy ) If this is the cradle of IE where are the centum place-names. Why as kuzmina says on the north pontic steppe we find only indoaryan place names?
And we are told that at the same time the indoeuropeans reached spain portugal italy bringing only centum like place names. Sincerely these are questions that need to be answered.
@Matt Yea, is it all LPIE, or just LPIE to Northern Europe.We need more Myceneans.But if II came from the steppe so did Greek I would say.
Matt,
For what it's worth, they don't use the simple f4 ratio now. Rather, they tend towards qpGraph/qpAdm, and in the pages I've referenced, Reich is referring to some sort of broad modelling produced by Patterson (probably something with qpGraph, but he doesn't say).
The "Alder-ASI" vs "f4 ratio-ASI" is an intriguing idea, but I just don't think he means that. Looking at
Sidenote, if one wants a contemporary Indian population that fits this 75% Onge-like + 25% Iran_N-related, the Bhumji1 sample is perfect for this.
IndoIranian II
Sein:For what it's worth, they don't use the simple f4 ratio now.
Sure (it's still not very useful assuming more than 2 admixing populations), but either way, no way that extra Iran_N could've produced any inflation in that old f4 ratio regression estimate...
@Singh
"Mesolithics samples from India (10-8 YBP) = ANE-ASE, creating a "ASI". "
I'm also beginning to strongly suspect this for NORTH India. It could be a factor behind Indian models asking for seemingly ANE-shifted samples like Srubna_outlier across various models(getting about 25%). CWC-like ancestry(i.e. bona fide steppe_MLBA) in high caste N. Indians may not exceed 15% after all is said and done.
btw, check this comment from an earlier thread out:
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/03/ancient-genomes-from-southeast-asia.html?showComment=1520825000880#c1913974680129171937
@OldEurope
What do you think about the etymology of terms for lion beginning in l- in Slavic languages?
Are they ultimately borrowings from Greek(perhaps in an indirect fashion, e.g non IE Near Eastern language---->Greek-->Latin-->Germanic--->Slavic) OR can they be traced to a PIE origin? If the latter, should this be seen as support for a(more southerly) Anatolian origin?
Great commentary, btw.
@Davidski
"Horse worship on the steppes predates the Divine Twins mythos. This is suggested by the presence of horse headed scepters in burials on the Eneolithic steppe. "
This is exactly what I was going to write about. According to Kuzmina these scepters were found in Eneolithic Eastern Kazakhstan and Varfolomievka, and according to her some of the daggers resemble Przewalski horses. This suggests to me that they were worshiping wild horses just like they were worshiping other wild animals like the warrior boar.
"However, the first instance of R1b-M269 in West Asia is from an Iron Age burial at Tepe Hasanlu in Northwest Iran. "
I believe that this IA Iranian is an Early Mede based on the fact that he was close to Parsumash and Marlik, and around the time the Medes made it to Western Iran. Yet he has less steppe ancestry than modern day Iranians despite him being a newcomer from the east, why?
@EastPole
"Many common features in Greek, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages and religions which are better explained by North-Eastern European climate and folk traditions or have Slavic etymology etc."
Can you give a real example of this? My main interest in the whole PIE thing is the religion and culture part.
@Antrho Survey
"can they be traced to a PIE origin?"
According to Ivanov and Gamkrelidze they did, they even see an evidence of a lion cult. There seems to be a cult of leopards in PIE as well.
Anthro I do not know. But I think a single word cannot prove much. To the gimbutians I have another question. According to the steppe theory westerneurope was IEized only in the second millennia BC. only a few centuries later we witness the first inscriptions in latin, italic and celtic languages. We know they were already highly different. How could be? In few centuries the corded ware gave western europe two different family of languages? That is difficult to believe. On the other side in a huge geographical area we have the diffusion of balto-slavic and indoaryan that are much more similar than italic, celtic and germanic.
Really strange........
@Vara
Interesting! Btw,I just found out that the word for lion in Basque is 'lehoia'. I'm not sure if this is a Romance borrowing or not, though(as many Basque words are). If not, this seems to lend support for EEF's strong linguistic contribution to PIE.
Vara said...
"However, the first instance of R1b-M269 in West Asia is from an Iron Age burial at Tepe Hasanlu in Northwest Iran. "
I believe that this IA Iranian is an Early Mede based on the fact that he was close to Parsumash and Marlik, and around the time the Medes made it to Western Iran. Yet he has less steppe ancestry than modern day Iranians despite him being a newcomer from the east, why?
The sample from Tepe Hasanlu is ID--F38 and he well downstream from Lezgin Russian L584* sample.
R-Y23838Y23999 * CTS4582 * Y23838formed 4300 ybp, TMRCA 4300 ybpinfo
R-Y23838*
id:F38
https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-L584/
@Anthro Survey
Yes, those tall Ganga plain Mesolithic folks will turn out to be ANE-ASE (in my opinion). They were often compared to Eastern European Mesolithics in skeleton pathology journals due to their tall stature or E.Euro Mesolithic being intermediate between W.Euro Mesolithic and Ganga plain Mesolithic by Lukacs & Pal (2003), in their updated study (2017) they did not compare them to any mesolithics.
https://i.imgur.com/8hsTLlZ.jpg
Blogger a said...
Blogger Rob said...
@ Chetan
"You’re incorrect about Khvalynsk
Khvalynsk doesn’t have any Z2103. Khvalynsk we’re also flat burials, not kurgans
Z2103 appears in the Volga area after 3000 BC.
And whatever you believe, the fact remains that the Y chromosomal shift in Khvalynsk is accompanied by an autosomal shift"
The problem you have is that both the Khvalynsk R1b and R1a copper/hoard-status markers derive from Balkan sources not Maykop or Iran farming communities.The same goes for the 5000ybp+/- sample I0444-SP58 his copper club-status marker- is also Balkan derived copper, not Maykop or Iran farmer.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/06/11/science/12zimmer1/12zimmer1-master1050.jpg
@OldEurope
For me, the big question is what sort of language BB era migrants to Ireland would have brought. Was it non-IE, para-celto-italic or Celtic?
If it wasn't Celtic but some para-CI language, then it implies Celtic was spread into the region centuries later on from some Halstatt-era(?) Central European source. Italic has also has a Central European urheimat, apparently, and reached Italy in the late 1st millenium. So, not only are we dealing with fast differentiation within the CI branch, but also one that's taking place in a relatively constrained geographical area.
@Singh
Thanks for the link!
Btw, do you think the ANE-related ancestry in Central Asian foragers would have been closely related to that in Indian Mesolithics?
In other words f3(EHG's ANE;N.India's ANE,CA ANE) > f3(N. India's ANE;EHG's ANE,CA ANE)
Or do you think the sign is < and CA's foragers shared more drift with EHG's ANE-like ancestors?
Yamnaya pottery from 4000-3500BCE-Stratified from
Kyzyl Khak & Kara Khuduk sites.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=0FDqf415wqgC&pg=PA319&lpg=PA319&dq=yamnaya+stratified+burial&source=bl&ots=2Z6-wSPILF&sig=G5I9twX2sggs_2aIwyqMj9E5MEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAmoVChMItLzH7-jFyAIVRCseCh3niALy#v=onepage&q=yamnaya%20stratified%20burial&f=false
@singh
Has DNA been extracted from ganga Mesolithic skeletons?
Matt,
True, but the f4 ratio estimates were contingent on CEU, Georgian, or Basque references.
But in the book, Reich is referring to a basal load of at least 25% Iran_N, not a basal load of 25% CEU/Georgian/Basque. Ergo, it does seem like he's saying that this basal load of Iran_N was "masked" (due to the use of references which were too genetically "western"). If this is what Reich is saying (admittedly, he is being quite mysterious, so I can't be sure), it would align perfectly with additional data.
I mean, David can only get populations like the Kalasha and the HGDP-sampled Pashtuns to be around 10%-15% ENA (with his recent qpAdm runs). In the case of qpGraph, I've seen a range of 7% to 19%, with most setups converging on 12%-14%. Ditto with TreeMix. Not to mention nMonte in conjunction with Global_25 (13% for the Kalasha, and 13% for the Pashtun sample that resembles the usual average), and nMonte in conjunction with Fst-based PCoA (10% for the Kalasha, 13% for the Pashtuns).
Side-note, but Reich states (in the book) that the highest “ANI” percentage for any Indian population is around 80%, which seems higher than the previous estimate (what was it, around 70% for Kashmiri Pandits, right?).
Anyway, when examining this question, one must recognize that the South Central Asian percentages will always come packaged with the percentages seen for other West Asians. In other words, if the HGDP-sampled Pashtuns (I keep referencing the fact that they were sampled by the HGDP, since I have access to 10 other Pakistani + Afghan Pashtun samples which are quite different, not to mention those Afghan Pashtuns from Di Cristofaro et al.) are around 20% ASI, then populations from northwestern Iran will tend to be around 5% ASI (with Bandari Iranians at 15%, and Iranians from Khorasan at 10%), and populations from the Tajikistan highlands will tend to be around 10% ASI. And that, at least to my mind, doesn't make much geographical or historical sense (I mean, by what means would South Asian-specific ENA penetrate that far west and north?).
Now, if the HGDP-sampled Pashtuns are construed as 10%-15% ASI, northwestern Iranians will tend towards 1% ASI, and Pamiri peoples will tend towards 3%-5% ASI, which seems far more sensible if we are talking about the geographic spread of indigenous South Asian hunter-gatherer ancestry.
That being said, if there were ASI-related peoples deep into West Asia and Central Asia, our space of possibility looks rather different. If that were the case, Pashtuns could definitely be 20% ASI, Pamiris 10% ASI, and northwestern Iranians 5% ASI. In which case, we would have to redefine South Asian-specific ENA as an essential component in the ancestry of southeastern West Eurasians (just like how we consider very ancient ENA admixture to be an essential component in the ancestry of modern Europeans, with the whole model of the French being 25% Ami-like).
Though, my current picture is quite different. My primary assumption is that pure ENA populations (ones with strong South Asian-specific drift) only extended as far as the Gangetic plain. If I’m right (who knows, I’m probably totally off-base! Lol), it just seems unlikely for Central Asian/West Asian populations at the doorstep of South Asia (Pashtuns/Dardic highlanders/Pamiri/Tajiks of various stripes, all populations which are well outside the geographic and cultural boundaries of South Asia) to have so much of it, and ditto for northwestern Iranians.
