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...
Reading Reichs book, comments and watching video Interviews, its very clear he doesnt want to revive the classic, pre-Marxist influenced theories and notions of race.
ReplyDeleteHe wants the politically correct interpretation of human history, behaviour and differences to survive the genetic revelations.
But thats not possible, because these ideological distortions of reality were based on lies and misconceptions from the start.
That doesnt mean however, that the old ideas and concepts, or even worse explanations, were always right, but rather that we will, if dealing with the facts objectively, come to a future synthesis.
If he wants to keep the politically correct dogmas alive and untouched the way they were about 2000, scientists would have to lie so big that sooner or later too many people will see it.
Only oppressive measures can prevent the truth from coming up then.
The IE is only one rather 2nd tear aspect of this problem, but its a part of it nevertheless. He knows it very well as his Kosinna quotes prove. Ideological misconceptions and blinders should not determine which facts being published and how they being interpreted scientifically.
Politics and ideologies should accept the facts and adapt to it. If science is not independent,it will produce lies and nonsense and of course, it will lose credibility.
Even to the point uneducated observers will distrust science and education as a whole. That's a growing problem already. If science is being ideologized, a large portion of society wont listen any more. That wont help anybody, especially no one which appreciates the truth.
Reich is more honest than most others actually, I truly appreciate this. But still you can feel how he cringes desperately on something which just Slips away. At some point the truth and being a scientist in the classic sense of it is a decision against ideological distortion and political control.
It always was, just the ideologies changed.
In this case of IE he desperately wants to keep up the story of "ex oriente lux". If they were brutal conquerors like in the classic teachings, they have to be darkish half orientals taught by Near Eastern derived masters.
Now I wouldnt having an issue with that, if it would be true and works out as THE explanation. But even with my rather limited knowledge I can see that too many parts dont fit into that puzzle.
Its just not meaningful. For me steppe Maykop really sealed the deal for a big Maykop/late CHG contribution.
They had called Eastern tribals to fend Yamnaya off, thats what we see.
Like borderline ethnic troops in later, historical times.
Sure there was cultural exchange, probably minor genetic, but Maykop was not formative. Formative was primarily the male lineage contributor and those were native steppe dwellers.
As for R1a: My guess is a surprise (sub-)population to come. Not sampled so far, which will harbour a high frequency of R1a.
The single individuals found so far are obviously just the results of small scale geneflow from this group.
Just a speculation, if there is J in Khvalynsk but not in Yamnaya maybe J left the area as Hittite ancestors. Some of the Hittite samples were J. Their steppe ancestry would be diluted when they arrived in Anatolia.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, i don't think any lab believes CHG is native to Eastern Europe.
@Cpk
ReplyDeleteI guess it depends on your definition of native.
Considering that CHG was present in Eastern Europe since at least the early Eneolithic, then by my standards that type of CHG found in Eastern Europe is native to Eastern Europe.
There's no point calling the Piedmont Eneolithic samples native to Iran, is there, unless you're crazy...and maybe you are.
@David: For saying they were Iranian, they need to prove the migration through or around the Caspian, of an Iranian derived people into the steppe.
ReplyDeleteBut there is no hint for such a massive migration having taken place.
If you are right and they were native Caucasians meeting EHG as they moved on the steppe, even "Iranian HG-related", though formally right, would be misleading.
But even if a massive migration from South East of the Caspian could be proven, the development of Yamnaya and related groups would have taken place on the steppe after consolidation, and not with a recent Maykop expansion.
Academia.edu tells me that Mallory bookmarked a paper by Carlos Quilles this morning.
ReplyDelete@Janko Raven Johnson
ReplyDeleteMaybe Mallory's finally lost his mind? And if he hasn't yet, he will after reading Carlos' so called paper.
@Davidski
ReplyDeleteAt 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 a forager from Karelia, 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.
Yes, but it may, and in fact very likely to be so, still have come with the pre-Eneolithic population from the Caucasus that brought the large-scale CHG ancestry to the steppe in the first place. Indeed, this scenario would make your theories on the formation of the EHG-CHG mix more believable. Many people have criticized your theories due to the lack of Y-DNA contribution from the CHG side because it would be very unlikely for such a high CHG contribution would have absolutely no accompanying Y-DNA haplogroups. If J is found among the highly CHG-admixed Eneolithic steppe populations, that will weaken the arguments of your critics. True, J is not found in Yamnaya, but Yamnaya is too late to be relevant as there had passed enough time before Yamnaya for the development of the founder effects that would totally breed out the already sparse J from the steppe gene pool.
Hi Davidski, this is unrelated by I have been experimenting on Monte and I was amazed by the results I got with Dzharkutan_2 and Northern Caucasians, with some Adygeans having a distance of less than 3. What do you think about that? Also this might be old news but Geoksiur, Anau and another sample I forgot were incredibly close to HotuIII
ReplyDeleteFrom memory, Dzharkutan_2 had a lot of ancestry from the Caucasus. Probably from Maykop or Kura-Araxes.
ReplyDelete@Davidski
ReplyDeleteThing is though, they were more similar to modern Adygean, Abkhaz and Chechen samples than they were to KAC samples, including the Dagestani Velikent sample (even though Velikent was the most similar one). Uzbekistan is a long way from Maykop or KAC areas, and what is even stranger is that it was only the Dzharkutan 2 sample that was incredibly similar to aforementioned peoples, Dzharkutan 1, Gonur and other BMAC samples were clearly different from Northern Caucasians.
I meant that Velikent was most similar among KAC samples.
ReplyDeleteThat's because Dzharkutan_2 also has some Steppe_MLBA ancestry.
ReplyDelete(Please read all of the links I shared. My goal is not to dictate, but to keep in mind an alternative idea of the origin of the Turkic peoples and, if necessary, to be evaluated)
ReplyDeleteI know it's irrelevant to the current discussion, but what I'm going to write is a little bit related to the previous thread.
Although most people here believe that the Xiougnus were Proto-Turkic(I also believe that the they were Turkic) and were ultimately descended from a "pure eastern Siberian" population,I have some objections.
Firstly, the Proto-bulgaro-Turkic language begins to be divided into other languages in the range of 800-1000 BC according to the most accurate calibration.The Xiougnu appeared at least 600 years after this date, meaning that the Xiougnus were positioned too late to speak the Proto-bulgaro-Turkic language.At best, the Xiougnu spoke the Proto-Oguz language.(If you read the articles below, you'll know why I'm saying Proto-Oguz)
Beside the popular opinion that considers eastern Siberian or Mongolian urheimat for PBT, the PBT language does not has terms for desert,taiga, big rivers,and big predators specific to that geography. However,deciduous trees,forest steppes, small steppe creatures and small water resources related terms abundant in PBT language.
The PBT language contains many native terms related to metalworking,agriculture,pastoralism, and horse breeding. Although the etymologies of Indo-European origin are assumed for some of these terms, these propositions are very weak and this words have very meaningful Turkic etymologies.
Based on all these results, the urheimat of the PBT language is the western Siberian forest-steppes (especially the Baraba steppes), and the Seima-Turbino cultures rooted in this region (Krotov, Odinov, etc.) Are ancestors of those who speak the PBT language. The late PBT language was probably spoken by the Irmen culture.
Of course, there is not enough genetic data to support this theory. The Baraba steppes in particularly have hardly been studied. But the fact that the Y DNA associated with botai and other western Siberian cultures are present in today's (Bashkirs,kumandis etc) and ancient Turkic peoples leaves a small touch to my theory.
If you want to understand how I came to this conclusion, these articles will help you.
http://www.turkceogretimi.com/dosyalar/turkdillerininsiniflandirmasi.pdf
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://chuvashlar.blogspot.com/2012/10/back-to-turkic-languages-in-nutshell.html&ved=2ahUKEwiYvMDc9OPjAhUgysQBHSG8DY4QFjABegQIBRAB&usg=AOvVaw1_X1TjLz0zBe37xTOeUNzm&cshid=1564739731274
"sample": "UZB_Dzharkutan2_BA:Average",
ReplyDelete"fit": 1.7166,
"Adygei": 90.83,
"UZB_Dzharkutan1_BA": 7.5,
"TKM_Geoksiur_En": 1.67,
"RUS_Sintashta_MLBA": 0,
It is obvious they had Caucasian ancestry, but the question is how, when did the migration happen? Is it possible it was just one extremely random guy who just decided to travel from the Caucasus to Uzbekistan?
@Mem
ReplyDeleteI do not want to seem to be ignoring you. But I had discussed with you your theory on several occasions, so there is no need to repeat my arguments.
A possibility of a migration from the SE Caucasus c. 6000 BC to lower Volga sounds interesting
ReplyDeleteSo you have > 4 possible strata in eventual emergence of PIE (from east to west): CHG, north-east Pontic & northwest- Pontic hunter-fishers, and then MNE languages due West, with PIE prodeominantly originating from one of the northern HG groups.
Drago, I think there already was at least a little ENF in SE Caucasus by 6000 BC. Meanwhile Steppe EN cultures had no ENF at all if I recall correctly.
ReplyDeleteAnd about the CHG component in PIE. If I recall correctly,the CHG component in the South Caucasus and the steppe were genetically quite distant. As I remember they were talking about a 20,000 years isolation between them.
ReplyDeleteThis long isolation could only have taken place in the ice age, but in the last Ice Age, glaciers covered the entire Caucasian mountain range and glaciers were down enough to separate the kolkhis plain (west Georgia) and the Azerbaijani Plains from each other. In addition, the vast majority of the Azerbaijani plains were buried in the Caspian Sea.The genetic results from South Caucasus come from these unfrozen and undrought refugee places, and none of them have an affinity with the steppe CHG.
Also there was very few human occupation detected piedmont area,and this materials linked with west georgian paleolithic.Also in LGM many areas in Piedmont again buried in Caspian sea and made a water way between azakh and Caspian seas.(Maybe because of this there were very few human occupation in Piedmont).
In ADNAERA blog assumed that, CHG of steppe brought by Mazandarani Hunter gatherers(South Caspian region in Iran) like Hotu foragers.
I'm not going to go any further, you can read more at this links.
https://adnaera.com/2018/12/10/how-did-chg-get-into-steppe_emba-part-1-lgm-to-early-holocene/
https://adnaera.com/2019/01/11/how-did-chg-get-into-steppe_emba-part-2-the-pottery-neolithic/
@ KG
ReplyDeleteI don’t think you have understood what I’m suggesting
I’m hypothesizing about the complex genesis of IE; not the Volga Forest-steppe eneolithic
The 2 aren’t synonymous
@Davidski
ReplyDelete"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."
In the set up David Anthony describes roughly 6200-4500 BC a HG culture he suggests may have been native CHG reached the Volga delta, and at Samara an EHG presence remained. That means the merger was way before the emergence of PIE.
See also rms2 remark on AG:
https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?16234-Bell-Beaker-Archaeology-and-Ancient-DNA&p=587935&viewfull=1#post587935
On Anthony's avoidance of discussing the Steppe Maykop samples, since he doesn't comment and we're free to project whatever we want on his reasons entirely ;), I'd of course say is basically because he thinks exactly the same as I do; that the samples of Steppe Maykop we have are largely admixed between populations in the Caspian Depression desert steppe zone reaching into Central Asia and don't prevent or preclude any population contact at Repin. (And I'm also not sure they all represent a two-way mix between the same Precaspian population and Maykop).
ReplyDeleteWhich he stresses here as at least culturally important for Yamnaya, if he is fairly quite skeptical of genetic importance. "Also, if contact with the Maikop culture was a fundamental cause of the innovations in transport and metallurgy that defined the Yamnaya culture, then the lower Don-North Caucasus-lower Volga steppes, closest to the North Caucasus, would be where the earliest phase is expected.... I also accept the general consensus that the appearance of the hierarchical Maikop culture about 3600 BC had profound effects on pre-Yamnaya and early Yamnaya steppe cultures. Yamnaya metallurgy borrowed from the Maikop culture two-sided molds, tanged daggers, cast shaft hole axes with a single blade, and arsenical copper. Wheeled vehicles might have entered the steppes through Maikop, revolutionizing steppe economies and making Yamnaya pastoral nomadism possible after 3300 BC. .... ". Essentially reiterating HWL.
So it would be great if we had genetic samples in the actual zones of interaction which were important for the genesis of Yamnaya, to talk about that (and even despite, even if these were genetic interactions, they may have been ultimately "transient" influences, as the influence of the steppes for instance was in Copper Age SE Europe).
I'd add that I think it's quite fair minded that when his original thesis in HWL was for spread of IE by elite recruitment, he talks about this possibility in interactions between Maykop and pre-IE groups ("So it is still possible that steppe people interacted as raiders and traders and perhaps even political clients of the Maikop people, with interaction intense enough to make leading political figures in the pre-Yamnaya steppes bilingual in the Maikop (Northwest Caucasian?) language").
I suspect he perhaps doesn't believe it too strongly or at all. But it's all better for him to acknowledge it than when compared to some supporters and boosters of HWL we sometimes encounter online, who suddenly got amnesia that he made that argument when genome wide adna came through suggesting it was no longer necessary to save a steppe origin from Renfrew's immovable demic block.
Couple of accompaniment reprocessed PCA using Davidski's West Eurasia 9: https://imgur.com/a/utgYTJ4
ReplyDelete(That seems like the best because it has a lot of relevant samples that G25 doesn't get).
PC1 and PC2 are the usual main West Eurasian, while PC3 is dominated by Iberia+Central Asia vs Baltic+Caucasus
I've labelled the samples from Varna and Smyadovo that Anthony highlighted on the plots. It doesn't seem to me like ANI152 ("Golden Man") has much more steppe-related than ANI160, who has very poor grave goods. "Golden Man" is "East" and "South" of ANI160, but not much appreciable amount. But both have a sliver of the admixture that the earlier Varna sample ANI163 has.
So the convex hulls are clear (which needs at least three samples), I've split Steppe_Maykop into a main and admixed group of 3 each, and rolled all the Piedmont_En into a single cluster.
@Juan. Could be. And must have persisted for some degree anyway, for Lola sample to come about (Though this sample has further ancestry probably from Yamnaya). And possibly some Sintashta outliers.
CHG = Kammenaya Balka on the Lower Don during the Late Upper Paleolithic...
ReplyDeleteLooking at the Piedmont Eneolithic->Khvalyansk set in my above plots and wondering about diversity in Khvalynsk.
ReplyDeletePhys anth stuff seems to emphasise heterogenity in Khvalysnk cemeteries (of more southern and northern) and then a further "migration of people from the Don Steppes to the southwest" in actually forming Volga Yamnaya.
Excerpts: https://imgur.com/a/jw1RfiP
(Taken from: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KWmRDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA122&lpg=PA122#v=onepage&q&f=false )
So I wonder if this will hold up. Some other elements like diversity in Sintashta phase through incorporating individuals from forest-zone seem to hold up (seems like more diversity in Sintashta, although there are many samples, and the above seems to note Seima-Turbino artefact and Botai similar cranial series in Potapovka and Sintaskta).
But other elements like increase in heterogenity from Yamnaya->Poltavka seems less clear (though Poltavka does have the LNBA European like "Poltavka outlier" as one out of 5 in the set I'm looking at, so perhaps there is something to that).
@Matt according to this book you quoted the CHG rich admixture was later than the Eneolithic and dated to the BA
Delete@Matt
ReplyDeleteOn Anthony's avoidance of discussing the Steppe Maykop samples, since he doesn't comment and we're free to project whatever we want on his reasons entirely...
