There's been a lot of talk lately about the finding that the peoples associated with the Corded Ware and Yamnaya archeological cultures were genetic cousins (for instance, see
here). As I've already pointed out, this is an interesting discovery, but, at this stage, it's difficult to know what it means exactly.
It might mean that the Yamnayans were the direct predecessors of the Corded Ware people. Or it might just mean that, at some point, the Corded Ware and Yamnaya populations swapped women regularly (that is, they practiced female exogamy with each other).
In any case, I feel that several important facts aren't being taken into account by most of the interested parties. These facts include, in no particular order:
- despite being closely related, the Corded Ware and Yamnaya peoples were highly adapted to very different ecological zones - temperate forests and arid steppes, respectively - and this is surely not something that happened within a few years and probably not even within a couple of generations
- both the Corded Ware and Yamnaya populations expanded widely and rapidly at around the same time, but never got in each others way, probably because they occupied very different ecological niches
- despite sharing the R1b Y-chromosome haplogroup, their paternal origins were quite different, with Corded Ware males rich in R1a-M417 and R1b-L51 and Yamnaya males rich in R1b-Z2103 and I2a-L699
I suppose it's possible that the Corded Ware people were overwhelmingly and directly derived from the Yamnaya population. But right now my view is that, even if they were, then the Yamnaya population that they came from was quite different from the classic, R1b-Z2103-rich Yamnaya that spread rapidly across the steppes.
Indeed, perhaps what we're dealing with here is a very early (proto?) Yamnaya gene pool located somewhere in the border zone between the forests and the steppes, that then split into two main sub-populations, with one of these groups heading north and the other south?
I do wonder what David Anthony would say if he was made aware of the above mentioned facts? Then again, perhaps he's already aware of them, and simply chose to ignore them when formulating his
latest theory about the origin of the Corded Ware people?
See also...
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Great post, it should spark up some interesting conversations.
How common was I2a-L699 in Yamnaya?
Nowhere near as common as Z2103, but it was present at a decent level in Yamnaya, because it shows up regularly in Yamnaya samples all the way from Hungary to the Volga.
Did Catacomb inherit that lineage?
Davidski: Indeed, perhaps what we're dealing with here is a very early (proto?) Yamnaya gene pool located somewhere in the border zone between the forests and steppes, that then split into two main sub-populations, with one of these groups heading north and the other south?
I think that's certainly a possibility, and ongoing contact between these populations may have been the case, rather than a hard split.
I think from my perspective, the main questions on these two cultures are like:
1) Did the early Yamnaya and Corded Ware most likely speak essentially the same language? Under which I'd bracket any pair of dialects that's about < 1000 years separated and in contact (like Scots and English, or Czech-Slovak etc). Like there are a few sound and grammar changes but nothing major enough to call them separate languages.
2) Were the predecessors of Yamnaya and Corded Ware in enough ongoing contact that David Anthony's model where core reconstructed pIE cultural features arise more on the steppe and then spread out from there first is still plausible?
Whether the ancestry was actually diverged by like ( 500 < x < 700 ) years or something, is not as massively interesting I guess. DA's original theory after all didn't even have a large demic component in it - was mainly cultural when it came to Europe. (As a compromise to Renfrewvian and Sforzian ideas about Copper Age European demography that either may not have been true, or may not have been true for Europe outside the Balkans. To digress, Reich had this slide about finding of relatedness between EN and MN people in Europep - https://imgur.com/a/rfz07ax - "Population sizes in the ancient world are small enough that we can detect a substantial fraction of the relationships (between individuals)". Suggests that the reason why the Indo-European/steppe turnover was impactful may be because not as many people as had been thought, so the argument against genetic turnover, from population size, didn't hold.).
It is interesting if there actually was some incipient or very early differentiation between the proto-Yamnaya and proto-Corded Ware by about 3400 or 3300 BCE, about 15 generations or so before we find the earliest CWC people in NE Europe. But I do think it still supports more of an Anthony type view where the changes of the late 4th millennium in *the wheel* and *mobility*, are decisive in the Indo-European expansion, and this seems to happen earliest on the steppe (with proto-Yamnaya mobility up to the Altai in the form of Afanasievo, preceding the expansion of CWC mobility to the west, and arguably Steppe Maykop mobility precedes Yamnaya, although this may have been more to do with trade and such so not quite the same thing as a mobile community lifestyle), and where migrations are only really impactful to the west after 3000 BCE. Rather than a Marija Gimbutas type model where you have Kurgan waves being shucked off and transforming culture since 5000 BCE due to a long term difference in social structure (rather than technology and mobility).
That's more what I see DA's ideas as bringing to the table (or reviving, if there were earlier predecessors which I don't know about, entirely possible), and placing more emphasis on, rather than it being important to those ideas that the people who were buried in the pit graves under kurgans were exactly ancestral in large proportions to people from Europe.
(As an aside, I hadn't remembered that Reich's video compared to Ringbauer's showed a different length of clustering. Looking at them side by side - https://imgur.com/a/tFKS6qK - together with the slides on population size changes and proportions of matching pairs against date separation. The 8-12cm links look to often preserve common ancestry over 1000 years or so, and hence we can see some link between Unetice and CWC, and CWC and Yamnaya, and even a few weaker links between 3 Russia_Maykop, surely Steppe_Maykop and the later Yamnaya_Russia and Poland_Corded_Ware, as well as the earlier Eneolithic cultures in Russia and the 3 Russia_Maykop. While the 16-20cm links are much more zeroed in on the samples that are close in time.)
Corded Ware likely ‘comes from’ the forest-steppe variant of the Budzhak culture
This hits on where this conversation is right now.
Even though the full answer is unknown, I think Davidski is correct in saying we can be confident that even if Corded Ware descends from Yamnaya that wouldn't make them the same as the uniformly R1b Z2103 Yamnaya across the Eurasian Steppe.
David Anthony is trying to make them the same. He is trying to make Corded Ware normal Yamnaya people who due to the rise of a plebian class or a founder effect switched to R1a M417.
He hasn't understood what the Y DNA pattern really means.
I think Davidski has a good answer for what is happening.
Yamnaya represents IE tribes adapted to dry Steppe. Corded Ware represents IE tribes adapted to temperate forests.
Due to this they migrated into different regions.
So even if Corded Ware descends from yamnaya, they don't descend from mainstream R1b Z2103 clans who settled Eurasian Steppe. One way or another Corded Ware descends from a different collection of IE clans who didn't really participate in the Yamnaya Eurasian Steppe wide expansions.
Why did Corded Ware people migrate so far so quickly. Why leave their "Motherland" and graves of their Ancestors behind unattended ? Why go all the way to the Rhine in +-200 years when stories of their Motherland surely were still fresh in their memories ? Something drastic must have happened for them not to yearn for the Good Old Days. Is there any evidence to show that their Cattle herds declined rapidly because that seems to have been their staple ? Even the Plague seems not to be a good enough reason for such an extreme expansion. Not even the Roman Empire expanded so far in such a short time. The only thing relatively comparable is the Mongol expansion and that was driven mainly by relatives of a family core.
There are some things I want to pin down and i think it will clarify the issue for others.
1. What is the earliest known presence of CHG adjacent (southern component in steppe) north of the caucasus? Do we have a time period in which CHG adjacent component was not found north of the caucasus? In other words, what is the upper and lower bound for its presence on the steppe.
2. What is the upper and lower bound for when the CHG adj component even existed? I believe that by the late neolithic, CHG adj in the caucasus mixed with ANF (anatolian neo farmer), CHG adj on the steppe mixed with EHG, CHG adj in Iran mixed with ANF and LNF (levant neo farmer), and CHG adj in the Western Caucasus mixed with West Siberian Neolithic.
What are the general timing of each of these admixing events.
3. Is it true that every ancient r1b m269 and r1a m417 has been found with WHG and/or EHG, sometimes exclusively, thereby establishing the ydna on the steppe is native to the north?
I think the somewhat iffy cases where the r1b m269 in Shiraz and in enolithic(?) armenia. But I also think Davidski showed some Steppe, and hence EHG, in those samples.
4. Correct me if Im wrong, but so far we have not found steppe in Enolithic or Bronze Age turkey when anatolian should have arrived there.
If so the steppe hypothesis would require us to eventually find the right samples in Turkey, stipulate that anatolian speakers split from PIE but did not quickly arrive in anatolia, or the original anatolian speakers donated their language without much genetic exchange. Are any of these too unreasonable?
Can someone knowledgable please compile all these fact?
@davidski
Arent you the one that keeps saying how WSH must was formed between the black and caspian sea. That would imply that CW came directly from the steppe, rather than the forest steppe, regardless of what we call them. David anthony has been pushing for the idea of a population high in CHG adj moving into the volga delta and then mixing with EHG to form WSH. Having the lower volga as the location for the formation of WSH is ironically closer to the forest steppe than what you have proposed. Do you think that a population high in CHG could have moved close to the forest steppe west of the Caspian and then mixed with EHG to form WSH? This would be a midpoint between yamnaya and CW.
The confusing thing about David Anthony is that he says the southern element in WSH moved into the steppe by 6200 bc which is before the existence of PIE and proto anatolian. It implies that PIE formed on the steppe and proto anatolian came from the steppe. But doesnt his collaborators buy into the armenian hypothesis or something like it?
@ Matt
''As a compromise to Renfrewvian and Sforzian ideas about Copper Age European demography that either may not have been true, or may not have been true for Europe outside the Balkans.'''
At ~ 3500 bc, Central Europe had a larger demography than Balkans (=post-collapse phase)
@pnuadha
The EHG/CHG mixed gene pool that eventually gave rise to Yamnaya and Corded Ware formed somewhere around the Don, so between the Black and Caspian seas.
But Yamnaya and Corded Ware may have formed somewhere else, like in Sredny Stog, or even further west.
Maybe they formed in the forest steppe around what is now Moldova? I don't know, but the high mobility of the people who lived on the steppe after the Neolithic makes this really hard to pin down, unless maybe we get a lot of samples from all over the steppe and forest steppe.
Interesting theory.
We know Z2103 from Bell Beaker burials in Hungary - according to earlier entries, it is a manly Yamna, who "just" became Bell Beaker.
But what about BB in Poland? Has anyone done research on this individual with the Z2103? Has anyone compared the sample and identified where it came from?
In Single Grave we have the older R1B V1636. What about this theory if the SG also includes the Z2103? What if Z2103 is in CWC? Would that mean the Z2103 had little migration with the L51? Or that he got to Central Europe at a similar time, but from a different side? On Y Tree Malyschew, we can see that the small arm of Z2103 separates from the rest of the eastern part and migrates to Europe. How does all of this relate to them?
If Z2103 were only "occasionally" in BB, the researchers are very lucky to have already found several such samples. So I assume that although they were a minority, the known today Z2103 samples from BB confirm the migration of this SNP to Central Europe and that it has "something" to do with the CWC cultures in this part of Europe.
@Dranoel
There's a Corded Ware sample with Z2103 coming soon from Czechia or Slovakia (I can't recall exactly).
So there was some Z2103 in Corded Ware as well as in the eastern Beakers.
But of course, Slovakia and southern Poland are close to Hungary, where Yamnaya proper built thousands of kurgans, so I don't think it's anything surprising to find Z2103 there that post-dates these kurgans.
I would be very surprised if Z2103 turned up in Late Neolithic samples from Ireland, the UK, France or even Switzerland, but I'm not aware of anything like that.
@Dranoel,
Yeah, there are a handful of R1b Z2103s in Beaker Poland, Hungary, Czech.
But all of them show Southeast European ancestry. In other words ancestry from Western Yamnaya.
So this doesn't support the idea R1b Z2103 went along with R1a M417, R1b L51 into Northern Europe. It just means Bell Beaker intermarried with Yamnaya derived people.
I bet the R1b Z2103 in Corded Ware Davidski speaks of is also due to admixture with Western Yamnaya.
@Davidski
@Genos Historia
So we have a situation where:
a. The Z2103 from Yamnaya most likely migrates to Central Europe via a route other than the L51, from the south;
b. at some point in the Neolithic / Bronze Age Z2103 arrives and mixes with the CWC and BB Central European populations / they meet in one place.
Isn't excluding the Z2103 from further wandering off the L51 too hasty? A moment later we have the Unetice culture, which had its influence in Northern Europe, and its origin is connected with the territory of the Czech Republic. The people of Unetice probably also migrated to the Islands (links between Pommelte and Stonehenge). My guess is that we have a lot of insecurity with the large L51 branch, and knowing the small group of Z2103 that have distanced themselves from their "core" will still be tough. Much heavier.
