Saturday, June 18, 2022

David Reich on the origin of the Yamnaya people (!?)


Harvard's David Reich is doing a talk next month about the genetic history of West Asia and nearby parts of Europe. This is a quote from an online abstract of the talk (found here).

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.

If this is actually what David Reich is going to claim then I'd say his team has a lot of work to do before they put out their paper on the topic.

First of all, Yamnaya did not have two distinct gene flows from West Asia. I don't even know what that means exactly, but there's no way that this statement is correct no matter how one interprets it.

In fact, the Yamnaya population formed on the Pontic-Caspian steppe from earlier groups native to this part of Eastern Europe, such as the people associated with the Sredny Stog culture.

That is, there were no migrations from West Asia into Eastern Europe that can be claimed to have been instrumental in the emergence of the Yamnaya population. On the other hand, Yamnaya may have been significantly influenced by cultural impulses from West Asia, but this is nothing new.

In terms of deep population structure, the Yamnaya genotype can be described as a mixture between Eastern European and West Asian-related genetic components. However, these Asian-related components were already in Europe thousands of years before Yamnaya came into existence.

Indeed, soon to be published ancient DNA shows that hunter-gatherers very similar to the Yamnaya people, packing quite a lot of West Asian-related ancestry, lived in the Middle Don region (just north of the Pontic-Caspian steppe) well before 5,000 BCE (see here).

So, did the West Asian ancestors of these Middle Don hunter-gatherers speak Proto-Indo-European, or, as David Reich calls it, Indo-Anatolian? Keep in mind that most linguists put the birth of Indo-Anatolian around 4,000 BCE, which is actually the Sredny Stog period.

Moreover, in underlining Anatolia's supposed impermeability to exogenous migration, David Reich is arguing against things that no one worth their salt ever claimed. That's because the spread of Indo-Anatolian speakers into Anatolia has never really been described by archeologists and linguists as a massive migration, but rather as an infiltration into lands already heavily populated by the Hattians (for instance, see here).

We may have already seen the genetic evidence of this infiltration in the presence of steppe Y-chromosome haplogroup R-V1636 in a Chalcolithic burial at Arslantepe (see here and here). Let's wait and see what else crops up over the next few years as many more ancient Anatolian genomes are sequenced by David Reich and colleagues.

See also...


122 comments:

  1. @David,

    But could it not be assumed that the study of the ancient populations on the Don and Dnieper is one thing, and the arrival of another two paternal troops of the lines R1a and R1b, in fact PIE, is another thing - from that Southern Arc?

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  2. I am ignorant on this topic but I am curious so I would like to know your opinion.

    Quoting Nemets

    "If I’m understanding David Reich correctly, he thinks the rectangular building people (with haplogroup J?) who invaded S Caucasus from N Iran in 6th millennium BC were the speakers of proto-Indo-Hittite."

    Were they cousin lineages to those who arrived from hotu cave and admixed with AASI 5500bce in Indus valley?

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  3. @StP

    R1a and R1b are native to Eastern Europe. They didn't come to the steppe from the so called Southern Arc.

    And considering that hunter-gatherers with West Asian-related ancestry lived in the Middle Don, then good luck trying find populations without West Asian-related ancestry in the region that mixed with migrants from the Southern Arc to form Yamnaya.

    So this isn't just about parsimony, with Yamnaya likely to have been derived from Sredy Stog, with which it matches so well genetically, but about what's actually possible after 4,000 BCE or even after 5,000 BCE.

    Southern Arc my ass.

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  4. I think one of the questions I have here is whether, with all these new samples and with enrichment of existing samples to higher SNPs/coverage, are they now placed to detect some fine structures of multiple waves with confidence that have been hard so far? Do they have samples from the steppes that suggest admixture in situ? Even if only some transient genetic influence. This need not be an actual direct admixture - it could be exactly the sort of trail that people would accept for Anatolian, but it should be something. Is their new sample set providing some kind "ace in the hole" or not?

    You've got Nick Patterson's comment on it all here, last month: https://imgur.com/a/f4NdhB4 , which is still of the side that there aren't enough samples to provide the full detail and that Yamnaya form "genetically" about 4000 BCE.

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  5. @Matt

    If there are hunter-gatherers in the Middle Don with something like 1/3 Caucasus-related ancestry, then I'm pretty sure that there will be hunter-gatherers closer to the Caucasus with 1/2 or even 3/4 Caucasus-related ancestry.

    We might even get to the point where the Vonyuchka and Progress samples from ~4,000 BCE cease to be interesting, because there will be Yamnaya-like people further north dating to ~5,000 BCE.

    I'm guessing that's basically what Nick Patterson is getting at as well. That is, the big picture is known, but we need more samples to flesh out the details of where and when exactly.

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  6. Setting aside for a moment whether or not the CHG-related ancestry in the steppe should be referred to as "West Asian," I'm much more curious about what Reich has in mind when he speaks of Yamnaya having two distinct "West Asian gene flows." Could he be talking about gene flow into Yamnaya proper itself or is he also referring to Yamnaya's ANCESTORS on the steppe? If the latter, the idea of two waves of CHG-related admixture into the steppe reflects this passage from the upcoming Allentoft Stone Age Eurasia paper:

    "We demonstrate that this “steppe” ancestry (Steppe_5000BP_4300BP) can be modelled as a
    mixture of ~65% ancestry related to herein reported hunter-gatherer genomes from the Middle Don
    River region (MiddleDon_7500BP) and ~35% ancestry related to hunter-gatherers from Caucasus
    (Caucasus_13000BP_10000BP)"

    The CHG-related ancestry the Don HGs already have might constitute the first "West Asian" wave that Reich alludes to, with wave 2 being a reference to the CHG-related ancestry found in later steppe pops (that which is in excess of what's already in Don HGs). Maybe Reich simply replicated what Allentoft found and is trying to communicate the same ideas. I guess we'll find out soon.

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  7. @Michalis

    Neither Reich nor Allentoft are making much sense to me.

    Like I pointed out to Matt above, we might eventually see Yamnaya-like people somewhere on the steppe dating to 5,000 BCE.

    Take a look how far north those Middle Don samples are from.

    Why would we need them to get to Yamnaya, if we already have proto-Yamnaya on the steppe?

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  8. @Michalis

    The most parsimonious explanation is that the second "west asian" geneflow is ANF no? Considering he described them as distinct geneflows, and Harvard's tendency to analyze things using broad components I doubt it would refer to two distinct CHG/Iranian geneflows. But who knows we will see eventually.

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  9. On a side note, what happened to those progress-like neolithic foragers from the Volga-Caspian region that Anthony wss talking about last year, or those from Saratov?

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  10. Samples closer to the Caucasus could remain interesting if it seems like they have the right y haplogroups (or closer relatives to them) and practice pastoralism and the more northern populations don't. There can be shuffling and replacement between related populations like this. Have to wait this one out.

    On the topic of the Sredni Stog samples, at the moment it looks like (as of about a year ago) Reich lab, from David Anthony's presentation, they have a *lot* of Khvalynsk samples, but only 4 Sredni-Stog samples and 1 early Sredni-Stog sample: https://imgur.com/a/MWX38hE . All of these samples are from the boundaries of present day Ukraine (so mustn't be from the Don?). The Sredni Stog overlap with Yamnaya while "Early Sredni-Stog" is north.

    This may be why Nick Patterson describes the Sredni Stog with high confidence as being variably admixed; if the 4 Sredni-Stog samples turned out to be relatives or something like this, that could further functionally reduce the set...

    From the "Stone Age Eurasia" paper we also have these two samples, from Middle Don River, who are genetically north of Yamnaya: https://imgur.com/a/nFdP7FI

    (On a tangent, kind of interesting question maybe whether there's then a coincidence that the samples in Anthony's PCA from Yamnaya_Russia_Don, who have enriched HG ancestry compared to Yamnaya, are also from Don River. Was this a holdout region of enriched HG ancestry?).

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  11. @Matt

    I've seen some very Yamnaya-like samples from southwestern Ukraine dating to ~4,000 BCE, but I think their precise archeological affinities are still being worked out.

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  12. @Copper Axe

    Yeah, I think Reich means CHG-related and Anatolian-related gene flows.

    But if Yamnaya got its CHG-related ancestry from Eastern European hunter-gatherers, and its Anatolian-related ancestry from European farmers, then that has nothing to do with Proto-Indo-European, because it's all way too old.