Still, this is something that can only be clarified with aDNA.
@Anthro I wonder about that too.Based on the BB behemoth ca.1500 bc would be a good guess for ProtoCeltic arriving in Iberia.
@singh
"Reich is most likely talking about Neolithic Rakhigahri samples in context of "ASI" being Iran_Neolithic & ASI. "
No. Reich says ANI=50% Iran neo + 50% steppe related. ASI= 25% iran neo +75% local hunter gatherer.
Wrt rakhi garhi, he says either 1. They were iran neo
2. Asi (ie iran neo +local hunter gatherer)
3. ANI
Anthro
Yes this is a very big puzzle. Consider the romance languages. They start to differ from each other at least from 1500 years and still they quite similar even today ( italian franch spanish and portoguese can be read synoptically) .
The only possible answer is that indoeuropean centum languages were in central western europe at least 2 millennia before the arrival of the corded ware people.
I was stunned when i discovered that in middle neolithic culture of my region ( lombardy) 4700/4500 BC The square mouthed pottery people were buried in the same fashion of the corded ware ( east west orientation and flexed and with a little polished stone battle axe on their side!!!). Also the remedello burial fashion resemble that of the bell beaker ( north south orientation). we are talking about remedello at least 700 hundred years before the bell beaker!!.
@ "a"
"The problem you have is that both the Khvalynsk R1b and R1a copper/hoard-status markers derive from Balkan sources not Maykop or Iran farming communities.The same goes for the 5000ybp+/- sample I0444-SP58 his copper club-status marker- is also Balkan derived copper, not Maykop or Iran farmer."
That's not a problem, why's it a problem ?
@Vara ...
“"Many common features in Greek, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages and religions which are better explained by North-Eastern European climate and folk traditions or have Slavic etymology etc."
Can you give a real example of this? My main interest in the whole PIE thing is the religion and culture part”
There are plenty of such examples but you would have to be familiar with Slavic literature on this subject and not Wikipedia only.
An example of common feature in Greek, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic may be poetry. Elements of archetypal Indo-European poetic language present in the most archaic phases of Rig-Vedic and Greek composition, were also found in Slavic poetry.
http://s22.postimg.org/jp60mfvg1/screenshot_150.png
Why do I think it came from Slavic to Greek and Indo-Iranian and not the other way round.
Firstly, because it was found only in the most archaic verses of Rigveda and Homer, but was present in Slavic poetry in more recent times.
Secondly, because Greek poetry was influenced by Orphic poetry which predates Homer, and Orphic poetry has northern Thracian/Hyperborean origin. Rigveda which also was influenced by some northern Hyperborean poetry shows many similarities to Orphic poetry.
By the way Orpheus is linked by linguists with the Rigvedic Ribhu or Arbhu, and with Slavic Robu (worker), a word still used in common language.
Thirdly some of those Orphic/Rigvedic myths were preserved in Slavic or Baltic folklore until recent times for example in water and fire cult.
RV. X.129
3. Darkness existed, hidden by darkness, in the beginning. All this was a
signless ocean.
What existed as a thing coming into being, concealed by emptiness—that
One was born by the power of heat.
4. Then, in the beginning, from thought there evolved desire, which existed
as the primal semen.
Searching in their hearts through inspired thought, poets found the
connection of the existent in the nonexistent.
Original life came from fire lit in waters by love. Eros born from the ocean, goleden embryo, golden egg in the ocean
Fire ritualistically lit on waters represents love and life and in Slavic and Baltic folklore young girls ready for love and marriage carry this ritual during pagan fertility rite later accepted into the Christian calendar.
https://s17.postimg.org/5aakqdea7/kupala-e1340276920732.jpg
https://s17.postimg.org/i33a3rs1r/image.jpg
And by the way my question about who brought the cremation rite to the andronovo people still hangs in the air.
You miss the very point that in ancient societies , unlike ours, religion and burial rite was a very very very important thing. cremation rite is important because is linked with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls . You can find this belief at the extreme point of indoeuropean culture: italo-celtic and indoaryan. Which is the source? We can find the cremation rite in neolithic ireland, in the chassean culture, in some danubian culture, in the cucuteni culture, in the late neolithic and copper age in northern italy. In the steppe is completely nonexistent till andronovo. But the gimbutians are silent.......a deafening silence.
@ 'old Europe', Dmytro
Good comments, I agree. I don;t think Dave has looked at Yamnaya too closely, in archaeological terms. But he's somewhat right about genetics, the Yamnaya (3000 BC) sees an autosomal swing east.
Of course, given that I2a2a1 is 'western', and who knows exactly about R1b-M269, it could just mean a lot of women from the Volga were married haha
And I would not make a forceful claim that PIE is from old Europe, I have mostly focussed on culture and populations, but lets see what Anatolian shows. Whatever the case, the interpenetration of west & east going all the way to Andronovo is very interesting for genuine scholars of Eurasian prehistory.
@ supernord
" Maykop did not use the wagons before Yamnaya culture. The wagon appeared only in Novosvobodnaya culture/stage."
It spread before Yamnaya in the Zhivotnoe-Volchansk horizon.
Blogger Rob said...
@ "a"
"The problem you have is that both the Khvalynsk R1b and R1a copper/hoard-status markers derive from Balkan sources not Maykop or Iran farming communities.The same goes for the 5000ybp+/- sample I0444-SP58 his copper club-status marker- is also Balkan derived copper, not Maykop or Iran farmer."
"That's not a problem, why's it a problem ?"
Not many solid 5000+ year old copper cludgel's found in Maykop and or Iran farmer and or Balkan burials.
I0444 5000YBP+/- = R1b>Z2109>KMS75
Pathans are R1b>Z2109>SK2087
https://kumbarov.com/ht35/aDNA_02_11_30_2015.png
https://archive.archaeology.org/0203/newsbriefs/cudgel.html
"The Kutuluk grave is substantially older than the Rig-Veda, and probably represents a society that was ancestral to the people who compiled the hymns."
Comparison between copper bar celts-Kutuluk and India.
http://www.academia.edu/3836804/An_Indo-Iranian_Symbol_of_Power_in_the_Earliest_Steppe_Kurgans
@a
"The Kutuluk grave is substantially older than the Rig-Veda, and probably represents a society that was ancestral to the people who compiled the hymns."
Wait for the Rakhigarhi paper to be out and the Rigveda will become concurrent with the Kutuluk grave date
Mr. Kulkarni said...
@a
"The Kutuluk grave is substantially older than the Rig-Veda, and probably represents a society that was ancestral to the people who compiled the hymns."
"Wait for the Rakhigarhi paper to be out and the Rigveda will become concurrent with the Kutuluk grave date"
Okay thanks for the input- Kutuluk is quite old concurrent with Rigveda-. Any idea when the paper comes out?
@EastPole
"Slavic literature on this subject and not Wikipedia only."
Trust me I'm very familiar with Slavic literature from Nikita Kajumyaka to Ludmila and Ruslan to Cheburashka :)
"Firstly, because it was found only in the most archaic verses of Rigveda and Homer, but was present in Slavic poetry in more recent times."
I think it's because Slavs were in seclusion compared to the rest of the Indo-Europeans while the rest were in contact with other non-IE people. I think that's why Balto-Slavic languages are more conservative then the rest of the IE languages spoken today. The first mention of these Slavs by the Byzantines was in the 5th century. Furthermore, just because it's present now doesn't mean it's older, and just because Slavic is conservative doesn't make it the oldest because if that was the case then why do all linguists consider Anatolian the oldest split?
"Secondly, because Greek poetry was influenced by Orphic poetry which predates Homer, and Orphic poetry has northern Thracian/Hyperborean origin."
Greek poetry and religion were influenced by many things; Minoans, Anatolians, Phoenicians, Zoroastrians...etc. There is no proof that Orphic poetry predates Homer and in fact everything we have of this Orphic thing is after the times of Homer. Orpheus himself was Thracian he wasn't Hyperborean and the first mention of him going to Hyperborea was in the 1st century BCE I think.
Number two is that the evidence of Hyperboreans being Slavs is very weak. The first mention of Hyperboreans:
"visited the Issedones; beyond these (he said) live the one-eyed Arimaspians, beyond whom are the Grypes (Griffins) that guard gold, and beyond these again the Hyperboreans, whose territory reaches to the sea. Except for the Hyperboreans, all these nations (and first the Arimaspians) are always at war with their neighbors; the Issedones were pushed from their lands by the Arimaspoi (Arimaspians), and the Skythians (Scythians) by the Issedones, and the Kimmeroi (Cimmerians), living by the southern sea, were hard pressed by the Skythians and left their country. "
That puts them in Siberia rather than Eastern Europe even though the location changed over time. Most likely there was no Hyperboreans just like there was no one eyed people and griffins.
All you have shown is the similarities between Slavic and Indo-Iranian. You still didn't prove that it came from Balto-Slavic.
Rob, it is fiction, where do you always get some left information?
Wagons were in Novosvobodnaya culture after the start of Yamnaya culture and Novotitorovskaya culture.
@Rob
We've been through this before; I2a2a1b1b is native to the steppe and expanded from there to the Balkans.
The only reason you're still going on about I2a2a is because you have no arguments when it actually comes to I2a2a1b1b.
Steppe invaders in the Bronze Age Balkans
The natural thing to do would be to find an argument in regards to I2a2a1b1b. So, over to you. I'm happy to wait.
@Old Europe
It could also be that current linguistic drift estimates are quite off and those steppe-admixed 2500BC Beaker communities in Central Europe were speaking more differentiated languages than previously thought.
Wow, so you are from Lumbardia? It's too bad you weren't here when the region was frequently discussed in previous threads. I've always wondered about the following:
1)Relative demographic impact of BB waves from Central Europe, Urnfield Era expansions, Iron Age Celts, and Langobards. It's hard to determine this from current autosomal data, but Y Hgs suggest only Veneto was profoundly affected by the last wave as a whole(I'm sure islands of differential ancestry exist throughout Po region, though).
2)When did the region pick up most of its West_Asian/East Aegean affinity?: 2nd millennium BC, 1st mill BC, or Roman Age(from Italians or Hellenized Anatolians &Syrians). Did it vary between, say, Rumagna and Insubria, between alta and bassa pianura? What do the digs say?
The region's fluctuating population density adds another layer of complexity, ofc.