Well my theory is that, judging by Anthony's references to the ADMIXTURE bar graph in Wang et al., he doesn't know what to make of Steppe Maykop, because its ancestry in the said bar graph looks kind of similar to that of Yamnaya.
Nah, I just think that Anthony doesn't know what to make of Steppe Maykop, because in the Wang et al. ADMIXTURE bar graph Steppe Maykop and Yamnaya look very similar.
ReplyDeleteThe currently oldest sample with Anatolian Farmer ancestry in the steppes in an individual at Aleksandriya, a Sredni Stog cemetery on the
ReplyDeleteDonets in eastern Ukraine. Sredni Stog has often been discussed
as a possible Yamnaya ancestor in Ukraine ... The single published grave is dated about 4000 BC ..and shows 20%
Anatolian Farmer ancestry and 80% Khvalynsk-type steppe
ancestry (CHG&EHG). His Y-chromosome haplogroup was
R1a-Z93, similar to the later Sintashta culture and to South
Asian Indo-Aryans, and he is the earliest known sample to
show the genetic adaptation to lactase persistence (I3910 T).
Just wanted to make sure you guys didn't miss the above.
The data on West Eurasia PCA 9 suggest it's more like 66:33 Khvalynsk:BGR_N, but sure. It doesn't really clear up the place and time of LP mutation though...
ReplyDeleteE.g. resampling on West Eurasia 9 - https://imgur.com/a/lBKdUbQ
ReplyDelete@mzp1
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to make sure you guys didn't miss the above.
Except this sample from the North Pontic steppe is older and has way more Anatolian ancestry than I6561...
Ukraine_Neolithic_o I3719 4949-4799 calBCE
@ Juan
ReplyDelete“”Specifically GAC-like.””
Apart from being > 1,500 older than GAC; it lacks the same level of WHG admixture.
@ Davdski
ReplyDelete“But then, suddenly, its R1a-M417 subclade goes BOOM! ..”
Superlatives aside; that sequence is very important ; as the mid-late CWC-Sintashta-Andronovo was expanding east; IE groups were shifting around in Greece & Anatolia. Exact details are lacking; but This is the final common thread for IE
I fail to see the overwhelming relevance of Khvalynsk in all this
Based on the above; PIEs can be traced to Dereivka & Cernavoda etc
@Drago
ReplyDeleteI think it's still all to play for as new samples arrive.
I agree that Khvalynsk need not have been PIE. There's nothing suggesting that it had to be. For all we know it was linguistically a dead end, maybe PIE related or not.
More data are needed, including both human and horse ancient DNA from Khvalynsk, Repin, many different Balkan and Anatolian cultures, to see how it all fits together.
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.
Anthony demonstrated a very competent and up to date understanding of the currently available data. He was also very fair and reasonable in his assertions. In the process of being fair he did a better job of arguing against a PIE homeland on the steppe than for it by providing a detailed description of the cultural impact of balkan neolithic farmers and maikop on the steppe people. Animal domestication, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, were all an import onto the steppe from these neolithic farmers. The core concept of the steppe hypothesis is based on attaching a reconstruction of the PIE language to a candidate culture based upon the origin of these cultural elements none of which are native to the steppe.
ReplyDeleteI pick Varna man as Dyeus himself.
@Romulus
ReplyDeleteAnthony demonstrated a very competent and up to date understanding of the currently available data.
I think he focused too much on the ADMIXTURE output in Wang et al., rather than on the estimates of ancestry proportions from formal mixture tests, which usually produce different outcomes to ADMIXTURE.
@Davidski
ReplyDeleteI agree that in general his comments on genetic relationships and ancestry estimates is inferior to the current understanding and modelling done by yourself and others, which is much more nuanced and accurate.
I think that the Yana paper makes the relationship between EHG, CHG, and ANE more complex than how he represented it and he made some, in my opinion, questionable statements about EHG with no CHG ancestry. This is dubious to me as EHG by definition should include some CHG.
@mzp1 + Davidski
ReplyDeleteWas the Sredny Stog sample identified as R1a-Z93? Not just M417?
In the Mathieson et al. paper that Y-chromosome is classified as M417, but there's widespread agreement that the data in the BAM file point to Z93, and even a subclade immediately ancestral to the South Asian L657.
ReplyDeleteIt’ll be interesting which subclades the quoted haplogroups turn out to be . More V3616? P312?
ReplyDeleteWill be an important detail
@Juanrivera
ReplyDelete"eems Maykop has Steppe Maykop ancestry, more than Maykop ancestry in Steppe Maykop (except Steppe Maykop outlier)."
I would like to see the exact test setup for that, because I find it pretty unlikely that Maykop had significant Steppe Maykop ancestry. Steppe Maykop had 40+% WSHG related ancestry (in average and without the outlier) and Maykop had none of it or just noise level.
In G25 nMonte:
"sample": "RUS_Steppe_Maykop:Average",
"fit": 2.7621,
"RUS_West_Siberia_N": 46.67,
"RUS_Sidelkino_HG": 21.67,
"GEO_CHG": 18.33,
"IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N": 13.33,
"Anatolia_Barcin_N": 0,
vs.
"sample": "RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya:Average",
"fit": 2.5633,
"GEO_CHG": 50,
"Anatolia_Barcin_N": 33.33,
"IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N": 16.67,
"RUS_Sidelkino_HG": 0,
"RUS_West_Siberia_N": 0,
and
"sample": "RUS_Maykop:Average",
"fit": 2.9203,
"Anatolia_Barcin_N": 38.33,
"GEO_CHG": 29.17,
"IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N": 24.17,
"RUS_Sidelkino_HG": 6.67,
"RUS_West_Siberia_N": 1.67,
Also:
"sample": "RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya:Average",
"fit": 2.4744,
"RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En": 71.67,
"ARM_Areni_C": 28.33,
"RUS_Steppe_Maykop": 0,
I just modelled it with zero Steppe Maykop ancestry, with samples older that Steppe Maykop. So what was your model?
@slumbery, since the comment is "Seems Maykop has Steppe Maykop ancestry, more than Maykop ancestry in Steppe Maykop (except Steppe Maykop outlier)" and Steppe Maykop excluding probably don't have any Maykop ancestry, and probably only have any if you include AY2001 (who I think should be considered an outlier), then as even 1% > 0%.....
ReplyDelete"He was also very fair and reasonable in his assertions. In the process of being fair he did a better job of arguing against a PIE homeland on the steppe than for it by providing a detailed description of the cultural impact of balkan neolithic farmers and maikop on the steppe people. Animal domestication, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, were all an import onto the steppe from these neolithic farmers. The core concept of the steppe hypothesis is based on attaching a reconstruction of the PIE language to a candidate culture based upon the origin of these cultural elements none of which are native to the steppe. "
ReplyDeleteCultural innovations are one thing, to apply them successfully in a big way another. Cultural contact can be enough for the transmission.
Its about the ethnicity which spread, not the origin of a cultural innovation. That can be the same, but must not.
And I fail to see the complete package before the steppe derived ancestry comes into play.
« Animal domestication, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, were all an import onto the steppe from these neolithic farmers. «
ReplyDeleteThere’s some evidence that wheeled vehicles originated in the Tripolye culture after it was taken over by Sredy Stog people.
From "The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia", Kohl 2007:
ReplyDelete"Two early pre–Pit-Grave kurgan burials with the actual remains of wooden wheels have been found respectively in the Lower Don (Koldyri, burial 7, kurgan 14) andKuban (Starokorsun, burial 18, kurgan 2) areas. Rassamakin (2002: 53) believes that their appearance in these latter areas was due to “the migration or re-settlement of groups from the agricultural population” farther west. The latter discovery, which consisted of the remains of a wagon with wooden wheels (approximately 60 cm. in diameter), has been attributed to the “early Novosvobodnaya” phase of the Maikop culture (Munchaev 1994: 180, table 44, no. 3), and the partial remains of a similar wheeled cart were found in a kurgan at Tsagan-nur in Kalymykia to the northeast that also apparently contained Maikop-related materials (ibid., 187)."
"Such vehicles are among the earliest known examples of wheeled transport found on the Eurasian steppes. They may be roughly contemporaneous with or perhaps a few hundred years later than the now earliest well-documented carts from moors in northwestern Germany and Denmark (Hayen 1989; 1991: ptc. 7; and Hausler 1981; 1994). On current evidence, the diffusion of the technology of wheeled transport may have just as plausibly spread north to south from northwestern Europe with its forests of useable hard woods to the more open steppes to the southeast and then farther south into Mesopotamia as the reverse (cf. Bakker et al. 1999). The important point is not where this revolutionary technology first originated but rather how quickly it diffused across western Asia, Eurasia, and Europe during the Early Bronze period, underscoring the interconnections among disparate cultures throughout this vast area.
Later during Late Early and Middle Bronze times or beginning in the first half of the third millennium BC such wheeled vehicles are well documented in eastern Ukraine (Pustovalov 1994: 99–101; 1998), the northern Caucasus (Gei 1991, 2000), and in Transcaucasia (cf. Miron and Orthmann 1995: 69–94) and provide direct evidence for a more mobile economy and the movements of peoples throughout this area."
@Davidski- Obviously the only explanation for R1a-M417 is a massive founder effect similar to what happened with P312
ReplyDeleteI cannot read the book although I suppose it will have very interesting data, however, from your comments I do not understand why people are surprised to see that variety of haplogroups in Khvalynsk and in general in all steppe cultures. I say this because everyone should understand that these cultures are the furthest from a homogenous culture that exists. They were not genetically or culturally or anthropologically or archaeologically homogeneous. And this in my opinion is one of the foundations of the criticisms of the famous mass migrations proposed by Haak and company
@Juan Rivera-"Sure looks like Molgen is the only site now that denies that peninsular european R1b(xV88,R1b1*), R1a-CTS4385, Q1a and IE all come from steppe groups. On another topic, in the RUS_Samara_HG file, its R1b clade seems more congruent with M73 than with M269, according to present ISOGG nomeclature"
I see that you are obsessed with Molgen, and if you allow me some advice, I would change your obsession and dedicate to studying a bit of genetics and European Prehistory, because your knowledge is very scarce and superficial. If your conclusion about the genetic makeup of these cultures is that the Gimbutas hypothesis has been confirmed, I think you don't understand a word about what's going on.
+ Reich and company, and other people, knew about the existence of J in Khavlynsk, so there was the turn regarding the origin of IE and place it south of the Caucasus, and in the process solve the problem of the Hittites and Mycenaeans (all of them J) looking for a more coherent genetic explanation to the expansion of IE.
Talking about mass migration today has become a joke that only the most ultrakurganist fans can accept. There is nothing more absurd than to think that with this variation of haplogroups in the steppes, the explosion of R1a and P312 in mainland europe can be related to massive population movements.
The elimination of Khvalynsk as a candidate to be the source of these migrations is an additional problem for the Kurgan theory because I hope nobody expects us to believe that there was a customs office in Hungary and that those who had a passport with Q or J did not could go to mainland Europe.
A few months ago some intelligent people realized that the fallacy of migrations from the Yamnaya culture could not be maintained for longer. Genetics has spoken, and unless a miracle occurs in the form of L51 the future of this lineage will be linked to Western Europe. Now Khvalynsk turns out to be a conglomerate of haplogroups (with R1a in minor francity in addition) that also has not been identified until 2,900 BC in Central Europe, had to remain without moving from the steppes for hundreds of years.
Regarding the CHG, I suppose that you will all have read Sikora, but it is also clear that the expansion of this ancestry from the South Caucasus had two directions, the first along Anatolia to Europe and the second to the north, the two linked to the male haplogroup J. at different historical moments and with different intensity.
The paper that we have commented recently on the tocharian is a clear example of scientific fudge with evidence of lack of knowledge, lack of dedication and lack of intelligence to draw correct conclusions. The same can be said of the papers of Haak (massive migrations) and Olalde (European BBs). They are authentic fudge with misused data to square theories that have proved absurd. The next thing will be to end the myth of the steppe ancestry, first called Yamnaya ancestr, and of course apologize.
Please Juan, have you thought we are idiots? When Q1a, or J has been found in the Neolithic or Chalcolithic of Central or Western Europe?. Can you cite a single case? You cannot mix the expansion of haplogroups at present with the hypothetical migration of any steppe culture such as khvalynsk Sredni Stog, Repin, Yamnaya etc. What happened to those J or Q1a men from Khvalynsk or Yamnaya? they simply had no offspring? did not have the passport in order ?, did not know how to ride a horse ?. Didn't they have a driving license? They were slaves of P312 and R1a-M417 they were uglier than the R1b and the R1a and the women ignored them. Come on man, you just have to look for other explanations, mass migrations are a tease.
ReplyDelete@JuanRivera
ReplyDelete"But, such extreme founder effects almost certainly didn't happen in steppe groups, nor anywhere else in the world that I know, so, that undercuts the argument above."
No,there are many known founder effects in word especially at pastoralist groups.
The best example is Yakuts. Approximately 90% of the Y DNA of modern Yakuts belongs to just one N1c subclade as a result of the genocide they suffered at the beginning of Mongol rule.
Also,about three-quarters of Kyrgyz men are R1a-Z93.
R1b-V88 in Hausas in West Africa,I2-din in Serbo-Croatian are other examples for bottlenecks.
Jenghis Khan cluster across the steppe. However it is not as old and far reaching as Yamnaya-kurgan cluster
ReplyDeleteR1b-z2109 utilized wagon technology perhaps modeling the 5000 ybp ydna Q wagon burial,different in design from Sumer wagon pictures. Also metallurgy and quite possible Du 2 horse connection from Hungary Yamna.
ReplyDeleteAt 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 a forager from Karelia, 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.
ReplyDeleteI still think there's something to the concept of "Ancient Central Eurasian" (ACE) discussed in the comments here earlier this year... http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2019/02/all-quiet-on-eastern-front.html
For one it helps explain why EHG and sometimes MA1 appear to have CHG but no Basal Eurasian -- because they have ACE admixture and not CHG proper, which is something like ACE mixed with Dzudzuana.
What is the ID of of the hg J Karelian and is he in the G25?
PIE and possible words for violence.
ReplyDeleteControl over the patch of land inhabited by the pre-Yamnaya and post Yamnaya was by combat. Probably violent one on one confrontation, sometimes to the death; for control of tribal/clan or women,resources/and the future male heirs. It looks like there was a mix of various ydna lines prior to the formation of Yamnaya with R1b-Z2109+Yamnaya-coming out as the clear winner.Many male ydna lines would have had a chance to compete/fight for dominance in such a scenario-much like the Beast R1a and its expansion into south Asia, or the Beast R1b expansion into western Europe.
Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-
European/h₁éḱwos[horse]males also battle for dominance-Alpha ranking.
"Kulanda 2008 argues that the PIE word is borrowed from North Caucasian, since there are no known Nostratic cognates; compare Kabardian шы (šə), Abkhaz аҽы (āčə), Avar чу (ču), Karata ичва (ičʷa, “mare”), Lezgi шив (šiv, “horse”) etc. (NCED 520"
"Bomhard connects it to Proto-Altaic *èk‘á (“to move quickly, to rage”) with the original meaning not “the swift one” but “the spirited, violent, fiery, or wild one”, both deriving from Proto-Nostratic root *ʔekʰ- “to move quickly, to rage; to be furious, raging, violent, spirited, fiery, wild”."
