Archeologist David Anthony has a new paper on the Indo-European homeland debate titled
Archaeology, Genetics, and Language in the Steppes: A Comment on Bomhard. It's part of a series of articles dealing with Allan R. Bomhard's "Caucasian substrate hypothesis" in the latest edition of
The Journal of Indo-European Studies. It's also available, without any restrictions,
here.
Any thoughts? Feel free to share them in the comments below. Admittedly, I found this part somewhat puzzling (emphasis is mine):
It was the faint trace of WHG, perhaps 3% of whole Yamnaya genomes, that identified this admixture as coming from Europe, not the Caucasus, according to Wang et al. (2018). Colleagues in David Reich’s lab commented that this small fraction of WHG ancestry could have come from many different geographic places and populations.
I think that's highly optimistic. It really should be obvious by now thanks to archeological and ancient genomic data, including both uniparental and genome-wide variants, that the Yamnaya people were practically entirely derived from Eneolithic populations native to the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe. So, in all likelihood, this was also the source of their minor WHG ancestry.
Indeed, they clearly weren't some mishmash of geographically, culturally and genetically disparate groups that had just arrived in Eastern Europe, but the direct descendants of closely related and already significantly Yamnaya-like peoples associated with long-standing PC steppe archeological cultures such as Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog. I discussed this earlier this year, soon after the Wang et al. paper was published:
On Maykop ancestry in Yamnaya
I hope I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that the scientists at the Reich Lab are finding this difficult to accept, because it doesn't gel with their theory that archaic Proto-Indo-European (PIE) wasn't spoken on the PC steppe, but rather south of the Caucasus, and that late or rather nuclear PIE was introduced into the PC steppe by migrants from the Maykop culture who were somehow involved in the formation of the Yamnaya horizon.
Inexplicably, after citing Wang et al. on multiple occasions and arguing against any significant gene flow between Maykop and Yamnaya groups, Anthony fails to mention Steppe Maykop. But the Steppe Maykop people are an awesome argument against the idea that there was anything more than occasional mating between the Maykop and Yamnaya populations, because they were wedged between them, and yet clearly distinct from both, with a surprisingly high ratio of West Siberian forager-related ancestry (see
here and
here).
Despite all the talk lately about the potential cultural, linguistic and genetic ties between Maykop and Yamnaya, including claims that the latter possibly acquired its wagons from the former, my view is that the Steppe Maykop and Yamnaya wagon drivers may have competed with each other and eventually clashed in a big way. Indeed, take a look at what happens after Yamnaya burials rather suddenly replace those of Steppe Maykop just north of the Caucasus around 3,000 BCE.
Yamnaya_RUS_Caucasus
RUS_Progress_En_PG2001 0.808±0.058
RUS_Steppe_Maykop 0.000
UKR_Sredny_Stog_II_En_I6561 0.192±0.058
chisq 13.859
tail prob 0.383882
Full output
Yep, total population replacement with no significant gene flow between the two groups. Apparently, as far as I can tell, there's not even a hint that a few Steppe Maykop stragglers were incorporated into the ranks of the newcomers. Where did they go? Hard to say for now. Maybe they ran for the hills nearby?
Intriguingly, Anthony reveals a few details about new samples from three different Eneolithic steppe burial sites associated with the Khvalynsk culture:
The Reich lab now has whole-genome aDNA data from more than 30 individuals from three Eneolithic cemeteries in the Volga steppes between the cities of Saratov and Samara (Khlopkov Bugor, Khvalynsk, and Ekaterinovka), all dated around the middle of the fifth millennium BC.
...
Most of the males belonged to Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b1a, like almost all Yamnaya males, but Khvalynsk also had some minority Y-chromosome haplogroups (R1a, Q1a, J, I2a2) that do not appear or appear only rarely (I2a2) in Yamnaya graves.
As far as I can tell, he suggests that they'll be published in the forthcoming Narasimhan et al. paper. If so, it sounds like the paper will have many more ancient samples than its early preprint that was posted at
bioRxiv last year.
For me the really fascinating thing in regards to these new samples is how scarce Y-haplogroup R1a appears to have been everywhere before the expansion by the putative Indo-European-speaking steppe ancestors of the Corded Ware culture (CWC) people. It's basically always outnumbered by other haplogroups wherever it's found prior to about 3,000 BCE, even on the PC steppe. But then, suddenly, its R1a-M417 subclade goes BOOM! And that's why I call it...
The beast among Y-haplogroups
At this stage, I'm not sure how to interpret the presence of Y-haplogroup J in the Khvalynsk population. It may or may not be important to the PIE homeland debate. Keep in mind that J is present in two foragers from Karelia and Popovo, northern Russia, dated to the Mesolithic period and with no obvious foreign ancestry. So it need not have arrived north of the Caspian as late as the Eneolithic with migrants rich in southern ancestry from the Caucasus or what is now Iran. In other words, for the time being, the steppe PIE homeland theory appears safe.
Update 20/12/2019: A note on Steppe Maykop
See also...
Is Yamnaya overrated?
The PIE homeland controversy: January 2019 status report
Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...
439 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 400 of 439 Newer› Newest»The evidence we have thus far is:
R1b-L51 - rich individuals are found in western Europe, where both IE & non-IE languages are found. The reconstructed paleolexicon for proto-Celtic demonstrates shared terms for Iron & Chariots (Waddell ..Celticization of Ireland). Perhaps it would be good to start from there & build up, instead of starting with the belief that R1b-M269 were the Ur-PIE; and everything else has to be fit around that (even when not factually consistent).
@Gaska
The mitochondrial lineages of the BB culture in Central Europe are mostly (90%) from European Neolithic cultures (with a good percentage of typically Iberian chalcolithic lineages) and 10% of steppe lineages that passed to this culture thanks to the exogamy through the CWC.
10% of female exogamy equals 50% of steppe ancestry?
The Bb culture stopped the expansion of the steppe peoples (I think we should no longer call them Indo-European) in Hungary. The Western P312 mixed with the CWC and from it they acquired that famous steppe ancestry.
Then why do Beakers in Hungary look like a mix between Hungarian Yamnaya and Corded Ware-related populations? I would expect these R1b-L51 samples to be richer in EEF and deficient in steppe if you were right.
@zardos “In Central Europe its interesting to see what happened after the fall of Bell Beakers, to the beginning of Hallstatt.
Unetice was no longer dominated by R1b, but showed a presence of I, was physically closer to Corded Ware than BB. From all we know the same goes for Urnfield and Hallstatt. Now the break took place in Central Europe from BB to Unetice.“
The only problem with your theory is that both BB and modern Western Europeans are predominantly R1b, like Yamnaya
@Drago
"A particulary interesting question is the possibility of loans between Iberian and Aquitanian/Basque. The recent identification of possible numerals in Iberian, bearing a striking similarity to their Basque counterparts would - if correct - imply either genetic relationship or large-scale borrowing. The former has often been ruled out as unworkable; if borrowing is responsible, it seems likely that the direction of borrowing would have been from Iberian into Aquitanian/Basque rather than the other way round, since Iberian was apparently the dominant language of trade and commerce throughout the north-east, and was influential even in areas where it was apparently not the main native language of the local populations (see p.100)"
- Multiligualism in the Graeco-Roman Worlds
Alex Mullen, Patrick James
You state: But the relationship has been proposed by a linguist.
If we are going to challenge it, then we need to provide support for claims, otherwise you seem to be saying the comparative method - the foundation of modern linguistics- should not be used .. in this particular case. Where is the consensus against it. You have provided no reference; or statistical analysis of the total number of article on Vasconic vs those for / against the proposal. The only reference you've made to is..Epoch. ;)
The comparitive method starts with a list of cognates. Please provide one beyond the numerals.
Epoch:
"But the gist of your idea probably is: If Vedic came later the earlier Outer languages must have come before Swat, and that kills the steppe theory?"
Not quite. My ideas are:
1.) The Steppe was an important hub for secondary spread of late PIE, most notably into Central/Western Europe (a/o CWC), but also as concerns Vedic, and Indo-Aryan-related interaction with late Proto-Uralic.
2.) However, the Steppe can't have been the original PIE homeland:
a) A Steppe homeland can't explain shared PIE agricultural vocabulary. This concerns a/o cereal farming terms, as pointed out by Adams. It also concerns the probably most widespread agricultural PIE root, namely *h₂wĺ̥h₁[neh₂] "wool", attested from all PIE families and borrowed a/o by Sumerian, with a credible IE-internal semantic (PIE *welH- "to turn, wind", c.f. German wellen "to curl [hair]"). For all we know from archeology and DNA, wool sheep originated on the Iranian Plateau.
b.) A Steppe homeland leaves early IE branches unaccounted for. This concerns a/o Anatolian and Tocharian, but also a possible pre-Vedic, centum IE layer in (mountaineous) S. Asia, Zoller's "outer languages". It furthermore concerns attested IE borrowings in Sumerian (wool, copper, male/female slave, the eye-shaped IGI Sumerogram, etc.). All these can only be explained from a hub south of the Caucasus/ Caspian.
3.) Ultimately, the "homeland" approach IMO misses the main question, namely "Where did (pre-pre-PIE) develop those features that make it unique and set it apart from all other major language families?" After all, it wasn't lexical comparisons that lead to the "discovery" of relatedness between Sanskrit, Latin, OGrk and Germanic in the 18th century, it was morphological similarity (synthetic, fusional suffixes, similar verbal morphology, etc.). The lexical stuff (comparative methodology, systematic sound shifts etc.) came much later, putting flesh on the bones of that morphological skeleton.
The answer IMO lies in a prolonged incubation period in relative isolation, which should have been the LGM, and the most plausible spot for this process IMO is the S. Caspian LGM refugium, where a/o walnuts and almonds weathered the LGM.
@FrankN
There were farmers just west of the Dnieper during the Neolithic, and of course they're the source of the Anatolian farmer ancestry in the Sredny Stog II sample.
So the idea that steppe people weren't familiar with farming and had no words to describe it during the Eneolithic needs to be put to bed.
Domesticated sheep were also found near the steppe at this time, in the Caucasus and probably on the North Pontic steppe. So again, not sure what the fuss is about?
Juan Rivera:
"Kennewick is autosomally similar to the other "Paleoindians""
Which were your reference pops? Technically, it makes sense to restrict to only pre-Kennewick samples. In the Yana paper's PCA, Kennewick is visible displaced from the Amerindian mainstream towards Beringia/ E. Asia. Dave's older G10 spreadsheets showed him incorporating some 25% "Beringian" ancestry compared to "pure Amerindian" Anzick1.
In any case, the mtDNA X2(a) issue has remained somewhat obscure. Most analyses I have seen conclude that it wasn't among the original "founding" mtDNA haplogroups. The most southerly reported modern occurence in the Americas is on the Central Mexican Pacific coast. It appears to be completely absent from S. America, while accounting for almost a quarter of Algonquinian mtDNA, lending some genetic credibility to S. Nikolaev's proposal of a Wakashan-Nivkh-Algic language family originating from early Holocene trans-Pacific migrations.
Whatever the case - as I have said, reported lexical/ phonological closeness of PIE to Beringian languages is puzzling, and I am yet unable to come up with a satisfactory explanation.
@Drago
"Gomez Moreno's brillant decoding had two important consequences. One was that it demonstrated that Plaeohispanic texts were not written in one language, but in several. The other was that it revealed that the Iberian language could not be understood via Basque, a conclusion which put an end to the Vasco-Iberian hypothesis, despite resistance from outside Spain by scholars as prestigious as Schuhardt, which, as well as the conflict that was engulfing the continent at the time, significantly delayed the acceptance of the decoding in Europe."
- Celtiberian: Language, writing, epigraphy
Francisco Beltran LLoris, Carlos Jordan Colera
epoch: The comparative method starts with a list of cognates. Please provide one beyond the numerals.
Yeah, this is how these conversations about the relationship of Basque and Iberian tend to go (as a dialogue):
A: So B (proponent of idea), what's the lexical evidence for a relationship between Basque and Iberian?
B: The numeral system! It would be very strange and unusual and almost unprecedented for a numeral system to be borrowed, therefore there must be a family relationship.
A (and all historical linguistics): OK, numeral systems are borrowed at times but let's move on and ask: Why no lexical relationship in any basic vocabulary at all outside the numeral system? (Other than some terms relating to trade and urbanism (towns, silver, money) which would be not too surprising to be borrowed.)
B: Silence / something about adstrate borrowing from Latin, etc. into Basque replacing enough core vocabulary (but not numbers!) such that it is now impossible to see relationship.
And no one around this table is any more convinced.
Reconstruction of a relationship in Indo-European, and of a proto-lexicon, is highly blessed by the number of daughter languages and how widely dispersed they are, and the richness of current and historical attestation (even if it is frustrating too little for early branches). These are very difficult questions outside IE.
Consider "proto-Celtic" lexicon being dated to Iron Age as Dragos talks about upthread.
Is this shared "Iron Age" lexicon secured through the continental branches of Celtic, which are scantily attested, or purely through the ones in Britain and Ireland? The material for Celtiberian is very scanty after all. There is an argument for a shared term between Gaulish and Celtic languages in Britain (and notably the term crosses the sharing barrier into Germanic) (see: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cLB3v7csB0UC&lpg=PP33&pg=PP33#v=onepage&q&f=false and https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tzU3RIV2BWIC&lpg=PA314&pg=PA314#v=onepage&q&f=false). But this is not Celtiberian.
And even if there is a shared term for iron, is it implausible that a Bronze Age people skilled in metallurgy would know what iron is, and have a shared term for it, even if they did not practice ferrous metallurgy on a wide scale or use it for tools? This is similar to the problem of stating that a word for horse implies horse domestication, which of course it does not, or even that horses were a frequently encountered animal.
Plus these are languages which are interacting at close range - unlike the broader IE where later stage loans are implausible over very long distances*, it isn't implausible to explain iron related vocabulary via loans (we even know it happened across the Celtic->Germanic border, possibly in NE France).
*E.g. How would an IE in India and Europe from the neolithic both get identical loans of securely Copper Age terms? The only plausible thing to say is to challenge whether the vocabulary is actually a systematic homoplasy from an older word - e.g. words for turning systematically being used to generate words for wheel, etc.
"
The only problem with your theory is that both BB and modern Western Europeans are predominantly R1b, like Yamnaya"
It is not my theory per se, but one possible explanation I consider before new data and analysis hopfully solve the issue.
Whether Yamnaya was itself completely IE speaking is open to debate, so is where Western R1b lineages came from exactly at which time and in which cultural context.
But that later Celts had a significant impact in the West is pretty much a sure thing.
For discussion of that problem of reconstrution of languages from modern evidence, and bias due to poverty of early branching, critical material, and Celtic as an example (which is also the case more widely for IE in the poverty of certain material in early branching varieties):
Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics: For example, the Celtic languages are attested very unequally with respect to both the dates and the amounts of available material. While Celtiberian, Lepontic and Gaulish are attested in the 1st millennium BCE, they have provided us with very limited corpora, while the earliest monuments of the Insular Celtic languages stem from the middle of the 1st millennium CE, but have a very large corpora. Therefore the reconstruction of proto-Celtic must either rely chiefly on the comparison of forms from two branches of Insular Celtic (which may be one of the primary sub branches of Celtic), or must remain very incomplete.
(https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cQA2DwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA24&&pg=PA24#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Dave:
"There were farmers just west of the Dnieper during the Neolithic, and of course they're the source of the Anatolian farmer ancestry in the Sredny Stog II sample."
Fully aggree. But these farmer's aDNA didn't make it to Khvalynsk or Andronovo, and neither did their technology - at least not according to Adams, or Mallory [For Sredny Stog II, OTOH, cereal farming is archeologically attested].
Intriguing in this respect is the introduction of non-light sensitive barley, better suited for moderate/ continental climate with late frost and humid summers. The original ANF/EEF barley varieties were non-light sensitive, well adapted to Mediterranean climate with spring precipitation but dry summers. Their origin has been traced back to the Levante and NW Syria. Barley was a frequent crop for Cardial Pottery, but rarely planted N. of the Alps (LBK, etc.).
Non-light sensitive barley, OTOH, has been traced back to the Iranian Plateau. It was a/o instrumental for colonising the Caucasian uplands - the higher in altitude Sioni and Kura-Araxes settlements, the more they planted barley instead of wheat. Intriguingly, the earliest Central European culture that predominantly, almost exclusively planted barley was Danish Single Grave. Subsequently, barley became the dominant crop in Unetice and Urnfield.
"Domesticated sheep were also found near the steppe at this time, in the Caucasus and probably on the North Pontic steppe."
Right. And again, we are probably talking about wool sheep, of Iranian origin, not about original ANF/EEF "meat and milk" sheep. Analyses of modern sheep aDNA have clearly demonstrated a dual origin of domesticated sheep - Anatolia plus the S. Caspian. While the former (mtDNA A) already expanded to Europe with EEF, the latter (mtDNA B) remained for quite a while restricted to south of the Caucasus (plus Central Asia/ India), only reaching Europe via the Steppe during the 4th mBC. [I'd love to see such inference from modern breeds be complemented by sheep aDNA, similarly to what has just been done on goats.]
IMO, aside from higher resistance to the Plague, a key factor for the success of - presumably late PIE-speaking - Steppe populations was an improved "agricultural package" that included wool sheep and non-light sensitive barley. Both innovations originated on the Iranian Plateau. It is a sensible assumption that the associated vocabulary did so as well.
@FrankN
ad 2a: See Davids response. Also, there were sheep bones found in many Eneolithic settlements all over the steppe. Sheep do not resemble indigenous animals from the steppe so the keeping of sheep is pretty old.
https://www.academia.edu/11290674/Der_%C3%9Cbergang_zur_Rinderzucht_im_n%C3%B6rdlichen_Schwarzmeerraum
ad 2b: We have literally two Hittite genomes and the Hittites settled among previous non-IE populations. We also have Kumtepe 4, which is a poor sample. But put in an ADMIXTURE run it shows steppe admixture. It is from exactly the right dating at exactly the right spot for the steppe hypothesis: When Kumtepe saw a massive change change, tied to latter Troy.
ad 3: PIE does not have a root for almond. Nor for olive. Nor saffron. Nor for tiger. etc etc. As for the suggested PIE-Sumerian connection, it is disputed. And if you read the article you might see what is the issue. Too much "hineininterpretieren".
Epoch: "How would an IE in India and Europe from the neolithic both get identical loans of securely Copper Age terms?
Alexander the Great (Greek presence from Iberia to Bactria from ca.330 BC to around at least Augustean times)?
Skyths (occasionally) on the Oder and in Austria? E. Iranic-speaking Alans (Ossetians) marching with the Vandals to Iberia and ultimately N. Africa?
Let's also not forget Arabic, during the Medieval spoken from Malaga to Makassar, which has incorporated various Greek loans, e.q. qasdir "tin", from Greek κασσίτερος (kassíteros).
@frankN
"Fully aggree. But these farmer's aDNA didn't make it to Khvalynsk or Andronovo, and neither did their technology - at least not according to Adams, or Mallory [For Sredny Stog II, OTOH, cereal farming is archeologically attested]."
