Human Paleogenetics of Europe-Brandt and Haak

[Angela]

Here is the link to the paper. It's hot off the presses.
http://www.researchgate.net/publicat...known_unknowns

One great thing about it is that it summarizes and provides links to all the data we currently have about aDna.

I only went through it once quickly, but there are also some assertions, or speculations, really, that are extremely interesting, although I have my doubts about some of them. They're also quite interesting if you consider them in light of the fact that Haak is working with Lazaridis on the Corded Ware paper, and so would presumably be aware of their current thinking on the whole subject of Yamnaya and the Indo-Europeans. This is all on the level of reading the tea leaves, so fire away. :)

My first major surprise was how much time they spent discussing the Anatolian theory of the spread of the Indo-European languages. To hear forum type people talk, I thought it was supposed to be as dead and discredited as last month's poll results. I thought the Pontic Caspian theory, while it was also discussed, almost seemed to get short shrift. I don't see how that could square with David Anthony being a collaborating author on the Samara paper. (Brandt et al also seem to waffle a bit...are they talking about the old Renfrew theory, the new Renfrew theory, or the Gramkelidze and Ivanov slightly later "Armenian" theory?)

There's also an intriguing graphic which includes Yamnaya which shows an arrow going from the south Caucasus into the Pontic Steppe with a question mark where the date should be. Am I reading it correctly?

Then there's the whole issue of R1b/R1a. They come down on the side of R1a coming into Europe proper with Corded Ware, and I think they're saying that came from Yamnaya. When it comes to R1b, they seem to be saying it was the Bell Beaker male lineage, and it along with some forms of mtDna "H", came from Iberia. The question is, how do they come to that conclusion, other than the fact that it's spread all over western Europe? Also, they're silent as to how it got there. It had to come from the east, but when, and what was the precise route? Was it Copper Age, and it spread, as Jean Manco has maintained, after breaking off at the Danube and going overland for a while? Or was it Copper Age and spread by sea to Iberia, bringing metallurgy with it?

Or, as Aberdeen has suggested, did it and some of the H lineages spread along the coast of North Africa, or indeed both coasts of the Mediterranean, and we just haven't found the traces yet?

Which brings me to their discussions of mtDna "H". They do support the idea that it is a Near Eastern/Caucasus lineage, but they give it a Mesolithic era spread into Europe, mainly, I think, because they accept the authenticity of the Iberian finds, but secondarily because of the reports that there is one find in Karelia and that preliminary results from Greece indicate that southeastern Europe also had a varied mitochondrial "package", and one that didn't include haplogroup "U". They also indicate a spread of other forms of "H" up into eastern Europe directly from the Near East.

So, what are we to make of this? I suppose I would say that I'm not sure about those Iberian results. However, the more interesting question to me is what were these Iberian carriers of mtDna H1 and H3 like autosomally? The authors devote quite some time to Iberia. Based on their categorization of "H" as mesolithic, they find more "mesolithic hunter gatherer" ancestry in Iberia. (This also influences all of their graphs about the changes in representation of the three major European groups throughout the applicable periods of pre-history." )

However, does that square with what we know about the modern Iberians autosomally? The far northern Spaniards are 72% EEF, while the rest of them are 83% EEF. In the far northwestern and northeastern areas of Europe, where it has been hypothesized that a lot of hunter gatherers sought refuge, EEF figures are about forty. So, why are the numbers in Iberia so high? A few options occur to me, but I'm sure there are others:
l. The mtDna carriers of "H" who got to Europe perhaps ahead of farming nevertheless were autosomally not all that different from the people who brought farming to Europe. This would tie into the caveat I've always proposed that we don't yet know the genetic composition of the people in Italy, Greece, etc. (and perhaps central and southern Iberia) just before the arrival of farming.
2. Additional EEF was brought to Spain subsequently, either with the Indo-Europeans, or with the Berbers during the long Muslim domination.

There's also some information about the changes which took place in Europe during the Middle Neolithic, (cleaning up the ambiguity from the prior paper) involving the increasing incorporation of female hunter-gatherers, which, of course, would have changed the autosomal picture as well. I have to review this section more carefully ( the whole paper actually) because it's very complicated. I'm not quite sure if they're saying that in central Europe the hunter-gatherers didn't last, but in places like southern Scandinavia, there were fewer, "pioneer" farmers, so there was more acculturation going on than a swamping of the genetics. This more mixed group then moved south into central Europe with climate changes? So, would this explain why, if Yamnaya turns out to be heavily EEF like, the early Bronze Age people have more WHG in them than the math would indicate should be the case? What the paper doesn't satisfactorily indicate is why, if this was driven overwhelmingly by incorporation of female hunter-gatherers into farmer groups and not vice versa, we have so many yDna I2 groups and even "I' in a Neolithic context.

[Sennevini]

Whatever they claim, we need Y-DNA samples.

About the Anatolian hypothesis: all linguistic evidence
suggests an origin of IE in the steppe, or otherwise said:
the linguistic evidence does not support an agricultural origin of IE.
I don't know about the scientific background of the authors, but I think
it is time that linguists learn about genetics, and that genetic scientists
learn about linguistics, because I'm noticing lack of understanding on both sides.

[Greying Wanderer]

"My first major surprise was how much time they spent discussing the Anatolian theory of the spread of the Indo-European languages."

My understanding is there are non-IE farming loan words which need to have come from somewhere. If Pontic-Caspian was the source of the core language then Cucuteni would be the likeliest source of those farming loan words so all that would need to happen to square the various circles might be to shift "Anatolian farmer" to Cucuteni.

