Two Ancient Iberia DNA Papers with articles.

Well, I'm a great admirer of Gimbutas. Yes, she got some things wrong, but she got a lot right too, and without the benefit of the technology to decipher ancient dna.

As for her view of the "Old Europe" of the Balkans as some sort of female ruled ocean of peace and harmony, I think she got that mostly wrong.

However, I still maintain that in the "farmer" societies, like my favorites, the Minoans, women may have had more of a role, and they certainly didn't have the warrior cult and idolization to which I so much object.

As to modern parenting, you're preaching to the choir. I'm extremely old-fashioned in my views. Yes, a single mother can do a good job raising her children, including sons, but I maintain it's much harder. The two parent family hasn't lasted so long without a good reason. It's the optimum situation for raising children. Fathers are particularly important, imo, for sons, to teach them how to "be" men.

I look around me now, and I don't see a lot of men like my father and my uncles, or like my husband's uncles. I see spoiled little boys obsessed with their electionic toys and with trying to get easy sex.

That's part of the reason why I'm actually in favor of mandatory military service at least for boys, although it doesn't provide the whole answer. If their families can't do it, someone or something has to socialize them. They need to learn discipline, respect, a sense of duty, and the values of commitment to the group that hopefully it can inculcate. Heck, just making sure they can keep themselves and their quarters clean, and themselves healthy is a start.

I honestly do fear for the future for my own children.
 
Well, I'm a great admirer of Gimbutas. Yes, she got some things wrong, but she got a lot right too, and without the benefit of the technology to decipher ancient dna.

As for her view of the "Old Europe" of the Balkans as some sort of female ruled ocean of peace and harmony, I think she got that mostly wrong.

However, I still maintain that in the "farmer" societies, like my favorites, the Minoans, women may have had more of a role, and they certainly didn't have the warrior cult and idolization to which I so much object.

As to modern parenting, you're preaching to the choir. I'm extremely old-fashioned in my views. Yes, a single mother can do a good job raising her children, including sons, but I maintain it's much harder. The two parent family hasn't lasted so long without a good reason. It's the optimum situation for raising children. Fathers are particularly important, imo, for sons, to teach them how to "be" men.

I look around me now, and I don't see a lot of men like my father and my uncles, or like my husband's uncles. I see spoiled little boys obsessed with their electionic toys and with trying to get easy sex.

That's part of the reason why I'm actually in favor of mandatory military service at least for boys, although it doesn't provide the whole answer. If their families can't do it, someone or something has to socialize them. They need to learn discipline, respect, a sense of duty, and the values of commitment to the group that hopefully it can inculcate. Heck, just making sure they can keep themselves and their quarters clean, and themselves healthy is a start.

I honestly do fear for the future for my own children.

I think Gimbutas had a lot of things wrong too, but if you think about it, most thing she got wrong are proving with Archeogenetic when it didn't really existed at her times. Wich is not fair game at all. I actually think that Farmers societies weren't that peacefull and that even Social Stratification probably came from Old Europe, or developped simultaneously with Early Steppe and Middle-East groups, maybe because of a Circum-Pontic already established trade system. I'm also extremelly old fashioned, it's actually my favorite cocktail... No but to be serious, there is a very low chance that a single mother can do the perfect job, both boys and girls needs the admiration over a father figure. Porn is one of the cancer who is ruining men's life, even married ones, it is changing something in your brain, and like Opioids, you get anesthetize and need more and more in more troubled ways. The problem and that was the point between my Order and Independance idea, people and especially Women ( sorry to tell this ) see Porn or Depraved Sexuality as something Empowering, while a lot of Men are seeing this as something Depraving for themselves and are trying to overcome that and to become better persons, you can see that with internet movements such as No Fap or MGTOW ( wich i'm not part of and dont really support the idea btw ). I also like the idea of Conscription wich my country applies, but i didn't do it. I think for Europe, countries like France would make a good use of it, they use to have it, but they stopped it, for whatever reason, probably money.
 