“Equus” is originally a PIE word. No external connections needed
Delete@JuanRivera would what you just posted about Villabruna and Yana explain why CHG has 35% ANE component in it?
ReplyDeleteWhat I don't understand is some various theories about Yana, CHG and Villabruna. When looking at the split between Y-DNA Haplogroups I, J and K we see that it had to have happened before Ust Ishim Man. And if there was some connection of Yana to a population West of the Urals it most probably was due to the Joint IJK genes which predates Yana by several thousands of years. We can not really disconnect R1b in Villabruna from Mal'ta and the Older Yana P1 and eventually Haplogroup K. And we can not look past the fact that Ust Ishim was already disconnected from I and J much earlier. How can R be closer to I than it was to K ? Doesn't make sense from a Y-DNA perspective...
ReplyDeleteBlogger zardos said...
ReplyDeleteCultural innovations are one thing, to apply them successfully in a big way another. Cultural contact can be enough for the transmission.
1.In terms of overall size, some of Cucuteni-Trypillia sites, such as Talianki (with a population of 15,000 and covering an area of some 450 hectares – 1100 acres) in the Uman district of Ukraine, are as large as (or perhaps even larger than) the more famous city-states of Sumer in the Fertile Crescent, and these Eastern European settlements predate the Sumerian cities by more than half of a millennium.
2.Among the Late Copper Age innovations, the appearance of the wheel and wheeled vehicles launched an
“industrial revolution”. Late Copper Age inventions and innovations precipitated other discoveries that have remained with us until the present. These innovations had a positive impact on the life of the period’s communities.
Better life circumstances led to rudimentary forms of wealth accumulation (wealth and prestige items) and social
differentiation became more visible as it was also embodied by these commodities. At first, wheeled vehicles were
the prerogative of the elite and only later did they become a genuine medium of communication and transportation.
Based on the distribution of wheeled vehicles and the prestige items appearing simultaneously, it would
appear that aside from Mesopotamia, developed communities with the necessary needs, economic position and
social receptiveness that were capable of coming up with new innovations and inventions or of integrating these
into their lives could be found in the southern Ukraine (late Tripolye culture), the Caucasus (Maikop culture) and
in Central Europe (Baden complex) in the mid-fourth millennium BC.
Its about the ethnicity which spread, not the origin of a cultural innovation. That can be the same, but must not.
If ethnicity and y chromosomes were the ultimate trump card with respect to the transmission of language then you would not be able to explain populations like the Basques and others. Transmission of a technology like bronze making would almost necessitate a 1 way transmission of language from teacher to student.
And I fail to see the complete package before the steppe derived ancestry comes into play.
See 2.
Anthony back in 2007 was advocating that the Late Khvalynsk born Yamnaya culture destroyed both the central pontic-caspian PIE cultures (i.e. the Evdik culture presented in the Kosntantinovka kurgan which was the manifestation of Maykop amalgamated PIE) and replaced all the western PIE too (i.e. the Usatovo, Kemi Oba, Late Sredni Stog etc.) which were influenced by the Proto-farmers or the descendants of Mesolithic Europeans.
ReplyDeleteHe wrote that this is how the formal PIE spread to all areas (excluding Anatolia). He wrote these things in his book "the Horse, the Wheel and Language".
Why does he now appears of having second thoughts?
Is it because he has any info that we still do not know?
I dunno but it is strange to read this opinion from Anthony!
I’m curious if the early Sredny Stog spoke a forager Mesolithic or a Farmer Neolithic language.
DeleteCertain specific fauna/domesticated cows/horses traction and or food- flora/trees/hardwood-softwood lumber required for the evolution of Yamnaya culture specific wagon construction-for example Middle Eastern language did not have word for wheel while /Sumer would have to source the required tree/wood types-pictorially different from Yamnaya constructed carts. This probably required and evolution in tools to cut/groove out joints;evolving from stone/flint to copper/bronze[trading network sources] to iron[(1538 °C, 2800 °F)]and required special knowledg of ores and or woods for heat, found in specific steppe areas[Kargaly kurgans] Yamnaya/Afansievo-[eastern metallurgy North western China].These were combined to create a culture that was the first to take advantage of converting steppe grasslands into calorie energy, and starbursts from Hungary to Western China- in dominant male lineage.
ReplyDeleteTechnology (and associated wanderworts) moves faster than culture. Culture moves faster than genes. Genes move faster than entire languages. Without realizing it, even experts fall into the trap of thinking that some cultural or genetic marker found in populations must mean languages came along together. Not always, but it can seem that way because languages get a chance to catch up. Compounding this difficulty is the a very pervasive need to connect Semitic beliefs with IE origin, whether with the garden of Eden or the landing site of Noah's ark, that the IE (or "Aryan") people somehow originated from Anatolia or south of the Caucasus and hence making them special. Luckily, this is now mostly only found among the less academically inclined, but it seems to echo beyond them as well.
ReplyDeleteQuotation of David Reich's book(Who We Are and How We Got Here) which is relevant to this subject:
ReplyDelete"From seven thousand until five thousand years ago, we observed a steady influx into the steppe of a population whose ancestors traced their origin to the south—as it bore genetic affinity to ancient and present-day people of Armenia and Iran—eventually
crystallizing in the Yamnaya, who were about a one-to-one ratio of ancestry from these two sources. A good guess is that the migration proceeded via the Caucasus isthmus between the Black and Caspian seas."
"The evidence that people of the Maikop culture or the people who proceeded them in the Caucasus made a genetic contribution to the Yamnaya is not surprising in light of the cultural influence the Maikop had on the Yamnaya. Not only did the Maikop pass on to the Yamnaya their technology of carts, but they were also the first to build the kurgans that characterized the steppe cultures for thousands of years afterward. The penetration of Maikop lands by Iranian-and Armenian-related ancestry from the south is also plausible in light of studies showing that Maikop goods were heavily influenced by elements of the Uruk civilization of Mesopotamia to the south, which was poor in metal resources and engaged in trade and exchange with the north as reflected in Uruk goods found in settlements of the northern Caucasus. Whatever cultural process allowed the people from the south to have such a demographic impact, once the Yamnaya formed, their descendants expanded in all directions."
"Wagons using wheels may have been adopted by the Yamnaya from their neighbors to the south: the Maikop culture in the Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas."
Conclusion is that the Southern populations(from Mesopotamia, Caucasus, Iran) started penetrating into the Steppe regions from the 6th millennium BCE(From Eneolithic until the Chalcolithic). These people brought their Kurgan culture into the native people of the Steppe. They spoke the language of the Sumerians, and the natives of the Steppe spoke the PIE language.
To define these Southern people:
-J found in the Khvalynsk culture is very important showing the cultural movement of the Southern people into the Steppe regions. Not to forget the Karelian(I0221) J result(6850-5000 BCE).
-David Anthony wrote about the Steppe ancestry of the Varna golden man(grave 43, 4683–4406 BCE). This individual belonged to T-M184.
-The Areni-1(Southern Caucasus, Proto Kura Araxes) individuals(I1407, I1632, I1634) from 4000 BCE(4300-3700 BCE) (The genetic structure of the world’s first farmers), with L1a, also had a lot of steppe ancestry.
-Among 3 or 4 Maykop individuals(of study The genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus) L-L595 was found.
-Steppe Maykop individual IV3002.A0101 had T-L206.
-Chalcolithic individuals from Peqi'in(4500–3900/3800 BCE), with T1a, was mentioned to have originated from Northern Mesopotamia.
-Maykop individual I6272 (3696-3000 BC) had G-PF3147. Two individuals(ARM002.A0101, ARM003.A0101, 3631-3030 BCE) from the Kura Araxes had G-FGC2964.
All the above data show the cultural movement of the Southern people into the Steppe regions, the mixing between the natives of the Steppe and people from the South, the direction and the starting point of the cultural transmission.
Maykop bad luck in cultural transmission. I concede no Maykop kurgans on the steppe with Maykop ydna lines. I also concede no settlements or signs of a expansion on the steppe that left any impact. I can also concede the bad luck in transferring basic pottery skills to YamNaya,a much easier skill than metallurgy.
ReplyDeleteSo Bug-Dniester or Dnieper-Donets spoke a para-PIE language? And then they got replaced by Sredny Stog II?
ReplyDelete@Suyindik
ReplyDeleteA population like Yamnaya already lived on the steppe before Maykop and before Meshoko, and maybe already during the Mesolithic.
You can read about it here...
Yamnaya isn't from Iran just like R1a isn't from India
And you'll have to accept it sooner or later.
Actually, I made a bit of a slip up in my post, because there are now two instances of Y-haplogroup J in Mesolithic foragers from Eastern Europe, one each from Karelia and Popovo.
ReplyDelete@JuanRivera “...and that it wasn't present before the BA.”
ReplyDeletePC Steppe IS in Europe. Eastern Europe.
Isotope values; Maykop cultural transmission versus Maykop colonization. @11:12
ReplyDeleteWhy give and or share with a competing steppe culture[Yamnaya] the tools[metallurgy] to possibly stop your own culture from expansion/colonization?
Excellent lecture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0aFqzKTBp8
European guns and horses.
ReplyDeleteHorse domestication on the steppe is an interesting subject, when compared to animals such as zebra.
Gun powder is also interesting, looks like it had nothing to do with Maykop or Yamnaya.
Iron-would be nice to see the genetic results of the graves associated with iron like Utyevka cemetery 4800-4500 YBP 1 kurgan 1 grave 1 copper pin with iron head and Catacombe 4500YBP+/- Gerasimovka on the Donets, arsenical bronze handle and iron blade.
@a
ReplyDeleteGun powder is also interesting, looks like it had nothing to do with Maykop or Yamnaya.
No shit. Awesome discovery there.
There’s no Q1a in SHG; just one in Zvejnieki
ReplyDelete@Davidski-"A population like Yamnaya already lived on the steppe before Maykop and before Meshoko, and maybe already during the Mesolithic."
ReplyDeleteI did not mention the contrary of this in my comments in here.
Genetically Pre Neolithic Europe and the Steppe Regions consisted of haplogroups C1a, I, Q and R1. The majority of Bronze Age Yamnaya genetics also consists of this genetic structure. There is a genetic continuity in here on the paternal side. But there is no cultural(archaeologically) continuity in here. And there is mixing with the penetrating Southern Groups since the 6th millennium BCE(until the end of the Chalcolithic), the J found in the Khvalynsk is an important discovery of this. The penetrating Southern Groups(From Mesopotamia, Caucasus and Iran), who consisted of haplogroups G, J, L and T brought their Kurgan culture and replaced the native cultures of the Pre Neolithic Steppe. But the next misunderstood point is that accepting a cultural package doesnt mean that the native language does have to change. I believe that the Pre Neolithic Europe and the Steppe Regions spoke a PIE language. But, the Pre Neolithic Mesopotamia, Caucasus and Iran Regions spoke a Proto Sumerian language. These are two different languages. The Southern groups may have linguistically effected(assimilated) a minor group in the Steppe, and these could be related to a part of the medieval Huns and Turkish tribes whom consisted of a mix between Steppe and Southern genetic structure, but the majority of them(Steppe groups) took the new culture, preserved their old PIE language and formed the groups like the Celts in the Iron Age / Bronze Age in Central Europe.
@Suyindik
ReplyDeleteThe penetrating Southern Groups(From Mesopotamia, Caucasus and Iran), who consisted of haplogroups G, J, L and T brought their Kurgan culture and replaced the native cultures of the Pre Neolithic Steppe.
Are you on drugs or something?
There's no G, J, L or T in any of the steppe populations commonly associated with the proto-Indo-European expansions.
So who got replaced? Why did R1a-M417 spread with Corded Ware and Sintashta? Why did Yamnaya males belong to R1b-Z2103? Where are the foreign haplogroups that you're seeing?
Can you point out the specific samples? List them here.
"If ethnicity and y chromosomes were the ultimate trump card with respect to the transmission of language then you would not be able to explain populations like the Basques and others. Transmission of a technology like bronze making would almost necessitate a 1 way transmission of language from teacher to student."
ReplyDeleteIt just means part of the BBC was not IE. I don't know how this happened, but as in earlier posts, there are 3 options:
1. Not all Yamnaya related groups moving West were IE speakers from the start.
2. A Yamnaya group was hijacked by a local lineage before reaching Iberia
3. A steppe influenced Beaker group was in Iberia or North of it assimilated by the original BB culture and adopted its language.
Regardless of how it happened, the BBs speaking a different language differed in more than their speach, so its again an ethnic difference.
Ethnicity in material culture is more closely related to style and tradition, rather than technological innovation. Just because two groups adopted metal working, doesn't mean that they were the same otherwise. Therefore its indeed the complete package defining the classic IE expansion. And this package was born on the steppe, carried on by the IE ethnicity, possibly by others too - as in later times with Turkic and Mongol people adopting large part of it.
@Davidski
ReplyDeleteYou get aggressive when you get into a discussion which you know you were wrong about. I thought you were different then those provocative trolling admins at Anthrogenica, these guys dont care about the truth, when it doesnt fit their agenda, they start cursing or banning the person they are discussing with... This is not related to any kind of a civilized scientific discussion!
As to your reaction, there is now proven evidence of J in the Khvalynsk population, this individual has Steppe ancestry and CHG ancestry, what does this mean to you if you think about it impartially? There is a T found among the Steppe Maykop individuals(the outlier). And all of the Maykop individuals were G2, J and L. And like mentioned in my previous comment, looking at the Varna culture individuals, you can see G2, T and R1b. David Anthony is speaking about Steppe ancestry among the golden Varna man. And not to forget the Chalcolithic Areni-1 individuals with L1a, which had also Steppe ancestry.
It means that populations from the Southern Regions (Mesopotamia, Caucasus and Iran) penetrated the Steppe Regions since the 6th millennium BCE, and mixed with the natives of there. Archaeologically it is a fact that there is a big change in the culture of the Steppe Groups beginning in the late 5th millennium BCE. It means that the existing Pre Neolithic Steppe cultures are replaced by the culture of the penetrating Southern groups (cultural replacement is not equal to a genetic full replacement).
I am not talking about the later Bronze Age / Iron Age movements, my point is about the cultural package coming from the mentioned Southern regions into the Steppe from the Eneolithic until the Chalcolithic.
In my earlier post I gave the list of ancient individuals with the penetrating G, J, L, T results. They did not replace the already existing natives of the Steppe genetically, and they were minority in the Steppe. It is just a transmission of a cultural package, and during this transmission period a minor amount of mixing happened. The groups that didnt mix and didnt got assimilated linguistically formed the Yamnaya and created the cultures like Corded Ware in Central Europe(related to PIE). But even with this subject, how many Yamnaya groups from how many regions were tested until now? Maybe in the future we will find a specific group of Bronze Age Yamnaya individuals, which has majority of Southern paternal haplogroups, just like the 2 distinct groups within the Bell Beakers(Iberian and Central European groups)? Even if this is not found the Maykop and Steppe Maykop individuals show enough evidence of the direction of the cultural movement. And we should not forget that the language of Pre Neolithic Mesopotamia(which was spread in later periods into Iran, BMAC regions and the Caucasus) was Proto Sumerian, and is not related to PIE. PIE was the language of the Pre Neolithic natives of the Steppe, and this fact will not change.
Davidski said...
ReplyDelete@a
Gun powder is also interesting, looks like it had nothing to do with Maykop or Yamnaya.
"No shit. Awesome discovery there."
Yes thank you, I will concede that point, with special emphasis on Maykop.
