Where did the Anatolian branch of Indo-European originate?

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Moderation note: This thread was split from 137 ancient human genomes from across the Eurasian steppes.

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Our results also suggest distinct migrations bringing West Eurasian ancestry into South Asia before and after but not at the time of Yamnaya culture. We find no evidence of steppe ancestry in Bronze Age Anatolia from when Indo-European languages are attested there. Thus, in contrast to Europe, Early Bronze Age Yamnaya-related migrations had limited direct genetic impact in Asia

They disprove any involvement of Yamnaya in major IE migrations but they stick with it. Realy I'm considering if steppitis is a real illness.
 
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Can people stop with the exaggeration?

They found one Hittite sample.* You can't disprove an entire theory on one sample, although I admit it's suggestive that no EHG like material has yet been found anywhere in Bronze Age Anatolia. Indo-European speakers were all over the place.

Even if the Proto-PIE developed in Anatolia and then moved north to the steppe where the other PIE languages developed, it doesn't invalidate the tie between the Indo-European languages and the steppe.

I've been the first one to say that a lot of the analysis was like "IE for dummies", but that there is some tie is undeniable. It's just not how people have been describing it.

*It appears to be G-M406, yes?

I can't vouch for the accuracy of the below information. If it started moving 2000 BC into southern Europe I don't know why the harping on the Phoenicians, especially as from the analysis they're quoting the similarities are to Turkish and Armenian sub-clades. Whether they got into Italy directly or via Greece I have no idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_G-M406

"The sharing of common ancestors much farther back in time (perhaps 3,500 years ago) among some of these samples does not provide information so useful because the migration westward could have occurred anytime in the earlier period. The finding of likely G-M406 samples in the ancient isolated highlands of Sardinia, however, suggests the arrival of G-M406 in that island prior to the arrival of the Phoenicians. The latter began a Sardinian coastal presence about 3,000 years ago.
There is currently no information to explain the dispersion of G-M406 to the southern Indian area."

Ed. A few Hittite samples.
 
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Lol this is what one commenter over on anthrogenica posted:

"OOEET is dead, the Hittite samples are out, just a mixture of CHG and Anatolian farmers, zero EHG. For the people who have been insisting EHG has anything to do with Indoeuropeans it's over. They're also J2 and G2, as I've been saying all the south Caucasus Y-DNA like J2, R1b-L23, G2, T, etc. have very similar distribution in Europe, example:

E4ZCp0f.jpg


It came with Indoeuropeans, it wasn't there before. IE moved westwards from the south Caucasus homeland into Anatolia then southeast Europe then south France, where the R1b founder effect that gave birth to Bell Beaker happened. From that point on Centum languages were spread to northern Europe only with R1b instead of the full spectrum of IE Y-DNA.
 
If all the non-Anatolian IE languages expanded from the 'steppe', then we can talk about 'a tie between the Indo-European languages and the steppe'.
But, that isn't proven and it is likely false.


 
They disprove any involvement of Yamnaya in major IE migrations but they stick with it. Realy I'm considering if steppitis is a real illness.
IE probably moved out of the Steppe into the Middle East 6000 years ago, so if they focused on 6000-5000 years ago they're going to find cold adapted Asian lineages that moved in during a little ice age.

I haven't closely looked at the study, no Y-DNA? Weird.
 
I think no steppe in a bronze age Anatolian sample isn't a surprise at this point. Not sure what this says about PIE though.

@Angela Looks like the first evidence of domestic horses is in Northern Anatolia around 2700BC, associated with Bulgarian cultures, dare I say Anatolian IE speakers? I really really want to see who these people were. They need to sample the people now. Someone get on the phone.
 