Maybe apathy, social marginalization, slavery/servitude, indifference/depression, loss of confidence, lower self-esteem and lower social status, loss of competitive advantages and willingness to compete, reproduce and thrive... all of that disturbance in the males' social identities and orders ultimately leading to them not passing their lineages down not just because they were dying in higher proportions, but because at each generation they were leaving shorter offspring? That has happened many times with primitive societies, affecting males invariably more than females, when they met more economically and technologically advanced incomers, but I'm not sure the effect would be the same when the encounter was between farmers and pastoralists with similar levels of cultural and technological achievement.

I have the same feeling.
The bronze age newcomers had some thrive, the European farmers seem to have lost. They had become apathetic.
I don't know why.
 
Conan the Bárbaro is one of my favorite movies with Greasse and others. In cinema everything is possible with a good sound vanda and a script that makes us always winners but the same in reality would be quite sad, opaque, tragic regrettable. In Spain mothers and even grandmothers are already taking little boys with pigtails and painted nails to create gender equality in the future in the face of so much political advertising. If only Europe happens and at the same time we are receiving immigration from places where even though they live in Spain they will never change roles, integration will be even more impossible. Or everything is in pure aesthetics and although the man appears makeup with painted nails and shadow in the eyes continue the man in his usual role that is older than makeup. I do not know what will happen.
 
Conan the Bárbaro is one of my favorite movies with Greasse and others. In cinema everything is possible with a good sound vanda and a script that makes us always winners but the same in reality would be quite sad, opaque, tragic regrettable. In Spain mothers and even grandmothers are already taking little boys with pigtails and painted nails to create gender equality in the future in the face of so much political advertising. If only Europe happens and at the same time we are receiving immigration from places where even though they live in Spain they will never change roles, integration will be even more impossible. Or everything is in pure aesthetics and although the man appears makeup with painted nails and shadow in the eyes continue the man in his usual role that is older than makeup. I do not know what will happen.

The makeup at the Versailles court was extremely important. In the courts of the kings Louis XIV and Louis XV, the ideal of beauty was linked to everything that was artificial. The face, the body, the language, the emotions, everything became "makeup" ... The flaccid flesh was trapped by corsets and heavy fabrics ... The lips were makeuped with bright red and the cheeks with the pink or with red. The false pints (les mouches) made of fabrics were cut into various shapes and, depending on where they were placed, meant something. Both, men and women, makeup theirselfs. To hide the lack of hygiene, people wore perfumes with notes of flowers and musk. The teeth were brushed with coral dust, extremely abrasive, with oyster powder or white wine ...
White and red were the predominant colors. Red was seen as the tone capable of hiding old age and evoking sensuality. It came to be used everywhere, including the cheek of the dead. In addition to the red, the blue was used to hide the veins of the forehead, of the temples and of the neck in order to evoke the blue blood of the aristocracy.
Through the white oxide of lead, the women obtained the idealized white complexion. Most of the products used at that time, although extremely expensive, were highly harmful since they had as their basic element lead or arsenic. Let us also remember that women ate arsenic tablets to become anemic and keep the skin pale.
The color white was the favorite color of the skin, because a livid skin caused the effect of 'statue', and, reminder of the Middle Ages, evoked virginity. The extremely translucent skin created the illusion of purity, suggested a face and, by extension, an individual free of any blemish or scar. Being extremely makeuped also meant that her skin was homogenized, since the products disguised the dermatoses, the rosaceas, the redness ... To avoid tanning, the precious ones wore a mask that they held by their teeth, which prohibited them from talking. Fitelieu wrote in 1642 that, in order to make an elegant woman of the time, a whole boutique was necessary!


Versailles became a stage where arrogant puppets stared at each other in the mirror ...

View attachment 10816
 
^^

I really think that the habit or the makeup would not influence the roles in the end, even if the current radical feminists, rather than equality, try to inhibit masculinity, which has nothing to do with homosexuality, since there are very masculine gays in fact They are so macho that they sleep with men.


The makeup in France is incredible, there are still people in Spain who believe that the French do not bathe but simply perfumed. You have to see what the clichés are.
 