I also will acknowledge that if there were a direct line of useful inventions combining copper and the the evolution of the flint to copper adze[a useful tool for carpentry either wagon[mobile no settlements-Yamnaya culture] and or Maikop culture- structure/settlements- it might show up in R1b-V1636.
1]R1b-V1636-Kura-Araxes culture: Armenia_EBA I1635 was not into using a copper adze to make wagons for a kurgan type burial.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/12/r-v1636-eneolithic-steppe-kura-araxes.html
2]R1b-V1636-Khvalynsk culture 10122 / SVP35 (grave 12)was an elite male burial with 80% of the copper objects in the combined cemeteries of Khvalynsk I and II.
3]R1b-V1636-Progress 2-PG 2001 - in Russia and
the closest R1b-V1636 kurgan burial sample[in terms of location] , to SA-6004 a wagon burial with ydna Q1a2. Buried with a flint blade, flint adze, flint projectile.
@Suyindik said...
ReplyDeleteAs to your reaction, there is now proven evidence of J in the Khvalynsk population, this individual has Steppe ancestry and CHG ancestry, what does this mean to you if you think about it impartially?
It means to me that most of the Y-haplogroups found in Eastern European hunter-gatherers were also found in the Khvalynsk population, namely R1b, R1a, Q1a, I2 and J.
Can you prove that the J in the Khvalynsk sample isn't a subclade native to Eastern Europe like those from Mesolithic Karelia and Popovo?
There is a T found among the Steppe Maykop individuals(the outlier). And all of the Maykop individuals were G2, J and L. And like mentioned in my previous comment, looking at the Varna culture individuals, you can see G2, T and R1b. David Anthony is speaking about Steppe ancestry among the golden Varna man. And not to forget the Chalcolithic Areni-1 individuals with L1a, which had also Steppe ancestry.
You sound totally f*cking crazy.
Steppe Maykop was completely replaced by Yamnaya, so it makes no difference what haplogroups it had.
Maykop wasn't located on the steppe.
Varna wasn't located on the steppe.
Areni-1 wasn't located on the steppe.
@Davidski-"It means to me that most of the Y-haplogroups found in Eastern European hunter-gatherers were also found in the Khvalynsk population, namely R1b, R1a, Q1a, I2 and J."
ReplyDeleteTo list a couple of Pre Neolithic Steppe individuals:
-I1734: R1b, 7252 BCE, Ukraine
-I1819: R1a, 8693 BCE, Ukraine
-I5876: R1a, 6872 BCE, Ukraine
The culture of these individuals are 0% related to the cultural package that started replacing the culture in the Steppe from the late 5th millennium BCE. And there is no G, J, L, T found in the Steppe around this time period. Like David Reich mentions in his book, Southern groups start penetrating into the Steppe (together with their cultural package) since the 6th millennium BCE.
@Davidski-"Can you prove that the J in the Khvalynsk sample isn't a subclade native to Eastern Europe like those from Mesolithic Karelia and Popovo?"
-Khvalynsk culture dating range: 4700–3800 BCE.
-Individual I0211 from Karelia: 5500-5000 BCE.
-Individual Popovo2 from Karelia: 7500–5000 BCE
It means they are all dated around the late 6th millennium BCE. And the Khvalynsk individuals had CHG ancestry up to 50%. This means that these individuals were coming from different populations from Southern regions.
I repeat the quotation from David Reich:
"From seven thousand until five thousand years ago, we observed a steady influx into the steppe of a population whose ancestors traced their origin to the south—as it bore genetic affinity to ancient and present-day people of Armenia and Iran—eventually
crystallizing in the Yamnaya, who were about a one-to-one ratio of ancestry from these two sources. A good guess is that the migration proceeded via the Caucasus isthmus between the Black and Caspian seas.".
He is talking about a penetration of Southern populations from 5000 BCE until 3000 BCE. The earliest finding of J in the Steppe is dated to around 5000 BCE (also remember the other examples i described of G, L, T). This is all proving the above made point of David Reich. But, one important addition would be that the language of these Southern people is not PIE.
Like written in the paper of David Anthony, the individuals of the Varna and Areni-1 cultures had a lot of Steppe ancestry. How did they got this ancestry? It is because of the movement into the Steppe and the mixing with the Steppe natives since the 6th millennium BCE of these Southern populations. And I didnt wrote that Maykop was located on the Steppe... The culture of Steppe Maykop and Maykop is the same, but the cultural package originates and comes from the Southern direction, arriving into the Steppe and replacing the (Pre) Neolithic cultures in the Steppe.
I'm somewhat skeptical of that Sredny Stog Alexandria sample being Z93, as that subclade's origin is 3000 BC, a thousand years after the sample was dated. Heck, Z645 is only 400 years older. Either the dating is wrong on the sample or the subclade, or the decision on giving him the Z93 was overly enthusiastic.
ReplyDelete@Suyindik how do you know if these Southern migrants spoke PIE or not?
ReplyDeleteYou’re also wrong completely about the identity of the migrants as “Proto-Sumerians”. First, Haplogroup T Ydna is of Neolithic Anatolians and not Iran or Mesopotamia. Second, this whole Uruk expansion turned out to not impact Caucasus population as there was a direct transition from Darkveti Meshoko to Sioni and Shuvaleri Shomu to KA. And also, Sumerians were intrusive to the Middle East whereas Elamites were Iran_N (Dzudzuana + ANE)
ReplyDeleteOne thing on reflection that was weaker from Wang's paper was that it was quite poor in clearly delineating where the samples and sites were in relation to the horizon of Maykop Culture.
ReplyDeleteUsing the definition from their fig depicting the Maykop Culture vs "Late Maykop Sphere of Influence" and trying to adhere as close to the frontiers they provide - https://imgur.com/a/Ec4Go2A
The "Steppe Maykop" sites and samples are generally quite closer to the northeastern frontier of the Maykop, and there's of course some minor trend where samples closer to the Maykop core tended to be admixed with the Maykop proper while the others tended to form a uniform clade between Piedmont_En+West Siberia.
(This northeast frontier is fairly near to the Caspian Depression site of Kair Shak which Anthony argues is associated with entry of CHG ancestry to Khvalynsk cemeteries. Without samples from this area, it will be very difficult to see if there is any truth to this, or the people at those hunter's camps were more like Steppe Maykop.)
Again we really need samples from what they term "the Late Maykop Sphere of Influence" to really understand whether this sphere of influence (culturally profound in Anthony's conclusion) was accompanied by actual admixture.
This southeast of this zone where Maykop culture and Don Steppe Repin interacted could have been a good place for Yamnaya_Ukraine_Ozera female (intermediate between to be from, at about the same time as the Yamnaya_Samara, Yamnaya_Ukraine_Shevchenko, Yamnaya_Kalmykia. Yamnaya_Ukraine_Ozera is within the "zone of influence". May make sense for her to be from a region closer, rather than further away; nothing about her burial suggests a long range high status migration.
(And was there, as phys anth seems to suggest, a migration from the northern parts or fringe of this influence zone ("the Don steppes to the southwest", accompanied by Repin ceramics) into the Volga-Ural region to form the core Yamnaya?).
@Andrzejewski
ReplyDeleteHardly any comparison's have been done[if any] between construction type/materials used -between European[ Bronocice pot-3635–3370 BC],, Sumerian, Maykop, and Steppe wheels/wagons.
http://www.pittwateronlinenews.com/resources/800px-Ur_chariot.jpg?timestamp=1338644542177
Sumerian=language isolate not connected to proto-Afro-Asiatc and or Semitic.
Proto-Afro-Asiatic>Akkadian word for wheel, compared to Sumerian?
@Andrzejewski-"how do you know if these Southern migrants spoke PIE or not?"
ReplyDeleteThe Maykop and earlier cultural package that penetrated into the Steppe during the Eneolithic/Chalcolithic period has its origins in Pre Neolithic Mesopotamia. This of course doesnt mean that this original cultural package is directly related with Pre Neolithic Caucasus and Pre Neolithic Iran. But as it is obviously seen from the archaeological findings, since the Neolithic Period, there is a movement of native Mesopotamian culture into the Caucasus, Iran and the BMAC regions. In the Caucasus, this spreading can be seen from Shulaveri-Shomu and Leyle-Tepe cultures. In Iran it can be seen from sites like Se Girdan. In BMAC it can be seen from sites like Tepe Hissar. (And then after these initial spreading, the West Asian groups mixed with each other and made migrations into the Steppe regions during the Eneolithic/Chalcolithic periods.)
But in the Pre Neolithic period its quite possible that even the natives of Caucasus, Iran and Mesopotamia could have different paternal genetics.
David Reich describes in his book this situation as following:
"The high differentiation of human populations in the Near East ten thousand years ago was a specific instance of a broader pattern across the vast region of West Eurasia, documented by Iosif Lazaridis, who led the analysis. Analyzing our data, he found that 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."
But what is important in our case is the language spoken in Neolithic and Pre Neolithic Mesoptamia. This is certainly not PIE, the language spoken in this region at that time was Proto Sumerian. The Sumerian language was a native Mesopotamian language, it is not brought by the Sumerians into the region, it was already present during the Ubaid, Halaf, Hassuna, Jarmo periods. It was very developed at the time of Sumerians, showing that it was already settled in the region thousands of years ago. Also, the Sumerians were probably a group from the BMAC culture. The BMAC people were actually people originating from the above mentioned West Asian regions whom migrated into Central Asian regions.
Haplogroup T was not found among the Neolithic individuals from Western Turkey whom were tested until now. This means that this haplogroup probably has its origin in Neolithic / Pre Neolithic Eastern Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia.
Quotations from Harney. et. al. 2018 about the Peqi'in Cave individuals with T:
"One hypothesis is that the Chalcolithic culture in the region was spread in part by immigrants from the north (i.e., northern Mesopotamia), based on similarities in artistic designs."
"It has been suggested that some Late Chalcolithic burial customs, artifacts and motifs may have had their origin in earlier Neolithic traditions in Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. Some of the artistic expressions have been related to finds and ideas and to later religious concepts such as the gods Inanna and Dumuzi from these more northern regions. The knowledge and resources required to produce metallurgical artifacts in the Levant have also been hypothesized to come from the north."
@Suyindik Sumerians replaced the Halafians, Ubaidians and other groups. They may have admixed with them but they spoke a language isolate. The former groups may have spoken Natufian related/Semitic languages.
DeleteElamites are Iran_Neolithic and they were created by infusion of ANE into a Dzudzuana-like population, which is the defining characteristic distinguishing Anatolian Farmers from Iran or CHG.
Elamites therefore either spoke a Dzudzuana related language related to Anatolian Farmers (and LBK) or ANE one’s.
Haplogroup T ydna was common among LBK and other European Neolithic groups, stemming from Anatolians.
And if you wanna know what language the Anatolian Farmers spoke, look at the 40% of the Greek language which is non-IE. There was a paper a few years ago that found out that agricultural terms were similar throughout Europe and had the bearing of an Aegean origin. They therefore concluded that LBK, Rössen, TRB, GAC and other farming societies spoke a Lemnian/Tyresnian/Pelasgian language(s).
I0434 is Q1a, but I wouldn't really term him "outlier" as such. The three Khvalynsk samples all have different positions on the EHG->CHG cline. I0433->I0122->I0434. I0222 is almost at the midpoint of I0434 and I0433. It's not like there was a stable population and I0434 is an outlier or something.
ReplyDelete(I0122 was R1b and I0433 was R1a).
E.g Plots: https://imgur.com/a/qg0NFS9
"Gunpowder"
ReplyDelete???
@Davidski
Which study is the Popovo forager discussed in?
@Bob Floy: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02825-9
ReplyDelete@rozenfag “Similar to other European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, our Baltic foragers carry a high frequency of the derived HERC2 allele which codes for light iris colour, and like SHG and EHG they already possess an increased frequency of the derived alleles for SLC45A2 and SLC24A5, coding for lighter skin colour (Supplementary Table 6). The male individuals carry Y-chromosomal I and R1...”
DeleteSo EHG ancestors of Yamnaya DID have a light skin and blue eyes already...
What makes this article such a massive piece of progress is that it acknowledges - with solid arguments - what we all saw before. Wang et al killed any south of the Caucasus Urheimat hypothesis.
ReplyDeleteEDIT: removed pedantic remark.
What people don't seem to be able to face, however, is that it is now almost certain that Yamnaya was not I.E.
ReplyDeleteLet's examine the ''Yamnaya clan''/ M269 impacts
- Afansievo - extinct
- Catacomb- some dispersion & assimilation into other cultures (e.g. Haji Firuz), before it got replaced by North Caucasian speakers (which have nothing to do with Majkop, was Anthony wrongly claims), but during new, LBA arrivals
- Yamnaya west - BB -> Atlantic / Vasconic Europe
Im sure northern Italy, will seal the deal.
I’m waiting for @Drago to announce HIS PIE theory. So far we have heard NONE
ReplyDeleteWell, I for one, no longer have a PIE homeland theory.
ReplyDeleteI'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'm waiting for more data points and more tangible clues so I can figure it out for myself.
But you are still inclined towards a Steppe homeland, right?
Delete@Rozenfag
ReplyDeleteThanks.
@Davidski
ReplyDeleteI still haven't completely given up on the indo-Hittite idea.
@Bob Floy Not a Reich-style South Caspian one, I hope :)
Delete@ Andre
ReplyDelete''I’m waiting for @Drago to announce HIS PIE theory. So far we have heard NONE''
Can I do it in the form of interpretive dance ?
No. You criticize everyone else’s hypothesis so I want to know what @Drago thinks when it comes to the origins and roots of PIE
ReplyDelete@Drago
ReplyDelete"Can I do it in the form of interpretive dance ?"
I'm a musician and would be happy to compose something specially for that, just let me know.
You guys are going to make my life difficult if you keep getting personal like this. Please stick to discussing the data and science.
ReplyDelete@Andre
ReplyDelete"But you are still inclined towards a Steppe homeland, right? "
It's complicated. Imagine that!
@Davidski
ReplyDeleteThat is interesting. Can you elaborate on some of the issues you have with some scenario's?
@Drago
ReplyDeleteSteppe BB didn't originally speak Vasconic. I know toponyms aren't a very reliable source, but it's all we have and they do not point to that.
@epoch
ReplyDeleteI'm personally inclined to think that certain BB groups began speaking Vasconic through contact with farmers, rather than it originating on the steppe, but there's no way that Vasconic-from-the-steppe can be ruled out using toponyms.
@epoch
ReplyDeleteThat is interesting. Can you elaborate on some of the issues you have with some scenarios?
Well, the least plausible, and indeed basically now redundant are the Anatolian and Armenian theories.
But there are also several lose ends in regards to the steppe homeland theory, such as the lack of corroboration from aDNA for the steppe origins of the Hittites and Tocharians, and the strange situation in Iron Age Iberia, where the first instance of a non-R1b Y-hg in the post Beaker period shows up in...attested Indo-Europeans.
All of this can be rationally explained of course, but what happens next will be very important. Either these anomalies are made redundant by new data, or they're not, and instead we see many more such anomalies, which I think would be a problem. So let's wait and see.
The distribution of Ash Trees (Fraxinus excelsior) is interesting. They are found all the way as far as the Lower Don River, just as the European Crab Apple. Wonder which kind of Oak were used for the Axles of the first Wheels ?
ReplyDeleteInteresting is the Gap between the Don, Volga and the Caucasus when it comes to the distribution of Ash Trees. Basically non-existant East of the Volga...
