Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Geography is hard (for some)
It's that time of the academic year again when bioRxiv is inundated with ancient DNA preprints. I'm not complaining, but I almost spat out my coffee when I saw this map in one of the new manuscripts (here).
What's the logic behind labeling almost all of Eastern Europe as "Steppe", and instead labeling just Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia as "Eastern Europe"? In my opinion those three countries, plus Poland, are better described as East Central Europe anyway.
It seems to me that many people working at the highest level in population genetics simply don't know what the Eurasian steppe is. They appear to see it as a continent of its own, when, in fact, it's a topographical feature and ecoregion that straddles the continents of Europe and Asia. That's why it's called the Eurasian steppe, and it's made up of three main parts: the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe, the Kazkah steppe of Central Asia, and the Eastern steppe of Mongolia.
Here's the same map with a few corrections (in red). Much better, don't you think?
Citation...
Antonio et al., Stable population structure in Europe since the Iron Age, despite high mobility, bioRxiv, posted May 16, 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.05.15.491973
See also...
Matters of geography
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406 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 400 of 406 Newer› Newest»@Gaska said: Does anyone need more evidence to at least think carefully that maybe (I only dare to say maybe), R1b-P312 never spoke IE? Why don't we leave the matter in the hands of R1a-M417 and Z2103?
In south-eastern Poland, we have everything you need. First there are the descendants of R1b-L51: in the same archaeological environment the Proto-Indo-Europeans CWC and the BBC.
There are also descendants of R1a-M417: this is the Chłopice-Vesele culture of Małopolska and the North-Western Carpathian Valley; as well as CWC-Baltic and Mierzanowice culture (etc.) and R1a-Z93 CWC-ProtoFatjanovo.
Linderholm et al (2020)
Corded Ware cultural complexity uncovered using genomic and isotopic analysis from south-eastern Poland
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63138-w
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63138-w.pdf
"@Gaska said: Does anyone need more evidence to at least think carefully that maybe (I only dare to say maybe), R1b-P312 never spoke IE? Why don't we leave the matter in the hands of R1a-M417 and Z2103?"
Y haplogroups don't speak languages.
A couple of things. First, the idea that Bell Beaker originated in Iberia is known as the Spanish Model. It owes its renown to the early involvement of Bosch-Gimpera and other Spanish archaeologists in the study of Bell Beaker. That was back in the early part of the 20th century, when of course there was no genetic research and certainly no ancient DNA research. But even back then archaeologists could tell there was something strange about Iberian Bell Beaker. The Iberian burials that were claimed as the oldest BB burials we’re in Neolithic long barrows and were communal, not individual. The skeletons in them were gracile and longheaded, of the type known as Mediterranean. Later, intrusive BB burials were of non-Mediterranean skeletons in single graves under round tumuli, very much like Corded Ware burials, characterized by sexual dimorphism (males buried with one physical orientation, females with another), weapons, tools, etc. Now, thanks to ancient DNA, particularly as revealed in the groundbreaking Olalde et al study of 2017, we know the Spanish Model was mistaken. Those old Iberian communal burials lacked steppe DNA and Y-DNA R1b-M269. On the other hand, Single Grave/Kurgan Bell Beaker was typically characterized by steppe DNA and Y-DNA R1b-M269. Now we know that the most accurate model of BB origins is not the Spanish Model, but the Dutch Model, which was based on a careful analysis of BB and Corded Ware pottery. The Dutch Model posits that BB was derived from Single Grave Corded Ware in the Netherlands and NW Germany. Not only does that explain the pretty obvious similarities between BB and CW burial rites, and the obvious evolution of CW All-Over-Ornamented and All-Over-Corded beakers into BB beakers, but it also explains the obvious genetic relationship between BB and CW.
Now, regarding Etruscans, I think everyone who reads this blog knows the Etruscans are entirely irrelevant to the issue of Indo-European origins. They’re just too late. It really doesn’t matter what Y-DNA haplogroups are found in ancient Etruscan remains. No doubt R1b and R1a will turn up in Iron Age Turks, too.
Also Gaska : Iberian origins of BB is a myth
Speaking of the Spanish Model and the Dutch Model of BB origins (and what Rob just said of the Spanish Model is correct), not too long ago there were a number of different models of Corded Ware origins, as well. One of the most popular was that CW was simply of local, Central European Funnel Beaker derivation. That model was supported by quite a few scholars who should have known better. Now, thanks primarily to ancient DNA, we know that Corded Ware was primarily of steppe pastoralist derivation, its steppe DNA male mediated. Ancient DNA has led to a similar revelation with regard to the origin of Bell Beaker.
Thanks StP, we already discussed in this blog that Linderholm´s paper, those cases in southern Poland are from the late CWC therefore they do not provide solutions”
VAsiSTha-
Of course, the Y haplogroups spoke languages, they were not mute, the interesting and intelligent thing is to look for solutions and explanations to be able to demonstrate which language the different markers spoke. In the case of Iberia and Etruria, we know they were overwhelmingly Df27 and U152 and spoke Iberian and Etruscan. There is no discussion about it. The absence of migrations and reasons to change language, and the existence of genetic continuity also in the female markers and in the autosomal composition makes us think that their ancestors of the BB culture spoke the same NON-IE language
No Rob, it is not a myth because the antiquity of that culture in Iberia is much greater than in Holland. As you are a smart guy and you have access to many papers on the subject, I suppose you have drawn that conclusion in an unbiased way (I don't think you have a horse in this race). Although here in Spain no archaeologist shares that position, I respect that you think differently, sooner or later you will realize that you are wrong
What is entirely irrelevant to the origin of PIE is P312. Despite attempts to Levantinize, anatolize or africanize the Etruscans, they have turned out to be entirely Western (except for 2-3 outliers), very similar genetically to the Iberians, Northern Italians and Spaniards. Their U152 does not come from the urnfield culture because it has been found in northern Italy (1,600-1,500 BC) so it is clear that they and the Rhaetians, join the club of Aquitanians/Basques, Iberians and Tartessians. You should understand that it is not an isolated case but a massive linking of Iron Age Western Europe with R1b and NON-IE languages. Gimbutas's theory doesn't make any sense except for some lineages like M417, Z2103, I2a-L699 and maybe R1b-V1636. Regarding L51>P312, it is a totally irrelevant marker for the history of IE. In Western Europe, its situation in France, Italy, and Iberia is dramatic because it always appears associated with NON-IE languages, while in Greece, Anatolia, and South Asia, P312 simply does not exists
Rich,
No matter how persistently and forcefully you repeat these incontrovertible facts, certain parties simply won't listen, stop their ears and keep parrotting the same lines over and over and over.
It's worse than kindergarten.
@J.Thomas
That's funny, I guess you mean me. Perhaps you should watch the video of Nick Patterson's latest lecture (who is a supporter of Anthony's theories on IE expansion)-The Spread of Indo-European across Eurasia-Nick Patterson Symposium Amphithéâtre Maurice Halbwachs (31 May 2022, 12-12.30 pm)-He said; What we don´t know
1-How and when did Hittite ancestors reach Anatolia?
2-When did Greeks reach Greece. From where?
3-What is the relationship of Tocharian speakers and Afanasievo?
4-Were Bronze Age Britons Protoceltic?
5-Origin of Armenian
6-Origin of Albanian
7-Steppe ancestry reaches Iberia around 2.400 BC and Britain perhaps a little later-Linguistic implications? Guess-THESE EARLY MIGRANTS TO IBERIA DID NOT SPEAK IE
As you will understand Rich's opinion and yours are totally irrelevant because you have no idea about European prehistory, and as you have no arguments you dedicate yourselves to talking nonsense. Maybe now that a prestigious kurganist like Patterson says that these early migrants to Iberia did not speak PIE you will be able to understand our arguments (although I doubt it very much).
The Bell Beakers who moved into Iberia may or may not have spoken IE. People can change languages, especially during migrations.
But these Iberian Bell Beakers ultimately originated from the early Corded Ware population of Central Europe, which must have been IE speaking.
And Celtic in all likeliness developed in a post-Bell Beaker population somewhere in West-Central Europe.
Yeah I guess the official explanation will be that the descendants of R1b-P312 in southern France, north-central Italy and Iberia had to (or decided to) change their language of origin. and that the British spoke another type of IE, or only started speaking IE when Celtic arrived from continental Europe. They no longer talk about the conquest of old Europe by the Yamnaya R1a/R1b and the imposition of IE on the neolithic farmers but that the steppe riders agreed en masse to change their language in western europe. I guess the end of the story is that late Sredni Stog>CWC spoke PIE (>Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Italo-Celtic) and that the rest of IE languages have an absolutely different explanation i.e. Anatolia/Armenia>Greece, Albania, South Italy.... even with different male lineages involved (J1/J2.....)-Patterson has resorted to the Socratic paradox- at least "they only know that they know nothing".
@Davidski
Will those new Magyar samples be available on G25 soon? I've been meaning to make an entry on the Magyar for quite a while but I was waiting until the data came out.
Also any comments on Patterson's latest conference in terms of the PIE debate? I havent watched it myself yet, but I doubt it contains many surprises.
Cheers!
“How and when did Hittite ancestors reach Anatolia?”
Does this mean Harvard isn’t interested in other IndoEuropean languages jn Anatolia ?
@Copper Axe
If the Hungarian genotypes are available then I can run them. Do you have a link?
I wasn't aware of the Patterson presentation until now, and I haven't watched it.
I think the PIE/early IE debate can only move forward here when new samples become available and I can run them.
i had a look at them via G25 mode
e.g. K2per29
Avar 71%
Kra001 10%
RUS_Tyumen_HG 5%
Sarmatian_RUS_Caspian_steppe 14%
SVK_Poprad 0%
Seems like Patterson places the Anatolian - IE split in north Caucasus
But that’s Harvard-style autosomal reductionism
Does he provide any new evidence for a Caucasus homeland?
So far, the only argument I've seen is that Hittite-era Anatolians lack steppe ancestry, although they have plenty of Caucasus-related ancestry.
However, maybe they're genetically Hattians, and only learned to speak Hittite (if they actually spoke it)? So that's not a very persuasive argument IMHO.
And I'm not aware of any persuasive linguistic arguments in favor of a Caucasus homeland either.
A southern population (Caucasus, piedmont ??) moved north (Pontic steppe) and east (Anatolia) around 4,200 BC (although the date for Anatolia is not known) and later (3,000 BC) the CWC moved west. I guess they won't be able to link the steppe male lineages with the IE dispersal into Anatolia so it will be interesting to hear a more detailed explanation. They don't know what happened in Greece and Albania so I guess the IE in that region will have their origin in Anatolia. Regarding the BB culture recognizes origin in Iberia but says (like Olalde) that there were no population movements northwards (i.e. everywhere pots>People, except in Iberia where the pots moved teleported). In my opinion a total mess
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB49971
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222007321
Thanks!
Those are BAM files.
@Gaska said...Thanks StP, we already discussed in this blog that Linderholm´s paper, those cases in southern Poland are from the late CWC therefore they do not provide solutions”
I admire your perseverance, Gaska! However you don't have any earlier L51 ... L151 in Iberia than we have in the prefields of the Carpathians (~ 2500 yBC). You don't have R1a-Z645 in Iberia than we have on the prefields of the Carpathians (Glavanesti; 3300 yBC). You also have no trace of early CWC as we have horizon CWC-X (~ 3000 yBC) on prefields of Carpathians.
My view is that the R1a lineage and the early PIE developed from Pieschanica and Southern Oleni Ostrov through the Upper Dvina to the Middle Dnieper. On the other hand, we can see the late PIE (R1a and R1b) in the prefields of the Carpathians.
@StP-
Ha Ha Ha is not perseverance, it is simply that a Spaniard never gives up if he thinks he is right and is fighting for a just cause. Maybe the Carpathians' prefields are the key and you are right but we have our reasons to think differently (we have L51 in Lechuza cave-Neolithic-2.800 BC and M269-ATP3 3.400 BC)-
You are right about the CWC, because it has absolutely nothing to do with Western Europe. I do not dispute that M417 and that culture spoke PIE/IE what I dispute is that that culture gave origin to the BB culture (if you have read Papac's paper you will understand that they are absolutely different cultures). Even the BBC samples in Poland and Hungary have western origin (Germany and Bohemia).
Remember that years ago 99% of people were convinced that Yamnaya was the origin of R1b-L51 and R1a-M417 and now everything has changed radically. In any case, don't worry if we are ultimately not right we will acknowledge our mistakes
Here's Nick Patterson's lecture:
https://tinyurl.com/bdfrptnt
"The Spread of Indo-European across Eurasia"
"Rob said...
“How and when did Hittite ancestors reach Anatolia?”
Does this mean Harvard isn’t interested in other IndoEuropean languages jn Anatolia ?"
I was also disappointed that Patterson's lecture offered literally zero hints on whether they've made any discoveries on the origins of Luwian, Greek, Armenian, Phrygian or any of the numerous paleo-Balkan IE languages. I hope it's a case of secrecy rather than lack of interest. Lazaridis' upcoming paper supposedly has a ton of samples from Southeastern Europe so hopefully it's the first case.
Thanks Rob! Was this Conqueror Hungarian some kind of an exeption in terms of being so close to Avars?
