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Sunday, May 3, 2020

Understanding the Eneolithic steppe


Archeologist David Anthony has teamed up with Harvard's David Reich Lab to work on a paper about the Eneolithic period on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

A couple of other labs are also preparing papers on similar topics, and they've already sequenced and analyzed many of their ancient samples (for instance, see here). However, I don't have a clue when these papers will be published. My guess is that we'll have to wait a year or so.

Needless to say, knowing what happened on the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe and surrounds during the Eneolithic is crucial to understanding the origins of the present-day European gene pool. It's also likely to be highly relevant to the debate about the location of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland.

In this blog post I'll explain what I've learned about the Eneolithic peoples of the PC steppe based on already published data.

If we ignore Steppe Maykop samples, the currently available Eneolithic individuals from the eastern part of the PC steppe form an essentially perfect cline in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of ancient West Eurasian genetic variation.

The cline runs from the Mesolithic hunter-fishers of the Eastern European forest zone to those of the Eneolithic sites of Progress 2 and Vonyuchka in the North Caucasus foothills. Let's call this the Khvalynsk cline, because three of the samples are from a burial site in the Volga River valley associated with the Khvalynsk culture. The relevant datasheet is available here.


The reason that these samples form the cline is because they carry different ratios of admixture related to Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) from what is now Georgia. Moreover, the Khvalynsk individuals appear to be relatively recent mixtures between sources rich and poor in this type of ancestry.

I also marked a Maykop cline on the plot. This cline is made up of individuals associated with the Maykop and Steppe Maykop cultures from the Caucasus Mountains and nearby parts of the PC steppe, respectively. The Maykop culture is dated to the Early Bronze Age (EBA) period, but the PC steppe was still part of the Eneolithic world at the time.

The Maykop cline is more complicated than the Khvalynsk cline, because some of the Maykop individuals carry genetic components that the others lack. These genetic components are closely related to the aforementioned CHG, as well as Anatolian Neolithic farmers (ANF) and Western Siberian hunter-gatherers (WSHG).

Note that the two clines intersect, but this isn't because any of the Khvalynsk cline samples harbor Maykop-related ancestry. It's largely because the Steppe Maykop individuals carry high levels of Vonyuchka-related ancestry.

So unless we're dealing here with a remarkable string of coincidences, then the Vonyuchka hunter-fisher must be a decent proxy for the people who spread significant levels of CHG-related ancestry north of the Caucasus.

The important question, therefore, is where and when exactly did this population form? And it's a question that the authors of the aforementioned upcoming papers should be aiming to answer comprehensively.


In my view, it was the result of interactions between the hunter-fishers of the North Caucasus and the southernmost parts of the PC steppe during the Neolithic period, perhaps around 6,000 BCE, just before significant ANF-related ancestry spread across the Caucasus during the Eneolithic. That's because the Progress 2/Vonyuchka samples lack ANF-related ancestry, or at least an obvious signal of it, and are dated to ~4,200 BCE. And when I say Neolithic in this context, I don't mean the Near Eastern type of Neolithic with well developed farming, but rather the local type of Neolithic still based on hunting and fishing.

Now, obviously, the people of the Corded Ware and Yamnaya cultures were the children of the Eneolithic PC steppe. So you might be wondering how they fit into all of this. I still don't know, and apparently neither do the scientists at Harvard (see here). However, I'd say that the Maykop cline isn't relevant to this question. The Khvalynsk cline might be relevant, but even if it is, this doesn't necessarily mean that the Yamnaya people are by and large derived from the Khvalynsk people.

Here's the same PCA plot as above, but this time with early Corded Ware and Yamnaya samples also highlighted. Note that, apart from a few outliers, they form a rather tight cluster that is shifted slightly away from the Khvalynsk cline, but probably not in the direction of the Maykop cline.


A couple of the Yamnaya outliers are shifted towards the "eastern" end of the Khvalynsk cline, and thus near the Progress 2/Vonyuchka samples. This isn't surprising because these Yamnaya individuals are from burial sites close to the North Caucasus and probably harbor significant levels of local ancestry.

The most extreme Yamnaya outlier, from a site in what is now Ukraine, is clearly shifted towards the Maykop cline, and even towards the Caucasus Maykop cluster. However, this is a female with no grave goods and she may have been a foreign bride or captive, possibly from a late Maykop settlement. It's also possible that her 3095-2915 calBCE dating is wrong.

I'm pretty sure that when we find out why the Yamnaya cluster is so deliberately shifted away from the Khvalynsk cline, we'll also discover how the early Corded Ware and Yamnaya populations formed. For now, I strongly suspect that this has something to do with gene flow from the western edge of the PC steppe and the ethnogenesis of the Sredny Stog culture, which was located just west of the Khvalynsk culture.

By and large, the PC steppe is still seen by historical linguists and archeologists as the most sensible place to put the PIE homeland.

However, a theory that the PIE homeland was located somewhere south of the Caucasus, and that instead the PC steppe was the late or nuclear PIE dispersal point, has gained popularity in recent years, largely thanks to the apparent lack of PC steppe ancestry in a handful of samples from Hittite era Anatolia. In this scheme, the Maykop culture took PIE into Eastern Europe and the Yamnaya culture subsequently spread late/nuclear PIE from the PC steppe, while Proto-Anatolian, the ancestor of Hittite, was introduced into Anatolia from the east along with Maykop-related ancestry.

This is possible, in the sense that almost anything is possible, but it doesn't strike me as the most parsimonious interpretation of the facts.

Even before ancient DNA, it was known that the Maykop culture colonized parts of the PC steppe, at least for a short time, and probably had contacts with the Yamnaya people and/or their antecedents. But it was generally seen as the vector for Caucasian and other non-Indo-European influences in PIE.

Moreover, not only were the Maykop and Yamnaya populations of fundamentally different genetic origins, but apparently the Yamnaya people didn't absorb any perceptible Maykop ancestry as they expanded into the North Caucasus region at the tail end of the Maykop period.

That's really difficult to explain if we assume that these groups were close linguistic relatives, and much easier to reconcile with the assumption that they were derived from different worlds culturally and linguistically.


Another important question is what happened to the Steppe Maykop people, because right now it looks like they vanished almost without a trace, essentially as if they were pushed out or even erased by the Yamnaya expansion. If they were indeed pushed out or erased, then it's likely that their language was as well.

As for the lack of PC steppe ancestry in Hittite era Anatolians, I honestly can't see this is as a significant obstacle to a PIE homeland on the steppe, especially if we consider that the most widely accepted Indo-European phylogenies show the Anatolian family as the most basal node.

In the opinion of the vast majority of experts, it's the most basal node because the Proto-Anatolian speakers were the first to leave the PIE homeland. And if they were indeed the first to leave the homeland, then why should we expect their descendants to harbor significant ancestry from the homeland? In my view, such an assumption would contradict the most widely accepted Indo-European phylogenies.

See also...

The Caucasus is a semipermeable barrier to gene flow

445 comments:

1 – 200 of 445   Newer›   Newest»
Anonymous said...


Let's be precise, those Anatolian samples belong to the Assyrian era and pre-Hittite, we don't have reliable samples of the Hittite era.

Samuel Andrews said...

About....

Abstact: Genome-wide ancient-DNA investigation characterizes a genetic contact point in the Eneolithic southwestern Russia

They aren't direct. But, it seems they are saying the EHG/CHG mixed "Eurasian agro-pastorlists" samples lived south of the forest Steppe. And that neighboring Forest Steppe Eneolithic samples are pure EHG.

"Furthermore, the gradual integration of a genetic component associated with the Eurasian agro-pastoralists into the forest-steppe gene pool suggests a close contact between these two groups at that time. "

Maciej Pogorzelski said...

I wonder if the direct crossing of two clines (Khvalynsk cline and Maykop cline) is just a coincidence seen on PC1/PC2. The Khvalynsk cline is drawing from EHG out in the direction of pure CHG (we can imagine the dotted line going further from the crossing point); Maykop cline goes from Western Siberian HG to Caucasus (CHG+Anatolian). Even if there is common point on the plot it does not mean the people on the crossing are the same.

Olympus Mons said...

Davidski. You are changing your tune. here one song relevant to you....

I've been watching you
A la la la la long
A la la la la long long li long long long
Come on Shulaveri Shomu,
A la la la la long
A la la la la long long li long long long
Standing across the room I saw Shulaveri Shomu smile
I said I want to talk to you for a little while
But before I make my move your Yamnaya emotions start running wild
My tongue gets tied and that's no lie
I'm looking in your eyes
I'm looking in your big brown eyes (Ooh yeah)
(And I've got this to say to you)
Shulaveri, oh Shulaveri!
A la la la la long long li long long long….

Davidski said...

@Samuel

They're going to show almost exactly the same thing as the Khvalynsk cline, except more to the east in a population that received less Vonyuchka-related ancestry but had some WSHG.

And if anyone is wondering, their samples have nothing to do with early Uralic populations, because there's no Y-hg N in them.

Davidski said...

@Maciej Pogorzelski

I wonder if the direct crossing of two clines (Khvalynsk cline and Maykop cline) is just a coincidence seen on PC1/PC2.

None of the new Khvalynsk samples, and there's a lot of them, come even close to being pure CHG. Khvalynsk is obviously a mix of local EHG plus a Vonyuchka-like population.

Also, Steppe Maykop is almost exactly a 50/50 mix of West Siberian hunter-gatherers and a Vonyuchka-like population. I've checked this in several different ways, including with formal stats.

So the PCA is correct, even though it does only show a limited range of genetic variation.

Davidski said...

@All

I've already had to delete several comments. Not a good start.

CrM said...

I remember an older post about Darkveti-Meshoko and their "chalcolithic fortresses",
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-case-of-chalcolithic-fortresses-in.html

There's this part which @Davidski embedded
"The results support the view of the excavators: changes were caused by the interaction of two cultures differing in origin. The earlier culture, associated with the constructors of the Meshoko fortress, shows no local roots, and was evidently introduced from Transcaucasia. The one that replaced it was significantly more archaic (a few copper tools notwithstanding), and reveals local Neolithic roots."
This "significantly more archaic" culture with "local Neolithic roots" perhaps was related to Progress/Vonyuchka, maybe the Steppe ancestry that is seen in Areni is from that population?

Someone mentioned previously that Areni Steppe ancestry lacks WHG, but in G25 Areni Prefers Progress over more ANE-rich Steppe Maykop. I think this ghost population played a big role in the formation of Progress/Vonyuchka, because they too, as many have noted before, were pretty ANE-rich and lacking in a lot of WHG ancestry despite being, (as everyone traditionally claims) 50% EHG.

Slumbery said...

@Davidski

"Another important question is what happened to the Steppe Maykop people, because right now it looks like they vanished almost without a trace, essentially as if they were pushed out or even erased by the Yamnaya expansion."

A side point, but something I bought up multiple times in the past. A population that is similar to them prevailed in the wider region for millennia, they made it into Andronovo time.
Samples that represent this population in near pure or admixed forms:
Lola (NV 3001), Sintashta_o1 (I1007, I1017), Srubnaya_o (I0354), Kairan_o (I4566, I4780), Maitan_o (I6792, I6795) and I could probably find a few other if I combed trough all the Steppe_MLBA samples.
The Andronovo outliers are mixed (something like half Sintashta give or take), but their existence in this late time suggest a population similar to Steppe Maikop persisted until Andronovo times (and then melted into Andronovo as a minority, because indeed, in the Iron Age, there is no identifiable trace any more).

Now, I cannot tell for sure if this population was actually the descendant of pushed out Steppe Maikop itself or the descendant of a sister population or a combination of both, but nMonte runs detect some direct Maikop ancestry in most of them and suggest actual ancestry at some level. So I would not say that Steppe Maykop disappeared without a trace. There is a trace.

I completely agree with you however that they had no measurable impact on the Yamnaya population.

Davidski said...

@Slumbery

The Lola individual might indeed be derived from Steppe Maykop, but the rest are more likely to be the descendants of groups like Kumsay_EBA from the Kazakh steppe.

EastPole said...

I have plotted Eneolithic-steppe-PCA in 3D and marked RUS_Vonyuchka_En:VJ1001 by black triangle and RUS_Steppe_Maykop:AY2001 by red triangle. It looks like these samples are close in many dimensions and for PC123 the clines seem to be real:


https://i.postimg.cc/RF8WscSZ/Eneolithic-steppe-PCA.png

Rob said...

@ CrM
Pretty complex scenario The older population replacing the newer.
Where did they cone from ?

NB Meshoko look pretty “archaic” as well

Davidski said...

@EastPole

Even if RUS_Steppe_Maykop:AY2001 didn't exist, and neither did Caucasus Maykop, if we drew a cline from West_Siberia_HG to Steppe Maykop, and extended it beyond, it would intersect with the Khvalynsk cline and RUS_Vonyuchka_En:VJ1001.

That's because Steppe Maykop is a ~50/50 mix of West_Siberia_HG and something like Vonyuchka_En.

Richard Rocca said...

Anthony is heavily invested in the PC homeland, but either way, he already gets the gist of what's going on. From his last paper:

https://www.academia.edu/39985565/Archaeology_Genetics_and_Language_in_the_Steppes_A_Comment_on_Bomhard?auto=download&fbclid=IwAR0qGLNUryRcU-RXNgqo_Y1Cu_TNWGDJLlhZEKRpOzvRXZAtXUR514w7oLA

But if Wang et al. 2018 are correct, if the Anatolian Farmer element in Yamnaya came from mating between steppe peopleand late Tripol’ye or Globular Amphorae farmers, then the CHG genetic element in Yamnaya, more than half of Yamnay aancestry, could not have been heavily admixed with additional Anatolian Farmer ancestry. Yamnaya had a minor component of Anatolian Farmer ancestry, 10-18%. If most of it came from Europe then the CHG that was so prominent in Yamnaya ancestry must have been a relatively un-admixed variety ofCHG, with a low percentage of Anatolian Farmer ancestry. This un-admixed kind of CHG disappeared after about 5000 BC in the Caucasus and northwestern Iran, according toWang et al. (2018) combined with Lazaridis et al. (2016) and the forthcoming Naramsimhan et al. (2018 posted on bioarxiv).