ReplyDelete@Bob Floy & Drago
ReplyDeleteYes, no etymology can be considered anything more than a slight circumstantial evidence and the possibility exists for all etymologies of all toponyms is that something completely unknown was at play. But there are a number of reconstructions of river names both in Iberia and outside Iberia in areas that spoke Celtic later on that point to pre-Celtic Indo-European names. The former can be found here:
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=4087416
The latter is the river Meuse, that can be reconstructed to have a a PIE root derived from a word for "maze", and that shows sound shifts typical for Germanic language in the Dutch name and shifts typical of Celtic language in the French name.
Lastly, I tend to think that the language diversity in Iberia actually is evidence against BB bringing Vasconic languages.
None of this is near conclusive evidence and I think there very well may never be any conclusive evidence. But I interpret it this way: The steppe hypothesis has certainly not been served a blow by the Olalde paper.
Basques are closest to what one may consider a direct, unbroken link to Bell Beakers.
ReplyDeleteThey are/were closest physically even. They are BB descendents.
Now look at the rest of France in comparison and both genetics and physical traits formed a Celtic and Germanic influenced Northern and a more Neolithic, Greek and Roman South.
Basques deviate strongly from both of these IE speakers while being closest to BB with one of the highest R1b frequencies in the world.
I really doubt that this is a mere coincidence, actually it would be completely illogical to assume that.
So we have to consider the simple fact that what defined later, attested IE speakers genetically and physically, was introduced to the West later and was different from BB. As we can see from France the Vasconic sphere of stronger influence extended further North.
Now this could all be because one branch of steppe BB was hijacked or converted by another group of people in the West. But right now that BB were no IE speakers is somewhat more likely.
Really important is to find out were exactly CWC came up and how the transition from CWC and BBC to Unetice took place imho.
But even later transitions must be examined, because any change could indicate a significant expansion of a different people.
Italy is really big and I want to know which exact haplogroups were present in Italic speakers.
There is no reason to assume all steppe derived groups spoke IE. It may well have been only the direct ancestors of CW did.
The distribution of Wych and Field Elm is also interesting. Basically people West of the Middle Volga to Lower Don had all of of the Types of Trees needed to build Wheels and Axles. Yes the Caucasus had it to, but there is interesting gaps between the Don and Caucasus related to some species used for Wheel and Axle construction...
ReplyDeleteI think the questions should be, How practical was wheels in a mountainous environment ? We see for example in South Africa during the pionering years that the back Wheels of wagons had to be taken of the Ox Wagons when the pioneers had to descend down steep declines otherwise the wagons ran the risk of running away...etc. Time consuming business, plus the added necessity of Big oxen or horses to pull the wagon up a steep incline.
So I personally think that the West to East spread of the Wheel along the Plains makes more sense than some migration through or originating in the Caucasus...
@epoch
ReplyDelete"I tend to think that the language diversity in Iberia actually is evidence against BB bringing Vasconic languages."
How so?
@Zardos
ReplyDelete"There is no reason to assume all steppe derived groups spoke IE. It may well have been only the direct ancestors of CW did."
I think this, more and more. Yamnaya and Co.(including it's predecessors) look less and less like a culture that spoke only one language, and that was never really a reasonable assumption anyway.
I think the Basque question will be answered when we unravelled the interaction of people along and across the Middle to Upper Rhine and Rhone Rivers during the Early Bronze Age...
ReplyDelete@Bob Floy
ReplyDeleteBasque has a clear relationship to the old Aquitanian language. However, only the Basque numbering system has been clearly identified in the old Iberian language. No other cognates have been identified. Yet a number of similarities have been found, enough to consider the possibility both languages are connected. Tartessian is even harder to connect to Basque, maybe not at all.
In my opinion that means that by, say, a few centuries before Christ you either had three or two different language families in Iberia, or these three were diversified enough to be tough to connect. Do take in mind that there is no issue connecting Aquitanian to Basque, so this cannot be due to particularities of the limited dataset or time depth.
Now, if these languages were diversified from a common language brought by steppe BB, that diversification would have happened in a pretty short time, maybe too short to be feasible. And if one of these non-IE language wasn't brought by steppe BB it must have been picked up by steppe BB. If that indeed is the case, then why not consider all three as picked up steppe BB?
Rick since wheels are found in Tochaian and Sanskrit vocabulary. What is the oldest dated R1a wheeled sample?
ReplyDeleteThere's R1a in Steppe Maykop actually...
ReplyDeleteSA6013.B0101 Sharakhalsun 6 Steppe Maykop outlier R-M459
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wkLjTA856nW6On8Q10U-WrhyTBWlwCVdK6AMQFCfIaw/edit?usp=sharing
I'm starting to find this debate silly. The debate ended 2 years ago. Don't forget Yamnaya, Corded Ware, Bell Beaker all descend from the same recent common ancestor on the Eneolithic Steppe. They aren't as distinct as they might seem. It's obvious this ancestor they all descended from were the proto-Indo Europeans.
ReplyDeleteCorded Ware & R1a M417 in general for sure spoke IE. Because...
-Baltic Corded Ware were the proto-Balto Slavs.
-Andronovo were the proto-Indo Iranians.
What about other IE languages? Well, ancient Myceneans (early Greeks) had Steppe admix. It is fair to say that's where their Indo European language came from.
Bell beaker descendants invaded Italy during the Bronze age. Later, we see many Iron age Italians spoke Indo European languages.
I don't dispute that Basque language existed in Spain before Celtic did. Celtic is an Iron age language. But, this does not mean that pre-Iron age languages of France & British Isles were non-Indo European.
Neolithic survival in Iron age Spain was very high as it was in Iron age Italy. This can easily explain the existence of non-IE languages in Spain, Italy.
Is anyone supposing Celtic derives from R1a M417 Corded Ware? If so where's the R1a in western Europe? 100% of the first Y DNA from Celtic France is all R1b. The first Celtic Y DNA from central Europe is also R1b. Whoever, the proto-Celts were they were certainly descendants of Bell beaker. This nicely explains the relationship between Italic & Celtic.
How does one explain that Corded Ware spoke Indo European but Yamnaya did not.
ReplyDeleteHere's the only option....
-Corded Ware adopted IE language from farmers in northern or eastern Europe.That doesn't sound likely.
There's no sign in DNA that Corded Ware admixed with Balkan farmers. Corded Ware's farmer ancestry is akin to Globular Amphora.
Samuel Andrews. As far as I know there has never been a list of PIE words matched with dated R1a R1b grave goods. For example wagon chariot silver wheel wheat/grain horse etc etc.....
ReplyDelete@Andrzejewski
ReplyDeleteSumerians were probably coming from Western Central Asia regions, these are the people from the BMAC culture. The origin of the BMAC culture itself lies within earlier Mesopotamia and neighbouring regions. So, it is probable that the Halaf, Ubaid people will show the same genetic structure as the Sumerians. As to the language, the Sumerian language is so developed at the time of their arrival that it cant be a newly introduced language. In fact, you can see the archaic forms of the Sumerian letters among the archaeological findings(seals, stamps, etc.) of the Halaf, Ubaid and earlier cultures from Mesopotamia. These seals, stamps are the fundamentals of the alphabets like the Sumerian, Etruscan alphabets.
As for the language spoken in the Natufian culture, Harney et al 2018 clearly makes a distinction between the origins(genetic and archaeologically) of Pre Neolithic Northern Mesopotamia and Pre Neolithic Levant. It means that the language spoken in (Pre) Neolithic Northern Mesopotamia is not related to Semitic/Akkadian.
Yes, I know T is found among the Early Neolithic individuals of the Starčevo–Körös–Criş culture(Bulgaria) and LBK(Germany). But among the so many Neolithic Western Turkey individuals, T was not found until now. This means probably that the hotspot of T was in Eastern Turkey(Eastern Anatolia) which is located in the borders of the geography of Northern Mesopotamia. During the formation of the Early Farmers, individuals with T mixed mostly with the individuals with G2, H, J(from Western Turkey) and made migrations into Eastern and Western Europe.
I agree with the Lemnian/Tyresnian/Pelasgian language(agglutinative, not PIE) of Early Farmers.
CWC might have grown out of steppe related people which shared a common ancestry to a certain degree but were differentiated through different lineages, customs and of course language.
ReplyDeleteRarely if ever the steppe and its vicinity were inhabitated by just one group of people.
R1b has a lot of different subclades of which just some are common along the Atlantic coastline.
R1b is to diverse to state all of the modern subclades must be of the same people from early Bronze Age.
Typical Celts had not just the BB heritage, but also different R1b and I variants in particular. So when and how did they come in?
But yes, its possible just one branch of BB was converted, not the rest, but is this more likely?
But so far even the exact origin of the BB lineages before their expansion in the west is still a mystery.
@ a
ReplyDeleteWhy do you think Chariot should be a shared PIE word ? Chariots and spoked wheels only became relevant after during and after the Sintashta period...and why should any of those things necessarily be found within graves ?
@ Samuel Andrews
ReplyDeleteYes I agree. I also can not see how Globular Amphora could have transfered their Language fully onto the Steppe Yamnaya related people. No real boundaries, population density or technological superiority that could keep Steppe Yamnaya related people at bay...
Rick. Even though some grave sites were pillaged by scavengers. A complete detailed list of grave goods with accompany ydna and autosomal + date would be extremely useful IMO. You could compare the evolution of wheeled carts from the type of wood to the type of lightweight construction to the metallurgy used for tools and weapons. Chariots are found in San skirt along with wagons. Horse and oxen or dog DNA from grave goods like Xiaohe wheat might give a clue when where Tocharians derived their language. It would be a ambitious project with a lot of detail but might be informative for different categories within R1a R1b evolution languages
ReplyDelete@ a
DeleteOo okay. Yes that seems reasonable, however like many Bell Beaker Graves they found Wristgaurds without Bows and people could jump prematurely to the wrong conclusions...But yes, things like Type of Wood used etc. could potentially point to a specific region...
If Hallstatt upper class, proven Celtic warriors and Italic speakers are all R1b with little else, then Basques are indeed just an "anomaly" of local conversion and steppe BB were most likely IE speakers.
ReplyDeleteI see that much of the debate is once again centered on the Basque question, and since I am Basque, it may be interesting that you take my opinion into account. Also so that you do not think that we are ultranationalists or ultraracists, the first thing I have to say is that the Basques are not the main problem for the PIE Homeland, not only because their origin in the current Spanish territory is not clear (maybe we entered during the Iron Age) but because we have no idea what the territory they really occupied during the Bronze and Iron ages was.
ReplyDelete1- Nor are the Tartesians a big problem, because we can only make more or less accurate specifications about their language (and I think it will be very difficult for the linguists to end up deciphering it)
2-The real and most interesting issue centers on the Iberians because their relationship with the Basque/Aquitanian is accepted by many Spanish and French linguist experts. It was also spoken throughout the south of France to the Rhone River, in fact in Herault a large number of Iberian inscriptions have been found that have helped to decipher part of the language, And also this territory is mostly R1b-P312.
3-As Zardos and others have said, genetic continuity is super evident in Spain. There is no population in the world (except for our Irish, Scottish and English) friends who can boast like the Basques and the rest of Spaniards of being the direct descendants of the men and women who developed BB culture in Europe. And in addition to this genetic continuity, it turns out that neither our Iberian Aquitans or Tartesians ancestors spoke IE languages, nor the thrust of the IE languages have succeeded in ending the last NO-IE language in Europe.
4- The Kurganist vision of European prehistory has caused the debate to focus on finding all kinds of more or less intelligent explanations to solve the problems posed by the need to justify the origin of R1b, the IE language, etc. etc. in the steppes .
5-Many archaeologists and some Spanish geneticists see it in an absolutely different way- The BB culture is totally western, it has absolutely nothing to do with the steppes and through small migrations of both men and women it was extended to small settlements in Hungary and Poland where they stopped the Indo-European expansion of the CWC and R1a- For us the debate is over, you will understand that for many of us who do not speak IE languages, we do not care much about the territorial origin of that linguistic family. I explained it many times in Anthrogenica and that is why they banned me in that blog. Since January Davidski has tried to explain that the Yamnaya culture only reached the Tizsa river and that the Hungarian BBs are a mixture of Central Europeans BB, Yamnaya and Neolithic farmers, basically the same as I defend years ago.
Rick having a central database with as much useful information as possible on genetically matched grave goods would be the beginning of something I envision as useful online conference debates with no personal attacks. I would like to see a neutral face to face mature exploration of the subjects without all the mudslinging.We know within the R1a and R1b sphere there were different parts of the puzzle that combined can give a very good explanation of the ethnogenesis of the Europeans. I could envision a live civil debate with a mod online open to R1a and R1b lineages.
ReplyDeleteSuch a format could bypass the blockage in useful exchange s within the R1a and R1b community. Instead of waiting in years like the setup in current R1a R1b peer review papers After all these samples are our oncestors.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteIt is true that the rejection of Iberia has caused many people to continue looking for possible alternatives for L51 and P312. Actually, although I would like to know the origin of my ancestors, I have no problem thinking that we have origins in the current German, Swiss, Italian or French territory, but this subject must be reliably demonstrated with scientific data (ancient DNA, archeology and linguistics ) not with speculations that change even from month to month as new papers are published. We will leave for later the origin of L51 and P312 in the SGC (CWC), and if you want to focus on the linguistic debate, the truth is that the PIE Homeland in the steppes is getting more and more complicated. Let us be cautious and we will see what happens in Italy, also in Switzerland and France where there are interesting works to publish, and then surely we find more reasonable explanations.
@ a
ReplyDeleteYes sounds interesting. However no place is safe and Mudsling free. There will always be some selfproclaimed "Super Intelegent" individuals somewhere. Heheheeh. So that is why I stick with Davidski's Blog because he was correct about many things in the past and didn't disappoint yet.
Of course you have posters with emotional baggage. However if they can pass their anger management counseling lessons why not invite them? Being recognized facially genetically amongst one's own R1a R1b community might also dissuade nasty behavior as unacceptable.
Delete
ReplyDeleteI am going to give you an example of what is happening; I am Df27/Z225, This lineage has been found in a site of the late BB culture in Herviás (La Rioja, 1.800 BC) near the current border with Alava where my family is originally and which obviously has always spoken in Basque and Spanish. The following Z225 has been found in a site of the Iberian people of the Ilerkavones in the province of Castellón (Spanish Mediterranean Coast, 600 BC), where hundreds of ceramic pieces written in Iberian have also been found. What can I think? Obviously, my ancestors have never spoken an IE language because genetic continuity is evident and because we also have WRITTEN EVIDENCE. Now everyone tries to convince me that in reality the BB culture did not originate in Iberia, and that the father of Z225 or the father of Df27 or the father of P312 (which on the other hand have only been found in Western Europe), spoke an IE language that was also spoken in the steppes where Obviously our origins have to be. And they try to do it
1-not knowing what language was spoken in the steppes
2-without having found my lineage in the steppes
3-without having scientific evidence that BB culture originated outside of Iberia
I repeat if there is any doubt about what I think, R1b-L51 is Western, the BB culture is Western and spoke a Neolithic language NO-IE (Anatolian, Sardinian / Iberian / Vasconic / Aquitanian or whatever you wanted to call it)
I personally think that the only lineage clearly linked to the steppes and IE is R1a (and that, despite its shortage in Khvalynsk and its absence in Yamanya). Only a founder effect can explain its situation in Central Europe
@Drago
ReplyDeleteYamnaya isn't IE...I can almost here Carlos Quiles' stroke from across the Atlantic...his poor theory...oh well, as Drago might say, if it dies, it dies. Science never got anywhere by people doing the safe thing.