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Lol this is what one commenter over on anthrogenica posted:

"OOEET is dead, the Hittite samples are out, just a mixture of CHG and Anatolian farmers, zero EHG. For the people who have been insisting EHG has anything to do with Indoeuropeans it's over. They're also J2 and G2, as I've been saying all the south Caucasus Y-DNA like J2, R1b-L23, G2, T, etc. have very similar distribution in Europe, example:

E4ZCp0f.jpg


It came with Indoeuropeans, it wasn't there before. IE moved westwards from the south Caucasus homeland into Anatolia then southeast Europe then south France, where the R1b founder effect that gave birth to Bell Beaker happened. From that point on Centum languages were spread to northern Europe only with R1b instead of the full spectrum of IE Y-DNA.

There is indeed a link in the spread of G2a-M406, J1-Z1828, J2a1-PF5116 and T1a-P77 (and perhaps some R1b-L23), but that wasn't with the Indo-Europeans. It was the contemporary Kura-Araxes culture that spread these lineages, as I have explained in my haplogroup pages (for each of these haplogroups) for a few years now. The more detailed the Y-DNA phylogeny becomes, the more it corroborates this theory.
 
Can people stop with the exaggeration?

They found one Hittite sample.* You can't disprove an entire theory on one sample, although I admit it's suggestive that no EHG like material has yet been found anywhere in Bronze Age Anatolia. Indo-European speakers were all over the place.

Even if the Proto-PIE developed in Anatolia and then moved north to the steppe where the other PIE languages developed, it doesn't invalidate the tie between the Indo-European languages and the steppe.

I've been the first one to say that a lot of the analysis was like "IE for dummies", but that there is some tie is undeniable. It's just not how people have been describing it.

*It appears to be G-M406, yes?

I can't vouch for the accuracy of the below information. If it started moving 2000 BC into southern Europe I don't know why the harping on the Phoenicians, especially as from the analysis they're quoting the similarities are to Turkish and Armenian sub-clades. Whether they got into Italy directly or via Greece I have no idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_G-M406

"The sharing of common ancestors much farther back in time (perhaps 3,500 years ago) among some of these samples does not provide information so useful because the migration westward could have occurred anytime in the earlier period. The finding of likely G-M406 samples in the ancient isolated highlands of Sardinia, however, suggests the arrival of G-M406 in that island prior to the arrival of the Phoenicians. The latter began a Sardinian coastal presence about 3,000 years ago.
There is currently no information to explain the dispersion of G-M406 to the southern Indian area."

Ed. A few Hittite samples.

I am not sure where you found that that Hittite sample was G-M406 as I couldn't find it in the supplementary data. But if it is, G-M406 is an Anatolian lineage peaking in central and northeastern Anatolia. I have theorised that it spread with the Kura-Araxes culture to the Greek islands (and with the Greeks to southern Italy), as the Minoans almost certainly descended from a Kura-Araxes expansion.

If the other Hittite sample is J2a (I also couldn't find it), it would be from anywhere in the northern Middle East.

However the fact that these samples possessed Anatolian and Iranian farmers admixture with EHG and that they do not have any Y-DNA associated with Yamna or any other Bronze Age IE culture (R1a, R1b-L23, I2a2a-L701, E-V13, G2a-U1, G2a-Z1816, J2b2a-L283) is a good indication that these samples were in fact local Anatolian people assimilated by the Hittite invaders, and not Hittite themselves. Contrarily to what happened in Europe between 3000 and 1500 BCE, Indo-European migrations to Anatolia must have had a much more minor genetic impact, because Anatolian cultures had the time were more advanced and more densely populated than Europe (esp. Western and Northern Europe). The Hittites were merely a small ruling class, like the Goths in Italy and Spain. I doubt that they represented more than 5% of the population (or overall DNA in the gene pool after they mixed with locals) of their empire.

