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Monday, March 25, 2019

Celtic probably not from the west


The term "Celtic from the west" is the catchphrase for a working theory, offered in a couple of recent books, positing that the earliest speakers of Celtic languages lived in Atlantic Europe during the Bronze Age or even earlier. It'll be interesting to see how this theory holds up against increasing numbers of ancient samples from attested early Celtic-speaking populations.

More popular and long-standing theories postulate that the Proto-Celts are associated with the Urnfield and/or Hallstatt archeological cultures of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Central Europe. I'm inclined to agree with these more mainstream views when looking at my qpAdm mixture models below of three Celtiberians from what is now La Hoya, northern Spain, from the recent Olalde et al. paper on the genomic history of Iberia.

Celtiberian_LaHoya
Halberstadt_LBA 0.207±0.077
Pre-Celtiberian_LaHoya 0.793±0.077

chisq 15.031
tail prob 0.522396
Full output

Celtiberian_LaHoya
Halberstadt_LBA 0.196±0.074
Non-Celtic_Iberian 0.804±0.074

chisq 17.366
tail prob 0.362297
Full output

The Celtiberians show a stronger signal of (Urnfield-related?) ancestry from the northeast than their Bronze Age predecessors in northern Iberia (Pre-Celtic_LaHoya) as well as their Iron Age contemporaries from eastern Iberia (Non-Celtic_Iberian). The latter group very likely spoke the non-Indo-European Iberian language. It's not clear what the Bronze Age northern Iberians spoke, but it may have been a language related to Basque, which is also non-Indo-European.

Of course, the fact that the Celtiberians harbored more northern Bell Beaker-related ancestry than basically all earlier Iberian groups was already reported in the Olalde et al. paper (on page 2), but I just wanted to see if I could flesh out some more details in regards to this observation by using chronologically and archeologically more proximate reference populations.

See also...

Open thread: What are the linguistic implications of Olalde et al. 2019?

An exceptional burial indeed, but not that of an Indo-European

Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...

285 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   201 – 285 of 285
Grey said...

random thought on the debate over whether specific clades of ydna and/or mtdna might have protection from particular diseases what if it's true but correlation rather than causation

i.e. people with certain ydna and mtdna were disproportionately engaged in work which brought them into contact with cowpox/horsepox and as a result were disproportionately immune to small pox?

#

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/blackdisease_01.shtml

"The plague bacteria is thought to have spread from the arid plains of central Asia. The plague generally left untouched the indigenous nomad population, because rat fleas do not like the smell of horses, with which the nomads lived in close proximity."

the smell of horses or horses get a milder form of plague which they then transmit to humans who get over it and develop immunity?

accidental vaccination

Gaska said...

Everything is already absolutely proven, R1b is Western, DF27 is overwhelmingly Iberian, and neither of them spoke IE. That's what genetics, archeology and linguistics tell us. Whoever says otherwise, has to prove it. That is, can you tell me a site in the steppes where P312 or Df27 has been found ?, or can you show that the Iberians did not speak Iberian, or that the Basques do not speak Basque, or that the Basque, Iberian or Tartessian are Indo-European languages?. Can any of you do it? Can any of you give a reasonable argument that is able to convince us that the BB culture spoke an IE language?

It is not that I am critical with the relation of P312 with the steppes, it is that P312 has absolutely nothing to do with the steppes except that autosomal steppe composition that serves to model genetic samples of prehistoric individuals.The uniparental markers explain a story for R1b-P312 and the autosomal markers explain an absolutely different and surprising story, because neither the culture where that haplogroup was developed, nor the vast majority of the female markers that accompany it, have anything to do with the steppes.

Absolutely all R1b-P312 in Western Europe present in their autosome that steppe signal to a greater or lesser degree? Ok.
All contemporary western Europeans present that steppe signal to a greater or lesser degree? Ok.

Does that mean that we all have ancestors who lived in the steppes? I think so.
Does that show that massive migrations took place? NO
that in the steppes or on the BBC was IE spoken? NO
that there were violent conquests? do not
that the cultures of the steppes brought some technological innovation to Western Europe during the Neolithic or the Chalcolithic. Of course not

BB culture was a heterogeneous culture both culturally and genetically, with strong regional variations due to the great territorial extension it reached and its great duration in time (hundreds of years, and in the case of Iberia, a thousand years). Meanwhile the CWC had a similar temporal duration, and presents at least 12 regional variants. Both cultures were very different both genetically and culturally speaking, and only coincided in a small Central-European territory. Unlike the BB culture,this culture had a steppe origin (R1a, Mit-Haps and certain cultural traditions).
It is possible that L51 was hidden in the CWC-NO
It is possible that P312 was hidden in the CWC or in some of its regional variants- I think not, however, if someone can prove it, I would have no choice but to accept it.


I believe that there was a massive founder effect of R1b-P312 in Western Europe, U152 in Germany, L21 in France/Alps/the isles and Df27 in Iberia, perhaps in a short period of time (100 years). So R1b-P312, his descendants and relatives spread in a short period of time throughout Western Europe taking advantage of the neolithic paths that BB culture maintained during chalcolithic. This would also explain its genetic heterogeneity, with very steppe individuals, and with individuals with only 5-10% of steppe signal, depending on the region where it was established or originated. In the beginnings of the BB culture, the P312 of Germany and Holland would be very steppe because of their proximity to the CWC, those of the islands, Iberia and Italy very little because of their distance.


FrankN said...

Ric Hern:
The famine would have come with the 4.2 kya event. The Atlantic oscillation ("Gulf stream") weakened, resulting in cooler N. Atlantic surface temperatures and, consequently, less evaporation and eventually less rainfall over Europe. Naturally, Ireland and W. Iberia would have been most affected. For Denmark, a cooling of the Skagerak, and some population drop around and after ca. 2,200 BC has been demonstrated.

Dave: El Argar is often (e.g. in German literature) related to the whole EBA/MBA culture of the SW. My discussion above was relating to that culture, not the eponymous site specifically. Sorry if that has been misunderstood.

Epoch: What I said and meant was "One may speculate that some R1 males had acquired gene mutations that increased their resistance against the plague." This is not implying an "inbuilt" feature of R1 yDNA - in fact, R1b-V88 doesn't seem to have done particular well during the LN/CA/EBA. However, if some R1b-M269 males had acquired genetic resistance somewhere on their autosomes, it could well explain the star-like expansion.

Grey: Smallpox certainly had a major demographic and selective effect - well documented a/o for the Americas and Polynesia. However, smallpox are a pastoralist/ farmer disease. I can imagine that the observed disappearance of Mesolithic Europeans especially on the Balkans prior to the EEF expansion may well relate to smallpox.
However, smallpox wouldn't neccessarily have given an epidemiologic advantage to Steppe populations - acquired immunity from long-term exposure to cowpox and related cattle/goat infections should have been as good, if not better among EEF populations.
Yet, I aggree that when it comes to explaining the apparent demographic collapse at the end of the Iberian CA, other plagues may have played their role as well. Tuberculosis, e.g., has been attested from PPNC Levante, and was frequently found in 3rd mBC Egyptian mummies. With expanding trans-Mediterranean trade, it might also have found its way into CA Iberia. I imagine that acquiring pneumonic plague on top of a chronic TB infection isn't increasing the chance of survival.

FrankN said...

Grey: "the smell of horses or horses get a milder form of plague which they then transmit to humans who get over it and develop immunity?"

The plague strains in question for the LNCA weren't adapted to flea transmission, as they hadn't yet acquired a mutation that keeps the fleas' immune system from recognising and defeating them. In Central Europe, the medieval variant so far has been first detected in victims of the Antoninian Plague. Its earliest attetation overall is from a Srubnaya grave in Samara Oblast.