It will indeed be great if the Italo-Celtic Linguistic Hypothesis can finally be proven to predate recorded History and later Roman Empire influence. Even better if it was Urnfield or even Bellbeaker related or anything prior to the Hallstatt...
ReplyDeleteThis will surely throw a spanner in the Linguistic works...
ReplyDelete@Gaska: The problem is that we have to explain the appearance of attested IE in former BB territory.
ReplyDeleteI see a fairly big change happening after BB, but the impact was not as big as the BB expansion itself before.
And it seems it happened, to a large degree, from within BB-related people.
So we deal with an assimilation of a BB branch in Southern France becoming non-IE or with an assimilation of BB branches in Central Europe becoming IE.
In Iberia the non-IE maternal influence was huge, but little happened on the usually more important paternal side.
In Central Europe and the Celts on the other hand we have a paternal impact of significance, but no replacement and the further West you go, the less.
This could have been a wave-like phenomenon, but that is not that much more likely as an Franko-Iberian conversion by old BB masters from Iberia probably.
So to me its really undecided.
If R1b is completely of local pre-steppe origin, the later conversion from Central Europe is much more likely though. Because that would avoid the problem of a language shift in patrilineage without external pressure.
It could also better explain why some BB and R1b lineages might have adopted IE under steppe influence, while others just retained their non-IE mother tongue.
@zardos the only non-Steppe R1b before the BA is the Villabruna cluster
Delete@a
ReplyDeleteReligious artifacts like twins or similar would be a more reliable marker of IE burial, than high practical utility things like wheels.
@Andre: We can now discuss R1b in betweenMesolithic and BBC, but what really matters is when exactly the direct ancestors of the BB R1b entre Western Europe. Did they come with massive steppe ancestry (more likely) or were they there before (less likely).
ReplyDeleteBut we have no definitive answer yet, or do we?
I have an extensive tool collection. Routers drills saws et etc... I would like to see high definition shots of the type of joints and carpentry involved in Yamaha and Sintashta wood working. I also have welders I would like an in depth online conference with details about Yamaha Sintashta Bell Beaker Corded Ware Stredny Stog advance in working metals. I enjoy looking and learning about cultural steppe religious artifacts also. My point is to take advantage of the Internet capabilities in all forms. Travelling brick and mortar paper peer reviews sessions are old school mostly inefficient carbon producing.
ReplyDeleteIs the original Caucasian substrate hypothesis paper still available anywhere? It looks like the academia.edu version is now gone.
ReplyDelete@Suyindik
ReplyDeleteThe golden man from Varna was T-M184. Gold metallurgy appears in Israel at the same time as those haplogroup T Péquin cave people. The KEB peoplein Morrocco were also T and appeared around the same time, coming from Spain.
One thing no one mentions is the Flood. There’s evidence for a massive Black Sea flood around 5000 BC, and evidence of settlements under water in the flooded areas. It might sound crazy but if this is real its probably significant.
@Groo Salugg - An exchange of ideas would not be complete without a great museum. I also envision a place in the future R1a R1b posterity can view all coresponding archeological and gentic data in a well illustrated intercative virtual museum narrated by AI.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry for everyone: all your posts are wonderful and really interesting, but the main reason I visit the comment section of Eurogenesblog is to amuse myself by reading the cosmic bullshit posts written by Vinitharya.
ReplyDeleteLazaridis: “Dzudzuana is genetically closer to both contemporaneous Gravettians from Europe (0.051±0.012) and also to the much later Neolithic Anatolian farmers (0.039±0.005) who are genetically closest to them according to this measure.“
ReplyDeleteSo Anatolian Farmers cluster closely with Gravetians
@epoch
ReplyDelete"Now, if these languages were diversified from a common language brought by steppe BB, that diversification would have happened in a pretty short time, maybe too short to be feasible."
I don't think I agree that 1,500 years+ is too short of a time for that diversification to have happened, in fact it makes good sense to me.
I don't have a strong opinion about Tartessian, but there are plenty of possibilities, many of which may not have occurred to us, or still be hidden in the archeological record somehow. We should all be awake at this point to the possibility that more surprises are waiting for us, we've certainly had a lot of them over the past year.
ReplyDeleteWe've been around the block a few times on the issue of "Basque from the steppes".
ReplyDeleteTo recapitulate beyond arguments Epoch has already made, ultimately, the big problem is that none of the linguistic arguments that support mainstream urheimat hypotheses for Indo-European are tenable or evidenced for "Basque from the steppes". There is:
a) no centre of the distribution argument; and no particular strong argument for violation of the centre of the distribution principle
b) no evidence of a wider distribution of either Basque or Iberian related languages than SW Europe at all
c) little to no family relationship reconstructed through the comparative method lexical and grammatical relationship between Basque and Iberian (despite claims of a relatively shallow linguistic divergence, comparable with that between two Indo-European stocks)
d) no linguistic paleontology reconstructing an Euskarro-iberian urheimat at a particular place and time (as the old school Indo-European historical linguists would like and place faith in), certainly not the late Copper->Bronze Age and not the steppes
e) no core lexical divergence work reconstructing a late Copper->Bronze Age divergence (as the new school Bayesian phylo linguists would like)
In short, an absence of a primary linguistic argument that can then be scaffolded by genetic evidence. To imagine that mainstream linguistics and the experts linking mainstream linguistics and archaeology will accept a "Basque from the steppes" argument on the basis that R1b-M269 male groups would and could not have switched languages under any circumstances (until "elite dominance/recruitment" by "Iron Age Celts"), seems quite fanciful to me.
I imagine they will continue to regard it as more parsimonious that speakers of IE (or whatever language if not IE) migrating into Iberia simply switched languages or that at least their descendants did.
*******
Btw, if anyone has had trouble with accessing Anthony's paper (I think there was a comment upthread by someone to this effect, poss deleted), I have copied it to a pastebin: https://pastebin.com/GB66hvYG
@Matt & @All Anthony: “But Wang et al. (2018) complicated that picture. From the first Eneolithic farmers who appeared at Unakozovskaya in the northwest Caucasus about 4600 BC to the Maikop culture, all of them had significant CHG ancestry, on a cline of 28-60%. But the other 72-40% of their ancestry can be modeled as an admixture of Anatolian Farmer (the great majority), Levantine Neolithic, and Ganj-Dareh-type Iranian Farmer ancestries. The Anatolian Farmer component is bar-graphed as 30-40% of the Eneolithic farmers’ ancestry (Wang et al. 2018: Figure 2c)”
DeleteSo if Eneolithic Farmers of Darkveti Meshoko were 30%-40% Anatolian Farmers, doesn’t it imply that in most likelihood NW Caucasus languages were probably Anatolian derived and close or related to LBK and Tripolye ones (and maybe to Etruscan and Lemnian and the 40% non-IE substrate in Greek)?
@ Blasonario Cremonese
ReplyDeleteDo you have a time machine where you can go back and prove the language spoken by the Yamna people and then articulate a coherent theory as to why Indo-Iranians and Balto-Slavic people are predominantly R1a, without using the silver bullet of 'severe bottlenecks' to explain away why there is very little R1b in those peoples and that which is there is the result of introgression from neighboring people and not some mythical relict population? And ad hominems will get us nowhere.
@ Vinitharya
ReplyDeleteApparently everyone have Time Machines because there are only Sanskrit and Hittite that can without any doubt be linked to Indo-European before the Iron Age, by means of Written evidence. So beyond that we only have Cultural and Genetic evidence of probable relatedness which is not Necessarily linked to Language. Reconstruction of PIE is also a hit and miss affair linked to probabilities with no absolute certainty.
@Ric Hern: Don't forget about Mycaenean Greek.
ReplyDeleteO yes. Thanks. Forgot about them.
Delete@Matt: I would not say that "Basque from the steppe" is very likely, but you cant know for sure.
ReplyDeleteMost of your argumentation rely on the lack of related branches of Proto-Basque, but that is irrelevant.
Because Basque must have come from somewhere and the lack of living close relatives leave its origin open.
But the latest big turnover for Basques was the BB expansion. Nothing Hit hard later.
For the later Celtic provinces, the same cant be said as later populations prove.
@zardos, as noted I don't think historical linguistics will find the attested distribution of Basque "irrelevant", and if you think they will, you simply do not understand why the steppe hypothesis has the acceptance among linguists which it has. The attested distribution of IE was not "irrelevant" to anyone serious in historical linguistics who has proposed an urheimat.
ReplyDeleteIt's not based on R1a or R1b, etc. expansions, at root, or really archaeology. The argument for the late Copper Age steppe hypothesis of Indo-European has always been based on primarily linguistic properties - the distribution of the language family, the evidence for its expansion, the reconstruction of shared lexicon that matches to a particular place. It is not based on the idea that "IE must have come from somewhere, so it must have come from where X patriline must have come from". Archaeology and even genetics have been only supporting arguments.
I don’t mean its irrelevant in general, but which kind of comparison are you supposed to make with a sole survivor?
DeleteIf the recent findings taught us one thing, it is that where a people lives now had quite often little to do with where they came from.
At the time of the first IE studies, with rather stable, long lasting European nations, the idea of conquerors bringing a culture and language to people as far apart as Celts and Indo-Aryans was novel indeed.
How can you say were Proto-Basques were 5000 years ago?
@Samuel Andrews
ReplyDelete“Corded Ware & R1a M417 in general for sure spoke IE. Because...
-Baltic Corded Ware were the proto-Balto Slavs.”
No, proto-Balto-Slavs came from late PIE i.e. from Yamnaya, probably by mixing with post Sredny Stog.
@zardos said-"So we deal with an assimilation of a BB branch in Southern France becoming non-IE or with an assimilation of BB branches in Central Europe becoming IE"
ReplyDeleteYes, totally agree. Even that same situation can occur within the Iberian Peninsula and of course in Italy.
I will try to explain it- That same genetic continuity between the BB culture and the Iberians-NO-IE, can occur in certain peoples such as vettones, vacceos or cantabrians. That is, if the linguists end up demonstrating that these peoples spoke an older IE language (NOT Celtiberian), then we would have in these peoples the same genetic continuity in the uniparental markers between the BB culture and at least the end of the Bronze Age (1,000 BC). That is why some Spanish geneticists have begun to gather skeletons (the only ones that are preserved are children) from the vettones and the vacceos during the Iron Age (1000-200 BC). If those markers were Df27 then we would have in Iberia, descendants of the BBs who would speak both IE and non-IE languages and the puzzle would be even more complicated. As you will see I am being totally honest in the approach, and I recognize that anything can happen.
But currently, in addition to the data that the ancient DNA is offering us, we have to try to solve the archaeological problem, and for us, Iberian migrations to the rest of the BB regions is a proven fact. So far and as long as we do not have data from the vettones and vacceos during the Iron Age, we must assume that it is much simpler for the P312-Central-European BBs to adopt the CWC's own language either because of exogamy or simply because of its small number in those regions.
That explanation is simpler and more coherent because in addition P312 is so far absolutely western with the oldest cases in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Alsace, so it is possible that he spoke a NO-IE language and simply adopted an IE language by influence of the CWC- This would undoubtedly complicate Davidski's theory of finding P312 in the SGC, because if this were so, this lineage would have a close origin in the steppes and obviously speak an IE language. For that reason, and for the lack of Archaeological and genetic evidence at the moment I cannot admit that L51 or P312 was hidden in any branch of the CWC.
ReplyDelete@Matt-
I don't know what you think, but I think nobody is trying to take the Basque to the steppes, the problem is that the obsession to link certain lineages (in this case R1b) with certain languages (in this case IE) It has led us to a dead end. Obviously the IE language must have an equidistant origin with respect to its Asian and European derivatives and for that reason everyone thinks about the steppes, Anatolia or the South Caucasus. In our case, we simply think that Iberian/Aquitanian/Euzkera is a Neolithic language (or perhaps earlier), linked to the European Neolithic population of any culture, because the genetic and cultural similarity in Europe is amazing (remember for example the megalithic culture) and we did not find significant differences to justify the existence of different languages (mainly due to the great mobility of the population and exogamy).
Imagine a European-Vasconic language linked to all the at least Western Neolithic cultures, including the BBC), any uniparental marker that arrived (in one way or another) to those cultures would end up speaking that language regardless of its origin (even the steppes). But for that, the first thing we must do is show that there were no massive migratory movements or conquests, only small population movements and then massive founder effects of certain male lineages.
@Gaska there are 2 HG lineages in Spain: WHG and Magdalenians. Which one is more common among Basques?
ReplyDelete@am Andrews-"I'm starting to find this debate silly. The debate ended 2 years ago. Don't forget Yamnaya, Corded Ware, Bell Beaker all descend from the same recent common ancestor on the Eneolithic Steppe. They aren't as distinct as they might seem. It's obvious this ancestor they all descended from were the proto-Indo Europeans"
ReplyDeleteJa Ja Ja
'Steppe Maykop' is not a thing.
ReplyDeleteGreeks believed essentially that the ancestors of NWC speakers were essentially, at least partially, Pthiotic Achaei of Jason's crew and Laconians. That's a myth but whatever. (I will make a religion out of these myths to justify believing in them if some people have a problem with that)
They also believed, that there were people who were 'anciently Hellenes', afaiu in the Volga Finnic area, certainly in the forest steppe.
The thing that I would like to learn is if any of the lineages in these regions can have Greek Neolithic origin or common origin outside of what is now Greece (but where?) that would explain the existence of these traditions.
**
Concerning L51 I would associate it to prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps (and ultimately a Villabruna related population). Certainly it would be interesting to find out what haplogroups they had, even if it would be something like G2a.
Also Cardial and Impressed Ware cultures should be studied more.
@JuanRivera, @All From the Anthony paper (reply to Bomhard): “Yamnaya men were almost exclusively R1b, and pre-Yamnaya Eneolithic Volga-Caspian-Caucasus steppe men were principally R1b, with a significant Q1a minority.”
ReplyDeleteI’m curious what happened to the Q1a minority. Where did it disappear?
Also, Khvalynsk had a significant minority of R1a1 (most likely from Ukraine). Then what happened that Yamnaya was almost exclusively R1b?
@Apostolos. « They also believed, that there were people who were 'anciently Hellenes', afaiu in the Volga Finnic area, certainly in the forest steppe. »
ReplyDeleteWhat’s your source for that?
@JuanRivera Yes, but what happened to all these Q1a and R1a of Khvalynsk culture? How come Yamnaya was overwhelmingly R1b with nary a trace of Q1a or R1a?
ReplyDeleteAnthony sort of agreed with Bomhard that PIE was created as a merger of pre-Uralic in two stages with CHG language(s): early Eastern Caucasus influenced PIE’s morphology and phonology while later Maikop (NW Caucasus) influenced just the lexicon. Do you agree with their assessment?
ReplyDeleteFor some reason I think the non-CHG one couldn’t have been pre-Uralic but something else.