K2per29
Avar 71%
Kra001 10%
RUS_Tyumen_HG 5%
Sarmatian_RUS_Caspian_steppe 14%
SVK_Poprad 0%
@ copper axe
“I've been meaning to make an entry on the Magyar for quite a While”
Yeah you should take a look. Your posts a usually decent
I’m afraid you’re right. To listen to some people, one would think the Indo-Europeans had little or no effect on Europe west of the steppe, that Europe was still loaded with non-IE languages and peoples. One wonders how Europe came to be overwhelmingly IE in language and culture and how R1b-M269 came to predominate, since it is missing in action from Neolithic European remains. And how did Europeans acquire their steppe DNA, which was also missing from Neolithic Europeans? It couldn’t have been primarily from females, because it’s neither mtDNA nor X-chromosome DNA that shows rapid expansion since the Neolithic.
@ Huck Finn
I only had a quick look with not amazing distances, but Avar seems to be present in most. I had also interjected other sources of NEA ancestry (Khovsgol, Slab Grave, Huno-Sarmats, etc), but Avars keep coming up !, although the Magyars are fairly diverse in terms of what else they have
This guy interesting too:
K2per52
North Caucasus MBA 50%
SVK_Poprad 40%
Avar 10%
When Dave processes them, I'm sure community will play around with G25 and hone in on details
@ Davidski, Alex
As Gaska outlined, the talk suggests a migration from the Piedmont to Dnieper c. 4200 BC to form Sredni Stog, so S.S. is a mix of CHG & Ukraine HGs- Patterson says (which seems to be a departure from Harvards/ Anthony's previous claim that Ukraine HG's became extinct); then Yamnaya is a more mobile form of late S.S.
P. then suggests that he believes that 2,000 years later, there was a migration from the Piedmont central Anatolia, bringing Hittite but admits the data remains scant.
The issue with this, however, relates to the nature of human habitation and cultural sequences in the north Caucasus - as we here by now know it was something of a population sink, always shifting. A couple of specific points
- the Progress-type population was novel to the Piedmont. And despite its apparent 'southern/ CHG' affinity, a major part of them came from the north (? Volga-Don) to obtain Caucasian obsidian
- the Progress type population was then superceded & admixed into Steppe Majkop after 3800 BC. 2000 years later, Progress pops did not exist.
In 2200 bc, we would be looking at Kura-Arax, which is hardly IE. The post-Catacomb movement into Caucasus seems more to do with Armenian or even an Iranian adstrate.
The more sensible option would be to see what's happening in west Anatolia, esp close to the Coast. Like Alex said, if the "Arc" paper has BA data, we will have a better idea
I’m surprised to see someone still citing ATP3 as proof that R1b-M269 was in Iberia in the 4th millennium BC. One would think that if that were true, a much better exemplar would have turned up by now. But it’s not true, which is why no M269 has turned up in Neolithic Iberia. ATP3 is very low coverage. Reich’s anno file has it listed as R1b1a1 (R1b-L389), not as R1b-M269. The coverage is 0.031, and with regard to contamination/damage it is listed as “QUESTIONABLE”.
ATP3 was dismissed quite a few years ago as being too lousy to waste time arguing about. Back when it first appeared most of us agreed that if it really was any kind of indication that M269 was in Iberia as early as the 4th millennium BC, surely more would show up. It hasn’t and that was seven years ago.
@Gaska said: …You are right about the CWC, because it has absolutely nothing to do with Western Europe. I do not dispute that M417 and that culture spoke PIE/IE what I dispute is that that culture gave origin to the BB culture (if you have read Papac's paper you will understand that they are absolutely different cultures).
.
Yes, the Sub-Carpathian CWC did not have a direct impact on the Dutch BBC but did have an indirect effect through the CWC northern branch..
A.Linderholm wrote:
„Te genetic variation of BBC individuals from south-eastern Poland overlaps with the broad variation of BBC individuals from Central Europe (Bohemia, Moravia, Germany, south-western Poland and Hungary) (Fig. S22) which corresponds well with archaeological data.” (the SATEM group?)
.
„…The eight published CWC individuals from the Polish lowland10,11 more closely resemble BBC individuals (Fig. S21). Tis fact is not unexpected if we consider the CWC communities in Polish lowlands as representatives of north-western parts of the CWC world called as the Single-Grave culture (see supplementary information)”.
„Bell Beaker individuals from Pełczyska [Malopolska] mostly favour German, Polish (lowland) and Estonian.” (the KENTUM group?)
Thank you Rob, very interesting. Just by looking also at the original study it seems that Avars are slightly more southern than Conquerors, in Asian terms, so kra001 in your model apparently tries to compensate for that. Otherwise, Conquerors have mixed with people around Ural area, whereas Avars didn't do that, as we know.
The genetic link of the BBC with the archaic Balto-Slavic branch, which is a direct continuation of the PIE state, is indeed best visible in Poland and its vicinity:
RISE567 15025 Czech_Bell_Beaker Knezeves
Distance to: Bell_Beaker_CZE_o
0.03702918 Polish
0.03863979 RUS_Sunghir_MA
0.03914259 Ukrainian
0.04008791 HUN_Avar_Szolad
0.04044683 German_East
@ambron
There's absolutely no link between BBC and Balto-Slavic.
You're using an outlier to force a link.
This sample is an outlier because he's highly unusual.
Thank you! I'm currently just collecting images of artefacts, some romanticist paintings here and there and doing background reading of iron age to early medieval archaeology of the relevant regions of eastern Europe and western Siberia. Some friendly Hungarian academics provided me with some good references to read that I havent delved into yet.
RISE567/I5025/I4136 is a genetic female, while the burial context is male (position and grave goods). No direct date on the sample. So while she could be both a social and a genetic outlier, seems to me a pretty high chance of sample mix-up.
I think BB question is not so simple.
Todate I keep thinking the first makers of the typical pottery (2800 BC?) were rather coastal western Iberic people (« iberic » : gegraphically speaking). They apparently had Neolithical cultural practices and were foreigners to the first Chalcolithic rulers of Iberia, kept at first outside the fortifications. Their pottery appeared later among these fortifications or new strongholds, after some stagnation or decline of former Chalco elites, and under forms limited in number and of prestige style, no more of domestic use, for the most, if I understood well, and with other artefacts (wrist-guards, special arrowheads, special cutlass maybe of diverse origins but pooled by them). Could it be called « second generation BB » ? It could be thought of as a captation by new elites came form somewhere else. I lack helas precise anthropologic metric surveys about the new elites under BB label. SOME of these BB people seem having been very moving by land, rivers, mountains paths and sea. It’s possible they were kind of prospectors send all around, having created a network after some of them returned say towards a possible west-central Europe last « cradle » ?
The physical aspect is intriguing ; this ‘dinaric’ aspect has surely some signification, even if it doesn’t say too much about far origins and can be selected on a small portion of population by crossings after some generations without a complete turnover about autosomals. This type if considered the elites one could have been imitated by cradle practices in some clans. All the way it has been found in almost all « second generation » BB settlements in Europe whatever the proportions, after the possible adoption, and this seems to show that the first more active and moving « BB » core was of this type : like the mean of the Worms Middle Rhine clans. The more northern BB’s, who were the most ‘steppic’, the Netherlands and Britain ones, were physically a mix of these Worms BB and local TRB (of strong ‘borreby’ input) and Coon’s ‘corded’ types, what could prove that the very last BB (« third »?) were not the launchers either of the first pottery styles or of the basis of the European network. We have some few elements which could show that the most evident place of meating for CWC and BB was around Czechia ; even the Desideri’s work on non-metric traits could prove that, except that the ‘mediterranean’ physical trend from southern BB into central Europe with BB was not the fact of the first Y-R1b bearers there but the result of their exogamy in Iberia when they adopted genuine original BB aspects (only someones in fact).
Concerning Y-haplo’s I think (without any firm prove it’s true) that todate the possible cradle place of R1b-L51 could be between curent Baltic lands and northern Ukraina… a place where it could have been in contact with CWC but not by force in direct contact with first PIE speakers, contrary to the brother Z2103. What doesn’t exclude it would have been indo-europeanized early enough a bit later. ATW I think these first L51 developped seriously and gave birth to a lot of downstream SNP’s only in west-central Europe, not in east-central Europe. It nevertheless left some L11 in Northern Europe which doesn’t seem a return of western BB which seemingly never were dense there. P312 increased even more West, among the « second » BB.
Language ? At first I though BB (even the « second » or « third » stage) were not I-E speakers. After the paper about Britain BB, i’m invaded by the doubt. I doubt the iron Age (Hallstatt and La Tène) Celtic people has been able to populate whole western Europe to impose Celtic and cousin languages allover western Europe from southern Iberia to Scotland. If I’m not wrong we have NO important demic moves between BB and IA ; the BA pop’s in West seems a BB ’s continuation or a redistribution on limited scales of circular and contradictory moves before and during Urnfields. Surely Atlantic BA by instance has surely changed games here and there (maybe late introduction of Y-R1b-L21 in northern Spain ?), but a coming of new IE speakers from east-central Europe seem excluded, and I doubt CWC had in ITSELF the power of indo-europeanization of non-IE BB nor the aura to pass its language. To pass a language you need number but number isn’t enough, superior culture and organisation is better. I’m not archeologist but BB as whole seem better interconnected between them than were CWC (here it’s more a guess than personal science).
The Aquitano-Basque and Iberian regions void of IE language and full of Y-R1b-P312 are a problem, I avow. That said, in the El Argar paper we see a ‘steppic’ input later than more in North, and with less ‘steppic’ ; a) I don’t know what language was spoken by the new elites at first apparition (beginning of personal tombs ?), because Iberian seem whatever its precise birthplace, could have taken the strong side only a bit later – b) a new elite with only males intruding in a well developped and established culture can loose it’s language after some generations (look at Franks in France). What is more, Iberian is now considered by some linguists as a mixed heterogenous language which imposed itself only late enough on its bigger extention as a lingua franca ; They base themselves on the hydronyms of the most of the Iberian language territory which are I-Ean. The fact it could show ties at the same time with Aquitano-Basque and Etruscan, if proved, come as a confirmation of this statute of commercial ligua franca (almost a pidgin ?).
Someone here said that Corded Ware has nothing to do with Western Europe. Of course, that is self evidently not true, since Corded Ware people inhabited western Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland; but let’s attribute good faith to that person and assume that by “Western Europe” he meant everywhere else in Western Europe. After all, this thread is about a mistake in European geography.
Papac et al (2021) has come up a time or two, since it revealed that the oldest Corded Ware Y-DNA yet discovered was R1b-L51, which of course is the most common Y-DNA haplogroup in Western Europe. Anyway, Papac et al’s Introduction begins as follows: “Archaeogenetics has revealed two major population turnovers in Europe within the past 10,000 years (1-5). The first, beginning in the seventh millennium BCE, was associated with expanding Neolithic farming communities from Anatolia . . . The second major turnover occurred in the early third millennium BCE with individuals of the Corded Ware (CW) culture . . . The CW represents a major cultural shift in central, northern, and northeastern Europe, bringing changes in economy, ideology, and mortuary practices (14-22). CW individuals were shown to be genetically distinct from culturally pre-CW people, having ~75% of their ancestry similar to Yamnaya individuals from the Pontic-Caspian steppe (3, 4, 23-27). This Yamnaya-like “steppe” ancestry then spread rapidly throughout Europe, reaching Britain, Ireland, the Iberian Peninsula, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and Sicily before the end of the third millennium BCE (5, 28-32).”
Anyone who has read David Reich’s book, Who We Are and How We Got Here, knows that it says the same thing in greater detail, and that it shows that the expansion of steppe DNA was male mediated. A number of scientific papers (e.g., Delser et al; Batini et al) also show that the expansion of steppe DNA had to be male mediated, since neither mtDNA nor X-chromosome DNA show a rapid expansion that corresponds with the third millennium BC and the Early Bronze Age, but a limited number of Y-DNA haplogroups do, especially R1b-M269.
Yet some here seem to be asserting that that second European population turnover never happened, or if it did, it was either female mediated or Y-DNA R1b-M269 had little or nothing to do with it. Or perhaps only R1b-Z2103 was involved, despite the fact that Z2103 is of little numerical consequence in Central and Western Europe and hasn’t turned up in ancient Corded Ware remains (pardon me if I’ve missed one or two).
Anyway, it’s baffling to me that the massive preponderance of the ancient DNA and modern DNA evidence, along with the self-evident force of European archaeology, history, and linguistics, amount to the ridiculous term, “Kurganist propaganda”.
@ Moesan
''Todate I keep thinking the first makers of the typical pottery (2800 BC?) were rather coastal western Iberic people (« iberic » : gegraphically speaking). They apparently had Neolithical cultural practices and were foreigners to the first Chalcolithic rulers of Iberia, kept at first outside the fortifications. Their pottery appeared later among these fortifications or new strongholds, after some stagnation or decline of former Chalco elites''
I havent come across any convincing evidence for BB artefacts in Iberia as early as 2800 BCE, although that figure is passed from paper to paper, esp. in older literature. The figures for Leceia Hut - a key site in the Tagus- has been revised down to 2600 BC. Even that is skeptical, because no other sites in Portugal are that early. In fact, if you move down toward Algarve, the datings are all after 2400 BC. So somethign is clearly >odd< about date from Leceia hut.
What's more, is the insistance by various scholars that BB originated in Iberia based on one, potentially problematic, site date seems forced & dogmatic. Even if 2600 BC is correct, that's still 150-200 years after CWC arrived in Switzerland or the lower Rhine. Hence it needs to be contextualised against a wider backdrop.
But the key thing is as you mentioned - these look like new groups arriving at a time when the great Chalcolithic civilizations of the southwest were declining. I wouldnt make too much of the pastoral- agricultural dichotomy: as BB had agricultural scope (e.g. refer to the Swizz Lake sites). So who were these 'new people' moving arond western Europe c. 2600 BC ? I think the answer is fairly obvous by now
ambron
You know the Yersinia pestis branch found in Corded Ware samples from Papac et al--- Czech- Vlineves (VLI092 (2882-2669 BC) xP312, xU106) and Großstorkwitz GRS004, are younger in phylogeny and date, than RK1001.
