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Friday, April 19, 2024

It's complicated


Three important manuscripts appeared recently at bioRxiv, mostly dealing with the origins and expansions of proto-Germanic and proto-Indo-European populations.

Steppe Ancestry in western Eurasia and the spread of the Germanic Languages (McColl et al.)

The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans (Lazaridis et al.)

A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age (Nikitin et al.)

All of these studies are very useful, but there are some problems with each of them. Indeed, I'd say that the authors of the Lazaridis and McColl preprints need to reevaluate the way that they use ancient DNA to solve their linguistic puzzles. Once they do that their conclusions are likely to change significantly.

I'm aiming to produce a couple of detailed blog posts about these preprints within the next few weeks. Afterwards I'll get in touch with the relevant authors to change their minds about some key things.

Please stay tuned.

See also...

Indo-European crackpottery

1,378 comments:

1 – 200 of 1378   Newer›   Newest»
Gaska said...

And yes, I WAS WRONG, there are three L51 samples at Yamnaya, so I have to admit my mistakes, but people have to interpret the data correctly because those papers also prove me right on other issues because Yamnaya is NOT the origin of either M269 or L51>L151, it is the sink for these markers.

1-L151 samples in Bohemia are older than those of the Yamnaya culture. Two that are dated by C14 (2,650 BC) and the third one has a higher chronological range because it is an archaeological dating, then it will be in the same date range. They are also a minority in a sea of Z2103 (2%).

2-We also have Y13200 at Afanasievo (I20559-3.003 BC) and Yamnaya (I6731-2.999 BC) which proves what I have been saying for years i.e. the Baltic (and therefore western) connection of the EHGs. The Kunda, Narva, Lyalovo & Volosovo HGs survived in Yamnaya. Epigravetians from southern Europe migrated north and created the northeastern techno complex, then the path is very easy along the Volga.

3-R1b-L754 remains Italian and the oldest M269 is still at Smyadovo. We won this battle a long time ago.

4-The origin of Z2103 is neither in Sredni Stog nor in Khvalynsk, maybe we have to look more to the west. Sredni Stog and the Ukrainian Neolithic contributed to the genetic composition of Yamnaya with I2a-L699, nothing more so far in terms of male markers.

5-And the big question: where is the origin of L51? Considering that we have M269 in Bulgaria the answer would seem obvious, but M269's sibling is in the Baltic and northern Russia so we cannot rule out an origin much further north of the steppes and the Balkans and follow the path of his relative Y13200. The fact of having L151 in Bohemia with an obvious autosomal Baltic sign points in that direction.

6-It seems that Lazaridis has found L21 in Hungary, which would take P312 to central Europe, it seems that the British have found their holy grail.

I3525 (2.700 BCE)-Sárrétudvari, Hungary-HapY-R1b1a/1b1a/1a2c/1-L21>DF13>Y132510

ancestralwhispers.org said...

We finally have a Sredny Stog elite/Novodanilovka sample. Initially, I thought the Vinogradne specimen was the same one mentioned in Gerasimov's 1955 publication, where they wrote about the Sursk culture specimen, with some of them being from Vinogradny Island. The Sursk-Vinogradny specimen from Gerasimov's publication and the VIN1 from "A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age" are different, unrelated specimens from different but proximally close sites. The differences between them are very interesting and go to show the distinction between the local foragers and Steppe invaders.

So, with the Sursk culture and Vinogradny Island specimen, you have the following attributes: non-kurgan burials with no inventory, laying on the back with legs and arms stretched, and cranial affinity to Murzak Koba and Dnieper Donets specimens. However, the VIN1 burial description is completely different. He was buried in a kurgan, his legs and arms were bent with knees up, he was heavily covered with ochre, buried with a dagger, and had a trepanation hole in his skull. All those customs are very typical of Steppe Eneolithic groups and were not practiced by the preceding Ukr_N foragers.

Another interesting thing about the VIN1 specimen is his uniparentals. He is I2-L699 and H13, which might hint at "continuity" with Ukr_N. However, we now know that the oldest Steppe Eneolithic Berezhnovka sample also had the same uniparentals, hinting that at least some of L699 in the region might have been "reintroduced" from further Southeast, either Lower Don or even further East. Berezhnovka itself is an intrusive culture in the Volga that has origins west of that region.

The Q1 Suvorovo samples are also very interesting. The Q1b Csongrad individual was Khvalynsk-like and also a horse rider. So far, the earliest Indo-European elites have proven to be Q and I2-L699, with more of them likely belonging to R1b V1636 and J1 (later two already found in Cernavoda and Usatovo contexts). These lineages could possibly be the original spreaders of the Indo-European tongue, with the now more widespread R1 IE lineages being a marker assimilated by the Indo-Europeans from the preceding Ukrainian foragers with non-IE burial traditions.

Another interesting aspect is that they've sampled the Zhivotilovka culture, and one of them turned out to be fully Maykop-like (and J2b apparently?). This would explain the additional Caucasian ancestry in Usatovo, but it does not explain the Caucasian ancestry in Cernavoda, which predates Maykop. Incidentally, Cernavoda and Usatovo are pretty similar autosomally. The recent Remontnoe sample at Ulan IV, dated to 4150-3800 BC, is mentioned to be on a cline between Steppe Eneolithic and Meshoko, but I'm curious if this population instead is a continuation of Nalchik, which in turn possibly contributed to Cernavoda. Nalchik would also display the same burial traditions found in the Vinogradne kurgan.

a said...

I have been waiting for this to confirm the quick spread of specific strain of Yersinia Pestis within the ranks of Yamnaya R1b L 51 and R1b Z2103 from Afanasievo to Central Europe.
Shatar Chuluu 1 3320-2918 a L51 that is a Z-2106 Yamnaya/Afanasievo clone and it
predates Bohemia to boot.
It's a slam dunk!

a said...

R1b-Z2103 I33307-5577BP+/- Caspian.
I32534 (3635-3383) pre Core Yamnaya in Mykhailivka Lower Dnipr-Ukraine. Both samples slightly predate Yamnaya L51+ Z2103 as well as Afanasievo in Mongolia L51 3320-2918, and Bohemia Corded Ware L51.

Norfern-Ostrobothnian said...

Got genotypes for these samples
https://www.mediafire.com/file/n35lyr87hjk78sb/Sirak_2020.zip/file
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB32751

Slumbery said...

The supplementary materials of the A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age contain the following sentence:

"Another Usatove male from Mayaky carried the R1a lineage, has a widespread Eurasian distribution, but its initial diversification is thought to have started in Iran."

They refer to Underhill et all. article published 10 years ago as a source (The phylogenetic and geographic structure of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a), a study entirely based on the modern distribution of R1a. Shouldn't this be revisited with the archaeogenetic data accumulated during the last 10 years?

Davidski said...

@Slumbery

Yes, of course there was no R1a anywhere near Iran until it got there from Eastern Europe during the Late Bronze Age.

It looks like one of the authors just did some Googling for a paper about R1a and the old Underhill one was the most recent one available.

MaxT said...

A lot of new group labels, feels bit messy.

They are proposing CLV cline is mixture of BP group (Berozhnovka/Progress) and Caucasus Neolithic Aknashen (mixture of CHG/Levantine/ANF). This CLV cline are supposedly Proto-PIE speakers..?

I think Central Asia admixture in BP-groups is more likely be Kelteminar culture from near by Kazaksthan, not TTK from Tajikistan.

This is clearly not their final conclusion papers on Indo-European origins. Hope we will see more.

Synome said...

Authors continue to insist on the plausibility of sub Caucasian origin of the ancestors language of PIE, as if their own study didn't render it moot with clear evidence of steppe (CLV) ancestry in BA Anatolia.

However, if we accept their models of Anatolians (need to be checked thoroughly) then a Caucasian route for Proto Anatolian becomes plausible. But BA Anatolians as a 2 way between CLV and Mesopotamians? It sounds absurd.

Davidski said...

As soon as it was clear that there was a movement of steppe-related people via the eastern Balkans into Anatolia, it was game over. And that was a while ago.

The only reason that the south of the Caucasus Indo-Anatolian hypothesis is still being considered is because it's appealing to many people for different reasons, including pure wishful thinking that the homeland not be placed in Eastern Europe.

Davidski said...

@Norfern

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13cd2keI-0fJWkYgxJrgCfb66QTgkGjoo/view?usp=sharing

a said...

Zooming out at 30,000 foot view. When you look at Martin Sikora IBD links you can see the lines connecting Corded Ware, with (V1636 Pontic steppe region) and are interconnected with Yamnaya/Afanasievo Z2103/L51 + the region of Core Yamnaya at the lower end of the Dnipr-Ukraine.

Aram said...

Gaska

Y13200 was found in Samara HG and even in Botai. With random founder effects You can't never know from where it entered into Yamnaya/Afanasievo gene pool. What is more important is that rumours about the extinction of Afanasievo Y dna were exaggerated. The R1b-Y13200 is popular in that region Turkic people today.

This example simply shows that dense sampling is very important for finding the real haplotype diversity.

With dense sampling the real Neolithic origins of R1a-M417 and R1b-M269 will be found sooner or later.

EthanR said...

There's some interesting IBD results on page 41 of the main paper. I don't think any eneolithic balkan samples were used for this figure, unfortunately:

-immense sharing of Berezhnovka-Progress-Vonyuchka in all directions and over a wide timeframe, including three whopping 30+ CM segments with Areni, Sredni Stog, and Khvalynsk.
-Remontnoye indeed has quite a few matches with Yamnaya
-Maikop and Meshoko don't have any matches with anyone

epoch said...

"Pre-Yamnaya populations which appear as sources in Table S 34 include Usatove/USV and Kartal cluster A (KTL_A) and Mayaki (MAJ) that either narrowly pass or miss the p=0.05 threshold. However, these models appear contrived and implausible as they predict the almost choreographed arrival of people from the Balkans and Mesopotamia, bypassing from both directions the people that lived on the path to their Central Anatolian destination, and their admixture there to form the Central Anatolian Bronze Age."

Akkadian was one of the most used languages in documentation of the old Hittite kingdom. Why not assume there was a Mesopotamian ancestry source already waiting in Anatolia?

Gunslinger said...

E-L618 precursor of E-V13 in Mayaki kurgan?

I12704 Mau6 Mayaky, Kurgan 7, Burial 2
3620-3030 calBCEg M T2h2 E1b1b1a1

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

In the paper they fail to acknowledge that the appearance of steppe ancestry in BA Anatolia from the Eastern Balkans would coincide chronologically with the appearance of steppe ancestry in Greece, hence there is a precedent. The lack of Balkan Neolithic admixture in BA Anatolia can be explained by a coastal movement rather than some protracted overland migration. Models involving Usatove, Majkay, and Boyanovo all proved to be valid:

Can see those pops here from the Penske paper:
https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-023-06334-8/MediaObjects/41586_2023_6334_Fig1_HTML.png?as=webp

Rich S. said...

There are five Yamnaya R1b-L51 in this new Lazaridis preprint, including one that is R1b-L52 (P310):

I11838 - Krasnosamarskoe-4 site (Middle Volga steppe). R1b-L51, mtDNA U5a1a1. 2851-2498 calBCE.

I12823 - Smeeni (Romania, just west of the Black Sea). R1b-L51, mtDNA K1b2b. 3300-2500 BCE (estimate from archaeological context).

I6884 - Krestovyi kurgan (Rostov region, Aksay District, near Alitub village). R1b-L51, mtDNA T1a1. 2852-2500 calBCE.

I12893 - Idzhil-2 (Republic of Kalmykia, Oktyabrsky District, Idzhil Village). R1b-L51, mtDNA H13a1a. 3300-2600 BCE (estimate from archaeological context).

I20499 - Zabalj-Medisova-humka, Serbia. R1b-L52 (P310), mtDNA U4b1b1. 2880-2633 calBCE.

Three are from the steppe, one is from Smeeni, Romania, not far west of the Black Sea, and one is from Serbia in the Carpathian Basin, but all are Yamnaya.

I look forward to reading what Davidski has to say about this paper. I don't think the fact that these L51 Yamnayans are slightly later than Papac's L151 Corded Ware guys makes that much difference. All these results tend to show the source of M269 (and L51) was the steppe east of peninsular Europe. It will be interesting to read more on the autosomal profiles of these latest Yamnaya individuals.

And don't forget the two R1b-P310 Afanasievo samples we already know about, both of them pretty old.

mister funk said...

It is noteworthy that in the admixes from their article, samples from the Volga wedge, in proportion to the Caucasian component, also have the TTK001 component, which is the same northern Eurasians with an Iranian mix, if memory serves, it was Q1, perhaps there were R1b among them, so , it is more logical to assume that this was the profile of the North Caucasian hunters, a mixture of the Caucasus, Iran and TTK001, as far as I understand Lebyazhnik is used as a proxy as an EHG
Sory for my english

https://i.postimg.cc/8cZ4BRhn/Screenshot-30.png

https://i.postimg.cc/DwvQs5mj/Screenshot-29.png

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

@Slumbery

Alhamdulillah we have found @Davud's ancestors in Iran. Allahu Akbar!

Finngreek said...

@Davidski

I look forward to reading your upcoming reviews on these papers. In Uralic news, have you read Zeng et al. 2023 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560332v1.full) regarding Uralic Yakutia_NLBA Y-DNA? I'd appreciate if you wrote a blog on that as well: Its correlation with kra001 and the Ymyyakhtakh culture is of interest; and it seems to me encouraging for Uralo-Yukaghir theory - although I am not formally a proponent, I find its lexical evidence more impressive than other deep external comparisons with Uralic.

Matt said...

I hope that we will see the Ayshin Ghalichi work too before the conference - https://imgur.com/a/0bEiGCZ

This latest version of their abstract (which redacts some key details from a previous version that Davidski mentioned two and a half years ago!) mentions that they see "several" ancestry profiles associated with Maykop culture samples. Hopefully this is something more interesting than "We several individuals; some are 'Steppe Maykop' and others are 'Caucasus Maykop' showing varying CHG levels".

Matt said...

Off topic; but for those folk who generously convert ENA samples to G25 - https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJNA1023923 - "Shotgun sequencing of ten archaeological individuals from the archaeological site of Histria, Romania"

Data is now uploaded.

EthanR said...

@Matt
someone on genarchivist already did:
https://genarchivist.com/showthread.php?tid=749

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

https://i.imgur.com/K00Bvgb.png

Hypothesis B harmonizes with all known facts and the results of our reconstruction of Yamnaya origins strengthen it, as the Yamnaya do indeed have ancestry from the south:.....

Hypothesis A-West is not the focus of this study and has the difficulties we outlined above. However, we think that it must continue to be explored......

