Almost a decade ago scientists at the David Reich Lab extracted DNA from the remains of three men from the Khvalynsk II cemetery at the northern end of the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe.
These Eneolithic Eastern Europeans showed significant genetic heterogeneity, with highly variable levels of Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) and Near Eastern-related ancestry components.
As a result, the people at the David Reich Lab concluded that the Eneolithic populations of the PC steppe formed from a relatively recent admixture between local hunter-gatherers and Near Eastern migrants.
Unfortunately, this view has since become the consensus among scientists working with ancient DNA.
I say unfortunately because there's a more straightforward and indeed obvious explanation for the genetic heterogeneity among the samples from Khvalynsk II. It's also the only correct explanation, and it doesn't involve any recent gene flow from the Near East.
Here it is, in point form, as simply as I can put it:
- EHG is best represented by samples from Karelia and Lebyazhinka, which are modern-day Russian localities in the forest zone and on the border between the steppe and the forest-steppe, respectively
- Khvalynsk II is also located on the boundary between the steppe and the forest-steppe, and very far from the Near East
- so the genetic structure of the people buried at Khvalynsk II does represent an admixture event
- however, this admixture event simply involved an EHG population from the forest-steppe and a very distantly Near Eastern-related group native to the steppe (that is, two different Eastern European populations).
I've written this blog post because I think David Reich, Nick Patterson, Iosif Lazaridis and colleagues should finally admit that they didn't quite get this right. And it'd be nice if they could put out a paper sometime soon in which they set the record straight.
See also...
450 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 400 of 450 Newer› Newest»@Sam
Everything you say about L283 seems reasonable, J is a typical western Eurasian lineage originating in Caucasus-Iran, its path to Serbia may be the one you say or it may have come through Anatolia. If you have time check the Mygdalia mtDNA, they are all typical of Anatolia, so many times the autosomal composition of some samples leads us to wrong conclusions because a single generation is enough to change 50% of the autosomal DNA of a person. In any case the link of this lineage with the IE is undeniable, not only for the samples in Greece, also the theorically Proto-Illyrians of Croatia, but these are much more modern times (Bronze and Iron Age) that do not clarify its exact geographic origin (which I still think is in the Caucasus and not in Europe).
J2b-AH2-epe Abdul Hosein, Central Zagros, Luristan, PPN, Iran (7.981 BC)-J2b-M102>Y143912
J2b1-M205-Tel Yehud, EBA, Israel I7182 (2.300 BC)-Much more Near Eastern shifted
J2b2-Kotias Klde, mesolithic, Georgia NEO281 (7.773 BC)- -HapY-J2b2-M102>Z534>Z1825>Z2453
J2b2a/2-Indus Periphery-I11480 (2.800 BC)-HapY-J2b-M102>Z534>Z1825>Z2432>Y22893
J2b2a/1-Mokrin Necropolis, Maros culture, Serbia-MOK15 (1.900 BC)-HapY-J2b2-L283
J2b2a/1-Kabardino-Balkaria-Northern Caucasus, Russia-KDC001 (1.864 BC)-HapY-J2b2-L283
@ Wee_e
'Eg, Etruscan (as far as it’s known) has always seemed to me like a mad mashup of everything up and down Europe's western fringe — Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, quite apart from obvious connections with Latin. (Those who know Greek see connections there) yet it’s said to be non-IE.'
I suspect this has more to do with linguistic convergence, biligualism and other phenomena related to language contact
I have wondered if Etruscan is an Alpine language which existed within the eastern Urnfiled mullieu. But the real trick is why did Etruria speak Etruscan and not adopt italic, and vice-versa for most of the rest of Italy.
@ Gamerz_J
''More eastern compared to ANE as in Onge-like or East Asian-like?''
Probably East Asian. But I dont see a consistent image with qpGraph. Although the broad picture remains the same, individual results depend on which samples you include, how many East Asians are included etc.
I hope to examine in detail when Dzudzuana comes out. The MUP Satsurblia genokms is available, but such poor coverage not worth incorporating
@ Matt
''I think it's quite hard to work out when in the time-frame from 8000BCE (approximately Kotias) to 5000 BCE (approximately Progress), that layer of admixture happened. Middle Don people are 5500 BCE and Khvalynsk approximately 5000 BCE. The two Progress samples for example still show some fair amount of dispersal on PCA, at approximately this time, so there is probably not really evening of admixture out, by that time: https://imgur.com/a/sjsoHRi''''
As others have pointed out, with R.E. correciton, KhvalynsK dates `~4500 bc, Progress somehwat later, 4300 BC (middle Don would also need evaluation). And the younger date of Progress needs to be understood, with archaeology also suggests that they came from the north. At face value, this is counterintuitive in light of the south to north gradient of CHG, but in fact everything remains consistent.
'''Didn't Iosif's recent paper argue that there were two layers of migration, and earlier of these (timed with Early Neolithic developments, but not necessarily at all neolithic in subsistence) ultimately lacked Anatolian/Levant related ancestry?''
There are multiple layers of 'West Asian' ancestry, not just two. More like ripples of individual & clan mobility than 'waves', ranging from CHG to Meshoko, Majkpop and various EEF-related gropus.
Quite a bit the CHG admixture patterns relates to intra-steppe population dynamics.
'Out of the following date ranges, when would we think that the CHG related ancestry got north of the Caucasus?:''
Could be anytime between Satsurblia and late Mesolithic (6000 BC)
Specific range of north Caucasian sites from Leonova's table of C14 dated sites https://ibb.co/rfcm4Tq
As regard to the 'Mesolithic CHG' component , I'd favour ~ 6000 BC
@ Sam Elliot
''Obviously this isn’t a problem unique to J2b L283 as even R1b M269’s origins are shrouded in mystery, as you’re well aware.''
Agree with all your comments, however I don't think it's completely mystrious. R1a-M17 & R1b-M269 must be from the Dnieper-Don region or somewhere nearby. Add I-L460 coming in from the West, and there's pre-proto-Yamnaya.
And I'm no expert on J2b2, however it seems Y-hg J1 represents the older CHG-related strata.
Given that j2b2 is present in Shulaveri-Shomu, then it's tempting to link it with some south-Caucasian clan which arrived to the steppe c. 4000 BC, within the broader Majkop phenomenon. In the Late pre-Yamnaya Eneolithic, various distinctinve burials appear, but then disappeared c. 3200 BC.
The oldest DOZENS of J2b-L283 samples are from the Western Balkans, specifically tied to the EBA-MBA Cetina culture and later its successor/late phase variant MBA-LBA Dinaric (Posušje) culture and lately IA Glasinac Mati/Classical Illyrians. The "J2b" from Shulaveri Shomu is neither L283 nor even ancestral to J2b-L283 so bringing it up is redundant and taking a macrohaplogroup designation J2b-M102 that apprx. lived in the PALEOLITHIC into the discussion is, too, total non sense. When tracing the migration pattern of a male line you cannot argument with a macrohaplogroup designation, or not even ancestral lineages that split in the upper paleolithic.
As was pointed out all of the bulk of the J2b-L283 Cetina/Dinaric/Illyrian samples are EEF + 30-40% steppe plus carry additional WHG ancestry. There is literally zero additional excess CHG ancestry in them.
This is a link to a aDNA map with all of the many J2b-L283 found so far in archeogenetic records with links to actual papers:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1luwBVUlmGoqbj7yzO2tyKKIJlvh7mtQX&hl=en_US&ll=48.74992772963409%2C22.6271305&z=4
The latest Aegean paper had this:
"For the Aegean, we also estimated a significantly lower WES-ancestry proportion on the X chromosomes of the male individuals compared to most of the autosomes, which is consistent with male-biased admixture (Extended Data Fig. 3). However, only four out of the 30 male individuals dating post-sixteenth century bc (LBA and IA) carry the R1b1a1b Y haplogroup. The remaining—as well as the EBA/MBA ones—attest to the high prevalence of Y haplogroups J and G/G2 (39 and 10 out of 59, respectively; Supplementary Table 2)."
That could suggest that Greek - Or at least the entry of Greek in the Aegean - came from a group with partial steppe ancestry and a remarkably large amount of J. As we know from Crete, it is pretty clear that the arrival of steppe ancestry coincides with the arrival of the Greek language.
A somewhat similar mix of Y-DNA is found with Cetina samples from the arc paper. One R-Z2118 and several J2b L283, as Sam Elliots mentions above.
@Rob I can see why you would think that — but it is more than just vocabulary.
Partly it is that you find collocational or thematic groups (like pronouns & other people-words) that would have had to borrow from widely dispersed IE linguistic regions.
But it’s structure. It’s as if many IE languages have retained different grammatical elements or syntactical habits that are random samples from Etruscan ways of doing things. (Somewhat in the way that people say there’s a helluva lot of the Neanderthal genome still extant, dispersed in tiny random packets in Homo sapiens.)
People say “Oh, Etruscan’s agglutinative” as if that rules it out as deeply related (rather than being influenced by) IE.
What would an early IE dialect look like if proto-IE were agglutinative, and if this early IE had been in isolation among unrelated languages for a long time, and had acquired some local vocabulary as time went on, and developed on its own course for some time before it encountered its siblings again?
@gamerj_z
"@Vasistha
Would not this stat simply be due to higher basal Eurasian in Iran_N relative to CHG?"
Maybe, the genesis of these 2 will remain a mystery for some time. Did chg give birth to Hotu_meso or the other way round? or were these 2 independent products at the end of a cline? Cant say with the meagre data we have.
“But the real trick is why did Etruria speak Etruscan and not adopt italic, and vice-versa for most of the rest of Italy.”
You might also ask why Italians have a plethora of dialects instead of all adopting and retaining classical Latin.
Like Latin — preserved for a time as the language of high ritual/religious status?
That is all the more important in “revealed” religion, whether monotheistic or divinatory — that it ought to need interpreters. Luckily for them.
The King of England will probably have some words of Latin muttered over him at his coronation: his temporal authority is conferred literally in and by the archaic language of religious authority that almost nobody in the UK can speak. Latin — as we saw in our recent PM — is still such an important currency amongst the movers and shakers that it is studied in every expensive UK private school, but almost no others any more.
That might explain why Etruscan remnants seem to be grave inscriptions, supernatural prognostications and captions for pictures of gods.
Maybe they wrote the rest of their business in some form of Italic. They were an elite there in Etruria, but not in Rome.
I'm thinking of that long line of kings and aristocracy in England who spoke Norman French among themselves for about three centuries until ridiculed out of it by the French themselves (it sounded quaint to them). It had lost its prestige. Henry iv was the first king of England whose first language was English. Meanwhile, pretty much from the first generation, Normans spoke to the lower classes in English, had their deeds and charters and wills written out in Latin but their military orders and records in what was by then Franglais.
Only because of the shortage of educated clerks caused by the Black Death did anything official start to be written in English.
Apologies, Davidski, if we went to far off topic.
@The Rudism
"that particular branch of CHG-related or "Middle East related" ancestry was in the Eastern European steppe"
Why even call it Middle East related? Why not just call it native European without any affirmation that it is related to a Middle Eastern group closest to southern Caucus populations?
Are the CHG in Kotias and the CHG that contributed to the steppe populations very genetically differentiated? If so, how so?
@Orpheus I appreciate the detailed response, I learned a bunch and it clarified things, thanks. No doubt, there seems little chance CWC could have seeded ALL the Paleo-Balkan language through Babyno as you explained. And perhaps I should have distinguished between proto-Greek and Mycenaean Greek regarding connections to Sintashta.
The morphological similarities in the ceramics and jewelry of Upper Danube Unetici and Babyno very cool, and seemingly out of left field. A migration from Northern Alpine hinterlands to the Don Steppe in the late 3rd millenium? Bizarre.
Didn't mean to get to off topic with my comment. I listened to the Khan interview with Anthony and am also very much looking forward to Anthony's latest genetic findings from Western-most Euro steppe - I wish he could have thrown us a bone or two, lol.
gimby20
You wrote:
"Last I checked modern Middle Eastern populations are not just Natufian + ANF. The closest population to CHG are... Georgians... which are... I guess European? Lol"
Lol? Why? Even pops dwelling IN Southern Caucasus (and not SOUTH the Caucasus were not properly "Near-Eastern" pops, but here it's a geographic definition question; more interestingly if we speak of pre-8000 BC pops, they had some confortable distance with ancient Anatolians and Levant pops, genetically, the most of the exchanges having taken place at Chalcolithic. Just my point, geography is not the most important for me, less than for you and for Davidsky.
My answer to you was rather motived by your "demonstration" about a crossing of pops staying the same whatever the time passed after (your Nigerians-Swedes after bilions of years!).
The question is not only a question of places but also of chronology and its input.
No systematic opposition.
@Mark
Interesting answer. Could you tell me when appeared the two J2-L283 around the Caucasus?
@ Mark
“The oldest DOZENS of J2b-L283 samples are from the Western Balkans, specifically tied to the EBA-MBA Cetina culture and later its successor/late phase variant MBA-LBA Dinaric (Posušje) culture and lately IA Glasinac Mati/Classical Illyrians. The "J2b" from Shulaveri Shomu is neither L283 nor even ancestral to J2b-L283 so bringing it up is redundant and taking a macrohaplogroup designation J2b-M102 that apprx. lived in the PALEOLITHIC into the discussion is, too, total non sense. When tracing the migration pattern of a male line you cannot argument with a macrohaplogroup designation, or not even ancestral lineages that split in the upper paleolithic.
As was pointed out all of the bulk of the J2b-L283 Cetina/Dinaric/Illyrian samples are EEF + 30-40% steppe plus carry additional WHG ancestry. There is literally zero additional excess CHG ancestry in them.”
Your sermon is quite problematic , because you seem unhappy with the prospect of west Asian origins for J2b2
-The oldest J2b2 is in Mokrin, in the carpathian basin
- to say that related J2b finds in 6000 bc Caucasus are irrelevant is simply stupid
- you don’t seem to understand the difference between population splits and inferred phylogenetic TMRCA. If the ancestors of J2b2 arrived in the Paleolithic, why is J2b missing from hundreds of European samples between the Paleo and late Neolithic?
- your autosomal inferences are too crude and broad brushed . Yamnaya can be modelled as having Majkop ancestry, some outliers are obviously from Majkop, and such compositions can in any case shift fairly rapidly.
@ Steppisch said...
Paleobalkan languages feature J2b2, R1b-Z93, EV13 and I2a-L68 etc
None of these are CW -related lineages
“A migration from Northern Alpine hinterlands to the Don Steppe in the late 3rd millenium? Bizarre. “
No migration, just Shared jewellery due to well described female exogamy
And I doubt david Anthony will get PaleoBalkan languages right. He couldn’t even get the steppe right despite the millions of dollars harvard invested into his pet theory
@ epoch
Not quiet as you say.
Cetina is probably protoIllyrian, not proto Greek
These just mean that Illyrians expanded all the way down the western greek coast & integrated into Mycenaean society
and the real interesting thing is that J2b2 appears to have originated somehwere near northern Zagros, took a long route to the western Balkans, then constituted a major component in proto-Illyrians, mixed in with southern Greeks, and later even Nuraghi via southern Italy
@Moesan
I actually responded to you but David didn't let my comment through lol.
No point conversing here if he is going to moderate comments he doesn't like (that aren't insulting in any way) while advocating free speech.
I haven't deleted any comments in this thread except duplicates and one potentially defamatory message by Gaska.
If gimby's comment was lost somewhere along the way, that's no big deal tough, because he's not making much sense here.
@Moesan
Geography is important. You won't completely understand European genetics if you don't understand European geography.
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/06/matters-of-geography.html
"The arrival of steppe ancestry coincides with the arrival of the Greek language"-Really????
1-Male markers (3,000-2,000 BC) in the territory of present-day Greece (excluding Crete)-HapY-C1a2b, G2a-FTC60521, G2a-PF3378, J2a-L26>Z36800, J2a-L26>Y113289, L2-L595, J1-L620, J1-ZS50, I2-L596, I2a-Y87044 (xL699)
2-Evidence of admixture with steppe people in Logkas, Sarakinos etc (2.400-2.000 BC) with NO change in uniparental markers.
3-The Mycenaean culture originated in the Peloponnese and not in Thessaly, Macedonia, or Serbia.
4-From the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (6,000-2,000 BC) there is no trace of uniparental or autosomal steppe markers in the Peloponnese.
5-Male markers of the Mycenaean culture-HapY-C1a2-V20, G2a-Y130324, G2a-FGC55322, G2a-Z6494, G2-Y238, G2a-Z7016 (2), G2-P287, J1-FT137403, J1b, J2a-L26>Z6057 (2), J2a-L26>Y14434 (2), J2a-PF5008> Y24510 (2), J2a-M67>Z7671 y J2a-L26>PF5252
6-HapY-R1b-PF7562 appears in the Peloponnese (LBA, 1400-1300 BC), J2b-L283 (Mygdalia, 1,500 BC).
7-Mycenaean elites are NOT R1b or R1a. There is no trace of R1b-L51 or R1a-M417 in Greek territory.
With these data, the southern arc paper categorically states that the Mycenaean originated directly from the Yamnaya culture (appearance of R1b-PF7562 ????). Lazaridis is not joking, someone might think that Indo-European Amazons conquered the Peloponnese but we do not even find steppe mtDNA markers in the Mycenean culture.
The Peloponnese is the region of Europe where for the first time a written IE language is documented (Mycenaean, 1,600 BC). How did the Indo-Europeanization of this territory take place?-No evidence of massive migrations, the percentage of steppe ancestry is negligible and can be acquired by exogamy, there are no uniparental steppe markers but Greco-Anatolian
Does anyone have a coherent explanation?
