The PIE homeland controversy: December 2024 open thread

It seems like we're getting close to the moment when Iosif Lazaridis has to finally admit that the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland was located in Eastern Europe, and also that the ancestors of the Hittites and other Anatolian speakers entered Anatolia via the Balkans.

Let's discuss.

However, please note that comments from total morons, trolls and/or mentally unstable people will not be approved.

See also...

Indo-European crackpottery

But Iosif, what about the Phrygians?

A paper in Science co-authored by around 200 scientists from some of the world's top academic institutions surely must mean something, right? Not necessarily.

In this short blog post I'll try to explain, as simply as I can, why the Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. paper doesn't get us any closer to solving the riddle of the so called Indo-Anatolian homeland.

However, it must be said that the paper does include many interesting and valuable samples. I'll be using six of these samples, labeled TUR_C_Gordion_Anc, to argue my case.

The TUR_C_Gordion_Anc sample set is from Gordion, the capital of ancient Phrygia, and thus, in all likeliness, it represents Phrygian speakers.

Phrygian is an Indo-European language and the leading hypothesis is that it originated in the Balkans.

In terms of fine scale ancestry, TUR_C_Gordion_Anc can be reliably divided into two genetic clusters. In the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) below these clusters are labeled TUR_C_Gordion_Anc1 and TUR_C_Gordion_Anc2.

Note that TUR_C_Gordion_Anc1 is obviously pulling away from TUR_C_Gordion_Anc2 towards samples from the Balkans. I've used ancient samples from what is now North Macedonia, labeled MKD_Anc, to represent the Balkans. To see an interactive version of the plot, paste the PCA coordinates from here into the relevant field here.

Visually, this is not an especially dramatic outcome, but it's an incredible result nonetheless, because it shows that even a few ancient samples can help to solve an age old mystery.

Across many dimensions of genetic variation, the shift in the PCA from TUR_C_Gordion_Anc1 to TUR_C_Gordion_Anc2 represents about 20% admixture from the Balkans, and about 8% from the Eastern European steppe. That's plenty enough to corroborate the linguistic hypothesis that the Phrygians originated in the Balkans, and that some of their ancestors came from the steppe. The mixture models below were done with the tools here.

Target: TUR_C_Gordion_Anc1
Distance: 1.6634% / 0.01663373
40.6 Kura-Araxes_ARM_Kaps
22.2 Anatolia_Barcin_N
21.8 MKD_Anc
13.6 Levant_PPNB
1.4 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.4 Han

Target: TUR_C_Gordion_Anc1
Distance: 1.7109% / 0.01710904
40.2 Kura-Araxes_ARM_Kaps
37.8 Anatolia_Barcin_N
12.4 Levant_PPNB
8.0 Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
1.2 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.4 Han

Target: TUR_C_Gordion_Anc2
Distance: 2.0293% / 0.02029339
51.0 Kura-Araxes_ARM_Kaps
26.8 Anatolia_Tepecik_Ciftlik_N
17.6 Anatolia_Barcin_N
4.6 Levant_PPNB

Surprisingly, Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. didn't have much to say about this topic. This quote basically sums it up:

However, in individuals from Gordion, a Central Anatolian city that was under the control of Hittites before becoming the Phrygian capital and then coming under the control of Persian and Hellenistic rulers, the proportion of Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry is only ~2%, a tiny fraction for a region controlled by at least four different Indo-European–speaking groups.

I have no doubt that Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. can run a very decent PCA, and then blow it up to a size big enough to show that the Gordion samples represent two genetically somewhat distinct groups. I'm also sure that, if they really try, they can locate significant levels of proximate and relevant European ancestry in some of these samples.

They don't have to use my methods; they can use any methods they like. My point is that they won't find much if they're just looking for genetic signals from the Upper Paleolithic or Mesolithic.

Now, considering the way that the Phrygian question was treated by Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al., despite the fact that they managed to sequence a few likely Phrygian speakers from none other than the Phrygian capital, let's not pretend that their paper brought us any closer to understanding the genetic origins of Anatolian speakers or pinpointing their ancestral homeland.

