Saturday, September 4, 2021

The genomic formation of modern Balkan peoples (Olalde et al. 2021 preprint)


Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. This preprint deals with some very complex issues, so I can't say much about it until I have a good look at the relevant genotype data. However, for now, my impression is that the authors have oversimplified the genetic origins of most Balkan peoples.

For instance, they model the present-day Greek population as a two way mixture between ancient Greeks from a Greek colony in Iberia and present-day Mordovians. The Mordovians are basically a proxy for the Slavs who moved into the Balkans during the Medieval period.

However, the problem is that, strictly speaking, this isn't a historically plausible model, because Mordovians are actually a Uralic-speaking group from the Volga region with significant Siberian ancestry. Needless to say, it's extremely unlikely that anyone like them had an appreciable impact on the present-day Greek gene pool.

So instead I'd like to see the authors try three-way and four-way models with ancients from Mycenae, Anatolia and some places (well to the west of the Volga River) likely to have been inhabited by early Slavs.

Feel free to let me know what you think about this preprint in the comments below. Here's the abstract:

The Roman Empire expanded through the Mediterranean shores and brought human mobility and cosmopolitanism across this inland sea to an unprecedented scale. However, if this was also common at the Empire frontiers remains undetermined. The Balkans and Danube River were of strategic importance for the Romans acting as an East-West connection and as a defense line against “barbarian” tribes. We generated genome-wide data from 70 ancient individuals from present-day Serbia dated to the first millennium CE; including Viminacium, capital of Moesia Superior province. Our analyses reveal large scale-movements from Anatolia during Imperial rule, similar to the pattern observed in Rome, and cases of individual mobility from as far as East Africa. Between ∼250-500 CE, we detect gene-flow from Central/Northern Europe harboring admixtures of Iron Age steppe groups. Tenth-century CE individuals harbored North-Eastern European-related ancestry likely associated to Slavic-speakers, which contributed >20% of the ancestry of today’s Balkan people.

Olalde et al., Cosmopolitanism at the Roman Danubian Frontier, Slavic Migrations, and the Genomic Formation of Modern Balkan Peoples, bioRxiv, posted August 31, 2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.30.458211

See also...

A Greek tragedy

182 comments:

  1. It has to be much more than just >20%. I suspect the culprit is the 527AD Justinian Plague that not only decimated the Romanized population but it also contributed to the societal collapse akin to what it did in Britain around the same time. In both cases the Slavic or Germanic invaders had become the new rulers afterwards.

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  2. Y chromosome lineages also provide evidence for gene-flow, as 5 of 7 males in the Central/Northern European and Steppe cluster belonged to two lineages not found in the Balkans earlier: haplogroup I1 with a strong Northern European distribution and haplogroup R1a-Z645, common in the Steppe during the Iron Age and early 1st millennium CE 26–28.

    Mediana site

    Both skeletons laid in their graves in an outstretched position, with their hands alongside their bodies. They had an east-west orientation, with their heads on the west 4. The archaeological and historical context indicates these individuals belonged to the Gothic cultural circle 9. In connection with this, both individuals present artificially deformed skulls which were characteristic of Germanic tribes during the Great Migration period (Figure S4). This cultural practice was could have been adopted from the Huns 11. Furthermore, the skull bandaging method observed for these two individuals corresponds with other examples of cranial deformation previously observed in Germanic necropolises at Viminacium 12.

    From this necropolis, only G-34 individual yielded enough DNA for further genetic study. The analysis of this sample points towards them having Central-North European Iron Age- related ancestry, admixed with a small yet significant portion of Iron Age Steppe related ancestry, compatible with possible Germanic peoples (further explained in Supplementary section 12.6).

    I1a2a1a1a, I1,I-Z58,I-Z59,I-CTS8647,Z60,Z140,Z141

    How much of this Goth or Gepid Central-North European Iron Age-related ancestry is in modern South Slavs?


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  3. I do not know why they even included Mordovians, but they run the same calculations with Russians too. (Although it would be good to know what Russian samples were used exactly...)

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  4. They're the usual north Russians from Kargopol; very similar to Mordovians and obviously with a lot of Uralic ancestry.

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  5. I dont get why they used the empuries (iberian) sample to model modern mainland greeks when the roman_greek sample they previewed is from mainland greece itself. As usual we need classical greek samples, but if they are really cypriot-like like the roman_greek one, then we can safely say that mainland greeks have actually very little continuity with ancient ones.

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  6. @davidski

    I tried to reproduce these in G25 nmontes using Russians from Kursk and Belarusians. The difference is not very big in this particular setup, although for population with high Slavic ancestry (like Serbians) the fit visibly improves. I suspect that the usage of an Iberian colony of an Anatolian Greek city is a bigger problem for a simple two way model like this.

    BTW, they are consistently using non-Slavic populations as reference. Ingria IA? That is almost certainly Finno-Ugric too. In the supplementary materials they say they simply could not find more proximate ancient samples for that model.

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  7. Could Sarmatian ancestry be a proxy for the Alani? Jordanes mentions several mixed Goth-Alani people in the area.

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  8. These samples should be crucial to understand how the Balkan cline today came about.

    When I look at formal stats (450k SNPs on the HO array), and fortunately Italy_Imperial.SG is such good quality I can use it with moderns, there's a cline in the Turkey_N:IronGatesMeso:Steppe_EMBA that points roughly through all the Balkan populations to a destination that looks like Czech Republic or Hungary.

    Here are the stats in question: https://imgur.com/a/yygDV6R

    But we need samples to sort of validate whether this is actually showing us a scenario that has simple two-way admixture...

    An alternative scenario: https://imgur.com/a/QYKmZPW

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  9. Mainland Greeks can still be modelled with empuriote/myceanean and a standard slavic source like hun_avar_szolad. Source: altvred on AG

    https://imgur.com/kF6iNRP
    https://imgur.com/wZ5VKqD
    https://i.imgur.com/vUmKeJm.png
    https://imgur.com/goYqSyu

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  10. OloriNick said...
    "I dont get why they used the empuries (iberian) sample to model modern mainland greeks when the roman_greek sample they previewed is from mainland greece itself. As usual we need classical greek samples, but if they are really cypriot-like like the roman_greek one, then we can safely say that mainland greeks have actually very little continuity with ancient ones."

    Why would classical greeks be cypriot like? What historical record accounts for this massive population change in the mainland (like we have in Italy: see Juvenal, etc.)?

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  11. Frickin' Mordovians. They should know Mordovians are Uralic and not a good reference for proto-Slavs. This is an elementary mistake.

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  12. I remember a Polish and Serbian user on DNA forums who had I1a3 Z58. Now we know for sure they had Goth Y DNA.

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  13. A few more plots at looking at the present day Balkan cline - https://imgur.com/a/x1PAbyW

    I thought f4(Blatterhohle_MN,Latvia_BA;X,Y) might be a good stat for sorting out the "Balto-Slavic drift"; presuming that Blatterhohle_MN has the same amount of WHG:Antolian ratio as the non-steppe part of Latvia_BA when plotted against f4(Mbuti,Steppe_EMBA;X,Y) it should give a nice breakout of the BS drift. It seems to have done OK, although not 100% perfect.

    @Frank D: Word of Davidski at the moment (as of May) on classical era Greeks is as follows: - https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/05/beware-of-greeks-bearing-gifts.html - "Greeks do have Cypriot-like ancestry, it's just that it's not necessarily from Cyprus. This is obvious by looking at modern Greek DNA vs Mycenaean DNA. But it'll also be shown with new samples from Classical Greece, some of which actually cluster with Cypriots and Anatolians."

    It seems even less likely that, if Dave's been previewed correctly about classical era Greeks, that much later pre-Slavic Migration influenced Greeks as of 600 AD or something about 900 years later, after a few hundred years of Romanization and many more years of Hellenic empires in Anatolia, are basically still gonna be Mycenaean like.

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  14. I have to say that I'm more than slightly amused for people being embarrassed because of reference groups representing completely wrong linguistic circles. Luckily this however is a genetic, not linguistic study. Late Sarmatians in the Supp's PCA BTW look surprisingly Uralic, if I'm right.

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    1. Not so surpricing knowing Finnish ancestry includes even iranic genes influence.

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  15. Modeling Greeks with Mordovians isn't particularly realistic in terms of linguistics, geography or genetics.

    Models can work depending on what outgroups and other references are chosen, but such models are only very broad reflections of reality, like this one.

    And why would Greeks have Uralic-like ancestry from the Volga anyway, when they don't have any discernible Siberian admixture?

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  16. I have noticed that there are at least some Greeks with paternal N, too. Not that it would be anyhow related to the Ingrian/Mordovian/whatever used in the study, but: who'd have believed that?

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  17. @ Drake

    Modern Greeks are more west asian/east med admixed compared to their forefathers.They have Imperial Rome mix like Italians and other balkaners got.If you remove their northern(balto-slavic admix) you get an Anatolian like population.

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  18. At what point do the scientists get told they can’t science anymore? Amateurs are leaps and bounds ahead of many of these people...

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  19. Been a while since I posted, but somewhat related to this topic, a pre-print using a new version of Globetrotter is making the case for pervasive West Asian-North African as well as Siberian admixture into Europe, in the case of the former dated to just after the fall of the Roman empire apparently.

    https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.12.455263v1

    (I honestly don't know how accurate the model of some Germans groups being part Moroccan part NW European is, to me at least the paper doesn't make much sense)

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  20. @FoxVillager

    My impression is that Greeks are diverse with some having northern ancestry that is not Slavic. I also don't think Greece from Crete to Macedonia was entirely Anatolian before the Slavs. Anatolians are not exactly homogenous either judging by both the literature and G25.


    As for Imperial_Rome mix it's basically only found in southern Balkaners in any appreciable quantities and it doesn't seem to be the exact same thing that Imperial Romans had either.

    Could be wrong of course.

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  21. Very interesting study, aside from odd choice (might have had technical reasons? ) of Iron Age Uralics for proto-Slavs. Why wouldn't they use Szolad ? The net result would be a significant under-estimation of Slavic admixture. Also questionable claims of female-biased admixture, doesn't seem to be consistent with Y-DNA

    Given the Cosmopolitan nature of cities, Iron Age samples would be required to accurately discern what Balkans looked like.

    Kuline is very interesting. This is where Royal Frankish Annals place the Timociani, a Slavic tribe near the Timok river (although dated to 9th century vs 10th of this site). They rebelled against Bulgar dominion and sought alliance with the Franks, along with a host of other groups (e.g. Abodriti, Serbs). The west European twins could be a Frankish link

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  22. When the genomes become publicly available, they are likely going to be of significant importance for the debate on the origins of the Albanians and their language. Most prominent linguists have longed argued for a proto-Albanian homeland in southern Serbia and/or Kosovo (part of Moesia Superior), from a Daco-Moesian population. Indeed, judging from inscriptions, most Roman soldiers stationed in Viminacium in the time transect of the study, were of Daco-Moesian origin.

    While some of the E-V13 and J2b branches of these samples might belong to the ones that are common in Albanians, aren't the two R1b's part of the "Near Eastern" and CNE outliers respectively? So they were part of genotypes that were foreign to the region. Could the R1b-CTS450+ be part of the Germanic BY250 subclade?
    If the latter is the case, we would have no local genotypes with R1b-Z2103, which is very strange, given its frequency in modern Albanians.

    These studies are likely to annoy nationalists from both Serbia and Albania, as they might suggest that proto-Albanians lived in now Slavic lands, and that Albanians did not always inhabit Albania.

    Furthermore, the evidence for an Albanian-Illyrian connection becomes even weaker if you consider that J2b samples from Bronze and Iron Age Croatia (in Illyrian sensu lato territories) belong to entirely different subclades (J-Z38240, J-Z36834, J-Z615) from the primary J2b lineages of Albanians (J-Y20899). The authors themselves indicated that the ancient Croatian samples seemed to have been autosomally closer towards Slovenian Iron Age samples (likely Celtic-influenced), and not the Serbian Iron Age and Roman local samples.

    The Balkans have always been a melting pot, and nationalist propaganda is not going to cut it as science advances - be it Greek, South Slavic, or Albanian. Lets not forget the Palatial Aegean fiasco.

    Now regarding the modelling of modern Greeks, we would need Mycenaean + West Asian + South Slav + Albanian/Vlach proxies. Perhaps even something related to Helladic MBA, as Central and Northern Greeks may have been influenced from populations from further to the North. The upcoming samples from North Macedonia will hopefully help us resolve the proximate origins of modern Greeks.

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  23. @ Arza et al

    Which are the ‘Scythians’ supposed to show some Balto-Slavic affinity ?

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  24. Not directly germane to the topic but sort of close - is there any consensus on how Greek modern day Anatolian Turks are? I've recently been reading a bit on the initial Turkish conquest of Anatolia in the 11th-12th centuries and it's truly staggering just how destructive and pervasive Turkish raids really were. The Byzantines don't seem like they ever really had much of a chance.

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  25. @ gamerz

    If its not Slavic then how you explain their balto-slavic drift and the fact in all of the PCA's they have a direction/shift towards to Eastern EU?

    Second, what do you mean by anatolians? Who are the anatolians today? I dont know if from Macedonia down to Crete people were Anatolian admixed before the Slavic conquest, what i know is that modern Greeks showing Imperial Rome influences(Iran N, CHG, Levant PPNB etc). Ofc mainland Greeks less compared to Greek islanders who are pretty much mostly Anatolian-Levantine pop plus some Slavic.

    As for balkaners they show similar components as well(at least South balkaners, Romanians inclunding) are pretty much IA balkanic romanicized folks With Imperial mix plus the Slavic input.You just have to read the recent paper/study.Its obvious this Middle East influx existed long before the Slavic invasion.Middle East/West Asian immigrants settled in various parts of the empire diplomats, mercenaries, merchants and so on. And as we can see they left some genetic impact. Ofc it decreased in some way with the Germanic and Slavic conquests both in Italy and Southeast Europe.

    There is even an African) Sudanese like individual founded) in the recent study. These Romans were the globalists of the Ancient World. They were taking mercenaries even from Africa.Imagine how many mercenaries and diplomats they received from Anatolia, Levant,Mesopotamia etc.

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  26. @ Leonidas

    '' Most prominent linguists have longed argued for a proto-Albanian homeland in southern Serbia and/or Kosovo (part of Moesia Superior), from a Daco-Moesian population.''


    However provinces like Dacia Ripensis, Darsania, were abandoned by the Byzantine administration ~ 600/ 620 AD.
    By contrast, 'refugees' from these provinces and elsewhere swelled in regions such as Epirus, which show continuity through the late Migration Era and into Middle Ages. Evidently, they coalesced into a new peoples at some point between the 600s and when Albanians first become noted in historical sources in the 10/11th cc.

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  27. Linguistically, Albanian has long proven a connection with Illyrian (and Messapic too), so I don't know what some here are going on about. The Albanoi themselves were an Illyrian tribe, and Illyrian tribe names are all linked to names of animals and plants in the modern Albanian language. See Dalmatia, Taulanti, Dardania, etc... From the little Thracian/Dacian inscriptions we have, there's 0 link to Albanian (at least linguistically). It seems this Leonidas is some Greek dude "concern trolling" the rest of the Balkans.

    These samples though are not representative of all Iron Age Balkans, but northern parts. We are still missing a huge chunk of DNA from the Illyrian/Macedonian/Paeonian/Epirote belt that will enlighten us more on the Iron Age Balkans. They should be CLOSE genetically to these samples, but they will enlighten on how the Balkans were Indo-Europeanized.

    Both that Mycenean study and this I might say are pure garbage. The data is FINE, but the conclusion and comparisons make no sense. Really disappointing. At least this study takes into account Slavic migrations to the Balkans, unlike the Mycenean study that just skimmed over it. But the reference populations make no sense.

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  28. @Huck Finn I can see some of the Greek N being picked up by Slavs from Avars and Magyars. Maybe some of it came through Anatolia with Turks also.

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  29. The data on the share of the Slavic admixture in the Balkan population obtained when selecting Russians from Kargopol as a proxy for early Slavs are surprisingly consistent with the data obtained when selecting Poles:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Bulgarians#/media/File:A_genetic_atlas_of_human_admixture_history_-_East_Europe_II_and_Mediterranean.png

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  30. "Rob said...
    Very interesting study, aside from odd choice (might have had technical reasons? ) of Iron Age Uralics for proto-Slavs. Why wouldn't they use Szolad ? The net result would be a significant under-estimation of Slavic admixture. Also questionable claims of female-biased admixture, doesn't seem to be consistent with Y-DNA"

    At least in Greece, the percentage of Slavic Y DNA doesn't show signs of male bias. We already knew that of course by looking at modern Greek mtDNA distribution, where we find many clades of clear Northern Balkan and Slavic origin. But since nobody takes mtDNA into account for some reason, it's nice to see it formally acknowledged.

    "DragonHermit said...
    Both that Mycenean study and this I might say are pure garbage."

    I'll take Reich, Lazaridis and Olalde over random anonymous Balkan users with a nationalist axe to grind. Seems like a lot of people are annoyed by the evidence of East Med/Anatolian influence in the Balkans and Greece. It's ok, the East Med is cool :)

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  31. @ Alex

    ''At least in Greece, the percentage of Slavic Y DNA doesn't show signs of male bias. We already knew that of course by looking at modern Greek mtDNA distribution, where we find many clades of clear Northern Balkan and Slavic origin. But since nobody takes mtDNA into account for some reason, it's nice to see it formally acknowledged.''

    I've not seen any full-mitogenomic studies of modern Greeks. Where can one look to ?

    From a Y-DNA perspective, mainland Greeks have ~ 30% ''Slavic' Y-DNA (I2a1 and R1a-assoc); leaving aside the provenance of E-V13. So if Greeks have even more Slavic mtDNA (say ? 50 - 60%), then the Slavic impact in mainland Greece was truly huge.