Additionally the Hittites arrived very late (1650 BCE) and were just an offshoot of other Anatolian IE speakers from Western Anatolian (Trojans, Luwians, Lydians, Lycians), who might have been in Anatolia for centuries, and before that in the Balkans, perhaps since c. 4000 BCE, giving them over two millennia to mix with Neolithic Anatolian/Balkanic populations. So it's hardly surprising if we find little Steppe DNA among the Hittites. In fact, there should be less of it than among Indo-Aryans in India (10-20%) because the Proto-Anatolians clearly left the Steppe much earlier (around 4000 BCE) than the Proto-Indo-Iranians (around 2000 BCE), yet the Hittites appear c. 1650 BCE, exactly at the same time as the Indo-Aryans in northern Pakistan and NW India!

What is going to be interesting is to see if the Anatolian IE tribes until the days of the Hittites also practised some sort of endogamy. I doubt it considering how all other Indo-European people freely mixed with conquered populations. We will know it once they find R1b-L23 (or other potential PIE) lineages among Hittite samples. If they have anything more than 5% of Steppe DNA, then endogamy might have been practised at least for a few centuries. If there is substantial Steppe DNA (say over 30%) then endogamy would have started very early after the Proto-Anatolians left the Steppe. But again, I very much doubt it.

The bottom line is that the two "Hittite" samples have non-IE Y-DNA and therefore can be expected to be assimilated indigenes.
 
Lol this is what one commenter over on anthrogenica posted:

"OOEET is dead, the Hittite samples are out, just a mixture of CHG and Anatolian farmers, zero EHG. For the people who have been insisting EHG has anything to do with Indoeuropeans it's over. They're also J2 and G2, as I've been saying all the south Caucasus Y-DNA like J2, R1b-L23, G2, T, etc. have very similar distribution in Europe, example:

E4ZCp0f.jpg


It came with Indoeuropeans, it wasn't there before. IE moved westwards from the south Caucasus homeland into Anatolia then southeast Europe then south France, where the R1b founder effect that gave birth to Bell Beaker happened. From that point on Centum languages were spread to northern Europe only with R1b instead of the full spectrum of IE Y-DNA.
Lol Olympus Mons...
 
Can people stop with the exaggeration?

They found one Hittite sample.* You can't disprove an entire theory on one sample, although I admit it's suggestive that no EHG like material has yet been found anywhere in Bronze Age Anatolia. Indo-European speakers were all over the place.

Even if the Proto-PIE developed in Anatolia and then moved north to the steppe where the other PIE languages developed, it doesn't invalidate the tie between the Indo-European languages and the steppe.

I've been the first one to say that a lot of the analysis was like "IE for dummies", but that there is some tie is undeniable. It's just not how people have been describing it.

*It appears to be G-M406, yes?

I can't vouch for the accuracy of the below information. If it started moving 2000 BC into southern Europe I don't know why the harping on the Phoenicians, especially as from the analysis they're quoting the similarities are to Turkish and Armenian sub-clades. Whether they got into Italy directly or via Greece I have no idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_G-M406

"The sharing of common ancestors much farther back in time (perhaps 3,500 years ago) among some of these samples does not provide information so useful because the migration westward could have occurred anytime in the earlier period. The finding of likely G-M406 samples in the ancient isolated highlands of Sardinia, however, suggests the arrival of G-M406 in that island prior to the arrival of the Phoenicians. The latter began a Sardinian coastal presence about 3,000 years ago.
There is currently no information to explain the dispersion of G-M406 to the southern Indian area."

Ed. A few Hittite samples.

Sardinians were in Crete around the 14-13th century bc (Kommos) and in Cyprus (Pyla Kokkinokremos) around 1230-1170 bc, Cretans and Cypriots were also present in Sardinia around that time (Antigori, San Sperate, etc). To get an idea of how intense the exchange between Sardinia and the Eastern Mediterranean was during the late bronze age look for instance at the distribution of Cypriot oxhide ingots. And around that same period Sardinians learned the lost wax technique and iron smelting likely from Cyprus and adopted a lot of new Cypriot tools and technologies which the other Central Mediterranean peoples didn't adopt.
 
