Armenian Mycenaeans_&_Empuries2 0.233±0.041 Kura-Araxes_Kaps 0.767±0.041 chisq 18.422 tail prob 0.142151 Full output Georgian Globular_Amphora 0.071±0.025 Kura-Araxes_Kaps 0.929±0.025 chisq 18.419 tail prob 0.142266 Full outputAt the most basic level, the results suggest that both Armenians and Georgians are overwhelmingly derived from populations of Bronze Age Transcaucasia associated with the Kura-Araxes archeological culture, albeit with minor ancestries from somewhat different sources from the west. As far as I can see, when using more than 400K SNPs and a wide range and large number of outgroups (or right pops), neither Armenians nor Georgians can pass perfectly for any one ancient population in my dataset. The best proxies for the minor but significant western ancestry in Armenians are Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age Aegean region and Greek colonists from Iron Age Iberia (Empuries2). Obviously, and perhaps importantly, these are both attested Indo-European-speaking groups. On the other hand, the very minor western ancestry in Georgians is best characterized as gene flow from Middle to Late Neolithic European farmers rich in indigenous European forager ancestry. It's practically impossible to say what language or languages these farmers spoke. How about something Kartvelian? In any case, for me, the perplexing thing about present-day Armenians is that they harbor very little steppe ancestry. By and large, no more than a few per cent. Compare that to the currently available samples from what is now Armenia dating to the Middle to Late Bronze Age, which show ratios of steppe ancestry of up to 25%. For now, I'm guessing that what we're dealing with here is the classic bounce back of older ancestry layers that has been documented for different parts and periods of prehistoric Europe. See also... Early chariot drivers of Transcaucasia came from... Catacomb > Armenia_MLBA Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...
Friday, April 12, 2019
Armenians vs Georgians
Armenians and Georgians are ethnic groups that live side by side in the south Caucasus, or Transcaucasia. By all accounts, they've both been there since prehistoric times and they're very similar in terms of overall genetic structure.
However, they speak languages from totally unrelated families: Indo-European and Kartvelian, respectively. How did this happen and might the answer lie in the small genetic differences that do exist between them?
To investigate this issue, I ran a series of qpAdm formal mixture models of present-day Armenians and Georgians using tens of ancient reference populations. To come up with as straightforward and meaningful results as possible, I constrained myself to two-way models. I then discarded the runs that produced "tail probs" under 0.1 and retained less than 400K SNPs. Only a handful of models passed muster, including these two:
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«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 293 of 293capra internetensis said...Primrose 2, 3790-3660 cal BC, female - was that the one people were looking at?
That's the one. I had written on my first post about it that it was likely a female due to its low Y-DNA to total DNA ratio. Good to see they confirmed it.
"Apparently the words for clover in Celtic, Germanic and Georgian all come from the same, presumably Kartvelian source."
iirc clover is often (usually?) grown as animal fodder (which may or may not be relevant)
#
JuanRivera said...
"It is me or do CSID (Congenital Sucrase-Isomaltase Deficiency) rates show a correlation with levels of ANE ancestry?"
not adapted to eating fruit - would make sense if so.
#
Andrzejewski said...
"Which should only corroborate that WHG ratio should increase instead of decrease from CWC as we move North and West into territories where foragers are strongest and famers weakest. But it apparently didn't turn out that way, did it?"
speculating but
if farmers couldn't expand into wetlands (e.g. Ertobolle/Baltic) leading to a border and a hybrid population in the wetlands region that was more equally balanced between farmer and HG with a mixed HG/farming culture i could imagine them surviving better in times of crop disaster.
if that hybrid population was say 50/50 farmer/hg and expanded east due to some farmer calamity or other then i'd imagine the hg part could get diluted as they moved east and if a resulting 40% HG, 60% farmer person descended originally from around Ertobolle/Baltic eventually married a steppe person you might get 20% hg, 30% eef, 50% steppe mix.
(or alternately a hg/farmer mix from the west and a steppe/farmer mix from the east both expanding due to some farming calamity)
I'd say its much less about calamities than success stories, with the HG lineage derived, more pastoralist groups having higher reproductive rates and having an military edge the same time.
Crop farming was no success story in the North and HGs were more numerous and competitive than further South.
It would be very interesting to see how similar the modern Vainakh are to the Kura-Araxes people. The origins of the Vainakh are one of the most mysterious among modern relatively large Caucasian nations. On a genetic level, it seems that at least parts of Eastern Georgia were populated by Vainakh tribes, Tsanars were almost possibly a Vainakh group. Amjad Jaimoukha, a Circassian historian also considered it possible that the so called Her, or Ersh people were also a Nakh people, and the city of Yerevan's older name, Erebuni, was connected to them (meaning house of Ers in modern Chechnyan). Jaimoukha also thought that the Dvals, so-called modern South Ossetians, were also a Nakh people, but genetic studies showed that South Ossetians are closer to other Georgians than to any North Caucasian people. But then there are the Malkh people who are thought to have lived in modern North Ossetia, so it is quite strange.
The view that Tsanars and Dvals were not Georgians might largely exist due to the fact that these regions were Christianized relatively lately, and the historians of the crown might have viewed them as a different people specifically because of their faith. In any case, I would be very curious about the similarity between Kura-Araxes and Chechens.
http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/ossetians.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakh_languages
There were also two Armenian historians whose names I sadly do not remember, who were saying how Northern Armenia used to be inhabited by a people whose language was very strange. These people probably were not Georgians, as Georgians were well-known to Armenians.
Hey, did you read that?
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/study-aegean-farmers-replaced-hunters-ancient-britain-62406652
Also, "Whereas Britain's outgoing hunter-gatherers — including the oldest known Briton, "Cheddar Man" — likely had blue or green eyes and dark or even black skin, the farming populations migrating across Europe are believed to have had brown eyes and dark to intermediate skin."
So, I guess light skin originated with Yamnaya Steppe Kurgan IE groups? Or was it due to a process of natural selection?
@Knowledgeable Geneticist
There were also two Armenian historians whose names I sadly do not remember, who were saying how Northern Armenia used to be inhabited by a people whose language was very strange. These people probably were not Georgians, as Georgians were well-known to Armenians.
This is like hearsay on multiple levels.
Well now that I2 came under projectors let's see what we have.
While ago Maciamo on his website made a claim that one of Unetice samples is positive for I2c2 (officially it is a I2c )
I0116 I2c2 W3a1 Esperstedt, Germany 2050 BCE
My friend Karen from Molgen checked it and confirmed that the Unetice guy is I2c2. ( Do not confuse it with another Unetician who is I2c1)
Thanks to OpenGenomes we also learn that a sample from elite burial in Lchashen-Metsamor culture (Armenia LBA-IA) is also I2c2. In Reich's spreadsheet it is just I.
I2c2 has a young coalescence age. Something like 4000 years. It is today mostly popular in South Caucasus. The highest level in the world is among Gardman Armenians. ( 9% )
There is little doubt that this I2c2 comes from EEF background. Highest concentration I2c was found among Hungarian farmers. (Lengyel, Protoboleraz, ALPc etc ). Also one case was found in Barcin.
The presence of I2c2 in Unetice favours the idea that at some point he joined Steppe groups and moved with them in various directions having a success story in South Caucasus.
One of the most important unknowns about the migrations to Armenia from Steppe is the question was it just a one time event from Catacomb. Or there was a second migration later. This I2c2 increases the chances that there was a second migration. This second migration could be from Multicordon ware / Srubna interaction period in Steppe or could come from a source more deeper in Europe. In most likelhood this migration was a mix of various haplotypes R1b, and E-V13 included. One of highest levels of E-V13 in West Asia is found in Urmia bassein region.
Dragos
Did I say I2c is from Steppe? Read once more. I2c-s highest concentration is in Hungaryan neolithic.
But I was speaking about I2c2. How it came out to be present both in Unetice and Armenia. Lchashen starts at 1500Bc. I2c2 is dated at 1200BC. If You propose a migration via Anatolia at this date I have no problem to accept it. But for such a migration tgere is a problem. The Hittite empire's army.
@Dragos: Look at the geographical distribution of E-v13. There is a core area in SE Europe, but there is also a low level distribution throughout most of the steppe influenced world. Only the classic steppe markers have a more complete presence.
So some E-v13 guys must have hopped on the steppe train early on.
Sure, E -V13 might have expanded into Greece & Western Asia from the north. But calling this a steppe expansion is just funny.
Not sure about that. If they became part of the steppe expansion early on, those specific v13 lineages would have been spreaders of steppe genes and culture.
Its like I2 in Britain, which might be more extreme though. Because they might have been Mesolithic killers of the original Neolithic males, yet they spread Neolithic ancestry and culture to Britain.
Or another example being R1a Turkic nomads killing Indo-Europeans in Central Asia.
If a lineage switched sides and became a vector for a different set of genetic and cultural traits, you can hardly associate it in the given context with its very different ancestral population.
@Davidski
Once again, there was an Armenian historian who was saying that Northern Armenia used to be inhabited by a tribe of a strange people. Since I can't find that source, this will suffice.