@Rob
I adhere to what scientific data shows and/or leaves room for reasonable speculative approaches.
Reading comprehension: I said "zero additonal excess CHG ancestry" (let alone the far from reality claim of additional Iran Neolithic that someone here mentioned). That is a fact.
Well, you have mentioned that you have no foreknowledge on the phylogeny of J2b-L283 and that shows in repetitively using nomenclatures such as "J2b2" instead of J2b-L283.
The sample, I repeat again, from Shulaveri Shomu, is not ancestral to J2b-L283, neither is it closely, related. A comparative scenario would be tracing the migration pattern of R1b-U106 by investigating aDNA coverage of R1b-V88, you get the idea (perhaps not but others surely will).
EBA-MBA Cetina starts in the second half of the third Millennium BCE. The most likely scenario for J2b-L283 given both phylogeny and autosomals of the many West Balkan, West Adriatic etc. samples found, is that during the CA/EBA transitional period it migrated along the Danube river systems (and tributaries such as Tisza, Maros, etc.) likely from Moldova, Western Ukraine.
@Gaska
Not sure this is coherent or even evidence based, but I think it's just a case of multiple steps happening bettween steppe mediated language introduction to group x and Greek entering Greece. Minority groups achieving dominance somewhere and fanning out but having their haplogroups in particular masked by regular old demographic processes. The haplogroups you see among Mycenaeans are probably mostly those of the majority non-IE groups that were somehow indo-Europeanized in maybe Carpathian/Danubian region up there kind of maybe. I think they are "IE haplotypes" in the sense that they're probably associated with a group from farther north that spoke Greek. Just a different process than what you see in the rest of Europe. Probably very different population sizes at work in that part of the world incl Anatolia.
@Mark-
How did L283 reach Moldova or western Ukraine?
If his ancestors lived in the Caucasus-Iran, do you think it is impossible that he reached the steppes with the Maykop culture?
I guess you mention that there is no excess of CHG in the L283 from the Western Balkans to deny an Anatolian route, however many uniparental markers are shared between the Balcans (including Greece) and Anatolia. Do you think L283 is an exception?
How do you explain the Kabardino Balkaria sample (1.864 BC)?
Have you checked the autosomal composition of L283 in Russia and Armenia?, there is Balkan ancestry in those samples?
@epoch
"That could suggest that Greek - Or at least the entry of Greek in the Aegean - came from a group with partial steppe ancestry and a remarkably large amount of J. As we know from Crete, it is pretty clear that the arrival of steppe ancestry coincides with the arrival of the Greek language."
I'm skeptical of their X chromosome analysis because they potentially included recently admixed individuals from Crete (Chania LBA) with fathers from the Greek mainland and Minoan mothers from Crete. It would be nice if the authors clarified which individuals are included in this "Aegean LBA" set.
If the analysis is technically correct then I assume one way it can be explained is something like the scenario you describe, where (pre-)proto-Greeks formed by mixing with Balkan locals, hence the high incidence of G2a, J2a, C, etc.
@Matt any thoughts on this?
@Gaska
Mycenaean AID001 has a Yamnaya-related mtDNA lineage (U5a1d2b).
Quick question for Davidski. I've seen what I think is the most recent preliminary G25 for the Gretzinger paper, but it seems to be missing the P312>DF27 "exclusively-CNE" trio of SED018, SED020 and SED021 (from Sedgeford). Were these three an oversight or qualitatively unsuitable for some reason? Thanks!
@epoch Gimbutas dates the arrival of proto-Greek to around 2200BCE. We've got steppe-harboring samples that are centuries older, in the mainland (Crete remained bilingual even after Mycenaeans). Virtually all samples prefer CWC than Yamnaya/EMBA Steppe as a source too (with the exception of Tiryns IA if I'm not mistaken).
Their yDNA is also not found in Mycenaeans but I don't consider this very important, haploautism isn't a barrier to language transmission. But so far the samples don't seem related to Mycenaeans, and seem more related to the Logkas samples and the older samples from Koptekin et al 2023.
@Steppisch Found some depiction from BA Greece chariots that might interest you. http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/chariots.htm
Structurally, the chariots are most related with the Near Eastern ones, but their spoked wheels are different (you can compare them to Mitanni or Assyrian chariots for example). So it was probably an older arrival in Greece. Not sure if through trade or migration.
What I found most interesting is that these chariots appear basically simultaneously (1500-1550BCE) in both Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, and Minoans seem to have incorporated them in their own culture pretty early on judging by the griffins pulling the chariots instead of horses. Can't tell who adopted it from who or if both adopted it from another source at the same time.
@Gaska Are you sure that he said specifically Greek comes directly from Yamnaya? I thought he said that the Balkanic languages come from Yamnaya, which isn't really controversial. Greek could have come from intermediary populations, direct admixture with Yamnaya didn't necessarily bring the language if it had already arrived earlier in Greece in another way.
@Mark 11 out of 14 Croatia Bronze Age j2 samples in Lazaridis et al 2022 have excess CHG ancestry
One j2b2 even has 37,5% CHG compared to 2,4% EHG lol
Fine, the TLDR of my comment is this:
I am well aware that trying to call these ancient and pre-historic populations "European" or "East Asian" or "Middle Eastern" is anachronistic (mainly because they predate the existence of these peoples), but people like to understand who these populations are closer to.
Saying CHG is closest to certain Middle Eastern populations and WHG or EHG are closest to certaub European populations is perfectly fine in my book.
And for @The Rudism claiming anti-European bias because I supposedly didn't bring up Anatolian Neolithic Farmers and their relatedness to Europeans regardless of their geography, I say RIDICULOUS! Just check my comments on the *last thread*.
I consider Pinarbasi closer to Europeans than to Middle Eastern populations, and ANF are sort of equidistant, but with more bias to Southern Euros over Levantines.
So yes, WHG, EHG, ANE, AHG have more affinity to Europeans, while Mesolithic Iranians, Neolithic Iranians, CHG, Natufians, PPNB and PPNC more to Middle Eastern populations
I would say ANF are somewhere in between both if you average the distance of all Europeans and all Middle Eastern populations, so they can be claimed as the common heritage of both 'peoples' if you will.
@orpheus
What you are writing is not true at all. None of the J2b-L283 Cetina samples have an excess amount of CHG ancestry. Besides, the one non european "J2b" sample, again, is not J2b-L283, so totally irrelevant to the context of the discussion.
@Rob
Your tone is rather accusatory and an ad hominem methodology in argumentation won't give your "points" more credibility.
It is still J2b-L283 not "J2b2" and the samples you are mentioning are, still, not closely related nor adjacent to J2b-L283 and/or ancestral. They aren't even parallel haplogroup branches on the "ancestral" M241 level. You are just verifying what I have mentioned before which is non existent foreknowledge on the phylogeny of J2b-L283 (nor any other parental phylogeny for that matter).
Most of the posts I'm reading here (like the two above) have more to do with heated heads rather than reasonable argumenation supported by fact.
@2nd or 3rd George-
Well, at least you have tried to give an explanation
@Alex
You are absolutely right it has been found in Yamnaya, Afanasievo etc... there are also some absolutely anatolian (Mygdalia for example).
@Orpheus
Evidently Lazaridis meant that all IE languages (except Anatolian) have their origin in Yamnaya, because no direct migrations can be established between Yamnaya (3,300-2,600 BC) and the Mycenaean culture (1,600-1,200 BC). But for this language transmission to take place, there must be a genetic connection even if it is very distant in time. And it also has to be very important because a small percentage of steppe ancestry and one or two uniparental steppe markers 1,000 years after Yamnaya disappeared are not sufficient arguments to think that there was a language change. The theory of intermediary populations does seem to me to be a really controversial issue, i.e. it is not a conclusive proof.
@ Mark
You’re twisting facts
I did not say it’s ancestral, but the Cetina related clade is nevertheless related to Zagros lineages .
You’re taking too literally the deep MRCA . It doesn’t mean these populations divorced and we’re living in completely different parts of the world. Where is the evidence for an ancient presence of J2b2 in Europe ? Why is it only J1 appears in Mesolithic contexts ?
Secondly, if you are going to make claims about genome-wide ancestry - demonstrate them. Don’t repeat someone’s else’s generic statement. Whatever the case, you keep ignoring the premise that what the ancestry component profile of cetina looks like in 2000 BC is not going to necessarily reflect what J2b2 looked like in 5000 BC.
Your analogy of about R1b is not relevant because R1b was spreading across Europe since the ice age. This is not the case for J2b2
Moldovan Eneolithic sites show interesting and direct contacts with Majkop. But these then disappeared during the Yamnaya period
So whilst it’s in theory possible J2b2 arrived during the ice age, the evidence isn’t exactly favouring that proposal
@Gaska
Don't leave out the first part of epoch's comment
"As we know from Crete, it is pretty clear that the arrival of steppe ancestry coincides with the arrival of the Greek language."
There is after all strong coincidence of steppe ancestry and Greek language in Crete. Remember that the first Linear B is found in Crete c.1450BC, not on the mainland until at least a century or two later. The situation in Greece is evidently more complex but unlike there, Crete has a long history of non-Greek writing followed by written Greek only when steppe admixture arrives, and not when the elevated CHG autosomal and associated J2 y-dna etc. flows in earlier on. There is no plausible reason why Greek would be spoken earlier by such eastern-origin people but then only coincidentally started being written down when non-Greek steppe people arrived at a later date, the only conclusion is that the arrival of Greek is associated with steppe ancestry.
Don't confuse "Mycenaean" (which refers to people of the Argolid and part of the Peloponnese controlled by Mycenae and Tiryns, and in later times their allied palace-states across much of southern Greece) to refer to all early Greeks as a whole. Mycenaeans happen to be the first to write in Greek because they had the best access to literate people (Minoans and their island + mainland representatives), not because they spoke Greek first and everyone else is their descendant. The major Greek regional dialectical branches probably split prior to 2000BC
As for uniparentals, I agree these do not indicate a direct arrival of Yamna to Greece but as others have already explained a mediated movement through the Balkans to Greece. For Mycenaeans specifically though we should wait for the pending re-sequencing and direct radiocarbon dating of the Grave Circle burials for the last word.
With regards to U5a1:
U5a1 might be a good indicator of the proximate origins of people at Mycenae, but I have always thought it might reflect exogamy related to Mycenaean control of the Aegean trade of amber and gold coming from further north, possibly also contacts relating to the later appearance of northern mercenaries in the Aegean.
U5a1 however also appears in Crete c.2400-1700 BP at Lasithi (I0071), obviously only the lower end is within timeframe to plausibly derive from early Greek presence on Crete itself. There seems to be no reason to suspect a foreign origin based on the burial context or autosome. But the woman is not directly dated and in theory could relate to later Greek settlement, like the other U5a1 from Crete at Armenoi (I9123) about 1350BC. At Armenoi there is Linear B, and uniquely among the Cretan sites surveyed by Richards et al 2022 the sulphur isotopes suggest many people with foreign origins (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35947574/)
The same individual I9123 has this indication, also has steppe admixture and in this paper haplotype call U5a1e
@Orpheus Thanks, I will take a good look at that interesting site. But its opening line: "The chariot, probably invented in the Near East ..."
Really??? (Sintashta c2000BC)
@steppisch the calibrated carbon dates for Sintashta wheels are closer to 1900bce.
The first representation of spoked wheel in Anatolia is around 1850bce. The number of spokes are completely different from that of Sintashta.
Cross bar horse drawn proto chariots from tepe hissar are from around 2300bce.
For a change one should read actual chariot experts Littauer, crouwel and raulwing.
@vasistha
Isn't that just a lone cylinder seal depiction?
Not particularly convincing form of dating for a region or center of chariot use let alone innovation, given that 100, even 50 years is more than enough time for this technology to spread rapidly.
@LGK-
1-As you can see from my comments I have excluded Crete from the beginning of the debate because we don't even know for sure if they spoke an IE language, in fact I have sent a link about the possible relationship with Indo-Aryan. BTW, there is Linear B at Iklaina near Pylos approx 1,400 BC, not a century or two later than Crete
2-Nobody confuses Myceneans with early Greeks or Proto-Greeks, but you have to think scientifically. The only thing we know for sure is that the Myceneans were the first to write an IE language in mainland Europe. Everything else is conjecture, i.e. we don't know what languages were spoken in northern Greece and the rest of the Balkans during the Bronze Age, we don't know who spoke Greek first and we don't know the exact date of appearance of its branches.
3-Everything is speculation except the dating, the language spoken and the genetic composition of the Mycenaean culture. Therefore, based on the available genetic data, the relationship between Mycenaeans and the steppes is minimal and the genetic relationship with Anatolia is much stronger
4-IMO mtDNA U5a1 is of little relevance to this debate because it has been widespread throughout Europe since the mesolithic
In my opinion, and being coherent with the data obtained and his reasoning, Lazaridis should have included the Peloponnese in a Greco-Anatolian genetic and linguistic continuum, but the consequences would have been devastating for the steppe theory.
The thing about J2B2 is that during BA/IA it's always linked to higher steppe ancestry. Even in these Greek samples that are clearly admixed with locals, the J2B2 samples have more steppe ancestry. A southern route makes this very unlikely.
This is in contrast to lineages like E-V13 or even later on RZ2103, that by the Iron Age, have all sorts of autosomal profiles attached to them.
@Gaska
You can't seriously be insinuating that the steppe signal in LBA Crete is due to archaeologically invisible Indo-Aryans from the 17th century BC? Or are you suggesting Linear A Minoan is Indo-Aryan? I don't known which is worse but both are desperate denials of the simple connection between steppe admixture and written Greek in Crete (and at Armenoi, the residence of foreign-born people probably from the Greek mainland)
@Rob
The Cetina samples are J2b-L283, the fact that you are not writing the nomenclature correctly but choose a macrohaplogroup designation to support your non sense claims speaks volumes. You claim to be super smart so why not analyze the .bam file of ID 18088? You would realize that it is J2b-L283 like all of the other Cetina/Dinaric/IA Illyrian samples and not Z593 negative for it's downstream haplogroup branches.
If you want to lump together haplogroups that are not closely related and even whose ancestral haplogroup branches split in the Upper Paleolithic then so be it, but that is a very poor methodology in argumentation and has nothing to do with the scientific method.
Your proposal of some South of the Caucasus (you are even excluding them to have been from the Caucasus and ofcourse not North of it) people raided their way in, what, 3500 BCE to the Balkans where only in 2000 BCE not earlier (how dare they), replaced Yamnaya related lines and somehow this would not be detectable in auDNA?
What you are doing is trolling. No serious academic would cite what you are writing neither would it get through peer review. I am sure you would disagree because what you are writing, according to your opinion, is definitely worth hundreds of citatations, right?
@Steppisch Littauer & Crouwel (and a more recent publication by Crouwel) have argued that Sintashta had two-wheeled carts due to their design. They were too unstable to be used as chariots and they lacked maneuverability.
Regardless of that, there are older depictions of chariots in the Near East. Some of them are already complete war chariots too. See below
@LGK Went through my chariot folder
Karum II Kültepe (cylinder seal) 1900BCE
Tepe Hissar (cylinder seal) 2350BCE
Morhana Pahar site, Mirzapur and Vindhya region in India, multiple chariots with spoked wheels depictions (and war chariots) in frescoes, Chalcolithic
I could be missing some. But it seems the chariot reached the steppe from trading, same with the wheel and spoked wheel. And early on it was used more like a light cart. At least that's what it looks like taking into account all the recent findings.
@LGK
I am not insinuating or suggesting anything, just read the paper I sent. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else, knows for sure if the language spoken by the Minoans was IE or not, but whatever it was, it is certain that it has its origin in Anatolia because Crete is Anatolia genetically speaking. What seems desperate to me is to try to link Mycenaean with the IE language spoken in Yamnaya without a sufficient genetic basis to prove this hypothesis
@lgk
"given that 100, even 50 years is more than enough time for this technology to spread rapidly."
There is continuity of development of all the stages - from solid wheeled, to crossbar, to proper spoked chariots in Asia itself, Sintashta is not needed. Sintashta spoked wheels are sort of an anomaly in the region, with proto stages unknown/missing. Anatolian spoked wheels have 4-6 spokes, Sintashta 10-12.
Plus, nothing is known from Sintashta other than they used spoked wheels (only imprints found), horses and some sort of vehicle. Rest of it is a reconstruction and experts reconstruct it differently than Anthony.
Tldr. Near eastern chariots do not descend from Sintashta vehicles.
@Gaska
So what is the point of the linguistic paper to discussion about Cretan genetics? The only impression I get from this vagueness is that you want to muddy the water in regards to the plausible source of steppe ancestry in LBA Crete, to be from something other than the Greek speakers known to be resident from 1450 and earlier.
@Orpheus
Suffice to say these guys have been talking about Sintashta not having "real" chariots for decades, I don't think many buy the argument (but obviously it is popular with OIT enthusiasts).
As for "early" "chariot" evidence in India its all unreliable, either not securely dated or recent to predate (Kultepe), all paintings are undated (styles can persist for centuries or even millennia and are not a reliable dating method). And of course the famous Sanauli "chariot" is only a solid-wheeled cart.