What you say about Neolithic sites in Lombardy with CWC-like rituals demonstrates the same idea Rob's paper does. As for cremation rituals----Well, CWC, Andronovo and Sintashta samples did have significantly more EEF ancestry(likely GAC) compared to the Yamnaya. So, sure, this could have been the vector of transmission.
@Davidski
Neolithic Ukraine shows a considerable WHG shift--whether they came from the Forest Zone or somewhere around Romania is anyone's guess. Iron_Gates_Hg and Latvia_HG are both positive for upstream I2a2a1b, though.
Alternatives:
1)I2a2a1b was brought to Ukraine(and ultimately the steppe) by this WHG wave---either from the Forest zone or Romania. Downstream I2a2a1b1b was born on the steppe and tied to steppe-like DNA.
2)I2a2a1b1b itself was born earlier---around Romania. Some of it was coupled with a WHG shift in Ukraine, while additional I2a2a1b1b(other subclades) arrived with Balkan EEFs.
@Anthro Survey
I2a2a1b1b is found in a forager from the North Pontic steppe. Therefore it's native to the steppe.
And it makes no difference whether it may have been originally from somewhere else, or if it was also native to somewhere else. I don't care.
The reason I don't care is that after the Neolithic, I2a2a1b1b is only found in samples with steppe admixture, and this makes perfect sense, considering that, as per above, the earliest instance of it is in a forager from the steppe.
That's how things stand currently. If you have new data to bring to the discussion, then by all means, and I might change mind as a result. But not until then.
@Davidski
Yes, the I2a found in those two Bronze Age Balkan samples more than likely arrived circa 3000BC accompanied by steppe DNA as opposed to steppe-like women marrying locals. The question for me, though, is whether this ultimately represents a reflux or whether upstream I2a clade was already established in more archaic EHGs(since Iron Gates and Latvia are slightly shifted that direction).
@Al Bundy
Hard to say. That early wave may have just been Lusitanian speakers. Don't know if you've followed the previous thread or not, but mine and other models suggest a subsequent gene flow from Central Europe---potentially early Iron Age. Maybe Celtic languages were introduced with this Cogotas 2 phase.
@All
Jean Manco passed away. She was ill with cancer.
http://bellbeakerblogger.blogspot.com/2018/03/jean-manco-in-memorium.html
RIP
I remember speaking to her at Anthrogenica... she was an erudite woman, and very kind.
My deepest sympathies to her family and friends.
RIP
@ Dave
I2a2a1b1 HAS NOT ( to date) been found in any Mesolithic forager on the steppe.
It has only appeared in the mariupol/ early sredny stog phase (c5000 BC)
These had a clear WHG and EEF shift, and one of those I2a2a1b was in fact 100% EEF.
The same Clade exists in ALPc Hungary also c 5000 BC with a typical WHG /:EEF profile.
It’s nearest couple Clade, I2a2a1b2 has been found in copper age Iberia & Neolithic Britain.
What is so difficult to understand / accept about basic things. ? Look at the data and see what it is instead of what you wish to be
Yes genuinely very saddened to hear about Jean. I really enjoyed debating - and agreeing- with her .
@Rob
He's a goddamn forager. And his is the most proximate Y-DNA lineage to that found in Kalmykia and Bulgaria Yamnaya.
Maybe this will help?
Ukraine_Neolithic:I1738 (forager) with the oldest recorded instance of Y-hg I2a2a1b1b (5473-5326 calBCE)
I'll keep wheeling this out until it becomes clear to you that I2a2a1b1b expanded with an Yamnaya-related population into the Balkans. And it will become clear when more Yamnaya samples come in.
@Chetan
"Believe me when I say Indo-European languages and PIE have been researched like no other for the past 150 years. The closest relatives to Indo-European are all situated in North Eurasia - Uralic, Yukaghir"
This is not a belief system. 150 years of study does not prove anything and such statistics are irrelevant. Astrology has been studied longer.
What are the hard criteria and specifics?
First of all the above are modern languages. What makes them related beyond Stray false positives, loans and wanderworts?
Yeah, was checking in at BBB and saw that. RIP.
I really hope someone can take over for her at Ancestral Journeys. Such a useful reference.
@postneo Uralic and Indo-European are commonly accepted to have a genetic relationship beyond simple borrowing and contact. The same for Yukaghir
I don't think we have seen any new info in Reich's book that seriously challenge the Steppe Urheimat. Reich's ambiguous wording seems to have encouraged many alternative theory proponents for no reason. But he himself says he wanted to phrase the conclusions in a way that is both scientifically accurate and "non offensive".
As long as there are no competing alternative models explaining PIE spread from Anatolia or the Caucasus satisfactorily, the steppe Urheimat is still the best theory.
The one block in the steppe theory is the position of Anatolian. But we already have evidence of steppe incursions into copper Age Balkans. If M269 is found in the Suvorov genomes (which will be sooner or later), then that closes all other options.
@Vara
“Number two is that the evidence of Hyperboreans being Slavs is very weak.”
From Wikipedia:
“Apollo was venerated among the Hyperboreans, the Hellenes thought: he spent his winter amongst them. According to Herodotus, offerings from the Hyperboreans came to Scythia packed with straw, and they were passed from tribe to tribe until they arrived at Dodona and from them to other Greek peoples until they to came to Apollo's temple on Delos.”
“Hyperborea indicates a region that lay far to the north of Thrace.”
“The Hyperboreans were believed to live beyond the snowy Riphean Mountains.”
So Hyperboreans lived north of Riphean Mountains, North of Thrace and north of steppe where Scythians lived.
It is very unlikely that Riphean Mountains were Alps or Ural Mountains. Most likely they were Carpathian Mountains. Therefore Slavs are the most likely Hyperborans.
This was the most likely ethnic situation in times of Herodotus and Homer:
https://s18.postimg.org/t4aber97t/Slavs_2000_BC.png
I think Slavs fit the best all that we know about location of Hyperboreans but the decisive argument is the language and the religion.
Hyperboreans were not Mongolians or Syberians, they were Indo-Europeans and had the religion with elements very similar to Greek and Vedic religion because these elements came to Greece and India from them:
https://s10.postimg.org/c46yjeqih/screenshot_344.png
Kingsley is right about Orphico-Pythagorean roots of Greek philosophy but he is wrong that it came from Mongolia or Tibet.
Common Hyperboran roots explains many similarities in Vedic and Greek philosophy.
I know that Greeks were influenced by Egyptians and others. Some claimed that Orphism and Pythagoreanism originated from Egypt. But scientists studied Egyptian papyri and didn’t find anything like this.
There are many studies about common Pythagorean and Vedic philosophic ideas and one should ask about numerals which were so important to Pythagoras: why are they so similar to Slavic, i.e. Hyperborean, numerals and not to Mongolian, Egyptian or Tibetan numerals. Most of basic Sanskrit numerals are actually identical to Slavic.
I think Slavic-Hyperborean theory best explains all similarities between Greek, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages and religions. It is now confirmed by genetics.
https://s22.postimg.org/n2g526x9t/screenshot_168.png
PIE from Iran/Armenia theory will not explain these similarities because it is much older.
@Rob "What matters is that there was a profound and sustained shift in Ukraine after the Mesolithic and right through to the late Eneolithic which was along the WHG - EEF line, some pure WHG some pure EEF."
I agree with this but can you explain why this should contradict the steppe theory?
@EastPole
Greeks and Albanians barely have any R1a-z93. Instead, they've got R1b-z2103 and the "Slavic" R1a subclade.
A better candidate for Paleo-Balkanic languages(and Armenian, tbh) was the Cordoned-Ware culture of present day Ukraine. That R1a dude from Bulgaria was most likely a visitor no different to the N1 visitor from Iron Age Hungary. Visitations by such z93 groups using the Dobruja steppe corridor as a conduit continued well into the classical period, when Greek cities were famous for using Scythian mercenaries. Besides, he was too late in the game to have spoken undifferentiated Greco-Aryan.
@Rob
Well, Ukraine_Neolithic:I1738 clusters with Mesolithic Ukrainians. So he's looking very native no matter what.
Just sayin.
Ukraine_Neolithic:I1738 (forager) with the oldest recorded instance of Y-hg I2a2a1b1b (5473-5326 calBCE)
@ Dave
It doesn’t matter if you want to call him a forager, vegan or jehovas witness
What matters is that there was a profound and sustained shift in Ukraine after the Mesolithic and right through to the late Eneolithic which was along the WHG - EEF line, some pure WHG some pure EEF.
These people came from the west because the aDNA , phylogenetic and archaeological evidence proves so
These were the same people who are found in late Chalcolithic Balkan burials , western Yamnaya and EBA barrows, despite the profound eastern autosomal shift
If you’re incapable of analysing data honestly/ competently, then don’t call your blog Eurogenes
@ Chetan
Where have I said that contradicts the (late PIE) steppe theory in the broad sense ?
I'm merely accurately outlining the propper set of events into a more realistic model, and thus only contradicting Dave's paranoid 'all about the steppe' theory.
@ Dave
"Well, Ukraine_Neolithic:I1738 clusters with Mesolithic Ukrainians. So he's looking very native no matter what."
Your hedging your bets on a single individual instead of the totality of I2a2 which appears in large numbers after 6000 BC, and most likely 5000 BC. You're also ignoring the conclusions of the formal paper written by harvard
Sure, I have no issue with that particular individual clustering with Mesoithic Ukranians, esp given that his own origins were similar to LepeskiVir or Zvejnieki, and married local gals. Why wouldnt he ?
Chetan
In this blog we are dealing with two factors connected with IE formation and expansion
GENES and
CULTURAL AND ARCHEOLOGICAL STUFFS
If you agree that there was a gene flow from farmers to the steppe ( From west to east) and
we know for sure that there was a MASSIVE AMOUNT of cultural and archeological traits that went in the same direction ( from west to east)
You wonder why this is a problem for the steppe theory???????????
@Chetan
I don't think people like Rob and Old Europe are questioning the importance of the steppe in spreading IE languages. Rather, they are challenging the overly simplistic "steppe-tard" paradigm. Among other things, it downplays EEF's importance in early steppe's ethogenesis(as well as post-Bronze Age Europe, on occasion) while overemphasizing steppeDNA % in assessing how groups across Eurasia interrelate culturally.
@old europe
"that without a demic invasion in western europe ( corded ware never reached this part of the continent) old europe guys renamed every single creek, every single river, every single mountain, every single hill.......even a sick man can understand that this is impossible."