As such, for the Central European LNCA we are talking about the pneumonic plague, which is primarily transmitted from human to human along similar paths as the flu.[While fleas are mostly out of the question, the possible role of lice, bugs or ticks in this respect is yet unclear.]
Ungulates appear to be immune to the plague. However, a secondary infection path runs via cats and dogs. In 2014, a Colorado man was found to have caught the pneumonic plague from his dog, which in turn had most likely eaten a plague-infected rodent. Food contamination by rodents is another possible incubation path. The Y. pestis bacteria is able to survive some time in rodent faecals, and may be inhaled from them.

The a/m Colorado 2014 case is instructive. It took the hospital 10 days to recognise they were dealing with the plague, not some other kind of respiratory infection, but they were still able to heal the man. This shows that humans may survive the infection by two weeks or longer, which is long enough to travel a substantial distance and spread the infection elsewhere.

The survival time of plague-infected dogs is unknown - in the 2017 case described below, it was around a week.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331559034_pneumonic_plague_in_a_dog

A good illustration how infected dogs can cause a local plague outbreak is provided by the 2009 case from Quinghai province, China.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/52/2/185/375514

the dude said...

The VSO word order that you see in Welsh (and Irish) after 400AD is not present in the classical sources for the island Celts in terms of tribal names, personal names etc. They clearly have the same word order as Gaulish. The switch to VSO seems to have occurred around 400-500AD. There is no evidence it existed before then.

Think about it - the isles had incredibly high steppe beaker input of the Dutch type and very very little of the pre-beaker farmer genes survived. Its therefore the last place in the beaker world where you would expect a Neolithic substrate linguistic effect like some are suggesting for VSO. You would more expect to find an IE language with some sort of farmer substrate effect in the areas where the beaker people had far less steppe genes than the isles beaker people. The last place you would expect such an effect is the isles where beaker people seem to have completely obliterated the genes of the local Neolithic farmers.

the dude said...

Isn't the answer rather straight forward. Where very high steppe autosomal DNA beaker groups existed, they spoke IE languages. Where beakers just spread a steppe male lineage like P312 but clearly heavily diluted their autosomal DNA with local non-steppe people, they may have taken up the local non-IE language in some cases. Particularly in places like southern Europe where the beakers did not really bring much to the table because those areas already had complex metal using societies.

One thing I will warn about is considering the Basques as in-situ. I kind of agree that the basques and Iberians could be the descendants of originally IE speaking P312 migrant men who then absorbed far more non-IE genetics and became a population of P312 males speaking a non-IR language they acquired locally and carrying a large amount of overall non-steppe ancestry which they also acquired locally in SW Europe. However neither the Spanish Basque area of the Aquitanian speaking part of France had much of a beaker input so its very likely that the Basque population were driven into those areas from elsewhere by later waves of people. Several later waves of peoples drove into southern France and south-east/north-east Iberia in the post-beaker bronze age. They probably displaced them.

Matt said...

@Davidski, I've kind of complained a little elsewhere about the individual ancestry proportions for CA, BA and IA in this paper - basically they only seem to have run qpAdm for CA individuals who they've already identified as meeting a certain threshold for northern Beaker ancestry.

I think this might have potentially missed some samples with northern Beaker ancestry below their threshold, but still in a good 10-15% (which is of a level present in a few of the Bronze Age samples) which might tell us something about interactions. There are at least two of these who look in G25 like they may have some steppe ancestry (I4229 and I3485).

Would it be possible if I gave you a set of Copper Age sample IDs, for you to run their qpAdm model again? That would be:

pleft: https://pastebin.com/3bFi40JJ / https://pastebin.com/q7zNq6EY
pright: https://pastebin.com/PY8fPtMm
Set: https://pastebin.com/EA3fzrrR

I know some of these are low coverage, but they do seem to have included a lot of low coverage samples in their set that they have modeled, so it's consistent with their approach (and many of the samples have fairly bad coverage).

I know the pright might not be as good as your normal set, but I want to keep setup as close to the paper as poss.

If problem with using Iberia_CA in pleft because it includes samples within the list I've asked to test, use Iberia_MN instead?

Also, on your qpAdm models for Celtiberians, have you considered adding some samples that show specific drift with Iberia / Central Europe to further detect any potential dilution of Iberia_CA ancestry? E.g. Iberia_CA, Globular_Amphora_Poland, Scotland_N, France_MLN, Hungary LNCA probably could all be viable ones to add to supplement your normal set of outgroups (WHG vs IronGates might also be useful).

Davidski said...

@Matt

You might have to direct your request to someone at AG, like maybe Kale. My computers are busy over the next few days, so I'm not able to run so many qpAdm tests.

Matt said...

@Davidski, no problem, thanks.

EastPole said...

April 12, 2019 in Albuquerque, New Mexico may be interesting:

https://i.postimg.cc/6qMjjHBy/screenshot-488.png

https://i.postimg.cc/FKPYK3F0/screenshot-487.png


https://documents.saa.org/container/docs/default-source/doc-annualmeeting/final-program/2019-final-program/2019-program.pdf?sfvrsn=5b365b30_6

https://www.saa.org/annual-meeting

Ryan said...

@the dude - you're assuming Bell Beakers spoke IE. The little information we has suggests at least some did not, so that's a pretty crappy assumption.

Davidski said...

@EastPole

There are links to SAA 2019 PDF books with abstracts here...

https://www.saa.org/annual-meeting/programs/abstract

Richard Rocca said...

The only sample with a Y-haplogroup (P312+L2+) found in Central European samples is NE_Iberia_Greek (Empúries1) I8209 dated to 450–400 BCE.

distance%=2.5487"

Iberia_East_IA,60.3
Beaker_France_South:I3875,34.9
Mycenaean,4.4
Iberomaurusian,0.4
Hallstatt_Bylany,0
Iberia_Northeast_BA,0
Iberia_Central_CA,0

Naughtius said...

@Grizzloe
Doesn’t Partraige come from the word for crab, and I think Parthelon is related to Bartholomew.
I wouldn’t place much stock in Irish legends, they were more interested in tying themselves to Christian and classical figures.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Rocca, I guess he's half Gaul, half Spanish. I3875 is second least Steppe-admixed French Beaker. 44% Yamnaya. Yet, this person scores 35% I3875, so maybe his dad came from a Gaul tribe intermediate between Iron age Spain & northwest Europe.

Davidski said...

@Richard

What's the terminal SNP for Iberia_Northeast_Empuries1 I8206?

Samuel Andrews said...

Hopefully, in the next few years BBC does a documentary on Bell Beaker (& R1b P312 'nation' in general). It's fundamental to British & western European history. Also, I'd like to see that because the story is so anti-PC & western Europeans are so PC.

A big piece of the story is a strictly patrlineal 'nation' killing men & stealing women, making their paternal lineage dominate the region till present day. Also, it includes a 90% whip out of the ancient Brits who built Stone Henge.

Of course, BBC will take a very leftist perspective on it. Focus, on critising social stratification, hierarchy, sexism And refusing to present these 'evil' things the way the ancient people understood it.

Garvan said...

@Samuel.

Neolithic ancestry increased with time from bronze age to Iron Age to present, in both Ireland and Britain, so where did this Neolithic ancestry come from? There were no Romans in Ireland. If it came from France, then it complicates your BB story. But in my models the French were too close to the British genetically to make a big change.

There are two waves of BB in Ireland, the first went straight to the copper mines in the south west, selling the copper in Britain, so we know they traveled by sea. The second wave 200 years later is the Dutch BB who came overland from Britain. The copper miners cremated their dead, but they were lucky to find one burial and he had “inflated levels of Neolithic ancestry relative to indivulised burials from the north and east” (Casidy).

One possibility is this practice of cremation by people with Neolithic ancestry is creating a bias. In my opinion you do not have sufficient clarity to make your BBC BB documentary just yet.

On another topic, have you or others looked at the Y-Dna of the British Neolithic? If I heard correctly, then Cassidy thinks it is hunter gather derived.

