Years of blogging about population genetics has seriously eroded my faith in the peer review process.
During the past decade I've witnessed an inordinate amount of crap published in basically all of the major science journals. Often the work is misguided in some way, sometimes even quite strange, and occasionally outright wrong.
Back in 2014, a team of scientists from the UK published a paper in
Science emphatically titled
A Genetic Atlas of Human
Admixture History. These people were Garrett Hellenthal, George B. J. Busby, Gavin Band, James F. Wilson, Cristian Capelli, Daniel Falush, and Simon Myers. See
here.
The thing that really sticks out for me in this paper is Figure 3, which shows the present-day Polish population as largely a mixture between Northern European- and Turkish-related ancestries. Incredibly, the Turkish-related ratio appears to be about 25% and dated to 438 CE.
This is not just inexplicable, but utterly wrong. It's a result that is impossible to reproduce with any standard population genetics methods.
In fact, in terms of deep ancient ancestry, present-day Poles are very similar to present-day Scandinavians, and even to Viking Age, Iron Age and Bronze Age Scandinavians. This is easy to demonstrate, for instance, with f4-statistics, in part based on samples from the Hellenthal et al. paper.
Chimp Yamnaya_Samara Swedish_modern Polish_modern -0.000311 -1.574
Chimp Yamnaya_Samara Ollsjo_Bronze_Age Polish_modern -0.000044 -0.152
Chimp Yamnaya_Samara Sealand_Iron_Age Polish_modern -0.000072 -0.293
Chimp Yamnaya_Samara Sealand_Viking_Age Polish_modern 0.000078 0.525
Chimp Yamnaya_Samara Gotland_Viking_Age Polish_modern -0.000141 -1.322
Chimp Barcin_N Swedish_modern Polish_modern -0.000318 -1.662
Chimp Barcin_N Ollsjo_Bronze_Age Polish_modern 0.000216 0.798
Chimp Barcin_N Sealand_Iron_Age Polish_modern -0.000023 -0.104
Chimp Barcin_N Sealand_Viking_Age Polish_modern -0.000186 -1.310
Chimp Barcin_N Gotland_Viking_Age Polish_modern 0.000083 0.788
Chimp Karelia_HG Swedish_modern Polish_modern -0.000134 -0.540
Chimp Karelia_HG Ollsjo_Bronze_Age Polish_modern 0.000056 0.162
Chimp Karelia_HG Sealand_Iron_Age Polish_modern 0.000047 0.153
Chimp Karelia_HG Sealand_Viking_Age Polish_modern 0.000424 2.241
Chimp Karelia_HG Gotland_Viking_Age Polish_modern 0.000134 0.959
Simply put, if Poles have ~25% ancestry from a Turkish-related source, then so do Swedes, Norwegians and basically all other Northern Europeans going back hundreds and even thousands of years. This is obviously not the case, and it's also not what Hellenthal et al. claimed anyway.
A year later, a team of scientists that again included Garrett Hellenthal, George B. J. Busby, James F. Wilson, Cristian Capelli and Simon Myers, published another, similar paper in
Current Biology. And guess what? This paper also claimed that present-day Poles had Turkish-related ancestry, but this time dating to a somewhat later period. See Busby et al. 2015 Figure 4.C
here.
I've got most of the samples from that paper, so I can analyze them myself, and I think I know what the problem is. Basically, the Turks are mixed. So what appears to have happened is that Busby et al. got things backwards.
Below are three plots from a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) largely based on data from Busby et al., featuring samples from England, Germany, Norway, Poland and Turkey. The first plot is based on dimensions 1 and 2, the second plot on dimensions 1 and 3, and the third plot on dimensions 1 and 4. The relevant data file is available
here.
Note that the Europeans are more or less symmetrically related to the Turks, which means none of these European populations has significantly more Turkish-related ancestry than the others. Indeed, it's the Turks who show more variation in the first (horizontal) dimension, suggesting that they might have variable levels of European ancestry.
I chose the aforementioned papers to make my point here because they made quite an impression on me. In other words, they really pissed me off.
For the sake of completeness, I'm now going to try and get in touch with the authors and ask them how on earth they managed to make these Poles Turkish-related, and also why they never corrected their mistake.
See also...
Don't believe everything you read in peer reviewed papers
Which mistake could be worse: writing that Poles are 25% Turkish related, or claiming that PIE came from Iran?
ReplyDeleteWell, claiming that Poles are 25% Turkish-related is just stupid, because any basic test shows that it's not true.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the search for the PIE homeland is much more theoretical, and so a PIE homeland in Iran may be true, even if it's a bad hypothesis and a long shot.
Clearly a leftover from the Polish Sarmatian descendant elites :)
ReplyDeleteInteresting analysis, honestly the 25% Turkish-related never made much sense for Poles.
ReplyDeleteThis group had a new pre-print out this year, which finds even more admixture events (something like African and East Asian up to Belgium even IIRC), I had linked it in a previous comment.
Btw, is Barcin_N the best proxy for the Anatolia_N-related in Europeans? Does anyone know for sure? Global 25 usually prefers it with the exception of Italians/Greeks etc.
In G25 Turks always seem of variable relatedness to European pops, with those from the European side being closest, which also often shows up in PCAs included in Harvard papers.
And you forgot to mention Turkish ancestry in Poland makes no sense historically.
ReplyDeleteThe average joe, knows Turkey and Poland never lived in the same polity or had any real connection. Why didn't the authors know this and therefore question their results.
This is truly unbelievable.
Lol.
ReplyDeleteDavidski has done a good job revealing to us how his home country Poland has been dissed in many DNA studies.
>Some studies use Polish Jews to represent Poles
>Some studies use Estonian Poles to represent Poles
>One study said Poland has Mongolian ancestry. Now we see there are studies that claim they have Turkish ancestry.
Davidski also linked a study which claimed Germans have Turkish ancestry, based on Russian Germans.
ReplyDeleteIt is the same type of mistake.
The authors must come in wanting to prove a theory about Turkish ancestry, don't know how to run or interpret DNA tools, and conclude their speculation is correct.
Not even Europeans who were ruled by Turkish ottoman empire have turkish ancestry.
ReplyDeleteBosnians don't have any Turkish ancestry despite being Muslim.
The idea of Ottoman Turkish ancestry was never an idea people pushed hard and DNA has already disproven it. There are some Turkish minorities from Ottoman times but that is it.
With these methods is the authors seem persistently unwilling to characterise their sources in these methods in terms of simple f-stats and unlinked analyses.
ReplyDeleteIn this example, if the "Northern European" like source is Lithuanian like, and the "Turkish" like source is actually some EEF rich population that's remote from Turkish people, but best reconstructed with them, then that could make sense. Poles are something like Lithuanians diluted with EEF, which is in a very, very remote sense, related similar to Turks.
It's not implausible that they reconstruct Bulgarians as a combination of a Norwegian like and Greek like source and that this they date around 1500 years ago - https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126/science.1243518/asset/62d78faf-4273-4359-b66f-e96640ed5fa7/assets/graphic/343_747_f3.jpeg . Makes sense in an admixture cline.
But can we know if this is the case? If there is any sensible interpretation to like this? If their reconstructed sources are something that might be plausible given PCA etc?
No; instead what any of these sources are actually like is completely unintelligible to us as an audience. Their sources are somehow composed of the populations that they draw chunks from, but how distant they are to them, and what they actually look like in terms of simple measures like PCA/ADMIXTURE/f stats, is completely opaque and uninterpretable.
If they are using these methods that look at linkage, then they should be paralleled to check that these sources at least make sense at an unlinked level. And this is something I commented back to the earlier article mentioned by gamerz_j mentions, but no response. If there's some way to bridge what they find with what we find from other sources, it's not clear at all.
When the paper first came out, I thought that at some point they'd try to bridge the gap, but it's been about 7 years now and no attempt has been made, at which point they definitely lose any benefit of the doubt from me.
I've been reading about the "crisis" of peer review and reproducibility across ALL sciences for the better part of a decade. Not only is the problem widespread and catastrophic for the process of science, but it's even widely known too.
ReplyDeleteOnce you open your mind to the possibility of "experts" being wrong, of the idea that its not just the news that's fake but also a significant portion of what we believe to be settled science and settled history, a pretty different world than what we thought it was starts to come into view. Imagine, if you will, that EVERY field of science is in an equal state of crisis as this one that you know quite well. The scope of the problem starts to come into focus.
I dubbeth thee "Davidski the Hun"
ReplyDelete@ Genos Historia
ReplyDeleteIt's not only the ethnic identity of Poles that is being molested by the misconstruction of genetic papers but that of Europeans in general. If I remember rightfully, there was a study that suggested Turkish admixture in present-day Germans because they used Volga/Russian Germans with Uralic ancestry as a reference group. To me, the Viking paper was a prime example of how scientific articles in the media distort the findings of genetic research. The media announced that the DNA of the Vikings imply that they were generally dark-haired, swarthy folks, with some being part Asian. They reported about the Southern European /Sami admixed outliers as if they were representative while omitting the fact, that the Scandinavian Vikings were Nordic that looked basically like modern Danes. In fact, the reports of several major publications completely misrepresented what the data in the Viking study actually said. That said, not only bad journalism but the involved authors with their interviews often contribute to providing poor understandings of the past or genetic findings. Anyway, numerous publications jumped on the Blond Viking-bashing bandwagon by repeating this “news” that all Vikings were swarthy, dark-haired, and part Asian Vikings.
It seems to me, that proving or overinflating, exotic/Non-European ancestry of ancient or present-day Europeans has been a running goal of the research of DNA studies.
@Genos Historia
ReplyDelete"The average joe, knows Turkey and Poland never lived in the same polity or had any real connection."
That is not entirely true, there were some events linking these two countries, like several Polish-Ottoman wars, including famous battle by Jan Sobieski. Though of course none of them would lead to 25% Turkish ancestry in Poland.
There was a recent paper that came out that found people from Turkmenistan only had about 10% Xiognu (Turkic) ancestry. Hence 25% in Poles would be impossible.
ReplyDelete@Wise Dragon,
ReplyDeleteYes. I see the same trend. Dude, the news surrounding the Viking paper was such propaganda it was funny. I did what I could to expose the lies in a video.
This trend is why I always say the Harvard lab, David Reich are the best lab. They covered deep origins of Europe more than anyone and have remained basically completely a-political.
@Xdzyn
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, Polish scientists often try to pander to the whims of Western European scientists.
So if Western European scientists get a stupid idea in their heads, like, for instance, that Poles are part Turkish, then Polish scientists will agree with them, and possibly even try to outdo them.
@Genos Historia “ Not even Europeans who were ruled by Turkish ottoman empire have turkish ancestry.
ReplyDeleteBosnians don't have any Turkish ancestry despite being Muslim.”
Turks from Anatolia are only 15% East Eurasian or Central Asian, with overwhelmingly majority of their ancestry being West Eurasian, both European and West Asian mix.