.

"It had to come from the east, but when, and what was the precise route? Was it Copper Age, and it spread, as Jean Manco has maintained, after breaking off at the Danube and going overland for a while? Or was it Copper Age and spread by sea to Iberia, bringing metallurgy with it?"

Both imo, *if* BB were primarily traders and metal workers then a river BB through LBK territory in central Europe and a maritime BB around the coast linking up with Atlantic megalith culture would make sense i.e. following the trade networks from an originally common source.

In this case the mdna H from Iberia would be local women they married whether HG or perhaps more likely Atlantic megalith culture women assuming the BB lived in the Atlantic megalith culture's pre-existing coastal settlements.

.

"However, does that square with what we know about the modern Iberians autosomally? The far northern Spaniards are 72% EEF, while the rest of them are 83% EEF. In the far northwestern and northeastern areas of Europe, where it has been hypothesized that a lot of hunter gatherers sought refuge, EEF figures are about forty. So, why are the numbers in Iberia so high? "

We're probably not going to agree on this but I don't think the basal in EEF means what people think it means. I think it's "African Border Zone" dna rather than strictly middle eastern - it only seems middle eastern because we are projecting back from modern populations which have most of it. So I think a lot of the HGs in Europe had a lot of this basal *before* the farmers (who also had a lot of it) arrived.

(i.e. i think there was initially a layer of originally "African Border Zone" dna across most of the globe (at least along the coasts) which was submerged in most of Eurasia by a back migrating "ASE" population coming out of S/SE Asia which was diverted around the middle east and into northern and western Eurasia by these ABZ people. And as these presumed ASE people were themselves originally derived from the ABZ people they also contain some of the same basal signal but not as much.)

.

"the early Bronze Age people have more WHG in them than the math would indicate should be the case? What the paper doesn't satisfactorily indicate is why, if this was driven overwhelmingly by incorporation of female hunter-gatherers into farmer groups and not vice versa, we have so many yDna I2 groups and even "I' in a Neolithic context."

I'm not sure the pattern will be the same across Europe. In particular I think it could be divided into three horizontal strips: northern, central and southern by route taken i.e. 1) north of the Carpathians, 2) Danube and 3) coastal. If the Corded Ware in the northern third were wagon-based mobile herders who spread south later they may have simply incorporated some northern HGs (ydna I imo) along the way whereas elsewhere it may have been different e.g. male BB traders marrying local women.

[Aberdeen]

I can't access the paper because I'm not an academic. However, I'm getting the impression that it may have some sloppy aspects. If they're going to resurrect the Anatolian hypothesis, they need to explain why a genetic theory seems to go against the linguistic and archeological evidence, IMO. And I don't think it makes sense to talk about how R1b arrived in Europe without considering the possibility that different subclades arrived from different directions at different times. I have argued that the Iberian subclade may have arrived from the Mediterranean and/or from North Africa, but that doesn't mean that the German subclade did. And the Celto-Iberian subclade seems to have already been IE during the time of the Hallstatt Culture, so I think it must have been in the Crimea or the northern Balkans if, as I've suggested, it wasn't part of the original proto-IE population.

[Angela]

Greying Wanderer: My understanding is there are non-IE farming loan words which need to have come from somewhere. If Pontic-Caspian was the source of the core language then Cucuteni would be the likeliest source of those farming loan words so all that would need to happen to square the various circles might be to shift "Anatolian farmer" to Cucuteni.

Yes, we've already hypothesized on this Board that this could be the source of the agricultural words in Indo-European, as we've also hypothesized that this was the source of some kinds of metallurgy on the steppe (and the Balkan Old Europe cultures as well). However, that's quite different from the hypothesis put forward by Bouckaert et al. as just one example, or Gramkelidze and Ivanov.

Both imo, *if* BB were primarily traders and metal workers then a river BB through LBK territory in central Europe and a maritime BB around the coast linking up with Atlantic megalith culture would make sense i.e. following the trade networks from an originally common source.

In this case the mdna H from Iberia would be local women they married whether HG or perhaps more likely Atlantic megalith culture women assuming the BB lived in the Atlantic megalith culture's pre-existing coastal settlements.

Then what do you make of the fact that the physical anthropology of BB in Iberia is indistinguishable from the preceding Neolithic peoples whereas the central European BB is quite different, and, if I remember correctly more "Dinaric" in type? Also, what was the ultimate origin? Was it the steppe? Are you following Jean Manco's formulation that the split occurred on the Danube? Other than the stelae, where is the sign of their passage?

We're probably not going to agree on this but I don't think the basal in EEF means what people think it means. I think it's "African Border Zone" dna rather than strictly middle eastern - it only seems middle eastern because we are projecting back from modern populations which have most of it. So I think a lot of the HGs in Europe had a lot of this basal *before* the farmers (who also had a lot of it) arrived.

(i.e. i think there was initially a layer of originally "African Border Zone" dna across most of the globe (at least along the coasts) which was submerged in most of Eurasia by a back migrating "ASE" population coming out of S/SE Asia which was diverted around the middle east and into northern and western Eurasia by these ABZ people. And as these presumed ASE people were themselves originally derived from the ABZ people they also contain some of the same basal signal but not as much.

You're right...we're not going to agree. :) It's immaterial to me how "African" shifted, or not, Stuttgart's "basal" might have been, if that's what you mean. It's my impression that the latest word was that this isn't supported by extensive modeling, but I don't know and I don't see how it matters. It's just that, forgive me, what you propose is too speculative for me, and I like to speculate, mind. :) Where is the ancient dna and the mathematical modeling that would support this?

