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Sunday, November 10, 2019

Etruscans, Latins, Romans and others


I've just added coordinates for more than 100 ancient genomes from the recently published Antonio et al. ancient Rome paper to the Global25 datasheets. Look for the population and individual codes listed here. Same links as always:

Global25 datasheet ancient scaled

Global25 pop averages ancient scaled

Global25 datasheet ancient

Global25 pop averages ancient

Thus far I've only managed to check a handful of the coordinates, so please let me know if you spot any issues. Below is a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) featuring the Etruscan and Italic speakers. I ran the PCA with an online tool specifically designed for Global25 coordinates freely available here.


Can we say anything useful about the origins of the Etruscan and early Italic populations thanks to these new genomes? Also, to reiterate my question from the last blog post, what are the genetic differences exactly between the Etruscans, early Latins, Romans and present-day Italians? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Update 13/11/2019: Here's another, similar PCA. This one, however, is based on genotype data, and it also highlights many more of the samples from the Antonio et al. paper. Considering these results, I'm tempted to say that the present-day Italian gene pool largely formed in the Iron Age, and that it was only augmented by population movements during later periods. The relevant datasheet is available here.


Update 13/11/2019: It seems to me that the two Latini-associated outliers show significant ancestry from the Levant, which possibly means that they're in part of Phoenician origin. These qpAdm models speak for themselves:

ITA_Ardea_Latini_IA_o
ITA_Proto-Villanovan 0.547±0.081
Levant_ISR_Ashkelon_IA2 0.453±0.081
chisq 7.573
tail prob 0.87027
Full output

ITA_Prenestini_tribe_IA_o
ITA_Proto-Villanovan 0.679±0.068
Levant_ISR_Ashkelon_IA2 0.321±0.068
chisq 7.222
tail prob 0.89033
Full output

The Proto-Villanovan singleton is also a key part of the models. Dating to the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition, she appears to be of western Balkan origin. Moreover, her steppe ancestry is probably derived directly from the Yamnaya horizon.

ITA_Proto-Villanovan
HRV_Vucedol 0.677±0.031
Yamnaya_RUS_Samara 0.323±0.031
chisq 10.397
tail prob 0.661174
Full output

The cluster made up of four early Italic speakers can be modeled with minor Proto-Villanovan-related ancestry, but, perhaps crucially, it doesn't need to be. Indeed, judging by the qpAdm output below, it's possible that almost all of its steppe ancestry came from the Bell Beaker complex, and, thus, the Corded Ware culture complex before that.

ITA_Italic_IA
Bell_Beaker_Mittelelbe-Saale 0.480±0.055
ITA_Grotta_Continenza_CA 0.411±0.042
ITA_Proto-Villanovan 0.109±0.084
chisq 10.294
tail prob 0.590205
Full output

Two out of the three available Etruscans look very similar to the Italic speakers in the above PCA plots, and yet they show a lot more Proto-Villanovan-related ancestry in my qpAdm run. The statistical fit is also relatively poor, perhaps suggesting that something important is missing.

ITA_Etruscan
Bell_Beaker_Mittelelbe-Saale 0.186±0.081
ITA_Grotta_Continenza_CA 0.283±0.064
ITA_Proto-Villanovan 0.531±0.126
chisq 17.175
tail prob 0.143143
Full output

Interestingly, the Etruscan outlier with significant North African admixture (proxied in my run by MAR_LN) doesn't need to be modeled with any Bell Beaker ancestry.

ITA_Etruscan_o
ITA_Proto-Villanovan 0.675±0.057
MAR_LN 0.325±0.057
chisq 14.864
tail prob 0.315912
Full output

Update 17/11/2019: The spatial maps below show how three groups of ancient Romans (from the Imperial, Late Antiquity and Medieval periods) compare to present-day West Eurasian populations in terms of their Global25 coordinates. The hotter the color, the higher the similarity. More here.




See also...

Getting the most out of the Global25

669 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   201 – 400 of 669   Newer›   Newest»
Rob said...

@ Arame
“”Various non IE groups in BB territory can also mean that for many Neolithic communities the Y dna was not important for the language preservation.
After all those Neolithic farmers were initially G2 rich then they became I2 rich and then R1b rich. N”

Lol that’s a reductio ad absurdum

Rob said...

@ FrankN


''IMO, the most parsimomious placement of the HU homeland is SE Anatolia/ N. Syria (the Khabur valley), where Hurrian presence has been attested from the beginnings of Near Eastern literacy. That would make (pre-proto-)HU a prime candidate for Eastern ANF language, and in all likelyhood also for the idiom spoken by at least Cardial Pottery related, "island-hopping" EEF.''

I think that is highly unlikely. Hurrian is far too eastern, and far too young to be credibly linked to Cardial Pottery neolithic. There's simply no link there

Ryukendo K said...

@ Zardos

You repeatedly state that BBs replaced 100% of the Y chromosomes in Iberia in a short time when this is simply false. Unadmixed, purely EEF populations, with I2 Y chromosomes persisted for ~450 years alongside the admixed descendants of Bell Beakers after their arrival. The last unadmixed EEF individual in the record was an I2 male from Central Iberia. Only after almost half a millennium did admixture take place between pure EEFs and Bell Beaker descendants such that unadmixed EEFs disappear, Steppe % drops and there is near-complete R1b dominance (which you can also suspect is an artifact because of cases like I2a appearing in South Asia despite it not showing up in hundreds of Steppe samples, telling us that preservation biases due to social stratification can be extreme).

The modern Basque people are a historically clannish relic with small population size. In fact, Basques have the lowest STR variation in R1b-DF27 of any Iberian population by a large margin despite them being the population having the highest % of this clade anywhere in the world. Every subclade of DF27 is less diverse and estimated to be younger in Basques than in other Iberians, and so their high frequency is due to recent events and the dominance of few founders, and cannot be attributed to especially instantaneous and large replacement by Bell Beaker males in the ancestors of the Basques alone out of the populations of Iberia millenia ago (in fact the diversity in other Iberians would suggest that more Bell Beaker males were involved in them than in Basques). Look up Calafell et al 2017. These types of arguments are incredibly weak.

Rob said...

@ RK

''100% of the Y chromosomes in Iberia in a short time when this is simply false. Unadmixed, purely EEF populations, with I2 Y chromosomes persisted for ~450 years alongside the admixed descendants of Bell Beakers after their arrival. ''


The replacement occured fairly rapidly at a regional level, within 1-200 years, but could be even quicker. Simply existing in broadly similar time & space (''LCA Iberia'') isn't quite the same as co-existing and assimilating.

I2a lingered longest around in Portugal, but thats simply because that the furthest away from the route of R1b-M269 entry into Iberia.

One also needs to look at the complementary archaeological data; e.g.
- BB enters Iberia c. 2500 at the earliest
- by 2400 BC the tholoi of Los Millares end.
This signals a major rift in previously long-established and assertive power structures.

Rob said...

@ RK

''The modern Basque people are a historically clannish relic with small population size. In fact, Basques have the lowest STR variation in R1b-DF27 ''

This changes nothing about the fact that Basque R1b is from Bell beaker culture, nor that R1b-M269 effected a Y-chr sweep throughout Europe in a eerily rapid period.
It's not like there was a ppol of I2a living insivibly in the Pyrenees, which then shifted to R1b during the Roman era
These arguements are completely vacant

NB:
''cases like I2a appearing in South Asia despite it not showing up in hundreds of Steppe sample''

Huh ? Apart from Sredny Stog, western Yamnaya, Kazakh Sakae..

FrankN said...

Rob: "Hurrian is far too eastern, and far too young to be credibly linked to Cardial Pottery neolithic. There's simply no link there "

I agree as concerns Hurrian proper. My theoretisizeing builds on a - so far not explicitly stated - axiom: For language families to have evolved in their uniqueness (and the uniqueness of HU, as agglunative, exclusively suffixing family w. complex verbal morphology, Suffixaufnahme, antipassive and a couple more definining features stands out of question), it requires a substantial period of isolation. Otherwise, linguistic convergence will work its way, leading to mutual borrowing of vocabulary, and Sprachbund phenomena that transfer morphological features across linguistic borders. That period of isolation would obviously have been the LGM that, as we all know, also lead to genetic specification, e.g. the yDNA I-J, J1-J2, and R1a-R1b splits.

As such, pre-pre-proto HU can't have developed in E. Anatolia or the Khabur vallyey, since according to what paleoclimatic research and archeology tells us, these areas were uninhabitable for human(oid)s during the LGM. The most proximate LGM refugium was the Bay of Iskenderun, and I suppose that, once we get post-LGM aDNA from the regions in question, it will show that the northern Fertile Crescent was mostly, if not exclusively, repopulated from there.

You can take it from there: "Island-hopping" neolithisation is archeologically well evidenced to have originated from the Bay of Iskenderun (with Cyprus as first step), which in all likelyhood also provided the base for post-LGM repopulation of the Northern Fertile Crescent. Therefore, IMO both streams should have spoken some kind of pre-pre-proto HU. Which of the elements known from Hurrian (HU) were also (still) present in the language of "island-hopping" EEF remains, however, speculative - we probably will never know for sure..

Ryukendo K said...

The argument you and zardos make that involves basques is that:
1. The R1b patrilineal bell beaker sweep is rapid and complete
2. The Basques plausibly best preserve the results of this sweep, given their high R1b %. Large R1b contribution to ancestors of Basques --> preservation --> High R1b % in Basques

1 is false and 2 is also false because Basques do not preserve the sweep especially well. In fact, every other Iberian population has higher R1b-DF27 variation than the basques, and have it older than the basques. The distribution of %s in Basques is clearly affected by later phenomena.

For I2a, you know full well that I mean Steppe MLBA, the immediate precursors to IArs.

Rob said...

@ Ryu

''1 is false and 2 is also false because Basques do not preserve the sweep especially well. In fact, every other Iberian population has higher R1b-DF27 variation than the basques, and have it older than the basques. The distribution of %s in Basques is clearly affected by later phenomena.''

Basques have a lower effective male population size than other Iberians and their concentration of DF- 27 is reflective of a more recent founder effect. That doesn't change Zardos' observation of the lineage sweep in western Europe assoc. with BBC.


Ryan said...

I think folks have missed my point here. How can the Etruscans be from the Near East when the plot west of modern Italians on the PCA? Is that off base?

Samuel Andrews said...

@Ryu,
"1 is false and 2 is also false because Basques do not preserve the sweep especially well. In fact, every other Iberian population has higher R1b-DF27 variation than the basques, and have it older than the basques. The distribution of %s in Basques is clearly affected by later phenomena."

Basque founder effects don't mean their ancestors didn't have very high frequencies of R1b Df27 before the founder effect. Olalde 2019 found that I think 100% (or close to it) Bronze and Iron age Iberians belong to R1b M269. It was a sweeping, Y DNA replacement in Iberia.

Rob said...

@ FrankN

The paleolithic is the most poorly researched period in Anatolia & Syria. Im sure there were more glacial refuges than the bay of Alexander. But whatever the case, I dont see how that relates to H-U. The Near East had its fair share of population shifts, so I wouldnt subscribe to any overly evolutionist paradigms. But i can certainly agree that the Cardial Neolithic involved island hopping

zardos said...

Ryu: The crucial aspect to the Basque story is, that there was a quick replacement and no integration of local lineages. Whether local males persisted, probably under a rock so to say doesnt matter.
They did not influence the dominant culture, because they were killed or excluded. And even if BB would have made an exception for a high skill smith or the like, that won't change the bigger picture.

That in a clan based societies one more recent lineage dominantes just fits in too.

Also, Basque ancestry can be largely modelled as Iberian Beakers, no other Beaker group shows a higher degree of continuity. All other post-BB show genetically, archaeologically and historically more of a break.
So Basques are like a early Bronze Age time capsule in comparison to the rest of Western Europe. Its not just the yDNA continuity, which is remarkable in itself.

@Frank: All the examples you came up with allow the possibility of a slow and step by steppe male assimilation or a drastic cultural asymmetry in a rather closed system.
That is not the case for Beakers.

To me the lack of integration of mixed sons onto the fathers caste is the only reasonable explanation. The initiative to adopt the language of the mothers must have been a deliberate decision if it took place to form a new caste/clan of their own.
If a language shift took place at all.

But then the number of potential BB languages is rising, so at some point predominantly BB derived people had to shift. However, Basques can only be explained that way or the other way around they didnt change, but the others due to New waves from CE and SEE.

@Rob@Frank: You really think Cardial was fundamentally different from LBK? Ancestry wise and by yDNA (G, E) the core seems to have been the same, wasnt it?

Matt said...

@Davidski, thanks for the West Eurasian PCA. I think the newest thing it adds is that it is relatively easy to see the specific dimensions that relate to East and Western Europe today, and that the early Italian+IA samples more or less cluster like Remedello, or somewhat between Remedello and the steppes, on this dimension. They have a less strong Iberian/Western European personality than IberianIA samples. I think it's also clearer looking through the dimensions on which Imperial samples are *really* affected by Levant gene flow and which Asia minor related flow.

@Ryukendo, yes, the actual dynamics on the ground of shift from I2 to R1b-L51 variants in Iberia and Southwest Europe are unknown. There may have been some local male membership in transitional communities which was wiped out by founder effects (which are high in both the entry of steppe ancestry into Iberia, and later history for Basques).

Personally, I suspect they involved at least bilingualism of males learning a language of local females in more than one case, and possibly longer term bilingualism, with an opportunity for language shift.

I don't think there can securely be said to be a case in which incoming males forbid their sons and daughters of speaking the language of the mothers, nor less that language was a marker of identity and the sons of incoming males were forbidden to speak or learn languages which were not the "clan language", nor that any such languages would be despised and "low" and that the incoming males would have refused to learn to speak them or allow their children to learn them. (This is, IMO, probably projecting modern day language=identity ideas onto ancient people.)

Cases in which there is a strong sex biased admixture event like this among people of this sort of social complexity and the dynamics of how language change plays out through that, as well as the actual details and time of how these events happened, are all weakly known to us in their detail.

The linguistic arguments against a kind of Vasco-Iberian wider Bell Beaker sphere (there being no evidence *for* it and weak evidence of a language family link, and even less evidence of a language family link between these languages timed to Bell Beaker, even where there are attested) are already also well discussed previously.

All that said though Ryu, getting onto the question of unsampled missing populations, I will have to depart from your view on the present of I2a (and E1b?) in Swat_IA being from unsampled steppe populations.

Narasimhan 2019 presents working models in which the Indus_Periphery samples can be modeled using Onge and Turan samples with low levels of Anatolian ancestry (7-14% I think?), and if they can, by extension Swat probably works as well.

Steppe_MLBA is pretty exhaustively sampled and shows little other than R1a, except in those cases where there is admixture, in which case there is often different y about as often as not (e.g. no major sex biases in favour of Steppe_MLBA males in these interactions, generally).

Given that and the ease with which even with low levels of flow y-dna can move about, and that even Narasimhan still finds Turan populations with low Anatolian a plausible ancestry for Indus_P, it's probably simply the case that these are not just the origin of I2a (or E1b) in Swat_IA.

Aram said...

The two J2s found in Italian Cardial ware are very unusual. We don't have anyhthing like that in Barcin related farmers. One is J2-M67. Deep origins of M67 are in East Turkey. The other one is J2a2 which was found in North Iranian related farmers but never in Europe. So the origins of Cardial ware might be in Cilicia and even deeper in Near East.
If Tyrsenyan family descend from Cardial ware then the link with HU is possible.
The alternative that Tyrsenian family is from Iberia CA is very unrealistic.

zardos said...

@Matt: "Personally, I suspect they involved at least bilingualism of males learning a language of local females in more than one case, and possibly longer term bilingualism, with an opportunity for language shift. "

This kind of bilingualism was rejected by me because of the clanish character of BB. However, the Lech Valley added a real social caste to the picture in which only people with male AND female Beaker ancestry were allowed.
Even from physical anthropological surveys it was always clear Iberian BB were no "pure"/typical members of the Central European group.

So this really allows a new group to emerge from mixture which did keep bilingualism because of a lack of identity with the fathers clan.
We can observe that kind of matrilinear identity transfer especially in ethnoracially mixed people with a largely absent father.
Now the Lech Valley showed that even the Lower social strata were largely steppe derived.

But I know from Western German specimen that you can see more poor burials with non-typical BB physical traits. And women in particular which are clearly CW.
Now to work on genealogical detailed studies like in the Lech Valley is theway to go.

Because so far we always see glimpses with huge gaps in between.

Lets say we see a sort of revolution in the records, with lower caste lineages taking over in a given region or that the gene flow between French and Iberian Beakers stopped at some point while Iberian ancestry increased or the social structure changed, all that could help to solve the puzzle.

Many studies like the one on the Lech Valley are the way to go. And the more you have the more you can say. E.g. by knowing who participated in the Lech bride exchange network, who sentimental the (Unetice?) females which left no children in Lech. Did some have children which were sentimental back?
Did the Lech people something similar with some of their women, did lower caste people rise up occasionally and so on.

That way we can solve the issue for Basques with high certainty too. Eventually.

Aram said...

The most realistic external link of Hurrian is not the link with NEC but with Kassitic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kassite_language

Also Hurrian names are found in Marhasi. The location of Marhasi was almost certainly in more Eastern place than Mesopotamia. Either BMAC or Jiroft.

https://www.scribd.com/document/242322412/Francfort-et-Tremblay-Marhasi-et-la-civilisation-de-l-Oxus-pdf

Aram said...

Women usually (but not always) speak the language of their husbands but do they always have kids from their husbands?
This practice is attested in Africa, Siberia , America.

https://nairobinews.nation.co.ke/life/nambian-tribe-offering-wife-guest-night

The rationale about this practice is very simple. To avoid to much endogamy and get some fresh blood into community. Later biologic factors can become important. Hybrids can have better immunity because they are more heterozygous.