^^

I really think that the habit or the makeup would not influence the roles in the end, even if the current radical feminists, rather than equality, try to inhibit masculinity, which has nothing to do with homosexuality, since there are very masculine gays in fact They are so macho that they sleep with men.


The makeup in France is incredible, there are still people in Spain who believe that the French do not bathe but simply perfumed. You have to see what the clichés are.
^^

LOL. In fact it takes to be a superman to sleep with another man. LOL. I'm laughing, but I'm not prejudiced about it. The cliché about of the hygiene of French people also exists in Brazil and there are many French YouTubers with channels directed to the Brazilian public that play with this and do much success by here. LOL.
 
The makeup at the Versailles court was extremely important. In the courts of the kings Louis XIV and Louis XV, the ideal of beauty was linked to everything that was artificial. The face, the body, the language, the emotions, everything became "makeup" ... The flaccid flesh was trapped by corsets and heavy fabrics ... The lips were makeuped with bright red and the cheeks with the pink or with red. The false pints (les mouches) made of fabrics were cut into various shapes and, depending on where they were placed, meant something. Both, men and women, makeup theirselfs. To hide the lack of hygiene, people wore perfumes with notes of flowers and musk. The teeth were brushed with coral dust, extremely abrasive, with oyster powder or white wine ...
White and red were the predominant colors. Red was seen as the tone capable of hiding old age and evoking sensuality. It came to be used everywhere, including the cheek of the dead. In addition to the red, the blue was used to hide the veins of the forehead, of the temples and of the neck in order to evoke the blue blood of the aristocracy.
Through the white oxide of lead, the women obtained the idealized white complexion. Most of the products used at that time, although extremely expensive, were highly harmful since they had as their basic element lead or arsenic. Let us also remember that women ate arsenic tablets to become anemic and keep the skin pale.
The color white was the favorite color of the skin, because a livid skin caused the effect of 'statue', and, reminder of the Middle Ages, evoked virginity. The extremely translucent skin created the illusion of purity, suggested a face and, by extension, an individual free of any blemish or scar. Being extremely makeuped also meant that her skin was homogenized, since the products disguised the dermatoses, the rosaceas, the redness ... To avoid tanning, the precious ones wore a mask that they held by their teeth, which prohibited them from talking. Fitelieu wrote in 1642 that, in order to make an elegant woman of the time, a whole boutique was necessary!


Versailles became a stage where arrogant puppets stared at each other in the mirror ...

View attachment 10816

You are white, why are you so obsessed with blackness and why are you not telling quite clearly early? That's the real true question.
 
You are white, why are you so obsessed with blackness and why are you not telling quite clearly early? That's the real true question.

this has nothing to do with blackness
it's because they despise the 'stupid peasants' who work outside in the fields and are tanned
 
this has nothing to do with blackness
it's because they despise the 'stupid peasants' who work outside in the fields and are tanned

You didn't see his previous posts, he has a black skin bias, but he dont quite tell it. I'm slightly aware of France history, thank you.
 
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^^But if he says it continuously. He has published it and always mentions it. It has never been hidden or ignored or hidden or hidden, I have never seen it.
 
You didn't see his previous posts, he has a black skin bias, but he dont quite tell it. I'm slightly aware of France history, thank you.

You are mistaken. I have no obsession with blackness. The truth is that the old European nobility never had much sympathy for the sunburned skin and the calloused hands of the peasants. In China of nowadays the same thing happens. People living in cities do not like to expose themselves to the sun because they do not want to look like "uneducated" peasants with extremely tanned skin. Even to go to the beach or to the pool they cover themselves totally with clothes similar to the clothes used by divers.
I do not see where you could see some racial bias in my previous post.
The French nobility before the French revolution was completely alienated, to the point that a court servant told Marie-Antoinette that the people were revolted because they had no bread to eat and she replied frivolously: "If there is no bread, let them eat brioches”.
 
You didn't see his previous posts, he has a black skin bias, but he dont quite tell it. I'm slightly aware of France history, thank you.