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  32. @ambron

    But instead of using Mordovians, Poles, Avars or whoever else, why not just sample a few really old Slavs?

    Considering the numbers of samples being sequenced these days, it shouldn't be too difficult to find some early Slavs for a paper like this, which really needs them.

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  33. @Foxvillager

    "If its not Slavic then how you explain their balto-slavic drift and the fact in all of the PCA's they have a direction/shift towards to Eastern EU?"

    Never said it's not Slavic, but I don't believe it's just Slavic because there are the same time lineages in Balkaners associated with NW Europe (subclades of R1b and I1 for example).

    "You just have to read the recent paper/study.Its obvious this Middle East influx existed long before the Slavic invasion."

    I've read it and they write that this type of ancestry does not seem to have contributed substantially to the region. USing Global25, you can also find some minor Anatolian-related gene flow in most Balkaners up to Croatians but not even in all the samples.


    "Second, what do you mean by anatolians? Who are the anatolians today? "

    That's my point, there is no one type of Anatolian, Anatolians from Antioch /SW Turkey are different to those from NW Turkey/Laz -inhabited areas and different from those on the Aegean coast. Given the papers, it was like that during ancient-times too, the NE cluster in the paper is not as Levantine shifted as some modern-day Anatolians are.

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  34. There's definitely Bronze Age and later Anatolian ancestry in the Balkans, because Balkan samples from the Iron Age and earlier sit on a different cline from modern Balkan groups.

    You can see that on any decent PCA of Europe that compares modern and ancient samples.

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  35. @ Tom: yes, paternal N among Greeks is probably related to Avars, Magyars and such, quite possibly via Slavs.

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  36. One of the samples(G15-G25-G26-G27A-G28-G97-G123) from Slog Necropolis from phase II is-R1b-CTS-1450 -a clad also found in modern day Russian-Mordovins.
    I15552 Timacum Minus, Slog Necropolis R1b-Z2103,R-M12149,R-Z2106,R-Z2108,R-Z2110,R-CTS7556,R-Y5592,R-CTS1450 H1c
    https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-CTS1450/

    Leonidas D said...
    "When the genomes become publicly available, they are likely going to be of significant importance for the debate on the origins of the Albanians and their language. Most prominent linguists have longed argued for a proto-Albanian homeland in southern Serbia and/or Kosovo (part of Moesia Superior), from a Daco-Moesian population. Indeed, judging from inscriptions, most Roman soldiers stationed in Viminacium in the time transect of the study, were of Daco-Moesian origin.

    While some of the E-V13 and J2b branches of these samples might belong to the ones that are common in Albanians, aren't the two R1b's part of the "Near Eastern" and CNE outliers respectively? So they were part of genotypes that were foreign to the region. Could the R1b-CTS450+ be part of the Germanic BY250 subclade?
    If the latter is the case, we would have no local genotypes with R1b-Z2103, which is very strange, given its frequency in modern Albanians."



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  37. @ Gamerz

    I am not 100% sure if there was a pop in the balkans with such a northern autosomal like 'balto-slavs' got....but lets say that some of the 'paleobalkaners' used to had a good bulk of steppe DNA,still the vast majority of modern Greeks having an eastern euro shift(balto-slavic drift).They need a 'Slozad' like refrence in their modelings...prefering it over other 'paleobalkan'samples we got.You can also check it as i mention above from the PCA's.They have a direction towards southeast/eastern europe.As for the lineages you mention,there are indeed some weird clades can be found in Greece from I2,I1 to R1b.Don't forget that was Greece raided even from Celts and Germanics during the periods...and ofc later we had the Crusaders here.

    As for the 'Anatolian' issue i can tell you as an 'Anatolian Greek' my self, that with exception Cappadocian Greeks and Pontic Greeks(thought the last are Caucasian-west Georgian/Laz admixed) all the other groups are pretty much dead or mixed with other elements.Anatolian Greeks from the west coast are nothing else but mainland Greeks and Greek islanders in their autosomal.They are immigrants there during the Ottoman times(diplomats,merchants,sailors,traders etc).They got zero relation with ancient anatolians.Also,keep in mind that the bronze age anatolian samples we got until now.. are foreign even for Cappadocian Greeks and Pontic Greeks, simply becuase both have a high Levantine admix...something that is lacking from the bronze age samples we already have from Cappadocia.Only the samples from Arslantepe in some way showing a huge bulk of Levantine/Mesopotamian admix(but this region for some people it is considered to be northern mesopotamia or western armenian highlands).Anyway,with a few words...we need post-bronze age Anatolian samples to check what exactly happened there.There was def a semetic/levantine genetic influx in the area.

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  38. @Davidski

    There's some of course, I was just mentioning that not all samples have it in G25 runs I did. Maybe most Greeks and Albanians do but not really Serbs and Croatians. That's why it seems northern Balkaners can get a passing fit being modeled as Bulgaria_IA and Slavic.

    Btw, could I ask your thoughts on that Globetrotter paper? Do you think MENA-type ancestry is so pervasive in western Europe and Siberian ancestry in eastern Europe?

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  39. Reducing admixture analyses to small haplotypes inevitably increases noise, and sometimes it's even possible to mistake the direction of gene flow, so no, I don't take those sorts of papers too seriously when they're claiming that minor percentages of admixture are real.

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  40. @ Dragon Hermit what are you talking about? A proven connection between Albanian and Illyrian? You seriously need to start familiarizing yourself with the primary literature on the ancient languages of the Balkans, otherwise the nationalist propaganda you have been regurgitating here is going to melt your brain.

    The fact that some Illyrian words can be explained through Albanian means at best that the languages might have been distantly related - even that is debatable, as Illyrian is one of the least known languages of the area.

    What you have to explain is how proto-Albanian matches perfectly all the linguistic transformations of Daco-Moesian (at least 100 times better attested than Illyrian), and at exactly the same time. And this is the consensus among linguists and Albanologists, such as Joachim Matzinger, Vladimir Georgiev, Vladimir Orel, John Bassett Trumper, and Edgar C. Polomé, among others.

    "The Albanoi themselves were an Illyrian tribe, and Illyrian tribe names are all linked to names of animals and plants in the modern Albanian language. See Dalmatia, Taulanti, Dardania, etc... "

    Almost all Dacian plant names in the works of Dioscurides have direct cognates in Albanian. Can you think why?

    Funny that you mention the Taulanti. Do you know that proto-Albanian lost its diphthongs *au>a and *eu>e very early (as did Daco-Moesian), whereas Illyrian maintained them: e.g. Albanian dhausa > dash, *aug-> ag; Daco-Moesian*dhau-kes > Dakes, *dhau-k-ina > dakina. Compare to Illyrian: Taulantius, Autariatae, Teuta, etc.

    "From the little Thracian/Dacian inscriptions we have, there's 0 link to Albanian (at least linguistically)."

    Go to Georgiev's book "Introduction to the history of the Indo-European languages", and check Table 10, page 140. What does it say about Daco-Moesian and Albanian? Georgiev was a genius, and you definitely aren't. Or are you going to say that he was biased because he was a Slav?

    You also have to explain why 40% of the Albanian language consists of Latin loans if they had always been in Albania, when almost the entirety of Albania was below the Jirecek line, and certainly Greek-speaking. There are barely 20 ancient Greek loanwords in Albanian, because the speakers of this language had always been above the Jirecek line. Do you even know what I am talking about?

    Now about genetics, virtually all likely proto-Albanian lines (E-V13, R1b-Z2103, J2b) are most diverse in the extreme North of Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro, corroborating linguistic data that Albanians expanded from the North in the last 1500 years. Also, why does Albanian J2b belong to such a different branch from ancient Croatian J2b, if the former are Illyrian descendants? No matter how much you might hate this conclusion, genetics is a pretty precise science, and you know that this pattern is true.

    You need a serious reality check, otherwise you are going to keep repeating ridiculous nationalist claims, in the same way that some Greeks believe that Vlachs are latinised Greeks, and that the Arvanites are a Dorian tribe.

    PS - I am Greek, and I descend paternally from Gheg Albanians. This doesn't mean I am going to leave propaganda from either country unchallenged.

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  41. @ a

    "One of the samples(G15-G25-G26-G27A-G28-G97-G123) from Slog Necropolis from phase II is-R1b-CTS-1450 -a clad also found in modern day Russian-Mordovins.
    I15552 Timacum Minus, Slog Necropolis R1b-Z2103,R-M12149,R-Z2106,R-Z2108,R-Z2110,R-CTS7556,R-Y5592,R-CTS1450 H1c
    https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-CTS1450/"

    This clade splits into several branches, which are correlated with Germanic (BY250), Slavic (Y5587), and paleo-Balkan (Z2705) migrations, respectively. So we need to go further downstream than R-CTS1450 if we are going to attempt an ethnic affiliation of the two samples from the Olalde et al. 2021 paper.

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  42. @Foxvillager

    "they got zero relation with ancient anatolians.Also,keep in mind that the bronze age anatolian samples we got until now.. are foreign even for Cappadocian Greeks and Pontic Greeks, simply becuase both have a high Levantine admix...something that is lacking from the bronze age samples we already have from Cappadocia"

    They probably have some relation with ancient Anatolians because they share similar components to some extent. I don't really know about Cappadocian Greeks but I think you misunderstood me, I didn't claim that the Anatolian admixture in Greeks was from modern-day Anatolian Greeks (though I suppose some of that too, I'd expect so at least).

    In fact my point was that the Anatolian ancestry most Greeks and Balkaners received does not seem to be as heavy in Levantine components as a lot of modern-day Anatolian ancestry is,although also didn't lack them entirely. Islanders on the other hand seem to have received more actual Levantine ancestry.

    ReplyDelete
  43. @Davidski

    Thanks for the reply.

    In G25 at least, there seems to be some minor MENA ancestry all the way up till southern France, though Basques don't show it and then some Italian ancestry in south Germans. Eastern Europeans west of Estonia don't really show Siberian although Polish and other Slavs show something EHG-related which might not even be there in reality (since I think you had talked about this in an earlier post)

    ReplyDelete
  44. @ Gamerz

    I have played a lot in G25 with various balkan pops inclunding Greeks.It depends individual.Some of them require something transcaucasus(CHG/Iran N),others need an Alalakh bronze age refrence(anatolian-levantine mix) while others need something pure Levantine (PPNB admix).Its obvious that these west asian immigrants were not homogenous genetically but coming from all over the middle east.Might had been anatolians,armeno-caucasians,mesopotamians,levantines even Perso-Iranics.What we can say for sure it is that balkans(or at least south balkans),Italy,Greece and maybe even some parts of Iberia?...showing this middle east influx that it can't be seen in central-eastern--western-northern EU.I am pretty sure and i believe that if it wasn't the Slavic and Germanic expansion towards to the former Roman Empire lands the middle east influx would had been quite higher from what it today.

    ReplyDelete
  45. David, as Arza said in his blog:

    "Luckily it's a preprint, so there's room for improvement."

    Now there are the early Slavic genomes from Krakauer Berg and Pohansko, and their entire battery from Poland is on the way.

    ReplyDelete
  46. @gamerz_J

    For modelling Croatians and North Balkanites, I don't think using BGR_IA would make sense as Croatians should descend from the distinct HRV_IA.

    As for MENA ancestry in the rest of Europe, Roman Imperial admixture can be detected all the way to south Germany. This paper was based on the city of Viminacium, which isn't exactly "deep-south" balkans. There are bound to be near-eastern samples found up all the way to Pannonia atleast.

    ReplyDelete
  47. @gamerz_j

    You are right, there does appear to be some Anatolian introgression in Croatia on G25 (even when BGR_IA is used, which has aegean already).

    https://imgur.com/mIHlNZY

    So this means near-east cluster individuals were common further north, or there is something not being taken into account.

    ReplyDelete
  48. Why don't they use ancient Greek samples from actual geographic Greece? Instead of a Greek speaking population from ancient Iberia? How silly.

    ReplyDelete
  49. I have many thoughts, some of which I've expressed before here and elsewhere.

    Despite some of the apparent headscratchers (Uralic proxies, conclusion of no lasting Anatolian shift in Balkanites north of Greece, etc.), this study is the first we've seen to propose the existence of both significant post-BA Near Eastern shifts and also medieval Slavic shifts in the Balkans. For that alone I'm thankful.

    It's nice to see confirmation of IA Paleobalkan people (Thracians, Illyrians. Dacians) plotting where I thought they would, in a cline between HRV IA and Bulgaria IA. I suspect ancient IA Macedonians will be on the Bulgaria IA-like end of that cline, and will have a lot more Emporiote-like ancestry than Paeonians. By the time of the Hellenistic period, probably more southern Greek ancestry coming into the area as well, I'd imagine.

    As far as modelling the samples with strong Anatolian ancestry goes, I think the reason Barcin Chalcolithic worked best in the paper might be because it has some steppe not found in the BA Isparta samples. The Imperial Roman-era Greek sample from Marathon is clearly going to plot near these heavily Anatolian-like people, probably somewhere in between Cypriots and Dodecanese if I had to guess. I expect many Hellenistic Greeks will fall on a cline connecting a Mycenaean/Emporiote profile to a Barcin Chl-like one. In fact, I suspect a cline like this might also have existed during the IA and classical times, but became even more firmly established during the Hellenistic period, with perhaps most Greeks falling more on the Anatolian side than LBA Aegean side by the Roman period. We will have to wait and see how the Himera samples turn out, but I think many might have been too quick to assume that classical Greeks will all look like Emporiotes. We even see interesting structure in BA Greece with a Cycladic sample having a lot more Iran Neo/CHG than the others, so there is precedent already for diversity. And we know already Mycenaeans will be more diverse than what we've seen. And who knows how things might have changed after the BA collapse. Two Emporiotes isn't a lot to go on.

    It is however interesting to note that the East Med cluster in general (where modern Aegean islanders and Southern Italians plot) doesn't quite fall in the middle of a Near Eastern (Anatolia and Levant) to Mycenaean cline. The cluster seems shifted off-center of this line, toward mainstream Europe. This can be explained by Slavic and Italic (and Germanic) ancestry in Greeks and Italians respectively, though the shift might be older than that in some cases.

    ReplyDelete
  50. @ Genos Historia, here's a shout out for your You Tube Channel. I was searching through You Tube and my algorhythyms presented your video. I didn't make the connection until you gave credit to David's Eurogenes blog in your video. Anyway, I subscribed and encouraged others to do so. I look forward to your future videos.

    ReplyDelete
  51. @Leonidas, if you try to discredit Albanian - Illyrian connection in haplogroup "J2b", I'm afraid you will be disappointed. I understand you cherry picked a single Albanian J2b-L283 cluster, in J-Y20899, but even with this one, if you look at upstream samples starting with J-PH4679, you will see there is ~3200 ybp TMRCA in Albania, so modern samples suggest western Balkan continuity of J-Y20899 since at least LBA.

    Furthermore, as is the case with J-Y20899, the vast majority of Albanian J2b-L283 belongs to J-Z638 branch (which is parallel to MBA Dalmatian sample), and according to preprint data of the recent Daunian paper (who are thought to have migrated from ancient Illyria), two of the J2b-L283 samples in Daunians are under J-Z638 branch.

    In regards to R1b-Z2103>CTS9210>BY611>Z2705, everything suggests it originates from Paleo-Balkan peoples. We even have R1b-Z2103>CTS7556 in EBA North Serbia. Since the diversity of R-Z2705 is greater in the western Balkans, my honest opinion is this is native to the western half of the Balkans. There is also a R1b-Z2103 sample among Daunians. But, anyway, let's wait for more aDNA from the Balkans before jumping into any conclusions, including E-V13 samples that belong to Albanian branches..

    ReplyDelete
  52. Leonidas D said...
    @ a

    "One of the samples(G15-G25-G26-G27A-G28-G97-G123) from Slog Necropolis from phase II is-R1b-CTS-1450 -a clad also found in modern day Russian-Mordovins.
    I15552 Timacum Minus, Slog Necropolis R1b-Z2103,R-M12149,R-Z2106,R-Z2108,R-Z2110,R-CTS7556,R-Y5592,R-CTS1450 H1c
    https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-CTS1450/"

    This clade splits into several branches, which are correlated with Germanic (BY250), Slavic (Y5587), and paleo-Balkan (Z2705) migrations, respectively. So we need to go further downstream than R-CTS1450 if we are going to attempt an ethnic affiliation of the two samples from the Olalde et al. 2021 paper.


