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Monday, February 13, 2023

Dear David, Nick, Iosif...let me tell you about Yamnaya


Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. recently claimed that the Yamnaya people of the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe carried "substantial" ancestry from what is now Armenia or surrounds.

However, this claim is essentially false.

Only one individual associated with the Yamnaya culture shows an unambiguous signal of such ancestry. This is a female usually labeled Ukraine_Yamnaya_Ozera_o:I1917. The "o" suffix indicates that she is an outlier from the main Yamnaya genetic cluster.

Unlike I1917, typical Yamnaya individuals carry a few per cent of ancient European farmer admixture. This ancestry is only very distantly Armenian-related via Neolithic Anatolia (see here).

It's difficult for me to understand how Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. missed this. I suspect that they relied too heavily on formal statistics and overinterpreted their results.

Formal statistics are a very useful tool in ancient DNA work. Unfortunately, they're also a relatively blunt tool that often has problems distinguishing between similar sources of gene flow.

There are arguably better methods for studying fine scale ancestry, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA).

Below is a somewhat special PCA featuring a wide range of ancient populations that plausibly might be relevant to the genetic origins of the Yamnaya people. Unlike most PCA with ancient samples, this PCA doesn't rely on any sort of projection, so that all of the actors are interacting with each other and directly affecting the outcome.


Here's another version of the same plot with a less complicated labeling system. Note that I designed this PCA specifically to differentiate between European populations and those from the Armenian highlands, the Iranian plateau and surrounds.


And here's a close up of the part of the plot that shows the Yamnaya cluster. This cluster is made up of samples associated with the Afanasievo, Catacomb, Poltavka and Yamnaya cultures. All of the individuals in this part of the plot are closely related, which is why they're so tightly packed together. The differentiation between them is caused by admixture from different groups mostly from outside of the PC steppe.


The Yamnaya cluster can be broadly characterized as a population that formed along the genetic continuum between the Eneolithic groups of the Progress region and Neolithic foragers from the Dnieper River valley (Progress_Eneolithic and Ukraine_N, respectively). However, this cluster also shows a slight western shift that is increasingly more pronounced in the Corded Ware samples. This shift is due to the aforementioned admixture from early European farmers.

Indeed, the plot reveals two parallel clines extending west from the Progress samples. One of the clines is made up of the Yamnaya cluster and the Corded Ware samples, and pulls towards the ancient European farmers. The other cline includes Ukraine_Yamnaya_Ozera_o:I1917 and pulls towards samples from the Armenian highlands and surrounds.

Being aware of these two clines and knowing how they came about is important to understanding the genetic prehistory of the PC steppe and indeed of much of Eurasia.

At some point, probably during the late Eneolithic, a Progress-related group experienced gene flow from the west and became the Yamnaya and Corded Ware populations. Sporadically, admixture from the Armenian highlands and the Iranian plateau also entered the PC steppe, giving rise to people like the Steppe Maykop outliers and Ukraine_Yamnaya_Ozera_o:I1917.


Unfortunately, this sort of PCA doesn't offer output suitable for mixture modeling, basically because the recent genetic drift shared by many of the samples creates significant noise.

However, to check that my inferences based on the plot are correct I can create composites with specific ancestry proportions to see how they behave. In the plot below Mix1 is 80% Progress_Eneolithic and 20% Iran_Hajji_Firuz_N, Mix2 is 80% Progress_Eneolithic and 20% Armenia_EBA_Kura_Araxes, while Mix3 is 80% Progress_Eneolithic, 15% Ukraine_N and 5% Hungary_MN_Vinca (Middle Neolithic farmers from the Carpathian Basin).


Obviously, we can't get Yamnaya by mixing Progress_Eneolithic with any ancients from the Armenian highlands or the Iranian plateau. On the other hand, Mix3 works quite well, at least in the first two dimensions. In some of the other dimensions genetic drift specific to Ukraine_N pulls it away from the Yamnaya cluster, but this is to be expected.

By the way, the plots were created with the excellent Vahaduo Custom PCA tool freely available here. It's well worth trying the interactive 3D option using my PCA data. The relevant datasheet is available here.

See also...

Dear David, Nick, Iosif...let's set the record straight

The Caucasus is a semipermeable barrier to gene flow

892 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   801 – 892 of 892
Wee e said...

@Orpheus
You are taking the term “trade language” ridiculously literally. It’s a lingua franca.

It is a type of language developed by ordinary people in contact over larger areas who have different mother tongues. Often it‘s what you might call a mature or developed pidgin — but the sign-language of the American plains is a prime example of a “trade language”.

It would be used for trade (whatever they had to trade…?) and also for chance meetings in border areas, for smoothing out potential conflicts, for communicating with prisoners, slaves, subjugated peoples or (initially) with diplomatic marriage partners from a different language group.

A “trade language” would allow people like the henge builders (or later druids) from all over ancient Britain to meet on an equal basis in inter-regional festivals (or for priestly training). Or, as with Swahili today — allows one to travel through several language regions without an interpreter being essential, and allows international mass communication.

English has become the trade language of the globe, but that doesn’t mean it’s restricted to trade. It is the most widespread language of commerce, yes, but also of education, scientific publication & collaboration, and international diplomacy.

In distinction to this, medieval Latin was a language of diplomacy — written and spoken between elites but not used by ordinary people.

LivoniaG said...

Wee e said...
@Orpheus You are taking the term “trade language” ridiculously literally. "It’s a lingua franca. It is a type of language developed by ordinary people in contact over larger areas who have different mother tongues. Often it‘s what you might call a mature or developed pidgin"

Quick note. There is something that's best described as the language of the marketplace. And the "market" is a very broad idea. It includes everything from how to make something (like a wheel) to metals from faraway places to material for clothing to recruiting mercenaries to wayside inns. Since before the code of Hammurabi, governments have been setting up marketplaces where people can depend on peaceful transactions, honest measures and a reliable measure of exchange. This tends to create a convergence of language instead of the natural splintering of dialects that linguists usually mention in connection with language growth. There is a definite economic advantage to being able to understand each other. And convergence tends to simplify language (like what happened to Anglo-Saxon when it turned into English.) But it may still become a complex language. This would happen when that marketplace language includes technical know-how. Picture the instruction needed to learn to manufacture something like a spoked wheel. Or farming plants or animals for that matter.

Matt said...

Still looking in Ringbauer IBD analysis through some of the medieval samples. Sunghir6, the medieval "Balto-Slavic" person from Russia, seems to have only one long link, with a Hungary Hun period "commoner" who lacked East Asian ancestry. This seems geographically and temporally plausible, although this person from Hungary has no Balto-Slavic relation and seems to be more like German people.

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/d4sb6yU

Orpheus said...

@Rob Where did Lazaridis claim that proto-Greek existed in 2400BCE?

"ask any serious linguist and they’d say they “don’t do (absolute) dates. It’s not like words can be C14 dated"
Yeah no shit.

"proto Greek being dated by some linguists to 2200 bc matched the 24500 bc genetic evidence almost perfectly"
220BCE is the lowest of the average they give, and that's based on archaeology and "according to the theory..." It's not based on anything else. When linguistics are studied independent of archaeology we see that proto-Greek is part of a broader language family, and that family is not accepted to split into Greco-Phrygian or even Greco-Albanian prior to Italo-Celtic. The only linguists that I'm aware of proposing something like that were Gray & Atkinson with their 2000s phylogenetic model. There was a better and more recent one but I can't recall the study it was in or what it showed. Maybe with AI it can get better, and Ringe can seethe even harder.

As for the ~2400BCE samples, these are yet to be found if they are CWC-related or Yamnaya-related. The later (~2200BCE onward) samples are CWC-related so they're ruled out. If the steppe ancestry in the 2400BCE samples is Yamnaya-related, then they are likely to be speakers of a dialect of Greco-Phrygian (which then split into proto-Greek). That's my point. The timeline also fits, because it's pre-Mycenaean. I've repeated this at least twice so if you don't get it that's your problem.

Orpheus said...

@Wee e Lingua franca of which people? And for what purpose? Over what networks? From where to where? Why would proto-Anatolian become a lingua franca and not whatever (presumed) non-IE language the inhabitants of Anatolia spoke, who were far bigger trading hubs and subsequent exports? This also means that they would be the ones in charge of naming their products (and charging money for them, presumably in their own currency). (If you've ever worked in trading and imports/exports you're familiar with this.) They hold much more weight, to put it this way.

"It would be used for trade (whatever they had to trade…?) and also for chance meetings in border areas, for smoothing out potential conflicts, for communicating with prisoners, slaves, subjugated peoples or (initially) with diplomatic marriage partners from a different language group. (...) It is the most widespread language of commerce, yes, but also of education, scientific publication & collaboration, and international diplomacy."
You'll have to tie this to the specific timeline and cultures of the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. These things happened between other cultures as well (powerful & powerful or powerful & poor/weak) of the time and later on, without any lingua franca developing. Why?

I find the theory interesting, but is it an actual theory or just magical thinking where things just magically happen because that helps prove a broader theory? There's no reason to not take it literally since it is something literal that occurs for concrete reasons (solve specific problems that arise between trading networks, allow for bigger profits etc).
As I said the theory is interesting, but multiple questions arise. How can the theory explain them, and in the process prove its validity (otherwise it's just an empty assertion)? That's what I'm asking.

epoch said...

@Orpheus and others

I read about the Great Caravan Route theory by Turan Efe, which stated that a large caravan route existed reaching from Troy to Cilicia running over the southern part of Anatolia. So when Guus Kroonen came up with very early Anatolian sounding names in Ebla tablets, considered to be from Armi, which nobody can identify but is considered somewhere in S.E. Anatolia I thought these could have been part of a back and forth along that route. It could tie Troy and Troas to the rest of Anatolia.

It could maybe even fit with some, though disputed, suggestions of linguistic contact between Semitic and PIE.

https://www.academia.edu/1184220/The_theories_of_the_Great_Caravan_Route_between_Cilicia_and_Troy_the_Early_Bronze_Age_III_period_in_inland_western_Anatolia

@CopperAxe

I was under the impression its first spread was due to trade. But a spread by use as an administration language as well as due to trade, or even a consolidation of a trade language - which indeed is a vague notion - in such a way.. It could fit with what we know of Anatolian languages.

Vara said...

@Orpheus

You know it's all special pleading trying to fit the data into a dead model.

Other than trade which was also from as far west as Greece there is almost no cultural impact on the east from western Anatolia. In fact western Anatolia (Arzawa and Lukka) may have been considered a backwater by the Hittites:

"The report of the raid of Hattusili I at Arzawa around 1650 BC mentions that:“I went to the land of Arzawa and took away their cattle and sheep”. The text show no booty from palaces or rich cities, which raises an assumption, that Arzawa land might have had various small agricultural communities and no large cities in that time period. The city Beycesultan itself may have already been demolished by a severe fire before 1650 BC and the land of Purušhanda had already belonged to the Hittite Kingdom. No artifacts, text, nor mythical narrative have been found, which indicates, that in the time period of 3000 till 1700 BC, a kingdom of Arzawa did exist. ...Manfred Hutter pointed to the fact that the Luwian gods of Arzawa and Lukka have not been incorporated into the Hittite state pantheon, though Lukka and the Arzawan lands had clearly been a part of the New Hittite kingdom. This in contrast with the Luwian gods of Kizzuwatna and the Lowerland with Tarhuntassa, who figure within this pantheon of the Hittite gods"

https://www.academia.edu/20278742/Puru%C5%A1handa_and_the_Old_Kingdom_of_Hattusa


In fact, Troy's most glorious period(VI) is after the migration of the Luwians from Purushanda(Konya). On the other hand, east to west influence both IE and non-IE is very clear:
"from an early date Hattian and Hurrian elements can also be detected penetrating into Luwian religion."

