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:

  1. There are two clines on the steppe.

    Only one of the clines has something Armenian about it, and this is not the Yamnaya cline.

    How have they missed this for the past decade?

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  2. OT: Planck listed (https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/faces/ViewItemFullPage.jsp?itemId=item_3491037_2) where the 'Paleogenomics of Upper Paleolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers' paper will be released, in Nature.

    Posth, C., Yu, H., Ghalichi, A., Rougier, H., Crevecoeur, I., Huang, Y., et al. (in press). Nature. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-0000-0.

    Should be soon, perhaps today.

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  3. What is the relevance of talking about the yamnaya outlier? Isnt the existence of the cline consisting of yamnaya (minus the outlier) between progress and more Western pops enough to show that yamnaya doesn't have significant armenian like admixture? Are you showing the other cline, progress to yamnaya outlier/maykop outliers to arminia, to show what actual armenian admixture looks like?

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  4. @Dear David

    Why must the Anatolian source be specifically from EEF and not say Maykop or Meshoko?

    Target: Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
    Distance: 3.5029% / 0.03502885
    77.6 RUS_Progress_En
    17.4 UKR_N
    5.0 RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya
    0.0 HUN_Vinca_MN

    Here's a PCA with a 75% Progress, 15% Ukr_N 10% Maykop_Novosvobodnaya versus 80% Progress, 15% Ukr_N, 5% Vinca. Both are located in the Yamnaya cluster.
    https://i.imgur.com/R6SBkCb.png


    And going by the "Population Genomics of Stone Age Eurasia" paper, we see that there are foragers with a semi-Steppe genetic profile that are rich in CHG, (but not as much as what Yamnaya has), these foragers have additional WHG that also in turn exceeds the WHG percentage of Yamnaya.
    So my question is, why can't Yamnaya/Sredny Stog be a mix of the aforementioned population plus Maykop, Darkveti-Meshoko, related? That should tone down the WHG but also increase the CHG to the Yamnaya levels.
    And regarding the supposed absence of Levant ancestry in Yamnaya, - neither Maykop nor Kura-Araxes are exactly rich in Levant_N ancestry.

    Target: Kura-Araxes_RUS_Velikent:VEK007-009
    Distance: 3.3375% / 0.03337548
    37.0 GEO_CHG
    28.8 TUR_Marmara_Barcin_N
    19.4 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
    12.4 RUS_Progress_En
    2.4 Levant_PPNB

    Target: Kura-Araxes_ARM_Kaps:ARM001
    Distance: 4.7175% / 0.04717516
    41.4 GEO_CHG
    35.4 TUR_Marmara_Barcin_N
    22.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
    1.2 RUS_Progress_En
    0.0 Levant_PPNB

    Target: RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya:I6267
    Distance: 3.8787% / 0.03878674
    44.2 GEO_CHG
    31.0 TUR_Marmara_Barcin_N
    17.2 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
    4.0 Levant_PPNB
    3.6 RUS_Progress_En

    Target: RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya:I6272
    Distance: 3.2497% / 0.03249680
    45.0 GEO_CHG
    31.0 TUR_Marmara_Barcin_N
    14.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
    5.4 RUS_Progress_En
    4.6 Levant_PPNB

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  5. The EHG part of Yamnaya is diverged from the ANE. The ANE is CHG is diverged from the ANE in EHG. Also, CHG = Dzudzuana + ANE, much like Iran_N, but it seems that the Dzudzuana/Gravetian/AHG component in CHG and Iran are not identical to that found in Natufians and Anatolians.

    Complicating matters more is that WHG in WSH are not exactly like the Balkan style WHG. We see how Iron Gates HG is more similar to ANF than to WHG.

    What intrigues me the most is to find out where the sudden explosion of R1a1 came from into the forest zone, giving rise to Sredny Stog, Corded Ware and Yamnaya. Is R1a1 was associated with PIE rather than R1b? If we can finally resolve this question we could pin it down more accurately.

    In any case, both EHG and CHG in Eastern Europe had nothing to do with Iran or even the CHG in Georgians. And Yamnaya was already 18% Neolithic farmers.

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  6. Very interesting. Thanks. Corded Ware's position is also interesting....

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  7. @Davidski

    "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)."

    But if instead of Ukraine_N you will take Ukrainian_Mesolithic or EHG (and most likely something between them), then the Yamnaya "cloud" is not on a straight line between them and Progress/Vonychka. The Yamnaya culture stands on the line between the Ukrainian Mesolithic+EHG and the Neolithic of Turkmenistan, and Progress significantly deviates to the right of this line. Therefore, in order to somehow involve Progress in the model, you have to take not the Ukrainian Mesolithic, but the Ukrainian Neolithic, but even that is not enough, for this you need to add the European Neolithic Farmers, or even the WHG, to shift this line to the left. What am I leading this to? Progress itself is a mixed population, and may contain a significant component common to Yamnaya culture, but it also contains a component absent in Yamnaya.

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  8. @VakhaDuyev

    Why must the Anatolian source be specifically from EEF and not say Maykop or Meshoko?

    Because Yamnaya derives from Sredny Stog in Ukraine, so Maykop is too late and irrelevant.

    There might be some Meshoko ancestry in the Yamnaya cluster, but if so, it's very minor and not important.

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  9. @Tarbagan

    Yamnaya formed in Ukraine from Sredny Stog, so there's no need to bother with any irrelevant sources like EHG from Karelia.

    WTF has Karelia HG got to do with Yamnaya really? Nothing.

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  10. Boggles my mind that Yamnaya was from Sredny Stog but was lacking R1a1, while Single Grave derived from CWC although it was overwhelmingly R1b. These small-scale pop movements determine origin but that’s exactly the small details of migration and admixture that are missing! All we’re left with are distal models and deep ancestry schematics, which Lazaridis, Patterson and Reich tend to accept as the gospel.

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  11. If it turns out that the Proto-IE or anything putative that gave birth to it originated with forest steppe HG dwellers (not just “Sredny Stog”, we know that), but specifically some R1a clan, that would be huge. Progress might be our ancestor genetically but linguistically they may not be.

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  12. I still think that the original Pre-pre-proto-IE was a language isolate, and that a considerable agricultural vocabulary lacking in Anatolian Branch (“milk”) came to us from Tripolye, GAC or another EEF language to the immediate west.

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  13. @The Rudism Earliest j2 in Greece would be the j2a present in minoans (and some mycenaeans later on) associated with Chalcolithic Anatolia (50% of Minoan ancestry derives from there). They're also present in Cycladics who have a more CHG-related source than Minoans (see Skourtanioti et al 2023)
    It's also present in LBA Crete as well as the LBA mainland Mycenaeans
    There are also j1 lines

    j2b appears in LBA Greece in the Peloponnese. Single family, 30% steppe from CWC as the best fit. No other data for now, I'm guessing a balkan origin for the line of those samples

    Studies are
    Skourtanioti et al 2022, 2023
    Lazaridis et al 2017, 2022
    Clemente et al 2021

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  14. @Andrzejewski It's not that uncommon to have ancestors who spoke a different language. 50% of your ancestors and 65%+ of mine are EEF/Anatolian Neolithic but neither of us speaks an EEF language.
    Not to mention Finns, Hungarians etc

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  15. @pnuadha

    As VakhaDuyev and Tarbagan above contemplate the endless possibilities that exist and talk about some imaginary clines that aren't on the PCA, I'm focusing on the reality.

    All of these samples are very important, because they show us the structures that actually existed on the steppe and they reveal the patterns of admixture that happened there.

    These Ozera and Steppe Maykop outliers are gold, because they behave so differently from mainstream Yamnaya, and the difference is that they actually have Armenian-derived ancestry.

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  16. Do you think the Armenian-shifted outliers could be early speakers of Anatolian IE languages?

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  17. @Orpheus “ It's not that uncommon to have ancestors who spoke a different language. 50% of your ancestors and 65%+ of mine are EEF/Anatolian Neolithic but neither of us speaks an EEF language.
    Not to mention Finns, Hungarians etc”

    I agree. My theory regarding origins of Proto-IE or its predecessor(s) were neither an EHC nor a CHG one, but a language isolate that was either a Progress R1b one (Piedmont origins) or a Forest Steppe R1a1. After the Anatolian branch split, the IE mother language (core) absorbed up to 30% of its vocabulary from farmers to its West. Nothing in IE was EHG, CHG let alone Uralic.

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  18. @Andrzejewski

    I think you should just accept the obvious fact that there was more than one Y-DNA lineage among the Proto-Indo-Europeans. This is just my opinion, based on what I can see from the evidence. There were different IE-speaking tribes on the steppe and forest steppe, apparently dominated here by this Y-DNA haplogroup, and there by that one, mostly R1a and R1b, but also some Q, some I2 and whatever else. The exogamous exchange of females among the IE tribes on the steppe over time stirred the autosomal pot, creating a pretty homogeneous mix, while allowing each tribe to retain its own particular patriline.

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  19. FYI, when I clicked on the first link in the post, it went to the magazine's main webpage and not to the article referenced which I had trouble finding. I often have the same difficulty when I try to post links on Blogger.

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  20. @Ryan

    Do you think the Armenian-shifted outliers could be early speakers of Anatolian IE languages?

    Why's that? Do you really believe the hype that Anatolian speakers came from Armenia?

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  21. @The Rudism

    Is there enough information to get an idea of the cause of the J2 prevalence in Greece despite the heavy steppe admixture? I'd like to hear your comments on that.

    As far as I can tell, the J2 in Greece has several different sources, including locals, various migrants from around the Aegean and beyond, and even some people from the north of Greece who had a lot of steppe ancestry.

    So there was always plenty of J2 around, and more coming in.

    Also, Greece, like Anatolia, was a different place than Northern and Eastern Europe. People who moved there, and even those who came as invaders, had to deal with a more complex world of city states. There's plausibly less opportunity for massive founder effects in such societies.

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  22. @Rich S. “ The exogamous exchange of females among the IE tribes on the steppe over time stirred the autosomal pot, creating a pretty homogeneous mix, while allowing each tribe to retain its own particular patriline.”

    Where do you think did the PIE language come from? Was it some farmer language like Rob thinks?

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  23. All prehistoric societies including Yamnaya practiced exogamy on a regular basis. Ozera_outlier have Levantine mtDNA (R0a) and there are a few other cases of South Caucasian markers in both Yamnaya and CWC, while in Maykop the markers are overwhelmingly Anatolian. There are also farmer outliers in the Ukrainian neolithic and many farmer mtDNA markers in Yamnaya & CWC with origins in Carpathian Basin or the Balkans. All this shows that the steppes were not immune to population movements originating in the bordering regions (east, west, north and south), but is anyone able to say for sure if those genetic influences, however small (I agree with David that the genetic influence of Maykop in Yamnaya seems irrelevant) did not produce changes in the language? In my opinion this is impossible to prove, so we are going to enter into an eternal discussion between supporters of the origin of PIE south or north of the Caucasus without anyone being able to convince the contrary.

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  24. Regarding J in the Balkans, everyone should know that this lineage has its origin in the Caucasus-Iran, and therefore all the branches found in Europe since the neolithic followed a route through Asia Minor. Unlike western Europe, Iron Gates HGs practically disappeared from the Balkans during the neolithic so that this region is since then, a sort of Anatolian genetic continuum with later levantine (south) and steppe (north-Bulgaria, Serbia) influences. The result is a Bronze Age IE society with hardly any steppe influence dominated by markers of local neolithic and Anatolian-Levantine origin which in my opinion complicates the official explanation of the Harvardians, i.e. that Mycenaean Greek originated in Yamnaya (Lazaridis).

    Off topic, CLL007 (Villena, Alicante, Spain) is R1b-DF27>Z195, archaeologically dated to the chalcolithic (collective burial, 3,300-2,300 BC), sufficient collagen has been extracted from all samples from Cueva de las Lechuzas and an official dating of the sample has been requested. The anthrogenica naysayers who have been arguing for years for a German origin of this marker must be jumping for joy.

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  25. @Dear David

    Meshoko isn't irrelevant at all. Neither in time nor in cultural impact.

    "The few ceramics of the Novodanilov burials are represented by amphora-shaped vessels with a high cylindrical neck or goblet-shaped vessels with a funnel-shaped neck, which have a rounded, pointed or spike-like bottom. The ornament on such ceramics includes either mastoid or round moldings [2; 32]. Such pottery is not characteristic of the Khvalyn-Middle Stog cultural and historical community. However, in the Sredny Stog layers of settlements from the Dnieper to the Don (Strilcha Skelya, Alexandria, Konstantinovskoye, Razdorskoe) there is ceramics decorated with the so-called pearl-and-pearl ornament, which is typical of the pre-Maikop horizon of sites in the North Caucasus. such ornamentation, along with forms, makes it possible to draw parallels between the Novodanilovo, Srednestog and Pre-Maikop sites, which can also advance the solution of the question of the origin of the Novodanilovo sites and ceramics with prickly-pearl ornamentation."

    Now pull up those Golubaya Krinitsa and Don Eneolithic samples and model Yamnaya with those plus Darkveti, Ukr_N and Vinca.

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  26. @ the Rudism

    The CHG related shift in Mycenaeans isn’t from Neolithic Peloponessus. For a start, such shift is lacking in the Helladic samples, so it has to be more recent. There were several sources of “CHG “ shift in the Aegean

    @ Andrze

    Don’t end up like the maniac Archie who claimed that PIE came from his grandads R1a village in Siberia
    Rich S is correct, there were several “para-steppe” lineages , it’s pretty obvious by now from the Eneolithic samples we have, but some produced profound founder effects.
    Some of these groups ^ interacted with Anatolian/ Balkan farmers very early , since 5500 bc , when EEFs reached the Danube - Dniester region. So these might have been Anatolian IEs who migrated back to Anatolia. But the difference is they have small bit definite levels of east European ancestry

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  27. The success of PIE can be easily explained by the fact that he was a shepherd's professiolect. Professiolects are not spread by members of the same families, but by performers of the same activities.

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  28. @Davidski

    But if Yamnaya do take Meshoko as they seem to do, then would they not still have "Southern Arc ancestry" as Lazaridis implied, minor as it may be?

    Just not from Armenia.

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  29. @gamerz_J

    A lot of strange things are possible if we're talking about very minor ancestry. Even some cryptic Meshoko ancestry in Progress is possible.

    But obviously that's not what Lazaridis meant when he claimed that Yamnaya had "substantial" ancestry from south of the Caucasus.

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  30. @Davidski

    Perhaps Allentoft's IBD-based method could be of help here but actually Lazaridis only said there's less than 10% Levant-ANF ancestry in Yamnaya. He then extrapolated that it is "substantial" based on the absence of majority Levant/ANF pops outside southern Anatolia, so the rest of the admixing pop would be CHG indistinguishable from the CHG of Yamnaya.

    So if Progress has Darkveti-Meshoko ancestry or as one commentator above said, Yamnaya has it in excess of the CHG-rich Don samples, then we may be looking at 20% Meshoko contribution, which is not exactly minor. In fact, it agrees with Lazaridis' inference of Levant and Anatolian ancestry in a 1/2 ratio, even the percentages of it are similar.

    All I am saying here is while it's rather evident Yamnaya/Stredny Stog/Progress don't have Armenian-like ancestry they may in fact have substantial Meshoko-related ancestry, or at least it may be something worth exploring more, considering the archaeological connections noted above.

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  31. @gamerz_J

    You seem confused.

    Let me explain it this way: Yamnaya doesn't have any substantial ancestry from West Asia over what Progress has.

    Meshoko is too West Asian to work.

    And I don't know why you and others are talking about those Middle Don forest steppe samples as if they were relevant to the formation of Yamnaya on the steppe.

    Progress is a steppe population that is much older than Yamnaya and it has much more CHG than Yamnaya.

    You must know this obviously, but maybe you had a brain fart when you were typing that last comment?

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  32. I don't really have anything to say about the methods here.
    On a tangent, one thing I find odd in formal stats:
    When we do f4 stats like

    f4(Outgroup,Levant/Anatolian/European farmer, Steppe_EMBA, Steppe_Eneolithic)
    or
    f4(Levant/Anatolian/European farmer,Levant/Anatolian/European farmer, Steppe_EMBA, Steppe_Eneolithic)

    There are basically no statistically significant preferences for any group of farmers shown by Steppe_EMBA relative to Steppe_Eneolithic, in a direct statistic.