    What is very strange are the samples from preprint, "Early Bronze Age Mokrin necropolis in northern Serbia - preprint"

    For example MOK22; 2100-1800 BC; Mokrin necropolis, Kikinda, Banat; Serbia; Maros_EBA-EBA_sc.txt MOK22_sc. Early Corded Ware like ancestry?
    -------------- ANCESTRY BREAKDOWN: -------------
    35.771% Corded_Ware_Baltic__Spiginas2
    28.358% HUN_Mako_EBA__I1502
    14.386% HUN_BA__I7042
    14.100% Iberia_Central_CA__I3485
    2.295% Bell_Beaker_Iberia__I4247
    2.280% Bell_Beaker_HUN__I7045
    1.801% Bell_Beaker_Bavaria__I5020
    0.568% PER_LaGalgada_4100BP__I2261
    0.441% Bell_Beaker_Iberia__I0826
    ------------------------------------------

    MOK22 belongs to subclades -Punjabi and Swedish? Y14420>BY127891>BY89871

    https://www.yfull.com/live/tree/R-Y14415/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Punjabis are not positive for Y14420 and BY127891. MOK22, MOK19A, a Swede, and a Turkish belongs to the BY127891 subclade

      Delete
  53. @ Hades

    This 'Greek' speaking population from Catalonia contains the same autosomal profile like the samples we got from bronze age Greece(Lazaridis paper).It has the same 'Minoan/Mycanean' DNA.They were actually colonists from Phocaea of (Anatolia) with their origins/roots going back to Phocis(mainland Greece).These people founded colonies in France,Italy,Spain etc.We are not talking for a hellenized pop here...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emp%C3%BAries
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phocaea
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phocis_(ancient_region)

    ReplyDelete
  54. @FoxVillager

    Non-trivial levels of Sidon_MBA are prevalaent in Croatia and Hungary aswell on G25, you would need to include them.

    https://imgur.com/a/Dgyo5sP
    https://imgur.com/a/Dgyo5sP
    https://imgur.com/a/Il6mAMs

    In addition, 10% of the German samples on G25 display Rome_Imperial admix.

    https://imgur.com/a/J2RzrZp

    ReplyDelete
  55. Grave 97 downstream CTS-1450?
    Sondage F II (VII)/1995.
    Remains of a stone construction around the skull.
    Finds (Pl. VII, 5):
    1. a shank of an iron spear to the right of the skull,70
    2. a leaf-shaped iron arrowhead in the region of the
    right pelvic bone,71
    3. an animal bone (sheep or goat’s pelvic bone) in
    the region of the chest

    @https://www.academia.edu/9853696/Military_Graves_from_the_Late_Roman_Necropolis_at_Slog_in_Ravna_Timacum_Minus_Starinar_64

    Grave 97--G-97 Remains of a stone construction around the skull (W-E).
    "The burial with weapons in grave 97 belongs to
    phase II of the Slog necropolis, that is to the period after
    the Battle of Hadrianopolis, in the last decades of the 4th
    and first decade of the 5th century, when the fortification’s garrison consisted of an equestrian unit of pseudocomitatenses Timacenses, an auxiliary unit of light
    cavalry of the “Alanic type” "Furthermore, in grave 97, in the region of the chest
    of the buried individual, an animal bone, part of the
    pelvis of a goat or a sheep, was found. This was a remnant of a posthumous feast, given as an offering to the
    deceased. The placement of meat into the grave is not
    a part of the Roman burial ritual, whilst posthumous
    feasts are characteristic of the funerary cult of the late
    phase of the Chernyakhov – Sântana de Mureº culture.92
    "

    ReplyDelete
  56. @Sds,

    Awesome! Yes, it is hard to get the attention of the youtube algorithm so that's good news. Thanks for subscribing.

    Next I will be making a video on the issue of whether Yamnaya is the ancestor of Corded Ware.

    I'm gonna be asking for some advise from people at this blog about this issue.

    ReplyDelete
  57. @ Drake

    Interesting models there.Indeed Croats are not so northern shifted as they imagine(never understand why they consider serbs and bosniaks alliens in comparison with them).Hungarians def assilimated latinicized balkaners(Romano-Vlachs etc).

    As for the German samples,i have no idea from what area/province these samples are coming from.Let me guess....Bavaria or Baden?I am imagining Αustrians will show more Imperial Rome influx plush adittional Slavic/Balkanic mix.

    ReplyDelete
  58. Also noteworthy how Medieval HUN_Szolad_MA_o1 is still Empuries-like, judging from G25 distances, and a predominantly early/middle Helladic mix with some minor Italic admixture. So this genetic profile hasn't disappeared by then.

    @Foxvillager

    "I have played a lot in G25 with various balkan pops inclunding Greeks.It depends individual.Some of them require something transcaucasus(CHG/Iran N),others need an Alalakh bronze age refrence(anatolian-levantine mix) while others need something pure Levantine (PPNB admix).Its obvious that these west asian immigrants were not homogenous genetically but coming from all over the middle east."

    The same in Italy! Judging from my latest G25 vahaduo models, which I was trying to keep as unsupervised as possible, my 25.5% Italian ancestry from Cesena and surrounds seems to be mostly Celtic (Hauts-de-France_IA2), Greek (Szolad_MA_o1) and southern Levantine (Yehud_IBA), leaving out Anatolia and the northern Levant.

    ReplyDelete
  59. @ Simon

    You see the region of Emilia-Romanga being Celtic rather Italic?Or something in between?Also Hauts-de-France and northern France/Belgium Celts would carry the same autosomal profile with the Celts of the Alps(Helveti etc) and with the Cisalpine Gauls?Do you see a homogenous autosomal profile for the Celts of central and western EU?

    Btw Emilia-Romanga if i am not mistaken is somewhere between Northern and Central Italy genetically.Some indiviudals ploting quite northern while others have central Italian mix and they showing this 'Imperial'middle east influx.

    ReplyDelete
  60. @Matt,

    I saw your reply to my video in the other thread.

    Yes, let's wait for new Yamnaya DNA to come out in the new Harvard study. But I don't think it will change the basic conclusions we've come to.

    I'm working on a video about Yamnaya's relationship to Corded Ware and role in the IE story. I'd like to your guys' thoughts.

    ReplyDelete
  61. @@MikeW,

    I tend to like to be respectful to David Anthony and the Harvard lab. I just really wanted to emphasize in his book he didn't give much attention to Corded Ware.

    ReplyDelete
  62. @ Gjenetika

    I'm just interested in finding out what happened, as I am sure you do.

    As I said myself, I agree with you that there is no doubt that most of Albanian E-V13, J2b, and R1b-Z2103 are paleoBalkan, more specifically, of Western-Central Balkan origin. I am somewhat surprised that the Balkan Iron Age samples of Olalde et al. 2021 did not have any Z2103 - only two outliers did, but it could be that this haplogroup was not as common in those particular populations sampled.

    The ancient Croatian J2b branches do not seem to support the hypothesis that the bulk of the Albanian paternal lineages are Illyrian. As you yourself said, the most widespread J2b lineages in Albanians (under J-Y21045) are parallel (or more correctly, sister) to those of the ancient Croatians. A sister-group relationship between Croatian and Albanian J2b lines certainly indicates a close relationship, but not direct descent. So my initial claim that at least up to now, ancient Croatian J2b is not ancestral to most of the Albanian J2b, is correct, and I absolutely did not cherry pick anything.

    Also, as far as I know, the J-PH4679 sample you mentioned is Vlach, not Albanian (although the two peoples were definitely part of the same, or at least related group in antiquity). So there is no strong indication that J-PH4679 is a line that survived in Albania since the Bronze Age. On the contrary, Vlachs moved a lot, and their original homeland was not in modern day Albania, but slightly to the North-East. So it is more likely that J-PH4679 is not local to Albania.

    Furthermore, to be as precise as I can (although I might bore readers not interested in the subject), there are a couple of Albanians under the HRV-IA J2b branches (e.g. FT29034), but these lines are so remarkably rare in Albanians today, that it is obvious they played no big role in their ethnogenesis. In contrast, this adds further credence to the scenario that they might be relics of the Romanized Illyrian population that lived in central/North Albania, prior to the southward expansions of proto-Albanians into their territory in late antiquity. Lets not forget that multiple sources mentioned the medieval inhabitants of Dyrrhachium as Ρωμανοί ( = Latin speakers). Hellenized and Slavicized populations almost certainly lived further to the South, as we know from archaeology and toponymy.

    Which brings me to the last question, that so far nobody has answered. Your own excellent website, plus Rrenjet, show that the greatest diversity of E-V13, J2b and R1b-Z2103 exists in North Albania and Kosovo, and it gets decreasingly diverse as you go South. Please tell me honestly that this is not evidence for a North-to-South migration, which has been repeated so many times by linguists as well? And it explains perfectly why Albanian is so strongly influenced by Latin - because it was above the Jirecek line. No one disputes this.

    I am confident that when we get a lot of ancient DNA samples from across the North-Central-West-East Balkans, we will find that the pre-Slavic populations were remarkably diverse in E-V13, J2b, R1b-Z2103, and some branches of J2a. It is simply too early to make a connection between Croatian and Albanian J2b. What will we do if we find that both Daco-Moesians and Illyrians had very similar Y-lineages?

    I do not think I have anything else to contribute on this particular debate, at least from a genetic perspective.

    ReplyDelete
  63. Leonidas, you need to be educated on what Y-DNA diversity is. There are countless "sibling" clades next to each other spread out geographically.

    The people called "Illyrians" (if they were homogenous that is) by the Greeks and Romans occupied a coastline over 1000 miles. They lived from Greece all the way to Austria. You will find many sibling clades of J2b or other Y-DNA spread all over, not just in the Western Balkans but also Messapia. If you want to study genetic continuity in a region, then look at THAT region. Croatia is not Albania.

    If you notice, I try to stay away from making any genetic claims for now, because we need more data and these studies certainly are NOT helping. But linguistically you are grasping at straws from outdated theories akin to the "Indo-European languages came from Anatolia". A simple Google search will show that Albanians were an Illyrian tribe that lived in that region >= 2000 years. How much external genetic input they got from Slavs, Greeks, Anatolia, etc... remains to be seen.

    P.S. I also laugh at the fact that you don't even understand basic autosomal PCA plots. A father and son (who is biracial for example) can plot very different from one another in those graphs. It doesn't mean they are not related. That's why you need something similar to that "23 and me" distant cousin analysis to determine genetic flow between two groups.

    ReplyDelete
  64. @Leonidas,

    1) Why should Albanian J2b-L283 be under the same branch as MBA Croatia (I4331)? These branches have diverged since EBA-MBA. So Albanian J2b-L283 (J-Z638 lineages) may have been a bit further south at the time. On the other hand, if Albanian J2b-L283 was mostly under the same branch as MBA Croatia, I can imagine people like you would say: "Albanian J2b is recent arrival from further North/Croatia".

    2) Yes, J-PH4679 contains a Vlach from south Albania that splits from the "North Albanian" J-Z38300 branch ~3200 ybp, which is also obviously under J-PH4679 with a TMRCA of ~3200 ybp among Northern Albanian samples. Learn how to interpret the phylogeny :) All I said is that, according to the data we have, this branch shows local/western Balkan diversity since at least MBA. You're mentioning you think it likely came from somewhere NE of modern Albania, allegedly in late antiquity/early middle ages, which could still be within western Balkans. Anyway, the phylogeny we have clearly doesn't support that either. You also ignored the recent Daunian samples I brought up, which according to the preprint, two Daunians should be under J-Z638 branch, where the vast majority of Albanian J2b-L283 is (including J-Y21045>PH4679).

    3) You're mentioning Iron Age samples from Olalde et al. 2021. This recent preprint didn't have any Iron Age Y-DNA samples. Further, you claim there is IA Croatian samples under J-FT29034? First time I'm hearing all this. You should show us the source of these Iron Age Y-DNA results from Croatia/Balkans.

    ReplyDelete
  65. @ Genos Historia

    "I tend to like to be respectful to David Anthony and the Harvard lab. I just really wanted to emphasize in his book he didn't give much attention to Corded Ware."

    I didn't sense that tendency from your youtube video that you posted here. It is a bit provocative. That's okay.

    However, we should all recognize that David Anthony's book was written by 2007 so it is easy to criticize an old version of anything. (I used to sell software.)

    The scientists at the Reich Lab have more rigorous standards than we do. They have to be have completed their scientific processes (data collection and controls, documentation, citations, peer review, etc.) before publishing.

    This doesn't make us smarter than them for talking about something publicly before they do. You might consider this before criticizing them.

    The other suggestion I have for your video is that the cartoon figures and simplistic assertions are not necessarily credible. Some people like that kind of stuff but I'm not sure how that goes.

    ReplyDelete
  66. @Genos, I actually didn't watch the video (no "shade", just we've discussed a lot of the likely content and I'm not a big Youtube video-explainer-watcher).

    Point I'm making only that although there's this large demic expansion of CWC steppe groups to North-Central Europe, there is also still a trail of admixing steppe ancestry through Carpatho-Balkan region via Yamnaya. Even if only for some of expansion of pIE , Anthony's model spreading through that region by recruitment of local chiefs etc into Yamnaya culture is not yet necessarily precluded, just because we know the CWC to have been more of steppe ancestry initially than many archaeologists thought (ignoring as they did the anthropometry to focus on the re-use of similar axes to TRB and to pottery?), and that the early CWC is most likely to be the ultimate source of steppe ancestry in the Indo-Iranian chain. Yes, people might prefer a model where it only happened one way (it is more parsimonious) but languages can spread with multiple different levels of genetic flow in different circumstances at the same time.

    ReplyDelete
  67. Btw, Sam/Genos and others, I think its worth having a look at the slides again from Nagy's presentation last year - https://m.imgur.com/a/DajRJEG

    Lots of the samples previewed on her f3 plot like early Czech_CWC and the Encrusted Pottery culture guys from EBA Croatia with rich HG ancestry are now released, so we can make more inferences about the patterns... There's a plot there that provides a nice comparison to the one that I did which Davidski used in the below post

    ReplyDelete
  68. @ Dragon Hermit

    I am going to stop responding at your posts now, because there is no reason to discuss with a person who just uses google to inform themselves regarding major linguistic debates.

    Are you seriously saying that citing major linguists such as Vladimir Georgiev, is comparable to say that IE came from Anatolia?

    The rest of your points are not even worth responding to.

    ReplyDelete
  69. The Komani -Kruja cultural zone might adequately explain, both, the genesis of Vlachs & Albanians

    ReplyDelete
  70. @ Gjenetika

    Responding to your points:

    "1) Why should Albanian J2b-L283 be under the same branch as MBA Croatia (I4331)? These branches have diverged since EBA-MBA. So Albanian J2b-L283 (J-Z638 lineages) may have been a bit further south at the time. On the other hand, if Albanian J2b-L283 was mostly under the same branch as MBA Croatia, I can imagine people like you would say: "Albanian J2b is recent arrival from further North/Croatia"."

    I partially agree with your point, although I am not sure why Albanian J2b lines always have to be more southern than those from Croatia. Why not slightly to the East, in the Central Balkans, like most linguistic evidence suggests?

    Also, if Croatia is too to the North to be used to study Albanian Y-DNA, then why are you obsessing over Daunians? Its not like they came from Gjirokaster - are the Daunians not too North?

    "2) Yes, J-PH4679 contains a Vlach from south Albania that splits from the "North Albanian" J-Z38300 branch ~3200 ybp, which is also obviously under J-PH4679 with a TMRCA of ~3200 ybp among Northern Albanian samples. Learn how to interpret the phylogeny :) "

    What the phylogeny actually shows is that the Albanian J-Z38300 is clearly downstream of J-PH4679, not vice versa:

    https://yfull.com/tree/J-PH4679/

    "You also ignored the recent Daunian samples I brought up"

    Until they are publicly available and uploaded on Y-full, there is no point obsessing over them at the moment.

    "3) You're mentioning Iron Age samples from Olalde et al. 2021. This recent preprint didn't have any Iron Age Y-DNA samples. Further, you claim there is IA Croatian samples under J-FT29034? First time I'm hearing all this. You should show us the source of these Iron Age Y-DNA results from Croatia/Balkans."

    I am referring to the Balkan Iron Age cline that is mentioned in the Olalde et al. 2021 pre-print, I think this is clear.

    I do not claim that there are IA Croatians under J-FT29034, but the opposite. The IA Croatian branch (J-Y146400) is upstream of J-FT29034, so people under the latter branch likely descend from these ancient people. You know, like the Albanian-Illyrian connection you are trying to establish. I think this is crystal clear.

    ReplyDelete
  71. @ Gjenetika

    Continuing my previous post.

    What you are choosing to do, is to ignore fundamental questions for the Albanian ethnogenesis, which unfortunately do not suit the nationalist narrative:

    1) Why does your own dataset show such a high diversity of Albanian paleo-Balkan lineages in North Albania and Kosovo, which rapidly decreases the more South you go?

    If we saw this in any other population, we would suggest that a North-to-South migration is very likely (among other scenarios, which I can list if you want). Why does this pattern not apply to Albanians?

    2) How could the Albanian language have evolved in Albania, when it has 40% of Latin loans and almost no Greek ones i.e. it clearly evolved above the Jirecek line?

    How could Albanian have evolved in Albania, when ancient authors mentioned that most of the Illyrians in what is now Albania were at least bilingual in their native tongue and Greek? Why is the material culture full of Greek/Byzantine inscriptions?

    3) Why did Albanian follow all the phonological changes of Daco-Moesian, at roughly the same time? Why do none of these phonological changes take place in Illyrian*? Why did proto-Albanian treat Illyrian toponyms in the same way it treated Latin loans - i.e. as foreign linguistic elements? And of course, why did Nis in Serbia take its name from an Albanian intermediary?

    Until you answer these questions, nobody in the genetics and linguistics community will take you seriously.

    This is situation is further aggravated by the facts that Albanian nationalist claims are not even consistent; the internet is riddled with crackpot theories linking them to Illyrians, Pannoanians, Liburnians, "Dardanians", Messapians, "Pelasgians", "Dorians" etc. You can't descend from all of these people.

    * the fact that some Illyrian words can be etymologised from Albanian means nothing. Baltic is the best proxy when trying to reconstruct the roots of proto-Albanian IE words; this doesn't mean that Albanian and Baltic are the same language. If Illyrian and Albanian followed the same phonological rules, then you would have a case. But you know how most Albanologists describe the connection between Illyrian and Albanian? "Like day and night".

    I understand that a long presence in a particular area and common descent are/were very important for traditional tribal culture in Albania (at least from what I can read in Albanian historical websites and 19th-20th century travel books). I also understand that since the rise of Albanian nationalism, autochthony to Albania and arrival there prior to the Slavs are of the outmost importance to the national narrative, in the same way that many Greeks are in denial about the impact of the Slavic invasions in their country.

    However, what people from across the Balkans (Albanians, Greeks, and Slavs) need to come to terms with, is that 21st century diplomacy has moved away from claims of autochthony and blood ties when trying to resolve disputes in our multiethnic and interconnected world. And this is a major step forward for humanity as a whole.