Did such a practice existed in Neolithic Europe?

Btw if women always speaks the language of their husbands why everyone here says that Basques are not a WHG language? After all Western Europe was predominantly I2 before the arrival of steppe folks. Why no one learned the language of this I2 husbands?

Rob said...

@ Zardos

Of course, we can always speculate all sorts language shifts, but neither Matt nor RK have demonstrated this. And we should be able to, given the large number of samples available, if they are to sustain their claims. In fact, it seems they're simply ignoring the data.
Bavaria is different, the the incomers / foreigners are wealthy ones.
In Iberia, the dominant groups are the central European newcormers.

Aram said...

The J2 M67-Z467 found in Cardial ware was suggested as an Etruscan marker long before any aDNA. It is found among Tuscans.

The J2 Z6055 found in Lengyel LN also probably has a Cardial ware origin. E M78 of Cardial ware was also found in Lengyel LN. So Cardial people really tried to expand toward North Balkans.

Rob said...

For Iberia, an instructive case is Camino de Yseras, where both 'steppe' and 'nonsteppe BB'' (as so labelled by Reich) apparently co-exist. And all broadly dated to c2500 -2000 BC.
So if one glances at this superficially, we could claim the coexisted for 450 years, giving ample opportunity for language shift.

But in fact the said groups are buried in different parts of the site, and had distinctly different goods.


Another case is the site Paris street, Barcelona.
The currrently published data is actually from the non-BB level. This was levelled at some point and on top of that is a double burial with BB goods.
The shift is one generation

This is the kind of analysis which is required, not arm waiving by people who havent even looked at the data

Rob said...

@ Aram

''The J2 Z6055 found in Lengyel LN also probably has a Cardial ware origin. E M78 of Cardial ware was also found in Lengyel LN. So Cardial people really tried to expand toward North Balkans.''

There is J2a in Barcin Neolithic, Lengyel , LBK Austria. These aren;t from Cardial

zardos said...

@Rob: Fully agreed, but the rather extreme social stratification allows for strange phenomenons. You probably know the practise of concubinat with slaves or dependent Staffel like in Beaker society.
In many cases these children were not fully legitimate in any way and raised by the mother exclusively.
This is quite likely considering the importance the "pure" and typical Beaker women seem to have had.
So the house father, the patriarch had children with his legitimate wife and probably with dependent women too, but these were raised primarily by the mother. This should be investigated in Lech, whether the patriarchs had children only with their wives or the lower, staff women too. Or whether they just had a low husband and whether this had the same lineage as the higher caste or both did happen.

@Aran: Yes, if Basque is a pre-BB language, its more likely coming from Mesolithic Europe. Because the I2 guys conquered much of Europe before the steppe expansion. This is very clear in Northern Europe.
First foragers kidnapped farmer girls, which used pottery etc, then these clans started with farming themselves. They expanded as warlike agro-pastoralists and largely replaced the G2 males while overtaking females on the move.
The constant rise of WHG plus the replacement of the Neolithic lineages was a conquest like the steppe expansion. Same thing.

Rob said...

@ Zardos

''rather extreme social stratification allows for strange phenomenons. You probably know the practise of concubinat with slaves or dependent Staffel like in Beaker society.''


I havent seen strong evidence of a caste system per se during the BB period in Iberia (although there was social stratification). Instead, there seem to be a number of different & evidently competing groups, with a resulting marginalization of all which were non-BB.

significant Stratification is evident in the subsequent El Argar phase; but by then, its all R1b-M269; meaning the commoner & elite were ultimately derived from the same lineage.
We can posit that Iberian is maybe an ''EEF language' or 'WHG language'; but what about Basque ? It is the surviving member of a larger language chain, incl Aquitainian. Here too, the shift was complete. Did BB also take on the language of Aquitainian females ?

''The constant rise of WHG plus the replacement of the Neolithic lineages was a conquest like the steppe expansion.''

This would depend on which region in question specifically

zardos said...

@Rob: I spoke explicitely about Central Europe. Now in this highly stratified, caste like people, which seem to have lived that way for many hundreds of years, with closed, exclusive bride exchange networks, how would they deal with a mixed group of an expansion? That's the point.
I think the new mixed group formed a similar network on their own, with distinction on purpose.

Also I don’t understand why people are so reluctant to accept war and genocidal actions as the true cause of most expansions. Even if they don’t like the idea, its a logical consequence.
Yes, Baden was very peculiar, but TRB, GAC, Britain and Iberia are all clear cut cases.
This was a wave of conquest and destruction in which many thousands of Neolithic males of all ages were killed.
Male lineages dont disappear like that and usually no famine or plague leads to the disappearance of so many people.their lineages and culture.
It was no Ice Age for gods sake.

The "natural phenomenons" only have such consequences if there are people which exploited the weakness caused by it. I recently came across a good Interview in which a leading scientist explained the consequences of climatic changes and natural catastrophies on human societies.
The more robust ones came out stronger than before rather than anything else.

If there would have been no wars and genocides in between, G2 would still be dominant in all of Western and Central Europe without a doubt.

Instead we see in some regions the 10th replacement! Humans groups, males, rarely accept foreign males unless there is good reason. And Eurasian was a very competitive place with lot of people, so it was even more true.

Males don’t step aside and tell foreigners to take all their pretty girls. But even if some group of people would be so insane to do so, after all we are humans and culture can become suicidal, thats just the countdown to the end.
There is just one situation in which males might do so: If utterly defeated so that at least the female side might stand a chance for survival.

But I see no group doing so unless defeated in European prehistory or history. That would be no recipe for success. In fact, as long as they were winning on their own, they rarely accepted foreign males.
After all the G2 males marched from one end to the continent to the other. What else they got (E, J?) they mostly brought from home.
In the North, neighbouring the foragers which kidnapped their girls, there was a clear border. Like a militarised no mans land.
Then these Northerners adapt to become warlike agro-pastoralists and suddenly this new culture which is almost exclusively I2 and more WHG crosses this border, spreads everywhere. And G2 evaporates!
This is no friendly exogamy or caused by bad harvests, not even a plague, thats war and conquest. Not saying other factors could have weakened the Neolithics, but without the Northerners crushing their heads they would just have recovered on their own! Like others did in worse situations if there were no people to exploit the situation.

If the Europeans would have brought the plagues to America, would the Indians have disappeared? Of course not, they would have recovered and being stronger next time most likely.
It was the combination of plagues and colonisation which made the difference. People just recover in such large populations like the Neolithics had. But others took their place instead. Look at what frequency G2 has right now.
Oetzi too didnt wanted to be used for target exercises.
We just don’t have something like Tollense, Eulau or Koscyce.
Some years ago some ideologically motivated archaeologists questioned whether war and massacres were happenIng in the Stone Age at all. But thats no argument any more.
Results speak for themselves.

Ariel said...

When it comes to the Bell Beakers and co. arrival in Italy one would say that was a fairly peaceful process. BB elements were assimilated in the Rinaldone and Remedello culture. Proto-Villanovan integrated elements of Terramare and Appenine culture. On the DNA level one North Italian BB was full EFF, one was a mix, one had a little more steppe. In Sicily the lone BB had little to no steppe ancestry. Let alone the various non Indoeuropean languages that manage to survive in the pensinsula, like Raethians, Etruscans, Ligurian. But even in the Iberian Peninsula you have Tartessian and Aquitanian. In great scheme of things, BA Iberians were 75%EEF 25% Steppe at best. I don't think that we can have the same argument that we have for the replacement of the old Copper Age/previous farmer stock like we have in Central/Eastern Europe.

old europe said...


@zardos

In northern europe there was no mass murder of farmers TRB and Gac score something like 75% and 80% EEF. What happens was local ylines acculturated and integrated into the farmers societies. The more you go far from the mediterranean the more agricultural societies became less based on demic diffusion and more about acculturation of local hunter gathers.

Anonymous said...

@FrankN Each case of female language transmission is unique, it is unusual. Island languages are a special case. That is, when a man goes to live with his wife's family. Special cases of wartime violence and dissidents have become tribes, such as the English and French in the Indians. Neither English nor Hungarian is a mother language.

Gaska said...

@Zardos

You have an apocalyptic vision of prehistory in which almost no one agrees with you. There were no conquests or invasions and not even mass migrations, the BB culture stopped the IE expansion in CentralEurope- R1b-P312 never spoke IE and the genetic continuity in Iberia is the best proof of this, we have already spoken many times.

ǵenh said...

@ Aram

"The J2 M67-Z467 found in Cardial ware was suggested as an Etruscan marker long before any aDNA. It is found among Tuscans."

This is one of the many hypotheses based on modern samples, but there is no evidence yet that J2 M67-Z467 was an Etruscan marker. It is found among Tuscans at very low percentages (in the study making this hypothesis was found in 2.7% of the sample, G2a-L497 and R1b-U152 were definitely much higher in the sample), J2 M67-Z467 is found anyhwere in Italy, including north Italy, and it is definitely more common in the non-Etruscan areas of Italy: Adriatic side of Italy (Marche and Abruzzo) and southern Italy.

J-L26 and J-M304 have been found in samples of the Neolithic from Marche (Adriatic side of Italy) and the Neolithic of the Marche does not show great relations with that of the west coast where then the Etruscans will flourish.

old europe said...



......the same thing happened in Ukraine where farmers from Cucuteni and GAC acculturted local foragers toward a more agropstoral kind of society ( the switch toward pastoralism came initially from the farmers).
Read Manzura...

Davidski said...

I've read Manzura. He missed the mammoth in the room: steppe migrants from the east.

Anonymous said...

@Ariel "Let alone the various non Indoeuropean languages that manage to survive in the pensinsula, like Raethians, Etruscans, Ligurian."

Ligurian is most likely a BB language, it is possible that Basque/Aquitaine and Pictish are all in the BBC. Etruscan is an alien language, and Raethian is apparently a derivative of Etruscan adopted by the conquered Ligurians (Troas > Etrusc/Rasna/Raeth).

Anonymous said...

Manzura isn't serious.

zardos said...

@Old_Europe: No, thats wrong. The reason for the high EEF ancestry is that even the very core of the Northern agro-pastoralists was mixed. Like I said, the development started with hunters taking Neolithic girls. They became mostly acculturated by those women and their neighbours, but it was a new clan of a different ethnicity, no doubt about it.

This already mixed core group captured in a chain Neolithic settlements, largely annihilated the local males and took sone of the females with them.
That's why you get I2 with a sudden rise of WHG ancestry, with some exceeding 75 percent, others dont.
When they met stronger Neolithic Balkan groups and the steppe people (R1), the expansion was first slowed down, then local fusions were formed and in the end an improved steppe people rolled them up like the I2 Northern clans did it with G2 Neolithics before.

Look at the rather sudden cultural changes, the spread of cattle herders and I2 with significantly increased WHG. Exclusively I2, G2 disappearing.
They made their own Neolithic culture. The female side contributed a lot, but it was Northern hunters having the say. If they mixed two times with the Neolithics you got the 75 percent already.
Again, if there would have been peaceful cooperation and acculturation, there would be something like 50:50 in the male lineages. Instead you have pure I2 clans over areas as large as the EU before the fall of the iron curtain. Comparable to the Roman Empire or the Celts at their hey days.
Taken from the G2 Neolithics it a relatively short time span.
If that was no conquest, what else? The expansion of the Romans and Celts had less of an impact.

ǵenh said...

@ Archi

You're a constant source of disinformation and you turn every argument into a joke.

Rhaetian language cannot be derived from Etruscan. This is demonstrated on both a linguistic and an archaeological level.

zardos said...

@Gaska: Its fun, if people are constantly at war, they say war is the father of everything. If they have leaders which want to control and trade, dominate peacefully if possible, peaceful exchange and cooperation becomes the new (Marxist derived) dogma. Then sone think the climatich changes are so important and will pushed global control and cooperation, and suddenly its "always the climate".

If one view on society and ideological extreme position become too dominant, they dominated the debates unfortunately.

All explanations can be true for a specific case in question, but all should be considered.

In premodern times, why should you negotiate and pay if you can just take it easily by force?
The times were apocalyptic indeed and even more so in desperate times of crisis. Usually such large expansions are the result of one group having a clear advantage, superiority, at least for a time, combined with pressure on the advanced group.
Now Northern Europe was a harsh place, but for transitional foragers to farmers it was like a experimental laboratory.
The agricultural colonisation failed there more than once miserably, both because of the larger numbers of fishers living there and their resistance as well as the bad climate and soil for crop farming.
In other places the HG were weaker and had less time to react and adapt to the Neolithic invasion. But in the North and East the HG were stronger, the farmers weaker.
And the warlike agro-pastoralism was invented and expanded 2 times, in both cases by settled fishermen in large communities in long term contacts with neighbouring farmers from which they took wives. One time in Northern Europe, resulting in TRB-GAC, one time at the rivers of the Southern Pontic steppe.
That was no coincidence. This was a hunter-fisher culture adopting warlike agro-pastoralism in their own style and rolling over farmer neighbours.
Just the ancestral components were different and the steppe version was physically stronger and had horses.

Anonymous said...

@ǵenh said...
"You're a constant source of disinformation and you turn every argument into a joke.

Rhaetian language cannot be derived from Etruscan. This is demonstrated on both a linguistic and an archaeological level."

You always write the untruth without any reason. Rhaetian borrowed Etruscan script, so they could use Etruscan as a literary language as medieval Latin. This is a common thing, look at the bilinguals of Anatolia in the same epoch, where they were written in two languages at once or simply in a foreign language. So you can keep your joke fantasies to yourself.

ǵenh said...

@ Archi

"Rhaetian borrowed Etruscan script".

Etruscans borrowed the script from the Greeks who settled in southern Italy, and spread it to the rest of Italy.

You lack the basis for an honest exchange of information.

El Lurker said...

It's possible for conquerors to learn the language of the conquered people.

In Paraguay the Spanish became polygamous, each with many Guarani women at their disposal, and the kids from those polygamous unions learned the language of their mothers (the people who raised them).
Paraguay is still 100% Spanish Guarani Bilingual, and before public schools, Guarani was the main language. Spanish probably would have disappeared without the constant arrival of bureaucrats from Spain for 3 centuries. They also became majority r1b through their Spanish fathers.
The same happened in Brazil, they only became majority Portuguese speakers in the 1700s through State intervention from Portugal (before they spoke Lengua Geral, a tupi-guarani language)

Etruscans seem to be a people very similar to Latins who for some reason managed to keep their neolithic farmer language. Now both Etruscans and Basques seem a lot less exotic than 10 years ago.

zardos said...

@El_Lurker: Thanks, perfect examples for what I meant and the only way it could have happened with patriarchal BB.
Not the incoming conquerors learned the language of the defeated, but the many mixed sons which were raised almost exclusively by their mothers and could not enter the caste of their fathers. Like the mestizos didnt become Spaniards, but the mixed new population. Some of the fathers might even went back home again, to their legitimate high caste family. But they destroyed the preceding system and disposessed or killed the local males,installiert their mixed sons as the new leading clan or those became it, with or without their fathers blessing.
Extreme polygamy after the conquest would have made this more likely. This would be an hypothesis which could be verified by genealogical genetic research like in the Lech Valley.

Anonymous said...

@ǵenh "Etruscans borrowed the script from the Greeks who settled in southern Italy, and spread it to the rest of Italy.

You lack the basis for an honest exchange of information."

Go to school, dishonest man. The Rhaetian alphabet is a late North-Etruscan alphabet derived from the Etruscan alphabet. It is not borrowed from Greek but from Etruscan. The Etruscan alphabet itself is so early that at the Greeks have not yet found its prototypes. This alphabet was found on Lemnos in the 6th century B.C (or early), and could not be spread by Greeks in Italy, because Etruscans used it in Italy before the Greeks. Latin alphabet borrowed from south Etruscan alphabet.

Hodo Scariti said...

According to the studies by prof. Adolfo Zavaroni, Ligurian is indeed an IE language.

Ric Hern said...

@ El Lurker

Thank you very much.

Groo Salugg said...

@old europe
GAC emerged when the (former) foragers acculturated the farmers towards mobile pastoralism and military society.

Anonymous said...

Ancient witnesses deserve more trust than it is unclear who. They say that Ligurian was not a Celtic or Italian language, i.e. no IE language. They say that the Ligurians lived on the Corsican coast, that is, they were not Indo-Europeans.

zardos said...

@Groo: Indeed, but "acculturation" is an euphemisn to me for the case in question. If they conquered, killed and disposessed, they were not on a cultural mission like Jesuits in Paraguay. They did acculturate, the Christian missionaries or rather small Greek colonies which led to the diffusion of East Mediterranean high culture in Southern Gallia.

But thats not what this was about, they didnt invite their Neolithic neighbours to peaceful talks about their future cooperation and what nice cultural progress they made. ;)
If almost no G2 male survived the expansion North of the Alps, thats a genocidal conquest.

ǵenh said...

@ Larth Ulthes


There are no Ligurian inscriptions. Zavaroni found inscriptions on rock, but is not yet accepted by scholars that it is Ligurian. Btw Zavaroni is not a professor and not even an academic, he is an independent scholar.

old europe said...


@zardos and all

learn the basics of northern european farmers their cultural package and above all where they came from. Time to update.

https://populationgenomics.blog/2019/02/01/of-stone-blood-the-demography-of-the-megalithic-expansions-work-in-progress/

Synome said...

I think the evidence is mounting that Etruscan is native to Italy and descended from a Neolithic/Chalcolithic farmer language.

The other major Tyrsenian language, Rhaetian, is highly diverged from Etruscan. How can this be if Tyrsenian languages entered Italy only in the late Bronze or Early Iron age? It would require two separate establishments, versus a scenario of diversification in situ.

Now the aDNA shows no obvious evidence of Anatolian admixture, and we would expect this similar profile to Italic speakers if there was a long period of intermixture between the groups, which would happen if Etruscan was an old presence in the peninsula.