OK, no-one knows less than me about either genetics or population movement, but aren’t they just talking about the wee bit of neolithic Anatolian farmer genetic legacy that Poles and the rest of us still have from the people whose mixed descendants spread farming about Europe? (Starting with huntygatheryfishy people on the banks of the Danube?)
ReplyDeleteTurks would have more of it from people who stayed in Anatolia and were still there when other Turkish ancestors arrived. (Loads of 21st century Turks are Turkefied grandchildren of IE speaking Kurds anyway, many more than find it politic to admit)
And then Europe gets another incidental wee dose of the neolithic Anatolian from the bronze-age cattle herders milling about Romania, Bulgaria and themselves having a bit of give and take with Anatolians (so some ancestral Turks now have some herder genes, and several more times after that) before setting out in various other directions, including back across Europe.
(Not to mention centuries of Russian and Ukranian slave-princesses in Turkish harems in recent centuries, and the tax / tithe paid in Slav village boys for Janissaries and harem eunuchs.)
I just don’t get what the fuss is. Turks are a bit of everything. It would be weird if they didn’t share a fair amount of genes with Poles or other Europe-Europeans.
Genos/Samuel “ This trend is why I always say the Harvard lab, David Reich are the best lab. They covered deep origins of Europe more than anyone and have remained basically completely a-political.”
ReplyDeleteAnd it was Lazaridis (Broad) who found out (2015) that PIE were EHG + CHG in roughly equal measures; the only beef I have with them is their so-called “South Caspian” origin theory.
@Wee e
ReplyDeletePoles don't have more Anatolian farmer or any sort of Anatolian ancestry than Northern Europeans. In fact, we have less of it than most Northern Europeans.
See that's why Poles and ancient Scandinavians are symmetrically related to older populations like Anatolian farmers.
Also, Poles don't have any Balkan herder, or any Balkan, ancestry that would change this.
Turks do have varying levels of recent European ancestry. But of course, that wasn't the reason given in the said papers for the Turkish-related ancestry in Poles. The authors' explanation was Medieval population movements into Europe from West Asia.
@Davidski “Poles don't have more Anatolian farmer or any sort of Anatolian ancestry than Northern Europeans. In fact, we have less of it than most Northern Europeans.”
ReplyDeleteIsn’t it because we only have 33% EEF via GAC (1/2 of our WSH ratio, approximately), but Western Euros also carry additional, western or “Atlantic” Farmer admixture, mediated through the Bell Beakers?
Is there any modern pop in Europe with a fair share of Balkan farmers, or did they go extinct like the dodo with Ötzi and the Tripolyeans?
@Andrzejewski
ReplyDeleteI haven't looked closely at the different types of farmer ancestries and if/where they still exist today.
"The authors' explanation was Medieval population movements into Europe from West Asia."
ReplyDeleteI have to ask... was their sample 1/4 or 1/2 Jewish by any chance?
I've got their Polish samples. These are ethnic Poles with no perceptible Ashkenazi ancestry.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, 'as any fool knows' - as Molesworth used to say - the Ottoman Turks, which I assume what they mean by 'Turks' only arrived in the Anatolian peninsula and penetrated into the Balkans in what were, basically, the later middle ages.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Anatolia, that part of the world the modern mind associates with 'Turks' was very heavily populated by distinctly non Turkish speakers for millennia up to the Ottoman conquest. The words 'Greek' and 'Armenian' spring to mind.
One would have though any 'educated' person who passed through high school would know this as second nature.
Its possible that their algo made a "North European" source from the systematically less EEF parts of North Europeans, then topped it up with EEF stuff from Turks while avoiding the other ancestry Turks have. Thus getting to largely the same place while explaining some pattern in the Polish genomes.
ReplyDeleteBut it's totally opaque if this is whats going on, because the authors never really characterise what their sources are.
@Davidski
ReplyDeleteMy mistake. I had thought that was a subset, people from one particular district of Poland, rather than general.
There are plenty of „scientific” publications signed by serious „scientists” showing that Poland is genetically a special place:
ReplyDeletehttps://postlmg.cc/rRt2f5fd
Western scientists and the public are brainwashed and there are no Polish scientists because they were exterminated during World War II by Germans and what was left was finished by communists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion
So any shit any racial hate propaganda can be easily distributed and sold to the public in the west. It is visible in the USA and Western Europe.
@Andrzejewski
ReplyDeleteIsn’t it because we only have 33% EEF via GAC (1/2 of our WSH ratio, approximately), but Western Euros also carry additional, western or “Atlantic” Farmer admixture, mediated through the Bell Beakers?
Is there any modern pop in Europe with a fair share of Balkan farmers, or did they go extinct like the dodo with Ötzi and the Tripolyeans?
Arza has analyzed this issue in detail in this blog:
Surplus EEF ancestry in modern day Slavs
- May 21, 2021
https://slavicorigins.blogspot.com/2021/05/surplus-eef-ancestry-in-modern-day-slavs.html
I'll say an unpopular thing here and say, the only thing I want to say in balance about this method is that, it's not just purely some crazy mad method that makes up fake events.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the events identified by the method are plausible. There's a finding of an influx of Greek-like and Northern Balto-Slavic like ancestry to produce Bulgarians around 900 CE. Not implausible.
Or a pulse of admixture from a population made of segments mainly from Scotland, which enters Kalash around LBA-IA (window of 1000-200 BCE). That's pretty close to the Swat_IA admixture time that we have definitely evidenced Steppe admixture. If we could isolate those segments, we might find they were similar to Sintashta, if they were projected onto PCA.
Or dating a Mongolian expansion across Asia at about the time of the Mongol Empire.
And there are some others like this. It's easy to get caught up in weird instances and miss that quite impressive in a way to actually find dated events, produced by the method, which ADMIXTURE methods could not really give us at all. No other method did this at all! (ADMIXTURE, for example, gives proportion, but when the admixture happened, or how the positions formed of why patterns in ADMIXTURE and PCA were like they are relied purely on interpretation, rather than the method itself giving any date.)
It's not like these are methods that the muddled WestEuro scientists ("who don't understand Europe") are doing to confuse European history with excessive admixture or something. These methods do produce these interesting and plausible conclusions across the world that other methods did not find, and they've just been applied to Europe and this is what comes out.
Even their main analysis of modelling Polish as 65% Lithuanian/Russian like with 35% French like from an admixture around 1000 CE is not so bad, as given here - https://www.well.ox.ac.uk/~gav/admixture/2014-science-final/ . If we stick Polish into G25 with Lithuanian and French as sources, well, it's not a very good model, but it does indeed come to the proportion of 33% French and 67% Lithuanian produced Polish. In terms of EEF/WHG/Yamnaya, it's probably more-or-less correct. (See: https://imgur.com/a/BwDr7NJ). It's not the best model, but it's in the right neighbourhood of deep proportions and has a plausible date.
It's where the authors don't give any toolkit to actually interpret what these pulse are outside their framework, where the big problems seem to begin to me.
And yet they chose a totally implausible result (~25% Turkish-like for Poles) in one of their main figures.
ReplyDeleteSee that's the problem. They pulled this out of their asses, instead of going for a more balanced approach, by highlighting models that show some decent correspondence with results from other methods.
Yeah that's fair.
ReplyDeleteYou're right that if they have a range of findings, and they report sensationalised ones that don't even make a rough fit with his, and fail to parallel their findings in the more interpretable and clear cut methods that *have* to be consistent, then that's all on them, and it is very disappointing practice and you're right in calling it out. Just wanted to emphasize that the method wasn't totally useless and did find some cool stuff, and it wasn't singling out Poland but just applying this same method everywhere.
ReplyDelete@EastPole
ReplyDelete"So any shit any racial hate propaganda can be easily distributed and sold to the public in the west. It is visible in the USA and Western Europe."
That's a quirky interpretation of what seems to be going on. The leitmotif especially in the media coverage seems to be that Europeans are very mixed up with non-Europeans and that ethnic identitites are constructs made out of constantly fluctuating entities. That's what Genos and Romulus were pointing out, and this is also my impression. So what's the natural reaction of the average Joe who swallows this message? Racial hate? Rather the opposite I would think. If we are all a little bit of everything there's no point in hating other groups. The only way this could cause something like racial hate, for example against Poles, is among white non-Polish suprematists who would then despise the allegedly admixed group in question, if they didn't already hate it before. But these circles are a small minority in western Europe and the USA.
@Tigran,
ReplyDelete"These "scientists" (soybnoys) are pushing a political agenda. its quite obvious and people should stop tip toeing around them and call them out on their bullshit and projecting their stupid politics back into their "scientific" work."
You're so right. I read several interviews from the prominent geneticists from Havard, Max Planck Institute, Standford. The scholars from these Labs, referred to genetic studies, ancient DNA to advertise mass migration and multiculturalism. They argue that Europeans are mixed folks anyway and the descendants of all kinds of migrants. According to them, Europeans are basically not indigenous even to Europe. Besides, there was a very recent study about the genomes of Qatari people that suggested Finns have recent admixture from Qatari/Jews/North Africans and what not. I see a pattern here.
@Genos Historia,
ReplyDeleteAlthough Havard Lab produced some great studies about ancient DNA, I wouldn't say that they're totally apolitical.
@Davidski, @Tigran, @ Wise dragon, @EastPole
ReplyDeleteSaddly 100% true. :-(
I am very curious what 'Dranoel' can say on this topic, because knowing life, he and others like him will defend this official narrative, i.e. alleged Turkish genes on the Vistula area…
By the way, when something is mixed with everything, it fits everywhere ...
scientists should state observations, and not pay lipservice to current social fads like
ReplyDelete'wokeism'
yeah, Europeans are a mix, but a specific mix with deep (Paleo-Meso roots) from, or nearby, Europe. The portrayal by some geneticists & the hyperbole prone media makes it sound that Europeans have no roots in their own land and are just a random mish-mash of people. And given that they are a random mish-mash of immigrants, we might as well open the flood gates and if you dont agree then you're ignorant
also it doenst matter where the researchers are from, but they should have good knowledge of local culture-history. Otherwise its arrogant & insulting for them to make up erroneous and nonsensical claims & theories
The only positive I can see is when things like the ancient paper on Ancient Egypt being super West Eurasian come out nobody can claim these labs were motivated by some sort of right wing agenda. It will be more humiliating for Afrocentrists when their soyboy allies crush their dreams. Can't wait.
ReplyDelete@Rob
ReplyDelete"And given that they are a random mish-mash of immigrants, we might as well open the flood gates and if you dont agree then you're ignorant"
And even if it was true who the hell makes modern political decisions concerning the welfare of your country and people based on ancient migrations? Europeans aren't a random miso-mash and even if they were that has nothing to do with present day decision making.
Can we cut the politics?