Grey said...

Garvan said...
"There are two waves of BB in Ireland, the first went straight to the copper mines in the south west ...snip... find one burial and he had “inflated levels of Neolithic ancestry relative to indivulised burials from the north and east” (Casidy)."

maybe miner wave was mostly male and married local while the later wave brought women?

Grey said...

FrankN

yes, not suggesting smallpox vs plague as "the" cause just that there may have been multiple animal borne plagues.

"smallpox wouldn't neccessarily have given an epidemiologic advantage to Steppe populations - acquired immunity from long-term exposure to cowpox and related cattle/goat infections should have been as good, if not better among EEF populations"

true unless particular strains of animal borne disease were associated with different breeds of horse/cattle/pig/dog/cat from different regions.

or the other thought i had on that was the comment from the wiki about how specific occupations e.g. milk-maids, were protected so

a) steppe cowboys/girls + neolithic milk-maids?

or

b) conquest leading to an untouchable caste who did all the animal work and thus got the immunity?

(i was thinking of how in English the words for herd animals are from Saxon: sheep, cow, pig etc, while the words for meat are from Norman French: mutton, beef, ham.)

#

the idea of a conquered caste + occupation specific immunity threw up another related thought on the bounce back of HG ancestry among EEF (if that is still an accepted thing?)

it's well known from the Americas that HGs didn't adapt well to sedentary farming but in some places they adapted well to stock breeding

https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/8bcb569f571c35488ff58eb5d4663cdf

so possibility of conquered population being made to do all the animal work and thereby getting disproportionate degrees of immunity to lethal animal borne diseases?

#

"Ungulates appear to be immune to the plague"

well that's the thing - when i read "rat fleas do not like the smell of horses" that sounds to me like something somebody made up in the middle ages and no-one ever checked so when i read elsewhere that there's a milder horsepox/cowpox version of smallpox and surviving that confers immunity to smallpox it makes me think what if there's a similar mechanism with other diseases like the plague i.e. people working in close contact with the animals involved (whatever they were) got a milder flu-like version of an illness which innoculated them against the lethal version?


Ric Hern said...

@ Garvan

Well if a population was almost exterminated but 10% were left, then I think County Kerry would have been an excellent place to hide out. Mountains and almost Jungle Like vegetation....I personally was surprised to see such a place exists in Ireland...

EastPole said...

“Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA”

They are asking the question: “were the Yamnaya the most murderous people in history?”

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132230-200-story-of-most-murderous-people-of-all-time-revealed-in-ancient-dna/

But in Eastern Europe it didn’t happen, Funnel Beaker Culture (FBC), Corede Ware Culture (CWC), Globular Amphora Culture(GAC), Tripolye Culture (CT) were coexisting and interacting in Poland and Western Ukraine for long time.

https://i.postimg.cc/Zn3StbSb/screenshot-489.png

https://www.academia.edu/31593295/Pelisiak_A._2007.The_Funnel_Beaker_culture_settlements_compared_with_other_Neolithic_cultures_in_the_upper_and_middle_part_of_the_Dnister_basin._Selected_issues._State_of_the_research._Analecta_Archaeologica_Ressoviensia_2_23-56


So the theory that Yamnaya component may be responsible for genocidal inclinations seems strange.
Not Yamnaya component but Bell Beaker Culture is responsible for genocide in Britain. Maybe something in their religion made them do it. We don’t even know if they were IE.
It is like not white Christians but Germanic followers of Hitler are responsible for Holocaust in XX century.

Grey said...

Ric Hern said...
"Well if a population was almost exterminated but 10% were left"

or if they only settled 10% (the bits with soft metal) leaving the other 90% to the original HGs...

and then a second group came along, displaced the HGs and settled the 90%?

#

EastPole said...
“Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA”

lol media switching narrative from it didn't happen to Euros most evul popul evah!!!

expect to see dozens of stories like that over the next few years. it's kinda funny in a twisted way.

Samuel Andrews said...

3.3661"

Iberia_Central_CA_Afr:I4246

Levant_N,34.6
Iberia_MN,28.2
Iberomaurusian,23.8
Yoruba,9.9
Natufian,3.5

2.0329"

Moroccan

Levant_N,26.6
Iberomaurusian,26.4
Yoruba,14
Iberia_ChL,9.5
Tepe_Hissar_ChL,9.2
Barcin_N,6.7
Darkveti-Meshoko,4.7
Iberia_MN,2.9

The Iberian farmer admix in ancient Northwest Africa tells us where the mtDNA H1, H3, and other typical European mtDNA in North Africa today comes from.

Richard Rocca said...

Davidski said... What's the terminal SNP for Iberia_Northeast_Empuries1 I8206?

His terminal SNP is R-L2 which accounts for about 90% of resolvable Eastern Bell Beaker samples (Bavaria, Czech, Poland). That also happens to be the the same lineage as Hallstatt Celt sample DA111 (836-780 BC). The linguistic affiliation is difficult given that this was the area of the non-IE Iberians but also the area of Iberia that received Urnfields which most see as IE speakers.

the dude said...

@ryan Basically nothing has changed. We already were aware that the Basques were a SW European non-IE group who nevertheless carried a lot of the P312 line which everywhere else is strongly associated with IE speakers. All the recent finds have done is proved that the phenomenon of stray P312 groupings loosing much of their autsomal DNA and taking up the local non-IE language was underway quite early in Iberia. None of that is very surprising. it is still the tail not the dog. Elsewhere P312 is associated again with steppe genes but in much higher quantities. IN areas where P312 retained most of its steppe signal (be it from CW or whatever) those areas are not known for non-IE languages. Thw tiny Basque/Iberian tail is wagging the enormous IE dog again with regards to P312. Whenever it became clear that the later beaker people in Iberia carried P312 but much lower steppe ancestry than other P312 people in NW and central Europe, it was clear that they may have lose their language. They certainly did not have the impact that we see in most of the rest of Europe where within a few centuries their genes have largely replaced those of the existing farmers. Seriously I do not understand what people's obsession with Iberia, the Basques etc is. Those area have very little genetically in common with most of the rest of Europe.

As for people STILL looking for an Iberian link with Ireland, they clearly believe in fairytales. Someone on some forum posted about Parthalon etc recently, completely oblivious that most of the Irish invasion myths were creations of early christian monks and were drawing more on biblical and classical information than native beliefs. Parthalon is just Bartholomew borrowed into Irish. Much of the rest of it can be similarly deconstructed as coming from non-Irish classical and biblical models. It is scholars and specialists in the field in Ireland itself who have (for some decades now) exposed the Book of Invasions etc as 90% made up nonsense. We dont need to go there. We know the Irish largely carry the L21 DF13 male line in common with Britain. We know that L21 was associated with very Dutch beaker like autosomal DNA. We know that the Dutch beakers were v similar to Corded Ware. We know that these beakers and CW carried austosomal DNA that is very similar to Yamnaya and was unknown outside eastern Europe till 2750BC. It really is time to retire the Atlanticist nonsense.

André de Vasconcelos said...

I8206 has a very NW Euro profile though - moreso than the DA111 Hallstatt Celt - so he's certainly a migrant (or a descendent of) who ended up in ancient Emporion, almost certainly a Celtic-speaker.


Interestingly a few samples from Empuries also cluster close to the La Hoya Celtiberian samples, such as I8203, I8209 and I8214 both on G25 and on the CvG PCAs.

The La Hoya I3758 Celtiberian, despite being the local sample with highest CWC_Germany on their models actually plots further away from Western Europeans, and closer to Iberians, on the Celtic VS Germanic PCA. Maybe his steppe-related ancestry is older and s/he's not as closely related to Celts?