Arte Watch said...

@FrankN: "- Semitic (Y-DNA J1, especially J1-P58, is considered a "Semitic" marker, yet it is of clearly Caucasian origin and only arrived in the Levante with the Kura-Araxes "Khirbet-Kerak" expansion around 3,000 BC)."

Have a good look at this map and tell me where you see Kura-Araxes or KKW:

https://i.imgur.com/xwoXwgQ.jpg

Because as far as I'm aware, the only J1 that has ever been found in a K-A context is VEK007 from Velikent in present-day Dagestan, this individual is Z1842 which is the branch normally found in Northeast Caucasian-speaking groups.

It's doubtful that P58 ever was a major marker in K-A. More to the point, the main branch of P58 associated with Semitic-speaking groups is L862 (Z2331) and everything immediately downstream, their TMRCAs are all around 5,600 years old, so this lineage is bound to have been present in the Levant since the Chalcolithic... In other words roughly a thousand years before K-A reached the Levant.

I do not dispute that J1-P58 was not involved in early Afroasiatic dispersals, what's clear though is that it was involved in Semitic dispersals since proto-stage, you can expect upcoming results to confirm this.

Anonymous said...

Rhaetian's kinship with Etruscan is a hypothetical hypothesis, worse than that. Etruscan script from the Lydia region, because only there are such symbols of the Etruscan alphabet as 8.

Everybody wants to be Etruscan. It's like in the times of ancient Rome, all the noble families brought themselves out of the Trojans, everyone wanted to sneak in to them.

Anonymous said...

@Synome "I think the evidence is mounting that Etruscan is native to Italy and descended from a Neolithic/Chalcolithic farmer language."

Etruscan J2b2 is not native in Italy! It wasn't in the Neolithic/Chalcolithic!

Hodo Scariti said...

@ Archi

Ligurians were also in Southern France according to the ancients...
I don't understand your logic: Ligurian wasn't celtic nor italic, so it was non-IE... there were also other IE languages extincted.

And, according to your view, if Rhaetic wasn't a relative of Etruscan, so what is its affiliation?

Anonymous said...

"Larth Ulthes

Ligurian is not Celtic nor Indo-European.
Ligurians are not Celtic nor Indo-European.
Ligurian culture is not Celtic nor Indo-European.
Including in the South of France.
Nemirovsky found in Etruscan borrowings from the Hattian language: torment.
There is no need to speak about Raetic at all, it is something found on the border of Etruria, the influence of Etruscans there on the face, writing is borrowed from Etruscans, and nothing about the language is clear.

Rob said...

Comparisons to colonial America are not relevant
Analyse the data for itself
200 Spanish men talking women in Mexico for sport is not the same family units and tribes colonising new lands and creating a new culture system

Rob said...

@ Zardos

“Also I don’t understand why people are so reluctant to accept war and genocidal actions as the true cause of most expansions. Even if they don’t like the idea, its a logical consequence.
Yes, Baden was very peculiar, but TRB, GAC, Britain and Iberia are all clear cut cases.
This was a wave of conquest and destruction in which many thousands of Neolithic males of all ages were killed.
Male lineages dont disappear like that and usually no famine or plague leads to the disappearance of so many people.their lineages and culture.
It was no Ice Age for gods sake.”

Yes of course but look at the findings from Britain and Sweden - there were no G2 in the first place; so they weren’t replaced . Instead farming was introduced by groups from western France already I2.
Going back a step to the loess belt; LBK was almost 100% G2; we would need more data from SBK to understand further. Expansion of HG lineages seems to have been mostly in the late phase of TRB; & with GAC
Iberia is different still- several waves of migration into it from Central Europe; even prior to BB .

zardos said...

@Rob: The good thing is a lot of those hypotheses can be tested with more material.
For all we know the first waves of BB in Iberia could have been mercenaries, garrisons, some form of fluid occupation or the like. We just know that the local men were mostly disappearing, BB men appear and they have children with the remaining local women.
How they related to their strict caste like relatives further North is not sufficiently explored as far as I see it. Did new males from the North come in and if so for many generations? How big was the influx of BB females?
Were the BB occupants all staying or did they move back, stood in touch with their home communities. How about the mixed ones?
If those in the North did not accept them or if they were disconnecting on purpose, the back flow should be minimal, especially to the higher social strata.
Now which exact BB group, network was the main force behind the colonisation?
DO we have sufficient data to say something about the backflow?

Because coming back to America, male white could go all ways, but the backflow was sometimes rather limited obviously, even more so to the higher classes of society. So there might be, only as one scenario, a one way Ticket south. But this can be tested with the backflow.

Rob said...

@ Zardos

“For all we know the first waves of BB in Iberia could have been mercenaries, garrisons, some form of fluid occupation or the like. We just know that the local men were mostly disappearing, BB men appear and they have children with the remaining local women

Yes we know - some of the earliest steppe/ CE BB burial was a female - I0462 Arroyal
I6626- female with 30% steppe at CdY

They came as groups to settle; taking key regions Basque region; Meseta; then expanding from there . Naturally; they also incorporated local females; but this was gradual accretion which did not alter their social norms or tight-knit culture which was reproduced everywhere virtually the same

A said...

@ old europe

A recent study on the megalithic culture in Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and Iberia:

"males from megalith burials belong almost exclusively to YDNA haplogroup I, more specifically to the I2a sublineage. The high frequency of the HG-derived I2a male lineages among megalith as well as nonmegalith individuals suggests a male sex-biased admixture process between the farmer and the HG groups."

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/19/9469

The same thing was found by a 2011 study on a megalithic burial site in northern France.

Olade et al. 2018, supplementary material:

"A striking observation is the haplogroup composition of Neolithic males in Britain, who displayed entirely I2a2 and I2a1b haplogroups. Thus, there is no evidence at all for a contribution to Neolithic farmers in Britain of the Y chromosome haplogroups (e.g., G2) that were predominant in Anatolian farmers and in Linearbandkeramik central European farmers."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5973796/

zardos said...

@Rob: But don't you think its possible, even quite likely, that if they kept contact, especially if they did so at first, they might have called in mercenaries and seasonal warriors from BB territories beyond the Pyrenees? Fighters which didn't stay, but left after their combat operations? Probably with some booty, some being even pait, with a foot in the door if they wanted to move South too and either pregnant women left behind or some slaves taken with them? We know that from later times in tribal societies very well. Like Celts and Germanics. Oftentimes related tribal warriors which were not part of the core group, but which volunteered to support a mission of another allied tribe or great tribal leader.

In any case if they kept close contacts with their source group - unless the whole party was on the move - there must have been significant backflow.

Matt said...

@El Lurker, good example if as you describe.

zardos is perhaps correct to point out that there was, too, another (Spanish) ethnic identity which mixed children could not exactly enter.

But this is not that important a point. there is no reason why there had to be for a similar situation you describe with the use of Guarani to unfold. It could easily unfold even if there were no such distinctions (or no such that lasted longer than a generation or two). There's nothing required in the general dynamic you describe requiring this (or even polygamy, really).

FrankN said...

Zardos:
1. "You really think Cardial was fundamentally different from LBK? Ancestry wise and by yDNA (G, E) the core seems to have been the same, wasnt it? "
Evidence is inconclusive so far, because we don't have yet that many Cardial samples. Note, however, that the ADMIXTURE diagrams in Fig. S12 show a considerable Iran_HG component (dark grey) in CentralItaly_Neo, probably around 10% or more. That componment is widely absent from the Balkans, Central European and British Neolithics, and also seems to lack in Barcin (albeit, IIRC, not Boncuklu). Neolithic Greece (part of the "island-hopping" route) shows that Iran_HG component as well.
I also remember analyses that Rob and Alberto ran some time ago on my request, according to which Cardial CB13 from Barcelona (5470 - 5360 BC) differed from the other Iberia_EN samples by preferring Boncuklu over Barcin, and requesting some Levante_Neo. The Mathieson e.a. Balkans paper, OTOH, included a few Cardial sites from the Dalmatian coast that hardly differed genetically from the Inland - albeit that may also have to do with the archeologically well documented interaction across the Dinaric Alps (transhumance, salt trade).
I guess we'll need a few more Cardial, "island-hopping" samples (Neolithic Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete would be great), and some samples from early farming centres in SE Turkey, e.g. Cayonü, for certainty.

2. "All the examples you came up with allow the possibility of a slow and step by steppe male assimilation or a drastic cultural asymmetry in a rather closed system.
That is not the case for Beakers.
"
Apparently, you still think that yDNA replacement in Iberia was caused by BB. This is wrong! The Tagus estuary, with the earliest and densest record of BB presence in Iberia, has so far not delivered a single R1b BB. Instead, we find there BB I4229, yDNA I2a1a1, as late as 2289-2135 calBCE. From the El Argar periphery, we a/o have I8048, La Navilla (Granada), 2200-2000BC, yDNA I2a1b (intriguingly in Olalde 2019 included in the SE_Iberia_CA [non-Steppe] set). Moreover, there is COV20126, 1747-1627 BC, yDNA G2 from the Cueva del Angel half-way between Malaga and Cordoba (Gonzalez-Fortes e.a. 2019, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2018.2288).

The aDNA we have so far - which is pretty thin as concerns the EBA, i.e. 2200-1800 BC - suggests that the pre-dominance of R1b started in Central Iberia during the CA-EBA transition, but may only have taken full effect in other parts of Iberia during the MBA, possibly as late as around 1600 BC.
I don't know which agricultural systems prevailed in Central Iberia during the EBA (Gaska - can you help out?), but a substantial transhumating pastoralist element doesn' seem unlikely. In such a system, the men would migrate with the herds to summer pastures, leaving young boys with the mothers, until they reach a certain age - say 8-12 - to join their fathers on the migration. Girls would exclusively speak their mother's tongue, boys would be raised in their mother's tongue as well but later on acquire the father's idiom as well. The ultimate outcome would be a mixed language with approx. 25 % contribution from the fathers' idiom, and 75% from the mothers' (as we see it in Garifuna).

Akko said...

@Archi What? Many archaeologists claim that it didn't begin until 1200 bc? Like who?
Almost all archaeologists agree the Nuragic civilization started in the Middle bronze age around the 17th century bc, some argue it started even earlier with the Bonnanaro phase around the 20th century bc but that's debated. If anything some archaeologists argue that it ended around 1200-1150 bc since no new Nuraghi were built after that date, and many were abandoned. Of course that's an extreme view because there's continuity in the pottery tradition and because although the civilization changed and new structures such as the well temples were built, it was clearly a local development and not the result of a migration.

If you want to learn about the chronology of the Nuragic civilization, read this:
https://www.academia.edu/38838695/MEDITERRANEA_ITINERA_Lo_Schiavo_Perra?fbclid=IwAR3RKfLJ7ajAw850EFneqKX-clqmiUpt8JWh72JERWzsKJaGHjCVepY1Fgs

Rob said...

@ Zardos
Yes of course they remained connected; which is why they reproduced the same cultural norms
As you know; the place which diverged most was Central Europe; not Iberia.
So it’s actually quite the opposite of what some are claiming

FrankN said...

Aram:
"This practice is attested in Africa, Siberia , America.

https://nairobinews.nation.co.ke/life/nambian-tribe-offering-wife-guest-night
"

And, of course, in Polynesia - see Bounty Mutiny - and might actually be a key reason for Polynesians speaking Austronesian, in spite of a pre-dominance of non-Austronesian yDNA.

Matt said...

Ultimately, in Iberia we know that we have approx 40% of Beaker-outside-Iberia ancestry.

In simple mathematical terms, if you replace 40% of the ancestry in Iberia, then you must either be bringing 80% of the males ancestors and 0% female ancestors, or else a much lower proportion of males that moves away from this to approaches 40% males, 40% females. (Or of course in theory a female biased ratio, but that is in anything other than theory hard to square with the R1b-M269 replacement)

If anyone is arguing that large numbers of females accompanied male Beaker groups moving into Iberia, they are inherently arguing for male Iberian continuity. (I.e. you can't argue for 100% outside males, 60% outside females = 60% local continuity? That would give 20%. Doesn't work in simple mathematical terms.)

If, Rob, you are arguing for very slow, gradual incorporation only of local female people into Iberian Beaker groups, not any kind of large, significant pulses happening, that this is knowable through the archaeology and dna, and that we go further than this and demonstrate that groups with this formation (rather than some other process) were directly ancestral to Aquitanian and Iberian speakers... then I kind of feel that this sounds like a very complex argument that will not be made well through large numbers of separate comments on various different posts on Eurogenes, and which you should probably publish on and make available to peer review by archaeologist peers. It goes beyond anything which I could see archaeologists going for, but you should probably make your case to them?

Gaska said...

@El Lurker said-"It's possible for conquerors to learn the language of the conquered people.

It has never been seen in the history of mankind that a conquering people adopt the language of the conquered. Spanish friars learned native languages ​​to evangelize Indians but that was never done by soldiers or settlers. The survival of the Guaraní and other indigenous languages ​​in the Spanish colonies was thanks to the Catholic Church. Despite the caste system of the colonial regime, all mestizos were educated according to Spanish customs.

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

The Beakers brought females but they around half Rhesus negative, hence when they were paired up with Neolithic rhesus positive Farmer males they had no offspring. The compound effect of that over time we see in Basques.

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

http://mathii.github.io/2017/09/21/blood-groups-in-ancient-europe

https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/rh-factor/about/pac-20394960

zardos said...

@Frank: "The Mathieson e.a. Balkans paper, OTOH, included a few Cardial sites from the Dalmatian coast that hardly differed genetically from the Inland"

But wouldn't that be some of the most pure Cardial settlers for the Western route? Fairly close to their starting point in Europe, like before the chance to mix with other groups during their expansions? And can't some deviations not be the result of mixing with different people they got into contact with, rather than those Dalmatians being the result of mixture - which wouldn't eradicate any more Eastern/Iranian tendency but only reduce it anyway.

@2: I meant steppe Beaker CE networks ofc, not BB culture in general, especially not for Iberia. Its remarkable however that all the cases you point to are South and remind me of the remnants of Moors during Reconquista. The last resort. Probably they find the last ones in Gibraltar...

I would add to the transhumance the fact that BB didn't conquer all of Iberia at once as an important additional factor for absent fathers. First, I would assume, like I said earlier, warriors to come in and out, for campaigns with notable leaders. Second, even those staying might have been quite often and long on campaign too, since they most likely raided and attacked their foes on a regular bases. This is how they might have brought them down actually. Because that's the big advantage the agro-pastoral warriors had, beside others, that they could move with their food, the crop farmers and city dwellers could not. Even if they would have sitten in their fortresses which they couldn't storm initially, the food would have run out eventually.
With no effective strategy to defend their resources, no help in sight, they were lost, even if they couldn't be defeated by brute force in the first assaults. Add to that the greater mobility steppe BB surely had.

If you assume they have taken the strategically most important regions first, from North to South generally speaking, you end up exactly in the places where you was pointing to for I and G survivors till late.

But absent and mobile fathers, with mixed sons raised by their mothers is really, one way or another, the only viable scenario for a language shift among steppe derived, patriarchal, warlike agro-pastoralists like we see them in Europe. And the caste-like character of the Lech Valley, if being proven for most of BB communities through space and time, would be an important factor for sure too.

If we assume mostly absent fathers, because they moved back or were with the herds or on campaign, living in polygynous relationships of some sort with the sons having no access to the original fathers clan position and social network, this would be something. But with all that speculation, the really decisive issue would be "fathers absent, not forming a nuclear family, not living with mother & son". For whatever reason, even if living some houses apart with another woman.









Gaska said...


@Frank said-"I don't know which agricultural systems prevailed in Central Iberia during the EBA (Gaska - can you help out?), but a substantial transhumating pastoralist element doesn' seem unlikely.

Transhumance in Iberia has been practiced since prehistoric times. Central and Northern Iberia is very cold and it snows abundantly, it is impossible to keep the cattle in autumn and winter and the herds have to move to Extremadura or Andalucia where there are abundant pastures most of the year. Then obviously the Bbs were also transhumant. Some time ago BB Blogger started an interesting thread-"Marauder Mesetans Take Booty" in which we talked about the possibility that the Bbs of the Castilian plateau would expand in all directions in search of pastures for their cattle. This expansion could be violent attacking the large Chalcolithic villages of southern Iberia. However, archeology tells us something totally different, because between 2,750 and 2,500 BC, the BB package was adopted with total normality in Zambujal, Leceia, La Pijotilla, San Blas, Valencina, Los Millares etc etc



Gaska said...

I hope they don't take long to publish the results of El Argar, so we can see how it was a hierarchical society of a great culture of the Bronze age and we can know if that annihilation of the Iberian Neolithic population was true or if it only exists in the imagination of the Dr. Reich and zardos

FrankN said...

Rob: "There is not a single bell beaker Sample from Portugal get Frank. Look at the actual data and the supplementary material."

Actually, the Olalde 2019 SupMats seem to lack any description of the Cova de Moura site that has delivered I4229, but it is listed as BB site in J. Czebreszuk (2014): "Similar but Different: Bell Beakers in Europe" (available online as Google Book).
From the Martiano e.a. 2017 SupMats: "Cova da Moura is a natural cave, in which human remains were buried, located in the Sizandro River Valley, Estremadura. The site was discovered and excavated in the 1930s[3]. Radiocarbon dates obtained from human remains are as follows: 2620 to 2210 cal BC (@95.4%, 3950+60 BP, UBAR-536); 3635 to 3372 cal BC (@ 95.4%, 4715+ 50, UBAR-593) (Silva, 2002). Burial may have continued for as long as 1000 years [4] but appears to have been concentrated in the Late Neolithic and Copper Age, when exceptionally rich and exotic grave goods (jet, variscite and ivory) were also deposited [5]. The archaeological deposits were very disturbed and the human bones were disarticulated."
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006852#sec024

Whether BB or not - yDNA I2a1a1 during the CA-EBA transition in a burial place characterised by "exceptionally rich and exotic grave goods" is certainly telling..