Hypothesis A-East has fewer difficulties from the genetic point of view, as it requires only one dilution of steppe ancestry: between the steppe and the highlands of West Asia. But, such a dilution5 did indeed take place as we see the Maikop and Armenian Chalcolithic had limited steppe ancestry (Table S 8;
Table S 11). Thus, Hypothesis A-East must only explain why despite the numerical disadvantage of their ancestry the language of the steppe migrants prevailed – a difficulty not faced by Hypothesis B.

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

You can see their favored hypothesis has PIE originating south of the Caucasus in "B". Among some J2a1 guys 🙄.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski

In these new papers.

Harvard changed their stance on a lot of topics. They agree with us or at least have moved in our direction on multiple topics.

I'm happy about this.

Yet at the same time.

I'm suprised they found actual recent caucasus geneflow into the Steppe. I forget the name, but there were sites on the Steppe signifcantly north of the Caucauss, with real Caucasus Neolithic admixture.

I know you already knew about this. But to me this is disappointing and it kinda supports Harvard's original theory of more recent geneflow from Caucasus into the Steppe.

Rob said...

Its funny reading back how 'academic' clowns tried to claim that Dnieper-HG was replaced by 'invaders from the East' based on their usual statistical voodoo.
But here we have it - Sredni Stog, the Lower Doon group - full of I2a-L699 and related lineages.

I would be looking forward to seein where the j2a lineage from the lower Don fits in the Y-tree. Seems to be somewhat related to Meshoko, in line with my own qpAdm models showing that Meshoko is the main vector for actual southern CHG/ iran ancestry in the Volga-Piedmont network

@ Romulus
Its just one person pushing that theory. No guesses required.

Rob said...

@ AW

“Another interesting thing about the VIN1 specimen is his uniparentals. He is I2-L699 and H13, which might hint at "continuity" with Ukr_N. However, we now know that the oldest Steppe Eneolithic Berezhnovka sample also had the same uniparentals, hinting that at least some of L699 in the region might have been "reintroduced" from further Southeast, either Lower Don or even further East. Berezhnovka itself is an intrusive culture in the Volga that has origins west of that region.””

That seems like special pleading . Because it would require these lineages which were originally there to go east then just so happen that those same lineages, rather than J2 or R1, coming back and being the dominant lineage in the same river valley . What are those chances ?
Seems more likely these people stayed there and acquired Eastern wives on a large scale, thus changing the make up of their community

mister funk said...

@Romulus

Davidski adheres to the A-west hypothesis

Rob said...

The lower Don data also nails the fake news peddled about LDC being precocious pastoralists from Iran

MaxT said...

They claim there would be considerable dilution of steppe ancestry and increase in ANF/WHG with Hypothesis A-West, Anatolia Chalcolithic and Bronze Age lacked Balkan huntergather ancestry apparently.

We now consider the possibility of a western route of steppe people into Anatolia (Hypothesis “A-West”). The strongest arguments for this hypothesis is the western distribution of Anatolian languages within Anatolia51 and the archaeological and genetic evidence for pre-Yamnaya expansions from the steppe into southeastern Europe.11,60,61 The main counter-arguments have been (i) the lack of steppe ancestry in Anatolia4,20,21,49,50, and (ii) the fact that the trajectory of ancestry change in Chalcolithic/Bronze Age
Anatolia was strongly in the direction of an increase of “eastern” (Caucasus-Mesopotamian) ancestry4, whereas migrations from the Balkans would have introduced a mixture of Anatolian Neolithic-WHG ancestry.


"One possibility (“Hypothesis A-West”) is that steppe migrants came from Southeastern Europe into Anatolia.4 If they had shed their steppe ancestry by admixing with local Southeastern European farmers then perhaps their entry into Anatolia would not be detectible. However, we know that the farmers of Southeastern Europe were of largely Anatolian Neolithic ancestry with local Balkan hunter-gatherer admixture.11 Admixture from that area would then presumably introduce back to Anatolia some of this Anatolian Neolithic ancestry as well as some Balkan hunter-gatherer ancestry. Yet, in Anatolia during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age we see a decrease of Anatolian Neolithic ancestry and a lack of Balkan huntergatherer ancestry.4"

'CLV' steppe ancestry in Central Anatolia via eastern route from Caucasus into Anatolia. Decline in ANF ancestry and CLV steppe admixture in Central Anatolia.

"Eastern migrants from Caucasus /Eastern Anatolia into central/western Anatolia;
Drastic reduction of “Anatolian Neolithic ancestry”4;. CLV ancestry in Bronze Age Hittite-era Central Anatolia2"


"TUR_C_BA that includes Hittite era samples20 is the only population for which there is evidence of steppe ancestry. We further analyzed the Central Anatolian Bronze Age samples by period (Table S 42), following their assignment in ref20 into Early Bronze Age (3000-2500BCE), Assyrian Colony (~2000-1750 BCE), and Old Hittite periods (~1750-1200 BCE). This shows that the inferred steppe ancestry, either via a population in which it had been diluted (such as Chalcolithic Armenia) or from populations of the steppe itself, is significant and present in all three subsets of this population."

"Hypothesis B harmonizes with all known facts and the results of our reconstruction of Yamnaya origins strengthen it, as the Yamnaya do indeed have ancestry from the south: both early ones via their BPgroup ancestors which experienced gene flow from the Caucasus and contributing to the Serednii Stih and Volga clines; but, also later ones via the migration of Remontnoye-related people (who also had Maikop/Aknashen ancestry). What was only indistinct before (the CHG ancestry in the Eneolithic steppe and the extra Anatolian-Levantine ancestry in the Yamnaya4 ) has now come into better focus."

MaxT said...

Continued..

Another possibility (“Hypothesis A-East”) is that steppe migrants came via the Caucasus into Anatolia. This hypothesis also requires some shedding of steppe ancestry to have occurred (to account for its lack or paucity in Chalcolithic and Bronze age Anatolia). However, it has the advantage (compared to “Hypothesis A-West”) of going “with the grain” of the transformation of Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Anatolia. Any Proto-Anatolian-speaking migrants from the east would indeed bring some ancestry from the eastern highlands of West Asia into the west of Anatolia even if—under this hypothesis— they had shed most of their steppe ancestry while adopting the language of their steppe (linguistic) forebears.

Hypothesis A-East has fewer difficulties from the genetic point of view, as it requires only one dilution of steppe ancestry: between the steppe and the highlands of West Asia. But, such a dilution5 did indeed take place as we see the Maikop and Armenian Chalcolithic had limited steppe ancestry (Table S 8; Table S 11). Thus, Hypothesis A-East must only explain why despite the numerical disadvantage of their ancestry the language of the steppe migrants prevailed – a difficulty not faced by Hypothesis B."

EthanR said...

@Rob
"I would be looking forward to seein where the j2a lineage from the lower Don fits in the Y-tree. Seems to be somewhat related to Meshoko, in line with my own qpAdm models showing that Meshoko is the main vector for actual southern CHG/ iran ancestry in the Volga-Piedmont network"

This as far as they gave us: https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/J-M319/tree
Hopefully it can be narrowed down when the sample becomes public.

Davidski said...

Hypothesis A-West isn't contradicted by anything apart from their expectations, which are contrived and don't reflect reality.

Mycenaens got their language from the steppe, and yet they don't show any Balkan (Iron Gates) hunter-gatherer ancestry and only have a minority of steppe ancestry.

So we can use the same model with the same expectations for Hittites as for Mycenaens.

Hypothesis A-West looks just fine, and overall it's way ahead of anything else.

Rob said...

As an additional example, let’s recall the Yunatsite cluster
These guys were EEF rich & had virtually no steppe ancestry, from 3000 BC Bulgaria
But they weren’t locals. They seem to be an enigmatic farmer group which also migrated after the 4000 bc turnover event in the east Balkans. So there are EEF groups in SEE / Balkans which aren’t locals and won’t have Iron Gates (IG HG) ancestry

Also , the Cycladic BA group has 10% steppe ancestry with qpAdm. This confirms that some sort of maritime spread toward Anatolia was occurring
But I also think there were movements from the Caucasus to Anatolia too. There’s some testing happening of the chalcolithic kurgans from the southern Caucasus underway too, according to local sources .

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

R1b-L51 in Yamnaya doesn't convince me that Corded Ware descends directly from Yamnaya. It's not a new phenomenon, that Afansievo sample has been around awhile.

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

Here is what the Nitkin paper has to say about modelling Corded Ware:

We applied the Core Yamna + Globular Amphora to Corded Ware individuals from Germany and
obtained an estimate of 26.6±1.3% (p=0.034). For both the Proto-Yamna individual and the Corded Ware
individual, we noticed that shared genetic drift with the Villabruna hunter-gatherer (from the Base set of
outgroups) is underestimated (Z<-2.5), suggesting that there is an excess of hunter-gatherer ancestry
(above and beyond what was part of the Globular Amphora population sample we have) in both. Adding
Serbia Iron Gates hunter-gatherers as a 3rd source results in a successful fit in both Proto-Yamna
(p=0.328) and Corded Ware (p=0.156) with a significant proportion of such ancestry (6.1±2.6% and
2.9±1.2% respectively). We also added Latvia_HG16 from the Baltic region as the 3rd source inspired by
the model of ref.32 which includes an amount of northeastern European ancestry in the Corded Ware. This
model also fits for both the Proto-Yamna (6.2±2.9%; p=0.262) and Corded Ware (3.2±1.3%; p=0.135)
and thus the source of the Villabruna-related ancestry in the Corded Ware and Proto-Yamna cannot be
well-determined geographically. As the territory of the Globular Amphora is located in-between the
Balkans and the Baltic, we think it likely that the Corded Ware was formed by admixture with a local
Globular Amphora-related population that had a slight excess of hunter-gatherer ancestry rather than an
extra pulse of admixture from either the Balkans or the Baltic.


They need a GAC-related source but one with more HG ancestry. Wild guess is it's something related to the Kisapostag / Encrusted Pottery group, they had a lot of HG ancestry.

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

The "Proto-Yamna individual" referenced above is the R1a-M417 guy from Bulgaria. Why they call him "Proto Yamna" and not "Proto Corded Ware" when he is 55% GAC is strange.

Davidski said...

Proto-Yamna is an archeological term, and it doesn't necessarily mean ancestral to Yamnaya. In this instance it's just a very early form of Yamnaya and clearly different from later core Yamnaya.

This burial is quite special and rich in terms of its inventory. There's at least one detailed archeological paper about it.

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

This basically speaks for itself.

https://ibb.co/n6CS2kj

In the Laz paper they went to great lengths to model BA Central Anatolia (Hittites), the only ones with Steppe ancestry. The best model is with Sredni Stih ancestry. Needing Sredni Stih ancestry to model BA Anatolia is evidence for a Western entrance to Anatolia as neither their Hypothesis B or A-East account for the presence of Sredni Stih or Core Yamnaya ancestry in the PIA.

ancestralwhispers.org said...

The J2-M319 man buried in the Krivyanskiy-9 kurgan at Lower Don is dated to 4300 BC and seems to be a pure Steppe Eneolithic:

"The I31755 male had a Caucasus-derived Y-haplogroup, J2a J-M319, variants of which were
shared with Aknashen and Maikop, but he lacked the Aknashen-type Neolithic CHG and instead
exhibited only the older CHG variant related to Mesolithic CHG, like the Berzhnovka/Progress-2
population. His paternal ancestry was rare in the sampled steppe populations. His mt-haplogroup, T2a1b, was widespread among steppe women, found in Ukraine Neolithic, Serednii Stih and Volga Cline groups. In PCA the Krivyanskiy-9 male was very close to the Yamnaya cluster although not in the Yamnaya clade."

VIN1 is described as Yamnaya-like:

"The Yamnaya must have been a subset of the wider “Pre-Yamnaya” population experiencing this admixture, although we can find only scant evidence for others like them, except perhaps the Vin1 sample from Vinogradnoe, one of the individuals of SShi most similar to the Yamnaya."


@Rob

There was a discontinuity in the Volga region with the arrival of a new culture originating from the Lower Don.

"At the turn of 6-5 thousand BC. In the Lower Volga there is a cultural restructuring, which results in the degradation of the Kairshak culture and the emergence in its place of the Orlovskaya (Dzhangaro-Barfolomeevskaya) and Tentexor cultures, the distinctive feature of which is the use of pure prickly ornamentation of pottery. In the Middle Volga, the earliest complex of prickly ceramics was discovered in the lower layers of the Ivanovo site. According to radiocarbon data, it is dated to the beginning of 5 thousand BC. [6, p.61], which, at first glance, does not contradict the accepted chronology of pierced antiquities of the Lower Volga region.

The reason for the disruption of previously existing contacts between the population of the forest-steppe and steppe Volga regions is not entirely clear and requires detailed study. As a working version, it can be assumed that the weakening of meridional contacts between the steppe and forest-steppe Volga region occurred due to the strengthening of the latiudinal direction of connections with the Lower Don region. The following circumstances support this assumption. Firstly, this is the chronological priority of the triangular impaling on the Lower Don compared to the Volga region. According to published data T.D. Belanovskaya, a triangular prick appears in the lowest layers of the multi-layered settlement of Rakushechny Yar, dating back to the beginning of the 6th millennium BC, and continues to be used in the ornamentation of dishes from layers 23 to 8 without interruption [8 , p. 102]. Secondly, the obvious cultural similarity of the population of these regions in the Neolithic-Chalcolithic, identified and scrupulously listed by A.I. Yudin [2, p. 159]. These facts can be assessed either as a result of the migration of part of the Lower Don population to the east, who brought with them to the Volga the tradition of ringed ornamentation of dishes, or as a result of strengthening ties between neighboring regions.
Based on the cultural and chronological differences between the Dzhangar-Barfolomeevskaya (Olovskaya) and Tentexor cultures, it can be assumed that there were several migrations (or periods of increased contact) from the Lower Don to the Volga. One of the earlier ones led to the spread of the triangular pierce in the Lower and Middle Volga and the formation of the Orlovskaya culture, the later caused the spread of the oval pierce and the appearance of the Tentexor culture in the steppe Volga region and the pierced complex of the Vilovatovskaya site in the forest-steppe."

Source: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/problema-kontaktov-stepnogo-i-lesostepnogo-povolzhya-v-rannem-neolite

ancestralwhispers.org said...

This is why I mentioned that Berezhnovka isn't really directly relevant since its origin lies further to the West at Lower Don, where it could have picked up the I-L699 lineage. That's not to say that this confirms that all local I-L699 lineages were replaced in Ukraine. But what we have with VIN1 are burial customs that are completely Steppe Eneolithic associated, the knee position (which was also done in Volga), the trepanation (found in almost all Steppe Eneolithic cultures, with Khvalynsk also practicing a weird form of initiation rite which involves hitting ones skull with a blunt weapon, leaving a very noticeable dent at the top of the skull), and a dagger being placed inside the burial. In contrast the preceding local cultures in the vicinity of the Vinogradne site were inventoryless, no kurgans, and buried with their legs stretched.

ancestralwhispers.org said...