But later on it did. Late and Middle Bronze Age steppe has farmer admixture that early bronze age steppe hasn't.
Let's see what Mallory considered the problem:
As Anthony remarks in this symposium, there is really no serious evidence for arable agriculture (domestic cereals) east of the Dnieper until after c 2000 BCE (see also Ryabogina & Ivanov 2011; Mallory, in press:a). This means that there is also no evidence for domestic cereals in the Asiatic steppe until the Late Bronze Age(Andronovo etc). From the perspective of the Pontic-Caspian model, the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians and Tokharians should not cross the Ural before c 2000 BCE at the very earliest. Hypotheses linking the Tokharians to earlier eastward steppe expansions associated with the Afanasievo or Okunevo cultures of the Yenisei or Altai (Mallory and Mair 2000) become very difficult if not impossible to sustain (as
long as there is no evidence of arable agriculture in these cultures) as Tokharian retains elements of the Indo-European agricultural vocabulary.
This clearly must be connected to the uptick of EEF in late bronze age steppe (more or less suggested to be a CWC migration eastward) and seems a fine solution for that problem. The agricultural terms were reintroduced, and we have the genetic data to back that up.
@davidski-"Well, I for one, no longer have a PIE homeland theory"
Everything is now much more complicated, but also more interesting and forces us all to think about reasonable solutions.
@Drago-Perhaps it would be good to start from there & build up, instead of starting with the belief that R1b-M269 were the Ur-PIE; and everything else has to be fit around that (even when not factually consistent)”
Agree- If the geneticists had done their job right from the beginning, we would have saved a lot of problems. I mean, it is one thing to analyze ancient genomes and another, to draw hasty conclusions or to use supposed autosomal components to achieve preconceived theories. If anyone is interested in rereading Haak's work on the massive migrations of the steppes and Olalde's paper on the European BBs, he will realize what I am saying. What is left of the massive migrations of R1b to Europe that radically changed European genetics and brought the IE language? Just 5 years later (in the case of Olalde a year later), the R1b lineages of the steppes have absolutely nothing to do with the Western R1b lineages and now we don't even know the language spoken in the steppes. Wonderful right?
@gabriel-10% of female exogamy equals 50% of steppe ancestry? Then why do Beakers in Hungary look like a mix between Hungarian Yamnaya and Corded Ware-related populations? I would expect these R1b-L51 samples to be richer in EEF and deficient in steppe if you were right.
Obviously there are hundreds of genomes of the CWC and the BBC to analyze, so far an exhaustive study of the Mit-Haps of these cultures has barely given us 10% of lineages from the steppes (or EHG). That is the reality we face because even in the CWC many mitochondrial lineages come from the Neolithic cultures of each region (GAC, even Baalberge). I cannot answer you because for me the steppe ancestry remains a mystery, or rather an artifice, used by some geneticists to square their theories. Everyone knows that modeling ancestry is relatively simple, and that the results depend in many cases on the samples used and the comparisons made. Then I am very skeptical about the percentages of steppe ancestry in the BBs. Could you tell me what are the samples used (and to which cultures belong) to determine the steppe ancestry of the Iberian BBs and the current Basques? Yamnaya ?, Repin ?. Maykop ?, Catacomb ?, Sredny Stog, Khvalynsk,?, All of them?
Have they found out those percentages by comparison with the CWC?
Regarding Beakers in Hungary, I suppose you will be up to date, and you will know that we have R1b-Z2103, H, I2a, G2a, that is, they have nothing to do with the CWC but with the BBs from Germany and Bohemia (R1b-P312) that traveled east where they mixed with small groups from Yamnaya (R1b-Z2103) and with Hungarian Neolithic farmers (H, G2a, and probably I2a) Many of them do not have steppe ancestry and have good percentages of Iberian blood. We have already spoken many times. The only possibility for L51 and P312 to have origins in the steppes is Davidski's theory that they were hidden in small groups in some subculture of the CWC. And that at the moment also seems very difficult.
@Zardos-I use steppe beakers in a neutral way for those carrying steppe ancestry autosomal. Fact is, so far all BB groups with significant autosomal steppe ancestry were more R1b than anything else, whereas those without it had no R1b. So R1b carriers introduced steppe ancestry to Iberia. Where and how they picked it up is not completely solved by now. They could be local Wester European male lineages (less likely) or coming from further East (more likely). From where exactly is not known by now.
The term "steppe beakers" has never made much sense, let alone now. Regarding R1b bringing the steppe ancestry to Iberia, I cannot deny that it is a possibility (since R1b was able to acquire that ancestry of the CWC-ergo more likely) and then pass the Pyrenees, but to think that R1b-L51 originates in the steppes does not make much sense for me (ergo less likely)
@epoch
and that is....if there is no agricolture east of the dneper till 2000 that means that nothing east of the dneper can be envisaged to be the PIE homeland. Because PIE not only have agricoltural words but actively practised agricolture ( see also tripartite ideology that requires the presence of a farmer population)
( see Encyclopedia of IE culture "agricolture) So the only archeological culture that fits the bill is Sredni Stog ( which is a EEF-WHG/ Steppe eneolithic mix)
Scholars say that PIE is born out of a caucasian like language mixing with uraloid north eurasian language. It is an educated guess that this linguistic mix was also a genetic mix. Since the CHG in the steppe did not bring agricolture because the mix happened far east in the steppe I think we
go towards a scenario in which the caucasian language was the one brought by the european farmers and the uralic like the one connected with steppe eneolithic peoples ( dneper donets foragers).
so PIE= MNE Europe + Steppe Eneolithic
This theory works well also in terms of cultural package since Pit grave Culture is largely SS derived.
Genetic fully support this ( R1a M417 in SS and likely R1b L-51 in the westernmost part of the steppe and maybe even in Romania and sorroundings)
Only racism and political bias at this point prevent many to see the full picture ......it is all there in front of us.
@old europe
Vinca and Lepenski Vir (Serbia) are the PIE homeland. PIE language is the Vinca's Serbian language.
@Matt
"It would be very strange and unusual and almost unprecedented for a numeral system to be borrowed, therefore there must be a family relationship."
If I understand correctly the Iberian numerals are mostly from texts on coins (This needs more checking though). Even if this loan is indeed unusual in this case we can see the method of transfer as well as the reason why it was transferred: The use of Iberian coins for money.
R1A in Serbia is 12000 years old, in Europe 7000 years, in Russia about 4500 years, India 3850 years.
@Milan
Show me R1a from the Balkans older than 4,000 years or I'll ban you.
You have a couple of hours.
@a DNA from Horses, Oxen and Dogs?? You seem to forget that those domesticated animals went wherever their migrating human owners went. It is therefore unlikely that the descendants of these animals are found in the 'source' regions today. One only has to look at the difficulty of finding the PIE homeland via hundreds of ancient genomes to see that your suggestion is a non-starter. Now DNA from wood that might be more useful, as long as the biomes that hosted the trees are still extant (doubtful) NeilB
@Davidski
Free pdf (for e.g. map on p.19)
http://www.pollitecon.com/html/ebooks/Where-the-Slovens-and-Indo-Europeans-Came-From-DNA-Genealogy-provides-the-Answer.pdf
Cheers
Epoch:
"Let's see what Mallory considered the problem:
(..) the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians and Tokharians should not cross the Ural before c 2000 BCE at the very earliest.(..)
This clearly must be connected to the uptick of EEF in late bronze age steppe (more or less suggested to be a CWC migration eastward) and seems a fine solution for that problem. The agricultural terms were reintroduced, and we have the genetic data to back that up."
Unfortunately, not. That c2000 BC crossing of the Urals (Sintashta) was by IEs that in all likelyhood already spoke a Satem language, and therefore can't explain Tocharian, including its agricultural terminology. There is simply no feasible way to connect Tocharian farming to the Steppe. Your quote shows that even Mallory has become aware of this problem. Unlike Adams, however, he doesn't seem yet prepared to fundamentally retreat from his earlier publications.
@All
Milan is now banned from this blog.
Banned commentators list
@Matt and Epoch-
I see that you are interested in the possible relationship between Iberian and Basque. The Spanish Linguists have been discussing the matter for decades, but from a few years to now, it seems that a consensus has been established regarding its similarity. There are many other examples that help to understand the situation (not only the numerals, which on the other hand are the best evidence)
Ascoli Bronze (89 BC) - Bronze plaque found in Rome, in which the Consul Cneo Pompeyo Estrabón, granted Roman citizenship to the "Turma Salluitana" under the "LEX IULIA de Civitate Latinis et Sociis Danda" as a reward for the conquest of Ascoli in the framework of the Social War (91-88 BC) against the revolted Picentinos. This Cavalry Squadron in command of a Decursion, was formed by the following riders (30), most of them Iberians and Basques
Basques-Sosinaden and Sosimilo (Son of Sosinase)-Urgidar (son of Luspanar)-Gurtano (son of Biurno)-Elando (son of Enneges)-Agirnes (son of Benabels)-Nalbeaden (son of Agerno)-Arranes (son of Arbiscar)-Umargibas (son of Luspangibas)- Beles (son of Umarbeles) etc
Iberians- Belennes (son of Albennes)-Atullo (son of Tautindals)-Bastugitas (son of Adimbeles
The names of the Basque and Iberian riders are very similar, there are Basques and Iberians in Aragon and they share the same cavalry unit. Many people believe that they are the same people and that the language is very very similar
Another evidence is the root "IL" very common in names and cities both Iberians and Basques
Strabo, Geography IV, 1, 2-Aquitans differ from the race of Gauls so much because of their
physical constitution as per its language; in fact, they look alike more to [the race of] the Iberians.
That is to say, the Aquitans (Basques) are more like Iberians than Gauls, not only physically but also in their language.
Epoch:
"PIE does not have a root for almond. Nor for olive. Nor saffron. Nor for tiger. etc etc".
Neither for salmon, nor for Cranberry. Might have to do with the fact that IE is now spread over a wide range of eco-zones...
Otherwise, olives were domesticated in the Levante, so one should rather expect a proto-Semitic than a PIE root for them. But in fact, Witzel suggests a borrowing from Dravidian, along the semantic path of seed->Sesame->oil seed->vegetable oil->olive (oil tree).
I don't propose "out of India", so I don't bother with PIE lacking a root for "tiger". However, there is also no PIE root for "lion", in spite of lions being attested on the Pontic Steppe and the Balkans well into late antiquity.
"There are isolated later finds from Neolithic contexts: Greek Macedonia (ca. 6.46e6.0 cal ka BP) and western Hungary (ca. 5.5 cal ka BP), and more numerous records after ca. 5.0 cal ka BP from Hungary, the Ukraine, Bulgaria and Greece (Chalcolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age). We obtained a date of ca. 4.65 cal ka BP on a lion pelvis from the Bronze Age Mycenean site of Aigeira Acropolis, Greece (Table 1). In summary we can say that lions invaded south-eastern Europe during the Holocene, presumably via the Bosphorus from Turkey, perhaps as early as 8.0 cal ka BP and probably by ca. 6.5e6.0 cal ka BP. The survival of lions in Greece ca. 2.45e2.35 cal ka BP is attested by
classical authors such as Herodotus, Xenophon and Aristotle (Ninov, 1999; Sommer and Benecke, 2006; Bartosiewicz, 2009), but they had probably disappeared from the Ponto-Mediterranean region by about 2000 years ago at the end of the Iron Age (Sommer
and Benecke, 2006)."
http://av-sher.narod.ru/Biblio/21_stuart_pantera.pdf
Anthony 2007 a/o reports lion depictions and statuettes from the Maykop Kurgan. So - what does that tell us about the PIE homeland?
[Sanskrit सिंह (siṃhá), btw, is intriguing for its closeness to Swahili simba (Proto-Bantu *ǹcímbá].
@FrankN
Tigers lived in the Caucasus and Iran until the 1950s or even later.
But lions never lived on the Pontic-Caspian steppe. In fact, the closest they got was the Caucasus and Iran.
Dave:
"Tigers lived in the Caucasus and Iran until the 1950s or even later."
Wasn't aware of that, thx for the info. Wikipedia even dates their extinction as late as the 1970s.
"But lions never lived on the Pontic-Caspian steppe."
All scientists aggree they did, c.f. my quote above. Lions are a common motive in Skythian art, see e.g.
https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/digital-collection/25.%20Archaeological%20Artifacts/879763/!ut/p/z1/jZDLTsMwEEV_hS6yxJ48HKfdWUailBajikfqDXKjPIwSJ3JMI_H1GMSqgsDsrubMnTuDJc6xNOqka-V0b1Tr9UGmL4KxNIw5bAQnV8DE_p7s-d01hAl-_gLgl2KA5X_mZwA5b7_5a4G_ILI7vquxHJRrLrWpepxHBF0wWzSq7Nu-1oVqvXS6UoUbcZ7RJU1jn02eud_cUu_-QNZCPPGIJ9_AfD597NBUdAgQiQiE8RIgoxFNsvQzHDPHOPPhbFmVtrTozfqvN84N4yqAAKZpQoM2zvdGh5QL4Kehph8dzs9ZPHSP-ft2Da-kPW3ZYvEBZPAk3w!!/dz/d5/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/?lng=en
@FrankN
Scythians learned about lions from Persians and maybe Greeks. I can assure you that Yamnaya people never met any lions.
In fact, the former scientific name for the lion sub-species that still survives in India is panthera leo persica, because it was first described from specimens from Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_lion
I think it is easy to adopt counting words from other Languages especially if your own Language's counting words are long and laboursome. We see this with Bantu people adopting shorter Indo-European words...
@epoch
What is the composition of the steppe admixture of Kumtepe 4? I read that it could be fully CHG?
Even Moose(Elk) lived in the Caucasus...I think areas bordering the Eastern Black Sea would also have been good for Moose.
Dave:
"I can assure you that Yamnaya people never met any lions."
Really?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250007417_A_lion's_share_of_attention_Archaeozoology_and_the_historical_record
"In the Ukraine, largely contemporaneous Copper Age lion finds have been published from the Tripolje culture settlement of Mayaki that included, among others, a proximal radius and a distal tibia fragment (Fig. 4.7).54 A phalanx media was also reported from the Gumelnitsa culture settlement of Bolgrad (Fig. 4.8).55 A reference to a yet unpublished Copper Age lion bone is known from the site of Molukhov Bugor."
Molukhov Bogor lies on the Dniepr in Cherkassy Oblast, some 200 km SE of Kiev. It has yielded AMS dates around 3500 BC, and is commonly assigned to the Dereivka culture.
The paper sets forth: "By now, lion remains have been identified in several Early Iron Age assemblages from settlements along the lower reaches of the Bug River and the Odessa region, including Tira (Fig. 4.19), new finds from O1’biya (Fig. 4.20),71 Berezan (Fig. 4.21), Chernomorka II (Fig. 4.22) and Chernovaty (Fig. 4.23)."
So far on "Scythians learned about lions from Persians and maybe Greeks."
@FrankN
Lions lived in the Balkans and the Caucasus, so they or their remains may have been exported occasionally further north.
But there's no agreement that modern lions ever inhabited the Pontic-Caspian steppe.
@Cpk It's in de ADMIXTURE run of the Anatolian Hunter-Gatherer paper. In the supp info.
Dave, come on!
"Modern lions reached the steppes of Ukraine and Hungary, without penetrating the forests of Central Europe."
https://academic.oup.com/biolinnean/article/109/1/66/2415711
"In Southeast Europe, the lion inhabited part of the Balkan peninsula up to Hungary and Ukraine during the Neolithic period."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lions_in_Europe
"The Novoselskoe II hillfort is currently the 10th point with finds of lion’s bones and the extreme south-western point on the territory of modern Ukraine where the lion from Holocene is recorded."
https://www.e-anthropology.com/English/Catalog/Archaeology/STM_DWL_BWz5_JyZjZlYKDr1b.aspx
" lion finds from the Holocene are known only from Greece and Ukraine apart from the Carpathian Basin."
https://www.hnp.hu/en/szervezeti-egyseg/conservation/oldal/geography
How many more quotes do you need? A Google search for "Lion holocene Ukraine" yields around 317.000 results...
@FrankN
The lack of evidence for certain roots is never evidence because everything can get lost in time. I am aware. But there is literally not one shared root in IE that can be traced to the local ecology of the south Caspian, even not when clearly used for food.
It may not function as proof, it certainly should urge one to keep an alternative Urheimat in mind.
@FrankN
On Tocharian agricultural terminology:
"the proportion of words
inherited from the proto-language in a technical meaning is low.
Some other terms are borrowed from Indo-Iranian and Chinese,
and the rest is of unknown origin."
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=9&ved=2ahUKEwign9bo9_DjAhVSJVAKHbXGBMwQFjAIegQIABAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.leidenuniv.nl%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F1887%2F72349%2F08_Michae%2560%25C4%2599l_Peyrot.pdf%3Fsequence%3D1&usg=AOvVaw1Wxcpxd8IUTWzGiw16rnZ3
Wild sheep (Mouflon) were found as far as the Crimea area..and only became extinct around the Later Bronze Age if I remember correctly...
@JuanRivera @ epoch
Whoa, I never noticed how different the samples from Kumtepe are (I think the original paper only looked at the kum6?). I don't think too much stock can be put in such a low-res sample... but intriguing nonetheless.
[1] "distance%=14.1298"
Anatolia_N_Kumtepe_low_res:kum4
Boncuklu_N,41.6
Levant_N,21.8
EHG,14.6
CHG,12.6
Seh_Gabi_LN,9.4
[1] "distance%=13.6799"
Anatolia_N_Kumtepe_low_res:kum4
Anatolia_Tepecik_Ciftlik_N,66.4
RUS_Progress_En,33.6
@ FrankN
"Novoselskoe II hillfort" = Lower Danube ? Extreme Southwestern Corner of Ukraine. Does that really count as the Broader Pontic-Caspian Steppe area ?
Re: Zardos' assertion that Basques are like Bell Beakers; Gabriel already applied some criticism, so Zardos revised his initial assertion to the point that they are like Bell Beakers patrilinearly and that they show the least evidence of post-BB change. But I think it's an important point that Bell Beakers and the EBA in Britain and Ireland were quite distinct from Basques in showing more steppe ancestry.
Re: Davidski's assertion that CHG is native to Eastern Europe... Well! If you say something is native after having lived there for many millennia this certainly isn't wrong. But on the other hand CHG are very different from the WHG-EHG cline, they show much more Basal Eurasian ancestry, and they're closer to Iranian HG than to WHG or EHG. This doesn't refute the idea that they may be called native to Eastern Europe, but it's something to keep in mind nonetheless.
Re: Zardos's musings on Reich, notions of race and political correctness in the initial comment: I picked up that some months ago there was a heavy debate about Reich's view on race in the New York Times. I didn't have the opportunity to follow it nor do I exactly know what Reich suggested. I suppose he suggested that the traditional races be replaced with the big genetic clusters like West Eurasian, Sub-Saharan, East Eurasian? Correct me if I'm wrong or if you know more. In any case this was heavily criticised by some journalists, again I don't know exactly why, but I suppose they didn't find it constructivist enough.