    Examples: https://imgur.com/a/DEomANH

    Even something like f4(Jordan_PPNB, Czech_N_GlobularAmphora; Russia_Afanasievo/Russia_Poltavka, Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic) evaluates with Z scores 0.142/-0.545. Even with better quality Israel_C set, it still evaluates well beneath a significance score of 3.

    I don't think this particularly helps with the problem, but this perhaps points at why its so difficult to distinguish between any source with Levant/Anatolian farmer ancestry.

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  33. @Davidski

    Yamnaya formed in Ukraine from Sredny Stog, so there's no need to bother with any irrelevant sources like EHG from Karelia.

    WTF has Karelia HG got to do with Yamnaya really? Nothing.


    Because the fact that Sredniy Stog culture arose from the Ukrainian Neolithic (Dnieper–Donets culture), and Yamnaya arose from Sredniy Stog culture, is an outdated concept of the last century. According to the new data, everything was much more complicated. If it is very simplified, on the basis of the Azov-Dnieper culture, which moved eastward to the lower Don and began to mix with local cultures, the Lower Don culture arose, which then spread to the middle Don. A part of the population split off from the Middle Don group of this culture and migrated to the southwest to Dnieper Valley, where, mixing with the Surska and Dnieper–Donets cultures, they formed a number of Eneolithic cultures - Kvityanska, Dereivska, Sredniy Stog, Skelyanska. In the Don basin, the Repin culture arose on the basis of the Lower Don culture. Repin and the rests of Azov-Dnieper culture most probably took part in the formation of the Yamnaya. Plus, assimilation of local EHGs in the middle Don and Volga is possible. And plus a CHG-like component, also in the Don and Volga valleys. This if very simplified.
    But Ukraine_N is a Dnipro-Donetsk culture in which, in comparison with the Ukrainian Mesolithic, the admixture of WHG has increased (to be more precise, the admixture of something like Iron Gates or Koros HG). This is obviously related to population migration from the southwest to the territory of the Dnieper valley. But whether this migration reached the Don Valley en masse and whether it later gave a component to the Yamnaya culture is a big question.

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  34. @Davidski

    Perhaps I did not type it that clearly earlier but accepting that Yamnaya has indeed nothing West Asian more than Progress and Middle Don not being relevant, is not Progress relevant? And if so, is it not likely that Progress is PIE?

    What I meant to say is that Progress looks to have some substantial Meshoko-related ancestry and an affinity to the Near East over what earlier samples in the steppe seem to have had (based on those we have thus far ofc)- I mean you also said that's its a possibility. So in this case would not Southern Arc still have some validity to it.

    If you model (in qpAdm or G25) Yamnaya as EHG/EEF and CHG without Progress they need something like 20+ Darkveti_Meshoko-like to work apparently (I would send a model but on the PC right now unfortunately)

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  35. @The Rudism Not sure about Mycenaeans, but they do seem to have excess Levant compared to Minoans. Clemente et al 2021 best fits included a Levantine source but not very proximal due to lack of samples

    Minoans have a preference for Anatolia ChL over CHG, while Cycladics and Helladics have the opposite. Check Skourtanioti et al 2023

    J2 spread is easy to explain with cultural influence fron Anatolia and the Near East that is abundantly present in both Minoans and Mycenaeans. This coincides with genetic influence. Some J lineages are also local from the ChL/N

    @Andrzejewski I'm not sold on any homeland for now and I just watch the drama, but wasn't core PIE poor in agricultural terms? The agricultural vocabulary shift happened in European IE languages after Tocharian and Indo-Iranian split (Kroonen et al 2022)

    @Davidski Pointing at outliers (or even haplos without autosomal signal) as bearers of IE is a line of thinking that is pretty commonly applied for the steppe hypothesis, easy to see how it would be applied elsewhere as well.

    @gamerz_J Yeah something like 35% total admixture, a similar amount to what Allentoft et al 2022 detected (but modeled as old CHG).
    The claim they make is that this population was ancestral to both Yamnaya and CWC.

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  36. @Orpheus

    Pointing at outliers (or even haplos without autosomal signal) as bearers of IE is a line of thinking that is pretty commonly applied for the steppe hypothesis, easy to see how it would be applied elsewhere as well.

    So Anatolian speakers migrated into the steppe from Armenia and Indo-European is actually derived from Anatolian?

    Haha.

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  37. @Tarbagan

    What I really meant to say is that Sredny Stog samples that are coming look like Yamnaya.

    So that pretty much puts proto-Yamnaya in Ukraine at >4,000 BCE, no matter what archeology suggests to you.

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  38. @gamerz_J

    Progress can't be modeled with substantial Meshoko ancestry.

    If Progress does have any Meshoko ancestry it's something like 1-2%, so I don't know how that would back up anything that Lazaridis claimed?

    I don't know what Progress spoke, but if you read my blog post above I say that Yamnaya was a population that formed along a genetic continuum between Progress and Ukraine_N-like populations.

    So that doesn't mean Progress is the real ancestral source for Yamnaya nor that it was PIE.

    I can show you how those Middle Don HG samples will cluster in my PCA. Meshoko is also highlighted.

    Obviously, you can't get Yamnaya from these sorts of populations. You need something Progress like.

    This isn't very complicated. People who make it complicated usually have an agenda.

    PC1&2

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/15KMf5Nbq9xoXeVhHKhtN2nW49FEWsR1o/view?usp=sharing

    PC1&3

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/15bZrlBixqd6RuLNPhj9jNJ0gNfaQd7DW/view?usp=sharing

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  39. @Davidski “ Yamnaya was a population that formed along a genetic continuum between Progress and Ukraine_N-like populations.”

    Was Ukraine_N more like Tripolye, Bug Dniester or Dnieper Donetsk?

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  40. @Davidski No idea, I don't rely solely on DNA so I don't have a position on the issue yet.

    PIE is not derived from Anatolian in any linguistic hypothesis though and nobody has made such a claim. Anatolian doesn't migrate to the steppe in the southern arc hypothesis (they argue for PIE/Indo-Tocharian speakers migrating after Anatolian had already split and moved westward to anatolia). Same for the steppe hypothesis (Indo-Tocharian left behind)

    BTW is the upcoming paper from Patterson? A different one than the Nikitin et al 2022 I assume

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  41. @Andrzejewski

    "Where do you think did the PIE language come from? Was it some farmer language like Rob thinks?"

    Geographically, I think it developed first on the Pontic Caspian steppe. I don't think it was a "farmer language". That sounds like Renfrew's idea. It was spoken first by people with horses, wheels, wagons, and a male-centered system of kinship, among other things. It was rather lacking in agricultural terminology, as I recall.

    I don't think we'll ever be able to say that this or that single Y-DNA haplogroup is the original PIE Y-DNA haplogroup. We'll have to settle for the handful of original haplogroups that the remains of early IEs is showing us.

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  42. The thing with this supposed Meshoko in Progress is that Meshoko begins around 4500 bc with transcaucasian migrants. Basically contemporary to the oldest steppe_en and more importantly, to Khvalynsk and Saratov. Because if Progress has it then so do they. You'd have to explain how a significant amount of Meshoko ancestry in hunter-fishers 800km north of Meshoko within a century of Meshoko forming in the North Caucasus.

    Samples during the eneolithic with Meshoko type ancestry is a different topic and not exactly unsurprising but you have to wonder if this geneflow was significant enough to affect the autosomal profile of a whole population.

    Btw Davidski ever noticed there is a cline between eneolithic western pontic samples and Yamnaya_Samara with early CWC sitting inbetween these two? It makes me think the separation between CWC and Yamnaya happened around 3500 bc ish, which interestingly is roughly when wagons entered the steppe (which lead to the mass dispersal over the "dry steppe").

    Perhaps the situation looked something like this around 3500 BC, with the ancestors of following cultures located in these areas prior to their formation:
    Usatovo: Western Ukraine/Moldova
    CWC: Western-Central Ukraine (around the Dnieper?)
    Yamnaya: Central-Eastern Ukraine
    Afanasievo: Russian Don-Volga steppes

    And you had Cernavoda on the southwestern portion of the Black Sea as well.

    In terms of genetic clines on the steppes I think such a schematic works well.

    That being said, how is it 2023 and we are still discussing this stuff lol. Its been more than a minute since Wang 2018/2019 dropped.

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  43. @Gaska

    "Off topic, CLL007 (Villena, Alicante, Spain) is R1b-DF27>Z195, archaeologically dated to the chalcolithic (collective burial, 3,300-2,300 BC), sufficient collagen has been extracted from all samples from Cueva de las Lechuzas and an official dating of the sample has been requested. The anthrogenica naysayers who have been arguing for years for a German origin of this marker must be jumping for joy."

    What paper is that sample from?

    The burial itself may be archaeologically dated to the very broad, thousand-year period from 3300 BC - 2300 BC, but there's no way any R1b-DF27>Z195 is as old as the upper end of that range. It's probably closer to the 2300 BC end, if even that old.

    I'd like to read about that sample myself.

    I'm not on Anthrogenica these days, but those "naysayers" may have in mind sample I0806 from Quedlinburg, Germany, radiocarbon dated to 2431-2150 BC, an R1b-DF27 Beaker man. He's the oldest DF27 I know about. He wasn't Z195, unless there's been an update.

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  44. I am still wondering....

    a. When all of them come out and state in plain English -steppe carried "substantial" ancestry from Shulaveri-Shomu".
    b. As I have been saying for long (eight years?) it is a no brainer that Shulaveri were the original PIE speakers and both Anatolian as IE originally spun from that language.

    I accepted long ago after so much trolling that I couldn't be right and everybody else wrong.

    Now, eight years into this madness .. wouldn't it be something? Wouldn't it be F**ing something?

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  45. I already looked at Meshoko.
    It contributes a small amount to one of the progress samples, but not the other. So it’s very minor.
    Overall, the CHG contribution is a case of apparent genetic input being greater than the cultural & linguistic one. These people were culturally quite backward and fairly irrelevant to the formation of Sredni Stog

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  46. @Davidski - Why's that? Do you really believe the hype that Anatolian speakers came from Armenia?

    No, but I do believe they may have passed through Armenia. I'm suggesting Progress Eneolithic as "PIE" with Kubano-Tersk->Armenia MLBA->Anatolian IE languages.

    I'm being dumb though and that's been your point the whole time hasn't it. Hrm.

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  47. @Ryan

    I think Anatolian speakers came from the western part of the steppe and entered Anatolia via the Balkans.

    This is the number one hypothesis that is still very much alive and will remain so unless it's thoroughly investigated and debunked by a detailed study with a wide range of relevant samples from Copper Age and Bronze Age western Anatolia.

    Just take a look at how many samples relevant to this hypothesis appeared in the Southern Arc paper.

    Having said that, there was also an expansion of steppe people via the Caucasus into the Near East during the Copper Age. This is when kurgan burials first appeared in the region. That's probably how the Areni Cave people from Armenia got their steppe ancestry.

    And, of course, Kura-Araxes was influenced by steppe people. So that's another potential vector for the spread of early Indo-European languages into the Near East.

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  48. @ Ryan

    “but I do believe they may have passed through Armenia. I'm suggesting Progress Eneolithic as "PIE" with Kubano-Tersk->Armenia MLBA->Anatolian IE languages.”


    Armenia MLBA takes KMK / western catacomb, not progress En. Moreover, these groups are obviously linked to Armenian speakers.

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  49. The truth of the matter is we have a population north of the Black Sea and another south of the Black sea speaking related tongues, but so far very little, if not 0, archeological or genetic evidence tying them together. It's truly bizarre. I'd love to see a rebuttal of this post by Lazaridis & co, but so far the genetic and archeological arguments from BOTH sides have been terribly weak. Anatolians and steppe people seem like they're from different planets.

    This is the beauty of linguistics that often gets ignored in these forums. It sets an axiom (that Anatolian and late PIE are related), that genetics and archeologists have to scramble and find an answer for. If it wasn't for linguistics, no one would even connect these two.

    My own personal opinion is that the Anatolians would have been orders of magnitude higher in population and more technologically advanced than Yamnaya. I would find it plausible for Yamnaya to penetrate into northwest Anatolia, but unlikely that the eastern Anatolian empires like Hittites are Yamnaya-derived based on "elite invasions" only. However, my opinion has nothing to do with the southern Arc paper's genetic arguments and it's simply speculation on historical events. Ultimately, I think it has to do with the Bronze Age starting in the Middle East ~3500 BC, and them exerting cultural influence on the Yamnaya.

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  50. @David - Did some more reading of your early blog posts and Wang (2019) and this paper, so hopefully I'm caught up. :) Apologies for the long post here.

    When I look at your tests for steppe ancestry in West Asia, you seem to be relying on Progress 2. If you substitute that with any of the Yamnaya samples, does the fit improve or does it worsen?

    My thinking is that most linguistics seem to agree that Anatolian languages separated from other IE languages first, with Armenian and other branches separating rather later. So that suggests to me that Anatolian IE ancestry descends from an earlier stage of development on the steppe than other IE languages do. So if the "big" IE expansion was Yamnaya, then Anatolian split off from something earlier. Proto-Armenian must have spent time with Proto-Greek and Proto-Iranian that Proto-Anatolian did not. So you suggesting this early branching seems plausible for that split. Does that make sense?

    I do think the logic in the Lazardis paper is rather tortured. We don't really know where Hittite or the other Anatolian languages come from, but we do know it was intrusive to Hattusa and it's surrounding area. So a Hittite arrival from the east, whether from the Chalcolithic Areni cave people, or from the Kura-Araxes people, or the later and blatantly steppe-derived Trialeti-Vanadzor people doesn't seem like a real problem to me. That doesn't rule out an arrival from the west either, just that when your neighbourhood is crawling with Indo-Europeans as of 2,500 BCE, having Indo-European names show up in your backyard 700 years later doesn't seem that surprising.

    If Kura-Araxes was the vector though, I'd think we'd have seen Indo-European names in Mesopotamian texts a bit earlier though.

    On the linguistic front, I know you've posted this paper before, but I think it's worth revisiting: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275744

    On the basis of the evolution of the subsistence strategies of consecutive stages of the protolanguage, we find that one or perhaps two cereal terms can be reconstructed for the basal Indo-European stage, also known as Indo-Anatolian, but that core Indo-European, here also including Tocharian, acquired a more elaborate set of terms. Thus, we linguistically document an important economic shift from a mostly non-agricultural to a mixed agro-pastoral economy between the basal and core Indo-European speech communities. It follows that the early, eastern Yamnaya of the Don-Volga steppe, with its lack of evidence for agricultural practices, does not offer a perfect archaeological proxy for the core Indo-European language community and that this stage of the language family more likely reflects a mixed subsistence as proposed for western Yamnaya groups around or to the west of the Dnieper River.

    Note that core Indo-European excludes Anatolian IE languages, and that it is only those core (non-Anatolian) IE languages that share agricultural terms. So that suggests actually Anatolian coming from the eastern part of the steppe, prior to mixing with Neolithic groups. It also doesn't make much sense in Lazardis' scenario where IE languages came from the heartland of the Neolithic Revolution!

    Also can you tell which samples Lazardis is using for his Yamnaya cluster? I can't, and the claims of 0 WHG ancestry there seem pretty out of line compared to previous studies. Assuming I'm not getting the colour coding in Wang's PCA confused, the Yamnaya Caucasus samples look shifted towards Kura-Araxes and other Armenia or Armenia-adjacent samples though. Is he using Maykop-admixed Yamnaya samples from the Caucasus?

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  51. Ha Ha Ha, Quedlinburg has never been DF27, and besides CLL007 there are other older DF27 samples in Iberia and Occitania. Don't be lazy and get up to date. Many years ago Spanish researchers proved its origin in the Franco-Cantabrian region and time has proven us right.

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  52. @Ryan

    I haven't checked whether any particular Yamnaya samples are a better fit for steppe ancestry in West Asia than Progress, but one of the Armenian EBA samples belongs to a Progress R1b line, so it made sense to try Progress.

    Also, I'm not suggesting that all of Kura-Araxes was Indo-European. Kura-Araxes people were often in conflict with steppe people, but sometimes they mixed with them.

    The idea that Yamnaya can't have any European farmer ancestry because it apparently lacks WHG is awful reasoning and bad methodology.

