Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

[Alan]

"The point is there is an whole West Asian highland package"

Bride kidnapping is part of that package.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping#Central_Asia

"Approximately half of all Kyrgyz marriages include bride kidnapping"

So like all of this the question is simply which direction did it come from. Did it originally come from the farmers or did it originally come from mounted steppe HGs raiding farmer settlements.

Bride kidnapping is part of the Indo European and Caucasic culture. My people did it too and we call it "berdel", but they usually kidnapped brides from other tribes or families were the father didn't agree on the marriage, not whole other people I think.

But even if. There must still have been some dominant male population who imposed their culture on the Yamna people. The reason for that is simply and has already been mentioned. The whole Yamna culture is simply a copy of Maykop. Kurgans, pastoralism, and at least half of their genetics.

You don't let kidnapped brides teach you how to burry your own people. Even the pottery everything else seems to be Maykop copy. The only logical conclusion is, a migration from Maykop to the Steppes and we know Maykop has copied most of their culture from NW Iran and Mesopotamia earlier. This is what a paper some few years old wrote.

 

[Fire Haired14]

People say they have allot of West Asian samples but didn't include them for whatever reason. Might be because they are witholding it for further studies to publish.
The whole point is that it gives many people who are not that knowledgeable about the topic the impression that Yamna is all like North and Northeast Europeans.

I would love them to publish the actual aDNA so people can start comparing it to modern populations. Look at Sindhis from Pakistan they have almost as much Yamna ancestry as Bergamo has. Now imagine how much Yamna ancestry Kurds, Iranians, Georgians, Pashtuns and Tajiks with some East Eurasian DNA will show.

The paper is submitted and will be published when the editors feel it should. This is what David Patterson said about one month ago.

This paper was focused on north Euro origins, which is why to some people it may appear Yamna were just like North euros. In reality they are one part of the equation which created north euros. Like you've said they were probably just as related to northern west Asians as to north Euros.

It's up to debate why northern west Asians have relation to Yamna. It's hard to say exactly why till we get ancient west Asian genomes spanning the Neolithic-Bronze age at least.

Reich and his crew's focus in the next few years will probably go towards middle easterns and south Asians. Maybe they'll get Maykop genomes, Bronze age Indians, or early Neolithic ones from the near east.

 

[holderlin]

View attachment 7085

Beat a dead horse indeed. The irony.

I think the model above might help some people understand.

And I encourage everyone to consider horses more scrupulously. Domesticated ones.

*EDIT*

It occurred to me that I should comment on the wave model I posted. This is an oldy, but a goody. I think it was published in 1972. Here you see 24 Isoglosses, and 1 is Centum/Satem. Some of these are only relevant to subfamilies, but it's still a baller chart. In spite of Centum/Satem you see that Greek-Irainian/Indic-Armenian share many similarities as do Germanic-Baltic-Slavic and even Celtic-Italic-Tocharian-Hittite. Of particular interest to this discussion would be Tocharian and Hittite/Anatolian. Both very conservative, very similar to each other, and yet about as far apart as possible. This means that both of these languages departed from the PIE seat very early, retaining archaisms. Especially Hittite. In Hittite we even see a lack of forms that developed in ALL other IE languages indicating that it was likely the first departure. In fact it may have left before PIE even became the PIE whence all other IE languages came from. This sort of rules out an Anatolian homeland, on a purely linguistic geographic basis.

Given some of the similarities we see my guess is that Italic/Celtic, Hittite, and Tocharian were early departures forming the initial periphery. Latter departures were Greek/Armenian and Indo-Iranian, and Baltic/Slavic-Germanic form the center of gravity that didn't move all that much. The similarities between Germanic and Celtic are likely from latter interactions, which fit the archaeological and historical record perfectly.