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  13. @Davidski

    "But if Yamnaya got its CHG-related ancestry from Eastern European hunter-gatherers, and its Anatolian-related ancestry from European farmers, then that has nothing to do with Proto-Indo-European, because it's all way too old."

    Anatolian ancestry would fit in with the Proto-Indo-European period, particularly if Altvred suggestion that Patterson's 4400-4000 BC dates are actually a sign of EEF introgression is correct. It would perfectly match up with Archaic PIE (pre-Anatolian split).

    However good luck trying to convince that a <10% trickle of EEF ancestry lead to the dispersion of a language amongst peoples which from linguistics can be assumed to have been highly patrilineal, patriarchal and patrilocal.

    Regarding the CHG, I agree that it is way too old to be relevant for PIE. This is why I find "EHG language" "CHG language" debates to be a bit silly. I still don't understand why so few people this academic circle has ever made the suggestion that CHG-like ancestry would have been present in Eastern Europe since the later mesolithic. Aside from genetic evidence that points towards it, there is some archaeology that points towards this too after the Caspian sea flooding. You'd expect someone like David Anthony to come up with this considering his expertise being the prehistoric volga steppes, but alas.

    For the folks who are unaware, you can read more about it here: https://musaeumscythia.blogspot.com/2022/01/when-did-western-steppe-herder-genetic.html

    And lets be real the whole reason why they were so fixated on this is due to their fascination with "farmer language dispersal theory"(no surprise that MPI is shilling Transeurasian now) but after Wang 2019 it should've been clear there is no correlation with CHG ancestry and agriculture, because it seems that the most CHG-rich populations on the steppes were also foragers until quite late.

    If the argument is then that Archaic PIE split somewhere in the Near East (Armenia, Iran, or are they returning to Anatolia now again?) I think they have to provide very solid evidence that the CHG/Iranian related geneflow into the steppes has a recent and strong affinity with the same geneflows in Anatolia that they then associate with Proto-Anatolian languages, rather than pointing to broad genetically related components. Why? Because the split between Anatolian and common PIE has time constraints going by linguistics.

    Also, I just want to say that it is quite silly to have 700+ samples from the Southern Arc and then being so fixated on the topic of Proto-Indo-European, rather than the many different ethnolinguistic groups of the Ancient Near East. Can't Afro-Asiatic languages get some love from Harvard? Sumerians? Hurrians? Elamites? Etc.

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  14. @Copper Axe

    Anatolian ancestry can only possibly represent Proto-Indo-European in Yamnaya if it came from south of the Caucasus during 4400-4000 BC, or later.

    If it came from the west, like the Balkans, then no, because this would actually be European farmer ancestry.

    And I don't think anyone is stupid enough to still claim that European farmers were Indo-European speakers.

    But yeah, the idea that Yamnaya got its language from some minor gene flow from south of the Caucasus doesn't look too hot, especially considering how far west its ethnogenesis probably was anyway; in Ukraine and actually closer to the Balkans than the Caucasus.

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  15. Copper Axe: Also, I just want to say that it is quite silly to have 700+ samples from the Southern Arc and then being so fixated on the topic of Proto-Indo-European, rather than the many different ethnolinguistic groups of the Ancient Near East. Can't Afro-Asiatic languages get some love from Harvard? Sumerians? Hurrians? Elamites? Etc.

    I'm not sure there's a *lot* they could say about those? Their model here is: "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." So probably they could say that where the Levant farmers were a new demic expansion, language probably shifted to Afro-Asiatic, while where they admixed into local communities languages tended to continue. And I daresay they will. But what else? Sumerian / Elamite etc aren't dispersing language families so it's not really like they *need* an origin point explained, or that there's evidence we could comprae to get there. Afro-Asiatic dispersing with Neolithic Levant farmers is not really so controversial, but they could comment on the Mesolithic dispersal proposal.

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  16. Maybe they could do a bit more on those topics, but I don't really mind that the abstract bit chose to tell us about the dispersal of steppe ancestry into NW Iran / Armenia for'ex.

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  17. @Davidski said... R1a and R1b are native to Eastern Europe. They didn't come to the steppe from the so called Southern Arc…. June 18, 2022 at 2:08 AM

    I understand and I do not deny their native origin, I like it!
    But I wouldn't rule out some extra old south groups, maybe even some prePIE language.
    I have no arguments to exclude some old R1a branches there in the Middle East
    After all, there are representatives of the first descendants of R1a-CTS11530, the father of YP4141> YP5018 and of YP459.

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  18. I don’t know about two separate genetic pulses from the “Southern Arc” into Yamnaya or the population that would become Yamnaya, but the linguistic argument against a Southern Arc origin for early Indo-European (“Indo-Hittite” or whatever) is too strong to be overcome by the simple negative that Reich et al have yet to find much steppe DNA in ancient Anatolian remains. Anatolia and the rest of the Southern Arc were simply too full of non-IE speakers to have been the IE Urheimat, non-IE speakers whose languages had little or no influence on the formation of early IE, as they should have had, if early IE was actually born in their midst.

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  19. "Eastern wing of Southern Arc"

    Where is that ?

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  20. This is an interesting tidbit.

    "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."

    The point is it doesn't seem clear if this lack of differences in steppe ancestry among social strata is overall, i.e. all samples lumped together, or can be seen per site.

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  21. So Indo-Anatolian originated in the Eastern Arc where Earlier Yamnaya from the Steppe reached into earlier, Yamnaya Genes slowly disappeared but the Language survived and spread with more local type genes into Anatolia....so Language spread without the Genes of the originators...

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  22. Makes me think that Indo-Anatolian was a widely used trade language. A type of Lingua Franca...if the spread from the Eastern Arc holds some truth...?

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  23. As one point of interest for what this does say about Near Eastern languages...

    One objection raised by JP Mallory, I think, to IE either moving up through the Caucuses or down through the Caucuses, was that it couldn't have done so without disturbing the rich diversity of languages there. That's an argument for why Armenian must have come via a later erased pulse through Northern Anatolia, from the Balkans.

    But it seems like this finding with what would be putatively pre-proto-Armenian would suggest that actually IE speakers/steppe people, just did move down through the Caucuses, without changing languages much there. And at the same time brought the Yamnaya related patrilineages down to Armenia there, while in the North Caucasus, where they left an imprint autosomally, there's neither an imprint in ydna or language. This maybe tells us something about how those people interacted with people moving up from the steppe.

    (Maybe this is some more supportive evidence for the idea that ydna commonly moves with languages? Though the Iberian and Polynesian case still provide some counterexamples).

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  24. @David said…Anatolian ancestry can only possibly represent Proto-Indo-European in Yamnaya if it came from south of the Caucasus during 4400-4000 BC, or later.

    The Indo-European linguist prof.LB asked me, where do geneticists place the origins of the pre-PIE, these Anatolian and Tocharian outliers? There, south of the Caucasus, it would be appropriate!
    See Outliers prePIE by Kassian:
    http://www.tropie.tarnow.opoka.org.pl/images/kassian2019-radiation-ie-languages.jpg

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  25. So, David Reich is coming around to it?
    And still the story is the same as always. Truth has it way, does it not?

    PIE originated in the Shulaveri-Shomu (eastern wing of the Southern Arc) and migrated to steppe by 4900BC where it began the admix to become yamnaya after being sredni stog, as much as on the other hand it remained around eastern Anatolia specially in Erzurum region.

    I am curious though if Reich is going to state it plainly or not.

    Note: they mention neolithic Armenia (Aratashen) because it’s the only Shulaveri DNA they got their hand on. The rest is from the many more sites of that culture in Georgia but unfortunately it’s in the hands of the French, and what falls in French hands goes full black hole.

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  26. So Yamnaya can't transmit their language to West Asia without gene input, but West Asians can transmit their language to Yamnaya without gene input? Alright... Or is he insinuating the female mediated West Asian ancestry is the one responsible for the language?

    This truly makes no sense linguistically either as West Asia had largely adopted agriculture, and PIE lacks farming terminology. PIE is a pastoralist language.

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  27. I agree with Copper Axe that this is all coming from the the idea everything in the modern "world" must be from the first farmers in the Fertile Crecent.

    They expressed this idea in their last paper on the first farmers. Now they are dong it again.

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  28. I'm frustrated with David Reich.