I could see, however, how the "Basal" component in Stuttgart and Oetzi and Gok, however it was formed, could have been present in Europe before the Neolithic arrived, perhaps in central/southern Iberia, Italy, and Greece. We have to wait and see what ancient dna tells us. Even if it was present prior to the Neolithic, we would need to figure out, again by ancient dna, whether it was present since the Paleolithic, or whether it was a late Mesolithic movement into Europe from the Near East, perhaps paralleling the movement of mtDna "H", and the increases in population that some studies have proposed actually took place right before the Neolithic, not after the Neolithic. Whatever the case may be, it wasn't present in the WHGs. I would think all the modeling that has been done would make that clear. I think it's also clear, based on mtDna alone, as the authors are at pains to point out, that the LBK people were very related to the agriculturalists of the Near East. Papers on the spread of U6 are also informative. I think the parsimonious explanation is that "Basal" Eurasian, in Lazaridis terms, was present in the Near East, and spread north, west, south and east with farmers. At least that's what the current data would lead me to believe.
.

I'm not sure the pattern will be the same across Europe. In particular I think it could be divided into three horizontal strips: northern, central and southern by route taken i.e. 1) north of the Carpathians, 2) Danube and 3) coastal. If the Corded Ware in the northern third were wagon-based mobile herders who spread south later they may have simply incorporated some northern HGs (ydna I imo) along the way whereas elsewhere it may have been different e.g. male BB traders marrying local women.

I wasn't speaking of the Indo-Europeans. The reference was to the section in the paper that discusses the changes that took place in the Middle Neolithic. The discussion was about the fact that in those northern regions there was more incorporation of female hunter-gatherers by smaller groups of farmers, and that later this progressively more mixed group moved back down in a reflux, if you will, to central Europe. We had speculated here that this might be the case, and that therefore the people whom the Yamnaya derived groups encountered (i.e. through Corded Ware) in more northerly regions contained more WHG autsomal material than might have been expected.

Therefore, admixture with 50% Armenian like and 50% Karelian like people could produce the EEF/WHG/ANE mix we see today, and/or it was basically empty up there, as was most of central and northern Europe before the arrival of the Neolithic if these authors are correct. What they seem to be postulating is that only when they adopted agriculture did the WHG increase in numbers, which we had already sort of figured out.

I have speculated before that perhaps the incorporation of a few Mesolithic male lineages may have taken place in the initial arrival. Perhaps it took place with the encounter with the people of the Danube Gorges, who were already pretty sedentary in terms of culture.

Just generally, to do some extreme speculating of my own, I'm starting to wonder how "Indo-European" the people of western Europe, Iberia, etc., actually are in terms of autosomal percentages. West of the Hungarian plain, there's no sign of them archaeologically. You suggest that they were mobile wagon people and so they didn't stay long in one place. If that's the case, they may not have left much genetic impact either. Also, why would they abandon their culture. Why does the Kurgan trail end in Hungary. That' one of the things that has always bothered me about the Pontic-Caspian Steppe theory. There's plenty about the other theories that doesn't make sense either, of course.

[Angela]

The Bell Beaker Blogger is heard from on the subject of Mesolithic (or Paleolithic) mtDna "H" in Iberia. (I don't always agree with him, but I like his writing style. :))

http://bellbeakerblogger.blogspot.com/

Shell Middens or Shenanigans-
"There are other issues with these remains. I don't want to come off like a chimpanzee on xanex, so I will leave it at that for others to study, but some of these early DNA studies from Southwest Europe and Italy need to looked at with a little more caution before we spend a lot of time debating European pre-history."

I would, "cautiously", agree.

[Angela]

The paper can be accessed publicly, for which the researchers should be applauded. Just go to the link I provided, scroll down, and you will see a box that says Full Text, and then a box that says VIEW. Just click view. It's readable. To download you do need to sign up.

[Aberdeen]

I'm still thinking about the paper, but my first reaction is that it's a broad survey paper that covers a lot of ground but doesn't provide much support for the positions they're taking. And they've revived the Anatolian hypothesis because of a 2013 paper by linguist Paul Heggarty, in which he associates the arrival of Indo-European languages in Europe with the arrival of Neolithic farmers. I guess Heggarty is unaware that the Iberian Peninsula and large parts of Italy were non-IE until the expansions of the Iron Age Celts and Romans into what were previously non-IE areas. And that's just the stuff from the historical period that contradicts his view. Heggarty's paper can be found here.

www.academia.edu/2951032/Europe_and_Wes

[motzart]

I enjoyed the paper a lot, thank you for posting it Angela.

It looks like the point of this paper was to basically give a recap and summation of the results of all the aDNA tested so far, and the implications of the data. The surprising points (for me) are that they advocate for the Anatolian hypothesis (implying the PIE were the first G2a farmers in Europe), and that they believe that R1b Bell Beakers spread from Iberia into Europe.

I would guess this was published to give context to the upcoming Laz paper on the Yamnaya.

[Greying Wanderer]

Yes, we've already hypothesized on this Board that this could be the source of the agricultural words in Indo-European

That's good then.

Then what do you make of the fact that the physical anthropology of BB in Iberia is indistinguishable from the preceding Neolithic peoples whereas the central European BB is quite different

I'll have a think about that. The first thought would be if the source was IE who had made it to somewhere around the source of the Danube and one branch had already broken off into northern Italy and taken local wives then the Italic branch might already have been physically distinct from the Celtic branch even though they were still culturally similar. So if the river BB came out of the Celtic branch and the maritime BB came out of the Italic branch that might explain it - but I'll have to read up on that.

edit: Also I should add I'm not 100% on BB being IE. I think they might have been refugees from the copper working cultures of the Balkans that disappeared (or a bit of both: partly displaced refugees from those disappeared cultures and partly artisans from those disappeared cultures incorporated into IE)

Also, what was the ultimate origin? Was it the steppe? Are you following Jean Manco's formulation that the split occurred on the Danube?