Anyway, the division between IE and non-IE speakers in IA Iberia looks kind of muddy looking exclusively at these samples. Besides we don't know for sure how populations further west in Iberia looked like, we only have the two possible Lusitanian individuals, but they are low res and one (I7687, male) looks like another BA individual, albeit plotting futher south than the individuals from Las Cogotas I (slightly closer to modern Iberians)

Davidski said...

@Richard

His terminal SNP is R-L2 which accounts for about 90% of resolvable Eastern Bell Beaker samples (Bavaria, Czech, Poland). That also happens to be the the same lineage as Hallstatt Celt sample DA111 (836-780 BC). The linguistic affiliation is difficult given that this was the area of the non-IE Iberians but also the area of Iberia that received Urnfields which most see as IE speakers.

Thanks, that makes perfect sense.

But Empuries was technically a Greek speaking settlement, so it's likely that I8206 was a Greek-speaking Gaul who moved to Iberia from one of the Greek colonies in France.

Samuel Andrews said...

Several of the 10-16th century samples from Granda (Spain) are part Sephardic. One is fully Sephardic.

If....
Looks irrefutable that Iberians have Greek islander/south Italian-like admixture. Classical Greeks from Spain don't fit the profile. Levant BA doesn't fit the profile. Anatolia BA doesn't fit the profile. BalkansIA doesn't fit the profile. Doesn't that make Romans the only viable option?

Richard Rocca said...

David, you asked about I8206 but I thought you were asking about the one I gave the nMonte results on. The terminal clade for I8206 is P312> DF27 > Z195 > Z198 > L165

Davidski said...

OK, that doesn't make much sense. LOL

Nah, it's possible that we're dealing here with a very mixed population of Iberians, Celtiberians, Gauls and Greeks.

Davidski said...

@JuanRivera

The R1a-M17 in the Neolithic Siberian samples may have been due to contamination.

The researchers used a PCR based method to test their samples, which is susceptible to contamination, and their results weren't subsequently backed up with shotgun and capture methods, because there are no ancient pre-Bronze Age Siberian or even Asian samples sequenced with shotgun and capture methods that belong to R1a.

Richard Rocca said...

Davidski said... "OK, that doesn't make much sense. LOL

Nah, it's possible that we're dealing here with a very mixed population of Iberians, Celtiberians, Gauls and Greeks."


Keep in mind that Bell Beaker sample I0806 from Quedlinburg, Germany (2431-2150 BC) was R-DF27.

Arza said...

Late Jomon male and female genome sequences from the Funadomari site in Hokkaido, Japan
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJDB7235

Funadomari Jomon people were hunter-gatherers living on Rebun Island, in Hokkaido, Japan approximately 3,500 to 3,800 years ago. In this study, we determined the high-depth and low-depth nuclear genome sequences from a Funadomari Jomon female (F23) and male (F5). We genotyped HLA class I and other anthropological traits. We also identified a pathogenic mutation in the CPT1A gene, causing the Pro479Leu nonsynonymous change, in both F23 and F5. The phylogenetic relationships among F23, modern/ancient Eurasians, and Native Americans showed a deep divergence of F23 in East Eurasia, probably before the split of the ancestor of Native Americans from East Eurasians, but after the split of 40,000 year old Tianyuan. This indicated that the Northern Jomon people were genetically isolated from continental East Eurasians for a long period. However, coastal East Asians are genetically slightly closer to Jomon than other East Eurasians. Moreover, the Y chromosome of F5 belonged to haplogroup D1b2b, which is rare in modern Japanese. These findings provided insights into the history and reconstructions of the ancient human population structures in East Eurasia.

Also:
Shimomotoyama Yayoi nuclear genome
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJDB8029

FrankN said...

East Pole:
Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA

What a bullshit! (not talking about you, but the Journalist who invented that headline)

Lets look at the facts:
1. Central Europe (MES, Bavaria, Bohemia, Hungary):
BB coexisting with CWC, as well as with non-CWC LN Pops (Schönfeld Group, Goldberg-Cham, etc.) [Interestingly, while you will have a hard time finding any archeologist who believes that BB were autochtonous to MES/Bavaria, German_BB are suddenly believed to be behind the Iberian BA transformation]
2. Sardinia: No apparent genetic shift introduced by BB acc. to the recent studies.
3. Sicily: BB introduced some Steppe ancestry, but apparently didn't eradicate the previous EEF Population
4. S. France/ N. Italy: While we still lack BA samples, BB are unlikely to have completely eradicated previous populations. France_MLN still pops up when modelling modern populations.
5. Iberia: Genetically diverse until ca. 2,200 BC. The genetic transformation (actually only on the yDNA side) took place during the BA, when BB had already disappeared from most of the Peninsula, to give way to the Agraric and other cultures.As to why that happened is still open - I think climate change plus plague(s) are a plausible Explanation, others obviously still prefer a genocidal Scenario. Whoever is right - you can't blame it on BB, because they were already gone when the shift happened.
6. England: As Iberia - the Boscombe Bowman (I2416) was still low steppe, yet received an outstanding burial. In fact, only 7 of the 33 Britain_BB samples in Olalde e.a. 2018 have been directly AMS-dated to before 2,200 BC, and only one of them (I2565) was tested positively for R1b-L21. Here as well, the genetic transformation seems to have mostly taken place during the EMBA. To which extent it can really be ascribed to BB, or rather to subsequent cultures as the Wessex Culture, is still open.
7. Ireland: So far, we only have the Rathlin samples, which in tendency are rather MBA than EBA. Archeologists ascribe the emergence of Irish copper mining to Iberian influence (CWC/ Single Grave wasn't really into [copper] metalurgy, the only alternative origin worth considering would be the pre-Alps, e.g. Cham-Goldberg III). So, aDNA-wise, the CA->LBA dynamics of Ireland still Needs to be established.

Samuel Andrews said...

@FrankN,
"I think climate change plus plague(s) are a plausible Explanation, others obviously still prefer a genocidal Scenario. Whoever is right - you can't blame it on BB, because they were already gone when the shift happened."

In, Iberia there's little or no DNA data from between 2300bc and 1500bc. It's very possible P312 spread across most of the peninsula during the Beaker period or shortly afterwards. If, not done by the Beaker people it was done by their direct descendants who were still essentially the same people.

War is the only good explanation for what happened in Iberia & Britain. No plague or climate only affects men. No plague or climate could kill of an entire population.

Beaker people themselves were the product of an extreme sex-bias admix event between Northern farmers (like GlobularAmphora) & a Steppe people.

Drago said...

@ Davidski
“As far as I know, we don't yet have any samples from El Argar, so it might be best to hold off with any suppositions that its people were the direct descendants of Bell Beakers.”

I think you’d be brave to bet against it :)
In any case; I think Frank would be interested to know that the earliest Iberian Hallberd is found in Humanejos; Meseta; c. 2500 BC ; in an individual buried with BB components (dagger, pots, wrist guards). In other words, it was already a component of the ‘BB set’.

zardos said...

@the dude: "@ryan Basically nothing has changed. We already were aware that the Basques were a SW European non-IE group who nevertheless carried a lot of the P312 line which everywhere else is strongly associated with IE speakers. All the recent finds have done is proved that the phenomenon of stray P312 groupings loosing much of their autsomal DNA and taking up the local non-IE language was underway quite early in Iberia. None of that is very surprising. it is still the tail not the dog. Elsewhere P312 is associated again with steppe genes but in much higher quantities."

That is not correct, because before the new data, it wasn't known that Basques resemble Iberian BB so closely, show the greatest continuity and really no signicant later input whatsoever, not even autosomally. That's really huge and the final nail to the coffin of Basques coming from anything else but BB.
Also, BB were so closely tied together socially, it is very unlikely they spoke different languages in the West.
Considering those facts, BB seem to have been non-IE, with Basques and Iberians being the historical proof. The association of IE with P312 is not stronger for the earlist times than with many other yDNA lineages, but the association with non-IE is a fact by now.

