Almost all present-day populations speaking Uralic languages show moderate to high frequencies of Y-chromosome haplogroup N. I reckon there are two likely explanations for this:
- the speakers of Proto-Uralic were rich in N because they lived in an area, probably somewhere around the Ural Mountains, where it was common, and they spread it with them as they expanded from their homeland
- Uralic languages often came to be spoken in areas of North Eurasia where N was already found at moderate to high frequencies
The major exception to this rule are Hungarians, whose language belongs to the Ugric branch of Uralic. Their frequency of N is close to zero and they don't differ much in terms of overall genetic structure from their Indo-European-speaking neighbors in East Central Europe.
This is an issue that has generated much debate over the years about the nature of Uralic expansions, who the Hungarians really were, and how the Hungarian language came to be spoken in the heart of Europe.
But I never understood what the fuss was about, because based on historical sources alone it seemed rather obvious that Hungarian was introduced into the Carpathian Basin during the Middle Ages by a relatively small number of invaders from the east, probably from somewhere around the Ural Mountains, who imposed it on local Indo-European-speaking populations.
As far as I can remember, this has always been the academic consensus, and the results from one of the first ancient DNA studies of human remains soundly corroborated it. Back in 2008, Csányi et al. reported that two out of four skeletons from elite Hungarian conqueror graves dating to the 10th century carried the Tat C allele, which meant that they belonged to Y-haplogroup N (see
here).
We've since had to wait over a decade to get a more comprehensive look at the Y-chromosome haplogroups of medieval Hungarians. The most useful effort to date, a manuscript courtesy of Neparáczki et al., was posted this week at
bioRxiv (see
here).
The results in the preprint suggest a much more complex picture than simply a migration of an obviously Uralic-speaking population rich in Y-haplogroup N into the medieval Carpathian Basin. But they do confirm the presence of N in Hungarian conqueror elites, and, in fact, of very specific subclades of N that link them to the present-day speakers of Uralic languages from around the Ural Mountains. Here are some pertinent quotes from the prepint:
Three Conqueror samples belonged to Hg N1a1a1a1a2-Z1936, the Finno-Permic N1a branch, being most frequent among northeastern European Saami, Finns, Karelians, as well as Komis, Volga Tatars and Bashkirs of the Volga-Ural region. Nevertheless this Hg is also present with lower frequency among Karanogays, Siberian Nenets, Khantys, Mansis, Dolgans, Nganasans, and Siberian Tatars 23.
...
It is generally accepted that the Hungarian language was brought to the Carpathian Basin by the Conquerors. Uralic speaking populations are characterized by a high frequency of Y-Hg N, which have often been interpreted as a genetic signal of shared ancestry. Indeed, recently a distinct shared ancestry component of likely Siberian origin was identified at the genomic level in these populations, modern Hungarians being a puzzling exception 36. The Conqueror elite had a significant proportion of N Hgs, 7% of them carrying N1a1a1a1a4-M2118 and 10% N1a1a1a1a2-Z1936, both of which are present in Ugric speaking Khantys and Mansis 23.
...
Population genetic data rather position the Conqueror elite among Turkic groups, Bashkirs and Volga Tatars, in agreement with contemporary historical accounts which denominated the Conquerors as “Turks” 38. This does not exclude the possibility that the Hungarian language could also have been present in the obviously very heterogeneous, probably multiethnic Conqueror tribal alliance.
Indeed, a large proportion of the 44 males from elite Hun, Avar and Hungarian Conqueror burials analyzed in the study belonged to Y-haplogroups that can't be plausibly associated with the earliest Uralic speakers, but rather with those of various Indo-European languages, such as I1 and R1b-U106 (these are Germanic-specific markers), I2a-L621 and R1a-CTS1211 (obviously Slavic) and R1a-Z2124 (largely Eastern Iranian).
If most of these results aren't due to contamination, then it's likely that both the early Hungarian commoners and elites were, by and large, derived from Indo-European-speaking populations. No wonder then, that present-day Hungarians are basically indistinguishable genetically from their Indo-European-speaking neighbors and, like them, show hardly any Y-haplogroup N.
See also...
Hungarian Conquerors were rich in Y-haplogroup N (Fóthi et al. 2020)
More on the association between Uralic expansions and Y-haplogroup N
Ancient DNA confirms the link between Y-haplogroup N and Uralic expansions
243 comments:
1 – 200 of 243 Newer› Newest»Davidski
But is it me or are they implying here that these guys were Turkic speakers ?
@Dragos
They're not. They're speculating that this was a motley bunch speaking various languages including Turkic and Uralic.
So maybe one of two scenarios. A language change forced by a Small Military Elite or an adoption of Uralic somewhere in or around the Ukraine by East Germanic people and Slavs which spread into Hungary...
This surely could complicate the Iberian Peninsula linguistic issue as well....
@Ric
Well, it's the ancient Hungarians who show genetic links to Uralic speakers from around the Urals, not the East Germanics or West Slavs.
And I'm not aware of any Uralic languages ever being spoken in what is now Ukraine.
@ Ric
I thought this rather settles the issue ? This is what evidence of mixing, brothers-in-arms, confederacies, etc; should look like.
@ Davidski
Maybe a migration through Ukraine from the the Urals picking up Slavic and Germanic peoples on their way to Hungary...Isn't there some Germanic R1bs among the Bashkirs ?
@Ric
Isn't there some Germanic R1bs among the Bashkirs?
I think it's R1b-P312, which was actually found in a commoner Hungarian grave in this study.
But the R1b-P312 among the Bashkirs implies population movements from west to east, which does make sense if there were regular contacts between the Uralic and Turkic speakers in the Carpathian Basin and near the Urals.
The next question is what happened to this haplogroup N. Why it is practically inexistant among modern Hungarians. Mass killing of N clans ? o_O
@Aram
Didn't I explain in my blog post? Well, I tried anyway.
The Hungarian conquerors quickly absorbed a lot of Indo-European males with other Y-HGs into their ranks, which basically made Y-HG N disappear from the gene pool over time.
The languages spoken in Pannonian Avar tribal union are unknown but their N-lineage seems to be related to current Buryats and such. However, that N-lineage is a brother clade to N-CTS10760, including nowadays not just Uralic speakers such as Finns but fex also many Balts and Scandinavians. Phenotypes of this whole ancient N-bunch seem to vary a lot. Some such as Avar N's are clearly Asians with dark eyes and hair, some Hungarian N's are blonde and have blue eyes, apparently with very European looks.
There are also other exceptions, Latvians and Lithuanians, both speaking IE-languages. Among them the frequency of N is equal to R1a. Which one was the conqueror? If R1a, did they speak Uralic language before it? I would expect higher Siberian admixture then... Another issue in theories connecting Uralic languages and HG N by looking at clade ages rather than real TMRCAs. People are often fooled to watch only haplotrees and clade ages. Actually clade ages can be what ever, because ancestral bottle necks and later expansions can happen absolutely regardless of the clade age.
@ Aram: I'd guess that many Hungarian N's got whacked in and after the Battle of Mohi by the Mongols. According to contemporary sources the whole army was practically killed in the battle.
@M. Myllylä
Y-HG N isn't found in any Coded Ware or Bronze Age remains from the Baltic region. They're all firmly R1a.
But it does show up suddenly in Tarand culture remains during the Iron Age that cluster with modern Estonians.
The Tarand culture has links to cultures to the east near the Urals and is associated with early Uralic speakers.
Balts absorbed a lot of Y-HG N near the edge of the Uralic expansion west. Other Indo-Europeans rich in R1a absorbed much less or none at all. Of course, (Uralic) Estonians also absorbed a lot of Indo-European R1a.
So I'm not seeing any dilemmas here at all.
@Davidski,
I agree with you, Tarand graves are connected to Baltic Finnic languages by many historians. But only to Baltic Finns, not in general to Uralic langianges. Some of oldest Tarand graves in Baltic area exist in Sweden where the most common N clade L550, being older than in Latvia and Lithuania. My point was that do not watch frequencies and clade ages, because bottle necks and later expansions, let's now say after the Bronze Age, are always possible in small populations and didn't call for certain clade ages. The difference between clade age and TMRCA is crucial.
You didn't answer why Balts have such a low percentage of Siberian. My answer is that originally Baltic Finns, those using Tarand graves, had not Siberian admixture.
@M. Myllylä
You didn't answer why Balts have such a low percentage of Siberian. My answer is that originally Baltic Finns, those using Tarand graves, had not Siberian admixture.
Well, I sort of did. I said that Balts absorbed a lot of Y-HG N, but that doesn't mean they absorbed a lot of admixture from the first waves of the Tarand grave people.
But it's a long way from the Urals to the Baltic, so it is possible that the earliest Tarand grave Baltic Finnic speakers didn't have much Siberian ancestry, considering that even Uralic speakers near the Urals are very far from being Siberian.
Well, I wrote this under multiple related posts, but it is especially worth a repeat here. 900 AD Hungarians being mixed Uralic-Turkic linguistically is not a new speculation, it is a the consensus for a long time. I was even taught so in school. It is based on a few things.
- On the fact that Hungarian envoys visiting the court of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII referred to themselves as Turks when asked about how they call themselves. In the same Byzantine account of the visit the envoys themselves said that Hungarians spoke two languages. Example words were given and one of the languages were identified by the Byzantines as similar to the contemporary Bashkir, while the other apparently did not ring a bell for them.
- A linguistic implication of the fact that there is a strong Turkic layer in the modern Hungarian language. Jusst by counting words the Slavic effect seems to be bigger, but the Turkic influence is deeper, reaching core layers of the language, like names of body parts.
- Later Medieval chronicles mentioning the fact that three of arriving tribes were Turks.
Now, the exact details and the dynamics of the Turkic-Uralic interaction are not known. Medieval sources says the Turkic tribes were mere vassals, but that could be a history written by the guys who won dominance later. Pretty much nothing is known about the internal politics of the Hungarians before the end of the 10th century.
As for the Germanic specific YDNA in the conqueror burials: it is much thinner in the Avar age layer, so it was possibly an Eastern Goth heritage bought by the Hungarians themselves (presumably by the Turkic side), not local admixture.
And of course the Iranic haplogroups were a widespread general steppe ancestry, I find it unlikely that those people were still Iranic speaking at the time.
As for the disappearance of the Hg N. As mentioned this study focused on elite burials. Depending on the exact population ratios this could be simply dilution. Of course it is also a fact that during the two big wars that caused huge population losses, both times the core Hungarian speaking regions took the heaviest hit (not to mention the huge loss of the elite against the Mongols/Tatars), and in both times it was followed by immigration and assimilation. So it could be dilution by selective population loss during wars. Until we have let's say 12th century samples with a representative Geography and amount, I withhold judgement on the exact ratio of this two effects. Probably both were at play.
The Bashkirs belong specifically to Eastern Bell Beaker marker P312+L2+. Already there was a Scythian P312+L2+ sample dated to 768-431 BC in central Ukraine, so it was to the east long before these conqueror samples.
There was also this Avar study https://doi.org/10.1101/415760
14 out of 17 male elites carried N1c the rest being Q1a or Q1b. Much more homogeneous than the study above.
The Sargat kurgans that are thought to be proto-Hungarian were already a N1c, R1a mix. It seems clear that as the Magyars incorpated more peoples, so did their elite. The original N1c Uralic lines became less and less common (keep in mind they were probably only common amoung the elites to begin with). Combine that with massacares made by the Mongols and mass Slavic migrations and its easy to see why there is so little N1c in Hungary.
It doesn’t seem that N1c was very huge in Magyars to begin with, though
Only 3 of them. A couple other eastern lineages (C, Q1..)
Dragos
I see 5 N out of 29 y dna in Conqueror period. That's making 17% of total. Adding Q1a. Makes 20%. We can go further and add that eastern Z93.
imho the broad picture is clear.
20% is not huge but it is not small.
Btw Finding 20% new Y dna in ancient Celtic context in Britain would be a huge sensation. :)
What's known about the phylogeny of N in Europe? All from the same ancestor at 4kya (or something like this), a la R1b-M269 expanasion etc, or substructured?
https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(16)30160-4 seems like the most recent thing on trying to estimate split times and substructure within N. It is suggested that "the characteristic genetic marker of Uralic-speaking peoples is haplogroup N1c-Tat (Y-DNA)", however this coalesces about 12.5kya ago; that's more than twice estimated split time for Uralic langugaes (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jeb.12107 - 5300 - 5600 YBP).
Their suggestion is: "The most striking aspect of the phylogeography of hg N is the spread of the N3a3’6-CTS6967 lineages (Figure 3). Considering the three geographically most distant populations in our study—Chukchi, Buryats, and Lithuanians—it is remarkable to find that about half of the Y chromosome pool of each consists of hg N3 and that they share the same sub-clade N3a3’6. The fractionation of N3a3’6 into the four sub-clades that cover such an extraordinarily wide area occurred in the mid-Holocene, about 5.0 kya (95% CI = 4.4–5.7 kya). ..... N3a3’6 has high frequencies in the patrilineal pools of populations belonging to the Altaic, Uralic, several Indo-European, and Chukotko-Kamchatkan language families. There is no generally agreed, time-resolved linguistic tree that unites these linguistic phyla. Yet, their split is almost certainly at least several millennia older than the rather recent expansion signal of the N3a3’6 sub-clade, suggesting that its spread had little to do with linguistic affinities of men carrying the N3a3’6 lineages. Although the initial spread of the hg N3a3’6 clades most likely ignored any existing language barriers, the subsequent diversification often occurred within linguistically defined metapopulations."
Another pattern involves the similarity in the range of hg N3a3’6, especially in the western part of Eurasia and the distribution of the Seima-Turbino trans-cultural phenomenon during the interval of 4.2–3.7 kya. Extending across northern Eurasia from Mongolia to the Baltic region, this phenomenon encompasses the cultures of nomadic forest and steppe societies with advanced metal-working technology. Taken together, these facts hint at the Seima-Turbino metalsmith-traders as the probable primary carriers of hg N3a3’6 lineages.