That's absurd. He's the furthest thing from a racist.
 
phylogeographer.com_mygrations_%2B%25281%2529.png


L618
This map makes my journey. Arrives in Romania. With whom did you reach the Iberian peninsula?
 
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THE NEW YORK TIMES

A History of the Iberian Peninsula, as Told by Its Skeletons

With an analysis of DNA from nearly 300 fossilized remains, scientists are peering into human prehistory in the region

By Carl Zimmer
March 14, 2019

For thousands of years, the Iberian Peninsula — home now to Spain and Portugal — has served as a crossroads.
Phoenicians from the Near East built trading ports there 3,000 years ago, and Romans conquered the region around 200 B.C. Muslim armies sailed from North Africa and took control of Iberia in the 8th century A.D. Some three centuries later, they began losing territory to Christian states.
Along with historical records and archaeological digs, researchers now have a new lens on Iberia’s past: DNA preserved in the region’s ancient skeletons. Archaeologists and geneticists are extracting genetic material spanning not just Iberia’s written history but its prehistory, too.
“We wanted to bridge the ancient populations and the modern populations,” said Iñigo Olalde, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Olalde is the lead author of a paper published on Thursday in Science that analyzes the DNA of 271 ancient Iberians.

In recent years, scientists have created similar chronologies for entire continents, based on hundreds of samples of ancient DNA. Now researchers are starting to narrow their focus to smaller regions.
With a total of 419 ancient human genomes obtained by various laboratories, Iberia offers a rich trove. Scientists have recovered only 174 ancient genomes in Britain, and just eight in Japan.

This dense record shows that Iberia’s genetic profile changed markedly in response to major events in history, such as the Roman conquest. But researchers have also uncovered evidence of migrations that were previously unknown. Iberia, it now seems, was a crossroads long before recorded history, as far back as the last ice age.

The oldest known human DNA in Iberia comes from a 19,000-year-old skeleton found in 2010 in a cave called El Mirón, in northern Spain. The skeleton belonged to a woman, a member of a band of Ice Age hunter-gatherers.
People in Iberia continued to live as hunter-gatherers for thousands of years after that, long after the end of the Ice Age. Dr. Olalde and his colleagues analyzed DNA from four additional hunter-gatherers, while a separate team, based at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, extracted DNA from 10 more.

Both teams obtained the same striking result: Iberian hunter-gatherers had a remarkable mix of genes, showing that they descended from two profoundly distinct groups of early European hunter-gatherers.

One of these groups can be traced as far back as 35,000 years, thanks to a skeleton discovered at a site in Belgium called Goyet. The Goyet-related people spread across Europe, only to be replaced on much of the continent near the end of the Ice Age by a genetically distinct population.
The earliest sign of the second group appears 14,000 years ago, known to researchers by DNA in a skeleton at an Italian site called Villabruna.
But in Iberia, the new studies find, the Goyet and Villabruna people coexisted. Hunter-gatherers across the peninsula had a mixture of ancestry from the two peoples.
“This is quite amazing, because it’s not happening in other areas,” said Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, the lead author of the Max Planck study, published in Current Biology.

Ms. Villalba-Mouco speculated that the geography of Iberia — located in a far corner of Europe — may have allowed the Goyet people to endure there after they disappeared elsewhere. “Maybe nobody was bothering these hunter-gatherers,” she said.
But whatever solitude Iberia might have offered came to an end about 7,500 years ago, when new people arrived with crops and livestock. These first farmers, originally from Anatolia, brought with them a distinctive genetic signature.


After their arrival, the genetic makeup of Iberians changed dramatically. Ninety percent of the DNA from the later skeletons derives from the Anatolian farmers; 10 percent comes from the hunter-gatherers.
But this shift was not a simple story of an older population replaced by a newer one. Starting about 6,000 years ago, Dr. Olalde and his colleagues found, hunter-gatherer ancestry in Iberian farmers actually increased to 20 percent.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]

It’s possible that hunter-gatherers endured beyond the advent of farming. They may have taken up farming as well, and perhaps later the two cultures merged.