BUT, if one flips things, which given the strangeness of the archaeology and culture of the Hittites isn’t too crazy, we could reverse it and propose that “Proto-Hittite” is actually the real PIE that the cattle herders brought to the steppe through the Caucuses. I believe this is what the R1b cattle driver theorists would need to stand on. This sounds like a brilliant reversal, but makes explaining latter IE expansions, and how they arrived at their historical seats nearly impossible. Unless we say that the “cattle breeding R1bs” infiltrated the steppe through the caucuses, enveloping the steppe peoples and converting them to their pastoralist culture and language while leaving remnants of the true PIE back home in Anatolia. Such a model teeters on the edge of exceeding the scope of the homeland problem, and I would probably have to argue that the PIE homeland would still be the Pontic-Steppe on the basis that expansions would still need to have begun there. I think this is, if not impossible, extremely unlikely on countless other grounds, but an interesting idea. PIE would have been surrounded by non IE languages which it no doubt would have shared much more similarities with; Hattic, Hurrian, Semitic, etc. just before teleporting across the caucuses to found PIE version 2 – Horses and hunters. There are also a ton of Hurrian and Hattic loanwords in Hittite. Why don’t we see at least some of these in PIE? If the true PIE is really a sort of proto-Hittite, then it would probably extend deep into the Neolithic. So we would not only have expected form similarities along with word sharing by the Early Bronze age, but also expected to see a deeply rooted agricultural lexicon easily reconstructed to PIE.

PIE from Anatolian R1b cattle drivers moving from their Anatolian homeland not only doesn’t fit, but it’s an answer to a different question. PIE is a Bronze age language, and if we push theories too far back we’re talking about something that couldn’t be PIE in the first place.

Here's another chart showing distance between languages through ascribing a binary structure to the isoglosses: 0->1 for innovation or change.

View attachment 7087

Here's my post from a different forum that many of you may have read. It's linguistics/Historic, but I think it's very relevant even in a gene-centric discussion.

If one honestly considers the consequences of an Anatolian/West Asian homeland consisting of R1b's that brought PIE by trickling through the Caucuses, you either conclude that it's impossible/extremely unlikely, or it's an answer to a different question, beyond the scope of PIE.

The more I consider it, the more crazy it sounds to me.

 

[holderlin]

I think it was horse trading for cattle, bronze or what not. Horses are THAT valuable in the ancient world and I don't know how people can't see this. It was the first form of VERY rapid transportation that could easily be weaponized. It's that simple.

Look at Mitanni for instance. A Hurrian people, speaking Hurrian, and yet all of their writings on Chariot battle and horse training/horsemanship is in Indic/Aryan. Now there's additional evidence that this was actually an Aryan aristocracy imposing themselves on the Native Hurrians, but whatever, at the very least it supports my point.

PIE arose on the Steppes with the domestication of horses, and IEs wielded enormous power through use as a tool and a SUPER valuable commodity. They no doubt traded for cattle, which became integral to their culture and religion. Interesting that you can reconstruct "raid for cattle" into PIE, and there appears to be a myth suggesting that the primary function of the first specialized PIE warriors was to retrieve stolen cattle and presumably kill the thieves, then the priests would sacrifice the cattle and distribute the parts. Super interesting. The thieves also appear to be construed as non-indoeuropean foreigners. What strikes me is that the cattle has to be stolen for this cycle to perpetuate, which makes one wonder who was really doing the stealing.

Early Afanasievo genomes could be very telling. These people are very likely to have spoken Tocharian. With the very early departure, before any other known IE's in that direction, especially at such great a distance these samples offer a very unique glimpse into the IE genome. We will of course expect them to look like Yamna, but if they look like R1b Samara and R1a Karelin, with both R1b and R1a, then we have additional genetic evidence of a Steppe origin.

 

[Drax]

@Alan

Well, I have already understand your point of view, and imho you speculate alot, you create big group of "west asian"; when they are vaguely related to each other like your conclusion:

If already one North Caucasian population is genetically closer to Yamna than North and Northeast Europeans.

Wrong, the first group are Mordovians, something I can consider in North (I guess the term is very general in the paper, that include them) and they are not related with North (or south) Caucasus groups (or west asians); for the North Caucasians, see my previous messages, they are closer to Europeans than west asians (see Chechen); and there are in an equal range in the list with Russian (a North east European country for me; remember I live in France), that make your second point irrelevant.