    It takes the faith in formal statistics and ancient DNA data to a whole new level, because Yamnaya only has a few per cent of Euro farmer ancestry, so its WHG admixture is even smaller.

    Such argumentation should not be allowed in a paper like this, and the fact that it was suggests that we're dealing with a bunch of fools across the board.

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  53. @All

    I'll have to correct myself a bit.

    Progress does probably have around 18% admix from a Meshoko-like source.

    It seems to be a mixture between steppe people already rich in CHG and early North Caucasus goat herders (?) with some Anatolian admix.

    But obviously this is not the same thing as ancient Armenians migrating to the steppe to give rise to Yamnaya.

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  54. @ Dragon Hermit

    That’s true it’s a challenging ask, although you do appear to be conflating your own lack of familiarity with people being unable to connect the link between steppe & Anatolia
    naturally, this kind of question can only be tackled by a master

    https://archaeogeneticsblog.com/2023/01/05/evidence-for-mobility-from-balkans-to-anatolia/

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  55. @ Gaska

    The Franco-Iberian refuge is the homeland of haplogroup C1a , you poor Fool

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  56. I had already predicted in my substack article that there's 15-30% ancestry from Transcaucasia in Progress. This is now proved to be correct.

    All Steppe_Eneolithic samples can be modelled with 2 sources, Khvalynsk_I0434 and Darkveti-Meshoko.

    Russia_Progress_EN_PG2001
    Russia_Khvalynsk_En_I0434 = 72.6% ± 3.7%
    Russia_Caucasus_Eneolithic = 27.4% ± 3.7%
    p-value = 0.907146

    Russia_Progress_EN_PG2004
    Russia_Khvalynsk_En_I0434 = 82.3% ± 3.9%
    Russia_Caucasus_Eneolithic = 17.7% ± 3.9%
    p-value = 0.997974

    Russia_Vonyuchka_EN_VJ1001
    Russia_Khvalynsk_En_I0434 = 69.7% ± 3.8%
    Russia_Caucasus_Eneolithic = 30.3% ± 3.8%
    p-value = 0.388636

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  57. @Anveṣaṇam

    Transcaucasia is the South Caucasus.

    The North Caucasus is called Ciscaucasia.

    But I guess it depends how you classify Meshoko-like ancestry.

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  58. @Davidski

    Yeah, my bad. We need more samples from Ciscaucasia to know when Transcaucasian migrants arrive to make sense of the new "theory" pushed by MPI and Harvard. But if they arrive around or before 5000 BCE, it'd be a major setback for their theory.

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  59. It’s a sensical conclusion per archaeology.

    Here’s my brief remarks on this blog back in October
    https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-kura-araxes-people-deserve-better.html?m=1#comment-form

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  60. Progress having Darkveti-Meshoko ancestry would explain the linguistic similarities between PIE and Caucasian languages such as Northeast Caucasian, Northwest Caucasian or Kartvelian. The Southern Arc is real, technically.

    It is becoming increasingly likely that PIE was first spoken by these "Progress" groups. And they had nothing to do with R1a or R1b-L51.
    Y-DNA, while an important aspect in determining a cultural affiliation, doesn't really say much when we're observing populations that were subjects to massive founder effects, like Yamnaya or Corded Ware. Take a look at modern or medieval Turkics who hardly have any definite Proto-Turkic lineages left.
    The earliest Steppe layers were extremely complex when it comes to paternal lineages. Even further West we see heaps of different YDNA including J1, J2, I2. Which of these were vital to PIE as a language? Seems that the answer lies in a now irrelevant lineage that is R1b-V1636.
    And what can be said about pre-PIE?

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  61. @Rob

    You are not only rude, you are also profoundly ignorant. I am talking about DF27, I guess you don't know any paper about this marker so make an effort, study hard and you will learn something about it.

    The Franco-Cantabrian Iberian refuge not only has C1a2, also I2a1a-CTS595 and I1 and there is an evident genetic continuity between the Aurignacian>Gravetian>Solutrian>Magdalenian and Azzilian, with the only arrival of the Villabruna cluster (approx 21.000 BC).And remember that in the this cluster there are samples of R1b-L754 in Italy and France (Iboussieres), sooner or later it will also appear in Spain.

    It is better that you dedicate yourself to theorize about how the Balkans colonized Anatolia.

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  62. @ Gaska

    You should be thankful I even bother to make fun of you

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  63. @ Gaska

    Yes Gaska, R1b-DF27 is from the Basque Ice Age, from 1999.

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  64. @ VakhaDuyev said...

    ''Take a look at modern or medieval Turkics who hardly have any definite Proto-Turkic lineages left.''



    What are the proto-Turkic lineages, and how are they absent in medieval Turkics ?

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  65. @VakhaDuyev

    Quit being a dickhead for the first time in your life.

    No one said that Progress actually had Meshoko ancestry, or that Yamnaya had Progress ancestry.

    There are near and far relationships between these populations, that's all for now.

    And sorry to break this to you, but R1b-V1636 actually comes from the Khvalynsk/Sredny Stog-related steppe ancestors of Progress to the north.

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  66. @Davidski

    R1b-V1636 is hard to imagine coming from the Caucasus.

    But, it is also hard to see the significance of Progress having Meshoko-related instead of Meshoko ancestry or Yamnaya Progress-related instead of Progress ancestry.

    If Progress really had about 20% of a Meshoko-like contribution (as it appears to have had) it's still 20% of a "Caucasus/Southern Arc-keep the former if the latter implies only south of it" ancestry despite its actual source.

    It reaches 30% of the non-Europe/Steppe source in the qpAdm runs Anvesanam shared:
    Russia_Progress_EN_PG2001
    Russia_Khvalynsk_En_I0434 = 72.6% ± 3.7%
    Russia_Caucasus_Eneolithic = 27.4% ± 3.7%
    p-value = 0.907146

    Again, that does not necessarily mean that it's relevant to PIE but now a good case can be made that it is.

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  67. Are there going to be any awesome ass papers on the horizon, related to Europe or anything new from the Middle East or Africa. Maybe something Upper Paleolithic, etc.

    It's been getting stale.

    Also, why the hell do we have more samples from even friggin Pakistan than India? Even fucking war torn Iraq has more pre Iron Age samples than India does.

    At this point it doesn't look like incompetence or neglect. Afghanistan will somehow end up having more samples than India some day soon.

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  68. @The Rudism Over ADMIXTURE tables and qpAdms (on different studies too) scoring a good chunk of ChL Anatolia and 50% instead 100% Neolithic Aegean, and a vahaduo PCA (lol) guess which ones I'll take seriously

    But you could already look at the Lazaridis et al 2017 PCA. Minoans cluster with Mycenaeans instead of Greece_N. Same can be seen in Clemente et al 2021 where Minoans, Cycladics and Helladics cluster with Anatolia_BA and are closer to Mycenaeans tham they are to Neolithic Aegeans. Not sure why would anyone would rely on PCAs though (amateur ones at that) when far more accurate tools are already used

    Again you can just look at Skourtanioti et al 2023. Neither Minoans nor Helladics/Cycladics are Neolithic Aegeans only, when that source is used alongside Anatolia ChL or CHG.

    @Rich S. "It was spoken first by people with horses, wheels" Risky to claim this when PIE lacks the word for these, in addition to having words for wine, lions and some agricultural terms.
    There's a reason Anthony and others have moved to claiming Sredny as proto-Indo-Anatolian instead of Yamnaya, Sredny movements into the Balkans etc

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  69. @Copper Axe Wang et al 2019? Got refuted by Lazaridis et al 2022 (Wang's models fail) apparently so there's plenty of room for discussion

    @DragonHermit That's why Lazaridis et al 2022 focuses so much on the ghost CHG-Levant-Anatolia population. In their calculations it's the only thing (so far) tying Anatolian speakers with Yamnaya and CWC

    @Ryan Lazaridis agrees that Anatolian is intrusive to Anatolia. Harvard isn't arguing for an Anatolian origin of IE languages wtf lmao

    Also Kroonen et al 2022 which you quote places PIA (with Anatolian) in the west (Sredny), and core PIE in the east (Yamnaya), not PIA in the east

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  70. Unrelated, but: Out of the (3) main European ancestry components (WHG/EEF, Steppe), which carries the most Neanderthal DNA?

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  71. @Davidski “ Progress does probably have around 18% admix from a Meshoko-like source.

    It seems to be a mixture between steppe people already rich in CHG and early North Caucasus goat herders (?) with some Anatolian admix.

    But obviously this is not the same thing as ancient Armenians migrating to the steppe to give rise to Yamnaya.”

    Well, to me it sucks big time, because it will give Reich lab all the excuses and justification to claim that both our heritage and our genetic origins came from the middle east!

    18% Meshoko is quite a large percentage, especially now that academics would assert being vindicated all this time that they were asserting that Yamnaya’s culture and genes derived a large part from Maykop.

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  72. In this country, we are living in an atmosphere where “woke” academics are turning a case of a brutal murder of an innocent black persona by 5 rogue, abusive BLACK cops into a showcase example of…WHITE supremacy…I’m not at all surprised how come Reich and Lazaridis are holding onto that Yamnaya-Is-from-South-of-Caspian straw.

    The close to 20% Meshoko in Progress sample would make all these who are against the theory of Western Steppe Herders originally being from the Eastern European Steppe (and forest Steppe).

    There were also more findings pointing to WSH people who have propensity for green or blue eyes, blond or red or at least a light brown hair pigmentation, and it’s a far cry from “Yamnaya were dark eyed, dark brown haired and carrying a skin color only moderately darker than average modern European”. WSH had genes for light skin.

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  73. We also know now that both EHG and CHG roaming the Steppe had SLC alleles for light skin. A lot of ink has been spilled about EHG inheriting alleles for skin color from ANE, but what’s left out in the rain is that CHG is 2:1 Dzudzuana:ANE, therefore it’s quite possible that the light skin genes in CHG came from ANE, not from Middle Eastern AHG/Dzudzuana.

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  74. Correction, PIA did have eqwos (ekku in Anatolian) probably meaning donkey/wild horse as Gamkrelidze said "The lack of a clear Proto-Indo-European word for ‘donkey’, given the presence of domesticated donkeys throughout most of the territory where horses were domesticated and where the Indo-European tribes must have lived, can he explained by assuming that *ek*’wos was originally used with the meaning ‘donkey’ as well as ‘wild horse; horse"
    Definitely not domesticated horse since PIA predates the Botai horse by 1000+ years and the domestication of the common horse by 2000+ years

    Wagons are also later innovations than PIA. Wheel is another matter though

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  75. @Davidski: Progress does probably have around 18% admix from a Meshoko-like source.

    What's the basis of this model?

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  76. Davidski, why dont you get a twitter account. Im sure you would gather a decent following in no time. With that following you are more likely to be heard by researchers, and they would see the actual weight you pull. Losif Lazaridis seems to be pretty active on twitter https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1562864506023292928

    You could respond directly to his posts.

    Twitter also fits your style of concise, certain style of wit, replies.

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  77. @Matt

    What's the basis of this model?

    New data.

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  78. @ Dave

    Well if there is 15% Meshoko , for exercise one can then show that there is ~ 30% Armenian N in that, in turn that is mostl CHG like + some distant near eastern PPN. So overall we’re dealing with small percentages
    With middle Don samples, that’ll drop further


    @ GamerzJ


    “Again, that does not necessarily mean that it's relevant to PIE but now a good case can be made that it is.””

    I don’t think we can use % admixture to make a case. It’s not algebra , but anthropology
    Understanding their overall relevance for Sredni Stog is what matters, and that tells us they were the end of a chain, foreign to the system.

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  79. @gamerz_J

    So can you try and make a good case that the ~18% Caucasus ancestry in Progress is associated with PIE?

    And I actually mean a good case, in which you choose a linguistically plausible homeland, and then argue successfully that Progress was Indo-European speaking, that Yamnaya actually had ancestry from Progress, that Hittites were somehow Caucasus related, etc.

    I bet you can't unless you conveniently forget most of the facts, like the fact that the Yamnaya gene pool formed a long way from Progress and probably earlier than Progress.

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  80. @pnuadha

    I don't have the time or patience for Twitter discussions.

    The only reason I'm here regularly is because I have to moderate.

    Facts are facts, and they will eventually rise to the top.

    There's no need to try and make Lazaridis change his mind on Twitter.

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  81. @Gaska
    "Ha Ha Ha, Quedlinburg has never been DF27, and besides CLL007 there are other older DF27 samples in Iberia and Occitania. Don't be lazy and get up to date. Many years ago Spanish researchers proved its origin in the Franco-Cantabrian region and time has proven us right."

    What paper did that sample CLL007 come from?

    As far as proving that DF27 originated in the Franco-Cantabrian region, you must be talking about that goofy paper from some years ago based entirely on modern Y-DNA, with no ancient Y-DNA whatsoever (Sole-Morata et al?). Ridiculous, as so many papers featuring ancient DNA have actually proven.

    Amazing that you're still plugging away at the Iberian homeland thing. Certainly if you go far enough downstream of DF27, you'll find some clades that really did first appear in Iberia.

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  82. @jeddom Neandertal DNA is higher in Southern Europe than in the North (Prufer et al 2017, Fu et al 2014) so I'm guessing Anatolian+CHG/Iran is richer in Neandertal than EHG and WHG.

    Quilodran et al 2022 on the other hand finds WHG ancestry carrying more Neandertal DNA than Neolithic farmer ancestry (2,8% vs 1,8%).

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  83. @Orpheus

    Those garbage PCA plots in scientific studies were even less accurate than they are now until I did something about it.

    https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/05/pca-projection-bias-fix.html

    They're still not as good as the Vahaduo PCA though.

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  84. @Davidski, OK; I can't imagine what data would allow Progress to clearly come out like that - some models I've done allow it some Anatolian though in the context of other ancestry streams (thik it was WSHG like), so maybe some new samples data would allow that to happen. Perhaps more DVM samples so more confident models can be made than with the three relatives. I guess that means that people today from Europe typically would have something like 8-4% ancestry from people like DVM (1 in 13 to 1 in 25 ancestors).

    @jeddom, on the basis of more Basal Eurasian = less Neanderthal, WHG would have the most Neanderthal, while between Steppe and EEF groups, probably Steppe has slightly less than EEF but it couldn't easily be determined - some statistical tests for Basal Eurasian in Steppe have it come out with a similar level to Middle Neolithic European farmers, some more like Anatolian, as far as I can remember.

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  85. @Orpheus - Lazaridis agrees that Anatolian is intrusive to Anatolia. Harvard isn't arguing for an Anatolian origin of IE languages wtf lmao

    I think we're differing on semantics, but yes, I meant West Asian rather than Anatolian. The arguments that Kroonen makes against an Anatolian homeland also apply to any West Asian homeland.

    Also Kroonen et al 2022 which you quote places PIA (with Anatolian) in the west (Sredny), and core PIE in the east (Yamnaya), not PIA in the east

    I think you're confused there. It literally says the opposite, as outlined in my quote.

    I used to have a very good paper on the loanwords to/from various stages of Proto Indo European but for the life of me I can't find it now.

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  86. Apologies if this is a double post. Having a hard time with the character limit.

    @David - Re: trusting formal statistics too much, I wonder if they're just interpreting them wrong.

    One thing that stuck out to me is that compared to their "inferred Eneolithic steppe source" for Yamnaya, they claim that Progress has "too much ANE" and "too little EHG."

    How do you actually distinguish between that and an excess of WHG in Yamnaya? Is their baseline for EHG too heavy in WHG ancestry? They also seem to be using Russian Yamnaya samples.

    If Progress had some Meshoko-like ancestry that would make the statistics even more deceptive if Lazardis is assuming that the source population for Yamnaya was a two way mix of EHG and CHG too, right? If that Meshoko-like ancestry made it into the source population for Yamnaya.

    From Wang: A direct source of AF ancestry can be ruled out (Supplementary Table 15). At present, due to the limits of our resolution, we cannot identify a single best source population. However, geographically proximal and contemporaneous groups such as Globular Amphora and Eneolithic groups from the Black Sea area (Ukraine and Bulgaria), representing all four distal sources (CHG, EHG, WHG, and Anatolian_Neolithic), are among the best supported candidates (Fig. 4; Supplementary Table 16).