Well put Rob. I can't believe one site in Portugal dominated discussion bell beaker for years. I can't wait to make a video on bell beaker.
Bell Beakers did not originate from Iberia, this is dated information based on the frequency of pottery found. Late Bell Beaker is heterogeneous but early bell beaker was not and spread through essentially Bronze Age colonialism. Genetically the origin point is likely to have been homogeneous steppe rich Rhine Beakers who conquered South and either exterminated (Britain) or absorbed (South Europe) the local Neolithic Farmer populations. Its becoming pretty clear that the Bell Beaker expansion was the West European equivalent of the Aryan conquest of India.
Regarding the origin of the BB culture, I recommend these papers (all of them coincide in dating BB pottery in western Iberia 2,800-2,750 BC). There is nothing more to say.
*Campaniforme:chronology, pottery, and contexts of a long term phenomenon in the Portuguese Douro Basin-Maria de Jesus Sanches and Maria Helena Barbosa
*Absolute chronology of the Beaker phenomenon North of the Tagus estuary: demographic and social implications-Joao Cardoso
*El Campaniforme en Portugal-Michael Kunst
*Datación por técnicas luminiscentes de la tumba 3 y el conjunto Campaniforme de la Pijotilla (Badajoz, España)-Carlos Odriozola
*Campaniforme y Territorio en la cuenca Media del Guadiana-Daniel Garcia Rivero
Rob, Regarding the pre-BB package I recommend you this paper (I could send you some dozens but it would be very boring). “Materiales de la Edad del Bronce hallados en Muñogalindo (Avila)-Mª Socorro López Plaza”, you will see wristguards found in pre-BB levels-3.000 BC (the same can be said for the rest of the BB package).
@Moesan-
It is evident that you are the only one of those who have written who knows some keys to the BB culture (it is a pity that Rob is not able to write in an unbiased way because he could also contribute interesting data).
1-It is true that the BB pottery (at least in the large Chalcolithic settlements) seems to be a matter of the ruling elites. It is not surprising because the BB culture was a thalassocracy that dominated the trade routes of the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast. We have hundreds of skeletons to analyze in Los Millares, Zambujal, La Pijotilla, San Blas etc etc to be able to confirm the genetic origin of these people, although the results of El Argar where we expected to find DF27 in the elite and the rest of lineages in lower social classes have been strange because all the social classes belong overwhelmingly to this lineage without finding other markers.
2-Regarding anthropology, brachycephaly appears sporadically in the Alps and Pyrenees since the Neolithic, but in the first sites of the BB culture with Ciempozuelos style (as you know exclusive of Iberia) R1b-P312 are clearly brachycephalic (like the cases found in Sicily and Occitania). It is not a question of strange habits but a physical trait that by the way has absolutely nothing to do with the CWC nor with the steppes. It is amusing to think how the dolichocephalic steppe riders became brachycephalic beakers by magic.
3-The Iberian migrations related to the BB culture have already been genetically confirmed although the naysayers still do not recognize it. They reached North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Liguria, Occitania, and even the eastern domain. And they were both female and male (see Z195 in Sicily).
4-Regarding the language issue of course we have population movements in iberia from the BB culture to the Iron Age. The urnfield culture crossed the Pyrenees through the eastern passes and settled in the Ebro valley and in the eastern region of the Castilian plateau. Spanish archaeologists have demonstrated the cultural continuity with the Celtiberians who resisted the Romans (Numantia etc). I seem to remember that you speak Spanish.
Campos de urnas en la meseta oriental, nuevos datos sobre un viejo tema-Mª Luisa Cerdeño-“The necropolis has provided three successive phases of use that demonstrate a prolonged use over almost a millennium, a rather exceptional fact in the panorama of funerary finds”
5-The lingua franca issue has been debated by Spanish linguists for decades. Nobody thinks that way anymore (we have thousands of inscriptions in Iberian and not only commercial ones). Besides, a lingua franca never imposes itself on local languages (look at what is happening with English nowadays, nobody stops speaking their mother tongue even if they use English for business). The lingua franca hypothesis is undermined, however, by the conclusion reached by Heggarty (2017, 163), in another context: trade and lingue franche, like religions and sacred languages, in fact tend to be rather poor drivers of first language expansions, replacing other languages
6-Regarding the origin of L51 I am not a fortune teller either, I was simply correct in denying its origin in Yamnaya. The Baltic-Northern Ukraine solution is certainly a possibility, but there are others (Balkans, Central Europe), we will see what happens.
RISE567 is a outlier from the BBC, but not from place and time, because we see similar individuals in the Polish CWC and Czech proto-Unetice.
"Agelmund said...
Its becoming pretty clear that the Bell Beaker expansion was the West European equivalent of the Aryan conquest of India."
Bad analogy. Nothing cultural or linguistic survived out of the Bell Beaker "conquest", as opposed to India which still has the original Hindu religion and people speak languages derived from the language of the Indo-Aryans. Large parts of Iberia and France only speak IE languages today because of the Roman Empire. The English, Brythonic and Celtic languages came later and have nothing to do with Beakers. There's no surviving epic of the Beakers, as opposed to India (or Greece or Scandinavia). And from all the evidence we have, the Northwest European farmers were in steep decline (in terms of population, production, health, etc) before the Beakers even came, totally incomparable to the great Harappan civilisations.
@ alex
Really jaw dropping comments those...
It seems likely to me that most BB people spoke IE dialects close enough to very early Celtic that when early Celtic came along, it was easy to adopt, kind of in the same way in which Semitic speakers in the Near East were easily able to adopt Aramaic starting in the 6th century BC.
A number of very respectable scholars over the years have asserted that BB people in Britain and elsewhere spoke an early form of Celtic. I can’t say whether or not they were or are right, but I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.
@Rob said... "I haven’t come across any convincing evidence for BB artefacts in Iberia as early as 2800 BCE...
You are right to be skeptical. Corded Ware was already in Alsace when the earliest uncontested All-Over-Corded Bell Beaker flexed single-grave burial shows up there. The female sample is dated to 2832–2476 calBC (4047±29 BP, MAMS-25935). Considering that the All-Over-Corded Bell Beaker is nothing more than a Dutch style Corded Ware beaker with the cord decorations taken all the way to the base, it is easy to see that the Rhine was the first contact point for this practice and spread west from there. The skeleton lacked steppe ancestry, but there is no denying that the genetics of France from that point forward contained steppe ancestry. She may have literally been the first generation to make contact with steppe people and likely married into an R-L151 male dominated Corded Ware clan. Here is the paper:
https://www.academia.edu/7324909/50_Une_nouvelle_s%C3%A9pulture_campaniforme_%C3%A0_H%C3%A9genheim_Alsace_Bell_Beaker_grave_in_southern_Alsace
@Samuel - "But we don't know if Urnfield is derived from Unetice or represents a resurgence of Bell Beaker."
Sorry for the slow reply. My guess is that Urnfield is derived from Unetice which is derived from Corded Ware. But I acknowledge it's a guess. The timeline makes sense though.
I think if Bell Beakers left behind a living language IE it would be a MUCH more divergent representative of IE like Hittite or Tocharian.
I'm definitely not denying that Bell Beaker Folk made it to Italy and Gaul first though. They did, and they brought with them a tonne of steppe ancestry, which they passed down to the modern populations of these areas today.
Hey could Ostuni1 be put into G25?
Someone needs to explain why Celtic Britain had 90% R1b L21.
Are we to say no Celtic males migrated to Britain? It is weird.
The R1b of Celts in Bohemia is basically all R1b U152.
They don't have common paternal ancestry with Celts in Britain.
Once again, does mean males didn't play a role in the spread of Celtic languages? Is there no common ancestry between Celts in Britain and Bohemia?
What has been clear for a long time, is the R1b P312 clades in Europe today are a continuation of the clades first brought by Bell Beaker.
R1b Df27 in Spain, R1b L21 in British isles, R1b U152 in Italy.
Where is the common Celtic R1b clade?
What is interesting is France has a near even mixture of R1b Df27 and R1b U152 and also a decent amount of R1b L21. At somepoint multiple R1b tribes mixed there. This could be a marker of the spread of Celtic U152 into France. But it isn't convincing.
@Ryan,
Well, I mean Corded Ware derived languages, like Slavic & Iranian, aren't basal in the same way Hittite is.
Bell Beaker is Corded Ware derived. So its IE language wouldn't have been a weird basal branch.
But we don't have to guess what a Bell Beaker IE language would be like, because Italic languages come from Bell Beaker.
I'm guessing that a lot of Celtic migrants to Britain belonged to L21.
So to track their migrations we have to go beyond L21, and also look at a variety of minor lineages within other Y-haps that may have arrived with the Celts.
@Norfern-Ostrobothnian
OK, look for ITA_Ostuni1_HG.
@Davidski,
I suspect the same thing.
But where is the common ancestry between Celts in Bohemia and Celts in Britain? There had to be a common proto-Celtic population therefore there should be significant shared Y DNA between Celts across Europe.
Since there isn't much shared Y DNA, this must mean Celtic migrations in the end had little genetic impact.
Which samples from Bohemia are you counting as Celtic?
The ones labelled as La Tene and Hallstatt.
I misspoke a bit on their R1b.
U152=8
L21=4
Df27=1
DF19=1
U106=1
Z2103=1
Maybe Celts introduced L21 & DF27 to Bohemia because many Beaker, Unetice, middle Bronze age R1bs are all U152.
It would be confusing as hell as proto-Celts had a mixture of L21, Df27, U152.
77% of Iron age Britain is L21. btw. Not 90%. I misspoke.
Hi Davidski, I want to inform you that in the newly updated Global25 spreadsheet, there are 63 samples that repeat twice. They are as follows:
A1801
A1802
A1804
A1805
A1806
A1807
A1809
A1810
A1811
A1812
A1813
A1814
A1815
A1816
A1817
A1818
A1819
A1821
A1822
A1823
A1824
A1825
A181013
A181014
A181015
A181016
A181017
A181018
A181019
A181020
A181021
A181022
A181023
A181024
A181025
A181026
A181027
A181028
A181029
I16741
I16743
I16744
I16750
I16751
I16752
I16753
I16759
I16812
I18174
I18184
I18185
I18222
I18223
I18224
I18225
I18742
I18743
I18744
I20798
I20799
I20800
I20801
I20802
Interesting that Irish Myths mention indirectly why and how Neolithic Burial Sights were re-used like what can be seen Archaeologicaly when Bell Beaker people arrived....
@John Smith
Have a look now.
@All
The Medieval Erfurt Jews are now in the G25.
Look for DEU_MA_Erfurt1, 2 and 3.
@Ric, yeah the myth of Newgrange "Hill of Sin" coinciding with the genetics of the man who was found there is some evidence that certain things were remembered all the way from the Neolithic down to Middle Irish. Therefore it seems doubtful that all the Beaker myths and stories were lost...
I also think it's quite likely that, even if Celtic replaced most of the dialects and languages of Western Europe in Iron Age, they had some strong areal influence on proto-Celtic.
@ Matt
Indeed.
I doubt the allover roughly Celtic-Italic-like languages spoken in Spain, Portugal, France, Southern Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and The Great Isles came there only at Iron Age. And I don't see which culture could have brought these languages there, and the IE hydronyms, if not the BB's? It seems that the possible languages shifts (> non-IE) occurred at the margins in some specific cases (East Iberia, Basques-Aquitaine, Etruscan-Rhaetian non-IE...) which could be explained by specific conditions.
Celtic and Italic were not fallen from the skye. THey are the lucky descendants of dialects spoken around which were part of these big family of western IE languages.
Thank you Davidski for always keeping everything up to date. Could you please add the samples from this paper as well?
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.13.483276v1
Could Ust-Ishim like people be the ancestors of Yana RHS/Malta/AG2/AG3 instead of Tianyuan-BachoKiro-Oase2?
Hey, sorry to sound like a knucklehead, but what paper are those stats from? I apologize, but I’ve been out of the loop for awhile. My wife nearly died from Covid and was in the hospital for five months, two and a half of them in ICU on a ventilator.
@John Smith
Do you have a link to the genotype data?
Further re: NW Europe
''And from all the evidence we have, the Northwest European farmers were in steep decline (in terms of population, production, health, etc) before the Beakers even came,''
An important aspect about pre-Beaker groups is not simply boom & busts but shifts in where they lived. For ex; there is ample evidence that populations in western Europe had foccussed around southern/ western Iberian 'mega-sites' after 3000 BC, but this point is rarely explicitly highlighted. Quite literally, this would have left large tracts of northern Iberia & SW France more sparsely populated. In the Isles, Orkney had already become the new power player c. 3000 BC, so the continuation of pre-Beaker lineages there is not simply a fluke of 'refuge'. They appear to have been mobile groups, even Stonehenge features Grooved'ware pottery of Orkney origin or inspiration. So we see two major systems competing in Britain - the Orkney and Beaker. Naturally Beaker became predominant because it had a massive population pool across mainland Europe + more advanced economy, whilst Orkney had become isolated. But even 5-10% survivcal of the former is still fairly huge in absolute terms. I think this helps contextualise the observed 'turnovers'
When you move to analysing regions with population continuity since Bronze Age, e.g. Ireland, and how to explain langauge emergence, then we need to look at extra-genetic evidence, such as the fluctuations in population size, changes in mode of living (centralised/ decentralised, and how they connected with other parts of Europe - incl SE britain & continent).
following on from Rob's comment, @alex: "the Northwest European farmers were in steep decline (in terms of population, production, health, etc) before the Beakers even came, totally incomparable to the great Harappan civilisations."