Davidski said...

@Richard

I wish Anthony and Harvard would finally move away from these distal models which somehow manage to force unadmixed CHG onto the steppe and into Iran at the same time.

They really need to start thinking more proximal.

Slumbery said...

@Davidski

Good point, but Kumsay itself is younger than Steppe Maykop and not very far. In fact it is around the region where I would except a forcefully pushed out population to end up east of Yamnaya. I find Kumsay_EBA to be too similar to Steppe Maykop for a simple coincidence. So in my eye Kumsay is not really a competing theory, more like a bridge trough the time gap between Steppe Maykop and the later samples.

I suspect the competing model for the birth of the Kumsay_EBA population would be Yamnaya + West Siberians. Let's compare in G25 nMonte.

"sample": "KAZ_Kumsay_EBA:Average",
"fit": 2.8221,
"RUS_Vonyuchka_En": 44.17,
"RUS_Tyumen_HG": 32.5,
"KAZ_Botai": 23.33,
"RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya": 0,

"sample": "RUS_Steppe_Maykop:Average",
"fit": 2.1038,
"RUS_Vonyuchka_En": 47.5,
"RUS_Tyumen_HG": 41.67,
"KAZ_Botai": 10,
"RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya": 0.83,

"sample": "KAZ_Kumsay_EBA:Average",
"fit": 1.9286,
"RUS_Steppe_Maykop": 87.5,
"KAZ_Botai": 12.5,
"RUS_Tyumen_HG": 0,


"sample": "KAZ_Kumsay_EBA:Average",
"fit": 3.7815,
"Yamnaya_RUS_Kalmykia": 44.17,
"RUS_Tyumen_HG": 28.33,
"KAZ_Botai": 27.5,

The model of separate birth from Yamnaya + plus West Siberans is clearly at loss here. What other alternate (not Steppe Maikop) scenarios are available. Earlier eastern expansion of Vonyuchka mixing with west Siberians? That is basically the Steppe Maykop sister population theory.


Matt said...

True, Yamnaya_Ozera has no burial grave goods, but I would highlight she does have burial information: "The poorly preserved skeleton of a young woman (20-25 years old). She was buried in crouched position on her right side, with her head to the northeast. The left arm is bent at the elbow, the right arm, apparently straightened–the elbow was missing–was directed towards the knees. The skeleton is colored with brown ochre, particularly intensely on the skull."

Since there are no other samples, we don't know if she was typical of some group or not, or an outlier, and I am not entirely sure if she should even be characterised as Yamnaya or not. But we do know that there were, from at least one sample, probably some people buried in accordance with a broadly steppe like tradition, who lived in the region, who were genetically intermediate the main Steppe_EMBA cluster and the Caucasus cluster (perhaps with some excess Balkan farmer ancestry?), without any I think signal of an excess of WSHG associated with Steppe_Maykop.

If she were a captive or foreign bride (and we don't know as there is no indication of whether her genetic composition were different the culture she lived with or not), rather than the local second-generation offspring of such, then that group itself would have been intermixed / between Yamnaya and the Caucasus. If she were a captive person, she would have been one buried in a recognisably steppe EMBA tradition (crouched single burial, ochre).

In an ideal world we'd be able to impute her genome and then use these linkage disequilibrium methods to say whether she was an F1 between these two pops or what. If we knew she was from a population where she was at least an F3, for'ex, we'd know that her population was likely to be of the same general proportions as she was.

***

On the general topics, I feel like we're pretty stuck since Wang's paper.

We know after that that Piedmont_En must be mostly formed from CHG+EHG (and not a direct Caucasus+EHG mix) and then that Steppe_EMBA must be mostly formed from Piedmont_En. But the details are difficult to resolve because of resolution of outgroups. Is Piedmont_En only CHG+EHG, or mostly CHG+EHG with some wider participation in networks involving Ukraine_N, NW Iran_N, West Siberia, Barcin related ancestry? Is the Steppe_EMBA best modelled by mainly Piedmont_En + some GAC, or by mainly Piedmont_En + some Ukraine_N + Caucasus_En?

If more Eneolithic samples can show us the actual populations mixing in situ, we can know more about what actually happened without reliance on trying to find offsets between models. (For'ex, Yamnaya_Ozera and the R1b-M269 but Ukraine_N rich sample I5884 - looks to first approximation 23:77 Barcin:Ukraine_N, maybe with some Piedmont_En related ancestry at high resolution. Representative of something wider, or just peripheral outliers?).

Coldmountains said...

Did the ancient Romanian Z93 sample (GLAV_14 3000-3500 B.C) not had Maykop/WSHG ancestry too? But maybe he is misdated

Richard Rocca said...

@David,

Either way, it shows that Anthony knew even in 2018 that PIE could not have come from South Caucuses nor Anatolia. This must've been reassuring to him since his linguistic theory depends on PC=PIE. Once Harvard accepts that, the rest can be figured out with more sampling. Their reputations are on the line, so I think they will.

epoch said...

I'm pretty interested in the "Middle Dnieper Culture", a subculture of the Corded Ware horizon. The IE Encyclopedia has this about it:

"The Middle Dnieper culture is an eastern variant of the
Corded Ware cultural horizon (c 3200-2300 BC) and was
situated primarily in the north Ukraine between the other
Corded Ware regional groups and the forest-steppe and steppe
zone cultures. The culture is known from over two hundred
sites, primarily tumulus barrows, some of which have been
inserted into earlier Yamna burials and the cultural substrate
is seen to be both Yamna and late Tripolye.
"

It seems like the oldest attestation of CWC, and the fact that it apparently covers Yamnaya territory is interesting. Here we might find samples that could help clarify the relation between the two.

Maciej Pogorzelski said...

@Davidski
I didn't mean there is something wrong with the PCA. My point is about the interpretation.
Is there really a a Maykop cline created by mixing of CHG/Anatolian with WSHG?
Perhaps that cline was created in different way (as you suggested). Vonyuchka-like population was mixed on the end of Khvalynsk cline (pure CHG + EHG) and later on, it was admixed in three directions: to Maykop (with CHG/Anatolian); to Steppe Maykop (with WSHG) end to Khvalynsk (with more (EHG)
So the straight line of the Maykop cline with Vonyuchka in-between could be a coincidence - the line could be broken at Vonyuchka point as well.

Rob said...

Ukraine ozera outlier is Zhivotilovka-Vilchansnk horizon

Davidski said...

@Maciej Pogorzelski

Is there really a a Maykop cline created by mixing of CHG/Anatolian with WSHG?

It's definitely in that PCA in the first two dimensions. That can't be denied.

But there's also a Steppe Maykop cline from WSHG to Vonyuchka_En that intersects with the Khvalynsk cline in all dimensions, for obvious reasons.

That's probably because Vonyuchka-like groups expanded out of the North Caucasus region to different parts of the steppe. Otherwise, yes, what we're seeing is a series of coincidences, but I don't believe that.

CrM said...

@Rob

"Where did they cone from ?"
You mean the Steppe-like ancestry that is in Areni, or the population that clashed with Darkveti-Meshoko? (both are connected IMO)
I think they came from the Steppe, but were present in North Caucasus as well.

By the way, one of the Meshoko carries some EHG-like ancestry,

Target: RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En:I2055
Distance: 3.2583% / 0.03258267
56.4 GEO_CHG
22.6 Anatolia_Tepecik_Ciftlik_N
15.2 IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C
3.0 RUS_AfontovaGora3
2.0 Levant_PPNB
0.8 ITA_Grotta_Continenza_Meso
0.0 Anatolia_Barcin_C
0.0 Anatolia_Barcin_N
0.0 ARM_Areni_C

Target: RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En:I2055
Distance: 3.2073% / 0.03207304
55.4 GEO_CHG
20.8 Anatolia_Tepecik_Ciftlik_N
17.0 IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C
4.4 RUS_Samara_HG
2.4 Levant_PPNB
0.0 Anatolia_Barcin_C
0.0 Anatolia_Barcin_N
0.0 ARM_Areni_C
0.0 ITA_Grotta_Continenza_Meso
0.0 RUS_AfontovaGora3

Target: RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En:I2055
Distance: 3.2084% / 0.03208355
55.2 GEO_CHG
21.2 Anatolia_Tepecik_Ciftlik_N
15.6 IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C
3.6 RUS_Samara_HG
2.8 Levant_PPNB
1.6 RUS_Vonyuchka_En
0.0 Anatolia_Barcin_C
0.0 Anatolia_Barcin_N
0.0 ARM_Areni_C
0.0 ITA_Grotta_Continenza_Meso
0.0 RUS_AfontovaGora3
0.0 RUS_Progress_En

And regarding the Anatolian IE languages, I've noticed that there's some ANE signal in Anatolia_C. Could it too be connected with Areni?

Target: Anatolia_Barcin_C
Distance: 2.8293% / 0.02829333
29.8 Anatolia_Tepecik_Ciftlik_N
25.8 Anatolia_Barcin_N
25.0 IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C
14.8 GEO_CHG
4.6 RUS_AfontovaGora3
0.0 ITA_Grotta_Continenza_Meso
0.0 Levant_PPNB
0.0 RUS_Samara_HG

Target: Anatolia_Barcin_C
Distance: 2.6595% / 0.02659490
29.4 ARM_Areni_C
27.4 Anatolia_Barcin_N
16.4 Anatolia_Tepecik_Ciftlik_N
15.4 IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C
10.6 GEO_CHG
0.8 RUS_AfontovaGora3
0.0 ITA_Grotta_Continenza_Meso
0.0 Levant_PPNB
0.0 RUS_Samara_HG

Davidski said...

The Chalcolithic samples from the Areni Cave definitely have steppe ancestry.

This will be obvious when they're finally modeled with earlier samples from Armenia. Right now there's nothing like that to use.

Kavkasi said...

@Davidski

Can you please add the third Khvalynsk(I0434) sample to G25 Coordinates ?

zardos said...

The fun aspect of all this is that even if Maykop would have had an linguistic impact on a North Pontic steppe people, this doesn't have to be the final verdict on PIE origins, because they might have influenced tribes which were not the dominant ones later.

There is no way to be sure, but the best approximation is to find a unbroken chain of a dominant clan, of ancestry combined with social social dominance or at least independence.

The best alternative to the Anatolian languages coming from the East is or being even local is definitely the hypothesis of a Balkan route. This relates to your comment about the dilution of the ancestral component from the steppe: We need to have an alternative migration path.

Which leads back to the end of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture and steppe people moving down to the Balkans as ethnosocial units. So when can we expect more samples to come from the Balkans in the crucial period? Especially from Cernavoda and Troja?
Because its there where we have to find the link to Anatolia.

Anything coming? If the labs take it seriously, why don't they go for it? The Balkan, Bosporus and Western Anatolia is absolutely key to solve that question. Much more important than taking samples from much further East, from remains which deeper ethnic affiliation is purely speculative.

FrankN said...

I still think that it will be the Cis-Caspian (or Pre-Caspian) culture where the first evidence of the steppe-typical EHG/CHG mix is going to show up. Khvalynsk was clearly derived from the Cis-Caspian culture, from which it took over animal husbandry, and lithics. It is parsimonious to think that alongside with that transfer, the CHG element also entered Khvalynsk from the Cis-Caspian culture.

Recent research papers on this sequence:
https://ipae.uran.ru/sites/default/files/publications/users/Vybornov%20et%20al.pdf
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f31d/acb470c3c869c5a470bf4ab2136eb69991be.pdf?_ga=2.54841512.2036215555.1588508138-1928203483.1554002044

The question is then: From where and why did the Cis-Caspian herders move to the Lower Volga around 5,200 BC? As to why, a look at the reconstructed Caspian Sea level curve is instructive (c.f. the discussion in Link 2 above):
https://adnaera.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Black-Sea-Level-curve.jpg

The 8.2 ky event lead to a temporary increase in glaciation, resulting in the Caspian Sea level falling to ca. -30m, thereby exposing substantial parts of the North Caspian Basin. Afterwards, warm and humid climate quickly drove up the level to its holocene highstand of - 18-20m by around 5.000 BC, flooding a large coastal strip between Makhachkala in the West and the Mangyshlak peninsula in the East.
For an idea, go to https://www.floodmap.net/, zoom in on the Caspian Sea, and set water levels to alternatively -30m and -18m. The latter exercise also provides an explanation as to why the Cis-Caspian people didn't stay in the Astrakhan Region, but moved onwards to the Middle Volga and the Lower Don (Kremennaya III, 5.200-4.300 BC?, see https://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/DocumentaPraehistorica/article/view/44.13/7349).

FrankN said...

Otherwise:
1. "The Chalcolithic samples from the Areni Cave definitely have steppe ancestry.
They should! Some 15% of the ceramic assemblage at Areni consist of typical North Caucasian "pearl-ornamented pottery". Besides, the Eneolithic Dniepr Rapids area has yielded finds of Armenian obsidian, so there definitely existed a (pre-Maykop) trans-caucasian trade link during the Eneolithic.

2. Steppe Maykop is a ~50/50 mix of West_Siberia_HG and something like Vonyuchka_En. Interesting! Atbasar Culture (kind of the Cis-Caucasian Culture's eastern sibling, with similar lithics and pottery, and acc. to some Russian researchers pastoralist elements)? The arrival of Botai from further east (Trans-Baikal?) around 3,700 BC should have replaced Atbasar people westwards, maybe ultimately as far as the Steppe Maykop area.

Luuk said...

@Davidski

What do you think about the IV3002 individual from the Steppe Maykop culture?

In the PCA of the recent Salmonella study, IV3002 is close to the Armenia Chalcolithic individuals from the Areni Cave in Armenia.