The early Steppe-associated I2 appears to be exclusively I2-L699. In contrast, the Q lineage seems to comprise both Q1a2 and Q1b (Q-BZ1466). There is even more diversity within the J lineage, with Krivyanskiy showing J2. Usatovo at Revova displaying J1-FT265222, which is a very old branch. Assuming there's no deeper call, it could be related to the Karelian EHG J1. Additionally, there's the presence of J1-CTS1026 found in Khvalynsk and Afanasievo. J2b, on the other hand, does not seem to be part of the original J sets and was likely introduced by the South Caucasian part of Nalchik, Meshoko or Maykop (Zhivotilovka).

In terms of R1, V1636 exhibits a significant presence in the Steppes north of the Caucasus. However, the later dominance of R-L23 and M417 poses a mystery, as they do not yet demonstrate a substantial presence in the early Indo-European cultures.

Davidski said...

@ancestralwhispers.org

In terms of R1, V1636 exhibits a significant presence in the Steppes north of the Caucasus. However, the later dominance of R-L23 and M417 poses a mystery, as they do not yet demonstrate a substantial presence in the early Indo-European cultures.

There's no evidence that these are early Indo-European cultures. There's no way to actually link them to any Indo-Europeans.

The furthest we can possibly go back is Sredny Stog, and only because it's ancestral to Yamnaya and Corded Ware. Beyond Sredny Stog it gets way too speculative.

You have to consider that there were also pre-Indo-European, para-Indo-European, and near and far related Indo-European speaking cultures on the steppe. Only a subset of them was actually Indo-European.

Rob said...

@ Ancestral Whispers


I think these Volga-related groups mostly donated autosomal input into the developing PIE, but were not themselves the final common ancestor, because they largely disappeared, whilst I2a-L699 did not - it's almost the prevailing lineage in Balkan steppe related groups. Obviously, R1a-Z645 and R1b-M269 were the main expanders, and they seem to emerge from nowhere.

Im not sure what you mean by 'steppe related' burial. Archaeologists have described 4 or even 6 burial styles in the Eneolithic steppe, and they largely stem from 2 or more Neolithic predecessors

But yes archaeologists did well to anticipate movements of groups from west of the Don toward the lower Volga.




Matt said...

@Ethan, thx. The paper is out too but very thin.

Re; IBD, thanks again. I would note that Caucasus_Maykop did have matches with Yamnaya_Ozera, but she's not in the relevant sets of samples they're looking at in Extended Data Table 5 on page 41.

@Sam: "I'm suprised they found actual recent caucasus geneflow into the Steppe. I forget the name, but there were sites on the Steppe signifcantly north of the Caucauss, with real Caucasus Neolithic admixture.
I know you already knew about this. But to me this is disappointing and it kinda supports Harvard's original theory of more recent geneflow from Caucasus into the Steppe."


Not to get into any argument with you on this, but I don't get how we could be disappointed by finding things that actually happened.

If Nalchik shows some evidence of geneflow from the south up into the piedmont circa 5000 BCE, and, accompanying or at least correlated with pastoralist practices, this is going into the BP group, then that's just what happened. If there's a continution of this ancestry, or a separate wave after dilution that gives us the Remontnoye samples at 3700 BCE, showing some IBD with Yamnaya (see Ethan's comment), likewise. Or a link between Usatovo and the Caucasus that's seen in the IBD links with Steppe Maykop and from Caucasus-like genome wide ancestry (Nitkin: "confirming that the CLV ancestry in Usatove was not from the lower Volga-centered BPgroup, but had a significant proportion of southern Caucasus Neolithic-related ancestry"), then same.

This helps us make more sense of how pastoralist practices could have passed the Caucasus boundary (and I say could have because I know there are folks would debate that the vector was via SE Europe), without more complicated theories about why this wouldn't be accompanied at all by any integration of marriage and reproduction or travel, which isn't really straightforward to explain. So I don't get why we'd be disappointed by learning about what actually happened, and is a more straightforward explanation for cultural change towards these originally Near Eastern domesticated animals. The point of being into this stuff is to understand these processes in human prehistory and history, so from that perspective, how can it disappoint?

Gio said...

@ Davidski

“You have to consider that there were also pre-Indo-European, para-Indo-European, and near and far related Indo-European speaking cultures on the steppe. Only a subset of them was actually Indo-European”.

And elsewhere the steppe they weren’t?

Davidski said...

@Samuel

Nothing to be disappointed about.

Random people moved all over the place. Someone from the Caucasus even made it up to Karelia during the Mesolithic. So there's nothing new there.

Rob said...

I dont think pastoralism was 'introduced from Mesopotamia' But a market for it was, the proto-Urban Middle East with growing populations. All the raw material, and wide open spaces for livestock, were native to the European steppe. They had contact with livestock for at least a millenium already, and domesticate the horse independently. Perhaps some techniques were introduced from the NE to polish it off.
Initially, groups liek Majkop & KA were intermediaries, then the steppe groups appear to have and moved directly south for themselves, esp the post-KA expansion of Catacomb groups. A lot of research on this remains outdated and Mesopotamic centric, despite sexying it up with "residue analysis"

Rob said...

To give another example, the 'sub-Neolithic' Lower Don culture. Some might recall my rebuttles against the hypothesise that these were a key site for introduction of domesticates via the Caucasus corridor.
The older excavations were miscontextualised, and wild animals called 'domestic'. Recent research has shown that these were specialist Fishers. The elements of complexity are autonomous developments due to sedentization. That is why the sampled individuals have closer links to Denmark than they do to south of the Caucasus.
As expected, the first clearly Caucasian individual appears in the Copper Age, occasional individuals moving and settling in; or kept on moving toward the west Balkans.
Even now with this clear evidence, Im sure it'll be a case of Old fairytales die slow.

StP said...

@MaxT wrote April 20, 2024 at 5:18 AM

Do you know this publication by Balanowskaya et al. of April 2023 on the genetics of the population of the eastern and northeastern Caucasus?
https://vestnik.rsmu.press/archive/2023/3/1/abstract?lang=ru
https://vestnik.rsmu.press/archive/2023/3/1/media?lang=ru

mister funk said...

Cattle breeding in the Caucasus appeared much earlier than the Kura Arak and Maikop cultures


"A group of scientists, including researchers from several Russian scientific centers and their international colleagues, discovered when the peoples of the Caucasus and the Oka-Volga-Don region first began to raise livestock for milk. To do this, researchers studied deposits on the teeth of human remains found in these regions. The methodology allows determining when dairy products appeared in the diet of ancient peoples. It turned out that in the Caucasus, sheep dairy farming began as early as 7,000 years ago, while on the plains, this type of animal husbandry appeared a little later."

https://www.rscf.ru/news/humanitarian-sciences/sekrety-zubnogo-kamnya/

Mike said...

Without an extensive sampling covering the early and middle Eneolithic periods, it will be difficult to adequately understand the origin of the main Indo-European lineages, such as R1a-m417 and R1b-m269. In the Lower Don region, there is a significant number of burials dating from the beginning to the middle period of the Eneolithic, as well as some burials from the Neolithic period. In the Dnieper Rapids region, there are hundreds of burials belonging to the post-Mariupol type and other post-Stog groups. Those laboratories should put more effort in solve the question.





StP said...

Among the Nogais (Karanogais!) north-eastern Caucasus, almost 100% Steppe in Admixture K=3 and K=10.
On a certain table I see Karanogais R1a-M458(n.2) and R198(n.18); R1b, various subgroups around n.20

rozenblatt said...

@StP Regarding that paper by Balanovskaya: the authors only use modern DNA in their analysis. As such, what they call "Steppe cluster" is cluster based on modern population of Eurasian Steppe, so people like Kazakhs, Karakalpaks etc. It is not the same as Bronze Age Steppe cluster.

Slumbery said...

@Romolus

I bring this here from the other tread, it is more relevant here anyway.

"Explain to me what other culture is

-it must have certainly been to the west of the Core Yamnaya
-and at the same time the geographic neighbor of the Yamnaya."


I do not think I am the one who should explain this. Usatove as Proto Corded Ware does not work according to the explicitly stated fine analysis of the authors. What other known archeological culture can be at play do not know. Usatove is southwest of the assumed core Yamna population, what was northwest at the time?

mister funk said...

@StP
in this article the steppe is associated with the Turkic Kazakh Nogais, and not with the people who lived in the Early Bronze Age xD
The greatest interest for me is that with an increase in the parameter K, each people of Dagestan, including the Iranian-speaking Tats, acquire their own color, i.e., as if on the admix graphs, it is clear that they become an independent people
Another interesting thing is what is meant by the Caucasus at low K, Kubachi people? It would be interesting to look at a similar graph for the Yamnaya culture, how much “yellow” and “green” they have

Synome said...

@epoch

"Akkadian was one of the most used languages in documentation of the old Hittite kingdom. Why not assume there was a Mesopotamian ancestry source already waiting in Anatolia?"

Indeed, the authors themselves state on page 208 of the supplement:

"In conclusion it is possible that the Çayönü-related ancestry in TUR_C_BA could reflect populations on
the path from southeastern Anatolia to central Anatolia and future studies may clarify if the admixture
occurred in the east of the Hittite area followed by migration of the admixed population, or in Central
Anatolia itself."

So they causally label the modeled Cayonu ancestry as Mesopotamian in most of the paper discussion, but they admit could have just as easily been in Anatolia already.

Tobias said...

I fail to see what Indo-European has anything to do with all this.

Kartvelian - Aknashen - CHG/Anatolian
Northwest Caucasian - Armenia_C - EHG/CHG/Anatolian
Hurro-Urartian - Kura Araxes - IranN/CHG/Anatolian
Northeast Caucasian - Armenia_MLBIA - Yamnaya(BHG)/IranN/CHG/Anatolian

Ryan said...

@David - "So we can use the same model with the same expectations for Hittites as for Mycenaens."

You'd think if they branched out from PIE at a similar time via a similar route the languages would be more similar though, no?

Davidski said...

@Ryan

I didn't say that Anatolians and Mycenaens branched out at the same time.

What I said was that their ancestors moved from the steppe via a similar route and faced roughly the same conditions, so the same basic expectations apply when it comes to things like mixing along the way and the dilution of genetic ancestry.

But they obviously ended up in different places, so my comparison says nothing about the linguistic relationship between Greek and Hittite.

And if the steppe ancestors of the Mycenaens didn't pick up any Iron Gates ancestry and they somehow managed to impose their language on a majority of people already living in a complex society, then there's no reason why we shouldn't expect that something very similar happened in Anatolia.

It really should be obvious that the Mycenaen model is the model that we need to apply broadly to the Anatolian expansion, because the parallels are very clear.

Ryan said...

@David - "And if the steppe ancestors of the Mycenaens didn't pick up any Iron Gates ancestry and they somehow managed to impose their language on a majority of people already living in a complex society, then there's no reason why we shouldn't expect that something very similar happened in Anatolia."

I agree with the process being similar, but I'm a bit confused by Iron Gates comment. The argument for the A-East theory seems to be that the steppe source population for Anatolia lacked Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry relative to Core Yamnaya. Is that true of the steppe source in Myceneans too?

I suppose that doesn't entirely rule out a western route - the Csongrád and Giurgiuleşti samples are pre-Yamnaya and well to the south and west as well, so there was some sort of pre-Yamnaya movement out of the steppe. But it would rule out Yamnaya as the vector.

Rob said...

Sticking to the example of proto-Greek, It's fairly simple, all we have to do is follow the evidence. But misunderstanding the Family Tree model makes some people straight-jacketed in their thinking: ''but but the Tree says Greek & Aremanian form a clade''.

Firstly, they dont a priori. There are some correspondences but nothing definitive. Some articles will make some ''statistical'' inferences and come up with their own Tree claims, but you cant do statistics to words. And the evidence from classical linguistiscs is not strong enough for fragmentary ancient languages and the stochastic effects of loss/ preservation.

Secondly, forget what you read on Twitter or fora such as GeneArchivist which is the usual inane projections about R1b-M269/ L51 or Albanian amateurs proclaiming that the entire Balkans, incl Greece, was founded by '6 foot Albanian Yamnayans" LOL.
Instead, an awareness of academic linguistic articles discussing the role of convergent phenomena shows how this is consistent with what we see at the population level: the movement which contributed Greeks (I2a-L699 in Theopetra cave) and I2a-L699 in Luwia implies a partial common origin, ultimately from Sredni Stog & Cernavoda-Usatavo. The divergence comes from the fact that proto-Greeks stayed in the central-eastern Balkans for another few hundreds years before moving into Greece itself, whilst the others moved into Anatolia. Those pre-proto-Greeks were then joined by a later, larger pulse of R1b-Z2103, and then moved into Greece. On the other hand, the early Anatolian venturers met a completely different substrata and might have converged with those R1b-V3616 groups in the East, but again what the fanboys of the eastern route don't understand is that Arslantepe was conquered by the Hittites only in 1600 BC.


Davidski said...

@Ryan

I'm still getting my head around all the models and stats in the paper, but it seems like Sredny Stog is good enough as a source of steppe ancestry in Hittite speakers.

https://ibb.co/n6CS2kj

In any case, there's another issue that we need to keep in mind here, and that's the likelihood that steppe ancestry was introduced into Anatolia via the Caucasus by people who didn't speak Indo-European.

For instance, it's plausible that Hurrians spread steppe ancestry from the Caucasus into Anatolia of the type that lacks Ukraine Neolithic input.

But this doesn't complicate anything if there's evidence of a steppe-related migration via the Balkans into western Anatolia that corroborates the classic steppe hypothesis.

Ryan said...

@David - Good points.

EthanR said...

The higher Steppe individual MA2203 shows elevated ANF or Balkan ancestry vs the other BA central Anatolians when I examine it.
AC-BC for the above gives results suggesting that C is something broadly south european.

I'm not sure how relevant the sampled SS will be for modelling them though.
Suvorove are close to BP group (shifted toward Khvalynsk). Cernavoda want a BP group steppe source (see analysis in Nikitin supplement). Usatovo is more heterogeneous but seem to want PV group.

The profiles that expanded westward have profiles a bit more eastern than the sampled Dnipro SS. I think it is likely that somewhere around the lower Don, or between it and the lower Volga, existed a more Progress-rich population rich in I-L699. One of the sampled Berezhnovka already is I-L699. Perhaps this kind of group is responsible for Cernavoda.
Where I-P78 is to be found I'm not really sure. Hopefully when this data gets released it will show up on the Steppe.

MaxT said...

Some more on that and BP group ancestry in Central Anatolia.