    I can't help but wonder, does he ever read this blog?

    Someone needs to seriously yell at him and tell him to read this blog. He shouldn't try to solve these questions in an isolated Harvard cave.

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  29. https://a-genetics.blogspot.com/2022/03/anatolian-from-armenia.html

    The anatolian languages have nothing to do with steppe. It's time you realize, accept and internalize this. Kurgan theory is dead.

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  30. The 2 waves from Asia into steppe are
    1. Older CHG (seen in khvalynsk).
    2. Additional IranN related (seen in progress)
    Has been clear to me since long.

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  31. @Copper Axe "And lets be real the whole reason why they were so fixated on this is due to their fascination with "farmer language dispersal theory"(no surprise that MPI is shilling Transeurasian now) but after Wang 2019 it should've been clear there is no correlation with CHG ancestry and agriculture, because it seems that the most CHG-rich populations on the steppes were also foragers until quite late."

    Slightly offtopic, but speaking of Transeurasian, there was this recent preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.09.495471v1

    The authors argue against Transeurasian family and one of the authors is Russell D. Gray, also from MPI. On the other hand, Gray is not without his won problems.

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  32. @StP

    I have no arguments to exclude some old R1a branches there in the Middle East
    After all, there are representatives of the first descendants of R1a-CTS11530, the father of YP4141> YP5018 and of YP459.


    You're not making any sense because you're talking about modern DNA.

    You don't know where those lineages were 2,000 years ago, let alone 5,000 years ago.

    There's no real evidence of any R1a in the Middle East before the Bronze Age.

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  33. Well, there is clear archaeological, linguistic & genetic evidence of a movement of steppe groups via Balkans into Anatolia.


    Barcin_C
    Turkey_N
    Russia_Caucasus_Maikop_Novosvobodnaya
    Bulgaria_EBA_Yamnaya_o

    best coefficients: 0.398 0.380 0.221
    tailprob 0.465245




    Turkey_OldHittite
    Turkey_Ikiztepe_LateC
    Bulgaria_BeliBreyag_EBA

    best coefficients: 0.673 0.327
    tailprob 0.287285


    To recap from previous thread, we have clear evidence for -
    Balkan/steppe -> Luwian/Hittite in Anatolia c. post-4000 BC
    Catacomb -> proto-Armenian in southern Caucasus c. 2200 BC
    Both Cataomb & Timber-grave ancstrey in W Asia 2220 BC, and movement into India after 1500 BC. The 20th century European linguists & archaeologists pretty much nailed it, unless these woke new flops :)


    Basic layout of Anatolian languoscape : Kura-Araxes is probably linked with Huro-Urartian






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  34. Barcin_C dated 3900-3600bce
    Novosvobodnaya samples dated 3500-3000bce.
    Bulgaria_EBA_Yamnaya_o dated 3000bce, plus it's an outlier.

    Yamnaya complex didnt even exist at the time of Barcin_C.

    That model is crap. Stop misleading people with nonsense.

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  35. The two distinct gene flows they speak of are probably ordinary Danubian-like farmers and the other a more Levantine or Zargosian variety identifiable by high CHG. And they were certainly north of the 'then' Black Sea now under 39,000 sq miles of salt water including the then lower littorals and North Turkey. But archaeologically, for the lack of a better designation, Impresso folk. (and no I don't buy them being identical to Danubian farmers)

    "Indeed, soon to be published ancient DNA shows that hunter-gatherers very similar to the Yamnaya people, packing quite a lot of West Asian-related ancestry, lived in the Middle Don region (just north of the Pontic-Caspian steppe) well before 5,000 BCE"

    See Dymytro Gaskevych. We're not talking random impresso pots but an entire regional phenomenon from the early neolithic in the Northern Black Sea region. really, just about everywhere there is water. But importantly, these immigrants would have come from two directions, the Adriatic and the Byblian coast eventually.

    But in any case, insitu is my vote.

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  36. qpAdm for Hittite = Ikiztepe_lateC + Belibrayag_EBA

    left pops:
    Turkey_OldHittitePeriod.SG

    Turkey_Ikiztepe_LateC - 0.967 +- 0.046
    Bulgaria_BeliBreyag_EBA - 0.033 +- 0.046

    p-value = 0.00062 Fail

    https://pastebin.com/N3Gm1gqS

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  37. @ Vasistha

    Yes I suspect you won;t like that because it disproves your biased & misinformed peddling.
    No, that Yamnaya individual from BGR is not an outlier, but a typical representative of Yamnaya groups in the East Balkans. What the curators of the dataset labelled it has no bearing on reality. Secondly, Yamnaya like people already existed by 4000 BC, it seems that everybody is aware of that apart from you. Thirdly, your own models conflate much older Cuacasian -related ancestry flowing across northern Anatolia with Kura-Araxes culture, which you additionally ignore the non-congruency of its ditribution with I.E. languages.

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  38. This so-called "Iran _N" ancestry sweeping across Anatolia after 5000 BC are a second, more northern Neolithic wave rich in CHG. They reached all the way to Greece, and formed a possible basis for Hatto-Minoan, Kaskian, etc.

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  39. @Rob

    Everyone now accepts the non steppe/balkan origin of anatolian other than fringe idiots on this blog. I'll let you seethe.

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  40. @Vasishta

    "Kurgan theory is dead."

    Again? O dear.

    So if the Kurgan theory is dead please tell me which culture is the source of PIE. Or which candidates there are.

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  41. @ Vas

    So who brought PIE to Europe ? CHG, or Majkop or Indians or Sarmatians ? You’ve got no clear thesis apart from manipulating the data disingenuously
    Moreover, you’re projecting your own biases. Many here have entertained various positions, but people who have a clue over the years have coalesced around a similar conclusion.
    Don’t mind the current fad by some of these low acuity geneticists - It’ll pass before legitimate linguists & archaeologists even take notice of it.

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  42. The claims that ancient Van region didn't have Steppe ancestry unlike the territory of modern Armenia is not surprising. Because there is a mountain range separating those two regions. And the mountain Ararat reaching 5160 meters above sea is part of those range.
    But I would be very surprised if no any R1b or no any outlier is found in Van region. If R1b managed to reach South Levant BA why he would be missing in Van.
    Btw those results suggest an interesting perspective that the MLBA period Van-Urmia ware was proto-Urartian. Or at last partly was Urartian.

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  43. @bellbeakerblogger: The two distinct gene flows they speak of are probably ordinary Danubian-like farmers and the other a more Levantine or Zargosian variety identifiable by high CHG.

    Probably not since they claim this supports an origin in the eastern wing of the Southern Arc (which Southern Arc more or less means Fertile Crescent but wider).

    In terms of models for Afanasievo (which has the best coverage and forms a clade with Yamnaya), I am still finding the model that gives me the best p values is: Caucasus_Maikop, Khvalynsk, Steppe_Eneolithic (Progress+Vonyuchka). Where Caucasus_Maikop (Novosvobodnaya set) is a proxy where I'd prefer to use the Eneolithic Darkveti-Meshoko samples (for reasons that they are more optimal in time and have less Anatolian and Iranian related ancestry and more CHG) but that would start to kill my SNPs (because there's two of them and they're relatives and don't have especially good coverage).

    By comparison, I don't get passing p values from: 1) Russia_Karelia_HG, Caucasus_Maikop, Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic, 2) Ukraine_N, Poland_Globular_Amphora, Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic, 3) Ukraine_N, Ukraine_Eneolithic_Trypillia, Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic, 4) Ukraine_N, Ukraine_Eneolithic_Trypillia, Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic, 5) Poland_Globular_Amphora, Russia_Khvalynsk_Eneolithic, Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic, 6) Ukraine_Eneolithic_Trypillia, Russia_Khvalynsk_Eneolithic, Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic

    Now, I'm not totally 100% on this, as there might be some limitations in the setup (I've got CHG and Iran_N in the outgroups, so that's no issue, but I can't use Steppe_Eneolithic in the outgroups and ancestral populations). But I'm not seeing anything like the evidence that Wang's paper seems to claim that the Yamnaya must have ancestors from specifically European farmer populations (and I do have both EHG and WHG related mesolithic groups in my outgroups, as well as Native American, European Upper Paleolithic etc). It seems like these models "like" to have the Afanasievo better as taking a point on Steppe_Eneolithic->Khvalynsk cline and then displacing it towards the Caucasus, compared to taking a point on that same cline and then displacing it towards GAC/Trypillian. (Or anything similar taking a point on a Steppe_Eneolithic to Ukraine_N cline).