Both IV3002(Y-Haplogroup T) and the Areni individuals(Y-Haplogroup L) harbour approximately the same amounts of Steppe, CHG and Anatolia_N ancestries.

The Varna Eneolithic elite individual ANI152(Y-Haplogroup T) from Bulgaria (4683–4406 BCE) also harbours the same amounts of Steppe, CHG and Anatolia_N ancestries.

What do you think about the origin of these individuals? When and where did they get their Steppe ancestry, and did they have contact with the Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog cultures?

Luuk said...

This is what David Anthony mentions in his paper on above individuals:

"Anatolian Farmers of course remained living in western Anatolia, and after about 5000 BC their mating networks expanded eastward to include mates in Transcaucasia (Areni-1 Chalcolithic, about 4200-4000 BC) and western Iran (Seh Gabi Chalcolithic, about 4800-4600 BC). The Anatolian Farmer ancestry recently discovered in Yamnaya genomes could have entered steppe mating networks through the Caucasus or through southeastern Europe. Its geographic source is an important question that also affects the source of the CHG in Yamnaya."
and
"By 5000 BC permanent agricultural towns stood on tells throughout the lower Danube valley and Balkans, not far from the Pontic steppes. Large Cucuteni-Tripol’ye towns constructed. Yet among 48 individuals with whole-genome aDNA from 16 Neolithic and Copper Age cemeteries in Bulgaria and Romania dated 5800-4300 BC, only three showed any ancestry from a steppe mating network (Mathieson et al. 2018)."
and
"All three of the steppe-admixed exceptions were from the Varna region (Mathieson et al. 2018). One of them was the famous “golden man’ at Varna (Krause et al. 2016), Grave 43, whose steppe ancestry was the most doubtful of the three. If he had steppe ancestry, it was sufficiently distant (five+ generations before him) that he was not a statistically significant outlier, but he was displaced in the steppe direction, away from the central values of the majority of typical Anatolian Farmers at Varna and elsewhere."
and
"At Khvalynsk, 373 copper ornaments were recovered from 27 graves among 199 excavated , the largest copper assemblage from a fifth-millennium BC site anywhere in the steppes (Agapov 2010). Most of it is argued to be Balkan in origin. Balkan copper also reached Svobodnoe, a site related to Meshoko (Courcier 2014: 586) and Progress-2-type steppe graves in the North Caucasus (Korenevskii 2016). Ornaments of Balkan copper, exotic ornamental shells (Glycemeris, Antalis), long lamellar flint blades, polished stone maces, and perhaps people and animals were exchanged across the Pontic–Caspian steppes from Varna to Khvalynsk and Svobodnoe between 4500-4200 BC."
and
"After this 4300-4200 BC event, Anatolian Farmer ancestry began to pop up in the steppes. The currentlyoldest sample with Anatolian Farmer ancestry in the steppes in an individual at Aleksandriya, a Sredni Stog cemetery on the Donets in eastern Ukraine. Sredni Stog has often been discussed as a possible Yamnaya ancestor in Ukraine (Anthony 2007: 239- 254). The single published grave is dated about 4000 BC (4045–3974 calBC/ 5215±20 BP/ PSUAMS-2832) and shows 20% Anatolian Farmer ancestry and 80% Khvalynsk-type steppe ancestry (CHG&EHG)."

MitchellSince1893 said...

@epoch
"The Middle Dnieper culture is an eastern variant of the
Corded Ware cultural horizon (c 3200-2300 BC) and was
situated primarily in the north Ukraine between the other
Corded Ware regional groups and the forest-steppe and steppe
zone cultures. The culture is known from over two hundred
sites, primarily tumulus barrows, some of which have been
inserted into earlier Yamna burials and the cultural substrate
is seen to be both Yamna and late Tripolye."

I too have found the Middle Dnieper group appealing for its location in the “Goldilocks” zone where Corded Ware and Yamnaya meet/overlap. However, Alan at anthrogenica says recent dating puts Middle Dnieper at no earlier than 2550 BC...with Fatonoya culture being 200 years older/likely source for Middle Dnieper. If true then it’s too late to be a factor

Samuel Andrews said...

The contents of this post is old news to some of us. Davidski trying to convince the naysayers.

Rob said...

@ CrM

“ And regarding the Anatolian IE languages, I've noticed that there's some ANE signal in Anatolia_C. Could it too be connected with Areni? ”

It seems areni C is a dead end group, associated with expansion of kurgans from steppe to South Caucasus (the early, 4000 BC ones). But this ancestry virtually disappears by late Majkop & KA period
I’m not sure what ~ 5% distal ANE will mean in historical-demographic terms, or indeed if it’s there in formal models
I think there’s good evidence for migrations from Balkans to Anatolia.

Ric Hern said...

@ All

How much of the so called previously proposed PIE Package did the Eneolithic Pontic-Caspian Steppe population have ? If they were Hunter Gatherers till very late my guess is that they were not PIE yet but contributed (maybe significantly) to the formation of PIE in Sredny Stog. So could it be accurate to say that they were maybe rather Proto-Proto-Indo-Europeans ?

Rob said...

@ FrankN

“ still think that it will be the Cis-Caspian (or Pre-Caspian) culture where the first evidence of the steppe-typical EHG/CHG mix is going to show up. Khvalynsk was clearly derived from the Cis-Caspian culture, from which it took over animal husbandry, and lithics”

Not really. There is no real evidence for animal husbandry in either Pc nor Khvalynsk
This has been demonstrated scientifically - the humans still ate overwhelmingly fish
The odd cattle or sheep bone feasted during a funeral or celebration doesn’t change that
Frank, you need to observe the evidence, not just keep pushing your view lints because they sound nice for you

Anonymous said...

FrankN said...
"I still think that it will be the Cis-Caspian (or Pre-Caspian) culture where the first evidence of the steppe-typical EHG/CHG mix is going to show up. Khvalynsk was clearly derived from the Cis-Caspian culture, from which it took over animal husbandry, and lithics. It is parsimonious to think that alongside with that transfer, the CHG element also entered Khvalynsk from the Cis-Caspian culture."

Absolutely not so, Khvalynsk has nothing from the Caspian culture, just everything connected with the Neolithic Caspian culture disappears, it has no continuation, especially in the north, there is no borrowing in ceramics and industry, it just disappears in the Caspian region. On the contrary, northerners come to the Northern Caspian Sea coast with their ceramics and industry.
The most interesting thing is that your source has written the same thing, but you contradict it:

"After the climatic aridizationat the Oroshaemoe site the transition to more favourable conditions resulted in the appearance of people from the Khvalynskaya Eneolithic culture at 4725–4336 cal BC."

There are no arguments that the Khvalynsk culture borrowed domesticated animals from the Pre-Caspian, even that they appeared earlier in the Cis-Caspian region.

Jatt_Scythian said...

Could you put this in the context of uniparental markers? For example what is WSHG associated with? Are all the Khvalynsk samples R1b (And M269+)? What about Sredny Stog? Also is there a cline between EHG and farmers that led to the creation of the Z93+ Usatovo and Sintashta/Andronovo guys?

mzp1 said...

@Rob,

Thanks, for the info about the cis-Caspian. I think it could turn out relevant at some point.

@Slumberry,

You don't think Kumsay_EBA is evidence for an eastern formation of Steppe_Maykop? I mean Steppe_Maykop came from Kumsay_EBA?

If not, you will have some complex scenario where WSHG is moving west, forming Steppe_Maykop there, and then moving back eastwards, which is kind of a weird back-migration.

Davidski said...

@Luuk

What do you think about the IV3002 individual from the Steppe Maykop culture?

That's one of the Steppe Maykop outliers and he's in my PCA.

He's a mix of Steppe Eneolithic, Caucasus Maykop and West Siberia HG. So nothing to do with Varna, nor directly related to the Areni Cave individuals.

Davidski said...

@Jatt_Scythian

According to Anthony:

- there's plenty of R1b1a in Khvalynsk samples, but no mention by Anthony of any R1b-M269, which is in line with my info, and obviously makes it tricky to directly link Yamnaya males to Khvalynsk

- he says that at least five Khvalynsk males belong to Q1a1b, and some of them are from very rich graves

- other Y-haplogroups in the Khvalynsk samples include R1a1, J1 and I2a2a

- he potentially links the J1 to a recent influx of CHG-related ancestry into the steppes, which may or may not be correct considering that there's earlier J1 in Eastern Euro hunter-gatherers (EHG) from way up north in Karelia.

Source:

https://brill.com/view/title/56151

Jatt_Scythian said...

@Davidski

Thank you. I have oa few final questions and then I'll go to spectator mode. Also I find it interesting Q1a did not expand despite it likely being the second or third most common haplogroup on the PC steppe.

Does that mean the R1b is something related to V88 or M73? Or just a bunch of dead lines?

Is the R1a1 ancestral to any modern R1a?

Any info on mtdna? Is mtdna T elevated (like we see in the Andronovo period)?

And any info on pigmentation alleles, lactase persistence, EDAR and height?

Thanks again. This blog had been super informative and I'm happy you''re moderating the comments especially given the agendas of many people in recent weeks.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Jatt_Scythian,

I'll answer the question about Khvalnsky mtdnA. They won't have the high frequenct of mHG t1a1 shich Andronovo did. This is because the mtDNA T1a1 15% frequency in Andronovo is due to a founder effect unique to them.

Andronovo mtDNA is deeply 'inbred.' Like how most insulated modern ethnic group's mtDNA is.

Which is why I think, before for several centuries they were an insulated ethnic group in eastern Europe who lived in a small area then exploded across Eastern Europe and Central Asia in 1800-1500 BC.

Ric Hern said...

@ Davidski

"- he says that at least five Khvalynsk males belong to Q1a1b, and some of them are from very rich graves"

How did these guys become so rich ? If Khvalynsk was only mainly Hunter Gatherers what did they have to offer their neighbours to become rich ? Pots, Women, Furs ?

Anonymous said...


It would be quite natural if the Pottery Neolithic was brought to Eastern Europe by Q1a2.

Rob said...

@ Zardos

'', but the best approximation is to find a unbroken chain of a dominant clan, of ancestry combined with social social dominance or at least independence.''

That would be surprising, given the mobility, shifts and fluctuations between 5000 and 2000 BC

Anonymous said...

@Ric Hern
"How did these guys become so rich ? If Khvalynsk was only mainly Hunter Gatherers what did they have to offer their neighbours to become rich ?"

It is a long tradition of burials in Eastern Europe, the wealth here has always been collective. In Eastern Europe, the tribe richly buried of the most valuable members of society, they were children and men in their prime (25-35 years old), but people older than 40 years were the most useless and their burials were the poorest, as in the famous poor burial Q1a because he was older than 40.

Khvalynsk was not Hunter Gatherers.

Rob said...

@ Archi

''It would be quite natural if the Pottery Neolithic was brought to Eastern Europe by Q1a2.''

Probably. But these guys all date to ~ 5300 BC, not 6500 BC
I suspect the organic residues and shell temper in many dates elevated previous dating

Anonymous said...

"But these guys all date to ~ 5300 BC, not 6500 BC"

Q1a2 reachs Latvia(!) Zvejnieki [I4550 / ZVEJ3] to 6000-5100 BCE

Pottery Neolithic starts with 7000-6750 BC (without shell effects) in the extreme east of Eastern Europe in the Yelshanska culture.

Simon Stevens said...

Why would Q1a2 have brought pottery to Eastern Europe if Q1a was already there via ANE ancestry in both EHG in mesolithic Latvia and Khvalynsk? I believe Afontova Gora 2 belonged to Q1a, so this must have been a founding lineage of the early EHG. None of the aforementioned have east asian ancestry. Would the transfer of pottery occurred by almost pure ANE sources from Central Asia in the Neolithic?

Rob said...

Yeah but Butovo culture is pre-ceramic. It is associated with Pressure flaking technique

Davidski said...

@All

After further consideration, I've edited this...

In my view, it was the result of interactions between the hunter-fishers of the North Caucasus and the southernmost parts of the PC steppe during the Neolithic period, perhaps around 5,000 BCE, just before significant ANF-related ancestry spread across the Caucasus during the Eneolithic.

To this...

In my view, it was the result of interactions between the hunter-fishers of the North Caucasus and the southernmost parts of the PC steppe during the Neolithic period, perhaps around 6,000 BCE, just before significant ANF-related ancestry spread across the Caucasus during the Eneolithic.

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

Based on this I can't see Yamanya as IE:

http://suyun.info/index.php?LANG=ENG&p=4_17062017_7_3

Some part of the male population of Yamnaya culture, had SNP markers, which are currently found only in representatives of the Bashkirian clan Buryjan”. The overall snp (KMS75) was revealed by Sergei Malyshev on the basis of data from the full genome sequencing of the Yamnaya culture[1].

Davidski said...

@Kavkasi

Holy crap, this guy has a new date of 5051-4860 calBCE, and he's already basically like Yamnaya minus its western signal.

,PC1,PC2,PC3,PC4,PC5,PC6,PC7,PC8,PC9,PC10,PC11,PC12,PC13,PC14,PC15,PC16,PC17,PC18,PC19,PC20,PC21,PC22,PC23,PC24,PC25
RUS_Khvalynsk_En_scaled:I0434,0.120652,0.057885,0.049403,0.145997,-0.04647,0.049364,-0.00893,-0.020076,-0.058085,-0.084558,0.010718,-0.008393,0.001635,-0.039085,0.030809,0.016839,-0.009909,0.000253,-0.005028,0.012756,-0.009733,0.003586,0.012818,0.005302,-0.006826

,PC1,PC2,PC3,PC4,PC5,PC6,PC7,PC8,PC9,PC10,PC11,PC12,PC13,PC14,PC15,PC16,PC17,PC18,PC19,PC20,PC21,PC22,PC23,PC24,PC25
RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0434,0.0106,0.0057,0.0131,0.0452,-0.0151,0.0177,-0.0038,-0.0087,-0.0284,-0.0464,0.0066,-0.0056,0.0011,-0.0284,0.0227,0.0127,-0.0076,0.0002,-0.004,0.0102,-0.0078,0.0029,0.0104,0.0044,-0.0057

Rob said...

