I think Indo-Europeans are well defined, any people who speak one of IE languages.
Great, for a literal, but, forgive me, not all that helpful definition in terms of the holy grail of Indo-European studies, i.e. the location of the linguistic, cultural, and genetic Indo-European homeland. The assumption has been that there is total overlap of all those elements. I'm not so sure about that. I'm also not sure Haak and Lazaridis et al have proved that Yamnaya is it. What they have proved, in my opinion, is that Yamnaya type genetics have had a large influence in Europe, more, at least as it looks now, in northern than in southern Europe. Otherwise, how could Corded Ware be 73% Yamnaya or modern northern Europeans 50% Yamnaya? I know all this might seem pedantic, but my business is words. Words matter. Definitions matter. Imprecision of language is a result of fuzzy thinking and leads to misinterpretations.
For those folk who went all directions from Yamna it makes sense to find a new name. Because a) it is not known if they cover all IEs; b) it is not known if they spoke PIE. Yamnoids?
or "Yamna Indo Europeans".
I agree with all your qualifiers, and I like that definition.
From now on I will call them Yamnaya Indo-Europeans.
Btw - modern Samara folk (where Yamna's samples were taken) has <1% Gedrosia.
I guess next good question is when and how did they loose it?
Cultures in Samara:
Yamna, Catacomb... - and maybe there is no need to move any further. This is what Maciamo comments (bold mine):
Originally Posted by
Maciamo
As I explained above, the Balto-Slavic branch probably descends from the pure R1a people from around Belarus and central western Russia,
who later founded the Catacomb culture. Since their mtDNA shows no West Asian lineages whatsoever (as opposed to 45% of N1a, K, T, W and X in Yamna),
they cannot have had West Asian admixture, including Gedrosian.
I don't know about their not having had West Asian, but as I have been saying, I think the Baltic area's "Yamnaya Indo-European" scores may be inflated to a degree because of excess EHG/SHG, especially in the case of Finland, for example. That doesn't mean they
don't have influence from Corded Ware and thus Yamnaya to some degree. Corded Ware moved into Latvia and Lithuania rather early didn't it? At any rate, the culture definitely came from Corded Ware. The language I don't know. I'm sure you know a great deal more about this than I do. Could it have been a more Uralic type language? That's one of the supports for the location of the "homeland" on the Pontic Caspian steppe isn't it...i.e. that this would explain the Kartvelian and Uralic influences on Indo-European?
In terms of genetics, the formal stats in Haak and Lazaridis et al are pretty unambiguous in showing that the northern populations cannot be modeled solely as prior Europeans plus a big influx of EHG. That "West Asian" component is a necessary ingredient.
Let's take a look at the Dodecad K7b for another vantage point on the genetics, although of course there isn't going to be a complete correspondence between this type of blunt tool and formal stats.
This is Corded Ware
- 66.02% Atlantic_Baltic
- 27.10% West_Asian
- 3.73% South_Asian
- 3.13% Southern
- 0.02% Siberian
- 0.00% African
- 0.00% East_Asian
These are the scores for "West_Asian" for modern European populations. (this term means different things in different runs, of course)
Belorussians: 11.7
Germans: 11.9
Lithuanians 10.4
Finns 6.9
We're seeing the same phenomenon as with "Gedrosia". What happened to the "West Asian"? Clearly, the further north you go with modern populations, the more that West Asian drops. It also drops as you go west. Perhaps it's partly because at the margins of Corded Ware there was more mixing with pre-existing populations. Also, as Haak and Lazaridis specifically state in the paper, there was a
resurgence of prior existing genes after the Bronze Age invasions, just as there was a
resurgence of WHG in Europe between the early and the late Neolithic. Whether it was a resurgence in either case or just a question of the types of burials that survived (i.e.elite or dominant burials) is, I think, an open question.
Then, Admixture is going to "aggregate" gene alleles slightly differently depending on what is present and the modal population chosen.
(Armenians are about 53% West Asian in this calculator by the way. About half would be about 27%? Has anyone run Yamnaya through K=7b?)
Anyway, for what it's worth, this is what Dienekes discovered about the relationship between the components in his runs.
As to this interrelationship between K12b and World this is what he had to say. Clearly, some more recent discoveries put some of these into question, but some still seem to be pretty accurate. Also, these are all more recent "clusters" formed of more ancient layers of more "Basal" groups.
- Gedrosia appears to be Caucasus + a slice of Siberian
- Both Siberian and Southeast Asian appear to be wholly East Asian
- East Asian on the other hand, appears to be mostly Southeast Asian + minority Siberian
- Northwest African appears to be Caucasus + a minority Sub Saharan
- Atlantic Med appears to be Caucasus + a slice of North European
- North European appears to be Atlantic Med + Gedrosia with a slice of Siberian
- South Asian appears to be Caucasus + East Asian
- East African appears to be Sub Saharan + minority Caucasus
- Southwest Asian appears to be Caucasus
- Sub Saharan appears to be East African
- Caucasus appears Atlantic Med + Gedrosia + slices of Northwest African and Southwest Asian
Anyway, I'm not at all saying that we should be relying on these or any other calculators, not when we have formal stats based on ancient samples. It's just that if we're going to discuss them we should try to understand how they relate to each other.