"How and when did this blend reach Central Anatolia? We note that populations along the path from the steppe to Central Anatolia can all be modeled with BP group ancestry and distinctive substratum ancestries along the north-south / Caucasus-Mesopotamia cline: Aknashen-related in the North Caucasus Maikop; Masis Blur-related in the South Caucasus Chalcolithic population of Armenia at Areni-1; and Mesopotamian Neolithic for the Central Anatolian Bronze Age (Extended Data Fig. 1e, f). This series of admixtures had certainly begun by ca. 4300-4000BCE (the date range of the Armenia_C population9 558 ) and can be dated using DATES to 4382±63BCE (Extended Data Fig. 2f). The Pre-Pottery Neolithic population of Çayönü was itself genetically halfway between that of Mardin10 560 , 200km to the east, and the Central Anatolian pottery Neolithic at Çatalhöyük along the east-west / Mesopotamian-Anatolian cline. Chalcolithic/Bronze Age people from Southeastern and Central Anatolia all had ancestry from the same Çatalhöyük563 Mardin continuum and such populations may have been proximal sources for the Çayönü-related ancestry of the Central Anatolian Bronze Age population (Supplementary Information section 2). If the Proto-Anatolian population was formed in this region by the admixture of CLV cline people with Mesopotamian ones then their descendants may have been present there at the unknown site of Armi whose Anatolian personal names are recorded by their neighbors in the kingdom of Ebla in Syria. 568 50 We thus propose the following hypothesis: that CLV cline people migrated southwards ca. 4400BCE, or about a millennium before the appearance of the Yamnaya, (admixing with different substratum populations along the way) and then westwards before finally reaching Central Anatolia."

Rob said...

Their scenario is plausible, but one could use clsoer samples from central Anatolia, such as Buyukaya and Camlibel Tarlasi. Cayonu is 7000 years earlier and from the Syrian border. So I don't really follow their reasoning for preferentially using Cayanu. Yes it lies on a cline between Catalhoyuk and Madrin (which isnt even C14 dated). Maybe Matt has some thoughts ?
Speaking to Turkish archaeologists, they dont really seen any Mesopotamian intrusion happening around this time.

mister funk said...

Do you still think that North Caucasian hunters were similar to the hunters of the South Caucasus? at least from the article it is clear that the population of the Volga wedge included a mixture similar to the Georgian CHG and Iran+ane, similar to ttk001

mister funk said...

Steppe en
https://i.postimg.cc/HWhky3kw/Screenshot-31.png

Matt said...

@Rob, no I don't have any specific thoughts about it (Cayonu), but will keep that question in mind.

....

With caveat that haven't read modelling in detail, on some of the other comment in the thread (discussion between David and Ryan), I think their argument about preferring A-East over A-West may not be too dependent on any assumptions about Iron Gates related ancestry at all really, but to do with lacking any of a range of Balkan/SE European or (West of Central Anatolia) combinations of Anatolian+WHG ancestry plus Sredni-Stog or Usatavo.

Even if we were to say, "Well, the Balkans had populations without Iron Gates ancestry, almost pure NW Anatolian Early Neolithic by ancestry, so perhaps the Sredni-Stog ancestry was diluted by such a population without Iron Gates, before reaching Anatolia?" then perhaps they think that model itself doesn't really work well. I'm not sure if they test it though.

Or at least to be more unlikely than the models of CLV ancestry (without the additional Ukraine_N in Sredni-Stog) via the Eastern route.

Turning to a model of purely Sredni-Stog plus Anatolian Copper Age (or apparently earlier and possibly anachronistic?) would not be any of the models in their competing set; as taken literally it would literally propose *no* dilution in the Balkans (whether by a population with Barcin_Neo+HG or purely Barcin_Neo).

I think they'd find that idea strange to apply, which is why they've discounted it. It'd be like "Well, here's this Sredny-Stog population that's an offshoot of CLV plus Ukraine_N. Now only part of it later seems to explode as Yamnaya/Corded Ware (and otherwise it doesn't really expand at all), but we're proposing that earlier, in a form undiluted by any movement through the Balkans, it shows up in Anatolia, without any of the uniparental markers that are more uniquely associated with it, and then effects a transfer of language".

It's a distal model that might pass, but there is a question when you look at the plausible proximal trail. It's a purely statistical model that doesn't take any other limiting factors into consideration.

They think models with dilution are more plausibly, and that such a trail of dilution is only plausible via the East route.

Overall, feels like guess the dna evidence here is relatively inconclusive about Indo-Anatolian (it is questionable to use Cayonu PPN as others here have raised?) and we would probably still do better to hew closer to the linguists' opinion (which favours A-West) in absence of any conclusive genetic model information?

Still, maybe the findings of some pulses of ancestry moving north across the Caucasus might fit with some of those ideas that proto-Indo-Anatolian had contact effects or substrate or borrowed lexicon from Caucasian languages?

Rob said...

@ Arsen

''Do you still think that North Caucasian hunters were similar to the hunters of the South Caucasus? at least from the article it is clear that the population of the Volga wedge included a mixture similar to the Georgian CHG and Iran+ane, similar to ttk001
Steppe en
https://i.postimg.cc/HWhky3kw/Screenshot-31.png''


These are Eneolithic individuals, so unlikely to be representative of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the North Caucasus. Maybe the Satanay genome will tell us (from what abstract says mixed EHG/CHG? )

StP said...

@ Arsen wrote: Do you still think that North Caucasian hunters were similar to the hunters of the South Caucasus? at least from the article it is clear that the population of the Volga wedge included a mixture similar to the Georgian CHG and Iran+ane, similar to ttk001"

E.W.Balanovska et al. 2023 in (ru)
“The role of the Caucasian, Iranian and Steppe populations in the formation of the diversity of the autosomal gene pool of the Eastern Caucasus”,
wrote that:
The "steppe" genetic layer in the Eastern Caucasus constitutes almost the entire gene pool, 91%, only among the Karanogais, and in the remaining genomes of the region it ranges from 7% among the peoples of Dagestan to 19% in Azerbaijan…
The "steppe" layer is associated with the late and slight influence of the Eurasian steppe…
However, the results indicate that this "steppe" layer constitutes the basis of the gene pools of many peoples of the Caspian region (Astrakhan Nogais, Karakalpaks, Turkmen), reflecting a powerful genetic component over a vast space.

My question:
And what role did the genomes of the Karanogais population play for the entire CLV formation? Were they the initiators, the beginning or just part of it?Moje pytanie:
A jaką rolę spełniły genomy populacji Karanogais dla całej formacje CLV

Aram said...

What about the R1a sample from Glavaneshti in Romania.

If I remember correctly it was M417 and had autosomes similar to CLV?

Davidski said...

@Matt

It might be useful to keep in mind that they couldn't find any steppe ancestry in Bronze Age Anatolia until this paper.

Rob said...

In the supplement they suggest they can obtain passing models without steppe ancestry
Anyhow, the issue with west Black Sea samples is their immense diversity, despite that they all have a little or a lot of En steppe type ancestry. It would be a necessary but painstaking task to examine each as a source for admixture into Anatolia, that’s why En Volga steppe worked. It’s still a more distally based model which passes easier

epoch said...

@Matt

"They think models with dilution are more plausibly, and that such a trail of dilution is only plausible via the East route."

The point is that the expansion of steppe in the Balkans wasn't something that happened smoothly. The Chalcolithic Tell cultures collapsed and everything was on the move.

Like Steppe ancestry popped up all of a sudden in Hungary.

We know 3500 BC a steppe cultural burial site was there at the doorstep of Anatolia.

mister funk said...

@Роб

I did not say that these steppe en are hunter-gatherers, I said that they are part of the Volga wedge of the Eneolithic of the Caucasus, a population close to Samara hunters descended along the Volga down to the Caucasus, perhaps 6-5 thousand years ago, met there a population of North Caucasian hunter-shepherds who were similar (but not a mixture) chg_iran +ane_iran (ttk001 close population), and this is how the Volga wedge was born including steppe en and Khvalynsk
here in the picture of mixtures, the Volga wedge is approximated so that when EHG (in this particular case, the Samara hunter from lebyazhinka) tends to zero, only the chg_iran_ane typical population remains

https://i.postimg.cc/8cZ4BRhn/Screenshot-30.png

Matt said...

@epoch, if that's proposing a "no dilution" model where some Sredni Stog branching people moved quickly down the coast and then into Anatolia, then I think the group behind this paper would suggest that to then, that kind of direct model is less plausible because it has a hard time explaining why the small group's language should prevail (and again without apparent significant disruption in y-dna).

Which is why they prefer the models that allow for serial dilution.

Davidski said...

@Matt

There's no point creating a new abstract reality based on opinions about how genetic ancestry dilutes just to end up with a statistically clean and elegant model.

The only useful thing to do is to look at what happened in the real world, like in Greece and Hungary.

Neither the ancestors of the Mycenaens or Hungarians were discussing whether what they were doing was statistically hard to explain.

StP said...

@Aram wrote... April 22, 2024 at 3:29 AM
„What about the R1a sample from Glavaneshti in Romania.
If I remember correctly it was M417 and had autosomes similar to CLV?”

The sample from Glavanesti in Romania was marked as R1a-Z93* (about 5300-5000 yBP).
If we call CLV from Lazaridis PIE "formed", then Glavanesti Z93* could be PIE "MRCA" (about 5300-5000 yBP).
I saw a note in the text on the front page of the paper by Sirak et al. 2019/2020 pdf
It was also entered into the ANE catalogue.
It was also quoted by Carlos Quiles:
Human auditory ossicles as an alternative optimal source of ancient DNA in BiorXiv
https://indo-european.eu/2020/03/earliest-r1a-z93-from-late-trypillian-in-the-podolian-volhynian-upland/
The records soon disappeared, which may mean that the Y-DNA testing of the Glavanest sample was programmatic and intended for another publication.
My attempt to contact Dr. Sirak (Türkiye) to ask for clarification was unsuccessful.Attempt to contact Dr. Sirak (Türkiye) failed.

Matt said...

@Davidski, but in Mycenaean Greece do we not have exactly a serial dilution model for the ancestors all the way down to Southern Greece? I'm not sure what the analogy was pointing at?

mister funk said...

@Rob

Here's a little more food for thought: this is an approximate map of archaeological cultures for the Caucasus and steppe zone around 5000 BCE. I've marked with a triangle the area where sheep bones were found.

https://i.postimg.cc/9XwKc27c/Screenshot-32.png

Another interesting fact is that the Volga Wedge is linked to the Eneolithic of the northeastern Caucasus. Look, there's a little sheep figurine drawn above my house

https://i.postimg.cc/NFnz7NSq/Screenshot-33.png

Ethan said...

It's interesting that they couldn't seem to get Kura Araxes models to work for BA central Anatolia, even though one of them works for ChL central Anatolia (I'm not sure which samples constitute that set). It's also interesting that ChL central Anatolia doesn't seem to contribute to the BA (this seems wrong).

For the Steppe ancestry, I still wouldn't discount dilution scenarios where this largely happens in Thrace or NW Anatolia itself.
Kartal has some WHG-like ancestry which seems to be the problem for them.(they think it's from Trypillia, which constitutes 50% of KTL_A's ancestry). But it's easy to imagine more southern profiles.

Hopefully the paper mentioned by Kristiansen brings some relevant samples.

mister funk said...

Take into account that the Samara hunter from Lebyazhinka has a bit of CHG in his mix, so he consumes a bit of this mixture on this mixture chart.

epoch said...

@Matt

Fair point. But collapse can be a vector for that, because small groups could become important survival points and thus their influence can become large in recovery. Mind you, the North-West of Anatolia also saw collapse and recovery.

Cultural steppe influences exceeded genetic influences after the recovery.

And let me repeat what the connection with NE Balkans is in Besiktas. They found figurines similar to Chalcolithic figurines from the Balkans, with so called Vinca culture runes. In a graveyard with kurgans, some burials, but mostly cremation, so of mixed cultural heritage. The only steppe cultures that have similar figurines were Usatove (Mayaki) and Cernavoda I.

That is pretty big evidence, I'd say.

https://arkeonews.net/runic-alphabet-symbols-in-the-tombs-found-in-the-excavations-in-istanbul/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_symbols

Ryan said...

@Matt - " I think their argument about preferring A-East over A-West may not be too dependent on any assumptions about Iron Gates related ancestry at all really, but to do with lacking any of a range of Balkan/SE European or (West of Central Anatolia) combinations of Anatolian+WHG ancestry plus Sredni-Stog or Usatavo."

Yah, that's a point I didn't mention (still digesting the paper). One argument against A-West is that the dilution in the Balkans or West Anatolia would have been CHG poor, requiring a second dilution with a CHG-rich population. If the intrusion into Anatolia was sudden though and the dilution all occurred within Anatolia then I'm not sure that's still an issue for A-West?

"and we would probably still do better to hew closer to the linguists' opinion (which favours A-West) "

Which linguistics are those? Would be curious to see. The one solid paper I saw that tackled the issue seemed to indirectly at least support A-East (or at least Anatolian picking up advanced agricultural terms from a different source than all other IE languages). That is why I favour A-East while I recognize the genetic data is still very inconclusive.

@David - Looking at the supplemental again, I think I misinterpreted the UNHG argument in my previous comments. It looks like their models disfavour their steppe source having more UNHG than Core Yamnaya, but can't rule out the steppe source having UNHG levels equal to Core Yamnaya. Is that your interpretation of that too?

They seem to imply that the Balkans and Balkans-adjacent Yamnaya samples (see Extended Data Table 4) have greater UNHG and EEF ancestry than can be explained by their model, but I don't see those populations formally tested as sources for Anatolian speakers. Does anyone else see such a test?

Ryan said...

@David - I think the historic Hungarian example of an elite coming in and imposing their language/culture, then the same elites getting mostly wiped out by further warfare, is pretty darned valuable too. Presumably either half of this scenario played out many times in situations where we lack historical records.

George said...

Could Anatolians ship along the coast (east of Black sea or west)? It's improbable that CLV people living on Volga, Don, Azov, Caspian, Black Sea wasn't seafaring nation (probably using Dugout canoe/monoxyla)

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

I'm trying to understand what exactly SShi is from the models in the paper and it is very obtuse. The admixture model is clear but useless. The other models don't really work, some of them involve modelling SShi as coming from Core Yamnaya?wtf circular definition, we have some back to the future situation going on.

mister funk said...

@Rob

here is a little bit of what I translated from a book on the history of Dagestan, the book is quite old

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LqfnumwN8qv0gs2BHcLzWpoqXwyi5Ec6YsJgFSTQ0L0/edit?usp=sharing

if necessary, I will send a translation with the Paleolithic of the North-Eastern Caucasus, but there is not much information there

Rob said...