"In Greek mythology, the Gargareans, or Gargarenses, (Greek: Γαργαρείς Gargareis) were an all-male tribe. They copulated with the Amazons annually in order to keep both tribes reproductive. Varying accounts suggest that they may have been kidnapped, raped, and murdered for this purpose, or that they may have had relations willingly. The Amazons kept the female children, raising them as warriors, and gave the males to the Gargareans.[1][2]
The Gargareans are held by some historians[3] to be a component of the ancestry of the Chechen and the Ingush peoples, and equivalent or at least related to the Georgian name Dzurdzuks.[4]
Strabo wrote that "... the Amazons live close to Gargarei, on the northern foothills of the Caucasus mountains". The Amazons were attributed to the Circassians via the root maze. Gaius Plinius Secundus also localizes Gargarei at North of the Caucasus, but calls them Gegar.[5] Some scholars (P.K. Uslar, K. Miller, N.F. Yakovleff, E.I. Krupnoff, L.A. Elnickiy, I.M. Diakonoff, V.N. Gemrakeli) supported that Gargarei is earlier for of Ingush ethnonym. Jaimoukha suggests that the myth might have been a nod to the similarity between Circassians and Durdzuks, despite their very different languages. The Ancient Greek chronicler Strabo mentioned that Gargareans had migrated from eastern Asia Minor (i.e. Urartu) to the North Caucasus.[6] Jaimoukha notes that Gargareans is one of many Nakh roots- gergara, meaning, in fact, "kindred" in proto-Nakh.[7] If this is the case, it would make Gargarei virtually equivalent to the Georgian term Dzurdzuk (referring to the lake Durdukka in the South Caucasus, where they are thought to have migrated from, as noted by Strabo, before intermixing with the local population) which applied to a Nakh people who migrated North across the mountains to settle in modern Ingushetia.
In addition to their importance to the ancestry of Chechens and Ingush, the Gargareans have also been considered possibly central to the formation of the Èrs, another historical (albeit now extinct) Nakh people living in Northern Armenia, Caucasian Albania and Hereti (the name Hereti is derived from them)."
@Davidski
Also, you said this "Apparently the words for clover in Celtic, Germanic and Georgian all come from the same, presumably Kartvelian source.".
Clover in Georgian is სამყურა, samk'ura, which literally means three-eared. I don't know the Celtic and Germanic equivalents.
@Knowledgeable Geneticist
See here...
http://loanwords.prehistoricmap.com/2018/09/20/clover/
@zardos "Not sure about that. If they became part of the steppe expansion early on, those specific v13 lineages would have been spreaders of steppe genes and culture.
Its like I2 in Britain, which might be more extreme though. Because they might have been Mesolithic killers of the original Neolithic males, yet they spread Neolithic ancestry and culture to Britain."
What are you talking about? I've just posted a link to a new article which claims that the original HG of Britain were completely wiped out by Neolithic Farmers 4000 BC. What exactly are you talking about?
@Davidski
Oh, definitely these are interesting, and I will add another important similarity, the word for "soul" in Georgian is sul-i, root being sul, which is quite similar to the English equivalent, but at the same time the PIE word for "soul" is quite different ("etmn", if my source doesn't lie). I don't know if this is a coincidence.
In regards to "clover" and other words spreading via Maykop, I doubt that for some reason. Kartvelian and PIE definitely have a common root, if we go back far enough, so I think it would be more realistic to assume that those similarities are just there because of a much older common language, because why would you adopt a word for "clover" or "earth" from a different ethnic and linguistic group? People in the past had no difficulty with coming up with new words, so there would be no necessity. What other scenario can there be?
@Knowledgeable Geneticist
I'm guessing you missed this part...
Rather, a transfer may have occurred along with some of the goat words that also appear to have unique ties between European languages and the Caucasus. The connection seems plausible, probably in the semantic sphere of agriculture rather than a natural term.
@zardos https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/study-aegean-farmers-replaced-hunters-ancient-britain-62406652
That's exactly the link I've just posted...
@Andrzejewski
That mainstream news article doesn't tell the whole story. It misses the crucial part where the so called Aegean farmers become Atlantic farmers, and in the process score a shitload of extra European hunter-gatherer ancestry including European Y-hg I2 lineages.
@Andre: That's the pattern I tried to point out. Mesolithic male lineages of I2 which annihilated the original farmer dynasties introduce Neolithic genes and culture to Britain.
This colonisation results in the extinction of the British HG population.
Male lineages which adapt well, expand, take foreign women and mix might produce a population in which not too much of their original genetic heritage, except their yDNA might be left.
And they might, equally successful, turn on their source population to eradicate it.
It happened over and over again.
The person who did the reconstruction of Cheddar Man should have their license removed. It looks like someone infected with a flesh eating virus!
Like with the previous Uralic language post the more and more likely explanations seem to be.
1) The tendency of linguists to try and stick to the classical tree model of Indo-European language development, which is nice and simple is subject to the conjunction fallacy and probably not valid.
2) Genetics and tracing rare alleles as definitive proof of a causative change in culture or language is quite clearly the result of issues like the "reverse gambler's fallacy". While not an exact fit to that model because there can be various effects like the founder effect etc...which make the process unlike the "fair coin"; The fact that YDNA from want group wasn't daughtered out or non-existent in modern populations and the rare ancient samples is statistically independent and the probability of it having been in the population in the past in any ratio
3) While it is awesome we can track some movement when we win the lottery and have both ancient and/or modern sources; it is becoming clear (to me) that both language and culture are most likely spread independent of lineage or at least are likely to do be.
While is remotely possible that there was a "bounce back of older ancestry layers", the inconsistency of steppe ancestry, and the entire Kurgan based hypothesis seem to be naive at best. Don't get me wrong, all ideas need to be examined, The probability of a tree like PIE model directly related to conquest is far less with the information we have seen.
There are an infinite number of explanations that would explain the Armenians and Georgians, the PIE tree model and the Kurgan based claims seem to be the only reason to tie these together.
Why not consider aspects like the Baltic Amber trade which is known to have been happening for thousands of years and may have explained monied Uralic speakers being closer to their markets in the Med as an explanation for monied elites being in the area as an example.
Please note I am making this statement out of respect, but it seems that you are starting down a similar path as the Anatolia model folks where results contradicting by the empirical record is ignored. The claim that PIE origins and genetic lineages form a conjunctive set seems to be false, or at least the naïve tree model is and this seems to be due to know typical human reasoning biases.
Sure the PIE homeland may be in the steppe and Middle to Late Bronze Age Armenians and Georgians may have had more steppe ancestry that washed out...but if one avoids the limitations of Bazian heuristics one should ask what evidence to you have that still stands that PIE spread with genetics as culture was proven to be an issue to this date.
The above posted link calls out how interconnected the 'Ansarve megalith' groups were: "These observations imply that the groups that erected and used the megalithic burial structures were stable and stratified, but probably not isolated farmer societies"
Which once again seems to contradict the Kurgan derived hypotheses as being related to distinct reasonable replacement, invasion, and/or language movements.
IMHO DNA will be far more useful for tracing ancient trade routes than languages, but I will be happy if someone proves me wrong.
Lol! xD The Indo-European clownery has reached a new level! Now Yamanaya are the bad guys, the most genocidal people of all time (words of Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden)! xD
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132230-200-story-of-most-murderous-people-of-all-time-revealed-in-ancient-dna/
Thoughts about this whole clownery?
@HAUMAVARGĀ,
"@All what do you think about these results? "
They make sense to me. Armenians & Georgians are similar because both share ancient Middle Eastern roots but they don't share recent ancestry. Armenian look more like an Iraq/Mesoptamia pop than a Caucasus pop.
@Andrzejewski
"So, I guess light skin originated with Yamnaya Steppe Kurgan IE groups? Or was it due to a process of natural selection? "
I think that these traits varied between different EEF-type groups.
In fact, Sam did a guest post here last summer explaining that traits like fair hair, lactase persistence, and possibly light skin seem to have originated with eastern farmer groups like GAC.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/06/guest-post-we-owe-many-of-our-genetic.html
@nyrikki
You're not making much sense there.
For one, Georgians don't speak an Indo-European language. So the lack of steppe ancestry in Georgians supports the steppe hypothesis.
Secondly, the western, Mycenaean-related admixture in Armenians supports the mainstream view based on the steppe hypothesis that the Armenian language arrived in the Caucasus from the Balkans after the Bronze Age.
Finally, you can't explain the large scale population movements from the steppes during the Bronze Age by claiming that these were expansions of trade routes. Obviously, these were folk migrations that replaced the native populations in varying degrees in many parts of Eurasia.
Early Farmers and HG in Europe may have involved a complex sex biased admixture process.
To explain, note, that they say:
To characterize the extent of sex-biased admixture between HGs and the individuals of the megalithic contexts, we assessed the affinity of all individuals buried in megaliths with sufficient genetic data, to an Early Neolithic farmer or a HG ancestry on the autosomes and the X chromosome using f4-statistics (SI Appendix, section S11.5). Higher levels of HG admixture on the autosomes than on the X chromosome implies a greater genetic contribution of male HGs than female HGs to these individuals, suggesting an HG male sex bias admixture.