For centuries afterward, the researchers found, there was little change in the genetic profile of Iberians. But there are hints of a few remarkable migrations.
A skeleton from an elaborate grave in central Spain about 4,400 years old belonged to a man whose ancestry was 100 percent North African.
“That’s crazy,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the paper in Science. “We double-checked it because it was so weird.”

Another striking result emerged when the researchers studied the DNA from a 3,500-year-old woman. They concluded she had a North African grandparent.
These findings suggest that people were moving into Iberia from Africa more than 3,000 years before the rise of the Roman Empire. “These are cosmopolitan places,” Dr. Reich said.
About 4,500 years ago, still another wave of people arrived, profoundly altering the makeup of Iberia.

A few centuries earlier, nomads from the steppes of what is now Russia turned up in Eastern Europe with horses and wagons. They spread across the continent, giving up nomadic life and intermarrying with European farmers.
When they finally reached Iberia, these people spread out far and wide. “They really have an impact on the whole peninsula,” said Dr. Olalde.
But skeletal DNA from that period is striking and puzzling. Over all, Bronze Age Iberians traced 40 percent of their ancestry to the newcomers.
DNA from the men, however, all traced back to the steppes. The Y chromosomes from the male farmers disappeared from the gene pool.
To archaeologists, the shift is a puzzle.

“I cannot say what it is,” said Roberto Risch, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who was not involved in the new studies. But he ruled out wars or massacres as the cause. “It’s not a particularly violent time,” he said.

Instead, Dr. Risch suspects “a political process” is the explanation. In their archaeological digs, Dr. Risch and his colleagues have found that Iberian farmers originally lived in egalitarian societies, storing their wealth together and burying their dead in group graves.
But over several centuries, palaces and fortresses began to rise, and power became concentrated in the hands of a few. Dr. Risch speculated that the cultural shift had something to do with the genetic shift found by Dr. Olalde and his colleagues.
The Bronze Age in Iberia was followed by the Iron Age about 2,800 years ago. In skeletons from this period, Dr. Olalde and his colleagues found clues of more arrivals.

Iron Age Iberians could trace some of their ancestry to new waves of people arriving from northern and Central Europe, possibly marking the rise of so-called Celtiberian culture on the peninsula.
In addition, the scientists found a growing amount of North African ancestry in skeletons from the Iron Age. That may reflect trade around the Mediterranean, which brought North Africans to Iberian towns, where they settled down.

North African ancestry increased in Iberia even more after Romans took control. Now the peninsula was part of an empire that thrived on widespread trade. At the same time, people from southern Europe and the Near East also began leaving an imprint.
This shift in ancestry could explain one of the biggest mysteries in Iberian history. Researchers have long puzzled over the distinctive culture of the Basque region in northern Spain.

The Basque speak a language that is unrelated to other European tongues. Some researchers have speculated that they descended from a population that had been distinct since the Bronze Age or earlier.

Genetically, at least, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Before the Roman era, the Basque had DNA that was indistinguishable from that of other Iron Age Iberians. But Roman genes did not flow into Basque Country.
After the fall of Rome, ancient DNA in Iberia reflects its medieval history. Skeletons from the Muslim era show growing ancestry from both North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.

Which brings us, just a millennium later, to the present. In February, Clare Bycroft of the Wellcome Trust Center for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford and her colleagues published a study of the DNA of 1,413 people in Spain.
The team was able to identify pieces of North African DNA in people across Spain. The researchers estimated that the subjects’ North African ancestors lived about 800 years ago, during Muslim rule.
The researchers were also able to group Spaniards into five genetic clusters. On a map, these groups form five strips running north to south. Those strips line up neatly with history.

At the height of the Muslim rule, a few small Christian states survived on the northern coast of Spain. As Muslims lost power, those states expanded their southern borders, starting roughly 900 years ago.
Up until now, wide swaths of time typically separated genetic studies of living people and those of ancient DNA. But now, in places like Iberia, the gaps are being filled in, creating an unbroken genetic chronology.
“The two worlds are starting to merge,” said Dr. Bycroft.