@FrankN
Maybe prePIE or early PIE had an animate-inanimate distinction and feminine gender was introduced after contact with an Afroasiatic like language.
I think some say that the feminine descended from a collective plural.
@PF
"I don't think too much stock can be put in such a low-res sample... but intriguing nonetheless. "
It is such a pity because the sample comes from exactly the right spot, at exactly the right time. Kumtepe apparently showed a sudden change in culture, and this apparently is related to the rise of Troy as well.
A real effort should be made to re-analyse. If something is left, that is. I emailed some authors about that but got no answer.
If someone makes a model for Central European BB with samples 9000 years old or older, one of them being Villabruna, what it will be like?
@Simon: I didnt revised anything, I just clarified. BB made little to no foreign male assimilation. Rather they made a tabula rasa.
The NW BB had even less of a maternal foreign input, but that makes little difference.
What makes a difference is that Basques are like a BB dominated population in a time capsule, but nobody else in Western Europe. There was just no other agent which could have introduced Basque.
Finns are more Corded Ware than most actual IE speakers, but they were converted by a wave-like Uralic expansion.
If the same happened with Celts, a small paternal change might have reached the Atlantic fringe.
Celts are not the issue, but Italics are more complicated as an early attested IE expansion.
In Italics and Hallstatt elite we should find non-Beaker ancestry of significance.
Even if BB spoke an IE dialect, I would still assume a Celtic expansion from Central Europe to the West with a significant impact.
About Reich: I think he wants to be as politically correct as possible without telling obvious lies deliberately.
In the current political context thats enough for the thought police to dont like him. In fact, they dont like Natural science dealing with humans in general, because their constructs dont do well if being put to test and analysed critically.
I know the interviews and reactions to it, but this is not the right place to discuss this at length.
@FrankN: on the other hand, pantherine cat remains are notoriously difficult to separate, and there have been many instances of lions, tigers, European jaguars, and cave lions all getting mixed up, confused, and the relations between them very, very difficult to resolve. In a parallel to our discussions here, it seems that some genetic research has created a situation where the expectation of Pleistocene lions and their relation to existing lions—all of which overlapped in the range of tigers, by the way—was turned pretty much on its head recently.
Not that I disagree with you, but I'm just saying. Depending on the methods used in those papers, they may or may not have been lions.
All that said, this discussion cum speculation on the formation of early PIE, the Caucasian substrate hypothesis (and any putative distant relations to any eastern Eurasian languages, Uralic or otherwise) sounds like a great subject for a post at ADNAERA. I find it fascinating stuff and would love to see it collated into something more coherent in presentation than some comments, if at all possible.
@Gaska
Many of them do not have steppe ancestry and have good percentages of Iberian blood.
These samples don’t belong to P312.
@zardos
If the same happened with Celts, a small paternal change might have reached the Atlantic fringe.
But aren’t Finns dominated by N? So, why that’s not the case with R1a in Western Europe? Must be a Hittite situation then?
Celts are not the issue, but Italics are more complicated as an early attested IE expansion.
In Italics and Hallstatt elite we should find non-Beaker ancestry of significance.
Aren’t early Italics and Etruscans identical, and a Bell Beaker-farmer mix? Seems unlikely they will show something from the east. Also, R1b-U152 dominates Italy.
Unetice was no monolithic block and most of the later groups too were not as homogeneous as CW or BB. R1b clans were obviously integrated and became part of it early on.
Still the BB tradition survived mainly in refuges and further West, but was otherwise replaced.
Like Drago said, the more hierarchical, stratified, professional etc a society became, the more they used foreign males instead of cutting them down.
This is very obvious from the Hallstatt culture, with its farmers and miners, craftsmen, professional warriors and a ruling aristocracy in proto-state/early state chiefdoms.
Thats not comparable to the more tribal-clannish nature of BB and CW.
But again, the BB might very well have been IE speakers, we need more data.
@Samuel Andrews
I tried your suggestion again to use the French cluster 1 for modelling the Swiss. In my failed first attempt I had overlooked that I have to put the data into comma separated format.
[1] "distance%=1.4474"
Swiss_French
FrenchCluster1,46.7
Bell_Beaker_FRA,32.1
ITA_Collegno_MA:CL121,11.9
DEU_MA,9.3
CZE_Hallstatt_Bylany:DA111,0
[1] "distance%=1.0016"
Swiss_German
FrenchCluster1,45.1
DEU_MA,33.5
Bell_Beaker_FRA,13.8
ITA_Collegno_MA:CL121,7.6
CZE_Hallstatt_Bylany:DA111,0
[1] "distance%=2.3308"
Swiss_Italian
FrenchCluster1,53.8
ITA_Collegno_MA:CL121,44.2
Bell_Beaker_FRA,2
CZE_Hallstatt_Bylany:DA111,0
DEU_MA,0
Looks like all Swiss ethnic groups alike can be modelled as roughly 50% stemming from the French cluster 1. However, I don't think this is a useful modelling as long as we've got decent ancient samples at hand. Because the French cluster 1 is a modern cluster of mixed origin, hence it rather hides the ancient origins than uncovering them.
@Simon “Re: Davidski's assertion that CHG is native to Eastern Europe... Well! If you say something is native after having lived there for many millennia this certainly isn't wrong. But on the other hand CHG are very different from the WHG-EHG cline, they show much more Basal Eurasian ancestry, and they're closer to Iranian HG than to WHG or EHG. This doesn't refute the idea that they may be called native to Eastern Europe, but it's something to keep in mind nonetheless.”
Both Iran_N and CHG are Dzudzuana-like populations (close or similar to Anatolian_Epipaleolithic) with a dose of 35% -50% ANE, so they may cluster somewhere close to Eastern European HG (EHG).
@Epoch, re; money and numbers, that feels like it could be a bit too congruent with the other vocabulary that is borrowed/shared between Iberian and Basque that I don't quite trust myself to believe it, but it would seem to be plausible.
@epoch, also re; cereal usage in the steppe zone -
Intensification in pastoralist cereal use coincides with the expansion of trans-regional networks in the Eurasian Steppe
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35758-w.pdf
The pace of transmission of domesticated cereals, including millet from China as well as wheat and barley from southwest Asia, throughout the vast pastoralist landscapes of the Eurasian Steppe (ES) is unclear. The rich monumental record of the ES preserves abundant human remains that provide a temporally deep and spatially broad record of pastoralist dietary intake. Calibration of human δ13C and δ15N values against isotope ratios derived from co-occurring livestock distinguish pastoralist consumption of millet from the products of livestock and, in some regions, identify a considerable reliance by pastoralists on C3 crops. We suggest that the adoption of millet was initially sporadic and consumed at low intensities during the Bronze Age, with the low-level consumption of millet possibly taking place in the Minusinsk Basin perhaps as early as the late third millennium cal BC.
Starting in the mid-second millennium cal BC, millet consumption intensified dramatically throughout the ES with the exception of both the Mongolian steppe where millet uptake was strongly delayed until the end of first millennium cal BC and the Trans-Urals where instead barley or wheat gained dietary prominence. The emergence of complex, trans-regional political networks likely facilitated the rapid transfer of cultivars across the steppe during the transition to the Iron Age.
(Section on "Participation in trans-regional political exchange networks redirected pastoralist dietary intake" and associated cultural change is really interesting!).
Although the "low carb diet" doesn't seem to be so associated with great health, at least for Volga populations postdating the Khvalynsk cemetaries:
Biocultural Analysis of the Prehistoric Populations of the Volga Region
https://pure.qub.ac.uk/ws/files/42562597/CHAPTER_8_Murphy_and_Khokhlov_pdf.pdf
The results would tend to suggest that, with its low levels of cribra orbitalia, the Khvalynsk population was relatively healthy. This would correlate with the high prevalence of older adult males in the corpus and with the potentially high status nature of the Khvalynsk II burial ground as evidenced by the occurrence of a rich array of copper grave goods in the burials. The levels of enamel hypoplasia were relatively high, however, but given the other positive indicators of health it is possible that this is just a sign that those individuals who had been subject to ill health as a child had the ability to recover thereby enabling the hypoplastic defect to develop.
The standard of health appears to have dramatically declined between Khvalynsk (Eneolithic) and Yamnaya (EBA) times, when individuals had the highest levels of cribra orbitalia, enamel hypoplasia and violence-related injuries. None of the Yamnaya adult males survived into older adulthood which may be a further indicator of poor health...
The dentitions of all groups were characterised by high levels (c. 50-100%) of periodontal disease and calculus, and generally low levels (0-30%) of extensive tooth attrition, ante-mortem loss, abscesses and caries. ... When the frequencies of calculus and caries are compared, however, they can be used to assess the relative levels of proteins versus carbohydrates within a group's diet (Keenleyside 2008, 265). Lillie (1996; 2000) found, for example, that Mesolithic and Neolithic populations in Ukraine displayed no caries and high levels of dental calculus. He interpreted these findings as indicative of a protein-based diet that was low in carbohydrates, and therefore compatible with the hunting-fishing gathering and, for the Neolithic, pastoralist form of economy expected for these early populations. These trends are very similar to those derived from the Volga populations where caries are practically absent and the calculus levels are even higher. It can therefore be concluded that all of the Volga populations from the Eneolithic through to Late Bronze Age times consumed a high protein diet in which cereals were largely absent.
Femur lengths plugged into a standard equation (http://www.adbou.dk/fileadmin/adbou/projektopgaver/ADBOU_linear_regression_Mette_Wodx.pdf) suggests heights would tend to be fairly low from Yamnaya onwards at about 5'6", with Poltavka population seeming to be the tallest (albeit with low N) and Srubnaya the smallest. Corded Ware samples from Europe (genetically similar to Potapovka-Srubnaya) are similar, as I can recall. See - https://imgur.com/a/xymY8Fl
For Corded Ware 5'6" would be rather at the lower end of the spectrum, as they were usually taller than 170 cm and significantly taller than most Neolithic populations which were on average shorter. Actually Corded Ware were among the tallest post-HG poplations of Europe before the Bronze Age. Bell Beaker too were rather at the tall end of the spectrum, but slightly shorter than CW.
A height of more than 170 cm would have been exceptionally tall for a purely Neolithic group.
To those who believe R1b steppe people were Vasconic, what do you think of Germanic R1b?
@Gabriel - "To those who believe R1b steppe people were Vasconic, what do you think of Germanic R1b?" The Bell Beakers folk made it pretty far into what later became Germanic speaking areas, so that's not really a problem, whether you think Bell Beakers spoke Vasconic or not.
I don’t know what exactly R1b-BB were, but for the start, even if they had CW-related ancestry, they were in no way the same people.
We still dont know the exact path they took or where they were coming from. They were physically very different and had increased Neolithic, but even more important increased WHG ancestry.
So how did that come?
I see no sufficient answer, but just groups of fairly typical BB males with corresponding females which expanded in all directions while taking local females, including CW, on the move, while males were rarely allowed to assimilate and if, they were among the poor, presumably without the same status and rights in the group.
That rather exploitative BB system existed for many generations largely unchanged, as if specific BB caste kept it alive.
But then you see it collapsing. The culture changes significantly, the physical and genetic profile as well. BB refuges and strongholds survive, like Neolithic groups survived the steppe invasion, but their system and power in Central Europe was broken down. The remains integrated in the new, already less clanish system.
They didnt disappear, but they mixed and changed in the new environment of the full Bronze Age.
After that change many more cultural, possibly also ethnic movements went over the BB territories.
So after the 4th-5th large turnover we have attested Celtic languages. Fine, but their is only relative genetic continuity with a lot in between.
The only people which show real continuity from their BB ancestors are Basques.
Now what do you do with that? Like Drago said look at other places than Western Atlantic Europe. Germanic can be, like Celtic, come from post-BB influences.Actually its much less of a problem with such a high proportion of non-R1b.
But we need more samples. Italic warriors, Hallstatt and Celtic elite for example, then we might know.
@zardos Germanic languages originated with the merger of a CW (Battle Axe, Single Grave) R1a with an incoming BB Halstadt group. That’s why they are very hard to place on the tree and that why they exhibit characters of both Balto-Slavic and Italo-Celtic.
The drivel about Germanic being 33% - 50% lexically (and/or morphologically, phonologically and so forth) EEF/WHG is pure hogwash and horse manure.
@Ryan @Andrzejewski
I doubt most Germanic R1b is from Bell Beaker.
Besides, the significant amount of I1 can explain whichever substrate there is in Germanic.
@ mzp1 and re "Uralic borrowings are Iranian not Indo-Aryan." This is most probably not true, I'd say that early Indo Aryan of Abashevo is a good candidate for the very early loans as recently suggested by Parpola.
Häkkinen 2012 lists a whole series of Uralic borrowings over various stages of development from Proto-Aryan to Iranian, e.g.
IE *ghew- >Early Proto-Aryan *gughew- >Early PU *juxi- "to drink"
IE *ghen- >Middle Proto-Arian *dzen- >Middle PU *senti- "to be born"
IE kmtom >Late Proto-Aryan catam >Late PU *seta "100"
IE gh(o)l(H) > Late Proto-Aryan *zhar > Early Iranian zaranya >Late PU *serna "gold"
"Based on all the relevant arguments Proto-Uralic is located in the taiga zone in the Volga-Ural region, from where its expansion began only ca. 2000 BC (Kallio 2006; Häkkinen 2009), but PreProto-Uralic seems to have been spoken in Southern Siberia, north from the Sayan Mountains, where it shared typological developments with the protolanguages of the Altaic type (Janhunen 2001; 2007) and donated loanwords to Pre-ProtoYukaghir (Häkkinen 2012b). The Aryan developments must have taken place in the vicinity of Proto-Uralic, that is in the North Caspian Steppes, as extensively argued by Carpelan & Parpola (2001). "
http://www.elisanet.fi/alkupera/Problems_of_phylogenetics.pdf
@zardos, I tried again with the stature estimation equations from two major stature estimation papers from ancient papers, to generate a true apples-to-apples comparison, and the Yamnaya do come out more "favourable" from those:
1) Using comparison data from "Stature and the Neolithic Transition - Skeletal Evidence From Southern Sweden", male stature is: Yamnaya: 173.79, Battle Axe Culture: 172.8, TRB: 164.8, PWC: 164.5, Ertebolle: 162.4 cm.
(Imperial: Y: 5'8, BAC: 5'8, TRB: 5'5, PWC: 5'5, E: 5'4).
2) Using comparison data from "Transition to Agriculture in Central Europe: Body Size and Shape among the First Farmers", male stature is Yamnaya: 172.8, Corded Ware: 168.7, Linearbandceramik 162.8 cm.
(Imperial: Y: 5'8, CW: 5'6, LBC: 5'4).
See: https://imgur.com/a/zEQ3eaI
But on overlap being "exceptional" SD is about 7.5 cm for males, so if you take that SD then in
1) about 15% of TRB would overlap with top 50% Yamnaya and BAC, or in
2) 10% of Linearbankceramik would overlap top 50% Yamnaya, and 20% top 50% CW
Not really exceptionally rare to overlap, but possibly something like 1 in 5.
Though these people would probably not just look small but short-legged to us.
That is there's some data in Cox's big study of heights* (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/07/02/690545.full.pdf) using Ruff's data that shows slightly reduced leg length in proportion to height: https://imgur.com/a/A6RUcYY.
Note if averages in above graphic from Cox's paper seem low compared to male averages above, they're male+female, so male neolithic under Mathieson's study would also be about 166-167cm, predominantly shorter in the leg due to stunting.
*This is one I may have called Mathieson's before, but she's the main author and he is just one of them, so it's fairer to her to call it hers.
@Matt: I spoke of pure Neolithic populations, TRB is obviously not a pure Neolithic, but significantly WHG influenced population.
Generally speaking the Eastern pastoralists were taller and had more robust bones, thats true for Yamnaya and Corded Ware, with BB being also more on their side, but more variable in comparison and more of a range from very robust to even very gracile, probably because of their constant mixture with the surrounds. The core type was rather tall-robust too.
Also we now have first impressions of "genetic height" and this points even more to the heigher steppe people height. Actually you can in Europe, to a point at least, guess the steppe percentage respectively Neolithic ancestry by looking at height alone. This is even true inside of nations like France and Italians. There are some exceptions to this rule, because a lot happened in between, but if speaking of a very generalised pattern, its true.
I know some CW groups were somewhat shorter, but 168 is really at the lower end of their range.
"Not really exceptionally rare to overlap, but possibly something like 1 in 5."
I talked about averages. Obviously the tallest Neolithics could overlap with the steppe average. But nevertheless, the physical difference is signfiicant. Depending on the kind of warfare, it might have played in too.
At that time the environmental influence was stronger than now of course. In the Hallstatt burials the upper class was close to modern heights, whereas the poor were almost as short as Neolithics. Now that can be mostly attributed to nutrition and living conditions, but the genetic height should be considered too in future research.
@JuanRivera
Intriguingly, it shows no apparent genetic connection to nearby (and earlier) Barcin_C.
Barcin_C (aka Anatolia_Chl) is nearly a millennium *later* than Kum4...
If the Kum4 admixture results are taken as accurate, it certainly lends a lot of credence to a very early Steppe-related migration almost surely coming via the Balkans, which got diluted over time leading to trace amounts in Barcin_C and later. Enough to transmit a language? I have no idea.
Migration may be too strong a word. It almost seems like it was just a few individuals at first (like Varna_outlier). Anyways would be great to try and retest Kum4 and more generally get more genomes from late Neolithic western Anatolia.
@Zardos: I spoke of pure Neolithic populations, TRB is obviously not a pure Neolithic, but significantly WHG influenced population.
But the skeletal data seems to show that mesolithic WHG were no taller than neolithic groups! See the data from Cox and the Swedish study...
Pitted Ware Culture and Ertebolle were shortest in the Swedish study, while Cox's study showed the Mesolithic and late Upper Paleolithic (e.g. Villabruna WHG types) to be shorter than the Neolithic group...
EEF tended to have pretty robust limbs in terms of proportionate strength - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171129143359.htm - "A new study comparing the bones of Central European women that lived during the first 6,000 years of farming with those of modern athletes has shown that the average prehistoric agricultural woman had stronger upper arms than living female rowing champions."
Though facial shape may have been more gracile.
@Matt: The Mesolithic populations were quite variable and you have to consider their genetic height too, which I don't know for them - probably you?
Also, mixture can oftentimes result in taller variants and in the case of TRB and GAC, my impression is that selection pushed the HG influenced pastoralists in the direction of the classic Corded type.
In a way, they reached through the Corded expansion and partial replacement faster what the Northern pastoralists were already heading for. For example in pigmentation (lighter), lactase persistence, taller and more robust overall. Thats part of the reason why in the past a lot of people put GAC and CWC rather close together, because especially in comparison to earlier Neolithics and Eastern HG groups, they were not that different after all physically and culturally. Coming from a different background, both headed towards a quite similar way of life which was at that time the best adaptation to the Northern habitat. CW had just the edge over the Western groups, for whatever exact reasons.