First of all, IIRC very much if not all of the Alps have very recent names, e.g. "Jungfrau" and "Mont Blanc". Secondly, I am pretty sure there are pre-IE names for some river, e.g. "Meuse", which can be traced to a Celtic Mosa but is older as the Germanic name Maas is derived from Maso. It has no certain etymology.
There must have been populous and advanced cultures speaking Caucasian languages in the area for a long time, given that they have survived til this day. This is right a the Steppe contact zone. Why is not common sense that CHG signal on the Steppe came from those people?
@old europe
Bronze Age steppe cultures were distinct from Old European farmer cultures. It doesn't matter if they borrowed some culture and language from the farmers they interacted with.
They were patriarchal, warlike, horse worshipping cultures, that were, in their own way, more advanced from those of Old Europe.
What makes you think that, say, the Sintashta people spoke a language from Old Europe, when their culture was so different from anything in Old Europe?
Sinatshta and their close relatives managed to use the steppe to expand across most of Asia, and they took their Y-chromosomes with them (R1a-Z93). Why didn't any Old European Y-chromosomes make an impact so far east if they brought culture to the steppe peoples and dominated them, as you seem to claim?
@Anthro Survey
“Greeks and Albanians barely have any R1a-z93. Instead, they've got R1b-z2103 and the "Slavic" R1a subclade.
A better candidate for Paleo-Balkanic languages(and Armenian, tbh) was the Cordoned-Ware culture of present day Ukraine.”
What was religion and language of Cordoned-Ware culture, could you give examples of some numerals.
Tell me the whole story, genetic history, linguistic history, starting from PIE in Armenia/Iran.
I am talking about similarities and influences not about origins. I have no idea where Greeks and Albanians came from and how it all happened. I know that there were some links between Balto-Slavs, Indo-Iranians and Greeks which explain some similarities in languages and religions.
Dave
It doesn't matter if physically old european farmers never made to the eastern steppe with andronovo and sintashta what really matters is the role they played in the cultural ethnogenesis of the steppe people. to deny this could involve a language shift is unscientific to say the least.
anyway for the first time I see you write this : " if they borrowed some culture and language from the farmer" I think many will credit me for this important sentence!
Cremation rite is far more important than horse worshipping to detect indoeuropean culture. Horse worshipping is not present in the italo-celtic family and the germanic one. Cremation and sun worshipping is more important for IE culture.
You, like many, are not aware of the importance of cultural and religious factors involved in the formation of languages. You always talk about genes, and this is fair because the blog is called eurogenes. But when you talk about IE origins you should have a more multi disciplinary approach to this problem.
Imho R1b homeland is in the North of Black Sea 20.000 years ago. The Gepid's y dna being Ph155 also points to this direction.
@Davidski
“Bronze Age steppe cultures were distinct from Old European farmer cultures. It doesn't matter if they borrowed some culture and language from the farmers they interacted with.
They were patriarchal, warlike, horse worshipping cultures”
I don’t know about PIE and Yamnaya, but I can assure you that Balto-Slavs, Indo-Iranians and Hellenes i.e. tribes which can be linked to R1a dominated populations coming from Sredny Stog Dereivka and CWC didn’t worship any horses, cows and any animls.
Just for example RV 10.73.10 says about Indra:
10. When they say, “he came from a horse,” I think of him rather as born
from strength:
he came from (battle) fervor; he stayed in a secure house [=womb?]. But
whence he was born, (only) Indra knows that.
Horses, bulls were symbols of strength, power not the material object of worship. Those simple people 5000ya didn’t have the word for energy and used animal as symbols of it. Indra, Agni were forms of spiritual energy not material beings.
When poets said: ‘o Indra, you bull or you horse’ they didn’t worship the horse or bull but the power, the energy of Indra.
Moreover I am strongly convinced that substantial part of Slavic religion which is common with Vedic and Hellenic, like fertilizing fire and water cult came from Tripolye, not from the steppe.
@old europe
I do take a multidisciplinary approach to the PIE homeland problem. In fact, my position aligns exactly with that of most historical linguists.
And indeed I'm the first one to acknowledge that the PIE homeland problem is foremost a linguistic problem. So I would never claim that it's something that can be challenged by ancient DNA alone, or even ancient DNA and archeology, unless the circumstances are exceptional, and something in the current consensus amongst historical linguists is being exposed as obviously wrong by new scientific data.
But nothing of the sort is happening. In fact, as things stand, ancient DNA is more or less validating the Kurgan PIE model, so that's that. There's nothing to complain about.
If you're interested in linguistic arguments in regards to why early Anatolian and European farmers are a bad fit for Proto-Indo-Europeans, then see here...
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2015/10/linguistics-archeology-and-genetics-l-g.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0asQ4IrwUIg&list=PLAXoDomeFLX90fTHi0W8lYBtEoZHSBH2i&index=13
There will be a whole project looking at this sort of stuff, and the people involved will also use scientific data, like ancient DNA, to form their conclusions. Scroll down here...
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/03/was-ukraineeneolithic-i6561-proto-indo.html
@Old Europe
"doesn't matter if physically old european farmers never made to the eastern steppe with andronovo and sintashta"
Perhaps I misunderstood you here, but their DNA most certainly DID make it over there.... Andronovo and Sintashta have a sizeable EEF chunk. Look at where they sit relative to Yamnaya. Btw, according to the available pigmentation data, they likely got their lauded-by-some blondism and fair skin from East-Central EEFs as well. Genetiker did a comprehensive sweep of them.
@EastPole
The thing is, such links are routinely made for different sets of IE-speaking people. Most are legit but it's hard to weigh in on their relative importance. At any rate, horizontal cultural exchanges between groups on the steppe probably contributed to some convergent trends as well as sharing some common EEF substrates(e.g. Tripolye as you suggest or the Germanic-Slavic interactions). Some of this convergence may just have been independent developments, too.
I agree with regards to the R1a patriarchy/Balto-Slavic-IA connection, but Greeks and pre-Slavic Balkaners as a whole don't really fit into this from a genetic standpoint. Again, though, maybe their presumed steppic ancestors from the Multi-Cordoned Ware horizon were culturally influenced by ancestors of the former.
As for Classical Greeks---
Their proofs of theorems(which is what ultimately set their brand of philosophy apart, not triangles and numbers)and a secular approach to questioning nature's workings was unparalleled in the ancient world and a stroke of genius on their part. Much of the world was doing empirical math and seeking spiritual explanations to the physical.
Nevertheless, there is still something to be said about an explosion of inquisitiveness during the so-called Axial Age between 7th and 2nd centuries BC which manifested itself in India and Greece, but also in China. These were fundamentally different approaches albeit with some basic overlaps.
Anthro
I'm well aware of the genetic input in Andronovo by farmers but I wanted to be as fair as possible with Dave.
EastPole
so no indoeuropean worshipped horse? Another nail in the coffin!
Dave
as for non common agricultural terms I remind that Old europe farmers were differentiated in two groups : Cardial and LBK, with the Cardial taking over in the middle neolithic ( Chassean, Michelsberg, Megalithism from atlantic etc...) .
Epoch
I will replay in the afternoon ( italian time) that is a very busy day for me.
@Anthro Survey
I think you are mixing philosophy and science. Philosophy means the love of wisdom. Wisdom is not science.
Wisdom should lead to fullness of live and happiness. Science, mathematics etc. is very useful but it is not wisdom.
The challenge for us is to understand ancient wisdom, not science because our science is much better than theirs but our wisdom…well, just look around.
The wisdom of Vedic sages, Greek philosophers and our Slavic traditions are not well understood now. It can be better understood when we find common source. Genetics is useful in searching for it because we don’t want the wisdom of other people which maybe not applicable to us because of biological differences but we want to understand the wisdom of our ancestors.
Elliv J said...
"There must have been populous and advanced cultures speaking Caucasian languages in the area for a long time, given that they have survived til this day. This is right a the Steppe contact zone. Why is not common sense that CHG signal on the Steppe came from those people?"
Also keep in mind EHG+WHG+CHG all have archaic human admixture{aka Neanderthal}which to date has the highest [level of admixture]and earliest sample ever found is from around Iron Gates. Yamanaya,Corded Ware,Bell Beaker all have Neanderthal admixture. We don't have Maykop or Iranian farmers or Hittite samples -level of Neanderthal admixture. However we know that the most least admixed (isolated endogamy )Bedouin have Neanderthal admixture. In contrast,scientific papers have already admitted that little to no archaic human (Neanderthal) admixture was found in ancient Iranian samples,and Natufian samples----- the very regional nexus precisely where you would have expected the interchange to have occurred, to validate migrating split of ydna lines.
Aram said...
"Imho R1b homeland is in the North of Black Sea 20.000 years ago. The Gepid's y dna being Ph155 also points to this direction."
Just south of Yamnaya with in Russia region
R1b-Z2108* has a connection with Dagestan/Russian region
R1b-L584* has a connection with Dagestan/Russia region
https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-Z2108/
https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-L584/
@All
Rumor has it that this new Central Asian aDNA paper is coming very soon. Maybe within days.
Epoch
You mentioned the example of mont blanc
To determine the ancient name of the mountain we need to examine the name of the wall or ridges. For example the south ( italian side) is named parete della Brenva ( wall of brenva) Since brenva has the typical IE radical for high altitude places ( briga berg ecc. we find thousand of them on the alps) that means that the ancient called the mont blanc Brenva.
As for the Jungfrauhoch your example is misleading. Hoch is a typical IE suffix for mountain peaks. The ancient gave this name to thousand of summits both north and south of the alps ( hoch in german Cucco in italian ) This is IE because the same root is found in hundreds in the iran mountains ( Kuh).
The alps have the greatest concentration of IE place names in all the world.
Sorry I must add the ancient name of the jungfrau was a common name they with time became a personal one with the jungfrau term. Ancient place names of course were generic name. The tribes called the mountains simple mountain or high place etc. etc. also we have the IE root CARA
Karakorum, Carpath, Carnia, Carabantia Carso and on and on and on and on.....In the slavic languages this root gave birth to the term for fortress villages and then city: GORA
@old europe
Sure there must some old remnant here and there. But most peaks got their name recently, which means that it is perfectly normal that old names disappear and new names are made. Jungfrau and Monch are Christian terms. Mont Blanc a description. If you go through the list most are modern.