If I understand the history of Hungary correctly, it appears for the first time as an organized national-state in correlation with the adaption of Roman-Catholicism. So, I would naturally suspect that the Uralic-speaking elite at one point, also composed the elite clerus of the time. So in other words, state and church were inseparable from each other. I would assume with the introduction of Christianity, that the language of the Christian-elite was slowly adopted by the native pagan elite and passed on to the masses, with the spread of Christianity.
There's a huge amount of data now from Scythians. Stretching from Moldova to China.
It shows, at dawn of European history (circa 500bc-500ad), in a continuous stretch of land from Ireland to western China people were roughly at least 40% Yamnaya-like derived & mostly Y DNA R1a/b. This was due to the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker, and Andronovo cultures.
In circa 1700bc, from Ireland to Siberia, many people were essentially identical. However, Andornovo was a foreign-colonizing population in Asia & quickly became mixed with Asians to create Sycthians.
I think it's pretty amazing. The, genetic shared ancestry between Indo European speakers would have been much more obvious back then. ancient DNA wouldn't be needed, to figure it out.
@Matt
I agree N3a3'6 or L1026 is a possibile Seima-Turbino line. With that being said many of the non Uralic speakers with high amounts of N-L1026 had historical contacts with them (mainly Siberian groups with founder effects).
The only line N-L1026+ that can't be connected at all to Uralic speakers is the Turkic/Mongolian N-Y6058 branch which split 4800ybp according to Yfull.
@Creative
Although the final fixation the mainly Uralic rooted Hungarian as the dominant language could be very well connected to the organisation of the Christian state, but I strongly doubt that the language of the elite clerus played a significant role in it.
- A considerable part of the early elite clerus was Italian and German.
- Most of the Slavs in region were already Christian by then and in fact the Hungarian language borrowed a lot of religious terminology from Slavic.
- The language of the elite clerus was pretty much Latin, especially since they were a rather multi-ethnic bunch in early times. (Fun fact: the sole official language of Hungary was Latin until well into the 19th century and Hungarian scarcely existed in written form until the Reformation. We have exactly one written Hungarian fragment from the entire 11th century (other than place and personal names of course) and it is some three words in an otherwise Latin text - the scribe was probably Hungarian and could not figure out how to say that particular phrase in Latin.)
Why I am saying it could be still connected? This is a pure speculation and mostly a second hand one (from somebody on a Hungarian discussion). The biggest-richest elite burial site of the first half of the 10th century is Karos (a lot of the samples of the linked article are from there actually). Karos is in the upper Tisza valley near to the modern Ukrainian border. Then we enter written history at the end of the 10th century and everything is in Transdanubia and the upper Tisza region is a total periphery. There are more than one possible explanations, including sampling bias, but one of the possible explanations is the existence of a upper-Tisza centered elite that lost power sometime in the second half of the 10th century. The Transdanubian (Western) clans rise to dominance after this and that lead to a drastic change in foreign relations (no more raid against German and Italian regions) and some groups were possibly relocated.
Now, we can speculate that the Eastern Carpathian Basin was the territory of the more Turkic-leaning groups and the more forested and hilly Western regions were the home of the more Uralic-leaning clans, so the discontinuity of the Karos burial sites and the increasing dominance of the Western clans meant the end of the Turkic clans as independent entities, while the Christian state was organised from the West. (The West, were the Slavic proto-states were before the conquest and a partial integration of their elite would explain the Slavic religious and state-administration vocabulary in the Hungarian language.)
But as I said this is just speculation. It could be dead wrong. The Church's elite is however seems to be an unlikely agent for the assimilation of the non-Uralic speaking groups.
@Antony Hanken
"The only line N-L1026+ that can't be connected at all to Uralic speakers is the Turkic/Mongolian N-Y6058 branch which split 4800ybp according to Yfull."
I don't see why that can't be connected. Do we even know where the ancestors of Turkic people lived 4800 years ago? They could very well draw partial ancestry from relevant parts of Siberia and then the Mongolian carriers could be descendants of assimilated Turks. It is speculative (as we do not have evidence) but I would not say it "can't be connected".
This post beings to mind Peter Schrijver's book _Language Contact and the Origins of the Germanic Languages_, in which he argues that the earliest stage of proto-Germanic resulted from a Finnic-speaking population learning to speak something very like proto-Baltic while largely retaining the accent (and a few speech patterns) of their own language.
@Slumbery
4800 years ago PU would still have only been spoken in the Volga-West Siberia region. Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolian probably originate around Inner Mongolia. N-Y6058 is also found amound far East Siberian Chukotko-Kamchatkan peoples.
Hard to connect these languages to Uralic this early on unless this branch spread east later, not to mention no modern Uralic speakers carrry this branch.
I'd guess that we shouldn't look too much at modern distributions of the single N lineages without keeping in mind the big picture. For instance N-M2019 i.e. "the Yakut lineage, Yakuts being Turkic speaking" was now found among ancient Hungarian samples and a basal form has previously been found in Estonia. Besides, there already are two Hungarian samples located downstream vs. N-M2019 in YFull. It is obvious that some part of the lineage either originally was or became Turkic speaking, but.
Besides, this Turkic/ Mongol/etc. N-M6058 is as said a brother clade to N-CTS10760, related fex to Finns, Latvians, Lithuanians and Scandinavians. Based on more ancestral N-L708(TMRCA 7500 years) it is not even impossible that this Turkic/Mongol/etc. lineage is originally coming from areas somewhere next to Ural mountains, as this ancestral form and some lineages based on that such as N-Y9022 are to be found in places such as Bashkortoshtan, Komi, Mordovia and Tatarstan. Also, we know with certainty that some or even many Bashkirs and Tatars there are language shifters from Uralic to Turkic.
@Jack Rusher
That is highly interesting feature shared in Finnish and Germanic, the fact that sound laws for consonants are different if followed by a stressed or an unstressed syllable. In Germanic it's called "Verners Law", the Finnish laws - they really look very similar - are considered part of what is called consonant gradation, the latter being part of a wider range of phenomena.
Now that last tidbit is exactly where stuff gets interesting, as the phenomenon is also found in the Samoyed language Nganasan, albeit not exactly similar. That means that it must have been part of Proto-Uralic, for Samoyed languages are considered the first split in Proto-Uralic, and even in alternative theories considered to be very old. And therefore the Germanic rule should be considered a Uralic substrate.
So Schrijver thinks this is proof that Uralic is a ancient North-European language. But that simply can't be maintained anymore in the light of recent developments. So how did the Finnish and Germanics got to share the feature? (Please look up what the two rules; they really have to be related) I can think of the following possibilities:
1) The connection of the Finnish feature and Samoyed is coincidental. Both the Finns and Germanics picked up a HG substrate.
2) The feature is part of WHG languages that managed to leave it in Scandinavia and the Kunda Culture, which is adjacent to what is often considered the PU homeland.
Anyway, it's a really interesting problem.
@ Slumberry
Perhaps youre overstating the Turkic thing here.
''Tourkai'' was reported generically by Byzantines for the steppe peoples of the time.
The fact that Magyars detached/ fled from the Khazars (themselves a Turkic speakers), could simply account fow whichever Turkic element existed
''And of course the Iranic haplogroups were a widespread general steppe ancestry, I find it unlikely that those people were still Iranic speaking at the time. ''
Given that the Khazar conglomeracy was centred on the Saltavo-Mayaki culture, I find it highly likely that there were Iranic peakers on the steppe at this time.
@Matt
What's known about the phylogeny of N in Europe?
It's not very important.
I'd say that the snippets of info that we've received in recent months about ancient DNA associated with early Uralic speakers is more useful in this context than anything that has been published to date on modern Y-HG N.
As things stand, the main things to know are that N first appeared in the East Baltic with Tarand grave people and that Iron Age Finns had a frequency of N close to 100%.
Hopefully the relevant papers are published soon.
@ Slumberry
Thank you for the insight.
(Just to clarify what I meant.)
Sure the language of the (elite) Catholic clerus was Latin, but they also preached in the native tongue of the people. This would be naturally, whatever language the inhabitants spoke. But, here's the thing with "Catholics", they were pragmatic and flexible when it came to appealing or converting local nobles. In addition Catholic missionaries (even if they were foreigners) would correspond with the ruler, in the native tongue of the ruler. So, I kind of see what this hierarchical structure could lead to; you have missionaries targeting local nobles in their native tongue. So, I would presume that this internal (State) church structure would lead to the passing down of ecclesiastical knowledge in the native language of the elite, from high to low. This may also explain Slavic religious terms in Hungarian, in the sense of intermingling based on religion on a state level. As you also mentioned, an existing form of administration would actually fasten the transformation and in addition you have a common religion, which is actually another plus.The ones on top can easily force the administration to speak their language. But their also has to be some common ground within the belief system of different groups that will ease and fasten the adaption of a new language through religion. Or maybe I am just making things-up, as I go along...
As a native G2a2b1 guy from the Philistine-coast, it is my predestination to look for answers from the perspective of religion. ;-)
I am not trying to suggest N-L1026 expanded from the east. It seems to me pretty likely it expanded from west of the Urals or at least close to them. I was trying to make a point that N-L1026 probably did in fact expand with Uralic languages. As I said N-Y6058 can not be connected to Uralic because it is not found in any Uralic speaking populations. Maybe the founder of this lineage spoke PPU or PU but his language was clearly lost during its expansion.
I would argue that the fact this branch is so wide spread among so many different language groups supports the idea that it spread quickly over a vast amount of space with Seima-Turbino, going through founder effects regionally and then spreading again among Tungusic/Turkic and Chukotko-Kamchatkan speakers during the Iron Age and historical times.
Davidski: It's not very important.
Well, I mean, YMMV but it seems like it could pretty useful to inform things really. For'ex, if European R1a was assembled from a bunch of separate expansions following a split 15kya, we'd draw different conclusions than it were associated with a single recent expansion 5kya, and so on.
@Matt
For'ex, if European R1a was assembled from a bunch of separate expansions following a split 15kya, we'd draw different conclusions than it were associated with a single recent expansion 5kya, and so on.
Well, that's sort of what the working theory was for R1a in peer reviewed literature based on modern data.
And that's why IMHO inferences about N in scientific literature based on modern data aren't all that important. They'll almost certainly be significantly modified once ancient DNA comes into play.
At this stage, I'd say that the two points I made about N in my blog post pretty much cover all plausible scenarios, but we'll need a lot of ancient DNA data to figure out the details.
- the speakers of Proto-Uralic were rich in N because they lived in an area, probably somewhere around the Ural Mountains, where it was common, and they spread it with them as they expanded from their homeland
- Uralic languages often came to be spoken in areas of North Eurasia where N was already found at moderate to high frequencies
@Davidski: Well, that's sort of what the working theory was for R1a in peer reviewed literature based on modern data.
Not really, they worked out that there was an explosive founder effect at around 4-5kya well before adna said so. That's what Karmin 2015 "A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture" said, then subsequently validated within ancient dna, and Poznik 2016 "Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences" repeated.
I don't see any reason any attempt using the same methodology to understand N expansions would be flawed. Why would the dates on their phylogeny be off?
@Matt
Why would the dates on their phylogeny be off?
Obviously because they're based on modern DNA. It's not a precise science.
@Aram
Keep in mind that almost all of these ancient samples from Hungary are from elite burials.
So your figure of 20% for the ratio of Y-chromosome lineages that can be attributed to invaders in Conqueror period Hungary isn't a reliable one.
But I can see your dilemma...
If a relatively small band of warriors could shift the language of a whole nation in the medieval Carpathian Basin, and in such a way that this language is still being spoken there today, then how is it that waves of Bell Beakers migrating into Copper Age Iberia couldn't do the same there?
Well, maybe they did, because they may have been the speakers of Proto-Basque and/or Iberian. That's the point I've been making all along in regards to that issue.
My understanding was though, that once you have the mutation rate right, it is a fairly exact science. Karmin 2015 computed the phylogeny and split dates without reference to any adna samples and got results for all the modern samples that stand up to adna when it did come through. You'll miss some basal branches, but you won't get split dates wrong on orders of 3x-4x time. Once you've got the mutation rates right, you'll get basically the right result, as much as others before that study may have used the wrong mutation rate and got it wrong.
@ Anthony Hanken & Matt
«I agree N3a3'6 or L1026 is a possibile Seima-Turbino line.»
However, ancient Hungarians carried N-M2004 (the Yakut line) which is N(xL1026) and the phenotype of these N-M2004 guys was European.
A connection with Seima-Turbino is ok, if it is meant to refer to a movement of N lines from west to east. We already have PLENTY of ancient yDNA from Altai/Yenisei/Baikal area, and the Uralic lines detected in ancient Hungarians have not been found there. To my knowledge, in Altai and Baikal area, only N-P43, N-Khakass line and maybe the Botai line have been found.
@ Anthony Hanken
«Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolian probably originate around Inner Mongolia.»
Please explain this statement and give us the reasoning behind this conclusion?
@Kristiina
However, ancient Hungarians carried N-M2004 (the Yakut line) which is N(xL1026) and the phenotype of these N-M2004 guys was European.
Right, but I doubt that they had much in common with the early Uralics of the Ural region in terms of overall genetic structure and phenotype.
Just take a look who they were buried with.
@Matt
Karmin 2015 computed the phylogeny and split dates without reference to any adna samples and got results for all the modern samples that stand up to adna when it did come through.
Maybe, maybe not. That still needs to be checked against a comprehensive ancient dataset.
In any case, part of the reason why I said this isn't all that important is because there can be no such thing as a disjointed Y-HG N phylogeny in the context of the Proto-Uralic expansion.
There might be subclades of N which experienced slow or rapid expansions before the expansion of Proto-Uralic, for whatever reasons not linked to the Proto-Uralic expansion. We should also expect to see some subclades of N that aren't present in all Uralic populations, but instead shared between some Uralic groups and other linguistic groups, because they may have expanded late locally on the back of the Uralic or Turkic expansions.
There are all sorts of scenarios that can explain the complexity in the distribution of N subclades. The main point is that the Uralic language family came from somewhere in the Eurasian forest zone, which also just happened to be N country, so the two are correlated to some degree, and indeed it seems that when Uralic languages spilled over into areas outside the forest zone during the metal ages and medieval period, so did N.
@ Davidski “Just take a look who they were buried with.”