We find that in general, megalith groups do not harbor higher levels of HG ancestry on the autosomes compared with on the X chromosome (SI Appendix, Table S7 and Dataset S1.6), but the Scottish_MN farmers of this study showed a tendency toward an HG male-sex biased admixture in the recent past. The Scandinavian (Ansarve and Gökhem) individuals displayed an HG admixture for both the autosomes and the X chromosome (SI Appendix, Table S7), suggesting a scenario of more recent admixture with HGs in northern Europe.
If you have a constant process of male HG->female EEF, you wouldn't't really get a balanced X:Auto ratio as you just get increasing accumulation of X:Auto ratio in favour of EEF.
But if you have the mixed pop, call it pop B, which is male HG->female EEF, turn around and mix with Pop B male->female HG, then you that moderates the ratio back down, because Pop B which provides less of the X relative to autosome is more EEF, even though their fathers were HG. Of course, the resulting population would still be HG on its Y chromosome.
Anyway, that's a simplified model, but you can appreciate how complex processes can mess around with X:A ratio, even if a male biased sex process seems to be the case from the Y.
This sort of thing may matter in Bronze Age and post-Bronze Age Europe as well, where we may end up finding that mixed steppe M:MN European F, turned around around and mixed with >steppe ancestry F, and this cancelled out some of the X:A autosomal ratios more than we might initially expect. Or not, if the sex bias admixture is still very clear in later population. Basically, they're going to have to run these ratios on a diverse range of populations to try and explore this though. It's possible the signs we see in the Y, we won't see in the X:A.
KnowGen, Dave: There are a couple more, quite intriguing Georgian-Germanic isoglosses:
- Georgian mtkveli "quail"
- Georgian wizi "to speak, understand" vs. "wise", Germ. wissen "to know".
Georgian lacks grammatical gender, and uses prefixed descriptors instead (c.f. English "he/she-goat"). One of these descriptors is khari "bull" (itself a.o. related to OEgypt. ka "bull"). Intriguing in this context is NGerm *karldyr "male animal". For the Proto-Germanic "k"->"h" sound shift, "Karl" [->Charles], as all Germanic words starting with "k", is a borrowing, and the *karldyr construction suggests a Georgian origin. The borrowing must post-date the Proto-Germanic "k"->"h" sound shift, and might as such either be attributed to Georgian-Gothic language contact, or to Alans (Ossetians) transferring some Georgian roots into Germanic.
This is in no way meant to rule out an earlier transmission of certain Kartvelian roots alongside "goat words", but the IA/ early medieval needs to also be considered.
Quick toy model to explain from last post about how you *could* get very little signal of male biased admixture on X:A ratio, despite total replacement of y lines with derived from HG: https://imgur.com/a/M0PngCA
(Again, not that it would necessarily have happened like this, or this did happen, just an example of how patterns of X:A ratio and Y chromosomal haplo could become detached.)
@Aram
Are there any good papers online about the Iron Age Lchashen site in Armenia? The Damgaard et al. supp info has almost nothing about this site and the samples.
W.r.t Middle Neolithic Europe, probably looking at scenarios similar to Matt's suggestions - male-biased HG admixture in extremeties of continent (France, north European plain), the further (? female biased) admixture in Isles & Scandinavia, resp.
Tracing the specific lineages is future taask to further help elucidate.
@ Zardos
''To say the replacement of the original Neolithic colonisators did happen throughout Europe randomly,with the same end result everywhere, is putting random behaviour and chance on a new and rather unlikely level.''
I did not say random, but admixture happened at different locales. This is definite (e.g. Iron Gates/ East Carpathian; Western France, north Germany).
@Bob Floy "I think that these traits varied between different EEF-type groups.
In fact, Sam did a guest post here last summer explaining that traits like fair hair, lactase persistence, and possibly light skin seem to have originated with eastern farmer groups like GAC."
GAC males are all I2a. So perhaps the trait came with the Ancient North Eurasian admix? After all, AG3 is the ancestor to Yamnaya's ANE both via its CHG component and through its EHG one.
Adding to the puzzle is the fact that GAC has lots of Ertebolle and SHG/Baltic HG which has some ANE itself.
But...you will never see anthropologists attribute fair hair to Steppe Kurganist groups post-WWII: it is not very Politically Correct...
@Andrzejewski
If you look at the genotype calls for the Afanasievo, Catacomb, Yamnaya and Poltavka, in other words Steppe_EMBA, samples, you'll see that almost all of them carry markers that are associated in modern Europeans with dark hair and brown eyes.
Markers associated with blond hair and light eyes become much more common on the steppe with the expansion of Sintashta and related groups from somewhere in the west, probably the contact zone between Globular Amphora and TRB farmers with steppe pastoralists, and that's probably not a coincidence, because these farmers appear to have been very light pigmented.
@Davidski "If you look at the genotype calls for the Afanasievo, Catacomb, Yamnaya and Poltavka, in other words Steppe_EMBA, samples, you'll see that almost all of them carry markers that are associated in modern Europeans with dark hair and brown eyes.
Markers associated with blond hair and light eyes become much more common on the steppe with the expansion of Sintashta and related groups from somewhere in the west, probably the contact zone between Globular Amphora and TRB farmers with steppe pastoralists, and that's probably not a coincidence, because these farmers appear to have been very light pigmented."
Then something is very lacking here. There is a sort of a missing link as after all most Southern Europeans possess a swarthy pigmentation, being it skin color, hair color, eye colors, etc. Therefore I am not sure if it's due to a later Levant admixture, some hidden WHG or related groups or completely because of a natural selection process.
Sardinian are close to 88% Anatolia_N and most of them don't look very much like most Poles or Swedes.
Now, going off on a tangent about EEF contributions, I am at a loss attempting to grasp the contribution of Cucuteni Tripolye to future Europeans: we know that this culture contributed genes to Ukraine_Eneolithic (Sredny Stog) and to Yamnaya, however the pertinent question to be asked should be the linkage between its mdDNA (and some autosomal DNA) and Proto-Balkan (Illyrians, Romanians, Thracians, Dacians, Albanians, etc). We talk a lot about the GAC's central role in CWC and BB but I wonder if other farmer complexes have had any real influence on modern Europeans' genetics.
@Andrzejewski
Then something is very lacking here. There is a sort of a missing link as after all most Southern Europeans possess a swarthy pigmentation, being it skin color, hair color, eye colors, etc.
GAC and TRB farmers weren't Southern Europeans, not for their time and not compared to modern populations.
They lived in Northern and Eastern Europe, and in PCA they cluster at the northern end of ancient European and Near Eastern farmer populations, and nowhere near most modern Southern Europeans.
I think the problem here is that, like with languages, you want to link the light pigmentation of Northern and Eastern Europeans to a source somewhere in Paleolithic Europe or Asia, but like with languages, that's not practical.
@Davidski "GAC and TRB farmers weren't Southern Europeans, not for their time and not compared to modern populations.
They lived in Northern and Eastern Europe, and in PCA they cluster at the northern end of ancient European and Near Eastern farmer populations, and nowhere near most modern Southern Europeans."
What I mean is that Southern Europeans are mostly Anatolia_N vis-a-vis Northern or Eastern Europeans. When Otzi's DNA was analyzed it was found closer to modern Sardinians on the PCA chart.
My assumption was as GAC and TRB were mostly Anatolia-derived farmers they must've clustered closer to modern Greeks or Italians. So perhaps there were other factors in play to differentiate Aegean based farmers in Southern Europe to the ones in Northern and Eastern ones. My conclusion then is in part because of a genetic drift.
But part of me thinks that TRB/GAC/LBK may be different than Southern Europeans because of increasing admixture with foragers. Problem here is that foragers were described as even relatively more darker pigmented than EEF; and also due to the strange fact that contrary to common sense - as farmer populations moved into newer pastures they should've increased WHG levels. Same should go to CWC and BB. In reality, on the other hand, WHG haplogroups (I2a, U5, etc) are very low today.
@Andrzejewski
GAC, TRB and other northern farmers were a new population that formed via admixture with various Western and North European foragers, genetic drift and natural/social selection.
So there's no reason to assume that their pigmentation traits should reflect some basic model of their ancestry such as 75% Anatolian farmer + 25% WHG.
You need to be more realistic with your assumptions and accept that there are many unknown/random factors at play, so you won't be able to work these things out just by looking at basic distal mixture models.
@Andrzejewski
From what we know at present, it looks like the fair hair&skin, light eyes, etc. that we see in modern Europeans emerged from the heavy intermingling between the EEF and WHG type populations in eastern Europe, just west of the steppe. Like David said, Yamnaya related groups do not seem to have carried these traits originally, so it dosen't make sense to think that they came with ANE. When I first started learning about this stuff, I too wanted things to be simple and direct, so I feel your pain, but it's just not the case.
It's definitely confusing, because the modern day European populations which are best known for having fair hair and skin also tend to have a high cut of ANE. But then you look at the Georgians, Kurds, Tajiks, etc., who have even more ANE than northern Europeans. Not a whole lot of fair hair/skin. So that should be your first hint that things are more complicated than that.
ComunistaComMuitoOrgulho said...
"Thoughts about this whole clownery?"
inevitable
if you want to troll them online for giggles i'd suggest agreeing but adding the Bantu expansion into the mix e.g.
"yes i agree with you the Aryan and Bantu expansions were the most genocidal events in world history"
that should generate some entertaining wriggling as they try to explain how one is different from the other.