^ Add to that Assyrian + Akkadian and even BMAC influence in Kanesh. Even some of the names of early Hittite royalty like Pithana are connected to the mountains north of Syria. Yep, Hittite the oldest and most archaic branch of the family while Lydian is the most divergent. The Eblaite texts only confirm what was obvious for decades:
"Norbert Oettinger (pers. comm.) points out that the near certain adoption by the Hittites of the Old Babylonian script via a northern Syrian intermediary also suggests that the Hittites' position at the start of the second millennium was relatively closer to Syria than that of the Hattians" - Melchert

But check this out from Efe:
"The relations between Anatolia and what is now Southeast Europe were not very intensive at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age. However, the influence of Anatolia could be followed into Bulgaria in the 2nd half of the 3rd millennium BC. The finds of treasure from Troy could even indicate a relation between West-Anatolia and Central-Europe."

I guess Central Europe also spoke Anatolian.

ambron said...

Matt, I'm more puzzled by Sunghir6 sharing such long segments of IBD with Neolithic Western Europe. And sharing with the early medieval Anglo-Saxon is also interesting. All this seems to confirm the words of Nestor about the arrival of the Slavs to Russia from Central Europe.

Wee e said...

@Livinia. Yes. As I mentioned, the trade language can easily become a native language for subsequent generations, especially urban — or marketplace/industrial, if you will — as Swahili has in many places. Swahili began as an island language meeting the mainland — and from at least a thousand years ago (however it may have developed since) there have been people who self-identify as “Swahili speakers”.

Tbh I have often thought that Etruscan might have come about this way: a huge amount of Indo-European vocabulary in a mashup with less other vocab than it first appears. Cases are pretty conventional IE cases — but it’s structured in a way that’s unusually agglutinative for IE (Phoenician? It would be an obvious candidate to investigate.)

When you look at what Etruscan basic vocab you can get from tombs and religious calendars — pronouns, personal names, family naming, environment — most of the Swadesh list that can be found actually appears little changed or unchanged in modern Celtic, Baltic, Slavic and Germanic languages. Words that are not held to be later influence from Latin. (Apparently also Greek. I don’t know who has looked to Albanian vocab, but also seems to be some commonality.)

Etruscan numbers, unsurprisingly, do not seem to be very IE.

Wee e said...

@ Orpheus “Lingua franca of which people? And for what purpose? Over what networks? From where to where? Why would proto-Anatolian become a lingua franca and not whatever (presumed) non-IE language the inhabitants of Anatolia spoke,”

Actually, I was not thinking about Anatolians. I was thinking of a period of IE before proto-Anatolian.

You can ask all the same questions about the signed lingua franca of plains Indians -- many of whose tribes were also highly mobile and some still hunter gatherers. Why didn’t the language of one of the more powerful and warlike tribes become the lingua franca? Nevertheless there it was, a lingua franca for several unrelated peoples (and one which was nobody’s native language!) performing all the functions I already listed, and more.

Wee e said...

@Orpheus
“It would be used for trade (whatever they had to trade…?)”
Far from being magical thinking, this is a direct reference to the native of the American plains. It is your answer to why a bunch of mobile steppe people on another continent would have a use for a lingua franca: for the same reasons, whatever they were. (Some of which I tediously listed.)

You seem to have an unspoken presumption that the only reasons different tribes (or nascent ethnicities) or speakers of different languages would bother to meet and learn to communicate would be market-commerce.

Patently not. People from all over Britain, as far as Orkney, routinely went in numbers to southern England, (eg Stonehenge) in the neolithic (actually a much trickier journey than popping over to the Lofoten Islands or the mouth of the Elbe.) They weren’t bringing anything that people in the south of England couldn’t get or make for themselves. (The Orcadians did actually influence a pottery style down there at one point, though.) People from all over the island took livestock to Salisbury Plain to slaughter in such quantities they were leaving large chunks of unbutchered remains behind. They stayed weeks at a time, apparently feasting and doing cultural stuff like making ditches and henges.

Look at Australian corroborrees as well: people would walk hundreds of miles to be at a particular spot on a particular week of the year, and they might do this several times a year in different directions. Chiefly to meet people different from themselves in intensely social activities.

It appears to have been what gave rise to Gobeleki Tepli as well. Not primarily trade centre but social / cultural.

To this day, people gather on the Mongolian plains in just this way. Horse races, wrestling, archery, music, meeting people.

Wee e said...

“These things happened between other cultures as well (powerful & powerful or powerful & poor/weak) of the time and later on, without any lingua franca developing. Why?”

Let’s overlook the slyness of demanding that someone prove a negative: and that the very definition of a lingua franca is that its development takes place between ordinary people in contact.

On what grounds do you assert no other lingua franca developed? How do you know no other lingua franca developed? There are thousands of extinct languages in the world. Most left nothing written.

What do you know of the origins of non-IE language-families that tells you none of them developed out of a lingua franca or creole?

Nobody suspected Tocharian (Kuchean / Agnean) languages until writing was found — and those are relatively recent languages.

How much would we know of Hittite if they had not had writing? We wouldn’t even know Luwian ever existed.

EastPole said...

@Wee e

„Not primarily trade centre but social / cultural”

Of course. The reason for similarity between Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages is religion not trade. The language of commerce changes fast. The language of religion is long lasting.
The reason why there is such a mess with the history of IE languages is because western scholars don’t understand IE religion, and they think everything came from the Middle East.

alex said...

"Orpheus said...

As for the ~2400BCE samples, these are yet to be found if they are CWC-related or Yamnaya-related. The later (~2200BCE onward) samples are CWC-related so they're ruled out."

Where do you base the theory that 2200 BC steppe-admixed samples from Greece are CWC-related? I might have missed that part of the discussion, can you repeat?

A said...

@Orpheus

“The later (~2200BCE onward) samples are CWC-related”

What’s the evidence for that?

Matt said...

@ambron, there are some odder results particularly under 12cM, so may that specifically may be questionable to me tbh! Definitely to me it seems like the 12cM and above links are more clear cut. Re; that particular link with Sunghir6, it seems like it could be from a number of different causes (this isn't me being either for or against it as evidence for the origin theory you're talking about.)

Davidski said...

@alex and A

Where do you base the theory that 2200 BC steppe-admixed samples from Greece are CWC-related? I might have missed that part of the discussion, can you repeat?

He just seems to believe this for no good reason.

There might be some CWC/Srubnaya-related ancestry in ancient Greece, because it shows up nearby in Bulgaria during the Bronze Age.

But most of the steppe ancestry there just looks Yamnaya + some sort of Balkan farmer mix.

It's only later, when the Slavs move into the region, that we see a lot more CWC-derived ancestry in Greece.

Gaska said...

@Wee e

The idea that IE (or IE before proto-Anatolian) may have spread throughout Anatolia as a lingua franca is yet another attempt to justify the absence of steppe genetic components in Asia Minor.

Trade and lingue franche, like religions and sacred languages, in fact tend to be rather poor drivers of first language expansions, replacing other languages. Trade languages often remain principally as second languages, and fail to replace native tongues. They do not even represent expansions at all, then, on the level of native languages and families. Like Swahili still today . . ., many trade languages count far more second- than first language users. This leaves them highly susceptible to their apparent (but only second-language) expansion collapsing back in on itself once circumstances change. Witness the declines of several once widespread trading languages of the Mediterranean (Phoenician, Greek, Sabir) or the eastern coast of Africa (Arabic, Portuguese, Swahili), none of which established itself as a first language across the whole region

Moreover, one cannot intelligently compare the use of lingua francas in the 21st century with their use in the Chalcolithic, it makes no sense to do so, we have to take into account that we are talking about prehistory, i.e. there were no computers, no televisions, no telephones, no roads, the possibility that trade, religious meetings etc. caused the change of language of a certain culture is zero. In other words, in no case can a lingua franca explain the existence of Indo-European languages in Anatolia.

Regarding the comments on Etruscan, its status as an agglutinating non-Indo-European language (like Iberian and Basque) are indisputable. Etruscan is characterized by a simple, synthetic grammatical structure, specifically agglutinative and by an ergativity of a passive type that it shares, for example, with Basque.

Orpheus said...

@epoch That still leaves unanswered the major questions. How is Troy tied to Sredny Stog? Why would it result in language change? Why would it be from Troy > inlands instead of the other way around? Why did Anatolian remain a not agriculture ultra-heavy language? Why did that jot happem between other trading vultures of the same period (from central-eastern Anatolian as well)? etc.

The biggest problem are the dates though. EBAIII (~2500bce per Efe) is when oriental influence appears westward, and only by the EBAII (late 3rd millennium) there's west > east influence. That's too late for Anatolian and without any evidence that would hint at language change due to trading, it can be assumed that any change in language occurred first from the east to the west.

@Vara Very interesting, thanks for the input.

@Wee e Some archaic stage of proto-PIA reaching south Balkans/Anatolia and Anatolian forming there is highly improbable.

"(...) Nevertheless there it was"
'it just happened bro, trust me'

Orpheus said...

@Wee e "You seem to have an unspoken presumption that the only reasons different tribes (or nascent ethnicities) or speakers of different languages would bother to meet and learn to communicate would be market-commerce."
You seem to fail to understand that a theory needs to make arguments in its favor.

I'll give you a hint, the Southern Arc hypothesis is better substantiated by using your line of thinking.

"proving a negative"
Nice projection lmao. Here's an example of asking someone to prove a negative:
Anatolian spread into Anatolian from the Balkans from where it spread from Ukraine, as a trade language (at least in Anatolia). See, a lingua franca developed in other places so it definitely did in my special case too. (Let's also ignore any similar thing being more likely to happen from south Caucasus > eastern Pontic steppe at a more fitting timeline as well) "On what grounds do you assert no other lingua franca developed?"
On the grounds that you make Rob sound smart.

Orpheus said...

@alex Matt posted some IBDs earlier on for the EBA Logkas between one sample out of the two and CWC.

Clemente et al 2021 and Skourtanioti et al 2023 in their supps model the Logkas samples and Skourtanioti all the newer ones too, bar Koptekin's. All prefer a CWC-related source before a Yamnaya-related one (except Tiryns IA which prefers Yamnaya).

Vara said...

"How much would we know of Hittite if they had not had writing? We wouldn’t even know Luwian ever existed"

We would. We actually do know more about the older stages of these from Old Assyrian texts. These people weren't living in another dimension and were interacting with others around them. Battle of Kadesh?

It's pretty simple when it comes to Anatolian(which is what Orpheus asked for) as we have actual evidence. Texts containing personal names, royal names and place names are available so no need for guess work to formulate a hypothesis.

Gaska said...

If there is consensus that genetics (uniparental and autosomal markers) will help resolve the origin of a language, then in my opinion there are only three-four lines of genetic continuity linking chalcolithic with existing european languages (IE and non-IE) in the Bronze Age and Iron Age.