One question our linguistic experts might answer. One of Reichs main arguments against a steppe homeland of the PIE is that Anatolian speakers, according to him, lacked the vocabulary for the parts of a wagon and other means of transportation which all other IE speakers ought to share.
How accurate is his argument? Do Anatolian IE speakers lack a lot of the vocabulary one would attribute to the steppe way of life completely? Beyond what could be lost in the new homeland?
@zardos it’s estimated that Anatolian branch languages branched out 6500 YBP, which is just before horse riding and horse taming, wheel utilization and charioteers came into being. But I may be sorely wrong
@Gabriel - Why do you doubt that R1b in Germanics is from BB? They made it as far as Denmark. Not all of it has to be direct either - half of Germany was Celtic speaking at one point.
I don't think the Beaker folk are the origin of the substrate in Germanic though except perhaps minor contributions.
@Andre: 4500 BC is quite early isn't it? About 1000 years earlier than usually assumed. And attested in Anatolia much later.
So if assuming they came from the PC steppe, they could have been in the vicinity of other IE groups for much longer time, but probably no longer in the direct sphere of influence and exchange, before entering Anatolia.
When and where they entered Anatolia is completely unknown if I recall correctly.
Could the switch from TRB/Funnelbeaker in Central Europe to Globular Amphora be attributed to a migration of a different set of Middle Neolithic farming community from the Paris basin? Would Michelsberg be responsible for the vast introgression of WHG ancestry in the GAC with its accompanying I2a y-DNA? Maybe blondism which according to @Samuel Andrews’ guest blog post was limited to GAC and subsequently spread in all directions via absorption into the expanding CWC was not a legacy of Rössen or Laryngial or the impact of Motala or Erteboelle on LBK but it actually migrated from France? And last but not least - could it be that Michelsberg is responsible for the exponential meteoric rise of mtDNA H on the expanse of (now rare, previously common in Cardial Pottery) N1a, K1a (common in Ashkenazi Jews and seen in Ötzi) or HV and R0 (common among Cucuteni Tripolye)?
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179742
“At the regional level, the analysis of the Gougenheim mitochondrial gene pool (SNPs and HVR-I sequence analyses) permitted us to highlight a major genetic break associated with the emergence of the Michelsberg in the region. This genetic discontinuity appeared to be linked to new affinities with farmers from the Paris Basin, correlated to a noticeable hunter-gatherer legacy. All of the evidence gathered supports (i) the occidental origin of the Michelsberg groups and (ii) the potential implication of this migration in the progression of the hunter-gatherer legacy from the Paris Basin to Alsace / Western Germany at the beginning of the Late Neolithic.”
@zardos
Anatolian languages have indeed not inherited any of the words associated with wagons as found in late PIE. Their word for wheel, "ḫūrkis", is almost certainly from a PIE root. That may mean that it's an innovation. However, there also is the Tocharian A word for wheel, "wärkänt", which could be associated. If that is the case Reich's argument is falsified.
I am by no means an linguistic expert, mind you. Not even nearly. I just had the same question as you a while ago and this is what I basically found.
@JuanRivera It’s not that Yamnaya offspring populations didn’t admix with Botai; it is that the latter’s influence on the former is almost tantamount to none. Compare it to Sen. Warren’s claim to an indigenous Native American heritage, where she got very very little. <2% equals “noise levels”. According to this Botai analogy 60M -70M Americans have Cherokee blood.
On top of this genetic analysis, bear in mind that even if Botai had contributed significantly to Indo-Iranian populations, their DEMIC and cultural, linguistic et al influence on their developements is diddly squat.
Furthermore, to seal the deal - Narasimhan 2018 clinched it by pointing out that neither Botai nor BMAC have donated any large enough chunk of ancestry to be accounted for as a considerable (=non negligible) genetic contribution. Therefore, it negates the hitherto-prevailing view regarding Hinduism and Avesta as deriving from non-IE BMAC.
All that said, I’m curious where culturally and linguistic isolates in India and Nepal came from, their linguistic affiliation and their genetic origins: Burusho, Nihali and Kusunda. Any ideas?
@JuanRivera
Levanluhta_IA has East Eurasian and EHG ancestry (in addition to Corded_Ware_Baltic), whereas Levanluhta_IA_o gets only Baltic_HG ancestry (in addition to Corded_Ware_Baltic), which bears similarity to the Saami_IA and Finnish_IA groups of the Yana paper, respectively.
Nope.
The West Eurasian ancestry in Levanluhta_IA and especially Levanluhta_IA_o is mostly Germanic not Corded_Ware_Baltic.
On the trail of the Proto-Uralic speakers (work in progress)
@zardos, well, in terms of the actual height of people in the Neolithic, Mesolithic, Bronze Age, etc., and the nutritional / stress and so on influence of them and what this said about the health and diet of different populations, which was the original topic, you have to consider only the measured heights or estimates via femur.
(Partly I'm interested in this because you get these ideas contrasting tall, healthy, strong pastoralists and hunter gatherers who are seen as akin to modern people in their health, with farmers who are seen as malnourished, small and weak. Yamnaya and Corded Ware and WHG male 6 footers and the like, contrasted against 5 foot tall farmers.
It seems like a very sanitized and "PC" view of ancient foragers and pastoralists, who were probably rather poorly nourished and had physically demanding and stressful lifestyles to modern people. I'm against what seems to be an increasingly popular romanticisation of ancient forager and pastoralist lifestyles.)
If you wanted to consider how much of height of modern people is explained by ancient ancestry, then I guess you would instead want to look at genetic scores.
But the scores from Cox's paper suggest that the identified genetic height differences between Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age people are small, something like 0.5-0.25 of an SD, depending on how the GWAS corrected for population structure.
Mesolithic and Upper Paleolithic samples also came out with the same genetic score as Neolithic people... Perhaps Mesolithic populations are variable, but it does seem to be a bit untestable to argue that there must have been some genetically ultra tall hidden set of samples that they hadn't sampled...
Even if that is an underestimate of the real genetic differences by 2-3x, you would still only get to 2-3ins or something like this (which is a bit allowance), which matches OK the skeletal record in the Swedish paper or Central European paper (between high steppe CW populations and their respective local TRB and LBK populations).
Re; loss of shared wheel and wagon vocabulary in Anatolian (Hittite, Luwian, etc.), the argument (if I remember rightly, and I may not) is that they didn't have shared terms with other IE groupings but separate derivations and loanwords (though I don't know if this is true or not).
Not that they didn't have words for wheels and wagons at all, which would be fairly ridiculous to expect in any Bronze Age people.
It's not like anyone could ever argue "Oh, they moved to Anatolia, where people wouldn't need to know what wheels and wagons are" which is insane from the perspective that these were widespread technologies that were pretty much everywhere across West Eurasia almost as soon as they were invented (from Sumer to the Middle-Late neolithic farmers of NW Europe).
The argument that they could not have switched out on this particular set of words doesn't seem overwhelmingly strong however. It's not like there is some reason that they couldn't have shifted these lexemes.
Arguments that hinged on "X must have diverged earlier because when we see them turn up later in history, they lack shared vocabulary on Y which happened at time Z" is not really a very strong argument.
Stronger arguments for early divergence of Anatolian seem to be in the structure of the phylogeny of morphological and phonological changes, and greater variation in core lexicon (which has no particular strong impetus to change in response to technological change).
@Davidski
In Anthony's article it's written that most Yamnaya individuals score more than 50% CHG, but in models I've tried with G25 EHG is much higher than CHG. Why is that?
@Matt: From all data I have ever seen the pastoralists were in much better health than the farmers in Central- and Northern Europe. Mesolithic HG populations were fairly variable.
If Cox finds so little differences in genetic scores, I'm not sure his work was spot on, because again, all I have ever seen points in a different direction. But probably he is right, and all the others wrong, we'll see.
This study on height and BMI in modern populations follows the pattern I meant:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4984852/
And you know Mathieson et al:
"First, the Iberian Neolithic and Chalcolithic samples show selection for reduced height relative to both the Anatolian Neolithic (p=0.042) and the Central European Early and Middle Neolithic (p=0.003). Second, we detect a signal for increased height in the steppe populations (p=0.030 relative to the Central European Early and Middle Neolithic). These results suggest that the modern South-North gradient in height across Europe is due to both increased steppe ancestry in northern populations, and selection for decreased height in Early Neolithic migrants to southern Europe."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4918750/
Linguistics:
"Stronger arguments for early divergence of Anatolian seem to be in the structure of the phylogeny of morphological and phonological changes, and greater variation in core lexicon (which has no particular strong impetus to change in response to technological change)."
Well, there are two problems: First, Anatolian IE met a pre-IE substrat and this substrat was numerically, culturally and structurally stronger than any other IE met when first taking a region. So in the oldschool interpretation, a lot of the change was attributed to foreign influences on Proto-Anatolian.
Second, even if that's not right and can be refuted by linguists, an earlier departure from the main IE communities would be mean little for the homeland from my perspective. Especially since we know nothing about where Anatolian was before it can be historically attested.
So the argument of Reich, for a lack of steppe people's innovations and their vocabulary for it at the time of separation, would be mean something, the rest not. But I agree that this is a very weak linguistic argument of Reich, and if its the only one, with the idea of genetic CHG influence from Transcaucasia, his whole story is not plausible.
@Nezih Seven
In Anthony's article it's written that most Yamnaya individuals score more than 50% CHG, but in models I've tried with G25 EHG is much higher than CHG. Why is that?
Because Anthony isn't talking about CHG ancestry per se, but rather about the component inferred with ADMIXTURE that peaks in CHG. Note that he refers to Figure 2c in Wang et al. in his text. That's the ADMIXTURE bar graph.
However, normally it's not a good idea to infer ancient ancestry proportions from ADMIXTURE output. Here's an example of how things can go wrong...
The Metal Age invader that never was #2
Quoting Suyindik who cited Reich:
"about ten thousand years ago there were at least four major populations in West Eurasia—the farmers of the Fertile Crescent, the farmers of Iran, the hunter-gatherers of central and western Europe, and the hunter-gatherers of eastern Europe. All these populations differed from one another as much as Europeans differ from East Asians today."
Is this really the case when we consider that all populations are admixed with one another? EHG are roughly half WHG. Anatolia_N derives mainly from Mesolithic Anatolia (Feldman 2019)in which there is obvious geographic proximity that tie Mesolithic Anatolians to WHG. There is Villabruna connection to the Near East.
Iran_N would be the most extreme outlier but even here, there is some overlap with components (ANE, which is also present in EHG and to a lesser extent, WHG; possibly even Anatolia_N itself, via Iran_N input. And again, the aforementioned Iran_N input into Anatolia_N.)
When compared to the rest of the world,facial morphology is largely the same throughout Western Eurasia, which led to the craniometrical taxon 'Caucasoid' being applied to a large swath of Western Eurasia. It's not very empirical, and even pooh-poohed nowadays, but it's obvious to see in comparison with East Asians, Native Americans, Sub-Saharan Africans.
The relative uniformity is largely down to post-bronze age movements of peoples around Eurasia but could also suggest that this is something very old-a feature common to Pre-Ice age Western Eurasian groups like Dzudzuana. Given the fact that facial reconstructions show the facial morphology of of WHGs like La Brana, Loschbour, Cheddar Man to already fit within European range, the latter could be a possibility.
@zardos: Re genetic height, it's technical but there are lots of questions raised about those old GWAS studies (2015 is, unbelievably, old considering how fast the field is moving) in the last year.
The issues with older GWAS like that GIANT dataset analysis is that because you're talking about alleles of such low effect and the realized phenotype is correlated with population structure, there is really minimal sensitivity to distinguishing true height alleles from alleles which just represent population structure.
So e.g. you end up with Neolithics ending up with lots of "short" variants, but those actually may just be "Spanish / Portuguese" variants that are not really causally related to height and just happen to be related to a phenotypically shorter and taller population in the present day (and can't be used to create a genetic height score, properly). Such "height" signals are inflated, then.
In the same way, if you had a panel with a lot of Dinaric Alpine people and Hungarian or something, you'd find that the tall variants would probably become Neolithic (though maybe less dramatically so).
Hence the better way to do so is to just use an ethnically homogenous panel to control for population structure and find "real" variants. Ideally you use siblings.
But you can't do this until you have sample sizes like the UK Biobank White British cohort. So this was not done until Biobank was out there.
Since we had UK Biobank then, there are a couple of studies that did this last year:
https://elifesciences.org/articles/39725 - "Reduced signal for polygenic adaptation of height in UK Biobank" (Copenhagen's paper)
https://elifesciences.org/articles/39702 - "Polygenic adaptation on height is overestimated due to uncorrected stratification in genome-wide association studies" (Harvard's paper)
These find that the height score differences between WHG, Neolithic, etc. do replicate to some degree, but at far, far lower magnitude clip.
So it's not like Samantha Cox vs Everyone Else, more like "Everyone Pre-Biobank sample sizes" vs "Everyone Post-Biobank sample sizes". And the post-Biobank people have a better dataset.
But this stuff will continue to be validated or not as other countries begin to churn out Biobank scaled datasets, and scores that independently replicate across population begin to be identified.
@zardos: Re the impact of substrates acting on Anatolian to accelerate divergence and make it look like a falsely older than it is, one issue is that this is supposition though and not demonstrated that substrates do accelerate change.
But the more essential point is that arguments for extraordinary substrate pressures would really only applies to the Bayesian models that look at rate of change in core lexicon.
If you have a "perfect phylogeny" model of reconstructing an IE tree through a series of phonological and grammatical changes which can only happen in a series 1->2->3->5->n with no back mutation and the Anatolian languages are always splitting at 1, then you can't really attribute this to extraordinarily accelerated change rates from substrate influences.
That seems to be the case for Anatolian, at least on the linguistic consensus of reconstruction of PIE.
That is, that Anatolian preserves some extremely archaic features of earliest IE, and have features directly derived from earliest PIE, so those can't be explained by "substrate influence". Google "archaism" and "Anatolian" for specific examples.
(It seems to be less a consensus in the case of some other branches that look early diverged under the Bayesian core lexicon models - Indo-Aryan, etc. These are often postulated to be early branch offs under the Bayesian analysis of core lexicon, but do not branch off as early under "perfect phylogeny".)
I don't really have the linguistic knowledge to confirm this one way or the other, but it seems to be the general linguistic consensus.
[i]Aug 3: David: But the location of the PIE homeland is somewhere around the Black Sea, that's for sure, and probably rather late in the scheme of things.
Aug 4: Well, I for one, no longer have a PIE homeland theory.
I'm just not satisfied with any of the explanations that I've seen. Some scenarios do look more plausible than others, but none are especially meaningful considering all of the data.[/i]
----------------------------
David, these two statements seem contradictory? Did you change your mind after seeing some new evidence between these two posts?
Regarding the admittedly odd y-dna patterns observed in BA Iberia: What do you think about the "fourth" steppe theory, which has been proposed by amateurs only very recently: that a European farmer group (like Globular Amphora or Cucuteni) are the progenitors of PIE?
The linguistic argument requires early contact between PIE and pre-Uralic, and this box could be checked by the proximity of these cultures to Pit Comb Ware.
Genetically, we know there's a pulse of WHG-heavy farmer admixture into Yamnaya/CW immediately prior to the explosive spread of late PIE. And of course the I2a2 clades found in both Yamnaya and in BA Spain, Balkans, etc, might be ultimately traced to farmers.
I personally still think the steppe theory holds crown until it's definitively dethroned, but a European farmer homeland model would be a much more plausible alternate than the Anatolian and Caucasus models, IMO
@Ben Osland “The relative uniformity is largely down to post-bronze age movements of peoples around Eurasia but could also suggest that this is something very old-a feature common to Pre-Ice age Western Eurasian groups like Dzudzuana. Given the fact that facial reconstructions show the facial morphology of of WHGs like La Brana, Loschbour, Cheddar Man to already fit within European range, the latter could be a possibility.”
Do we actually have a full cranofacial reconstruction of La Brana, Cheddar etc? So far, only Ötzi seems to be fully reconstructed, and even that is deemed inaccurate.
I read a study saying that Anatolia_N was something between Dzudzuana and WHG of the Villabruna cluster, with the former being a Gravetian-like population. I don’t know how serious this claim is, especially when WHG and ANF were described as very physically different from each other.
On wheels: The most obvious example of a late transfer of "wheel" terminology is German "Rad" - a medieval borrowing from either Latin or Celtic (Iranian, via Alans, is another possible source). Otherwise, it seems to be consensus that Sumerian GALGAL ultimately also goes back to PIE *kweklos, possibly via an intermediary such as Hurrian (in which case, however, Anatolian "ḫūrkis" as apparent deviation from the Near Eastern "mainstream" would be even more problematic).
Otherwise, there is Proto-Wakashan-Nivkh-Algic *kwilku “round” (c.f. Proto-Algic *kwelk “to turn, return”, all as per Nikolaev 2016). Nivkh kulku-r “wheel” is probably rather an independent development than an IE borrowing.
Elsewhere, we find:
- PNC *gwɨ[l]gwǝ “round object, skull”, *hwǝ̄lkwē “carriage, vehicle; wheel”,
- Georgian (ḳwe-)ḳwer-a “round”, OGeorg grgol “ring”,
- PST *qʷār “move; round (object)”,
- Altaic *k`úlo “to turn”,
- Chukchee-Kamchatkan *kǝvlǝ- “to spin, roll; wheel, spindle”,
- Uralic *kulke “to move” *kerä “round, turning”,
- Eskimo *akra-ɣ- “round, to roll, wheel, (snow-)ball”,
- Telugu *kral“to move, turn round”, kalu “wheel”,
- Katuic *(kǝ-)kol “round”, *wiel “round; (re-)turn, spin”,
- Afras *kVr(kVr) “round; to rotate; ring, circle, ball”,
- Bushman *kVrV “round” [all from starling.rinet.ru],
- Manga (Nilo-Saharan, from Blench 2007) bukukul “round”;
- German Kugel, Dutch kogel "ball, bullet" (c.f. "Kulturkugel") of unclear, probably non-IE origin.
IOW, we are not talking about an IE-specific term, but about a globally distributed paleo-root with the meaning "(go/turn) round" that has been applied to various round objects, including skulls, (snow-)balls, rings, and also wheels.
You, Epoch, deem the lack of Anatolian and Tocharian equivalents to "wheel" and/or "Rad/rota" terms otherwise found in IE a "very weak linguistic argument of Reich". Now, I agree, it is certainly not the strongest point to be brought forward. But when it comes to "very weak linguistic arguments" Anthony's "horse and wheel" stuff should IMO clearly but higher on the respective list.
@FrankN
You mean "zardos". I just pointed to what I found.
@K33
Did you change your mind after seeing some new evidence between these two posts?
The point I was making was that there were no tangible clues and no real evidence linking any known archeological culture with archaic PIE.
All that we have right now, at all levels of the game, is pure speculation based on the rather obvious fact that the PIE homeland was somewhere in the vicinity of the Black Sea, and the high probability that late/nuclear PIE exploded from the steppe.
Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...
Regarding the admittedly odd y-dna patterns observed in BA Iberia: What do you think about the "fourth" steppe theory, which has been proposed by amateurs only very recently: that a European farmer group (like Globular Amphora or Cucuteni) are the progenitors of PIE?
This sounds like a western version of the Maykop PIE theory. In other words, the light is passed on to the steppe hoi polloi, and they do most of the leg work. Lame.
It should be obvious by now that there's no PIE theory without at least a significant input from some steppe people.
@Matt: Of course a different substrate or neighbour accelerates changes.
We can see this everywhere. Take Sanskrit as an example with some foreign influences from the start.
You could observe it in realtime with German dialects, especially in fringe areas.
But to pin it down for something quite specific and important like in the case brought up by Reich is beyond anything I can evaluate by myself.
But in the end genetics will decide it and the only thing I accuse Reich et al us that they present the case almost as if its a sure and proven thing, which it is definitely not, even less so for their scenario than others.
Language could be female mediated which is why there is a language shift to a non-IE language. We see many of the R1b rich cultures of southern Europe, such as in Iberia have taken EEF wives as we know they heavily practiced exogamy. This must have also been the case for the R-V88 hunter gatherers. Since the northern European farmers collapsed, there was more of a balance between EEF/Steppe derived females, where as the ones in the south of Europe did not, making mates more readily available.
I don't see the importance of language when it comes to the roles of men in a primitive society. Also, poster Gaska keeps emphasizing that Z2103 and L51 having "nothing to do with each other", which is pretty much impossible since they have a common ancestor 700 years earlier, probably the western steppes or the Carpathians.
According to Asko Parpola in his book “Formation of the Indo European and Uralic( Finno Hugric ) languages family in the light of archeology” the hittitan Word for “chariot” was “zalti” a word loaned from de Luwian “zala” wagon, cart.
That is the oficial interpretation.
In euskera or basque language “Zaldi” means “horse” And horses existed before carts were invented.
In Asturias, North of Spain, close to the Basque Country, small horses that run free in the Cantabric Mountains are called “zaldones” and like the basque ponnies “pottokas” are considered natives of Iberia.
These facts lead me to think that vasconic languages have very old Anatolian connection and also do Iberian and Tartesic languages.
If I am not mistaken, the neolithic component of basques forms a cloud with Barcin.
Of course in the route from Anatolia to the last end of Europe, they encountered West Hunter Gatherers, with their own languages with whom they mixed and formed the base that gave origin to vasconic people and language in West Europe.
Perhaps there were several waves of people coming from Anatolia, Levante and Central Europe in small quantities. But Euskera, in spite of the different contacts and culture, is a sort of fossil keeping words from the Stone Age before metals were wrought and carriages were invented.Who knows if the small “zaldi” helped to drag stones and build dolmens.
@zardos: All things being equal, it may be that contact effects accelerate linguistic change. But it's far from certain that this is the dominant force, in the summary of all effects. You can easily find examples where groups that don't have much contact have extensive change, or where communities of speakers take in lots of outgroup speakers with little influence on the language. (You refer to Sanskrit, for'ex but this has often been considered conservative within IE.)
There are material attempts to work this sort of thing out however: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/42/E8822
It's not implausible for contact effects to be significant, it just seems the sort of thing that ends up with arguments that can't really be tested and so there's no idea if they're correct or not.
@FrankN, and if talking about linguistic correlates of wheels has challenges, there is at least clear archaeological evidence that wheels and wagons existed before and outside the spread of Corded Ware Culture to Central and Western Europe.
Much more difficult is the spread of the domesticated horse.
It often seems to be an article of faith that horses spread into Central+Western Europe only with the spread of the Corded Ware or other offshoots of the steppe.
But of course there are horse bones present before this, and it is well conceivable that a useful domesticate could spread well before CW, so the argument then hinges on use of domesticated horse, and that is hard to provide evidence for.
So the argument is then that size differences in horse bones should be taken as indication of system breeding.
But there are no agreements between specialists about how to distinguish this trend from natural variation, and small sample sizes render it difficult to make a judgement!
As described here (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=EaVTxjrbIFQC&lpg=PA253&pg=PA248#v=onepage&q&f=false) -
"Benecke (1994), for example, maintains that an increase in variation of body size should be considered a marker of domestication in horses, similar to that seen in the probable domestic populations from Kazakhstan and Russia dating to the Bronze and Iron ages. Uerpmann (1990), on the other hand, believes that a similar degree of variation in body size among Neolithic equine populations in fourth millennium Germany falls within the limits of a wild population".
Thus you can get anything in this variability
"Employing the same LSI technique as Uerpmann, Benecke (2006a) identifies the first domestic horses in central Germany to the Late Neolithic Bernburg culture (3500–2700 cal. BC), where there is an increase in the average size of horses, an increased variability in bone size and also a higher proportion of horse bones found at sites (this latter is discussed further below). Benecke (2006a) interprets the combination of the increase in size and variability of bone measurements as representing the importation of domestic horses from sites in eastern or south-eastern Europe, where horses are known to be larger (there is east–west size variation of post-glacial horses with larger animals in eastern Europe and the steppe and smaller horses in the Iberian Peninsula (Uerpmann 1990; Bokonyi 1974: 248–54, 1978)). However, in contrast to Benecke’s interpretation, Steppan (2006) interprets changes in size variability of horses in the Neolithic of Germany and Switzerland as resulting from human activities causing ecological changes to their habitats." ("From wild horses to domestic horses: a European perspective" - https://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00438243.2012.647571?src=recsys&journalCode=rwar20 - Bendrey, 2012)
(Or for another example of even earlier purported import of domesticated horses by Late Neolithic European populations - http://sciencepress.mnhn.fr/sites/default/files/articles/pdf/az2016n1a2.pdf - a high size variability in Eneolithic Funnel Beaker culture (TRB, 3800-3350 BC) together with a non-homogeneous distribution in Řivnáč culture (3100-2800 BC) and a significant increase in size between Lengyel and Baden-Řivnáč horizons (probably already in TRB) combined with the occasional occurrence of unexpectedly large individuals probably indicate the importation of tamed or even domesticated horses as early as the times of TRB culture
@Unknown: But for Ireland we know that a language shift took place, or do you propose a Celtic speaker's continuity in Ireland from the earlist Beakers to modern times?
Like I said, Celtic spread from Central Europe in all likelihood and did so in a wave like form, in which one chiefdom created and assimilated the next. From Hallstatt on in particular, thats perfectly possible. In Central Europe there is no continuity at all and I wouldn't even dismiss a Neolithic lineages' revival among Unetice's core group.
Another issue is that the Irish are for sure not a direct continuation of BB, but show admixture and the modern R1b levels might be, in part, the result of later developments like founder effect and not just continuity.
Its perfectly possible that steppe influenced BB were IE speakers, we will see. A language shift through captured brides, and BB brought women with them too btw, is just ridiculous in the given context. It might have happened earlier and in more Norhtern parts, at a time the original BB founders were dominant though. Thats possible.
@zardos,
There is strong continuation in Ireland since Bell Beaker. 70% of irish belong to R1b L21, 100% of Bell Beaker in British Isles belonged to R1b L21. Founder effects can't explain this.
There's a slight shift south in the British Isles in the iron age. *Slight.*
@All
Please note that posting with the nick "Unknown" isn't allowed here.
And in regards to Ireland, there was definitely a genetic shift in much of the country since the Bell Beaker period, to a more southerly genetic structure.
@Ben Osland,
"Quoting Suyindik who cited Reich....Mesolithic West Eurasians as different from each other as modern Europeans and East Asians (paraphrased)."
You're right to be critical of this claim.
This claim which Reich (and the others) consistently repeats is false. Just as his claim the claim Yamnaya was founded by migrants from iran is false. And just as his claim WHG moved into Europe from the Middle East 15,000 years ago is false.
All of the Epipaleolithic pops from the Middle East shared mtDNA (Modern Europeans & East Asians share no mtDNA). It is obvious they were distinct from each other but shared somekind of Paleolithic common ancestry.
And obviously, to say EHG was not related to WHG is crazy.
I know Reich bases his claim Epipaleolithic West Eurasians were as distinct from each other as modern Europeans are from East Asians on some-kind of statistic. Whatever, that statistic is it cannot describe full relationship between populations. Basal Eurasian ancestry might be hiding the recent common ancestry between them.
Also, Reich & others know that to describe Europeans as multi-racial sounds good politically. So, they like to exaggerate how different the various pops who founded Europe were from each other. Anatolia is not far away from Europe. Yamnaya lived in eastern Europe not Central Asia. When you think about it, the idea they have that populations from different worlds mixed in Europe starts to look silly.
Where is the shift in Basques? Even a slight one like in the Irish?
We know Celts came in later, so no reason to propose a Northern BB Italo-Celtic continuity. Assuming a wave like expansion from the comtinent means we don't have to expect a huge genetic impact. Times were different then they were in the times of Yamnaya, GAC, CWC and BB. In Hallstatt we find a stratified society in which the majority of males was rather poor and dependent, in comparison to the upper and middle class, but its rather unlikely they were of a different ethnicity and spoke a different language. Central Europe became in the late Bronze and early Iron Age, in this respect, more like Greece and Anatolia were before.
But from where should the Basques have come? Let's assume the R1b in BB is steppe derived, lets assume the original BB cultural masters taught a steppe derived fringe group their secrets of copper metalurgy, a new cult and whatnot, and assimilated them somehow, someway - they had to do it earlier and in more Northern/Eastern parts of Europe, where this steppe derived fringe group was when they met. But if it was like that, why should only the Basques being converted? Its possible, because they were the lineages closest to Iberia and under a stronger influence in Southern France already f.e., while the others were not and stayed on their mother tongue, used the Iberian language as a lingua franca only.
There are many more possible scenarios, but the most likely one is that BB as a whole had one language and for sure they didn't change it because of the women they took with them. Though they might be more inclined to do so, if they were fluent speakers of the Iberian tongue even before entering the peninsula, because of some kind of relationship to a Southern founder group.
But for explaining Celtic and Germanic, you don't need them to speak IE. Because even if they were IE speakers, they might have been of a different branch.
What happened in Central Europe is even more complicated actually, because there might have been different ethnicities and even language groups which became dominant with the next turnover. Like form BB-Unetice-Tumulus-Urnfield-Hallstatt-LaTene.
While La Tene is "the" Celtic culture, it is rather unlikely that Hallstatt didn't harbour a Celtic core group in its geographic range. But before that, its highly speculative. Urnfield might have still been Italo-Celtic or even multi-ethnic.
Whatever happened, whole lineages seem to have been integrated by the ruling group on a regular basis and complete, genocidal purges like we saw them before became in any case less frequent in comparison to LN/EBA. At least in the more developed societal units, like in Hallstatt. This could even result in client based chiefdoms, in which the majority of local lineages could survive - like they did in Ireland. The invaders genetic impact was comparatively small if the takeover was not too nasty. Even smaller or harder to detect if we deal with closely related (all steppe influenced, Northern) populations with rather subtle differences.
By “Southerly” you mean “more EEF”, right?
No, I mean more southerly as in south of Ireland. EEF no longer existed at the time.
There's strong continuation between Bell Beaker/EBA British Isles and Celtic British Isles.
1.8808"
Irish
England_CA_EBA,66
FrenchCluster1,22.3
Hallstatt_Bylany:DA111 (Celt),11.7
1.9919"
England_IA
England_CA_EBA,70.3
FrenchCluster1,29.7
There's also strong continuation between Bronze age Spain & Iron age Spain (modern Basque, catalonia).
1.2518"
Iberia_East_IA
Iberia_North_BA,72.8
FrenchCluster1,27.2
Hallstatt_Bylany:DA111 (Celt),0
2.0009"
Basque_Spanish
Iberia_North_BA,63.5
Hallstatt_Bylany:DA111 (Celt),22.5
FrenchCluster1,14
@Samuel Andrews
If you want to test the genetic shift in Iberia that occurred during the spread of Celtic languages there, then compare the Celtiberians who are labeled Iberia_North_IA with the pre-Celtic populations from the region.
This might give you a clue as to whether the post-Beaker genetic shift in Ireland was large enough to be accompanied by a language shift.
But I wouldn't use the Scythian/Asian-admixed Hallstatt samples to do this, as it's unlikely that they're a good proxy for the early Celts who migrated into Western Europe.
I’ve just read an excellent article on Peqi’in Cave:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327118987_Ancient_DNA_from_Chalcolithic_Israel_reveals_the_role_of_population_mixture_in_cultural_transformation/fulltext/5b7af4e1299bf1d5a718c27d/327118987_Ancient_DNA_from_Chalcolithic_Israel_reveals_the_role_of_population_mixture_in_cultural_transformation.pdf?origin=publication_detail
It’s amazing how the 26% Anatolia_N (in addition to 57% Levant_N and 17% Iran_N) was corresponding to a remarkable increase in both ydna T (the one Thomas Jefferson had!) but also in the frequency of alleles responsible for light skin and blue eyes. That tells me that perhaps all MN societies in Europe had those light pigmentation properties and not just GAC.
@Andre
"perhaps all MN societies in Europe had those light pigmentation properties and not just GAC."
I seriously doubt that *all* European MN groups had those traits.
A different phenotype emerged in the north east.
@Davidski
How large, would you say, was the genetic shift in Ireland since the Beaker period? Any Germanic or English influence, by the way?
Speaking about BA Ireland:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/no-wait-real-ava-bronze-age-woman-scottish-highlands-180970950/
So “Ava” who had been originally reconstructed as a red haired light pigmented Highlander Scot in 2016 got a makeover in 2018 to look more “Southern European”. On the other hand, a 5,500 year old Neolithic man from the U.K. looks almost like a modern Brit including all the “bells and whistles” of having a red hair:
https://gizmodo.com/this-is-possibly-what-5-500-year-old-man-looked-like-1495379777 (+pic)
Until recently I used to be an avid “Yamnaya’ist”, believing that what we associate with “modern European” look (and genetics) came with the Indo-Europeans from the PC Steppes, but more and more I’m starting to believe that it’s actually the Anatolian Farmers, with their Ötzi and that 5,500 year old Brit and with the upshot of light skin and blue eyes in that cave in Pequi’in 6,000 years ago (time of LBK) who were behind modern phenotypes. In fact, that 5,500 year old “Brit” could be undistinguishable in any Supermarket in Manchester today, and Loschbour man could pass as local in Berlin. And the cherry on the cake is that both Loschbour and the “Neolithic Brit” don’t look that different from each other despite being from a different source population (former was WHG; “Brit” was Neolithic EEF).
@Bob Floy First of all, this dude below is not an Arsenal Football Club fan in 2019, but a 5,500 year old reconstruction of a ‘British’ man who lived 500 years before Stonehenge; look how “modern” he looks:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Du0ZHP7oifI/UrBuOhn-OLI/AAAAAAAAJa4/oJes4IzZBqs/s1600/article-2525035-1A24190400000578-122_634x773.jpg
This phenotype seems to be unbiquitous all over Neolithic Northern Europe.
Second, would you assert that the different phenotype in the NE was because of admixture with Baltic HG? Or do you think that SHG a-la-Motala has anything to do with this emerging phenotype?
Third, would the alleles for Pequi’in cage dwellers’ light pigmentation, their high (26%) Anatolia_N and ydna T a coincidence or do they have a direct correlation?
Last but not least: do you believe that an inteogression of WHG-rich population from Paris (=“Michelsberg”) is behind the turnover from TRB/Funnelbeaker into GAC?
@Andre
For starters, I've learned to take these reconstructions with a grain of salt.
"this dude below is not an Arsenal Football Club fan in 2019"
Lol, definitely not. Don't get me wrong, I don't think what you're saying is necessarily silly or anything like that, but I've given up on getting pat answers to any of these questions, the more data comes in, the more questions we have. A few years ago it looked like everything was on the verge of being solved, now, not so much.
" would you assert that the different phenotype in the NE was because of admixture with Baltic HG? Or do you think that SHG a-la-Motala has anything to do with this emerging phenotype?"
I lean(in a non-committal sort of way) towards the Baltic HG idea.
I think that anyone who's into this topic, being honest, will admit that their expectations have been violated, and that they've gotten a whole lot more than they bargained for. Anyone who thinks they have all the answers now, dosen't. The only thing I'm certain of is that the spread of steppe-related people is connected in some way with the spread of IE, but it need not have come with the first major wave. There's no reason to assume that all Yamnaya related people necessarily spoke IE, we're talking about a story that played out across a huge area over a few thousand years. I also think that PIE may have originated in the caucuses. And when I say "the caucuses", I mean the caucuses, not northern Iran, lol.
For the linguistic debate, what really matters is to finish finding out (once and for all) the exact genetic component of all steppe cultures. and in this sense the panorama is complicated as ancient genomes are published. If we think that Khvalynsk uniparental markers data is true (although I think we still do not know to which subclades of R1b that majority of Khvalynsk men belong), we have that this culture is also a mixture of male lineages from the Caucasus (J) , Asia (Q1a), the steppes (R1a, R1b) etc. If this culture also does not have autosomal components from Neolithic farmers because it is supposedly a "pure" or "basal" CHG, and if we also take into account that theoretically this ancestry only appears in mainland Europe from the year 3000 BC with the CWC, then only the Yamnaya culture remains as a source of expansion of the IE language towards Europe
Yamnaya is a more farmer shifted fusion of Progress & Khvalynsk, and the source of the ANF shift must be, GAC, Majkop or Cucuteni groups-This means that this culture is even more mixed than Khvalynsk, so more than a source of influences it seems their destiny. This culture only lasted 700 years (3,300-2,600 BC) and for now we only have R1b-Z2013, R1b.V1636 and I2a (correct me if I'm wrong). On the other hand, we have Z2013 and I2a in the eastern BBs and we have to assume that R1a (CWC) comes from Yamnaya, and we also know that Central Europeans BBs only have about 10% of steppe mitochondrial lineages (arrived through the CWC).
With this data, can anyone really think that the Yamnaya culture and the male and female lineages linked to it could produce a total linguistic change in a continent inhabited by at least two million people? Are we serious?
Are you going to continue defending that L51 is hidden in some subculture of the CWC, that later one or several small clans of this lineage kidnapped the BB culture and then kidnapped the languages of Western Neolithic farmers? What the hell are we talking about?
If the subclades of R1b in Khvalynsk (we are going to leave the problem of R1a, in minority in that culture, and disappeared in Yamnaya for now) turn out to be R1b-L23/L51/P312 then our discussions will be over, but in the meantime, the Steppe cultures do not seem capable of having produced the great genetic and linguistic changes that everyone seems to see. I can be wrong and of course if this happens I will have to acknowledge it publicly, but so far everything seems like a fairy tale.
Zardos is right, if the situation in Iberia has been complicated by the affairs of the Basques/Iberians and the results of the Iron Age, I imagine what can happen when studies of Italy and especially those of southern France are published because, both the Etruscans- Aquitaine and Occitania are absolutely NO-IE. If we add to this that the Mycenaeans and Hittites so far are J, then can someone explain to me the link between R1b-P312 with the steppes and the IE language? are we kidding?