In case you are hinting at the possibility of the phenotype of N guys coming from the daughters of R1a1 males, let’s take a look at the data;
Blue eyes:
K2/6 E1b1b1a1b1a,
KEF2/1027 N1a1a1a1a2
KEF2/1045 N1a1a1a1a2
MH/16 I2a1a2b
MH/9 I2a1a2
Skin colour:
KEF2/1045 N1a1a1a1a2 very pale
MH/15 I2a1a2b pale
MH/9 I2a1a2 pale
K1/10 R1a1a1b1a2b intermediate/pale
K2/29 N1a1a1a1a2 intermediate/pale
MH/16 I2a1a2b intermediate/pale
KEF1/10936 Q1a intermediate/pale
SH/41 R1b1a1b1a1a2b intermediate/pale
SH/81 J2a1a intermediate/pale
Hair colour:
K2/29 N1a1a1a1a2 light/blond
MH/16 I2a1a2b light/blond
MH/9 I2a1a2 light
K2/6 E1b1b1a1b1a light/red
KEF1/10936 Q1a light/red
KEF2/1045 N1a1a1a1a2 light/brown
K2/52 I2a1a2b light/brown
K2/18 R1a1a1b1a2b light/brown
K3/13 R1b1a1b1a1a1 light/brown
SH/41 R1b1a1b1a1a2b light/brown
SH/81 J2a1a light/brown
None of the R1a1 or R1b guys have blue eyes. Two N-guys have blue eyes.
There is only one sample with a very pale skin and it is KEF2/1045 carrying N1a1a1a1a2-Z1936, which is the haplotype carried by aproximately a half of the Finnish males. R1a1 and R1b guys have intermediate skin colour except for one R1a1 guy.
Only one R1a1 guy has light/brown hair, while the only light/blond guys belong to the haplotypes N1a1a1a1a2-Z1936 and I2a1a2b. There are six R1a1 guys and only one of them is light/brown, the rest are dark/brown x2, dark/black x2, dark brown x1 and one who is defined 100% EA is NA for all three phenotype criteria.
How about the daughters of the I2a1a2 guys?
If you mean that N-L708, R1a1 and R1b-M269 became "white" due to the influence of the European Mesolithic/Neolithic population carrying yDNA I2, you may be right.
I didn't mean that.
Let’s check the mtDNA of the N guys KEF2/1027 N1a1a1a1a2, KEF2/1045 N1a1a1a1a2 and K2/29 N1a1a1a1a2.
KEF2/1027 N1a1a1a1a2: mtDNA N1a1a1a1a
KEF2/1045 N1a1a1a1a2: mtDNA N1a1a1a1a
K2/29 N1a1a1a1a2: mtDNA J1b1a1e
N1a1a1a1a is still found at least in Komis and Buryats, but it is not very frequent in modern Uralics. However, N1a1a1a1a (16189C) seems to have been present in the Sargat Culture in Western Siberia (Pg1 c. 500-0 BC). She is a woman. N1a has also been found in Gulyukovo in medieval Volga Ural. This is what is explained about the Gulyukovo site:
The material of Gulyukovo cemetery of the culture was investigated. … The cemetery shows connections with the supposedly Ugric, semi-nomad population of the Ural area, therefore majority of the archaeologists in the region identify this material as the heritage of the Hungarians who stayed in the east and had later been found by Friar Julian in the 13th century. This assumption can be reinforced by the presence of kurgan burials, shrouds placed on the eyes and mouths, handmade pottery with stamped decoration and the sporadic remains of partial horse burials. This material appears in the Trans-Ural region as well.
Therefore, the two N-bearing ancient Hungarians seem to carry a mtDNA haplogroup from the Uralic area.
J1b1a1e has been detected in two ancient Hungarians and in one Roman period individual in York (71-200 AD, BrMA). Upstream haplogroup J1b1a1 has been detected several times on the steppe, so J1b1a1 probably developed on the Bronze Age steppe without any connection to I2a1a2b as I2a1a2b has not been detected in Afanasievo or Sintashta.
"However, ancient Hungarians carried N-M2004 (the Yakut line) which is N(xL1026) and the phenotype of these N-M2004 guys was European".
The "Yakut line" is the result of a founder effect or a relatively recent bottleneck in that population. It amoung Hungarians, I would guess means it had a presence on the Steppe with Turkic(?) speakers. I don't see a problem with that or why their physical appearance matters in such ethnically diverse region. N-L708 probably didn't originate farther east than the Altai as it is absent in BHGs.
"A connection with Seima-Turbino is ok, if it is meant to refer to a movement of N lines from west to east. We already have PLENTY of ancient yDNA from Altai/Yenisei/Baikal area, and the Uralic lines detected in ancient Hungarians have not been found there. To my knowledge, in Altai and Baikal area, only N-P43, N-Khakass line and maybe the Botai line have been found".
Specifically N-L1026+ branches. ST spread late in the BA and the migrating population size is unknown so I'm not suprised we haven't found it in any aDNA yet. N-Y6058 would have spread with ST east. Netted Ware derived cultures seem to have ST influences in their metal working hinting at a connection west of the Urals.
"Please explain this statement and give us the reasoning behind this conclusion?"
Early Turks/Mongolians are both attested to in early Chinese records as living just north of them. Proto-Mongolian seems to have been spoken in the Rouran Khagnate, possibly as well as Turkic. I am no expert but this is what seems to be accepted.
@ Anthony Haken
“Early Turks/Mongolians are both attested to in early Chinese records as living just north of them.“
That is not correct. According to Wikipedia [and if you do not trust Wikipedia, please correct me]:
The Tiele (Chinese: 鐵勒; pinyin: Tiělè, Turkic *Tegreg "[People of the] Carts"), also transliterated as Chile (Chinese: 敕勒), Gaoche (Chinese: 高車), Tele[3] or (Chinese: 特勒), were a confederation of nine tribes living to the north of China and in CENTRAL ASIA, emerging after the disintegration of the confederacy of the Xiongnu. Chinese sources associate them with the earlier Dingling. The Tiele were a collection of tribes of mostly Turkic ethnic origins.
The Dingling (Chinese: 丁零) were an ancient people mentioned in Chinese historiography in the context of the 1st century BCE lived in Siberia. They are assumed to have been an early Proto-Turkic-speaking people, whose original constituents mainly assimilated into the Xiongnu and Xianbei groups. They originally lived on the bank of the Lena River in the area WEST OF LAKE BAIKAL, gradually MOVING SOUTHWARD to MONGOLIA AND NORTHERN CHINA.
“Proto-Mongolian seems to have been spoken in the Rouran Khagnate, possibly as well as Turkic.”
Rouran Khaganate is not the same as Inner Mongolia:
https://www.google.fi/maps/place/Inner+Mongolia,+China/@43.9488193,93.7117869,4z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x3605cc4bd26914df:0xd59746816dc2e950!8m2!3d43.37822!4d115.0594815
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouran_Khaganate#/media/File:Asia_400ad.jpg
@Davidski
Regarding the comparison between language shifts in Hungary and Bronze age Iberia, there is a reasonable explanation.
Bronze Age Iberia was dominated by small scale societies. There wasn't any mechanism for imposing language over large distances. Language shift dynamics were probably dominated by social structure and kinship networks. Literacy was nonexistent or confined to a small elite.
Medieval Hungary was a state society with a central government and a literate clergy. There is evidence of written Hungarian liturgy from shortly after the adoption of Christianity. Since the language had the official backing of the government administration and was sanctioned for religious use, it likely became dominant in a top down process.
@Kristiina-"If you mean that N-L708, R1a1 and R1b-M269 became "white" due to the influence of the European Mesolithic/Neolithic population carrying yDNA I2, you may be right"
Can you explain this theory a bit better?
@Kristiina
The Dingling connection seems to be attested but agian I am no expert so I can not say. Old Turkic seems to be nested within the same region as Proto Mongolian however Proto-Turkic may be more northern/western as you have said.
My original comment was that Proto-Mongolian originated around Inner Mongolia, not necessarily within it. The Rouran Khagnate did however encompass parts of Inner Mongolia.
If the Xiongnu/Huns were Turkic they seem to be high in Q and R1a not N going by the aDNA we have.
@ Gaska
It was a very general, polemic remark, so do not take it too literally.
However, I have the impression that the “whitest” ancient population is EEF-rich Globular Amphorae and also Corded Ware was quite pale. Yamnaya was quite dark. In any case, all three (pale skin, light hair and blue eyes) have the highest concentration in northern Europe, and many of you repeat over and over again that the IE-speaking R lines are from the steppe.
For example
- Yamnaya culture - dark hair pigmentation; mixed eyes (light and dark colours); darker skin
- Catacomb culture - predominantly dark pigmentation just like in case of Yamnaya culture
- Bronze Age Altai: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rFgh7T7Bp78/U5FOfhxpgwI/AAAAAAAAJoM/q7nbDxZPuDs/s1600/hollard.png
@ Anthony
The fact that "The Rouran Khagnate did however encompass parts of Inner Mongolia" is not much evidence for the origin of Proto-Mongolic in Inner Mongolia. Jinggouzi pastoralists with yDNA C2b1a-F1699 are, however, attested in Inner Mongolia c. 1000-500 BC, but they were newcomers from the north. C2b1a haplotypes are found in American aborigins and Koryaks who cannot be taken as speakers of Proto-Mongolic in Inner Mongolia.
Obviously the U152 guy was a commoner, because he was a local who had been living in "Hungary" since at least Bell Beaker times. Hungarians were not native to "Hungary".
@Kristiina
From Wikipedia,
"Proto-Mongolic can be clearly identified chronologically with the language spoken by the Mongols during Genghis Khan's early expansion in the 1200-1210s."
The Rouran Khagnate was established in 330AD. The Jinggouzi pastoralists inhabited Inner Mongolia much earlier than any Proto-Mongolians.
@Kristiina said- "However, I have the impression that the “whitest” ancient population is EEF-rich Globular Amphorae and also Corded Ware was quite pale"
That's the truth, the Anatolian farmers (not only GAC and CWC) had pale skin, even a few had blue eyes
"Yamnaya was quite dark. In any case, all three (pale skin, light hair and blue eyes) have the highest concentration in northern Europe, and many of you repeat over and over again that the IE-speaking R lines are from the steppe"
Not me, I´m Diego, and I have always said that L51/P312 is Western and that it is not related to the Yamnaya culture. Mesolithic WHgs were generally swarthy and had blue eyes, so I asked you, because there are R1b (Villabruna for example) with blue eyes, but there are also I2 and C1a2 with blue eyes. It is therefore not related to a specific male or female uniparental marker. They are mutations of which we still lack information but on which the environment also influences. That pigmentation is one of the reasons why a mass migration to Western Europe seems impossible.
@ Anthony
Exactly. I agree on that. We do not have much evidence to link Donghu/Jinggouzi in Inner Mongolia with Proto-Mongolic.
@ Synome
"Medieval Hungary was a state society with a central government and a literate clergy etc."
I think there is no Hungarian liturgy, You think Latin one? By the way I think the introduction of Hungarian language is easy to explain: the very same process happened in medieval England.
There is Hungarian speaking elite (pagan) and Slavic speaking peasants (mainly Christians, Constantinople oriented).
The question is why the melting between these two population was so instant? I think these DNA findings are obvious answer.
(by the way what is your explanation of language shift in medieval Wallachia?)
@Synome
"There is evidence of written Hungarian liturgy from shortly after the adoption of Christianity."
The earliest one is from 200 years after the adoption of Christianity.
I wonder how tall the Yamnaya and related men were. If they were quite y’all it might explain their success with farmer and forager women. “Tall, dark and handsome” men providing a new subsistence amidst failing crops could explain to a lot of the ydna replacements.
Kristina: Donghu tribes could be proto-Tungusic speakers. Ghengis Khan saw his ancestors among the Xiongnu, so further north and west.
@Leron, In my opinion the intermarriage between 'Steppe' men & 'Farmer' women wasn't consensual. Steppe tribes subdued, conquered, farmer tribes. They did the same thing to other Steppe clans.
In the end, anthropologist & what not will answer the question why this happened. The cause was probably extreme male-localism & female exogamy in Steppe clans. Males never left clan, often married women from different clans. Result, is hyprid population of local males & foreign women.
@AWood
Obviously the U152 guy was a commoner, because he was a local who had been living in "Hungary" since at least Bell Beaker times.
The commoner classification was based on the burial site (the Sárrétudvari–Hízóföld cemetery).
There were two samples from this commoner cemetery in the paper, one belonged to U152 and another to J2a1a.
@Slumbery
And of course the Iranic haplogroups were a widespread general steppe ancestry, I find it unlikely that those people were still Iranic speaking at the time.
Nope, it's actually quite likely that there were some Iranian speakers in the early Avar armies. I remember reading about this ages ago, and Wikipedia has a few lines on the topic here...
Wikipedia: Pannonian Avars
Obviously, these sorts of claims should never been taken too literally, but the presence of lineages under Y-HG R1a-Z93 in the Hun and early Avar samples that also appear to be basically of West Eurasian ancestry does suggest that in this instance they're basically correct.
I've got a feeling that when the genome-wide data for these and similar samples are released, some of the individuals with R1a-Z93 will essentially come out like this guy from early Iranian speaking territory.
An early Iranian, obviously
@All
Looks like Mauri has been dipping into the topic of ancient Finns and Y-haplogroup N lately too...
Iron Age Finns in Southwestern Finland belonged to N-haplogroup
@Davidsky
I misunderstood you, I thought you meant the Iranic lines in the Hungarian burials. I agree that some of the sampled Avars could be Iranic speakers at the time.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/03/southern-european-blues.html
AND +
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/09/early-anatolian-farmers-were.html
So it means, that: 1. Neolithic Farmers were an admixed population of WHG (or "Iron Gate" HG) and Natufians (later Levant_N) with a later strong bidirectional infusion of extra Natufian genes (with Natufians becoming also more Anatolia farmers-like). And: 2. A similar or close population to Anatolian farmers was already residing in Southern Europe before the LGM so that explains why there was almost a non-existent WHG population there, unlike in Eastern or Northern Europe.
Am I correct?
@Andrzejewski
Nope.