R1a-M417-CWC>balto-Slavic, Baltic & Slavic
R1b-Z2103-Yamnaya>Italic IE languages
R1b-P312-BBC>Iberian, Tartessian, Etruscan
J1, J2a, G2a, and other Asia Minor markers>Mycenean

Regarding the autosomal components, both WHG, ANF and Steppe are spread all over Europe in different percentages and different times, so in the same way that someone can say that the steppe signal is proof of the transmission of IE from its homeland in the steppes, anyone can say that the ANF component proves Renfrew right in his Anatolian theory. A few years ago it seems that only massive Yamnaya migrations were able to provoke a language shift, now it seems that sporadic and even minimal or non-existent contacts are more effective to achieve it. I think that everyone will continue to think according to their own bias rather than evaluate the arguments to the contrary.

epoch said...

@Orpheus

"How is Troy tied to Sredny Stog? Why would it result in language change?"

Troy is connected to Kumtepe 1B and Kumtepe 4 is a low res sample that nevertheless shows steppe admixture. Kumtepe 1B also seems connected to Yassitepe EB and there we have a steppe/balkans related Y-dna sample. We also know that Barcin Chalcolthic has a tad steppe and there are steppe looking burials around Istanbul.

"Why would it result in language change? Why would it be from Troy > inlands instead of the other way around?"

All I can say is there is a steppe link. But do take in mind that while an archaeologically *visible* influence might go from one side to the other the whole concept of trade means that as a result something else went the opposite way. Trade is by definition a two way exchange.

"Why did Anatolian remain a not agriculture ultra-heavy language? Why did that jot happem between other trading vultures of the same period (from central-eastern Anatolian as well)? etc."

I don't understand what you want to ask.

"That's too late for Anatolian and without any evidence that would hint at language change due to trading, it can be assumed that any change in language occurred first from the east to the west."

It's not that Efe states that this route came into existence in EBAIII. He states that influences that formerly were thought to have gone by travel over sea could have gone over land. And thereby he suggests a trade route.

Wee e said...

Orpheus.
I’m sorry that you fail to understand that pre-market-economy plains people (and mixtures of hunter gatherers and foragers) on other continents EVIDENTLY developing some lingua francas … means there is no argument for the necessity of a market economy as driver in Europe.

I’m sorry that you don’t understand that absence of evidence fails constitute evidence: especially when you’re talking about pre-literate times.

And I am sorry that you have decided to presume on premisses that I did not make, such as “a first-language expansion” of IE when my very first and core suggestion was the inverse, its start as nobody’s first language — a creole with wings. Or related creoles.

I can’t tell whether you forgot this was the point you originally engaged with or whether you’re arguing in bad faith.

Wee e said...

@Vara
I used a poor example then: disproving a faulty example from a later era says nothing about my fundamental point.

Which simply is : PIE or early IE, its genesis need not have been anyone’s native language, it can have developed as a lingua franca. I have not even argued that it DID — only that it is a possibility that should not be excluded.

There are reasons for thinking it was a lot less analytical and also more agglutinative than its offspring

PIE or early IE linguistic expansion happened in a period and a region where there was zero literacy. Potentially I guess there can be found some very early text in Egypt or Mesopotamia that evidences PIE or early IE.

But presuming it must have originated as one single discrete language of one people is just an uncalled for presumption, and one that could allow such a discovery to go unrecognised.

Wee e said...

@ Gaska “The idea that IE (or IE before proto-Anatolian) may have spread throughout Anatolia as a lingua franca is yet another attempt to justify the absence of steppe genetic components in Asia Minor. “

I made no such suggestion. You have read ridiculous amounts of your own preoccupation into what I wrote. And your imputation of motives to me is actually laughable. You guys are like the blind men arguing your personal elephant with anyone who comes along, accusing passers-by of being ”treetrunk” or “wall” partisans, when they are not even talking elephants.

Why can people not read a simple word like “originate” and understand that it means “originate”? GENESIS is not SPREAD.

1. I already STATED that I was not in fact thinking of Anatolia AT ALL when I made my first comment. I NEVER MENTIONED ANATOLIA until replying to dumb strawman comments. And then it was a throwaway example of even mature IE languages remaining unsuspected for as long as there was no written reference. Which again was picked up as if it was my original caveat and burned along with some more strawmen.

2. I STATED REPEATEDLY that I was thinking about ORIGINS of PIE/early IE. I was advocating that one should not exclude a general possibility of HOW it came about.

Why I was making this point? For one thing, there is a logical possibility that people are chasing a chimera in trying to reconstruct PIE as a single language. I feel this “pure” or mature-language assumption is taken as an axiom, without really being argued for as such.

For another — if there was not an existing “pure” (for want of a better expression) single progenitor language, then trying to identify one or other small group or descent-lineage with that language is definitely on a hiding to nothing.

I suggest that the possibility should be held open that it might have ORIGINATED as a meld of vocabulary from one (or more) languages(s) and equally possibly. AT THAT STAGE, as a creole or early lingua franca, it was structured differently from whatever parent donated most of its vocabulary. More /less inflexional/analytic. Or losing agglutination. & / or, its structure simplified in ways characteristic of creolisation.

3. Everything I wrote did imply an origin located vaguely in the steppe / forest steppe, almost anywhere BUT Anatolia — FOR ITS ORIGIN.

I said absolutely nothing about its SPREAD TO Anatolia. Or any other place, come to think of it. You guys all read your own peculiar obsessions into absolutely everything. While completely ignoring the point I WAS making — which is a perfectly simple logical possibility,

4. I am not a geneticist. I don’t give a tinker’s fart about steppe genetic components in Asia Minor one way or the other.

Wee e said...

@ Vara. Someone else’s writing — fine. Point being, we only know of Luwian because of a relatively recent development — writing. Which shows it as an already mature language. Pre-writing, we really do not know what we don’t know: Therefore Orpheus’s sweeping declaration that there WERE no other lingua francas is stupid.

Matt said...

Re; the IBD stuff, I've done so checks to try and summarise the samples that have >12cM links over a long time distance, quick table of the ones that have the most and longest separated - https://imgur.com/a/zbgvHPK

This tables list those samples, sorted by highest time separation of the links (this is between irk034 and Neanderthals!).

Basically it seems like the noUDG.SG samples are *heavily* overrepresented in these. Of the samples Ringbauer tested, 893 of 4274 or 20% were noUDG.SG. Of 927 samples (22%) that generate at least one potentially problematic >12cM long length of IBD over 1000 years difference (which is still a fair small proportion of potential problems), the number who were noUDG.SG is 273, or 30% of the total, so overrepresented. Then of 122 that I thought were the worst offenders, 59 of 122 (48%) were noUDG.SG. It continues to go up as you focus on the longer and less plausible links. More of them were also shotgun in general. I would be more cautious about this technique applied to NoUDG.SG.

Orpheus said...

@epoch Yes, but how is Troy connected to Sredny? Burials obviously don't tell us much (see Maykop etc), and the steppe ancestry must be from Sredny unless you want to argue that that dude was a Tocharian or Indo-Iranian speaker.

Let me rephrase the bit you quoted: Why would proto-Anatolian remain a not very agricultural-heavy language, and why did no other language in the connected areas develop into a common trade language that was later adopted as the native language?
Keep in mind all the "but why did X?" questions wrt Caucasus when the Arc paper dropped.

"There is a Steppe link"
And there are Wet Asian links in the Steppe, or CTC links in Sredny and so on. Not very convincing hence my inquiry for either evidence (so far there's none) or at least some explanation aa to why it happened. A trade route seems the most logical out of all the other ones I've heard but still falls pretty short. IE isn't some kind of magically transmitted language where just by listening to it once you magically change your native language to IE, and the devices it used to spread and allegedly replace earlier languages must be outlined and proven.

Orpheus said...

@Matt Have you checked Ringbauer's announcement about the new method they're developing? Might interest you

@Wee e There could very well be a lingua franca, perhaps not even Anatolian but something Mesopotamian (more plausible given the cuneiform texts). The issue is that there's no evidence for a lingua franca (in Anatolia or the Steppe or in Neolithic England and TRB/GAC or in Sredny and CTC etc) and no argument to explain why it came to be. Not to mention non-IE speakers right next to IE speakers. Where's the lingua franca there, one adopted it as a native language and the other one didn't because, reasons?
That's called either rationalization or pseudoscience, take your pick.

DragonHermit said...

Steppe people bifurcated north of the Carpathians (CWC) and south of the Carpathians (rest of Yamnaya) along the Danube.

I don't see how that allows any room for CW to have anything to do with Greeks. I'd say even Hungary and Slovakia were almost fully old fashioned Yamnaya territory. Only once you go into Czech Republic/Austria you encounter CWC or Beaker.

The Carpathians have been so crucial to that region for thousands of years that even today that maniac Putin is killing hundreds of thousands just for Russia to reach it and use it as a natural barrier. It clearly defines the southern boundary of CWC. Greece clearly falls south of it.

Davidski said...

@DragonHermit

Yamnaya moved south of the Carpathians because that's where the steppe was, since Yamnaya was a population adapted to the steppe.

CWC moved north of the Carpathians, because it was a population adapted to the forests.

gimby20 said...

And what are these biological adaptions that extremally genetically closely related populations in the forests vs steppe had that caused them to be so strongly overfitted to their (slightly different) niches?

Rich S. said...

@Gaska

"If there is consensus that genetics (uniparental and autosomal markers) will help resolve the origin of a language, then in my opinion there are only three-four lines of genetic continuity linking chalcolithic with existing european languages (IE and non-IE) in the Bronze Age and Iron Age.

R1a-M417-CWC>balto-Slavic, Baltic & Slavic
R1b-Z2103-Yamnaya>Italic IE languages
R1b-P312-BBC>Iberian, Tartessian, Etruscan
J1, J2a, G2a, and other Asia Minor markers>Mycenean"

That may be the most ridiculous and idiotic post I have ever read here, but if there is a worse one, you were probably also the author of it.

I've been otherwise occupied for the last couple of weeks, so I haven't looked at the comments on this thread until today, but I see you haven't gotten any smarter or more widely read.

@Gaska

"Regarding the autosomal components, both WHG, ANF and Steppe are spread all over Europe in different percentages and different times, so in the same way that someone can say that the steppe signal is proof of the transmission of IE from its homeland in the steppes, anyone can say that the ANF component proves Renfrew right in his Anatolian theory. A few years ago it seems that only massive Yamnaya migrations were able to provoke a language shift, now it seems that sporadic and even minimal or non-existent contacts are more effective to achieve it. I think that everyone will continue to think according to their own bias rather than evaluate the arguments to the contrary."

Seriously, you need to do some reading. You know sooooo very little about why Indo-European languages are associated with steppe pastoralists and thus steppe DNA, and that is why you are able to write things like the above.

I'm amazed Davidski allows you to continue posting here - unless it's for comedy relief.

Dranoel said...

@ Davidski

Taking into account the division you write about, how to explain the presence of Z2103 people in CWC in the Czech Republic and BB in Poland, etc.?

In your opinion, did any part of the Z2103 population accompany the CWC and other P312s from the very beginning? Is it rather the result of later mixing of populations?

Besides, since we have Z2103 in CWC and in BB, it can be assumed that he also appeared on a small scale in Single Grave...