ReplyDeleteI suspect they misinterpreted Sarmatian/Scythian ancestry which Poles and other Slavs should theoretically have given their geographic proximity.
ReplyDeleteWith respect to wokeism, I consider myself pretty woke. You guys should be more open minded and embrace it. When my wife and I first started dating she said she was half German but DNA testing showed she was 25% Polish and Eastern European. At first I was resistant to the idea of making mixed race children with her (I am 200% British) but I have come to terms with it. It's not her fault and she is a good person despite it.
They mixed up European ancestry in Turks with Turkish ancestry in Poles.
ReplyDeleteSome of the Turks in their dataset cluster in the Balkans, and obviously have Slavic ancestry.
@Romulus,
ReplyDeleteWow, you really are woke. I'm already 'mixed race' so it doesn't matter to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying countries should have closed borders, I’m an immigant myself
ReplyDeleteBut I think the whole population turnover is sometimes overdone / misunderstood
David,
ReplyDeleteHow can supposedly 'highly educated professional' scientists make such a basic and elementary error as that?
What would you call a plumber who fitted your kitchen tap back to front?
There's no excuse for getting things this wrong at that level (Science journal level).
ReplyDeleteBut what's worse is that these authors never went on the record to correct this mistake.
Sorry, off topic,
ReplyDelete@Matt
Not sure if you will continue to monitor Celtic language thread where I just posted to you:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EYJ6SGhTsGiFYS6j-2m1fwwtRT814G3bROFbDObUoPo/edit?usp=sharing
I am now starting to define sites for each group and then will identify samples that fall in the appropriate timescale for each grouping. I shall probably initially exclude sites that have successive groupings due to radiocarbon plateau issues and potential difficulty in accurately allocating samples to a small time window.
If you will continue to monitor that thread I will post links to sites and sample data in the next few days.
Bob
"In fact, in terms of deep ancient ancestry, present-day Poles are very similar to present-day Scandinavians, and even to Viking Age, Iron Age and Bronze Age Scandinavians."
ReplyDeleteDavidski, while in overall agreement about your criticism, I wonder if you overstate the deep ancient ancestry relationship between modern northwest Europeans and modern northeast Europeans. I'm designating the former group as Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, English, Scottish, Irish, and German, and the latter as Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, and Russian. (East Germans constitute the intergradation zone.) Considered at global level, these clearly form two separate clades or phylogenetic species.
You may be aware there's discussion around forums about the respective merits of the scaled and unscaled G25 datasets. While seeing them as each having different relative strengths and weaknesses, my perception would be that for the specific purpose of determining phylogenetic relation between groups of populations, unscaled data would likely elucidate subtle differences entailing evolutionary meaning that might otherwise be lost with the scaled data. This is especially true regarding populations in northern Europe, where differences manifest more clearly at the higher dimensions.
Using unscaled G25 data with the PAST software, what I find is that, in global context, while the northwest European and northeast European groups I described above respectively each form very solid clades to themselves (bootstrap often near 100), they form either at best a weak clade together or no clade at all (aligning instead with other groups), depending on similarity index used. When ancient samples are included, the relation becomes weaker still -- per some similarity indices, modern northeast Europeans will align more closely with European hunter gatherers than with modern northwest Europeans.
Otherwise regarding ancient ancestry, unscaled data would show that the cladistic separation that exists between modern northwest Europeans and modern northeast Europeans dates to the bronze age, or that would be the time frame in which the subspeciation events creating these modern phylogenetic species occurred. Among all ancient samples, I find that Ireland bronze age is best representative for proto-northwest European (closer than any continental or Scandinavian bronze age or Bell Beaker), while Latvia/Estonia bronze age would be closest representative for proto-northeast European.
Sintashta-related Corded Ware populations are per unscaled G25 data phylogenetically closer to modern northwest Europeans than to modern northeast Europeans, matching affinities at certain extreme genomic loci even though these populations would all be very close to each other in terms of overall genetic relation in human context.
Modern northwest Europeans and modern northeast Europeans are very closely related groups, with almost negligible genetic distance between them in overall human context, but in terms of phylogenetic analysis at higher dimensions of differentiation they form easily separable clades implying different evolutionary origins demonstrably dating to the bronze age. I've seen you state elsewhere that the present differentiation between northwest and northeast Europeans is due to "drift," but I don't think it's that at all.
@Silvia
ReplyDeleteIf you want to look at deep phylogenetic relationships, then you should use formal statistics like f4 or D stats, rather than the G25.
The G25 is designed to be more sensitive to specific recent genetic drift, like, for instance, Balto-Slavic drift.
See here...
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/05/global25-workshop-2-intra-european.html
Several of the dimensions, for instance, reflect Balto-Slavic-specific genetic drift. I ensured that this would be the case by running a lot of Slavic groups in the analysis. A useful by-product of this strategy is that the Global25 is very good at exposing relatively recent intra-European genetic variation.
There is some new Roman DNA, 2 new Y-DNA:
ReplyDeleteT46 J-Z7815 J-M304 J
F4_I G-M3261 G-M3240 G2a2b1a2a1
https://t.co/kgrrt8gQT3
People from CB were genetically similar to North African and Middle
Eastern individuals. Specifically, T21 and T46 were similar to present-day Egyptians, while
F4_I was similar to Middle Eastern populations such as those found in Israel.
A model-based clustering (Figure 3) of selected present-day individuals and coeval
samples spanning the Mediterranean areas was employed to estimate the proportion of
people buried in CB. As previously suggested [9,10], Eastern Mediterranean ancestry was
also one of the leading components in the Roman Empire (Figure 3).
These were "Ancient Roman Fullers".
ReplyDeleteThe fullers of ancient Rome were launderers who washed the clothes of the city and also finished processing fabric later made into clothing, blankets, or other necessary items.
1-Could PIE be a WHG language?
ReplyDelete2-Where does the West Eurasian ancestry in ANE come from? Levant->Iran->Central Asia like some have speculated or from Eastern Europe?
3-Obviously PIE is not an ENA/IUP language but did this change the chain of events and have some impact? Would IE be the same had this admixture event never occurred?
PIE is only about 6,000 years old, so it can't be a WHG language, because WHG was extinct by that time.
ReplyDeleteWhat about a Ukraine forager language? Those were mostly WHG like I thought?
ReplyDeleteMaybe, but how do you know?
ReplyDeleteSince they didn't leave any texts, you need to find a strong link between them and Indo-European speakers. What's the link?
“ WHG was extinct by that time.“
ReplyDeleteHow did you arrive at that conclusion ?
WHG was everywhere , even in unadmixed form, like southern Baltic region
Whatever methodological flaws are involved in the Hellenthal et al. 2014 and Busby et al. 2015 papers, I do not think their Polish results are due to inclusion of individuals with recent Balkan hence Slavic ancestry among their Turkish samples. For one, the Turkish samples in the Hellenthal et al. paper are all from the Behar et al. 2010 paper, the Behar et al. Turkish samples are all from Cappadocia and none of them show genetic results indicative of recent Balkan ancestry. Furthermore, while the Turkish samples in the Busby et al. paper are from the Hodoğlugil et al. 2012 paper in addition to the Behar et al. paper and some of the Turkish samples in the Hodoğlugil et al. paper have recent Balkan ancestry based on their genetic results, such samples with recent Balkan ancestry constitute only a small minority of the Turkish samples in the Hodoğlugil et al. paper. Also, the recent Balkan ancestry explanation would certainly not explain the Polish results of the Hellenthal et al. paper since apparently none of the Turkish samples in that paper have any recent Balkan ancestry as I pointed out.
ReplyDeleteWhat can explain the Polish results of the Hellenthal et al. and Busby et al. papers? I do not know. What I know is that the recent Balkan ancestry explanation (for some of the Turkish samples) does not hold up, especially for the Hellenthal et al. paper.
.^ everywhere perhaps apart from Greece / southern Balkans
ReplyDelete@Rob
ReplyDeleteCan you point me to an actual WHG population that still lived around 4,000 BCE?
Something like Narva was largely WHG, but only in a distant sense.
That is, it wasn't a recent mixture between PIE speaking WHG and EHG, or something like that. It was actually a very ancient mix, and unlikely to be IE speaking anyway.
@Onur
ReplyDeleteEven a small amount of admixture can confound a haplotype analysis.
At some point the algorithm has to make the call where certain alleles or haplotypes came from, and if it makes the wrong call, then you'll see something strange like Turkish admixture in Poles or Kalash admixture in Northern Europeans.
what of this question?
ReplyDelete3-Obviously PIE is not an ENA/IUP language but did this change the chain of events and have some impact? Would IE be the same had this admixture event never occurred?
And yea it would be hard to tell where exactly PIE comes from.
@Tigran
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
All over Northern Europe there were still unadmixed WHGs - in the classic sense : Poland; Germany . Which is why you see such TRB outliers . All these MN samples are from loess soils, which were surrounded by HGs. Polish archaeologists even think that they survived as late as 3000 bce
ReplyDeleteAnd I’d also call Narva essentially WHG, because it’s eastern admixture is second hand via Kunda & uniparentally WHG
Then you have the various reformulations which contain WHG; ranging from Atlantic farmers to those Ukr HGs you & Tigran refer to
Evolved or shifted perhaps, but not extinct.
As an aside, what most people don’t realise is that R1 lineages actually went through a more major lineage prune/cull (aside from the explosive growth of R1a-M417 and R1b-M269), because a major direction of their expansion was in the direction of R1 rich forest zone . In comparison, a greater diversity of WHG-assoc hg I survived, to this day ~ 30% of European lineages
@Rob
ReplyDeleteLet's be more specific.
I honestly can't see PIE being spoken by a late WHG isolate around 4,000 BCE.
@Davidski
ReplyDeleteAt least I know relatively well the sources and genetics of the Turkish samples used by the Hellenthal et al. 2014 and Busby et al. 2015 papers, they are like I described in my previous comment. The issue might be with the Polish samples used by those two papers, they use Polish samples collected for the Hellenthal et al. paper and no info is provided on their sources. If some of them have Uralic mix like some of the Polish samples used by the Kushniarevich et al. 2015 paper, that might explain the weird results of the Polish averages in the Hellenthal et al. and Busby et al. papers. I think this is an explanation worth examining.
@ Davidski
ReplyDelete'Let's be more specific.
I honestly can't see PIE being spoken by a late WHG isolate around 4,000 BCE.''
Well obviuosly PIE did not emerge from an isolated, diminishing hunter-gatherer group like Swifterband or Narva.
I was quiblling with ''WHG was extinct by that time''. There were late Hunter-gatherers all around northern and eastern, even central Europe (refer to HG-rich ROU_C_o).
If we are to hypothesise about a pre-4000 pre-PIE population of sorts, then it'll be the East European plain, because that's where the WHG -rich 'Swiderians' met the ANE-'PaleoSiberians' to form EHG
@Onur
ReplyDeleteThese Poles are from Poland and quite typical. I used them in the f4 stats above with the Scandinavians.
