The spread of R1b

I was looking at the map of the spread of R1b. It makes parts of Kazachstan and Iran the source of R1b, obviously due to the existence of people carrying M-343. However, the Kazach source of these R1b are the so called "Kazach Kurds", Kurds that were deported by Stalin from the Caucasus, to wit Nakhchivan and Georgia. That would place the origin of R1b in the Caucasus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurds_in_Kazakhstan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_(Y-DNA)#R1b_.28R-M343.29

Any thoughts on this? There has been more very, very effective deportations and ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus and north of it which may defy the idea that people replacement can never be so complete as to cover all traces of former people. I call in mind the Circassian wars, or genocides as some would call it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian–Circassian_War

This is a great find epoch! It was always very enigmatic, not only for me I guess, how come R1a and R1b are both IE but avoided mixing, almost at all? The seclusion of R1b in Caucasus mountains could be vital in explanation of this phenomenon. It might mean that they started from rather small population of mountain pastoralists. Soaked IE culture and language during Yamna domination of the region. And when learned technological achievements of Yamna (horse, wagon, bronze weapons) they started conquering and expending. I think Maciamo pegged IE R1b to Maykop Culture of Caucuses.

http://www.eupedia.com/europe/neolithic_europe_map.shtml

This might be their early expansion:

What's missing so far, for me, is any evidence that there was ever a significant amount of R1b on the steppes prior to or during the Bronze Age. That was why I tried to start a discussion about what people expected from the Samara results from David Reich et al that will be published "sometime soon". That paper should be interesting.

Aberdeen said:

What's missing so far, for me, is any evidence that there was ever a significant amount of R1b on the steppes prior to or during the Bronze Age. That was why I tried to start a discussion about what people expected from the Samara results from David Reich et al that will be published "sometime soon". That paper should be interesting.

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The steppe has a tendency to delete entire peoples due to migration and warfare. I don't think there was a genocide of R1b, it's just that they were pushed towards Europe and the Caucasus by some other force.
It's not easy to stay in one place in the steppe, while the nearest mountains and forest regions have a much greater diversity and a more even distribution of haplogroups.

I guess that the steppe had a lot more N and Q in mesolithic times, but they just got chased away by R1b, and later R1b got chased away by R1a.
At the time, during the bronze age, perhaps the entire population of R1b in the world didn't exceed 20-30.000 men.

SuperStalin said:

The steppe has a tendency to delete entire peoples due to migration and warfare. I don't think there was a genocide of R1b, it's just that they were pushed towards Europe and the Caucasus by some other force.
It's not easy to stay in one place in the steppe, while the nearest mountains and forest regions have a much greater diversity and a more even distribution of haplogroups.

I guess that the steppe had a lot more N and Q in mesolithic times, but they just got chased away by R1b, and later R1b got chased away by R1a.
At the time, during the bronze age, perhaps the entire population of R1b in the world didn't exceed 20-30.000 men.

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Evidence, or it didn't happen.

The upcoming paper by Reich et al should give us some answers. My guess is still that the Samara region was an almost exclusively R1a enclave during the period prior to the IE expansion. If there were other Y haplotypes, I'd expect to see N or Q sooner than R1b, which seems to have been centred in Anatolia.

LeBrok said:

This is a great find epoch! It was always very enigmatic, not only for me I guess, how come R1a and R1b are both IE but avoided mixing, almost at all? The seclusion of R1b in Caucasus mountains could be vital in explanation of this phenomenon. It might mean that they started from rather small population of mountain pastoralists. Soaked IE culture and language during Yamna domination of the region. And when learned technological achievements of Yamna (horse, wagon, bronze weapons) they started conquering and expending. I think Maciamo pegged IE R1b to Maykop Culture of Caucuses....

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One interesting thing is that the R1a/R1b divide matches up very closely to the Satem/Centum division in the IE languages, which could indicate that PIE predates the "split" in the Satem-speaking R1a and Centum-speaking R1b tribes. Most of the theorizing appears to relate to efforts to demonstrate which group first "owned" PIE and which group adopted it later. Could it be the case that PIE originated in a third culture that has since disappeared? Maybe the Satem and Centum changes represent substrates from the previous R1a and R1b speech that were preserved when they learned PIE, possibly from a smaller band of overlords of a different type.

Centum and Satem refer to one very specific isogloss which happened due to linguistic contact and it's NOT a language grouping. Germanic and Greek are both Centum languages but Germanic is a lot closer to Balto-Slavic in terms of cognates, grammar, etc... even though Balto-Slavic is a Satem language.

Finalise said:

Centum and Satem refer to one very specific isogloss which happened due to linguistic contact and it's NOT a language grouping. Germanic and Greek are both Centum languages but Germanic is a lot closer to Balto-Slavic in terms of cognates, grammar, etc... even though Balto-Slavic is a Satem language.

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Perhaps, but Germanic-speaking peoples have an above-average R1a minority that you don't see in most other Centum-speaking populations, notably Celtic and Romance which have very little R1a. Romanian might be an exception to that, but it has been partially Slavified anyway so one might expect that to be caused by an infusion of Slavic-speaking R1a people.

RobertColumbia said:

One interesting thing is that the R1a/R1b divide matches up very closely to the Satem/Centum division in the IE languages, which could indicate that PIE predates the "split" in the Satem-speaking R1a and Centum-speaking R1b tribes. Most of the theorizing appears to relate to efforts to demonstrate which group first "owned" PIE and which group adopted it later. Could it be the case that PIE originated in a third culture that has since disappeared? Maybe the Satem and Centum changes represent substrates from the previous R1a and R1b speech that were preserved when they learned PIE, possibly from a smaller band of overlords of a different type.

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It doesn't match up very closely, in my opinion (by that logic, the non-Indo-European Basques should be firmly Indo-European, or, conversely, the overtly Iranic-speaking Ossetians should be speaking some Caucasian language), nor should we expect the lineages of Y-chromosomes to neatly match up with isoglosses. Its far more probable both were present in the original population, and due to founder effects, different Haplogroups became dominant in the subsequent populations. You also shouldn't account later events in history (migration period and the middle ages, in particular). The distribution patterns we see today are basically the sum of it all.