    So, a model of a second wave of ancestry from the "eastern wing of the Southern Arc" seems genetically plausible (and in the above model, potentially in reasonably substantial amounts like 30%). But it's not decisive. They must actually show that this actually happens in some region of the steppe adjacent to the Caucasus and then results in a northern migration to form the basis of Sredni-Stog, which I don't think they actually can on the basis of the samples I'd guess them to have.

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  44. On their finding of the migration to Armenia, note a golden oldie from Davidski that called it:

    https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2019/02/catacomb-armeniamlba.html

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  45. on the southern Farmers theme, I previously made the claim that Barcin_N only has ~ 30% AHG, contrary to popular belief.


    Turkey_N
    Pinarbasi
    Satsurblia_HG
    Jordan_PPNB

    best coefficients: 0.322 0.126 0.551
    tailprob 0.1006

    Full out

    Although AHG-like ancestry might be in north Levantine PPNB groups

    Can't wait for Mesopotamian data.

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  46. @Rob, I think we'll probable see some high coverage and non-contaminated Natufian people, which have indicated as something the Reich Lab are doing by the anno files for quite a while. So this'll give a firm basis on how much the Levantine farmers are themselves a by product of geneflow back from Anatolia/Northern Fertile Crescent. And be very useful to frame proper qpAdm analyses without having to use later populations with decent coverage (I generally use Israel_C for the most part).

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  47. Hi Davidski, Razib Khan wrote a comment about this Reich paper, and he also referred to you:




    "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 [Looking online, there’s a 2012 paper that indicates that modern Armenians have of the specifically Yamnaya R1b lineage. If this, true might explain why Armenian is so hard to place within a Indo-European tree, as Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-European seem to come out of a broader Corded Ware cultural complex], 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 [David of Eurogenes does not like this, but this could mean Anatolian and CHG/Iranian pulses?],👉 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."

    https://www.gnxp.com/


    It seems that many are thrilled about Reich's validation of the Anatolian hypothesis.



    ReplyDelete
  48. @Rob

    "So who brought PIE to Europe ? CHG, or Majkop or Indians or Sarmatians ? You’ve got no clear thesis apart from manipulating the data disingenuously"

    The 2nd wave of that additional 35% CHG 'like' ancestry brought IE to the steppe. That 2nd wave had minimal Barcin_N ancestry, which rejects south caucaus and western iran as a source for that time period. I'm also detecting significant Tarim_emba related ancestry in Progress II (just add it to outgroup and check). Which region/source is left? :))

    Dont worry, with time everything will be clear. Some important regions dont even have pre 4000bce samples available yet.

    @epoch

    '"Kurgan theory is dead."

    Again? O dear.

    So if the Kurgan theory is dead please tell me which culture is the source of PIE. Or which candidates there are.'

    Gimbutas's kurgan theory is dead. Steppe is not the original homeland. Internalize it and save yourself from embarrassment. Any candidate other than steppe is a better fit for the original homeland. Anatolia/armenia/iran/SC Asia are all better. Anatolian samples prove it.

    ReplyDelete
  49. @Matt,

    Whatever the genetic affinity of people B, I'm only pointing to the elephant in the room, which the Reich people seem totally unaware. That is that two (broadly) distinct archaeological groups existed in the North Pontic in close proximity during the timeframe in which mixing should have occurred.

    Whether the Black Sea flooded in a catastrophic deluge or if it happened gradually from 8000bc to 5500bc, it would have affected the economies of both peoples, those that relied on salmon runs and fishing traditionally, and those who, for whatever reason, tended small living like goats and sheets close to the water's edge. In any case, the full salinization of the Black Sea seems to happen right around the formation of Sredny Stog, although that's still controversial.

    So, in short, I think IE forming anywhere else is ridiculous, but these Impresso peoples were probably more numerous that we might expect and all there progeny were subsumed by patrilocal hunter lineages. Probably over thousands of years, maybe less.

    ReplyDelete
  50. Well, here's a little to chew on. You could say, like with the Beaker Phenomenon, the miscegenation of pottery techniques and styles means that people were intermarrying as well. North Pontic.

    https://www.e-anthropology.com/English/Catalog/Archaeology/STM_DWL_UAeh_StH6wnkOSeHb.aspx


    ReplyDelete
  51. @ Matt
    True , although the high coverage PPNB genome from Feldman belonged to hg N1b, unlike U of Pinarbasi. ANF are then inundated by hg N1.
    Clearly, these are separate post-glacial networks ; with large scale migration into Anatolia at start of farming (Although I know one person tried to claim that such lineages are “native” to Anatolia )

    ReplyDelete
  52. @ BBB

    I'm not sold on that idea of a Mediterranean origin for the “Impresso pottery' in Black Sea region. Instead, impressed pottery was a feature of local Pontic mesolithic groups enegaged in discourse with Balkan neolithic. Most recently, a young ukrainian archaeologist drew close parallels with Balkan Impressed wares. Agatha Reinrguber strongly advocates the forager roles in broad exchange networks in creating this style
    (A network of the steppe and forest steppe along the Prut and Lower Danube rivers during the 6th millennium BC)


    @ Vasistha

    “The 2nd wave of that additional 35% CHG 'like' ancestry brought IE to the steppe. That 2nd wave had minimal Barcin_N ancestry, which rejects south caucaus and western iran as a source for that time period. I'm also detecting significant Tarim_emba related ancestry in Progress II (just add it to outgroup and check). Which region/source is left? :))''

    That’s all quite interesting as far as post-glacial and early pottery HG networks goes, but trying to force that into a model of PIE dispersal is difficult for several reasons
    - lack of basal IE languages in south caspian region
    - The expansive male lineages of IE were R1a, R1b and I2a2, none of which come from Iran or India or the southern Caspia senso lato
    - there is no cultural synonymity between south Caspian and Pontic steppe. Instead, the latter formed in situ over several millenia from local forager-fisher-hunteing groups in early dialogue with EEF . The Maykop model pushed by Hansen & the Germans is the same “magic bullet” BS that you you love to malign.
    - CHG is present by at least 6000 BC in the steppe, thus 2,000 years before PIE coalseced into an expasive ideological system & final language proto-state.

    In other words, the “language of CHG” is a moot point, as Copper Axe pointed out


    “Dont worry, with time everything will be clear. Some important regions dont even have pre 4000bce samples available yet.
    '''


    Thanks for the reassurance. I won’t belabor the issue, but there is Steppe via Balkan ancestry in Barcin_C (3800 bc), Kumtepe 4 (3000 bc) and even central Anatolia (2000 bc). With the upcoming data, it'll be even more clear.

    ReplyDelete
  53. Blogger Matt said…
    "One objection raised by JP Mallory, I think, to IE either moving up through the Caucuses or down through the Caucuses, was that it couldn't have done so without disturbing the rich diversity of languages there.”

    Yeah, the Black Sea may have been a highway not an obstruction.
    If you use Google Maps to track a canoe trip from the cosat of Georgia to Istanbul, it would take SEVEN DAYS.
    But Google maps says the same journey through Russia and the Balkans on foot would take THREE MONTHS.
    Also, it says somewhere that the Russian rivers all dictate the current in the Black Sea. So if you just float a raft you end up on the south shore in Turkey.

    Another thing is that, awhile ago, it became apparent that archaeologists in Turkey were misdating sites by about 1000 years too late.
    Stuff was coming into Anatolia from the Balkans — like high arsenic copper daggers — around 4000 BCE.
    (see Thomas Zimmermann1 Early daggers in Anatolia – a necessary reappraisal. Anodos. Studies of the Ancient World 4-5/2004-2005, 251-262.)

    So if Varna already had some steppes ancestry, then the opportunity for early IE traveling as a trade language was already there.

    Part of the reason Mallory pretty obviously doss this is to avoid the idea that Anatolian IE moved into the Steppes thru the Caucasus.
    No big deal. Unemotionally, steppes ancestry really looks like it spread IE just by populating all over Europe.
    So if early IE started in Anatolia, no big deal. The evidence says the big spread was out of the steppes.

    ReplyDelete
  54. ROB wrote:
    "CHG is present by at least 6000 BC in the steppe, thus 2,000 years before PIE coalseced into an expasive ideological system & final language proto-state."