Yep. The so-called ''Eneolithic steppe' guys are mostly Q1a, J1, Rb-V3616

Ric Hern said...

@ Davidski

So he is not shifted East of the Urals anymore ? Did you get better reference samples ?

Davidski said...

@Ric

I used as many markers are were available in the latest data release, and he seems to be plotting where he should be, despite the low quality sequence.

Leron said...

Romulus: Funny enough, that reminds me of a theory I read that Yamnayians were "proto-Altaic" or Proto-Turkic speakers.

Ric Hern said...

@ Davidski

So does this make the Samara area a better option for the origin of Yamnaya likeness than the Caucasus Piedmont area ? Or is this why you changed the 5000 BC to 6000 BC. near the Caucasus ?

Davidski said...

@Ric

I can't see Samara being the area where this type of ancestry originated, because the local pre-Khvalynsk population is just EHG. And even many of the Khvalynsk samples dated to after 5,000 BCE are almost pure EHG.

There was definitely a migration from the south into the Volga-Ural region around 5,000 BCE bringing with it Progress 2/Vonyuchka-like ancestry. But the guys who were involved were often, and perhaps mainly, Q1a.

Yamnaya and early Corded Ware appear to be from a similar population that was located west of both Khvalynsk and Progress 2, probably somewhere in what is now the Voronezh Oblast or close by.

Samuel Andrews said...

Khvalnsky_I0434 fit......
@2.4
Progress_Eneolithic:PG2004=74%
EHG=26%

Yamnaya_Samara fit....
@3.4
Progress_Eneolithic:PG2004=79%
Ukraine Mesolithic=12.4%
Hungary Farmer=8.2%

Weird, Yamnaya choses Ukraine HGs while I0434 choses EHG. whatever their exact mixture, I0434 looks more EHG than Yamnaya.

@David,
What is your source for I0434's 5051-4860 calBCE date? I recall 4500-3500 BC from Haak 2015 which was a super confusing date.

Davidski said...

@Samuel

Look at the anno file here...

https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/downloadable-genotypes-worlds-published-ancient-dna-data

Did you say that Anthony told you that the mixture between EHG and CHG on the steppe took place around 4,500 BCE?

Someone should tell this Khvalynsk guy that. He's way before his time.

Rob said...

Let’s remember that none of the published Samara samples have been corrected for reservoir effect; but they might be in future aDNA papers

Ric Hern said...

So maybe Yamnaya/Corded Ware R1b and R1a moved up the Don while Q1a moved up the Volga ? Then it kind of makes sense that some R1b M269 apparently ended up near Moscow...But was the Voronezh area influenced by Sredny Stog or did that population migrate into Sredny Stog from the Northeast ?

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski.

Yep, in the email he said he thinks EHG and CHG were mixing in 4500-4300 BC creating Khvalansk. He thinks a pure CHG pop lived near the Khvalnsky cemetary.

This is because, he and the whole Harvard Lab (including Anthony) still holds the belief they had back in 2015, which is that Khvalnsky is where the Yamnaya profile originated. In other words that they think Upper Volga Russia is the main place where pure EHG and CHG mixed. Anthony also says he thinks Khvalnsky probably represents the Proto-Indo Europeans.

As we know, lots of data say the Yamnaya profile formed earlier further south. But anyways, that's where their thought process is. But, they're open to changing their minds.

Samuel Andrews said...

The new 5051-4860 cal BCE date for I0434 is awesome news. David anthony is definitly aware of his early date. He probably has other KHvalnsky samples this old.

ambron said...

David, what do you think about Sredny Stog? Is this a random coincidence of the principial components and mutations of Y-DNA, or is there genetic continuity from Sredny Stog, through CWC, to Steppe MLBA?

Copper Axe said...

"There was definitely a migration from the south into the Volga-Ural region around 5,000 BCE bringing with it Progress 2/Vonyuchka-like ancestry. But the guys who were involved were often, and perhaps mainly, Q1a"

Weren't the samples in Wang et al mostly R1b-v1636? Thanks.

Coldmountains said...

@Jatt_Scythian

The R1a-M459 in Khvalynsk is not ancestral to R1a-M417 and diverged from the ancestor of Indo-European R1a already 15000 years ago. R1a was widespread in Eastern Europe but lower in frequency than R1b. R1a-M417 was just one "lucky" guy around 7000 years ago which was part of the very first PIE group (probably in early Sredny Stog or nearby cultures) which later replaced almost all basal R1a which was for example found in Khvalynsk.

Kavkasi said...

@Davidski

Thanks for adding him. As I thought, he is basically Eneolithic Steppe + minor EHG. I think we will find every major Y-Haplogroup in this Eneolithic Steppe like population (EHG/CHG).Now the most important question to me is, where did this population mixture form and when exactly ?

Copper Axe said...

Any theories for why Khvalynsk were outcompeted or did not contribute significantly to the later western steppe herder genetic pool?

Sredny Stog as a PIE homepoint explains the agricultural terms in PIE but iirc Anatolian languages did not share those terms so perhaps it split off before agriculture in the PC steppe, so late 5th millenium I guess. But that was in the west and the east didn't really have much agriculture.

Perhaps an eastern answer via the Piedmont steppe or Khvalynsk populations? Sorry just speculating here.

Rob said...

@ Copper Axe

“ Weren't the samples in Wang et al mostly R1b-v1636? “

Yep that’s what I just wrote above/ it seems the “steppe signal” was ‘generated’ by Q1a , J1 , R1b-V3616 guys

Anonymous said...

Samuel Andrews said...
"The new 5051-4860 cal BCE date for I0434 is awesome news. David anthony is definitly aware of his early date. He probably has other KHvalnsky samples this old."

What is really awesome surprising? This sample has the same dating as the other samples. Why should it be different?

5045–4846 calBCE (6040±80 BP, OxA-4310) Khvalynsk II, Volga River, Samara [I0122 / SVP 35]

Davidski said...

@All

Here's a theory...

Steppe Maykop was created when West Siberia HG ancestry spread into Khvalynsk and the Khvalynsk and Maykop cultures started trading and cooperating.

Anonymous said...

Davidski said...
"Steppe Maykop was created when West Siberia HG ancestry spread into Khvalynsk and the Khvalynsk and Maykop cultures started trading and cooperating."

Only this cannot be, because the Maikop culture appeared when the Khvalynsk culture has long since disappeared!

Davidski said...

@Archi

Only this cannot be, because the Maikop culture appeared when the Khvalynsk culture has long since disappeared!

No problem.

That's because Shishlina 2009 argues that the Eneolithic on the Caspian steppe ended about 3,800 BCE, and this is when Steppe Maykop appeared.

This transition obviously didn't happen overnight and Steppe Maykop didn't just pop out of the ground. My theory potentially explains how it may have happened.

https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/view/3511

Rob said...

The Khvalynsk samples need reservoir effect correction. None of the published samples have that, in fact they’re not even carbon dated.
They are eneolithic culture, but still predominantly fished.
Thinking about it historically; Khvakysnk dates ~ 4500 - 3800 BC
Theres still much to be understood about the transition between eneolithic and Yamnaya, everywhere in the steppe

Anonymous said...

@Davidski

1. Eneolithic does not mean the Khvalynsk culture.

2. Khvalynsk and Maikop did not neighbor or influence each other in any way, because they lived in different eras.

3. The Maikops generally ate a lot of fish, including steppe, but the dates on them lead without correction of the reservoir effect, and they are very approximate.
"The Steppe Majkop population (3800–3000 cal BC) penetrated into the open steppe under favorable conditions. They are considered to be agriculturalists and pastoralists (Munchaev 1975). The new data indicate that river products were the main dietary components of people who occupied steppe ecological areas at that time."

Davidski said...

@Archi

The idea is that groups with significant West Siberia HG ancestry entered the Caspian steppe via the Khvalynsk culture, and became the Steppe Maykop population.

I won't discount this until I can test it properly.

Anonymous said...


In general, no dates are subject to reservoir correction, all cultures ate a lot of fish, southern cultures ate a lot of fish, but no one corrects their dates. In Neolithic Greece, so in general, all fed fish. So there is nothing to do the Khvalynsk culture exception, with it just fine, for her reservoir effects are measured.

zardos said...

@Archi: "It is a long tradition of burials in Eastern Europe, the wealth here has always been collective. In Eastern Europe, the tribe richly buried of the most valuable members of society, they were children and men in their prime (25-35 years old), but people older than 40 years were the most useless and their burials were the poorest, as in the famous poor burial Q1a because he was older than 40."

I have a different or at least additional explanation for that pattern: Young males got their endowment and if they got sons, the sons got a large portion of it. If they had no sons, so mostly the young dead, they couldn't inherit their goods to a son but were buried with it.

I doubt that males with 40+ "were the most useless" and got for that reason less goods in their grave.

@Rob: Khvalynsk is a good example for a broken chain: Their ancestry survived, but they got under foreign influence and broken into pieces. Yamnaya too didn't survive on the steppe in a dominant position to historical times. Same for TCC, GAC and so on.

But Corded Ware and related groups did keep up an unbroken chain in all likelihood. So its about working back in time from where Corded Ware was coming from, which seems to lead to Sredniy Stog and from there to the Lower Don Culture and the local hunter fisher clans.

Anonymous said...

@zardos

No, there were no differentiation in Eastern Europe except for the age and sex differentials. In general, there was no accumulation of wealth and personal transfer of wealth, this was firmly established by archaeology. There was only a gender and age differentiation, and the wealth of the buried depended only on the gender and age of the buried.

Angantyr said...

@Simon Stevin

"Why would Q1a2 have brought pottery to Eastern Europe if Q1a was already there via ANE ancestry in both EHG in mesolithic Latvia and Khvalynsk?"

Note that I4550/ZVEJ3, that Latvian guy, belonged to the Narva culture and was thus a pottery user. (And by the way, he was more WHG than EHG, though I don't doubt that it was EHGs that brought the pottery to the Eastern Baltic region.)

zardos said...

@David: "In my view, it was the result of interactions between the hunter-fishers of the North Caucasus and the southernmost parts of the PC steppe during the Neolithic period, perhaps around 6,000 BCE, just before significant ANF-related ancestry spread across the Caucasus during the Eneolithic."

That's exactly when the Lower Don settlements started to flourish and I stick to my prediction that there most likely will be a coastal Black Sea people which remains are now largely underwater and those moved more up the rivers at around that time, coming into contact with local hunter fisher groups. That's the diversity which is present in the Lower Don Culture. The coastal Black Sea hunter-fisher people will be CHG and might have come under some transcaucasian influence with little genetic impact however when the larger settlements were formed. The local hunter fishers up the rivers with which they came into contact were of course the EHG contributors which began to dominate these mixed communities.

@Archi: "No, there were no differentiation in Eastern Europe except for the age and sex differentials. In general, there was no accumulation of wealth and personal transfer of wealth, this was firmly established by archaeology. There was only a gender and age differentiation, and the wealth of the buried depended only on the gender and age of the buried."

I did not say there was a big differentation other than the one explained: A male gets items when being young and if he gets a son, a large portion of this being transferred to the son. If the son dies childless at a young age, he can't inherit his "wealth" and being buried with it.
That's what I said.
I don't think that they would have cut a male hunters items from his burial once he hit a certain age just like that. That sounds unlogical to me. If its being transferred to his son(s), its logial.
Many young men buried "wealthy" were therefore just dying childless imho. If they find an old man in a "wealthy" burial, he probably was just dying childless too if that pattern stays?
But most old men would have been successful fathers I guess and therefore have given a lot of their items to the "still active" sons.

Mike said...

I don't get it. How Volosovo can be the source of R1b-M269 if Sredny Stog is older?

Anonymous said...

@zardos "A male gets items when being young and if he gets a son, a large portion of this being transferred to the son. If the son dies childless at a young age, he can't inherit his "wealth" and being buried with it."

There was no transfer of objects, don't fantasize. These were all not some hereditary luxury goods, they were the most common things that were made here and now. No sons inherited anything from their fathers, there was no inheritance at all, the rich buried people who already had sons. It wasn't young people who buried rich people, it was children (you deliberately changed the word children to young people, completely changing the meaning).

It was very simple, children were the future for the tribe, so the death of the child was mourned in the most expensive way. The man in his prime of physical and sexual strength was the present for the tribe, his death was the loss of his breadwinner, so he mourned the rich offerings. The death of a young man was the norm, so they were mourned little. And the old men were useless in general, they did not get anything and were a burden, their death was not mourned because it was natural.

"I don't think that they would have cut a male hunters items from his burial once he hit a certain age just like that. That sounds unlogical to me. If its being transferred to his son(s), its logial."

Only this was established, there was no inheritance and nothing to make up. There's no need to transfer your logic of modern man to the ancient people, it's a typical mistake of a beginner.

epoch said...

@MitchellSince1893

Pity. So Fatyanova is the oldest instance of CWC?

Davidski said...

Sredny Stog and Volosovo overlap in their dates.

https://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/DocumentaPraehistorica/article/view/40.6

And if M269 is found in both groups, this doesn't necessarily mean they're paternally closely related, nor that they both contributed to modern populations.

Anonymous said...

Davidski said...
"Sredny Stog and Volosovo overlap in their dates."

Sredny Stog and Volosovo don't overlap in their dates.

Sredny Stog is older 4250-4200 BC.

Volosovo is after 4000-3800 BC. Dates 6631–6485, 4580–4180, 1497–1016 BC, 381–235 AD are marked as erroneous.

This once again proves that errors in 2000 (and more) years in radiocarbon measurements occur.

Mike said...

The middle Don appears to be a region of strong cultural intersection.
Interesting papers below

https://www.academia.edu/37781649/Chronology_of_Neolithic_sites_in_the_forest-steppe_area_of_the_Don_River
https://www.dissercat.com/content/rannii-neolit-verkhnego-dona-po-dannym-keramicheskikh-kompleksov

AWood said...