The logical conclusion is that the other genetically close North Caucasians populations are closer to Yamna too. And populations like Kurds, Iranians and Azeris which are genetically as close to Lezgins, as North Europeans to Mordovians/Russians, will cluster as close to Yamna as North Europeans.

No, see the place of Armenians or Sindhi (or other South Europeans), far after North and East European country; according your theory, Norwegians for example should be in the bottom or not in the list; remember we don't see the complete list, it's the 10 closest group to Yamna.

They have samples from many more Caucasus and S-C Asian groups but decided to include just a few non-European populations in the fst-comparison.

I serious smell Eurocentrism in this decision otherwise I can't explain why they wouldn't inclue other non European populations which would show Yamna as what they are.

I don't know maybe they think they don't need it or they have been "tested" but don't make "good score"(in the list); or similar to the bottom samples like Amernia and Sindhi etc...for examples we don't have the samples of all the Europeans countries in the list too (despite some them are close to the ones in the top of the list); that don't make Reich and his team "Europeans haters" or "anti-white"; I don't think we know, just with internet, all their works and all the result of these tests (I don't know if the guy from your quote speculate or not); they are professionnal; they are scientifics; they know their works, and I think honestly you have been very harsh to accuse them to be too "eurocentrism"...

In the same time I don't think I should take your comment too seriously from a kurd-centrist or nationalist like you (according your own words); but hey that cool; but maybe you should try to write to Reich if you think he have done a mistake (or if he is too "eurocentrist").

But whatever, thanks for to have taken the time to reply.

 

[MOESAN]

these two maps are about the LBK more common sites (a) and about the unique Derenburg (b) - they are supposed to show us the neat difference of region of origin of the two groups based upon today Aanatolia/Caucasus populations- do notice that the today Europeans, showing very more of the first (common: central Anatolia and Caucasus: surely enough Y-G2 by the way, and 'danubian' type) than of the second, show also, and nevertheless, roughly the same uneven % of every component, country to country -

 

[MOESAN]

all 'gedrosia' is certainly not modern 'west-asian' component, I think - 'gedrosia' elemnts were found in very ancient skeletons of Siberia and northern Steppes - like some ANE, it seems linking all Central Asia, North and South, wherever the today borders between political states are -

 

[Sile]

Am I sure about which bit?

I think both sides of the argument accept there was a farmer migration onto the steppe which came into contact with the steppe HGs. The questions are:

1) Was there a peaceful merger or a conflict?
2) If there was a conflict who won?

I'm suggesting the PIE culture that resulted implies the answers to those questions.

the ages of these are over 5000 years old ...but their isotopic mtdna of these are 4000BC in germany. what do you mean who won, the paper states they mixed ( summary page 3)

the farmers arrived in germany before the hunters did ..........for this central german area

 

[MOESAN]

addenda:
I base myself upon some surveys but it is amazing seeing some contradictory tables, with non neglictible 'gedrosia' or at opposite almost NO 'gedrosia' in the same regions - perhaps I pressure my poor inner "cabbage" for no gain???

 

[MOESAN]

Some good points. Just that I would add WHG is like 2.5 as much as among North Caucasians and half of what modern North/Northeast Europeans have.

which is basically around ~27% as I have said so many times in the past. And has been proven by the fact that Norwegians minus their Yamna ancestry have ~25% WHG. That brings us to the conclusion that Yamna added ~25% of WHG to Norwegians.


just a detail:
Alan, I appreciate what you write for the most, but here am I a bit block-headed ? I don't understand the way Yamanaya can add their 25% of WHG to Norwegian already possessing 25% of WHG? percentages don't add but mix according to the weight of every componant: if I suppose Yamnya made 50% of the modern Norwegians and have roughly the same % of WHG I find 50 x 25% (Yamnaya) + 50 x 25% (old Norwegians) = 100 x 25% (new Norwegians) - Or I made a miss something?
No offense

 

[Angela]

I don't know the difficulty about to understand that the distance of Yamna from modern Europeans is equally big as the distance from any northern West Asians to them. That the Yamna samples cluster "north" of East Europeans doesn't mean Yamna was more North European it just means that Yamna is more shifted towards ANE. It is a 2 dimensional map.