Isn't that in fact *exactly* comparable though? The Harappan civilization was in steep decline (and as Rob says, also the comparable spatial reorganisation and abandoning certain settlements) before what we'd believe to be the major migration of Indo-Aryan speakers?
It's not just the case that Indo-European groups from steppe zone only ever had impacts through history on regions in decline, but it does seem to be a pattern where you've got a good size population in these steppe zones when agricultural zones are in an overexhausted phase, and then that allows a migration to have more impact. (Even though there are differences - the population of the Harappan sphere obviously far larger even in decline relative to the LBA Bronze Age steppe than late Neolithic areas of Europe where Corded Ware expanded were compared to the steppe. So more admixture and less replacement).
@All
I'm taking a close look at the Asian admix in those Erfurt Jews.
Hopefully I'll have something useful to say about that in a new blog post next week.
Best await Davidski's take of course but I did some quick stuff of my own to look at the Erfurt samples.
Basically just used a PCA+regression technique to extrapolate the cline from Erfurt1/Romaniote_Jew -> Erfurt3 -> Erfurt2.
So this is where my extrapolations sit on Vahaduo PCAs: https://imgur.com/a/iNqxmzP
And this is the population averages they're closest to, not including the Erfurt samples themselves: https://imgur.com/a/axx9osV
(Base_for_Admix in the last of above is basically the sort of base that my model assumes provides the cline draws from. It's closest to Sephardic/Italian_Jew, not including the Erfurt samples themselves).
Pastebin for G25 coordinates: https://pastebin.com/Ka5EmKcc
The extrapolations look like they sit somewhere in Northeast Europe, largely, but with some distance to any single population average in my set. This may possibly just be an acceleration of population specific drift picked up in G25 though, or random error in extrapolation, I'm not sure.
Davidski said...
“Celtic and Italic languages didn't spread with the Bell Beaker culture. They originated within very specific subsets of the post-Bell Beaker world.”
There’s a gap between THE Proto-IE language and all the daughter IE languages.
Steppes ancestry spread so quickly across Europe. Amazingly it was already in Iberia by 2700 BCE
So when did people who spoke PIE stop speaking PIE? Maybe say Corded Ware was speaking PIE at 3000 BCE. 500 years later, is anyone still speaking the PIE language? If the PIE language was already turning into different languages, then there was already separate paths.
There should be a straight line from PIE to Iron Age Celtic. So, somebody is speaking the ancestor language of Celtic for what? 2000 years? Did those “pre-Celtic” speakers hide for 2000 years? Or are there already a lot of pre-Celtic speakers in 2500 BCE.
Some linguists work very hard to show that Greek, for example, is like just a few hundred years from PIE. That feels wrong. Especially if steppes ancestry spread almost 2000 years before Mycenaean Greek was spoken.
If Corded Ware and Bell Beaker spread IE languages throughout Europe, it was a done deal by 2500 BCE. Somebody was already speaking pre-Celtic. Otherwise Celtic would not exist.
BTW Slavic is really the mystery IE language family. Where was pre-Slavic spoken for an unattested 2500-3000 years before it broke out and covered half of Europe? That is a much tougher question.
Keep in mind that there used to be many more Indo-European languages and even language groups than what we have left today.
So it's likely that Western and/or Central Europe was full of Celtic-related languages for hundreds of years before Celtic appeared.
I don't think anyone will ever work out all of the details, but I don't think many linguists would push the birth of Celtic beyond the Bronze Age, simply because of how fast languages are generally known to evolve.
@LivoniaG,
I like your post. I have had similar thoughts.
Yeah would be different models between Slavic and Celtic. for example Slavic was often expanding into empty lands, although some of our friends deny that fact
Empty in a literal sense is hard to prove, though pretty low population density lands should be an easier hurdle and seems plausible enough.
If a model of Slavic expansion from a central point, perhaps slightly east of the Vistula, to the west and east, turns out to be the accurate model*, then I'd expect the main lands of low population density to be to the east of that central point, more inhabited by low density pastoralists and hunters (Balts?, Uralic?), who were absorbed in more small number by Slavic farmer expansion. The lands to the west of that point would be more densely populated still, and when we find early Slavic people they should be relatively admixed, which seems tentatively true in the case of the post 700AD samples we have from Czech Republic and Serbia/Balkans?
*I don't really have a strong archaeological case for this, it just seems likely with the core of Slavic autosome sitting more or less where you'd expect on a genetic cline from Lithuania-Latvia to LBA Hungary, and with no Central Asian admixtures that I'd tend to expect as likely if we were going too close to the border of Belarus-central Ukraine.
Btw, not ancient dna but this paper may be of interest to some - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2119281119 - "Revealing the recent demographic history of Europe via haplotype sharing in the UK Biobank"
Mostly it's not new information, but it's interesting to see how through a large enough sample of a modern day large country (UK), even sampling people who are largely born over 60 years ago, a sample can be extracted of much of European diversity and fine scale relationships and population history (size over time).
(One difference from the Human Origins panel is that lots more of the sample of people born in Turkey here sit in a space between Greek/Balkans and Turkey, and also a few more of their Bulgarians and Greeks sit in this space too. Maybe this is because people with this kind of history - cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire? - are disproportionately likely to have migrated to the UK back 40 years ago or more. These people would've been more missing from a sample scheme looking to capture the country people in most nations?)
@ Matt
The most depopulated regions were northern East-Central Europe (esp Pomorania, the lower Oder, trans-Elbe, much of Greater Poland) and the Balkans. The obvious explanationfor the first is the well documented out-migration of 'Germanic" groups, and for the Balkans the decline of Roman provincial infrastructure and attrition of its populace during plagues, Gothic wars, earthquakes, etc.
Quite the contrary, the East Euro boreal zone was well populated by agricultural populations, and likely a major source of proto-Slavic gene pool as far as the middle Dnieper region is concerned.
Matt, regarding the Slavic homeland, you see exactly what should be clear to anyone who knows anything about genetics. The biological Slavic homeland no could have been elsewhere, like only somewhere on the northern slopes of the Carpathians.
Rob, I understand that you are talking about the proto-Slavic gene pool of the Middle Dnieper in the understanding of Kusznierewicz and Balanowski, that is, from before the arrival of the Slavs on the Dnieper in the Middle Ages...
@ambron, appreciate your view, I in my more cautious view of things wouldn't go quite that far (that nowhere else is possible), as the genetics are so uncharacterised (possibly there was this somehow this same sort of cline going further east and just some barrier that kept the Siberian/Iranic genepool separate). Just my best guess on the grounds of probability at the moment. Hopefully we will get the dna, some non-cremations, to start to solve these questions and put the different views of it all to the test. (On another point, that there is a subset of Hungarian La Tene females, albeit very small, that can autosomally generally model fairly well many Slavic populations seems to suggest to me that they would not have had to come from very far away, although it is possible that they did.)
@ Ambron
I’m not sure who K & B are. The dna evidence was clear 25 years ago when YDNA studies documented sharp boundaries between Germany (I1, U106, etc) and Slavic countries (I2a1, R1a,). This can only be the result of the large demographic sweep
Funnily enough, the archaeological evidence has also been clear for decades and only reconfirmed more modern excavations.
large tracks of land north of the Sudetens bear almost no archaeological habitation for 50 to 100 years (apart from an apparent episodic visitation by Scandinavians from the north ) with massive reforestation
Okay, I have now done OrienteC as well: https://www.mediafire.com/file/ftt43nhlmlh2e95/I2158.zip/file
Dave- which Ostuni did you use for above ? The original version was only 0.004x (or something like that)
I think it was Ostuni1 from the files at the Reich Lab.
I just ran it, without checking anything though.
@Rob wrote: "The obvious explanation... is the well documented out-migration of 'Germanic" groups and for the Balkans the decline of Roman provincial infrastructure and attrition of its populace during plagues, Gothic wars, earthquakes.."
But once again we're talking about spoken languages. Slavic language hardly attested and barely mentioned 1500 years ago now has about 400 million speakers. Think about that.
How many Slavic speakers in the whole world were there back in 100 BCE? That's a lot of fast breeding or a lot of fast learning Slavic speech
Also with all the talk of "Germanic migrations," where did exactly the Germanic speach "spread" in the end? It looks like it spread right back where it cane from. It's not like the whole south of Europe speaks Post Roman invasion Germanic.
Go back to pre-Celtic and it's the same question. What were they doing for 2000 years while waiting for the iron age to show up? Maybe they were talking to Beaker types?
@LivoniaG
Like I already said, you need to consider some important background factors, like mass language extinctions and replacements, as well as the fact that no one was writing in the cousin and predecessor languages of Slavic and Germanic, or even in Slavic or Germanic until quite recently.
So yeah, without any records being kept, it was actually quite easy for languages to have been "hiding" in the vastness of Eastern and Northern Europe until the major expansions of their speakers, and their fairly recent contacts with societies that could read and write.
Barely a million people inhabited Russia at the turn of common Era. Would be interesting to see how many of these were Baltic-Slavic-Iranian.
Eastern Europe was sparsely populated even in 2000bce ;)
Iranians dwelt on the steppe and forest steppe in Eastern Europe.
Balts and Slavs lived in the forests well to the north of the steppe.
So there weren't many contacts between them after Proto-Balto-Slavic split from Proto-Indo-Iranian.
Rig Veda 6.61.12
Seven-sistered, sprung from threefold source, the Five Tribes' prosper, she must be Invoked in every deed of might.
Would be interesting to see what the composer actually wants to convey. Does he mean 5 tribes live together and belong to same ethnic-linguistic affiliation or they are spread across the seven rivers of North West India-Pakistan.
Post 2000bce we have mature Urban Harappan civilization breaking into 5 local cultures;
Gandharva Grave culture (Swat)
Cemetery H culture (Punjab)
OCP culture (Ganga Yamuna Doab)
Jukhar culture (Sindh)
Rangpur culture (Gujarat)
@ LivoniaG
~ 140 million of those speakers are from Russia, where Slavic is a lingua franca. Even at the outset in Russia, there were language-shifting Baltic & Finnics.
In 100 BC, some form of pre-proto-Slavic would have been spooen in Belarus, north Ukraine
Germanic - we know there were Germanic speakrs all around southern Europe. They were in the Balkans, they were in Italy and Iberia. The Gothic people probably numbered 100-200,000. A sizable army, but not exactly a big population. In the Balkans, they packed up & left to go to Italy & iberia. There they eventually died off because they did all the fighting against Byzantines, Moors and other Germanics. The local Italians didn't partake. for ex.
As we said, Celtic is different matter to Slavic expansion, different model of language expansion.
also, there were progroms against Gothic families in Italy & Greece
Adding to the previous post:
Gandharva Grave Culture has BMAC heavy steppe ancestry
Cemetery H culture has cremation going on
OCP has copper hoards, weapons, proto-chariot, royal burial
All these are linked to Indo-Aryans
Rangpur & Jhukar cultures I am not aware of. Doesn't seem to show any Indo-Aryan feature.
Also if BMAC is not originally indo-Aryan or Indo-Iranian, ain't it interesting what this Fire-soma cult called their religious concepts in a non IE language ;)
@ Assuwatama
What is so unusual about cultural borrowings from preceding civilizations ?
I am just a layperson but do you really think that a current Hindi word 'Manish' has survived completely unaltered right from proto-Indo-Aryan times? Did Akkadians even have contact with Indo Europeans to begin with?
This is a curious case of cultural continuity accompanied by claims of complete language replacement.
Let's be honest Fire-soma cult in BMAC were most likely chanting Fire based Mantras to appease Fire deity.
How likely they decided to one day replace their supposedly non IE mantras for Fire deity to an Indo-Aryan Vedic one.
I am really interested in understanding the transition of Indo-Aryan speaking BMAC heavy people into Iranian languages.
What caused this shift?
I went through your previous blog and from there this is what I gathered:
Alalakh lady who you consider an early Mitanni has ~90% of her ancestry from eastern Iran+BMAC.
Early Medes have ~40% ancestry from BMAC+steppe remaining is from Kura-araxes and Levant.
If BMAC was indeed Indo-Aryan 1500bce then what caused Indo-Aryan languages to transition into Iranian languages West and North of Indus?
(Was it incorporation of non-Aryan Semitic & East asian people into the Aryan clans)
I may be wrong here but doesn't seem like Proto-Indo-Iranian broke into Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Nuristani.
Viktor Sarianidi was right about connections between Gonor & swat valley :)
The indo-Iranian problem in the light of the latest excavations in Margiana has interesting pointers
Rudradāman (indo-scythian/saka) fought many battles against the Sātavāhanas (or the Āndhras) and Vashishtiputra Satakarni, the son of the Āndhra king Pulamayi, in an effort to end the hostilities, married the daughter of Rudradāman.
And that's how scythian steppe ancestry made its way into the Deccan ;)
@LivoniaG said: If Corded Ware and Bell Beaker spread IE languages throughout Europe, it was a done deal by 2500 BCE. Somebody was already speaking pre-Celtic. Otherwise Celtic would not exist.
BTW Slavic is really the mystery IE language family. Where was pre-Slavic spoken for an unattested 2500-3000 years before it broke out and covered half of Europe? That is a much tougher question.
…
Where was pre-Slavic spoken for an unattested 2500-3000 years before it broke out and covered half of Europe?
Simple answer: The Slavs lived there, where the Balto-Slavs lived: first as one family, then two families next to each other.