@Anyone with an opinion

Is there any relationship between these Q1a2 males on the Eneolithic steppe and the Q bearers in Scandinavia? Or are all the genomes too low quality?

Matt said...

A thing that may be of interest (maybe noted previously, maybe not):

Looking through the .anno file above, I see that I4110, the sample previously known as UKR_Dereivka_I_En2, is now known as Ukraine_Eneolithic_SredniStog.

Now in contrast to I6561 (now UKR_Eneolithic_SredniStog_o4), she's not labelled as an outlier.

Knowing Harvard, that may suggest that I4110 is pretty close to whatever their SredniStog "main cluster" is. She may be a sneak preview of what a "SredniStog" set will be like.

Another thing that may be of interest is that sample Bul4 is labelled as BGR_EBA_Yamnaya_o (Yamnaya I2a2a1b1b).

This suggests that he's an outlier and other Bulgarian Yamnaya may be different.

The reason for my checking was I wanted to update some graphics I made before showing change of West Eurasia PC dimensions over time, with any new date changes. See here for that: https://imgur.com/a/6HWAuUH. Noticed a few label changes at the same time!

Mr. J said...

Seems like J1 had a more Northern distribution than J2 did in the distant past even though Kotias is J2.

vAsiSTha said...

This 5000bce I0434 is clearly shifted towards Iran_N + WSHG as compared to other Khvalynsk individuals. Aigyrzhal being a proxy for such an ancestry (with 0 anatolian) in the the 5th mill bce east of caspian.

Target Distance GEO_CHG KGZ_Aigyrzhal_BA RUS_Karelia_HG
RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0434 0.03527824 17.2 25.6 57.2
RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0122 0.03741079 19.8 0.0 80.2
RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0433 0.04174810 14.4 2.4 83.2
Average 0.03814571 17.1 9.3 73.5

10434 can be seen pulled towards Iran_N + WSHG compared to the other 2 individuals here as well.

Target Distance GEO_CHG IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N RUS_Karelia_HG RUS_Tyumen_HG
RUS_Khvalynsk_En_scaled 0.04047758 25.2 7.2 58.4 9.2
RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0122 0.03741079 19.8 0.0 80.2 0.0
RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0433 0.04181004 15.8 0.0 84.2 0.0
Average 0.03989947 20.3 2.4 74.3 3.1

Simon Stevens said...

@All So a population related to Khvalynsk admixed with West Siberian Hunter Gatherers to produce Steppe Maykop? Though Khvalynsk proper doesn't have WSHG ancestry because of the Siberian, East Asian component in WSHG, unless there were some heavy ANE derived WSHG who lacked this component. Khvalynsk is old enough to have given ancestry in varying proportions to differing Steppe populations such as Yamnaya and Steppe Maykop if I understand it correctly?

Synome said...

I think a reasonable theory about how the Yamnaya and Corded Ware ended up being the main sources of PIE expansion rather than earlier steppe groups further east is that the adoption of wheeled vehicles came through from the CT culture zone to the west, and not through the Caucasus. This scenario remains archaeologically plausible afaik.

The scenario I envision, which fits into some of David Anthony's reconstructions of early PIE movements, is that the earliest PIE community began in the Volga-Don region where the Eneolithic Steppe component formed, and where horses were domesticated, perhaps in the north of this region. Then, there was an initial spread of this population to the west, where they mixed with the Dniepr Donetsk forager groups and gave rise to Sredny Stog. This mixed population then adopted wheeled wagons from the dense CT culture groups to their southwest and rapidly expanded in multiple directions, overwriting earlier steppe groups in the east becoming Yamnaya and moving into peninsular Europe with Corded Ware.

What ties this scenario together and centers Sredny Stog is the horse-wagon synthesis. Horses from the east, wagons from the west. They meet in Sredny Stog.

andrew said...

"As for the lack of PC steppe ancestry in Hittite era Anatolians, I honestly can't see this is as a significant obstacle to a PIE homeland on the steppe, especially if we consider that the most widely accepted Indo-European phylogenies show the Anatolian family as the most basal node. In the opinion of the vast majority of experts, it's the most basal node because the Proto-Anatolian speakers were the first to leave the PIE homeland. And if they were indeed the first to leave the homeland, then why should we expect their descendants to harbor significant ancestry from the homeland? In my view, such an assumption would contradict the most widely accepted Indo-European phylogenies."

I know it is a minority position, but based upon historical Akkadian and Hittite written accounts, the archaeology, especially involving iron working, and the timing of cremation burial practices there and in the vicinity of SE Europe, among other things, I think that the Anatolian language arose from the migration of Indo-Europeans to Anatolia ca. 2000 BCE and that the strong differences between Anatolian languages and other Indo-European languages is due to very strong substrate influence relative to other cases in an area where language shift was more due to elite influence than demic replacement (notably the indigenous language of Anatolia remained in place as a liturgical language for centuries after the Indo-Europeans Hittite people assumed political control, some domestic political elites were integrated in and some of the basic political geography was retained), and where the substrate was very different from the substrate in lots of other places where Indo-European language shift occurred (i.e. a completely different macro-language family). Hittite and Hittite names show a lot of influence from prior languages of the region (e.g. Hattic) in how they sound. The genetic evidence supports rather than posing a problem for this narrative. Also, the Hattic people that the Anatolian language speakers conquered were probably a Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age society that probably conquered the Neolithic Society of Anatolian farmers from the Eastern Highlands, with a lot of demic replacement, not the original Anatolian farmers who expanded across Europe as its first farmers.

FrankN said...

Rob: "There is no real evidence for animal husbandry in either Pc nor Khvalynsk "
Oh, there's lot of evidence. Just read the papers I have linked above (or, as concerns Khvalynsk, Anthony 2007).
You probably a/o refer to Schulting/ Richards 2016
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305475992_Stable_Isotope_Analysis_of_Neolithic_to_Late_Bronze_Age_Populations_in_the_Samara_Valley
Note that, while the Khvalynsk samples (from the middle Volga) still fall into the same isotopic cluster as Neolithic samples, i.e. point to a strong aquatic element in the diet, this doesn't hold true for the Sok Valley Eneolithic (Samara Culture?). Their isotopic signature is statistically not distinguishable from subsequent BA populations (Yamnaya etc.).
Fresh from the shelf Vybornov, Kulkova e.a. 2018:
https://ipae.uran.ru/sites/default/files/publications/users/Vybornov%20et%20al.pdf
" Lipid analysis of food crusts from pottery allowed the cooked food to be characterized (..) It is very important to note the presence of short-chain fatty acids in the food crusts from the pottery of KairshakVI site [Lower Volga Khvalynsk], as they are a characteristic of dairy products." More specifically, they identified caproic, caprylic and capric acid, which all derive their name from Lat. capra "goat as they are typical for goat milk.

"The Khvalynsk samples need reservoir effect correction." True for the Middle Volga. Anthony commonly applies a 300y downward correction, which I deem to be fair.
For the Lower Volga, there is obviously no need for correction (none of the analysed food crusts contained any fish-derived lipids), so the AMS-based Kulkova/Vybornov dating of 4700-4,400 BC for Khvalynsk there looks reliable.

Dave: "The idea is that groups with significant West Siberia HG ancestry entered the Caspian steppe via the Khvalynsk culture, and became the Steppe Maykop population.
But shouldn't their route have led through either Samara or Orenburg Oblast? There, we find the Samara culture, the latest (Turganik) phase of which lasted to ca. 3,500 BC, before becoming superseded by Repin (Morgunova 2015).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287799741_Pottery_from_the_Volga_area_in_the_Samara_and_South_Urals_region_from_Eneolithic_to_Early_Bronze_Age

I mean, o.k., I could still accept the idea that the Repin expansion drove out the Samara-Turganik people towards the Maykop area. But even in that case I would expect Samara_Orenburg (I0370) to at least bear a little bit resemblance to Steppe Maykop...

Davidski said...

@Matt

Knowing Harvard, that may suggest that I4110 is pretty close to whatever their SredniStog "main cluster" is. She may be a sneak preview of what a "SredniStog" set will be like.

As far as I know, new Sredni Stog samples look pretty much like Yamnaya from the steppe.

Anonymous said...

Synome said...
"The scenario I envision, What ties this scenario together and centers Sredny Stog is the horse-wagon synthesis. Horses from the east, wagons from the west. They meet in Sredny Stog."

Completely impossible scenario. And the horses weren't domesticated at the time, they weren't put in carts. And the wagons weren't invented in the west, not in CT.

Mike said...

Davidski From What period are these samples from?

Davidski said...

Early 4th millennium BC.

Luuk said...

@Davidski-"That's one of the Steppe Maykop outliers and he's in my PCA.He's a mix of Steppe Eneolithic, Caucasus Maykop and West Siberia HG. So nothing to do with Varna, nor directly related to the Areni Cave individuals."

Ive uploaded the PCA and Admixture Analysis of the "Emergence of human-adapted Salmonella enterica is linked to the Neolithization process", you can see it in here: https://imgur.com/a/9u2124N

As you see, IV3002(Y-Haplogroup T, Steppe Maykop, 3600-3000 BCE) forms together with the Ikiztepe(3300-3000 BCE) individual and the Areni-1 individuals(Y-Haplogroup L, Proto Kura Araxes, 4350-3700 BCE) a clade. And the ancestry proportions in the admixture analysis are looking similar. They all have an important amount of Steppe ancestry.

So as you said "This transition obviously didn't happen overnight and Steppe Maykop didn't just pop out of the ground.", IV3002 and the Areni-1 individuals probably got their Steppe admixture from a time in the beginning of the previous 5th millennium BCE. So, do you think that next to the Y-Haplogroup J1 of which we already know is associated with the CHG component in the Steppe populations, can we expect Y-Haplogroups L and T to be found among specific Steppe groups of the Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog culture as a minor representative of a mix of Anatolia_N and CHG ancestries?

Rob said...

@ Zardos

“ But Corded Ware and related groups did keep up an unbroken chain in all likelihood.”

Yes - for Baltic, northern and Central Europe, although even here the situation is complex for the strip of Mitteleuropa from Scandinavia to Hungary; due to persistent MNE / resurgence

@ Synome


I think a reasonable theory about how the Yamnaya and Corded Ware ended up being the main sources of PIE expansion”

Maybe main but there are def. earlier movements into Balkans and Anatolia ~ 3800 BC.

Anonymous said...

FrankN said...
"Fresh from the shelf Vybornov, Kulkova e.a. 2018:
" Lipid analysis of food crusts from pottery allowed the cooked food to be characterized (..) It is very important to note the presence of short-chain fatty acids in the food crusts from the pottery of KairshakVI site [Lower Volga Khvalynsk], as they are a characteristic of dairy products." More specifically, they identified caproic, caprylic and capric acid, which all derive their name from Lat. capra "goat as they are typical for goat milk."

So the reservoir effect is not measurable. You obviously assume that this population was obliged to cook fish in vessels, but you are wrong. From a recent study of the Neolithic population on the Atlantic coast, they naturally ate a lot of fish but did not cook it in vessels! There's no fish lipids. They only boiled fish in Eastern Europe, and not everywhere, but where there was no influence from the Caucasus and Central Asia.

"True for the Middle Volga. Anthony commonly applies a 300y downward correction, which I deem to be fair."

The measured effect is 200-275 years. This means start from 4900-4800 BC.

"Their isotopic signature is statistically not distinguishable from subsequent BA populations (Yamnaya etc.). For the Lower Volga, there is obviously no need for correction (none of the analysed food crusts contained any fish-derived lipids),"

You are deeply mistaken, for Ymnaya also ate a lot of fish. It has the same reservoir effect as Khvalynskaya, although you will not find boiled fish there.

"in the Yamnaya burials Krivaya Luka IX and XXI. During more humid conditions, the steppe rivers were apparently abundant with fish. Fish were caught with nets; mats in the form of a knotless net were found in some graves. Ethnographic data show that woven mats were used to catch fish (Rybina 2003); similar items have been identified in the collection of mats coming from Yamnaya graves we have studied (Shishlina 2008)."
"Paired dating of Yamnaya culture human bones and wood (Fraxinus, Ulmus, Acer) from the same grave show the reservoir effect for the bones: Mu-Sharet-1, k. 5, g. 3, 195 yr; Mandjikiny-1, k. 14,g. 12, 265 yr; and Mandjikiny-2, k. 11, g. 2, 270 yr."


Rob said...

@ Frank N

Vybornov . They have one site with sheep dating to 4700 BC, which is a multi-stratified site, with the date falling to Khvalynsk period
Isotopes - from Schulting et al “ The clearest trend to emerge from the Samara Valley stable isotope data is the marked difference between the Eneolithic and the Bronze Age. This is interpreted as indicating a substantially greater contribution of freshwater fish and no detectable C4 input in the diet of most individuals in the earlier population, in contrast to a lower contribution of fish and a greater influence of wild C4 plants, primarily via grazing stock, in the later population. The timing of this shift can only be viewed in broad terms at this stage, pending a program of further AMS 14C dating. The earliest Bronze Age individual comes from the site of Lopatino I, dating to 3339 to 2918 cal BC

Rob said...

@ Davidski

“ Early 4th millennium BC.”

That’s Post-Stog, Repin, mikhailovka etc

Anonymous said...

Davidski said...

"Early 4th millennium BC."

It's not Sredniy Stog, it means either Dereivka or Konstantinovka or Repino (etc) cultures.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,"As far as I know, new Sredni Stog samples look pretty much like Yamnaya from the steppe."
"Early 4th millennium BC."

That's big news. Last time you said Sredny Stog has lots of farmer ancestry. Which didn't make sense considering Early Corded Ware has no farmer ancestry. Sredny Stog basically being like Yamnaya makes a lot more sense.

If Yamnaay like people had been living across the Steppe since 4500 BC, which it looks like is the case. There is a possibility lots of Y DNA lineages existed there which never made big expansions outside of the Steppe.