Now, with river names it's a different story but IE had a thing with rivers. See the rivers in the underworld or the rivers in the Rigveda. But still, the example of the Meuse showed an name which was old enough to have its Dutch name traced back to a Germanic root (Maso) and its French name to Celtic root (Mosa), both undeniably from the same origin and without a good (P)IE explanation.
names do not change frequently. you mentioned the example of christianity which had a deep impact in europe. Name change when you have discontinuity. They do not change without that. Since chrstianity came we do not have much alteration in place names. We had in the middle ages a lot of town names renamed for saints but if you look in the surroundings you can always easily find the ancient name ( IE root)
@Chetan
"But we already have evidence of steppe incursions into copper Age Balkans. If M269 is found in the Suvorov genomes (which will be sooner or later), then that closes all other options"
I have not read Reichs book or some excerpt you allude to. I thought he included the steppe as a potential home/late home. There is no need to read too much into a random statement and become all defensive.
M269 is not a language. steppe folks may have traveled wherever and assimilated local languages.
Uralic does seem to have demonstrative pronoun sequence like IE and perhaps the trait is beyond coincidence but their earliest attestation of Finnish is from the 13th century AD at best. God knows where the purported interaction with IE happened.
@old europe
That same logic would hold good for India too. All toponyms and hydronyms in the panjab extending as far east as the yamuna have indo-european etymologies.
"Where are the rig vedic fire altars found outside of Iran,india and bmac?"
random thought - forges?
@old europe
The hydronomy of Europe is not all of IE origin, Vennemann in recent years has challenged that idea, and presented a very persuading case against it, and an older non-IE explanations for them.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-968X.1994.tb00432.x
http://www.academia.edu/2009897/Against_Old_European_Why_we_need_to_be_more_specific
"Vennemann reanalyses many of Krahe’s ‘Old European’ hydronyms in Vasconic terms, relating them to known Basque lexemes (and assuming Basque to be extremelyconservative). The names remain recognizably Basque-like despite their age and the changes they must have undergone since being adopted by IE speakers."
@daviski - Is the central asia paper likely to contain data from swat as well?
Great news Davidski, but I wouldn't waste time beating up on early farmers being PIE.It must have been Khavalansk or Caucasus.
Or just more speculation.
Nothing burger{insight into PIE origins}-stats--3700+ ancient samples and counting--
Hittite ydna samples-0, tested/and or released[public]or confirmed.
Afanasievo ydna samples-0, tested/and or released[public]or confirmed.
Maykop ydna samples-0, tested/and or released[public] or confirmed.
Earliest wagon/wheel burials with remains-0, tested/and or released[public] or confirmed.
Lets see if this new set of papers have any insight into the above missing ydna pieces of the puzzle, before speculating without anything concrete genetic evidence.
@EastPole
"The wisdom of Vedic sages, Greek philosophers and our Slavic traditions are not well understood now."
I see what you're trying for, but it is well understood by those who want to understand it, and it has always been like that throughout history. There have been sages, keepers of the tradition-at least in India, who have written copious commentaries on each and every aspect of the Vedic philosophy.
"RV. X.129
3. Darkness existed, hidden by darkness, in the beginning. All this was a
signless ocean.
What existed as a thing coming into being, concealed by emptiness—that
One was born by the power of heat.
4. Then, in the beginning, from thought there evolved desire, which existed
as the primal semen.
Searching in their hearts through inspired thought, poets found the
connection of the existent in the nonexistent."
I recently met an ascetic-mendicant in a remote part of India, and as a course of our conversation, he asked me that we are made of Pancha Tattva(a sanskrit term for 5 elements) which are Akash (Sky or Space), Vayu (Air), Jal (Water), Agni (Fire) and Prithvi (Earth), and he asked me - Which of these do you think is the absolute essential without which others won't exist or you won't exist?
The answer he gave is Agni or fire, as Agni actually denotes the invisible non-physical element, the one which we don't see, but one which is making us see.
Also, just as you narrated the floating of fire on water, that still continues in India, along with the same old Vedic mantras,
https://s7.postimg.org/ifvpn77ln/IMG_3717.jpg
Jijnasu
you have a point : India could fit the bill as for place names but
it does not fit the bill with archeological culture and
it does not fit the bill for genes flow
THE PIE must give an answer to all this question.
Steppe could fit the bill with genes
Steppe does not fit the bill as for culture and archeology
steppe does not fit the bill as for place names
Old europe fit the bill for culture and archeology
old europe fit the bill for place names
old europe could fit the bill for genes
Let's see the material from caucasus and/or anatolia
I may be wrong but I believe the main reason many are not willing to accept at least the possibility of old europe being the PIE urheimat is connected to the problems related to western cultural importance in world history.
People can accept the greatness of roman empire or colonial powers in more recent times but to them the idea that western europe was badass also in prehistory is not bearable. So they prefer to look at the more "politically correct" steppe hypothesis ( which by the way I accept it could turn out to be true).
But I could be wrong.
Or maybe the even more "politically correct OIT"
@old europe
"you have a point : India could fit the bill as for place names but
it does not fit the bill with archeological culture and
it does not fit the bill for genes flow"
There is no archaeological evidence for any movement into India either. We are waiting for the aDNA from India, we don't have anything yet.
@Sanuj
“Also, just as you narrated the floating of fire on water, that still continues in India, along with the same old Vedic mantras,
https://s7.postimg.org/ifvpn77ln/IMG_3717.jpg “
Thank you Sanuj.
Similar Slavic rites with similar meaning cannot be just accidental similarity:
https://s17.postimg.org/5aakqdea7/kupala-e1340276920732.jpg
https://s17.postimg.org/i33a3rs1r/image.jpg
It even more certain when we take into consideration the similarity of our languages. For example ‘Ogni’ in Slavic means “fire”, very similar to ‘Agni’ in Vedic.
Slavic and Vedic religions had some common roots.
Also what you wrote about ascetic explaining five elements is very similar to explanations given by some Greek philosophers but it is completely misunderstood here because they teach us in schools that it is science, whereas it is not science, it is wisdom which must be approached in a different way.
By the way “five” is Vedic ‘pañca’, Avestan ’panca ,Persian ‘panča/panj’, Polish ‘pięć(pienci)’, Greek ‘pénte’.
In my opinion highly advanced philosophical religion cannot be the product of PIE from Iran/Armenia or Khvalynsk, but a much later development.
@EastPole
The thing is, Greek philosophers obtained their pearls of wisdom via the same rationalistic approach they've used to elucidate beautiful mathematical relationships. It is no accident that sages doubled as mathematicians and vice versa---well up to the 19th century.
The Hellenistic revolution was famous for its *approach* to addressing and solving problems, not so much for its technological prowess(although, many tech gadgets of this period like the torsion catapult and toothed gears naturally followed). Of course, they were not fond of empiricism and emphasized an a priori approach, but an important foundation was laid down nonetheless.
Our technology and accumulated knowledge is far ahead of our predecessors, but do we truly have the same will to think, per capita?
@Sanuj
"There is no archaeological evidence for any movement into India either."
That's debatable. At any rate, we shouldn't expect mounds(pun intended) of evidence if the demic impact was relatively small.
New article from David Reich:
“The Nazi ideology of a “pure” Indo-European-speaking Aryan race with deep roots in Germany, traceable through artifacts of the Corded Ware culture, has been shattered by the finding that the people who used these artifacts came from a mass migration from the Russian steppe, a place that German nationalists would have despised as a source. The Hindutva ideology that there was no major contribution to Indian culture from migrants from outside South Asia is undermined by the fact that approximately half of the ancestry of Indians today is derived from multiple waves of mass migration from Iran and the Eurasian steppe within the last five thousand years.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/opinion/race-genetics.html
@Anthro
We don't need 'mounds' of archaeological evidence, but we need some for the massive claims being made.
Also, they ancients sometimes came up with mathematical solutions purely for practical problems, like making fire altars of different shapes with the same area. The Pythagoras theorem, is already attested by Baudhayana in Shulba Sutras, dated earlier than Pythagoras himself(even these dates are probably wrong, & should go back much earlier).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shulba_Sutras
@EastPole
That's an excerpt from his book, he is just repeating the already current migration theory, while he has left open the possibility that IVC was ANI. He should have closed that loop if he had access to data. So nothing new.
EastPole said...
New article from David Reich:
“The Nazi ideology of a “pure” Indo-European-speaking Aryan race with deep roots in Germany, traceable through artifacts of the Corded Ware culture...."
You know Bolek rhymes with Molech, the deity Manasseh sacrificed his live sons to the fire; besides shedding much innocent blood of his own people[possibly sawing prophet Isaiah into two].
It's also good to remember people who have a good reputation for doing good things and not spiraling down into negativity. Like the House of Piast--Casimir III the Great and of course the Mede/Iranian Cyrus the Great.
@EastPole
@Sanuj
http://sms.zrc-sazu.si/pdf/20/SMS_20_02_%20Sielicki.pdf
@Sanuj
10-15% CWC ancestry in Northern Brahmin castes(which in turn don't make up such a large percentage of the overall population) is hardly massive.
Empirical, induction-based maths were commonplace in Babylonia, Egypt and India. There is a reason why Greek proof-based mathematics was such a revolutionary approach reaping rewards to this day----as were and do Newtonian physics(and the medieval Oxford forerunners, really).
Thanks for the link @Twazstar
@Anthro
By massive, i didn't just mean the genetic component, the level of wipe out of any preceding culture begs a minimum level of archaeological impact which is entirely missing.
Also, formal mathematics (and much Western philosophy) is based on the false belief that proof based on two valued logic (”deduction”) is “superior” to empirical proof (”induction”). This belief is NOT universal (e.g. Indian mathematicians used empirical proofs, e.g. Buddhists used a different logic).
Regarding the medieval revolution in mathematics, calculus was invented centuries before Europe in India, and the facts are being acknowledged only in last decades. Madhava of Sangamagrama was the first person to use infinite series, and his work might have traveled to Europe via Jesuit priests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhava_of_Sangamagrama
There was a well established group in Kerala who were churning out pioneering work centuries before the same works popped up in Europe,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_School_of_Astronomy_and_Mathematics
In all honesty, a movement based on some "pan-Aryanist" solidarity---be it Hitler's version or any of the updated versions---was and continues to be a silly proposition. That isn't to say that strong feelings of solidarity and/or belonging to a macro-ethnos in general are.