I can't recall reading it (but that doesn't mean anything as I read a ton and forget where half of it came from) so it sounds like I do. I think the most likely source of the first wave of I-E will have come from the farmer-steppe transition zone between Yamnaya and Cucuteni and displaced by pressure from the east.

Other than the stelae, where is the sign of their passage?

The disappearance of the peoples along their path with no sign of replacement settlements (because the replacement "villages" were made up of wagons (ed)).

It's immaterial to me how "African" shifted, or not, Stuttgart's "basal" might have been

I agree it's hair splitting in the context of Europe but I think it leads to a significant difference in terms of the peopling of most of the rest of Eurasia. (edit: not so much difference as a simplification of the model.)

Whatever the case may be, it wasn't present in the WHGs. I would think all the modeling that has been done would make that clear.

Well then I've misunderstood the modeling as my understanding was "EEF" was an arbitrary distinction where a WHG population were more than half Basal i.e. most of the WHG had some of it but some had a lot which implies WHG was a mixture of Basal and something else (with the something else being ASE from S/SE Asia imo) (similar to Usty).

I'm starting to wonder how "Indo-European" the people of western Europe, Iberia, etc., actually are in terms of autosomal percentages.

I think it's likely to vary a lot by region and I'd divide it into at least four strips: a vertical Atlantic coast strip and three horizontal strips, 1) north of the Carpathians (ed), 2) central Danubian channel, 3) Med. coast, with it going (IE + native HGs) in the north, (IE + some farmers) in the central belt and (IE and mostly farmers) along the southern coastal channel with the Atlantic coast being more of a mystery early on but eventually getting input from all three channels.

Same source, three channels, autosomal variation due to encountering different populations along each channel.

[Aberdeen]

I see no reason to believe that the BB folk were IE. If I'm correct in thinking they arrived in Iberia from along the Mediterranean and/or from North Africa, they wouldn't be. And I see no reason to think they came from eastern Europe, since they seem to have stopped their expansion at the boundaries of the Corded Ware folk. I really don't buy the ideas in Paul Heggarty's paper about IE spreading across Europe during the Neolithic. The Corded Ware folk may have been IE but I wouldn't bet the farm on that, and there's lots of evidence that other parts of Europe weren't IE until well into the Iron Age. As for what physical type BB folk were, it seems to me that there's plenty of evidence that physical type can be affected by things like climate, geography and diet. What we need in order to make definite conclusions is more BB genetic data, I think. But I still see IE as coming out of the steppes, whether originally with Corded Ware or with Bronze Age people, and I think the latter is more likely.

[Angela]

I'm still thinking about the paper, but my first reaction is that it's a broad survey paper that covers a lot of ground but doesn't provide much support for the positions they're taking. And they've revived the Anatolian hypothesis because of a 2013 paper by linguist Paul Heggarty, in which he associates the arrival of Indo-European languages in Europe with the arrival of Neolithic farmers. I guess Heggarty is unaware that the Iberian Peninsula and large parts of Italy were non-IE until the expansions of the Iron Age Celts and Romans into what were previously non-IE areas. And that's just the stuff from the historical period that contradicts his view. Heggarty's paper can be found here.

www.academia.edu/2951032/Europe_and_Wes

Thanks for the link, Aberdeen. I think the Heggarty paper is certainly part of it, but so is the Grey and Atkinson paper, which was excoriated by linguists, as well as the Bouckaert et al 2012 paper.

This is the link to the Gray and Atkinson 2011 paper:
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.o.../1090.abstract

This is the discussion at the Dienekes' site:
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2011/04...neolithic.html

This is the contrary view:
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/12...gins-talk.html

This is the link to the Bouckaert et al paper.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6097/957.abstract

I can't believe that they aren't publicly available yet. If someone knows where they could be accessed, that would be great.

As for the Heggarty paper, I have to agree with the following:

" It seems safer to side with those specilists like Clackson ( 2007:esp. 15-19), who keep an open, agnostic mind as to which of two radically different visions-in time-frame, geography, nature and causation-most plausibly accounts for humanity's greatest 'linguistic migration'. ".

That's where I land after reading all these things: I'm an agnostic. There are too many holes in each theory, in my opinion, for all of this certainty, unless you're selling a thesis.

[Greying Wanderer]

Just to stress something which i find really odd and so maybe I am missing something.

My understanding is the generally accepted theory is humans came out of Africa, mixed with some archaics in the middle east to become "Basal" and then "Basal" HGs spread everywhere - otherwise it wouldn't be basal.

Just to repeat that: "Basal" HGs spread everywhere**.

(**apart from where Basal had been submerged by a back-migration from S/SE Asia)

So... if "Basal" HGs were everywhere before farming developed and farming developed among one segment of this "Basal" HG population to become "Basal" farmers then where does this idea come from that the "Basal" farmers were completely distinct from the "Basal" HGs everywhere else**? (Apart from any specific farming adaptations.)

It seems much more plausible that there were Basal HGs all around the Med. coast and one of those groups developed farming and that group of Basal farmers then spread to other regions including some regions that contained Basal HGs. In other words autosomally there might be very little difference between Basal farmers from the near east and Iberian Basal HGs and "EEF" includes both Basal farmers and Basal HGs.