Arza said...

@ Richard Rocca (on AG)
Britain and Ireland had 100% populations replacements and uber-P312 Ireland remained untouched by the two IE suspects you are proposing for language change in Iberia (Urnfield, Hallstatt)

Here Reich talks about possible later inflow of people genetically similar to British Beakers that can be largely invisible from a genetic POV:
https://youtu.be/5OazVFNWL7I?t=3028

Here he also points out that isotopic signature of the Netherlands and Northern France is virtually identical to the signature of Britain so movement from these areas will be undetectable via isotopic analysis:
https://youtu.be/5OazVFNWL7I?t=3530

BTW From the D-stats it seems that continuous gene-flow from Central Europe was broken for a moment in the Iron Age by some population shifted towards Iberia:

https://i.postimg.cc/qMr0LfHY/Dstats-Britain.png

Urnfield [pre-Celtic/Italo-Celtic]-> Southern France [proto-Celts - Koch's Basque-IE interactions resulting in Celtic] -> Iberia [continental Celts] / Britain [insular Celts]?

@ the dude

Any fixed word order is ultimately an effect of non-IE substrate.

Grey said...

Samuel Andrews said...
"Doesn't that make Romans the only viable option?"

routes to Iberia
- rivers to baltic/north sea/Atlantic then down the coast
- overland directly across the pyrenees
- along north coast of Med
- island hopping across Med
- along south coast of Med

personally i think it's more likely three
- rivers to atlantic region, then iberia from the west
- mixture of european med coast and islands
- mixture of north african med coast and islands

i don't know if Carthage itself fits the right timescale but some kind of similar but earlier settlement(s) along the north African coast and/or islands?

#

"No plague or climate only affects men. No plague or climate could kill of an entire population."

I think that's true but there's still a question whether it was all out war from the beginning or something else in the beginning which ended violently.

I think it's possible herder populations catalyzed on the edges of the farmer expansion eventually moved inside farmer territory but onto the marginal land not used by farmers ending up with two regionally mixed but locally separate populations creating a giant petri dish of animal borne plagues which ended up weakening the farmers more than the herders.

(thing about Carthage or similar settlements is they were very mixed: a base trader population + local natives + mercenaries)

Grey said...

zardos
"Also, BB were so closely tied together socially, it is very unlikely they spoke different languages in the West."

i think that makes sense generally but in the historical colonial era there was a wave of male/female expansion from the east to the west and a forward wave of almost entirely male prospector/trapper type dudes out ahead of the main wave who spoke native American languages and married local women.

are modern native americans mostly (iirc) the product of those unions partly because they inherited immunity to certain diseases?

zardos said...

@Grey: Status, material wealth and military strength were important for those trapper societies and why they got their Indian females. It was custom among those Indians to buy a bride anyway at times.
However, the situation was completely different to Iberia and the best comparison to be made would be Latin America and the Spanish conquest. It was not about single BB here and there, even though that was also the case before, but rather a sudden, quite abrupt and nearly complete replacement of the male population. So we deal with a real and hard conquest, mass killings and the overtake of a land and female population by the incoming males. Those males were no single adventurous men, but they came as warbands, clans, members of armies and economic-militaristic orders. That was a quick hostile takeover par excellence.

Iberia was not exceptional, the same thing happened virtually everywhere, including the Rhine region. The absolute mystery of Bell Beakers, which was apparent from there physical type already, is that it seems typical males came and came in and came in. They took local females which fit the CW and Neolithic substrate, they mix, but still more of the typical BB come in.
And now the clue is, and always was, while we see that they come and come, we don't know from where!
That is the real issue, there is still no place were you can pin it down, where you can say that is the source, that's the home of the original BB were the first waves of typical representatives came from. Even with the genetic data available, we made little progress in finding that source, while it is known for about 100 years that male warrior-entrepreneurs as the core group of BB came in into various regions of Europe over and over again.

Richard Rocca said...

Arza, the "invisible gene flow" from the continent did not do anything to change the Y-DNA of the island as all Iron Age Britons were still R-L21. Hard to argue for a massive language change without any of the typical Central European lineages like R-U152 or R-U106 showing up there.

Davidski said...

@Richard

In theory, it's possible that British and Irish Beakers were the speakers of Celtic, but that's not the mainstream view. And I don't think that the high frequency of L21 in Iron Age Brits is enough to swing things against the mainstream view, especially if there's evidence of any sort of significant gene flow from continental Europe to Britain during the Iron Age. In other words, language shifts can happen without a large scale replacement of Y-chromosomes, and that's what may have happened in Britain and Ireland.

Richard Rocca said...

What "significant" gene flow from the continent?

ANI EXCAVATOR said...

@ zardos

Your comment has a large number of factual errors. The language that was most spread by the Spanish conquest in Mexico and Peru were Nahua and Quecha respectively, in fact Quechua reached much of its present range under the Spanish and not the Incas. The situation in Mexico was also different from what you say. The Native elite allies of the Spanish, mostly Nahuas, passed into a class of extremely wealthy native landowners, such as the Villagomez family, and Nahuans accompanied the Spanish into areas the Aztecs never brought them, such as the Mayan area and the deserts north of the Mexica valley, which were controlled after conquest by the Tlaxcalan allies of the Spanish who were now recognized as the hidalgos of the area. The conversion of the native population in the initial stage was accomplished under native language materials prepared by Franciscan and Dominican monks. All this only changed after an extensive and intolerant hispanisation policy was imposed.

The state of Paraguay, where Guarani is the dominant language and the culture overwhelmingly native, tells us what happens when Eurasian genes, political forms, and religion were introduced without forceful hispanisation.

Beakerisation was niether a single process nor a single abrupt episode of massacre, how can you explain ~400 years of co-existence between the foreigners and unadmixed locals? The tight genealogical and social identity of the Beakers likewise cannot last throughout a 400 year period--for perspective, thats more than the amount of time the Latin Americans took to declare independence from Spain. Your model of the process is just incorrect.

Davidski said...

@Richard

It seems that there was more or less continuous gene flow from the south into Britain and Ireland after the Beaker period, because all British and Irish populations are shifted closer to continental Western European populations compared to British Beakers and Ireland_EBA.

D(Mbuti,X)(Yamnaya_Samara)/D(Mbuti,X)(Barcin_N,WHG).

Some of this gene flow may have been associated with the arrival of Celtic culture and languages in Britain and Ireland. It might be possible to work this out with many more ancient samples from Iron Age Britain and continental Europe.

ANI EXCAVATOR said...

@ Arza

I'm not a linguist, but we can at least look at the general activity of specialists in IE and Celtic. On this basis, there is more evidence for a non-Indo-European substrate in even Germanic than there is for Celtic. The Germanic substrate theory is a thread pursued by multiple well-regarded linguists, and forms the core of a body of literature. Both the skeptics and proponents recognize for a long time now that non-IE forms comprise a significant percentage of Germanic lexicon (not just a few words), and there are very famous pairs of IE and non-IE doublets, e.g. 'sea' vs 'mare'. Where is the same treatment for Celtic, other than the pseudolinguist Theo Venneman?

I'm sure if you ask multiple linguists for Celtic, you will find the opinion that there is simply no good evidence for extensive non-IE influence in Celtic, definitely no such extensive influence for Vasconic-- because they universally reject Venneman's proposal, and far less non-IE influence than we should expect for cases with equivalent levels of IE genetic contribution, such as Greek (if we see post-BB movements as responsible for IE-isation of British Isles).

zardos said...

@Ani: The process didn't last for so long region by region, but for the whole of Iberia. That's like talking about all of America, when there were regions which were completely under European control and settled by Europeans in a short period of time. It doesn't matter how much time passed for the whole of Iberia, but for the regions which came under complete control by BB.
And there are plenty of historical examples were a people moved forward, at the expense of another, step by step, province after province and at the end, even if they needed centuries, they got it all and never lost their ethnic identity and animosity towards the opponent.

