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You're right, the pace of language change is certainly a big issue for this hypothesis, since the Euphratic substrate is most definitely typologically differentiated in the direction of the northern & western branches of IE, though it might not actually be on the same clade and instead some type...

I really botched the formatting there. I'm mostly in full agreement with the general picture you described here. I'm still unsure about the language & Y-DNA correlations, but only ancient DNA will tell I guess. Hopefully some usable DNA from ancient southern Iraq can be retrieved. If the...

In his newer paper Whittaker proposed an already differentiated (i. e. definitely non-Anatolian) in Sumerian: https://www.academia.edu/3592967/Euphratic_-_A_phonological_sketch I lack the expertise to evaluate how solid this is, but here's Indo-European linguist Prof. Piotr Gasiorowski thinks...

Levant_BA shifted Greeks from 900 CE sounds a lot like Eastern Romans to me. I'm at a loss as to what they were doing in those mountains though. That reminds me that there was a little preview of an upcoming paper on Greek DNA from the neolithic, antiquity and the medieval age a couple of...

Considering all those populations must have converged at least before 6,000 B.C., it's quite pointless to speculate which of the well-attested language families or isolates was spoken by which population. To put things in perspective, Bomhard proposed an origin for the Nostratic macro-family in...

Surveying yfull it looks like one of the regions (other than Turkey) that consistently shows very basal types of R1b is the western coast of the Persian Gulf - Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and so forth. Naturally Iraq & Iran will be underrepresented in commercial tests, but I'm sure we would see...

I think in this context it's good to remember that we still have no ancient samples from the earliest herding cultures in the northern Black Sea region. I'm sure by now mostly everyone is aware of Maykop. An equally interesting culture with more distinct southern influences would be Kemi Oba...

IIRC the consensus is that the Kikkuli text is something like a translation of a translation, since the original Hurrian text retained the Indo-Iranian words when the vocabulary was either very specialized or difficult to translate. So the Mitanni were definitely Indo-Iranian.

Some of the newer work on Leyla Tepe is interesting. Najaf Museyibli (2016): The Ubaid culture quite peculiar too. I've read Alberto Green's "The Storm God in the Ancient Near East" just recently, not expecting it to be so heavy on archaeological research. Describing the female-centred rites...

Thanks! Perhaps the authors just listed those low coverage samples as belonging to whatever the last positive call was that their software gave them. A bit misleading, but then again those samples can easily be ignored.

So does someone have an opinion on Darra.I.Kur_d from northern Afghanistan? The coverage is bad, but I've compared it with the samples in Olalde (2017) and it looks like if the assignment is correct this would be the oldest occurence of typically Western European R1b (L151). That can't be right...

I really hope he gets some perspective though. Those 'host population' formulations are genuinely sinister. He's reading propaganda of the worst kind.

No group has had greater achievements in the natural sciences and mathematics of the late 19th and the 20th century than European Jews - and that's before normalizing for population size. Those fields don't strike me as very heavy on verbal reasoning. Obviously they were confined to economic...

There was a paper last year that anticipated that age estimates based on ancient West Eurasian samples would be a bit off. Harris et al. "Rapid evolution of the human mutation spectrum". I think Reich referenced it a couple of times. About South Asia: could the Siberian HGs have been the...

Looks like someone on Anthrogenica got his hands on the data and sure enough the Hajji Firuz Tepe individual is R1b-Z2103. Autosomally all samples from this site are very similar - i. e. a coalescence of Iran Neolithic and Anatolian Neolithic streams of ancestry, with an emphasis on the former...

According to the supplementary tables it's not only M269, it's Z2103 (i. e. the Y-DNA that predominates in Yamnaya) 1500 years before its predicted to have made its appearance as per mutation rate estimates. The nomenclature is quite unwieldy, but the table gives it as R1b1a1a2a2.

Also 2850-2460 BCE R1b-L151 in Afghanistan. Is this the earliest R1b-L151 discovered to date?

R1b-Z2013 in 5900-5500 BCE Western Iran (I2327) at Hajji Firuz Tepe. We've found the male ancestor of the Yamnaya phenomenon :-)