European Neolithic farmers were a mixture of European Mesolithic foragers and Anatolian Neolithic farmers, and Anatolian Neolithic farmers were mostly derived from Anatolian Mesolithic foragers, with some minor gene flow from the Neolithic populations of the Levant and eastern Mesopotamia. Natufians weren't involved in any of this directly.
And Southern Europe was inhabited by foragers very similar to those who lived in Northern Europe.
From Anthrogenica : average CWC with I6561 ( Sredni Stog)
sample": "CWC_Germany:Average",
"fit": 3.4882,
"Ukraine_Eneolithic--I6561 : 85,
"EHG": 8.33,
"Globular_Amphora_Ukraine": 3.33,
"LBK_N": 1.67,
"SHG": 1.67,
"WHG": 0,
Davidski- have Pinarbasi and Dzudzuana made it onto the G25 yet ?
@Dragos
I don't have the genotype data for these samples yet. Probably will soon.
Repetition is the most basic technique for learning ;) Basically it is vaste of time to search origins of languages by watching present-day ydna's and haplotrees. Often TMRCAs of whole living branches, for instance in Finland, are below 2000 years old and one man barely forwarded any language. The problem setting is fundamentally different from the assumptions we make. We can postulate that during the TMRCA of now living clade NOT ONLY ONE MAN belonged to the this clade in question, but he had brothers, cousins and even more distant cousins. Subsequently all other brother clans died out and so they didn't forward their own mutation chains to the present. This idea keeps our idea alive, but still proves nothing. It is mostly vaste of time to speculate until we have ancient dna showing who lived on the road of supposed speakers of any language, this assuming that we have no textual evidences. Even in case we have ancient texts we can be wrong, because wars, migrations and invasions change genome, for instance Egypt.
And going ahead with this scheme. If only one man forwarded his ydna to the present, it is also possible that lineages of real language distributors died totally out and the only thing they left us is language. The difference between one and zero man is not a big business.
@Slumberry
- On the fact that Hungarian envoys visiting the court of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII referred to themselves as Turks when asked about how they call themselves. In the same Byzantine account of the visit the envoys themselves said that Hungarians spoke two languages. Example words were given and one of the languages were identified by the Byzantines as similar to the contemporary Bashkir, while the other apparently did not ring a bell for them.
- A linguistic implication of the fact that there is a strong Turkic layer in the modern Hungarian language. Jusst by counting words the Slavic effect seems to be bigger, but the Turkic influence is deeper, reaching core layers of the language, like names of body parts.
- Later Medieval chronicles mentioning the fact that three of arriving tribes were Turks.
It's quite anachronistic to treat those labels as if they were linguistic labels, however. Most likely if they called themselves Turks or others called them Turks it had more to do with their lifestyle than what language they spoke.
Not that I don't agree with the general conclusions that the Magyar invasion was probably multi-lingual and that Hungarian developed early on with some form of contact with Turkish, but it's also not a coincidence that the Magyars lived in the same way as, say, the Bulgars nearby. When they called themselves Turks I don't think it was because they spoke a Turkic language, because the concept of a Turkic language being integral to their identity is a modern one, not a contemporary one.
@Kristiina
It was a very general, polemic remark, so do not take it too literally.
However, I have the impression that the “whitest” ancient population is EEF-rich Globular Amphorae and also Corded Ware was quite pale. Yamnaya was quite dark. In any case, all three (pale skin, light hair and blue eyes) have the highest concentration in northern Europe, and many of you repeat over and over again that the IE-speaking R lines are from the steppe.
If the Yamnaya were "quite dark" and the CWC were "quite pale" and yet 1) CWC is 75% Yamnaya at a genome wide level, and 2) the paler genetics, especially with regards to eye color, are known to be recessive, then it strongly suggests that there's some kind of sampling bias that's skewing our results in some way. It doesn't make much sense that a minority population with recessive genes nevertheless contribute so strongly to the phenotype that it has been remarked upon by everyone who's ever written about them from the ancient Greeks to the modern day.
The genetic history of admixture across inner Eurasia
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
The indigenous populations of inner Eurasia, a huge geographic region covering the central Eurasian steppe and the northern Eurasian taiga and tundra, harbor tremendous diversity in their genes, cultures and languages. In this study, we report novel genome-wide data for 763 individuals from Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. We furthermore report additional damage-reduced genome-wide data of two previously published individuals from the Eneolithic Botai culture in Kazakhstan (~5,400 BP). We find that present-day inner Eurasian populations are structured into three distinct admixture clines stretching between various western and eastern Eurasian ancestries, mirroring geography. The Botai and more recent ancient genomes from Siberia show a decrease in contribution from so-called “ancestral North Eurasian” ancestry over time, detectable only in the northern-most “forest-tundra” cline. The intermediate “steppe-forest” cline descends from the Late Bronze Age steppe ancestries, while the “southern steppe” cline further to the South shows a strong West/South Asian influence. Ancient genomes suggest a northward spread of the southern steppe cline in Central Asia during the first millennium BC. Finally, the genetic structure of Caucasus populations highlights a role of the Caucasus Mountains as a barrier to gene flow and suggests a post-Neolithic gene flow into North Caucasus populations from the steppe.
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJEB31152
@ Dragos Re:PinarBasi
There is 10-dimensional PCA in the supplement. You can use nMonte to model PinarBasi using samples that overlap with G25 and then reproduce this mix in G25.
scaled
PinarBasiProxy,0.11970307,0.177423102,0.026734022,-0.07229449,0.0691441,-0.039026244,-0.00263908,-0.003213524,0.048037786,0.08303808,0.006186028,0.015364004,-0.021311422,0.00128482,-0.02863736,-0.002867188,0.017070854,0.004468212,0.0099483,-0.005011178,-0.00538335,0.009126694,-0.005916702,-0.014088696,-0.004060192
@Desdichado said...
"It's quite anachronistic to treat those labels as if they were linguistic labels, however. Most likely if they called themselves Turks or others called them Turks it had more to do with their lifestyle than what language they spoke."
Generally I would agree, but there is a context and the usage of this ethnonym alone is just a small part of the argument.
Two further notes:
If the Byzantines could ignore language in ethnonyms, so could the Hungarians. They could very well used "Turk" or "Onugor" as an alternate ethnonym at some point.
The source material (De Administrato Imperio) used the specific names of other known Turkic groups (like Pechenegs). Ironically Hungarians are the only group consistently called Turks in that text, even when they are mentioned together with Turkic groups.
BTW, the Uralic root won in the language and there is no reason to assume that they weren't the main group from the beginning. The point is: they intertwined with actual Turkic groups on multiple levels. The melting pot of the Steppe.
@ Slumberry
Generally I would agree, but there is a context and the usage of this ethnonym alone is just a small part of the argument.
To be clear; I don't disagree with the conclusion at all. I just don't think this particular line of evidence means in context what it's being presented as.
@All
the question of language shift by elite dominance comes up strongly in this topic. Based on the heavy dilution of YDNA some assume that the Hungarians were a very small elite group, let's say not more than 5% of the population and then assimilated everybody. Business as usual, isn't it? No, it is not. I yet to know even a single documented historical example where this happened with these population ratios in a situation where the elite had no live/intensive connection to a homeland behind them. The latter is important, because it protects the small elite group from counter-assimilation, but the Hungarians did not have that. I do not say it is impossible, but it is not as evident as some seem to see it.
@Slumbery - What you're missing is two things:
1 - This was a two step process. First, the Magyars took the leadership of a multiethnic coalition, imposing/spreading their language on/to various nomadic holdovers. Then that coalition migrated to Hungary. The frequency of haplogroup N would already have been very diluted by that first step, and causing your estimate of the size of the elites to likely be low.
2 - The local populace was itself multiethnic and multilingual, with Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and a host of Avar-linked languages being spoken. There was no majority to be assimilated into.
@Ryan
I am not missing any of these. The Hungarian speakers already having a more favorable number around 900 AD (not being limited to the elite) is one of the obvious answers to the paradox. However there are people even in this topic, who propose that the language was bought in by a _small_ elite group. So my question stands.
BTW, there was no romance speaking population in the Carpathian Basin or Transylvania around 900 AD or just in very small numbers at best and the Germanic presence was also arguably small by the number of native speakers and limited to one sub-region. Also many speculate that most of the Avars were already mostly Slavic speakers at the time (especially Slavic historians love to assume that everybody was Slav there, but well, maybe there is some truth in it in an extent).
@Slumberry - Why are you assuming 5% if you took that into account already? Hungary is what, 5% haplogroup N? So probably more like 10-15% at least.
Also re: romance survival - Gesta Hungarorum disagrees with you.
@Ryan
I do not assume it was 5%. I am criticizing that assumption.
And Gesta Hungarorum is a nice origin story told to the contemporary aristocracy and is proven to be anachronistic. It was written 300 years after the conquest and projected the ethnic groups of its time back. The lack of Romance toponyms and personal names in the 11th century Transylvania (despite the fact that the texts were written in Latin) tells a different story. And that is just one point of evidence agains the Gesta's story.
@ Slumberry
BTW, there was no romance speaking population in the Carpathian Basin or Transylvania around 900 AD or just in very small numbers at best and the Germanic presence was also arguably small by the number of native speakers and limited to one sub-region. Also many speculate that most of the Avars were already mostly Slavic speakers at the time (especially Slavic historians love to assume that everybody was Slav there, but well, maybe there is some truth in it in an extent).
Depends on how tightly you define the geography. The Romanians didn't come from nowhere, nor from outside. They were probably Romanized Dacians, although I admit that I'm not very familiar with the genetic continuity (or lack thereof) of the area during the time period in question. But a hybrid of Dacians with a Roman admixture and Romanized culture and language is the prevailing consensus of the ethnogenesis of the Romanians and Moldavians.
@Desdichado
Sure, but we know that:
- History says the Roman population of Dacia was evacuated into the South in the second half of the 3th century.
- Archeology says that the Roman settlements were indeed abandoned here at the time.
- Linguistic says that the modern Romanian language developed in contact with Albanian.
- Genetics says that modern Romanians are genetically _much_ closer to Bulgarians than to any other of their neighboors.
BTW, most of the Balkan was Greek speaking in Roman times, but Dacia was Latin + Dacia was evacauted into the region where Romanians emerged later (give or take), so it is very likely that the Romance population of the Balkan had its roots in the population of Dacia at least partially. But there was some migration in between.
But this is a controversy, because it touches natioanlistic sensitivities. Some people think modern rights should be based on millienia old arriving orders. :P
I've suddenly lost all confidence in the the theory that steppe males would steal farmer women.
https://nerdist.com/article/9000-year-old-teenager-facial-reconstruction/
^ She's likely a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer, though, living just before the Neolithic people showed up. She'd probably plot like Iron Gates, or possibly like Croatia HG or Romania HG. No doubt a WHG, not a farmer.
Physical anthropology tells us most ANFs/EEFs were morphologically Classic/Gracile Mediterranean, so they probably would have been the best-looking people around for miles, at least by modern standards. Not that it matters much; our AMH ancestors bred with Neanderthals and Denisovans for crying out loud-- we're clearly not that picky. I'm sure Dawn looked just fine to her contemporaries. ;)
WHG does not predate EEF in Greece, Mesolithic Greek samples are 95%+ EEF.
@M. Myllylä
There are also other exceptions, Latvians and Lithuanians, both speaking IE-languages. Among them the frequency of N is equal to R1a. Which one was the conqueror? If R1a, did they speak Uralic language before it?
I don't see them as exceptions at all. It is not like Latvians/Lithuanians originally spoke Uralic... Exception in Baltic actually are Estonians, who lost their Baltic languages due to migration of Uralic speaking L550 from NE.
Latvian and Lithuanian L550 variation(centered around Lithuania) differs from Estonian. L550 migration to Estonia was Baltic Finn speaking, but L550 branch that migrated to Latvia and Lithuania was Baltic speaking - most probably also mixed with M558. The branch that migrated to Estonia arrived there later(by 1000-2000 years) than the Baltic speaking branch of L550, that migrated from east. Some of the reasons why Baltic L550 pushed to west was also arrival of Slavonian tribes in that area.
There are not much information about bigger differences in M558 variation of R1a in Baltic, so it is hard to tell how much of R1a is native and how much came together with L550.
It is not always black and white question of conquerors and subjugation - but acquiring better advances in technology. Are English/Americans conquerors of 21st century, because we communicate in English? Are we subjugated?
In a big picture - Uralic became agricultural and settled down under influences of Baltic, where Uralic has many terms borrowed from Baltic about agriculture and other topics. The area of those metamorphoses are located to the east of current Balts. Some of the Uralic switched to Baltic in process. At least some of the Russian sources I've read, have identified some cultures as culturally Uralic(burials, clothing style) who used Baltic language.
The way left-wingers in Britain used WHG's dark skin to further their agenda was messed up. But, it is also annoying how every ancient people are depicted as European/white. Even Neanderthals were depicted like northern Europeans.
That 9ky greek girl is given northern European-like complexion. If, they looked at ancient DNA research they'd know she was probably mostly WHG & had brown skin. If, she was EEF she would still probably have brownish skin.
@Samuel Andrews
Everything you wrote is wrong. WHG was never in Greece, and the earliest EEFs from Anatolia and the Aegean were light skinned.
This is for samples 6000 B.C. Same age as this Greek girl.
Given that the Aegean is the likely origin of European Neolithic farmers, we used Bar8 and Bar31 as putative sources to assess the extent of hunter-gatherer admixture in European farmers through the Neolithic. f4 statistics of the form f4 (Neolithic farmer, Anatolian, HG, ‡Khomani) indicated small but significant amounts of hunter-gatherer admixture into both Spanish and Hungarian early farmer genomes, and interestingly, the Early Neolithic Greek genome. Our mixture modeling analysis also inferred a small genetic contribution from the Loschbour hunter-gatherer genome (3–9%) to each of the Early Neolithic Hungarian and German genomes, but evidence of a smaller contribution to any Aegean genomes (0–6%). These results suggest that mixing between migrating farmers and local hunter-gatherers occurred sporadically at low levels throughout the continent even in the earliest stages of the Neolithic. However, consistent with previous findings (3), both f4 statistics and ADMIXTURE analysis indicate a substantial increase in hunter-gatherer ancestry transitioning into the Middle Neolithic across Europe, whereas Late Neolithic farmers also demonstrate a considerable input of ancestry from steppe populations (SI Appendix, SI8. Proportions of Ancestral Clusters in Neolithic Populations of Europe and Fig. S32).