[Aberdeen]

Just to stress something which i find really odd and so maybe I am missing something.

My understanding is the generally accepted theory is humans came out of Africa, mixed with some archaics in the middle east to become "Basal" and then "Basal" HGs spread everywhere - otherwise it wouldn't be basal.

Just to repeat that: "Basal" HGs spread everywhere**.

(**apart from where Basal had been submerged by a back-migration from S/SE Asia)

So... if "Basal" HGs were everywhere before farming developed and farming developed among one segment of this "Basal" HG population to become "Basal" farmers then where does this idea come from that the "Basal" farmers were completely distinct from the "Basal" HGs everywhere else**? (Apart from any specific farming adaptations.)

It seems much more plausible that there were Basal HGs all around the Med. coast and one of those groups developed farming and that group of Basal farmers then spread to other regions including some regions that contained Basal HGs. In other words autosomally there might be very little difference between Basal farmers from the near east and Iberian Basal HGs and "EEF" includes both Basal farmers and Basal HGs.

When Lazardis et al use the term "basal Eurasian" in talking about EEF they're referring to a lineage that split prior to the separation of other non-Africans and which may be ancestral to modern Bedouins, which is why I think they should have used some other term.

[Aberdeen]

I personally think we should ignore computational linguistics if it conflicts with other aspects of linguistics (the presence of a lot of non-IE words in German, Europe's most recent IE language group) or history (the widespread presence of non-IE languages in Italy and Spain during the Iron Age).

[Angela]

Greying Wanderer: I'll have a think about that. The first thought would be if the source was IE who had made it to somewhere around the source of the Danube and one branch had already broken off into northern Italy and taken local wives then the Italic branch might already have been physically distinct from the Celtic branch even though they were still culturally similar. So if the river BB came out of the Celtic branch and the maritime BB came out of the Italic branch that might explain it - but I'll have to read up on that.

edit: Also I should add I'm not 100% on BB being IE. I think they might have been refugees from the copper working cultures of the Balkans that disappeared (or a bit of both partly displaced refugees and partly artisans from those cultures incorporated into IE)[/I]

I don't know if that will fly, because in northern Italy, for example, you see the same phenomenon, i.e. "Mediterranean" type skulls, and then, with new types of artifacts etc., a new skull shape. It's the "Beaker", "Dinaric" type that is intrusive, in so far as I can remember. If Moesan sees this, perhaps he can opine further on it. Perhaps he would know if there's a possibility that the type formed by the admixture of Mediterranean with something else.

As to your other point, what's clear is that the oldest R1b found to date is in a Bell Beaker context in central Europe. Until we find some kind of R1b further west at an earlier point in time, the whole R1b from the west theory is problematical. Plus, the phylogeny indicates it came from the east. If you're going to say it spread from Iberia to central Europe you have to explain how it got to Iberia in the first place. There are certainly theories a plenty, including yours that they are displaced Old Europe copper workers. Maybe it's true; it would make sense. The thing is that we need ancient y dna before we can assert it with any certainty.

Of course, I get the feeling this paper may be setting the parameters or explaining the background for the upcoming papers on Corded Ware and Yamnaya. Haak is, after all, a contributing author to the paper on Corded Ware from Lazaridis. You would think he would have access to their recent yDna findings. On the other hand, David Anthony is a consulting author on the Yamnaya paper, and I would think it's highly unlikely he's going to dump the theories on which he's based his entire career. Of course, maybe there's a split in the group as far as the Indo-European languages are concerned, with one group saying that the theories should all be reconsidered in the light of newer archaeological data.

I can't recall reading it (but that doesn't mean anything as I read a ton and forget where half of it came from) so it sounds like I do. I think the most likely source of the first wave of I-E will have come from the farmer-steppe transition zone between Yamnaya and Cucuteni and displaced by pressure from the east.

Jean Manco has promoted some version of this theory for years. The best explanation of it can be found in her book Ancestral Journeys. I personally think it's a good attempt to reconcile population genetics, archaeology and linguistics, even if I think that it glosses over many of the problems with Anthony's work. I also think it was very brave of her to attempt such a thing, given how quickly new data is being published.

As for the specific route, what she proposes is that at some point during the movement up the Danube, a group split off and left the river route, took off across the Balkans by land, reached the Adriatic and either crossed it, or made an end run into Italy south of Alps, crossed Italy to somehow reach the Mediterranean (they couldn't have used the Po River, because that doesn't drain into the Mediterranean) and then went by sea to Iberia. Respectfully, that doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that given the hardships and slowness of land travel in the heavily forested Europe of that time, they would either have used the sea, hugging the shore and looking for likely looking metal configurations in the mountains, or they would have hugged the seacoast. That doesn't mean that a split didn't happen, of course. I just doubt that was the precise route.

The disappearance of the peoples along their path with no sign of replacement settlements (because the replacement "villages" were made up of wagons (ed)).

To my knowledge, nobody disappeared along this particular route.

Well then I've misunderstood the modeling as my understanding was "EEF" was an arbitrary distinction where a WHG population were more than half Basal i.e. most of the WHG had some of it but some had a lot which implies WHG was a mixture of Basal and something else (with the something else being ASE from S/SE Asia imo) (similar to Usty).

I think the Willerslev paper on Kostenki 14 has confused everybody, and more so even than the paper, the comments of Willerslev himself.

This is the model from Lazaridis et al:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...re13673-f3.jpg

As you can see, the Lazaridis et al "Basal Eurasian" is completely separate from both WHG and ANE.