The other inescapable fact is that there are no safely dated domestic horses in India prior to 1800BC, if even that. As a touted center of chariotry horses should be everywhere as they are on the steppe but they are not in evidence
The wheel and basic wheeled vehicle I agree is probably not originally from the steppe, it only makes sense for settled, urbanised, farming people with domesticated large bovids and other equids (asses) to figure out how to use them as draft animals from an early stage. Some of these eventually developed into carts that transported personnel in a military context, but not actually used in fighting. Maybe they were the original inspiration for the war/hunting chariot, but I think the latter was ultimately developed on the steppe. To me it is no oddity that the steppe peoples who had horses the longest and used them most intensively were the ones who developed chariots, as with many other later equestrian military developments.
Solid two-wheeled horse drawn (indicated by the curvature on the yoke relative to the carriage angle) carts were present in the Catacomb culture so the idea that proto-stages were missing is incorrect.
Fyi the Tepe Hissar cylinder seal looks very similar to the miniature standing, ox-drawn two-wheeler without a carriage frame from Mohenjo Daro (c. 2500 bc) but with a crossbar rather than solid wheels. If that thing is a "chariot" then yeah sure Sintashta had none lol.
So did CHG originate on the Steppe due to an EHG-like + Dzudzuana-like admixture ? Maybe the Villabruna Cluster pulled towards the Near East because of this Dzudzuana-like population who actually lived on the Steppe. So my guess is Both WHG/Villabruna and CHG both originated North of the Caucasus...
"Solid two-wheeled horse drawn (indicated by the curvature on the yoke relative to the carriage angle) carts were present in the Catacomb culture so the idea that proto-stages were missing is incorrect."
There are no 2 wheeled vehicles - forget horse drawn - related to Catacomb culture as per Elena Izbitser, a Russian scholar who specializes in wheeled vehicles and can actually read Russian properly, unlike Anthony.
https://oaji.net/articles/2017/4586-1489507252.pdf
Here scathing review of Anthony's book includes evidence for why Anthony is wrong about the catacomb two wheelers. And this gem,
"These kinds of mistakes in descriptions and explanations provided by D. Anthony clearly show that the author, at most, only browsed through the publications but did not understood their contents correctly. And his reference to A. Gei’s book is especially revealing. The book is devoted
to the Novotitarovskaya culture, for which the wagons constitute a typical feature of the burial rite. Though the culture shares a number of similar features in burial rite with the Yamnaya culture, these two are different archaeological cultures. The specifi c characteristics of the Novotitarovskaya culture, distinctive and independent from the Yamnaya culture, were realized from the very first discoveries of its graves in the 1970s. Although the origin of the Novotitarovskaya culture is still under debate, no one, and A. Gei in particular, ever considered the culture to be a variant of the Yamnaya culture. The main goal of his book was to demonstrate the specifi cs of the Novotitarovskaya culture. However, D. Anthony, referencing A. Gei, describes it as “a local Kuban region EBA (i.e. Early Bronze Age) culture that developed from early Yamnaya."
"Perhaps, D. Anthony overestimated his understanding of the Russian language. His knowledge of the language displayed in the book is flawed – there is no single Russian title in the References without grammatical or transliteration error. Other times it is amusing, like when he follows the senseless habit of translating proper names and gives the translation of Kislovodsk as “Sweet Water” (p. 285), kislyi in Russian means “sour” "
@LGK Considering the argument for chariots on the steppe are not actual chariots but wheel imprints I tend to listen to them more than the chariots-on-the-steppe argument since they offer a rebuttal but nobody offers a rebuttal to them. I think you are correct to question the evidence for chariots in the Near East though. That made me do some digging.
As for horses in India, they could have come from BMAC or directly from the steppes. IVC definitely had horses, some researchers have alleged some of the remains belonged to the typical domesticated horse (equus caballus). Sewell and Guha (1931), Bholanath (1963), Wheeler (1953), Mackay (1938), Piggot (1952), Sharma (1974, 1992, 1993, 1995), Rao (1979), Stacul (1969), Sankalia (1974), Jarrige (1985) are the sources I got that report on horses in IVC. Small horses were used too, the first domesticated horse (Botai) wasn't even the equus caballus one.
The Sinalui horse-drawn cart/chariot is dated to 2000-1800BCE btw.
BMAC has been reported to have horses one century before Sintashta (Sarmiento's quote), from the Royal graveyard in Gonur. Grave 3200 contains a horse radiocarbon dated to 2250BCE. Sarianidi (2005, 2008) reports on other horse findings in graves 3210 and 3310.
First war chariots were apparently not even drawn by horses and weren't even chariots but carts. Quoting Britannica: "The chariot apparently originated in Mesopotamia in about 3000 bc; monuments from Ur and Tutub depict battle parades that include heavy vehicles with solid wheels, their bodywork framed with wood and covered with skins. On the earliest chariots the wheels rotated on a fixed axle that was linked by a draft pole to the yoke of a pair of oxen. (...) These Mesopotamian chariots were mounted by both spearman and charioteer, although it is doubtful that fighting was conducted from the vehicle itself."
Standard of Ur is dated to 2600BCE. The Tutub one (Painted Ceramic Jar From Khafajah) is from 2800 to 2600BCE, drawn by some kind of horse or donkey, same as the Ur ones. Relief B16665 from Ur dated to 2340-2200BCE (K.P. Room 2, Larsa Level?; UE IV: Found in a chamber of the Larsa temple of Nin-Gal) depicts a two-wheeled cart/chariot, presumably used for war (accompanied by a soldier, also the geometry points to a design favoring maneuverability over the simple carts).
That's 500+ years before Sintashta and used for warfare. This points to the Near East as the source of the war chariot. Especially with the spoked wheel being apparently invented in the Near East as well (see Hissar and Mehrgarh wheels). It simply fits better, especially for war, plus we already got proto-chariot depictions from Akkadians, and considering the place it was found (religious, sacred temple) it was pretty common by that time. Near Eastern cultures were far more frequently at war than steppe cultures who could do their job on horseback. This puts a lot of evolutionary pressure on the Near East for the development of a light two-wheeled fast vehicle for warfare and far less evolutionary pressure on the steppe cultures, especially considering they had the habit of either mass migrating or coexisting with other cultures (seen in Europe from the times of GAC and CTC. Also BMAC).
When it comes to the chariot regardless of warfare, it could have very well been developed independently in both places. Sintashta gets their spoked wheels through trade, puts them on their two-wheeled carts, eventually making chariots out of them. A few centuries earlier, spoked wheel two-wheelers are found in the Near East (e.g. Hissar), which then developed into chariots.
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There are also warfare depictions from Lagash (Sumerian) dated to 2550-2500BCE. A wheeled vehicle used for warfare can be seen in one stone relief, but the bottom part is missing and we can't see if it's four-wheeled or two-wheeled. Fragments from another relief from Telloh (same date from what I found) show a two-wheeled vehicle but we don't know if it's for warfare. (Littauer & Crouwel 1979 has a depiction, 18a). Dated to Ur III so 2112-2004 BCE.
In Tell Agrab in 2800BCE there is a figurine depicting a man riding a two-wheeler pulled by four horses or donkeys. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/2-Copper-model-of-a-Mesopotamian-welded-vehicle-Tell-Agrab-Iraq-2800-BC-Frankfort_fig2_321977309
You can read more here (about Nippur too) http://www.archaeopress.com/Public/download.asp?id=%7B95052261-274D-4D16-A6E0-8E0320340C03%7D
@Copper Axe Catacomb carts are radiocarbon dated to 2300-2200BCE (Shishlina, Kovalev, Ibragimova 2014) so these proto-chariots without spoked wheels and not for warfare are at best contemporary with the Akkadian (no spoked wheels, used for warfare) and Hissar (spoked wheels) ones, and ~500 years later than the Tell Agrab two-wheeler (no spoked wheels).
@LGK
No, genetics has confirmed what we already knew, i.e. the arrival of the Mycenaeans in Crete (and with them the steppe ancestry). There is nothing to discuss about it, the important thing about this paper is that if the language of Crete turns out to be IE then it would be the first (of which we have written records) to arrive in Europe, and not from the steppes but from Anatolia. In any case, we are only speculating about Crete, the important thing is to determine the origin of Greek-Mycenaean
@vAsiSTha
As always, you reveal your tendencies to rapidly ctrl+f articles without doing any background reading, which is why it is hard for most people to take you seriously. This article does not mention the two-wheeled wagons I was talking about. You should be more respectful of David W. Anthony as well, you are being childish with your remarks here.
@ Orpheus
That article is about ox drawn four-wheeled wagons of the Catacomb culture, not two-wheeled carts meant for rapid movement. Those are not Proto-Chariots in any sense of the word, their purpose is transportation of people and goods allowing for mobile pastoralism across the steppes. This article does cover them however:
https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/kurgan-tyagunova-mogila-i-problemy-kolesnogo-transporta-yamno-katakombnoy-epohi-v-vostochnoy-evrope
@Orpheus
What is the actual radiocarbon date for grave 3200? Gonur necropolis c14 dates range from 2300 to 1630 calBP. More importantly is it (a foal) even actually a horse? Sarianidi referred to all the equids as "horses" but according to Parpola and Janhunen (2010) a horse identity cannot be confirmed for them by specialists. Sataev et al (2022) say 3200 is a donkey.
Same goes for IVC "horses", they are asses.. Which is why almost everything you cited is from 50 years ago, same as with BMAC its before archaeologists took more than a cursory look and figured this out. And there's nothing I know of to suggest the Sanauli cart was specifically horse-pulled? It was probably pulled by donkeys
Yes, like I said I don't disagree that people used carts in the Near East for "military" purposes from early on, as in Ur -
But they simply aren't the fast fighting chariots relevant to the Mitanni, Hittites, Hyksos, Luwians, Mycenaeans, and so on but rather carts, they aren't towed by horses, and they aren't even used in fighting but probably just carrying around important personnel at low speed. There's no clear line for development of such devices into fast fighting chariots until horses are available and again, the evidence for domestic horse is only equivocal in the steppe context in the relevant timeframe and extremely problematic south of there until after Sintashta.
Basically I'll believe they (BMAC, IVC) had such chariots and horses without getting them from the steppe when they present direct bone dates and DNA confirmation they are horses.
@Gaska
Ok, so the logical answer is that Greek is associated with steppe ancestry and therefore arrived through a migration from there which did not lose the autosomal component before reaching the Aegean. Obviously this rules out an Anatolian route given the lack of comparable steppe ancestry in the relevant time frame.
Whether Linear A is Anatolian, Hattian or Harappan doesn't really matter to this question
Peter Schrijver argues that Minoan is connected to the Hattic language.
https://www.academia.edu/38376555/Talking_Neolithic_the_case_for_Hatto_Minoan_and_its_relationship_to_Sumerian
There are a number of spells in the language of Keftiu, as the Egyptians called Crete, which points to the use of a non-IE language on Crete.
http://minoablog.blogspot.com/2010/02/minoan-incantations-on-egyptian-papyri.html
@LGK
The Sinauli cart's design is essentially a modified bullock cart, you need an animal with lower shoulder height than horses to carry it otherwise the carriage tilts too far backwards, furthermore the low height of the pole would interfere with the horses' gait which is very undesireable for charioteering. This is should be obvious to anyone with some equestrian experience. Asses could work too but I bet bovines were pulling this thing. Note that no horse or equid bones were present, it being a horse-drawn chariot is entirely a nationalist driven agenda.
Never seen a guy who continues to be wrong but still have this many worshippers like David Anthony. No actual proper knowledge of history hence why he keeps getting ridiculed by the actual specialists like Von Dassow, Joseph Maran...etc. I guess if you ignore the critics hard enough they will disappear.
Mitanni chariots are not the same as Sintashta chariots this is 100% proven. Even Anthony claims that the Sintashta chariot was used by javelin throwers.
The Near East was way ahead of the rest of the world when it came to wheeled devices. Even according to Anthony the earliest "equid" guided by a metal bit in the world is found in Anshan. Yet, it's funny how he still obfuscates everything about horses and chariots. Horses somehow "passed through the Caucasus to Northern Iran" in the Chalcolithic whatever that means LOL. Care to elaborate something so detremintal to your theory? Unbelievable, without a mighty steppe horde!? We always need a migration to explain horses. No way they could've been traded right?
@Copper Axe I can't read Russian. What's the radiocarbon date?
@LGK I think I was pretty clear that the animals used were either donkeys or some different type of horse instead of the common one. Gradually I change my mentions of "horse" for this reason.
If that's the case for all findings then IVC probably didn't have the same cart-pulling animals Sintashta have. I dont see how this is a big deal though
"But they simply aren't the fast fighting chariots relevant to the Mitanni, Hittites, Hyksos, Luwians, Mycenaeans, and so on"
Neither are Sintashta's, which are neither chariots nor for warfare, and pribably neither for speed (Littauwer & Crouwel). Neither can be proven, in fact the chariot claim is refuted (Littauer & Crouwel), at that time we have the technology already at Kultepe with or without horses. Sintashta having horses but being unable to develop chariots when they were more or less invented already in the Near East without horses being available is a nice indicator on who has the tendency to invest stuff and who does not. Same goes for the spoked wheel.
Also, wagons used for warfare purposes can be proven for the Near Eastern ones but not for anything on the steppe. Guess our pastoralist friends should have made more cave drawings.
"but rather carts, they aren't towed by horses, and they aren't even used in fighting but probably just carrying around important personnel at low speed."
We don't know that, that's your own personal speculation. And again, we don't have any evidence of Sintashta carts beinf used for warfare in any form (while we do have for the Near Eatern ones).
In the Standard of Ir you can also see a cart running over an enemy. This requires speed, which apparently the carts did have even without horses. It also points at the personnel on them being actively engaged in fighting while mounting them instead of just for transport.
Dude I get that you have a predetermined position but ignoring recorded evidence isn't helping your case, especially when your argument is "huh there were no 100% super duper real chariots in the Near East... therefore Sintashta carts were super duper 100% war chariots!" That's a non-sequitur.
"There's no clear line for development of such devices into fast fighting chariots until horses are available"
And yet Sintashta still didn't have war chariots.
"the evidence for domestic horse is only equivocal in the steppe context in the relevant timeframe and extremely problematic south of there until after Sintashta."
I agree on that, although I'll of course change my mind if evidence is provided for the opposite.
That being said, still, with the horse being available, as well as spoked wheels (through trasing with the Near East most likely since the earliest spoked wheels are from there).
The only case you can make is that Sintashta carts (not used for warfare) were faster than the Near Eastern ones (used for warfare). Although the "speed" argument has been refuted by Littauwer & Crouwel.
To put it this way: If Sintashta had chariots, especially war chariots (how can this even be confirmed for them? Lol), then this technology, including spoked wheels, already existed in the Near East for centuries. If in the Near East there were no actual chariots and war chariots (or proto-chariots) because "insufficient evidence" then Sintashta has even less sufficient evidence. Having the common horse doesn't magically make you invent technology that you don't have especially when you already have high speed (horseback, see Mongols 3000 years later still massively preferring the horse over chariots for their conquests).
@Orpheus
Why would steppe people bury their carts with their horses, as if they were to be pulled by horses in the afterlife, if those carts weren't pulled by horses in real life?
I'd also be careful when it comes to Parpola's interpretations (unless he present something with a material substance instead of his opinion) considering he missed the memo in his 2015 work that the Potapovka funeral alleged to be the Dadhyanc legend by Anthony, was already retracted by Anthony 10+ years before Parpola's 2015 work.
@LGK
You are making stuff up this is from Sataev: " This identification was proposed at the time of the excavations when no archaeozoologist was present and, due to the more frequent presence of donkeys at the site, doubts could be raised. However, we believe that an animal tooth from this tomb is undoubtedly from a horse."
Horses at Godin Tepe are accepted. Sumerian horses literally come from Gutium. You know ass of the mountains from the Zagros? Shulgi of Ur?
The idea that only people from the steppes had access to horses is ridiculous.
@epoch “ Peter Schrijver argues that Minoan is connected to the Hattic language.
https://www.academia.edu/38376555/Talking_Neolithic_the_case_for_Hatto_Minoan_and_its_relationship_to_Sumerian
There are a number of spells in the language of Keftiu, as the Egyptians called Crete, which points to the use of a non-IE language on Crete.
http://minoablog.blogspot.com/2010/02/minoan-incantations-on-egyptian-papyri.html”
If so, it may be a NorthWest Caucasian language related to adyghe/Cherkes
@Vara
The idea that only people from the steppes had access to horses is ridiculous.
Domesticated horses came from the steppe. Ancient DNA shows this clearly.
There's no evidence of genetically domesticated horses anywhere else at this time frame.
@Davidski
Horses were domesticated between 4500-3500 BCE in Dereivka. Which is funny to me because Anatolians who allegedly come from Suvurovo have no word for this animal.
You think horses wouldn't be traded in 3000BCE? Okay how about when people were trading peacocks and monkeys across the world?
I guess no rich dumbass thought to buy some horses. Needs a mighty invasion!!!
PS. The Italian archaeologists know horses were around.
@Vara
Outdated bullshit.
@Davidsky
I wrote badly concerning geography. Yes, it 's of importance (origins, trails...), but not the globalizing more or less received labels (European, Near-Eastern) based on unstable frontiers or concepts...
I know some secrets 😜
@Davidski They were pulled by chariots though? At least that's my impression and seems like the logical conclusion. I don't think I wrote anywhere that the vehicles in the steppe weren't pulled by horses, especially considering that horses were widespread on the steppe and the horse was domesticated there, in fact both the Botai and the common horse.
@Vara I came across this while looking for something unrelated https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327011415_BEYOND_HARAPPA_CHARIOTS_AND_HORSES_IN_PREHISTORIC_INDIA_Dr_Shiv_Sastry_2018 Sources therein are interesting.