Aegean individuals are homozygous for the derived rs1426654 T-allele in the SLC24A5 gene, and four carry at least one copy of the derived rs16891982 G-allele in the SLC45A2 gene. This suggests that these reduced-pigmentation–associated alleles were at appreciable frequency in Neolithic Aegeans and that skin depigmentation was not solely a high-latitude phenomenon (SI Appendix, SI12. Functional Markers). The derived rs12913832 G-allele in the HERC2 domain of the OCA2 gene was heterozygous in one individual (Klei10), but all other Aegeans for whom the allelic state at this locus could be determined were homozygous for the ancestral allele, indicating a lack of iris depigmentation in these individuals.
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/25/6886
@Roulus, That study sequenced genomes from Greek farmers not hunter gatherers. No genome from a Greek hunter gatherer has been sequenced.
Two mtDNA genomes from Greek hunter gatherers has. They belonged to K1c. K1c has been found in Iron gate/Serbia hunter gatherers. Also, the Greek HGs share extra mutations with a K1c from Iron Gate confirming a relationship between the two. So, those Greek Hgs had at least somekind of common ancestry with Serbia HGs. It is still equally likely they were EEF as it is they were WHG.
No one said she was an HG but YOU and she is from the exact same time period as the samples from the study I linked you to. You are a moron, seriously.
I got that from Mike Jedi. He said thinks she's way a hunter gatherer. Anyways, it is always interesting to prehistoric reconstructions. Thanks for sharing it!
@gL
A typical example of ethnocentrism in which you depreciate your neighbour and minimize their genetic, linguistic and cultural contribution and value and overrate your own.
We now know for sure that N-L1026 arrived in Estonia c. 700 BC with the Tarand Graves Culture.
It is amazing that you manage to make L550 even 4000-5000 years old in the Baltics when you claim that it arrived in the area with R1a1-M558 c. 2700-1700 BC! Have a look at https://www.yfull.com/tree/N-Z4908/
@ Kristiina and related to "We now know for sure that N-L1026 arrived in Estonia c. 700 BC with the Tarand Graves Culture.". 700 BC, plus or minus something, indeed seems to be based on those facts which are available. Besides and related to M. Myllylä's previous comments: it is very unclear to what extent we're able to connect the older i.e. non-classical Tarand burials to Uralic speakers. These older Tarands are like circular, many times rather non-symmetric low walls or rings made of stones. Classical, younger Tarands are basically quadrilateral squares, basically just like house basements made of stones (which they possibly or even probably are, related to the older House of Death burial tradition of Volga-Kama, fex in Dyakovo culture ). In other words, these older Tarands may or may not be Tarands at all, just circular burial structures also made of stones and possibly related to other people than Uralic speakers, fex Proto Germanic speakers in the area.
@Davidski @Kristiina I've seen the Wikipedia entry re: Yamnaya Culture where the skin color was changed by some "editor" from "moderately light but slightly darker than contemporary Northern Europeans" into "significantly darker than the average modern European", with some bogus drivel about their tendency to tan rather than burn. I presume some Southern Europeans/Middle Easterners have altered the data deliberately.
@Arza "Finally, the genetic structure of Caucasus populations highlights a role of the Caucasus Mountains as a barrier to gene flow and suggests a post-Neolithic gene flow into North Caucasus populations from the steppe."
Does it explain why Adyghe and other North Caucasus populations look closer to "European" compared to Georgians and Armenians? Would you attribute it to a post-Neolithic Steppe influx?
@Romulus @Mike The Jedi "I've suddenly lost all confidence in the the theory that steppe males would steal farmer women.
https://nerdist.com/article/9000-year-old-teenager-facial-reconstruction/
"
Her skeleton bone structure and facial features are very close to those of "Otzi the Iceman", don't they? She looks like "Dawn" and "Otzi" both sprung from the same or similar, closely related populations (either WHG or EEF, perhaps an admixture thereof).
@ Huck Finn
You are right in particular if N-L1026 is considered a Proto-Germanic marker. When we look at the yfull tree, the age of N-L550 around the Baltic Sea seems to correspond to the arrival of early Tarands.
In any case, in order to be really able to argue to which modern population the old Tarands belong, we need autosomal DNA. Without yDNA and autosomal DNA it is very much speculation.
However, I know that some people would be very happy if Proto-Germanic were spoken in Estonia.
@Andre,
Yes. Adygei, Ossestian, Lezgin are basically Maykop/Georgain+something Steppe/European.
@Samuel Andrews "That 9ky greek girl is given northern European-like complexion. If, they looked at ancient DNA research they'd know she was probably mostly WHG & had brown skin. If, she was EEF she would still probably have brownish skin."
Do you agree then that light skin came from the Steppe?
Also, doesn't she remind you of Otzi when it comes to her skull's shape?
Different Tarand Graves can be caused by cultural shifts and not including a linguist evidence, but sure there is an obvious connection between the appearance of Finnic language in Estonia and Tarand graves. I have to mention in this context that all those great remains under research in Iron Age Finland (Luistari), including many N men, were from inhumation graves, not from cremation graves, and Tarand graves were mostly cremated. Cultural shift was obvious again. There is on debates like this one ignorance, misleading information or even biased opinions, inoffensively or goal-directed. Tarand graves are sure some kind of evidence of the Finnic language, but the whole history of Baltic Finns is much more complicated. Just a side note to the discussion ...
@Andrzejewski
I can't say that I share your passion for human physical traits. The reason being that such traits can change rapidly in populations even without any significant foreign admixture coming in, due to selection and/or environmental factors.
The other issue is that inferring complex physical traits like skin color with DNA in prehistoric populations is often guesswork, because no one really knows whether the markers that are associated with various traits in modern populations were also associated with the same traits in populations that are a few thousand years old or older.
And it might be useful to keep in mind that facial reconstructions of ancient humans are more often than not total BS. It's not something even worth discussing.
@Romulus "No one said she was an HG but YOU and she is from the exact same time period as the samples from the study I linked you to. You are a moron, seriously."
Dawn (Avgi) is actually from 7000 BCE, not 6000 BCE. 7000 BCE is about the start of the Neolithic transition in Greece, so MAYBE she is a farmer, but the Greek scientists describe her as a Mesolithic sample. Maybe that's inaccurate OR maybe Mesolithic Greeks were similar to Anatolian farmers/hunter-gatherers in the first place. Either way, there's no reason to be uncivil or call Sam a moron.
New tools for ancient DNA will be available soon:
https://twitter.com/vagheesh/status/1115976576427077632
OT: Some abstracts from a conference at the close of last month, may be of interest to Frank and some other archaeological detail oriented commentors :
https://crossdem2019com.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/crossdem2019-abstracts-2.pdf
Scaffolding Irish Demography with ancient genomes
Lara Cassidy and Dan Bradley (Trinity College Dublin)
Ireland provides a relatively contained microcosm in which to study the defining demographic events that have shaped European populations. It has acted as the geographic terminus for major migrations in the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age, while its island status has afforded it some level of genetic continuity over the past four millennia. We explore the impact of such events on the genomes of over 100 ancient Irelanders. These encompass all eras of the island’s history, from the Mesolithic to Early Modern period. Dense sampling across time intervals of known demographic flux allows us to examine the complex interplay between geography and culture in the assimilation of new peoples to the island.
We find persistence of older divergent ancestries in the western extremes during both the Neolithic and Bronze Age transitions, suggesting geography may drive recurrent genetic and demographic trends time and time again. Genomic sequencing to a median of 1X allows for the imputation of diploid genotypes, providing haplotypic data to dissect subtle patterns of population structure and relatedness among more homogenous Irish populations during periods of demographic continuity. With these methods we find cultural drivers of structure during the Irish Neolithic period, related to burial type.
Diploid data can also be used to define genomic runs of homozygosity, the size distributions of which give insight into both ancient and recent inbreeding bottlenecks. Most strikingly, two Irish Mesolithic genomes show the highest recorded levels of short homozygous segments, suggesting an isolated restricted island population.
Signals of genetic continuity and change after the initial establishment of the modern Irish population in the Bronze Age are also explored, with haplotypic diversification evident across the four millennia.
(tbc.)
The Beaker transition in Britain: an integrated view of the funerary evidence
Anna Bloxam (UCL)
The first appearance of the Beaker phenomenon in Britain marks the transition from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic, with the changes seen in this period setting the path for future developments across the Early Bronze Age. This ‘Beaker period’ (c.2450-1950 BC) is also associated with widespread indications of demographic change: the archaeological evidence indicates the sudden appearance of new ways of life and approaches to death; the osteological evidence reveals morphological changes to the people present in burials; and the genetic evidence suggests that the period saw a near-total genomic replacement of the pre-existing Neolithic peoples of Britain. While some of these findings have been considered in conjunction with each other (for example in Olalde et al.’s 2018 genetics paper), our archaeological interpretations of the period have yet to catch up with the availability of new forms of evidence. Perhaps more crucially, a re-evaluation of the funerary practices of this period suggests that our existing understanding of the Beaker phenomenon in Britain may be overly reliant on outdated assumptions of the homogeneity of cultural expressions across the period.
In this paper, I present new work on the burial practices of the Beaker period, including new archaeological, osteological, and radiocarbon analyses, and compare my findings to the published genomic research. I seek to move past existing stereotypes surrounding the archaeological data, in order to explore the evidence for cultural diversity and inter-group interaction across this transitional phase in British prehistory. In incorporating a wide range of the available data, I aim to provide a more nuanced consideration of the nature, scale, and temporality of the cultural and population changes of the Chalcolithic. I argue the importance of avoiding a return to the culture-historical narrative of a ‘Beaker Folk’, and demonstrate that by integrating multiple strands of evidence it is possible to both enrich and continue to develop our understandings, even in intensively-studied periods and place
(For a flavour of this author's research, check out her profile and conference abstracts at - http://ucl.academia.edu/AnnaBloxam and https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/people/research-students/anna-bloxam. Seems like she is particularly a skeptic of the idea of a caesura of cremation during the British Beaker period - practiced in late Neolithic Meldon Bridge period, where we have extremely limited adna (because of cremation?), ceased with Beaker, resumed in EBA, approx. 300 years later. Whether that idea is right or not, generally methodology in abstract above exactly the sort of thing I am hoping to see, as well as in Iberia for periods under discussion, ideally supplement with some more extensive rechecking of dna, sample by sample, than even Olalde's papers did.)
Wrt Avgi. If truly a Greek Mesolithic, she would be neither Anatolian farmer nor WHG; but along a more archaic HG- cline from Europe to Anatolia. Perhaps somewhere between AHG & Iron Gates
But I suspect she’ll actually be Neolithic , unfortunately
According to Lang early Tarand type graves are found on the coastal parts of Sweden and Finland. Similer to the distribution of Akozino type celts.
Early branches of L550 are found in Sweden and Southwest Finland. I don't think it's a stretch to say it came with early Tarands and possibly engaged in trade with Proto-Germanics even possibly adopting both languages.
The Stone-Cist graves in the same study are thought to be of Scandinavian origin. All men were R1a.
Matt, there are two problems with her reasoning:
1. There are plenty of Neolithic skeletons up to the Bell Beaker period in Britain, and unlike the case in Iberia, they stop abruptly. It makes no sense that incoming Bell Beakers only replaced those that practiced inhumation and not those practiced cremation.
2. Up to the Roman period, dozens of samples all belonged to L21. Hard to believe that a substantial I2a population kept practicing cremation for two thousand years and not revealing themselves heavily in Celtic burials.
“”but the Greek scientists describe her as a Mesolithic sample”
Oh I see. That’s awesome
@Andrzejewski
"Does it explain why Adyghe and other North Caucasus populations look closer to "European" compared to Georgians and Armenians?"
This is absolutely absurd. If there is an ethnic group in the Caucasus that doesn't look European, it is the Adygheans and some Dagestani groups. A lot of Adygheans have noticeable Mongoloid features. It is not clear when the Mongoloid people were absorbed into Adygheans, but since it is often speculated that Adygheans originally moved from Anatolia when they were fleeing Indo-Europeans, the admixture with the Mongoloid peoples would be a result of the Turkic and Mongolic migrations.
If there is a group of people in the Caucasus that can be described most "European-looking", by which you prolly mean every part of Europe except the extreme South, then the primary contenders are the Vainakh, who have the highest frequency of haplogroup J2, which spread from the Northern Levant. The Vainakh do have a very heterogenous mtDNA, though.
Also, Georgians look quite similar to Central Italians, Albanians, Northern Spaniards, Sardinians and I have heard from some people even to Yugoslavs, though I don't see the similarity.
You need to clarify what a "European" look is.
@Anthony Hanken
The Stone-Cist graves in the same study are thought to be of Scandinavian origin. All men were R1a.
What's the source for the former?
Mike the Jedi said...
"OR maybe Mesolithic Greeks were similar to Anatolian farmers/hunter-gatherers in the first place"
this is an important point imo - there had to be transitional population(s) who were both recent HG and early farmer (obvious but worth explicitly reminding now and then).
#
Samuel Andrews
"That 9ky greek girl is given northern European-like complexion. If, they looked at ancient DNA research they'd know she was probably mostly WHG & had brown skin."
*if* depigmentation is a result of needing better vitamin d absorption in high latitudes
and
*if* HGs living in high latitudes but near the coast could get their vitamin d from seafood
then it seems highly likely to me there could have been a divergence in pigmentation between populations along the coast and populations in the interior.
(e.g. the SHG samples who iirc had various depigmentation genes)
(on the other hand i agree that until the pigmentation thing is fully understood the choice of skin color will often be subjective)
@Knowlegeable Geneticist "Also, Georgians look quite similar to Central Italians, Albanians, Northern Spaniards, Sardinians and I have heard from some people even to Yugoslavs, though I don't see the similarity."
