I'm putting together a G25 Proto-Indo-European master sheet that I'll be using in a future blog post about the Indo-European, or, if you wish, Indo-Anatolian homeland.
An early version of the master sheet is available
HERE. Please note, the first pop label is my own while the second one is from the v66.2M.AADR dataset.
I'm aiming to expand it significantly and update it regularly. Below is a
Vahaduo G25 West Eurasia PCA with all the samples. What am I missing? Feel free to let me know in the comments.
Spoiler alert! Here are a few of the revelations that you can expect in the aforementioned blog post about the Indo-European homeland:
- Yamnaya is almost certainly derived from Serednii Stih (aka Sredny Stog). I've been talking about this for years and you can probably pick it up without too much trouble in the PCA above. Finally, even Iosif Lazaridis, David Reich, Nick Patterson and friends are now on board with this idea as per their latest paper on the topic (see Lazaridis et al. 2025).
- However, I'm not convinced by the Lazaridis et al. hypothesis that the Caucasus–lower Volga (CLV) cline is intimately linked to the Indo-Anatolian and proto-Anatolian expansions. That's because the CLV cline is an artifact of isolation-by-distance working for thousands of years across a vast and highly diverse landscape, and it includes a wide range of populations that usually have nothing to do with each other.
- The question of who actually spoke Indo-Anatolian first will, in all likelihood, never be solved to everyone's satisfaction. But the number of true candidate groups is actually quite small, and I reckon they're almost certainly all highlighted in my PCA above. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
See also...
The Caucasus is a semipermeable barrier to gene flow
419 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 401 – 419 of 419@ Ethan
Rob-''"There's no simple scenario or singular homeland for I2a groups"
Ethan-That's the obvious takeaway. These lineages come from various hunter gatherer groups throughout Europe. ''
My comment to Gio which you quoted about the Y-hg I2 meta-clade as a whole during and just after the 'Ice Age'. But for some reason you have mis-represented or misunderstood that sentence onto the specific case of I2a-M223-L703. It is interily reasanoable to ascribe a more specific haplo-history for L703, and that is in fact the case.
'' It is your special pleading that demands some sort of origin in Ukraine for the clades in question.'
LOL special pleading would be to claim P78 is from the Iron Gates, despite its absence from hundreds of samples there, vs its relative frequency & early presence east of the Carpathians, just where its closley related cousin is also found.
Also, your G25 models, qpAdm and G25 both demonstrate a very sound fitting of Dnieper-N for Chalcolithic- BA samples with P78.
''I'm going to ignore the deflections''
On the contrary, you should carefully digest the counter-examples I described because they outline the commonly made errors by haplo-enthusiasts perching themselves on the proverbial TMRCA high-horse . Its up there with 'genes dont speak languages' and 'pots arent people'.
''I-P78 very well could be related to the Indo-European migrations into Anatolia, although I'm not sure it took the same route(s) I-S1219''
Maybe they didn;t hold hands, but the fact remains that P78 and L699 are closely related lineages which both ended up in Anatolia and parts of Greece at pretty much the same time. Your contrary viewpoints are just .. special pleading .
I don't think I-P78 is necessarily from iron gates, only that it could be or from other HG groups. I also wouldn't discount it being from the Steppe, but there's simply zero evidence for that.
I don't find the fact that they all ended up either in thrace, Anatolia or Greece very convincing of anything. For instance, the Theopetra sample appears to be a Yamnaya-related sample that mixed with Cernavoda-related groups before arriving in Greece (see IBD results for that sample).
I also am not sure they all moved at the same time, I think the phylogeny of I-S12195 (diversification of different branches ~4000bc, with different branches all still showing connections to Anatolia) and the Barcin_C->Kulluoba connections seem to suggest an entry prior to Cernavoda III or Ezero. Not the most definitive evidence but it stands out.
I'd also be curious about I-P78 entering via bidirectional geneflow between Troy and Ezero (Kanlıgeçit seems to be an example of the reverse, Troy influencing Thrace). That would neatly explain things, although if I-P78 ever shows up in central Anatolia as opposed to west Anatolia, it would probably need to be discarded.
Regarding L702 and Iron Gates, I recall Ethan noting that Pribislav had assigned L702 to LEPE18. Did that not pan out? It's not in FTDNA.
New paper maps how Steppe ancestry spread with IE languages. Greek, Armenian & Albanian are all traced to a Yamnaya-derived source — distinct from Corded Ware (Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Indo-Iranic) & Bell Beaker (Celtic, Italic) carriers. Albanian specifically enters via the same Yamnaya-derived route as Greek into the Balkans.
https://x.com/dryscoop/status/2090858843475501486?s=20
No it didn't pan out, FTDNA assigns it way upstream at I-P222. I am not sure if there are specific reads which lead Pribislav to think it could be I-L702.
A book of papers was published on PIE:
https://medialibrary.reichert-verlag.de/en/9783752003659_the_speakers_of_indo_european_and_their_world/
Unfortunately some of them seem very questionable.