Otherwise, we have I1970, Bell Beaker, 2700-2300 BCE, yDNA I, from Alverco de Ribatejo (Olalde e.a. 2018).

Rob said...

@ FranK

''Actually, the Olalde 2019 SupMats seem to lack any description of the Cova de Moura site that has delivered I4229, ..but from...From the Martiano e.a. 2017 Supplement''

Which is the relevant supplement

'' Burial may have continued for as long as 1000 years [4] but appears to have been concentrated in the Late Neolithic and Copper Age, when exceptionally rich and exotic grave goods (jet, variscite and ivory) were also deposited [5]. The archaeological deposits were very disturbed and the human bones were disarticulated."''


Yes, it tells us that there were well connected communities in south Iberia before BB arrived, and that this sample is not connected to BB culture, as you claimed. Quite the contrary, this type of vurial is pathognomonic of pre-Beaker Megalithic burials

''Otherwise, we have I1970, Bell Beaker, 2700-2300 BCE, yDNA I, from Alverco de Ribatejo (Olalde e.a. 2018).''

doesnt seem so: ''Unfortunately, the location of the skeletons within the cave is unknown, as they do not appear on published plans. Doubts remain as to whether they can be included in any of the four identified and registered burial phases''

BB people simply deposited a lot of BB ceramics in old caves . Its confused a lot of people

Rob said...

Believe me, Ive gone through all samples with a fine comb. There are thus far only 2 non-R1b-m269 males with some sort of BB goods. An R1b-V88 male in CdY I6622: Individual inhumation in artificial cave with Ciempozuelos ceramics; and an I2a2 double male in Humenajos with some BB pottery, possibly small copper dagger. All the others, esp those with full BB sets, are R1b-M269.

FrankN said...

Zardos: "If you assume they [BB] have taken the strategically most important regions first, from North to South generally speaking, you end up exactly in the places where you was pointing to for I and G survivors till late."

Oops! Iberia isn't really at the top of the list when it comes to agricultural productivity in Europe: Too arid, to mountaineous, to little fertile loess produced by glaciers. Surely, it was a major exporter of olive oil and wine during the Roman Era. The origin of both traditions has still remained somewhat mysterious to me, but I don't think it can be linked to BBs. Nevertheless, CE Celts, e.g. from Manching, preferred wine from Bordeaux and the Languedoc over Iberian one, as has been archeologically well attested, and for Dutch BBs, Aquitainian wine would probably have done the job.
O.k., there are some salt lakes on the Meseta, and early BB settlement actually seems to have clustered around them, but when it comes to salt (surely a strategic commodity for pastoralists), Iberia's largest and historically most important deposits are found in Catalonia.
The really big Prices, aside from Catalonian salt, were the Andalusian gold and silver deposits (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Tinto_(river)), and Galician tin - whereby the latter, intriguingly, doesn't seem to have been of interest to CA/EBA populations, which were still focusing on arsenic bronze. And, of course, it was exactly for that Andalusian gold and silver that Los Millares, and later on El Agrar, became so rich and powerful.
So, the Meseta doesn't look like "the strategically most important region" to me, more like some sort of backwater, sparsely populated, where it was easiest to assume control. How R1b managed to spread from there across virtually the whole peninsula, in order to ultimately also dominate the ressource-rich regions (Andalusia, Catalonia), is certainly a fascinating question, to which I don't have an answer yet.

FrankN said...

Zardos - reply continued:
When you state "usually no famine or plague leads to the disappearance of so many people.their lineages and culture", you apparently haven't well studied recent demographic research:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian: "One of the deadliest plagues in history, the devastating pandemic resulted in the deaths of an estimated 25–50 million people during two centuries of recurrence, a death toll equivalent to 13–26% of the world's population at the time of the first outbreak." Those 13-26% of the world population translate into around 50% of the European plus circum-Mediterranean population.

- The toll of the Medieval Black Death can be pretty well traced based on available records. In a number of major cities, including Florence, London, Cologne, Hamburg and Lübeck, it surpassed 50%.

- https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/2/4/96-0416_article: "Four major epidemic diseases (TB, typhoid, influenza, and smallpox) devastated the Marquesas from 1791 to 1863/64; approximately 80% of the population died." Similar, albeit somewhat lower percentages have been reported for Tahiti and Hawaii (compare that to the number of locals shot by. J. Cook's people on said islands).

- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/381905v1:
"The model also inferred the collapse experienced by the Mixe (included in the model for the split between Northern and Southern Hemisphere populations) and the Huilliche-Pehuenches after European contact, which were much more severe. We infer a 94% (95% CI[0.94-0.96]) collapse for the Mixe and a comparable 96% (95% CI[0.95-0.96]) collapse for the Huilliche-Pehuenche."

As such, there is clear evidence that diseases actually can eradicate whole populations, and bring about more substantial genetic change than wars. Whether that was the case also during the Iberian EBA is yet unclear. Nevertheless, the Plague rampaged Lech valley BBs (which probably had already acquired a certain degree of resistance), and might also have reached late CA Iberia that, for all we know, hadn't experienced that disease before.

Rob said...

@ FrankN

'' How R1b managed to spread from there across virtually the whole peninsula, is certainly a fascinating question, to which I don't have an answer yet.

They probably controlled the river valleys. Control Meseta then from there ''decapitated'' Los Millares. Essentially, swept aside any serious resistence and the rest starved or were marginalised. The degree of shift is surprising; but what we see is just the same everywhere in W Europe, once we sift out the mis-labelled data. In fact these findings up turn dogma & have significant implications for the language history of SW Europe.


@ Matt

''Rob, you are arguing for very slow, gradual incorporation only of local female people into Iberian Beaker groups, not any kind of large, significant pulses happening, that this is knowable through the archaeology and dna, and that we go further than this and demonstrate that groups with this formation. hen I kind of feel that this sounds like a very complex argument that will not be made well through large numbers of separate comments on various different posts on Eurogenes, ''

Yes its a complex issue. Females accompanied BB migrations at every instance, i see little point in debating this. There was an up to 50% migration into Iberia when modeled with the historically appropriate source population from southern France. The same inturn can be said when modelling southeast Iberia with a source population from the Messeta. Anyhow, I just felt RKs comments had to be addressed, because they were clearly erroneous.

Kristiina said...

The earliest Iberian/Marittime style Beakers are dated to ca 2850–2250 BCE (I0261). The first Steppe Bell Beakers seem to arrive after 2500 BC. I filtered the Excel file from the newest Olalde paper to include only the males from the period 2500-1500 BC. This is the result:

2900–2346 BCE [2568–2346 cal BCE) CA Spain El Mirador I5838/Mir202-037 I2a2a2a-F1696/SK1250
2900–2346 BCE [2568–2346 cal BCE) CA Spain El Mirador I1302 G2a2b2b
2900–2346 BCE [2568–2346 cal BCE) CA Spain El Mirador I1274 I2a2
2900–2346 BCE [2568–2346 cal BCE) CA Spain El Mirador I1282 I
2900–2346 BCE [2568–2346 cal BCE) CA Spain El Mirador I1284 I
2900–2346 BCE [2568–2346 cal BCE) CA Spain El Mirador I1314 G2a2b2b1a1
2900–2346 BCE [2568–2346 cal BCE) CA Spain El Mirador I1303 I2a1a1a
2568–2346 cal BCE CA Spain El Mirador Burgos I1277/Mir14 I2a2a2a-F1696/SK1250

2880–2490 cal BCE Iberian Bell Beaker Verdelha dos Ruivos Lisbon Portugal 2700-2300 BCE I1970 I2a2a
2571–2350 cal BCE Iberian Bell Beaker Cerdanyola Barcelona Spain 2571-2350 calBCE I0257 R1b1a2-V88
2850–2250 BCE Marittime Bell Beaker Cerdanyola Barcelona Spain I0261 R1b1a2-V88
2458–2206 cal BCE Marittime Bell Beaker Arroyal Burgos Spain 2458-2206 calBCE I0458/Roy1 I2a2a-M223
2481–2212 cal BCE CA Spain El Sotillo Alava I2467 I2a2a-M223/P223
2571–2347 cal BCE CA + Bell Beaker pots Spain El Sotillo Alava I1976 I2-M438
2474–2300 cal BCE Iberian Bell Beaker Cerdanyola Barcelona Spain 2474-2300 calBCE I0825 G2
2460–2145 cal BCE CA Spain Murcia Camino de Molino I0453/Cmol79 I
2500–2000 BCE Iberian Bell Beaker Humanejos Madrid Spain 2500-2000 BCE I6587/Hume 15B I2a2a- M223
2461–2209 cal BCE Bell Beaker Arroyal Burgos Spain Roy3/I0460 I2a2a-M223
2473–2030 cal BCE CA Iberia/ Bell Beaker Camino de las Yeseras Madrid I4246 E1b1b1a-L539
2336–2063 cal BCE Cova da Moura Portugal 2336-2063 calBCE I4229 I2a1a1-L158
2127–1905 cal BCE CA Spain Camino de las Yeseras Madrid I6604 Yese 2A G2a2a1-PF3155/3148
2020–1768 cal BCE CA Spain Camino de las Yeseras Madrid I6608 Yese 5A I2a1b-CTS848/Y3104
2200–2000 BCE CA Iberia La Navilla Andalusia I8048 I2a1b
2479–1945 BCE CA Spain Camino de las Yeseras Madrid I6543 Yese/13A I

We do have quite many usually Chalcolithic like non R-L51 bearing males in Iberia during the period 2500-2000 BC.

Gaska said...

@Frank- said"So, the Meseta doesn't look like "the strategically most important region" to me, more like some sort of backwater, sparsely populated, where it was easiest to assume control.

The Castilian Plateau was always sparsely populated and only was important for dryland agriculture and livestock production, but the large mineral resources are in the south.

@Frank said-"How R1b managed to spread from there across virtually the whole peninsula, in order to ultimately also dominate the ressource-rich regions (Andalusia, Catalonia), is certainly a fascinating question, to which I don't have an answer yet"

Due to the age of the deposits in Portugal (Leceia, Zambujal, Porto Torrao) and Extremadura, (La Pijotilla, San Blas), we understand the BB culture differently than it is understood in other regions of Europe- We see that it extended northwards following the course of the Guadiana and Tagus rivers until reaching the Castilian Plateau (Meseta), by sea to the north until reaching Galicia, Brittany and the British Isles and south through the Strait of Gibraltar to the Mediterranean coasts of Spain, France, Italy, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia and Sicily.

The big question is - Does this expansion of BB culture coincide with the expansion of R1b-P312?

I think the answer is that this culture in Iberia lasted more than a thousand years (2,700-1,700 BC), and during this time many lineages participated in the process. First, we need ancient DNA from these large chalcolithic villages (3,200-2,600 BC) to rule out P312 as the first diffusion factor.If we do not find it, then only I2a and G2a participated in this first stage of expansion

In a second stage (2,500-2,100 BC) P312 actively participated in these migratory movements- We have explorers looking for copper in the Cantabrian mountains where the deposits of the BB culture are very scarce (La Paloma, Asturias, 2,350 BC), and navigators that following the old maritime and commercial routes from the Neolithic, reached Valencia (La Vital-2,500 BC), Liguria (2,450 BC), Sardinia and Sicily (Df27-Z195-2,350 BC)



Matt said...

@Rob, if you assume Iberia_CA_Stp up to essentially 90%-100% of a Late Copper Age entering Iberia Beaker population, with no local continuity at all, then you can get to 50% for Bronze Age, rather than 38% as per paper.

See for this unfolds in the individualized proportions from Olalde's Table S15: https://imgur.com/a/g0YrTQY

Some of these individuals would have gone above 100% German_Beaker, so have to go beyond that with a less steppe rich population, implying significant heterogenity.

So if you were to think that the Iberia_CA_Stp CA essentially had no local ancestry on average, and only local ancestry enters the picture in BA, then you could get down to 50% by BA.

The problem with this is that Iberia_CA_Stp doesn't really model well in Olalde with much other than Germany_Beaker+Iberia_CA.

Not Germany_Beaker+France_MLN / France Beaker.

The main point is that, even at 50%, you can't have 0% native male contribution with less than 100% native female contribution. If the native female contribution goes down, native male must go up.

Gaska said...

@Kristiina said-"The earliest Iberian/Marittime style Beakers are dated to ca 2850–2250 BCE (I0261). The first Steppe Bell Beakers seem to arrive after 2500 BC.

The oldest dates in the Portuguese and Spanish Chalcolithic settlements are between 2,800-2,750 BC. And we not only find the classic maritime style (MHV), there are also CZM, AOC and AOO (2,650 BC) in Galicia, Portugal (Porto Torrao) and Extremadura (La Pijotilla)

Curiously, R1b-P312 is currently only found in deposits with Ciempozuelos style that, as you all know, is the only one exclusive to the Iberian peninsula with some deposits in southern France, northern Italy and the islands of the western Mediterranean- Ergo, if P312 crossed the Pyrenees adopted this style in the Peninsula because it certainly did not bring it from Central Europe

EHU002-El Hundido (2.434 BC)- BBC Ciempozuelos style-HapY-R1b-P312-
EHU001-El Hundido-(2.365 BC)- BBC-Ciempozuelos style-Haplogrupo Y-R1b-L5-
I3238-la Paloma Cave (Asturias) (2.350 AC)- NO grave goods-HapY-R1b1a1a2a-L49-
I6472/RISE701-La Magdalena (2.250 BC)-BBC Ciempozuelos style HapY-R1b-P312
I6539-Humanejos (2.200 BC)- BBC-Ciempozuelos style-Hap Y-R1b-P312-
I6588-Humanejos (2.192 BC)- BBC-Ciempozuelos style-Hap Y-R1b-L151/P311-
I3485-Castillejo del Bonete (2.200 BC)- BBC Ciempozuelos style-HapY-R1b-CTS2229
I5665-Virgazal (2.133 BC)- BBC-Ciempozuelos style-HapY- R1b-P312-



zardos said...

@Frank: Yes, plagues can have huge impact. Coming back to imperial Rome, Malaria in particular took a heavy toll on Northern derived people in the risk areas and favoured East and South Mediterranean people with better resistance.

However, in theory Subsaharans are best adapted to Malaria, yet they didnt replace the dead Italics, simply because there were not enough in place and other factors were important too.
Even if the allels for immune responses, including SCD, spread, this can decouple from any ancestry and race like the LP European variant.

So its always about one group of people using the weakness of another for their own advantage and expansion. Be it a genetic or cultural superiority of any sort.

Smallpox was indeed extreme for some South West American Indians, but take Azteks as classic example. Without the Spanish attack and the uprising of the suppressed Indian tribes against their rule, they might have endured, just like many others did.
The black death too didnt result in too much of an ethnic change, even though we can assume selection.

The central and west European Neolithics were replaced because they couldnt defend themselves against the Northern agro-pastoralists assault. Nothing else is a sensible conclusion. And no big surprises other than that are needed, because the innovations and character of the more mobile agro-pastoralists seem to have been generally superiour at that time. Both the Northern and the Eastern variants. We know that so welk because the Neolithics did best where they adopted the same ways!
But of course, a plague could have been a contributIng factor, since the more mobile way of life could be protective on comparison to the more sedentary lifestyle.

As for Iberia: The rich South was a prize for sure, but pastures with easy access to salt are the base for the agro-pastoralists steppe people. If they got, they can stay and spread.

How important such regions can be, you can see even for the Moors or Byzantines. Its nice to have Granada or Constantinople, but you need herders for food and as warriors. So you need horses once they rose to importance.
The Byzantines were in real trouble after Mantzikert. Not because they lost the richest parts of the country, but their backbone for animal husbandry. And to hide behind walls was for sure even less of a long term option in CA Iberia than it was in medieval Byzanz.
You need food, animals and space. You can really see how they were squeezed into a corner. Even the last Byzantine emperors were fairly rich. Didnt help too much neither.

I would really compare it with the Turkish conquest of Anatolia. Pretty similar. Main difference was, the Turks took advantage of the conquered peoples production and taxes. The steppe BB did replace the locals, killed them and bred them out, since such a system was not established then.

Aram said...

The J2 found in LBK Austria is Z6049 . It was fpund in Barcin and is affiliated to Kotias J2. This is a completly different J2 unrelated to Cardial J2-s.

The Cardial J2-s and E M78 had different origin. They are from Cilicia not Barcin and almost certainly they were speaking a different language than Barcin farmers.

zardos said...

@Aram: But rather like different tribes with one, also because of the geographical position, with slight additional admixture from the start -if at all.
But no fundamentally different people or even language groups. I think thats out of question.

zardos said...

@Aram: Also about E, it seems e.g. v13 was present in both cultures. Were do you see the clear split?

Davidski said...

@All

I've figured out where these Iron Age (Italic??) outliers are coming from. It's not from the Aegean or Anatolia.

I'll post the relevant qpAdm models tomorrow.

Gaska said...

@Zardos, Matt, Rob, Frank..