Have you even taken a look at the data?

Here the map once again . But take in mind this is only a 2 dimensional map showing the general genetic closeness but is not about the real actual Yamna ancestry and therefore not 100% accurate. It only shows a rough impression on how Yamna clusters. In general we can say the closest are Mordovians/North Caucasians/Russians second by Norwegians, Lithuanians, Kurds, Iranians, French, Croatians, Bulgarians followed by Greeks, Turks... Iberians... Armenians and so on.

The Yamna core is equally distant from Mordovians/Russians as from North Caucasians.

The Yamna is equally distant from North and East European as it is from northern West Asians like Kurds/Iranians/Turks.




I respect your opinion but for me he has a very Kurdish face.



I never said North European means WHG. I didn't even use the WHG/ANE/ENF components and exclusively the Dodecad once. I don't mix those two calculators because it is impossible to mix them accurately. Caucasus_Gedrosia is 2/3 ENF + 1/3 ANE. North European is something like 5/9 WHG, 3/9 ANE and 1/9 ENF.

So if modern Europeans means for you North Europeans. Than allot of Europeans are not European and even in that case Yamna is not like North Europeans because they share allot more ancestry with modern West Asians than any modern North European.

The point is you can't describe ancient cultures with modern ethno_geographic terms. We only can tell which part of their ancestry reached when Europe.

WHG most likely during mesolithic, ENF during early Neolithic and most of ANE (and Caucasus_Gedrosia as hybrid of this and ENF) during late Neolithic/Bronze Age.

There is no genetic Europe. There is an ethno_geographic term which describes populations with similar culture, history, politics and to some degree looks.



In modern peoples eyes they would have looked like Europeans, and pimgentationwise like modern Central, East and North Europeans yes. But to be exactly more like, those light Iranic people. And in genetic sense this doesn't matter. Otherwise we could argue that Yamna were all West Asians.

The point is that looks does not correlate with genetics for 100%. And especially not among genetic groups which are so close.

I mean the genetic difference between northern West Asia and Europe is so extremely small in global comparison that it is negligable. It is so small I remember all Kurds, Turks, Iranians and Armenians on Global Similarity charts in 23andme appearing closer to South Europeans and even North Europeans as to Arabians. And Arabians themselves are genetically very close to what we would call "European" in global perspective. So now you can imagine how close West Asian and European really are.

West Asia and Europe are genetically like two siblings who have diverged very recently. so a genetic Europe doesn't really exist. The only reason why there is a fluent connection from South to North or North to East Europe is because there was never an event which could have created a gab. This was not the case in the Steppes.

As I said in the past and as many ancient samples have proven me over time as right. There was once a fluent genetic transition from northern West Asia to Europe and Central Asia with the North Iranic tribes.

It is no wonder that Yamna and other ancient samples seem to be on "no mans land".

Just recently I opened a thread about this and explaining how the Turkic and later Slavic expansion changed the demographics of the Steppes and created this gap.
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/30706-Europe-West-and-South_Central-Asia-and-the-unnatural-gap

And here is a map to make clear how close actually Western Asia and Europe are in comparison to East Eurasian and Sub Saharan diversity.
http://i760.photobucket.com/albums/xx249/Aletheia14/Xing2010PCA.jpg

I don't have time to spend on the site today, but I just wanted to point out that while I agree with almost everything you say here in this post, and with your explanation of the PCA, the part of the paper debated in this series of posts is not the end of the story. I was directed to the post(s) by RK on the Eurogenes thead on the Armenian paper. I think they make great sense, and not just because they might provide evidence through the Laz(?) modeling in the paper of some of my own speculations.