Davidski said...

@gimby20

These obviously weren't biological adaptations, but economical and social adaptions.

Davidski said...

@Dranoel

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure the Z2103 in Polish Beakers is due to admixture from Yamnaya, probably Hungarian Yamnaya.

Davidski said...

@Orpheus

It must be clear by now to any objective observer that the Pontic-Caspian steppe was the main expansion point for early Indo-Europeans. All of the really strong evidence from ancient DNA, archeology and linguistics point to this conclusion.

So it's not much of a leap to assume that the Proto-Anatolians also came from this steppe homeland.

Are there any realistic alternatives? There's a lack of anything tangible pointing to the South Caucasus as any sort of an Indo-European homeland or even Proto-Anatolian expansion point.

Yes, I know that the scientists at the David Reich Lab have some autosomal models for Yamnaya that seem to correlate with their idea that Armenia was the Indo-Anatolian homeland, but unfortunately these models are highly speculative, or indeed totally wrong.

There is actually both genetic and archeological evidence of influences from the steppe in Copper/Bronze Age Anatolia. The only issue is that the ancient DNA evidence doesn't point to a large scale migration, but no one worth their salt ever claimed that there was a large scale migration from the steppe into Anatolia.

Gaska said...

@Wee e

I agree that there is a logical possibility that people are chasing a chimera in trying to reconstruct PIE as a single language.

The chances of a lingua franca replacing a native language are zero, and regarding the origin of PIE I have already said that I do not care because it seems to me an absolutely unprovable question and therefore a waste of time.

We can only know for sure the genetic composition of the peoples who spoke IE or non-IE languages in the Bronze Age (Peloponnese) and in the Iron Age (Italy, France and Spain) where there are reliable written records, everything else is speculation.

@Rich S

Sorry buddy, but the Aquitans, Iberians, Tartessians and Etruscans were overwhelmingly R1b-P312 and none of them spoke IE. To complete the puzzle it turns out that the Sicans of Sicily who had their remote origin in Iberia and who also did not speak IE also have DF27 (with origin in the Iberian BBC migrations) so the dilemma no longer exists, genetic continuity in those regions by male and female line since the chalcolithic and what is the result? No IE languages until the Roman conquest. Do you get it knucklehead?

Mycenaeans?, they still haven't even found Z2103 in the Peloponnese and yet this marker has been documented in both Latin and Apulia (IE languages), funny right?

By the way, 8 years later the first official paper has been published confirming ATP3 as R1b-M269, I am sorry you had to waste so much time to deny the existence of that marker in Iberia. You screwed up again.

You remind me of the friars of the Holy Inquisition calling for the bonfire for dissenters, no wonder, you are pathologically ignorant.

Davidski said...

@Gaska

In societies that can read and write trade and administrative languages can spread without gene flow.

That's what happened in the Hittite Empire, even though the bulk of the population probably continued to speak Hattian, Hurrian etc.

This wasn't the Corded Ware culture. It was a totally different dynamic.

ambron said...

Matt, if it's not a problem, can you write what samples the Polish Vikings VK155 and VK212 share long segments with?

Gaska said...

@Davidski

Yeah maybe, even in America, the indigenous societies that did not mix with Spaniards had to accept the imposition of the Castilian language. Colonial bureaucracy was necessary for any kind of daily activity (business, marriages, trade, wills ....).

The Anatolian issue seems unsolvable unless the genetic data is interpreted correctly. To me, Lazaridis' position seems weak, desperate and unconvincing.

Regarding the CWC issue, for me is a closed case, there is genetic continuity between that culture and the historical Balto-Slavic peoples, so there is nothing to discuss.

When I tried to convince Carlos Quiles that he was seriously wrong, he didn't want to listen to me, he deleted my comments and did not improve to participate in his blog, we all know what the result was. When I told him that the eastern BBs had nothing to do with Yamnaya but rather came from the West, he told me that I was a chauvinistic Basque. At least he has had the balls to admit that he was wrong.

There remains however the issue of the Balkans which has always been a melting pot of cultures, races, religions, languages etc... For me, the Yamnaya influence in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Croatia is evident, but the problem is that we do not know the Paleobalkan languages and we do not know where they come from. So we only have the Mycenaean as a reference, and here you will have to admit that the links with Yamnaya are very very very very weak.

Iberia is a totally different matter than the Balkans, for Goodness sake, we have over 500 Bronze and Iron Age genomes and all but three male markers are P312>DF27. The chances of language shift between the BBC and the Romans are minimal.

Gaska said...

By the way, in case anyone is interested, a bronze hand from the 1st century BC has recently been discovered in Navarra, which is the cradle of the Basques in Iberia (not the current Basque Country, which has only been inhabited by Basques since the beginning of the Middle Ages).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_of_Irulegi

The hand cannot be translated with today's euzkera, but it has words that look Basque (Zorioneku). Although Basque nationalists interpret it as the first text written in Euzkera, the truth is that it is written in Iberian alphabet and has some words that seem Iberian. This means not only the confirmation that Basque has the same origin as Iberian but that it was spoken mainly in Aquitaine (north of the Pyrenees, nowadays France), while in the Iberian Peninsula only Iberian and Tartessian were spoken (except in the Ebro valley where evidently the Celtiberians spoke archaic Celtic).

Celtiberians (Berones, Autrigones, Karistians and Varduli) occupied the current Basque territory and bordered with the Ibero-Basques who inhabited Navarre. Some Spanish linguists defended years ago the possibility that Iberian was a kind of lingua franca, but we already have more than 6,000 texts written in this language and that theory is currently totally discarded. ALL the men analyzed in sites (villages) where texts written in Iberian have been found have turned out to be DF27. We only have one Celtiberian genome and it is I2a, do you understand why it is so difficult for us to accept that the BBC spoke an IE language? We need convincing evidence, not fairy tales.

Wee e said...

@Gaska “The chances of a lingua franca replacing a native language are zero”.
Once again spectacularly failing to understand the basic point. And also ignoring history.

Patently some lingua francas or creoles do replace native languages. They do so when there isn’t sufficient mass media, mass education, or numerical supremacy / speaker motivation to impose one language over all others. Like Swahili, (name adopted from a later exonym meaning “coastal”) which despite some people’s presumption, was already well established, and spreading, centuries before Europeans exerted an influence.

Creoles BECOME a native language: they become a first language of the offspring of the different language communities who developed the creole. Because the kids speak it to each other. You quickly have a language with its fully developed grammar and syntax. It can happen very rapidly. It is the youth who innovate language. (Which we all already know when we think about it.) They don’t care whose words or grammar, only that it works for them.

From 1979, deaf Nicaraguan children were brought to school together for the first time to learn lip-reading and speaking Spanish. By 1986, the teachers, who were only able to finger-spell and did not sign, believed the children were just “miming” and that their efforts to teach them a language — to teach language itself — had failed.

In fact from a huge spread of individual “home signs” developed ad hoc in their own families across the country, the children had already developed a first-stage pidgin — and younger, newer children were already using verb agreement. In seven years.

Observing this, the linguists who were called in to “help” decided to refrain from imposing some other country’s sign language and observe instead. They observed as the language was substantially developed by young children into a full and distinctive sign language. This was despite the entire purpose of this education, hours every day, being (with very limited success) to lip-read and speak Spanish. In other words, the powerful had failed to impose their language (in this case because it was more difficult & less useful to their own priorities, for deaf kids to acquire proficiency in Spanish.)

Some older, original “creole” signing innovators remained permanently at the pidgin stage. This may be in part because they were later than normal in acquiring language as such. From the later 1980s there was some influence from other sign languages — not from instruction but from the usual ways that different-language users will encounter each other.

Anybody trying to track the DNA of the originators of Nicaraguan sign language is going to be very confused. This was an analogy.
Please do not pick on some side issue or peculiarity of this specific analogy to say that because it doesn’t apply to IE, the general principle cannot apply. The nature of an analogy is that it must break down at some point.

Undoubtedly some of those mobile, neolithic-to-bronze-age Eurasian plains lineages would have struck up relationships with more sedentary people (eg forest hunters, fishers, mountain people). And they would be an unusual steppe population if they did not come together for some big annual jamborees, potlatches, corroborrees or marriage fairs. And we know they did interbreed far and wide with populations located in various spots since the neolithic.

It’s just stupid to announce that a lingua franca at some point beginning to be spoken as a first language by the offspring of some such a mix is “impossible”.

epoch said...

@Orpheus

"Yes, but how is Troy connected to Sredny? Burials obviously don't tell us much (see Maykop etc), and the steppe ancestry must be from Sredny unless you want to argue that that dude was a Tocharian or Indo-Iranian speaker."

I disagree with the notion that burials don't tell us much. They do. The Maykop examples show that not always it means a genetic link, but very often they actually do. So the proposal is: Sredny Stog gave rise to Suvorovo-Novodanilovka, and they could have given rise to the kurgans in Istanbul.

Kumtepe was abandoned and repopulated roughly 3800 BC, forming the 1B layer from which the - very low res - sample with noted steppe ancestry comes. Kumtepe B has been noted to have ties to Eastern Thrace:

"The Chalcolithic pottery of Kumtepe shows only slight similarities to the Anatolian inland inventories, but has parallels on the Anatolian west coast and in eastern Thrace"

http://www.elenamarinova.net/publications/RiehlMarinova334_2007_118_fulltext.pdf

There is another thing: Both the Southern Arc hypothesis as the Steppe hypothesis agree that the steppe is a source of almost all IE-languages, only the Southern Arc hypothesis requires a previous even more Ur-Urheimat in Iran. So one could say that this theory is special pleading as well. Mind you, all scenario's of different homelands require some sort of special pleading. But the agreement on the steppe as source of the majority of IE languages goes to show that if one can come up with a likely connection between the steppe and Anatolia it is more than just saving a hypothesis.

"And there are Wet Asian links in the Steppe, or CTC links in Sredny and so on. Not very convincing hence my inquiry for either evidence (so far there's none) or at least some explanation aa to why it happened. A trade route seems the most logical out of all the other ones I've heard but still falls pretty short."

The - alleged - expansion of Sredny Stog "chiefs" in Bulgaria, Suvorovo, followed a population contraction, and the Kumtepe 1B layer is part of a repopulation after a hiatus.

"IE isn't some kind of magically transmitted language where just by listening to it once you magically change your native language to IE, and the devices it used to spread and allegedly replace earlier languages must be outlined and proven."

You will not be able to prove anything, I think. The best we can do is see how certain scenario's fit the data. But do take in mind that it by no means clear how many people spoke Hittite as their native language in Nesa, let alone in the empire. What is clear though is that it wasn't everybody. Only after the crash of the Old Kingdom did new entities arise which used the Luwian language. I don't think Anatolia was an uniformly Anatolian speaking area earlier.

So the proposal would be: Settlement brought IE from eastern Thrace to Western Anatolia, trade made it available over a larger area and political developments consolidated it.

Gaska said...

@Wee e

IMO, what is stupid is to speculate on the possibility that a lingua franca could end up imposing itself on one or more native languages. I do not know of any case neither in prehistory, nor in antiquity nor in modern times, and if there were, it would only be the exception that confirms the general rule. So regardless of the customs of the nomadic shepherds of the steppes, the fact is that there is no data that makes us think that IE was a lingua franca and imposed itself on the languages spoken in mainland Europe, Asia Minor, Iran, India or central Asia.