Maybe, there was a Y DNA Q1a1 Kurgan clan.

Rob said...

@ Andrew

“ I know it is a minority position, but based upon historical Akkadian and Hittite written accounts, the archaeology, especially involving iron working, and the timing of cremation burial practices there and in the vicinity of SE Europe, among other things,”

Apparently macedonia specifically; but there were several streams of movement into Anatolia between 4500 & 2000
So it’s a bit hard to pinpoint

MItchellSince1893 said...

@epoch
"Pity. So Fatyanovo is the oldest instance of CWC?"
I think Fatyanovo CWC only goes back to 2700 BC and it's origins may lie further to the West (see link below) From what I can gather (and I freely admit I'm a novice), the Bay Coast (E. Prussia/Lithuania) CWC cluster goes back to ~2950 BC. That's the earliest I can find.

Also Alan recently commented on this topic
here https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?20189-Corded-Ware-A-Horizon-and-P310-P311-L52&p=663853&viewfull=1#post663853

A said...

@Archi

"And the wagons weren't invented in the west, not in CT."

Where were they invented then?

andrew said...

@Rob

"Apparently macedonia specifically; but there were several streams of movement into Anatolia between 4500 & 2000 So it’s a bit hard to pinpoint"

But, what you have is contemporaneous written accounts, some by the participants themselves, saying that they were newly arrived and have one or two city states tops, or them conquering cities and marrying the locals. Of the locals not speaking their language. Of their city by city conquest of Anatolia and its vicinity.

Most of the world has no written record of the early Indo-Europeans. It wasn't a literate culture at first. But, in Anatolia we do. And, there is nothing in that which suggests that Anatolian language speakers had been in Anatolia for 1500+ years or that they were a significant share of the linguistic population at first. The literary accounts of the first Anatolians coincide well with the first genetic traces of steppe ancestry in ancient DNA in Anatolia.

Rob said...

Blogger Rob said...
Not many people know, even professional archaeologists, but there was a Boleraz-Baden migration from central Europe just prior or at the same time as Yamnaya, to Northern Europe, Balkans and into >post-Tripolje < areas . These are a likely candidate for the dispersal of wheeled transport. Obviously everyone knows the models founded in Brononice and lubjana marshes.

Rob said...

@ Andrew

“ But, what you have is contemporaneous written accounts, some by the participants themselves, saying that they were newly arrived and have one or two city states tops, or them conquering cities and marrying the locals. Of the locals not speaking their language. Of their city by city conquest of Anatolia and its vicinity.”

Yes but the sources are speaking around the surrounds of Hattusa and such cities. It doesn’t tell us anything about what was happening in the rest of western northern Anatolia, with a presumed Anatolia.

“ Most of the world has no written record of the early Indo-Europeans. It wasn't a literate culture at first. But, in Anatolia we do. And, there is nothing in that which suggests that Anatolian language speakers had been in Anatolia for 1500+ years or that they were a significant share of the linguistic population at first. “

You could be right, but there is simply no written evidence before 2500 BC for any people whether you’re talking about indo-Europeans , assyrians and local anatolians. Moreover, Bryce suggests “ the supposed impact of Hattic on Hittite language and
institutions has been consistently overestimated’. Even the royal titles
Labarna (variant Tabarna) and Tawananna, long thought to be Hattic in origin, have recently been claimed to be Indo-European”

“ The literary accounts of the first Anatolians coincide well with the first genetic traces of steppe ancestry in ancient DNA in Anatolia.”

Are we sure about that ?

ambron said...

David:

"As far as I know, new Sredni Stog samples look pretty much like Yamnaya from the steppe."
"Early 4th millennium BC."

There will be no genetic continuity in the steppe from Sredny Stog I6561. This is a random coincidence of principled components and Y-DNA mutations with CWC and Steppe MLBA. Steppe MLBA was created through the CWC from Central Europe. Do I think right?

Davidski said...

@ambron

I don't know. Let's wait and see.

Samuel Andrews said...

Nice to hear about R1a Z93 in Eastern Corded Ware. Can't wait till it is published. It'll give us R1a Z93 and R1b L51 in Corded Ware with identical genetic makeups. Talk about evidence for the Kurgan hypothesis.

At this point, it looks like R1a Z93 lived in pretty far north in Russia for like 500 years before moving towards Samara area. Then, in 1800 BC they expanded across basically the whole Eurasian Steppe from Ukraine in the west to Kazakhstan in the east.

This behavior by R1a Z93 people of widespread expansion, is exactly what Yamnaya and Corded Ware and Bell Beaker did. It is the secret behind Indo European language expansion.

Think about, the European Steppe was taken over by R1b Z2103, then R1a Z93. In a sense R1b Z2103 due to Afanasievo did live across Eurasian Steppe for a time, just as R1a Z93 did later. Interesting patterns.

Anonymous said...

Now everyone who claimed that Fatyanovo is Slavs ripping their hair off.

Samuel Andrews said...

Yeah, JP Mallory in his book said Fatyanovo were Balts. Which we see is not true. More like pre-Indo Iranian or something.

Jatt_Scythian said...

Not sure where you get the idea that R1a-Z93 lived pretty far north in Russia given we have found it in Sredni Stog as well as Usatovo. Some segment might have lived pretty far north but that's not true for the haplogorup as a whole. Stop trolling.

Davidski said...

@Jatt_Scythian

Fatyanovo wasn't native to the forest steppe. It moved there from the southwest, probably from near the Carpathians somewhere.

Anonymous said...

The Fatyanovo culture is not the forest steppe, but just the forest.

ambron said...

Fatynovo and derivatives are probably Indo-Iranians in fact. Balts came east in the Iron Age, and the Slavs - scarcely in the Middle Ages.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Jatt, You should know I am the farthest thing from a troll. I'm just connecting dots on maps.

Fatyanovo lived pretty far north. As Archi, says they didn't even live in the Steppe, they lived in the forest region.

Abashevo, is according to archeaology, the ancestor of Sintashta. And they mostly overlap with older Fatyanovo territory. Pretty far north in Russia as well.

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

I understand oldest R1a Z93 is in Romania, that they lived somewhere pretty far west fro a while. But, they also lived in Northern Russia for at least several hundred years before moving across Eurasian Steppe.

vAsiSTha said...

Why are the 5 richly endowed Q1a1b and 1 J1 khvalynsk samples not being published? It is clear that this specific Q subclade is from the east. The low coverage Q1a sample I0434 is an outlier compared to the other 2 khvalynsk samples, shifted towards Wshg & iran_N from other 2 khvalynsk samples.

Q1a1 is found in AG2, so it is a ANE/WSHG and/or East asian related lineage (Kolyma_meso = Q1a1b).

Davidski said...

Khvalynsk is a dead end and not ancestral to Corded Ware or even Yamnaya, so no one cares. But they will be published soon I guess.

Mayuresh Madhav Kelkar said...

Davidski said...
"Khvalynsk is a dead end and not ancestral to Corded Ware or even Yamnaya, so no one cares. But they will be published soon I guess."

They can potentially support Kozintsev' theory of an east of Caspian homeland.

Davidski said...

No they can't.

Khvalynsk got its West Siberian ancestry from east of the Caspian, and its CHG-related ancestry from the North Caucasus.

There are just as old or older samples with CHG-related ancestry coming soon from west of Khvalynsk.

And like I said, Khvalynsk wasn't ancestral to Corded Ware or even Yamnaya.

vAsiSTha said...

@davidski
how can you be so sure when qpAdm can model yamnaya with khvalynsk, and both R1b1a and I2a2a, the Yamnaya male parentals, are present in khvalynsk?

Davidski said...

I'm pretty sure there's no M269 in Khvalynsk.

The population that gave rise to Yamnaya and Corded Ware lived west of Khvalynsk.

Anonymous said...

Yamnaya's ancestors may have lived south of Khvalynsk in Dzhangar, and the ancestors of Corded Ware to the west and north.

Davidski said...

There wasn't enough CHG-related ancestry west and north of Khvalynsk to produce the early Corded Ware population.

But there was plenty of it southwest of Khvalynsk near the Don River. And that's where early Corded Ware formed of course.

Anonymous said...

@Davidski

What do you mean? You wrote about Voronezh, and it's exactly west of Khvalynsk/Saratov, not southwest. The Don River is to the west and northwest of Khvalynsk. To the west of Khvalynsk there are the sources of the Dereivka culture, the corded ware successor of Sredniy Stog.

Davidski said...

I said Voronezh Oblast, and more specifically I meant the part that was southwest of Khvalynsk, not Voronezh City.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Voronezh+Oblast,+Russia/@50.8087521,36.0591159,6z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x412329ca62b37593:0x102a3a583f19650!8m2!3d50.8589713!4d39.8644374

mzp1 said...

@Davidski,

"Khvalynsk is a dead end and not ancestral to Corded Ware or even Yamnaya, so no one cares. But they will be published soon I guess."

You know it's not relevant whether that is true or not. Because Khvalysnk is related to Yamnaya, in a major way, whether directly ancestral is not important. Khvalysnk is obviously closer to Yamna than European Farmers, and the eastern affinity of Khvalynsk cannot be separated from it's shared ancestry with Yamna.

Davidski said...

@mzp1

The eastern affinity of Khvalynsk cannot be separated from it's shared ancestry with Yamna.

Well, duh, sure it can, because it's called West Siberian HG, and Yamnaya lacks it.

Rob said...

@ Avsistha

Your question/ statement led me to an epiphany . Thanks

@‘Davidski

“ There wasn't enough CHG-related ancestry west and north of Khvalynsk to produce the early Corded Ware population”

Maybe they borrowed some ?

Davidski said...

Early Corded Ware formed on the steppe, that's why it looks like it does.

Anonymous said...

To the south-west of Khvalynsk there is the Volgograd Oblast, but the corded ware Dereivka culture on the Middle Don stretches from Voronezh to the north-east to the north Don region border, to the south of Voronezh there is no the Dereivka culture on the Don, it appears only at the Azov Sea.

Jatt_Scythian said...

@Davidski

I think we're in agreement. I was just countering Samuel Andrew's idea that R1a-Z93+ lived far North in Russia when it seems more likely it arrived there from the Southwest like you said probably from Ukraine and/or Romania.

Anonymous said...

@mzp1

"You know it's not relevant whether that is true or not. Because Khvalysnk is related to Yamnaya, in a major way, whether directly ancestral is not important. Khvalysnk is obviously closer to Yamna than European Farmers, and the eastern affinity of Khvalynsk cannot be separated from it's shared ancestry with Yamna."

You again confuse the concepts of kinship and ancestry. Your father's brother is your kinsman, but he is not your ancestor. No one could ever prove that the Yamnaya culture comes from the Khvalynsk culture, although no one ever doubted that they are related.

Mayuresh Madhav Kelkar said...

@archi

"Your father's brother is your kinsman, but he is not your ancestor."

Even I know that my uncle is my ancestor through my grandfather.

Jatt_Scythian said...

What makes Q1a (and Q1b) East Asian as opposed to WSHG?

mzp1 said...

@Archi,

"No one could ever prove that the Yamnaya culture comes from the Khvalynsk culture,"

As I asked Davidski, why is this relevant? What makes Yamna IE and not Khvalynsk. We are interested in the origin of IE not just the direct ancestor of European IEs or Yamnaya.

It seems you guys are assuming only Yamnaya is IE and not Khvalynsk, even though they are very closely related.

Anonymous said...

@Mayuresh Madhav Kelkar
"Even I know that my uncle is my ancestor"

My uncle didn't give birth to me, but if your uncle gave birth to you then you're an unicum.

Anonymous said...

@mzp1 said...
"What makes Yamna IE and not Khvalynsk. We are interested in the origin of IE not just the direct ancestor of European IEs or Yamnaya.
It seems you guys are assuming only Yamnaya is IE and not Khvalynsk, even though they are very closely related."

I don't suppose so, I don't even understand why you think so, you're making something up for yourself. Even Yamnaya was not a PIE, it was a side branch of the IE language, most likely completely extinct, and what happened to Khvalynsk culture is not clear, it was before the disintegration of the PIE.
You just don't understand what we are talking about.

Falcon said...

@Jatt_Scythian
"What makes Q1a (and Q1b) East Asian as opposed to WSHG?"

It's from ANE part of WSHG.

WSHG is mostly ANE (over 70%) with minor EHG and East Asian.

This ancestry does not exist in Yamnaya or Corded Ware.

Ric Hern said...

@ Davidski

Is that part of the Voronezh Oblast still within the Forest Steppe zone ?

Trees are important within most Indo European Cultures so I can not imagine they originated in a pure Grassland environment.

ambron said...

mzp

You have to accept the censorship of time. Linguists most often assume that a common Indo-European language was used 5.5-5.0 ybp. We can't track him any longer. Earlier, there could have been distant dialects that were subject to convergence.

FrankN said...

I found it useful to re-examine Anthony's latest publication on steppe aDNA:
https://www.academia.edu/39985565/Archaeology_Genetics_and_Language_in_the_Steppes_A_Comment_on_Bomhard
(p.10, emphasis is mine):
"The variety of CHG that constituted more than half of Yamnaya ancestry could have been the Mesolithic/Early Neolithic variety, like Hotu Cave or Kotias Cave, not yet admixed with Anatolian Farmer ancestry. (..) a Caucasian CHG population from an older phase, before 5500 BC, could have migrated from the south Caspian to the north Caspian, which would put them in the steppes."
I should be happy, because he essentially says what I have been saying myself for quite some time
https://adnaera.com/2019/01/11/how-did-chg-get-into-steppe_emba-part-2-the-pottery-neolithic/.