@ Arsen
Right, you're saying the TTK-type eastern ancestry was already preent in north Caucasian HGs before ~ 4500 BC ? Possible, would be interesting to see


@ Matt
I don't have them on hand atm, but I did obtain passing & sensible qpAdm models for a couple of Anatolian BA individuals with BGR_Yamnaya a while ago.

Rob said...

@ Romulus

The A-East model is just a back-door for the B -southeast model :)


@ Arsen

From your summary. ''The first steps towards transitioning from a hunting-gathering economy to agriculture and animal husbandry were taken. ''

I doubt it. There is no solid evidence for agriculture in Caucasus, including NE, until the Chalcolithic. These claims are based on old Soviet theories which have not come to fruition.


Rob said...

''The one solid paper I saw that tackled the issue seemed to indirectly at least support A-East (or at least Anatolian picking up advanced agricultural terms from a different source than all other IE languages). ''

Even if these sorts of murky, indirect language substrate exercises are valid, the different source could be a different group of EEF (e.g Haemangia/ Gulemnitsa vs GAC).

EthanR said...

@Romulus
See PCA on page 11 of the paper.
SShi is Core Yamnaya drifted toward Golubaya Krinitsa or some other WHG/EHG mixed source. "hi" just means it's closer to Yamnaya than SSmed and SSlo.

By implication, assuming the authors are correct, it's more like Remontnoye+Golubaya Krinitsa.

mister funk said...


at least this is the conclusion I received from this article by Lazaridis, looking at these mixture graphs and PCA coordinates, it is clear that CHG at the Volga wedge correlates directly proportionally with TTK, and it is unlikely that it is associated with EHG from Samara, or from anywhere else
I also believe that this mixture associated with ttk reached the northern Caucasus through the southern Caspian Sea, and much earlier than 4500 BC

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ryan said...

Interesting thread from Lazaridis on Corded Ware. Argues they descend from Yamnaya with some sort of founder effect or something.

https://x.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1782510956188451109?s=46

@Rob - I don’t entirely disagree, but you would think European farmers would have pretty similar agricultural terms though, no? Especially in Eastern Europe. And what EEF group would have ran into that none of the other IE groups did?

mister funk said...

@Rob, This is how I saw this model of PCA graphs, I immediately noticed where these two clines were heading, one originates from the upper Volga and Kama, where the EHG lived since ancient times (Mesolithic Sidelkino, then Samara hunters), the other originates from the UNHG, in this in the clin are located the Golubaya Krinitsa (which is older than the steppe_en, so they cannot descend from them), as well as samples of the Yamnaya from the lower Don, and the Yamnayas themselves, do you see where these two clines lead? where do they converge? just in the "plane" of iran-chg-ane

https://i.postimg.cc/pTqvZ6KW/Screenshot-34.png

Davidski said...

@Ryan

Interesting thread from Lazaridis on Corded Ware. Argues they descend from Yamnaya with some sort of founder effect or something.

It's the opposite.

Core Yamnaya is the obvious founder effect, while Corded Ware is more diverse.

Corded Ware appears to be the result of a contact zone in the forest steppe in Ukraine between groups like Yamnaya and Usatovo.

The end result was a movement into the forest zone, but I don't know why.

EthanR said...

After plotting what their model is trying to say I can see why it works.
https://i.imgur.com/PULw7jt.png
Also:
-Camlibel Tarlasi is already pretty close to the BA group.
-KTL A shouldn't be modeled as one set, and that's probably the reason they got so few working models for them.
-MA2203 from the Hittite set behaves differently from the others.

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

Apparently I20079 is Usatove archeologically? but Yamnaya genetically, not Usatove

Rob said...

@ Ryan

''I don’t entirely disagree, but you would think European farmers would have pretty similar agricultural terms though, no? Especially in Eastern Europe. And what EEF group would have ran into that none of the other IE groups did?''

Literature has assumed that 'Neolithic Farmers' are some monolithic block, tacitly or not-so-tacitly influenced by the traditional kurgan narrative which places them as one big "Old Europe", as Kroonen plainly admits in his Agricultural Substrate Hypothesis.
But there are in fact several different Neolithic blocks. Even with the common thread of Anatolian-derived terminology, there are some in the West Black Sea region which showed a second wave of a Iran-Caucasus enriched group. There are then those, like GAC, which are basically farming-adapted hunters, thus altogether different.

Ultimately, all this lacks evidence, as there are no inscriptions or writings, but inferences from random survival in later languages. I think it is very hard to construct a linguistic landscape of Neolithic from Iron Age Germanic languages. Nothing wrong with attempting inference, though

Rob said...

@ Ethan is MA2203 the Hittite period individual pulled toward the balkans ?
Comparted to CT, all those Bronze Age central Anatolians seem shifted toward Usatavo.

EthanR said...

@Rob
Yes, that's the one.
As for the others it seems a bit ambiguous, at least visually, if we are to assume Central Anatolia was CT-like before this.

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

Hypothesis A-East or B both require that PIE came from some population devoid of Sredni Stii ancestry and was then essentially female mediated into Sredni Stii to form Core Yamnaya. I find that hard to accept.

DragonHermit said...

Lazaridis pretty much covered everything I wanted to say on Twitter for both the CLV and Yamnaya theories, so I won't bother repeating most of it.

The western route made sense when archeologists thought PIE's origin was in Western Ukraine or something. The CLV throws that out the window. CLV region is literally a few hundred miles north of east Anatolia. To think these people would circumvent the entire Black Sea (and on foot like some here suggested), and end up just south of where they started is a completely absurd suggestion.

I agreed that the Southern Arc conclusion was stupid, and David provided enough evidence against it. But now all the CW/Euro-centric people here are behaving like the Out-Of-India cultists/conspiracy theorists. Fact of the matter is Proto-Anatolians are the CLVs that migrated south. Also, Yamnaya > CW. If some posters want to smash their head against a wall, by all means have at it, but academia has clearly moved in this direction for years. You're just fighting science and tilting at the windmill at this point.

mister funk said...

@DragonHermit

Davidski adheres to the A-west theory, so I also think that this theory is correct, in such things you need knowledge of mathematics and logical thinking to understand that this theory is the most correct
Regarding the fact that the proto-Anatolians are CLV who migrated to the south, it turns out that the people from the Areni cave were proto-Anatolians? I asked several times what language they spoke, now I’ll know)
they invented sneakers, miniskirts and tequila

St said...

A quick observation: In the Kroonen study's table (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275744), I counted how many Hittite agricultural terms have cognates in Proto-Greek—eight out of ten. For comparison, four are presented also in the Indo-Iranian languages. The ninth term is not represented in Greek but is present in Albanian. That aside, it's uncertain whether this is a coincidence or if it indicates a special connection between the speakers of Greek languages and the Hittites, such as the absorption of the same Neolithic substrate (or same agricultural practices?) It might suggest also a Hittite substrate in Greece before the Mycenaeans' arrival, or in Anatolia, the Balkans, the northwest Black Sea region, the Caucasus, elsewhere. Alternatively, it could support an Anatolian trajectory of the Greek migration or, conversely, a Balkan trajectory (or a homeland..) of the Hittites, who would have belonged to the Paleo-Balkan group encountered by the Greeks upon their arrival in the later case. It might also imply a period of exchange between Hittites and Proto-Greeks in Anatolia. However, the shared agricultural vocabulary between the Mycenaeans and Hittites suggest the absorption of a shared Neolithic substrate, to the exclusion of the rest of the Indo-European groups...

Rob said...

@ Dragon Hermit

I don't think one internally self-contradictive preprint constitutes "the current academic consensus". People were claiming that the southern scenario is the new concensus.
These sorts of topics need to be backed by context and theory at the very least.
Your 'facts of matter' are uninformed & 1-dimensional claims which merely project your own complexes.

St said...

For comparison, the Baltic languages share 14 agricultural terms with Slavic (a known connection), while Italic languages share 9 agricultural terms with Celtic (also a known connection), and Indic languages share 9 terms with Iranian (another known connection). Conversely, Armenian/Iranian have 4 cognates (with no proposed connection), and Tocharian/Germanic have 6 cognates (also with no proposed connection). The sharing of 9 agricultural terms between otherwise unrelated and asynchronous Indo-European languages might suggest a partially shared influence from an agricultural substrate. This scenario is unlikely if the Mycenaeans migrated from the west and the Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the east, unless the Proto-Greeks indeed migrated from the west but were first shaped in Anatolia and later trekked to the Balkans. P.S. I should correct my previous post - while Hittite and Greek indeed share a total of 8 terms, only two of them are uniquely shared, to the exclusion of any other Indo-European language.

Rob said...

@ Dragon Hermit

'' Fact of the matter is Proto-Anatolians are the CLVs that migrated south''

And that the clearest evidence for this is in western-central Anatolia.
And the only non-slave context European related male lineages also come from western Anatolia and from the west.
Who cares if they walked there or paddled on a rubber duckie

EastPole said...

@Davidski
“Core Yamnaya is the obvious founder effect, while Corded Ware is more diverse.

Corded Ware appears to be the result of a contact zone in the forest steppe in Ukraine between groups like Yamnaya and Usatovo.

The end result was a movement into the forest zone, but I don't know why.”

But it also could be the result of a contact zone in the forest steppe in Ukraine between groups like Serednii Stih Proto-Yamna population and Trypillian/Globular Amphora.


https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0285449


TRB, GAC and Trypillia were the first neolithic cultures with wagons. From them Serednii Stih Proto-Yamna got it and transformed into Yamnaya and CWC.

Matt said...

@Ryan, I guess it's possible you could have some dilution of a SS+Anatolia_Neo population and then within Anatolia, some process grinds down specifically the Anatolia_Neo related excess?

@Ryan, there's promise for an abstract as I think the most recent EAA (not sure if it was some other conference) where it seems that there will be a paper have an ongoing transect from Hungary over time during the pre- and post-Hun migration era. So (in some pretty fine detail) we could see how much there is progressive dilution simply explaining things (where there's just this pretty small founding population and their numbers don't expand, although perhaps just due to warfare, and they get demographically diluted to almost nothing over time) vs any sudden shifts (where they're pretty prominent one generation, and then the next much reduced in an almost absolute way).

...

@Romulus; I guess by contrast, I don't have any problem with a scenario where a group retains its patrilocal dominance, but learns another language, becomes bilingual, to facilitate bride-exchange, and then that language by chance becomes the language for the community.

Similarly I don't have any confidence as to we can say whether the groups that formed with a heavy HG dominance in y-dna in France, in the Neolithic, spoke a language from the HG forefathers, or from their dominant autosomal fraction.

I'd guess that if the scenario is driven by a smaller number of hunters or fishers are exchanging goods and partners with a large number of herders or farmers, then that would tend to favour the smaller party becoming bilingual (unless there are specific middlemen in the larger group, which is very possible). People often learn languages because they're useful to them for trade or travel, and cultural commitment to retaining the ancestral language and how much people see the language as essential to some group heritage, variable.

But I recognize that we don't really have any good evidence of how likely this is or isn't, in these prehistoric scenarios. Perhaps this is a naive view from me? I can't say that the other argument, which seems to be that patrilocal groups would never ever under any circumstances absent state compulsion allow a shift from the language of their forefathers, is actually incorrect. (Apologies if this seemed exaggerated, just how it seems to me to boil down).

StP said...

@ DragonHermit said...
„Fact of the matter is Proto-Anatolians are the CLVs that migrated south. Also, Yamnaya > CW. If some posters want to smash their head against a wall, by all means have at it, but academia has clearly moved in this direction for years. You're just fighting science and tilting at the windmill at this point.” April 22, 2024 at 10:50 PM

Indo-Europeanists write that the Anatolian language was like pre-PIE, early and incomplete PIE. The CLV language was certainly like thatIndo-Europeanists write that the Anatolian language was an early and incomplete PIE. The CLV language was certainly like that!

StP said...

@All, Note this modern distinction in PIE languages:

E.g. Kassian et al. 2021 make a distinction between inner-PIE and outlier-PIE
„The following cases must be noted:
1)Nuclear IE (all without Hittite), p = 0.7. As follows from the MrBayes table of bipartitions (Table S1), the main competitive hypothesis is that Hittite and Tocharian form a distinct clade, its posterior probability is relatively high: p = 0.25. It is not entirely clear how to interpret such a result, it can hardly be explained by the long branch attraction effect.
2)Inner IE (all without Hittite and Tocharian), p = 0.8. The main competitive hypothesis (Table S1) is that Greek-Armenian and Tocharian form a distinct clade with p = 0.15.
3)The Balto-Slavic–Indo-Iranian clade has a low probability p = 0.76 in the Bayesian tree Figure S2e due to the unstable position of Albanian which can be inserted within this clade in some sampled trees available in the MrBayes output files *.runX.t: either [[Balto-Slavic, Albanian], Indo-Iranian] p = 0.18 or [Balto-Slavic, [Indo-Iranian, Albanian]] p = 0.06. Since Albanian is raised to a higher level in the manual consensus tree Figure 2, the sum of the aforementioned probabilities can be taken as the cumulative probability of the Balto-Slavic–Indo-Iranian clade with or without Albanian: p = 1.”

Alexei S. Kassian: Rapid radiation of the inner Indo-European languages: an advanced approach to Indo-European lexicostatistics
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2020-0060/html

Aram said...

R1b-PF7562 from Yamnaya culture site in Romania. We discussed this with Gaska previously and now it's confirmed.
PF7562 is remarkable because it was found in Mycenean Greeks.

Rob said...

@ StP
Is that similar to how Dravidian languages come from Europe ?

Rob said...

Looking at the samples in detail, it is clear that steppe ancestry peaks in Western Anatolia, + MA2203 who is pulled toward them
Even Isparta in southwest Anatolia has more steppe ancestry than Arslantepe R1b boy (~ 0%).
This is consistent with a large swath of Luwian inscription in SW Anatolia

https://imgur.com/v65ojU7 (direct link)

QED.


StP said...

@Rob said...
StP, Is that similar to how Dravidian languages come from Europe ?

If you attribute the idea of some kinship between parts of the European and Dravidian genomes to me, I feel honored (without any major merits of mine!). Thank you!
And this PIE language tree is also my achievement? Thank you!

Rob said...

NB: adding Piedmont_EN didnt change the picture above

mister funk said...

@Rob

amazing, I didn’t even think that in the Copper Age of Western Anatolia there was such a high origin connected with Chernovoda and the steppe

Gaska said...

@Aram-

I don't think you understand the movement of the Baltic markers into the Volga and Central Asia. The origin of M73 is in the Baltic and its appearance in Volosovo, Botai etc until ending in Yamnaya is the demonstration of what I have always said i.e. the obvious genetic connection between the Baltic HGs and the EHGs. The sample closer in time indicates the origin of this marker in both Afanasievo and Yamnaya.