Another thing is that autosomal it seems impossible to distinguish the origin of "Yamnaya" from the ancestors of the L51 and Z2103. If their contribution is somewhere in Central or Northern Europe, for example, they cannot be separated without Y DNA.
I do not know if this forum is a good place to mention FTDNA (if not, sorry and please ignore the rest of the message) but from all the Z2103 we know the descendant SNP CTS9219 and others, where most people come from Germany and Ireland, and since FGC43622 just in Poland and the Czech Republic (big advantage over other countries). The time when SNP was established and their location in the FTDNA base favors the view that it migrated from Germany to the Islands as early as in the Bronze Age, and then spread from Germany to Poland and the Czech Republic. Although the current Y-decay of DNA probably leaves much to be desired ...
@Rob, there are some interesting ideas that archaeologists have about how to estimate past demography. Ancient dna may be able to soon put that directly to the test to calibrate (although there are some complexities there if you have a heavily divided subpopulation in some way that doesn't map well to geography). With any luck there will be a window into what is happening in this region immediately around 3500-2500 BCE and we can compare to Globular Amphora culture.
@Dranoel
The eastern Beakers with Z2103 are outliers in terms of autosomal ancestry.
They clearly have some influence from south or east of the Carpathians.
I guess by the time the Unetice culture developed and spread across Central Europe, and beyond, this admixture may have been bred out, potentially leaving Z2103 in people with typical post-Beaker ancestry.
But I haven't yet seen that in any of the samples that I'm aware of.
@ Matt
That 'IBD' pic you posted of Neolithic was quite interesting. And I think you're right. If ''Farmers" in pre-steppe Europe weren't quite as populous as once thought (although I am wary of catch-all 'plague' scenarios), then the big steppe impact can begin to make more sense (however, the originally quoted 70% replacement figure for C.E. was a sample bias - observer error issue).
@Davidski
I understand. And what is the situation with the Czech CWC Z2103 - also shows S and SE origin? Do we know the dating of this sample? Maybe the Polish BB does not come directly from Hungary, but from the Czech Republic?
Since we have Z2103 in CWC and later in BB, is it likely that he also appeared between them in Single Grave?
David Anthony is extremely aware of the genetic facts. The question is how to interpret them.
David pointed out to me that about 80% of the individuals buried in Kurgans are male. This shows
that our samples are not a random sample from the Yamnaya. Does this matter?
I'm not convinced about David's idea, but here are some arguments in favor.
1) Yamnaya artifacts vary quite a bit across the steppe. That made the
archaeologists surprised about Yamnaya genetic uniformity. Maybe the artisans
are genetically varied too -- but we don't see the burials.
2) The explosive radiation of the Yamnaya must have meant a huge increase in the
manpower needed for herding the animal flocks. Were there enough workers just from
natural increase of the small core population?
3) There are examples of a specific patrilineal lineage having extra privileges.
For instance the "golden lineage' of the Mongols. You could imagine only a specific
lineage gets a Yamnaya Kurgan burial.
4) There are examples of extreme stratification in pastoral societies with little or
no genetic mixing; see for example the Nama and Damara of Namibia.
@Rob “ That 'IBD' pic you posted of Neolithic was quite interesting. And I think you're right. If ''Farmers" in pre-steppe Europe weren't quite as populous as once thought (although I am wary of catch-all 'plague' scenarios), then the big steppe impact can begin to make more sense (however, the originally quoted 70% replacement figure for C.E. was a sample bias - observer error issue).”
I think the Neolithic population was much more populous than you think. Otherwise, the WSH Indo-Europeans would’ve made a much larger genetic impact on BA Europe (akin to what farmers did to foragers).
50% replacement rate is huge but it’s a far cry from what would’ve happened.
@pnuadha
There is no southern element coming into steppe, CHG is poor fit for this ancestry as Wang et al 2020 shows. Whatever this CHG ancestry is in steppe, it is very drifted and it much more shifted towards Euro HG ancestry, and may have even formed in Northern Caucuses much before even Kotias existed.
Eneolithic steppe like Progress_en samples are 30%-50% CHG and rest is EHG according to David Anthony himself. Yet all Eneolithic steppe samples plot with EHG-rich population, despite high CHG in them. That itself shows that CHG signal in steppe samples is very old and drifted, that's why current CHG samples are poor fit for them.
1. Eneolithic steppe VS Moderns
PCA plot : https://imgur.com/sUp5R4H
2. Yamnaya steppe VS Moderns
PCA plot: https://imgur.com/wDmEaLH
3. Corded Ware VS Moderns
PCA plot: https://imgur.com/On0llGQ
Pozdrawiam , Dawida
http://www.tropie.tarnow.opoka.org.pl/polska-pd-wsch-praojczyzna-ie-narodow.htm#Glavanesti
I think Corded Ware Cut Globular Amphora in halve basically moving from Northeast(+-White Russia) towards the Southwest and that is why Late Globular Amphora moved Southeastwards towards Moldova. I do not think Corded Ware originated near the Northwestern Black Sea coast. The minimal use of Copper in the Single Grave Culture I think speaks of a Culture not influenced significantly by Chalcolithic Balkan etc. societies.
@Nick Patterson
1) At least to me, Yamnana doesn't seem like a culture heavily reliant on artisans. Whatever art they produced, it was probably done after a day's herding.
2) The explosive radiation of the Yamnaya is probably the reason why Yamnaya Y-DNA is mostly Z2103 with a sprinkling of I2a-L699.
3) Yamnaya was certainly patriarchal, but it doesn't strike me as a heavily stratified society in terms of class.
4) All of the data, including the IBD results, show that Yamnaya populations mixed, and they also mixed with Corded Ware, or at least with their immediate ancestors.
I think that if you find R1a-M417 and R1b-L151 (as opposed to just L51) in Yamnaya, they'll be in a very specific geographic location, and not associated with any class or economic group.
Had anyone done an autosomal analysis of GLAV_14 yet? Would be interesting since it is R1a Z93 from 3000-3500 BCE in Forest Steppe Romania.
@Nick Patterson (Broad)
"The explosive radiation of the Yamnaya must have meant a huge increase in the
manpower needed for herding the animal flocks. Were there enough workers just from
natural increase of the small core population?"
I have been thinking about that. Before the Yamnaya horizon emerged previous cultures mostly had sheep as domesticated animals. The Dereivka site might have been an exceptions but since the claim it is a site of horse domestication is hotly disputed let us ignore it.
Imagine you are at a Eneolithic village on the banks of one of the rivers of the Pontic Steppe. You have some sheep, some cattle. You might manage to have someone get a flock of sheep to graze on the steppe. People and dogs can keep such a flock under control. But a large amount of cattle? No way. Now imagine you manage horse back riding. That vast insurmountable plain of grasses that can be grazed is now totally accessible.
Such a thing has been noticed in the Pontic steppe: Yamnaya was vastly dependant on cattle whereas its predecessors weren't. Thre sheep were more prevalent. So one could state that Yamnaya filled a previously unused ecological niche.
from what I understand of the first Corded Ware settlements - or one should say evidence as actual CW settlements are rare - they occupied areas unused by neolithic farmers. In the Netherlands the Veluwe has huge barrow structures ranging from Corded Ware to early iron Age. The barrows were made of sods shown to have been part of heaths. Heaths were the result of burning for cattle and sheep. It really looks like CW took an unused ecological niche just as well as Yamnaya did.
It might have been the explosive exploitation of a niche once it came available rather than anything else that caused the remarklable Y-DNA distribution.
Mind you: Just some loose thoughts.
We can say that the homeland/abaton of CHG is somewhere close to modern Georgia/Ossetia i would say myself...but i got zero idea about the homeland/abaton of EHG.Is it possible to say that Karelia and north Russia/Finland in general is where EHG originates?EHG started migrating more southern while CHG moved a little bit more north and these 2 components meet each other near the Don area/river.Does anyone knows from where EHG arrived?
@ Andrzejewski
''I think the Neolithic population was much more populous than you think. Otherwise, the WSH Indo-Europeans would’ve made a much larger genetic impact on BA Europe (akin to what farmers did to foragers).''
It was mostly foragers who 'replace' farmers, not the other way around
ergo, the rest of your inferences are unlikely to be correct, either
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't Z2103 virtually the only R1b found in speakers of every Indo-European language family? Wider spread than R1a as a whole even? Pretty suggestive that Yamnaya was close to if not the root of the Indo-European tree.
@nick patterson
Yamnaya artifacts vary quite a bit across the steppe. That made the
archaeologists surprised about Yamnaya genetic uniformity. Maybe the artisans
are genetically varied too -- but we don't see the burials.
It is clear that the Yamnaya expansion at the edges of the Yamnaya horizon involved the expansion of yamnaya women rather than yamnaya men who simply married local women. The only reason Yamnaya men in Hungary are autosomaly identical to Yamnaya men in the Altai region is because the men took yamnaya women with them and rarely married the local women, at least initially. We should probably assume that the same happened within the Yamnaya horizon, IE the men traveled with their brides. In that case, each source region of population growth within the yamnaya horizon, and nearby, would spread its ydna lineage. It makes sense that we see an explosion of r1b Z2103, r1b L51, and r1a 417 around the same time.
As for the Kurgan burials, its hard to imagine a society that expands with migrating families would be so carefully in preserving an internal underclass. I suppose its possible but that underclass was certainly having lots of kids.
@Rob “ It was mostly foragers who 'replace' farmers, not the other way around
ergo, the rest of your inferences are unlikely to be correct, either”
It was ultimately the pastoralists who replaced both foragers and farmers
Rob, foragers did not replace farmers; the latter outnumbered the former 10:1. Even now, in Poland it’s about 4:2:1 WSH : Neolithic: WHG.
@Ryan
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't Z2103 virtually the only R1b found in speakers of every Indo-European language family? Wider spread than R1a as a whole even?
Z2103 shows the lowest association with Indo-European speaking populations compared to R1a-M417 and R1b-L51.
In fact, even now I have doubts whether Z2103-rich Yamnaya was Indo-European, as opposed to something like Northeast Caucasian, because Z2103 is so common in the Northeast Caucasus, and this is where actual Yamnaya (probably via Catacomb) genes are now most widespread.
From Haak we can look at the Yamnaya individuals
Eg.: I0438 ''an adult male 25-35 years old was found in a cemetery with no obvious kurgan, surrounded by the graves of 5 children. He was buried face down with his hands behind his back. He was crippled by a blow with a heavy blunt instrument to his right hip that crushed his femur just below the trochanter''
-R1b-Z2103
or
I0429
''(kurgan 31, central grave 1, 3339-2917 calBCE, AA47804)
was from a grave of an adult male 35-45 years old, 175 cm tall, supine, with a
triangular flint projectile point beside him. ''
- R1b-Z2103. An 'artisan"' or shepherd perhaps
What this brief example shows is that Yamnaya was overwhelmingly Z2013 regardless of burial status.
Again; this calls for careful reading of the data ; rather than mere claims of doing so
@ Andrzejewski
'' foragers did not replace farmers; the latter outnumbered the former 10:1. Even now, in Poland it’s about 4:2:1 WSH : Neolithic: WHG.''
Anatolian-derived ancestry is ubiquitous throughout post-Neolithic Europe, incl. today
However, early Farmers - as a social system - were replaced in most parts of Europe by new socieities which derive from hunter-gatherers. Iberia, Spain, Poland, France .
The amount of HG -assoc. introgression is actually huge. The present methods which quantify admixture underestimate this greatly if we interpret % values at face value without really understanding what they’re seeing
We’ve discussed this before
'It was ultimately the pastoralists who replaced both foragers and farmers''
Outside northeastern Europe, there were no pure foragers left at this time.
Then, Bell Beaker & CWC often had better agricultural techniques than the groups which they imposed themselves on , eg. in Britain or TRB areas. Pastoralism is a variant of farming.
"Anatolian-derived ancestry is ubiquitous throughout post-Neolithic Europe, incl. today
However, early Farmers - as a social system - were replaced in most parts of Europe by new socieities which derive from hunter-gatherers. Iberia, Spain, Poland, France .
The amount of HG -assoc. introgression is actually huge.
You've been explained this before, try to sharpen up"
Derive from hunter-gatherers? Derive from a population that is 70-90% farmer by DNA, you mean. Yes, that's elevated forager population compared to central european cultures of before, where the farmers almost COMPLETELY replaced forager DNA, but to suggest that a population that is only 10-30% or so hunter gatherer by DNA is a population of hunter gatherers is not true at all.
Only in Scandinavia did the hunter gatherer DNA amount to "high" levels, i.e., 50% or so in the EBA. And that wasn't introgression from Iberia, that was a local phenomena of lingering SHG.