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There is indeed a link in the spread of G2a-M406, J1-Z1828, J2a1-PF5116 and T1a-P77 (and perhaps some R1b-L23), but that wasn't with the Indo-Europeans. It was the contemporary Kura-Araxes culture that spread these lineages, as I have explained in my haplogroup pages (for each of these haplogroups) for a few years now. The more detailed the Y-DNA phylogeny becomes, the more it corroborates this theory.

Interesting.

On a tangentially related note, I have read your haplogroup page on R1b and i'm curious about PF7562. For PF7562 you theorize that it may be either an early Steppe migration to the Balkans dating from the Sredny Stog period or related to the Hittites.

I'm a bit perplexed as to its balkan distribution and what it means:

R1b-PF7562.JPG


Source: http://r1b-pf7562.blogspot.fr/
 
If all the non-Anatolian IE languages expanded from the 'steppe', then we can talk about 'a tie between the Indo-European languages and the steppe'.
But, that isn't proven and it is likely false.

It's actually the opposite, in that it's very likely that all Non-Anatolian IE languages expanded from the steppe. And in fact Anatolian likely came from the steppe as well.

Anatolian is the possible exception that has made this question ever more complicated.
 
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As i said earlier, David Reich's whiteboard had no movements towards Anatolia and they have much more data than anyone else, which they have not shared yet.
 
Lol this is what one commenter over on anthrogenica posted:

"OOEET is dead, the Hittite samples are out, just a mixture of CHG and Anatolian farmers, zero EHG. For the people who have been insisting EHG has anything to do with Indoeuropeans it's over. They're also J2 and G2, as I've been saying all the south Caucasus Y-DNA like J2, R1b-L23, G2, T, etc. have very similar distribution in Europe, example:

E4ZCp0f.jpg


It came with Indoeuropeans, it wasn't there before. IE moved westwards from the south Caucasus homeland into Anatolia then southeast Europe then south France, where the R1b founder effect that gave birth to Bell Beaker happened. From that point on Centum languages were spread to northern Europe only with R1b instead of the full spectrum of IE Y-DNA.

The ONLY evidence of this so far is the recent Z2103 findings. Modern day distributions have been proven to show little correlation to ancient distributions, this being more true the further back we go.

There is Caucasian admixture on the Steppe well before any evidence of contact with the Caucuses. It increased at the beginning of the Bronze Age, but every population in the Old World began to admix significantly as we moved toward the Bronze Age. This fact combined with the unassailable continuity of the material culture on the steppe through the Bronze Age leaves me unconvinced that this increase in Caucasian signals a linguistic shift. It's possible, but it's less likely in comparison to known examples.

Nearly everywhere we see a linguistic change in pre-industrial populations, e.g. Anglo Saxon migrations to Britain, Roman introduced Latin in France, Germanic into Central Europe etc. (there are countless examples), the cultural changes are extremely emphatic. A more contemporaneous example of a massive cultural imposition would be the Anatolian Farmers into Europe. Of course we can't prove anything linguistic one way or another in this case, but it still exemplifies a far more drastic cultural imposition in a pre-historic context that can be used as an example of what we'd like to see on the steppe if IE speakers were imposing there language with a Caucasian population. Language imposition is a big deal. All this hand waving about South Caucuses PIE, is just that.

I don't know if we have enough Anatolian DNA to use that as evidence of a Non-steppe origin of the IE Anatolian Languages, nor do I know how exactly to interpret this given what we know about the Hittites. I'm willing to say that "so far Anatolia looks to have nothing to do with Steppe IE during the period where we'd expect IE to have been spoken," but there are historical Mesopotamian records of non-IE Anatolian languages. They are plain as day. We see nothing about Hittites or otherwise Anatolian IE speakers until Hittites arrive on the historical scene later. They appear to be intrusive to the region in the historical records.

I think it's possible and I'm becoming more willing to entertain the notion of a South Caucuses PIE, but it's still big massive speculative project at this point.
 