Not necessarily: Stalin would've looked indistinguishable amongst the populace in Syria, whereas the Russians typically refer to Kartvelians and Armenians as "Churki". The average Armenian or Georgian pass off more as a Middle Easterner than as a European. (I know that @Davidski is not happy with me talking about and bringing up Physical Anthropology but it fascinates me how come modern Europeans and ME'ners share many common populations, including Anatolian farmers yet are so different by-and-large nowadays, appearance-wise; or how come as soon as one leaves Geographic Europe into Siberia or Central Asia, and all of the sudden people look noticeably different).
Speaking of the Caucasus and Vainakh etc, I'm wondering whether the much-talked about "Uruk expansion" and Halafian Culture's role in the formation of the Meshoko Culture, Kura-Araxes or even Maykop might be misplaced. Isn't it more plausible that the large-scale migration wave into the Caucasus 4000 BCE was basically more of an Anatolian farmer variety? After all, Georgians and Armenians along with other Caucasus populations share an almost identical ratio of CHG vis-a-vis EEF (30%-35%)?
I'm still trying to make out how Caucasus language families came about: for me it's an interplay of Anatolian farmer languages (Kartvelian?), CHG ones (Adyghea?) and Vainakh (Iran Neolithic)?
@Grey there was a more widespread admixture between HG's and Farmers than have been so far acknowledged. Maybe Otzi is both. His mtDNA is K1f which seems to be an ancestral population to both.
BTW, are modern Swedes closer to Motala or to Goeken? I've read a study claiming that Nordics have more HG's in them than Farmer aDna, although the actual SHG ratio is fairly low to non-existent. So I'm guessing it has to do more with an WHG proper, maybe the Ertebolle Culture component within Funnel Beaker/GAC?
@Davidski
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.kirj.ee/public/Archaeology/2012/issue_2/arch-2012-2-91-117.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiI69SorMjhAhULW60KHRrqD4MQFjAIegQICBAB&usg=AOvVaw0ipY7AsikEKdD68BEvb1Km&cshid=1554996378431
Aparently there are even bronze objects of Danish origin in some of the Estonian graves.
There are also more works done by Valter Lang on the subject.
Kristiina said...
"However, I have the impression that the “whitest” ancient population is EEF-rich Globular Amphorae and also Corded Ware was quite pale. Yamnaya was quite dark."
if wetlands foragers living around the black sea (and/or various lakes) got their vitamin d from fish then they might not have had the same selective pressure for lighter skin.
it seems to me that pressure - if that is the cause of depigmentation - would be highest on HGs out on the steppe itself i.e the combination of high latitude and no fish.
#
"people of the carts"
pet theory: i think kilts are a clue there might have been a "wagon IE" expansion before the full "horse IE" expansion.
Andrzejewski said...
"are modern Swedes closer to Motala or to Goeken?"
i haven't been keeping up so dunno what the current idea is - all i recall is some time ago there was an idea that various depigmentation genes were mostly spread by EEF (and maybe they were) but the presence of those genes in SHG seemed to me to imply EEF originally got them from SHG and they spread rapidly among the EEF cos something about those genes was adaptive for people who had switched to the farmer diet.
(my guess is the first farmers originally lived around lakes and were relatively dark but when they expanded away from marine sources of food they needed more vitamin d)
@Andrzejewski- "I've seen the Wikipedia entry re: Yamnaya Culture where the skin color was changed by some "editor" from "moderately light but slightly darker than contemporary Northern Europeans" into "significantly darker than the average modern European", with some bogus drivel about their tendency to tan rather than burn. I presume some Southern Europeans/Middle Easterners have altered the data deliberately"
The truth is that your comments as well as being funny and absurd, show that you should travel a little more and stop saying stupid things. There are a lot of topics about the Northern and Southern Europeans that are not true. The Poles have always been a friendly people for the Spaniards, because they have had a sad history and are Catholics, but hearing you speak we are beginning to think that we prefer the Germans. At least they have learned the lessons of history. Obviously the Europeans are mainly white thanks to the Anatolian Neolithic farmers and the environmental adaptation and we have blue eyes thanks to the WHGs. Everything else is racist stupidities.
@Knowlegeable Geneticist "Also, Georgians look quite similar to Central Italians, Albanians, Northern Spaniards, Sardinians and I have heard from some people even to Yugoslavs, though I don't see the similarity."
You also need to travel a little more and stop using absurd clichés. Who do you mean the Northern Spaniards, the Basques, the Cantabrians, the Galicians? You should know that there are more blond, blue eyed Andalusians than Galician and that despite the fact that Galicia is considered Celtic land.
No wonder that Davidski does not like to talk about these issues here, because in addition to demonstrating a supine ignorance, it shows that in the attempt to bring the BBs of the steppes lies a clear racist intention.
@ Matt -
Unlike Rocca, I think Anna Bloxam is right, many mitochondrial haplogroups of the islands survived the pretended conquest of the BBs, which shows a clear mix with indigenous women. They were able to maintain those cremation rituals. The works that I know (Cassidy and Brace) show that the vast majority of these haplogroups are identical to the Iberian ones, which shows the existence of commercial and migratory routes between Iberia and Ireland since the Neolithic. These routes were maintained during chalcolithic as some Irish archaeologists have already shown.
@Rocca- They don't stop abruptly. A good percentage of the mitochondrial haplogroups of the British BBs are autochthonous Neolithic. I can give you some examples.
"Romulus said...
I've suddenly lost all confidence in the the theory that steppe males would steal farmer women."
if humans were pretty much two-legged wolves for most of history i'd guess the main cause of attraction for most of that time was scent.
Gaska
"Obviously the Europeans are mainly white thanks to the Anatolian Neolithic farmers and the environmental adaptation and we have blue eyes thanks to the WHGs."
the problem with
WHG: dark skin, light eyes, dark hair
plus
EEF: light skin, dark eyes, dark hair
is where did the light hair come from?
seems like you'd need a third population.
@Grey
As far as I understand it, the Scots got their kilts from the Norse. The Irish wore some kind of one piece wool robe, and with a fancy brooch pin for the wealthy.
@Grey "seems like you'd need a third population"
Actually, everything is a bit more complicated, but I try to simplify it so that our Polish friend understands something.
"One of the two major Caucasoid depigmentation mutations, in the gene SLC24A5, is now found at or near fixation in all Caucasoid populations. Two copies of this mutation were present in almost all of the samples, including the hunter-gatherers, whose ancestors inhabited Europe during the Upper Paleolithic, and the first farmers, whose ancestors inhabited the Middle East during the Upper Paleolithic"
The selective sweep for the SLC24A5 mutation started 19.000-11.000 years ago. It’s also consistent with that Afontova Gora2, an Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer who lived 17.000 years ago in Siberia had the SLC24A5 mutation. The 2012 paper estimated that the selective sweep for the Veddoid depigmentation mutation in the gene KILTG started 30.000 years ago, but we know for the 45.000 years-old Ust’-Ishim genome that selection for the Veddoid depigmentation mutations began far earlier. The other major Caucasoid depigmentation mutation in the gene SLC45A2 is now found at or near fixation in almost all European populations, but it is found at significantly lower frequencies in the Caucasoids of the Middle East and North Africa.
Sandra Wilde, Adrian Timpson (2.014)- 63 Copper and Bronze Age samples from the Pontic Caspian steppe. Those results showed frequencies for the light skin mutation in SLC45A2, the blue eyes mutation in OCA2/HERC2 and the light skin mutation in TYR that were lower than the frequencies found in modern day Europeans.
The derived alleles at both rs1426654 and rs16891982 positions are found at extremely high frequencies in present-day European populations (where the former allele is virtually fixed and the latter is ~90%), an observation that has been interpreted as the signature of recent positive selection in Europeans.
The dark skin and blue eyes phenotype combination was likely very common among WHGs- La Braña, Lochsbour, Cheddar man, Villabruna etc..
The Karelian-EHG presents high probabilities of being brown-eyed (0.99), and having a dark hair (0.96). Samaran individual exhibits high probabilities of being blue-eyed (0.88), light hair shade (0.99); most likely being blond (0.75).
Light eye pigmentation variants were present at high frequencies in WHG, SHG, EHG and EEF (not present in PEHG), while the blue-eye color founder haplotype h-1 was found in the La Braña, Loschbour, Villabruna WHGs, SF12, Motala1 and Motala12 SHGs and at least one early farmer. Such results suggest that the blue eye-color allele is rather old. Using an ABC modeling approach Nakagome et al, predicted that the light-pigmentation allele at rs12913832 emerged around 42,000 years ago or earlier; a date close in time to the initial peopling of Europe.
The large effect light-skin alleles at rs16891982 and rs1426654 were present in SHG, EHG, CHG and EEF but absent in WHG and PEHG. Similarly, the C11 haplotype is present in hunter-gatherers (SHG, EHG and CHG but not WHG and PEHG) throughout Europe, as well as in at least two early farmers. This pattern is consistent with reports that the rs1426654 derived allele arose ~22,000-28,000 years ago, and that the light-pigmentation allele at rs16891982 arose only once in Eurasians. A possible geographical origin for these two major light-skin alleles is West Asia or the Near East.
Later migrations across the Caucasus (CHG) and Eastern Europe would have brought it to Scandinavia, while EEF migrations introduced both alleles into central Europe. Moreover, suggested that selective sweeps on rs1426654 and rs16891982 (light-pigmentation alleles), started at between ~15-19 kya (under a dominant model) and ~11-13 kya (under an additive model), respectively.
These results, of a high frequency of rs1426654 light-skin allele in Mesolithic Scandinavia
and Eastern Europe, at a time when it is not seen in central Europe, supports a scenario of environmental adaptation to northern latitudes
@Rocca- They don't stop abruptly. A good percentage of the mitochondrial haplogroups of the British BBs are autochthonous Neolithic. I can give you some examples.
You don't need to, I've already seen the ancient DNA data, both on the Y-chromosome and autosomal side. What you didn't answer is the absurdity of Bell Beaker men only replacing men that practiced inhumation. Did the conversation go something like this?... "Excuse me sir, do you practice cremation? You do, OK then I won't kill off your lineage." It's the same lame argument that some online Brits were using to say that the Neoltihics were P312 but practiced cremation.
@Rich, what do you mean by: There are plenty of Neolithic skeletons up to the Bell Beaker period in Britain, and unlike the case in Iberia, they stop abruptly.?
Are you talking about burial rite?
If you're talking about samples genetically typed by Reich lab as having a Neolithic ancestry profile, we can't talk about them stopping abruptly with Beaker, as there are about two samples from Orkney and a femur from Cheddar with very low coverage, not really in any world anyone's idea of "plenty".
See - https://i.imgur.com/Pxi74Hy.png
If there are in fact plenty of inhumations in England at during the transitional phase in question (and I don't know enough about burials to know), and their gap is not due to cremation practice, then the performance of Olalde 2018 in sampling two Orkney passage graves and a ultra-low coverage femur is pretty bad, and hopefully in the future they will be able to improve it.
Also what do you mean by "dozens of samples all belonged to L21"? Precisely, Olalde 2018 had 57 male post-Neolithic samples, 3 were I2a2a, 1 was F, 1 unassigned, 52 were R1b1a, in percentage terms I2a2a 5%, R1b1a 91%.
Though the sample count is too low to be reliable on exact percentages.
I'm not totally sure what her argument is from her abstracts though; I assume something compatible enough with evidence to not demolishable by two lines of text.
Matt, my point is that, if she is arguing for a much larger British Neolithic survival, there is nothing in the DNA to substantiate it. Simply saying "well people were cremating" doesn't cut it either because the DNA of those cremators would have eventually made their way into the Y-chromosome record. As you stated, the I2a survival was minimal up until the Roman period.
@Richard, I don't know if she is arguing for more survival in genomic terms, rather to me seems about talking about how people interacted "on the ground" and the cultural influences and interactions that may have occurred despite by and large genetic replacement.
Genomically a greater survival to a small extent (maybe 10% less than their 90% replacement) may be plausible if there was some "hiding" of samples due to burial rite and a slightly more steppe rich set of Beaker people entering Britain than the later Dutch samples which are used as their proxy suggest (if those samples have some introgression of local EEF ancestry themselves), which there I think there may be some support in that their two earliest Beaker samples in Britain have much less steppe ancestry and possibly about 10% more than the Dutch average.
But not to a large extent. But I don't think she is arguing for a large extent.
It may also be that the practice of cremation was not totally foreign to the BBC, in Iberia there are burials with partial cremations, and also secondary burials (leaving the bodies in the field for wild animals to eat them, and then burying the bones ); These practices were carried on the Castilian Plateau until the arrival of the Romans with three types of burials- Children before their teeth came out, on the floor of the houses, the warriors were left in the field to be eaten by vultures and the rest of the population incinerated. Thank God in Iberia there are dozens of skeletons of children recovered in the Bronze and Iron Age sites. Maybe the same thing happened on the isles.
I am also convinced that other haplogroups besides R1b-P312 have to appear in Iberia during these periods, especially in very hierarchical societies such as El Argar, that would explain the survival of I2a and G2a in Spain to this day.
Gaska
Cremation doesn’t explain the disappearance of lineages throughout the Atlantic
Given the current evidence, Bloxam’’s arguement that there were no “BB folk” is not even wrong
However cremation does explain difficulties in the Celtic period; which did introduce cremation in significant quantities
Eg in Iberia - a whole new horizon in Celtiberian lands
“This new archaeological group could be defined by the following elements: 1) the appearance of the first hill-forts (locally called castros, small settlements in high areas with natural defences and man-made defensive structures); 2) the establishment of the first cremation cemeteries (Burillo 1990); and 3) a whole range of ceramics and new metallic objects, many of which were forged from the new metal, iron. Such objects had not previously existed in local pottery and metallurgy traditions ..”
Davidski
What are your thoughts in recent suggestions that Slavic expanded with haplogroup E?
Slavic expanded with haplogroup E
durnota - lack of common sense; senseless thing, Polish
दुर्नीत durnIta - lack of good sense; foolishness, Sanskrit
@Davidski
I saw you mentioned Dzudzuana earlier in the comments, hopefully you can get that genome soon. A bit off topic, but there was an interesting discussion on that North Africa paper from last year over on Anthrogenica recently about the so-called "Ancestral North African" component that contributed to Taforalt, Natufians, and what have you. Do you have any opinion on whether this somewhat mysterious "ANA" population could plausibly be called SSA or some kind of very diverged Eurasian? Maybe once you have Dzudzuana, we can start to get more clarity on deep Eurasian structure.