Here is e.g. the number+normalized number of common IBD ancestors, on average in one pair of residents. Our closest relatives in Europe:
1) POLAND and Latwia 39,11; Poland 39,08; Belarusia 38,29; Lithuania 37,44; Ukraine 35,88; Estonia 34,40; Mordva 32,50; Cossakia 30,18 (compare: and Germany 17,44, and Russia?).
2) LATVIA and Latvia 59,81; Lithuania 51,66; Estonia 49,51; Poland 41,07; Ukraine 38,96; Belarusia 37,54; Mordva 36.07; Russia 34,59 (compare: and Germany 14,24)
3) LITHUANIA and Lithuania 58,96; Estonia 44,38; Latvia 41,01; Belarusia 38,74; Ukraine 37,52; Poland 35,84; Russia 32,10; Vepsja 30,20 (compare: and Germany 16,22)
(Based on the tables by G. Khvorykh 2020)
Is BMAC believed to have spoken an Indo-Aryan language? Didn't Proto-IndoIranian has loanwords(sorry I don't know the right word) believed to be from the BMAC language.
Rob, I hope you're kidding that you don't know the authors of the greatest study of Slavic genetics.
The genetic border between Germans and Slavs is only in Y-DNA, while in mtDNA and auDNA there is a continuum.
The areas north of the Sudetes were relatively densely populated at the turn of antiquity and the Middle Ages, as is the result of palynological research (Izdebski). The cultural continuity between the Przeworsk culture and the Prague culture is also the most visible in these areas - Sukow-Dziedzice culture.
David, Waldemar wrote at AG today:
“Ok, I know from an "anonymous informant" ( ) that Poznan team will claim that local Przeworsk culture population was genetically Balto-Slavic (or even Slavic-like) and direct ancestors of the Poles.”
https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?p=855271#post855271
We know this relation:
Mierzanowice –> Trzciniec –> Lusatian –> Pomeranian –> Przeworsk
Przeworsk was proto-Polish
Pomeranian was proto-Lechitic
Lusatian was proto-West-Slavic
Trzciniec was Slavic
Mierzanowice was proto-Slavic
What interests me a lot is the link between Slavic, Vedic and Orphic religions. It probably came from Trzciniec. Sintashta didn’t cremate, Mierzanowice didn’t cremate. It started in Trzciniec and then spread to Sintashta/Andronovo and India, and to the Balkans and Greece.
My hunch is that protoIranians formed ~ Begazy-Dandybai culture , close to Amirabad communities. Their BMAC related admixture ~20%
@Norfern-Ostrobothnian
Scaled
ITA_OrienteC:I2158,0.120652,0.112724,0.188937,0.200907,0.162184,0.059404,0.021621,0.03646,0.099603,0.03426,-0.020461,-0.016485,0.015758,-0.012386,0.058903,0.065234,-0.006128,-0.00038,-0.002765,0.067282,0.122284,0.008903,-0.052134,-0.176651,0.029458
Raw
ITA_OrienteC:I2158,0.0106,0.0111,0.0501,0.0622,0.0527,0.0213,0.0092,0.0158,0.0487,0.0188,-0.0126,-0.011,0.0106,-0.009,0.0434,0.0492,-0.0047,-0.0003,-0.0022,0.0538,0.098,0.0072,-0.0423,-0.1466,0.0246
@ Ambron
There's little point in discussing with you. The palynological evidence does not claim anything of the sort you suggest. You're merely confabulating one paper which showed "some evidence" of human activity in one site at Greater Poland c. 300 AD into '6 million people lived in Poland' during the Migration times. The evidence has been clear for decades, and neither some dubious claims of 'skull shape continuity' nor some Czech archaeologists wishy-washy reference based on mtDNA can cange the glaring dynamism in the anthropological & archaeological record.
And no, that the Slavs arguably originated in the middle-upper Dnieper region wasn't formualated by this 'most best-est' genetics study you claim, but has been around since the 20th century.
Or maybe it was like this:
Przeworsk was proto-Polish
Pomeranian was proto-Lechitic
Lusatian was proto-West-Slavic
Trzciniec was proto-North-Slavic
Nitra was proto-South-Slavic
Mierzanowice was proto-Slavic
I have absolutely zero faith in these sorts of leaks, and even very little faith in the conclusions of peer reviewed papers of this kind.
We'll know what the real story is when the BAM files and genotypes are released, so we can check the Y-chromosome lineages and test for Slavic-specific drift.
@CaroPrasd
Nobody knows what BMAC spoke. Archaeologically BMAC does appear to have Indo-Aryan/Indo-Iranian ritual stuff going on from ~2100bce.
Victor also confirm the architectural similarities between Mitanni Mesopotamia and BMAC. BMAC ancestry is also detected around Mitanni territories
The question can also be pointed the other way: What influence did the migrating Andronovians had on the languages of BMAC? Did they spoke ancestral languages to Balto-Slavics or some language close to it?
Sintashta–Petrovka culture > Andronovo steppe people were R1a-Z93 < R-Z2124. If there was a large scale ingress by these men then we will find their lineages in India. As of now there is no evidence of it.
Are you sure about that?
Trzciniec culture is dated 1600bce-1200bce. Cremation in India is dated from 2000bce if not earlier.
Medes ~11thc BCE
Scythians ~ 10thc BCE
Persians ~ 8thc BCE
Medes appear a few centuries after the fall of Mitanni in the same region.
Ashokan Prakrit (Delhi)
~250bce
devānaṁpiye piyadasi lājā hevaṁ āhā ye atikaṁtaṁ
aṁtalaṁ lājāne husa hevaṁ ichisu kathaṁ jane
dhaṁmavaḍhiyā vāḍheya nocujane anulupāyā dhaṁmavaḍhiyā
vaḍhithā etaṁ devānaṁpiye piyadasi lājā hevaṁ āhā esame
huthā atākaṁtaṁ ca aṁtalaṁ hevaṁ ichisu lājāne katha jane
Its kinda interesting that "R" is missing from Raja/Rajane as well as Priyadasi ;)
Makes hell lot of sense.
2000-1500bce Arya people of BMAC considered "Dasyus" as hostile people. These Dasyus occupied the north-eastern territories of caspien sea.
In the territories of BMAC in that time frame we have 2 distinct groups. One is native BMAC population while the other group is incoming steppe Sintastha Andronovo people.
"There is evidence of sustained contact between the BMAC and the Eurasian steppes to the north, intensifying c. 2000 BC. In the delta of the Amu Darya where it reaches the Aral Sea, its waters were channelled for irrigation agriculture by people whose remains resemble those of the nomads of the Andronovo culture. This is interpreted as nomads settling down to agriculture, after contact with the BMAC, known as the Tazabagyab culture."
Andronovo people were Dasyus :)
These hostile people were driven westward by Agni and later attested as A confederation of three tribes – the Parni, Xanthii and Pissuri – the Dahae.
What a bunch of crap.
There's loads of R-Z2124 in India.
And obviously Z93 is also from Eastern Europe, so Indian R1a is from Eastern Europe.
Are you sure about that?
Everyone says it's R1a-L657+. (80% of Indian R1a).
Let's make it clear I am not saying Indian R1a is native. Its most likely of the EE origin.
My point is both Y3 (2600bce) and l657 (2200bce) which are Indian specific clades either came very early or very late. Its also possible that some early trader or Adventurer who carried ancestral clad to Y3 migrated and settled in India or somewhere outside eastern Europe and from there his descendants many millennia later migrated into near East and India as bearers of l657.
We are yet to pick their signals in aDNA records.
L657 bearers also speak Dravidian languages in India and one historical era sample bearing this clad has no steppe.
Trziniec culture had barrow inhumations, so Indian cremation has nothing to do with it
In any case , there was cremation widely across Neolithic Europe (predating 2000 bc by Millenia)
@Assuwatama said...
Sintashta–Petrovka culture > Andronovo steppe people were R1a-Z93 < R-Z2124. If there was a large scale ingress by these men then we will find their lineages in India. As of now there is no evidence of it.
June 15, 2022 at 9:02 PM
So far there is no evidence of this?
https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-Z2124/
In R-Z2124 I find: IND - 22 separate ancestral lines!!
Re; leaks, fine-scale things are hard, so of course wait for samples.
But I don't think there's anything inherently too doubtful about finding samples who are basically autosomally Slavic in Eastern Poland by the mid 1st Millennium BCE or the first few centuries of the 1st Millennium AD. This is probably very simplistic but if the description of Tacitus in 98AD of the Venedi as living on the east bank of the Vistula up to the Bay of Gdansk is accurate, and the Byzantine suggestion that they are the ancestors of the Sclaveni is also correct, then it wouldn't be surprising.
(On a side note, as an experiment to take stock of all the samples, I did a quick check with Vahaduo+G25 yesterday to see which samples before 500 AD and after 500 AD are closest to the present day Polish average: https://imgur.com/a/ZzA438D).
Was going through your other blog posts. Indus Periphery has 10% & Steppe Maykop has 50% ancestry from Russian_Tyumen HG. What was their language?
If 7% steppe in alakh lady can change her language from non IE to steppe IE then so can 10% WSHG ancestry among Indus Periphery :)
@Assuwatama
We're losing IQ points here reading your posts.
Give it a rest.
Matt, the middle section of the Hungary BA / Baltic BA axis, lies north of the Carpathians. Thus, the assumption that the Slavic homeland was at the center of Slavic genetics is the most economical and consistent with the principle of the economy of thinking. Each strong eastward twist of this axis requires the introduction of an additional assumption explaining how the Hungarian genome met the Baltic genome, for example on the middle Dnieper, giving rise to the Slavic genome.
Looking at PCA Kusznierewicz it is clearly visible that the North Carpathian Slovak genome lies exactly at the center of Slavic genetics:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0135820
In ancient DNA :)
These lineages could also have come later but that is irrelevant to Indo-Aryan debate. Swat has 2 R1a (44 male samples 1400bce to 800bce culture)one of them is Z93 IMO. Around 500bce that region probably spoke Gandhari Prakrit.
Sorry Teach 🙏
Was being sarcastic with the Steppe Maykop post.
I am currently looking into the possibility of possible loans from Andronovo language into BMAC.
Man in Hindi is called Manushya, Mard, Insan, Aadami, Purush etc. Some are Sanskrit loans others are Iranian loans.
Son is Sunus as well as Putra in Sanskrit as far as I know. While Putra is the original Indo-Aryan word, I am considering if Sunus for son was introduced into the language by the Andronovians who got this word through their contact with Proto-Balto-slavs.
Same with Nakt & Ratri for night :)
E1b1a (1/18) , E1b1b (1/18), G (2/18), J* (2/18), J1 (1/18), J2 (4/18), L (2/18), R* (1/18), R1b (1/18), R2 (2/18), and T (1/18).
These are the Y haplogroups of people who initiated Fire-Soma cult. Scholars not sure Witzel or someone else claims Indra was picked up by Andronovians as they overtook BMAC :)
So not only Fire-Soma but even Indra has non steppe origin. As of now I think there are 2 Vedic god's who could be of Andronovian origin; Bhaga & Parjanya.
@Rob
“there was cremation widely across Neolithic Europe (predating 2000 bc by Millenia)”
But they were different people, different languages and religions, not related to Indo-Slavs.
Trzciniec introduced cremation and had advanced religion:
See the cross, the symbol of fire and the sun (Ogni –> Agni)
https://postimg.cc/Q98mqMSB
https://postimg.cc/HVDcGNDz
and Trzciniec had links with Sintashta:
https://postimg.cc/7JLz5G9V
https://postimg.cc/kBgxYZxH
And it explains why Slavic and Vedic religious vocabularies are so similar.
Insan and aadami may have been borrowed into Hindi via Persian, but the origin of these words is (proto-Semitic >) Arabic rather than Iranian, and the Hindi forms that you have cited are still quite close to the Arabic originals.
Its kinda amusing that scholars (Asko Parpola) want us to believe that Steppe nomads were Arya & people residing in the cities of BMAC were Dasas.
If you go by their literal meaning then Arya = Noble and Dasa = Servant, good luck convincing people about the idea that Nomads from steppe considered BMAC population servants.
Brandon Sanderson writes better fantasy than these scholars ;)
"New research in Murghab region, in excavations at defensive walls of Adji Kui 1, showed pastoralists presence as early as the second half of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2210-1960 BC), with the coexistence of BMAC people living in the 'citadel' and pastoral population living on the edge of the town."
These people didn't mix for nearly 500 years.
@Assuwatama
I'll give you two historically verified examples of steppe peoples reducing townsfolk to servants: Turks and Hungarians.
Now shut up finally.
@All
I won't be able to get anything up about the Erfurt Jews until the weekend. But this is the ADMIXTURE analysis that I'll be basing my blog post on. It's one of a large series that produced basically the same outcomes over and over.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VAzvtmTCWSfkXLkjEPdICOvpuU5z7mWo/view?usp=sharing
Feel free to check it out and potentially preempt my findings here.
Umm sorry but there is no escaping from post Neolithic migration of steppe mlba type ancestry in India, no matter how averse the nationalists are towards it.
It's higher proportion in upper caste people , higher frequency of associated uniparental markers in them and it's complete absence in IVC sample- the broader picture is pretty clear.
L657 will eventually be found in aDNA.
Exactly!
Persian became official language of Indian Turkic elite from 1206-1757. So many Perso-Arabic loans which are more visible in Urdu than Hindi.
Does "hoon" mean anything in Arabic language? Hoon in kashmiri means dog. I don't think it's of Indo-European origin.
Elaborate so I understand the context, Teach.
Well, Dravidian speakers also have higher frequency of IranN associated uniparentals.
Even a single mating event is enough to introduce a haplogroup into the population but in absence of it's subsequent inputs (endogamy?) it will only take a few generations for the steppe signal to vanish.