@Davidski,
Western Yamnaya is a good candidate for the source of Illyrian.
@Genos
The point I was making to Ryan was that Z2103 was never really seen as a Proto-Indo-European marker before it was found in Yamnaya, and that was for a good reason.
@All
Let me add to my comment above, just in case it doesn't make much sense.
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/07/on-origin-of-corded-ware-people.html?showComment=1626896903729#c4017882055565027245
At least to me, Yamnana doesn't seem like a culture heavily reliant on artisans (to the point of needing an artisan class).
Whatever arts and crafts they produced, it was probably done after a day's herding.
I completely agree with Davidski. In general, it is premature to draw any conclusions with the complete absence of Y-aDNA of the forest-steppe zone from the Carpathians to the Urals from the Paleolithic to the early Middle Ages. At the same time, archeology clearly shows the settlement of the steppe population in this territory at least starting from 4000 BC, and the first penetrations occur even earlier starting from 5000 BC.
@ Desdichado
'' Yes, that's elevated forager population compared to central european cultures of before, where the farmers almost COMPLETELY replaced forager DNA''
That's not correct. LBK never replaced any foragers. LBK are ~ 100% Balkan/Anatolian because they did not mix with foragers, not because they replaced them. This an important difference. You can infer about foragers by looking at newcomer farmers.
The same deal with CWC. To claim that CWC represents a 70% or 90% replacement in CE is similarly wrong
Too many academics are bonded to making tabloid claims of “population replacement”
'' but to suggest that a population that is only 10-30% or so hunter gatherer by DNA is a population of hunter gatherers is not true at all.''
Of course its true. The ‘new farmers’ groups from northern & Western Europe are completely different to LBK. They have ~ 0% Anatolian Farmer Y-DNA, and their economy & culture (hunting, foraging) is continuous from the hunter-gatherer epoch. They adapted agriculture on an as-needed basis. Some even reverted back to foraging and hunting.
The reason why they have 70% EEF is highly complex, and should not be taken at face value as a sort of daft autosomalism
''Only in Scandinavia did the hunter gatherer DNA amount to "high" levels, i.e., 50% or so in the EBA. And that wasn't introgression from Iberia, that was a local phenomena of lingering SHG.''
That is also incorrect
@David - isnèt that plausibly from admixture from Indo-Europeans thoughÉ
Alans and the likeÉ
@Ryan
Northeast Caucasians have around 30-40% pure Yamnaya admix, and a lot of Z2103.
Your suggestion implies that late Indo-Europeans like Alans were basically like Yamnaya and very rich in Z2103.
But of course, we already know that these sorts of groups had much more complex ancestry, and a lot of typically Indo-Iranian R1a too.
Apart from that, there are Bronze Age samples on the way from Dagestan with Z2103 and a lot of Yamnaya ancestry.
@Rob,
Hungary, Balkan, Italy farmers up to 3000 BC have 85%+ Anatolian farmer ancestry. This is displacement.
British farmers basically completely replaced British hunter gatherers.
The expanse of LBK can only be explained by taking land from hunter gatherers. They didn't live peacefully side by side.
What is undeniable is farmer way of life and Anatolian ancestry became predominate side by side. I don't understand how you can interpret this any other way than a kind of replacement.
On the other hand, the most numerous Y-DNA in modern Armenia is R1b-Z2103. There are also many of them in Turkey and Greece.
@Ryan
Its not like Sarmatians and Alans could only pass on their steppe ancestry and not pass on ancestry from the tons of other populations they had acquired ancestry from.
Leaving aside steppe_en related ancestry already present with the Maykop, most of the steppe ancestry comes from yamnaya and Catacomb people.
If lets say there was a 10% contribution of iron age nomads, 4-5% of that ancestry would be steppe ancestry. If 40% steppe would primarily be mediated through iron age nomads, that would basically imply they were 80% Sarmatian or something.
Yamnaya was probably Indo-European, but to me, the most ancient culture most likely to be Indo-European is Corded Ware.
The reason is that the vast majority of native Indo-European speakers today have ancestry from the Corded Ware population, all the way from Iberia to India.
That's why to link Yamnaya to the Indo-European expansion, it's actually necessary to link it to Corded Ware.
@Davidski
NEC don't have more R1b than they have U4 + U5 as per Yunusbayev paper.
And their Yamnaya ranges from 50% to 30%.
https://i.imgur.com/TEb7p3Q.png
@Davidski
"That's why to link Yamnaya to the Indo-European expansion, it's actually necessary to link it to Corded Ware."
Or alternatively, we'd have to really figure out who the steppe progenitors of Greeks, other 'paleo-balkan' IE speakers, and Tocharians were.
@ Genos
“ Hungary, Balkan, Italy farmers up to 3000 BC have 85%+ Anatolian farmer ancestry. This is displacement.”
No. It’s only replacement if there’s someone there to replace . If they advance into near empty land ; then it’s simply colonization (climatically enforced)
Hence, to call replacement is not only terminologically wrong; but it’s pseudo-science because it it makes up something which never occurred
Wherever there were foragers; we see plenty of Forager ancestry almost immediately
Even in Hungary / northern balkans; most late farmer males descend from foragers
“ British farmers basically completely replaced British hunter gatherers. “
British farmers come from Brittany/ Paris basin with prevailing Forager derivation; not farmers of Anatolia or even Hungary .
“ I don't understand how you can interpret this any other way than a kind of replacement.”
Maybe try harder ?
@Copper Axe
Yamnaya is too early to be directly responsible for the spread of Greek and Balkan languages, so we're looking at post-Yamnaya groups in these cases anyway.
But by this time, there are Corded Ware derived and mixed Corded Ware/Yamnaya groups on the steppe, like Babino KMK.
The point is that once Yamnaya ceases to exist, and Corded Ware and Bell Beaker ancestry is all over the place, it becomes difficult to be sure what Yamnaya ancestry represents linguistically.
Tocharian is still an open question for me.
@CrM
mtDNA U4 is found in the ancient North Caucasus well before Yamnaya or Catacomb get there.
Take a look at the samples from Maykop and Kura-Araxes. Quite a bit of U4 there.
@Davidski
"Yamnaya is too early to be directly responsible for the spread of Greek and Balkan languages, so we're looking at post-Yamnaya groups in these cases anyway."
Yes that is exactly what I'm stabbing at, which steppe populations and when. Lets say those northern Greek samples with notwworthy steppe ancestry were the Pre-Proto-Greek populations we were looking for would these then be from pre 3300 bc migrations, yamnaya period, catacomb period etc. That sort of thing. I get that right now we definitely do not have enough data to track down their origins.
In the end there are/were a bunch of Indo-European languages in Europe that currently do not seem to be the result of Corded Ware or Corded Ware derived people. These languages are part of the puzzle as well.
"Corded Ware/Yamnaya groups on the steppe, like Babino KMK."
Based on the preexisting archaeological data or are there unpublished KMK samples floating around somewhere?
@Davidski
Thing is, the only Kura-Araxan with U4 is from Velikent, Dagestan, who differs from other Kura-Araxans by having a higher Yamnaya admixture. Maykop were a dead end, and existed in North Caucasus longer than Kura Araxans existed in Dagestan, not to mention their spread never properly reached Dagestan.
I'm not even mentioning U2e and other Steppe lineages that must be present in Dagestan since the paper did not make a big distinction in subclades.
@Rob
Yes, but does Greek actually come from Yamnaya or maybe Catacomb?
It might, but we need to prove it with enough of the right data, and we don't have that yet.
@CrM
That sample doesn't have Yamnaya admixture. It just seems to have a higher cut of EHG-like ancestry.
@ Dave
Catacomb is more restricted to the steppe than Yamnaya. In fact Catacomb is oriented toward Donets and Caucasus region. So if there is R1b-Z2013 in Balkans (which there obviously is), then it would have budded off in Yamnaya period.
However, there is no clear 'smoking gun' or archaeological trail from Yamnaya to Greece, for example. But hypothetically, Yamnaya-derived groups moved into southern Balkans, but acquired a different look (e.g. different burial styles). There are tumuli all the way down the Adriatic coast & into Greece, but these do not exactly look like pit-graves.
I think that's a job for DNA. So far, we have not had any clinching aDNA
Of course, we do have Srubnaja derived R1a-Z93 in Thrace. maybe they're relevant for Thracians.
@Davidski
What? Why and from where would it have "a higher cut of EHG-like ancestry"??
Target: Kura-Araxes_RUS_Velikent
Distance: 2.7887% / 0.02788663
85.6 Kura-Araxes_ARM_Kaps
14.4 Yamnaya_RUS_Caucasus
0.0 RUS_Karelia_HG
0.0 RUS_Steppe_Maykop
From Progress-like people.
Anyway, like I also said, U4 seems to be native to the North Caucasus, and was there before Yamnaya.
@Davidski
So a Kura-Araxes sample that represents a recently expanded population further North, closer to the Steppes, with a clearly higher Yamnaya input compared to their Southern kin, must have some archaic non diluted Progress-like ancestry instead of recent Yamnaya???
And no, you can't weasel out like this, the only U4 samples barring Velikent is Maykop (who by the way all display some amount of Steppe signal), a culture that has little to do with Dagestanians.
@CrM
Try and understand this...
1) There was a lot of U4 in the North Caucasus way before Yamnaya got there
2) Those Kura-Araxes samples from Dagestan are dated to 3000-2800 BCE, which is way before Yamnaya-derived (Catacomb) ancestry could have plausibly made it down there
3) There's R1b-V1636 in Kura-Araxes from Armenia, which points to some sort of Progress-like ancestry getting into Kura-Araxes rather early
4) Also, ages ago I ran a lot tests on those Kura-Araxes Velikent samples, and concluded that their source of extra EHG ancestry was older than Yamnaya, which of course fits with their dating.
@Davidski
"1)There was a lot of U4 in the North Caucasus way before Yamnaya got there"
Now do point out WHERE exactly in the Caucasus.
"2)Those Kura-Araxes samples from Dagestan are dated to 3000-2800 BCE, which is way before Yamnaya-derived (Catacomb) ancestry could have plausibly made it down there"
Which is not too far off from the Martkopi culture??? One that likely originated thanks to the Steppe people following the Caspian into South Caucasus, with Velikent being right next to the coast.
"3) There's R1b-V1636 in Kura-Araxes from Armenia, which points to some sort of Progress-like ancestry getting into Kura-Araxes rather early"
Yes, early, Velikent isn't early KAC, and that R1b sample did not harbor as much Steppe as Velikent.
"4) Also, ages ago I ran a lot tests on those Kura-Araxes Velikent samples, and concluded that their source of extra EHG ancestry was older than Yamnaya, which of course fits with their dating."
Nothing wrong with the dating, see above.
@CrM
Ah, OK, so a 3000-2800 BCE sample from Dagestan actually has Yamnaya ancestry?
Haha.
Don’t know if this relates; but Areni_C have Progress _EN
admixture & mtdna U4a
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X14000665
3.11. Y haplogroups I-M170 and R1b-U106: possible genetic determinants of extreme tallness in Europe
Although the documented differences in male stature in European nations can largely be explained by nutrition and other exogenous factors, it is remarkable that the picture in Fig. 1 strikingly resembles the distribution of Y haplogroup I-M170 (Fig. 10a). Apart from a regional anomaly in Sardinia (sub-branch I2a1a-M26), this male genetic lineage has two frequency peaks, from which one is located in Scandinavia and northern Germany (I1-M253 and I2a2-M436), and the second one in the Dinaric Alps in Bosnia and Herzegovina (I2a1b-M423).16 In other words, these are exactly the regions that are characterized by unusual tallness. The correlation between the frequency of I-M170 and male height in 43 European countries (including USA) is indeed highly statistically significant (r = 0.65; p < 0.001) (Fig. 11a, Table 4).
Study attributes increased male height and lactose tolerance to Y haplogroups. Any truth to it or just BS? Coincidence? The authors don't even mention anything autosomal.
@Davidski
"Ah, OK, so a 3000-2800 BCE sample from Dagestan actually has Yamnaya ancestry?"
Yes??? You're going to imply that Martkopi won't have any Yamnaya ancestry?
And amusingly enough, Dagestanians have twice as much U5 as they have U4.
Your passive-aggressive "Haha's" get as old as your snarky remarks towards Quiles.
@CrM
Like I already said, these samples from Dagestan are dated to 3,000-2,800 BCE, which is even early for Yamnaya.
So there's no way that they can have ancestry from Yamnaya.
Or from Martkopi, because this is a later phenomenon (~2,600 BCE), and I'd say that it was linked to the southern movement of the Catacomb culture.