The "PIE colour" paper did make it though, which features the following conclusion:
https://i.gyazo.com/b8946f5906472dc42982d0fc5723988d.png
Interesting news about Phrygian-period tumulus burials in Türkiye. The Phrygians were Anatolian linguistically, weren’t they?
A 2,800-year-old Phrygian tumulus is being excavated for the first time in Ankara
Scientific excavations have begun at the BT10 Tumulus, located in the Western Necropolis of the Phrygian period in the Bahçelievler–Emek district of modern Ankara, Türkiye.
The tumulus is dated to approximately 800–550 BC and is one of around 20 known tumuli in the Western Necropolis. Remarkably, BT10 had never previously been subjected to archaeological excavation.
Researchers expect the excavations to provide new evidence about Phrygian burial customs, everyday life, and the ancient history of Ankara.
The project is being conducted by a multidisciplinary research team led by Prof. Dr. Atakan Akçay. Following the excavations, the area is planned to become an archaeological park.
The discovery is particularly interesting because the site lies within the modern capital of Türkiye, revealing that significant remains of Iron Age Phrygian Ankara are still preserved beneath the modern city.
Source: Anadolu Agency, 21 August 2026.
https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/kultur/frig-donemi-bati-nekropolunde-yer-alan-bt10-tumulusunde-bilimsel-kazilara-baslandi/4033499?utm_source=chatgpt.com
@ Ethan
“I don't think I-P78 is necessarily from iron gates, only that it could be or from other HG groups. I also wouldn't discount it being from the Steppe, but there's simply zero evidence for that.”
A lot of philosophical arm-waving there, princess.
“That would neatly explain things, although if I-P78 ever shows up in central Anatolia as opposed to west Anatolia, it would probably need to be discarded.”
Haha You now want to exclude samples that don’t fit your preconceived visions. Didn’t Laz. already try that, low-level grifting doesn’t convince Elites
@ Shomu
“New paper maps how Steppe ancestry spread with IE languages. Greek, Armenian & Albanian are all traced to a Yamnaya-derived source — distinct from Corded Ware (Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Indo-Iranic) & Bell Beaker (Celtic, Italic) carriers. Albanian specifically enters via the same Yamnaya-derived route as Greek into the Balkans.
https://x.com/dryscoop/status/2090858843475501486?s=20”
Meh. Why is Gretzinger still stuck on the simpleton “Yamnaya-languages”, “CW - languages” schema from 2015?
And I understand that these chuds on X have invested their savings on their little Yamnaya hats, but Albanian emerges during the early Byzantine era from a mixed Balkan provincial population. It’s no more “Yamnaya -derived” than English, French or Croatian.
Like, it doesn;t even matter what soil ecology P78 was first found in. This is getting ridiculous. M269 is probably from the forest-steppe. It's silly that people have been brainwashed into thinking that so-called 'Steppe_Eneolithic'' = steppe people
@Rob
"Haha You now want to exclude samples that don’t fit your preconceived visions"
Nope, I'm making the exact opposite claim. A European clade that shows up in both West and Central Anatolia is likely IE-related.
Anyway here's how they compare in terms of big picture phylogeny (using for each a clade containing an antiquity Anatolian sample as an endpoint). The "immediate descendants" column is just the number of new subclades at each time estimate:
https://i.gyazo.com/105f0c60c516fbe6131b6c77e135e1b4.png
https://i.gyazo.com/3490f894b19ecc74f97195eb9550dbca.png
@ Ethan
Oh you mean the commonly held Troy -> Ezero view ? Ozdogan has already cast doubt on that position. Against expectations, none of the Ezero, Yamnaya & other Bulgarian BA samples hold excess neo-Anatolian/ CHG-infused ancestry
Anyhow, although almost everybody else is still waffling on about CLV, the real question is how did numerically small group of IEs (of European origin) manage to politically & linguistically impose themselves in Anatolia
@ Shomu
Phrygian is not part of 'Anatolian-IE' but 'Balkan IE,' related to Greek & Paeonian. Later wave after 1200 BC, LBA collapse, etc
I wonder how P78 got into steppe Sarmatians as far as Kazakhstan.
@Rob
My understanding is that some level of contact between Troy and Ezero is agreed upon but a causal sequence in either direction is not supported.
However, the somewhat younger Kanlıgeçit basically looks like a Trojan colony, so contacts between Troy and Thrace probably also involved the movement of people in at least one direction (but I don't think we should be surprised if the reverse were the case sometimes, too).
I just don't know much about the history of the Anatolian languages, all I know is that at one time half of Anatolia belonged to Greece, the other part to Armenia.
@ Rob "the real question is how did numerically small group of IEs (of European origin) manage to politically & linguistically impose themselves in Anatolia"
Yes. How exactly did that happen?
@ Rozbojnik
In brief, there seems to be an fairly palpable Ezero-era impact across NW Anatolia (as already clear from the Y-haplo tracer dyes). Add the 4.2 kiloyear perturbations (destruction horizons and cnflict throughout the region) and we can imagine how some IEs already in Anatolia managed to extend themselves into central Anatolia & carve up power. Subsequently based on some form of city-state power projection, ruling over a mostly non-IE population stratum. Maybe quasi-Normam model, but of course vague analogies never do justice.
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