Was Ukraine_Eneolithic I6561 a Proto-Indo-European?

It's certainly a valid question, simply because the remains of this individual (sampled by Mathieson et al. 2018, see here) are from a cemetery of the Sredny Stog culture, which, based on historical linguistics and archaeological data, has already been posited to have been a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture, that gave rise to the supposedly Late Proto-Indo-European (LPIE) Yamnaya culture, that swept into Central Europe from the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the 3rd millennium BC. Moreover, consider the following points:

- whatever you might say about calling Y-Chromosome haplogroups "Proto-Indo-European", the fact is that Ukraine_Eneolithic I6561 is the oldest recorded individual belonging to Y-haplogroup R1a-M417, which is not a marker that can be reasonably linked to human expansions dating to the Paleolithic or even Neolithic, and yet today it peaks in frequency in modern-day Indo-European-speaking East and North Europeans and South Asians, and is also recorded as the main Y-haplogroup amongst the ancient Scythians, who also were, in all likelihood, Indo-European-speakers, which strongly suggests that it was initially spread far and wide across Eurasia by the early Indo-Europeans

- following on from the last point, R1a-M417 can be divided into three main subclades: R1a-L664, R1a-Z293 and R1a-Z282, the first of which is almost exclusively confined to Northwestern Europe, while the latter two peak in frequency in South Central Asia and Eastern Europe, respectively, and the really interesting and important thing is that R1a-Z93 and R1a-Z282 are more closely related to each other than either is to R1a-L664, which mirrors the relatively close linguistic relationship between Balto-Slavs, who are rich in R1a-Z282, with Indo-Aryans, who are rich in R1a-Z93, (for instance, see here) and renders any arguments in this case based on isolation-by-distance practically useless

- Ukraine_Eneolithic I6561 is the oldest sample with UDG-treated genome-wide data to carry the 13910*T lactase persistence allele, which reaches its maximum frequency in Northwestern Europe, and is also relatively common amongst Indo-European-speaking South Asians, but not Middle Easterners (see here), suggesting that it spread from the Eastern European steppes both into Northwestern Europe and South Asia along with such ancient steppe markers as R1b-M269 and R1a-M417, and Indo-European speech

- based on historical linguistics data, the Proto-Indo-Europeans are generally regarded to have been foragers turned pastoralists, rather than farmers, but nevertheless, pastoralists familiar with farming, and indeed Ukraine_Eneolithic I6561 appears to be mostly a mixture of Eastern European and Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (EHG and CHG, respectively), but with around 30% input from early European farmers.

Of course, we'll need many more ancient samples from Ukraine and surrounds to cement these findings, and prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the Sredny Stog people were indeed the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and that the Yamnaya people were the Late Proto-Indo-Europeans. It might also be necessary to develop new scientific methods that take into account multidisciplinary data to achieve this.

On a related note, the University of Leiden is currently seeking four historical linguists and one bioarchaeologist to take part in a new project titled The Linguistic Roots of Europe's Agricultural Transition. The principal investigator on the project is Guus Kroonen, whom I mentioned in a couple recent blog posts (see here, here and here). This is the project objective:

Today, Europe’s linguistic landscape is shaped almost entirely by a single language family: Indo-European. Even by the dawn of history, a patchwork of Indo-European subgroups, Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Baltic, Slavic and Greek, was covering the continent, and over the centuries, these subgroups evolved into the modern European languages, among which Russian, Italian, German, Lithuanian and Swedish, as well as the global lingua francas French, Spanish, and English.

The Indo-Europeanization of Europe was probably one of the most profound linguistic shifts ever to have taken place in the prehistory of Europe. The origin of the European languages, unsurprisingly, is therefore a matter of intense academic debate. There are currently only two prehistoric events that in the present academic debate are considered as likely driving factors behind the spread of Indo-European speech.

One the one hand, there are those historical linguists who by meticulous comparison of the different Indo-European languages have reconstructed a language and culture that is typical of the early Bronze Age. Terminology for horse-riding and wagon technology provides a possible link to the expansion of the Yamnaya culture on the Pontic-Caspian steppes, which was fueled by the invention of the wheel and the domestication of the horse. Others have suggested that the Indo-European languages diffused from Anatolia together with another major prehistoric event, the spread of agriculture to Europe between the 8th and 5th millennium.

The debate has remained unresolved for over two decades, but a new approach produces potentially decisive results. By studying prehistoric loanwords absorbed by the speakers of Indo-European when they entered Europe, and test the resulting cultural implications against the available archaeological record, new light can be shed on the language of Europe’s first farmers, and whether or not they spoke a form of Indo-European.

If you have the necessary passion and qualifications to apply for these positions, then please do so ASAP via these links:

PhD Candidate or Postdoctoral Researcher in the field of linguistics

Postdoctoral Researcher in the field of archaeology (specialization: bioarchaeology)