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There is indeed a link in the spread of G2a-M406, J1-Z1828, J2a1-PF5116 and T1a-P77 (and perhaps some R1b-L23), but that wasn't with the Indo-Europeans. It was the contemporary Kura-Araxes culture that spread these lineages, as I have explained in my haplogroup pages (for each of these haplogroups) for a few years now. The more detailed the Y-DNA phylogeny becomes, the more it corroborates this theory.

Exactly. It's strange that people are willing to completely dismiss the emergence of Caucasian languages, so that they can force a speculative PIE in the Caucuses.
 
I am not sure where you found that that Hittite sample was G-M406 as I couldn't find it in the supplementary data. But if it is, G-M406 is an Anatolian lineage peaking in central and northeastern Anatolia. I have theorised that it spread with the Kura-Araxes culture to the Greek islands (and with the Greeks to southern Italy), as the Minoans almost certainly descended from a Kura-Araxes expansion.

If the other Hittite sample is J2a (I also couldn't find it), it would be from anywhere in the northern Middle East.

However the fact that these samples possessed Anatolian and Iranian farmers admixture with EHG and that they do not have any Y-DNA associated with Yamna or any other Bronze Age IE culture (R1a, R1b-L23, I2a2a-L701, E-V13, G2a-U1, G2a-Z1816, J2b2a-L283) is a good indication that these samples were in fact local Anatolian people assimilated by the Hittite invaders, and not Hittite themselves. Contrarily to what happened in Europe between 3000 and 1500 BCE, Indo-European migrations to Anatolia must have had a much more minor genetic impact, because Anatolian cultures had the time were more advanced and more densely populated than Europe (esp. Western and Northern Europe). The Hittites were merely a small ruling class, like the Goths in Italy and Spain. I doubt that they represented more than 5% of the population (or overall DNA in the gene pool after they mixed with locals) of their empire.

Additionally the Hittites arrived very late (1650 BCE) and were just an offshoot of other Anatolian IE speakers from Western Anatolian (Trojans, Luwians, Lydians, Lycians), who might have been in Anatolia for centuries, and before that in the Balkans, perhaps since c. 4000 BCE, giving them over two millennia to mix with Neolithic Anatolian/Balkanic populations. So it's hardly surprising if we find little Steppe DNA among the Hittites. In fact, there should be less of it than among Indo-Aryans in India (10-20%) because the Proto-Anatolians clearly left the Steppe much earlier (around 4000 BCE) than the Proto-Indo-Iranians (around 2000 BCE), yet the Hittites appear c. 1650 BCE, exactly at the same time as the Indo-Aryans in northern Pakistan and NW India!

What is going to be interesting is to see if the Anatolian IE tribes until the days of the Hittites also practised some sort of endogamy. I doubt it considering how all other Indo-European people freely mixed with conquered populations. We will know it once they find R1b-L23 (or other potential PIE) lineages among Hittite samples. If they have anything more than 5% of Steppe DNA, then endogamy might have been practised at least for a few centuries. If there is substantial Steppe DNA (say over 30%) then endogamy would have started very early after the Proto-Anatolians left the Steppe. But again, I very much doubt it.

The bottom line is that the two "Hittite" samples have non-IE Y-DNA and therefore can be expected to be assimilated indigenes.

Well said. We already have a Yamnaya grave in the Balkans that is like 50% Anatolian Farmer and that is pretty much right on the steppe interface. Why would we expect Anatolian speakers to have any more? With the right samples we should see some, but there's no reason to expect a significant portion, nor to expect that it was widespread in Anatolia during the era in question.

And the Hittites themselves were known to absorb the gods of their conquered subjects. It was a fundamental part of their identity, which is consistent with the notion that they mixed ALOT with anyone they encountered. They were called the people of 1000 gods for a reason.
 