It looks like both the term "chariot" is accepted for the Near Eastern vehicles (which I called carts), and "true horse" bones have been discovered. I don't see on what grounds the "refutations" of these findings stand. So these mentions aren't even controversial, except in a few circles with an obvious Kurganist predisposition.
Btw cattle can run on average at 40km/h, 20 to 30 miles per day compared to 20 to 40 for horses. Cattles are also stronger than horses per individual. So I don't know where the whole "you need horses to have chariots!" argument came from.
@Andrzejewski Regarding Minoan I would also suggest the following
Davis 1967
Finkelberg 1990
Finkelberg 1991
Finkelberg 2000
Brown 1992
Brown 1993
Woudhuizen 2004
Kazansky 2012
@Davidski I don't think he disagrees with that. A diffusion of the horse is most likely from the steppe (given the DNA evidence as you mention). However the diffusion probably happened quite early on, so the wealthy centers of the Near East had access to horses through trading. Hence the various horse findings in the Near East. These are genetically derived from the steppe horse and not vice versa, as far as I know.
"This article does not mention the two-wheeled wagons I was talking about. You should be more respectful of David W. Anthony as well, you are being childish with your remarks here."
I made no remark myself, I merely quoted Izbitser.
These remarks below are mine:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers-of-the-steppes
Like that time in 1995, when Anthony and Vinogradov proclaimed that the Potapovka 'Rsi dadhyanc like' horse head burial was Vedic? Only to find out later that the horse head and human body were 1000yrs apart by carbon date and silently retract the claim through a footnote at the end of his 2007 book. A concoction still unfortunately repeated as fact by people like Witzel in 2020. Other concoctions include steppe Kurgan building being described in the Rig Veda.
You used the word nationalism, let's talk about Soviet nationalism and how it was used to build up the 'Aryan' identity of the Soviets in the late 1900s. https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/21124/Olsen_2002.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
By CC Lamberg Karlovsky
"Arkhaim has become a center for followers of the occult and Russian supernationalists, a theater of, and for, the absurd and dangerous. It is argued that it was constructed to reproduce a model of the universe; that it was built by King Yima, as described in the Avesta, the sacred book of the Zoroastrians (Medvedev 1999); that it was a temple observatory; that it was the birthplace of Zoroaster, who is buried at Sintashta; that it is the homeland of the ancient Aryans; and that it is the earliest Slavic state.
The swastika, which appears on pottery from Arkhaim, is proclaimed a symbol of Aryanism. Visitors come to pray, tap energy from outer space, worship fire, be cured, dance, meditate, and sing. “We Slavs,” writes Zdanovich,
the director of excavations, “consider ourselves to be new arrivals, but that is untrue. Indo-Europeans and Indo-Iranians had been living here [in the southern Urals] since the Stone Age and had been incorporated into the
Kazakhs, Bashkirs, and Slavs; such is the common thread linking us all” (quoted in Shnirelman 1998, 1999). Shnirelman (1995:1) writes that nationalist concerns in the former U.S.S.R. are creating “an explicitly ethnocentric vision of the past, a glorification of the great ancestors of the given people, who are treated as if they had made the most valuable contribution to the culture of all humanity.”
Going back a bit, when someone claims there was a migration from Alpine Europe to the Don steppe, we should ask- where is all the R1b-L151 in 2000 BC Don steppe ? There is none. hence, such a migration did not happen and there's no point copy/pasting outdated literature in a thread where people have analytical & critical thinking abilities.
The opposite in fact occurred. Circa 22/2000 BC, there was a migration from the north/ east in the form Srubnaya culture replacing and partially assimilating the preceding Catacomb culture. The paradox is that Srubnaja had more EEF although it didnt proximally arrive from the West
The discussion on horses & chariots is interesting of course, but its often over-hyped because past scholarship tended to attach too much significance to it, as some kind of 'index-fossil' of IEs. Which it's not.
@Orpheus
These days everyone accepts that horses were domesticated on the steppes, even those who favor other homelands for PIE.
Near Eastern horses (zi-zi-) are also accepted by everyone in the world including Anthony: "Perhaps a few Akkadian horses were acquired from the chiefs and princes of western Iran known to the Akkadians as the Elamites". Even though I doubt Elamites had much influence far into the highlands before the Shimashkian dynasty but it's Anthony, what do you expect?
The Hurrians were breeding horses around 2400 BCE at the latest. However, the only reason Anthony and his lackeys question the South Central Asian and South Asian horses is because these areas are associated with Indo-Europeans and you cannot have other explanations than STEPPE INVASION! Of course these Harappans couldn't trade horses with the Akkadians right?
"Zimri-Lim's palace" was built by a craftsman from Gonur, couldn't he ask for horses as a payment? Assuming horses didn't come from the west, surely they could've been traded indirectly from Afanasievo>Vakhsh>Pre-BMAC?
Anyways, let's just say there's people who examined the supposed South Asian "hemione" in person and confirmed they were horses.
The idea that Near Eastern horses were successfully domesticated is outdated.
There's no evidence for it in horse DNA.
Horse DNA shows that DOM2 is the ancestor of the modern domesticated horse and it replaced other horse populations ~2000BCE.
That's irrelevant to whether or not Hurrians had useless horses in 2400BCE that are now extinct.
"pulled by chariots"
pulled by horses*
@Vara Interesting. I don't find it too far-fetched considering the first domesticated horse wasn't even the common horse. Do you know of any proposed reasons as to why it got eventually replaced (just like the Botai horse)?
Looking at ftDNAs high-res j2a tree, many of the Mycenean-ear J2a do not fall within recent Near Eastern branches. They fall within a clade rooted with LN Lengyel individuals from Hungary
Sorry Gaska ..
@Orpheus
There's no evidence that horses were domesticated in the Near East you moron.
The common domesticated horse is the only type of horse for which there is direct evidence of its domestication.
The Botai horse may have been domesticated, but if so, it was only used to provide meat and milk.
https://www.kavehfarrokh.com/iranian-studies/initiatives/iranian-militaria-initiative/military-history-and-armies-of-scythians-sarmatians-and-achaemenids/image-of-a-jiroft-horseman-with-short-lance/
Supposed 3rd mill bce horserider from Jiroft. I have not verified the authenticity.
http://ijarch.org/Admin/Articles/9-Note%20on%20Chariots.pdf
Horses and spoked chariots in cave paintings with OCP (sanauli style) weapons from ganga region. OCP weapons of that style dated to 2500-1500bce.
@Davidski Who cares lmao imagine getting worked up about something like that, whether some horses were domesticated in the Near East and then got replaced changes nothing for the topics discussed here. Could've been used for meat and milk like the Botai ones
"The common domesticated horse is the only type of horse for which there is direct evidence of its domestication."
Then Vara will have no issue confirming this if there's no evidence to the contrary.
@Vara
Don't all the dates you provide for Akkadian and Hurrian horse use significantly post-date the earliest findings from Eastern Europe and Central Asia?
How do you know this horses weren't brought in from there through trade?
@Rob It was I who was interested in opinions regarding strange morphological similarities between Southern Unetici and Babyno. Volker Heyd referred to a 'pulse' from central Europe to the Steppe. Someone in this thread subsequently mentioned exogamy to explain it. Who knows? However, you are right - if there had been a migration into the steppe, where then is the L151?
I might say though, that the Srubnaya migration and all that R1a dropping down into the desiccating steppes beginning c2000BC that you mention probably would have cleared any L151 out as it did the Catacomb R1b at that time. But enough of that, L151 does not show up in any Catacomb migration zones as far as I know and not in the Mycenaeans in the Greek peninsula either as I hypothesized in my initial post.
Heyd also mentions a large amount of R1a-417 showing up in the Mittelelbe-Saale and Malopolska regions (2500-2300BC) perhaps emanating from the Middle Dnieper Culture (Piotr Wlodarczak, 2018). I could not help but wonder if these migrations west along the north edge of the Carpathians might have resulted in applied pressure (domino style) to the Upper Danube Unetice and gotten them on the move so to speak - it was just a thought.
@Rob
Sorry?, why?
I have never affirmed that this could not be so. In your opinion, what are the shared markers between Lengyel (or any other European neolithic culture) and the Mycenaeans? Greek and later Mycenaean markers are mostly of european neolithic origin (thanks to G2). There are also lineages that can only have come from Anatolia (or perhaps the Levant) such as L and T1 and also a total absence of steppe markers until the late Bronze Age.
If J2a and G2a had been in Greece for thousands of years, why did they change their language, if the elites were not steppe people either?
The origin of J2b-L283 remains to be determined because the autosomal composition of the Cetina samples does not prove a steppe or Balkan origin. All over Europe there are I2a or G2a samples with percentages of Yamnaya ancestry equal or higher than those of Cetina, and that does not prove that they originate in the steppes. IMO where to look is in the Caucasus.
And remember that Smyaodovo M269 (4.500 BC) opens the possibility that some branches of this marker have their origin in the Balkans. Perhaps Yamnaya owes more than a small percentage of EEF to the cultures of old Europe.
@All in horse/chariot discussion
Notice how all the cases of "horses" in the "Southern Arc" are after 2200, when Sintashta DOM2 type horses are expanding? This applies to both Godin Tepe and Ur (for which horses are suggested in the late period which overlaps Sintashta). Naturally a robust dating and DNA program for pre-2000 "horses" in the south would do wonders to clarify the inconsistencies in identification opinions, undatable figurines and art etc.
Early horses may well have reached south of the steppe through trade or gifting around or after 2000. But it doesn't seem like they were considered important or bred in any numbers in their new homes, probably because these people already had cattle, other equids and then camels thoroughly domesticated and put into draft roles for millennia. So it seems quite clear to me that the pairing of horses and fast chariots to use in a "real" military sense was a Sintashta novelty, and that the combination came to the "Southern Arc" through their influence.
@Vara WRT Gonur 3200 specifically I'm talking about Sataev "In the burials
3200 and 3900, the skeletons of donkeys were found alongside the skeletons of double-humped camels and re- mains of four-wheeled wagons. In total, 4 burials with carts were found at Gonur, where the skeletons of camels are always present, whereas only in two of them — the skeletons of donkeys. It is possible that the bulls and camels were main draft animals of the Gonur people, while the donkeys mainly played the role of a pack and riding animals."
Meadow doesn't agree with horse identification from a single tooth as Sataev did earlier, I assume this is talking about a different set of remains. And in the more recent paper I have just quoted horse is omitted from the tally of animals in burial 3200 (which includes camel and dog otherwise). So maybe a change of mind.
@Vasistha
The Jiroft bronze is probably a donkey or ass. There has been recent discussion about donkeyback riding in the Near East more broadly since the EBA
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196335
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-24363-0_4
Although as always depictions that are not really to scale or particularly realistic can't be confidently identified, so these are not ideal evidence for either side of the argument
@Steppisch wrote: „Heyd also mentions a large amount of R1a-417 showing up in the Mittelelbe-Saale and Malopolska regions (2500-2300BC) perhaps emanating from the Middle Dnieper Culture (Piotr Wlodarczak, 2018).”
It was a late-CWC Chlopice-Vesele culture from Podkarpacie and Lesser Poland (Malopolska).
„I could not help but wonder if these migrations west along the north edge of the Carpathians might have resulted in applied pressure (domino style) to the Upper Danube Unetice and gotten them on the move so to speak - it was just a thought”.
This migration formed the Nitra culture in the northwestern Carpathian Basin in Slovakia
@Gaska
"The origin of J2b-L283 remains to be determined because the autosomal composition of the Cetina samples does not prove a steppe or Balkan origin."
What kind of repetitive crackpot non sense is this? What kind of auDNA do the J2b-L283 Cetina/Dinaric/IA Illyrian samples represent if not typical EBA-IA autosomal DNA of that ancient Western Balkan people of that time?! There is already a clear autosomal pattern characteristic for this group and absolutely no proof of some recent migratory Iranian pseudo scientific fringe theory as put forward in this and other comment sections of this blog multiple times.
There is neither any archeological, historical nor genetic evidence for any of this crap. If you want to claim that the people buried in Ostrvica Pasičine, Velika Gomila, Ston, Smiljan, Cetina, Veliki Vanik, Gudnja, Mala Metaljka,... are Iranians then try to serve that Iranian crackpot theory to the Croatian archaeogeneticists, historians and everyone else involved in deciphering the genome of these people.
I am not sure if most of such comments are just rooted in the dumbness of its commentators or general blatant ignorance toward West Balkan archeology and/or archaeogenetics.
Could be, old Armenian էշ (ēš) - ass - is a cognate of ashwa.
While we are on this topic, it should be mentioned that a bull pulled 'ratha' race is explicitly mentioned in RV, possibly the only real world mention of such a chariot race. Check - RV 10.102 - MudgalAni's bull chariot race/battle.
@LGK
It is probably incorrect to refer to DOM2 as an exclusive "Sintashta" horse when the oldest example of DOM2 (in Turkey btw) predates Sintashta, and a few others were in Europe prior to the Srubnaya formation on the Pontic steppes. The authors worded things a bit strangely which lead many people to this confusion. In my opinion DOM2 is probably from Poltavka/Catacomb groups whose horses then came to be in possession by Abashevo groups.
LGK
There are no inconsistencies. Seals of kings and figures are pretty dateable as well as cuneiform texts. The current consensus is the following from The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East vol III: "horses were introduced into southwestern Asia in the mid-third millennium bc". Irrelevant whether these horses were DOM2 or not.
I know nothing will change your mind but here from the paper you sent:
"Разрозненные кости домашнего осла встречены на Северном и Южном Гонуре (единичные кости этого вида обнаружены также на сателлитных памятниках Гонур-20, Гонур-21). Они присутст-вуют в мусорных наслоениях (в том числе в заполнении могильных ям) и на полу построек (табл. 1). Добавим, что на Гонуре кроме осла обнаружены кости других представителей рода Equus: кулана (Equus hemionus) и лошади (E. caballus), но по сравнению с костями осла их немного (табл. 1)."
I don't remember Meadow mentioning the Gonur horse. I know Meadow is a deity because of his association with Anthony but he has not checked those horses in person and even he said the following: "but in the end that may be a matter of emphasis and opinion."
Let's just say there are other well known archaeologists who have checked those recently.
@Gaska Could've been in Helladics. We don't have that many samples from them. Language can also change without significant haplo or autosomal change
@LGK Horses from the steppe could've arrived even earlier. Maykop already has some horse-like depictions in figurines if I'm not mistaken
"So it seems quite clear to me that the pairing of horses and fast chariots to use in a "real" military sense was a Sintashta novelty, and that the combination came to the "Southern Arc" through their influence."
If Sintashta are proven to have had war chariots capable of high speeds then it's highly probable. Although it could have come even later than Sintashta through a more admixed steppe population
WRT Jiroft, donkeys can't develop high speeds when compared to horses or cattle. They're animals mainly used for labor in the fields and carrying stuff around or pulling carts in slow/average speeds. It would seem highly improbable for a warrior using a lancet (which requires a lot of speed to develop force) to use a donkey
@Mark It doesn't have to be a recent migration. It reached the balkans at some point, then remained there and when steppe ancestry arrived it just absorbed it without changing lineages. Remember, 11 out of 14 Bronze Age Croatia j2 samples in the Southern Arc paper have excess CHG
Orpheus
Note on DOM2:
"Combined, early selection at GSDMC and ZFPM1 suggests shifting use toward horses that were more docile, more resilient to stress and involved in new locomotor exercise, including endurance running, weight bearing and/or warfare."
Explains why the 3rd millennium Mesopotamians considered the horses useless compared to the donkeys and why DOM2 even replaced the other steppe horses. It seems the horses were associated with less agriculturally advanced people i.e Iranian highlanders and Hurrians who probably used them for food.
However, Domesticated horses or equids are irrelevant to PIE or IE. Calvert Watkins compared the Greek and Anatolian version of the Asvamedha, where it is a wild donkey that is sacrificed not a horse and says the following: "The sacrificed donkey and the sacrificed horse are two sides of the same coin". Also, the Asvins are the only deities associated with the donkeys in the Rigveda (other than like 2 mentions of Indra's chariot being pulled by donkeys).
Of course, Ivanov and Gamkrelidze solved the *hekwos puzzle a long time ago; "The lack of a clear Proto-Indo-European word for ‘donkey’, given the presence of domesticated donkeys throughout most of the territory where horses were domesticated and where the Indo-European tribes must have lived, can he explained by assuming that *ek*’wos was originally used with the meaning ‘donkey’ as well as ‘wild horse; horse"
This makes sense even in a steppe PIE context where onagers were hunted and Equus hydruntinus weren't extinct in the Balkans yet.
@Mark
"I am not sure if most of such comments are just rooted in the dumbness of its commentators or general blatant ignorance toward West Balkan archeology and/or archaeogenetics."
I have my answer: it is both.
@Orpheus
"Remember, 11 out of 14 Bronze Age Croatia j2 samples in the Southern Arc paper have excess CHG"
Yet another senseless and dumb post just as the ones you have delivered before. Also, your bizarre claim of one such sample having nearly 40% CHG followed by a q.e.d. moronic "lol".
You should first learn about uniparental analysis and how to correctly read the nomenclature of a lineage before continuing with your even more erroneous autosomal DNA butchering.
What an ignoramus.
@ steppisch
''I who was interested in opinions regarding strange morphological similarities between Southern Unetici and Babyno. Volker Heyd referred to a 'pulse' from central Europe to the Steppe. Someone in this thread subsequently mentioned exogamy to explain it. Who knows? However, you are right - if there had been a migration into the steppe, where then is the L151?