You have to keep in mind that,

1- Indeed, according to Olalde, the first genomes with steppe ancestry in Iberia are women (2,500 BC) -But the strange thing is that these lineages are typical of the Neolithic in the Iberian Peninsula- Dolmen del Arroyal (2.456 BC)- Female-Mit-Hap-K1a+195-This lineage has been found in

San Fernando (Cádiz, Andalucia)- Ierian Neolithic-4000 BC-Olalde, 2,019
Ireland-Primrose-Megalithic culture-3.715 BC, Scotland (Midhowe), England(Trumpington
Meadows), Poland (GAC), Italy (Grotta Continenza), and then in several BBC sites in Spain, Sardinia, Czech Republic-

ERGO It is a typical marker of Western Neolithic, it has nothing to do with the steppes or the CWC etc. So where did she get that steppe signal? The same happens with the rest of the samples with steppe signal in Iberia, all their mitochondrial lineages are Iberian.The genetic continuity of women in Iberia is amazing from the Neolithic (and some lineages from the Paleolithic to the present)-Regarding the BB culture in Iberia we only have doubts regarding two or three lineages that may have entered Iberia after 2,600 BC, the rest are all previously documented- Then for the moment we have to say that no women related to BBC entered in Iberia

2-We will assume that only small groups of R1b-P312 (hunters, merchants, explorers, miners) reached Iberia around 2,500 BC, its mitochondrial lineages are also Iberian, then the first or second generation had to mix immediately with local women - if they were few and quickly adopted local customs (Ciempozuelos Style, Palmela points etc) then they are likely to lose their native language. This is the only possibility that could explain this theory,and as Matt says it would explain the percentages of steppe ancestry both in the chalcolithic and in the Bronze age

3-There is archaeological evidence that the vast majority of the BBC sites are family burials not collective, with women, children and men of the same family clan buried in the same graves. The men did NOT abandon their families, neither their women nor their children, they could go outside their villages to hunt, fish, look for copper or take their cattle south, but the cattle had to return to the villages in summer looking for pastures where there would be them, as it happens in all seasonal climates

4-There were no conquests or violence, the great Chalcolithic villages took 300 years to disappear after the arrival of P312 and in the tombs of the aristocracy the BB package was adopted naturally

5-Olalde could only model the Iberian Bbs with the German ones, but this similarity CAN ALSO COME FROM WOMEN, and not from German women in Iberia but from Iberian women in Germany, because the lineages of the BB culture in those two regions coincide in a large number of cases-

Davidski said...

@Gaska

5-Olalde could only model the Iberian Bbs with the German ones, but this similarity CAN ALSO COME FROM WOMEN, and not from German women in Iberia but from Iberian women in Germany, because the lineages of the BB culture in those two regions coincide in a large number of cases-

Honestly, I can't recall a worse argument than this in all the years in the comments section at this blog.

Gaska said...

@Davidski

Really?

Is someone able to distinguish in an ancient genome if that percentage of coincidence comes from men or women?. If so, then my argument makes no sense, but otherwise, the similarity of mitochondrial lineages between all BB regions means that women also have something to say about it.

Do you think the steppe ancestry is only male mediated? There were no women in the steppes? There are no female steppe markers in the CWC?

Do you think that the Iberian and German Bbs only look alike because they are P312 if their mitochondrial lineages are also the same?


zardos said...

@Gaska: The patrilineages are a clear cut thing for most of the time, since ethnic groups were usually founded around a male lineage determined core group at least, if not descending almost completely from one "Ur-clan" or even, later mythical, ancestor.

The female side on the other hand could profit from the success of their men, but you rarely have such founder effects. Rather others by chance and selection.
As you know Cardial was closely related to LBK, and both made it to e.g. France. So regardless of your general argument, which wont work out anyway, how can you be so sure about your matrilinear theory?

Its possible that steppe Beakers started a bride exchange network with the I2 folks South.
Probably there was conflict later, even related to those marital contacts. But thats it, rather like the prelude to the great Drama of the I2 annihilation after many lost battles.

About the settlement continuity: Well, if there were big battles, why should they burn the villages and kill fertile age women once they finished the males off? Like Stonehenge. Make some adaptations and keep using it.

Probably sone say you find your Spanish Tollense with hundreds of dead, probably never. But I'm 100 percent sure similar battles took place beside thousands of raids you will never be able to unearth, because nothing is left.
For bringing down the fortified centers in Southern Iberia, there were armies called upon. And if they had to call in all relatives and allies for such a campaign.

That there is no burned layer everywhere doesnt mean there was no violence.

zardos said...

As an Iberian, what is really left from the large battles with the Muslims? Even those well known, with exact dates and Information about the European knights which fell in battle?!

Oftentimes absolutely nothing and they are not even able to find the place the large battle took place!

Thats just 1000 years ago, large armies, more durable equipment, historical descriptions, many dead, whole countries overtaken and changed fundamentally.
But remains from the battles? Rarely if ever, rather by chance even.

And you think that you have no clear proof from 4500 years ago means anything? If the males of one group disappeared and others took their place, oftentimes 100 percent rate, than there was genocidal war. That's common sense.

Ric Hern said...

Ideally men will go out to face their enemies usually before they reach their settlement. A fortress is usually a last resource because it can be surrounded, preventing food and drink from entering and people from leaving. A fortress is basically doomed if the surrounding countryside can support an army for an extended time. Anyway that is why there need not be destruction to take over a town or fortress.

Gaska said...


Obviously it is difficult to find remnants of battles even if the troops faced were very numerous but recently in Spain it has been discovered, the place where the battle of Munda took place (March 17, 45 BC-41,000 dead legionaries)-During the II civil war of the Roman Republic, between Gaius Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius. The battle ended in a decisive victory of the first, whose most direct consequence was that Julius Caesar achieved absolute power in Rome-

Regarding the wars with the Moors, I will translate this news- "The University of Castilla-La Mancha culminates the extraction of the remains of 200 Castilian soldiers killed in front of the Almohad troops in July 19, 1195 and that allowed the salvation of Alfonso VIII" In the last excavation campaign, a large number of armaments have also been located: different types of arrows, darts, spearheads (some up to 56 centimeters), knives, sickles and short swords.

Then it is difficult but not impossible. Regarding those hypothetical chalcolithic battles
the truth is that it is very difficult for them to occur because demography was scarce and because armament was too. In Spain, only 20% of the graves of the BB culture contain metal weapons or tools (in the CWC this percentage decreases to 6%, and only in some subcultures)-Nor did they have horses or the organization and strength to attack villages walled

It is true what you say about founder effects in the patrilineages and that this rarely occurs in female lineages, but this has nothing to do with what I am telling you-

Matrilinear theory?-I only said that many papers refer to female genetic continuity in Iberia, that it is very very difficult to find new Mit-Haps in the Iberian genetic registry and that there is no Central European Mit Haps in Iberia (but there is a lot of Iberian Mit-Haps all over Europe), and that this is proof of Iberian female migrations. Did only women travel as a result of exogamy? I believe that in the case of the BB culture No- The men also moved and the best proof is Sicily with Iberian Df27 in deposits of the BB culture-

BBs sharing both male and female uniparental markers in Iberia and Germany, but how can one be absolutely of the direction of the migrations?- The Iberian samples in their majority (except Osterhofen) are older than the German ones and the proof of Iberian female migrations is for example in Hegenheim where a woman with typical Iberian Mit-Hap and zero steppe ancestry was found in a burial with Maritime style pottery

old europe said...

@zardos

the demise of the I2a lineage in Spain happened in 500 years ( more or less)
How do we call that... the "500 years war" the longest fought in world history probably....

Ryukendo K said...

The idea that the Bell Beakers formed cohesive and genetically isolated communities that exterminated the local farmers as they spread over the landscape is a priori false, because local EEF contributes, at the lowest estimate, half of the ancestry of the post-BB admixed populations. In raw terms, the resulting population had an equal number of, or more, ancestors in their genealogical tree from non-BB populations than in BB populations. There are an equal number or more of people who began life in a non-BB community and reproduced in a BB community, than people who were born and reproduced in a BB community uninterruptedly in Iberia from a source outside. This is a simple fact.

You (Rob) of all people should know best that is completely unreasonable to expect people to "prove" language shift from archaeology. The only way to prove it is resurrecting the dead. The fact of the matter is that a wide range of sociological scenarios are compatible with language shift, which leaves an even wider range of archaeological scenarios. The Garifuna, Near Oceanian, Hungarian cases are all compatible with language shift, and the former saw complete extermination of Arawakan males by an extremely patriarchal and warlike society but preservation of their language. Given that so few sociological signals can be correlated with language shift definitively, how likely are there to be necessary and sufficient archaeological signals of language shift?

The fact of the matter is that the only valid logic you can use to tie together archaeogenetic signals and language is that speakers of the language must at least have moved from the source to the destination if we were to suppose that the language spread thus. Given that there are a clear set of population movements that tie together events in Britain and Iberia to events in India, that ultimately emerge from the Steppe (and it will eventually come to light that they tie together BB and the earliest CW as well), and that not just Celtic IE, but other IE is present in Iberia, the hypothesis that BB spoke IE languages throughout much of their range, instead of speaking Basque languages throughout much of their range, continues to be a more straightforward interpretation of the facts.



@ Sam

Given the founder effects in Basques, we cannot know if they represent well sociological continuity from the ancient world. Their R1b% may have been either high or low in the ancient period.

Ryukendo K said...

@ Zardos

Leaving aside the Basque issue, What I'm addressing here is your social scenario. The claim of "swift replacement throughout Iberia" is false, of a caste system is also false (otherwise individuals with as high steppe as the first Bell Beakers to enter Spain would continue to exist, but even all male R1bs have increased EEF ancestry after the entry of BB). And now Rob has found two cases of I2 males with Bell Beaker goods, showing that there is male integration in at least a nontrivial % of cases (the total number of BB males we have now from Iberia is not as large as many think). Even taking your assumptions at face value, the only way your argument is airtight is if you systematically exclude every other social scenario playing out in every case of social interaction between BBs and non BBs (e.g, a majority population continued to exist but were not recovered due to presence of stratified society, some lowest steppe BB groups underwent language change but then conquered and then back-admixed with higher steppe BB groups) and the fact is the archaeology already suggest more social diversity than that. And we have not even covered the other avenues of language change, e.g. the Garifuna scenario, the Melanesian scenario, etc.

Gaska said...

@Ryukendo K

The Basques are a kind of isolated Iberians that thanks to the racial politics of the Spanish Monarchy have reached very high R1b percentage (93%)- But the Basques are not the key to this debate but the Iberians and the Tartessians who are also direct BBs descendants by patrilineal line- These people spoke NO-IE languages ​​of which we also have written evidence-And that is the only valid logic you can use to tie together archaeogenetic signals and language-

That is to say, the genetic continuity between the Iberian Bbs and the Iron Age Iberians has been demonstrated by Olalde, then logically we can deduce that neither the BB culture nor P312 spoke IE- Do you see that genetic or archaelogical continuity between the steppes the CWC and the BBC/Iberia?- It simply does not exist-

zardos said...

@Gaska: "Matrilinear theory?-I only said that many papers refer to female genetic continuity in Iberia, that it is very very difficult to find new Mit-Haps in the Iberian genetic registry and that there is no Central European Mit Haps in Iberia (but there is a lot of Iberian Mit-Haps all over Europe)"

My argument was rather about the timing. Of course they could have come over Iberia, but how can you be so sure about the timing? They could have come in the earlier agro-pastoralist expansion or even from earlier Cardial, undersampled LBK-related groups etc. How can you be so sure they spread only in the Copper Age from Iberia, yet alone with Iberian BB, with all the chronological issues.

old_europe: Forget about ideologically charged archaeological concepts influenced by Marxist materialism and concentrate on real world examples of ethnic conflict. First of all: Iberia is a huge peninsula, so you don't have to make a 500 years single conflict out of it, but rather a chain of events. Take two such cases: The conquest-reconquest of Iberia and Pannonia by Muslims-Christians respectively, or the Turkish conquest of Anatolia.
But also conflicts like the Celts and Germanics had. One tribe, small kingdom or province was overrun, things slowed down for a time, then the next was targeted and so on. If one side keeps its superiority in the antagonism, one domino will fall at a time, until nothing of the former ethnopolitical unity will be left. Like with Celts first in Germany, then in Gallia itself under Germanic and Roman pressure.

If you look at the concrete strategic units in Iberia, like Rob said, it was about one generation maximum (!) in most cases. So a tribe, chiefdom, province, small kingdom fell, was overrun. Then there might have been even some sort of peace or small raids. The steppe BB consolidated their rule, produced mixed offspring which they assimilated fully or not, one way or another. Then the looked for the next target and so on. Its clear as daylight what happened.

@Ryu: "You (Rob) of all people should know best that is completely unreasonable to expect people to "prove" language shift from archaeology."

Actually its easier to disprove theories about language shift than to prove it. But considering all the examples of different language groups speakers we have in South-South Western Europe, even by the method of exclusion and probabilities for every single case, one might be able to conclude back on each example. Any language shift must e.g. correlate at least with some genetic shift and new element in the CA-BA context. Either mass immigration or elite dominance. No change in the gene pool makes a language shift unlikely and continuity quite likely. So for a high probability of language peristence, you have to prove genetic and cultural continuity without too much of a break. Like Basques after the establishment of steppe BB. But obviously, this leaves open the possibility of a language shift during the conquest and formation in Iberia...

"Leaving aside the Basque issue, What I'm addressing here is your social scenario. The claim of "swift replacement throughout Iberia" is false"

Its not false, see scenario above. Its a common scenario you see quite often in history. A swift conquest of huge areas is exceptional, it occured, but its exceptional. Even the Russian conquest of Sibiria or the European-US conquest of the "Wild West" took a long time, was taking place in stages. The end result was fairly clear, the superiority of the Europeans in the competition also, it did still need time. Partly because people are quite often satisfied if they have new resources and pastures, got rid of a neighbouring foe. They had no interest to carry on with the war, even with high reproductive rates. But once they consolidated, the border zone was disputed, same things started anew.

zardos said...

"of a caste system is also false (otherwise individuals with as high steppe as the first Bell Beakers to enter Spain would continue to exist"

I didn't say there was a caste system in Iberia which excluded local women. Did I? They did exclude local men and there was little to know backflow, AFAIK, to places like Central Europe, where there definitely was a caste like system and strict social stratification for many generations in BB societies, like Lech Valley has proven.

I said the caste system made the establishment of a local Iberian steppe BB network, largely independent from further North, more likely (!), its a scenario I propose and its similar to the situation of the Iberian colonisation of Latin America, which made a language shift to the literal mother's tongue also more likely.

Garifuna is actually an example for what I propose, or do you really think the blacks which could flee wanted to keep up the Spanish tradition and language at all costs? No, they were going to form a new identity, exactly in distinguishing themselves for their former masters. That's what I was saying. The mixed sons (non-literal, could also mean slaves, half-slave children of the conquerors) must have a reason to abandon their fathers culture - or the fathers were absent.

And like I said before, these are scenarios, I don't say they are the only possible ones. But guess what, the good thing about many of these scenarios I came up with is: They could be viable explanations and they can be tested by genealogical genetic comparisons, like Lech Valley 2.0 on big scale!

If you do that, if you reconstruct the relations of different generations before, during and after the conquest, for different regions and social strata, you will be able to answer and prove/disprove any such scenario. Might be they test in 5 years and the result will be, no, it was not like that. Or they will prove it and I hope they have the guts, intellect and honesty to publish is with a correct comment.

Not like this "king with 1000 virgins" crap and social stratification with "big personality" which bred out the whole male I2 population. Yes, such "big men" were there, most likely, and we have even some burials pointing in that direction, but they would be nothing without their clan and tribe still. This was an ethnic conflict and conquest, no doubt about it.

@Gaska: Indeed. What makes the situation so complicated is indeed, that even if we accept this or that scneario, it doesn't suffice. Because if the incoming BB spoke IE and the local I2 Proto-Basque and the mixed steppe sons adopted Basque, we still have Aquitanian (Basque or Basque-related, so probably ok), Iberian (where did that come from?), Ligurian (most say not IE) and Etruscan, to name just the more important ones. So there must have been much more than simple IE vs. non-IE going on in Southern - South-Western Europe.

zardos said...

The problem of the Garifuna was also, probably, that the blacks didn't even spoke the same language when they landed! They might have been of different tribes.

Now that brings me to another scenario, which is however rather unlikely, since the BB were so uniform, but still its a scenario for other places probably. Namely if a coalition of warriors conquer a territory, but they lack a common language. Then too, they might, even if they largely annihilate the local male population, come to the arrangement of using the language of the defeated as a lingua franca, as the new language of their newly formed tribe.
So the Garifuna are a peculiar example even in this respect, because:
- they were slaves, no established unity
- they didn't wanted to keep up the culture of their masters, which they might not even have adopted yet
- they might have been of different backgrounds, ethnolinguistically, so that an arrangement to use the language of the locals - which they didn't really exterminate either- could have been the best solution.

Rob said...

@ RK

'''The idea that the Bell Beakers formed cohesive and genetically isolated communities that exterminated the local farmers as they spread over the landscape is a priori false, because local EEF contributes, at ''

Well, that's a strawman, because I dont think anybobyd said that BB ''killed all farmers'', you should be able to comprehend better.
What it did was completely culturally marginalise the preceding cultural systems, marginalise their men & impart a new social system.
THis is incontrovertible, and you, Matt and old Frank clearly dont understand this.

''You (Rob) of all people should know best that is completely unreasonable to expect people to "prove" language shift from archaeology. T''

Pfft. Another strawman. First off, I did not mention anytnhing about exact language affiliation. But we can make more solid predictions about likelihood of language flows
But this requires the deep knoweldge & analysis of multiple components of evidence (from population to intra-site analysis; DNA, theoretical anthropology). One needs to eat, breathe & have this stuff in your blood. You cant be a child poser with virtually z e r o knowledge of European culture & hsitory, engaging in false analogies & statistical masturbation and passing it off as 'theories'. That'll never compensate.

Honestly, you're better off sticking being a sicophant at Anthrogenica, because youve just demonstrated you know nothing (esp after your 'modern Basque STRs disprove ancient DNA statement). Come back when you're ready to learn

Leron said...

Am I the only one that thinks this study is 1 step forward, 2 steps back? The overemphasis on diversityTM during imperial times and ‘homogeneity’ prior to it reeks more of a political agenda than anything else. I’m sure they have more samples from key eras but for whatever reason they are don’t releasing them.

Arza said...