The Phoenicians and the Greeks with their Mediterranean commercial empires were not able to impose their languages neither in Iberia, nor in France, nor in Italy. Perhaps the children they had with the indigenous women spoke Phoenician or Greek in the villages, colonies or factories they established on the Mediterranean coasts, but this foreign population was always quickly absorbed by the natives. In fact, these peoples influenced the natives culturally, but the Iberians, Celtiberians, Tartessians, Gauls or Etruscans always wrote their native languages using foreign alphabets and of course in many cases they defended their cultures to the death. Perhaps Etruscan and Iberian traders spoke Greek or Phoenician to understand each other, but commercial contracts, payment documents, stock counts, etc., are always written in Iberian or Etruscan.

Only the Roman conquest was able to impose the IE languages in Western Europe. Violence has always been much more effective than trade in destroying a culture, language or civilization and this principle is applicable to any historical or prehistoric time.

Orpheus said...

@DragonHermit There weren't any actual ~100% CWC people in the southern Balkans, it was closer to 40-50% CWC and they probably moved via long-distance travel. An example of this is some Crete LBA finds in Skourtanioti (I posted the excerpt here earlier).

As for CWC ancestry in Mycenaeans and others, maybe a few people had 1/4 or 1/3 of their steppe ancestry (a 9-10% average so around 2-3%) from the CWC-related people, assuming they absorbed them. But besides that there wasn't any influence. Considering that there's no substratum in early Greek from CWC languages those people most likely didn't even speak IE by the time they got to Greece (haplogroups could be related to this, or not).

@Davidski "So it's not much of a leap to assume that the Proto-Anatolians also came from this steppe homeland."

Well, it's not much of a leap to assume proto-Anatolians came from somewhere in NW Iran or Armenia given how steppe ancestry is related to IE, but Hittites lack it. That was Lazaridis' position verbatim, I reckon.
I wasn't asking about this though. I'm asking how it all fits together wrt proto-Anatolian spread regardless of where its homeland is, and what theories being put forth have arguments (let alone proofs) in their favor besides non-sequiturs. For example Anatolian could have spread in Anatolia without anyone with steppe ancestry participating, because proto-Anatolians from the steppe could have proliferated their language but their genes got massively diluted to the point where the language was later spread by people without any steppe-related ancestry. Such a scenario doesn't conflict neither with what you say nor with what I said earlier since I wasn't talking about the homeland.

"Yes, I know that the scientists at the David Reich Lab have some autosomal models for Yamnaya that seem to correlate with their idea that Armenia was the Indo-Anatolian homeland, but unfortunately these models are highly speculative, or indeed totally wrong."
The tricky thing here isn't really archaeology (some evidence do indeed exist as has been pointed out 1-2 threads ago if I remember correctly), but linking Yamnaya with Sredny. IBD will be useful for that, guess we'll find out. PIE spread in Europe (at least initially) being tied to Yamnaya and CWC isn't really debated by anyone. PIA is a different matter though. It's more obscure, PIA as a language has specific prerequisites, not to mention the transition in the steppe from hunting-fishing to pastoralism (domesticated goats and cattle are a bit hard to catch in rivers while fishing), and one could argue about IE religious elements as well. But that's a bit too theoretical for now.

I'll wait for 5-10 papers showing similar results about the hot topics of PIE/PIA honestly. This is how Yamnaya/CWC being pivotal to IE spreading in Europe was settled, after all.

Davidski said...

@Orpheus

Well, it's not much of a leap to assume proto-Anatolians came from somewhere in NW Iran or Armenia given how steppe ancestry is related to IE, but Hittites lack it.

It's a huge leap, because all you've got is negative evidence, if we can even call it that since no one has actually tested any Hittite samples.

Like I said, there's nothing tangible showing that the Indo-Anatolian homeland was in NW Iran or in Armenia.

Matt said...

@orpheus, lol I saw the April Fool's Joke, yeah ;)

@ambron, it's no problem at all: https://imgur.com/a/tkFOFFd

Note that the Poland_Viking are part of the big non-UDG treated shotgun set from Margaryen, so I would guess they are more likely to generate false / questionable positives at the long level (and I would guess at 8cM too, even though I haven't tested this).

But that said, I don't think there are any which are wrong, apart from Spain_EBA_oNorthEurope:I4558, female, who seems generally weird, with lots of matches between both Viking Era North Europeans, but doesn't seem to me to be simply a misdated NE Spain Celt because also matches Spain_EBA samples (https://imgur.com/a/SAvnS7k). It also has weird long links with older samples from the neolithic! Weird sample here, and is responsible for a disproportionate number of questionable long link matches at 2000-3000 years. I don't think this sample made it through to G25, so something may be wrong with it.

As well as the above imgur link, I thought it would be useful to label the Cedynia sample who looks more simply Baltic-Slavic from the Bodzia site who look mainly Slavic but with some Scandinavian/Swedish flavour too:

Bodzia - https://imgur.com/a/vIwlANn
Cedynia - https://imgur.com/a/50gZ2fH / https://imgur.com/a/hVOT2ia

The strongest links are:

1) a close relationship between VK156 and VK154 from the Bodzia site; this man and woman were not identified to be close relatives within the paper I think so this is new. Oddly this seems closer than VK155 and VK157 another pair who *were* identified as 1st degree relatives within the paper. But in any case it looks like the four Bodzia site samples form two related pairs.

2) The Cedynia sample has an apparently close relationship to the Balto-Slavic / Baltic looking sample from the Roman site of Viminacium, about 900 years earlier.

Another interesting link for the Cedynia male, although only at 12cM, is that he shows a link to an Avar with a mixed East-West Eurasian profile. I think in this table there are a few of these Balto-Slavic like samples now, who seem to have no East Asian themselves, but to share links with mixed West-East Eurasian Avars. So probably these IBD links is via a shared contribution whereby a relative of their ancestors donated to some Avars (rather than any identifiable East Asian Avar donation to them); that seems in line with the historical reporting that there was some possibly female mediated contribution to Avars by Wendish/Slavic groups in the early part of Late Antiquity. (It seems consistent with the Hunnish/East Asian groups being a small population, arriving from disparate sources joined into a confederacy with a male bias, marrying with local women, and then not intermarrying too much among themselves over time so getting diluted into a larger/growing population?)

Both sets of samples from both sites have quite varied relatives from both Balto-Slavic and Germanic poles of North Europe PCA, but it seems like the strongest links are also closer in G25.

Orpheus said...

@Gaska For Paleobalkan we have a bit more than just Mycenaean (refer to Olander 2022). I'm curious though, from where do you think Balkanic sprang out of if it wasn't from a Yamnaya-related language (after the CWC split)? Keep in mind I'm not talking about spread since people without steppe could have very well spread IE languages adopted from Yamnaya (and vice versa, as you say).

@Wee e "Undoubtedly some of those mobile, neolithic-to-bronze-age Eurasian plains lineages would have struck up relationships with more sedentary people (eg forest hunters, fishers, mountain people). And they would be an unusual steppe population if they did not come together for some big annual jamborees, potlatches, corroborrees or marriage fairs. And we know they did interbreed far and wide with populations located in various spots since the neolithic."
Couple of replies ago there's Davidski arguing about how CWC were pretty close with other CWC-related cultures, to the exclusion of non-CWC ones. Steppe people didn't really form alliances, they other assimilated others or got assimilated themselves. Take BMAC/Andronovo for example, living side by side for centuries yet minimal contacts.

@epoch "The Maykop examples show that not always it means a genetic link, but very often they actually do." There are other examples too (see Varna, or the general case of GAC), what it boils down to is that it sometimes shows a link (and transfer/continuity of something, in this case language), and other times it does not. There's no definitive answer, and things become even more complicated when you try to locate the origin of the kurgan since there were several cultures (many of them unrelated with each other) using this practice.

"So the proposal is: Sredny Stog gave rise to Suvorovo-Novodanilovka, and they could have given rise to the kurgans in Istanbul."
I'm aware of the theory, I'm asking how can this be linked to Sredny and then how it can be linked to Western Anatolia (not european Turkey), and then Hittites and Eastern Anatolia.

"There is another thing: Both the Southern Arc hypothesis as the Steppe hypothesis agree that the steppe is a source of almost all IE-languages, only the Southern Arc hypothesis requires a previous even more Ur-Urheimat in Iran."
Technically the Steppe hypothesis requires this Ur-Urheimat now too, called Indo-Anatolian. They just locate it to Sredny Stong and them assume it transferred to Yamnaya. The difference between the two theories (actually three, if you include the alternative route of West Asia > Central Asia > Steppe) is that the initial phase is located in different places. In fact both theories now locate it away from the Yamnaya culture homeland, one is just closer to the other.

"if one can come up with a likely connection between the steppe and Anatolia it is more than just saving a hypothesis."
Sure, if there are no contradictions with the theory itself (eg timeline, source of ancestry) then it would be strong evidence for Anatolian arriving in Anatolia from the Steppe via Balkans. Potential problems with this would be if the source of the steppe ancestry isn't steppe-rich itself. It would have to be some culture that is very culturally similar to Sredny which would point at various cultural elements (eg language) being retained. Otherwise it could be a scenario where Etruscans influence some other culture - there's steppe ancestry but no IE language. That's why my position is that it is simply too early to know given how little samples we have so far, and how many more are to come.

1/2

Orpheus said...

@epoch 2/2
"The - alleged - expansion of Sredny Stog "chiefs" in Bulgaria, Suvorovo, followed a population contraction, and the Kumtepe 1B layer is part of a repopulation after a hiatus."
I was referring to how Anatolian spread in Anatolia and allegedly replaced the native languages of multiple different people and cultures in a relatively short timespan. Anthony's theory is trying to address the arrival (which is indeed an explanation regardless of whether it sounds like wishful thinking or not).

"The best we can do is see how certain scenario's fit the data."
Agreed.

"I don't think Anatolia was an uniformly Anatolian speaking area earlier."
Could be. Depends on the data we'll have and how we can relate them to archaeology. If the timeline and archaeological (or/and genetic) data fits, there could be a case for Anatolian being pretty confined but then expanding quickly. Or the opposite. There's also the vocabulary issue - anything less than a sudden intrusion that did not manage to alter proto-Anatolian (which would adapt to the local agriculture-heavy environment) makes it harder for the Balkans > Anatolia route. A North Caucasus > Eastern Anatolia route is actually more likely if we take this into account (regardless of who mediated it).

"So the proposal would be: Settlement brought IE from eastern Thrace to Western Anatolia, trade made it available over a larger area and political developments consolidated it."
I'd be interested to hear the arguments (basically, the alleged evidence) in favor of trading driving the change and spread.

@Davidski
"all you've got is negative evidence"
That's not an argument I use though. Steppe Yamnaya ancestry in Anatolia is pretty useless for Anatolian to begin with, since any DNA being a potential vector of languages would be Sredny.

Indo-Anatolian being located in West Asia is also unrelated to Hittites with or without Yamnaya ancestry. In fact the scenario could be West Asia > Steppe > back to Anatolia via Steppe (or via Balkans).

Orpheus said...

@epoch 2/2

I was writing a reply and the browser crashed lmao, I'll try to give a summary of what I remember.