Whatever Willerslev means by "Basal Eurasian" it isn't this component. I also don't know at this point if the choice of the term "Basal Eurasian" for this component found by the Reich Lab was appropriate or not. If it is indeed the component that represents the first split after OOA (with no additional more recent inflow from Africa) isn't it "Basal"? On the other hand, if it turns out that there was additional gene flow from Africa, then I would agree that perhaps it isn't really Basal. Lazaridis et al, it seems to me, threw both possibilities out there.

If we assume for the moment that the Lazaridis "Basal" is indeed just that, i.e. the initial split after OOA and nothing additional, then perhaps the Willerslev Lab "Basal" is the Basal for all the rest of the Eurasian lineages, including the UHGs with whom Lazaridis' "Basal" mixed in the Near East to form the first farmers. It would still, despite millennia of drift, have some similarities to the component centered on that first initial split.

Anyway, too much of this rooting about in the ancient human tree gives me a headache, so I'll give it a rest. :) I'd just add however, that none of this has much to do with the main takeaways of the Lazaridis paper. I think we forget that even a few years ago, (indeed some bloggers maintained it until a year ago), people were adamantly insisting that the Neolithic was a simple matter of the acculturation of the indigenous people of Europe by a novel new technology from the Near East. Unless we find out that these EEF people were already living in Greece and Italy and southern Spain, and no additional newcomers joined them, this paper has told us that this isn't the case.

Ed. To italicize

[Greying Wanderer]

When Lazardis et al use the term "basal Eurasian" in talking about EEF they're referring to a lineage that split prior to the separation of other non-Africans and which may be ancestral to modern Bedouins, which is why I think they should have used some other term.

Fair enough - I personally think they are the Basal Eurasians (partly muffled in most of Eurasia by back migrating ASE) but with either version there's still no reason to presume the Basal HGs that must have preceded the Basal farmers were restricted to exactly the spot where farming developed and only there. It might be true but it would require them to be locked behind or inside a desert or something.

It seems more likely to me that Basal HGs existed over a range and Basal farmers developed out of one segment of these Basal HGs and expanded outwards leading in some regions to Basal farmers migrating over the top of pre-existing Basal HGs.

It might not have made any difference in some regions if the Basal farmer dna replaced the Basal HG dna anyway - but in a few places e.g. up some Iberian mountains, maybe the Basal dna is from Basal HGs that were there before the farmers arrived.

(Similar imo to IE and ANE with ANE HGs originally spread over a very wide range in northern Eurasia and one segment developed into IE herders and expanded dramatically over that range. So in most places the non-IE variants of ANE may have been replaced by the IE variant of ANE but in a few remote spots the pre-IE variant carried on.)

[Aberdeen]

.........

As to your other point, what's clear is that the oldest R1b found to date is in a Bell Beaker context in central Europe. Until we find some kind of R1b further west at an earlier point in time, the whole R1b from the west is problematical. Plus, the phylogeny indicates it came from the east. If you're going to say it spread from Iberia to central Europe you have to explain how it got to Iberia in the first place. There are certainly theories a plenty, including yours that they are displaced Old Europe copper workers. Maybe it's true, it would make sense. The thing is that we need ancient y dna before we can assert it with any certainty.

Of course, I get the feeling this paper may be setting the parameters or explaining the background for the upcoming papers on Corded Ware and Yamnaya. Haak is, after all, a contributing author to the paper on Corded Ware from Lazaridis. You would think he would have access to their recent yDna findings. On the other hand, David Anthony is a consulting author on the Yamnaya paper, and I find it highly unlikely he's going to dump the theories on which he's based his entire career. Unless there's a split in the group as far as the Indo-European languages are concerned, with one group saying that the "Kurgan" theory should at least be reconsidered.



Jean Manco has promoted some version of this theory for years. The best explanation of it can be found in her book Ancestral Journeys. I personally think it's a good attempt to reconcile population genetics, archaeology and linguistics, even if I think that it glosses over many of the problems with Anthony's work.

As for the specific route, what she proposes is that at some point during the movement up the Danube, a group split off and left the river route, took off across the Balkans by land, reached the Adriatic and either crossed it, or made an end run into Italy south of Alps, crossed Italy to somehow reach the Mediterranean (they couldn't have used the Po River, because that doesn't drain into the Mediterranean) and then went by sea to Iberia. Respectfully, that doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that given the hardships and slowness of land travel in the heavily forested Europe of that time, they would either have used the sea, hugging the shore and looking for likely looking metal configurations in the mountains, or they would have hugged the seacoast.


...............

Arguing that Bell Beaker folk came across Europe from the east is certainly problematic, since the archeological evidence supports the idea of an expansion from Iberia. So I suspect that BB folk did travel by sea or across North Africa to Iberia before expanding from there. I don't see the fact that we have no BB Y DNA samples other than the two from Germany as proof of anything, so I don't think either theory can be considered proven until we have more genetic data about BB. The lack of Y DNA data from Iberia certainly doesn't prove or disprove anything.

[Angela]

Thanks for the link, Aberdeen. I think the Heggarty paper is certainly part of it, but so is the Grey and Atkinson paper, which was excoriated by linguists, as well as the Bouckaert et al 2012 paper.

This is the link to the Gray and Atkinson 2011 paper:
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.o.../1090.abstract

This is the discussion at the Dienekes' site:
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2011/04...neolithic.html

This is the contrary view:
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/12...gins-talk.html

This is the link to the Bouckaert et al paper.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6097/957.abstract

I can't believe that they aren't publicly available yet. If someone knows where they could be accessed, that would be great.