In order to even try to solve these problems with ancient DNA, we need a wide range of samples from Hittite, Luwian and other key sites where Anatolian languages were spoken. And then we must analyze them properly.

I'm guessing that Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. went out of their way to get such samples, but for one reason or another they failed. If so, that's OK, but I have a feeling that even if they got them, they wouldn't know what to do with them, because at best these samples would only show ~2% Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry. Haha.

For what it's worth, I believe that the ancient data in the Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. paper point to the North Pontic steppe as the Indo-Anatolian homeland, and I'll lay out my arguments in an upcoming blog post.

See also...

Dear Iosif...Yamnaya

Dear Iosif, about that ~2%

Dear Iosif...

Dear Iosif #2

Dear Iosif #3

Mainstream media BS: Europeans owe their height to Asian nomads

From a recent Daily Mail article by some clown named Sam Tonkin:

Present day Europeans owe their blue eyes to hunter gatherers, their height to Asian nomads and their blonde hair to Anatolian Neolithic farmers, a new study suggests.

...

Most of the contemporary European genetic makeup was shaped by movements that occurred in the last 10,000 years when local hunter gatherers mixed with incoming Anatolian farmers — from present-day Turkey — and Asian nomads, or Pontic Steppe pastoralists.

The latter originated from what is now parts of Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan.

Haha.

Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine are European countries. The relevant parts of Russia and Kazakhstan are also located in Europe.

Obviously, the author is referring to the Yamnaya herders who lived on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, which is obviously in Eastern Europe.

I blame Johannes Krause for this.

See also...

Matters of (basic) geography

Blond hair is only indirectly associated with Anatolian ancestry in Estonia...duh

Ancient ancestry and complex traits in Estonians (Marnetto et al. 2022)

The PIE homeland controversy: February 2022 status report

I think we'll see the emergence of two main competing proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland theories over the next few years:

- a homeland in the Eneolithic North Caucasus, and the spread of Anatolian languages into West Asia with Maykop-related ancestry

- a homeland in the North Pontic region, possibly within the Eneolithic Sredny Stog archeological culture, and the spread of Anatolian languages into West Asia via the Balkans.

Both theories have support from ancient DNA. Some of it has already been published (for instance, see here).

At this point, I can see myself firmly in the North Pontic camp, even if it turns out that North Pontic-related ancestry only made a fleeting impact on Bronze Age Anatolia.

After all, there's no direct relationship between genes and languages, so to prove that Anatolian languages came from the North Pontic, there's no need for North Pontic-related ancestry to persist in Anatolia, as long as we have solid evidence that people with this type of ancestry moved there at the right time.

In my mind, for now, the Maykop culture provides an excellent explanation for non-Indo-European influences in PIE, and there's no need to make it Indo-European speaking, let alone PIE speaking.

See also...

The PIE homeland controversy: June 2021 status report

Looking forward to a post-Covid world

I was hoping that the Covid-19 pandemic wouldn't have an immediate impact on the publication of ancient DNA papers and new data, but considering how much things have slowed down in this respect, it seems that I was fooling myself.

So let's take a break until early next year, and then see what happens.

Trust me, we've got a lot to look forward to in the post-Covid-19 world. Based on what I've heard from various sources, here are some predictions about what we might see:

- the search for the Proto-Indo-European homeland will shift west to the North Pontic steppe

- on the other hand, the search for the Proto-Uralic homeland will move deep into Siberia

- the key role of the Single Grave (westernmost Corded Ware) culture in the population history of Western Europe will finally get some attention

- following on from the above, Y-haplogroup R1b-L51 will be revealed as a Single Grave marker

- the idea that the Pontic-Caspian steppe was colonized by migrants from Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age will be forgotten, and, ironically, we'll instead learn that there was a significant influx of steppe ancestry into ancient Mesopotamia

- Old Kingdom Egyptians will come out less Sub-Saharan African than present-day Egyptians.

I probably shouldn't blab everything out, so that's all you're getting from me for now. You'll just have to wait for the rest until next year, or perhaps even the year after that.

See also...

Ancient ancestry proportions in present-day Europeans (to be continued)

This year has already been massive in all sorts of ways, including for new data and software releases. So I'm thinking it might be time to update many of the analyses that were featured at this blog a while ago.