As for America, it too depends on the region, but I was talking about European settlement in which the newcomers brought their culture with them and no native males were allowed. We don't deal with a small elite controlling the local population in BB Iberia, we deal with a replacement. Some parts of Latin America were really just colonies, without full scale migration and colonisation by Europeans. Those are not what I'm talking about.

Drago said...

The notion of ItaloCeltic is rather problematic, as many linguists point to Celtic's affinities to eastern languages like Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, even Greek (e.g./ Schmidt, Isaacs), which makes sense given that they were the vectors of spreading chariots which only emerge in western Europe late in prehistory.
The other aspect is the prevalance of hg I2 in Urnfield samples from Germany (e.g. Lichtenstein cave), the I2a1 in the Celtiberian, all poiting back to the heterogeneous Unetice culture in central /Alpine Europe, which incorporated R1-M417 and R1b-U152 also.
The post-BB communities in northwest Europe might have utlizied their kindred connections with those further east, and eventually become Celticized.

Davidski said...

I remember someone posting here a few months ago asking if maybe Robert Drews was right about a very late Indo-Europeanization of Western Europe associated with the spread of the horse chariot complex.

We sort of laughed it off at the time. But it doesn't look so funny now, after the Iberian paper.

https://www.amazon.com/Militarism-Indo-Europeanizing-Europe-Robert-Drews/dp/1138282723

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

Here is something unrelated to the topic but somewhat interesting nonetheless. A 2018 study published Y DNA frequencies found in the U.K. Biobank databsae.

n = 211,033

That dwarfs any modern regional y-dna study done, especially on the U.K. Sadly they didn't report downstream SNPs or identify subregional frequency variation.

R1 = 71.06% of the U.K. population
I1 = 12 %
I2 = 7.6 %
E1 = 4.4%
J (xJ1) = 1.9%
G2 = 1.9%

Here is a screenshot of the table: https://i.imgur.com/Svt2scn.png

Link to the study: https://lra.le.ac.uk/bitstream/2381/43219/1/2018PORISWANISHNPhD.pdf


Ric Hern said...

And when precisely did chariots arrive in Ireland ? 500 AD...

Davidski said...

@Ric

No idea when chariots got to Ireland exactly, but 500 AD sounds too late. The Celts in Britain fought the Romans with chariots earlier than that.

MOCKBA said...

It seems like linguists consider Koch's idea about mutual influences of Celtic and Vasconic with bemusement. Koch dwells on similarities in consonant phonetics (and bypasses the fact that vowel systems are extremely different between the two). But beyond that, the list of potentially borrowed words is small and questionable; grammatically, ergative and verb-final Basque is very different from verb-initial, nominative-accusative Celtic languages such as Old Irish or Middle Welsh; Basque nouns are gender-less while classic Celtic languages keep the old IE system of 3 genders...
http://languagehat.com/how-basque-has-survived/#comment-3581813

Synome said...

Chariot burials are absent in western Europe until well into the Iron Age. Do we really want to say that IE arrived with chariot burials circa 400 BCE in Britain, and 8th century BCE in Halstatt C in Germany?

The earliest chariot burials are found in Sintashta, where spoke wheeled chariots were probably invented. And they were found in Bronze Age China and India. While the wooden parts of chariots decay quickly, metallic horse harnesses and wheel covers last. They are good evidence for the presence of chariots.

For that and other reasons, I don't find Drews' theory very convincing.

Davidski said...

@Synome

I'm not familiar with Drews' theory. I never paid much attention to it until it was mentioned in the comments here.

But I was suggesting that Celtic languages may have spread into Northwestern Europe along with chariot warfare, which may or may not line up with Drews' theory. In any case, this doesn't preclude other, unattested Indo-European languages from being present there earlier.

Andrzejewski said...

@Davidski "Some of this gene flow may have been associated with the arrival of Celtic culture and languages in Britain and Ireland."

Don't forget the Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans...

Davidski said...

I don't see how Anglo-Saxons and Vikings are relevant to Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Britain.

This is even before the Romans get there.

Andrzejewski said...

British newspapers are "slandering" our PIE ancestors:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8754910/horse-riding-yamnaya-tribe-most-violent/

Andrzejewski said...

Seems that either Reich got his conclusions wrong again (or is it the Sun editor?)

"Their research showed that 7,000-8,000 years ago, a closely related group of early farmers moved into Europe from the Near East."

Nope. Neolithic farmers were a distinct population, both vis-a-vis WHG and vis-a-vis our Steppe Kurgan ancestors.

FrankN said...

@Zardos:
Thanks for pointing me to the Humanejos halberd - I had overlooked that one. However, your 2500 BC date is too early. The burial has supplied two AMS dates: 2482-2295 BCE for the senior male, and 2345-2136 BCE for the female (I6585).
https://www.academia.edu/22743601/Bell_Beaker_funerary_copper_objects_from_the_center_of_the_Iberian_Peninsula_in_the_context_of_the_Atlantic_connections

While the halberd is usually assumed to have belonged to the male, females buried with halberds are not uncommon in the Argaric culture (one of the reasons it is often assumed to have been matriarchic). It also cannot be excluded that it was only deposited during the grave's reopening for the female burial.

Moreover, the groundwater in and around Madrid stems from carbonised soils and is extremely hard (https://artedemadrid.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/the-fuente-del-berro-madrid.pdf).
For SE Ukraine, such hard groundwater has been demonstrated to result in AMS dates of human and animal bones some 200-300 years older than short-lived (pollen, leaves etc.) material from the corresponding layer. As such, the halberd is unlikely to date before 2.350 BC, and a prudent dating would rather place it towards the beginning of the EBA.

Acc. to Horn 2014, the earliest Iberian halberds stem from Los Millares (grave 57) and Alcalar (Algarve) tholoi 3. They can be paralleled to a stone halberd from La Pijotilla, Bajadoz (2862-2625 cal. BC), and suggest arrival of that form, possibly from Italy/ Sardinia, during the 27th cBC. Horn also draws attention to parallels between N. Italian and Galizian/ N. Portuguese petroglyphs, including - but not restricted to - halberd depictions. However, while the Italian petroglyphs can be linked to Remedello, the dating of the Iberian petroglyphs is uncertain. Horn furthermore lists an undated halberd from Girona that is typologically similar to the early halberds from the Carpathian basin (3,500-3,000 BC).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262116194_Studien_zu_den_europaischen_Stabdolchen

Lull e.a. (FN 17) challenge Horn's assignment: "Given that copper metallurgy starts in Ireland around 2500 BCE it is impossible to place the production of metal halberds before this date in its main Atlantic distribution area." Apparently, they implicitly assume innovation flow from Ireland to Iberia.
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2024/IberCrono_12.pdf

Needham 2015 relates the original impulse that lead to the development of Irish halberds to Remedello/ Rinaldone, more specifically Horn's type 14a/b. From Italy via France and Britain to Ireland, he sketches a "thin typological thread connecting early halberds across western Europe. Note, this need not be the only thread.(Fig. 29)"
http://orca.cf.ac.uk/114828/1/hafted_halberd_excavated_at_trecastell_powys_from_undercurrent_to_uptake_the_emergence_and_contextualisation_of_halberds_in_wales_and_northwest_europe.pdf

However, Horn's type 14a/b also includes the a/m early halberds from Los Millares, Alcalar and La Pijotilla. Essentially the halberd issue is connected to the question from where Irish copper mining was initiated – W. Iberia or the NW Alps ? For clarification, we will probably need more aDNA from Ireland and France.

In any case, even for their occasional appearance in BB contexts as Humanejos, halberds essentially represent pre-Steppe CA symbolism, and their re-surgence in El Argar and Unetice is difficult to consolidate with a genocidal scenario.