    I think the results on Iron Gates ancestry in the paper are interesting. IRN-HajjiFiruz_BA has significant (20%+/-3%) EHG Ancestry. It also has small but significant (4%+/-3%) Iron Gates ancestry. That seems like a smoking gun for Neolithic European ancestry via the western steppe, and I'd note that this Iron Gates ancestry only shows up in Iran/Armenia alongside EHG (but not all EHG-admixed samples show Iron Gates).

    This is signal is also weaker for the Armenian steppe-admixed samples, with the only ARM_Tavshut_Trialeti_MBA (4%+/-2%) and possibly ARM_Urartian (1%+/-0%) and a couple of MBA/LBA samples showing ~1% Balkans HG ancestry.

    In Turkey, there's a complete absence of Iron Gates ancestry from the Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age. There's a very interesting sample (ALA026) from Alalakh in Hatay. These remains areaya.

    I really think comparing this to Wang (2019) is interesting.

    Surprisingly, we found that a minimum of four streams of ancestry is needed to explain all eight steppe ancestry groups tested (Fig. 2; Supplementary Table 12). Importantly, our results show a subtle contribution of both AF ancestry and WHG-related ancestry (Fig. 4; S from a 4 year old boy buried outside the city walls around 1744-1628 BCE - around the time Hittites conquered the city (not sure if before or after though). This child is ~7% EHG with no Iron Gates Ancestry.

    My thinking:

    1. "Core" Indo-European (ie Iranian, Armenian, Phrygian, Greek) derives from Western Yamnaya, and brings some European Neolithic ancestry. They arrived in West Asia no later than the MBA, and ARM_Tavshut_Trialeti_MBA and IRN-HajjiFiruz_BA are members of these "core" Indo-European groups.

    2. Anatolian derives from an earlier population that contributed to Yamnaya, probably similar to Progress 2, and that arrived earlier to West Asia.

    3. West Asian samples that have Steppe Eneolithic without any European Neolithic represent Anatolian or proto-Anatolian IE speakers. They arrived in West Asia no later than around 4,000 BCE, as represented by the Areni Cave samples. The Hatay outlier is probably one of these folks too, either a Luwian or a Hittite.

    4. Both "Core" Indo-Europeans (proto-Armenians) and proto-Anatolians may have lived in or around Bronze Age Armenia.

    5. Iranian, Armenian and Anatolian languages probably entered West Asia from the East and North. Phrygian and Greek certainly came from the West.

    And on the linguistic front, I'd also suggest:

    If Anatolian languages derived from either Yamnaya or something in the Armenian highlands, they would share agricultural terms with "core" Indo-European. They do not.

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  87. @Matt

    If you mix Meshoko with some of the CHG-rich individuals from the Neolithic and Eneolithic Volga region you get Progress with a really good fit.

    I'm not 100% confident this will work with more than the Meshoko singleton and higher quality data, but it looks like there's something to it.

    At the very least, it seems to me that Progress people did interact with those early goat herders just to the south of them and picked up some of their ancestry, which makes sense considering their proximity and early signs of pastoralism.

    And considering the mobility of steppe people, it wouldn't take much for these alleles to spread north.

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  88. @Ryan

    Yes, I think Lazaridis is making wrong assumptions like that.

    But the point is that if formal statistics were better at picking up fine structure, then maybe such assumptions could be tested properly and ignored.

    One thing I'm really surprised about is the total lack of awareness by Lazaridis that Yamnaya is mostly a Progress-like/Ukraine forager mixture.

    How did he/they miss that?

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  89. @Davidski “One thing I'm really surprised about is the total lack of awareness by Lazaridis that Yamnaya is mostly a Progress-like/Ukraine forager mixture.”

    Ukraine forager means: Bug Dniester, Dnieper Donetsk or even something affiliated with Combed Ceramic or Narva HG?

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  90. @Davidski “ I bet you can't unless you conveniently forget most of the facts, like the fact that the Yamnaya gene pool formed a long way from Progress and probably earlier than Progress.”

    My best bet is on LDC. Steppe WSH adna may have formed then before piedmont.

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  91. @Rich S “ Geographically, I think it developed first on the Pontic Caspian steppe. I don't think it was a "farmer language". That sounds like Renfrew's idea. It was spoken first by people with horses, wheels, wagons, and a male-centered system of kinship, among other things. It was rather lacking in agricultural terminology, as I recall.”

    Exactly! PIE is neither a CHG nor from EHG. It arose independently on Western Eurasian Steppes, in Eastern Europe. It’s like Sumerian, closer to no known language.

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  92. @VakhaDuyev “Progress having Darkveti-Meshoko ancestry would explain the linguistic similarities between PIE and Caucasian languages such as Northeast Caucasian, Northwest Caucasian or Kartvelian. The Southern Arc is real, technically.”

    What are you talking about?


    The only similarities stem from Indo-European influences over these Caucasus based language families, which BTW, have NOTHING in common between them.

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  93. @Andrzejewski - The only similarities stem from Indo-European influences over these Caucasus based language families, which BTW, have NOTHING in common between them.

    I really wish I could find that paper on loanwords in PIE, but if memory serves, there are a few Caucasian-related words in PIE relating to kinship (particularly female inlaws) and wine and a few other things? I can't recall what stage of PIE those influences date to though.

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  94. OT Some window to deciphering WHG/EHG languages is the 1/3 non-IE non-Uralic substrate in Sami. The odd fact that sticks out is that Sami have ZERO SHG admixture, unlike modern Scandinavians. All of which begs the question, who were these Proto-Laplandic speakers.

    Some non-IE non-uralic toponyms amd hydronyms may also hold the key.

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  95. @Andrew - Exactly! PIE is neither a CHG nor from EHG. It arose independently on Western Eurasian Steppes, in Eastern Europe. It’s like Sumerian, closer to no known language.

    I don't think any language having no external relations is really tenable lol. PIE must be related to other languages somehow, even if most of its close relatives are all dead. I would bet on it coming from ANE via EHG personally but that's a hunch.

    One thing I found interesting in the Wang paper is they modelled Progress' CHG ancestry as being pure basal Eurasian, rather than sharing any drift with the West Eurasian part of its ancestry. I don't know if that's just an assumption of the model though?

    Also apparently the middle of my "long" post got garbled in copy paste. Sorry for the confusion!

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  96. @ Ryan

    “I think you're confused there. It literally says the opposite, as outlined in my quote.


    Dare I say, Orpheus is correct, you seem to have misunderstood Kroonens paper

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  97. @Rob - can you show me a quote to that effect? Because the quote I posted supports me. Or am I misunderstanding what you two mean by PIA?

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  98. @ Ryan

    You appear to have misconstrued their term “core IE”
    They’re saying that IE neither “core” or greater Indo-Anatolian, can’t come from the Volga-Ural, and your preferred Progress En fall into that linguistic non-viability .

    They don’t deal at length with Anatolian itself, but say-
    “The Sredni Stog has previously been connected with the Indo-Anatolian phase [3:262; 23], and the Anatolian split with the movements of the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka chiefs into the Balkans.”

    and

    “The evolution of the Indo-European lexicon implies that cattle breeders interacted closely with contemporaneous farmers in the Northwest Pontic Region prior to the linguistic dispersals of the majority of Indo-European subgroups. Arguably, the linguistic interactions between farmers and pastoralists resulted from some of the same processes that contributed to the emergence of the major archaeological complexes that soon came to dominate much of Late Neolithic Europe [232]. ”

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  99. @Ryan “ I don't think any language having no external relations is really tenable lol. PIE must be related to other languages somehow, even if most of its close relatives are all dead. I would bet on it coming from ANE via EHG personally but that's a hunch.”

    Aren’t CHG 1/3 ANE? Then where did Caucasian languages come from? Dzudzuana? Are they distantly related to Anatolian Farmer languages then?

    And going by this logic, if Kartvelians, NWC and NEC are mostly CHG genetically, then how come are these macro families utterly unrelated to each other?

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  100. Ryan “ I really wish I could find that paper on loanwords in PIE, but if memory serves, there are a few Caucasian-related words in PIE relating to kinship (particularly female inlaws) and wine and a few other things? I can't recall what stage of PIE those influences date to though.”

    Or the vector could be PIE —> Caucasian languages.

    Georgian has at least 20% of its vocabulary cognates with IE ones.

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  101. @Andrzejewskis - Or the vector could be PIE —> Caucasian languages.

    They were able to distinguish between the two.

    Aren’t CHG 1/3 ANE? Then where did Caucasian languages come from? Dzudzuana? Are they distantly related to Anatolian Farmer languages then? Maybe. The relations are probably so far back we can't reconstruct it, but that doesn't mean they aren't real. If you buy Dene-Yenesian then there would be an ANE-Caucasus linguistic connection, but ANE is itself a composite population so... :/

    @Rob - I'll take another look.

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  102. @Rob - "You appear to have misconstrued their term “core IE”"

    Looking at it again, I am very sure I have not. See Figure 2. Basal IE includes Anatolian. Core IE excludes Anatolian. European IE excludes Anatolian, Tocharian and Indo-Iranian.

    Figure 3 shows Core IE originating between the Dnieper and the Danube. Again, Core IE is a stage after the departure of Anatolian speakers from the PIE homeland.

    Thus, we are faced with a paradox: we cannot assume that the (core) Indo-European speech community possessed an elaborate set of terms referring to sedentary agriculture, while at the same time endorsing the early Yamnaya culture, with its roots in the Volga-Don steppes, as an archaeological proxy.

    Again, they are referring to the non-Anatolian branches of IE.

    In conclusion, while many cereal terms have been proposed in the literature, their number must be substantially reduced, especially for the most basal stage of Indo-European, Indo-Anatolian. The resulting picture is one that is far less problematic to the Steppe Hypothesis than has been previously suggested [10]. The overall scarcity of shared cereal (cultivation and processing) vocabulary at this stage strongly contradicts a deeply agricultural language community and thus disqualifies the Anatolia Hypothesis as it was initially formulated. The results in fact also contradict the revised form of the hypothesis, which entailed a scenario in which core Indo-European was introduced to the Pontic-Caspian steppe by an outmigration from an agrarian homeland in Anatolia. This scenario implies that Indo-Anatolian was originally rich in agricultural vocabulary, but that this part of the lexicon was largely lost in core Indo-European during an economic transformation from sedentary farmers to mobile pastoralists. The linguistic evidence is suggestive of the opposite scenario in which core Indo-European repurposed various originally non-agricultural Indo-Anatolian lexical roots to reference an increasingly agricultural economy.

    So again, core IE (not Anatolian) comes from western Yamnaya, and Anatolian comes from something more eastern and early than western Yamnaya.

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  103. @Davidski, ah OK. It would be good to have more DVM samples for confirmation of course, perhaps Ghalichi's paper ("Neolithic individuals from Georgia, as well as new data from genetically unexplored regions/cultures in the northeastern highlands and the dry steppe") will find some more people like that; there's clearly some distinction between them and later people with a similar plotting but more actual NW_Iran_N related ancestry. I guess you have some access to Lower Volga Eneolithic samples now then?

    Some relatively limited relationship between DVM / early Caucasus herders and Progress would seem to me (perhaps naively) to fit with Scott and Reinhold 2022 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01701-6), where PG2001 and KUG007 (a contemporary sample from on the steppe, though we don't have any adna) shows some signs in dental calculus of drinking sheep's milk. Although perhaps animals came from the west etc as we have discussed and folk have contended before.

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  104. @ Ryan

    I dont think they'd be talking about Balkan-route Suvorovo chiefs if they believe the linguistic evidence points in the other direciton.

    Moreover, they explicitly state From the linguistic perspective, it is worth noting that the Sredni Stog culture, with its limited evidence for agriculture, potentially offers a better archaeological fit for the basal, Indo-Anatolian language community than the eastern Yamnaya culture, which shows no traces of agriculture.


    What remains is for us to obtain a clearer picture for what these west Sredni Stog looked like genetically. But we already know theyre going to be more weighted toward Urk_N, 'western EHG', and EEF than Progress. Yet for some reason, Yamnaya & 'early Corded' profiles switched toward a more homogenouelsy Progress-shifted make-up, which misled a lot of people in their "search for PIE", from one error (the Volga region) to another (southern Caspian).

    Hence my long running contention, where exactly in the southern Arc 'CHG' in Progress came from isn;t going to change things, but it's obviously worth figuring it out. In fact, I spelled it out clearly months ago

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  105. Hmm... I can see where the model of DVM into Progress works; when I model with target Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic, then I do find that Russia_Caucasus_Eneolithic+Russia_Khvalynsk_Eneolithic+Georgia_Kotias (25:57:18) is superior to Russia_Khvalynsk_Eneolithic+Georgia_Kotias (62:38). Although it does give a failing p for the outgroups I tried.

    So presumably if the most CHG-rich people from lower Volga (e.g. Berezhnovka as in PCA from Anthony - https://imgur.com/a/1Bt6QoA) are like Russia_Khvalynsk_Eneolithic+Georgia_Kotias, but in some way subtly different, because they are ancestral to Russia_Khvalynsk_Eneolithic in a way that Russia_Khvalynsk_Eneolithic+Georgia_Kotias can't emulate exactly (causing model failure?), then I can see why maybe that model might work. Still very reliant on relatively few samples of course.

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  106. @Rob & @Ryan “ What remains is for us to obtain a clearer picture for what these west Sredni Stog looked like genetically. But we already know theyre going to be more weighted toward Urk_N, 'western EHG', and EEF than Progress. Yet for some reason, Yamnaya & 'early Corded' profiles switched toward a more homogenouelsy Progress-shifted make-up, which misled a lot of people in their "search for PIE", from one error (the Volga region) to another (southern Caspian).”

    I, unlike Lazaridis and Reich et al, believe that this limited agricultural vocabulary came from the West, namely Romania, Moldova etc, rather than from the South.

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  107. I can't believe you tried to make a whole case using PCA lol. Extremely scientific. PCA Visuals can be extremely misleading, especially when there are multiple ancestry types present.

    Vahaduo G25 calculator does that job using the same underlying data, leaving less to interpretation than PCA. Even that is not a formal tool, just informal stuff to play around with. 2 models cant be compared statistically, cant resample with bootstrap, jacknife, etc.

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  108. @Davidski

    Indeed I cannot make a good case that Progress was PIE, I assume it can be done if one supposes the similarities between Caucasian languages and PIE may derive from that admixture event.

    Again though, Yamnaya may not have Progress admixture but what I was trying to convey is that you now have an established ancestry link to the Caucausus and ultimately West Asia affecting Yamnaya as well.

    @Rob

    G25 gives me this distal model for Meshoko, I think it's slightly higher PPN than 30% Armenia_N only but yeah, still overall low.

    Target: RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En
    Distance: 2.7040% / 0.02704038
    65.4 GEO_CHG
    17.0 TUR_Marmara_Barcin_N
    10.6 Levant_PPNB
    4.4 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
    2.6 Yamnaya_RUS_Samara

    (Yamnaya is obv. artefactual)

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  109. @Ryan Kroonen's argument against the Anatolian homeland is that core PIE wouldn't have agricultural terms. This makes sense for Anatolia but I don't see how it applies to all of West Asia, especially the more mountainous areas

    I think you're the one confused here. Kroonen argues for core PIE in the east, not Indo-Anatolian which he explicitly says must be looked for in the west, near Sredny Stog. Indo-Anatolian is the initial phase before core PIE and Anatolian split. Rob's response is what I'm talking about
    I think I found why we're misunderstanding each other. Core IE/PIE comes from west Yamnaya as per the paper, but basal IE/PIA comes further to the west, from Sredny. That's their argument. "East" means to the east of Sredny, which is still in the NW PC steppe
    That's still consistent with the Southern Arc hypothesis btw

    Btw Anatolian does share agricultural terms with core PIE. It's in the paper you linked. Actually cereal terms, agriculture-related terms would be more. If linguists (and A.I. now lol) agree on the initial formation of PIA (basal IE) ir would be interesting to see if it's a HG or pastoralist-heavy (or hybrid) language and how does it relate to the date of the shift from HG to pastoralism in the steppes

    @Ryan Yeah wine is a common one. Also shared with many other languages and even Egyptian iirc. An agricultural term too

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  110. @Ryan On a sidenote, basal IE (PIA) which is linked with Sredny is not in the east. And the paper does not mention that PIA is in the east. They tried to support a steppe homeland and refute an anatolian homeland, but this isn't a problem to a more eastern homeland in wet asia. Keep in mind the paper was drafted before Lazaridis et al 2022 came out.
    They then add that early Yamnaya is found in the west, as an attempt to link Yamnaya with core IE. If they were in the east (close to the caspian steppe) it would be weird if they were PIE speakers which had an even more cereal-related vocabulary than PIA. But a western early yamnaya origin is more likely to have been influenced by agriculture, as they say
    Not sure what Mallory and other archaeologists have to say about that, haven't looked into it

    @The Rudism If you can get these results peer reviewed and published, be my guest
    Different studies from different labs and PCAs have already been provided, if you want to stick to your own fringe untested theory, be my guest at that too

    @The Rudism BA Anatolia samples have continuity with ChL ones (Damgaard et al 2018)
    Pull toward them isn't surprising. And 25% CHG in Cycladics/Helladics is obviously not from pure CHG which did not exist at the time. It's simply an unsampled 60-40 Anatolia-CHG population, just different than the one in Minoans. Don't forget Minoans even clustered with BA (and thus ChL) Anatolia
    Again if you have a problem with that publish a response to their papers. What you say is not visible in neither actual PCAs, ADMIXTURE tables or qpAdms of at least four different studies. Archaeological and religious influences is just the cherry on top. Not even gonna go into he kinguistics where both Anatolian IE and Anatolian non-IE have been proposed for Linear A. Chalcolithic Anatolia is simply inescapable but hey, dude g25 models lmao

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  111. @Rob Also check out Nikitin et al 2022 where they mention some limited agricultural practices in Sredny. An eastern origin of basal IE (PIA) does not make sense and is not mentioned in the paper either.

