Did agriculture develop thanks to the original carriers of macro Y-haplogroup K ?

[Maciamo]

There was definitely a connection between the fertile crescent, Indus Valley and East Asia but I doubt that farming evolved independently in multiple areas of the world.

More likely farmers from fertile crescent migrated to Indus Valley and from there to China.

Agriculture did evolve independently in various parts of the world. The American continent and New Guinea are proof enough. As for China, Cui et al. 2013 tested 47 Neolithic Y-DNA samples from the West Liao River Valley, Northeast China and the haplogroups turned out to be exclusively East Asian (N1, C/C3e and O3a). In any case there is no evidence of migration from West or South Asia to China in Early Neolithic times, either from ancient DNA or from archaeology. Chinese pottery also pre-dates West Asian one by over 10,000 years.

 

[Maciamo]

Ceramic technology as in art and figurines, but not true utility wares as in Asia. Depending on who the Gravettians were genetically, possibly an older association can be known. But it seems that true ceramic pottery spread to the West during the Pre-pottery Neolithic.

As I said, the first widespread use of ceramic utility wares were in Jomon Japan, which we know from ancient DNA tests belonged exclusively to hg C and D.

I think the jury is still out on this. O & K, are found in Polynesian peoples such as the Hawaiians. The peopling of the Americas, especially the Western coasts is still not totally understood. R1b may have spread via waterways in Europe, North Africa and the Near East. You mention haplogroup C, which strangly appears in almost all these places in Asia, the Pacific and the Americas but not in West Eurasia.

The Polynesian colonisation happened very recently, the last major expansion (to Hawaii, New Zealand, etc.) taking place only between 700 and 900 years ago. In contrast, haplogroup C is thought to have spread around Austronesia at least 40,000 years ago. That is the difference in time scale between C and O3.

I don't know that it really matters in some cases, but cultural similiarities usually require proximity as in the
spread of ceramics. This could potentially place haplogroups in geographic proximity zones in a similar way that diversity
is used to trace the origin of haplotypes. The two can compliment each other.
So, using this logic,
1. R* peoples historically swaddled infants
2. Q* peoples historically swaddled infants
3. Very few people not in contact with 1 or 2 swaddled infants
Therefore, infant swaddling could have originated amongst R and Q peoples in a proximity zone or its ancestor P-M45.

Of course, I don't take a dogmatic view on swaddling or any of this. I just find some of the correlations interesting, especially those between West Asia and the Americas. The two are so far removed and isolated, yet both appear to retain cultural aspects from a very distant past.

I wasn't quoting your examples of ceramics and swaddling but only mound buildings and burial types.

 

[Maciamo]

Agriculture had already sprung up across the Fertile Crescent and Indus Valley before the climate in Europe was even fit for agriculture, this could explain why the first agriculture in Europe popped up in the southeast with the arrival of middle eastern lineages.

The climate in Mediterranean Europe was at least as warm as in the Near East, especially mountainous Anatolia and the Caucasus. Besides, agriculture had arisen in cold and harsh northern China by 9000 BCE.

 

[Maciamo]

Why not? Even until 4000 BC the sea level of the Bering is believed to have been low enough for Human to cross from Asia to America. So why shouldn't some farmer in East Asia crossed the Bering into America?

I mean it's not like this idea is something new.

Sorry but that idea doesn't make sense. Here is why:

1) East Asian farmers would have to migrate all the way from China (the northernmost place in East Asia with agriculture in Neolithic time) to Mexico and the Andes. This alone seems unreasonable. Why would settled farmers suddenly shift back to a nomadic lifestyle and leave a fertile land for the harsh Siberia and Alaska ?

2) Those Chinese farmers should have managed to keep the knowledge of agriculture without using it for many generations during their long migration. Obviously they wouldn't have been able to bring their crops with them, and indeed no East Asian crop has been found in the Americas. So they would have needed to domesticate brand new crops in the Americas, with which they were utterly unfamiliar. This process would have taken many generations to select the right plants and use selective breeding to increase the size of the seeds. I would have been much easier for local Amerindians to achieve that than for newcomers who weren't familiar with the environment.