That's how you have lower castes, tribes and that tribal like sample with l657.
I have a question. People (especially OITtards) often associate Dravidian languages with South Asian HGs/AASI. But in case of a HG population inhabiting the Indian subcontinent, potentially since Paleolithic , shouldn't we have several different language families who at most can be deeply related (like Americas and Australia)?
@ East Pole
That's great, but it's still true that the predominant Trziniec rite was barrow inhumation either reusing Corded Ware era tumuli or building new ones. And the idea of cremation was borrowed form 'Neolithic Europe', where it had been a common rite.
Aligrama_IA
970-550bce
G2a2a, R2a3a, L1a
Barikot_IA
1000-800bce
U2e1, H2Oa, J1b1b, U8b1a1, M65a
H1a1
Butkara_IA
200-0bce
M30b, U2a, HV
J1
Katelai_IA
1000-800bce
U4d, J1d, M35b, Z31a1
J2a1, R2a
Leobanr
1300-1000bce
R30b1
L1a
1000-800bce
W3a1b, U2e, M4, M5, U7a, T2g1, U2c1, U3b
L1a x4, R1b, R2a, C1b, Q1b2
Saidu Sharif
500-300bce
H, H15a, M30, K1b1, M52a, C4a, H13a, R5a2, U2b2
R1a1a1b, L1a, Q1b2, A
Udegram_IA
1200-800bce
M65a1, T2a1b, U8b, R30a1b, U7a, U1a, H2a2, M, U4c, W3a1, U1a1, H14a,
E1a, E1b x8, A0T, CT, H1a1a
I will recheck if I missed any but Swat valley has only 1 R1a and that too from 500-300bce, R2a -L1a-E1b make the bulk.
There are 2 T2a1b in swat valley dated 1200-800bce.
Wilde et al. (2014) tested mtDNA samples from the Yamna culture, the presumed homeland (or Urheimat) of Proto-Indo-European speakers, and found T2a1b in the Middle Volga region and Bulgaria.
What other steppe mtdna do you see in swat valley?
Davidski wrote:
“So yeah, without any records being kept, it was actually quite easy for languages to have been "hiding" in the vastness of Eastern and Northern Europe until the major expansions of their speakers, and their fairly recent contacts with societies that could read and write.”
Yes. All that’s true. No argument that before writing hiding would have been easy.
But shouldn’t there have been dozens, even a hundred of those hiding non-written languages that evolved after PIE started dividing up, right? Starting maybe about 2500 BCE?
But my understanding is that linguistic consensus is that Common Slavic, which includes all the dialects, dates to 300 AD. You can draw a straight line from Common Slavic in 300 AD to all modern Slavic languages.
So basically Slavic was one language before and during the break out.
If there were dozens of split-off languages in the vastness of Eastern and Northern Europe, how come suddenly Slavic was being spoken in half of Europe?
That kind of pattern that’s also been suggested for Germanic. For Germanic, Lehmann (2005) wrote: “a grammar of Proto-Germanic must be a description of the language from approximately 2500 BC to the beginning of the common era.”
I think maybe it’s possible there weren’t that many different IE languages in Europe from 2500BCE. Maybe there weren’t that many languages going extinct. And maybe when writing comes, we’re seeing all kinds of different daughter languages because there were very few.
Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Greek, maybe, in early forms, they were there right from the beginning.
ROB wrote
“we know there were Germanic speakrs all around southern Europe. They were in the Balkans, they were in Italy and Iberia. The Gothic people probably numbered 100-200,000. A sizable army, but not exactly a big population.”
Rob - that was my point. The so-called Great Migrations didn’t seem to have much impact on languages spoken in southern Europe.
What you bring up might suggest the migrations were more military than migration and left behind most Germanic speakers exactly where we find them today. Right smack in the Migration Age, about 630 AD, a Germanic king named Dagobert marches an army against Slavic speakers maybe in Bohemia and get his butt kicked at Wogastisburg. So not all Germanic speakers migrated.
Herwig Wolfram, in his History of the Goths, notes that Germanic speaking Goths and Bastarnae were in the Balkans and Crimea well before the “Migration Age.” But not much of their language stuck. His theory was that the Goths lost the recruitment contest with the Slavs because the Goths were snooty, Christian and exclusive, but the Slavs were pretty open to whoever wanted to sign up. And that’s why the Gothic language never had a chance against Slavic and Italian.
OT, crossposted at Razib's place:
A future adna lecture for those interested in Near Eastern genetics (the Southern Arc is coming!):
https://iias.huji.ac.il/event/david-reich-lecture -
Lecture by Prof. David Reich - "The Genetic History of the Southern Arc: A Bridge between West Asia & Europe" - "The lecture will be held at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies at 11am on Tuesday, 12 July 2022."
"We present an integrative genetic history of the Southern Arc, an area divided geographically between West Asia and Europe, but which we define as spanning the culturally entangled regions of Anatolia and its neighbors, in both Europe (Aegean and the Balkans), and in West Asia (Cyprus, Armenia, the Levant, Iraq and Iran). We employ a new analytical framework to analyze genome-wide data at the individual level from a total of 1,320 ancient individuals, 731 of which are newly reported and address major gaps in the archaeogenetic record. We report the first ancient DNA from the world’s earliest farming cultures of southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia, as well as the first Neolithic period data from Cyprus and Armenia, and discover that it was admixture of Natufian-related ancestry from the Levant—mediated by Mesopotamian and Levantine farmers, and marked by at least two expansions associated with dispersal of pre-pottery and pottery cultures—that generated a pan-West Asian Neolithic continuum. Our comprehensive sampling shows that Anatolia received hardly any genetic input from Europe or the Eurasian steppe from the Chalcolithic to the Iron Age; this contrasts with Southeastern Europe and Armenia that were impacted by major gene flow from Yamnaya steppe pastoralists.
In the Balkans, we reveal a patchwork of Bronze Age populations with diverse proportions of steppe ancestry in the aftermath of the ~3000 BCE Yamnaya migrations, paralleling the linguistic diversity of Paleo-Balkan speakers. We provide insights into the Mycenaean period of the Aegean by documenting variation in the proportion of steppe ancestry (including some individuals who lack it altogether), and finding no evidence for systematic differences in steppe ancestry among social strata, such as those of the elite buried at the Palace of Nestor in Pylos.
A striking signal of steppe migration into the Southern Arc is evident in Armenia and northwest Iran where admixture with Yamnaya patrilineal descendants occurred, coinciding with their 3rd millennium BCE displacement from the steppe itself. This ancestry, pervasive across numerous sites of Armenia of ~2000-600 BCE, was diluted during the ensuing centuries to only a third of its peak value, making no further western inroads from there into any part of Anatolia, including the geographically adjacent Lake Van center of the Iron Age Kingdom of Urartu. The impermeability of Anatolia to exogenous migration contrasts with our finding that the Yamnaya had two distinct gene flows, both from West Asia, suggesting that the Indo-Anatolian language family originated in the eastern wing of the Southern Arc and that the steppe served only as a secondary staging area of Indo-European language dispersal. The demographic significance of Anatolia on a Mediterranean-wide scale is further documented by our finding that following the Roman conquest, the Anatolian population remained stable and became the geographic source for much of the ancestry of Imperial Rome itself."
Comment on the Reich Lecture: Anatolia was just too damn populous and the Indo-Europeans coming via Europe could do nothing, demographically? It's where Cavalli-Sforza's hypothesis that the demographic bulk was too large to be displaced (except by similarly sized large farmer populations) really held true? A contrast with the places that were in the same ecozone and where farmers had low/declining populations. But these places would later grow to host huge farming populations, much later in history...
Mycenaeans also show a situation where steppe ancestry autosomally is uncorrelated with social status... Though this isn't surprising as it was true on a more compressed scale in Britain (albeit there we'd guess admixture is not very frequent where autosomally teh "King of Stone Henge", the Amesbury Archer, I14200) was in significantly more EEF than the Beakers as a whole. Although he probably got his admixture in France/Switzerland and not England. It'll be interesting to see if this is true y-dna wise as well (unlike in other regions)... the one Mycenaean male published so far being a J2a (I9041) and contemporary Greeks lack of R dominance, would both suggest that steppe y-dna would lose its association too, conforming to a scenario where patrilineal bonds broke down in favour of collaboration between lineages and assimilation into IE speaking, perhaps because the requirements of the more complex society favoured it. But we'll know when we see it.
Direct migration by the Yamnaya as far as Northwestern Iran - not just getting to NW Iran via Central Asia! We have already had Bronze Age dna that his indicated that this is happening, in the form of one sample - which is I4243 at 2300 BCE. That sample seemed to have nothing to do with the Corded Ware/Sintashta so, the hypothesis there was that the desertification conditions on the steppe around 2400-1900 BCE drove the Yamnaya/post-Yamnaya Catacomb culture south, and then they were later replaced on the steppe by the Lola Culture from Central Asia (admixed ANE-Yamnaya type guys) and more substantially by the Sintashta from the northern forests, who then go onto move into Central Asia in another wave. So it's nice to see that the idea of a pulse into NW Iran is confirmed and not just an outlier...
(Kind of confirms why the Corded Ware matter more for our dna today than the Yamnaya; the Yamnaya migrated out to places where the population was already big, but the potential for growth was much lower, or places like Central Asia where it would forever remain low, while the Corded Ware took over Northern Europe where population was low, but there was enormous agricultural productivity in its future. Possibly even population of Yamnaya descendents certainly might have boomed above Corded Ware, for a few hundred years, but then...)
It's interesting that NW Iran is specified - did this wave then peter out and not move further east into Central Asia? Steppe ancestry is largely absent from the BMAC/Gedrosia Zone sampled by Narasimhan in his paper. Though culturally a language could've continued to spread eastwards through this zone. Even more tentatively; might this potentially help explain any shared linguistic features identified through a putative Indo-Graeco-Armenian grouping of IE? Generally the Indo-Balto-Slavic grouping is more strongly maintained, but there are some authors who've argued for shared features between Indo-Graeco-Armenian. Did the movement of Yamnaya->Armenia and NW Iran have anything to do with the movement to Greece? Certainly Graeco-Armenian is commonly recognised, so it seems difficult to have a movement to Greece be totally independent of a movement to Armenia from the steppe giving rise to Armenian...
I believe they may also be arguing that the Yamnaya receive different CHG related ancestry from West Asia at different times, presumable a later one with a little Anatolian, and an earlier one without any?
@Rob
„And the idea of cremation was borrowed form 'Neolithic Europe', where it had been a common rite.”
I think it was a common rite in ‘Mesolithic Europe’. From HGs it got to EEFs.
Before Trzciniec cremation was practiced by some HG and HG-EEF mixed groups around Carpathian mountains which are difficult to describe genetically because they cremated. Mixing of R1a CWC Proto-Slavic people with this HG-EEF people around Carpathian mountains and the birth of new religion took place around 2000 BC and then that new solar religion, new concept of the soul, fire cult and cremation started to spread, reached Sintashta/Andronovo, Thrace, Greece etc. It explains Slavic, Vedic and Orphic similarities. Traces of that religion are best preserved in Slavic folklore and language.
PS. It has nothing to do with PIE.
@LivoniaG, it seems possible there could have been multiple and repeated dialect levelling events that led widespread speakers to homogenize their speech to some powerful/prestige dialect from a particular place, reducing expected linguistic divergence. Probably happened at least with the expansion of Latin, but that would need to happen a lot though; and it doesn't seem to have happened a lot in the period when we have historical records; French diverges from Spanish, Italian dialects from each other etc.
@CarosPrasd; I think the suggestion there is that Dravidian went from some particular AASI HG subpopulation->admixed AASI+Iran_N population (roughly), then expanded. It's not actually that Iran_N interacted separately with lots of different populations in South Asia and adopted each of their languages. There's really no way to know though. The model of Reich lab suggests that a single "ASI" population formed in India with 70% AASI and 30% Iran_N, and then mixed with the ANI population, which was Iran_N+AASI+Steppe_MLBA. So it's not like it is implausible that the ASI mixture adopted a proto-Dravidian language from particular HG group.
I call bullshit on this.
The impermeability of Anatolia to exogenous migration contrasts with our finding that the Yamnaya had two distinct gene flows, both from West Asia, suggesting that the Indo-Anatolian language family originated in the eastern wing of the Southern Arc and that the steppe served only as a secondary staging area of Indo-European language dispersal.
Fair! I think David Anthony (whatever opinion of him) has presumably seen this stuff and not been shifted from the view that Anatolian is explained by early branches off of Sredni-Stog moving west and ultimately to Anatolia. OTOH the model may fit with Ayshin-Ghalichi abstracts: "In the Late Eneolithic period, we find evidence of admixture from the south into the steppe groups, detectable through the presence of Anatolian_Neolithic-like ancestry.". It seems like the lab is not totally on the same page on this maybe, as Patterson's recent lecture described Yamnaya as genomically basically late Sredni-Stog in his opinion, with no other admixtures, I think.
@Davidski
Throwback from earlier this year, seems like we called it in regards to PIE and "the southern arc":
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-pie-homeland-controversy-february.html
How incredibly predictable this has all become...
@ Livonia G
That was the zeitgeist in the immediate pre-aDNA era: migrations were minimized & the idea of ethnicity apparently deconstructed. There was no such thing as the 'Beaker folk', anyone could become a Goth by being a soldier, Slavs are just an amalgataed mass, etc. Evidence goes against overly minimalist positions, although of course people can change their identity, adopt languages, etc but its still predicated on a series of social & demographic processes.
