Fire Haired14;481622]@Angela,
This looks like the most likely science: Farming began in the Middle East which had distinct races who had common ancestry and didn't spread with genes all the time, then those related but differnt races who learned how to farm expanded into Europe, India, etc. This isn't the same as a single race inventing farming and spreading the idea with their genes all over the place. I don't understand why this is so special. Farming changes lifestyle and its origins is important to human history, but there was no farmer race who can be considered the "womb of nations" genetically(culture is another debate).
There you go again, using undefined terms and drawing conclusions not based on anything yet presented into evidence, to use a lawyerly term. Terms have to be defined and generally agreed upon. If there isn't a piece of evidence directly on point, all anyone can do is give an opinion, hopefully an education opinion, but an opinion none the less. Fire-Haired, please don't break the law, and if you do and are charged, never go on the stand. Any decent prosecutor would have you tied in verbal knots in minutes!
These aren't different
races. There's a vast over-use of that term by amateurs in this field. If we were to speak of it in a general, modern sense, we have three roughly continental "breeding groups", perhaps West Eurasian, East Eurasian and Sub-Saharan African. Maybe you could add "Native American" and Australoid or Papuan New Guinea. All the people who first developed farming were West Eurasians from everything we know so far. There were different groups in the Middle East, not different
races.
Were there differences between them? It seems there were; I'm not at all denying that, but by the time they moved out of the Middle East,
five thousand years after farming first started, there was, in my opinion probably a certain amount of admixture. That's
5000 years, Fire-Haired. Even in Europe, where the H-G and farmer groups were living totally different lifestyles, there was some admixture, and a significant amount 2000 years in. Those in the west had some WHG, those to the east, perhaps CHG or something CHG like if the abstract turns out to be accurate. From everything we know so far, they perhaps both had a lot of Basal Eurasian, have you forgotten that? How different could they have been if they both turn out to have been around 50% Basal Eurasian, for goodness sakes? Then, one of the most interesting things in the Hofmanova paper is that pretty early there is a change that shows up even in what that paper calls the "Aegean farmers". That seems totally sensible. As I said, the archaeology shows movement from Central Anatolia to the northwest. The mistake you and some other enthusiasts are making is that you're, as I said above, assuming that the genetics stayed static in the Middle East. They didn't. At some point there was admixture.
I trust them when they say the Zagros Neolithic woman was distinct from Neolithic Anatolians and more similar to earlier Caucasus hunter gatherers. They wouldn't have claimed this if the Zagros woman was very similar to Neolithic Anatolians.
See above.
Yep, we have to wait for more ancient genomes to create more accurate names.
Finally, agreement.
That would make sense but we still do know there was considerable genetic diversity in the Neolithic Middle East. The Caucasus mountains became much more EEF-like between 7000 and 2000 BC, but I think the population(s) who made them EEF like were relatives of EEF and not actual EEF. Because I know a lot about mtDNA, I know as well as anyone that modern Middle Easterners don't appear to be direct descendants of EEF. I'm skeptical about EEF ancestry being important anywhere outside of Europe.
I'm not denying there was diversity. (See above) I'm sorry to say that the rest of this comment doesn't make any sense. You acknowledge my point, that the Caucasus, among other areas, became more EEF like as time passed, but they weren't EEF they were just relatives of EEF? Have you taken Shakespeare, yet, Romeo and Juliet?
"
What’s in a name? That which we call a roseBy any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. "
If they're more EEF like as time passes, it's because EEF like people moved there.
Yamnaya's CHG ancestors may have been farmers but that doesn't make them the same people as EEF.
I never said they were. Please see comments above and in prior posts.
Your initial comment, which sparked this debate, was your seeming disbelief that the EEF, or, in your terms, "Sardinian like" people had spread and dominated for a while North Africa in addition to the land mass from Ireland across Europe all the way to Turkey. We don't have access as of yet to North African ancient genomes, but it is my prediction that farming and animal herding spread there, as it did everywhere else, to our knowledge, with people. I think it is highly likely that those farmers, although they may have gotten some CHG by the time they got there, were more EEF like or rather, to be more precise myself in my language "Early Neolithic farmer like" than anything else. There, the farmers met the local hunter-gatherers, whom other analyses, although not ancient dna, have shown had quite a bit of WHG. There is no admixture analysis of which I'm aware that shows very much "West Asian" or Caucasus in North Africa, despite the Arab invasions which brought J1 and some J2, but I think that's because there was a massive founder effect for J1 in the Arabian peninsula, not because there are huge amounts of "Caucasus" there, although even the Bedouin have some, in so far as I remember.
There are already papers using ancient genomes which have modeled Ethiopians and Horners as "Sardinian like" plus SSA, and we know that Sardinians are the closest living people to the early farmers, although they're not identical to them. So, I think that covers that. How did these "Sardinian like" people get to Egypt and the Horn? Did they fly over the Levant, as I asked you before? I doubt it, so at some point, Sardinian like people seemed to have at least moved through the Levant, yes?
That leaves the Near East itself. We'll have to wait to see what genomes from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic in the Near East show, but from the evidence we have so far, my speculation is that just as EEF like genes moved from Anatolia toward the Caucasus, they probably moved down to the Levant if they didn't already exist there.
Dienekes was claiming that farming always spread with genes and all the Middle Eastern farmers were the same people. It doesn't matter if Zagros and Anatolian farmers shared lots of distant ancestry, they were still genetically distinct. They weren't the same people. Middle Eastern farmers who shared distant pre-farming ancestry went all over the world and contributed of genes to people, but there was no "womb of nations" and farming race like Dienekes thought. It's historically and genetically significant but whatDienekes predicted isn't exactly correct.
Yes, in so far as we can tell with our current samples and analyses, farming always spread with people. It was not spread anywhere that we know of by cultural diffusion alone. That great question which vexed archaeologists and geneticists and anthropologists for so many decades has been answered. As for the rest you're going around in circles. Dienekes wasn't talking about EEF versus other kinds of farmers. This was years before any ancient genomes had been analyzed. He's talking about "farmer genes" in general, genes present in the Near East, which of course originally were carried by h-g groups, which were brought to other parts of the world by farmers. They're what brings the fst so close for all the six groups he listed. I find it hard to believe you don't see the evidence and the logic here. Anyway, I can't explain it any better, so if you refuse to acknowledge it, there's nothing I can do about it.
This, by the way, is the area he was talking about, the one in red. As more recent papers have shown, I think the initial relevant areas extended to the Natufian zone in the Levant.