    Yeah. That's modern ideology right there. There's no evidence of any proto-state or of any coalescing. And there's no way to know what language CHG people spoke in 6000 or 4000 BCE. That whole statement is not a belief. It may even be true, but there's no evidence for any of this.

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  55. @ /correct/ Davidski said... You're not making any sense because you're talking about modern DNA. You don't know where those lineages were 2,000 years ago, let alone 5,000 years ago. There's no real evidence of any R1a in the Middle East before the Bronze Age. June 18, 2022 at 5:38 PM
    .
    Lucyna Domanska 1990, Inowroclaw: „Caucasian and Black Sea cultural patterns in the development of late Neolithic society in the Lowlands of the border zone of Eastern and Central Europe (polish: Kaukasko-nadczarnomorskie wzorce kulturowe w rozwoju późnoneolitycznych spoÅ‚eczeÅ„stw Niżu strefy pogranicza Europy Wschodniej i Åšrodkowej)” Chap. II DÄ™by: Stand 29. Direct source justification for the reception of patterns of protoneolytic culture. Chap. III: The Caucasian-Black Sea stage of neolithization of the lowland societies in the border zone of Central and Eastern Europe.

    Archaeologist Domańska discusses the origin of the so-called Dęby-type inserts, microlithic in the Polish Kujawy region from around the middle of the 6th millennium.
    These Kuyavian microlithic inserts are like faithful inserts found, for example, in the Kura river basin in present-day Georgia and more broadly. In Central-Eastern Europe, between the Oder and the Dnieper, many archaeological sites with similar monuments have been found, testifying to the lively contacts between the people of the Janislawice culture and the Caucasus-Black Sea cultural region, and further south, around 5500 BC.

    ReplyDelete
  56. @StP

    You're confused.

    Interpretations of archeological data can't tell us anything about the history of R1a.

    There's no R1a in any ancient DNA from West Asia dating to before the Bronze Age, and that's because there was no R1a in West Asia before the Bronze Age.

    ReplyDelete
  57. @Vasishta

    "Gimbutas's kurgan theory is dead. Steppe is not the original homeland. Internalize it and save yourself from embarrassment. Any candidate other than steppe is a better fit for the original homeland. Anatolia/armenia/iran/SC Asia are all better. Anatolian samples prove it."

    So you don't have a theory at all?

    ReplyDelete
  58. @Vasishta

    What's the bet that those Middle Don hunter-gatherers from >5,000 BCE also have "Iran_N" ancestry?

    ReplyDelete
  59. @David,

    I have this book by prof. Lucyna Domańska from 1990 (with her personal dedication).
    On five maps it presents archaeological material from the area of Janisławice-RudoOstrow culture and other cultures further east to the Volga; compiled by over a dozen authors; originating from the Caucasus and the Middle East from the eighth to sixth millennium BC.
    These are nearly a dozen archaeological forms, imported or created locally, but according to the patterns from the Caucasus and the Middle East, from Natufia to the Tigris-Euphrates.
    So far, there is no genetic or ethnic elaboration.
    Our science somehow ignores this topic?

    ReplyDelete
  60. I personally think the wording is wrong, maybe intentionally so...If Yamnaya spread South from the Steppe like Mentioned, ended up in the Eastern Southern Arc and formed Indo-Anatolian there, then clearly the First wave was Southward from the Steppe. The Second wave was also from the Steppe but Later towards the West and East. I think the word "Secondary" is misleading...

    ReplyDelete
  61. It could be that Indo-Anatolian spread earlier from the Eastern part of the Southern Arc into Anatolia than Corded Ware and Later Yamnaya spread from Ukraine into Central and Western Europe but these were two totally separate events. The one did not flow chronologically into the other....

    ReplyDelete
  62. Maybe the point they are trying to make is that Language does not always spread with the Genes of the originators and that the bulk of Indo-Anatolian spread without the accompanying Steppe signal seen spreading throughout Europe. How this could have happened is up for grabs but there had to be a very good reason eg. A Lingua Franca within a trade Network...However then this can be superimposed upon the Steppe if there was a significant trade network between cultures and claims of Language adoption can be made....this basically has the potential to create a Never Ending Story and the Steppe/Europe haters will absolutely love this kind of scenario.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If I am not wrong Carnelian & Lapis Lazuli have been found in Maykop.

      Harappan merchants were everywhere... adventurous bunch of people :)

      Delete
    2. How much of this reached the Middle Don ? As far as I could gather most influences came from the Balkans....

      Delete
  63. One would have thought that the J1 in Karelia around 8300 years ago would have rung a bell at the possibility of CHG in Eastern Europe during the pre-Neolithic/Mesolithic period but it looks as if it fell on some deaf ears.....

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  64. The Karelia J1 Hunter Gatherers Paternal Ancestors must have entered the EHG rich zone at least +-300 years earlier to get the CHG bred out of him if it was a single adventurous Male moving into Eastern Europe. If his Ancestors moved as a group or groups then the timeframe of entry could have been much earlier in order to dilute the CHG Ancestry enough so that he appears as if he is part of the EHG. So 6600 BC. at Least...

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  65. Problem I believe is with the people who on the basis of limited data make absolutist arguments.

    Indians have seen the rule of Achaemenid Parathians Greeks Scythians Kushanas Huns Turks Turkic-Mongols and British starting 500bce which ended 1947.

    We don't speak their language. Our languages continued, evolved and reached their modern forms.

    East of Indus is still Indo-Aryan :) both in language & faith unlike most of our Iranian cousins who have fallen to semitic faith.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Persian never ruled bharat if we leave nadar shah.indogreek migrated and saka, parthian,kushan were descended of ancient indians.some of hunnic were defeated by guptas.

      Delete
  66. “” Lucyna Domanska 1990, Inowroclaw: „Caucasian and Black Sea cultural patterns in the development of late Neolithic society in the Lowlands of the border zone of Eastern and Central Europe (polish: Kaukasko-nadczarnomorskie wzorce kulturowe w rozwoju późnoneolitycznych spoÅ‚eczeÅ„stw Niżu strefy pogranicza Europy Wschodniej i Åšrodkowej)” Chap. II DÄ™by: Stand 29. Direct source justification for the reception of patterns of protoneolytic culture. Chap. III: The Caucasian-Black Sea stage of neolithization of the lowland societies in the border zone of Central and Eastern Europe.”

    It seems that this link is mediated via the ANE component which moved into Europe and Caucasus from Siberia



    @ Livonia G

    In ancient peoples we see strong correlation between languages and peoples and culture. Ancient peoples could form bonds on a biological basis and maintain them over vast distances through contacts and constructed ideologies.
    This is not a function of modern political bias, quite the contrary it was the “new school” of theorists who attempted to “disprove” that. The current trend in adna is the wish to show regions (at least some) have little continuity with their past “because nationalism is bad'.

    ReplyDelete
  67. @Rob said... It seems that this link is mediated via the ANE component which moved into Europe and Caucasus from Siberia

    ANE from Tigris-Euhhrates and Natufia?
    I wrote:"These are nearly a dozen archaeological forms, imported or created locally, but according to the patterns from the Caucasus and the Middle East, from Natufia to the Tigris-Euphrates."

    ReplyDelete
  68. Off topic overshare: Just found my 25th half sibling using commercial DNA testing!

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  69. The Middle Don hunter-gatherers are about 1/3 CHG-related ancestry. So they don't have anything to do with the Balkans.

    My guess is that Eneolithic proto-Yamnaya populations formed on the steppe from hunter-gatherers like the Middle Don foragers, but with much more CHG-related stuff.

    They then acquired some farmer ancestry from the Balkans and possibly the Caucasus, resulting in Yamnaya having ~10% Anatolian-related ancestry.

    So I can't see how Yamnaya's language can be associated with gene flows from south of the Caucasus.

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  70. Well there a in fact 3 flows broadly "west Asian' reaching Poonto-Caspian region

    1. Epipaleolithic CHG - broad diffusion along 'Volga network', but limited male uniparental impact. Amplified & multiplied via obsidian trade 6000 - 4000 bc

    2. Anatolian Farmer via Balkans-Central Europe - limited permeation along Dnieper border genomically, back reached as far as VOlga via local HGs
    2a - early LBK via Bug-Dniester
    2b. - Tripolye, with collapse of B-D
    2c. - GAC period

    3. Majkop sphere - limited permeation along lower Don, Ozera outliers, etc border 3800 - 3000


    But overall this is a development of 'native' groups ''cooking'' between 6000 & 4000 BC, then expanding outward.