As for the Heggarty paper, I have to agree with the following:

" It seems safer to side with those specilists like Clackson ( 2007:esp. 15-19), who keep an open, agnostic mind as to which of two radically different visions-in time-frame, geography, nature and causation-most plausibly accounts for humanity's greatest 'linguistic migration'. ".

That's where I land after reading all these things: I'm an agnostic. There are too many holes in each theory, in my opinion, for all of this certainty, unless you're selling a thesis.

The only additional thing which occurred to me is whether perhaps the spread of the Indo-European languages from eastern Anatolia would work if we looked at it from a Anatolia to the Caucasus to the Steppes rather than from an Anatolia to the Balkans to the Steppes angle.

By that, I mean, what if Gramkelidze and Ivanov were onto something, whether or not they got the time frame right. What if there was a split in the Neolithic, with some of the farmers going west carrying their non-Indo-European languages, like the ancestors of Basque and Etruscan etc., and some of the farmers went more or less north through the Caucasus and either in the Caucasus, or in Maykop on the edge of the Steppes, developed proto-Indo-European.

This would nicely take care of any findings of half Karelian like and half Armenian like Steppe people. It also would put metallurgy and agriculture on a route to Siberia perhaps along the Inner Asian Corridor, which would take care of the problem that there's no agriculture east of the Volga until you get to Siberia, where you suddenly find it, and that the metallurgy in Siberia is more sophisticated earlier than the metallurgy on the steppe. (at least going by what I've been able to find. Hopefully there's some research out there that would either prove or disprove that. )

Anyway, it's all rank speculation, but if I had taken another road in life, that's what I would be researching.

[Angela]

Aberdeen: I don't see the fact that we have no BB Y DNA samples other than the two from Germany as proof of anything, so I don't think either theory can be considered proven until we have more genetic data about BB.

I would totally agree with that. I guess I'm an agnostic about this as well. :)

[Aberdeen]

That's certainly an interesting idea, Angela, and it would fit some things together nicely. And even if I turn out to be right in thinking that BB may be associated with the Iberian subclade of R1b, that doesn't mean that all R1b reached Europe by the same route if the dispersal point was Anatolia. I wasn't expecting the upcoming paper to say that the Yamana samples contain R1b but if they do, I'd bet on it being specifically the Italo-Celtic subclade and would see it as possibly supporting your theory of Anatolia via the steppes.

[bicicleur]

Arguing that Bell Beaker folk came across Europe from the east is certainly problematic, since the archeological evidence supports the idea of an expansion from Iberia. So I suspect that BB folk did travel by sea or across North Africa to Iberia before expanding from there. I don't see the fact that we have no BB Y DNA samples other than the two from Germany as proof of anything, so I don't think either theory can be considered proven until we have more genetic data about BB. The lack of Y DNA data from Iberia certainly doesn't prove or disprove anything.

what proof do you see in support of a North African route to Iberia?

[Greying Wanderer]

Angela

I don't know if that will fly, because in northern Italy, for example, you see the same phenomenon, i.e. "Mediterranean" type skulls, and then, with new types of artifacts etc., a new skull shape. It's the "Beaker", "Dinaric" type that is intrusive

Fair enough. I'm very iffy on whether BB were IE. It seems to me they might have been orphaned traders or displaced refugees from one or more of the disappeared copper working cultures in the Balkans which potentially could have spread in all directions or maybe somewhere entirely different.

My thoughts on the IE option are based on taking each possibility in turn and saying *if* they were from X then how might they have come to be a) so widespread and seemingly along trade networks and b) such a big deal population wise along the Atlantic coast but much less so elsewhere. It's stretch any way you look at it imo but the most plausible explanation to me if you start with the IE premise as a fixed point is lactose tolerant metal workers who stumbled onto a mostly empty ecozone they were adapted for.

On balance though I still think displaced non-IE copper workers from the disappeared Balkan cultures is more likely.

Jean Manco has promoted some version of this theory for years.

I probably got it from there then. I tend to read multiple things at once and forget where different pieces came from.

As for the specific route, what she proposes is that at some point during the movement up the Danube, a group split off and left the river route, took off across the Balkans by land ... and then went by sea to Iberia. Respectfully, that doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that given the hardships and slowness of land travel in the heavily forested Europe of that time, they would either have used the sea, hugging the shore and looking for likely looking metal configurations in the mountains, or they would have hugged the seacoast.

Yes, or rivers - until you hit the source - then you have to go overland for a bit until you find the source of a new river on the other side of the watershed. Hence (imo) the IE piling up around the source of the Danube and Hallstatt developing around the watershed between the Rhine and Danube.

Looking purely at the physical geography the likely spots for what became the Italic branch to break off from what became the Celtic branch might have been either through Croatia to reach Italy from the north east or over the Alps from the north.

http://education.randmcnally.com/ima...ysical_Int.png

As you say given human nature's inclination to path of least resistance the latter case would seem more likely i.e. they went over mountains rather than following the valleys only when they were blocked by the Danube running out and no longer had a choice, or if it was the former case through Croatia then maybe the advance up the Danube was temporarily blocked by a strong culture in the Hungarian plain they hadn't defeated yet.

The sea part to Iberia is the easiest bit to imagine imo (if BB were mainly traders) as there were already trade networks in place from the Atlantic megalith culture.

Although - despite all the above - a sea route following trade ports all the way to Iberia seems at least as likely.

To my knowledge, nobody disappeared along this particular route.

Cucuteni, various Balkan cultures and LBK seem to have disappeared or been submerged along the central Danubian route and Globular Amphora and Funnelbeaker along the northern forest route. (Not necessarily related to IE but maybe.)