    I think I am going to stop responding at this point, as I feel we are going in circles.

    ReplyDelete
  72. @ Rob

    "The Komani -Kruja cultural zone might adequately explain, both, the genesis of Vlachs & Albanians"

    Literally no serious archaeologist or linguist will agree with you. Do you want a list of papers claiming the opposite?

    ReplyDelete
  73. @Francis_Drake

    "As for MENA ancestry in the rest of Europe, Roman Imperial admixture can be detected all the way to south Germany"

    I don't know, possibly, but seems forced to me. There a few "odd" uniparental lineages in south Germany and France that I've noticed but overall nothing significant.


    @Foxvillager
    "
    I have played a lot in G25 with various balkan pops inclunding Greeks.It depends individual.Some of them require something transcaucasus(CHG/Iran N),others need an Alalakh bronze age refrence(anatolian-levantine mix) while others need something pure Levantine (PPNB admix)."

    I agree, at least I've seen the same in G25, that's what I was getting at earlier, even today Balkaners seem relatively "diverse" with some individuals being more Levantine-shifted others more Anatolian others less so etc.

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  74. @ Leonidas

    Like literally no one ? Bold claim.

    it seems you have too liberally interpreted Georgiev et al, who shows close linguistic contacts between proto-Albanians (PA) & proto-Romanians (PR). But to establish where this occurred, we'd have to understand the demographic situation in the Balkans in the 500s - 900s, not imagine some vague and static notions of Iron Age 'Daco-Moesians'.
    You've completely omitted this dimension of evidence.

    After having spent themselves in the Gothic wars, Phocas' rebellion & the Persian attacks, the Byzantines were in dire situation, and decided to tactically withdraw from the Danube frontier & defend closer to the coastal zones ~ 620 CE. At this time, the province of Epirus shows clear archaeological evidence of populations moving from the central Balkans toward the southwest, bolstering those who were already there. This is clear to any archaeologist. Your scenario, on the other hand, brings proto-Albanians invisibly in from some undefined part of central Balkans with little if any settlement evidence after 620 CE, and then when settlement does appear ~ 50 years later, it's Slavic in character.

    The Romance toponyms in northern Kruja zone in no way excludes a diglossic, or even multi-glossic situation at least amongst certain segments of the communities which were buried there. The shift toward Albanian at expense of Romance then became a matter of cultural choice & a way for certain tribes to distinguish themselves from others. On the other hand, the 'Vlachs' chose to hold onto Romance, and further dispersed across the Balkans, riding the visitudes of inter-Balkan politics & empires.

    Of course, genetics supports this close contact because Albanians & Romanians have more IBD
    sharing than with Serbians, Macedonians, Bulgarians

    The notion that Albanians simply 'roamed around the mountains' invisibly for few hundred years holds no anthropological merit, it doesn't matter if some scholars from yesteryear believe that. but in pointing out their northern Albanian provenance, it does not mean that that Albanians are 'Iron Age Illyrians', nor necessarily 2nd century Albanoi, either.

    Moreover, this is very similar to what happened with Welsh. The 'Gaelic' which Welsh speak is not Iron Age Bryttonic, but a new language which many Romano-Britons reverted back to as they moved toward the western highlands & abandoned any pretense of 'Romanness', just before or as the 'Anglo-Saxons' were arriving in the East.

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  75. I am not an expert of the Albanian language.But from an Albanian friend.. he told me that their language influenced a lot from the Slavs.Not sure if this is true or not.Maybe some of the Albanian users here can inform us.

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  76. @gamerz_j

    "I don't know, possibly, but seems forced to me. There a few "odd" uniparental lineages in south Germany and France that I've noticed but overall nothing significant."


    What do you mean by forced? As for France, Provence would have this admixture as any other region in the Balkans would; Provence was a major Roman urban center.

    https://imgur.com/a/BKOY7fG

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  77. In fairness, the authors aren't trying to establish the population genetic history of the Balkans back to the beginning of time, only for the last two thousand years or so, presumably from a baseline of the populations that existed in the Iron Age or in the Classical Greco-Roman period. They are only peeling off the top layers of the onion so to speak.

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  78. @Francis Drake

    "What do you mean by forced? As for France, Provence would have this admixture as any other region in the Balkans would; Provence was a major Roman urban center." In Germans I meant, at least those with levels under 5%.

    Southern French obviously have Latin-type ancestry, probably actual Latin as well and most likely some Rome_Imperial also.

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  79. Even if the 'TMRCA' of Illyrian languages is MLBA, they still link back to some Yamnaya-descended group in northern Balkans or Pannonia
    It does, however, seem evident that Thracian is a later arrival; but probably rather mixed in population streams.

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  80. @ Leonidas D

    If I can cut in - calling Y5587 typically Slavic is not correct.

    I know I repeat this like a mantra, but:

    1. Apart from the typical location of most Z2103 (EU SE and E) we know that in Neolithic / Bronze some group of Z2103 people starts to mix in Central Europe with CWC / BB - we have Z2103 from Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic. So we can assume with a high degree of probability that these people have been around since then. This can be confirmed in part by the Z2103-By593 from the medieval Czech sample, the Z2109 from the VK 535 sample and the current FTDNA results (although I know that you have to be careful about it).

    2. In my opinion, suggesting, inter alia, FTDNA etc. you will notice that since CTS9219 we have a lot of samples from Central Europe and NW. By250 (called Germanic by you) and Y5587 are present here all the time, from the Bronze Age to today. Looking at the next (below CTS9219) SNPs, we can see a few more migrations. Probably Y18959 split - FGC43622 / Y5587 stayed in Central EU, and By611 went away to SE. Then local Y5587 turns to PH2147 and part migrates to SE and becomes Y5586. We know this SNP (Y5586) from, among others. Alani samples etc. But looking at the Y TREE and the dates of these SNPs, it seems very old! So, for example, if (suppose) Y5587 was present in the Lusatian culture, it could have migrated with it towards the SE and stayed in an area that was later inhabited by Iron Age nomads who "absorbed" Y5586. From PH2147 we can see that this and the following SNPs are mainly dominated by Poles and Czechs with small amounts from other countries. Many Czech samples seem to come from older Polish ones.

    What could all this mean?
    On 1 - that we can say that Y5587-PH2147 is "Slavic" if we think about the fact that today it is most common in countries with a Slavic language (Poland and the Czech Republic)

    After 2 - we absolutely cannot say that this is the Y DNA of the ancient Slavs. The Z2103 in this part of Europe is probably from the Bronze Age, so according to history, the first ethnically named tribes in this region (Iron Age) are Germanic. In fact, from Y FGC7556 there are several matches in NW and N Europe - mainly Sweden. In Sweden, we have the known CTS7556, FGC43622 and a few people below By593 and FGC43625. It also suggests contacts with Europe N.

    If you don't want to call Y5587-PH2147 Germanic, you can Celtic, Old European, or more unfamiliar but definitely not SLAVIC. At most "slavinized".

    If Z2103 performed in the Czech Republic with BB / CWC, it is very likely that with them or later Unietice or Tumulus he moved further north.

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  81. @Foxvillager
    "I am not an expert of the Albanian language.But from an Albanian friend.. he told me that their language influenced a lot from the Slavs.Not sure if this is true or not.Maybe some of the Albanian users here can inform us."
    Albanian vocabolari is heavily influenced by Latin, to e lesser degree by Turkish and even less by Slavic. Although structurally Albanian shares some characteristics with Balto Slavic, it differs from them. It is is not a fully Satemized language as it has both Satem and Kentum examples. Apparently has a three velar series and other odd characteristics. Furthermore someother features have made some linguist think that they should be grouped with Germanic, while others think they should be grouped with Greek Armenian. Of what has remained as a written evidence from the old languages Albanian is linked with Mesaapic languages. It shares also a lot of words with Romanian. Now the problem lies exactly here. Mesaapic is considered an Illyrian language, while Romanin it is thought to be spoken by descendants of Dacians. The case is either Albanian is Illyrian and shared words with Romanian are loan words from Albanian to Romanian, or Illyrian and Dacians were strongly related Languages thus the corresponding words. As usual in this case the Balkan disputes come into place. To the Romanian nationalists the fact that the shared words could be loan words from Albanian means that Romanian ethnogenesis happened outside modern day Romania. and in proximity of Albanians in Montenegro Kosovo Ohrid Epirus area. That is unacceptable so many go for the hypothesis that Albanians derive from unasimilated Dacians who moved to current Albania in medieval times while other Dacians were assimilated.to Latin and remained in Romania. Usually the same discourse is supported by nationalists in Serbia and Greece. On the other hand Croatians and Hungarians support the other version. That the Albanians come from Illyrians. In the end of the day what remains is that from archaeological linguistic evidence, Albanian is connected with Mesaapic and Mesaapic is usually considered as an Illyrian language. (archaeology support this theory too).. so you go to the thongs I said above. Linguistically Albanian is linked with Mesaapic. So either those shared words with Romanian are loan words either the ancestor of Romanians were very closely related to Messapian people.

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  82. @ Aigest

    In the real world, however, no expert supports the delirious theories you are mentioning. The linguistic evidence is quite strong that proto-Vlach evolved somewhere around the Morava valley. The Albanian cognates in Vlach in fact represent a common linguistic substrate, not loans, as has been repeated countless of times in publications in the last 60 years, which you of course (choose to?) ignore.

    It is true that Romanian nationalism cannot accept that the Romanian language came from Vlachs migrating northwards, in the same way that Albanian nationalists cannot accept that their language came from elsewhere.

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  83. @ Dranoel

    I'm not sure what you are trying to say, as you have contradicted yourself several times in your own post:

    "If I can cut in - calling Y5587 typically Slavic is not correct."

    "we can say that Y5587-PH2147 is "Slavic" if we think about the fact that today it is most common in countries with a Slavic language (Poland and the Czech Republic)"

    "we absolutely cannot say that this is the Y DNA of the ancient Slavs"

    "If you don't want to call Y5587-PH2147 Germanic, you can Celtic, Old European, or more unfamiliar but definitely not SLAVIC"

    Can I ask a simple question? Am I correct to say that this haplogroup has spread into the Balkans via the Slavs?

    I think your argument has the same validity as saying that haplogroup I1 is not Germanic, but a hunter-gatherer one. Yes, if you compare different time periods together you might say that, but the fact is, I1 was transmitted to most of Central and Southern Europe by Germanic speakers.

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  84. Think @zardos made a comment in this thread about Corded Ware links to Indo-European and not Yamnaya... I think perhaps in future maybe we / archaologists will need to think more carefully about what early Corded Ware and Yamnaya of the same time period were.

    One read I could make of them (which I expect the more archaeologically minded and knowledgable posters - @Rob - will reject); the former (CWC) were a group of steppe people who as they moved into Europe used stone-axes and Corded Ware pottery, which it seems some archaeologists link to both being very similar in form to that used by the TRB and GAC cultures which preceded them and they buried their dead in large kurgans not often, while the latter (Yamnaya) were a group who tended more towards elaborate kurgans, and who traded with copper producing societies in the Caucasus and Balkans, and so included more copper items in burial. We know that these movements were dominated by different y-dna lineages, but R1-Z2103 does appear in some Corded Ware and some Q1b and I2a do show up in Yamnaya. There are also these previewed indications of relatively recent direct relationships (not just coincidentally a different profile that had been isolated for over 1000 years or so, or anything like this).

    So are these two societies, or were they just two slightly spatially separated parts of what was in a sense one society (linguistically) with slightly different regional burials traditions, clans and interactions, who then moved into Europe differently? What's the better model here?

    When we compare the change in steppe ancestry over time, looking at ‪Anna Szécsényi-Nagy‬'s preview of the Hungarian transect which is upcoming, with the plot for the new Czech data, it does appear like the degree of European introgression in Yamnaya and Corded Ware as they move into previously EEF dominated areas is fairly similar at a given time-slice. (Around 80% in both by 2600 BCE, albeit the Hungarian sequence in Szécsényi-Nagy's data is still sparser and harder to read - hopefully they have more good samples now). However it seems that in those regions where Yamnaya are going, there are both more people with EEF y-dna and with these sort of 75:25 EEF:Steppe showing up, while this doesn't really happen in Northern Europe.

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  85. As another comment, I think the idea of possibly having lineages that are "submarines" under water, non-archaeologically visible, in steppe cultures, which later emerge into the archaeological record when burial rites or clan status change, and also seeing similar introgression levels of EEF into CWC and Yamnaya at the same time, really does possibly pose a bit of a challenge to whether we can confidentally say that "Fatyanovo was derived from Corded Ware", for sure. Or maybe not, hard to be sure.

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  86. @Leonidas
    Vlach is a roman language attested at Medieval times. Mesaapic is an Illyrian Language attested at Iron age. Albanian is a non Latin language related to Mesaapic and through common words with Romanian. These are the facts. Can you give a solution, different from what I said above?

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  87. Leonidas, right! You can also give an analogy here with the M458 / L1029 lines, which will be archaeologically related to Celtic cultures (Hallstatt, La Tiene), which does not change the fact that these are typically Slavic paternal lines. Simply changing the archaeological culture (and even changing ethnicity) does not imply a biological exchange of the population.

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  88. @ Leonidas D

    You are talking about "Slavic" in an archaeological / cultural sense, so I will answer in a nutshell - no, Y5587 cannot be considered Slavic.

    Look at Y tree. Y5587 / PH2147 and Y5587 / Y5586 split up a long time ago. From then on, Y5586 becomes local to Europe E, while PH2147 is local to Central Europe. Everything happens long before any Slavs. We know Y5586 from Sarmatian or Alanian samples, so maybe these snp and younger were later absorbed by groups of Slavs.

    PH2147 and its younger SNP in my opinion were slaved after the arrival of the Slavs to this part of Europe, so PH2147, By593 and FGC43625 were culturally not related to the Slavs at first.

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  89. It will be interesting to see if the early R1b-Sarmatians from the Dzhaubermezov Murat et al paper--will be related to modern day Ossetian/Alan-Digor- R1b, or the sample found in Timacum Minus- Slog Necropolis (I15552) or perhaps maybe even R1b-V1636 from Denmark-SGC(https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0244872). Another interesting sample is from Unterländer et al 2017----5th-2nd century BCE-Sarmatian -Pr3 / M Pokrovka SW Russia- it might be R1b-Z2109 and connected.


    Ancient DNA analysis of Early
    Medieval Alan populations of
    the North Caucasus

    https://eaa.klinkhamergroup.com/eaa2021/full_paper/files/2378/s412_Dzhaubermezov.pdf

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  90. @Matt

    "really does possibly pose a bit of a challenge to whether we can confidentally say that "Fatyanovo was derived from Corded Ware", for sure. Or maybe not, hard to be sure."

    Fatyanovo is unquestionably a Corded Ware variant, there is no debate regarding this, it is per definition part of and derived from the Corded Ware horizon.

    Its only later material cultures such as Abashevo and Sintashta which move away from the typical eastern CWC model which Fatyanovo followed to a T, with the additions of large-scale metalworking, burial mounds (fatyanovo had flat burials rather than kurgans) and a horse-centric element to their culture, both in their religions and economies.

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  91. @ Matt

    I think what you see in Corded Ware Culture is also present in western Yamnaya: corded pottery, battle axes, etc. Maybe they do reflect an interaction with north European groups like GAC, which we know were also semi-mobile and moved toward the steppe.
    Its not that Yamnaya kurgans were more grand as such, at least not a priori;and not compared to the over-sized Majkop kurgans reflective of true Chiefdoms. Rather, they were liable to be continuously enlarged through successive burials; whilst 'CWC" kurgans tended to be single use. This points to divergent cultural choices in that specific domain. But overall, they speak of the same ideological dialogue. Archaeologists have tended to overemphasise the differences betwen Yamnaya & CWC, partly because the Volga-Ural variant of Yamnaya was believed to be archetypal

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  92. @Matt
    the Encrusted Pottery culture guys from EBA Croatia with rich HG ancestry are now released

    Encrusted Pottery is from the MBA. EBA Croatia samples have much more HG ancestry than them.

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  93. @Rob,

    I'm trying to learn about differences between Yamnaya & Corded Ware culture.

    Was it standard for Yamnaya to put new burials into already existing Kurgans? Hence is this why Corded Ware is often referred to as Single Grave culture?

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  94. Western Yamnaya burials matche PC Steppe Yamnaya well. Yet Corded Ware doesn't. This really makes it seem there is something culturally divergent from Corded Ware.

    If they do come from yamnaya, they must come from Early Yamnaya who archaeologists didn't notice practiced different burial customs.

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  95. Dranoel, old Slavic Central European paternal lines justify the fact that the Slavs live in Central Europe from the beginning of their ethnogenesis.

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  96. @Arza, OK, possibly those aren't the same samples, though I don't know if I totally trust authors to be totally separated EBA and MBA.

    @Rob, I wonder if we will genomically be able to see any evidence of the Western Yamnaya groups interacting with any particular EEF ancestry group that distinguishes between them.

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  97. @Copper Axe, you're probably right on that one; actually one thing I did just check was the IBD matching slide that Ringbauer showed off as ISBA, and that does show Fatyanovo does have a bit more connectivity with the Corded Ware compared to the Yamnaya.

    (Posting image links again: https://imgur.com/a/6duCo6T)

    Only about half Yamnaya sites, the eastern and northern sites, seem to be matching at all at the 16-20 cm level with Fatyanovo at rates of 1/40 pairs, while many CWC sites are matching at 2/34 pair or 1/18 pair and all have at least one match (Western Yamnaya have no Fatyanovo matches at this level, and this appears to be unlike the CWC in Central Europe - Poland to Germany - who seem to be matching more frequently with *Western* Yamanya than Eastern).