A common linguistic node and an ancestral signal corresponding to the not-so-straightforward spread of this linguistic family is very interesting to study, but India, Iranshahr and Europe should not be treated as some geno-cultural macrosphere on this basis. This is where many go wrong. These are all highly distinct civilizational sectors which came about from an efflux of different steppe groups under different circumstances and their extensive hybridization with the locals. More importantly, what we consider to be distinctively Indian or European largely developed in the Vedic and various Bronze Age European horizons, respectively, not the steppe. So, in that regard, the area comprising Germany, Czechia and Hungary was just as pivotal in Euro-genesis as the Central Ganges was in India or BMAC zone to Iranshahr.
In the same manner, it makes no sense to just lump Syria in with Eritrea and leave it at at that----or even with Saudi Arabia for that matter. Nor Anatolian Turkey with Yakuts.
Rob said...
".............The steppe were barbarians emulators, of which the L51 who moved to Atlantic spoke Basque, and later in prehistory switched to celtic" :)
I'm confused. According to your theory do the Basque/Celtic[transitional] speaking R1b-L51 share the same origin/blood ties with R1b-Z2103[Like the ones found in Poland Bell Beakers/Hungary Bell Beakers,or Vucedol or Yamnaya/Afansievo or Sarmatian samples?
What the Jeneusse article shows , and Remedello aDNA proves , is that the warrior ideology , Sun worship etc didn’t begin in the steppe; but a specific subset of Majkopised steppe (Usatavo) and old Europe (Remedello , pre-Vucedol). Hence the false dichotomy promoted by the ignorant simplicists is false
The steppe were barbarians emulators, of which the L51 who moved to Atlantic probably spoke Paleo- Basque, and later in prehistory switched to celtic :)
“_a__”
Yes it’s very clear you’re confused
Vucedol, Csepel, Nagyrev , not to mention sarmatians , were different cultures
Your inferiority complex- based obsession with R1bs presence doesn’t change this
Go educate yourself in anthropology
@Sanuj
Referring to it as calculus is a bit of an exaggeration. While the general concept of infinite sums may not be unique to Europe per se, there was no Leibniz in India. Moreover, this "calculus" wasn't really applied to the physical world full of x-y relationships with non-constant ratios as it was in the west(e.g. Work-kinetic energy theorem).
I should note here also that mathematical notation gradually developed and standardized in the West by people like Francois Viete greatly facilitated progress.
I don't like using the terms "superior" or "inferior" very much, but suffice it to say, the systematic Western approach ended up mightily building on itself and forms the backbone of modern science. Yes, the Chinese and Indians had impressive gadgetry but didn't really understand the fundamental principles behind them and nor did they care to very much. More importantly, there didn't exist the kind of efficient knowledge-exchange apparatus that we saw take shape in the West. Perhaps gunpowder was accidentally discovered in China, but only in the west was it taken to its logical conclusion(s), eventually being phased out by synthetic compounds after chemistry behind was elucidated. It isn't at all that Westerners have "muh higher IQ" like some reductionists believe.
B"_ob"
"Yes it’s very clear you’re confused
Vucedol, Csepel, Nagyrev , not to mention sarmatians , were different cultures
Your inferiority complex- based obsession with R1bs presence doesn’t change this
Go educate yourself in anthropology"
Okay goutcha "B" type answer; that clears it up, certainly not prominent in the Basques, something you did not catch : ). I'm just like you trying to figure out my roots, well maybe not[ I doubt your even from Europe]let alone related to any of the samples.
BB didn't speak Basque. That Theo Vennemann Vasconic bullshit was thrown out long ago and holds no weight with anyone respectable. I'm sure Agamemnon is familiar with it and can chime in.
He is the same dumbass that says there was Semitic settlement in the North Sea during Carthaginian times and this significantly influenced Germanic. That's the kind of bullshit he talks about. So, no, BB didn't speak some Basque-like tongue.
Oh yes Chad Vannemann is the guy Who said that old europe river Names were Basque. Complete BS!
Anthro
You couldn 't write a better post
@ Chad
When Aga actually publishes a peer-reviewed article, then I'll consider listening to his opinions.
Like so many others on AG, he is just so sure with his 'just so' views. Just like Folker & Ebuzir are just so sure that Anatolian arrived in 1753 BC because of some imagined 'consensus' they aren;t able to provide any evidence of
Chad - stick to your echo chamber of the arrogantly ignorant.
" a""
Yes Im European and you must be Circassian ;)
@Chad
Maybe he was on something when formulating his Semitic settlement theory. :D The "Semitic EEF" theory doesn't really hold much water either, btw. It's more likely that Levantine and Anatolian PPNBs spoke a language akin to Georgian(the region received a southern influx).
I wouldn't be so dismissive about a SUBSET of BB groups speaking Basque, though. Most believe that groups of IE speakers from Central Europe came and assimilated into a Basque-speaking society, but what if some assimilation took place in Central Europe itself? What if BB groups were not uniformly IE-speaking(didn't always inherit their "Yamna"-associated language) and one of these early groups---Basque speakers----ended up trekking towards Iberia?
Agamemnon does linguistics.... so..
Please, explain why there is no Vasconic substrate and not even any influence on Celtic or Germanic... Because it is a copper age relic.. Outside of the BB sphere, where a small DF27 founder effect took place. That is all it is. BB has nothing to do with Vasconic. Please, find a reputable IE scholar that finds any evidence of Vasconic influence outside of the Pyrennes.
@Anthro
"Yes, the Chinese and Indians had impressive gadgetry but didn't really understand the fundamental principles behind them..."
That's a big statement to make. The gradual development in India of the decimal numbering system to the formative levels of calculus wouldn't happen if there was no understanding of the principles behind it. They had their own notations and traditions that was followed. Are you aware that the Leibniz series for pi is now called Madhava-Leibniz series.The power series expansion of the arctangent function is called Madhava–Gregory series, in acknowledgement of his original work, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhava_series
Do you know that the entire modern western metallurgy developed out of reverse engineering Wootz steel, a pioneering steel alloy developed in Southern India and exported over the world for 2500 years, until the colonial era when the knowledge was lost. The research to reproduce it exactly is still going on,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel
All of this was not going on without an 'understanding' of science.
Yes, Europe made a lot of progress in the last centuries, and brought all of it together to bring science to it's current position. But, it happened due to some very specific socio-political reasons, and factors which not always had to do with science.
In his book, Reich mentions Iberia Bronze age recieved 30% Steppe replacement while Britain Bronze age 90%. I assume he means Beaker_Holland-like admixture. Also, 90% Y DNA replacement in Iberia Bronze age. Sounds like he's referring to unpublished Iberia Bronze age samples.
Modern Iberians are about 40-45% Beaker-Holland like.
@Sanuj
The wikipedia article essentially communicates what I've already said. It was not Calculus proper, but rather para-Calculus in both scope and nature. And, again, certainly was not consequential w/respect to cornerstone physics principles, which are unthinkable without calculus-based proofs.
When I said gadgets, I was talking chemical compounds and mechanical devices. A desire to find the essence in things and seeing the physical world from a mathematical lens is what allowed Westerners to build ever more complex machines and outpace the rest. Even before having a solid grasp of what makes gunpowder pop, Westerners mastered ballistics:they elucidated the parabolic trajectory projectiles take. Even before the Boltzmann constant was derived, Westerners were neither strangers to the thermometer nor the barometer.
The term reverse engineering applies when something was initially engineered in the first place. In order to (chemically) engineer something, you must have at least a cursory understanding of patterns of reactivity etc. As such, chemical engineering as we know it didn't really begin until the golden 1800s when people like Humphrey Davy managed to split compounds like NaCl into their constituent elements or when we truly understood what confers steel its properties. Of course, that century was a culmination of a road begun a couple of centuries prior with extensive experimentation to test out models for composition of matter(Lavosier, Dalton, and so on). Southern Indian metalsmiths had good PRACTICAL knowledge, but they certainly didn't understand the chemistry behind it and, most importantly, weren't on the right track to discovering it. Thanks to the Western approach, things didn't stop at mere manufacturing of high-quality steel. Metallurgy was taken to many next levels, culminating in Uranium reactors and Silicon semi-conductors.
@Samuel Andrews
"Modern Iberians are about 40-45% Beaker-Holland like."
MODERN, yes, but it's more than that when you adjust for Berber and Roman-age(?) West_Asian admixture. Look at mine and Alogo's models in the Iberomaurisian thread.
Back in Hannibal's day, folks inhabiting Iberia, Padania, and Transalpine Gaul/Belgica would have clustered closer together on a 2D PCA, I think.
@Chad
We shouldn't assume that pre-BB Europe had low linguistic diversity. Again, perhaps proto-Basque was only spoken in a geographically narrow region before being shuttled to Iberia on the backs of Europe_MLBA-like folks.
The Mongols did use Chinese-built siege engines. I assume we had nothing remotely as effective at that time at least. The Romans likely did long before.
@Sanuj/Anthro
In the West we are taught as school (at least I was) that science was started by the Greeks and Romans, then there was a period called the "Dark Ages" where nothing happened, until the Enlightenment carried on where the Romans left off.
Truth is that the "Dark Ages" was only in Europe, and in the rest of Eurasia a "Golden Age" was underway - particularly in Chinese, Indian, Iranian and Islamic cultures, where science, maths and medicine were continually being developed and improved. The Enlightenment actually stood more on the shoulders of Arabic and Indian advances, than on the Greeks/Romans. The fact that modern maths uses Hindu-Arabic numerals, and not Roman numerals, is the obvious evidence of this - but as well as zero and the decimal system, other basic concepts like negative numbers, sine/cosine, Fibonacci numbers were all developed outside of Europe during the "Dark Ages", as well as many more advanced concepts/technologies.
Anyone who was raised and educated in the West would be well advised to do some reading on Hindu and Islamic science in the Mediaeval period, because you probably weren't told anything about it at school. Here are some good starting points:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_mathematics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_in_medieval_Islam
What I should have included was what I also meant, that by the time of our Late Middle Ages the Asians had better mastered various instruments of death, from the Mongols themselves to Samurai swords, and so they may not have had the science we had almost on the way, they certainly had the power to destroy it and practically anything else.
Anthro,
Why would they be linguistically diverse when 90% of them come from the same guy in the last couple hundred years, and even more recently spread out from around Germany?