*I4630 (7.272 BCE)-ZVEJ30-Zvejnieki II, Latvia_HG-HapY-R1b1a/1a-P297>Y13200
*I12964 (3.267 BCE)-Sakhtish2a, burial34, Volosovo, Russia-HapY-R1b1a/1a-Y13200
*I20559 (3.003 BCE)-Afanasieva-Gora, Afanasievo-Yenisei -HapY-R1b1a/1a-Y13200
*I6731 (2.999 BCE)-Leschevo3, EBA_Samara_Yamnaya, Russia-HapY-R1b1a/1a-Y13200

-Regarding PF7562 in the Peloponnese, the problem is that the entire Greek territory is overwhelmingly NO-R1b (any of its branches). I have always expected to find Z2103 in the Mycenaean culture but only PF7562 has appeared and when this culture had already collapsed, so until the Greek territory is not thoroughly analyzed in my opinion it is impossible to link the Mycenaean with Yamnaya (because even the elites are not R1b).

Gaska said...

@Romulus-

The three L51 samples in Yamnaya are 2% of the males tested and very late in time ergo we could consider them as uniparental outliers. We already have L151 in Bohemia 250 years earlier. Unlike L23, PF7562, Z2103 & Y13200, the R1b-L51>L151 marker does not appear in Yamnaya, so it may have followed a direct path from the Baltic to central europe.

1-For me, the most surprising thing is the total absence of R1a-M417 or any other branch of R1a in Yamnaya, the origin of the CWC is a mystery at the moment, but it is evident that it is not descended from Yamnaya.

2-Regarding uniparental Yamnaya's origin, everything seems much simpler to understand. It remains to determine the origin of Z2103 which, although it does not appear in Sredni Stog at the moment, may have its origin in the Volga region or even further north.

-“Western” Yamnaya-Ukraine is totally R1b-Z2103,

-“Central” Yamnaya-Lower Don is overwhelmingly I2a-L699-Sredni Stog marker with very distant origin in the Balkans-Baltic-I2a1b/1a2-CTS10057 in Hadučka Vodenica-6.206 BCE & Zvejnieki, Latvia-5.506 BCE

-Eastern Yamnaya-Volga etc is also overwhelmingly Z2103 although there are isolated occurrences of Y13200, V1636, L51, I2a-L699 & Q1b2b-L933 i.e. some surviving Volosovo and Khvalynsk lineages.

3-The linguistic debate? every day it is more difficult to understand the Harvard autosomal arguments. For me, in the absence of convincing evidence, it remains a matter of faith.



Ned said...

@ Davidski
You said "The furthest we can possibly go back is Sredny Stog, and only because it's ancestral to Yamnaya and Corded Ware."
I don't think you can even do that as regards I-E language. Yes the Yamnaya may be mostly descended from Sredny Stog but all we can say on the basis of this paper is that Yamnaya spoke Late I-E and that Proto-Indo-Anatolian was spoken by people on the Caucasus-Lower Volga cline.
We must remember that the wheel (for transport) was invented (shortly) after the Anatolians had split from the other speakers of Indo-Anatolian and some of the oldest wheels (for carts or barrows) are to be found in the Maykop culture of the Ponto-Caspian area. Such a massive technological leap could be a vector for language adoption by neighbouring peoples.

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

@Rob
https://imgur.com/v65ojU7 <--- this is great

Laz brings up R-V1636 as justification for the Eastern route but then ignores I2 Yassitepe in his criticism of the Western route.


@Gaska

For me, the most surprising thing is the total absence of R1a-M417 or any other branch of R1a in Yamnaya, the origin of the CWC is a mystery at the moment, but it is evident that it is not descended from Yamnaya.

I agree. Lazaridis references those "lower class Yamnaya" ideas to explain its absence, that theory is terrible.

StP said...

@Gaska said...
„For me, the most surprising thing is the total absence of R1a-M417 or any other branch of R1a in Yamnaya, the origin of the CWC is a mystery at the moment, but it is evident that it is not descended from Yamnaya.”

The creation and development of the PIE language must have been similar to that of most languages. First, there must have been a small group of families (from the Eastern Caucasus and the Lower Volga) among which common linguistic innovations took place, such as "formed" a new language, CLV.

However, developed expansions, such as the PIE-MRCA, may have occurred close to the Carpathians, in a known region of interaction of three archaeological cultures: the early CWC with the GAC and the Yamna. Marzena Szmyt (et all) indicated this region as the Upper Dniester and Prut and the Upper Western Bug and San (in Between West and East. People of the Globular Amphora Culture in Eastern Europe: 2950-2350 BC. Baltic-Pontic Studies 8, 2010; Forest-Stepe Zone, pages 99, 142 and 178 and maps 63 and 64)

Jaakko Häkkinen said...


DragonHermit:
“The western route made sense when archeologists thought PIE's origin was in Western Ukraine or something. The CLV throws that out the window. CLV region is literally a few hundred miles north of east Anatolia. To think these people would circumvent the entire Black Sea (and on foot like some here suggested), and end up just south of where they started is a completely absurd suggestion.”

Your argument is like claiming that it is absurd that the Indo-Iranians made a full clockwise circle ending up in the Sintashta Culture, when they could have just moved directly from the steppe to the Southern Ural Region, cutting their path much, much shorter. You forget that any random movement is possible, and the moving people cannot know in where their distant descendants will eventually end up.

It seems possible that there was a migration over the Caucasus to Anatolia, but it is not yet impossible that there was also a migration via the western route to Anatolia, like Davidski has argumented. Is either of these possible migrations associated with the Anatolian languages? That we cannot see from the DNA or the genetic results. There are always many migrations or admixture events everywhere, but only one of them could be associated with the certain language carriers. Which one it was, cannot be decided by throwing a dice – it can only be found out by comparing to the linguistic results, if any of those are available.

Rich S. said...

There are FIVE R1b-L51 Yamnaya in this new Lazaridis et al preprint, not merely three, and one of them is R1b-L52.

Papac's Bohemian CW R1b-L151s are not 250 years earlier than these new R1b-L51/L52 Yamnayans. The average of the midpoints of Papac's c14-tested R1bs from Bohemian CW is 2777 BC. The average of the midpoints of the c14-tested Yamnaya L51s is 2702 BC. That's 75 years. In terms of c14 dates, that's not much, although it's not nothing. As an aside, the average c14 midpoint of Papac's Bohemian CW R1as is 2704 BC, essentially the same as the c14 midpoints of these new L51 Yamnayans.

It's likely those M73 HGs in the Baltic were the descendants of HGs who followed river valleys from the interior of Russia downstream to the Baltic. There us no evidence - not even a hint - that L151 moved from the Baltic to Central Europe.

It's baffling why someone who has been so wrong for so long would continue to make authoritative pronouncements and isn't instead very humbled, contrite - humiliated even - trying to learn and to correct his numerous errors. Here he is saying, "[T]he R1b-L51>L151 marker does not appear in Yamnaya", which is the same kind of thing he said on many previous occasions about L51.

The fact that these five R1b-L51 Yamnayans were recovered from widely separated locations could be an indication that L51 was more common in Yamnaya than we were led to believe by its apparent absence up until now.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1Tzz0Yb2Tt2248Pji0uYVe_PAM50cBhc&usp=sharing

Jaakko Häkkinen said...


St:
“A quick observation: In the Kroonen study's table (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275744), I counted how many Hittite agricultural terms have cognates in Proto-Greek—eight out of ten. For comparison, four are presented also in the Indo-Iranian languages. The ninth term is not represented in Greek but is present in Albanian. That aside, it's uncertain whether this is a coincidence or if it indicates a special connection between the speakers of Greek languages and the Hittites, such as the absorption of the same Neolithic substrate (or same agricultural practices?) It might suggest also a Hittite substrate in Greece before the Mycenaeans' arrival, or in Anatolia, the Balkans, the northwest Black Sea region, the Caucasus, elsewhere. - -
The sharing of 9 agricultural terms between otherwise unrelated and asynchronous Indo-European languages might suggest a partially shared influence from an agricultural substrate. - -
P.S. I should correct my previous post - while Hittite and Greek indeed share a total of 8 terms, only two of them are uniquely shared, to the exclusion of any other Indo-European language.”

Interestingly, there is a feature shared by Anatolian and East Greek:
“The first person plural verbal ending poses a similar problem. Greek dialects attest two variants of this suffix: —mes in West Greek dialects, and —men elsewhere. - -
A generalized present and past *—s ending is also found in Italic (e.g. Latin —mus < *—mos), across the Adriatic Sea from West Greek, while an *—n ending is also found in Anatolian (e.g. Hittite —wen), across the Aegean Sea from the non—West—Greek dialects. It would be attractive to analyze the relevant events in context as innovations spreading between adjacent dialects in a continuum.”
https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~garrett/BLS1999.pdf

It could also be possible that instead of horizontal adstrate borrowing, this feature represents a vertical substrate influence from “Balkan Anatolian” to Greek. By scrutinizing such features we could perhaps achieve evidence about the western route for the Anatolian branch – or lack of it.

DragonHermit said...

@Rob

Please read Lazaridis' threads as he explains this very well and spend less time with ad hominem attacks against me. There's actually IBD sharing between Vonyuchka-1 in the steppe and Ovaören in Central Anatolia. I don't know how much clearer this needs to be... This is the bull's eye archeogeneticists have been waiting for. A more "basal" steppe component that predates Core Yamnaya. This matches the basal nature of Anatolian language perfectly.

The crazy thing about this, is this is the first time genetics actually solved a problem that neither language/archeology couldn't definitively prove. The 2015 paper just mostly backed Gimbutas/Anthony books and old IE theory. But this is groundbreaking stuff.

@Stp

Agreed!

Ryan said...

@David - to be clear “some wierd founder effect or whatever” is my interpretation not Lazaridis. He says possibly it was picked up from a group Yamnaya mixed with or from a subgroup in Yammaya that wasn’t being buried in kurgans or something else.

And yah the Lazaridis paper explicitly says Corded Ware is Core Yamnaya plus Usatove. So you two seem to agree on that.

Jaakko Häkkinen said...

DragonHermit:
"The crazy thing about this, is this is the first time genetics actually solved a problem that neither language/archeology couldn't definitively prove. The 2015 paper just mostly backed Gimbutas/Anthony books and old IE theory. But this is groundbreaking stuff."

What do you mean by this? Linguistics, archaeology, and genetics all study different object, if you did not know. Language cannot be seen from the DNA any better than haplogroup can be seen from the pot shards. There is no law of nature dictating that language must follow certain genetic or cultural root.

Falcon said...

ANE were pretty much responsible for many common cultural, mythological, motifs in Indo-Europeans, Siberians and Native Americans.

1. ANE introduced tumulu/kurgan burials and cremation in Eurasia and Americas.

2. ANE spread common mythology in Eurasia and Americas; dogs as guardian of the afterlife, warrior transformed-into dog/wolf myth. They were also first to domesticate dogs according to Perri et al 2020 study.

3. ANE most definitely introduced Swastika motif across Eurasia and Americas.

Hittites very likely spread kurgans, cremation and swastika motifs to Near East and Anatolia from steppe.

DragonHermit said...

@Rob

I have been saying for at least a year (literally even in the last thread) that Proto-Anatolian, for lack of a better term, were "eastern cousins of the Yamnaya". Lo and behold, that's exactly what this CLV thing showed. An archaic southeastern group of steppe people, that lacked some of the more western EEF/WHG components of Yamnaya. And it had to be archaic, because linguistically the split was estimated 4500 to 4000 BC.

And the two Central Anatolian samples actually even shared IBD with these CLVs... They are 10% CLV autosomally (similar to Myceneans in terms of steppe-related ancestry) and rest of their autosomal is Middle Eastern looking. These are clearly people migrating from the north and east.

This syncs everything perfectly. The archaic linguistic split, the archaic autosomal split, IBD, and even Y-DNA (in the form of sporadic R1b-V1636s).

Gio said...

@ Jaakko Häkkinen

"Interestingly, there is a feature shared by Anatolian and East Greek:
“The first person plural verbal ending poses a similar problem. Greek dialects attest two variants of this suffix: —mes in West Greek dialects, and —men elsewhere. - -
A generalized present and past *—s ending is also found in Italic (e.g. Latin —mus < *—mos), across the Adriatic Sea from West Greek, while an *—n ending is also found in Anatolian (e.g. Hittite —wen), across the Aegean Sea from the non—West—Greek dialects. It would be attractive to analyze the relevant events in context as innovations spreading between adjacent dialects in a continuum.”
https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~garrett/BLS1999.pdf"

But why are you too a follower of the prejudice of Ex Oriente lux (and the last dress is just the "Southern arc theory") and the origin of languages in the Babel tower? Don't you think that we are ready for a scientific point of view? So far the oldest hg. R1b1 is Villabruna in Italy and not elsewhere and don't forget the Adriatic as probably the first place where the pile dwellers were born, both for DNA and languages.

Tobias said...

@DragonHermit

Unfortunately you are piling assumption over assumption. Where is the evidence that CLV people were Proto-IE speakers? Where is the evidence that Proto-Anatolian came via migrations from the northeast? You'll need to connect it with known facts, and from the verifiable linguistic and historical evidence, it absolutely does not corroborate it.

Anatolian languages were spoken almost exclusively in the west and south of Anatolia, Luwian and it's daughter languages, and Lydian. While to the east there's a variety of Caucasian languages. To the east of the Hittites where the Hurrians, and from their archeological connection to Kura-Araxes, they had ties to people of the Caucasus. The Hurrians also heavily influenced the Hittites around the late middle period of their empire. To the north of the Hittites where the Kaska tribes who were hostile to the Hittites, and based on how the Hittites treated them they were very different people compared to their other Anatolian kinsmen. Luwians also have a significant presence in the plain of Adana, which is a region completely surrounded by the Taurus mountains except for the southern coast. This points to a migration of Luwians from the west along the coastline.

mister funk said...

In our new preprint we propose that the likely route connecting Anatolian speakers with the Yamnaya (and thus with the speakers of Indo-European languages) is from the east. This thread summarizes different arguments for this hypothesis, as well as the alternative (from the west)

https://x.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1782950678530293829

Gaska said...

When someone has fanaticized (genetically speaking) to the point of thinking that three L51 catacomb samples prove the origin of M269, L51 or L151 in the steppes or the Yamnaya culture, they should think about going to a shrink.

The problem is that some ignorant people have been ignoring the evidence for many years and have not accepted that not only in Bohemia, but also in Switzerland, Belgium and Spain there are older samples of this lineage than in Russia or Romania.

Maybe these words of Lazaridis & Anthony after finding a P297 in Ekaternivoka will help you to think about it- “It is surprising that the subsequent mutations in this important subclade (R-P297>M269>L23>Z2103) are NOT DOCUMENTED in our STEPPE sample set until their appearance in Yamnaya individuals MORE THAN 1000 years later”.