@Bob Floy @Davidski I assume then that the question of whether the similarities between the Shulaveri, Dartveti Meshoko and Kura Araxes to Mesopotamian and Syrian (Halafian, Ubaidian) are because of demic or merely cultural transmission. We know that agriculture spread from the Fertile Crescent to Anatolia via cultural transmission but later into Europe with a demic one. If we ever find out or figure out genetic profile of various Mesolithic Mesopotamian and compare them to Mesolithic Caucasus then maybe we could ultimately resolve this nagging question regarding the so-called "Uruk Expansion" and its influence on culture/ethnogenesis of the Caucasus.
On the same vein we would probably never solve the enigma of linguistic affiliation amongst 3 indigenous Caucasus-based language families. Likewise, it will likely be rendered futile to attempt to relate the PIE with any living (or extinct) language family or language isolates because the chances we'll ever come across any documentation let alone be able to decipher it (read: Linear A) are very slim.
I am looking forward for the prospects of coming across verifiable Sumerian remains, test their DNA and unlock the mystery of their genetics and where they most likely originated.
@FrankN
If by wizi you mean vitsi, the word means "I know", not "to know". "To know" is tsodna, which is also the word for "knowledge". Georgian does have this characteristic that many verbs in infinitive are very different from the same verb in finite. For example, to drink is "sma" in infinitive, while "I am drinking" is "vsvam" and "I drank" is "movsvi". It is still possible that there are some ties with German, but it might also be a coincidence considering the nature of Georgian verbs.
@Knowledgeable Geneticist
"because why would you adopt a word for "clover" or "earth" from a different ethnic and linguistic group?"
If I'm correct Guus Kroonen investigated a agricultural non-IE substrate in Germanic, proposing that it was derived from the language of the pre-IE farmers. He mentions that one of these words also pops up in Caucasian languages. I think that doesn't necessarily mean that Neolithic farmers spoke Kartvelian, but some word roots may have been shared between Anatolian farmers and early Caucasians. In that case adopting the words "clover" (It actually is a word only found in Icelandic) and "earth" does make sense. Clover - or similar plants from the genus Trifolium - can be grown as fodder and the word earth originally could have meant soil (E.g.: It does so in nowadays Dutch) so these words could be part of a newly adopted way of feeding animals.
I've often wondered whether Sumerian might not have been related to whatever language(s) were spoken by the neolithic Anatolians. It also seems that, of all the possible relationships which have been suggested for Sumerian, the two least ridiculed are Caucasian languages and Basque. If one of the main neolithic farmer languages did expand into Mesopotamia, the Caucuses, and mainland Europe, that sure would tie up a lot of loose ends.
@FrankN
"as all Germanic words starting with "k", is a borrowing"
That is not true. This Germanic sound shift produces a "k".
PIE: *g > Proto-Germanic: k [k]
@EurDNA: "W.r.t Middle Neolithic Europe, probably looking at scenarios similar to Matt's suggestions - male-biased HG admixture in extremeties of continent (France, north European plain), the further (? female biased) admixture in Isles & Scandinavia, resp.
Tracing the specific lineages is future taask to further help elucidate."
That's a pretty reasonable suggestion and it certainly could've been like that, or phases of different complex sex biased admixture could've been playing out on a more local scale within continent. You still have populations like Blatterhohle Cave (in ceneral Europe) or the Ukrainian Neolithic / Narva (Eastern-NE Europe but mostly similar to WHG) about fairly late. BKG caught a couple of HG outliers (4300 BCE). I guess the main thing to me seems to be lack of X:A signal similar to the y-dna signal, and I'm a bit agnostic on what events could've led to that exactly.
(Also to clarify for anyone looking at my above posts and still baffled by my descriptions, a couple analogies:
1) For a kind of fantasy example: Say you have European males mix with Native American females, and give rise to a mixed population. Say you then about 500 years later have that population have purely male biased admix back with European females. You wouldn't see any sign of sex biased admixture in X:A in the final population (indeed a very small surplus of autosomal Native American ancestry would be present), and you might conclude from that no sex biased admix, but you'd see total Europe male y-dna. So the y-dna preserves the "initial event" and latest male layer, while the X:A can shows how the cumulative phases come together.
2) Take NE Europe - it looks likely the Baltic_BA population formed by male biased mixture of male Corded Ware with female HG (e.g. Baltic_BA all have CW type R1a). So you'd expect a signal of female biased HG on the X, assuming no sex bias admix in CW itself in opposite direction for HG. But if these groups then had male biased admix with Central European/SE European groups with less HG ancestry, that might end up being reversed...).
@ capra internetensis said...Primrose 2, 3790-3660 cal BC, female - was that the one people were looking at?
@Rocca That's the one. I had written on my first post about it that it was likely a female due to its low Y-DNA to total DNA ratio. Good to see they confirmed it.
It seemed clear that it could only be due to pollution (as happened with a sample in the cave of El Toro, Antequera), although the truth is that we still have not lost hope of finding R1b-M269/L51 in the Western European Neolithic (France and Italy mainly because they are two countries very little studied). Regarding Iberia I think the Neolithic has been studied enough and it seems impossible for us to find these haplogroups here. However, the most important thing is that even the guardians of the Kurganist orthodoxy have to admit that the steppe theory as it has been interpreted in the last three years has become increasingly inconsistent (the nervousness and sweats of my Kurganist friends only show that, even they fear that all their theory crumbles from one day to the next-In this case I must admit that Mr. Rocca has made public results that clearly harmed the theory of the steppes, so at least in this case has acted in a clean and honest way. I hope you rectify in some other appreciations that are clearly biased)
I will not repeat our arguments because they are sufficiently known, but it is obvious that we need many more analysis of the Iberian chalcolithic (3,000-2,000 BC), not only of BB sites (only 12 have been analyzed in Spain) but of the great chalcolithic cultures of Andalusia. Only then, we can more accurately determine the origin of P312, because the possibilities of this haplogroup speaking an IE language are now ZERO.
Regarding the last two published papers, it is important that they have demonstrated 1-The evident linkage of the Atlantic megalithic culture with the haplogroup I2a and 2-The female Iberian lineages are identical to those of the islands and also some of them appear in Sweden throughout the III millennium BC. Everyone should remember that I2a is also a mesolithic lineage in Western Europe including the British Isles, then a mix of Anatolian women farmers with Western hunter gatherers seems obvious (both men and women- Mit Haps H and U5b are the clear demonstration of what I am saying)
Regarding this last conversation it seems that there are still people who do not know what the difference between genotype and phenotype is. The obsession with the steppes is so ridiculous that not only the IE language has originated there, also the metallurgy, the haplogroup R1b, the domestication of the horse, and now even the clear skin of the Europeans. There is nothing more absurd than to think about this idiocy, we have talked enough about this many times, and it is clear that if some day the theory of steppes claims to be minimally credible the first thing you have to do is get rid of all those racists that intend to link the Yamnaya culture (or any other steppe culture) with the white race.
@Rocca-Of course the person who has done the reconstruction of the Cheddar man's face has not been especially lucky, he has only hit on the color of the skin, the eyes and the hair (You also have to remember that not all European HGs were swarthy). But for all those who think that it was R1b-P312 that introduced the clear skin on the islands and in the rest of Western Europe, I recommend that you read some interesting study on the phenotype of the Anatolian farmers (you may be surprised to see the results).
A hug for all the French friends who participate in this blog, we have felt a lot of what happened at Notre Dame, I am sure you will rebuild it quickly because it is a symbol of European culture.
HAUMAVARGĀ
Thanks for that model. The thing that I was saying is that modelling Armenians only with East-West populations is over-simplistic. Armenians do have some amount of ancestry from North-South cline which Your model just demonstrated.
Proportions are off-course not very realistic. But this is not important. The important thing is the possibility of such a model.
As for MBA_North Caucasus. It must be just a continuation of local Kura-Araxes (EBA). Genome wide it is similar to KA samples from South of Caucasus, just it harbours more CHG. Which makes sense because it was from Caucasian foothills. As for linguistics he might be related to Kura-Araxian languages imho.
I also want to add that the history of Armenian nation was very complex. And modern Armenians represents the situation of Middle Ages rather than the situation at 2500-3000 ago.
Modern Armenians do have some ancestry from Cilicia/South Anatolia which can easily screw the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Kingdom_of_Cilicia
That is why we need samples from ancient East Anatolia. I have little doubt that Arslantepe samples will change a lot the modelling of modern Armenians.
@All
In Reich's spreadsheet Motala2 is marked as I2c. So we know for sure that I2c was WHG/SHG marker before becoming a farmer. Also no single case of I2c was found in Steppe.
While the I2c found in Barcin do not have positive calls downstream of I2c. It just I2c*. negative for I2c2c
https://genetiker.wordpress.com/y-snp-calls-for-i0724/
Davidski
I/We asked one of archaeologists Ben Vardanyan who was also coauthor in Wang et al. paper he confirmed that the I2c2 was found from the tomb were numerous wagons and chariots were found. Chariots had a poor preservation. Chariots appear in Armenia only at LBA, after 1500BC.
Here You can see the wagons and the chariots sculpture. I will post other more academic type links also.