Im not sure about what Dagobert proves- we know Franks existed in western Europe & then expanded East and clashed with 'Wends' perhaps somehwere near Austria-Moravia. Lombards remained in Slovakia into the 7th century, as documented by continued cemeteries in the region, meaning not all had left for the Balkans & Italy, and moreover they maintainead contact with remaining Germanic groups in the north- Thuringia, Scandinavia, etc. There are also traces of Germanic groups in eastern Germany & Poland, but the number of settlements are miniscule compared to preceding periods. In fact, the emigration of Germanic groups from northern Europe took over 1,000 years, with bursts of activity which culminated 400-500 AD. From 600 AD, new cultural models expanded across Poland & Eastern Germany, namely Prague-Korchak groups & the distinctive Sukow-Dziedzice northern tradition. In most micro-rgions, there is a 50-150 year hiatus in settlement.
I see, so it can be from the dominant SA HG population.
But what about the language of IranN who presumably were more technologically advanced than the pre farming HGs of South Asia . Is it possible that Dravidian languages are associated with them? Maybe Indus script if ever deciphered can answer the lot of these questions.
Is it possible to determine the heterogeneity of SA HG ancestry in South Asians?
What are you suggesting? That swat valley samples are THE vedic indo Aryans? That steppe ancestry in South Asia is female mediated?
The above are typical cope of OIT retards.
I looked into T2a1b in steppe but only found 1500bce T2a1b1 in Tajikistan & T2a1a in Yamnaya & Afanasievo 3000-2600bce.
Sintastha_MLBA doesn't carry it (excel sheet V. narasimhan) Wonder when did this clad arrive in Swat.
Is H2a mtdna of Russian/Ukrainian Origin? One Indus periphery sample from ~2500bce has it. Allakh_Mlba has H2a3 and Swat IA has H2a2.
U4d1 in Afanasievo. U4d in Swat
H13a H14a H15a H20a all appear to be of European origin?
Are K1b1, U2e and U2e1 of European origin?
@Caroprasd
Yes it's female mediated in Swat and they indeed were Indo-Aryan speaking.
Rig Veda and Atharvaveda attests to Gandhara as well as Old Persian in 500bce. Gandhara was mahajanapada 600bce and from here they have attested Gandhari Prakrit (Middle Indo-Aryan) ~300bce.
These samples are dated from 1200bce-0Ce.
These samples lack R1a and are low in steppe compared to modern samples. My intuition is they recieved more steppe from groups like Kangju who carried R1a, 50% steppe and low East asian Component thus making it a good source for later steppe enrichment.
Kangju mtdna lineages can be seen in modern Kashmiri Population.
@CaroPrasd,
But what about the language of IranN who presumably were more technologically advanced than the pre farming HGs of South Asia . Is it possible that Dravidian languages are associated with them?
Yeah, it's very, very possible; I just wanted to lay out the case for it coming from AASI, which is that you do have this ASI ghost population that has very large amounts of AASI ancestry, and its plausible that the language then came from them (and the AASI population might be diluted in lots of speakers). There isn't really a strong linguistic case for either option; it's believed that the Dravidian languages must've expanded largely after 2000 BCE, but before that whether they were either an originally AASI language (which presumably might've taken on much vocabulary related to farming from the incoming farmers), or originally from incoming farmers seems difficult to know.
Is it possible to determine the heterogeneity of SA HG ancestry in South Asians?
Yeah that's an interesting question.
In general what seems to be the case is that India is modelled very well by ANI(Iran_N+AASI+Steppe_MLBA)+ASI(Iran_N+AASI), where each of ANI and ASI have fixed ratios of their components, and then different subpopulations in India just have founder effects on this that reflect endogamy. Broadly that works, and there are mostly slight deviations from that, where e.g. Vellamas have a tilt away to being more Iran_N than expected / Brahmins might have more Steppe_MLBA than expected, but broadly it works well.
There's also possibly some leakage in of Austroasiatic / Tibeto-Burman related ancestry into some groups at a low level, and some small subpopulations with extra geneflow from Near East (Jews etc).
What there just doesn't seem to be a need for is different AASI HG subpopulations really. That is, we haven't found any degree of broad scale genetic variation that needs different substructured AASI HG subpopulation. It all just seems to work well with the standard cline plus founder effects (and maybe some extra East Asian ancestry / West Asian ancestry in some minorities of cases).
This is pretty weird since we'd expect India as a big place to have multiple HG subpopulations. So either:
1) Only one AASI actually contributed; one group absorbed/got absorbed a lot, but then the others really didn't make much contribution at all
2) In a genetic sense, all the AASI in India were just one genetic community with no real structure
3) Multiple AASI groups were mixed together the farming expansion phase and we can't detect the different ones without ancient dna
That said, it might be difficult to tell a contribution from some diverged AASI HG into one specific jati group/subpopulation in India, because it could be confused with endogamy. But generally it just doesn't seem like there's any use in models from having multiple diverged AASI groups.
That's my understanding of it, it might be that people who are hardcore into Indian genetics have found something.
@Caroprasd
~250bce shahbazgarhi
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Shahbaz Garhi is situated on the junction of three ancient routes;
01 Kabul to Pushkalavati (modern Charsadda)
02 Swat through Buner
03 Taxila through Hund on the bank of Indus River.
"Asti pi cu ekatai samaye sasumate devanapiasa priadrasisa raño
Pura mahanasasi devanapriasa priadrasisa raño anudivaso bahuni prana satasahasani arabhiyisu supathaye"
Who spoke in this language if not for these people?
@ Matt
Seems like Catacomb -derived groups diffused across Armenia, into upper Mesp/ East Anatolia. With Iran receiving both Catacomb, & Srubnaja derived, as well as Kura-Araxes flows. Makes it interesting for developmnet of southern Iranic groups& relations to Armenian, as you say.
It seems that by the time of Myceneans, there was no status difference for steppe/ low steppe admixture people, meaning that proto-Greeks had arrived earlier, before the birth of Mycenean propper.
I'm pretty sure there is European admixture in Anatolia, Harvard seem to think think that if their statistical exercises don't detect something, it didn;t happen :) The historical & archaeological evidence clearly supports it, so will genetics. Barcin_C probably already has such admixture. As Ive said, overall it is difficult to ascertain whats happening in Anatolia between the 'Early Farmer' horizon & the Bronze Age. But the data is already there for us.
The '2 flows' from West Asia in Ymmnaya could mean EEF , CHG, Majkop, admixture ?
Naturally, Reich's view about PIE is difficult to support currently given that there is widespread European / western steppe influence across western Asia, coming from multiple different directions.
Megido, Ashkelon, Alalakh, Barcin_C , etc. Are they even trying ?
@LivoniaG
Celtic did not exist at the time of the BB culture, the first branch that separated from the common Celtic language is precisely the Celtiberian, which entered the peninsula with the urnfield culture (1.200-1.000 BC)- Celtiberian is the oldest Celtic language of which we have written evidence and we know that its origin is not in Iberia but in central Europe. It is there where you have to search and then relate those results with the different cultures that occupied that region.
Theoretically the archaeological sequence is BBC>Unetice>Tumulus>Urnfield, but there is no patrilineal genetic continuity between those cultures-That genetic continuity is only found in Iberia between the BB culture and the Iberians (P312>DF27). In Spain we have many sites of the urnfelders to analyze, during more than 300-400 years they mixed with the native population and adopted a kind of mixed culture with burials and cremations, when those sites start to be analyzed we will know their genetic origin and you will be able to find out which European culture spoke pre-Celtic. To know where the ancient Celtic pre-Celtic or proto-Celtic (as you want to call it), was hidden, you just have to know who were the men and women of the urnfield culture.
@CaroPrasd, one thing about India is that there is a whole South Indian neolithic that is somewhat pastoral in its nature, but is not understood well - https://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~tcrndfu/web_project/abot.html
So given the position of Dravidian languages, where only Brahui is in the north, there's one plausible possibility where the Dravidian languages are from some AASI rich group that develops in the south ("ASI") and then diffuse north.
But I don't really think we have a plausible way to say for sure what happened.
Re; the Southern Arc paper, it's interesting that Urartu seems to have had no steppe ancestry, in the light of the indications that horses are a common cultural theme in Urartu (https://www.worldhistory.org/Urartu_Civilization/ - " Given the use of chariots by the Assyrians, it would seem reasonable to suppose that their adversary also employed them, especially given the Urartians fame for horse breeding. ... Urartu art is best seen in bronze sculptures made in the round which show an influence from Assyria, particularly in the choice of subjects - lions, bulls, mythological creatures such as griffins and centaurs, and military themes, especially horse riders. ").
But no steppe ancestry in Urartu. So another point in favour of the fast and independent distribution of horse culture independently from large migrations of steppe ancestry that changed populations. (As indicated by Ludovic Orlando and Librado's paper finding really fast dispersal of the "Sintashta horse", DOM2, with the finding of this type of horse at Acemhoyuk in Turkey almost immediately, where the horse at Acemhoyuk AC8811_Tur_m2125 was actually the earliest DOM2 horse sampled, even though its ancestry is obviously very recently from the steppe).
@Davidski,
Can you help upload the genotype data from this paper and converted them into G25 please?
Below is the link where the genotype data is located: https://zenodo.org/record/4570184#.Yqxd_XZBy3A
I will greatly appreciated your help in this.
Thank you very much and Best Regards,
Ramber
Taxila was the center of Vedic learning and Sanskrit language.
Its kinda interesting that Ashoka decides to place an inscription there in Aramaic (official language of former Haxamanish strappy) but 100km away in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa his inscription is in Gandhari Prakrit.
No Sanskrit No old Persian ;)
Thanks man that was an interesting read.
@Rob, it does seem like Reich has hedged his terms on European flow into Anatolia a little by saying: "Our comprehensive sampling shows that Anatolia received hardly any genetic input from Europe or the Eurasian steppe from the Chalcolithic to the Iron Age, which is different from the later mention of impenetrable, and would I guess be their way to cover some edge cases with low levels (like the CA Barcin sample which may have 5% or something if we're talking about the sample sample).
I don't think my view's shifted too much that if they find a transient/minimal/patchy genetic signal going from South->Steppe and a transient signal going Steppe->Anatolia, then the reasonable thing to do is to treat each as cancelling the other out as far as evidence goes, and then default to the view of linguists, which is Anatolian from SE Europe->Anatolia.
...
Going back to the mention in the abstract of:
"A striking signal of steppe migration into the Southern Arc is evident in Armenia and northwest Iran where admixture with Yamnaya patrilineal descendants occurred, coinciding with their 3rd millennium BCE displacement from the steppe itself. This ancestry, pervasive across numerous sites of Armenia of ~2000-600 BCE, was diluted during the ensuing centuries to only a third of its peak value"
It seems like from a quick Vahaduo test, the steppe rich Haji Firuz BA sample I4243 has about 56% Yamnaya related ancestry and LBA Armenia more like 28%, so either those late samples or Haji Firuz BA has under/over rich steppe ancestry for their time, or the initial entrants to Armenia/NW Iran may have had up to 70-80% Yamnaya related ancestry? (E.g. https://imgur.com/a/87CVe4P).
Yes, maybe it was female mediated in SGPT samples. But I am not so sure about their language.
Do they have the right Steppe:BMAC ratio to be source for most South Asians?
IIRC Rors, Jatts, Brahmins and 'inner south asians' have lower proportion BMAC ancestry wrt steppe ancestry?
Also steppe ancestry in rest of South Asia is likely Male mediated.
Sorry I didn't get your question. But I think by 200 bce the Indo Aryan propagation would have been completed in whole subcontinent. Maybe even caste system would have been solidified by then.
Gaska, the oldest written "uncontested" examples of a Celtic language have been Lepontic from north-east Italy for many decades. Has something changed in Iberia?
@ EastPole
Mesolithic indeed
PS just call it Svyata-Slavic ?
At the moment Anthony probably makes the most sense
modification is that it seems that Khvalynsk declined along with the Varna type groups in balkans (loss of privileged status, etc), and that Anatolian came with late cernavoda/ Yamnaya rather than Suvorovo chiefs
However Heyd’s theory on CWC is more appropriate now that we know for sure R1a wasn’t a “steppe underclass “
Is Ashmound culture contemporaneous with IVC or is a post IVC phenomenon?
I am just a layperson so I have no idea about quality of this paper-https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3676702
Also author appears to be a proponent of a proto Dravidian IVC, I hope that the paper is not biased.
@Ramber
Yes, but it'll take a couple of days.
Umm by the time of samrat Ashok didn't sanskrit get limited to a liturgical language probably restricted to castes having access to education and literature?
While Prakrits were languages of commoners.
@CaroPrasd
What likely hood these samples belonged to Ashvaka tribes (and their ancestors) who fought against Alexander? Scholars are of the opinion that Ashvakan could be ancestral to Afghans/Pashtoon. So they need not be ancestral to rest of India. Harappa + Kangju looks a good fit for khatris and Kashmiris according to some.
They Could also be Kambojhs.
Steppe autosomal and R1a diffusion post 1000bce are irrelevant to Indo-Aryan debate. Steppe was Iranic post 1000bce.
Since claims are there would be no R1a in Harappa we are left with tiny window of 2000-1000bce for diffusion of both Language & R1a males.
Its not the case in Swat looks unlikely in Sanauli, if word of mouth is anything to go by ;)
Both sites linked to Indo-Aryans along with cemetery h culture of Punjab.
@caroprasd
Here is an interesting data point.
Alexander did what one would expect from him. Population of Ashvakan tribes dwindled (many killed some fled). Few centuries later under Kushanas, several Kangjus migrated to this region.
What Kangjus spoke ?(Archaeological evidence suggests that the Kangju spoke an Eastern Iranian language, which was probably identical to Sogdian, or derived from it.)