I have been saying for a long time that the northeast European populations are not "Armenian like" enough to be as heavily Yamnaya like as some of the analyses in the paper would indicate, and that the correlation might be related to excess EHG (only before this paper came out I called it WHG/EHG) that moved south with later migrations. I also speculated that this might explain why "Gedrosia" as a component shows up more strongly in northwest Europe than in northeast or eastern Europe. This analysis would perhaps help to explain that anomaly? I would be interested in your view of it.

The 2/3 ENF, 1/3 something "ANE like" makes sense to me for Caucasus-Gedrosia. (Did the final percentages for Yamnaya in terms of WHG/EEF/ANE come out close to our speculations?)

The source of the ENF can be pretty easily explained by the movement of the Neolithic into Iran and then Turkmenistan as per the maps I posted.

The "ANE" like component is a little more problematical. I am inclining toward thinking it moved east to west, but we need more aDna. I certainly see no reason to believe that it has to have been a north/south migration, and the same holds true for the movement of R1b. RK also discusses this in those posts.

How and when this "Armenian like" component got into the steppe populations is a separate issue, which is again separate from but related to questions about the uhrheimat of the Indo-European languages.

 

[Goo King]

This is completely delusional talk. Indo Europeans did not come from the steppe, they came from Anatolia with the invention of agriculture. Renfrew's theory makes a hell of a lot more sense.

 

[LeBrok]

I don't have time to spend on the site today, but I just wanted to point out that while I agree with almost everything you say here in this post, and with your explanation of the PCA, the part of the paper debated in this series of posts is not the end of the story. I was directed to the post(s) by RK on the Eurogenes thead on the Armenian paper. I think they make great sense, and not just because they might provide evidence through the Laz(?) modeling in the paper of some of my own speculations.

I have been saying for a long time that the northeast European populations are not "Armenian like" enough to be as heavily Yamnaya like as some of the analyses in the paper would indicate, and that the correlation might be related to excess EHG (only before this paper came out I called it WHG/EHG) that moved south with later migrations. I also speculated that this might explain why "Gedrosia" as a component shows up more strongly in northwest Europe than in northeast or eastern Europe. This analysis would perhaps help to explain that anomaly? I would be interested in your view of it.

The 2/3 ENF, 1/3 something "ANE like" makes sense to me for Caucasus-Gedrosia. (Did the final percentages for Yamnaya in terms of WHG/EEF/ANE come out close to our speculations?)

The source of the ENF can be pretty easily explained by the movement of the Neolithic into Iran and then Turkmenistan as per the maps I posted.

The "ANE" like component is a little more problematical. I am inclining toward thinking it moved east to west, but we need more aDna. I certainly see no reason to believe that it has to have been a north/south migration, and the same holds true for the movement of R1b. RK also discusses this in those posts.

How and when this "Armenian like" component got into the steppe populations is a separate issue, which is again separate from but related to questions about the uhrheimat of the Indo-European languages.

There is one aspect that mudding the water in Armenian Like admixture. Armenians are IE linguistically and contain genetically a big percentage of European Steppe ancestral component. If they journey to the Anatolia started in Yamnaya they surely carried it to the Near East with them. Part of it still persists today in Anatolia and Caucasus. This backflow movement of some components, that possibly originated in Near East and native Northern components makes the whole picture difficult to decipher.

 

[MOESAN]

very unreliable reconstitutions!
to Alan:
no, dolichocrane euryprosope (broad low faces) are not 'mediterranean' - they evocate the 'cro-magnon' phylum when jaws are broad too, very ancient, and which features could be found today among populations of same far origin but having evolved towards disfferent modern populations, concerning other autosomes (because thiese traits depend on autosomes, spite some profans remarks) - the typical 'mediterraneans', short or high statured, don't have broad faces, and these broad faces are today a relatively rare to very rare % in pooulations, except some little populated isolats - they did not fade completely out and can be found at low rate in individuals, curiously enough in rugby world among Welshes, Irishmen and French Basques or southwest by instance, or in some parts of Scandinavia, but evolved very early in some parts or were mixed in others -
these faces can be found at higher level in North-East an Central Europe, but then associated to brachycephaly (Borreby touch)- very rare around Mediterranea or Near East all the way -