-----
http://www.armeniapast.com/prehistory/bronze-age/
The excavations at Lchashen, undertaken by the History Museum of Armenia and the Institute of Archaeology and led by archaeologist Harutian Nakatachien are not yet fully published, but among the discoveries were sumptuous wooden catafalque carts, with the ashes of the chiefs, unique examples of arms and armour, and highly artistic sculptures of animals. The burials were made in burial chambers, the walls of which were made of slabs weighing 2 to 5 tons. The ceilings were covered by logs supported by solid wooden columns, and the vaulted roof of huge slabs was placed thereon.
The most spectacular discoveries are were more than a dozen four-wheeled and two wheeled wagons, as well as two wheeled chariots with spoked wheels – evidence that at least as early as the Bronze Age chariots were being used in the Caucasus. ‘Battle scenes with chariots give notion of the Armenian armed troops of that period’ (Hakob, this is a quote from your book: do you have a photo of these scenes?)
Two of these carts are on display in the National Museum and make one of the more spectacular displays. One of the four-wheeled wagons was a covered cart with the semicircular roof made out of withies still preserved. At the time, Prof Stuart Piggott was fascinated and included them in his classic book on The Earliest Wheeled Transport
@Aram
North_Caucasus_MBA is related to Meshoko, not to Kura-Araxes, which never spread into that part of the Caucasus.
I can assure you that Armenians share a lot of ancestry with Kura-Araxes from Armenia, and not with any population from the North Caucasus.
"And remember that so far CWC is R1a and I2a, there is NO R1b, I do not think it is so difficult to understand"
FWIW, this is inaccurate.
Davidski
Off-course I know that Armenians do not have ancestry from the North Caucasus. Most haplotypes that moved to North Caucasus didn't move back to South any-more / except those from steppe /.
And Yes Armenians do have ancestry from KA. But how many samples we have from East Anatolia? Do You really expect that Kura-Araxian sample from Arslantepe or Van region will plot with KA-Kaps.
I don't think so.
I expect that KA from western Armenia will have much lower ration of CHG/ANF and maybe some of them will cluster very close to modern Armenians.
@All
The name Diucini (possible cognate of Greek Diogen-es) that I mentioned was the leader of those Lchashen-Metsamorians who were waging a war against the Urartu. Lchashen-Metsamor culture ends at 800-750BC when Urartian army crossed Araxes from South and invades their territory.
@Aram
Is there any information about the likely linguistic affinities of the Lchashen chariot/wagon drivers?
Indo-European? Early Armenian?
Aram said...
"Here You can see the wagons and the chariots sculpture. I will post other more academic type links also.
-----
http://www.armeniapast.com/prehistory/bronze-age/
"
loving that wagon - didn't know an actual example had survived
Regarding Y DNA I2 and I2c especially, it seems related to the Swiderian culture (as well as related to similar but more southernly cultures which also took part in the Paleolithic-Mesolithic transition). There were large influences on the Maglemosian for one thing (explaining that Swedish I2c), but also (and a lot of crazy people go crazy about this, but it's one of the few truths in what they say) it is highly possible - in other words, from what I've seen, there likely IS a connection but not necessarily direct - that the Swiderian or some other related group was responsible for Gobekli Tepe thus implying an Anatolian presence. This was the belief of Klaus Schmidt for one thing, and who else knew better than him.
It's my personal belief that Anatolia was mostly Y DNA I2 (and C1a2) before G2a groups moved in, probably from Syria or Iraq. The Anatolian HG paper suggested agriculture spread to Anatolia via trans-cultural diffusion as the Anatolian HGs were 80%+ similar to later Anatolian farmers but without the additional Iran-related ancestry (and also without a bit of Levantine related ancestry). However, it is just more likely that that 10-20% change came mostly from the arrival of G2a who spread farming in that direction via partial demic diffusion instead: Y DNA G2 after all definitely did not originate in Anatolia. It's also worth remembering that Levantine, Anatolian and Iranian ancestry in the meeting point of the Middle East between Turkey, Iran and Israel are all on a cline and that someone with intermediate admixture isn't necessarily a hybrid between two or more of the extremes. As such, it's probable that this mostly Iran but somewhat Levantine increase between Anatolian HGs and Anatolian farmers came from a population originating very roughly in the territory claimed by Rojava (i.e. between the Syrian Euphrates and Tigris).
One thing that interests me is that it does not seem that the Y DNA I2a1 farmers that spread e.g. across the Mediterranean, but also in my opinion perhaps as part of the later Dudesti "black and grey pottery invasion" wave into Europe (forming cultures like Vinca, Boian, Cucuteni-Trypillia etc.), were simply G2a Danubian farmers with the males replaced by recent European HGs. This leads me to actually suggest that some Y DNA I2a1 (not the entire subclade of course, but specific subclades therein) were farmers from Anatolia originating from the same stock as the Gobekli folk (as well as I2c of course, and we already have an I2c Anatolian farmer). I also speculate that this is what made some of those NW Asia Minor farmers light haired/eyed. Unlike WHGs in the West of Europe, WHGs in the East of Europe were light pigmented.
David, no love for our long lost Megalithic brothers and sisters with a dedicated thread?
@Big Momma There was no demic diffusion from Syria or Iraq. In any case, if there was one, it would've been a Pottery Culture (Levant_Mesolithic) associated with spread of Semitic languages. I'm still having a hard time deciding the rule of the "Uruk Expansion". Maybe it was a wrong source and the actual expansion into Caucasus was associated with Anatolia_N and Haplogroup G.
Anatolia_Epipaleolithic has some UHG component to it which may or may not be related to the Gravettian Culture and apparently it had links to both the Balkan and to contemporary Levant populations, as it formed a midpoint halfway point distinctly on the cline on the PCA chart.
@Big Momma "One thing that interests me is that it does not seem that the Y DNA I2a1 farmers that spread e.g. across the Mediterranean, but also in my opinion perhaps as part of the later Dudesti "black and grey pottery invasion" wave into Europe (forming cultures like Vinca, Boian, Cucuteni-Trypillia etc.), were simply G2a Danubian farmers with the males replaced by recent European HGs. This leads me to actually suggest that some Y DNA I2a1 (not the entire subclade of course, but specific subclades therein) were farmers from Anatolia originating from the same stock as the Gobekli folk (as well as I2c of course, and we already have an I2c Anatolian farmer). I also speculate that this is what made some of those NW Asia Minor farmers light haired/eyed. Unlike WHGs in the West of Europe, WHGs in the East of Europe were light pigmented."
I don't think so. I believe that lactose tolerance and absorption of Vitamin D played a role in lightening of the skin. It was a millenia long process. What fascinates me is the gradual doubling of mtDNA H of its various clades within population frequencies from 19% to 45%, and the reduction of other Anatolian farmer mtDNA N1, T, W and K1.
@Polish Andrew But, I mean, many Eastern WHGs in the aDNA literature show light pigmentation at least as old as Iron Gates (Lepenski Vir?). But this doesn't matter really.
I firmly believe (not for any tribalistic purpose, as I'm E-V13) that on the below map the blue and red arrow groups came from Anatolia and were I2 all along:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Neolithic_expansion.svg/1920px-Neolithic_expansion.svg.png
The red arrow group is the group that invaded the pioneering Danubian G2a cultures and brought with them the cultural package required for things like Vinca, Hamangia, Boian, Cucuteni-Trypillia etc. (all these groups have clear Anatolian relations, stemming from the presumably Anatolian group that migrated to Dudesti).
@Andrzejewski
"There was no demic diffusion from Syria or Iraq. In any case, if there was one, it would've been a Pottery Culture (Levant_Mesolithic) associated with spread of Semitic languages."
This really makes me wonder just how old you think the Semitic languages are? You assume it to be super old, but in reality probably no extant language family is that old. You can't talk about "Semitic languages" before 6000 years ago or so. Definitely not in the time of the Levant pottery Neolithic.
I would find it very peculiar if Lchashen people were IE speakers, considering they would be completely surrounded by Kartvelians, NEC speakers and Urartians. These people don't appear to be associated with Scythians either.
Gaska, I do not have a problem with envisioning some, or even all DF27 being Basque-speaking in Iberia from the Bell Beaker period onward. Like I mentioned to David, the difference in steppe ancestry seems to go up in both IE and non-IE Iberians during the Iron Age, with the differentiator being closeness to France more than it is to language family. We'll see how the narrative plays out when we have DNA from actual IE speakers like Lusitanians. I have little doubt that they will show less steppe ancestry than non-IE speakers from NE Iberia. If folks are proposing that Italo-Celtic originated in Central Europe and expanded from there with Urnfield/Hallstatt/La Tene, then there has to be a lot of special pleading because those areas would have still been rich in DF27's brother clade U152, which is really the only clade that can explain IE languages in Italy. What are people going to argue, that Italo-Celtic was an R1a language? So, when you say that the "possibilities of this haplogroup speaking an IE language are now ZERO.", it may be possible for Iberia, perhaps even for SW France, but there is likely little chance of that applying for all or even the majority of P312.
@Slumbery What's your opinion about the Uruk Expansion? Do you think it may have anything to do with current inhabitants or the Caucasus?