- Both the Steppe theory (as formulated nowadays) and the Southern Arc theory require an Ur-Urheimat, and in both theories it is located outside of Yamnaya. In the Steppe theory it's just closer (Sredny). The steppe theory is also now much more constrained and has to meet more requirements (see Kroonen's paper). On the upside, if indicators of these requirements being met come up as more samples get published, it would make a stronger case for the steppe theory than before. (As I've said, I'm undecided.)


- I'm aware of Anthony's theory about Sredny, but I was mainly asking about how Anatolian spread throughout Anatolia, not how it arrived. Alleged Sredny movements are indeed an explanation for the route proto-Anatolian took (allegedly).

- Anatolian could have originally been confined in a smaller area and then expanded quickly. Or the other way around, spread over large areas initially, then diverged.

"So the proposal would be: Settlement brought IE from eastern Thrace to Western Anatolia, trade made it available over a larger area and political developments consolidated it."
I'm interested in hearing the evidence for trade spreading it (presumably from West to East).

@Davidski
"because all you've got is negative evidence"
That's not my position, I'm just giving an example of the mainstream conversations on the IE topic right now.
Steppe Yamnaya ancestry is pretty useless in Hittites as a marker of Anatolian. Sredny is far more relevant, as you can guess.

"Like I said, there's nothing tangible showing that the Indo-Anatolian homeland was in NW Iran or in Armenia."
Of course there is (albeit theoretical, but then again all we have is theories for now), but it's not related to Hittites who didn't even exist at the time. You also have to consider that a West Asian homeland could very well lead to a spread of Anatolian into Anatolia from a different source (this time Yamnaya could do it): NW Iran (or wherever else) > Steppe > Anatolia (either via Caucasus or via Balkans).

Davidski said...

@Orpheus

That's not an argument I use though. Steppe Yamnaya ancestry in Anatolia is pretty useless for Anatolian to begin with, since any DNA being a potential vector of languages would be Sredny.

I guess you haven't heard that new, accurately dated Sredny Stog samples are basically identical to Yamnaya (just minus the Z2103 so far).

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/pz-2022-2034/pdf

Indo-Anatolian being located in West Asia is also unrelated to Hittites with or without Yamnaya ancestry. In fact the scenario could be West Asia > Steppe > back to Anatolia via Steppe (or via Balkans).

Seems like a pointless exercise, since there's nothing tangible showing that the Indo-Anatolian homeland was in West Asia.

See that's why Lazaridis et al. had to make Yamnaya ~25% Armenian, or they'd have no argument.

ambron said...

Matt, thanks for the tables and extensive commentary! I'm just trying to analyze it all.

Simon Stevin said...

what's the name of the paper with the resampled ATP3?

Orpheus said...

@Matt Did you check any links with the Nganasan-harboring IA samples from Peltola et al 2023? It could be shared ancestry in both groups from this source instead of from one to another.

@Davidski If that genetic profile is pretty old (as you yourself allege) then PIA would be the innovation of a single group out of the several that shared this genetic profile. Thus a link between the groups must be established, that's what I was referring to.

Case in point from the paper you linked, "Sredni Stog individuals also had genetic ancestry more like Khvalynsk and Progress-2".
That's in the case Yamnaya had this genetic profile as well.

But maybe it was the other way around: "Many traits indicate ‘eastern’ influences on Sredni Stog material culture, economy, and genetic ancestry, and the supine-with-raised-knee burial pose is one of these."

"The Sredni Stog culture succeeded and replaced the Dnieper-Donets culture in the strategic Dnieper Rapids and throughout the steppes of Ukraine beginning around 4500–4300 BCE and ending in the late fourth millen-nium BCE with the appearance of Yamnaya. Unpublished Sredni Stog male genomes exhibit admixture ‘cocktails’ with the same basic elements as Yamnaya (EHG & CHG
& AF). The CHG & EHG component was like Khvalynsk/Progress-2, suggesting an eastern origin for at least partof the Sredni Stog population, and the AF component could have come from either the early Maikop or Tripol’ye populations. Sredni Stog introduced into the Ukrainian steppes new funeral customs (the Khvalynsk or ‘Yamnaya’ position), ceramic types (shell-tempered like Khvalynsk), and economies (large numbers of horse bones) that had appeared earlier on the Volga."
I won't really go into how Reich obviously doesn't support this position anymore, and rather focus on the only scenario that is easy to believe that Sredny passed on IE languages that they allegedly spoke: influence to the East instead of from the East (as the paper alleges). Otherwise what's the scenario, that they got replaced like the EEF cultures in NE Europe but somehow managed to pass down their language to incoming Yamnaya?
There's also the issue of Sredny not actually clustering with Yamnaya (see Nikitin et al 2022), so the "included individuals" could refer just to eastern migrants from the areas to the east of Sredny.

Oh no what's this? "The earliest domesticated animals appeared in the middle Volga steppes around 4800–4600 BCE (using dates on animal bones), just 100–300 years before Khvalynsk29. Khvalynsk appears to have been a central place for the performance of these relatively new
sacrificial rituals, a gathering place for genetically diverse populations participating in a new funeral cult focused on the ritual power and value of domesticated animals."
Exactly what I was saying a few comments earlier (including religion, as mentioned in other parts of the paper).

Anyway, you have obviously solidified your position on the IE issue. I'll simply wait for more studies. If you're correct then there's nothing to worry about, no? (inb4 "harvard is cooking up results")

Orpheus said...

Hm I still get the same crash error. Posting this as a test to see if the previous comment was registered or not.

Rob said...

Migration from pre-steppe Balkans to Anatolia :


“Kodjadermen-Gumelniţa-Karanovo VI culture, is that the population gradually migrates south – the settlements to the north of Stara Planina and especially to the north of the Danube gradually become fewer during phases II and III, while those to the south of Stara Planina become more, and even in the region of Turkish Thrace, where settlements from the early stages of the culture are absent, small settlements (by area) appear, probably with short-lived habitation.

As far as can be judged by the small areas of the settlements from the end of the Late Eneolithic in Turkish Thrace, the spreading population apparently did not stay there for long, but likely continued on to other regions.
Anatolia is one such assumed region. Metallurgical production based on mining starts there during the 4th millennium. I


Excerpt from: "Communities in Transition: The Circum-Aegean Area During the 5th and 4th Millennia BC" by Oxbow Books. Scribd.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/369215410”

That is why west Anatolian individuals can be modelled with Rou N and Vinca, as per Dave & I

Richard Rocca said...

Gaska said..."Only the Roman conquest was able to impose the IE languages in Western Europe."

So I guess all the speakers of Celtic from Scotland to Western Iberia and from NW Germany to Northern Italy were not IE speakers now? You literally have no shame.

DragonHermit said...

@Orpheus

Crete was Minoan up until the Greek invasions. There's nothing there about CW. CWs are just steppe people that migrated north of the Carpathians and mixed with GAC. Its more "southern" CW derivatives are only found in Central/Western Europe once you cross the Carpathians, like Italo-Celts.

All these groups like Greeks, Illyrians, Thracians, Dacians are the southern steppe derivates (although Illyrians seemed to have some BB contact up north around Slovenia). Most of them migrated along the Danube and south of the Carpathians. (Plus there's also the eastern derivates like Yamnaya-derived Afanasievo and Armenians, and CW-derived Sintashta).

epoch said...

@Rob

Can samples like Barcin Chalcolithic and the Chalcolithic samples from Ilpinar be modeled like that as well?

Matt said...

@Orpheus: "Did you check any links with the Nganasan-harboring IA samples from Peltola et al 2023? It could be shared ancestry in both groups from this source instead of from one to another."

Assuming we're taking about the link between Hungary_Transtisza_EAvar:A1807 and Poland_Viking_Cedynia:VK212?

Just to clear up what I'm doing, I'm not myself running any checks between any pairs of samples; I've just added population labels to Ringbauer's table of matches (using their list of population labels matching sample IDs to populations) and then filtered them. So if a link was present and found by Ringbauer et al for VK212, I would've already included it in the table matches I uploaded for ambron. There's no "check(ing for) links" on my part exactly.

So also one thing about this is, because the preprint uses not necessarily the 100% most up to date samples, this means their data file when I checked doesn't include any studies from 2023, so any matching with anything from the study you mention (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(22)01826-7.pdf) is not either excluded or included as such by their tests.

As for what long links they did find for A1807, here's what that sample has: https://imgur.com/a/GTbdVZs . Mostly they are other Avars from near the time and place, which is sensible, although there are a few (including Poland_Cedynia_Viking) that aren't (one of the others seems early in a way that's a bit odd but maybe is still plausible, but the other seems close enough in time for it to seem reasonable). With the G25 on A1807 and the samples with long links to A1807, I don't see anything Nganasan related in Vahaduo's North Eurasia 3 PCA that breaks out the "Uralic cline".

Orpheus said...

@Richard Rocca I think he was referring to an IE language being imposed on other language speakers (non-IE or IE ones, e.g. imposition of Latin on some Celtic and Germanic speakers), since nobody imposed Celtic on Celts or Germanic on Germanics. His argument would be better phrased as "imposition of IE an language in Western Europe occurred only during the Roman conquest".
It would probably be better understood as "Western Mediterranean" without the rephrasing.

Rob said...

@ Oprheus



'' ‘eastern’ influences on Sredni Stog material culture, economy, and genetic ancestry, and the supine-with-raised-knee burial pose is one of these."

How exactly are they eastern traits ? Where are the sites and C14 date for their 'eastern predecessors ?





- ''The Sredni Stog culture succeeded and replaced the Dnieper-Donets culture in the strategic Dnieper Rapids and throughout the steppes of Ukraine beginning around 4500–4300 BCE and ending in the late fourth millen-nium BCE with the appearance of Yamnaya. Unpublished Sredni Stog male genomes exhibit admixture ‘cocktails’ with the same basic elements as Yamnaya (EHG & CHG)''


The CHG + EHG model is defunct. Seems that eveybody apart from you , Lazarides & Anthony know that
Moreover, rhere is no single Dnieper-Donetz culture, and it obvoiusly wasn't completely replaced. Anthony cant understand the difference between admixture , migration & replacement . The other thing is Anthony doesn;t know much about genetics and can't even use stats to support his claims (had to quote some off-hand remark by Iain Mathieson), and had to come up with pseudoscientific claims about slaves to support his theory.


'' Oh no what's this? "The earliest domesticated animals appeared in the middle Volga steppes around 4800–4600 BCE (using dates on animal bones), just 100–300 years before Khvalynsk29. Khvalynsk appears to have been a central place for the performance of these relatively new''

Nothing to see here. ~ 4700 BC is Eneolithic / early Sredni Stog with links to Balkans.
No magic migration from Turkmenistan or India required.

Richard Rocca said...

@Orpheus, that wouldn't make sense either because before Corded Ware, there were non-IE all over Western Europe.

Rob said...

@ Epoch

''Can samples like Barcin Chalcolithic and the Chalcolithic samples from Ilpinar be modeled like that as well?''

Some more than others. Some can be modelled as 2-way admixtures of ANF + a CHG-rich source, others e.g. Yassitepe need more specifically somthing like ROU_N. Even Isparta has a better fit with a European source

The other thing is is that not only is there a hiatus at kumtepe, but widely across central -western Anatolia. So like i said, if ANF/EEF rich populations were (re-)appearaing there after a 1,000 year hiatus, where did they come from ?

epoch said...