All Anthony: “But Wang et al. (2018) complicated that picture. From the first Eneolithic farmers who appeared at Unakozovskaya in the northwest Caucasus about 4600 BC to the Maikop culture, all of them had significant CHG ancestry, on a cline of 28-60%. But the other 72-40% of their ancestry can be modeled as an admixture of Anatolian Farmer (the great majority), Levantine Neolithic, and Ganj-Dareh-type Iranian Farmer ancestries. The Anatolian Farmer component is bar-graphed as 30-40% of the Eneolithic farmers’ ancestry (Wang et al. 2018: Figure 2c)”
ReplyDeleteSo if Eneolithic Farmers of Darkveti Meshoko were 30%-40% Anatolian Farmers, doesn’t it imply that in most likelihood NW Caucasus languages were probably Anatolian derived and close or related to LBK and Tripolye ones (and maybe to Etruscan and Lemnian and the 40% non-IE substrate in Greek)?
JuanRivera wrote,
ReplyDelete"Meanwhile, I'm using the G25 map to model the Itelmen, which are near purely Magadan_BA"
What is the source of this "Itelmen" sample?
It is a bit difficult for me to believe that an Itelmen sample could be "purely" anything because the Itelmen hardly exist as a distinct ethnolinguistic group at present. Almost all of them should have Russian admixture and possibly also admixture from various non-Chukotko-Kamchatkan indigenous ethnic groups of Siberia and vicinity, Evens in particular.
I agree with Matt and Sam, the fact is that:
ReplyDelete-Steppe Bell Beakers resemble Corded Ware
-early Steppe Bell Beakers don’t resemble Basques, but Northern Europeans, and are close to Nordic Bronze Age and Celtic fringe populations, the latter who are their utmost modern descendants, whereas Basques have significant additional farmer ancestry
-Germanic and Germanic-related groups carry R1b-L51 in significant amounts, and it looks unlikely this is associated with any non-Indo-European substrate
-R1b-Z2103 is present in Balto-Slavs and Indo-Iranians, and they don’t seem to show any Vasconic or Caucasian substrate
If anyone can argue against these, then let me know.
@JuanRivera
ReplyDeleteYou’re right. In fact, R1b-Z2103 is present in Albanians and Greeks, and I’m not very confident it’s Pelasgian or something like that.
@Gaska: I don't know what you think, but I think nobody is trying to take the Basque to the steppes
ReplyDeleteYes, I am engaging with the hypothesis which some have presented in these very comment threads that the Basque language derives ultimately from a Copper Age steppe urheimat, and was brought there by a movement by a patrlineal clan whose descendents never changed languages, at approximately 2500 BCE.
"Basque from the steppes" been argued in this thread and others.
I am aware you have not made this argument, but not everything is about you or in relation to arguments you have made, or the "our" who you often seem to presume to speak for.
@zardos: I don’t mean its irrelevant in general, but which kind of comparison are you supposed to make with a sole survivor?
Historical linguistics would not engage with claims that languages originated far from where they are found, without a linguistic argument, even if it is feasible that they originated far from where they are found today.
For'ex on other isolates, some Japanese or Korean are argued to originate from further west, but this is on attempts to tie them into a wider Transeurasian family and languages which are attested and exist there. Dravidian (less an isolate, but a family) some would argue had an external origin, but they make this argument on linguistic grounds of arguing for a relationship to Elamite (which I think the consensus does not agree on).
But in both cases, linguists would remain circumspect about suggestions that they must have come from very far away, without direct distributional evidence. It's quite possible and indeed more parsimonious that Japanese or Korean is anciently language of some people on the Korean Peninsula or Japanese mainland, and that Dravidian the language was the language of some people in India.
Take Burushaski; it would be quite possible probably to imagine some scenario where Burushaski is the last remnant of a large sphere of Burushakian languages, associated with movements of whatever their modal y haplogroup is, from some specific place where that y haplogroup recently expanded from, when it expanded. But what are linguists meant to make of those claims when there is no actual attested linguistic evidence for any of that sphere or broader presence of the language? And the larger this sphere that is imagined, the more questionable it becomes that *some* evidence of this was not left at the time languages become attested, and the less parsimonious it becomes.
I know the cases you brought up very well, but following your argument, linguists just dont have the last word.
ReplyDeleteJapanese for example must be from further East and Dravidian came with the Iranian farmers in all likelihood, regardless of a securely proven external relationship.
Or does anyone propose American Indian languages being native to the continent on an absolute way, if there would be no Eurasian relatives?
And a complete exchange of paternal lineages in a couple of generations by conquest is usually close to pioneer settlements. It almost always results in linguistic change.
And yes, genetically and physically Basques are what to expect from a steppe Beaker - Neolithic Mediterranean mixture.
The issue is, the other Western Europeans are not as clear cut. They have additional, later incoming influences of significance.
Thats why I consider the possibility of BB being not IE as a whole. Simply because its possible. Basque continuity from their paternal BB ancestors is certain. The continuity of language with BB being Proto-Italo-Celtic is not. Even if ots likely and might become almost certain with more Italic and Celtic warrior samples.
Japanese from the West of course.
DeleteJuanRivera wrote,
ReplyDelete"Squares with the fact that R1a can be found in Chukotko-Kamchatkan speakers (but not R1b, at least not yet)."
Dr. Tatiana Karafet's team's sample of eleven Koryaks contains a member of haplogroup J2b-M12 and a member of haplogroup O2a2-P201(xM134, M7). Both are very exotic Y-DNA haplogroups for the region; J2b-M12 has been observed elsewhere mainly among people in Southern Europe and South Asia, and O2a2-P201(xO2a2b1-M134, O2a2a1a2-M7) has been observed elsewhere mainly among southern Han Chinese (O2a2a-M188(xO2a2a1a2-M7)) and among people in Hunan Province of South-Central China, coastal East Asia, and Austronesia (O2a2b2-N6).
Matt raises some interesting points which can looked at further
ReplyDeletea) no centre of the distribution argument; and no particular strong argument for violation of the centre of the distribution principle
The issue is that there this ''centre'' disappeared. As I outlined, the direct clannic descendants of the core Yamnaya groups dispersed to Afansievo, which was locally replaced; and Catacomb, which eventually also dipsersed due to the arrival of NW Caucasian speakers in the foorhills & Andronovo peoples in the steppe.
So why should there be any trace of a group which dispsersed over 4, 000 years ago, and in a zone where several turnovers of pre-literate societies ocurred.
b) no evidence of a wider distribution of either Basque or Iberian related languages than SW Europe at all
Yet, you seem to have recently suggesting that Vasconic arrived to Iberia with Urnfield culture.
One the one hand, Vasconic can't possibly have arrived to Iberia from central Europe 4,500 years ago because there's no evidence left, but precisely because the lack of this evidence, the logical conclusion is that it in fact arrived much later ?!
c) little to no family relationship reconstructed through the comparative method lexical and grammatical relationship between Basque and Iberian (despite claims of a relatively shallow linguistic divergence, comparable with that between two Indo-European stocks)
That seems to be your personal opinion, Matty. One only needs to gander at the similarities in the decimal systems between Basque & Iberian to consider the possibility. Have you any specific refutations to Iberian linguist Eduardo Orduna's very suggestion?
d) no linguistic paleontology reconstructing an Euskarro-iberian urheimat at a particular place and time (as the old school Indo-European historical linguists would like and place faith in), certainly not the late Copper->Bronze Age and not the steppes
Let's be serious; paleolinguistics cant reconstruct which patch of land languages come from.
e) no core lexical divergence work reconstructing a late Copper->Bronze Age divergence (as the new school Bayesian phylo linguists would like)
However, is there any evidence to the contrary ? If so please provide it
To imagine that mainstream linguistics and the experts linking mainstream linguistics and archaeology will accept a "Basque from the steppes"
The perspective is not that Basque came from the steppe, but the core of its ancestors did. The central tenet really isnt about Vasconic . In anycase, the mainstream linguists seem to think that Basques come from the Ice Age. So that's not a very sturdy theorem
Two final points
ReplyDelete''To imagine ..that R1b-M269 male groups would and could not have switched languages under any circumstances (until "elite dominance/recruitment" by "Iron Age Celts"), seems quite fanciful to me. ''
Well, La Tene period Celts did migrate to Iberia.
For elite recruitement to occur, someone has to exist. Hence, this model can be employed in the Iron Age, when heriarchies already existed, but it cannot be employed in LCA Iberia - & Atlantic Europe as a whole, when arriving BB seemed to have purged the pre-existing status quo.
But this is not to suggest that the series of Celtic Cremation cemeteries which dot the north Mesetan landscape single handedly Celticized western Europe, or even Iberia. Indeed, the process might have begun much earlier. As you suggest - it might be precisely because some M269 males could switch languages that, L151 became a marker of NW Indo-European
Dave:
ReplyDelete"there are also several lose ends in regards to the steppe homeland theory, such as the lack of corroboration from aDNA for the steppe origins of the Hittites and Tocharians .."
Fair enough. I'd like to add the Swat Valley samples. The Swat River appears in the Rigvedas as Suvastu, with IE etymology, so the IA samples from there should represent IE speakers.
Now, there is pretty solid evidence of (late) Proto-Uralic borrowing from Indo-Aryan, and the most plausible zone of contact was the S. Urals during Sintashta times [Parpola argues for Sumerian as (Para-)Uralic, with Maykop as northward link, but I have a hard time to align such a scenario with the archeological and aDNA record.] Doesn't that mean that - in spite of weak aDNA evidence - the Sintashta, ultimately Steppe origin of Indo-Aryan may be regarded as linguistically assured?
Well, apparently Indic contains some traces of Centum languages, e.g. Bangani koto, Kashmiri hata "hundred". Zoller 2016 assesses the linguistic Picture in quite some detail and concludes (emphasis is mine):
“I have shown that at the time of Old Indo-Aryan there must have existed a linkage of lects, with Vedic just one of them. These lectal differentiations seem to suggest that the standard model of the three branches of Indo-Iranian is in need of a revision. Their existence also supports the idea of the earlier immigration of the ancestor(s) of the Outer Language which led to a strong encounter with Munda/Austro-Asiatic languages (but to a weak encounter in case of Vedic and Classical Sanskrit) which must have dominated the prehistoric linguistic area of northern India. This dominance must have extended far into prehistory because of the many parallels in the language isolate Burushaski. ”
https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/forskning/publikasjoner/tidsskrifter/acta/volum_77/ao_2016_cpz.pdf:
IOW: Even if we accept Vedic Sanskrit as Sintashta, ultimately Steppe-derived, it apparently wasn't the first IE language arriving in India. Instead, it overformed earlier IE languages spoken there (which may, or may not, have been related to Tocharian).
IMO, everything at the moment points to (pre-)PIE originating from the S. Caspian. This includes Matt's latest PCA (thx, Matt, btw, for the efforts you always put into these). The Khvalynsk-Progress cline there points eastwards towards Tajiks, and when extrapolated further towards "ancients", it lands somewhere between Iran_Hotu and Saraszm. [The archeological connection between those two is well established: Neolithisation of Central Asian by the Jeitun culture originated in the Alborz foothills.]
Having said that, there are still two things that puzzle me:
ReplyDelete1. In terms of basic lexicon, PIE appears to have most in common with Chukotko-Kamshatkan. I also compared the PIE Swadesh 100 list with Proto-Wakashan-Nivkh-Algic (PAW) as proposed by S. Nikolaev (links under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algic_languages), with a surprisingly high number of parallels that go beyond what I term "paleo-substrate". E.g., PIE *h₁egʷʰ- “drink” and *h₂ékʷeh₂ "water" find almost perfect matches in Nikolaev's reconstruction. What is even more intriguing is that Nikolaew reconstructs *wä- "water" as generic PAW term (water body, liquid, etc.), with *hek - wä meaning "drinking water". So, the analogy isn't just restricted to the basic roots, but extends to the way the roots are combined in order to express a specific concept.
The issue here is that Nikolaev's PAW is transpacific and ancient, so there is no point in trying to find steppe signals in modern Chukotko-Kamchatkans. We are either dealing with an early Caucasian expansion that ultimately made it to the Americas (c.f. Kennewick Man's mtDNA X2a vs. the X2 in Iran_Neo), or late Mesolithic ENA influence on PIE, e.g. connected to the introduction of "combed"/ "pseudo-corded" pottery that can ultimately be traced back to the lower Amur Epi-Paleolithic.
2. There seems to have been significant cultural influence of late Mesolithic/ early Neolithic Ukraine on Khvalynsk and Yamnaya, far beyond its rather meager genetic contribution. Points in case are ritual trepanations (first evidence from the Dniepr Rapids area during the 6th mBC, common in Progress/Vonyushka and also Khvalynsk), use of red ochre in burials (a common UA_Mes, Baltic_HG and SHG feature), and also the "proto-Kurgans", essentially not much more than stone heaps, in Progress/Vonyushka. Opposite to what Anthony suggests, they hardly have anything in common with the large and richly furnished Leyla-Tepe / Maykop kurgans, but correspond well to contemporary practices in the Donetsk area.
If the late Mesolithic Dniepr-Donetsk area was culturally so important, why not also linguistically?
@FrankN maybe PIE evolved among Sredny Stog and was transplanted into Repin/Khvalynsk
Delete@FrankN
ReplyDeleteI fail to see how that linked article by Zoller leads to a South Caspian Urheimat for PIE. So, what if two consecutive migrantions brought IE languages to India?
Suyindik has above cited D. Reich as follows:
ReplyDelete"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."
So far, the linguistic implications of this observation seem to have gone widely unnoticed. Genetic isolation of course also means linguistic isolation, and a longer period of specific linguistic drift. Most of the major language families have now been reconstructed to proto-level, at a time depth of typically 5-6 ky ago (substantially longer for Afro-Asiatic). Apparently, except for mixed languages/ creoles, since then no new language family emerged. There has also been some recent work on comparing, possibly combining proto-languages into Macro-families, which bears the potential to increase the time depth by another couple of thousand years. However, any attempts to do so for PIE (Nostratic, IndoUralic etc.) have so far remained unconvincing, meaning that (pre-pre-)PIE is apparently very ancient.
As such, I believe that when it comes to the "homeland" issue, a key question is: When and where could a family develop its specific features that set it apart from all other families. Outside the tropics, the "when" question is answered relatively easily - we are either dealing with the Younger Dryas, but more likely with the LGM, when relatively small populations concentrated in spatially confined refugia, linguistically and genetically isolated from other populations.
The "where", of course, then needs to be answered separately for each population/ language group. As concerns (pre-pre) PIE, my best guess in this respect is the S. Caspian refugium. Theoretically, Siberia might be considered as well, but then we run out of LGM refugia out of which pre-pre-Proto Uralic and Altaic could have emerged...
Epoch:
ReplyDelete"So, what if two consecutive migrantions brought IE languages to India?"
What would have been the first migration? Acc. to Adams, Andronovo already fails for Tocharian, so I can't see it having reached India. Also, the Swat_IA samples preclude significant Steppe (Andronovo) ancestry in that "outer language" area described by Zoller - even more so, if the meager Portion of Steppe ancestry in them is to be attributed not just to Sintashta-derived overforming, but actually to two Steppe migrations.
Nah, the only plausible source of this first migration is Central Asia, and that means ultimately (directly, or with a stop-over in Zerafshan) the S. Caspian. While we still lack aDNA IVC aDNA, otherwise the NE Iranian connection is genetically obvious - be it Reich's old ANI, haplogroups of Indian goats and sheep, or the ca. 3500 BC Walnut finds in Kashmir. Modern Kashmiri Walnut trees have been established to descend from S. Caspian stock, one of the 2-3 LGM refugia for the Persian(!) Walnut (the other refugia lay around the Pamirs/ Tian Shan, that's where a/o modern Chinese trees originate from).