3) Neolithic Chinese farmers would have had domesticated animals (chickens, pigs), which they could have taken with them, but obviously didn't since none were found in pre-Columbian America, even in archaeological remains.

4) If all the above were nevertheless possible (extremely unlikely) and East Asian farmers had been the ones bringing agriculture to the American continent, we would expect that their population would have boomed compared to that of hunter-gatherers, like everywhere else in the world. Therefore their haplogroups would have to be dominant in places where agriculture developed. Yet, all Native Americans in places where agriculture developed (S-E USA, Mexico, Andes) belonged to Y-haplogroup Q, while Neolithic and modern Chinese belonged chiefly to O, with minorities of C3 and N. The Chinese also have a much greater diversity of mtDNA haplogroups than anywhere in the Americas. The split between East Asian and American subclades of hg A, B, C and D took place at least 10,000 years before the Neolithic.

 

[Alan]

Old ideas can be improbable too. And archeology is pushing back the time of the beginnings of archeology in South America and Mexico, and creating a picture of people in those areas developing agriculture as a means of increasing yield from crops they were already harvesting.

Agreed they are pushing back the dates of farming in Americas and East Asia but if I am not wrong the dates are around 10000 BC.

Time estimation for farming go as far back as 23 000 BC in the Near East.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LrSoIPVTkkU/UdceczBRiZI/AAAAAAAAI84/j6ZGAI9WDKE/s640/F1.large.jpg

 

[Alan]

Sorry but that idea doesn't make sense. Here is why:

1) East Asian farmers would have to migrate all the way from China (the northernmost place in East Asia with agriculture in Neolithic time) to Mexico and the Andes. This alone seems unreasonable. Why would settled farmers suddenly shift back to a nomadic lifestyle and leave a fertile land for the harsh Siberia and Alaska ?

Maybe they were forced out (not enough fertile land for everyone.

2) Those Chinese farmers should have managed to keep the knowledge of agriculture without using it for many generations during their long migration. Obviously they wouldn't have been able to bring their crops with them, and indeed no East Asian crop has been found in the Americas. So they would have needed to domesticate brand new crops in the Americas, with which they were utterly unfamiliar. This process would have taken many generations to select the right plants and use selective breeding to increase the size of the seeds. I would have been much easier for local Amerindians to achieve that than for newcomers who weren't familiar with the environment.

3) Neolithic Chinese farmers would have had domesticated animals (chickens, pigs), which they could have taken with them, but obviously didn't since none were found in pre-Columbian America, even in archaeological remains.

4) All Native Americans in places where agriculture developed (S-E USA, Mexico, Andes) belonged to Y-haplogroup Q, while Neolithic and modern Chinese belonged chiefly to O, with minorities of C3 and N. The Chinese also have a much greater diversity of mtDNA haplogroups than anywhere in the Americas. The split between East Asian and American subclades of hg A, B, C and D took place at least 10,000 years before the Neolithic.

Well to be honest you might be right. It could be that Agriculture developed independently in two places of the world (Near East and East Asia). It just sounded a bit of too much coincidence that this might happened in 2 places of the world without one side influencing the other. especially after this Mal'ta individual turned out to be more West Eurasian like than modern East Asian populations.

 

[adamo]

Which y-DNA haplogroups can be linked to the spread of gravettian and aurignacian culture in Europe?

 

[Aberdeen]

Maybe they were forced out (not enough fertile land for everyone.





Well to be honest you might be right. It could be that Agriculture developed independently in two places of the world (Near East and East Asia). It just sounded a bit of too much coincidence that this might happened in 2 places of the world without one side influencing the other. especially after this Mal'ta individual turned out to be more West Eurasian like than modern East Asian populations.

Agriculture developed separately in at least four places, I would say. Farming appears to go back at least 10,000 years and to have developed from the exploitation of local plants in both New Guinea and South America, whereas European agriculture, for example, seems to have been based primarily on growing imported plants such as wheat, which is one of the proofs that agriculture didn't originate in Europe. And while there's a remote chance that people in New Guinea could have been influenced by outside forces, I don't see any way that agriculture could have been imported into the Americas from the east, given the late date of the Polynesian expansion and the somewhat limited potential for crop growing in northern Siberia.