    So it does sort of evidence that idea a bit more firmly genetically and conform to an archaeological signal - that Fatyanovo either did branch off later from the more western CWC after both had branched from Yamnaya, or were having geneflow more frequently from them after dispersal.

    (These IBD matching methods are not just dissolving the idea of Yamnaya and CWC as separate by showing more connectivity between them, but also showing that there is intragroup connectivity within them that can't be attributed solely to deep ancestry. That might be a reassuring thing to note for some people who are bit wary that these methods are just overly conflating or connecting different cultural traditions.)

    The Western Yamnaya don't seem to be matching with GAC at all in these methods which seems a bit against the idea of much interaction with them, although it might be more specific in future to look at the particular samples and whether they're outliers in steppe ancestry level / y-dna etc. There's also that bit of substructure where the Western Yamnaya match a bit less with the Eastern Yamnaya.

    (On that about comparing outliers to IBD matching, for instance just thinking about the matching of CZE_Bell Beaker and CZE_Corded Ware in that plot, which is limited but slightly more present than Western Yamnaya matching with CZE_Bell Beaker - how does that happen if the CZE_CWC were split up by time and steppe ancestry levels? Do we find that individuals within the CZE_Beaker with more steppe ancestry are the ones with the links to late CZE_CWC or anything like this?).

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  98. @ambron

    „old Slavic Central European paternal lines justify the fact that the Slavs live in Central Europe from the beginning of their ethnogenesis.”

    Ethnogenesis of the Slavs started after separation from that line of Indo-Slavs which migrated to Asia dominated by R1a-Z93. But in the beginning population autosomaly was much more diverse. So we have to go by paternal lines to look for Slavs. Before convergence process reduced autosomal variability of Slavic speakers to modern pattern Slavs could be found any place within dashed line or maybe even outside:

    https://postimg.cc/K4tGtRTL

    I am very interested where Nitra group will be located.

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  99. @ Genos

    ''Was it standard for Yamnaya to put new burials into already existing Kurgans? Hence is this why Corded Ware is often referred to as Single Grave culture?''

    Well it was common during the Yamnaya period. You'd have a founder grave, then others would be added episodically over time. And each time it happened, the barrow was enlarged
    This didnt happen north of the steppe. After the founder generation, women and children, and eventually community burials developed, increasingly flat. But they could also re-use TRB megaliths, for ex.


    @ Matt

    ''wonder if we will genomically be able to see any evidence of the Western Yamnaya groups interacting with any particular EEF ancestry group that distinguishes between them.''

    I think they'd be the same as the rest of Yamnaya, and you would see the usual picture as in CWC - with 'early' steppe-rich guys and mid-late with increased EEF. However, there might be a very specific subset which interacted with GAC, for example, in the middle Dniester & Dnieper regions. So it was a rather focalised interaction, followed by secondary dispersal within Yamnaya networks

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  100. This map from Szmyt shows the Siret-Dniester region, as an example of Yamnaya - GAC interactions. But a similar thing could be seen in Poland for CWC & GAC, or anywhere else.

    We see that different groups lived in the same region at the same time, but occupied distinct areas within it. They mostly kept to themselves, and exchange was mostly limited to individual transactions rather than wholescale admixture. Which is what we see in the DNA.
    And this exchange could have been a marriage exchange or two chiefs giving gifts to each other to keep the peace, so to speak. Conflicts was probably more an exception than the rule. Although overtime, these groups would have differential success rate for various reasons.

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  101. @Genos, as far as I know the term "Single Grave" has tended to be used in two ways

    1) more recently to refer to tends just is a broad way as "Single Grave Burial Rite" ("SGBR Culture") to refer to particular tradition of burial of single individuals in whole, undecomposed in a crouched burial, with burial goods, after which the grave was not reopened and the bones were not manipulated or moved or anything like that. Again, as far as I know the Yamnaya culture practiced this sort of single burial too, but had multiple burial pits built up the burial mounds over time as Rob described.

    Other cultures in Europe sometimes did or did not practice these sort of single burials. For example think the GAC culture did generally, as I understand although with different grave goods (e.g. the "Globular Amphora" and sometimes stone axes). This is why back when ignoring the bioarchaeology of skull shape was the fashion, CWC was thought by some to emerge from GAC without migration.

    (Another example of indiviual burial in the Copper Age - "The dominant Baden (Culture) mortuary rite was individual interment in an extramural cemetery. The largest so far known is that of Budakalász, near Budapest. In excavations from 1952–1961, 436 graves of the Baden culture were discovered (Bondár 2009). The majority, 312, were individual inhumations, but double and triple burials were also found, as were un-urned and scattered cremations, and graves containing no skeleton (Bondár 2009).")

    Some other cultures had different rites, like for instance, they would leave the body somewhere to decompose or bury it or cremate them, then they would collect the bones and deposit them into a monument. Sometimes individuals where sometimes mixed up, and then possibly later removed. Some people think that in the Copper Age is related to these cultures having the idea that once people died they joined into a collective of ancestors that would protect or watch over the community, and so the burial deemphasized them as individuals, although I wonder if it could be as simple as that monuments took significant effort from a community and it would be more efficient in terms of space to have lots of bones in the same place. (An similar thing or example of this sort of burial much later in history is in Christian cultures - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary - "A body is first buried in a temporary grave, then after some years the skeletal remains are removed and placed in an ossuary ("os" is "bone" in Latin). The greatly reduced space taken up by an ossuary means that it is possible to store the remains of many more people in a single tomb than in coffins.".)

    2) Older is to refer to a specific local variant of the Corded Ware culture in Northern Germany/Denmark - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Grave_culture

    There are probably some minor errors in the above somewhere but hopefully its mostly correct.

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  102. Yet another post about Southern Europe, that gets hijacked by discussions about the northern European population. Does actually someone have any comments to make on the implications of this pre-print on the formation of the modern Balkan peoples?

    There are plenty of posts to discuss Corded Ware.

    The Slavic impact on the Balkans was huge, and my own personal interest is to elucidate how the Slavic, Alan, Gothic (and other) newcomers gradually merged with the preceding populations to form the ethnic groups we observe in the Balkans today.

    However, the Balkans of classical and late antiquity hosted some of the most linguistically and ethnically diverse populations of Europe. I'm sure they at least merit a discussion focused on them...

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  103. EastPole, we still had the Balto-Slavic stage on the way.

    Therefore, the closest to the truth are probably Russian scientists (including geneticists) who claim that the ethnogenesis of the Slavs took place somewhere in the Przeworsk culture. In the first stage, the Slavs spread along with the expansion of Przeworsk, Wielbark and Cherniakhov culture, and in the second stage they migrated in small groups from different places in all directions.

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  104. Are there any samples from Greece currently available after the Mycenaean era (1100 BC) to the end of the Hellenistic era around 1 AD? The time period from 700 BC to 300 BC is especially of significant importance.

    I want to see what Greeks were like then, genetically. Then we can talk about Slavic admixture. Modelling the modern ones with the Myceneans as the base reference isn't that helpful IMO. The Mycenaeans predate the Dorian invasion so the classical Greeks could be a bit different.

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    Replies
    1. Dorian invasion is an outdated theory with no basis in reality

      Delete
  105. So one Danish Single Grave Culture sample had R1b-V1636 as well as two Piedmont Eneolithic samples.

    https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-tantalizing-link.html

    I completely overlooked the fact that the pictures Matt shared on IBD sharing showed that there was a close relation between an Usatovo sample and a Maykop sample.

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  106. @Matt

    One of the few very well preserved SGC burials from the Netherlands - very close to where the dutch Bell Beaker samples came from - actually shows signs of being left on a burial bed. He has animal gnaw marks everywhere.

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  107. "Ancient DNA analysis of Early Medieval Alan populations of the North Caucasus"

    Poster [PDF]:
    https://ru.files.fm/f/cr8jnmqhp

    Via:
    https://twitter.com/Abdulhady333/status/1436080433142378499

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  108. @ambron

    “EastPole, we still had the Balto-Slavic stage on the way.

    Therefore, the closest to the truth are probably Russian scientists (including geneticists) who claim that the ethnogenesis of the Slavs took place somewhere in the Przeworsk culture. In the first stage, the Slavs spread along with the expansion of Przeworsk, Wielbark and Cherniakhov culture, and in the second stage they migrated in small groups from different places in all directions.”


    Ambron, I think you are confused. From Przeworsk some Lechitic tribes could have originated. Slavic ethnogenesis took place thousands of years earlier. From your forum:

    https://slawomirambroziak.pl/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=5241.0;attach=1948;image




    @Arza
    "Ancient DNA analysis of Early Medieval Alan populations of the North Caucasus"

    Poster [PDF]:
    https://ru.files.fm/f/cr8jnmqhp


    Very interesting. So early Alans had very little R1a, late Alans had more R1a, and Ossetians, who are the only proof that Alans were Iranians, don’t have any R1a at all.
    Looking at the PCA Alans most likely came from Iran. Have nothing to do with old “Indo-Iranians” of Sintashta.

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  109. @ Ambron

    The vast majority of sources as well as historical / archaeological evidence locate the alleged homeland of the Slavs, at least east of the Vistula. I am not talking about it and I am not questioning anything.

    I am writing only about Z2103 - Y5587 - PH2147 and younger as a group typical for Central Europe, and more specifically for the Czech Republic and Poland west / west of the Vistula. This blog has covered this topic many times. This is not a primary area for Slavic genesis. So you cannot call Y5587 (or the whole Y5587) as Slavic because it couldn't be.

    @ Leonidas D

    In my statements it was not about changing the subject, but only about "correcting" the issue of Y5587. That's all. Analyzing contemporary SNPs, it can be seen that people below PH2147 in this region are not very common, and as they are, they are contemporary migrants from Central Europe.

    My statement did not concern Y5586 which is more eastern.

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  110. Arza, the very "Baltic" appearance of three Hungarian Iron Age individuals on this PCA caught my attention.

    I suspect, probably like you, that this is an old local (Carpathian) Baltic BA type component.

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  111. @ambron

    "In the first stage, the Slavs spread along with the expansion of Przeworsk, Wielbark and Cherniakhov culture"

    And where do you place the Goths, the Vandals and the Burgundians in that picture? In the Jastorf culture firmly to the west of the Oder-Neisse-line? Didn't the Goths migrate along the Vistula to the Ukraine, along with the Wielbark culture that gave rise to the Cherniakhov culture?

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  112. @Arza

    Pity there are hardly any samples from Chechnya.

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  113. @Foxvillager

    "You see the region of Emilia-Romanga being Celtic rather Italic?Or something in between?"

    Most of the time I have considered at least its lowland parts to be rather Italic, because of the comparatively low incidince of blond hair there (lower than in Umbria and Tuscany). I was just referring to a rather unsupervised G25 model of myself I recently did, which suggested a 1/3 Celtic + 2/3 kinda Roman Imperial mix. Of course if the Imperial Roman admixture is strong enough, that might have reduced the incidence of blond hair, too. I really don't know for sure. According to Pliny, the Boii had "disappeared" from the Aemilia. But maybe they were just thoroughly assimilated by his time. Then there's the evidence of the Roman centuriation, the division of the farming land into small parcels that can still be seen today. These parcels were given to Roman citizens. But on the other hand they were used for farming, not to be settled by large masses of Romans.

    "Also Hauts-de-France and northern France/Belgium Celts would carry the same autosomal profile with the Celts of the Alps(Helveti etc) and with the Cisalpine Gauls?Do you see a homogenous autosomal profile for the Celts of central and western EU?"

    Rather not; for now we have Celts from Hauts-de-France, Alsace and Languedoc, and they are not exactly the same. There's also the CHE_IA individual from the Alpine Rhine valley, which plots Italic-like. If this female was indeed pre-Roman, she was probably Celtic speaking too. The Senones in Italy came from northern France, this may have influenced my model. But considering my geographical roots I probably have also Celtic ancestry from the Raurici and Vindelici. In northern Italy there were different waves of Celtic invasions, some coming via southern France, and others from a more northern route, I guess they were genetically different.

    "Btw Emilia-Romanga if i am not mistaken is somewhere between Northern and Central Italy genetically.Some indiviudals ploting quite northern while others have central Italian mix and they showing this 'Imperial'middle east influx."

    From what I've gathered, the Emilia plots more northern than Tuscany, close to Liguria. The Romagna on the other hand plotted central Italian-like in one of Matt's PCAs, close to Umbria. I also remember a DNA relative of mine, half from Romagna (Cesena) and half Sardinian - he was like a 50-50 mix of Sardinia and Latium according to his Eurogenes K36. This apparent genetic difference between the Emilia and the Romagna makes sense historically, because the Romagna belonged to the central Italian papal states for most of the time. It's just odd that I seem to lack the strong Anatolian admixture associated with central Italy. Maybe my Italian grandfather had it, and I just missed it by chance. But shouldn't these old short segments be spread quite evenly across the genome?

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  114. @ Dranoel

    My comment was not directed at you.

    Since you mention Y5587, I think its transmission in the Balkans through Slavs/Alans appears to be quite obvious.

    ReplyDelete
  115. EastPole, linguistic dating must always be approached with a wide margin of confidence. Contemporary linguists like Babik teach us that linguistic differentiation is a long process. Specific Slavic and Baltic innovations might have arisen a long time ago, but their layering took a long time before the Slavic and Baltic dialects became completely incomprehensible to each other.

    ReplyDelete
  116. Dranoel, the area with the highest concentration of the old Slavic toponymy is the area between the Oder and the Vistula. So, somewhere in this area, the places earliest were given Slavic names.

    ReplyDelete
  117. Simon, and why would the Goths interfere with the spread of the Slavs? On the contrary - the Goths could have been the driving force behind the spread of the Slavs. This model confirms it well:

    Target: UKR_Chernyakhiv_Legedzine:MJ19
    Distance: 2.4591% / 0.02459127 | ADC: 0.5x
    77.8 Polish
    13.0 German
    4.6 Tajik_Shugnan
    3.8 Estonian
    0.8 Karelian

    ReplyDelete
  118. @EastPole

    Very interesting. So early Alans had very little R1a, late Alans had more R1a, and Ossetians, who are the only proof that Alans were Iranians, don’t have any R1a at all.
    Looking at the PCA Alans most likely came from Iran. Have nothing to do with old “Indo-Iranians” of Sintashta.


    There are several outliers that plot quite the opposite direction from the Caucasus than Iran. Such population is not necessarily from Iran, there is another possibility: South Central Asia - Turan. At that time a steppe group from there could be very Iranian-like at first glance. In fact there is a theory that identifies Alans with the Yancai (奄蔡) people of Chienese sources and the Chinese sources lists them as a vassal of the Sogdians. That would place them quite south, in a region where very Iranian like populations are possible before Turkic and Mongolic movements.

    BTW, most of the "R1" in the early samples could be unresolved R1a and then the difference between early and late samples not that big in this regard at least.

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  119. @ ambron

    So you think that this is the homeland of the Slavs?

    I do not know if any research currently indicates this. Neither archeology nor history takes anything like this seriously. A piece of eastern or SE Poland maybe, but not western Poland.

    @ Leonidas D

    Let's not spoil this blog. I have said what my opinion is, I have given numerous arguments. And you? What do you base your theory on? What does this indicate? I am not a fanatic and if you have something wise to say, I would love to hear you.

    So far, however, it all seems to me to be the theory of "Great Lechia" or other "TURBOSLAVANS". They have always been, from the Oder River to the steppes, and everyone was afraid of them.

    Besides, in history, archeology, etc., nothing is obvious. On the contrary, everything is more or less presumed. So I'm waiting for you to explain how Y5587 became the Slavic determinant of expansion.

    ReplyDelete
  120. @ Ambron/ East Pole

    ''Russian scientists (including geneticists) who claim that the ethnogenesis of the Slavs took place somewhere in the Przeworsk culture. ''

    This is Sedov's problematic model
    He attempts to link the north Russian sopki and long barrow Slavs with Przeworsk - a 400 year gap, with no credible typological links of any kind
    I don't think any serious analyst takes much heed of it these days.


    ''Simon, and why would the Goths interfere with the spread of the Slavs? On the contrary - the Goths could have been the driving force behind the spread of the Slavs. This model confirms it well:''

    Again, a 400 year gap between the Gothic migrations (200 AD) and Slavic expansion (600 AD).
    you need to frame your theories within the constraints of reality




    ReplyDelete
  121. @Slumberry and Rob

    The Yancai are never described as coming from the south of Central Asia. They lived northwest of the Aral Sea, and are later described as living between the black and Caspian. They were vassals of the Kangju state which isn't exactly the same as Sogdians as the Kangju ruled over more regions and peoples than Sogdiana, and had a nomadic-descendant ruling class.

    So if anything the location of the early Alans would be on the steppes between the Caspian and Aral sea, and that region was connected to ural-caspian region and the volga steppes, rather than eastern central Asia. But it would still be proximate enough to mediate some southern central asian ancestry.

    The lower Siberian/higher central Asian characteristic of Sarmatians as a whole I think is due to them deriving from populations from a similar location who then migrated to the Volga and then to the Azov Sea etc.

    The Yancai are linked to both the Aorsi and Alans by the way, but later on Chinese sources use Alan/Alanliao and Yancai interchangeably. The samples labeled Sarmatian Caspian Steppe on G25 are likely Aorsi given their location and period, giving you an idea what Early Alans looked like

    "This is a rather tenuous proposal made by philologists & historians of past seeking rationalisation, pretending etymologycal guesses constitute a sound platform of evidence"

    Also this is not true. In the Weilue its written that the Yancai now named Alan border the Romans on their west and the Kangju on their southeast, and are no longer vassals of them. Its pretty clear they were talking about the Alans here.