But since you're a fan of Quiles, then that sort of explains everything.
@Davidski
And Catacomb being almost 100% identical to Yamnaya... That's like being pedantic about your qpAdm models that use Yamnaya_UKR as a reference population for European moderns instead of say early CWC or Yamnaya_Samara which is often the academically used proxy for Steppe ancestry.
Later yes, but the Martkopians wouldn't just teleport from the Steppes into Georgia all in 2600BC.
Not a fan of Quiles, his sample map is great though.
The reason I mentioned Catacomb is that this is the Yamnaya-related culture that actually moved south enough to be a realistic source of this type of ancestry in Caucasians.
But of course there's no way that these early Kura-Araxes samples from Dagestan can have any Catacomb ancestry.
They must have something earlier than Catacomb, and also earlier than Yamnaya.
And since there's some sort of Progress-like ancestry in late Kura-Araxes in Armenia, then it's likely that EHG-related ancestry first entered the Kura-Araxes gene pool in the North Caucasus, and was then diluted as it moved south.
Ergo, I can't see the mtDNA U4 in North Caucasians as an obvious signal of Yamnaya/Catacomb ancestry, when there's evidence of much earlier steppe gene flow into the Caucasus, and even some U4 in Maykop.
Haha.
@CrM “ NEC don't have more R1b than they have U4 + U5 as per Yunusbayev paper.”
Which exist because they are Yamnaya markers (I wouldn’t attribute them to WHG).
What boggles my mind is how come they don’t speak an IE language
Can it be that CWC spoke PIE and Yamnaya spoke some “para-PIE”?
It would be intriguing to find out whether Khvalynsk, Repin, Samara HG, Progress_En etc spoke anything related to or resembling/ancestral to PIE.
@Davidski
"They must have something earlier than Catacomb, and also earlier than Yamnaya"
???
https://i.imgur.com/0bizoHp.png
"EHG-related ancestry first entered the Kura-Araxes gene pool in the North Caucasus, and was then diluted as it moved south."
Velikent people got to Dagestan from the South.
"Ergo, I can't see the mtDNA U4 in North Caucasians as an obvious signal of Yamnaya/Catacomb ancestry, when there's evidence of much earlier steppe gene flow into the Caucasus, and even some U4 in Maykop."
Amusing, do you see U5 as an "as an obvious signal of Yamnaya/Catacomb ancestry", if so, then why must all U4 in NEC must be entirely KAC or Maykop derived?
You need a sanity check, I genuinely think you're trolling at this point.
@Andrzejewski
"What boggles my mind is how come they don’t speak an IE language"
Well they do now, hahaha. Though due to different dynamics.
@CrM “ Well they do now, hahaha. Though due to different dynamics.”
Yes, they speak Russian because the have lived in Russian Fed/Soviet Union. But their native tongue which they communicate with each other is non-IE. They do look much more “European”-shifted compared to Georgians and Armenians, however.
It will be interesting to see if there is any IBD 8-12 cM sharing between samples like Deriivka R1b-Z2103(/I5884 Ukraine_ 2890-2696 calBCE) and Yamnaya- Catacombe-Afanasievo R1b-Z2103/ and Hungarian Eastern Bell Beaker R1b-Z2103, I2787. Also in the future IBD applied to horse remains, for example Csepel Island Hungary, Deriivka and S'ezzhee.
@Tom, I personally treat the claims of haplogroup I associations as junk because:
1) In European populations where males are tall or lactose tolerant, women are also... tall and lactose tolerant, to the same degree (e.g. in female standard deviations, women are about as much taller than the average country's women as men are from the average country's men. See - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/mean-height-males-vs-females - North Macedonia does seem to be a slight outlier with taller men relative to women, but this isn't the case in any of the Scandinavian countries, or Serbia, or Bosnia).
No explanation has ever been offered by the "haplogroup I -> height" theorists as to why it would also make women, who do not carry a y-chromosome, tall. Or either why, if haplogroup I makes the men in these countries tall, there is some separate, female specific effect that makes the women tall too.
2) It should be very easy to prove that specific y-dna haplogroups make specific men taller. There are big Biobanks covering the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Poland, etc. now. These have recorded height for all partipants and generally enough y-dna sequence to call the haplogroup. So if you find that in these, the y-dna I Poles or Brits are much taller than y-dna R Poles or Brits, then that easily shows the connection.
This has never been tried by the "haplogroup I -> height" theorists, even though it wouldn't be very difficult, nor has it ever been shown by any other researcher looking at these genetic databases, even when they have been specifically looking for haplogroup assocations.
3) In some of these instances, there isn't really even any reason why we would expect the y-dna haplogroup to possibly have some influence. The best replicated haplogroup effect in Europeans is a finding of increased infertility in the bearers of the most common European clade of R1a, because of some changes in the chromosome that make it more likely to repeatedly re-evolve a deletion that renders carriers infertile. We'd expect that to be a likely thing - the y should be responsible for fertility.
But lactase for example? Why would the y even have anything to do with that?
Anyway, Tom, I don't find that the "haplogroup I" theorists have good explanations for these. The response is pretty much like ".............. Er... Anyway, like I was saying, look at my European wide country-level height correlation with haplogroups!", and doesn't really engage using the intra-population tests or the problems above at all. (I find my opinion of the researchers who *don't* try to engage with these problems gets lower, for every year they don't engage with them!).
Andrzejewski: Can it be that CWC spoke PIE and Yamnaya spoke some “para-PIE”?
It would be possible, but if the early proto-CWC and Yamnaya had split from a single population around 3500-3300 BCE, which seems reasonably likely from the autosomal and IBD results, then it wouldn't be likely that the languages were very diverged from each other by 2800 BCE or so. In the ballpark of how two different Slavic languages would be by the early medieval period (1100 AD taking 400-600 AD expansion as consensual).
It *could* even be the case that Yamnaya and CWC spoke languages which were more diverged than that, if there had been multiple languages in use in the proto-steppes populations for thousand of years... But if Yamnaya and CWC do both come from a single rapidly expanding population that had small size, again this is even more unlikely.
@David - I guess the proof will be in the pudding when we get better Hittite and other Anatolian steppe-admixed samples. That's where I would expect IE speakers to have a strong preference for Yamnaya over Corded Ware if I'm right. Correct me if I'm wrong though but we still don't have good samples there, right?
And re: Alans - just using that as one example. Presumably there have been many waves of IE speakers sloshing around the steppe that could plausibly dump steppe ancestry into the Caucasus. But fair points.
The logical answer is that NEC languages are local to the region among the native J1, G2 and other male populations who have been living in the Caucasus region well over 10 thousand years. I don't see any universe where these languages arrived from the steppes unless there is compelling evidence. I'm no linguist but it would be counter-intuitive to associate them or any Caucasus language with R1b, since they are by and large newcomers.
@Andrzejewski
Initially, the PIE language was centum (as Bednarczuk tells me) and probably in the R1a family it evolved into satem. And the kentum of the R1b lineage did not evolve, but unchanged it passed to the emerging groups, from Anatolia and the Tochar onwards.
@Davidski,
Question - Where do you think Fatyanovo/Eastern CWC fell in terms of ecological niche? Was it fundamentally a CWC forest-type culture, or more of a Yamnaya pastoralist group? I am not necessarily talking about genetic origins, just the ecological niches that they occupied.
I wonder how many of previous perspectives on the linguistic landscape of the Caucasus made before ancient dna are going to remain true. There was an old notion that these languages are “very ancient” due to the remote, mountainous landscape
instead this seems to have been a lot of language shift, some of which were fairly recent
@Aniasi
Fatyanovo was located deep in the forests.
@Davidski
@Ryan
After all, one thing does not exclude the other at all.
David writes that Yamnaya has a lot of Z2103 with the addition of I2a-L699. Currently, the largest clusters of L699 are registered in Germany / Scandinavia / the Islands. Given that L699 and Z2103 co-existed as Yamnaya, it may turn out that part of the migration to NW and Central Europe took place together?
We know that most of the Z2103 is related to the South and East of Europe. We see Z2103 (Z2109 / Z2109 -> KMS75) in the culture of Yamnaya, Poltavka etc. Later in the Iron Age nomads. Some of them accumulate in Armenia, etc. But from Z2109 also comes another, younger snp CTS7556, which Malyshev already assigns to Europe.
As mentioned above, from the CTS7556 we have a different, independent line in central Europe with a tendency to the Northwest / North (like L699, which also groups generally with R1b in this part of the world). True, it is a small % of the total Z2103, but important because it started its operation in a completely different place in Europe than the other Z2103. We have Z2103 in BB and CWC. I understand it has a S / SE tendency, but still - it is. This proves that in the western Yamnaya there were people who changed their environment and culture. Taking this into account, as well as the previous neighborhood with L699 and the FTDNA results, we can assume that those Late Neolithic / Early Bronze Age people who adopted the BB and CWC culture lived here in sufficient quantity to keep this trace to this day. If not from BB, then with other cultures they had to go to the N and NW, to Scandinavia and the Islands. If the person Z2103 from the CWC in the Czech Republic multiplied, it means that the descendants of Z2103 were present in the place from which a lot of migrations were coming out that could carry this DNA further.
The whole problem in my opinion is that the typical Yamnaya as such did not migrate with the CWC which formed R1a and R1b L51 - but it was a small percentage of it, hooked up to the L51 or L699 which at the same or similar time as they moved to this part of Europe. Can we say that the Z2103 people brought Indo-Europeanization and the CW culture? Not. But with a great deal of certainty we can assume that some Z2103 was with them from the very beginning.
What do you think about it?
@a, yeah, only Nick knows about whether those examples are the case, we'll have to wait!
On the other point, I do think animals could be a potential use for these techniques. The advantage would be that ancient animal bone is really plentiful - there are just big piles of these things in rubbish heaps at sites. Disadvantages I guess are possibly quite severe though. Firstly animal sequencing is usually shotgun I think so that limits the available data compared to capture (because of cost). Secondly it must be aligned to a reference panel of modern haplotypes, which may not be available or as good in less well studied species. But the big one is that generation time in domestic animals is generally much faster, so links will generally decay much quicker - even horse are 8 years to humans 20-25, so signals will decay at over 2x speed. Likely we'd find structure within a site or between contemporary sites, but really long range connections will decay faster. It would definitely be cool if possibke to go beyond guessing at whether animals were domesticated (as in some studies) to saying "Well, these Kura-Araxes horses are obviously long range descendents of Yamnaya horses, so clearly they bred them and traded them" or something like this.
@Davidski,
Croatia Bronze age, Greece Bronze age don't have Corded Ware ancestry.
I'm confident IE languages in Balkans, before Slavs, don't come from Corded Ware. R1b Z2103 may be the only indigenous IE Y DNA there.
@Genos
Maybe, but they post-date the Corded Ware expansion, which also affected the Balkans one way or another.
The point being is that we need more specific sampling to track the expansions of certain language groups to see how they formed, and whether they can be unambiguously linked to Yamnaya, as opposed to post-Yamnaya language spreads.
@Ryan
Well, as far as I know, the Copper/Bronze Age samples from western Anatolia that do show some sort of steppe or Eastern Euro ancestry, don't show any specific links to Yamnaya.
You know Davidiski, your observation regarding Z2103 in relation to Northeast Caucasian speakers is quite interesting. I have always held this in for a while but now that you have mentioned it, whenever they reconstruct the Yamna culture guys, to me, quite a few of them actually reminded me more of how some Chechens could look at times. But I always tried to stay away from that game but couldn't help to bring it up now that you mentioned it...
@David - Any steppe haplogroups for those samples? Just curious.
Yes, the one mentioned here...
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/05/steppe-invaders-in-bronze-age-balkans.html
@ Davidski; Genos
“Illyrians” is a broad term
The ‘classic’ Glasinac-Mat group might be different to Iapodes or Pannonians, etc
@Rob,
The Iron Gate HGs lived in Serbia. Hunter gatherers lived in Hungary. Yet, the farmers in Hungary and Serbia show 85%+ Anatolian ancestry. So, this is a replacement of the native hunter gatherers.
The case of Britain is also an undeniable case of hunter gatherers being replaced.
@Ryan,
The current Chalcolithic sample from Barcin, Turkey has ~10% Steppe ancestry. I think she dates to 4000 BC.
Bombshell I guess, Steppe ancestry in Anatolia in 4000 BC. But it isn't a bombsheel because we've known this since 2016. It is unfortunate she isn't apart of the mainstream conversation. I don't know why the Harvard lab ignores her Steppe ancestry.
Maybe because they think she got it from Eneolithic Caucasus, because a few outliers there have Steppe ancestry.
