Taranis
Elite member
European R1b subclade is very old. At least it is not younger than the Neolithic age. The Caucasus range has got the highest mountain tops in Europe. Mount Elbrus is much higher than Mont Blanc. So G2a in the Caucasus had more chance to survive than in the Pyrenees. Due to the isolation.
Is there any evidence this is really the case? All the older varieties of R1b-M269 are either found only outside of Western Europe or are very rare. Western European R1b-M269 is in turn dominated by R1b-P310/L11, which in turn is very rare outside of Western Europe. I really fail to see how R1b-P310/L11 could be older than Neolithic.
Maybe before R1b Europe was populated by the I and G2a folks. Maybe in Europe both haplogroups were both equally distributed, but not in Basque land. Maybe there was much more I than G2a in Basque land before R1b arrived at the first place, due to the bottleneck (founder) effect. Maybe the distribution in Basque was more like 80-20 (I-G2a).
In my opinion, the Neolithic population of Treilles was of mixed hunter-gatherer / farmer stock.
How old is PIE?
PIE must have been spoken in the late Neolithic / early Chalcolithic. There are common words for agriculture, cattle, horses and most importantly metals and metal-working.
European R1b is maybe 10.000 years old. So maybe it didn't belong to the PIE but to the Neolithic farmers that were not proto-Indo-European at all.
European R1b is decisively younger than 10,000 years, even if the M269 is about 10,000 years old - it wasn't in Western Europe until after 3000 BC. And as I said, none of the Neolithic farmer sites thus far turned up any evidence for R1b in Europe. I do agree however that the Neolithic Farmers were - very likely non-Indo-Europeans.