 

[MOESAN]

its not centered on this thread, but it concerns it asn other threads linked to history and I-Eans and diverse hypothesis and autosome approximatios:
present in Eurogenes and Dienekes blogs, thanks them - it is somwhat partly discussed by Eurogenes - but it could change our insight about populations moves (for a long time I thought, based upon old anthropology, that Armenians were not a so homgenous group -

[FONT=Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif]Geneticevidence for an origin of the Armenians from Bronze Age mixing ofmultiple populations [/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif]MarcHaber et al. [/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif]TheArmenians are a culturally isolated population who historicallyinhabited a region in the Near East bounded by the Mediterranean andBlack seas and the Caucasus, but remain underrepresented in geneticstudies and have a complex history including a major geographicdisplacement during World War One. Here, we analyse genome-widevariation in 173 Armenians and compare them to 78 other worldwidepopulations. We find that Armenians form a distinctive clusterlinking the Near East, Europe, and the Caucasus. We show thatArmenian diversity can be explained by several mixtures of Eurasianpopulations that occurred between ~3,000 and ~2,000 BCE, a periodcharacterized by major population migrations after the domesticationof the horse, appearance of chariots, and the rise of advancedcivilizations in the Near East. However, genetic signals ofpopulation mixture cease after ~1,200 BCE when Bronze Agecivilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean world suddenly andviolently collapsed. Armenians have since remained isolated andgenetic structure within the population developed ~500 years ago whenArmenia was divided between the Ottomans and the Safavid Empire inIran. Finally, we show that Armenians have higher genetic affinity toNeolithic Europeans than other present-day Near Easterners, and that29% of the Armenian ancestry may originate from an ancestralpopulation best represented by Neolithic Europeans. [/FONT]

 

[LeBrok]

its not centered on this thread, but it concerns it asn other threads linked to history and I-Eans and diverse hypothesis and autosome approximatios:
present in Eurogenes and Dienekes blogs, thanks them - it is somwhat partly discussed by Eurogenes - but it could change our insight about populations moves (for a long time I thought, based upon old anthropology, that Armenians were not a so homgenous group -

Geneticevidence for an origin of the Armenians from Bronze Age mixing ofmultiple populations

MarcHaber et al.

TheArmenians are a culturally isolated population who historicallyinhabited a region in the Near East bounded by the Mediterranean andBlack seas and the Caucasus, but remain underrepresented in geneticstudies and have a complex history including a major geographicdisplacement during World War One. Here, we analyse genome-widevariation in 173 Armenians and compare them to 78 other worldwidepopulations. We find that Armenians form a distinctive clusterlinking the Near East, Europe, and the Caucasus. We show thatArmenian diversity can be explained by several mixtures of Eurasianpopulations that occurred between ~3,000 and ~2,000 BCE, a periodcharacterized by major population migrations after the domesticationof the horse, appearance of chariots, and the rise of advancedcivilizations in the Near East. However, genetic signals ofpopulation mixture cease after ~1,200 BCE when Bronze Agecivilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean world suddenly andviolently collapsed. Armenians have since remained isolated andgenetic structure within the population developed ~500 years ago whenArmenia was divided between the Ottomans and the Safavid Empire inIran. Finally, we show that Armenians have higher genetic affinity toNeolithic Europeans than other present-day Near Easterners, and that29% of the Armenian ancestry may originate from an ancestralpopulation best represented by Neolithic Europeans.

Thank you Moesan, I wonder how much of it was in 50% of "Armenian like" admixture?

 

[Aberdeen]

Did anyone else read the new article in the Deinekes Blog entitled "Scandinavian team looking for Indo-Europeans in Kazakhstan"? It has a link to a Kazakhstan newspaper that has an article about a Scandinavian team testing 120 "Bronze Age and early Iron Age samples", although the results aren't available yet. But the article also says the samples are 4000 years old. Perhaps the samples actually cover a range of time periods. Regardless, the results should be interesting, although I would personally rather see testing of 4000-5000 year old samples from western Yamnaya. I suppose those will come in time.