@Ryan
"I guess the proof will be in the pudding when we get better Hittite and other Anatolian steppe-admixed samples."
The issue is that the Anatolian languages are often argued to have separated before the Yamnaya period began so this wouldn't be exactly a smoking gun regarding the Yamnaua question as they likely weren't derived from them.
Autosomally CWC is basically just EMBA steppe + 25% farmer. I don't understand this obsession with Y chromosomes or the desire to put some "mystery" on CWC origins. We know 70% of CWC ancestry came from the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Why do they show R1a to such a dominant degree? Well obviously those are the lineages that made it to the top of the patriarchy there. Who cares if it was very infrequent in the EMBA steppe populations? There's no real mystery here. The only mystery is who were these ban of R1a males who's lineages became so dominant in Central and Northern Europe. There's no mystery regarding the overall 'racial' or ancestral origins of the CWC people.
@ Genos
The Iron gates aren’t in Hungary. But, the Carpathian basin had a very sparse Mesolithic population, just like did almost all of southern and south-central Europe by ~ 5550 bce
So if we consider 15% autosomal admixture and the ~ 50% forager-derived YDNA in Baden or Boleraz; and if you consider that early Neolithic villages consisted of hundreds of 'Anatolian farmers' while forager bands were in the dozens; then foragers made a disproportionately large contribution. Some might have been from I.G., others from Poland or even western Europe. Look at the Koros and ALPc cultures in eastern Hungary. They are ~ 95% EEF but 100% I2a. Clearly, genome-wide stats have limitations and can lead to wrong conclusions if considered in isolation. Nevertheless, look at the Malaki Presljavets outliers, some have ~ 40-50% forager ancestry
Moving to Northern & Atlantic Europe; where the forager population was bountiful, admixture rates reach 30% genome wide & almost 100% YDNA. Here we can say Early farmers were “replaced” & taken over by foragers. Of course it is not that simple, but the demise of 'early Farmers' certainly explains why Farmers reached central Germany and the Paris basin in 5000 BCE, but did not manage to make it to Scandinavia or Britain until 4000 bce, at which point the 'wave' of Anatolian-farmer related ancestry continued.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t discontinuity and replacement of foragers at a local or even regional scale. Maybe this is the case in Britain; but Mesolithic Brits were I2a2 and I2a1 and so were all (but 1) Neolithic Brits, so there's certainly no population replacement at a macro scale.
@Arch
Well, I'm not happy with what David Anthony has been writing on this topic.
And I reckon that I'm justified in being unhappy about it, because he obviously didn't take into account all of the evidence, especially the genetic evidence, before trying to explain the high frequency of R1a in Corded Ware.
You know, the basic stuff like that this R1a isn't just R1a, but R1a-M417, which is known to have undergone a major and very rapid expansion at around that time.
So common sense would tell us that if R1a-M417 was present in the Yamnaya groups that have already been sampled, then it hasn't turned up not because of any burial rite issues, but because R1a-M417 was very rare on the Yamnaya steppe, and only became very common as the Corded Ware people fanned out into Central and Northern Europe.
Another problem is that Corded Ware is actually a different population than the classic Z2103 Yamnaya in terms of paternal origins, because the R1a isn't the only thing that splits them apart. They also have different R1b subclades, and the Corded Ware R1b-L51 is not derived from the Yamnaya R1b-Z2103.
On top of that, Yamnaya is patriarchal, but is it highly stratified in terms of socio-economic origins? Like upper vs lower classes, or warriors vs artisans? If so, then how come both the rich and poor kurgans contain remains with R1b-Z2103?
I'm hoping that the good people at the David Reich Lab explain all of this and more to David Anthony as they move forward with their collaboration.
Mixing apples with oranges only complicates cultural origin. R1a, R1b, I2 have different cultures and origins. For example, putting aside PIE origin- Males found Corded Ware with R1b-L151 derive from R1b-M269-L23+, same with Bell Beaker and SGC R1b-L151 derive from M269-L23+. Steppe-Yamnaya known for(pointed egg shaped pottery, stelae-like Kernosovskiy idol-Kurgan burials, horse burials, wagon burials also derive from M269-L23.
For those of us who are passionate about this, some recurrent errors can get annoying. However, other scholars are still claiming DNA is 'dangerous', and that ancient peoples didnt share biological affinities, or didn't migrate. So I guess we need to contextualise.
@a
Mixing apples with oranges only complicates cultural origin. R1a, R1b, I2 have different cultures and origins.
This is the sort of nonsense that David Anthony probably picked up somewhere on the web, I'm guessing at Quiles' blog, and then went to write his papers.
Obviously, you troll, the M269 and L23 mutations predate Yamnaya, so there's no point claiming that because both Yamnaya and some Corded Ware samples were L23, then a Corded Ware sample with L23 shares a special relationship with Yamnaya that an R1a-M417 Corded Ware sample doesn't.
But you've always shown a rather limited intellect here, so I don't expect you to understand.
I would be fascinated to find out if the language spoken by the Philistines ultimately belonged to the Hellenic branch, the Anatolian one or the Illyrian one; some sources also claim that certain tribes also arrived from Sardinia and Sicily (Italic?)
@Genos Historia “
The current Chalcolithic sample from Barcin, Turkey has ~10% Steppe ancestry. I think she dates to 4000 BC.”
Is this the smoking gun for the Steppe origins of Anatolian languages we’ve been waiting for?
If Anatolian branch is indeed dated to 6ky BP due to an early split, then perhaps it would disprove all those proponents of Anatolian Origin Theory like Renfrew, once and for all.
That Barcin Chalcolithic sample has Majkop ancestry, not steppe ancestry (at least, nothing major)
It's not Maykop ancestry, at least nothing directly from there. It's something like TUR_Buyukkaya_EC.
If you add that to the model, either in G25 or qpAdm, then the Steppe Eneolithic ancestry shows up as well.
And there are more Chalco samples like this on the way from Barcin...
Not sure, looked at it a while ago. Buyukaya_EC is ~ 5300 bce. Anatolia underwent a pretty significant change after 5000 BCE. Might struggle with historically plausability if Buyuk_EC is used as a source.
More proximate groups from Majkop-Laila Tepe horizon would be relevant. Such ancestry is also present in certain sub-populations in Ikiztepe, and would parallel the arrival of arsenical Bronzes in the region ~ 3800 bce.
"Obviously, you troll, the M269 and L23 mutations predate Yamnaya, so there's no point claiming that because both Yamnaya and some Corded Ware samples were L23, then a Corded Ware sample with L23 shares a special relationship with Yamnaya that an R1a-M417 Corded Ware sample doesn't."
A lot of Yamnaya Z2103 are a specific branch like (KMS 67+). Wasn't there one Yamnaya sample(the one that is really good quality) that was L23+ Z2103- ?
How to explain more IBD sharing between and Polish R1b-L151 Corded Ware - and Ukraine/Afanasievo than Volosovo R1a-Z93+ samples?
Those Polish Corded Ware samples also belong to R1a-M417 you moron.
By the way, Volosovo samples are rich in R1b.
The R1a-Z93 sample from Volosovo is actually from a Fatyanovo culture burial.
Corded Ware Fatyanovo R1a replaced Volosovo R1b in the forests.
Yamnaya R1b sample Io443 upstream to both L151 and Z2103
Haak et al. (2015) sample I0443 (Yamnaya) 3300 BC-2700 BC is L23(xL51,xZ2105):
From Haak:
"This individual could only be assigned to haplogroup R1b1a2a (L49.1:2842212T→A,
L23:6753511G→A). It could also be assigned to the upstream haplogroups R1b1a2
(PF6399:2668456C→T, L150.1:10008791C→T, L1353:19179540G→A, PF6509:22190371A→G,
M269:22739367T→C, CTS12478:28590278G→A). The individual was ancestral for haplogroup
R1b1a2a1 (L51/M412:8502236G→A) and, unlike I0231, I0370 and I0438 also for R1b1a2a2
(Z2105:15747432C→A). Thus, it could be designated as R1b1a2a*(xR1b1a2a1, R1b1a2a2).
You would think Fatyanovo IBD would match with Polish (South Eastern)samples L151 if they come from a common core?
@Davidski “ Corded Ware Fatyanovo R1a replaced Volosovo R1b in the forests.”
Of course. And if their language was completely unrelated to PIE, it would put to rest Anthony 2019’s assumption that PIE “was an EHG language”.
@Davidski
I think the key to the knowledge of the CWC vs Yamnaya in the foreland of the Carpathians, in Lesser Poland and the Carpathian Basin has Szecsenyi Ann (Hungary) and its collective
@a
Like I said, you're a moron.
Just because a couple of the Yamnaya males are just L23 doesn't mean that Corded Ware L51 is derived from them or their population, since L51 is actually older than those Yamnaya samples.
And Fatyanovo isn't the oldest stage of Corded Ware. It's also more heavily mixed with Globular Amphora. So this is in line with its lack of IBD sharing with Yamnaya.
L51-rich Bell Beakers from around the same time also don't share IBD with Yamnaya.
Haha.
@Rob,
Farmers having larger population sizes is apart of the way they replaced hunter gatherers.
Hunter gatherers may have made a disproportionate impact, considering lower population size, but it doesn't change that future populations derived 70%+ from Anatolian farmers. This is still genetic replacement.
I'll admit you make good points showing hunter gatherers survived better than a simple narrative would suggest. This is why we listen to what you have to say. But I can't see how it is possible to say that no genetic replacement took place.
@Arch Hades,
A band of R1a M417 males hit R1b Z2103 over the head and told them to stay put in the Steppe while they migrate west, where they multiplied in great numbers. :)
This narrative doesn't work because those two lines would not exist in the same population.
Kurgan Y DNA is an ethnic marker not a class marker. There could not have been bands, classes of R1a M417 men. They always would have lived in a sizeable population, their own ethnic group separate from R1b Z2103.
@ Davidski,
Weren't you saying a short while ago that Corded Ware came from Yamnaya? I've lost track.
I think there will be a lot of sensations when the old Y-aDNA samples are refined using the YMCA method, as in this work https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-94491-z
1) Thinking about this again, while dangerous to underestimate Nick's smarts on anything, it does seem anachronistic for us to get any image of people living in settled groups with a large inequalities among them? These aren't periods and places where there are significant large settlements, which is a big part of the whole problem here - why horse bones are elusive (compared to Sintashta where horses are buried close to people's graves so we actually have them to test, or other early steppe cultures where people are somewhat settled and there are middens), why we are reliant on kurgan graves and grave goods for reconstructing culture, etc.
It doesn't seem impossible to imagine that different clans lived on the steppe and may have had trade (and some exchange of people) and only one of them had these very visible graves and then they expanded in slightly different directions, but I think it would seem hard to think of these as these as economic classes in a single society.
Thinking about R1b-Z2103 as a separate priest/warrior group and other y haplos as associated with economic activities seems a little bit too much like trying to find a neat parallel with the "trifunctional hypothesis" and haplogroups...
(Besides the problem of why the different y haplogroups would all experience explosive founder effect - it would seem more like we would expect a class of ordinary "worker" people to generally preserve the diversity of different haplogroups seen on the steppe previously, like probably seen in Sredny Stog / reported in Khvalynsk).
2) Re; the Beaker question (its relationship with CWC and Yamnaya) again, looking forward to seeing the IBD substructure to see if that helps at all. It looks so far like, on the limited results we've been previewed too:
On the 8-12 cm segments (measures older relationships) looks like within culture grouping that there are more strong relationships within CWC and within Yamnaya, and some relationship within Unetice too (but with less shared IBD than in CWC and Yamnaya sites). And then between cultures it seems like Yamnaya shares more with Corded Ware than with Unetice, and that this relationship is strong than Unetice sees with Corded Ware. However, it doesn't look like there's too much of a strong relationship binding Unetice and CWC together to the exclusion of Yamnaya. (Doesn't look like a lot more matches between CWC and Unetice than Yamnaya and Unetice).
While on the 16-20cm segments, it looks like intra-CWC and CWC-Yamnaya (mostly Western Yamnaya) relationships are stronger than with CWC with Beaker or Unetice.
But can I really eyeball these with any confidence? There definitely might need to be some sort of normalization for sample dates and population on these as well to really look at it in a detailed way. (Like, if CWC shows some greater amount of short matches with Beaker than Yamnaya, is this just expected for the different times of the samples or not?).