BTW: RISE431 (Leki Male, PL) seems to represent the earliest (proto-)Unetice halberd burial. Might be interesting to compare him with Agraric aDNA...

Davidski said...

LOL

That Sun article was hilarious. Like some sort of parody.

Andrzejewski said...

Other newspapers stated that Yamnaya "came from the Caucasus" or that "Bell Beaker originated in Iberia". I wonder who the science editors of these newspapers are. At least one newspaper referred to it as the "European Steppe" instead of claiming that our ancestors came from Central Asia.

ANI EXCAVATOR said...

@ zardos

Its just a pure assumption/speculation that the process "lasted a short time by region". If you want to say this, you got to show a pattern in the radiocarbon dates, the locations, and the ancestry. Is there such a pattern? You should assemble the sites, dates and ancestries and report back.

Taking a quick look at the tables, steppe ancestry appears rapidly in all regions of Iberia, but there's still a person of unadmixed neolithic ancestry in Central Iberia down till ~2100 BC (I3485), and from other papers as seen from Fig 2B till 1900BC, approximately six hundred years after the first appearance of steppe ancestry here (and its a male also, though we don't know their location in Iberia).

Reich's interpretation is that of coexistence, then convulsive admixture at ~2000 BC. The abrupt homogenization of Steppe ancestry levels at around 25% (where did the extra EEF come from?), coinciding with the disappearance of the local Y, probably plays a role in his interpretation.

More importantly, the replacement in Iberia is only complete after the transition from the copper to the bronze age. There is no evidence that the disappearance of local Y-chromosomes ~2100BC is a repetition of the same process as that which introduced Bell Beaker ancestry half a millennium earlier, i.e. a massacre repeated in the same way for 16 generations straight--for one thing, the cultures that were doing the expanding were very different by that time already.

Andrzejewski said...

I'm still baffled how come in Iberia there was an almost annihilation of just the male line while in Britain it was a full blown extermination, not a sex biased one.

Ric Hern said...

@ Andrzejewski

Maybe the Steppe people got xenophobic towards people with the Plague in Britain ?

FrankN said...

@ ANI EXCAVATOR:
"if you ask multiple linguists for Celtic, you will find the opinion that there is simply no good evidence for extensive non-IE influence in Celtic"
Oops.. Have a look at P. Shrijver's publications - one of the most reknowned European lecturers on Celtic. For a start, take his 2015 paper
http://compsoc.nuigalway.ie/~dubhthach/DNA/Pruners_and_trainers_of_the_Celtic_famil.pdf
He describes the evolution of Celtic as "a series of shocks caused by contact with non-Celtic languages":

1. ca. 1000 BC: Development of Celtic out of Italo-Celtic by language contact with Basque/Iberian (e.g. loss of "p", which Iberian equally lacks). [In parallel, Italic also underwent specific sound changes such as PIE "bh"->"f", "gh"->"(c)h" that are commonly attributed to Etruscan, which lacked the "b" and "g" sounds.]

2. prior to 500 BC: Split into S. Celtic (Lepontic, Celtiberian) and N. Celtic (Gaulish, Insular Celtic). The latter absorbed an adstrate that gave rise to the so-called "verbal complex" - up to 12 markers (in OldIrish) clustered around a verb. I can't follow his Old Irish examples, but feel reminded of French constructions such as "il n'y en a pas du tout" ("there isn't", lit: "it not there in has little at all"). Shrijver parallels these constructions to Minoan and Hattic, and speculates about them representing EEF adstrate.

3. prior to the 1st cAD: Development of Insular Celtic, a/o by language contact with a so-called "Language of Geminates". This "Language of Geminates" has also left its traces on NW Germanic and Saami and seems to represent some Nordic HG language (Pitted Ware?). One of the English borrowings from this language is "cunt".

Shrijver provides further detail on the "Language of Geminates" in https://www.academia.edu/38396354/Lost_languages_in_northern_Europe.pdf
Note, btw, that in the a/m article he classifies the "Old European Hydronomy" as Pre-IE.

Otherwise, there is Matasovic "The substratum in Insular Celtic" exploring a/o Afro-Asiatic, and especially W. African influence on Celtic, and presenting multiple evidence of a non-IE substratum in (Insular) Celtic, the origin(s) of which remain unclear.
www.jolr.ru/files/(101)jlr2012-8(160-164).pdf

Matt said...

@FrankN & @Sam Andrews: In, Iberia there's little or no DNA data from between 2300bc and 1500bc.

Few graphics to try and contextualize info on the time distribution of samples a bit: https://imgur.com/a/YJy6v4R

That's fairly reasonable if hyperbolic.

I think we'd still benefit from better qpAdm modelling of steppe ancestry proportions in *all* the transitional CA-BA samples we have though, rather than the Olalde 2019 approach of only modelling steppe ancestry in CA samples that meet some particular threshold, as I suspect it misses the low threshold.

The X chromosome work they do suggests that a 25% male line contribution from pre-BA Iberians is plausible, and some slightly different cultural contact scenarios would be possible if the scenario was more like 75:25 Steppe:Iberian on the male side, with strong founder effects within incoming R1b over the whole population distorting this in later samples.

Matt said...

@Romulus, nice, thanks for that link, I'd wondered if anyone had used population scale data to estimate y haplo frequencies yet.

Surprising that R1b+R1a (R1) is at 71.06% only, then I1 at 12% and I2 at 7.6%.

Looking at the Poznik 2016 ref based on 1000 Genomes - but only 46 male British samples! - the estimate is R1 at 84%, I1 13%, I2 only 2%, and of course easy to get slight inflations or deflations in low sample sizes (in this samples size if you just happen to get 1 I2 male rather than 2-3, and of course it's impossible to hit the true frequency exactly as that needs "Two and a Half Men"). (Relevant figures: https://imgur.com/a/YhaQy45, from "Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences" - https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3559#supplementary-information)

(I wonder how much of that I2 in UK Biobank is Isles / NW Europe subtypes of course...)

Shows the importance of large scale sample sizes to estimate population frequencies properly. Those are more ideal than hobbyists who not to dismiss them seem to be pulling together different sources, self selected populations etc. Not sure how consistent / inconsistent the UK Biobank work is with samples between these two, e.g. 1000 male samples from a pop or something?

Davidski said...

@Matt

Iberia_BA is modeled in the paper as Iberia_CA/Iberia_CA_Stp 40/60.

So I don't know if a figure of 25% admixture from outside Iberia is actually plausible, even if the numbers work.

That's because you'd need Iberia_CA_Stp to already have a lot of local Iberian ancestry, but the chances of this are slim in my opinion. I think it's more likely that Iberia_CA_Stp was basically a population of unadmixed Beakers from somewhere north of the Pyrenees.

If so, then the genome-wide replacement in Iberia from the Copper Age to the Bronze Age may have been well over 50%.

Matt said...

@Davidski, I don't really understand. Your comment is:
I don't know if a figure of 25% admixture from outside Iberia is actually plausible, even if the numbers work.

Mine is:
The X chromosome work they do suggests that a 25% male line contribution from pre-BA Iberians is plausible, and some slightly different cultural contact scenarios would be possible if the scenario was more like 75:25 Steppe:Iberian on the male side and close to 100% CA Iberian on female side.

So I'm confused who is talking about "25% admixture from outside Iberia"?

Drago said...

@ Davidski
'' I think it's more likely that Iberia_CA_Stp was basically a population of unadmixed Beakers from somewhere north of the Pyrenees. ''

All those males are very similar - falling c. 25- 2000 BC, being R1b-L51, + steppe ancestry, daggers, Beaker ware, etc). Theyre from a circle in north Iberia - Asturias, Burgos, ..
Judjing from the archaeological sequence, they had arrived further south by 2400 BC, and the main shift had happened c. 2200 BC.

Matt said...