Let's start with the classic hunter vs farmer vs herder mixture model for present-day European populations. The rules of the game are as follows:

- run the latest version of qpAdm using qpfstats output

- use transversion sites and 1240K capture data

- pick a set of diverse and chronologically sound outgroups

- for a model to be successful the p-value must reach 0.01

- tweak the left pops in models that are clearly underperforming

- follow high end scientific literature, logic and common sense

Obviously, the reason that I decided to limit my analysis to markers from transversion sites is to mitigate problems associated with modeling the ancestry of modern, high quality samples with relatively low quality ancients. One of these problems appears to be qpAdm assigning faux East Asian/Siberian admixture to present-day Europeans (for instance, see figure 4 here).

My starting reference populations and outgroups are listed below. In qpAdm terminology the former are known as the "left pops", while the latter as the "right pops". Most of these samples are freely available at the David Reich Lab website here.

left pops:

HUN_Koros_N_HG
TUR_Barcin_N
UKR_Yamnaya

right pops:

CMR_Shum_Laka_8000BP
MAR_Taforalt
Levant_Natufian
IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
Levant_PPNB
CZE_Vestonice16
BEL_GoyetQ116-1
Iberia_ElMiron
RUS_Karelia_HG
RUS_West_Siberia_HG
MNG_North_N
RUS_Ust_Kyakhta

As you can see, I picked a wide variety of right pops. But I chose most of them specifically to be able to differentiate the three streams of ancestry - from ancient hunters, farmers and herders - that are the focus of my analysis. I also intentionally avoided using samples in the right pops that may have experienced gene flow, including cryptic gene flow, from the populations in the left pops.

I somewhat speculatively earmarked HUN_Koros_N_HG, from the Early Neolithic Carpathian Basin, and UKR_Yamnaya, from the Early Bronze Age North Pontic steppe in what is now Ukraine, to represent the hunter-gatherer and pastoralist streams of ancestry, respectively.

That's because I expected HUN_Koros_N_HG to be the best proxy for the hunter-gatherer ancestry that was initially absorbed by the early farmers who fanned out from the Aegean region across much of the European continent, and of course it made sense to choose a steppe pastoralist population that was located close to Central Europe where such groups first made the biggest impact outside of the steppe.

Interestingly, HUN_Koros_N_HG and UKR_Yamnaya did prove to be among most effective choices for the types of ancestries that they represented. For instance, UKR_Yamnaya generally produced much stronger statistical fits than a very similar set of Yamnaya samples from the Caspian steppe (more precisely, from the Samara region in Russia). However, this might well be an artifact, due to very specific characteristics of these few ancient individuals. Larger sample sets would be welcome, especially from Yamnaya sites in Ukraine.

Below, dear audience, is a spreadsheet featuring the preliminary results. Click on the image to view and/or download the spreadsheet. The general rule is that the higher the tail prob, or p-value, the more likely it is that the ancestry proportions are close to the truth (a tail prob of well below 0.05 is usually a strong indication that something isn't right). For a detailed look at each of the qpAdm runs, feel free to consult the zip file here.

Note, however, that many of the European groups in my burgeoning genotype dataset are yet to make an appearance in the spreadsheet. That's because their models with the standard left pops showed p-values well under 0.01, which essentially meant that they failed, and I'm still trying to make them work.

But round one has certainly revealed some fascinating stuff. For instance, except for Hungarians and Estonians, none of the Uralic-speaking groups can be modeled successfully in the standard three-way model.

However, I managed to significantly improve the statistical fits in their models by adding a Siberian population, RUS_Baikal_BA, to the left pops. This is unlikely to be a coincidence, because the Proto-Uralic homeland was almost certainly located in or very near Siberia. Iain Mathieson please take note.

Saami
HUN_Koros_N_HG 0.134±0.043
RUS_Baikal_BA 0.270±0.015
TUR_Barcin_N 0.081±0.026
UKR_Yamnaya 0.515±0.058

chisq 19.865

tail prob 0.0108571

Full output

See also...

Yamnaya-related ancestry proportions in present-day Poles