For some reason I tend to think that Kartvelian languages originated with the Anatolian farmer expansion into the Caucasus rather than with local CHG stock. KA seems to be speakers of multiple languages from Kartvelian to Nakh to HU. But I have a hunch that both Kartvelian and NW Caucasus are EEF languages, although they took different routes: former directly from Anatolia, NWC from Cucuteni or any Balkan based farmer language family moving East.
@Andrzejewski
"What's your opinion about the Uruk Expansion? Do you think it may have anything to do with current inhabitants or the Caucasus?"
Not possible to tell without relevant aDNA, but I think that Uruk is too southern to be a main population source for Kura-Araxes and Maykop. KA and Maykop people did not have a ton of Natufian related/Levant ancestry. The bulk of the Levant ancestry in modern Armenians arrived later and more northern groups do not have much even today.
This is not to say that there were no Uruk-rooted effect at all, but I do not think it was dominant.
"For some reason I tend to think that Kartvelian languages originated with the Anatolian farmer expansion into the Caucasus rather than with local CHG stock."
Not impossible, but again, too much uncertainty. CHG was a very old population already at the time Maykop and KA, not a fresh expansion. They could have spoken very different regional languages. At the other hand the nowadays rather dominant YHg G2a definitely came up from the South. However I would not cross out Iran either.
I see no reason to assume that NW Caucasian languages are from around the Balkan.
Slumberry: You can't talk about "Semitic languages" before 6000 years ago or so. Definitely not in the time of the Levant pottery Neolithic.
I aggree. However, by the time Semitic is first attested, early 3rd mBC, it was already fairly differentiated from Old Egyptian that itself dates to at least 3,400 BC. As per
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages:
"Ancient Egyptian is highly divergent from Proto-Afroasiatic (Trombetti 1905: 1–2), and considerable time must have elapsed in between them. Estimates of the date at which the Proto-Afroasiatic language was spoken vary widely. They fall within a range between approximately 7,500 BC (9,500 years ago), and approximately 16,000 BC (18,000 years ago). According to Igor M. Diakonoff (1988: 33n), Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken c. 10,000 BC. Christopher Ehret (2002: 35–36) asserts that Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken c. 11,000 BC at the latest, and possibly as early as c. 16,000 BC. These dates are older than those associated with other proto-languages."
The minimum age of PAfrAs, 7,500 BC, corresponds to PPN B, and there is little in the Levante's aDNA and archeological record suggesting massive, language-shifting arrival of African populations during the Neolithic. As such, a putative Levantine homeland of Afro-Asiatic, and language expansion across N. Africa during the spread of agriculture, is a plausible scenario.
Alternatively, if accepting Ehret's early dating to 16.000 BC, one might connect AfrAs to Iberomaurusian. [Here, of course it would be good to have more N. African Upper Paleolithic aDNA in order to better understand distribution and spread of Iberomaurusian ancestry.]
In any case, I am reasonably certain that Levantine farmers spoke some kind of early Afro-Asiatic, be it PAfrAs, or some kind of pre-proto Semitic.
Despite its historic significance, I don't think that the Armenian Genocide is the main source of "bias" for some reduced steppe-ancestry in modern Armenians. Diaspora Armenians from all parts have been enthusiastic DNA testers (also for obvious reasons of wishing to discover long lost relatives) after all, and many do have recent/ancient northeastern Anatolian ancestry.
When speaking of the "Anatolianness" of Armenians, which is fairly undisputed as far as recent Anatolian populations go, one also should not dismiss the level of intermarriage that would have occurred between Anatolian Greeks and Armenians -- not to mention intermarriage between any other non-Muslim minorities including Anatolian Jews. Where did those Anatolian Jews go, after all (where is that "synagogue of Iconium" that was mentioned in the Bible? There are important churches still visited in conservative Iconium but no synagogues today..)? The Jews of Istanbul are mainly Sephardic (Ladino) and Romaniote, as are those of Ankara.
As for the Anatolian Greeks, regardless of what "steppe-ness" one attaches to the Phrygians, one cannot rule out that Anatolian Greeks -- which we Turks call "Rum" referring to all Byzantine Christians -- encompass a spectrum of even variation greater than that including Cypriot-like and Thessalonniki-like.
And the Anatolian side of the story does not even begin to touch upon the Persian side. Armenians and Persians shared empires, Zoroastrian (and probably pre-Zoroastrian faith), pomegranates, and much more. For all of the ridiculous "physical anthropology" comments here, let me add one more: Anyone walking into a room of Armenians cannot help but be struck by how much they resemble Persians (especially their prominent, expressive -- dare I say beautiful? -- eyes). Even so, we could not assume that a Cilician Armenian would have similar genetic make-up with a Persian Armenian -- nor that either would have any high similarity with Russian Armenians (some of whom also have Russian, Tatar, Circassian, Jewish ancestry...).
Unfortunately, due not only to the genocide but various assimilations of the past millennium, it is difficult to do a study on specifically Cilician Armenian genetics or sub-structure within the Armenian genepool in general (though I'd personally be very interested!)...
Re; megalithism paper (https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/04/09/1818037116), one thing is to note is that they state, We found that significantly more males than females were buried in the British Isles megaliths (31 of 42 randomly sampled individuals; P = 0.0014, binomial test) and at the Primrose megalith alone (9 of 11; P = 0.032) (SI Appendix, section S8). However, other megalithic tombs with at least four individuals investigated, including Ansarve (6 of 9; P = 0.25), Gökhem (1 of 4; P = 0.93), La Mina (2 of 4; P = 0.68), Holm of Papa Westray (2 of 4; P = 0.68), and Isbister (Tomb of the Eagles) (8 of 10; P = 0.054), did not show the same striking pattern ... Overall, genetic data from all individuals from megalithic contexts suggest a higher male-to-female ratio in these burial chambers (41 of 60; P = 0.0031).
That might throw some doubt on association of megaliths disproportionately with male burial. However, Primrose was the bulk of their sample there, and other sample sizes probably too small to say.
Another paper with high sample size supporting high male fraction in megalithic burials, in Spain, is here Demographic evidence of selective burial in megalithic graves of northern Spain: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440314004221?via%3Dihub - Relevant comments: Systematic bias of (against) younger children and certain adults, mainly women, is detected. ... a minimum of 248 individuals were analyzed. ... The megalithic graves from the group of Rioja Alavesa-Sonsierra provide male rates from 100% to 225% including male, probable male, female and probable female individuals; whereas the megaliths from the Cameros group yield rates that go from 110 to 300% (Table 7). The overall data show an elevated sex ratio that indicates the existence of more males than should theoretically exist for the number of women and men to be in equilibrium. ... Funerary use of these sites spans the local Late Neolithic and Late Chalcolithic periods, which approximately correspond to 3700-1500 cal. BC
Sex ratio differences stand for Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic individuals (see Table 8), so a phenomena only overlapping late period (BA, which indeed does not present successfully sex typed individuals in this paper).
This paper is less sure about the statistical difference than the megalithic genomc paper, but seems to be that the statistical threshold is higher, rather than ratio lower. (34/46 sex typed burials from Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic individuals).
The above is from 2015 though, and in their 2016 version (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.22963 - Demographic differences between funerary caves and megalithic graves of northern Spanish Late Neolithic/Early Chalcolithic) they indicated - The total skeletal sample consists of a minimum of 261 individuals, 149 being buried in caves and 112 in megalithic graves .... a significant divergence in sex ratios (χ2, P = 0.002) is also identified between site types, clearly prioritizing women in caves (sex ratio = 0.45) and men in megalithic graves (sex ratio = 1.33)..
Another relevant paper re; megalith paper - Living different lives: Early social differentiation identified through linking mortuary and isotopic variability in Late Neolithic/ Early Chalcolithic north-central Spain - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0177881 - Here, we undertake stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses on a substantial sample of 166 individuals from a series of broadly contemporary Late Neolithic/ Early Chalcolithic (3500 to 2900 cal BC) mortuary monuments (El Sotillo, Alto de la Huesera, Chabola de la Hechicera and Longar) and caves (Las Yurdinas II, Los Husos I and Peña Larga) within a very spatially restricted area of north-central Spain, with sites separated by no more than 10 km on average... The results demonstrate a statistically significant difference in human δ13C values between those interred in caves and those placed in monuments. The difference appears to be correlated with fine-grained environmental factors (elevation/ temperature/ precipitation), suggesting that use of the landscape was being divided at a very local scale. The reasons for this partitioning may involve differential social status (e.g. those interred in caves(rather than monuments)may be of lower standing with more restricted access to the valley’s arable resources) or economic specialization (e.g. upland herding vs. valley farming) within the same community or, alternatively, different populations performing different funerary practices and following distinct subsistence economies in some respect.
@ Matt
certainly the patrolocality is not necessarily universal in Megaliths, which themselves were quite diverse. We are careful not to suggest that what might be the case for Swedish TRB is the same across the board, even for other areas of TRB.