At the end of the day, how do we explain the Centum Indo-European Languages if R1b were not originally Indo-European speakers ? I really think some Tocharian and Hittite samples will come in handy to clear up some of these issues...
At the end of the day Homo Sapiens remains were found in the Near East since at least 100 000 years ago. So I doubt that Dzudzuana +- 70 000 years later, will throw more light on an Unadmixed Basal Eurasian population....And even if "Modern Humans" left Africa about 60 000 years ago there are still some 30 000 years of potential admixture to account for..."Modern Humans" could have hung around in North Africa and the now deserty Middle East since 300 000 years ago. 90 000 year old "Modern Human" like technology in Northern India complicates things even more... And there is still some questions about precisely when and where the Neanderthal line split from the Modern Human line. The fact that the earliest Modern Human presence in Europe and Siberia seems to point at a migration into these areas at around 45 000 years ago doesn't really exclude a much Older presence in other parts of Eurasia...
The presence of a R1b sample in the Neo-Hittite States (Syro-Hittite) could point to the possibility that that R1b originated from the Hittites and as we all know Hittite was after all an Indo-European Language and probably the closest example we have to PIE....Unless you think that Hittite spread with Non-Indo-Europeans from the West, Heheheeh...
Or did Urnfield, Unetice, Bell Beaker or Corded Ware reach all the way into Anatolia ? I think by this time we can see that R1b from the Steppe clearly was Indo-European. Whatever happened in France and Iberian Peninsula could be interesting but not actually throw a spanner in the Works of the Majority Steppe R1b being Indo-European...Just my thoughts.
@Ric - I think R1b-Z103 was clearly Indo-European, even if other non-Z103 branches are not. It is well attested early in Yamnaya and is found in all living and dead IE branches. That's what made it to Anatolia and the Tarim Basin.
@Ryan&Ric
I'm still expecting to find that the Royal Neš, whenever they get sampled, were carrying R1b-Z103, that probably was *the* PIE marker.
But those P312 guys in the western BB groups, for whatever reason, were speaking some farmer language by the time they got to the Atlantic, I'd bet on that too.
@ Ryan
Yes, I think from R1b-M269 onwards. We just need some more samples from Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland and all this talk of R1b-L51 being Non-Indo-European will be something from the past...
Can you tell me where you have the Hittite results?
R1b in Hittite is very interesting.
@ Bob Floy
Compare the situation to Hungarian and a score of new possibilities flares up for the Linguistic landscape of the Iberian Peninsula...
@ Mem
A while back there was a R1b sample found in the Neo-Hittite States, dated to +-900 BCE if I remember correctly. So anything is possible...
@Ric
"Compare the situation to Hungarian and a score of new possibilities flares up for the Linguistic landscape of the Iberian Peninsula... "
Hungary and Iberia are very different, but if we do compare them in that context, it seems to me that IE(Celtic, in this case) probably was to Iberia what Magyar was to Hungary.
@M. Myllylä
Please don't link to that crackpot blog here. The only thread where you can discuss that blog is this one.
Indo-European crackpottery
Doesn’t N3a2 show a Bronze Age expansion? Couldn’t that fit with an FU expansion ?
@ Ric
There’s little similarity betweeen the Conquering Hungarians and BB, but please elaborate ...
@ Dragos
Where is the evidence that Tartessian, Iberian etc. etc. were spoken by the Bell Beaker people ? As far as I remember the earliest attestation of those Languages date to +- 700 BCE or later. A lot could have happened in more than a thousand years within Iberia. Even something similar to what happened in Hungary. A little can go a long way....
@Ric
Where is the evidence that IE was spoken in Iberia, or in the British isles, for that matter, before the same time period?
@ Bob Floy
Precisely. Some people speak as if everything is a certainty. So if Irelands Linguistic Landscape could have been changed by Minimal Cultural Influence, and Hungarian by Minimal Genetic Influence why then not the Iberian Peninsula as well Post-Bell Beaker ?
@All
Evidence for the presence of Indo-European languages can come in very different forms and doesn't necessarily need to be direct to be convincing.
However, the problem with Iberia is that its male population was solidly R1b-M269 from the late Copper Age to the Iron Age, precisely until the Celts and Romans (ie attested Indo-Europeans) arrived there.
So that is a problem, even though it doesn't preclude Indo-European languages from theoretically being spoken in Bell Beaker, Bronze Age and pre-Celtic Iron Age Iberia, as well as in the British and Irish Isles during these periods. But it is a big issue.
Medieval Hungary is a different kettle of fish altogether. Just look at the wide range of Y-haplogroups among the Hungarian Conquerors and in present-day Hungarians. If the Y-haplogroup landscape was just as diverse in post-Beaker/pre-Celtic Iberia we wouldn't be having this discussion.
@Ric Hern
"A while back there was a R1b sample found in the Neo-Hittite States, dated to +-900 BCE if I remember correctly. So anything is possible.."
Ho, I missed that one! What paper was that?
@Ric: The situation in Medieval Hungary was very different in so many ways from BB Iberia, its difficult to decide where to begin with the refutation.
Also, if Magyars prove anything, the proof is that even an extreme case of elite dominance language transfer is usually accompanied by a significant impact on the male lineages.
You see foreign, non-local males flooding Pannonia, even the Eastern provinces.
That the Magyar core was not too big in the samples analysed so far is of secondary importance.
If it tells us something for the prehistoric West, its about the introduction of IE and Celtic in particular.
But where is the incoming element in Iberians and Basques?
It would be like Roman Pannonians starting first with Germanic, switching to Avar and Slavic, finally speaking Hungarian and German with no genetic change, no new male lineages, just like that.
That to assume would be absurd, wouldnt it be?
But still people propose it for Iberia.
Who knows all the divisions among people with steppe ancestry? The exact story of p312?
But what we know is steppe Beakers most likely spoke some sort of Proto-Basque before they came to Iberia
@ Ric
“Where is the evidence that Tartessian, Iberian etc. etc. were spoken by the Bell Beaker people ? As far as I remember the earliest attestation of those Languages date to +- 700 BCE or later. A lot could have happened in more than a thousand years within Iberia. Even something similar to what happened in Hungary. A little can go a long way....”
Certainly a lot can happen in 700 years
But what did, in south Iberia ? Colonisation of Phoenecians and Greeks, but we know they spoke Semitic & Greek, resp
What about north Iberia - Urnfield , La Tene impacts
It seems everything we need to fit in the various pre-Roman languages is there
The importance of the Hungary case is that it finally demonstrates what elite conquest or minority language impact is like- it doesn’t matter whether one sees Uralic to have originally been linked to I2a1 (highly unlikely) - -> N1-Tat (most probable); it shows how a group which is an absolute but not relative minority can impose
Linguistic shift . In this specific case; given the diversity of elite lineages- it must have been perceived mutual benfit rather than coercion
By contrast - Bronze Age Iberia - whether elite or commoner; down in Portuguese Tagus or the northern Cogotas region; all
Males are R1b-L51. And here’s the interesting thing- despite their common “organic” origins- the various Iberian BA groups moved along their own cultural trajectories; so much so that some of our friends believed that something is amiss, and we’re missing samples of exotic post-BB migrants . But to me it dovetails with why those non-IE languages in Iberia aren’t quite a family
And how precisely did Hittites become Indo-European according to the Current Genetic evidence of so called "Hittites" in Anatolia ? Any R1a or R1b samples ? Nope ? So I will agree to disagree about painting all R1bs in Western Europe as Non-Indo-European.
My link to this text was aimed to show some foolish ideas, namely the idea of the Germanic homeland in Volga region, cherished by some Finns, nothing about the origin of IE-languages. So shortly, here is a tendency to move the origin of Germanic languages to the Kama Volga region, because oldest Germanic loan words are dated to the era of supposed Finnic home land in the same area. It is not my problem, but an obvious problem of linguists searching the way to place the origin of Baltic Finnic languages there. Here is however much more probable explanation for those early Germanic loan words, if we don't nail our opinions to the Volga origin. I will not change my outcome until western linguists prove that Germans came from Volga.
@Ric
I'm not sure we can say that the Celts had "Minimal Cultural Influence" on Ireland. Their languages and culture had come to dominate all of Atlantic Europe prior to the rise of Rome.
@Ric
And how precisely did Hittites become Indo-European according to the Current Genetic evidence of so called "Hittites" in Anatolia?
No idea yet, but it's best to keep an open mind about these things, especially as more ancient DNA comes in from attested Indo-Europeans and non-Indo-Europeans living close in space and time to each other.
This is what we've got so far...
- Anatolia EBA (pre-Hittite) to Anatolia MLBA (Hittite-era) practically no change
- Minoan Crete (pre-Greek) to Mycenaean Greece (Greek) not much of a change
- BMAC (pre-Iranian?) to Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Central Asia (Iranian) not much of a change
- Bronze Age Iberia (pre-Celtic?) to Iron Age Iberia (Celtic) not much of a change
- Bronze Age Ireland (pre-Celtic?) to present-day Ireland (Anglo-Celtic) not much of a change
So let's see what else ancient DNA shows in this context. Maybe despite the large scale migrations from the Bronze Age steppe, Indo-European expansions often failed to have a significant demic impact?
@ Bob Floy
Can you point me to the Massive amount of Archaeological Evidence of Hallstatt in Ireland ?
@Ric- Where is the evidence that Tartessian, Iberian etc. etc. were spoken by the Bell Beaker people ?
This is the evidence
I1312d-Can Roqueta (Barcelona) (1.782 BC)-HapY-R1b-Df27-Z195-Hap Mit-HV0+195
I4559-Galls Carboners (Tarragona) (1.600 BC)-HapY-R1b-P311- Mit-J1c1
I4563-Galls Carboners (Tarragona) (1.600 BC)- Hap Y-R1b- Df27-Z195-Hap Mit-H1/H84
I1836-Cova del Gegant (Barcelona)- (1.593 BC)- Hap Y-R1b-L151-Hap Mit- U5a2/b3
I8570-Tossal Mortorum (Castellón) (1.400 BC)- Hap Y-R1b-L151- Hap Mit-J1c3
I12641-Can Revella (Barcelona)(665 BC)-Hap Y- R1b-M269- Hap Mit-HV0d
I12640-Can Revella (Barcelona)(618 BC) HapY-R1b-P312-Hap Mit-H1t
I8211-Ampurias (Gerona) (475 BC)- Hap Y-R-Hap Mit-HV0+195
I8344-Ampurias (Gerona) (450 BC)-HapY-R1b1a/1a-Hap Mit-H3
I12410-Mas Den Boixos (Barcelona)(445 BC)- Hap Y-R1b-P312-Hap Mit-H
I12877-Mas Den Boixos (Barcelona)(445 BC)- Hap Y-R1b-M269- Hap Mit-J1c1
I8210-Ampurias (Gerona) (425 BC)- Hap-Y-R1b1a/1a2-Hap Mit-U5b3
I8209-Ampurias (Gerona)(425 BC)- Hap Y-R1b-P312- Hap Mit-U1a1/a
I8212Ampurias (Gerona) (425 BC)-Hap Y-R- Hap Mit-H27+16093
I8341-Ampurias (Gerona) (425 BC)-Hap Y-R1b-P312-Hap Mit-H1
I3323Puig de Sant Andreu (Gerona) (284 BC)-- Hap Y-R1b-L151-Hap Mitl-X2b
I3324- Puig de Sant Andreu (Gerona)(276 BC)-Hap Y-R1b- DF27-Hap MitH1
I3496- Turó de Can Oliver (Barcelona) (250 BC)--Hap Y-R1b- Df27-Hap Mit-H1e1/a
I3326-Puig de Sant Andreu (Gerona)(225 BC)- - Hap Y-R1b-P297- Hap Mit-J1c
I3327-Puig de Sant Andreu (Gerona)(225 BC)- Hap Y-R1b-L52- Hap Mit-J2b1/a
I3321-Els Estrets-El Racó de la Rata (Castellón) (200 BC) Hap Y-R1b-P312-Hap Mit-U3a
I3320- Els Estrets-El Racó de la Rata (Castellón) (200 BC)-Hap Y-R1b-Df27-Z225- Hap Mit-I1
I8206-Ampurias (Gerona) (200 BC)- -Hap Y-R1b- Df27-Z195-Hap Mit-H7a1
In Iberia there are 8 cultures of the Bronze Age according to the different regions and territories. These examples are from the Bronze culture in the Northeast (Catalonia and Valencia). Everyone will be able to see;
1-Evident genetic continuity from BB culture to the Iron Age in uniparental markers. For those who do not know, in addition to finding P312 in Iberia from 2,500 BC, the BB culture also lasted much longer than in other regions of Europe (1,800-1,700 BC)
2-The examples of the Iron Age belong to different Iberian peoples (Indiketes, Layetanos, Ilerkavones), all of them with testimonies written in the Iberian language (NO IE)
3-The Iberians spoke the same language as their grandparents of the Bronze Age and their great grandparents of the BB culture.
4-Absolute domain of HApY-R1b-P312-Df27, so we are seeing a massive founder effect in Iberia
5-The same happens in the rest of the Iberian Bronze Age cultures
6-In the Iron Age the Tartessians and the Iberians were also R1b-P312, we suppose that the rest of the peoples except Celtiberians (I2a) and perhaps Lusitanians were P312.
Then the genetic continuity is the best evidence that the BBc at least in Iberia and France did not speak IE. You have to remember that in Aquitaine and Occitania up to the river Rhone, Basque-Aquitanian and Iberian were spoken. P312 never spoke IE because he was never in steppes. His relative Z2013, was there then is the best candidate to participate along with R1a and I2a in the expansion of IE towards the West.
In fact R1a-I2a are in the CWC and Z2013 and I2a in the eastern BBs.
@ Davidski
Yes thanks. I just can not see R1b on the Steppe as being Non-Indo-European. That is why I said that actual Hittite and Tocharian samples are needed to clear up this issue. Also samples from Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland....