@Orpheus

The wheel came from the west [1]. And the copper from the Khvalynsk copper artifacts came from the Balkans.

[1] https://www.academia.edu/1872923/Rassamakin_Yu.Ya._2002._Aspects_of_Pontic_Steppe_Development_4550_-_3000_BC_in_the_Light_of_the_New_Cultural-Chronological_Model._In_K._Boyl_C._Renfrew_M._Levine_eds._Ancient_Interactions_East_and_Wwest_in_Eurasia._Cambridge_McDonald_Institute_for_Archaeological_Research_University_of_Cambridge_49-73

Mark said...

@Rob

"I dont think it's as simple as you say.

If we look at J-Z1846, for ex, which is in the Minoan site at Halgos, it is not evident from the aDNA record that the earliest samples are a simple case of being from Anatolia or further east. Esp if one is aware of the demographic record of Anatolia (major shifts post 5000 bc).
We see Asrlantepe ~ 3300 BC & MBA Kalehoyuk on the branch tree, but the earliest individual belonging to that family is Ripa Blance, Italian Neolithic 5300 bc !
Similarly, J-CTS7683 in Ikiztepe 24 is linked to an older clade within Barcin N and Kotias.


*Much of the classical Farmer Anatolia in Capadocia and the southern Konya was depopulated after 5000 BC and new settlements formed after 4000 BC. As I said above, some of these G2a & J2a lineages are in fact contendors for migrations from western Anatlia to the East c/w observed 'homogeniation' between CHG & ANF stated in 'Arc' paper."

Never claimed it was. I was essentially just pointing out the appearence of certain paternal lineages which don't have a phylogeny, generally speaking diversification processes and dispersal that are evidence of some sort of Balkan Neolithic or other European Neolithic affiliation. I did not, nor before, make any argument based on macrohaplogroup designations (in this case J2a-L26).

"Obviously J-L24 in Imerpial Rome is an East Mediterrenean arrival.
Etc. "

I agree. These are AD phenomena tangible, too, in the autosomal MENA shift across Roman Era sites (Italy, Balkan peninsula and what not). J2a-L24 lineages fit the bill and there is already a lot of archaeogenetic evidence for it.

Orpheus said...

@Matt Oh I thought they released it already. My bad

@Richard Rocca Hmm true, guess he'll clarify what he meant. I'm guessing west Med

@Rob Did you even read the paper or are you shitposting? It is so far clear that Sredny has several influences that first appear to their east and possibly some outsiders from there (still to be seen) but the opposite is not seen. The steppe theory (as of now) requires a connection from Sredny to the Yamnaya areas instead of the other way around. One might be found in the future but so far there isn't anything big (if anything at all) and at the same time the opposite is seen.
Wait, are you thinking that by "eastern" I'm talking about Central Asia despite all the context and excerpts from the paper? Brainlet lmao

"The CHG + EHG model is defunct"
No shit discount Sherlock, it's not like I wrote the following because of that: "That's in the case Yamnaya had this genetic profile as well" and "I won't really go into how Reich obviously doesn't support this position anymore"

"~ 4700 BC is Eneolithic / early Sredni Stog with links to Balkans."
Yeah and 4800-4600 BCE is older than Sredny and to its east, with Khvalynsk (c ~4900BCE) being central to the diffusion of these traits and practices to the west.

There are always interesting details in the papers Davidski posts, try reading them sometime.

Orpheus said...

Correction, Khvalynsk and early Sredny are both ~4500BCE (see the paper Davidski linked). When all the cultural elements that made their way into Sredny made their appearance to the east of Sredny, Sredny didn't even exist yet.

@epoch I'll bypass that this would show material culture influence from the Balkans to Khvalynsk (like in Sredny from CTC) instead of any proofs of Sredny to Khvalynsk. Anyway, from the paper Davidski linked we can read that it wasn't even material culture that they imported but just raw materials.
"Balkan ores probably were the source of the copper imported to Khvalynsk, although most of the imported metal was worked into rings and beads by local artisans." + "The copper ornaments were worked and welded locally, but the metal probably was obtained from Balkan cultures where smelting was practiced." (Also hHmm wonder where hunter-fishers learned metallurgy from)
Trade with the south (Caucasus) is also speculated in the paper for some other ores. Not sure you'd call that cultural influence though, it's even less significant than the CTC influence in Sredny (pottery, alleged agriculture). Considering the pretty hefty amount of evidence for Khvalynsk (east) > Sredny (west) influence, it's pretty safe to argue that Khvalynsk knew what was going on in the areas right next to Sredny and what they could obtain from there via trade. (Damn where's a trade lingua franca when needed)

But I digress. "Rassamakin74 proposed that the Dnieper Rapids region emerged in this era as a secondary center of ‘Skelya-culture’ metalworking between Varna and the North Caucasus steppes. Most of the Khvalynsk copper is consistent with this kind of secondary source, among local steppe artisans. This could also be the source of a copper bead found at Svobodnoe, made of Balkan copper75."
Dnieper Rapids fall within CTC territory consistent with their metalworking utilizing arsenic

"Svobodnoe was one of a series of agricultural settlements established in the Kuban River drainage after 4700 BCE by immigrant farmers who crossed the North Caucasus peaks from Georgia76."
Uh-oh

"They participated in the trading network that brought Balkan copper into the steppes. Svobodnoe also produced many polished greenstone axes with faceted butts, like the axe found at Khvalynsk in grave I:105, probably made in the North Caucasus. A polished serpentine bracelet at Khvalynsk found in grave I:8 probably was made in the North Caucasus (Figure 9: middle panel); it was like bracelets at Nalchik. The Khvalynsk population was active in inter-regional exchange systems (Danube-Dnieper-Caucasus-Volga) that were stimulated by the heightened production of Balkan copper after 4500 BCE."
Lol it just keeps getting better. Imagine if all of this stuff was found between some steppe culture and pre-Hittite Anatolia or something like that, you'd have several people from here tearing their throats out screaming that it's definite confirmation of the steppe theory.

1/2

Orpheus said...

2/2

@epoch
"Copper represented contacts with distant others. It symbolized foreign adventures and long-distance travels102"
Kind of fits the lifestyle of Yamnaya & co. too, although circumstantial.

The whole copper thingy is also later than the dates I mentioned.
"During the brief interval between Khlopkov Bugor and Khvalynsk, perhaps around 4500 BCE, Balkan copper began to flow through exchange relationships in the Volga steppes and was concentrated at Khvalynsk."
"Khvalynsk was part of a network of cultures that participated between 4500–4200 BC in the exchange of copper, exotic shells, domesticated animals, and emerging symbols of hierarchical leadership (polished stone maces)".
And Sredny isn't older than 4500 BCE. Many elements in Khvalynsk can be traced to the ~4800 BCE eastern Pontic Steppe culture (refer to the paper) a bit to the north of Khvalynsk. The Khvalynsk-like elements in Sredny can likewise be linked to Khvalynsk and/or ~4800 BCE. Where's the pre-Sredny influence in Khvalynsk though?

Found this interesting bit too: "Domesticated animals, first adopted in the Volga-Ural steppes about 4800–4600 BCE, had triumphed by 4500 BC as the principal means of communication with the gods and ancestors, who apparently desired only sheep and goats, cattle, and an occasional horse. The horse was the only acceptable mammal that was indigenous. This new system of belief about the desires of the spirit world necessarily post-dated the arrival of domesticated animals, so it was a recently established ritual in 4500 BC. Yet this was the exclusive sacrificial ritual in the funerals at Khvalynsk. Khvalynsk was a central cemetery (because of its size) for a new funeral cult in which domesticated animals were the preferred channel of communication with the spirit world. If the Volga steppes were part of the Proto-Indo-European homeland, as many have argued100 then from the point of view of Indo-European religion, this was the moment when the world, made from the pieces of a cosmic cow101, began."
Plenty of animals that are non-indigenous to the steppe suddenly having a central role in their religion (and literally transforming their entire way of life and economy).

As a sidenote, Dnieper Rapids non-CTC samples are neither Sredny/Khvalynsk nor Yamnaya, they're just hunter-gatherers with EHG and WHG (p. 41).

Also can you tell me the page about wheels? I didn't find it.

Rob said...

@ Mark

''Similarly, J-CTS7683 in Ikiztepe 24 is linked to an older clade within Barcin N and Kotias'

No, you need to learn about the settlement / demography, instead of posting ghost theories based on DNA alone
As per above, central and inland wedst Anatolia were depopulated, hence these lineages cam anew

Orpheus said...

oops missed this

@DragonHermit They weren't Minoans and in fact were post-Mycenaean too, I posted the exact quote from the paper earlier.

If by "southern" you mean CWC then no, Balkanic languages and proto-Balkanic speakers have nothing to do with CWC and CWC languages.

Rob said...

@ Orpheus


''Brainlet lmao''
Col. We have a short man being a keyboard warrior.
Ease up or you might pull that congenitally weak back of yours



''Did you even read the paper or are you shitposting?''

I understand more than any Paper, but your mana inhibits you frrom understanding that.
Sredni Stog isnt 'from the East'', it emerged from the preceding Mariupool horizon.
Yes it has eastern admixture, but this would need to be defined relationally by site, date and appropriate transects. Given that you don;t even understand Greece, you shouldnt be smugly lecturing us about Eastern Europe.

Mark said...

@Rob

'Similarly, J-CTS7683 in Ikiztepe 24 is linked to an older clade within Barcin N and Kotias'

No, you need to learn about the settlement / demography, instead of posting ghost theories based on DNA alone
As per above, central and inland wedst Anatolia were depopulated, hence these lineages cam anew"

I am not really sure what you are arguing for in this post, very contradictory statements.

You do realize that the most recent common ancestor of CTS7683 lived 16000 years ago? You often times argue with macrohaplogroups to prove a certain believe of yours, I noticed.

What does this have to do with the haplogroups I have discussed before?
If they only appear in the EBA in the Aegean, and it is obvious that no where else in Europe will you find those lineages accompanied by that autosomal DNA, then they weren't there before.

This seems to rather have to do with the wish for continuity in said region I assume? I like to stay out of such personalised ethnonationalist discussions, my area of interest is the Western Balkans not Greece ;)

Matt said...

@ambron, I had a look at the IBD links for a couple of pre-0CE samples that are relatively close to present day Slavic populations on G25: https://imgur.com/a/g4y6YlJ

Nothing much found there; some links to Viking populations, but again this could just be due to the shotgun UDG issues.

Rob said...

@ mark

''I am not really sure what you are arguing for in this post, very contradictory statements.''

There's nothing contradictory there. You just don't know anything about the subject matter so it sounds alien to you.





''You often times argue with macrohaplogroups to prove a certain believe of yours, I noticed.''

Nonsense. Despite your lies, I specifically mentionend that J-Z6273 found in BA Anatolia has older finds in Neolithic Europe, such as Ripa Biance, and given that Anatolia was depopulated between 5000 and 3500, the re-appearance of said lineage as well as certain G2a clades represent migrations from somewhere to the West, perhaps Balkans or Greece. This is concordant with GW models and archaeology.