One of them might have some recent ancestry from east of Poland, but that's about it.
I think the Balkan admixed Turks from Busby et al. are definitely an issue. But there's probably more than one reason for these weird results.
I think "where were there WHG groups at 6,000 BCE" is missing the point - which is where did PIE's ancestors come from. I think the linguistic evidence leans to it being from the ANE side, right? That's why Indo-European usually gets grouped with various Siberian languages, as has been blogged about here before.
ReplyDelete@Davidski
ReplyDeleteI think the Balkan admixed Turks from Busby et al. are definitely an issue. But there's probably more than one reason for these weird results.
Maybe. But that still does not explain the Polish results in the Hellenthal et al. 2014 paper as apparently none of the Turkish samples in that paper have recent Balkan and thus Slavic ancestry, they are all typical Central Anatolian Turks except one sample with likely Kurdish origins and one sample with likely Circassian or similar origins based on their genetic results.
@Onur
ReplyDeleteWell, these Poles don't have any sort of West Asian ancestry, and certainly nothing Turkish-like at ~25%.
So it's a mystery to me as to what happened, and like I said in my post, it's not reproducible science.
@Ryan “ I think the linguistic evidence leans to it being from the ANE side, right? That's why Indo-European usually gets grouped with various Siberian languages, as has been blogged about here before.”
ReplyDeleteNo.
PIE was a language isolate from Eastern Europe. It was unrelated to other languages, let alone from Siberia.
@Davidski
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the Polish results of those two papers are weird and nothing like we see with any other genetic analysis method. Certainly the authors of those papers should reexamine their methodologies and correct their errors.
they are all typical Central Anatolian Turks except one sample with likely Kurdish origins and one sample with likely Circassian or similar origins based on their genetic results.
ReplyDeleteBTW, those two outlier samples may actually not exist in the Hellenthal et al. 2014 paper as that paper has 17 of the 19 Behar et al. Turkish samples, they may have excluded the outlier ones.
BTW, those two outlier samples may actually not exist in the Hellenthal et al. 2014 paper as that paper has 17 of the 19 Behar et al. Turkish samples, they may have excluded the outlier ones.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, in the Busby et al. 2015 paper all the Turkish samples of the Behar et al. 2010 and Hodoğlugil et al. 2012 papers are included whereas in the Hellenthal et al. 2014 paper they included only the Behar et al. Turkish samples and 17 of them instead of 19 like I said.
@Andrzejewski - No language can be truly unrelated to others. They share a common origin or origins at some point. Your statement is just reductivist unless you truly believe PIE was handed down fully formed from some sort of diety.
ReplyDeleteAlso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twxJbU9vxnc&ab_channel=DanDavisHistory
@ Ryan
ReplyDelete''That's why Indo-European usually gets grouped with various Siberian languages''
one can see 'macro-linguistic' trees such as this
But it's untenable
Aside from the doubtful notion that linguistic affinities can be reduced to a 'network analysis' of words, modern Siberian languages rel. recently expanded from northeast Asia, whilst PIE diffused from west to east.
Romulus, in the light of the results of Athanasiadis's research, it is the British who have over 32% of the Eastern European admixture, typical of contemporary Poles.
ReplyDelete@Ryan “ No language can be truly unrelated to others. They share a common origin or origins at some point.”
ReplyDeleteSo why are Sumerian, Elamite, Basque or Ainu deemed “language isolates” by most mainstream linguists?
@Andrzejewski - "So why are Sumerian, Elamite, Basque or Ainu deemed “language isolates” by most mainstream linguists?"
ReplyDeleteIt's because we don't know their external relations. It's not because those relationships don't exist.
@Rob - sure, the time depth of any such relationship would be pretty old though, and pre-date these expansions. Which is why the relationships are so hard to reconstruct. I'm not saying any of this is cast in stone but those relations seem to be where things are hinting at least. Same goes for shared mythology, religion, etc.
ReplyDelete@ Andrzejewski
"why are Sumerian, Elamite, Basque or Ainu deemed “language isolates” by most mainstream linguists?"
Because their relatives aren't known, obviously. They were prehistoric and left no record of themselves, so it's not possible to determine which languages Sumerian, Elamite, etc. are related to.
@Bob Floy “ Because their relatives aren't known, obviously. They were prehistoric and left no record of themselves, so it's not possible to determine which languages Sumerian, Elamite, etc. are related to.”
ReplyDeleteSumerian and Elamite left enough cuneiform evidence to be deciphered. Basque and Ainu are living languages.
Where do you think PIE came from?
@ Ryan
ReplyDeleteSeems like general similarities amongst north Eurasian hunter-gatherers
Eg we see dog veneration in north Germany 14,000 bp
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440318300049
Otherwise; there is sometimes a hint of underlying romanticised New World neo-autochthonism which sometimes overplays similarities
As I always say:"Two roughly similar words doesn't make a dictionary."
ReplyDeleteExample, a sheep calls Meh, an Indo-European says Ma or Mo, and some Bantu tribes say Mme. So are we all directly related to Sheep ? Heheheeh.
ReplyDeleteRob:
ReplyDelete"one can see 'macro-linguistic' trees such as this ..." [referring, apparently, to Gerhard Jäger's experiment in pushing computational analysis of possible ancient cognates to the limit]
"Aside from the doubtful notion that linguistic affinities can be reduced to a 'network analysis' of words..."
In fact, Jäger was explicit about the limits of what he was doing and circumspect in regard to his "achievement". He never said anything as ridiculous/overstated as "PIE was a sister language of Proto-Chutko-Kamchatkan" – (contrary to the sensational reportage and wilful distortions that followed).
"modern Siberian languages rel. recently expanded from northeast Asia, whilst PIE diffused from west to east"
Firstly, if one sets up as a starting point the language that we call PIE, then one doesn't need to deal with the question of where and when "pre-PIE" was spoken. And I think most of us would countenance the idea that PIE was not created, de novo as a kind of "paleo conlang"? For instance there is the relatively uncontroversial hypothesis of a contribution to PIE from the Northwest Caucasus language family and within that, Kabardian in particular. Perhaps another long-extinct NwC language was even closer to PIE – nevertheless, the differences are so great that some unrelated and now utterly unknown source/s had to be involved.
Secondly, bearing in mind the well-known contribution of the, ahem, "Ancient North Eurasians, it isn't at all fanciful to suggest that PIE had at least some linguistic influence from Eastern Siberia. There is also, of course, supporting Y-DNA evidence, such as the known bearers of ancient Y-DNA hg R* (Ma'lta boy/MA1) in Buryatia, and its direct ancestors P-P284* (Yana 2) and P-M45/P337* (Yana 1) in Yakutia. Although as I say, for the sake of parsimony, I wouldn't go much further.
Are there any new studies about PIE linguistics? Alexander Kozintsev 2020 study is recent one i'm aware of but are there anything else?
ReplyDeleteAlexander Kozintsev - On the Homelands of Indo-European and Eurasiatic: Geographic Aspects of a Lexicostatistical Classification.
https://www.academia.edu/43594756/On_the_Homelands_of_Indo_European_and_Eurasiatic_Geographic_Aspects_of_a_Lexicostatistical_Classification_2020_
@Andrzejewski
ReplyDelete„Where do you think PIE came from?”
4000-3000 BC in the area of South-Eastern Poland and North-Western Ukraine mixing of people and cultures occurred: EEF and HG around Carpatian mountains mixed together and with incoming forest-steppe tribes. This process formed PIE language and culture. After 3000 we have CWC Indo-Slavic languages and cultures, which are directly descended from PIE, in the above mentioned area.
All other theories are BS without any grounds. Don't waste time on them.
@Bob, thanks for that; I'll try to get some time to have a proper read through and think about how to classify samples according to your framework in ways that could be tested.
ReplyDelete@all, this new paper "Three Reagents for in-Solution Enrichment of Ancient Human DNA at More than a Million SNPs" - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.13.476259v1.full.pdf - (h/t anthrogenica) from Nadine Rohland and Shop Mallick and others, is following up from a talk Reich gave at ASHG 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF18mYe5WoA).
It discusses the use of two alternative reagents which can be more cost effective and reduce biases between co-analysing shotgun samples and in the case of one, which would reduce biases in inflating differentiation between African samples with each other and non Africans.
This latter one is possibly being used to reduce African biases in the paper Arza mentioned as having an abstract on the ENA - "Ancient DNA and deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers" - https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB49291?show=reads ?
By the way, the data from this paper that Arza mentioned is published on the ENA (or most of it is), so if any brave souls want to map it to G25, now is the time!
The new paper by Reich group "Three Reagents for in-Solution Enrichment of Ancient Human DNA at More than a Million SNPs" provides a list of the 27 libraries (from 26 samples) they've tested this on, and I've taken out the IDs and checked which ones are published - https://imgur.com/a/aNwxFW1
Slightly under half are unpublished. Excitingly one of the samples used is Dzudzuana2, so that means they probably intend to publish the Dzudzuana samples soon!
(I think they will also soon publish a new very of the Allen Ancient DNA Resource - "Fraction of published ancient DNA data produced by in-solution enrichment: To compute the proportion of genome-wide ancient human DNA data for which data had been generated by 1240k enrichment (>70%), we used all published data from version v51 of the Allen Ancient DNA Resource (https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/allen-ancient-dna-resource-aadr-downloadable-562genotypes-present-day-and-ancient-dna-data), consisting of compiled records of published genome-wide ancient human DNA data as of December 22, 2021.".)
Claiming that PIE is a EHG language (cue:Anthony) makes just as much sense as asserting that the PaleoLaplandish substrate in the Sami language comes from both WHG and Globular Amphora because of their corresponding Haplogroups.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust266/sust266_aikio.pdf
Quote: “ In terms of ancient population genetics, people preceding the speakers of Sami languages correlate with the spread of Y-DNA haplogroup I1 and mtDNA haplogroups H1 and U5b1b.[6] However, it is possible that the presence of Y-DNA haplogroup I1a* (a subclade of I1) among the Sami can be explained by migration during the last seven centuries.” - according to Karlsson:
https://www.nature.com/articles/5201651
The data for the Orkney study - "Ancient DNA at the edge of the world" - is also uploaded to ENA - https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB46830?show=reads
ReplyDeleteAnd also a new adna study on Himalayas / Tibet - https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB41752?show=reads
BTW, there’s a Wikipedia entry pertaining to alleged “non-IE substrate” in Celtic languages, and the authors bring up a couple of examples (e.g. “andere” for “young woman”) as so-called possible cognates with Basque. Since we know of the connection between Ireland and Spain (and France) in regards to Celtic languages, I would rather assume that these words were instead Celtic or at least para-Celtic IE words which entered into Basque.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goidelic_substrate_hypothesis
I don't get how people just stop speaking the language of their ancestors. But I wonder what Yana/Matla/Ag3 spoke, if they were related to each other and it if was an IUP or common west eurasian language?