A version of this article appears in print on March 19, 2019, on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Stories of Migrant Peoples, Written in DNA. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 
^^

The New York Time for issues of Spain both past and present is very imprecise and inaccurate and does not usually contrast the news.


In current affairs usually screw up because you have to imagine what he will do in past issues.


The last place we have to resort to the Iberians to know ourselves is the New York Time.
 
^^

The New York Time for issues of Spain both past and present is very imprecise and inaccurate and does not usually contrast the news.


In current affairs usually screw up because you have to imagine what he will do in past issues.


The last place we have to resort to the Iberians to know ourselves is the New York Time.

^^ Hi Carlos. Great hug my beloved friend :)
 
Have Reich said the following " A few centuries earlier, nomads from the steppes of what is now Russia turned up in Eastern Europe with horses and wagons. They spread across the continent, giving up nomadic life and intermarrying with European farmers. " Or is it the NYT Author's projection?

The part of the text that you emphasized and highlighted is linked to the following article by Carl Zimmer (2015):


[h=1]DNA Deciphers Roots of Modern Europeans[/h]
For centuries, archaeologists have reconstructed the early history of Europe by digging up ancient settlements and examining the items that their inhabitants left behind. More recently, researchers have been scrutinizing something even more revealing than pots, chariots and swords: DNA.
On Wednesday in the journal Nature, two teams of scientists — one based at the University of Copenhagen and one based at Harvard University — presented the largest studies to date of ancient European DNA, extracted from 170 skeletons found in countries from Spain to Russia. Both studies indicate that today’s Europeans descend from three groups who moved into Europe at different stages of history.
The first were hunter-gatherers who arrived some 45,000 years ago in Europe. Then came farmers who arrived from the Near East about 8,000 years ago.
Finally, a group of nomadic sheepherders from western Russia called the Yamnaya arrived about 4,500 years ago. The authors of the new studies also suggest that the Yamnaya language may have given rise to many of the languages spoken in Europe today.


Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Dublin who was not involved in either study, said that the new studies were “a major game-changer. To me, it marks a new phase in ancient DNA research.”
The two teams worked independently, studying different skeletons and using different methods to analyze their DNA.


The Harvard team collected DNA from 69 human remains dating back 8,000 years and cataloged the genetic variations at almost 400,000 points. The Copenhagen team collected DNA from 101 skeletons dating back about 5,400 years and sequenced the entire genomes.
Both teams also compared the newly sequenced DNA to genes retrieved from other ancient Europeans and Asians, and to living humans.


Until about 9,000 years ago, Europe was home to a genetically distinct population of hunter-gatherers, the researchers found. Then, 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, the genetic profiles of the inhabitants in some parts of Europe abruptly changed, acquiring DNA from Near Eastern populations.


Archaeologists have long known that farming practices spread into Europe at the time from Turkey. But the new evidence shows that it wasn’t just the ideas that spread — the farmers did, too.





The hunter-gatherers didn’t disappear, however. They managed to survive in pockets across Europe between the farming communities.


“It’s an amazing cultural process,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who led the university’s team. “You have groups which are as genetically distinct as Europeans and East Asians. And they’re living side by side for thousands of years.”
From 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, however, hunter-gatherer DNA began turning up in the genes of European farmers. “There’s a breakdown of these cultural barriers, and they mix,” Dr. Reich said.
About 4,500 years ago, the final piece of Europe’s genetic puzzle fell into place. A new infusion of DNA arrived — one that is still very common in living Europeans, especially in central and northern Europe.
The closest match to this new DNA, both teams of scientists found, comes from skeletons found in Yamnaya graves in western Russia and Ukraine.