    I'm gonna laugh real hard if Sredny isn't a source for Yamnaya neither in autosomal nor haplos nor IBD because that would be the death of the revised Steppe hypothesis from Kroonen and Anthony and would spark some delicious drama here. On the other hand high CHG Sredny samples would also be juicy

    Unrelated: Nikitin's paper has a PCA with Russian and Ukrainian Yamnaya on an EHG-GanjDareh_N cline. Their Sredny sample (in a CTC setting in 4000-3800BCE) is on an EHG-modern Armenian cline or an Ukraine_N-GanjDareh_N cline

    BTW what's the date for the alleged Sredny movements into the Balkans (and then supposedly Anatolia)?

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  112. I found the source of sample CLL007, proudly touted by Gaska as an R1b-DF27>Z195 found in Iberia in a burial context archaeologically dated to 3300-2300 BC. The paper from which it comes is Villalba-Mouco et al, "Genomic transformation and social organization during the Copper Age–Bronze Age transition in southern Iberia" (2021).

    Interestingly, here is what is said of that sample on page 9 of 53 in the Supplementary Materials:

    "CLL007 (Arc. ID: Lech 11 (LE11B)): Adult male burial. This individual was
    considered intrusive and thus excluded from the analysis, as it showed steppe related ancestry. The remainder of the individuals are genetically similar to the SE_Iberia_CA group, so we assumed the indirect chronology for all of them."

    Hmmm. "[S]teppe related ancestry". I thought that might be the reason Gaska was reluctant to tell me what paper that sample came from.

    Citing that sample as some sort of proof that DF27 originated in Iberia strikes me as somewhat less than honest, which is putting it politely.

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  113. @Davidski

    What I really meant to say is that Sredny Stog samples that are coming look like Yamnaya.

    What samples do you mean? Those from Igren in "Population Genomics of Stone Age Eurasia"?

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  114. If Steppe_Eneolithic is like 18%-30% Meshoko-like how come there isn't any ANF in Progress when I model it with G25 coordinates on Vahaduo. Just a reminder, Meshoko is like 25% ANF.

    Also, is a population like Progress/Vonuchka ancestral to Sredni Stog?

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  115. @Andrzejewski
    And going by this logic, if Kartvelians, NWC and NEC are mostly CHG genetically, then how come are these macro families utterly unrelated to each other?

    Good question. Macro families must differ from each other, at least in some way. The basic genetic component for all three is the same - Maykop/Kuro-Araxian culture. Kartvelians are the most close to these cultures. I think that Maykop/Kuro-Araxian cultures were protokartvelians. And how do NWC and NEC differ genetically from them? And they differ in that NEC has a significant steppe component, while NWC has some steppe and some Turkish Neolithic. And the steppe component could have been brought there most likely by the North Caucasian culture. From this we can conclude that the North Caucasian culture and possibly the Catacombs spoke NEC languages. For NWC languages, a variant of origin from Dolmen is possible.

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  116. @Rob I dont think they'd be talking about Balkan-route Suvorovo chiefs if they believe the linguistic evidence points in the other direciton.

    That's just a review of others' research though, not really confirmed or debated in the linguistics paper.

    Re: Sredni Stog - when I say something earlier and to the east, I mean that to include them as an option.

    But Sredni Stog is shifted towards the Khvalynsk-Progress cline compared to preceding Dnieper-Donets culture I believe? And looking at the Mathieson data at least seems to suggest Sredni Stog was much more WHG-rich and CHG-poor compared to Yamnaya.

    the source of this ancestry need not be as far east as the Volga - there is quite a bit of space between the Volga and the Dnieper.

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  117. @vAsiSTha

    qpAdm shows the same thing you dumb piece of trash.

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

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  118. @David - What site are the new Sredni Stog samples from? That sounds very different from the Dereivka samples.

    @Orpheus - "On a sidenote, basal IE (PIA) which is linked with Sredny is not in the east."

    It's east of the western Yamnaya areas in the paper. East/west is a relative thing.

    " This makes sense for Anatolia but I don't see how it applies to all of West Asia, especially the more mountainous areas"

    Lazardis is explicitly claiming Neolithic farmers as the source of basal IE. If we were talking some sort of movement from CHG long before the advent of agriculture that would solve this agricultural terminology problem, but he's using the Late Neolithic Aknashen source, and he's making a lot of his argument based on low levels of ancestry from early Levantine farmers.

    Maybe I'm mistaken here but my understanding is in the timeframe we're talking about (4,500 BCE onwards), farming was pretty pervasive in West Asia, wasn't it?

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  119. @Rob/@Orpheus - to be clear, the western Yamnaya they refer to in Kroonen is SW of Sredny Stog.

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  120. @ Orpheus

    “ BTW what's the date for the alleged Sredny movements into the Balkans ?”

    from 47/ 4500 bc
    But those maps with arrows flying out of Khvalysnk are wrong, because it was a multilateral network, with EEF and Caucasian pops participating, although the bulk was formed by Dnieper -Don-Volga quasi-pastoralists


    - “and then supposedly Anatolia?”

    Some isolated individuals at best. Eg there is supposedly a Suvorovo-like individual in Ikiztepe (buried in extended supine pos. with Ochre strewn).

    As I’ve said, for Anatolia we need a wider picture. iMO This includes -
    - epipaleolithic movements from Balkans and north Black Sea to west anatolia
    - big migration of Fertile Crescent farmers through Anatolia and into Europe 7/6000 bc
    - Balkans Chalcolithic influences & social networks across western-central Anatolia 5-4000 bc
    - Caucasian migrations across Anatolia 4-3000 bc

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  121. …to continue

    - 5/4000 bc Halaf related movements
    - 3000 Yamnaya movements toward NE Turkey


    @ Ryan

    “ But Sredni Stog is shifted towards the Khvalynsk-Progress cline compared to preceding Dnieper-Donets culture I believe?”


    the Volga-Caspian network participated / contributed, but weren’t central . Seems like their women were highly sought after

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  122. My reluctance is just about ending your laziness, you need to exercise your brain because you only have "steppe related ancestry" in it.

    1-We are talking about a neolithic site with a collective burial of 18 individuals, one of which is R1b-Df27-Z195. All the grave goods are typical of the Iberian neolithic, there is no trace of metal or anything related to the BBC, and there are no intrusive burials. The skull of the sample was placed with three other skulls on one side of the cave in a kind of cist. None of the skulls had mandibles, i.e. it was a secondary burial. The archaeologist understood it as a kind of cult of the skull for its special treatment.

    2-As the archaeological dating of the burial is very old (3,300-2,300 BC), i.e. 2,800 BC, we have asked for an individual dating of the sample to check its age, which is probably higher than 2,500 BC. I guess you don't mind, do you?

    3-That would make CLL007 the oldest sample of that lineage in Europe, surpassing a Spanish and a French sample that are currently the oldest (I will not tell you the sources either, to see if you keep working and find them). By the way, both are older than Quedlinburg the fake.

    4-Putting it politely, have you still not understood that it is far better to be honest than to try to manipulate data to suit your agenda?

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  123. @Rob - "the Volga-Caspian network participated / contributed, but weren’t central . Seems like their women were highly sought after"

    Not sure where you're getting it from that the transition from Dnieper-Donets to Sredny Stog was female-mediated? Not saying it wasn't but we have so few samples I can't see how you came to that conclusion either.

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  124. @Davidski

    Since I have Reich's 2018 book,he writes:

    "Ancient DNA available from this time in Anatolia shows no evidence of Steppe ancestry...This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because anicent DNA from the people who lived there matches what we would expected for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians." (Page 120)

    And you may also be interested in this thread by Iosif Lazaridis, if you have not seen it already: https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1563953730499878926

    Lastly,I am pretty sure Lazaridis had Yamnaya as a mix of EHG and Iran Chalcolithic in his 2016 farmer paper, maybe useful as an older reference.

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  125. @Ryan Early Yamnaya appeared to the west of Sredny? Where, in Romania? Yeah sure lmao

    "Lazardis is explicitly claiming Neolithic farmers as the source of basal IE."
    Lol what? Did you even read the paper?

    "If we were talking some sort of movement from CHG long before the advent of agriculture that would solve this agricultural terminology problem, but he's using the Late Neolithic Aknashen source, and he's making a lot of his argument based on low levels of ancestry from early Levantine farmers."
    These are proxies as he clearly states. The actual proximal source they're looking for is not included in the study at all. The PIA speakers in Lazaridis et al 2022 have CHG+Anatolian+Levantine ancestry and it is explicitly stated that they have nothing to do with with the initial CHG-like ancestry north of the Caucasus found in khvalynsk, sredny etc
    He also got good fits with ChL Iranian sources anyway

    "Maybe I'm mistaken here but my understanding is in the timeframe we're talking about (4,500 BCE onwards), farming was pretty pervasive in West Asia, wasn't it?"
    4500 is the PIE/core IE, PIA is older. Also no, farming wasn't everywhere, West Asia has plenty of areas that are garbage for agriculture and a pastoral economy is more sustainable. Even in Iran pastoralism was common around that time or shortly after (can't recall). Now imagine more mountainous areas. That's why Anthony shifted to Sredny now, he assumes they maintained a mixed economy and learned limited agriculture from CTC which would explain the agricultural terms in PIA

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  126. @Rob Such a timeline would explain the absence of wheel for Anatolian and PIA/basal IE but at the same time PIE/core IE does have a word for wheel, and this is more or less synchronous with the movements in the theory. It would make sense if it was the other way around, with Sredny moved through the Caucasus and PIE going westward and getting wheels from CTC.
    Actually this is also explained by the Gamkrelidze route from West Asia, not through the Caucasus but through Central Asia and encountering wheels along the way. Explains all the other words (lion wine etc) too. But that's a bit far-fetched, at least without any genetic data backing it so far although some archaeological stuff does exist and has been posted here a couple of blogposts ago. But it seemed very minor and I wouldn't consider it an indicator supporting that theory/route. Just food for thought

    And yeah more samples are definitely needed, Harvard is stalling

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  127. @The Rudism Ikr, and what's better than multiple papers from independent labs showing the same thing over and over using multiple tools and proximal sources? Oh right some random schizo on an online blog.

    Take your meds

    ReplyDelete
  128. @Orpheus - "@Ryan Early Yamnaya appeared to the west of Sredny? Where, in Romania? Yeah sure lmao"

    You may want to reread the paper and check out figure 3. Western Yamnaya isn't early Yamnaya. Their contention is that early Yamnaya came from east of Sredny Stog, but that agriculture only became well-established once they had spread southwest of Sredny Stog. Read or reread both the papers really. The sites they specifically refer to are Kholmske, Gura-Bykuluy, Glubokoe, Tetskany, Alkaliya, Belyaevka, Rysove, Mikhailovka, and Skelya-Kamenolomnya. If any of those sites are classified as Sredny Stog please let me know. There may well be some overlap there but they seem to be leaning towards a west-of-Dnieper location.

    Re: West Asia - it's hard to imagine an area so remote that wouldn't have had terms for agriculture though. I'm not a farmer but I know what a sickle is. Basal IE didn't have a word for it.

    And these "southern" PIE homeland theories generally rely a lot on the spread of agriculture as the means by which the language expanded. And clearly a lot of language families did ride the waves of agriculture. Just not IE.

    ReplyDelete
  129. @Orpheus & The Rudism

    The Vahaduo PCA plots are very accurate while PCA in scientific studies suffer from various degrees of projection bias, so what's the problem here?

    I haven't been following the discussion but I can check this quickly if you explain the issue in a few words.

    ReplyDelete
  130. @ Orpheus

    ''Such a timeline would explain the absence of wheel for Anatolian and PIA/basal IE but at the same time PIE/core IE does have a word for wheel, and this is more or less synchronous with the movements in the theory'

    Wheels probably diffused rapidly across different social networks, so its neither here nor there. Ans at the end of the day 'paleo-linguistics' isn't a hard science.
    Hence I defer to culture-history. And that shows long-lasting links mostly forged between the north and west Pontic, with the Caucasus route joining episodically & late. And given the distribution of IE in west Anatolia, what I suggested makes more sense, at least to me.


    @ Ryan

    ''Not sure where you're getting it from that the transition from Dnieper-Donets to Sredny Stog was female-mediated? Not saying it wasn't but we have so few samples I can't see how you came to that conclusion either.''

    What I said was that the contrubution of the Volga-Caspian network, incl Progress_En, was mostly female mediated. Even David Anthony has come to that realisation after the scores of samples from that region.

    The Yamnaya -related I2a2 is found in Dnieper-Donetz and middle Don
    CWC-related R1a-M17 is found in middle Don
    and R1b-M269 remains to be discerend, but IMO this was also somewhere near Ukraine.

    IMO the data is clear, but many people struggle with it; so they should take the time to draw all the finds on a map of Europe. Then it'll sink in

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  131. @Gaska

    Again, a less than honest post. I already quoted the paper CLL007 appeared in showing that it was regarded as intrusive in that burial, since it has steppe DNA. Besides that, "archaeologically dated" is not the same as radiocarbon dated. CLL007 itself would certainly NOT appear at the upper end or even the middle of that archaeological range (3300-2300 BC). Probably it wouldn't even make it to 2300 BC.

    Here are a couple of more apt quotes from that paper, Villalba-Mouco et al (2021), this first one from the abstract:

    "Concomitant with the rise of El Argar starting ~2200 cal BCE, we observe a complete turnover of Y-chromosome lineages along with the arrival of steppe-related ancestry. This pattern is consistent with a founder effect in male lineages, supported by our finding that males shared more relatives at sites than females."

    This second one is from the introduction:

    "The beginning of the Bronze Age [Early Bronze Age (EBA)] in Iberia (2200 to 1550 cal BCE) marks a clear population turnover, suggested by both the omnipresence of steppe-related ancestry in all individuals directly postdating 2200 BCE. An even more notable shift can be observed in the frequency of Y-chromosome haplogroups in males, which are almost exclusively of the R1b-P312 type that was completely absent in Iberia before 2400 BCE (6, 7, 25, 26)."

    Catch this part: ". . . the R1b-P312 type that was completely absent in Iberia before 2400 BCE".

    Since DF27 is downstream of R1b-P312, it doesn't sound like the authors of that paper agree with you.

    Not only that, but as I mentioned before, the oldest R1b-DF27 currently known is sample I0806, radiocarbon dated to 2431-2150 BC (as opposed to "archaeologically dated" but excluded as intrusive), a Beaker man from Quedlinburg, Germany. That one makes sense, given that both DF27 and U152 spring from a common R1b-ZZ11 ancestor, and the distribution of ancient U152 samples hardly suggests that ZZ11 was in Iberia when he fathered the first DF27 man.

