sparkey
Great Adventurer
- Messages
- 2,250
- Reaction score
- 352
- Points
- 0
- Location
- California
- Ethnic group
- 3/4 Colonial American, 1/8 Cornish, 1/8 Welsh
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- I2c1 PF3892+ (Swiss)
- mtDNA haplogroup
- U4a (Cornish)
Too bad they couldn't be more specific. According to the genetic mathematician Ken Nortvedt, I2a1 is pretty old and his suggested spread map indicates some of it followed the "close to the mediterranean" pathway surmised for Neolithic colonization towards the West. Reps could have wound up in that France site.
The Neolithic samples were strongly predicted to I2a1a based on STRs. No real chance that they were I2a1b. There are several reasons to think that I2a1a was the most successful Haplogroup I subclade during the Neolithic, and that a lot of these other subclades that are common now, like I1 and I2a-Din, owe their current distributions to more recent expansions.
On the other hand, he has computerized, on the basis of very precise analysis of the elements of I2a1b1 (the older I2a2a) that this subclade, which currently dominates I2 in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, arose not sooner than 2,800 years ago somewhere north of the Danube. He thinks it spread southward with the Slavic explosion of the 1rst millennium AD. But he admits the possibility of other scenarios.
FWIW I think Nordtvedt has it right here, totally... our best guess should be the Slavic expansion until we actually have evidence of something else. Thanks for the great summary of Nordtvedt's views, he's an authority who has been right more frequently than most others.
As to the Sarmatians, I think Bodin is fascinated by the evidence of Constantine Porphyrogenitus associated to snippets from Pliny, which has nothing to do with DNA of course, and which must be treated with much caution in any case.
I think Bodin sees some important evidence: that I2a-Din is young and not ancient in the Balkans (or at least has a discontinuity), and that there is a good deal of Haplogroup I in Eastern populations like Kurds, quite possibly including I2a-Din or even being I2a-Din dominant. So he comes up with a fairly romantic theory about Sarmatians bringing I2a-Din to the Balkans. But as several of us have said, that's not the most likely theory with current evidence, and it will need a good amount of studies on Sarmatian ancient DNA, or at least modern Eastern I2a-Din. I guess that it's not a disprovable theory, I just wouldn't take a bet on Bodin's side.