 

[Alan]

Here's my post from a different forum that many of you may have read. It's linguistics/Historic, but I think it's very relevant even in a gene-centric discussion.

If one honestly considers the consequences of an Anatolian/West Asian homeland consisting of R1b's that brought PIE by trickling through the Caucuses, you either conclude that it's impossible/extremely unlikely, or it's an answer to a different question, beyond the scope of PIE.

The more I consider it, the more crazy it sounds to me.

I think it was horse trading for cattle, bronze or what not. Horses are THAT valuable in the ancient world and I don't know how people can't see this. It was the first form of VERY rapid transportation that could easily be weaponized. It's that simple.

Look at Mitanni for instance. A Hurrian people, speaking Hurrian, and yet all of their writings on Chariot battle and horse training/horsemanship is in Indic/Aryan. Now there's additional evidence that this was actually an Aryan aristocracy imposing themselves on the Native Hurrians, but whatever, at the very least it supports my point.

PIE arose on the Steppes with the domestication of horses, and IEs wielded enormous power through use as a tool and a SUPER valuable commodity. They no doubt traded for cattle, which became integral to their culture and religion. Interesting that you can reconstruct "raid for cattle" into PIE, and there appears to be a myth suggesting that the primary function of the first specialized PIE warriors was to retrieve stolen cattle and presumably kill the thieves, then the priests would sacrifice the cattle and distribute the parts. Super interesting. The thieves also appear to be construed as non-indoeuropean foreigners. What strikes me is that the cattle has to be stolen for this cycle to perpetuate, which makes one wonder who was really doing the stealing.

Early Afanasievo genomes could be very telling. These people are very likely to have spoken Tocharian. With the very early departure, before any other known IE's in that direction, especially at such great a distance these samples offer a very unique glimpse into the IE genome. We will of course expect them to look like Yamna, but if they look like R1b Samara and R1a Karelin, with both R1b and R1a, then we have additional genetic evidence of a Steppe origin.
​

First of all

West Asian pastoralist highlands =/= Anatolian farmer hypothesis.


If you made some effort into reading the arguments of the other users, instead of randomly throwing a statement into the room which doese not refute the other arguments, you would have probably known that.

1. You say the Yamna people simply took wives from the Maykop culture not even showing slight interest into the whole debate going on about this since several pages now, and in which this argument has been refuted and shown how ridiculous nonsense it is.

Reasons are
Yamna does not only have ~50% West Asian highland pastoralist ancestry. Yamna does not only have the pastoralist lifestyle, Also Yamna has the same burying rituals of Maykop and even many more.

Yamna is basically a clone of Maykop fact. Now instead of simply accpeting the most logical explanation, that there was a migration from the West Asian highlands, via Maykop into the Steppes. We could also argue that it might be possible that Yamna took systematically for over a millennia Maykop brides, and than might have forced these brides to teach them pastoralism and might even asked them to teach them how to burry their deads in Kurgan style. The oldest Kurgans are found in Leila Tepe, NW Iran/North Mesopotamia.

I think till here it should get obvious to everyone how ridiculous this theory sounds. This theory needs so many possibilities to add up at each other to even function properly, It is like tossing a coin 3-4 times and expecting that it turns always right. This is a prime example of how far humans are ready to go just to satisfy their own egos.

Even Reich himself speaks only about two possibilities.

Either PIE is the product of pastoralists meeting EHG in Yamna (therefore not a bride exchange but real mixing of cultures). Or that PIE was already spoken in the West Asian highlands by a pastoralist population.

Reich completely rules out that EHG could have spoken a PIE language. So no chance there.


sitenote: Mitanni =/= Indic. Someone who had been really interest in this would know it and not let himself be confused by the classification of Indo_Aryan some linguists made.

It is not clear wether Mitanni spoke an archaic and yet undivided(IranoAryan vs Indo Aryan) form of Indo_Iranian or it was part of the Indo_Aryan group which one part went into indian subcontinent while the other into Mesopotamia.