Archaeologists have long been fascinated by the Yamnaya, who left behind artifacts on the steppes of western Russia and Ukraine dating from 5,300 to 4,600 years ago. The Yamnaya used horses to manage huge herds of sheep, and followed their livestock across the steppes with wagons full of food and water.
It was an immensely successful way of life, allowing the Yamnaya to build huge funeral mounds for their dead, which they filled with jewelry, weapons and even entire chariots.
David W. Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College and an author of the Harvard study, said it was likely that the expansion of Yamnaya into Europe was relatively peaceful. “It wasn’t Attila the Hun coming in and killing everybody,” he said.
Instead, Dr. Anthony said he thought the most likely scenario was that the Yamnaya “entered into some kind of stable opposition” with the resident Europeans that lasted for a few centuries. But then, gradually, the barriers between the cultures eroded.


The Copenhagen team’s study suggests that the Yamnaya didn’t just expand west into Europe, however. The scientists examined DNA from 4,700-year-old skeletons from a Siberian culture called the Afanasievo. It turns out that they inherited Yamnaya DNA, too.
Dr. Anthony said he was surprised by the possibility that Yamnaya pushed out over a range of about 4,000 miles. “I myself have a hard time wrapping my head around explanations for that,” he said.

The two studies also add new fuel to a debate about how languages spread across Europe and Asia. Most European tongues belong to the Indo-European family, which also includes languages in southern and Central Asia.


For decades, linguists have debated how Indo-European got to Europe. Some favor the idea that the original farmers brought Indo-European into Europe from Turkey. Others think the language came from the Russian steppes thousands of years later.
The new genetic results won’t settle the debate, said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at Copenhagen University who led the Danish team. But he did say the results were consistent with the idea that the Yamnaya brought Indo-European from the steppes to Europe.
The eastward expansion of Yamnaya, evident in the genetic findings, also supports the theory, Dr. Willerslev said. Linguists have long puzzled over an Indo-European language once spoken in western China called Tocharian. It is known only from 1,200-year-old manuscripts discovered in ancient desert towns. It is possible that Tocharian was a vestige of the eastern spread of the Yamnaya.
“We can just say that the expansion fits very well with the geographical spread of the Indo-European language,” said Dr. Willerslev.


Paul Heggarty, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, said that the new studies were important but still too limited to settle the debate over the origins of Indo-European. “I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said.
Dr. Heggarty noted that the studies showed the arrival of Yamnaya in Central Europe about 4,500 years ago. But Greek is an Indo-European language, and the oldest evidence of writing in Europe shows that Greek had developed about 3,500 years ago. By then, it was distinct from other Indo-European languages in Southern Europe, like Latin.


If the Yamnaya were the source of Indo-European languages, they would have had to have reached southern Europe soon after they had made it to Central Europe.
Dr. Heggarty speculated instead that early European farmers, the second wave of immigrants, may have brought Indo-European to Europe from the Near East. Then, thousands of years later, the Yamnaya brought the language again to Central Europe.



More ancient DNA could swing the balance of evidence in favor of one theory over the other, Dr. Heggarty said. A stronger case for a steppe origin of Indo-European might emerge, for example, if scientists discovered that Greeks around 4,500 years ago abruptly acquired Yamnaya DNA.
“Let’s see whether they look like the steppe people or not,” he said.


Correction: Jan. 13, 2016The Matter column on June 16, about two studies of ancient European DNA extracted from skeletons found in countries from Spain to Russia, misstated the age of the skeletons from which a team from the University of Copenhagen analyzed DNA. The 101 skeletons dated back about 5,400 years, not 3,400 years. This correction was delayed because the error was only recently pointed out to editors.


 
As I've been comparing mytrueancestry results with Iberians, I thought I might post some of the results here for whatever insights they might provide.

Here are the samples. The first genetic "fit" is Carlos', the second is mine, and the third one is for Jovialis. The smaller the number the better the fit. I also have Duarte's and Stuvane's figures. Duarte gets numbers close to those of Carlos but a little bit worse in terms of fit, and Stuvane gets numbers similar to mine, with fits also a bit larger. Both have posted their results so you can easily look them up in the mytrueancestry thread. It's just getting very tedious looking all these numbers up, as well as being time consuming.