We will see what happens with genetic continuity in Central Europe during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, but, for God's sake, the only Spanish Celtiberian analyzed is I2a, I suppose Hallstatt and Tene will have an important genetic mix because Central Europe (unlike Iberia, Italy or the British Isles, which are remote places and therefore the last places where genetic, cultural, technical or linguistic developments can arrive) has to be a kind of genetic shaker. Undoubtedly the expansion of IE languages has to be much later (Bronze Age, Iron Age), forget the BB culture as a factor of dispersion.
We have talked little about Vk531 in Norway (R1b1a1.2.400 BC) without a gram of steppe ancestry, maybe everyone is looking in the wrong direction.
@Davidski
"At this stage, I'm not sure how to interpret the presence of Y-haplogroup J in the Khvalynsk population."
Maybe not all steppe CHG is female mediated?
@Gabriel: "How large, would you say, was the genetic shift in Ireland since the Beaker period? Any Germanic or English influence, by the way?"
Of course Ireland has significant later Germanic influences. Like in Northern Italy, they might have been more Northern shifted afterwards, like in Northern Italy. Northern Italy too might have come back to be more Northern shifted with Germanic influence than it was in Roman times. Populations can bounce back depending on the influx they experience.
When Italics came in, Northern Italy is supposed to be Northern shifted, with Celts even more so, then came the Roman intermixture and everything was moving South-East. But with the Germanic influx, they might have ended up being almost were they were before.
It is clear that the crude genetic profile of BB and Proto-Celts was not THAT different, because they came from an at least related source with similar proportions of the main Northern European components. So don't expect a complete change like from British Neolithic to BB, even if a fair share of the population was actually replaced.
If I'm right about the "Celtic wave-like expansion" through Western Europe, the new influence should be larger starting from Eastern France to the British Isles and Iberia. Which means you need regional sammples from the times of Urnfield-Hallstatt-La Tene to put everything into context.
@David: Some scholars speculated about an Eastern influence of significance on Hallstatt, especially the Hallstatt elite and Hallstatt East even more so. Would be really fascinating to find more Iranian influences. Could have been that originally some parts of the Hallstatt elite were of a different ethnicity after all.
The animal style in art and the horse cult could be interpreted as later Eastern influences in La Tene/Celts, which postdate the original "Indoeuropeanisation".
The shift from Hallstatt to La Tene was quite dramatic in every respect. We should not underestimate the possibility of big upheavals postdating everything which came from the steppe.
@Gabriel: "How large, would you say, was the genetic shift in Ireland since the Beaker period? Any Germanic or English influence, by the way?"
The East Coast of Ireland cannot be less than 30% British, considering ancestry in the last 400 years.
Going back further, to the verge of history, then we have the Brigantes refugees from Roman occupation of Britain, in the South East, Cruithin (Picts) near Belfast. Manai in Wicklow (from Gaul), Gangani from north Wales, Domnanii from Deveon and Cornwall.
What do you mean by Germanic influence? The Beakers were from the same source population as the Germans. The shift has been away from Beakers.
The twist to the story is that the genetic cline in Ireland is from the North (Steppe) to the South (farmer), the opposite to what I expected considering that La Tene entered Ireland through the North.
@fGarvan:
"What do you mean by Germanic influence? The Beakers were from the same source population as the Germans. The shift has been away from Beakers.
The twist to the story is that the genetic cline in Ireland is from the North (Steppe) to the South (farmer), the opposite to what I expected considering that La Tene entered Ireland through the North."
In Central Europe the post-BB developments resulted in waves of admixture from people with more WHG, more steppe or more Neolithic, depending on the exact lineages and developments. So I wouldn't wonder about Celts which were reaching the British Isles would have picked up more Neolithic ancestry on the way, if not having it from Central Europe to begin with. The British BB were, after all, from the more heavily Corded influenced Northern/Dutch groups if I recall correctly.
Also, we might expect even some Roman times influence reaching Ireland one way or another.
I don't agree with Germanic being of the same stock. Closely related, yes, but same? No. In Ireland we have not just English, but also Viking influences of significance btw.
The general rule of thumb is, the area where the highest diversity of a single language family exists is most likely near the area of origin.
Due to it’s mountainous topography the Caucasus was able to preserve language families that went extinct everywhere else. Yet some people still consider the Caucasus a possible origin of IE? That really amazes me. Even Anatolia makes more sense.’
@Leron, what language families does that hold true for though? Greatest diversity of Tibeto-Burman in SE Asia, Afroasiatic in North and East Africa, IE languages not in Pontic-Caspian for sure. Niger-Congo languages, maybe?
We largely only have hypotheses about language family ur-heimats, but doesn't seem that present day diversity and origin reliably match. The principle of "Centre of Attested Distribution" - or, with more sophisticated the shortest vector along phylogenetic language trees to attested distribution - makes more sense than present day diversity I would say.
The problem of looking at present day diversity is that when you have a zone which looks close to the languages which form the first attested split, but there is little downstream diversity, or a language replacement there, you would miss that.
For Sino-Tibetan, linguistics might support a primary split between SW Tibeto-Burman and Sinitic as primary in the tree, which logically suggests a homeland in NW China, but if you looked at diversity measures alone in the sense of raw # attested mutually unintelligible varieties, you might think that the family was in NW Indo-China...
@David: How reliable are the admixture proportions from the Viking paper in your opinion?
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/07/17/703405/F11.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1
So far I always read BB had more WHG, but in this one they make a graphic showing just more Neolithic, but actually even less WHG for Central European BB?
Corded and Unetice is actually the same in that admixture graph. I know thats not comparable to a solid statistic, but would you agree or disagree with that comparison? Because if true it would point to Unetice being the result of a Corded ancestry revival after BB, like I think it happened based on other known features of the three cultures, even though BB and additional WGH-Neolithic elements might have been integrated in Unetice.
@zardos
Celtic and Germanic are probably both from Single Grave so, eh, if so, kind of the same stock.
@JuanRivera
Forest Yukaghirs fit pretty well as half Tundra Yukaghir, half Russian.
We still dont know exactly from where Western R1b and BB came from. There are just hints and speculation.
But even more important, Celtic and Germanic might stem from Eastern regions in which the BB legacy was smashed and only parts reintegrated into the new cultural system from Unetice on.
At their height, BB were in control, but after their demise no more.
I think both Celtic and even more so Germanic came from later cultural formations without direct continuity from BB. Genetically the BB legacy survived in an admixed form.
@Matt
The main point is figuring where the earliest divergences took place. For Proto-Sino-Tibetan this is along the southeastern zone of the Tibetan plateau and for Sino-Tibetan, it’s close to the southern portion of the Hexi corridor. The vast majority of Sino-Tibetan language speakers are Chinese living in the eastern parts of China, yet many of them only speak dialects derived relatively recently from Middle Chinese, with some Daic-Hmong and Austronesian substrates.
For IE, where do you think the earliest sub-family splits occurred? Or to phrase it another way, the area with the highest concentration of divergent IE languages in close proximity, not accounted by modern historical movements.
@Leron, yeah, the diversity doesn't really matter, only if weighted heavily to early splits.
Anyway, considered only on that basis, for IE the safe bet is probably somewhere that triangulates between Anatolian and others that branch early (variously Tocharian, Armenian and Greek, or Tocharian, Italo-Celtic and all other IE depending on the model). But that doesn't really help us narrow down the geography very much on its own, because all the primary candidates are roughly in that region.
@zardos
How reliable are the admixture proportions from the Viking paper in your opinion?
The qpAdm stuff looks more or less correct, considering that it can vary somewhat depending on the outgroups used.
So it's informative, but I wouldn't use it as evidence to say that Unetice is more closely related to Corded Ware than to Bell Beakers. One of the bar graphs shows that early Slavs from Bohemia had about as much Yamnaya ancestry as Corded Ware, which doesn't look right to me.
@JuanRivera
Most of the Sintashta samples are from the Kamennyi Ambar 5 cemetery, which is in West Siberia, so the Botai/Steppe Maykop-like admixture is probably from the local pre-Sintashta Siberian foragers.
At this stage, there's no sign that Steppe Maykop people resurfaced among the Sintashta population, although I guess it might be a tempting possibility considering how mobile and reliant on vehicles both cultures were.
@Andrzejewski
It's easy to tell the difference from EEF and WHG in formal stats etc and I have always read that WHG and EEF were very different, but the more I have read, the more I doubt that they were genetically so far removed from one another, if nothing else for the proximity of Anatolia to Europe; the typesite of Barcin is only 90 kms from European part of Turkey. Greece can't be much more than 300 kms.
And again, Anatolia_N were only really just Anatolian Foragers-turned farmers in-situ(perhaps a bit of Iran_N?). Foragers who also shared geneflow with Iron Gates WHG. Pontus Skogland reckoned the direction was from Iron Gates to Anatolia. Again, Sam makes a good point about uniparentals.
@Sam
Your point about Reich: not really a conspiracy theorist, and certainly inter-group diffs were bigger than in the past, but there does nevertheless seem to be a worrying trend in the media for requiring everything (including the past) to fit a certain way of thinking, one that increasingly does not allow questioning. Really, they are noble goals, but the problem is that their unintended consequences are starting to include some kind of score-settling,virtue signalling or need for certain groups to be brought to account for the actions of their ancestors. Which of course is not only crazy but unhealthy for society as a whole, as human nature is not only to want to give back what you are getting, but to rebel against governments seen to be discriminating against them.
@ Zardos
“But even more important, Celtic and Germanic might stem from Eastern regions in which the BB legacy was smashed and only parts reintegrated into the new cultural system from Unetice on.
At their height, BB were in control, but after their demise no more.
I think both Celtic and even more so Germanic came from later cultural formations without direct continuity from BB. Genetically the BB legacy survived in an admixed form.”
Perhaps removed in a few key zones of Central Europe & Hungary ; but they continued elsewhere - most notably Bavaria which very much continued the BB family model but was also closely integrated into a interaction zone with Epi-Corded, north Balkan BA, etc groups . It might have served as a vital link to their cousins further west
On the Afanasievo/Tokharian topic, did you notice how much Afanasievo ancestry have Huns of the Tianshans and Xiongnu? And why Tokharians and early Turks were not almost indisguishable genetically? On a Linguistic stand point, it seems Tokharian influenced a lot proto or early Turkic. We dont even know the language of Huns to be honest and Hephtalits also known as White Turks are thought to be linked with Yuezhi.
@Halfalp
On the Afanasievo/Tokharian topic, did you notice how much Afanasievo ancestry have Huns of the Tianshans and Xiongnu?
They don't have any Afanasievo ancestry. It's an illusion created by a mixture of local Andronovo and early farmer (Sarazm-like) ancestry.
Hun_Tian_Shan
RUS_Lokomotiv_N 0.312±0.011
TJK_Sarazm_En 0.165±0.021
UZB_Kashkarchi_BA 0.523±0.019
chisq 10.007
tail prob 0.615365
@Drago: "Perhaps removed in a few key zones of Central Europe & Hungary ; but they continued elsewhere - most notably Bavaria which very much continued the BB family model but was also closely integrated into a interaction zone with Epi-Corded, north Balkan BA, etc groups . It might have served as a vital link to their cousins further west"
Yes, nests and strongholds survived and showed the independent development of BB groups which were integrated in the new networks without being lost as independent entities.
Adlerberg comes to mind as the most famous example and their physical type had a much higher proportion of the classic BB core type too.
But they were a farcry from the power the BB once had, reduced to a provincial character.
In the centers BB were integrated completely in the following systems.
But if the BB were Proto-Italo-Celtic, a resurgence of a BB group would be possible even if Unetice would, like I expect, being a break with a dominance of CW and-or Neolithic-WHG lineages.
How are the few Unetice samples doing in the analysis?
Thanks for a great site. Have a degree in prehistory and a master’s in archaeology - trying to educate myself on ancient DNA. Fascinating.
@ zardos
If you have seen Southwestern parts of Ireland you will immediately understand how people with farmer ancestry could have survived the Bell Beaker influx. In County Kerry there is Bogs, Mountains and thick Forests...been there and seen that. Almost slid into a bog with my car...
@AWood-"Also, poster Gaska keeps emphasizing that Z2103 and L51 having "nothing to do with each other", which is pretty much impossible since they have a common ancestor 700 years earlier, probably the western steppes or the Carpathians"
Exactly-NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER- We have been listening to Kurganists for years to tell us that R1bL51 etc. will appear in any steppe culture, now it seems that you have moved a little to the West and already think of an origin in the Carpathians for L51-
As I am not a fortune teller I cannot know what will happen in the future, but I bet on an origin in any of the German or French Neolithic cultures, even in the Baltic Countries where you have R1b in abundance (70% WHG and 30% EHG). Where do you think the R1b samples have come in the steppes? from Siberia?, and what explanation do we give to all the R1b of Europe (Italy, France, Latvia, Romania even Norway), all extinct? Come on, Aaron, the Kurgan theory has the days counted, and the longer you recognize it, the harder the fall will be.
Only a massive founder effect of R1a in the CWC and L51 in Western Europe can explain what we are seeing. And the big question is, could this founder effect not only provoke, but maintain throughout the millennia the percentages of steppe ancestry that all Europeans apparently have? Olalde and Haak tell us that the steppe ancestry is only linked to R1b-M269. Ok, what happened to the other haplogroups of the steppes? They also went extinct?. Why is there no Q1a or J in Central and Western Europe during the chalcolithic? The influence of Neolithic farmers in Yamnaya is important enough to take it into account, did this genetic flow have linguistic consequences? It had the cultural influence of Maykop linguistic influences?. The more genomes published, the more doubts arise.
This makes the debate increasingly interesting, and at least the dogma of the steppes has become a mini-dogma questioned by more and more independent people.
@Gaska
Nothing to do with each other ? You seem to not understand the R1b Tree...Look again and tell me what this tree basically say.
https://www.yfull.com/tree/R1b/
@Ric-
The resulting phylogenetic tree demonstrates that haplogroup R-L23 splits into two main branches, R-L51 and R-GG400. The former includes West Europeans, while the latter comprises exclusively representatives of East European populations. Note that members of this eastern branch R-GG400 came mainly from the steppe area of East Europe.
A common view is that Bell Beaker groups expanded out of Iberia along the western Mediterranean and along the Atlantic façade before they moved inland (but never further east than Hungary), and always settled in small pockets. This scenario is based on a morphological study of teeth from 2000 European Bell Beaker individuals. They were travelling artisans and probably well-received because of their skills, but they were also a demographic force looking for new places to settle. Through hybridization between the Corded Ware/Single Grave Culture and the expanding Bell Beaker Culture, hybrid Beaker Cultures emerged in the British Isles and in Central Europe. These new cultures experienced a rapid expansion that transformed society in much the same way as the Corded Ware and Single Grave Culture had transformed temperate Europe c. 300 years earlier.
You know that R1b-L754 was divided into R1b1a/2-V88 and in R1b1a/1-L388. In turn, the latter was divided into R1b-V1636 and R1b-P297
You also know (or should know) that V88 has been found in Spain, Germany, Romania, Serbia (Iron Gates) Sardinia and Ukraine, and that the Serbian samples are at least 1000 years before the Ukrainians (I5235-8.884 BC)-Following the Kurganist reasoning but vice versa, we find that since V88 is a relative of P297 (in the same way that L23 is a relative of Z2103), then the western origin of not only V88 (Iron Gates) but its relative P297 would be demonstrated. You also have a lot of P297 samples in the Latvian hunter-gatherers of the Kunda and Narva cultures and they are all P297. Knowing this, as someone can say with total resounding that R1bL51 has an oriental origin? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to think exactly the opposite? The WHG of Villabruna and Iboussieres would support this argument, and yet we have to listen without questioning that since L51 is a relative of Z2103, our lineages have to have steppe origin. I think you are very wrong, and that the obsession with the steppes will become a fad.
@Gaska
and yet we have to listen without questioning that since L51 is a relative of Z2103, our lineages have to have steppe origin.
It’s because R1b-M269, their parent, hasn’t been found anywhere outside the steppe or steppe-derived populations.
And since R1b-V88 is found in West Africa, maybe you could say R1b-L51 is of African origin?
@abriel
And all the ancestors of R1b-M269 where they have been found? You know Italy, France, Latvia etc right?
Bla Bla Bla, you should think about things before saying them, unless you have found R1b-V88 in West Africa older than the samples from Serbia.
Everyone wondering about Basque and the predominance of R1b in Iberia since the EBA (not yet the late CA/BB period, when there was still quite some yDNA diversity, including tha "African" BB) might want to take a look at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garifuna_language :
"The Caribs had conquered the previous population of the islands, Arawakan peoples like the Taino and Palikur peoples. During the conquest, which was conducted primarily by men, the Carib married Arawakan women. Children were raised by their mothers speaking Arawak, but as boys came of age, their fathers taught them Carib, a language still spoken in mainland South America. When European missionaries described the Island Carib people in the 17th century, they recorded two unrelated languages: Carib spoken by the men and Arawak spoken by the women. However, while the boys acquired Carib vocabulary, after a few generations, they retained the Arawakan grammar of their first language. Thus, Island Carib, as spoken by men, was genetically either a mixed language or a relexified language. Over the generations, men substituted fewer Arawak words, and many Carib words diffused to the women so the amount of distinctly male vocabulary diminished until both genders spoke Arawak, with an infusion of Carib vocabulary and distinct words in only a handful of cases.
I don't want to say that this is exactly what happened in BA Iberia. In fact, one may question whether the process described above would have also taken place if the Spanish arrival in the Carribeans hadn't significantly eroded the political dominance of Carib male conquerors.
Nevertheless, linguistic differentiation between males and females, possibly resulting from asymmetric marriage patterns, was/is anything but unusual. Aside from the Garifuna, it is a/o documented for a number of Andean languges and, IIRC, also Old Japanese. The earliest attested case is Sumerian.
Such assymetrical marriage patterns may lead to quite unexpected linguistic outcomes: The Mednyj Aleut language, e.g., is characterised by a pre-dominance of Aleutic vocabulary but a verbal morphology that is essentially Russian. It is explained from heavy 19th c AD intermarriage between Aleutic women and Russian men, whereby the latter apparently took a more active role in language dissemination to their offspring than Carib males in the Garifuna example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mednyj_Aleut_language
@ Zardos
I’ll look into Unetice again later this week; but from what I recall there was some diversity; but otherwise plot near Central Europe BB
So they might just be locals which profited from an alliance with the southeast; & adopted their symbolism.
Need more data; but presently I think 2500 BC looks the time of PIE expansion. It even accounts for Anatolian
@Gaska
It doesn’t matter so much that these samples carry clades ancestral to M269 as much as none of them besides samples on the steppe belong to it, nevermind that there are samples from the steppe who belong to such ancestral clades.
In other words, it’s really unlikely that the R1b-M269 in Yamnaya is of western farmer origin.