@ Rob
There is a job for you:
https://twitter.com/DGUF1969/status/1194954972661764096

zardos said...

@Leron: I think the study is a solid first step, but as we see now, something like Lech Valley and beyond is needed to get real insights into what was happening. I know I'm repeating myself, but just imagine you have something like from Lech and more, for all the places and times we talk about. Actually, it would be like searching for a term, looking into a encyclopaedia and saying in 90 percent of the cases, "oh, that's what it means."

Right now its like you have some words, half-sentences of the article and everybody can still come up with more or less sensible guesses concerning what it really means in between. That can mean you get it right, but it can also still mean you get it horribly wrong. Yet even those few words make some things clear, namely what's still possible and what's not. And they make things exciting too!

Now we know that in a lot of urban places, in the cheaper quarters of Rome and surrounds, most likely for the reasons I mentioned already (low birth rates, bad family ethics and moral, many war losses, diseases, bad living conditions and plagues, plus mass immigration from abroad, especially the East and South Mediterranean, by people better adapted) there was a decline in Central and Northern European ancestry in Rome, like always expected, like it was written (for a reason!) by ancient authors already, like, most notably Juvenal.

But now its about the extend, the details and all that. I say we will see huge social and regional differences for a whole variety of reasons. Like local living conditions and diseases, urbanisation, attractiveness of the place for migrants, percentage and origin (!) of slaves etc.

The agenda comes with the comments and newspaper articles, the data is fine. What did you expect? Late Rome was seen by some Christians even, of which many came themselves from abroad, which profited from and still hated it, the whore of Babylon for a reason.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Ryu,
"Given the founder effects in Basques, we cannot know if they represent well sociological continuity from the ancient world. Their R1b% may have been either high or low in the ancient period."
"And now Rob has found two cases of I2 males with Bell Beaker goods, showing that there is male integration in at least a nontrivial % of cases "

100% of Bronze age Iberians belong to R1b P312. 90% of Iron age Iberians do. There was 90% male Y DNA replacement in Iberia between 2300 and 1600 BC. This was the main point made by Harved geneticists many times over and over again. It is proven and not up for debate. I don't know why you are disputing it.

Basque belong to recent R1b founder effects but ancient DNA indicates that their ancestors before those founder effects also belonged 90%+ to R1b. I don't know why you would argue there was Iberian farmer continuation into the Bronze, Iron age if ancient DNA literally proven that is not the case.

Davidski said...

@All

I've posted qpAdm models for the Iron Age samples. Scroll down to my latest update.

The idea that the Latini outliers have ancestry from the Aegean and/or Anatolia looks way off to me. They have way too much Levant ancestry for that to be plausible.

John Thomas said...

Regarding the proposed 'Steppe' - that is ultimately Corded Ware ancestry in the ancient Italics; "Everyone is Polish only they don't know it". ;)

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,
"which possibly means that they're of Phoenician origin"

In g25, ITA_Ardea_Latini_IA_o comes out with lots of Levant ancestry. But, ITA_Prenestini_tribe_IA_o doesn't score any. He only scores Anatolia_BA.

1.8452"

ITA_Prenestini_tribe_IA_o:RMPR437b

Anatolia_BA 40.6
Anatolia_EBA 18.6
ITA_Etruscan:RMPR474b 14.5
ITA_Prenestini_tribe_IA:RMPR435b 14.2
ITA_Ardea_Latini_IA:RMPR851 12.1

He had Y DNA R1b P310. So, he must be half Latin Italian, half Anatolian.

Davidski said...

@Samuel

Yeah, fair enough, in the Global25, ITA_Prenestini_tribe_IA_o does look more northern.

qoAdm is also somewhat ambiguous in regards to this guy's ancestry, showing some good fits with Mycenaeans and Anatolians.

Anonymous said...

I don't think that Rutuli sample is modeled from the historical point of view correctly. Probably, there are no necessary sources yet, because if I am not mistaken Levant_IA2 it is already samples which have appeared as a result of campaigns of the Peoples of the Sea, that is, have been influenced by the population of this samplea.

Iron Rituli Italy Ardea, T101 II, L. petrous, 2.5.2018 [R850] outlier 800 - 500 BCE M T1a1a T2c1f
Neolithic Bulgaria Malak Preslavets [I0700 / MP5] 1d_rel_I1108 5800-5400 calBCE M T1a1a T2e
Neolithic Bulgaria Malak Preslavets [I1108 / MP1] 5800-5400 calBCE M T1a1 T2e
Bronze Middle Bronze Age Armenia Nerquin Getashen [RISE413] 1906-1698 calBCE (3493±34 BP, UBA-28941) M R1b R1b1 (M415/PF6251+ SK2063/FGC21034/V2197-, Y5586- FGC3890/Y11839-) T2c1f
LBA / IA Iron I–Post Ramses III Israel Ashkelon [ASH066.A0101] 1371–1129 calBCE M J T2c1c


Yamnaya/Vucedol in Proto-Villanov is a clear anachronism, you need something much closer like CWC/Maros/Unetice/Urnfield/... .
Iron Protovillanovia Italy Martinsicuro; Martin sicuro; Bronzo Finale; No; Inv. Pisa 254 [R1] 930 - 839 calBCE F U5a2b
Bronze Maros Hungary Szoreg - C [RISE371] 2136-1941 calBCE (3653±32 BP, OxA-30988) F U5a2b
Copper Ukraine Klembivka [poz211 / Grave 5, barrow 1] 2898-2761 BC (Poz-70670) M U5a2b



I don't think that the population changed between Proto-Vilanova and Villanova and Latini, but rather there was further mixing with the locals. After all, even the culture of Lazio is also Villanovan, only an independent variant, which is traditionally singled out in a separate culture.


Anonymous said...

Etruscan p=0.14 is still a not so big probability. Etruscan_o p=0.31 so is not big probability.


Aram said...

Zardos

E was present in Trypillia but in a different company. With G2a2b. Imho this Trypillian E is from the Cardial ware. But when he mixed with G2-s he could have changed his language. From what culture are modern young E-V13? Imho Trypillia is more likely than western Balkans/Cardial.
Anyway I changed my opinion about V13. I don't think that it was a important player in BA. It expanded later. In IA and even more in Current Era.

Davidski said...

@Archi

You should read the Philistine paper again.

Levant_IA2 represents a bounce back in local ancestry and doesn't even show any European admixture.

Anonymous said...

@Davidski

It does not matter, because the Sea Peoples influenced them anyway, and they were different. ASH135 of Levant_IA2 has European admixture.

Matt said...

Visualizing position of the two qpAdm sims for Italic_O from the main post with West Eurasia 9 dimensions 1 v 2, 3, 6:

https://imgur.com/a/q70EoFp

(1: North v South, 2: East v West, 3: CHG+AnatoliaN v Indus+Natufian+EastEurasian/African, 6: recent+ancient West v East European)

Fits are pretty close, though, both reals look slightly more "western" in all dimensions, most so for R437 and less so for R850. Looks like the two Italic_O would be better fit as intermediate the main Italic+Etruscan+Villanova set and something else than fits involving proto-Villanova?

Davidski said...

@Archi

ASH135 of Levant_IA2 has European admixture.

Do you know what standard errors are?

See Fig 3 in Feldman et al. 2019 (the Philistine paper).

Matt said...

As a complement to above West Eurasia 9 plots, same plots with position of Kaman_Kalehoyuk_MLBA and Minoans labelled - https://imgur.com/a/5hzTgno

Anonymous said...

@Davidski

If it is a matter of returning to the previous population, then the Levant_IA2 model should not differ from Levant_LBA.

Do you try Levant_IA1 model?

ǵenh said...

@ David.

Could you also run qpAdm models for ITA_Villanovan:RMPR1015? It's an Etruscan sample.

ITA_Proto-Villanovan:RMPR1 is ancestral to Piceni, who are an Osco-Umbrian-speaking tribe.

Davidski said...

@ǵenh

ITA_Villanovan:RMPR1015 shows basically the same ancestry proportions as the Etruscans, except with less Proto-Villanovan-related stuff.

Also, I've actually seen some results for a few Umbri samples, and I doubt that a population like ITA_Proto-Villanovan:RMPR1 could be the main source of ancestry for them.

The reason being is that RMPR1 is too Balkan, with steppe ancestry from Yamnaya, while the Umbri, like the Latini, look mostly Bell Beaker-derived.

Anonymous said...


So the Rutuli sample can be modeled as ~

ITA_Ardea_Latini_IA_o
HRV_Vucedol 0.370
Yamnaya_RUS_Samara 0.180
Levant_ISR_Ashkelon_IA2 0.450

So the Etruscans samples can be modeled as ~

ITA_Etruscan_o
HRV_Vucedol 0.455
Yamnaya_RUS_Samara 0.230
MAR_LN 0.325

ITA_Etruscan
Bell_Beaker_Mittelelbe-Saale 0.186
ITA_Grotta_Continenza_CA 0.283
HRV_Vucedol 0.360
Yamnaya_RUS_Samara 0.171

From the point of view of history and uniparental markers it is more correctly.

zardos said...

@Michalis Moriopoulos: Juvenal made a very critical, yet satirical description of the social reality in Rome. He is a first hand witness of the demographic and cultural changes in Imperial Rome and the picture he draw is realistic and dark. He is quite critical of his old stock compatriots too, because their failure is the reason for all this.
Also, different agents have different roles in different times in prehistory and history from my point of view. An agent which was very fertilising in one epoch or some way, could be rather detrimental in another. Its all relative.
I most certainly have no negative "feelings" towards Greeks if you mean that, actually even on the contrary. But there were cultural developments in the Hellenistic world, which reached Rome together with Near Eastern cults and the ancestral change, which were from my point of view toxic and part of the reason Rome deteriorated and finally fell. I have no doubt about that. But it was the fault of the old Roman stock to have allowed it to happen. They were the victors, after all and ruined it themselves. Without Greek and Near Eatern influences, there would have been no Roma anyway. Yet what they achieved at one point was stable and vital in its own right and should have been kept that way. But some issues were not controllable, like Malaria. Others were, at least in theory, like the ban of marriage during military service (was changed fairly late), bad inheritance pattern, which meant wealthy families lost their fortune with many sons and so on.

Richard Rocca said...

David, I think this one Proto-Villanovan sample will turn out to be a red herring. It is from a site in coastal North East Italy and Balkan materials were found on the site as well. There are many other Proto-Villanovan sites throughout all of Italy and none have anything to do with the Balkans materially. Therefore, I think the steppe ancestry in Proto-Villanovan from Latium and almost all other locations will be Bell Beaker derived as well.

zardos said...

@Aram: My point was E-v13 was everywhere with the European Neolithics. Now I know it is supposed to have a much closer TMRA, yet nobody knows were the surviving lineage came from exactly, where it endured and how it re-expanded.
The best scenario seems to have been to me a survival from TCC and an expansion with an East Carparthian Indo-European people in virtually all directions, most successful in some Illyrian and Greek people.
But that needs to be proven, because it might predate anything like that in Greece in particular.
I'm also asking myself how reliable the the TMRA estimates really are, because some are really off it seems.
But if its correct for E-v13, its the best scenario right now.

zardos said...

@Richard: "I think the steppe ancestry in Proto-Villanovan from Latium and almost all other locations will be Bell Beaker derived as well."

Mostly for sure, but exclusively so?

ǵenh said...

@ Davidski

Interesting that ITA_Villanovan:RMPR1015 shows less Proto-Villanovan-related stuff and is the older among the Etruscans.

Thanks for the information on the ancient Umbrians.

Consider that Umbrians are the westernmost population in the context of the Osco-Umbrian languages. According to a linguistic hypothesis, the oldest layer in the Umbrian language is called Paleoumbrian (it might be more similar to a Proto-Latin) and it is a more recent layer that has imposed the Safin-like Neoumbrian (Safin is the name of the Sabines, Samnites) and has turned the Paleoumbrian into an Osco-Umbrian language. It is a linguistic hypothesis that must be taken with caution, but there is the possibility that the Umbrians are not the most representative population of the Osco-Umbrian-speaking tribes.  In the ethnogenesis of Osco-Umbrian peoples, the contribution of an Adriatic-Balkanic element is often underlined by archeologists. Of course, if even the Sabines, Samnites and Oscans look mostly Bell Beaker-derived, this closes the matter, although I think we have to wait for many more ancient samples analyzed to get a detailed picture.

@ Richard Rocca

Proto-Villanovan sample is from a site at the border between coastal Central East Italy (Marche) and Southern-Eastern Italy (Abruzzo). I do agree with you that Protovillanovan culture is so complex and geographically extensive that one sample is not enough to draw conclusions on Protovillanovan culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martinsicuro

Andrzejewski said...

@zardos “This is quite likely considering the importance the "pure" and typical Beaker women seem to have had.”

Yes. I clearly noticed the obsession of Germans with genetic purity since Beaker times...

Too bad though that Beakers were hardly the “pure Steppe” patrilineal blood lines envisioned by Göbbels and co, because they were heavily admixed with all layers of EEF and WHG, diluting their “pure Indo-European” blood line to barely 40%, if not lower...

zardos said...

Purity in the ethnosocial context can be related to some older ancestry or race, but it doesnt have to, its about a social concept related to a specific ancestry group. Primarily its about social endogamous marriage patterns.
You can look at the higher status BB women yourself.
Actually some of the lower caste Western German maidens among BB are more Corded Ware derived imho.
So this had nothing to do with being more IE, and fell BB were excluded too. It was a free and wealthy class which married among each other and might have cared for specific physical traits. The pattern is peculiar in any case.

Gabriel said...

@Andrzejewski

Most Northern European Beakers were more than 40% Steppe, don’t let a grudge towards Germans get in your way.

Davidski said...

@zardos

Do you have a handy list of the elites and commoners from the Lech Valley paper?

I can mark those that have enough data on a PCA plot and we can check if there are any trends.

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

How much Levant_ISR_Ashkelon_IA2 ancestry does the Iron Age Phoenician from Ibiza show?

Chad said...

qpAdm model of Medieval Romans as a mix of Imperial Romans, Latinis, and Medieval Germans. Successful model.

left pops:
Roman_Med
Italy_IA_Latini
Imperial_Roman
Germany_Med

right pops:
Chimp
Ust_Ishim
Brazil_LapaDoSanto_9600BP
Kostenki14
Iron_Gates
Ganj_Dareh_N
CHG
ANE
EHG
WHG
Levant_N
Anatolia_N
Steppe_EMBA
IBM

numsnps used: 463892

best coefficients: 0.470 0.308 0.222
std. errors: 0.058 0.042 0.026

fixed pat wt dof chisq tail prob
000 0 11 10.841 0.4567 0.470 0.308 0.222

Bob Floy said...

@Andre

"Yes. I clearly noticed the obsession of Germans with genetic purity since Beaker times..."

"the “pure Steppe” patrilineal blood lines envisioned by Göbbels and co."

FFS, really?

Anonymous said...

The Etruscans' models are clearly incorrect, they're low in probability.
It is clear that you cannot use Proto-Villanova for Etruscans.
The modern distribution of J2a completely confirms the ancient authors and the arrival of Etruscans from the Greek Islands/Balkan/Anatolia. It confirms the legendary way of Aeneas.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d6/07/5b/d6075bd7cc5e161d907dc98c05df53d4.gif
Unfortunately, it did not find a good map for J2b2a.

Interestingly, in ancient times, the Illyrian languages were not at all contacted to the Greek language, between them there was a layer of a certain language, most likely a Luwian language of the Teucroes.




Rob said...

@ Archi

“The modern distribution of J2a completely confirms the ancient authors and the arrival of Etruscans from the Greek Islands/Balkan/Anatolia. It confirms the legendary way of Aeneas.”

The modern distribution of J2a has been developed by post-bronze events
Myths are precisely that - myths . Not to be taken literally

Anonymous said...

@Rob

This is not a myth, it is a real spread of the haplogroup J2b2a to the Late Bronze Age/Iron Age. This way is confirmed by everything, but the myth does not to perceive its.

Protivillanova even in dreams is not Etruscan culture, so the models with its use for the Etruscan are fundamentally wrong, especially since they give a low probability of their correctness.

Rob said...

@ Archie

''This is not a myth, it is a real spread of the haplogroup J2b2a to the Late Bronze Age/Iron Age. This way is confirmed by everything, but the myth does not to perceive its.

Protivillanova even in dreams is not Etruscan culture, so the models with its use for the Etruscan are fundamentally wrong, especially since they give a low probability of their correctness.''

I don't pretend to know what language Villnova or P-V spake. As people have mentioned, it was a complex, perhaps mu;tidimensional 'culture'.
As for J2b2 - lets wait and see what aDNA shows before we get too ahead of ourselves.
And yes, myths hold grains of truth, but one cant reconstruct Bronze Age history from historic Greco-Roman ''historians'', whose accounts are a mixture of politics, polemics and heresay

Anonymous said...

@Rob

You must be confusing Aeneas' Path with legendary hero Aeneas. The legend about the person is only a legend, but here the way on all parameters is real, that is, the data on distribution at ancient authors is true. How much this Path has borrowed at Etruscan nobody knows, but as it is accepted at ancient authors all got to one person - a legendary primogenitor, however it means nothing. The way is existed, and it was on it that Etruscans came, as well as Sardinians.

Rob said...

Yes it does seem clear connections between Nuraghe & Etruscans (archaeology, the J2b2a)

Rob said...

@ Aram

''The J2 found in LBK Austria is Z6049 . It was fpund in Barcin and is affiliated to Kotias J2. This is a completly different J2 unrelated to Cardial J2-s.''

It simply means that there was a smattering of divergent J2 lineages in Anatolian farmers, which formed the basis of Cardial, LBK, Starcevo (all of which ultimately came from south-central Anatolia).

it's problematic to connect them to Hurro-Urartian, and in fact the population shifts seen in Anatolia after the middle copper age preclude it

zardos said...