@Tobus
Islamic polymaths operated fro the same exact set of Hellenistic premises Europeans were. There wouldn't be an Avicenna without an Aristotle, so to speak. Same "Occidental" tradition.
Actually, the "Dark Ages" weren't even a big thing in Europe to begin with. The "muh Romanz...muh barbarians....muh Renaissance" is an outdated paradigm. See, the Roman era was an intellectually quiescent age even in Greek-speaking areas. Secondly, Greek knowledge didn't really reach the Latin-speaking areas covering the Western Empire during this time, but more so during Reconquista and Crusades. So, there can't be a dark age if there was no "age of light". At any rate, early medieval Europeans were already above and beyond when it came to metallurgy(esp military grade), architecture and alternative energy sources(wind and water).
Outside cultures like Byzantium and the Persianate/Islamicate world marveled at and coveted Western crossbows, windmills, and spectacles. By the 1300 and 1400s, Byzantine VIPs were sending their retinue to get an education in Europe. 1453 thing doesn't fit.
Also, read up on the Oxford Calculators and the verge escapement underpinning modern clocks. The latter was a true turning point.
@E.Donovan
Engines? Steam engines? :-) Or siege engines? Counter-weight trebuchets are a product of Europe/Mediterranean basin(we haven't sorted out all the deets), not China. The Mongol secret to success were their swift cavalry and composite bows, not proto-rifles(as revisionists like Needham might claim) and certainly not any sort of 'locomotives'. They represented a pinnacle of steppe warfare.
@Anthro
The achievements of the Kerala school were pioneering and way ahead of it's time. That it didn't morph into something more substantial and of practical application was because the entire school collapsed in later years due to political situation and instability. That does not mean they were not on the way to getting where Newton and Leibniz got to in later centuries.
Regarding the actual start of lab based chemistry, it didn't have it's root in Europe, but by the Persian alchemist Jabir Hayyan who later influenced later medieval era alchemists in Europe.
And I am saying it again, Europe progressed because it reached an unparalleled level of domination, resources, and knowledge from every nook of the world. They did well to systematize it and use all of that knowledge to practical use.
*above and beyond Roman predecessors
@Chad
Again, I'm talking about linguistic diversity among EEFs on the eve of the Yamnaya event. They colonized much of continental Europe by 5000BC. 2.5K years is apmle time for distinctive languages to have developed across France, Germany and much of Central-Northern Europe.
We also have to remember that some EEF groups were rather WHG-heavy. I have to wonder about the degree of creolization.
Anthro,
I never said that pre-BB Europe had low diversity. I never even brought it up.
@EastPole
"I don’t know about PIE and Yamnaya, but I can assure you that Balto-Slavs, Indo-Iranians and Hellenes i.e. tribes which can be linked to R1a dominated populations coming from Sredny Stog Dereivka and CWC didn’t worship any horses, cows and any animls."
To carefully protect this shrine, the inhabitants have instituted special priests. When they convene there to offer sacrifices to the idols or assuage their anger, these priests sit while everyone else stands. Murmuring together in secret, they tremble and dig in the earth so that, after casting lots, they may acquire certainty in regard to any questionable matters. When this is finished, they cover the lots with green grass and, after placing two spears crosswise on the ground, humbly lead over them a horse which they believe to be the largest of all and venerate as sacred. That which the casting of lots had already revealed to them, should also be foretold by this almost divine beast. If the same omen appears in both cases, it is carried out in fact. Otherwise, the unhappy folk immediately reject it. An ancient but equally false tradition also testifies that, if the harsh savagery of a long period of internal warfare is imminent, a great boar whose teeth are white and glistening with foam will emerge from that same lake and appear to many witnesses while happily disporting itself in the mire with a terrible shaking.
https://goo.gl/RJbFu9
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konik_(obrz%C4%99d)
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turo%C5%84
Sanuj is going to be crying when the South Asian paper is out. Is there an Indian version of kleenex? I feel I should be investing around now.
@ Chad
"Agamemnon does linguistics.... so..'
Hiding behind the tapestry of an undergrad degree ? LOL
He claims there is no evidence of an expansive archaeological correlate from south Caucasus / East Anatolia in M5/M4 ? He must be kidding
It's easy to fool oneself into believing they're an authority when surrounded by a mass of applauding useful idiots. Like communist cult figures. You and Dave are pretty popular there too
@Sanuj
Jabir, Avicenna, Alhazen, etc. were operating from the same "Hellenistic" set of premises. Think of their work as a 'sister clade'.
He was a good start, I agree, but he took things from step 2 to step 7. A couple of extra acidic solutions and some improvement upon distillation techniques already known in Hellenistic times. European chemists---say between 1600 and 1850----took things from 7 to 90. A RADICAL change in the understanding of matter's composition and techniques used to study it.
Also, Islamic polymaths made many respectable advances in mathematics and optics(which is a sub-branch of it, tbh), but they didn't apply mathematics to the physical world. I.E. They didn't have a father of "electrostatics", "materials science" or "fluid dynamics".
"an unparalleled level of domination, resources, and knowledge from every nook of the world."
Bernouilli's equations were derived BEFORE there was ever a British or French empire spanning half the globe. It's equations like those that allowed them to dominate half the world in the first place.
Geographically speaking, the Middle East enjoys a more favorable crossroads position than Europe does. Yet, the Ottomans were always behind Europeans technologically and frequently relied on pirated guns or renegade gunners from Padania or smth. Numerically speaking, they were much more powerful and covered a lot more ground in the early modern era.
Rob,
You're the one making crazy claims that rival Vennemann. Great claims require great evidence. The onus is on you to prove BB was Basque speaking. You won't be able to though. If you want to go ad hominem, at least pepper it with something academic to back your point.
@Chad
Alright, so then you can see how one oddball group of Yamna-like migrants could have genetically hybridized with an EEF group that didn't cover a large area and spoke proto-Basque. After linguistic assimilation, this hybrid went on to settle Iberia bringing proto-Basque there. Meanwhile, the language went extinct in Central Europe: other, more numerous EEF languages went on to form the non-IE substrate of German, etc.
You would think some toponyms would survive in Central Europe, but to the best of my knowledge, they don't. I think it is local.
Not if it originally occupied a small area and was ultimately overshadowed by other EEF-steppe hybrids with diff. and minor substrates. Just a possibility.
Other early BB expansions may have likewise carried non-IE languages from the heart of Europe westward only to be absorbed later by subsequent IE-speaking waves in what was a centuries-long stream of people.
@Anthro,
"Back in Hannibal's day, folks inhabiting Iberia, Padania, and Transalpine Gaul/Belgica would have clustered closer together on a 2D PCA, I think."
Possibly. More ancient DNA will be needed to measure the post-Neolithic east med influence in Iberia. The bigger the influence the higher chance, Iron age Iberians had 30-40% Steppe like possibly Gauls did.
Using, Steppe (Yamnaya, Afanasievo), MN/Chl Europe (xHungary, Italy), BA/Chl Greece & Minoan & Middle East, the Spanish get 15% Minoan/Beaker Sicily/Greek Neo outlier.
That's smaller than the 20-25% Anatolia BA I got earlier even though Anatolia BA had twice as much CHG than them. I don't know how to explain the difference.
@Anthro Survey,
Using the same test, the Roman soldier from Bavaria gets 2% Moroccan and 13% Agean BA. Maybe, he was from Iberia? His score is really similar to northern Spanish.
@Salden, Anthro
"When I said gadgets, I was talking chemical compounds and mechanical devices." ...and what not.
Leibniz post dates the introduction of place value notation and numerals which spread from india. Imagine where mathematics or commerce would be without it. The first generative grammar or compiler was written for Sanskrit by panini and contemporaries. Nothing like that was ever written for another2400 years. These are not gadgets or monkey tricks by people who don't understand their value. It takes a lot of effort to write a compiler.
its pointless to say that the US makes the most jet propulsion engines in the world today but they had a head start only because of earlier efforts by British and germans. Such arguments are meaningless. people a few centuries down always will always have lower barrier to overcome.
@Samuel Andrews
"Maybe, he was from Iberia? His score is really similar to northern Spanish."
He was found 20 km north of where the Ala I Hispanorum Auriana was stationed.
Not to mention the sidereal distance that Middle Age Europe had in relation to political thinking. Medieval Europe was dotted with hundreds of Parliament all over the continent ( in England it was national in other countries they were locals) in order to control power and taxation . Remember for example the magna Charta or the freedom in italian city states . Many of their achievements are lacking in large part of the world even today!!
Or take the clock for example
The chinese may have invented before but for them it was only a playing object for the emperor and his court while for the europeans was an object that immediately was placed in public squares and city halls to get a public mesure of time . Some historians believe that this helped to rationalize even more the way of thinking ( time is money!) and led to scientific and industrial revolution.
The fact is that europe was a totally different kind of society .
To be fair much of the new vision of society in medieval europe was a product of the contact with biblical culture. The indoeuropeans ( latin, celtic, indians etc. ) had a cyclical vision of time. The past was the same as the future. Christianity brought a new world vision where time was running towards the future. The future became much more important than the past. Besides christianity stressed the importance of the individual responsibility in building the common good before neighbors and in reaching salvation before God. That was a tremendous cultural revolution that led to individual rights and the birth of democratic thinking. The blending of roman political and juridical culture, the greek philosophy and biblical anthropology was one of the most important thing to ever happen in world history.
@Samuel
Here is a simple visual 2D demo of how geometry may play a role in things.
Figure 1: https://justpaste.it/1j00w
We have two parallel clines. Crete and Ana_BA sit on cline 1. The other cline is steppe---EEF_sum. We have a population to model with a certain % of admixture from some unknown cline 1 population.
No matter whether if we choose Crete or Ana_BA(or any population on the cline for that matter) , %s are going to be the same. That's because the two triangles are similar, i.e proportional. It's just that with Ana_BA, you'll get reduced steppe and vice versa.
Figure 2:https://justpaste.it/1j00y
The clines are no longer parallel and converging on the right. In this case, We DON'T have the condition of similar triangles anymore. In this setup, Ana_BA ancestry will always be higher. You see why, right? If the clines were parallel, the distance from population to Ana_BA would still be c. Instead, it's c-k. This spikes Ana_BA ancestry. Crete would be spiked with a left sided convergence.