It seems like anyway these results in full could, anyway whatever they look like, actually provide some direct evidence for the idea of proto-Beaker and CWC culture being either in some sense the same culture or at least in more intense contact than Beaker and Yamnaya. I guess at this point I'm guessing on some more contact going on between a patrilineal clan of early CWC and proto-Beaker, rather than between proto-Beaker and Yamnaya, after they these lineages and associated autosome left the steppe zones (because they're both going west and there's more opportunity for contact?). But not a really strong relationship between CWC and proto-Beaker, for any very long period of time (over hundreds of years). I think the hypothesis of a strong Yamnaya-Beaker connection to the exclusion of CWC will be refuted, but I also would guess its unlikely that CWC and Beaker will have too strong connection to the exclusion of Yamnaya, and it'll be closer to a trifurcation. Then the archaeologists can think about whether it makes sense to bracket both these early steppe clans together as part of the same Corded Ware culture, or whether its more like a better model is they're two cultures that are in contact and share some materials (maybe because they're adopting them from some degree from Late Neolithic societies) but then diverge in then inventing diametrically opposite cultural signals (that might reflect some intensification of opposing identities). But that's just my guess right now, and it all may be refuted - maybe it will look like a bifurcation.
In the Fatyanovo paper models the CWC samples only show a very marginal preference for GAC over Trypillia. They also did not use the recent Immel et al samples in their reference for Trypillia. Big difference between the Immel samples and previous CT samples is the Immel ones are from much later, 3500-3000 B.C. and have 30% Steppe. If the Fatyanovo paper used the Immel samples the preference for Trypillia over GAC in a 2 way model with Yamnaya would be large. Fatyanovo comes from Usatovo as Glav_14 proves.
@Davidski (or Arza or Norfern-Ostrobothnian), on another topic, I was reading this old paper from 2018 again - "Overcoming the dichotomy between open and isolated populations using genomic data from a large European dataset" (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep41614) - and noticed that the genotypes for some of their small Italian population isolates (from Sardinia and NE Italy) were open at this source - https://zenodo.org/record/50114.
The genotyping looks like it may be lower coverage and a different array than often typical, but do these look like they have enough coverage, and on the right SNPs, to potentially go into Global 25? Or is it a no-go? The Sauris samples seem particularly interesting to me as this population had some interesting positions on PCA in an earlier paper (i.e. PCA here - https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2012229/figures/2 with label Sa_i and Sa_g - and here - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fejhg.2012.229/MediaObjects/41431_2013_BFejhg2012229_MOESM27_ESM.pdf as FVG Sauris)
@Matt
Thinking about this again, while dangerous to underestimate Nick's smarts on anything, it does seem anachronistic for us to get any image of people living in settled groups with a large inequalities among them?
I would say that it certainly is.
Nick is defending David Anthony probably because he thinks he's being unfairly treated here.
But Anthony is clearly out of his depth when it comes to understanding the Y-haplogroup data.
"Fatyanovo comes from Usatovo as Glav_14 proves."
Doesnt Glav_14 have a pretty big chunk of Kumsay/Steppe Maykop ancestry?
I cant be alone in thinking these are misdated middle bronze age or even pre-Cimmerian (like MJ31) individuals. They look very atypical for the eneolithic.
@Romulus “ CWC samples only show a very marginal preference for GAC over Trypillia. They also did not use the recent Immel et al samples in their reference for Trypillia. Big difference between the Immel samples and previous CT samples is the Immel ones are from much later, 3500-3000 B.C. and have 30% Steppe. If the Fatyanovo paper used the Immel samples the preference for Trypillia over GAC”
I read recently that Baltic-Slavic prefer Tripolye compared to Germanic’s affinity to GAC.
I doubt it.
@Copper Axe “ I cant be alone in thinking these are misdated middle bronze age or even pre-Cimmerian (like MJ31) individuals. They look very atypical for the eneolithic”
Were Cimmerians an Andronovo horizon offshoot?
@All Does it make sense that the language spoken by the LBK could be related to the languages language families spoken by the Balkan/Aegean Farmers such as Etruscan/Lemnian/Raetian, whereas the language spoken by the GAC could be related to a Cardial Pottery Language family like the one spoken by the Basques?
@ Well for me "Close Cousins" mean that they were Closer Related at a time before the formation of Yamnaya and Corded Ware. So Corded Ware basically split from this Ancestral group before the formation of Yamnaya. So I think Corded Ware ancestors were already outside Yamnaya Territory during Yamnaya formation. So who were the Brother/Sister Cultures who gave rise to the Cousins ?
So the Ancestral Cultures independently were Majority EHG on one side and CHG on the other. So this then the EHG Father and CHG Mother (Mesolithic). After mixing they created the EHG/CHG Brothers (Neolithic). These Brothers went their own way and created the Cousins (Eneolithic) ?
Yamnaya must have expanded from the northwest Black Sea region
Thats where the quatrification of the bottleneck/expansion lineages trace back to
@Andrzejewski
"Were Cimmerians an Andronovo horizon offshoot?"
Yes, they were. But probably a freshly mixed bunch, because the East Asian and the BMAC related ancestry in the three samples present in G25 are very uneven. Still overall they resemble Asian Scythian/Saka.
@ Davidski
I would like to ask you about your earlier entry from "Bell Beaker Highway". As you pointed out yourself, you can see a strong line between the Carpathian Basin and the North Sea. We read further that this may confirm the movement of the Yamnaya people from south to north. I will quote an excerpt:
"By itself, the heat map is probably very favorable to the rather popular idea nowadays that the Yamnaya-related Beakers originated in the Carpathian Basin. Their ancestors, for instance, may have been Yamnaya groups that arrived from the Pontic-Caspian steppe via the Balkans, and their ethnogenesis may have been sparked by the cultural impulses that were streaming into the region from across Europe, perhaps from as far away as Iberia. The descendants of these early, potentially Yamnaya-derived, Beakers may then have moved en masse to the North Sea region and beyond via the aforementioned superhighway. "
This is basically the situation we wrote about earlier. Corded Ware traffic followed the route you described and the Z2103 to Central Europe and NW arrives from the south. The samples you wrote about together with @Genos Historia confirm this additionally. We have a road from Hungary, through the Czech Republic, to, among others Polish. Do you think that from the Czech Republic, eg along the Elbe or Odra rivers, they could have wandered further north? This would explain today's SNP in this part of Europe and it would not be in conflict with your assumptions tracy CWC and BB.
The discovered Z2103 in BB shows that despite their close origins from Yamnaya, they adopt BB's cultural values. Perhaps the next generation (s) have completely abandoned the Yamnaya culture and become more closely related to the cultures further north.
We have VK535 sample from Z2109. If I remember correctly, her admixture points to a person from Italy, Greece or Macedonia. But this is a sample dated to the 12th / 13th century, so it is probably an Italo-Norman, whose grandfather came to this place several generations earlier. So his aDNA may have changed, and it looks local now. However, his burial specifics indicate that he was associated with the Normans, so this could be an indication that the Z2103 migrated with them from NW / N Europe.
The fact that we have so few samples and contemporary Z2103 data from this part of Europe does not help with the research. But somehow this little squad of Z2103 had to come here and multiply and the transition period from Yamnaya to CWC / BB is perhaps the perfect occasion for that. Is it possible that the road from the south will finally hit the Z2103 in Single Grave?
I do think when it comes to IBD sharing, these will need some careful interpretation.
Like at the moment there is some idea that relatively *high long IBD chunk* sharing *between* different Eastern European countries implies low effective population size among the ancestors of say, Poles, for the entire time up until around 400-600 AD, compared to say Germany or Britain.
But this does not seem to be clear cut as the case according to a couple of independent studies data.
1) Al-Asadi and Petkova 2019 - https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1007908 - Note Figure S5. (This calls the IBD segments PSC segments - "Pairwise Shared Coalescence" - but it's the same thing). The estimated population size of Poles at 700 BCE, estimated from 1-5cm long chunks, is exactly what is typical of a Northern European country of their present day population size. (Comparable to Germany or UK, with effective population size estimate around 400,000). Again looking at longer chunk lengths around 1300 AD it is also about expected, and at 1700 AD slightly larger than expected from present day population.
They've done this by working out how much PSC sharing there is within a sample *relative* to the samples location within the country and then adjusted that up by country area. So it's indirect but takes into account how dispersed the sampling is. There's some element there that could create some questions of course.
2) "Overcoming the dichotomy between open and isolated populations", 2017 - https://www.nature.com/articles/srep41614 . Note Figure 4.
Possibly its the case that the population histories with some disproportionate long IBD may be indicative of the expansion of some small population as affecting the ancestry of Central-Eastern European (maybe multiple times), rather than this necessarily being the same as the *entire population size*...
It'll be interesting to see this applied to ancient dna. I'm thinking about interpretations of population size in the Slavic migration I guess and applying that to the early Slavic genome wide data. One interpretation has always been that the Slavic groups had a small population size until they expanded into empty territory *then* expanded in population size. But maybe they actually attained a relatively large population size (at least compared to Germany, Britain) in some specific unsampled part of Europe prior to the migrations (Pripet Marsh?) and then were just dispersed into other territory around Eastern Europe by invasions and admixed with previous local people to some extent, but this event did not cause a break in their long term population size trend. Rather than the "demographic benefactors" of the Migration Era, more like the "heir apparent" of Eastern Europe due to some previous demographic trend?
@Dranoel
The point I was making was that there was a migration of Beakers from the North Sea region into Central and Eastern Europe, NOT that Yamnaya migrated from the Carpathian Basin to Northwestern Europe.
@Davidski @Dranoel “ The point I was making was that there was a migration of Beakers from the North Sea region into Central and Eastern Europe, NOT that Yamnaya migrated from the Carpathian Basin to Northwestern Europe.”
Yamnaya seems to be a dead end, unless it turns out that either Armenia derives from Catacomb or Phrygian/Thracian/Illyrian/Hellenic stem from Yamnaya Hungary/Bulgaria.
Srubnaya is a Fatnayovo (=CWC) offshoot, correct?
@Slumberry “ Yes, they were. But probably a freshly mixed bunch, because the East Asian and the BMAC related ancestry in the three samples present in G25 are very uneven. Still overall they resemble Asian Scythian/Saka.”
It could be that Cimmerians, Indo-Iranians and Tocharians were all descendants of Sintashta-Andronovo, and all had almost exclusively R1a1 male ydna.
@ “ Andrze
“ Yamnaya seems to be a dead end”
Where do you get these ideas ?
@ Slumberry
“Yes, they were. But probably a freshly mixed bunch, because the East Asian and the BMAC related ancestry in the three samples present in G25 are very uneven. Still overall they resemble Asian Scythian/Saka.“
We should use correct terminology.
In archaeological terms, Saka are from southeast Kazakhstan & TianShan, but in historical reality; it was a cognate termed borrowed to refer to those border tribes immediately north of Iran during/ after Darius I
They are heavily BMAC admixed; and thus show little direct affinities with Cimmerians
Cimmerians - the east shifted ones- are close to the so-called “Altai Scythians” [a modern back-projection]
In comparison to “Cimmerians”, the later Scythians are heavily European admixed
Which is why it is extremely dubious when one sees claims like “descendants of Scythians continue to live in Central Asia” , etc
@ Rob
So do you think Yamnaya originated in the Usatovo or Suvorovo Cultures ? Or are you talking about later expansion ?
"And Fatyanovo isn't the oldest stage of Corded Ware. It's also more heavily mixed with Globular Amphora. So this is in line with its lack of IBD sharing with Yamnaya.
"L51-rich Bell Beakers from around the same time also don't share IBD with Yamnaya."
I was not looking at Fatyanovo IBD sharing with Yamnaya L23/KMS67 or Hungarian Bell Beakers R1b-Z2109- no IBD results as of yet. Why is there no Z93 in Europe and hardly any in the region of Sintashta? Maybe Mat can give his thoughts on Fatyanovo IBD sharing with L51 or lack of.
@ Ric
''So do you think Yamnaya originated in the Usatovo or Suvorovo Cultures ? Or are you talking about later expansion ?''
There must be some link, although I'm not sure exactly what
My inference was a simple spatial one, although consistent with other lines of evidence
Something like this
This is for the period 4000-3000 bce, mind you.
As more Eneolithic data comes out, we would be able to analyse all aspects in fine detail: genome-wide ancestry, IBD links, uniparentals, burial posture, goods/ 'status', etc
How they intersect and what tell us specifically.
@ Rob
Interesting. Thanks.
@Rob
I knew that and wrote my comment knowing it. It is intentionally imprecise. As I said in the comment the Cimmerians included in G25 have a very varying level of BMAC related ancestry.
While cim358 is around the average of Tien-San Saka, cim359 resembles Altai Scythians and cim357 is almost like a Sarmatian with high Sintashta ancestry. A very mixed bag, that is why I could not be precise.