I might say though, that the Srubnaya migration and all that R1a dropping down into the desiccating steppes beginning c2000BC that you mention probably would have cleared any L151 out as it did the Catacomb R1b at that time. But enough of that, L151 does not show up in any Catacomb migration zones as far as I know and not in the Mycenaeans in the Greek peninsula either as I hypothesized in my initial post.''
My overall point was that whilst there are 'central European influences' which appear in the western steppe c. 2200 BC, they are nothing new, as such had appeared in 5500 BC, or 3000 BC with GAC. Moreover, these specific ones did not come directly from central or western Europe, but from northern epi-corded groups derived from Fatyanovo, and rich in R1a-Z93. As we've said, they took over the steppe at 2200 BC, but their links to central Europe are earlier (c. 2500 BC). Something like the BB impact on Polish Iwno culture might also have facilitated a 'domino effect', as well as the phenomenon of female-exogamy, as documented in Lech valley
Even more interesting, these western R1a-Z93 groupds moved into Bulgaria, and probably represent a major linguistic contribution proto-Thracians whilst concurrently accounting for isoglosses with Balto-Slavic
''Heyd also mentions a large amount of R1a-417 showing up in the Mittelelbe-Saale and Malopolska regions (2500-2300BC) perhaps emanating from the Middle Dnieper Culture (Piotr Wlodarczak, 2018). I could not help but wonder if these migrations west along the north edge of the Carpathians might have resulted in applied pressure (domino style) to the Upper Danube Unetice and gotten them on the move so to speak - it was just a thought.''
You'd have to rationalise that hypothesis against the finds from Papac et al. Whatever the case, the nature of MDC is poorly understood. It is often counted amontst Epi-corded, but its typologies link it with Catacomb culture in the steppe. Whatever the case, this is the period of catacomb influences in Malopolska
@ Gaska
You keeep repeating the same thing, no matter our efforts to educate you. Perhaps your belief that Europe was a pan-Vasconic Utopia whilst PIE can only be some foreign element disallows you from assimilating evidence ?
Not all G2a had been in Greece since the Neolithic. You would need to begin to understand the specific lineages - some G2a subclades are continuous since Neolithic, some more central European, some nuveau-Anatolian
Same with J2a. Look to specifics. Quite a number do not fall within the Neolithic pool, but are linked to the Carpathian basin, others, e.g. in Sarakenos cave and in Minoans link to Anatolia.
Yes, J2b2 is deeply from the Caucasus (more likely northern Zagros), but they didnt flye to Greece from Caucasus, nor did they travel via Anatolia.
They had first been in the northwestern Balkans for hundreds of years and then moved to Greece. The question remaining when and how they got to the Balkans, and IMO this was closer to 4000 BC than 9000 BC
lastly, you keep saying there are no steppe lineages in EBA Greece, despite being informed that IL_68 is a Yamnaya-assoc. lineage in addition to being found in the Dnieper and middle Don Eneolithic.
So all this supports a nuanced steppe-related model, one espoused by European specialists & highlighted by me for over 10 years
@ Rob
What made you decide to return to anthrogenica? I thought you hated it
@Vara Interesting, thanks
@Mark careful not to pop a vein there LMFAO
@ psikh
I dont hate anyone, certainly not over discussion of prehistory which is a noble exercise. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, so long as they are willing to learn, aren't an insolent doofus and don't construct a weird personality cult about themselves.
@Mark,
I agree, a Steppe origin of J2b2 makes sense for these two reasons.
Near 100% of Bronze, Iron age West Balkans carry it yet they have none of the Anatolian admixture seen in Greece.
They have no Anatolian admixture but lots of Steppe admixture.
So you got to consider they got the J2b2 from the Steppe.
It's not a crazy suggestion.
You guys need to stop treating him like he's crazy.
The only problem is there is no J2 found in Steppe at all. We have western Yamnaya Y DNA and none of them carry J2.
Imo, it seems Yamnaya is certainly the Steppe ancestor of the western Balkans.
"J2b2 must be from Anatolia."
But there's literally no Anatolian admixture northwest of Greece.
Before Roman times, recent Near Eastern admixture was restricted to Greece, Thrace, Sicily.
@Samuel and Mark
There is evidence of some CHG/Iranian-related ancestry in the eastern Balkans during the Neolithic.
So a non-steppe origin of J2b-L283 can be potentially explained by this early gene flow into the eastern Balkans from far to the east, possibly across the Black Sea.
All that would need to have happened afterwards is for J2b-L283 to be associated with steppe groups somewhere like eastern Romania, and then spread west in people who didn't have any significant extra CHG-related ancestry.
The only other option is the steppe option, and if so, then J2b-L283 may have been a steppe CHG-related lineage and moved west ahead of Yamnaya, in a group like Usatovo.
Case in point, there's a low coverage sample labeled Romania_EN_oIran:I6661, dating to 5621-5482 BCE, which probably has some sort of Caucasus or more eastern ancestry.
And there's also one labeled Bulgaria_Krepost_N:I0679_d, dating to 5723-5623 BCE, with significant admix of this eastern type.
So there was more happening in the Balkans than just steppe people moving in there.
@Rob
You are losing the good habit of deleting your comments after rereading them. If you stop doing that and keep posting nonsense everyone will think you have a big problem
@Mark
Calm yourself down, you seem very nervous, you may end up like those knuckleheads in AG who are all day long elaborating theories about the origin of L283 and E1b-V13.
There is an excess of CHG and Levant_PPN in Cetina compared to the Vucedol samples AND we have some outliers that demonstrate the arrival of a strong Caucasian component in the Western Balkans in the early Bronze Age. In addition we have the Kabardino-Balkaria sample showing that this marker in the Caucasus was at least contemporary with the Balkans. Mycenaean samples demonstrate the linkage of that marker with IE, but they do not originate from Cetina but from Serbia. Unless you have evidence of that marker in some European culture between 4,000-2,000 BC, then it is logical to think that during that time period it was in the Caucasus. You don't have to insult or despise anyone, the only thing you have to do is to prove what you are saying.
This is an example-qpAdm model, Lazaridis, 2.022
HRV_Cetina_BA
0,415-Caucasus_HG
0,387-Marmara_Barcin_N
0,169-SRB_Iron_Gates_HG
0,029-Eastern_HG
0,000-Levant_PPN
It’ll be funny when Gaska get proven wrong yet again. But he’ll continue slumbering in his delirious stupor
Gaska being wrong is nothing special. But it's far from settled that J2b-L283 is a steppe marker.
There is a rather unusual and mysterious Neolithic link between the eastern Balkans and the Caucasus.
People knew how to sail back then and they probably moved across the Black Sea regularly.
Absolutely. Underwater archaeology is at at its incipiency still
@Rob
Take your time, re-read the comments I have posted and the ones you have posted, then think about an unbiased reader reading what we have written. You seriously think that you have somehow proven me wrong? - if your conclusion is that, you need treatment. You know you are wrong but you don't have the balls to admit it
According to the distal Lazaridis model there is a 10% increase in CHG and aprox 3% decrease in EHG between the chalcolithic (Vucedol-Croatia) and Cetina samples. Therefore this increase in CHG is not related to more steppe migrations but to anatolian migrations.
And since I am always wrong, my next prediction is that Harvardians will sooner or later have to rectify about the Indo-Europeanization of the Peloponnese and the uniparentals involved.
The Southern Arc study even has a diagram showing that a Yamnaya expansion around 5000 years ago (3000 BCE) introduced “Eastern European” ancestry to the Balkans and Greece. This is true, but there were other groups, smaller in scale, that preceded these Yamnaya migrants. David Anthony even admitted during the Razib Khan podcast that they have samples that are full blown Yamnaya 1000 years BEFORE the Yamnaya. He mentions around 4000 BCE. The R1b Z2103 Yamnaya show many branches around 3300/3400 BCE. So I interpret this to mean that they might even have Yamnaya-esque genomes dating to as early as 4300 BCE. Even more interesting, none these samples belong to R1b Z2103 (at the time of the podcast). To me, this seems like quite the revelation.
Furthermore, these early pre Yamnaya migrants must have been mobile and must have moved into the Balkans before the conventional Yamnaya migration. So they certainly had, at least, a small scale impact on the region in terms of the autosomal ancestry. But we can’t understand the scope of this impact because we don’t have access to these samples. The archaeological record is very clear that there were various small scale, mobile groups moving through the area at that time. There were the Suvorovo Novodanilovka folk, followed by Cernavoda, then Usatovo. These earlier groups would have also introduced Eastern European ancestry to the Balkans and possibly Greece, yet that contribution is unaccounted for. So, to me, this is a real problem.
I don’t have a strong opinion on the whole PIE debate, but if the Anatolian branch of IE split sometime between 4400-4000 BCE and there are samples out there showing Yamnaya ancestry already present on the western steppe and even the Balkans around that same time, then those samples should have been included in any sort of comprehensive study looking to nail down the origin of PIE. By fixating on the Yamnaya expansion around 3000 BCE, these earlier groups almost appear to have been intentionally taken out of the equation.
@Sam Elliott
The Southern Arc study even has a diagram showing that a Yamnaya expansion around 5000 years ago (3000 BCE) introduced “Eastern European” ancestry to the Balkans and Greece.
The Southern Arc paper is a piece of fluff. See here...
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/09/but-iosif-what-about-phrygians.html
It should never have been published in its current form and it'll always be a problem for me that it was published.
As for the formation of Yamnaya, the population that gave rise to Yamnaya existed already in Ukraine well before 4,000 BCE. I've been saying this for the last few years here.
A rapid expansion across the steppe (from a shared homeland with proto-Corded Ware people) and a founder effect can explain the fact that Yamnaya males carry mostly Z2103. See here...
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/07/on-origin-of-corded-ware-people.html
@Vasistha
"Yeah well, its similar to Yamnaya, Progress is the ancestor."
Honestly, it's hilarious to see you make up such theories. It's because you don't really get what's going on. f4(Mbuti.DG, WHG, Russia_Progress_En, Russia_Samara_EBA_Yamnaya) produces a Z-score of 4.909, which means Yamnaya has excess WHG relative to Progress. Now you tell me, what realistically available sources are there for Progress to admix with to get the needed WHG for Yamnaya? There are none, that's where Don Eneolithic samples come in. They have the needed WHG, EHG and CHG ready on a platter and by 4300 BCE you already have Yamnaya-like Sredni Stog living in the steppes, contemporary to Progress which not only has lack of WHG but also has excess ANE than needed for Yamnaya.
@Anveṣaṇam
"Honestly, it's hilarious to see you make up such theories. It's because you don't really get what's going on."
Literally no model for Yamnaya works without Progress, so far. Even if some other samples work in the future, that would be because of Progress like high EHG + CHG/IranN related ancestry. The Khvalynsk samples will all have max 25% CHG/Iran, they cannot be direct Yamnaya sources.
"f4(Mbuti.DG, WHG, Russia_Progress_En, Russia_Samara_EBA_Yamnaya) produces a Z-score of 4.909, which means Yamnaya has excess WHG relative to Progress. Now you tell me, what realistically available sources are there for Progress to admix with to get the needed WHG for Yamnaya?"
No shit sherlock. WHG is from UKR_N like ancestry which is a later addition as it is missing from Khvalynsk, Progress, Samara_HG etc. This is not some revelation. Check my articles on formation of steppe ancestry.
"There are none, that's where Don Eneolithic samples come in. They have the needed WHG, EHG and CHG ready on a platter "
There will be no Don_eneolithic sample substantially pre-dating 4500bce with as high a chg/iran ancestry of progress_en which is needed for Yamnaya. If they are dated to 4200bce or so and are similar to progress, that indicates a migration from the south to the north. But you have the insider info, so let me know what the date on those don_eneolithic samples is.
"and by 4300 BCE you already have Yamnaya-like Sredni Stog living in the steppes, contemporary to Progress which not only has lack of WHG but also has excess ANE than needed for Yamnaya."
Yamnaya-like Sredni itself cannot be a source for yamnaya or yamnaya-like Sredni samples. That's like saying Sintashta is the ancestor of Sintashta.
That 4300bce date is not a problem, that's perfectly in range of what the DATES output for yamnaya/afanasievo says - 4800-4300bce.
@ Davidski
''As for the formation of Yamnaya, the population that gave rise to Yamnaya existed already in Ukraine well before 4,000 BCE. I've been saying this for the last few years here.
A rapid expansion across the steppe (from a shared homeland with proto-Corded Ware people) and a founder effect can explain the fact that Yamnaya males carry mostly Z2103. See here...''
The curious thing is that R1b-M269 might not be from that middle Don cluster, which had I2a-L68 and R1a-M17. Of course future sampling might clarify that, however as yet R1b-M269 are much further west, Bulgaria, SW Ukraine, etc.
So it'll be interesting to decipher the dynamics behind that clans mass expansion to the East, into David Anthony's favourite niche in the Volga bend :)
@Rob
There’s an R1b Z2103 from much further west dated 4500 BCE? Where? I’m a aware of an R1b M269 from Smyadovo, Bulgaria with the same date.
The Smyadovo sample has steppe ancestry, so if that's actually an M269 sample (the coverage isn't great), then this doesn't actually prove that M269 is from the Bulgaria.
This sample probably represents a very early migration from the steppe into the Balkans.
@ Vasistha
''There will be no Don_eneolithic sample substantially pre-dating 4500bce with as high a chg/iran ancestry of progress_en which is needed for Yamnaya. If they are dated to 4200bce or so and are similar to progress, that indicates a migration from the south to the north. But you have the insider info, so let me know what the date on those don_eneolithic samples is.''
As you know, Progress only dates to ~ 4300 BC, whilst other Sredni-Stog-like sites extend a few hundred years earlier.
Hence the bulk of Progress Eneolithic ancestry came from the North. Plus they have some additional admixture from Meshoko.
If there are those individuals from the lower Volga region with just as high or even higher CHG % than Progress, then it all falls into line, and requires that CHG arrived c. 6000 BC.
This is a time when many population movements were ocurring right across Eurasia due to the impact of the 8.2 kiloyear event
@ Davidski
''The Smyadovo sample has steppe ancestry, so if that's actually an M269 sample (the coverage isn't great), then this doesn't actually prove that M269 is from the Bulgaria.
This sample probably represents a very early migration from the steppe into the Balkans.'''
The new coverage from the Arc paper is up to .10x, so considerably better than it was. Certainly worthy of analysis, with due caution due to it's singletons status
No of course R1b-M269 isnt from Bulgaria, but It seems it could be Ukraine_HG related somehow. That could explain its early presence that far west whilst missing from dozens of samples in the Volga-Caspian region.
@ SamElliot
It is mentioned in mysentence
@vAsiSTha
There will be no Don_eneolithic sample substantially pre-dating 4500bce with as high a chg/iran ancestry of progress_en which is needed for Yamnaya.
The Middle Don is north of the steppe you moron. Yamnaya is from the steppe.
So what's your point exactly?
Yamnaya-like Sredni itself cannot be a source for yamnaya or yamnaya-like Sredni samples. That's like saying Sintashta is the ancestor of Sintashta.
Yes, well done, Sredny Stog in Ukraine at 4,300 BCE is practically Yamnaya.
So obviously we're really interested in the older, Progress-like ancestor of Sredny Stog.
So again, moron, what's your point?
All of the J2b samples from the Mygdalia site in this new Greek paper come from the remains of newborn infants. None of them have any pathologies. It reminds me of the Spartan practice of leaving weak or deformed infants to die.
@Rob
"As you know, Progress only dates to ~ 4300 BC, whilst other Sredni-Stog-like sites extend a few hundred years earlier.
Hence the bulk of Progress Eneolithic ancestry came from the North. Plus they have some additional admixture from Meshoko."
Sure, bulk (>50%) of ancestry in progress is likely from the north. So what? Progress is the oldest sample from the Piedmont, the ancestry there formed much earlier I guess, 4800-4300bce range is what I get with DATES for yamnaya. So, 4300bce sredni sample is not a problem, even if the sample date is correct.
qpAdm for Steppe_En (Result file: https://pastebin.com/n3aJ4JzN)
P-val: 0.05
Sarazm:0.220
Aze_LN: 0.068
Khvalynsk: 0.536
CHG_Kotias: 0.176
54% from the north.
G25 agrees, except it cant catch the Aze_LN type component.
Target: RUS_Progress_En
Distance: 2.8598% / 0.02859770
64.2 RUS_Khvalynsk_En
18.8 TJK_Sarazm_En
17.0 GEO_CHG
0.0 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN
0.0 RUS_Karelia_HG
0.0 UKR_N
Target: RUS_Vonyuchka_En
Distance: 3.2817% / 0.03281675
51.0 RUS_Khvalynsk_En
24.0 TJK_Sarazm_En
22.0 GEO_CHG
3.0 UKR_N
0.0 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN
0.0 HUN_Vinca_MN
0.0 RUS_Karelia_HG
@Davidski
"The Middle Don is north of the steppe you moron. Yamnaya is from the steppe.
So what's your point exactly?"
The point is that north of the steppe is not a source of Progress like high CHG/Iran ancestry lol, its a sink. The caucasus piedmont is the intermediate source.
"Yes, well done, Sredny Stog in Ukraine at 4,300 BCE is practically Yamnaya.
So obviously we're really interested in the older, Progress-like ancestor of Sredny Stog."