Lol this is what one commenter over on anthrogenica posted:

"OOEET is dead, the Hittite samples are out, just a mixture of CHG and Anatolian farmers, zero EHG. For the people who have been insisting EHG has anything to do with Indoeuropeans it's over. They're also J2 and G2, as I've been saying all the south Caucasus Y-DNA like J2, R1b-L23, G2, T, etc. have very similar distribution in Europe, example:

E4ZCp0f.jpg


It came with Indoeuropeans, it wasn't there before. IE moved westwards from the south Caucasus homeland into Anatolia then southeast Europe then south France, where the R1b founder effect that gave birth to Bell Beaker happened. From that point on Centum languages were spread to northern Europe only with R1b instead of the full spectrum of IE Y-DNA.

Linguistically it does not make a lot of sense to associate the spread of Italo-Celtic, Germanic and other European IE branches with the supposed (if the lack of EHG in any part of Hittite or Luwian-inhabited Bronze Age Anatolia comes to be confirmed) expansion of the Anatolian branch. If those non-steppic/northern IE branches were demonstrably closer to Anatolian than to the steppic/northern IE branches like Indo-Iranian or Balto-Slavic, that could even be argued, but what has been demonstrated is exactly the opposite. If anything, from a linguistic point of view, that only reinforces the hypothesis of a "two stages" development of PIE, with its earliest existence in a region different from its latest homeland and focus of wider expansion. The southern homeland wouldn't have been as successful in the long term outside of the northern portions of West Asia, whereas the northern and later homeland (which wasn't necessarily centered only in one region and could've actually been very substructured) would've been responsible for the vast majority of the IE expansion. That fits the pattern of IE divergence better than assuming that the Indo-Europeanization of Western & Central Europe came directly from the Caucasus/West Asia, in which case we'd expect those languages to be much more apart from the "other", northern IE families, because their origins would've been very early on before the "proto-PIE" people separated in different waves of migration.
 
It is pointless in using modern haplogroup maps to talk about ancient migration!
why not do maps of ancient samples found , we can do the range from roman empire to back from there
 
Scientists don't work from fixed ideas and then reject anything that doesn't comport with those ideas.

If samples from Royal Hittite tombs are tested and there is no or extremely low steppe, then Hittite is autochthonous, not an import from the steppe via the Balkans.

You work from hypotheses, and follow the evidence. You don't start with the conclusion and do tons of special pleading to reduce the significance of the evidence that you have.

All of that said, two samples do not answer the question, so we have to wait.

As for the Huns, no need to speculate any longer. There are lots of admixture analyses for them, as there are for the various Scythian groups. It pays to read the paper and the supplementary materials as well.
 
From Iosif Lazaridis:

Iosif Lazaridis@iosif_lazaridis May 6More



- The steppe hypothesis predicts some genetic input from eastern Europe (EHG) to Anatolia.- Bronze Age Anatolians (Lazaridis et al. 2017) from historically IE-speaking Pisidia lack EHG; more samples obviously needed


Iosif Lazaridis@iosif_lazaridis May 6More



Possibilities:1- Additional Anatolian samples will have EHG: consistent with steppe PIE2- Additional Anatolian samples will not have EHG, then either:



More



If additional Anatolian samples lack EHG, then either:1- Steppe not PIE homeland2- Steppe PIE homeland but linguistic impact in Anatolia vastly greater than genetic impact


Iosif Lazaridis@iosif_lazaridis May 6More



Tentative steppe->Anatolia movements reach Balkans early (Mathieson et al. 2018) and Armenia (some EHG in Lazaridis et al. 2016). But not the last leg to Anatolia_ChL (Lazaridis et al. 2016) or Anatolia_BA (Lazaridis et al. 2017).



More



If Anatolians consistently don't have EHG, steppe PIE is very difficult to affirm; Near Eastern alternative likely (contributing CHG/Iran_N-related ancestry to both western Anatolia/steppe)If Anatolians have EHG, one could further investigate by what route they got it.


In addition, why all this emphasis only on Hittites. Indo-European was spoken all over Anatolia. Where the heck are the samples with steppe?
 

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