Recent content by markod

The pastoralists resemble Cushites a lot. It looks like they came from an intermediate location in Sudan where a Taforalt/Natufian population acquired admixture related to present day Nilotes. There is in any case nothing particularly (recent) Eurasian about the uniparentals, so I think this...

Yes, I think the introgression of EHG alleles accelerated the trend towards depigmentation. You see this in northern Baltic CWC, which goes from more or less uniformly dark to uniformly light between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

Don't think GAC and the blond Hungarian LBK had it. That doesn't mean rs12821256 isn't a strong causal factor in blondism. But the selective pressure was in place among farmers before the introgression.

In HIrisPlex-S rs12821256 isn't required for blondism I think.

Boys suffer disproportionate degrees of infant mortality in most tribal societies (due negligence and culling). That's because having many daughters is the easiest way to become wealthy. As for blondism, it seems to be associated with settled agriculture at high latitudes - both CW and GAC...

Yes, they killed their swarthy kids. As always you came up with the most plausible explanation. How do you do it?

An early presence of Italic in Italy would explain why the two branches (Latino-Faliscan and Osco-Umbrian) are so different from each other. I think that's one of the problems with the Villanovs hypothesis. Agreed with your general sentiment. I guess the problem are the events we can never...

That's essentially the Pallottino hypothesis. I think it must be either that or Woudhuizen's hypothesis (Villanova = Italic, Apennine = Etruscan) . All the other hypotheses seem to rely on special pleading 🤷

But in the LBA it's the Apennine and Urnfield cultures that collide in Italy. Perhaps some Terramare people survived without leaving an archaeological culture, but there's no good reason to derive Etruscan from this ghost culture, especially now that we know one Etruscan plots as far north as...

There were a number of tribes that have lived in S. Italy before the Osco-Umbrian expansion. The Oenotrians and their mythical ruler Italus are interesting for instance.

So same old 'eastern' hypothesis. This begs the question, since the earliest UP transitioners (Oase, Ust-Ishim) went extinct, where did the Sungir and Goyet populations come from? For the latter my guess would be Turkey/Levant, but Sungir is more difficult. Indus? Where did they converge with...

Don't be cryptic. Who was in BA N. Italy other than Terramare and the Urnfielders?

Seems pretty populated for the time:

Anyone who talks about Etruscan archaeology should know about the Terramare collapse. I linked a comprehensive paper above, and I even highlighted the relevant parts.

The region was depopulated. There was no pre-Anything in North Italy when the Villanovans came.