Unfortunately, I think Anthony is somewhat undersimplifying things:

1. Instead of one EN stream, we have to reckon with two separate streams. Both streams brought pottery to S. Russia at ca. 6,200 BC, and as such should ultimately relate to the Gorgan plain (Hotu and Belt Caves) that have provided W. Eurasia's oldest pottery. But otherwise, the streams were fairly different, and also strongly competing with each other in the forest(-steppe) zones.

a.) The Lower Volga EN (Jangar, Orlovka) is characterised by triangular and diagonal impressions/ incisions, often alluded to as “steppe decoration”, as it was a/o also typical for Andronovo and Sintashta. A similar decoration, albeit painted instead of impressed/ incised, was common in LN Iran (Cheshmeh Ali, Haji Firuz etc.), and the closest parallel to the Lower Volga is provided by Early Kelteminar incised pottery, so one might equally label it as “Circum-Caspian style”.
https://adnaera.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Lower-Volga-ceramics-e1544976745612.jpg
Considering further that the Lower Volga Neolithic had mud-brick houses, an architecture well attested from Neolithic Iran / Central Asia (and Kelteminar), but e.g. absent from the W. Caucasus, the trail here clearly goes back to the (south-)East Caspian.

b.) Lower Don (R. Yar) and Elshan potteries, OTOH, were essentially undecorated except for pits near to and/or around the rim. That style literarily left its impression across much of NC Europe, e.g. Narva, PWC, early Baalberge/TRB-N, possibly even British "grooved ware". Intriguingly, the same decoration was also widely present south of the Caucasus (Shulaveri-Shomu - here "knobbed" instead of "pitted", EN Tsmi/N. Ossetia, Sioni, Shengavit/ early KA).
https://adnaera.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Elshan-pottery-e1545605785487.jpg
It is clear that R.Yar and Elshan wares were related (and the Middle Don appears to have been a plausible link), and Caucasian ware seems to have the same origin. However the exact location of that origin is yet unknown. My best guess is Gobustan/AZ, where pottery appeared around 6,700 BC. Gobustan is known for its boat petroglyphs, and a sea/river route along the Kuma-Manych spillway to the Lower Don is well conceivable, but that is still quite speculative at the moment. In any case, we are in all likelyhood dealing here with a W. Caspian trail.

2. While we still lack aDNA from the Lower Volga EN, R. Yar and Elshan, we have aDNA from sites that absorbed their pottery, namely (i) Samara_HG and (ii) UA_Neo. In both cases, we see some uptick of CHG ancestry compared to the Mesolithic. However, we are just talking about +2.4% extra CHG in the Samara_HG, and around 5% in UA_Neo, far below the increase in CHG ancestry observed after ca. 5.000 BC. As such, I think Anthony's narrative still misses the main agent, which IMO was the Cis-Caspian culture.

Kavkasi said...

@Davidski
"There are just as old or older samples with CHG-related ancestry coming soon from west of Khvalynsk."

Are we talking about the Lower Don or just North of it ? If it is the Lower Don, do you think the Pre-Caspian culture will be the source for the CHG-related we see in Khvalynsk ?

Synome said...

Regardless of the exact mechanism, it seems to me that the interaction of the Eneolithic steppe groups with the Chalcolithic "Old Europe" cultures of Ukraine and the Balkans was the crucial driver of the massive Yamnaya and Corded Ware expansions. This was an intense interaction zone primed to drive cultural evolution through competition and cooperation.

I think one of the biggest oversights of the past few years of academic aDNA studies has been overlooking this interaction zone in favor of the Caucasus and Iran, for reasons already thoroughly discussed. Maybe David Anthony can help Harvard pivot west to investigate this important area. He certainly thinks it's important, judging from his books and publications.

mzp1 said...

@FrankN,

"Interesting! Atbasar Culture (kind of the Cis-Caucasian Culture's eastern sibling, with similar lithics and pottery, and acc. to some Russian researchers pastoralist elements)? "

Do you know about the Ayakagytma site? The earliest level is from 6,000BC. Apparantly the economy was almost fully based on animal husbandry, with hunting, gathering and fishing only playing a minor role. Huge numbers of Horse and Cattle.

http://briai.ku.lt/downloads/AB/11/11_014-021_Lasota-Moskalewska,_Szymczak,_Khudzhanazarov.pdf

Cattle: 170, Camel: 118, Horse: 190, Sheep/Goat: 15

The Camel, Horses and lack of farming shows that this type of system is independent of the Neoltithic further South, and it's already well-developed by 6,000BC. Site is described as a 'campsite' so about as clear evidence for early pastoralism as you can wish to find.

vAsiSTha said...

Davidski rejects Khvalysnk as ancestral to some of Yamnaya because of lack of M269 so far, although it is very likely they will find some of that soon in the 10s of unpublished samples.
But it is strange to me that he does not apply the same logic to complete absence of south asian R-Y3 and L657 in all of steppe eba, mlba and lba.

Another interesting tidbit from Anthony
"But Yamnaya individuals chose for kurgan burial seem to be drawn from a narrower subset of THESE, almost all of them R1b1a, suggsting those buried under Yamnaya kurgans in the PC steppes belonged to a restricted patrilineal group of some kind....."

This is right after he discusses the various haplogroups found in Khvalynsk. and that is what he means by 'THESE'. So clearly anthony thought yamnaya was from khvalynsk. dont know if that has changed.

Anonymous said...

As far as I know the Fatyanovo results are ready, the only question is: how many years will they need to complete the paper?

gamerz_J said...

@Davidski

So did Khvalynsk had a similar (none or minimal that is) contribution to European genetics as Maykop did?

Anonymous said...

@FrankN "Instead of one EN stream, we have to reckon with two separate streams. Both streams brought pottery to S. Russia at ca. 6,200 BC, and as such should ultimately relate to the Gorgan plain (Hotu and Belt Caves) that have provided W. Eurasia's oldest pottery."

It is impossible, there was no pottery in Iran at that time, and in the Caucasus it appeared later than everybody else, already in the Eneolithic. So it is absolutely impossible to spread pottery from the South of Caucasus to Russia.

Davidski said...

@vAsiSTha

There's clearly a western genetic shift in the Khvalynsk/Ekaterinovka area very suddenly when Yamnaya appears there.

This western shift includes a more westerly overall genetic structure and the rapid rise of Y-haplogroups M269 and Z2103.

So it's pretty clear already that Yamnaya was foreign to the Khvalynsk area and wasn't derived in large part from the native population.

I'm sure that when Anthony, David Reich and Nick Patterson et al. have a chance to look at all the data they'll come to the same conclusion.

Davidski said...

@gamerz_J

So did Khvalynsk had a similar (none or minimal that is) contribution to European genetics as Maykop did?

The Khvalynsk people possibly contributed some ancestry to the various local ethnic groups around the Volga.

I'm not sure if Maykop contributed any ancestry to Europeans.

Mayuresh Madhav Kelkar said...


"Blogger ambron said...
mzp

You have to accept the censorship of time. Linguists most often assume that a common Indo-European language was used 5.5-5.0 ybp. "

Not every linguist though. James Clackson (2013), Professor of IE linguistics University of Cambridge.

"Anthony’s family tree also includes dates for the early splits of PIE. These dates (meaning 4500 BCE from the picture), it should be stressed, are not supported by any objective linguistic evidence at all.Indeed, although Anthony mentions that the dates are supported by research on rates of language change, the most recent attempt to date the splits of PIE through estimates based on the speed of vocabulary replacement have proved controversial and come up with different dates to the ones given by Anthony here (see Gray and Atkinson 2003)."

See Bouckert et. al's dates in the picture below.

https://www.google.com/search?q=bouckaert+et+al+indo+european&sxsrf=ALeKk0136i5hkUV5IcnzPxNiRJAOsQKsOw:1588719702458&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjvzYyM6p3pAhVvl3IEHUpGCJUQ_AUoAXoECA0QAw&biw=1745&bih=852#imgrc=fTxcx2RkRvYCaM


Paul Haggerty of the Max Planck Institute has similar views. Papers available on Academia.edu

Davidski said...

@Kavkasi

It's imopossible to say who the people of the Pre-Caspian culture were until their remains get tested.

@Ric

I'm looking at a map, and the sites in question are on the steppe, but near the forest steppe boundary.

Anonymous said...

@Davidski

The closest people to the Yamnians are the people from the Jangar burial ground.

Rob said...

@ mzp1

''Cattle: 170, Camel: 118, Horse: 190, Sheep/Goat: 15

The Camel, Horses and lack of farming shows that this type of system is independent of the Neoltithic further South, and it's already well-developed by 6,000BC. Site is described as a 'campsite' so about as clear evidence for early pastoralism as you can wish to find.''

It would be ideal if these are subject to further, 'modern' study, with dedicated paleozoologists, carbon dating, etc

FrankN said...

It's useful to delve a bit more into the chrono-geographical origin of CHG ancestry.

Note first that Dzudzuana Cave is located only 1km west of Darkveti village, and 15 km N. of Kotias Klde, so whatever archeological / aDNA information we have for any of the a/m locations is likely to also represent the other sites.

It is clear that Middle Paleolithic (MP) Dzudzuana (ca. 32 ky BC) was genetically still quite different from UP/Mesolithic CHG (Kotias/ Satsurblia). So, when did CHG ancestry form? More specifically: Did the shift from Anatolian-like MP Dzudzuana to Vilabruna+Basal+ANE CHG already take place before the LGM, or only afterwards. In the latter case, we might assume CHG to be a rather localised, primarily Colchian phenomenon, questionning the often postulated "CHG/Iranian" genetic identity.

In this context, I have deemed it useful to study the latest Dzudzuana excavation report by Bar Yosef e.a. (2011)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266673749_Dzudzuana_an_Upper_Palaeolithic_cave_site_in_the_Caucasus_foothills_Georgia

They have identified four Paleolithic to (E)Neolithic units (layers) at Dzudzuana, all separated by hiatuses and as such unlikely to have been affected by cross-layer contamination:

- Unit D has been AMS-dated to ca. 32-30 ky BC and obviously represents the layer from which Dzudzuana aDNA sample has been taken.

- Unit C dates to ca. 25-22 ky BC, i.e. immediately before the LGM.

- Unit B belongs to the Terminal Paleolithic, ca. 14.5-11.2 ky BC, which is somewhat earlier than Satsurblia. Nevertheless, the archeological parallels drawn by the authors to other EP Colchian sites such as Apiancha (Abkhazia) or the EP layer at Kotias Klde make me quite confident that this layer, as Satsurblia, may be safely assigned to the UP "Imeretian Culture" that is ultimately considered to reflect Epi-Gravettian traditions.

- Unit A, finally, AMS-dated to the 5th mBC, was already clearly (E-)Neolithic, including pottery and pollen from domesticated cereals and grapes, as such representing the Eneolithic Darkveti Culture (to be distinguished from Mesolithic Darkveti as attested at Kotias Klde).

So, the focus goes to Pre-LGM Unit C: Did it essentially set forth MP (Dzudzuana aDNA) traditions, or rather announce the arrival of a new, Villabruna-like (proto-Gravettian) population? The question isn't discussed explicitly by Bar Yosef e.a.; in all likelyhood they weren't even aware that it might ever become relevant. Still, here is what they had to say:
"[In unit D,] a unique type of endscraper, of the rounded variety is found in small numbers yet it is quite distinct and absent from the following Unit C assemblages. (..) The [Unit C] lithic assemblage is dominated by the production of small blades and bladelets detached predominantly from carinated narrow cores (..) In the absence of typical Aurignacian tool types this category of carinated cores cannot serve as a cultural marker for the presence of this mostly west European culture. (..) A unique characteristic of Unit C (mainly sub-units C2–4) in the upper area is the Sakajia point. (..) Although their shape is reminiscent of Gravette points they differ technologically. (..) Of interest are the antler points (..) Overall, Unit C is relatively rich in bone artefacts as there are at least another 100 worked items from the previous excavations."

My impression - as a non-archeologist and anything but a specialist when it comes to the (Upper) Paleolithic - is that of a substantial break between MP (Unit D) and pre-LGM (Unit C) Dzudzuana, with the latter already alluding to a number of (Epi-)Gravettian and West Eurasian HG features. Therefore, I feel that the MP Dzudzuana->CHG (Villabruna-like) population shift occured already before the LGM, implying that CHG ancestry is a concept applicable to aDNA analyses from at least shortly before the LGM (as opposed to the ca. 11 ky BC Satsurblia date as lower chronological boundary).

Davidski said...

@Archi

Those people may have moved into the Dzhangar area from the west.

Anonymous said...

@FrankN

In the Upper Paleolithic, the population of the Caucasus was constantly dying out, there was never any succession of camps. In the Caucasus, people appeared much later than in Siberia and Europe, and there people were constantly disappearing for long periods of time.

Falcon said...

@FrankN

Those cord-marked/pointed-bottom/combed-ceramics aka "steppe pottery" were already present at earliest in Volga, Samara, Narva and it was introduced by ANE

I have read your blog post about steppe pottery but it's very unlikely that steppe pottery came from Central Asia or Kelteminar as you're suggesting, it looks like other way around archaeologically. The fact that Hotu has "similar" pottery while IranN does not have any kind of pottery shows that Hotu received it from either ANE or WSHG's from the north.

Samuel Andrews said...

I agree with Davidski that Corded formed deep in Steppe.

The lack of significant European farmer ancestry in Early Corded Ware, means we can remove possibility Corded ware came from Kurgan pops who lived in Eastern Balkans or anywhere near farmers.

David Anthony in 2007 book said Corded Ware is from Ustavo patreons, that's not really possible anymore.

mzp1 said...

@Rob,

"It would be ideal if these are subject to further, 'modern' study, with dedicated paleozoologists, carbon dating, etc"

Yeah, more research would be good because I think it is a very important site for us, but I am not sure what more could be found from a 'campsite'

"A regular excavation in Ayakagytma ‘The Site’ started in 1996, and was continued, with some breaks, till 2004"

So not that old, and it has been Carbon Dated..."a ‘The Site’ had two clearly separated phases: an Early Neolithic, 14C dated to ca 8000–7400 cal. BP, and a middle neolith one, 14C dated to ca 6000–5000 cal. BP. Almost one and a half millennium lasting settlement gap between those two phases, according to our data, was caused by the deluging of the area of the camp by raising waters of an adjacent great water reservoir, called by us the Io Sea (Szymczak, Khudzhanazarov 2006). "

" With their economy based on cattle breeding, they could ride horses and camels, and use them as a mean of transport. Such a picture is well
supplemented by a presence of domesticated dog (Table 1)."