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  122. @ Copper Axe

    ''The Yancai are never described as coming from the south of Central Asia. They lived northwest of the Aral Sea, and are later described as living between the black and Caspian. They were vassals of the Kangju state which isn't exactly the same as Sogdians as the Kangju ruled over more regions and peoples than Sogdiana, and had a nomadic-descendant ruling class.''

    But the point is many historians do in fact believe that the Chinese sources signify a movement from SCA -> West. The basis of this was, as I suggested, a problematic reading of proposed etymological connection

    However, the genetic evidence doesn’t support that theory. Early & Late Sarmatians form a clade, with no rise in inner Asian ancestry

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  123. @Rob

    I agree with you about Sarmatians. However if the linked PCA from the Russian is site is about correct, Alans had quite lot of SW Asian ancestry and not from the Caucasus only. I'd withhold my judgement until I see them in G25 though. The Alan samples that are already there are not like that.

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  124. Dranoel, the Slavic problem is only a linguistic problem, as is the case with any ethnolinguistic group.

    Let me remind you that there have always been two concepts of the origin of the Slavs - Central European (autochthonous) and Dniepern (allochthonous). So there is no need to pin this first theory of the label of Great Lechia or the Turboslovians.

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  125. Rob, do not be offended, because I am not saying this to you, but there is a joke in Polish science that there is indeed a gap, but only in the heads of the supporters of the Pripyat theory.

    All possible data (archaeological, palynological, linguistic, genetic) clearly confirm that there was no gap.

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  126. "Dorian invasion is an outdated theory with no basis in reality".

    I don't think so. Something has to explain the relationship of classical era NW ancient Greek to that of the classical Peloponnese ancient Greek languages. Typically both are classified as Doric. With the language of the Peloponnese being labeled as Doric proper. And the complete replacement of Mycenaean Greek in the Peloponnese.

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  127. @ Copper Axe
    From where are the Iranian-related populations within Kangju supposed to be derived ?

    ReplyDelete
  128. Rob, this is not my thesis, but a scientific theory with a very strong foundation in Russian and Polish science.

    And you are mistakenly treating linguists, because the Slavic problem is a linguistic problem, not another one. And the area of the Kiev culture has almost no Slavic hydronymy, but it abounds in Baltic, Iranian and Finnish.

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  129. @Rob

    Mostly just Central Asia. The Kangju was centered around Tashkent but their rule extended to the Aral sea, with vassals beyond it. Both nomadic and sedentary Iranian speaking peoples were part of of the Kangju realm.

    Or simply said a combination between central asian nomads, sogdians and khwarezmians.

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  130. @ Ambron

    Of course, "the big lechia and the turbo slavs" are just a caricature. Indeed, for many years there has been an argument about both of these concepts.
    However, the autochthonous concept is rather obsolete and hardly anyone believes in it. Kostrzewski forcefully tried to introduce it in a nationalistic way. In Polish science, it is rather a reason for jokes.

    But it is not excluded that "part" of the Slavic homeland was indeed part of the Lusatian culture. At the same time, the term "Lusatian culture" is not correct, because it is a large area, probably of different peoples, which were characterized by certain similarities. The Lusatian culture, in the areas of the old tumulus (pre-Lusatian) culture, surely has a different origin, also genetic, etc., than the eastern circle. So, for example, to the west of the Vistula, peoples similar to the Germanic could have formed, and to the east - to the Slavic ones. But this does not change the fact that we cannot say that "Lusatian culture was Slavic".

    As for the settlement gap during the migration of peoples - indeed, more and more archaeological research (especially in the construction of highways) proves that there was no complete "gap". The population decreased significantly, but still remained relatively numerous in the main settlement networks. BUT this does not prove the presence of the Slavs, but rather the presence of the Germanic people who did not take part in the migration of peoples. This is exactly what the archaeological research shows.

    Maybe this is where the Western Slavs differ from the Eastern and Southern Slavs? Because in the west they mingled with a fairly large (relatively) Germanic group that remained here. In this case, we can speak of "slaving" the other peoples here. If there were more Slavs, it is also obvious that they imposed their culture (and after germaniums we can see some "influences" in ornamentation, ceramics, etc.). This may create the appearance of "the former presence of Slavs and the transition from the Przeworsk culture to the Slavic states of the early Middle Ages". As you know, this is not true.

    And here, returning to the topic of Y5587 that we discussed with Leonidas D - in my opinion Y5587 / PH2147 / By593 / FGC43625 etc. correlate well with dates and known historical events. I believe that these are people who have been here for a long time (Bronze Age?) And have not left this area during the migration of peoples.

    * I note that I am not talking about Y5586, which is also under Y5587

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  131. @ Copper Axe

    That's the point I was making, it doesn't look like Alans came from SCA. But that has been a common theory based on the literary links.

    @ Slumberry

    In the PCA with East Eurasian, SW Eurasian groups become clustered together. We Caucasian pops projecting with Iranians.


    @ Ambron

    None taken as I don't think things originate in the Pripet marshes. I don't think any other serious model does, either

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  132. @Dranoel
    (…) So far, however, it all seems to me to be the theory of "Great Lechia" or other "TURBOSLAVANS". They have always been, from the Oder River to the steppes, and everyone was afraid of them. (…)

    It seems that your knowledge on this subject is not really profound.

    It seems that geniuses like you do not understand that the so-called ‘Turboslavism’ is a propaganda concept that is entirely based on a reinterpretation and criticism of the so-called historical sources / chronicles.

    ‘Turboslavism’ has never had and still has nothing to do with genetics, much less linguistics. It is only and solely an interpretation (and its criticism) of historical written texts and one painting hanging in the Dominican monastery in Jasna Góra.

    Many different people brought up on Prussian-Nazi lies and propaganda, such as you, are clearly lost and throw into one bag everything that they associate with Slavdom, Slavs and Slavic languages.

    Well done! Gustaf K., Adolf H., Joseph G. and their "Aryan" colleagues must be really proud of all of you!

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  133. Dranoel, Kostrzewski's autochthonous theory is younger than Kossinna's allochthonous theory. Both of these nationalist theories are outdated. Nevertheless, the essence of both concepts is still valid in science.

    The supporters of the Central European autochtonus Slavs do not deny that the Germans were here. They only argue that these lands were inhabited jointly by Slavs and Germans. And this is what genetics confirm, among others in the old paternal lines. But not only, but also in maternal lines, lactase persistence alleles and IBD segments.

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  134. @Rob

    Just an observation, but in G25 West Eurasian Abkhazians and Georgians are also plotted pretty much together with Iranian groups, Armenians, and whatnot. This offers the explanation that the part of Alans that extends into that direction simply represents people who are unadmixed South-Caucasians, let's say Georgians or something along the line.
    (The Alan samples that are already in G25 plot together with modern North-Caucasus, Adygei, Kabardin, Ingush, etc. Just like the main block of the new samples.)

    ReplyDelete
  135. @ambron
    EastPole, linguistic dating must always be approached with a wide margin of confidence.

    Can you explain more precisely what you mean here?
    Do you claim that the so-called glottochronology is a science as reliable as mathematics?

    @vAsiSTha thoughtlessly referred to the results of this 'science', received my answers and somehow did not have the courage to defend his thesis afterwards, see:

    https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/08/r1a-vs-r1b-in-third-millennium-bce.html?showComment=1630775892313#c1681604490562038116
    September 4, 2021 at 10:18 AM
    September 5, 2021 at 5:22 AM
    September 5, 2021 at 2:07 PM

    Contemporary linguists like Babik teach us that linguistic differentiation is a long process. Specific Slavic and Baltic innovations might have arisen a long time ago, but their layering took a long time before the Slavic and Baltic dialects became completely incomprehensible to each other.

    Have you ever thought what caused the different IE languages to differentiate one from another, see e.g. Germanic, Baltic and Slavic? Do you think they somehow changed by themselves?

    What do you think triggered these changes, e.g. those described by the Rask / Grimm / Verner laws? Do you think that it was done by the wicked and sneaky red hat dwarfs / wee folks? ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  136. @SKRiBHa

    Actually languages change by themselves all the time. It is pretty much business as usual. Of course various outside influences effect them, sometimes quite substantially, but assuming that there must be a special reason behind every change is wrong on principle.

    ReplyDelete
  137. @skribha

    Do not reference me anymore in your comments you hack. This in a genetics blog, not for linguistics. You can create linguistic myth in your own blog; with proto slavic born in 3000bce and free from every external influence so far, the purest of them all.

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  138. Skribha, Slumbery is right to say.

    The nineteenth-century notion of a linguistic division is an anachronism. Of course, there have been incidents in the history of the Indo-European language when some dialect group migrated long distances and lost contact with the linguistic matrix. But those were just incidents - and linguistic differentiation doesn't work that way in everyday life. Typically, innovation centers are formed from which isoglosses diverge. Innovation gradually builds up, making dialects near the center of innovation incomprehensible to dialects outside the range of isoglosses. At this point, nearby dialects can converge to form a koine that differs significantly from more distant dialects.

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  139. @Slumbery
    „Actually languages change by themselves all the time. It is pretty much business as usual. Of course various outside influences effect them, sometimes quite substantially, but assuming that there must be a special reason behind every change is wrong on principle.”

    Yes, languages change all the time. But if there is no special reason for a change they change very slowly. It is proven that if there are no external influences, like mixing of populations, religion change, etc. the rate of change can be as slow as 1-2% per 1000 years.
    What is special about Slavic languages?
    They have been changing very, very slowly and there is a lot of evidence for it.
    One cannot compare Slavic languages to Italic, Celtic or Germanic languages.
    Nothing certain is known about the history of these languages. There are some few centuries BC old inscriptions with strange words which some linguists try to reconstruct as Germanic, Celtic or Italic. It is all speculation. Nothing is certain.
    In the case of Slavic we have hundreds or maybe thousands of such words which do not need any reconstructions because they are identical to modern words, we have whole sentences which we can understand, well preserved in the most archaic Vedic language.

    Migrations to India occurred well before 1500 BC because after that date Central Asia was dominated by East Asian tribes, not present in India.
    The ancestors of the tribes which migrated to India around 2000 BC were in the Vistula-Dnieper area around 3000 BC and their Indo-Slavic language was for sure much more similar to Slavic than Vedic Sanskrit was.
    Slavic folk stories can explain fragments of Rigveda, many Vedic words, including the names of Vedic gods, have Slavic etymology, etc.

    It is all simple and obvious for people who are interested but many people have no clue about it. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the construction of world history has been dominated by western Europe, following their presence in the rest of the world as the result of colonial conquest and the Industrial Revolution. Now it turns out that a lot of what they produced was forgery and manipulation.

    There are many questions about how history was written. For example interesting series of articles about Roman antiquity and how western Europeans tried to eliminate eastern European Byzantium from history:

    https://www.unz.com/author/first-millennium-revisionist/

    Even the history of Latin is questioned:

    https://www.unz.com/article/how-fake-is-roman-antiquity/#the-mysterious-origin-of-latin

    A lot of effort has been put into falsifying linguistic and cultural history of Slavic people and to eliminate them from history. But they failed.

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  140. @eastpole

    "Migrations to India occurred well before 1500 BC because after that date Central Asia was dominated by East Asian tribes, not present in India."

    Not true. kashkarachi, uzbekistan has 2 steppe samples dated to 1200bce with no east asian admixture.

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  141. @vAsiSTha
    Do not reference me anymore in your comments you hack.

    Can you be logical at all and write something meaningful? Which comments have I allegedly 'hacked'? You mean the quotes from your nonsensical scribbles?

    I see the truth has hurt you and now you are sitting in the corner and crying facing the wall. You are as pathetic as what you write. You have no arguments and you get logically beaten up like a child.

    The dating of the alleged formation of Proto-Slavic, which you 'proved' on the basis of the 'data' of the 'science', called glottochronology, is ‘as true’ as the ravings of other Hindutva / Hindu nationalists such as Nirjhar007 and others, such as the alleged formation of R1a in India about 7,000, 15,000 or even 45,000 years ago, or creation of the Vedas by Harappans who were Dravidian-speaking people, etc. LOL!

    This in a genetics blog, not for linguistics. You can create linguistic myth in your own blog; with proto slavic born in 3000bce and free from every external influence so far, the purest of them all.

    You are clumsily lying and manipulating because you are just a lazy intellectual coward. Here you have a discussion about the alleged origin of the Pre-Slavs from the Scythians, Sarmatians, etc:

    (…)
    3. CWC R1a comes from somewhere on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

    4. The so called Asian R1a, which is Z93, is from the part of the CWC that Fatyanovo came from, wherever that was, maybe the eastern Carpathian region.

    5. The R1a in Scythians is from the CWC.

    6. Poles don't derive from Sarmatians, and don't even have any significant ancestry from them or similar populations.


    April 30, 2021 at 11:59 PM
    https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-history-of-scythians-gnecchi.html?showComment=1619852360520#c7773014023967968824

    Before you write anything as 'smart' as always, educate yourself. Be careful because this is Davidski’s quote!

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  142. @Slumbery
    Actually languages change by themselves all the time. It is pretty much business as usual. Of course various outside influences effect them, sometimes quite substantially, but assuming that there must be a special reason behind every change is wrong on principle.

    What do you think triggered these changes, e.g. those described by the Rask / Grimm / Verner laws?

    Ambron claims that allegedly:

    (…) The supporters of the Central European autochtonus Slavs do not deny that the Germans were here. They only argue that these lands were inhabited jointly by Slavs and Germans. And this is what genetics confirm, among others in the old paternal lines. But not only, but also in maternal lines, lactase persistence alleles and IBD segments. (...)

    I do not know how genetics allegedly proves it (and I would like to read something about it), but the facts are as follows:

    According to this 'logic', the Proto-Slavic should have developped the same or very similar distortions as the Proto-Germanic. According to some virtuosos of logic, Proto-Slavic is supposed to be much younger than Proto-Germanic.

    The problem is that even in the officially restored Proto-Slavic, there are no such distortions! :-)

    This clearly indicates that the above statements are not supported by logic and facts, i.e. they are untrue. :-)

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  143. @skribha

    I hope to dear God that you have some iota of intelligence in your head.

    I never claimed anything about poles (lol). I never claimed that slavs genetically derive from sarmatians or Alans. Please try to comprehend and use your brains more rather than typing long rambling shit which noone reads.

    Just like English has made a decent language impact on India without any genetic contribution during the British rule, similarly the centuries long rule of scythians sarmatians and Alans has left an impact on the slavic languages at the proto slavic stage, so much so that some linguists claim that even the partly satem nature of slavic and the ruki law is due to iranian influence. The extent of the influence can be debated but nuts like you cannot get away with claiming that there's no influence at all. Just google 'iranian loanwords in slavic' and start your journey from there.

    As far as the 'creation' of R1a in India goes, i have never claimed it because there's no data. I challenge you to show me where I have claimed such a thing.

    As far as the Vedas go, they were definitely not composed on the steppe, the geography of the Vedas is extremely clear and it is squarely in modern NW india and pakistan and absolutely nowhere else.

    This is my last reply to you, don't find you worthwhile wasting my time.

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  144. @ambron
    The nineteenth-century notion of a linguistic division is an anachronism. Of course, there have been incidents in the history of the Indo-European language when some dialect group migrated long distances and lost contact with the linguistic matrix. But those were just incidents - and linguistic differentiation doesn't work that way in everyday life.

    Well, you have not answered some of my questions, see:

    1.
    Do you claim that the so-called glottochronology is a science as reliable as mathematics?

    2.
    Have you ever thought what caused the different IE languages to differentiate one from another, see e.g. Germanic, Baltic and Slavic?

    3.
    What do you think triggered these changes, e.g. those described by the Rask / Grimm / Verner laws?

    (…) Typically, innovation centers are formed from which isoglosses diverge. Innovation gradually builds up, making dialects near the center of innovation incomprehensible to dialects outside the range of isoglosses. At this point, nearby dialects can converge to form a koine that differs significantly from more distant dialects. (…)

    And what if it is exactly opposite, see Schmidt's wave theory?

    Logic dictates that e.g. devoicing +H or S>H>? is a process that arises in exactly the opposite way to the one described above and has to do with the mixing of languages / peoples, see eg substrate, adstrate / superstrate.

    It has to do with genes and it should be clearly visible. And that is what it is, see for example CWC > Fatianovo > Sintashta > Andronovo > Indo-Arians, while BMAC / Yaz > Iranians.

    The same goes for Proto-Germans who were a mixture of CWC > BB R1b + I1.

    The Proto-Slavic marker is R1a Z282, isn't it? Can I1 be considered a Proto-Germanic marker? :-)

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  145. @EastPole

    Sure, the change can be slow. Or not. The speed is uneven even if nothing big happens. Nevertheless, I just warned against a simplistic viewpoint, where changes in the language always have to have some special reason behind them.

    However about this point:
    "Migrations to India occurred well before 1500 BC because after that date Central Asia was dominated by East Asian tribes, not present in India."

    It is pretty evident that post 1500 BC Central Asia was _not_ dominated by "East Asian tribes" (whatever it means). We have Andronovo samples younger than that with minimal or no East Asian shift. And as for South Central Asia / the former BMAC region, I'd wager to say that it was not dominated by them even in the Iron Age.

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  146. Skribha, innovations may occur for no reason, or they may be the result of a substrate or a superstrate. It does not matter. The very fact of innovation and isoglosses spreading is important. The isoglosses spread out like a wave, which is what Schmidt's wave theory says.

    The Germanic, Slavic and Baltic languages differ precisely because innovation centers have emerged in the CWC's horizon - including Germanic, Slavic and Baltic centers.

    Speaking of the joint inhabitation of the lands by the Slavs and the Germans, I meant the Germans as newcomers, and the Slavs as local. And genetics simply shows the biological continuity of the Polish population in paternal and maternal lineages, lactase persistence alleles and IBD segments.