For 400 years Kushanas ruled these parts and Bactrian was their common tongue.
What does Rabatak inscription ~150ce talk about;
3–4
"And it was he who laid out (i.e. discontinued the use of) the Ionian speech and then placed the Arya (or Aryan) speech (i.e. replaced the use of Greek by the Aryan or Bactrian language)."
What scholars agree upon?
"What scholars do agree on is the fact that Pashto is an Eastern Iranian language sharing characteristics with Eastern Middle Iranian languages such as Bactrian, Khwarezmian and Sogdian."
And that's probably how Gandhara and Afghanistan switched to Pashto (Eastern Iranian language)
@R.Rocca-
The only thing that has changed in Iberia is the weather.
I guess you'll be happy, now that Harvard has buried the steppe hypothesis and relegated Yamnaya to a second degree of linguistic diffusion. ¡!! RIP Gimbutas, Renfrew is almost alive ¡!!. I have no opinion on this because I don't care about the origin of IE, but it will be interesting and fun to read the Harvardian arguments regarding Armenia, Anatolia and the Balkans and what male lineages were involved.
How far away are the times when you and your anthrogenica friends fantasized about the conquest of Europe by the horsemen from the steppes and the routes they had taken to change the genetics of mainland Europe.
By the way, in your last post (which I did not read until many days later), you said that you are certain that you have found L51 in the steppes. Congratulations, do you know when they are going to publish it?, do you know in which culture they have found it?-I hope this time you are not wrong because 7 years ago you said that this lineage would appear in Yamnaya with total certainty.
A long time ago I told you to take into account the name of this site-Valle de las Higueras (Toledo), maybe you will have nightmares when you see what they have found there. I hope those L51 cases in your dear Yamnaya are very very very very old.
@Assuwatama said “ Hoon in kashmiri means dog. I don't think it's of Indo-European origin.”
The obvious cognates are Hund in German and hound in English. Both come from the same indo-european root that gives rise to the common words for dog that start with k/kh in most centum languages and s/š in most satem languages. (The reconstructed PIE root is *ḱwón).
This doesn’t mean Kashmiri necessarily went through the same sequence of sound changes as English and German did: there are various well-attested pathways for common sound shifts, and it can happen in a long or short chain of steps.
Satem and centum type languages have very common sound shifts where s/š and k soften to an h sound. (These sound shifts are common beyond indo-european languages, but Okham’s razor suggests you start with Kashmiri’s sister languages and predecessors.)
Other examples you gave in another post had an r replaced by an l or dropped (after certain consonants). This is also really, really common. I noticed the passage you quoted does not have any r-sound. In some IE languages to this day an L/R contest, so to speak, is ongoing among otherwise near-identical dialects separated by a few miles, or sometimes a difference frozen in a specific set of words.
If you look at the ways Kashmiri departs from predecessor & or sister languages you will probably find where the w or uo sound (as in *kwón >> hoon) starts disappearing from or altering in other words besides the one for dog.
@Davidski
Thank you very much. I greatly appreciated it
@gaska
Reich et al haven’t “buried the steppe hypothesis” or “relegated Yamnaya to a second degree linguistic diffusion”, especially where Europe is concerned. I’m not sure how extensive their ancient sampling in Anatolia has been, but it seems to me a problem they’ve had is in realizing there never was a large IE population there to begin with. Reich and company have dug up and tested the Hatti and other non-IE peoples. Of course, they’re not finding steppe DNA in those sorts of “Hittites”. The IEs in Anatolia were a dominant military elite; they didn’t come in large numbers. If Reich and company look long and hard enough, they’ll eventually figure that out. The linguistic and archaeological evidence are against a Near Eastern IE Urheimat. So is the ancient DNA evidence.
As for your comments about the old days at Banthrogenica and about L51, I’m surprised you would bring that up, since things have gone so utterly and completely contrary to what you argued back then. The Kurgan Hypothesis has garnered one ancient DNA victory after another, especially where R1b-L51 is concerned. Now we know, as one example among many, that R1b-L151, one step upstream of R1b-P312, was present in the oldest Corded Ware samples yet tested, samples with a lot of Yamnaya or Yamnaya-like DNA. Soon R1b-P312 and perhaps some of its subclades will show up in Single Grave Corded Ware in Northern Europe.
Gimbutas wasn’t right about everything, but she was way ahead of her time and a great archaeologist. Renfrew himself has acknowledged that.
I hope your mixture modeling takes into account the dynamics of Population mixing.
1 to 1 mixing Swat valley + Kangju will look something like this,
Harappa 25%
Bustan 30%
Sintastha 30%
Mng+Kazak 15%
1st 3 values are close to what we see in medieval samples from swat region. Not sure how much mng+Kazak is there in modern/medieval swat samples if any. But the Kangju could have arrived with a diluted mng+Kazak after they mixed with people in Gilgit and Kashmir before arriving in swat.
Keep in mind I took only average of Kangju ancestry. Some Kangju samples have ~12% mng+Kazak, which both in direct and diluted ways will disappear or reach negligible levels in few generations.
@caroprasd
There lived people outside the Harappan zone who formed chalcolithic farming societies and Neolithic HG societies in East and South of Harappa.
We don't know about their ancestry yet but these guys were in contact with Harappans and late Harappan cultures.
This is the best I could come up with for Hajji-Firuz BA with acceptable Tail prob & SEs
Iran_BA_HajjiFiruz
Armenia_MBA
Kazakhstan_Taldysay_MLBA1
best coefficients: 0.544 0.456
Tail Prob 0.12; SE 0.074
usual PRights
Thanks 🙏
Though this is in contrast to other Indo-Aryan languages who have Kutā, Kukura, kutaro, kutta for Dog.
Shvaana in Sanskrit. Though one synonym for Dog in Sanskrit is Kukkura.
Its kinda interesting words like Ashva, Nakta and Shvaana (closer to PIE) are entirely dropped and words like Ghotika, Ratri and Kukkura become source for Modern Indo-Aryan words.
@CaroPrasd
I am not denying steppe ancestry in India. Point is its relationship with language.
Jats are non-elite peasants-herders. Their steppe ancestry is atleast 1.5 times that of Brahmin groups but carry only 25% R1a.
The notion that Brahmins are from steppe is not only Political but absurd. Varna and Jati are 2 separate concepts often intermixed in India. While Varna are classes, castes are a mixture of Clans-sub clans-tribes-sub tribes.
Brahmin is Varna not caste. Kaul, Bhat, Sharma, Rajput, Mahajana, Gupta etc are castes.
@caroprasd
Now where would you put these high steppe peasant-herders like Jats & and nomadic Gujjars :)
(Gujjar phenotype is like those of Afghans)
Not sure about the current status of Jats but last I heard in some states they are categorised as OBC.
Half of India's population is OBC and I can guarantee you most of them will have same ancestry profile as those of so called Upper castes.
Back to Matt's comment ''Anatolia was just too damn populous and the Indo-Europeans coming via Europe could do nothing, demographically? ''
Genetics papers often don't mention it, however archaeologists studying Anatolia that much of central & western Anatolia, between 5000 & 4000 BC "it seems that the vast Anatolian landmass from Cilicia to Turkish Thrace was temporarily uninhabited {or at least sparsely so}" (S Blum; 2012).
One can also look at the sampling dates from Skourtanioti, showing a similar dearth of burials during that period.
Of course, after 4000 BC the population grew rapidly, and became quite populous by the Bronze Age. The default explanation is large infiltration of so-called ''Iran_N'' groups. "Iran_N" capture from Mesopotamia to Turan, so it serves as a catch-all explanation for low-acuity geneticists and online OIT pedlars alike. But they often, very little effort is made to clarify what or where they mean by correlating with Y-DNA, archaeological or lingusitic inferences.
But there were also infiltrations of steppe groups from Balkans & Caucasus. Yes, they were numerically small and eventually became linguistically extinct, but we already know that from history .
@RS
First of all, I am so sorry you lost your wife, our differences of opinion don't matter when such important losses occur
Secondly, the most basic steppe hypothesis is that the Pontic steppes are the origin of ALL Indo-European languages. In this sense this theory is long dead, Gimbutas was wrong about many things. Anatolia is lost to the Kurganist cause and Greece is on the same path. The fanciful dream that L51 spread those languages all over the world has been reduced to a fairy tale. The whole building is collapsing and only a blind man can not realize it. Most scholars defend an origin of IE south of the Caucasus independent of where exactly they place it (Anatolia, Armenia, Iran etc) only Anthony seems to claim an origin north of the Caucasus but with two different paths (and with different male markers). I have already said that I have no horse in this race and I don't think that my personal opinion matters but the contradictions were obvious for many years (although many people preferred to close their eyes and to pull forward). I personally believe that both Yamnaya and the CWC spoke IE languages, but I disagree with you and the rest of Kurganists on the uniparental markers that were involved in the spread of those languages
And let me tell you, that this is the funniest sentence I have read for years in specialized genetics blogs. “The Kurgan Hypothesis has garnered one ancient DNA victory after another, especially where R1b-L51 is concerned”
We definitely live on different planets, because the defeats have been so continuous and evident with respect to what, you, Rocca and company defended years ago that I smile just remembering it. All those threads are recorded and saved to remind everyone of the amount of idiocy people are capable of saying. Yes my friend, the blue-eyed blond Yamnaya horsemen did not conquer mainland europe (they were not blond, nor had blue eyes, nor conquered shit and did not even use horses), the most overwhelmingly R1b-P312 peoples of the planet next to the British and Irish (Basques, Spaniards, Iberians, Etruscans, Aquitanians) never spoke IE languages, the BB culture originated in Iberia, there were Iberian migrations that reached the eastern domain of that culture, P312 has western origin, DF27 originated in the French-Cantabrian region (Iberia, Aquitaine, Occitania) currently L51 and U106 have their origin in Bohemia and Yamnaya has been debunked. Do you really believe that this is a Kurganist success? Ha Ha Ha
Tweet of one of the people involved in recent rakhigarhi excavation:
"Genome sequencing is done from Rakhigarhi which is part of Bronze Age Civilization.
The preservative condition of the samples is not good given the environmental conditions which poses difficulty in extracting sample. Many samples go in the lab"
Sigh!
@Rob, yeah, it does seem like you're not the only one that I can remember finding better models might with Steppe_MLBA samples. I don't have confidence that I'd get decent enough SNPs etc with the single target sample and the pRight that we'd need, so I'm not going to try qpAdm myself.
But a problem for Steppe_MLBA related ancestry is that after the time of IRN_Hajji_Firuz_BA female, when we get to Iron Age NW Iranians I2327 (from Hajji Firuz) and F38 from Hasanlu, both of them are males with a R1b1a1b1b haplogroup in ISOGG notation, which matches best with the Yamnaya/Afanasievo Steppe_EMBA group.
The abstract here seems to suggest that these guys aren't an outlier condition, but actually these Yamnaya/Afanasievo related patrilineages enter and are commonly found with the steppe ancestry since 2300 BCE.
So that's a potential inconsistency; how do we have these type of patrilineages entering if its with an autosomal Steppe_MLBA ancestry? So I can see why people (and I myself) might tend to the idea of "Oh, well, maybe it's just topped up locally with some extra Anatolian ancestry". But if this paper is what its cracked up to be in terms of the sample richness they have available (it's not all just loads of Iron Age Anatolians or something), hopefully we will have sufficient sets of samples for both pLeft and pRight to look into this in more depth with qpAdm.
On a side note, if we have an independent Yamnaya contribution to a population that coincides with the spread of an Inner/Core Indo-European language (I can't remember the exact term we've been using), that's a big problem for the idea that Corded Ware were Inner/Core Indo-European, and Yamnaya spoke a kind of earlier ancestor language that was a side branch that lacked core IE linguistic features. To add to the problems with this found by Ringbauer's work finding 4th/6th degree cousins between early Corded Ware and Yamnaya. Unless we are to say that these people aren't actually the ancestors of the Armenians, and these came later, which seems like it could have its own problems.
On a side, side note, the Hasanlu and Hajji Firuz IA samples do have less apparent steppe ancestry/northern shift than the LBA Armenians, so possibly these are more representative of why Reich Lab claims that ancestry is reduced to a third of its peak. (E.g. on Vahaduo's PCA: https://imgur.com/a/mcB6GOj ).
@Rob, followup comment, look at the set in the region on Vahaduo PCA, I can see why the late Bronze Age Taldaysay from 1200 BCE might work, as a combination of Hajji_Firuz_BA being off cline from a straight Yamnaya-Hajji_Firuz_CA mix.
But at the same time, we've got the Yamnaya related male lineages in published samples attested later in time (and already in the BA if the abstract's right), we've got Yamnaya type steppe EMBA ancestry moving south with these haplogroups across the Caucasus with Kubano-Tersk_Late, and the later Hasanlu and Hajji_Firuz_IA are pretty on target for Catacomb+Hajji_Firuz_CA: https://imgur.com/a/mcB6GOj
So the Anatolian ancestry being slightly variable in the admixing Near Eastern population does seem more likely to me as an explanation.
@ Matt
It’s not a problem - the Armenia_MBA (herein 55%) broadly encapsulates the post-Kura, Catacomb-infused state of play. Catacomb = Yamnaya in male lineages
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-potentially-violent-end-to-kura.html?m=1
Catacomb seems like Yamnaya in everything (male lineages, autosome, even mtdna)?
E.g. just seemed like a pretty good clade with Afanasievo, Yamnaya and Poltavka - https://imgur.com/a/Nn6EYXz, in qpAdm (with about 309804 polymorphisms, so not the highest but pretty robust).
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