At the end of the day it all comes down to Linguistics. How isolated was PIE when it formed and which other Language Families did it impact at time of early formation. Proto Karelian plus Proto Uralic....
Sorry Proto Kartvelian.
Where is the most likely place and time where this could have happened and who lived there ?
@Ric
The northern Caucasus.
@ Ric
“ at the end of the day it all comes down to Linguistics. How isolated was PIE when it formed and which other Language Families did it impact at time of early formation. Proto Karelian plus Proto Uralic....
It has to be what’s most consistent with data from the proposed speakers .
Contacts weren’t necessarily 1st order & direct. So there’d be a zone of possibility . It could be near the Don or could be further West.
And it’s odd that some point to Kartvelian; when it should be NW Caucasian that was closer in location
@Drago “And it’s odd that some point to Kartvelian; when it should be NW Caucasian that was closer in location”
Probably because Kartvelian is likely a CHG language vis-a-vis NW Caucasus ones who seem to originate with the Anatolian Farmers
Andre
NW Caucasian being an “EEF language” doesn’t have any basis . There hasn’t been any migration from, say, C-T or GAC to the Caucasian foothills
As for YDNA ; from Rootsi
“Concerning the presence of hg G in the Caucasus, one of its distinguishing features is lower haplogroup diversity in numerous populations (Supplementary Table S1) compared with Anatolia and Armenia, implying that hg G is intrusive in the Caucasus rather than autochthonous. Another notable feature is its uneven distribution. Hg G is very frequent in NW Caucasus and South Caucasus, covering about 45% of the paternal lineages in both regions2 in this study. Conversely, hg G is present in Northeast Caucasus only at an average frequency of 5% (range 0–19%). Interestingly, the decrease of hg G frequency towards the eastern European populations inhabiting the area adjacent to NW Caucasus, such as southern Russians and Ukrainians,18, 40 is very rapid and the borderline very sharp, indicating that gene flow from the Caucasus in the northern direction has been negligible. Moreover, these general frequencies mostly consist of two notable lineages. First, the G2a1-P16 lineage is effectively Caucasus specific and accounts for about one-third of the Caucasian male gene pool (Figure 2f). G-P16 has a high frequency in South and NW Caucasus, with the highest frequency among North Ossetians—63.6%. G-P16 is also occasionally present in Northeast Caucasus at lower frequencies (Supplementary Table S1), consistent with a previous report.3 Outside the Caucasus, hg G-P16 occurs at ≥1% frequency only in Anatolia, Armenia, Russia and Spain, while being essentially absent elsewhere. A network analysis of representative hg G-P16 Y-STR haplotypes reveals a diffuse cluster (Supplementary Figure S2). The coalescence age estimate of 9400 years for P16 coincides with the early Holocene (Supplementary Table S4). The second common hg G lineage in the Caucasus is U1, which has its highest frequencies in the South (22.8% in Abkhazians) and NW Caucasus (about 39.7% in Adyghe and 36.5% in Cherkessians), but also reaches the Near/Middle East with the highest frequency in Palestinians (16.7%) and, shows extremely low frequency in Eastern Europe”
@David
Given the admixture we see in Khvalynsk, and the fact that the "CHG-like" admixture cannot be from Maykop or Darkveti-Meshoko, who are the likely candidate populations for this admixture?
I see what seems to be a non-trivial West Siberian Neolithic component in Khvalynsk, in addition to the majority Samara component. Doesn't this indicate that the Iran Mesolithic / Neolithic-like came from some group far from the Anatolian Neolthic that had connections to the people east of the Caspian?
Global25 ancestry composition of sample: I0433 Population: RUS_Khvalynsk_En Neolithic Steppe
Global25 ancestry composition of sample: I0122 Population: RUS_Khvalynsk_En Neolithic Steppe
@ Dragos
Yes however the Proto Kartvelian Language could have stretched over a much bigger area and maybe produced more Kartvelian Languages than what survived until recorded history. Maybe some that were even closer to PIE.
@Drago
The two G2a-P15 subclades specific to the Caucasus today are of recent origin.
Most important, Wang et al. (2018) found only two haplogroup G individuals in the ancient Caucasus:
1. ARM002-ARM003 3341-3106 calBCE from the Kura-Araxes culture in Kaps, Armenia. He is in G2b2b-Y37100, the very same subclade as WC1 from Wezmeh Cave in the Zagros Mountains of Western Iran from 7455-7082 calBCE.
2. I16272 3500-3000 calBCE from Maykop Novosvobodnaya. He is in G2a2a-PF3147* (PF3148-) which was found in sample Tep003 from Tepecik-Ciftlik in Central Anatolia from 6635-6475 calBCE.
Neither Y clade has been found in the North Caucasus today. The ancestor of the very common G2a1a1-Z6653 (G-P16) clade found in the northern and central Caucasus today, G2a1a-Z6553, was found in sample I1671 from 5837-5659 calBCE in Seh Gabi (Godin Tepe) in Western Iran, in a Halaf culture context.
It may be that either Northwest Caucasian or Kartvelian are related to the languages spoken by the Anatolian Neolithic Farmers and the European Neolithic descendants, but the absence of haplogroup G in the Chalcolithic in the region where these languages are spoken today does not lend any support to a potential connection.
Yeah perhaps Majkop spake something ~ Proto- Kartvelian ; with modern Kartvelian representing an abridged survivor
@ Open Genomes
Given the admixture we see in Khvalynsk, and the fact that the "CHG-like" admixture cannot be from Maykop or Darkveti-Meshoko, who are the likely candidate populations for this admixture?
Yamnaya.
https://i.postimg.cc/fbn2crP7/yana-EHGyamnaya.png
@ Open G
''The two G2a-P15 subclades specific to the Caucasus today are of recent origin.''
Yes that i what I understood from Rootsi when they suggested ''First, the G2a1-P16 lineage is effectively Caucasus specific and accounts for about one-third of the Caucasian male gene pool''
So as I said, the idea that NW Caucasian is an EEF language a non-entity, proposed by one or 2 commentators here. Instead a more realistic link is with the West Caucasus Dolmen (MBA-LBA) or Koban cultures (LBA-IA).
@OpenGenomes, low influences seen at the Khvalynsk cemetery in some samples by West Siberian Neolithic group are not implausible (the "main Steppe Maykop" cluster that is a simple mix of Piedmont_Eneo+West Siberia N suggests contact in the Volga and Caspian Depression Regions).
But there is no means to understand if any low level of that has arrived in concert with CHG-related ancestry, or separately.
West Siberian is not too correlated with CHG in your nMonte runs.
A fuller transect of the full set of Eneolithic cemeteries that is coming, and I would argue may samples in the Repin culture that was actually interacting with Maykop and with circum-northern shore Black Sea cultures, will be necessary to understand what genetic influences came together and what came separately.
(I am also not sure RISE61 - Nordic_MN_B should be in your models, as this guy is Bronze Age and just has a weird nomenclature. Placed in set baSca by Allentoft - https://media.nature.com/original/nature-assets/nature/journal/v522/n7555/extref/nature14507-s1.pdf).
Kale @ AG said...
Also, on an unrelated topic, does anyone else suspect that y-hg J may have been ANE in origin?
If ANE is a mix of East and West, what was the lineage of the Western source? So far ANE has only been found indisputably with y-hg P1 (and descendents), which is presumably from the Eastern source.
Yg-I is found among, and likely formed in, paleo-Europeans, and is the brother to y-hg J... just as the Western ancestry of ANE is in a way a brother of paleo-Europeans.
It's something that I wanted to write since a long time, but the climate here wasn't lately favourable for any serious discussion.
Y-DNA J is possibly native to EHG.
Autosomal trail of a back-migration that has brought Y-DNA R is clearly visible in the PCA plot I've posted few comments above.
The so called "steppe component" aka Yamnaya can't be modelled as EHG + CHG because it's not shifted (or at least not as much as EHG) towards Yana-like population.
That's why "steppe component" is so unique and it's also an excellent marker - it preserves high level of "Western source of ANE" without having high levels of WHG (like Ukraine_N), Yana-like (like EHG) or basal (like CHG) ancestry that are present in all other populations.
@Open Genomes
The CHG-related ancestry in Khvalynsk comes from the same population as the CHG-related ancestry in Progress and Vonyuchka Eneolithic samples, and this population was very closely related to CHG.
So there's no point in looking for this population east of the Caspian.
Khvalynsk may well have some West Siberia forager ancestry, which wouldn't be surprising given its location, and Steppe Maykop definitely has ancestry from east of the Caspian.
But the CHG in Khvalynsk/Progress/Vonyuchka can't be from Central Asia or even Iran. This is impossible.
@David
At this point do you have a strong opinion on exactly where that CHG likely came from?
@Bob Floy
At this point do you have a strong opinion on exactly where that CHG likely came from?
Yeah, I had a close look at this using all of the hunter-gatherer samples from around the Caucasus/Caspian, including those from Iran (Belt and Hotu caves), and the only solution I can see is that there was a CHG-rich Mesolithic population similar to Vonyuchka Eneolithic living in the steppes somewhere between the Black and Caspian Seas.
By the way, the Belt and Hotu cave samples are much worse proxies for the CHG ancestry in the Progress/Vonyuchka samples than actual CHG, including Satsurblia alone which is dated to the Upper Paleolithic. So I don't see Anthony's Azeri/Iranian theory working out.
Dave: " the Belt and Hotu cave samples are much worse proxies for the CHG ancestry in the Progress/Vonyuchka samples than actual CHG, including Satsurblia alone which is dated to the Upper Paleolithic.
True. However, Iran_Hotu may reflect a late arrival from the Zagros: For inconsistent AMS dates that reach as low as ca. 6,100 BC, Lazarides e.a. 2016 warn that, instead of being Mesolithic, the sample may have been introduced from overlaying Neolithic deposits. We need more samples from the S. Caspian, especially samples that are with certainty Mesolithic, before a S.Caspian origin of the CHG in Khvalynsk, Yamnaya etc. can be ruled out.
Progress/Vonyuchka is a more complex case. Some 10% of the sherds in Areni Cave (Arm_CA) bear similarities to N. Caucasian "Pearl-ornamented pottery", suggesting interaction across the Central Caucasus during the late 5th mBC. Moreover, isotopic analyses (Shishlina) showed one of the males from the Nalchik Cemetary having had a largely plant-based diet that contrasts markedly with the meat/dairy/fish diet that otherwise prevailed in Steppe populations (Khvalynsk, Yamnaya Kalmykia, Lola ec.). This is assumed to signify that the Nalchik man was a cereal farmer of possibly S. Caucasian origin.
As such, the elevated CHG in Progress/Vonyuchka is probably reflecting some recent migration from S. of the Caucasus on top of the CHG that was present in Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog II.
"the only solution I can see is that there was a CHG-rich Mesolithic population similar to Vonyuchka Eneolithic living in the steppes somewhere between the Black and Caspian Seas.
Unfortunately, archeology shows a virtually complete hiatus in the Caucasus piedmont between ca. 6.2-4.5 mBC. So, the only feasible option at the moment seems to be the Lower Don (Rakushechny Yar, etc.). Rakushechny Yar pottery strongly influenced pottery development in E. Europe, including Elshan, the Dniepr-Dvina interfluve (Serteya etc.), eventually even Narva and Ertebölle. If Rakushechny Yar was CHG-rich, and demographically strong enough to ultimately bring forward the elevated CHG shares we find in Khvalynsk and elsewhere, shouldn't we find more of that CHG already in UA_Neo and/or the Samara_HG.
More precisely: I believe that Rakushechny Yar contained a substantial CHG element. Its pottery can be linked to the Circum-Caspian, my best guess at the moment is that it originated from Neolithic Gobustan in Azerbaijan. However, I question its demographic strength. We find some uptick of CHG ancestry in UA_Neo compared to UA_Mes, and in Samara_HG compared to Sidelkino, but in both cases we are only talking about some extra 4-5%.
The main surge of CHG ancestry came during the Eneolithic. It is linked to the appearance of Steppe pastoralism, and a new lithic inventory including leaf-shaped points, both of which are ultimately of East Caspian origin.
@FrankN
Unfortunately, archeology shows a virtually complete hiatus in the Caucasus piedmont between ca. 6.2-4.5 mBC.
Unfortunately, by itself archeology is often unreliable.
At some point you and many others will have to acknowledge that the CHG-related ancestry in Yamnaya is very, very similar to CHG and has nothing to do with the South Caspian or Central Asia.
The funny thing is that this has been obvious for a long time now.
Dave: "At some point you and many others will have to acknowledge that the CHG-related ancestry in Yamnaya is very, very similar to CHG"
Wang e.a. (2018) see it differently. According to their analyses, Colchian CHG (Kotias) split from the CHG found in Yamnaya at least some 20,000 years ago. Do you have any reason to question their findings?
Y-DNA J is possibly native to EHG.
Surely you don’t mean the entire Hg J tree is “native “ to EHG
I & J split 35,000 years ago
The majority of J probably remained behind the mountains
@FrankN
Wang e.a. (2018) see it differently. According to their analyses, Colchian CHG (Kotias) split from the CHG found in Yamnaya at least some 20,000 years ago. Do you have any reason to question their findings?
Those sorts of estimates are even less reliable than archeology without ancient samples for calibration.
Wang et al. may as well have plucked a very different figure out of the air and it would've been about as relevant.
The fact is that CHG, Progress, Vonyuchka, and Yamnaya all share a lot of genetic drift. You can see this in any half decent PCA; those steppe samples are almost on a CHG>EHG cline, and show no close relationship to Iran_N, Belt or Hotu.
Dave: "Unfortunately, by itself archeology is often unreliable."
This certainly holds true for coastal areas, especially those subjected to frequent sea level changes as eg. typical for the Caspian Sea. There are relevant parts of the continental shelf that were exposed between the LGM and the early Holocene (Doggerland, the outer English Channel, Northern Adriatic Sea, Sicily-Malta landbridge, NW Black Sea, etc.) and most likely exploited by Epi-Paleolithic and Mesolithic humans, where it is sheer luck if any archeological finds turn up.
But when it comes to the Caucasus Piedmont, we are dealing with a quite densely populated and well-explored region with a rich archeological record that dates back to the Middle Paleolithic (Neandertalers). The apparent lack of Neolithic finds, and especially a documented archeological hiatus in several key sites such as the Gubs Cave (Adygea) or Tsmi (N. Ossetia) IMO requires a better explanation than that "archeology is often unreliable." This holds even more true in view of the region's resources (obsidian, salt lakes/springs) that attracted human(oid)s since the Middle Paleolithic - and obsidian knapping leaves well identifyable archeological traces.
The Zayukovo Obsidian source described in the link below lies some 15 km south of Progress...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X18306242
@FrankN
You're ignoring the simple fact that Yamnaya-like foragers were already well at home in the Piedmont steppe well before 4,000 BCE.
If you really think they're recent migrants to the region from somewhere like Iran or Central Asia, and that their high affinity to CHG is some sort of a coincidence, then clearly a new hobby beckons for you and others who are thinking similar things.
@OpenGenome @Drago “Neither Y clade has been found in the North Caucasus today. The ancestor of the very common G2a1a1-Z6653 (G-P16) clade found in the northern and central Caucasus today, G2a1a-Z6553, was found in sample I1671 from 5837-5659 calBCE in Seh Gabi (Godin Tepe) in Western Iran, in a Halaf culture context.
It may be that either Northwest Caucasian or Kartvelian are related to the languages spoken by the Anatolian Neolithic Farmers and the European Neolithic descendants, but the absence of haplogroup G in the Chalcolithic in the region where these languages are spoken today does not lend any support to a potential connection”
So the Halafians and Ubaidians spoke a language close to modern Kartvelian/NW Caucasus? These languages were the source in all likelihood of substrate in Sumerian
@ Drago
Native in the same sense as e.g. Y-DNA I found in different WHG(-rich) groups is also "native" to them. In other words that J trickled down to EHG from some West Eurasian population that became also the core of autosomal composition of EHG, CHG or ANE proper.
@ Davidski
You're ignoring the simple fact that Yamnaya-like foragers were already well at home in the Piedmont steppe well before 4,000 BCE.
Yamnaya-like foragers (or rather their genes) were at that time north of the steppe and in Bulgaria.
Varna outlier is dated to 4711-4542 calBCE and it carries not only Yamnaya-like ancestry coupled with EEF, but also the "Balto-Slavic drift" - some specific HG admixture likely from Belarus or northern Ukraine.
This entire controversy about "R1b Bell Beaker is Basque" will blow over when R1b of the Bell Beaker type is discovered in Corded Ware, which is very likely given the state of affairs now. I predict something like this will be out within the next year or so.
@Arza
Varna outlier is dated to 4711-4542 calBCE and it carries not only Yamnaya-like ancestry coupled with EEF, but also the "Balto-Slavic drift" - some specific HG admixture likely from Belarus or northern Ukraine.
Interestingly, this sample has my mtDNA haplogroup.
But more importantly, this individual has been renamed to Varna_EN3, which might suggest that she's not an outlier anymore and there are more where she came from.
@ANI EXCAVATOR
This entire controversy about "R1b Bell Beaker is Basque" will blow over when R1b of the Bell Beaker type is discovered in Corded Ware, which is very likely given the state of affairs now. I predict something like this will be out within the next year or so.
Well, Basques are definitely the direct descendants and also overwhelmingly the direct paternal descendants of Iberian Beakers. Just look at the PCA here...
What are the linguistic implications of Olalde et al. 2019?
This won't change if and when it's eventually shown that Beakers and their P312 are ultimately of Corded Ware/Single Grave origin.
And I expect that the Beaker/Basque controversy will continue, because Beakers for many people are synonymous with proto-Celts, but this is unlikely to be true. Rather, it seems that Beakers spoke an extinct language, and Celtic appears to have formed in a more heterogeneous post-Beaker population in Central Europe. This might be a huge issue because for many it takes some gloss off the Beaker phenomenon.
"You're ignoring the simple fact that Yamnaya-like foragers were already well at home in the Piedmont steppe well before 4,000 BCE."
You are wrong here. There wasn't anything like "Yamnaya-like foragers" ever living in the Piedmont Steppe (and if they were, they can't have been speaking PIE, if we take Mallory/Adams serious). There were Yamnaya-like pastoralists, but they were relatively recent arrivals. Acc. to Shishlina e.a. "After applying a reservoir effect correction for the steppe Eneolithic period, the time interval for the Caspian steppe Eneolithic population has now changed to 4300–3800 cal BC."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254821440
And before that, there apparently was very little. Trifonov has provocatively asked, whether there was a Neolithic at all in the W. Caucasus - unfortunately in Russian only, so I don't know what he has concluded . But, presumably, some visitors here may understand Russian and can help out in this respect.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283122496_Whether_the_Neolithic_existed_in_the_Western_Caucasus_or_not_in_Russian
The southernmost findspot with a reasonably dense Neolithic archeological record including a burial dated to ca. 5,000 BC appears to be Rassypnaya VI, some 200 km S. of Rakushechny Yar, and 350 km NNW of Progress. "The flint industry is similar to that at Kremennaya II and III and other sites in the Eastern Azov basin (Rassypnaya 1, Zhukovskaya 2, etc.).(..) Given the typology, we can suppose that most material can be dated to the last quarter of the 6th to the first quarter of the 5th millennium BC. Although this site was probably also visited/inhabited during the 7th and second half of the 5th millennium BC."
https://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/DocumentaPraehistorica/article/view/44.13/7349
The problem here is that the flint assembly was still of the Neolithic type, i.e. excluded the "leaf-shaped points" so typical of Khvalynsk, Yamnaya, even BB ("Palmela points"), which only entered with the (pre-)Caspian culture.