    @ StP

    There aren't any direct items from Natufia in Poland or Eastern Europe. They reached the Caucasus , and were indirectly moved north local foragers during return-migration. But the major demic phenomenon impacting eastern parts of Europe & the Caucasus at that period was arrival of ANE.

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  71. Rob
    “ 1. Epipaleolithic CHG - broad diffusion along 'Volga network', but limited male uniparental impact. Amplified & multiplied via obsidian trade 6000 - 4000 bc.
    But overall this is a development of 'native' groups ''cooking'' between 6000 & 4000 BC, then expanding outward.”

    Do you think it's one population? In Allentoft's preprint, despite the fact that he has samples of Satsurblia and Cotias, the component Iran Neolithic is indicated as a component of the Middle Don.

    At the same time, the component of the progress and Vonuchka samples is Kotias and Satsurblia. Maybe there really were two components in the steppe - the Neolithic of Iran that entered through the eastern Caucasus older than 6000 BC and the Cotias that entered through the western (central Caucasus) about 4400-4000 BC?

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  72. What were Black Sea levels like around or just before 5,000 BCE?

    ReplyDelete
  73. I was googling this paper and I came across a reference to it that states there will be new Trypillian samples from Moldova in it.

    2019 – present. In collaboration with Moldovan Academy of Science, The National Museum of History of Moldova (Ministry of Culture of Moldova), Harvard University and Grand Valley State University from Michigan, USA established a joint project for Geo-Genetical research on ancient DNA human bone samples of the various Late Tripyllian archaeological groups from Moldova in April 2019 aiming to discover the Roots of Europe and most possible place of origin of the Indo-European language family. This project is still ongoing, but part of human bones provided with my full scholarship and initiative is reflected in upcoming 2021 Science’s article publication “
    The genetic history of the Southern Arc: a bridge between West Asia and Europe
    ”with my co-authorship (submitted for review panel on August 3, 2021)


    https://ku-dk.academia.edu/DrHenryShephard/CurriculumVitae

    ReplyDelete
  74. @Copper_Axe, I don't post on anthrogenica (I did for a brief time but lost my account details in a crash and then haven't bothered to re-register) but I do look in on the conversation from time to time, and I noticed you placed an interesting comment on about how the new IBD sharing methods should enable Harvard to sort out whether a contributing group to Yamnaya came from south of the steppe.

    Now I actually think that might be bit a challenge, if the groups with Anatolian ancestry from south of the steppe maintained high population size and don't have too much IBD. Though, even so there would be ways to use it - e.g. if that's the case Yamnaya/Sredny Stog would show a dip in shared IBD between themselves and earlier steppe populations beyond what could be explained by a low input of direct Anatolian/SE European EEF ancestry itself.

    What does seem relatively easy to do would be to confirm/eliminate whether the Anatolian is coming from one of the EEF groups that expanded into North Europe and have a lot of IBD with themselves.

    E.g. if a take the supplementary data from the recent paper on ancient Maltese (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222007059) which did an extensive IBD analysis between EEF groups that they included, and build a tree in PAST4: https://imgur.com/a/JZVvUlv

    We can see that in the IBD tree, many of the Anatolian samples (though this only goes up to the age of Tepecik!) don't really break from SE Europe, but the Northern and Western European groups they include (unfortunately not GAC) have a nice break in the tree where they have clear subtrees (GAC would likely have a clear subtree which is a sister to the SWE Ansarve Megalithic tree if they were included).

    So it should be relatively easy to find if we can identify GAC related chunks in Yamnaya or something like this.

    What might be more difficult is if both the potential direct SE European and Caucasian contributors of Anatolian to Yamnaya are plausible and both have very low levels of founder effects. Then we might be more stuck with looking at the first option I mentioned (is a decline in IBD in Yamnaya more consistent with a lower infusion of SE European EEF ancestry or a higher infusion of Caucasus Eneolithic ancestry?).

    However, in either case, one other good use of the IBD stuff should be to help look at population movements into Greece or Anatolia. Hopefully should be able to tell whether there are any signals of movement in that would be missed if we just looked at broad Anatolian ancestry proportions, e.g. at a minimum hopefully if Greece actually has ancestry from GAC or not, and thus from the Corded Ware (there seemed little evidence of this contributor in the Allentoft paper, in the steppe admixed Balkans, from a limited sample set, but I didn't go through with a fine-toothed comb) or just more directly from Catacomb.

    Harvard have mentioned a "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" so it's possible they actually do mean IBD sharing. Reich seemed quite excited about these methods in previous videos, so it's possible, although they haven't really published anything in this direction so far (in contrast to Copenhagen/Dublin).

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  75. @ Vladimir

    We would need to analyse the data ourselves ( Eg Copenhagen claimed the medieval Alans don’t have Sarmatian admixture when they clearly do )
    But there might be variation in the CHG because they came north at different times -

    “ Currently, in the Northern Caucasus (Golovanova et al., 2014), most sites have calibrated ra diocarbon dates before the cold Younger Dryas (12600-11900 calBP). In the region, there is no clear evidence of human occupation coinciding with Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (12000/11800– 11000 calBP) in the Levant. Only a few North Caucasian assemblages dated ca. 10500-8500 calBP can be preliminary synchronized with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (10950–8400 calBP) of the Levant. In the Northern Caucasus, the earliest sites with Neolithic ceramics (Mez- maiskaya Cave, layer 1-2B; Cmi open-air site) have similar dates about 8000–7500 calBP (Golovanova et al., 2016). We report results of modern research in these sites.
    (New data about the Neolithic in Northern Caucasus)


    So 3 episodes of habitation , which might have minor variation

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  76. Although, on my last comment on IBD signals between EEF groups as a signal for population movements where EEF is admixed with steppe, this might get more difficult if the EEF themselves made independent moves back south independently from the admixed Steppe-EEF groups.

    E.g. if Hungary Copper Age people moved south into the Balkans and Greece before Steppe ancestry arrived, that might be difficult to separate from a movement of people south with admixed ancestry from HUN_CA and steppe ancestry, without a very thick sample set. Quite difficult. For a purely hypothetical example.

    (Or as an analogy if, the British EEF reacted to worsening climate by migrating south to France - which is what would be sensible - of course probably female biased migration (due to patrilocality in pre-steppe Western Europe), leaving only a more pastoral remnant in Britain and surviving farmers in Orkney. Then if becomes to work out the true contribution of British EEF to later Western European populations.)

    ReplyDelete
  77. @Vladimir

    The fact that European domestic goats do not have East Caucasian Tur genes but some West Caucasian Tur genes rules out the spread of Iran Neolithic into the Steppe via an Eastern Caucasus route for me. If at all they had to go via a Middle or Western route...

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  78. @Ric Hern
    The nuance here is that the very first migrations of CHG older than 6000 BC were very conditionally agricultural. I've only seen mention of sheep. And Rob generally believes that this was a migration of typical HG. But if we assume that there was a second separate migration or, say, contact along the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka arc -the pearl ceramics culture of the North Caucasus (previously it was considered an early stage of Maykop) - the Tsopi-Sioni-Ginchi culture, then at this stage it is quite possible to exchange domesticated animals.

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  79. @Matt

    It was more along the lines of the CHG/Iran ancestry in steppe populations rather than ANF ancestry as this is seen as the "common denominator" between Anatolian IE and Steppe IE by Reich. If you have A that then splits into B and C, then B and C will have stronger IBD connections to A compared to genetically similar populations that did not contribute. It might be more of a hassle for Anatolian samples but regarding the steppe samples this should be manageable, atleast that is my impressions from looking at the tinlering with IBD that Allentoft and co. were able to pull off.

    And yes you could also apply this to the debate whether its EEF or ANF from Anatolia that is carried by steppe_emba populations.