ReplyDelete@Andrzejewski
ReplyDeleteBob meant that the _relatives_ had left no records of themselves. Sumerian and Elamite itself obviously did, othetwise we would not even know they existed and yes, Basque is living. But their relatives had not left records and they are not living.
As others said before me, a language isolate is simply a language without _known_ relatives. Languages go extinct all the time and given enough time they can also change a lot. Just because we do not know any relative of Sumerian, it does not follow that there were no related languages 5000 years ago. Being a language isolate is not an internal attribute of a language, it is just a happenance.
As for were IE came from in a linguistic sense? We have to accept the fact that historical linguistic reconstructions have a time limit and there are things we will never known. It is safe to assume that most languages that were around at the time of the formation of early PIE went extinct before ever recorded. We will never know those languages, period. (Unless there is an alien civilization monitoring Earth since prehistory and they share their database...)
@EastPole “ 4000-3000 BC in the area of South-Eastern Poland and North-Western Ukraine mixing of people and cultures occurred: EEF and HG around Carpatian mountains mixed together and with incoming forest-steppe tribes. This process formed PIE language and culture. After 3000 we have CWC Indo-Slavic languages and cultures, which are directly descended from PIE, in the above mentioned area.”
ReplyDeleteThat’s more or less what Rob is saying
If we went by genetics, then the pre-Laplandic Paleo-European substrate in Sami can point to either a WHG language or GAC-like one. But since Karlsson et al couldn’t associate it with alleged pre-IE substrate in Germanic, then it by itself proves that the Germanic non-IE substrate theory is bunkers.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDelete@Andrzejewski
"Sumerian and Elamite left enough cuneiform evidence to be deciphered. Basque and Ainu are living languages"
Yeah, but that tells us nothing about the now dead(and unrecorded)languages they were originally related to. This is why they're called "isolates", there's nothing extant for us to compare them to. It's not that mainstream linguists think they appeared from nowhere.
Actually, I agree with what you said months ago, about Sumerian possibly being related to an Anatolian farmer language, that seems plausible to me, but, no way to prove it obviously.
"Where do you think PIE came from?"
Again, we can't actually know, but if we're speculating, I'm inclined to think it had something to do with an EHG group, maybe with some influence from an adjacent(CHG related?) group.
@ Grant
ReplyDelete'Secondly, bearing in mind the well-known contribution of the, ahem, "Ancient North Eurasians, it isn't at all fanciful to suggest that PIE had at least some linguistic influence from Eastern Siberia. There is also, of course, supporting Y-DNA evidence, such as the known bearers of ancient Y-DNA hg R* (Ma'lta boy/MA1) in Buryatia, and its direct ancestors P-P284* (Yana 2) and P-M45/P337* (Yana 1) in Yakutia. Although as I say, for the sake of parsimony, I wouldn't go much further.''
I wouldnt say its fanciful at all, and in in fact think it is an interesting exercise to marry aDNA with the field of 'prehistoric sociolinguistics'.
But first off, we need to establish undersstanding in several fields
1. PIE itself links back to 5th Mill BC, linguistically but also in terms of the social processes which galvanised the community of PIE speakers
2. its fine to hypothesise about further back in time, and look for any possible deeper link but we need to understand (a) the social structure of hunter-gatherer socieites before 6000 bce (b) have a working knowledge about types of language contact & transmission
During an expansion phase, there can be clear links between Y-DNA lineages/ autosomal ancestry & language, but that breaks down over a longer period of 20,000 years during the ''lull'' of 'stead-state' inter-mixture (e.g. refer to decoupling of R-L151 from IE in western Europe)
So even if you preference (reasonably) that genesis of PIE to R1-rich groups, this is not to say that P-P-PIE emerged from R*-linked Siberian groups. I would also point out that Mal'ta is west of Baikal and Yana is an extinct lineage. In fact, by the time of Mal'ta, there were probably ANE in the Volga-ural region already, ANE itself was superceded in Siberia by NEA admixed groups sometime during the Late Glacial. Any reaosnable speculation about P-P-PIE can only take you back to EE itself
''And I think most of us would countenance the idea that PIE was not created, de novo as a kind of "paleo conlang"?''
Indeed it was not. But lets look to the major split ot IE - proto-Anatolian, which represents a vestige of 'lost diversity' which obviously lies across the EBA Balkans and Chalcolithic western Ukraine. It doesn't lead off toward Siberia or North America. People speak of evidence, but ignore the most glaring one
The problem with macro-language hypotheses is that they are not amenable to statsitics, nor comparative method, nor Romanticized comparative mythology; and those exercises lack any Euro Hunter languages, thus suffer from 'sample bias'. Instead, population histories become vital, and an understanding of the variuos lines of language contact (from languae shift, to interefernece, and various degrees of loans, all contingent upon 'social 'attitudes' and societal predispositions). It's far more complex than people think
@Davidski
ReplyDeleteA new paper on donkeys and horses, Bennett et al. (2022):
"Before the introduction of domestic horses in Mesopotamia in the late third millennium BCE, contemporary cuneiform tablets and seals document intentional breeding of highly valued equids called kungas for use in diplomacy, ceremony, and warfare. Their precise zoological classification, however, has never been conclusively determined. Morphometric analysis of equids uncovered in rich Early Bronze Age burials at Umm el-Marra, Syria, placed them beyond the ranges reported for other known equid species. We sequenced the genomes of one of these ~4500-year-old equids, together with an ~11,000-year-old Syrian wild ass (hemippe) from Göbekli Tepe and two of the last surviving hemippes. We conclude that kungas were F1 hybrids between female domestic donkeys and male hemippes, thus documenting the earliest evidence of hybrid animal breeding."
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm0218
@Bob Floy “ Again, we can't actually know, but if we're speculating, I'm inclined to think it had something to do with an EHG group, maybe with some influence from an adjacent(CHG related?) group.”
ReplyDeleteI would say PIE came from Vonyuchka with strong GAC, Narva HG and perhaps some Triplolyan influences, by the Dnieper area forest zone.
Looking forward to that Orkney study. Apparently greater preservation of pre-Beaker genetics
ReplyDeleteRob,
ReplyDeleteSurely the evidence for _autosomal_ ties between ANE/Eastern Siberia and Europe, moving more than once E>W and W>E, is now rock solid. (Also, as I said, Y-DNA/paternal lineages are supporting evidence, at best, so even if it's absolutely correct that Ma'lta is west of Baikal and both of the Yana individuals represent totally dead lineages, it doesn't at all affect my point.) The real question about ANE and subclades of Y-DNA macrohaplogroup P1 (P-M45), such as R1a and R1b, moving from E. Siberia to the westernmost Steppe areas is not "if" but "when".
"[The] major split of IE ... proto-Anatolian ... represents a vestige of 'lost diversity' which obviously lies across the EBA Balkans and Chalcolithic western Ukraine"
No, not necessarily the case at all. Leaving aside the far east for a moment, there is (e.g.) the drowned coastal plains of the Pontic Steppe, along the LGM Black Sea and Caspian.
"It doesn't lead off toward Siberia... People speak of evidence, but ignore the most glaring one..."
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially on the "paleo superhighway" that was the Steppe, where the evidentiary waters have been muddied by many human migrations, in both directions, over tens of millennia.
"those exercises [by Jäger] lack any Euro Hunter languages, [and] thus suffer from 'sample bias'. Instead, population histories become vital...
Indeed. And so in the absence of vital material evidence that might add vital perspectivity, to the tentative results of such thought experiments, it's all too easy to fall into the trap of asserting premature conclusions – here we are all prone to "jump the gun" or, perhaps, in this case, the flint axe :-)
I posted a new video today......
ReplyDeleteBig Pots=People was a RULE for prehistoric Europe
https://youtu.be/McWTARO9rIo
I "drew" life-like cartoons of the prehistoric people we talk about.
The video starts with a 3-minute cartoon skit showing all the 'nations' who migrated into Bohemia from 5500 to 2000 BC.
Andrze you can ask me why I depict LBK, Funnel Beaker, Corded Ware, etc the way I do. Everything about the way they look is intentional.
I also have a conversation with a Corded Ware ghost. He makes fun of me for having Covid. I actually do have Covid right now. He says it's nothing compared to the five times he had the plague and lived through it.
ReplyDeleteDo you have any symptoms?
ReplyDelete@Andrzejewski
ReplyDelete"I would say PIE came from Vonyuchka with strong GAC, Narva HG and perhaps some Triplolyan influences, by the Dnieper area forest zone."
Of course this is possible, but I try not to get too specific when I speculate, since we know so little about what actually happened. The earliest records of IE are Hittite, and these are from 2,000 years after PIE would have been spoken. We don't actually know anything about the linguistic environment from which PIE emerged.
Personally I doubt that PIE was influenced by any EEF languages, although later Indo-European languages may have borrowed from these.
@Carlos Aramayo
ReplyDeleteSo I'm guessing the significance here is that these kungas were thought by some to have been horses, but it turns out they were half donkey, half wild ass.
@Genos Historia “ Andrze you can ask me why I depict LBK, Funnel Beaker, Corded Ware, etc the way I do. Everything about the way they look is intentional.”
ReplyDeleteI will definitely explore it later today :)
Btw, sorry to hear that you have COVID. That sure sucks big time! Hoping for a quick recovery for you.
@Davidski,
ReplyDeleteI got tested and got a positive Covid result.
The symptoms are fever, soar throat, fatigue.
The only thing unique to Covid is the fatigue. And also it has lasted longer than normal fever. But overall, it isn't radically different than a seasonal sickness. It is worse but not much worse.
@Andrze,
ReplyDeleteThanks man. The fatigue is gone so I've gotten through the worst part.
I'm not sure that Harvard is so keen on "forcing exotic admixture on Europeans" as alleged by some commenters here, given that the Olalde et al Danubian pre-print inexplicably proposes the theory that near Eastern (Anatolian and Levantine) ancestry in Italy and the Balkans vanished after the fall of the Roman Empire. This is obviously wrong and it just takes one look at a West Eurasian PCA to see it.
ReplyDeleteI just realized the new Celtic study fills the gap in Bohemian/Czech ancient DNA after Unetice all the way to the Iron age.
ReplyDeleteThe Middle Bronze age Czech samples, right after Unetice, are a discontinuation of Unetice.
They are mostly French-like, they seem to be a new population from western Europe.
Goddamit. This is some of the best documentation of never ending new population waves into a region.
But people will have a hard time understanding the changes weren't radicle. The new population almost always came from a nearby part of Europe from people closely related to the people already living in Bohemia.