Imperial Period:
6. Roman Iberia Granada (300 AD) (16.5) - I3982 Angela [FONT=&quot](15.42)[/FONT][FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
51. Roman Iberia Granada (350 AD) (22.96) - I3983 Angela [FONT=&quot](15.18)[/FONT][FONT=&quot] Jovialis [/FONT](20.78) [FONT=&quot]

[/FONT]
Early Medieval:

40. Late Roman Iberia Granada (470 AD) (21.55) - I3575 Angela [FONT=&quot](13.51) Jovialis[/FONT][FONT=&quot] (17.51) [/FONT]
Early Medieval Iberia Granada (500 AD) (17.63) - I3981 Angela [FONT=&quot](11.99)[/FONT][FONT=&quot] Jovialis [/FONT](23.83)
45. Late Roman Iberia Granada (500 AD) (22.0) - I3581 Angela [FONT=&quot](14.39)[/FONT][FONT=&quot] Jovialis (22.58)
[/FONT]
EarlyMedieval Iberian (670 AD) (14.53) - CL23 Angela: [FONT=&quot](9.671) Jovialis [/FONT](24.17) [FONT=&quot] [/FONT][FONT=&quot]I would be cautious about this. It comes from Collegno and I'm doubtful about the labeling by mytrueancestry.[/FONT][FONT=&quot][/FONT]
Early Medieval Iberia Granada (760 AD) (13.51) - I3585 Angela[FONT=&quot](15.1)[/FONT][FONT=&quot] [/FONT]

Medieval Iberian Valencia (1100 AD) (15.42) - I2515 Angela [FONT=&quot](10.29 Jovialis [/FONT](24.77)

Later Medieval Iberia:
19. Medieval Iberian Valencia (1120 AD) (16.75) - I2514 Angela [FONT=Segoe UI, sans-serif]11.87 Jovialis [/FONT](26.5)
Medieval Iberian Valencia (1200 AD) (14.63) - I2649 Angela[FONT=&quot](15.54)[/FONT][FONT=&quot] [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Jovialis[/FONT][FONT=&quot] [/FONT](27.14)
17. Medieval Iberian Valencia (1200 AD) (16.53) - I2644 Angela 15.06 Jovialis (27.54)
30. Medieval Iberian Valencia (1200 AD) (19.83) - I2647 Angela [FONT=&quot](15.84)[/FONT][FONT=&quot] Jovialis [/FONT](24.22)

Carlos doesn't seem to get results in the top 60 for these, which seems strange. Well, there are samples in the top 60 which aren't in ours.
22. Late Roman Iberia Granada (500 AD) (14.83) - I3582 Jovialis (24.54)
26. Late Roman Iberia Granada (470 AD) (15.17) - I3576 Jovialis (22.49)
36. Early Medieval Iberia Granada (515 AD) (18.88) - I3980 Jovialis (20.48)

In one case Carlos gets a better fit than I do. In the rest mine are closer, in a few cases by not very much, and in the rest by a lot. The fits for Jovialis are sometimes in between mine and those of Carlos, and in some cases they're the most distant.

In other samples, like the Bell Beakers of France, central Europe etc., his scores are either better than mine and those of Jovialis or they don't even show up for us.

Yet, on these samples we have some similarities.

So, is it really ancient similarity, ie. Anatolian farmer like ancestry? We both have a lot of it. Is it also a signal that there is indeed Roman Era ancestry going into Iberia from the Italian peninsula, as the paper maintains? Yes, I think so, and Greek as well. I think it was most prominent in the east and south going by the settlement patterns, but we'd need more results from more Iberians and Italians.

Did that "Roman" ancestry come from northern, central or southern Italy? I don't think there's any way to even get a hint from results like this. There could have been southerners who admixed over time.

You would need to do some analyses to see if they were newcomers to the area or were at least local from birth, as was done in the Langobard paper.

I don't know how universal these results are...I'm from Emilia and Eastern Liguria/Lunigiana. Stuvane is from the Romagna, and his fits are usually a little less close than mine but very similar, even the order is almost the same. However, there might be more northern Italians who get worse fits, or better ones for that matter.
 

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