Where were these markers? On the moon? Do you still intend to use the argument that the region has not been sufficiently analyzed after thousands of ancient genomes?

M269 remains MISSING except for the Smyadovo sample

By the way, the famous L51 from Yamnaya_Romania also belongs to the catacomb culture, I don't understand why the exact dating (sup info) is not listed in the data sheet.

And there is one L21 in Yamnaya_Hungary, which must be a mistake because most ancient genomes have calls for this marker.

Dospaises said...

All samples to date that are derived for R-L23, or a subclade of R-L23 such as R-Z2103 or R-L51 or R-L52, have shown to also carry Steppe autosomal DNA. Therefore, until proven otherwise, R-L23 can be assumed to come from a group with Steppe autosomal DNA. With the date of R-L23 being between 4350 BC-4250 BC then all we need are specimens derived for R-L23 from around 4000 BC to prove or disprove of R-L23 being from a group that already had Steppe autosomal DNA. We need the scientists to keep looking for specimens from that time period with R-L23 to for a confirmation and once that is done then there will not be much more to discuss about the origin of R-L23.

mister funk said...

It would be nice to have DNA samples of the Mesolithic Azerbaijan hunter-gatherers on hand before they mixed with Anatolian farmers

VakhaDuyev said...

The absence of R1b-M269 and R1a-M417 in the Proto-Indo-European stage evidently suggests they were later additions. R1b-M269 and R1a-M417 seem to have adopted the language of the original predominantly I2-L699 and R1b-v1636 carrying Proto-Indo-European speaking population. But people were claiming that Indo-Europeans was strictly patriarchal, and therefore their language couldn't have been maternally mediated?

And what's with the weird result of the R1a-M417 Bulgarian Proto-Yamnaya, someone posted the samples genetic distance here, and he was too close to Slavic populations, as if he has Balto-Slavic drift. The sample must be from another layer, while the real Proto-Yamnaya sample likely was I2, similar to other known Yamnaya Bulgaria sample.

Davidski said...

@VakhaDuyev

But people were claiming that Indo-Europeans was strictly patriarchal, and therefore their language couldn't have been maternally mediated?

Yes, which suggests that you're not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Otherwise you wouldn't be claiming as a matter of fact that the Proto-Indo-Europeans just belonged to I2-L699 and R1b-v1636.

Gio said...

@ VakhaDuyev

I invite you to note that I-M223 expanded from Mesolithic Italy (largely demonstrated by aDNA) and I think also R1b. About R-V1636 and its presence in Italy I wrote hundreds but perhaps thousands of letters, beyond what the Harvardians found so far.

VakhaDuyev said...

@Davidski

I2-L699 and R1b-v1636 being the Berezhnovka haplogroups, which are associated with Steppe_Eneolithic, who are evidently THE Indo-Europeans. You see these lineages in Early Sredny Stog and in Anatolia. The other Early Sredny Stog lineages are J2a and V88, I did not bother to include them because they weren't as successful.
They pretty much covered the whole SS area, and have yet to find R1b-M269 and R1a-M417, who obviously joined later, kind of like an earlier version of I1 or V13.

Rob said...

Folks interested in Eastern Anatolia should familiarise themselves with Arslantepe, rather than making vague claims.
It has been extensively studied
So the period:
3500 - 3000 BC: it is an Uruk outpus
~ 3000 : K-A take-over and destruction. Followed by demise in importance
LBA: conquest by Hittites
The political breakup that is thought to have occurred in the territory of Malatya and Elazığ in the second half of the third millennium b.c.e. may have created favorable conditions for the cultural and, later, political domination by the eastward expanding Hittite state during the second millennium b.c.e
(Arslantepe-Malatya: A Prehistoric and Early Historic Center in Eastern Anatolia. M Frangipani)

How's that copiun, Derwood ?



@ Arsen

''https://x.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1782950678530293829''

Hypotheses based on rather distally-based & non-contextualised autosomal models (and awkward baby steps with uniparentals) are not adequate for this topic, even with 'groundbreaking" IBD. Nobody has asked - how does a 4500 BC individual from Vonuchka share kinship links an individal 2000 years younger ?!
In any case, the autosomal data is actually fairly clear, as I've shown.

Rob said...

Further, Jaako is quite right on this fact, these historical linguistic questions need to be addressed also via a socio-linguistic prism (what happens when different groups meet, conflict and/or admix).

Davidski said...

@VakhaDuyev

Which samples in Anatolia belong to I2-L699?

VakhaDuyev said...

@Gio

Interesting. Italy would seem like a good bet for the emergence of PPIE.

@Davidski

Remind me, was it Gaziantepe or Arslantepe?
Nevermind, those were v1636.
Incidentally, the IBD sharing between Ovaoren and Vonyuchka is quite interesting as well.

Jaakko Häkkinen said...

Gio:
“But why are you too a follower of the prejudice of Ex Oriente lux (and the last dress is just the "Southern arc theory") and the origin of languages in the Babel tower? Don't you think that we are ready for a scientific point of view? So far the oldest hg. R1b1 is Villabruna in Italy and not elsewhere and don't forget the Adriatic as probably the first place where the pile dwellers were born, both for DNA and languages.”

Your comment does not relate to anything I have written, so I do not know to whom you meant to answer. Could you tell me how do you think this relates to my opinions?

Rob said...

The link between Volga steppe, Dnieper, Balkans and Anatolia is at I2-L702 level, which is a fairly compact group, ~ like R1b-M269
It is in Yassitepe BA in western Anatolia, still found in Iron Age and Medieval Anatolia.
So far, this is the only clear link at a uniparental level between steppe-related males & Anatolia, apart from the sacrificed boy at Uruk-era Arslantepe.

Gio said...

@ VakhaDuyev

"@Gio

Interesting. Italy would seem like a good bet for the emergence of PPIE".

I thought that, but after it seemed to me that the Gaska's hypothesis that R1b in western Europe had nothing to do with that was interesting and that the hunter-gatherers of the Siberian corridor accepted the Caucasian languages of the Alpine region of hg I. I have no doubt that hg I-M223 and hg R1b1 expanded from the Alpine region, but to demonstrate the language they spoke is another question. It is possible that they used the IE in their migration eastward, but I-M223-L701 was in Ukraine between 5500bc to 2694bc and we can not demonstrate that they brought IE or accepted that language up there, for that I consider important the studies of linguists about that. Of course if we'll be able to demonstrate that not only hgs I-M223 and R-V1636 but also R-V88 and R-M73 and R-M269 etc came from the same place the demonstration could be easier.

StP said...

Starting tomorrow during the three days of the conference in Budapest, silence here!
The Transformation of Europe in the Third Millennium BC
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h5ZbEQ7vi-zfvsTazPlPtaW5yhXLCVJO/view?pli=1

StP said...

! DAY
blob:https%3A//www.youtube.com/dd0a6459-35bd-4903-a621-bd80fb89aa24

mister funk said...

Regarding M269, it says here that an ancient sample was found from the Neolithic of the Central Russian Plain (Volosovo culture), but I didn’t find any more information

https://i.postimg.cc/ZYcLrCBp/Screenshot-35.png

Ethan said...

I-P78 likely made it very deep it into Anatolia.
Distance to: Serbia_Viminacium_Roman_elite_2.SG:R6750.SG
0.03333482 Turkey_TellAtchana_MLBA
0.03354727 Lebanon_EjJaouze_Phoenician.SG
0.03403441 Lebanon_Chhim_Phoenician.SG
0.03491004 Turkey_MBA
0.03651989 Macedonia_Classical_Hellenistic_o
0.03672363 Turkey_Alalakh_MLBA

Rich S. said...

All FIVE of the new R1b-L51 Yamnayans (one of which is R1b-L52) are identified in the Lazaridis preprint as belonging to Yamnaya.

DragonHermit said...

@Tobias

That logic is valid when talking about pastoralists, but it's thrown out the window when we start talking EMPIRES. It's like asking why aren't there more languages in Italy other than Latin. Gee, I wonder what happened to Etruscan, Gallic, Messapic, Southern Greek, Sabine, Venetic, etc...? Take a guess. Both Greece and Italy destroyed linguistic diversity after becoming part of Empires. All Greek dialects were replaced with Koine, and Italian languages with Vulgar Latin.

The Hittites came to dominate most of central and eastern parts of Anatolia. There are "more" languages in Western Anatolia, simply because the Hittites didn't take them over.


@Stp

Kristiansen said this conference will show evidence of Corded Ware coming from Yamnaya archeologically, where southeastern Poland was the "transition" zone.

Matt said...

Sabine Reinhold gives the talk about "Bioarchaeology of Innovations – The 4th/3rd Millennium BC in the Caucasus and Beyond" - https://www.youtube.com/live/ow36WzmMq8k?si=aOs21ZgP_TXjGswe&t=4647 (her talk starts earlier than this timestamp, but this is when the genetic results begin):

Reinhold (with some small paraphrasing): "The first decisive moment in this process in the North Caucasus is the mid 5th millennium BCE" (approx 4500 BCE?) "when groups with a Near Eastern, neolithic way of life crossed the mountains north.

They brought with them not only agriculture, architecture, animal husbandry, and all the so-called things of the neolithic package, but also the genetic ancestry that had emerged in the South Caucasus here between the Anatolian Neolithic components and Caucasus hunter gatherer components here.

So this ancestry components spread north to the northern part of the mountains.

At the same time we witness the formation of the earliest steppe ancestry profile on the basis of Eastern hunter gatherers and Caucasus hunter gatherer groups which were not admixed with these other neolithic components."

"So archaeologically, these groups are associated with the first burial mounds in the steppe between the Lower Volga, the Lower Don and the North Caucasus and they have a very similar material culture".


"The second milestone was the fourth millennium BCE archaeologically associated with the Maykop culture".

(There are also some bits where she talks about how the Progress Eneolithic samples show evidence of dairy consumption that are not seen at Khvalynsk or other sites to the north, but we know about this already).

The plots show the formation of Eneolithic Intermediate at approx 4500 BCE modelled with 25% EHG and 75% Caucasus Eneolithic (at least two individuals).

From a subsequent question (from Anthony linking her results to the samples identified at Remontnoye in the new Reich/Patterson/Lazaridis paper) I think these samples are described as from Nalchik but it is not clear.

As well as the formation of Steppe Eneolithic (the "CLV") and also quite interestingly a Ukraine Neolithic shifted variant, both around 4300 BCE.

There is also shown a Late Steppe Eneolithic outlier with 43% Steppe Eneolithic and 56% Caucasus Eneolithic (possibly just one individual). (So these are outliers from Ghalichi's abstract in 2021 were not just Steppe Maykop, after all).

In followup questions Reinhold mentions that from their view it looks like the Caucasus route is the "most likely one" for domesticated animals into the steppe, but does not rule out the SE European route, or via Iran from the Kopet Dag (although I get the sense add this last was an afterthought). Daniel Bradley in Ireland, of the Dublin group with Lara Cassidy et al, will be looking at animal adna to address this question.

Davidski said...

@Matt

Reinhold is either confused or she's obfuscating.

She talks about two different processes there (in the North Caucasus and on the steppe) and then lumps them together.

Obviously, the steppe people were largely hunter-gatherers until Yamnaya, even those with a lot of CHG.

The important point is that the North Caucasus farmers never colonized the steppe.

Rob said...

@ StP
Nothing overly new there. The debate between DA & EK was fun

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

I don't think there is any direct or indirect evidence for Hittites coming into contact with other Anatolian speakers who weren't Luwian or Palaic speakers in central/east Anatolia.

Western Anatolia harboured a very basal Anatolian language (Lydian) and in all likelihood central-west Anatolia is where proto-Luwic disintegrated into its daughter languages (Carian, Lycian, Milyan, Luwian, and likely the Kalasma language), suggesting it was there at a very early point in time. Nothing similar can be said for central-east Anatolia.

Rich S. said...

StP said...
Starting tomorrow during the three days of the conference in Budapest, silence here!
The Transformation of Europe in the Third Millennium BC
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h5ZbEQ7vi-zfvsTazPlPtaW5yhXLCVJO/view?pli=1

My response:

In his recent interview with Razib Khan, Kristiansen said that at that conference Völker Heyd will show that "Yamnaya transformed into Corded Ware" (his words, or something close, not mine).

My prediction is the evidence will show a movement of NW Yamnaya up the Dniester valley through Podolia in Ukraine and into Małopolska, where the two known CWC-X Horizon (Pre-Corded) burials are located, at Srednia and Hubinek, dated to 3000-2900 BC. CWC-X marks the transition from Yamnaya, or something very much like it, to early Corded Ware.

I think that is what Heyd will say, because that is the word from Polish archaeologists like Piotr Włodarczak and Ukrainian archaeologists like Svitlana Ivanova. Obviously, I could be wrong.

mister funk said...

@Matt

the video from YouTube that you posted, can you tell me? Sabrina didn't explain what the green circle circled in red means? there is no description
https://i.postimg.cc/yYQG5WQS/Screenshot-37.png

where is it possible to get this picture in better quality?

Rob said...

@ Matt
Thanks for the link, I had missed the start due to work. Reinhold's talk was clearly enunciated/ well presented.

However, Sabine failed to clearly enunciate, or is unaware, that the CHG component in the north is as old as 15,000 calBP. Similar to Harvard's problematic '2 wave model', it heaps under one umbrella two very different phenomena.

As for pastoralism, I am not convinced by the Haak/Hansen/Reinhold's group's Ex Orient Lux fervor. In fact, she states that domesticate animals were already present from Khvalynsk to Dniester [in what I'd call complex/ sub-Neolithic fisher-hunter-gatherers], it's just that there's no evidence of goat-milking based on residue analysis [so they might have been used for occasional feasts & sacrifices, rather than in a developed 2' Products manner]. Fine
But I still think it developed locally, but just spurred on by demands of southern markets, via a long links to Mesopotamia.
This is the model of the Future.



Rob said...

I like the Schenke plot Reinhold presented (@ 1:22:04 in Matt's link). However, they present Caucasus Eneolithic primordialistically, as an immaculate conception :)
Why wouldnt they complete the plot and draw its own development from CHG & Iran. They should also make use of the Shuvaleri genomes now widely available rather than the more distal Haji Firuz

Simon Stevens said...

@Rich S.