@Davidski, the Kungas were long proposed to be hybrids like this and weren't thought to be horses. It's interesting to get confirmation that the Mesopotamians were selectively crossing animals to combine high speed (hemihippes) and tameability (donkeys). Presumably this is because moving vehicles at speed mattered a bit to them, but IDK. Doesn't have much to do with the Indo-European-y type topics very much, save that when they stopped doing this was probably just after the expansion of Sintashta type horses made an easier alternative available.
ReplyDelete@Matt
ReplyDeleteMore Nepalese genomes, nice. We should also be getting the one from Qiaomei Fu's lab pretty soon, considering how long ago the mtDNA was published.
@Genos Historia
ReplyDelete"They are mostly French-like, they seem to be a new population from western Europe."
How they come to be French-like if, don't misunderstanding you, "they came from a nearby part of Europe from people closely related to the people already living in Bohemia."
Where do they came from, Western or Central Europe?
Speaking of pots do we believe Anatolia_N populations invented pottery on their own or is there an ANE related source responsible for pottery in West Asia?
ReplyDelete@Genos Historia
ReplyDeleteDo you have any suggestions / ideas with what historical event or archaeological culture it may be related to?
@Sam: Yamnaya ancestry level in current Czech transect - https://imgur.com/a/fLlU1dU
ReplyDelete@Davidski
ReplyDelete"So I'm guessing the significance here is that these kungas were thought by some to have been horses, but it turns out they were half donkey, half wild ass."
Bennett et al. also mention (or suggest) that the actual horse arrived in Mesopotamia around 2000 BC coming from Caucasus, although they do not elaborate the idea.
@Rob
ReplyDelete"The problem with macro-language hypotheses is that they are not amenable to statsitics, nor comparative method, nor Romanticized comparative mythology"
With the advent of AI, some people are giving empirical statistical methods a shot. For example:
"Abstract: This research demonstrates that linguistic similarity predicts network-tie formation and that friends exhibit linguistic convergence over time. In Study 1, we analyzed the linguistic styles and the emerging social network of a complete cohort of 285 students. In Study 2, we analyzed a large-scale data set of online reviews. In both studies, we collected data in two waves to examine changes in both social networks and linguistic styles. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) framework, we analyzed the text of students’ essays and of 1.7 million reviews by 159,651 Yelp reviewers. Consistent with our theory, results showed that similarity in linguistic style corresponded to a higher likelihood of friendship formation and persistence and that friendship ties, in turn, corresponded to a convergence in linguistic style. We discuss the implications of the coevolution of inguistic styles and social networks, which contribute to the formation of relational echo chambers."
https://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/images/uploads/faculty/adam-kleinbaum/Linguistic_Homophily.pdf
Are online discussions in a common language the newest drivers in language evolution, independent of population movement?
Random question for the amateur linguists here - Afro-Asiatic is usually said to be a hella old family, apparently at least 10,000 years, and often even older. Are there any other language families out there that are considered to be a comparable age?
ReplyDeleteOne problem I have is that proto-AA is said to be so old, the regular comparative method fails to reconstruct it like with Indo-European and other, younger families. But the validity of the family itself is still considered to be unquestioned, because of some common (I think mostly verbal?) morphology shared between all major nodes (Semitic, Berber, Cushitic, etc.) that point to a common origin, as such basic morphological constructs are apparently very unlikely to be borrowed. But isn't it possible that instead of some supposed great time depth back to the proto-language, each of the sub-branches could be distorted by intense language contact/shifting with non-AA languages?
@ Grant
ReplyDeleteYou make some odd claims, like R1a and R1b being from eastern Siberia, or that the reason you aren't informed about the European origins of proto-Anatolians ? is because the last 4 decades of scholarly work are under the Sea
@ Bob Floy
''We don't actually know anything about the linguistic environment from which PIE emerged.''
How do you mean ?
@ Genos
ReplyDelete''But people will have a hard time understanding the changes weren't radicle.''
Not at all. For anybody who is familiar with the region, aDNA has simply confirmed the complexities that we predicted.
However, despite these advances, the major deficit in aDNA works remains the poor understanding of the big picture (a) initial Neolithization (too many claims of HG replacement); (2) steppe genesis (the simplistic ''EHG met CHG'' theory)
@Genos Historia “ Andrze you can ask me why I depict LBK, Funnel Beaker, Corded Ware, etc the way I do. Everything about the way they look is intentional.”
ReplyDeleteYour video is nothing short of phenomenal. Did you do the animation all by yourself?
Very fascinating! One fact that stands out is that Bell Beaker exterminated all of the preceding CWC population, a rate exceeding even the replacement of Iron Gate-like HG by LBK: even LBK and WHG continued to life side by side for 1ky.
I can wait for your much anticipated CHG vid :)
@Cy Tolliver “ Random question for the amateur linguists here - Afro-Asiatic is usually said to be a hella old family, apparently at least 10,000 years, and often even older. Are there any other language families out there that are considered to be a comparable age?”
ReplyDeleteProto-Afro-Asiatic is what the Iberomaurasian probably spoke.
Semitic languages were most likely formed when these North Africans invaded the Levant and were changed by the Dzudzuana-related substrate.
R1a and R1b could Indeed be from ANE population.
ReplyDeleteAlso steppe eneolithic iranian is guaranteed to be from east of Caspian.. my qpgraphs leave no doubt about it. Chg doesn't work, a branch of iranN doesn't work, only thing which works is a combination of chg and a branch from the ancestor the pop which contributed 70% to indus periphery.
@ Cy Tolliver
ReplyDeleteThe latest study shows that Zebu Cattle started interbreeding with Taurine cattle in Ethiopia and the broader Sub-Saharan Africa around a 1000 years ago. Since Ethiopia is basically Cushitic speakers it shows that there were extensive contact between the Middle East and Cushitic speakers. Camels domestication and spread could also have influenced how much contact AA speakers retained. And I think like Anatolian Languages which absorbed a lot of Non-Indo-European, Cushitic also absorbed some Non-Afro-Asiatic maybe making them look more archaic than they actually were/are.
@ Genos
ReplyDeleteyes, I like the funny cartoons, but Farmers did not replace WHGs. There were not many WHGs in south-central Europe, but those which did live there lived in uplands, not the fertile lowlands. So they lived in different niches
What you (and some geneticists) are doing is looking at LBK - who are the immigrants / descendants of Balkan farmers and claiming they replaced WHG (the natives) without sampling the latter. Naturally, this is wrong, and is called sampling and observer bias.
Most of the WHGs lived further north, and in the Atlantic, and they certainly were not replaced
Secondly, TRB is not from western Europe, but a heterogeneous pan-regional horizon. Don;t worry about your 'G25 models' simply look at the cacophony of uniparentals in Czech TRB and their absence in western Europe.
Nor did, TRB did not completely replace the post-LBK groups in Bohemia, but again they occupied different regions - ones in the north the others in the south
Moving into CWC & BB eras, now we can start talking about replacement , but even here it might be overestimated.
What you need to do is understand who lived where and when. you can't just look at genome-wide models and invent some narratives.
@Grant
ReplyDeleteI'm not seeing any signs that R1a and R1b per se came from Siberia.
They really do seem to be native to Europe.
To me, Iran_N & CHG look like completely different Pops. Everyone says CHG 'should have' ANE related admixture, but I don;t seem to be seeing any. Iran N does, but not CHG, which instead is shifted toward Natufians.
ReplyDeleteBut then, this does align with uniparentals & archaeolgy, so maybe it isn't so strange..
@rob
ReplyDeleteI get CHG as 54% West eurasian (dzudzuana), 31% East eurasian, and 15% basal out of africa
I get IranN as 42% WE (dzudzuana related), 22% Basal, 37% EE (out of which 5% is a different EE source, maybe some ANE could be better proxy, in which case it will reduce some WE %).
Natufian isnt part of my graph.
@capra, ah, didn't know anything more around that was upcoming from Fu... thanks.
ReplyDelete...
Re; Orkney study, the samples that are in it have probably been listed in this big list of "SCOTTISH ARCHAEOLOGICAL HUMAN REMAINS THAT HAVE BEEN SAMPLED/ANALYSED FOR DNA AS OF JANUARY 2019"
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339237748_A_SUMMARY_ROUND-UP_LIST_OF_SCOTTISH_ARCHAEOLOGICAL_HUMAN_REMAINS_THAT_HAVE_BEEN_SAMPLEDANALYSED_FOR_DNA_AS_OF_JANUARY_2019
(Takes a while from sampling to publication!)
It looks like they're listed on page 11, which if I'm right indicates they're from an MBA cemetary: Links of Noltland, Westray, Orkney, then Iron Age samples on page 14. Only a few seem specifically RC dated. There are also a couple CA-EBA Orkney samples listed from other sites / studies, but they're female and I think remain unpublished. There is a useful key that shows which samples produced good quality dated but remained unpublished (at least as of early 2019).
Ancient Genome of King Bela III of the Hungarian Arpad dynasty
ReplyDeleteThe ancient Hungarians, “Madzsars”, established their control of the Carpathian Basin in the late ninth century and founded the Hungarian Kingdom around 1000AD. The origin of the Magyars as a tribal federation has been much debated in the past. From the time of the conquest to the early fourteenth century they were ruled by descendants of the Arpad family. In order to learn more about the genetic origin of this family, we here analyzed the genome of Bela III one of the most prominent members of the early Hungarian dynasty that ruled the Hungarian Kingdom from 1172 to 1196. The Y-Chromosome of Bela III belongs to haplogroup R1a-Z2123 that is today found in highest frequency in Central Asia, supporting a Central Asian origin for the ruling lineage of the Hungarian kingdom. The autosomal DNA profile of Bela III, however, falls within the genetic variation of present-day east European populations. This is further supported through his mtDNA genome that belongs to haplogroup H, the most common European maternal lineage, but also found in Central Asia. However, we didn’t find an exact haplotype match for Bela III. The typical autosomal and maternal Central Eastern European ancestry among Bela III autosomes might be best explained by consecutive intermarriage with local European ruling families.
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB50150
The girl with finches
ReplyDeleteCave burials are generally absent from historical periods in Europe. Consequently, the discovery of a post-medieval inhumation of a child buried with at least one bird head placed in the mouth in Tunel Wielki Cave (southern Poland) is an exceptional find. The aim of this paper is to discuss this unique burial based on multiproxy analyses conducted on the human and avian remains, including genetic and isotopic analyses as well as CT scans, radiocarbon dating, and anthropological and paleontological assessment. The results reveal the burial was that of a 10–12 year old girl of likely Fennoscandian or Baltic genetic ancestry, who died in the post-medieval period and was buried in the cave with the placement of one, and possibly two, bird heads in the mouth of the deceased. We propose that the girl is associated with Finno-Karelian troops of a Swedish garrison stationed at the adjacent Ojców Castle during King Carl Gustav’s invasion of Poland in 1655–1657
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB49644
@Davidski
ReplyDeleteYeah R1a and R1b no indeed seem to be European especially the former. The latter has a really old clade (PH155) I think that might be Central Asia so maybe R1b might be from around the Urals.