The older-Progress like ancestry is from the caucasus piedmont in the south around Progress itself post 4800bce and not from east Ukraine (where Dereivka samples till 3500bce show minimal such ancestry) or from the north (regions around khvalynsk, lebyazhinka or ekaterinovka, middle don, golubaya_krinitsa; don't care) wont show any such high >40% chg/iran ancestry till much later.
Then there is the matter of PPN ancestry which is undoubtedly present in the Yamnaya samples and which cannot come from anywhere else other than the Caucasus.
Your abuses here won't change the fact that like OIT theorists you are trying to relabel the CHG/Iran ancestry as native steppe ancestry because the truth is too inconvenient for your ego.
@ vasistha
If there were CHG rich individuals in the lower Volga , then not all CHG is from south . Much of it came from the north
The only other historically plausible group to have also contributed were Darkveti-Meshoko. Right place right time, we don’t have to imagine some far-flung migrations from Turkmenistan, and they appropriately account for the more distally associated Caucasian N ancestry
Hence I stand by my model for progressEn as
Khvalysnk + WSHG + CHG + Meshoko
Once we have the lower Volga samples it’ll be essentially a one-way fit, +/- extra Meshoko for some individuals
"If there were CHG rich individuals in the lower Volga , then not all CHG is from south . Much of it came from the north"
Let's be specific. How much CHG% do you expect from the north? Where and from which dates are you expecting to find them. Why have they not yet been found from dozens of samples in the pipeline?
@vAsiSTha
At ~5,000 BCE there are people at Khvalynsk that are like the Progress samples, except with a slightly higher EHG ratio and Y-DNA Q.
They represent one of the two populations mixing at Khvalynsk, the other being almost like EHG.
Considering the slight heterogeneity in the Progress samples, it's obvious that admixture was happening in much of the steppe and forest-steppe around 5,000 BCE between populations like these with variable ratios of EHG and CHG.
No need for any migrations from Iran or Tajikistan.
Cope harder.
@ Vasistha
I'm not as VIP as you, Anveṣaṇam & Dave, so I don't know what's in the pipeline :)
In Anthony's talk, he referred to a sample from Berezhnovka in the lower Volga which has the highest amount of CHG (quoting Patteron's analysis), and mentions that this population formed c. 6200 BC. Here is DA & his wife Dorcas Brown in an interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MOrEA84qvo
As I mentioned above, this timing makes complete sense because a lot of things were happening c. 6000 BC, not the least the explosion of pottery-technology & new types of toolkits across north Eurasian hunter-gatherers. So whilst I dont agree with all his explanations, I think D.A. is correct in this regard.
The Berezhnovka sample is a lucky find, as it represents a population of the 'Kairshak type' (lower Volga, Caspian littoral 'Neolithic') which unfortunately did not leave anthropogenic remains either due to taphonymic reasons or unusual burial rituals.
CHG populations moved episodically beyond the Caucasian mountains, and this particular episode ~ 6000 BC imparted a premanent genetic impact. In turn, these Kairshak groups moved further north up the Volga, catalysing the Volga-Caspian mating network with variable proportions of EHG/CHG
But then it was dismantled, by a R1b-Z2103 'Yamnaya strictu sensu' clan moving in from the west. Given the consistent EHG/CHG proportions in Yamnaya, the mix occurred in one specific region/ family burial which might not even have been even particularly close to the Piedmont region.
but i would not exclude a more eastern source for some of the CHG-rich admixture, e.g. if Kelteminar fits the profile of CHG & WSHG inputs.
@Davidski
"At ~5,000 BCE there are people at Khvalynsk that are like the Progress samples, except with a slightly higher EHG ratio and Y-DNA Q."
Hahaha, 5000bce Khvalynsk samples are present only in your dreams. I already know you are bullshitting. Adjusting FRE brings them all down to 4500-4400bce. Quoting Anthony et al 2022 below:
"Four new dates are presented here, making it 14 from Khvalynsk I"
"For Khvalynsk II, eight dates were published previously by the Oxford, Groningen, and Arizona laboratories, and two dates by PSUAMS46. To these ten previously published dates we now add 24 new PSUAMS dates from Khvalynsk II, making 34 dates from Khvalynsk II (Table 1)."
"Most of the dates are on human bones or teeth. This is a problem, because studies by Shishlina and van der Plicht have shown that radiocarbon dates from Eneolithic human bones can be more than 1000 years too old in this
region, a result of freshwater reservoir effects (FRE)47. Therefore, most of the radiocarbon dates in Table 1 are skewed too old."
"Therefore, the faunal dates of 4450–4355 calBCE from Khvalynsk I and 4448–4362 calBCE from Khvalynsk II provide the best estimate currently available for the true age of the two cemeteries."
"The mean faunal date of 4400 calBC probably is the most accurate estimate of the midpoint date for the Khvalynsk cemetery. A relatively short span of time is suggested by the fact that 70 % of the individuals analyzed from Khvalynsk II were related to other individuals in ways that could fit within a 5-or-6 generation span, or about 140–170 years"
We already know from the 3 samples we all have have access to (I'm not privileged either Rob) that one is an outlier. I1034 has 44% CHG as per Lazaridis et al, but its not convincing as p-value is 0.001, and G25 differs considerably. G25 shows an additional TTK like ancestry, which would also have brought haplo Q (I0434 is yhg Q as well) and possibly J.
Target: RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0434
Distance: 3.4625% / 0.03462486
51.4 RUS_Karelia_HG
20.6 Tajik (Davidski take note) TTK001
20.0 GEO_CHG
8.0 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En
0.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN
0.0 HUN_Vinca_MN
0.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG
0.0 TJK_Sarazm_En
0.0 UKR_N
As compared to
Target: RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0122
Distance: 3.7439% / 0.03743896
78.2 RUS_Karelia_HG
18.6 GEO_CHG
1.8 TTK001
1.4 HUN_Vinca_MN
0.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN
0.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG
0.0 TJK_Sarazm_En
0.0 UKR_N
@Rob
"In Anthony's talk, he referred to a sample from Berezhnovka in the lower Volga which has the highest amount of CHG (quoting Patteron's analysis), and mentions that this population formed c. 6200 BC."
Interesting, waiting for this sample then especially. If true, it would seem that there would have been 3 admixtures - first early one from caspian shore with CHG, second and third from the east (ttk/sarazm/jeitun/kelteminar) and south (armN like). Steppe Maykop samples also confirm that this inflow from its east occurred at some point.
@vAsiSTha
I don't care.
We've got mixing between EHG and CHG-rich groups in the Middle Don by 5,000 BCE, and we've got Progress-like people way up north at Khvalynsk by at least 4,400 BCE.
These are all hunter-fishers, occasionally with some goats and sheep.
They're local steppe groups moving around and mixing with each other. There's no evidence here of any miraculous long-range hunter-gatherer migrations.
Cope harder moron.
@Rob
"In Anthony's talk, he referred to a sample from Berezhnovka in the lower Volga which has the highest amount of CHG (quoting Patteron's analysis), and mentions that this population formed c. 6200 BC. Here is DA & his wife Dorcas Brown in an interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MOrEA84qvo"
Interesting, keen for the future paper.
@vAsiSTha
"Literally no model for Yamnaya works without Progress, so far. Even if some other samples work in the future, that would be because of Progress like high EHG + CHG/IranN related ancestry. The Khvalynsk samples will all have max 25% CHG/Iran, they cannot be direct Yamnaya sources."
Exactly, Progress isn't the only population with the high EHG + CHG/Iran_N-related ancestry. I have unpublished samples, and they work. Just cuz Progress is available publicly, doesn't mean it's the true source for everyone.
"No shit sherlock. WHG is from UKR_N like ancestry which is a later addition as it is missing from Khvalynsk, Progress, Samara_HG etc. This is not some revelation. Check my articles on formation of steppe ancestry."
This WHG signal was completely missed by Lazaridis et al., 2022. EHG, CHG and WHG all three are available in quantities required by Sredni Stog and Yamnaya in populations northwest of Progress which predate Progress lol. They're just not public yet.
"There will be no Don_eneolithic sample substantially pre-dating 4500bce with as high a chg/iran ancestry of progress_en which is needed for Yamnaya. If they are dated to 4200bce or so and are similar to progress, that indicates a migration from the south to the north. But you have the insider info, so let me know what the date on those don_eneolithic samples is."
I'll just say that they indeed predate Progress.
"Yamnaya-like Sredni itself cannot be a source for yamnaya or yamnaya-like Sredni samples. That's like saying Sintashta is the ancestor of Sintashta."
No one is saying that. Yamnaya and Yamnaya-like Sredny Stog's high EHG + CHG/Iran_N ancestors aren't from Progress is what we're saying.
"Progress is the oldest sample from the Piedmont, the ancestry there formed much earlier I guess, 4800-4300bce range is what I get with DATES for yamnaya. So, 4300bce sredni sample is not a problem, even if the sample date is correct."
You seem quite confused. Progress has two main components, EHG and CHG. These two components were done admixing latest by beginning of the fifth millennium BCE. There's no excess pure CHG-related admixture post fifth millennium BCE.
"qpAdm for Steppe_En (Result file: https://pastebin.com/n3aJ4JzN)"
I already showed this to you like yesterday. Your model with same sources fail for Progress_N and Vonyuchka.
Khvalynsk can't be the source for Progress, it makes no sense lmfao. Let's just run DATES on Steppe_EN and Khvalynsk (all Khvalynsk I and II samples) to find out the time of admixture between EHG and CHG. For Steppe_EN with Z=5.349 and nrmsd=0.118, I get a range of 6045-5068 BCE at 95% confidence interval if I take 4250 BCE as the average date for the samples. For Khvalynsk with Z=8.448 and nrmsd=0.065, I get a range of 5458-5053 BCE at 95% confidence interval if I take 4400 BCE as the average date for the samples. (Click here to see the output).
The younger dates you get for Yamnaya/Afanasievo are due to confounding. I have used the exact same sources for EHG_pooled and Iran_N_pooled as Chintalapati et al., 2022 and only added the new Karelia EHG, PES001, KAR001 and BER001 and some other EHG rich Khvalynsk-like unpublished samples to the EHG_pooled label. To conclude, ancestors of Steppe_EN and Khvalynsk_EN were done admixing 46.6±8.7 and 30.5±3.6 generations ago respectively.
Your blind guess of Khvalynsk_EN admixing with pure CHG and Tajik immigrants to form Progress in fifth millennium BCE itself was hilarious though.
@Rob “ But then it was dismantled, by a R1b-Z2103 'Yamnaya strictu sensu' clan moving in from the west. Given the consistent EHG/CHG proportions in Yamnaya, the mix occurred in one specific region/ family burial which might not even have been even particularly close to the Piedmont region.”
I think the key to PIE = Corded Ware Culture is with R1a1 rich groups that suddenly appeared literally “out of nowhere” in the forest Steppe zone.
@Davidski “Considering the slight heterogeneity in the Progress samples, it's obvious that admixture was happening in much of the steppe and forest-steppe around 5,000 BCE between populations like these with variable ratios of EHG and CHG.”
That’s true, although I doubt that Khvalynsk was speaking a para-PIE language. For one, the y-hap Q bearers might’ve been speaking something related to Kelteminar or Steppe Maykop, a WSHG dialect; but a more important cause could be that I suspect that PIE per se arose within a cluster of a R1a1 pop inhabiting Sredny Stog forest Steppe lands.
Genetically, I agree with you, but linguistically…
@David,
Probably from this work A. Bose et al. 2021, Integrating Linguistics, Social Structure, and Geography to Model Genetic Diversity within India,
you can download a big bag of common Indo-European samples of Aryan and Dravidian language people.
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/38/5/1809/6108106
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article-pdf/38/5/1809/37799240/msaa321.pdf
Would comment that the samples from Berezhnovka don't have a *lot* more CHG than what we see at Progress tho.
Not based on the PCA that Anthony presented: https://imgur.com/a/1Bt6QoA
One possibility to throw into the ring - Ayshin G's study (referenced here - https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/10/coming-soon.html) that remains unpublished, contained reference to "We present the first genomic data from a Mesolithic individual (6100 calBCE) from the Northwest Caucasus that shows Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry, Neolithic individuals from Georgia, as well as new data from genetically unexplored regions/cultures in the northeastern highlands and the dry steppe. We observe a degree of genetic continuity through time within the main mountain and steppe genetic groups, but also identify various episodes of gene flow between these and the neighboring regions.".
So maybe there's some possibility that re-admixture happened not too long before this time, 6100 BCE, but in the Caucasus zone, and then was re-exported north, but was somehow replaced by Meshoko?
The comments above are interesting (Rob, etc). Btw, do any of you guys have access to this paper and what do you think of it if so - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/abs/diet-and-chronology-of-neolithiceneolithic-cultures-from-6500-to-4700-cal-bc-in-the-lower-volga-basin/2E6D1836A71827B62EB80667DA2E568D?
"During the last several years, new multi- and single-layered archaeological sites, in which the most ancient Neolithic pottery in the Eastern Europe had been found, were excavated in the region of Lower Volga. Animal bones and organic materials were sampled from these sites for radiocarbon (14C) dating and diet investigations. The evidence from these studies suggests that the first domestic animals in the Lower Volga region appeared in the Cis-Caspian culture of the Early Eneolithic. Lipid analysis of food crusts from pottery allowed the cooked food to be characterized. The detailed chronology from Neolithic (6500–5400 cal BC) to Eneolithic (5300–4700 cal BC) cultures, as well as the diet of these ancient people, were reconstructed."
Also https://meso2020.sciencesconf.org/325437 - "The transition periods in Mesolithic and Neolithic of the Northern Cis-Caspian region"
and
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01491-8 - "The transmission of pottery technology among prehistoric European hunter-gatherers" 22/12/2022 - "Through radiocarbon dating, we propose this dispersal occurred at a far faster rate than previously thought. Chemical characterization of organic residues shows that European hunter-gatherer pottery had a function structured around regional culinary practices rather than environmental factors. Analysis of the forms, decoration and technological choices suggests that knowledge of pottery spread through a process of cultural transmission. We demonstrate a correlation between the physical properties of pots and how they were used, reflecting social traditions inherited by successive generations of hunter-gatherers. Taken together the evidence supports kinship-driven, super-regional communication networks that existed long before other major innovations such as agriculture, writing, urbanism or metallurgy." ... "New radiocarbon dates and age models reveal that pottery appeared near the northern shore of the Caspian Sea shortly before 5900 cal bc, and spread rapidly northwards and westwards (Supplementary Methods: Site chronologies). "
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379121003504 - "The use of early pottery by hunter-gatherers of the Eastern European forest-steppe" - "The dating programme was able to clarify the sequence and show that hunter-gatherer pottery production was unlikely in this region before the 6th millennium BC. Regarding use, stable isotope and molecular analysis of 160 pottery samples from 35 sites across the region shows that terrestrial animal carcass fats were preferentially processed in pots at Middle Volga sites whereas aquatic resources dominate the residues in pottery from the Middle and Upper Don basin. This is supported by fragments of fish, legumes and grasses in the available charred deposits adhering to the inside of pottery from the Don basin. Since the sites from both river basins had similar environmental settings and were broadly contemporaneous, it is posited that pottery use was under strong cultural control, recognisable as separate sub-regional culinary traditions. The ‘aquatic hypothesis’, previously suggested to explain the emergence of Eurasian pottery, cannot be substantiated in this context."
Pottery moved faster (from wherever it moved from) than constrained food production technologies, among existing networks, but still via a chain of kinship?
@Davidski
I have the following version: EHG did not mix with Middle Eastern migrants, and not even with CHG, but with migrants from Central Asia. What exactly do I mean? Anthropologists identify several anthropological types within the Khvalyn culture and Yamnaya culture. One of these types is mesomorphic East Mediterranean dolichocranial variant with a high face of medium width, narrow nose, high orbits. The horizontal profiling of the face is very sharp. This type is very similar to the Neolithic and Eneolithic series of Turkmenistan. Apparently, it is with this type that the impurity Caucasian Hunters-Gatherers is associated. What is the origin of the Eastern Mediterranean component? I believe that it is not directly connected with the Caucasus, but came from Central Asia through the Northern Caspian, most likely in the era of the paleolithic Zarzi culture. Later, in the region of the North-Western Caspian, there were cultures such as Seroglazovskaya, Harbinskaya, Nizhnevolzhskaya, etc. So they and their descendants most likely gave that East Mediterranean component (CHG-like). Therefore, the Yamnaya culture is so easily represented with the help of a mixture of European hunters with the Iranian or Turkmen Neolithic. But with Progress, all f3 statistics are positive. And it is unlikely that the Progress component played a role in the formation of the gene pool of the Yamnaya culture. Moreover, since Progress is the foothills of the Caucasus, this may be the result of local migration of the Transcaucasian population (for example, the Shulaveri-Shomu culture), which crossed the Caucasian ridge, but did not go far north to the steppes.
I asked ChatGPT about similitudes between Sredny stog and Shulaveri shomu, since part of my shulaveri hypothesis was that shulaveri crossed via kuban river and became part of the ethnogenesis of Yamnaya. So, can anyone with more knowldege confirm this that ChatGPT said:
********
The Sredny Stog culture and the Shulaveri-Shomu culture were both early agricultural cultures that existed in the region of the South Caucasus and the northeastern part of the Black Sea region around 4000-3000 BCE. Some similarities between the two cultures include:
Agricultural practices: Both cultures were known for their early development of agriculture, including the cultivation of crops such as barley and wheat.
Pottery styles: Both cultures produced distinctive pottery styles, characterized by the use of geometric shapes and decorations.