Re; time distribution of samples, of course, and gaps where it implied there is change, this issue is worse in the British dataset, where you have about 3 samples between 2800-2400, two of which are from Orkney (where Megalithic Neolithic and agriculture traditions are noted to persist best and latest) and one is a low SNPs femur from England.

(British N with late dates -

I5374 - snps 39969, male (HG CT) - 2830–2460 calBCE (Cheddar, Somerset, England)
I2630 - snps 932048, male (I2a1b1) - 2580–2463 calBCE (Orkney)
I2932 - snps 786582, male (I2a1b) - 2570–2347 calBCE (Orkney)
(See - https://imgur.com/a/R7IUUhc) )

So there are really no useful samples from the parts of Britain most likely to be interacting with (and potentially admixing with) Beaker groups from continental Europe (in Eastern England and Eastern Scotland), in the likely early time frame any interaction could happen 2800-2400 BCE.

The earliest samples in England following this timeframe are then the 'Boscombe Bowmen', incl. I2416 / Grave 25004 ("among the British individuals dated to after 2450 calBCE in our dataset, the skeleton from burial 25004 has the lowest amount of steppe-related ancestry") and I2417* (who has the highest, about 20% above the average of the later, largely at the turn of 2000BCE BK_Netherlands group) in a type of burial that is unique to the site and generally difficult to parallel in Wessex and Britain as a whole). Along with some females from the same area and the Amesbury Archer "companion".

I'm hoping Lara Cassidy's paper on the Irish transition is lucky to get some more samples in the relevant time ranges for Ireland, though not exactly holding my breath (part of the issue being cremation, as I understand it, and the Isles wide general population decline in this era prior to late Beaker / post-Beaker era resurgence in population size).

*You can discern I2416 on Reich's figure above, but I2417 is annoying non-discernable because for whatever reason the fig seems to ceiling above 100, but clearly well short of I2417's 118% "eastern ancestry".

Richard Rocca said...

Davidski said...It seems that there was more or less continuous gene flow from the south into Britain and Ireland after the Beaker period, because all British and Irish populations are shifted closer to continental Western European populations compared to British Beakers and Ireland_EBA.

Some of this gene flow may have been associated with the arrival of Celtic culture and languages in Britain and Ireland. It might be possible to work this out with many more ancient samples from Iron Age Britain and continental Europe.


Looks like subtle gene flow from the continent and not some mass migration, especially when one considers that all of the populations you used, in the grand scheme of things, all are closely related and originate from the same population. Either way, it looks like the subtle gene flow is one IE speaking population (P-Celtic) augmenting an already existing and more archaic IE speaking population (Q-Celtic), and not some drastic Basque to Celtic shift as some are hoping.

Gaska said...

I see that many people still think of violent conquests, nothing is further from the archaeological reality of Iberian sites. Now that the president of Mexico has asked by letter to the King of Spain that we apologize for the conquest, perhaps we should ask the Bbs to apologize for exterminating the Iberian natives. The truth is that as genocide we Spaniards have never had great success, because 95% of the Mexican population is indigenous or mestizo. 500 years ago Hernán Cortés entered Tenochtitlan and the Mexicans continue to blame us for their misfortunes.

The reality of the relationship between Ireland and Iberia is so obvious, that nobody who knows a bit of genetics can argue. Nor do archaeologists do it.

Cassidy-"The Mesolithic population shares high genetic drift with contemporaries from France and Luxembourg and shows evidence of a severe inbreeding bottleneck, apparent through runs of homozygosity (ROH). Substantial contributions from both Mediterranean farming groups and northwestern hunter-gatherers are evident in the Neolithic Irish population" "Haplotypic affinities and distributions of steppe-related introgression among samples suggest a potentially bimodal introduction of Beaker culture to the island from both Atlantic and Northern European sources, with southwestern individuals showing inflated levels of Neolithic ancestry relative to individualised burials from the north and east"

Fitzpatrick-Amesbury Archer (2.380-2.290 BC). In general the typological similarities of the objects in his grave are with Western, not central Europe. 2 knives could be from northern Spain, the third from western France. Although the style of the gold ornaments is British, it may have Iberian origins or represent a fusion of Iberian and central European styles- The gold they are made from, may also be continental European.

Fiztpatrick-Ireland- "Deehomed ornament, earliest gold object from Ireland, recent analyses confirm that the ornament is not of Irish gold and as its best parallel is from Estremoz (Evora, Portugal), it is probably an import"


On the Ocean: The Mediterranean an the Atlantic from the Prehistory to AD 1.500- Barry Cunliffe- In the west, copper was first began to be produced in significant quantity in Iberia towards the end of the IV Millenium BC, and from there the technology spread along the metal rich Atlantic façade reaching the south west of Ireland about 2.400 BC and western Britain at the end of the III Millenium. The earliest copper extracted from the Ross Osland mines in Ireland had a high arsenic content, which gave the metal a hardness that pure copper lacked.

The BB migrations are also an evidence, the repetition of the decoration models in the different European regions, means that people moved with the pottery. We had the doubt if only the women moved, now we have the demonstration that men did too - Sicily. The best explanation is the establishment of factories or small colonies in the more distant regions dedicated to the trade of exotic materials, and migrations of small family groups following the course of the rivers in both directions (north and south of the Pyrenees), all those that they continue thinking about invasions and conquests sooner or later will also have to rectify.


Drago said...

Someone mentioned Schriver above
He seems to think that non-IE was spken Ireland until quite late

https://www.academia.edu/38390147/More_on_Non-Indo-European_surviving_in_Ireland_in_the_first_millennium_AD

Hard to say with linguistic suppositions; but small scale elite- movements can probably have big effects in such places

Davidski said...

@Richard

Either way, it looks like the subtle gene flow is one IE speaking population (P-Celtic) augmenting an already existing and more archaic IE speaking population (Q-Celtic), and not some drastic Basque to Celtic shift as some are hoping.

I'm not in a position to discuss anything about P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, but keep in mind that Basques, Iberians and Tartessians aren't very different from Celtiberians and modern Western European Indo-European speakers, so we're dealing here with subtle gene flows regardless of the linguistic relationships involved.

But in any case, I think that the early Celtic expansion will be fairly easy to track when there is a comprehensive database available of attested ancient Celtic- and non-Celtic-speaking samples from across space and time in Western Europe.

Ric Hern said...

My problem with the time of split between P and Q-Celtic is that written Language is not always spoken Language. A group of people can speak a totally different language for hundreds of years while praying and writing in another....

Ric Hern said...

Adding to my previous comment. E.g. The use of Sanskrit...

Xaver said...

Hallstatt surely was an Indoeuropaen culture, Tarim basin mummies as old as 4.000 years wore the same textiles, plaid woolen designs, reminding of Scottish kilts, found in Hallstadt salt mines dating to roughly the same time and even earlier.

The Mummies of Ürümchi
by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Ric Hern said...

If it is difficult to see Geneflow between Northwestern Europe and the Isles during the Bronze Age, wouldn't the same maybe count for MtDNA Geneflow between France and the Iberian Peninsula during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages ? In other words a Maternal Replacement from France to the Iberian Peninsula could be difficult to distinguish....

olga said...


Among all the plagues mentioned, I can add one that may have consequences on the fertility of men That is "Mumps"
Especially I imagine in populations, that have never been in touched with the virus, and are debilitated because of famine, weather changes and war.
Foreign men probably were immunized against this disease in the Bronze age, and Iberian were not.

Ric Hern said...

If R1b on the Steppe were not Indo-European, then how do we explain the Centum Languages ? All due to Urnfield even in the Helenes, Hittites and Tocharians ?

Ric Hern said...

@ olga

Yes there are some diseases that cause infertility but famine also can cause a reduction in fertility. And people do not even need to look at fertility alone. Just something that could have impaired the sex drive. Lack of libido...

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