However from what I have been reading it looks much more like Mitanni was a very archaic form of Indo_Iranian(the reason some linguists however classify it as Indo_Aryan is because overall Indo_Aryan is more archaic and akine to proto Indo Iranian than Iranic is) just like Hittite was of PIE. Another reason for me to wonder if the PIE homeland was not too far away.

 

[Alan]

Some good points. Just that I would add WHG is like 2.5 as much as among North Caucasians and half of what modern North/Northeast Europeans have.

which is basically around ~27% as I have said so many times in the past. And has been proven by the fact that Norwegians minus their Yamna ancestry have ~25% WHG. That brings us to the conclusion that Yamna added ~25% of WHG to Norwegians.


just a detail:
Alan, I appreciate what you write for the most, but here am I a bit block-headed ? I don't understand the way Yamanaya can add their 25% of WHG to Norwegian already possessing 25% of WHG? percentages don't add but mix according to the weight of every componant: if I suppose Yamnya made 50% of the modern Norwegians and have roughly the same % of WHG I find 50 x 25% (Yamnaya) + 50 x 25% (old Norwegians) = 100 x 25% (new Norwegians) - Or I made a miss something?
No offense

I meant that pre IE Norwegians had ~25% WHG. And the rest of their WHG was added with the incoming Yamna. Sometimes more sometimes less depending on the populations.

Norwegians have roughly ~47% WHG. ~24% of it was added from Yamna.

Yamna is said to have been ~50% EHG like and ~50% WA pastoralist.

EHG is said to be 40/60% ANE/WHG. So ~60% /2 = ~30%

Until IE reached Norway their WHG and ANE probably decreased slightly. Remember Reich said pre Yamna WHG almost completely "died out" in Europe. So it must have become very weak and IE was what gave WHG new life.
Pre Bronze AgeTuscans had almost no more WHG!

Pre Bronze Age Europe seems to have been dominated by European farmers.

 

[Alan]

I don't have time to spend on the site today, but I just wanted to point out that while I agree with almost everything you say here in this post, and with your explanation of the PCA, the part of the paper debated in this series of posts is not the end of the story. I was directed to the post(s) by RK on the Eurogenes thead on the Armenian paper. I think they make great sense, and not just because they might provide evidence through the Laz(?) modeling in the paper of some of my own speculations.

I have been saying for a long time that the northeast European populations are not "Armenian like" enough to be as heavily Yamnaya like as some of the analyses in the paper would indicate, and that the correlation might be related to excess EHG (only before this paper came out I called it WHG/EHG) that moved south with later migrations. I also speculated that this might explain why "Gedrosia" as a component shows up more strongly in northwest Europe than in northeast or eastern Europe. This analysis would perhaps help to explain that anomaly? I would be interested in your view of it.

The 2/3 ENF, 1/3 something "ANE like" makes sense to me for Caucasus-Gedrosia. (Did the final percentages for Yamnaya in terms of WHG/EEF/ANE come out close to our speculations?)

The source of the ENF can be pretty easily explained by the movement of the Neolithic into Iran and then Turkmenistan as per the maps I posted.

The "ANE" like component is a little more problematical. I am inclining toward thinking it moved east to west, but we need more aDna. I certainly see no reason to believe that it has to have been a north/south migration, and the same holds true for the movement of R1b. RK also discusses this in those posts.

How and when this "Armenian like" component got into the steppe populations is a separate issue, which is again separate from but related to questions about the uhrheimat of the Indo-European languages.

Our speculation seem to have been roughly correct. it seems Yamna was 25-30% WHG, 30% ANE and the rest must be ENF part of Caucasus_Gedrosia.


An explanation for why modern East Europeans have less Caucasus_Gedrosia can be that is has been diluted and they are not that much descend of Corded Ware.

I agree that most of modern Northeast European similarity to Yamna is based on the EHG portion of Northeast Europeans, but there is also allot of Caucasus which probably adds to it.