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  80. Yeah, I think I got that and it's a good point; I wanted to respond that there might be some difficulties if the largely CHG derived Caucasus/West Asian population are large and don't share much within population IBD, so you couldn't directly show whether a pulse in CHG ancestry is there or not so easily but even still 1) you could indirectly infer whether Yamnaya had a pulse from a larger population or a smaller one by change in their IBD, compared to Eneolithic Steppe ancestor and 2) rather than the vector of CHG, it might be easier to prove or disprove IBD from Anatolian derived populations we know had strong founder effects, like the various northern EEF. Basically just to talk about how that might work and that there should be ways to prove and disprove and higher standard of proof for both options (Anatolian from early Maikop/Caucasus Eneo and from Tripolye/Europe), coming from IBD. If the theory's correct, it present an opportunity to prove.

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  81. @Davidski

    Dave, do you think there was any admixture between proto-Yamnaya and Maikop (including related cultures such as Novosvobodnaya)? If so, does that mean Yamnaya and Corded Ware (and by proxy all modern Europeans) have some Maikop derived ancestry, albeit quite minor?

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  82. Gravettian uni parental lineages are similar to AASI( C,F , Some (GHIJ) on Y M and U2 on Mt). Until the proof of K2B2 lineage in Europe is found the discussion continues.

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  83. @ Vlad

    Pearl ornaments ceramic phase is thought to be synonymous with Darkveti-Meshoko culture
    Eg from Wang “The earliest attested evidence of the Neolithic [ie farming] lifestyle in the North Caucasus, including
    domesticates and settlement architecture, dates to the mid-5th millennium BCE and is associated with a cultural formation termed Darkveti-Meshoko Eneolithic or ‘pearl-ornamented ceramic’. “


    So we have those genomes already

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  84. The abstract says there was "hardly any" input from Europe/Eurasian steppe sources into Anatolia from the Chalcolithic until the Iron Age. How much do we think will "hardly any" turn out to be, and what kind of Chalcolithic to IA samples will be used to justify the implied claim that this has nothing to do with the origin of the Anatolian languages?

    Surely nothing less than clearly identified early Hittites would be required. And much like the apparent ambiguity of 'elite' Greek samples from Greek-speaking palatial areas with little or no steppe ancestry, it's very likely that the Anatolians integrated natives into their system from the outset.

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  85. LGK

    “Surely nothing less than clearly identified early Hittites would be required. ”

    any sensible data from Bronze Age western Anatolia would be instructive

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  86. This Reich paper has freaking 731 new samples! It seems these new samples are making David Reich Lab confident in disproving Eastern European Steppe as the PIE homeland. Krause's favorites for the PIE origin is Iran rather than Anatolia. The Max Planck Institute recently asserts this: "we are quite certain that the Indo-European languages ultimately originated in the Fertile Crescent, as proponents of the Anatolian theory suppose, but not, as they suggest, in western and central Anatolia; rather, it emerged from northern Iran."

    ReplyDelete
  87. The Max Planck people are either insane or they're idiots.

    Yamnaya doesn't have any ancestry from Iran.

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  88. I’d love to know what they have that’s made them so unabashedly confident, considering the dearth of R1 and even Q/I Y-DNA lineages in pre-EBA-MLBA West Asia. I have a feeling they’re probably gonna embarrass themselves, especially in regards to the “very little to none” steppe ancestry in BA Anatolia. They told us the Mycenaeans had very little to none, yet they still had respectable amounts. And what about Cernavoda? Do you think this is political Dave? Someone on AG said there’s been this attempt in archaeology, at trying to tie everything to the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, and the first farmers.

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  89. @Rob

    Sure, although I figured Hittite sites might provide a better opportunity to delineate "Hittites" from assimilated locals than would western Anatolian contexts at least in theory

    @Simon

    Yes, it will be awkward for them to try to say steppe ancestry has no linguistic role related to Anatolian in Anatolia but does relate to IE everywhere else. I wonder if they will try to cast this as relating only to relatively late Mitanni / Indo-Aryan activity in the area

    And that seems to be a big lynchpin of the broader argument. Otherwise one must face the facts that none of the other cultures with larger or predominant levels of West Asian ancestry component(s) implied to have introduced Proto-Indo-European in the steppic and Anatolian contexts seem to have spoken Indo-European, and explain why this is the case.

    As it is, we are asked to believe that solely the steppic and Anatolian branches spoke and spread PIE, and their local relatives either didn't speak it, or that they died out before writing; or number amongst the unclassifieds of the middle-western parts of this "southern arc" (Hurrian, Hattic, Minoan etc.). Seems a tall order.

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  90. LGK: "As it is, we are asked to believe that solely the steppic and Anatolian branches spoke and spread PIE, and their local relatives either didn't speak it, or that they died out before writing; or number amongst the unclassifieds of the middle-western parts of this "southern arc" (Hurrian, Hattic, Minoan etc.). Seems a tall order."

    It's kind of "least worst option" situation we have here. It's a tall order to claim that all the pre-Yamnaya branches of IE died out on the steppes, and only survived in Anatolia leaving no trace in Europe, despite coming from the steppes. This branch of IE that had the massive momentum to somehow takeover the most vastly populated and developed place perhaps in the world at this time, by presumably by assimilating people rather than demographic expansion... yet nothing of them survives in Europe at all, not even in the Balkans; completely unable to expand there, with no impact in Greece or the Balkans.

    People still do it, and sort of wave their hands around elites and such with no real explanation or information about this. It's kind of a "What is the alternative to this tall and on-the-face-of-it-unlikely order?" thing. It's kind of about choosing the least unlikely option at this point.

    I have to agree I don't really think that there's any good explanation at all from the Harvard mob at the moment about how their hypothetical Indo-Anatolian group managed to expand through Anatolia... But at the same time, the proto-Armenian backflow was totally confined to the northern parts of the Near East, unable to intrude on any of the Urartian groups or other linguistic groups until the Indo-Iranian migrations.

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  91. @Matt

    The steppe is actually a good option for a lost language to have prospered and then gone extinct, because there's nowhere to hide there from foreign expansions.

    Lots of groups and languages went extinct up there, right up to the modern era, with Turko-Mongols being pushed out by Slavs quite recently.

    On the other hand, the Caucasus Mountains are a place where I'd expect something basal Indo-European to still survive if this was the PIE homeland.

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  92. @Davidski, that's a good point... on the other hand nothing basally related to Armenian survives in the Caucasus mountains despite the fact that the Armenians seem to have pushed through or around them (according to the latest dna). Seems like the peoples of the mountain flank linguistically strongly resisted any intrusion from any direction, and yet IE speakers seem to have gone through there at least once.

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  93. @Matt

    Contacts between the steppe and mountain people there appear to have been fairly hostile...

    https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-potentially-violent-end-to-kura.html

    That may have played a part.

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  94. Yeah; maybe the mountain people could "afford" to be hostile without losing because of their home turf advantage, or just were more likely to be hostile due to culture? (Protecting scarce lands and pasture?).

    There's a big question here actually, of the role of mountains and islands generally in survival of language isolates and unusual dna. We've got Basque in SW Europe, and perhaps if the idea of Etruscan from the Alps is right, the Etruscan too. The eastern Iberia where pre-Celtic, pre-IE languages survived is relatively mountainous within Iberia. Paleo Sardinian as in insular example until the Romans in Sardinia. The Caucasus languages survived. In Orkney we have possible male line survival without autosomal survival. In the Hindu-Kush those guys in Swat who we think should be Indo-Aryan speakers of a sort, but somehow richer in BMAC/ANE and lacking in steppe y DNA. Also the Burushaski mountain people today. Possibly Uralic too, depending on our thoughts about when that got to the Urals with North East Asian ancestry (late during IA or earlier in LCA?). There's also arza's question of whether there was an autosomally unusual survival in the Carpathian Mountains. Even in Swiss Alps, the Corded Ware sample who show up first were I2a, which was odd. Mountains were also a longstanding barrier to steppe people in Wang's paper, with occasional leakage.

    Obviously there are some mountain and island colonising IE peoples - the proto-Armenians here, if we see these smples as that, maybe, or the Kalash that we know of (who were fearsomely genetically isolated). But mountains may have been home to other pastoralist people and not places they were well adapted to or found desirable, perhaps (speculating) so often went through them or entered into some kind of relationship with the people that led to loss of either or both of y DNA or language, depending on circumstances (rather than a more typical for Central Europe male biased large migration with linguistic continuity?). Or they remained hostile and geneflow was slow/little.

    This all makes me think of the recent Malta adna paper, which proposed that the same geographic features that led to isolated peoples today led to them in the past (via looking at IBD in Neolithic farmers). You'd expect the opposite to be true in the past, too.