    You ought to give up the ultra-Iberian-partisan schtick that has kept you toiling away at the increasingly foolish - and dishonest - attempt to hang onto some sort of Iberian homeland - for what? First, some years ago, it was R1b as a whole. Then it was P312. Now it's DF27. Eventually continued retreat downstream will get you to a subclade that actually did originate in Iberia.

    ReplyDelete
  132. @Rob - "The Yamnaya -related I2a2 is found in Dnieper-Donetz and middle Don
    CWC-related R1a-M17 is found in middle Don
    and R1b-M269 remains to be discerend, but IMO this was also somewhere near Ukraine."

    R1b1a and R1a1 are both in Khvalynsk, part of the Volga-Caspian network...?

    ReplyDelete
  133. At least some of the extra CHG in Mycenaeans is recent BA Anatolian no doubt based on my own formal models, certain Y-DNA J2a clades and archaeology. Such is missing in the earlier Helladic mainland samples


    @ Ryan
    in addition to learning how to properly read articles, learn about Ydna subclades

    ReplyDelete
  134. @The Rudism

    You're essentially correct, and these two f4 stats prove that you are.

    Cameroon_SMA Iran_GanjDareh_N Turkey_N Greece_BA_Mycenaean 0.000602 3.729

    Cameroon_SMA Iran_GanjDareh_N Greece_Peloponnese_N Greece_BA_Mycenaean 0.000108 0.536


    Note that in the first stat the Mycenaeans show a significantly positive Z score (>3), suggesting that they carry excess Zagros-related (GanjDareh_N) ancestry relative to early western Anatolian farmers (Turkey_N).

    However, in the second stat that Z score drops to basically zero, suggesting that the Mycenaeans have about as much of this eastern ancestry as Peloponnese Neolithic farmers (Peloponnese_N).

    Also, another thing to keep in mind is that there's very clear substructure in the Peloponnese_N set, with individuals I3709 and I3920 being more eastern shifted than the rest.

    In PCA, all PCA, including in scientific studies, these two samples are clearly eastern shifted and they cluster with Minoans.

    So even though the Mycenaeans and Minoans are more Caucasus/Zagros-related than early western Anatolian and Greek farmers, this eastern ancestry entered Greece (or at least the Peloponnese) already during the Neolithic.

    One thing I would add, though, is that considering the clear substructure in the Peloponnese Neolithic farmers, that eastern ancestry was spreading into Greece during their time, and may have continued for some time afterwards.

    But its most obvious source is Anatolia, not actually the Caucasus or the Zagros.

    ReplyDelete
  135. @Matt

    As an impartial observer with access to Admixtools, can you confirm the above stats and hypothesis?

    ReplyDelete
  136. @Rich S(teppe)

    Neither you, nor Villalba-Mouco (i.e. Max Planck) know that there is P312 in Spain before 2,400 BC? It is your problem, you have to keep working and searching, only this way you will stop making a fool of yourselves because it has been four years since those samples older than 2.400 were published (the whole international scientific community knows them, Max Planck and you are the exception).

    Quedlinburg? don't make me laugh, it's amazing how the human brain can run away from reality. That ship sailed a long time ago, only fools believe your nonsense. Maybe you can explain to us how is it possible that if that marker was born and died in Germany, not one more sample of that lineage has been found in that region (Germany, Holland, Belgium. Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia etc) until the Iron Age. I suppose that his children went on vacation to the sunny Iberian beaches and stayed there forever, right? Ha Ha Ha.

    Your old Iberian partisan argument is another joke, you've been repeating it for years. It's funny to hear it from a person who continues to defend a steppe origin for P312, keep it up, when you're older you'll understand that you've wasted your whole life defending an absurd theory. Doesn't it scare you to think how many times you've been wrong? For God's sake, you haven't hit a single one for years. If you keep reading Gimbutas and Anthony you're going to end up in a mental hospital.

    ReplyDelete
  137. https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1620459177595531265

    Lazaridis repsonds to a guy who claims to show that Yamnaya has EEF and doesnt have much of anything armenian like.

    https://vicayana.substack.com/p/southern-arc-or-southern-farce?sd=pf

    ReplyDelete
  138. @princenuadha

    Can't look at Twitter now, but I had a look a few days ago and Lazaridis was posting some stats that didn't even seem directly related to the topic.

    Again, I think he's making too many assumptions. And stats like these are only useful if these assumptions are correct.

    ReplyDelete
  139. @ Davidski

    I dont think the D-stat

    Cameroon_SMA Iran_GanjDareh_N Greece_Peloponnese_N Greece_BA_Mycenaean 0.000108 0.536

    specifies the timing of gene flow

    Rather, it shows that Iran_N does not have any greater affinity for Myceneans than it does with Peloponessus N


    Then, as usual, everything needs to be understood in contextual time & place, as can be seen using your G25 data


    First, we have to breakdown Peloponessus_N, because they are heterogeneous
    It is I_3920 the late, outlier which shows increased eastern affinity, dated 3933-3706 calBCE (5000±25 BP, UCIAMS-186359), with 15% Kurdu & ~ 11% CHG as a representation

    CHG/ Kurdu really rises in the Cycladic_BA samples, then Minoans & Myceneans.
    By comparison, the Middle Bronnze Age mainland samples from Logkas, Theopetra and even Sarakinos (in the south) have very low levels of CHG/ Kurdu (because they come from the Balkans)

    Therefore the rise in CHG-related ancestry in Myceneans is novel

    lastly, Greece Peloponessus can;t be the source of CHG/ Kurdu in Myceneans, because it has lower levels than they do






    ReplyDelete
  140. @Davidski, I'll try and have a look at checking those those for the Peloponnese_N stats later.

    On the face of it that the idea seems sensible, but may need to define exactly the time periods.

    On a Vahaduo model, with the samples from Skourtanioti, we have 9 published "Neolithic" samples from areas within the boundaries of present day Greece - all from Peloponnese or Crete - who have enough quality to be used on G25 (which would also limit use in formal stats.

    These are scattered over a really wide time scale from 6600 BCE to 3400 BCE. It's very limited set compared to other regions.

    But using Vahaduo as a quick model (formal stats generally better of course) the samples later in this sequence, after 4600 or after 4000 BCE do seems to build up more CHG or Levant related ancestry, which would be our signals of migration from Anatolia, e.g. here: https://imgur.com/a/H9kAW7n

    Although there is a sample from Crete from Skourtanioti at ~3600BCE who seems to have none.

    It seems possible a movement could fall within what is considered the Copper Age in Turkey. I remember you mentioned you thought that the 'Uruk Expansion' 4000-3100 BCE might have had some influence on a wider population movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruk_period); not sure if that's exactly what you said and even if so I don't know if there's a different picture in the big datasets in Southern Arc since.

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  141. @Rob

    How do we know that I3920 was the most eastern shifted person who lived in Greece at the time?

    Krepost_N is way more eastern shifted. That's the sample from Bulgaria dating to 5723-5623 calBCE.

    Check it out on the Vahaduo PCA.

    BGR_Krepost_N:I0679_d,0.1161,0.152329,-0.024513,-0.071383,0.020311,-0.042112,-0.003525,-0.012461,0.005113,0.047746,-0.006333,0.009292,-0.014866,-0.013625,-0.029451,-0.014187,0.019297,0.002027,0.006536,-0.00963,-0.012977,-0.001113,-0.006162,0.000964,-0.001676

    ReplyDelete
  142. @ Dave

    Yep aware of it. But Krepost is also one of a kind within the entire Balkan N set . So yeah, CHG shifted individuals were arriving early on, but the main, more homogeneous shift occurs, as Matt also said, after 4000 BC
    There are historical reasons for that. Not a single source either, and doesn’t really change much about the origins of proto-Greeks

    ReplyDelete
  143. @Ryan Only a part of Yamnaya speaking PIE but the others not makes zero sense, and their only argument in favor of that theory is just "hurr must've been somewhere with agriculture nearby" which is itself a non-sequitur if the population itself didn't practice agriculture (trading isn't practicing) let alone the major peoblem of wtf did the rest of Yamnaya speak if PIE arose only in the western wing of Yamnaya. If they manage to get archaeology and genetics to support their theory then sure but it's not gonna happen. Even the Anatolian hypothesis makes more sense than their argument that most of Yamnaya didn't speak PIE because muh agriculture.

    Btw PIA does have agricultural cereal terms as you can see in the paper, not to mention all the other ones that have been proposed over time (eg Mallory). It's not a pastoralist language but a hybrid language at best, not accounting for potentially lost words. They literally write in the paper that Sredny is a candidate exactly because of their assumed connection to agriculture.

    @Rob Yeah I don't disagree about linguistics. I always wait for aDNA first and then archaeology in this order (other way around led to Gimbutas seeing GAC as some Yamnaya population offshoot lol).

    ReplyDelete
  144. @Davidski The conversation was about Minoans and Helladics/Cycladics and their j2 lineages. Mycenaeans don't have the same Near Eastern influence, and are more Levant-shifted than Minoans and Cycladics/Helladics.
    Same amounts of CHG/Iran as Neolithic Peloponnese would point at their CHG/Iran (or adjacent ancestry) being boosted since the steppe they have brought it down.

    It's good that you brought up the Neolithic samples because their admixture dating is crucial. See below

    @Rob
    @Matt
    Looked up the DATES from Skourtanioti et al 2023 for the most Eastern-shifted Peloponnese Neolithic samples (2318, 709, 3920)
    Their admixture with CHG is dated to 5400-4800 BCE. A more proximal source shows ~4200 BCE
    The admixture in Minoans from the same Eastern source is ~4700 (5100-4400) BCE. Assuming they pair better with ChL Anatolia than CHG as Skourtanioti et al 2023 mentions, a more proximal source would potentially bring the date down to a similar date with the Peloponnese individuals.
    Cycladics/Helladics have an admixture date of ~4300 (4500-4000) BCE. It matches with Peloponnese.

    This matches with the findings of Skourtanioti, Lazaridis, Clemente. We don't have Minoans or Cycladics/Helladics without this influence which means it was probably already there. The Peloponnese Neolithic samples seem like a good proxy for the NE-shifted population of Cycladics/Helladics and by proxy Minoans. And keep in mind it could have taken 100-500 years of continuous geneflow. But all samples and studies show that the admixture A) is there, B) it was was already there from the Late Neolithic. To say that Peloponnese Neolithic is a good proxy for Minoans and C/H includes this NE influence which is visible in Minoans and C/H with more distal modeling which basically shows the modeling of Peloponnese LN which acts as a proxy of the main source of these populations.

    ReplyDelete
  145. @Gaska

    Obviously you've run out of gas. That last post was completely devoid of even a vague attempt at presenting any evidence. Every time you cite an ancient sample that you want people to believe supports your point of view, someone, not always me, points out how it does just the opposite.

    Sample I0806 from Quedlinburg is R1b-DF27, however often you deny it, and it is the oldest DF27 thus far known.

    One more thing: I don't recall claiming that P312 originated on the steppe, although it might have. Papac et al speculate that it originated somewhere in Central Europe, perhaps in the vicinity of the Rhine. That might be right. What I believe about the Pontic-Caspian steppe, based on what I know of archaeology, linguistics, and archaeogenomics, is that PIE originated there, and that R1b-L51 (as represented by whichever subclades are old enough to have been involved) was one of the handful of Y-DNA haplogroups carried by the early PIE-speaking peoples. Obviously PIE peoples moved west into peninsular Europe, carrying their DNA, language, culture, and religion with them, changing Europe forever.

    By now, in 2023, all that is readily apparent to people not blinded by maniacal national or ethnic pride.

    ReplyDelete
  146. @Orpheus - Only a part of Yamnaya speaking PIE but the others not makes zero sense, and their only argument in favor of that theory is just "hurr must've been somewhere with agriculture nearby" which is itself a non-sequitur if the population itself didn't practice agriculture (trading isn't practicing) let alone the major peoblem of wtf did the rest of Yamnaya speak if PIE arose only in the western wing

    So I agree with you re: linguistic unity for Yamnaya. But this is about time as well as geography. The argument is that these elements from western Yamnaya spread across the Yamnaya range. There is both linguistic and genetic evidence for this even in the Lazaridis paper - MLBA samples in Armenia and NW Iran have detectable EEF ancestry.

    But this terms (and ancestry) would not have spread to groups who had already departed the steppe. So that's why this paper argues that Anatolian left at an earlier stage of development. So Anatolian must have departed the steppe prior to Yamnaya reaching west of the Dnieper.

    My own conjecture is that if the route Anatlian took was to the west through the Balkans, they would have encountered the same EEF groups, and adopted similar agricultural terms. My suggestion is that they took an eastern route, and Anatolians should show steppe ancestry without EEF ancestry. Areni Cave and the Hatay outlier are both good candidates for that in my opinion (and according to the Lazaridis paper, though I am suspicious of that paper given the other issues David and others have outlined).

    They literally write in the paper that Sredny is a candidate exactly because of their assumed connection to agriculture.

    The limited connection to agriculture, but yah. The samples we have for Sredny are ~20% EEF, but David seems to be hinting that there are Sredny samples coming that may be a bit different.

    @Rob in addition to learning how to properly read articles, learn about Ydna subclades

    Maybe cool the insults, especially when you deleted your own comments when you realized you had misread Kroonen. It was a brain cramp on my part, that's all lol. You're right about the Y-DNA of course.

    @princenuadha - that's Anveṣaṇam in this thread that he's responding to. Here's his blog post that largely comes to the same conclusion's as David's.

    https://vicayana.substack.com/p/southern-arc-or-southern-farce

    ReplyDelete
  147. @Rob - Okay maybe it's only a partial brain cramp! The Dereivka samples match Khvalynsk. See table 1: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25778

    So it seems possible at least that the male-mediated part of the Volga-Caspian network eventually extended to the Dnieper, prior to Yamnaya.

    ReplyDelete
  148. A slight correction: Evidently sample I0806 from Quedlinburg, Germany, is no longer the oldest known R1b-DF27. There is one in the same age ballpark, but slightly older: sample GBVPK, a Beaker man from Grotte Basse de la Vigne Perdue in France, dated to 2461-2299 calBC, reported in Seguin-Orlando et al (2021), "Heterogeneous Hunter-Gatherer and Steppe-Related Ancestries in Late Neolithic and Bell Beaker Genomes from Present-Day France."

    GBVPK, who is DF27>Z195, has steppe ancestry, of which the authors say the following:

    "One Bell Beaker individual (GBVPK) and the two Early Bronze Age individuals (GBVPO and TORTF), however, clustered with other previously reported Early to Middle Bronze Age individuals from France13,16 but were displaced along an axis showing closer affinity with Yamnaya steppe herders from Samara.2,40,59 D-statistics of the form (Mbuti, Yamnaya; X, GBVPK, GBVPO, or TORTF) also suggested a statistically significant excess of Yamnaya ancestry in these three individuals relative to some of the others from both sites (Figure S4)."

    "The different analyses presented supported the presence of an excess of WHG ancestry in two individuals at Mont-Aimé (2H10 and 1H06) and an excess of Yamnaya_Samara ancestry in one individual at Grotte Basse de la Vigne Perdue (GBVPK)."

    I don't usually follow R1b-DF27 very closely, but I did some checking around to make sure I am up to date on the oldest DF27 sample. Apparently GBVPK (which is DF27>Z195) is it, thus far.

    ReplyDelete
  149. @ Rudism

    Krepost is a dead-end, or at least onw which dispersed into the mainstream Bulgarian EEFs
    There was definitely extra flow in LBA Greece - a frank colonization of NEar Eastern merchants and traders in parts of Greece c. 2500 BC. perhaps via the Cyclades and other Aegean islands



    @ Oprheus

    '' I always wait for aDNA first and then archaeology in this order (other way around led to Gimbutas seeing GAC as some Yamnaya population offshoot lol).

    Genetics isn;t always correct if not done properly, as we see in many papers with their caricature conclusions

    Gimbutas was writing decades ago, and GAC - which we now know arent from the steppe - didnt fit into her views of feminist, peaceful, cereal farming pre-steppe Europe.

    The problem is, modern Indo-Europeanists and commentators here still hold the same outdated views, which is why I always separate LBK farmers form other post-LBK groups in central and northern Europe. There's a plethora of Neolithic and para-Neolithic socieites to distniguish, including those which led to the formation of Sredni Stog.