Figure3:https://justpaste.it/1j014
A more complex situation where cline 2 is not as straight as we think in multiple dimensions. It's depicted instead as a convex, curved segment. So, it behaves differently depending on the population's non-cline_1 makeup: either spiking Ana_BA or Crete.
@Old Europe
It's not just a matter of clocks. The Chinese Su Song clock was an impressive, complex water-driven clock. It post-dated Ctesibius' Hellenistic-era models.
In either case:
1. Water is impractical in freezing climates
2. Both models had to be regularly tended to
3. Neither Chinese nor Hellenistic society had a regular occurrence of public clocks. Most people relied on sundials.
Weight-driven dry escapement clocks using the elegant verge & foliot mechanism were invented someplace in medieval Europe: southern Germany, low countries, France, Padania or Tuscany. We don't know where, but we know that within a brief time span sometime during the 14th century, clocks were installed in many major towns' squares.
A
If PH155 is found south of Caucasus i will change my mind. But that Gepid had a heavy hunno-avaric admixture. And Ph155 is present in India. And the oldest R1b is still in Italy. So maybe i should place R1b homeland in more western place?
Ph155 is the first split in R1b. It is not M269.
A
Is Your BAM file present in Yfull?
@ Chadmungo
Toponyms wash away a lot more rapidly than you think
And the expansion of celtic and paraCeltic being a late phenomenon is still mainstream
Rob
There's nothing, nothing that changes less rapidly than place names.
Personal manes change the fastest ( think for example of the washing away of saxon personal nane after the norman conquest or the disappearing of pagan personal manes in the middle ages)
take milan for example . we have been ruled by
ligurian
celts
roman
osthrogoths
longobards
franks
french
spanish
austrian
the name of the place is still the same! It has been only altered a little bit, from mediolanum to Milano
@Sam
After putting him through a few runs, he looks to be between Aragonese and Basques/French_south when you adjust for the Aegean affinity. Peri-Vasconic maybe--either Iberian side or Aquitaine side. Probably not from those Celtic zones of Iberia.
@Aram PH155 was found in Narva culture, are you aware of that? That with the fact that all the earliest ancient samples of R1b1* are also found in Europe. What does that tell you?
The R1b basal that is now claimed to be present may turn out to be something different with better sampling. At one time, most R1b in Anatolia was also thought to be M343 but later they turned out to be V88. We have to wait to see what happens in Iran
R1b was clearly an early arrival to Europe, R1a much later probably.
Chetan
"That with the fact that all the earliest ancient samples of R1b1* are also found in Europe. What does that tell you?"
It tells me that Europe is the most densely sampled region of the world as far as aDNA concerned. By a wide margin.
That is not to say that R1b is not very early in Europe (it is here from UP), but the above fact is not to be forgotten.
Anthro Survey: I wouldn't be so dismissive about a SUBSET of BB groups speaking Basque, though. Most believe that groups of IE speakers from Central Europe came and assimilated into a Basque-speaking society, but what if some assimilation took place in Central Europe itself? What if BB groups were not uniformly IE-speaking(didn't always inherit their "Yamna"-associated language) and one of these early groups---Basque speakers----ended up trekking towards Iberia?
Nice suggestion as usual AS; a Vasconic substrate across Western Europe is probably unprovable, but whether the Basque languages was adopted by people with steppe ancestry mixing into 35-25% more Iberian ancestry within Iberia to form recent Basques, or in groups in France or Central Europe is open. (Again also probably unprovable but not clearly less parsimonious!)
There probably was a mass migration led expansion of Celtic after all, and we, and probably can't, know what came before. As Reich says in "Who We Are..." - "Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that the people of Britain today are descended without mixture from the “Beaker folk.” In fact, Britain’s population has been transformed by multiple subsequent waves of migration of continental people who were genetically similar to the people associated with Beaker burials. New, more sensitive methods are needed to determine how much ancestry in Britain derives from later waves.").
He then goes on to discuss haplotype chunk sharing (though calling it a "new method" is a bit off when Martiniano and so on are already using it, but rather in line with Reich's seeming strategy of pretending work outside his lab and personal involvement, like Schiffels Anglo Saxon work, doesn't exist).
All much in line with comments on this blog as it happens; though I think D-stats on affinity to various groups of ancient MN farmers between NW Beakers vs later Iron Age populations already speak to population shift without even considering haplotype information.
@Postneo
Before the numerals made their way west, the groundwork essentials for Occidental mathematics had already been firmly established. No doubt Indian they made life easier, but imagine how cumbersome maths would still be without notation developed in early modern West like decimal points, xyz, equal sign, to name a few.
As for borrowing and being influenced---this was standard practice for all civilizations. Not all civilizations had a systematic approach to deconstruct, refine, integrate with existing ideas/technologies and quantify to the same degree, though. So, Jared Diamond makes a rather compelling case for the Americas, Sub Saharan Africa and Oceania as they were outside the "Eurasian exchange network" but his theory falls short of accounting for differences between major Eurasian cultural zones.
Moreover, ideas with earlier precedents needn't necessitate borrowing or a shared phylogeny. Independent discoveries happen all the time and often times are dead ends. Case in point: Heron's aelopile devised in the early Roman era was NOT the forerunner of modern steam engines.
The engine analogy is way out of proportion because it implies that 90% of the work was done outside the West and they merely put the icing on the cake.
@Slumbery Yes that is surely true
@Matt
Yeah, that's the thing with the data at this point. It's a matter of getting the high-res techniques to achieve better separation of the mandarins from the tangerines.
I myself have wondered many times how many waves of Beaker-like ancestry swept across W.Europe or whether it can be modeled as 2-3 semi-discrete pulses in the first place as opposed to just a smooth, continuous stream.
Y-Hg data with terminal subclades may provide many clues, as well, I would think. For instance, Ireland is practically all R-l21, but it would be premature to stop there. Could have been the same geographical source area that was Celtified after the first Beaker sweep into Ireland with neither a mass replacement of lineages nor (similar, Beaker-like) autosomals. A second sweep into Ireland, in turn, would have mainly differed in downstream l21 mutations and aut. haplotypes.
Will have to add to the off-topic discussion, but post-Roman dark ages in Europe is real and Ottomans did not have any numerical advantage over Europe.
Aram said...
A
"Is Your BAM file present in Yfull?"
My ydna line branches downstream--R1b-Z2110-BY592 from Ossetians BY5586 ] is downstream from the Bell Beakers samples from Poland/Hungary Z2109+. The group that in theory is an offshoot into Corded Ware (Corded Ware as an offshoot of Hungarian Yamnaya (Anthony 2017). For example a lot of Yamnaya are R1b-KMS67+, many present day Armenians R1b-L584, many present day North Ossetians-Y5586.
The problem is upstream basal nodes R1b-Z2109 and R1b-Z2110( are also found in Pashtuns as well as Swat Pakistan-region-vicinity as well as Bulgaria-Italy)
David already did tests on Bell Beakers from Hungary the sample with Narva is upstream Z2109 from my line.
[1] distance%=1.9191
Beaker_Hungary
Barcin_N,49
Yamnaya_Samara,31.8
Narva_Lithuania,11.4
Blatterhole_HG,6
Ukraine_Mesolithic,1.8
[1] distance%=4.9659
Beaker_Hungary_no_steppe
Barcin_N,76.2
Blatterhole_HG,23.8
[1] distance%=2.4992
Beaker_Hungary_outlier
Yamnaya_Samara,76
Barcin_N,19
Koros_HG,4.4
Blatterhole_HG,0.6
talking about dark ages?
The only dark age of europe ( especially the western part) is the one we are living today.
Just look at the culture of death that is sweeping the continent since the sixties: abortion, divorce, destruction of family values, gay marriage, euthanasia, the predominance of a reckless and out of control financial and banking system ( the BANKSTERS) . We are becoming the shithole of the world.
It is not a coincidence that this is connected with the looming of the christian faith.
Anthro Survery: "Dark Ages" weren't even a big thing in Europe to begin with. The "muh Romanz...muh barbarians....muh Renaissance" is an outdated paradigm.
My understanding basically agrees with yours but a bit more of yes and no on this. On the one hand, there definitely was a big collapse of economic activity, literary production, literacy rate and engineering prowess in Western Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire. There were ways in which the Romans were able to do things that benefited from both the extent of their unified market and the large tax base their civilization could call on, that just couldn't be sustained at all once that collapsed. To some extent this shock did regress much of Western Europe to an Iron Age level "lower" than Rome and much of the world at the time.
On the other hand, this decline absolutely was more gradual in onset and shorter in duration and different in kind (no large scale things, but lots of small scale technological advance) that thought of by those who believe in a "Dark Age" up to the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century. Certainly as you say the Europeans of the High Middle Ages by at least the 11th century were able to do things technologically which the Romans could not, which other cultures in their world at that time could not, for all that they were not able to do some of the things that Rome could that specifically depended on their huge empire.
Also like you say, it's never been the case through history larger empires have ever really had a consistent strong return to science or philosophy (against "Two heads are better than one" that scientific progress is linked to the ability of cultures to include larger volumes of people). Science was always more of a sporadic, culturally motivated phenomenon among small groups of individuals than anything like a mass pursuit which consistently scaled with the economy, and Rome really didn't seem to boom scientifically any more than what followed (probably less).
(One of the distinctions between China and Europe that has been noted is that China's tendency to unification produced repeated iterations of a similar, though shallower cycle; a period of growth following the establishment of a dynasty, due to wider trade and a larger tax base for the government, followed by mass death, population decline and economic decline in a down phase when the dynasty lost control of its territory. Post-Roman Western Europe by contrast was always so divided that while it never experienced the same booms, it could never all experience this kind of huge decline again, and so the picture for the continent as a whole looks more like linear growth.
If you ignore the downswings China can look glorious compared to Europe of the same time, and particularly if you look at large projects like the Grand Canal that can only be done by a large empire, but the downswings matter!)
@Matt
What you wrote mirrors much of what I also think. I often like to make the following analogy: Medieval Europe was like an ambitious investigator with inadequate funding for his lab. :D
Indeed, technological improvement was one of the constants in the middle ages despite the turmoil. I'm sure Romans would have marveled at articulated plate armor, not to mention the tall, spacious Gothic cathedrals. Things really started taking off after 1250, imo, when Europe started to gain a definitive edge over the rest.
It should also be noted that the virtual absence of slavery in Europe probably stimulated, in part, a greater reliance on non-human power, namely windmill and watermill construction. This increase in mechanization surely had consequences.
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