''This seems to rather have to do with the wish for continuity in said region I assume? I like to stay out of such personalised ethnonationalist discussions, my area of interest is the Western Balkans not Greece ;)''


First off Mark, im not from Greece. And if I was making a continuity narrative up, Id be sounding like you and claiming that J2b2 has been present in Europe since the Ice Age 'because muh TMRCA" . You clearly dont even know what that concept means
Due to your own chauvanisms, you're discontent that your lineage has ~ Eneolithic arrival time from Western Asia Deal with it, my Menteshe Tepe friend.

Rob said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
DragonHermit said...

@Rob

I don't think anyone is arguing J2B2 not being a CHG-related Y-DNA. The issue here is that Yamnaya/WSH is half CHG-related. They have way more CHG-related DNA than EEFs. There is no reason to think J2B2 is anymore a farmer lineage than a steppe lineage. In fact, given its strong association of its earliest samples with high steppe ancestry, it makes it 100x more likely to be a steppe lineage.

We have WAY more European Neolithic farmer samples than we do steppe samples and no J2B2 has shown up. We still haven't found the the proper PIE urheimat in the steppe where we know lineages like R1b-L51 came, so we know for a FACT that the steppe is badly sampled. If we still haven't found R1b-L51 origin in the steppe, asking for J2B2 samples which are a minority is pointless.

The earliest J2B2 does actually come north of the Danube in the Serbian/Hungarian border, but this is still Yamnaya territory. So while it might not be a BB lineage, it's very likely a Yamnaya/steppe lineage. It might have been absorbed in latter BB-derived cultures along the Danube though.

I think some here still have come to terms with the fact, that yes, the steppe is still HORRIBLY undersampled. Trying to discount X or Y theory based on LACK of steppe samples, is nonsense.

Mark said...

First, I definitely never said anything about J2a-Z6273, and it shows that your answers are worthy solely for their comedic value for putting words into the mouths of other people. I mentioned in my initial post addressed at Alex and Matt that the two Neolithic/Chalcolithic affiliated farmer lineages under J2a-M410 present in the Aegean Endogamy paper, phylogeny-wise cannot be compared to other haplogroups under J2a-M410 (M319, Y17002, PF5008+ and Z7671 etc.) forming the majority of those samples etc. and I might add: having likely a common more eastern origin representing dead end branches with basal J1-P58 lineages found there. If not then you might as well claim that Asia Minor Greeks are nearly 100% Balkan paternally, also including other Western and Eastern Anatolian groups like Zaza
Kurds, Turks etc.. This is a far from reality claim but everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

Second, I come from a background in a math-intensive field of the natural sciences and given your overall demented self-portrayal, I realize that as my addressee, you obviously do not.

As for the oldest J2b-M12 sample already mentioned by myself and others, that is a Mesolithic sample from Kotias Klde, Georgia that actually belongs to a tertiary ancestral branch directly affecting J2b-L283 and is approximately ~10000 years old (Allentoft / Willerslev forthcoming paper). Mentesh Tepe's samples belong to a rare quaternary descendant branch of J2b-Z42941. As for all this Ice Age and Bell Beaker, and what not rambling, I never claimed such a thing. The initial basal diversification processes of J2b-L283, a European (mainly West Balkan to be more precise :)) haplogroup nonexistent in Iran and the Middle East, are in the Upper Danube and further, 3600/3500 median BC.

Well, more to say those dozens and dozens of West Balkan J2b-L283 samples (Geography is, too, something you are not familiar with).

Lastly, get psychological help, Kuttekop.

Orpheus said...

@Rob I didn't mention anything about "Sredny being from the east" or "having eastern admixture" (neither did the paper) even if it is indeed a possibility given the pre-Sredny samples of the area. So we aren't necessarily disagreeing.

DragonHermit said...

@Davidski

"Yamnaya moved south of the Carpathians because that's where the steppe was, since Yamnaya was a population adapted to the steppe.

CWC moved north of the Carpathians, because it was a population adapted to the forests."

You have to let go this "different ecological zones" b.s. A unified reconstructed language implies 1 single, small homogenous group of people. You're putting such heavy archeological, geographic and linguistic barriers between Yamnaya/CW-ancestors, that it makes PIE as a theory impossible.

Like I said, most of those RZ2103s in kurgans are dead ends and simply PIE-related distant cousins, not PIE itself. PIE was some farming-heavy western/northwestern steppe people, a SUBSET of Yamnaya. Not all Yamnaya = PIE. PIE by definition needs to have both R-L51 and RZ2103 for example, not just one. We still haven't found the exact Urheimat.

Your theory relies on these steppe people somehow being aware they're "R1a", "R1b", moving to different regions IN THE STEPPE, adapting there, and then still speaking the exact same language centuries later. It's complete nonsense. Listen to Reich, Anthony, Lazaridis. They are in agreement for a reason.

Rob said...

@ Dragon Hermit

''I don't think anyone is arguing J2B2 not being a CHG-related Y-DNA. The issue here is that Yamnaya/WSH is half CHG-related. They have way more CHG-related DNA than EEFs. There is no reason to think J2B2 is anymore a farmer lineage than a steppe lineage. In fact, given its strong association of its earliest samples with high steppe ancestry, it makes it 100x more likely to be a steppe lineage.''

The issue isn;t about whether it's a steppe or Farmer lineage. These things arent in fact mutually exclusive, at least for some lineages. Only more aDNA will resolve exact paths.

The problem for Mark is that he got upset back when I made the passing remark along the lines of 'J2b is relatively recently from west Asia'. He scolded for not making reference to specific sublineages, and then proceded to lecture about TMRCAs & what-not. Apparently, because he's a mathemetician, he thinks that nobody else knows about sub-lineages and we need to reference R1b-L754-L388-M269-L151-DF27 everytime we discuss something.

But whichever way we look at, the Balkan-clade J-L283 arrived from western Asia
Its brother clade - J-Z2444- is found in Bustan bronze Age & Swat IA.
And three 'cousin clades' are all found in the southern Caucasus & Iran

So the fact remains, j2b is from western Asia, Being pretentiously pedantic isn't going to change reality.

Rob said...

@ Mark
Thanks for your autobiography, sounds dazzling. When I’m up for a geography lecture from somebody who’s probably never even been to those regions, I’ll email you

Davidski said...

@Matt

Does the Ringbauer preprint include a discussion about false positives due to excess DNA damage and/or due to founder effects?

By false positives I mean haplotypes that aren't really IBD but rather the same patterns of damage and IBS haplotypes that look like IBD, respectively?

Davidski said...

@DragonHermit

Have you noticed that early CWC and Yamnaya differ not only in terms of Y-DNA lineages but also autosomal DNA, with early CWC being more "northwestern"?

This implies that their ancestors lived in different parts of the steppe.

Are you actually telling me that I have to ignore this information, and instead rely on David Anthony's bone headed idea that the ancestors of CWC lived amongst Yamnaya as a different class of people?

But wouldn't this mean turning off my brain and suspending my disbelief?

By the way, there's no J2b in any Yamnaya samples that I've seen, and Yamnaya obviously isn't 50% CHG.

How can you even claim something so wrong? You must be a total newb.

Matt said...

@Davidski; not specifically for either of those questions.

Also to note: "After filtering to all individuals with geographic coordinates in Eurasia with dates within the last 45,000 years, and sufficient genomic coverage for robust IBD calling we are left with 10,156 unique ancient individuals (4,274 of which are published, Supp. Tab. 1A). As coverage cutoff, we used at least 600,000 1240k SNPs covered for 1240k data, and at least 200,000 1240k SNPs covered for whole-genome-sequencing aDNA data. This metric was chosen as the number of 1240k SNPs covered is readily available in the AADR database for all samples. "

There's another ~6,000 individuals analyzed they've compared that aren't published, compared to the pairs listed in Supplementary Table A and B.

epoch said...

@Orpheus

I am hesitating to answer you, as you seem to be very unserious:

"As a sidenote, Dnieper Rapids non-CTC samples are neither Sredny/Khvalynsk nor Yamnaya, they're just hunter-gatherers with EHG and WHG"

and:

"Dnieper Rapids fall within CTC territory consistent with their metalworking utilizing arsenic"

The two most well known Sredny Stog sites are Dereivka and Sredny Stog itself, both directly at the Dnieper. The first is situated just above and the second just below the Dnieper Rapids.

You cited the paper:
"Rassamakin proposed that the Dnieper Rapids region emerged in this era as a secondary center of ‘Skelya-culture’ metalworking between Varna and the North Caucasus steppes"

The ‘Skelya-culture’ is a proposition of a cultural horizon by Rassamakin encompassing all Chalcolithic steppe cultures, amongst which Sredny Stog and Khvalynsk.

epoch said...

@Orpheus

I'll respond nevertheless.

"I'm interested in hearing the evidence for trade spreading it (presumably from West to East)."

The reason I toy with the idea of a trade language is that the places where Anatolian languages are found they are clearly intrusive: Hittite empire and Kuzzawatna. In both cases a local non-IE language was part of the languages of the kingdom, Hattian and Hurrian respectively. While not conclusive it gives a bit credit to a western entry point of Proto-Anatolian.

Kloekhorst hypothesizes that Hittite and all other Anatolian languages split roughly 3000 BC and there is no large upheaval known from the archaeological record from that time. And we know that there are Anatolian names known from Armi roughly 2500 BC.

Virgin_Quilles_Sucks_R1a_Chadvski said...

Great Davidski, could you tell me if you think that Sredny could be the Real PIE, Dereivka I and II, people usually claim about Yamnaya but considering y-dna lineages it doesnt make a lot of sense. So if yamnaya had an extra Armenian Input why should us care? Some females marriage with the Yamnaya Chiefs from Southern Steppe, in a Patriarchal Culture its doesnt matter, imo, off course.
And about absence of AuDNA in Anatolian Bronze Age, we didnt see it in some Bronze Age Iberians with R1b-DF27 lineage, clearly associated with Western Corded Groups(Czech). We have 3 billions nucleotide pairs, if we cant identify in few individuals some admixture in auDNA but we find R1b-Z1203 associated with Anatolian Indo Europeans(Luwian, Hatti), considering that we had few individuals(so might be something related to the low coverage Area in DNA that our current models use, that a great n could resolute). Its just some doubts i have about Southern Arc Hypothesis, i want ask you cause you re expert about. Thanks if you could answer me and for your great job. Congrats for your fight against Quilles, from one R-Z280 ""cousin"", some people insists in trying to make R1a "Uralic", arguing always about the R1a Turkic and Magyars lineages that were clearly absorbed by early Altaic and Uralic Migrations to Central Asia Scytho-Samartian Continuum(Saka Tien showed us it clearly), when R1a was probably the most PIE Lineage(considering Derievka first stage).

Davidski said...

It's important to understand that Yamnaya is derived from Sredny Stog.

So this Yamnaya vs Sredny Stog argument that is still happening in some places online is pointless and outdated.

There are new Sredny Stog samples that will be published soon and they're just like Yamnaya.

The only difference is that they carry R1a and I2, not Z2103. So obviously Yamnaya is a subset of Sredny Stog in which there was a Z2103 founder effect.

On the other hand, Corded Ware is a subset of Sredny Stog in which there were M417 and M269 founder effects.

PIE came from Sredny Stog. Yamnaya is not PIE, it's late PIE at best, same as Corded Ware.

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