@David: Actually it would be the most interesting to me to see the early BB in such a comparison. burials like those showing the obvious presence of Corded Ware and Neolithic people, clearly different in physical type and quite often burial equipment. If significant differences would appear in Lech Valley after so many generations, in which I would assume house fathers were fathering servant children too, this would be huge.

Unfortunately I don't have such a list and can't generate one, but would be very interested in the results of such a comparison myself. Any analysis would have to distinguish at least between the regional upper class, the lower class, the BB women of the upper class from abroad and the foreign women from abroad.
Probably there is even more.

I guess it will come soon, because:
"These close family members, either male or female, tended to be buried alongside ample stashes of grave goods, suggesting high status was inherited. Cemeteries contained two other groups of individuals who were unrelated to any family members: people with poorly furnished graves, and high-status females."

and

"In unpublished work, he and colleagues sequenced DNA from more than 100 individuals from southern Germany and built family trees from the data."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03046-w

Once we have these too, latest, it would be possible to compare some of those "dynasties" with the dependent poors or slaves in detail.

Unfortunately I don't even have full access to the paper...

Open Genomes said...

Med25 3-Dimensional PCA dimensions 1-2-3

What can people see by zooming in and mousing over to get the sample names?

Comments?

Open Genomes said...

The ancient Italians and Romans on the Ward's Distance-Square Clustering Tree

Zoom in on your browser to 125%, or to be able to search the tree, download and open it in any free PDF reader aside from Adobe Reader (which can't handle this size of PDF), for example, Foxit Reader.

Samuel Andrews said...

@All,

Btw, this map explains the official narrative Harvard is telling about "Yamnaya" migrations.

https://i0.wp.com/dailynexus.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/F1.large_.jpg?resize=1280%2C591

Notice the pink area on the map. The pink marks the Eurasian Steppe which stretches from Hungary to Mongolia. Its a huge, unspecific area. They insist, on calling this huge area the homeland of "Yamnaya" and from where "Yamnaya" migrated into Europe & Asia.

This is inaccurate because "Yamnaya" lived in specifically in the European section of the Eurasian Steppe therefore it'd be most accurate to call their homeland the European Steppe.

Also, they consider "Yamnaya"'s homeland to be in a separate continent from Europe. Which makes no sense because "Yamnaya" lived in Europe.

Really, this is about political correctness. Harvard, and other researchers, have a knee jerk rejection against saying anything in Europe originated in Europe ad saying anything in Asia originated in Europe. It's that simple.

EVen, blogger Razib Khan, who is very open minded, obviously tries to disassociate the Indo-Aryans who went to India with modern Europeans.

Samuel Andrews said...

If you think about it.......Corded Ware's ancestors probably originated in modern day Ukraine. That's not very far away from Poland, Latvia, Germany, Sweden where Corded Ware's ancestors settled.

Genetically, Steppe people were a world away from the people already living there But, geographically Ukraine is not far away from those countries.

But, Harvard is depicting Steppe migrations into Europe which created Corded Ware as migrations from one continent ("Eurasian Steppe") to another (Europe). This is an inaccurate description.

Rob said...

Btw Sam
You’re wrong about Bb Iberia
The shift occurred 2500-2000 BC
This means that BBC isn’t IE

A said...

^ they even warped and stretched the map.

A said...

"Genome wide ancient DNA from 523 ancient individuals sheds light on genetic exchanges between the Steppe, Iran and South Asia, and highlights the parallel demographic histories of two subcontinents: Europe and South Asia."

So Europe is a subcontinent now. I presume it's a subcontinent of Eurasia, which would mean Asia is also a subcontinent. And that would mean South Asia is a sub-subcontinent...

Samuel Andrews said...

@Rob,
"You’re wrong about Bb Iberia
The shift occurred 2500-2000 BC
This means that BBC isn’t IE"

I don't have an opinon when R1b P312 took over in Iberia. I just know it started in Bell Beaker period and was complete by 1600 BC. I've always considered it might have been completed in the Bell Beaker period.

"This means that BBC isn’t IE""

Why? BBC admixture in Italy coincides with Italic languages. So that makes it seem BBC spoke IE.

Samuel Andrews said...

@A,
"So Europe is a subcontinent now. I presume it's a subcontinent of Eurasia, which would mean Asia is also a subcontinent. "

They are all subcontinents of the only true continent: The Eurasian Steppe. lol.

Samuel Andrews said...

Overall, the geneticists at Harvard do a great job at breaking down and explaining the ancient DNA they sequence. I don't think they have an agenda or something. But the way they describe Yamnaya as being from the "Eurasian Steppe" needs to be edited.

Rob said...

@ Sam

We only have to follow the bountiful evidence. There are scores of data from the Cu Age & bronze Age. There is no intrusion of people c. 2200 BC. It all happens 2500 BC.
Its very clear. By 2200 BC, it was all done n dusted

''Why? BBC admixture in Italy coincides with Italic languages. So that makes it seem BBC spoke IE.''

Yes BBC admixture in Italy coincides with western Italic speakers. But they were always going to have BB substrate, by geography. Lets wait until we get Bronze Age data from the real Italics in eastern & southern Italy..

By contrast, elswhere in western Europe, a variety of non-IE languages descend from BBC.
It just seems rather odd that BBC should be switching their language to that of their foes, after they went to all that trouble to kill their men, collapse & then purify by fire their megaliths, so on. it simply doesnt fit
Economically, the simplest thing would be to keep your own language, because they wserent encountering the Roman Empire with a centralised language, but a hodge-podge of groups, no more advanced then BB itself

A good analogy is the Battle Axe in sweden. They completely marginalised the native TRB lineages; but gradually acquired extra EEF by way of female mediation. Its possible that BAx took on the language of TRB people, but surely its more likely they simply kept their own

Davidski said...

@Samuel

One problem that they're grappling with is how to simplify the story that the continents of Europe and Asia were both affected by populations coming from what isn't a third continent but a topographical feature that straddles Europe and Asia.

But yeah, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that the European and Asian parts of the Eurasian steppe were quite distinct, especially in terms of genetic ancestry (for ex. Yamnaya vs. Botai), until the ancestors of the Andronovo people expanded from the west (Europe) across the Asian parts of the steppe.

Instead we're seeing narratives, especially in the science media, in which "Asians" from the steppe migrated into Europe. So I guess the Botai people migrated into Europe? Nope, actually the Botai people went extinct. How'd that happen I wonder and who caused it? No one's really talking about that.

Gaska said...

@Sam said-Why? BBC admixture in Italy coincides with Italic languages. So that makes it seem BBC spoke IE.

And BBC admixture coincides with Etruscans. So that makes it seem BBC spoke NON-IE

@Sam said-Overall, the geneticists at Harvard do a great job at breaking down and explaining the ancient DNA they sequence. I don't think they have an agenda or something.

Really? you think that Harvard has no an agenda?

Davidski said...

@All

Check out the maps in the latest update.

zardos said...

These maps make the Germanic-Frankish contributions to Italy quite obvious it seems. They show that the East and South Mediterranean influence was there to stay, but the bounce back to a more Northern population was caused by new waves from the North, from explicitly Germanic territories and probably better survival rates in some Northern provinces too.

Again its amazing how especially the Late Antiquity map directly corresponds to climate and diseases, especially Malaria. You can really overlap it.
They should test for the Malaria resistence genes in the various population components. This can be proven directly. Of course it was mass immigration primarily, but the selection factor will show up as a significant one.

@Openn_Genomes: I had no problems opening it with Firefox and Adobe.

A said...

Yeah the media version is Asian pastoralists and Arab farmers migrated into Europe and mixed with black African hunter-gatherers to produce Europeans.

Slumbery said...

@FankN
"Evidence is inconclusive so far, because we don't have yet that many Cardial samples. Note, however, that the ADMIXTURE diagrams in Fig. S12 show a considerable Iran_HG component (dark grey) in CentralItaly_Neo, probably around 10% or more. That componment is widely absent from the Balkans, Central European and British Neolithics, and also seems to lack in Barcin (albeit, IIRC, not Boncuklu). Neolithic Greece (part of the "island-hopping" route) shows that Iran_HG component as well."

Now that the samples are uploaded to the online nMonte runner I tried this. In G25 nMontes none of the Central Italian Neolithic samples show any such ancestry, regardless if it is tested with Ganj Dareh or CHG as a reference. I found only one deviation from the Barcin_N + minor WHG picture: RMPR6 has a lot more WHG ancestry than the others.
So I do not know what the test in the article caught there, but G25 nMonte does not see it.


By the way, I also tested other samples of that time period that I suspected to have Iran ancestry. I came to the realization that Krespost I0679_d probably has Armenia Calcholitic-related ancestry. This means the Armenia CLh population probably formed much earlier than the time of the Areni samples.

Michalis Moriopoulos said...

@ Dave
"One problem that they're grappling with is how to simplify the story that the continents of Europe and Asia were both affected by populations coming from what isn't a third continent but a topographical feature that straddles Europe and Asia."

Yes, and on the subject of mischaracterizing the steppe as outside of Europe, that's probably just due to lazily relying on imprecise conventions (like someone who uses "African" as a synonym for sub-Saharan or "Asian" when they mean East or South Asian).

These scientists have spent a lot of time characterizing the strong genetic divide that used to exist between the Eastern European Plain (with its steppe & northern forest forager people) and the rest of Europe (with its EEFs). These two parts of Europe might seem like totally different worlds if you're in that headspace, so it's tempting for these scientists to use "Europe" as a shorthand for the part of the subcontinent inhabited by the farmers. In fact, some people use "Old European" as a synonym for EEF, even though Pontic-Caspian and forager ancestry is also very ancient in Europe. I also think the transcontinental nature of Russia and the former Soviet Union (easily othered by Westerners as an alien entity) probably contributes to the perception of the steppe as "not really Europe." And some people might just have EU territories in mind when they say Europe.

@Zardos

You know, I've always thought the overthrow of the Roman Republic had to do with in-fighting between a few ambitious powerbrokers. I also believed that the fall of the Western Roman Empire was the result of a complex cocktail of internal problems and external pressures. Thanks to you, now I know a portion of the blame for its decline belongs to the "detrimental" influence of its East Med/MENA population. And here I was thinking it was the Germanic barbarians who posed the greatest demographic threat to the Empire. Boy am I embarrassed! Glad you've set the record straight on this.

Still... isn't it a wee bit strange that the Western half of the Empire lasted 500 years with all those degenerate "Easterners" running around everywhere? Also rather odd that those same people would somehow keep the Eastern Roman Empire going for an even longer span of time. And from what I recall, Juvenal lived during the Pax Romana, probably the most prosperous time in Imperial history. It's almost like implicating the ethnic character of the Imperial Romans is nonsensical or something.

epoch said...

@Rob

"By contrast, elswhere in western Europe, a variety of non-IE languages descend from BBC."

Iberia and Guyenne. We have no idea what the rest of Western Europe spoke, although there is some evidence that there are IE substrates in NW Europe.

Also, that variety is a problem for your theory. It seems unlikely that BBC spoke mre than one languages, or that the take over of Y-lineages was done in more than one wave of seperate cultures. So why are Iberian and Aquitanian-Basque so very different? They shouldn't be.


"It just seems rather odd that BBC should be switching their language to that of their foes, after they went to all that trouble to kill their men, collapse & then purify by fire their megaliths, so on. it simply doesnt fit."

Maybe the language adaptation came before the take overs you describe.

Andrzejewski said...

@Aram “Notice female lineages were not changing much.I mean do we have dramatic increase of U5 when WHG was increasing?
Basques btw have very low number of steppic mitogenomes.”

Modern U5 could be more attributable to Steppe mtDNA in my opinion than to WHG ones. They found samples with U5 subclades in both CWC & BBC so it’s most likely that they derive from the EHG side of the Steppe DNA.

Vadjzna said...

@ Davidski

Imo it should be more like this in northern Italy. Unfortunately there are no samples from Emilia-Romagna released and the Ligurian average is based on just one sample. This also applies to the other maps.

https://i.imgur.com/ZAczV7R.jpg

Andrzejewski said...

@zardos “Oetzi too didnt wanted to be used for target exercises.”

Ötzi himself was 25%-30% WHG (@Samuel Andrews stated ‘Serbian HG’ on his maternal side), which may explain why he showed a CroMagnon Brachythephaly-like cranial features. So he may already have been a GAC or other MNE or even Late Neolithic represetative.

Gaska said...

@epoch said "So why are Iberian and Aquitanian-Basque so very different? They shouldn't be.

I didn't know that you are an expert in Iberian and Basque,surely you can explain to everyone how these languages ​​differ- In case you can't do it, you'll understand that we don't consider your opinion about it- I can recommend good books for you to study the subject-


Andrzejewski said...

@Gaska “
@epoch said "So why are Iberian and Aquitanian-Basque so very different? They shouldn't be.

I didn't know that you are an expert in Iberian and Basque,surely you can explain to everyone how these languages ​​differ- In case you can't do it, you'll understand that we don't consider your opinion about it- I can recommend good books for you to study the subject-”

There is not enough material known to scientists/linguists re: Iberian language but so far from the little tiny bit of known stuff it’s clear to them Iberian similarities with Acquitanian is at best just a casual language contact or even a Sprachbund and not more than that!

Gaska said...

@andrei said-There is not enough material known to scientists/linguists re: Iberian language but so far from the little tiny bit of known stuff it’s clear to them Iberian similarities with Acquitanian is at best just a casual language contact or even a Sprachbund and not more than that!

HaHaHaHa- We already have two linguistic experts. Congratulations sure if you repeat it many times you will end up believing that it is true,

epoch said...

@Gaska

Fine. Since you are so sure you can come up with a list of cognates between Iberian and Basque languages apart from the numerical system.

What are they?

Matt said...

Oetzi is in Davidski's West Eurasia 9 PCA as Iceman_MN.

His closest 15 matches in Euclidean Distance are: Sardinian:HGDP01075, HUN_Vinca_MN:I1895, HUN_LCA:I5118, HUN_Tisza_LN:I2358, HUN_Protoboleraz_LCA:I2791, Anatolia_Pinarbasi_HG:ZBC_IPB001, Anatolia_Boncuklu_N:ZHJ_BON024, HUN_Hunyadihalom_MCHA:I2783, HUN_Balaton_Lasinja_CA:I4189, HUN_ALPc_MN:I1506, HUN_Balaton_Lasinja_CA:I1907, HUN_Protoboleraz_LCA:I2789, HUN_Baden_LCA:I2370, Sardinian:HGDP01071m HUN_Balaton_Lasinja_CA:I2394

Oetzi has very much Copper Age Hungarian, or Remedello BA or Italian Neolithic levels of HG ancestry. As you would expect, he is similar to Italian Neolithic->EBA people. Seems like a person local to the Alps. Not really 25-30%, more like 10%.

ancient dna said...

what do you think of these models?

ITA_Proto-Villanovan
49.7 % Corded_Ware_DEU + 50.3 % HUN_Starcevo_N 0.012 ( CW rather than Yamnaya?)

73.5 % HUN_BA_o + 26.5 % ITA_Ardea_Latini_IA 0.0147
81.1 % HRV_IA + 18.9 % ITA_Ardea_Latini_IA_o 0.0142

perhaps peoples similar to Latini (Etruscans, Prenestini and Italy BB are also good fits) already existed in the bronze age and this sample had admixture from them? i find it hard to believe it was just a pure Balkanian in Italy.

David said...

Just a little point... Iberian doesnt seem to be a unique language. There were at least Iberian,Tartessian and surely another language in East Andalucía: https://youtu.be/HPvSBwM6pLA
Aquitanian/Vasque, Tartessian, several Iberians, Etruscan, Ligurian... there were a whole collection of N-IE languages in southwestern Europe.
Does some kind of matrix exist about correlation between tested IE cultures and No-IE cultures with percentages of Y haplogroups?

Andrzejewski said...

@All Let me understand something here: according to sources I read then essentially Natufians were 75% Dzudzuana-like + 25% Iberomairosians who somehow imposed an Afro-Asiatic language on them. Iran_EN/CHG are basically Dzudzuana-like + various ratios of ANE (35% in CHG, 50% in Iran), and Steppe are mostly 50:50 EHG:CHG.

Now it’s getting interesting: EHG = 75% ANE + some CHG and WHG. And we know that the most recent studies give Steppe samples up to 20% EEF.

Can we then get a more accurate and precise deep ancestry breakdown? As in - Steppe (Corded Ware) = Neolithic Farmers 20% + Dzudzuana in CHG —> 65X Anatolian Barcin + 20% Barcin

+ 75% ANE + 10% CHG (65X Barcin + 35% ANE) = EHG

+ WHG in Anatolian EEF in Steppe + WHG already in EHG.

Can we allow ourselves to use this method?

Grant said...

"Archi 12, 2019 at 12:50 PM
The consensus among linguists is that the German-Italo-Celtic group forms a close link between themselves... Germanis closely linked to part of Italics and Illyrian. Read Porzig and other linguists."

These are outdated hypotheses from the 1950s and 1960s. The "big data" research, using computational comparison, by Ringe, Warnow et al. since the 2000s has consistently found distinct Italo-Celtic and "Germano-Albanian" (probably Germano-Ilyrian) clades, which were likely the third and fourth language groups to emerge from "Core PIE". Later, both Germano-Albanian itself and its descendant languages were in prolonged contact with the Celtic and/or Italic languages.

In fact, it has often hypothesised that Germanic (like Albanian) was originally been part of the satem isogloss (like Albanian), and was "centumised" through prolonged, geographically extensive contact with Celtic (in particular) in NW Europe. There is linguistic evidence for this in the "half-centumised" phonology of Germanic languages, e.g. the old name for the Carpathians in proto-Germanic was something like Harpadha. Likewise the words for 100 (hundred/hundradh/hundert) should be something like "kandred", had the Germanic languages always been centum languages. Even the generic endonymic root teuto- (later deuts- etc) is probably borrowed from Celtic.