What about R1 and R? Could that younger Bacho Kiro sample be P like speculated?
@@Cy Tolliver - Re: old language families, I think Afro-Asiatic is the oldest language family that is widely accepted. Probably not a coincidence that it occupied much of the same region where writing developed. Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic could be fairly old too.
ReplyDeleteBeyond that things get more speculative, but that doesn't mean those speculative ideas are wrong.
@David - re: R1b/R1a's origins - Obviously R1b has been in Europe since at least 14 kya with Villabruna, but didn't you show Villabruna was about 10% ANE/
Siberian in origin? R1a/R1b may have developed in Europe but surely R1 or R originated in Siberia I'd think.
Re; Sam's comment about the changes in populations in Czech Republic, another thing I thought an interesting comparison that might highlight something would be to add the diversity *within* populations for present day population to that graph I did up thread: https://imgur.com/a/LVVHptQ
ReplyDeleteIf we look at the diversity of the Yamnaya proportions in the La Tene samples (n=41) from Hungary, although the average is pretty close to France, the individual proportions range from quite a bit higher than the whole set of British samples (from England to Wales to Scotland, n=80) to as low as than the whole set of French samples from the G25 "French" label (n=68), which I believe come from across France as they are stretch as far as French Alsace to French Provence. Individual proportions range from less steppe ancestry than southern French today, to more / comparable to present day Scandinavians.
There's a difficulty in judging what the diversity should be for a population at this time (it takes time to homogenize), and they are across multiple sites.
For example, an England_IA sample set (n=94) at this time is also more diverse than present day people, though I intentionally included outliers to keep it fair: https://imgur.com/a/ljyeCmk .
Though the England_IA set seem less diverse for their sample size compared to Czech La Tene. Rather than just eyeballing it, comparing the Standard Deviation of Yamnaya ancestry in sample sets then... If we normalize variation in present day Czech Republic to 1, we get in ascending order: present day Britain - 1, present day France - 1.57, Iron Age England circa 250 BCE - 1.61, Czech Halstatt Ware - 2.34, Czech Late Corded Ware - 2.44, Czech Unetice Early Bronze Age - 2.79, Czech La Tene circa 250 BCE - 3.59, Czech Knoviz (including outliers) - 4.24, Czech Early Corded Ware - 6.39.
(Surprisingly to me, the measure seems to indicates the entire British sample from Scotland to Cornwall seems only about as diverse as Czech Republic sample of equal size would be expected to be? Unless that statistics fail on my part.)
So although it's not totally consistent, it does seem like the Czech Iron Age cultures are quite diverse in their ancestry proportions, and this maybe an indication that they're not just a locally continuous bunch (which yes, I don't think anyone archaeologically informed would necessarily suggest), but part of a network of people from quite far afield, with fair amounts of at least female driven high migration?
But more things to sort of quantify these patterns might help to look at what is happening in the Centre of Europe. The general idea is it's possible that in central regions, the change in averages might be slightly suppressed and hard to see at times (though there is a change in averages here), because of balancing flows from north and south, east and west... But if high levels of diversity are maintained over time, that could indicate constant migration.
@vAsiSTha
ReplyDeleteThat seems like too much EE. Can anyone else confirm if this is likely?
@Matt
ReplyDeleteCould it be of any interest to look at how many La Tene samples plot within the French range diversity vs Britain's one?
@ J.S., there's overlap but in terms of Yamnaya, in my G25+Vahaduo model the La_Tene samples come back as:
ReplyDeleteBelow French range (<27% Yamnaya): 1/41 (2.5%) (Lowest 26.4% so barely outside French range)
French range only (27% - 39% Yamnaya): 21/41 (51%)
Overlap between French and British (40% - 46% Yamnaya): 10/41 (24%)
British range only (46% - 50% Yamnaya): 5/41 (12%)
Beyond British range (>50% Yamnaya): 4/41 (9.7%) (Highest 57%, other 3 barely above British range)
Overall they definitely overlap better with French in the Yamnaya share, only about 20% have more Yamnaya than the French range (which excluded the Bretons, so I guess with them the French range would have been comparable). It's pretty simple model so it might a few percentage points overall in either direction for each of these numbers I guess, but it should all hold relatively I'd expect.
@ Vasistha
ReplyDeleteI realise that some ENA/ ANE is expected but it’s getting 0% admixture edge , with or without Natufians. I’ll try adding WSHG
@ Ryan
There’s a difference between recognising some form of ancestral R* came via Siberia and claiming that PIE came from 20,000 bc Siberia
@Rob - "There’s a difference between recognising some form of ancestral R* came via Siberia and claiming that PIE came from 20,000 bc Siberia"
ReplyDeleteNot PIE, but it's ancestor more than likely, no?
@Ryan
ReplyDeleteThere's no evidence that the ancestor of PIE came from Siberia.
Language formation doesn't work like that anyway.
If we go back to the Paleolithic, then PIE would've had a myriad of "ancestors" from across space and time.
It's impossible to untangle this process that far back and there's no way to prove that the most important pre-PIE language lived in Siberia.
@Ryan “ Not PIE, but it's ancestor more than likely, no?”
ReplyDeleteNo. Because going by your method, you’d agree that the pre-Finno-Ugric substrate in Sami is either WHG related or GAC-affiliated, or both (I2a, H1, U5).
There aren't any plausible linguistic links between Saami and WHG or GAC.
ReplyDeleteSaami probably have hunter-gatherer ancestry from PWC, which was a very ancient mixture between WHG and EHG, with more recent admixture from TRB.
@Rob, Davidski
ReplyDeleteWhat I said was:
"The real question about ANE and subclades of Y-DNA macrohaplogroup P1 (P-M45), such as R1a and R1b, moving from E. Siberia to the westernmost Steppe areas is not "if" but "when"."
OK, using R1a and R1b as an example was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Nevertheless, at some point, one or more subclades of P1 (M45) did begin to move from Eastern Siberia towards Eastern Europe. I don't know whether it was R*, R1* or some now-extinct basal sublade of R. It's unlikely to have been P1 or Q. If I had to guess, I'd say that it was R1*, and both R1a and R1b emerged in Eastern Europe. As far as I'm aware there is no serious suggestion that P* or P1* was in Paleolithic/Neolithic Europe; I don't think that claim has been argued for R* either?
so it was more likely R1* (than R1b)
@J.S. this might interest you; to visualise the variation in Yamnaya level in La_Tene vs other cultures, I made a set of plots showing these, where the X axis shows Yamnaya level and the Y axis shows the % of samples in the population label with that level.
ReplyDeleteHere: https://imgur.com/a/4UJ90CJ
Particularly comparing La_Tene vs present day populations, the distributions is very "fat", like we'd expect from the higher standard deviation, while the present day populations are quite narrow in their distribution.
Even comparing La_Tene to England_IA and Unetice_EBA, the distribution is quite sprawling and "fat", with a broader range and a lower peak.
It could be the case that G25 slightly overdisperses ancient samples during projection and is this exaggerates things, although excessive compression relative to moderns is also quite likely (and more of an issue generally, as Davidski has mentioned frequently). But it shouldn't be compressing La_Tene more than say England_IA or Unetice_EBA, so it seems like we can be fairly confident there was a broader distribution of Yamnaya levels in La_Tene than many other cultures in Czech Republic that preceded it.
La_Tene even seems to have a broad distribution compared to Halstatt or Knoviz, which look more peaked with outliers.
@Andrze,
ReplyDeleteThank you good sir. I did do all the animation myself. I found a clever way to do it without needing any real artistic skills. ;). I thank modern software apps.
Yeah, it does look like Bell Beaker basically totally replaced/kicked out Corded Ware in central Europe. I would like to see what others here think of that idea.
Whatever the case, Bell beaker definitely caused large scale population change. The shift from Corded Ware to Bell Beaker should forever be used as a classic example of pots=people.
@Rob,
ReplyDeleteI'll respond to your comment later. It is the first good critical comment cutting at the heart of the claim of my video. So I need time to create a response.
(Couple more graphs showing spread of present day populations to show how larger countries with larger samples in G25 are a bit more diverse - https://imgur.com/a/3zZeynS).
ReplyDelete@Andre, @David - I do kind of assume that the substrate in Sami is a WHG language (via PWC).
ReplyDelete"If we go back to the Paleolithic, then PIE would've had a myriad of "ancestors" from across space and time. It's impossible to untangle this process that far back and there's no way to prove that the most important pre-PIE language lived in Siberia."
Let's take this a step back. I'm sure we all agree that the most important 20kya ancestor to PIE was spoken somewhere on planet Earth with 100% certainty. Pre-modern era, I doubt languages ever spread without some gene flow, however minor, so we can probably narrow that down further to say it was spoken somewhere in Eurasia with 99.9% certainty. Are we agreed?
I'm not saying anything beyond that is provable, just that it is likely. Like, my own personal guess would be there's an 80% chance PIE's most important ancestors were in Siberia at some point.
I guess what I'm saying is this:
In pre-modern times, wherever genes travelled, so did language to some degree, and whenever language travelled, so did genes to some degree.
I'd further suggest that the genetic signal is usually strongest on the Y-chromosome, barring weird founder effects.
Is that so controversial? I think your work on this blog is some of the strongest evidence for that, showing the arrival of Indo-European languages coincided with the arrival of steppe-admixture over and over again. A true map of the origin of languages should look something like a treemix graph, albeit with different weights.
If that's agreed, then there's really only a 4 candidates for the origins of pre-proto Indo-European languages - a WHG language, an Anatolian language, a Caucasian language or a Siberian language. No?
In my copy of A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture...
ReplyDeleteFig. 3. Multiway admixture in Eastern Europe: Has an red arrow labelled Southern (South Europe and West Asia).
In one of my own Admixtures of 8 Poles I come up with the following ~58% Belorussian-Lithuanian modal; 12.25% GBR-Orcadian modal; 21.61% "Southern" of which 13.25% leans Sardinian/Basque; 1.27% NE Asian with some odds and ends.
This sort of jives with GENOGRAPHIC 2 for Poland: 59% Eastern Europe; 13% West & Central Europe; 7% Finland & Scandinavia; 5% Asia Minor; 7% Southern Europe & 6% Jewish (possibly from the Frankist conversion).
http://admixturemap.paintmychromosomes.com/ by some of the same researchers has more variations on Polish and Lithuanian ancestry [including a "Hadza" second event which has never been explained].
@Sgt
ReplyDeleteIt's all bullshit. Also known as calculator effect.
I can't believe anyone takes that seriously, or ever did.
@Matt
ReplyDeleteThank you very much. Indeed, it is very interesting, especially since i don't know how to do it. :)
What struck me is that Knoviz and Hallstatt distribution also seem to be included in the Modern French range and i wonder why.
According to you, does it means Modern French Ancestry trace back to Czechia rather than to local continuity or is that genetic similarity just the product of some kind of chance.