From a Y-hg perspective, England & Iberia, for ex, seem more diverse (esp the latter G2a, H2, I2a2, I2a1, etc). The overiding meaning of megaliths is monuments to act as centres of community and links to ancestral past in the relatively peripheral parts of Europe where tells were not established. An interesting physical anthropolgy study, to add to your lists, from French megalithic grave at Bury suggests its use changed over time: from a ''communal '' use to one where fewer & fewer segments of the population were allowed access (it then ceases function during the BB period; but other Megaliths, as we know, continued to be re-used all the way to the Bronze Age).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/from-one-ritual-to-another-the-longterm-sequence-of-the-bury-gallery-grave-northern-france-fourthsecond-millennia-bc/3326DA87E70B936AD94822F8AEF20155
@Andrzejewski
"For some reason I tend to think that Kartvelian languages originated with the Anatolian farmer expansion into the Caucasus"
I am Georgian and I have been thinking about this a lot. It is thought that Svan is the closest to the ancient common Kartvelian language, from which Zan (Megrelian and Laz) and Georgian emerged. Linguistic differences between the vocabularies of Svan and other Kartvelian languages is so large that you can compare it to the difference between Scottish Gaelic and Greek. On top of that, the phenotypes among Western Georgians like Megrels and Svans are a little different from that of Eastern Mountainous Georgians. For some reason Georgians are thought off as one very genetically homogeneous group, but I expect that the Eastern Mountainous Georgians are more similar to Chechens and Ingush than to Svans or other Western Georgians.
The big linguistic differences can be explained by this: We know that there were Kartvelian tribes that were migrating from Northern Anatolia to the Caucasus, we know that from certain Greek and Roman travellers describing through centuries the different coastal tribes and their geographic locations. I am talking about the mid/late first millenium BC here. Of course by this time Colchis had been long created, so we know that Kartvelians had either been migrating here from at least the 2nd millenium BC or they were native to the region, but the Eastern Georgian state, Iberia, was created only in the very end of the 4th century BC. Other than significant cultural differences, what could explain the huge gap between the creation of a state in Western Georgia (around 12th century BC, Colchis, Diaokhi) and Eastern Georgia (year 302 BC, Iberia). If there were such important cultural differences, we could speculate that the peoples living there were also ethnically different, or at least used to be ethnically different. It is quite possible that Eastern Georgia was populated by Nakh tribes that were acculturated by newcomer Kartvelians. This is similar to Amjad Jaimoukha's hypothesis, that Dvals, Tsanars, Ers were Nakh peoples. This explains the "mystery" of the so-called Metsamor people living in Northern Armenia. They were probably a Nakh people, and there was a geographic and ethnic continuity from Northern Armenia (at least) to Northern Central Caucasus (North Ossetia was populated by a people called Malkh according to Chechen legends).
@EurDna, I'm very far from an expert in the megaliths, so I'll take your suggestions on board, including suggestion change over time and variation over space.
That said, it does seem to me that they would have to be selective in who was buried in megaliths from the start though - even at the earliest stages, I'm not sure they would have the capacity to bury all the population in them, so there is having to be a degree of selection from the beginning.
Even if we're thinking in terms of them serving a community function, I would tend to suspect that political dynamics would favour burial bias towards men who held power in the local communities and their kin, and who had the authority / respect to push efforts of construction. Even small scale societies tend towards some degree of stratification and differentiated status (even if only on the basis of hunting / herding skill), and tendency to males being the most politically dominant individuals in those communities is basically universal.
Btw, have you seen Lara Cassidy's thesis? Ireland again but mentions - http://www.tara.tcd.ie/handle/2262/82960 - Societal complexity during the Neolithic is suggested in patterns of Y chromosome and autosomal structure, while the identification of a highly inbred individual through ROH analysis, retrieved from an elite burial context, strongly suggests the elaboration and expansion of megalithic monuments over the course of the Neolithic was accompanied in some regions by dynastic hierarchies.. It'll be very interesting to know when this individual was dated to. If he/she's late in the sequence then, while just circumstantial evidence, that would fit more with a story of restriction over time.
I think I agree I agree that seems not clear cut that they're all, or even any at all, *explicitly* in the minds of their builders, necessarily serving a purely patrilineal function, even if a disproportion of patrilineally related males emerges. (The inclusion of women, even daughters sprung from a particular patriline, is difficult for that, as it would be for the inclusion of women in kurgan burials, which we see).
Leron
Lchashen is in the lake Sevan bassein. Which was inhabited by Welikuni tribe. If we remove the Urartian -uni suffix is what remains the Welik- root which later with typical Armenian shift transforms into Gelik-
Comparable to Phrygian belos from *wel. Or Wilusa in NW Anatolia. Also Illyrians.
Davidski
I can't find any good quality paper in English about this burial. The excavation was done in Sovietic times and published in Russian, and even this is not found in Internet.
Sagona discuss here but he discuss only the wagons.
https://books.google.am/books?id=ueg7DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA364&lpg=PA364&dq=Sagona+Lchashen+wagon&source=bl&ots=Tdwd03M1OZ&sig=ACfU3U2t7MjbS5_VSJjEn4TVdNNq_5dnpA&hl=ru&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjz4t7PqtnhAhVIwqYKHXlRCBEQ6AEwAHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=Sagona%20Lchashen%20wagon&f=false
As for ethnicity. As I mentioned earlier because Lchashen-Metsamor culture survived until the Urartean era so we know some tribe's name and their names. The Lchashen was occupied by Uelikuni or Welik-uni tribe. The name itself sounds like a IE name. But this is soft argument. If someone wishes he can find a different etymology.
There was another tribal confederation Etiuni who's leader's name was Diucini.
https://www.academia.edu/2939663/The_Armenian_Elements_in_the_Language_and_Onomastics_of_Urartu
So IE tribal names and anthroponymes are present in Lchashen-Metsamor culture in Iron Age.
In Damgaard paper the Lchashen-Metsamor culture was classified as (possible IE) which reflects the cautious opinion of archaeologists.
But all this is not very important. What is more important is to from were do come the Mushki tribes in Cappadocia. If genetics do show that they are affiliated with those Lchashen-Metsamorians then it is case solved.
Davidski
I advise to You to read this paper.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3642931?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
The transition from Anatolia_MLBA to Early Iron Age was quite brutal in Anatolia and Cappadocia, also parts of East Anatolia.
New populations came from west known as Phrygians but more importantly an important wave from East from a South Caucasian side.
That is why I asked You how modern Greeks from Cappadocia are looking. Those Greeks represents a pre-Turkish population of Cappadocia so we will have hint what occured after 1200 BC and 1000 CE in Anatolia/Cappadocia.
What is Your opinion? Was there an extra increase in CHG after Anatolia_MLBA?
Btw current studies on Phrygians is very advanced. We know that they didn't conquered South Anatolia where later Lydia emerged. They didn't have any serious impact in Malatya region. They were mostly confined in NW Anatolia , west of Halys river. And at 600 BC Phrygia was finished by Cimmerians and Lydians.
I doubt that we will see any serious genetic impact from Phrygians yet alone posdible Armenians. Not surprisingly no one mentiones any haplotype for such a migration. Because there isn't left.
KnowGen:
First, thx for correcting me on vitsi. While I was able to acquire a little bit of conversational Georgian (ara vitsi Kartulad), I never properly studied its grammar.
The intriguing thing about Colchis is that it always displayed a cultural entity of its own, already far before it developed a stateehood. Colchis didn't partake in the Kura-Araxes or Shulaveri-Shomu phenomena, even its UP/ Mesolithic was original (Imereti culture). Neolithic housing, once complementing cave-dwelling, was wattle-and-daub, markedly contrasting with ShuSho / Anatolian mud-brick "tells". Moreover, Colchis was a latecomer to farming, with a focus on pig-breeding instead of the ANF/EEF preference for cattle (a system Colchians during the CA exported to Meshoko and Crimea). As such, I neither see strong Anatolian influence during the Neolithic, nor can imagine any Colchian role in spreading early farming to Europe.
For a more in-depth discussion, see (especially the comments):
https://adnaera.com/2019/01/11/how-did-chg-get-into-steppe_emba-part-2-the-pottery-neolithic/
As you say "If there were such important cultural differences, we could speculate that the peoples living there were also ethnically different." "Ethnically different" might first and foremost mean "linguistically different", i.e. (pre-)Proto-Kartvelian having evolved in Colchis in situ from Colchian HG roots.
Puzzling in this respect, of course, is the yDNA replacement, with Colchian HG J(2a) giving way to G2a that especially dominates Svanetia today. However, we may be dealing with a founder effect here - the Svanetian archeological record only starts in earnest with mid 3rd mBC gold and copper mining, and G2a may well represent a CA arrival to Colchis.[There is indication of G2 being associated with below-average body height, a feature beneficial to underground miners.] Meshoko, commonly believed to represent strong Colchian influence, was still yDNA J(2a).
Matt
"necessarily serving a purely patrilineal function, even if a disproportion of patrilineally related males emerges. (The inclusion of women, even daughters sprung from a particular patriline, is difficult for that, as it would be for the inclusion of women in kurgan burials, which we see)."
a common theme from later history is queens acting as regents when a king dies and the heir is too young so that might be an explanation - especially if the average age of kingly death was quite low?
makes me wonder if Egyptian royal burials follow that pattern (i.e. female regents getting special treatment)?
although i think most of the hg bounce back will be along the lines of
- farmers expand to a hard limit (mountains, swamp etc)
- hybrid hg/farmer population forms in the border zone
- hybrid pop expands later due to some advantage (disease resistance, less fragile food getting?)
however i'm also curious about who spread early mining (or maybe even earlier, how to pan soft metal from rivers) as i think that must have happened.