Architecture: Both cultures built circular structures, including houses and storage facilities, which suggests a similar architectural tradition.
Metalworking: Both cultures had a significant knowledge of metalworking and used copper and bronze for various purposes.
Further spurred on by Rob's comments and related to the papers above on earliest use of ceramic pottery in Volga Region, https://uole-museum.ru/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/S.-Panina-S.-Savchenko.-The-emergence-of-hunter-gatherer-pottery-in-the-Urals-and-West-Siberia.pdf -
"The emergence of hunter-gatherer pottery in the Urals and West Siberia: New dating and stable isotope evidence" (2020)
"The emergence of pottery among Stone Age hunter-gatherer societies of Eurasia constitutes one of the major open questions in Old World prehistory. Located halfway between the earliest Late Glacial cores of pottery production in East Asia, and Eastern Europe with forager ceramic starting around 6000 cal BC, the Urals and West Siberia are a key region in various scenarios currently under discussion. A lack of reliable absolute dates has been hindering an in-depth understanding of the temporal and spatial scales of the initial spread of the ceramic innovation. A Russian-German dating programme has now created a more reliable chronology of the early pottery phase, based on 28 AMS dates from across the study region. Taking freshwater reservoir effects into account, we can show that the earliest reliable evidence for pottery stems from the West Siberian forest steppes and Urals foothills, dating to the end of the 7th millennium cal BC. Over the following centuries, the innovation spread rapidly north into the taiga. Here, the early pottery horizon coincides with a unique set of innovations and intensification in the settlement system and the socio-economic sphere, including the appropriation of vast previously barely settled regions, the emergence of complex and even fortified settlements, and of ritual mounds. Pilot isotopic analyses of pottery charred crusts indicate diverse functions of the early vessels that were apparently not restricted to the processing of fish. The emerging wider picture indicates a surprisingly late, largely concurrent appearance of pottery in hunter-gatherer groups over extensive areas along the southern fringes of the taiga to both sides of the Urals at the end of the 7th millennium cal BC which is apparently not connected to the earlier, Late Pleistocene ceramic traditions in Trans-Baikalia and further East. Possible links to the 8.2 ka climatic event, other underlying triggers as well as the detailed chronology of these developments are still poorly understood and require further archaeological, biomolecular and typological studies."
"The world’s oldest known ceramic vessels have been produced in Eastern China in the remote times of the Last Glacial Maximum, around 18,000 cal BC (Kuzmin, 2017; Sato and Morisaki, 2017). Over the following millennia, pottery technology became known in the Russian Amur region, in Japan, Korea, Transbaikalia and the northern parts of South-East Asia. ... Lake Baikal seems to represent a “halting line” in North Eurasian pottery dispersals: all sites with Late Pleistocene ceramics are located East of the lake while to the West of it, dates for early pottery complexes do not set in before the end of the 8th millennium cal BC (Goriunova and Novikov, 2015; McKenzie, 2009; Piezonka, 2017a; for a critical discussion of earlier dates at Goreli Les: see McKenzie, 2009:186–187). "
If pottery in the Volga-Don and steppe region and Urals region largely emerges around the same time (around 6100 BCE), with no clear chain of transmission to the very early East Eurasian pottery (and to some degree a genetic barrier between WSHG and East Eurasian groups, although with some gene flow), is it crazy and amateurish to think that that transmission to the north might be more connected with the emergence of the Pottery Neolithic in Western Asia, between 7000-6000 BCE? (Without any suggestion of precocious transmission of domestic animals etc).
@Matt
A few points:
We don't know the archeological context or precise location of that Mesolithic individual from the Northwest Caucasus. And I guess we'll soon see whether this is really an EHG sample, part EHG or something broadly related.
Berezhnovka II is an Eneolithic site. The samples from there are very similar to Progress/Vonyuchka. Anthony's estimate that this group formed ~6,200 BCE may or may not be right.
Pottery spread via the north, so it's not relevant to the CHG-related ancestry on the steppe. In fact, Samara_HG is plausibly the most relevant sample we have available in regards to the spread of pottery into the PC steppe.
@Tarbagan
You're not making any sense. Your comment about Progress is very strange.
Progress and Shulaveri samples are very different. They don't show any sort of relationship, and it's impossible to derive the Progress population from Shulaveri in whole or even in part.
Did you actually check this by looking at the ancestry of the Progress and Shulaveri samples before coming up with your theory?
If so, then how can you get things this wrong? If not, then why the hell did you suggest such a thing?
Also, currently, one of the oldest samples on the steppe with CHG-related ancestry, and the one with the most of this type of ancestry, is Vonyuchka VJ1001, from the North Caucasus steppe
This sample is very similar and closely related to Progress, Yamnaya, Sredny Stog and Khvalynsk, so why would the CHG-related ancestry in Vonyuchka and these other people come from Central Asia, when Vonyuchka is from the North Caucasus and CHG means Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer?
At best, at very best, all you can hope for is minor Central Asian ancestry in Vonyuhcka, Progress, Khvalynsk, Yamnaya and all their close relatives on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.
By the way, Yamnaya is obviously not the same as Progress, but it is in large part derived from a population similar to Progress. This population is early Sredny Stog.
There's no mystery here how Yamnaya is related to Progress. Anyone who fails to understand this is an idiot.
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/09/dear-iosifyamnaya.html
@ Matt
“. Btw, do any of you guys have access to this paper and what do you think of it if so - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/abs/diet-and-chronology-of-neolithiceneolithic-cultures-from-6500-to-4700-cal-bc-in-the-lower-volga-basin/2E6D1836A71827B62EB80667DA2E568D? ”
it seems that Vybornov wishes to give the impression that domestic sheep were present in the cisCaspiam culture phase, but the oldest carbon date from Orashamoe site is only 4700 calBc , which is ~ early Khvalynsk period
The papers on pottery are on track, esp now they have sensible datings down to 6000 BC, thanks to international scientific input
Spread via west Siberia and/or Kelteminar
But some still see pottery invented “independently” in southern Eastern Europe. Ie it’s not a carbon copy of Siberian forms
I think CHG reached the Samara River around 7 000 BC. via the Lower Don and formed the Elshanka Culture. Around 6200 BC. there was a change in climate and they migrated down the Volga or even the Ural rivers towards the Northern Caspian. The Middle Volga Culture took their place....then there was backmigration up the Volga around +-5500 BC. and more substantial admixture took place along the Samara River...
@Davidski, re; pots, Samara Culture is 5th Millennium so later than papers describe Kairshak?
Rob: "it seems that Vybornov wishes to give the impression that domestic sheep were present in the cisCaspiam culture phase, but the oldest carbon date from Orashamoe site is only 4700 calBc , which is ~ early Khvalynsk period"
Is that based on rumninant fats on pottery? If there are sheep/goat bones, should be simple to check with adna sequencing; are they in a clade with Near Eastern sheep? (No need for inconclusive morphometric analysis).
"The papers on pottery are on track, esp now they have sensible datings down to 6000 BC, thanks to international scientific input
Spread via west Siberia and/or Kelteminar
But some still see pottery invented “independently” in southern Eastern Europe. Ie it’s not a carbon copy of Siberian forms"
So might the problem of the lack of pottery dispersal through HG networks until this time ("“halting line” in North Eurasian pottery dispersals") be due to the fact that the HG groups with strong East Eurasian ancestry did not move far to the west until >8000 BCE?
@Matt
Yes, somewhat later, but it's associated with that type of pottery. And yet Samara_HG is basically EHG.
Yeah, the paper argues that pottery largely diffused among kin networks, but not via demic diffusion I think.
@ Davidski
"You're not making any sense. Your comment about Progress is very strange.
Progress and Shulaveri samples are very different. They don't show any sort of relationship, and it's impossible to derive the Progress population from Shulaveri in whole or even in part.
Did you actually check this by looking at the ancestry of the Progress and Shulaveri samples before coming up with your theory?"
But who said Shulaveri was genetically homogeneous? North Caucasian culture, for example, is very heterogeneous. The same Yamnaya. Known samples of Shulaveri, if I am not mistaken, come from the territory of Azerbaijan. And we are primarily talking about the mountain valleys of northern and northwestern Georgia, where the descendants of the CHG could have been preserved. You won't deny that the present-day Svans have the greatest admixture of CHG compared to other groups?
"Also, currently, one of the oldest samples on the steppe with CHG-related ancestry, and the one with the most of this type of ancestry, is Vonyuchka VJ1001, from the North Caucasus steppe"
Steppe is if very imprecise. In general, Vonyuchka and Progress are already the foothills of the Caucasus. According to archaeological data, the actual Yamnaya culture was formed in the steppes about 200 km to the north.
"This sample is very similar and closely related to Progress, Yamnaya, Sredny Stog and Khvalynsk, so why would the CHG-related ancestry in Vonyuchka and these other people come from Central Asia, when Vonyuchka is from the North Caucasus and CHG means Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer?"
The main reason why I do not consider Progress and Vonychka is that the f3 statistics with them for Yamnaya culture are strictly positive. That is, for the Yamnaya culture, I combine progress with EHG, with WHG, with Ukrainian Mesolithic, etc. - and everywhere I get strictly positive f3 statistics. If, instead of Progress, I take either the Turkmen Neolithic, or Sarazm, or some Iranian samples - then the f3 statistics becomes negative with good Z-scores. That is why I believe that the CHG-like admixture in the Yamnaya and Khvalyn cultures came from Central Asia, and Mesolithic and Neolithic cultures from the lower Volga were genetically similar to Central Asian ones. And Progress and Vonyuchka are mountain descendants of local Caucasian hunters, but they were locally limited in the mountain and foothills and did not penetrate far north into the steppe, therefore they did not participate in the formation of Yamnaya and Khvalyn cultures. If you do not agree with me and consider Progress to be one of the ancestors of Yamnaya culture, then explain to me why the f3 statistics with Progress is positive.
@Tarbagan
But who said Shulaveri was genetically homogeneous?
The Shulaveri samples we have from Armenia and Azerbaijan look very similar, and they show no relationship with Progress.
Progress never existed in the South Caucasus. It's a totally alien population to anything that is found there after Kotias, and CHG Kotias is only very distantly related to Progress.
If you do not agree with me and consider Progress to be one of the ancestors of Yamnaya culture, then explain to me why the f3 statistics with Progress is positive.
I never said that Progress was actually ancestral to Yamnaya, but it's very similar and closely related to Yamnaya. So Yamnaya obviously derives largely from a Progress-like population.
Unfortunately, f3 stats are a really shit way to prove anything when it comes to admixture. You really have to know what you're doing, and even then it's hard to read the output properly.
You should move on to something more reliable.
Actually, you should show your f3 output to Nick Patterson and tell him that you found evidence of the Central Asian origins of Yamnaya.
If he doesn't die from laughing too much, he might explain to you that you're misinterpreting the output.
Basically, what's happening is that f3 stats produce more extreme results when they have more divergent populations to work with. So unfortunately, they're useless if you want to look at complex and fine scale models
There's a technical explanation for this glitch. Would you like to hear it from me or someone at the Reich Lab?
@ Matt
That article states:
''Species such as saiga, aurochs, tarpan, onager, red dear, wild boar, and wolf were identified (Table 2). This selection is similar to the bone assemblages of Orlovskaya and Tenteksor types. But there are some differences. In the layer of the Cis-Caspian culture, the bones of domestic sheep and goat were identified (Table 2).
The bones of domestic sheep and goat were also found in the Kurpezhe-Molla site, which is
located in the northern Caspian Sea region (Table 2).
The date of Oroshaemoe, middle layer is 5806 ± 26 BP -> 4724–4557 calBCE
And NB- this site had at least a couple 'layers'
The site Kurpezhe-Molla isn't even dated, but in another artticle he attributes it to an Eneolithic layer.
As for the lipid analysis - the state - ''The results of the lipid analysis showed that animal or plant food had been cooked inside of the pottery from Kairshak III, Baibek, Tenteksor, Algay and Varfolomeevka sites''
So we don;t know what animals they stewed or stored in those pots.
To me it seems these lower Volga-Caspian littoral sites were hunters and gatherers, and thus different to the LDC for ex, which seem to have become sedentised sturgeon experts.
The date 4700 BC above falls in line with the Khvalynsk culture, i.e. Sredni Stog sensu latu
My opinion is that J2B2-L283 in Greece is linked to the so called "Dorian Migrations" of northern people like the Spartans, Macedonians and Epirotes, since it's also accompanied with higher steppe ancestry and the timeline is ~ that time. I avoid using the term Dorian "invasions" because in Ancient Greek it wasn't written as such. That's a mistranslation and it wasn't a one time event.
It was probably a chain migration of people from the north that took hundreds of years to complete, and replace the old "Spartan" dialects during the time of Trojan War, with the new dialects that existed around the time of the Greco-Persian wars.
We also saw the Iron Age Macedonians display a Northwestern Balkan profile similar to Illyrians in the southern Arc paper. Some brushed them off as "not real Macedonians" but these high steppe J2B2 people are popping up all over Greece by the end of the BA/IA.
@Davidski What's Patterson's position on alleged Levantine/Anatolian ancestry in Yamnaya?
@DragonHermit Dorian Invasion/Migration was a concept used to explain the late collapse, but zero archaeological evidence have been found for a mass migration or invasion so far. The title stems from the "return of the Heracleids" myth in Greek mythology (return means that the people returning were already there in the past).
In Plato's Laws you can read a Spartan emphatically agreeing on the story the narrator says, that Dorians were Achaeans who were driven out, regrouped in Dorida (right across the Peloponnese, next to Delphoi) from where they got their new name as per the quote, and then came back to the Peloponnese. Typical archaeologist schizobabble trying to tie myth to reality, ignoring most of the myth in the process and failing to prove anything at the end. Even the Etruscans-are-Anatolians theory was better substantiated (by culture) than this lmao
"We also saw the Iron Age Macedonians display a Northwestern Balkan profile similar to Illyrians in the southern Arc paper. Some brushed them off as "not real Macedonians" but these high steppe J2B2 people are popping up all over Greece by the end of the BA/IA."
You saw a limited amount of Hellenistic samples significantly postdating the appearance of Macedonians and geographically being very to the north compared to the position of early Macedonians. Thus the "not real Macedonians" claim, if referring to the actual early Macedonians, is accurate.
"High steppe" also means something like CWC (75-80%) not 40% steppe at most. These samples also don't have high steppe, not even 40%, and are not like Illyrians. You can check their autosomal breakdown on the paper, they have lower EHG and excess CHG while all Illyrian-related samples do not. What they point to is either Thracians with more southern admixture assimilated by the Hellenistic era kingdom or a combination of Archaic Greeks and some Illyrians after the assimilation of said Illyrians due to the Hellenistic expansion, which seems more likely.
Also aren't all the j2b2 samples some infants from a single family in cist tombs from Mygdalia LBA? These have 25-30% steppe in the best fitting models (steppe En_EMBA and CWC). So under 30% steppe if we subtract the EEF from CWC.
Southern Arc or Southern farce?
https://vicayana.substack.com/p/southern-arc-or-southern-farce?sd=pf
and here is Lazaridis response:
https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1620459177595531265
I'm skeptical that anyone can prove anything at such a fine scale with formal stats based on a mix of modern data (Mbuti.DG), shotgun data and capture data.
That's really wishful thinking.
@Orpheus
What's Patterson's position on alleged Levantine/Anatolian ancestry in Yamnaya?
I guess whatever was published in the last paper on the topic that he co-authored. But you would need to ask him if anything's changed since then.
Apparently he's working on a new paper on the origins of Yamnaya so he might well have some new insights, but I don't know.
Relying on the presence or absence of a small amount of distal ancestry in Yamnaya to prove something important about its origins is nonsense anyway.
It's very difficult to detect minor distal admixtures or to avoid noise in such analyses.
Mixing modern data with capture and shotgun data can be a problem, but even getting wrong some basic assumptions can also mean everything ends up wrong (ie. garbage in, garbage out).
So if the new paper about Yamnaya is going to be based on inferences from distal formal stats and models, rather than direct evidence and fine scale proximal analyses, then no thanks.
Several Epi-Palaeolithic Camps on the Kuban River....with connections to the Caucasus.
Dear Davidski,
Can you upload these Mongolian samples to G25 please?
https://zenodo.org/record/5067504#.Y9n8iXZBy3A
Ramber
No one can deny the steppe component in L283 in both Serbia and Croatia. But those samples and also those from the Peloponnese are very young with respect to the age of that lineage and could have been genetically indo-europeanized in the Balkans. Moreover, we have not only the contemporary samples in the Caucasus (Kabardino Balkaria and Armenia) but a good number of L283 in the Nuragic culture of Sardinia with ZERO Steppe ancestry. Just as someone can argue that these Nuragic people are migrants of Balkan origin who lost their steppe ancestry after several generations, others can argue that they are Anatolian migrants who never had steppe ancestry. The autosomal composition of some samples can lead to misconceptions so in my opinion considering L283 as a steppe marker is too risky until we have samples between 3,500 and 2,000 BC.
Something similar happens in Bulgaria-Thrace, supposedly the Thracian language is IE and the Thracians were overwhelmingly V13, does that mean that this marker is of steppe origin when it is missing from the European record from the neolithic to the Iron Age?
The key to understanding Yamnaya's involvement in the Indo-Europeanization of the Balkans and Anatolia is Z2103 and that marker is non-existent in mainland Greece and the Peloponnese until historical times. As long as they do not find that lineage (or even I2a-L699), the explanations will remain fairy tales.