I made this list of the oldest P297 and Y13200 samples. Suffice it to say, their origins do not lie in Baltic HGs:

MN2003, Minino II, Vologda Oblast, Russia, 8654-8413 calBCE, mtDNA: U5a2, Y-DNA: R1b-P297(xM269,Y13202,FTA35755),

NEO536, Minino II, Vologda Oblast, Russia, 7618 BC, mtDNA: U4, Y-DNA: R1b-P297,

I4630, Zvejnieki, Latvia, 7471-7073 calBCE, mtDNA: U5a2c, Y-DNA: R1b-P297(xY13202,M269)

NEO555, Karavaikha, Vologda Oblast, Russia, 6418-6236 BC (cal midpoint 6327 BC), mtDNA: T2a1b1, Y-DNA: R1b-Y13200>Y13202>pre-Y13204,

NEO559, Karavaikha, Vologda Oblast, Russia, 6318 BC (cal midpoint), mtDNA: U5a1, Y-DNA: R1b-Y13200>Y13202,

Rob said...

@ Rich S

''My prediction is the evidence will show a movement of NW Yamnaya up the Dniester valley through Podolia in Ukraine and into Małopolska, where the two known CWC-X Horizon (Pre-Corded) burials are located, at Srednia and Hubinek, dated to 3000-2900 BC. CWC-X marks the transition from Yamnaya, or something very much like it, to early Corded Ware.''

I don't doubt the theory, but I doubt such data will be presented. Most of the talks defend the expected theoretical platform that culture and genes don't match, rather than looking into how they actually do

Rich S. said...

Rob said...
@ Rich S

''My prediction is the evidence will show a movement of NW Yamnaya up the Dniester valley through Podolia in Ukraine and into Małopolska, where the two known CWC-X Horizon (Pre-Corded) burials are located, at Srednia and Hubinek, dated to 3000-2900 BC. CWC-X marks the transition from Yamnaya, or something very much like it, to early Corded Ware.''

I don't doubt the theory, but I doubt such data will be presented. Most of the talks defend the expected theoretical platform that culture and genes don't match, rather than looking into how they actually do

My response:

I think you're right. What Völker Heyd will probably talk about is the archaeological evidence, since that's his thing.

I don't think the ancient DNA has caught up with it yet. I wish some reliable researchers would test remains from those two CWC-X burial sites.

Rich S. said...

Simon Stevin said...
@Rich S.

I made this list of the oldest P297 and Y13200 samples. Suffice it to say, their origins do not lie in Baltic HGs:

MN2003, Minino II, Vologda Oblast, Russia, 8654-8413 calBCE, mtDNA: U5a2, Y-DNA: R1b-P297(xM269,Y13202,FTA35755),

NEO536, Minino II, Vologda Oblast, Russia, 7618 BC, mtDNA: U4, Y-DNA: R1b-P297,

I4630, Zvejnieki, Latvia, 7471-7073 calBCE, mtDNA: U5a2c, Y-DNA: R1b-P297(xY13202,M269)

NEO555, Karavaikha, Vologda Oblast, Russia, 6418-6236 BC (cal midpoint 6327 BC), mtDNA: T2a1b1, Y-DNA: R1b-Y13200>Y13202>pre-Y13204,

NEO559, Karavaikha, Vologda Oblast, Russia, 6318 BC (cal midpoint), mtDNA: U5a1, Y-DNA: R1b-Y13200>Y13202,

My response:

Thanks. That's what I had in mind: the movement of HGs from the Russian interior to the Baltic via the Baltic basin. As you point out, the Russian stuff is older than the Latvian and not the other way around, and following the river valleys to the Baltic Sea just makes sense.

mister funk said...

@Mett

Am I understanding correctly that this is the eneolithic period of Nalchik? And why on earth is there no component associated with Iran in their mixture graphs?

https://i.postimg.cc/qvfqRQBx/Screenshot-38.png

Vara said...

The historical illiteracy when dealing with Anatolians still cracks me up.

I wonder why do the Leiden linguists and their fans never cite or read the most important work on Luwian out there by Yakubovich.

mister funk said...

as I thought, the neotilization of the Caucasian hunters of Georgia occurred approximately 7700 years ago(5500-5800 BC) and the Anatolian proxy is connected with Catalhoyuk, whose age is 1000 years older, that is, approximately 8500 years old, they own the most ancient city in the world with the same name ,very interesting
Nalchik is modeled as the Caucasus Eneolitic and EHG

EthanR said...

The same Yakubovich who identifies Luviya with the Konya Plain and precludes locating it in Kizzuwatna?

Rob said...

@ Vara; Yakubovich supports the Balkan path of Anatolian

Vara said...

Yep, the same Yakubovich who promotes an east to west spread of Luwic languages.

"In a later period, perhaps in toward the end of the third millennium BC, the Luvic population groups began to spread westward along the Mediterranean coast."

I wonder why almost every western Anatolian city state has a non-IE name but almost every southern Anatolian toponym is IE.
As for the Hittites, I think everyone is over them so we don't need an explanation as to why most members of the Hittite royal clan had Hurro-Urartian related names, right?

Rob said...

For the same reason the German Royal family took English names :)
And yes, Ive already pointed out that southern Anattolia was more IE than the north,
We don;t need to re-discuss the issue of PIE coming from Iran. I think there's a couple of desparate guys on Laz's Twitter thread that might oblige you, though

Vara said...

Nice dodge. Ignore it enough times and it might go away!

I guess the German Royals were naming themselves after hills in England huh.
You didn't point out why Western Anatolian languages had peculiar features (not that you know of it) however.

Rob said...

Much of the southwest coast probably was indeed non-IE. They were part of the Minoan network

Matt said...

@Арсен: Various question:

1) 1080p is the maximum resolution for the Youtube upload so I don't think it's available anywhere.

2) Yes, I think it may be (Nalchik) from the response to the followup question, but it's still not very clear to me, and that may not match a close study of the presented map.

3) I guess there is no specific component associated with Iran (compared to CHG) here as it did not emerge in their ADMIXTURE?

....

All; there are some other points she covered in the talk that I didn't cover in my excerpt though:

1:11 - "And second result of this study" (Wang 2019) "was that the immigration from the Near East via the Caucasus to Eurasia, which is the classical Ex Oriente Lux explanation for the spread of the innovation in the 4th and 3rd Millennium BCE, can not longer be stated."

1:37 - "We can now time the development of the steppe ancestry in a time between 6000 and 5000 BCE, without having skeletons".
So I think there is maybe some mix of ideas about when the steppe ancestry (CLV) formed, and about the role in the diffusion of technologies/practices, and it does not literally propose the formation of the component in the Eneolithic.

Rob said...

@ Vara
Hurrian names really began appearing after 1300 BC, 'when they were borne by kings, princes, members of the élite, and ordinary people in Anatolia and in the Syrian countries subordinated to Ḫatti'' (Hurrian Theophoric Names in the Documents from the Hittite Kingdom'')

There are plenty of IE Names in western Anatolia ''The Luwians of Western Anatolia, Their neighbours and predecessors'' Dr. Fred C. Woudhuizen

StP said...

@Dragon Heremit wrote […], Rich S wrote […]

Yesterday, however, on Wednesday, the Budapest conference began, devoted mainly to the Jamna culture (xJamnaya, because it is a grammatical Russianism). Prof. Włodarczak (also called Włodarczyk there) talked interestingly about probably the earliest Yamna culture, mainly in... the region of Bulgaria and Serbia.
He also listed the cultural elements of the transition to the CWC in Central Europe, including our Hubinek.

Today we expect more about CWC. Prof.
For example, Anna Szecenyi-Nagy around 11.15–11.45: Human Genetics Perspective of the Carpathian Basin at the Dawn of the 3rd Millennium BCE, will probably talk about the genomes of the Chłopice-Vesele (pre-Mierzanowicka) culture from Malopolska, which transferred several dozen to the Carpathian Basin. R1a, and separately R1b also arrived from outside the Carpathians (more eastern.)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h5ZbEQ7vi-zfvsTazPlPtaW5yhXLCVJO/view?pli=1

mister funk said...

@Matt

very interesting thank you, it’s just that on that map where that green dot is surrounded by a red line, it seems to me that this is the Ginchi, but I don’t understand what samples they took, eneolitic or bronze, if the eneolitic is indicated there as green “mixed caucasus-steppe” then this confirms my words that the steppe was brought to dagestan long before any yamnys or catacombs, as Mr.Davidski claims)

Vara said...

The names of Anitta, Pithana, Zuzu, Ishtaribri...etc are all Hurro-Urartian related.

Vara said...

Western Anatolia was fully IE when Arzawa was first attested ~1600BCE. I would even say by 2000BCE. The issue is that the names of most of these western Anatolian city states is not IE, despite the claims on the internet(Melchart), which is pretty weird considering we're supposing Indo-Europeans imposed their languages in the west first before the first emergence of the first cities.

Lydian and Arzawan Luwic has peculiar features which may be due a substrate.

StP said...

The Conferenc3 Day 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4S10jfPWoc

Rob said...

@ Vara
Cataloguing town names might not be useful, because I don't think the arrival of proto-Luwians/Hittites was a Norman-like conquest, as some commetators suggest
Rather, and regardless where one thinks they came from, they came during the middle-late Chalcolithic, before towns & complexity. And in whatever scenario, they would have been very mixed from the get go, multiglossic habitations, and naming could have gone either way

Ethan said...

There are plenty of IE toponyms in Western Anatolia, and in any case their absence anywhere in Anatolia shouldn't be terribly surprising given that Anatolian is not native to the area.

Anatolian languages are thought to enter the region around the turn of the third millennium BC. Now that we know Kalasmaic has significant Luwic features, I'm not sure how you realistically triangulate the relations of Luwic dialects to a mid third millennium BC location somewhere around west-central Anatolia.

Also, Hittite has regal Hattic names, not Hurrian. Hurrian influence floods into Hittite in a significant manner only after imperial expansion into the area that would eventually be known as Kizzuwatna.

Falcon said...

Toponyms are irrelevant. In Europe, river names are non-IE (Old European hydronymy). These were all because Yamnaya took EEF brides and old non-IE toponyms would be preserved from what they would have learned from these women.

Same could have happened in Western Anatolia because of greater assimilation, probably through alliance with local elites in Western Anatolia.

Steppe women weren't particularly pretty, they were tall muscular Helgas with Frankenstein-sized heads. This was probably why steppe men preferred EEF women and old toponyms remained because of such alliances.

Finngreek said...

@Jaakko
"Your argument is like claiming that it is absurd that the Indo-Iranians made a full clockwise circle ending up in the Sintashta Culture, when they could have just moved directly from the steppe to the Southern Ural Region, cutting their path much, much shorter. You forget that any random movement is possible, and the moving people cannot know in where their distant descendants will eventually end up."

No bearing on your original debate, but unless I'm misunderstanding something, this is not how the formation of the Sintashta culture is described in Parpola 2022: 262, which shows a simple southeastward migration of Pre-PII Abashevo from the Kama-Belaya interfluve to the Ural-Tobol region. If Abashevo succeeded the Late Yamnaya/Poltavka culture, I don't see where there was a "full clockwise circle".

Vara said...

The guys who composed the first known Indo-European texts and their homeland:
"Erich Neu stated in 1974 (the Anitta Text, StBoT heft 18, 134) that the name Anitta did not have an Indo-European origin and that a Hattian base is also not likely... He pointed to the Hurrian onomastikon of Nuzi He pointed also to the connection of the name of king Pithana with perhaps a
mountain in the border area of North Syria...Kussara was a territory, where perhaps Indo-European and Hurrian languages were spoken."
https://www.academia.edu/10347067/A_Hurrian_attack_at_the_city_Kanesh_c_1710_BC_

If anything this shows that the original homeland of the Pithana was under strong Hurrian influence and possibly fully Hurrianized after it's no longer mentioned by the later Hittite kings, a short while after the pre-Mitanni big Hurrian invasion.

Oh, and the script they used? Check out Melchert: "Norbert Oettinger (pers. comm.) points out that the near certain adoption by the Hittites of the Old Babylonian script via a northern Syrian intermediary also suggests that the Hittites’ position at the start of the second millennium was relatively closer to Syria than that of the Hattians (cf. the similar comments by Neu 1968 134)."

Not sure why we keep arguing about things that should be basic knowledge by now.

Also, the language of 1500-1200CBE Kalasma doesn't change anything for any route since Luwic should have reached that area centuries earlier. The most likely linguistic model is somewhere between Kloekhorst(Hittite), Yakubovich(Luwic) and Goedegebuure.

Orpheus said...

This is still the Southern Arc theory as they've laid it out in the past btw. Lazaridis was explicit in saying that the northern wing of the SA has a circle which spans from south to north of the Caucasus.

Getting Anthony on the boat simply means that this will become the de facto commonly accepted hypothesis even in the Kurganist circles (the ones that actually matter). It's ogre

@Matt "The point of being into this stuff is to understand these processes in human prehistory and history, so from that perspective, how can it disappoint?"
Roughly 9/10 people here are into this stuff to feel special by proxy of their country/region/peoples, literally the My Ancestor :) meme.

Davidski said...

@Finngreek

Both Sintashta and Abashevo are overwhelmingly derived from Corded Ware via Fatyanovo.

Davidski said...

@Orpheus

It's the other way around.

Since there's obviously steppe ancestry in Bronze Age Anatolia, then some people are now trying to save face.

David Anthony is helping them to save face.

But this isn't over. Wait until they release the data and I get it.

Falcon said...


Steppe men had to wake up to this every morning, no wonder they preferred EEF women.

Yamnaya woman from Utyovka burial, look at the size of the skull.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FzzLUk-akAcWHtL?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

Yamnaya woman from Leshevski burial

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-fb1f4dc54f87e8f2881daefd636fd595-lq

Davidski said...

@Falcon

Are you 12 years old?

Do your parents know that you're posting here?

Finngreek said...

@Davidski

I appreciate the elaboration; but I consider it a false equivalence to compare the potential migration of the singular Anatolian branch with the polyphasic developments that eventually led to the formation of Proto-Indo-Iranian in Sintashta: By the time depth of a Corded Ware origin, we are no longer talking about Indo-Iranian - let alone to extend that identity back to the Middle Dnieper and Yamnaya. Even to begin from a CW origin shows a roughly eastward migration: not a random loop. We don't know how far north, west, or east the precursor to Pre-PII was before it either separated from, or was influenced by, CW. The Anatolian migration should not innately depend on so many steps, whatever path it may have taken.

Falcon said...

@Davidski

Sweeping selection and preference for EEF women by steppe men is a fact. It's pretty clear from wide-spread admixture that occurred in Bronze Age. If Yamnaya men preferred their own women we would see a lot of INGROUP selection with 100% steppe admixture to exist still but that's not the case. They were simply not happy with their women, they preferred beautiful women and EEF were seen as a prize because they had beauty and skills.

EEF cared alot more about ingroup preference (rarely mixed with hunter-gatherers in some regions). This is contrast to steppe men who preferred other women over their own women with every expansion.

Alliances like that would also preserve considerable local toponyms and greater assimilation. Western entry into Anatolia is not detectable because of such alliances.

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