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
607 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 601 – 607 of 607@ Gester
''that, by the way, is an interesting issue'
yes, thank you bro (I hope im not misgendering you)
''What was there before? Nobody knows. Which makes me feel, by the way, that some groups of early Indo-Europeans had some unusual ways of dealing with the dead: water burial, cremation etc. Because I don’t know about not just DNA-samples, but about ANY human remains from that area before Yashkul''
There is an explanation for this - firstly, we have the 'Kairshak-Jangar' or 'lower-Volga-Caspian' Neolithic horizon amply described by Vybornov (a good guy) ; numerous camp / hunting sites but no burials. And if these folk had unusual 'invisible' burials, then they are obviously not PIE, because PIE had a well-defined set of burials (kurgans, cromlechs, catacombs) with elaborate accompanying ceremonies incl shrines. And it is also entirely clear that the Sredni Stog (incl Eneolithic lower-Volga-north Cacuasus) burials evolve from the Dnieper-Azov Mariupol burials, as much as some DNA scholars ignore this fact. So we cant have 2 groups having very different cosmologies and claim they are both PIE.
Secondly, we need to be comfortable with the fact that not all regions were consistently and/or densely inhabited, even apparently 'productive' ecotones. Just like Today, prehistoric populations tended to concentrate in some regions, with intervening spaces of little or even no human settlement. So we don;t need to appeal to missing data, or 'absence of evidence =/= evidence for absence' slogans.
Thus, if we lack data for said region before 4200 BC, it might just be the case that it was initially empty, and then settled later. And this is exactly what the data shows - the Khvalynsk-type communities essentially packed up and vacated the middle Volga to move south, explaining the 'hiatus' between Khvalynsk and Yamnaya recently outlined by C14 data series. And we know these folk were heavily represented by R1b-V1636 and Q1, the latter perhaps representing the Kairshak component becoming 'archaeogenetically visible'.
'' Clearly not from the Pontic areas (“Ukraine”), where, despite of extensive sampling, we don’t have a single not to say R1b-M269, but even its precursor, R1b-P297.''
I agree with that, certainly not from Dnieper-Azov region, probably not even lower Don. But the same can be said about the Volga-north Caucasus region, which is also extensively sampled although much larger in span. I've got my eye on the Donetz-middle Don zone, BTW the Repin culture probably formed in the SW Russian forest-steppe, and some moved south
See https://imgur.com/a/J2quF6v
But if R1b-P297-M269 shows up further east, that's fine.
[Fetching the popcorn.] This is what I came to this blog for! Regarding the -nth- suffix, we have a lot of it in Etruscan, Rhaetian, and seemingly other non-IE (most likely ultimately EEF-derived) languages of Iberia (there mostly as -nt- or -nd-), as well as what little we see of Minoan, so I would side with the substrate on this one. The problem with Anatolia is always that we have a lot of back-and-forth migration, making it tricky to keep the various primary and secondary layers separate from one another
@ Odola
''Regarding the -nth- suffix, we have a lot of it in Etruscan, Rhaetian, and seemingly other non-IE (most likely ultimately EEF-derived) languages of Iberia (there mostly as -nt- or -nd-), as well as what little we see of Minoan, so I would side with the substrate on this one. ''
Fair enough
''The problem with Anatolia is always that we have a lot of back-and-forth migration, making it tricky to keep the various primary and secondary layers separate from one another''
absolutely, true
Yes, I have passed through Kalmykia a couple of times -these are literally vast steppes.
I'm not familiar with Etruscan sharing many of the peculiar Greek suffixes (in Ancient Greek, I understand that the -nth is actually an -nthos).
Comparable suffixes appear in toponyms that extend into Anatolia (especially Western Anatolia) in somewhat different forms (-ndos). -ssos and -assa also have been seen as comparable.
My understanding is that this is better explained as a shared substrate rather than any direct contact between Greek and Anatolian in their infant stages.
Etruscan Personal names (praenomina): Arnθ, Aranθ, Arunθ, Deities: Vanθ and Manθ, other words : hinθ / hinthi / hinthia below, beneath, hinθial, tesinθ / tesinth guardian, trutnuθ / trutnuth / trutnvt priest, specifically a lightning-interpreter, penthuna / penthna boundary stone? So the -nθ ending is productive in: male praenomina, chthonic theonyms and related
agent or occupational nouns. Raetic shows the cluster /nθ/ not completely final (e.g. in enθu-, kleimunθeis).
The issue is not that -nth never occurs in Etruscan, or even that there is not possibly even some (very) deep relationship contributing to that type of morphology but that:
1. The Ancient Greek suffix is instead always -nthos
2. A significant number of Greek/Anatolian comparables (-nthos vs -anda) happen to be placenames (all of the Greek examples, actually, as far as I know).
I'm less equipped to speak to the Etruscan side.
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