Dear Davidski,
Sorry here are the genotype links:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Yt87Lg6HILlFOJrZ1Nnh0WAFkLfg8ASC/view
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DVWfzIzJPACqbyDVrnNDiDHjeSr6my3v/view
New paper about Paleolithic Iberians with data:
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB58642
@ Gaska
You should note that there are 2-3 R1a-Z93 in MLBA Thrace, as mentioned here previously.
Very interesting finding, IMO
"Human populations underwent range contractions during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) which had lasting and dramatic effects on their genetic variation. The genetic ancestry of individuals associated with the post-LGM Magdalenian techno-complex has been interpreted as being derived from groups associated with the pre-LGM Aurignacian. However, both these ancestries differ from that of individuals from central Europe associated with the chronologically intermediate Gravettian."
In other words.....
Solutrean and Magdalenian probably descend from Augrician culture.
"The Malalmuerzo individual carried genetic ancestry that directly connects earlier Aurignacian-associated individuals with post-LGM Magdalenian-associated ancestry in western Europe. This scenario differs from Italy, where individuals associated with the transition from pre- and post-LGM carry different genetic ancestries. By contrast, Iberian hunter-gatherer groups carry a genetic legacy that predates the LGM, which suggests different dynamics in the proposed southern refugia of Ice Age Europe and posits Iberia as a potential refugium for western European pre-LGM ancestry."
The situation is probably
WHG comes from gravitean
Magdalonian comes from Augrician
@Ramber
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_j7VcWpyeI_xjKL6z30cUzTAwuBz-dYd/view?usp=sharing
@Davidski
Is this from the first genotype link sent to you?
Yes
@Samuel Andrews “ The situation is probably
WHG comes from gravitean
Magdalonian comes from Augrician”
It would be interesting to figure out their relatedness and the differences between them on uniparental and adna.
@Michalis Moriopoulos:
Can you help annotate the various Mongolian subgroups from this study please?: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2021.735786/full
Here is the spreadsheet btw:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_j7VcWpyeI_xjKL6z30cUzTAwuBz-dYd/view
@Davidski
It seems Yamnaya may not have "southern admixture" but according to this (I think interesting) substack post, Progress does, along with WSHG (WSHG in progress, not WSHG having southern admix-excepting Kumsay types obv). And in this case G25 also shows whatever southern thing to exist to affect Progress rather than Yamnaya.
Interestingly, some affinity even with Levant_N but what I find odd is proximal southern pops from around the Caucasus are not really preferred to Iran_Seh_Gabi_C in rotating qpAdm. Anyways, I am leaving this here in case anyone is interested:
https://vicayana.substack.com/p/southern-arc-or-southern-farce?sd=pf
@Rob
On your graph for Iran_N, would you say the eastern part of ANE and Iran_N are related? Apologies if a redundant question, Vasistha told me his thoughts and I was curious about yours. G25 and f4 stats appear both inconclusive, can't really make a qpGraph myself.
I actually do recall Vasistha making a qpGraph that it showed something vaguely East Asian affecting ANE and the CHG-Iran_N duo.
@gamerz_J
It's important to understand that these models only reflect the reality that we see based on the currently available samples.
The assumptions that Yamnaya, Progress etc. actually have per se EHG, CHG, WSHG etc. ancestry may well not be strictly correct or even not correct at all, which means that these models will also end up being wrong.
This is a real problem that should be kept in mind when someone claims that, for instance, Yamnaya certainly has some minor Levant ancestry. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.
Let's see what happens when more samples come in and we can use different reference populations and better outgroups.
@Davidski
Considering the models in the my article, there doesn't seem to be any direct southern arc ancestry into Yamnaya. Whatever is there, it's through Progress-like source. But there's definite EEF and Ukraine_N like ancestry.
These f4-statistics show that there's excess Ukraine_N and Trypillia ancestry in Yamnaya over Progress. Check this image for rotating models. Only passing model involves Progress, Ukraine_N and Verteba_Trypillia and no Southern arc source.
However, in case of Progress I see clear underestimation of genetic drift with ANF, Levant_PPN and AfontovaGora3 while modelling it as simply EHG and CHG. In 4-src models, Darkveti-Meshoko seems to be one of the best sources.
What do you think of this?
@Davidski
https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1620459177595531265
https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1620466809223909377
This is what Lazaridis thinks on the issue, apparently somehow CHG has an aversion for PPNB rather Progress having an attraction, which I guess could possibly be due to Dzudzuana-like ancestry affecting EHG and PPNB and/or the so-called eastern input in CHG.
Anyways, I am only an amateur but it just seems to me like Progress seems rather central to the Yamnaya issue either way, and appears to have enough of the (non-EEF) southern and eastern components for it.
Like you said, more relevant ancient genomes are needed. But I am also commenting because it seems that there is less certainty on the CHG component of Steppe now compared to last year, especially after the Southern Arc papers were published.
It is of course, very hard to conceive of Chalcolithic Iranian ancestry moving into the Steppe archaeologically and chronologically.
@Samuel Andrews
Seems to me Magdalenians are a mix of Aurignacian Goyet-type pops and something Gravettian.
@Davidski
Can you help upload the second genotype link please? Will gladly appreciated it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DVWfzIzJPACqbyDVrnNDiDHjeSr6my3v/view
@Orpheus. Those J2B2 samples are admixed with locals. They did not originate there. We can see matrilineal connections with the other people there. So their ancestors would have been much higher than 25 to 30% steppe.
And as for the Dorian migrations, that is 100% a real thing. The dialects spoken during the Trojan War, are not the same as during the Greco-Persian wars. They were replaced. True, there is no archeological proof so far, but there is linguistic proof, that's why scholars still talk about it.
@Davidski
"This is a real problem that should be kept in mind when someone claims that, for instance, Yamnaya certainly has some minor Levant ancestry. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't."
You appear to be backtracking a bit. Were you not adamant that Yamanya has no Iranian Neo-ancestry, let alone genuine Levantine ancestry? Anyway, people are naive to believe that this investment by certain geneticists in proving that Yamanya or Indo-Europeans have Levantine admixure is not driven by their bias.
Does anyone know when the coordinates will be released from this study?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05247-2
@Wise dragon
You appear to be backtracking a bit. Were you not adamant that Yamanya has no Iranian Neo-ancestry, let alone genuine Levantine ancestry?
It makes no difference whether Yamnaya has some minor genuine Levantine ancestry.
It might have some via its European farmer admixture or some other very minor input. Or this Levantine signal might just be noise due to the use of wrong reference populations.
The main point to understand is that Yamnaya has no discernible Armenian-related ancestry, and instead it shows a clear relationship with European farmers.
@Anveṣaṇam
Using formal stats and PCA I've also consistently found that Yamnaya is currently best characterized as a mixture between Progress, Ukraine_N and Eastern European farmers.
So my comments weren't criticizing your work which leads to the same conclusion.
I was just saying that there's no point getting into a pissing contest about whether Yamnaya has some minor Levantine ancestry or WHG ancestry, or any other 1-2% of something, in models that will never be perfect.
And this is especially pointless when working with a mix of modern data, capture data and shotgun data.
So yeah, basically I was saying that some of those arguments in the Southern Arc paper aren't even worth trying to counter.
@Declan
Does anyone know when the coordinates will be released from this study?
This will take a while yet (around 2 weeks), but eventually I'll post both the G25 and Celtic vs Germanic coordinates for these samples.
@ GamerzJ
Probably very similar to Pinarbasi/ AHG, + extra ANE
Maybe even a touch of north African or something “basaloid” from the Gulf
Davidski: "This will take a while yet (around 2 weeks), but eventually I'll post both the G25 and Celtic vs Germanic coordinates for these samples."
On the Gretzinger samples, I was finding when looking directly at the f2, f3 and f4 scores computed from the Allen adna files that the weird outgroup (functionally African) attractions present in the preliminary G25 coordinates for some of the continental North-Central European samples from Germany, also still seem to be present when looking at their direct f2, f3 and f4 scores.
(E.g. when I crossplot, for example, f3(Mbuti,Norwegian,X) against f3(Mbuti,Sardinian,X), then Germany_Drantum_Saxon_Medieval has this weird position on the crossplot that indicates it has an excess outgroup attraction to Mbuti: https://imgur.com/a/WCu3MHz . Same is true for other f3 stats.)
Will be interested to see if the coordinates genotype based on the genotypes from HO still have this issue.
I don't expect anything subsequent to overturn the main conclusions of the Gretzinger paper, but if their samples do still have these problems, I hope that Reich Lab (perhaps Nick Patterson) have some early medieval papers planned that will get more comparable or normal data that lacks this issue.
(Man, it feels like adna is so boring right now... No resolutions to the same questions.)
@Davidski What I got from the Arc paper is less about Yamnaya and more about the assumed southern source that was far heavier in Anatolian/Levantine that contributed in their genesis and assumingly brought PIE with it. That was the main argument I saw, Yamnaya was just used as an indicator of this. In the supplementals they state that this source is still missing and they're looking for it, so expect more papers on that (either supporting it or refuting it), possibly within 2023.
@DragonHermit Strawman, nobody cares about where some of their ancestors came from. There's no "j2b2 popping all over Greece" as you said, it's a handful of infants from the same family in a single graveyard among dozens upon dozens of samples from Greece so far. That was what was pointed out.
As for the Dorian migration, re-read what I wrote. The change did happen, the difference is that the concept some archaeologists decades ago came up with to explain it is shit and they probably came up with it when trying to bring an impressive hard-hitting proposition to the table so they can then sell books and write articles about it. Simple marketing.
A better explanation was already given in antiquity. We aren't disagreeing on that it happened.
Easiest explanation is linguistic drift in contact with northern dialects or adoption of a new dialect that was across the Peloponnese, and then introducing it back to the Peloponnese. This type of thing happens even nowadays so it's the most likely option, and does not require any major archaeological impact.
@ Orpheus
'What I got from the Arc paper is less about Yamnaya and more about the assumed southern source that was far heavier in Anatolian/Levantine that contributed in their genesis and assumingly brought PIE with it. That was the main argument I saw, Yamnaya was just used as an indicator of this. In the supplementals they state that this source is still missing and they're looking for it, so expect more papers on that (either supporting it or refuting it), possibly within 2023.''
Its an interesting statistical question, but has no major relevance to Yamnaya ethnogenesis nor PIE. Linking Yamnaya formation with some questionable distant source seems quite frankly contrived & dishonest.
@Orpheus
There's no way to really link Yamnaya ethnogenesis with Armenia.
The distal models in the Southern Arc paper fail to do this and they don't support the authors' conclusions.
Matt wrote:
“I don't expect anything subsequent to overturn the main conclusions of the Gretzinger paper”
Yeah, the Gretzinger paper has a basic problem in completely disregarding Continental Celtics. France IA is just a weird label. Written history says “France IA” - Iron Age France - is not the Franks, it’s the Gauls. Celts.
The paper shows an artificial picture because it’s using arbitrary populations to rule out groups that may have been in both places all along.
Here’s an example
“One potential caveat in this analysis is our relatively sparse Roman sample from England, where we particularly lack samples from the south, which might have pre-existing France IA-related ancestry. We, therefore, turned to one of our early medieval sites, the post-Roman cemetery of Worth Matravers at the southern coast of Dorset, whose individuals have nearly no CNE ancestry”
So why didn’t they use a site with CNE ancestry to rule out France IA? Wouldn't that make more sense?
MLZ005-HapY-C-V20 mtDNA-U2'3'4'7'8'9- Solutrean individual????-Malalmuerzo cave
MLZ003-HapY-R1b-M269 Malalmuerzo cave
Aurignacian>Gravettian>Solutrean+ Villabruna cluster =Magdalenian-El Miron cluster
Neolithic, chalcolithic, Bronze Age-Caserones, Aguilillas & cueva Ardales-"More, individuals from Cueva Ardales, which were thought to be of Paleolithic origin, date younger than expected and, together with individuals from the Andalusian sites Caserones and Aguilillas, fall within the genetic variation of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age individuals from southern Iberia"
ADS007-I2a-Y11222-Cueva Ardales
The mtDNA-U2'3'4'7'8'9 connection between Siberia (Yana), Italy (Paglicci, San Teodoro), France (Rigney), Sicily (Grotta Oriente, Grotta Dell Uzzo) and Iberia (Malalmuerzo cave, Santa Maira cave, Balma Guinayá) seems interesting and the mobility of the Gravettian and Epigravettian (Solutrean in Iberia and France) groups is amazing.
@Gaska,
Yes well this mobility goes back before Epugravitean.
U2'3'4'6'7'8'9 is at least 40,000 years old. The oldest samples come from Russia 37ky.
The new Solutrean dude is apart of the same U subclade as a Magdalenian individual from France.
A epipaleolithic sample from Sicily is also apart of this U subclade.
This U subclade is NONE EXISTENT in Mesolithic samples. It doesn't exist today as far as I know.
U8a is the other U subclade identified in multiple Magdalenian individuals.
U8a is none existent in Mesolithic samples.
This supports the idea Magdalinian did not contribute ancestry to Mesolithic Europeans outside of Spain.
U8a reappears in the Neolithic. It does exist in Europe today. But it is rare.
The solutrean guy is an almost perfect mtDNA match with a later Magdalenian female in France.
Orpheus--Linking Z2103-Z2106-Z2109 samples with Late phase Sredny Stog culture-- (aka-Deriivka sample I5884 R1b-Z2103+) with Iron age Armenia Rise 397(R1b-Z2106+) sample using strictly Yersinia pestis phylogeny dating.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04550-9/figures/2
"the oldest (RISE509) and youngest (RISE505) isolates from the LNBA lineage are shown in purple, RT5 and RT6 are shown in green, the Iron Age RISE397 isolate is shown in brown,"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=9169917_pnas.2116722119fig01.jpg
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9169917/
"Given that I5884 is phylogenetically more derived on the LNBA− lineage than Gyvakarai1 and VEL003, which date to 4,571 to 4,422 and 4,516 to 4,297 calibrated years before present (cal. BP), respectively, we would expect the C14 dating range of I5884 to either overlap with those genomes or to be younger. Instead, we observe an older, nonoverlapping date (4,840 to 4,646 cal. BP) for I5884. This unexpected age could be explained by a reservoir effect, which results in shifts of the C14 dates. Such effects can occur through the consumption of marine or freshwater resources, whereby, via different factors, such as deep geological filtering and consumption habits of the involved fish, carbon in these foodstuffs is derived from geologically older sources of carbonates rather than atmospheric carbon."
@Rob Pretty sure they focused on Yamnaya and CWC due to their vehicle status for IE spread in Europe. Doubt they found hunter-fishers as likely PIE/PIA speakers so they focused on whatever else they could pick up. Sredny makes things more interesting, guess Patterson will address that (and how it relates to Yamnaya) soon
@Davidski They'll just point at relatively more proximal working models with Tepe Hissar ChL + RUS_Eneol_Mountains, or Ganj Dareh etc instead of Levant PPN, Iron Gates and so on.
Unless they refute their own position themselves only a contra/response study will force them to address that. Better get to work lol
@Samuel Andrews A Mesolithic sample from Romania does have Magdalenian-related ancestry alongside two MN samples from France (Rivollat et al 2020)
After that it disappears
@LivoniaG; the CNE dilution event they claim by CWE is still quite mysterious. I think real data is needed from France during the relevant periods. Is the claim of a continuous population in France that remains alike to the various (different) French_IA samples and then merged / migrated into Southern Britain really applicable?
The Roman Period samples in France have some variable subjects: https://imgur.com/a/TWZnxTN
I'm not sure that Rome didn't change the ancestry structure in France at all and that IA is a perfect reference...
Just a reminder of long lost battles here: Yamanya was a population derived from Shulaveri-Shomu arriving to north Caucasus and admixing with one or several local populations with EHG.
Shulaveri did not arrive in steppe as a population in strength. Their disappearing of south Caucasus was too sudden to be a normal expansion. They arrived in stress.
PIE - there is zero chances PIE was not the language Shulaveri spoke.
Well, just a refresh of that part of the shulaverian hypothesis. - No trying to rattle anyone, just reposting what was long state by me.
@ Oprheus
''Pretty sure they focused on Yamnaya and CWC due to their vehicle status for IE spread in Europe. Doubt they found hunter-fishers as likely PIE/PIA speakers so they focused on whatever else they could pick up. Sredny makes things more interesting, guess Patterson will address that (and how it relates to Yamnaya) soon''
It doesn't matter who deems what. What matters is reality.
The expanding IEs emerged from a north Pontic fisher-hunter-gatherer subset which became pastoralists due to thousand year interaction patters with western Farmers.
Exactly how & why this came about needs detailed study, but the broad picture should be clear to anyone
@ Orpheus
''Andrews A Mesolithic sample from Romania does have Magdalenian-related ancestry alongside two MN samples from France (Rivollat et al 2020)'
No that's an error in the image creation
There is NO magdalenian ancestry
It is EHG
@Matt
Don't want to bother you, but can you, please, post the G25 of the ancient French samples used on the PCA's? Cant find them all.
Matt wrote:
"I think real data is needed from France during the relevant periods."
Absolutely.
They lead the Gretzinger paper with these historical references and somehow miss the common assumption that British-Welsh-Irish and Gaul spoke the same language and therefore were related people. I'm not saying that's right, but this was no way to test it. 1300 CE Brittany should be by all accounts where Gaulish and Insular Celtic cross.
Matt - if it's not a bother and worth the time, and if it's possible, could you include as ungreyed the "Celtic" dots in your second imgur graph, to see where they fall?
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