I think the Willerslev paper on Kostenki 14 has confused everybody ... As you can see, the Lazaridis et al "Basal Eurasian" is completely separate from both WHG and ANE.

I agree labeling is a bit of a nightmare in this but I don't think it's all down to him. "Basal Eurasian" has a pretty specific meaning so if it's completely separate it's not Basal.

Personally I think it is Basal Eurasian with ASE deriving from it and ANE deriving from ASE (leading to the Basal signal itself getting diluted with each layer) but that remains to be seen. I think the bigger confusion is "EEF" as it's a composite of Basal and WHG but which many people seem to treat as if it was simply Basal.

.

As an aside I think the labeling will turn out to be:

current Basal should be WHG (i.e. Basal are the western aka African border zone, HGs imo)
current WHG should be ASE (ASE HGs coming up from the direction of India into northern Eurasia and west from there)
current EEF should be mixed Basal and ASE (in the border zone between the two)
actual early farmers -> one segment of mixed Basal/ASE from somewhere in the general vicinity of the the Kurdish highlands who developed farming
current ANE -> as they are but derived from ASE (with maybe another archaic mix involved in the process?)

.

Anyway, too much of this rooting about in the ancient human tree gives me a headache

This is very true. I tend to only think about it in bursts because after a while I baffle myself - especially over BB.

I'd just add however, that none of this has much to do with the main takeaways of the Lazaridis paper.

I'd agree with that. I think the main difference is the addition of an ASE population as the main derived basal in Eurasia before the east-west split so on a large scale it's more important for the global picture. In Europe I think its main significance is in terms of particular populations living up mountains in Iberia who have a lot more EEF than you'd expect given the terrain (unless like me you think EEF is simply a mixture of Basal HGs and ASE HGs and only some of it is from farmers - although maybe most of it in the regions that were suitable for the neolithic farming package).

[Melancon]

That's certainly an interesting idea, Angela, and it would fit some things together nicely. And even if I turn out to be right in thinking that BB may be associated with the Iberian subclade of R1b, that doesn't mean that all R1b reached Europe by the same route if the dispersal point was Anatolia. I wasn't expecting the upcoming paper to say that the Yamana samples contain R1b but if they do, I'd bet on it being specifically the Italo-Celtic subclade and would see it as possibly supporting your theory of Anatolia via the steppes.

BB is Mesolithic I1 and I2 Y-DNA as well as Paleolithic mtDna U5 and Mesolithic founder mtDna group H.

R1b arrived in the Bronze Age; in theory.

I would be impressed if you could prove R1b was in Western Europe (or Iberia) as early as 8000+ BC. You claim that there may have been several migrations of R1b?

I'm going with Maciamo's theory on how the Basque men became R1b. (And I am guessing the men were originally Y-DNA I2 and I1. As he may have theorized. On the other hand; this probably would explain why both Iberia, Western France, Sardinia and Norway have the highest portions of mtDna H.)

Although, with the vast amounts of a forested European land/continent (during that time); I can cast doubts into the theory that Indo-European nomadic horseman carrying R1b slaughtered indigenous populations; and took their women, rather than assimilated. Europe wasn't a steppe like parts of Western Russia. So your theory may have some legitimacy. Unless these Indo-Europeans knew how to venture through foreign woods with their "superior technology".

It still makes me wonder why these Mesolithic men (probably I2 and I1) in theory; were easily taken down by the invading R1b men. When the Mesolithic men were already indigenous and familiar with Western Europe and had plenty of time to take refuge. (Maybe Paleolithic or Mesolithic Sardinia would be the answers for these questions? At present, Sardinians are predominantly Y-DNA I2 and mtDna H. Which shows a very old-Europe population.)

[Greying Wanderer]

BB is Mesolithic I1 and I2 Y-DNA as well as Paleolithic mtDna U5 and Mesolithic founder mtDna group H.

R1b arrived in the Bronze Age; in theory.

I would be impressed if you could prove R1b was in Western Europe (or Iberia) as early as 8000+ BC. You claim that there may have been several migrations of R1b?

I'm going with Maciamo's theory on how the Basque men became R1b. (And I am guessing the men were originally Y-DNA I2 and I1. As he may have theorized. On the other hand; this probably would explain why both Iberia, Western France, Sardinia and Norway have the highest portions of mtDna H.)

Although, with the vast amounts of a forested European land/continent (during that time); I can cast doubts into the theory that Indo-European nomadic horseman carrying R1b slaughtered indigenous populations; and took their women, rather than assimilated. Europe wasn't a steppe like parts of Western Russia. So your theory may have some legitimacy. Unless these Indo-Europeans knew how to venture through foreign woods with their "superior technology".

It still makes me wonder why these Mesolithic men (probably I2 and I1) in theory; were easily taken down by the invading R1b men. When the Mesolithic men were already indigenous and familiar with Western Europe and had plenty of time to take refuge. (Maybe Paleolithic or Mesolithic Sardinia would be the answers for these questions? At present, Sardinians are predominantly Y-DNA I2 and mtDna H. Which shows a very old-Europe population.)

"It still makes me wonder why these Mesolithic men (probably I2 and I1) in theory; were easily taken down by the invading R1b men."

If you divide Europe into three east-west channels: 1) north of the Carpathians, 2) Danube and 3) coastal then they didn't. In the northern strip they incorporated them into the gang, in the central strip the mesolithics had already mostly been replaced by farmers so the more mobile R1 just had to raid the settled farmers until they collapsed under the pressure one region at a time.