@FrankN
ReplyDelete"Also, the Swat_IA samples preclude significant Steppe (Andronovo) ancestry in that "outer language" area described by Zoller"
Narashim prepub:
Finally, we examined our Swat Valley time transect from 1200 BCE to 1CE. While the earliest group of samples (SPGT) is genetically very similar to the Indus_Periphery samples from the sites of Gonur and Shahr-i-Sokhta, they also differ significantly in harboring Steppe_MLBA ancestry(~22%). This provides direct evidence for Steppe_MLBA ancestry being integrated into South Asian groups in the 2nd millennium BCE, and is also consistent with the evidence of southward expansions of Steppe_MLBA groups through Turan at this time via outliers from the main BMAC cluster from 2000-1500 BCE. Later samples from the Swat time transect from the 1st millennium BCE had higher proportions of Steppe and AASI derived ancestry more similar to that found on the Indian Cline, showing that there was an increasing percolation of Steppe derived ancestry into the regionand additional admixture with the ASI through
Works fine.
Narasimhan preprint, that is.
ReplyDeleteEpoch:
ReplyDeleteThe Narasimhan preprint clearly distinguishes Steppe_EBA (w/o EEF/ANF admix) and Steppe_MLBA (with such admix). So these 22% Steppe_MLBA are Sintashta-related, not from Andronovo, and there is actually nothing in the pre-print suggesting Steppe_EBA (Andronovo) making it across the Hindukush.
22% is what I call "meager", considering the impact of a similar magnitude of admixture on Basques (speculatively also Etruscans).
Epoch:
ReplyDeleteIn addition, look at the timescale: Steppe_MLBA ancestry appears around 2000-1500 BC in BMAC, by 1200 BC it is attested in the Swat valley. Now, the Rigvedas are commonly dated to around 1500 BC, and explicitly mention the Swat river as Suvasto (with IE etymology). Steppe_MLBA alone is not only too little, but also too late to explain this IE toponym.
After all, the Swat is quite a major river (and was important enough for being mentionned in the Rigvedas), and such rivers tend to keep their names for a long time - c.f. Missisippi (Algonquin), Guadalquivir (Arabic), Havel (->W. Slavic Hevelli), etc. This holds even more true if an ancient resident population isn't completely replaced, but only assimilated through "elite dominance" or whatever else you want to call 22% admix.
Zardos:Or does anyone propose American Indian languages being native to the continent on an absolute way, if there would be no Eurasian relatives?
ReplyDeleteThere is some probably some distinction in weight of extra suppositions required here between "The Americas was completed unpopulated of any human life" vs what you are proposing in the case of Basque.
There are no reasons to be certain that linguistic change did not happen in the case that you have described, no reasons that I believe historical linguistics, drawing on the actual record of linguistic change, will find proven or demonstrated.
Dragos: So why should there be any trace of a group which dispsersed over 4, 000 years ago, and in a zone where several turnovers of pre-literate societies ocurred.
Perhaps there wouldn't be, but you would need some form of positive evidence to argue that there ever was such a group present. There doesn't seem to be any besides assertions about R1b-M269 clans not switching languages.
Yet, you seem to have recently suggesting that Vasconic arrived to Iberia with Urnfield culture.
No, I don't really think that is necessarily the case, and neither did I use those words.
Though it is curious that Urnfield influence overlaps with the area that later speaks Iberian (my quotes "Indeed if you look at the Urnfield Culture proposed to be ancestral to Halstatt or proto-Celtic itself, it does seem as if its distribution overlaps the cultures within Iberia that later are found to speak non-Indo-European languages" ... lots of post-Urnfield folk seem non-IE, in any case referring to Iberian and Etruscan speaking zones).
My comment in that thread was more to poke fun at the actual suggestion that an Urnfield archaeological expansion can be linked to Celtic, since it seems not. I'm not actually proposing "Iberian from Urnfield".
But even if I did really believe that, it probably wouldn't pass muster among historical linguistics. And fairly rightly, and despite being a much less onerous proposition than Vasco-Iberian languages in a whole zone where they aren't attested and the numerous other problems.
The other aspects we've discussed before; 1) a family relationship is not consensus, a close and recent family relationship of shallow depth less so, 2) you may not believe in linguistic paleontology (and there are arguments against it, though ones which are rather more pronounced for "Iron Age Celtic" than many other scenarios), etc. but historical linguistics believe in 3), it's not for others to refute that Iberian and Basque have a family relationship and split in the late Copper Age, as if that were the null hypothesis, it's for proponents to demonstrate that it's the case (they cannot be assumed to have this relationship until it is proven otherwise).
So there is not much point discussing them again.
@FrankN
ReplyDelete"by 1200 BC it is attested in the Swat valley. Now, the Rigvedas are commonly dated to around 1500 BC, and explicitly mention the Swat river as Suvasto (with IE etymology). Steppe_MLBA alone is not only too little, but also too late to explain this IE toponym. "
Samples run from 1200 BC on. The oldest graveyard investigated has datings from 1400 BC on. There are even older Swat cultural signs, if I recall correctly up to 1700 BC. The 1200 BC has only to do with the oldest sample that the paper presents.
From the Supp Info:
The samples are from an extensive graveyard in Udegram village in the Swat Valley dating to 1400-800 BCE. The graveyard of Udegram (32 excavated graves) features two burial phases, encompassing 1400-1100 cal BCE and 1000-800 cal BCE.
Interestingly enough mentioning two burial phases.
Uralic borrowings are Iranian not Indo-Aryan. There is not enough evidence to suggest multiple competing dialects during Vedic times. The Vedic geography is widespread and the lanuguage is standardized. For example,
ReplyDeleteLatin Committee
Indo-Aryan Samiti
You can see that only Indo Aryan maintains the root Sam, meaning together, also as Sum in Latin. Clearly the Centum form is a divergence.
S -> H Occurs mostly in Iranian but also some modern Indo-Aryan dialects. We dont know the direction of transfer, bun-standard IA seems likely to have developed in periphary IA regions.
Also, Uralic borrowings are mainly, if not exclusively, through Iranian.
As to the ancientness of (pre-pre-)PIE, let me exemplify it on a specific feature (this is also meant as a sort of delayed repsonse to Matt, who a couple of days ago questionned the usefulness of grammatical/ morphological comparisons vis-a-vis lexical ones).
ReplyDeleteThis feature is grammatical gender (thx to Kristiina for drawing my attention to it). PIE is unique in this respect among all major language families (I can't exclude the possibility that one day somewhere on New Guinea a language with similar features pops up, but even then every serious linguist would immediately check whether it is some PIE relative.)
1. Presence of grammatical gender alone already sets PIE apart from roughly half of the world's language families. This concerns of course all isolating languages (e.g. Sinitic, Austronesian), but also many synthetic languages including Kartvelian, Uralic, Altaic, Hurro-Urartian, and most Austro-Asiatic languages except for the Munda familiy.
2. PIE expressed grammatical gender by suffixing, in contrast to pre-fixing (nominal class-based) families such as North Caucasian or Niger-Congo.
3. Gender marking was fusional, i.e. merged with other markers (numerus, case) into an inseparatable unit. This sets it apart from agglutinative languages w. grammatical gender, e.g. Dravidian, in which each category (gender, case, numerus) is expressed by a separate affix.
4. PIE's grammatical gender was sex-based, in contrast to the animate-inanimate distinction a/o employed by Chukotko-Kamchatkan, many Amerindian languages (Algic, Siouan, Uto-Aztecan etc.), Sumerian and Elamite, or more complex mixed gender/animateness systems as e.g. found in Burushaki and many Pama-Nyungan languages.
5. The last remaining major family, namely Afro-Asiatic, with which PIE shares all a/m criteria, finally, differs in that it only distinguishes masculine-feminine, while PIE also had a neuter gender.
Now, none of the above was/is set in stone. Some IE languages, most prominently English, have almost completely abolished grammatical gender (#1) except for pronouns. Several others (especially Romance) have lost the neuter (#5). Gender-differentiated articles (a/o Romance, Germanic) may be considered as a shift towards gender-prefixing (#2); Welsh even varies the initial consonant according to gender. West Slavic, finally, appears to have introduced an additional animate-inanimate distinction (#4). However, most of these changes are rather recent - grammatical gender, e.g. was still present in Old English, and Latin had a neuter.
It appears that PIE's way of gender marking was stable for some 4,000 years or longer, which may provide some indication on how long it took pre-PIE to develop this unique feature.
@FrankN
ReplyDeleteBut 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?
As the Vedic language was a koiné, a standardized language with a clear elite feeling, it could have had a different exposure to the indigenous languages. But there is also the case that among BMAC steppe outliers start to appear at 2000 BC. And we have no real samples from immediately *before* Swat, some of which are considered Indo-Aryan (Cemetry H was considered that by Parpola).
Even within Swat there might be an older layer.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301336720_The_Gandhara_Grave_Culture_New_Perspectives_on_Protohistoric_Cemeteries_in_Northern_and_Northwestern_Pakistan
@zardos
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, genetically and physically Basques are what to expect from a steppe Beaker - Neolithic Mediterranean mixture.
You keep claiming this, but put aside the fact early Steppe Bell Beakers resemble Corded Ware and are a firmly Northern European population.
So I find your argument that Basques are the “purest” Beakers and that therefore Beakers were Basque weak because early Steppe Bell Beakers did not resemble Basques.
@gabriel
ReplyDelete"early Steppe Bell Beakers resemble Corded Ware and are a firmly Northern European population"
CWC and BBC are a mix between a southern population (EEF) and an eastern european population (EEF/CHG) in which way they are " northern"......
And in any case they came from eastern europe, by any stretch they are not northern european. They can be called northern because they followed a "northern" route to enter peninsular europe ( at least for now seems very likely)
@Gabriel: Basques are no "pure Bell Beakers", but the result of exclusively BB male lineages taking over Neolithic-Mediterranean communities and mixing with the local females with very little non-BB male lineages survivors initially.
ReplyDeleteSo they made a complete take over and since then little happened which comes even remotely close. They still have the same physical and genetic features which you have to expect from such a union.
All the other Western populations differ from them and show significant other physical and genetic traits.
The last proof for that fact is the study on France.
Even if some other people have as much and more BB ancestry, they show later influences which can be best explained by Celtic CE and Germanic NE in the North and Roman and Greek etc influences in the South.
So their is genetically more of a significant for later language change in IE than in Basques. Why those unchanged adopted a different language, while those changing are supposed to be in the BB tradition is something which needs to be justified by additional data.
The post-Beaker impact is by far the lowest in Basques.
@zardos
ReplyDeleteIf patrilines are the most important part of the equation, how do you explain R1b-U152 looking like the main haplogroup that had the job of spreading Celtic instead of, say, R1a-Z93? A Hittite-type situation?
I find it hard to believe Urnfield was the result of a Sintashta- or Trzciniec-related intrusion into Beaker territory, rather than an evolution from earlier Beaker cultures.
@Old Europe
Northern does not necessarily mean WHG/EHG, you’re basically saying all modern Northern Europeans are not “northern” because they have EEF/CHG ancestry.
Honestly, right now I'm 50:50 about steppe influenced Beakers being originally IE speakers or not.
ReplyDeleteMore data is needed, like I said before. Italics might be an important clue.
Interestingly the Hallstatt culture was highly hierarchical, with a small upper class. At the end of Hallstatt, a revolution took place and a new culture of free warriors emerged. The Celtic La Tene.
Now some said the Hallstatt upper class came from the East. Now I would like to see upper class Hallstatt, Celtic and Italic warriors from central, clearly proven contexts.
Hallstatt would be one of the best candidates for a language transfer I know of. But like I said, its all open now with the strongest argument against IE Bell Beakers being non-IE Iberians, especially the Basques.
@gabriel-steppe bell beakers is an absurd term used or invented by the guardians of Kurganist ultra-orthodoxy to try to differentiate the central European BBs from Iberian and southern France BBs. Remember than P312 is older in Spain than in Holland, France, Hungary, Bohemia, the British Isles, Hungary Italy or Poland
ReplyDelete@old europe- BB culture can only be related to the east, due to the supposed steppe ancestry, which as of the date, we still don't know exactly what it is, nor with what steppe culture it is related, nor when it entered mainland Europe, nor how it spread. R1bL51 and P312 are western lineages, they have never been found and will never be found in the steppes. The Bb culture is absolutely western. 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. Gimbutas theory as it has been defended in the last 5 years is dead and buried, we cannot even affirm that IE has its origin in the steppes, and there is still some fanatic that tries to convince us that the steppe BBs existed and that there were massive population movements.
And regarding the Basques, I can say the same as for the Iberians (Spain and France) and the Tartesians (Western Andalucia and Extremadura), that NEVER spoke IE languages and that nevertheless were and are absolutely P312, with which they are the most direct descendants of BBs that exist.
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.
In Central Europe its interesting to see what happened after the fall of Bell Beakers, to the beginning of Hallstatt.
ReplyDeleteUnetice 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.
Urnfield, Hallstatt and La Tene traditions are all NOT from the West, the more BB influenced regions, but expanded into these regions. Now this can mean
1. BB spoke no IE dialect (like Proto-Basque)
2. A different (non-Celtic/Italo-Celtic) IE language
3. They spoke Proto-Italo-Celtic and the later cultures and migrations didn't change it.
I doubt number 3 to be true, because the cultures which might have created the Celtic sphere were all born further East, outside of the BB strongholds. There is no West to East expansion - or at least I don't know of one which could be it. So we are left with 1 or 2.
The direct heir of BB lineages is Basque, which is non-IE, which is a huge problem for BBs being all IE speakers originally.
But I really hope for Italic samples and more from Celtic warrior burials and Hallstatt elite graves.
@Gaska: 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.
@ Matt
ReplyDelete''a family relationship is not consensus, a close and recent family relationship of shallow depth less so''
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. ;)
''you may not believe in linguistic paleontology (and there are arguments against it, though ones which are rather more pronounced for "Iron Age Celtic" than many other scenarios), etc. but historical linguistics believe in''
Theat is not quite correct.
Here are linguists - Szolt Simon: 'the basic principle of linguistic palaeontology must be that a hypothesis can be built only on existing data. No argument can be built on the lack of a data, i.e. of a word (argumentum e silentio) since we cannot decide why a given word is missing from the reconstructed lexicon – either it was indeed not part of the PIE lexicon or for whatever reason linguists cannot reconstruct it from the data provided by fragmentarily attested daughter languages''
Heggarty ''On the level of principle, and despite simplistic assertions to that effect, linguistic
palaeontology patently does not inherit the status and reliability of the Comparative Method
itself. The deception is because it glosses over a critical difference between the two levels on which that method works. When linguists reconstruct from correspondences in sound and meaning, these two levels play radically different roles (Anttila 1989: 365). Reconstruction works essentially on sound ‘laws’, in the sense that the changes they plot are precise, regular, identical and repeated across all words that have the corresponding phonological context. This consistency and predictability is what gives linguists such con dence in the sound sequences they reconstruct. That con dence does not carry over to the level of meaning, for we have no strict ‘meaning laws’ to predict precise semantic change (see Urban, this volume).
On the contrary, while sound change is exceptionless enough to make reconstruction viable
on that level, we cannot safely reconstruct the precise meaning or semantic origin of a given word string, especially far back in prehistory.''
P/L can give broad ideas about chronology, but not the kind of claims made by Anthony or Kroonen; which are little short of pseudo-science.