Ric
As Davidski said; keep an open mind and look to dynamic scenarios
Nobody is saying “BB was Basque “, although some academics propose it was Celtic; or CWC was proto-Germanic
These are static models which soon will be sidelined
It’s all about the journey and becoming
@Ric
"Can you point me to the Massive amount of Archaeological Evidence of Hallstatt in Ireland ?"
Hahaha no, I can't(although there is plenty of La Tene stuff there), but I don't think we need that to suppose that Ireland was Celticized during the iron age(as opposed to the Beaker period), there are plenty of other reasons to suspect that. But, like Dragos said, the important thing is to keep an open mind and await further data, we're just getting started here.
@ Dragos
Yes I do keep an open mind and that is why I said let's wait for actual Hittite and Tocharian samples before running the "Basque Language From The Steppe" thing...
@M. Myllylä
My link to this text was aimed to show some foolish ideas, namely the idea of the Germanic homeland in Volga region, cherished by some Finns, nothing about the origin of IE-languages. So shortly, here is a tendency to move the origin of Germanic languages to the Kama Volga region, because oldest Germanic loan words are dated to the era of supposed Finnic home land in the same area. It is not my problem, but an obvious problem of linguists searching the way to place the origin of Baltic Finnic languages there. Here is however much more probable explanation for those early Germanic loan words, if we don't nail our opinions to the Volga origin. I will not change my outcome until western linguists prove that Germans came from Volga.
Finding the origins of loan words in space and time is not a precise science.
So the argument that so and so claim that all Finnic languages contain Proto-Germanic loan words, therefore the Finnic homeland couldn't have been near the Volga, because the old Germanic homeland wasn't, can fall down in multiple ways, such as...
- what if these old Germanic loan words don't actually exist in all Finnic languages?
- what if some of these words are actually Proto-Indo-European?
- what if some of these old Germanic loan words actually just spread from Scandinavia to the Volga with a few migrants or via trade links?
Surely it's a much bigger problem to argue that the Indo-Uralic homeland was on the North Pontic steppe, that the Uralic homeland was near the Baltic in the Corded Ware complex, and R1a-M417 was the Proto-Uralic marker that somehow became most common in two linguistically closely related ancient Indo-European speaking groups: Balto-Slavs and Indo-Aryans.
This is the fantasy that the blog that you linked to is propagating. The guy who's pushing it really needs help, but you're not helping him by linking to his work.
Bob Floy
Like I said in some of my previous posts. The Rhine seemed to have been a barrier since the Neolithic. So let's first look at what happened in France along the Rhine before jumping on the "Basque From The Steppe" train.
@ Ric
No massive migrations of Halstatt; but certainly some modest evidence.
Also of La Tene.
They were minimised in the past; pretty much by the same sort of views which also thought BB was indigenous
What we can learn from the expansions from the steppe is that it was never about the language which was spoken. Even genetic traits are more impactful than languages.
But before anything else it was always the cultural package, the ideology, toolkit, way of life and domesticated animals.
There could have been different ethnicities in tribal alliances and sometimes this, another time that part gave the language during ethnogenesis.
But thats the issue with Iberians: There was just one part of significance and continuity since then. I might stress: Absolute and truly remarkable continuity in Basques, much more than needed to make the argument.
Long before genetic testing Anatolian IE were always the outsiders. Its the early elite that matters.
IE groups in the East seem to have made alliances with local elites as soon as they settled down and could profit from the local males workforce.
BB and their descendents were really hard and more on the genocidal side.
Whereever IE could be attested or made likely, we have the BB rule broken or transformed from outside.
The greatest and longest continuity we see at the Western fringe in Britain and Iberia, where there impact was huge, little of the preceding male population was left alive.
And there we find non-IE ethnicities!
@Ric
"Basque From The Steppe"
For the record, this is not what I'm pushing. I'm not actually pushing anything, but I've come to suspect that at least some Beaker groups, or perhaps even some western Yamnaya groups before them, came to speak a farmer language one way or another. Maybe this even had to do with the split between them and their Sintasha cousins? Obviously we can't know right now, but this latest data from Iberia makes the Beakers bringing IE to western Europe look less likely, and the total lack of attested languages there prior to the Iron age dosen't help things.
@ zardos
Don't you see how you try to equal a 90% Population replacement in Britain and a 40% Population replacement in Iberia ? So let's wait for more samples from France.
@Davidski,
"- Anatolia EBA (pre-Hittite) to Anatolia MLBA (Hittite-era) practically no change
- Minoan Crete (pre-Greek) to Mycenaean Greece (Greek) not much of a change
- BMAC (pre-Iranian?) to Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Central Asia (Iranian) not much of a change
- Bronze Age Iberia (pre-Celtic?) to Iron Age Iberia (Celtic) not much of a change
- Bronze Age Ireland (pre-Celtic?) to present-day Ireland (Anglo-Celtic) not much of a change
"
There is a big change between BMAC and Iranian speaking Iron age central Asia.
Evidence, some ancient Anatolians had Steppe admix is the fact Greek Islanders are mostly Anatolian but have 15% Yamnaya ancestry. IMO, southern Italians mostly descend from ancient Anatolians/Aegeans like this.
Like I said in the previous thread about the issue, I would rather look for Italy than France and Iberia.
The Western fringe BB were non-IE, but which lineages can be associated with the introduction of IE in Italy?
Can R1b linked to attested IE speakers there? Or will that be a failure too.
Anything new about that?
@Ric- Yes thanks. I just can not see R1b on the Steppe as being Non-Indo-European.
You already have R1b in the steppes, specifically R1bZ2103 and R1b V1636, together with their brothers R1a and I2a, and probably linked to IE. The problem is that you still see P312 in the steppes when it is a clearly Western haplogroup. The only thing we have to find out is when their ancestors came from the steppes because they certainly did not do so in relation to migrations from the Yamnaya culture. That is to say, the theory of the Kurgans as it has been interpreted by some geneticists does not make sense unless you find L51 / P311 / P312 / Df27 etc in the steppes.
It is indifferent where, how and when P312 acquired that Neolithic language that gave rise to the Proto-Basque and the Iberian. It can be a language linked to the Neolithic farmers of Anatolia or the Caucasus (and therefore dominant in all European Neolithic cultures).Taking into account the antiquity (approx 2,700 BC) of P312, it is evident that it was a language spoken by its parents, and inherited from European Neolithic traditions.
@ zardos
Yes Italy as well...
@Ric: Its the males that matter. Nothing of what you can find can change things for Iberia, but it might help to solve how steppe Beakers came into existence and whether R1b switched the language in Western Europe and how long it was present in the West already.
But again, that has nothing to do with Iberia and little with Britain, its about the developments before, which is actually even more interesting.
@ Gaska
This is all good and well if you can show me some P312 or their immediate ancestor in Neolithic samples across Europe...
Wasn't R1a found in Urnfield?
In any case, the situation on the islands had to be quite different than in Iberia. I am not an expert in the Bronze and Iron Age in Great Britain and Ireland, but there, the genetic continuity related to L21 is also evident, and yet in Roman times they spoke an IE language. Is there evidence of invasions from mainland Europe in those times? Because it is assumed that if Df27 spoke Proto-IBerian, so would his brothers L21 and U152, then when L21 lost his language ?.
@ Gaska
Good Point.
@Ric "This is all good and well if you can show me some P312 or their immediate ancestor in Neolithic samples across Europe..."
This is all good and well if you can show me some P312 or their immediate ancestor in Neolithic samples across the steppes...
We already have R1bP297 and L754 during the mesolithic throughout Europe
@ Gaska
And we have the Brother of L51 in the Steppe...
The core group samples from Unetice we have are I2.That alligns well with a break with BB proper,but more samples are needed and BB seem to have been integrated at the fringes.
Buta language shift from BB to Unetice seems much more likely than BB adopting an Iberian language late on the peninsula.
Not saying Unetice was IE speaking for sure.
Some Western European pre-BB might very well have spoken Mesolithic languages after the original Neolithic colonisators were displaced by local lineages by the way.
Dont forget the shift from G and E early Neolithics to I2.
Are the I2a from Unetice steppe derived or from GAC? Can that be determined at all?
Yes, Ric, but if your reasoning is valid for L23, then it would also be valid for Iberia. Since we have DF27 in abundance and is a brother of L21 that means that L21 also has to be in Iberia, and as of the date we have not found Df27 in the islands or L21 in Iberia (Bronze and Iron Age). Each haplogroup has a different story and in the case of L51 it is evident that there was a bottleneck that will make it very difficult to solve the mystery, unless the French and the Italians decide to help us.
For the solution of the expansion of the IE languages, it must be taken into account that during the final Bronze Age (1250-800 BC), all of Europe experienced a period of relative tranquility with a strong increase in population, agricultural and livestock production , commercial exchanges, and construction of fortified cities throughout the continent. Funerary customs became practically Pan-European (incineration) without the need for migrations.
Pliny the Elder- "It is a universal custom not to burn any child before the eruption of the teeth (N.H. VII, 16)"
This funerary practice is demonstrated from the Languedoc to Andalucia during the Bronze and the Iron Age, although I do not know if it was used in other European cultures. The words of Pliny show that cremation was also universal, hence the scarcity of remains throughout Europe. If the cultural customs were universal (European) this could also be the time of the expansion of the different Indo-European languages (Urnfield. Hallstatt, La Tene), but obviously at this time no single uniparental markers could be linked to linguistic expansion, because all cultures would be an evident mixture of haplogroups. Look what has happened with the Visigoths in Iberia
@Kristiina
"Finnish historical linguists usually only take into account the Germanic cognate word."
Well obviously if the word only exists in Finnic branch it likely came from Germanics or Balts. By the time Finnic speakers existed as a separate branch they probably weren't far away from Baltic sea or at the Baltic sea coast already and even if cognates exists in like Arabic or Mandarin Chinese they surely didn't get from them as they were nowhere near them.
Also not that I completely write off the idea that some of the loanwords couldn't be acquired trough long distance trade routes, but it's clear there was Germanic presence in Finland at least as we've seen even in genetics for ex. Levänluhta sample. Of course some etymologies are dubious and can't be explained very simply.
@ Mouthful
IMO, 'lehti' with all the Western Uralic cognates is Proto-Indoeuropean. 'Pelto' has a Corded Ware distribution around the Baltic Sea. 'Nauta' is the oldest as it has a pan-Eurasian distribution. The Finnish words 'pelto' and 'nauta' could be related to the Corded Ware cultural horizon from where it spread to the Balto-Slavic, Germanic and Uralic area.
Here's some datings of supposed loanwords by Santeri Junttila from Helsinski University of course as other mentioned they shouldn't be taken 100% for truth, as it's not very possible to date the exact time of borrowing but only the general gist of it, when some sound changes occurred within different language branches and you more or less can pin point at what stage it happened.
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/santerijunttila/files/2019/01/Poster-Santeri-Junttila-2017.pdf
@Davidski
"
However, the problem with Iberia is that its male population was solidly R1b-M269 from the late Copper Age to the Iron Age, precisely until the Celts and Romans (ie attested Indo-Europeans) arrived there.
So that is a problem, even though it doesn't preclude Indo-European languages from theoretically being spoken in Bell Beaker, Bronze Age and pre-Celtic Iron Age Iberia, as well as in the British and Irish Isles during these periods. But it is a big issue."
There might be another way, using circumstantial evidence, to probe the language of BB. The river name "Meuse" comes from French. It's derived, via the Latin name Mosa from a proto-Celtic "Mosa". The Dutch name for it however is "Maas", which is derived from a proto-Germanic "Maso". The vowels in both names make sure that neither can be a loanword from the other. However, they cannot be any doubt the names must have the same origin. That means that both proto-Germanic and proto-Celtic must have been derived from a previous substrate.
The name "Mosa" or "Maso" is connected to an IE root connected to "maze", possibly due to its winding meanders. It's clear that both Celts and Germanics didn't arrive in the area of the Meuse until the iron age, just like Spain.
That means that a pre-Celtic/pre-Germanic IE language must have named the river, which means that pre-iron age NW Europe spoke a IE dialect. And that is also an area with a lot of R1b-M269, albeit not so abundant as Spain.
@Davidski
"what if some of these old Germanic loan words actually just spread from Scandinavia to the Volga with a few migrants or via trade links?"
This is the only way to explain these pre-proto-Germanic loan words in Volga Kama. Other explanations lead to conflict with main stream linguistic theories.
"Surely it's a much bigger problem to argue that the Indo-Uralic homeland was on the North Pontic steppe, that the Uralic homeland was near the Baltic in the Corded Ware complex, and R1a-M417 was the Proto-Uralic marker that somehow became most common in two linguistically closely related ancient Indo-European speaking groups: Balto-Slavs and Indo-Aryans.
This is the fantasy that the blog that you linked to is propagating. The guy who's pushing it really needs help, but you're not helping him by linking to his work."
I didn't know that he is such a controversial figure. I only saw that there was some good points regarding the Finnic home land. Whatever he has written about IE-languages is out of my competence.
@epoch
That area is quite far north and within former Corded Ware territory, so the name might have been coined by the Single Grave people, and obviously we don't have any samples from them.
But in any case, as I said above, Iberia was solidly R1b-M269 when it was home to attested non-Indo-Europeans, and then things changed when the attested Indo-Europeans (Celts and Romans) got there.
I'm sure that the irony of this isn't lost on anyone posting here.
@M. Myllylä
I only saw that there was some good points regarding the Finnic home land.
His theory concerns the Indo-Uralic and Uralic homelands.
And it's not based on any good points. He just uses whatever fits and ignores what doesn't, and makes things up as he goes along.
@Kristina and Mouthful,
I am not qualified to argue against linguists, so I am taking their best loan word classifications without mistrust. Kristina, it is not in my hands and I don't understand how your reckonings can help me, or anyone else. I appreciate if you can somehow (linguists can, not me) validiate your ideas about IE/Germanic loan words. Basically there is individual loan words and umbrella theories and as far as I know the (pre-)proto-Germanic loan words in Finnic languages is a acknowledged theory. But am a logical person and if I see contradictions in their theories, it sure makes me suspicious.
@Davidski,
I was not agreeing with him in any matter. I wrote in my original message that his texts show how confusing all theories about the Finnic home land are, extending it to the question about loan words and linguistic datings.
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