    Maybe it should make us suspect of taking mountains or small islands as representative of lowlands and trying to infer population movements around them.

    ...

    On a separate point, another thing that strikes me as potentially a problem with the Reich Lab's proposal is; if Anatolian IE came to Anatolia separately from other IE, directly from NW Iran/Caucasus, shouldn't we expect they can reconstruct a common Anatolian ancestor with terminology indicative of this region? If they can reconstruct it with lots of terms for West Iranian/Turkish fauna which are lacking in Balkans or steppe, that helps them (a family that diversified in Balkans or West Anatolia shouldn't have such things as shared terms), but if not it's a problem.

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  95. "Huge hoard of copper weapons and items found in Mainpuri. Estimated to be around 4k years old i.e. similar age as the Sinauli finings."

    Its kinda interesting that these weapons start showing up East of Harappa in the Ganga plains starting 2000bce and not in your traditionally Harappan sites.

    Did it belong to the natives and were used against the Harappans who at that time were migrating eastwards to these areas or were these Harappan weaponry which they used against the hostile people in these regions or probably against native Harappans from different sites who were fighting it out for fertile lands after the collapse of IVC.

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  96. About Steppe population reaching Anatolia, a small paper from 2021:
    https://www.academia.edu/47868329/%C4%B0stanbulun_M%C3%96_3_Biny%C4%B1l%C4%B1_%C5%9Eeng%C3%BCl_G_Ayd%C4%B1ng%C3%BCn_Nezih_Ba%C5%9Fgelen_Haldun_Ayd%C4%B1ng%C3%BCn_Ayberk_Enez
    " Although our knowledge of Istanbul’s Lower Paleolithic to Chalcolithic ages is limited, It was known thanks to the studies done in the 19
    th and 20th centuries. However, until recently, findings from the 3rd millennium and the 2nd millennium BC were almost nonexistent. After 2010 with the surveysand salvage excavations carried out, it is seen that this problem has started to come to end. Theresults of the Istanbul Prehistoric Age Surveys project and the results of the rescue excavations bythe experts of the Istanbul Archeology Museum for reasons such as public projects and constructionhave provided new and important to complement this chronological gap. Thus, it was understoodthat Yamnaya / Kurgan communities that preferred pastoral life settled down to the area of theBosphorus through the Balkans in the third thousand BC. In addition, we can say that this communi-ties is in contact with the Western Anatolian Bronze Age communities and they entered the remoteaccess trade line in the last quarter of the 3rd millennium BC. The reason why the traces of the 3rdmillennium BC were suddenly cut off, probably in the Sea of Marmara. It can be attributed to oneor more tectonic movements that occurred in the first half of the second millennium BC"

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  97. Yeah, there were obviously migrations of steppe people down into eastern Bulgaria, and then into Anatolia, but in very specific ways.

    This is how Anatolian languages moved into Anatolia, and the idea that there should be loads of steppe ancestry in Anatolia if the PIE homeland was on the steppe is quite silly, putting it mildly.

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  98. What about the fact that the oldest attestations of IE are in Anatolia. They even had a hieroglyphic script developed entirely in IE

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  99. Poor argument.

    Languages can't be written down unless someone knows how to write.

    No one knew how to write in the Proto-Indo-European homeland, because this homeland wasn't in a region where there were civilizations and/or writing.

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  100. According to the original paper from 2013, Yamna was a combination of EEHG and something from southern arc, *also ANE rich*. If hittite samples did not carry steppe signal but did carry caucasus/iran component, it just moves PIE language further back in time and further to NE as ANE people, presented both in EEHG and CHG become the original PIE speakers, spreading both ANE genes and PIE dialects in Yamna, Caucasus and Anatolia.

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  101. Hittites and other Anatolian speakers are from the steppe.

    The reason there isn't much steppe ancestry in ancient Anatolia is because Anatolian speakers were the first to migrate out of the steppe homeland, and their ancestry was diluted.

    This actually also fits the Indo-European language tree, with Anatolian languages the first to break off from the tree near the root.

    The idea that Anatolian languages came from the Near East or even the Caucasus is actually quite stupid.

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  102. @Davidski

    "The idea that Anatolian languages came from the Near East or even the Caucasus is actually quite stupid."


    Is anyone here able to prove that he has more sound evidence for the PIE homeland than the famous geneticists from prestigious universities? Going against Harvard and Manx Plank scholars requires excellent arguments, otherwise, people won't take the whole thing seriously. By the way, there'slots of glee over the fact that the top researchers, such as Reich and Krause suggest that the original PIE speakers were either from Anatolia or Iran, thus the Middle East instead of the Eastern European steppe.

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  103. Indo-Armenian makes a lot of sense linguistically. According to Anthony, Hittite has sheep words but no wool, wheel, cart or wagon words from PIE. So the early PIE speakers moving to the steppes at least culturally and then domesticating the horse, the wooly sheep, inventing the wheel, cart and wagon all fits.

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  104. Indo-Armenian doesn't make any sense.

    Armenian is definitely from the steppe according to linguistics, ancient DNA and archeology.

    On the other hand, there are numerous problems with a West Asian PIE homeland, including the lack of West Asian uniparental markers in Yamnaya and Corded Ware, the presence of numerous other language families in the region, and the evidence of steppe people in Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Anatolia.

    For instance, there's a Corded Ware sample from Denmark belonging to the steppe lineage R-V1636, and I don't know many sane people who would doubt that this was an Indo-European speaker.

    Well, we also have a relative of his, also belonging to R-V1636, in Chalcolithic Anatolia, so what language did he speak?

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    Replies
    1. Patrilineal markers reveal nothing....Teach

      We have Dravidian speakers carrying R1a-z2123. There are more English speakers in India than UK :)

      Delete
  105. R1a is strongly correlated with Indo-European speech in South Asia.

    And indeed the recent ancestors of those R1a Dravidians were Indo-European speakers.

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  106. @ Phillip Owen
    Indo-Armenian? Why not some other peripheral branch of IE , like Lusitano-Belgic, Norweigo-Swedic or Croato-Latvian ?
    A historically correct and “neutral” term for ancestral PIE would be Dnieper-Donian :)



    @ Assuwatama

    ''Patrilineal markers reveal nothing.''

    Yes we hear that often from people who don't quite understant genetic anthropology, or perhaps don't like what it reveals. They are a great sanity check which counter vague & miscontructed claims based on coarse-grained genome-wide inferences (made by academics & enthusiasts alike)

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  107. Indo European, Anatolian, Iranian all are combination/mix of joining different areas. They are in Moderate temperature areas where early civilization started and society innovated. European spread and adaptation to these areas joined them all together. it's a natural spread of human migration and expansion. If Pontic steppe is their home land. where did they come from previous generation and how they replaced Gravettians.. They did not come by spaceship to Pontic steppe. That question also need to be discussed as part of the same discussion.

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  108. @ Nathan Paul

    In a way that’s correct; the long distant ancestors of PIE were eastern epigravettians from the paleolithic. No spaceships are required
    It always helps to learn some basics of history - the earliest heirarchical society - Varna; the earliest developed metallurgy - Vinca, massive population concentrations - Cucuteni. These are all close to the western steppe, and appeared 1-2000 years before Majkop & 2-3000 years before Harappa

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    Replies
    1. @rob harappan is much older that oldest site is 7570bce and majority of sites are still not excavated.

      Delete
  109. Has any text from this talk been released yet?

    ReplyDelete
  110. You asked a day too soon, because the paper is out today:

    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4247

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  111. This is a really interesting article and places the source of Early Indo-Europeans in the Caucasus. Linguistically I think the map makes a lot of sense. This would give a date of ca 4,000BC in the Caucasus for Early proto-Indo-European (called Indo-Anatolian in the article) and ca 3,000BC for Late proto-Indo-European (called Indo-European in the article).

    There is no reason why the earliest speakers of Indo-European had to be R1A/B.

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  112. @semaz Ha! Finally! Looking forward to the analysis that pops up here.

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  113. "Yamnaya doesn't have any ancestry from Iran."

    Did you even read the new paper? Yamnaya is like 50% Iranian/Armenian

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  114. Yamnaya is not like 50% Iranian/Armenian.

    You're very confused. This might help...

    https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/09/dear-iosifyamnaya.html

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  115. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

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