Dienekes has decided to opine:
http://www.dienekes.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-story-of-69-ancient-europeans.html
Some quotes:
"The EHG (Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers) are likely Proto-Europeoid foragers and the Yamnaya (a Bronze Age Kurgan culture) were a mixture of the EHG and something akin to Armenians.The "attraction" of later groups to the Near East is clear in the PCA: hunter-gatherers on the left side, the Near East (as grey dots) on the right side, and Neolithic/Bronze Age/modern Europeans in the middle. The second migration may very well be related to the
Uruk expansion and the
presence of gracile Mediterranoids and robust Proto-Europeoids in the Yamna:"
"
The estimate of Yamnaya related ancestry in the Corded Ware is consistent when using either present populations or ancient Europeans as outgroups (SI9, SI10), and is 73.1 ± 2.2% when both sets are combined (SI10). [...] The magnitude of the population turnover that occurred becomes even more evident if one considers the fact that t
he steppe migrants may well have mixed with eastern European agriculturalists on their way to central Europe. Thus, we cannot exclude a scenario in which the Corded Ware arriving in today’s Germany had no ancestry at all from local populations."
He also takes the opportunity to show what he obviously feels was the prescience of some of Coon's observations by quoting the following from Coon:
"We shall see, in our survey of prehistoric European racial movements, 8 that
the Danubian agriculturalists of the Early Neolithic brought a food-producing economy into central Europe from the East. They perpetuated in the new European setting a physical type which was later supplanted in their original home. Several centuries later the Corded people, in the same way, came from southern Russia but there we first find them intermingled with other peoples, and the cul-tural factors which we think of as distinctively Corded are included in a larger cultural equipment. [...]
On the basis of the physical evidence as well, it is likely that the Corded people came from somewhere north or east of the Black Sea. The fully Neolithic crania from southern Russia which we have just studied include such a type, also seen in the midst of Sergi's Kurgan aggregation.
Until better evidence is produced from elsewhere, we are entitled to consider southern Russia the most likely way station from which the Corded people moved westward.
He also quotes Coon as to language development:
"Linguistically, Indo-European is probably a relatively recent phenomenon, which arose after animals had been tamed and plants cultivated.
The latest researches find it to be a derivative of an initially mixed language, whose principal elements were Uralic, called element A, and some undesignated element B which was probably one of the eastern Mediterranean or Caucasic languages. 5 The plants and animals on which the
Somewhere in the plains of southern Russia or central Asia, the blending of languages took place which resulted in Indo-European speech. This product in turn spread and split, and was further differentiated by mixture with the languages of peoples upon whom it, in one form or other, was imposed. Some of the present Indo-European languages, in addition to these later accretions from non-Indo-European tongues, contain more of the A element than others, which contain more of the B.
The unity of the original " Indo- Europeans," could not have been of long duration, if it was ever complete.
I think this is very important. Yamnaya was a big place. Who knows what lineages will show up around its entire expanse.
On Urheimat (or not)
If PIE=EHG (as
Anthony and Ringe suggest), then "from the crib", PIE got half its ancestry from a non-IE, Near Eastern source. Conversely, if PIE=Near East (as
I suggested) then "from the crib", PIE got half of its ancestry from a non-IE, Eastern European source.
The "Yamnaya" seems to max out in Norwegians at around half, which means that they are about a quarter Proto-Indo-European genetically, regardless of which theory is right.
Dienekes goes on further to say:
"These two possibilities (as well as the third one of PIE being neither-nor, but rather a linguistic mixture of the languages of the EHG and Near East) are testable. The
Anthony/Ringe version of the steppe hypothesis predicts pre-Yamnaya expansions from the steppe. Whether these happened and what was their makeup can be tested: if they did occur and they did lack "Near Eastern" ancestry, then the steppe hypothesis will be proven. PIE in the Near East, on the other hand, predicts that some PIE languages (certainly the Anatolian ones) will be a "within the Near East" expansion. If such migrations did occur and they lacked "EHG" ancestry, then some variant of the Gamkrelidze/Ivanov model will be proven. Or, the truth might be that everywhere where Indo-Europeans arrive they carry a blend of "West Asian" and "EHG", supporting the third possibility. Time will tell."
He also cautions against too much certainty at this point:
In the interim, I am curious about how much Yamnaya ancestry existed in different parts of Europe (all of the post-5kya samples in this study come from Germany, with a couple from
Hungary). In northern Europe, all populations seem to have less Yamnaya ancestry than the Corded Ware: there it must have declined. But, modern Hungarians have more than Bronze Age Hungarians: there it must have increased.
Germany and a slice of Hungary is a very narrow window through which to see the whole of Europe and these results must be tested by looking at samples from beyond the "heartland". I do hope that some kind of Moore's law operates in the world of ancient DNA, and in three more years we'll be reading studies about
thousands of ancient individuals.