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  147. RE Dorian invasion

    Its been a few years since I was reading about it, but first of all it is a literary -genealogical narrative (in fact several disparate traditions), is it not ?
    But yeah there is archaeological evidence which links to as far as central European Urnfield traditions: cremation burials, cist graves, new types of swrods and irong brooches.



    @ Arch Hades

    ''I want to see what Greeks were like then (Iron Age), genetically. Then we can talk about Slavic admixture.''

    it would be interesting, but if you want to understand impact of Slavic admixture, then we would need Byzantine Era samples, because they would have been the substrate. The admixing population would be something like these Kuline samples.


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  148. @ Ambron

    ''And genetics simply shows the biological continuity of the Polish population in paternal and maternal lineages, lactase persistence alleles and IBD segments.''

    How does lactase persistence demonstrate continuity ?
    What samples show continity between Iron Age & Medieval Era in the Vistula-Oder region

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  149. Rob

    "Sequencing of intron 13 of the MCM6 gene in 131 ancient individuals indicated that LCT-13910C>T is probably the only SNP responsible for the regulation of lactase activity in Polish population, since none of other known SNPs (LCT-13907C/G, LCT-13909T/A, LCT-13913T/C, LCT-13915T/G) was found among the studied samples.

    The numerical scanning indicates an interval of increased probability of the selection starting point in a range between 3.875 and 2.875 Ka BP...

    ...people from Gotland living between 4.8–4.2 Ka BP as well as those from Central Poland (living roughly between 4 and 3 Ka BP) could have witnessed the beginning of the T allele selection...

    Having an opportunity to sample and characterize a large number of individuals living over several millennia in the same region, not encountered in the literature so far, we followed the HVR-I sequence to evaluate genetic continuity, heterogeneity, putative origin and their relationship to ancestral and descendant populations. Based on HVR-I sequence and comparative haplotype analysis, it can be demonstrated that, except the subpopulation from Rogowo, all studied samples share continuity in the maternal lineage with an ancestral population."

    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122384



    ReplyDelete
  150. @vAsiSTha
    (…) I never claimed anything about poles (lol). I never claimed that slavs genetically derive from sarmatians or Alans. (…)

    Where did I allegedly claim you claimed the above? I only quoted Davidski's claims confirming that Poles, and more broadly Slavs, do not come from Iranian peoples, such as the Scythians or Sarmatians, etc.

    Some ‘scientists’ claimed and still have claimed otherwise, but they are wrong, see also below.

    (…) Please try to comprehend and use your brains more rather than typing long rambling shit which noone reads. (…)

    This is logically untrue as you have just responded to what I wrote, so you must read it. LOL :-)

    (…) Just like English has made a decent language impact on India without any genetic contribution during the British rule, similarly the centuries long rule of scythians sarmatians and Alans has left an impact on the slavic languages at the proto slavic stage, so much so that some linguists claim that even the partly satem nature of slavic and the ruki law is due to iranian influence. (…)

    When and where did the 'the centuries long rule of scythians sarmatians and Alans has left an impact on the slavic languages at the proto slavic stage’ allegedly occured? Any evidence for this?

    By the way, according to this 'logic', the English would also have had an influence on the language of the Vedas ... LOL! :-)


    Many 'scientists' claimed and still have claimed all sorts of things, see e.g. glottochronology and its 'dating' of Proto-Slavic origin, etc. Once upon a time 'scientists' claimed that the earth was flat and all good things came to us from the east, etc... They were wrong. :-)

    (…) The extent of the influence can be debated but nuts like you cannot get away with claiming that there's no influence at all. Just google 'iranian loanwords in slavic' and start your journey from there. (…)

    Be a hero, try to give and defend at least one such example! I will give you a hint. Try the word Bóg / Bo'G, which is officially supposed to be an Iranian borrowing from Bhaga / BHaGa. I bet you will play chicken and fly away as usual...

    (…) As far as the 'creation' of R1a in India goes, i have never claimed it because there's no data. I challenge you to show me where I have claimed such a thing. (…)

    Where did I allegedly claim you claimed the above? Learn to read and understand, see:

    ‘The dating of the alleged formation of Proto-Slavic, which you 'proved' on the basis of the 'data' of the 'science', called glottochronology, is ‘as true’ as the ravings of other Hindutva / Hindu nationalists such as Nirjhar007 and others, such as the alleged formation of R1a in India about 7,000, 15,000 or even 45,000 years ago, or creation of the Vedas by Harappans who were Dravidian-speaking people, etc. LOL!’

    (…) As far as the Vedas go, they were definitely not composed on the steppe, the geography of the Vedas is extremely clear and it is squarely in modern NW india and pakistan and absolutely nowhere else. (…)

    Am I saying that it was so or not? Where? The fact is that the English who ruled India for several hundred years had no influence on the language of the Vedas. :-)

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  151. I was doing some research searching for admixtures specific to Bulgarians and I think I found something interesting. I am an amateur thought and it would be great to get a second opinion. Here's a link to the WIP document:

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pZLCxcJfNKCPmwFdtn1hA89Ps5Pw_uAWxr8uP12M83I/edit?usp=sharing

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  152. @ Ambron

    Yeah. So we're basically talking about the same thing. The population living in eastern and western Poland could have had a completely different "base", and somewhere between them there was a "line of contact". And referring to my previous statements, I believe that Y5587 / PH2147 is related to its western part.

    @ SKRiBHa

    I thought for a long time whether to answer you or not. I will be sparing in words, because after reading your blog, I find that we have absolutely nothing to talk about. You are a simpleton and a fanatic who offends everyone around you who have a different opinion. Your statements are steeped in fairy tales and should not be displayed on this forum because they spoil it. I will not comment on references to Adolf H. etc. at all. The administrator should punish you for this rudeness.

    @ VasiSTha

    I think we should all "ignore" SKRiBH - such trolls live off stupid and insulting statements.

    @ all
    Mr. SKRiBHa should pay attention to this. This film (based on authentic facts) was read from peleolithic tablets - the action takes place near Warsaw in Poland. The Slavs fight the natives for the land. It's true, I promise !!!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2bgeq6hAlU

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  153. Dranoel, you present a high level of personal culture and it is pure pleasure to discuss with you.

    So, if I were to clarify, the combined multidisciplinary data suggests rather such a scenario that the Balto-Slavic post-CWC horizon reached quite far to the west - maybe even to the Elbe. On the other hand, the Germanic ethnos took shape somewhere further west / northwest. In turn, in the Iron Age, the Germanic tribes settled on Polish lands in the vicinity of the indigenous Balto-Slavic population, forming tribal confederations with them.

    The Germans had such traditions that part of the clan left their homeland, which prevented food shortages. In the draw was decided on who had to leave the homeland.

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  154. @Dranoel
    You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. The fact is, apart from expressing it, that you have not put forward anything to support it. I understand that it is safer for you because you have no arguments, and what Prussian-Nazi science has established is sacred to you. I would also like to have such fanatic faith in what the ancestors and descendants of Bismark and his colleagues established in the 19th and 20th centuries, for example at Humbolt University.

    I understand that what I wrote about the Prussian-Nazi science hurt you. Indeed, logic and truth can be somethimes painful.

    Can you prove where I wrote the untruth? Do not be afraid and try it. I will not shoot you for disagreeing with me. :-)

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  155. @Davidski, Arza,

    Looks like this Bronze age, Eneolithic DNA in Italy is available.
    Seguin-Orland 2021
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221005352

    The accession number for the DNA sequences reported in this paper is ENA:PRJEB37660 (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJEB37660). The data are also available through the data depository of the EBC (http://evolbio.ut.ee).

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  156. My bad that is a link to a different French ancient DNA study. I've never seen that french paper either.

    Heterogeneous Hunter-Gatherer and Steppe-Related Ancestries in Late Neolithic and Bell Beaker Genomes from Present-Day France
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960982220318352

    Ancient genomes reveal structural shifts after the arrival of Steppe-related ancestry in the Italian Peninsula
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221005352

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  157. @Dranoel
    I would like to sincerely apologise to you because I wrote the untruth by mistake! Shame to me. I mean this sentence:

    ‘The fact is, apart from expressing it, that you have not put forward anything to support it. I understand that it is safer for you because you have no arguments, and what Prussian-Nazi science has established is sacred to you.’

    Sorry, but because of rush I did not go through the 'arguments' you wrote below, see:

    (…) This film (based on authentic facts) was read from peleolithic tablets - the action takes place near Warsaw in Poland. The Slavs fight the natives for the land. It's true, I promise !!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2bgeq6hAlU (…)

    I understand that this is all you can ‘argue’ with me. It is obvious you did not understand anything of what I wrote before, see:

    (…) It seems that geniuses like you do not understand that the so-called ‘Turboslavism’ is a propaganda concept that is entirely based on a reinterpretation and criticism of the so-called historical sources / chronicles.

    ‘Turboslavism’ has never had and still has nothing to do with genetics, much less linguistics. It is only and solely an interpretation (and its criticism) of historical written texts and one painting hanging in the Dominican monastery in Jasna Góra.

    Many different people brought up on Prussian-Nazi lies and propaganda, such as you, are clearly lost and throw into one bag everything that they associate with Slavdom, Slavs and Slavic languages.
    (…)


    So this time shame to you… because your ‘scientific arguments’ are truly lame again.

    ReplyDelete
  158. Not an aDNA paper, however it may be of interest for people here:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03798-4

    Dairying enabled Early Bronze Age Yamnaya steppe expansions

    During the Early Bronze Age, populations of the western Eurasian steppe expanded across an immense area of northern Eurasia. Combined archaeological and genetic evidence supports widespread Early Bronze Age population movements out of the Pontic–Caspian steppe that resulted in gene flow across vast distances, linking populations of Yamnaya pastoralists in Scandinavia with pastoral populations (known as the Afanasievo) far to the east in the Altai Mountains1,2 and Mongolia3. Although some models hold that this expansion was the outcome of a newly mobile pastoral economy characterized by horse traction, bulk wagon transport4,5,6 and regular dietary dependence on meat and milk5, hard evidence for these economic features has not been found. Here we draw on proteomic analysis of dental calculus from individuals from the western Eurasian steppe to demonstrate a major transition in dairying at the start of the Bronze Age. The rapid onset of ubiquitous dairying at a point in time when steppe populations are known to have begun dispersing offers critical insight into a key catalyst of steppe mobility. The identification of horse milk proteins also indicates horse domestication by the Early Bronze Age, which provides support for its role in steppe dispersals. Our results point to a potential epicentre for horse domestication in the Pontic–Caspian steppe by the third millennium bc, and offer strong support for the notion that the novel exploitation of secondary animal products was a key driver of the expansions of Eurasian steppe pastoralists by the Early Bronze Age.

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  159. @ambron
    Skribha, innovations may occur for no reason, or they may be the result of a substrate or a superstrate. It does not matter.

    Well, logic does matter, but I do not see it here. Things do not happen without a reason. You may not see, know, or understand the reason, but it always exists.

    The very fact of innovation and isoglosses spreading is important. The isoglosses spread out like a wave, which is what Schmidt's wave theory says.

    OK, but what if Schmidt was partially wrong and 'innovation centers' form at the point where waves overlap, see e.g. IE or NIE substrate + NIE or IE adstrate / superstrate?

    In the next post I will describe how it could possibly have worked.

    The Germanic, Slavic and Baltic languages differ precisely because innovation centers have emerged in the CWC's horizon - including Germanic, Slavic and Baltic centers.

    What supposed to be the original 'CWC's horizon innovation', if not the so-called satem, see East CWC Fatianovo > Indo-Aryans and Central CWC which has never moved out of Lesser Poland > Proto-Slavs?

    Why is there not the same 'CWC's horizon innovation' found in Proto-Germanic?

    Logically, it had to disappear in Proto-Germanic, because CWC>BB mixed with NIE I1... By the way, you shall not forget about an alternation of sounds still present, for example, in Polish...

    Speaking of the joint inhabitation of the lands by the Slavs and the Germans, I meant the Germans as newcomers, and the Slavs as local. And genetics simply shows the biological continuity of the Polish population in paternal and maternal lineages, lactase persistence alleles and IBD segments.

    You mix events separated by thousands of years, see CWC in Małopolska 4900 years ago and the beginnings of settlement and germanisation there 700 years ago.

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  160. Skribha, we live in a cause and effect reality, so obviously every effect has a cause. However, if we do not know the cause of a phenomenon, why discuss it? For example, what was the cause of the centum's innovations?

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  161. Hi Leonidas,

    I am one of the very few Albanians who would agree with you. Recently I have become aware that in the Serbian-Bulgarian border area there are many toponyms that seem to be Albanian derived, and many others pronounced in a manner that can only come from an Albanian throat/phonetics, possibly Vlach as well. Just west of the Bulgarian capital there is a valley called Burel, seems to be related to the Albanian word berryl(elbow), the valley has a 90 degree angle turn, thus shaped like an elbow. At the heart of medieval Albania, near the Mat valley is the village of Burrel.
    There many toponyms in this area of Bulgaria that I noted down, but most convincing to me are the following: Kambelevtsi (from Alb. kumbulla, plum), two villages named Dreatin (related to Albanian Drite(light), there are settlements in Albania with this name),Bukorovtsi (from Albanian bukur), Arzan (same as Albanian villages arrez, from the word arre (farm land)), Buzovitsa from Albanain buze(many such toponym derivates in Albania), Lyalintsi from ALbanian lala(this toponym existed even in Peloponnese), on the Serbian-Bulgarian border there is the Ruy mountain which can be related to the Alabanian word for safety/protection ruj, on the Serbian side of the border Grapa (Gropa in Albania from the word for hole/depression in the land), many toponyms called Gramade seems to be from Albanian gurmadhe(big rocks)or the related Albanian word for ruins germadhje, village of Postalica from Albanian posht(lower), there are also two settlement with similar name Petrilje and Petrlas which reminds me of the Albanian fort and settlement of Petrela near Tirana where the first Albanian principality appears.

    The region in question used to be ruled by the Byzantine empire until 800 AD, the Bulgarian khaganate captured Serdets (Sofia) in 802 and shortly afterwards the Byzantines set up the theme of Durres. I am going to assume the Byzantines settled Albanian refugees, or the Bulgarians did several decades later when they expanded to the Adriatic coast and settled the Albanians as auxiliaries. In either scenario this is when the Albanians take their present form.

    In regards to haplogroup J2b, it is not very common in southern Albania, because of that I am of the opinion that it is a remnant of southern Illyrians and it entered the Albanian corpus in late middle ages, I have heard people use the term Lezha cluster. I could be wrong and have not devoted that much study to it but its weak presence in the south suggests it was not a player when Albanians were expanding south, it was absorbed by western Ghegs and it achieved big success after the merger.

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  162. ambron said...
    (…) Skribha, we live in a cause and effect reality, so obviously every effect has a cause. (…)

    It is nice that we agree on this problem.

    (…) However, if we do not know the cause of a phenomenon, why discuss it? (...)

    I do not know,.. maybe to try to understand and explain it? You are joking at me, aren’t you?

    (…) For example, what was the cause of the centum's innovations? (…)

    It is nice you just asked about that. The explanation of the so-called 'centum's innovations' is trivial and logical. Although the so-called the cenum has officially supposed to be the original PIE state, while CWC is already Post-PIE ...

    Something does not add up here, does it? Do you see that there is an abyss lurking in your question that undermines the foundations of the Prussian-Nazi ‘science’ of the PIE? :-)
    Analyze the formation of the CWC and its expansion east / north, west and south, please.

    The data logically indicate that the CWC from the beginning of its formation in Małopolska and further south, MUST have been so-called satem (or rather alternate). This is proved by the so-called satem and the eastern CWC Fatianovo > Proto-Indo-Iranians, the northern CWC > Proto-Balts, as well as the central CWC from Małopolska / Lesser Poland > Proto-Slavs, but for BMAC / Yaz there was virtually no mixing with NO peoples, see:

    (…)
    2. Yes, the Sintashta population and all closely related populations were very homogeneous, apart from clear outliers who didn't have any noticeable impact on the main Sintashta cluster.
    (…)
    3. I don't understand the question. Obviously, Fatyanovo and Sintashta didn't have any Asian admixture, unless you mean their Anatolian farmer ancestry.
    (…)


    Davidski May 6, 2021 at 6:25 AM
    https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-history-of-scythians-gnecchi.html?showComment=1620307540013#c9017677983718665569

    West CWC > BB > Proto-Celts (+I1) > Proto Germans and South CWC> Proto-Hellenes mixed with NIE peoples and this caused secondary devoices that are perfectly visible and audible everywhere in the CWC periphery!

    This is exactly the opposite of what Schmidt claimed. I will describe it to you in more detail until evening.

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  163. I just don't know where the opinion came from that the centum is a primary Proto-Indo-European condition and that satem is an innovation. Academic linguistic textbooks say the opposite: satem is a continuation of the Proto-Indo-European condition, and the centum is innovation.

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  164. Jugu, you are right about some of the toponyms. I would add Maleshevska mountain in western Bulgaria and Maliovitsa peak in Rila mountain as associated with Albanian Mal (mountain?), I have heard that Osogova mountain is also Albanian stem. There is abundant evidence for an old Albanian presence in the area, preceding the slavs. Some of the toponyms you mentioned are however coming from the other way around, for example Gramade which is Bulgarian and also means big pile of stones/rocks (gramada) It derives from "ogromen" (big, enormous) and also gramaden (big again). Albanians have been traditionally migrating towards Bulgaria for centuries, which is perhaps not well understood in i-net circles. There are many villages founded by migrating Albanian groups - for example Arbanasi near Veliko Tarnovo or Mandritsa in Rhodope mountains. There is also one of the occupation-related dialects spoken by the local masons in Rhodope mt. that for big surprise turned out to be based on Albanian language. The topic is poorly studied. Of course, influence had been bi-directional and I can point to you many hundreds Albanian words, that are in fact Slavic loan-words. However, some of the toponyms in Western Bulgaria (mostly mountain names) hint to an ancient Albanian presence in the area, that precedes the appearance of the Slavs.