Varna was apparently one of the earliest cultures doing this (from a mine in Sredna Gora according to wiki)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_culture
so i wonder if the miners/panners from there had a particular ydna clade?
(some clade of J seems like it might be another candidate for this spread)
#
on a completely separate note while googling Bulgarian mountains i came upon this map of transhumance routes in the Balkans
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Transhumance_ways_of_the_Vlachs.jpeg/800px-Transhumance_ways_of_the_Vlachs.jpeg
which illustrates how a river might end up being a cultural or tribal barrier even if it's not a physical one i.e. the transhumance routes go between the mountains and a river so even if humans could easily cross a river their tribal boundaries might follow their herd's boundaries which went to the river edge.
similarly(?)(for example) a post here a while back showed different mammoth clades east and west of the Urals line - if there was some barrier there that the mammoth couldn't cross then it might separate humans who lived off the mammoth east and west of the line even if the humans could cross the barrier.
Off topic again, but good news for the Anthrogenica doods who want to know what Roman Era Lebanese were like - https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(19)30111-9 - "A Transient Pulse of Genetic Admixture from the Crusaders in the Near East Identified from Ancient Genome Sequences"
We found that all individuals from Lebanon’s Roman period (Lebanon_RP) clustered with Near Easterners and were close to present-day Lebanese. In contrast, the Crusaders’ pit individuals were more diverse and we classified them into three groups based on their PCA position. First, a group of four individuals appeared to be local Near Easterners since they clustered with the Roman period and present-day Lebanese.
Contra ideas that Roman Era Levant were more "European" and then shifted away towards Arabian Peninsula populations?
Looking at Fig 1, present day Lebanese do seem very slightly shifted towards the Caucasus tho which fits with some coalescence of the West Asian genepool together, just more of an "Ottoman Empire" type influence (East and West merging), than a pulse that has anything to do with Arabia.
(Terrible colour scheme - I'm sure quite a few will mistake Crusader era samples and Roman Era samples).
@dragos
Good question- how exactly does C become I2? Somewhat dramatic case of “not enough calls” there...
Contamination?
@ WeightofAudio
This is the first time we have Cheddar Man's Y-DNA haplogroup... I don't know why are you and Dragos speaking about haplogroup C and how it became I2a...
WeightofAudio said...
"how exactly does C become I2?"
wasn't the ydna C WHG guy one of the very early samples from the continent (loushbour?)
@ Weightof Audio , Blesario
Blesario check this http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/02/c-for-cheddar-man.html
Probably just early day rumours back then, Im not sure what was Davidski's source/.
I think nobody with genetics background had actually looked at it yet, indeed, the Y data had not even been released.
Shame though, would have been an interesting link between Mesolithic Iberia & the Isles
@Dragos
Did I ever claim that there was a source? The post clearly states that it was a rumor and I asked whether anyone could confirm it. See here...
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/02/unleash-power-global-25-test-drive.html?showComment=1518099657745#c1333519651058187815
Davidski
I know it was just rumours, I’m not suggesting otherwise, or that somebody got something wrong . I was just directing Cremonese where the initial throughts originated
@FrankN
Sorry for the late reply, you brought up something very interesting in regards to the Colchian focus on pigs instead of cattle. We have a text of Mursili II from the ancient city of Arina, where it says that the Kaski people herded swine and wove flax. This is something that was integral of the Svan culture up until the 20th century and it is still a known tradition for modern Svans. Men used to herd pigs while women wove flax and took care of the family hearth. Kaskians were also noted to be a very warlike people and, if I am not mistaken, they were noted to wear wooden armor, just like the Persians or Greeks said about the Colchians who were at that time one of the satrapies.
The heavy usage of flax is something that Herodotus noted too, although he was quite off with his Egyptian theory. It is almost certain that the Kaskians were an ancient Kartvelian people. Another important thing is the names of Kaskians. Mursili II noted a Kaskian named Pikhunia who conquered the region of Ishtitani to make it his pasture. Pikhunia sounds VERY Megrelian, to the extent that I wouldn't be surprised if it was a common name before the USSR.
There are remains of woven flax from near modern Samsun, in Ikiztepe, which are dated to the Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age. Flax was also used to make different oils, so as it seems it was very important for ancient North-East Anatolians.
Another important reason for us to believe that Kaskians were proto-Kartvelians is that they had very developed viticulture, and they even paid tribute to Hittites in wine.
Here is another one, Kaskians had a god named Tsitkharia (also name of a city on the coast), the symbol of which was a sheep's leather i.e. fleece. The modern word for sheep in Georgian is Tskhvari. Note that Megrelian is noted to have more vowels than Georgian, so the sound of Tsitkharia sounds more Megrelian than it does Georgian.
This leads me to believe that, perhaps Kaskians mostly were of G2a stock, and perhaps during the Bronze Age collapse, they migrated to territories that were settled by related tribes, in Western Georgia, or perhaps they conquered it from a linguistically distinct people.
Kaskians being proto-Kartvelians is pretty much certain for me. Another reason I can add is the ki ending, similar with Mushkis or Moschoi for Greeks called them. We, today have a region in Georgia called Meskheti (Meskh-eti), eti being the toponym suffix. A Mushki person in Georgian is a Meskhi, just like Kolkhi being a Colchian, and there were other North-Eastern Anatolian tribes that had a -khi suffix (which Greeks and Romans made -ki). Today there is a village of Kola in North-East Turkey, which was and is populated by ethnic Georgians, so it might be that the Kolkhi tribe came from the region of this village.
I forgot to add some examples of those tribes. Those were the Mossinichoi, Sanigi, Viterukhi (this one was from the Urartian Argishti I), Heniochi and some others. I suspect that the Sanigi and Mossinichoi was one tribe, as it was quite common for ancient historians to get confused by names of different tribes.
I must also note the strange nature of the modern Georgian ethnonym, Kartveli, where -eli is a suffix signifying origin and ethnicity. The reconustruction of the ancient version of the word Kartveli (reconstruction based on Megrelian, Svan and other Caucasian ethnonyms for "Georgian") is "Kardhu", which sounds very similar to "Urartu" when you consider that Arde/Arte meant town or field in Hurro-Urartian (modern examples are the cities of Artaani and Artvini, most likely created by Urartians but populated by Kartvelians).
Or perhaps Eastern Georgians are descendants of Xenophon's Carduchoi people?
I am very interested if there are genetic differences between Eastern and Western Georgians (primarily Megrelians). In fact I would not be surprised if there are significant differences even between Eastern mountainous Georgians and Eastern lowland Georgians from Kakheti region.
Here how Greeks from Anatolia looks as a mixture of two populations.
[1] "distance%=1.1332"
Greek_Central_Anatolia
Anatolia_Kaman-Kalehoyuk_MLBA,67.8
Kura-Araxes_ARM_Talin,32.2
After adding source populations from Balkanes here what we get.
[1] "distance%=1.0254"
Greek_Central_Anatolia
Anatolia_Kaman-Kalehoyuk_MLBA,50.8
Kura-Araxes_ARM_Talin,35
BGR_IA,14.2
There was a migration both from East and West after LBA. The most important was from East related to Iron age expansion of grooved ware. Then there was a migration with Alexandr Macedonian after which Greek language became lingua franca in Near East especially in Anatolia.
A new update. Two population mix using RMPR68 from the Latin paper.
This was a Imperial era sample.
Target: Armenian
Distance: 1.9944% / 0.01994400
69.4 ITA_Rome_Imperial:RMPR68
30.6 ARM_Lchashen_MBA
Notice for all populations neighbouring Armenians the distance is higher and exceeds 4.5% for Lazes for example.
Some qpAdm involving Arm LBA. Offcourse tail prob is low but it is similar to what is published here.
---
left pops:
Armenian.DG
Kura_Araxes_ARM_Kaps
ARM_LBA
TUR_Alalakh_MLBA
0.243 0.590 0.167
tail: 0.0843576
chisq: 17.882
right pops:
Mbuti.DG
Morocco_Iberomaurusian
Israel_Natufian_published
Israel_PPNB
Iran_GanjDareh_N
Turkey_N
CHG
Russia_MA1_HG.SG
Russia_Ust_Ishim.DG
Russia_Kostenki14.SG
Russia_HG_Karelia.SG
Russia_Siberia_Lena_EN
Brazil_LapaDoSanto_9600BP
Italy_North_Villabruna_HG
left pops:
Armenian.DG
Kura_Araxes_ARM_Kaps
ARM_LBA
TUR_Arslantepe_EBA
0.148 0.638 0.214
tail: 0.112209
chisq: 16.856
right pops:
Mbuti.DG
Morocco_Iberomaurusian
Israel_Natufian_published
Israel_PPNB
Iran_GanjDareh_N
Turkey_N
CHG
Russia_MA1_HG.SG
Russia_Ust_Ishim.DG
Russia_Kostenki14.SG
Russia_HG_Karelia.SG
Russia_Siberia_Lena_EN
Brazil_LapaDoSanto_9600BP
Italy_North_Villabruna_HG
https://forum.molgen.org/index.php?topic=70.2520
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