(Nevertheless Altai Scythians and especially Saka are also very heterogeneous themselves. The ancestry components were not evened out in these populations at the time when the sampled people were alive. Cimmerians are similar to them. As opposed to Sarmatians, who are much more homogeneous in their entire range, local admixtures not-withstanding.)
@ Slumberry
Yes, agree that Initial Scythians (''Cimmerians'') are heterogeneous, i just think that, overall, BMAC-related ancestry is not a salient element in their make-up c.f. Sarmatians or Sakae.
Granted Cim358 does have higher levels (~ 20%), but this is still lower than T/S-Sakae
The Tasmola Sakae (aside from a couple of outliers) are relatively compact & have very high Shamanka/Khvosgol-related ancestry, even higher that Tagar for instance. It is these groups which were arriving in the west ~ 800 bc, and have a paucity of BMAC-related ancestry (levels of ~7% )
Z2103 clearly contributed to the Bronze and Iron Age Balkans, Caucus, and parts of Anatolia and the steppe in terms of language, so no, CW is clearly not the urheimat.
@ Davidski
I understand that your entire statement proved it, and it probably was. But every "highway" works both ways. In fact, I found the answer to my question in your statement, in further comments:
"Davidski said ...
@Richard Rocca
I think a much bigger problem than any dates are the genetic ancestry and head shape of the earliest Rhenish and German Beakers; they're basically western Corded Ware people with brachycephalic skulls.
But I don't doubt that there was some Hungarian Yamnaya influence on Beakers as far west as parts of Germany. As you know, Z2103 has already popped up in Hungarian and Polish Beakers, and I think we might see it eventually in German Beakers, when enough of them are sampled.
February 7, 2019 at 12:23 PM "
So at this point you confirm what I wrote about now. We have Z2103 in Hungary, then further north - in the Czech Republic and Poland ... and here you write that you expect Hungarian influence in Germany.
So, if you haven't changed your mind, this is the answer to my question :)
@ Andrzejewski
I do not know why you conclude this, but it seems to be unfounded for now.
@ DragonHermit
Of course CWC is not an urheimat for Z2103. After all, we write all the time that it is typical for the S and SE parts of Europe. Nobody questioned it. BUT we have its influence and some migration to the north and this cannot be questioned anymore because we have samples of Z2103 from Poland and the Czech Republic.
Yes, bidirectional gene flow between Beaker communities in Germany and those south of the Carpathians is likely, and has actually been proven with ancient DNA.
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-balkan-connection.html
@Dranoel
What's your take on iron as a status metal, found in Yamnaya, Afanasievo Kurgan/burials, and Catacombe culture? Co-incidence also found in Hittites?
The Yamnaya people were pastoralists, but their specialisation and stratification was farily limited. There is absolutely no reason that any significant portion of the male population was hiding and for sure not a majority or large part of it.
I very much appreciate Davids current position, which I stressed all the time, that from my point of view there is no quick and easy transition from Yamnaya to Corded Ware culture. The whole framework is different, its based on different traditions, its from the Western fringe of the steppe and heavily influenced by neighbouring farmer cultures, which Yamnaya was not.
Corded Ware was closer culturally to groups like Cernavoda and Cotofeni among others than Yamnaya proper, especially those Yamnaya groups dominated by R-Z2103, which was just a completely different culture and ethnos. The Yamnaya pastoralists were restricted, throughout their existence, mostly to the steppe habitat in its narrowest sense. They rarely made it beyond and they rarely if ever successfully adapted to the more settled down and agro-pastoralist lifestyle which is the main pathway in most of continental Europe.
Its possible there was some gene flow between Yamnaya proper and Corded Ware and related Western groups, no doubt about that. But much more likely and important is that these two ways of adapting to different ecological niches and ways of life developed from one common root, which largely came up from the evolution of Lower Don Culture groups, which transitioned into Sredny Stog and from these both the Western groups (Corded Ware and related) and the more Eastern (Yamnaya proper) came up. This was, at the time Yamnaya proper and Corded Ware and related groups had formed, not long ago.
So if there was a good overlap of segments between the two groups, the exact size and dates matter a lot, because they are supposed to have been closely related, with a branching event less than half a millenium ago and potential gene flow going on afterwards.
The idea that Corded Ware is a direct descendent of Yamnaya proper is in no way viable. Even the alternative model of a very Western fringe group is debatable, but it would also soften up the definition of Yamnaya. Because those real Yamnaya which made it to the West were simple pastoralists, just as they appear in Bulgaria and Pannonia. They were clearly different from the Corded Ware and related groups in all respects, even if they, what's possible, spoke the same language.
@ zardos
''Corded Ware was closer culturally to groups like Cernavoda and Cotofeni among others than Yamnaya proper, especially those Yamnaya groups dominated by R-Z2103, which was just a completely different culture and ethnos. The Yamnaya pastoralists were restricted, throughout their existence, mostly to the steppe habitat in its narrowest sense. They rarely made it beyond and they rarely if ever successfully adapted to the more settled down and agro-pastoralist lifestyle which is the main pathway in most of continental Europe.''
All the features of CWC are seen in contemporaneous Budzhak Yamnaya, incl the eponymous battle axes and corded ware beakers. That is because they derive from the same pre-Yamnaya groups from NW Pontic region, instead of the Iran-> LDC stories which you imagine
Moreover, Yamnaya groups did move to non-steppe regions in the Balkans.
@ Dranoel
This might help explain what your seeking
@Rob
Which Yamnaya burials in the Balkans aren't on the steppe?
Keep in mind that the steppe extends down into eastern Bulgaria, almost as far as Greece.
@ Dave
Well there is a small cluster in Montenegro
But thats not the point. Rather, I suspect that the descendants of Yamnaya could adapt to highland and valley zones beyond the steppe, after 2500 BCE . The difficulty is that classical Yamnaya culture ends at this time; and clear continuity is only evident in its Katacomb sons back i the Don-Caucasus steppe
What I could gather is that Budzhak was Yamnaya and if Corded Ware and Yamnaya were Cousins then Budzhak basically had nothing to do with the genetic formation of Corded Ware. Cousins basically tells me that there was at least one stage extra between the Common Ancestor and the eventual formation of the two.
@Ric
Yamnaya and Corded Ware are genetic cousins. That is, more precisely, some (many?) Yamnaya and Corded Ware individuals are actual cousins.
This doesn't meant that we should necessarily view the Yamnaya and Corded Ware cultures as cousins.
So they may, for instance, have been siblings, or Yamnaya may have been the mother culture of Corded Ware.
Matt
It is absolutely impossible for the Polish population to reach its effective population size (the largest in Europe) in the marshes of Pripyat. First, thisee area was very sparsely populated (palynological and genetic data). Second, it is not known how to imagine it. The population of Pripyat would have to move entirely to the territory of Poland and territory of Poland have to be a complete settlement emptiness.
@ambron, the population size estimated in Al-Asadis paper was smaller than Spain, France and Italy and comparable to Great Britain and Germany.
Matt
In any case, it is very large, comparable to the most populous countries in Europe.
David, it is about the Roman period that preceded the Middle Ages. In Ralph's study, we clearly see the IBD segments sharing from this period between Poles and the Balkan population.
Bullshit.
These shared segments are due to Slavic expansions from the north.
The dating is wrong, because it's based on modern data. Ancient data show a shift in Balkan genetic structure after the Roman period.
The change in the genetic structure of the Balkans after the Roman period is not related to the change in the genetic structure of Poland during the Roman period.
But this is a detail that is not worth arguing about.
Going forward, it will be interesting to compare the IBD segments between, Fatyanovo-Balanovo 2900 to 2050 BC to L51 in Corded Ware and compare the mystery of the elite Poltavka sample I0432-2925-2536 calBCE.
"Considering that Poltavka outlier came from a Kurgan burial, and was therefore an individual of some social standing, he might be the direct ancestor of many millions of present-day Asians"
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-poltavka-outlier.html
ambron, yes I definitely agree these things show a relatively large population size that is at some odds with idea of much smaller population size.
There are methods that can reconstruct effective population size curves over time in fine, recent detail. See example for Scandinavia - https://www.genetics.org/content/genetics/204/2/711/F6.large.jpg - and the Netherlands in high detail - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Dutch-effective-population-size-over-time-a-Historical-change-in-effective-population_fig2_338365045.
So what would really validate the idea of a proportionately large expansion would be to compare these curves for Poland to other large European countries. I don't know if it is currently validated to consider a population expansion necessarily simply from what is presented in Coop and similar papers.
@a, I think looking at the Poltavka outlier, if he can be sampled in such depth, may be interesting to try and compare the distribution of IBD matches (if there are any), in particular less because I'd expect the sample to be a "super ancestor" who had unusual numbers of offspring, but because it might distinguish as to whether the Sintashta like outlier was actually a sample with a pattern of relatedness to people from a later era (say 500-600 years later) in a way that indicates the sample was misdated. It's altogether feasible that this was a person who originated in one of the CWC cultures but became part of Poltavka, but the alternative is also possible... It's not uncommon for the same kurgan sites to be reused.
@ Matt
Just keep in mind that often models can be wrong, no matter how whizz-bang its authors claim them to be. At best, they should serve as an 'icing on the cake' in analysis; nothing substitutes for the sanity check of raw, analogue data
@ Ambron
''The change in the genetic structure of the Balkans after the Roman period is not related to the change in the genetic structure of Poland during the Roman period.''
C'mon, let's not live in denial. They're obviously linked
Some food for thought for you & Matt: between 600 & 800 AD, there are ~ 60,000 burials in the Carpathian basin. Poland in 500 AD looks virtually empty in comparison. The same could be said for the northern & central Balkans ~ 600 AD.
@Rob, sure but a model in this case should be wrong in a systematic way (rather than like, it gets some right and some wrong for unaccountable reasons). I'm not sure what would be raw analogue data you could draw an inference from here either.
@Matt
The R1a (-https://amtdb.org/sample/I0432 sample is interesting)
Potopovka or Poltavka?
"Ÿ- 10432 / SVP42
Potapovka I is an important cemetery of the late MBA or MBA2 Sintashta-culture era, but
this grave shows that an older MBA Poltavka cemetery was located in the same place on the
Sok River, in the transitional forest-steppe zone of Samara oblast. Grave 6 was dated 2925-
2536 calBCE (4180 ± 84 BP: AA12569), centuries older than the MBA2 grave pit that cut
through it, removing about 60% of the Grave 6 skeleton. Grave 6 was that of a male
(confirmed genetically) age 35-45 years, his foot bones stained with red ochre, buried with
the lower leg bones of a sheep or goat. His Y-chromosome haplotype was R1a1a1b2a (...)
His MtDNA haplotype was U5a1c. Another Poltavka grave under kurgan 3 was cut through in
the same way, so Potapovka 1 seems to have been established in the MBA2 directly on top
of an older Poltavka cemetery."
@ Matt
SNPs, to potentially go into Global 25? Or is it a no-go?
It depends on how many SNPs overlap in both datasets. In this case only Davidski can tell...
Re: Ne
"Recent effective population size in Eastern European plain Russians correlates with the key historical events"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66734-y
Based on the smallest value of the RMSE, the following three models were selected for the studied populations: DE for Russians, EFE for Bashkirs, FE for Tatars.
DE - double exponential expansion
According to the DoRIS optimized scenario, the population of the ethnic Russians was of constant size before the 115th generation (~13th century BC, assuming 30 years per generation), then it was growing until the generation 65 (~5th century AD), after that it began to grow with increasing rates.
Comparison with the Netherlands (very similar trajectories):
https://i.postimg.cc/nF7PtDJW/popsize.png
https://i.postimg.cc/ZbBxktrK/popsize28to30.png
Matt - it's just a general comment. In most parts of Europe, the state of research allows fairly good overview of how many sites there where in a certain time-period, whether they were dispersed/. nucleated, and inform on demography. Although impressionistic, it would constrain any model which seems at odds
Rob, archeology is not a scientific discipline that places restrictions on other disciplines (although this is how some archaeologists would like to see it). Neither palynology nor genetics show any particular depopulation of Poland in the middle of the first millennium. As I wrote before, archeology is a lottery. The shortage of burials in relation to the population density is mainly explained by the change in the level and topology of waters in a given period, because urn cemeteries were usually located near water reservoirs. On the other hand, the excess of burials is sometimes the result of plagues, such as wars or epidemics. In the Carpathian Basin, the Romans, Dacians, Sarmatians, Germans, Slavs, Huns and Avars clashed at that time.