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  165. @ Jugu/ St/ Leonidas

    Yes many people understand the “toponyms argument”
    And I have also previously though that, if not “native” to Albania; then the main vector for arrival is during the Bulgarian expansion toward Epirus
    However, we need more concrete evidence. Where is the archaeological evidence for Albanians in 600, 700s, 800s and 900s Morava valley ?
    Given they kept their language, they had a strong identity and this would manifest distinctively from the “mass of slavs” which surrounded them.

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  166. More on the early linguistic contacts between Slavs and Albanians: Some Slavonic loan-words in Albanian language:
    -korítε (slavonik korito)
    -matukε — (slavonic motika)
    -magulε, gamulε — „hill",slavonic "mogila"
    stréhe, -a, strεhε — slavonic streha (tent, eaves)

    postré, - slavonic postreha, gutter

    роdε, pod -slavonic pod, house floor



    zid, slavonic " zid", "stone wall".

    ргак, pragu (tosk), praku (geg) — slavonic prag, house threshold

    gražd, - slavonic grajd, lower place in a house or an enclosure for animal husbandry



    pol'itsε, polits, slavonic politsa, shelf

    ponitse — ponitsa, basement in a house

    izbε — slavonic izba, underground basement. I can go on for hours, as the total of old slavonic and proto-slavonic loanwords in albanian consists of thousands of words.. Many of the loan words are in fact in the Swadesh list, deeply ingrained in Albanian language. b) struk (m.), slawonih strug

    teslitsε (f.) šteslitsε (гег.) — slavonic tesla, little axe.

    topεr (f.) — slavonic topor, big axe.
    vitlε (f.) — slawonik vitlo, nail.
    klétškε, k'étškε (f.) - slavonic klechka, piece of wood.



    kovátš - slavonic kovach, blacksmith

    potkúa, potkúe, poktúa, patkúa, paktúa; slavonic - podkova, under-the-feet.



    verigε (f.) — slavonic veriga, chain

    sablé - slavonik sablia, saber. yet some mor old Slavonic loanwords in Albanian - vozís, vozít — slavonic voziti, giving a ride.

    totšís, totšít — slavonik tochit, tochish - sharpen


    darís, darít — slavonic darish, giving gift

    darovís, darovít — slavonic daruvam, giving away

    gostís, gostít — slavonic gostit, gostia - accepting guests, feeding guests

    Now we come to bigger troubles - basal words in Albanian language, denoting kin and family relations, are slavonic loanwords:
    - opštinε — slavonic obshtina, community, or family
    family property — baštinε; slavonic bashtina.
    domak'in — slavonik domak, domakin - head of a family, reach man
    stopán — slavonic stopanin, stopan, again head of a household, head of a farm

    momε — slavonic moma, maiden, young lady

    tšupε — slavonic chupa, young girl
    babε — slavonic baba, grandmother

    pobratim, probatim, probatin, probotím — slavonic pobratim, becoming brothers in blood

    rod (m.) rodnár — slavonik rod,roden, kin, kinship

    tšéta - slavonik tseta, group of related people

    et cetera. The point of this posting is to shed some light on the relation between Slavs and Albanians in the early medieval epoch. Judging by the number and by the character of the borrowings, no, Albanians did not live in isolation. So in regard with the language shift that must have happened to Albanians under the influence of old Slavonic and proto-slavonic, I do not see any surprise in the Slavonic component in contemporary Albanians, claimed by this study. This should be no surprise to anyone. If we compare Slavonic loanword/borrowing in Albanian to the surprisingly few borrowings from Latin (roman, Vlah, Aromanian) and Greek, we will probably be as confused about the precise homeland and deep history of Albanians as linguists are. So, make what you wish from this.

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  167. @ Jugu / St / Rob

    Thank you for your posts. It would be great if we could compile likely Albanian toponyms from Serbia and Bulgaria that predate the Slavs. As I mentioned earlier, Niš in Serbia almost certainly passed into Slavic through an Albanian intermediary, hinting towards an ancestral presence of Albanians in the area. The etymology of the Carpathian mountains may also be proto-Albanian.

    If you send me the names I can make a nice map.

    Now about the entry of Slavic loanwords in Albanian, according to Vladimir Orel, this took place in two phases:

    1) The oldest Slavic toponyms exist in North Albania, and are dated to approximately the 6th century.

    2) The youngest Slavic toponyms exist in Southern Albania (i.e. most of the country), and are derived from fully formed 8th century South Slavic.

    The above add further credence to the obvious pattern of North-to-South migration of Albanians in the country that is now Albania. The most likely scenario is that proto-Albanians entered North Albania sometime in the 5th-6th century, and had contacts with speakers of early Slavic. As they moved southward in later centuries, they absorbed Slavic speakers and their toponyms.

    This makes perfect sense with the fact that virtually all likely proto-Albanian lines (E-V13, R1b-Z2103, J2b) are most diverse in the extreme North of Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro, corroborating linguistic data that Albanians expanded from the North in the last 1500 years.

    Likely non-proto-Albanian lines [J2a (some lines), R1a, I2a Din, and R1b-Z29758] are more diverse and more numerous in south Albania, further corroborating the above pattern.

    Regarding J2b in Albanians, the vast majority is likely proto-Albanian, there is no doubt about that. Some extremely rare lineages (mentioned in previous comments) that are also found with Croatian Iron Age samples (likely Illyrian), in my opinion represent remnants from the Romanised inhabitants of pre-Albanian Albania.

    It is quite remarkable that Albanians, a pastoral population, were able to rapidly expand and prevail in such a large area, with quite a few urban centres. Of course, they had a fierce military culture that was exploited by the Byzantines, Venetians, and the Catalans, alike. The same holds true for the Aromanians, who were able to conquer the largely Germano-Slavic population of Romania, and very large parts of Greece (e.g. Thessaly).

    By the way, we really do not know the ethnic affiliation of the Komani-Kruja culture. They were almost certainly Romanised (based on toponymy and inscriptions), and most of their material culture was heavily Byzantine, with Avar elements. So I do not think there is any considerable evidence as to whether they were proto-Albanians or not.

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  168. @ambron
    I just don't know where the opinion came from that the centum is a primary Proto-Indo-European condition and that satem is an innovation. Academic linguistic textbooks say the opposite: satem is a continuation of the Proto-Indo-European condition, and the centum is innovation.

    This is the first time I have heard of something like this! Can you provide a quote that confirms this and its source, please?

    Officially, the alleged original state of the so-called PIE was supposedly to look like described here:

    wiki/Centum_and_satem_languages

    Of course, these are only mutually contradictory presumptions.

    I argue that logic and evidence show that there was an alternation of the stems / roots in the Post-PIE CWC.

    wiki/Alternation_(linguistics)
    wiki/Alternacja_(j%C4%99zykoznawstwo)

    Unfortunately, some of the examples visible there are examples of the so-called apophony:

    wiki/Apophony
    wiki/Przeg%C5%82os

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  169. @Leonidas D

    While you are quick to deliberately assume that Albanians have very little to do with Albania itself, pay attention carefully to the toponyms of Mat & Lezhe along with the Buna river.

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  170. David, I noticed that the Kowalewko samples are no longer in G25. Is this because they were of too low quality?

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  171. Were they ever in my G25 datasheets?

    Yes, they're very low coverage and I'm waiting for higher quality versions.

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  172. Okay. Yeah, they were in there but the coordinates for the average was placed in the individual samples list and vice versa.

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  173. ST: . Maleshevska is a Slavic toponym, there are such names for settlements name all over Slavic countries. No idea on Maliovitsa, does not sound Albanian, could it stem from Albanian? Possibly but in the current form, it reveals nothing in Albanian. Maja is the word used for peak, mal for mountain and kodra for hills(also hills within mountains).

    I would be more interested in the census of the villages listed from medieval times(Bulgaria even ruled the Serbian side). Did the Bulgarian empire take census of villages like the Ottomans did? I would bet if we can get our hands on that, we can find people with Albanian names in the villages that have Albanian names. I believe those villages represent Albanians that stayed behind, if Albanians left entirely, the old toponyms would have not been transmitted to the Slavs.

    In South Albania there is a Greek region called Dropull, from Hadrianopolis(ancient Roman city). There are many blondes among them, and Albanians on youtube get offended when they see videos of the people accusing them of being fake Greeks, or sold out Albanians. In fact they are Hellenized Slavs, when the Ottomans took the first census of the area in the 1430s, the majority of the people had Slavic names. Today there are no Slavs, all Hellenized. Something similar had to had lasted in the area of Pernik and west of Sofia.

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  174. "It is quite remarkable that Albanians, a pastoral population, were able to rapidly expand and prevail in such a large area, with quite a few urban centres. Of course, they had a fierce military culture that was exploited by the Byzantines, Venetians, and the Catalans, alike. The same holds true for the Aromanians, who were able to conquer the largely Germano-Slavic population of Romania, and very large parts of Greece (e.g. Thessaly)."

    Actually the expansion is entirely due to the geography of Albania, geography is chaotic, the valleys do not run parallel but in random directions, this prevents a strong state to form, at least in pre-industrial times. This worked to our advantage, because we are disorganized and function well in small bands/tribes, at least in the middle ages we were semi-nomadic. This allowed us to prey on the Slavs of south Albania easily who did not have the strong state, and who function better in larger arrangements but lacked them due to centuries of Byzantine rule. Albanians preyed on the settled people when Byzantine rule was weak, basically in times of anarchy the settled people with no structure of their own(because they were incorporated into the Byzantine Romei system) were easy pickings. Geography helped greatly.

    The other was simply timing. Byzantine empire went into gradual decline which allowed Albanian to bite off pieces southward. The timing of settling our new location was our luck. The weak state of the Byzantines allowed a strong Slavic state north to develop(Serbia). Being on the periphery of a dying empire helped our situation because the Byzantines didn't have the luxury to incorporate us into their Roman system, instead we functioned as semi-autonomous ally of the Byzantines, a buffer zone against the growing Serbian state.

    This reveals how delicate life is, how fast lands can change hands. Most Albanians have shown zero concern as the current regime talks about bringing Bengladeshis and Africans for work (not a joke, jobs in Albania) and have already started importing them. If you believe you always lived in your current land evolving from the rocks you step on, you'll be unable to see the obvious threat that is developing.

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  175. @ Leonidas


    “ The same holds true for the Aromanians, who were able to conquer the largely Germano-Slavic population of Romania”

    The establishment of Romance voivodes in Romania was pragmatic.
    The Mongol invasions had devastated the region (& almost wiped out the old Magyar chiefly class in the Carpathian basin). The Hungarian kings then enticed Vlachs to establish proto-principalities in Walachia & Moldavia. As it happens, they were significantly Slavic admixed and most of their names are Slavic

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  176. @ambron

    You have not answered my question, see above. From the 'logic' you presented earlier emerges something like this:

    Allegedly suddenly and for no reason, a Proto-German chap who lived once (maybe 500-100BCE), somewhere in a Proto-Germanic forest began to change sounds D>T, T>D, P/B>PH/PF/F, K>G/H, S>H, etc... because he liked it so much.

    All the other Proto-Germans who lived in the other remote Proto-Germanic forests beyond the mountains and rivers, suddenly and for no reason at all, started doing exactly the same thing too.

    /wiki/Nordic_Bronze_Age
    /wiki/Germanic_parent_language
    /Proto-Germanic_language
    /wiki/Grimm%27s_law

    Ancient Proto-Germanic magic and telepathy must have worked and kaboom!

    They came into existence from nothing, just like the Universe! :-)

    And this is how secondary distortions appeared on their own,.. being strangely identical to the characters of PIE and Proto-Slavic, which, according to some 'scientists', was supposed to form around 100CE (Kushniarevich), or even 800CE (Curta)...

    It is already proven beyond any doubt that there was no so-called settlement emptiness / Siedlungsleere on the region of Vistula River in 5-6 century.

    Nowadays, even the representatives of the Prussian-Nazi ‘science’ have claimed so.

    They also claim that the Proto-Slavs absorbed and assimilated the descendants of the Proto-Germans who remained there.

    If this was supposed to be the case, then shouldn't the Proto-Slavs have borrowed at least some of the same Proto-Germanic distortions?

    After all, according to official Prussian-Nazi science, the Proto-Slavs would allegedly only crawl from their original habitats located in dens of the Pripyat swamps, to the areas previously occupied by the descendants of Proto-Germans...

    After all, officially the Slavs borrowed everything good after and from the mighty Proto-Germans, who, however, did not entirely depart south to defeat the invincible ancient Rome...

    How is it possible that the Proto-Slavs, who allegedly knew and had nothing on their own, did not borrow from the ones who remained the most important, that is, the secondary Proto-Germanic distortions, hm?

    How is it possible that in Polish there are still such alternated words as Trzeć/ TR"eC’ and Drzeć / DR”eC’, etc.?

    Your above claims are illogical. I argue that there is a logical and simple solution which is the reverse wave theory'.

    1. All secondary devoicing / so-called centum, etc., in Post-PIE CWC was caused by substrate or NIE adstrat / superstrate. The primary Post-PIE / CWC state was the alternation of sounds, with a predominance of the so-called satem.

    2. Post-PIE CWC waves went east > Fatianovo, west > BB and south > Balkan CWC. On their way, they encountered various NIE peoples, with haplogroups I1, N, G, Q, C, R2, etc.

    3. It is through the mixing of the Post-PIE with NIE peoples and languages, all secondary devoicings were formed, see:

    - east > CWC Fatianovo > Andronovo > Proto-Indo-Aryans > Vedic Sanskrit (+H); BMAC / Yaz > Proto-Iranians > Avestan (+H, P/B>F, S>H); (the so-called Tocharian language was atested from only 6-8 century),
    - west > CWC > BB > Proto-Celts of which the Proto-Italics were formed to the south of the Alps (P/B>F/Q/K, D>F, etc.) and the Proto-Germans were formed in the north of them (D>T, T>D, P/B>PH/PF/F, K>G/H, S>H, etc.), who mixed with NIE I1.

    It was similar with the Proto-Armenians and the Proto-Hellenes who came on chariots first to Epirus (-W, S>H>?, P/B>PH/F, etc.).

    4. Anatolian languages like Hittite may come from Post-PIE other than CWC e.g. Suvorovo, Usatovo, etc,. Then in Anatolia they mixed with NIE peoples and languages like Hattic or Hurrian etc., which gave similar secondary distortions (alleged so-called laryngals) like the ones mentioned above.

    …..

    Will there be a daredevil who dares to challenge my ‘reverse wave theory'?

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  177. Some comments regarding Albanian, Romanian origin romanian
    1. Make no sense to have an old balkanic language survive in present day Albania, proto albanians probably come from inland montan areas
    2. Moslty common word in romanian and albanian are not loans but heritage from a old proto language
    3. Proto Romanians were not a single tribe with unique origin but were romanized balkan people withdifferent origins, probably mostly dacian and thracian, indeed the bulk of protoromanians was in today Serbia and East and North Bulgaria
    4. At the timre of Magyars arrival romanians/vlach were already established north of the Danube and in the process to fully asimilate the slavs, the slav assimilation give them the numbers. "Around 1210 Hungarian king (Andrew II) sent Joachim (Turje) to lead an army of Saxons, Vlachs, Székelys and Pechenegs across the Carpathian Mountains to fight for Boril of Bulgaria" a hungarian royal charter issued around 1250 said. There are no slavs or magyars in that transylvanian army so who already assimilated the slavs at thet time?

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  178. @ Jugu

    Together with Anthrogenica users Bruzmi and Anthrofennica, we have checked your proposed etymologies, and I'm afraid most are not related to Albanian, but represent normal Slavic forms.


    Arzan: could not find any early Slavic word with -arz. An Albanian etymology is not convincing, as -arz is also absent from Albanian as far as I know. It could possibly be Thracian toponym, as many of them had the component -arz/erz e.g. onomastic Αρζηνώ or the toponym Αίρζίς, or even a Turkic Bulgarian one?

    Bukorovtsi: Alb. bukur (substrate term with Aromanian) --> this makes sense

    Dreatin: P-Slavic derti with metathesis (see Serbo-Croatian drijeti , cleansed/open field)

    Gramade: gërmadhe is actually a loan into Albanian from the early Slavic * gromada (heap, mass), so no proto-Albanian etymology here

    Grapa > Alb. gropa (pit) > cognate with Romanian groapa --> perhaps loan from Germanic cropa; cognate with proto-Slavic * grobz (grave); no word starting with grap- in Slavic etymological lexicon, solely grapa in Old Icelandic (= to seize)

    Kambelevtsi > Alb. kumbulla (plum). This is a Doric loan according to Orel, and indeed there is no early Slavic word starting with -kamb. However, Anthrofennica suggests that the Albanian kumbulla "plum" is a Romance loan, and indeed some Dalmatian Slavs call damson plums "kumbule" (plural -a>-e), and it is used among South Slavs as far north as Carniola where they use "kampol" for the same plums. So not sure we are talking about Albanian mediation here.

    Ruy Mountain: Ruj, from South Slavic. It means sumac technically, but it is used basically for all reddish features: red earth, all red shrubs and even as a name Rujevic (someone who has reddish features) . Ruaj is the Tosk variant of ruoj which would be more like ruonj in late Proto-Albanian, hence it's impossible as an etymology for this mountain. There are plenty of Ruj- based toponyms in former Yugoslav regions. It's not uncommon.

    Personally, only Bukorovtsi convinces me, but it seems much more likely to be of Aromanian mediation. Nearby villages are called Vlasina and Chuka, attesting to an Aromanian origin.

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