    But we see many labs working on Europe hold the same 'old outdated e.g. Kristiansen & his girls at the Copenhagen Lab. Just jump from EEF to CWC, and make bullshit claims about disappearance of pre-steppe ancestry


    @ Ryan

    LOL I misread Kroonen ?
    I've been very patient with you, but I realised that an entire paragraph of explanation was too much for you, so I just quted the article directly, and you still cant accept it.
    Youre the Steppe-version of Gaska LOL

    ReplyDelete
  150. @Rob - So you still think their term "core Indo-European" includes Anatolian then? Even after reading the figures in the paper?

    ReplyDelete
  151. @ Ryan
    I don’t mind about labels. Although I do think the term, Indo Anatolian is biased & misleading


    @ Rudism

    “t came from Anatolia to the Southern Balkans and had a stronger impact on Greece. No additional near Eastern geneflow during the chalcolithic or bronze age had any impact on LBA Greece if it turns out that the eastern shifts of this degree were present in early Neolithic Anatolia and the Balkans. Maybe it's erroneous for us to assume all early anatolian farmers were identical to pinarbasi and barcin N”



    Whilst there obviously is structure in early Anatolian farmers, there is additional migration after 4500 bc
    Incl halaf to Cappadocia and Caucasian to north / east Anatolia
    This undermines simple tales of “CHG migrations”

    ReplyDelete
  152. @Rob - Did some more digging into the latest on the Volga/Caspian samples and see what you mean. But just because the populations we have samples far don't match Yamnaya, doesn't mean there isn't some unsampled population rich in M269 and CHG from that area (or say the Don).

    The Yamnaya-related I2a2 is found in Dnieper-Donetz and middle Don

    And the Volga: https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/sites/reich.hms.harvard.edu/files/inline-files/10.1515_pz-2022-2034.pdf

    Sample I6103 is I2a2a2b.

    When I went through the Dnieper-Donets samples though, they seem to have been reassigned to I2a1 on Y-Full? I don't think either is a great smoking gun - they both show up way earlier and across Europe.

    There's also a lot of R1b-V88 in Dnieper-Donets.

    We don't have Y-DNA for Sredny but we do have ADNA, and it shows a sharp increase in CHG. So correct me if I'm wrong here, but you're saying that this CHG came from Progress-like females, correct?

    The trouble is you need a second wave of EHG/CHG to get to Yamnaya though, as they have much less WHG than Sredny. Was that Volga/Caspian females as well?

    ReplyDelete
  153. @ Ryan

    “When I went through the Dnieper-Donets samples though, they seem to have been reassigned to I2a1 on Y-Full? ”

    It’s not “reassigned” , the entire ISOGG nomenclature changed between 2018 and 2020 (they should have stuck with older form)
    The results remain the same


    “? I don't think either is a great smoking gun - they both show earlier across Europe “


    Not true, for above reasons
    The steppe related form is not found “across Europe” but is found in the carpathian basin

    “And the Volga”
    A single or two western migrants


    “There's also a lot of R1b-V88 in Dnieper-Donets.”

    Correct, these guys didn’t do so well
    They seem to disappear from the steppe , whilst the I2a remained in western Yamnaya & postTrypyllia groups like Gordinesti


    “We don't have Y-DNA for Sredny but we do have ADNA, and it shows a sharp increase in CHG. So correct me if I'm wrong here”

    Sure we do.
    There is 47-4000 bc data incl Y dna , if we include Suvorovo horizon
    There is a Yhg H2 farmer
    There is a R1b-preM269 in Bulgaria with low CHG ; high UkrN
    There is also a single Q1 individual, but we don’t know yet his autosomic composition

    We have the middle Don group too
    And we have the extensive Volga-Caucasus sample set which also dates to SS period, and non are M269 or R1a-M17




    “ So correct me if I'm wrong here, but you're saying that this CHG came from Progress-like females, correct?”

    Well apparently some of the middle Don already had it, and yeah the rest probably came from Volga/ Progress females


    “The trouble is you need a second wave of EHG/CHG to get to Yamnaya though…Was that Volga/Caspian females as well?”

    It seems so, for the most part, because there is little R1b-M71 and J1 in Yamnaya & CW

    And it’s no trouble at all, because it’s the complex reality

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  154. Some of the Progress-En-related ancestry was probably spread with Q1a. There is one in Boyanovo- BGR, another in Czech CWC, and it was obviously present around the Eneolithic. Same with R1b-V3616 & the J1 in Afanasievo. However, they didnt expand massively, for some reason.

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  155. @Rob “ Some of the Progress-En-related ancestry was probably spread with Q1a. ”

    Steppe Maykop?

    ReplyDelete
  156. @Rob “ The trouble is you need a second wave of EHG/CHG to get to Yamnaya though, as they have much less WHG than Sredny. ”

    Sredny and CWC had more long lasting impact than Yamnaya on European populations post BA.

    I think that we have much more WHG than accounted for.

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  157. @Ryan

    Seems like everyone is misinterpreting those Middle Don forest steppe samples.

    They don't represent the first stage of the formation of Yamnaya.

    They're actually a mixture between local hunter-gatherers and a Yamnaya-like population from the steppe just to the south.

    So it looks like a Yamnaya-like population already existed around 5,300 BCE in the Lower Don.

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  158. @Ryan The paper mentions that Yamnaya arose in the east of the dnieper. Westernmost yamnaya would be a secondary appearance. How did they manage to impose PIE on the other assumingly non-PIE speaking Yamnaya? We're talking about all of PIE (core IE, about Indo-Tocharian).
    That's what doesn't make sense

    @The Rudism Do you mean APO004? Per the study: "Affinities with far-eastern groups like Neolithic Iran are traced for Neolithic Aposelemis (APO004) but only reach significance levels on the EBA groups from Nea Styra and then prevail for most of the later Aegean BA groups." Aposelemis N shows continuity with Bonckulu Islands-Mainland LN-EBA fail with that source only. (Page 3)

    Even in the PCA the Aposelemis individuals don't cluster with EMBA Crete and Islands/Mainland (but do cluster with a few other individuals).
    Lazaridis et al 2022 detected some minor Iran/CHG in Neolithic Greece but ir didn't exceed 5-10% before 4000-5000BCE. The admixture dates are also consistent with this.

    @Rob Gimbutas was a schizo but I was referring to cultural assimilation vs genes as an example. Etruscans ans Italics/Latins would be another one.

    As for LBK I just add the EEF from LBK with the excess WHG in their qpAdm graphs. Together it gives an image close to the Clemente et al 2021 admix where EEF isn't the 15-25% sometimes found in NE Europe because LBK has something like 4% WHG max lol

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  159. @ Andrze

    Actually the Q in Bulgaria is from Kapetan, but not C14 dated, only context inference
    It appears to belong under the Latvia-HG branch of Q, whilst Steppe Majkop is related to Kumsay. There were probably different subclades of Q in steppe Eneolithic, steppe majkop, etc

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  160. @The Rudism DATES depends on the sources given. Aegean groups don't descend from a plethora of groups so it's easier to get an accurate date on them

    I don't know what else is there to mention. Even the study itself expicitly mentions that the Eastern shift in the Aegean is greater after the Neolithic, and the Neolithic Eastern shifted samples are from 4000 BCE with a DATES consistent with the DATES of EBA groups. PCAs also show a shift, with Minoans sometimes even clustering with BA Anatolia. Chalcolithic Anatolia begins 5500-5300 BCE and is the only source that this could have come from for Minoans and Cycladics/Helladics. Again I don't rely only on them as Mathieson has mentioned how PCAs can get 20%+ autosomal admixture wrong (omit it), not to mention extreme reference dependence, but every tool used in five (5) studies has found the same, and this agrees with archaeology too (especially in Minoans). If you can falsify their results I don't see why not emailing them, unless you're just attention seeking here for replies

    @Rob Iirc they said that the hybrid population was what moved, not CHG ancestry on its own (which didn't exist in undiluted form after the Neolithic)

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  161. @Orpheus

    Iain Mathieson was referring to some random PCA, probably his own.

    I could say more about that, especially the PCA in his papers, but I'll let it go.

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  162. @ Orpheus

    ''they said that the hybrid population was what moved, not CHG ancestry on its own (which didn't exist in undiluted form after the Neolithic)''


    what are you referring to here, sorry lost the train ?

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  163. @Rob If by "CHG migrations" in your reply to The Rudism you refer to the Lazaridis et al 2022 claim of a CHG geneflow "transforming Anatolia" as they said, they aren't talking about actual 100% CHGs since that ancestry ceased to exist in an undiluted form post Neolithic. Can't recall where they mention this, either main paper or supplementals when talking about thw CHG-related ancestry in Khvalynsk & co and how it's pre-Neolithic for this reason.

    Not sure why they phrased it as a "CHG transformation", sounds stupid

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  164. @ Orpheus

    ''they aren't talking about actual 100% CHGs since that ancestry ceased to exist in an undiluted form post Neolithic. ''

    Right, but I didnt think they did. What I'm saying is there were probably several sources of CHG-rich related admixture in Anatolia- from actual Caucasus hubnter-gatherers, to northern & Zagros PPN groups, through to later Caucasian Bronze Age groups, Mesopotamian individuals during the Trade Network era, etc. It obviously accelearated after 4500 bc, but it had already been happening. Hence it a long and multifold process. If you had a large number of high quality ancient uniparentals & Kinship studies, which is slowly happening, then that'll provide details of genealogical links. So that's what it might take - dense sampling of citadels as well as countryside hamlets.

    When you add in the other set of influences - such as those connecting to the west, we'll probably be on it for decades to come



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  165. @Davidski “ Seems like everyone is misinterpreting those Middle Don forest steppe samples.

    They don't represent the first stage of the formation of Yamnaya.

    They're actually a mixture between local hunter-gatherers and a Yamnaya-like population from the steppe just to the south.

    So it looks like a Yamnaya-like population already existed around 5,300 BCE in the Lower Don.”

    Maybe. But Sredny and Corded were formed in the FOREST Steppe zone, not the Steppe proper. Therefore, they seem more relevant to modern European’s genetic profile than Yamnaya. Rob turned out to be right after all, it was the interaction between WSH with GAC, Tripolye and perhaps some HG of some sort that made Indo-Europeans what they were, at least late stage ones.

    I can’t get over the shock that a word like “Hmelg” didn’t originate with earliest ancestral Proto-pre-PIE and that Hittite had a completely different root word for that white stuff oozing out of a cow’s udders. The fact that “milk” is a new invention (or even a borrowing from some farmer, non-IE language in Romania) rather than something common to “Indo-Anatolian” such as “eat/ed’” or “water/wadar” completely changes the game for me.

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  166. Where did Botai come from and why do Blaček and Vajda claim affiliation to Yenisseyan languages?
    The only y Haplogroups found thus far are Basal N (Baikal HG, Uralic, Siberian), O (Chinese) and some subclade of R1b (EHG). Ket and other Paleo-Siberians may have WSHG Q1a paternally, but they all - Nivkh, Okhotsk, Inuit, Kukchi, Kamatchadals, Yakuguirs and Gilyaks - are 67% -85% East Asians and seem all to be descended from a back migration of Yamaktakh archaeological culture from Trans-Beringia.

    The most absurd thing I’ve heard is that the word “Hequos” for horse in PIE is a Botai/Yenisseyan borrowing (in Kett the word is “Yand”…after all).

    Any comments?

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  167. Rich S-

    Very good, you are doing your job.

    Now, according to you the oldest DF27 is buried in a collective burial cave of Narbonne, and you know where Narbonne is, don't you? Exactly, in the department of Aude, Occitania, southeastern France. That is, according to you, the Spanish researchers were right to place the origin of DF27 in the Franco-Cantabrian region (which as you should know includes Aquitaine and Occitania) specifically in the eastern Pyrenees.

    Meanwhile you have used for years the Quedlinburg myth (do you know a single SNP under Df27 in that sample?) even to ban people who dared to defend a Franco-Cantabrian origin of Df27.
    Regarding the origin of P312, Papac et al have confirmed that it has no steppe origin ergo we were right about this too. Now you only need to look for P312 Iberian samples, older than 2.400 BC, sure you will find them too because it has been four years since the samples were published. There is only one P312 (U152) older than them in ALL Europe.

    Since you have already started to work, you could look up the dozens of posts where you and your friends have written that M269 or L51 would never appear in a neolithic site (caves, dolmens or collective burials because they were always buried in kurgans) and then have the balls to recognize that you have been wrong about that too. We can continue with the assertion that L51 would appear in the Yamnaya culture, that there were never migrations related to the Iberian BB culture to other regions of Europe, that Yamnaya riders conquered Western Europe, etc etc etc....

    We have not changed a single letter from what we were saying 10 years ago. Now everyone knows who are the people blinded by maniacal national or ethnic pride

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  168. Relevant quotes I missed:

    "We found that the early farmers from Crete shared the same ancestry as other contemporaneous Neolithic Aegeans. In contrast, the end of the Neolithic period and the following Early Bronze Age were marked by ‘eastern’ gene flow, which was predominantly of Anatolian origin in Crete."

    "Notably, Iran/Caucasus-related genetic influx was inferred in published individuals from the later Neolithic phases on the mainland (I2318, I709 and I3920; Peloponnese, around the fifth millenium BC)—but not earlier—as well as most of the EBA individuals from Euboea, Aegina and Koufonisia. Overall, the genetic heterogeneity among the Late Neolithic (LN) to EBA is not correlated with time alone, since within the Nea Styra grave male individuals carried substantially varying proportions of Iranian-related ancestry. By applying DATES on the LN and EBA individuals from the mainland and the islands (Methods), we obtained an average admixture date of around 4300 ± 250 BC (Supplementary Table 6), which is slightly younger when estimated from the Nea Styra individuals alone (about 3900 ± 460 BC). This variance in admixture dates also corroborates ongoing biological admixing with incoming individuals from the east of the Aegean following the establishment of the first Neolithic Aegean communities."

    If someone can falsify their models and show that there are better models with Early Neolithic Aegeans (with limited CHG/Iran) being thr source of Minoans, then thisbqiuld actually stroke my ego since it would make them even more local to my country. I'm not necessarily picking a side since both suit me, but the result of every study on Minoans and Cycladics/Helladics is the same. It seems illogical to suggest otherwise unless there is some kind of data which in comparison with the data and models of the papers (with the same methodology), comes out better.

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  169. @Davidski

    Have you read https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/sites/reich.hms.harvard.edu/files/inline-files/10.1515_pz-2022-2034.pdf from last year? (Especially the last section "Cranio-facial groups and genetic mating networks in the steppes" right before the conclusion) It seems Anthony has shifted his view closer to yours and it will be interesting to see his upcoming article on the formation of Yamnaya.

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  170. Any connection between the early stages of the Elshanka Culture and CHG ? CHG forming either at Kammenaya Balka or Northwest of the Caucasus during the Epipaleolithic and from there moving up the Don and crossing the Volga and up the Samara river where they maybe established contact with Pointed Pot makers (migrating or trading from the Altai) and established the Elshanka Culture from where these Pointed bottomed pots spread Westwards ?

    Some CHG maybe split when reaching the Volga and migrated Southwards to the North Caspian or while moving up the Samara reached the Ural river and from there Southwards to the North Caspian. Maybe the CHG rich zone stretched from the Northwest Caucasus to the Samara River and the Southern Urals from +-13 000 BC to +-6000 BC.

    Several Admixture events with EHG could have happened during this time and along that route Lower Don and or along the Samara river. Just my thoughts.

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  171. @crashdoc

    David Anthony appears to be confused at the moment.

    The source of this confusion seems to be the advice that he's getting from David Reich about ancient DNA.

    He even put up a video at Youtube claiming that the so called CHG ancestry in Khvalynsk was from Iran, which is nonsense.

    https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2020/02/did-caucasus-hunter-gatherers-ever-live.html

    So I don't hold out much hope for the Yamnaya paper. But I'm looking forward to the data.

    Once I get all the data from that paper, I'm going to write my own manuscript on the prehistory of the Pontic-Caspian steppe and put it up at bioRxiv.

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  172. @ Matt

    formal stats generally better of course

    They aren't better in any way if we talk about f-stats and qpAdm. They're just different, with their own limitations.

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  173. Anyone knowswhy Krepost_N shows Yamnaya-like admixture? Is it due to damage or some kind of early Progress-like gene flow?