Scientists and historians are not really interested in whether animal husbandry in Eurasia has a separate origin from farming. It is a big problem. The question doesn't mean anything for them, but it does when looking at the origin of IE, because IE kind of predicts that animal husbandry and cattle/horses should exist prior or independent to farming.

Samuel was even criticising my ideas for lack of evidence for this pastoral economy, so I wonder what he makes of this particular culture? Evidence for such an economy would be scarce on the ground, but we need to infer as much as possible from the limited data available to us.

I would interested in where early pottery appears. Seems there is some pottery that arrived from the East related to the early EHG cultures.

FrankN said...

mzp1: "Do you know about the Ayakagytma site? "
Of course. That's the prime archeological source for early Kelteminar. IMO too remote from the Lower Volga to have beeen directly involved in archeological (genetic?) shifts there, but still a reasonable (often the only available) proxy for 7-6th mBC developments east of the Caspian Sea, and north of the Kopet Dag foothills (Jeitun).

Archi: " there was no pottery in Iran at that time"
Check out the link below, and come back after digestion:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314159761_A_Preliminary_Analysis_of_Prehistoric_Pottery_from_Carleton_Coon's_Excavations_of_Hotu_and_Belt_Caves_in_Northern_Iran_Implications_for_Future_Research_into_the_Emergence_of_Village_Life_in_Western_Ce

Samuel Andrews said...

@mzp1,
That's really interesting that you see camels, horses, goats possible animal domestication in a pre-Neolithic site in Central Asia. And to say they were the Proto-Indo Europeans, needs a lot of evidence.

mzp1 said...

@Frank,

I believe cattle would of been the highest value domesticates in those cultures but I don't think they would of been especially numerous in the more NorthWestern parts of the Kelteminar, due to climate. Ayakagytma would be the prime archeological site because those cultures were centred closer to the South, near the water sources for cattle, and other resources, and southern trade routes across central asia. I think the rest of Kelteminar would just be an extension of a culture centred more towards the South. In Central Asia the periphery regions are more important, the southern foothills, and the northern forest-steppe, not so much the central steppes or open plains/deserts North of the Kopet Dag.

Vladimir said...

@Davidski “I'm looking at a map, and the sites in question are on the steppe, but near the forest steppe boundary.”

I suspect that you are referring to the Cherkasskaya-5 monument on the bityug river in the Voronezh region? This is really the border of the steppe and the forest-steppe.

Around this area really was a mix of the local population of the middle don culture (uncertain attribution, but the style of pottery similar to the culture of the Dnieper-Donets and middle Volga culture), came from the North tribes Dolgovo comb ceramic culture (apparently EHG) and came from the southern tribes cultures R. Yar (probably CHG). All this occurred in the period from 6000 to 5000 years BC. As a result, there was formed a syncretic population.

Conventionally, this is called the stroke-ornamented culture comb-ceramics. It is found in the settlement of Ksizovo-6 (5000-4000 BC) already in its developed form. This is the Northern part of the forest steppe. Then this population went to Northern Ukraine and Belarus, as a culture of pit-combed ceramics. That is, the population of the pit-comb pottery EHG predominated, but it absorbed the chg population of the lower don and also the population that was local to the middle don.

Davidski said...

I'm pretty sure that there won't be any CHG people on the steppe.

ambron said...

Kelkar, there are of course other dates PIE, but they usually remain outside the mainstream.

Anonymous said...

@FrankN

It's all no big deal, finds dating from 6000-6500BC on the layer with bones of people eating fish at standard error in astronomical +-500(!!!!) years, or even 800(!!!) years, such dating nobody considers serious, it's bug dating. And in Russia, the mass finds of pottery from 7000BC on a vast territory, and the dating is not made indirectly on the layer with the bones, and directly on the pottery (no reservoir effect). The absence of any intermediate pottery industry between Iran and Russia, despite the fact that their pottery is not at all similar and appeared not earlier than in Russia and no penetration of farms in Russia, make your assumptions about the penetration of pottery in Russia from Iran is ridiculous.

gamerz_J said...

@Davidski

"I'm not sure if Maykop contributed any ancestry to Europeans." I was going by what I had read here, if they did contribute, in which part of Europe do you think they did? Eastern/Southeastern Europe?

Davidski said...

I don't think Maykop contributed to any modern populations outside of the Caucasus.

epoch said...

Could Khvalynsk have contributed to Afanasievo? Would explain the Q1a and J1.

Cpk said...

Khvalynsk certainly played a role in steppe expansion. Earliest CCR5 is from there.

gamerz_J said...

@epoch

Not sure, I don't think Afanasievo had the apparent eastern affinity of Khvalynsk.

Mayuresh Madhav Kelkar said...


"Blogger ambron said...
Kelkar, there are of course other dates PIE, but they usually remain outside the mainstream"

James Clackson

https://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/people/james-clackson

Indo European Linguistics An Introduction by James Clackson.

https://caio.ueberalles.net/Indo-European-Linguistics-Introduction/Indo-European%20Linguistics%20-%20James%20Clackson.pdf

Cambridge University Press is not outside the "main stream" what ever that means.

What launched the discipline of Indo European linguistics is the famous pronouncement of Sir William Jones in 1780 CE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)

"Jones is known today for making and propagating the observation about relationships between the Indo-European languages. In his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society (1786) he suggested that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin languages had a common root, and that indeed they may all be further related, in turn, to Gothic and the Celtic languages, as well as to Persian.[9] Although his name is closely associated with this observation, he was not the first to make it. In the 16th century, European visitors to India became aware of similarities between Indian and European languages[10] and as early as 1653 Van Boxhorn had published a proposal for a proto-language ("Scythian") for Germanic, Romance, Greek, Baltic, Slavic, Celtic and Iranian."



The Brits are the ones who started this debate and imo they are the ones who will finally wrap it up. The Harvard libs need to realize that their masters are still sitting in London. So please get a grip on yourself brother/sister.

George said...

Some papers:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287799594_The_oldest_pottery_in_hunter-gatherer_communities and_models_of_Neolithisation_of_Eastern_Europe

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322254006_Chronology_of_Neolithic_sites_in_the_forest-steppe_area_of_the_Don_River

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273355989_Flesh_or_fish_First_results_of_archaeometric_research_of_prehistoric_burials_from_Sakhtysh_IIa_Upper_Volga_region_Russia

mzp1 said...

Reading about early pottery use, it seems there are very early dates in East Asia and possibly it's spread is related to the Mongolia, Siberia, NorthEastern Europe, ANE trans-Eurasian route. But this is region is still poorly studied. We know a lot about the Near East, Europe, Central Asia (relatively) but the relationship between ANE and East Asian seems dynamic and productive but we know little about this it seems.

epoch said...

@FrankN

Both Dzudzuana samples from the Iosif Lazaridis paper are dated 26,000 years BP and therefore in the C Unit, which Bar-Yosef dated 27,000-24,000 years BP. So the distinction between pre-LGM and post-LGM is clear.

Falcon said...

@mzp1

ANE is West Eurasian, it has no relationship with East Asians or any kind of Asians.

New papers that came out as recently as two weeks ago also confirms that there is no relationship between with ANE and East Asians or any kind of Asians.

"We find no evidence on the genetic affinity of MA-1 with ancient and present-day Southeast/East Asians including Devil’s Gate Cave (8.0 kya), Chokhopani (3.0 – 2.4 kya), and IK002 Jomon (2.5 kya) (Fig.2). Therefore, we conclude that MA-1 gene flow occurred after the divergence between the ancestral populations of Northeast Asians/East Siberians (NS-NA) and East Asians"

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/579177v1.full.pdf

"The origins of East Asians (Wang et al. 2020)" also confirms the same, there is no East Eurasian admixture in WHG or ANE.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.25.004606v1.full.pdf

"A dynamic 6,000-year genetic history of Eurasia’s Eastern Steppe (Jeong et al. 2020)" -

"Eastern Steppe populations, we find that individuals associated with these slab grave burial types show a clear northeastern-Eurasian (ANA) genetic profile lacking both ANE and WSH admixture."

EastMongolia_preBA is genetically indistinguishable from DevilsCave_N (ANA) (Fig. 3a; Table S13; Fig. S9-S10), whereas Fofonovo_EN and the slightly later central Mongolia_preBA both derive a minority (12-17%) of their ancestry from ANE-related (Botai-like) groups with the remainder of their ancestry (83-87%) characterized as ANA (Fig. 3a; Table S13). Reanalyzing published data from the western Baikal early Neolithic Kitoi culture (Baikal_EN) and the early Bronze Glazkovo culture (Baikal_EBA), we find that they have similar ancestry profiles and a slight increase in ANE ancestry through time (from 6.4% to 20.1%) (Fig. 3a)."

Take a look at Fig. 3. Genetic changes in the Eastern Steppe.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.25.008078v1.full.pdf

ambron said...

Kelkar, to be precise: Wojciech Dębołęcki started the Indo-European debate, from whose ideas Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn drew.

James Clackson deals widely with the Indo-European problem, presenting Anatolian and Kurgan theory. In the Kurgan theory, PIE is dated 6,000 to 5,000 BP, as I wrote earlier. And here we only discuss the Kurgan theory, if I understand it correctly.

FrankN said...

Epoch:
"Both Dzudzuana samples from the Iosif Lazaridis paper are dated 26,000 years BP and therefore in the C Unit, which Bar-Yosef dated 27,000-24,000 years BP. So the distinction between pre-LGM and post-LGM is clear. "

Thx. Interesting..
I have no idea how that can be consoled with the Wang e.a. finding that Colchian CHG and Steppe CHG separated 20.000 years ago.

Jatt_Scythian said...

Aren't there maps of Fataynovo showing it existed as far North as the Baltic sea? I doubt this culture was purely Indo-Iranian or Indo-Iranian at all.

Rob said...

@ mzp1

Apparently the earliest pottery appears in southern China, during the local late Palaeolithic.
It’s dispersal north -north west across eurasia must relate somehow to an ENA shift across the pre-existing ANE cline in Siberia

Jatt_Scythian said...

Rob

You think there was an ANE population without ENA? Was the ENA admixture/cultural influence male or female mediated?

Rob said...

@ Jatt Scythian

Not sure. Publications to date don't show admixture edges from East Asian to ANE, but I recall seeing in one of Chad's qpGraphs a ~ 30% from something in between Ust-Ishm & Tianyuan going into ANE, as well as the Goyet.
But rather than admixutre into, I think it could be pre -west-Eurasian

Simon Stevens said...

@SLMD do you think this ANE admixture in Fofonovo_EN, and the western Baikal early Neolithic Kitoi culture (Baikal_EN) accounts for the drift these Ancient East Asian/ANA derived populations share with WSHG?

epoch said...

@FrankN

"I have no idea how that can be consoled with the Wang e.a. finding that Colchian CHG and Steppe CHG separated 20.000 years ago."

The split was 24 ka between Kotias and EEF. So a split pre-LGM between Dzudzuana and CHG. Makes perfect sense.

CrM said...

@FrankN

"Unit D has been AMS-dated to ca. 32-30 ky BC and obviously represents the layer from which Dzudzuana aDNA sample has been taken."
This may be a Gravettian layer, and not Dzudzuana.

From "The origin of the Gravettians: genomic evidence from a 36,000-year-old Eastern European":

"Although the integration of Eastern European EUP and MUP traditions into an archaeological framework defined in Central and Western Europe has historically been problematic, recent reassessments of EUP assemblages from the Caucasus10–12 emphasize similar lithic traditions among roughly contemporaneous (40-30,000 cal BP) layers at sites such as Dzudzuana Cave (layer D), Ortvale Klde (layer 4c), Mezmaiskaya Cave (layer 1C), and the six layers of Buran Kaya III (layer 6-5 to 5-2) in Crimea13,14 (see Supplementary Text for the stratigraphy of Buran-Kaya III). Some authors suppose that the appearance of these Caucasian and Eastern European EUP assemblages, which include backed blades and bladelets, are primarily based on the distribution and transformation of Ahmarian traditions from Near East to Europe, probably through the Caucasus, independent of that which brought the proto-Aurignacian to Central and Southern Europe and the Mediterranean area10,14–16."

It's also interesting that aside from being genetically closest to Anatolians, Dzudzuana also had an affinity to Gravettians.

"By contrast, Dzudzuana is genetically closer to both contemporaneous Gravettians from Europe (0.051±0.012) and also to the much later Neolithic Anatolian farmers (0.039±0.005) who are genetically closest to them according to this measure."

gamerz_J said...

@SLMD

Interesting papers, but for me the main issues with ANE not having any relationship (irrespective of direction) with East Asians are:
1) sharing more alleles with East Asians (Han for example) than WHG do with East Asians
2) The connection between haplogroup R and East Eurasian haplogroup P

vAsiSTha said...

"It's also interesting that aside from being genetically closest to Anatolians, Dzudzuana also had an affinity to Gravettians."

The excess dzudzuana in chg compared to iran_n is what makes chg closer to EHG.

Davidski said...

It's likely that there were all sorts of different CHG-related populations living in and around the Caucasus from the Mesolithic to the Eneolithic, some with quite different ratios of more ancient components.

So using CHG, Neolithic Zagros farmers, Eneolithic Central Asian farmers, and so on as fixed points and constantly referring to them as evidences of migrations specifically from here or there is really dumb.

We don't know who was living in the North Caucasus foothills during the Neolithic, but it's unlikely to have been EHG or CHG.

gamerz_J said...

@Davidski

But still, you can infer if an Iranian-related component is more CHG-like or Iran_N-like can you not?

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