Late contact aside, there is no evidence of a stronger ancestral relationship between Germanic and Italic than either of these branches has with, say, Greek or Iranian.

Anonymous said...

@Grant said...

"These are outdated hypotheses from the 1950s and 1960s ...."

That's not true, it's not an outdated hypothesis, by any chance. All this also turns out in calculations by modern methods of the 2000s.

http://s019.radikal.ru/i602/1602/93/737e7a159e02.png

Most linguists do not recognize "big data" methods, but rather as pseudoscientific ones.
German was not a satemon language, but it was very closely contact with Balto-Slavonic, it is possible that some protosatem group joined it, in any case, everyone admits that the proto-Germanic came from a merge of several different dialects.

"Likewise the words for 100 (hundred/hundradh/hundert) should be something like "kandred""

hundred is an absolutely normal German word, it should be from the PIE *k' > Germ. h, *n. > un, etc., it could not be **kandred - learn the historical phonology of Germanic languages before fantasizing.

Gaska said...

@epoch

Are you really interested in knowing the similarities between Iberian and Basque/Aquitanian?

Ok-There are lots of anthroponyms and toponyms, but we also know hundreds of Iberian words that can be translated through the Euzkera-We start in alphabetical order ABARIEKITE, ABARKEBORSTE, ABINER. ABULO, AILAMUE, AIUISAS, AKAINAS; AKAINAKUBOS, AREREKUTUBOIKE.....

I guess you'll understand that I don't write them all, I would recommend that you study a bit of Iberian and Basque and not try to convince anyone about an issue that your knowledge is very very very scarce

Example-

Iberian-BASTAIBAITIEBA...Basque-BASTA-IBAI-(T)IEBA-DA-
Español-Ir a la orilla del rio.... English-Go to the riverbank

Iberian-BILOSTIBASIBEISUR---- Basque-BILUTS-TXIBA- UMEIZU
Español-Niño Huérfano English-Orphan boy

Some Spanish linguists are developing very interesting methods that begin to allow deciphering Iberian texts even though the Euzkera already has 70% of words of IE origin (Latin, Spanish, French)

Gaska said...


You will allow me a funny example of Iberian/Basque words that have passed into Spanish

Iberian-TITAS Basque-TITIAK Español-TETAS English-Boobs

You have already seen that my English is not very good but I think that the word Tits is also used in English

epoch said...

@Gaska

"I guess you'll understand that I don't write them all, I would recommend that you study a bit of Iberian and Basque and not try to convince anyone about an issue that your knowledge is very very very scarce"

Fine, show me where you're list of cognates is from. With links.

"We start in alphabetical order ABARIEKITE, ABARKEBORSTE, ABINER. ABULO, AILAMUE, AIUISAS, AKAINAS; AKAINAKUBOS, AREREKUTUBOIKE..."

Which are cognates to what exactly?

Gaska said...


In historical linguistics, cognates are called those terms that have the same etymological origin, but a different phonetic evolution and, often, also a different semantics.

Iberian-AREREKUTUBOIKE Basque-ARARE-GUDUBOI- Español-Enemigos Armas English-Enemies Weapons

There are two very interesting doctoral theses. By the way there are also similarities with Tartesian, Etruscan and Ligurian.If you are interested I can send you the links, I do not want to bore everyone with iberian and Basque words

epoch said...

@Gaska

You don't bore us with posting links. Post them!

natsunoame said...

Gaska
CICA,CICI is in bulgarian the same word..
So is this a sample for not IE words and languages or what?
Akainas what’s the translation for that one?

Bernd said...

You'll have to excuse me for my low quality source, but according to Wiktionary, which is generally a good source, Teta in Spanish comes from Tete in Old French, which actually comes from a germanic word *titt, which is the origin of both "teat" and "tit" in English. So your argument for that as a reason that we should be seeing non-IE language is actually completely backwards.

Rob said...

@ Slumberry

'' G25 nMontes none of the Central Italian Neolithic samples show any such ancestry, r''

Exactly what I found too. I was surprised, but good to 2nd confrim


Anyhow, Cardial Neolithic is actually from northwest Greece.
Its not from Levant or Cilicia. Its only that some impressed ware has been found in north Levant sites.
Frank should refer to Spattaro

Rob said...

@ David

''Does some kind of matrix exist about correlation between tested IE cultures and No-IE cultures with percentages of Y haplogroups?''

Yes I once read a paper, but it was poor quality

@ Grant

I find it sceptical that one can apply statistics to linguistics. I mean one can, but does it mean the results are true ?
We only need to think of the 'results' produced by applying stats to Y-STRs and even mtDNA. They often didnt hold up
People seem to like to 'statisticize' many things, as if it validates their methodology

Rob said...

@ Gaska

What is the main route one would take in ancient times if they wished to arrive in the Meseta & Madrid plains from southern France ?

zardos said...

@Michalis Moriopoulos:
"I also believed that the fall of the Western Roman Empire was the result of a complex cocktail of internal problems and external pressures."

Sure it was, never said something else, did I? But there is this demographic and biological factor which played a big role - beside others. And I'm not here to discuss every wrong decision the emperors and senate made.

"Still... isn't it a wee bit strange that the Western half of the Empire lasted 500 years with all those degenerate "Easterners" running around everywhere?"

I didn't say they were all degenerate, but the replacemnt of the local, old stock Romans meant a drastic change in every respect. And don't forget, the Romans did largely eliminate the regional elites of the East too. What was coming in was to a large degree slaves and tradesfolk. What they were losing was old stock Roman peasantry and warriors. And thats something you can really notice, that they became a trading nation themselves.

Guess why the Germanics became such a threat. Part of the reason was the empire became passive and relied more and more on foreign mercenaries and foederati. Rome became more like Carthage. Romans could buy the throne and they relied on foreign mercenaries to defend it. And they constantly had to integrate foreign people, had to integrate too fast even, because their own demography, especially in the urban centers, was completely screwed.

Look at what Juvenal described. The change in attitude and atmosphere in Rome even at his time. This was not good for the stability and strengths of the state.

Add to that the Eastern cults which came in, most notably and finally Christianity. It started with mysteries cult like the one of Kybele and ended up with Christianity. This was really foreign to the old Roman belief system and way of life, the values they had, how the communities were kept functional. You might say Rome lasted after the Eastern shift for centuries, but the shift was still going on and it was going down the whole time, quite steadily. With Christianity it collapsed just in a couple of generations actually. The East survived mostly behind walls and with mercenaries for much longer. The Byzantines could rely upon their gold trade. This was also very bad for all these states, including the Greek ones earlier. Because Europe was, for the most time, rather poor in gold and had other currencies and relied more on silver, if on noble metal at all (early Rome did not, Sparta did not!). With gold you opened up Pandora's box and made yourself dependent on long distance trading, which the Eastern traders could exploit. The West was drained out. Byzantium lived from this for centuries - this is obvious if looking at the history of the solidus and they used the currency exchange rate for their advantage. But this could be a long debate about many issues which are often interrelated...

Davidski said...

@Samuel Andrews

What can you say about the affinities of the ancient eastern and western Finnish mtDNA haplogroups in this paper?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-51045-8

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-019-51045-8/MediaObjects/41598_2019_51045_MOESM2_ESM.xlsx

Gaska said...

@Bernd

It is clear that you have not understood what I mean, I am not talking about the origin of the English word but that the Basque word titiak can perfectly explain the Iberian word TITAS and help translate the text or texts where has been found. Do you get it?-Regarding the origin of the Spanish word, it can obviously be French, but it can also be Iberian because there are many Castilian words that do not derive from Latin but from Iberian/Basque

@Epoch-

I think it is better that you as a great expert that you are, begin to explain to us what are the differences that you find between the Basque and the Iberian- Surely we learn a lot-

Basque descends from a family of languages that in prehistoric times were spoken in every region of Europe. The only Vasconic language apart from Basque to have been a written
medium is Iberian. Most of the surviving texts are in the East Iberian Script, and the
majority of these are rolls of donors of grave goods. Pan-European Vasconic footprint.

Substrate loanwords. These are the words that speakers of Vasconic languages retained
when they started speaking non-Vasconic languages. All Indo-European languages
spoken in Europe contain Vasconic substrate loanwords. The largest concentration is
probably to be found in Greek.

Onomastics. Anthroponyms,toponyms potamonyms and oronyms that survive in the record or are still extant.




Gaska said...

@Rob said-"What is the main route one would take in ancient times if they wished to arrive in the Meseta & Madrid plains from southern France ?

Western Pyrenees through Guipuzcoa

@Natsuoname

Iberian-AKAINAS- Basque-Akain Español-garrapata English- Tick
Iberian-Akainakubos Basque-Akain Gabe Español-Sin garrapatas- English-No tick

The important thing is not only that the same words exist in Iberian and Basque, but that the Iberian texts can make sense using the Basque meaning

Bernd said...

@gaska

It's quite evident that I, like most other here, understand that your arguments are a combination of grasping at straws, ignoring evidence, and operating on your own personal biases. I just grasped upon a line of evidence that struck me as evidently wrong and showed why it is so.

All the best with your mission of spinning webs of ideas out of nothing,

Berd.

Rob said...

Davidski
Seems like the “farmer” mtDNA in Finns is from CWC/ post CWC in east; whilst west was mostly hunter gatherers

Gaska said...

@Bernd

It's quite evident that you, like most other here, have no idea what they are talking about, nor know the Basque, nor the Iberian, nor the Aquitanian nor the Tartessian, nor the Etruscan, nor the relations between those languages. There are many great Spanish linguists who have been trying to decipher the Iberian for many years and are very close to achieving it.

Could you tell me what are the obvious differences that both you, epoch or Andrei find between Iberian and Basque, or have you only come here to to use absurd arguments or insult?

Davidski said...

@Rob

It's definitely not from the CWC, unless you inhabit the same strange parallel universe as Carlos Quiles. Maybe you do, I don't know.

But, from the paper...

The most significant cultural changes, possibly driven by expansions, proceeded from east/south-east and extended into most of today’s territory of Finland, while the Corded-Ware culture influence spread from south occupying only the southwestern part of Finland.

So something other than CWC, which was long gone everywhere by the Iron Age anyway, has to explain the "farmer" haplotypes in the ancient eastern Finns. But it's likely that there isn't a single explanation.

Andrzejewski said...

@zardos "The best scenario seems to have been to me a survival from TCC and an expansion with an East Carparthian Indo-European people in virtually all directions, most successful in some Illyrian and Greek people."

Bravo! Finally *someone* has mentioned or brought up the fact that Cucuteni Tripolye Culture, which was a very important Late Neolithic civilization not less in my opinion than its contemporary GAC, DID SURVIVE the Steppe incursion (by Yamnaya Bulgaria/Hungary?) and that Greek and Illyrian people have direct continuity with this fine, civilized Neolithic Farmer (with minimal WHG introgression) population.

Could the EEF/ANF in Mycenaean Greeks be attributed also to Cucuteni Triolye and not just and merely to native Cardial Pottery?

zardos said...

@Andre: TCC played a role in Indo-Europeans genetically and culturally. But like in Iberia, genetically mostly via conquered and exchanged females.
But somehow-someway patrilineages managed to survive within different IE speakers too. Most likely E-v13 as the most important lineage probably related to TCC which made an impact.

Who brought Greek to Greece is an interesting question, because there might have been different layers of IE in what became Greece.
In any case, I would assume the IE brought TCC ancestry via the Balkan-Danubian complex, but I'm not sure to which extend or how much of it survived.

Andrzejewski said...

@zardos " TCC played a role in Indo-Europeans genetically and culturally. But like in Iberia, genetically mostly via conquered and exchanged females.
But somehow-someway patrilineages managed to survive within different IE speakers too. Most likely E-v13 as the most important lineage p TCC played a role in Indo-Europeans genetically and culturally. But like in Iberia, genetically mostly via conquered and exchanged females.
But somehow-someway patrilineages managed to survive within different IE speakers too. Most likely E-v13 as the most important lineage probably related to TCC which made an impact.

Who brought Greek to Greece is an interesting question, because there might have been different layers of IE in what became Greece.
In any case, I would assume the IE brought TCC ancestry via the Balkan-Danubian complex, but I'm not sure to which extend or how much of it survived.robably related to TCC which made an impact.

Who brought Greek to Greece is an interesting question, because there might have been different layers of IE in what became Greece.
In any case, I would assume the IE brought TCC ancestry via the Balkan-Danubian complex, but I'm not sure to which extend or how much of it survived."
________________________________________

Interesting:

1. Can we say that just like GAC, Cucuteni Tripolye survived via its female side? Previous posters went overboard to "prove" that GAC played such an formative role in both CWC and BBC, and that Cucuteni Tripolye basically all but disappeared off the face off the earth like Botai. They were portraying GAC as the only farmer substrate in all modern Europeans. Would you contend then that Greeks and other Balkanic IEs are mostly directly CTC offsrprings on their female sex-based farmer ancestry?

2. Could it be said that at least some ancient or even modern European groups, e.g. Hittites, Phrygians, Thraco-Cimmerians, Illyrians, Albanians, Dacians or Panonians are descendants of Yamnaya groups, even with admixture of Bell Beaker and/or Corded Ware, to the effect that it's possible that SOME language branches - Greek, Anatolian, Armenian might actually be either from Yamnaya, Catacomb, Srubnaya and so forth - and NOT a Corded Ware or Bell Beaker branch?

3. I'm curious as to what important contributions CTC added to Indo-European cultures?

4. How can we interpret so frequent occurrences of J1/J2 (CHG mostly) or E y-dna (mostly Afro-Asiatic) in Greek and Balkanic groups other than the fact that the Neolithic farmers who originally had colonized Greece/Balkan were different than the LBK/Cris/Koros/Sarvevo/TRB ones by having an already high admixture of Levant, Natufian and CHG tribes EVEN BEFORE the obvious CHG and then Steppe (including CHG+ EHG) admixture with Mycenaeans?

5. Off a tangent - I've already been very perplexed how come classic LBK farmers had almost exclusively G2(a) on their Y-DNA (Otzi is one good example!) with some minor E and J (ratio is somewhat reversed for the Cardial Pottery Neolithics), but on the other hand, their mtDNA is nothing but highly diverse: T, N, J, H, UV, X, Z, R, R0, W etc.?

Andrzejewski said...

@zardos "Purity in the ethnosocial context can be related to some older ancestry or race, but it doesnt have to, its about a social concept related to a specific ancestry group. Primarily its about social endogamous marriage patterns.
You can look at the higher status BB women yourself.
Actually some of the lower caste Western German maidens among BB are more Corded Ware derived imho.
So this had nothing to do with being more IE, and fell BB were excluded too. It was a free and wealthy class which married among each other and might have cared for specific physical traits. The pattern is peculiar in any case."

Yeah, it's an irony of history that the Corded Ware women, with the higher percentage Steppe component (70%-75%) were at the bottom of the rung while the more EEF/WHG-admixed ones and hence the "less pure Indo-European" one were higher on the scale. I'm sure if the Germans knew back in the 1930s what we know now in 2019, they would embark on a "correction path" to make the people with the Corded ancestry the cream of the crop ;)

Which reminds me that when the Germans conquered Ukraine and Russia on "Operation Barbarossa", they were amazed how the Slavs, whom they imagined just one notch above the Jews in the "purity ranking ladder", had a higher percentage of blond haired blue eyed fair skin pigmented people than their own. Must've been all the Anatolian and WHG admixture picked up en route from the Ukrainian Steppe to Germany that resulted in Hitler and Goebbels looking more "Mediterranean/Alpine", respectively. LOL

Andrzejewski said...

purity ranking order, that is

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,"@Samuel Andrews, What can you say about the affinities of the ancient eastern and western Finnish mtDNA haplogroups in this paper?"

It is fascinating that 13 of 26 (50%), of Medieval mtDNA from Southwest Finland belong to haplogroups U4 and U5. None of them belong to U5b1b1a, which is the Saami form of U5 which takes up a lot of U5 in Finland today.

Several belong to Steppe-specific forms of U5. But, most don't. So, this high frequency of U4 and U5 can't be explained by Steppe ancestry. NorthEast European hunter gatherer ancestry is the only thing that can explain.

Several belong to young U5/U4 clades found in NorthEast Europe today. That could mean they have recent ancestry from somewhere else in Northern Europe like East Baltic and Scandinavia. But, more belong to basal or rare clades U4/u5, which could come only from Finnish hunter gatherers: U4b1b1, U4a2, U5b1b1g, U5b1b2.

Genome-wide DNA is needed from these sites in SW Finland with high u4, u5 frequencies. I think they have some Finnish hunter gatherer.

Davidski said...

@Andrzejewski

Yeah, it's an irony of history that the Corded Ware women, with the higher percentage Steppe component (70%-75%) were at the bottom of the rung.

Do you have any evidence for this?

I asked zardos to produce a list of the elite and commoner samples from the Lech Valley paper and he couldn't, so his theory hasn't been proven.

In fact, my understanding of the data is that the commoners were locals, with the most typical local genetic ancestry, while the elites were of foreign stock, and included individuals both with elevated and lower levels of steppe ancestry, because they came from very different communities.

Indeed, the women who resembled Corded Ware samples may well have been elites too.

Samuel Andrews said...

The "Farmer" sites from Medieval Eastern Finland.....

Belong mostly to Finnish and Baltic-specific mtDNA clades under hapogroup H. 0% belong to u4, u5, which is weird.

But they can't possibly be a farmer refuge in the Middle Ages. This is because their mtDNA has so many matches with modern Finns, North Russians, Estonians. They definitely had a lot of hunter gatherer & Steppe ancestry even if doesn't show in their mtDNA.

I think they are Finns, some of them Finns with Baltic admixture. They lived close to Karelia so geographically it makes sense.

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