    Target: BGR_Krepost_N:I0679_d
    Distance: 3.1492% / 0.03149239
    77.0 TUR_Marmara_Barcin_N
    9.8 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
    7.8 GEO_CHG
    4.6 Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
    0.8 Levant_PPNB

    Target: BGR_Krepost_N:I0679_d
    Distance: 3.1492% / 0.03149239
    77.0 TUR_Marmara_Barcin_N
    9.8 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
    7.8 GEO_CHG
    4.6 Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
    0.8 Levant_PPNB
    0.0 HUN_Koros_N_HG
    0.0 MAR_Taforalt
    0.0 ROU_Iron_Gates_HG

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  174. @ GamerzJ
    Why are you even including Yamnaya for a 5500 bc individual ?

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  175. @Arza

    You're pretty good with numbers, so have you looked at Lazaridis' stats and figured out where he's going wrong?

    It's obvious that Yamnaya is a mix of something like Progress and Ukraine N, with a few per cent of Eastern Euro farmer input, so how's he getting ~20% Armenian ancestry in Yamnaya on top of the Progress ratio?

    If Yamnaya does have any Armenian-related ancestry, it can only be something that was in Progress already.

    Lazaridis is actually describing a population like the Steppe Maykop outliers, but there's a good reason why they don't cluster with Yamnaya.

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  176. I keep reading the LDC on the anthrosphere. It has taken on the next holy grail for Yamnaya origins
    But it too is overrated

    The actual “Neolithic” LDC was composed of specialised fishers . So you can’t go from sturgeon fishers to Yamnaya pastoralists
    Then later on in the Eneolithic id bet it had Majkop/ steppe Majkop contacts
    Then Yamnaya pastoralists took the region

    Need to look to the forest steppe near Trypillia

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  177. @Rob

    I never said anything about the LDC.

    My point is that Yamnaya is mainly a mixture between Progress-like and Ukraine_N-like populations, and seems to have been directly derived from Sredny Stog.

    I have no idea yet where exactly this mixture took place or how many populations were involved.

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  178. @Gaska

    "Regarding the origin of P312, Papac et al have confirmed that it has no steppe origin ergo we were right about this too. Now you only need to look for P312 Iberian samples, older than 2.400 BC, sure you will find them too because it has been four years since the samples were published. There is only one P312 (U152) older than them in ALL Europe."

    I have to say you really are consistent in denying reality. There is not a single specimen positive for R-P311 or a downstream SNP that does not have Steppe autosomal DNA. The oldest P312 Iberian sample is EHU002 which is from 2564-2299 so it is fairly close to GBVPK in time and distance. Anything older is from farther east including from as far away as Afanasievo and Mongolia which are hundreds of years older than EHU002 and GBVPK. P312 could have been born in western Europe but R-L52 and older are not originally from western Europe and there has never been a specimen that is from 3000 BC or older from western Europe that is derived for any of the SNPs R-L52 or R-L23 or anything equivalent or between them even with all of the hundreds of Neolithic specimens from western Europe that have been sequenced. How do you explain that?

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  179. @ Dave

    It was just a general comment.





    @ Rudism

    '' Chalcolithic anatolians seem all over the place between CHG-Like, Barcin N-Like, and Southeast Anatolia PPN''


    Correct.

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  180. @Dospaises

    In the absence of migrations and conquests related to the Yamnaya culture reaching western Europe, the ubiquity of the steppe component in the vast majority of ancient European samples from 2.500 BC, can only be explained by the founder effect of certain male lineages (P312, L21, DF27 and U152 are good examples) and by the practical depopulation of France, Iberia and the British Isles, i.e. the neolithic population density in those regions must have been very low (for example in Spain there are thousands of megalithic monuments, but they are concentrated in certain regions while the Castilian plateau hardly has this type of constructions). That means that P312 has its origin in Yamnaya? Certainly not, first because it has never been found nor will be found in that culture and secondly because if the first P312 had a 100% Yamnaya mother (look at the women of the CWC in Bohemia), that man would pass that component to all his descendants (both male and female). You will never find a 100% Yamnaya P312 in France, Iberia or Britain, but that component will never disappear if the population is very scarce. Maybe you will understand it when you check that in the culture of El Argar (La Almoloya) 100 of the males were DF27 (of any social class) this is the best example of a founder effect in a prehistoric european culture. Evidently all these men have small percentages of steppe ancestry and evidently this does not mean that DF27 has steppe origin.

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  181. @Gaska

    Nobody is saying that the steppe ancestry in western Europeans comes from Yamnaya, and nobody is saying that R1b-P312 originated in Yamnaya, and nobody is expecting to see 100% WSH individuals in either France or Iberia.

    The point is:

    -There is R1b-L51 (upstream of R1b-P312) in Afanasievo (I6222 and C3341 both have it) and in early Czech CWC, both of which have WSH autosomal profiles.

    -Every French or Iberian R1b-P312 sample (DF27 or otherwise) has steppe ancestry.

    -DF27 itself probably did originate in western Europe somewhere, but its provenance going back evidently leads back to the eneolithic steppe. We can clearly see that L51 is a steppe lineage. There's basal P310 in Afanasievo. Perhaps P312 originated in central Europe, and DF27 originated in western Europe. Not at all an unsensible idea, I don't think. But the point is that the line of continuity leads back to L51 being a WSH lineage, with branches of it introduced to central and western Europe by individuals with steppe ancestry.

    As for exactly where the first R1b-DF27 male lived within central or western Europe, I don't know what to suggest exactly, based on information known to me. But I think that him living somewhere outside of Franco-Cantabria, and his descendants enjoying a founder effect there, is again not an unsensible suggestion at all. British Bell Beaker males are overwhelmingly R1b-L21, but that doesn't make it likely that R1b-L21 originated in Britain. In fact, to the contrary. If it originated in Britain, we would expect to see closely-related R1b-P312 subclades alongside it in Britain, and we don't (at least, not until later on in time). Its overwhelming frequency is suggestive of it having originated in the region of the Netherlands, and then having been taken to Britain and established there via a founder effect.

    I'm not saying that DF27 must have originated in the region of the Netherlands, but I am saying that the first ever DF27 male might have lived in France, Germany, Spain, who knows exactly? But in any case, the point that people are raising here is that his forefathers carried R1b-P312, and their forefathers carried R1b-L51, and we know where those guys lived and what their autosomal profiles looked like.

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  182. @Gaska
    So you see no link between P312 and L51 with L23? Two different Y-R1b lineages, maybe P312 and L51 are in fact of the V88 lineage?
    What authorize you to simplistically link Neolithic population density to megaliths? The megalithic eclosion in West in a specific phenomenon which didn't involve the whole neolithic farmers world.
    And the use of the "Franco-Cantabric refugium" term is a bit inadapted, it sends us back to the LGM, does it not?
    ATW there are a lot of places between Atlantic and the Altay.

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  183. @Gaska

    Dospaises answered you pretty well, so I won't bother reprising all of that. As for your claim that I and others once said that R1b-M269, etc. would never appear in a Neolithic context, that's not quite true. Quite a few authors, Harrison and Heyd among them, have for a number of years pointed out that both Corded Ware and Beaker people sometimes inserted their burials in the collective tombs of the Neolithic farmers who preceded them. I remember discussing that with Jean Manco, Rich Rocca and others quite few years ago. What makes those burials stand out is how they differ from Neolithic farmers in Y-DNA, in having steppe DNA, and sometimes in the addition of certain artifacts.

    Are you still claiming that R1b-L51 was Indo-Europeanized, right down to its autosomal DNA, by women? How did that happen exactly? Who were these L51 milquetoasts before Yamnaya women got hold of them and steppe-pasteurized them? How did females impart to them a male-centered religion and kinship system, as well as a warlike, male-centered culture?

    I remember some years ago when the steppe wives argument was first advanced. It was moronic then. It is even more utterly moronic now. The female-mediated steppe autosomal DNA argument was originally advanced as a form of special pleading to at all costs exclude R1b-L51 from any claim on the steppe or on being Indo-European in its own right. It is a form of damage control. Too late to stop at least some R1b (Z2103) from being Indo-European, but by all means let's not let it go any further!

    As Anthony mentions in his book, outsider wives taken into a tribe are not cultural innovators. Instead, they are very fastidious about fitting in and adopting the culture and language of their husband's people. So, what happened, as Kristiansen and others have pointed out, is that steppe males often took outsider wives from among the Neolithic farmers into whose territory they moved. That's why we see EEF DNA increase steadily at the expense of steppe DNA as the Indo-Europeans moved west, away from the steppe. Yamnaya and early Corded Ware thus had more steppe DNA and less EEF than middle and later Corded Ware, and middle and later Corded Ware had more steppe DNA and less EEF than Beaker, and so on. The outsider women who were being acquired by R1b-L51 (and R1a-M417) men of steppe origin were for the most part of Neolithic farmer origin. They were reducing the steppe component, not adding to it. The true picture is of steppe men moving west and acquiring non-steppe women, not of Neolithic farmer men moving east into the steppe and becoming progressively steppe-pasteurized Yamnaya Amazons.

    *For the pedantic out there, "steppe-pasteurized" is meant as a tongue-in-cheek term, a play on the similarity between the name Pasteur and the word pasture (since the early IEs were pastoral people).

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  184. @The Rudism I see 3709 at 12,6% CHG, Minoans are around 17-18% (Lazaridis et al 2022) so I'm not surprised it's close. Two samples from Odigitria have lower Iran/CHG and higher PPN which would pull them more southward in a PCA, theoretically.

    Samples like Peloponnese Neolithic could be a better proxy than West Anatolia Neolithic, though what would change is the percentage of ChL Anatolia, personally I assume it's lower than 50%. The additional Iran N required in Minoans could point at a more Iran-rich local source than the one used, or a more Iran-rich ChL Anatolian source (yet unsampled) which would prove me wrong and increase the ChL Anatolian %.

    What I found weird was a potentially different source in Cycladics/Helladics (yet unsampled) from the one in Minoans, but this would explain the cultural differences.

    Ofc if new samples are discovered in the Aegean and they are Iran-rich from the Neolithic and provide a better fit for Minoans I'll change my position too.

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  185. @ Davidski
    Lazaridis' stats

    On which page?

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  186. @Rob

    I probably should not, I had forgotten it in the model from a previous run. But I am curious as to why G25 shows it regardless.

    @Davidski

    Probably has been asked before but when we are dealing with fits of under 0.02, and sources that contribute components under 5% should we treat them as real or not? For example if out of all the target samples 1 shows some odd admixture in low levels that does change the fit from say 0.021 to 0.0178 then should I treat it as real despite making low sense historically? Usually the odd values range from 2-4% in my experience.

    Would help a lot solving some confusion I get with low source contributions like these in runs.

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  187. @Arza

    There's a whole section on this in the Southern Arc paper supp info.

    Also, he posted some stuff at Twitter recently as a reply to a blog post that criticized his models.

    For instance...

    https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1620459177595531265

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  188. @gamerz_J

    You'll see noise in some models for different reasons, such as:

    - low quality of one or more of the samples

    - excess damage in one of more of the samples

    - wrong reference samples that are either too young or way too old

    - too many reference samples.

    The noise will vary depending on how messed up your methodology is.

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  189. Krepost isn't irrelevant. It's also not alone. The Romanian is definitely Caucasus/late Iranian. This ancestry becomes more widespread in the late Neolithic. The connection between the Caucasus and western Black Sea goes back to the beginning of the Neolithic.

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  190. @Dospaises

    Exactly-EHU002 is 2,431 BC (ergo before 2,400 BC), if someone from Max Planck read this blog then they will realize their mistake, maybe they don't put much interest when they have to prove their narrative. In any case if anyone is interested in that sample check their BAM file, maybe they will be surprised (officially it is P312*). There is not a single specimen positive for R-P311 or a downstream SNP that does not have WHG or EEF autosomal DNA because these components have been present throughout Europe since the paleolithic and neolithic migrations. But in my opinion an autosomal component cannot be used to establish the origin of an uniparental marker and neither to establish the geographic origin of a language

    @H₂ŕ̥ḱtos

    Have you really never heard anyone say that the steppe ancestry in Western Europeans comes from Yamnaya culture, or that P312 originated in Yamnaya or that there are 100% Yamnaya R1b individuals in Western Europe? you must be JOKING. Regarding R1b you are talking about a lineage linked to WHGs not a steppe lineage. L754 (Italy), P297 (Baltic), M269 (Bulgaria), L51 (Switzerland), L151 (Bohemia), U106 (Bohemia), P312 (Germany), U152 (Germany), Df27 (France), L21 (England) all the rest are Kurganist fairy tales. Regarding the origin of DF27 I think you are just speculating and have no idea what you are talking about.

    @Moesan

    Spanish and French researchers consider the Franco-Cantabrian region as a cultural continuum since the Paleolithic, I have not spoken about a refuge, only about a region on both sides of the Pyrenees regarding the origin of DF27, that's all. The megalithic culture dominated Western Europe, at least in Iberia where there are no megaliths, there are hardly any Neolithic sites, so of course we can link this type of construction to population density. It has been demonstrated that it has been a gigantic mistake to think that by finding L23 and Z2103 in Yamnaya they would also find L51-Nothing as far from reality, Yamnaya has absolutely nothing to do with the Indo-Europeanization of western europe (not even with Greece as Lazaridis defends).

    @RichS

    You have a very bad memory, there are many of your posts denying that M269 would appear in neolithic burials out of the steppe. As so many other times, you only backtrack when the evidence overwhelms you. If you don't understand the role of women and exogamy you'd better find another hobby. You simply have to follow the mtDNA markers path-Steppe>CWC>BBC, there are dozens of cases. We are not going to bore people with data but the role of women is fundamental to understand the ubiquity of steppe ancestry in mainland europe. There will always be people like you who think that it is the sole responsibility of males and specifically of the lineages under M269, again you are wrong.

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  191. @Davidski @Arza “There's a whole section on this in the Southern Arc paper supp info.

    Also, he posted some stuff at Twitter recently as a reply to a blog post that criticized his models.

    For instance...

    https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1620459177595531265


    Elhaik jumping in on the thread. A cirque de suleit in action

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  192. @Davidski and @Arza, you both can read my replies too under Lazaridis' thread. He couldn't accept the fact that his best models for Yamnaya fail badly.

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  193. @ Chad

    Krepost is not “irrelevant”, but it is (currently) a singleton

    Not sure which “the Romanian” you’re speaking of or which LN samples carry extra CHG ?

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  194. Romania_N_oIran. It's not a singleton. This ancestry becomes more spread out among the Varna and CT.

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  195. I reckon this mysterious Caucasus/Iranian-related people introduced J2b into the Balkans during the Neolithic via the Black Sea.

    But that's just a pet theory for now.

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  196. @Davidski Can we say that the I2 founder effect among WSH clans is attributed to an EEF influence
    , as in Globular Amphora, instead of a WHG forager effect? IIRC, Anthony claims that it was male EHG and WHG who married ANF and CHG wives. I bet he’s not well versed in adna analysis, just parental haplogroups. It’s more likely that WSH of Sredny and offshoots thereof had admixed with Neolithic Farmers (GAC) than with pure WHG.

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  197. @Andrzejrwski
    "There were also more findings pointing to WSH people who have propensity for green or blue eyes, blond or red or at least a light brown hair pigmentation, and it’s a far cry from “Yamnaya were dark eyed, dark brown haired and carrying a skin color only moderately darker than average modern European”. WSH had genes for light skin"

    It can't be denied, there was selection after the IE migration. Fair colours of hair and eyes became more common after the LNBA. Dark brown hair in western Europe needn't be from MN farmers. Otherwise the steppe component would be too low there

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  198. @Andrzejewski

    The oldest instance of I2a-L699 is in a Neolithic hunter-fisher from Ukraine.

    I can't see any EEF in this sample.

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  199. @ Chad

    'Romania_N_oIran. It's not a singleton. This ancestry becomes more spread out among the Varna and CT.''

    there are 2 Rou_N outliers, but one (Rou_N_o1) is high in Euro HG
    The other (Rou_N_o2) is said to be high in CHG-related ancestry, but is not C14 dated and crap coverage 0.01x (its not in G25). Hard to say much from that

    I haven’t looked at Varna lately but from what I recall theyre Euro-HG shift.

    I do think a new wave, rich in CHG was arriving, but very much limited demographically as far as Europe goes, maybe helped develop the Vinca style. But novo-Anatolian admixture remains low in the Bronze Age in most of Balkans, which was more related to Central & Eastern Europe

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