@ambron
"On the other hand, the excess of burials is sometimes the result of plagues, such as wars or epidemics. In the Carpathian Basin, the Romans, Dacians, Sarmatians, Germans, Slavs, Huns and Avars clashed at that time."
There were no Romans, Dacians, Sarmatians or Huns in the Carpathian Basin in the time period mentioned by Rob. No large scale warfare mentioned by any sources either. Also in general this argument is weird when we are talking about a sustained high burial density for 200 years. When a war causes a lot of death, then it often means mass graves (or even no graves), not individual burials, and once it happened the number of deaths must drop. You cannot say that the much bigger number of burials for 200 years is due to wars, because people do not live for 200 years, wars or not...
As for the first part of your argument: do you think that water bodies behaved fundamentally different in the Carpathian Basin than in Poland or do you think that an order of magnitude of difference in found burials can be caused by sheer luck?
@arza, thanks for that comparison; yeah I had seen that Russian study (and I think there's a fine scale Estonian one out there - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41431-020-0699-4 - though of course less relevant to Slavic groups) - I was a bit nervous about mentioning the curve in that one since had some worries that it might not be an even comparison due to whether low-level Siberian admixture might somehow inflate population size (though I don't think this happened in the Estonian set so is maybe not a serious concern).
Yeah, I guess it is up to David to say on those Italian population isolates. Though I think there should be enough overlap potentially - found an Anthrogenica thread from the time of the paper where user Tomenable posted a set of what he claimed was G25 data for the Carloforte subset (https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?15969-Effective-population-size-in-open-and-isolated-European-populations).
These at least have the right sort of positions it looks like - https://imgur.com/a/YQ6BVKO, which are consistent with their population history, very Northwest Italian but with an individual Carloforte14 with a slight displacement towards Sardinia, possible marriage connection, and some other individuals trailing off in a Sardinian direction.
(Population History on Wikipedia: "Carloforte was founded in the 18th century by around 30 families of coral fishers, originally from the Ligurian town of Pegli, near Genoa. They had left their hometown in 1541, and had settled in the island of Tabarka, off the coast of Tunisia, to fish for coral. After centuries, the coral in that area was exhausted and the families, while setting off back to Italy, found there was plenty of coral in the sea off the Sardinian west coast. They asked the King of Piedmont-Sardinia Charles Emmanuel III for permission to settle down on the once uninhabited San Pietro Island instead. When he granted them permission, the island was colonized (1739); the name Carloforte ("Charles the Strong", but also the "Carlo's Fort") was given to the town they then proceeded to found, in the Piedmontese king's honour.")
The Carlofortese don't seem to have made it to the final Global25 datasheets, but this data seems compatible enough. Unless there were some concerns about inaccuracies from incompatibilities.
Slumbery, the Avar Kaganate, which was continuos wars, was enough. The Carpathian Basin could not be particularly densely populated at that time, since the Magyars found there a place for themselves without any problems.
I do not know how the water reservoirs of the Carpathian Basin behaved, but the hydrological changes in the Odra and Vistula basins caused settlement changes in these areas around the middle of the first millennium.
If someone can make a set of Plink files with those Italian samples then I can run them.
Additionally, if they're all labeled properly I can add them to the G25 datasheets.
@ambron
I'd argue that during the time when the Kaganate was on the top, there was not much of destructive, mass-killing war inside of their territory. But there is a much more important point I tried to make: warfare does not increase the number of burials for a 7 generations period, unless it is paired by a constant large scale population influx. It does not matter if people typically getting killed, die from the plague and starvation or die from old age, it will be the same amount of people. Except that war, plague, and famine also decrease the population, so even worse for this argument. War, plague, famine can cause a pulse in burial numbers, but in the long run (and 7 generations is a very long run in this context) they have the opposite effect.
As for the waters. I do not know the early Medieval situation in details, but I know that in Carpathian Basin also a lot of settlements were near waterways and a lot of rivers on the plains historically had unstable beds. I can imagine that the burial destruction in Poland was bigger, but I think there is a limit how of the difference can be attributed to this.
And as for the Hungarians, they arrived after this period, when the Kaganate had fallen and actual destructive invasions happened. Nevertheless, I do not think that the population in the 600-800 AD period was super dense here. I could be wrong, but I do not think that is the point Rob tried to make either. 60 000 burials in 7 generation can be still a low population density in the absolute sense, depending on how high the preservation ratio we assume. It just that, based on burial numbers, the population of Poland was even less.
https://www.academia.edu/48919873/The_Dnieper_homeland_of_IndoEuropeans
Here is a paper about the PIE. regarding CWC the author favors the idea that CWC is a Sredni Stog /north caucasian females mixing . So the affinity between Yamnaya and CW could be just an illusion.
Glad to see highlighted the Dneper Don urheimat. Interesting the linguistic argument based on the river names.
It's not an illusion. They are very closely related, it's just a matter of being sure how close exactly.
Third party female gene flow from the Caucasus doesn't explain what we're seeing.
"Paper" lmao
One thing that I'm not clear on, and maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the relevant literature, is exactly where the CHG admixture came into the western steppe. Anthony's sources seem to be saying the Dnieper-Donets was a predominantly EHG population with some WHG admixture. Later, its successors like Sredni Stog picked up EEF ancestry from neighboring Cucuteni-Trypillia, but that the CHG ancestry primarily happened in the eastern steppe and spread from there, i.e. Khvalynsk or even earlier. I'm a little unclear on what other alternatives to this model that Anthony et al seem to be promoting on where and when the CHG ancestry admixture happened.
There was a cline of EHG vs CHG ancestry on the steppe since the hunter-gatherer Neolithic period, and possibly even since the Mesolithic.
The CHG ancestry became more important over time, probably due to increasing mobility on the steppe.
Anthony was still talking recently about a late migration of hunter-gatherers from Iran that took CHG to the Volga Delta, and that this is where it spread from to the rest of the steppe, but I'd say that at this point it's just best to ignore him.
@Desdichado,
CHG ancestry in indigenous to the western Steppe. This is for sure ever since David Anthony confirmed it is present in hunter gatherer on the Volga river.
What he says is ~50% CHG, just like Yamnaya had, existed in Neolithic hunter gatherers along Volga river. This is at the eastern end of the PC Steppe which suggests this Yamnaya-like profile originated considerable east of Ukraine.
But it doesn't prove it. There is a still a possibility Yamnaya-like hunter gatherers existed from Ukraine to Volga river. The Dnieper Donet guys are in the middle of Ukraine. Maybe hunter gatherers in Eastern Ukraine were different.
I highly doubt they only existed on the Volga which is what Anthony seems to think. Steppe Eneolithic DNA suggests hunter gatherers like this lived in the Step near the Caucasus mountains too.
@Desdichado,
If you want to get a more specific answer.
My guess is Sredny Stog comes from Khvalynsk. Or from the same people along Volga who founded Khvalnsky. In other words, I think the foundation for all Kurgan people originated in Russia well east of Ukraine.
Yamnaya (who comes from Sredny Stog) is too EHG/CHG to be native to Ukraine in my opinion.
This is just a guess. We need Neolithic DNA from all over the PC Step to really know where exactly Sredny Stog came from.
I think Davidski tends to put more weight on Ukraine than I do.
The reality may be that Sredny Stog (by default Yamnaya) is mixture between CHG rich hunter gatherers from both Russia and Ukraine.
As an alternative to (but pre-dating the formulation of) the lower Volga theory for CHG, other (mostly Russian) archaeologists have proposed links between Lower Don & Zagros. They believe the presence of idols and settlements in the LDC needs to be accounted for by migrants from the Zagros region. However, the more plausible explanation is that they're complex fisher-hunter-gatherer communities. You dont need to come from the civilized Near East to throw up wattle-&-daub houses. The lack of any obvious intermediate sites makes it further unconvincing
There were people like Yamnaya in western Ukraine and even Moldova already during the Eneolithic.
So there's no need to derive Yamnaya directly from Khvalynsk, the Don region or even eastern Ukraine.
The EHG/CHG-like mix that gave rise to the Khvalynsk, Sredny Stog and, ultimately, Yamnaya populations did form between the Black and Caspian seas, but it formed such a long time ago that it doesn't directly explain the origins of Yamnaya and Corded Ware.
@ Davidski
When you say Eneolithic in that area at what timeframe are we looking at ?
Well, at least the Usatovo period, and maybe earlier, so 4,000-3000 BCE.
In any case, it seems to me that there was a narrow migration corridor along the northern shore of the Black Sea that linked the steppe in Moldova and surrounds to the Caspian-Volga steppes.
People moved back and forth along this corridor, but they didn't have much of an impact on the areas north of this area until the rise of Yamnaya.
So Ukrainian hunter-gatherers may have survived north of the Black into the early Yamnaya period, but this doesn't tell us anything about where Yamnaya formed.
@ Davidski
So where does the Stone Mazes and the Horse Headed Scepters (Khvalynsk expansion ? Or from that general area ?) come into the picture ? Was this a very early Eneolithic expansion from the East ?
I don't know much about that. But I guess if the western and eastern parts of the Eneolithic Pontic-Caspian steppe were linked via a corridor, then apart from gene flow, we should expect the exchange of ideas and all sorts of goods.
If you go by the dating on ANI163 , Yamnaya like people have been migrating into and mixing with Eastern Balkan Neolithic cultures since as far back as 4500-5000 BC, and as far south as Bulgaria.
The mouth of the Danube, like the mouth of the Nile was to Ancient Egypt, was a place rich in natural wealth that attracted people.
David, it didn't have to be a narrow migration corridor, because in the old days the Black Sea was just a larger lake.
@Gebnos Historia
"My guess is Sredny Stog comes from Khvalynsk. Or from the same people along Volga who founded Khvalnsky. In other words, I think the foundation for all Kurgan people originated in Russia well east of Ukraine."
Even if we put aside the YDNA mismatch, Khvalynsk is much lower on CHG than Yamnaya. That means you need another more CHG-rich source population to form Yamnaya with Khvalynsk.
Also looking at the map the Sea of Azov - Lower Don region is not any more distant from the Caucasus than the Volga region (let alone the core Khvalynks territory up north). In fact there is a better, more obvious route in that direction, because of better climate and vegetation.
Slumbery, I meant that the Avar Kaganate was the starting point for looting and robbery activities. The allied tribes of the Avars sheltered here, prisoners and slaves were brought here. The chronicles describe the stories of the kidnapping of entire Balkan villages and taking them across the Danube. Thus, it was not so much the absolute population density as the high rotation of human masses that could have caused the overrepresentation of burials in the Carpathian Basin.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s1vc7lkhmvpj1qj/CWC.jpg?dl=0
If we look at these graphs by David W. Anthony, we can assume the following. At the first stage, EHG is mixed with CHG (approximately with where the Afanasievo ejection is located) (I on the graph). As a result, EHG/GHC is formed similar to Berezhnovka. At the second stage, Berezhnovka is mixed with the eneolite of the Dnieper-Donets (II on the graph). As a result, an early Sredniy Stog is formed. And then everything is simple. We look at the graph. The upper right corner is CHG. The lower right corner is EEF. The lower-left corner is WHG. The most original and similar to the early Srednjy Stog are Yamnaya Don and the early CWC Baltic. All other populations are formed by mixing the early Sredniy Stog with populations with maximum CHG (III). This is Afanasievo. Further from IV to V, CHG gradually decreases and EEF increases. Then VI and VII are mixed with the EEF/WHG populations. VIII is mixed with the WHG population. This is the Baltic Sea.
The ancient admixture between EHG and CHG-like populations took place in the North Caucasus, not north of the Caspian Sea.
This idea that David Anthony has that foragers from Iran migrated north into the Volga Delta is his own personal fantasy not supported by any data.
@avidski "The ancient admixture between EHG and CHG-like populations took place in the North Caucasus, not north of the Caspian Sea.
This idea that David Anthony has that foragers from Iran migrated north into the Volga Delta is his own personal fantasy not supported by any data."
I think that in relation to PCA, this is not essential. Apparently, the coordinates of Berezhnovka roughly correspond to the coordinates of Progress-En
@Ric Hern
I recall reading somewhere that isotopic analysis showed the copper from the copper artifacts of Khvalynsk came from the Balkans.
@Vladimir
The oldest steppe samples with a lot of CHG-like ancestry are from the Middle Volga region. They're foragers dated to the so called Pottery Neolithic.
But the steppe sample with the highest ratio of CHG-like ancestry is Vonyuchka Eneolithic.
So there's good reason to assume that this CHG-like ancestry spread north from the Caucasus, probably along the Volga, and finally into the Volga Delta.
I honestly don't know what the hell Anthony was thinking when he came up with his Iran theory. It seems to me that he wasn't thinking at all.
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