@Rob
ReplyDeletecan you check if ENA in CHG is causing the ANE effect? And could perhaps ENA have some type of ANE or CHG-related? I know most papers argue against that but I guess it would be fun to check.
@Vasistha
What do you have as EE sources in Iran_N?
@ Grant
ReplyDelete''Nevertheless, at some point, one or more subclades of P1 (M45) did begin to move from Eastern Siberia towards Eastern Europe.''
Well no, P1 never moved from Eastern Siberia to Europe, if we want to be specific.
Yana is an extinct lineage, representing a temporary foray into sub-Arctic northeastern Siberia during a climactic optimum (~ 33,000 calBP).
The main R/P population was further southwest.
The 'point of departure' was western Sierbia, and some form of R* arrived in eastern Europe c. 20,000 BC. Arguably, the R1b-PH155 found in Central Asia (sensu latu) might be a leftover/ 'stragglers', but its still interesting that it doesnt not appear there before 2500 BC
@ Ryan
'' my own personal guess would be there's an 80% chance PIE's most important ancestors were in Siberia at some point.''
You're conflating genes and lanugage at a point in time when they're not necessarily linked. We all know that ANE was at some point in Siberia, refer to above
As I said, we need to understand how hunter-gatherer society was. It is not like the bronze age Corded Ware expansion where we can expect a 'male-mediated expansion'.
Hunter-gatherers were often matrifocal, and 'horizontal language transmission' (language shift, high amounts of borrowing, etc) was common. So in addition to what Dave said (innumerable possible ancestros), the chain of language transmission often defies linear inheritence patterns, although the comparative method is stil usable for HG languages
So up until you get the formation of a proto-IE societal pattern (in the 'steppe Neolithic phase), we cannot apply the expectations of Corded Ware cultural model back onto 20, or 10,000 BC. In theorey, R1* could have adopted the language of some Baltic - WHG women in western Russia, or the entire WHG/ EHG mix could have adopted the language of CHG-rich Volga fisher-hunters.
All guessework. So it's best to start with what's reconstructable and look at 'the big picture' The big picture is :
- P-PIE was a hunter-gatherer language in near-eastern Europe
- these hunter-gatherers were obviusly influenced by Farmers, but they clearly maintained a distinction (because they were not demographically inundated by Farmer genes, like WHGs in western Europe;and they only selectively & piecemeal adopted Farmer cultural influences).
- you also get a few loans from Majkop, etc (e.g. wine, etc)
- if we wish to get further, lets see what further samples bring out about from where expanding lineages I2a-L466, R1a-M17, R1b-M269 . From what we already know, they were already quite west by the Mesolithic, which positioned them well to accept the aforementioned influences. By this point, Siberia is obviuosly irrelevant.
@ Genos
Sure. In meantime, examine this
Any thoughts on R1b-M222 showing up in a La Tene burial from France btw? Late entry into Ireland or...?
ReplyDelete@Matt
ReplyDeleteG25 coordinates for the six groups now added at rear of document.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bRI3ujhjmxitdgSOszfACM8iBI-lOgHCb60Qc4jM8Vw/edit?usp=sharing
Anyone else catch a glimpse of these new samples in the Patterson paper? Two stand out to me. The first is I20509. He is labeled "La Tene," and hails from an Iron Age gravesite in Bohemia, Czechia (400-200 BCE); he has Y-DNA N1a-L550 and mtDNA H7b. This sample doesn't appear to be contaminated, with a coverage of 245k SNPs. The next sample is I16184, another N1a sample (Y-DNA: N1a-L708, mtDNA: H17, 2000-800 BCE), and he's been labeled "France_BA_GalloRoman." These two samples were dated archaeologically, rather than with direct dating. Not sure why, but something here feels off. I've been hesitant to trust assignments like this right out of the gate. There have been a few papers to come out in the last eight years with weird assignments. I believe the Brunel paper on the French Neolithic, found E1b1a1a1a1c2c (CTS3274) in a farmer sample (ID: PSS282), and that's a clade normally found in Senegal. Then there was that mtDNA B bearer in Neolithic Switzerland, and the mtDNA C5 bearers (or C4, can't remember) in Copper/Bronze Age Andalusia. The fact we have N1a bearers in Bronze Age/Iron Age Czechia and France--and no I1--seems quite odd.
ReplyDelete@ Gamerz_J
ReplyDeleteI'm not 100% sure, but it seems that something related to Epipaleolithic Amur mixed into Iran (~25%), but (with some of the new Paleo samples in the mix) I'm not seeing a big need for any east Eurasian in CHG.
@Simon Stevin
ReplyDeleteYou're right. These samples aren't from the Iron Age.
I20509 has some Asian admix.
Also, check this out. I reckon this is a Swedish soldier from the 30 Years' War.
Distance to: CZE_IA_La_Tene:I20509
0.04170159 HUN_MA_Szolad:SZ9
0.04265008 VK2020_EST_Saaremaa_EVA:VK510
0.04335364 VK2020_SWE_Gotland_VA:VK50
0.04437952 FIN_Levanluhta_IA_o:JK2065
0.04445129 VK2020_EST_Saaremaa_EVA:VK551
0.04480193 VK2020_NOR_North_VA:VK547
0.04488761 VK2020_EST_Saaremaa_EVA:VK484
0.04523526 VK2020_SWE_Oland_VA:VK343
0.04558229 Bell_Beaker_Scotland:I5367
0.04560176 VK2020_SWE_Oland_IA:VK522
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War
what uniparentals account for ENA in Iran_N?
ReplyDelete@ David, Andrzejewski and Ryan
ReplyDeleteBeing pedantic here, but the Saami are very unlikely to have ancestry from Pitted Ware. That is because the Pitted Ware people mainly inhabited coastal areas of southern and central-cast Scandinavia, not Lapland. Pitted Ware were also practically extinct and/or fully assimilated by the time the linguistic ancestors of the Saami arrived in northern Fennoscandia. If Saamis have SHG ancestry it is likely to be from HGs of the Slate Culture of northern Scandinavia. VK531 was probably a descendant of that culture given his SHG autosomal profile and had Y-DNA R1b-Y13202. However, a lot of Saami HG ancestry may also be from further to the east, perhaps even from unsampled populations. Any actual Pitted Ware ancestry that modern Saami may have they are likely to have gotten from Scandinavians (who have a little, not much) because there has been substantial male-biased southern Scandinavian contribution to the Saami gene pool in the last millennium.
Rob,
ReplyDelete"P1 never moved from Eastern Siberia to Europe, if we want to be specific."
Technically, R1a, R1b, R2 are subclades of P1 (haplogroup phylogenies being a kind of nested model). So a majority of living males in Europe are part of macrohaplogroup P1.
"Yana is an extinct lineage, representing a temporary foray into sub-Arctic northeastern Siberia ... The main R/P population was further southwest... The 'point of departure' was western Siberia".
Sources?
@Rob
ReplyDeleteIs this the Amur river sample from 19kya? And the admixture would be from Amur to Iran_N (East to West) and not the reverse correct?
Lazaridis had Onge IIRC but probably just a rough model. If I may ask, what else do you see? What would Anatolia_HG be composed of for example?
@Tigran
Ydna R2 it seems. The ENA Iran_N had imo correlates with ANE admixture. They seem to have arrived together. Going older than that, Ydna LT (or K1) as it is called seems broadly related to IUP/ENA-like pops especially if one considers the affinities of Bacho Kiro, Oase and Ustishim (albeit it's likely all 3 specific pops were dead-ends)
If the ENA is really that northern, I would assume it's related to the ENA side of the Tarim mummies from Ning's paper some months ago. '
What's interesting is this topic is that between 33kya and 19kya lots of things changed in parts of Eurasia (LGM) I remember reading that 33kya you had Tianyuan-like pops in the Amur region but 19kya you already had East Asian-like ones (but more northern than most modern-day East Asians) On the other hand, post-LGM ANE samples from Afontova Gora are still somewhat similar to the Yana samples 31kya (but don't seem to form a clade).
@EL - good point
ReplyDeleteRyan
ReplyDelete"there's really only a 4 candidates for the origins of pre-proto Indo-European languages - a WHG language, an Anatolian language, a Caucasian language or a Siberian language."
I agree, with the proviso that more than one of these candidate groups was almost certainly involved. I have already alluded to one of these: the NW Caucasus family and Kabardian (or an extinct close relative) in particular. The evidence for second (or even third) candidates being involved is that the "para-Kabardian" influence on PIE, first suggested by Kuipers around 60 years ago, while striking and discernible, is not substantial enough to justify a phylogenetic connection – in other words, the link was probably through prolonged contact on the Pontic Steppe. That is, the closest relative of Kabardian, Adyghe, is so close that many speakers of these languages regard them as a unity called Circassian, and even some Kabardian speakers refer to their own language as East Circassian, or even simply (and confusingly) "Adyghe". And yet there are far fewer evident links between PIE and West Circassian/Adyghe proper. (All but ruling out the hypothetical "Pontic language" metafamily, combining NWC and IE, that was proposed by people who took Kuipers a little too seriously.) Perhaps, just possibly, this "para-Kabardian" influence parallels the relatively minor autosomal contribution from CHG.
There is different evidence for a contact-only relationship (not phylogenetic) between IE and Uralic in that it was apparently more one-way (IE > Uralic), and much stronger in the "northeastern" IE branches (Tocharian and Indo-Iranian), and hence later. Likewise the influence of the semi-accepted Vasconic and Tyrsenian families appear restricted to the Romance/Italic, Celtic and/or Germanic branches.
I don't think anyone, other than some fringe scholars (often seeming to have a particular nationalistic axe to grind) have ever seriously, proposed connections between IE and Kartvelian, Northeast Caucasian, or the disparate paleo-Anatolian languages (Hattic-Kaskian, Hurro-Urartian etc).
That narrows down the field a lot, without necessarily ruling out an "EHG language" or one of the Siberian families.
As for where the bulk of the PIE vocabulary/rootwords and morphology came from, we will probably never know, or be able to rule out some possibilities, because it's extremely unlikely that we will ever have access to all of the proposed precursors.
A peer reviewed book published by Routledge claimed that my video about ANE was promoting "pseudosacience" yet not one of the authors was a geneticist or a historian nor were the reviewers it seems!
ReplyDelete@romulus
ReplyDelete[CITATION NEEDED]
First of all, the claim that Xiongnu were Turkic is a weak, minority position. There are also other weak positions such as that the Xiongnu were Northeast Iranic (the position of Hungarian Iranologist Janos Harmatta) or that they were Mongolic (the position held by all Mongolian scholars and some Western scholars). The scientifically strongest theory is that the Xiongnu spoke a Yeniseian language.
https://www.academia.edu/1804190/Did_the_Xiong-nu
https://www.academia.edu/1804191/Xiong-nu_Part2