From the link above: "Kremennaya II and Rassypnaya VI are attributed to early stages of the Neolithic period, and Kremennaya III to a later stage.(..)Kremennaya III is located near Kremennaya II, at a low hypsometric level. (..) New tools appeared: polished flint heavy duty tools and arrowheads." Unfortunately, Kremenaya III has produced a wide range of AMS dates from as early as 6600 BC to as late as 4075 BC, so it has remained unclear to me when typical (pre-)Caspian lithics ("heavy duty tools and arrowheads") appeared there, but we seem to be dealing with a later time frame than the one attested for Rassypnaya IV.
(Pre-)Caspian Culture sites on the Lower Volga have been AMS-dated to the first half of the 5th mBC, and belonged to pastoralists, not foragers, see
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287799497_The_origin_of_farming_in_the_Lower_Volga_Region
I think the CHG in Progress/ Vonychka is eastern; not Colchian. They lie on a cline from EHG - Khvalynsk - Progress - Sarazm & Hotu; not Kotias, and not Meshoko. It was female mediated trans-Caspian exogamous exchange between patrilineal hunter-fishers.
But what does this mean? Well, simply that Progress are a probably derive from the north Caspian.
Yamnaya itself might derive from a more western groups, perhaps by the lower Don. Corded Ware in turn, around Dereivka & the southern forest steppe, and so forth. The networks could shift, and at times, the system disrupted by actual migrations & displacements, etc
I don’t see huge reason to place the primacy on this “eastern CHG”.
Dave, did you ever look at Chad's qpGraph analyses of the Progress samples? If so, what is your opinion about them? The graph with Progress as 9% CHG and 91% [62% EHG & 38% Tepe Hissar_CHL] seems to produce quite a good statistical fit.
I also found the f3 analyses interesting, e.g.
X Y Test f3 std. Error Z-score SNPs
CHG EHG Progress -0.001668 0.002449 -0.681 413273
Iran_Meso EHG Progress 0.010461 0.003531 2.963 70383
Hajji_Firuz EHG Progress 0.005077 0.002363 2.149 448044
Geoksiur EHG Progress 0.004428 0.002316 1.912 347963
https://populationgenomics.blog/2019/03/09/steppe-eneolithic-or-prikaspiiskaya-caspian-culture-from-the-south/
@Matt, thank you for pointing out that RISE61 is in fact a Bronze Age sample with Steppe ancestry.
@David
I reran the restricted nMonte for the two Khvalynsk samples, and came up with something interesting for I0433:
Global25 ancestry composition of sample: I0433 Population: RUS_Khvalynsk_En Neolithic Steppe
I0433 has 8.6% Darkveti-Meshoko (specifically associated with sample I1722).
If we analyze Darkveti-Meshoko I1722, we see that I1722 does in fact have 20.6% Anatolian Neolithic and 10.8% Levant PPNB.
ncestry composition of sample: I1722 Population: RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En Neolithic Caucasus
So it seems that at least I0433 from Khvalynsk has Anatolian Neolithic ancestry via Darkveti-Meshoko, and that David Anthony is wrong in saying that the "CHG" ancestry in Khvalynsk must have come from an unadmixed CHG / Iranian population.
BTW, I3499, the Croatia Starcevo Neolithic outlier, seems to be actually a Bronze Age or even Medieval individual, and this confuses the nMonte results for I0122 from Khvalynsk.
When I3499 is excluded, I0122 also shows up with 5.0% Darkveti-Meshoko:
Global25 ancestry composition of sample: I0122 Population: RUS_Khvalynsk_En Neolithic Steppe
So Khvalynsk seems to be EHG (i.e. Samara HG) + additional CHG from a Darkveti-Meshoko-like population + West Siberian Neolithic.
@ Drago
cline from EHG - Khvalynsk - Progress - Sarazm & Hotu
Such cline doesn't exist.
G25, reprocessed, 3D, rotated:
https://i.postimg.cc/KjzJHGh7/drago-Cline.png
Red - your "cline".
Blue - reality.
@ Open Genomes
So Khvalynsk seems to be EHG (i.e. Samara HG) + additional CHG from a Darkveti-Meshoko-like population + West Siberian Neolithic.
No, it doesn't seem to be like that.
G25, reprocessed, PC1/2/4 3D, rotated:
https://i.postimg.cc/SRcNHMFC/opengenomesmodel.png
Red - your model.
Blue - reality.
Off topic: https://phys.org/news/2019-08-ancient-pigs-genomic-turnover-europe.html - predominant replacement of Near Eastern pig ancestry with European wild boar ancestry introgression since the Neolithic.
Gradual, not connected with sudden steppe ancestry migration.
Though Western Yamnaya on the Dnieper (Mikhaylovka) did seem keep pigs judging by bones, alongside their overwhelming cattle complex. As did Repin on the Lower Don, with their large horse population (as suggested by Anthony to be linked to raising horses for export to the Maykop phenomenon). See - https://imgur.com/a/ybmxZKk
@David
"the Belt and Hotu cave samples are much worse proxies for the CHG ancestry in the Progress/Vonyuchka samples than actual CHG, including Satsurblia"
In other words, more evidence that the CHG in steppe is "true" CHG, rather than Iran_neo. Am I right in thinking that?
@Bob Floy
In other words, more evidence that the CHG in steppe is "true" CHG, rather than Iran_neo. Am I right in thinking that?
Nope, it's a population very closely related to CHG.
Basically like Vonyuchka Eneolithic, just probably with less EHG.
@Open Genomes
There's no Darkveti-Meshoko ancestry in the Eneolithic steppe populations.
Khvalynsk has CHG-related ancestry from a population like Piedmont (Progress + Vonyuchka) Eneolithic, and doesn't show any genome-wide, mtDNA or Y-DNA links to Darkveti-Meshoko.
@ Arza
There is someting odd with your plot; because Meshoko (which packs ANF_related ancestry) and whilst Geoksur & Hotu (which do not, and instead have something like Siberian) shouldn't be plotting on top of each other, as they do in yours. It suggests that for some reason, it cannot discern differences in CHG
Here's the cline
So I think Frank might be right in that respect, although I don't agree with his insinuations about pastoralism, P.I.E & languages in general
@Drago “There is someting odd with your plot; because Meshoko (which packs ANF_related ancestry)...”
That’s why I assumed that either Kartvelian or NW Caucasian are ANF language(s)
@ Andrze
Meshoko-Darkevti has ANF-like ancestry from further south, but it's predominantly CHG, and overall they’re a very different population to EEF.
@FrankN
Dave, did you ever look at Chad's qpGraph analyses of the Progress samples? If so, what is your opinion about them?
I think they're very creative, but unfortunately they don't have anything to do with reality, as there is no Tepe_Hissar_CHL ancestry, or anything of the kind, on the Eneolithic steppe.
It's just a simple fact that you can work out for yourself even just by looking at the uniparental markers.
There's way too much wishful thinking and creative interpretations of the data when it comes to these issues.
Eneolithic steppe populations form a different biogeographical zone from those in what is now Iran.
Look at the data objectively and deal with the facts. A large proportion of the Y-HGs in the ancient pops from Iran are really weird for the Eneolithic steppe, like R2, L, and H. The mtDNA HGs are also weird, like U7.
You really have to massage the genome-wide data in very special ways to back the theory that the Piedmont Eneolithic foragers were the recent descendants of migrants from anywhere far to the south of the steppe.
Dave: "there is no Tepe_Hissar_CHL ancestry, or anything of the kind, on the Eneolithic steppe.
It's just a simple fact that you can work out for yourself even just by looking at the uniparental markers."
Hmm.. The Naramsimham e.a. identification of uniparental markers seems quite questionable. As concerns Khvalynsk, we just have learned that its yDNA diversity was broader than suggested by the early published three samples. For the Elbrus piedmont, we so far have three samples. I don't think that - with a view towards genetically related Khvalynsk, but also apparent substantial UA_Mes/Neo cultural influence - they already fully capture the uniparental profile of the Elbrus piedmont.
Among all the arguments to be potentially brought forward, the "uniparental marker" one currently looks as the weakest to me (which doesn't mean that you can't convince me otherwise).
Otherwise, I don't think it is adequate to lump together everything from modern Iran because it is from modern Iran - a concern I have already voiced here several times and since quite some time. Iran is pretty large and geographically very diverse, which is reflected archeologically as well as genetically (possibly human, certainly goat aDNA) and linguistically (modern Iran houses Azeri [Turkic] speakers as well as Farsi and Kurds).
The Central Zagros (Ganj Dareh etc.) differs considerably from the Urmia Lake area (Haji Firuz), both look archeologically (ecologically anyway) quite different from the SE Caspian coast (Hotu cave), and the Alborz foothills (N. of Teheran) and the Persian Gulf coast are yet again very different from all the a/m in multiple respects, and so far uncovered aDNA-wise.
@FrankN
The Naramsimham e.a. identification of uniparental markers seems quite questionable.
Yes, but the Y-DNA calls were released and the mtDNA haplogroups make good sense, so we don't have to wonder whether the ancient uniparentals from the steppe match with those from Iran. They don't, except in the case of Steppe Maykop to some degree.
As concerns Khvalynsk, we just have learned that its yDNA diversity was broader than suggested by the early published three samples.
Yeah, broader, by two haplogroups (I2 and J). And these haplogroups, like the other haplogroups reported for Khvalynsk, have also been reported in Eastern Euro foragers: I2, J, Q1a, R1a and R1b.
For the Elbrus piedmont, we so far have three samples. I don't think that - with a view towards genetically related Khvalynsk, but also apparent substantial UA_Mes/Neo cultural influence - they already fully capture the uniparental profile of the Elbrus piedmont.
I think they do, considering they're exactly what one should expect when also looking at all of the obviously closely related samples. So I don't expect any surprises.
Why hasn't any obvious link to something like Tepe_Hissar_ChL surfaced yet in all of the Eneolithic and Bronze Age data from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, except for Steppe Maykop?
Probably because only Steppe Maykop has this type of ancestry.
@David, fair enough about the CHG-like ancestry in Khvalynsk coming from a Piedmont Eneolithic population.
This is what I get for Khvalynsk when I include Eneolithic/Chalcolithic samples:
Global25 nMonte ancestry composition of sample: I0122 Population: RUS_Khvalynsk_En Neolithic Steppe
I0122:
50.8% EHG
30.4% Progress Eneolithic
10.0% Sredny Stog II
7.0% West Siberia Neolithic
1.8% Afontova Gora 3
Global25 nMonte ancestry composition of sample: I0433 Population: RUS_Khvalynsk_En Neolithic Steppe
I0433:
59.2% EHG
20.4% Progress Eneolithic
10.6% West Siberia Neolithic
9.8% Sredny Stog II
This is pretty straightforward, but is it valid chronologically?
Notice that the West Siberia Neolithic in Khvalynsk is in addition to this kind of Piedmont Steppe ancestry.
@Open Genomes
The Progress/Vonyuchka Eneolithic samples look like a stable mixture despite being from two different sites and carbon dated to ~4,200 BCE.
So a population like this existed somewhere on the steppe well before 4,200 BCE.
The Khvalynsk samples aren't carbon dated and appear to be genetically a variable and thus new population mostly made of up local foragers and something like the Progress/Vonyuchka samples. They might well have some Siberian ancestry too considering their location north of the Caspian near West Siberia.
@David
So if Khvalynsk is the PIE population, then we have 4 ancestral components:
1. EHG
2. CHG (via Piedmont Eneolithic)
3. West Siberian HG / Neolithic
4. Iranian Neolithic (via Piedmont Neolithic)
It seems that based on the ancestral components, the linguistic situation would be more than a two-way mix between an "EHG" Proto-Uralic and some kind of "CHG" language (NW Caucasian, or Kartvelian - which?)
@David
"Basically like Vonyuchka Eneolithic, just probably with less EHG."
This makes good sense to me. So we're talking about a CHG-adjacent population from north of Kotias and Satsurblia, which would have intermingled with EHG sometime in the Mesolithic.
Present-day Yakut mtDNA of Western Eurasian origin or affinity:
HV1a1a: 3/169 = 1.78% of Yakut samples of Duggan et al. 2013, 5/423 = 1.18% of Yakut samples of Fedorova et al. 2013
HV1a1a also has been observed in Tunisia, Yemen, Armenians, Matera (southern Italy), and Qashqai (a Turkic-speaking population in Iran). Outgroup HV1a1b has been observed in a Syriac and in an Armenian. HV1a1* has been observed in Armenia (incl. an ancient specimen), Poland, and Trapani (Sicily).
H49: 3/169 = 1.78% of Yakut samples of Duggan et al. 2013. (Fedorova et al. 2013 have 12/423 = 2.84% H(xH1, H8, H20) in their Yakut samples, but have not resolved whether any of them belongs to H49.]
H49 also has been observed in Spain, Netherlands, a Mennonite from Mutterstadt (Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany), Poland, Sweden, and Finland.
W3a1+199: 2/169 = 1.18% of Yakut samples of Duggan et al. 2013. (Fedorova et al. 2013 have found 6/423 = 1.42% W in their Yakut samples, but they have not resolved whether any of them belongs to W3a1+199.)
W3a1 with an additional T199C mutation also has been observed in England, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Hungary, and New Zealand.
It's not possible to confirm the presence of West_Siberia_N admix in the Khvalynsk population because we only have three very low quality Khvalynsk samples to work with (and only two in the Global25).
Another problem is the lack of a clear signal of West_Siberia_N ancestry in Sredny Stog, Yamnaya, Corded Ware, Bell Beakers, etc.
So something doesn't look right, and at this stage I would hold off with any claims that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were partly of Western Siberian origin.
[cont.]
T2g1[a]: Observed in 2/169 = 1.18% of the Yakut samples of Duggan et al. 2013. Duggan et al. have reported these as T2g1, but they belong to T2g1a according to Ian Logan. Fedorova et al. 2013 have found T2 in 5/423 = 1.18% of their Yakut samples, but they have not resolved whether any of them belongs to T2g1.
T2g1* has been observed in Palestine and in a Lowland Tajik from Dushanbe. Besides Yakuts, T2g1a* has been observed in specimens from ancient England (including two victims of the Black Death from East Smithfield medieval cemetery in London), Egypt, Palestine, Yemen, a Jewish individual, a Persian individual from Iran, an Armenian individual, Turkey, Kyrgyz from Kyrgyzstan, and an individual from Jammu and Kashmir. T2g1a1 has been observed in Hungary and Iraq. T2g1a3 has been observed in Italy (including an individual from Sardinia). T2g1 has been found in a Jew from Lithuania and a Jew from Iran, so it may have an ancient presence among Jews.
J1c5: Observed in 1/169 = 0.59% of the Yakut samples of Duggan et al. 2013 and in 6/423 = 1.42% of the Yakut samples of Fedorova et al. 2013.
J1c5* also has been observed in a Jewish individual, Spain, England (including two ancient specimens), Scotland (including Orcadians), Denmark (including two ancient specimens), Sweden, Poland, Russia (Novgorod Oblast, Belgorod Oblast), and a Finnish individual. J1c5a has been observed in Russia (Oryol Oblast, Pskov Oblast), Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, a Herzegovinian individual, Ireland, and Spain. J1c5a1 has been observed in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, and Newfoundland. J1c5b has been observed in Denmark and Germany. J1c5c* has been observed in France and Greece. J1c5c1 has been observed in Spain and in a French individual. J1c5d has been observed in a European, Newfoundland, and Russia (Belgorod Oblast). J1c5e has been observed in Europe and India ('Punjab138'). J1c5f has been observed in Denmark and in an individual from Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Fedorova et al. 2013 also have found J1c5 in 4/125 = 3.2% of their samples of Evenks from Yakutia (collected in Olenyoksky District, Zhigansky District, and Ust-Maysky District) and in 1/105 = 0.95% of their samples of Evens from Yakutia (collected in Eveno-Bytantaysky National District and Momsky District).
Another subclade of mtDNA haplogroup J, J2a2b (J2a2b3 according to Ian Logan), has been observed in 2/46 = 4.3% of a sample of Evenks from the basin of the Nyukzha River (Duggan et al. 2013). Fedorova et al. 2013 observed mtDNA that belongs to haplogroup J2 in 7/125 = 5.6% of their samples of Evenks from Yakutia, but they have not resolved whether they belong to J2a2b. Judging from sequences on GenBank associated with a paper by Pala, M., Olivieri, A., Achilli, A., et al. (2012) ("Mitochondrial DNA signals of late glacial recolonization of Europe from Near Eastern refugia," Am. J. Hum. Genet. 90 (5), 915-924), J2a2b3 also has been observed in samples labeled as "YK11" from "Russia: Siberia" and "Evenk10-3099" from "Russia: Siberia," so it may also be found among Yakuts (or perhaps Yukaghirs).
J2a2b* has been observed in United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and Armenia (Oshakan). J2a2b1* has been observed in Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen. J2a2b1a has been observed in Morocco, Tunisia, the Canary Islands, and southern Italy (Calabria). J2a2b2 has been observed in the UK, Greece, Armenia (Oshakan), and Russia (Vladimir Oblast).
@ Drago
My plot is perfectly fine. If you have a 3D space you can rotate it in a way that any given pair points can be overlaid on each other.
The plot with your "cline" was rotated to maximize visual difference between EHG-Khvalynsk vector and a set of three vectors - EHG-Progress, EHG-Darkveti-Meshoko and EHG-Sarazm/Hotu. That's why they are clustered together.
There is a very good separation between Hotu and D-M, you just don't see it in this particular projection, because the vector of the difference between them is perpendicular to the screen (think that D-M is "well behind" the screen, CHG in a plane of the screen and Hotu in front of it).
Note also that this is a reprocessed PCA. It pulls out a lot of information from the original PCA that is usually smeared across multiple dimensions and maximizes the visual difference between populations.
To see that your cline is not a cline you don't even have to use any 3D-plotting software. Just make subsets of the data, reprocess them in PAST and plot the first 3-4 dimensions against each other.
When it comes to your plot - the arrow points upwards (tip of it is even "above" CHG), while Hotu & Co are diving deep "behind" the screen). If you would rotate it 90 degrees around the green line you would see the structure that I showed on my plot, just flattened due to the lack of reprocessing.
Arza
Sure; I don’t have a strong opinion ; given the blanks in data which remain
As I have concluded earlier- it’s fascinating in its own right; but the whole EHG/ CHG thing doesn’t appear directly relevant for PIE; other than being the end of a chain
Post a Comment